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A Universal History of Infamy by Jorge Luis Borges (1935, revd. 1954)
The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable.
(Borges's 1954 preface to A Universal History of Infamy)
One thinks of Borges as a modern classic so it comes as a bit of a surprise to learn just how long ago he was writing. Born in 1899, Borges published his first book in 1923 and wrote steadily for the next 60 years (he died in 1986). In his long life he published an enormous number of volumes ('In addition to short stories for which he is most noted, Borges also wrote poetry, essays, screenplays, literary criticism, and edited numerous anthologies') and the Wikipedia bibliography lists 66 volumes of prose, poetry and essays, in total.
Which makes it all the more odd or unfair that he is still best known in the English-speaking world for more or less one volume, Labyrinths, and a handful of lesser works. Borges had published the following before we get to the book under review:
Fervor de Buenos Aires (1923) poetry
Inquisiciones (1925) essays
Luna de Enfrente (1925) poetry
El tamaño de mi esperanza (1925) essays
El idioma de los argentinos (1928) essays
Cuaderno San Martín (1929) poetry
Evaristo Carriego (1930) essays
Discusión (1932) essays
You'd expect poetry from a starter author, but it's notable that so many of these early volumes contain essays, in other words short prose explorations of ideas – about other authors, historical events or topics etc. It was for his short essays on imaginary or fantastical subjects that he was to become famous and A Universal History of Infamy, more or less the earliest work by Borges you can read in English translation, gives an indication why.
A Universal History of Infamy
A Universal History of Infamy is not, in fact, a universal history of infamy or anything like that ambitious. In reality it is much smaller in scope, and consists of:
seven 'biographical essays' – witty, ironic accounts of legendary bad guys and women from history whose stories Borges has cherry picked from his highly eclectic reading
one relatively straightforward short piece of fiction
eight summaries of stories or anecdotes he had come across in arcane sources and which attracted Borges for their fantastical or humorous aspects
Most of the essays had been published individually in the Argentine newspaper Crítica between 1933 and 1934. The 1934 collection was revised and three new stories added in the 1954 edition. There are two English translations of the book. The one I own dates from 1972 and was translated by Borges's long-standing English translator, Norman Thomas di Giovanni. The 2004 English edition gives the stories slightly different titles.
The title A Universal History of Infamy derives from the fact that the seven biographical essays are fictionalised accounts of real-life criminals. The textual sources for each biography are listed at the end of the book: for example, the essay about the Widow Ching cites a 1932 History of Piracy as its source, the essay on Monk Eastman cites Herbert Asbury's 1928 history of The Gangs of New York, the essay about Lazarus Morell cites Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, the one about Tom Castro cites the Encyclopedia Britannica as its source, and so on.
So the sources are a) not particularly recondite and b) they were often fairly recent to Borges's time of writing, in some cases published only a year or so before Borges wrote his potted summaries.
That said, Borges treats his sources very freely, changing dates, incidents and even names as he fancied to make his fantasy biographies deliberately fanciful and untrustworthy.
Part 1. Seven infamy stories
So these are stories Borges found in other books during his wide and eclectic reading and which attracted him for their elements of the macabre or gruesome, and which he chose to retell, dropping or adding details as he saw fit.
The Dread Redeemer
Lazarus Morell is poor white trash who grew up on the banks of the Mississippi and as an adult comes to be a leader of crooks who devise the following scam: they persuade gullible black slaves to run away from their owners and allow themselves to be sold on by the Morell gang who promise to liberate them and share the proceeds of this sale. But they don't. They have 'liberated' some 70 slaves in this manner until the gang is joined by Virgil Stewart, famous for his cruelty, who promptly betrays them to the authorities. Morell goes into hiding in a boarding house, then, after 5 days, shaves off his beard and makes an escape to round up what remains of his gang and try to create a mass uprising of the southern slaves and lead a takeover of the city of New Orleans. Instead he dies of a lung ailment in Natchez hospital in January 1835 under an assumed name.
This story is quite florid enough to satisfy anyone's taste for the lurid and melodramatic. What tames and raises it from being a shilling shocker is Borges's dry wit and irony.
Morell leading rebellions of blacks who dreamed of lynching him; Morell lynched by armies of blacks he dreamed of leading – it hurts me to confess that Mississippi history took advantage of neither of these splendid opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (or poetic symmetry), did the river of his crimes become his grave.
We expected a grand finale? Sorry folks.
If Borges's narrative ends playfully, it opens even more so, with Borges referencing Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas. Why? Because it was de las Casas who (apparently) had the bright idea of importing African slaves to work the silver mines of the newly discovered New World. Borges phrases this with characteristic irony (or is it facetiousness?)
In 1517, the Spanish missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, taking great pity on the Indians who were languishing in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines, suggested to Charles V, king of Spain, a scheme for importing blacks, so that they might languish in the hellish workpits of Antillean gold mines.
That is an example of what you could call literal facetiousness, the repetition of the initial heartless description being so unexpected as to be funny. But it then expands into a more grandiose type of joke as Borges goes on to deliver an unexpected perspective on the results of de las Casas' brainwave i.e. the vast and numerous consequences of the invention of African slavery, and proceeds to a mock encyclopedic list of some of its untold consequences, namely:
W. C. Handy's blues; the Parisian success of the Uruguayan lawyer and painter of Negro genre, don Pedro Figari; the solid native prose of another Uruguayan, don Vicente Rossi, who traced the origin of the tango to Negroes; the mythological dimensions of Abraham Lincoln; the five hundred thousand dead of the Civil War and its three thousand three hundred millions spent in military pensions; the entrance of the verb 'to lynch' into the thirteenth edition of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy; King Vidor's impetuous film Hallelujah; the lusty bayonet charge led by the Argentine captain Miguel Soler, at the head of his famous regiment of 'Mulattoes and Blacks', in the Uruguayan battle of Cerrito; the Negro killed by Martín Fierro; the deplorable Cuban rumba 'The Peanut Vender'; the arrested, dungeon-ridden Napoleonism of Toussaint L'Ouverture; the cross and the snake of Haitian voodoo rites and the blood of goats whose throats were slit by the papaloi's machete; the habanera, mother of the tango; another old Negro dance, of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the candombe.
The intellectual pleasure derives from the combination of mock scholarliness with the pleasing randomness of the examples selected. And not only surreal but – and this is an important part of Borges's appeal – conveying an enormous sense of spaciousness; the sense of an enormously well-read mind, overflowing with wonderful facts and references, from the obvious to the fantastically recondite and abstruse. And that by reading along with Borges, we too, become as fantastically learned and knowledgeable as him.
If you like this kind of subject matter, and the dry ironical tone, then the world of unexpected and outré references is like a door opening in your mind, hundreds of doors, revealing all kinds of wonderful, mind and spirit enhancing vistas and possibilities.
Tom Castro, the Implausible Imposter
Arthur Orton was born in Wapping in 1834. He ran away to sea and resurfaced decades later in Sydney Australia where he had taken the name Tom Castro. Here he became friendly with a stately, clever black man, Ebenezer Bogle and the two set up as con-men. In 1854 a British steamer sank in the Atlantic and one of the passengers lost was slender, elegant Roger Charles Tichborne, heir to one of the greatest Roman Catholic families in England. His mother, Lady Tichborne, refused to believe he was dead and advertised widely throughout the colonies for his return. With wild and hilarious improbability Orton and Bogle decide to reply to her and claim that obese illiterate Tom Castro is in fact her slender, elegant aristocratic son…after some years of living in Australia!
Most of this is comic but Borges milks it for further comic ideas, such as the notion that it was the very outrageousness of the entire idea which gave Bogle and Orton confidence; the more ridiculous it seemed, the more emboldened they were to tough it out in the light of lawyers and Lady Tichborne's heirs who violently rejected their claim. Very funny is the notion that so mad is Lady Tichborne to have her son restored that she will accept anything Orton says and so when he completely invents some tender childhood memories, Lady T immediately accepts them and makes them her own.
Finally, the relatives bring a trial where all is going well until Bogle meets his death at the hands of a passing hansom cab and Orton loses all his confidence. He is sentenced to 14 years in prison but, here again Borges emphasises the humour, pointing out that Orton so charmed his imprisoners that he was let off for good behaviour and then took to touring theatres giving a one-man show retelling his story.
It is typically Borgesian that, at each venue, Orton is described as starting out maintaining his innocence but often ends up pleading guilty depending on the mood of the audience.
A story, any story, about anything, is infinitely malleable.
The Widow Ching, Lady Pirate
China at the turn of the 18th century and the story of a redoubtable woman pirate who, when her husband Ching is killed in battle, takes over his pirate crew and leads them in 13 years of 'systematic adventure'. The emperor sends one admiral against her, Admiral Kwo-lang, who she comprehensively defeats, and before leading her 'six hundred war junks and forty thousand victorious pirates' on devastating attacks on China's seaboards. A second expedition is sent under one Ting-kwei. This one defeats Madame Ching who, on the night after a huge and bloody battle, has herself rowed over to the admiral's ship, boards it and presents herself with the appropriately flowery oriental rhetoric: 'the fox seeks the dragon's wing.' She was allowed to live and devoted her later years to the opium trade.
There is something immensely satisfying in the way Borges creates a scene, a historical period, its key characters and conveys a series of big events in just nine pages. More than that, the first page is devoted to two women pirates of the Western tradition, Mary Read and Anne Bonney, before we even get round to China.
Their speed and brevity, their exotic setting and subject matter, the tremendous confidence with which Borges cuts from scene to scene, zeroing in on key moments and drilling down to one line of dialogue, and all told in a wonderfully humorous, often tongue-in-cheek style, make these bonne bouches immensely appetising and pleasurable.
Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities
Borges freely acknowledges his source for this narrative as Herbert Asbury's 1928 volume The Gangs of New York, and gives a 2-page summary of some of the most notable hoodlums from New York's Victorian underworld described in that book, before arriving at his potted biography of 'Monk' Eastman who is the particular subject of this narrative.
Born Edward Osterman, Eastman he was Jewish but grew into a 'colossal' and violent killer who lorded it over the whole goy underworld. He hired himself out as a hitman and led a violent gang. They were involved in a shootout so epic it became known as The Battle of Rivington Street, then a two-hour fistfight with the leader of the main rival gang, Paul Kelly, watched by a shouting crowd. He was repeatedly arrested and, after the final time, in 1917, decided to enlist in the US Army which had joined the war in Europe. This, like everything else in the story, is told with detached facetiousness:
We know that he violently disapproved of taking prisoners and that he once (with just his rifle butt) interfered with that deplorable practice…
On his return Monk quipped that 'a number of little dance halls around the Bowery were a lot tougher than the war in Europe.' He was found dead in an alley with five bullets in him. These throwaway endings, without any Victorian moralising, give them a Modernist, 'so what' aspect, a throwaway bluntness which contrasts vividly with the extreme scholarly punctiliousness about the sources.
The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan
Scenes from the life of William Harrigan aka Billy the Kid. For a start, it's factually interesting to learn that Billy was a street hoodlum born in the very tough slums of New York before he headed out West. Borges amuses himself by assigning Billy's life to different stages, namely:
The larval stage
Go West!
The Demolition of a Mexican
Deaths for Deaths' Sake
He killed his first man aged 14. There's a running joke that whenever Billy boasted about the number of men he killed he always added 'not counting Mexicans' who he held in utter contempt.
Borges's wonderful fantasy-mindedness, the way he can introduce a mind-teasing idea into even the most obviously material occurs when he casually mentions that, despite his best efforts to turn himself into a hard-riding cowboy, Billy:
never completely matched his legend, but he kept getting closer and closer to it.
This implication that the legend of Billy the Kid existed before he began enacting it, and that he was fated to aspire to match his own legend… there is something wonderfully dizzying about this metaphysical-magical perspective, a dizzying magic metaphysical worldview which was to emerge more powerfully in his famous mid-career stories and excerpts.
The Insulting Master of Etiquette Kôtsuké no Suké
To be honest I didn't understand this one, even after reading it twice. It's set in Japan in 1702. An imperial envoy comes to stay with Asano Takumi no Kami who has been 'trained' by a rude and dismissive master of etiquette, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké. Asano was rude to the imperial envoy who, as a result, had him executed. Asano's other retainers came to Kira Kôtsuké no Suké and told him, that since the error stemmed from his poor training of Asano, he should commit hara-kiri, but he refused and ran away and barricaded himself into a palace. Asano's 47 retainers laid siege to the palace, broke in, discovered he had hidden, found him and killed him. That is why the story is sometimes called 'The Learned History of the Forty-seven Retainers.
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
The story of Hakim, born in 736, who grows up to assume the identity of the Prophet of the Veil and establish a religion to rival Mohammed's, by telling the impressionable that a messenger from God had come down from heaven, cut off his head and carried it up to heaven to receive a divine mission from Allah. He crystallises his position when, amid a crowded caravan, someone releases a leopard which Hakim appears to quell with the power of his eyes alone. He becomes the Veiled Prophet or Masked One and leads his followers to military victory, taking cities. He keeps a harem of one hundred and fourteen blind women.
He promulgated a belief system derived from the Christian Gnostics, namely that the world is a parody of Divine Reality, created by nine emanations from the original.
The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations.
Five years into his rule, Hakim and his followers are besieged by the army of the Caliph when a rumour goes round from one of the women of his harem that his body has various imperfections. He is praying at a high altar when two of his captains tear away his permanent veil to reveal that Hakim bears the revolting disfigurements of the leper, and they promptly run him through with spears.
Part 2. A short story
Man on Pink Corner
This is a surprisingly poor short story and a good explanation of why Borges focused on writing his metaphysical-brainteasing essays rather than trying any attempt at conventional fiction. It's the account of a street hoodlum, a junior member of a gang in the unfashionable poor north side of Buenos Aires, and a supposedly fateful night when he and his gang are at a dance hall when in crashes a massive hard man, Francisco Real, who muscles his way through the crowd to confront the head of the local gang, Rosendo Juárez, at which point, inexplicably, Rosendo backs down and Real takes his place as head honcho and steals his woman, La Lujanera.
I found a lot of this inconsequential, silly and hard to follow because nobody seemed to be obeying any rules of human nature I'm familiar with. Rosendo disappears, and Real takes La Lujanera outside, presumably to copulate with her in a 'ditch':
By then they were probably going at it in some ditch.
Our narrator wanders out to take the air then returns to the dance where old gang members and new gang members seem to be dancing happily. Then there's a banging on the door, and in stumbles the huge bruiser Real with a big gash in his chest. He collapses on the floor and bleeds to death. The hoodlums of both gangs strip him of his clothes, appear to rip open his guts and pull out his intestines, cut off his finger to steal his ring, then chuck him out the window into the river Maldonado which flows just outside the building.
In the final paragraph, the narrator mentions Borges's own name as if he is recounting this story directly to him:
Then, Borges, I put my hand inside my vest – here by the left armpit, where I always carry it – and took my knife out again…
And in the last sentence implies that it was he, the narrator who, when he slipped out, managed to fatally stab Real – in which case why wasn't there a description of this presumably fairly melodramatic scene, how did he manage to do it if Real was shagging La Lujanera in a ditch? How come La Lunajera didn't point out our narrator to everyone in the hall as the murderer?
It seemed to me a collection of 1930s noir crime, lowlife clichés thrown together with no plausibility and no account of human psychology. Borges himself seemed bemused by the story's popularity. Thank God he abandoned this mode of altogether in favour of the 'baroque' and mind-bending essays gathered in Labyrinths.
Part 3. Etcetera Etcetera
Being short 2 or 3-page excerpts from scholarly books which presumably struck Borges because of the surrealism or bizarreness or humour of their content. The excerpts are interesting or amusing or ghoulish in their own right, but what really impresses is the arcane nature of their sources, and the range of reading and learning they imply.
A Theologian in Death
From the Arcana Coelestis by Emanuel Swedenborg (1749 to 1756).
The Protestant theologian Philip Melancthon (1497 to 1560) dies and goes to heaven but doesn't realise this is what has happened because the angels recreate his worldly house and study. However, as a great and learned man, they pester him to write about charity. But Melancthon obstinately persists in writing that charity is unnecessary because, like a zealous Protestant, he believes we are justified by faith alone. The result is that the angels , as warning and punishment, slowly degrade his house and then his own body. Day by day ghost Melancthon awakes in a further degenerated condition, till the last that's heard of him he is 'a kind of servant to demons.'
The Chamber of Statues
From The Thousand and One Nights numbers 271 and 272.
In the Andalucian city of Ceuta was a citadel with a door to which each successive king by tradition added a lock. Then a wicked man usurped the throne and, against the advice of holy men, insisted on ripping out the locks and opening the door to find what was inside. He discovered a series of rooms containing wonders, the last of which contained an inscription saying whoever opened the door would be overthrown. And, indeed, within a twelvemonth, the Arab leader Tariq ibn-Ziyad overthrew the usurper and sold his women and children into slavery.
Tale of the Two Dreamers
From The Thousand and One Nights number 351.
A merchant in Cairo falls asleep in his garden with a fountain and a fig tree and has a dream in which angels tell him to seek his fortune in Isfahan in Persia. So he packs up and off he sets.
After a gruelling journey, overcoming numerous threats and natural disasters, he finally arrives in Isfahan and falls asleep by a mosque.
But that night a house next to the mosque is robbed, the owners raise the alarm, the stranger is apprehended, thrown into prison and tortured. He is brought before the captain who asks who he is and why he's here.
The merchant tells the story of his dream, and the captain laughs and says he also has a dream of a garden of a house in Cairo with a fig tree and a fountain which has treasure buried under it, but he knows it's just a dream and has never acted on it.
He lets the whipped merchant go, who returns all the way back to his house in Cairo, digs under the fountain, and discovers a vast treasure. So the dream came true, just not at all in the way expected.
The Wizard Postponed
From the Libro delos enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor at de Patronio (1335) by Juan Manuel.
A beguiling story in which a Dean from Santiago, wanting to learn about magic, visits the noted magician Don Illán of Toledo and promises him anything if he will teach him magic.
So the Don takes him down into a cellar deep underground and submits him to a test, namely telescoping the next thirty years of their lives together. In this quick journey through the future the Dean is blessed with a series of promotions within the Catholic church, ending up being elected Pope.
At each step of the way the Don asks for some grace or favour but the newly promoted Dean puts him off, until he finally gets fed up of him and tells the Don to stop bothering him or he'll have him thrown in prison.
At which point the entire future they've lived through disappears in a puff of smoke and the Dean finds himself back in the deep cellar with Don Illán who says 'I told you so', escorts him to the door and wishes him a pleasant journey home.
The Mirror of Ink
From The Lake Regions of Central Africa (1860) by Richard Burton.
How the wizard Abd-er-Rahman al-Masmudi threw himself on the mercy of the tyrant of Sudan Yaqub the Ailing, who orders him every morning to show him visions and wonders, until one day al-Masmudi shows him a figure being dragged for execution. When Yaqub demands that the figure's veil be taken off, it reveals his own face and he watches the executioner raise his great sword and, when it falls and severs the neck of the man in the vision, Yaqub the Ailing himself falls dead.
A Double for Mohammed
From Vera Cristiana Religio (1771) by Emmanuel Swedenborg.
Since the idea of Mohammed is so closely linked to religion in the minds of Muslims, Allah ensures that heaven is overseen by a kind of deputy or second Mohammed, whose identity actually varies. A community of Muslims was once incited by evil spirits to acclaim Mohammed as their God, so Allah brought the spirit of the actual Mohammed up from under the earth to instruct them.
The Generous Enemy
From the Anhang zur Heimskringla (1893) by H. Gering
In 1102 Magnus Barfod undertook to conquer Ireland. Muirchertach, King of Dublin, sends him a nine-line curse which, by roundabout means, ends up coming true.
On Exactitude in Science
From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J.A. Suárez Miranda.
A fragment which tells of a magical empire where the geographers at first essayed maps so huge that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the Empire itself an entire Province. These were eventually replaced by the ultimate map of the empire which was the same size as the Empire itself, and coincided with it point for point. Over the years it fell into neglect and now only a few tattered fragments survive in the Western Deserts, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar.
Borges' approach
The content of the seven infamy tales is lurid and melodramatic, with plenty of murders, assassinations, beheadings, shootouts and suicides. But they are all refracted through a highly bookish, ironic sensibility which does at least two things: 1. It is very careful to cite the sources of the story, in a parody of a learned or scholarly article, and 2. it mocks the content of his own story with irony and knowing humour.
The first quality (a showy, pseudo-academic concern with indicating sources) is most evident in the opening of The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv:
If I am not mistaken the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number: a) those passages from The History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b) The Giant's Handbook, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the Dark Rose, or Hidden Rose, which was the Prophet's Holy Book; and d) some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian railway. (p.77)
'If I am not mistaken', that's a nice touch. The effect of these kinds of learnèd references is to give the very pleasurable sense that you are entering the magical realm of books and stories. Not the everyday books we encounter in our lives or local bookshops, glossy gardening books or biographies of celebrity chefs or tedious accounts of adulteries in North London – but that we have been transported to the realm of old-fashioned stories, stories of extreme actions and derring-do and marvellous deeds in exotic settings.
Stories from our remembered childhood which fired our imaginations before we were forced to grow up and become sensible. It is a very old-fashioned tone and it's no surprise that Borges, throughout his career, said his earliest and most enduring inspiration derived from the yarns of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle.
This old-fashioned, bookish tone overlaps with the wonderfully exotic settings of many of the narratives: slave plantations of the Deep South; Australia; the China seas; 18th century Japan; the Wild West; 12th century Ireland; medieval Spain; medieval Persia.
In the first preface he mentions Robert Louis Stevenson as a source and you can feel Stevenson's restless quest for exotic locations shared by Borges.
Intellectual themes
One of the most obvious recurring tropes of the stories is (the currently very modish theme of) 'identity'. The seven historical characters freely change their names or have names assigned them by contemporaries or historians. Writing of Monk Eastman, he says:
These shifts of identity (as distressing as a masquerade, in which one is not quite certain who is who) omit his real name – presuming there is such a thing as a real name.
The most flagrant example is Tom Castro who has already changed his name once before he embarks on the criminal project of impersonating Roger Charles Tichborne, which leads to the sensational trial in which the nature of 'identity' is central. A great deal could be said on the subject of fiction and identity but I'm going to pass.
Two prefaces
After the fact, Borges commented on his own stories in two prefaces, one written for the 1934 edition, one for 1954.
1934 preface
The 1934 preface is only one page long and Borges admits that the stories stem, in part, from:
my rereadings of Stevenson and Chesterton, and also from Sternberg's early films, and perhaps from a certain biography of Evaristo Carriego
combined with the over-use of certain tricks:
random enumerations, sudden shifts of continuity, and the paring down of a man's whole life to two or three scenes
I found it very interesting indeed that he casually says:
They are not, they do not try to be, psychological.
Traditional literature, and many short stories, focus on a psychological crux, a decisive moment in someone's life, and investigate the 'moral' and psychological aspects of it. Borges consciously turns his back on that tradition and exploits his sources to create pen portraits which are not at all concerned with anyone's inner life, but use the content as 1. entertainment, creating striking scenarios and tableaux, as if in paintings or – as he frequently remarks – like scenes from movies. In the 1954 preface he elaborates that:
The book is no more than appearance, than a surface of images; for that very reason, it may prove enjoyable
They are intended to be all surface. That partly explains why they end so abruptly and with no moralising whatsoever: to emphasise their shiny metallic surfaceness.
2. What Borges doesn't mention is that the stories are also quite clearly used as starting points for ironic and amused meditations on ideas, the more metaphysical and paradoxical the better. And that this was a harbinger of the work which was to come later.
The 1954 preface is twice as long as the 1934 one, being an extravagant 2 pages in length. Borges immediately launches into a consideration of 'the baroque', claiming it is a style:
which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its possibilities and which borders on its own parody… [that] only too obviously exhibits or overdoes its own tricks.
He goes on to link this to a fundamentally comic worldview:
The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has stated that all intellectual labour is essentially humorous.
I disagree. Having attended a big London exhibition about The Baroque I came away with the strong conviction that 'the Baroque' is above all about Power, the Complete Power wielded by monarchs who believed in their Divine Right to rule and the Total Power over all believers claimed by the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church.
Apart from anything else, Baroque works of art and churches are massive and imposing whereas Borges, if he is anything, is a precise miniaturist. He is more like a Swiss watchmaker than a Baroque architect.
But we are not reading Borges for accurate scholarship, in fact the precise opposite, we are reading him for his whimsical playing fast and loose with facts and figures and ideas for our amusement, an attitude he makes explicit when he writes that the stories are:
the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of others.
Borges may be correct in using the term 'Baroque' to indicate an interest in following every detail or narrative possibility to its logical conclusion, in the compulsive inclusion of every finial and architectural flourish possible. But his work is at the opposite end of the scale from The Baroque style in art and architecture.
And the Baroque is, above all, deadly serious, whereas Borges's work is informed throughout by a dry, metaphysical humour, that comes from somewhere else. This bookish humour is entirely Borges's invention, filtered through the gentlemanly, ironic tone of the late Victorian British authors he loved so much.
Literary influence
Apparently (or, as Borges might write, 'If I am not mistaken') the Puerto Rican critic Angel Flores (1900 to 1994) was the first person to use the term 'magical realism' and dated the start of the Magical Realist movement from this book.
This is echoed by the blurb on the back of the Penguin edition which claims that Borges intended the stories simply to be light entertainments, newspaper squibs:
'yet after its appearance in 1935 its influence on the fiction of Latin America was so profound that its publication date became a landmark in the history of Latin American literature.'
A Universal History of Infamy (1972 edition) online
Posted in Latin America, Philosophy, Short stories
Tagged A Universal History of Infamy, Abd-er-Rahman al-Masmudi, Angel Flores, Anhang zur Heimskringla, Anne Bonney, Arcana Coelestis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Orton, Asano Takumi no Kami, Australia, Baroque, Bartolomé de las Casas, Battle of Rivington Street, Billy the Kid, Borges, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Catholic church, Charles V, Chesterton, China, Don Illán of Toledo, Ebenezer Bogle, Edward Osterman, Emanuel Swedenborg, Emmanuel Swedenborg, Encyclopedia Britannica, Essays, Evaristo Carriego, fiction, Gangs of New York, Gnostics, H. Gering, Hakim of Merv, Herbert Asbury, history, identity, Ireland, Isfahan, Islam, J.A. Suárez Miranda, Japan, Juan Manuel, Kôtsuké no Suké, King of Dublin, Kira Kôtsuké no Suké, La Lujanera, Lake Regions of Central Africa, Lazarus Morell, Libro delos enxiemplos del Conde Lucanor at de Patronio, Life on the Mississippi, Madame Ching, Magical Realism, Magnus Barfod, Mark Twain, Mary Read, Monk Eastman, Muirchertach, narrative, New York, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Persia, Philip Melancthon, Richard Burton, Robert Louis Stevenson, Roger Charles Tichborne, Rosendo Juárez, short stories, Slavery, Sternberg, Tariq ibn-Ziyad, Thousand and One Night, Tom Castro, Travels of Praiseworthy Men, Vera Cristiana Religio, Virgil Stewart, W. C. Handy, William Harrigan, Yaqub the Ailing
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/05/03/universal-history-of-infamy-jorge-luis-borges/
Tamburlaine Part I by Christopher Marlowe (1587)
'I that am termed the scourge and wrath of God,
The only fear and terror of the world…'
Full title of the first printed edition, 1590
Tamburlaine the Great. Who, from a Scythian Shephearde, by his rare and woonderfull Conquests, became a most puissant and mightye Monarque. And (for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was tearmed, The Scourge of God.
The first written record we have refers to Tamburlaine being performed in 1587 which was the year Marlowe arrived in London from Cambridge, so he was quick off the mark.
Scholars guess that there was only ever meant to be a part one but that the play proved so phenomenally popular (and lucrative) that Marlowe was quickly commissioned to produce a sequel. Hollywood's cynical way with sequels is nothing new.
Both part one and two were published in 1590 and, although there was no name on the title page, no-one doubts that its author was Marlowe, not least because so many contemporary and later authors associate the two.
The historical Timur-i-Leng
Who knows what inspired Marlowe, living in an age characterised by courtly romances, dainty pastoral verse and witty sonnet sequences, to devote a play to one of the greatest megalomaniac conquerors and mass killers of all time? The play's short prologue suggests the author despised the jiggling verse and feeble comedies of his day and wanted to blast them aside with the Elizabethan version of the Terminator movies.
From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits,
And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,
We'll lead you to the stately tent of war,
Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms,
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.
Timur-i-Leng (meaning Timur the lame) was born in 1336, the son of a Mongol chieftain in Uzbekistan. He was described by Marlowe's sources as coming from Scythian tribesmen north of the Caspian Sea. He united the Mongol tribes and embarked on a campaign to conquer all of Asia, heading south to defeat the Moghuls at Delhi, west to ravage through Persia, taking on the Egyptian army in Syria and then the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia.
Timur became legendary for his brutality, laying waste to entire cities if they defied him, and massacring every single inhabitant. It's thought he was responsible for the deaths of as many as 17 million people representing as much as 5% of the world's entire population at the time. Timur died in 1405, somewhere in his 60s, as he was planning yet another campaign east into China.
Scene 1 The play opens in the court of the king of Persia, Mycetes, who is shown as being weak and ineffective. He asks his brother to make a speech which quickly turns into a traitorous critique of himself, Mycetes, so he threatens his brother but then does nothing. From this squabbling it emerges that the Persians are worried by the approach of the Scythian warlord, Tamburlaine, but Mycetes in his delusion, thinks he'll be able to deal with him by sending a thousand horsemen. He dispatches Theridimas, a general, to bring this about.
Meanwhile, Cosroe his brother, insults Mycetes to his face and says his subjects despise him for his feebleness. The king and his entourage depart leaving Cosroe who explains to Menaphon there is a conspiracy afoot to crown him king (Cosroe) of Asia, and next minute a crowd of courtiers and generals enter who explain that, because the current king is weak and his soldiers languishing while the provinces of the empire are being seized by Tamburlaine, they hereby elect Cosroe king of Persia. Cosroe accepts and promises to restore the empire's former glory (don't they all).
Scene 2 Tamburlaine's camp Enter Tamburlaine leading Zenocrate, Techelles, Usumcasane, Agydas, Magnetes, Lords,
and Soldiers, laden with treasure. Tamburlaine is in his early Scythian bandit phase. He and his band of robbers have intercepted the princess Zenocrate and her entourage as they were returning with all their treasure from Medea in Persia to her father, the Soldan of Egypt.
Tamburlaine tells them to have no fear, he will treat them well, he needs men and allies to grow his empire as part of his aim to become 'a terror to the world'. Meanwhile – is Zenocrate married, by any chance? Her beauty should grace the bed of he who plans to conquer Asia. He takes off his shepherd's or rustic wear and straps on a suit of armour to impress her, saying he will become emperor of the world and indicates his two lieutenants, Techelles and Usumcasane, who will command armies so large they will make mountains shake.
Zenocrate and her followers are sceptical of all this big talk, whereupon Tamburlaine decides they shall all stay with him to see these prophecies come true. Tamburlaine delivers another of Marlowe's trademark speeches packed with lush and sensual luxury:
A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee,
Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus;
Thy garments shall be made of Median silk,
Enchased with precious jewèls of mine own,
More rich and valurous than Zenocrate's.
With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled,
Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,
And scale the icy mountains' lofty tops,
Which with thy beauty will be soon resolved.
My martial prizes with five hundred men,
Won on the fifty-headed Volga's waves,
Shall all we offer to Zenocrate, −
And then myself to fair Zenocrate.
At this point a messenger announces the sighting of the 1,000 Persian cavalry led by Theridamas. Tamburlaine teases his auditors. He asks Zenocrate if she is not now secretly thrilled at the prospect of being freed? He asks his two lieutenants whether they should attack the approaching Persians and they, of course, enthusiastically say yes.
And then Tamburlaine surprises everyone by saying he will parlay with the approaching forces, instead. Theridamas enters and addresses Tamburlaine respectfully, and Tamburlaine invites Theridamas to join him.
Forsake thy king, and do but join with me,
And we will triumph over all the world;
I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about:
And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere,
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.
This is Marlowe's mighty line in action, but the lines are merely reflecting the mightiness of the thought of the conception – and that is always straining to be world beating, world leading, strive with the gods, thinking globally, at the uttermost limits of human achievement. Tamburlaine tells Theridamas that together they will conquer the world and become as immortal as the gods.
Overcome by his planet-striding rhetoric, Theridamas announces he will join Tamburlaine and become his partner and Tamburlaine greets him with open arms.
Scene 1 Persia In the court of Cosroe, who we saw being crowned alternative king of Persia. He asks a general who has seen him, for a description of Tamburlaine which is predictably hyperbolic. Cosroe says he plans to ally with Tamburlaine and Theridamas and overthrow Mycetes, then he will go a-conquering and leave Tamburlaine as his regent in Persia. His lackeys agree that it was a good decision to crown him — I think the point is, Cosroe – although smarter than 'the witless king' Mycetes – is still totally underestimating Tamburlaine. They all are.
Scene 2 Georgia In the camp of King Mycetes who rails against his brother's treachery, and promises they'll soon conquer this thievish villain Tamburlaine. An example of Mycetes's follish superficiality is that, in a report about Tamburlaine, he pays no attention to the military facts but is distracted by mention of the myth of Cadmus, who was said to have slain a dragon and sowed its teeth in the earth, from which sprang up an army of warriors.
General Meander tells the troops the plan, which is to scatter gold around the battlefield to distract what they expect to be Tamburlaine's undisciplined and thievish rabble, and while they scatter to retrieve it, massacre them. Mycetes sounds as frail and peevish as Justice Shallow in Henry IV.
MYCETES: He tells you true, my masters: so he does.
Scene 3 Cosroe has allied with Tamburlaine and Theridamas. They hear that Mycetes and the Persian army are approaching and gird for battle, inspired by Tamburlaine's rhetoric.
Scene 4 Enter Mycetes fleeing as if after a defeat, lamenting how horrible war is and trying to find somewhere to hide his crown. Enter Tamburlaine who abuses Mycetes for hiding in the heat of the battle, then seizes the crown from the wimp, sizes it up, Mycetes feebly begs for it back and Tamburlaine jocularly returns it, saying he'll be back and exits.
Scene 5 The allies have defeated Mycetes' army and their leaders now gather. Tamburlaine officially hands the crown of the Persian Empire to Cosroe who proceeds to give orders. One of his armies will march east to reclaim 'the Indies', he will take the main body to march in triumph through Persepolis, and he exits.
Tamburlaine takes up the phrase:
TAMBURLAINE: 'And ride in triumph through Persepolis!'
Is it not brave to be a king, Techelles?
Is it not passing brave to be a king,
'And ride in triumph through Persepolis?'
He and the generals disquisit on the glories of being a king and then, abruptly, Tamburlaine says he wants it – he wants the power and glory of the crown. He wants the crown he has just given Cosroe. And – rather mind-bogglingly – he gives the order for their combined armies to attack Cosroe and his forces who only departed a few minutes earlier.
Scene 6 Scandalised that his ally of five minutes ago, Tamburlaine 'that grievous image of ingratitude' has turned against him, Cosroe gives a speech rallying his troops.
Scene 7 The Big Battle Enter Cosroe, wounded; then Tamburlaine, Theridamas, Techelles, Usumcasane, with others. Cosroe is badly wounded and curses his enemies. Tamburlaine gives a definitive speech arguing that treacherous ambition is a) according to the pattern set by the father of the gods, Jove, who overthrew his own father, Saturn b) in our natures:
Nature that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regiment,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds:
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure every wandering planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,
Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest,
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.
Cosroe describes in poetic language what it feels like to die, and dies, his last words a curse on Tamburlaine and Theridamas. Tamburlaine places Cosroe's crown upon his own head and all his followers hail him King of Persia!
Scene 1 Anatolia, near Constantinople Enter Bajazeth, the Kings of Fez, Morocco and Algier, with others in great pomp. Bajazeth is emperor of the Turks, or, as he describes himself:
Dread Lord of Afric, Europe, and Asia,
Great King and conqueror of Graecia,
The ocean, Terrene, and the Coal-black sea,
The high and highest monarch of the world…
He is a completely different beast from either Mycetes or Cosroe: he truly believes himself the most powerful man in the world and his host covers the earth so completely as to hold back the spring, because rainwater cannot penetrate through the army to the soil, etc. He and this mighty host are besieging Constantinople.
Bajazeth explains he has heard the threats coming from Tamburlaine and the eastern thieves. He charges one of his 'bassos' ('Bashaws, or Pashas, Turkish governors or military commanders) to go and meet Tamburlaine and tell him to desist. If he insists on advancing, Bajazeth and his army will meet him. The messenger sent, Bajazeth returns to discussing with his generals details of the siege of Constantinople.
Scene 2 Enter Zenocrate, Agydas, Anippe, with others. In which it becomes clear Zenocrate has fallen in love with Tamburlaine who has treated her and hers with respect. Tamburlaine enters at the back of the stage and, as was the convention in Elizabethan theatre, overhears without being seen, Zenocrate admitting how much she has fallen in love with him. He also hears her adviser Agydas, bitterly criticise him.
Then Tamburlaine comes forward and gallantly takes her by the hand, giving black looks at Agydas who is left alone to curse the fact he was overheard and lament Tamburlaine's dark looks. Enter Techelles carrying a naked dagger which he hands to Agydas, with Tamburlaine's expectation that he will do the right thing. Agydas makes a speech then stabs himself. Techelles and Usumcasane are impressed how nobly Agydas spoke and acted.
Scene 3 Enter Tamburlaine, Techelles, Usumcasane, Theridamas, a Basso, Zenocrate, Anippe with others. The Basso sent by the Turkish Sultan Bajazeth has conveyed his warning to Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine scorns him and says he will fight and overthrow the Turk and then free all the Christian slaves he keeps.
Rather surprisingly, Sultan Bajazeth himself enters with his attendants. The two parties exchange abuse, like gangs of schoolboys. Both men address their queens, Bajazeth setting Zabina, mother of his three sons, on a throne to watch the battle, while Tamburlaine sets up Zenocrate. Then the boys fall to abusing each other again, vaunting and threatening and promising to defeat and enslave the other.
The menfolk exit, presumably to go off and fight, leaving the two queens on thrones to hurl insults at each other like two fishwives, and bring in their servants to affirm that the other wife won't even have the rank of scullion once her husband is overthrown. This must have been very entertaining to watch. Trumpets sound and cannon roar offstage to indicate the battle and both wives insist their husband is winning.
Until Bajazeth runs onstage pursued by Tamburlaine who overcomes him and makes him concede. Zabina laments. Theridamas takes Zabina's crown and gives it to Zenocrate. By defeating the Sultan, Tamburlaine has come into possession of his lands including most of North Africa. Bajazeth begs to be ransomed but Tamburlaine says he's not interested in money; when he conquers India all its rulers will throw gold and jewels at him.
He orders Bajazeth and Zabina to be bound and led away.
Scene 1 Enter the Soldan of Egypt, Capolin, Lords and a Messenger. The Soldan of Egypt enters shouting at his men to wake and sound trumpets, his daughter is held by the Scythian thief and bandit etc. (It needs to be explained that having conquered the Turks besieging Constantinople, Tamburlaine has moved south east and is now besieging Damascus, capital of Syria. Syria was owned by Egypt, hence the involvement of the Soldan.)
A messenger tells the Soldan Tamburlaine's horde now consists of 300,000 armed men and 500,000 foot soldiers. The Soldan says he defies him, but an adviser warns that Tamburlaine's forces are armed and ready while the Egyptians are unprepared. He goes on to explain Tamburlaine's method of siegecraft:
On the first day of a siege, Tamburlaine's tents and accoutrements are white: if the town surrenders to him on this day, its citizens will suffer no harm. But on the second morning his tents, dress and banners are changed to red. If a town surrenders on the second day, he will kill only those who wield weapons i.e. soldiers – Thomas Fortescue, the author of Marlowe's source for the play, The Collection of Histories (1571), wrote that if a city submitted on the second day, Tamburlaine would only 'execute the officers, magistrates, masters of households, and governors, pardoning and forgiving all others whatsoever'. But if these threats did not move, on the third day his pavilion, 'His spear, his shield, his horse, his armour, plumes' were changed to black and then the inhabitants of the besieged town could expect to be massacred to the last man, woman and child.
Outraged at this breaking of all the traditions of war, the Soldan orders a courtier, Capolin, to go request his ally, the king of Arabia to whom Zenocrate was engaged, to send the Soldan his army.
Scene 2 Outside Damascus' walls Enter Tamburlaine, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, Zenocrate, Anippe,
two Moors drawing Bajazeth in a cage and Zabina following him. Tamburlaine is reaching full-blown megalomania now. He has Bajazeth taken from his cage, and forces him to kneel on the ground so Tamburlaine can use him as a step up to his throne.
Bajazeth bitterly complains and his wife says Tamburlaine is not fit to kiss her husband's feet which have been kissed by so many African kings. Tamburlaine tells Zenocrate to discipline her slave, a message Zenocrate passes on to her handmaid who warns Zabina she'll have her stripped and whipped. Tamburlaine has Bajazeth returned to his cage and tells his wife she shall feed him with the scraps from Tamburlaine's table like a dog.
He turns his attention to the siege of Damascus and repeats the process described above: white flags on the first day, red on the second, black for total massacre on the third.
Scene 3 Enter the Soldan, the King of Arabia, Capolin and Soldiers with colours flying. The Soldan and his army are approaching Damascus to engage Tamburlaine. The Soldan repeats all their mutual grievances against the upstart peasant Tamburlaine to his ally, the king of Arabia. The Soldan orders the trumpets sound to warn of their arrival.
Scene 4 A Banquet set out; to it come Tamburlaine, all in scarlet, Zenocrate, Theridamas, Techelles, Usumcasane, Bajazeth in his cage, Zabina and others. Tamburlaine and colleagues fall to a feast taunting Bazazeth who calls down dire curses on their heads. They offer him scraps which he throws away. They give him a knife so he can kill his wife, Zabina, while she's still got some meat on her, but Bajazeth throws it away. Tamburlaine says maybe he's thirsty and his servants give him water which Bajazeth throws away.
Attention switches to Zenocrate who is sad. She explains it is because this is her father's city and her father's land she's seeing being laid waste, she asks Tamburlaine to make a peace with him. Tamburlaine says he will make peace with no man but aims to become emperor of the world. He will spare the Soldan's life, however. Anticipating victory, Tamburlaine awards his closest followers the Soldanship and kingdoms of Fess and Moroccus.
Scene 1 Inside Damascus Enter the Governor of Damascus, with several Citizens, and four Virgins having branches of laurel in their hands. It is day two of the siege and Tamburlaine's tents have turned to red, The governor and military leaders know their lives are forfeit. They have called together four virgins and give them the task of pleading with Tamburlaine for their lives.
Scene 2 Tamburlaine's camp outside Damascus Enter Tamburlaine, all in black and very melancholy, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, with others. The virgins piteously plead with Tamburlaine but tells them death sits at the tip of his sword and they shall taste. He orders them taken away and killed. A messenger enters to say they have been killed and their bodies hauled up the walls of Damascus.
Then Tamburlaine delivers a very long soliloquy about his feelings for sad Zenocrate… before pulling himself together. His generals enter to tell him Damascus has fallen but the army of the Soldan and king of Arabia approach. Theridamas pleads for the Soldan's life to please Zenocrate and Tamburlaine agrees.
He has Bajazeth pulled onstage in his cage to watch him prepare for war. Tamburlaine exits and Bajazeth and Zabina lament their humiliating destiny, at considerable length. Zabina exits and Bajazeth beats his brains out on the bars of his cage. Zabina returns, sees her dead husband, has a hysterical fit and also dashes her brains out against the bars of the cage.
Enter Zenocrate bitterly lamenting what she has seen in Damascus, awash with the blood of the massacred population and virgins hoisted up on spears and killed. So saying she comes across the bodies of the suicided Bajazeth and Zabina. She is horrified, and moralises that this is what even the highest most powerful emperors come to. Is this to be the end of her and Tamburlaine?
A messenger arrives to announce that her father, the Soldan of Egypt, and his ally the king of Arabia, have arrived and are engaging Tamburlaine's army in battle. Zenocrate's duty and love are torn apart (remember she had been engaged to Arabia).
In staggers the king of Arabia badly wounded, declaring he has fought and is dying for Zenocrates' honour. She goes to him, cradles him, laments their fates, and he dies.
Re-enter Tamburlaine, leading the Soldan, Techelles, Theridamas, Usumcasane, with others. Zenocrate is delighted to see her father still alive. The Soldan laments his defeat, but Tamburlaine says he will restore him as a tributary king. Tamburlaine has now reached stratospheric heights of mania, convinced the god of war has handed over power to him, the king of the gods is terrified of him, hell is overflowing with the souls he has sent there.
The god of war resigns his room to me,
Meaning to make me general of the world:
Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan,
Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.
Where'er I come the Fatal Sisters sweat,
And grisly Death, by running to and fro,
To do their ceaseless homage to my sword;
And here in Afric, where it seldom rains,
Since I arrived with my triumphant host,
Have swelling clouds, drawn from wide-gasping wounds,
Been oft resolved in bloody purple showers,
A meteor that might terrify the earth,
And make it quake at every drop it drinks.
Millions of souls sit on the banks of Styx
Waiting the back return of Charon's boat;
Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men,
That I have sent from sundry foughten fields,
To spread my fame through hell and up to Heaven. −
The climax of this train of thought is to crown Zenocrate Queen of Persia, and all the kingdoms and dominions he has conquered. He declares all these nations will have to pay her father, the Soldan, an annual tribute. He vows to give Bajazeth and Zabina and the King of Arabia worthy funerals. And he will marry Zenocrate.
And there, abruptly and suddenly, the play ends.
Timur's Hellenisation It's so ubiquitous that it's easy to overlook the fact that Tamburlaine refers incessantly to Greek mythology whether it be replacing Mars as god of war or challenging Jove king of the gods or causing a backlog for Charon to ferry over the River Styx and hundreds of other references. But Timur was a Sunni Muslim of Turco-Mongolian ancestry. In other words, the historical Timur would have thought and spoken in terms of Turkish, Mongolian and Muslim concepts, legends, traditions and language which we know nothing of. The Timur depicted in the play has been thoroughly Europeanised or Hellenised or Marlowised, and has more in common with those other early Marlovian heroes, Leander and Aeneas out of whose mouths poured a never-ending stream of classical references.
Timur's romanticisation Another indicator of Timur's domestication by Marlowe is the way the central spine of the play is, arguably, Tamburlaine's noble, chaste and dignified love for Zenocrate, which conforms completely to European tropes of romantic love developed during the Middle Ages. The real-life Timur was nothing at all like this, instead collecting dozens of women as wives and concubines as he conquered their fathers' or erstwhile husbands' lands, totting up some 43 wives and concubines that we know about.
Timur the Muslim Another token is the speech in which, on the eve of fighting the Turkish Sultan, Tamburlaine is made to vow that he will liberate the Christian slaves from their Turkish servitude. It is extremely unlikely that Timur ever thought like this. He was a devout Muslim who described himself in documents as 'the Sword of Islam', founded Muslim schools and hospitals and forced the rulers he conquered to convert to Islam. In fact, far from being a friend of Christians, Timur is now credited with virtually exterminating the Church of the East, which had previously been a major branch of Christianity.
In this as in so many other of his behaviours the real-life Timur was unknowably different from the reassuringly Europeanised figure Marlowe depicts.
My enemy's enemy However, throughout the Renaissance Timur was a well-known figure because popular opinion had it that, by attacking the Ottoman Turks when he did – defeating then Ottoman Sultan Bayezid in the Battle of Ankara on 20 July 1402 – Timur not only lifted the Ottoman siege of Byzantium, which gave that city another 80 or so years of Christian freedom, but stalled the Ottoman advance into Europe. He may have been a mass murderer on a colossal scale, but he hamstrung Christian Europe's chief enemy for a generation.
White slavery 'From 1530 to 1780, it is estimated that over one million Europeans were captured and enslaved by African pirates. The pirates not only made prizes of European shipping, but also raided the extensive European coastline for slaves, even descending on English villages occasionally, as they did in Cornwall in 1625 – right in the middle of the great era of English Renaissance drama.'
Tamburlaine part 1 on the Elizabethan Drama website This excellent website gives you a choice of reading the play script unencumbered by notes, or a comprehensively annotated text full of fascinating facts.
Marlowe's works
Introduction to Christopher Marlowe
Hero and Leander
Ovid's Amores
Dido, Queen of Carthage
Tamburlaine, Part I
Tamburlaine Part II
The Jew of Malta
Edward the Second
After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires 1400 – 2000 by John Darwin (2007)
Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia @ the British Museum
by Simon on October 19, 2020 • Permalink
Posted in English literature, Literature, Play, Theatre, War
Tagged 1587, Agydas, Anatolia, Anippe, Asia, Bajazeth, Bashaws, blank verse, Capolin, Charon, Christianity, Christopher Marlowe, Constantinople, Cosroe, Damascus, Delhi, drama, Egypt, Elizabethan drama, Europe, Fez, Georgia, Greek mythology, Jove, king of Arabia, King of Persia, Literature, Magnetes, Meander, Medea, Moghuls, Mongol, Morocco, Mycetes, Ottoman Turks, Persepolis, Persia, Play, poetry, Renaissance drama, River Styx, Saturn, Scythia, Soldan, Soldan of Egypt, Sultan Bajazeth, Sunni Islam, Syria, Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine the Great, Techelles, theatre, Theridamas, Theridimas, Thomas Fortescue, Timur i Leng, Usumcasane, Uzbekistan, White slavery, Zabina, Zenocrate
Posted by Simon on October 19, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/10/19/tamburlaine-part-1-christopher-marlowe/
A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barr
I had no idea the French were behaving so tyrannically' ( Winston Churchill, when informed how the French were planning to rig the supposedly 'free' elections to be held in Syria in 1943, quoted page 249 )
One should kill the British wherever one finds them. They are pathological liars and that is how they have ruled the whole world. ( French policeman chatting with a released Jewish terrorist, quoted on page 342 )
This is a really shocking book about the long-running rivalry between the British and French in the Middle East from the outbreak of the First World War through to Britain's ignominious withdrawal from Palestine in 1947. It makes you really despise, and even hate, the French for their corruption, cowardice, brutality and pomposity.
The book's last part is a detailed account of Jewish terrorist campaigns against the British, not only in Palestine but in London, where clubs, government buildings and even cabinet members were targeted. I hadn't realised how extensive it was – Churchill and young Princess Elizabeth were among targets considered for assassination. The terrorist plans of the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gangs put al-Qaeda to shame.
And the murder of hundreds of soldiers and officials in Palestine (not to mention hundreds of innocent Arabs) and the bomb attacks and letter bomb campaign in mainland Britain were aided and supported by France. Barr has the documentary evidence to prove it.
Imagine if the British secret service had given money and guns to the Islamic terrorists who carried out the Bataclan nightclub massacre. Same thing. The Jewish gangs convinced themselves that terrorism was a valid method of freeing their people from imperialist rule, just like Islamic terrorists want to overthrow the West, liberate the Holy Places and re-establish the Caliphate etc. And you do that by machine-gunning kids in nightclubs. Genius.
It's not often a book leaves me feeling physically sick and revolted by the moral bankruptcy of the people described, but this one did. The pompous prick de Gaulle, the French diplomatic corp and security services, or the murdering Jewish terrorists – it's hard to decide which are the more disgusting.
French failure
The French education system tells its citizens that France is home to a unique civilisation and a tradition of unparalleled military gloire. When you look closely, however, you realise it's a lie. The French were soundly beaten by the British throughout the 18th century, when we seized both Canada and India from useless French forces in the 1750s.
The Global Seven Years War by Daniel A. Baugh (2011)
1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World by Frank McLynn (2004)
After causing 25 years of mayhem across Europe in the Napoleonic Wars, the French were finally crushed at Waterloo in 1815, and went on to suffer a series of political revolutions in 1830 and 1848.
1848: Year of Revolution by Mike Rapport (2008)
Gareth Stedman Jones on Marx and 1848
The failed 1848 revolution in France evolved, through three years of tortuous political shenanigans, into the rule of the characteristically jumped-up, pompous 'Emperor' Napoleon III.
Napoleon III A Life by Fenton Bresler (1999)
The rule of this 'grotesque mediocrity' (in Marx's words) came to an inglorious end when the French were crushed during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and Paris collapsed into a blood-thirsty civil war.
The Franco-Prussian War by Sir Michael Howard (1961)
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1870-71) by Alistair Horne (1965)
The French came off second best in the Scramble for Africa and were constantly irritated by the feeling that somehow the British had beaten them unfairly, had seized India, Canada and their African colonies using 'underhand' tactics.
Running beneath everything is France's sulky inferiority complex to the British; forever seeking to restore the mythical gloire they fondly associated with Napoleon, and failing time after time, most glaringly at the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when they rattled sabres and then were forced to ignominiously back down. ( My notes on The Scramble For Africa by Thomas Pakenham )
France's most notable social achievement at the turn of the century was the Dreyfus Affair which revealed the vast extent of French anti-semitism and just how culturally polarised a nation it was.
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris (2013)
Battle lines were drawn between secular liberals and Catholic reactionaries, deep hatreds revised, Frenchmen murdered each other on the issue, the far-right proto-Fascist Action française movement was founded.
Although nationalist politics were confined to the margins in France, the ideas at their heart – a nation defined by the exclusion of those deemed not fit to belong to it, Jews quite specifically – remained undiluted as one part of a divided French culture. ( To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-1949 by Ian Kershaw, page 18 )
At the outbreak of the First World War the French only managed to stem the German attack in 1914 with the help of a British Army. While the British Army (amazingly) held its morale throughout the war, the French army experienced widespread mutinies in 1917.
As this quick review of the history indicates, educated French people suffer from cultural schizophrenia: everything in their tradition tells them that France is unique, a beacon of civilised values, a nation of unparalleled military genius – and yet their actual historical record is one of defeat, division and civil war. The French Revolution developed into a civil war, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 split the nation, the Commune of 1870 left enduring scars, the Dreyfus Affair revealed how divided the country was.
This schizophrenia continued after the First World War. The French people were told they had won the war and yet France experienced a profound economic slump, mass unemployment and a succession of short-lived governments. Something was wrong. Something was undermining French gloire. Someone was conspiring against them. Who could it be? Of course! The British! The old enemy.
Even before the First World War there were tensions between Britain and France. We managed to sign an Entente Cordiale in 1904 but this was less a sign of friendship than a way to try and limit and control their ongoing imperial rivalry, which had led to clashes in Sudan (which the British claimed) and Morocco (which the French claimed).
Britain and France worked reasonably well together in managing the Western front during the First World War, despite recriminations and blame about the various catastrophic military initiatives. But away from the fields of Flanders, the two nations continued their fierce competition. One of the flashpoints was in what we now call the Middle East but which was still, right through the Great War and up until 1923, called the Ottoman Empire.
The sick man of Europe
Throughout the second half of the 19th century the Ottoman Empire was thought to be on its last legs, staggering from one crisis to another in each of which it tended to lose another bit of territory, from the 1878 Russo-Turkish War when the Russians yet again tried to advance as far as Constantinople, through the British annexation of the theoretically Ottoman territory of Egypt in 1882, to the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 which saw bits of the formerly Ottoman Balkans handed over to Serbia and Bulgaria, and the Turco-Italian War of 1912-13 in which Italy seized the Ottoman provinces to the west of Egypt which were eventually consolidated into Italian Libya.
The Ottoman Empire attacks Russia; Russia vows revenge
After some reluctance, and only on the basis of the promise of arms, ammunition, lots of money and German military aid, the 'Young Turk' rulers of the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary (in October 1914).
They signaled their entry by a surprise attack on the Russian Black Sea fleet. From that point onwards, an angry Russia was determined to grab big chunks of Ottoman territory, namely Constantinople and its environs in the West, and an extended bite into Anatolia from the Russian-controlled territory of the Caucasus, in the East.
Italians, Greeks, Bulgarians and Russians all had their eyes on seizing more Ottoman territory.
The Sykes-Picot plan
This was the context in which two civil servants, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, one British, one French, drew up a map of how the Ottoman Middle East would be divided by the two countries (assuming the Allies won the war). The plan allotted a French sphere of influence in the north and a British sphere of influence in the south, with the dividing line running from Acre on the Mediterranean coast to Kirkuk in northern Iraq, near the border with Persia.
This map has four colours because the diplomats made a distinction between areas of 'direct control' and areas merely of 'influence'. The yellow area roughly corresponding to modern Israel, was left open subject to further discussion.
The Sykes-Picot plan for the Ottoman Middle East (Source: The Institute for Curriculum Services)
A Line In the Sand
This is the starting point of James Barr's history, A Line In The Sand, which is notable not so much for its coverage of the wartime context of the plan (which is thin) as for his very detailed survey of what came afterwards i.e. the consequences of the plan over the next 30 years.
This is where the book feels like it adds new and fascinating information. It's divided into four parts which give you a good feel of the content:
The Carve-Up, 1915-1919
Interwar Tensions, 1920-1939
The Secret War, 1940-45
Exit, 1945-49
The Sykes-Picot agreement is portrayed in conventional liberal historiography as a wicked imperialist 'land grab' which took no account of the wishes of the native peoples of these areas. But like all such agreements, it can also be seen as an attempt to prevent conflict between rival powers.
In fact, to gain even a basic understanding you need to realise it was just one among many post-war agreements between numerous states, all of which had to do with drawing lines on maps in an attempt to be fair to people's nationalist aspirations while also reconciling the conflicting wishes of rival governments. Thus the treaties of:
Brest-Litovsk, March 1918
Versailles, June 1919
Saint-Germain-en-Laye, September 1919
Neuilly, November 1919
Trianon, June 1920
Sevres, August 1920
Rapallo, November 1920
Riga, March 1921
Lausanne, July 1923
All of these consisted of drawing lines on maps and trying to get warring parties to agree to them, and all of them ignored the interests of numerous national and ethnic groups on the ground: for example, the Poles and Ruthenians left on the wrong side of the new Polish border with Ukraine, or the three million Germans who found themselves stuck inside the newly invented nation of Czechoslovakia, the Germans isolated in the newly 'free' city of Danzig, the Romanians caught inside Bulgaria, the Bulgarians caught inside the new Hungary. And so on and so on.
It was an era of bad maps, of diplomats trying their best to create viable states out of the enormous chaos left by the collapse of the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.
To single out Sykes-Picot for special opprobrium seems silly to me. Bad maps pregnant with all kinds of future problems were being created all over Europe.
Post-war rivals
The 1920s in Syria
Barr doesn't mention any of these other treaties or situate Syke-Picot in the broader post-war settlement (which is, admittedly, huge and horribly complex). For a really sophisticated account of the agreement (and of the key role played in it by Russia, who Barr doesn't mention at all) I strongly recommend Sean McMeekin's brilliant account of the period:
The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923 by Sean McMeekin (2015)
Instead Barr focuses very narrowly on the rivalry between Britain and France in the Middle East which followed the Great War and it's here that his detailed account of the politicking between the two supposed allies is genuinely eye-opening.
Broadly speaking the French, acting on the Sykes-Picot deal, moved into Syria and Lebanon, where they had long-standing cultural links, with French schools and institutions etc, although it is a mark of French arrogance, insensitivity and stupidity that they also based their claim on the legacy of the crusaders (!), the majority of whom had been French and had only been kicked out of the region as recently as 1291. French premier Clemenceau claimed that France had:
a centuries-old Protectorate, the origins of which date back to the Crusades.' ( quoted page 75 )
In fact it was British forces who had first entered Damascus at war's end (General Edmund Allenby captured Damascus on September 30, 1918) and allowed a political body set up by Syrian intellectuals and politicians, the Syrian Congress, to elect Faisal, son of the Sherif of Mecca, first King of Syria in 1919 and to set up an independent Syrian parliament. The French were furious and insisted that the British bring pressure to bear on Faisal to allow the French to take over Syria in the form of a 'mandate'.
As so often the French liked to think of themselves as 'a great power' and yet somehow, yet again, found themselves beholden to the damn British.
The sequence of events is complex, but basically the Syrians proclaimed an independent state under King Faisal and this triggered the French to a) assert their rights at the international San Remo conference of April 1920, armed with which they b) issued an ultimatum to Faisal to stand down as king and disband his forces. Reluctantly, Faisal did so and fled south into British-controlled Palestine (p.103). King Faisal's defense minister Yusuf al-'Azma, ignored the king and led the poorly armed Syrian army to Maysalun where it was crushed by superior French forces, who went on to enter Damascus and assert full French political control.
The first thing the French general who crushed the Syrian army, General Gouraud, did when he entered devastated Damascus was go straight to the tomb of the the great warrior Saladin who fought the Christian crusaders, to tell him: 'Saladin! We're back!' (quoted page 103). The French mandate over Syria ran from 1920 to 1946.
All through this tortuous series of events the French felt the British hadn't adequately supported them, a feeling which was crystallised by the next event. British forces occupying 'Iraq' had been troubled with their own violent uprisings but took a different strategy; rather than impose military rule, the British cast around for someone to make a nominal Arab figurehead of an Iraqi government and settled on… Faisal, the very same Faisal who the French had just run out of Syria. Thus in August 1921, Faisal was crowned Faisal I, king of Iraq (at what was, by all accounts, a sad and miserly ceremony: p.126).
The story of Faisal's changing fortunes is colourful enough, as is Barr's account of the initial French and British losses to well-armed and motivated Arab rebels against both their 'mandates'. But for Barr's purposes the point of the story is that the French felt that the British choice of Faisal was, yet again, a deliberate snub and insult to them. Touchy bastards.
French rule in Syria proved to be distinctly different from Britain's rule in Iraq and Palestine, and quickly acquired a reputation for corruption and brutality. This sparked successive Arab risings and armed insurrections. It didn't help that France herself was undergoing a severe economic crisis in the early 1920s, reflected in political instability as one short-lived administration followed another, creating a national sense of paranoia and bewilderment (p.142). They had supposedly won the war but seemed to be badly losing the peace.
Barr gives a detailed account of the Great Druze Revolt of 1925 to 1927 by the obstinately independent Druze Muslims who lived in the region south of Damascus, sparked by 'French mistreatment of the Druze population' (pp.128-152). At its climax the French High Commissioner Maurice Sarrail ordered the shelling of the capital city Damascus to flush out rebels, which led to the destruction of much of the Old City. A good example of French civilisation and gloire.
(In fact the French were to shell and bomb Damascus again, in May 1945, after refusing the Syrian government's request to hand over the French troupes speciales. Instead de Gaulle sent French army reinforcements and then used them to mount a major attack on all the offices of the Syrian government, bombing the parliament building, shooting up Syrian and British offices. The shooting went on for days. One Russian holed up in Damascus's main hotel said it was worse than Stalingrad. It was described as a 'reign of terror', in line with the Terror of the French Revolution, and the Terror unleashed during the 1870 Commune. Some 800 Syrians were killed. Syrian gendarmes were found buried in a mass grave, some of them having been mutilated by the French troops. The Parliament building was left a smoking shell. Eventually, the British government announced they would intervene militarily unless the French desisted. The Syrian authorities were livid and wanted the French officers in command to be tried for war crimes. And de Gaulle? De Gaulle blamed the British and their secret agents for everything. The man was a colossal turd. pp.303-310)
But why were the Arab population of Syria rebelling against them, the French, with their wonderful civilisation and poetry and art? Just because they hanged the natives and used them for forced labour and taxed them to the hilt to run their corrupt administration and displayed the corpses of dead Arabs in the town square? No. Natives love that kind of treatment. There must be something else behind it. Yes! It must be the British aiding the Syrian rebels! (p.152)
French soldiers, administrators and diplomats at all levels came to believe that the Arab insurgents were being funded by the British. Some of the Druze warriors confirmed these suspicions – but they were only repeating propaganda put around by their own leaders to hearten them (p.150).
This wasn't true – it was not British policy to support Arab insurgents against the French. But, on the other hand, the British had to consider Arab opinion in their area – stretching from the Sinai Peninsula, across the bare desert north of Arabia and then down into the region then known as Mesopotamia, making up the inhabited centres of the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys, modern Iraq. The British wanted to distinguish liberal British rule from what quickly became known as the corrupt and very brutal French rule in their zone.
To take a small but symbolic example, the British refused to hand over the terrorist leader Muhammed al-Ashmar who the French thought was behind atrocities in Syria, when he crossed over into British territory. This understandably infuriated the French. A host of little issues like this crystallised the French sense that the British were doing everything in their power to undermine their rule.
The Mosul oil pipeline
Another issue which caused bad feeling between the so-called allies was oil. At the very end of the war Britain campaigned hard to seize Mosul in the far north of Iraq, in fact British troops only took possession of the city the day after the armistice of Mudros with the Ottoman Empire took force, and it remained contested territory until the League of Nations confirmed its inclusion in the British mandate in 1926 (p.145).
But that was a trivial detail compared to the long, drawn-out wrangling about who should share the proceeds of the vast oil reserves which were finally discovered around Mosul in 1927 (p.153). A joint venture was set up with American and French companies under the aegis of the Turkish Petroleum Company, around which a great deal of haggling, arguing and threatening took place, gleefully recorded by Barr.
All sides agreed that the pipeline carrying the oil should run west to the Mediterranean coast. It was much cheaper than running the shorter distance south to the Persian Gulf because then it would have to be shipped around Arabia and through the Suez Canal. But should the pipeline run directly west from Mosul, in which case it would pass through French-controlled Syria to a French-controlled port – or take a more southerly route through the empty deserts of north Arabia and hit the coast at Haifa, in British-controlled Palestine. Obviously the Brits preferred this option, but it cost a lot more and was an obvious snub to the French. Barr details the convoluted political, strategic and financial arguments which dogged the project until it finally opened in a bifurcated route, with spurs heading off to British Haifa and French Tripoli, in 1934. The French resented the fact that, yet again, they'd been ganged up on (p.163).
The 1930s in Palestine
Rancour between the two countries came back to bite the British as the crisis in Palestine bubbled up during the 1930s. Small-scale Jewish immigration had been allowed throughout the 1920s not least as a consequence of the notorious Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which a hard-pressed British government tried to rally Jewish support for the Allies by promising the world's Jews – especially the rich and influential Jews in the United States – a homeland in Palestine. But it was relatively small, in fact it's surprising to learn that there was net emigration of Jews out of Palestine in 1927.
Still, there was a steady low-level hum of Arab-Jew antagonism, which occasionally flared into serious incidents such as the riots in 1929 which left 271 dead and 580 wounded (p.160).
What changed everything was the rise of the Nazis. The number of Jewish immigrants began to grow as the Nazis seized power of Germany (1933). Although they were often desperate, the Jews nonetheless tended to have more resources than the dirt-poor peasants of Palestine, were much better educated and organised, and so began to buy up extensive tracts of land (p.167). This soon led to resentment, petty disagreements escalated into shooting, then both Arabs and Jews took to carrying out terrorist atrocities, chucking hand grenades into marketplaces, and so on.
Initially a lot of this violence was committed by Arabs, under the supervision of the Arab Higher Committee led by Hajj Mohammed Amin al-Husayni, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. When assassins shot the British assistant district commissioner for north Palestine, the British authorities moved to arrest members of the Higher Committee but it's military leadership fled to nearby Damascus in French territory, where they were received… like heroes. And when the British turned to the French for help the latter, with a characteristic Gallic shrug, refused (p.175). This period of well organised Arab attacks on British soldiers and locations is known as The Great Arab Revolt, 1936-39.
The British authorities recruited Jews as special constables to go on increasingly illicit 'night raids' against suspected Arab terrorist strongholds. One such was Moshe Dayan, future leader of the Israeli Army. But in 1938 a Jew who had shot at an Arab bus, Schlomo Yusef, was hanged by the British – the first Jew to be hanged by the British in Palestine – and this crystallised the opposition of hard-line Jews, specifically the Hagana, to abandon their sympathetic attitude to the Brits and to mount full-blown attacks. On 6 July 1938 two bombs were thrown into a Haifa marketplace killing 21 Arabs (and 6 Jews). On 15 July a bomb in Jerusalem killed ten Arabs. And we're off on a rollercoaster ride of non-stop killings and atrocities by both Jews and Arabs, with the British authorities haplessly trying to keep order.
The final part of the book turns away from Syria and Iraq to focus on the long, tortured story of the conflict in Palestine. I found the accounts of Jewish terrorism upsetting and the revelation that the French security services aided and abetted Jewish terrorists targeting British soldiers in Palestine and British civilians in London absolutely disgusting.
De Gaulle comes over as an arrogant, lying prick. The British gave him home, shelter, broadcast facilities in London and helped the French Resistance, often at the cost of British lives, so it was disgusting beyond words to read again and again and again and again, the recorded statements of De Gaulle's haughty contempt for Britain, his disdain of Britain, and the rampant anglophobia which ran right through the French political and military establishment.
In his memoirs de Gaulle recalled with relish how Britain's Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, once asked him whether he realised that he had caused "more trouble than all our other European allies put together." "I don't doubt it," de Gaulle replied. "France is a great power." (p.206)
It is worth remembering that, once Hitler attacked, the cheese-eating surrender monkeys (the ones who were defeated in 1870 and then only survived in 1914 because of British help) capitulated in just five weeks (the Battle of France lasted from 10 May to 25 June 1940).
To Lose a Battle: France 1940 by Alistair Horne (1969)
This was due not least to the profound divisions among the French themselves.
France [in 1936] remained a completely divided country. The hatred of the nationalist Right for the Popular Front went far beyond conventional political opposition. Special vitriol was directed at its leader, Léon Blum, a Jewish intellectual who had been an early supporter of Dreyfus. Blum had been physically assaulted by a nationalist mob in February 1936. And the previous spring, the leader of the far-right Action Française, Charles Maurras, had appallingly denounced Blum as 'a man to be shot – in the back.' (To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1949 by Ian Kershaw, page 298)
A popular right-wing slogan was 'Hitler rather than Blum'. Many – many – French people preferred to be ruled by Hitler than by a Jew. Ponder that fact.
The French political scene [in the 1930s] was notoriously venal and corrupt. ( To Hell and Back: Europe 1914-49 by Ian Kershaw, page 237 )
The opening part of this episode of The World At War gives a summary of just how chaotic and divided France and its governments were during the build-up to the Second World War.
After their defeat, the French set up the Vichy regime, a right-wing semi-fascist government which enthusiastically co-operated with the Nazis to round up French Jews and send them off to concentration camps (75,000 French Jews were deported to Nazi death camps). Blum was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp where, luckily, he survived.
Yes, proud France! That is how to treat your Jewish politicians! Liberty, Equality, Fraternity indeed. La gloire. La mission civilisatrice.
Somehow de Gaulle blamed all this on the British. Why? Because whenever anything bad happens in France, it isn't France's fault – it must be Britain's fault.
The Vichy government inherited control of Syria and Lebanon. The British led a campaign to oust the Vichy forces – the Syria-Lebanon Campaign of July 1941 – because Vichy had signed an agreement with the Nazis to let them use Syria and Lebanon's airfields, for possible attacks on Greece or Crete.
The British (and Australian) forces were accompanied by Free French forces supplied by de Gaulle, who assured us that the Vichy army would quickly collapse. He was confident they would rally to him, the Greatest Frenchman in the Word. But they didn't. They fought back very fiercely. When shown the evidence that he was completely wrong in his military estimate, de Gaulle characteristically said it showed how valiantly Frenchmen fought for any cause and went on to blame Britain's lack of resources and commitment for the setbacks. It's always the British fault (p.221).
When the Free French (backed by the British) eventually did succeed in overthrowing the Vichy regime in Syria, they discovered they didn't have enough personnel to administer it, so a lot of French personnel swapped sides (as they do so easily) and discovered a new-found love of de Gaulle. 'Ah, mon brave, mon cher, mon ami' is the sound of self-serving hypocrisy (p.225).
The British had publicised their campaign to the Arab world by saying they were going to overthrow the brutal Vichy administration. Then de Gaulle kept almost all the Vichy administration in place, thus placing the British in the position of appearing to have lied.
De Gaulle's unbearable ingratitude and arrogance make reading anything about him difficult. He cultivated a strategy of 'bad manners and a foul temper'. He gave interviews to American newspapers blaming all setbacks on the British (the same British who were fighting and dying to establish a Free French regime in Syria) (p.228).
When the British tried to make good on the promises they'd made to the Syrian Arabs during the Syria-Lebanon Campaign, to hold free and fair elections, de Gaulle, characteristically, refused. He said it was out of the question for Glorious France to diminish her Glory. He and Churchill had a bitter shouting match about his refusal, after which the British simply cut off de Gaulle's telegraph links with the outside world for a week to show him that he wasn't a Great Power, he was just a man in an office with a phone which didn't work (p.242).
Re. de Gaulle, it's worth recalling from Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another by Jonathan Fenby, that American President Roosevelt really, really, really despised de Gaulle, as did most of the American administration. They saw him for the jumped-up boaster he was, refused to allow him to attend meetings of the Big Three, and tried to manoeuvre a rival candidate, General Giraud, to replace de Gaulle as leader of the French Committee for National Liberation (p.257).
In November 1943 the French army staged a coup against the democratically elected Arab government of Syria, rounding up the President, the Prime Minister, Faris al-Khoury, and most of the cabinet, throwing them in prison, and letting their Senegalese troops run riot through the streets of Damascus.
It was incidents like this which convinced Roosevelt that de Gaulle had authoritarian, if not actual fascist tendencies, and didn't deserve to be present at meetings of the Big Three (p.261). Syrian rebels began assembling forces in the hills. The situation threatened to descend into anarchy. And to solve it all…. de Gaulle blamed the whole situation on the British for interfering in French affairs, and threatened to resign (p.261).
Eventually Churchill threatened to use superior British forces to declare martial law in Syria and so de Gaulle, his man on the spot, The General Delegate to the Levant, the alcoholic Jean Helleu, was recalled to Paris along with all of his team responsible for the coup, the Syrian President, Prime Minister and his cabinet were restored to power and France's name, very gratifyingly, was mud (p.263).
Jewish terrorism and Israel
What makes the last part of the story – from 1943 to 1948 – really weird – was the way these formerly very right-wing Vichy French allied with the Jewish resistance against the common enemy, the British. After reading over 100 pages documenting the virulent anglophobia and Brit-hatred of all the senior French politicians, from de Gaulle downwards, the sensible assumption just becomes, If they're French, they hate the British and, if they're in a position of power, almost certainly funding anti-British terrorism.
Thus we arrive at the devastating final section in which we learn that, Anglo-French rivalry became so venomous that, in the last days of World War Two, even as British soldiers were fighting and dying to liberate France, the French government was financing and arming Jewish terrorists who were attacking and killing British soldiers in Palestine. What a bunch of bastards.
With the war years and the growth of the Jewish resistance forces, you enter a surreal world of unlikely alliances.
Lehi [often known pejoratively as the Stern Gang] initially sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, offering to fight alongside them against the British in return for the transfer of all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Believing that Nazi Germany was a lesser enemy of the Jews than Britain, Lehi twice attempted to form an alliance with the Nazis. (Wikipedia)
Jewish freedom fighters seeking an alliance with the Nazis? (p.268) You can see how real history, the real record of human affairs, like human beings themselves, is faaar more complex, contradictory and irrational than the baby morality of political correctness and identity politics allows.
The British had been forced to make a strategic decision. They were at war with Hitler who controlled the entire continent of Europe. Meanwhile, along with a host of other responsibilities around the world, they were theoretically in charge of Palestine. If more Jews immigrated into Palestine it would inflame the low-level conflict between Arabs and Jews which was already burning there. Arabs or Jews, which side do you want to alienate? Well, the Arab world stretches from the Atlantic to Persia, so the answer is simple: keep the Arabs onside, specially as they populated the lands around the Suez Canal, which was the carotid artery of the British Empire.
Thus, in order to try and keep the Arabs onside, the British government issued a White Paper in 1939 which restricted both Jewish immigration and Jewish land purchases in Palestine. This one step turned the Jews into fierce enemies, and as the war went on and the Holocaust began to be enacted, Jewish anger at the perceived anti-Jewish bias of the British soured into military operations carried out by gangs of terrorists. Helped by the French.
The Haganah put its intelligence network in Syria at the disposal of the Free French (p.267)
When the Allied attack on the Levant took place the Haganah provided members of its elite units to serve as guides
British police trailing suspected members of the Stern Gang saw them get a taxi to the Syrian border, cross the border, and be welcome by a French officer (p.269)
In his memoirs a member of the Stern Gang confirmed that the gang was supplied with arms and ammunition by the French regime in Syria, knowing they would be used to kill British soldiers and officials (p.271)
A Stern Gang member on trial stated that if Palestine was under a French mandate he was sure the British (who were trying him) would instead be giving him arms (the implication being… like the French were doing) (p.272)
A Hebrew-language publication of the gang admitted they were getting arms from the French (p.272)
In November 1944 MI6 uncovered proof that the French secret service was supplying money and guns to the Haganah and the Stern Gang – who had, that month, assassinated Britain's Minister-Resident for the Middle East, Lord Moyne (p.289)
The French secret service was sharing with the Zionists information sourced from a French spy inside the British legation (p.290)
'The French are in collusion with right-wing Jews and known terrorists have lunched with Alessandri [top French security service official]', (Jewish Agency liaison officer and future mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, quoted page 292)
'The British government, beset by French-sponsored Jewish terrorism in the Levant…' (p.298)
'Now, deeply alarmed at the prospect that France going to be thrown out of the Levant, both the Jewish Agency and the terrorist organisations made contact with the French government to offer their services, (p.309)
France helps the Jewish terrorist campaign in Britain
'The British government had known for some time that the Irgun and the Stern Gang were planning to use Paris as a base for assassinations of key British politicians including Churchill and Bevin… (p.337)
Barr describes the extensive contacts and meetings between members of the Irgun and Stern Gang with French officials in Paris who supported them in their plans to carry out terrorist attacks in Britain. Lawyer and advisor to Léon Blum, André Blumel, hoped the LEHI would get all the assistance it needed to launch attacks on Britain. (p.338). Senior French lawyer helps terrorists attack Britain.
The first attack was carried out by a student of Jean-Paul Sartre's, Robert Misrahi, who left a bomb in a raincoat at the Officers Club off Trafalgar Square (p.339).
When a Zionist shipment of arms was impounded by French police in south-west France, the minister of the Interior intervened to ensure that they were sent on to the Zionists in Palestine. When five members of the Stern Gang broke out of a British prison in Eritrea and managed to reach the French colony of Djibouti, the French offered them asylum in France (p.340).
A young woman terrorist, Betty Knout, left a bomb in the toilets of the Colonial Office in Whitehall, which failed to go off and fingerprints and equipment indicated its manufacture by Stern Gang members. When British Special Branch tried to track her down in Paris, the French security services did what they could to block the hunt (p.340).
They launched a letter bomb campaign, sending letter bombs to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Anthony Eden among others.
When a new Zionist point man arrived in Paris, he discovered his predecessor had reached an understanding with the French government: the Irgun and Stern Gang could use Paris as their base providing they didn't carry out any attacks on British targets on French soil. When Princess Elizabeth paid a visit to France, the French police met the Irgun face to face to make sure they didn't have a plan to assassinate her. Nice of them, don't you think (p.343).
Semi-fascist views of the Zionist terrorists
It's important not to be under the illusion that these were 'nice' or sympathetic people:
According to Yaacov Shavit, professor at the Department of Jewish History, Tel Aviv University, articles Lehi publications wrote about Jewish 'master race', contrasting them with Arabs who were seen as a 'nation of slaves'. Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes: 'Lehi was also unabashedly racist towards Arabs. Their publications described Jews as a master race and Arabs as a slave race.' Lehi advocated mass expulsion of all Arabs from Palestine and Transjordan or even their physical annihilation. (Wikipedia)
Timeline of violence in Palestine
Jewish terrorism, and British attempts to stop it, only intensified once the Germans were defeated and peace was declared in Europe on May 1945. Wikipedia has a timeline:
Timeline of the Jewish insurgency in Mandatory Palestine
Note how Jewish attacks on British forces are interspersed with British Army attacks on terrorists, the handling of prison breakouts, issues with immigrant ships trying to dock.
Reading this sorry story, the puzzle is why the British government persisted as long as it did. Remember, this was the government of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan which is routinely remembered in folklore as founding the National Health Service (as memorialised at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games).
It's easy to say they screwed this up, but what choice did they have? A government's first responsibility is to try and maintain peace and security by enforcing law and order. This becomes difficult to do in any insurgency situation, and the British authorities made the same mistakes as they had during the Black and Tan period in Ireland 1920 to 1922 and with the same generally negative effects, i.e they often targeted innocent civilians, missing the real culprits but managing to alienate the wider population. Which is what your insurgents want (p.185).
The British just give up
The British unilaterally terminated their Palestine 'mandate' on 15 May 1948. The Zionist leadership announced the Israeli Declaration of Independence and Arab armies attacked from north and south.
The role of the Americans
In the later stages of the war and the post-war years America plays a bigger and bigger role. The American administration and American public strongly supported the Jews and raised millions of dollars for them. Jewish intellectuals and businessmen lobbied President Truman very hard. Barr gives a fascinating account of the very effective work of the American league for a Free Palestine run by Hillel Kook, which took out full-page ads in the newspapers, got celebrity endorsement, organised all kinds of publicity campaigns – with texts written by Hollywood scriptwriter Ben Hecht – and significantly influenced American public opinion in favour of the Jewish cause.
All those dollars and all that moral support made a big difference to the Zionists, gave them confidence that they wouldn't be abandoned or left in the lurch, and the moral encouragement to fight on.
No solution
And finally, the obvious observation that – nobody could come up with a solution. It wasn't like there was an easy solution to hand and the British stupidly ignored it. All the best diplomats and politicians on the planet had plenty of time and motivation to think up a solution. The Peel Commission, the Woodhead Commission, the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, the United Nations Commission On Palestine, all tried to find a solution.
But nobody could. They still can't, to this day, because there is no solution.
My view of the book
I knew nothing about this era (Middle East in the 1920, 30s and 40s) and so was fascinated by everything Barr had to tell.
His book is notable for the immense attention he pays to specific meetings and conversations between key figures on both sides. We are introduced to a large cast of diplomats, soldiers and politicians, with quick pen-portraits of each of them, before Barr, typically, gives us precise exchanges and conversations.
Much of this must be sourced from the minutes of all these meetings, because they often describe the exact words used by, for example, French premier Clemenceau and British Prime Minister Lloyd George, to give one example from hundreds. Barr is strong on the exact words used in crucial meetings, diplomatic notes, letters and diaries and also recently declassified documents, both in the UK and in France.
The book's weakness is that sometimes this deep immersion in the precise sequence of meetings and notes and memos and speeches and diaries obscures the real significance of key issues or turning points. Big things get buried. Sometimes I had to reread sections to understand what just happened.
The other obvious shortcoming is Barr's neglect of the wider geopolitical context. I felt this most acutely in the first section about Sykes-Picot which completely ignores the role played by Tsarist Russia, by Germany and, of course, by the Ottoman rulers themselves because I just happened to have read Sean McMeekin's excellently thorough and insightful account of the same period.
For example, Barr doesn't mention the Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov, who co-signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement because, in addition to the carve up of Syria/Palestine/Iraq, the deal allotted Tsarist Russia a big chunk of Eastern Anatolia, and also gave her her long-cherished dream of Constantinople and the territory around it. Because of the Russians' heavy involvement, McMeekin thinks the agreement should be known as the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement.
And nowhere does Barr mention the extraordinary fact that one of the baits the Allies dangled in front of Italy while she dithered whether to join the war or not (Italy didn't enter the war, on the Allies side, until May 1915) was a big slice out of southern Anatolia.
Therefore, a full picture of the Sasonov-Sykes-Picot map looks like this. Note the flesh-coloured patch on the right which was to be given to Russia, along with the city of Constantinople and the territory north and south of it (at the top left), and the extraordinary amount of territory which was going to be handed over to Italy.
Sykes-Picot map showing the territory promised to Russia and Italy
None of this is in Barr's account, which therefore comes close to being seriously misleading about this period.
It is symptomatic of Barr's Anglocentrism that instead of all this vital context involving other major powers, he devotes entire chapters (chapters 2 and 3, Enter TE Lawrence and Allenby's Man, pp.37-64) to Lawrence of Arabia, the pukka English hero, who in fact comes to dominate the whole of the first part of the book. We get a blow-by-blow account of Lawrence's (rather feeble) military exploits as well as quotes from his letters, diaries, newspaper articles and quotes from his friends.
By 'Anglocentric' I mean we get 100-pages about Lawrence and his influence, but nowhere does Barr mention the names of the last two Ottoman sultans who ruled during and after the war (Mehmed V 1909-1918, Mehmed VI 1918-1922) nor does he name the three Turkish politicians who ruled the Ottoman Empire during the war, Enver, Talaat, and Cerman. The great military and political leader who dominated the final 1923 settlement of the Ottoman Empire at the Treaty of Lausanne, Mustafa Kemal, later to be given the title Ataturk, is mentioned just once.
It's as if the Ottoman Empire, whose territory the entire book is about, barely exists or matters.
The book's strength is its weakness. It isn't interested in the broader geopolitical implications. It is a narrow and very deep dive into the diplomatic minutiae of the troubled relations between Britain and France in the Middle East 1916 to 1946. Barr goes into extreme detail – apparently writing from the minutes and notes taken at specific meetings of various French and British civil servants, ambassadors and leaders – to give you a memo-by-memo account of the behind the scenes conversations and decisions.
But sometimes so detailed, you lose the thread of what's actually happening. And always, so focused on just Britain and France, that you get no sense at all of the wider geopolitical situation, of events in Turkey, the Caucasus or neighbouring Russia or Persia. Silence.
My view of the two key issues
I think received liberal opinion about Sykes-Picot and the Balfour declaration is too simple-minded.
1. Sykes-Picot
I'm no expert but it seems to me simplistic to attribute all the conflicts in the Middle East to just one agreement out of scores and scores of similar treaties and a whole sequence of very complex events, which flowed before and after it.
If you read Barr, with his exclusive focus on the British and French governments, you get the impression they were responsible for everything bad that ever happened. But if you read McMeekin's much more comprehensive account, you are immediately plunged into the maze of ethnic tensions and rivalries which plagued the region, from the poisonous enmities all across the Balkans (Serbs, Bulgarians, Croats, Bosnians, Greeks, they all hated each other) to the huge divides which split the Middle East, from the conflict between Shia and Sunni Muslims, to that between ethnic Turks and all their subject peoples – the squabbling tribes of desert bedouin, the Christian Armenians in the East, the Kurds in south-east Anatolia, and so on and on.
Barr doesn't, for example, even mention the Armenian Genocide of 1915 to 1917, a prime example of the extreme ethnic violence which had roots far back in the 19th century way before the British and French started planning their 'carve-up' – or the horrifying ethnic cleansing surrounding the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-23.
When you read McMeekin on the other hand, you reach a really good understanding of why the entire region was a powder keg which had, in fact, already exploded several times before the Great War broke out. The Ottomans had repressed Armenian and Bulgarian uprisings with great brutality and bloodshed throughout the later 19th century.
That's why the ante-penultimate sultan, Abdul Hamid II (reigned 1876 to 1909) was nicknamed 'the bloody sultan' or 'the red sultan'. It was the historical track record of pogroms, ethnic cleansing and massacres which gave liberals like David Lloyd George such a deeply engrained antipathy to the Ottoman Empire (and, as it turned out, an inclination to give the Greeks deeply misplaced encouragement in their ambitions to invade Anatolia).
Whoever ended up ruling over these regions was going to inherit a very poisoned chalice of ethnic rivalries and enmities. Indeed it's one of the many strengths of McMeekin's book that he makes you realise how very astute Mustafa Kemal was, the man who rose to become Turkey's post-war ruler, when he allowed most of the former empire to be hived off to the British and French by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. All these bickering minorities were their problem now, the fools.
Attributing all the problems of the entire region to one agreement just strikes me as foolish. The Sykes-Picot agreement was merely the formal recognition of at least four nations' claims on Ottoman territory, was provisional and was soon superseded by a whole raft of other agreements such as:
the Anglo-French Declaration promising to establish independent states in the Middle East with freely chosen governments (November 1918)
the Agreement of San Remo (April 1920) which defined three 'class-A' mandates, 'Palestine', 'Syria' and 'Mesopotamia'
the Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) which was a first attempt to 'carve up' the Ottoman Empire including Anatolia and its European territory
the Treaty of Lausanne (1923), which marked the official end of the Allies war against the Ottoman Empire and established the borders of modern Turkey
Why not blame those treaties too? They all contributed to what was, in fact, a continuous flux of conflict, resolution, treaties and agreements which continued throughout the Mandate period and afterwards, right up to the present day.
2. The Balfour Declaration
Similarly, a lot of people blame the Arab-Israeli Conflict on the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917. But Zionism existed well before the declaration. Wikipedia defines Zionism as:
the nationalist movement of the Jewish people that espouses the re-establishment of and support for a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine)
And points out that it originated 'in the late 19th century' and in Austria and Germany not Britain.
Jews were already emigrating from Europe, and especially anti-semitic Russia, into Palestine well before the Balfour Declaration. To ponder a counter-factual, do people think that, if there had been no Balfour Declaration, Jews would not have emigrated to Palestine? Of course not. A Jewish homeland in Palestine was a central plank of Zionism for decades before Balfour, whether the British government supported it or not, in fact whether any Western government supported or tried to block it.
We shall migrate to Palestine in order to constitute a majority here. If there be need we shall take by force; if the country be too small – we shall expand the boundaries. (speech by David ben-Gurion, quoted page 274)
The fact that net Jewish migration to Palestine was negative in 1927 – ten years after the declaration – shows that the declaration in itself had a negligible effect, it certainly didn't open any 'floodgates'.
The most important cause of modern Arab-Israeli conflict was Hitler. The Nazis not only caused the trickle of migration to Palestine to turn into a flood, they – and the experience of the Holocaust – made an entire generation of Jews absolutely determined to establish a Jewish state come what may, no matter who they had to assassinate, murder, letter bomb, massacre and hang to achieve it.
That wasn't Balfour's doing. That was Hitler. Hitler made the creation of the state of Israel inevitable.
France's great 20th century diplomatic achievements
La gloire!
A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barr was published by Simon & Schuster UK in 2011. All references are to the Simon & Schuster paperback edition of 2012.
by Simon on May 22, 2020 • Permalink
Posted in European History, Great War, History, Turkey, World War One
Tagged Abdul Hamid II, Action française, André Blumel, Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry, Anglophobia, Anthony Eden, anti-Semitism, Arab Higher Committee, Armistice of Mudros, assassination, Balfour Declaration, Bataclan, Battle of France, Battle of Maysalun, Betty Knout, Britain, British Empire, British mandate, crusades, Damascus, David Lloyd-George, de Gaulle, Dreyus Affair, Druze, Entente Cordiale, Faisal, Faris al-Khoury, First World War, François Georges-Picot, France, Franco-Prussian War, French, French Committee for National Liberation, French Empire, General de Gaulle, General Giraud, General Gouraud, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Great Arab Revolt, Great Druze Revolt, Haganah, Haifa, imperialism, Iraq, Irgun, Jean Helleu, Jews, Kirkuk, Lawrence of Arabia, League of Nations, Lebanon, Lehi, Mark Sykes, Maurice Sarrail, Middle East, Mohammed Amin al-Husayni, Moshe Dayan, Mosul, Mustafa Kemal, Napoleonic War, Nazis, oil, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Peel Commission, Persia, Robert Misrahi, Saladin, San Remo conference, Schlomo Yusef, scramble for Africa, Sean McMeekin, Sergei Sazonov, Seven Years War, Stern Gang, Sykes-Picot plan, Syria, Syria-Lebanon Campaign, Syrian Congress, TE Lawrence, terrorism, the Bloody Sultan, the red sultan, Treaty of Lausanne, Tripoli, Turco-Italian War, Turkish Petroleum Company, United Nations Commission On Palestine, Vichy France, Winston Churchill, Woodhead Commission, Yusuf al-'Azma
Posted by Simon on May 22, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/a-line-in-the-sand-james-barr/
This is a very good book, maybe the definitive one-volume account of the subject currently available.
McMeekin's earlier volume, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918, although full of solid history, was conceived and structured as an entertainment, using the erratic history of the Berlin to Baghdad railway project as a thread on which to hang an account of the German High Command's attempt to raise a Muslim Holy War against her enemies, Britain and France, across the entire territory of the Ottoman Empire and beyond, into Persia and Afghanistan.
It had a chapter apiece devoted to the quixotic missions which the Germans sent out to try and recruit various Muslim leaders to their side, very much dwelling on the colourful characters who led them and the quirky and sometimes comic details of the missions – which, without exception, failed.
In Berlin to Baghdad book McMeekin had a habit of burying references to key historic events in asides or subordinate clauses, which had a cumulatively frustrating effect. I felt I was learning a lot about Max von Oppenheim, the archaeological expert on the ancient Middle East who was put in charge of Germany's Middle East Bureau – but a lot less about the key events of the war in Turkey.
Similarly, as McMeekin recounted each different mission, as well as the various aspects of German policy in Turkey, he tended to go back and recap events as they related to this or that mission or development, repeatedly going back as far as the 1870s to explain the origin of each thread. I found this repeated going over the same timeframe a number of times also rather confusing.
This book is the opposite. This is the book to read first. This is the definitive account.
In 500 solid pages, with lots of very good maps and no messing about, following a strict chronological order, McMeekin gives us the political, military and diplomatic background to the Ottoman Empire's involvement in the First World War, a thorough, authoritative account of those disastrous years, and of their sprawling aftermath through the disastrous Greco-Turkish War (1919-23) ending with the Treaty of Lausanne, signed in July 1923, which established the modern republic of Turkey and brought that troubled country's decade of tribulations to an end.
McMeekin suggests that the bloody decade which stretched from the first of the two Balkan Wars in 1912/13 through to the final peace of the Greco-Turkish War as, taken together, constituting The War of The Ottoman Succession.
This is the first detailed account of the Gallipoli disaster I've read, which clearly sets it in the wider context of a) the broader Ottoman theatre of war b) the First World War as a whole. I was a little shocked to learn that the entire Gallipoli campaign was in response to a request from Russian High Command to draw Ottoman troops away from the Caucasus, where the Russian High Command thought they were being beaten.
One among many bitter ironies is that the Russians were not, in fact, being defeated in the Caucasus, that in fact the Battle of Sarikamish (December 1914 to January 1915), which the Russian leadership panicked and took to be a rout, eventually turned into the worst Ottoman defeat of the war.
But the Russians' panicky request to the British at Christmas 1914 was enough to crystallise and jog forward British ideas about opening a second front somewhere in Turkey. From a raft of often more practical options, the idea attacking and opening up the Dardanelles (so British ships could sail up to and take Constantinople, and gain access to the Black Sea) soon acquired an unstoppable momentum of its own.
As with Gallipoli, so McMeekin also presents the Armenian Genocide in the context of the bigger picture, showing, for example, how the Christian Armenians did rise up against their Ottoman masters in the eastern city of Van, and did co-operate with the attacking Russians to expel the Ottomans and hand the city over, and so did justify the paranoia of the Ottoman High Command that they had a sizeable population of fifth columnists living in potentially vital strategic areas.
For it was not only in the far East of the Empire, in Armenia, a fair proportion of the Armenian population of Cilicia, over on the Mediterranean coast, was also prepared to rise up against the Ottomans, if provided with guns and leadership from the British (pp.223-245).
So McMeekin's measured and factual account makes it much more understandable why the Ottoman High Command – under pressure from the ongoing British attack at Gallipoli, and terrified by the swift advances by the Russians through the Caucasus – took the sweeping decision to expel all Armenians from all strategically sensitive locations.
None of this excuses the inefficiency they then demonstrated in rounding up huge numbers of people and sending them into the Syrian desert where hundreds of thousands perished, or the gathering mood of violent paranoia which seized local authorities and commanders who took the opportunity to vent their fear and anxiety about the war on helpless civilians, which led to localised pogroms, execution squads and so on. But it does help to explain the paranoid atmosphere in which such things are allowed to happen.
McMeekin emphasises that, once it saw what was happening on the ground, the Ottoman leadership then tried to moderate the expulsion policy and explicitly forbade the punishment of Armenians, but it was too late: at the local level thousands of administrators and soldiers had absorbed the simple message that all Armenians were 'traitors' and should be shown no mercy. The net result was the violent killing, or the starving and exhausting to death, of up to one and a half million people, mostly defenceless civilians, an event which was used by Allied propaganda at the time, and has been held against the Turks ever since.
Siege at Kut
Again, I was vaguely aware of the British army's catastrophe at Kut, a mud-walled town a few hundred miles (230 miles, to be precise) up the Tigris river, where an entire British army was surrounded and besieged by a Turkish army, in a situation reminiscent of the Boer War sieges of Mafeking and Ladysmith (pp.263-270, 290-293).
But McMeekin's account helps you see how the Kut disaster was a climax of the up-to-that-point successful campaign to seize the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Shatt al-Harab, and to win towns as far north as Basra, Qurna and Amara.
He takes you into the British thinking strategic thinking behind the ill-advised decision to push on towards Baghdad, and explains why the Turks turned out to be better dug-in and better led around that city than we expected (p.269). There's a fascinating thread running alongside the slowly building catastrophe, which was the extreme reluctance of the Russian commander in the field, General N.N. Baratov to come to our aid (pp.290-292).
In fact Russian tardiness / perfidy is a recurrent theme. We only mounted the Gallipoli offensive to help the bloody Russians, but when it ran into trouble and British leaders begged Russia to mount a diversionary attack on the Black Sea environs of Constantinople to help us, the Russians said the right thing, made a few desultory naval preparations but – basically – did nothing.
British take Jerusalem
Similarly, I vaguely knew that the British Army 'took' Jerusalem, but it makes a big difference to have it set in context so as to see it as the climax of about three years of on-again, off-again conflict in the Suez and Sinai theatre of war.
Early on, this area had seen several attempts by Germans leading Turkish armies, accompanied by Arab tribesmen, to capture or damage parts of the Suez Canal, which McMeekin had described in the earlier book and now tells again, much more thoroughly and factually. The capture of Jerusalem was the result of a new, far more aggressive British policy of not just defending the canal, but of attacking far beyond it – known as the Southern Palestine Offensive of November to December 1917, carried out by the Egypt Expeditionary Force led by General Edmund Allenby.
Similarly, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917. I knew about this but hadn't realised how it was related to the Russian Revolution. Apparently, world Jewish opinion was split for the first three years of the war about who to support because:
Zionism, as a movement, was actually an Austro-German invention, the brainchild of Austrian journalist Theodor Herzl
the World Zionist Executive was based throughout the war in Berlin
most powerfully, the Western democracies were allied with Russia which had, from time immemorial, been the traditional enemy of Jews and Judaism
But the overthrow of the Tsarist government, and the transition to what everyone hoped would be more liberal democratic rule, tipped the balance of world Jewish opinion, especially in America, where the money came from (pp.352-3), against the Central Powers. The Balfour Declaration was a pretty cynical attempt to take advantage of this shift in Jewish opinion.
God knows how many histories of the Russian Revolution I've read, but it was fascinating to view the whole thing from the point of view of the Ottoman Empire.
1916 was actually a good year for the Russians in the Ottoman theatre of war. They won a series of sweeping victories which saw them storm out of the Caucasus and into Anatolia, seizing Van and then the huge military stronghold at Erzerum.
And McMeekin shows how, even as the central government in faraway Petrograd collapsed in early 1917, the Russian Black Sea navy under Admiral Kolchak, chalked up a series of aggressive victories, climaxing with a sizeable naval attack force which steamed right up to the Bosphorus in June 1917.
But the collapse of the Tsarist regime in February 1917 had led to slowly ramifying chaos throughout the army and administration, and the the arrival of Lenin in the capital in April 1917, with his simple and unequivocal policy of ending the war, sowed the seeds of the complete collapse of Russian forces.
McMeekin leaves you with one of those huge historical what-ifs: What if the Russian revolution hadn't broken out when it did – maybe the Russians would have taken Constantinople, thus ending the war over a year early and permanently changing the face of the Middle East.
The best history is empowering
As these examples show, this is the very best kind of history, the kind which:
lays out very clearly what happened, in a straightforward chronological way so that you experience the sequence of events just as the participants did, and sympathise with the pressures and constraints they were under
and places events in a thoroughly explained context so that you understand exactly what was at stake and so why the participants behaved as they did
McMeekin is slow to judge but, when he does, he has explained enough of the events and the context that you, the reader, feel empowered to either agree or disagree.
Empowerment – and this is what good history is about. 1. It explains what happened, it puts it in the widest possible context, and it empowers you to understand what happened and why, so you can reach your own assessments and conclusions.
2. And it has another, deeper, empowering affect which is to help you understand why things are the way they are in the modern world, our world.
McMeekin explains that, on one level, the entire history of the later Ottoman Empire is about Russia's relationship with Turkey and the simple facts that the Russians wanted:
to seize all of European Turkey, most of all Constantinople, to reclaim it as a Christian city to be renamed Tsargrad
to make big inroads into eastern Turkey, creating semi-independent states of Armenia and Kurdistan which would be Russian protectorates
the net affects of 1 and 2 being to give Russia complete dominance of the Black Sea and easy access to the Mediterranean
This is the fundamental geopolitical conflict which underlies the entire region. The intrusion into bits of the Empire by the British (in Egypt, Palestine and Iraq) or the French wish to colonise Lebanon and Syria, are in a sense secondary to the fundamental Russo-Turkish conflict whose roots stretch back centuries.
Competition for the Caucasus
McMeekin covers the 'scramble for the Caucasus' in the Berlin-Baghdad book but, as with the rest of the subject, it feels much more clear and comprehensible in this version.
It's the story of how, following the unilateral declaration of peace by the Bolsheviks, the Germans not only stormed across Eastern Europe, sweeping into the Baltic nations in the north and Ukraine in the south – they also got involved in a competition with the Turks for the Caucasus and Transcaucasus.
In other words the Ottoman Army and the German Army found themselves competing to seize Armenia, Georgia, Kurdistan and, above all, racing to seize Baku on the Caspian Sea, important not only for its strategic position, but because of the extensive oil fields in its hinterland.
The story is fascinatingly complex, involving a British force (led by General Dunster) which at one point held the city for 6 weeks (the British got everywhere!) but was forced to withdraw by boat across the Caspian as the hugely outnumbering Turks moved in – and a great deal of ethnic conflict between rival groups on the spot, specifically the native Azeri Muslims and the Christian Armenians.
Events moved very quickly. Local political leaders across the region declared the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic which included the present-day republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia which existed from just April to May 1918, but the area around Baku was engulfed in ethnic violence – the so-called March Days massacres from March to April 1918 – and then in May 1918, the leading party in Baku declared independence as the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic.
Nice for them but irrelevant as the Ottoman Army then routed the British and seized the city in September 1918. And only a few years later, most of these countries were reinvented by the Bolsheviks as Socialist Soviet Republics strongly under the control of Moscow, as they would remain for the next 70 years till the collapse of the Soviet Union (so in this region, the Russians won).
The end of the Great War…
The race for Baku was just one example of the chaos which was unleashed over an enormous area by the collapse of the Russian state.
But for McMeekin, it was also an example of the foolishness of the main military ruler of the Ottoman Empire during the entire Great War, Enver Pasha, who over-extended the (by now) under-manned and under-armed Turkish army, by dragging it all the way to the shores of the Caspian in what McMeekin calls 'a mad gamble' (p.400) 'foolish push' (p.409).
This left the Anatolian heartland under-defended when it suffered attacks by the British from the north in Thrace, from the south up through Palestine, and in Iraq – not to mention the French landings in Cilicia and Lebanon on the Mediterranean coast.
The Empire was forced to sign the Armistice of Mudros with Great Britain on 30 October and Ottoman troops were obliged to withdraw from the whole region in the Caucasus which they'd spent the summer fighting for.
… was not the end of the fighting
The war between France and Britain and the Ottoman Empire theoretically ended with the Armistice of Mudros on 30 October 1918. But McMeekin's book is fascinating because it shows how invasions, landings, fighting and massacres continued almost unabated at locations across the Empire.
Specifically, it was a revelation to me that the Allied decision to allow the Greeks to land troops in the city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast turned out to be the flashpoint which triggered the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Disgruntled Ottoman officers had been gathering in central Anatolia, away from Constantinople, now occupied by the Allies, who bitterly resented the way the civilian politicians were handing over huge tranches of the Empire to the Allies. These men rallied in Eastern Anatolia under Mustafa Kemal, who became the leader of the hastily assembled Turkish National Movement.
And thus began, as McMeekin puts it, one of the most remarkable and successful political careers of the twentieth century, the transformation of Mustafa Kemal from successful general into Father of his Nation, who was awarded the honorific Atatürk ('Father of the Turks') in 1934.
As always, when reading a history on this scale, some events or issues leap out as new (to me) or particularly striking. Maybe not the ones the author intended, but the ones which made me stop and think.
1. The First World War ended in Bulgaria
Brought up on the story of the trenches, I tend to think of the war ending because the German Spring offensive of 1918 broke the Allied lines and advanced 25 miles or so before running out of steam, at which point the Allies counter-attacked, pushing the Germans back to their original lines and then ever-backwards as more and more German soldiers deserted and their military machine collapsed. That's how it ended.
I knew that Bulgaria had surrendered to the Allies as early 24 September and that that event had had some impact on German High Command, but it is fascinating to read McMeekin's account which makes the end of the First World War all about the Balkans and Bulgaria.
The British had had a large force (250,000) defending Macedonia and the approach to Greece from Bulgaria, which was allied with Austria and Germany. But the Bulgarians were fed up. In the peace treaties imposed on the new Bolshevik Russian government in May 1918 the Bulgarians got hardly any territory. When the Germans advanced into Ukraine the Bulgarians received hardly any of the grain which was seized. The Bulgarians are Slavs and so there was widespread sympathy for Russia while many ordinary people wondered why their young men were fighting and dying for Germany. And there was abiding antagonism against the Ottomans, their supposed ally, who Bulgaria had had to fight to free itself from and had fought against in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13.
All this meant that when an aggressive new French general, Louis Félix Marie François Franchet d'Espèrey, arrived to take command of Allied army in Macedonia, and sent exploratory probes against the Bulgarian line, discovered it was weak, and then unleashed a full frontal assault in the Vardar Offensive of September 1918, that the Bulgarian army and state collapsed.
The Bulgarian army surrendered, mutinied, part even declared an independent mini-republic, and the Bulgarian government was forced to sue for peace on 24 September 1918. When he heard of the Bulgarian surrender, the supreme leader of the German Army, Ludendorff, said they were done for. The Turkish generalissimo, Enver Pasha, said we're screwed.
The collapse of Bulgaria gave the Allies command of the Balkans, allowing the channeling of armies south-east, the short distance to capture Constantinople, or north against the vulnerable southern flank of Austro-German territory.
In McMeekin's account, the collapse of Tsarist Russia was certainly a seismic event but it didn't, of itself, end the war.
The trigger for that event was the surrender of Bulgaria.
2. East and West
Another of the Big Ideas to really dwell on is the difference between the First World War on the Western Front and on the other theatres of war – the Eastern Front in Europe, but also all the warzones in Ottoman territory, namely Gallipoli, the Black Sea, Suez, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus.
Any English person brought up, like me, on the history and iconography of the Western Front, with its four-year-long stalemate and gruelling trench warfare, will be astonished at the dynamism and tremendously changing fortunes of the combatants on all the other fronts I've just listed.
Not only that, but events in the East were intricately interlinked, like a vast clock.
Thus it is one thing to learn that Serbia, the cause of the whole war, which Austria-Hungary had threatened to demolish in the first weeks of the war, was not in fact conquered until over a year later, in November 1915. So far, so vaguely interesting.
But it took my understanding to a whole new level to learn that the fall of Serbia to the Central Powers was the decisive event for Gallipoli. Because, while Serbia was holding out, she had prevented the Germans from shipping men and material easily down through the Balkans to their Ottoman ally. Once Serbia fell, however, the transport routes to Turkey were open, and this was the last straw for strategists in London, who realised the bad situation of the Allied troops stuck on the beaches of the Dardanelles could only deteriorate.
And so the decision to abandon the Gallipoli campaign and remove the troops from the beaches.
This is just one example from the many ways in which McMeekin's account helps you see how all of these events were not isolated incidents, but how, all across the region from Libya in the West to the Punjab in the East, from the Balkans via Palestine to Suez, across Syria, down into Arabia, or up into the snowy Caucasus mountains, events in one theatre were intricately connected with events in all the others – and how the entire complex machinery was also influenced by events on the immense Eastern Front to their north, which ran from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Basically, the First World War in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, was vastly more complicated, dynamic and interesting than the war in the West. And also pregnant with all kinds of long-running consequences.
3. The ends of wars are incalculably more complex than the beginnings
Real peace didn't come to Turkey till 1923. In this regard it was not unlike Germany which saw coups and revolutions through 1919, or the vast Russian Civil War which dragged on till 1922 and included an attempt to invade and conquer Poland in 1920, or the political violence which marred Italy until Mussolini's black shirts seized power in 1922.
Across huge parts of the world, violence, ethnic cleansing and actual wars continued long after the Armistice of November 1918. In fact McMeekin goes so far as to describe the Battle of Sakarya (23 August to 12 September 1921) as 'the last real battle of the First World War (p.456).
Thus the book's final hundred pages describe the long, complex, violent and tortuous transformation of the Ottoman Empire into the Turkish Republic, a story which is riveting, not least because of the terrible decisions taken by Prime Minister David Lloyd George, often against the advice of his entire cabinet, namely:
to allow the Greek Army to occupy Smyrna, which led to riots, massacres, and outrage right across Turkey
to occupy Constantinople on March 20 1920 – I had no idea British warships docked in the harbour, and British soldiers backed by armoured cars set up control points at every junction, erecting machine-gun posts in central squares – God, we got everywhere, didn't we?
And bigger than both of these, the folly of the Allies' approach of imposing a humiliating peace without providing the means to enforce it.
That said, America also played a key role. Much is always made of the Sykes-Picot Plan to divide the Ottoman Empire up between Britain and France, but McMeekin goes to great pains to emphasise several massive caveats:
1. Sazonov That, when it was drawn up, in June 1916, the Sykes-Picot Plan was largely at the behest of the pre-revolutionary Russian government which had more interest in seizing Ottoman territory than the other two combatants, so the plan ought, in McMeekin's view, to be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picto Plan because of the dominant influence of Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.
2. Sèvres I was astonished to see that the Treaty of Sèvres (imposed on the new Turkish government in May 1920, reluctantly signed in August 1920) handed a huge amount of territory, the bottom half of present-day Turkey, to Italy – in fact pretty much all the contents of the Treaty of Sèvres are mind-boggling, it enacted 'a policy of forcefully dismembering Turkey' (p.447). As McMeekin brings out, a document better designed to humiliate the Turks and force them into justified rebellion could barely be imagined.
Map showing how the Ottoman Empire was carved up by the Treaty of Sèvres, not only between the French and British, but the Italians, Greeks and Russians as well (Source: Wikipedia, author: Thomas Steiner)
3. States That the key player in the final year of the war and the crucial few years after it, was the United States, with some plans being drawn up for America to hold 'mandates' over large parts of the Ottoman Empire, namely Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia. Given a choice the native populations wanted the Americans in charge because they thought they would be genuinely disinterested unlike the colonial powers.
Here, as across Central Europe, it was a great blow when, first of all Woodrow Wilson had a stroke which disabled him (October 1919), and then the American Congress refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations.
As the chaos continued, and as David Lloyd George listened to his influential Greek friends and supported a Greek army invasion of Smyrna on the Turkish coast (with its large Greek population), and then its pushing inland to secure their base, only slowly did I realise McMeekin was describing events which are nowadays, with hindsight, referred to as the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922.
I had no idea the Greeks penetrated so far into Anatolia.
Map of the Greco-Turkish War, blue arrows showing the advance of the Greek Army into undefended Anatolia and coming within 50 miles of the new Turkish capital at Ankara before being halted at the Battle of Sakarya (source: Wikipedia, author: Andrei Nacu)
And no idea that the Greeks were encouraged to the hilt by David Lloyd George right up until it began to look like they would lose after their advance was halted by the vital Battle of Sakarya just 50 miles from Ankara.
Nor that the Greeks then forfeited the backing of the French and British and world opinion generally, by the brutality with which they pursued a scorched earth policy in retreat, torching every town and village and railway and facility in their path, also committing atrocities against Muslim Turkish civilians. It's gruelling reading the eye-witness descriptions of destroyed villages, raped women, and murdered populations. What bastards.
Mustafa Kemal's impact on Britain
It was a revelation to me to learn that, once Kemal's Turkish army had driven the Greeks back into the sea and forced the evacuation of Smyrna, and with his eastern border protected by a rock-solid treaty he had signed with Soviet Russia, Kemal now turned his attention to the Bosphorus, to Constantinople, and to Thrace (the thin strip of formerly Turkish territory on the northern, European side of the Straits), all occupied by (relatively small) British forces.
It was news to me that Lloyd George, backed by Winston Churchill, was determined that Kemal would not have either Constantinople or the Straits back again, and so a) wrote to the premiers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa asking them to contribute forces to a second defence of Gallipoli – they all said No – and b) the British public were by now so sick of the war in Turkey, and war generally, that they, and all the newspapers, roundly called for an end to British involvement – STOP THIS NEW WAR! shouted the Daily Mail.
And that it was this crisis which caused the collapse of the coalition government which had ruled Britain and the Empire since 1916.
The Conservatives abandoned the coalition, it collapsed, the Liberals split into two factions and the election of October 1922 resulted in not only a Conservative victory (344 seats) but the Labour Party emerging for the first time as the largest opposition party (142 seats), with the two factions of the Liberal party knocked into third and fourth place. The Liberals, even when they finally recombined, were never to regain the power and influence they enjoyed throughout the nineteenth century.
Thus, McMeekin points out with a flourish, Mustafa Kemal had not only divided the wartime Alliance (the French wanted nothing to do with Lloyd George's foolish support for the Greeks) and atomised the Commonwealth (all those white Commonwealth countries refusing to help the Old Country) but ended the long history of the Liberal Party as a party of power.
Fascinating new perspectives and insights
Nowadays, it is easy to blame the usual imperialist suspects Britain and France for all the wrongs which were to beset the Middle East for the 100 years since the Treaty of Lausanne finally finalised Turkey's borders and gave the rest of the area as 'mandates' to the victorious powers.
But McMeekin, in his final summing up, is at pains to point out the problems already existing in the troubled periphery – there had already been two Balkan Wars, Zionist immigration was set to be a problem in Palestine no matter who took over, Brits, Russians or Germans – Arabia was already restless with the Arab tribes jostling for power – Mesopotamia had been a hornet's nest even during Ottoman rule, with the Ottoman authorities telling non-Muslims never to visit it. All this before you get to the smouldering cause of Armenian independence.
All these problems already existed under the last years of Ottoman rule, the British and French didn't invent them, they just managed them really badly.
Ataturk's achievement was to surgically remove all these problems from Ottoman control and delegate them to the imperial powers. He was clever, they were dumb, inheriting insoluble problems. He created an ethnically homogenous and 'exclusionary state' whose borders have endured to this day.
As a very specific example, McMeekin cites Kemal's readiness to hand over the area around Mosul to British control, even though he was well aware of its huge oil deposits. He made the very wise assessment that the benefit of the oil would be outweighed by the disruptive issues he would inherit around managing the ethnic and religious conflicts in the region (between Kurds and Arabs, between Sunni and Shia Muslims). And indeed, the low-level conflicts of the region are alive and kicking to this day.
The Allies for 25 years struggled to rule Palestine, Arabia, Syria, Iraq and eventually withdrew in various states of failure. McMeekin's mordant conclusion is that the 'the War of the Ottoman Succession rages on, with no end in sight' (p.495, final sentence).
For the clear and authoritative way it lays out its amazing story, and for the measured, deep insights it offers into the period it describes and the consequences of these events right up to the present day, this is a brilliant book.
The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin
Other blog posts about the First World War
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
The Hapsburg Empire by Pieter M. Judson (2016)
Lenin on The Train by Catherine Merridale (2016)
Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary at War, 1914-1918 (2014)
Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
The Dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1867-1918 by John W. Mason (1985)
The Eastern Front 1914-18: The Suicide of Empires by Alan Clark (1971)
Memoirs and fiction
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
All Quiet On the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden (1928)
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
The Good Soldier Švejk, the Life of Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume One: Behind the Lines (1921)
The Good Soldier Švejk, Epilogue to Volume One
The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Two: At the Front (1922)
The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Three: The Glorious Licking (1922)
The Good Soldier Švejk, Volume Four: The Glorious Licking Continues (1923)
Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain
Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
The Great War in Portraits @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2014)
The Great War (BBC TV series)
Elgar's Great War music
Which describe the first arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the region, their conquest of Anatolia, Byzantine territory and, finally, Constantinople itself.
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall (2) by John Julius Norwich (1995)
Byzantium: The Apogee by John Julius Norwich (1991)
Posted in Germany, Great War, History, Turkey, World War One
Tagged Afghanistan, America, Anatolia, Arab nationalism, Armenia, Armistice of Mudros, Atatürk, Austria-Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Azerbaijan, Baghdad, Baku, Balkan War, Basra, Battle of Warsaw, Black Sea, Bolshevism, Britain, Bulgaria, Cilicia, Constantinople, David Lloyd-George, Egypt, Enver Pasha, Euphrates, First World War, France, Gallipoli, General Allenby, Germany, Great War, history, imperialism, Iraq, Jerusalem, Jews, Kut Al Amara, Lebanon, Lloyd-George, Ludendorff, Max von Oppenheim, Middle East, military history, Mosul, Muslim, Mustafa Kemal, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Persia, Russia, Russian Civil War, russian revolution, Sean McMeekin, Sergei Sazonov, Shatt al-Harab, siege of Kut Al Amara, Smyrna, Syria, the Balfour Declaration, the Battle of Sakarya, the Battle of Sarikamish, The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power 1898-1918, the Bosphorus, the Caucasus, the Greco-Turkish War, the League of Nations, the Treaty of Lausanne, the Vardar Offensive, The War of The Ottoman Succession, Theodor Herzl, Transcaucasus, Treaty of Lausanne, Treaty of Sèvres, Treaty of Versailles, Tsargrad, Turkey, USA, Van, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Zionism
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/05/13/the-ottoman-endgame-sean-mcmeekin/
Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art @ the British Museum
European explorers
As John Darwin's brilliant history of Eurasian empires, After Tamerlane, makes clear, quite a few things distinguished European culture from the culture of the other Eurasian empires (i.e. the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire in Persia, the Moghul Empire in northern India, the Chinese Empire and the Japanese Empire) in the centuries after the death of Tamerlane the Great in 1405.
Just two of them were a readiness, on the part of the Europeans, to travel and explore, and an endless curiosity which led to almost obsessive collecting and categorising and curating and exhibiting.
No Chinese explorers visited Europe during the 19th century and were so dazzled by its history and architecture and art that they made copious sketches and drawings, took photographs, bought up every quaint European curio they could get their hands on, and carried them all back to China to catalogue and categorise and trigger an artistic renaissance.
That kind of thing just didn't happen because few Chinese travelled abroad. Very few wanted to, or had the means to, and anyway it was frowned upon because every educated Chinese knew that the Celestial Empire was the centre of the universe, the possessor of a perfect culture, which didn't need or want to know anything at all about the outside world, overrun as it was by cultureless barbarians.
And Darwin shows how this complacent and self-centred attitude was echoed by the cultural and political elites of Japan, Moghul India, the Safavid Empire and the sprawling Ottoman Empire, for centuries.
No, the wandering, exploring, collecting bug seems to have affected Europeans on a completely different scale from any of the world's other civilisations.
Thus it was that from the 1500s onwards a steadily increasing stream of travellers, explorers, soldiers and sailors, archaeologists and artists travelled all over the Muslim lands lining the North African coast and the Middle East – territory nominally under the control of the extensive Ottoman Empire – to explore and describe and paint and buy and plunder.
Inspired by the East
This ambitious exhibition delves into one aspect of this huge European enterprise by looking at the long and complex history of cultural interchanges between the Islamic Middle East and Europe from about 1500 onwards.
Not surprisingly several of the earliest objects are swords and helmets since the single most important fact about Islam is that it was a conqueror's religion, spread by highly organised and zealous Arabs as they exploded out of Arabia in the 7th and 8th centuries to seize the Christian Middle East and North African coastline.
Gilt-Copper helmet, Turkey (about 1650) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
The Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman dynasty which began its rise to prominence in the 1200s was itself just the last in a line of dynasties which had vied for leadership of the Muslim world since the birth of Islam in the 630s.
The Ottoman Turks rose to dominate the area we call the Middle East during the period 1300 to 1453 (the year when the Ottomans seized Christian Constantinople and made it into their capital, Istanbul). I've reviewed several books about the decline of the Byzantine Empire as it came under relentless pressure from successive Muslim rulers, until its eventual fall to the Ottomans.
The Ottoman heyday is usually dated from the year of the fall of Byzantium – 1453 – to around 1600, during which they extended their power across all of North Africa and deep into Europe. It's salutary to remember that twice the Ottoman army besieged Vienna, in 1526 and 1683, and was only just defeated both times i.e. they could have penetrated even further into Christian Europe.
As it was, throughout this period the Ottomans ruled the extensive territory of former Christian Europe which we call the Balkans, as well as Christian Greece and Christian subjects in numerous Mediterranean islands.
Mainly Victorian
A handful of pieces and a few wall labels in the exhibition gesture towards this long and complex early history of Ottoman rise and conquest and domination, including the striking portrait of Sultan Bayezid I by a painter from the school of Veronese, which has been used as the poster for the show.
A Portrait of Sultan Bayezid I by a member of the School of Veronese (c. 1580) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
But the exhibition really focuses on works from the much later period of the 19th and early 20th centuries, partly for the simple reason that the period 1800 to the outbreak of the Second World War saw a steadily increasing number of European travellers to North Africa and the Middle East.
Some of this was simply a function of continually improving transport, sailing ships giving way to steamships, the steady spread of railways, the industrial revolution creating a new leisured class, especially in Britain and France, who wanted to see the world, helped along by firms like Thomas Cook which launched its first cruises in the 1870s.
Many devout Victorians, such as the Pre-Raphaelite artist William Holman Hunt, wanted to tour the Holy Land and see for themselves the places where Our Lord had stood. Flocks of visitors drew and sketched and painted watercolours and oils and bought all manner of souvenirs, carpets and clothes, tiles and glasswork. By the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 the British public was highly aware of the extremely diverse and colourful cultures of the peoples it ruled over.
But the thesis of this exhibition is that the Islamic culture of the Ottoman Empire bore a uniquely close and fractious relationship with Europe, was the predominant colonial and foreign cultural 'Other' for Europe throughout the period – a kind of backward cousin, a slothful and declining 'Orient' against which we could measure our ever-growing knowledge, technology and power. And that a huge number of craftsmen and artists and metalworkers and glassblowers and designers and artists and architects were particularly dazzled and influenced and inspired by Islamic and Middle Eastern art and culture.
So this exhibition, Inspired by the East, aims to bring together a wealth of artifacts to show a) some of the original Islamic arts and crafts from the era and b) the impact Islamic architecture, designs and patterns had on European craftsmen, artists and designers through a large selection of European objects.
Enamelled glass lamp made by Philippe-Joseph Brocard, France (about 1877)
Thus the exhibition includes wonderful, ornate and beautiful examples from a whole range of media and crafts such as:
I was interested to learn there was a genre called 'costume books' which simply showed the costumes of all the new races and peoples Europeans had discovered as they expanded and explored from the 1500s onwards and which, of course, featured books devoted to the clothes and garments of the Middle East.
I learned that all kinds of products by Islamic artisans were prized in the West from early on, such as Egyptian metalwork and Persian ceramics. During the 19th century Western craftsmen could use developing technology to reproduce much of this work. The exhibition includes Arab-inspired ceramics by Théodore Deck, a leading French ceramicist who in the late nineteenth century created a range of pieces directly inspired by Islamic originals.
Nearby is a section devoted to Owen Jones, one of the most influential tastemakers of the Victorian era. His pioneering studies on colour theory, geometry and form still inspire designers to this day. Jones was an architect, designer and design theorist and was Superintendent of Works for the 1851 Great Exhibition. His masterpiece was Grammar of Ornament, a huge and lavish folio displaying stunning patterns, motifs and ornaments in 112 illustrated plates, many of which featured Islamic decorations and motifs. Some of the Islamic plates from the book are on display here.
But but but… I was struck by several obvious problems.
Number one was that most of the works on display are by Europeans. They are not original works by the Islamic craftsmen and artists who are so praised. They are European copies, displayed with the intention of showing how widespread the impact of Islamic styles and motifs was on the European arts. If you're looking for a world of authentically Islamic arts and crafts you'd do better to go the V&A.
Number two was that, despite the beauty of individual works, it became difficult to avoid a sense of scrappiness, a sense that the curators are trying to cover a lot of ground, in fact an enormous subject – the impact of the Muslim world on the art and culture of the West – with a surprisingly small range of exhibits.
Take my home area, history: A few helmets and a sword are accompanied by a paragraph or two about the extent of the Ottoman Empire – but this, the military rise and dominance of the Ottoman Empire, is a huge, a vast subject, which I felt was barely scratched and whose omission made the entire show feel one-sided i.e. presented only the Europeans as aggressive colonialists whereas, as I've explained, it was the Muslims who originally conquered half the Christian Mediterranean.
Similarly, the friend I went with is mad about Islamic tiles so was pleased to see a display of half a dozen beautiful and ornate tiles – but disappointed that they turned out to be made by a Victorian British manufacturer using Islamic motifs – and that that was it when it came to tiles.
Islamic architecture is distinctive and beautiful and exists over half the world, but it was dealt with via just a few British buildings which used Islamic motifs, such as the well-known artist Lord Leighton's famous house in West London which he had modelled inside to recreate some of the rooms from the Alhambra in Spain, namely 'the Arab Hall'. Leighton had the place covered in Islamic tiles designed by William de Morgan. There are photos of the interior and a lovely wooden model but… is that it?
The single most dominant impression was made by the paintings, a few scattered in the early sections but then leading up to a huge wall displaying about 20 classic, late-Victorian, Orientalist paintings.
In the Madrasa by Ludwig Deutsch (1890) © Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia
This brings us to the several meanings of 'Orientalism', a word and idea which are raised early in the exhibition and then referenced throughout.
1. The word Orientalism was originally, during the 19th century and first half of the 20th, a value-neutral term applied to all or any scholars, linguists, archaeologists or artists who specialised in 'the Orient', a vague expression generally taken to be Islamic North Africa and Middle East but sometimes stretching to include India. It survives in this neutral sense in many places to this day, for example in the name of London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
2. However, the term underwent a revolutionary change in 1978 when the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said published his academic study Orientalism. In this book Said subjected the so-called 'scholarly' works of 19th century Orientalist academics to in-depth analysis in order to support one big radical idea: that almost all the supposedly scholarly and academic books and ideas produced by European scholars about the Orient were the witting or unwitting handmaids of Western Imperialism.
Almost all the nineteenth-century Orientalists declared the Ottoman Empire corrupt and stagnant, Islam itself incapable of change. The people living there were stereotyped as somehow more primitive, dressing in loose but colourful clothing, slothful and lazy and corrupt.
Probably the most notable idea was the fascination the institution of the harem had for repressed Westerners who projected all kinds of sexual fantasies onto Oriental woman and painted no end of soft porn depictions of the sultan and his slaves and concubines and slave auctions and so on.
So powerful was Said's critique that it spread and prospered in the academy, becoming the new orthodoxy and casting a critical shadow back over everything written or painted about the Middle East in the previous 200 years or more. Since its publication almost everything any European said, wrote or painted about the Ottoman Empire has been reappraised to appear in a much more sinister light, either furthering malicious racist stereotypes, aiding in imperial exploitation, or the shameless appropriation of a weaker culture's art and designs.
Now the woke young curators of this exhibition are fully paid-up subscribers to Said's unforgiving views about Western exploitation of the Middle East. This isn't a guess on my part. They quote page one of Orientalism in the very opening wall label which introduces the exhibition:
The Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also the place of Europe's greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant… The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.
And every other wall label takes pains to remind us that the plate or vase or tile or translation of The 1001 Nights or any other cultural product which we're looking at and which references Islam may well seem beautiful to us but, tut tut, we should be aware that it was part of the wicked European fashion to appropriate Islamic patterns for vases or the exploitative trend for mock Moorish architecture, or the thieving use of Arabic script in picture frames and so on.
And that behind all of this detail, all of these individual examples of cultural appropriation, lies the huge looming shadow of Western Imperialism!
Four tiles by William De Morgan & Co, Britain (1888-1897)
Cumulatively, these hectoring labels and panels created, for me at any rate, a strange sense of schizophrenia. In one and the same wall label the curators might both praise the craftmanship of a western tile maker or architect – and yet accuse them of being part of the general movement of cultural appropriation. Praise and damn almost in the same breath.
As so often in modern exhibitions, I began to feel that I got more visual and aesthetic enjoyment if I just stopped reading the hectoring labels – felt less harangued and nagged to feel guilty about things which happened 150 years before I was even born.
Orientalist painting
It's probably in painting that the Orientalist issue is most obvious, or most familiar to most of us because the antique shops of the West are awash with third-rate late-Victorian depictions of the Arab world, of mosques, old men in long gowns with even longer beards, camels crossing the desert, Oriental markets, scantily dressed concubines and so on.
Said's idea is that, although these images are fairly harmless looked at individually, taken together they become condescending, sexist and racist, depicting a fantasy world of harems and sultans, long-gowned scholars in picturesque mosques, colourful markets or the desert at dawn – all of which, taken together, creates a patronising distortion of the complex realities of the many peoples and tribes and ethnic groups and nations scattered across North Africa and the Middle East.
Moreover, taken together, they all tend in the same direction, promoting an ideology claiming that all these cultures and peoples might well be noble and beautiful, but were also backward and in decline, and therefore needed to be taken in hand, taken over, guided and ruled by us, the enlightened West.
At Prayer by Ludwig Deutsch (1923)
The big wall hanging of twenty or so massive Orientalist paintings which I mentioned earlier are obviously meant to represent a kind of 'Wall of Shame'. Tut tut, we are encouraged to think: look at all these stereotypical markets and mosques and rugs and carpets. Look how oppressive they are.
However, I just didn't feel the moral outrage I think the curators intend us to feel. The real impact of hanging so many Orientalist paintings next to each other was, in my opinion, to make you feel a bit sick, as if you'd been let loose in a sweetshop and eaten everything in sight. They are self-consciously opulent and gorgeous to the point of absurdity.
Another, more objective result of examining so many of these over-ripe productions was that, pace Said, most of them are not from the imperial nineteenth century, nor, surprisingly, were many of them produced by the classic imperialist powers who carved up the Middle East between them, France and Britain.
At least half of them were from the twentieth century, many from after the Great War (the two above are from 1913 and 1923). And quite a few were by either German or American painters, not by the cultural Anglo-French cultural appropriators. Neither the Germans nor the Americans had any colonial presence in the Middle East till well after the Great War and even then, not very much.
Orientalism or Romanticism?
As I read yet another wall label pointing out how the Orientalist painters fantasised and romanticised and embellished lots of the subjects they painted, as if this was a shockingly immoral and exploitative thing to do, a simple thought occurred to me: Didn't all 19th century artists?
There are thousands and thousands of Victorian genre paintings which romanticise and glamorise all kinds of subjects, from their own working classes (cf the exhibition of cheesy paintings of Victorian children I saw earlier this year at the Guildhall) to windswept Hebridean crofters.
In other words, wasn't the entire artistic movement of Romanticism about, well, stereotypically romantic subject matter – about mountains and storms at sea and heroic adventures and tormented heroes and shy maidens with heaving bosoms who needed rescuing from dragons (I'm thinking of the amazing late-Victorian fantasies of Edward Burne-Jones as recently displayed at Tate Britain).
The same exaggerated depiction of popular conceptions of subjects was applied to everything – I bet medieval knights weren't as manly and knightly as they appear in Victorian paintings, that Highland crofters weren't as proud and noble, or our brave soldiers quite as manly and beautifully kitted out, as they appear in those big hearty late-Victorian paintings.
Don't all Victorian paintings depict extravagant stereotypes in lush and glamorous colours? In other words, there is nothing particular or exceptional about this hyper-romantic style being applied to 'Oriental' subjects: it was applied to countless other subjects as well.
The Guard by Antonio María Fabrés y Costa (1889)
The harem
I was especially looking forward to the section about the harem, not because I was expecting to be particularly titillated but because I was anticipating the orgy of outraged feminism it would prompt in the commentary.
After all, one of the most obvious and much-repeated claims of anti-orientalist, politically correct literary critics, feminists and curators is that Western white men used the Ottoman institution of the harem to concoct a vast number of soft porn, erotic fantasies which bore no relation to reality at all, but merely satisfied the gloating gaze of fat, rich, white, male collectors.
So the most astonishing single thing about this exhibition about Western depictions of the Orient is the complete absence of even one decent painting showing a classic, late-Victorian harem scene. Not one.
I thought I must have missed a room somewhere and went back through the exhibition to check, but eventually realised that the little collection of five or so chaste drawings and one painting – none of which show a nude woman, all of them very restrained – is all they have!
There's a tiny photo of one of the classic nude-in-a-Turkish-bath paintings by Ingres, but any actual huge, beautiful and sexy harem scenes by him or Eugène Delacroix or John Frederick Lewis or any number of their followers and copyers… nothing! None!
I think I could go to my nearest antiques shop and find more cheesy old Victorian paintings of scantily-clad maidens in a supposed harem than there were in this exhibition. It is an astonishing gap. The big oil painting I mentioned is of a fully-clothed woman who could be more or less anywhere.
Off to one side there is one little drawing of a woman playing a musical instrument by a French artist we are assured, by the conscientious curators, was a notorious Orientalist – though it could hardly be less offensive. Does this image strike you as being offensively racist and sexist, stereotyping the Orient and providing visual underpinning for Western imperialism? It doesn't, to me.
Study of a girl playing a stringed instrument by Jean Léon Gérôme (1886)
In fact it raises a related politico-aesthetic question, because the curators point out that the artists, Jean Léon Gérôme, was well known for his meticulous sketches and drawings he made preparatory to making an oil painting. Which made me reflect: I n what way can these artists be accused of peddling lazy stereotypes if they were carefully and meticulously depicting what they saw, what was actually in front of them?
The sex object bites back (or photographs itself wearing clothes)
The absolute of real killer harem scenes is all the more puzzling because it is meant to set up the final part of the exhibition, which is devoted to contemporary works by modern Muslim women artists.
The curators have chosen to interpret these contemporary Muslim women artists as responding to the despicable tradition of Western Orientalism. They are 'speaking back to Orientalist representations of the east'. They are 'subverting and undermining works by earlier European and North American artists'.
But alas the curators' plan doesn't really work because we have not seen any of the sexy, sexist Orientalist representations of the east which these contemporary artists are kicking back against. We pretty much have to imagine them, or remember them from other exhibitions or books.
In fact I thought all four of the women artists on display here were very good, very very good, in their way better than the rest of the exhibition. Best of the four was a triptych of images by Lalla Essaydi, part of a large series of works titled Women of Morocco.
In them Essaydi or her models adopt the poses of the scantily-clad women draped around in famous Orientalist paintings, only here the women are chastely and Islamically dressed and – and this is the distinctive thing from a visual point of view – both they, their clothes and the studio backcloths are covered in Islamic script. I thought it was a brilliant idea, brilliantly executed, to produce really vibrant and exciting images.
Les Femmes du Maroc by Lalla Essaydi (2005) © Lalla Esaydi
Inspired by the East feels, in the end, like a rather thin exhibition.
Firstly, it claims to be a look at the interaction between East and West, so you'd expect it to be divided into two parts; How East affected West and how West affected East.
As noted, there's plenty of examples of the way Westerners appropriated Eastern designs and motifs and patterns, architecture and design (although this felt like a much larger subject which really deserved to be investigated in much greater depth – All over London are buildings which incorporate Islamic motifs; if you add in tiling and ceramics and metalwork you have a huge subject).
But as to West affecting East, this section felt very skimpy indeed, with just one small room showing a couple of photo albums by pioneering photographers in Istanbul and a map or two. Is that it?
Secondly, there is the big shadow of Edward Said and his embittering theory of Orientalism threaded throughout the show, the premise that all depictions of the Middle East and all forms of appropriation of its culture were handmaidens to the wicked, Western imperial exploitation of the area.
But this rather harsh and inflexible approach militates against the more nuanced vibe of the 'cultural interactions' parts of the show. One minute the curators are praising Western craftsmen; the next they are berating the subtle cultural imperialism of copying Islamic designs.
Hence my comment about the unsettling schizophrenia I thought the show suffered from.
3. And when I got to the section on the harem and realised how tragically thin it was, it suddenly crystallised for me how skimpy the rest of the exhibition feels. It feels like it's trying to address two or three really big issues and not quite doing any of them quite properly.
Alhambra vase, Spain 1800–1899 © Islamic Arts Museum, Malaysia
Writing versus art
I read Orientalism at university four or five years after it was published, when it still had 'the shock of the new', before it settled down to become the new orthodoxy taught to each new generation of humanities and art students.
And Said's book is almost entirely concerned with Orientalist writing – with the supposedly factual works of Orientalist 'scholars' (who he systematically debunks) and with the Western literary writers who perpetuated stereotypes about the Exotic East (Byron, Nerval, Flaubert just for starters).
A lot of this kind of writing was produced in the nineteenth century and so Said had a rich vein to draw on, and was able to show how the supposedly 'scholarly' writing, and the literary works, easily morphed into official, governing and imperial writing, could be co-opted into government reports and assessments, how anthropological studies could be quoted in business cases for invading Egypt, say, or Iraq.
But it is much harder to divine a particularly patronising, racist or imperialist motive behind a set of porcelain which just happens to use an Islamic motif, or in picture frames which use Arabic script as decoration, or in glassware which incorporates Islamic patterns.
It's easier to imagine that they were just one among the millions of other ranges of pottery and ceramics and frames produced during the consumer boom of the nineteenth century, which cannibalised motifs and patterns from all available sources – from India and China and Japan to name just a few – if it produced something which would sell.
To see most of the objects in this exhibition as part of an enormous explosion of art and crafts products which catered for the burgeoning middles classes as, to some extent, they still do today.
So my last thought is that maybe the bittiness and thinness of the exhibition is owing to the fact that the curators are trying to illustrate a basically literary theory with works of art and museum objects. And not nearly enough of them to really round out the argument.
Whatever the reason, for me this exhibition contained an entertaining pot-pourri of lovely objects, but didn't really hang together either as history, or as a sustained exploration of the themes it purports to address.
Julia Tugwell
Olivia Threlkeld
Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art continues at the British Museum until 26 January 2020
Reviews of other British Museum exhibitions
Inspired by the East (November 2019)
Sir Stamford Raffles: collecting in Southeast Asia 1811-1824 @ the British Museum (November 2019)
Admonitions of the Instructress to the Court Ladies (November 2019)
Pushing Paper (September 2019)
Portrait of the Artist: Käthe Kollwitz (September 2019)
Collecting histories: Solomon Islands (July 2019)
Manga (July 2019)
Edvard Munch: love and angst (July 2019)
The World Exists to Be Put On A Postcard: artists' postcards from 1960 to now (May 2019)
I am Ashurbanipal king of the world (January 2019)
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece (June 2018)
Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor (March 2018)
Living with Gods (March 2018)
Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia (December 2017)
Places of the mind: British watercolour landscapes 1850–1950 (May 2017)
The American Dream: pop to the present (May 2017)
Sicily: culture and conquest (May 2016)
Every room in the British Museum (December 2015)
Celts: art and identity (October 2015)
Indigenous Australia (April 2015)
Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art (April 2015)
Vikings: Life and Legend (May 2014)
Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art (December 2013)
Ice Age art: arrival of the modern mind (March 2013)
by Simon on November 13, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Architecture, Art, Exhibition, History
Tagged After Tamerlane, Antonio María Fabrés y Costa, Arabs, architecture, British Museum, Chinese Empire Japanese Empire, Christian Europe, Christian Greece, Edward Said, Eugène Delacroix, Europe, exhibition, France, Grammar of Ornament, India, Ingres, Inspired by the east: how the Islamic world influenced western art, Islam, Jean Léon Gérôme, John Darwin, John Frederick Lewis, Lalla Essaydi, Ludwig Deutsch, Middle East, Moghul Empire, North Africa, Orientalism, Orientalist painting, Ottoman army, Ottoman Empire, Owen Jones, Persia, Philippe-Joseph Brocard, pre-Raphaelite, Safavid Empire, School of Oriental and African Studies, Sultan Bayezid I, Tamerlane the Great, Théodore Deck, the Alhambra, the Balkans, the Great Exhibition, the harem, the Holy Land, the Second World War, tiles, Turkey, Vienna, William de Morgan, William De Morgan & Co, William Holman Hunt, Women of Morocco
Posted by Simon on November 13, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/13/inspired-by-the-east-islamic-world-british-museum/
Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone (2012)
I picked this up in the library to shed more light on the very early years of Anatolia, specifically on the Seljuk Turks who stormed into the old Persian Empire in the 1050s, seized the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate, Baghdad, in 1055 and went on to inflict a seismic defeat on the Byzantine Empire at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the equivalent – for the region – of our Battle of Hastings, which marked the decisive shift of control of Anatolia i.e. modern Turkey, away from the Christian Greeks and towards the Islamicised Turks.
On reflection it was foolish to expect much on just this one era from a book which is only 165 pages long, only claims to be a short history, and which has reached the origin of the Ottoman Turks (the 1250s) by page 23 and the fall of Constantinople (in 1453) by page 32.
The Seljuk period is skimmed over in a few brief pages and the Battle of Manzikert in a couple of brief sentences. I'm glad I had read the long, detailed account of the build-up, the battle itself, and its historical repercussions, in John Julius Norwich's book, Byzantium: The Apogee.
Odd tone
This is an odd book. All the important dates and ideas are here, but Professor Stone comes across as a rather grumpy and capricious older fellow, who makes dated attempts at humour, and is easily distracted by historic trivia.
He takes a dismissive tone to much historical debate, a kind of urbane, pooh-poohing lofty tone. For example, he jocosely points out that Iranian schoolchildren learn that Turkish barbarians came and stormed their civilised empire, while Turkish schoolchildren learn that effete, decadent imperial Persia was revived and renewed with the strong, virile blood of the Turks. Similarly, discussing the influence of Asian tribes on the early state of Russia (in the 1500s), he writes,
The Russian princes eventually copied the Tatars, Moscow most successfully, and in 1552, Ivan the Terrible conquered the Tatar capital, Kazan, on the Volga. Nineteenth-century warhorses then presented Russian history as a sort of crusade in which indignant peasants freed themselves from 'the Tatar yoke'. (p.20)
'Nineteenth-century warhorses'? I'm still not totally sure what he means by that phrase. Does he just mean boring schoolmasters, or is he also referring to the wider culture of Russian writers and journalists and thinkers etc.
He mentions the many areas or issues where the early history of the Turks is contested by historians, where there are conflicting theories – but rarely without being pretty casual, sometimes rather dismissive, or even facetious.
There is a twentieth-century claim that the early Ottomans (which is a westernisation of Osmanli) were bright-eyed fighters for the cause of Allah, itself the answer to a rather Christian-triumphalist claim that they were noble savages who had to learn everything from Byzantium, but the evidence either way is thin. (p.23)
So all the right dates are here, along with nodding references to the main cruxes or issues of Turkish historiography – and the book does give you a good quick overview of the entire history from the Seljuks to the glories of the great Ottoman Empire (at its peak in the 1550s) and then its long decline down to the death agonies in the First World War, and then the rebirth of modern Turkey under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
But all conveyed in a deliberately jocose, facetious way.
The Turks had a modern army, whereas the Christians were still fighting pre-gunpowder wars, in which heavy cavalry, imprisoned in armour, charged off pretentiously after quarreling leaders had windbagged away as to who would lead. (p.27)
'windbagged away.' Presumably Stone thinks – or his editors suggested – that he could make the knotty and complex history of medieval and Renaissance Turkey more palatable if he slipped in wrote it in a jokey and irreverent tone.
The Pope staged a great conference in Rome in 1490 and, as in Cold War days, it attracted all manner of bores, adventurers and braggarts – poor Cem [the Ottoman sultan's exiled brother], some stray Byzantine pretenders, a fake Georgian prince or two, men wanting money to print unreadable tracts, Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes… (p.43)
Hence the ho-ho tone of much of his commentary ('Portuguese waffling at length, Hungarians going on about their woes') – except that it itself is heroically out of date. It reads like the jokey slang of the Just William stories, or Geoffrey Willans' Down with Skool! books from the 1950s. Looking it up I see that Professor Stone was born in 1941, so is now 78, was around 70 when this book was published. On one level, then, it feels a bit like a repository of naughty schoolboy attitudes from the 1950s.
Turkish trivia
Not only is the tone odd, but Stone is easily distracted by eccentric factoids and historical trivia. For example, it is odd that the prelude to this short book, where space is surely a premium, spends five pages describing the German academic exiles from Nazi Germany who came, settled in Istanbul, and helped set up the world-class university there. All very well and interesting, but not really the first or most important thing which readers ought to know about Turkish history.
Once we get to his swift outline of the Turks' obscure early history in Central Asia, it is dotted with odd explanations, for example the fact that the Italian word pastrami derives from a Turkish original which he uses to illustrate some key aspects of the Turkish language – the way it includes preposition, tenses and other information by making changes to internal vowels and adding prefixes and suffixes and structural changes (although this brief paragraph is not really very useful).
He is particularly fond of the way medieval crowns and titles have descended by historical accidents to the most unlikely descendants. Thus he tells us that, after the last crusaders had been kicked out of the Holy Land in 1291, some took refuge in highly fortified islands, such as Cyprus, the ruler of which called himself 'King of Jerusalem' for generations afterwards, the title eventually passing to… the Courtenay family in Devon!
Similarly, he describes the machinations by which the Sultan Bayezid (1360 – 1403) kept his brother Cem detained by various Christian powers far from the throne, until Cem died – at which point Bayezit had all Cem's descendants murdered – except for one, who fled to the Knights of St John on Rhodes, converted to Christianity, acquired a title from the Pope and… has a chief descendant in Australia!
The book is packed with trivial pursuit factoids such as:
on the Bosnian-Serbian border there were silver mines Srebrenica, the town which saw massacres during the Yugoslav wars, derives from the Slavonic name for 'silver'
in the Middle Ages the Black Sea was the high road for the Russian trade in furs and slaves – the present-day Turkish name for prostitute, orospu, is medieval Persian, and the central part of it denotes 'Rus'
Turkish rulers hit on the idea of recruiting young boys from occupied lands (especially Greece) to the court, converting them to Islam, giving them an education and training. Some formed the nucleus of elite units within the army known, in Turkish, as the yeñi çeri (meaning 'new soldiers') who, over time, became known to Westerners as the Janissaries
The Topkapi palace in Istanbul is laid out in courtyards with elaborate pavilions known as köşk, the Turkish word for an ornate wooden mansion, smaller than a palace – which is the source of the English word 'kiosk'
And there are lots more distracting and diverting factoids where they came from.
Contorted style
Another major feature of the book is the odd, garbled prose style. On every page he phrases things, well, oddly.
To what extent was the success of the Ottomans based on Islam, or would you read this the other way round, and say that the Ottomans were successful when their Islam was not taken too seriously? (p.7)
His prose is not incomprehensible, just oddly laid out. Stiff. Ungainly.
There is a line in Proust, to the effect that someone looks on history as would a newly born chicken at the bits of the eggshell from which it had been hatched. (p.8)
You can see what he's getting at, but can't help noticing how inelegantly it has been phrased.
By the mid-fifteenth century Byzantium had shrunk to the point that it consisted of just Constantinople and its hinterland. (p.29)
The Mameluks had made endless trouble for Constantinople and with their fabled riches from trade they provided an obvious target for Selim, who trundled his gunnery and Janissaries to effect against them. (p.49)
I think he means that Selim trundled his guns and Janissaries off to fight the Mameluks, with (or to) great effect i.e. his guns and Janissaries were very effective. Odd phrasing though, isn't it? And these oddities crop up on every page. After a while I began relishing the book, not only for its ostensible subject, but also for its car-crash prose.
As early as the eighth century, Turkish mercenaries had made their appearance in Persia, in the then capital of which, Baghdad, the Caliphate reigned over all Islam. (p.18)
A personal history of Turkey
Maybe you could turn my critique on its head by simply describing this book as a personal history of Turkey, one in which Professor Stone felt released from the corsets of formal, academic history writing, to air his opinions about everything – from penpushing bureaucracies to partisan school teachers, from the absurdities of the old Eastern Europe through the tastiness of Turkish tea – all served up in an idiosyncratic style which is continually reaching for the droll and the whimsical, rather than the serious or profound.
Madrid and Ankara are both artificial capitals, without economic activity between pen-pushing and boot-bashing. (p.54)
So, if you're looking for a short history of Turkey written in idiosyncratic English, which certainly covers all the bases but also includes an entertaining selection of odd anecdotes and Turkey trivia – then this is very possibly the book for you!
Turkey: A Short History by Norman Stone on Amazon
Reviews of other books and exhibitions about the Middle Ages
The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States by Michael Haag (2)
The Plantagenets: The Kings Who Made Britain (1) by Dan Jones (2013)
King John: Treachery, Tyranny and the Road to Magna Carta by Marc Morris (2015)
The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950 – 1350 by Robert Bartlett (1993)
Consequences of the Norman Conquest
Twelfth century chroniclers
Historia Anglorum by Henry of Huntingdon (1154)
A History of the English Church and People by the Venerable Bede (732)
The Conversion of Europe: 371-1386 by Richard Fletcher
Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire by Christopher Kelly (2008)
The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown
Posted in Books, Christianity, Crusades, European History, History, Middle Ages, Russia, War
Tagged 2012, Abbasid caliphate, Allah, Anatolia, Baghdad, Battle of Hastings, Battle of Manzikert, Byzantine Empire, Byzantium, Central Asia, Christian Greeks, crusades, Cyprus, fall of Constantinople, First World War, Geoffrey Willans, Holy Land, Islamicised Turks, Istanbul, Ivan the Terrible, Janissaries, John Julius Norwich, Just William, Kazan, Knights of St John, Mameluks, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Nazi Germany, Norman Stone, Osmanli, Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Turks, Persia, Persian Empire, Professor Stone, Proust, Rhodes, Rus, Russia, Selim, Seljuk Turks, Slavery, Srebrenica, Sultan Bayezid, Tatar, Topkapi palace, Turkey, Turkey: A Short History, Yugoslav wars
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/25/turkey-a-short-history-norman-stone/
Byzantine Emperors 324-802
This blog post uses the timeline of Byzantine emperors from Wikipedia and then adds details and comments from John Julius Norwich's book Byzantium: The Early Centuries.
Constantine I 'the Great' (324-337)
Son of the Augustus Constantius Chlorus and Helena. Proclaimed Augustus of the western empire upon the death of his father on 25 July 306, he became sole ruler of the western empire after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312. In 324, he defeated the eastern Augustus Licinius and re-united the empire under his rule, reigning as sole emperor until his death. Constantine completed the administrative and military reforms begun under Diocletian, who had begun ushering in the Dominate period. Actively interested in Christianity, he played a crucial role in its development and the Christianization of the Roman world, through his convocation of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea. He re-founded the city of Byzantium as 'New Rome', popularly known as Constantinople.
Constantius II (337 – 361)
Second surviving son of Constantine I, he inherited the eastern third of Roman Empire upon his father's death, becoming sole Roman Emperor from 353, after the overthrow of the western usurper Magnentius. Constantius' reign saw military activity on all frontiers, and dissension between Arianism, favoured by the emperor, and the Orthodox supporters of the Nicene Creed. In his reign, Constantinople was given equal status to Rome, and the original church of Hagia Sophia was built. Constantius appointed Constantius Gallus and Julian as Caesars, and died on his way to confront Julian, who had risen up against him.
Constans I (337 – 350)
Third surviving son of Constantine I. Caesar since 333, he inherited the central third of Roman Empire upon his father's death, and became sole emperor in the west following the death of Constantine II in 348. Constans was assassinated during the coup of Magnentius.
Julian 'the Apostate' (361 – 363)
Grandson of Constantius Chlorus and cousin of Constantius II. Proclaimed by his army in Gaul, Julian became legitimate Emperor upon the death of Constantius. He was killed on campaign against Sassanid Persia having failed to revive pagan religion.
Jovian (363 – 364)
Captain of the guards under Julian, elected by the army upon Julian's death. Died on journey back to Constantinople.
Valentinian I (364 – 375)
An officer under Julian and Jovian, he was elected by the army upon Jovian's death. He soon appointed his younger brother Valens as Emperor of the East. Died of cerebral haemorrhage.
Valens I (364 – 378)
A soldier of the Roman army, he was appointed Emperor of the East by his elder brother Valentinian I. Killed at the Battle of Adrianople.
Gratian (378 – 379)
Son of Valentinian I. Emperor of the West, he inherited rule of the East upon the death of Valens and appointed Theodosius I as Emperor of the East. Assassinated on 25 August 383 during the rebellion of Magnus Maximus.
Theodosius I 'the Great' (379 – 395)
Aristocrat and military leader, brother-in-law of Gratian who appointed him as emperor of the East. From 392 until his death sole Roman Emperor. Theodosius passed laws banning pagan religious practice, entrenching Christianity as the religion of the empire.
Arcadius (395 – 408)
On the death of Theodosius I in 395, the Roman Empire was permanently divided between the East Roman Empire, later known as the Byzantine Empire, and the West Roman Empire. Theodosius' eldest son Arcadius became emperor in the East while his younger son Honorius became emperor in the West.
Theodosius II (408 – 450)
Only son of Arcadius. Succeeded upon the death of his father. As a minor, the praetorian prefect Anthemius was regent in 408–414. Died in a riding accident.
Marcian (450 – 457)
A soldier and politician, he became emperor after being wed by the Augusta Pulcheria, sister of Theodosius II, following the latter's death. Died of gangrene.
Leo I 'the Thracian' (457 – 474)
Of Bessian origin, Leo became a low-ranking officer and served as an attendant of the Gothic commander-in-chief of the army, Aspar, who chose him as emperor on Marcian's death. He was the first emperor to be crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople. His reign was marked by the pacification of the Danube frontier and peace with Persia, which allowed him to intervene in the affairs of the western empire, supporting candidates for the throne and dispatching an expedition to recover Carthage from the Vandals in 468. Initially a puppet of Aspar, Leo began promoting the Isaurians as a counterweight to Aspar's Goths, marrying his daughter Ariadne to the Isaurian leader Tarasicodissa (Zeno). With their support, in 471 Aspar was murdered and Gothic power over the army was broken.
Leo II (January – November 474)
Grandson of Leo I by Leo's daughter Ariadne and her Isaurian husband, Zeno. He was raised to Caesar on 18 November 473. Leo ascended the throne after the death of his grandfather on 19 January 474. He crowned his father Zeno as co-emperor and effective regent on 10 November 474. He died shortly after, on 10 November 474.
Zeno (474 – 491)
As the leader of Leo I's Isaurian soldiers, Zeno rose to comes domesticorum, married the emperor's daughter Ariadne, took the name Zeno, and played a crucial role in the elimination of Aspar and his Goths. He was named co-emperor by his son on 9 February 474, and became sole ruler upon the latter's death, but had to flee to his native country before Basiliscus in 475, regaining control of the capital in 476. Zeno concluded peace with the Vandals, saw off challenges against him by Illus and Verina, and secured peace in the Balkans by persuading the Ostrogoths under Theodoric the Great to migrate to Italy. Zeno's reign also saw the end of the western line of emperors, with the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476.
Basiliscus (475 – 476)
General and brother-in-law of Leo I, Basiliscus seized power from Zeno but was then deposed by him.
Anastasius I (491 – 518)
He was a palace official when he was chosen as husband and Emperor by the Empress-dowager Ariadne. Anastasius reformed the tax system and the Byzantine coinage and proved a frugal ruler, so that by the end of his reign he left a substantial surplus. His Monophysite sympathies led to widespread opposition, most notably the Revolt of Vitalian and the Acacian Schism. His reign was also marked by the first Bulgar raids into the Balkans and by a war with Persia over the foundation of Dara. He died childless.
Justin I (518 – 527)
Officer and commander of the Excubitors bodyguard under Anastasius I, he was elected by army and people upon the death of Anastasius I. Illiterate, he was much influenced by his nephew Justinian.
Justinian I 'the Great' (527 – 565)
Nephew of Justin I, possibly raised to co-emperor on 1 April 527. Succeeded on Justin I's death. Attempted to restore the western territories of the Empire, reconquering Italy, North Africa and parts of Spain. Also responsible for the corpus juris civilis, or 'body of civil law' which is the foundation of law for many modern European nations. For John Julius Norwich Justinian was the last Roman emperor of Byzantium. (See my review of Robert Graves's novel about his reign, Count Belisarius.)
Justin II (565 – 578)
Nephew of Justinian I, he seized the throne on the latter's death with support of army and Senate. Became insane, hence in 573–574 under the regency of his wife Sophia, and in 574–578 under the regency of Tiberius Constantine.
Tiberius II Constantine (578 – 582)
Commander of the Excubitors, friend and adoptive son of Justin. Named Caesar and regent in 574. Succeeded on Justin II's death.
Emperor Maurice (582 – 602)
Became an official and later a general. Married the daughter of Tiberius II and succeeded him upon his death. Named his son Theodosius as co-emperor in 590. Deposed by Phocas and executed on 27 November 602 at Chalcedon.
Phocas (602 – 610)
Subaltern in the Balkan army, he led a rebellion that deposed Maurice but turned out to be spectacularly brutal and cruel. Increasingly unpopular, he was deposed and executed by Heraclius.
Heraclius (610 – 641)
The eldest son of the Exarch of Africa, Heraclius the Elder. With his father and uncle launched a revolt against the unpopular Phocas in 609 and deposed him in October 610. Brought the Byzantine-Sassanid War of 602–628 to a successful conclusion but was unable to stop the Muslim conquests; during his rule Muslim armies conquered of Syria (637), Armenia (639) and Egypt (639). In 638 Jerusalem fell after a two-year siege. The loss to the Muslims of Jerusalem, the holiest city to Christians, proved to be the source of much resentment in Christendom for centuries to come.
Heraclius officially replaced Latin with Greek as the language of administration. This act, for Norwich, makes Heraclius the first fully Greek Byzantine emperor. His military and administrative reforms created the backbone for the Byzantine Empire which helped it last another eight hundred years. He tried to solve the ongoing divisions caused by the monophysitic heresy by promoting a compromise theory, monothelitism, devised by Patriarch Sergius I of Constantinople, although this only ended up causing more ill-feeling and excommunications. Nonetheless, according to Norwich, his record:
remains a magnificent one. Without his energy, determination and inspired leadership, Constantinople might well have fallen to the Persians – in which case it would almost inevitably have been engulfed a few years later by the Muslim tide, with consequences for Western Europe that can scarcely be imagined. (Byzantium: The Early Centuries p.310)
Constantine III (February – May 641)
Born 612, eldest son of Heraclius by his first wife Fabia Eudokia. Named co-emperor in 613, he succeeded to the throne with his younger brother Heraklonas following the death of Heraclius. Died of tuberculosis, reputedly poisoned by scheming empress-dowager (i.e. Heraclius's wife) Martina.
Heraklonas (February to September 641)
Born 626 in to Heraclius' second wife Martina, named co-emperor in 638. Succeeded to the throne with Constantine III following the death of Heraclius. Sole emperor after the death of Constantine III, under the regency of Martina, but was forced to name Constans II co-emperor by the army. In September both Martina and Heraklonas were arrested: her tongue was cut out and his nose was slit, and they were sent into exile on Rhodes.
Constans II (641 – 668)
Born 630 the son of Constantine III. Raised to co-emperor in summer 641 i.e. aged just 11, after his father's death, Constans became sole emperor after the forced abdication and exile of his uncle Heraklonas (see above). Baptized Heraclius, he reigned as Constantine, 'Constans' was his nickname. Constans's 27-year reign was overshadowed by constant struggle against the fast-expanding Muslim caliphate. In 642 the seized Alexandria, later razing its defences to the ground and starting a new town at the head of the Nile Delta, which would become Cairo. In 649 the Muslims sacked Cyprus. In 654 they attacked Rhodes. In 655 they thrashed an imperial fleet off the coast of Lycia. In 663 Constans led an army across the Adriatic and into Italy to combat the Lombards. Having taken Rome he stripped it of its last remaining treasures and shipped them back to Constantinople. Then he moved on to Syracuse, which he made his base for the last five years of his reign. He was murdered by a slave while bathing.
Constantine IV (668 – 685)
Eldest of Constans II's three sons. In 669 there was an army uprising against his rule which he put down and then slit the noses of his two younger brothers to render them unfit to rule (in Byzantine theory the king or basileus had to be free of physical blemishes). From 674 to 678 he held off a sea-based siege of Constantinople, not least by deploying Greek fire, and in doing so – according to John Julius Norwich – 'saved Western civilisation'.
Had they captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe – ad America – might be Muslim today. (p.325)
Not bad for a man who died of dysentery aged just 33.
Justinian II nicknamed 'the Slit-nosed' (685 – 695)
Son of Constantine IV, he was named co-emperor in 681 and became sole emperor upon Constantine IV's death. He was a stern disciplinarian whose biggest act was to move an estimated quarter of million peasants and villagers from Thrace and northern Greece into Bithynia and the south coast of the Black Sea. He was also a ferocious taxer who made it plain he wanted to tax the aristocracy to extinction so when a military revolt broke out, they and other sections of the population gleefully welcomed Justinian's overthrow in 695. He was dragged into the Hippodrome where his nose was slit, before being sent into exile at Cherson in Crimea.
The Twenty Years' Anarchy (695–717)
Leontius (695–698)
A professional soldier from Isauria, Leontius led a military revolt against Justinian II, who was disfigured and sent into exile. In 698 the Muslims conquered Carthage and thus extinguished the entire Roman province of North Africa. Leontius had sent a fleet to defend the city but rather than return in disgrace, the sailors mutinied and elected a new king, the fleet returning to Constantinople and overthrowing Leontius.
Tiberius Apsimar (698–705)
Originally named Apsimar and of German origin, this is the admiral the failed Byzantine fleet elected their leader and king (and hastily gave the Roman-sounding name of Tiberius) and who led them back to the capital to overthrow Leontius. In the seven years of his reign he led military expeditions against the Muslims in Syria and Cilicia. His reign (and life) came to an end when the exiled Justinian II returned.
Justinian II 'the Slit-nosed' (705 – 711)
In exile Justinian did a deal with the Bulgar King Tervel to make the latter caesar in exchange for Slav troops. With these troops Justinian returned to Constantinople and seized power. The two usurpers – Leontius and Tiberius – were tracked down, put in chains, dragged round the Hippodrome in front of a jeering crowd, had their noses slit as Justinian had, and then were beheaded. Justinian then went on to inaugurate a reign of terror, torturing and executing his enemies.
In 709, for reasons which remain obscure, he sent an army to Ravenna – theoretically still a Byzantine 'exarchate' – round up the town's dignitaries and packed them off to Constantinople where they were all executed except for the archbishop, who he had blinded, while his army went on the rampage in the captured city.
Then he launched an expedition against the Khazars who had taken Cherson, site of his exile, where a complicated sequence of events led to an exiled general named Bardanes rallying rebellious Byzantine forces and sailing to take Constantinople, where a grateful populace greeted him. Justinian was captured a few miles outside of town and beheaded. His mother took his son, six-year-old Tiberius, to the sanctuary of a church across the Bosphorus but soldiers followed them there and slaughtered the little boy 'like a sheep'. The Heraclian line of emperors had ended.
Philippicus Bardanes (711 – 713)
A general of Armenian origin, he led the forces from Cherson which deposed Justinian II, but turned out to be a 'hopeless hedonist' (p.347). The Bulgar King Tervel vowed to avenge his friend Justinian and marched his Slav army up to the walls of Constantinople. Philippicus called on the Opsikian Theme (a theme was a geographical and administrative unit of the empire) just across the Marmaris to send troops to help, but they refused and instead nominated a rival basileus. Philippicus was enjoying a siesta in his palace when soldiers broke in, seized him, dragged him to the Hippodrome where his eyes were put out.
Anastasius II (713 – 715)
Originally named Artemios, he was a chief secretary to Philippicus and proclaimed emperor by the soldiers who overthrew Philippicus. Anastasius set about repairing the walls defending Constantinople and, hearing the Muslims were once again on the war path, sent a pre-emptive force of Opsikian troops in a fleet to Rhodes. However the rebellious troops clubbed the head of the expedition to death and then returned to the capital, picking up an inoffensive tax collector named Theodosius along the way. After a six month siege, Constantinople submitted to the rebels and Anastasius, who had fled to Nicaea, was allowed to retire to a monastery in Thessalonica. In 719 he led a revolt against his successor but one, Leo III, but failed, and was executed by Leo.
Theodosius III (715 – 717)
A tax collector unrelated to any royal blood, Theodosius was proclaimed emperor by rebellious Opsikian troops, entering Constantinople in November 715. Two years later Leo the Isaurian, who was governor of a theme on the eastern border, led a revolt of soldiers on Constantinople and, after some negotiations with the Senate and Leo, Theodosius was allowed to abdicate and retire to a monastery in Ephesus.
End of the Twenty Years' Anarchy
Leo III the Isaurian (717 – 741)
Norwich, in his history of Byantium, calls Leo 'the saviour of the empire'. He rose through the ranks from very obscure origins ('a Syrian peasant') to become a general. Led a rebellion and secured the throne in spring 717. In the autumn a massive Muslim army and fleet besieged Constantinople but Leo had prepared well, the besieging army was decimated during a bitter winter of famine and disease, the survivors massacred by a Bulgarian army which attacked from the north, and then the retreating fleet was destroyed in a storm. Saved again.
Leo's other big achievement was to inaugurate the movement known as Iconoclasm which set out to destroy all images of the human figure and face and which was to divide the empire and severely exacerbate the divide between the Western and Eastern churches. He had barely begun, by removing just one statue from one church, before he sparked a storm of protests across the city and the Greek East and from the pope in Rome. Despite protests, he pressed on and in 703 issued an imperial decree banning all religious images, demanding they be destroyed. Monks and priests fled east and west carrying their beloved icons and images concealed. The fleet and numerous military garrisons mutinied. There were riots in the major cities.
Some scholars attribute the rise of iconoclasm to the influence of the sternly anti-image Muslims who now controlled most of the former Roman territory in the East. But Norwich points out that the movement actually began as a charter launched by eastern bishops who thought they were challenging the increasingly fetishistic worship of icons in themselves. It had got to the stage where icons stood in as godparents during baptisms.
Constantine V (741 – 775)
The only son of Leo III. Constantine was made co-emperor in 720 and succeeded on his father's death. He was leading a military expedition against the Muslims when he was attacked by Artabasdos, an old colleague of his father's who had helped Leo seize the throne from Theodosius.
Artabasdos (741 – 743)
General who had helped Leo II to the throne and been given Leo's sister's hand in marriage, thus becoming brother-in-law to Leo and uncle to Constantine V, who he overthrew. For eighteen months he ruled in Constantinople making himself very popular by calling for the restoration of icons, which suddenly reappeared all over the city. Meanwhile Constantine had not been killed, but taken refuge in an eastern garrison filled with icon-supporters (the issue now split every level of Byzantine society) who marched behind him and they defeated Artabasdos in battle in Lydia.
Artabasdos fled to Constantinople which Constantine re-entered at the head of his army, dragged Artabasdos to the Hippodrome where he and his two sons were ritually blinded, their chief supporters executed or subjected to various mutilations. The Patriarch Anastasius was stipped naked, flogged, and paraded round the Hippodrome sitting backwards on a donkey.
Constantine V (741 – 775) part two
Constantine returned to power with renewed virulence against the icon-supporters, not least because they had helped overthrow him. He convened a church council which banned icons. He banned the use of the word 'saint' and 'mother of God' as blasphemous. He was particularly violent against monasteries, which had been growing in size and power. We have records of entire monasteries being sacked, the head monks having their beards doused in oil and set on fire, libraries burned to the ground. And this not by the Muslims, but by their fellow Christians.
Constantine campaigned continually against the Bulgars who threatened from the north but he was granted relief from the Muslim threat when, in 750, at the Battle of the Greater Zab River, the army of Caliph Marwan II was smashed by that of Abu al-Abbas al-Suffah and the Omayyad dynasty of Damascus came to an end. Power moved to the new Abbasid dynasty based in Baghdad, which was to be more interested in the East, in Persia, Afghanistan and Transoxiana than in Europe or Africa.
But in 751 Ravenna was taken by the Lombard king Aistulf and the last Byzantine foothold in north Italy was snuffed out forever. Constantine died of natural causes while on campaign against the Bulgars aged 56.
Leo IV 'the Khazar' (775 – 780)
Eldest son of Constantine V, co-emperor since 751, he succeeded upon his father's death and was much influenced by his powerful, scheming wife Irene. When he died aged just 30, Irene made herself Regent for their son, Constantine VI. Irene was
scheming and duplicitous, consumed by a devouring ambition and an insatiable lust for power, she was to bring dissension and disaster to the Empire for nearly a quarter of a century (p.366)
Constantine VI (780 – 797)
Born in 771 and only child of Leo IV, co-emperor in 776, sole emperor upon Leo's death in 780, he was for the next ten years under the regency of his mother, Irene of Athens.
Irene was a fierce supporter of icons and overthrew all Constantine V's legislation, in 787 convening the Second Council of Nicaea which condemned the practice of iconoclasm and restored the veneration of icons to Christian practice. This also helped restore relations with the pope in Rome, the Western church having never condemned icons in the first place.
Her icon-support sparked repeated mutinies in the solidly iconoclast army. Anticipating a coup in 790 she placed her son – fast becoming a focal point for iconoclast rebellion – in prison. When she tried to make the entire army swear an oath of allegiance to her personally, it mutinied, freed young Constantine (now 18 years old) and confined Irene to house arrest. Constantine proved weak and indecisive and a poor military leader. The famous Muslim leader Haroun al-Rashid had to be bought off with vast tributes of gold, while Constantine failed in his campaigns against the ever-threatening Bulgars of the North.
Constantine scandalised his church, especially the monks, by divorcing his first wife and marrying a court attendant. This issue, like everything else, became ensnared in theological language and led to splits among the icon-supporters which were exploited by the iconoclasts. In 797 Irene launched a coup against her own son, having him captured, taken to the palace and there ritually blinded. Her own son. He died soon after of his wounds.
Irene (797 – 802)
Although she tried to court popularity by reducing all manner of unpopular taxes, this only had the effect of impoverishing the empire, leaving her unable to repel further incursions by Haroun al-Rashid, alienating the iconoclast army, as well as every conservative who thought there mustn't be a woman basileus.
In 802, out of the blue, came a marriage proposal from Charles, King of the Franks, who had been crowned Holy Roman Emperor at St Peter's on Christmas Day 800. Theoretically the pope in Rome was subject to the emperor, the Roman Emperor, resident in Constantinople. But Irene's reign created a unique conjunction of events. For most churchmen, aristocrats and citizens, a woman couldn't be basileus. Therefore the Roman throne was vacant. Add in the factor that the popes of Rome had been abused, ignored, sometimes kidnapped and even murdered by various Eastern emperors – and that the East seemed to have been taken over by icon-destroying madness – and was militarily weak, especially against the Muslims – all these are reasons why Pope Leo should turn to by far the strongest military figure in the West, the pious and genuine Christian believer Charles King of the Franks who, in the preceding 30 years, had hugely expanded the territory of his kingdom.
Crowning him emperor in Rome in 800 a) created an entirely new centre of power in the West, resulting in there being two emperors in Christendom b) gave enormous power and influence to Leo (which protected him against powerful enemies who were conniving at his downfall) and – though no-one realised it at the time – to all his successors.
Charles and probably Leo thought that if Charles married Irene it would reunite the two halves of the empire, and hence the marriage proposal. Irene for her part knew how unpopular she had become and looked favourably on it. Imagine if they had go married and Christendom united.
Instead she was overthrown in a palace coup in 802, sent into exile on Lesbos and died a year later. The epoch of one Roman Empire united under one emperor, was over. From now on there would be a Holy Roman Emperor in the West and a Byzantine Emperor in the East.
Byzantium: The Early Centuries on Amazon
John Julius Norwich's website
Other early medieval reviews
Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (2008)
The Conversion of Europe: 371-1386 by Richard Fletcher (1997)
The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown (1971)
Count Belisarius by Robert Graves (1938)
Posted in Ancient history, Books, Christianity, European History, History, Middle Ages
Tagged 800, Abbasid dynasty, Abu al-Abbas al-Suffah, Afghanistan, Africa, Alexandria, Anastasius I, Anastasius II, Apsimar, Arcadius, Arianism, Armenia, Artabasdos, Artemios, Aspar, Baghdad, Bardanes, basileus, Basiliscus, Battle of the Greater Zab River, Belisarius, Byzantine emperors, Byzantium, Byzantium: The Early Centuries, Cairo, Caliph Marwan II, Charles, Cherson, Christendom, Christianity, Christmas Day, Cilicia, Constans I, Constans II, Constantine I, Constantine I 'the Great', Constantine III, Constantine IV, Constantine V, Constantine VI, Constantinople, Constantius Chlorus, Constantius II, Council at Nicaea, Damascus, Diocletian, Egypt, Emperor Maurice, Europe, Goths, Gratian, Hagia Sophia, Haroun al-Rashid, Helena, Heraclius, Heraklonas, Holy Roman Emperor, Iconoclasm, Illus, Irina, Isaurians, Islam, Jerusalem, John Julius Norwich, Jovian, Julian, Julian 'the Apostate', Justin I, Justin II, Justinian I, Justinian II, Justinian the Great, Khazars, King Aistulf, King of the Franks, King Tervel, Leo I, Leo II, Leo III the Isaurian, Leo IV, Leontius, Licinius, Lombards, Magnentius, Marcian, Martina, Mohammed, monophysitism, monothelitism, New Rome, Omayyad dynasty, Orthodox Christianity, Patriarch Sergius I, Persia, Persian Empire, Philippicus Bardanes, Phocas, Pope Leo, Ravenna, River Danube, Roman emperor, Roman Empire, Rome, Romulus Augustulus, Sassanid Persia, Sea of Marmaris, St Peter's cathedral, Syria, the Acacian Schism, the Balkans, the Battle of Adrianople, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Hippodrome, the Nicene Creed, the Ostrogoths, Theodoric the Great, Theodosius I, Theodosius II, Theodosius III, Tiberius, Tiberius Apsimar, Tiberius II Constantine, Transoxiana, Twenty Years' Anarchy, Valens I, Valentinian I, Verina, Zeno
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/10/byzantine-emperors-324-802/
Now, in Constantinople there is a square called 'The Square of Brotherly Love' with a fine group of statuary in it, on a tall pedestal, commemorating the fraternal devotion of the sons of the emperor Constantine – who subsequently destroyed one another without mercy. (p.183)
Apart from one year teaching at the University of Cairo, Graves made a living for his whole long life (1895-1985) from writing – books and articles, editing collections, but above all writing poetry.
He regarded himself first and foremost as a poet, slaving over his carefully constructed verses and developing slightly eccentric theories about poetic inspiration. It was only to pay the rent, and feed his growing family that he churned out the prose works which he didn't consider nearly as important.
But ironically, it is these prose works which posterity has remembered Graves for, starting with his hugely enjoyable autobiography, Goodbye To All That (1929), famous for its account of his service in the First World War, but which also includes humorous memories of his childhood growing up in Wimbledon, and then merry anecdotes of being a struggling poet, husband and father in the 1920s.
I, Claudius
On the same level of fame is the pair of novels he wrote about the Roman emperor Claudius (who ruled from AD 41 to 54), I, Claudius and Claudius the God (both published in 1934) which were made into a famous BBC TV series in 1976. Presumably this introduced Graves's name (and Claudius's) to million of viewers who'd never heard of either before.
Belisarius
Close behind the Claudius duet in reputation is this novel, which is also based around another major figure from the classical world, General Flavius Belisarius.
Belisarius (500-565 AD) rose to become the leading general of the Eastern Roman Empire in the first half of the 6th century. He is best known for serving the Eastern Emperor Justinian (ruled 527-565) and leading a series of campaigns to try and recapture the Western half of the Empire, over a century after the first sack of Rome (by Alaric and the Visigoths in 410), 50 years or so after the last Roman Emperor in the West was deposed (476) and Africa, Spain, Gaul and Italy had been overrun by barbarian conquerors.
Belisarius made his reputation in a campaign against the Persian Empire on the eastern border, before leading campaigns against the Vandals in Africa (then a word describing what is basically Tunisia today), before taking Sicily and then fighting Ostrogoth armies the length and breadth of Italy during the prolonged Gothic War (535-554). Unfortunately the resulting waste and devastation of Italy left the inhabitants with an enduring resentment of the Easterners / the Greeks / the Byzantines. At one point a minor character, the tall good-looking Theodosius who is a favourite of Antonina's (and who court gossip quickly suggests is having an affair with her) composes a comic song which ironically lists all the 'benefits' Byzantine rule has brought to Italy, including 'massacre, rape, arson, enslavement, famine, plague and cannibalism (p.298).
In fact the next effect of Justinian and Belarius's campaigns was so to weaken both Goth and Roman authority that just fourteen years after both sides had fought to exhaustion, the entire peninsula was conquered by another tribe of barbarian invaders, the Lombards, in 568.
As with the Claudius books, Graves had a number of good sources for the career of General Belisarius, namely the scurrilous account of court intrigue by the contemporary historian, Procopius (the origin and motivation for whose books is dissected right at the end of the text), as well as other chronicles by the likes of John Malalas, Theophanes, and John of Ephesus. But being such a good classicist, he has slipped in various inventions – invented characters and events – which fit seamlessly into his vision of the 6th century Byzantine Empire.
Flavius Belisarius depicted in the mosaic in the Church of San Vitale, Ravenna
I found the book slow going to begin with, but then became more and more absorbed by it. It is told in a straightforward chronological order, covering Belisarius's boyhood and school years, his move to the Eastern capital Constantinople, his rise in the army, reforms to the army, and then the long, long sequence of military campaigns.
What brings the book alive, though, is the narrator Graves has invented to tell the whole, long story – Eugenius the eunuch (p.11). He makes Eugenius the long-suffering servant of Belisarius's wife, an ex-prostitute named Antonina who, at an early point in her life ran a sort of nightclub-cum-brothel with several other filles de joie, including – as it happens – one Theodora who, after a series of unlikely events, ends up marrying the Emperor Justinian and becoming 'Her Resplendent Highness, the Empress'.
And what power she has! Again and again Eugenius shows Theodora as being the most resolute and decisive of all the emperor's advisers, and even going behind his back to take strong decisions when Justinian was dithering.
Theodora was no fool of the priests. She had seen the world, and she understood men and politics, both lay and ecclesiastical. She ruled Justinian as absolutely as it is said that the great Livia once ruled Augustus, the first Emperor of the Romans. (p.147)
[A discreet nod, there to the guiding theme of the Claudius novels, published just four years earlier.]
Thus although the novel is generally about a man, a military man, one of the most famous generals in history – and although it certainly contains a great deal about the Byzantine army and cavalry, their equipment, training and tactics, and describes in great detail pretty much every battle Belisarius was involved in – nonetheless, the novel still has quite a lot of feminine content, the eunuch Eugenius being as understanding of and sympathetic to his mistress and her lady friends, and in tune with the friendship between Antonina and Theodora, as he is with the more famous menfolk.
In fact Eugenius manages to be consistently rude about most of the male figures, not least Justinian (and his illiterate predecessor and sponsor, Justin, and his hapless predecessor, Anastasius I). Here he is on Justinian:
The man was a mass of contradictions: most of which, however, were to be explained as the result of great ambitions struggling with cowardice and meanness. Justinian wised, it seems, to make himself remembered as Justinian the Great. His talents would indeed have been equal to the task if he had only been less of a beast in spirit. (p.146)
Rudeness which slowly changes into contempt as he describes Justinian's growing meanness, avariciousness, paranoia and poor decision-making, until he is routinely describing examples of Justinian's
incompetence, cruelty, procrastination, meanness, ingratitude (p.407)
Towards Belisarius Eugenius is more ambivalent, painting him as the generally innocent victim of various court intrigues and Justinian's petty mean-mindedness – but all the same, he doesn't really like the general and is only supportive because of his undying loyalty to Belarius's wife, Eugenius's mistress, the lovely Antonina.
The Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565) and his entourage as depicted by a contemporary mosaic from the Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna (it is believed that the figure standing on Justinian's immediate right is Belisarius)
We learn a lot about the backstories of Eugenius, Antonia and Theodora which are described with wonderful plausibility. I particularly like Eugenius's own story, that he was the young son of a Welsh prince, kidnapped by Saxon raiders and then sold on to an unscrupulous Greek salesman of fake religious relics, Barak, who had him castrated, and crops up at amusingly unlikely moments throughout the rest of the story.
At Constantinople Barak [who had been arrested and sent there by Belisarius] secured an honourable release through bribery, and though by now seventy years of age, resumed his long-interrupted task as overseer of monuments in the Holy Places. It was his pleasure to refresh the blood-marks on the pillar of scourging; and to renew the hyssop-sponge at Golgotha, which the piety of pilgrims had worn almost to nothing; and to discover at Joppa, buried in an old chest during the persecutions of the Emperor Nero, a startling number of early Christian relics of the first importance and in an agreeably sound state of preservation. (p.305)
A passage which, incidentally, gives you a good feel for Eugenius's own ironic scorn for most Christian belief and practice.
Eugenius is a gossipy narrator and frequently stops the narrative to tell us diverting anecdotes about whoever is appearing in the main narrative whether it is the early stories about Antonina and Theodora setting up their brothel, or stories about the enemies Belisarius faces, like old Khavad of Persia, or describing the culture of the north African Moors, or a revealing anecdote about King Gelimer of the Vandals. All these little asides and stories make the book much more accessible and readable.
Eugenius is also a chatty and fascinating guide to the culture of 6th century Constantinople where the first half of the novel is set, before Eugenius sets off accompanying his mistress Antonina who insists on accompanying her husband Belisarius on his western campaigns.
Two massive issues dominated the culture of the time, which were the powerful antagonisms stirred up by the various Christian heresies which swirled round the empire, and, in the city itself, the huge division between the two factions, the Blues and the Greens.
Heresies
By the early 300s the spread of Christian heresies throughout the empire was already such a problem that the Emperor Constantine, the man who ordered the building of Constantinople (officially consecrated in 330) had been forced to call the Council of Nicaea in 325 to thrash out definitions of the key ideas and terms of Christianity.
Nicaea was the first ecumenical council of the Christian church, though far from the last. The heresy it was called to address was Arianism, named after the presbyter Arius who preached that Jesus – the Son of the Christian Trinity – was at some point created by the Father and therefore was not identical with him and was therefore, logically, inferior to him. This belief became very popular but contradicted the orthodox view that Jesus was fully divine, part of the Holy Trinity which was made up of equal members.
Although the Council of Nicaea stripped Arius of his teaching position and exiled him, his heresy continued to flourish, and others soon joined it. A recurring problem was defining the precise nature of Jesus: was he a man, or a God? Or half man, half God? Or both man and God? Was he eternal and one with God, or 'begotten' i.e. created at some later date i.e. not as godly as God?
These are all 'Christological' issues i.e. debates about the person, nature, and role of Christ, and they turned out to be prolific. To put it another way, Christianity was and is to this day, a very unstable theological or philosophical system, liable to splinter off into all kinds of heresies and sects.
At the period when the novel is set the most common heresy in the Greek East was monophysitism. This held that in the person of Jesus Christ there was only one, divine nature. This view conflicted with the 'orthodox' position, which had been agreed at a later ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which proclaimed that Jesus possessed two natures, divine and human.
The emperor Justinian was a staunch defender of the orthodox view propounded at Chalcedon, but his wife, Theodora, was a believer in miaphysitism. Miaphysitism holds that in the one person of Jesus Christ, Divinity and Humanity are united in one nature, 'united without separation, without confusion, and without alteration,' although – looking it up – I see that Chalcedonian orthodoxy considered this view assimilable within the orthodoxy. Thus Justinian and Theodora were more or less at one in their theology.
This may all sound very theoretical and abstruse but in fact heresy played a vital role in the geopolitics of the day. Virtually all the 'barbarian' tribes who had conquered the territories of the former western empire were Arians which put them at loggerheads both with the pope (who clung on in defeated Rome) and Justinian.
Thus the Ostrogoths, who had conquered and occupied all of Italy and the Adriatic coast, and who reached the zenith of their power under Theodoric (454-526) were Arians. It was these Ostrogoths who Justinian sent Belisarius to conquer in what turned into the long and ruinous Gothic War (535-554 AD) and, at various points in the long, complex negotiations for peace, the issue of religious belief became a stumbling block.
Also the Vandals who had travelled through Spain and crossed the straits in order to conquer Carthage and the surrounding area of north Africa were also Arians who lorded it over the native Roman population who were orthodox. This fact led to some bad decisions, for Belisarius – having conquered them in battle – sensibly recommended to Justinian that the Vandals be allowed to worship in their own way and receive eucharist from their Arian priests. But Justinian, more devout and more removed from military reality, insisted that the Vandals be forced to submit to orthodox priests and that their own religious rites be banned. Predictably, this (along with other tactical mistakes Justinian made, like not allowing the victorious Byzantine troops to hang on to the estates they had sequestered) led to a rebellion against Byzantine rule after Belisarius had left the area in order to campaign in Italy, forcing Belisarius to weaken his forces by sending some back to quash the rebellion. It could have become a peacefully restored part of the Byzantine empire but for Justinian's religious intolerance on this central issue of Christian heresy.
These heresies add depth to the personal, social and military clashes which feature in it. Of every single major character we need to know which form of Christianity they follow in order to gauge or understand their likely reactions to other characters, and to understand the broader religious-cum-power politics of the situation.
The Blues and Greens
Within the Eastern empire itself, and especially in the city of Constantinople, raged a fierce enmity between the Greens and the Blues. These had originally been the colours of competing teams of chariot racers in the city's massive Hippodrome. In fact there had originally been blue, green, red and white teams but the latter two had been swallowed up by the former.
By the time of the novel the conflict between Blues and Greens had permeated every level of Byzantine society. It was a bit like Brexit. Families were divided, friends opposed, politics became poisoned by the fierce opposition of Blues and Greens at every level. Even religion was dragged into it, with the Greens broadly representing monophysitism and the lower classes, while the Blues tended to be orthodox and upper class. Blues and Greens took opposing views not only on religion, but on social and political issues, up to and including the choice of new emperors.
Early on in the novel we learn that the empress Theodora was the daughter of one Acacius, a bear trainer of the hippodrome's Green faction. An internal rivalry among the Greens led to Acacius's death whereupon his widow brought her four children, including young Theodora, into the Hippodrome wearing garlands, but they were roundly booed and rejected by the Green half of the audience who had been led to believe Acacius had been a traitor to their colour. To spite the Greens, they were taken up by the Blues and from then on Theodora would be a Blue supporter.
The degree of enmity this rivalry caused has to be read about to be believed. In its sporting origins it was a bit like the sectarianism of football fans of my youth in the 1970s, and was accompanied by a lot of street hooliganism. Except that there were only two factions and the rivalry permeated right to the top of Byzantine society, something like the ineradicable difference between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or Turks and Greeks in Cyprus.
As with all the other sociological aspects of the book, Graves gives a completely convincing description of what it felt like to live and work in a society drenched in this rivalry. The different factions developed different haircuts and fashions. Young toughs of both sides patrolled the streets in gangs, wearing short swords, frequently stabbing each other in broad daylight.
The mounting anarchy climaxed in the Nika Riots of January 532. Some rioters from a previous horse race had been arrested and most of them hanged. A pair escaped and took refuge in a church. The emperor Justinian was just at a delicate point in negotiations with the Persian empire and facing hostility over high taxes at home. At the next day of chariot racing, on 13 January the crowd began chanting anti-government slogans at Justinian who, as usual, was sitting in the royal box (which linked directly into the enormous royal palace just behind the Hippodrome). By the end of the races the entire crowd, Blues and Greens, had united in chanting their opposition to Justinian via the slogan 'Nika', meaning 'Victory', the chant usually set up when one or other of their champions had won a race.
The crowd then surged out into the streets and ran wild, burning and looting. Justinian's palace was besieged and over the next week nearly half of Constantinople was burned or destroyed (including the grand church of Hagia Sophia) and hundreds of people killed. Senators opposed to Justinian saw their opportunity, first of all to call for the repeal of his unpopular laws and then, as things really got out of hand, they were bold enough to declare a new emperor, Hypatius, a nephew of former Emperor Anastasius I.
All this is described in a thrilling eye-witness account by the narrator, Eugenius. He explains how a) Justinian was all for fleeing the burning city but was restrained by Theodora who, like so many of Graves's women, is the really strong figure in the story, and so b) contrives a solution to the anarchy. This was to bribe the Blue faction by pointing out that he, Justinian, was a Blue supporter while the new emperor, Hypatius, was a Green. This, and a hefty bribe of gold, got the leading Blues back on the emperor's side, at which point they left the hippodrome, leaving the Green leaders isolated.
And it was at this point that Belisarius was ordered to lead Imperial troops into the Hippodrome, commencing a merciless slaughter of the Green rebels. In all, after the street violence and the out of control city fire, and then the mass slaughter, it is estimated that some thirty thousand rioters were killed.
Justinian tracked down Hypatius, who pleaded that he had only agreed to become puppet emperor because the rioters threatened to lynch him, but Justinian had him executed nonetheless, and had the senators who had supported the riot exiled. He then rebuilt Constantinople, and particularly the church of Hagia Sophia which stands to this day (although it was converted into a mosque by the conquering Turks after the fall of Constantinople in 1453).
Glorious though this may sound, Eugenius continually criticises Justinian for spending more money building churches and basilicas than defences for strategically important cities, and for continually skimping on men and supplies for Belarius's many expeditions.
Fighting the Persian empire
Again Graves takes historical fact and, by filtering it through the gossipy, chatty, storytelling narrator Eugenius, makes it come to life. The ancient Persian or Achaemenid Empire reached its zenith under Xerxes (519-564 BC) and Darius (550-486 BC), who both tried to invade the West, at that point represented by the Greek federation of cities led by Athens, which stopped the invaders at the famous Battle of Marathon.
At the time the novel is set, nearly 1,000 years later, Persia is ruled by the Sassanian Empire, the last kingdom of the Persian Empire before the rise of Islam. To quote Wikipedia:
In many ways, the Sassanian period witnessed the peak of ancient Iranian civilisation. The Sassanians' cultural influence extended far beyond the empire's territorial borders, reaching as far as Western Europe, Africa, China and India. It played a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asian medieval art. Much of what later became known as Islamic culture in art, architecture, music and other subject matter was transferred from the Sassanians throughout the Muslim world.
The Persian ruler is the ageing Kavadh I (449-531) (who Graves – or Eugenius – refers to as Kobad). The Byzantine Empire and Persian Empire are the two main powers sparring for control of the Middle East. In the first, Eastern half of the book, we become very familiar with the towns and rivers of the border region, the dividing line between the two empires running roughly from the Caspian Gates – a narrow pass through the Caucasus mountains in the north – dividing Christian Armenia in two, and then running across the headwaters of the River Euphrates, sloping diagonally down towards the Red Sea. Many offences are launched from the Persian frontier town of Nisibis. Belisarius leads the defence of the town of Dara, just over the border opposite Nisibis, in the Battle of Dara of 530, which Graves describes in great detail. A few years later the Persians launched a devastating raid on Antioch which they pillaged and burned (540).
Map showing the border between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Persian Sassanid Empire from 502 to 628
What is really interesting about Graves's account, though, is the insight he gives into the strangely friendly relationship between the Roman emperor and Persian emperor. Although they wage intermittent wars, there is a continual correspondence between them including exchanges of gifts and land. When both are threatened by attacks from the Hunnic tribes north of the Caucasus they arrange to suspend hostilities between them to fight against the common foe, indeed Kavadh at one stage invites Justinian to send Byzantine soldiers to bolster the Persian garrison defending the Caspian Gates. There had been another, important historical juncture when, in 525, Kavadh had asked Justinian's predecessor, Justin, to 'adopt' his youngest son, Khosrau. Kavadh had two older sons but wanted Khosrau to succeed. Much bloodshed would have been spared if Justin had agreed but, as it happened, he (Justin) was without an heir and so worried that Khosrau, if officially adopted as his son, might end up with a good claim to the Byzantine throne, which Justin wanted to hand on to his appointed heir Justinian. So Justin refused the offer and Kavadh was mortally offended, immediately launching an attack on Roman border towns.
Ten years later Belisarius, having completed the conquest of the Vandals in North Africa, returned to Constantinople where he was granted an enormous victory parade, first the soldiers of his army marching along the imperial high street, then hordes of captured Vandals, and then huge amounts of plunder and treasure which the Vandals themselves had built up during their career of looting (not least during their comprehensive sack of Rome in 455). But it is characteristic of the time that the new king of the Persians, Khosrou, sent an embassy to Justinian, half-jokingly asking for his share of the spoils since, as he pointed out, it was only due to his keeping peace on the Persian frontier which had freed up the soldiers Belisarius had used to conquer North Africa. And very characteristic that Justinian, choosing to continue the joke, sent the ambassador back to Khosrou with his thanks and bearing a valuable gold dinner service (p.204).
This is all fascinating stuff, but made all the more readable by being told in Eugenius's factual, but chatty, gossipy style, assigning praise and blame, relating these historical incidents to the present conflicts and battles he is describing, and weaving in and out of them his concerns for his mistress Antonina or behind-the-scenes accounts of power struggles at the court of Justinian.
Belisarius's career
505 Flavius Belisarius born in Illyria.
532 Belisarius puts down the Nika Uprising, slaughtering between 20,000 and 30,000 people.
530 Belisarius defeats the Persians at the Battle of Dara
533 Belisarius leads the Byzantine invasion of North Africa and defeats the Vandals under King Gelimer at the Battle of Ad Decium and the Battle of Tricameron.
534 Belisarius celebrates a triumph in Constantinople.
535 Belisarius' first campaign against the Ostrogoths in Italy, during which he conquers Sicily and, in spring 536, takes Naples.
536 Rome falls to Belisarius but is then besieged by the Ostrogoths from March 537 to March 538, during which Pope Silverius and some senators try to betray it to the Goths.
539 Belisarius conquers Ravenna and captures the Ostrogoth king Witigis but, due to disagreements in the Byzantine chain of command, Milan falls to a combined force of Goths and Burgundians, its inhabitants decimated and the city razed to the ground.
540 Belisarius captures the Goth capital of Ravenna, and is offered the crown by the Goths, but turns it down. Nonetheless he is recalled to Constantinople by Justinian who has been listening to rivals claiming Belisarius plans to seize the throne. Instead Belisarius is sent once again against the Persians.
545 Belisarius' second campaign against the Ostrogoths in Italy.
559 Belisarius is recalled again to Constantinople to defeat the invading Bulgars.
562 Belisarius is arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges of corruption. Pardoned by Justinian and restored to former position.
565 Belisarius dies in Constantinople of natural causes, and so does the Emperor Justinian
571 The year the narrator, Eugenius the eunuch, claims to be writing his text in (p.388)
One entertaining way Graves brings the period to life is having Eugenius report and explain various trivial aspects of contemporary life, such as the Empress's use of a wig, or the way young men of the Green faction wear their hair shaved back over the forehead but left hanging long at the back, 'in the Hunnish manner'. He tells us that the poor of Constantinople could claim a dole so long as they had obtained the requisite wooden ticket. He also includes a number of proverbs. Who knows whether he's made them up or not. When discussing the Massagetic Huns' addiction to drinking mares' milk, Eugenius comments:
Every fish to his tipple
Thistles are lettuces to the ass's lips
And various characters make pithy replies or sayings at crucial and dramatic moments, which are overheard by slaves and servants and end up becoming proverbial sayings. All these add colour and verisimilitude to the account.
Cruel and unusual punishments
But the story never lets you forget that they were living in a world of almost perpetual warfare, that anyone living in what was left of the Roman Empire was – far from being guaranteed peace and security – almost certain of the opposite. The narrative shows how Belarius brought war and ruin to North Africa, before inaugurating 20 years of war and devastation the length and breadth of Italy which reduced the land and all the cities to abject poverty – Rome's ancient defences are entirely removed by the Goths, who also burn Milan to the ground – marking a decisive break between the peace and plenty of the ancient world, and the role of backwater littered with ruins which was to be Italy's lot for the next 1,000 years. All the towns and cities of the Levant do not escape, as the book covers a period when the two largest cities – Antioch and Jerusalem – are sacked, and many other towns entirely razed, their populations taken off into slavery by the Persians. And Thrace, the area of north Greece to the west of Constantinople, is ravaged more than once during the 60 or so years the book covers, with barbarian tribes making it right up to the walls of Constantinople before just about being beaten back.
Overall, the book paints a picture of a world of continual warfare, in which the forces of Roman civilisation and Christian culture are only just keeping their heads above water.
And a world of stunning brutality. You get used to reading that an entire city was burned to the ground by the Goths or the Persians, all the men of fighting age massacred, and all the women and children led off into slavery but, if you stop to really reflect on what this must have meant, it makes reading the book a mournful and harrowing experience.
And this is brought into the foreground of the story, so to speak, by some of the cruel and unusual punishments meted to out to named characters. Thus we are told the fate of Photius, Antonina's son by her marriage before Belisarius. He grows up to be a selfish, scheming brat. After losing lots of money gambling on the hippodrome races, he flees Constantinople to Belarius's camp in Persia and there spins a long cock and bull story about how his mother (Belisarius's wife, Antonina) is having an affair with her musician companion Theodosius, and the two are conspiring to blacken Belisarius's name.
To cut a long story short the empress Theodora becomes involved to try and reconcile Belisarius and Antonina and this involves arresting, imprisoning and torturing Photius, at which he admits the whole thing was a conspiracy and also admits a string of thefts, embezzlements and perjuries. He had been helped in all this by a figure referred to simply as 'the Senator' who also confesses under torture. Now here's the point: as punishment, Theodora has the Senator stripped of all his property and immured in a dark underground stable. He is tied to a manger with a short halter, his hands shackled behind him and there he was forced to stand, unable to move or lie down, but forced to eat, drink, try to sleep, defecate and urinate in a semi-standing position. It turns out that back in the days when she worked in a brothel the Senator had very rudely insulted Theodora's appearance. This was her revenge. As for Photius he was shackled in the same underground stable but not given the manger treatment. After a while Justinian (who found sneaks and snitches useful) helped him escape. (pp.332-3)
Boutzes was one of Belarius's most successful generals but when he fell foul of Theodora she had him convicted of treasonous speech and punished by being lowered into an unlit dungeon in solitary confinement. He was thrown scraps of bread and meat once a day. He was only released after two years and four months by which point he could only crawl on his hands and knees which were covered in callouses, had lost all his hair and most of his teeth, and when he was dragged out the sudden exposure to harsh sunlight meant that he could never again see properly (p.345).
This litany of imperial cruelty reaches a climax at the very end of the book when the scheming, paranoid, ageing Justinian, unrestrained by Theodora, who predeceases him (she dies 548, Justinian dies 565) having recalled Belarius to Constantinople, finally charges him with a long list of 'crimes'.
Now Eugenius has described in great detail all his military campaigns so that we know that his defeats and setbacks were almost all due to the emperor refusing to send enough reinforcements or money. It was Justinian's insistence that the Arian Vandals be forbidden their religious rites, and his skimping on the pay of his own troops, which led to mutiny and the loss of North Africa, and we have seen countless examples of how Justinian's penny-pinching and deliberate undermining of Belsarius's authority hamstrung the years of campaigning in Italy. Why? Because, in Eugenius's account, Justinian is determined to go down in history as 'Great' and he is jealous of Belisarius and, when his general is at his most successful, genuinely afraid that Belisarius will raise up in rebellion and declare himself emperor. Certainly this has happened many times before in Roman history but Justinian completely fails to appreciate Belisarius's honesty and rectitude (as depicted by Eugenius).
Thus, at this final trial, Justinian takes all the occasions when Belisarius had failed militarily and declared them deliberate treasons, along with all the times he had been accused by others of treasonous speech or plotting, strings them all together, and comes up with the surreal conclusion that Belisarius is the greatest enemy of the state – despite his obvious track record of defeating all of the empire's major enemies (the Persians, the Vandals, the Goths).
All Belisarius's household servants and associates were tortured to provide incriminating evidence, including Eugenius the narrator. The tortures included being racked and scourged, having cords tied round the forehead and then tightened, and having their feet burned in a charcoal brazier. Eugenius insists he proclaimed Belisarius's innocence of all charges, but many others didn't. Belisarius was found guilty of treason against the emperor and blinded. Then he was pushed out of the state prison into the street, in rags.
The final pages describe how passersby give him money, then word spreads that the man who had, within the last year, led a last-ditch military effort to save Constantinople from marauding Bulgarians, had been treated this disgracefully and crowds, and then huge crowds assemble, to put money into his begging bowl, while his old troops and comrades rally to his assistance. Even this last monstrous ingratitude from his emperor doesn't shake Belisarius's loyalty and he is led by friends to Antonina's house where he spends his last days quietly before passing away. The murmur against Justinian becomes so great, shouting against him in the Hippodrome as well as graffiti all over town saying that he is the real traitor, that Justinian – cowardly to the last – hurriedly revokes the charge and magnanimously 'pardon's Belisarius. But the noble warrior is beyond caring and passes away in peace of spirit.
In the chapters up to this point the reader had formed the opinion that Justinian was a paranoid coward. This last passage leaves you feeling sick at the mention of his name.
Then again…
It's worth pointing out that John Julius Norwich, in his book Byzantium: The Early Centuries, gives a far more favourable account of Justinian, noting his jealousy of Belisarius's success, and his failure to give his general enough money or men to achieve the goals he was set, but also blaming the emperor's animosity against Belisarius largely to the influence of Theodora – more or less the opposite of what Graves's fiction claims.
Moreover, Norwich dismisses the story of Belisarius being imprisoned and blinded and then walking the streets of Constantinople dressed in rags and holding a begging bowl as a touching but entirely fictitious legend. Apparently, this story first appears in a history written five centuries later, in the 11th century, and so Norwich dismisses it.
Homo homini lupus
This novel was published in 1938, the year of the Munich Crisis and when the Italy which features in the book had been ruled for 16 years by a Fascist dictator, and Germany by the Nazi dictator for five years, and all Europe was paralysed with fear of another world war. Graves had served in the First World War and this gives his many detailed descriptions of Belisarius's battles a kind of quiet authority. But it also adds to the one small passage where Eugenius reflects that war is an unmitigated evil.
Count Belisarius by Robert Graves was published by Cassells in 1938. All references are to the Penguin Classics paperback edition.
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