History Today 2016-06

ARISTOTLE

The life and legacy of the ‘Mind’

EXECUTIONS Behind the axeman’s mask

RUSSIA

Revolutionaries in Siberia June 2016 Vol 66 Issue 6

What makes a Viking? Grabbing historical accuracy by the horns

Unlikely ally: President de Gaulle at the Bastille Day Parade, Paris, 1959.

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 3859 7093 [email protected]

FROM THE EDITOR

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THE REFERENDUM on whether the United Kingdom should leave or remain in the European Union (EU) takes place on June 23rd. Martyn Rady and Richard Overy, both distinguished historians of Europe, gather the historical arguments for Leave and Remain respectively on pages 6 and 7, demonstrating that both sides can appeal to rationality and reason as well as the past. Interestingly, a number of prominent Brexiteers have found succour in an unlikely source, the great – if anglophobic – French statesman, Charles de Gaulle: England in effect is insular, she is maritime, she is linked through her interactions, her markets and her supply lines in the most diverse and often the most distant countries; she pursues essentially industrial and commercial activities, and only slight agricultural ones. She has, in all her doings, very marked and very original habits and traditions. This quote, taken from a speech de Gaulle made in 1963 in opposition to the UK’s entry into what was then the European Economic Community, has been repeated with approval by, among others, the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan and the biographer of Margaret Thatcher, Charles Moore, both of whom are historically literate and eloquent Eurosceptics. Though there is some truth in the General’s assertions – Britain was the world’s foremost maritime power and suspicious of standing armies, it did privilege the industrial over the agricultural and its system of common law was at odds with that of the Continent – it shared a monarchy with a substantial part of France for 400 years (around the same length of time as the current, fragile Union between England and Scotland), while its Hanoverian monarchs ensured that Britain took great interest in the affairs of central Europe. When Britain did periodically turn its back on the Continent, it often met with criticism similar to that of de Gaulle’s. In August 1764, Frederick the Great, spurned by his capricious ally, complained that Britain ‘is not interested in anything but naval dominance and her possessions in America … guided by these sentiments she will not pay any attention to Continental European affairs’. He was wrong. She did and will do so again, even if she votes to leave the EU. For, as both sides of the current debate remind us, the EU is not Europe.

Paul Lay 2 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

HistoryMatters

New World Arrival • Celebrity Spiritualist • European Union

Pocahontas in England

Exploitation of Pocahontas began during her short lifetime and her visit to England in 1616 was a part of it

Arriving as Rebecca Rolfe in 1616, Pocahontas’ trip to London was used to raise support for Britain’s struggling colonies. Jane Dismore FOUR HUNDRED years ago, Pocahontas arrived in England with her husband John Rolfe. Bold, vivacious and smart, her story has become mythologised, not least the supposed romance that developed between her and Captain John Smith after she saved his life, famously depicted in the 1995 Disney film. Historical inaccuracies did not spoil the film’s commercial success, nor the profits it earned from merchandising, but exploitation of Pocahontas had already begun during her short lifetime and her visit to England in 1616 was a part of it. At this time, Rolfe was a successful tobacco farmer near Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in North America. Pocahontas was born around 1596, a daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Algonquianspeaking tribes and overlord of the vast Chesapeake lands. Powhatan played fast and loose with the settlers who, inexperienced and increasingly desperate, courted trouble. They had been sent by the Virginia Company, set up by charter from James I, to find a suitable site for settlement. In May 1607, 104 men and boys arrived on three ships under the command of Christopher Newport. Other notables included John Smith and George Percy, son of the 8th Earl of Northumberland. It was not a promising start. The settlers were too reliant on the

cooperation of the Indians. Smith was captured by Powhatan and thought he would be killed. Years later he said Pocahontas saved his life and, although his claim is now disputed, he was correct in saying she ‘preserv[ed] the Colonie from death, famine and utter confusion’. After a brief period of mutual goodwill, a gunpowder accident saw Smith leave Virginia in 1609 and the goodwill deteriorated. Percy wrote of men ‘destroyed with cruell diseases ... and by warres’, but most ‘died of meere famine’. Rolfe was bringing supplies and settlers on Sea Venture when it was wrecked off Bermuda. Indeed, the hurricane that shipwrecked Rolfe is said to have inspired Shakespeare’s The Tempest, although, unlike his friend Ben Jonson, Shakespeare never met Pocahontas;

Society woman: Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe, 1616.

he died six weeks before she arrived in London. By the time Rolfe arrived in Virginia in May 1610, 600 colonists had been reduced to fewer than 70 by famine, disease and skirmishes. The Anglo-Powhatan wars began. New governor Sir Thomas Dale oversaw the building of a new city, Henrico, where Rolfe began his farm. There he met Pocahontas, who was being held hostage by the English to encourage peace negotiations with her father. Living at the chaplain’s house, and already having learned English, she was taught to dress and behave as a lady and, crucially for England’s religious agenda, given Christian instruction. Rolfe sought Dale’s consent to marry Pocahontas by letter during 1614, saying he was not led by ‘carnall affection: but for the good of this plantation [and] our countrie ... and for the converting to the true knowledge of God and Jesus Christ, an unbelieving creature’. Seeing the chance for peace, Dale and Powhatan approved. Pocahontas converted, taking the name Rebecca on baptism. The couple were married at Jamestown around April 5th, 1614. News of the peace treaty and Pocahontas’ conversion were welcomed in England. The Bishop of London, Dr John King, was among those who fervently wanted a Protestant colony in the New World and saw their holy mission as converting the savages. However, the early problems had discouraged investors in the Virginia Company, which JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3

HISTORYMATTERS badly needed funds. A group of officers representing clergy and merchants received permission to hold lotteries and proposed plans for a religious school for the children of settlers and Algonquian Indians. When Dale suggested a visit by Pocahontas it was eagerly accepted. Her status as daughter of a chief would equate her with royalty and gain her entry into London society. Crucially, it might also encourage investment in the struggling Company. With their son Thomas, born in 1615, the Rolfes left Virginia in May 1616 and arrived in Plymouth on June 3rd, with Dale and an entourage, including maids to emphasise Pocahontas’ importance. In London she is thought to have lodged

Pocahontas’ status as daughter of a chief would equate her with royalty and gain her entry into London society at La Belle Sauvage in Ludgate Hill. The bishop hosted her; Samuel Purchas, rector of St Martin’s, was present: ‘Doctor King entertained her with festival state and pompe, beyond what I have seene in his hospitalitie afforded to other Ladies.’ She ‘accustome[d] her selfe to civilitie’ and ‘still carried her selfe as the Daughter of a King, and was accordingly respected [by] persons of Honor, in their hopefull zeale by her to advance Christianitie’. Some saw artifice in the presentation. When society engraver Simon de Passe made her portrait, chronicler John Chamberlain wrote of it: ‘with her tricking up and high style and titles you might think her and her worshipfull husband to be somebody, if you did not know that the Virginia Company out of their povertie [only] allow her four pound a week for her maintenance’. Others were fascinated. Ben Jonson met her at an inn, referring to it in his play The Staple of News. It may have been at the Three Pigeons in Brentford, which Jonson frequented: the Rolfes had moved to Brentford to escape the London air, which gave Pocahontas respiratory problems. It was also where George Percy’s family owned the Syon estate. Smith wrote: ‘[H]earing shee was at Branford [Brentford] with divers of my friends, I went to see her’. It was a 4 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

difficult meeting, for until they arrived in England she had believed him dead. On Twelfth Night 1617 at the Banqueting House, Whitehall, Pocahontas attended Jonson’s masque The Vision of Delight and was received by royalty. Chamberlain observed: ‘The Virginian woman Pocahontas, with her father’s Counsellor hath been with the King, and graciously used’. Tradition has it they also visited Heacham in Norfolk, where Rolfe’s family lived, before setting sail in March 1617 for Virginia. Returning was ‘sore against her will’, but Rolfe was now secretary to the colony. None of Pocahontas’ views were directly recorded but her wish to stay in England was fulfilled in tragic circumstances. At Gravesend she was taken ill and died on March 21st, aged 20, possibly from tuberculosis. She was buried in St George’s Church. Her husband, fearing for sickly Thomas, left him to be raised in England. Rolfe died in Virginia in March 1622 shortly before a massacre: the peace had been short-lived. Thomas later settled there and had children. Regarded by many as the mother of modern America, attempts have been made to find her remains and take them home. She could not prevent the impact of colonisation on her people. Her tribe, the Pamunkey, was only finally recognised by the US government in 2015. Pocahontas continues to hold our interest, though it is important to note that, in accounts of her voyage to her own ‘brave new world’, a crucial voice is missing: her own.

Jane Dismore is a freelance journalist and biographer. Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The Medium Goes to America The forgotten story of celebrity medium Eusapia Palladino and her seance tour of the United States. Simone Natale ON NOVEMBER 14TH, 1909, journalists of several New York papers, including the New York Times, gathered at the Lincoln Square Theater to attend a rather unusual press conference for the arrival of the Italian spiritualist medium Eusapia Palladino on American soil. Before an audience of newspapermen and theatrical impresarios, the medium gave a demonstration of her seance phenomena on the stage. Local celebrities added to the sensational event: the Broadway actress Grace George and her husband, William A. Brady, also a theatre actor, sat around the seance table together with Palladino, her manager and three journalists. While it might seem puzzling that such prominence was given to a medium, Palladino was at the time an international celebrity. Like a theatrical star, she had toured numerous countries, performing seances in Italy, France, England, Poland, Russia and Germany. She had gained the attention of eminent personalities – including the world-famous Italian psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso and the Nobel Prize laureates Marie and Pierre Curie – and was a constant source of interest for the popular press. In the months following her demonstration with the press, Eusapia Palladino gave seances in different cities along the Eastern coast. Influential scientists participated in heated debates about her alleged powers, and the press competed to report stories of her successes and accusations of trickery. William James, considered the founder of American psychology and one of the leading thinkers of his time, agreed to

HISTORYMATTERS

Caught in the act: a seance with Eusapia Palladino, early 20th century. Original photograph in the Museo di Antropologia Criminale, University of Turin, Italy.

publish a cautious endorsement in the Cosmopolitan, where he stated that her phenomena ‘probably are genuine’, and that, if proven true, they may ‘break the bounds which science has hitherto set to nature’s forces’. More sceptical was James’ former protégé, German-born psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, the director of the psychological laboratory at Harvard University. At a seance conducted by Palladino in Boston in January 1910, Münsterberg brought with him a collaborator, whose relationship with him was concealed. During the sitting, while Münsterberg distracted the medium, his accomplice succeeded in catching Palladino’s foot in his hands as she was trying, with a contortionist move, to lift the seance table. Palladino reacted with a scream as, at last, her glory was shattered. As Münsterberg wrote in his report of the events published in the Metropolitan Magazine, ‘her greatest wonders are absolutely nothing but fraud and humbug; this is no longer a theory but a proven fact’. The scene repeated almost verbatim

a few months later, as Dickinson Miller, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, convinced Palladino to conduct a series of seances in his New York apartment. The invitation was, in reality, nothing but a trap. Miller set up an investigation committee that included several professors and lecturers of Columbia, as well as three stage magicians, James L. Kellogg, John W. Sargent and Joseph F. Rinn, who had specialised in exposés of spiritualist mediums. At the beginning of the seance, Miller asked to test Palladino’s powers through an electroscope, a device with which she was already familiar. However, this was only a diversion to distract Palladino while Joseph Rinn and an accomplice hid themselves under the seance table. During the séance, the sitters made efforts to appear friendly and sympathetic toward the medium in the hope that she would feel more comfortable and less vigilant. When the table started to move, Rinn and Pyne could observe how she was using her feet to produce the alleged ‘spirit phenomena’. As she realised she was being framed, the

medium reportedly lost control and ‘in very rapid Italian, yelled so loud that the noise was heard in the street’. Reports of the exposures appeared in the main newspapers and magazines, dealing a terminal blow to Palladino’s reputation in the United States. In a public letter, her manager Hereward Carrington confessed that she had cheated, only to claim that this did not prove anything, as ‘Eusapia herself says that she will cheat if allowed to, and begs her sitters to prevent her from cheating.’ Carrington’s demand for a new series of tests, however, went unheard and the medium quietly returned to Europe. At the end of Palladino’s stay, the psychologist James H. Hyslop published a perceptive article in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, where he reflected on the dynamics of the tour. He observed that its scientific significance was jeopardised by the ‘vaudeville methods’ that Palladino and her manager had adopted from the very beginning. The medium had never really entered the scientific laboratory; she had instead appealed to the judgment of the public and the popular press. What was interesting, Hyslop noted, was that the men of science had followed Palladino through this path. In testing her seance phenomena, Münsterberg and the other scientists adopted the same behaviour of which they accused Palladino, wriggling under the table like ordinary cheaters. They participated in the controversy by writing and giving interviews in the same papers that Carrington and Palladino published their claims. They were apparently oblivious of the fact that ‘the publisher’s interest is in selling his goods’, rather than ascertaining the truth. Ultimately, the scientists had joined the medium in appealing to the verdict of the public rather than to the authority of science. In this sense, Palladino’s tour was an occasion for the booming American society to challenge and redefine the borders and the mutual relations between scientific authority and the public sphere.

Simone Natale is the author of Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Penn State, 2016). JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 5

HISTORYMATTERS

To leave or not to leave? Two historians take opposing sides as Britain’s referendum on EU membership approaches.

Leave

Martyn Rady Martyn Rady is Masaryk Professor of Central European History at University College London.

EUROPE is not the same as the European Union (EU), which is only an episode in the Continent’s history. The two, nevertheless, are frequently treated as if they were identical. It is, however, entirely possible to be a Europhile, in the sense of valuing and engaging with Europe’s cultures, peoples and history and yet be opposed to the EU and thus to Britain’s continued membership of it. Britain and continental Europe share much. Cultural, religious, philosophical and political movements and ideas have spilled across from one to the other. It would be strange if they had not, given their proximity. Nevertheless, exchanges 6 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

of this kind are hardly sufficient to justify political union. The histories of Poland and Russia are similarly entangled, but no one would now suggest that they should unite. The way that ideas have spread in Europe is important. One of the strengths of the Continent has been its diversity. The separate experiences of Europe’s countries have acted as inspirations and warnings to others. The example of British manufacturing in the 18th and 19th centuries, underpinned by the free trade philosophy of Smith and Ricardo, overturned the regulatory and protectionist regime that prevailed across much of Central Europe. Bismarck’s early welfare state and Swiss federalism had their own emulators. Across large parts of Europe, the lesson of the French Revolution stimulated the politics of conservatism

and of gradual change. The high modernist ideology that underpins the EU is predicated on the erosion of differences between countries. It would seek to impose single solutions that are blind to complexity and inimical to the sort of local experimentation that has been one of the driving forces in European history. Not only, therefore, are the EU and Europe different things, but by putting its stress on political, economic and social convergence, the EU may also be antithetical to Europe’s dynamic. The history of multinational ventures in Europe is not a good one. Over 400 years, the Habsburg Empire was unable to cement a workable enterprise. It only held together in the 19th century by striking bargains between the various national groups and by keeping them all, in the words of one Austrian prime

The histories of Poland and Russia are similarly entangled, but no one would now suggest that they should unite

minister, ‘in a condition of even and well-modulated discontent’. It is the same in the EU today. The European Council brokers between national governments. ‘European policy’ is not European at all, but an amalgam and compromise between contending national policies. The Habsburg Empire was not alone in being divided by local identities. Before Bismarck, the German lands were split between states with their own different political complexions, religious affiliations and regional allegiances. They were successfully brought together after 1870 because a larger pan-German sense of belonging had taken root, having been actively promoted in literature, folklore collections and scholarship. In the German lands, poets, historians and lexicographers made political union possible. France went down a different route in the 19th century. At its start, less than half of France’s population spoke French. The Marseillaise, sung in 1792 by volunteers from the Provençal south, was incomprehensible to most Parisians. Over the course of the century, the French state made a nation of French people, coercing a sense of national belonging and a single language through the schoolroom, bureaucracy and army. A similar pattern of cultural impressment took place in 19th-century Bohemia. Peasants from Moravia and Austrian Silesia were made into Czechs. A political union will prosper only if its peoples feel a common sense of belonging that makes them willing to make sacrifices for one another. This is lacking in the EU: Germans will not make financial sacrifices for the Mediterranean countries; other states put up barriers to keep migrants on their neighbours’ soil. Without the ambitious cultural project on which German unity was built or the drive towards cultural homogenisation undertaken in France, the EU will remain a discordant assemblage of competing national voices, unwilling to share burdens. So the EU offers the worst of both worlds. Its regulatory regime and policies of convergence threaten Europe’s historical experience of learning through diversity. Yet the European Union lacks the cultural underpinnings to construct an enduring political union, based on a sense of common identity. To adapt the satirist Karl Kraus’ verdict on the Habsburg Empire, it has already become a grand experiment in failure.

Remain Richard Overy

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. IN THE current wave of anniversaries commemorating the two World Wars it is striking how much emphasis there has been on Britain’s contribution to the process of building a free and liberal Europe. It is an important component of contemporary British identity that its soldiers, sailors and airmen fought and died not just to defend Britain, but to ensure that all Europeans should share the prospects of greater economic security, an end to tyranny and a common democratic culture. This was the ideal, popular with broad elements of Britain’s wartime population, which accepted the sacrifices made if the promise at the end of the war was a continent cleansed of nationalism, racism and political repression. The historical reality was rather different. Britain’s liberal credentials were compromised by the existence of an Empire in which the freedoms fought for in Europe in two world wars were denied to non-white peoples. British identity until the middle of the last century was schizophrenic: one part composed of the belief that British political evolution represented the progressive development of a free and tolerant society, the other composed of popular memory of centuries of warfare, violent imperialism and national self-assertion. The post1945 order saw the rapid eclipse and disintegration of the imperial project for Britain and all the other European empires, changing forever the nature of Britain’s place in Europe and of British identity. Then the wartime ideal of liberating Europe was undermined by the coming of the Cold War, which divided the continent once again into rival blocs, potentially as dangerous as the ideological confrontations of the 1930s. Few people looking forward from 1945, or even 1985, would have imagined a continent-wide European Union in which national, ideological and racial rivalries had been transcended in a common commitment to shared, economic, social, cultural and security interests. Britain is an essential element of that new Europe. That strand of historical identity which emphasised Britain’s

place in encouraging the development of parliamentary institutions, economic freedoms and a tolerant, liberal society is the one that matters, not the memory of military and imperial glories, or the belief that there is something historically unique or special about Britain’s past that separates its experience from the rest of Europe. If these values were worth fighting for in ten years of bitter warfare in Europe between 1914-18 and 1939-45, they are worth defending in today’s Europe. But that can only be done from the inside. British involvement in Europe is not solely about this or that economic advantage. It represents a commitment to ensuring that the narrow nationalism, ideological divisions, imperial jealousies, economic rivalry and overt racism that plagued the emergence of modern Europe from the late 19th century will never be repeated. The referendum debate has focused too much on economic fears or advantages that remaining in or leaving might bring. The European project is much more than the sum of its economic, social, medical and security components. Some of those strands that undermined European societies in the 20th century – a self-interested nationalism, racism, social intolerance – are never far below the surface. A British presence in Europe is about ensuring that the core values of free and liberal societies are protected by common endeavour, not as before through occasional violent intervention. The EU is not a perfect system, though it is infinitely preferable to the way Europe looked for much of the last century. But rather than struggling to avoid any commitment to making that union better by leaving it, Britain can sustain that strand of its identity built on its liberal and democratic past by working within the EU to achieve reforms that reflect those traditions. A British withdrawal from the EU can only be interpreted from outside as a rejection of those traditions, a desire to reinstate a narrow national self-interest in place of a collaboration that has displaced centuries of conflict, a wish to wallow in a sentimental and ahistorical image of Britain’s past and a rejection of the belief embedded in the current wave of military commemoration that Britain had, and still has today, something positive to contribute to the evolution of modern Europe.

The EU is not perfect, though it is infinitely preferable to the way Europe looked for much of the last century

JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

JUNE

By Richard Cavendish

JUNE 20th 1791

Louis XVI’s flight from Paris IF ANY KING could have coped with the French Revolution it was not Louis XVI. He was 19 when he succeeded his grandfather, Louis XV, in 1774. At 15 he had married the Austrian Habsburg princess Marie-Antoinette, who was 14. Louis was initially unable to consummate the marriage and, deeply unsure of himself, he hid his lack of confidence behind a haughty demeanour. The revolution is generally reckoned to have begun when an angry mob stormed the Bastille in Paris in July 1789. The fortress was a symbol of royal authority and the deputy mayor of Paris remarked that the city had conquered its king. From then on royal authority was steadily undermined. In October the royal family had to evacuate to the Tuileries Palace after Versailles had been attacked by another mob. They increasingly felt themselves prisoners and by 1791 they decided that they must 8 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Flight of fancy: Louis XVI and his family attempt to flee Paris. French caricature, 1792.

escape the capital. Louis believed that most people in the countryside were still loyal to him and the idea was to head north-east to Montmédy, near the frontier with the Austrian Netherlands, where they could be protected by troops led by royalist officers. The royal party’s escape began in darkness around midnight to an ingenious plan organised mainly by Axel Fersen, a Swedish officer in the French army who was a devoted admirer of Marie-Antoinette. The Chevalier de Coigny had for some weeks been a frequent visitor to the palace wearing a plain coat and hat, which Louis would wear when the time came so that the guards would take him for the chevalier. The royal children were all dressed as girls and the accompanying governess pretended to be a Russian aristocrat in charge of the group, while the role of governess was played by Marie-Antoinette herself, dressed in plain black. The king himself would pretend to be a valet. Fersen had wanted the party to use light coaches to cover the 200 miles to Montmédy as speedily as possible, with the king and queen travelling separately, but Marie-Antoinette insisted they must all be together so, after they had passed

through the city gate, Fersen met them with a large heavy coach, drawn by six horses. It was a crucial mistake. Louis would not let Fersen travel all the way with them. He did not want to escape ignominiously conducted by a foreign soldier, so Fersen presently dropped out and they proceeded on, changing horses at points along the way. Even so, they were hours too late to join up with the military escorts that had been meant to guard them along the route. By the time they reached Sainte-Menehould, news of their flight had reached the town and the national guard had been alerted. The local postmaster, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, had seen Marie Antoinette when he was in the army and he recognised her. He checked the face of the party’s ‘valet’ against the king’s on a paper currency note and they fitted. He rode quickly on to Varennes, the next stop, and was there when the royals arrived at close to midnight. Drouet insisted to the town authorities that the travellers were Louis and Marie Antoinette and, after some delay, an elderly citizen who had once lived at Versailles was brought in. As soon as he saw Louis he instinctively crooked his knee in homage and Louis admitted that he was the king. The royal party were held until next day when orders arrived to send them back to Paris. Louis said ‘There is no longer a king in France’ and thousands of national guardsmen and armed citizens accompanied the royal carriage slowly back. It was widely believed that the Austrians had organised the royal escape and evidence was found in the Tuileries after the palace was stormed by a murderous mob in August 1792. The royals were sent to prison and the National Assembly proclaimed France a republic. Louis and MarieAntoinette were tried for treason and both were found guilty. He went to the guillotine in January 1793 and she met the same fate in October.

Political pianist: Ignacy Jan Paderewski with part of his Chant du Voyageur.

JUNE 29th 1941

Ignacy Jan Paderewski dies in New York

THE IDOLISED Polish concert pianist was also a composer and, more surprisingly, was briefly Poland’s prime minister. He was born in 1860, when Poland was part of the Russian empire, in a village that is now in Ukraine. His father ran the estate of a rich local landowner, but his mother died when he was a baby. A piano tutor was hired for him as a child and the results were impressive enough for him to be sent to music school in Warsaw in 1872, when he was 12. Critics have questioned whether Paderewski was really as superb a pianist as he was made out to be, but there is no doubt that he had a colossal personality that took audiences by storm. His favourite composers were Chopin, Bach, Beethoven and Schumann and his early concerts in Paris, London and New York City at the turn of the 1880s and 90s were a blazing success. He settled in Switzerland in 1898 and the following year married Helena Gorska, Baroness von Rosen, of an old Polish family. They had a large farm on the shore of Lake Leman, where they profitably raised sheep, pigs and chickens. In 1904 Helena accompanied him, his

grand piano and their pet parrot on a triumphant tour of Australia and New Zealand. Paderewski was also a leading Polish nationalist, who looked back to the glory days of the independent kingdom of Poland centuries before. The Polish National Committee in Paris sent him to the United States during the First World War to urge President Woodrow Wilson to back independence for Poland. A new Polish Republic was duly created in 1918 and Paderewski was appointed prime minister and foreign minister. He signed the Treaty of Versailles for Poland, but office displeased him and he resigned at the end of 1919, went back to Switzerland and never set foot in Poland again. Paderewski continued to give triumphant concerts in Europe and the United States, where he travelled around in his own railway carriage, and starred in a 1937 film biography called Moonlight Sonata. Years later it would win him a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He died in New York City, aged 80, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His body was moved to Warsaw in 1992.

than 1891 to make him seem even more astonishingly precocious than he was anyway. Intelligent, charming and homosexual, he wrote many songs while at university at Yale and then Harvard. In 1919 he married a rich American divorcée called

Linda Lee Thomas. Despite his homosexual affairs, the marriage was mutually supportive and they lived in sumptuous luxury (one house had platinum wallpaper and zebra-skin upholstery) among a star-studded roster of celebrity friends while he wrote Broadway musicals and films. Things went wrong for him in 1937 when he had an accident out riding that required more than 30 operations and eventually the amputation of his right leg in 1958. He grew more closed in on himself, though he had one final success in 1948 with the music for Kiss Me Kate, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, for which he won the Tony award for Best Musical. After Porter’s wife died in 1954 he lived mainly in seclusion in his luxury apartment in New York until his death of kidney failure in 1964 at the age of 73 in Santa Monica. He was buried in Peru, between his wife and his father.

JUNE 9th 1891

Birth of Cole Porter ‘BIRDS DO IT, bees do it, even educated fleas do it, let’s do it, let’s fall in love …’ No popular songwriter ever quite matched the wit and sophisticated ingenuity of the lyrics Cole Porter wrote for his delectable tunes. Besides ‘Let’s Do It’ his hits included ‘Night and Day’, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’, ‘It’s De-Lovely’, ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ and countless others. Born to a wealthy family in the small town of Peru in Indiana, which then had a population of just 7,000 or so, his childhood was dominated by his mother. She not only encouraged, but ruthlessly pressured, her son to use his musical talents to succeed, even pretending that Cole had been born in 1893 rather

‘You’re the Top’: Cole Porter arriving in Paris, September 27th, 1951.

JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 9

ARISTOTLE

Aristotle is so synonymous with learning that he has been known simply as ‘the Mind’, ‘the Reader’ and ‘the Philosopher’. Admired by both Darwin and Marx, Edith Hall explores his life and legacy.

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XACTLY 2,400 YEARS AGO, in 384 bc, a boy was born in the town of Stagira in a remote part of northern Greece. Stagira perches on two cliff-tops jutting into the Aegean on the easternmost prongs of the peninsula called Chalkidike, between Thessaloniki and the Hellespont. Strategically more significant than its size might suggest, Stagira had seen mighty conquerors and allies, including Persia, Athens and Sparta. In 384 it was struggling to remain independent of its rapidly expanding neighbour, Macedon. The baby’s name was Aristotle. His father was a learned and much-published doctor called Nicomachus, descended from an illustrious line of medical practitioners; his services were used by the Macedonian monarch, Amyntas III, father of Philip II and grandfather of Alexander III (‘the Great’). Aristotle’s mother, Phaestis, was from a wealthy family with estates in the long island of Euboea, off the eastern shore of mainland Greece. Nicomachus and Phaestis cannot have imagined that their infant was destined to play a part in the genesis of the largest empire yet ruled from Europe. By the time he died, in his early sixties, Aristotle would have changed the shape of most academic subjects forever. Our consciousness has been shaped by his work. If you explain the material world through rational science, based on systematic empirical observation, you are thinking in the way that Aristotle pioneered (one reason he was praised by Charles Darwin). If you believe that the fundamental building block of human society is the individual partnership or association and that economic factors are central to historical developments, you are thinking like an Aristotelian (one reason why he was esteemed by Karl Marx). If you suppose that humans are able to make moral choices without appealing to divine intervention and in the face of random factors including luck, you are deliberating and exercising moral agency in the manner in which students were trained at Aristotle’s Athenian school, the Lyceum. Aristotle obviously enjoyed the prosperity and leisure that allowed him to make full use of the stimuli and education to which he was exposed. He was certainly standing on the shoulders of Greek giants in natural science and philosophy, including Thales, Democritus, Protagoras, Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato. But he was undeniably brilliant. No other individual has ever taken so many huge strides forward in such a wide range of intellectual fields. Yet Aristotle’s intellect was undoubtedly constrained by some of the social prejudices of his day. It is unfashionable

The Making of

The Mind Aristotle, from The School of Athens (detail), Raphael, 1509-11.

to praise Aristotle because, in the first book of his Politics, he defends slavery (when the slaves are not Greek and, in his view, are intellectually incapable of using freedom responsibly). He also believed that women are biologically incapable of rational deliberation, views which, rightly, have been attacked over recent decades. Yet neglecting Aristotle’s capacity for game-changing thought on almost every other issue, simply because he accepted some views which seemed self-evident to everyone in his era, produces a distorted view of intellectual history. Apologists for plantation slavery in 19th-century America may have cited Aristotle when defending atrocious practices, but critics of slavery have pointed to the instruction in his will that JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 11

ARISTOTLE none of his slaves was to be sold. They were all to be emancipated, either immediately or later by his heirs. Aristotle’s low estimation of women’s rationality has, similarly, been cited by men opposing the education of females. Yet he also, rather radically, compared the relationship between man and wife with that between (near-) equal citizens rather than between a monarch and his subject. Aristotle’s life was entangled with the rise of the Macedonian empire. Orphaned in childhood, he apparently spent his early teenage years shuttling between the house of a brother-in-law in what is now north-western Turkey and the Macedonian court. Just two years older than Amyntas’ son, Philip, Aristotle forged a lasting bond with this ruthless but gifted prince. At 17, the scholarly youth was sent to Athens to study with Plato, the greatest teacher in the Greek world, and stayed for 20 years. Aristotle soon gained a reputation for dazzling intelligence; Plato called him the ‘The Mind’ and complained that the Academy fell quiet in his absence. The other students called him ‘The Reader’. Yet when Plato died, Aristotle was not appointed head of the Academy, perhaps on account of his Macedonian connections as well as his disagreement with central Platonic doctrines. He No.1: Nicomachean went back to north-west Turkey to help Ethics a fellow student, Hermias, establish Based on notes from his a philosophical circle in the Greek lectures in the Lyceum, cities of Atarneus and Assos, of which Aristotle posits happiness Hermias was ruler. Aristotle married (eudaimonia) or ‘living well’ Hermias’ daughter Pythias; although as the primary goal in she died young, the marriage was happy human life. Named for his and produced a daughter, named after son, Nicomachus, the Ethics her mother. considers how man should

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RISTOTLE subsequently which produce happiness. moved to the nearby island Aristotle argues that man of Lesbos. For two years he does not need to act to researched marine biology, commit a crime: omitting to do something can be just as laying the foundations of zoology as it unethical. is still studied today. But Philip, who had ascended the Macedonian throne in 359 bc, did not forget him. In 343, when they were both around 40, the one-eyed autocrat appointed Aristotle tutor at Pella to his most promising son, Alexander, now in his early teens. For seven or eight years Aristotle was Alexander’s mentor, teacher and, presumably, close companion. Five years later, in 338, the Macedonian army defeated Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea. Alexander, who was only 18, shone in combat. Every community in mainland Greece, with the exception of Sparta, now agreed under the terms of a treaty to form a ‘league’. But Philip actually intended to create a massive world-conquering Hellenic army under his absolute command. We do not know how Aristotle felt about this development. He will doubtless have been relieved to be on the victorious ‘side’. 12 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Below: Aristotle as a young man in his study, 19th-century engraving. Bottom: Plato, Seneca and Aristotle (right), 13th-century English manuscript.

But his works on political theory usually advocate the independent, self-sufficient city state as the ideal community. When Philip had sacked Aristotle’s own hometown of Stagira ten years earlier, the philosopher had persuaded him to free the citizens he had enslaved and rebuild their damaged buildings. Nor was Philip content with mastery of Greece. In 336, he ordered the invasion of Asia by a force led by his most trusted general, taking advantage of the Persian crisis precipitated by the murder of Artaxerxes IV. Philip was himself assassinated before he could traverse the Hellespont and join his army. His 20-year-old son inherited the throne and the offensive war against Persia. But before he marched east, Alexander quelled an uprising of the Athenian League fomented by Demosthenes, the anti-Macedonian Athenian statesman. Aristotle seized the opportunity to return to Athens. The city which still dominated intellectual culture was now safe for associates of Macedonian royalty. He must have been delighted to found his own university at last, in the precinct, east of the city walls, of Apollo Lykeios (Apollo in his ‘wolfish’ avatar). Apollo, as god of medicine, poetry and prophetic omniscience, was the perfect patron for a multidisciplinary research institute. Alexander now crossed to Asia, never to return. By 332 he had taken Egypt; two years later he had conquered the Persian Empire; in 327 he invaded India. Athens provided Aristotle with a home for his sixth decade. He received updates from Alexander’s campaign, probably including samples of flora and fauna sent by his

School of Aristotle. Fresco by Gustav Adolph Spangenberg, 1883-88.

great-nephew, Callisthenes, who accompanied Alexander until they became estranged and Callisthenes died prematurely. During these years, Aristotle finally wrote most of his 150 treatises (just a small proportion of which survive). His prolific output later in life may have been facilitated by his sudden ability to devote himself fulltime to intellectual labour. He must have been repelled by rumours of the exhausting struggle at Pella between Alexander’s mother Olympias and Antipater, Alexander’s regent; he probably felt relieved to be distanced from the wild carousals, murderous in-fighting, emotional dramas, paranoia and superstition, which characterised Macedonian palace life. The man in charge of Athens, on the other hand, was now Lycurgus, a wise and experienced elder statesman. Although he had sided with opponents of the Macedonian conquest, Lycurgus maintained the peace, imposing the laws strictly. He was also, like Aristotle, a former pupil of Plato and sympathetic to philosophical pursuits. Aristotle found new domestic stability with a woman named Herpyllis from Stagira. She bore him the son, Nicomachus, to whom he dedicated the Nicomachean Ethics. The philosopher now surrounded himself with loyal disciples, including Theophrastus from Lesbos, an old friend and the leading Greek botanist. The Lyceum was self-governing; one of its members was elected chief administrator every ten days. Aristotle taught his students in the morning and gave more accessible public lectures (which regrettably have not survived) in the afternoons; he liked to walk as he taught, which is why his followers were called the ‘Peripatetics’, from the Greek verb meaning ‘stroll’. An innovative aspect of the Lyceum’s work was its emphasis on amassing books and intensive bibliographical research into previous scholars’ findings. Aristotle’s own book (or rather, papyrus-roll) collection helped to inspire the huge library which the first Macedonian King of Egypt, Ptolemy I, founded at Alexandria with a Lyceum alumnus, Demetrius of Phalerum, as consultant.

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No.2: Politics

When describing man as a ‘political animal’, Aristotle argues that the polis – or city state – is humanity’s natural habitat. Politics, meaning ‘things concerning the polis’, explores the best ways that man might live in society and describes how royalty, aristocracy and constitutional government corrupt to become tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. For Aristotle, different species have naturally occurring and fixed characteristics.

HE IDEA OF a community of book-loving scholars cooperating on research projects, which came to magnificent fruition at Alexandria, originated in Aristotle’s visionary Lyceum. He encouraged its members to conduct collaborative ventures in every branch of knowledge, to investigate authorities thoroughly and to publish textbooks. Several important works by his students have survived, revealing how his methods, including statistics, were applied to mechanics and diving technology, volcanoes and meteors, psychology and aesthetics. Many Lyceum projects had direct public and civic applications and often preserved invaluable information from ancient archives. The Constitution of Athens, for example, researched and written by a Peripatetic and found on a papyrus in the late 19th century, transformed our understanding of the Athenian Council. The treatise was probably written, under Aristotle’s supervision, as one of the JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 13

ARISTOTLE

Frege and Bertrand Russell appeared in the 19th and 20th centuries. It remains astounding that Aristotle was able to take the methods of philosophical reasoning, which he found in Plato and his predecessors, and treat the actual inferential systems as the topic of analysis themselves; that is, he was interested not only in what made the world function, but in the exact workings of the arguments on which thinkers based their conclusions about the world. With Aristotle’s contribution, Philosophy itself had become the object of philosophical analysis. Aristotle’s study is the first Aristotle’s precious last period of intense work to bear the title, though intellectual activity was cut short by the death N HIS two dazzling books on ethics, Aristotle Aristotle himself did not use the of Alexander in 323 bc. The Athenians turned posits happiness (eudaimonia) or ‘living in the term and it is thought to have against everyone associated with Macedonian best way possible’ as the fundamental goal of been added in the first century. rule. Aristotle sensed danger. In a politically motihuman life. The traditional translation of eudaiAristotle describes the work as vated move, the anti-Macedonian lobby in Athens monia as ‘happiness’ has drawbacks, since that ‘the study of being qua being’ or decided to prosecute him, as they had Socrates noun describes an emotional state, whereas to Arthe ‘first philosophy’, in which a lifetime before, for impiety – specifically, with istotle it is a mental state in which one is enabled, the author examines the nature failing to honour the city’s gods. Aristotle escaped by practising certain virtues – courage, self-conof ‘things that can be said to be’. with his family to the ancestral estate belonging trol, liberality, fairness – to aim at the highest to his mother in Euboea. He died the year after. It good. Eudaimonia is an activity equivalent to is possible that he was murdered, but more likely living rationally, in an examined and deliberated that he died from the stomach complaint which had long way. Aristotle’s political theory was an extension of this Doric columns plagued him. The place of his burial is unknown, although ethical position to the whole community, since happiness is of the Temple of Athena at Assos, the medieval travelogue of Sir John Mandeville, first the goal of the city state and the reason for its existence. Turkey. printed in 1499, claimed that there was a tomb and cult, Aristotle’s writings are unified by the methods of reasas if for a saint, in Stagira. The Anglo-American archaeoloning he evolved, expressed in a group of works on logic ogist Sir Charles Waldstein, on the other hand, claimed in which were later assembled and named his Organon (‘Inthe early 1890s to have excavated the tomb of Aristotle, strument’). Aristotelian methods monopolised the entire complete with writing styluses and a portrait statuette, history of philosophical logic until the critiques of Gottlob 170 Constitutions of individual city states that the Lyceum is said to have produced. Aristotle himself set about recording the full extent of his life’s reflection and investigations. His contribution to intellectual history is incalculable and not only to western philosophy. His Metaphysics in particular, when translated into Arabic, was instrumental in the foundation of Arabic philosophy (falsafa) in the ninth century ad; it elicited a massive commentary by the Spanish Arab philosopher No.3: Metaphysics Ibn Rushd, who had studied avidly in the West as Meaning ‘after the physics’, well, where he was better-known as Averroes.

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in Euboea near Chalcis. According to the most colourful tradition of Aristotle’s death, however, he drowned himself in the narrow straits between Euboea and the Greek mainland. The suicide was allegedly motivated by frustration that he could not scientifically understand the violent tides there, which reverse direction four times a day, a problem not solved until 1929. But the suicide was an invention of Aristotle’s early Christian detractors, who hated his scientific outlook and denial of Plato’s invisible, perfect world of ideas of which the material and fleshly world we inhabit is but a secondary – and vastly inferior – copy. The Christian Fathers wanted to present Aristotle as a last-minute religious convert, finally acknowledging that he could not explain the universe without God: he was supposed to have cried out as he fell, ‘Since Aristotle did not grasp Euripus, let Euripus take Aristotle.’ Aristotle’s fabricated conversion continued to be cited by Christians until well No.4: Poetics into the 17th century. Considered to be the oldest

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Top: the myth of Aristotle jumping into the waves to his death, 1786. Bottom: Plato and Aristotle (philosophy) tile, by Luca della Robbia, 1337-39.

surviving work of literary criticism, Aristotle produces a theory of how to construct drama through a study of the plays of Sophocles and Euripides and epic poetry. Drama was central to life in ancient Greece; Aristotle contended its study could offer a better moral education than history. Poetics is still referenced on screenwriting courses today.

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RISTOTLE WAS NOT in fact an atheist at all. He believed that there was a divine being of some kind, endowed (or even to be identified) with absolute intellectual power. This ‘unmoved mover’ of the universe took no interest in human affairs and did not reward or punish good or bad behaviour. Humans, who alone among animals on Earth are endowed with a portion of intellectual capacity similar to that of the supreme power, needed, he argued, to study the diverse, fascinating, beautiful material world in all its manifestations and attempt to explain what their senses could perceive empirically and their minds grasp in more abstract terms. Aristotle would have enjoyed Kepler’s inclusion of him, in note nine to his Somnium (1634), in a list of martyrs of science persecuted by dogmatic believers. But he would have been baffled by his popularity among the more traditional ‘scholastic’ medieval Christians, who after discovering his dialectical (question-and-answer) method in the 11th and 12th centuries enthusiastically used it to develop their complicated theories of atonement and prove, via the ‘ontological argument’, the existence of God. Most famous Scholastics, up to and including Thomas Aquinas, achieved the extraordinary feat of reconciling Aristotelian philosophical method with their Roman Catholic theological viewpoint; this inevitably meant that the content of his works, in Latin versions and by the 14th century in French vernacular translations, became familiar among the educated class of Europe. Dante was only reflecting popular sentiment when in the Inferno he called Aristotle simply ‘the master of those who know’ (il Maestro di color che sanno). It is only in the context of the overwhelming Scholastic dominance of European scholarship that Martin Luther’s vitriolic denunciation of Aristotle in his Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520) makes sense: ‘It grieves me to the heart that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has with his false words deluded and made JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 15

ARISTOTLE when the American founding fathers were formulating the constitution, but the philosophical language in which Jefferson phrased the citizen’s right to pursue happiness in the Declaration of Independence (1776) emphasised the founders’ adherence to an Aristotelian heritage. Twenty years later, George Washington’s ‘Farewell Address’ offered Americans several Aristotelian injunctions. Their republic and their liberty No.5: On the Soul needed to be built on the moral ‘dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity’ and (De Anima) ‘human happiness’, since ‘virtue or morality is a Written coterminously with necessary spring of popular government’. significant developments in We can trace Aristotle’s continuing role in scientific thought, logic and public and academic discourse by looking for biology, in De Anima Aristotle the distinctive vocabulary which he pioneered attempts to understand the – of theory and practice, potentiality and its soul, hoping to define its actualisation, substance and essence, tragic essential nature and properties, catharsis and tragic error. Yet mystery surrounds a task he describes as ‘one of Aristotle’s direct influence in history through his the most difficult things in the relationship with Philip and Alexander. His role world’. To do so, he discusses at their court can be seen as analogous to the the souls of different kinds contribution made by the experts in other fields of living things: plants, lower whom Philip’s wealth in timber, silver and gold animals and humans. enabled him to lure to Macedon from across the Greek world – his Cretan admiral Nearchos and his engineer Aristoboulos from Cassandreia. But these men came to Macedon to help build a world-conquering militia and navy, a phenomenon of which it is notoriously difficult to find much discussion in Aristotle. He writes with remarkable approval about some aspects of democracy; perhaps his own happiest years were those spent during his two sojourns in Athens. Just how much fools of so many of the best Christians.’ Luther’s primary the philosopher contributed to the dream of world empire, objection was to Aristotle’s argument in On the Soul that conceived by Philip but realised by Alexander, is one of human consciousness dies with the body. All his works on the conundrums of world history. On a more personal science, ethics and politics needed to be discarded altogethlevel, we will never know whether he came to regard his er, thundered Luther, although even he conceded that the former protégé as a drunken megalomaniac or a visionary works on rhetoric, poetry and logic could help students who dreamt of a peaceful, unified family of mankind. Was refine their techniques of argumentation. Aristotle’s name Aristotle among the many Macedonians who resented carried such unique authority that well into the 17th cenAlexander’s cultivation of Persian friends, allies and court tury he was often simply referred to as ‘the philosopher’; protocol (especially the belief in the divinity of the king), a shrewd London publisher named John How exploited as well as his politically motivated marriage to Roxana, the the popular assumption of Aristotle’s incontrovertibility Bactrian princess? Or did he believe that Alexander planned by naming an illustrated sex-and-babies manual (first puba new kind of tolerant, ‘multicultural’ arrangement, an lished in 1684 but destined to run into hundreds of editions ethnically diverse joint enterprise, a utopian brotherhood all the way until the 1930s), Aristotle’s Masterpiece. It had no of man based on virtue and reason? Sadly, we are unlikely connection with Aristotle, being a pot-pourri of materials ever to know. If Aristotle did ever commit his true feelings from previous midwives’ handbooks and sensational works on human anthropology, but it familiarised vast numbers of – positive or negative – about the Macedonian project to a papyrus, it disappeared long ago. otherwise uneducated people in Britain and America with Aristotle’s name. Edith Hall is the author of Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Bodley Head, 2015). MONG ARISTOTLE’S authentic treatises the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics have exerted the FURTHER READING most influence on subsequent history. The vocabJonathan Barnes, Aristotle: A Very Short Introduction, ulary of European political theory was born when revised edition (Oxford University Press, 2000). the Politics was first translated into modern languages in Edith Hall, ‘Citizens but Second-Class: Women in the 15th century. Its comparison of different constitutional Aristotle’s Politics (384 to 322 bce)’, in Cesare Cuttica & models – democratic, monarchical, oligarchic – has been Gaby Mahlberg (eds) Patriarchal Moments (Bloomsbury deployed by advocates of all three. After the execution of Academic, 2015). Charles I in 1649, Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and MagisArmand Marie Leroi, The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented trates, which justifies regicide under some circumstances, Science (Viking, 2014). uses Aristotle’s definition of a monarch. It is commonly said that it was the Roman Republic that provided the prototype

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Statue of Aristotle in modern Stagira.

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A We might applaud the tall, blond and ruggedly handsome Vikings of pop culture as being historically accurate, but authentic engagement with the past requires more than just convincing hair and make-up, says Oren Falk.

VID VIEWERS of Vikings, Downton Abbey or the 300 franchise share a recurring concern: the yearning for historical authenticity. It is the first topic any professed historian is asked about at a dinner party, a perennial question for the students who take our courses and a recurring feature in media coverage. Audiences expect to be entertained and titillated, no doubt, but – even when it comes to overtly fictional shows, films, comics and books – they also demand adherence to an exacting standard of period-appropriate realism. For historians, it is certainly gratifying, especially in these times of universal disdain for the humanities in general and for our profession in particular, to witness such ardent care for getting things historically right. But just what does ‘getting things right’ mean? Any historical representation is bound to be a mixed bag. Professional historians by and large acknowledge that, as Mark Twain might have said, we can never actually get history exactly right, but we can at least hope, every once in a while, to update our ways of getting it wrong. In contrast, when laypeople who prize historical authenticity articulate their desires, it becomes evident that they long for something surprisingly straightforward: they want the props to look genuine. Issues such as the outlandish

VIKINGS

Ragnar Lothbrok, played by Travis Fimmel in the History Channel’s series Vikings.

Barbaric Beauty

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VIKINGS mentalités of people in the past – those outlooks with which we can barely empathise and jokes we do not really get – hardly impinge on the popular notion of historical authenticity. Instead, historically conscious consumers focus on concrete things, assessing authenticity by the presence or absence of anachronistic implements (such as television aerials in Downton Abbey) and the meticulous rendering of period minutiae (such as 36lb chainmail in Rome). The popular imagination, in short, identifies authenticity strictly with accuracy in the depiction of material culture. Academics and laypeople thus are not entirely in conversation with each other over historical authenticity. How might this gap be bridged? To engage the earnest enthusiasts on their own ground and perhaps wrestle them over to a more critical and analytical way of spectating on the historical arena, I use as a case study the History Channel’s Vikings, the fourth season of which aired this spring. The show’s investment in historical authenticity is routinely, and rightly, lauded: characters unapologetically mouth off in Old Norse, Old English and Old French; saga plotlines and Eddic mythology are cut and pasted into the script; and

Historically conscious consumers focus on concrete things, assessing authenticity by the presence or absence of anachronistic implements lavish cinematography recreates the most purple passages from Viking Age sources – a funeral ship on fire, a pagan temple where human sacrifices hang alongside eviscerated oxen and fowl, a defeated leader subjected to the notorious blood eagle. There is certainly a lot here for the authenticity buff to like, even if the occasional complaint would surely also be justified (why on earth aren’t ships’ rudders, their ‘steering boards’, located on the ‘starboard’ side?).

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Y EXAMINATION here focuses on a specific feature of the onscreen Vikings: the show’s representation of Norsemen’s own bodies, and specifically the image it cultivates of idealised male physique in the Viking world. Modern stereotypes of Vikings fall into two distinct groups: we tend to imagine them either as hairy, fur-clad, unwashed brutes, or else as strappingly handsome, tall, muscular jocks. The occasional Viking cameos on Monty Python’s Flying Circus might illustrate the former stereotype; 1950s Hollywood’s casting of Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis as lead Norsemen establishes the latter. The History Channel, too, errs on the side of rugged good looks. The historical authenticity of this view seems vouched for by Muhammad ibn Fadlān, an Arab diplomat who met some Norsemen on the Volga c.922: he testifies that he had ‘never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy’. But what did Vikings themselves consider to be a good-looking man? On the face of it, this is still a question about ‘material culture’: the material in question just happens to be human flesh and bone. But the question is also dependent on what a society holds to constitute ‘beauty’: an ideal, a mental

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From top: Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in Richard Fleischer’s The Vikings (1958); promotional poster for The Vikings (1958); Floki (Gustaf Skarsgård), Bjorn (Alexander Ludwig) and Rollo (Clive Standen) in Vikings.

Who are the Vikings? Illustration by Þórhallur Þráinsson, 2012.

‘VIKING’ IS A catch-all term for the people who came from Scandinavia, what is now Norway, Denmark and Sweden, between the eighth and 11th centuries, more properly known as the Norse, or Norsemen. They have long had a notorious reputation as the raiders and pirates of the medieval world and certainly it is not unjustified: their raids were fearsome and long-running. However, they were also explorers and skilled seafarers, managing to spread across Europe and east into Asia, south to northern Africa and as far west as Newfoundland. They established trade routes across the known world and settled in northern Britain, Ireland and among the Franks, forming the Kievan Rūs kingdom on the River Volga. The Norse were initially pagan and targeted the wealthy Christian monasteries in their raids, but they later converted. A few of the stunning stave churches they built in Scandinavia can still be seen today. The origins of the name ‘Viking’ are uncertain. It may derive from the Old Norse word vík, ‘creek, inlet, bay’, meaning the Vikings were those who came from, or inhabited, the edges of the land and sea. Equally, it might be an Anglo-Frisian name, from the Old English wīc, ‘camp’, referring to the temporary settlements they built during their raids. They spoke Old Norse, a language which had a striking influence on English thanks to their settlement in the north of England (it has given us ‘slaughter’, ‘to birth’, ‘cake’ and ‘happy’, among countless other words). Early records of their writing can be found in runic inscriptions, which are often quite mundane, carved into objects and as graffiti (‘Eyjolfr Kolbeinsson carved these runes high up’ is carved above a door in Orkney). But the main source for their culture, beyond what is written by the peoples they encountered, is the sagas, which were written in 13th-century Iceland. These are the stories of their history – a romanticised mix of truth and legend.

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VIKINGS Clockwise from left: Danish depiction of Eric the Red on vellum, 17th century; Alexander Ludwig as Bjorn in Vikings; Gjermundbu Viking Helmet, 10th century.

construct, a state of mind. It makes authenticity a matter of correctly gauging the cognitive experience of past women and men, a much more elusive objective than creating a physical replica of weapons or gear. It allows the discussion of historical fidelity to ooze away from object fetishism and into the much more challenging (but, to this biased cultural historian’s mind, also much more interesting) realm of tentative reconstruction, empathetic imagination and uncertain inference from partial data. It is a question, in other words, that challenges us to think as historians rather than antiquarians. Our sources for what Nordic men actually looked like (let alone what looks they aspired to) during the historical Viking Age, usually reckoned from sometime in the eighth century to sometime in the 11th, are in fact remarkably scant. Ibn Fadlān’s eyewitness testimony is one of the stronger pieces of evidence we have, supplemented by occasional archaeological clues. The ‘Viking Age’ was not, however, just a set period in time, any more than any other historical period: it was (and is) created by historians who look back at events and discern a unifying pattern. Some of 20 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

the earliest of those historians were anonymous Icelandic authors who, from the 1100s onwards, wrote about the deeds of their forebears. These authors produced the opulent body of literature we now know as the Icelandic sagas.

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HE BULK OF THE EVIDENCE here comes from the so-called Family Sagas, several dozens of mostly 13th-century texts set in Iceland and the wider Norse world during the 10th century (c.870-1030 ad). These sagas piece together the earliest conscious construct of a Viking Age as a distinctive period. They give highly circumstantial accounts of Icelanders’ lives and deaths, including detailed descriptions of personal appearance. We also get to hear occasional assessments of aesthetics, be it from the mouth of narrators or from fellow saga characters – or, rarely, even from a self-critic’s own mouth. In the climactic scene of Droplaugarsona saga, for instance, the protagonist Helgi is engaged in fierce combat against one Hjarrandi. ‘At that moment’, says the saga, ‘Hjarrandi lunged at Helgi, but he deflected it with his shield, and the sword glanced into his face and landed

The Advance of the Norsemen

The extent of Norse settlement and contact across the known world

across his teeth, shearing off his lower lip. Helgi then spoke: “I never was fair-looking (fagrleitr), but you’ve hardly improved matters”. He then reached with his hand and stuffed his beard into his mouth and bit on it’, fighting on in this manner until his heroic demise.

Saga ideas about male beauty are largely dictated by one’s size, facial features and colouration Helgi Droplaugarson’s dying words are typical of saga sangfroid, but not entirely typical of the sagas’ character portraiture. For one thing, as already noted, Helgi volunteers his own aesthetic evaluation; usually such opinions are voiced in the third person. Earlier in the saga, the narrator’s omniscient commentary had offered a more appreciative glimpse of Helgi as a ‘well-built fellow and handsome and strong’. For another, this word-portrait in fact tells us little about Helgi’s appearance: we learn that

he was bearded and that he looked less appealing when his mouth was a mangled mess of blood and hacked flesh than when he had had a full set of lips, but not much else. Usually, we hear something about what made a person count as attractive or ugly; Helgi, for instance, is also featured in Fljótsdœla saga, where the narrator contrasts him with his brother Grímr: ‘Each brother went his own way in terms of appearances. Grímr was blond and tousle-haired and altogether sightly (sjáligr), but Helgi was a well-built man, tawny-haired and ruddy, open-faced and exceptionally elegant, but the most striking thing about Helgi’s appearance was that he had an ugly mouth’. Saga ideas about male beauty are largely dictated by one’s size, facial features and colouration; sartorial acumen also came into play. The narrator who admires Helgi’s physique, for instance, describes him as a mikill maðr vexti, which can be translated as ‘well-built’ but literally means ‘a man grown large’, and also as vænn ok sterkr, ‘handsome and strong’. The collocation mikill ok sterkr, ‘big and strong’, is commonplace in descriptions of handsome men. Thus Hávarðar saga says of an 18-year-old lad that ‘he JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 21

VIKINGS became a man most likely to perform great deeds and the prettiest-looking (fríðast sýnum) of men, big and strong’. Conversely, short stature is often associated with ugliness, as in one saga’s description of the skrælingar, ‘Native Americans’, whom the Norse encounter in the New World: ‘They were small men and ill-looking (smáir menn ok illiligir), and had bad hair on their heads; they had very prominent eyes and were broad in the cheeks’. When the Norsemen notice among the skrælingar ‘one man who was big and beautiful (vænn) … it seemed to them that he must be their chieftain’.

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HAT SAID, size and strength alone did not, in the eyes of saga Icelanders, a beautiful man make. Egill Skallagrímsson, the eponymous hero of his saga and as big and strong as they come, is predicted from childhood to turn out ‘very ugly and resembling his father’. Fóstbrœðra saga tells of a certain Butraldi, a ‘wellbuilt man, strong of muscle, ugly (ljótr) in appearance, harsh in disposition, a great killer of men, flare-nostrilled and vengeful’. In Butraldi’s case, it seems to be his visage – perhaps those gaping nostrils – rather than his overall physique that damns him. As with Butraldi and the mealy-mouthed Helgi Droplaugarson, the sagas only seem to notice the lower halves of men’s faces when something is wrong with them: often, an ugly set of dentures. We know that Viking Age gazes really were drawn to men’s teeth: archaeology confirms that some underwent what must have been an excruciatingly disagreeable procedure, a kind of dental tattoo, involving filing and perhaps inking in their teeth. Thus, what may be the most telling anachronism in modern portrayals of Vikings – no matter how heavily made-up the actors are with fake bloodstains, rub-on grime and prosthetic scars – are the perfect orthodontic smiles they all flash.

Anglo-Saxon women found irresistible – and Anglo-Saxon men were eager to imitate – Norsemen’s well-kempt coiffures If men’s jaws only merit notice when they detract from their beauty, however, the upper half of the head – specifically, eyes and hair – may count equally for or against them. Skarpheðinn’s eyes, as we just saw, are a redeeming feature in an otherwise unshapely face; another champion, Björn Hítdœlakappi, is said in contrast to be ‘a well-built man and beautiful and freckled, red-bearded, corkscrew-haired and droopy-eyed and the most warriorlike man’. Other attractive saga men often stand out as having ‘the best of eyes’, ‘very good eyes’, ‘altogether good eyes, blue and keen and restless’, and so forth. Likewise, we hear again and again of men said to have been handsome that they had a good head of hair (Njáll’s foster-son Höskuldr, for example, was ‘both big and strong, the prettiest-looking of men and well-haired [hærðr vel]’). This may accord well with various near-contemporary witnesses who claim that Anglo-Saxon women found irresistible – and Anglo-Saxon men were eager to imitate – Norsemen’s well-kempt coiffures. It also reminds 22 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

From top: poster for the National Socialist German Student League reading ‘The German student will fight for the Führer and his people’, early 1930s; elk horn head of a Viking Age warrior, c.9th-11th century.

From top: the Oseberg ship dating from 834, discovered in Vestfold County, Norway, 1903; ‘Day of German Arts’ procession with Viking ship float in Neuhauser Strasse Munich, July 16th, 1939; Viking ship with dragon prow depicted in a Anglo-Saxon manuscript from Northumbria, 10th century.

us that combs are among the most ubiquitous finds in Viking Age archaeological contexts, from Russia to Ireland. Some sources may also give us an idea of Norse styling; Ælfric, a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon writer, speaks of ‘Danish ways, necks balded and eyes blinded’, suggesting perhaps – if it is not just an ornate, churchy metaphor for subservience to Satan – that Norsemen shaved their napes and wore their bangs low. Vikings evidently aims to depict such a style, especially in the portrayal of Ragnar’s son, Bjorn. Hair, often long (the sagas speak frequently of mikit hárr, translatable as ‘big hair’, ‘a lot of hair’, or perhaps simply ‘mullet’, but also of ‘golden locks cascading all the way down to the shoulders’), is an essential marker of male good looks. Norway’s founding king, Haraldr, vows to neglect his hair until he should unify his kingdom; he is therefore known, in his youth, as Haraldr lúfa, ‘Mop-Head’, but after attaining his career goal he metamorphoses into Haraldr hárfagri, ‘Fair-Haired’. Lately, it has become customary to translate the latter nickname as ‘Fine-Haired’, probably because when hárr is said to be fagrt it is often associated with silk, but Old Norse does unequivocally prefer blond(e)s. Thus, Egill in early adulthood confirms the prophecy of his ugliness: he already has ‘wolf-grey and thick hair, and he soon became bald’. Elsewhere, a certain Ketill is described as ‘an ugly man and yet chieftain-like, dark and imposing’. No such qualifiers are necessary in order to call a fair-haired person beautiful: ‘he is called Helgi the White, because he was a handsome man with good hair (vel hærðr), white (i.e. blond) in colour’. This preference for fair hues extended to skin colour, too: a villain might be described as ‘swarthy of hair and complexion’. The Native Americans derided above as ‘small men and ill-looking’ were condemned in another manuscript as ‘black (svartir) men’. Either adjective, it seems, is fit for characterising the skrælingar as brutish. Vikings successfully captures many of these aspects of Norse appearance. Pallid skin is on display; likewise, characters’ hair-dos merit considerable attention. The only index on which Vikings largely departs from saga portrayals is hair colour. Surprisingly, perhaps, we find many fewer Nordic types in the show’s leading cast than we might expect: Bjorn is blond, as is the disposable Earl Siegfried, and the more formidable Earl Borg might qualify as honey-blond; but practically all the other main men – Ragnar, Rollo, Floki, Earl Haraldson, King Horik, Leif, Arne, Torstein, Kalf, not to mention the non-Scandinavians like Athelstan and King Ecbert – are dark-haired. Only among the women do we find a significant proportion of blondes (and even there, many striking beauties – Siggi, Gyda, Aslaug – are brunettes).

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INALLY, CLOTHING, TOO, often made the man, according to the sagas. Icelanders mostly dressed in homespun woollens, but those who travelled abroad routinely returned as dapper gentlemen. Gunnarr of Hlíðarendi, the finest-looking of all saga protagonists, comes back from his travels ‘so well-dressed that there were none there [at the National Assembly] who were equally well-dressed, and people came out of every booth to marvel at him’. Laxdœla saga tells how the homecoming hero Bolli Bollason rides in from the ship that has brought him back to Iceland: ‘When he returned from this voyage, Bolli was such a sharp dresser that he would wear nothing but scarlet and fur clothes, and all his weapons were gilded’. He and his 12 companions are described as: JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 23

VIKINGS magnificent men all, yet Bolli stood out. He wore the furs that the King of Byzantium had given him, an outer cape of red scarlet, and he was girt with Leg-Biter, whose hilt and runnel were all arabesqued with gold thread; a golden helmet on his head and a red shield at his side, on which was painted a golden knight, and a lance was in his hand, as is the custom in foreign lands. Wherever this company passed, the women could do nothing but gawk at Bolli’s and his companions’ elegance. The sagas do not mention skin art but we know from other sources that Norsemen in the Viking Age used their own bodies as canvasses. Ibn Fadlān describes them as ‘tattooed from finger nails to neck with dark green (or green or blueblack) trees, figures’. A little later in the 10th century, an Andalusian traveller to southern Denmark observed that ‘both men and women use a kind of indelible cosmetic to enhance the beauty of their eyes’. These aspects are nicely replicated by the History Channel’s make-up artists, who give virtually everyone on set extensive tattoos.

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ANY MODERN STEREOTYPES about Norse physiques thus seem to be confirmed by the sagas’ views on male beauty: beefy, blond, muscle-bound Aryan types are held up as an ideal. Unsavoury as it may be to contemplate, we must face up to the possibility that this is one thing the Nazis actually did get right. A straight line connects the male body idealised by 13th-century saga authors to countless Rassenhygiene posters from the 1930s, continuing right down to the present and to our fantasies of ‘authentic’ Vikings. But, by way of closing, let me reverse course and complicate the picture, calling my own conclusions into question: historical authenticity doggedly refuses to be pinned down. A key issue here is recognising that – philologically – Old Norse does things differently from modern English, and so – culturally – speakers of Old Norse in all likelihood conceived of things differently as well. Butraldi, for example, does not have a swinish nose, he is ‘flare-nostrilled’ (nasbráðr); Björn Hítdœlakappi does not have curly hair and heavy eyelids, he is ‘corkscrew-haired and droopy-eyed’ (skrúfhárr ok dapreygðr), and so forth. These examples are fairly straightforward, even if modern scholars usually detect in them a metaphorical flavour: Butraldi is hot-tempered, Bjorn has poor eyesight. But what to do with men who do not have good eyes but rather are, like the formidable Skarpheðinn, ‘well-eyed’ (eygðr vel)? This could conceivably refer to a keen observer who sees farther and clearer than any of his peers – hardly a trivial matter in a world without corrective lenses. Or it might be a metaphorical way of talking about a man of discernment – a visionary individual. Or maybe it simply highlights the disarming beauty of some men’s irresistible irises and long lashes. We may speculate and propose different answers. But the most important thing to keep in our sights, as it were, is precisely the fact of speculation: however we translate this awkward phrase into passably idiomatic English, we immediately run the risk of projecting our own biases onto the sources. Well-eyed Skarpheðinn is but an example; the sagas complicate matters further still, for instance when they describe the ugly Native Americans not, as I (and everyone else) have translated, as having ‘very prominent eyes’ but rather, literally, as ‘very much eyed’ (eygðir váru þeir mjök). Authentic reconstruction of medieval Norsemen’s aesthetic 24 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Members of the Danish Viking Olayers of Fredrikssund rehearse for a pageant marking the 75th anniversary of the Borough of Ramsgate, Kent.

tastes remains, in these instances at least, stubbornly beyond our grasp. We cannot hope for historical accuracy in the representation of physical appearances until we have run the gauntlet of wrestling with cultural cues, of struggling to decipher the attitudes that would have informed a Viking Age gaze. And we must bear in mind that any reconstruction we offer remains inevitably tentative, bound up as it is with our modern interpretations. How authentic is Vikings’ representation of Vikings, then? If we merely compare the characters who strut onscreen with the imagery imparted on us by the Icelandic sagas and the sparse Viking Age sources that supplement them, not bad at all. These finely attired TV Norsemen are, to a man, mikill ok sterkr, their bodies and faces tattooed and painted, their gazes penetrating and haunting, their hair and beards carefully kempt. But the point to drive home is that the question itself is ill-posed and ultimately unanswerable, because we would need to reorient our own mental set-up in order to be able to grasp the alien mindset to which descriptions like ‘very much eyed’, made sense. When we find the sagas – let alone present-day representations in pop culture – confirming our stereotypes, we should immediately be on guard: odds are that we are, in fact, failing to engage with the deep past at all. We must ask ourselves not whether the historical sources have vouched for the accuracy of how we envision the past but whether the ‘historically authentic’ Vikings we gaze on might merely be our own images, reflected back to us in a tautological mirror. Oren Falk is Associate Professor of History and former Director of Medieval Studies at Cornell University.

FURTHER READING William Ian Miller, Why Is Your Axe Bloody? A Reading of Njáls Saga (Oxford University Press, 2014). Preben Meulengracht Sørensen, Saga and Society, trans. John Tucker (Odense University Press, 1993). Gareth Williams, Peter Pentz and Matthias Wemhoff (eds), Vikings: Life and Legend (Cornell University Press, 2014).

EXECUTIONERS’ HOODS

The execution of Lady Jane Grey, by George Cruikshank, 1840.

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HERE IS AN ‘executioner’s mask’ in the Tower of London, with a spooky, lopsided grin. The mask was dismissed in the 1970s as a Victorian fake, based on a scold’s bridle. The description of it in the current Royal Armouries blog reads: This rather gruesome painted iron mask is from the 17th/18th centuries. It is made of three plates, roughly constructed with openings for the eyes, nostrils and mouth. In the nineteenth century, it was displayed at the Tower alongside a block and axe as an executioner’s mask. However, it is unlikely that an executioner would have worn an iron mask like this.

Off with his

HOOD Through the myth of the executioner’s mask, Alison Kinney explores our tortured relationship with life, death, mortality and museums.

Harold Arthur Lee-Dillon, Viscount Dillon, soon to be appointed Keeper of the Royal Armouries, gave a private tour of the Tower of London to members of the Royal Archaeological Institute in 1893, in which he decisively debunked the information provided by the ‘ordinary warder’ and by the collection labels, which described the mask as ‘a ghastly and grotesque face-covering of black wood’ (it is actually made of iron). Dillon stated that ‘the English executioner never wore a mask; that the executioner at the death of Anne Boleyn was attired like any other man of the Tudor period; and that the only known instance of concealment of the face was at the execution of Charles I, when the official tied a piece of crape over his face’. His comments squared with our knowledge of European executioners, as chronicled in paintings, broadsides, illustrations, legal documents, the diaries of the 16th-century Nuremberg executioner Franz Schmidt and the photographs of Mastro Titta, the Papal States’ executioner from 1796 to 1865. The mask and the hood were largely figments of the imagination. The few exceptions – such as Charles’ executioner, who faced the extraordinary consequences of regicide – only proved the rule: agents of state violence had no need to conceal their identities. In Paris, six generations of the Sanson family openly held the post of executioner. AS MARKUS HIRTE, managing director of the Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, says: In the German-speaking legal area, the profession of an execution was mostly a public service. For that reason everyone in town knew the executioner. Furthermore, it would have been very complicated to behead a person wearing an executioner’s mask with only small holes for the eyes. The records show ‘several regulations regarding the dress code for executioners. They included regulations to wear special robes or coloured hats, but no masks’. The histori-

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The Tower of London’s ‘executioner’s mask’.

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EXECUTIONERS’ HOODS cal abuse and shunning of executioners – housing segregation, physical attacks, the lack of opportunities to marry (except into other executioners’ families) – support this conclusion. Without public acknowledgement of executioners’ identities, neither the shaming nor the endogamy would have been necessary or possible. The Tower mask is not the only one to have been presented by a museum as an ‘executioner’s mask’. London’s Wellcome Collection has featured at least two: one, a black, beaky iron mask that has since been identified as a somen, or samurai mask; the other, now in the care of the Science Museum and identified as Portuguese, suggests nothing so much as the curly browed steel masks worn by medieval warriors from what are now modern Russia, Mongolia, Syria and Iran. The ‘executioner’s mask’ of Rüdesheim, held in a museum devoted to ‘medieval’ torture, is in fact a bascinet, a pointy-muzzled helmet used across the late medieval period. Hirte believes that the Kriminalmuseum’s mask, identified in the 19th or early 20th century as that of an executioner, was probably a shame mask used for public humiliation. With its cloth veil, smoothly moulded cheeks and wistful expression, it resembles a lost sibling of the Carnival and Christmas masks of southern Germany.

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HE PRESENTATION of these masks is part of a wider story about the role the mask plays in English life, in anybody’s life and in the museums of the 19th and 20th centuries. Those masks and hoods were made creepy, not by the touch of real executioners, but by curators, audiences, institutions of history and education and justice systems. They testify to the surprising connections between museum culture and penal culture, especially in the United States. The history of capital punishment reform spans centuries and continents, originating with the Quakers and the Levellers, and proposed in writings such as Cesare Beccaria’s 1746 ‘An Essay on Crimes and Punishments’ (which led to its abolition in Tuscany). Venezuela, the state with the world’s longest current ban, abolished capital punishment in 1863. Historians such as Louis P. Masur and Annulla Linders have chronicled how the reformers, who fought for privacy, dignity, professionalisation and human rights in their penal systems, unwittingly helped create what Thomas Mott Osborne, warden of the New York prison Sing Sing from 1914 to 1916, would call ‘the wrong remedy: they abolished publicity instead of abolishing executions’. Reformers and authorities around the world collaborated in moving executions from the public scaffold to private prison bureaucracies. Executions became invitation-only events for elite men who could be trusted to validate the proceedings (unlike public audiences). Unsurprisingly, the stereotype of execution audiences as rioters, carousers and copycat criminals also dates roughly to the reform period; as the French philosopher Michel Foucault pointed out, public audiences had been known to respond to sentences they found unjust by freeing prisoners, distributing broadsides in a prisoner’s defence, killing executioners and, in Montreal in 1759,

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Right: Harold Lee-Dillon, 17th Viscount Dillon, c. 1916. Below: ‘The Block, Axe and Executioner’s Mask’, by Rev. Richard Lovett, 1890.

Moving executions out of sight [removed] capital punishment from public sympathy or accountability stealing the gallows. Moving executions out of sight was intended partially to ensure prisoners’ privacy and nurture a less bloodthirsty society, but its collateral effects included the removal of capital punishment from public sympathy or accountability. What is not so well chronicled is the wave of artistic representations of the hooded or masked executioner, such as Jean-Paul Laurens’ mural of the execution of the medieval Maillotins, inside Paris’ Hôtel de Ville, and George Cruikshank’s illustrations of William Harrison Ainsworth’s 1840 novel about Lady Jane Grey, The Tower of London, which popularised the Tower as a visitor attraction. One illustration in Theophilus Camden’s History of England (1809) even places the Tower’s round mask on the executioner of Charles I. This century also loved its torture, punishment and death entertainments. In 1893, Lord Shrewsbury’s travelling exhibit of torture instruments from the Royal Castle of Nuremberg, including an Iron Maiden, crossed the Atlantic to New York. In Paris, La Morgue opened to the public. Then there were the wax museums: Madame Tussaud’s, the

Musée Grévin, the Boston Museum, the ‘panoptikons’ of Scandinavia and Germany. Upstairs, they displayed leaders and celebrities; downstairs, the ‘chambers of horrors’ (a term first used by the London press in 1846) reproduced acts of criminal and state violence, often graphic and sexualised, mingling the Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, the Terror and contemporary executions.

The Santee Sioux Uprising, 1862. Engraving.

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MBERTO ECO, in his Travels in Hyperreality (1973), called this gruesome phenomenon ‘shaggy medievalism’, the portrayal of the Middle Ages as a time of barbaric violence: ‘Dark par excellence’. The Middle Ages had been subject to this kind of fantasy ever since the invention of the ‘Renaissance’, but periods associated with ‘barbarism’ have long been contrasted with the supposedly humane, superior practices of the present. Shaggy medievalism matters, and not just because it irritates medieval scholars; when the US Cincinnati Enquirer gloated, in 1897, that the electric chair made hanging ‘a relic of barbarism in Ohio’, it had real consequences. As the art historian Robert Mills writes: Foucault may well declare that what he terms the modern ‘carceral city’, with its imaginary ‘geo-politics’, takes us ‘far away from the country of tortures, dotted with wheels, gibbets, gallows, pillories’. But tell that to the people being tortured now, in the police cells, prisons, detention centres and execution chambers of – yes – the modern West. The rhetoric gets deployed not only against the Middle Ages, but also against other nations and peoples. JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 31

EXECUTIONERS’ HOODS

‘Medievalising al-Qaeda and the Taliban was a crucial part of the legal strategy that led to Guantanamo Bay’, medievalists Louise D’Arcens and Clare Monagle wrote for The Conversation: ‘The point being made is that they are people from a barbaric and superstitious past, and consequently have not matured into modern political actors.’ Hence the Victorian fad for depicting executioners outfitted in anachronistic fantasy masks and hoods. The spooky, hooded executioner concentrated in his person all of society’s ambivalence about state killing, all its shame and pride and all the moral responsibility, too. These figures stepping out of the barbaric past allowed reformers, then and now, to congratulate themselves on the superiority of their own practices. The killing continued, though, but behind prison walls. In the United States, for ethnic minorities such as Native Americans and African-Americans, executions remained public. The largest mass execution in US history was the hanging of 39 Dakota men and boys, staged before 4,000 spectators in Minnesota, at the end of the US-Dakota War of 1862. Likewise, Southern states continued to publicly execute African-American prisoners well into the 20th century. While some scholars believe that the South ultimately implemented private executions because the public 32 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Clockwise from left: red coat of Mastro Titta, the Papal States’ executioner (17961865); German ‘executioner’s mask’, 17th century; Portuguese ‘executioner’s mask’, probably an Asian war mask, 16th19th centuries.

ones resembled lynchings, Michael A. Trotti has argued that authorities finally decided that public judicial executions did not look enough like lynchings because of the presence of African-American witnesses, who prayed, invoked martyrdom and otherwise resisted the penal narrative. Southern executions moved indoors so that authorities could stage real Jim Crow executions, which looked more like lynchings, witnessed only by white men. This is all to say that there has been an uneasy relationship between wardens and politicians, reformers and witnesses, and impresarios, artists, curators and scholars, when it comes to determining how 19th-century authorities shaped the lethal spectacles of capital punishment. Their roles in the exhibition of pain, the objectification of certain people’s lives and the management of public opinion overlapped and influenced each other in surprising ways. That influence destroys the illusion of any neat divisions between historical violence and contemporary

German ‘mask of shame’. Carved wood, 17th-18th century.

death penalties, fantastic spectacles and the horror shows of actual justice. The Tower of London has always straddled the line between spectacle and institutional power. It did so in the 1890s, when dozens of people were executed in England, by exhibiting a fantasy of masked capital punishment. It did so again at the outbreak of the First World War, when the Tower became, once more, an execution site. According

Art, images, exhibits and rhetoric do not stay neatly behind glass. Objects take on a life of their own, outside the invented, exhibited past, outside museum walls to Historic Royal Palaces curator Sally Dixon-Smith, ‘More people were executed within the walls of the Tower of London during the 20th Century than under the Tudors’. Bridget Clifford, the Keeper of Tower Armouries, said: ‘Arms and armour provide the means by which many chose to impose their will on others … Generally, one acknowledges that arms were intended and used to kill, but their

interest lies round all the consequences of that.’ Her goal of teaching history through artefacts, without relying too much on what she called ‘prurient history – the “ooh aah, weren’t they awful” approach’, must be squared with the nature of an institution ‘whose entire collection is dedicated to the dealing of death and the wielding of power’. Determining the role of heritage institutions in meeting, or whetting, public appetite for gore may be a chicken-and-the-egg question, but it is a crucial one for curators. In this context, punishment spectacles, whether enacted in prisons, museums or theatres, do not appear only to teach history, scare viewers about the law or even thrill the blood-thirsty public with real or fake artefacts. The Washington, DC Crime Museum holds a ‘medieval guillotine’ (not medieval, of course, but a kind of device used for executions in France until 1977) testifying to a time ‘long before the recognition of human rights’, when ‘the death penalty was a pervasive form of punishment throughout Europe’. Nearby, the museum has installed a video shooting range, where children on school trips can pretend to be police attacking civilians. Art, images, exhibits and rhetoric do not stay neatly behind glass. Objects can take on a life of their own, outside the invented, exhibited past, outside museum walls. JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 33

EXECUTIONERS’ HOODS Over the past century, many nations around the world have restricted or abolished capital punishment, the UK among them. In the 1970s, after a brief moratorium imposed by the US Supreme Court decision Furman v. Georgia, the US could have followed their lead, but did not. When the death penalty resumed, the state of Florida commissioned a ‘medieval’ hooded mask for its executioner. As Ivan Solotaroff chronicled in The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Private Life of the American Death Penalty (2001), at dawn on execution day in Florida, a corrections officer drives to a predetermined location to pick up the executioner, already wearing the hood, and escorts him to the death chamber. There is no public documentation of who made this ‘medieval’ garment, whether it is made of leather, cloth or vinyl, or even what it looks like, apart from one Department of Corrections (DOC) statement: it looks like ‘something out of the past’. In September, I called the Florida DOC to verify that the hood was still in use. The press officer said he did not feel ‘comfortable’ giving any details at all, except that the hood was, indeed, still worn by the executioner in 2015. The sartorial excess of the hoods may be bizarre but it tells us something about contemporary American penal secrecy, which distances us from the supposedly humane killing systems we no longer witness or oversee. Like the mask, the culture of secrecy comes straight from the 19th century, which first instituted execution witness controls, press gags and the armed policing of prayer vigils. One contemporary adaptation of secrecy surrounding the death penalty is the public non-disclosure of the qualifications of executioners, medical staff and drug and equipment suppliers. There is also the concealment of executioner identities on payrolls and the curtaining of death chambers from witnesses. Even the racial and class dimensions of the 19th-century death penalty survive today: as early as the 1840s, reformers criticised the disproportionately high number of executions of the poor and people of colour.

The sartorial excess of the hoods says something true about American penal secrecy, which distances us from the supposedly humane killing systems we no longer witness or oversee

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XECUTIONERS also wear ‘medieval’ hoods in South Carolina and Oklahoma and they probably echo the ‘medieval’ imagery of the 19th century, which we and their designers have jointly inherited. These masks and hoods were the products of systems that referenced museums, books, films and television for their cultural authority, authenticity and legitimacy. Without these images, we would have no hooded, masked executioners pulling switches and preparing the injections. The fictions emerged from the museums and picture books into the penal codes, with the power not just to represent, but also to facilitate state violence; as many legal battles have shown, the anonymity of executioners, disguised both by real hoods and by procedure, is crucial to the death penalty’s continuation. Florida shows us that designers, artists, curators and educators have shocking powers to rewrite history, to get the imaginary placed on the statute books and then to erase all traces of violence. What does not appear on the public tours, museum labels, DOC websites and official records – the gap between authoritative insiders and the public – begins to look like collusion. Even in nations that no longer practise capital punishment, questions of institutional

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Shame mask, previously thought to be an executioner’s hood.

faceless people.’ Indeed, the faceless, boring bureaucratisation of capital punishment is precisely what allowed it to continue in the US. As Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton asked: ‘Is the goal of curation to settle, or rather to unsettle established meanings of past events? Is it to create social space for a shared experience of looking, listening, and talking, creating alternate relationships and publics, for constructive meaning making and action taking?’ Clifford takes that job seriously. ‘I would hope to encourage people to think, question and arrive at their own conclusions. What they should ask themselves is how they might feel facing the execution block and axe, and begin to consider the theatricality of public execution.’

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violence and hooding may still be urgent: in wartime, in conflicts with police, in the treatment of prisoners of every kind. The Tower’s mask and Florida’s mask tell the same story: one of governmental denial, of state bureaucracies assuming procedural masks to decide what is best for the public. Although the Victorian scholars looking at the Tower’s mask could feel sanguine that no executioner ever wore it to kill, nowadays we should not feel so comfortable about its insulation from real state murder. Execution masks used to be fakes, but now they belong to an authentic tradition of witnessing and facilitating death. We cannot necessarily ascribe good or bad faith to today’s collections: the old exhibits rewrote history and uncovering the truth behind artefacts is painstaking work. Issues of power and justice are implicit in all institutions, all penal codes – and all museums – yet some have the luxury of choosing to hedge or ignore them. It is a much more complicated, fascinating and ethically engaged practice for curators to engage with their legacies of ‘difficult knowledge’ and ‘dark history’ and it is also hard work to handle this information and to keep it engaging for audiences. As Clifford says: ‘The colourful lives of the famous prisoners catch the public imagination more readily than seeing the growth of bureaucratic institutions manned by largely

Japanese samurai mask, or somen, misidentified as an executioner’s mask.

HIS IS NOT just about debunking, or even urging museums and image-makers, whose predecessors collaborated more or less in this misdirection, to take the lead in setting the record straight. Rather than judging spectacles of punishment or violence as simply inaccurate, we might think instead about their visceral, narrative power. These exhibits provide the nearest access many people have to the history and practice of institutional violence. What they teach, or do not teach, can profoundly affect our responses; they can help us think better, so that we question the curation – and creation – of the rhetoric and practices of life and death. Let us not just toss the masks into the curiosities aisle, but let us use their ghastliness and their duplicity to expose the collusion of political and intellectual authority in creating law and entertainment. If the collective fantasies of curators played a part in the hooding of Florida’s executioner, then perhaps museums have not only the obligation, but also the power, to reverse that violence: by making the invisible visible again and by unmasking the horror of state murder in that historic realm of suffering and spectacle that is our world in 2016. Alison Kinney is the author of HOOD (Bloomsbury, Object Lessons, 2016).

FURTHER READING Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton and Monica Eileen Patterson, eds. Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Petrus Cornelis Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Repression: From a Preindustrial Metropolis to the European Experience (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Michael A. Trotti, ‘The Scaffold’s Revival: Race and Public Execution in the South’, Journal of Social History, 451 (2011), pp. 195-224. JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 35

TSARIST RUSSIA ‘Russian Civilisation’, from the British magazine Judy, March 3rd, 1880.

For the tsarist regime, Siberia was a ‘vast prison without a roof’, where thousands of revolutionaries and political opponents were exiled. It became, as Daniel Beer explains, a laboratory of the Russian Revolution.

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N A MAY MORNING in 1864, a bespectacled man, dressed in the sort of dark frock-coat beloved of Russian intellectuals, prepared for his civil execution on St Petersburg’s Mytnaya Square. Nikolai Chernyshevsky, the editor of the radical journal, the Contemporary, had been found guilty of ‘plotting to overthrow the existing order’. As he knelt before a crowd of between 1,000 and 2,000 spectators, a sword was ceremoniously broken over his head and his sentence was read out. He was to be ‘stripped of all rights of estate and sent to 14 years of penal labour in the mines followed by settlement in Siberia forever’. In many respects, the authorities judged quite accurately the dangers this mild-mannered journalist posed through his steady stream of publications. His ideas were an intellectual broadside against the ideological foundations of the tsarist order and an inspiration to successive generations of radicals, who would conduct an ultimately successful struggle against the state for the next half century. Chernyshevsky’s demands for reform chimed with the ‘repentant noblemen’ of the 1860s and 1870s, who felt a great moral responsibility to the impoverished and downtrodden peasantry. Guilt would prove a psychological inspiration for the coming revolution. The Russian revolutionary movement in the reign of Alexander II (1855-81) was a shifting cluster of parties, ideological orientations and individuals inspired by the writings of radical thinkers. Some believed that gradualist campaigns of agitation and propaganda among the peasantry would rouse the people from their political slumber and bring about the overthrow of the government. Others, of a more impatient political and psychological disposition, favoured violent action and propaganda by deed. They believed, naively as it turned out, that the assassination of the tsar would trigger the collapse of autocracy. Between 1878 and 1881, the radical organisation known as the People’s Will launched a campaign of terror that came to be known as the ‘emperor hunt’. Revolutionaries killed two provincial governors and staged six (failed) attempts on the life of the tsar, the most spectacular of which was the bombing in February 1880 of the Winter Palace that claimed the lives of 11 soldiers and wounded 56. Alexander’s government responded with a series of ad hoc laws designed to radically increase the administrative powers of the police and of the governors to put under surveillance, detain, imprison and exile individuals suspected 36 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Russia’s

War on Terror JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 37

TSARIST RUSSIA

of involvement in, or even sympathy with, the revolutionary movement. These sweeping powers enabled the authorities to bypass the open courts and juries, which were proving unreliable allies in this war on terror. The government struggled against a tide of popular sympathy with the aims of the terrorists, if not their methods. On January 24th, 1878 a young woman, Vera Zasulich, entered the offices of the conservative governor of St Petersburg, Fyodor Trepov, and shot and seriously wounded him. Tried in open court, Zasulich admitted responsibility but argued that her assassination attempt was a justified response to Trepov’s order to flog a young revolutionary for his refusal to remove his cap before the governor in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Much to the dismay of the government, the jury acquitted her. Convinced that the courts were now working to undermine them, on May 9th, 1878 the tsar and his advisers introduced a new law that deprived anyone accused of attacks on government officials of the right to a trial by jury. Such defendants would now be tried in camera by military courts. The use of emergency police powers to detain suspects and of military tribunals to secure convictions proved deeply unpopular. Nonetheless, the measures appeared to be having the desired effect: the activities of the People’s Will were severely disrupted by the secret police and their finances fell into disarray. Then, on March 1st, 1881, the terrorists got their man. 38 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Top: Russian exiles on a march in a snowstorm, English engraving, 1882. Above: the assassination of Alexander II, March 1881.

After the assassination of Alexander II, the tsarist secret police, now equipped with telegraphs, card catalogues and extensive networks of spies and informers, hunted down and destroyed the People’s Will. Paralysed by the arrests and by the infiltration of its networks, the revolutionary movement was routed for a generation and would not challenge the autocracy again before the beginning of the 20th century. As a form of propaganda by deed, the assassination was an abject failure.

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VEN IN DEFEAT, however, the People’s Will clinched a vital victory in what was becoming a battle for hearts and minds. During the ‘emperor hunt’, the lines between political conviction and political action had blurred and the state’s persecution of all and any dissent, real or imagined, had reached paranoid proportions. In the wake of the assassination, Alexander III’s government promulgated the ‘Statute on Measures for the Preservation of Political Order and Social Tranquillity’. Intended as a temporary legislation, it remained in force right up until 1917. Described by Lenin as the ‘de facto constitution of Russia’, the law effectively gave the government the right to sentence anyone it suspected of seditious activity to between three and five years of administrative exile in Siberia (extended to eight years after 1888). The US journalist George Kennan, who travelled widely throughout Siberia in the late 1880s, explained the powers conferred by the new legislation:

Vera Zasulich shoots police chief Trepov, 1878.

Exile by administrative process means the banishment of an obnoxious person from one part of the empire to another without the observance of any of the legal formalities that, in most civilised countries, precede the deprivation of rights and the restriction of personal liberty ... [the exile’s] communications with the world are so suddenly severed that sometimes even his own relatives do not know what has happened to him. He is literally and absolutely without any means whatever of self-defence. The emergency legislation was an effective suspension of the rule of law and it remained in place long after public revulsion at the assassination of a popular monarch had subsided. In the decades that followed, the state failed to distinguish between dangerous radicals and moderate reformers. Astute observers, even those with little sympathy for the revolutionary movement, were almost unanimous in their denunciation of the laws. Political exiles, both those convicted of crimes by military tribunals and those exiled administratively, underwent a moral transformation from dangerous and misguided fanatics into sympathetic martyrs. The stage for this reinvention was Siberia.

Members of the People’s Will, c.1880.

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TSARIST RUSSIA

The political exiles of the 1880s and 1890s were determined to take their struggle to the authorities

There is Life Everywhere, Nikolai Yaroshenko’s depiction of exiles leaving for Siberia in closed trains, 1888. 40 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

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ETWEEN 1881 AND 1904, the state exiled around 4,100 individuals for their ‘political unreliability’ and a further 1,900 for factory disturbances. The figures were not great when contrasted with the more than 300,000 exiles located in Siberia by 1898. Yet the numbers mattered much less than the influence and standing of the men and women who found themselves caught up in the dragnet. Many, if not most, were educated and some hailed from prosperous and well-connected families. A military tribunal in Kiev sentenced Maria Kovalevskaya, the daughter of a Russian nobleman and the sister of one of the Russian empire’s leading economists, to 14 years of penal labour in Siberia for her revolutionary activity. Sons and daughters of the nobility, students, journalists, merchants and even state officials found themselves exiled for little more than possessing subversive literature. The political exiles of the 1880s and 1890s were determined to take their struggle to the authorities. Although many, if not most, of the revolutionaries had never been put on trial, they set about converting the way stations, prisons and towns of Siberia into a giant public courtroom. Outraged at what they saw as the injustice of their punishments, political exiles in Siberia engaged in a host of acts of minor defiance. They refused to leave their cells for roll call; they refused to travel on barges together with common criminals; they refused to remove their hats in the presence of prison officials. The authorities frequently noted that punishment of a single prisoner elicited a wave of protest from his or her comrades. The authorities found themselves locked in cycles of retaliation and escalation, which they could only win through the imposition of brute force. But, for a government attempting to shore up its moral authority in the age of a flourishing, if still censored, regional and national press, such tactics carried risks of their own. In this escalating test of strength between radicals and the state, 1889 would prove a decisive year. Two violent showdowns between the exiles and their captors were to have far-reaching consequences in the struggle for political power in Russia.

In addition to being a destination for political exiles, the town of Yakutsk in north-eastern Siberia became a staging post for the exiles’ deportation to the desolate snowbound settlements in the frozen wilderness of the Arctic Circle. Eager to clear a backlog of exiles that had accumulated in Yakutsk, over the winter of 1888-89, the acting provincial governor, Pavel Ostashkin, ordered the local authorities to press ahead with the onward deportation of the exiles in temperatures below -20°C. He also drastically cut the weight of luggage and provisions that the exiles were allowed to take with them further north. THE FIRST TO FACE an onward journey under these conditions was a group of some 30 administrative exiles, including almost a dozen women and children. On March 22nd, 1889 the exiles refused point blank to proceed and delivered a petition insisting that the governor rescind the order to force them to continue their journey in such lethal temperatures. They then barricaded themselves in a large wooden house, in the apartment of one of Yakutsk’s resident exiles, and awaited the governor’s response. Their protests fell on deaf ears, for the Yakutsk authorities were suspicious that the exiles wished to remain there until the spring, simply in order to escape. When Ostashkin’s instructions to surrender were ignored, the governor ordered a unit of Cossacks to surround the building and to drag the exiles into the yard by force but in the ensuing struggle one of the exiles produced a revolver and opened fire on the soldiers. In response, the assembled troops began shooting at the building for several minutes until the revolutionaries surrendered. According to some estimates, as many as several hundred rounds were fired. By the time the exiles capitulated and the acrid smoke had cleared from the apartment, six exiles, a police officer and a soldier lay dead; several more, including Ostashkin himself, were wounded. In the aftermath, the exiles insisted that they had only fired shots in an effort to defend themselves from violent assault by the

Siberia, circa 1890. JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 41

TSARIST RUSSIA

The relatives of exiles in the Moscow Forwarding Prison await voluntary deportation to Siberia, illustration from the Graphic, March 1881.

soldiers; the state meanwhile insisted that what had taken place was a premeditated rebellion against the lawful authority of the governor of Yakutsk. The state turned over the surviving exiles to a military tribunal, which determined that all those who had signed the petition were guilty of ‘armed insurgency’. In June it sentenced the three alleged ring-leaders to death, a further 14 were condemned to lifelong penal labour and the rest to 15-year terms of the same. On August 7th, 1889, Lev KoganBernshtein, Albert Gausman and Nikolai Zotov were hanged in the courtyard of the Yakutsk prison.

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ESPERATE and surrounded, without the weapons necessary for defending themselves, the exiles in Yakutsk had been no match for the armed force of the Russian state. The battle fought on March 22nd, 1889 was, however, part of the wider war for public sympathy being fought in the pages of both the Russian and the international press. The ‘Yakutsk Tragedy’ caused a scandal that reverberated around Russia and beyond. The revolutionaries understood the nature of this wider war for public opinion and they waged it skilfully. Even as he faced the gallows, Zotov grasped the power that the story of events in Yakutsk could wield. ‘Here is my testament’, he declared in his final letter to his comrades back in Russia: Steel yourselves, and under the impression of the finale of these horrors, this slaughter, this butchery, make use of this drama, this colossal example of the cruelty, arbitrariness and inhumanity of Russian despotism with 42 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

all the means at your disposal … Write to every corner of our motherland and abroad to all the [George] Kennans … This is the only way we can recoup our losses in this terrible act of state vengeance. By the autumn of 1889, revolutionary pamphlets detailing the ‘despotic cruelty’ of the Yakutsk authorities were, indeed, circulating throughout Siberia and European Russia. Political exiles in Irkutsk province despatched a letter to Alexander III himself, denouncing Ostashkin’s ‘outrageous and bloody punishment’ of the political exiles. In Europe and the US the press was no more sympathetic to the authorities. The reactionary regime of Alexander III was reviled. The Russian-language émigré journal Social Democrat, published in London, declared that ‘the exploits of the tsarist cannibals are so eloquent that they require no commentary’. The Times reported the incident on December 26th, 1889, calling it a ‘slaughter of political prisoners in Siberia’ and declaring that ‘this tale of blood and horrors is a story which the Russian government cannot afford to pass over. Superior to public opinion as it professes to be, there is a point beyond which it can not go in disregarding the verdict of mankind’. The New York Times followed in February with a lengthy article entitled ‘Men Shot Down Like Dogs: The True Story of the Yakutsk Massacre’. The tsarist state was creating a legion of Siberian martyrs, but seemed blind to this danger. A month after its bloody settling of scores with the survivors of the ‘Yakutsk Tragedy’, the Siberian authorities were to be provoked into another blunder even more damaging for the government’s credibility and legitimacy.

The revolutionaries understood the nature of the wider war for public opinion and they waged it skilfully

Adjutant General Baron Andrei Korf was governor-general of the Priamursk territory in eastern Siberia, an office with direct responsibility for the political prisoners in Kara, 1,000km to the east of Lake Baikal. Korf was a man of robustly conservative views and a critic of what he held to be St Petersburg’s excessive leniency in its dealings with ‘state criminals’. On August 5th, 1888 Korf made an official visit to the Ust-Kara prison and, coming across one young radical, Yelizaveta Kovalskaya, sitting in the courtyard, he ordered her to stand in his presence. She refused. ‘As a prisoner’, she recalled, ‘I absolutely could not stand up before the enemy against whom I had not ceased to struggle, even in prison.’ Korf was outraged by this demonstration of defiance. Two days later, he instructed that Kovalskaya be transferred to another prison in Eastern Siberia and be kept ‘under the strictest conditions’, in solitary confinement. He was explicit that the punishment should ‘set an example to others’.

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FEW DAYS LATER, Masyukov, the commandant of the Ust-Kara prison, had Kovalskaya manhandled, half-naked, from her prison cell in the dead of night. She was made to dress in regular convict clothing in the presence of male criminal exiles and carried out of the prison. Kovalskaya’s fellow women prisoners reacted with outrage, denouncing this ‘base mockery of a state criminal’. They wrote to the authorities in Irkutsk demanding a formal investigation of this ‘scandalous violation of the law’, as well as Masyukov’s removal from office. Relations between politicals and the prison authorities deteriorated sharply over the following year as the prisoners engaged in three separate hunger strikes only to abandon them on each occasion as death drew near. Then, another of Kara’s female prisoners, Natalia Sigida, initiated a dramatic escalation in the conflict. The 28-year-old member of the People’s Will had been sentenced to eight years of penal labour for operating an underground printing press. Recognising that the women would not succeed through their hunger strike in forcing concessions from the authorities, Sigida requested a meeting with Masyukov at the end of August 1889. Admitted into his office, she walked up to him and slapped him in the face. In what had become, for both the revolutionaries and the prison authorities, an attritional contest over moral authority and political legitimacy, striking a senior prison official was a symbolic assault on the Imperial state.

Above: a prisoner is searched before being sent to Siberia, 1880s. Below: a group of penal labourers in Siberia, 1880s.

DETERMINED ONCE AND FOR ALL to stamp his authority on the unruly political prisoners in his charge, on October 26th Korf ordered a clampdown at the Kara prison. Political prisoners were to be deprived of all of their personal possessions and denied the right of correspondence. Most scandalous for the revolutionaries, Korf ordered that Sigida receive 100 strokes of the birch rod. The impression made by this uncompromising disregard of the traditional exemption from corporal punishment of both educated Russians and women is difficult to overstate. Amid widespread public opposition to the use of corporal punishments on even common criminals, to flog political prisoners drawn from the educated ranks of Russian society was to transgress accepted moral standards; to subject a young woman to 100 strokes of the birch rod was to perpetrate an atrocity. The Kara physician refused either to sanction or to attend the flogging in view of Sigida’s poor health. Undeterred, the authorities proceeded with the punishment in the absence of a doctor on November 7th, 1889. In the moments before the flogging, Sigida declared that ‘the punishment was the equivalent of death’ and lay down voluntarily beneath the birch. These were not empty words. After she was returned to her cell later that day, Sigida and her three fellow prisoners poisoned themselves. Sigida died that evening, the others over the course of the next two days. When news of the flogging reached the other political prisoners in Kara, the suicidal protests spread. Within a week, seven prisoners JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 43

TSARIST RUSSIA Unexpected, Ilya Repin’s depiction of an exile’s unannounced return to his home in Moscow, 1884-88.

It was impossible to keep the thousands of exiles dispersed across the continent’s towns and villages under effective surveillance in the men’s prison had also attempted to overdose with morphine. More followed their example. In total, some 20 prisoners took poison and six died. The drama that played out in Kara was a public contest between revolutionaries and the state over control of the prisoners’ bodies. The radicals denied the state’s right to punish them physically and, in so doing, denied the authorities the right to treat them as common criminals. By taking their own lives, Sigida and her fellow revolutionaries used corporal punishment as a spectacle to underline the illegitimate violence of the authorities and, by extension, the tyranny of autocracy itself.

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OGETHER WITH THE ‘Yakutsk Tragedy’, the ‘Kara Tragedy’, as it was quickly dubbed, dealt a body blow both at home and abroad to the authority and legitimacy of the tsarist regime in its struggle with the revolutionary movement. On March 9th, 1890, The Times reported on ‘a very large demonstration’ that had gathered in London’s Hyde Park in protest at the ‘treatment of political prisoners, who, without trial, are exiled to Siberia, the living tomb of countless thousands of noble men and noble women, whose only offence is that they aspire to enjoy the political freedom which we in England have inherited from our forefathers’. Upon his return to the United States from his travels in Siberia, Kennan lectured to audiences on the exile system, often appearing on stage with half his head shaved and clad in rags and chains, like a Siberian convict. His message was clear: ‘The Siberian exiles are not wild fanatics, they are men and women who have given up all that is dear to them and have laid down their lives on 44 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

what we regard as the essential and fundamental rights of a human being.’ The Siberian Exile Petition Association had chapters in 50 American cities in the 1890s and gathered over one million signatures on petitions protesting the tsarist treatment of political prisoners. At Kennan’s lecture in Boston in 1890, Mark Twain rose from his seat and tearfully exclaimed: ‘If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by the use of dynamite, then thank God for dynamite!’ Perceptive members of the government were aware of what was happening. The GovernorGeneral of Western Siberia, Nikolai Kaznakov, reported that the exile system was only incubating sedition in Siberia. It was impossible to keep the thousands of administrative exiles dispersed across the continent’s towns and villages under effective surveillance, he argued, and banishing them to Siberia ‘hardly has the effect of convincing them of the error of their ways but rather only further embitters them’. The administrative exile of subversives, senior officials observed, served to forge revolutionaries into a cohesive group, ‘feeding their conviction that they have suffered an injustice and bolstering their spirit of resistance’. THE REVOLUTIONARIES THEMSELVES agreed. Naum Gekker, whose own suicide attempt in the wake of Sigida’s flogging had failed, looked back on his time in the Kara prison with something approaching a sense of pride: ‘Entire generations of our revolutionary youth passed through Kara, and for many dozens … it was an alma mater, a higher school of development and education.’ Based on his conversations with the exiled revolutionaries, Kennan became convinced that ‘it was not terrorism that necessitated administrative exile in Russia; it was merciless severity and banishment without due process of law that provoked terrorism.’ In 1889 the writing was already on the wall. Social Democrat issued a warning in its commentary on the violent showdown in Yakutsk that year: ‘“Woe to the vanquished!”– that is what the government wishes to say with its barbaric and cruel treatment of the revolutionaries who have fallen into its hands. So be it! There will come a time when it will feel all the merciless severity of that rule.’ If guilt had been the inspiration of the revolution, vengeance would prove its lifeblood. Daniel Beer is Senior Lecturer in History at Royal Holloway, University of London and the author of The House of the Dead: Siberian Exile Under the Tsars (Allen Lane, 2016).

FURTHER READING Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution (Allen Lane, 1997). Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Orion, 1972). Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps (Allen Lane, 2004). W. Bruce Lincoln, The Conquest of a Continent: Siberia and the Russians (Cornell University Press, 1994).

MakingHistory Practical details from historical sources may convince us that historical fiction is fact, but, warns Suzannah Lipscomb, such novels are fraught with danger for one in search of the past.

Face to Face with History HILARY MANTEL says historical novelists have a duty to be accurate and a responsibility to be authentic and we would all surely nod sagely in agreement at this. If we can trust writers of historical fiction to situate their stories within a framework of accuracy, we can allow their novels to deliver our heart’s desire: a seance with the past, a face to face encounter with the people of history, that we perhaps find lacking in history books. If we can see that their texts are rich with verbatim quotes from historic source material – as Mantel’s novels certainly are – (and if we put aside the notion that the source material was produced by humans with all the inaccurate recall and bias that humans always have in recording memories), we can relax, trustingly, into the novel’s historic world, as if into a warm bath. Then fiction can address for us all those gaps left by history – by the recorders of events in the past – because they were so commonplace. It can tell us what it was really like and how it really felt to live in those days. We can enjoy what Margaret Atwood called ‘the lure of time travel’, because, she adds, ‘it’s such fun to snoop’. Fiction can fill our imaginative senses with the taste of the food, the feel of the clothes and the not-so-scented smell of the streets. We can hear the bustle of horses and soldiers preparing for the battle of Towton, sneak through the Elizabethan underworld, eavesdrop on revolutionary France – all are within our grasp, because the novelist has aligned him- or herself with the two standards that Helen Cam set for good historical fiction in 1961: it must ‘equate with the temper of the age’ and ‘concur with the established facts of history’. But there is a secret, invidious

danger. If a novel bears the imprimatur of historical accuracy – sources are quoted, the mundane details are right: if the bodies lace up in the right way, if the streets are muddy, if the protagonist can read print but not script – it can create the illusion that what the novel is telling is actually the truth. Best-selling novelist Philippa Gregory states ‘a convincing lie is a wicked thing’ and Atwood, again, charges us

We can enjoy what Margaret Atwood called ‘the lure of time travel’, because ... ‘it’s such fun to snoop’ to remember what it is the writers of fiction do all day: ‘They concoct plausible whoppers, which they hope they can induce the public to swallow whole’. What the very best historical fiction can do is convince us of two dangerous things. The first is that human nature does not change at all. This seems an obvious truism but I am not sure it is true at all. What was in the heads of people in the past was

Real characters: Philip II (on a cow) with the Duke of Alençon, the Duke of Alba, William of Orange and Elizabeth I, by Philip Moro, 16th century.

very, very different indeed from what is in ours. Their moral compass had a different North. The law of Tudor England stated that it was illegal to kill a bull without it first being tortured in the bull-baiting ring. When Francis Dereham had sex with the teenage Katherine Howard without her consent, he was not thought guilty of child abuse or rape; Howard was thought to be a tart, a siren, a beguiler of men. And it is rare to find a novelist who writes about the 16th century who truly understands the importance of religion. As Robertson Davies puts it, ‘we all belong to our own time, and there is nothing whatever that we can do to escape from it. Whatever we write will be contemporary, even if we attempt a novel set in a past age’. The second thing fiction can convince us of, as we step into our protagonist’s shoes, is about the nature of an interiority of which we can realistically have no idea. The Cromwell of Mantel’s novels is far more likeable than the historical Cromwell surely was. As the setting, the landscape and the costumes are accurate, are we fooled into believing a ‘convincing lie’ about his character? Mantel’s response might legitimately be: we do not know who her Cromwell is as she has not finished writing him yet nor, actually, do we know who the ‘real’ Cromwell was. For historians, too, write from their own time, with their own biases and use those flawed sources from flawed humans. So, should all historical novels come with a warning label? THIS IS NOT THE PAST. IT JUST LOOKS LIKE IT. But should history books too? Suzannah Lipscomb is Head of the History Faculty at the New College of the Humanities, London and author of The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2015). JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 45

JOHN DEE

The young JOHN DEE

Although best known as Elizabeth I’s court magician, John Dee was also one of England’s most learned men. Katie Birkwood explores his books and the wealth of information they can provide on his early life.

46 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

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John Dee performing an experiment before Elizabeth I, by Henry Gillard Glindoni (1852-1913).

OHN DEE was one of Tudor England’s most extraordinary and enigmatic figures, an original Renaissance polymath with interests in almost every branch of learning. He served Elizabeth I at court, advised navigators on trade routes to the New World, travelled throughout Europe and studied ancient history, astronomy, cryptography and mathematics. Yet he lives on in the collective imagination largely as a result of his interest in mystical subjects: astrology, alchemy, the world of angels and magical mirrors. It is these seemingly arcane and occult activities that have left us with the image of Dee as the archetypal philosophercum-sorcerer, ‘The Queen’s Conjuror’, as one biographer has put it. So how did the reputation of the man who built – and lost – one of the greatest book collections of his age and devoted much of life to rigorous academic pursuits become so fixed on the supernatural? Moreover, are there reasons other than magic to make Dee a worthy subject of interest and discussion over 400 years after his death? JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 47

JOHN DEE

Portrait of John Dee. Stipple engraving by Robert Cooper, 18th19th century.

The answer to the first of these questions may lie in the main sources for the story of Dee’s life. Principal among these are Dee’s own diaries. These span the period from 1577 to 1607, beginning when he was already 50 and ending two years before his death: elderly, impoverished and out of favour. They also coincide with the period during which he was particularly preoccupied with fields of study that we today see as fantastical, especially his ongoing – and, he believed, successful – attempts to contact and converse with angels. We have a few scattered notes from earlier than this, but nothing substantial remains, if, indeed, anything was written. The main source for details of his early years is his own autobiographical account, known as the Compendious rehearsal. It was written in 1594 for a specific purpose: to explain Dee’s past and possible future value to the crown and to secure a royal position or appointment and regular income. Thus the account concentrates on Dee’s intellectual abilities, his acts of service to the queen and his sense of grievance at perceived ill treatment by the establishment.

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T IS EASY TO SEE how Dee’s later diaries, filled with esoteric obsessions and the apparently self-serving, self-written life story, have forged a portrait of the embittered, occultist outsider. However, to form a more rounded picture of Dee’s life, particularly his earlier, more conventionally successful days, it is necessary to turn to other sources. Chief among these are the richly annotated books that once formed part of Dee’s personal collection. Dee’s library was one of the very greatest in 16th-century England. He owned more than 3,000 printed volumes and 1,000 manuscripts, housed at his home in Mortlake, on the River Thames. It was a collection greater than that of either Oxford or Cambridge universities, their colleges or the great cathedrals. In line with the scholarly practice of the time, Dee not only studied his texts but annotated them, often extensively and with apparent enthusiasm; these annotations provide an extraordinary insight into his interests, his beliefs and his life long before the diaries begin. In the 48 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Henry Pierrepont, 1st Marquis of Dorchester. Stipple engraving, 1801.

A shelf of books from Dee’s library at the Royal College of Physicians.

Left: John Dee’s signature, ‘Jehan Dee. 1557.’ Right: John Dee’s signature, ‘Johannes Dee 1559’, overwritten by Nicholas Saunder as ‘Nich Saunder 1589’.

margins of the books the workings of one of the greatest minds of the English Renaissance are revealed. Tragically, Dee’s library would not last even as long as the man himself. In 1583 he left England to travel in Eastern and Central Europe. Before he departed, he entrusted the care of his house and collection to his brother-in-law Nicholas Fromond, who, he said, ‘unduely sold it presently upon my departure, or caused it to be carried away’. This betrayal and the destruction of his library devastated Dee and, though he was able to recover some of its contents, many books remained lost to him forever. A large number of the volumes stolen from Dee’s library came into the hands of Nicholas Saunder, who may have been one of Dee’s former pupils. It is unclear whether Saunder stole books directly from Mortlake himself or received them afterwards, but he certainly seems to

have known that the volumes once belonged to Dee: he repeatedly tried to remove Dee’s marks of ownership by washing, bleaching, scraping or cutting them away, and often replaced Dee’s signature with his own. Saunder’s books later passed to Henry Pierrepont, 1st Marquis of Dorchester, a devoted bibliophile. After Dorchester’s death, his family presented his entire library to the Royal College of Physicians, which had lost its own collection in the Great Fire. It has remained at the College ever since. Identifying Dee’s former possessions is not always straightforward. Some books bear his signature, or its traces, on the title page. His copy of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ treatise on the geometry of triangles, De lateribus et angulis triangulorum, for example, notes that he bought the book on February 9th, 1553 (1554 in the modern system), in London; thus revealing exactly where he was on a specific date, no JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 49

JOHN DEE

Extensive marginal notes in John Dee’s copy of Quintilian’s Institutionum oratoriarum, 1540.

mean task for a man who travelled so widely across Europe. Books that Dee did not sign can sometimes be identified by his other annotations, which come in many forms. They include a range of attention marks: underlined words and passages, trefoil flowers, pointing hands (called manicules) and brackets, sometimes fancifully shaped into human faces. The annotations, in Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew and English, include lengthy comments on the text, rare autobiographical details that cannot be found elsewhere and occasional beautiful illustrations. There are also traces of Dee’s writing on the outsides of the books: he would sometimes write the title of 50 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

a text along the edges of its pages. In the 16th century books were commonly shelved with the page ends, not the spine, outwards on the shelf, so these titles would have helped him locate a specific volume among the many. The search for Dee’s books goes on, at least in part, because they lift the veil on aspects of his life overlooked or left mysterious by other sources. Dee’s student years are just one such period. He went up to St John’s College, Cambridge in 1544, where he was tutored by the humanist scholar John Cheke. At this time he also began his lifelong involvement with book collecting.

Such an intense engagement with the text suggests that this may have been a book that Dee used not only for study but also for teaching Dee would claim in later life to have been an extraordinarily assiduous student, reporting that during his time at Cambridge he was ‘so vehemently bent to studie, that ... I did inviolably keepe this order; only to sleepe four houres every night’. It is, of course, impossible to verify this statement, which is rather typical of 16th-century scholars. However, there is clear evidence of Dee’s meticulous approach to the texts he studied as part of the essentially medieval curriculum. His copy of Roman rhetorician Quintilian’s Institutionum oratoriarum has thorough and impeccably neat annotations on most of the pages. These include notes in Latin and Greek and cross-references to other authors

and works. Such an intense engagement with the text suggests that this may have been a book that Dee used not only for study but also for teaching. Indeed, in 1546 Dee was appointed under-reader in Greek at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he was a founding fellow. Not all of Dee’s student books were serious works of history or oratory, it should be noted. Included among them is a copy of the poet Ovid’s Amatoria, a work that would have been considered too frivolous and sexually ambiguous for inclusion on the formal syllabus. Dee signed the title page of this compilation of love poetry and marked several verses in red. JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 51

JOHN DEE

John Dee’s sketch of a ship in the margins of Cicero’s Opera, 1539-40.

Many of these volumes from Dee’s Cambridge days are planets visible in the night sky, was also modest in size, not much larger than pocket books. On an typical of early-modern Europe. Astrolaltogether grander scale is Dee’s student copy of the complete ogy was a fundamental part of underworks of Cicero. A truly monumental tome: two large folio standing the natural world and had an volumes each standing 40cm tall and 15cm deep. As with his important place in medical practice and other Classical texts, Dee has worked over several sections other areas of intellectual endeavour. very heavily, numbering the points of interest, underlining The disease ‘influenza’, for example, whole sections, writing notable words in the margin and using takes its name from the medieval Latin his trademark manicules to highlight important passages. In influentia, meaning visitation or influone instance, a sketch seems to resemble a Greek temple on ence of the stars. Manicule in the margin of Quintilian’s a small island in flames: the nearby text of Cicero’s De legibus Ever the meticulous scholar, Dee set Institutionum oratoriarum, 1540. tells how the Persian king Xerxes set fire to the temples of the about refining his practice of astrology Greeks on the advice of the Persian magi. Doodled clues such by documenting and understanding the as this were used in some systems of reading as a means of interpreting natural world and relating these records to the movements of the heavand remembering the contents. In an age before comprehensive indexes, enly bodies. He visited the Low Countries in 1547, meeting with many let alone hyperlinks, Dee is developing a visual shorthand to allow him of the greatest names from the history of science, including Gerard to revisit and interpret his books with ease. Mercator, the celebrated map-maker. A rather more spectacular instance of scholarly doodling is found in He returned the following year to the University of Louvain, where the same volume. In his De natura deorum (On the nature of the gods) he studied mathematics, geography, astrology, astronomical observation Cicero quotes some lines from the Roman tragic poet Lucius Attius: and, ‘for recreation’, civil law. Evidence of his celestial investigations is preserved at the end of a small collection of astronomical texts. On one So huge a bulk glides from the deep with the roar of a whistling wind of the spare flyleaves at the back of the book is a list of all the days in Waves roll before, and eddies surge and swirl the month of August 1548 beneath the heading, in Latin, ‘Observations Hurtling headlong, it snorts and sprays the foam made of the various conditions and changes of the air at Louvain’. Next This verse is accompanied by an intricate drawing of a vessel at sea. to each date Dee notes the meteorological conditions using a series Though the perspective may not be perfect to our modern eyes, it of symbols, apparently of his own invention, explained on the facing page. These symbols predate regular meteorological records by centuremains an impressive piece of draftsmanship. ries. From these notes we learn, for example, that on the ninth of the Dee’s pervading interest in astrology, the belief that actions and events on earth are influenced by the movements of the stars and month it was totally cloudy until 12 o’clock, when it cleared somewhat. 52 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Clockwise from above: magic disc, owned by John Dee; astrological charters in the margin of Girolamo Cardano’s, Libelli quinque, 1547; Edmund Bonner, the ‘bloody’ bishop of London, 18th-19th century.

A gentle wind blew from the south until 7 o’clock and afterwards from the south-west. Dee also drew up astrological charts: what we would call today ‘casting horoscopes’. These charts show the positions of the planets and constellations at a precise moment. This moment might be the date of someone’s birth, but could also be any other significant point. Charting the stars for a specific time helped determine favourable conditions for a particular course of action, be that medical treatment, marriage, sowing crops or any important endeavour. Dee owned a copy of the Italian astrologer Girolamo Cardano’s compendium of astrological practice, Libelli quinque, published in Nuremberg in 1547. This book is filled with example charts and explanations of their significance. Dee filled the margins and the blank diagrams to practise the procedures and draw up charts for use. These notes are a rare opportunity to see a Tudor astrologer at work: charts and records were not often kept, as documentary evidence of predictions or

recommendations could have unfortunate repercussions, if they proved to be wrong, or if the astrologer fell foul of the authorities. Dee, mindful of the precarious position of the astrologer, does not identify the persons or circumstances to which his sketched charts refer, leaving us to wonder for whom and for what purpose the horoscopes were cast.

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HILE ASTROLOGY was, in the main, a respectable pursuit, it accounted in some measure for Dee’s rather chequered relationship with the royal court. In early life he ascended to prominence under the rule of Edward VI, years later recalling the time with fondness and describing Edward as an incomparable king of England: ‘Angliae Rex inco[m]parabilis’. However, after Edward’s death his continued communication with Princess Elizabeth and his continued interest in subjects – astrology, astronomy and particularly mathematics – that were increasingly seen by some as magical, made him easy prey for attack under the rule of Mary I. In May 1555 Dee was arrested on the orders of the Privy Council for allegedly casting horoscopes for the queen and her family without permission and practising witchcraft against his enemies. Dee was accused along with three others: the mathematician and astrologer John Feild, Sir Thomas Benger and Christopher Carye, one of Dee’s mathematics pupils. Their accusers were the poet George Ferrers and John Prideaux, who originally alleged that they had cast the nativities, or birth charts, of the queen, king and Princess Elizabeth, an act seen as tantamount to treason on account of the secret and privileged information it was believed could be revealed. Shortly after the arrests, two of Ferrers’ children were taken ill and the charges were increased to include witchcraft, used against the queen and Dee’s enemies. After interrogation by the lord chief justice of the court of common pleas, Dee was released in August into the custody of Edmund Bonner, the so-called ‘bloody’ Bishop of London. One book in the Royal College of Physicians collection bears powerful witness to this most testing period in his life. A slim volume of mathematics, the Mathemalogium prime partis by Andreas Alexander, includes numerous annotations and a longer inscription on the last page of text. Translated from the Latin, Dee writes: ‘Read through in the year 1555 between the 18th and 24th September in Fulham in the house of my singular friend, reverend in Christ father Edmund Bonner Bishop of London’. This is the only conclusive historical evidence that has been found to place Dee in Bonner’s house at this time. Dee’s use of the phrase ‘singular friend’ is intriguing: should we take it at face value, or does he mean it ironically? At this distance, it is almost impossible to JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 53

JOHN DEE tell. It could be that, after Bonner had been convinced of Dee’s religious orthodoxy, he and Dee did enjoy a friendship. Potential evidence for this comes from the 1563 first edition of John Foxe’s Actes and monuments (also known as the Book of Martyrs), in which Dee is mentioned during the interrogation of John Philpott as being Bonner’s chaplain and is described as ‘that great conjuror’. It is perhaps unwise to trust as biased a writer as Foxe with too many details about the associates of a man as vilified as Bonner. What is known for certain is that no further charges were pressed against Dee, though he continued to protest his innocence for the rest of his long life. Others will prefer to read Dee’s words as a first flowering of sarcastic wit, describing Bonner, his effective judge and now imprisoner, with such a delightfully ambiguous term.

Bearded faces, doodled in the margins of an alchemical book.

In any case, the whole incident appears to indicate that Dee either had the gift of persuasion or the necessary influence at court to avoid the lethal fate that befell so many others accused of similar wrongdoing. Indeed, in the year immediately following his arrest, Dee was already seeking support from the queen for a new scheme that he had devised: nothing less than the creation of a national library. Dee’s book-collecting was not a selfish pursuit. He amassed his library for the benefit of all scholars and welcomed many into his home in Mortlake to consult, and even to borrow, books and manuscripts. The value of his collection lay not only in its size, but also in its quality: many of the titles were very rare and exceptionally hard to acquire in England. Dee’s ambitions for his library extended beyond his own network of students and fellow intellectuals; he wanted to create a centre for research to serve the whole country. In 1556 Dee wrote a petition to Mary bemoaning the ‘destruction of so many and so notable libraries’ during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530-40s. He requested that the queen establish a national library to preserve the texts of the ‘famous and worthy Authors’, whose works were currently at risk of being scattered and destroyed. Here we find evidence of Dee operating as a courtier in the widest sense of the term: a man concerned with the operation of the court and, by extension, the kingdom of which it was the effective ruling body. Dee’s engagement with public policy, be it in regard to the 54 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

establishment of a national library, which was not successful, or in making the case for the teaching of mathematics at universities, advising on navigation or setting out an intellectual basis for England’s imperial ambitions, is another neglected element of his contribution to Tudor life. Could it be that these essentially practical preoccupations simply do not sit easily with the image of Dee as ‘that great conjuror’ which we have grown used to?

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F DEE’S ROLE as magician is imaginatively located in any place, it is often at the court of Elizabeth. Henry Gillard Glindoni’s magnificent Victorian history painting has the magus performing an ‘experiment’ before the Virgin Queen. His appearance, largely unchanged from a portrait owned by Elias Ashmole centuries earlier, is ostensibly that of a 16th-century scholar, though it has now passed into the iconography of sorcery, while the experiment itself resembles a 19th-century stage magician’s trick. Yet Dee’s relationship with Elizabeth is more longstanding and complex than this confected image might have us believe. Once more his books give us a clue as to where the story begins. Near the end of the same volume of Cardano’s compendium of astrological advice that reveals horoscopes in Dee’s hand and hints at his family history, a series of faint annotations are surviving proof of Dee’s early connection to the Elizabethan court. On the last page of text, Dee writes (translated): ‘Anne Compton, born on the 18 March 1523, second wife of W.H.’ and ‘I entered into the service of ’. Anne Compton was the second wife of William Herbert, first Earl of Pembroke, and this inscription is the only firm evidence we have that Dee was in the Earl’s service in the 1550s. William Pembroke and another of Dee’s patrons, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, introduced Dee to Elizabeth. It was Dudley who sought Dee’s advice on a date for Elizabeth’s upcoming coronation. Using his vast learning, Dee cast astrological charts, now sadly lost, but no doubt similar to those we find elsewhere among his papers. From these charts Dee selected Sunday January 15th, 1559 as the most auspicious day for the queen’s inauguration. It is a tribute to the esteem in which both astrology and Dee were held that the coronation did indeed go ahead on that date. This John Dee, the real Renaissance man, was respected not as a magician but as a meticulous scholar, just as astrology was heeded as a legitimate and powerful, if potentially dangerous, branch of knowledge. The John Dee who took his place at the new queen’s court may have been a young man, still only in his early thirties, but was a man of wide learning in many fields: a polymath in the process of amassing the greatest library in the land, ready to advise and guide on topics from empire to alchemy, medicine to mathematics, and trusted enough to choose the very date of queen’s coronation. So much more than a mere court conjuror.

Katie Birkwood is the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians, London and curated its exhibition Scholar, Courtier, Magician: the Lost Library of John Dee.

FURTHER READING Nicholas Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy: Between Science and Religion (Routledge, 1988). Deborah E. Harkness, John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 1999). Glyn Parry, The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee (Yale University Press, 2011). Benjamin Woolley, The Queen’s Conjurer: The Science and Magic of Dr Dee (HarperCollins, 2001).

Daisy Dunn on Hellenistic kingdoms Edith Hall lauds a history of Athenian democracy George Goodwin welcomes a new life of Frederick the Great

REVIEWS REFORMATION EUROPE

The Early Modern Refugee Crisis The plight of people seeking asylum overseas is not an issue confined to our age, says a new study, which challenges inherited assumptions about the Reformation.

THE MOVEMENT and plight of people compelled to leave their own countries and to seek asylum overseas is ever present in our television broadcasts and newspaper headlines. Casualties of the wars and conflicts that beset our troubled world, refugees are a symbol of global instability and the subject of urgent domestic and international attention and policy-making. In this stimulating, wide-ranging study, Nicholas Terpstra seeks to investigate the early modern origins of exile as a mass phen56 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

omenon and simultaneously to offer an alternative interpretation of the European Reformation. Central to this vision is the idea that, from the 15th century onwards, governments and communities became increasingly preoccupied with ideas of purity, contagion and purgation. This manifested itself in a wide range of initiatives to control, repress and eliminate contaminating ‘others’. Starting with the forcible expulsion of Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, it drove a series of official

initiatives to cut off the diseased limbs of the corpus christianum (the medieval Christian world) that continued well beyond 1700. These acts of radical surgery were accompanied by countless decisions taken by individuals to migrate voluntarily, a process that Terpstra terms ‘expelling the self’. Stretching beyond the mutually antagonistic groups of Christians that have dominated accounts of the period, he ably (if a little unevenly) integrates the adherents of Islam and Judaism into his analysis.

Taking the body as its organising metaphor, Terpstra’s book begins by describing how European Christians defined themselves and their relationship with God, together with the growing threat that heretics, witches and other deviants presented to its health and integrity. It then turns to dissect the various discourses and practices of discipline and exclusion that gathered pace, alongside state formation, in the 16th and 17th centuries: the impulse for separation from the world embodied in late medieval monastic observantine movements; the containment of female religious in enclosed religious houses and of potentially dangerous marginal groups in ghettoes, institutions and hospitals; the prosecution of deviants and criminals by the Catholic Inquisition and Protestant ecclesiastical tribunals; and the purgation of those whose presence was deemed to be intolerable. Chapter three examines the experience of exile from the perspective of selected individuals and the destinations to which refugees typically fled. Eschewing a thorough investigation of the competing theologies that underpinned these developments, chapter four assesses ideas about rites of initiation, such as baptism and circumcision, divine presence in the guise of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and the authority of the scriptures through which God

spoke to human beings. Building fruitfully upon Terpstra’s earlier research, its later sections also explore charity as a particular variety of boundary marking and of purificatory discipline. The final chapter is concerned with the mental and physical world, which this refugee Reformation brought into being; with the cultural processes of identity formation and confessionalisation; and with the empowering myths and narratives that gave the experience of exile significance and meaning. This latter discussion might usefully have been placed earlier in the book. It remains unclear why so many refugees were able to overcome the widespread worry that flight was ‘an unjustified surrender and abandonment’ of the ideal of Christian community which they held dear.

To expand [the Reformation’s] chronological and geographical parameters can only be applauded Untrammelled by footnotes, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World is a fluent and imaginative introduction to the Reformation era that will inspire students and surely find an enduring place on university reading lists. It is an original synthesis that should also foster debate among senior scholars. Terpstra’s self-conscious emphasis less on the ‘positive legacies’ of the Reformation than its darker dimensions contrasts strikingly with the stress on tolerance and peaceful coexistence that has emerged in recent work by Benjamin Kaplan and others. He notes but does not wholly explain the paradox that these tendencies emerged in tandem. Inflected by the themes of exclusion and repressive authoritarianism, the picture he paints has much in common with R.I. Moore’s influential The Formation of a Persecuting Society

(1987). It is also more than faintly reminiscent of the sinister story of punitive discipline and coercion told by Michel Foucault. The repressive programmes on which Terpstra focuses are likewise driven from the top rather than the bottom and they leave little room for the agency of individual people. The religious outlook and practice of the majority is described as lacking much intellectual substance and as operating on the level of a ‘more basic animism’. Despite his determination to give exile a ‘human face’, we seldom hear the voices of those who chose this route and at times they are rather eclipsed from view. Purgation is arguably the more dominant theme and the claim that refugees shaped not only the cities and settlements to which they went, but also the Reformation itself, in profound and culturally creative ways, might have been more fully developed. So, too, might the suggestion made in the book’s final pages, where Terpstra provocatively rejects the traditional tendency to date the Reformation from Luther’s protest against indulgences in 1517 as a ‘Northern European conceit’ and asserts that starting with the earlier initiatives of European Christians to expel the Jewish and Muslim ‘Other’ gives ‘a more acute view of the roots of some modern global realities’. While not all the threads of this ambitious overview are successfully woven together, it certainly injects important new insights and sets some fresh agendas for our discussion of religious change in early modern Europe. Terpstra’s concluding call for an ‘expanded conversation’ in which younger transnational scholars will challenge inherited assumptions about the Reformation and expand its chronological and geographical parameters can only be applauded. Alexandra Walsham Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World: An Alternative History of the Reformation by Nicholas Terpstra Cambridge University Press 353pp £23.99

The Medieval Islamic Hospital

Medicine, Religion, and Charity by Ahmed Ragab Cambridge University Press 282pp £64.99 MEDIEVAL HOSPITALS used to be represented as hell holes: overcrowded reservoirs of infection lacking medical facilities; places in which to die, not recover. Scholarship of recent decades has done much to modify this depressing picture. We now know that there were many hospital doctors and nurses doing their best by the standards of the time. In Florence and some other Italian city-states, indeed, the highest-paid physicians shuttled between elite clients and hospital practice. Even the smallest hospitals aimed to

Medieval hospitals used to be represented as hell holes ... places in which to die, not recover provide the clean sheets and the nourishing diet that were as important as elaborate medication. Still, much of this revisionist scholarship applies to the later Middle Ages and the European hospital remained what it always had been since its invention in the fourth century: a religious and charitable institution in which healing the soul took precedence over healing the body. If we want hospitals that seem more secular, that accepted patients of different faiths,

that took a relatively enlightened view of patients that most European hospitals excluded, such as the insane – that is, that look quite modern – then we turn to Baghdad and other centres in the Islamic world from as early as the ninth century. This is where Ahmed Ragab’s valuable book comes in. Like those revising our idea of European hospitals, he stands on the shoulders of several giants who have been studying the Islamic bimaristan (house of the sick) and relating it to the history of patronage, medicine, law and the economy, so that despite its apparent medical modernity it is set in the context of its time. This book is not a general history of Islamic hospitals, but a richly contextualised study of one hospital, established by the Mamluk sultan al-Mansur Qalawun around 1285 in his empire’s capital, Cairo, as part of a philanthropic and religious complex that included a mausoleum and madrasa. This foundation is examined against the background of its predecessors, in Islamic Egypt and the Levant, and in Crusader Jerusalem, where the main hospital, though indebted to Islamic exemplars, may also have exercised an influence of its own. Ragab places the Mansuri establishment within a wider setting of rulers’ patronage and piety and urban topography and architecture, as well that of medicine. Sometimes the contextual detail is so wide-ranging that it overwhelms the main argument and the general reader may be put off by the overly discursive footnotes. Specialists may feel that the author is not always ruthless enough in his source criticism (no anecdote too implausible not to be told one more time before being set aside). Yet specialist and non-specialist alike will be enthralled by much of what the author has to tell them, as he unveils a medieval hospital world far too little known even to Islamicists, let alone historians of medieval Europe.

Peregrine Horden JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

HELLENISTIC KINGDOMS

Guardians of Greek Identity Hellenistic kingdoms endured for centuries after the decline of Greece, drawing on its beauty and symbolism, as this elegant study demonstrates.

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HE FOREHEAD is the plainest part of the face. Compared with the eyes or the cheeks, there is little one can do to alter it, which is why, of all the fashion accessories of the ancient world, the diadem is most deserving of a revival. When Alexander the Great adopted the Persian diadem – a gold band that encircled the head and sparkled above the eyes – he was aware of its potential. Not only did it announce to all who saw him his conquest of eastern territories, but in its design it could convey how enthusiastically Macedon had absorbed Hellenic culture. A diadem featured in this book, a catalogue produced to accompany an exhibition of Hellenistic art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is decorated not with the figure of Herakles, Alexander’s hero, but with a Heraklean knot, modelled on the tie Herakles used to secure the Nemean lion skin on his shoulders. One is struck as much by its subtlety as by its symbolism. Alexander is the paradigm against which all later dynasts of the Hellenistic world are measured. In this book, the compari58 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

son is with the often-overlooked Attalid rulers of Pergamon, a remote, thickly forested kingdom in Mysia, Asia Minor, situated 25km inland from the west coast of modern Turkey. It was here that Alexander’s Persian lover Barsine and their illegitimate son Herakles are said to have been residing at the time of Alexander’s death. It

Alexander the Great is the paradigm against which all later dynasts of the Hellenistic world are measured was here, too, that Lysimachos, Alexander’s former bodyguard, deposited a weight of silver with an eye to acquiring power and appointed one Philetaeros, a eunuch, to guard it. Philetaeros decided to defect to the rival general Seleucus, who battled down Lysimachos, then died himself. Philetaeros survived and, adopting his nephew, established the Attalid dynasty, with Pergamon as its capital.

Like Alexander before them (and sundry rulers since), the Attalids strove to use art as a means of legitimising their power, which in effect meant endowing it with the age and pedigree it lacked. It perhaps comes as no surprise that many of the pieces they owned were therefore traditional (we would say ‘classical’) in style. Several of the Hellenistic period vases featured in this splendidly illustrated book retain the shape of those made in the fifth century bc, although the decoration is often cruder. More impressive and more effective at challenging our preconceptions about propagandistic, legitimising art today is the most famous Attalid commission of all, the Dying Gaul. The sculpture was made to commemorate the Attalids’ victory over migrating Galatians (Gauls) in the third century bc. As Massimiliano Papini argues in his introductory essay to the Attalid defeat of the Galatians, these sculptures, which originally stood in the Sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros (‘Bringer of Victory’) on the Pergamon acropolis, enabled the Attalids to present themselves ‘as guardians of Greek identity’.

Isolated from their context, and known today through Roman marble copies, they stand rather as timeless elegies of human suffering. No less affecting are some of the smaller scale items examined in the comprehensive catalogue: a terracotta model of a cock fight, presided over by children, and a first century bc-first century ad statuette of an emaciated young man, whom, we learn, a pathologist recently ‘diagnosed’ as a victim of chronic lead poisoning. The curators of the Pergamon exhibition have been conscious to set the Pergamon treasures in the broader context of the fourthfirst centuries bc, so we also find objects from, for example, Ptolemaic collections, including a vase that perfectly encapsulates the fashion for fusing Greek and Egyptian styles; cast in faience using Egyptian techniques, the oinochoe (a Greek vase shape) was inscribed in Greek ‘For the Good Fortune of Berenike [II]’. And, from a rubbish heap near El-Hibeh in Egypt, we see the earliest written fragment of the Odyssey ever discovered – a piece of papyrus from c.285-250 bc with lines from Book XX. It is no surprise that the Romans were keen to gather up as many Hellenistic treasures as they could when the final, heirless, Attalid bequeathed them the kingdom in 133 bc. Paul Zanker, in a characteristically incisive essay on the subject, suggests that the Romans were willing to include portraits of the Hellenistic dynasts in their collections ‘because they themselves toyed with the idea of a kingship in Rome’. But perhaps it was more that they felt that, in many cases, the craftsmanship and beauty of the art trumped its original context and meaning. Faced with a work such as the Dying Gaul today, we may be inclined to feel the same way. Daisy Dunn Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World edited by Carlos A. Picón and Seán Hemingway The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 368pp £40

REVIEWS

EXHIBITION

The so-called Temple of Concordia at Agrigento (c.440 bc) and Igor Mitoraj’s Fallen Icarus (2011)

Of Greek vases and Byzantine mosaics In 1787 Goethe wrote: ‘Sicily … will for me be an indestructible treasure for my whole life’. The British Museum’s new exhibition endeavours to make claim to those riches. Sicily: Culture and Conquest The British Museum, London, until August 14th, 2016 THE CURATORS of the British Museum’s Sicily: Culture and Conquest, Peter Higgs and Dirk Booms, have concentrated on two key periods in the island’s rich history, namely that of the Greeks (734-241 bc) and of the Normans (ad 1061-1189), with occasional forays beyond this temporal span. The earliest Greek settlers came to Sicily seeking fertile land, space and opportunity, which were denied them in their then impoverished, overcrowded homeland. The largest island in the Mediterranean offered untold natural riches. They set up apoikia, or homes from home, initially around the safe natural harbours on Sicily’s eastern coast and later all around the island. In time these colonies became some of the greatest Greek city states of antiquity, with Syracuse the greatest of them all. Indeed, at its height, Syracuse was so strong that, in 413 bc, its navy defeated the Athenians in the city’s Great Harbour, as so memorably described by Thucydides. Other cities, such as Selinous (Selinunte) and Akragas

(Agrigento) boasted some of the most beautiful Doric temples ever built, which would have been richly adorned with a multitude of votive offerings. These included bronze and marble statuary, beautifully painted vases and simple moulded terracotta effigies of the gods, such as Demeter, goddess of the harvest, whose approbation it was essential for farmers to nurture and maintain. Sicily: Culture and Conquest shows a broad range of such offerings, as well as stunning,

A rich array of tasters, rather than a banquet, but definitely worth visiting. The banquet is Sicily itself intricately detailed coins and jewellery, although the very best Sikeliote (Greek Sicilian) vases are not on show, but remain in Agrigento and Syracuse. After touching on the Romans (Sicily was a chief conduit through which Rome became Hellenised), the exhibition skips 1,300 years to the Normans, who landed on the island in 1061, led by Roger d’Hautville and his brother Robert, a brilliant strategist. Barely 1oo years later, the Normans had left

a cultural mark every bit as splendid as that of the ancient Greeks. Their greatest legacy was architectural, including the great cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale, and Palermo’s jewel-like Palatine Chapel, their interiors resplendent with Byzantine mosaics. Key Norman buildings were largely built by resident Muslim (mainly Fatimid) builders, often incorporating pre-existing edifices. Sicily: Culture and Conquest focuses on the multi-ethnic court in which these buildings were produced. After militarily wresting control of the island from the factious, infighting Muslim leaders (who had first arrived in ad 827), Count Roger of Sicily was politically astute enough to realise that keeping Muslims in charge of tax-collecting and general administration worked well, as, too, did their careful husbandry of the land and sophisticated irrigation systems. The show admirably highlights the Muslim contribution to Norman rule in Sicily. With French ecclesiastics, Greek officials, Muslim administrators and Al-Andalus intellectuals making up Roger’s court and, even more so, that of his son, Roger II, Norman Sicily became the Mediterranean superpower. The art produced in this period reflected this cultural diversity, which Sicily: Culture and Conquest brings to life. One intriguing exhibit is an inlaid tombstone for a noblewoman who died in 1148, which bears inscriptions in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Latin. In mosaics, the Norman kings are portrayed as Byzantine emperors, whereas at court they preferred Arab-style dress, as shown in the surprisingly effective backlit reproduction of part of the Palatine Chapel’s stunning painted wooden ceiling. However, Norman kings also wore their hair long and grew beards, arguably to be seen as more Frankish (or deliberately resembling Christ, perhaps?). The exhibition also shows that Norman kings adopted personal symbols of power which were commonly used in the Eastern Mediterranean, such as the Tree of Life and lions rampant. The beautifully produced catalogue, with over 200 excellent colour images, fully develops all of the show’s central themes. Also rooms 90-91 at the BM are showing some charming, complementary drawings of Sicily’s Greek sites by 18th-century English gentleman archaeologists. Sicily: Culture and Conquest offers a rich array of tasters, rather than a banquet, and is definitely worth visiting. The banquet is Sicily itself, and go there too, if you can. Philippa Joseph JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

ANCIENT GREECE

The birth pangs of democracy Thomas N. Mitchell’s in-depth study of how Athenians made their first strides towards an innovative democracy also throws light on our own failure to elect mature, upstanding leaders.

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HE FIRST democracy that we can study – arguably the first in world history – was established in Athens by a series of reforms that took place between 507 and the 460s bc. Any discussion of democracy is enhanced by engaging with the classical Athenians’ experience. Thomas Mitchell has written an ambitious and substantial history of the Athenians and their polity. He begins three centuries before the 507 revolution led by Cleisthenes and takes the main narrative through to the dissolution of the independent Athenian government by the Macedonians in 322 bc. But the author never allows his reader to forget that the story he is telling – of the Athenians’ intense, trial-and-error creation of the most egalitarian community the world had yet seen – is important because, as Thucydides suggested, human nature being what it is, learning about the experience of people in the past can benefit their descendants in the future. Complete with maps and well-chosen glossy illustrations, the book is lucidly, if somewhat discursively, written and elegantly produced. It is arguably 60 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

too dense and expansive for the beginner in Greek history or political theory, but provides a rewarding workout for the reader who already has knowledge of the basic outlines of the classical Athenian experience. Mitchell opens with a valuable discussion of what we mean by democracy. The current

Thinking about ... our ancestors’ history has sadly never prevented us from making their mistakes definition, which emphasises the electoral process by which people select their governors and confer power upon them, only after candidates for government have competed for the people’s votes, emerged surprisingly recently. No ancient Athenian would have agreed with our notion that the ‘essence’ of democracy lay in open, free and fair elections; for them, the ‘essence’ of democracy was that executive power (kratos) lay in the hands of the mass of people (the demos) rather than

in the hands of a ruling class or dynasty with superior financial resources or education. The Athenian citizens who constituted the demos did elect leaders, usually members of upper-class families. But elections were annual rather than quadrennial or quinquennial and accountability was rigorously enforced. This meant that the demos could quickly rid itself of unpopular generals or magistrates. Moreover, the citizens did not elect parliamentary representatives; they each voted in person for every measure that was put to their parliament, the ekklesia or Assembly. They were also all eligible to serve on the crucial institution of the Council, which was drawn from across the geographical and class spectrum. The Councillors amassed evidence and deliberated motions before they were put to the vote. The Council was perhaps the most inspiring achievement of the democracy, since it required in its ordinary citizen members a grasp of fiscal, financial, military and administrative affairs that would put to shame most modern parliamentarians, let alone regular members of the populace.

Mitchell de-clutters his pages by relegating his (thorough and helpful) textual references, and suggestions for further reading to the endnotes, while sustaining a narrative voice notable for its good sense and humanity. Some will complain that the women, slaves and resident foreigners, who were all excluded from agency in the central political processes of the Assembly, Council and law-courts, are treated too little and too late; others will notice that Mitchell is no less vague than most of his predecessors on the topic of the thetes, the lowest class of voting citizens. But his judgment is excellent and his enthusiasm clear for the undoubted achievement of the developed democracy, which succeeded in including a sizeable proportion of the inhabitants of Athens in its deliberative and executive procedures. Mitchell demonstrates carefully how long it took the Athenians to make even their first strides towards their innovative democracy, despite severe inequalities and extreme vested interests. He stresses that their system was no worked-out ideal imposed effortlessly from above, but a continuously evolving organic response to a series of specific and concrete problems. In these emphases, the most profound point the book makes about our contemporary world is the folly of expecting often recently created states, with no experience of even fledgling democracy, to produce a mature civil society that can maintain free and fair elections within months of all-out war. The ultimate message of thinking with Mitchell about Athenian democracy’s protracted birth pangs is that investigating our ancestors’ history has sadly never prevented us from repeating their mistakes. But what such investigations can surely do is enable us to understand just how predictable some of our own mistakes have been. Edith Hall Democracy’s Beginning: The Athenian Story by Thomas N. Mitchell Yale University Press 368pp £25

REVIEWS

Pericles and the Conquest of History A Political Biography by Loren J. Samons II Cambridge University Press 342pp £19.99

PROFESSOR SAMONS is no stranger to what he (but not all of us) call the ‘age of Pericles’, having edited a Cambridge Companion to that supposed entity and devoted a careful monograph to the finances of ‘imperial’ Athens, through much

of which Pericles (c. 495-429 bc) lived and which he did much to further. But in 2004 Samons wrote What’s Wrong With Democracy? From Athenian Practice to American Worship. It is quite hard to reconcile that attempted demolition of democracy with the much more measured presentation here of the Athenian democracy under Pericles. Yet not entirely impossible. What the Athenians called misthos (political pay) was introduced on the proposal of Pericles to enable even the poorest Athenian citizens to take time off to serve on the juries that were an essential organ of political self-governance within the framework of what the Athenians understood by demokratia. Yet, for Samons, Pericles’ measure was but ‘a policy that had a debilitating effect on Athenian (and later) democratic practice and ideology’. A standard ancient – and modern – accusation against the Athenians’ version of direct democ-

racy was that it encouraged ‘demagogues’ and self-interested rabble rousers. Some ancient writers, notably Thucydides, sought to drive a wedge between Pericles and ‘the demagogues’; others, including the later biographer, Plutarch, drew no such distinction. Samons goes with Thucydides; for him, Pericles ‘was no mere demagogue, manipulating the populace and playing on the electorate’s hopes and fears in order to empower himself’. But, alas, Samons for some reason fails to acknowledge a fundamental 1962 article by Moses Finley, ‘Athenian demagogues’, reprinted in his no-less fundamental and no-less uncited Democracy Ancient and Modern (1985). Demagogues were, as Finley demonstrated, a structural feature of the Athenians’ style of democracy. Pericles was a demagogue, inevitably. It is against that ideological backdrop that the present book must be judged. The reading is well worth the effort. Biography

as a genre and the prehistory of Pericles’s illustrious career (his family had produced the earliest version of Athens’ democracy) are usefully canvassed before Samons embarks on his subject’s opposition to Kimon, his collaboration with Ephialtes and his domination of Athenian politics from c.450 to his death. Two themes rightly colour the landscape more than others: Athenian imperialism and Athens-nurtured high culture and Pericles’ respective personal contributions to each. The secret of his success is ascribed finally to his empathetic understanding of the collective Athenian psyche. Yet, for all its merits, this study suffers by comparison with that of V. (not ‘A.’) Azoulay’s Pericles of Athens (2010). Samons’ strictures notwithstanding, this is a study that properly questions and historicises both the ‘age of Pericles’ label and the validity of any claim to write a ‘political biography’ of Pericles.

Paul Cartledge

JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

EXHIBITION

The Last Judgement, Jheronimus Bosch c.1495-1505.

Naked greed and human frailty exposed Jheronimus Bosch died in 1516, yet his works on the morality of life continue to speak to our sense of human vulnerability. Jheronimus Bosch: Visions of Genius: Het Noordbrabants Museum FROM FEBRUARY TO MAY 2016 the town of s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) attracted thousands of visitors to its anniversary exhibition Jheronimus Bosch: Visions of Genius. The atmosphere was carnivalesque, with banners and posters decorated with Bosch’s distinctive creatures, plants and machines. The town truly embraced its most famous son, born in a house on the market square as Jheronimus van Aken in c.1450, who only later in life began to sign his paintings as Bosch. The exhibition at the Het Noordbrabants Museum expertly displayed 100 items, paintings and sketches, never before seen side by side. There was a sense of pride about a provincial painter, who had travelled little, was not much known in his lifetime, but whose works were collected by kings soon after his death and later by the world’s leading museums. Jheronimus Bosch: Visions of Genius was underpinned by the Bosch Research and Conservation Project led by some of the Netherlands’ finest art historians. This 62 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

work involved research on the artist’s life, re-attribution of works to his workshop and much conservation work on several of the 45 surviving paintings. The Bosch who, since the 1960s, symbolised countercultural expression of repressed desires – his works were popular as posters in student digs – emerged in a wholly new light. Hence a large section of the exhibition offered ‘Bosch in s’Hertogenbosch’: Jheronimus Van Aken was a respectable burgher with a thriving painting workshop and he became member of the elite

Bosch’s works symbolised counter-cultural expression of repressed desires ... [and] were popular as posters in student digs Brotherhood of Our Lady, who celebrated his passing with a solemn mass in 1516. He was considered a skilled painter whose work was displayed in the church – now the cathedral – of St John of s’Hertogenbosch. While Bosch was a man of local professional horizons, his imagination was fed by the universal culture of late medieval

European Christianity. The exhibition included several printed books of Bosch’s times – vernacular bibles, books of the genre ars moriendi (The Art of Dying), Schedel’s Weltchronik – which show how much he learned from these early best-sellers. Away from great centres of artistic production – such as Antwerp, Bruges or Cologne – he was able to develop a distinctive style in composition and iconography, which even those he trained in his workshop found hard to emulate successfully. An interesting section, ‘Bosch as Draughtsman’, displayed several drawings that revealed the stages of creative imagining preceding the touch of paint. Non-invasive techniques showed the process of painting and change: in front of the stunning Saint Wilgefort’s Tripytch (c.1495-1505) Bosch hesitated, repeatedly re-painting the beard on the delicate face of this female martyr. The most exciting section of the exhibition was the display of the well-known altarpieces on the morality of human life: the Wayfarer constantly assailed by moral choices (c.1500-10); human inconstancy captured in the rickety vessel of the Ship of Fools panel (c.1500-10); and the Haywain (c.1510-16), where members of all classes are shown in their naked greed, desperately pulling at handfuls of golden hay, a biblical metaphor for material transience. All this leads them to Hell and, in imagining it, Bosch is at his most creative. Bosch presents Christian life – like Netherlandish adherents of the devotio moderna saw it – as a personal struggle of individual conscience to salvation, within a world beset by unpredictable cosmic struggles. From the distance of 500 years, Bosch’s vision still has the power to disturb in a visceral, immediate manner. The Last Judgment (c.1495-1505), now securely attributed to him, shows peaceful paradise on the triptych’s left wing and hell on its right. But it is the central panel that most intrigues, for chaos, pain and cruelty prevail in it. These are captured most directly by the scene of abject suffering when human bodies straddling a sharp knife are whipped by a servant from Hell. Images such as these lead us to question the distance between now and then: the art of 16th-century religious sensibility speaks to our sense of human vulnerability. This exhibition led us to reflect on Europe’s aesthetic, cultural and urban heritage in challenging and worthwhile ways. Miri Rubin

REVIEWS

MEDIEVAL SPAIN

The ‘learned’ Alfonso X, El Sabio Did the celebrated 13th-century king of Castile really anticipate the Renaissance, or were the great works produced during his reign created in spite of him?

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ROM THE vantage point of today, the patronage of Alfonso X ‘El Sabio’ (‘the Learned’) of Castile (r. 1252-84) seems extraordinary for its time. Alfonso initiated what appears to have been a coherent programme of scholarship in the principal vernacular language of his kingdoms, Castilian, with a variety of works, dated or dateable to his reign, that bear his name. These include a magnificent illuminated compilation on astronomical and horological instruments, a translation of treatises on the virtues of stones, legal compilations and chronicles and a Castilian translation of the Book of Mohammed’s Ladder, which may have inspired passages in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Alfonso’s role as patron of these works is established not only by reference to him in the prologues, but also by several images that depict him as the author. Other aspects of Alfonso’s reign, by contrast, were characterised by considerable political turbulence both at national and international level. His unsuccessful attempts to be crowned Emperor of the Romans were financially draining. In Castile,

his early efforts to consolidate royal authority upset the noble class, a number of whom decamped to serve the Muslim king of Granada in 1273. Alfonso’s later plan to divide his kingdom between two grandsons and his second son Sancho ultimately sparked his de facto deposition in 1282. Such an eventful reign and such a wide-ranging literary

One work produced in Alfonso’s reign ... may have inspired passages in Dante’s Divine Comedy legacy have ensured that the figure of the ‘Learned King’ continues to fascinate historians. Doubleday follows recent Spanish scholars, Francisco Márquez Villanueva and H. Salvador Martínez, in seeing Alfonso’s cultural patronage as a deliberate policy of cultural renewal for a kingdom that comprised vast areas of lands that were recent conquests from Muslim rulers. Yet Alfonso provided scarcely any institutional support for learning and the evidence of the

manuscripts that bear his name suggests they were intended to reinforce his royal authority and imperial ambitions before the elite of Castile. Much has been made of Alfonso’s contribution to the cultural heritage of Europe, but knowledge of the works he patronised beyond Castile seems to have circulated in spite of the king rather than because of him. Latin, not Castilian, was the language of international scholarship and, as Doubleday implies, the contents of Alfonsine scientific texts travelled abroad more as a result of the efforts of scholars employed by Alfonso than at the direct behest of the king himself. Sometimes the argument that Alfonso anticipated the Renaissance comes across as rather forced. On the other hand, this biography imaginatively seeks to provide emotional depth to an account of Alfonso’s reign by using themes present in Alfonsine literary works to elaborate upon episodes in his life. For example, Doubleday considers the aphrodisiac properties of stones described in the Lapidario, a work initially translated when Alfonso was still a prince, in the

context of what is known of his sexual life as a young man. Later, when citing a letter written by Alfonso to his young son Fernando, Doubleday unpacks the nature of medieval parenthood, bringing his arguments alive with reference to children’s toys excavated at the Tower of London and giving them depth by citing contemporary ecclesiastical writers on the subject. This can be illuminating and readers will no doubt enjoy the broad range of sources, Christian and Muslim, which Doubleday cites. But while he is at pains to stress the ‘heavy political agenda’ that underlies later chronicles of Alfonso’s reign, he makes little reference to the equally heavy political agenda that underlay the works the king himself commissioned. As a result, he sometimes reduces complex texts to simple ones. The poems and miniatures of the Cantigas de Santa Maria have an intellectually significant relationship, in which the images gloss the verses with deeper levels of theological meaning (in particular, they reinforce the doctrine of the Eucharist). The literal readings Doubleday provides, while lively, do this relationship a disservice. The works cited in the end-notes reflect contemporary scholarship but these are not signalled in the main text, leaving the reader to guess at their presence. However, the detailed family trees which open the volume are an excellent inclusion. Lastly, Doubleday’s text might have benefitted Alfonso’s editorial eye, to correct a number of anachronistic references, including that he sought to be crowned ‘Holy Roman Emperor’, a title which came about only in the 16th century but which is used throughout. Nor would Alfonso have referred to the Almohad minaret in Seville as the ‘Giralda’, as its weather-vane, or ‘giraldilla’, was added in 1568. Kirstin Kennedy The Wise King: A Christian Prince, Muslim Spain, and the Birth of the Renaissance by Simon R. Doubleday Basic Books 336pp £20 JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

The Work of the Dead

A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur Princeton University Press 736pp £27.95 DO THE DEAD MATTER? This is the central question in this meticulously researched, allencompassing exploration of our mortal remains. At its heart is Diogenes’ suggestion that his body should be thrown to the beasts after his death. Since

64 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

his body would be of no use to him, it is irrelevant to him what happens afterwards. If it does not matter what we do with our dead once life has ceased, then why do we take so much care over corpses? In this intimate and often very personal reflection, Laqueur asserts that we need our rituals to serve the dead to smooth over the rent that is caused in the passing of those we love. The dead make us face our own death, which both horrifies us and separates us. Most profoundly, he says: ‘It matters because we cannot bear to live at the borders of our mortality.’ Covering the western world from the enlightenment to the current day, but delving into ‘deep time’, Laqueur takes an anthological perspective to show how the caring for our corpses is what defines us as civilised. An array of complicated practices help us come to terms with death and give it meaning: funerary meals, death masks,

headstones and memorials. But our methods of disposal of the dead have changed over time, reflecting our shifting attitudes towards them. Burials would take place in medieval churchyards (implying a closeness to God); then in the 19th century celebration of the dead in huge

We remember our beloved dead as we cannot bear their loss ... but we also cannot bear to be forgotten landscaped crematories (with bodies moved to the outskirts of town); then to the early 20th-century crematoria, with their chimneys hidden among the skyline of factories (hygienic, total annihilation of the dead). Burial near relics of bones might save a dead person from purgatory or help them in the afterlife. The bones of the ‘special dead’, such as saints,

were believed to be imbibed with miraculous powers and thus worshipped. Against such idolatry, Calvinistic reformers smashed shrines and scattered bones: on one occasion they were proved right when the supposed bones of St Anthony were found to be a stag’s penis. In the 20th century the incessant naming of the dead became a notable obsession – our need to commemorate in great lists and memorials – the war dead, those who died of AIDS, those who died in the Holocaust. This thought-provoking tome, erudite and finely-written, seemingly encapsulates all past uttering on the dead in our fleetingly short lives. It is also about our own mortality. As Vladimir Nabokov said, ‘our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness’. We remember our beloved dead as we cannot bear their loss. But we remember our dead as we also cannot bear to be forgotten. Julie Peakman

REVIEWS

FREDERICK THE GREAT

Prussia’s blooming and its legacy Tim Blanning produces a scholarly but highly readable biography of the famously autocratic, expansionist and complex monarch.

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IM BLANNING offers a telling comparison at the beginning of this magisterial and insightful new biography. In 16th-century Brandenburg, the Reformation brought a windfall of land to its ruler and, in contrast to England, the new landholding was retained. The long-term consequence was that the Electorate of Brandenburg was transformed into the strong monarchy of Prussia, as Frederick the Great’s two important predecessors (his great-grandfather Frederick William, ‘the Great Elector’, and his father, Frederick William I) brought even more land under their direct control. The king personally owned a quarter of his own kingdom and produced half of the national revenue. Prussia had widely dispersed territories, yet it was a highly centralised state. Its nobility was a disciplined military and administrative class at the service of their king. But Frederick William I demanded an even greater and submissive loyalty from Frederick, his eldest son. When young Frederick reacted against the harshness of

his father’s discipline by trying to flee Prussia, the reaction was brutal in the extreme. Frederick William forced his son to witness the beheading of his best friend and possible lover. There followed years of humiliation until Frederick’s self-abasement earned him a form of independence. However, as Blanning shows, he never escaped his father’s shadow. Certainly the new King Frederick was, on a personal level, free to enjoy the art, music, literature and philosophy that his father detested and he did so with a French-speaking cercle intime that was, in Blanning’s words, ‘both homosocial and homoerotic and, for Frederick himself, probably homosexual too’. But, as a ruler, he was yoked to an autocratic style of government. As Blanning makes clear, Frederick found a ‘route to repairing the damage inflicted by his father: to do what the latter desired most, but to do it better’. Whereas Frederick’s father hesitated to unleash the force of the Prussian state for further territorial expansion, Frederick had no such compunction.

Within months of becoming king, he seized the resource-rich province of Silesia from Austria and Europe was plunged into conflict. Throughout his 46-year reign Prussia was either at war or preparing for it. Frederick achieved crushing victories but, as Blanning describes, quoting from the king’s own surprisingly candid writings, he was prone to gross tactical misjudgements on the battlefield and in diplomacy. Blanning does not spare Frederick. He reveals a man who was callous towards his sadly loyal queen and capable of vindictiveness towards anyone, including his brothers, who he felt had in any way failed him. In everything, Frederick sought control. Rising at daybreak, he went straight to his desk to direct government business. It was the same with his cultural interests: the grand opera house at Berlin was built to his specifications and its music played to his exact direction. Frederick was an autocrat, not a despot. He demanded civil obedience and loyalty, but did not interfere with the individual beliefs of his subjects. Frederick was dedicated to his own enlightenment, but his control meant that he could introduce religious toleration as a matter of policy. Yet, if his own rural subjects and Protestants across Europe wished to regard him as their champion, he was happy to take political advantage, even though he regarded all religion as nonsense. As to Frederick’s own ‘greatness’, Blanning demonstrates an acute understanding of 18thcentury statecraft to show that the Prussian king, with daring and some fortune, created a wholly new European power and with lasting consequences. For, though Napoleon tried, he failed to destroy Frederick’s legacy: Prussia would bloom again. This is a remarkable portrait of an exceptionally complex man, as readable as it is scholarly. George Goodwin

CONTRIBUTORS Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Profesor of Greek Culture emeritus at the University of Cambridge and author of Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016). Daisy Dunn is author of Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet and The Poems of Catullus: A New Translation (both William Collins, 2016). George Goodwin is the author of Benjamin Franklin in London: the British Life of America’s Founding Father (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016). Edith Hall is Professor in the Classics Department and Centre for Hellenic Studies at King’s College London. Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Philippa Joseph is Reviews Editor of History Today and a tutor at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. Kirstin Kennedy’s doctorate studies the manuscripts of Alfonso X ‘El Sabio’ of Castile. She is now a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Julie Peakman’s most recent book is Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore (Quercus, 2015). She also edited Sexual Perversions, 1670-1890 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Miri Rubin is Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. Alexandra Walsham is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning Allen Lane 672pp £30 JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Moving Map I found Dale Kedwards’ article ‘The World From on High’ (History Matters, May) deeply moving. It was a vivid reminder that, despite all the extraordinary technological and scientific advances that have been made since the Industrial Revolution, mankind’s sense of wonder at its place in the Universe remains largely unchanged since the days of the Ancients. What is even more remarkable is how people 700 years ago could create a vision of our world that is still recognisable to us today. History humbles us. Jayne Pelham Hughes via email

Mandate for Murder Rhys Griffiths in his ‘Grand Tour to Kolamskop’ in Namibia does not mention the approximately 75,000 Africans murdered by the Germans when they conquered and ruled the Herero and Nama peoples between 1890 and 1915. More of them died when, at Britain’s request, South Africa defeated the German occupiers during the First World War. Apartheid South Africa then ruled Namibia as a mandate until the Herero and Nama achieved independence in 1990 after much prolonged fighting. Marika Sherwood Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London

Periodical Patriarch Asa Briggs (‘Social History 40 Years On’, May 2016 and From the Editor, March 2016), whose death was announced in March, played an active role on the editorial advisory board of History Today. It was something that was evidently important to him. He helped develop what at its founding in 1951 was an entirely new concept: a serious periodical devoted to history for the ordinary reader. He and the 66 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

Email [email protected] Post to History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH

founding editors, Alan Hodge and Peter Quennell, did so in a manner that allowed readers to both confirm and reshape their understanding of a world that had been so deeply and traumatically challenged during the 1930s and 1940s. In more recent times he supported editors unreservedly and offered both insights, connections and gravitas. In so many ways, he was history today, both with capital letters and without. In 2001, on the occasion of History Today’s golden jubilee, Briggs, aged 80 and recovering from flu, insisted on coming up to London and stood at the lectern to deliver a fascinating 20-minute reminiscence of Hodge, Quennell, Brendan Bracken and others associated with History Today in its early days, then partied until late. (We invited readers who had been subscribing continuously since 1951, and several came, which for me made it a particularly special event.) For Asa’s 85th birthday he came up to town again, this time for a warm and laughterfilled lunch that was attended by all the staff, the owners and many of the advisory board (only the second time it had ever met, if I recall). For me, both occasions were special expressions of History Today as an extended family, with Asa as its patriarch. Peter Furtado Oxford

Place of Error I am writing to draw attention to an error in the photograph caption on page 2 of the April issue of History Today. ‘Sights’ should at best read ‘Sites’. It would be in rather bad taste, in the context of the Holocaust, if ‘sights’ is deliberate, in the sense of ‘Let’s go and see the sights ...’! The German word Ort on the pictured panel translates

as ‘place’ and therefore a more accurate translation of Orte des Schreckens would be ‘places of horror/terror’. John Margettsa via email

Incorrect Correct Before I opened my copy of April’s History Today, I was reading a review of Matthew Plampin’s 2015 novel Will & Tom. The reviewer noted:

As ever with present-day book production, there are small misprints and editorial infelicities which irritate: ‘beings’ for begins (p. 59); ‘gentlemen’ for ‘gentleman’ (p. 154); ‘underway’ for ‘under way’ (p.157); the gravestones were presumably ‘tilting’ not ‘lilting’ (p. 212); and so on.’ After I had finished reading the review I opened History Today and started reading Letter from the Editor, in which you write about the museum in Berlin, the ‘Typography of Terror’, rather than the ‘Topography of Terror’, a computer auto-correct. This put me in mind of the American, Jim, who returned home after a business trip. First he greeted his wife and then had a look in his email inbox. There, he found a mail from his friend and neighbour, Bob, who wrote: ‘While you were away I had a few problems at home and used your wife. I’m a bit embarassed that I can’t tell you to your face, but if you let me know the cost I’ll pay you straight away.’ Jim picked up his gun and went to confront Bob. As Bob opened the door to greet him, Jim pulled his gun and shot Bob dead. Returning home, he looked in his mailbox again and found a second mail from Bob saying: ‘I expect you spotted the auto-correct and realised it should read wi-fi not wife!’ Peter Robert Adamczyk-Haswell via email

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Ahistorical Anarchists By implicitly reinforcing the distorted popular image of Anarchists as shady bomb-carrying loners, Bernard Porter writes ahistorically (‘Too Tolerant of Terror’, History Matters, January). Yes, there was a comparatively brief period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when some members of specific and largely unrepresentative sections of a much more thoughtful, venerable and otherwise peaceful movement turned in desperation to ‘Propaganda of the deed …’. The first of those four words is the significant one. Yet in truth Anarchism is a mature, non-coercive movement with a belief in the efficacy of balance and freedom for human and planetary progress, which it is possible to substantiate. The philosophy has very little to do with the black beards and tattered raincoats so eloquently imagined by Joseph Conrad in his classic 1907 novel The Secret Agent and is one which does infinitely less harm than the governments and corporations without which Anarchists want to live. Mark Sealey via email

Borrow Revived I am writing as Chairman of the George Borrow Society to express our thanks to Colin Sowden for his letter about Borrow published in the March 2016 issue of History Today. He writes at the end: ‘Fortunately, interest in this talented and idiosyncratic writer is beginning to revive.’ In fact, the small but thriving George Borrow Society is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Readers interested to know more about this remarkable figure are invited to visit our website at http://georgeborrow.org. Dr Ann Ridler Wallingford, Oxfordshire

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Reassuringly intelligent. Comfortingly rational.

Coming Next Month Tragic, Wasteful, Futile?

In the 100 years since the battle was fought, the popular perception of Douglas Haig as ‘butcher of the Somme’ has stuck. Haig is considered an inept, callous technophobe who sent his men to be slaughtered. There is no such consensus among historians. As Gary Sheffield writes, ‘Haig faced the same dilemma of every military commander in history: to achieve objectives, he had to put his own troops in harm’s way’. Under his command the Somme was tragic and wasteful – but not futile.

What the Civil Wars Did for Medicine

Some estimates claim that three per cent of the population died during Britain’s Civil Wars, making them one of the most traumatic experiences in the nation’s history. Yet it was during this conflict that Parliament first assumed responsibility for the welfare of sick and injured soldiers, yielding a legacy that included improved medical treatment, permanent military hospitals and a national pension scheme. Eric Gruber von Arni and Andrew Hopper consider the medical legacy of the Civil Wars.

The Bride of the Desert

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Two millennia before the destruction visited on it by ISIS, the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra held a key position on the trade networks that connected the Chinese, Persian and Roman Empires. Unusually located in a wide expanse of desert, it enjoyed a high level of independence. Raoul McLaughlin describes how Palmyra’s unique position brought it prosperity, fortune and, ultimately, ruin.

Plus Months Past, Making History, Signposts, Reviews, From the Archive, Pastimes and much more.

The July issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on June 23rd. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

April’s Prize Crossword

The winner for April is Diane Archer, Macclesfield.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Bettmann/Getty Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © Mary Evans/Alamy; 5 Courtesy Museo di Antropologia Criminale ‘Cesare Lombroso’, University of Turin (Italy); 6 © Dan Kitwood/Getty Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Lebrecht/Alamy; 9 top © Mary Evans/ Alamy; bottom © Bridgeman Images. ARISTOTLE: 11 © Scala, Florence, 2016; 12 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom MS Hunter 231 © University of Glasgow/Bridgeman Images; 13 © akg-images; 14 © Alamy; 15 top © Trustees of the British Museum; bottom © Mary Evans Picture Library; 15 © Edith Hall. BARBARIC BEAUTY: 17 © Jonathan Hession/HISTORY; 18 top Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in The Vikings, 1958. Produced by Jerry Bresler. Directed by Richard Fleischer. Distributed by Bryna Productions/United Artists. Photograph © Moviestore/Alamy; middle © Bryna Productions/United Artists/The Kobal Collection; bottom © Jonathan Hession/HISTORY; 19 © Neil Price. Illustration by Þórhallur Þráinsson, 2012; 20 Clockwise from left: © Bridgeman Images; © Jonathan Hession/HISTORY; © AISA/Bridgeman Images; 21 Map by Tim Aspden; 22 top © akg-images; bottom © Alamy; 23 top, middle and bottom © akg-images; 24 © akgimages. THE MAP: 26-27 © National Library of Australia. OFF WITH HIS HOOD: 28 © Trustees of the British Museum; 29 © Royal Armouries Museum; 30 top © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom © Ken Welsh/Bridgeman Images; 31 © Peter Newark/Bridgeman Images; 32 Clockwise from left: Courtesy Museo Criminologico, Rome, Italy; © akg-images; © Science & Society Picture Library; 33 © akg-images; 34 © Mittelalterliches Kriminalmuseum in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany; 35 © Science & Society Picture Library. RUSSIA’S WAR ON TERROR: 36-37 Courtesy Daniel Beer; 38 top © Alamy; bottom © Topfoto; 39 top © Alamy; bottom © State Historical Museum, Moscow/Bridgeman Images; 40 © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/akgimages; 41 Map by Tim Aspden; 42 © Bridgeman Images; 43 top and bottom © Topfoto; 44 © Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow/Bridgeman Images. MAKING HISTORY: 45 © Bridgeman Images. THE YOUNG JOHN DEE: 46-47 © Wellcome Library, London; 48 top and bottom © Royal College of Physicians; 49 top © Royal College of Physicians; below left and right: Photography Mike Fear, © Royal College of Physicians; 50-51 Photography Mike Fear, © Royal College of Physicians; 52 top and bottom: Photography Mike Fear, © Royal College of Physicians; 53 top left © Trustees of the British Museum; top right: Photography Mike Fear, © Royal College of Physicians; bottom © National Portrait Gallery, London; 54 Photography Mike Fear, © Royal College of Physicians. REVIEWS: 59 © Kate Butler; 62 Photo Rik Klein Gotink and image process Robert G Erdmann for the Bosch Research and Conservation Project/Noordbrabants Museum; 63 The Renaissance of Venus by Walter Crane, 1877 © Tate, London 2015. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 British artillery in the Battle of the Somme, July 1916 © Peter Newark/Bridgeman Images. GRAND TOUR: 70 top compass rose © Antiquarian Images/Mary Evans Picture Library; bottom © Lothar Rübelt/ÖNB/ picturedesk.com. THE QUIZ: 71 The Yellow River by Ma Yuan (1160-1225). Beijing Palace Museum, China. Wikimedia/Creative Commons. We have made every effort to contact all copyright holders but if in any case we have been unsuccessful, please get in touch with us directly.

JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 69

PASTIMES

GR A ND TOUR

H I S T OR IC A L ODDI T I E S F ROM A ROU N D T H E WOR L D

Schneepalast (Snow Palace) Today, the world’s largest indoor ski resort is on the edge of a desert in the United Arab Emirates where, despite temperatures reaching a high of around 41°C, Ski Dubai boasts 6,000 tonnes of real snow, fir trees and alpine-style chalets. Indoor skiing has come a long way since the opening of Schneepalast – thought to be the world’s first indoor ski slope – in Vienna, in 1927. Housed in the city’s thenempty Nordwestbahnhof train station, Schneepalast featured a slope constructed on scaffolding covered with coconut matting and artificial snow produced using soda. An English chemist had found a way to produce fake snow as soft and slippery as the real thing, allowing visitors to ascend the 20-metre slope and ski or toboggan to the bottom. Skiers who ended up face down in the snow reported being able to taste the soda. ‘With a little imagination, you can believe you are somewhere in the mountains’, stated a report covering the attraction’s opening on November 26th, 1927. The event was overshadowed by an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Karl Seitz, the mayor of Vienna. Following the Anschluss in 1938, Nordwestbahnhof was the venue for an exhibition of ‘degenerate’ art. The original building was bombed during the war and eventually demolished in 1952. Rhys Griffiths

70 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

WHERE:

WHEN:

Vienna, Austria

Opened in 1927

Prize Crossword Fleet; common-law wife of George Johnston (6,8) DOWN 1 Mary ___ (1759-97), author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) (14) 2 Johann Heinrich ___ (1728-77), Swiss mathematician and astronomer (7) 3 Robert ___ (1833-99), US lawyer known as ‘The Great Agnostic’ (9) 4 ‘Go down, ___, way-down in Egypt land’ – African-American spiritual (5) 5 Opening words of the Lord’s Prayer (in English) (3,6) 6 Portuguese city, captured by the Moors in 716 (5) 7 Claire ___ (b.1933), biographer of Pepys, Hardy, Austen and 1 down (7) 8 Nine Lollards executed in Suffolk between 1515 and 1558 (7,7) 14 On a ship, a projection attached to reduce rolling (9) 15 ___ Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806) (9) 17 Epistle To the ___, book of the New Testament (7) 19 Sands Of ___, 1949 war film starring John Wayne (3,4) 21 Vivien ___ (1913-67), Academy Award-winning British actress (5) 22 Anglicised term for a viceroy under the Mughal rule of India (5)

The winner of this month’s prize crossword will receive a selection of recent history books Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH by June 30th or www.historytoday.com/crossword

The Quiz

14 Matthew Webb was the first recorded person to do what in 1875?

1 What are considered to be the Four Great Inventions of ancient China?

15 Who, by his own estimation, belonged to ‘the fag-end of Victorian liberalism’?

3 Which famous student of Charles Morton’s dissenting academy was jailed for bankruptcy in 1692? 4 The name of which Greek philosopher means ‘the best purpose’? 5 Who opined, ‘the food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper’ and ‘he who cannot endure red peppers is also unable to fight’? 6 The Charming Nancy brought the first what to America in 1737?

7 What has been known historically as ‘China’s sorrow’?

11 What are Wilberforce, Humphrey, Sybil, Larry and Freya?

8 The words ‘glitter’ and ‘cake’ derive from which language?

12 ‘Zamrock’ describes a style of music that originated in which country in the 1970s?

9 Who was the US Republican party’s first presidential candidate? 10 Who was the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire?

13 A ‘nabob’ was an 18th-century term for a man who had returned, with ample fortune, from which country?

ANSWERS

2 The Eastern Depot was a Ming dynasty spy group. What was unusual about it?

1. Paper, gunpowder, printing and the compass 2. It was composed of eunuchs 3. Daniel Defoe 4. Aristotle 5. Mao Zedong 6. The Amish 7. The Yellow River 8. Old Norse 9. John C. Freemont, in 1856 10. Francis II 11. Cats – specifically, the last five Chief Mousers to the Cabinet Office 12. Zambia 13. India 14. Swim the English Channel without artificial aids 15. E.M. Forster

ACROSS 1 Farnham-born journalist and agricultural reformer (1763-1835) (7,7) 9 French city ravaged by Edward, the Black Prince, in 1370 (7) 10 Term for a proposed IsraeliPalestinian agreement outlined by George W. Bush in 2002 (7) 11 ‘Bring me my ___: O clouds, unfold!’ – Blake, Jerusalem (1815) (5) 12 Orkney anchorage in which the German fleet was scuttled in 1918 (5,4) 13 Member of a tribe originating north of the Black Sea, led by King Ermanaric in the fourth century (9) 15 Ejup ___ (b.1946), President of Bosnia and Herzegovina 1997-99 and 2000-01 (5) 16 Barrymore, Waters or Rosenberg, say (5) 18 ‘___ is essentially the rage of the literati in its last stage’ – Jacob Burckhardt, 1929 (9) 20 Revolution or ___?, 1987 work on the English Civil Wars by G.E. Aylmer (9) 23 Hans ___ (1919-2003), Archbishop of Vienna accused of sexual molestation (5) 24 Marjory ___ (1803-11), child diarist of Kirkcaldy (7) 25 In the Catholic church, to recognise a person’s entry into heaven (7) 26 London-born convict (d.1846), transported to Australia with the First

Set by Richard Smyth

JUNE 2016 HISTORY TODAY 71

HENRY VIII

FromtheArchive Lauren Johnson revisits an article from 2000, which paints a picture of the newly prosperous and peaceful England that welcomed Henry VIII to the throne. It would not last.

Everlasting Glory … For a While THE DAWN OF Henry VIII’s reign was greeted by court writers with almost hysterical optimism. The 17-year-old was hailed as the ‘everlasting glory of [his] time’, equal to Adonis and Achilles and 1509 was to mark ‘the [end] of our slavery, the beginning of our freedom’. As Steven Gunn explored in his article ‘Portrait of Britain in 1500’ (2000), Henry’s accession coincided with a period of revitalisation for his country. ‘Living standards were comparatively high’, Gunn noted: England was under-populated, pastoral farming was thriving, serfdom withering, literacy expanding and an English builder’s wage in the 1500s ‘bought more food than in any decade until the 1880s’. After 50 years of royal ‘depositions, two murders and a death in battle’ the peaceful succession of an (almost) adult male to his father was remarkable. The last time it had occurred was 1413. For all this celebration, life at the beginning of the 16th century was not quite the idyll it appears. Gunn reported that enclosure ‘bred strife in 1500’, which is to put it mildly. Court records reveal contests over enclosed lands spiralling into violence, triggering lawsuits that dragged on for decades. Global horizons had expanded with the discovery of the ‘New World’, but the English remained fiercely protectionist. The ‘devious and crafty means of the foreigners’ were suspected of undermining native industries. Anti-immigrant violence, such as the 1493 siege of the German steelyard in London, suggest that labour shortages and a thriving economy did not put a stop to anxiety. Religious non-conformity was also of concern. Repression of the heresy of ‘Lollardy’ in 1510-2 saw so many public burnings that one contemporary 72 HISTORY TODAY JUNE 2016

joked that the price of firewood had rocketed. For Lollard-hunters, such as the Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, literacy among the low born was not a symbol of progress but a warning sign of heresy and ‘damnable books’ were dangerous items to be destroyed. Unrest was triggered by food shortages as harvests failed in the 1520s and ‘disease killed far more than hunger’. The chronicler Edward Hall lamented that in 1509 ‘the plague was great and reigned in diverse parts of the realm’.

Knowing the turbulence to come, perhaps the 1500s did represent a golden age This could have been the old diseases of dysentery and smallpox, or perhaps it was the new scourge, sweating sickness, which struck down the healthy and wealthy with horrifying speed. The medical knowledge of the 16th century was no match for epidemics, which were symptoms of moral malaise for which the ‘highest remedy’ was ‘penance and confession’. Though the poet John Skelton celebrated Henry as the symbol of the ‘rose both white and red’, there were still many survivors of the old conflicts between York and Lancaster: over-mighty subjects such as the Duke of Buckingham, or Yorkists like the imprisoned Marquess of Dorset and impoverished Margaret Pole. Nor was the literary flurry at Henry’s accession a sign of Tudor popularity. His father’s financial manipulation, local interference and network of ‘questmongers’ (spies) had bred resentment. That the young monarch was aware of this troubled inheritance is clear in the two days of subterfuge

that began his reign, during which his father’s death was kept secret while a coup was launched against his chief ministers, Empson and Dudley. In this period of uncertainty, communities banded together. The ritual year gave an opportunity for expressions of community pride and self-identity, expressed through guildbased performances, civic processions and congregations at parish churches. Knowing the turbulence to come, perhaps the 1500s did represent a golden age. By the mid-16th century, as Gunn points out, charitable provision ‘could not cope’ with the needs of the destitute. By that time welfare support from guild and parish was undermined and the rhythm of the ritual year shattered by Henry’s religious reforms. His reign was to see England severed from the ‘universal’ church of Rome. The next 40 years saw plague, rebellion, military loss and debased coinage. Few today would consider Henry the ‘everlasting glory of [his] time’. Lauren Johnson is the author of So Great a Prince: England and the Accession of Henry VIII (Head of Zeus, 2016).

VOLUME 50 ISSUE 8 AUG 2000 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta