Historia Hoy

May 2015 Vol 65 Issue 5

CRUSADES The Struggle for the Holy City

Plus Germany’s Other Führer / Killers at the Kremlin / Oxford, the Great War and the Rise of Female Students

King in all but name: The Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness, Oliver, 1659.

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editors Fern Riddell, Kate Wiles Publishing 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 7079 9361 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK. Distributed by MarketForce 020 3148 3539 (UK & RoW) and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America). History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246580) is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH, UK.

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD Dr Simon Adams University of Strathclyde Dr John Adamson Peterhouse, Cambridge Professor Richard Bessel University of York Professor Jeremy Black University of Exeter Lord Briggs Formerly Chancellor of the Open University Professor Paul Dukes University of Aberdeen Professor Martin Evans University of Sussex Juliet Gardiner Historian and author Gordon Marsden MP for Blackpool South Dr Roger Mettam Queen Mary, University of London Professor Geoffrey Parker Ohio State University Professor Paul Preston London School of Economics Professor M.C. Ricklefs The Australian National University Professor Nigel Saul Royal Holloway, University of London Dr David Starkey Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge Professor T.P. Wiseman University of Exeter Professor Chris Wrigley University of Nottingham All written material, unless otherwise stated, is the copyright of History Today

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FROM THE EDITOR I AM NOT NORMALLY a joiner, though I make an exception for the Cromwell Association. That is not because I am an unquestioning admirer of the Lord Protector, who remains an almost uniquely ambivalent figure: a fine general, though perhaps not as good as John Lambert, his political rival; an inspiring yet verbose speech-maker; a man of considerable personal tolerance but with an authoritarian streak made worse by an unquestioning belief in providence; and an unswerving commitment to government for the people – administered by his circle of the godly elect – rather than by the people. And then there is Ireland. No, the attraction of the Cromwell Association is that, while being broadly sympathetic to the achievements of the Protector, it rarely delivers panegyrics; indeed, at one recent symposium, one of its more prominent members, a leading scholar of the 17th century, lamented the fact that most recent biographies of Cromwell had been too positive; it was time for someone to call him to account, to present a more critical view of his rule. This makes the Cromwell Association a somewhat different kettle of fish from the Richard III Society, though in fairness the Cromwellians have rather richer fare to digest. Whatever one thinks of Cromwell, his achievements suffice to make him great, which is more than can ever be claimed for the last Plantagenet king. Compare and contrast, for example, the literature produced by the Cromwell Association with that of the Richard III Society. Cromwelliana, the association’s quarterly journal, is one of the more valuable forums for discussion of the crisis of the 17th century, which affected all corners of Britain and Ireland and, in the light of present politics in Scotland, has an especial resonance today. It is a sad fact, for example, that few people realise that what was once called the English Civil War and is now more accurately called the Civil Wars or the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, was actually sparked by events in Scotland. Which makes it all the more shameful that broadcasters such as Channel Four, with a public service remit, could devote hours of their March schedule to embarrassing live broadcasts of the pseudo-medieval shenanigans surrounding the reburial of Richard III – kitsch fit for a king – yet fail to shed any historical light on the current political struggle in Scotland or, say, Britain’s relationship with Europe. Public history? Yes please, but not at any price.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters

Boris Nemtsov • Jihadi Brides • Ivan Roots • Historians for Britain

Killings and the Kremlin

Ruthless or weak? What does Russia’s history of political assassination reveal about its rulers? Daniel Beer HISTORY NEVER really repeats itself but it does provide a (frequently distorting) lens through which contemporaries view the world unfolding around them. When, on February 27th, long-time Vladimir Putin critic Boris Nemtsov was gunned down by unknown assassins a few hundred metres from the walls of the Kremlin, many observers reached back into Russian history for analogies. Most have invoked what is probably the murkiest and most notorious of all the political assassinations in Russia over the preceding century, one that has continued to attract intense speculation and controversy. Indeed, only a few weeks before Nemtsov was shot dead, the Russian historical magazine Dilettante ran a series of articles devoted to the assassination on December 1st, 1934 of Politburo member and Leningrad Bolshevik Party boss, Sergei Kirov. Common to understandings of both the Kirov and Nemtsov killings is the persistent idea that assassinations are a form of political currency in Russia: a means of eliminating rivals, projecting power, shoring up alliances and of blackening the reputation of opponents. A charismatic, committed Marxist, Kirov had been Stalin’s pointman in the destruction of the opposition’s power base in Leningrad. He was shot dead in the Leningrad party headquarters in the Smolnyi Institute by Leonid Nikolaev, a young, disillusioned party member. Nikolaev was arrested and

executed and, in the days and weeks that followed, the Kremlin unleashed a wave of terror against perceived opponents in Russian cities. Kirov’s murder fuelled a swirl of rumour and speculation about Stalin’s involvement, which has persisted to this day. Competing narratives of Kirov’s assassination embrace different views of Stalinist political history. The first is of a ruthless leader eliminating a rival and then exploiting the killing to unleash repression against a host of perceived opponents. Stalin, it has long been argued, saw Kirov as a potential contender for the leadership,

Russian rivals: Sergei Kirov (centre), flanked by Anastas Mikoyan and Joseph Stalin, October 11th, 1932.

A charismatic, committed Marxist, Kirov had been Stalin’s pointman in the destruction of the opposition’s power base in Leningrad

a rising star in the party who, amid the chaos of the collectivisation and forced industrialisation, cut a figure around which discontented elements within the elite might rally. Nikolaev’s fatal shots in the corridors of the Smolnyi Institute were, many have subsequently argued, the opening shots in a carefully choreographed campaign of terror against doubters and dissenters in the Bolshevik elite and a brutal settling of accounts with social and political groups that were to have no place in the new Stalinist world order. Kirov’s assassination thus became the essential piece in a puzzle that exposed the Stalinist terror for what it was: the ruthless and deliberate campaign of a single dictator to crush all resistance and bend an empire to his will. Nikolaev may have pulled the trigger, it was argued, but Stalin pulled the strings. The second, more recent, interpretation is that Stalin did not MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3

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order a hit on Kirov. Nikolaev acted alone, fuelled by a cocktail of personal and political grievances. Fearful, reactive and apprehensive, Stalin lashed out at what he believed to be genuine threats. In this reading of the assassination the fear of enemies, backed by foreign powers, constituted a clear and present danger in the minds of a leadership faced with capitalist encirclement and insecure in its own power. Seized by fears for its own safety, the Kremlin responded to the

Stalin might have exploited the killing ... but Kirov’s death was an opportune pretext, not part of any master plan crime of a lone assassin with a wave of arrests of oppositionists. Stalin might have exploited the killing to move against his opponents, but Kirov’s death was an opportune pretext, not part of any master plan. For all the manifest differences between the murder of Kirov and the killing of Nemtsov, contemporaries in Russia and abroad have reached back into the dark years of the Stalinist Terror to claim parallels between the murky killing of a political ‘rival’ and the political uses to which it was put. What explains the appeal of the analogy? One answer is to consider the role of political assassinations in Russian history: moments when concealed power struggles erupt into the open with gunshots in dark streets and apartment stairwells. They seem to be moments in which one warring party fleetingly reveals its hand. Another answer is that the rush to interpret political killings as flickering illuminations of vast conspiracies has a long pedigree in Russia. Long encouraged by the Soviet state to justify its rule, conspiracy theories have flourished since the fall of communism. Belief in sprawling conspiracies as the real drivers of social and political change has grown amid the Kremlin’s stagemanaged democracy, the repeated 4 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

denial of rifts within the elite and a state media that relentlessly projects the image of Russia besieged by ‘dark forces’ (a phrase with real political currency under Stalin), both within and without. Another answer is that political assassinations have come at moments of great political uncertainty and accelerated change. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881, of Prime Minister Stolypin in 1911, Kirov in 1934 and a rash of assassinations of politicians, journalists and business people during the chaotic years of post-Soviet collapse all took place against a backdrop of political struggle. The controversies that surround the Kirov assassination and currently inform the speculation surrounding the Nemtsov killing capture an enduring tension. On the one hand the ruler is seen as ruthless and implacable, sacrificing allies and eliminating rivals in a series of brutal moves on the chess board of Kremlin politics. On the other the ruler is weak, apprehensive and reactive, struggling to stave off chaos and forever nervously looking over his shoulder at the manoeuvrings of rivals. These are the binaries within which much of our understanding of Russia remains trapped. Nemtsov’s assassination, like Kirov’s 80 years ago, confirms the lens through which we already view Russia. Daniel Beer is senior lecturer in history at Royal Holloway University of London. Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

Jihadi brides journey back to a world without teenagers

Arriving in Syria, three London schoolgirls will find themselves in a ‘medieval’ world where the teenager is an unknown concept. Gillian Kenny THE FLIGHT to Syria of three London teenagers in a bid to become ‘jihadi brides’ has prompted a storm of media coverage in Britain. The reasons for their choice are complex and may never be properly understood but the lure of a bad boy with a gun (and a religiously sanctioned bad boy at that) to girls from devout families should not be underestimated. They are said to now be living in ISIS-held Syria, which has, to put it mildly, very different attitudes to teenage girls than those evident in Britain, attitudes that have been characterised in the popular press as ‘medieval’ in a pejorative sense. With regard to the view of ISIS concerning girls and young women, however, the comparison is not entirely redundant, when one considers certain aspects of women’s lives in medieval Europe. The modern concept of a teenager as we understand it in the West holds little or no sway over there. The term ‘teenager’ itself is a postindustrial construct that emerged in the last century in western nations, most notably in the US. This idea that childhood stretches into post-puberty, when one ‘becomes’ a teenager, is one that would not only be alien to the jihadists of Syria but, until fairly recently, would have been unknown in Europe itself. Although debate still rages over the meaning and understanding of medieval concepts of childhood and adolescence, there certainly was not the same understanding and empathetic attitude towards adolescents and teenagers as exists today. To a large extent, children were seen as ‘proto adults’ and the rush was on to join the adult world. This rush was facilitated and encouraged by the

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age at which marriage was deemed appropriate by the Catholic Church in the medieval West: 12 for girls, 14 for boys. Well-known examples of young brides include Margaret Beaufort, who was married at 12 and became a mother at 13, and Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was married at 15 to Louis VI of France. By the age of 15, better-off girls certainly might have been expected to have a reasonable expectation of marriage. Lower down the social scale, marriage generally took place slightly later due to economic concerns about the raising of a dowry and establishing a household. Certainly though, if a girl was not to be married off young, then from puberty onwards (around the ages of 12-14) she would be expected to work and help sustain the family unit. Young teenage girls might even emigrate into larger cities and towns and work as servants or apprentices in order to save for a dowry and marry. When viewed in a certain light, the three London schoolgirls’ eagerness to become brides as soon as possible – marry a fighting man, set up their own households and bear his children (all tinged with a strong element of religious fanaticism) – is somewhat ‘medieval’ in terms of life goals. They have journeyed to an Islamic state, however, in which these life goals are perfectly comprehensible and seen as

particularly attractive. This (to western eyes) recidivist outlook is reflected in a recently released manifesto entitled Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto on Women by the Al Khanssaa Brigade, which is a detailed exposition of behaviours expected from women and girls in ISIS-held territory. In these lands, the extended childhood of modern western youth, with which the three girls are familiar, does not exist. Childhood

Worlds apart: women windowshop in Aleppo, Syria, 2008.

The journey to Syria for these girls is, in a way, a journey back in time. They will experience modes of living that would have been familiar to women in medieval Europe (for a girl) does not last long at all, as marriage is allowed from the age of nine onwards. Marriage and child-rearing are presented as the normative, indeed required, state for girls and women. Girls and women are entreated to lead ‘quiet’ lives, implying a restriction to gendered spaces which are familiar to historians of women in medieval Europe. The journey to Syria for these girls is, in a way, a journey back in time. They

will experience modes of living that would have been familiar to women in medieval Europe. In the most general terms, for most of our recorded history, wives and mothers were young and their children were required to grow up quickly, much like they are in ISIS. During the Middle Ages in Europe, girls’ and women’s places were deemed to be in those spaces approved of by their men, in the home and around the farm or wherever the family worked. This is the world that the three girls are travelling to; a society in which medieval concepts of girlhood and womanhood reign and which in some ways are even more restrictive than those of medieval Europe. In ISIS there appears to be no room for women to work, for example, or to operate – as they did in the Middle Ages – as femmes soles under the law with attendant rights. These East London schoolgirls are now living under a cultural system that imposes an idea of what ideal womanhood should be that echoes the words of European medieval thinkers on the subject, but which can be even more misogynistic and hardline on female rights than manifested in our medieval past and which clashes profoundly with what being a teenage girl can mean in a post-feminist West. The schoolgirls have discarded an idea of teenagerhood which allows for growth, development, experimentation and amounts of freedom. By refusing this path to adulthood they have chosen another, which is sharper and more brutal. It recalls a time in our past when girls became women almost overnight and were valued for their homemaking skills and childbearing potential. For those three young girls their journey to Syria really is a journey back in time. As in medieval Europe, Islamic State views 15-year-olds as women, ready and able for marriage, motherhood and the rigours of life in the new Islamic State. One hopes that their path has not been too dangerous thus far; judging by what can be discerned from ISIS teachings on women, however, their path into the modern Middle Ages is likely to be both a frightening and disorientating one.

Gillian Kenny is an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies at Trinity College, Dublin. MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Ivan Roots (1921-2015) The distinguished historian of Britain in its turbulent 17th century will be fondly remembered. Stephen K. Roberts IVAN ROOTS, who has died aged 93, was a regular contributor to History Today over a number of decades, especially as a book reviewer. Few historians of the mid-17th century have done more to widen the appeal of their subject to a general audience. He was much in demand as a lecturer to Historical Association branches and to history societies of all kinds. He was lecturing until illhealth overtook him in the last year of his life and rarely declined an invitation to speak to any groups of people with a genuine interest in history. He was born in Maidstone, Kent and won an exhibition from Maidstone Grammar School to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a pupil of Christopher Hill and fellow-student with another stalwart contributor to History Today, Donald Pennington. After graduating in 1941, Ivan was called up into the Royal Corps of Signals and spent the remainder of the war in India and Burma, attaining the rank of captain. After demobilisation he returned to Oxford, but soon found a lecturing post at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, now Cardiff University, where he stayed until 1967. He moved to become professor of history at the University of Exeter, eventually becoming head of the newlymerged department of history and archaeology. He retired in 1986. His best-known work is The Great Rebellion, 1642-1660, which first appeared in 1966 and is still in print today. He was proud of the book’s longevity, which owes much to its readability, clear organisation and humane and sympathetic judgments. It remains arguably the best single-volume, introductory academic history of the English Civil Wars and Interregnum, balancing compactness with a broad scope. Among scholars he will be remembered, 6 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Breakfasting with Oliver Cromwell: Ivan Roots.

too, for his first published academic work, The Committee at Stafford 1643-5, an edition of the order book of the Staffordshire county committee, a collaborative project with Pennington. Later studies of the local administration of 1640-60 inevitably reference this pioneer text. He also wrote a number of influential articles on aspects of Cromwellian governance and was responsible for fresh imprints of two major texts of the 1640s and 50s. In 1974 he reissued The Diary of Thomas Burton, first published in 1828 and an immensely valuable source; in the same year he was behind a new edition of A.S.P. Woodhouse’s Puritanism and Liberty, which contains the most accessible text of the Putney Debates of 1647. Ivan Roots reviewed for a wide range of publications. As well as his

He will be remembered above all else for his enthusiasm and for his support and encouragement of others

work for History Today and History, the journal of the Historical Association, he was a regular contributor especially in the 1960s and 70s to the Observer, the Daily Telegraph and the Listener. Through this last publication, when Maurice Ashley was editor, he became involved in the Cromwell Association. Someone of his approachable, informal and always friendly manner, as well as impeccable academic credentials and enthusiasm for Oliver Cromwell, was invaluable in a membership society and by 1977 Ivan had become its president. His interest in Cromwell lay in what he saw as the complex character of the Lord Protector. Although Ivan’s politics were broadly of the left, he was not a republican himself, still less one who admired Cromwell for his brisk way with parliaments or his resort to armed force. It was the multi-faceted aspects of the period, the challenges and dramas facing the writers and thinkers as much as the politicians, that captured his attention and which he was so successful at conveying to others, whether in print or in a lecture. As one of his students put it, he gave you the impression that he had just breakfasted with Oliver Cromwell. His lecturing style was informal, conversational, homely. His critics, if he had any, might have wished for more by way of factual delivery, but like all successful teachers he knew the limitations of lecturing as a medium for imparting information. His forte was the memorable image, the effective comparison and the telling quotation. Although he willingly travelled the country to deliver talks and lectures, in later years he became more at home in the history scene of south-west England, serving in one capacity or another on the governance of all the significant historical societies of Devon. His later publications, too, reflected his growing interest in the region where he lived for over 40 years and included The Monmouth Rising (1986) and Cromwellian and Restoration Devon (2003). In history circles, he will be remembered above all else for his enthusiasm and for his support and encouragement of others who shared his interest in the 17th century.

Stephen K. Roberts is editor of the 1640-60 section of the History of Parliament.

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Britain: apart from or a part of Europe? The ‘Historians for Britain’ campaign believes that Britain’s unique history sets it apart from the rest of Europe. David Abulafia WHY ‘Historians for Britain’? In many ways the organisation that I and several colleagues have been setting up over the last year could equally well have been entitled ‘Historians for Europe’, for we are not hostile to Europe and we believe that in an ideal world Britain would remain within a radically reformed European Union. We are a group of historians, both inside and outside the universities, who believe that a historical perspective on Britain’s relationship with Europe urgently needs to be supplied at a time when debate about that relationship has become not just lively but heated. As an offshoot of the pressure group Business for Britain, our view is that the British public does need to be consulted about Britain’s membership of the European Union. At the same time, a referendum held tomorrow would leave no chance for the renegotiation of Britain’s position in the EU and an opportunity for that is vital. More than that: renegotiation has to include a commitment by the EU itself to reform its ways and, at the very least, to leave those countries that do not seek to be part of a ‘United States of Europe’ free to rely upon their own sovereign institutions without interference. That might sound like a political manifesto rather than a series of historical arguments. Yet we hold political views that span the spectrum from the right to the left. We aim to show how the United Kingdom has developed in a distinctive way by comparison with its continental neighbours. This has resulted in the creation of a different legal system based on precedent, rather than Roman law or Napoleonic

codes; the British Parliament embodies principles of political conduct that have their roots in the 13th century or earlier; ancient institutions, such as the monarchy and several universities, have survived (and evolved) with scarcely a break over many centuries. This degree of continuity is unparalleled in continental Europe. To some extent you can find it in parts of Spain; but even there, where parliamentary assembles go back well into the Middle Ages, radical constitutional change and civil war have broken many continuities. You cannot find it in France after the Revolution and the Napoleonic era, while Germany and Italy are 19th-century creations, whose political systems were almost entirely reconstructed after 1945. Portugal apart, national boundaries have fluctuated, often wildly, over the centuries; and even Britain has contracted, with the

departure of most of Ireland. But – allowing for occasional coups d’état by Henry VII and William of Orange – Britain has not been torn apart by invasion since 1066. Nor has its public favoured the intense nationalism that has consumed many European countries, even allowing for the independence campaign in Scotland. Fascism and antisemitism never struck deep roots here, nor did Communism (except as a silly fad among student politicians). The British political temper has been milder than that in the larger European countries. Alongside these differences there is a

A challenging relationship: air raids against Germany are planned, 1944.

long history of British engagement with Europe; not just English engagement, but also Scottish (the ‘auld alliance’ with France, most notably). ‘Fog in Channel, Continent Isolated’, the famous newspaper headline, does not represent the real nature of Britain’s involvement in Europe, whether one thinks of the wool trade with Flanders that was such a source of wealth in the Middle Ages, or the English conquests that reached as far as Gascony, the ‘longest alliance’ between England and Portugal or, indeed, in more recent times, the British presence in the Mediterranean that at various points brought not just Gibraltar but Minorca, Corsica, Malta, Corfu and Cyprus under the British flag. British and French guarantees to Poland were honoured in 1939, with the result that we found ourselves in a war to the death with Germany. One way to describe this relationship would be to say that the United Kingdom has always been a partner of Europe without being a full participant in it. After all, until the second half of the 20th century, Britain still ruled over vast tracts of the globe very far from Europe. Becoming European might be seen as a reaction to ceasing to be imperial, or at least to the loosening of ties with the growing Commonwealth. But that is to over-simplify a complex recent history: in 1973 the United Kingdom joined a Common Market and there are many who would have preferred the founders of what is now the European Union to have forgotten their dreams of ‘ever-greater union’ and to have concentrated on making that economic association work better. Historians for Britain aims to facilitate that debate. How one votes in a referendum should be influenced by what sort of new offer is on the table following renegotiation of Britain’s position within the EU. That offer has to reflect the distinctive character of the United Kingdom, rooted in its largely uninterrupted history since the Middle Ages.

David Abulafia is Professor of Mediterranean History at the University of Cambridge and Chairman of Historians for Britain. MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

MAY

By Richard Cavendish

MAY 4TH 1415

John Wycliffe condemned as a heretic The Church Council of Constance assembled in 1414 under pressure from the Holy Roman Emperor to resolve the confusing and embarrassing situation in which the Church found itself with three popes all at once. There had been two rival popes since 1378 and three since 1409. The Council claimed direct authority from Christ and consequently superior power over any pope and succeeded in resolving the papal situation by the time it finished its labours in 1418. Meanwhile, in 1415, the Council had considered, and condemned as heretical, the teachings of the Prague priest Jan Hus and he was burned at the stake in Constance. It also condemned an Englishman whose writings had influenced Hus. Fortunately for the Englishman, he was dead. Thought to have been born in the mid-1320s, John Wycliffe or Wyclif (there are several other spellings) was a Yorkshireman, who studied at Oxford University, became a fellow of Merton College and went on to win a brilliant reputation as an expert on theology. Ordained priest in 1351, he was vicar of Fylingham, a Lincolnshire village, from the 1360s, but spent most of his time at Oxford. In 1374 he was made rector of Lutterworth in Leicestershire. By that time Wycliffe had developed startlingly unorthodox opinions, which were condemned by Pope Gregory VII in 1377. He had come to regard the scriptures as the only reliable guide to the truth about God and maintained that all Christians should rely on the Bible rather than the unreliable and frequently self-serving teachings of popes and clerics. He said that there was no scriptural justification for the papacy’s existence and attacked the riches and power that popes and the Church as a whole had acquired. He disapproved of clerical celibacy, pilgrimages, the 8 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Morning Star of the Reformation: John Wycliffe in a 16th-century portrait.

selling of indulgences and praying to saints. He thought the monasteries were corrupt and the immorality with which many clerics often behaved invalidated the sacraments they conducted. If clerics were accused of crime, they should be tried in the ordinary lay courts, not in their special ecclesiastical tribunals. Wycliffe advanced his revolutionary opinions in numerous tracts. He thought that England should be ruled by its monarchs and the lay administration with no interference from the papacy and the Church. In his On Civil Dominion of 1376 he said: England belongs to no pope. The pope is but a man, subject to sin, but Christ is the Lord of Lords and this kingdom is to be held directly and solely of Christ alone. His opinions gained him powerful supporters, including John of Gaunt,

who intervened to protect him from infuriated archbishops and bishops. He lost some support in 1381 when he denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, that in the Eucharist the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Parliament condemned his teachings the following year, but he was allowed to retire to his parsonage at Lutterworth. The corollary of Wycliffe’s belief that all Christians should learn the faith for themselves was that Scripture needed to be translated into their own languages. His most important achievement was the first complete English translation of the Bible, issued from 1382. Whether he translated any of the Latin Vulgate himself is uncertain and disputed, but there is no doubt of its impact at all social levels. The remarkable number of copies which have survived show how widely esteemed it was. At Christmas in 1384 Wycliffe was at Mass in the church at Lutterworth on December 28th when he had a stroke and collapsed. He had suffered a previous stroke a year or two before and the second one proved fatal. He never spoke another word and died on the 31st. His body was buried in Lutterworth churchward, where it remained until 1428 when, following the orders of the Council of Constance, it was dug up and burned. The ashes were scattered in the nearby River Swift. Wycliffe’s followers were known scornfully as Lollards, thought to be derived from a Dutch word meaning ‘mumbler’, though it acquired the implication of ‘lolling about’ and ‘idling’. There were groups of them at Oxford and elsewhere and some blamed the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler and others, partly on their influence. Some Lollards were burned as heretics and a Lollard rising in 1414, led by Sir John Oldcastle, was suppressed. All the same their influence persisted and Lollard ideas blended with the rising tide of Protestantism in the 16th century. Indeed, Wycliffe has been hailed as the Morning Star of the Protestant Reformation.

MAY 21ST 1965

Death of Sir Geoffrey de Havilland

The man who created the Tiger Moth, the Mosquito and the Comet taught himself to fly and started building his first airplane in 1908. He took off in it for the first and only time the following year after many hours vainly taxiing it around. Going downhill, the machine bumped about on the grass as he increased its speed till it suddenly rose into the air and shot straight upwards until the wings splintered and it fell to the ground in a shattered heap. Geoffrey de Havilland was 27 and far too determined a character to be deterred. Born in 1882, the son of a clergyman, he had trained as an engineer and worked at first for various car manufacturers, designing buses before borrowing money from his affluent grandfather to set up on his own, designing and building aircraft. He made his first successful

flight in his second plane in 1910 in a field in Hampshire, where he flew three or four inches above the ground for about 20 yards. He managed to sell the machine to the War Office factory at Farnborough, which took him on as a designer. In 1912, in a plane he designed, he set a new British altitude record of 10,500 feet. After service in the RAF in the First World War, Geoffrey set up the de Havilland Aircraft Company in 1920 and started producing a light airplane called the Moth, which helped to

Southern man: a statue of Charles of Anjou in the Royal Palace, Naples.

MAY 23RD 1265

Charles of Anjou proclaimed King of Sicily

Determined to fly: Geoffrey de Havilland, c.1925.

The Hohenstaufen dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors long dominated both northern and southern Italy and Sicily, hemming in the Papal States on both sides. The death of Emperor Conrad IV at 26 in 1254, leaving a two-year-old boy, Conradin, as his heir, seemed to offer the papacy an opportunity to end the situation, but Conradin’s bastard uncle, Manfred, took over southern Italy and Sicily as regent. Pope Alexander IV excommunicated him, but he had strong support in Sicily and was crowned king in Palermo in 1258. He went on to take a firm grip, extend his influence into northern Italy and marry his daughter to Peter III of Aragon. The next pope, Urban IV, failed to persuade the English to intervene and then turned to the French, offering the southern kingdom to Charles of Anjou. Charles was the ambitious youngest brother of Louis IX (St Louis), whom he had accompanied on crusade. The new pope, Clement IV, proclaimed him king

foster a growing civilian enthusiasm for flying. The Tiger Moth biplane, which the RAF used as a trainer, appeared in 1931 and the company did a profitable business in airliners. In 1933 it settled at Hatfield Aerodrome in Hertfordshire and went on to make a crucial contribution to victory in the Second World War, most notably with the Mosquito fighter-bomber, probably the most versatile warplane of its time. He was knighted in 1944. Returning to the civilian flying business after 1945, de Havilland’s produced a pioneer jet-engined airliner, the Comet, in 1949. Sir Geoffrey stopped taking any active part in the business in 1954 and it was bought by Hawker Siddeley in 1960. His life was not all glory. Two of his three sons, taking to the air like fledgling eagles, were killed flying. In his autobiography, Sky Fever (1961), he said: ‘Words are utterly inadequate to describe the sense of loss and shock from such tragedies.’ He also felt guilty for the Comet crashes of 1954. Awarded the Order of Merit in 1962, he was 82 when a cerebral haemorrhage carried him off in a hospital in Watford.

and he was crowned in Rome in 1266. He invaded southern Italy, defeated and killed Manfred in battle and had the 16-year-old Conradin beheaded in Naples in 1268. In 1271 he conquered Albania and was also planning to make himself King of Jerusalem. In 1282, however, the rebellion known as the Sicilian Vespers broke out and French officials in Sicily were murdered. The rebels were in league with Peter of Aragon and Charles lost Sicily to him. A tournament in Bordeaux with a hundred knights on either side was organised to settle the dispute, but Charles and Peter somehow arrived there at different times and each went away claiming victory. Charles retained Naples and southern Italy until his death in 1285. Alfonso V of Aragon reunited the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as it became called, under Spanish rule in 1442. In the Divine Comedy Dante pictures Charles and Peter reconciled, singing harmoniously together at purgatory’s gates. MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

END OF THE REICH Karl DÖnitz, Germany's second and last Führer, stands accused of war crimes, Nuremberg, November 2nd, 1945.

Dealing with Dönitz Richard Overy explains why the West’s confused approach to Germany after Hitler’s death damaged its relationship with the Soviet Union.

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HE HISTORICAL SPOTLIGHT on Hitler as the undisputed Führer of the Third Reich has cast a shadow on the beginning and end of the regime, when Hitler was not the head of state. Between January 1933 and August 1934 and again in the early weeks of May 1945, the German presidency was held by two senior military figures. The first was the ageing field marshal, Paul von Hindenburg, whose death in August 1934 opened the way for Hitler to create the unprecedented office uniting president and chancellor under the single word ‘Führer’ or Leader; the second was the chief of the German navy, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who was chosen by Hitler to

be his successor as president after the dictator’s suicide on April 30th, 1945. For historians, the Dönitz regime, which lasted for three weeks in May, including two weeks following the German surrender, is little more than a bizarre footnote to the end of the Third Reich. Yet the existence of what British diplomats called the ‘so-called government’, based in the north German coastal town of Flensburg, marked an important step in the break-up of the wartime alliance of the western democracies and Stalin’s Soviet Union well before the Cold War had become a historical reality. The shadow boxing between the Allies over the status and fate of Dönitz’s regime reflected important differences in the way the two sides viewed the proper way to treat defeated Germany. The arguments hinged at first on the question of how a German surrender should be accepted. The stated aim was the unconditional surrender of all German forces, but German armies in Italy, then in northern Germany and MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

Circles in Moscow suspected that Britain and America were negotiating a separate truce in order to allow the Germans to carry on fighting in the East Scandinavia surrendered on May 2nd and May 4th, 1945 to local Allied commanders, American and British. Soviet suspicions were heightened when Dönitz decided to send the operations chief of the German Supreme Command (the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, or OKW), Colonel General Alfred Jodl, to General Dwight Eisenhower’s supreme headquarters (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, or SHAEF), based in the French city of Reims. He was sent as a representative of what spokesmen in Flensburg continued to call the ‘new government’. The Deputy Chief of Staff of the Red Army, Marshal Alexei Antonov, told British and American representatives in Moscow, on May 6th, that for the Soviet regime the Dönitz government ‘in actuality does not exist’ and would not be referred to as a government. Antonov made it clear that the Soviet side would only accept the unconditional surrender of the German military high command and reminded the western Allies that circles in Moscow now strongly suspected that Britain and America were negotiating a separate truce in order to allow the Germans to carry on fighting the war in the East.

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OVIET SUSPICIONS are easy to understand. Not only did Field Marshal Montgomery’s army group in northern Germany fail to occupy Flensburg and incarcerate Dönitz and his associates, many of whom were on the Allies’ list of war criminals, but when Jodl arrived at Reims, a surrender document was signed early on the morning of May 7th without consulting Stalin. At the Soviet leader’s angry insistence, the West agreed to stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin on the following day in which Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of OKW, signed on behalf of German forces. The Soviet side regarded the Berlin ceremony as the formal and legitimate act of ‘unconditional surrender’. None of this appeased Soviet anxieties that the West would treat the Dönitz regime as the legally constituted government of Germany and might strike some kind of deal with the former enemy. In the Soviet Union the press ran a campaign, almost certainly approved by Stalin, more or less accusing the West of colluding with Fascism. The Soviet Red Fleet journal wrote that a ‘shameful and inglorious’ word had now entered the annals of war: ‘That word is Flensburg and it tarnishes the victory we have won!’ In the days immediately after the surrender no effort was made to wind up the Dönitz government and no decision was taken about its constitutional or legal status. Since Flensburg was in the British zone of occupation, the decision ultimately rested with Churchill and the British War Cabinet. The Flensburg regime announced that the British army had agreed to allow Field Marshal Ernst Busch to assume command of the

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Above: Admiral DÖnitz, commander of the German U-Boat fleet, is received by Hitler, June 23rd, 1942. Right: DÖnitz, having succeeded Hitler as Führer, leaves the German headquarters at Flensburg, May 1945, just before his arrest.

END OF THE REICH north German province of Schleswig-Holstein on May 12th to maintain order and the supply of essential goods for the population: an act that amounted more or less to recognition of Dönitz’s authority. In Flensburg itself thousands of German soldiers were crowded, still in uniform, while SS men guarded the senior ministers. Busch only a week before had been urging Dönitz to fight for the defence of Hamburg rather than surrender the city.

Far left: DÖnitz in the Mercedes once reserved for Hitler, Glücksburg, May 1945. Left: newspaper coverage of the unconditional surrender of the Wermacht at the US headquarters in Reims, May 7th, 1945.

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HE STUMBLING BLOCK to simply dissolving the new regime and arresting its members was Churchill. Orme Sargent, Deputy Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, already concerned that the Soviet side might, in retaliation, put up their own puppet regime in Berlin, as they had done in Warsaw a few months before, wrote to Churchill on May 12th urging him to reach a decision about the future of the Flensburg government, whose chief, Sargent reminded Churchill, was wanted as a war criminal. Churchill’s reply showed him at his worst. He refused to sanction winding up the regime on the grounds that it could assist the British authorities in keeping order in their zone of occupation. ‘I deprecate the raising of these grave constitutional issues’, wrote Churchill, ‘at a time when the only question is to avoid chaos.’ He hoped that Dönitz and Busch would speed up the surrender of German troops rather than forcing British soldiers to ‘go running round into every German slum’ to persuade men to lay down their arms. If Dönitz is a ‘useful tool for us’, concluded Churchill, it would be necessary to write off his ‘war atrocities’. Churchill remained consistently hostile to the rapid termination of the postwar German regime. Eisenhower wanted the power to arrest its members at once and urged the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff to issue instructions for him to do so, but Churchill dragged his feet. The crisis worsened when, on the evening of May 14th, the BBC broadcast the results of an interview conducted by a journalist, Edward Ward, with the man who claimed to be German Foreign Secretary and deputy to Dönitz, Count Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler’s Finance Minister for the entire period of the Third Reich. Von Krosigk tried to explain that, as head of state, Dönitz ought to be regarded as the German sovereign, while the men gathered in his cabinet were the figures best qualified for the task of organising postwar Germany and saving the country from the Russians. Not surprisingly, the Foreign Office protested in the strongest terms that the broadcast was tantamount to giving recognition to the regime by describing it as the ‘German Government’ and presenting von Krosigk as ‘acting Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary’. An angry Brendan Bracken, Minister of Information (and founder of History Today), rebuked the BBC for ‘a lamentable performance’, but the damage was done, encouraging what one British official described as ‘the morbid Russian fear that we may yet do a deal with the Germans to fight Bolshevism’. SOVIET HOSTILITY to the West over Dönitz reached a crescendo in the week that followed, fuelled in addition by Stalin’s suspicion that Hitler had not actually been killed in Berlin and was being shielded by his Allies. ‘These men constitute a Fascist gang’, complained Red Star: ‘They took part in Nazi crimes.’ The government paper Izvestia announced that the unexpected friendliness of the West MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

END OF THE REICH

Above: at the Soviet headquarters in Berlin, from left, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, Field Marshal Georgii Zhukov and General Carl A Spaatz toast the German surrender, May 7th, 1945. Right: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signs the ratified surrender terms in Berlin on May 8th, 1945.

Dönitz confirmed that he had delayed surrender to allow soldiers and civilians to escape the advancing Red Army

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to the Flensburg regime ‘has stunned the conscience of all sensible people’. Eisenhower’s representatives met with Dönitz on May 18th, while American intelligence officers working for the United States Strategic Bombing Survey interviewed members of the government, focusing their efforts in particular on Albert Speer, now Minister of Economics, whose views were wanted on the effect of bombing on German war production. In his interview Dönitz confirmed that he had delayed surrender for as long as possible to allow soldiers and refugees to escape from the advancing Red Army, but he also handed over copies of Hitler’s ‘Last Will and Testament’, which included his appointment, as evidence of his legal claim to be the German head of state. These contacts were easily subject to misinterpretation in Moscow, though they finally convinced Eisenhower that nothing was to be gained by prolonging the existence of the German regime. The following day, May 18th, he wrote to the Foreign Office and the State Department in Washington that the regime ‘was of very little value’ and should be terminated. In contrast to the Prime Minister, the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, agreed wholeheartedly, but he asked Eisenhower to act on his own behalf, ignoring the Russians. Some Foreign Office officials still thought that, in the choice between principle and expediency, the latter made more sense given that German collaboration had speeded up the disarming of German forces and might act as a source of stability.

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ISENHOWER EMERGES from the story as the most sensible of those involved. He insisted that, as the senior military commander in the West, he had to be instructed by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, not by the politicians, and that, despite Eden, the Russians would have to be consulted. The Soviet deputy supreme commander, Marshal Georgii Zhukov, asked Soviet representatives at Flensburg to meet the Americans on May 19th and here the two sides agreed that the Dönitz government would be arrested and its work terminated as soon as possible. Formal Soviet approval arrived on May 21st. It was minuted that Churchill ‘strongly objects to action proposed’, but the Combined Chiefs of Staff gave their approval and, on May 23rd, a unit of British soldiers arrested the members of the Flensburg cabinet. They were sent to the holding centres for major war criminals at Mondorf-les-Bains in Luxembourg (codenamed ASHCAN) and at Kransberg, near Frankfurtam-Main (codenamed DUSTBIN). The outcome perhaps reflected the extent to which Churchill’s own authority was waning by the spring of 1945. This did not end the uncertainty on both sides. The Soviet government continued to worry that the British and Americans might be searching for some way of using Germany as a new ally against the Soviet threat, while Churchill and his cabinet feared that the arrest of the Dönitz government might make it difficult to maintain order, to enforce the disarming of German troops and to combat a suspected underground insurgency. Ironically, many British soldiers and officials in Germany deplored what Geoffrey Harrison, a Foreign Office representative in Germany, called the ‘barbarity and callousness’ of the Red Army in its treatment of the Germans; this reality, he continued, worked to ‘inflame dislike’ of the Russians, while at the same time it inspired ‘toleration and some pity for the Germans’. The Joint Planning Staff were asked to

Top: members of the German government are arrested by soldiers from the 21st British Army group, Flensburg, 23rd May, 1945. Above: German officials under arrest following the seizure of the headquarters of the German High Command by British troops on the same day.

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END OF THE REICH Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, sent one of his cameramen to record the new government at work. Speer later wrote that theirs was nothing but ‘sham activity’, which the victors did not ‘deign to notice’, but the British Foreign Office, while deploring the failure to define the political status of the regime, was interested in its composition and function and received regular reports, including a full account of the personnel following the formal appointment of Dönitz’s cabinet on May 13th. The longer the regime was allowed to survive, the more it seemed that the western Allies might take it seriously, a judgment that suited Dönitz and his colleagues, who were themselves puzzled by the lack of action and the apparent endorsement of their authority, though also keen that some semblance of continuity for the German Reich should be kept going.

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report on May 23rd, on the likely after-effect in Germany of the arrest of the Flensburg government. The group reported back two days later that the termination of the Flensburg anomaly was ‘unlikely to add to the difficulty of the Allies in enforcing their requirements’. The arrests opened the way to what the Soviet side wanted, the formal establishment of the Allied Control Commission for Germany and a formal Allied declaration of the defeat of Germany, which took place a few days later in Berlin.

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HE DÖNITZ GOVERNMENT itself had been a hollow regime throughout. The surrenders were in the end made by senior military commanders, though technically under Dönitz’s authority. The ‘ministries’ set up at Flensburg controlled almost nothing except the immediate area of the town, though this did not stop the regime from giving regular radio broadcasts about German policy until they were terminated by the Allies. Dönitz used one of Hitler’s official black Mercedes cars to drive the half mile from his home to the temporary government headquarters (a converted schoolroom), while 16 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Top: Minister of Economics Albert Speer, DÖnitz and General Alfred Jodl are questioned by war correspondents soon after their arrest in Flensburg on May 23rd, 1945. Above: DÖnitz with, from left, Hermann GÖring, Alfred Rosenberg and Baldur von Schirach during the Nuremberg trials, 1946.

N THE END, the treatment of the Dönitz regime proved a dangerous anomaly for the West. Soviet distrust was embedded in their relations with their western allies through the failure to enforce unconditional surrender collectively, the tacit approval given to Hitler’s successor and the dithering response to the new government once hostilities were finally over. In the West’s defence, it might be said that there were fears that a German insurgency might result from a situation of chaos. ‘Do you want to have a handle with which to manipulate this conquered people’, wrote Churchill, ‘or just have to thrust your hands into an agitated ant-heap?’ Nor was there any precedent for the mass arrest of an enemy regime at the end of hostilities, though this had not stopped the western Allies from incarcerating Hermann Göring once he was caught in early May. The real fear governing British action was the reaction of the Soviet Union, to which Churchill seems to have been strangely impervious. A puppet, pro-Communist regime in Berlin would have created even greater difficulties for the West and, though an unlikely outcome at that point, the ambivalent attitude to Dönitz displayed by the West was a risky policy. As it was, Moscow insisted on action, but not before growing frustration and mistrust helped to foster a mutual hostility that soon widened out into the early stages of what was to become the Cold War. Dönitz was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was released in 1956, dying of a heart attack in 1980 in a small village in north-west Germany. He was, until 2012, the only head of state to have been convicted by an international tribunal.

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013).

FURTHER READING Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970). John K. Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (Andre Deutsch, 1981). Ian Kershaw, The End: Hitler’s Germany 1944-1945 (Allen Lane, 2011). Peter Padfield, Doenitz: The Last Fuehrer (Cassell, 2001). David Stafford, Endgame 1945: Victory, Retribution, Liberation (Little, Brown, 2007).

An Oxford Interlude

The Great War transformed women-only Somerville College. It became a hospital for convalescing soldiers, housed poets and writers and changed forever the fortunes of female students, writes Frank Prochaska.

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SOMERVILLE COLLEGE

N SEPTEMBER 1914 Harold Macmillan, an undergraduate at Balliol College, took the widely held view that the war would be over by Christmas. ‘Our major anxiety was by hook or crook not to miss it.’ He didn’t. Like large numbers of Oxford undergraduates, he signed up in the early days of the war and, like thousands of others, he paid a heavy price for it. In his case he was wounded three times, severely at the Battle of the Somme. He spent the remainder of the war in a military hospital and never returned to Oxford to finish his degree. ‘I just could not face it. To me it was a city of ghosts.’ The war transformed Oxford and its university. Academic life largely ended in the men’s colleges, with a consequent loss in fees and tuition. The local economy also suffered from the dramatic decline in the number of students – nearly 15,000 college men served in the forces and 2,716 of them died. ‘In the face of these challenges’, Malcolm Graham, a historian of the city observes, ‘a different wartime Oxford soon emerged as college, university, and other public buildings filled with billeted troops and wounded soldiers.’ As the casualties mounted, convalescing servicemen could be seen in the Exam Schools, the Town Hall and a tented hospital in New College garden, among other places. The Radcliffe Infirmary joined the Third Southern General Hospital, which in 1918 had nearly 3,000 beds in the Base Hospital and outlying institutions. Between them, they treated some 105,000 patients during the war. If the war was disastrous for the men of Oxford, it

The west wing of Somerville College, requisitioned as a military hospital, April, 1915.

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SOMERVILLE COLLEGE Students at Oriel College, including Dorothy Sayers and Vera Brittain (third row back, first and fifth from left) and Emily Penrose (second row back, tenth from left). June, 1915.

presented an opening for the women left behind. It unsettled the women’s colleges but they seized the opportunity to provide a degree of educational continuity in Oxford. For the first time, female dons were permitted to lecture in the university, coach male undergraduates and plan courses and lecture lists. The chance of academic advancement for women was not to be missed by a progressive institution like Somerville College, which saw itself in the vanguard of female education. Founded in 1879 Somerville was, along with Lady Margaret Hall, the oldest Oxford college for women and the premier destination for intellectual girls.

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ARTIME PRESSURES posed a serious dilemma for individual women in Somerville. Several undergraduates made a hurried exit to volunteer for war service, which left those who remained uncertain about the path of duty. Several dons left to treat the wounded abroad; others took on war-related administrative work; others joined various charities. On top of all this, the War Office requisitioned Somerville as a military hospital in April 1915, which caused considerable dislocation for students and fellows alike. When the college opened its doors to wounded soldiers, Somerville relocated to Oriel for the duration of the war. 18 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

For the first time, female dons were permitted to lecture in the university, coach male undergraduates and plan courses and lecture lists Vera Brittain, a first-year Somerville undergraduate reading English, remarked: ‘It is really splendid – much better as a Hospital than as a College.’ ‘Oxford versus War’ and ‘Learning versus Life’, wrote Brittain of her college days in her memoir Testament of Youth, an elegy for the lost generation of the First World War. She had arrived in Somerville in the autumn of 1914, a tumultuous world far different from her tranquil childhood in Derbyshire. ‘I live in an atmosphere of exhilaration, half delightful, half disturbing, wholly exciting’, she wrote in her diary at the beginning of her first term. She had won an exhibition and, as she put it, ‘tried to forget the war’. She laboured over Greek verbs, joined the Oxford Society for Women’s Suffrage and made friends; she took an immediate liking to the future author and translator of Dante’s Comedy, Dorothy L. Sayers, a third-year undergraduate,

whose crime novel Gaudy Night was set at Somerville. The ‘emergency migration’ to Oriel was something of an adventure for both students and fellows. The Oxford Magazine noted that a former dean of Oriel ‘must be turning in his grave’ at the thought of females in the college. Brittain, who felt the war had made student life ‘more elevated & less petty’, was positive about moving to a men’s college and wrote of the ‘dusty old dons and proctors’ who criticised Oriel for taking them in. ‘One realises at such times the value of men who have sufficient imagination and far-sightedness to be feminists. On the day we come into our own the dons and proctors won’t be shown much mercy!’ Such views reflected the fragility of female education at Oxford, where chaperones were still widely employed and the university denied degrees to women.

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HE FORMIDABLE principal of Somerville, Miss Emily Penrose, was in Switzerland when the war broke out and had to undergo an arduous journey home. She quickly adjusted to the changed environment and made the best of it for the sake of Somerville and women’s education more generally. She ‘gladly

Roland Leighton, December, 1914.

surrendered’ the college buildings and gardens to the military and saw an opportunity in the transition to an ancient men’s college; it was an indication of the progress that female students had made in the university. In her mind the move to Oriel was an historic event that required individual Somervillians to show character and intellectual mettle in the cause of women’s higher education. ‘We have’, she warned her exiled students, ‘to defend against the would be critics a long line of trenches; each student has her bit of the line to keep.’ The weekly magazine London Opinion took a less serious view: A hundred wounded soldiers fill (In days like these one might have feared it) The pleasant haunts of Somerville For Kitchener has commandeered it! But, driven from their loved abodes, The learned ladies find a corner Where once was sheltered Cecil Rhodes, Clough, Matthew Arnold, P.F. Warner! The quads adorned by Newman, Froude, Keble, and other grave professors, Are thronging with a multitude Of ardent feminine successors! The Common Room, which saw contend Logician with acute logician Is proving in the latter end The home of merest intuition! O Oriel, centuries ago To flowing-vested monks devoted, To think that thou again canst show A horde of scholars petticoated!

Vera Brittain, c.1915.

And when thy gallant sons return, Of whom the cruel wars bereave thee, Will not thy fair alumnae spurn Suggestions that it’s time to leave thee? MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 19

SOMERVILLE COLLEGE

‘To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for the first few days very much like paradise’ In fact, Somerville’s ‘petticoated’ feminists were cut off from the few remaining men at Oriel, for they were relegated to St Mary’s Hall, which had been a separate institution and thus easy to isolate from the two other college quads. Indeed, Oriel installed fortifications between the quads to allay the provost’s worries about a ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ incident, a reference to Ovid’s ill-fated lovers. Not all of Somerville’s 120-or-so students could be housed in St Mary’s Hall. A number of them lived in lodgings across the city, including Brittain, who was reduced to solitary tutorials on Pliny and Plato. The war and its effects on her love affair with Roland Leighton, who was stationed in France, soon cast a shadow over her studies. She took refuge in the poetry of Rupert Brooke, which stirred her anxieties and grief, and grumbled that ‘I am going down this year conspicuous for scarcely anything’. By the end of the academic year she had decided to become a nurse, which took her first to the Derbyshire Hospital back in Buxton and then on to London, Malta and France as a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment. In the battle between ‘Oxford versus War’ and ‘Learning versus Life’, the latter had won on both fronts. ‘I, too, take leave of all I ever had’, she lamented. She would not return to her academic studies until the end of hostilities.

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N 1916 the authorities decided to turn Somerville into a hospital for officers. For patients, there were decided advantages. With 262 beds, many of them in tents, the college was not only adjacent to the Radcliffe Infirmary on the Woodstock Road, but its rooms were off corridors rather than staircases, which made looking after patients easier. Moreover, the college founders had sought to create a domestic atmosphere in the common rooms suitable for young ladies, which was perhaps an aid to recovering officers. Several Somerville students volunteered to look after the wounded as hospital orderlies, wheeling out their charges in Bath chairs and organising outings in the country. Had Brittain stayed in Oxford and done this she would have come into contact with two of the great poets of the war, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, who spent time convalescing in the college. In his book, Siegfried’s Journey, Sassoon recalled being deposited in Somerville in August 1916 with a case of gastric fever just severe enough to get him sent back to England from his battalion in France. He was grateful to be relieved from playing any further part in the Battle of the Somme. The relaxed atmosphere of the college was a holiday after the trenches: ‘To be lying in a little white-walled room, looking through the window on to a College lawn, was for

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Robert Graves (front) and Siegfried Sassoon, September, 1920.

the first few days very much like paradise.’ He read Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina, which took his mind off ‘the war to end war which appeared likely to go on indefinitely’. In the tranquil surroundings he felt that he would now be able to pour out some of the poetry bottled up in him. Sassoon’s Somerville poems, which included ‘The Stretcher-Case’, ‘The Father’ and ‘The Hero’, expressed his growing cynicism about the war. ‘The One-Legged Man’, for example, illustrates his desire to upset the complacency on the home front. As he later admitted, it also revealed the suspect pleasure that he took from poetry inspired by the suffering of the wounded: And he’d come home again to find it more Desirable than ever it was before. How right it seemed that he should reach the span Of comfortable years allowed to man! Splendid to eat and sleep and choose a wife, Safe with his wound, a citizen for life. He hobbled blithely through the garden gate, And thought: ‘Thank God they had to amputate!’

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FTER A FEW DAYS in Somerville, Sassoon was fit enough to wander out of the college to visit the Oxford bookshops, admire the pictures in the Ashmolean and call on the society hostess Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor outside Oxford. Though he longed for congenial company, his only unhappiness was the belief that his friend Robert Graves had been killed at

the Battle of the Somme, as had been reported in The Times. He was thus joyous when a friend telegraphed with the news that Graves was alive. Sassoon wrote to Edward Dent, the eminent Cambridge musicologist: Robert has come back! ... Everyone said he was killed ... Isn’t that wonderful and splendid? And I’ve been in England with spots on my lungs or some rot and I’ve been lying on the lawn in sun and the Oxford bells – oh paradise for the poet. Sassoon’s convalescence in Somerville was short-lived and he returned to the front a few months after his hospital discharge. He was wounded at the Battle of Arras in April 1917 and invalided home as a war hero. Declared unfit for further service, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh where he was diagnosed with shell shock, or neurasthenia as it was then known, and famously made friends with Wilfred Owen. Meanwhile, Robert Graves, who was also being treated for shell shock, found himself recuperating in Somerville in the spring of 1917. Sassoon

The cavalry advance at the Battle of Arras, April, 1917.

wrote to Graves at the time: ‘How unlike you to crib my idea of going to the Ladies’ College at Oxford.’ Graves was undergoing something of an emotional change during his recuperation. In his autobiography, Goodbye to All That (1929), he claimed that his first love for a woman took place in Somerville with Marjorie, a probationer nurse and professional pianist; but when he discovered that she was engaged to a man at the front he did not press his case. He found distraction in strolls down the Cornmarket in his dressing gown for coffee at the Cadena. Like Sassoon before him, he often visited the Morrells at Garsington, where Aldous Huxley, Lytton Strachey and Bertrand Russell were frequent guests. ‘I enjoyed my stay at Somerville’, he later recalled, ‘the sun shone, and the discipline was easy.’ At the end of the war he returned to Oxford to take up his place at St John’s College. THE END OF HOSTILITIES saw the arrival of large numbers of demobbed undergraduates in Oxford and pressure to MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

SOMERVILLE COLLEGE to discover that her wartime experience meant so little in postwar Oxford. She wished to dwell on her nursing service and the deaths of her fiancé, brother and friends; but the new generation of students wished to erase the immediate past. She changed her subject to history, began her journey to pacifism and formed a lifelong friendship with the novelist Winifred Holtby. But her resentments and frustrations persisted and found poignant expression in ‘The Lament of the Demobilised’, published in Oxford Poetry in 1920:

Left: Emily Penrose with Professor Gilbert Murray, Somerville, c.1926. Below: Katharine Ludlow (née Wood), who was among the first women to receive degrees, with her husband, Sir Richard Robert Ludlow, in 1921.

return to normality in the colleges. The university celebrations that marked the Armistice soon gave way to claims for compensation on Somerville’s part for dilapidations to its buildings, eventually receiving £2,050 from the War Office. Agreements made in 1915 led Somerville and Oriel to expect to regain their premises within three months of the end of hostilities, but this proved impossible and led to hard feelings. Things were complicated by an event that has come down in the folklore of the two colleges as ‘the Oriel Raid’ or ‘the Pickaxe Incident’. Brittain, who returned to Somerville in the spring of 1919, recalls the story of the male undergraduates who, on the night of June 19th, carried out: A first rate ‘rag’ by breaching the wall between the sexes with a pickaxe. The protective female dons of Somerville were not amused on their way to breakfast to find a large gap had appeared in the masonry, through which a placard had been thrust: ‘oo made this ‘ere hole?’ MICE!!! The following day and night the Somerville principal and fellows took it in turns to sit on guard beside the hole and the legend spread that the provost of Oriel shared the nocturnal vigil. The incident caused embarrassment in Oriel and resulted in a spate of apologetic letters to Miss Penrose, who replied with her customary tact. As Pauline Adams, the historian of Somerville, remarks, it was ‘a dramatic climax to Somerville’s residence in Oriel’. The principal and fellows were relieved to return to their own buildings in July 1919 and took heart from their sacrifices on behalf of female education during the war. Brittain’s return to Oxford was less than happy. For her, as for Macmillan, ‘it was a city of ghosts’. She was pained 22 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

‘Four years’, some say consolingly, ‘Oh well, What’s that? You’re young. And then it must have been A very fine experience for you!’ And they forget How others stayed behind and just got on – And we came home and found They had achieved, and men revered their names, But never mentioned ours; And no one talked heroics now, and we Must go back and start again once more. Like many women of her generation, Brittain was growing increasingly political. Once back in Somerville she decided to concentrate her energies on degrees for women, an issue long championed by Miss Penrose. On this front there was notable success. The war had been ‘a wonderful period of progress’ for the status of university women and fewer and fewer people now openly opposed the prospect of granting them degrees. After all, it was women who filled the shoes of the male dons away on active service and female

students who provided much needed revenue for the Oxford economy. Moreover, the granting of women’s suffrage in 1918, albeit for women over 30, pointed to a glaring anomaly in which women could vote for parliamentary candidates for Oxford University but were still denied degrees.

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LL CHANGED IN 1920 when Oxford admitted women to degrees. (Cambridge did not do so until 1948.) In Testament of Youth, Brittain recalled the day in October when she joined the throngs of young women in the Sheldonian Theatre to see a degreegiving ceremony in which women took part. She paid particular tribute to Miss Penrose who was among those tapped on the head by the vice-chancellor in confused but solemn convocation: What a consummation of her life-work this was for her! I reflected with a feeling of partisan warmth towards the intellectually arrogant college whose Principal, more than any other Oxford woman, had been responsible for the symbolic celebrations of that morning. Brought up in the nineteenth-century educational tradition, she was an academic Metternich of an older regime – but it was a Metternich that the War and postwar periods had required. Her task during those complicated years, of reconciling college and university, don and student, man and woman, war-service and academic work, conscience and discretion, had been colossal in its demands upon tact and

An exchange of letters between Oriel and Somerville following the 'Oriel Raid', 1919.

ingenuity, and probably no woman living could have done it so well. When the first Somervillians received their degrees, the college held a grand dinner in hall to celebrate what the Oxford Magazine called ‘a victory won by courtesy, patience, and merit alone’. After seeing the ‘strange vision’ of a woman in cap and gown, a male student journalist recorded: ‘I realised with a pang ... that I was in the presence of my equal, and Schools assumed a new terror for me.’ Frank Prochaska is a Member of Somerville and the author of Eminent Victorians on American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012).

FURTHER READING Malcolm Graham, Oxford in the Great War (Pen & Sword, 2014). Pauline Adams, Somerville for Women: An Oxford College 1879-1993 (Oxford University Press, 1996). Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet (Duckworth, 1998). Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, Vera Brittain: A Life (Chatto and Windus, 1995). Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (Victor Gollancz, 1933). MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 23

InFocus

Ranji’s Special Guest

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UDGING BY THE CIGARS, W.G. Grace and his three friends, also in blazers and whites, may well have just finished lunch at Shillinglee, the house in Sussex that his fellow cricketer Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji has rented. Ranji himself is not in the picture and we do not know who the members of his entourage are, though the central figure might be one of his Indian prince friends. Perhaps the Englishmen are about to go off and play in a cricket match nearby. It is May 1908 and Grace has played his last game of first-class cricket, in his 44th season, aged 59, only a month before, turning out for the Gentlemen of England versus Surrey at the Oval. So he can allow himself some foolery here, wearing a patka silk scarf round his head, no doubt borrowed from his host. Grace entered the game just as it was transformed by the overarm bowling legislation of 1864. Using his phenomenal eyesight, timing, concentration and stamina, he then invented the modern style of batting, as well as being an outstanding bowler and fielder. In July 1866 he made 224 not out for All-England v Surrey, his maiden century; in 1868 he was the first to make two centuries in one match; in 1869 he scored four centuries in one month. Large of beard and of body – 15 stone in his early twenties – his presence matched

Using his phenomenal eyesight, timing, concentration and stamina, Grace then invented the modern style of batting his growing reputation. In 1871, his annus mirabilis, he scored 2,739 runs, the first time anyone had topped 2,000. In 1873 he was the first to score 100 before lunch and then the first to make 1,000 runs (actually 2,139) and take 100 wickets in a season, a double he repeated for the next five years. So the records went on until, in 1879, he qualified as a doctor and thereafter had to devote much more time to his work. The new popularity of the game as a spectator sport by then could be put down to the coverage it got in the much expanded press, the spread of transport links and the ‘Doctor’, as he was called. It was only in 1892 that he started to play more and regain his form, with another outstanding year in 1895 when, at the age of 47, he scored his 100th century for Gloucestershire and became the first ever to make 1,000 runs in a month. In 1896 he was rewarded with nearly £10,000 from a testimonial and throughout his 24 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

notionally amateur career he was earning much more than any professional through his ‘expenses’. This was the decade that Ranjitsinhji joined Grace in the top rank of cricketers, St Paul to the older man’s St Peter. Born into a branch of a princely family, he was to claim to be the heir to the Hindu Rajput state of Nawanagar, though he had never been confirmed as such by its ruler. However, after learning cricket at a special school for princes, he came to England and in 1892, aged 20, was let into Trinity College, Cambridge as a ‘youth of position’. In 1894 he left degreeless and in debt from trying to live the part of

a prince, but that year he also scored 94 in a partnership of 200 with Grace. It was soon apparent that here was someone taking batting to a new level, particularly with his speciality, the leg glance, an exotic attraction who drew the crowds. In 1896 there was much discussion in the press about whether he should play for England in a test match. The Australians were quite happy and in the second test he made 42 and 93 not out. By the end of the season he had made 2,780 runs, beating Grace’s record; and this included ten centuries, equalling Grace. So the outstanding scores went on through the years. By the 1900s he was driving

more because opponents had learnt to set effective fields on the leg side. He went back to India regularly to pursue his claims to Nawanagar and to borrow money to pay for his extravagances. There seems little doubt that when his form faltered, it was due to money worries. His regular cricketing career really ended in 1904 and in 1907 he was eventually adjudged to have inherited by the British and so became the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, but the unpaid bills continued, including the rent for Shillinglee. Only with the modernisation of his state after 1918 did his money worries end.

ROGER HUDSON

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THE CRUSA

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ADES

This feature contains links to related articles from our extensive archive. They are available at: www.historytoday.com/crusades

In the first of an occasional series in which leading historians tell the story of major events with reference to articles from the archive of History Today, Jonathan Phillips offers a comprehensive account of a compelling and controversial topic, whose bitter legacy resonates to this day.

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URING THE LAST FOUR DECADES the Crusades have become one of the most dynamic areas of historical enquiry, which points to an increasing curiosity to understand and interpret these extraordinary events. What persuaded people in the Christian West to want to recapture Jerusalem? What impact did the success of the First Crusade (1099) have on the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities of the eastern Mediterranean? What was the effect of crusading on the people and institutions of western Europe? How did people record the Crusades and, finally, what is their legacy? ACADEMIC DEBATE moved forwards significantly during the 1980s, as discussion concerning the definition of a crusade gathered real steam. Understanding of the scope of the Crusades widened with a new recognition that crusading extended far beyond the original 11th-century expeditions to the Holy Land, both in terms of chronology and scope. That is, they took place long after the end of the Frankish hold on the East (1291) and continued down to the 16th century. With regards to their target, crusades were also called against the Muslims of the Iberian peninsula, the pagan peoples of the Baltic region, the Mongols, political opponents of the Papacy and heretics (such as the Cathars or the Hussites). An acceptance of this framework, as well as the centrality of papal authorisation for such expeditions, is generally referred to as the ‘pluralist’ position. The emergence of this interpretation energised the existing field and had the effect of drawing in a far greater number of scholars. Alongside this came a growing interest in re-evaluating the motives of crusaders, with some of the existing emphases on money being downplayed and the cliché of landless younger sons out for adventure being laid to rest. Through the use of a broader range of evidence than ever before (especially charters, that is sales or loans of lands and/or rights), a stress on contemporary religious impulses as the dominant driver for, particularly the First Crusade, came through. Yet the wider world intruded on and then, in some ways, stimulated this academic debate: the horrors of 9/11 and President George W. Bush’s disastrous use of the word ‘crusade’ to describe the ‘war on terror’ fed the extremists’ message of hate and the notion of a longer, wider conflict between Islam and the West, dating back to the medieval period, became extremely prominent. In reality, of course, such a simplistic view is deeply flawed but it is a powerful MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 27

FIGHT FOR THE HOLY CITY shorthand for extremists of all persuasions (from Osama Bin Laden to Anders Breivik to ISIS) and certainly provided an impetus to study the legacy of the crusading age into the modern world, as we will see here, calling on the extensive online archive of History Today.

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for spiritual advancement, formed a hugely potent combination. Urban would be looking after his flock and improving the spiritual condition of western Europe, too. The fact that the papacy was engaged in a mighty struggle with the German emperor, Henry IV (the Investiture Controversy), and that calling the crusade would enhance the pope’s standing was an opportunity too good for Urban to miss.

HE FIRST CRUSADE was called in November 1095 by Pope Urban II at the town of Clermont in central France. The pope A SPARK TO THIS dry tinder came from another Christian force: the made a proposal: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, but not to gain Byzantine Empire. Emperor Alexios I feared the advance of the Seljuk honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of Turks towards his capital city of Constantinople. The Byzantines were God can substitute this journey for all penance.’ This appeal was the combination of a number of contemporary trends along with the inspiGreek Orthodox Christians but, since 1054, had been in a state of schism ration of Urban himself, who added particular innovations to the mix. with the Catholic Church. The launch of the crusade presented Urban For several decades Christians had been pushing back at Muslim lands with a chance to move closer to the Orthodox and to heal the rift. on the edge of Europe, in the Iberian peninsula, for example, as well as The reaction to Urban’s appeal was astounding and news of the exin Sicily. In some instances the Church had become involved in these pedition rippled across much of the Latin West. Thousands saw this as events through the offer of limited spiritual rewards for participants. a new way to attain salvation and to avoid the consequences of their Urban was responsible for the spiritual well-being of his flock and the sinful lives. Yet aspirations of honour, adventure, financial gain and, for crusade presented an opportunity for the sinful a very small number, land (in the event, most knights of western Europe to cease their endless of the First Crusaders returned home after The Pilgrimage Origins of the First Crusade in-fighting and exploitation of the weak (lay the expedition ended) may well have figured, March 1997 too. While churchmen frowned upon worldly people and churchmen alike) and to make good their violent lives. Urban saw the campaign as a motives because they believed that such sinful chance for knights to direct their energies towards what was seen as a aims would incur God’s displeasure, many laymen had little difficulty spiritually meritorious act, namely the recovery of the holy city of Jeruin accommodating these alongside their religiosity. Thus Stephen of salem from Islam (the Muslims had taken Jerusalem in 637). In return Blois, one of the senior men on the campaign, could write home to for this they would, in effect, be forgiven those sins they had confessed. his wife, Adela of Blois (daughter of William the Conqueror), that he This, in turn, would save them from the prospect of eternal damnahad been given valuable gifts and honours by the emperor and that tion in the fires of Hell, a fate repeatedly emphasised by the Church he now had twice as much gold, silver and other riches as when he as the consequence of a sinful life. To find out more see Marcus Bull, left the West. People of all social ranks (except kings) joined the First who reveals the religious context of the campaign in his 1997 article. Crusade, although an initial rush of ill-disciplined zealots sparked an horrific outbreak of antisemitism, especially in the Rhineland, as they Within an age of such intense religiosity the city of Jerusalem, as the place where Christ lived, walked and died, held a central role. When the sought to finance their expedition by taking Jewish money and to attack aim of liberating Jerusalem was coupled to lurid (probably exaggerated) a group perceived as the enemies of Christ in their own lands. These stories of the maltreatment of both the Levant’s native Christians and contingents, known as the ‘Peoples’ Crusade’, caused real problems western pilgrims, the desire for vengeance, along with the opportunity outside Constantinople, before Alexios ushered them over the Bosporus

Previous page: A battle between crusaders and Muslims. Left: The Council of Clermont and the arrival of Pope Urban II. Opposite: Crusaders embark for the Levant. All illustrations from Le Roman de Godefroi de Bouillon, France, 1337. 28 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

and into Asia Minor, where the Seljuk Turks destroyed them. Led by a series of senior nobles, the main armies gathered in Constantinople during 1096. Alexios had not expected such a huge number of westerners to appear on his doorstep but saw the chance to recover land lost to the Turks. Given the crusaders’ need for food and transport, the emperor held the upper hand in this relationship, although this is not to say that he was anything other than cautious in dealing with the new arrivals, particularly in the aftermath of the trouble caused by the Peoples’ Crusade and the fact that the main armies included a large Norman Sicilian contingent, a group who had invaded Byzantine lands as recently as 1081. See Peter Frankopan. Most of the crusade leaders swore oaths to Alexios, promising to hand over to him lands formerly held by the Byzantines in return for supplies, guides and luxury gifts.

Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon saved the day. This hardwon victory proved an invaluable lesson for the Christians and, as the expedition went on, the military cohesion of the crusader army grew and grew, making them an ever more effective force. Over the next few months the army, under Count Baldwin of Boulogne, crossed Asia Minor with some contingents taking the Cilician towns of Tarsus and Mamistra and others, heading via Cappadocia towards the eastern Christian lands of Edessa (biblical Rohais), where the largely Armenian population welcomed the crusaders. Local political conflict meant Baldwin was able to take power himself and thus, in 1098, the first so-called Crusader State, the County of Edessa, came into being. By this time the bulk of the army had reached Antioch, today just inside the southern Turkish border with Syria. This huge city N JUNE 1097 the crusaders and the Greeks took one of the emperor’s had been a Roman settlement; to Christians it was significant as the key objectives, the formidable walled city of Nicaea, 120 miles from place where saints Peter and Paul had lived and it was one of the five Constantinople, although in the aftermath of the patriarchal seats of the Christian Church. It was victory some writers reported Frankish disconalso important to the Byzantines, having been Crusades: The View from the East tent at the division of booty. The crusaders moved a major city in their empire as recently as 1084. September 2012 inland, heading across the Anatolian plain. A large The site was too big to surround properly but the Turkish army attacked the troops of Bohemond of crusaders did their best to squeeze the place into Taranto near Dorylaeum. The crusaders were marching in separate consubmission. Over the winter of 1097 conditions became extremely tingents and this, plus the unfamiliar tactics of swift attacks by mounted harsh, although the arrival of a Genoese fleet in the spring of 1098 horse archers, almost saw them defeated until the arrival of forces under provided some useful support. The stalemate was only ended when Bohemond persuaded a local Christian to betray one of the towers and on June 3rd, 1098 the crusaders broke into the city and captured it. Their victory was not complete, however, because the citadel, towering over the site, remained in Muslim hands, a problem compounded by the news that a large Muslim relief army was approaching from Mosul. Lack of food and the loss of most of their horses (essential for the knights, of course) meant that morale was at rock bottom. Count Stephen of Blois, one of the most senior figures on the crusade, along with a few other men, had recently deserted, believing the expedition doomed.

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‘Whoever for devotion alone ... goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance’

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Left: Baldwin I, King of Jerusalem (c.1058-1118), from the Abrégé de la Chronique de Jerusalem, France, 15th century.

They met Emperor Alexios, who was bringing long-awaited reinforcements, and told him that the crusade was a hopeless cause. Thus, in good faith, the Greek ruler turned back. In Antioch, meanwhile, the crusaders had been inspired by the ‘discovery’ of a relic of the Holy Lance, the spear that had pierced Christ’s side as he was on the cross. A vision told a cleric in Raymond of St Gilles’ army where to dig and, sure enough, there the object was found. Some regarded this as a touch convenient and too easy a boost to the standing of the Provençal contingent, but to the masses it acted as a vital inspiration. A couple of weeks later, on June 28th, 1098, the crusaders gathered their last few hundred horses together, drew themselves into their now familiar battle lines and charged the Muslim forces. With writers reporting the aid of warrior saints in the sky, the crusaders triumphed and the citadel duly surrendered leaving them in full control of Antioch before the Muslim relief army arrived.

With writers reporting the aid of warrior saints in the sky, the crusaders triumphed and the citadel duly surrendered

Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem, reconsecrated as an Islamic shrine when Jerusalem was retaken by Saladin in 1187.

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N THE AFTERMATH of victory many of the exhausted Christians succumbed to disease, including Adhémar of Le Puy, the papal legate and spiritual leader of the campaign. The senior crusaders were bitterly divided. Bohemond wanted to stay and consolidate his hold on Antioch, arguing that since Alexios had not fulfilled his side of the bargain then his oath to the Greeks was void and the conquest remained his. The bulk of the crusaders scorned this political squabbling because they wanted to reach Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem and they compelled the army to head southwards. En route, they avoided major set-piece confrontations by making deals with individual towns and cities and they reached Jerusalem in June 1099. John France relates the capture of the city in his article from 1997. Forces concentrated to the north and the south of the walled city and on July 15th, 1099 the troops of Godfrey of Bouillon managed to bring their siege towers close enough to the walls to get across. Their fellow Christians burst into the city and over the next few days the place was put to the sword in an outburst of religious cleansing and a release of tension after years on the march. A terrible massacre saw many of the Muslim and Jewish defenders of the city slaughtered, although the The Capture of Jerusalem oft-repeated phrase of ‘wading up to April 1997 their knees in blood’ is an exaggeration, being a line from the apocalyptic Book of Revelation (14:20) used to convey an impression of the scene rather than a real description – a physical impossibility. The crusaders gave emotional thanks for their success as they reached their goal, the tomb of Christ in the Holy Sepulchre. Their victory was not yet assured. The vizier of Egypt had viewed the crusaders’ advance with a mixture of emotions. As the guardian of the Shi’ite caliphate in Cairo he had a profound dislike of the Sunni Muslims of Syria, but equally he did not want a new power to establish itself in the region. His forces confronted the crusaders near Ascalon in August 1099 and, in spite of their numerical inferiority, the Christians triumphed and also secured a substantial amount of booty. By this time, having achieved their aims, the vast majority of the exhausted crusaders were only too keen to return to their homes and families. Some, of course, chose to remain in the Levant, resolved to guard Christ’s patrimony

Portrait of Alexios I Komnenos, after Byzantine miniature, 11th century.

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FIGHT FOR THE HOLY CITY Top: crusading foot soldiers, from La Vie de Saint Aubin d’Angers, France, 11th century.

and to set up lordships and holdings for themselves. Fulcher of Chartres, a contemporary in the Levant, lamented that only 300 knights stayed in the kingdom of Jerusalem; a tiny number to establish a permanent hold on the land.

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VER THE NEXT DECADE, however, aided by the lack of real opposition from the local Muslims and boosted by the arrival of a series of fleets from the West, the Christians began to take control of the whole coastline and to create a series of viable states. The support of the Italian trading cities of Venice, Pisa and, particularly at this early stage, Genoa, was crucial. The motives of the Italians have often been questioned but there is convincing evidence to show they were just as keen as any other contemporaries to capture Jerusalem, yet as trading centres they were determined to advance the cause of their home city, too. The writings of Caffaro of Genoa, a rare secular source from this period, show little difficulty in assimilating these motives. He went on pilgrimage to the River Jordan, attended Easter ceremonies in the Holy Sepulchre and celebrated the acquisition of riches. Italian sailors and troops helped capture the vital coastal ports (such as Acre, Caesarea and Jaffa), in return for which they were awarded generous trading privileges which, in turn, gave a vital boost to the economy as the Italians transported goods from the Muslim interior (especially spices) back to the West. Just as important was their role in bringing pilgrims to and from the Holy Land. Now that the holy places were in Christian hands, many thousands of westerners could visit the sites and, as they came under Latin control, religious communities flourished. Thus, the basic rationale behind the Crusades was fulfilled. There is a strong case for saying that the crusader states could not have been sustained were it not for the contribution of the Italians. ONE INTERESTING side-effect of the First Crusade (and a matter of immense interest to scholars today) is the unprecedented burst of historical writing that emerged after the capture of Jerusalem. This amazing episode inspired authors across the Christian West to write about these events in a way that nothing in earlier medieval history had done. No longer had they to look back to the heroes of antiquity, because their own generation had provided men of comparable renown. This was an age of rising literacy and the creation and circulation of crusade texts was a big part of this movement. Numerous histories, plus oral storytelling, often in the form of Chansons de Muslim Responses to the Crusades geste, popular within the April 1997 early flowerings of the chivalric age, celebrated the First Crusade. Historians have previously looked at these narratives to construct the framework of events but now many scholars are looking behind these texts to consider more deeply the reasons why they were written, the different styles of writing, the use of classical and biblical motifs, the inter-relationships and the borrowings between the texts. Another area to receive increasing attention is the reaction of the Muslim world. It is now clear that when the First Crusade arrived the Muslims of the Near East were extremely divided, not just along the Sunni/Shi’ite fault line, but also, in the case of the former, among themselves. Robert Irwin draws attention to this in his 1997 article, as well as considering the impact of the crusade on the Muslims of the region. It was a fortunate coincidence that during the mid-1090s the death of senior leaders in the Seljuk world meant that the crusaders encountered opponents who were primarily concerned with their own 32 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Above: Saladin receives the surrender of the Franks after retaking Jerusalem in 1187. Relief from the Museum of the Tower of David.

political infighting rather than seeing the threat from outside. Given that the First Crusade was, self-evidently, a novel event, this was understandable. The lack of jihad spirit was also evident, as lamented by as-Sulami, a Damascene preacher whose urging of the ruling classes to pull themselves together and fulfil their religious duty was largely ignored until the time of Nur ad-Din (1146-74) and Saladin onwards. THE FRANKISH SETTLERS had to fit in to the complex cultural and religious blend of the Near East. Their numbers were so few that once they had captured places they very quickly needed to adapt their behaviour from the militant holy war rhetoric of Pope Urban II to a more pragmatic

Muhammad alIdrisi’s map of the world, with Jerusalem at its centre, drawn for Roger II of Sicily in 1154.

Now that the holy places were in Christian hands, many thousands of westerners could visit the sites and ... religious communities flourished stance of relative religious toleration, with truces and even occasional survive. The Orders were founded to help look after pilgrims; in the alliances with various Muslim neighbours. Had they oppressed the case of the Hospitallers, through healthcare; in that of the Templars, to guard visitors on the road to the River Jordan. Soon both were fullymajority local population (and many Muslims and eastern Christians lived under Frankish rule), there would have been no-one to farm the fledged religious institutions, whose members took the monastic vows lands or to tax and their economy would simply have collapsed. Recent of poverty, chastity and obedience. It proved a popular concept and archaeological work by the Israeli scholar Ronnie Ellenblum has done donations from admiring and grateful pilgrims meant that the Military much to show that the Franks did not, as was preOrders developed a major role as landowners, as the viously believed, live solely in the cities, separated custodians of castles and as the first real standing Jerusalem: Dark and Satanic from the local populace. Local Christian communiarmy in Christendom. They were independent of the January 2011 ties often existed alongside them, sometimes even control of the local rulers and could, at times, cause sharing churches. trouble for the king or squabble with one another. The Frankish states of Edessa, Antioch, Tripoli and Jerusalem estabThe Templars and Hospitallers also held huge tracts of land across lished themselves in the complex religious, political and cultural landwestern Europe, which provided income for the fighting machine in scape of the Near East. One of the early rulers of Jerusalem had married the Levant, especially the construction of the castles that became so vital to the Christian hold on the region. into native Armenian Christian nobility and thus Queen Melisende (113152) had a strong interest in supporting the indigenous as well as the Latin Church. The quirks of genetics, coupled with a high mortality rate among N DECEMBER 1144 Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, male rulers, meant that women exerted greater power than previously captured Edessa to mark the first major territorial setback for the supposed given the war-torn environment of the Latin East and preFranks of the Near East. The news of this disaster prompted Pope vailing religious attitudes towards women as weak temptresses. It still Eugenius III to issue an appeal for the Second Crusade (1145-49). needed a strong personality to survive and, in the case of Melisende, that Fortified by this powerful call to live up to the deeds of their first was certainly so, as Simon Sebag Montefiore recounts in a 2011 article, crusading forefathers, coupled with the inspiring rhetoric of (Saint) which also gives a sense of the city of Jerusalem during the 12th century, Bernard of Clairvaux, the rulers of France and Germany took the cross as well as some contemporary Muslim views of the Christian settlers. to mark the start of royal involvement in the Crusades. Christian rulers The Franks were always short on manpower but were a dynamic group in Iberia joined with the Genoese in attacking the towns of Almeria in southern Spain (1147) and Tortosa in the north-east (1148); likewise who developed innovative institutions, such as the Military Orders, to

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MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 33

FIGHT FOR THE HOLY CITY Gold hyperpyron of Emperor Manuel I Komnenus (1143-80). This image depicts the emperor holding an orb and sceptre and being crowned by the hand of God. Byzantium, 12th century.

Damascus to mark the first time that the cities had been joined with Aleppo under the rule of the same man during the crusader period, something that greatly increased the threat to the Franks. Nur ad-Din’s considerable personal piety, his encouragement of madrasas (teaching colleges) and the composition of jihad poetry and texts extolling the virtues of Jerusalem created a bond between the religious and the ruling classes that had been conspicuously lacking since the crusaders arrived in the East. During the 1160s Nur ad-Din, acting as the champion of Sunni orthodoxy, seized control of Shi’ite Egypt, dramatically raising the strategic pressure on the Franks and at the same time enhancing the financial resources at his disposal through the fertility of the Nile Delta and the vital port of Alexandria.

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the nobles of northern Germany and the rulers of Denmark launched an expedition against the pagan Wends of the Baltic shore around Stettin. While this was no grand plan of Pope Eugenius but rather a reaction to appeals sent to him, it shows the confidence in crusading at this time. In the event, this optimism proved deeply unfounded. A group of Anglo-Norman, Flemish and Rhineland crusaders captured Lisbon in 1147 and the other Iberian campaigns were also successful but the Baltic campaign achieved virtually nothing and the most prestigious expedition of all, that to the Holy Land, was a disaster, as Jonathan Phillips explains in his 2007 article. The two armies lacked discipline, supplies and finance, and both were badly mauled by the Seljuk Turks as they crossed Asia Minor. Then, in conjunction with the Latin settlers, the crusaders laid siege to the most important Muslim city in Syria, Damascus. War in Paradise Yet, after only four days, fear of relief forces September 2007 led by Zengi’s son, Nur ad-Din, prompted an ignominious retreat. The crusaders blamed the Franks of the Near East for this failure, accusing them of accepting a pay-off to retreat. Whatever the truth in this, the defeat at Damascus certainly damaged crusade enthusiasm in the West and over the next three decades, in spite of increasingly elaborate and frantic appeals for help, there was no major crusade to the Holy Land. To regard the Franks as entirely enfeebled would, however, be a serious error. They captured Ascalon in 1153 to complete their control of the Levantine coast, an important advance for the security of trade and pilgrim traffic in terms of reducing harassment by Muslim shipping. The following year, however, Nur ad-Din took power in

The defeat at Damascus certainly damaged crusade enthusiasm in the West and over the next three decades there was no major crusade 34 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

HIS PERIOD OF the history of the Latin East is related in detail by the most important historian of the age, William, Archbishop of Tyre, as Peter Edbury describes. William was an immensely educated man, who soon became embroiled in the bitter political struggles of the late 1170s and 1180s during the reign of the tragic figure of King Baldwin IV (1174-85), a youth afflicted by leprosy. The need to establish his successor provided an opportunity for rival factions to emerge and to cause the Franks to expend much of their energy on bickering with each other. That is not to say that they were unable to inflict serious damage on Nur ad-Din’s ambitious successor, Saladin, who from his base in Chronicles of Crusades Egypt, hoped to usurp his former master’s June 1988 dynasty, draw the Muslim Near East together and to expel the Franks from Jerusalem. Norman Housely expertly relates this period in his 1987 article. In 1177, however, the Franks triumphed at the Battle of Montgisard, a victory that was widely reported in western Europe and did little to convince people of the settlers’ very real need for help. The construction in 1178 and 1179 of the large castle of Jacob’s Ford, only a day’s ride from Damascus, was another aggressive gesture that required Saladin to destroy the place. Yet by 1187 the sultan had gathered a large, but fragile coalition Saladin’s Triumph of warriors from Egypt, Syria and Iraq that July 1987 was sufficient to bring the Franks into the field and to inflict upon them a terrible defeat at Hattin on July 4th. Within months, Jerusalem fell and Saladin had recovered Islam’s third most important city after Mecca and Medina, an achievement that still echoes down the centuries. Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway University of London and the author of Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Vintage, 2010).

THE CRUSADES CONTINUES Jonathan Phillips continues his history of the Crusades in the May digital edition of History TodayÝ, in which he explains how the concept of crusading spread through Europe – primarily in the Baltic, in southern France and in Spain – and considers the legacy of the Crusades, especially their interpretation in the modern Middle East. ÝGet a free trial subscription by visiting www.historytoday.com/app

| SLEEP

Sleep, sweet deceiving Despite the modern obsession with a good night’s rest, more of us are sleeping less. Perhaps we should pay attention to the advice of early modern doctors, says Katharine A. Craik.

SLEEP IS AN URGENT TOPIC for neuroscientists and now more than ever is known about its crucial importance for concentration and memory formation. Despite all this, the western world spends fewer and fewer hours asleep. With human interaction increasingly taking place in timeless virtual spaces, our time spent asleep is shortening and our working days are lengthening, with profound implications for the quality of the lives we lead. In particular, the impact of light-emitting screens upon the circadian rhythms, so essential to well-being, are only just becoming apparent. A similar debate took place during the Enlightenment when artificial lighting offered many people the novel opportuni36 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Detail of St John from The Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno, 1447.

ty to manipulate their hours of wakeful productivity. But the origins of sleep science lie centuries earlier, in Renaissance theories about the body’s sensitivity to light and darkness. The science of sleep was developing rapidly in the 17th century, when rest was regarded as one of the core factors for maintaining good health, along with other essential ‘non-naturals’ such as air, food and drink. Most writers agreed that the optimum quantity of sleep lay somewhere between seven and nine hours and that its health-giving benefits were many and varied. The medical literature of the time however suggests that people – then as now – were

often plagued by slumber’s elusiveness. Since the way to achieve a good night’s sleep was by no means self-evident, a flourishing market developed in handbooks offering hints and advice to insomniacs. In 1637 the physician Tobias Venner suggested a range of therapies to those confronting the unhappiness of night-time ‘watching’, including ‘a good draught of soporiferous Almond milke’ blended with barley, the flowers of borage and violets and rosewater sweetened with sugar. Less conventional remedies included attaching small bags of aniseed to the nostrils or tying slices of bread steeped in vinegar to the soles of the feet. Early modern doctors knew how profoundly sleep (and lack of it) could affect not only the mind but physical well-being more generally. The body naturally purged itself of ‘foul humours’ during the hours of darkness and patients were therefore advised to unblock their own internal chimneys by sleeping with their mouths open. The physician William Vaughan wrote in 1612 that the downward passage of the body’s ‘hurtfull vapours’ could be impeded by thick leather shoe-soles, causing them to rise painfully upwards instead towards the eyes. Sleeping barefoot was therefore recommended. The urge to urinate and empty the bowels upon waking, together with a feeling of ‘sensible lightnesse of all the body’, was confirmation that the night had completed its purgative work. A sense of sluggishness, on the other hand, accompanied by the taste of last night’s dinner, suggested that the business of digestion remained incomplete. Doctors always emphasised that sleep should follow the natural rhythms of night and day: ‘We must follow the course of Nature, that is, to wake in the day, and sleep in the night.’ Sunrise was thought to trigger a chain of irresistible events in the sleeper’s body, opening the pores and causing spirits to spring outwards from the inward organs. Conversely the setting sun heralded the body’s own descent, as heat and blood retreated to ‘the inmost parts of the body’. Night-time therefore seemed to take place both inside and outside the sleeper, the body’s own ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ echoing events in the cosmos. To confound this natural rhythm by over- or under-sleeping was to resist the natural order of things, ‘so that there is made as it were a fight and combat with Nature to the ruine of the body’.

body’s light-seeking spirits and preserving against the odds the body’s own peaceful night-time. If bodies could rebel against the rhythms of nature, the opposite was also true. Early modern physicians were already debating the problems posed by what we call Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). What happens when the morning arrives shrouded in mist and gloom, more an extension of the night than a glorious new day? To the aforementioned William Vaughan, dull weather seemed as dangerous as the corrupted atmosphere of plague time. The best treatment was to expose oneself to the light: ‘It is better to abide either in bed with some light, or to sit in the chamber by some sweet fire.’ Here is the Renaissance equivalent of the UV lamp to fend off the winter blues. Scientists also began tracing connections between the sleep cycles of plants and people. Our current understanding of the human sleep cycle originates in the observations of those who noticed that the lives of plants are governed by circadian rhythms, which determine the movements of leaves and flowers in accordance with light sources in the environment. The human body-clock works along similar principles, as it is designed to be active during daylight and to rest during hours of darkness. Physicians accordingly drew intuitive connections between plants with unusual sleep cycles and people with disturbed sleep, recommending treatments based on ‘sleepy’ plants for insomniacs and ‘wakeful’ plants for sleepyheads.

Early modern doctors knew how profoundly sleep could affect physical well-being

'Untimely watchings' We tend to think of the early modern world as shrouded in darkness, but sleep scientists were in fact already surprisingly concerned with what we now call light pollution. Moonlight was a problem in the absence of effective curtains, as it could mimic the stirring effects of bright sunshine. Staying up late by candlelight, as students often did with ‘untimely watchings’ at their studies, was particularly hazardous. Deprived of the refreshing properties of darkness, the student’s energies were instead pulled constantly outwards to sustain movement and active thought. The exhausted body, full now of ‘putrid and vaporous humors’, was thought itself to resemble an artificially extended day whose life-force shone ever more weakly outwards. Doctors often described the youthful body as a natural rebel against rest, perpetually drawn towards even the weakest sources of light. Achieving rest involved wresting control from the

'Segmented sleep' Perhaps the most surprising feature of early modern sleep, however, is that it was seldom taken in one long stretch. The forgotten practice of ‘segmented sleep’, memorably described by the historian A. Roger Ekirch in At Day’s Close: A History of Night-time (2005), meant that people generally slept at night in two equal intervals, spending up to two hours awake between their first and second slumber. In the long, dark winter months, when the labouring classes may have spent as many as 14 hours in bed, broken sleep was regarded as routine and natural and only disappeared in Europe with the advent of artificial lighting. The first sleep, regarded as the most indispensable and restorative, was followed by a period of ‘watching’, a state of quiet, dark and often prayerful meditation, before the second sleep led towards dawn. In the middle of the night people made love, stoked the fire or even caught up on household chores. This period of mindful night-time wakefulness was quite different from the hazardous practice of extending the evening by working into the small hours. Perhaps because it took place largely in the dark, it was associated instead with rest, recuperation and reflection. The questions currently debated by sleep scientists, especially regarding the impact of light and darkness upon our well-being, do not begin with the advent of artificial lighting in the industrial age but rather in the more distant early modern period. Venner’s advice still rings true today: ‘If therefore ye desire peaceable and comfortable rest, live soberly, eschew crudity, and embrace tranquillity of minde.’ Katharine A. Craik is reader in English Literature (1550-1700) at Oxford Brookes University. Her Watching project is at www.watching.eca.ed.ac.uk MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

MakingHistory There is no shortage of commentators and experts to help guide us through our troubled world. But, asks Mathew Lyons, should historians do more to join in this global conversation?

Taking history out into the world MY EYES were caught the other week by a news story in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which reported an interview with the Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. Defending his country against accusations of antisemitism, Zarif cited, among other things, the role of Cyrus the Great, who led Persia in the mid-sixth century bc, in rescuing the Jewish people from Babylon. It is not often that politicians reach quite so far back in history for their examples. Indeed, as a rule, few politicians are much interested in history at all. It is a reminder that history – of peoples, of nations, of empires, of cultures – is perhaps more politically salient now than it has been for a very long time. Across the Middle East the nation states largely created by colonial powers in the last century are being pulled apart by social and ideological forces that long pre-date colonialism. ISIS avowedly pursues the fantasy of an idealised Caliphate in the Arab dust that would be laughable if it weren’t so steeped in blood. Putin’s neo-imperial Russia is looking hungrily at its old territories in Ukraine and elsewhere. Nationalist parties across Europe are on the rise, peddling dubious rhetorical tropes dressed up as calls to ancient liberties. The UK itself is straining under the force of Scottish nationalism and the national British parties’ confused and inept response. The past is everywhere in the present. I cannot recall a time in which people have looked forward more to the past or to an idea of the past that offers some kind of Utopian escape from the difficulties of the global now. The news media are not short of political pundits and commentators to chew over the bones of these issues. But where, in the public sphere, are the historians? 38 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Perhaps what we need is an organisation that, like History Today, loudly asserts and argues the value of history Surely now more than ever we need historians to be a part of national and international debate – of public life – to provide informed insight and, perhaps more importantly, an informed doubt that challenges the pseudo-pious certainties others hold about the past. The quality of doubt shows public life at its lowest point: the media’s fondness for talking points and for facts so trite they are indistinguishable from factoids makes it difficult for individual historians to cut through. History resists simplicity, we know. But how can the public reach us; or, how can we reach the public? There is no lack of hunger for seriousness, for intellectual challenge in

A world to survey: The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich, 1818.

public life. Look at the phenomenal success of the TED talks. Why are there so few forums for historians to foster and inspire debate? Are we too used to talking to ourselves in a language designed to exclude non-specialists, to engaging only with like-minded men and women focusing on ever-smaller disciplines and sub-disciplines? Or is the problem elsewhere? For all the modish talk of public history in faculties up and down the country, very little is actually being done at a significant public level. Most people’s idea of a public historian would probably be David Starkey. Starkey is among our finest historians but too often in his appearances on Question Time he seems cast in the role of an irascible don escaped from a minor piece by Terence Rattigan. That is not good for anyone. Perhaps, though, the problem is organisational as well as cultural. Perhaps what we need is an organisation that, like History Today, loudly asserts and argues the value of history – an Institute of Public History or similar. It would be both think tank and bully pulpit, organising debates and talks on current issues and aggressively pushing them out into the world as TED does, across all media. It would be a platform from which historians could challenge the mendacity of politicians and the banality of media alike. It would push back against the glib simplifications that make decision-makers sleep easier at night. It would take the public seriously and offer seriousness and intelligence in return. After all, intelligence – in its old sense of information – is the lifeblood of a democracy. It is our duty to take our wares out into the public square. The people need us. Mathew Lyons is author of The Favourite: Ralegh and His Queen (Constable & Robinson, 2011).

FRANCIS I

Le roi-chevalier

For the 500th anniversary of the king’s accession in 1515, Glenn Richardson explores the life and personality of Francis I, one of the greatest French monarchs.

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HIS BIG BOY will ruin everything’, so Louis XII of France is reported to have said, on more than one occasion, of his own son-in-law and putative successor: not exactly a ringing endorsement. The young nobleman whom the king disparaged was Francis of Angoulême, Duke of Valois. The royal quip expressed Louis’s fear that he would have no son of his own to inherit the throne and that Francis’ charismatic and impulsive personality would cast into shadow (and perhaps hazard) all that Louis had achieved during his own reign. At times it seemed that Francis might, indeed, have ruined everything. Nineteenth-century historians of his reign often scorned him for allowing a supposedly libidinous and erratic disposition to distract him from the principal tasks of kingship. Yet, 500 years after his accession, if there is one king of France before Louis XIV that the French people remember – and with affection – it is Francis I. Francis was born on September 12th, 1494, the son of Charles d’Orléans, comte d’Angoulême, and Louise de Savoie. His father died when Francis was only a year old and, when Louis d’Orléans became king in 1498, Francis was the new monarch’s nearest male relative. Given this situation, his education was seen as doubly important and was overseen by his mother. Alongside his older sister, Marguerite, Francis was taught some form of the fashionable studia humanitatis of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, ethics and history, alongside the many military and equestrian skills he was expected to acquire as a young nobleman. Louise’s ambitions for her son were truly imperial. She called him ‘my Caesar’ and devoted herself to preparing him to wear the crown, which she was convinced would be his not only by divine right but by divine intervention. And so it seemed to prove.

FRANCIS WAS BETROTHED to Louis XII’s eldest daughter, Claude de France, in May 1506. Two years later he moved to court, was acknowledged as heir presumptive with the courtesy title of ‘dauphin’ and soon attracted attention throughout France and beyond. Tall, handsome and engaging, the newcomer annoyed the king and delighted just about everybody else. Francis began an informal royal apprenticeship and joined the king’s council. He made his debut in war in 1512, as titular commander against the English invasion of Guyenne, although the campaign was actually directed by Odet de Foix, seigneur de Lautrec. Francis married Claude in May 1514 Francis I styled as and, in October of the same year, Louis a Roman deity, XII married the young and beautiful by Nicholas Belin, Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry 16th century. MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

FRANCIS I

His youth, personal charisma, love of hunting and extravagant, playful entertainment seemed to promise good times for all VIII. Had she conceived a son, all Francis’ hopes would have been dashed. Yet, less than three months after his marriage, Louis XII was dead and the 20-year-old Francis was proclaimed king of France on January 1st, 1515. Francis’ accession was greeted joyously by the majority of the French nobility. His youth, personal charisma, love of hunting and extravagant, playful entertainment seemed to promise good times for all, even if some older heads wondered how and when the new king would settle to the less exciting aspects of government. His primary ambition was to make his name internationally as a great French monarch by securing the dynastic claims of all his predecessors, particularly to the Duchy of Milan, lost by Louis in 1512. He inherited Charles VIII’s claim to the Kingdom of Naples, which included Sicily and most of southern Italy. He claimed certain territories along the ill-defined border between France, the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire, whose Habsburg overlord was the future emperor, Charles V. Francis also wanted the city of Tournai, conquered by Henry VIII in 1513, to be returned to France. For roughly 20 of his 32 years as king, Francis was preparing for war, active in it, or managing its consequences in expensive and convoluted diplomacy. It had all started splendidly. Barely nine months after his accession, in September 1515, Francis conquered Milan, after defeating a Swiss mercenary army at the battle of Marignano. The news spread rapidly and propelled Francis 40 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Left: Francis I by Jean Clouet, 1526. Right: Charles V by Christoph Amberger, 16th century.

to fame as western Europe’s foremost military leader. This success thrilled the French nobility and it seemed to confirm that, in Francis, it had found a king who really knew how to serve French interests. In return, the nobility as a whole was prepared to support Francis enthusiastically. He secured this prominence through peace treaties and alliances, culminating in his inclusion in the ‘Universal Peace’ of 1518, agreed in the name of Pope Leo X but actually organised under the auspices of Henry VIII, who felt a keen and life-long rivalry with Francis.

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OPING TO CAPITALISE on Henry’s evident desire for European prominence, Francis agreed to inaugurate their 1518 alliance personally at a meeting in June 1520, known subsequently as the Field of the Cloth of Gold. There, by a display of his personal prowess and his kingdom’s wealth, Francis had hoped to impress and intimidate Henry into committing himself as an ally against Charles V, whose power in Italy unnerved Francis. In the short term at least, Francis was disappointed of his hopes. He made an ill-advised pre-emptive strike against imperial territory in the Netherlands and Spain in early 1521. The emperor counter-attacked and Francis tried unsuccessfully to present himself as the victim of this aggression. The war which followed, into which Henry was rapidly drawn, saw the loss of Milan in 1521. Francis also provoked internal dissension in a row with his most

powerful subject, Charles III, duc de Bourbon, who rebelled against him in 1523. The revolt itself was a fiasco and Bourbon fled the realm to enter Charles V’s service, but it was an unwelcome development as Francis struggled to regain territory lost to the emperor. Francis’ effort to retake Milan began well enough in late 1524 but ended catastrophically at the Battle of Pavia in February 1525, in which many prominent members of the French nobility were killed and the king was forced to surrender on the battlefield. Francis was taken to Spain as the emperor’s prisoner. France was left vulnerable to its enemies and to internal dissent, which Louise de Savoie, as her son’s regent, had much to do to overcome while trying to secure Francis’ release. She immediately sought the assistance of the English and sympathetic Italian states, who were wary of the immense power of Charles V in the wake of his triumph at Pavia.

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FTER MONTHS of wrangling, Francis was forced to sign the humiliating treaty of Madrid, in early 1526, in order to obtain his freedom. He was required to cede all Charles’ territorial claims and to marry the emperor’s sister. Much of the negotiation of this treaty had been undertaken by his sister Marguerite and the king’s childhood companion, fellow-soldier and confidant, Anne de Montmorency. Yet, as they knew, Francis’ alliance with Henry, rapidly and expensively renewed by Louise, would now pay real dividends. Disappointed by Charles V’s lack of support for his own claim to France, Henry once more turned the tables on the emperor. A renewed AngloFrench alliance enabled Francis to repudiate the treaty of Madrid and led indirectly to a more acceptable agreement, called the Peace of the Ladies, eventually negotiated by Francis’ mother and Charles’ aunt in 1529. Indebted to Henry, both literally and metaphorically, but always annoyed by his incessant demands, Francis maintained peace with his English counterpart until 1542. Their alliance was helpful for him in fighting another war against Charles in 1536. A brief entente cordiale of sorts between the protagonists followed, by which Francis expected to secure Milan for his dynasty once more. Disappointed finally of these hopes, Francis fought one last war with Charles (who was once again allied to Henry) from 1542 to 1546, during which Boulogne was conquered by the English. Had he lived beyond the next year, Francis would almost certainly have been at war again before long.

Top: Francis I with his mother, Lousie de Savoie, and his sister, Marguerite d’Angoulême, in adoration of Christ, 16th century. Left: Coin of Francis I by Cellini, 1537.

FRANCIS WAS NEVER ONE of his kingdom’s greatest military geniuses. In the 1520s he often made war ineffectively but, aided by Anne de Montmorency, whom he made Constable of France in 1538, Francis was more tactically successful in his later wars. He never finally secured Milan from Charles but he did, nevertheless, maintain his dynastic rights against the emperor’s potentially overwhelming power. This he did in part by allying with the papacy, with various Italian states, with the heretical Henry VIII and with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent. These last two alliances scandalised Catholic Europe, but keeping Charles’ enemies close for as long as he could assisted Francis in projecting royal power well beyond the borders of the French state throughout his reign. Another important factor in Francis’ capacity to project this power was his widespread reform of crown fiscal MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

FRANCIS I administration after his return from Spain in 1526. These were prompted first and foremost by the need to pay huge debts incurred in the war and in securing peace with Henry and Charles. They were also prompted by the king’s need to rebuild a ‘royal affinity’ of support among the nobility, which had been weakened by the losses at Pavia and the absence of direct royal authority from the kingdom. Historians working on the royal finances have shown conclusively how a range of new mechanisms for increasing revenues and the king’s control over them were introduced in the 1520s. They have also shown a concomitant tightening of decision-making in a smaller and more effective royal council, supported by a body of legal and financial specialists. Using these reformed institutions, Francis asserted his authority at every turn. He leant on the provincial estates, towns and cities, Lyon bankers, his own financial officials, highest courtiers and, above all, the clergy for taxes, customs, forced loans and credit in general. He also created – and sold for profit – judicial offices in the Parlement of Paris and other royal courts. Insisting on exercising all his prerogative powers as king to the letter, he forced as much

Right: Philippe de Chabot by Andre Thevet, 1584. Below: Francis I with his second wife, Eleanor of Austria, 1530s.

He knew how important it was to have a strong but attractive persona as monarch and for this to be communicated to the realm money out of as many people as possible, as often as he could, using every available means. Yet, for all the fiscal efficiencies, re-structuring and administrative streamlining that they oversaw, Francis’ financial officials still struggled at times to get all the money he demanded into the central royal treasury, the Epargne, and were often made scapegoats for failings in the system. His sale of judicial offices set up long-lasting difficulties for the monarchy. There is no evidence, however, that Francis was ever driven by doctrinaire centralisation of power per se, so much as by his relentless personal ambition and the crushing costs it regularly involved him in meeting.

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RANCIS INSISTED ON obedience in all other areas of royal authority as well. The legal system was overhauled in a series of reforming edicts culminating in that of Villers-Cotterêts in 1539, whose most famous provision required that French be used instead of Latin in all legal documents. It also established that registers of births and deaths be held in each parish. Rather more difficult to legislate for was conformity to religious orthodoxy, about which Francis was particularly sensitive. He was a staunch defender of ‘Gallicanism’, the idea that the king of France, being an emperor in his own realm, acknowledged no authority over him in matters of State or Church. His Concordat with Pope Leo X agreed in late 1515, which secured papal support for his hold on Milan, appeared to concede to the papacy in return, the right of appointment to French benefices and thus to compromise the independence of the Church and weaken royal authority. This provoked the king’s first clash with his own highest law court, the Parlement of Paris, which had to ratify the Concordat for it to be legally effective in France. 42 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

dissent in his realm, with far-reaching consequences for his successors.

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IGHT FISCAL, legal and ecclesiastical controls manifested Francis’ power as king, a power he exercised to the full. Yet he also appreciated that securing and maintaining the support of interest groups, particularly the nobility, was vital to effective kingship. He knew how important it was to have a strong but attractive persona as monarch and for this to be communicated to the realm at all levels. This is what lay behind much of the personal patronage of nobles, scholars, architects and artists for which his reign is now chiefly remembered in France. Francis spent significant sums of money from 1526 onwards, to increase the attractiveness of the royal court to the nobility. It became progressively large enough to serve his personal needs and to project a compelling image of royal magnificence and splendour without ever being so big that it could not also function as the centre of a working royal affinity. Daily life there was never as elaborately choreographed under Francis as it would be under his successors. He is perhaps second only to Henry IV in his reputation for informality and spontaneity as a French king. Yet the court did not lack dignity and in the 1530s Francis gave more frequent formal entertainments than he had done in the previous decade.

The Parlement saw itself to some extent as the guardian of Church independence from both papal and royal interference. Francis eventually had his way over the ratification of the Concordat, but further clashes with the Parlement and the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris followed over their objections to reformist sermons and writings by a number of evangelical theologians who were under royal protection. Francis did not object to calls for Church reform but was wary of allowing theological debate beyond the confines of the court and academic elites. He vigorously resisted interference in his own household by what he regarded as conservative forces seeking to protect their vested interests, but was unable to protect all reformist clergy from prosecution. The king’s somewhat equivocal attitude to religious reform hardened into a defence of orthodoxy following the so-called ‘Affair of the Placards’ in 1534, when radical reformers nailed posters attacking the Mass on church doors in Paris and even at the royal château at Amboise. A widespread crackdown ensued, which forced a number of radicals, including the young John Calvin, to flee France. The king also conducted a savage suppression of the Cathar heresy in the south of France, but was never able entirely to repress religious

Constable and Marshal of France, Anne de Montmorency, c.1535.

FRANCIS’ RIGHT-HAND MAN in enhancing the style and prestige of the court and its effectiveness as a centre of royal patronage was, once again, Anne de Montmorency. On Francis’ return to France, he was appointed the grand maître of the royal household and became responsible for its overall structure and functioning. One very important mechanism used in attracting clients to direct royal service was the office of gentilhomme de la chambre, invented by Francis at his accession. Created initially for a small group of companions with whom the king wanted to surround himself, it gave its holders regular access to him at times when the rest of the court was excluded from the royal presence. As such it had rapidly gained kudos. Distributing this and a range of other offices, Montmorency and the king shortened and straightened lines of communication and patronage between themselves and the clienteles of the oldest families and great nobles as well as with newer men seeking to enter royal service. While many senior courtiers in the early 1530s at least owed their places to Montmorency, there were others in the king’s circle with competing influence. Another of his childhood companions was the Admiral De Brion, comte de Charny and Buzançois, Phillipe Chabot, who had his own supporters at court and beyond. He tended to oppose many of Montmorency’s ideas and policies in order to attract men away from his rival. Whereas the grand maître tended to favour peaceful relations with Charles V, Chabot advocated war. He was, with the assistance of the king’s mistress, Madame D’Etampes, eventually able to capitalise on the failure of the 1538 entente with Charles, which Montmorency had sponsored, to secure the latter’s dismissal from royal service. His own successor as Admiral, Claude D’Annebault, operated in a similar way in the 1540s, again MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

FRANCIS I

with the support of the king’s mistress, who was a power broker in her own right. Admittedly looking back nostalgically from the perspective of the Wars of Religion and the collapse of royal authority, later 16th century commentators credited Francis with balancing, or at least appearing to balance, the ambitions of individuals and factions at court and in the country beyond. This was broadly true in the 1530s, less fully so in the 1540s under the baleful influence of Madame D’Etampes. THE ROYAL COURT was also the principal conduit for the king’s considerable intellectual, artistic and architectural patronage. Francis patronised humanist poets and writers such as Clément Marot and Guillaume Budé, who was also the king’s librarian. Francis had a large collection of Greek and other manuscripts and his library contributed to what became the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. His interest in ancient languages and literature also led him to found four regius lectureships in classics, the lecteurs royaux, in 1530. The king was also an avid collector of antiquities and contemporary art. He used agents in Venice and Rome to acquire copies of classical sculptures, medals and coins and commissioned many items directly. Francis owned paintings by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and had portraits of himself in oil and in bronze by Titian and Cellini. The artist to whom he was most indebted, however, was the Franco-Flemish painter Jean Clouet, who produced a 1526 image of the king, together with many striking portraits of his companions, which still bring Francis’ court vividly to life. 44 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Top: The Battle of Marignan by Natale Datti, 16th century. Above: Battle of Pavia by Barend van Orley, 1528.

Francis also engaged in an extensive building and renovation programme from 1526. This was required to accommodate the growing household and to create more public and private spaces where Francis’ people could meet him and each other, while also providing the king with places of retreat and privacy. The king’s first major building project had been the construction of the Francis I wing at the châteaux of Blois in the Loire valley from 1516. This was followed by Chambord – a project that lasted the entire length of his reign. After his return from Spain, the king spent increasing amounts of time in and near Paris and it was here that his architectural patronage was concen-

trated. The Louvre was modernised, as was the hunting palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the west of the capital. Francis built an entirely new château, known as Madrid, in what is now the Bois de Boulogne. Yet the building for which Francis is justly most famous and which he himself called ‘home’ was the château of Fontainebleau. He lavished more attention on this building, its decoration and furnishing, than on any other single project. The rooms and galleries provided spaces for the presentation of the one subject which dominated Francis’ artistic patronage as no other; namely himself. He was referenced not simply through his ubiquitous ‘F’ chiffre and the emblematic salamanders that seem to scuttle over every vertical surface in his châteaux, but by more complex allegories of his imperial kingship, most famously in the

The ‘big boy’ had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history

Below: Carved and gilded salamander from Fontainebleau (bottom).

gallery at Fontainebleau, fashioned by the Italian artists Rosso Fiorentino and Primaticcio. The king’s houses, together with those of courtiers like Montmorency’s at Chantilly and the major abbeys, facilitated the king’s frequent peregrinations around his kingdom. As the records of the royal itinerary and the letters of weary ambassadors attest, Francis really did move out among his people throughout his reign and he visited most parts of his kingdom either in war or in peace. The accounts of the king’s hunting establishment, the vénerie and fauconnerie, also show that his expenditure, often as part of his frequent journeys, reached its height in the late 1530s and early 1540s. He hunted not simply because that is what all kings did but because he enjoyed it, was very good at it and throughout his life enjoyed showing his skills at the chase to ambassadors and courtiers alike.

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RANCIS DIED AT THE château of Rambouillet on March 31st, 1547, aged 53. The ‘big boy’ had come close at times to ruining everything, but had also made France a power to be reckoned with and made his own mark on its history. From his first day to his last, he was a king who ruled as well as reigned. He knew the importance of war and a high international profile in staking his claim to be a great warrior-king of France. In battle he was brave, if impetuous, which led equally to triumph and disaster. Domestically, Francis exercised the spirit and letter of the royal prerogative to its fullest extent. He bargained hard over taxation and other issues with interest groups, often by appearing not to bargain at all. He enhanced royal power and concentrated decision-making in a tight personal executive but used a wide range of offices, gifts and his own personal charisma to build up an effective personal affinity among the ranks of the nobility upon whom his reign depended. With one exception, that of Charles, duc de Bourbon, he also avoided marginalising the great princes of the realm. Under Francis, the court of France was at the height of its prestige and international influence during the 16th century. Although opinion has varied considerably over the centuries since his death, his cultural legacy to France, to its Renaissance, was immense and ought to secure his reputation as among the greatest of its kings. Francis seems to have had a genuine talent for what Louis XIV later called le métier du roi: the profession of the king. It was this talent, expressed dramatically and even quixotically at times, that Francis’ contemporaries recognised in him, according him the title of ‘the knight-king’, le roi-chevalier. Glenn Richardson is Reader in Early Modern History and Academic Director of History and Philosophy at St Mary’s University Twickenham and the author of The Field of Cloth of Gold (Yale, 2013).

FURTHER READING R.J. Knecht, Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of Francis I (Cambridge, 1994). R.J. Knecht, The French Renaissance Court (Yale, 2008). D. Potter, Renaissance France at War: Armies, Culture and Society c.1480-1560 (Boydell Press, 2008). G.J. Richardson, Renaissance Monarchy: The Reigns of Henry VIII, Francis I and Charles V (Arnold/OUP, 2002). MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

| TV AT WAR

A muddy vision of the Great War SINCE 2012 British television has produced a flood of dramas, documentaries and features in response to the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. The majority of British people want the conflict to be commemorated on TV, but the challenge is that no one actually remembers the war and almost no one (except some professional historians) understands it. Most people carry in their heads an amalgam of fiction, half-remembered facts and the little history they were taught at school. The power of TV to shape that image, probably for the one time that most people will have the opportunity to think deeply about the war, is a huge responsibility. It gives both historians and 46 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

programme-makers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to push the boundaries of the imagination and expand the knowledge of a large target audience. From much personal experience, I know the small miracle involved in any TV programme reaching the screen. I also know that what makes good history may not make good TV. Yet is still possible to get valuable history onto the screen. So why has the overall output on the Great War ranged only from the mediocre to the outright bad? The worst offenders have been those TV dramas about the war that have portrayed themselves as historically accurate. This has not just been a matter of getting buttons and

cap-badges wrong. In one interview, Steven Knight, writer for the BBC drama series Peaky Blinders, confidently stated that the British death rate on the Western Front was 60,000 every day, which over four years would have been more than twice the country’s population and is as ridiculous as saying that Edinburgh is 60,000 miles from London. The point is not that outrageously bad historical errors have been broadcast, but that from sheer ignorance they have largely passed unremarked through the editing and production process. Professor Sir Hew Strachan, the only expert historian of the war on the government’s advisory commemoration panel, wrote in January 2013, that if the commemoration ‘simply reworks the familiar themes of remembrance, it will be repetitive, sterile and possibly even boring. If we do not emerge at the end of the process in 2018 with fresh perspectives, we shall have failed’. That is indeed what is happening on TV. There has been plenty of time to plan and consider. The first historians’ conferences about the centenary were held in 2005 and the BBC in particular has involved many historians in its commemoration ideas. Although these contacts have been erratic, that is not necessarily a bad thing. The gifted amateur, the neglected genius and the rising star are all out there to be discovered, as long as the programme-makers actually know enough to assess whether they are dealing with the genuine article. Some academic historians have also been more willing to engage with TV: partly through institutional pressure to explore beyond the ivory tower; partly in the expectation that they should be properly paid for their services; mainly because it is tremendous fun. Sadly, some historians are simply not interested in TV, either with the compromises that it forces them to make, or with reaching mass audiences. Other historians believe that history on TV is an enjoyable but historically irrelevant activity. But for some of us, what is important is getting both our ideas and our chance to inspire others onto the screen; that is what is being lost. The problems that historians have had with history on British TV began to be identified about a decade ago, in a series of conferences which brought programme-makers and historians together. Of the three traditional aims of mainstream British television – that it should ‘entertain, inform and educate’ – education was being lost to specialist programmes and channels; even the chance to inform audiences through documentaries and features was clearly under threat. Partly because of these discussions, there has been a subsequent flowering of documentaries covering periods that were previously thought to be impossible for TV – notably the Middle Ages and the 18th century. This has been achieved mainly by focusing on elite social and cultural history and by a presenter-led format, set against a background of impressive buildings and artefacts. In other words, changes to formats have resulted in better TV history: but this has not happened for the Great War. Meanwhile, over the last three decades, almost every aspect of the First World War has been re-investigated by historians, producing an understanding of the war well at odds with that in the popular consciousness. The change has been similar to what happened in the United States to

the history of the Old West in the 1960s and 1970s. The main failure of TV’s approach to the First World War is that, in equivalent terms, it is still stuck in the clichés of the 1950s, with Cowboys good and Redskins bad; and this, or its wide-ranging equivalents, colours every programme made. The First World War was a violent, bloody and destructive event. It was also, for the British at the time, one of the most popular wars in history and one of their greatest victories. A hundred years on, it is hard even for historians to come to terms with this. It is far removed indeed from the views and attitudes of a modern TV audience or most of those who control a channel’s output. The obvious question is why in the 1990s did TV not follow this major shift in our knowledge of the war. British documentaries have an admirable record of presenting new ideas and controversies in many fields. Yet there is little evidence of the new ideas and controversies about the First World War on television. To give only a few examples, there has been nothing on the challenge to the ‘post-Fischer consensus’; nothing on the British army’s ‘learning curve’ or the ‘two Western Fronts’ hypotheses; nothing even on the German ‘stab in the back’ legend, any of which would make good, relevant TV history. The longer the chance to make such programmes has been blocked or ignored, the harder it has become to put the new evidence on the screen, to the point that it may now be impossible. The chief reason is the belief among commissioning editors that historical documentaries cannot portray controversies or unusual ideas, except perhaps as a heavily flagged ‘personal view’. At the heart of all this lies a conviction that there is nothing new to be said about the First World War, that the clichés explain it all.

Why in the 1990s did TV not follow this major shift in our knowledge of the war?

Fresh perspective? Making the BBC Three drama Our World War.

Fetish of access For the last 50 years there have been two basic formats for historical documentaries. One is the ‘current affairs’ format, deriving from the BBC series The Great War (1964), with each programme being made up of interviews, narration and footage of the actual events. The other derives from the ‘arts’ tradition: location-driven and presenter-led, starting with the 1969 BBC series Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark. For the First World War, the current affairs format is now played out: there is no one left alive to interview and, in response, programmes have, with increasing implausibility, sought a connection with figures from history through their living descendants. If a conscientious objector of 1916 is dead, then his granddaughter is interviewed for her vague childhood memories. Spoken of in television circles as ‘access’, this approach is historically a poor one; the weaknesses of oral history, particularly so many years after the event, are well known. This fetish is coupled with a misapplication of the old TV maxim that ‘people want to hear about people’, that the pseudo-memory of an ‘ordinary’ person is more appealing to an audience than any historical analysis. This approach has been joined by a new programmemakers’ maxim, derived from the arts tradition, that ‘people demand footage, not archive’, that historical evidence, MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 47

| TV AT WAR especially in the form of authentic but grainy black-andwhite film and photographs, is inferior to modern location shots, such as a Sarajevo café in 2014. There must also be movement on the screen: the presenter’s piece-to-camera cliché of the 1990s –‘I am standing on the very spot that …’ – has been replaced by ‘I’m going to take you on a journey’, which is being ridiculed into oblivion for good reason. A third format, the evidence-led historical documentary, is much less common, except for programmes about battlefield archaeology or weapons technology, though it is probably the best option for investigating the First World War. The potential for CGI is enormous, as is the vast improvement that digitisation makes to authentic film and photographs, as some recent documentaries have shown. But many programme-makers have fallen back on dramatic reconstruction, which has too often produced bad acting and drama divorced from real historical appearances. Other and more innovative TV formats remain extremely rare. So far, historians have had their most productive television contacts with ‘features’, the genre of TV, including news, that deals with short items. What news and features want is short and simple stories and First World War historians have these by the bushel. But even this has fallen foul of a professional historians’ shorthand that is code for a much wider and complex idea: that ‘historians tell stories’ in the manner of ancient tribal bards. Only a few historians are genuinely good TV performers; so why not use a professional story-teller instead, an actor or celebrity with better TV

skills? In reality, this is a formula for dullness. History is not an eternal soap opera; it is a thrilling detective story. Historical research requires the same high standards of evidence and analysis as the most taxing of the physical sciences and it is from these findings that our ‘stories’ are composed. For the same reason, historians are often spoilsports, modifying or destroying what everyone else believes is true rather than repeating the old platitudes. But this means that even the best historians are experts only in one or two fields; you don’t let a brain surgeon operate on your kidneys. So we have the recent TV phenomenon of the historian-as-figurehead, moving from one topic to another far outside their actual field of knowledge.

Historians are often spoilsports, modifying or destroying what everyone else believes is true It would be good TV, as well as good history, if, for the First World War commemoration, more historians were each offered their one chance and then left well alone. A further belief has damaged TV’s approach to the First World War: that the way to get more people watching is not to make a better programme, but instead to seek out another audience. Because the First World War is considered dull, there must be something extra to attract this second audience. This attitude comes directly from the enduring belief that the conflict is one long cliché of mud and slaughter, poets and mouth organs; this in turn comes from ignorance or unconcern about the war’s real history. As part of the search for the second audience, British TV has now given in to a practice long used in the United States: a ‘host’ as presenter, someone famous-for-being-famous. This is not a completely new approach nor, if used intelligently, is it automatically a bad one. But, as with historical dramas, the problem comes when the presenter is announced as a historical authority – after all, how hard can history be? With some exceptions, the result has too often been like listening to a novice violinist playing a quarter-tone flat. Either no historians have been consulted in the making of such documentaries, or – after their names have been used to get the programme commissioned – their advice has been ignored. This goes to the heart of the relationship between professional historians and TV: if our ideas are to be appropriated or abused by someone else, then our main motive for engaging with TV has gone. The serious history of the First World War may well have lost TV and that is an important loss for the life of the country. For any culture to mislead itself about any war has damaging long-term consequences. A slightly more optimistic thought is that, as happens when any art form becomes atrophied, the first company to commission and broadcast a programme or series on the real history of the First World War wins. We have until 2018 to watch and see. Stephen Badsey is Professor of Conflict Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and co-director of its First World War Research Group. Among his many books is The British Army in Battle and its Image 19141918 (Bloomsbury, 2009). He has appeared on TV and advised on television history for 30 years.

48 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

STUBBS Bishop William Stubbs, portrait by Hubert von Herkomer, 1885.

An Enduring Model

Adrian Leak looks at the life of Bishop William Stubbs, the last of the amateur historians and arguably the discipline’s first professional.

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

STUBBS

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ISTORIAN AND BISHOP William Stubbs has been called the ‘Father of Modern History’. His work on medieval chronicles and charters set a standard for the emerging school of English history in the 19th century and became the basic text for students in the succeeding generations. His prefaces to the 17 volumes he edited for the Rolls Series, as well as his three-volume Constitutional History of England (1874-8), introduced a style of historical writing that became an enduring model. The hallmark of Stubbs’ writing was his minute attention to the details of history; what he called the ‘little pebbles of the concrete in which the foundations of the historic superstructure are laid’. He dug deep in the dust of the medieval past and, from that dry and apparently sterile material, he created for us a gallery of living people: kings, barons, merchants, soldiers, clerks. His aim was not simply to tell a good story – he despised ‘picturesque’ history – but to trace the great movements of the past to their origins in the individual lives of ‘erring and straying men’ and to define ‘the contribution of the local communities of village, hundred, borough and shire to the political, educational and institutional growth of the English people’. Above all, he worked with remarkable affection for his material. There can be no better introduction to his work than the autobiographical sketch he drew during a lecture he gave at Reading in 1889:

‘I was born under the shadow of the great castle [Knaresborough] in which Becket’s murderers found refuge during the year following his martyrdom ... ’

I was born under the shadow of the great castle [Knaresborough, North Yorkshire] in which Becket’s murderers found refuge during the year following his martyrdom, the year during which the dogs under the table declined to eat their crusts. There, too, as customary tenants of the Forest, my fore-fathers had done suit and service to Richard, King of the Romans, and after him to Queen Philippa and John of Gaunt, long before poor King Richard was kept prisoner in the king’s chamber. My grandfather’s house stood on the ground on which Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner by Edward II, on the very site of the Battle of Boroughbridge; he, too, was churchwarden of the chapel in which the earl was captured. Evident in these words is his youthful delight in the intersection of personal with local and national history. He relished the continuity between past and present. He was no dilettante antiquarian, but enjoyed, from an early age, the toil of historical research. While still a teenager, he taught himself how to decipher medieval documents and was familiar with the contents of the archive in the old court house in Knaresborough Castle. At his first school he was lucky to have a regime that trained his natural gifts of memory and concentration. Under a Mr 50 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Cartwright he learnt Latin and Greek from the age of eight and, from 13, French, German and Anglo-Saxon. From these early beginnings he developed a prodigious memory, a rigorous mental discipline and an ability to work at an astonishing speed. It was noted that, when he was a bishop and preparing an ordination address, it took him no longer than 45 minutes to compose and draft in a neat, clear hand a thoughtful and substantial sermon, which took 20 minutes to deliver. When he was studying the William of Malmesbury manuscript in the Bibiothèque Nationale in Paris, it took him only one and a quarter hours to compare the entire manuscript with his edition, noting down all the words and passages where there were doubts and discrepancies. HIS MEMORY AND the breadth of his detailed knowledge of primary sources is evident not only in his published work, but also in his correspondence with E.A Freeman, who, like Stubbs, had left Oxford to pursue his studies as a freelance historian. Freeman would write for information from time to time. To an enquiry about the early Manx kings, Stubbs replied: ‘You will find all about the early ones in the Chronicon Manniae, which is in Munch, and in Johnstone, and in Camden’s

Top: Knaresborough Castle by Bernard Walter Evans, 19th century. Below: The house where Stubbs was born, engraving, 1904.

Britannia.’ And to another of Freeman’s letters, received as Stubbs was on the point of moving back to the university to take up his appointment as Regius Professor of Modern History, he replied: ‘I am sorry to say that the greatest part of my books is on the way to Oxford …’, but he went on to write: About the existence of Lucy there is no doubt – in the Pipe Roll of 31 Hen. I she was fined not to be obliged to marry again … If, however, she was really a daughter of Alfgar she must have been able to confess herself over sixty and been free to do as she liked, according to the Assize of Jerusalem at least. It was an indication of their erudition that the two friends could correspond with this precision of detail when neither was in reach of a college or university library.

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HE DRAWBACK to having such a huge memory might have been a tendency to become a bore. When a chance remark during a conversation after dinner in Exeter College senior common room raised a question about the value of the mark, Stubbs treated the company to a detailed, extensive and accurate discourse upon the mark at different periods of history from the early middle ages onwards, concluding with an account of its relative value to that of the contemporary German currency. We are assured, however, by those who knew him, that he was never a bore and that he would have delivered this small impromptu lecture with a measure of irony and self-mockery. Although he was entirely serious about his subject, as indeed he was about his Christian faith, he dreaded pomposity. His fear of appearing sententious sometimes led him into flippancy. It was almost as if he could never take himself seriously as a professor or a bishop. His undergraduate audience at Oxford was awoken with a start when Stubbs declaimed, with no discernible relevance to the subject of his lecture: Oh! give me a chisel, oh! give me a saw, To cut off the leg of my mother-in-law. These rare twinkles of frivolity were all the more surprising, coming as they did from a lecturer whose customary mode of delivery was to read without embellishment, head bent over his script. Committee work was inevitable. He bore the burden with grumbling resignation, though, despite his disavowals, there is evidence that he was an effective and conscientious colleague. His academic duties at Oxford included: Curator of the Bodleian, Delegate of the Oxford University Press, Member of the Hebdomadal Council, Junior Dean of Oriel, honorary fellow and chaplain of Balliol. He fought off boredom by writing squibs in verse. At a meeting of the Hebdomadal Council he passed a scribbled note to Montague Burrows, Chichele Professor of Modern History: Stubbs burrows for historic treasures In dull original research; Burrows stubs up the roots of measures That threaten to subvert the Church. Each to each a worthy brother, Neither can do without the other. AS WELL AS his various academic duties and in addition to his teaching (he delivered 18 lectures during the eight weeks of the Hilary Term in 1867), he combined his professorship first with the country living of Cholderton, where he resided during the Long Vacation and was MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

STUBBS Right: Edward Augustus Freeman, correspondent of Stubbs, 1886. Below: Depiction of the Bodleian Library in the 17th century, by Alfred Church, 1886.

said by the parishioners to be ‘a nice, kindly gentleman’, and then with a residentiary canonry at St Paul’s. This last gave him a London base from which he was able to attend all 75 sessions of the second Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, the most valuable fruit of which was his contribution of five substantial historical appendices to its report (1883). When in 1884 he exchanged a professor’s chair for a bishop’s throne, he had to carry new burdens of ecclesiastical committee work. First as Bishop of Chester, then as Bishop of Oxford he found the necessity of committees increasingly irksome. Although a conscientious pastor to his clergy – his five episcopal charges and numerous ordination addresses and sermons show that he had not forgotten the lessons of his 16 years as vicar of Navestock in Essex – he made no secret of his impatience with long sessions. At Diocesan meetings he was soon bored. During one he wrote: To the l’Etat c’est moi of Louis le Roi A parallel case I afford. Something like it, you see, May be said about me: Am I not the Diocesan Board? All of this makes him sound curmudgeonly and flippant, but we should not be deceived. His university colleagues had a higher opinion of his character than he would allow. Where they were critical – and we might agree with them in this – was of his decision to accept a bishopric with the inevitable and premature end to his academic career. For the last 17 years of his life he contributed nothing of significance to the study of English history. He was only 59 when he went to Chester. His decision to leave Oxford for a second time was a great loss to the study of the nation’s history. A question mark hangs over his career. It is painfully conspicuous, if we judge him as an historian; less so if we view him as a man deeply conscious of his vocation to the priesthood. Twice he turned his back upon the university in order to take up his work as a minister of the Church; once to become a parish priest and once to become a bishop. At the age of 24 he had become a fellow and tutor of Trinity. He had an aptitude and talent for study. He evidently enjoyed the opportunities of scholarship afforded by the university. But he applied for the college living of Navestock. Why? There was no need. He was at that time a bachelor and so marriage, or an engagement to marry – the usual reason for resigning one’s fellowship and accepting a college living – was not a factor in his decision. The answer was simple: he needed to be a parish priest.

P

ARISH PRIEST OR HISTORIAN? It would probably not have occurred to Stubbs in 1850 that there could be any incompatibility between the two. Until that time history was not thought of as a subject for professional academics. Before 1850 there was no faculty of history at the universities. There were no history professors apart from the two Regius professorships founded by George II, neither of which was taken seriously. There were no history dons; at least, none that devoted themselves exclusively to that subject. History was not 52 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

considered a proper matter for serious study. It was the occupation of educated gentlemen with time on their hands, men such as Carlyle or Hallam or Macaulay. Or it was the hobby of a parson with an extensive library and a spacious rectory. Such a man was the Reverend Francis Wrangham, whose collection of 15,000 volumes was adequate to sustain his antiquarian interest and his reputation for learning in the East Riding of Yorkshire. History was a study pursued outside the universities. Of the holders of George II’s two professorships little is known. They left no published work that could be judged as a serious contribution to scholarship. One of them, it was claimed, was the anonymous author of a volume entitled The Country Parson’s Advice to his Parishioners of the Younger Sort. Another, Thomas Wharton, published a history of the parish of

‘There is, I speak humbly … in the study of living History, a gradual approximation to a consciousness that we are growing into a perception of the working of the Almighty Ruler’ Kiddington. Of another, little was recalled beyond the fact that ‘he was killed by a fall from his horse when returning from a dinner with Lord Sandwich at Hinchinbrooke’. Macaulay claimed that the author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard was better qualified for the professorship than any recent incumbent. F.W.Maitland wrote 50 years later: ‘As to the wretched Middle Ages, they, it was well understood, had been turned over to “men of a low, unpolite genius fit only for the rough and barbarick part of learning”.’ Given the prevailing climate of opinion in the mid-19th century towards the study of history, Stubbs’ decision to pursue his research in his country vicarage, rather than at the university, was entirely reasonable. During the 16 years that he spent at Navestock he acquired a massive stock of knowledge about English medieval charters. He soon became the acknowledged authority on the contents of all the important cathedral and college libraries, episcopal registries and muniment rooms in the country. He took the opportunity of holidays to visit cathedral and college libraries. In his diary for 1855 he records: ‘May 8, first visit to Lambeth Library; May 29, Chichester, for registers; June 12, Rochester; July 2, Canterbury; 4th, Winchester; 5th, Salisbury; 6th, Wells; 7th, Lichfield, and home on 9th.’

John Richard Green, author of A Short History of the English People, 1893. Below: Bishop’s Palace at Cuddesdon, Oxford, 1890.

I

N 1858 HE PUBLISHED his edition of the Registrum Sacrum Anglicanum, tracing the course of episcopal succession in the English Church. In 1864 and 1865 there followed his first volumes for the Rolls Series: Itinerarium Regis Ricardi and Epistolae Cantuariensis 1187-99. His long introduction to the Itinerarium included an extended account of Richard I’s crusade. Although he was required by the Master of the Rolls to give a brief introduction to each edition, he used the opportunity to write a substantial narrative. This became a model for all the 19 volumes he produced for the series. An outstanding example of this is his introduction to the Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough, in which he gave a substantial account of the constitutional history of the reign of Henry II. In 1861 he brought out his edition of De Inventione Sanctae Crucis Nostrae in Monte acuto et de ductione eiusdem apud Waltham (On the Foundation of Waltham Abbey). In addition to these volumes, which were published during his time as vicar of Navestock, he was also preparing, for the Rolls Series, his editions of the Chronicle of Benedict of Peterborough (two volumes, 1867) and the Chronicle of Roger de Hoveden (four volumes, 1868-71). Thus it can be justly claimed that Stubbs had laid the foundations of our knowledge of the earlier Plantagenets and established the basis of English medieval studies while he was attending to the demands of his parish and before he returned to Oxford to begin his academic MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

STUBBS career. It was a colossal achievement. His weekday routine included daily Morning and Evening Prayer in church (the village school attended the morning service at 8am), sermon preparation (he wrote and preached two sermons every Sunday) and pastoral visiting in the afternoon (‘I suppose I knew every toe on every baby in the parish’). Although when he had moved to Navestock it was not unusual for historical study to be combined with parish work, what was exceptional was the depth and width of his research. In a way, Stubbs’ ability as an historian brought to an end the A leaf from the Chronicle notion that serious historical research of Roger de Hoveden, could any longer be conducted from a recording the Battle of country parsonage. He was the last of the Standard, 1138, with the amateurs and the first of the proan illustration of the fessionals. There were others, too, who royal standard. could claim either or both of these titles. Men who, like E.A.Freeman, J.A.Froude and J.R.Green, were present at the birth of the school of English history. When Stubbs gave his inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1867, he concluded his peroration somewhat defiantly: There is, I speak humbly, in common with Natural Science, in the study of living History, a gradual approximation to a consciousness that we are growing into a perception of the working of the Almighty Ruler of the world; that we are growing able to justify the Eternal Wisdom, and that we are coming to see, not only in His overruling of His Church in her spiritual character, but in his overruling of the world … a hand of justice and mercy, and of progress and order, a kind of wise disposition, ever leading the world on to the better, but never forcing, and out of the evil of man’s working bringing continually that which is good. I do not fear to put it before you in this shape; I state my belief, and it is well that you should know it from the first.

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HIS WAS very much the voice of the old fashioned Tory High Churchman and it was, even then, already out of date. J.R.Green commented: ‘Conceive the thoughts of young liberalism!’ However, it was Stubbs’ voice. And although such sentiments would have been inconceivable 50 years later, his belief in the overruling providence of a benevolent God gave his work its cohesion and impetus. He did not cease to be the priest when he entered the lecture room, just as he did not cease to be the historian when he was visiting his parishioners. Individual lives, even babies’ toes, were the little pebbles from which history is made. F.W.Maitland wrote of Stubbs’ work for the Rolls Series:

example, and the cost of having to keep a carriage. A constant worry was the expense of keeping his wife and seven children. When he was about to leave his parish and move back to Oxford he wrote to Freeman: About Navestock the case is this – the living is worth £400 clear now a year, and a house. It involves the keeping of a manservant, carriage and at least one horse. It is a very dear place, coals 30s a ton and meat and everything buyable in proportion; but of course there is no house rent nor garden stuff to buy. Everything is dear because we are so near London. Now at Oxford we shall have, I suppose, about £600 a year clear, and what else can be made by fees – out of which will come house rent and taxes, about £74. WHEN LATER AS BISHOP he was translated from Chester to Oxford, his stipend of £5,000 was encumbered by his predecessor’s pension to the tune of £2,000 a year. The large rambling palace at Cuddesdon, a village at that time, remote from the nearest railway station, required an ‘establishment’ of indoor and outdoor staff far in excess of Stubbs’ means. According to the Duke of Westminster, the Bishop of Oxford required an appropriate ‘equipage’ in order to maintain his position in society. Stubbs struggled in vain to persuade the archbishop to allow the sale of the Cuddesdon mansion and the purchase of a more suitable house in Oxford, resigning himself to his remote and extravagant residence as ‘a slave to gardeners and coachmen’. Despite these pebbles, he never lost sight of the larger picture. Helen Cam summed him up thus (Cambridge Historical Journal, 1948. vol. ix, p. 146): He was a born scholar; he grubbed in the muniments of Knaresborough Castle before he was nominated to a servitorship at Christ Church; but he learned some things in the sixteen years of parish life which are hid from the don in his study. And when he closes his great book [Constitutional History of England] by calling on the historian not only ‘to rest content with nothing less than the maximum of attainable truth’, but also ‘to base his arguments on that highest justice which is found in the deepest sympathy with erring and straying men’, we recognise that it is, in fact, his moral certainty and his religious conviction that impose unity and order on his vast and varied matter and form the rock on which his great structure is based. Adrian Leak is an Anglican priest who has retired from active ministry and lives in Surrey. From 1981 to 1986 he was the archivist of York Minster.

The mingling of small questions with questions that are very large is impressive. The great currents in human affairs, even the moral government of the universe were not far from the editor’s mind when he was determining the relation between two manuscripts or noting a change of hand.

William Stubbs, Constitutional History of England (Oxford, 1874-8).

Stubbs said in one of his lectures: ‘How great is the debt History owes to the ant-like instincts of collectors of memoranda, and recorders of births, deaths and marriages, the savers of old letters and old newspapers, of the very things that seemed most useless.’ He would, therefore, have thought it quite appropiate in an essay on his work that reference should be made to the mundane detail of his life: the price of coal, for

Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women and Historical Practice (Harvard, 2000).

54 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

FURTHER READING W.H.Hutton, Letters of W Stubbs (Oxford, 1901). J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981).

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester UP, 1992).

REVIEWS

Juliet Gardiner considers centuries of change Harry Munt on Arab conquests • Nathalie Aubert praises Picasso in Paris

Iconoclast: Charlemagne has a statue of the Saxon god Krodo torn down, while a church is built in its place. Engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder, 1630.

SIGNPOSTS

The Complications of Early Medieval States

Paul Fouracre looks at the origins of the states that formed after the Fall of Rome and the early historians who questioned whether the barbarians were oppressors or liberators. HISTORIANS, it seems, like to complicate things. This is certainly the case with the early history of the states that formed in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Ian Wood’s recent book, The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (2013), shows how the formation of the states that followed Rome 56 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

was argued about for centuries, sometimes fiercely, according to the national concerns of each generation of historians. But Wood also shows how this subject was always discussed within a narrow range of agreed terms: Rome fell, barbarians took over and new states formed in the conquered areas, taking their

names from the conquerors, thus England from the Angles, France from the Franks and Lombardy from the Lombards. (Other states would not quite fit this pattern because, like Ostrogothic Italy or Visigothic Spain, they inconveniently died out or changed their names or, like Germany, had not been part of the Roman Empire.)

What historians had traditionally disagreed about was whether these changes were for the better or for the worse. Had Roman rule been so oppressive that its end was a ‘good thing’? Were the barbarians thus liberators or were they the oppressors who destroyed the protection of Roman law and made themselves into a privileged elite? Where was Christianity in all this: a baleful influence, as Gibbon thought, or the only thing that saved civilisation? Round and round these discussions went and in the successive cycles we see the development of modern thought about national identity, social structure, fairness and, of course, about the place of religion in society. The same questions may have produced different answers but they were always asked of the same narrative sources, as if the latter were simple straightforward accounts of what happened. For this post-Roman period threw up some great historians and each of them seemed to be writing a kind of national history of those barbarian peoples who went on to form states. We have Jordanes, who wrote a history of the Goths in Italy (albeit after the demise of their rule); Gregory of Tours, who wrote what was perceived to be a history of the Franks; Paul the Deacon’s history of the Lombards; and, most familiar to us, Bede’s history of the English. It is these works that are the

sources of many of our images of barbarian rule: King Clovis of the Franks smashing in the head of a greedy warrior; the fair queen Rosamond forced to drink from a cup formed out of her father’s skull; Bede’s story of the conversion of King Edwin and so on. From the middle of the 20th century onwards this familiar treatment of the sources began to unravel and the picture became more complicated as the terms of the traditional discussion began to be found wanting: did the Roman Empire actually ‘fall’? Were there single groups of barbarians who went on to found states in their image? Can the entities that followed the Roman Empire be called ‘states’ at all? First of all, in the 1930s Henri Pirenne challenged the notion that it was Germanic barbarians who brought about the end of the ancient world; Pirenne put this down to the breakdown of

Had Roman rule been so oppressive that its end was a ‘good thing’? Were the barbarians thus liberators? Mediterranean trade, following the Arab conquests. More recently that breakdown has been put three centuries earlier, following archaeological data, but the idea remains the same: that the barbarians had little to do with the end of ancient Rome. Chris Wickham’s monumental Framing of the Early Middle Ages (2005) develops this idea to show that it was the decline of taxation following the breakdown of trade that really changed things. Equally important has been the challenge to the traditional narrative. In a path-breaking work entitled The Narrators of Barbarian History (1988) Walter Goffart argued that Jordanes, Gregory of Tours, Bede and Paul the Deacon were in no way the ‘national’ historians they had been assumed to be. Quite simply, they were not reliable

witnesses when it came to post-Roman states based on barbarian groups, for each historian had his own agenda in writing and each actually knew very little about the peoples they were supposedly championing. Goffart, like Pirenne, was writing the barbarians out as main players in the ending of the Roman World but he went further in suggesting that the very notion of the Germanic barbarian was a much later construct. Goffart’s thinking was part of a wider questioning of the whole notion of ethnicity and thus of ethnic nationalism, a rethinking that would be further stimulated by the dreadful events of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. Patrick Geary’s book, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (2003), caught this mood perfectly. Finally, and largely unnoticed by historians in Britain, there has been a fierce debate among German-speaking historians about what actually constitutes a ‘state’: were early medieval peoples even capable of forming them? It is a question no doubt prompted by the fact that Germany had no single barbarian group that formed a state. These complications are both necessary and welcome. They open up a subject that had been in danger of being closed down by circular argument and they are a testimony to the vitality of that subject. Most West Europeans do live in states that had their origins in what grew out of the Roman Empire and do want to know how this came about. The task is to write about this in a clear and accessible way that comprehends the complications and avoids the crusty value judgments of old. David Rollason has shown the way forward in his recent textbook, Early Medieval Europe 300-1050 (2012), which opens with the question: ‘why study this period?’ Well, because in its complications we see how the complex world in which we live first took shape. Oh, and it is fascinating. Paul Fouracre

In God’s Path

The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire Robert G. Hoyland Oxford University Press 320pp £18.99

BETWEEN THE 630s and 740s armies originating in the Arabian Peninsula achieved a remarkable series of conquests over territory from the Atlantic Ocean to Central Asia. Their leaders established a new empire replacing the two superpowers of antiquity, the Roman and Persian empires: a feat that Robert Hoyland calls an ‘undeniably world-changing phenomenon’. Hoyland provides a chronological narrative of all the various arenas of the Arab conquests, alongside a study of the establishment of new administrative and political structures in the conquered territories, which came to constitute the first Islamic empire. Much has been written about these momentous events before, yet In God’s Path offers several valuable new approaches and insights. One obstacle to modern study of the first Islamic century has been the fact that virtually all of the accounts of these conquests written in Arabic were composed at least a century and a half after the events had taken place. Contemporary sources written by the conquered inhabitants of the Mediterranean and Middle East are well known and studied but Hoyland’s is the most comprehensive narrative of the Arab conquests to privilege these accounts. He deploys an impressive array of material,

ranging from Latin chronicles written in Spain and Syriac chronicles in northern Syria and Iraq to the correspondence of an eighth-century Soghdian ruler of Panjikent (in modern Tajikistan) and Sanskrit texts from Gujarat written on copper plates. The value of these sources, alongside their contemporaneity to the events they discuss, lies in their acquaintance with the late antique world which the Arabs were conquering. One of the major themes of Hoyland’s book is that the late antique context is crucial to appreciating the Arab conquerors’ achievements. Many of them were not total newcomers intruding for the first time upon the imperial systems of the early seventh century but had served as federate allies of the Romans and Persians. They knew what the rewards of their victories and the difficulties these presented would be. They also knew how to advance their cause through conciliatory negotiations with the conquered elites. The process of the creation of the Islamic empire can only be appreciated fully once it is recognised that Muhammad’s successors were not creating something new out of nothing but rather gradually remoulding what they found in place. The spread of contemporary evidence across all the areas is not even discussed: North Africa and south-east Iran are particularly poorly served and Hoyland has to rely here largely on ninth-century and later Arabic and Persian accounts. In general, however, Hoyland has collated a disparate array of sources and built upon the results of other modern studies to create a lucid narrative and analysis, one which admirably gives as much space to regions frequently considered peripheral as it does to the heartlands of the new empire. In God’s Path provides a thorough, persuasive and timely overview of this century of transformations in the history of the Middle East for specialists and non-specialists alike. Harry Munt MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS

Seneca: A Life Emily Wilson

Allan Lane 253pp £25

FEW FIGURES in classical antiquity can be the subject of a detailed biography. Cicero and St Augustine each provide a lot of autobiographical material and the emperors, particularly, have attracted the attention of ancient historical writers. For Seneca, philosopher, dramatist and adviser to Nero, we have both kinds of evidence but the information is problematic. The difficulties are appreciated by Wilson, a sensitive literary critic and a skilful translator of Seneca’s tragedies. Some of the outside material is strongly prejudiced, while Seneca, even when writing in the first person, is not straightforwardly autobiographical and, as an orator, uses techniques of persuasion geared to his addressee and audience. Even his letters are not real letters but a collection of essays written for publication: far less self-revealing than the letters that Cicero did not himself publish, though they, too, are artistically constructed. Highly conscious of the dangers of circularity in deducing life from art and then illuminating the reconstructed life from his writings, Wilson is nonetheless convinced that Seneca’s writing ‘constantly resonates with the events of his biography, without ever providing a perfect mirror for it’. And the known events of Seneca’s life are striking. Of provincial background, Seneca became a Roman senator. He spent much of the reign of Claudius in exile in Corsica on a charge of adultery with an 58 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

imperial princess but he was recalled through the influence of Claudius’s new wife Agrippina, who made him Nero’s tutor. After his pupil’s accession Seneca influenced appointments, handled public relations and tried to steer Nero in the direction of constitutional conduct and respect for the governing elite. In the end Nero grew weary of any advice that constrained his artistic pursuits and Seneca was accused of conspiracy against the emperor and ordered to take his own life. Wilson mostly concentrates on Seneca’s general views on political and moral issues, eschewing the search for specific allusions to known events. After all, when Seneca defends himself in his On the Happy Life against charges of hypocrisy, that his luxurious style of living did not match his moral principles, he turns it into a general defence of philosophers’ conduct. However, prolonged exposure to Seneca’s rhetoric has left Wilson doubting whether Lucilius, addressee of the Letters and Natural Questions, Seneca’s one surviving effort at scientific writing, is an imaginary friend and whether the fire at Lyons of Letter 91 is a fiction. Yet the Lyons disaster is reliably mentioned by Tacitus and all the other addressees of Seneca’s work

Wilson helps the general reader enjoy her wellwritten and imaginative book are attested elsewhere. Curiously, she has no hesitation in taking the self-eulogy that Seneca composes for Lucilius to be a piece of naked self-defence and autobiography. Wilson finds Seneca’s life and work relevant to modern-day western culture, troubled by the psychological pressures that go with material wealth and by the problems attendant on consumerism and globalisation. By quoting in translation and explaining Roman practices she helps the general reader enjoy her well-written and imaginative book. Miriam Griffin

Centuries of Change Which Century Saw the Most Change and Why it Matters to Us Ian Mortimer The Bodley Head 416pp £20

THE GRAND narrative may have fractured, the longue durée appear bloodless, but interest in the sweep of history seems undiminished: Robert Tombs’ recent and acclaimed The English and Their History brought a fresh intelligence to the retelling of English history and Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in a Hundred Objects ranged over centuries and continents, exploring the history of cultures and peoples through an examination of their artefacts. Now Ian Mortimer, a medievalist, has thrown his hat into the ring, retelling English history, century by century from the 11th to the 20th, in a book that should provoke lively debate round dinner tables throughout the land. His optic is to assess what changed in each century, what was significant and lasting and what or whom might be the agents of change. This might seem a ringer for the Whig interpretation of history, a linear view of progress or a parade of the powerful, but Mortimer is well up for the task. Sitting in his study in Mortonhampstead on the edge of Dartmoor, where the church clock still strikes as it has for centuries (and one suspects there might still be honey for tea), he draws a wide circle of investigation, employing his well-stocked mind, wide curiosity, verve,

humour, telling turn of phrase and a proven ability to clarify and intrigue by making unlikely conjunctions and connections. He is particularly good at rendering statistics meaningful: for example, to drive home the horrendous loss of life during the Black Death, when around 45 per cent of English men and women died in seven months, he points out that the equivalent would be to drop an atomic bomb every day on a different city for a year and three months; and he compares the murder rate in Oxford in the 1340s to Dodge City in the Wild West era, when out of every 100,000 deaths, 110 were murders. Mortimer’s contention that ‘it is not always the most dramatic changes that make a difference to our lives’ is born out by his thoughtful discussion of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the spread of literacy, the measurement of time and the report of a group of Somerset farmers agreeing that the most important change in their lifetimes had not been fertilisers, mechanisation or silos but wellington boots. So which century does Mortimer finally plump for as that ‘which saw most change?’ Reluctantly, since it was his disagreement with the proposition that inspired him to write this book, Mortimer goes for the 20th century, though with a sobering prophecy. We only need to look at the famous ‘Earthrise’ photograph taken from space in 1968 to see how finite, how pitifully small our planet is, how unsustainable the march of change and progress will render it in the frighteningly near future. And who does Mortimer elect as the most powerful agent of change? Not Marx, nor Hitler, Peter Abelard, Rousseau nor William Harvey, all of whom he canvasses briefly, but God. Mortimer does not believe there is a God, but acknowledges that this (for him) non-existent deity has influenced men’s minds in the western world more profoundly than anybody or anything else. Juliet Gardiner

REVIEWS

CLASSIC BOOK REVIEW

Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England Jennifer Evans

The Boydell Press 215pp £50

PHYSICIANS recommended aphrodisiacs to assist fertility during the 17th century, with foods such as oysters, sweetbreads and caviar considered good for inducing lust. These ideas were found not only in medical texts but in home recipes, erotica and ballads, indicating a common knowledge. Jennifer Evans sets out to tell the story of the early modern understanding of aphrodisiacs and provides a thorough historical survey. However, she finds that sex for sex’s sake was not on the agenda. The focus was on heating the body in order to counteract barrenness and impotency which, Evans says, ‘were a crucial element in the struggle for fertility’. The main aim of promoting healthy and pleasurable sex was in order to conceive. Texts such as Nicholas Culpepper’s The English Physician (1652), A. Marsh’s The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682) and Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) all gave information on how to keep the body healthy and functional. According to the Hippocratic humoral, regulating bodily fluids was essential. Women’s bodies were thought to be cold and wet, men’s warm and dry. It therefore made sense for women to be warmed up in order to more easily conceive. One book suggested that ‘heating and puffing up the Vagina encreaseth sexual pleasure’. Men who were impotent or infertile were also thought to lean towards coldness

astonishing breadth of his horizons. His focus GROUNDBREAKING works of history are not was less on Rome than on her eastern provinces often a bare 200 pages in length and generously and on the empire ruled by Sasanian Persia. This adorned with illustrations. Peter Brown’s The ensured that the Germanic invasions of the World of Late Antiquity, published in 1971, had West, so central to traditional narratives of the the look of a coffee-table book rather than period, were rendered peripheral in The World of what it actually was: a decisive re-calibration Late Antiquity. It was cultural rather than politiof how the ancient and early medieval worlds cal history that principally interested Brown; and had conventionally been periodised. Brown’s in particular ‘the haunting mixture of classical genius for thinking himself into the mindsets reticence and new religiosity’ that defined the of the distant past, for running with a theme in emerging monotheisms of the age. Although original and suggestive ways and for combining emperors and barbarians do stalk the pages of remarkable sweep with masterly concision had his book, his real heroes are the holy men who, already won him a reputation as one of Oxford’s from the beginning of his career right up to the most brilliant lecturers; but The World of Late present, have always been the most insistent Antiquity brought him a new audobject of his fascination. It was ience. It was to All Souls what the this perspective that enabled Ed Sullivan Show had been to the him to portray Islam, not as Cavern Club. a guillotine dropped upon the ‘Looking at the Late Antique neck of Late Antiquity, but world’, Brown wrote in his instead as the culmination of its preface, ‘we are caught between profoundest trends. Concluding the regretful contemplation of his book with the foundation of ancient ruins and the excited Baghdad, he cast the emergence acclamation of new growth.’ In of the Abbasid Caliphate as the truth, of course, the emphasis final and clinching victory for of historians surveying the Persian civilisation in its centucentu centuries that witnessed the ries-old battle for supremacy with implosion of Roman power its great Roman rival. Under Harun in the West had traditionally al-Rashid, Brown declared, ‘a been very much on the side The World of Late world that had never lost touch of regretful contemplation. with its Late Antique roots The period had long been cast Antiquity enjoyed a final efflorescence in as one of steadily darkening Peter Brown its last, Muslim and Arabicskies, of abandoned baths Folio Society 208pp £34.95 speaking transformation’. and central heating, of Nevertheless, immense and decline and fall. True, Brown’s enduring though the impact of The World of Late emphasis on the vibrancy and creativity of late Antiquity has been, there are signs that fashions antiquity did not emerge from nowhere. Alois may be moving on. A decade ago, Peter Heather Riegl, a professor of art history in Vienna, had and Bryan Ward-Perkins both wrote compelling coined the term späte Antike as early as 1889. accounts of the late Roman West that succeeded However, it was Brown more than anyone else by emphasising material culture over intellectual history, in restoring academic credibility to the much-derided concept of decline and fall. Conversely, Garth Fowden has criticised the ‘apparently generous’ span of Brown’s conception of Late Antiquity for being too narrow and has argued that it can only properly be understood in the context of the entire first Christian millennium. I doubt that Brown himself greatly minds. ‘How to draw on a great past without smothwho introduced to Anglophone scholarship the ering change. How to change without losing notion of ‘Late Antiquity’ as a distinctive period one’s roots.’ These were problems that he saw of history: one that is now enshrined as academas being particularly insistent in Late Antiquity ic orthodoxy. It has been rare for such a slim and which he wrote The World of Late Antiquity book to pack quite so enduring a punch. to trace. Evolution, to Brown, has always been That Brown could make the case for late something to celebrate. antiquity as an age, not of crisis and decay, but Tom Holland rather of innovation and renewal, reflected the

The World of Late Antiquity had the look of a coffee-table book ... [but] combined remarkable sweep with masterly concision

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS and needed the same treatment. Plants and animal substances were thought to stimulate desire and hot foods were suggested to create warming sensations: rocket, mustard, pepper, cinnamon, cress and ginger. Philip Burrough wrote in an early medical treatise, ‘let his privie members be continually chafed and rubbed with oyles, ointments and other heating medicines’, including pepper and myrrh. Similarly ‘windy’ meats, chickpeas, pine nuts and beans were thought good to combat impotence as the air pumped up the member to assist an erection. The Apple-Dumpling Eater (1692) described the virtues of dumplings that allowed one man to get ‘his Wife with Child of Nine Boys at a time’. Less enticing was the suggestion for female barrenness,

Ordinary men and women knew about aphrodisiacs and were highly informed about medicine to ‘seeth the fish called A Trout in goat’s milk, and give it the party to drink when she goes to bed’. ‘Sympathetic’ remedies included ingestion of animal genitalia: ‘Stones of a Bull, of a lecherous Goat’, ’Stags Pissel’ or ‘Cocks Pintle’. At least one physic advised eating birds such as partridges, quails and sparrows, which, ‘being exceedingly addicted to Venery, they work the same in those men and women that eat them’. Even phallic-shaped vegetables such as parsnips and carrots were thought to stir up lust. In this scholarly contribution to medicine and attitudes to the body, Evans finds that ordinary men and women knew about the use of aphrodisiacs and were highly informed about medicine, making their own recipes to treat their families. This accumulated knowledge was gleaned from friends and relatives, manuscript collections of suggestions, advice of physicians, personal experience and was passed down through families. Julie Peakman 60 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie

Eighteenth-century Midwives and their Patients Robert Woods & Chris Galley Liverpool University Press 560pp £80

THIS BOOK constitutes a handsome compendium of 18th-century obstetrics, retailing both the stories of practitioners and their patients and offering advice about how best to read the biographical and autobiographical fragments contained in medical case notes. The result is a long, satisfying account that complicates the established portrait of male and female practitioners in this era being in antagonistic opposition to one another. The volume is characterised by two components: the reprint of cases attended by William Smellie in London and by Sarah Stone in Somerset, alongside a commentary on them and their place in medical education. The results will prove attractive to the general reader with a taste for gory detail and to the specialist who will appreciate the layered interpretive exercises surrounding the cases. Stone is portrayed as selecting cases for the better instruction of other female midwives, explicitly to allow patients to avoid the attentions of ‘every boyish pretender’ who thought to engage in male-midwifery. This intention accounts for the relatively high proportion of instances where either the mother or child dies. Her patient mortality rate also speaks to the fact that Stone was likely to be called to cases where other

midwives had already failed to deliver, where the infant’s presentation caused problems. Like other female practitioners, who generally eschewed the use of metal instruments, Stone typically preferred to deliver the child by securing a hold on the feet wherever possible. Smellie’s publication was altogether grander, for study in a lecture room or library rather than a handy aide-memoire in the pocket, and one of four volumes that have contributed to his subsequent reputation as ‘the father of British midwifery’. Smellie, too, attended a more than average share of difficult obstetric cases but, unlike Stone, he did not denigrate his competitors, instead valuing his working relationships with female midwives. Smellie published to augment his London teaching practice, which means that his cases emphasise instrumental deliveries; he apparently used forceps with approximately 20 per cent of his obstetric patients in London. His programmes of lectures began in the early 1740s and included regular opportunities for students to assist in a delivery. On one occasion Smellie was accompanied to the bedside of a poor woman in St Giles by no fewer than 28 students, eager to see what he did in a case of the foetus presenting via the arm, although the child died. Smellie did not report the mother’s reaction to her moment of fame. The experiences of practitioners and patients are not the only source of poignancy in this work. This is one of those occasional posthumous academic publications, because Woods died before the manuscript was completed. His co-author Chris Galley modestly observes in the preface that it ‘is not in the form it would have been had he lived’. We will never know for sure, but one thing we can rely on is that this is a richly detailed investigation which interrogates easy assumptions and clearly locates two prominent participants in 18th-century medical publishing. Alannah Tomkins

Empire of Cotton A New History of Global Capitalism Sven Beckert

Allen Lane/Penguin 640pp £30

EVERY YEAR enough raw cotton is produced for each person in the world to consume 20 T-shirts. Cotton is one of the most common commodities; even our banknotes are partly made of cotton. Sven Beckert explains that the story of cotton starts not with factories and commodities but with cotton cultivation. The first part of the book highlights the importance that cotton had in Asia – and in India in particular – before the sector was transferred and re-organised in Europe through the use of new machinery in the late 18th century. The global dimension of the book is in its assertion of the centrality of the West in recasting one of the most significant manufacturing sectors in the world. This was possible thanks to imperial expansion, the labour of slaves and wage workers and, indeed, machinery. Beckert claims that cotton was the ‘launching pad’ of the Industrial Revolution. But this is act two of western capitalism following what he calls ‘war capitalism’. War capitalism was based on violence and coercion by Europeans: the appropriation of land in the Americas, the enslavement of millions of Africans forced to cultivate cotton in the West Indies and later the American South and the power of imperial states, first of which was Britain. Beckert is at his best when considering slavery and cotton plantations, places of violent domination where, even more than in the dark satanic mills of England,

REVIEWS the rhythm of ceaseless exploitation was imposed by ruthless plantation owners. In an engrossing narrative, Beckert discusses the importance of factories, technological innovation and the expansion of imperial markets. Reducing the cost of labour was key for British cotton textile producers to outcompete India, still the major world producer of cotton textiles in the 1820s. The book concentrates on the raw material and engages only marginally in the production and consumption of cotton textiles and so the cotton story that Beckert presents is one of US global capitalism. In 1800 the US production of raw cotton was still very small, yet by the start of the Civil War in 1861 the US South produced most of the cotton used in British and European continental mills. It was truly King Cotton, accounting for nearly a third of the US exports. Here is the full manifestation of

Every year enough cotton is produced for each person in the world to consume 20 T-shirts the book’s narrative, not just of land and factories but also of credit, information, cotton brokers and dealers and commodity exchanges. The US developed a double system of southern plantations and northern finance, brokerage and insurance. Before steel, oil and informatics, this was the world of money, trade and financial links spanning across continents. One might think that this is a narrative of unredeemed Eurocentric triumphalism, if it were not for the fact that Beckert shows the unbalances, weaknesses and utter failures of the cotton empire. The 20th century is also the denouement of a story of capitalist expansion. What once was the backbone of western capitalism is now a sclerotic sector whose survival, at least in the US, relies on state subsidies. Giorgio Riello

Pétain’s Jewish Children

French Jewish Youth & the Vichy Regime Daniel Lee Oxford University Press 288pp £65

TO THE modern imagination, French Jewish life under the Vichy Regime (1940-44) has long been associated with antisemitism, persecution, betrayal and the notorious Vel d’Hiv round-up of July 1942, during which 13,000 Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps. Intertwined with this narrative are both the story of the French Resistance and that of the Righteous Gentiles, those nonJews recognised after the war as having helped the Jewish cause. Accordingly, the French Jewish experience has been chiefly remembered in terms of either victimhood or resistance, with very little in between. Daniel Lee’s new monograph offers an illuminating and sometimes startling account of the complexities that characterised Vichy’s relationship with its Jews, shining light upon precisely this in-between area of French Jewish history. After France’s defeat by Germany in 1940 an armistice was signed and France was divided into two: the Nazi Occupied zone and the non-Occupied zone, ruled by Marshal Philippe Pétain. Lee argues compellingly that in view of the horrific developments of 1942, when Jews from both zones became subject to round-ups and deportations, history and collective memory have tended to conflate this later traumatic period with the first half of the regime. This is MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 61

REVIEWS

EXHIBITION

Musée Picasso Paris

5 Rue de Thorigny, 75003 Paris Website: http://www.museepicassoparis.fr PICASSO famously said ‘give me a museum and I’ll fill it.’ The magnificent Hôtel Salé (inset) in the Marais district certainly fulfills his dream. Built in the late 1650s by architect Jean Boullier of Bourges, it owes its name ‘salty’ to its first owner, Pierre Aubert de Fontenay, responsible for collecting the gabelle or salt tax. In 1974 it was decided that Picasso’s dation (the death duties that the painter’s heirs had to pay) would be exhibited in the 17th-century building. Thus, the museum was first renovated, restructured and refurbished by the architect Roland Simonet (between 1979 and 1985) to house the future museum. In 2009 the museum closed down to undergo an ambitious programme of renovation, modernisation and expansion and it finally re-opened in October 2014. Following a refurbishment costing 43 million euros and the dismissal of its then director, Anne Baldassari (who nevertheless was responsible for the inaugural exhibition), the surface area of the museum has now doubled and exhibits 5,000 works by the artist. It also hosts Picasso’s impressive archives (the painter was also a poet, experimenting with words) and, very interestingly, his own private collection of 150 works by artists such as Braque, Matisse, Cézanne, Le Douanier Rousseau, Renoir, Chardin, Courbet and Corot, among others. Crucially for anyone who is trying to understand the roots of modern art, it also hosts a large room dedicated to Picasso’s African and Oceanian art collection, which clearly provided him with a pool of forms to borrow from, in which the ethnographic sculptures purchased from 1907 onwards held a special place: in addition to their expressive power, the painter saw them as ‘magical’ objects, able to intercede with the spirits, a view shared

by André Breton, founder of the Surrealist movement. These rooms, located in the attic (with lovely views over the city that he loved so much), show how Picasso was able to engage in a living dialogue with works of any period and cultural tradition. In a way, this is Anne Baldassari’s aesthetic parti pris throughout the museum: she wanted Picasso’s works to enter in a dialogue with works or themes (such as bullfighting or Déjeuner sur l’herbe after Manet and Cézanne, or even Musketeers after Rembrandt) that inspired him. We thus move from rooms where his works re-interpret African art or Cézanne’s works, following their influence on the development of Cubism, to rooms dedicated to the works inspired by the women who shared his life. The space is organised broadly chronologically around the various studios he occupied throughout his very long career: from the legendary Bateau-Lavoir in Montmartre to the 7 rue des Grands-Augustins where he created Guernica (now in Madrid) and to the South of France, where his art continued evolving, inventing and exploring new techniques such as ceramics and print making. Among the remarkable additions to this new, enlarged space are the underground vaulted rooms, previously reserved for the administration of the conservation wing of the museum, which are dedicated to Picasso’s studios, with numerous photographic evidence showing the works in progress. The sketches and drawings held here give an idea of the intensive experimentation that went into one of his most famous works, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Musée Picasso Paris affords us the spectacular experience of seeing a pictorial revolution in action. Picasso’s continual experimentation with forms and colours is apparent at every stage, in every room: from the Cubist Man with Guitar (1911) to the Still Life with Cane Chair (1912) displaying the works he developed with Georges Braque to the – much derided – interwar period return to figuration in painting (but not in sculpture, as his planned monument Figure of 1928, dedicated to the memory of his friend, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, made of intertwined wire, shows) to the exploration of committed art during the Second World War and beyond. The collection shows how Picasso transformed everything to incorporate in his works all of life, including what was considered insignificant. This is his revolution and one that is magnificently displayed in this newly reopened museum. Nathalie Aubert

‘Give me a museum and I’ll fill it …’ Picassso’s works are magnificently displayed in the Musée Picasso Paris

62 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

problematic because the years 1940-42 in fact saw a nuanced and often reciprocal partnership between the Vichy government and French Jewry that has been hitherto unexplored. Pétain’s Jewish Children centres around the institutionalised and occasionally odd world of scouting and youth movements. Humiliated by Germany’s victory, the Vichy government aimed to rebuild France through a carefully mapped programme of ‘moral regeneration’: abandoning decadent bourgeois urbanism – a trait associated with Jews – and returning to a productive rural life with traditional Catholic values. From the very beginning, Vichy envisaged its youth as the backbone of this project, a vigorous vanguard to help rebuild the nation. Although some antisemitic legislation was passed in 1940, Vichy’s desire for a strong and invigorated France frequently took priority over its racial laws and thus ‘spaces of liberty’ remained open for the Jews, in particular farming and agriculture. Jewish scouting movements, such as the Éclaireurs Israélites de France (EIF) that also promoted a ‘return to the land’ ethos were fully backed and supported by the Vichy government, while regime youth projects, such as Chantiers de la Jeunesse, for the most part welcomed Jewish participation. In one memorable photograph we even see a local EIF troop participating in an official state ceremony outside Pétain’s residence in May 1941. Pétain’s Jewish Children is part of the Oxford Historical Monograph series, which aims to bring the university’s most outstanding doctoral theses to a wider audience. Though some sections are heavy-handed, the book is, in its entirety, an accessible and fascinating piece of research that offers a meticulous record of its primary sources and a treasure trove of oral testimonies and private correspondence which will be invaluable to historians of this period. Giulia Miller

REVIEWS

The Pitt Rivers Museum A World Within Michael O’Hanlon Scala 168pp £16.95

AS ANY enchanted visitor knows, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is a Victorian cavern stuffed with intriguing objects, hand-written labels and unending surprises. Surprising, too – though less well-known – is its history, as the current director reveals in this engaging and fabulously illustrated meditation on the museum. How many know of the curious origins of the archaeological and

anthropological collection donated by General A.H.L.F. Pitt-Rivers (born Augustus Henry Lane Fox) to Oxford University and opened in 1884? It grew from his fascination with musketry and in 1851 Pitt-Rivers became involved with improving a new type of bullet for a rifle which triggered an interest in how weapons had evolved. Inspired by Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution, Pitt-Rivers convinced himself that all material culture, not just weapons, had evolved in steps, with ‘utility’ as a physical equivalent of the survival of the fittest. In 1891 he said: ‘It occurred to me what an interesting thing it would be to have a museum in which all these successive stages of improvement might be placed in the order of their occurrence.’ Perhaps appropriately, in the museum’s current collection – vastly expanded since 1884 – the second largest category of artefact (after ‘stone tools’) happens to be ‘weaponry’. In the words of one visitor: ‘Sometimes a nightmare, isn’t it? But it is us – human kind.’

Although the current collection fails to demonstrate Pitt-Rivers’ theory of evolutionary trajectories, it adheres to two other ideas he championed. The first is its emphasis on collecting everyday, rather than exceptional, artefacts – though of course an everyday object in Victorian Nigeria may today appear utterly exotic. The second is its comparative arrangement by form and function, not geographical origin. Thus one showcase displays games of gambling and chance from across the world, while another concerns ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’, including so-called shrunken heads (tsantsa) from the Jivaroan peoples of eastern Ecuador and Peru. The comparative approach has an obvious disadvantage: imagine a British Museum with no galleries devoted exclusively to ancient Egypt or Indian art. In the 1960s came an imaginative proposal by a former curator, Bernard Fagg, to transplant the collection to a modern rotunda with a concentric gallery design: an elegant mixture

of form and geography. ‘A visitor taking a circular path around the planned ethnological floor would find the original display by type of object preserved’, notes O’Hanlon. ‘Walking radially towards the rotunda’s centre, however, the same visitor would find collections arrayed by geographic region.’ The scheme failed, not least because the museum’s ‘Victorian’ displays were becoming regarded with increasing affection by visitors. Moreover, the new design would have reduced the flexibility that any museum needs to accommodate changing circumstances. A modern annexe was opened in 2007. It is impossible to do justice to such collections in a short, or longer, book. Even so, any aficionado of the Pitt Rivers will want this inspired publication. I spotted only one tiny error: the gods from the Hindu temple of Jagannath (hence, ‘juggernaut’) are located in east, not north-west, India. No doubt this will be corrected in the book’s many future printings. Andrew Robinson

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

What is wonderful here is that De Schaepdrijver manages to restore some individuality to her feisty subject

Gabrielle Petit

The Death and Life of a Female Spy in the First World War Sophie De Schaepdrijver Bloomsbury 272pp £19.99

‘THERE ARE graves that are alive’, the President of the Belgian League of Remembrance pronounced at Gabrielle Petit’s state funeral in 1919, three years after her execution. Petit, a young shop-girl, served her country not just in life and death but in legend afterwards. With such a fertile subject, Sophie De

64 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

Schaepdrijver has produced a fascinating study of the life and afterlife of this much-employed Belgian heroine. A disinherited child of the downwardly mobile provincial bourgeoisie, the aptly named Petit was neglected and abused by her widowed father, ‘morally abandoned’ by her wider family and denied the further education that could have enabled independence. Resilient, patriotic and fiercely defiant, she created family among friends and in the war found vocation, status and income serving her country by providing intelligence on enemy troop movements to the Allies.

Pleasingly, the nom-de-guerre she chose was ‘Miss Legrand’. When arrested she demonstrated ‘exemplary rudeness and astonishing arrogance’. ‘I am almost done being useless’, she wrote, at once refusing to ask for a pardon and betraying her driving motivation in life. But even Petit could not have imagined how much use would later be made of her story. Biography done, the author goes on to explore the meanings behind the various commemorations of Petit’s life. While men are typically honoured anonymously, De Schaepdrijver notes that women tend to be commemorated personally, as individual citizens. Petit was a pro-active heroine, not a victim, but that has not prevented various ‘memory agents’, as De Schaepdrijver calls them, from presenting her variously: as a worker-hero; national heroine and emblem of unsullied valour during the occupation; a source of solace during the disappointing peace; a force for later international reconciliation; and a focus for women’s rights. Women tend to be elevated as heroines, the author writes, but diminished as agents. What is wonderful here is that, while exploring the issues of class, gender and nationality that all find resonance in Petit’s story, De Schaepdrijver manages to restore some individuality to her feisty subject. This is essentially an academic book and contains some startling words such as centrafugality, arrestation and hecatomb. But small gripes aside, it is accessible and rewarding. While awaiting execution, Petit scratched out the words, ‘It’s the humble ones that make hidden heroes’. Petit was at once humble and mighty, both hidden and hugely venerated. But by the 1980s her statue had been relocated out of central Brussels and she was largely forgotten. De Schaepdrijver helps to restore Petit’s memory, while asking fascinating questions about why we should remember and how such commemoration serves us. Clare Mulley

Born in the GDR

Living in the Shadow of the Wall Hester Vaizey Oxford University Press 240pp £20

IN MAY 1991, just a few months after German reunification, I took a train from Berlin to Magdeburg in the heart of the old GDR or East Germany. I shared the carriage with two old codgers dressed in military caps, who discussed the pros and cons of being part of a greater Germany. They talked about oranges and their availability since the ‘change’ of November 9th, 1989. The exponential increase in the availability of oranges was clearly a good thing. On the other hand, they had plenty of things to grumble about: many certainties enshrined in the otherwise repressive East German state had disappeared; they had swapped oranges for insecurity. Hester Vaizey’s new book, Born in the GDR, is about that change and the ‘Ossi’s’ ability to adapt to an aggressive, unsentimental western world. Vaizey concentrates on eight case histories of women and men born between the mid 1960s and 1980 and supplements her material with examples garnered from a further range of interviewees. Many were just about to take their Abitur, or school-leaving certificate. The oldest was therefore only in her mid-20s when the Wall fell and the reader misses out on the attitudes of the Bonzen, those who enjoyed real power and privilege in East Germany. While comparisons with Nazism are sometimes inapposite, it is indisputable that the GDR perpetuated the idea of a social

REVIEWS community that you were either with or against. If you accepted it, you were reasonably well off and could lord it over Hungarians and Czechs during your holidays in the Eastern Bloc. There were plenty of ways of twisting the system in your favour. Friends in Schwerin once regaled me with quite monstrous quantities of pork and told me anything was possible, providing you got on with the butcher. If you insisted on fighting the regime, you faced the Stasi or Ministry for State Security which, even if not quite as brutal as the Gestapo, employed a phenomenal number of sneaks. Falling foul of them meant civil death. Other trappings of the system echoed the outgoing regime, from the Young Pioneers which indoctrinated children as to the merits of Trabant cars in place of the Nazi Volkswagen. Like National Socialism, one way of opposing the system was to be religious. The GDR was overwhelmingly Lutheran and, latterly at least, pastors and their churches became safe-havens for dissidents. Katharina’s story illustrates this point. She actually became a pastor, although the state threatened to blight her career at every turn. Born in the GDR is inevitably a gloomy portrait of a fairly dismal world but Hester Vaizey introduces us to some of the inventive vocabulary of the time from the Jammerossi (whingeing Easterner) to Kohl-onization (Helmut Kohl’s colonisation of the East). The GDR was paternalistic, prudish (if hugely tolerant of nudism), drab and claustrophobic. Party members had a better time of it but for most citizens their salaries were quite sufficient, for there was nothing to buy, resulting in an indecent interest in western trash all over the communist East. They lusted after McDonald’s hamburgers, blue jeans, western pop music and foreign holidays, even if a real yearning for western ideology was rare. That these interviewees express disappointment a generation later is hardly surprising: they had discovered that the taste of Coca-Cola capitalism quickly palled. Giles MacDonogh

Lives in Common

Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron Menachem Klein Hurst and Co 336pp £20

THE TITLE of this book, Lives in Common, was truer of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs before 1948 – when the state of Israel was established – than today. Indeed the notion has been replaced by ‘lives in parallel’. This separation, emphasising what is different, was initiated by the rise of 20th-century nationalism. Zionism for the Jews and panArab nationalism for the Arabs. The book is divided into two parts. Before 1948, which the author depicts in quasi-idyllic terms, and after the Six Day War in 1967 in which right-wing Israeli governments and their allies in the settler movement overwhelmed those Jews and Arabs who believed in fair play, based on coexistence, in a drive to construct a greater Israel. Klein argues that an ArabJewish identity developed in mixed-population cities such as Jaffa and Hebron, which exhibited distinct cultures, traditions and a bonhomie towards Arab neighbours. Jerusalem was seen as a multilingual, multicultural location. Gypsies lived in Wadi Goz, Americans read the Bible in the east of the city and businesses in the Jaffa Gate area were owned by German Templars, Greeks and Armenians. African girls could be purchased in the shuk until 1889. Jews lived in 70 per cent of homes in the Armenian Quarter and 30 per cent of the Muslim Quarter. Arabic words (kiftah, ‘meatball’) were

integrated into the local Yiddish dialect, while the Jerusalem Arabs learned the meaning of meshugineh (madman). Mixed marriages occasionally occurred up to the 1940s, mainly of Palestinian male elites with European women. The second wife of Raghib Nashashibi, Arab Mayor of Jerusalem, was Jewish. This veritable Garden of Eden evaporated with the rise of nationalism. The influx of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe after the First World War – regarded by conservative Arab society as Bolshevik agitators – as well as the simultaneous rise of a Palestinian national movement, led to killings of Jews in Jaffa, Jerusalem and Hebron in the 1920s. The Arab Revolt of 1936-39 finally cleared Jews from Hebron, while Jaffa suffered economically. All this set the stage for the war between Zionist Jews and Palestinian Arabs in 1948 in which the term ‘Arab Jew’ became redundant and was rendered meaningless. National affiliation superseded personal interaction. Thus in June 1997 an Israeli-Palestinian group found it impossible to find an art gallery willing to host the exhibition To Live Together in Jerusalem: Two Capitals for Two States. Klein, an Israeli academic, has attempted to capture the imagery of this lost world before national polarisation took hold. While fascinating to behold, since it appeals to the best in the human condition, Jews in the broader Arab world did not always live in harmony with the majority society. Life was particularly hard for Jews during periods of religious intensity when ‘the other’ was the object of discrimination. Are these examples of inter-communal benevolence in Palestine and therefore isolated episodes, or a general manifestation? Is an imagined perfect past preferable to the harsh reality of the present? Despite such questions this book sows the possibility of a different Middle East in the maelstrom of inter-ethnic conflict. Colin Shindler

CONTRIBUTORS Nathalie Aubert is Professor of French literature, Oxford Brookes University. Paul Fouracre is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Manchester. Juliet Gardiner is a historian and commentator on British social history and a former editor of History Today. Miriam Griffin’s most recent book is Seneca on Society: a Guide to De Beneficiis (OUP, 2013). Tom Holland’s latest book is Herodotus: The Histories (Penguin, 2013). Giles MacDonogh is a freelance historian and author of several books about German history. Giulia Miller is Affiliated Lecturer in Modern Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. Clare Mulley’s latest biography is The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Britain’s First Female Special Agent (Macmillan, 2012). Harry Munt is the author of The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia (CUP, 2014). Julie Peakman’s new book, Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore will be published by Quercus in June 2015. Giorgio Riello is author of Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge, 2013). Andrew Robinson is the author of many books, including India: A Short History (Thames & Hudson, 2014). Colin Shindler is an emeritus professor at the School of African and Oriental Studies, University of London. Alannah Tomkins is Programme Director for History at the University of Keele.

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Pragmatic Traders Joanna Warson’s article on Rhodesian UDI (‘A Secret History of Decolonisation’, April) highlights the ineffectiveness of commercial sanctions and the difficulty of enforcement when the business community, far from being indifferent, actively seeks ways to circumvent them. In pre-UDI days the main sea port for goods destined for Rhodesia was Beira in Mozambique, linked by rail with Salisbury. A major import through that port was oil and post-UDI it was well known that oil exports to Rhodesia were largely unaffected. Rather than citing only CFP and Total, the article would have carried more credibility if it had included a comparison table showing imports both pre- and post-UDI by company and country of origin. Even that would be thin evidence because oil companies have so many subsidiaries and associates that it is easy for them to disguise both source and destination for the finished product. To deny any ‘through trade’ would have harmed Mozambique at least as much as Rhodesia, because large numbers of the population depended on the ports and roads to Rhodesia for their living. Peugeot and Renault cars were popular throughout Africa because their reliability far outclassed British and US products, so a figure of 50 per cent ownership would probably be correct and would be reflected in figures throughout East Africa; thus parts and spares would be easily available through neighbouring countries, either legally or illegally. A figure of 22 per cent French military material also seems about right, but a table showing British, US and Soviet percentages pre- and post-UDI would be interesting. How much British material was in use? 66 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

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The French attitude to trade has always been pragmatic but a careful study of the activities of other international companies would reveal – as Warson pointed out – that they were far from being alone. Stewart West Malaysia

Darker History Suzannah Lipscomb writes in her article: ‘Shedding light on dark history’ (Making History, April) that ‘forgetfulness is terrible because it betrays a lack of empathy … Our duty towards past horrors is a sombre honouring’. Isn’t it therefore high time that the millions of Africans enslaved and transported and the millions who died in the process of enslavement and then on the plantations were commemorated in Britain? Isn’t it time to acknowledge these women, children and men? Their history is certainly ‘dark’ and our lack of acknowledgement disgraceful. Marika Sherwood Institute of Commonwealth Studies University of London

No Ken Do As someone who has had a long-standing interest in the Church of England during the 17th century, I was delighted to find John Jolliffe’s article (‘Bishop Ken and the Nonjurors’, April). However, while the article was interesting and enlightening – especially the section on Ken’s library – the opening was misleading. The king issued no ‘Declaration of Faith’, but his Declaration of Indulgence granting religious liberty was first issued on April 4th, 1687 and reissued on April 27th, 1688. On May 4th the bishops of the Church of England were instructed to have the declaration read in all churches on two successive Sundays. As Jolliffe states, it was

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against this order that the seven bishops directed their petition. They were, of course, the seven portrayed in the contemporary engraving which accompanied the article (Sancroft and Ken, plus Lloyd of St Asaph, Trelawny of Bristol, White of Peterborough, Turner of Ely and Lake of Chichester). Neither Cartwright of Chester nor Compton of London were signatories of the petition, though Compton was certainly aware of it. Compton had been suspended by James’ Ecclesiastical Commission for his failure to clamp down on anti-Roman Catholic preaching in the capital; in consequence he was not among those required to enforce the reading of the Declaration. Cartwright was the most loyal to James of all the bishops. His diary records his efforts to promote an address of thanks to the king after the issue of the first Declaration of Indulgence, while in June 1688 a Cheshire gentleman wrote in a letter how ‘the clergy of this county generally agree not to read the declaration notwithstanding the Bishop’s monition, as well as order’. In the parish of Barking, which Cartwright held ‘in commendam’ along with his bishopric, he dismissed his curate for failing to read the Declaration. Rev Michael Freeman via email

Contested Claims While I readily acknowledge that the historiography of the suffragette movement is contested, surely it is stretching credibility to claim, as Fern Riddell does (‘The Weaker Sex’, March 2015), that historians have failed to fully engage with the issue of suffragette violence. Suffragette violence was ridiculed in George Dangerfield’s influential 1935 The Strange Death of Liberal England and given extensive

coverage in Andrew Rosen’s 1974 text Rise Up Women! The Militant Campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903-4, among others. More recently, the late C J. Bearman focused on the topic. What is most remarkable is Riddell’s failure to place the violence within any context and, in particular, to ignore the violence against the suffragettes, even when they engaged in peaceful demonstrations. June Purvis University of Portsmouth

Mixed Methodism In his article, ‘The Forgotten World of Christian Socialism’ (March 2015) Robert Colls links the Tolpuddle Martyrs to Primitive Methodism but, in fact, the denomination’s missionaries did not reach the district around Dorchester until after the trial of the six men. Five of them did have some connection with Wesleyan Methodism and three – George Loveless, James Loveless and Thomas Standfield – may have been lay preachers in that connection. It is almost certain, however, that they were expelled from Methodist membership, as members of the union from other Dorset villages were. The Wesleyan community played no part in the campaign for their pardon and would continue to draw a veil over the Martyrs’ links to Methodism until the 1930s. The incident is a reminder that Methodist politics were always diverse and contradictory. Margaret Thatcher was, after all, as much a product of Methodism as Michael Foot. The idea that the Labour Party owed more to Methodism than to Marxism was politically useful in the 1950s but it is a claim that needs to be handled with care. Jonathan Rodell Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge

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This display explores the rich history of the Foundling Hospital Boys’ Band. For many boys it became a route into regimental band and service across the world. We reveal their stories. Download the FREE Foundlings at War iBook from iTunes

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FOUNDLING MUSEUM

40 Brunswick Square London WC1N 1AZ T: +44 (0)20 7841 3600 E: [email protected] www.foundlingmuseum.org.uk

The Boys’ Band marching at the London Foundling Hospital (detail), 1920s © courtesy Coram

Holidays

68 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

f o u n d l i n g s at wa r : m i l i ta r y b a n d s Until 10 May 2015

Reassuringly intelligent. Comfortingly rational.

Coming Next Month The Roots of Waterloo

By the time of the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815, Europe had been at war with itself for more than 20 years. Revolutionary France attacked Austria in April 1792 following a call for war by Jacques-Pierre Brissot (right), who said that that the new republic should engage in a ‘crusade for liberty’. Maximilien Robespierre opposed such plans, observing that ‘no one welcomes armed liberators’. The war soon spiralled out of control and it became the backdrop to the ‘Terror’, in which Brissot himself soon perished. Robespierre would go on to ‘accept necessity’ and became a leader of the revolution that would ultimately destroy him. Marisa Linton tells their dramatic story.

Shooting GÖring

Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel was an infamous Jewish gangster who made his fortune bootlegging during the prohibition years and his name as a Hollywood socialite and Las Vegas ‘booster’. According to various testimonies, in 1939 he travelled to Rome with his lover, Countess Dorothy di Frasso, in an attempt to sell Mussolini’s government a new explosive and while there considered an assassination attempt on Hermann GÖring. Larry Gragg considers this incredible story’s veracity, as well as the underworld’s wider involvement in the US war effort.

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www.historytoday.com/subscribe March’s Prize Crossword

The Birth of Comedy

Two and a half millennia ago the genre of comedy was recognised for the first time by its inclusion in the programme of drama competitions held by the Athenian state. In an outdoor theatre in the sanctuary of the wine-god Dionysus, a chorus of men dressed in obscene costumes accompanied an actor or two who cracked jokes and shouted versified abuse at an audience of tipsy citizens. The Athenians, argues Edith Hall, had realised that satire is not only funny but a democratic duty.

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

The June issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the UK on May 21st. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.

PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for March is Timothy Weakley, Dundee.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © British Library Board/Bridgeman Images. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © RIA Novosti/Alamy; 5 © Andrey Nekrasov/Alamy; 6 © Private Collection; 7 © Galerie Bilderwelt/Bridgeman Images. MONTHS PAST: 8 © Philip Mould Ltd/Bridgeman Images; 9 top © Getty Images; bottom © Bridgeman Images. DEALING WITH DÖNITZ: 11 © Press Association Images; 12 top © bpk, Berlin; bottom © Press Association Images; 13 top © akg-images; bottom © Getty Images; 14 top © Getty Images; bottom © akg-images/ullstein bild; 15 top © akg-images; bottom © Getty Images; 16 top © Getty Images; bottom © dpa/Alamy. AN OXFORD INTERLUDE: 17 and 18 © Somerville College, University of Oxford; 19 top © McMaster University Library, Canada/Roland Leighton Literary Estate; bottom © McMaster University Library, Canada/Vera Brittain Archive; 20 © National Portrait Gallery, London; 21 © Alamy; 22 top © Somerville College, University of Oxford; bottom by kind permission of Angela Ridge; 23 Letters © Somerville College, University of Oxford. INFOCUS: 24-25 © Getty Images. THE CRUSADES: 26-27; 28; 29 © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 30 © De Agostini/Bridgeman Images; 31 top © Jonathan Phillips; bottom © Alamy images; 32 top © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; bottom © The Tower of David Museum of the History of Jerusalem; 33 © Bridgeman Images; 34 © Jonathan Phillips. SLEEP, SWEET DECEIVING: 36 © The Art Archive/Alamy. MAKING HISTORY: 38 © Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany/ Bridgeman Images. LE ROI-CHEVALIER: 39 © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 40 top left © Louvre/ Bridgeman Images; top right Musée des Beaux Arts/Bridgeman Images; 41 top © Bibliothèque Nationale/akgimages; bottom © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge/Bridgeman Images; 42 top © Bridgeman Images; bottom Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2015/Bridgeman Images; 43 © Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images; 44 top © Musée Condé, Chantilly/Bridgeman Images; bottom © akg-images/ Erich Lessing; 45 top © Wikimedia/Creative Commons; bottom © Paul Thompson/Alamy. A MUDDY VISION OF THE GREAT WAR: 46 © BBC Photo Library. AN ENDURING MODEL: 49 © The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; 50-51 © Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle-upon-Tyne/Bridgeman Images; 51 bottom illustration from Letters of William Stubbs, edited by William Holden Hutton, pub. Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd, 1904; 52 top © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom © Bridgeman Images; 53 top © Alamy; bottom reproduced by kind permission of Oxfordshire County Council; 54 © The British Library Board. REVIEWS: 56 © akg-images; 62 © Alamy. COMING NEXT MONTH: © French Revolution Archive. PASTIMES: 70 top Gargantua, 1831, by Honoré Daumier; middle Esperanto flag; bottom Claude Galien, lithograph by Pierre Roche Vigneron, c.1865. Images © Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York/Bridgeman Images. 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.

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 69

Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 In classical Sparta, how many healthy sons did a Spartan man need to sire in order to be exempt from military service?

22 Which Hungarian king was killed at the Battle of Mohács in 1526? 23 Who created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death in the 1940s?

2 When did Melvil Dewey first publish his decimal library classification system?

24 Which two countries were involved in the Baltimore Incident of 1891?

5 Who was the first national leader to proclaim Christianity as an official state religion, c.301?

9 Of what significance is the year 1161 in the chronology of Edward the Confessor? 10 Which collection of essays by Joan Didion takes its name from a W.B. Yeats poem? 11 Which second-century parody is the earliest known piece of fiction involving space travel? 12 Where did Daniel Defoe describe as ‘the cleanest and beautifullest ... city in Britain, London excepted’? 13 Who was the last pagan emperor of the Roman Empire?

6 Popular among the Japanese aristocracy until the Meiji period, what is ohaguro? 7 Which King of Scots was the only surviving son of Robert Bruce? 8 Which Greek physician gained his reputation by performing public dissections of monkeys? 70 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

14 Which French artist was sentenced to six months in prison in 1832 for producing an unflattering caricature of King Louis-Philippe? 15 By what name is Saloth Sar better known? 16 What did Baron Karl Drais and

Otto Schillinger patent in 1818? 17 Who is the author of The True Word, an attack on Christianity written in the second century? 18 In which year was the first permanent transatlantic telegraph cable laid? 19 Which British High Commissioner in China ordered the destruction of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace in 1860? 20 Sonny Barger (b.1938) is known as a founding member of which organisation? 21 What is represented by the flag below?

25 Which Scottish explorer wrote Travels in the Interior of Africa, published in 1799?

ANSWERS

4 Which union united the kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden and Norway between 1397 and 1523?

1. Three. 2. 1876. 3. Vito Russo (1946-90). 4. The Kalmar Union. 5. Tiridates III of Armenia (c.250-c.330). 6. The custom of dyeing one’s teeth black. 7. David II (1324-71). 8. Galen (129-216/17). 9. It is the year he was canonised. 10. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). 11. True History by Lucian of Samosata. 12. Glasgow. 13. Julian (c.331-63). 14. Honoré Daumier (1808-79). 15. Pol Pot (1925-98). 16. The dandy horse, a forerunner of the modern bicycle. 17. Celsus. 18. 1866. 19. James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elgin (1811-63). 20. Hells Angels. 21. Esperanto. 22. Louis II (1506-26). 23. Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962). 24. US and Chile. 25. Mungo Park (1771-1806).

3 Which prominent gay rights activist and film historian wrote The Celluloid Closet?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth

ACROSS 9 Haydn’s ‘Emperor’ or Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’, for example (7) 10 Pirate or privateer (7) 11 Phase of human techno-cultural development, beginning in the Middle East c.1200 bc (4,3) 12 Daughter of Edward the Elder and consort of Otto I, also known as Eadgyth (7) 13 Byname of Henry I (9) 15 Name by which the Anglo-Indian cricketer Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji (18721933) was generally known (5) 16 David George ___ (1862-1927), English archaeologist and director of the Ashmolean Museum (7) 19 The ___ Alliance, military coalition also known as the Peloponnesian League (7) 20 The ___ of Gerontius, 1900 oratorio by Edward Elgar (5) 21 Welsh-born children’s author of Norwegian heritage (1916-90) (5,4) 25 ___ Green, district of East London; in 1943, its Tube station was bombed (7) 26 Post-1820s term for a well-made road surface (7) 28 Giovanni ___ (1866-1945), Piedmont-born founder of the Fiat motor company (7) 29 ___ Abbey, Monmouthshire ruin (7) DOWN 1 Arthur ___ (d.1679/80), Fifth

Monarchist, nominated to Barebone’s Parliament in 1653 (6) 2 Japanese city, site of a 17thcentury castle destroyed by fire during the Second World War (6) 3 Sicilian volcano, noted for eruptions in 475 and 396 bc (4) 4 Sir Richard ___ (1672-1729), co-founder of the Spectator (6) 5 ‘Books must follow ___, and not ___ books’ – Francis Bacon, 1657 (8) 6 South African coin, first minted in 1967 (10) 7 Jean ___ (d.1672), French general noted for his attention to training and drill (8) 8 The Act of ___, 1964 work by Arthur Koestler (8) 14 Byname of Henry II (10) 16 Satirical poem of 1663-64 by Samuel Butler (8) 17 Thomas ___ (d.1682), musician at the court of Charles II (8) 18 ___ visitation, tour of inspection undertaken by officers of arms from 1530 to 1688 (8) 22 City of Kazakhstan, destroyed by earthquake in 1887 (6) 23 Del Sarto, Pisano or Palladio, perhaps (6) 24 Norman ___ (b.1942), Chancellor of the Exchequer 1990-93 (6) 27 In the Gospel of John, the location of Christ’s first public miracle (4)

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 1st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation Doménikos Theotokópoulos, ‘El Greco’(1541-1614) 

El Greco

whose Modena Triptych was discovered in 1937 in the store rooms of the Galleria Estense, home to the art collection of the House of Este, a scion of which was …

favourite of Henry II of France, whom he created Duchess of Valentino, a title formerly held by …

Louise Borgia (1500-53)

Mary of Modena (1658-1718)

daughter of Cesare, who was the grandchild of a pope, as was …

the second wife of …

James II of England and VII of Scotland (1633-1701) whose grave was desecrated during the French Revolution, as was that of …

Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566)

Alessandro Farnese (1520-89) By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard

Italian cardinal, who was the patron of …

MAY 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

RICHARD I

FromtheArchive Steven Runciman’s profile of Richard the Lionheart, written at a time of impending crisis in Anglo-Cypriot relations, offers a nuanced and sensitive portrait, writes Minoo Dinshaw.

The Familiar and the Fresh RICHARD I of England, called the Lionheart, seized the island of Cyprus in the summer of 1191. Almost 700 years later, in 1878, Cyprus came under English, or British, rule once more. Between 1951 and 1954 the great Byzantinist Steven Runciman published his three-volume narrative, A History of the Crusades, achieving both scholarly acclaim and enormous sales. Following this, Runciman’s old friend, Peter Quennell, a founding editor of History Today, commissioned him to write a profile of Richard for the magazine, then in its fifth year. Runciman, who had passed a convalescent VE Day on Cyprus relaxing beneath the castle of Kyrenia, had remained well informed about Cypriot affairs because of his friendship with the Greek poet and diplomat George Seferiades, or Seferis, who was torn between admiration for British culture and unwavering support for Cypriot independence. From Seferis, Runciman would be one of the first Britons to hear of the foundation of the Cypriot terrorist organisation, EOKA, with its solemn oath ‘to free Cyprus from the British yoke’, in the same month that his article appeared in History Today. Runciman’s profile of Richard is to some degree extracted from The Kingdom of Acre (1954), the third volume of A History of the Crusades, and condenses what was the most familiar and dramatic part of the story to an English audience: the heroic confrontation between Richard the Lionheart and Saladin. Yet it also contains fresh elements, several of which relate to Cyprus. Runciman emphasises the haphazard nature of Richard’s invasion: ‘apparently almost without reflection, he set about the conquest of the island’, 72 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2015

contrasting the accident of the king’s attack, ascribed in part to bad temper and sea-sickness, with the long-term strategic and cultural repercussions of Cyprus’ capture. ‘The Cypriots’, he observes, ‘were never to be ruled by fellow-Greeks again.’ But this melancholy observation had only five years of life left in it. Runciman is vigilant in identifying the ongoing and unexpected consequences for Richard of his victory in Cyprus, some of them disadvant-

Runciman resists the Lionheart’s glamour with greater success than many of Richard’s biographers ageous. Fear of Byzantine vengeance led Richard to attempt a crossing from Corfu incognito, thereby causing his humiliating, financially ruinous capture by Leopold of Austria, whose Greek mother had been a cousin of Isaac Comnenus, the Cypriot ruler Richard had deposed. The many bons mots in The Kingdom of Acre (the most famous of which is the final verdict on Richard as ‘a bad son, a bad husband and a bad king, but a gallant and splendid soldier’) are rephrased and sometimes rethought. His conclusion to the profile is portentous but charitable:

in the direction of marriage’. John Harvey, in The Plantagenets (1948), had criticised the ‘conspiracy of silence’ surrounding the idea of ‘the hero Richard’ being what he quaintly termed ‘a victim of homosexuality’. Whether or not in response to this emergent line of argument, Runciman in this later article relaxes his earlier discretion: [Richard’s] private life gave rise to scandal. He had never lived with his wife since his return from captivity; and the presence of too many gay and vicious young men about his court provoked reproachful comments from the Church authorities. Runciman resists the Lionheart’s glamour with greater success than many of Richard’s biographers. While admitting the king’s charm and military ‘genius’, Runciman also describes Richard’s ‘sinister heredity’ and, with characteristically visual precision, ‘his hard, ungenerous mouth’. In the matter of Cyprus, especially, Richard had set a precedent which Runciman had increasing reason to see as regrettable and misguided. Minoo Dinshaw is writing a biography of Steven Runciman to be published by Allen Lane in 2016.

Though [Richard’s] faults loom larger now in the harsh light of history, we cannot deny him some elements of greatness. One interesting change of tack is Runciman’s much more overt position on Richard’s sexuality. In The Kingdom of Acre he contents himself with the decorous assertion that Richard’s ‘own tastes did not lie

VOLUME 5 ISSUE 4 APRIL 1955 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta