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
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Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
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Ohio State University
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London School of Economics
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The Australian National University
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St Johns College, Cambridge
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18,556 Jan-Dec 2014
2 HISTORY TODAY OCTOBER 2015
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
Macfarlanes thesis outlined in his 1978 study, The Origins of English Individualism.
Whatever ones 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 Lamberts Instrument of Government of 1653, which remains Britains 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
Protectorates 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
Wykehams nave and appears to have
inspired Foxs 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
HISTORYMATTERS
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 bishops 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 VIIIs
reign, during which Fox remained
keeper of the Privy Seal.
At the precise centre of the second
bay of vaulting, where the bishops
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 Foxs 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
Georges 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
Henrys 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 kings 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. Foxs 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, Catherines
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 U 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
HISTORYMATTERS
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 nogam
(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-ices, a seventh-century collection of grammarian
lore known in English as the Scholars
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.
HISTORYMATTERS
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 Womens Voluntary
Emergency Corps and a Womens
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 Womens Hospitals, whose
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 Evelinas 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
Evelinas 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 Bata
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
caf, 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 caf. 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 Bata 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.
HISTORYMATTERS
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 Johnsons The Churchill Factor
(2014), whose subtitle, How One Man
Made History, sums up the book.
Churchills 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 Hitlers
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 Churchills
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
fted 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.
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 Englands 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 kings
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 Englands 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 Lords Prayer. The familys titles and
estates were confiscated and Arundels
personal wealth (the equivalent of at
least 70 milllion today) was forfeited to
the king.
Arundels son and heir, Thomas
Fitzalan, was 15 when his father was
executed. He was made a ward of the
kings half-brother, the Duke of Exeter,
who treated him as a servant with bullying contempt. He particularly remembered having constantly to take Exeters
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
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 kings enemies, John of
Gaunts 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 Richards life. If Gaunts 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 countrys 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 Henrys orders.
Thomas Fitzalans titles and estates in
England and Wales were restored to him
and he was now Earl of Arundel and one
of the countrys 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 Henrys son, later Henry V,
and in 1410 led a force of his own and
the princes men to join the Burgundian
army in the civil war in France. Henry IV
died in 1413 and Arundel was appointed
to Henry Vs 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
Chaplins 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
Chaplins 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 countrys ferocious
dictator, Adenoid Hynkel. They looked
so alike that setting out to arrest the
barber Hynkels 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 films 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.
The First Global

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.
Empire
N THE DYING YEARS of the 15th century Portugal surprised the

world. Vasco de Gamas 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 its true, he wrote. However
I dont give credence to it. Priuli was registering the first reaction to a
seismic shift in the comprehension of our planet: Gamas voyage had
finally demolished the ancient authority of Ptolemaic geography, which
held the Indian Ocean to be a closed lake.
Priulis 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.
Gamas 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 Navigators 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
PORTUGAL
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 crowns 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 Gamas 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
oceans 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 Ferno de Magalhes (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 Gamas landfall. Asked why they had come, the man sent ashore,
Gulf, Goa, and Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, all critical hubs in the
Joo 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.
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
Europes 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
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 Pro da Covilh, 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
Gis, 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.
Lus Vaz de Cames, whose epic poem The Lusiads created a
founding mythology for the heroism of exploration, exemplified the sometimes desperate qualities of Portugals 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, Cames 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 Europes 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. Gamas 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
PORTUGAL
A chart of Brazil by the Portuguese cartographer Ferno Vaz Dourado, 1571.

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.
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 Franois Froger.
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
representations of European kings and images from Drer; 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 Wests 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,
Tristo 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 Drer was able to produce a passable likeness
armed only with a rough sketch.
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 Europes
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. Drer 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.
Portugals 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 Joo 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 Crowleys 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, 14151580 (University of Minnesota Press, 1977).
Jay A. Levenson, Encompassing the Globe: Portugal and the World in the
16th and 17th Centuries (Smithsonian Books, 2007).
AGINCOURT
Contemporary
portrait of Henry V.
Henrys
HOLLOW
VICTORY
Agincourt is among the most celebrated of all

English victories. Yet, argues Gwilym Dodd,
Henry Vs triumph against overwhelming odds
sowed the seeds for Englands ultimate defeat
in the Hundred Years War.
AGINCOURT
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 Shakespeares 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 Englands most
capable and successful monarchs came to be defined to a large extent by
the victory he achieved on St Crispins 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. Shakespeares 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.
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 Gods approval. How
else was the victory to be explained when the odds were stacked so
heavily against the English?
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 Henrys
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. Henrys 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 Henrys 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 Henrys 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.
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, Henrys 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 kings actions.
Above all, it was victory at Agincourt which retrospectively justified Henrys most extraordinarily
risky dalliance with Fortunes wheel.
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 Gods 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 Vs 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 Alenon. In spite of Henrys 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 Orlans 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
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 Alenon, Mortagne and Bellme; 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 Henrys reputation as Englands greatest king.
BUT ALL THIS disguises the fundamental weakness of the English position and the deeply flawed nature of Henrys 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 Johns
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.
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 Dauphins attendants.
It is not clear whether this was pre-planned
or a terrible misunderstanding, but the
result was the same. The dukes 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.
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 Henrys predecessor, Richard II (137799), that Englands 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 Henrys 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 kings 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 Orlans, but after three
during the 1410s. In a number of different ways, Henry had sown the
seeds of Englands final defeat in the Hundred Years War 30 years later.
days surveying the citys 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.
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 Vs
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 Crispins
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. Machens 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.
AGINCOURT
There was nothing else quite like Machens 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 Shakespeares version
of events in his play Henry V (1599) as history as well as
drama and several papers reproduced extracts from Henrys
St Crispins 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
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 Vs army.
This seems to have been in response to a German critics
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.
WO PAPERS the Dundee Evening Telegraph

(October 14th) and the Reading Mercury (October
16th) summarised Maxwells 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 Kitcheners 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 Crispins Day speech and that made to the troops
before the walls of Harfleur: Once more unto the
breach, dear friends.
Henry Vs 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 Vs 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 Vs 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 Crispins 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
subjects duty is the kings is the keynote of [Shakespeares]
play, and in none is the sense of duty more strongly portrayed
than in the King himself.
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.
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 Crcy 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
BUT, PERHAPS UNFORTUNATELY, there is also a more

prosaic explanation. My grandfathers enlistment in
December 1915 may well be explained by his position as a
married man with children. In his book Kitcheners 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 Kings 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
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 others 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
XXXXXXXXXX
| 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.
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 Mozarts audience walked from the Innere Stadt (city
centre) to the premiere of the Magic Flute in 1791 at Emanuel
Schikaneders Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, they would
have passed stalls and open-air workshops erected there by
Viennese artisans who simply ignored the regulation.
XXXXXXXXXXX
Moreover, Napoleon had found Viennas 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 Tbor Bridge and convinced the
Viennese garrison to surrender without a shot being fired.
Two years after Franz Joseph ascendedthe imperial
throne, Vienna incorporated the Vorstdte (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 Europes 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 bea 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 Europes
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 wasmore 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
doughtyafter 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,
whichstill 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 Josephs architects. But without
Franz-Josefs-Kai the Ring would be incomplete. Moreover,
the walls along this side of the city were demolished andan
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 (ViennasScottish Abbey), Burg Ring
after the imperial palace, some after street names Krntner
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
Universittsring, 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 Austrias 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 Viennas many historic hotels. Mlker 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, Viennas 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
| RINGSTRASSE
XXXXXXXXXX
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 theerection of a sequence of self-consciously impressive buildings.
One of the first was the Heinrichshof, a city block opposite
thesite 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 Wrttemberg on Krntner Ring. It was planned as the
city residence of the newly married Duke of Wrttemberg 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
Fhrer was definitely at the Imperial in 1938 following the
Anschluss and he later kept Mussolini a virtual prisoner in it
following il Duces rescue from Italy in 1943. After the war,
the Imperial was for many years the KGB headquarters in
the city; it is to theircredit 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 Krntner
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 archdukes palace is
now known as Kasino am Schwarzenbergplaz, a secondary
performing space for the Volkstheater.
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 buildings 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.
Caf culture
A more common form of buildingaround 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 lzelt 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 Viennas new role as a tourist centre
the Ritz Carlton hotel in 2012.
Hotels were also purpose-builton 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 sportsmore
hotels than ever before, it has few cafs, for Franz Josephs
great boulevard brought Viennese caf 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 cafs. 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 caf 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 emperors desire to tidy up the imperial
collections andmuch 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 youll get an even more bewildered
look: who is the finest Russian contemporary artist, the
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 worlds
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.
HESE PATHWAYS, known since the late 19th

century as the Silk Roads, serve as the worlds
central nervous system, connecting peoples and
places together. These networks are invisible to the
naked eye, just as the bodys 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.
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 ones 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 Caesars invasion of Britain, the Asterix
comic books and the film Gladiator try to make us think
that Romes 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 Britains 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 Muqaddas, Ibn Fadln and Masd, are obscure
and overlooked. The great works of Persian poetry and
prose such as the epic Shhnma of Firdaws or the Tarx-i
Jahn-Gu of Juvayn, 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
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 Sn, better known as Avicenna, alBrn and al-Khwrizmi, 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.
Romes 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 Empires 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.
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-Masd, 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 Wests 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.
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 Petersburgs attention away from the East and towards Germany
and its western flank. Britains 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.
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 Britains 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.
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 Shhnma, 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.
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).
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 Nmes
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-btard, 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 its important
to know that the cache-btard 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
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-btard 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 Uccellos painting The Hunt in
the Forest demonstrates the vanishing point or Michelangelos 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
periods 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.
SEXUAL ABUSE
|XXXXXXXXXXX
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 childs 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 childrens 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
| SEXUAL ABUSE
XXXXXXXXXX
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 childrens 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 childrens 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
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
childs 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 Childrens
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
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RESEARCHER OF THE YEAR
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A prize of 500 is given to a

picture researcher whose work,
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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).
| SEXUAL ABUSE
XXXXXXXXXX
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 childrens 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 MINDs 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 childrens 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
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 presss 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 Napoleons defeat at Waterloo, Frances Bourbon monarchy was
restored. It was the first, fragile step in a diminished states return to the family
of European nations, says Jonathan Fenby.
HE SUMMER OF 1815 was a turbulent one in France. On June

18th, the Battle of Waterloo brought to an end Napoleons
attempted comeback in the Hundred Days. Returning to
Paris, he declared All is not lost while taking a bath in the
Elyse 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-Elyses 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 Blcher, 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
RESTORATION
Seeing Talleyrand ... leaning on Fouchs arm, the writer-politician Ren 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, Carme, 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 doeuvres, 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. Blcher proposed to blow up the Pont dIna, commemorating Napoleons victory
over Prussia in 1806. Wellington posted a British soldier on the bridge,
guessing correctly that Blcher 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 kings 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.
ELLINGTON ALSO ORDERED the appointment as minister for police of Joseph Fouch, 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 Fouchs arm, the writerpolitician Ren 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 Fouch, 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 Napoleons
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 Ntre. 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 Comdie-franaise 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.
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 migrs 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 Dsir (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-Josphine 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 kings 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 NAPOLEONS 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 Odon 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,
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 rgime.
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 brothers 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 monarchys identification
with Catholicism. The column erected by Napoleon to his glory
in the Place Vendme was torn down.
Ignoring the kings 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 Bdoyre, 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 Napoleons 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
Fouch 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, Nmes,
Bziers and Uzs.
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
Top: Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, The Man with Six

Heads, coloured engraving, 1815.
Above: Joseph Fouch, 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 Napoleons 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.
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 Fouch 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
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 Frances
invasions. The occupation army was to remain for three to five years
under Wellingtons 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, Carme, 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-Comt in the treaty. If France is still France, it is
thanks to the Russians, wrote the Comte de Mol, another political
survivor who had been Napoleons justice minister but then held office
under the Bourbons. Faced with Britain, Austria and Prussia, Russia had
every interest in our remaining a power of the first order, as Mol noted.
France was on its way to being re-integrated into the European
system. This reflected the countrys 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).
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 Hochstrassers
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
Enlightened Germans:
Weimars statue of the
poets and dramatists
Goethe (left) and Schiller.
SIGNPOSTS
German Intellectual
History
Peter Schrder highlights key publications on

Germanys 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 Diotimas 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
Montesquieus 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.
Marxs 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, Germanys
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: Europes 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 Schrder
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 Pagdens 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. Reeds

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. Kants
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 Forsters 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. Reeds, 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. Reeds 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
Goethes Iphigenia in Tauris be the
first feminist play since Sophocles Antigone? Also perplexing
REVIEWS
is Reeds assertion that Hegels
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 Horkheimers
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
Reeds 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 Wielands
or, in fact, Kants definitions of
Enlightenment. The goal, like
Reeds, 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 Reeds 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.
Sen M. Williams
Cunegondes
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 Kaplans 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 Plancks 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 thats
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 Plancks 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
Plancks 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 Plancks
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
Browns 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 Fortnums
the British Museum showcases all 265 medieval
and renaissance treasures inherited and collected necessary rooms, generously funded by Ferdinands 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 dynastys 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 familys 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 Ferdinands collection survives
comfort of an armchair, in the readers own
intact, shared at his wish between the British
domestic smoking room. Online, there is a
Museum and his neo-Renaissance French
curators blog and a microsite with detailed inchteau at Waddesdon. That this should be the
formation about the pieces; for those who prefer
case is thanks to Ferdinands 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 Taits
Catalogue of the Bequest (1986-1991). Gorgeous
a nation.
colour photographs accompany a thoughtful
text, which introduces Ferdinands 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 fathers 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
nands 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
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
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 Goffs classic, The
Birth of Purgatory (1984), argued
for the 12th century as the
turning point. Peter Browns
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 ones way out of ones sins.
Peter Browns 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 everyones 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 Fhrer 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 Fhrer. But it is
trade that lies at the heart of Maria
Fusaros 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 Venices 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
Republics 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
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 Thompsons
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 Thompsons
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
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 Chartisms 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 Thompsons 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 Chartisms 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 leaderships 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.
Thompsons 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 dont come much
larger than Ferdinand Mounts
great-great-grandfather, John
(later General Sir John) Low from
Clatto in Fife.
Seeking his fortune in Britains 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. Lows 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 Companys and the British Crowns separate armies. This time British
officers in the former mutinied
and were dismissed. Lows 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 Mounts
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 Companys monopoly.
Low rose to become the
rather detached Military
Member of the GovernorGenerals Supreme Council, a
position he held during the
Mutiny, when several of his relations gained notoriety for randomly killing innocent people.
Lows 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 Humayuns tent in Allasani Peddanas 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
dass 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 Humayuns troop kept safe, his valuable
Buddhist women, in the millennia-old Theribooks were lost. Among them, his future son
gatha the worlds first anthology of womens
Akbars biographer Abul-Fazal would report in
the History of Akbar, was a history of Temr [the literature give us utterances of an indeterminable age:
Zafarnma] now in [Akbars] library. Where
Abul-Fazal traces that copy of the Zafarnma
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 nations historical past and its
India. The later absence of Buddhism itself is
literary presence than in this twist.
thrown into relief in Shahs 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 worlds
if far more catholic heir
earliest anthology notwithto Akbars own translation
standing. Halliseys own quesbureau (the Maktabkhna).
tioning, in his Introduction,
The Loeb and I Tatti Libraries
of the Therigathas minimal
for Greek and Italian texts,
reception history accentuates
and the Clay Sanskrit Library,
the unaddressed. Did the
being its more proximate preTherigathas 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
Shahs Sufi Lyrics, performed
water?); celebrates womens
by both Muslims and Sikhs.
enlightenment (What you [consider] pleasures
Abul-Fazals 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 Majestys 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 MCLIs 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 Huennekenss
telescoping of the 20th-centurys 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
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,
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 Socialisms 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 Snyders
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 Nazis 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 Hitlers 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.
Snyders conclusion is arresting: as the Earths 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 cultures 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 Treatys failing to restore
Europes 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 wars
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 books 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 Mahlers 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 Starkeys 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 Schrder is a senior
lecturer with a particular
interest in the history of ideas at
University College London.
Sen M. Williams is ViceChancellors Fellow in Germanic
Studies at the University of
Sheffield.
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
Email p.lay@historytoday.com
Post to History Today, 2nd Floor,
9 Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH
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.
Todays 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 todays 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 Motadels otherwise
unimpeachable article (Muslims in Hitlers 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
Connect with us on Twitter

twitter.com/historytoday
In the Dock
Clive Emsleys 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 Ritchies 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 Greats
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 Monarchs
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, Keplers 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 Germanys best-recorded witchcraft trials.
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Augusts Prize Crossword
Londons Technological Triumphs
Britains 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.
The November issue of History Today will be on sale throughout the

UK on October 22nd. Ask your newsagent to reserve you a copy.
PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The winner for August is Richard Tagart, Antwerp, Belgium.
EDITORS 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 Bibliothque Nationale/Bridgeman
Images; 12 Museu Nacional de Soares dos Reis, Portugal/Bridgeman Images; 13 Bridgeman Images;
14 Bibliothque 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. HENRYS HOLLOW VICTORY: 19 Philip Mould/
Bridgeman Images; 20-21 Jrme da Cunha/akg-images; 22 Maps Tim Aspden; 23 Bibliothque
Nationale/Bridgeman Images; 24 Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna/Bridgeman Images; 25 top Erich
Lessing/akg-images; bottom left Bridgeman Images; bottom right Muse des Beaux-Arts de Dijon/
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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
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Nationale de Tunisie/Bridgeman Images; 42 Bridgeman Images; 43 top Getty Images; bottom
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top Muse Carnavalet/Bridgeman Images; bottom Chteau de Versailles/Bridgeman Images; 53
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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 Chesters 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 cant shake hands with
anyone from San Francisco?
14 Who was Dr Johnsons 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 natures 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?
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, 18701918
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
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Security between US and Japan (4)
16 Sarah ___ (d.1737), eccentric
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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 Nights 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
Victorias Sceptre oer the Waves (5)
25 Sir William ___ (1782-1845),
army officer in the East India
Company (4)
The winner of this

months prize
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Entries to: Crossword, History Today, 2nd Floor, 9 Staple Inn, London
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Six degrees of Separation

Caroline Herschel
(1750-1848)
CAROLINE HERSCHEL
astronomer and first female scientist

to be paid for her work, has a main
belt asteroid named after her, as
does the Black Sea resort of Gaspra,
frequently visited by
English Pirate, known as Blackbeard

who received a royal pardon, as did
Admiral Thomas
Cochrane,
(1775-1860)
Alexei Maximovich
Peshkov
(1868-1936)
10th Earl of Dundonald, who was the

inspiration for C.S. Foresters character
Hornblower, who took his Christian
name from the husband of
known as Maxim Gorky, Russian

writer who was briefly imprisoned in
the Peter and Paul Fortress in
St Petersburg, as was
Frances Fanny Nelson,

Viscountess Nelson
(1761-1831)
Alexei Petrovich Romanov

(1690-1718)
Russian Tsarevich, son of Peter I,
who died in 1718, as did ...
Edward Teach
(c.1680-1718)
By Stephanie Pollard and Justin Pollard
who had rooms at 17 New King Street,

Bath, two doors away from the home of
BYZANTIUM
FromtheArchive
In drawing parallels with international events of the 1980s and 1990s, Michael Antonuccis 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
Antonuccis 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 Antonuccis
thesis is, it is not always convincing. To
start with, the examples that he used
to illustrate Byzantine diplomacy
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
Antonuccis 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 leaders participation in a public ceremony, where
he had to grovel in the dust at the
emperors feet. Antonucci described
how potential allies were invited to
Constantinople to be overawed by the
sight of the citys 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

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October 2015

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