History Today 10-2015

October 2015 Vol 65 Issue 10

Brave new worlds

How the Portuguese created globalisation Winning the Battle, Losing the War

Henry V and the problem of Agincourt

Journey to the Centre of the Earth The Silk Roads past and present

Publisher Andy Patterson Editor Paul Lay Digital Manager Dean Nicholas Picture Research Mel Haselden Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph Contributing Editor Kate Wiles Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths Art Director Gary Cook Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell Accounts Sharon Harris Board of Directors Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston CONTACTS History Today is published monthly by History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810 [email protected] SUBSCRIPTIONS Tel: 020 3219 7813/4 [email protected] ADVERTISING Lisa Martin, Portman Media Tel: 020 7079 9361 [email protected] Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321. Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.

FROM THE EDITOR

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IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME before someone drew parallels between the Levellers and Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing candidate for the leadership of the Labour party. Sure enough, Ted Vallance, the excellent historian of 17th-century radicalism, offered up such a piece in the Guardian at the end of August. The Levellers have long been seen as proto-democrats among many on the left, the pioneers of an egalitarian society, celebrated by the likes of Tony Benn and Michael Foot, who were regular attendees at Levellers’ Day, a commemoration held at Burford churchyard since 1975. There, on May 17th, 1649, Cornet Thompson, Corporal Perkins and Private Church were executed on the orders of Oliver Cromwell. In recent years, the Levellers have also attracted a more right-wing following, with that most eurosceptic of MEPs, Daniel Hannan, praising them for their libertarian tendencies alongside his friend, the sole UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell, their point of view owing something to Alan Macfarlane’s thesis outlined in his 1978 study, The Origins of English Individualism. Whatever one’s politics, it is true that the ideas put forward by the Levellers, outlined brilliantly by Sarah Mortimer in a previous issue of History Today (‘What Was at Stake in the Putney Debates?’, January 2015), had significant constitutional impact; much of their Officers’ Agreement, for example, was incorporated into John Lambert’s Instrument of Government of 1653, which remains Britain’s only written constitution. Yet, while Putney and Burford are well known, less familiar is the Levellers’ end. John Lilburne, ‘Free-born John’, the most celebrated of them, sank into quietude having converted to Quakerism, not then an especially quiet creed. Others, most notoriously Edward Sexby, aggrieved by what he saw as the Protectorate’s abandonment of the ‘Good Old Cause’, conspired with Royalists at home and in exile to bring down the Cromwellian regime through acts of terror. The ‘other’ Gunpowder Plot of January 1657, when Miles Sindercombe, another former Leveller in the pocket of Sexby, sought to burn down Whitehall with Cromwell inside it, is nowhere near as well known as it should be, but shows how desperate some of the Levellers became. As ever, the myth is an untroubled version of the history.

Paul Lay

HistoryMatters Winchester • Ogham • Evelina Haverfield • Churchill

unusually, raised well above the wall heads to provide space for the crown of the vault and the trusses alternate in design so that wall posts can be accommodated in the vault pockets in every other bay. This close integration of high roof and vault suggests that both were designed together, which is why recent dating of the roof has proved so important. The tree-ring dating was undertaken by Dr Daniel Miles of the Oxford Dendrochronological Laboratory, with Heritage Lottery funding and financial assistance from the Hampshire Field Club and Archaeological Society. The

Oak in the Middle Ages was used immediately after felling, so this provides the date of the roof itself

Witness From On High

New discoveries about Winchester Cathedral provide insights into the relationships between a prominent churchman and his Tudor kings. John Crook THE wooden high vault over the presbytery of Winchester Cathedral, about to be cleaned and conserved, has long fascinated Tudor historians. It was commissioned by Bishop Richard Fox (1448-1528) as part of his major building works on the east end of the cathedral. Its particular interest is the series of heraldic and ‘picture’ bosses, bolted to the intersections of the vaulting ribs. Some historians have suggested that these were later additions. Careful examination made possible by the recent erection of scaffolding has now shown conclusively that they are a primary feature. They are, indeed, designed to give the

Big boss: the arms of Henry, Prince of Wales and Catherine of Aragon flank the initials of Henricus Rex (Henry VII).

impression of being additions over the carved foliage that sprouts from the rib junctions. This is a design conceit that was used at Winchester a century earlier in the stone vault of William of Wykeham’s nave and appears to have inspired Fox’s design. Crucially, in some instances, the wooden foliage is attached, not precisely at the intersections of the ribs, but slightly further out, allowing the leaves to show beneath the larger bosses. There is no doubt that the bosses were intended to be seen from the outset. The vault cannot be considered in isolation from the high roof above it, which was designed to accommodate this type of construction. The tie-beams of all the roof trusses are,

latest timbers used in the roof came from oaks felled during the winter of 1507-8; oak in the Middle Ages was used immediately after felling, so this provides the date of the roof itself. The timber used for the vault was too finely finished to be accurately dated, the sap-wood rings having been cut away, though sampling of one rib confirmed that the vault was of the same general period as the roof rather than, say, a Victorian pastiche. If, as suggested above, the vault was being prepared at the same time as the roof, it might have been completed in the latter months of 1508. The subject matter of the carefully planned programme of bosses shows that they were being carved at the same time. The west end of the vault commemorates Bishop Fox. As well as his personal badge of a pelican pecking at its breast (‘The Pelican in her Piety’), we see the arms of his successive bishoprics: Exeter, Bath and Wells, OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 3

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Durham and Winchester. At the east end we find the symbols of the Passion of Christ, the Arma Christi. Yet it is the central section that has provoked most discussion. Here we find a display of royal heraldry commemorating the first two Tudor monarchs, Henry VII and Henry VIII. Bishop Fox had a particular reason for giving them such prominence. He was chief adviser to Henry VII, under whose patronage he rose to a position of considerable polit-

At the precise centre of the second bay of vaulting, where the bishop’s bosses give way to the royal ones, are the letters HR for Henricus Rex ical influence, which would continue during the early years of Henry VIII’s reign, during which Fox remained keeper of the Privy Seal. At the precise centre of the second bay of vaulting, where the bishop’s bosses give way to the royal ones, are the letters HR for Henricus Rex either side of the Bosworth thorn bush, which sprouts Tudor roses. The HR boss is flanked to the north by the royal arms with a three-pointed label for Henry, Prince of Wales followed further out by the Prince of Wales feathers and, to the south, by the arms of Aragon and Castile, the symbols for Catherine of Aragon, followed by the Beaufort portcullis. East of the HR boss are the royal arms, then the letters H and K linked by a rope, celebrating the betrothal of Henry, Prince of Wales (later Henry VIII) and Catherine. The inclusion of the Prince of Wales feathers is crucial to the dating of the vault. It is inconceivable that they would have featured once Henry had become king, so this confirms that the vault, including its decoration, was completed by the death of Henry Tudor on April 21st, 1509. Henry, Prince of Wales had visited Winchester in January 1506, which may also have reinforced Fox’s decision to emphasise his royal loyalties in the vault, probably then being designed. The royal motifs find an interesting parallel in the contemporary vault bosses of St 4 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

George’s Chapel Windsor, where Fox was Prelate of the Order of the Garter. Most interesting of all is the prominence given to Catherine of Aragon, who had been widowed at the death of Henry’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, in April 1502. Within 14 months she was betrothed to Henry for diplomatic reasons, but he had increasing doubts about the validity of the future marriage and the wedding took place only on June 11th, 1509, seven weeks after the old king’s death. The consequences of this union were immense, leading ultimately to the break of the English church from Rome and all that ensued. Fox was in favour of the wedding of Henry and Catherine during the years of uncertainty between 1505 and 1509. Fox’s attitude is amply demonstrated by the heraldic display we have described. With its allusions to Henry VII, shortly to die, to the future Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, it bears witness to a pivotal period of English history. It is a fascinating thought that at her marriage to Prince Philip of Spain in 1554, during the nuptial mass at the High Altar, Catherine’s daughter, Mary Tudor, may well have looked up at the vault with its heraldry commemorating her late mother and pondered on the turbulent times that had elapsed since the vault was constructed. John Crook is archaeological consultant at Winchester Cathedral. Further information can be found at www.winchestercathedral.org.uk

Alternative Histories by Rob Murray

The Story of Ogham The ancient rune-like writing system is carved into stones across Ireland. Catherine Swift ON A HILL above Ballycrovane harbour stands a tall, thin pinnacle of stone, standing over four metres high and clearly visible from the bay, as one sails from the open Atlantic into the safe haven located close to the Cork and Kerry border. Carved up the left-hand side is a dedication to an Irishman: MAQQI DECCEDDAS AVI TURANIAS, ‘belonging to Mac Deichet Uí Thorna’. The final two words identify this man as a descendant of Torna, which is possibly a reference to a long-gone local dynasty; the name is also found on four other stones in Kerry and Kildare and appears in later Irish genealogies. Early Irish law indicates that stones like this could be called upon to underpin a legal claim to land, while saga writers tell of long-dead heroes who, having fallen in battle, were buried beneath stones bearing their name. The archaeologist R.A.S. Macalister argued that this stone was originally erected as a prehistoric standing stone and that the inscription was added later – probably in the fifth century – after the invention of a form of writing known as ogham, created specifically to represent the Gaelic language. Dating ogham is difficult and often problematic: although the alphabet itself was created rather earlier, the evidence suggests that the surviving inscriptions of ogham in Ireland belong predominantly to the fifth and sixth centuries. The original form of ogham represented approximately 80 sounds from Gaelic, with 20 symbols arranged in four groups of five. Each group, or aicme, was made up of single strokes, easily carved in wood or stone, with each letter represented by one, two, three, four or five strokes and grouped in sequences of one to five located to the left, right, diagonally across or in the middle of a central stem-line (one stroke to the right is a ‘b’, two strokes is

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‘l’, three strokes ‘v/f’, and so on). Ogham was developed during the Roman Empire and demonstrates the spread of its influence far beyond the imperial frontiers; the fact that ogham has five vowel symbols (although Gaelic has ten such sounds) is one of the reasons scholars believe that the Latin alphabet, which also uses five vowels, was an influence on the invention of the system. Ogham was not a single, fixed system and the surviving stones show modifications, as new symbols were invented and older ones were lost. A few stones also show Christian influence, bearing carved crosses and the Primitive Irish word KOI, which is thought to be a translation of the Christian Latin burial formula hic iacit or ‘here lies’. Ogham inscriptions are also found in Britain, largely in areas of post-Roman Irish colonisation in Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and Scotland, but archaeologists have excavated examples from Roman Silchester and Orkney. Where the alphabet is used to write non-Gaelic languages, new symbols were invented, old ones were adapted or particular symbols were doubled in order to represent different sounds. In Shetland, ogham has been found representing

Still standing: Ogham Stone, Dunloe, County Kerry, Ireland. Above right: the original form of the ogham alphabet, arranged in aicme.

Norse words such as dattur (daughter) and krosk (cross) and, in Killaloe, Co. Clare, a particularly fascinating stone has a commemoration from c.1100 dedicated to a Scandinavian settler, Torgrim, which is written in Norse runes and then replicated in ogham. The longevity and creativity of the ogham alphabet in our surviving inscriptions is matched by its role in Gaelic language education. As with runes, each

The longevity and creativity of the ogham alphabet in our surviving inscriptions is matched by its role in Gaelic language education ogham symbol has a name: the letter ‘b’ is called beithe, ‘birch’ and the letter ‘c’ is coll, ‘hazel’. Bardic students learnt these basic names and used the ogham aicme sequences to create lists for memorisation. For example, the first aicme reads ‘b, l, v/f, s, n’, so a list for Énogam (bird ogham) reads: besan (pheasant), lachu (duck), faelinn (gull), seg (hawk) and naescu (snipe). Geographical and cultural facts were grouped similarly, so, for example, Linnogam (Pool ogham) lists the

major inland harbours Berba (Barrow), Luimnech (Limerick), and Febal (Foyle); and Ceallogam, the church ogham, lists churches: Beanchar (Bangor), Liath, Ferna and so forth. Other bards were influenced by Norse and Anglo-Saxon interest in cryptic runes and monastic delight in codes and ciphers. This led them to create adaptations of the ogham system designed specifically to bamboozle the reader. Nathair im ceann (snake around the head), for example, is written as a palindrome, in which the first letter of a word is placed in the centre of a sequence and the rest runs out in either direction from that central point. Ogham is also combined with sign language: adaptations of Cistercian sign language are found in Cossogam (Footogham) or Sronogam (Nose-ogham), which spell out individual letters using one to five fingers arranged around the shin or on either side of the nose (one finger on the right of the nose represents ‘b’ and two represents ‘l’, while a finger laid on the nose is an ‘a’ and two fingers an ‘o’). There are even writing systems known as gall-ogam (foreign ogam) and ogam lochlannach (Norse ogam), in which runic symbols are incorporated with ogham to form new, hybrid alphabets. These medieval experiments are discussed in Auraceipt na n-Éices, a seventh-century collection of grammarian lore known in English as the Scholar’s Primer. Many of these alphabets are also found written and drawn in the Lebor Oghaim, the Book of Oghams, in the late 14th- or early 15th-century Book of Ballymote, which is available to view on the website Irish Script on Screen, run by the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. The Institute is also running a project, Ogam in 3D, under Dr Nora White (ogham.celt.dias.ie), which is currently spearheading international collaboration on this fascinating aspect of the history of European writing and early language analysis. Although short-lived, ogham shows the versatility and inventiveness of its creators and reflects the variety of cultures coexisting in Britain at that time.

Catherine Swift teaches Irish Studies at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 5

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Evelina Haverfield: a Straight Fighter The life and legacy of a woman who sacrificed everything for her cause. Magda Czajkowska TO COME ACROSS a headstone engraved in English standing over a well-tended grave by the local church in a remote provincial town in Serbia is a surprise. Somewhat misspelt, it reads: Hear lies the body of the honourable Evelina Haverfield youngest daughter of William Scarlett 3rd Baron Abinger and of Helen ne Magruder his wife of Inverloky Castle Fort William Scotland who finished her work in Bajina Bashta March 21st 1920 through the war 1914-1920 She worked for the Serbian people with untiring zeal. A straight fighter astraight rider and a most loyal friend. R.I.P. Evelina Haverfield was the recipient of the highest Serbian award: the Order of the White Eagle. Born in 1867, she married Major Henry Haverfield at the age of 19 and continued to use his name even when, after his death, she married his fellow officer, John Blaguy. This was not a happy union and after some time they drifted apart. The rest of her life was informed by devotion to a cause. She became an enthusiastic supporter of the suffragette movement and was arrested during suffragette demonstrations in London for hitting an escorting police officer. Her only regret was not hitting him hard enough, promising to bring a revolver next time. During that heady time she met Vera Holme. Their companionship was to last the rest of her days. At the outbreak of the First World War the suffragettes supported the war effort by founding a Women’s Voluntary Emergency Corps and a Women’s Voluntary Reserve Ambulance Corps. Evelina became commandant in chief of the latter, looking, it was said, every inch a soldier in her khaki uniform, although she later left after a disagreement of an undisclosed nature. During the war Evelina volunteered as a hospital administrator in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, whose 6 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

White Eagle: Evelina Haverfield, c.1900.

aim was to provide medical care for wounded allied soldiers wherever they served. Her unit was sent to Serbia. On arrival they found untold misery caused by war atrocities and a raging typhus epidemic. The all-female unit was met with scepticism by the local military, but their attitude changed to respect once they saw Evelina’s skill with the cavalry horses. She went on to ride with the best horsemen of the Serbian army. The defeat of the Serbs and a forced return to the UK did nothing to diminish Evelina’s enthusiastic support. By now Serbia was her cause. A new transport unit was sent to Serbia via Russia, with Evelina its commander. It comprised 75 women noted for smart uniforms and shorn locks. Evelina herself was described as small, neat, aristocratic in bearing, eliciting devotion in some and scepticism in others. Her unit drove into the fighting areas, collecting wounded and exhausted soldiers. It earned Evelina a Russian military medal for bravery. Bravery notwithstanding, her haughty character led to another dismissal. But her enthusiasm for the Serbian cause continued undiminished: once in the UK, she, with Flora Sandes, established a Fund for Promoting Comforts for Serbian Soldiers and Prisoners. After the end of the war she, with Vera Holme, returned to Serbia as

commissioner of the Serbian Red Cross Society in Great Britain. On her own initiative she began to look for a suitable location for Serbian orphans. The mountain village of Bajna Bašta was chosen, the choice dictated by its dire poverty and numerous memorials to fallen soldiers. She managed to place about 100 orphans in a house with a café, which still stands. Its last survivor wrote in a local paper of her devotion: ‘My family was hovering between life and death when Mrs Haverfield arrived and brought me and other children to the converted café. She spent all her money on the children.’ Driving between villages she treated the sick children or brought them back to the orphanage. A year later, aged 52, she caught pneumonia and died. She was buried with full military honours. The offices and shops closed that day and all the inhabitants of Bajna Bašta attended the funeral. Today the landscape gives no clue of the ravages wrought by the war, which would have been familiar to Evelina Haverfield. A splendid, ultra-modern house overlooking the river Drina stands on a hill where once fierce fighting took place, a testimony to modern architectural flair and budding prosperity. Only the undulating ground betrays where once were trenches and gun positions, while the tragic consequences of war are commemorated here and there by a lichen-covered headstone or a monument. The work started by Evelina Haverfield continued after her death. A British medical mission remained until 1922 and was followed, first, by the centre for the poor, headed by Serbian doctors and, then, by a hospital, where a commemorative plaque to Evelina Haverfield hangs in the main corridor. Nearly 100 years later the esteem in which she is held in the town is undiminished. In 2012 two local priests who look after her grave and the museum housing her memorabilia proposed a shelter for the homeless bearing her name. In August 2014 a new plaque was unveiled at the entrance to the museum in the presence of the British ambassador and Serbian dignitaries, a fitting tribute to a remarkable life.

Magda Czajkowska is a writer and historian specialising in the Balkans.

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No One is Indispensable

Questioning the untouchable reputation of Churchill and the reality of politics in wartime Britain.

Mihir Bose AT THE HEIGHT of the Second World War, as Aneurin Bevan relentlessly criticised the strategy of Winston Churchill, his friend Archie Lush asked him in anguish: ‘Why do you keep attacking Churchill? What do you think happens if he goes?’ Bevan replied: ‘All right. Suppose he fell under a bus. What should we have to do? Send a postcard to Hitler giving in?’ Any criticism of Churchill as war leader is now seen as unpatriotic, if not heresy. This was vividly demonstrated during the events marking the 50th anniversary of his death, when the media joined hands in promoting the idea that during the war Churchill was a demi-god without whom this country could never have won. This has since been taken a notch further in Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor (2014), whose subtitle, How One Man Made History, sums up the book. Churchill’s contemporaries would have found this incredible. Churchill did play a huge part in developing his own personality cult. His history of the Second World War enabled him to fulfil his desire to ‘justify myself before history’ and put him on a pedestal from where he could look down on his rivals. Yet his contemporaries were not afraid to chip away at it. Emanuel Shinwell described the first volume, The Gathering Storm, as a novel in which Churchill was the main character, while Michael Foot wrote that, while the book was ‘vastly more enjoyable and instructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf’, when it came to ‘personal conceit and arrogance there is some likeness between the two’. Foot, who worshipped Bevan, was deliberately trying to provoke outrage but what all this demonstrates is that Churchill’s contemporaries were not prepared to accept his myth. While Boris Johnson makes much of the fact that Churchill ‘made the right call on Hitler, almost from the start’, John Ramsden has pointed

out that Churchill did not oppose the dictator at all through the 1930s. Before Munich in 1938, six years after Hitler had come to power, Churchill did not cast a single vote in the Commons against the government on either foreign or defence policy. Yet during this time he opposed any progress on even the very limited moves towards self-government in India. As Ramsden writes, Churchill ‘denounced Gandhi with even stronger language than he used against Hitler, even as he refused ever to attack

Churchill ‘denounced Gandhi with even stronger language than he used against Hitler, even as he refused ever to attack Franco at all’

Critical voice: Aneurin Bevan (right) with the future prime minister Harold Wilson at the Labour party conference, September 1953.

Franco at all’. ’Late in 1937’, he continues, ‘Churchill was still advocating the return to Hitler of former German colonies (confiscated in 1919, as part of a general settlement of European grievances), a policy more usually associated with Chamberlain.’ As late as February 1938, when Anthony Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary over appeasement, Churchill was one of the first Tory MPs to sign a round robin expressing his confidence in Chamberlain. Why does all this matter? Because in making Churchill a superman we fail to recognise that the war was won because of what is arguably the most brilliant collective effort Britain has ever produced, a wonderful example of the state and the people coming together. Indeed the British state produced a far more powerful collective response than the Nazis, which is one reason why the idea that state intervention was positive was able to take hold, explaining the postwar triumph of the Labour party. The belief that the state is always good has long since been discarded, but to substitute that with the notion that Churchill was solely responsible for victory is historically suspect and suggests that Britain was so lacking in confidence that it could only believe that its ability to sustain itself came down to one man. That is understandable in a country such as Pakistan, created only in 1947, which finds it difficult to come to terms with the historical facts about its founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but not in a country which can deal so readily with its history that it can have a statue of Cromwell, the first man to behead a king, outside the Palace of Westminster, which monarchs have regularly to pass as they come to address Parliament. What a contrast to how it was when Britain was fighting for its very existence. What was not forgotten then was the ability to look at events dispassionately and subject leaders to the critical analysis. While Churchill deserves to be fêted we should recall, with Bevan, that Britain would not have sent a surrender postcard to Hitler had he ceased to be prime minister.

Mihir Bose is a writer, journalist and historian of India. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 7

MonthsPast

OCTOBER

By Richard Cavendish

OCTOBER 13th 1415

Death of Thomas Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel THE FITZALAN family were active in the reigns of Richard II and his successor Henry IV. Richard was only 10 when he succeeded to the throne in 1377 on the death of his grandfather, Edward III. His father, the Black Prince, had died the year before and the new king was not in the same league. He proved to be a spendthrift incompetent, whose only lasting contribution to England’s story was the handkerchief. A council of regency was set up, with Richard Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel and Surrey, as a member. The most influential figure in the realm was the king’s uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, who tried to see the country through difficult times. The economy was still suffering as a result of the Black Death, there were persistent threats from the French and some of England’s aristocrats developed misgivings about the boy king. Arundel was so determined an opponent that in 1397 the king had him convicted of treason and beheaded on Tower Hill. He had been known for his piety and a story spread that his headless corpse stood up for just long enough to say the Lord’s Prayer. The family’s titles and estates were confiscated and Arundel’s personal wealth (the equivalent of at least £70 milllion today) was forfeited to the king. Arundel’s son and heir, Thomas Fitzalan, was 15 when his father was executed. He was made a ward of the king’s half-brother, the Duke of Exeter, who treated him as a servant with bullying contempt. He particularly remembered having constantly to take Exeter’s dirty boots off for him and clean them. He was a resourceful character, however, and he managed to escape to the Continent and join his uncle, the exiled 8 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Mighty subject: effigies of Thomas Fitzalan and his wife Beatrice in the family chapel at Arundel Castle.

Archbishop of Canterbury, in Utrecht. The archbishop, another Thomas Fitzalan, had fallen out with Richard II and been banished from the country. He took young Thomas to Paris to join another of the king’s enemies, John of Gaunt’s son and heir Henry of Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke and Richard were cousins, but he had turned against the king, who banished him from England in 1398. When John of Gaunt died in 1399 Richard seized his estates and disinherited Bolingbroke. It proved to be the worst decision of Richard’s life. If Gaunt’s estates could be confiscated, who was safe? He compounded it by going to Ireland to tackle a rebellion there, leaving another of his uncles, Edmund, Duke of York, in charge. Bolingbroke seized the opportunity to lead a small force to England. The archbishop and young Thomas Fitzalan went with him. They landed on the Yorkshire

coast and marched to Cheshire where they were joined by the two most powerful of the country’s northern barons, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmoreland. They were both seasoned warriors and, as other supporters gathered, the Duke of York surrendered the country to them, for which he was handsomely rewarded. Richard returned from Ireland to Wales, found himself hopelessly outnumbered and took refuge in Conway Castle, where he soon surrendered to Bolingbroke. A Parliament in London deposed him and Bolingbroke was proclaimed king as Henry IV. Richard was locked up in Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire and died there the following year. He apparently starved to death, whether of his own volition in despair or on Henry’s orders. Thomas Fitzalan’s titles and estates in England and Wales were restored to him and he was now Earl of Arundel and one of the country’s most powerful barons, a friend of the new king and an active supporter of the new regime. In 1400 he helped to defeat a rebellion against Henry IV and he reportedly took care to make sure that the Duke of Exeter, his former oppressor who was involved, was executed. He spent years fighting Owen Glendower in Wales and helping Henry IV to cope with other challenges to his authority. Henry organised his 1405 marriage to Beatrice, an illegitimate daughter of the king of Portugal. Arundel established a close relationship with Henry’s son, later Henry V, and in 1410 led a force of his own and the prince’s men to join the Burgundian army in the civil war in France. Henry IV died in 1413 and Arundel was appointed to Henry V’s royal council and to various high offices. He led his small army to help intervene in France again, but an attack of dysentery kept him out of the French defeat at Agincourt in 1415 and he returned to England, where he died at Arundel Castle on his birthday a few days later. He was still only 34 years old.

OCTOBER 20th 1890

Richard Burton dies in Trieste AN ARDENT explorer, both physically and mentally, Richard Burton produced more than 70 books, including unexpurgated translations of oriental sex classics. Fluent in Arabic, in 1853 he visited Medina and Mecca disguised as a pilgrim. During the 1850s he and John Speke went to Africa to discover the source of the Nile. In 1860 he went to Salt Lake City and wrote about the Mormons. Aged 39, in 1861, he married Isabel Arundell, a devout Roman Catholic who was ten years younger. He joined the Foreign Office and was sent as consul successively to Fernando Po, Brazil, Damascus and finally Trieste. Burton was 51 when he and Isabel arrived in Trieste in 1872. They told people they lived like a pair of brothers, not apparently minding the implication of no sex. He suffered from persistent insomnia and she would rise very early every morning to make

Travelling man: Richard Burton photographed by Ernest Edwards, 1865.

him tea. After breakfast at 5am he would work on his writings till lunch. He and Isabel did much travelling and she wrote successful travel books. Burton relied increasingly on Isabel as his health worsened. He would have his first heart attack in 1884. Meanwhile, his translations of erotica put him in danger of prosecution for pornography. He and his friend Forster Fitzgerald Arbuthnot tried to publish their translation of a Sanskrit love manual called the Ananga Ranga by pretending it was for their use only, but it so alarmed the printers

Heil Hynkel: poster for Chaplin’s screen satire.

OCTOBER 15th 1940

Premiere of The Great Dictator

IN 1938 CHARLIE CHAPLIN started writing the script of a film in which he would mercilessly mock Adolf Hitler. In his autobiography, published in 1964, Chaplin said that, if he had known about the German concentration camps, he would never have treated Hitler humorously. He wanted to ridicule Nazi antisemitism and ‘their mystic bilge about a pure-blooded race’. While writing the script Chaplin watched newsreels of Hitler to make careful note of his gestures, mannerisms and oratorical style. It helped that Chaplin and Hitler were the same age and looked quite similar. With his almost copycat moustache, Hitler could be seen as the evil counterpart of Chaplin’s famed ‘little tramp’ persona. Chaplin finished the script in September 1939 and pressed ahead with making it for United Artists, which he partly owned, though they doubted whether it could be shown in the US or Britain. He also received threatening letters from American fascist sympathisers, but com-

that they stopped the presses. By 1876 Arbuthnot had gone on to translate the Sanskrit Kama Sutra, which Burton edited and improved. They printed it in London in 1883 under the name of a non-existent foreign publishing firm and were encouraged to publish the Ananga Ranga in 1885. Burton went on to bring out an Arabic erotic classic, The Perfumed Garden, and began publishing his greatest work, his translation of The Arabian Nights. In 1886 he was knighted for his Foreign Office service. In books and articles Burton condemned what he considered the hypocritical attitude of society to sexual matters, but Isabel loathed his work on sex and after heart disease carried him off at 69 she destroyed almost all his diaries and papers. She published a lying two-volume biography of him in 1893 in which she pretended he had been a modest man and a secret Roman Catholic. Meantime she had him buried in the graveyard of St Mary Magdalen in Mortlake, London in a tomb shaped like a Bedouin tent, where she joined him when her time came in 1896.

pleted the film at his own expense. The Great Dictator was set in a fictitious country called Tomainia that was obviously Germany and Chaplin played two roles. He was a Jewish barber and he was also the country’s ferocious dictator, Adenoid Hynkel. They looked so alike that setting out to arrest the barber Hynkel’s stormtroopers seized the dictator instead. This gave the barber the opportunity to pretend to be Hynkel at a huge mass meeting and deliver a speech in which he announced that he had changed his attitudes and called for doing away with hatred and intolerance. After the film’s successful premieres at the Capitol cinema in New York and the Prince of Wales theatre in London it drew eager, enthusiastic audiences and was a huge financial success. It also marked a key stage in the development from the slapstick ‘little tramp’ Charlie Chaplin of the silent movies into Charles Chaplin, the serious producer, director and actor of his later years. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 9

The First Global 10 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

PORTUGAL Arabia and India, from the Miller Atlas, Portugal, c.1519.

Poor and small, Portugal was at the edge of late medieval Europe. But its seafarers created the age of ‘globalisation’, which continues to this day, as Roger Crowley explains.

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Empire

N THE DYING YEARS of the 15th century Portugal surprised the world. Vasco de Gama’s landfall on the Indian Coast in May 1498 was so unexpected that it strained credibility. A garbled rumour reached the Venetian diarist Girolamo Priuli that ‘three caravels belonging to the king of Portugal have arrived at Aden and Calicut in India and that they have been sent to find out about the spice islands and that their captain is Columbus’. His initial response was a mixture of shock and disbelief: ‘This news affects me greatly, if it’s true’, he wrote. ‘However I don’t give credence to it.’ Priuli was registering the first reaction to a seismic shift in the comprehension of our planet: Gama’s voyage had finally demolished the ancient authority of Ptolemaic geography, which held the Indian Ocean to be a closed lake. Priuli’s misattribution anticipated the extent to which Columbus has come to dominate the historiography of the age of discoveries. While 1492 is conventionally the watershed moment, the largely forgotten role of the Portuguese in begetting the early modern era is also immense. For a century they led the way in connecting the hemispheres and giving its people a new sense of their place in the world. Alongside the age of Columbus, there is an equally significant Vasco da Gama era of history. Gama’s rounding of the Cape of Good Hope was the result of 60 years of effort. Portugal was poor, small and marginal to the arena of the Mediterranean world, but its long Atlantic coast gave it unique skills in navigation, cartography and open-sea sailing and it had developed a precocious sense of national identity. The search for India was a stopstart affair, concerned initially with slaving and a hunt for gold – Henry the Navigator’s reputation as a founding father of scientific exploration has now been largely dismantled – but decade by decade the Portuguese worked their way down the west coast of Africa, exploring its great rivers and mapping the coastline. Lisbon, open to the sea, gave Europe a first taste of a world beyond itself. The African voyages transformed the city into the go-to place for new ideas about cosmography. The produce unloaded on its shores – spices, slaves, parrots, sugar – conjured up exotic possibilities. In the 1490s, as Columbus sailed west, Portuguese navigators finally cracked the code of the South Atlantic winds. THE 60-YEAR APPRENTICESHIP slogging down the African coast enabled the Portuguese to develop a methodology of knowledge acquisition based on first-hand observation. They became expert observers and collectors of geographical and cultural information. They garnered this with great efficiency, scooping up local informants, employing interpreters, learning languages, observing with dispassionate scientific interest, drawing the best maps they could, refining their deployment of diplomacy and violence. Astronomers were sent on voyages; the OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 11

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The Portuguese stepped ashore in New Guinea in 1525 and Japan in 1543. They may have been the first to visit Australia

collection of latitudes became a state enterprise. Information was fed back into a central hub, the India House in Lisbon, where everything was stored under the crown’s direct control to inform the next cycle of voyages. This system of feedback and adaptation was highly effective. It was accompanied by a rapid expansion in cartographic knowledge. Following Gama’s arrival on the Malabar Coast, the Portuguese put all this to good use. Within a decade of bursting into the Indian Ocean, they understood, pretty accurately, how its 28 million square miles worked, its major ports, the rhythm of its monsoons, its navigational the same year. They reached the Spice Islands in 1512; a first European mission to seek diplomatic relations with the Ming dynasty in China possibilities and communication corridors. They had a clear grasp of the landed at Canton in 1516. They stepped ashore in New Guinea in 1525 ocean’s choke points and rapidly constructed a geo-strategic vision for and Japan in 1543. They may have been the first to visit Australia. The controlling them. Under two inspirational leaders, Francisco de Almeida Portuguese navigator Fernão de Magalhães (Magellan) had led Spanish and Afonso de Albuquerque, they built a prototype maritime empire that would form the template for European colonial expansion. Without ships that achieved the first circumnavigation of the world, though the human resources to hold territory, it relied on the establishment he himself died during the voyage. In 50 years Portuguese mariners of fortified bases at key strategic points around the rim of the ocean, had touched every continent except Antarctica and possibly Australia. dependent on mobile sea power and ship-borne cannon. They acquired The impetus for this burst was summarised by the first words spoken Mozambique on the Swahili Coast, Ormuz at the mouth of the Persian at Gama’s landfall. Asked why they had come, the man sent ashore, Gulf, Goa, and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, all critical hubs in the João Nunes, replied: ‘We came in search of Christians and spices.’ Relilong-distance trade that moved goods between Egypt and China. gious mission, to outflank Islam and to convert, would intertwine with The Portuguese advance was rapid. They accidentally discommerce. Within the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese created covered Brazil in 1500, having already reached Newfoundland a formal empire, largely through violence combined with diThe Arrival of the and Greenland. They first took Goa, destined to be the seat of Portuguese in Japan, plomacy and legitimate trade. Beyond, in dealings with the old their Indian empire, in 1510 and Malacca in 1511. Albuquer- Namban screen, civilisations of China and Japan, they arrived as supplicants, carrying goods and religious messages. que despatched embassies to Burma, Thailand and Sumatra in Japan, c.1600. 12 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

With the exception of Brazil, the Portuguese, unlike the Spanish, did not conceive an empire of territorial possession. There were far too few of them and mortality in the tropics was high. Their early ambition to control the whole Indian Ocean relied on no more than 3,000 men at any one time. It was a world, in its more pacific manifestations, of mobile trading links, held together by ports and forts and redoubtable sailing ships, up to a size of 1,000 tons. In the process they shunted people around the world. The Portuguese exported themselves in sufficient numbers at times to worry the civic authorities at home. Emigration came in many forms, both voluntary or compulsory: as servants of empire – colonial administrators, factors and soldiers – sailors, merchants, fortune seekers, missionaries and convicts. Because these emigrants were largely male, they were formative in the creation of mixed race communities. In Goa this was a matter of state policy. Men were encouraged to marry local women, giving rise to a unique Luso-Indian society. A hallmark of the Portuguese diaspora has been the creation of creole societies.

them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother … mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face downwards on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them. As the numbers grew the techniques became industrialised. They were soon arriving in Portugal ‘piled up in the holds of ships, 25 or 40 at a time, badly fed, shackled together back to back’. The Portuguese were Europe’s largest importer of captured human beings. By the mid-16th century probably 10 per cent of the population of Lisbon were black slaves, but it was with the settlement of Brazil and the demand for

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HE WILLINGNESS to explore, to push beyond the limits of the known world, took many forms. Men went in search of gold, to seek religious converts, out of wanderlust, as ambassadors, merchants, spies, smugglers and pirates. Many just vanished off the map. The Arab-speaking Pêro da Covilhã, sent via Cairo to seek out the spice routes in advance of a final push for India, criss-crossed the Indian Ocean disguised as a Muslim merchant, visited Mecca and resurfaced in Ethiopia 30 years later. Bento de Góis, travelling as an Armenian, left Goa in 1602 and took five years to reach China through the Himalayas. Pedro Teixeira performed the remarkable feat of travelling upstream the length of the Amazon in the 1630s. Jesuits were in Bhutan and Tibet in the same period: missionaries were particularly indefatigable travellers and language learners. By the middle of the 17th century they had baptised probably over a million people from Mozambique to the Far East. They were most successful in Japan, creating about 300,000 converts until their activities induced a wave of xenophobia and they were either expelled or killed. Luís Vaz de Camões, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified the sometimes desperate qualities of Portugal’s adventurers. He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance: a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta (he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned). ‘Had there been more of the world’, Camões wrote of the Portuguese explorers, they ‘would have discovered it.’

Anonymous portrait presumed to be of Vasco da Gama, c.1524.

THE PORTUGUESE WERE also pathfinders in some of the bleaker aspects of European expansion. They invented Atlantic slavery. Tapping into an ancient trade in black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, they were bundling captured people into cramped caravels back to Portugal from Senegambia as early as the 1440s. The chronicle account of human beings unloaded onto an Algarve beach in 1444 under the gaze of Henry the Navigator is a founding text for Europe’s slave trade: Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground … To increase their anguish still more, those who had charge of the partition then arrived and began to separate

labour in its plantations and gold mines that transatlantic slavery took off. The trading post of Elmina on the coast of Ghana, centre of the gold trade, became in turn the efficient holding pen and point of departure for tens of thousands of people. They exited out of the Door of No Return onto ships colloquially referred to as coffins. Half died in transit. Over three hundred years between three and five million people were forcibly moved to Brazil alone, a colossal involuntary migration. The slave ships were an inevitable breeding ground for disease but the wider mobility of the Portuguese themselves contributed to the spread of pathogens around the world. Gama’s ships and their successors may have introduced syphilis to India and beyond: to Timor, where it was referred to as the Portuguese disease, and to China. Like the OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 13

PORTUGAL

A chart of Brazil by the Portuguese cartographer Fernão Vaz Dourado, 1571. 14 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Spanish, they carried with them into South America the diseases of Europe such as tuberculosis, mumps, yellow fever and TB. Smallpox and typhus proved particularly devastating to the native peoples of the Amazon.

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HE DEVELOPMENT OF A Portuguese commercial empire in the 16th century, stretching from South America to China, initiated long-range trading networks. It saw the start of a system that could exchange goods across hemispheres. Lenses travelled from Germany to China, elephants from Sri Lanka to Vienna. All passed through Lisbon as the major hub and the clearing house for goods in and out of Europe. The historian John Russell-Wood has reconstructed examples of the kinds of intricate exchanges that took place. A clock made in Flanders was exported from Lisbon. Carried to the Portuguese hub at Goa, it found no buyers and was taken on to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula where it was exchanged for sandalwood (probably from Sri Lanka or Southern India). The sandalwood was shipped to Macao where it was sold for gold. The gold was carried by Portuguese middlemen to

Goods circulated in the Atlantic Ocean between Portugal, Angola and Brazil. Trading cycles often never touched the mother country Nagasaki, where it was used to buy a valuable work of art, a painted screen. This was transported back to Goa and eventually returned to Lisbon. Cloves that would be sold in Morocco made the journey from Ternate in Eastern Indonesia, via Malacca, Cochin and Lisbon and would be exchanged for wheat that would find its way to West Africa. Venetian glass beads and Flemish brass pans, carried via Lisbon to Elmina, might be exchanged for pepper, gold, slaves and monkeys, that would be shipped back to Bristol, Antwerp and Genoa. All these commodities travelled in Portuguese vessels. WITHIN THE SEPARATE OCEANS triangular trades developed. Goods circulated in the Atlantic Ocean between Portugal, Angola and Brazil. Within the Indian Ocean and beyond, valuable trading cycles often never touched the mother country at all. Goa became the hub of one inter-Indian Ocean trade, moving goods and foodstuffs between the Swahili coast, the Persian Gulf and western India; Portuguese Malacca was the centre of another, onwards to the Spice Islands, China and Japan. When the Ming dynasty turned inwards and banned all foreign trade, Portuguese merchants cornered an intermediary market between China and Japan, shuttling silk, gold and porcelain from Macao to Nagasaki, returning with Japanese silver and copper. It gave them a lucrative role in Far Eastern commerce. Gold, initially from West Africa then from the kingdom of Mutapa in southern Africa and later Brazil, was the lubricant of these trades. The Portuguese had a major role in bullion flows, reshaping economies in their wake. They were instrumental in shifting Spanish silver across the world as far as China, which had a preference for the metal, and initiating a price revolution in India. They were facilitators in technology transfer, too, introducing firearms into Japan in 1543, where they were quickly adopted, together with pilot charts. The Jesuits, although limited in their success in China, interested the ruling dynasty in astrolabes and other astronomical instruments, constructed an observatory in Beijing and produced the first Chinese maps to show the Americas. This long-distance interchange of commodities extended to plants and foodstuffs. As with many areas of foreign contact, there was a genuine curiosity in the flora of new worlds. The work of the

Top: Elmina Castle in Ghana, built by the Portuguese in 1482 and used by them and then Dutch and English traders as a base for dealing in slaves. Above: 'How the Portuguese whip their slaves when they run away', from Relation d'un Voyage fait en 1695, 1696 & 1697 by FranÇois Froger.

OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 15

PORTUGAL

If the Portuguese described what they saw, they were also seen in turn as objects of curiosity, fear and wonder Portuguese Jewish doctor, Garcia de Orta, a pioneering empirical botareceived wisdom of ancient authority – the tales of dog-headed men and nist and author of a book on the herbs and plants of Goa, aroused wide birds that could swallow elephants – by the empirical observation of geinterest in Europe, via translations and plagiarised versions. As the conography, climate, natural history and cultures that ushered in the early modern age. It stimulated the production of a vast and varied output nections between the furthest reaches of their empire grew stronger, deof written material, which seeped into other European languages. By liberate experiments were made to transplant crops from one continent the 1600s, writers such as Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas were to another, sometimes by carrying whole plants, more often by taking transmitting Portuguese knowledge into English. seeds on their voyages. These initiatives made a major contribution to the dissemination of plant species, food supply and diet across the globe. They introduced spices from the East Indies to Brazil, returning IF THE PORTUGUESE described what they saw, they were also seen cashews, peanuts and peppers to both China and India, to which they in turn as objects of curiosity, fear and wonder. The Sinhalese were also introduced pineapples and tobacco. There was a significant species perplexed by their endemic restlessness and their eating habits, deexchange across the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa: maize, manioc, claring them to be ‘a very white and beautiful people, who wear hats and boots of iron and never stop in one place. They eat a sort of white cashews, sweet potatoes and peanuts travelled east on Portuguese ships, stone and drink blood’. The Japanese scrutinised the namban-jin (the returning from the West Coast of Africa with red peppers, bananas, Southern Barbarians, because they arrived via Korea) and scrupulously yams. From Portugal, vegetables, citrus fruits and sugar cane reached illustrated their ships, their ballooning pantaloons and strange hats in the New World. The Jesuits sent Chinese boars to Portugal. Filo pastry from North Africa led to the samosa in India and the spring roll in China; comic detail, lampooning their mannerisms and their large noses as rhubarb came to Europe from South China, satsumas from well as the appearance of the tall, black-robed Jesuits. Across the trading world images and artefacts of the Other reflected Japan. Genetic material was being shunted around the world. A Portuguese The interactions between the Portuguese and other merchant is a new trans-hemispheric awareness. Many of the cultures greeted by his peoples created an immense quantity of information. The first Indian houseto which the Portuguese travelled came to produce hybrid century of Portuguese discoveries saw a successive stripping hold, early 16th works of art: the Madonna and child as Chinese figurines; away of layers of medieval mythology about the world and the century. carved ivory boxes from Sri Lanka mixing Hindu deities with 16 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

representations of European kings and images from Dürer; Portuguese nobles in palanquins in Goan art and their ambassadors in Mughal miniatures; Benin bronzes of Portuguese soldiers with muskets and crossbows; and carved salt-cellars topped by miniature European ships. Much of this art was religious. The missionary fathers worked tirelessly at Christian presentation in local idioms and, from as faraway as China, where blue and white porcelain was produced bearing the arms of Manuel I, artefacts were being created for distant markets. A great deal of this exotica, along with foodstuffs, ethnographic ‘specimens’ (captured slaves or emissaries from beyond) plants and animals, worked its way back to Europe. It sharpened both an awareness of other cultures and the perspective on the West’s place in an expanded world. Particularly famous were two animals sent to Manuel I around 1513: a white elephant and an equally rare white rhino; the first live specimen in Europe since the time of the Romans. Manuel delivered the white elephant to the pope under the command of his ambassador, Tristão da Cunha. A cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians, and an assortment of wild animals – leopards, parrots and a panther – entered Rome, watched by a gawping crowd. A second gift, the rhino, drowned en route, but Dürer was able to produce a passable likeness armed only with a rough sketch.

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HE APPRECIATION OF the world beyond and its artefacts – the namban paintings from Japan, intricate worked ivories from Benin, inlaid chests from West India – expanded Europe’s ideas of visual possibilities and their wonder. One observer of the people of Sierra Leone noted them to be ‘very skilled in manual work, they produce salt-cellars in ivory and spoons and whatever task one sketches for them, they carve in ivory’. Dürer was amazed by such artefacts: ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenia of people in foreign lands. Indeed, I cannot express all that I thought there.’ Portugal’s commercial dominance of large swathes of the world lasted little more than a century. Yet the images, transmissions and trades that it engendered left a significant and long-lasting influence on the culture, food, flora, art, history, languages, and genes of the planet, together with dark shadows: the exploitation, violence and slavery that its colonial successors inherited. When the Dutch first dismantled its spice empire they found that Portuguese was the lingua franca of the commercial world from China to Brazil and were compelled to use it. Writing about the first decades of Portuguese exploration the 16th-century historian João de Barros described the viceroy of India, Francisco de Almeida addressing an Indian raja with the assertion that ‘the principal intention of his king Don Manuel in making these discoveries was the desire to communicate with the royal families of these parts, so that trade might develop, an activity that results from human needs, and that depends on a ring of friendship through communicating with one another’. It was a prescient awareness of the origins and benefits of long-distance trade: the runaway train of globalisation that started with Vasco da Gama. Roger Crowley’s Conquerors: How Portugal Seized the Indian Ocean and Forged the First Global Empire was published by Faber & Faber in September 2015.

FURTHER READING A.J.R. Russell-Wood, A World on the Move (Carcanet, 1992). Top: an ivory salt vessel decorated with figures of Portuguese noblemen, with the lid in the shape of a ship, Benin, West Africa, 16th century. Above: Portuguese disembark in Japan, Namban screen, c.1600.

Bailey Diffie and George Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire, 1415–1580 (University of Minnesota Press, 1977). Jay A. Levenson, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the 16th and 17th Centuries (Smithsonian Books, 2007). OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 17

AGINCOURT Contemporary portrait of Henry V.

Henry’s

HOLLOW VICTORY

Agincourt is among the most celebrated of all English victories. Yet, argues Gwilym Dodd, Henry V’s triumph against overwhelming odds sowed the seeds for England’s ultimate defeat in the Hundred Years War.

OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 19

AGINCOURT

20 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

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IRED AND EXHAUSTED after a two week march, on October 25th, 1415 an English army inflicted a crushing defeat on the flower of French chivalry near a village in Picardy called Agincourt. It was a victory that seemed to sum up the indomitable spirit of the English nation: steadfastness, tenacity and pluck in the face of severe adversity. The focus of Shakespeare’s play on Agincourt reflected the pivotal moment the battle held in the reign of Henry V (r. 1413-22). It also ensured that his reputation as one of England’s most capable and successful monarchs came to be defined to a large extent by the victory he achieved on St Crispin’s Day, 1415. Yet, on the occasion of the 600th anniversary of Agincourt, there is room to question the quality of leadership that Henry displayed and the unblemished reputation which he has subsequently enjoyed. On the surface, Agincourt was a great victory, but history shows that great victories often lead commanders into self-delusion, enticing them to pursue over-ambitious and ultimately unrealisable political and military goals. In three main respects credit can be given to the English for winning at Agincourt. First, the English army had in its king a dynamic, capable

On the occasion of the 600th anniversary of Agincourt, there is room to question the quality of leadership which Henry displayed and experienced tactician. Henry V, at 29 years of age, was in the prime of his life when Agincourt was fought. His early adult life had been spent fighting to secure the crown for his father, initially at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 (when he had been in the thick of the action and was wounded in the face by an arrow) and latterly in command of the English forces which successfully pacified Wales. Henry was no remote, armchair general: his presence, with his army, at Agincourt inspired confidence and respect among his troops. Shakespeare’s celebrated scene depicting the king addressing his army on the eve of battle is almost certainly grounded in historical truth. He had been with his army since it had landed on French soil on August 14th and in that time he had also established a reputation as a disciplinarian: he famously had a soldier hanged for stealing from a French church.

The Battle of Agincourt, from the Chronique d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet, 15th century.

SECOND, HENRY AND HIS CAPTAINS displayed considerable acumen in the way they prepared the English army for battle. Although it was the French who had selected the general location for the clash of arms, the English were still allowed some initiative in how they deployed their forces. Crucially, the true strength of the archers, positioned mostly on the flanks of the main body of English men-at-arms, was obscured from the French, partly because of the favourable lie of the land and partly because the woods and scrubland on the edges of the battlefield could be used for concealment. The English archers were, as is well known, a decisive factor in securing victory for their side, but they were also vulnerable, especially to cavalry charge. Henry and his advisers recognised this and duly ordered that each archer prepare a stake, measuring six feet long, to be driven into the ground to form a protective barrier. Whether or not this was decisive in blunting the French cavalry during the battle itself is unclear, but it would have given the archers enough sense of security to allow them to concentrate on their deadly fire. Third, the decisive factor which handed victory to the English at Agincourt was the combined use of archers and men-at-arms (the former comprising yeomen, the latter knights and esquires). It is often thought that the English archers won the day on their own, but this is not true. Their sustained fire into the ranks of the French vanguard as it advanced towards the English positions did not stop it but signifOCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 21

AGINCOURT

icantly blunted its effectiveness as a fighting force. They were thus easy prey for the relatively fresh lines of waiting English men-at-arms, who can take equal credit with the archers for breaking the back of the French army. But the archers were still vital. What made the English force distinctive was the overwhelming preponderance of archers to men-atarms – a ratio of 5:1 in an army comprising around 6,000 men altogether, according to the latest estimates. The French suffered grievously at the hands of the English archers because there were so many of them, perhaps as many as 5,000. It has been estimated that the French army, in comparison, totalled around 24,000 men, of whom at least 10,000 were men-at-arms, 10,000 lightly armed combatants and 4,000 a mixture of crossbowmen, archers and infantrymen. This gave the English army the advantage in terms of its ability to kill or wound from a distance, but it put it at a disadvantage in the event of close quarter, hand-to-hand fighting.

Top: Henry's Agincourt campaign. Above: the battle of Agincourt.

AN IMPORTANT QUESTION arises: did the English really win the battle, or did the French lose it? While it is important to acknowledge the martial achievements of the English, it is worth asking whether any of this would have made a difference had the French played their hand differently. The answer must be ‘no’. The French had it within their grasp to inflict a decisive defeat on the English, but a number of ill-considered decisions, their overconfidence and bad luck combined to let victory slip through their fingers. 22 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

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HE SITE OF THE BATTLE was not selected with due care. As we have seen, the narrowness of the battlefield allowed the English army to use the terrain to its advantage, in particular by using the woods to hamper outflanking movements. Second, the French army was still assembling when battle was joined, which meant that it was not up to strength and lacked cohesion. Third, and crucially, the French plan to attack the English archers with cavalry ahead of the advance of the dismounted French men-at-arms, foundered for lack of

numbers. Had these attacks been pressed home, inflicting substantial losses on the archers, it is highly doubtful whether the English men-atarms would have been able to withstand the onslaught of the French vanguard. The important point is that the French knew how to beat the English, even if on the day their plan did not work. Finally, it rained the night before. This made the ground soft and difficult for the French men-at-arms, clad in heavy armour and dismounted, to traverse the field quickly and easily. On balance, then, the French should have won the battle. They were the stronger military power. The French were overconfident not because they were arrogant, but because they had every reason to think it would be an easy win. They were not alone in thinking this: Henry himself understood it. It should be remembered that the English army had been trying to escape from French forces when its path was blocked at Agincourt and battle was forced upon it. At one point in the march Henry had been approached by French heralds inviting him to do battle at Aubigny in Artois. According to some sources, Henry had accepted the challenge and began marching due north to the rendezvous, but soon changed his mind and diverted his army onto a more direct route towards Calais, steering clear of Aubigny. One English source says of the English at this point that ‘their hearts were quaking with fear’ at the prospect of fighting the French, and another that prayers were said that God might ‘turn away from us the violence of the French’. They knew

The French were overconfident not because they were arrogant, but because they had every reason to think it would be an easy win

that the advantage lay with their adversaries. Perhaps it was in some way an acknowledgement of just how unexpected the victory had been and how close the English had come to catastrophe that so much emphasis was placed on the victory at Agincourt as a sign of God’s approval. How else was the victory to be explained when the odds were stacked so heavily against the English?

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HY, THEN, DID THE ENGLISH ARMY find itself in such a perilous position? It is here that we confront an unpalatable truth, for the situation which confronted Henry’s army – of trying to reach Calais without being caught by the enemy, of being unable to cross the Somme at the preferred location of Blanchetaque near the coast, of then having to march inland deeper and deeper into enemy territory to find a suitable crossing and of then being trapped by a far superior enemy and forced into battle – was entirely avoidable. Henry’s initial intention had been to seize the strategically vital port of Harfleur, situated on the mouth of the Seine, before marching southwards to Bordeaux. Yet the siege and eventual capture of Harfleur took longer than expected and by the beginning of October it was clear that Henry had left it too late for his planned march southwards. But what to do instead? The siege had taken its toll on Henry’s force: it is estimated that over 2,000 men had died of dysentery and a further 2,000 men had been invalided home. With another 500 men-at-arms and 1,000 archers needed to garrison Harfleur, the force which Henry had at his disposal was drastically weakened. By any measure, the sensible thing would have been to set sail for England and return the following year. This is what Henry’s advisers wished to do, but Henry would not countenance the idea and it was at his personal insistence that the army struck out northwards to try to reach Calais overland. A contemporary English chronicler, writing in about 1417, recorded the key moment:

English soldiers escort captured French men-at-arms from the battlefield at Agincourt, illustration from the Vigil of Charles VII, c.1484. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 23

AGINCOURT Although a large majority of the royal council advised against such a proposal as it would be highly dangerous for him in this way to send his small force, daily growing smaller, against the multitude of the French, our king – relying on divine grace and the justice of his cause, piously reflecting that victory consists not in a multitude but with Him … who bestows victory upon whom He wills, with God affording His leadership … did nevertheless decided to make that march.

John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, by anonymous Flemish artist, 15th century.

It seems then that the king could not bear the idea of restricting his military achievements of that year to the siege and capture of Harfleur. He needed more to show for the huge expense and trouble that the expedition of 1415 had cost. Moreover, Henry’s reputation and pride were at stake. But the very notion that the English could march all the way to Calais, 144 miles distant, without encountering a sizeable French force was at best optimistic and at worst hopelessly misconceived. Such a decision could not be justified on its own terms, so writers resorted to the image of divinely inspired leadership to explain the king’s actions. Above all, it was victory at Agincourt which retrospectively justified Henry’s most extraordinarily risky dalliance with Fortune’s wheel.

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ECENT work on the 1415 campaign has argued that, from the outset, Henry was motivated by a strong religious zeal and an unbending faith in God’s support. It is more likely that Henry was simply a strong-willed, impetuous young man intent on action and adventure. He was a born soldier, wholly immersed in the martial culture of the day and impatient to make a name for himself. Following the English deliverance at Agincourt, both Henry and his subjects were nevertheless quick to conclude that such an improbable victory would never have occurred had the English cause not met with the approval of God. This set of circumstances, in which the military and strategic ambitions of a forceful young king were nourished by an absolute conviction in divine providence as a result of the victory at Agincourt, had a profound impact on the course of the rest of Henry V’s reign. There were two immediate legacies of Agincourt. First, in practical terms, the English were now unquestionably the stronger military force. The French army had been decimated on the battlefield: estimates put their losses in the region of 6,000 men, with some 2,000 of those being princes, nobles and men-at-arms. In comparison, English losses were minimal: the Duke of York and young Earl of Suffolk were the only casualties of note. No fewer than seven senior members of the French royal family had been killed, including the dukes of Bar, Brabant and Alençon. In spite of Henry’s infamous (but entirely understandable) order to kill those French prisoners in English hands at the closing stages of the battle, when he feared a renewed French assault, numerous important French captives were taken, including the dukes of Orléans and Bourbon. These men were to wait many years before their release and their absence further depleted France of its military commanders. In contrast, the English star was ascendant and within months plans were afoot for a new expedition to cross the Channel. This was the second legacy of the Agincourt campaign: the great wave of enthusiasm and confidence which swept over the land after the victory 24 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

in 1415 gave added impetus to the plans of Henry and his commanders to extend English control in France. Their target was Normandy. In a campaign that lasted over two years, between 1417 and 1419, the English succeeded in doing what they had never done before: conquering and occupying new territory within the kingdom of France. Caen was captured in September 1417, then Alençon, Mortagne and Bellême; in January 1418 Falaise fell; and, finally, after six months under siege, the biggest prize of all, Rouen, capitulated in January 1419. These years appeared to confirm Henry’s reputation as England’s greatest king. BUT ALL THIS disguises the fundamental weakness of the English position and the deeply flawed nature of Henry’s strategy. The ultimate success of the English in France rested not on the conquest and occupation of Normandy, but on persuading the French that their situation was so hopeless that they had no choice but to seek terms and accede

Clockwise from above: the assassination of John the Fearless on the Montereau bridge by men loyal to the future Charles VII, 1419, from the Chroniques d'Enguerrand de Monstrelet, early 15th century; Philip, Duke of Burgundy, by Rogier van der Weyden, c.1445; 'English archery wins at Agincourt', an illustration from Rudyard Kipling and C.R.L. Fletcher's A History of England, 1911.

The king of France had been forced to the negotiating table and had agreed in principle to hand his country over to be ruled by the Lancastrian dynasty

to the English demands. For Henry the only realistic way this could be achieved was by exploiting the split that existed within the French nobility between the Burgundians and Armagnacs and persuading one of the two sides to join him. In October 1416 Henry had reached an accord with John ‘the Fearless’, Duke of Burgundy, who agreed to recognise Henry as king of France once a sizeable part of the kingdom had fallen under English control. But John’s commitment to Henry was unreliable and in September 1418 he drew closer to the Dauphin, son of Charles VI and leader of the Armagnacs. When Henry attempted to negotiate with the French in May 1419, now having conquered Normandy, Burgundy walked away from the talks. It was a key moment, for it showed that, even in the face of internal division and the loss of territory and with an ineffective king and little immediate hope of military revival, the French were still confident enough to resist making significant concessions. For the English, too, it was at this moment that the realisation must have dawned that winning a major battle and conquering Normandy had not necessarily brought overall victory any closer.

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HEN a most extraordinary event occurred that entirely transformed the situation for Henry. On September 10th, 1419, when the Duke of Burgundy met the Dauphin at Montereau, Burgundy was cut down and killed by one of the Dauphin’s attendants. It is not clear whether this was pre-planned or a terrible misunderstanding, but the result was the same. The duke’s son, Phillip, became the sworn enemy of the Dauphin and immediately joined the English. The treaty of Troyes (May 21st, 1420) was the direct outcome of this new Anglo-Burgundian partnership. It was unquestionably a diplomatic triumph for Henry: by its terms, Charles VI agreed to the marriage of his daughter Catherine to Henry; once Charles died, the French crown would immediately devolve upon Henry and his heirs. On parchment at least, Henry had won the war. The king of France had been forced to the negotiating table and had agreed in principle to hand his country over to be ruled by the Lancastrian dynasty. Not even Edward III had come close to this in the days of English success in the mid-14th century. But the triumph of the treaty of Troyes, like the victory at Agincourt, was mainly illusory. The treaty could say what it liked. The reality was that half of France was still controlled by the Dauphin and he remained implacably hostile to an agreement which effectively barred him from his inheritance. Little had changed, except that the treaty now placed an explicit obligation on Henry to challenge the Dauphin and overrun Armagnac territory. Far from heralding a new era of peace and prosperity, the treaty of Troyes committed England to a war with no end in sight. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 25

AGINCOURT

The victory at Agincourt gave Henry the initiative, but in the end he became a prisoner of his own ambitions Agincourt was a hollow victory because it engendered unrealistic expectations and, in particular, it blinded Henry and his advisers to the strategic impossibility that England could ever subdue its neighbour across the Channel. At no point in the Hundred Years War was France as weak as it was in the period 1415-21 and yet Henry was no closer to winning the conflict in 1415 or 1420 than any other English king in the 14th or 15th centuries. This harsh truth was evident to contemporaries. In the late 14th century, Charles V is reported to have commented that: England was only a little country by comparison with France, for he had ridden the length and breadth of it several times and had given much thought to its resources. Of the four or five regions into which one could divide the kingdom of France the poorest would offer more revenue, more towns and cities, more knights and squires than the whole of England. He was amazed at how they had ever mustered the strength to achieve the conquests they had. IN THE NEGOTIATIONS which preceded the long truce of 1396 the French had also pointed out that ‘they did not have sufficient strength to conquer the kingdom of England, and … the English were in no way strong enough to subjugate France’. It was this plain fact which persuaded Henry’s predecessor, Richard II (137799), that England’s interests were best served by peace. But Henry was a soldier, not a peacemaker. He wanted to prove himself a capable military commander. It was in pursuit of this goal that T IS TELLING THAT when news of the treaty of Troyes The wedding he recklessly risked the lives of his soldiers in an ill-conceived filtered through to Henry’s subjects there was no sponta- of Henry V and march to Calais from Harfleur. For sure, he led his soldiers bravely Catherine of neous rejoicing. The reception was distinctly lukewarm. in battle, but a responsible commander should never have put his Valois, French, When Parliament met in December 1420 concerns were 1487. forces at such risk in the first place. The victory at Agincourt gave expressed about what status England would have once Henry the initiative, but in the end he became a prisoner of his Henry ruled over the two kingdoms. More importantly, MPs asserted own ambitions and in the process of trying to realise them he subjected that, with the settlement of France on Henry and his heirs, England both England and France to one of the most intensive periods of fighting no longer had any obligation to fund the continuation of the war. The seen in the war. The greatest tragedy for England, however, lay in the hearts of Englishmen were no longer in the fight: they no longer shared twin legacies which Henry left after his death, for he not only lumbered their king’s dream for a cross-Channel empire. When Henry returned the kingdom with foreign policy goals impossible to fulfil, but also an to France in June 1421 he did so without having secured a grant of taxinfant son whose mental deficiencies – almost certainly inherited from ation to fund his campaigning. More seriously, it became clear that a his grandfather Charles VI – were to prove catastrophic and were to lead Herculean effort would be needed to defeat the Dauphin. These were to the sort of ruinous divisions in England that had existed in France bitter months. Henry marched south to seize Orléans, but after three during the 1410s. In a number of different ways, Henry had sown the seeds of England’s final defeat in the Hundred Years War 30 years later. days surveying the city’s defences he withdrew, realising that its capture lay beyond his capabilities. He then directed his efforts at reducing Armagnac-held towns to the south-east of Paris, but quickly discovered Gwilym Dodd is Associate Professor of History at the University of Nottingham and the that even capturing small places required huge outlays of treasure, mateditor of Henry V: New Interpretations (University of York Press, 2013). erial and time. Nowhere was this clearer than in the siege of Meaux, which lasted between October 6th, 1421 and May 10th, 1422. If a town of even modest size took seven months to take, what hope was there FURTHER READING that English forces could roll up the vast hinterland of Armagnac-held Matthew Bennett, Agincourt 1415: Triumph Against the Odds (Osprey territory south of the Loire? There are signs that even Henry understood Publishing, 1999). the hopelessness of his task when he allowed those members of the garAnne Curry, The Battle of Agincourt: Sources and Interpretations (The rison of Meaux who remained loyal to the Dauphin to pass unmolested Boydell Press, 2000); Agincourt: A New History (Tempus Publishing, through his lines to rejoin their own side. It was at Meaux that Henry Stroud, 2005). contracted the illness that would kill him. It was probably just as well Ian Mortimer, 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory (The Bodley Head, 2009). that it did, for his untimely death saved him from confronting the fact that his designs on France could never be realised.

I

26 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

AGINCOURT

The cover of sheet music for a song inspired by rumours of angelic intervention on the Western Front, 1915.

By the time of the 500th anniversary of Henry V’s victory, British troops were once more struggling against overwhelming odds in northern France. Stephen Cooper looks at how Britons of the Great War found inspiration in the events of St Crispin’s Day, 1415.

The Legacy of Agincourt H

OW WAS THE 500th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt celebrated? An inspection of the British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaper archive.co.uk) for October 1915 provides several answers; but first we should look back to August 1914 and the opening of the Great War, when a short story by Arthur Machen entitled The Bowmen was published in the Evening News. Ostensibly, it was about the Battle of Mons, when 80,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF)

encountered approximately 300,000 Germans around 70 miles from the village of Azincourt in Picardy. The story was that the British were assisted by a ghostly line of figures that appeared on the horizon. These were the bowmen of Agincourt, arriving to help their beleaguered descendants, and they duly proceeded to shoot the Germans down in droves. Machen’s story was pure fiction, but many readers took it for reportage and, as it was told and retold, it became the foundation for the legend of the Angels of Mons. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 27

AGINCOURT

There was nothing else quite like Machen’s story in 1915; but many newspapers did mention Agincourt in one way or another, especially in the anniversary month of October. The Yorkshire Evening Post for October 1st, the Wells Journal for October 15th and the Aberdeen Weekly Journal for October 29th informed their readers that ‘October is above all others the month of battle’ and bracketed Agincourt with Hastings, Sebastopol, Trafalgar, Edgehill and Balaclava. On October 2nd the Dundee Courier went further, pointing out that it was in the month of October that other less wellknown battles had taken place, involving Italian, French, Spanish, Russian and Prussian forces. The Burnley News published a word puzzle on October 30th (‘My first is in Utrecht etc) to which the solution was T.R.A.F.A.L.G.A.R. Journalists seem to have regarded Shakespeare’s version of events in his play Henry V (1599) as history as well as drama and several papers reproduced extracts from Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech; in fact the Cheltenham Looker-On for October 30th reproduced the whole of it. That same day, the Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald repeated the myth that St Crispin, the patron saint of shoemakers, came from Soissons, but that (following his martyrdom) his bones had been washed ashore on Romney Marsh. In the main the press was not interested in historical controversies, but the Cornhill Magazine for October 1915 carried an article by Sir Herbert Maxwell (1845-1937), who was a Scottish essayist and novelist and a former MP, entitled The Campaign of Agincourt. This claimed that: ‘The Battle of Agincourt is memorable as the first recorded instance of the success of line formation against column.’ At the 28 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Above left: Lewis Waller in the role of Henry V, 1915. Above: German stormtroopers advance through Picardy in the Kaiserschlacht of March 1918, during which Arthur Cooper was killed.

same time, there was a reference in the Birmingham Daily Post (October 26th) to the importance of the longbow in securing the victory and some discussion in the Derby Daily Telegraph (October 30th) of the size of Henry V’s army. This seems to have been in response to a German critic’s suggestion that the English were ‘crowing’ at the expense of their French allies in respect of the 500th anniversary, an allegation which the newspaper hotly refuted.

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WO PAPERS – the Dundee Evening Telegraph (October 14th) and the Reading Mercury (October 16th) – summarised Maxwell’s article and noted that the campaign had been a demonstration of humanity, since Henry V had issued orders that, while on the march, none of his troops should molest the French peasantry. Nevertheless, in the years before 1914 the British had been lulled into a false sense of security: ‘A year ago we were so simple as to believe that men had become

used to boost morale and specifically to support the drive to recruit more men for the titanic struggle on the Western Front. The old BEF had been virtually wiped out in 1914 and Kitchener’s New Army was still being raised, but this had to be done on a voluntary basis, since conscription was not introduced until 1916. Accordingly, the government had to take every opportunity to encourage able-bodied men to enlist. On Saturday October 2nd, 1915 the Liverpool Echo reported that Lewis Waller, who was a distinguished actormanager, the Laurence Olivier of his day, had participated in a ‘stirring call for recruits’ and made a ‘dramatic speech’ on the flags of the Liverpool Exchange. Waller had treated his audience to patriotic verse from several poets and sources, but the highlight had been his rendition of both great speeches from Henry V: the St Crispin’s Day speech and that made to the troops before the walls of Harfleur: ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends.’

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Henry V’s great victory was certainly used to boost morale and specifically to support the drive to recruit more men for the titanic struggle on the Western Front more humane than their forefathers and that means had been devised at The Hague and elsewhere to purge even war of the worst of its horrors.’ This was of course a pointed reminder to readers that the Germans had committed atrocities in occupied Belgium and France. The English had shown that there was a better way to make war, even in medieval times. The history of Henry V’s great victory was certainly

HE ANNIVERSARY and fifth centenary of the battle – October 25th – fell on a Monday. The Hull Daily Mail summarised the main features of the Battle of Agincourt: the English had been outnumbered, but the French generals had committed the most basic of tactical errors; the victory was won by the archers; and ‘Henry V was a knightly conqueror, and used his victory mercifully’. The Liverpool Daily Post and the Evening Despatch made it clear that, while they strongly approved of the heroism displayed by the English soldier, they were equally disapproving of Henry V’s conduct in starting the war in the first place, in pursuit of a ‘futile’ claim to the French crown. The Birmingham Daily Mail reported that George V had issued an appeal the previous Saturday in which he asked ‘men of all classes’ to come forward voluntarily. The paper then proceeded to issue its own appeal: the armies of George V were now engaged in a struggle on the same ground over which Henry V had fought; the king was still leading the nation; and the modern army was as ready to win a great and glorious victory on the field of Flanders as its medieval predecessor; but, in order to repeat the old success, it was now necessary to call for the help of ‘the whole manhood of the nation’.

THE TIMES OF LONDON printed long lists of the dead and wounded from the Battle of Loos; but it also reproduced the St Crispin’s Day speech and commented on it in a leading article: Five hundred years have come and gone today since England won the last and greatest of her medieval victories on foreign soil. This is the day of Agincourt, when Henry V, with his way-worn and half-famished band of Englishmen, attacked and put to utter rout the vast host that barred their way to Calais and the sea ... [England] has yet greater wars today, and her sons again stand embattled in the very fields where the noble Plantagenet with his ‘band of brothers’ snatched overwhelming victory from the very jaws of disaster ... ‘Every subject’s duty is the king’s’ is the keynote of [Shakespeare’s] play, and in none is the sense of duty more strongly portrayed than in the King himself. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 29

AGINCOURT this in turn meant that 42,100 had not fallen! And, in any case, ‘it was the custom of British people to tread the path of honour and duty, no matter what perils may surround it’. They should all reflect on the fact that October 25th, 1915 was the 500th anniversary of ‘the great Battle of Agincourt’; the same spirit which inspired Henry V and his men was now abroad. Moreover, ‘we had a greater cause to fight for now, for the campaign of Agincourt was, after all, a war of adventure and conquest’.

M

Y GRANDFATHER, ARTHUR COOPER, worked for the Post Office in Liverpool in October 1915 and would certainly have been one of those who received a letter from Herbert Samuel. He might also have witnessed the formidable Lewis Waller in full flow. Arthur was a married man, with three children, the youngest of whom was my father, born in August 1915; but he nonetheless volunteered for the army on December 1st, so it is not impossible that he was influenced by these appeals to the spirit of Agincourt. My aunt told me, many years later, that he had volunteered because he felt it was no longer right to stand by, while others were dying for their country.

Arthur Cooper, the author's grandfather, c.1916.

My grandfather had been assured that, if he enlisted on a voluntary basis, he would not be sent to the front until all the unmarried men had been conscripted The writer drew a further parallel between the events of 1415 and 1915. [The French] thought the English force ‘a contemptible little army’, as they had thought it at Crécy and Poitiers and as others have affected to think since. The Birmingham Daily Post of Tuesday October 26th, 1915 reported that, on the previous day, the Postmaster General, Mr Herbert Samuel, had addressed a crowd of postal workers at the General Post Office in London. He told them that he had written to every one of his employees, asking him to come forward. He said he was aware that some people said that every man who responded ‘was to be regarded as a doomed man’; but this was not so. It was true that 43,600 postal workers had already volunteered for the Front and that 1,500 of these had already fallen; but

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BUT, PERHAPS UNFORTUNATELY, there is also a more prosaic explanation. My grandfather’s enlistment in December 1915 may well be explained by his position as a married man with children. In his book Kitchener’s Army (2007) the historian Peter Simkins explains that in July 1915 the National Registration Bill had been enacted and a census was taken on August 15th (the day my father was born). This provided the authorities with a complete record of the number and distribution of men in the country. This was immediately followed by ‘the Derby scheme’, which involved a personal canvass of every man between the ages of 18 and 41 whose name was on the register, asking that he enlist voluntarily on the basis that the youngest married men would not be summoned until all age groups of single men had been called up. The prime minister (under pressure to introduce full conscription, but reluctant to do so) then gave a guarantee to the married men. On November 11th the author of the scheme, Lord Derby, whose family seat was at Knowsley in Liverpool, repeated the guarantee. The result was quite remarkable: the recruiting offices were overwhelmed. The Derby Scheme was originally due to end on November 30th but the closing date was extended to December 11th. I think this almost certainly explains why Arthur Cooper decided to enlist on December 11th; though of course, the spirit of Agincourt may also have been at work. My grandfather had effectively been assured that, if he enlisted immediately on a voluntary basis, he would not be sent to the front until all the unmarried men had been conscripted. It is surely not without significance that, when he enlisted in the King’s Liverpool Regiment, he was immediately relegated to reserve and that he was not called up for active service until 1918. Soon afterwards he was sent to the front as part of the desperate efforts to resist the enormous and almost successful German spring offensive, the Kaiserschlacht. He was killed within a fortnight of being sent to France and his body was never found. Stephen Cooper is a retired solicitor and a historian.

InFocus

South Korean Justice

32 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

A

The guard standing at the front is about to hit one of the political prisoners with his rifle butt

TRUCKLOAD OF South Korean political prisoners is driven off in August 1950, out of sight of press photographers such as Haywood Magee of Picture Post, who took this shot. The guard standing at the front is about to hit one of them with his rifle butt. If they have had any trial it was summary and almost certainly they will be executed shortly. It will have been enough for them to have been denounced by someone as unreliable, potential communists, either after North Korea invaded on June 25th, or in the months before that. Korea had been a colony of Japan for 35 years up to 1945. Soviet forces were already there in strength at the end of the war, but they agreed with the US that the country should be divided into two spheres of influence along the 38th Parallel. In the north, Kim Il-sung emerged with Soviet backing as dictator (and founder of a ruling dynasty). In the south, the Americans backed Syngman Rhee, not least because, as a long-term exile in the US, he was known to them and spoke English. He was ruthlessly repressive from the start, determined to eradicate leftists. Once the Soviets and the Americans had gone, both leaders announced their ambitions to take over each other’s fiefdoms, but while the Soviets had left armour and artillery for Kim, the Americans left none in the south. This accounts for the rapid advance of the North Koreans and their 400 tanks in the early weeks of the war, until they controlled all but a small area around the port of Pusan at the southern end of the peninsula. The South Korean and US forces opposing them were by now under the aegis of the United Nations, which found itself fighting its first war. Picture Post reporter James Cameron was a witness to what was going on. He protested to the US and the UN but got nowhere, even though, as he wrote in his memoirs, he was denouncing the ‘wrongness of method not because I was morally against the UN, but because I was seriously and not just sentimentally for it’. Moreover it was happening in a back area, ‘remote from any military emergency … Leaving the moral issue quite aside, I felt it was a form of psychological idiocy that ill became a war ostensibly undertaken in the name of collective international principle’. Soon after, General MacArthur, the US commander, launched his masterstroke, the seaborne landings at Incheon, 200 miles behind enemy lines, and the war entered a new phase. But it was not the end of the episode for Cameron or Magee and Bert Hardy, the Picture Post photographers. The outlines of the story had already found their way into both The Times and the Daily Telegraph when Cameron filed his own version, ‘a journalistic essay of elaborate moderation’, at Picture Post, a magazine with a progressive editorial line. Yet, with the issue in which the pictures and story were to appear already on the presses, the proprietor, Edward Hulton, demanded its removal, although he had already seen it in proof. Whatever his reason, it was a futile gesture because a proof immediately found its way to the communist Daily Worker and the details were soon spread far and wide. The Picture Post editor, Tom Hopkinson, was sacked and Cameron resigned. It marked the beginning of the end for a proud and pioneering magazine; in the 1940s it had been selling a million and a half copies but it ceased publication in 1957, having ‘drifted into the market of arch cheesecake and commonplace decoration’. ROGER HUDSON

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| RINGSTRASSE

The Holy Roman Ring Road

Emperor Franz Joseph officially opened the Ringstrasse on May 1st, 1865. Adrian Mourby looks at its 150 years as a Viennese landmark. 34 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

VIENNA CAME LATE to the idea of demolishing its city walls. By the middle of the 19th century most European capitals had recognised that modern artillery had made them redundant. Moreover, the impediment to civic enlargement presented by city walls negated any benefits to security. In Paris, Napoleon III had already shown that the creation of broad boulevards around a city centre increased security because it made the erection of barricades difficult. The Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph (r.1848-1916) was, however, conservative in all things. It was wholly in his nature to put off such an important decision. Yet his capital had already begun making the decision for him. As early as the reign of Joseph II (r. 1765-90), improvised streets lit by lanterns and lined by trees and bushes had been created in the glacis, the 500m-wide killing zone outside the city walls, where no building, nor even vegetation, was allowed. When Mozart’s audience walked from the Innere Stadt (city centre) to the premiere of the Magic Flute in 1791 at Emanuel Schikaneder’s Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, they would have passed stalls and open-air workshops erected there by Viennese artisans who simply ignored the regulation.

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Moreover, Napoleon had found Vienna’s city walls no obstacle to conquest when he took the city in 1805 and again in 1809. In November 1805 a French commander crossed the heavily defended Tábor Bridge and convinced the Viennese garrison to surrender without a shot being fired. Two years after Franz Joseph ascended the imperial throne, Vienna incorporated the Vorstädte (now Districts II-IX) as part of the city proper, thus making the walls not just an irrelevance but an obstruction to free movement within the newly enlarged city. Finally, in 1857 the emperor agreed to what was an inevitability. An imperial decree, Es ist Mein Wille (‘It is My will’), issued that year ordered the demolition of the walls and moats and the construction of a great boulevard within the former glacis. Rather than open up this ring of demolition around the city to speculative building, the Habsburg government stipulated not just the size of the boulevard but what was to be built along it. The emperor, bowing to the inevitable, created one of Europe’s great civil projects, not as drastic a venture as what Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann were achieving in Paris, but a project of greater character. The Ringstrasse was to be a showcase for the glory of the Habsburg Empire, with museums, a parliament building, theatres and concert halls. Not only would it become one of the main sights of the city, it would create its own architectural style, Ringstrassenstil, an eclectic form of historicism, usually dated between 1860 and 1890, that was to prove the backdrop to our familiar images of Viennese life, the city of Mahler, Freud, Klimt and Stefan Zweig. The walls and bastions were not easy to destroy. They had stood since the 13th century, partly funded by the ransom

The Emperor Franz Joseph, bowing to the inevitable, created one of Europe’s great civil projects The opening of the Ringstrasse, illustration published in Leipzig, 1865.

of 150,000 marks (65,000 pounds of silver) that England paid to the Holy Roman Emperor for the release of Richard I. This colossal sum was more than twice the annual income of the English Crown under Richard and had resulted in clergy and laymen being taxed for a quarter of the value of their property. The walls had subsequently been made even more doughty after the First Turkish Siege of 1529 exposed them to Ottoman technology. Much effort – and dynamite – was expended before the site was cleared. The blueprint for the Ring was the work of the architects employed by the emperor himself. The city of Vienna only paid for the Neue Rathaus and the piazza in front of it. There were to be two rings because, beyond the Ringstrasse itself, a parallel Lastenstrasse (cargo road) was constructed, which still exists today, marking the outermost edge of the glacis. This street, for deliveries, is known today as 2nd Linie, because the No.2 tram follows this outer ring round the city centre, while the No.1 tram follows the Ring itself. Far from being circular, the Ringstrasse is a septagon, a seven-sided irregular object following the equally irregular lines that the fortifications of Vienna had reached by 1857.

Some purists will argue that it is actually a hexagon, because the seventh side is Franz-Josefs-Kai overlooking the Danube Canal and not actually part of the Ring itself. This northern edge not only lacks the all-important ‘Ring’ suffix but also the parallel cargo road. Nor does it contain the grand civic buildings planned by Franz Joseph’s architects. But without Franz-Josefs-Kai the Ring would be incomplete. Moreover, the walls along this side of the city were demolished and an irregular boulevard created along the canal to link Schottenring and Stubenring. In the minds of most Viennese, the Ring has seven sides. Naming and re-naming Those sides were divided into eight streets of roughly equal length (nine today, because the Franzenring was subsequently subdivided; ten if you count Franz-Josefs-Kai). Some of the Strasses were named after points on the Ring – Schotten Ring after Schottenstift (Vienna’s Scottish Abbey), Burg Ring after the imperial palace, some after street names – Kärntner Ring after the important shopping street that led towards Carinthia – and even people: Schubert Ring was named after the composer. Because of regime changes, one section of the Ring has repeatedly been renamed. After the 1918 revolution the imperial Franzens Ring was renamed Ring des 12 November. In 1934 it was divided into two halves, one being Dr Ignaz Seipel Ring, named after the sixth chancellor of Austria, and the other half Dr Karl Lueger Ring after the mayor of Vienna, in office from 1897 to 1910. Under the Nazis, Dr Ignaz Seipel Ring was briefly renamed after the gauleiter of Vienna, Baldur von Schirach, and in 1956 it was renamed again after Karl Renner, father of the Austrian Republic and its fourth president. Finally, in 2012 Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring was renamed Universitätsring, as concerns about his antisemitism grew. To fund the creation of all these streets a ‘City Extension Fund’ was created. Much of the money to build the boulevards and the public buildings that would stand on them was sourced from Jewish bankers within the Empire, such as the Ephrussi and Epstein families. They in turn were offered the opportunity to build their own palaces on or near the Ring. This display of Jewish wealth was to have unfortunate consequences in the years following Austria’s defeat in the First World War. The plans were modified along the way with some original sections of the walls being allowed to remain. The Braun Bastion, on which the Saxe-Coburg family (in-laws of Queen Victoria) had, in 1845, just completed their palace, was not demolished, or else the palace would have had come down with it. Today this is known as Coburgbastei and Palais Coburg is one of Vienna’s many historic hotels. Mölker Bastei was also retained, which means that it is still possible to visit the apartment in which Beethoven lived from 1804 to 1815. It was here at the Pasqualati-Haus that the composer infuriated his landlord by putting in a window with a view to the glacis without permission and where he wrote his only opera, Fidelio, and symphonies five to eight. Further round the Ring the demolition of the walls exposed new views into the city. On Franz-Josefs-Kai, the Ruprechtskirche, Vienna’s oldest church, was opened up to views of the Danube Canal. Built in the 12th century on the site of the Roman city of Vindobona, it had all but OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 35

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disappeared over the centuries. Coincidentally, it went on to have a supporting role in the 1949 Carol Reed film The Third Man as, at different points in the film, both Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten flee down the steps below the church. A tabula rasa Elsewhere the Ring created a broad tabula rasa on which the emperor, his architects and his financiers facilitated the erection of a sequence of self-consciously impressive buildings. One of the first was the Heinrichshof, a city block opposite the site of the proposed new imperial opera house, which was built by the industrialist Heinrich von Drasche-Wartinberg to designs by Theophil Hansen and completed in 1863. Here the composer Anton Bruckner would live for many years. Unfortunately, it was destroyed in a bombing raid in 1945 and replaced with a dull commercial building in unappetising concrete. Most of the original building round the Ring has survived. One of the first Stadtpalais (city palaces) to be built was Palais Württemberg on Kärntner Ring. It was planned as the city residence of the newly married Duke of Württemberg and his wife, Duchess Marie Therese, a relative of the emperor. It took up a whole city block and had a front entrance on to the Ring through which two carriages could pass. The main staircase was located at the back of a central courtyard wide enough for a horse and carriage to turn round. The duke and duchess sold it in 1871 to be converted into the Imperial Hotel. Today its main staircase is still, curiously, a long way into the hotel and off to one side so as not to inhibit access to its stables. The hotel went on to host

In a rare joke, Franz Joseph commented that his brother should have been given a ballerina to keep him out of trouble Richard Wagner as a guest and, so it is rumoured, to employ Adolf Hitler as a workman in his penniless artist days. The Führer was definitely at the Imperial in 1938 following the Anschluss and he later kept Mussolini a virtual prisoner in it following il Duce’s ‘rescue’ from Italy in 1943. After the war, the Imperial was for many years the KGB headquarters in the city; it is to their credit that the building was kept in fine condition during the allied occupation of Vienna. Another royal builder on the Ring was ‘Luziwuzi’, Archduke Ludwig Viktor of Austria, brother to the emperor and the only openly transvestite and homosexual member of the Habsburg family. In 1863 Luziwuzi decided to erect the first new royal palace on the Ring. The design, by Heinrich von Ferstel, was completed in 1869 at the junction of Kärntner and Schubert Rings. It contained offices, living apartments and even a ballroom. This pattern was replicated at various plutocrat palaces and even in apartment blocks on the Ring, where you might only rent a small flat but would have access to grand public rooms on other floors. Luziwuzi was eventually forbidden to remain in Vienna because of his outrageous behaviour. In one of his rare jokes, Franz Joseph commented that his brother should have been given a ballerina as adjutant to keep him out of trouble. The archduke’s palace is now known as Kasino am Schwarzenbergplaz, a secondary performing space for the Volkstheater. 36 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Released from property owning restrictions, the banking families, Ephrussi, Leitenberger, Schey, Wertheim, Todesco, Eskeles and Epstein, built palaces on or just off the Ring. The history of one of these plutocrat palaces, Palais Ephrussi, has been told by Edmund de Waal, a descendant of the family, in his 2010 novel The Hare with Amber Eyes. It took up a whole city block and was built for the Ephrussis by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen, the architect of so much of the Ring, including the Austrian parliament building and the Bourse. After the  1938 Anschluss, the building’s then owner, Viktor Ephrussi, signed away his ownership of the building and its artworks in exchange for not being sent to a concentration camp and it was taken over by the new Nazi administration of Austria and the party ideologue Alfred Rosenberg until the end of the war. Café culture A more common form of building around the Ring was a city block made up of four grand units that backed on to a shared courtyard. One example is on the Schubertring, where the Adeliges Casino was constructed in 1865 and, next door to it, the Palais Ölzelt which was completed the following year. Behind them in 1869 were built Palais Gutmann and Mietpalais Borkenstein looking out on to the cargo road. These four buildings made up a block and they were subsequently merged to create the Girozentrale Bank in 1961 and – in a development reflecting Vienna’s new role as a tourist centre – the Ritz Carlton hotel in 2012. Hotels were also purpose-built on the Ring. One that was constructed for the Weltausstellung Wien (World Exposition) of 1873 was located close to the Bourse and designed by the same architect, the ubiquitous Theophil Freiherr von Hansen. Unfortunately an outbreak of cholera put the success of the exhibition in doubt and the hotel was turned into offices before it ever opened its doors. Only in 2013 was it converted back into a hotel, now known as the Palais Hansen Kempinski. It is an irony that, whereas the Ring now sports more hotels than ever before, it has few cafés, for Franz Joseph’s great boulevard brought Viennese café culture to its peak of ubiquity and sophistication. The newly expanded city was an expensive place to live and so, post-Ringstrasse, many unmarried men spent their days sitting, reading and even working in cafés. In all, 15 were built around the Ring (of which only three survive). Many of their clients even arranged to have letters and newspapers delivered direct to their favourite haunt. They went home only to sleep, usually in a cheap tenement room, where they would not dream of entertaining. Without a doubt, the vibrant café society that we associate with Freud, Mahler, Klimt and Zweig was a direct result of the Ringstrasse. It is probably true to say that Ringstrasse was the greatest achievement of Emperor Franz Joseph, certainly in Vienna. His personal project, the creation of the twin Natural History and Kunsthistorisches museums on Burg Ring, says much about the emperor’s desire to tidy up the imperial collections and much about the man, too: more curator of his empire than leader. But the Ring itself, into which he was pushed by events, is his greatest memorial, not the disastrous war he entered in 1914, which destroyed his empire. Adrian Mourby is a writer specialising in music and travel.

GLOBAL HISTORY

The World We Have

LOST Too many historians and commentators view history from a western perspective. In doing so, they turn their back on the roots of our global system, argues Peter Frankopan.

I The walls and minaret of the Abu Dulaf mosque, Samarra, Iraq, ninth century.

F YOU WERE TO round up some of the groups of school leavers pictured waving their A-Level certificates in the middle of August, I suspect that most would be able to recall some of the history they had been taught during the course of their school careers. The Romans in Britain will be in there somewhere, as will the Norman Conquest and the murder of Thomas Becket. The Wars of the Roses and the era of the Tudors will feature, as will the Civil Wars (with any luck). Those who stuck at it better and longer would hopefully be on solid ground when it comes to the transatlantic slave trade, the American War of Independence, Gladstone and Disraeli and then the two World Wars.

If you were to sit the same group in front of the evening news, I suspect they might struggle. Prominent on any given day would likely be the breakdown in Iraq and war in Syria; the increasingly likely prospect of Iran coming in from the cold; dramatic military confrontation in the Ukraine; continuing violence and uncertainty in Afghanistan; or perhaps a piece to camera on the significance of China to the global economy. Ask any of the new school leavers about the history of any of these countries, peoples or cultures and you will draw a blank. Ask them about contemporary culture and you’ll get an even more bewildered look: who is the finest Russian contemporary artist, the OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 37

GLOBAL HISTORY best Arabic pop star (or classical musician), or the most exciting Chinese author? Horizons are set, or rather limited, by a narrow focus that is confined to (western) Europe and the US; a focus that is broadly reflected in university history faculties, in books that are written about the past and in attitudes to the world around us. We look from the West at the West. Other regions and places might be interesting, exotic and important in their own way locally, but the stories that matter are those that linked ancient Athens with Rome, produced the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, led to liberal democracy and to the widespread acceptance of the principle of religious, gender and social equality. There are, though, other – and better – vantage points from which to look at history. To understand the past and the present, the best place of all to stand is not in the West or in the East, but in the region that links the two together. Although it might not seem promising to assess the world from countries in Central Asia such as Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, or from Iran, Iraq, southern Russia and the Caucasus, this is the crucible where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled, borrowed and competed with each other. It is the cauldron where language groups collided, where Indo-European, Semitic and SinoTibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. These are no backwaters, in other words, no obscure wastelands. In fact the bridge between East and West is the very crossroads of civilisation. Far from being on the fringe of global affairs, these countries lie at its very centre, as they have done since the beginning of history. Running across the spine of Asia is a web of connections that fan out in every direction, routes along which pilgrims and warriors, nomads and merchants have travelled, goods and produce have been bought and sold and ideas exchanged, adapted and refined. They have carried not only prosperity, but also death and violence, disease and disaster.

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HESE PATHWAYS, known since the late 19th century as the Silk Roads, serve as the world’s central nervous system, connecting peoples and places together. These networks are invisible to the naked eye, just as the body’s veins and arteries lie beneath the skin. Studying these connections provides an interesting corrective to standard narratives of the past. But in fact it does rather more. For just as anatomy explains how the body functions, so studying these connections helps understand developments not only across Asia, but in Europe, the Americas and Africa. They allow us to see patterns and links that otherwise pass unseen and they allow us to look at history itself in a very different way. Curiously, however, all this has been overlooked and ignored by scholars for three reasons. First, the story of the rise of the West – the narrative that seems to explain the modern world so well – is so secure as to be unchallengeable; because the world has revolved around European empires and the US for the last four centuries, there has been little need to dispute the accepted script whereby the rise of western civilisation was both inevitable and desirable. 38 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

To understand the past and the present, the best place of all to stand is not in the West or in the East, but in the region that links the two together

Heracles in a lionskin head-dress, one of many 'Alexander coins' issued following the death of Alexander the Great, fourth century bc.

Second, is the fact that an increasingly crowded and competitive field has resulted in historians specialising in ever smaller, narrower and more precise studies. As Fernand Braudel once noted, it is not just important for scholars writing about the past to be bold, but to attempt to be so on a grand scale. Writing histoire totale or ‘ultimate history’ has not just been dismissed, but has become academically derided, replaced by micro-histories and studies that look at differences between communities living a handful of kilometres apart rather than thousands of miles from each other. Perhaps, though, it is possible to combine the two and to catch enough of the detail while maintaining a broad canvas that spans centuries and millennia rather than months. This requires ambition, but also a new way of conducting research and of writing history; it involves becoming not only a specialist in one’s own field, but branching out into those of others. The third reason, of course, is one that will be familiar to school leavers and the general reader alike. In the same way that our cultural, political and historical horizons are limited to western Europe, so too are our language skills.

than 2,000 years ago understood, it was important to keep up with the times: ‘A talent for following the ways of yesterday’, he declared in 307 bc, ‘is not sufficient to improve the world of today.’ We hear constantly from television adverts and from commentators that we live in an increasingly globalised world; we should rethink the way we look at the present – and at the past – accordingly. Perhaps the most obvious starting point concerns the basic irrelevance of Europe in classical antiquity. The Greeks had little interest in – or rivalry with – those in the hinterland of the continent and little to do with those along its littoral. Apart from the internecine struggle between states like Athens and Sparta, the orientation of ancient Greek civilisation was set clearly towards the East: first, Troy and Asia Minor and then the Persians of Asia proper. It never crossed the mind of Alexander the Great to head westwards and subjugate Italy, Spain and continental Europe. The prizes worth taking all lay in the direction of the rising, not the setting, sun. This was echoed in the orientation of Rome, too. While courses on Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, the Asterix comic books and the film Gladiator try to make us think that Rome’s centre of gravity lay in Europe, its making lay in another continent altogether. It was the conquest of Egypt that transformed Rome from a successful state into an empire. The triumphant hero who oversaw the colonisation of the rich banks of the Nile used to boast about his achievement. I found Rome made of brick, he used to boast; but I left it made of marble.

T Fragment of silk found in a tomb in Astana, Xinjiang, c.eighth century.

As it is, modern language teaching in schools is confined almost exclusively to French, German and Spanish and even then in ever falling numbers. For those lucky enough to be able to study classical languages, Latin is the cornerstone; Greek is taken by a tiny number of students and is all but gone from Britain’s state sector. This means that the crown jewels of the past lie ignored and undisturbed. The literature of Byzantium – such as histories by Procopius, Anna Komnene or Akropolites – are known to few, despite being produced by an empire that flourished for a thousand years; treatises written in the great Arabic-speaking world that dominated the southern Mediterranean, North Africa and Asia as far as the Himalayas for centuries, such as those by Muqaddasī, Ibn Fadlān and Mas‘ūdī, are obscure and overlooked. The great works of Persian poetry and prose – such as the epic Shāhnāma of Firdawsī or the Ta’rīx-i Jahān-Gušā of Juvaynī, which relates the history of the Mongols – remain a mystery, while texts in Tamil, Hindi and Chinese – such as the Shi Ji, written more than 2,000 years ago by Sima Qian – fare no better. And yet, as King Wu-Ling, ruler of the Zhao state in northern China and beyond more

HE KEY TO THIS SUCCESS was access to the agricultural wealth of Egypt and the opening up of trade routes with the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean that were so extensive that states as far away as the Indus Valley soon began to imitate Roman coinage, so plentiful was its supply. As Rome boomed, so did its appetites for luxury from the East: spices, slaves and silks. Not everyone was best pleased about this. It was scandalous, wrote Seneca, that women could wear fabrics that showed all their curves and left nothing to the imagination. That was the least of it, thought Pliny. Just think how much money was leaking out of the Roman economy and into the hands of others: hundred of millions of sestercii, all heading East. It was not just goods and commodities that flowed along the trade routes. So did ideas. The most successful of these were about faith and, above all, those that involved salvation and eternal life. Christianity became the European export par excellence in the early modern era as missionaries fanned out into colonies across the world. It is all too easy to forget that the religion was born in and around Jerusalem within the context and physical setting of the Middle East. Scholars have tracked with great diligence how the disciples of Jesus Christ spread his teachings and stories about his life, death and resurrection throughout the Mediterranean. Little attention has been paid, however, to the way that Christianity spread in Asia, where, if anything, it was more effective and more popular than in the West, gaining followers quickly as it spread along the trade routes. The growth of Christian communities was further spurred by the dispersal of believers taken captive by the Persians in their long-running wars with Rome. So widespread and OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 39

GLOBAL HISTORY Many scholars focus on the apparent violence and intolerance that accompanied the dawn of Islam, but one of the keys to its success was precisely the opposite: offering a message that was understandable and accessible, which played down differences and accentuated similarities. Cataclysmic struggle between the eastern Rome and Persia opened the door for Arabs to stream through and build one of the greatest empires in history. The divine messages that had been received by the Prophet Muhammad were soon being uttered and repeated from Spain as far as the Himalayas. The new masters of the world found themselves rulers not only of a vast realm, but controllers of immense fortunes. As money flowed in to the centre of the Islamic world, cities such as Damascus, Merv, Samarra and, above all, a new city – Baghdad – flourished. Magnificent buildings were constructed from mosques to madrassas, from bath-houses to libraries. Money, coupled with surging self-confidence in the divine appointment of the House of Islam, enabled extraordinary advances in sciences and arts, with patronage given to some of the greatest scholars in history, such as Ibn Sīnā, better known as Avicenna, alBīrūnī and al-Khwārizmi, who became giants in their fields. A thousand years ago, the Oxfords and Cambridges, the Harvards and Yales were located in places now largely forgotten and confined to obscurity: Balkh, Bukhara and Samarkand.

T fast did the faith spread, in fact, that it was not long before there were bishops dotted across the whole of Central Asia. Indeed, there was a bishop in China (in the region of Kashgar) before Britain received its first nomination to an episcopal position. Rome’s orientation east was so pronounced that, by the start of the fourth century, a major new city was being constructed that was in many ways a model of the mother city itself. New Rome was a city of splendour, with institutions, administration and monuments that aped and rivalled those of Old Rome. Constantinople – as it came to be known after its eponymous rebuilder, the Emperor Constantine – was a statement of intent. The Empire’s focus lay in the East; this was where its interests lay and so, too, did its prestige rival of choice, Persia. Even as Rome itself slipped into the gloom as it went into decline following its sacking by Alaric and the Goths in 410, Constantinople continued to flourish, with fortunes that rose and fell over the centuries. Key was its relationship with Persia, in which several phases of success and failure were charted. In the early seventh century, however, competition between the two became intense as both, in turn, gambled on all out success and on the destruction of the other. As both came within an ace of delivering a knock-out blow that would have transformed the world of Late Antiquity, a new voice could be heard rumbling in the distance, deep inside Arabia, that did precisely that. 40 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Christopher Columbus, by Sebastiano del Piombo, 16th century.

HE ARABIC-SPEAKING WORLD looked at Europe at that time with bemusement and scorn, dismissing its inhabitants as violent, warlike and backward, unworthy of even being written about. Scholars were baffled by the narrow-mindedness of the westerners they came across and at their intellectual limitations: Europe had, after all, produced Plato, Aristotle and Euclid. Some had little doubt what was to blame. Once, wrote the historian al-Mas’ūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’. It is almost the precise opposite of the world as we see it today: the fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous were based in the East and certainly not in Europe. As one author put it, when it came to writing about non-Islamic lands, ‘we did not enter them [in our book] because we see no use whatsoever in describing them’. They were intellectual backwaters. Backwaters they may have been, but there were plenty of Europeans who had an eye on the luxuries of the East: spices, fabrics, jewels, books even. Our own modern presumptions make it easy to think of the passage of the Silk Roads as passing exclusively from East to West; but exchange is a two-way mechanism. The problem was how to pay for the goods acquired in the Muslim world. Fine swords were highly prized, though they required great skill to make. Archaeological and literary sources also reveal that amber, wax and honey were also shipped East in considerable volume. But the greatest prize that was sold was not food or produce, or even items that had been crafted by human hands; rather, it was human beings themselves. Cities like Venice, Verdun, Utrecht, Prague and Mainz all did good business trafficking slaves to Arab lands, above all, women and children. It was the Vikings, however, who

The fundamentalists were not the Muslims, but the Christians; those whose minds were open, curious and generous, were based in the East

A page from an edition of the Quran, published in Tunisia, ninth century.

seized control of this lucrative business, eventually building trading stations along the Russian river systems flowing south towards the Black and Caspian seas that grew into towns such as Kiev and Novgorod. Determination to get closer to the sources of wealth played an important role during the time of the Crusades, which began in the late 11th century. Tempting though it is to focus on knightly piety, on the bravery and personal devotion of men to fight for their beliefs, not everyone who was involved in taking and maintaining the Holy Land was solely thinking about serving God. The Italian city states of Amalfi, Pisa and, above all, Genoa and Venice earned handsome rewards by opening up new trade routes with Palestine and Egypt and later with the Black Sea, which survived and expanded long after the Crusaders were driven out of Jerusalem in 1187 and then from their last foothold at Acre in 1291. It was the desire to get closer to the source of the legendary riches of India and China that spurred the age of

European discovery. Christopher Columbus had not been trying to sail around the world to see if it was flat, or to find out what lay across a seemingly endless ocean: his journey was specifically intended to find a new route to Asia. Before the 1490s, countries such as Spain and Portugal found themselves at the wrong end of the world; afterwards, they found themselves at its centre. THE TRANSFORMATION OF EUROPE into a series of powers that controlled empires across the globe has many explanations, ranging from calorie consumption in different parts of the continent, fertility levels, environmental and climate change, sophistication of financial institutions and the exploitation of fortunate local circumstances. However, one key element to the success of Spain and Portugal, the Dutch Republic, France and Britain in ruling over land and sea was the western propensity for – and experience with – military violence. The struggle for power within Europe was constant, resulting in a near-endless litany of warfare, which in turn led to scientific advances in ballistics, firearms and weapons production. Not all the West’s conquests abroad resulted directly from the use of force: in some cases, as in Bengal, local rulers hired westerners as mercenaries, only to find their powers being superseded and expropriated. In the early modern period and onwards, the Silk Roads remained as vibrant and as central as they ever had been. OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 41

GLOBAL HISTORY

Bullion extracted from the Americas was recycled via centres such as Seville, London and Amsterdam to fuel building projects in India, China and beyond that reflected an increasingly globalised, inter-connected economy. By the 19th century, however, rivalries between the great European powers spilled over into all corners of the globe. Nowhere, however, were they more fierce than in the heart of Asia. What was at stake was not just control of India – the subject of growing concern in the corridors of power – but also influence and authority in the Persian Gulf and lucrative trade with China. For understandable reasons, historians look closely at the countdown to the First World War through a European lens, concentrating on German aggression and of missed steps during the July Crisis of 1914, which led to four years of tragedy and suffering. Here, too, though, what was happening along the Silk Roads had a profound importance. Competition between Great Britain and Russia had reached intense levels in the decades before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in July 1914, worrying policymakers in London so much as to think of ways of trying to orientate St Petersburg’s attention away from the East and towards Germany and its western flank. Britain’s buffer against its Russian rival had been ‘reduced to the thinness of a wafer’, one senior diplomat moaned; better, concluded the foreign secretary, to have an unfriendly Germany than have bad relations with Russia. If Britain did not stand by Russia as Europe lurched towards war, Sir George Clark observed: ‘Our very existence as an Empire will be at stake.’ 42 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

The results were catastrophic and they hid the story of the war by stressing the culpability of the Kaiser and his generals, while quietly leaving things unsaid that were best unsaid. The discovery of oil in Persia, for example, was of enormous importance for Britain’s war effort, leaving automobiles, trucks and Royal Navy ships at a distinct advantage against the Central Powers. So, too, did the great availability of foodstuffs as the war went on, something which made a great impression on a young soldier called Adolf Hitler. Two decades later, when talking to a League of Nations official in Danzig, he commented on how important it was for Germany to secure plentiful food supplies. This was essential, he said, ‘so that no one is able to starve us again as they did in the last war’. For Hitler, the solution was obvious: capture the wheat fields of the Ukraine.

I

N FACT, IT WAS PRECISELY this that dictated the decision to invade the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. German planners had looked carefully at crop yields in southern Russia and concluded that the richness of the soil would grow food that would fuel a great empire. Plans were drawn up by Herbert Backe, born to German parents in Baku and a specialist in the agronomy of the steppe lands. The Soviet Union was divided in two: a ‘surplus’ zone that produced much and a ‘deficit zone’ that only consumed. Attention was to be focused on the former, whose fields would supply Germans for generations. It was envisaged that there would be dire consequences for Soviets themselves. In the first plans, no number was given to those who

Clockwise from left: a scene from the Shāhnāma, the national epic of Greater Persia, 14th century; Herbert Backe, 1940; US troops confront a demonstration in Baghdad, 2005. .

would starve to death as a result of a German invasion: x million would die. Two weeks later, an update report made clear the scale of the likely suffering: tens of millions would be likely to starve. It soon became clear that the invasion, codenamed Barbarossa, was not going to plan. Although the German advance was swift, supply lines soon became overstretched and, more to the point, it turned out that expectations of what the ‘surplus zone’ would yield were wildly optimistic. Faced with severe food shortages, the decision was taken to start cutting calories in the rations of prisoners of war and inmates of detention camps that had been set up across Poland and elsewhere. Within weeks, it was decided to cut food supplies to a minimum and to begin killing those who were too weak to work. Thus the Final Solution was born.

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HE STORY OF THE second half of the 20th century and the first decade and a half of the 21st has seen the Silk Roads retain their centrality. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and United States clashed repeatedly, vying for position in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, while attempting to improve ties with China, India, Pakistan and Turkey. Although the story of the problems that have followed is familiar to many, the sudden richness of material that has been made available through the accelerated declassification of documents and from cables and evidence leaked by Edward Snowden and Wikileaks means that the catalogue of errors made by those seeking to gain access to oil supplies, to benefit from the financial spending of unsavoury regimes or to establish strategic advantage in a crucial part of the world can be seen in their full horror. It is no coincidence that the heart of the world is where we are witnessing the birth pains of a new era: the world is changing around us dramatically and much of the change is driven from the same locations, the same places that it has always been driven from. Nor is it a coincidence that the networks that connect East and West are also an area of opportunity, of expansion and of hope. New Silk Roads are being established across the spine of Asia, as countries bind together their commercial ties and strategic interests to confront a new dawn. As a historian, it is striking to see how powerful ideas about the past are in the rhetoric and co-operation between places such as Russia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, India and China, whose leaders talk approvingly about re-establishing connections and about a new centre of gravity in the world. The Silk Roads are rising again. Peter Frankopan is Senior Research Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford and author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World (Bloomsbury, 2015).

FURTHER READING Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage, 1978). Valerie Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford University Press, 2012). Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (Macmillan, 1996). Kevin M. Woods, David D. Palkki, Mark E. Stout (eds), The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime (Cambridge, 2011). OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 43

MakingHistory Historians try to produce as total a view of the past as possible. Yet does our concern with facts isolate us from how material culture influenced lived experience, asks Suzannah Lipscomb?

The stuff of the living past YEARS AGO, in my doctoral thesis, I wrote about how, in 1590, the local Calvinist authorities in Nîmes expressed their concern about the scandalous make up, immodest hairstyles and indecent clothing of the women of the town. There was a flurry of opprobrium for one especially indecorous garment: the so-called cache-bâtard, or ‘bastard-hider’. My examiners called me up on this point. What, they wanted to know, did a bastard-hider look like? What might a piece of clothing that concealed illegitimacy resemble? It was a salutary moment for me. I realised that I had entered a strange, cerebral world where my ideas about history had become divorced from the lived reality of the past. I had become more interested in the censure of the Protestant church than in what the women wearing this garment experienced or what this attire really looked and felt like. Ever since, and especially after some years working in heritage, I have been intensely conscious of the stuff of history – the material culture that shaped the daily lives of those in the past. I realise it’s important to know that the cache-bâtard was a name for a farthingale – or hoop worn under the skirts – believed to have developed to hide unwanted pregnancies and also able to sway up and expose the wearer, if worn incautiously. Having realised the importance of using the art, dress, objects and architecture of a period to enhance our understanding, I have become aware, too, of the corollary traps of using artistic and material culture in a thoughtless way. The Curator of Collections at Historic Royal Palaces, Brett Dolman, has written about the dangers of using Tudor portraiture for psychological profiling: to say, for example, that Jane Seymour had ‘good sense’ or ‘unsparing honesty’ or was 44 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

‘apathetic’ from her portrait alone, as some have done. You cannot, Dolman argues convincingly, deduce the inner character of a sitter from a picture produced to commission in 16th-century circumstances. But I have recently had, as it were, another cache-bâtard moment. Despite an interest in the artistic production of the period, I have always remained a little disparaging of 16th-century music. I have always considered that

I realised my cerebral ideas about history had become divorced from the lived reality of the past saying Henry VIII wrote ‘Pastime with Good Company’ is such faint praise as to damn his skills as a composer and have rued the unfavourable comparison of the century that is my natural home with the musical glories of the late-18th. But, following a music appreciation course, I am now aware that music and, specifically, how it acts as a mirror to the changing cultural values of the period is another lacuna in my understanding of the 16th century. Music of the spheres: Richard Sampson's motets, 16th century.

It turns out that there were several great innovations in music in the 15th and 16th centuries that reflected Renaissance principles no less than Paolo Uccello’s painting The Hunt in the Forest demonstrates the vanishing point or Michelangelo’s David represents the Renaissance heroic, idealised view of man. Renaissance music expresses a desire for vocal clarity; music was designed to ensure the words could be naturally articulated and easily understood. This meant a rejection of melismatic plainchant, when groups of notes had been sung to one syllable of text. In addition, re-animating Pythagoras’ discovery of the harmonic series, Renaissance music was based on the major triad – three different pitches that blend perfectly together – so that music could now have both melody and harmonic accompaniment. The guiding ideas behind these departures were that music should move the emotions – and, it was thought, it could only do so if the lyrics were understood – and should be an expression of order in the cosmos through consonance. Both are truly Renaissance ideas. These innovations could be imitated because, as with so much else, the invention of the printing press meant musical texts could circulate easily. Just this quick look at some of the period’s profound musical changes indicates how music perfectly embodied the 16th-century worldview. Any understanding of historical artistic, religious, cultural and technological change is deepened by musical appreciation. What else about a period might we be overlooking when trying to produce a real and total history? Suzannah Lipscomb is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History and Head of the Faculty of History at the New College of the Humanities, London.

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Lilian Wyles, one of the first police officers to take statements from female and child assault victims.

ANEENEE FITZGERALD-KENNEY, an Irish inspector of workhouses, wrote to the British National Vigilance Association in 1929, in despair at what to do with a 16-year-old who had been sacked from her job as a domestic servant. The girl had admitted to her employers that she had a history of being sexually abused. Remarkably, the abuse had led to a conviction: a rare outcome given that a child’s uncorroborated evidence was rarely sufficient as evidence of a crime. In 1932 a campaigner against child sexual abuse estimated that ‘not one case in twenty, if so many, is ever reported to the police’. In this Irish case, the long-standing nature of the abuse and the youth of the victim had led to a successful prosecution of ‘a middle-aged man’. Nonetheless, the victim now had to live with the damage to her reputation and the after-effects of personal trauma. Her mistress was incensed at this evidence of ‘bad character’ and no longer wanted to employ her. FitzGerald-Kenney was forced to acknowledge that the girl, though ‘quiet and willing’, did tell lies: ‘not infrequently, I think from nervous fear of being found at fault’. This kind of ambivalence towards child victims of abuse is marked in the sources that describe both voluntary and statutory work with children in the 20th century. The warden of a care home in south London, where girls who had suffered abuse were sent before testifying in court, noted in 1921 that the residents were ‘hopelessly ignorant of how to do the simplest housework or washing. They are often dirty in person and habits, and without any ideas of religion or manners’. A widespread impulse was to segregate the victims. In 1925 a judge at the Devon Assizes regretted that the mother of an abused girl refused to remove her daughter from school and send her to a children’s home. The judge ‘quite understood respectable people would not like their children to go to the same school as a girl like this one’. An inquiry into remand homes in 1945 found that social workers who dealt with child assault cases still attempted to segregate the victims and categorised the girls under their care into ‘clean or foul minded’. FitzGerald-Kenney was similarly worried that, if placed in residential care, her charge might ‘tell her tale and possibly do harm to girls’. Problem of the poor Sexual abuse of children in more privileged circumstances was rarely noted. It was widely assumed to be a problem of the very poor, living in overcrowded housing. An 18-year-old, convicted of incest in 1926, was addressed by the judge as a ‘victim of circumstance’, due to living in a two-room house with his parents and five siblings. The judge recommended the offender be sent to a Borstal, noting: I do not blame you so much as the society that permits such a state of things to exist as those under which you committed the offence. I think the best thing for you is to be pulled up sharp and to go somewhere where they will make a man of you.

A hidden history Throughout the 20th century responses by Britons to the sexual abuse of children have been hindered by the desire to avoid scandal, downplay harm and blame the victim, argue Adrian Bingham, Lucy Delap, Louise Jackson and Louise Settle.

Few records survive that can shed light on the intimate details of family life among the poor. Historians will only OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 45

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is one of those girls of whom there are so many to-day […] who are as immoral as any grown-up woman can possibly be. It is a terrible thing that those we look upon as mere children should be so, but it is true, and no one who goes about among the people who hear criminal cases can fail to know that there is a class of these children who are as bad as, and in my opinion worse than, the boys with whom they consort and get into trouble. Even for younger children who had been abused, there were numerous cases of judicial comments characterising them as depraved, wicked or immoral. In contrast, the abuser could be treated with tolerance, especially as, in the 20th century, a more medicalised approach displaced older moral concerns. As one commentator noted in 1929: The case of the moral pervert is similar to that of the victim of an infectious disease. We do not blame those who suffer from smallpox or scarlet fever, but we do restrain them from spreading their diseases – we isolate and treat them.

Opportunities to offend were exacerbated by a disciplinary culture that gave adults access to children’s bodies

A bad case: excerpt from the North Eastern Gazette, 1934.

ever gain a fragmentary knowledge of the abuse of children, much of which was unreported. However, a survey of newspaper reporting on this issue in 20th-century Britain points to the kinds of cases that did come to police attention and the languages available to address abuse as a social or moral problem. Reports suggest that the circumstances which led to sexual abuse were not solely about poverty. Inequalities in power relationships put children at risk. These ranged from the minor powers held by fathers, stepfathers and other male kin to the much more entrenched and public forms of authority held by professionals. Their opportunities to offend were exacerbated by a disciplinary culture that gave adults intimate and often unquestioned physical access to children’s bodies. Press reports reveal some notable patterns in offending; teachers were heavily over-represented and clerics also featured strongly. These were clearly professions that involved contact with children and, through social power, a degree of impunity. The good standing in the community of these figures was often used as a convincing reason for acquittal or very light sentencing. An additional factor that led to lighter sentences was the tendency to blame children for having invited or elicited sexual advances. A judge in 1934 dismissed a case of serious sexual assault on a young teenager, arguing that the victim 46 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Talk of treatment and psychological assessment were anathema to the vocal feminists of the interwar years, including women MPs newly present in the House of Commons as well as activists who had cut their teeth in the suffrage movement. The work of new MPs, such as Nancy Astor, led to a Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People, which reported in 1925. But there was a distinctly tepid social and political response. Though the number of policewomen employed to take statements from children and young people increased slightly, there was little change in judicial practice. Frustrated activists in the National Council of Women noted in 1932 that ‘a large number of assaults are committed by ‘‘normal’’ people who regard it as an excusable though regrettable lapse … Many magistrates, judging by the sentences given, take the same view.’ Hazards of evacuation The National Council of Women participated in a deputation to the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, to call for the implementation of the Departmental Committee recommendations in 1935, but the issue was not taken up with any enthusiasm by politicians or the press. Earlier calls for flogging became the preserve of just a few old-fashioned magistrates and even the cases of abuse associated with evacuation during the Second World War did not evoke any sense of urgency in addressing this problem. One schoolgirl, who had ‘left good parents and a comfortable home’ in 1939, complained that the householder with whom she was billeted had assaulted her. But due to her history of ‘slight nervous trouble, her teacher did not credit the story. When a moral welfare worker visited, she found the girl credible, but did no more than transfer her to a new household in 1940. Evacuation lacked safeguarding procedures and clearly

facilitated abuse in some cases; but the national debate was more about the shock of host families encountering urban poverty. Infestations of lice and lack of table manners in evacuees was thought more important than confronting a child’s vulnerability. Avoiding a scandal Relative tolerance towards abuse extended into postwar social work, where notions of rescue were displaced by a deep commitment to holding families together. The ‘moral welfare’ workers, who had predominantly dealt with sexual assault cases, turned instead to supporting single or teenage mothers. By 1968 members of the specialist Children’s Moral Welfare Worker Association had all been absorbed into other social work groupings. Even where pregnant girls were very young, the focus of care was on their pregnancy or baby, without discussion of the circumstances that might lead a 12-year-old to become pregnant. It was easy for the sexual abuse of children to be lost sight of, in part because the language of social work and associated professions downplayed harm. One contribution in 1957 to the journal Moral Welfare, by a forensic psychologist, talked of ‘the offender whose only impulse is to lift the skirts of a little girl and peep’. In government reports, the broader question of ‘child welfare’ was replaced by narrower concerns around ‘child health’. There was far less commentary on child sexual abuse as a problem in the postwar press or Parliament. Cases of abuse by authority figures remained newsworthy, because of the betrayal of trust involved; yet there was little impetus for institutional reform. In teaching, there was a lethargic response to the danger posed to children and abusers found it relatively easy to be re-employed in new schools. In state schools, teachers found guilty of serious sexual misconduct were blacklisted and asked to hand back their teaching certificate, but these procedures were not always communicated or followed through. Private schools were particularly poorly regulated and the avoidance of scandal (by quietly dismissing teachers) often trumped child protection. It was not until 1962 that independent schools were required to report allegations involving teachers to the Ministry of Education. Newspapers continued to report in a factual or neutral manner and it was not until the 1970s that sexual abuse was presented as a more urgent problem. In the late 20th century, press reports did become more sensationalist, but tended to focus on ‘sex beasts’ and the threat from strangers. There was little reporting of abuse by relatives and family friends or within schools and residential homes; nor was there an appetite to uncover the hints of organised, highlevel abuse featuring celebrities and politicians. Tabloids advocated a populist law and order response with tougher sentencing and the naming and shaming of offenders, paying little attention to the deeper social or institutional factors that made abuse possible. Above all, there was little sense that the site of sexual abuse might be the very place that was intended as a refuge for children: residential or foster homes. The 1946 Curtis Report into the care of children by the state found that fostering arrangements were ad hoc and unsupervised, usually set up without any police checks. Once fostered, the inspection was lax and was not always done by trained social workers. One county council used the typist from

The LongmanHistory Today Awards These awards are made jointly by the publishers Longman and History Today magazine to mark links between the two organisations and to foster a wider understanding of, and enthusiasm for, history. Books must have been published during the year October 1st, 2014 to September 30th, 2015. Publishers should send one copy of each book they wish to nominate, together with a signed statement confirming category and eligibility. Please mark the submission clearly to distinguish from ordinary review copies that may be received. Publishers may be asked to send further copies of titles in due course. In the case of the Picture Researcher Award, researchers may submit their work directly and include a note explaining in what ways they consider the work to meet the standards required. Entries must be received by October 31st, 2015. The prize will be awarded in January 2016. Please send your entries to: Annual Awards, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn, London, WC1V 7QH NB. History Today’s Undergraduate Dissertation of the Year Award is administered by the Royal Historical Society and entries submitted directly to History Today will not be considered.

BOOK OF THE YEAR

Presented in memory of Alan Hodge and Peter Quennell, co-founding Editors of History Today

A prize of £2,000 is given for an author’s first or second book, written in English, on any aspect of history. The winning book will display innovative research and interpretation in its field and will have contributed significantly to making its subject accessible and rewarding to the general reader. A proxime accessit of £250 may also be awarded. 2015 winner: Alban Webb,

HISTORICAL PICTURE RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR

Presented in memory of Jackie Guy, former History Today Picture Editor

A prize of £500 is given to a picture researcher whose work, on any aspect of history, demonstrates originality, creativity, imagination and resourcefulness and involves a wide range of sources, working from a minimal suggestion list or directly from the text. 2015 winner: Laura Canter, (Paul

Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Folio Society).

London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War (Bloomsbury).

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their public assistance office to check on fostered children. Such visitors, the Curtis Report asserted, ‘were apt to pat the children on the head and think that they were quite happy’. There is almost no evidence of institutional abuse in press reports. Most disturbingly, there is evidence of complacency and, perhaps, paedophile infiltration at senior levels of social work. In 1975 an article in the British Journal of Social Work deplored the levelling of sexual abuse accusations against staff in children’s homes and challenged social workers in residential settings to ask themselves: ‘What actual harm has been done? … what is gained from the identification of a “victim” and an “offender?”’ Confusion over how to understand child sexual abuse had resulted from the campaigning of paedophile support groups, who attempted to link their cause to that of gay libNancy Astor, MP, whose work led to the foundation of the Departmental Committee of Sexual Offences Against Young People in 1925.

from MIND’s chief executive in 2014. The success of the pro-paedophilia campaigns was patchy and short lived. PIE members were convicted of a range of offences from the late 1970s. Feminist perspectives within social work and policing had gained prominence and this led to more assertive policing and social work interventions in the 1980s. Nonetheless, social workers were sometimes blamed for removing children from parents on the basis of flimsy evidence. High profile cases in Cleveland in 1987, Rochdale in 1990 and Orkney in 1991 brought social workers into disrepute, limiting their effectiveness in acting upon abuse allegations. Blaming the victim Though children’s claims have been believed or acted upon to a varying degree across the 20th century, the treatment of their trauma has stayed relatively constant. The 1929 appeal for advice by FitzGerald-Kenney led to a response from Miss Eilladh MacDougall, a diocesan rescue worker in Southwark, who was also a taker of police statements and campaigner for better protection of children. She advised that: The child must first be given a real holiday in a bracing environment to steady her nerves and imagination which at present is leading her to tell the lies to which you referred. Following that she should not be put in a Home which merely leads to her exchanging details and information with the other girls and might be definitely harmful.

eration in the 1970s. Despite a tabloid backlash response to them, there is evidence of a willingness from around 1975 to take seriously claims that child/adult sexual interaction could be benign. The magazine Gay Left published a letter in early 1976 from a paedophile, giving his name and address, arguing that the ‘widespread feeling against child and adolescent lovers is not so much sexism as ageism’. The campaigning of groups such as the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE) encouraged the voluntary sector to consider paedophiles as a legitimate sexual minority. A summary of a workshop on sexual minorities, sponsored by mental health charity MIND in 1975, recorded that the PIE chair, Keith Hose, had testified to attendees: ‘Paedophiles were at pains to show that they were gentle people and that their relationships were two-way affairs, not exploitative.’ This opinion caused ‘much heated argument’ at the workshop, but MIND was willing to recommend PIE publications on a MIND reading list, an act that prompted an apology 48 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

The stress on forgetting rather than justice was a common response for much of the 20th century. It was widely believed that taking a case to the police and through the courts would be distressing and unlikely to result in justice. Despite widespread campaigning, the sensible recommendations of the Departmental Committee on Sexual Offences Against Young People in 1925 did not become common practice until the 1990s; children continued to be unsupported or subject to hostile questioning in court and were made to repeat their evidence in ways that could only cause trauma; parents were unwilling to pursue cases, preferring silence. The costs of reputational damage, as the Irish case suggests, were high. This exchange of letters over a single victim in 1929 tells us something of the complexities of trying to understand the hidden history of child abuse. The letters speak to societal responses of blaming the victim and of a failure to recognise the long-term impact that abuse might have on an individual. Even where children were believed and justice obtained, segregation and stigma were still the result. Press reports show a more changeable landscape, with varying degrees of interest at different points in the century. Yet press interest continued to be centred on the newsworthy stories of abuse by strangers. The press’s moralistic language of individual evil deflected attention from cultures and practices that enabled abuse. Adrian Bingham is Reader in Modern History at the University of Sheffield; Lucy Delap is Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, affiliated to Murray Edwards College; Louise Jackson is Reader in Modern Social History at the University of Edinburgh; Louise Settle is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh. Together they are conducting ESRC-funded research into the responses of the press, authorities and professions to child sexual abuse from the First World War onwards.

RESTORATION

Louis XVIII, praying for his family, holding the will of Louis XVI. Contemporary engraving.

Return of the King Following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, France’s Bourbon monarchy was restored. It was the first, fragile step in a diminished state’s return to the family of European nations, says Jonathan Fenby.

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HE SUMMER OF 1815 was a turbulent one in France. On June 18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleon’s attempted comeback in the Hundred Days. Returning to Paris, he declared ‘All is not lost’ while taking a bath in the Elysée Palace, but he enjoyed scant support and was obliged to abdicate. A visitor who went to see him to tell him to give up found Bonaparte ‘calm and serene with a faint but gracious smile – he spoke with firmness and precision’. Instead of trying to get to America as some suggested, he threw himself on the mercy of the British, ending up in his second exile on the bleak South Atlantic outpost of St Helena.

At this point, two centuries ago, the victorious Allies – Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia – would determine the fate of France. Their occupation army numbered 150,000 men. Their troops pitched their tents along the Champs-Elysées and frequently drunken British soldiers reeled through the streets of the capital insulting the French. The Austrian chancellor, Metternich, came from Vienna, Tsar Alexander from St Petersburg and, from Berlin, the 72-year-old Prussian Marshal Blücher, whose intervention had been decisive at Waterloo. Wellington ruled as a pro-consul; he presided over weekly balls and annoyed farmers outside the capital by importing his pack of hounds OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 49

RESTORATION

Seeing Talleyrand ... leaning on Fouché’s arm, the writer-politician René de Chateaubriand described the pair as ‘vice leaning on the arm of crime’ and hunting with them over fields without warning or compensation for the damage caused. In September the Allies held a victory march in the Champagne region followed by a series of banquets orchestrated by the chef, Carême, an ardent Bonapartist who adapted to the changing circumstances. The meal began with 300 plates of oysters followed by three soups, 56 plates of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, 28 plates of beef, 112 plates of turbot, veal heads, chicken and vols-au-vent, 28 plates of roasts and salad, 56 plates of vegetables and 56 plates of desserts. National treasures, which French armies had seized on their conquests, were reclaimed. The Prussians were the most set on revenge, looting at will. Occupying the Place du Carrousel at the end of the Louvre, they trained their cannons on the royal palace. Blücher proposed to blow up the Pont d’Iéna, commemorating Napoleon’s victory over Prussia in 1806. Wellington posted a British soldier on the bridge, guessing correctly that Blücher would not risk killing him. The Iron Duke oversaw the assembly of a government headed by the one-time revolutionary turned foreign minister to Bonaparte, Talleyrand, despite the king’s dislike for him. Given his sinuous record as a go-between with the Allies against his master, the emperor, nobody trusted the gout-ridden survivor, but he seemed the best pilot in uncertain times. Louis XVIII and his family in a 19th-century engraving.

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ELLINGTON ALSO ORDERED the appointment as minister for police of Joseph Fouché, the one-time agent of the Terror and regicide, who had served Napoleon before intriguing against the emperor in 1814, re-joining him in the Hundred Days, negotiating secretly with the Allies and then stagemanaging Louis’ entry into Paris in 1815. The king had to accept, even if he remarked that he was handing over his virginity. Seeing Talleyrand making his way to a royal audience leaning on Fouché’s arm, the writerpolitician René de Chateaubriand described the pair as ‘vice leaning on the arm of crime’. While these two escaped paying the price of their pasts, revenge was sought against some who had served the Republic or the Empire. Fifty thousand officials lost their jobs and 12,000 officers were put on half pay. Members of the Convention who had voted for the execution of Louis XVI were banished, though a blind eye was turned to Fouché, who now showed his habitual lack of scruple by drawing up a list of people to be purged: ‘He forgot none of his friends’, Talleyrand remarked. Since both the republican and imperial models were discredited and unacceptable to the victorious Allies, a royal restoration was inevitable; Wellington warned that there would be no peace in Europe unless the Bourbons mounted the throne again. The Congress of Vienna, held to define European frontiers after two decades of war, reversed Napoleon’s conquests but was otherwise generous to France.

The new monarch, Louis XVIII, had made a poor fist of it on his first return from exile in Britain in May 1814. He surrounded himself with appointees who had been out of government business for more than two decades and the first restoration was brought to an abrupt end by the Hundred Days. Louis fled once more, to return three weeks after Waterloo. The crowds cheered as he was driven in his carriage to the centre of Paris on July 8th, 1815. A National Guard sergeant kissed his hand. The Treaty of Paris, signed with the victorious Allies, assured Parisians that they would ‘continue to enjoy their rights and liberties’. Louis moved in to the Tuileries Palace, with its succession of halls and apartments stretching down what is now the rue de Rivoli to the Louvre. Night-time balls were held in the gardens laid out by the great designer Le Nôtre. When the authorities tried to stop them to protect the lawns, the monarch called from the window ‘Dance on the grass!’ The surrounding buildings were lit up at night. There were firework displays. Musicians strolled the streets. A charity kitchen fed the poor in the St-Antoine district. The restored monarch went to see plays at the Comédie-française and, each morning, courtiers gathered to listen to his stories, as he sat in a large armchair and gave them every opportunity to appreciate his wit.

Top: The Gardener of St Helena, colour lithograph, 19th century. Bottom: Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, by Sir Thomas Lawrence, c.1815.

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OUIS Stanislas Xavier Bourbon, grandson of Louis XV and brother of Louis XVI, became heir to the throne when Louis’ son died in prison in 1795, probably of tuberculosis. Born in 1755, he had been a frustrated figure as Comte de Provence, dabbling in business but politically powerless. Fleeing Paris in 1791, he joined émigrés across the Rhine who participated in the abortive invasion of France. Then came 15 years wandering around Europe, including two in remote Courland in the Baltic, after which he came to rest for seven years in England. Supporters dubbed him le Désiré (the desired one) but he lacked charisma and sought to avoid trouble. A heavy eater whose only exercise was whist and billiards, he grew extremely fat. Though usually calm, he could fly into sudden violent rages. In his sixties he suffered from diabetes, severe gout, varicose veins and skin ulcers. His marriage to Marie-Joséphine of Savoy was a distant, childless affair; she suffered two miscarriages. An intelligent woman with a sharp tongue, she was ugly, washed rarely and became a heavy drinker. Her husband had a succession of close and witty women friends, including the clever Madame de Balbi, whose husband was in a lunatic asylum and who shared the king’s taste for cards, and the well-rounded, amusing and somewhat fierce Countess de Cayala, a woman better known for her wit than her ideas but who knew how to be good company for the ailing monarch. A contemporary observer quoted the queen as saying that these relationships remained chaste. When asked to give sexual instruction to a royal duchess, she commented: ‘If I tell her only what the King taught me, she will not know much.’ REJECTING NAPOLEON’S VIEW that he should exercise despotic rule, Louis fancied himself as father of the people, refusing to be ‘king of two Frances’. He proclaimed his intention ‘to call round our paternal throne the immense majority of Frenchmen whose fidelity, courage and devotedness have brought such pleasing consolation to our heart’. To try to forge unity in what remained of the armed forces, he presided over a banquet for 1,200 men given by the royal guards for the formerly Bonapartist Garde Nationale; at a return dinner at the Odéon theatre, he watched as 3,000 guests ate their way through Portuguese hams, turkey, quail, partridge, chicken, duckling and 600 plates of desserts all washed down with a bottle of wine for each person. With a charter setting out rights for the richer sections of society, the king sought to win over bourgeois liberals and some Bonapartists, OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 51

RESTORATION although, with an electorate for the legislative chamber limited to 75,000 men, democracy was still far off. Voting for the Chamber of Deputies was on a rolling basis with staggered five-yearly polls. A new upper house mixed old and new figures. Civil rights, religious toleration and press freedom were guaranteed. Conservatives were reassured that ‘abuses’ would be controlled by Article 14 of the Charter, which enabled the crown to decree ordinances for state security in times of danger. Most importantly for the middle class and richer peasants, purchases of land taken from aristocrats and the church were left in their ownership. A police report found that barely ten per cent of the French favoured a return of the ancien régime. Still, the king showed the limits of his tolerance by insisting on the white royal flag in place of the tricolour and dating his reign from the death of his brother’s son in a revolutionary prison. Ministers needed majority backing in the Chamber but, when they presented proposals to the throne, they said simply ‘Here is our opinion’, to which the sovereign replied, ‘Here is my will’. Royal statues were restored. Streets and squares reverted to old names. Church building underlined the monarchy’s identification with Catholicism. The column erected by Napoleon to his glory in the Place Vendôme was torn down. Ignoring the king’s desire for national unity, royalists in various parts of the country exacted their revenge for events since the Revolution of 1789. In the region of Lyons, where Napoleonic sentiment still ran high, a portable guillotine was moved around rural areas. When General Charles de la Bédoyère, one of the last commanders to have left the battlefield at Waterloo, went to see his wife on his way to exile in Switzerland, he was recognised, arrested and shot. Marshal Ney, ‘the bravest of the brave’ in Napoleon’s words, was sentenced to death and executed near the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris after himself giving the order to the firing squad to shoot; one of the 12 crack marksmen aimed wide. Widespread violence by royalists and local criminal gangs led Fouché to warn the king that ‘France is at war with itself.’ The ‘White Terror’ in the Midi region in the south, where savagery between rival factions was rooted in the see-saw violence of the revolutionary era, saw brigands murdering and pillaging at will. Violence spiralled out of control in Marseilles and turmoil spread to Toulouse, Nîmes, Béziers and Uzès.

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S WELL AS THE HUMILIATION of defeat, France was suffering from manifold social and economic ills in the summer of 1815. In towns and villages alike, life was harsh for most people, 60 per cent of whom were illiterate. Infected water and lack of hygiene spread disease. Despite the efforts of the Jacobins to advance education nationwide, most people outside the Paris area communicated in the local patois; the port city of Toulon was known as ‘the northern colony’ because it was the only southern town where the national language was spoken by a majority of inhabitants. There were great empty, silent spaces. Stepping down from a coach at a staging post just 13 miles from the provincial capital of Bourges in central France, the writer Stendhal was struck by the sense of ‘complete isolation’, while, a little later, the German poet Heinrich Heine found Brittany ‘a wretched, desolate land where mankind is stupid and dirty’. Rural people faced the continuous threat of bad harvests and hunger. Much of the countryside, where 90 per cent of the population lived, was a backward patchwork of small farms, hamlets and country towns, isolated by poor communication, high hills and mountains, wide rivers, swamps and forests. There was little to do except work and sleep. Lack of transport and paved roads impeded the distribution of food and goods and peasants held on to what they had for fear of famine. Meat was rare; a pig had to support a family for a year. Peasants depended on 52 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Top: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, The Man with Six Heads, coloured engraving, 1815. Above: Joseph Fouché, Duke of Otranto, 19th century.

The return of the king, Louis XVIII, on July 8th, 1815.

Whatever its excesses, the Revolution would ‘leave for ever great models as well as salutary lessons’ the local nobility or teachers and priests to mediate with the authorities on their behalf and lacked a concept of a world beyond their immediate surroundings. Some men escaped to become day labourers in towns or travelling pedlars, but women were confined to the most humdrum, restricted existences. The demobilisation of hundreds of thousands of troops swelled the underclass. Ex-soldiers joined outlaw bands that roamed the countryside. The Allies imposed financial indemnities on an economy that had been weakened by the demands of Napoleon’s constant war-making and the effects of the British naval blockade. National output was below that of 1789. Eastern France had been devastated by the fighting. Wages were low and farming stagnated. Barter was common in rural areas. For the better-off, income from land and interest from state securities took precedence over other forms of investment. Trade was at half the level of the mid-1780s. Banking and finance were hobbled by regulations and an unadventurous spirit. Only seven shares were quoted on the Paris stock exchange. Though the state debt was low, government credit was limited and capital remained scarce. The new regime was obliged to raise funds by a forced loan and pawning royal forests, but still faced a budget deficit of 300 million francs. The Catholic church lost no time recovering from the setbacks of the revolutionary period, in which nearly all its 4-5 million hectares of land holdings had been confiscated and the priesthood had been reduced by more than 20,000 during the anti-Christian crusade from 1789 to 1793. The royal regime espoused religious values. Divorce was banned in 1816.

D

ESPITE ITS SUFFERINGS and exile during the Revolution, the nobility still possessed at least a fifth of all land; some aristocrats who fled abroad had used agents to secretly buy property requisitioned from their peers or from the church. On their estates they tapped in to pro-royalist sentiment among peasants and small holders, who had been alienated by the taxation and conscription of the Jacobins and the empire. But the promise and achievements of the Revolution were not forgotten elsewhere; the east of the country was indifferent to the Bourbons and, as would be seen with the Second Revolution of 1830, Paris remained a potential seedbed of revolt. As the writer Charles Louis le Sur put it, whatever its excesses, the Revolution would ‘leave for ever great models as well as salutary lessons’. Still, the election of the Chamber of Deputies in August 1815, on a tiny franchise, gave ‘Ultra’ loyalists to the throne 350 of the 402 seats. The new Chamber of Deputies was, the king remarked, more royalist than himself: he called it La Chambre Introuvable (The Unobtainable Chamber). The Ultras looked to Louis’ brother, the Count of Artois, as their leader and anticipated the day when he would succeed to the throne. Their dislike of Talleyrand and Fouché led to the pair being dropped. The new head of government was Armand de Vignerot du Plessis, fifth Duc de Richelieu, a grey haired, 48-year-old pipe-smoker with a yapping voice. He was a favourite of the Tsar after fighting in the Russian army against his fellow countrymen and serving as governor of the Crimea; he wore black boots and a black cravat in the Russian OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 53

RESTORATION

Holy Alliance 1815, contemporary engraving of the agreement of September 26th, 1815.

style. Having spent 24 years abroad, he did not know any of his ministers and was at the mercy of the Ultras, who pushed through legislation favouring the old nobility and clergy and instituting press censorship. At the end of November 1815 a white-faced Richelieu signed the definitive peace agreement dictated by the Allies, lamenting that ‘all is finished (by) this fatal treaty’. But, despite two decades of war, the conditions were far less draconian than hoped for by the Prussians. Although France lost some colonies to Britain, border modifications were minimal. French frontier fortresses were to be dismantled but were not taken over by the victors. The indemnity was set at 700 million francs, plus settlement of claims from individuals who had suffered from France’s invasions. The occupation army was to remain for three to five years under Wellington’s command, its food paid for by France. The Allies reserved the right to cooperate against any revival of ‘revolutionary principles’. Russia, Prussia and Austria proclaimed their Holy Alliance and Britain joined them in the Quadruple Alliance. France found a friend in Russia after Louis invited the Tsar to stay at the royal palace and served up three banquets, the cooking done by 35 chefs under the still-Bonapartist chef, Carême, who reflected that he had ‘never done anything so beautiful; anger made me a genius’. Alexander worried that the Ultras would provoke fresh revolution and his lobbying ensured that France held on to Burgundy, Alsace, Lorraine and Franche-Comté in the treaty. ‘If France is still France, it is thanks to the Russians’, wrote the Comte de Molé, another political survivor who had been Napoleon’s justice minister but then held office under the Bourbons. Faced with Britain, Austria and Prussia, Russia ‘had 54 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

every interest in our remaining a power of the first order’, as Molé noted. France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European system. This reflected the country’s continental importance; Europe could not function without it. The path to national recovery was faster than might have been expected in the summer of 1815, but what was plain was that the Hexagon between the Alps and the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Channel could no longer aspire to dominate Europe as it had sought to do under Louis XIV and Bonaparte. It had entered a new phase in its history with new challenges and the underlying question of how it would digest the heritage of the revolution which had been replaced in 1815 by restoration, but whose legacy remains vibrant to this day. Jonathan Fenby's History of Modern France, from the Revolution to the Present Day was published in September 2015 by Simon & Schuster.

FURTHER READING Philip Mansel, Louis XVIII (Frederick Muller, 1981). Evelyn Lever, Louis XVIII (Fayard, 1988). J.H. Shennan, The Bourbons: The History of a Dynasty (Hambledon Continuum, 2007). Munro Price, The Perilous Crown: France Between Revolutions 1814-1848 (Macmillan, 2007).

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REVIEWS

Averil Cameron in praise of Peter Brown John Owen on the Holocaust as warning • Dipli Saikia on Indian classics

GERMAN intellectual history of the last 300 years is an integral part of the history of Europe. As with its Scottish counterpart, the early Enlightenment in Germany followed the natural law tradition inspired by Roman philosophers such as Cicero, as shown by Benjamin Straumann in his recent Roman Law in the State of Nature (2015). Early modern natural law aimed to provide a political and moral framework that would be universally valid, despite the confessional division that had plunged Europe into endless civil and religious wars. Germany, where the Protestant Reformation had been born, had to face this predicament in even more radical terms than other countries. Tim Hochstrasser’s Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (2000) gives a comprehensive account of this period. Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) was a key player in subsequent developments. His legacy is now mainly seen in his struggle for toleration, but in the 18th century his writings on jurisprudence were taught in the leading Protestant law faculties in Germany, as outlined by Thomasius in Essays on Church, State and Politics (2007), edited by Ian Hunter, Thomas Ahnert and Frank Grunert. In his Rival Enlightenments (2001) Ian Hunter charts the wider intellectual context of this development, showing the rivalry between the doctrines of Thomasius and the illustrious Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). Germany and Austria were united in the Holy Roman Empire, an elective 56 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Enlightened Germans: Weimar’s statue of the poets and dramatists Goethe (left) and Schiller.

SIGNPOSTS

German Intellectual History

Peter Schröder highlights key publications on Germany’s contribution to the history of ideas from the Enlightenment to the present day.

monarchy with a federal structure, which embraced much of central Europe. At the same time, German territorial states (such as Saxony, Bavaria and Brandenburg) increasingly claimed their political sovereignty within this framework. A delicate balance between different confessional and political claims had to be found between these alternatives. With Thomasius, who advocated the political and confessional independence of the territorial state, and Leibniz, who wanted to strengthen the political structures of the empire, we have the crucial watershed from the Baroque period to new Enlightenment philosophy. The Anglophone world is perhaps more familiar with the work of Immanuel Kant, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohnn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the intellectual giants of the 18th century. They forcefully argued for religious toleration and the need for education, including of the lower classes. According to Kant, the motto of Enlightenment was ‘sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding!’ Individual autonomy and emancipation from prejudice were the main concerns of these distinguished thinkers, as shown by Frederick Beiser in Diotima’s Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (2009) and The Fate of Reason (1987), and Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760-1860 (2002). Influenced by Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), Johann Gottfried Herder

(1744-1803) tried to formulate what he believed to be specific about German culture. In contrast, Hegel (1770-1831) pushed German Idealism to a new height; he was probably the last philosopher to attempt a comprehensive and systematic philosophy of all existing phenomena. This included searching for new foundations for a universal philosophy of right. His Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) proved to be one of the most influential and lasting legacies of the 20th century, in particular for French existentialism, as traced by Martin Schuster in his Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (2014). With the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806. At the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), Europe re-established its political order on the old principles, but Austria and Germany went politically separate ways, as highlighted by Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (2014). In Germany, Romanticism shaped the first half of the 19th century but, like no other philosophers before them, Marx (1818-83) and Nietzsche (1844-1900) challenged in very different ways the familiar intellectual world of their day. Marx’s criticism of existing social injustice led him to declare class war against the bourgeoisie. His determinism and materialism were inspired by his critical reading of Hegel. Nietzsche, in contrast, wanted to liberate the human conscience from the slave morality of Christianity, as he put it in polemical and unambiguous terms. Social and psychological questions began to emerge as newly articulated problems of human society and individuality. Arguably, this is when we can discern the advent of modernity in intellectual history, demonstrated by Francis Wheen in Karl Marx (1999) and Walter Kaufmann in Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974). As has been studied exhaustively, the ‘long 19th century’

came to an abrupt end with the First World War. Less well known is how the loss of German colonies impacted on the self-image of the defeated nation, as recently studied by Britta Schilling in Post-Colonial Germany (2014). After the Great War, Germany’s Weimar Republic found itself in a precarious internal struggle for political survival against the threats of Communists and Nazis. However, its short, 14-year existence saw one of the most fertile intellectual periods in German history, as discussed by Peter Gay in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968) and more recently in a highly original study by Uri Greenberg, The Weimar Century (2014), in which fascinating case studies show how many ‘dominant Cold War concepts embraced by Americans were coined by Germans years before the global conflict with the Soviet Union had begun’. In the build-up to the Second World War, the racial and political fanaticism of the Third Reich drove many German, often Jewish, intellectuals into exile. Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, who later became leading political philosophers in the US, were among those forced to leave their country, as shown by Liisi Keedus in The Crisis of German Historicism (2015). The shadow of Nazism loomed large, with sympathisers even in the higher echelons of the British establishment, as Karina Urbach has shown in Go-Betweens for Hitler (2015). For a single book which engages magisterially with the intellectual landscape outlined here, see Peter Watson, The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance (2010), in which he traces how it ‘shaped our lives more than we know … was devastated by Hitler but … has lived on’. Indeed, in ways which have yet to be fully appreciated, the German contribution to intellectual life has shaped the cultures and institutions of modern Europe, Britain and the United States. To engage with German intellectual history is to plunge deep into our shared history. Peter Schröder

Light in Germany

Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment T.J. Reed Chicago University Press 304pp £28

RECENT OVERVIEWS of the Enlightenment have been pitched as correctives and as having contemporary currency. Ours is a time, so the story goes, in which we need reminding about what the Enlightenment really was and, in the words of Anthony Pagden’s 2013 study, why it still matters. For Adorno and Horkheimer in the 1940s (the founders of German critical theory) the Enlightenment lost

Light in Germany is one of the best historical introductions to late-18th-century German literature that I have read in a long time its self-awareness as it became entwined with nascent industrial capitalism. The risk of strong conviction in scientific enquiry, for Adorno and Horkheimer, was that it could actually assume a mythical status as scientism, thereby reducing its critical reflection on itself. Tolerance today may seem to stem less from reason and more from a reluctance to judge others, for fear of resultant totalitarianism. Light in Germany defends a canon of Enlightenment thought against a perceived anti-

Enlightenment prejudice. Reed’s lead character is Kant, who is read alongside major German contemporaries, such as Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and Forster. Light in Germany is one of the best historical introductions to late 18th-century German literature and thought that I have read in a long time. Kant’s notoriously difficult ideas are clarified as having emerged in a context that explored the physical world as well as the mind: comparisons between Kant in Prussia and Forster’s Pacific adventures are particularly illuminating. If it is surprising to call discussions of these famous figures Scenes from an Unknown Enlightenment, the subtitle makes sense for two reasons. First, German literary and scientific writers are seldom mentioned in general English-language works on the Enlightenment, so that the Anglo-American world tends only to engage with Kant and a handful of other philosophers. Second, the task of explaining Kant has all too often been left to specialist analytic philosophers. Reed’s, by contrast, will be comprehensible to general, non German-speaking readers. Reed writes in a matterof-fact and, for the most part, well-balanced way. His description of Frederick the Great is especially fair and he acknowledges the ethical limits of geographical discovery in the period, without distracting digressions into post-colonial theory. Reed’s subscription to learning worn lightly is what makes his engagement with Kant so accessible. Unsubstantiated passing comments raise questions, however. Reed refers to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi as an orthodox – that is, anti-Enlightenment – thinker, yet recent German-language scholars have controversially attempted to read Jacobi more sympathetically and intellectually, as offering an ‘alternative’ Enlightenment to the traditional canon Reed defends. Further, how can Goethe’s Iphigenia in Tauris be the first feminist play since Sophocles’ Antigone? Also perplexing OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 57

REVIEWS is Reed’s assertion that Hegel’s conception of Reason ‘lacks intellectual underpinning’. When Christoph Martin Wieland responded to ‘What is Enlightenment?’, he emphasised the metaphorical distinction between light and darkness. Enlightenment thought categorises in a reasoned way. Yet a commitment to this ideal can also slip up and unreasonably discriminate. Reed is right that Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment essay is disproportionately and inappropriately applied in historical scholarship on the German Enlightenment, a trend in need of correction. But does he really need to write that arguing with them is ‘as pointless as arguing with flat-earthers and Holocaust deniers’? Adorno and Horkheimer cannot be criticised for their lack of historical

Reed’s subscription to learning worn lightly is what makes his engagement with Kant so accessible examples of Enlightenment, because their essay is about an abstract concept – like Wieland’s or, in fact, Kant’s definitions of Enlightenment. The goal, like Reed’s, is to rescue Enlightenment thinking. Theirs is not a discourse of intellectual history, though, but of historically significant intellectualism in its own right. At points such as this, and with Hegel, Light in Germany reads as a preferential polemic intended to divide the torch-bearers from the Sophists. Leaving aside Reed’s stark preferences and occasional overly pithy sentences, his study is otherwise remarkably generous to the writers who are under its spotlight. Erudite in its exposition of them, it is a helpful, timely and, not least, a punchy book, all of which make it well worth reading. Seán M. Williams 58 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Cunegonde’s Kidnapping

A Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of the Enlightenment Benjamin J. Kaplan Yale University Press 312pp £19.99

MICRO-HISTORY is now vital to shedding light on the historical world of conflict and deviance and the subject really flourishes with the benefits of this approach. Characters come to life and individuals involved in such histories speak and debate issues that historians blandly assume they know about or take for granted. This is one such micro-history and what an enthralling and resonant story it is. Benjamin Kaplan has recreated a lost, yet utterly compelling, world from scouring very obscure archives in pursuit of a narrative with wide-ranging implications. It concerns a serving woman, Cunegonde, who is in some manner mentally handicapped. This makes her the tool of some vested interests who are persuaded to challenge the religious status quo in the German-Dutch borderlands of 18th-century Europe. As such, the story undermines received historical wisdom about the reach of religious toleration some way into the supposed Age of Enlightenment. Local and familial arrangements to religiously ‘live and let live’ become destabilised and contested by one incident that sparks off the nearest western Europe comes to a regional religious war in the 18th century. From a situation where Catholics and Calvinists lived peaceably, the story uncovers some individuals who wanted to reignite conflict and claim supremacy for

their own religion, precisely at the time when many antagonisms had been supposedly settled. Cunegonde was persuaded to snatch a baby that was the issue of a mixed marriage and to carry it back over the border from Calvinist Vaals in the United Provinces to Catholic Aachen so that it could be baptised in the ‘true’ faith. This act infuriated Dutch Calvinists in the area and Cunegonde was herself arrested and returned to the United Provinces. From here, a rescue mission was staged to snatch her back. The story of kidnapping and counter kidnapping spread like wildfire, provoking various violent incidents that left both Catholics and Calvinists on both sides of the border scared and uneasy in areas where they were a minority. While those most responsible for the episode appear to have escaped justice, poor Cunegonde was exhibited in the pillory by the Dutch authorities. This may have assisted with ending the incident, but Kaplan makes it clear that those more culpable for this challenge to tolerance should be judged more harshly by history. Micro-histories are valuable tools to think with, not simply about wider historical concepts but also about our own times. Benjamin Kaplan’s enthralling book makes us think deeply about borders, what they meant to early modern individuals and what they mean to us. In an age when these

Kaplan has recreated an utterly compelling world [and] ... a narrative with wide-ranging implications are both challenged and malleable, this book tells us how 18th-century people used them as ways of thinking about their neighbours, about ideas of danger and safety and ways of doing justice. Yet these were also capable of being arbitrarily crossed and transgressed in pursuit of aims and goals both laudable and questionable. David Nash

Planck

Driven by Vision, Broken by War Brandon R. Brown Oxford University Press 280pp £20

THE GERMAN PHYSICIST Max Planck published a ground-breaking paper in 1900 on thermal radiation and ‘unknowingly sparked the quantum revolution’. However, unlike his friend and contemporary Albert Einstein, who became a universally recognised celebrity physicist, famed for his theories of relativity, little is known about Planck outside the scientific community, something that this new biography by Brandon R. Brown seeks to rectify. Brown begins with a description of Planck’s status in the average text book: ‘In the typical side-column photo, we see him later in life: bald, and stern. He discovered quantum theory. He had a moustache. And that’s about it.’ Brown queries the discrepancy in renown between Einstein and Planck. Aside from differences in personality – Einstein enjoyed the spotlight and engaged enthusiastically with the media, while Planck was more reserved – there is simply a lack of primary documentation. In 1943 Planck’s family home in Berlin was bombed and his library, diaries and letters were lost forever. Driven by Vision, Broken by War pieces together what remains – mostly correspondence with other scientists, journalists and family members – to provide a moving account of Planck’s life story.

REVIEWS Brown is keen to paint as full a portrait of Planck as possible; as father, husband and as someone whose life was shaped by a series of tumultuous events: the Franco-Prussian conflict, the unification of Germany and two World Wars. During these years Planck enjoyed the prestige of the 1918 Nobel Prize for Physics, but also suffered the tragic loss of all four of his children, including Erwin, who was executed in 1945 for plotting the assassination of Adolf Hitler. Planck was kind and devoted to his work and family. Yet he was immensely patriotic, perhaps naively so, and stubbornly refused to acknowledge the alarming implications of the new Reich government. Notably, Brown approaches his subject not ‘as a science historian’ but ‘as a physicist long fascinated by his breakthrough and haunted by those sad eyes’. This is certainly evident from the prose, which is lively and passionate. However, from a methodological perspective, there are occasional flaws. Brown adopts the speculative approach of a theoretical physicist and applies it with problematic results. There are endless passages where Brown imagines what Planck may have seen or done and countless instances of ‘if he had … he might have ...’ and ‘if he had passed by at this moment, he might have noticed ...’. Brown even devotes a chapter to a selection of books that ‘may’ have been salvaged from Planck’s home and brought to him. While imagination and empathy are crucial for a biographer, so is evidence and there is something frustrating about these well-meaning though frequently unsubstantiated accounts. Nevertheless Max Planck is a compelling character and Brown’s fervour is inspiring. He has done a great service by shedding light on the life and work of a very brilliant though troubled individual, ‘father of quantum theory’ and witness to the greatest upheavals of the 20th century. Giulia Miller

EXHIBITION really only now, with the opening of the new THE REDISPLAY OF the Waddesdon Bequest at gallery, that the works are on show in Fortnum’s the British Museum showcases all 265 medieval and renaissance treasures inherited and collected ‘necessary rooms’, generously funded by Ferdinand’s descendants. The curator, Dora Thornton, by Baron Ferdinand Rothschild (1839-98). The and designer, Stanton Williams, wisely do not result is more than the sum of its parts: 100 objects may tell the history of the world, but this recreate the original displays. Instead of walls covered in red silk, armchairs upholstered with collection combines examples of the consumembroideries and objects cased according to mate skill of master craftsmen with the tale of material or type, the golden figure of a huntsman a modern dynasty’s emulation of the princely automaton, the gleam of gilded silver bowls and collectors of the Renaissance. In the early 19th delicately carved nautilus shells draw the visitor century the Rothschild family burst from the into a room of wonders designed to allow the Frankfurt Ghetto to establish banks in Paris, study of these treasures as closely as possible. London, Vienna, Naples and Frankfurt; from The rhomboid-shaped central finance they moved to control cases offer multiple views a global mining industry and of objects, while seeming to built the first steam railway in melt away; carefully-placed Austria. Their commercial and lighting brings out the opalfinancial success assured, they escent glow of a glass vase or engaged with enthusiasm in the delicate pink shades of the activity of gathering art an agate bowl; silent films on and antiques, often securing screens set discreetly into wall the best objects in a market panels explore and enlarge the awash with treasures in the intricate carving of a boxwood wake of political upheavals tabernacle or the ghostly and sales of princely collectreliefs on a rock-crystal cup. ions. This represented a Yet around the walls of the return to family roots: their room are images of the Wadforebear, Mayer Amschel desdon ‘Smoking Room’, a (1744-1812), had financed reminder that these exquisite the family’s first foray into objects, many once owned by banking by selling ‘medallions European nobility, in a later at cheap prices’ and jewels to Treasures from the century proclaimed the discustomers across Europe. Yet Waddesdon Bequest cernment, wealth and power of the 45 Rothschild houses The British Museum, London of their successor, a Prince of full of paintings, tapestries, Industry. silver and fine furniture in These objects can also be explored from the the 1900s, only Ferdinand’s collection survives comfort of an armchair, in the reader’s own intact, shared at his wish between the British domestic ‘smoking room’. Online, there is a Museum and his neo-Renaissance French curator’s blog and a microsite with detailed inchâteau at Waddesdon. That this should be the formation about the pieces; for those who prefer case is thanks to Ferdinand’s generosity and the pleasure of paper, there is a handsome book his appreciation that the art which can help establish family credentials can also help educate which updates some of the entries in Hugh Tait’s Catalogue of the Bequest (1986-1991). Gorgeous a nation. colour photographs accompany a thoughtful text, which introduces Ferdinand’s life and legacy. This is followed by clear, scholarly explorations of the construction and history of a selection of objects from the gallery. Studying these images, marvelling at the details, a reader is bound to feel something of the ‘thrill of delight’ which Ferdinand himself claimed to experience In 1899, the ‘Waddesdon Bequest’ entered when, as a child, he packed and unpacked old the British Museum. ‘I wish’, lamented C.D.E. leather cases filled with his father’s treasures. Fortnum, the curator entrusted with putting it Kirstin Kennedy on display, ‘he [Baron Ferdinand] had also left a good round sum of money wherewith we could build the necessary rooms’. Since then, FerdiA Rothschild Renaissance: Treasures from the nand’s collection has been enjoyed by museum Waddesdon Bequest by Dora Thornton visitors, free of charge, for over a century. It is The British Museum Press, 351pp, £30

Exquisite objects that proclaim the discernment, wealth and power of a Prince of Industry

OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 59

REVIEWS

The Ransom of the Soul Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity Peter Brown Harvard University Press 288pp £18.95

CHRISTIANS in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages were worried about what would happen when they died. Would they go straight to heaven or down to hell, and when would their body be resurrected? In East and West alike these anxieties were reinforced by depictions of devils with pitchforks, St

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Michael separating the virtuous and the damned, and the souls of the blessed in heaven. It was widely agreed that most souls would have to wait for the final Resurrection, but what would happen in the intervening period? Catholic Christianity had a detailed answer: Purgatory, a waiting room where the souls of the dead might be cleansed of their sins, assisted by the prayers, penance and donations of the living. Jacques Le Goff’s classic, The Birth of Purgatory (1984), argued for the 12th century as the turning point. Peter Brown’s focus is earlier and he has now thrown wealth into the equation. A great historian of late antiquity, he is also the author of the much-praised Through the Eye of a Needle (2012). The towering figure of St Augustine again looms large in The Ransom of the Soul and, like Le Goff, Brown deals with the West. Augustine was cautious about the afterlife but his insistence that human beings are intrinsically sinful fed

Money mattered. Sins became debts to be repaid and richer Christians helped the process though almsgiving, donations and prayers into the firmer views held by his early medieval successors. Eastern Christians had similar questions about the afterlife and they, too, were exhorted to demonstrate their penitence. But the developed doctrine of Purgatory belonged to the Catholic West. This is also a story of post-imperialism. For Brown, the Roman Empire in the West spectacularly fell apart in the fifth century ad, but in the post-Roman barbarian kingdoms the royal families and the influential new nobility provided new targets for warnings about the afterlife.

Brown insists that Augustine and his successors were writing for the better off. Money mattered. Sins became debts to be repaid and richer Christians should help the process through almsgiving, donations and foundations where prayers could be said. The church collectively became stricter and richer. Irish monks led by Columbanus added a dash of exoticism, and by the seventh century ad a new world had dawned in which one could pay one’s way out of one’s sins. Peter Brown’s prose is dazzling and his argument novel. The tabulation of penances, the exposure of sins in confession and the corresponding requirement to repay debts thus built up became hallmarks of western medieval Christianity. There was no escape: the roots of the system stretched back as far as the early days of Christianity and, except for martyrs and saints, sin was everyone’s lot. In this ‘arms race’ the richer you were, the more you were expected to pay. Averil Cameron

REVIEWS

Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean

The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450-1700 Maria Fusaro Cambridge University Press 433pp £74.99

ONE SOMETIMES forgotten admirer of both the Venetian and British empires was Adolf Hitler. The Führer frequently lauded each as having found the keys to power and popularity, worth recalling by his 1,000 Year Reich as historical

models. However, the commerce of the two seaborne polities was not an issue that attracted the attentions of the Führer. But it is trade that lies at the heart of Maria Fusaro’s fine account, sprung from massive archival labour, of the economic and political rise of one imperium, the economic and political fall of the other and the intermingling of these processes, both in real terms and, more importantly, in the mind. For Fusaro is determined to remind her readers, contrary to mainstream historiography, that Venice was indeed an empire and one whose imperial glories, preoccupations and costs acted as a model to those capitalist successors which have lasted into the 20th century and beyond: ‘The ultimate goal of the Venetian government was commercial hegemony through long-distance trade and the administration of its possessions.’ Therefore, she contends, ‘it is time to bring empire back into the history of Venice’. Once she has set out her interpretational wares, Fusaro

engages in a detailed and wide-ranging exploration of her subject, demonstrating how special Venice’s relationship was with Tudor England and a Levant being conquered by Ottoman arms (Cyprus fell in 1571). By the 1590s, for example, English merchant ships were acquiring a major role in the traffic of the Eastern Mediterranean, ousting Venetian competitors, even if, Fusaro is sure, ‘Venice always looked east’ and a hope in empire lingered until the Republic’s collapse in 1797. Given the pre-eminence of commerce, both London and Venice possessed merchant ‘communities’, with Fusaro precisely mapping such presence; her readers will learn which osterie were listed by the Republic as appropriate to satisfy foreign appetities. She similarly tracks which parishes in which sestieri housed such visitors, who sometimes stayed on from one decade to the next. Fusaro is perceptively insistent on the role in her story of the subjects of empire, the Greeks, Jews and other Levantines, who

took their place in the dealings of the rival polities and crafted their own collaboration or competition. The mugging of Lawrence Hider en route from Piazza San Marco ‘one balmy September evening’ in 1628 by the Cephalonian, Elia Vignari, is one well-told tale. The state, Fusaro underlines, mattered in the construction of each empire. But so did a motley band of cosmopolitan individuals, often possessed of their own networks that were neither simply Venetian nor simply English. And the state could be in error. During its last century as an imperial power, Venice wasted its resources on expanding its territorial rule of the Ionian islands and in Dalmatia. So, Fusaro concludes, in its decline, ‘while talking like a commercial empire, Venice was acting like a territorial empire’. Such a message from the past reads like cautionary tale to the great and powerful of our own times (one which Adolf Hitler, among many others, failed to comprehend). Richard Bosworth

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REVIEWS

The Dignity of Chartism Dorothy Thompson Ed. Stephen Roberts Verso 240pp £14.99

DOROTHY THOMPSON was both a remarkable person and an influential historian of Chartism. This collection of her essays – some minor, some more substantial – highlights the approach of one of a formidable pair of fellow historians and left-wing intellectuals. Dorothy Thompson remains much less well known than her husband Edward (E.P.) Thompson. He was the public personage of the two. He wrote prolifically, as a historian, poet, novelist, Marxisthumanist theoretician and antinuclear campaigner. Dorothy Thompson, who shared much of his thinking, was a more private person but had her own voice, as this collection reaffirms. Sixteen essays are assembled, following an affectionate tribute by the editor Stephen Roberts. He stresses Dorothy Thompson’s commitment to the future of the discipline, as a notably caring and constructive doctoral supervisor. She enjoyed developing the companionship of shared research interests, as she always did with her husband. And she, like he, was a ready and energetic debater. One hitherto unpublished contribution is a rare piece, being co-written by the Thompsons. It provides an in-depth study of Chartism in Halifax, with all the hallmarks of Dorothy Thompson’s deep immersion in the scene. At the end there is a rueful coda. Once the Halifax Chartists were dashing radical activists, in quasirevolutionary times, while later they seemed mere bit players in a 62 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

narrative of triumphant liberalism: ‘old buffers’ out of their time. That rueful phrasing hints at a particularly E.P. Thompsonesque sympathy with those who had gone out of fashion. In fact, neither of the indefatigable Thompsons could ever be accused of bufferdom. But they often felt isolated, even on the Left, which gave them their edge and – sometimes – their edginess. Calm briskness remained a key trait of Dorothy Thompson throughout. She constantly calls for clarity of definitions, attentiveness to the detailed evidence and an awareness of the importance of class analysis. She did not favour the so-called ‘linguistic turn’, which sought to prioritise language (known reverently in the 1980s as ‘discourse’) over social context. Nor did she ever rescind her belief in Chartism’s radical potential, pointing to its long-term indirect legacy of working-class self-help rather than to any immediate revolution.

A ready and energetic debater ... Dorothy Thompson sought to recover female activism on its own terms ... to restore women to their place in history Another of Dorothy Thompson’s concerns was to restore women to their place in history, but without an over-insistent feminism. She argued not only that working-class women contributed forcefully to Chartism but also that later 19th-century British politics became increasingly masculinised. Hence female engagement had become lost from later accounts. ‘The roughness of behaviour and the language of the Chartist women did not fit the image of the respectable 19th-century female, while the lack of a specifically feminist political programme meant they were of little interest to the feminist movement that arose

in the later years of the century’. So Dorothy Thompson sought to recover female activism on its own terms. That aim matched her independent feminism, which she always maintained calmly and straightforwardly, though not militantly. She clearly enjoyed her subject. Chartist denunciations of class privilege and expressions of hope for a more egalitarian future resonated with her own beliefs. But she developed a robust acceptance of realities. She did not demonise the powers-that-be to explain Chartism’s immediate political defeat. Nor did she believe that, but for state repression, there would have been a popular revolution. She rejected the easy view that the Chartist leaders had only to call for an uprising for such a victorious outcome to ensue. The masses were not simply a blank force, waiting to be roused at the bidding of others: ‘Men rarely follow leaders advocating armed rebellion unless they have nothing to lose or unless they are fairly certain of victory.’ Effecting structural political change in a profoundly unequal society was not something that could be achieved purely by the radical leadership’s will-to-win. Here is the brisk, sane voice of Dorothy Thompson. She became first and foremost a research historian with left-wing sympathies but with no pre-set narrative. In her later years she warned specifically against letting formulaic ideologies, whether Marxist or other, warp the historical account. She expressed this view in a valedictory speech in 2005 (reprinted in this collection). Collectively, these essays make the same point. Dorothy Thompson was a sturdy debater in print and even sharper-tongued in private. But she wanted the arguments to be informed by in-depth research and by good sense. As a young freelance scholar with family pressures she struggled for many years to write. The contrast with E.P. Thompson’s prolific pen must have been hard to bear, however much she admired his bravura style and intellect. Finally, however, Dorothy Thompson herself got into the archives and emerged triumphantly. Penelope J. Corfield

The Tears of the Rajas Ferdinand Mount

Simon & Schuster 773pp £25

IF YOU WANT a figure who bestrides the 19th-century history of the British in India from the early Mysore and Maratha wars to post-Mutiny consolidation, they don’t come much larger than Ferdinand Mount’s great-great-grandfather, John (later General Sir John) Low from Clatto in Fife. Seeking his fortune in Britain’s expanding colonies, the teenage Low joined the East India Company army in 1805, just as the Company was itching to extend its remit outside its Madras, Calcutta and Bombay ‘Presidencies’. Low’s regiment, the 1st Madras Native Infantry, was soon involved in a major scandal when, having had the temerity to revolt, its Indian sepoys were gunned down within the unlikely confines of a fives court in Vellore. Two years later, the little known ‘White Mutiny’ reflected tensions between the Company’s and the British Crown’s separate armies. This time British officers in the former mutinied and were dismissed. Low’s Zeliglike presence allows Mount to probe a grey area in the imperial story. After a lively military career which also took him to Java, Low became a benevolent though generally accommodating (to the authorities) civil administrator in several princely states including Poona, Nagpur, Oudh and Hyderabad. Mount is at his descriptive best evoking the

REVIEWS eccentric Persian-inspired Oudh court at Lucknow, complete with scheming stepmother and oddball Europeans. Meanwhile, Low formed marriage alliances with prominent British families in India – the Shakespears, Thackerays and Metcalfes – so around 20 of his kinsmen held high office in the Raj, adding variety to Mount’s story. Although accounts of senseless massacres abound, the evidence of relentless greed is more telling, as the East India Company, the British Crown and individuals all manipulated the situation for financial gain. Thus, after the 1842 Opium War against the Chinese, Gawlior was subdued, largely because its output of the drug threatened the Company’s monopoly. Low rose to become the rather detached Military Member of the GovernorGeneral’s Supreme Council, a position he held during the Mutiny, when several of his relations gained notoriety for randomly killing innocent people. Low’s son Robert won more conventional plaudits for his role in the later Relief of Chitral. Although strong on colour and narrative drive, Mount is alive to wider historical developments. So we learn about the battle in the civil service between eager modernisers, who wanted to change Indian customs, and more relaxed traditionalists, who were happy to work with the status quo. Mount sympathises with the traditionalists, arguing that only about a tenth of the poorest peasants were landless serfs. Most of the rest had admittedly often obscure land rights. But the relentless march of capitalism and its bureaucratic certainties could not be resisted. This is less a history book than a rattling, but by no means uncritical, panorama of British rule in India. At almost 800 pages it is too long. However it is astute, unfailingly interesting and the illustrations are excellent. Andrew Lycett

CLASSICS IN TRANSLATION TO THE MUGHAL EMPEROR Humayun’s tent in Allasani Peddana’s telling of the creation myth, a startling reference (in an age of palm-leaf and Cambay came an old woman one day, in around stylus) to intellectual property rights (‘A rogue 1535, demanding an audience. She had got wind poet … / steals … from the forest of palm-leaf of an impending attack on the emperor and was manuscripts. / But scholars catch him …’); in Surimparting this valuable intelligence in the hope das’s Poems from the Early Tradition, the force not that it might secure the release of her son from imperial captivity. In the storming that followed, solely of learned poetry but of oral performance. Uninhibited reflections on ageing by ordained while Humayun’s troop kept safe, his valuable Buddhist women, in the millennia-old Theribooks were lost. Among them, his future son gatha – the world’s first anthology of women’s Akbar’s biographer Abu’l-Fazal would report in the History of Akbar, ‘was a history of Temür [the literature – give us utterances of an indeterminable age: Zafarnāma] … now in [Akbar’s] library’. Where Abu’l-Fazal traces that copy of the Zafarnāma Once my breasts … beautiful in the 16th century, his 21st century translator, Full, round, close together … Wheeler Thackston, notes that selfsame copy is Now … like empty waterbags made of leather. ‘now in the Johns Hopkins University Library’. Equally remarkable is the evidence of an emergNowhere in these first five volumes of the new ing biographical convention in the Therigatha, Murty Classical Library of India (MCLI) is the given the later absence of the tradition across reader closer to a nation’s historical past and its India. The later absence of Buddhism itself is literary presence than in this twist. thrown into relief in Shah’s lyrics: his frequent Undertaking facing-page translations of catalogues (Arab, Hindu, Turk, Indian texts covering two milMuslim, Sikh, Shaikh) make lennia, the MCLI is a worthy no mention of it, the world’s – if far more catholic – heir earliest anthology notwithto Akbar’s own ‘translation standing. Hallisey’s own quesbureau’ (the Maktabkhāna). tioning, in his Introduction, The Loeb and I Tatti Libraries of the Therigatha’s ‘minimal for Greek and Italian texts, reception history’ accentuates and the Clay Sanskrit Library, the unaddressed. Did the being its more proximate preTherigatha’s mettle discomfit decessors, the MCLI evidencsociety into non-engagement. es the pluralistic nature of It dismisses patriarchy (‘What Indian history. Where the Pardoes being a woman have to tition sundered India in 1947, do with it? / What counts is bi-scriptal Panjabi (written … / that one sees what really right to left in the Persian is.’); knocks a few Brahmins script in Pakistan, from left to (‘Who told you … / like a right in the Gurmukhi script in India) ensures a continuity Murty Classical Library know-nothing speaking to a know-nothing / that one cutting across geo-political of India is freed from the fruits of an frontiers, patent in Bullhe Harvard University Press evil act / by washing off in Shah’s Sufi Lyrics, performed water?’); celebrates women’s by both Muslims and Sikhs. enlightenment (‘What you [consider] pleasures Abu’l-Fazal’s History engages with not merely are not for me, / the mass of mental darkness is a dynasty but the very processes of historiograsplit open’). phy and biography, as he ‘[gathers] … accounts of events in His Majesty’s life … questioning Aiming to redress the balance in reception members of the court … reducing their accounts and representation, including that introduced by to writing’. colonialism, the MCLI’s projected 500 volumes Given that India has 24 official languages (the over the next 100 years promise non-partisan EU has exactly the same number), what might representation. The Library has been made one expect? These volumes reveal the unexpectpossible by an endowment from Rohan Murty, ed, the atypical: in a Buddhist anthology, we find a Harvard computer scientist and son of the the most corporeal appraisal of reality; in a biogfounders of Infosys, Sudha and Narayana raphy of a Mughal, considered spiritual engageMurthy. Through the MCLI, Murty and every ment; in an 18th-century Sufi poet, unwitting scholar on board pays heed to Huennekens’s telescoping of the 20th-century’s Civil Rights caution: ‘We have emerged from being midgets movement (‘If you attend carefully …/ … [He] is of knowledge to being giants of information.’ contained in every colour’); in the 16th-century Dipli Saikia OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 63

REVIEWS

Black Earth

The Holocaust as History and Warning Timothy Snyder The Bodley Head 480pp £25

EVEN against the prodigious catalogue of human criminality that so tarnished the European experience over the course of the last century, the Holocaust is set apart by its bewildering brutality, its unimaginable extent and its darkly systematic implementation. In this profoundly philosophical work,

64 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

Timothy Snyder reorientates our understanding of the ideological structures and political circumstances that made the Nazis’ genocidal programme possible. In his subtle analysis of National Socialism’s ideological foundations, Snyder places competition for natural resources and for geographical expansion in pursuit of Lebensraum, at the very centre of a closed political vision. It is a vision in which any politics beyond the struggle for racial supremacy and geographical space merely distort a natural ecology in which the strong dominate the weak. Though they might masquerade as expressions of universal human values, other political doctrines - communism, capitalism, liberal democracy - are in reality only cover for the self-advancement of those who profit most from the perversion of the natural order: international Jewry. To restore the natural order, this perceived pestilence would need to be expunged, by

eradication or exile. However, it is in his analysis of the special geographical, temporal and political space, in which the massacre of Jews moved from rhetoric to reality, that Snyder’s work is most compelling. In a welcome corrective to the view that mutated state bureaucracy was chiefly responsible for the

As the Holocaust drifts slowly from living memory to history ... Snyder provides a warning against future complacency murder of Jews, Snyder argues that the escalating violence against Jews in collaboration with local populations from 1941 onwards was in fact made possible by a context in which states and their protective institutions had been destroyed:

crushed beneath the brutal dual occupations of the Soviets and the Nazis. It was in this stateless space in Eastern Europe that ideological mass murder became a lived reality. Snyder is able to deploy compelling empirical evidence to the effect that, where state institutions remained intact (even under Nazi occupation), Jews were better insulated from the Nazi’s exterminatory programme. For instance, in Denmark (occupied by Germany, but with its institutions of state left relatively unmauled), Snyder explains that virtually all the Jews alive at the time of the German invasion in 1940 survived, whereas in Estonia (where pre-war state institutions were completely destroyed), fully 99 per cent were murdered. Indeed, although Auschwitz has become emblematic of the Holocaust as a whole (despite the fact that the majority of Hitler’s Jewish victims were killed elsewhere and, indeed, were already dead

REVIEWS before it became a major killing facility), those Jews the Auschwitz extermination facilities were built to murder mainly lived outside this zone of state destruction. Paradoxically, therefore, those European Jews destined for Auschwitz (such as in Denmark) more often survived than those who were not. Snyder’s conclusion is arresting: as the Earth’s climate changes, as demands for resources intensify and where scarcity threatens, the temptation to seek Lebensraum and to seek strategic prizes, such as those that Hitler sought in the fertile black earth of the Ukraine, increases. It is here that the opportunity may reappear for demagogues of blood and soil to designate vulnerable groups as planetary enemies. With some few reservations, this is a deeply insightful and original treatment and, as the Holocaust drifts slowly but surely from living memory and into history, a warning against future complacency. John Owen

Out of Ashes

A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century Konrad H. Jarausch Princeton University Press 850pp £27.95

FEW HISTORIANS could be better qualified to write this book than the author. Born in Berlin, losing his father on the Eastern Front in the Second World War and emigrating across the Atlantic soon afterwards, Jarausch is in an excellent position to take a clear view of Europe from the US. In

A good book to get your teeth into ... as Jarausch provides a stimulating interpretation as well as telling a story spite of harrowing memories, he retains a positive attitude to his native continent, believing that it provides some lessons to the rest of the world. So this is a good book to get your teeth into, as it contains a stimulating interpretation as well as telling a story. Jarausch takes as his starting point the concept of modernisation, defying criticism of it as Eurocentric, although accepting that it has enough of a dark side to constitute an intellectual problem rather than a widespread aspiration. The ensuing argument is not difficult to follow for the most part, although the observation that Stalinist culture’s ‘voluntaristic revision of structural theory acquired mythical proportions’ is an example of a small number of passages that will be too much for some readers. There are four parts. The first takes us from 1900 to 1929 and is entitled Promise of Progress. It begins by pointing out that Europe was in many ways the centre of the world at the beginning of the 20th century. However, the promise of continued progress was broken from 1914 to 1918 with the First World War, I would argue, rather than in 1929 with the onset of the Great Depression, as Jarausch claims. While the Versailles Treaty’s failing to restore Europe’s pre-eminence receives full mention, there is neglect of the equally important Washington Treaties establishing the global influence of the US. There can be little quarrel with the label Turn to Self-Destruction, 1929 to 1945, although arguably Europe took a direct route from one world war to another. In this regard, the potential escape route via the Anglo-French-Soviet talks of August 1939 might have been

given more of a mention: their failure was due to Anglo-French as well as Soviet suspicion. However, one can only applaud Jarausch for his insistence that the Second World War in Europe was decided on the Eastern Front and that ‘it is necessary to stop treating the Holocaust as metahistorical morality tale and to reinsert it into the actual historical setting’, recognising that ‘anti-Slavic, antisemitic, and anti-communist phobias converged and mutually reinforced one another.’ Surprising Recovery from 1945 to 1973 must indeed have been surprising to those who experienced the total ruin of the war’s end. Jarausch engagingly enlarges on his assertion that the Cold War was much more than a military confrontation, but economic and cultural, too. He sympathetically records the disappointments of decolonisation. He charts the process of European integration with an enthusiasm modified by realism. The final part, Confronting Globalization, 1973 to 2000, begins with a description of a German demonstration against the construction of a nuclear reactor. This was significant, but the year 1968 might have been a better choice because of its more widespread protests. The book’s conclusion is put clearly and comprehensively, but is over-optimistic. The suggestion that the rest of the world might take Europe as its model is unlikely in any respect, while the threat posed by climate change and potential global war is greater than it appears here. It would be going too far, however, to suggest that a better overall title would have been ‘Ashes to Ashes.’ As well as considering modernisation from many points of view, Jarausch also looks, in a knowledgeable and incisive manner, at the various shapes and forms of modernism and other artistic movements. For example, I particularly enjoyed his appraisal of Gustav Mahler’s late Romantic ‘interminable symphonies, with their threatening dissonant crescendos … balanced by pleasing strains of folklike melody’. How many of us would agree, I wonder? Paul Dukes

CONTRIBUTORS Richard Bosworth published Venice: An Italian History with Yale University Press in 2014. Averil Cameron is former Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History at the University of Oxford. Penelope J. Corfield is Emeritus Professor of History, Royal Holloway, University of London. Paul Dukes is the author of Paths to a New Europe (Palgrave, 2004) and A History of the Urals (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). Kirstin Kennedy is a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Her publications include Medieval and Renaissance Art: People and Possessions (V&A 2009), with Glyn Davies. Andrew Lycett is the author of a number of well-received biographies, including Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation now in paperback with Windmilll. Giulia Miller is Affiliated Lecturer in Modern Hebrew at the University of Cambridge. David Nash is Professor in History at Oxford Brookes University. John Owen has undertaken research on a number of recent BBC2 documentaries, including, David Starkey’s Magna Carta and Churchill: When Britain Said No. Dipli Saikia completed a PhD in English (J.N. Tata Fellow), read Pali in London and Oxford and is based at the Institute of Ismaili Studies. Peter Schröder is a senior lecturer with a particular interest in the history of ideas at University College London. Seán M. Williams is ViceChancellor’s Fellow in Germanic Studies at the University of Sheffield.

OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 65

HAVE YOUR SAY

Letters Pro Lyons I would like to support, totally, the academic, professional and moral issues raised in Mathew Lyons’ ‘The Great Betrayal’ (Making History, September 2015). However, the situation he well describes was created by and is sustained by ‘academics’, some of whom may once have had some teaching and research experience and – occasionally – ability, but have now chosen to promote themselves out of the library, archive, seminar room and lecture hall to some kind of managerial Valhalla, where – supported by generous funding and remunerative consultancies – they preside over the situation described. Once, such administrative positions were held on the short term by genuine academics, who usually welcomed a return to the classroom, but now they seem to be perceived as permanent, or as a ladder to better paid, higher, Ruritanian positions. Dr John Easton Law Swansea University

Contra Lyons Mathew Lyons’ account is overly bleak. As an experiment I typed the phrase ‘early career researchers’ into Google ngrams. The result? Prior to 1995 the phrase was unknown, but its incidence in this vast corpus of scanned texts increases almost exponentially after 2000. An ‘ignored’ generation of scholars? Hardly. Universities, funders, learned societies and others are not only aware of the issues Lyons raises, but are taking steps to tackle them. For starters many universities (and not just Russell Group ones) have copied the model of ‘Early Career Fellowships’ developed by the Leverhulme Trust. These offer relief from teaching, providing an opportunity to turn the doctoral thesis into that crucial first book. In the bad old days only Oxbridge 66 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

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offered such fellowships. Lyons’ concern about a sink or swim approach to teaching is being addressed by new Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (PCAP) courses, which lead to a formal teaching qualification. Today’s wannabe academics not only have the chance to earn this alongside their doctorate, they also enjoy greater opportunities to have a go at teaching – and so work out whether they actually fancy this part of the job. So are today’s ‘early career researchers’ worse off than their nameless predecessors? Wages remain low. Many will have to travel to find work. But who said you could make a career in any academic subject without passion and self-sacrifice? Dr Jonathan Conlin University of Southampton

Mufti Machinations David Motadel’s otherwise unimpeachable article (‘Muslim’s in Hitler’s War’, September 2015) claims that the Third Reich failed to incite a major Muslim uprising against the Allies. But the Al-Rashid revolt in Iraq in the spring of 1941 cut off the oil pipeline from Baghdad to Haifa and posed a major threat to the Allied war effort. The coup was inspired by the Palestinian leader and Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Al Hussayni, and the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood and was supported both financially and militarily by the Germans and the Vichy French. An officially sanctioned pogrom also killed hundreds of local Jews before the British regained control, after which the protagonists fled to Berlin. Those who feel that the Palestinians received a less than generous deal under the 1947 partition often blame imperialist machinations but rarely the wartime behaviour of the Mufti and his allies. David Reuben London WC1

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In the Dock Clive Emsley’s article (‘Cops and Dockers’, August 2015) was a thoughtful insight into a lost world of working-class history. However, as the grandson of a London docker and agitator who was also a soldier and sometime military policeman, I feel some additional context would have been helpful. In particular, the readiness of communities to take advantage of the opportunities offered by items ‘falling off the back of a lorry’ needs to be understood against a background of casualisation and poverty wages that were used as a weapon against dock-working families in the years running up to the war and, of course, the horrors induced by the Blitz, which devastated such communities. Given their treatment, it is remarkable with what spirit men from the docks such as my grandfather fought that war (in Africa, Italy, France and Germany), despite having to be led through it by Winston Churchill, whom my grandfather utterly despised. Peter Sarris Trinity College, Cambridge

Neglected Plot With reference to Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (Months Past, September 2015), you may be interested to know that she is buried in the Garrett family plot in the graveyard of Aldeburgh parish church. In contrast to the graves of Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Imogen Holst some 150 yards away, which are signposted, well cared for and frequently visited, the plot is shamefully neglected; the inscription on the stone tablet marking her presence is so weather-worn that it is almost impossible to make out her name. The imminence of the centenary of her death in 1917 would be a good time for pressure to be brought to bear on surviving members of the family,

the church and local authorities to restore it. Her father, Newson Garrett, established the Maltings at Snape, one of the surviving buildings of which was, at the instigation of Britten, converted into the concert hall now at the centre of the Aldeburgh Festival. John Sims Leiston, Suffolk

Creole Theory I found Harry Ritchie’s article (‘Spreading the Word’, August 2015) very interesting. However, I am not convinced by his explanation of how a minor tribal language came to be the foundation of a major linguistic group. In Europe we are most familiar with the language development model offered by the emergence of the Romance languages from Latin. This required the imposition of Latin as the dominant language following conquest, the collapse of the imperial system and finally the creation of a more fragmented political system, involving the establishment of a non Latin-speaking ruler class. Ritchie rightly rejects this as a model for the development of the Indo-European languages. There is another model: creolisation. This occurs when people from diverse linguistic backgrounds create a language based on a common tongue which is not native to any of them. This has usually occurred among slaves who develop a common language based on that of their masters. The development of the Indo-European languages points to creolisation. As Ritchie points out, they are identifiable through a shared vocabulary. They also display a diversity of grammatical structures. This suggests a process which began from a shared vocabulary but evolved into different grammars. Martin Jenkins London SE18

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Coming Next Month Peter the Great’s ‘Special Book’

By the 18th century, the doctrine of divine-right absolutism was beginning to lose its authority in western Europe. This, however, was not the case in Russia. In 1723 Tsar Peter the Great commissioned and personally approved Pravda Voli Monarshei, or ‘The Monarch’s Right to Appoint the Heir to his Throne’, to safeguard his reforms after his death. Tony Lentin details the creation of this counterblast to Magna Carta.

The Astronomer and the Witch

Johannes Kepler was one of the most important astronomers of his day, establishing the three laws of planetary motion before his death in 1630. Less well known is that, 400 years ago, in 1615, Kepler’s 73-year-old mother Katharina was accused of witchcraft, prompting Kepler to put his work on hold and attempt to exonerate her. The Kepler case puts life in a Lutheran duchy under the magnifying glass, writes Ulinka Rublack, who reconstructs one of Germany’s best-recorded witchcraft trials.

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London’s Technological Triumphs

Britain’s Industrial Revolution evokes images of steam factories in the urbanised north, cotton mills in Lancashire and mines in Cornwall and Wales. Yet, writes David Waller, in the late 18th century London was the Silicon Valley of its day, home to a remarkable and overlooked concentration of technological expertise, which produced a series of technological triumphs, including tinned food, precision engineering and the computer.

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

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PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The winner for August is Richard Tagart, Antwerp, Belgium.

EDITOR’S LETTER: 2 © Alamy. HISTORY MATTERS: 3 © John Crook; 5 left © Alamy; right © Catherine Swift; 6 © Imperial War Museum, London (WWC Z-3); 7 © Mirrorpix/Alamy. MONTHS PAST: 8 Courtesy His Grace the Duke of Norfolk, Arundel Castle/Bridgeman Images; 9 top © National Portrait Gallery, London; bottom © Alamy. THE FIRST GLOBAL EMPIRE: 10-11 © Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 12 © Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Portugal/Bridgeman Images; 13 © Bridgeman Images; 14 Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 15 top © Werner Forman Archive/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Bridgeman Images; 16 © Bridgeman Images; 17 top © akg-images; bottom © Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Portugal/Bridgeman Images. HENRY’S HOLLOW VICTORY: 19 © Philip Mould/ Bridgeman Images; 20-21 © Jérôme da Cunha/akg-images; 22 Maps © Tim Aspden; 23 Bibliothèque Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 24 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Bridgeman Images; 25 top © Erich Lessing/akg-images; bottom left © Bridgeman Images; bottom right © Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/ Bridgeman Images; 26 © British Library/akg-images. THE LEGACY OF AGINCOURT: 27 © Mary Evans Picture Library/Alamy; 28 © Alamy; 28-29 © The Art Archive/Alamy; 30 Courtesy Stephen Cooper. INFOCUS: 32-33 © Getty Images. THE HOLY ROMAN RING ROAD: 34 © akg-images. THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST: 37 © De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 38 © Boltin Picture Library/Bridgeman Images; 39 © Bridgeman Images; 40 © Metropolitan Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images; 41 © Bibliothèque Nationale de Tunisie/Bridgeman Images; 42 © Bridgeman Images; 43 top © Getty Images; bottom © Alamy. MAKING HISTORY: 44 © British Library/Bridgeman Images. A HIDDEN HISTORY: 45 and 46 Courtesy the authors; 48 © Alamy. RETURN OF THE KING: 49 © De Agostini Picture Library/akg-images; 50 and 51 top © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 51 bottom © Apsley House/Bridgeman Images; 52 top © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; bottom © Château de Versailles/Bridgeman Images; 53 © Musée Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; 54 © Ullstein Bild/akg-images. REVIEWS: 56 © Alamy; 59 © The Waddesdon Bequest/The Trustees of the British Museum, London; 63 © British Library/Bridgeman Images. COMING NEXT MONTH: 69 © Hamburger Kunsthalle/Bridgeman Images. PASTIMES: 70 Images courtesy Wikimedia/Creative Commons. SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION: 71 © Alamy. 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.

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Pastimes Amusement & Enlightenment

The Quiz 1 In which year did Walter Williams, thought to be the last living US Civil War veteran, die?

22 What does the Peutinger Map represent? 23 Who first issued the Book of Sports in 1618?

2 Which French composer claimed that he dined only on ‘food that is white: eggs, sugar, shredded bones, the fat of dead animals’?

24 Robert of Chester’s translation of The Story of Khalid and Morienos in 1144 first introduced the idea of what to the West?

13 A society for ‘drink, debauchery and mock witchcraft’; what did Sir Francis Dashwood found in 1745?

5 Which US president reportedly said: ‘I can’t shake hands with anyone from San Francisco’?

14 Who was Dr Johnson’s first pupil? 15 Who did Edward the Confessor summon back to England from Hungary in 1057?

6 The accusation of what caused the novelists H.G. Wells and Joseph Conrad to fall out? 7 Who opined that ‘heat and cold are nature’s two hands, whereby she chiefly worketh’ in 1624?

8 Which inventor attempted to create a machine to facilitate communication with ghosts? 9 Which artistic method became known as ‘engraving in the English manner’? 10 What were first drilled at Titusville, Pennsylvania in 1859? 11 What was the Second Reich also known as? 12 Which pejorative word originated with an Irish family who disturbed Southwark at the end of the 19th century?

70 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

16 Into which two tribes did the Goths split in around 257? 17 What did Octavia Hill found in 1895? 18 Which publisher is credited with popularising paperbacks in Britain? 19 Who called the Ottoman Empire the ‘sick man of Europe’ in 1853? 20 Prevalent from the 16th to 18th centuries, what is the medical name for ‘jail fever’? 21 Which king made Madrid capital of Spain in 1561?

ANSWERS

4 Who was the only openly transvestite and homosexual member of the Habsburg family?

25 Which popular pastime did Dame Juliana Berners first analyse in the Book of St. Albans in 1486?

1. 1959 2. Erik Satie 3. Charles II 4. Archduke Ludwig Victor (luziwuzi) 5. Richard Nixon 6. Plagiarism. Wells accused Conrad of basing his character Kurtz in Heart of Darkness on his own Dr. Moreau. 7. Francis Bacon 8. Thomas Edison 9. Mezzotint 10. Oil wells 11. The Hohenzollern Empire, 1870–1918 12. Hooligan 13. The Hell-Fire Club 14. David Garrick 15. Edward the Exile 16. Ostrogoths (eastern) and Visigoths (western) 17. The National Trust 18. Allen Lane 19. Tsar Nicholas I 20. Epidemic typhus 21. Philip II 22. The Roman road system 23. James I 24. Alchemy 25. Angling

3 Which English king issued an apology ‘for being such a time a-dying’?

Prize Crossword

Set by Richard Smyth

ACROSS 1 Nickname of Yorkshire and England cricketer Fred Trueman (1931-2006) (5) 4 Sir Richard ___ (1732-92), Prestonborn cotton manufacturer and inventor (9) 9 Jean ___ (1639-99), French poet (6) 10 ‘Life is an offensive, directed against the repetitious mechanism of the ___’ – A.N. Whitehead, 1933 (8) 12 Otto ___ (1879-68), Nobel Prize-winning German chemist (4) 13 Polish economist (1904-65), author of On the Economic Theory of Socialism (1938) (5,5) 15 ‘All my possessions for a ___’ – last words of Elizabeth I? (6,2,4) 19 Washington headland, named by Charles Wilkes (5,2,5) 22 The Anatomy of ___, 1621 work by Robert Burton (10) 24 Robert ___ (d.1537), lawyer, leader of the 1536 Pilgrimage of Grace (4) 26 Carolus ___ (1707-78), Swedish botanist (8) 27 Sir John ___ (1786-1854), courtier, called ‘King John’ by William IV (6) 28 City in Puglia, scene of earthquake in 1627 (3,6) 29 See 1 Down DOWN 1/8/29 Novel by Ernest Hemingway, set during the Spanish Civil War (3,4,3,4,5)

2 1634 Rembrandt of Pilate presenting Christ to the people (4,4) 3 Shao ___ (1011-77), Chinese philosopher, also known as Yaofu (4) 5 US astronaut (b.1936), Command Module Pilot for Apollo 16 (3,9) 6 Maurice ___ (1875-1937), French composer (5) 7 George ___ (1608-57), Royalist, captured at Wakefield, 1643 (6) 8 See 1 11 Former royal residence on the Isle of Wight (7,5) 14 Japanese name for the 1952 Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between US and Japan (4) 16 Sarah ___ (d.1737), eccentric bone-setter (4) 17 ‘The Lay Of The Last ___’, 1805 narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott (8) 18 Headland in Swansea Bay, site of a lighthouse constructed in 1794 (7) 20 ‘Love looks not with ___’ – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1 Scene 1 (3,4) 21 Victorian castle in County Westmeath, also known as Delvin Castle (6) 23 Charles ___ (1784-1877), composer, author of the 1845 song ‘Victoria’s Sceptre o’er the Waves’ (5) 25 Sir William ___ (1782-1845), army officer in the East India Company (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 OCTOBER 31st or www.historytoday.com/crossword

Six degrees of Separation Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)

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OCTOBER 2015 HISTORY TODAY 71

BYZANTIUM

FromtheArchive In drawing parallels with international events of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Antonucci’s article from 1993 neglected the ideology that underpinned Byzantine diplomacy, argues Jonathan Harris.

A Vanished World ALTHOUGH it lasted for over a thousand years, the Byzantine Empire is perceived as remote and eccentric, fascinating in itself but without much contemporary relevance. Michael Antonucci’s 1993 article, War by Other Means: The Legacy of Byzantium, took a different approach, declaring that in the field of diplomacy Byzantium had something to teach the modern world. He focused on the way that the Byzantines compensated for their military weakness by resorting to covert diplomatic manoeuvrings. A prime example occurred in the late 13th century, when the king of Sicily, Charles of Anjou, gathered a huge army and fleet to seize Constantinople. Unable to match such force, the Byzantine emperor, Michael VIII, made contact with Charles’ restive Sicilian subjects, supplying them with money and arms, and sent envoys and a consignment of gold to the king of Aragon, whom he knew to have a grudge against Charles. The gamble paid off. An uprising in Palermo in the spring of 1282 – the Sicilian Vespers – was followed by an Aragonese invasion of Sicily. The threat to Constantinople evaporated overnight as Charles fought to defend his kingdom from the unexpected assault. Antonucci paralleled such diplomatic sleights of hand with events of the 1980s and early 1990s: US backing of the Kurds against Saddam Hussein and Soviet encouragement of nuclear disarmament groups in western Europe. They were all examples, he claimed, of diplomacy as a tool in the struggle between national interests, a continuation of war by other means. Refreshing though Antonucci’s thesis is, it is not always convincing. To start with, the examples that he used to illustrate Byzantine diplomacy 72 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015

were not always accurate. He claimed that in 1270 Michael VIII sent a gift of money to Pope Nicholas III, who in return told Charles to attack Muslim Tunisia rather than Christian Constantinople. In fact, Nicholas did not become pope until 1277. Second, in his enthusiasm for Byzantine diplomatic finesse, Antonucci envisaged an unlikely level of organisation and sophistication. There was certainly a kind of foreign ministry in Constantinople, the Bureau of Barbarians. On

To defend Byzantium went beyond simple patriotism; it was a sacred duty the other hand, there is no evidence that it was a kind of MI6 which ‘kept files on who was influential and who was susceptible to bribery’. Perhaps the greatest weakness in Antonucci’s article was his insistence that Byzantine diplomacy prefigures modern realpolitik and the theories of Clausewitz and Machiavelli, where the practical takes precedence over the moral or ideological. In fact, diplomacy has often had an ideological underpinning that goes beyond national interests, whether the spread of a religion, the establishment of representative democracy and the free market, or the advance of the inevitable revolution and the workers’ state. In the case of the Byzantines, that ideological basis was the conviction that their empire was no mere nation state among many. It was the Roman Empire, established by God at the time of the birth of Christ. It was as much part of the right order of things on earth as the Church and the Sacraments. To defend it went beyond simple patriotism: it was a

sacred duty, which justified underhand practice. As a result, Byzantine diplomacy sought to achieve not only security or economic and territorial advantage but to vindicate ideological tenets. Treaties with other Christian powers almost always included a clause acknowledging the theoretical supremacy of the Byzantine emperor, even in cases where the treaty concluded a war that the Byzantines had lost. When they did win, they often demanded the defeated leader’s participation in a public ceremony, where he had to grovel in the dust at the emperor’s feet. Antonucci described how potential allies were invited to Constantinople to be overawed by the sight of the city’s towering churches and palaces, but this was not just a cynical ploy. It reflected Byzantine beliefs about the place of the empire in the world; their diplomacy was designed to advance the will of God. Thus, while Antonucci highlighted an intriguing parallel with modern international relations, he neglected the differences that separate us from the vanished world of Byzantium. Jonathan Harris is the author of The Lost World of Byzantium (Yale, 2015).

VOLUME XLIII ISSUE 2 FEB 1993 Read the original piece at historytoday.com/fta