History Today 07-2016

July 2016
Vol 66 Issue 7
The SOMME
Tragic? Yes.
Wasteful? Yes.
Futile? No.
Publisher Andy Patterson

Editor Paul Lay
Digital Manager Dean Nicholas
Picture Research Mel Haselden
Reviews Editor Philippa Joseph
Contributing Editor Kate Wiles
Editorial Assistant Rhys Griffiths
Art Director Gary Cook
Subscriptions Manager Cheryl Deflorimonte
Subscriptions Assistant Ava Bushell
Accounts Sharon Harris
Board of Directors
Simon Biltcliffe (Chairman), Tim Preston
CONTACTS
History Today is published monthly by
History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10 Staple Inn
London WC1V 7QH. Tel: 020 3219 7810
enquiries@historytoday.com
Flowers of fascism:
Jean-Louis Trintignant
in Il conformista.
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Tel: 020 3219 7813/4
subscribe@historytoday.com
ADVERTISING
Lisa Martin, Portman Media
Tel: 020 3859 7093
lisamartin@portmanmedia.co.uk
Print managed by Webmart Ltd. 01869 321321.
Printed at W. Gibbons & Sons Ltd, Willenhall, UK.
Distributed by MarketForce 020 3787 9001 (UK & RoW)
and Disticor 905 619 6565 (North America).
History Today (ISSN No: 0018-2753, USPS No: 246-580)
is published monthly by History Today Ltd, GBR and
distributed in the USA by Asendia USA, 17B S Middlesex
Ave, Monroe NJ 08831. Periodicals postage paid New
Brunswick, NJ and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: send address changes to History Today, 701C
Ashland Avenue, Folcroft PA 19032. Subscription records
are maintained at History Today Ltd, 2nd Floor, 9/10
Staple Inn, London WC1V 7QH, UK.
EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

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

18,161 Jan-Dec 2015
2 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016
FROM THE EDITOR

I HAVE LONG FELT GUILTY about my attraction to Italian fascist architecture,
for which I blame an early addiction to film-maker Bernardo Bertoluccis 1970
expressionist study of political compromise and deceit, Il conformista. Yet, if
there is a more beautiful 20th-century building than the vast post office that
graces central Naples, I have yet to see it. So I felt a sense of relief when, in June,
Jonathan Meades, TVs most brilliant, belligerent and historically aware auteur,
devoted 90 minutes to the subject in his documentary, Ben Building: Mussolini,
Monuments and Modernism, which examined architecture under the regime of
the Dictator who could not dictate. Meades essay, Form and Fascism, in which
he outlines his thoughts on the topic, can be found on page 43.
Meades has long made plain his detestation of fascism and totalitarianism of
all kinds, as well as his militant atheism previously he has made coruscating,
thrilling programmes on architecture under Hitler and Stalin but he makes a
crucial point when he says: The attribution to inanimate objects of humours
or moral qualities is half-witted Can a car be fascist? The best of Italian
architecture produced during Mussolinis time has survived despite Il Duce and
his thugs. Much of it is extraordinary, the best of it is sublime.
And so to the ridiculous. At exactly the same time that Meades playful
provocations were being broadcast on BBC4, BBC2 offered us the first episode of
Versailles, a rompy-pompy French drama, allegedly the most expensive ever made
in that country, which purports to give life to the court of the priapic Sun King,
Louis XIV. It is what one might expect: oodles of nudity (which apparently is a
big thing, though it is no more daring than that in I, Claudius first broadcast in
1976); a smattering of violence, to hold the Game of Thrones crowd; and lots and
lots of hair. In other words it is a take it or leave it, silly if sometimes enjoyable,
riff on a few popular cliches about early modern kingship, similar in style and
what content there is to the highly profitable TV drama, The Tudors.
I am assured by those who have a stake in this kind of thing that the script
improves. Yet the most historic thing about Versailles, a fact overlooked by those
historians who have lashed themselves to its banner, is that such a high-profile
French production is in English. When even France, that most chauvinistic of
cultures, embraces the Anglosphere, that is truly historic. It is also rather sad.
Paul Lay
HistoryMatters
Willoughbyland Dissection Theatres Byzantine Lessons Pieter Geyl
The Colony
of Eternal
Spring
The short-lived colony of
Willoughbyland, in what is
now Suriname, was both
verdant and dangerous. In
the end, it was exchanged
for New York.
Matthew Parker
THREE AND A HALF centuries ago this
month, on July 26th, 1666, an English
armada of warships and 1,000 men,
en route from Barbados to recapture
the island of St Kitts from the French,
was struck by a devastating hurricane.
Almost the entire fleet, together with
the men on board, was destroyed,
driven ashore at Guadeloupe, with
wreckage washed up on Martinique as
well. Of its commander, the Governor
of the Charibbee Islands, Francis, Lord
Willoughby, there would be no trace,
except a couch, recognised as his own,
and some peeses of a ship washed
ashore at Montserrat.
Thus ended an extraordinary career.
A Presbyterian from a wealthy Lincolnshire family, Francis, Lord Willoughby
was a parliamentary general in the first
years of the Civil Wars. But alarmed by
the levelling principles taking hold of
the army and Parliament, he defected to
the Royalists in early 1648. Meanwhile,
he put together an exit strategy, securing a share of the proprietorship of the
English Caribbean islands. Following the
execution of the king and seeing that all
is gone at home, Willoughby, like many
other Cavaliers, set sail for Barbados,
which had declared itself Royalist.
When a parliamentary fleet arrived
Aphra Behn found

it a land where
all things by nature
are rare, delightful
and wonderful,
a place of Eternal
Spring
Cavalier colonist:
etching of Francis,
Lord Willoughby,
1647.
to subdue the island, Willoughby determined to resist, asking why Barbados

should obey a Parliament in which we
have no Representatives, or persons
chosen by us? But after two months
blockade, the Royalists surrendered.
Once again, though, Willoughby
had an exit plan. Soon after his arrival
in the West Indies he had sponsored
an expedition to the Wild Coast of

Guiana. Here he had established a small
satellite colony Willoughbyland in
what is now Suriname. Many previous
efforts at European settlement in the
Guianas had failed, usually ending with a
massacre by the indigenous inhabitants,
called Caribs by the English, who could
fire ten or twelve arrows in the time it
takes to load a gun. But Willoughby had
made a treaty with the local Carib kings
and secured an uneasy peace. The soil
was spectacularly fecund and far inland,
it was rumoured, lay the golden city of
El Dorado. Expelled from Barbados in
March 1652, the Cavaliers transferred to
Willoughbyland.
Aphra Behn, later a giant of the
Restoration stage, spent about seven
months in Suriname from mid-1663,
an experience that would inspire her
masterpiece, Oroonoko. She found it
a land where all things by nature are
rare, delightful and wonderful, a place
of Eternal Spring, where the blissfully
warm air was fragrant with the scents
of oranges, lemons, figs, nutmeg and
noble aromatics. Sometimes, she
writes, the heat was something violent.
An earlier visitor praised the luxuriant
soil and declared Willoughbyland the
most beautiful place on Earth. He also
devoted a whole chapter of his book to
Things there Venomous and Hurtful, including electric eels and jaguars, as well
as snakes, crocodiles, scorpions, bats,
ants, mosquitoes, toads, and frogs.
However rich or alarming the
wildlife, the soil was undoubtedly
luxuriant. As well as trading with the
Caribs for tobacco and cotton goods,
the first settlers, numbering some 300,
planted cotton and tobacco themselves
and harvested valuable dyestuffs and
hardwoods.
Willoughby himself had quickly left
for England, to recruit new settlers
and to plot for the return of the
monarchy. Left alone for a decade, the
colony boomed. As well as rich soil,
JULY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 3
HISTORYMATTERS
Willoughbyland enjoyed free trade
with all comers and friendly relations
with neighbouring French and Dutch
colonies. It was agreed that, even if their
countries were at war elsewhere, the
Guiana colonies would remain at peace.
Freedom of religion was established in
Willoughbyland, which quickly attracted
numerous Jewish immigrants, who were
granted freedom of conscience, the
right to erect a synagogue (the first of
which was built in 1654), eligibility for
election as burgesses and from seven
to 12 years exemption from taxation.
There was even democracy, described
Freedom of religion
was established in
Willoughbyland,
which quickly
attracted numerous
Jewish immigrants,
who were granted
freedom of conscience
by one settler as a peculiar form of
government, elective in the people, with
the annual election of a governor from
among the planters.
By the end of the 1650s there were
4,000 settlers and this number grew
weekly with incomers and with succeeding generation, for the women are
very prolifical and have lusty children.
There were around 200 plantations
lining the rivers that constituted the
sole method of travel and transport, of
which 50 were now growing what was
considered the finest sugar in the world.
In May 1662 a London newspaper informed its readership: Surynam ... is
coming to the highest probability of
being the richest and healthfullest of all
our foreign settlements. A government
inspector declared it Englands most
hopeful colony anywhere in the world.
Yet the colony had already reached
its zenith. The Restoration triggered a
series of disasters in Willoughbyland.
The elected governor, William Byam,
described by Aphra Behn as the most
fawning fair-tongud fellow in the
world ... not fit to be mentioned with
the worst of slaves, used the return of
the king to declare himself permanent
governor. As he later explained: Here
democracy fell, by the loyal concessions
to monarchy. The scheduled elections
were cancelled as a needlesse and
unnecessary Charge and Trouble to

the inhabitants. There were fierce
protests and Byam started locking up or
expelling his critics. Soon the colony had
descended into angry factionalism.
As a reward for his constant plotting,
after the Restoration Willoughby was
given the governorship of the Charibbee islands and also proprietorship
of Willoughbyland, to be held jointly
with the Earl of Clarendon. This gave
him almost unlimited power, a state
of affairs unwelcome to many planters
there. When at last Willoughby visited
his colony in November 1664, he only
narrowly survived assassination. Worse,
his entourage introduced a fever into
the colony, which killed as many as a
third of the population.
War brought the final ruin. At the
beginning of 1666, Willoughby ordered
Byam to overturn the gentlemens
agreement and attack nearby Dutch
colonies and then, in June 1666, the
French settlements to the east. Losses in
the fighting weakened a Willoughbyland
already decimated by disease and desertions. Willoughbys death at sea the following month further depressed morale.
So, when a fleet from Zeeland arrived at
the Suriname River in February 1667, the
English defenders of Fort Willoughby
quickly surrendered. The fort was recaptured in October but by then the Treaty
of Breda had been signed. This was the
end of Willoughbylands brief existence,
given to the Dutch in exchange for their
colony New Amsterdam, later renamed
New York.
Matthew Parker is the author of Willoughbyland:

Englands Lost Colony (Windmill Books, 2015).
Alternative Histories by Rob Murray
The Star is
the Corpse
The dissection theatres
of 17th-century Europe
were hot tourist spots,
spectacles that mixed
medicine with art.
Anna Jamieson
THE ANATOMICAL THEATRE in the
Archiginnasio of Bologna is one of the
citys most intriguing tourist attractions. For three euros, tourists can visit
the anatomical theatre and the former
university, one of Europes first. But the
space is missing one vital feature: a
corpse. In the 1650s the crowds would
not have flocked to take photographs
and gaze at the architectural features.
Rather, they came to gawp at the dead.
This cultural phenomenon was
not just reserved for Italy, despite the
presence of theatres in Padua, Verona,
Venice and Rome. Across Europe,
HISTORYMATTERS
anatomical theatres affiliated with the

early universities steadily became tourist
attractions, due to the public dissections they held. From Leiden to Paris,
Amsterdam and London, these unusual
urban sites opened their doors to an
enthused and interested public. As the
17th century progressed, the anatomical
theatre became a focal point of city
life, where the fashionable elite would
gather. Not solely reserved for medical
men, it represented an enlightened
arena, where clergymen, magistrates,
merchants, administrators and even
royalty could mingle.
Bolognas is not the only anatomical
theatre that survives; Leiden and Padua
serve as the earliest modern examples
that continue to operate as tourist
venues. Both built in 1594, they offered
anatomy lessons in the form of weekly
dissections for university students and
the public alike. Sessions took place
during the coldest months of the year
to preserve the corpses with different
ones dedicated to particular organs or
systems of the human body.
In 1638 Bologna followed suit and, by
the end of the 17th century, Europe was
Theatre of
death: the
anatomical
theatre in the
Archiginnasio,
Bologna.
awash with anatomical theatres. Putatively designed for educational purposes,

their function soon proved multifarious, as other uses quickly surfaced.
Grandiose in scale, ornate in decoration,
the varying theatres of Europe were
often different stylistically, most had
one thing in common: those dissected
had been executed as criminals. Aside
from Bologna, where relaxed laws
allowed other methods of procuring
the dead, most theatres relied on a
flow of corpses coming directly from
the gallows. In this sense, a trip to the
anatomical theatre went hand in hand
with viewing a public execution. Shortly
after viewing a hanging or execution,
witnesses could then see the same
individual being dissected, and a strange,
macabre and popular source of urban
entertainment began to unfold.
As a result, viewing a public dissection came to mean more than just a
medical investigation. In Italy especially,
dissections took place during communal
festivities; most notably, the Carnival.
Despite the fact that these celebrations
coincided with the cooler months, the
historian Giovanni Ferrari argues that
the intermingling of festivities and public
dissections was a very deliberate choice
by Bolognese officials, designed to encourage large audiences to attend. Out
of season dissections were often badly
attended and labelled as unsuccessful by
organisers, regardless of the usefulness
of the lecture or the range of subjects
covered. As one observer described,
Bolognas theatre was one of the most
renowned constructions in Italy, the
constant amazement of foreigners,
and the glory of the city wherein it was
built. This interplay between wonder,
recognition and glory suggests that
what was important here was not education or medical progress but, rather,
a large audience, international prestige
and a reinforcement of the universitys
authority, medical or otherwise. As
Jonathan Sawday notes, no respectable English traveller would travel to
Holland and miss Leidens anatomical
theatre, often the highlight of a visit. In
1641, the writer and diarist John Evelyn
wrote that: Amongst all the rarities of
this place, I was much-pleased with the
sight of the anatomy school, theatre and
repository adjoining.
By the mid-17th century the

anatomical theatre was no longer seen,
by the medical set at least, as a place of
anatomical discovery. Rather, jostling
crowds and competing academic
factions meant that getting a good seat
was tricky and students tended to rely
on private closed sessions, reserved for
medics, to advance their understanding
of the body. Historians now argue that
it was the ceremonial, symbolic and
ultimately spectacular function of the
anatomical theatre that drew in crowds.
In Bologna, posters were papered up
around the city announcing the date
and time of the public sessions. Like a
show or museum, entry was ticketed
and, usually, paid for. Often, the audience would be entertained with music
beforehand and reports were made of
rowdy revellers and hecklers, excited by
the festivities.
A vigorous set of rituals consolidated
this sense of ceremony. The audience
sat according to rank and a dress code
was maintained. Theatres themselves
were extremely beautiful and ornate,
often loosely based on classical models,
such as the Colosseum, and carved
from wood. Like Roman emperors,
anatomists behaved like showmen and
often sat aloft on decorated thrones.
The sense of spectacle was reinforced
by wooden carvings of renowned
physicians or eerie sculptures and wall
paintings of skeletons, strange and
unsettling mementos mori. All these elements created an enticing atmosphere
of drama and display, where viewing the
dead through an aesthetic and even celebratory eye was encouraged. Despite
the disapproval of medical men, such as
William Hunter, anatomical science had
become a form of spectacle, its gaze
no longer purely medical, which often
descended into voyeurism.
Whatever the motive for viewing the
dead, by the 1800s the popularity of the
anatomical theatre was waning, as new
teaching methods developed and public
interest decreased. Today, some still
stand, relics of a continuing relationship between medicine and the arts, a
fascinating meeting point for historians
of theatre, science and culture.
Anna Jamieson is a masters student of History of

Art at Birkbeck, University of London.
HISTORYMATTERS
Victims of
Their Own
Success
The United States should
heed the lessons of 1,000
years ago, if it is to sustain
its military superiority.
Peter Frankopan
THE PICTURE is a familiar one. Young
men, spurred on by religious beliefs and
encouraged by their peers, gathered
on the edges of Asia Minor, waiting
to attack the Christian world to the
west. Immense kudos was to be won
within the Muslim world from inflicting
pain and damage on innocent victims:
men, women and children who were
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Launching attacks could and did cause
untold damage to the economy, driving
fear and changing the way people lived,
moved and thought. Training bases in
northern Syria prepared eager wouldbe soldiers, teaching them the survival
techniques needed to infiltrate enemy
territory and, of course, how to launch
their attacks. And spiritual rewards were
on offer too: a place in paradise, if you
met your end during the mission. That
was Asia Minor 11 centuries ago.

The Roman Empire splintered in two
spectacular explosions. First, Rome itself
was sacked in 410 and then its western
provinces and many of those of North
Africa collapsed later in the fifth century.
Two hundred years later, the most important parts of the Empire did not just
remain standing, but were flourishing.
Centred on the great city of Constantinople, the East Roman (or Byzantine)
Empire, controlled the wealthy grain
basket of the Nile delta, as well as
Anatolia (modern Turkey), much of the
Balkans, Greece, Palestine and Syria.
Life looked rosy, as the numismatic and
archaeological records show.
The second expansion brought the
Byzantine Empire to its knees as followers of the Prophet Muhammad poured
out of the Arabian peninsula in the 630s,
forging a vast new world that linked
Spain with the Middle East and Central
Asia, pushing right up to the border
with China by 751. The Empire hung on
for dear life, pouring resources into a
frontier network across Asia Minor to
hold back the tide.
Byzantine generals were realistic
about how secure the border could be:
there was no hope of stopping bands of
motivated, fast-moving individuals from
penetrating under the cover of darkness
or otherwise: policing a frontier in this
way required (and still requires) money,
time, resources and people to maintain

it. Instead, the Byzantines had to learn
how to deal with attacks.
They identified patterns. Timing was
predictable; so, too, were the targets:
the attackers were more keen on glory
than death, on the bragging rights in
this world than the next and more keen
on enriching themselves than finding
out what paradise had to offer. The best
approach was to adapt to the reality
and prepare for regular pin-pricks,
rather than becoming the target of
more powerful forces further away. As
seen from Constantinople, there would
The USAF like the Byzantine

army of the 10th and 11th centuries
is a victim of its own success
Eternal war:
battle between
the Byzantine
and Arab armies,
from the Madrid
Skylitzes, 11th
century.
always be problems on the periphery, so

it was important to build relations with
Baghdad and Cairo and to use official
channels to try to rein in troublesome
warlords in border zones, whose
successes could destabilise not just
the Byzantine Empire but the Abbasid
Caliphate, too.
In the 10th century, however, the
balance began to change. A series of
economic shocks rattled the economies
of the Middle East and Central Asia, in
part the result of a period of climate
change. Soul searching in Baghdad
opened the door for daring Byzantine
raids that knocked out the attack bases
that had been used to such great effect
for almost 200 years. That, in turn,
changed the make-up and fighting
practices of the imperial military. Having
pioneered defensive tactics to prevent
raids causing too much damage, attention now turned to big targets: fortified
towns and cities.
Within the space of a generation, the
Byzantines had rolled the frontier back
hundreds of miles, recovering places
long lost to Muslims. The jewel in the
crown was Antioch in northern Syria,
the gateway to Palestine, but also the
protecting valve to defend Asia Minor
and the interior. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the century that followed saw an
astonishing period of economic and
demographic growth, as well as an
intellectual and cultural flowering, as
artists, scholars and writers like Michael
HISTORYMATTERS
Psellos created some of the treasures of

Byzantine culture.
The problem was that when a new
threat appeared in the form of the
Sekjuk Turks in the 11th century, it took
the Byzantines too long to remember
how to fight a rearguard action. Instead
of dealing swiftly with nimble attackers, a ploy that had worked in the past,
the response was to send large, heavy
armies that took too long to move and
were left chasing shadows.
A similar problem, it seems, is facing
the US Air Force today. In a recently
published report, Lt General David
Barno, former Commander of Military
Operations in Afghanistan, argued that
the USAF like the Byzantine army
of the 10th and 11th centuries is a
victim of its own success. Not a single
American warplane has been shot down
by an enemy aircraft since 1991; and not
one has been lost to enemy air defences
since 2003. As a result, General Bardo
notes, the risk to aircraft and airmen in
combat has become nearly negligible.
At a time when the US is acutely
aware of growing ambition and military
expenditure by China and Russia, the
fact that pilots have never experienced
contested air war means that investment is needed to prepare for threats of
the future and not those of the present.
It also means that skills need to be
taught and developed in advance, rather
than when it is too late. Resilience,
for example, to enable soldiers and
airmen to cope when more and more
squadrons of their mates dont come
home, should be impressed on serving a
military that has got used to undisputed
superiority.
When the going had been good in
Constantinople 1,000 years ago, there
were voices like those of General Barno,
too, who warned about under-funding
in the armed forces and the fact that
young people did not want to serve
the emperor but to feather their own
nests by becoming lawyers and making
money. By the time anyone listened, it
was too late. Whether General Barnos
warning meets the same deaf ears
remains to be seen.
Peter Frankopans The Silk Roads: A New History of

the World is published by Bloomsbury (UK) and Knopf
(US).
The Lives of
Pieter Geyl
On the 50th anniversary of

his death, we should recall
the career and influence of
the great Dutch historian.
Stijn Vanrossen
PIETER GEYLS influential career not
only shaped the development of the
historical profession in Britain but, at the
time of his death, he was one of the few
historians writing in a minor language
to have attained world fame.
Pieter Geyl arrived in London in
1914 as a correspondent for the Nieuwe
Rotterdamse Courant, one of the largest
Dutch newspapers, and interviewed
political leaders
such as Robert Cecil,
Winston Churchill
and amon de Valera.
After the First World
War he became
the first professor
of Dutch Studies
at the University of
London, with a chair
created by the Dutch
government at both
University College
London and Bedford
College for Women.
Encounters in History, the 1963
His early professional
edition.
years were notably
difficult: the individualist Geyl soon clashed with the provost,
Sir Gregory Foster, and was almost fired.
Being a professor was but one of the
lives Geyl led in this period. From 1919 he
acted as the London representative of
the Nationaal Bureau voor Documentatie over Nederland, a foreign affairs
agency that paid a number of silent
attachs to influence public opinion
and improve the image of the Netherlands abroad. The Dutch had stayed
neutral during the First World War,
causing a diplomatic rift with neighbouring Belgium, which was seeking
international support to annex parts of
the Netherlands as retribution. At the
same time, Geyl supported the Greater
Netherlands movement, advocating the
unification of Flanders with the Nether-
lands, and paid regular visits to Belgium

to meet with champions of the Flemish
case and to giving public speeches.
His political influence is illustrated
by the fact that he was refused entry
into Belgium in 1929 and 1931 and
almost missed his appointment at the
University of Utrecht in 1936, as a large
part of the academic staff saw him as a
troublemaker with dangerous political
views. On the brink of the Second World
War, Geyl moved away from the Greater
Netherlands movement, which aligned
itself increasingly with fascism. A lecture
series in Rotterdam, only months after
the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi
Germany, on the figure of Napoleon in
which parallels with Hitler were all too
clear, led to his arrest and initial transfer
to Buchenwald concentration camp.
Geyl was detained until 1944, mainly in
the Netherlands.
In Dutch historiography, Geyl is best
known for his unfinished multi-volume
study, three decades in its creation, on
the joint history of the Dutch-speaking
people of the Netherlands and Flanders,
in which his political ideas and personal
hopes at times overwhelmed his historical judgement. In the English-speaking
world, he found intellectual fame when
he turned from primary research to
historical criticism and the philosophy
of history, perhaps most notably in an
intellectual boxing match with Arnold
Toynbee on BBC radio in 1948, where
Geyl showed himself as a vehement
opponent of the determinism apparent
in Toynbees A Study of History (1934-39).
Geyl demanded a humble position
for the historian: historical research will
always have a relative character and
must be stripped as much as possible
from big theoretical frameworks or
conclusive certainties. In his work on
Napoleon, Geyl defined history, like
Ranke, as an argument without end.
And Geyl loved to argue, as Toynbee
himself wrote in his obituary on Geyl in
1967: The fact was that Geyl could not
resist the temptation to seize any opportunity for having a fight in any kind
of arena that offered itself.
Geyl in Britain. The Institute of Historical Research

and University College London will organise a
conference on the impact of Pieter Geyl in Britain
on November 18th, 2016. The full programme will
be announced on history.ac.uk in June.
SOMME
The first day of the Somme, July 1st, 1916,

has become synonomous with incompetent
leadership and a callous disregard for human
life. Gary Sheffield offers a more complex
picture of the four-month-long battle and the
role played by General Sir Douglas Haig.
An exercise
in futility?
The Battle of the Somme, or at least its opening day, is such a notorious event that it
is difficult to assess it objectively. On the first day of the offensive, July 1st, 1916, the British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) suffered 57,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 were killed. This
was just the beginning of a four-month attritional struggle, which may have resulted in as
many as 1.2 million British, French and German casualties. The Allies advanced a maximum
of seven miles. Arras and Passchendaele followed in 1917, battles that similarly failed to break
through the German trenches but which caused enormous losses. Such was the scale of the
suffering that many see the Somme as mere futile slaughter and the Commander-in-Chief
of the BEF, General (later Field Marshal) Sir Douglas Haig as a criminally incompetent
butcher. At least in the anglophone world, it is difficult to separate the reputation of
the Somme from that of Haig, both of which have undergone revision in recent years.
British and German walking wounded

on their way to a dressing station near
Bernafay Wood, July 19th, 1916.
SOMME
Clockwise from above: the 20th Deccan Horse

of the Indian Army line up in preparation for
attack, Bazentin Ridge, July 1916; General
Sir Henry Rawlinson, by Francis Dodd, 1917;
Douglas Haig, newly promoted to Field
Marshal, by William Orpen, 1917.
From the 1980s onwards scholars began a full-scale reassessment of

the BEF. A rough consensus emerged that, faced with the seemingly
intractable problems of trench warfare and revolutionary changes in
the conduct of war, the BEF eventually adapted well to these new conditions and by 1918 it had emerged as an effective fighting force. There
is no such consensus about Haig. Historians such as Tim Travers, Ian
Beckett, Paul Harris and the team of Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson
take a generally dim view of his generalship. Other historians, such
as Stephen Badsey, John Bourne and Peter Simkins, although far from
uncritical, regard Haig in a more positive light. Even in the 1960s, when
risible books such as Alan Clarks The Donkeys (actually about the British
army in 1915) attracted much attention, some historians such as John
Terraine, Cyril Falls and Anthony Farrar-Hockley had been prepared to
see the Somme as something other than blind slaughter.
The Somme continues to divide historians. Prior and Wilsons 2006
book The Somme takes a downbeat view of the battle. By contrast, my
study, The Somme (2003), places the offensive in the context of the BEFs
learning process and argues that the battle was an attritional success for
the Entente powers, an essential step on the road to eventual victory.
William Philpotts 2009 book goes even further. To quote its title, the
Somme was a Bloody Victory, Philpott being perhaps the first historian
since Terraine to make that claim, and he, too, explicitly links the 1916
battle with Allied success in 1918 (he also firmly re-inserts the French
army into the narrative of the Somme). Today, the debate goes on: the
2016 edition of Prior and Wilsons Somme is critical of Haig and robustly
disputes Philpotts thesis.
THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME was the consequence of Allied

strategy agreed in late 1915, whereby sequential offensives would be
mounted on the Eastern, Western and Italian fronts. The Franco-British
contribution was to be a push in the area of the River Somme. Originally,
the French army was to play the major role but the German offensive at
Verdun, which began on February 21st, 1916, changed all that. Increasing
numbers of French divisions were committed to Verdun, meaning that,
when the attack was finally launched, on July 1st, it was Haigs BEF that
took the lead. This was a major test for the British. Much of the BEF
consisted of raw wartime volunteers, the majority fighting in their first
major battle. This deprived the BEF of the advantage of being nursed
through the Somme by the experienced French army. On the northern
part of the battlefield on July 1st there was some initial success, which
could not be sustained, but otherwise it was a picture of bloody failure.
South of the Roman road that ran diagonally across the battlefield
things were different. Indeed, on the extreme right of the line the
British took all of their objectives and the French did exceptionally
well, the latters advances being achieved while sustaining very light
casualties. July 1st, 1916 was the beginning, not the end of the Battle of
the Somme. For four months, until November 18th, the Allies continued
the offensive, gradually forcing the Germans back but failing to deliver a
knockout blow. Such a result was almost certainly impossible to achieve
on the Western Front in 1916. It was certainly beyond the capabilities
of the inexperienced BEF.
The Somme is central to assessments of Haigs generalship. He
has been accused of being ludicrously over-optimistic and of failing
to exercise proper control over his senior subordinates. Other writers,
while acknowledging Haigs mistakes, view the Somme as a key stage
in his learning experience. It is important to remember that he had
only become C-in-C in December 1915 and it was the first major battle
which he had commanded at this level. As C-in-C, Haigs responsibilities
were huge. He was far more than just a battlefield commander. Rather,
he was a war manager, answerable to the government for the operations, discipline, training, logistics and welfare of the largest British
army in history. In todays terms he was an Army Group Commander,
responsible for conducting operations; a theatre commander with a
Haig (in cap) and Rawlinson leaving the

Fourth Army headquarters, Querrieu,
July 1916.
It is important
to remember that
Haig had only
become C-in-C in
December 1915
and it was the
first battle he had
commanded at
this level
SOMME
huge political and administrative burden; and a National Contingent
Commander, the senior British soldier in the coalition forces on the
Western Front. Arguably, as C-in-C he simply had too much to do, but
Haig was reluctant to give up any of his responsibilities.
One of Haigs urgent tasks on becoming C-in-C was to establish his
authority. As a full general, he was the same rank as his army commanders. Although Haigs authority was surprisingly limited (he did not have
a free hand in hiring and firing), he made it clear that he would only
allow promotion on merit and was prepared to work with men with
whom he had a difficult relationship. General Sir Henry Rawlinson,
commander of Fourth Army, had been caught trying to scapegoat a
subordinate for a failure in battle in 1915, but after due consideration
Haig had decided not to sack him. In December 1915 Haig recommended
Rawlinson for promotion knowing that he was not a sincere man but
believing he has brains and experience. It has been argued that Haigs
forbidding character discouraged subordinates from discussion because
they were scared of him. It is an assertion undermined by the planning
for the Somme, during which there was a great deal of debate between
Haig and Rawlinson. In the end, the Fourth Army commander simply
ignored his C-in-C.
1915
Dec 6-8th
Allied strategy for 1916 agreed

as Chantilly conference
1916
Feb 21st
German offensive at Verdun begins
June 24th
Allied artillery bombardment on

Somme begins
July 1st
Allied offensive on Somme begins
July 11th
Germans go onto defensive at Verdun
July 14th
British dawn attack captures

Bazentin ridge
July 23rd
Australians capture Pozires
Sept 3rd-6th
Battle of Guillemont
Sept 12th
French nearly break through

at Bouchavesnes
Sept 15th
British capture Delville Wood after

two month struggle
Sept 15th
British launch battle of

Flers-Courcelette (first use of tanks)
Sept 25-28th
Battle of Morval
Sept 26th-27th
Capture of Thiepval
Oct 1st-Nov 11th
Battle of the Ancre Heights
Nov 13th
Battle of the Ancre begins
Nov 18th
Battle of the Ancre and entire Somme

offensive concludes
Dec 18th
Battle of Verdun comes to an end
THREE OTHER CHARGES are often made against Haig. First,

he was too optimistic. There is some truth in this. Certainly his tendency
to believe what he wanted to believe about the German morale and
manpower reserves was, in 1916, his most serious defect as a commander. Brigadier-General Charteris, his intelligence chief, shared Haigs
optimism, but was not the cause of it. The second charge is that he was
a technophobe. On the contrary, Haig was a keen advocate of tanks, aircraft, artillery and machine-guns. In fact, one of Haigs most important
achievements was to oversee the transformation of the BEF from a mere
collection of units into a war-winning army. He played a critical role in
the adoption of modern technology into the BEF, as well as developing
training, logistics, doctrine and numerous other matters. Even during
the victorious campaigns of 1918, the BEF was a flawed instrument
of war. On the Somme two years earlier, the learning curve was steep
indeed: but it was real. The much-improved performance of the BEF at
the beginning to the Battle of Arras in April 1917 is testimony to that,
although there was still much to learn. Strangely, many historians have
downplayed the significance of his wider role as a war manager.
A third criticism is that Haig was callous. Although he was a ruthless practitioner of total war, he was not heartless with it. He had a
full measure of paternalism common to British regular army officers.
Why waste your time painting me?, he burst out to William Orpen,
when he was sitting for his portrait. Go and paint the men. Theyre
the fellows that are saving the world, and theyre getting killed every
day. Haigs remoteness from the ordinary soldier should not be equated
with callousness. His means of imposing his personality on the army, by
inspecting them on parade and publishing orders, was appropriate for
an army drawn from a deferential society although, as his aide-de-camp
noted, Haig talks to any odd man in the road: all being a means to the
end, to keep in touch with the spirit of his troops. Haig faced the same
dilemma as every military commander in history: to achieve objectives,
he had to put his own troops in harms way. He commanded more British
soldiers than any other general, before or since. Given that simple fact
and the general bloodiness of the fighting on the Western Front, it was
inevitable that more British soldiers would be killed on Haigs watch
than at any other time in Britains military history.
In preparing for the Somme, Haig had a Plan A: an ambitious operation to break through the German positions and reopen mobile warfare;
and a Plan B: a more limited attritional offensive, possibly combined
with an attack at Ypres. He has been much criticised for an antediluvian
approach to modern war because he kept faith in cavalry. As innovative
recent research has demonstrated, however, even on the Western Front
Goughs Mobile Army was the victim

of a fundamental disagreement between
Haig and Rawlinson
Welsh Guards in a reserve trench at

Guillemont, early September 1916.
cavalry could be highly effective, as was demonstrated on July 14th,

1916 near High Wood. The cavalry most definitely had a role in open
warfare. If a tactical defeat of enemy infantry is to be converted into
something greater, it is essential to have an instrument of exploitation,
i.e. troops that can move faster than foot-soldiers, to get in among the
retreating enemy and rout them. Given that the tank was only introduced in September 1916 and, in any case, was far too slow and unreliable
to be used in this role, cavalry was Haigs only option. The experience
of the Germans in March 1918, when they pushed the BEF back but
were unable to build on their initial success, demonstrated the perils
of mounting an offensive without cavalry.
Haig intended all-arms groups of Hubert Goughs Reserve Army

to play a key role. When a break in [the enemys] line is made, Haig
instructed, cavalry and mobile troops must be at hand to advance at
once to make a bridgehead (until relieved by infantry) beyond the gap
... At the same time our mounted troops must cooperate with our main
attacking force in widening the gap. This was a bold, imaginative
response to the problems identified in 1915, firmly grounded in
the practice of earlier years and anticipating many of the post-1918
developments in mobile warfare. But it was also extremely ambitious
and the staff work and traffic control involved would have severely taxed
the inexperienced BEF. In the event, Goughs Mobile Army was the
SOMME
On June 30th, Haig wrote to his wife: I feel

that everything possible for us to achieve
success has been done
Men of the Royal Field Artillery haul an

18-pounder gun into position at Delville
Wood, September 15th, 1916.
victim of a fundamental disagreement between Haig and Rawlinson

about how the Battle of the Somme should be fought.
Rawlinsons plan aimed for limited advances to capture the high
ground followed by a pause to break up the inevitable German counterattacks. The eventual plan that emerged was an unhappy compromise
between two fundamentally different concepts of operations. Rawlinson paid lip service to the C-in-Cs concept while quietly working
to subvert it. The consequence was tragic. The situation in the early
afternoon of July 1st, with the German First Position in British hands,
cried out for Goughs Reserve Army to fight its way onto the weakly
defended Second Position. The Germans had few forces to stop a determined advance. Positions, which subsequently took months to capture
at the cost of thousands of lives, could have been taken quickly. In sum,
the first day on the Somme could have ended with a partial success for
the BEF.
But Rawlinson ignored Haigs clearly expressed concept of operations. He failed to order local reserves forward, paid no attention to
Gough and at midday issued an order for the Reserve Army to stand
down. At 12.15pm Rawlinson wrote in his diary: There is of course no
hope of getting cavalry through today. According to one source the
XIII Corps commander, after carrying out a personal reconnaissance,
telephoned Rawlinson for permission to advance, only to be turned
down. The most likely reason why Rawlinson refused to advance is that
he had made up his mind long before the battle. In a classic example of
cognitive dissonance he simply refused to believe the optimistic reports
arriving on his desk. This is not to argue that, if Rawlinson had committed the mobile reserves, Haigs ambitious breakthrough plan would have
succeeded in full. Apart from anything else, the BEFs logistic system
was at that time incapable of sustaining a major advance. But even
an advance of 20 or so miles ending in a resumption of static warfare
would have been a major political victory that would have enhanced
Britains standing in the coalition and might, just might, have undermined German confidence sufficiently to have brought about an offer
of a compromise peace on terms acceptable to the Allies. While Haig has
often been accused of blindly adhering to a doctrine of breakthrough, on
July 1st, 1916 it was Rawlinsons rigid refusal to countenance anything
but a limited bite and hold approach that was disastrous.
Haig was little more than a bystander as his plans were being wrecked
by Rawlinson. July 1st, 1916 reveals much about the impotence of high
commanders in the First World War once battle had been joined. Haig
spent the morning at his Advanced HQ. At noon he wrote a letter in
which he gave a report on the progress of the battle. Although it may
seem incongruous, or even obscene, for the general in command of a
great army to be catching up with his routine paperwork in the middle
of a terrible battle, in truth it was as sensible a use of Haigs time as any.
Because Haig noted the exact time on his letter we have a clear idea of
how much he knew about the true situation four and a half hours after
the infantry went over the top: not very much. In the absence of reliable
radio communications, a major contributing factor to the deadlock, it
could not be otherwise. Haig arrived at Fourth Army HQ in the early
afternoon. He did not intervene to rescind the order for the Reserve
Army to stand down, if indeed he knew of it. In accordance with army
doctrine he requested, but did not order, the Fourth Army to continue
to attack on July 2nd.
ALTHOUGH RAWLINSON remained in command of the

Fourth Army throughout the Somme campaign, Haig grew increasingly dissatisfied with his performance. Rawlinson was sidelined during
1917 and returned to front-line command in 1918 largely through the
influence of his friend Henry Wilson, by that stage Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In the Hundred Days the series of decisive Allied
offensives, beginning with the Battle of Amiens, that ran from August
8th to November 11th, 1918 under very different conditions from
From top: the first official photograph of a British tank in action,

Flers-Courcelette, September 15th, 1916; a soldier of the Royal Fusiliers
wears a German helmet after the capture of Thiepval, September 26th,
1916; Gordon Highlanders march to the trenches along the BecordelFricourt road, October 1916.
SOMME
A German photograph of the Somme

following the Battle of Ancre, c.1917.
the Somme, Rawlinson proved an outstanding success as the Fourth

Armys commander.
Here is not the place for a detailed analysis of the reasons for the
failure and success on July 1st, 1916 but we can identify elements for
which Haig was personally responsible. On June 30th, Haig wrote to his
wife: I feel that everything possible for us to do to achieve success has
been done. These words reflected the huge efforts put into preparing the
army for battle and, as C-in-C, Haig deserved a share of the credit for any
success, as well as ultimate responsibility for any failures. Haig cannot
really be blamed for the failure of tactics employed by the infantry. He
certainly made clear his views on tactics to his senior officers but the
actual methods used by brigades and battalions were decided, quite
properly, by local commanders. The idea that the infantry uniformly
advanced slowly in lines has been shown to be false. It is clear that Haig
erroneously believed that German barbed-wire had been cut by the artillery bombardment before the attack on July 1st, but this was the information he had received as the result of a collective intelligence failure.
Haigs operational plan was sound in principle but too ambitious in
practice, given the state of training and the inexperience of the BEF in
1916. It was a case of trying to make his army run before it could walk.
He also deserves criticism for failing to impose his will on Rawlinson,
although the Fourth Army commander deserves more opprobrium for
sabotaging Haigs concept of operations. Haigs worst mistake was his
misuse of artillery. Poor Haig, Major General J.F.N. Curly Birch, artillery advisor at GHQ later reflected, as he was always inclined to
spread his guns. In theory, Haig understood the need to concentrate
artillery fire but, nonetheless, the frontage of trench attacked was too
wide for the number of guns available. Haig made things worse by directing that a greater depth of trench, an average of 2,500 yards, should
be included in the bombardment plan. Birch told Haig that he was
stretching his artillery too much, but Haig simply overruled him. The
result was that the weight of shell was dispersed, not concentrated. Too
few guns were given too much to do. It was a ghastly error on Haigs
part, perhaps prompted by a misreading of the lessons of recent battles.
As with many battles of the First World War, the butchers bill is
debated by historians, but there were probably 420,000 British Empire
killed, wounded and missing, 200,000 French and 500-600,000
Germans (a much lower German figure has been postulated but this is
based on a controversial source). Although morale remained substantially intact on both sides, attrition favoured the Allies, not least because
of the degrading of the quality of the German army. The conflict on
the Western Front climaxed, in 1918, with a series of decisive Allied
offensives, but the cumulative attrition of the previous years played a
vital role in determining the outcome. It is wrong to see the Somme as
an aberration. High-intensity battles fought between equally matched
armies fielded by modern industrialised states in the era of total war
were invariably attritional pounding matches, even when, as in 1918
and in the Second World War, they became mobile.
The inexperienced, poorly-trained BEF achieved as much on the
Somme as it was reasonable to expect under the circumstances. It made
the enemy take notice. Before the Somme, German high command had
underestimated the British army. Now, it faced the unpalatable reality
of a major new force on the Western Front. This contributed to a new
strategy. The German army at the end of 1916 was utterly worn out.
Between February and March 1917 it abandoned the Somme battlefield and pulled back to 20 miles to the newly built Hindenburg Line.
This gave tactical advantages but was also a tacit admittance of defeat.
Germany sought to achieve victory at sea, using submarines to try to
cut the Atlantic lifeline by sinking the merchant shipping that kept
Britain supplied with essential supplies. This was a dangerous gamble,
for the move to unrestricted submarine warfare involved attacking
neutral shipping, a move that predictably brought the US into the war,
further stacking the odds against Germany.
COULD HAIG CLAIM CREDIT for these consequences of the

Somme? The answer is a qualified yes. In his first experience of commanding the BEF in a major battle, Haigs performance was undeniably
erratic. His expectations of his green troops were too high, especially in
the initial stages. He failed to grip his principal subordinate, Rawlinson.
The Somme was a painful but vital stage in Haigs training as a high
commander. In a rare moment of self-analysis, he admitted as much at
the end of the battle in a conversation with one of his divisional generals.
But hammering away on the Somme was the right strategy. It did not
produce a crisis of the magnitude for which Haig hoped, but nonetheless
it weakened the German army. The Allied offensive also had an impact
on the minds of the German politico-military leadership that helped to
deflect them onto paths that proved ultimately disastrous for their cause.
Haigs official despatch written in December 1916 was uncompromisingly entitled The Opening of the Wearing-Out Battle. He also
followed this line in his Final Despatch of 1919, a carefully constructed
and powerful interpretation of the BEFs operations, which argued that
the fighting on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 formed a single
continuous campaign of ceaseless attrition, the pay-off being the victories of the Hundred Days. Although Haig imposed a degree of coherence
on events that in reality was absent and downplayed his expectation of
decisive success in 1916, this interpretation has never been satisfactorily
debunked. Indeed, it is reflected in influential writings on the Somme
to this day. The Somme was a tragic, wasteful battle, but it was not an
exercise in futility.
Gary Sheffield is Professor of War Studies at the University of Wolverhampton and the
author of Douglas Haig: From the Somme to Victory (revised edition: Aurum Press, 2016).
FURTHER READING
William Philpott, Bloody Victory The Sacrifice on the Somme and the
Making of the Twentieth Century (Little, Brown, 2009).
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme, new edition (Yale
University Press, 2016).
Gary Sheffield, The Somme (Cassell, 2003).
TheMap
Aboriginal Tribes of
Australia, 1940
NORMAN B. TINDALE was a hugely prolific entomologist,
ornithologist, anthropologist and curator at the South
Australian Museum. During the Second World War he was
integral to the deciphering of the Japanese master naval
code and the success of the American attack on Japan.
Tindales research, which included years of fieldwork,
challenged contemporary beliefs about the early history
of Australia. His work was vital to the understanding that
Aboriginal peoples were not nomadic, but rather held connections to specific regions, as represented in this map. He
also compiled over 150 parallel vocabularies of Aboriginal
languages. The map, published alongside his catalogue of
Aboriginal tribal groups in 1940, was designed to show the
diversity that was in danger of being subsumed by the European presence. It has been called radical in its fundamental
implication that Australia was not terra nullius.
Kate Wiles
PALMYRA
The oasis of Palmyra,
September 24th, 2008.
WHEN ALL ROADS

The desert city of Palmyra, ravaged recently by ISIS, held a key position on the
Raoul McLaughlin describes how a remote caravan settlement assumed a leading
LED TO PALMYRA
Silk Route, connecting the Chinese, Persian and Roman Empires.
role in international affairs, generating enormous wealth.
PALMYRA
Palmyras world, c.first century ad.
HE RUINS OF ancient Palmyra stand in the Syrian desert as a

rubble of collapsed stonework. They are now in a worse state
than time alone can account for, due to the recent destruction
wrought by ISIS. Once a great city and trade centre, lines of
broken classical columns can still be seen, marking the broad avenues
that led through the ancient city to large market squares, fronted by
temples and monumental administrative buildings decorated with
marble sculptures. Civic authorities and caravan merchants erected
statues and dedications to individuals who had performed some noteworthy service, some of which still survive on ancient stone edifices.
The inscriptions are written in a local form of Aramaic, called Palmyrene,
but many are duplicated in Greek so that the frequent Hellenic travellers
to Palmyra could understand the text. Over 30 of these inscriptions
commemorate people who assisted merchants on their caravan ventures into Babylonia and these texts reveal important details about the
organisation and destinations of Palmyrene trade ventures.
These business networks ranged throughout the Roman Empire.
A second-century funeral sculpture found at South Shields in northeast England depicts a seated Palmyrene matron dressed in fine fabrics,
holding a textile spindle and gesturing to an open box of jewellery by
her side. She was British by birth and the accompanying inscriptions in
Latin and Palmyrene read:
To the spirits of the departed and Regina, freedwoman and wife of the
Palmyrene Barates. Born a Catuvellaunian and died aged thirty.
Barates was a Syrian merchant who had married a freed slave-woman
from a native British community near the commercial city of Londinium (London). At nearby Coria (Corbridge) a memorial inscription
commemorating Barates was found. It reads: To the spirits and the
departed Palmyrene Barates, a vexillarius, lived 68 years. The term
vexillarius indicates that Barates was a supplier of vexilla, flags, standards and ensigns made from silk or fitted with silk tassels and trimmings. Both inscriptions confirm the existence of a Syrian commercial
network importing Chinese silk as far as the western frontiers of the
Roman Empire.
The oasis city of Palmyra held a unique position in the Syrian desert
between Rome and the Parthian Empire, which ruled Persia from 247 bc
to ad 224. Palmyra was unusual, occupying an outlying location and
separated from other Syrian cities by a wide expanse of desert. It, therefore, maintained a high level of independence and its citizens were able
to claim protection and assistance from both the Roman and Parthian
regimes. The local authorities in Palmyra raised and equipped their
own regional troops to protect their territory from bandits and to keep
control over the desert trails leading to their city. This allowed Palmyra
to develop into a major centre for caravan trade passing from Babylonia
and the Persian Gulf to Syria and the Mediterranean seaboard.
Ancient Palmyra appears in the Old Testament as Tadmor, from the
Semitic word Tamar meaning palm-tree. King Solomon, in the tenth
century bc, established an outpost at Tadmor in the wilderness, but
it was soon reclaimed by locals. By the third century bc, Palmyrenes
spoke a Semitic dialect related to Arabic and Hebrew, though the earliest
Palmyrene inscriptions used Greek terminology. Government consisted
of a council of appointed leaders (boule) presiding over a citizen body
(demos) assembled to receive instruction or approve political measures.
Early Palmyra was surrounded by oasis field-systems that irrigated a
broad stretch of land. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder reports:
Palmyra is a city famous for its location, for its rich soil and for its ample
springs. Its fields are surrounded on every side by a vast circuit of sand, so
that nature has isolated this place from the rest of the world.
Clockwise from above: relief

showing a Palmyran ship,
third century ad; funerary
relief showing a laden camel
with camel drivers, secondthird century ad; inside a
tomb in the Valley of the
Tombs, Palmyra, 2010.
Ruins indicate the size the city attained during the height of its prosperity, when its boundary walls encompassed an area almost as large as the
Syrian city of Apamea, which, according to Roman census reports, had
117,000 adult citizens. Neighbouring Babylonia was dominated by the
cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the banks of the Tigris. The combined
population of these enormous cities concentrated demand and offered
substantial business opportunities. Greek and Roman wines could be
traded for dates and figs and Mediterranean slaves were exchanged for
their eastern counterparts. Roman merchants visiting Seleucia acquired
Arabian incense and Indian spices from Persian Gulf trade routes as well
as oriental silks imported by Iranian caravans.
During the Augustan era (63 bc-ad 19), most Greek and Syrian merchants crossed into Parthian territory near Zeugma then travelled south
by caravan between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers. This trade route
crossed dry and difficult terrain to avoid the numerous tolls and taxes
imposed by the communities who controlled the river valleys. Though
the Greek geographer Strabo makes no mention of Palmyra as an important caravan city, Palmyrene merchants were gaining significance in the
overland trade routes between Syria and Babylonia. During this era the
first in a series of monumental buildings was constructed in Palmyra,
partly funded by the wealth acquired from eastern trade ventures. Construction of a vast temple devoted to the Babylonian god Bel began in
ad 19 with donations from the Palmyrene and Greek merchants from
Seleucia. Another dedication honours a citizen named Hasas who gave
money to the new temple on behalf of Palmyrene merchants in Babylon.
During this period Palmyra was considered part of Roman Syria,
but its civic council was permitted exceptional regional autonomy.
Palmyrenes could manage their own political arrangements with the
Parthian regime and negotiate deals with communities in Babylonia.
Pliny the Elder indicates the attitude of the Roman government in the
first century ad when he explains:
Palmyra has its own fate between the mighty Roman and Parthian
Empires, so any discord between these two regimes will cause them
immediate concern.
Palmyra was significant because it offered a direct caravan route from
PALMYRA
Left: digital reconstruction

of the Temple of Bel from the
New Palmyra Project, 2015.
Below: the Temple of Bel, 2001.
Syria to the mid-Euphrates, which flowed downstream

to Babylon. Merchants taking this route could also cross
to Seleucia and follow the Tigris south to where it joined
with the Euphrates. The converging rivers flowed past the
port of Spasinu Charax in the small subject kingdom of
Characene at the head of the Persian Gulf.
N INSCRIPTION dated to ad 71 provides the first

mention of Palmyrene operations at Spasinu
Charax. This trade route covered 600 miles and
represented a journey of at least 40 days for
caravans. Spasinu Charax was the main port for incoming
Indian and Arabian products destined for Babylonia. In ad
50 a Greek merchant from Alexandria wrote an account
of Roman trade in the Indian Ocean, The Periplus of the
Erythraean Sea. He describes large Indian craft bringing
shipbuilding materials, including teak wood beams and
copper used for rust-resistant metal fittings, to ports in
the Persian Gulf.
When the Emperor Hadrian visited Palmyra in ad 129
he bestowed political privileges on the ruling council and the city was
formally renamed Hadriane Palmyra in commemoration. Two years
later the Parthian king Vologases III seized direct authority over the
Gulf kingdom of Characene and installed a relative, Meredates, as ruler.
Meredates offered Palmyrene merchants privileged positions in his new
kingdom and extended his authority into the Persian Gulf.
Agreements between Meredates and the Palmyrene council gave
Characene associates an access route to Roman markets and, therefore,
a means to mutually enrich both territories. In ad 132 Palmyrene merchants from Spasinu Charax paid for the erection of a statue in their
home city honouring a colleague named Yarhai who Meredates had
made Satrap (governor) of the island of Tylos, in modern Bahrain, which
lay off the Arabian coast, about 300 miles south of Spasinu Charax, with
good harbours and valuable pearl fisheries.
Palmyrene caravans exported woollen fabrics, reworked silks, purple
cloth, wine stored in skin-flasks, perfumes, ointment, decorative tableware, coloured glass, red coral, Mediterranean slaves and batches of gold
and silver Roman coins to cities in Iraq. Evidence of this commerce is

revealed by sculptures of rich matrons bedecked in finely woven fabrics
and lavish pearl- and gem-encrusted jewellery. Remnants of silk found in
the ruins of tomb towers suggest that these ladies dressed in imported
oriental fabrics.
Palmyrene inscriptions refer to the caravans as synodiai, meaning
companies, and merchants were sons of the company. Each caravan
appointed two spokesmen: one of these representatives took the title
Synodiarchos, or Caravan-Leader, with responsibilities for security
and travel-logistics; another was appointed Archemporos or LeadingMerchant and managed tolls, taxes and business deals at markets.
Merchants joining the expedition contributed funds for necessary
expenses to these representatives. The Synodiarchos arranged for
caravan guards and the Archemporos paid the tolls and bribes taken
by communities encountered on the planned route. Sometimes the
Archemporos took care of expenses from his own funds or negotiated
a lower rate on behalf of his associates. These men were honoured by
Ancient Palmyra
on April 13th, 2010
(left) and 19th
April, 2016 (right)
showing ISIS
destruction of the
Temple of Bel.
The Destruction of Palmyra

In May 2015, just months after the
launch of UNESCOs Unite4Heritage,
a campaign aimed at protecting heritage in areas threatened by extremists,
Palmyra became the latest site to be
identified by ISIS Kataib Taswiyya
for cultural and historical cleansing.
Kataib Taswiyya, or, settlement battalions, is the branch of ISIS responsible for
identifying those mosques, churches,
shrines and cultural sites across Syria
and Iraq to be marked for destruction,
with the view to establishing tawhid
(monotheism). In the months before the
occupation of Palmyra these had included the Assyrian cities of Nineveh and
Nimrud in northern Iraq and artefacts
from museums in Mosul and Baghdad.
After the modern settlement of
Palmyra and its ancient ruins were
seized, ISIS initially promised to leave
the ruins untouched, vouched for with
a short video released via social media,
which showed the ancient city intact.
However, on August 18th, 2015 the

Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad
was murdered and his mutilated body
displayed in the city. He had been
interrogated by ISIS for months as to
the location of Palmyras antiquities, a
secret he refused to reveal. Despite the
UN banning the trade of artefacts looted
from Syria in 2011, ISIS has funded
much of its arsenal through the looting
and selling of antiquities on the black
market. The destruction of Palmyras
ruins followed throughout August,
beginning with the first-century Temple
of Baalshamin. As the world watched
the destruction via satellite images,
wholesale eradication of the ancient site
was feared.
ISIS 10-month habitation of Palmyra
came to an end in March 2016 when
Syrias government troops, backed by
allied Russian air strikes, retook the
site. The Syrian army reported that ISIS
had booby-trapped everything, trees,
doors, animals and left thousands of
mines which had to be cleared before
inscriptions in Palmyra, where they were praised for bringing back

caravans at no cost or at their own expense.
Palmyrene caravan ventures were seasonal operations, timed to
coincide with desert conditions and the annual trade winds in the
Persian Gulf, which delivered merchant ships to Spasinu Charax. Based
on later historical evidence, the Palmyrenes probably organised two
caravan ventures into Babylonia every year. One caravan travelled to
the main cities of central Babylonia and the other made the longer
journey south to Spasinu Charax. Both caravans would have left within
weeks of each other to exploit favourable seasonal conditions. Larger
convoys maintained several thousand camels to carry merchandise and
travel supplies, including bedding and tents. Each caravan included
several hundred drovers and scores of armed guards to ensure the safety
of the company as they passed through contested territories or regions
threatened by bandits.
Palmyrene merchants soon began to outfit their own commercial
ships to sail from the Persian Gulf to trade ports in the Indus Kingdoms.
archaeologists could assess the extent of

the damage. Retreating ISIS soldiers also
blew up the 13th-century castle. While
this marked a major victory in the war
against ISIS, the damage to Palmyra was
substantial, with many previously
well-preserved sites, including the
Roman Arch of Triumph (third century),
the Canaanite Temple of Baalshamin
(ad 131) and the Mesopotamian Temple
of Baal (ad 32), reduced to rubble.
On May 5th, 2016 St Petersburgs
Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra performed
at the Roman amphitheatre, the site
where 25 Syrian soldiers had been executed by a group of young ISIS recruits
not one year earlier. The concert, held to
celebrate Russias role in recapturing the
city, featured an appearance by the countrys premier Vladimir Putin via video
link from Sochi. While the liberation
of Palmyra was greeted as a cause for
celebration, the event a clear display of
Russian culture has also been interpreted as propaganda for the nations
ongoing military role in Syria.
From the Persian Gulf, ships also sailed westward to visit trade stations
in southern Arabia and northern Somalia. Evidence of Palmyrene business operations in the Gulf of Aden comes from the island of Socotra off
the Horn of Africa. Somalia produced incense and other fragrant saps,
which sold for high prices in Roman markets. Wooden tablets found
in a cave at Hoq on the north-east coast of Socotra included business
records written in Indian, Ethiopian, Nabataean and Palmyrene scripts.
In the mid-second century a group of Palmyrene businessmen
established a commercial building in the Nile city of Coptos. A Palmyrene inscription honours a businessman named Zabdalas, who
established the foundations of this building entirely from his own funds.
Archaeologists have found two Palmyrene altars in the ruins, along
with 12 stone slabs, each depicting a pair of Palmyrene merchants. Palmyrene businessmen from Coptos also left a dedication in the nearby
Nile town of Dendereh, the site of a major temple complex. This inscription refers to Palmyrene businessmen as naukleroi, captains or shipowners involved in Red Sea voyages.
PALMYRA
Clockwise from
top left: fresco of
women dressing
in silks from
Herculaneum,
third/second
century bc;
bust of Emperor
Gallienus, third
century ad;
tombstone of
Regina found near
Hadrians Wall.
Due to the wealth passing through Syria,

gangs of bandits would lie in wait to
ambush caravans crossing through
unclaimed wilderness territories
Roman agents at Palmyra assessed the quarter-rate customs tax, the
tetarte, which was imposed on all commodities crossing the imperial
frontiers. Some of these officials could have been Palmyrenes, who
paid imperial authorities competitive rates for the right to collect the
tax and keep any surplus earnings. An inscription from a tomb tower in
the Umm Belqis necropolis in Palmyra records how imports worth 360
million sesterces were assessed for the tetarte at Palmyra. The precise
amount is presented in three currencies: Roman, Palmyrene and Greek,
whose monetary units are listed down to small denominations such as
brass shekels and obols. To place this figure in context, the tax revenues
of the Roman Republic amounted to 340 million sesterces in the first
century bc. Palmyrene imports valued at 360 million sesterces would

have raised 90 million sesterces in tax revenue for the Roman state,
enough to pay the annual cost of six Roman legions.
Trade goods were conveyed onwards under a state bond, with the
assessed import payment due at the destination city. If a merchant
could not afford to pay the tetarte in cash, then customs agents would
secure a quarter share of his merchandise to sell on behalf of the government. This was the system that operated in Egypt and it meant that
the government was not responsible for the cost and risk involved in
moving large amounts of cash or seized goods between frontier stations
and Mediterranean ports.
I had the good fortune to get hold of some Indian lyceum as the drug had
recently been imported to Phoenicia together with some Indian aloe.
Galen was certain that the product was genuine because it was brought
in by camels with a whole cargo and the material is not produced in
this region. Many merchants would have sold their eastern goods to
Greek and Roman shippers based at Syrian ports, but Palmyrene trade
networks also operated in the Mediterranean.
M
Above: detail
on the Roman
arch in Palmyra,
third century ad.
Below: Palmyrene
funerary portrait.
Once the tetarte was evaluated at Palmyra, merchants regrouped

into smaller caravans for travel to the Syrian capital Antioch or one of
the other cities on the Mediterranean coast. Antioch was positioned
next to the River Orontes and connected to the Mediterranean via
Seleucia Pieria. At 150 miles, or ten days travel, from Palmyra, this was
the closest major seaport. Confirmation is provided by a Palmyrene
inscription honouring a tetarte collector at Antioch, who gave special
assistance to a caravan returning from Spasinu Charax. The Greek physician Galen encountered what was possibly a Palmyrene caravan at the
Phoenician port of Tyre or Sidon; he visited Syria in the 150s looking for
drug ingredients from the East for his medical remedies. He reported:
ANY OF THE merchant vessels visiting the Syrian ports

were sailing to Ostia, the main port serving Rome, which
was the largest market in the Empire. Merchant communities from Palmyra and Tyre operated in Rome, where
they established temples to their homeland gods. Their commercial
networks extended into Gaul and supplied the Atlantic trade routes
that brought Continental commodities and merchants such as Barates
into Roman Britain.
Due to the wealth passing through Syria, gangs of bandits would
lie in wait to ambush caravans crossing through unclaimed wilderness
territories. To counter this threat the city council in Palmyra raised
and armed its own troops to protect routes between the city and the
Euphrates. These troops were under the command of Palmyrene generals, issued with orders to accompany the caravans, protect approved
travellers and patrol the wilderness.
An inscription dated ad 144 records how a citizen named Soados
saved a Palmyrene caravan from an ambush by robbers. Soados held a
command on behalf of the city council and his intervention was commemorated by grateful merchants, with several statues in his honour
erected in prominent sanctuaries. A Greek inscription in the Palmyrene
Temple of Athena records that Soados took a large force and protected
the merchants against Ahdlallathos and his robbers who had lain in wait
for a long time to harm the caravan.
The Palmyrene Council also dedicated statues to Soados and placed
these on columns in a plaza near the city centre. A dedication from
ad 150 records that Soados achieved an unprecedented reputation
for his military actions and was the first Palmyrene to have statues
erected in his honour at Charax, Vologesias and a caravan station called
Gennaes. The inscription records that Soados was also honoured in
decrees issued by the governors of Syria and commended in official
letters by the Emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.
The Roman military were also involved in efforts to protect Palmyrene caravans from attack by bandits and nomads. In ad 135 a caravan
led by a merchant named Ulpius Abgar was returning from Spasinu
Charax when the group encountered difficulties on the Roman frontier.
An inscription commends a centurion called Julius Maximus, who protected the merchants from bandit communities in the Syrian Desert.
PALMYRENE INTEREST in protecting commercial traffic transformed
the city into a regional military power. Caravan inscriptions reveal
how civic officials received titles and recognitions usually given to
generals. An inscription from ad 199, for example, names a Palmyrene
named Ogeilu, who was selected several times by the council to serve
as strategos or general of desert troops. Ogeilu is credited with taking
command against the nomads and assuring the security of merchants
and many caravans under his leadership. Although they were not part
of the Roman command structure, these generals received commendations from Syrian governors in recognition of their military exploits.
As in other parts of the ancient world, trade thrived when overland
routes were dominated by a strong and accountable authority able to
deploy troops to protect its commercial interests.
But Palmyrene prosperity did not last. In ad 216 the Parthian army
was decimated in a new conflict with Rome. As a consequence, the
PALMYRA
Parthian regime was overthrown and replaced by a Persian dynasty, the
Sassanids. The third century also became a period of crisis for the Roman
Empire as repeated civil wars, lethal pandemics and foreign invasions
reduced the fighting strength of its legions. The desert frontier between
the two empires became a battleground as they fought to capture or
devastate strategic outposts and control invasion routes.
N AD 260 the Persian king, Shapur I, captured the Emperor Valerian

during an attack on Syria. Valerians son Gallienus was proclaimed
emperor in Rome but the commander of the Rhine legions declared
autonomy and established an independent government in Gaul.
Gallienus was also challenged by imperial rivals who seized power in
Syria. The Palmyrenes took this opportunity to intervene and a commander, Odaenathus, gathered a large force of armed men from his
home city. His militia pursued and attacked the Persian army as it withdrew from the Roman frontiers and helped defeat rival imperial claimants in Syria. With these victories, Odaenathus proclaimed himself
Ruler of Palmyra and received imperial titles from the grateful Emperor
Gallienus, such as Preserver of the East, as well as confirmation of
consular Roman rank. By the time Odaenathus was assassinated in 267,
Palmyra had become a royal military regime dominating Roman Syria.
After his death, Odaenathus wife, Queen Zenobia, claimed his royal
titles and began to rule on behalf of their infant son. In 268 there was
further crisis in the west when Gallienus was murdered and Roman
armies fought to repel Germanic invaders who threatened Italy. Exploiting the situation, Zenobia sent Palmyrene forces into Jordan, Egypt
and Asia Minor to seize authority from the established Roman governors. In ad 272 the Emperor Aurelian led a Roman counterattack and,
after defeating the Palmyrene army at Antioch, he marched on Palmyra.
Ancient Palmyra,
March 14th, 2014.
Zenobia was captured trying to escape into Persia and Aurelian placed
a Roman garrison in the captured desert city. The following year the
Palmyrenes staged an uprising and Aurelian ordered Palmyra and its
inhabitants to be sacked and destroyed.
Following these dramatic events Palmyra never recovered its former
independence or commercial importance. All records of caravan ventures cease in 273 and the depleted city became no more than a garrison outpost for imperial troops defending a frontier territory from
foreign hostilities. Yet even after two millennia, remnants of abandoned ancient ruins have survived the savagery of war, terrorism and
the erosion of dry desert winds. Such was the prosperity of the ancient
city of Palmyra. The concern now is its restoration or not following
the barbarities of ISIS as the Syrian civil war continues.
Raoul McLaughlin taught at Queens University, Belfast.
FURTHER READING
Pat Southern, Empress Zenobia: Palmyras Rebel Queen (Hambledon,
2009).
Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the
Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China (Bloomsbury, 2010).
Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The
Ancient World Economy and the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia and India (Pen
& Sword, 2014).
Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient
World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China
(Pen & Sword, 2016).
Out
of the
The idea of public history, in which academics seek to address a wider audience, is considered to be
a modern one, but, discovers Eleanor Parker, a form of it was practised during the Middle Ages.
ID PUBLIC HISTORY exist

in the Middle Ages? Since
the term itself is relatively
modern, the immediate answer to
this question would seem to be no.
Nonetheless, there were many diverse
forms in which medieval audiences
could encounter stories about history
and we might discover some parallels
in the various ways educated historians communicated information about
the past.
One of the most common means
must have been through public
preaching about the deeds of the
saints. The primary aim of preaching
is not to teach history, of course, but
in some cases it can hardly be avoided:
it is often necessary to understand the
historical context in which a particular
saint lived in order to understand their
deeds and their claim to sanctity. To
encourage popular devotion to their
saints, medieval preachers had to
find ways to explain this context to
audiences who might know very little
about it.
We can get some sense of how such
interactions might go from occasional
references in hagiographical texts
of sermons preached by monks and
clerics about the saints of the past.
One memorable example concerns
a monk of Bury St Edmunds named
Herman, a learned man and a trained
historian. In the last decades of the
11th century Herman wrote a long
and historically informed account of
the miracles of St Edmund, in which
he traces the relationship between
the saints cult and the chief events of
English history over the 10th and 11th
centuries.
Herman was also an experienced
preacher and in a contemporary text
we hear of him preaching at Pentecost
about St Edmund to a congregation in
the abbey church, probably in 1097.
The crowd who listened to him preach
without explaining something about

were lucky: they were hearing from
the historical context for his miracles,
an expert on St Edmund, who must
whether it was the separate kingdoms
have had plenty to say about the
which existed in England in
saint. While Hermans erudite
Edmunds time or the later
written works were intended
Danish invasions led by Svein.
for a Latinate audience within
However Herman explained
the monastery of Bury St
his subject, he greatly succeedEdmunds, in his preaching he
ed in increasing his audiences
obviously found a way of medienthusiasm for St Edmund.
ating this material to the crowd
Word spread and public
in English. To underline his
demand for access to the relics
sermon on this occasion, we are
increased. Unfortunately, while
told, he displayed to the congrehis preaching seems to have
gation the martyrs garments
been successful in inspiring his
and the casket in which the
congregation, it did not end
saints relics were kept. These
well for the preacher himself.
would have been dramatic
Herman got carried away and
visual aids for the preacher,
put the relics on open display
since Edmunds clothes were
in the church. He began to
still stained with blood and
allow the crowd not just to see
pierced with the holes left by
the objects but to touch and
Viking arrows.
Miracle worker: St Edmund in a
kiss them in exchange for gifts
It would be interesting to
miniature from the Macclesfield
of money. This disrespectful
know what Herman said about
Psalter, c.1330.
handling was apparently going
these relics as he displayed
too far. Shortly afterwards Herman
them to the crowd. Did he tell the
fell ill and died and a vision revealed
story of Edmunds death in 869,
to his fellow monks that his death was
explaining how the king was mara punishment for his lack of respect
tyred when the Danes invaded East
towards St Edmund.
Anglia under Ivar and Ubbe, sons of
Herman seems to have made
enemies and the fact that another
monk recorded this story about his
death (not very regretfully, it must be
said) suggests some of his colleagues
thought he had got what he deserved.
But it was not Hermans popular
preaching that proved his downfall,
but his presumptuous treatment of
the precious relics. This kind of public
Ragnar Lothbrok? Perhaps he told how
communication was a regular duty,
Edmunds vengeful ghost had caused
one of the ways in which knowledgethe death of Svein Forkbeard in 1014, a
able medieval monks would engage
story first found in Hermans writing.
with audiences outside the monastery:
Hermans work on the history of Edperhaps not so different from what
munds miracles aimed to show Gods
many historians aim to do today.
power at work through time, but it is
rooted in the complexities of preConquest English politics; it would
Eleanor Parker is a medievalist and writes a blog
be difficult to talk about Edmund
at aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk.
There were many diverse

forms in which medieval
audiences could encounter
stories about history
P
Life for the poor in 18th- and 19th-century Ireland
was hard and, for many women, prostitution was
the only option. But, writes Julie Peakman, the
bawdy houses were rife with disease and police did
little to protect women from violent customers.
Wretched
Strumpets
PROSTITUTION
HILIP REILLEY, a constable, and his wife Catherine

were tried and convicted on October 12th, 1736
for keeping a bawdy house in White Lion Court
in Strand Street, Dublin. Reilly was sentenced to
three months in jail and on the following day his wife was
to be whipped from Newgate Prison to Trinity College. The
Daily Gazetteer for October 1736 reported that Reilly was so
loving a husband that he earnestly begged the court that he
should be punished in place of his wife, but his request was
denied. The case was unusual in that most of the brothels in
Dublin were run by women, although there is evidence of
other couples running similar bawdy houses.
Many of the brothels were situated close to the centre of
Dublin, located along alleyways near Christ Church
Cathedral from Cork Hill, Copper Alley, Fishamble Street
and Wine Tavern Street (so-called because of the large
number of brothels, taverns and gambling houses in the
area) to Cook Street. The quaysides were particularly
notorious for brothels serving the seamen coming off the
boats on the River Liffey. Mary Browne operated in Princes
Street, near Sir John Rogersons Quay in 1751. She was convicted of brothel-keeping and sentenced to be carried in a
cart through the street but, because she was so popular and
the police were so corrupt, she was allowed to hide in the
floor of the cart to hide her from public view.
Most of what we know about prostitution in Dublin
in the 18th century comes from newspaper accounts,
A Bawd on Her Last Legs, by Thomas Rowlandson, 1792.

PROSTITUTION
Right: portrait
alleged to be of
Peg Plunkett by
William Hoare
(1707-92).
Below: title page
of the 1798 edition
of her memoirs.
which tell us that life could be dangerous: Catherine Halfpenny of Marshall Alley, Fishamble Street was targeted by
rioters in 1768; Miss Keenan in Frederick Street North in
1791 had all of her furniture removed from her house and
burned in street by a mob. While such reports are useful
and provide an idea of the public reaction to, and problems
inherent in, prostitution, relatively little is known about
the real extent of prostitution in Ireland, as few other
records survive. Further information can be gleaned from
court descriptions, the Magdalene Asylum records and from
later police accounts.
UBLIN PROSTITUTES were brought before the

citys courthouse. Those involved in the legal
process judge, barristers, court officials, jurors
and staff of the court (apart from the cleaner)
were all men. This brought with it all the implication of
gender bias, of mens views on the desire for modesty and
chastity in women coming into conflict with the perceived
necessity for prostitution. Brothel-keepers could be charged
under the Disorderly House Act of 1751, which recognised
that:
The multitude of places of entertainment for the lower sort of
people is another great cause of thefts and robberies, as they
are thereby tempted to spend their small substance in riotous
pleasures, and in consequence are put on unlawful methods of
supplying their wants and renewing their pleasures.
In order to prevent idleness and subsequent mischief, it
was deemed that any house, room, garden, or other place
kept for publick dancing, music, or other publick entertainment of the like kind needed a licence; those without
were deemed disorderly houses. It was therefore prudent
for some brothel-keepers to hide their business. In Ashtons
Quay in 1793, Mrs Brazen hid her business behind the
faade of a haberdashers shop. Such concealment, however,

did not necessarily make a place safe; Mrs Davis, who ran
a brothel behind the faade of a China shop in Fishamble
Street, incurred damage to her shop in 1792 when four
bucks pushed a blind horse into it.
Suppression of individual prostitutes was mainly reliant
on vagrancy and curfew laws. Prostitutes who came before
the local courts had often been arrested for crimes other
than soliciting, such as stealing, pickpocketing, indecency,
vagrancy or public disturbance.
Statistics on prostitution in Dublin become more plentiful from 1838 onwards, when the Dublin Metropolitan
Police kept records, which show 2,849 arrests in 1838 in
Dublin alone. As late as 1889, the manual for the Dublin
Metropolitan Police showed the continued difficulties
in bringing women to court, noting that, prostitutes
cannot legally be taken into custody for being prostitutes;
to justify that apprehension they must commit some
specific act that which is an offence against the law. Other
difficulties were that the public showed little interest in
attempting to eradicate prostitution; this was particularly
true of the soldiers who made up a large proportion of the
population of Dublin.
Prostitution was to be found in almost every town in
Ireland but was most prevalent in garrison towns. The
Dublin Barracks dominated Dublin City, an ever-present
reminder of British rule; other army camps were scattered
around the coast acting as defence. One contemporary observer remarked that the large number of troops and sailors
in every town, nay small village had led to an increased
profligacy of manners amongst the lower orders of females.
With thousands of soldiers in Ireland to protect British

interests, the army brought with it a ready made clientele
for the prostitution business. Isaac Weld commented,
about Roscommon, in 1832:
The evil was of far greater magnitude than it appeared in
view. In Castle Street, on the skirts of the town, there was
actually a range of brothels, at the doors of which females
stood noonday, to entice passengers, with gestures too plain
to be misunderstood.
He put this down to the huge military complex at Athlone
in the Irish Midlands. Prostitutes followed the barracks
while they were young and pretty and were obliged to beg
when they had lost their good looks.
HE REASONS WOMEN took up prostitution were

numerous and varied. The First Report From
his Majestys Commissioner for Inquiry into the
Condition of the Poor in Ireland in 1835 remarked
that any failure in chastity on the part of a woman meant
that she forfeited for life her character and caste. For
seduced women, this meant ostracism from family and
friends. The word seduced, though, is a broad term, which
might include intimidation or even rape, as can be seen in
one newspaper report, in which one little rosy cheeked
milk girl attracted the attentions of a gentlemen who
served in the Liberty; he frequently plied her with cake and
wine and promised to make a Queen of her, or anything she
could mention, if she consented to become his mistress.
She refused, but he eventually whisked her into his parlour
and easily prevailed on her to suck in as much of the juice
The Dublin
barracks in an
engraving by
James Malton,
18th century.
of the grape as threw her off her centre of gravity, and

entirely over powered her senses, thereby ensuring his
conquest. Drink was to play its part in the loss of many
womens virginity.
Poverty was also recognised as playing an important
part in women turning to prostitution, an illegitimate
child adding to a womans hardship. Work in agriculture
and domestic service were possibilities for poorer women,
but the latter was seen as a route into prostitution. With
poor pay, lack of skills and without family to support them,
survival for such women was bleak. Many women working
on the streets were often addicted to alcohol, homeless
and destitute. One witness claimed, most of the females
who infest the streets of cities are such persons [unmarried
mothers and poor].
Intimidation and procuring were seen on a daily basis.
Unscrupulous female brothel-keepers organised children
and young women into the ever-expanding sex trade in
Dublin and young girls were often impelled to work in
bawdy houses for fear of recrimination. The Hibernian
Journal for February 1781 reported that the police watch
had interviewed a local brothel-keeper and her cronies
about a prostitute who had been murdered in Temple Bar.
Although nothing was done at the time, eight months
later, after a 17-year-old Belfast girl was murdered in her
lodgings in Stephen Street, having refused to go with Ann
McDonagh, a brothel-keeper in Little Booter Lane, the
public reacted by ransacking her brothel. This was not
enough to prevent her continuing her brutal reign; in July
the following year, she beat up a prostitute so badly that
she lost an eye.
PROSTITUTION
British Plenty, engraved and published by Charles Knight, 1794.

The public saw the police as too ineffectual to deal with

the problem of procurement or ill-treatment of prostitutes
and often tackled the perpetrators themselves; after a dead
prostitute was discovered on the premises of Ms Truly of
Kennedys Lane a riot erupted in December 1795; her building was again damaged the following year after allegations
that a female passer-by had been forced into prostitution
there. When another procuress, Mother Beatty of Ross
Lane, had lured a girl into her brothel, the mob pelted the
police with stones, believing they were failing to take
proper action.
The police had difficulty controlling

crime, be it gangs of marauding
youths, riotous mobs or women
involved in prostitution
HE WOMEN WHO worked in the profession, as

elsewhere in the world, ranged from ill-dressed,
half-starved street-walkers to women from
wealthier backgrounds who serviced elite clients.
Those who came from wealthier backgrounds would be
more likely to look for a rich man to keep them. Women
in this position could expect expensive houses, credit at
the merchants and a coach and four. They would have the
education and the know-how to attract richer clients. Such
clients included aristocratic men from Dublin Castle, the
hub of British administrative rule, including the governor
of the Bank of Ireland, David LaTouche, and the Lord
Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Rutland. When the Irish
courtesan Peg Plunkett opened her elite establishment to
gentlemen, these men were among her lovers. Along with
her friend, Sally Hayes, she ran a luxurious brothel with lascivious prints on the walls and new elastic beds, in order to
pull in the most elite of punters. The attraction to this kind
of life was that they no longer had to rely on their keepers
and could forge an independent life of considerable luxury
and extravagance, answering to no-one but themselves.
Nonetheless, even in higher-class establishments life
was tough and their inhabitants were an easy target for
the gangs of ruffians who prowled the streets, ransacking
houses, beating up men and assaulting women as they
went. One of the most notorious gangs was known as the
Pinking Dandies. They dressed in fine regalia and strolled
around the town pricking passers-by with their swords.
One commentator wrote of them,
Some were sons of respectable parents, who permitted them to
get up to mans estates in idle habits, without adequate means
of support; others were professional students, who having
tasted the alluring fruits of dissipation, abandoned their
studies and took a shorter road to gain supplies, by means no
matter how fraudulent.
Often drunk and in bad humour having lost at gambling,
they would assail passengers in the street, to levy contributions, or perhaps, take a lady from her protector, and many
females were destroyed by that lawless banditti.
PEG PLUNKETT WAS the victim of an attack one night
in 1779, when the Pinking Dandies broke into her wellknown flash-house in Wood Street near Dublin Castle.
She described in her memoirs how the gang assaulted her
and wrecked the house, resulting in the death of her twoyear-old daughter and her unborn baby. The gang was led by
Richard Crosbie, who was later to become a famous figure
when he made an attempt to cross the Irish Sea in a balloon
in 1785. Although Peg successfully sued him and some of
the gang members, his earlier criminal activities do not
The court
buildings, Dublin.
Hand-coloured
engraving by
James Malton,
1798.
appear to have been a barrier to his future achievements.

The police had difficulty controlling crime, whether
gangs of marauding youths, riotous mobs or women
involved in prostitution. In part this was because policing
itself was problematic and half-hearted during the early
18th century. At that time it was provided by the local
watch; the official Dublin police force was not established
until the Dublin Police Act of 1786. Before this, each parish
had a permanent watch of 15, selected and overseen by the
minister and church wardens and presided over by a constable. The watch was only employed to police crime between
the hours of 11pm and 5am from April to Michaelmas and
10pm to 6am for the rest of the year. Trouble outside these
hours went unmonitored. Some 900 watchmen were supposed to cover 450 stands, some with two watchmen, some
with just one, the rest acting as flying patrols to come at
a moments notice. Even then they were hardly diligent
in their duties, as one statutory report noted in the first
half of the 18th century: The watches of the city of Dublin
have of late been found to be very weak and of little use, by
reason of many ill affected persons but refuse to watch,
when they are thereto required. In other words, they were
simply not fulfilling their duties. Another commentator described the reliance on the watch as a woeful experience,
thanks to the watch being unfit, feeble and unforthcoming.
Although prostitutes were regularly brought before the
courts, they were just as regularly dismissed. Brothelkeepers often made bribes to judges and many of the local
watchmen were in the wine trade, supplying the alcohol
sold in the brothel houses. Magistrates frequently rented
houses to prostitutes, either the more elite women near
PROSTITUTION
euphemism for catching venereal disease, once more in
Sackville Street.
A common route out of prostitution was for a woman to
enter one of the established Magdalene Asylums, such as
the one on Leeson Street in Dublin, opened by Lady Arabella Denny in 1767. The charity was intended to rescue young
women from the fate of prostitution and was focused on
seduced Protestant girls, those under 20 and expectant unmarried mothers. The aim was to offer a refuge to
penitents and shelter from Shame, from Reproach, from
Disease, from Want, from the base Society that had either
drawn you into vice, or prevailed upon you to continue
in it, to the utmost hazard of our eternal happiness. One
observer wrote in 1794 that such an institution was greatly
wanted for Dublin, where our sight was constantly struck
by objects disgraceful to human nature, with wretched
strumpets, tricked out in tawdry apparel, or converted with
tattered weeds; where our ears are constantly assaulted
with vociferations that would startle deafness, and appal
blasphemy. However, as the Report of the Committee of
the Dublin Female Penitentiary to the General Meeting
reported in 1815, it was unlikely these institutions would
allow hardened prostitutes to be admitted. Only those who
were at their first fall were accepted, if they were young
unskilled and not hardened in the ways of vice.
Dublin Castle or the lower end of the market housed in

Barrack Street close, as the name suggests, to the soldiers.
Two years after the new police force was introduced, the
situation changed and prostitutes were routinely arrested;
in 1788, 17 street-walkers were arrested in Copper Alley,
within the vicinity of St Stephens Green, and a further 32
were caught a few nights after; in July 1799, in the same
area and around the Rotunda, 150 women were rounded up.
ENEREAL DISEASES WERE another inevitable consequence of prostitution. These ranged

from pubic lice to unpleasant symptoms of
inflammation and discharge (gleets, whites
and sores) from gonorrhoea and syphilis. The two diseases
were thought to be different stages of the same disease
called the pox. Mercury was considered to be the only
effective treatment and could be administered in the
form of an ointment, a steam bath or a pill but, although
Portrait of Lady
Arabella Denny
by Hugh Douglas
Hamilton, 18th
century.
it appeared to alleviate symptoms, it was by no means a

cure. Brothel-keepers had particular doctors or surgeons on
whom they would call for gynaecological problems, sexual
diseases, pregnancy and abortions. The less fortunate could
seek treatment at the Westmoreland Lock Hospital, which
had opened at Donnybrook in 1755, although its location
outside of the city made this more difficult for Dublin city
prostitutes. A new site opened in 1792, in the centre of
Dublin. From the start, the hospital had treated both men
and women, but from 1820 onwards treated only women
and, in doing so, increased the visible association of women
with the infection. As Westmoreland Lock Hospital took
on an increasingly moral and reformatory role, one satirist
commented in 1826 that a female patient would be put
on a course of mercury and the Bible, and having spat out
her pint a day [salivation from mercury was a popular
treatment for syphilis] and perused her diurnal portion of
chapters, she has a choice of stitching plain or fancy work
in the Dorset Asylum, or go out to catch cold, a known
BY JULY 1803, though, little had changed regarding the

number of women working in prostitution, despite the
new police force being introduced. One commentator
complained that Parliament Street, Essex Street and the
immediate vicinity are much annoyed by a number of
prostitutes at all hours of the day and night, continually
drunk and insulting the passengers. The Police are usually
afraid to interfere as the prostitutes are protected by the
Military. As late as 1854 one witness to a committee on
Dublin hospitals confessed he thought prostitution is
absolutely necessary; if it is discouraged among the soldiers,
you would reduce the moral character of the men. It is
much better that soldiers have free access to women, or
they will have worse. Given the number of single army
men in the area, it was unlikely the situation would change
dramatically, although the area of Monto (nicknamed after
Montgomery Street, now Foley Street) would take over as
an area of known prostitution after the demolition of the
smaller alleyways.
The story of prostitution in 18th-century Dublin is one
of warring needs. For many women, prostitution was a
much-needed solution for their troubles and prostitutes
were seen as a necessary social evil. But they suffered, in
numerous ways, in their struggle for survival.
Julie Peakmans latest book is Peg Plunkett, Memoirs of A Whore (Quercus,
2015).
FURTHER READING
Kelly, James and M.J. Powell, (eds.) Clubs and Societies in
Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts Press, 2010).
Luddy, Maria, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800-1940
(Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Peakman, Julie, Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the
Eighteenth Century (Atlantic, 2004).
DEMOCRACY
The Age of Pericles, after

the painting, 1853, by
Philipp Foltz.
Decalogue of
Democracy
It comes in many forms and often disappoints, yet democracy
has come to be regarded as the most desirable of all political
systems. Paul Cartledge offers a guide to its roots in ancient
Greece and reminds us of its long absence in the West.
HERE HAS BEEN, in the last couple of decades, an outpouring of research, as well as agitational literature, on
the subject of democracy. Most of it concerns its contemporary condition, a sense that democracy is not all it is
cracked up to be. Winston Churchills quip, made in the House of
Commons in November 1947, that it is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from
time to time, may not be far off the mark. A contributor to the
letters page of a national newspaper lately claimed: The illusion
that we live in any sort of democracy evaporates by the day.
Did the West became too complacent in comparing its forms
of democracy too favourably with non-western autocratic or
oligarchic systems of governance, or even with genuinely democratic ones? A reaction has arisen among non-western scholars and
commentators, who advocate the merits of other modes of democracy (including that of the worlds largest, India), as well as from
western academics, who seek to knock the West and, in particular,
its original democrats, the ancient Greeks, off their pedestal.
There is no one democracy but rather a multiplicity of them,
now as well as in Hellenic antiquity, and all ancient democracies
differ from the modern variety in crucial respects. So I offer a
Decalogue of Difference, an abbreviated inventory of what I consider to be the ten constituents necessary to the essential nature
of ancient Greek democratic thought and practice.
DEMOCRACY
Etymology
The ancient Greek abstract noun demokratia combines

demos with kratos. We do not know exactly when or where
it was coined, but we do know that the word continued
to be used (and abused) in ancient Greece for
centuries, because it began life as a polemical
term of debate, even civil strife, rather than as
the agreed platitude that it has since become.
Lexicon
Kratos meant power (or strength), unambiguously. But Demos, crucially, was both ambiguous and
ambivalent. It seems originally to have meant
a village or a local community of some sort, a
meaning it retained even after two other political
meanings had emerged and been widely adopted.
These were, first, People (all the people, the
people as a whole); second, the Masses, the poor
majority of the People. Demokratia may therefore
be interpreted according to context as either (to
put it in somewhat anachronistic terms) Lincolns government of the People, by the People,
and for the People or Marxs Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.
Paradox
Much of English political vocabulary is

derived from ancient Greek: politics, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, tyranny,
plutocracy, anarchy and democracy. There
is a paradox here so far as democracy is
concerned. All contemporary systems of
democracy are either indirect or representative or a combination of the two. They
(politicians) rule for Us (citizens). But all
ancient Greek systems of demokratia were
direct: We the demos rule ourselves, for ourselves. To
an ancient Greek, all modern democratic systems would
count as oligarchy, that is, rule of and by the Few, even if
the Few happen to be elected to serve by (all) the People.
Translation
Though our English politics is derived ultimately from the

Greek word polis and its adjective politikos, translators beware.
The title of Aristotles treatise that we know as the Politics,
for example, meant Matters to do with the Polis. Aristotles
deceptively familiar Man is a political animal was intended as
shorthand to capture his special teleological view that Man is
a living creature designed by nature to realise his full potential
in, and only within, the framework of the peculiar state form
called polis by the Greeks. Aristotle remains by far the best
ancient analyst of the polis and it is on the basis of his and his
students enquiry (historia in Greek) that we can get something approaching a clear grasp of the essence of the ancient
Greek polis and its peculiar politics. It was not just a city
state. The most accurate translation of polis is citizen state:
for it was the collective body of empowered, participatory
politai (citizens) that gave its name to the political entities by
which the Greeks referred to themselves: the Athenians, the
Spartans and so forth, not Athens or Sparta, which were
geographical terms.
Below: the Athenian Agora, fifth century BC.

Bottom: ostraka, inscribed potsherds, cast against
Aristides and Themistocles in the 480s.
Constitutions
There existed in the three centuries or so between 600 and

300 bc something in the order of 1,000 of these citizen
states, which collectively made up Hellas, the Hellenic
world of culture that embraced much of the Mediterranean
and Black Sea basins. There was thus no single ancient
Greece, politically speaking. Of those 1,000 or so poleis,
only a minority ever had any form of demokratia for their
politeia (constitution). Most of them, most of the time,
were governed by more or less extreme forms of oligarchia,
that is the rule (arche) of the Few (rich elite citizens). Not
only was there no such thing as ancient Greek democracy,
there was not even such a thing as ancient Athenian
democracy. For over a roughly 200-year span Athens had,
successively, at least three versions of demokratia.
Anti-Democracy
All Greeks believed in,

or professed to believe
in, equality but differed
radically over which citizens
should be counted as equal
Most ancient Greek writers were not democrats. Some even

opposed it. Plato was extremely anti, Aristotle less so. The
number of ancient Greek writers who were ideological democrats was small: the Athenians Pericles and Demosthenes, the
atomist Democritus and his fellow-countryman Protagoras.
This is for two reasons: first, Greek political systems were
direct, not representative, and politics was reduced to in-yourface power play; second, anti-democrats interpreted demokratia
as a dictatorship of the proletariat, of the poor masses of
citizens exercising power for their own benefit over the elite.
Theory
The earliest surviving example of Greek political theory

is contained in the Histories of Herodotus (c. 484-425 bc).
The so-called Persian Debate (the three speakers were
Persian nobles) has a dramatic date of about 522 bc, which
is historically impossible, as is the Persian setting itself,
since the terms of the debate make it clear that the issues
as well as the theorising are purely Greek. The three
speakers advocate versions in turn of Rule by All, Rule
by Some, Rule by One, respectively an egalitarian
form of Democracy (though the word demokratia is
not used), an aristocratic form of Oligarchy and an
absolutist version of Monarchy. It is the speaker that
favours Monarchy who wins.
Egalitarianism
Top: bust of Herodotus, Roman period.

Above: a kleroterion (allotment machine) fragment, used to
select citizens by lot for public jury service.
All Greeks believed in, or professed to believe in, equality

but differed radically over which citizens should be
counted as equal, in what respects and to whom. Herodotus Persian pro-Democracy speaker, for example, advocated what he referred to as isonomia: literally, equality of
distribution of privileges and power, equality under the
laws, comprising selection of all officials by lottery, the
responsibility of all officials to the people as a whole and
the taking of public political decisions by majority vote
of all empowered citizens. According to this world view,
every citizen must be empowered with one equal vote,
regardless of birth, wealth, beauty, strength and intelligence. Opponents of radically egalitarian democracy,
however, believed that some citizens were more equal
than others, that the well-informed, clever, sensible, educated
and, above all, rich Few should be entitled to rule over the
ignorant, stupid, fickle, uneducated and poor masses.
DEMOCRACY
Gender
Harmodius and Aristogeiton,

Greek symbols of liberty and
democracy. Roman copies in marble
of bronze originals.
In one respect, however, not even an ancient Greek radical

democrat was egalitarian. The polis was a men-only club
for free, legitimate adults of citizen parentage. Only
they were entitled to qualify as citizens with political power. The point is well made in an ancient Greek
joke, supposedly a Spartan one, re-told centuries later
by Plutarch (c. ad 46-120): when an Athenian asked a
Spartan why his fellow-countrymen had not instituted
democracy as their form of self-government, the
Spartan replied that they would do so as soon as the
Athenians introduced democracy into their own homes.
By implication, the Athenians were male chauvinists,
as indeed, legally and politically speaking, they were.
Women in Athens were only ever second-class citizens,
treated legally as minors throughout their lives and
able to act both inside and outside the home only with
the authorisation of their official male kurios (lord and
master). Resident foreigners and slaves suffered even
greater political exclusion and deprivation.
Degradation
Finally, we must note the increasing depreciation of

demokratia over the course of antiquity, both as a word and
as a thing. After about 300 bc hardly any demokratia, in the
sense of the rule of the masses, existed anywhere in Hellas.
Instead, demokratia came to be used politically to mean
something like republic, freedom from direct rule either
by Greek autocrats or by the mighty Roman Empire, which
by 27 bc had conquered the Greek world. The Romans
always hated and set out systematically to destroy original,
Athenian-style democracy. For centuries they were themselves republicans, but from the reign of Augustus
(27 bc-ad 14) onwards, the Roman Empire became a
monarchy. The Byzantines, who called themselves
Romans and instituted a theocratic form of absolutist
monarchy, took the Roman abhorrence of demokratia a
significant step further: by the reign of Justinian (527-565)
the term could be used derogatorily to mean riot!
Against such a background it is not surprising to find
that democracy took a long time to recover any sort of
positive meaning or application. It took until well into the
19th century for it to do so. The real puzzle perhaps is the
rise in esteem of the term democracy from the later 18th
century to its present commanding heights.
Against such a background

it is not surprising to find
that democracy took a
long time to recover any
sort of positive meaning or
application
Paul Cartledge is A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture emeritus, University of

Cambridge. His latest book is Democracy: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2016).
FURTHER READING
L. Bretherton, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship and the Politics
of a Common Life (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
J. Dunn, Breaking Democracys Spell (Yale University Press, 2014).
J. Dunn (ed.), Democracy: The Unfinished Journey, 508 bc to ad 1993
(Oxford University Press, 1992).
D. Held, Models of Democracy, 3rd edition (Polity Press, 2006).
A. Papadatos, A. Kawa, A. Di Donna Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2015).
R. Fuller, Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed its Purpose and Lost
its Meaning (Bloomsbury, 2015).
FASCIST ARCHITECTURE
Though many writers, film-makers and other

artists found it difficult to work in Fascist
Italy, modernist architecture flourished under
the less than watchful gaze of Mussolini.
Jonathan Meades wonders why.
Through the myth of the executioners mask,
Alison Kinney explores our tortured relationship
with life, death, mortality and museums.
FORM
and
FASCISM
The Palazzo della Civit

Italiana, part of the EUR
complex in Rome and now
home to the fashion house
Fendi.
The alliance between progressive architecture and

progressive politics is ruptured by this uncomfortable
combination of buildings and ideology
T IS A COMMONPLACE that the dictatorships of the 20th

century existed in aesthetic isolation. This is a fabrication
of both the democracies which opposed the most murderous regimes mankind has yet devised and of the countries
that suffered the retrospective shame of having succumbed
to those regimes. Everyone is anxious to avoid the taint of
having shared the idioms or forms which supposedly characterised those regimes and those regimes alone.
Thus the Royal Academys 1985 exhibition, German Art
in the 20th Century, omitted work made between 1933 and
1945. Its curators could hardly deny that during those 12
years Germany was under Nazi rule. They duly referred,
then, to the infamous decadent art exhibition of 1937-8.
However, they included not a single bulgily muscled, genitally impoverished sculptural figure by Josef Thorak or Arno
Breker, nor a single representation of saccharine bucolicism
by Werner Peiner or Adolf Wissel. Yet the hackneyed genres
these artists adhered to were practised throughout the
rest of Europe and North America. A kindredly catholic
exhibition devoted to American art of the same period

would appear oddly curtailed if it did not show works by
Grant Woods or Thomas Hart Benton. Europes capital cities
abound in preposterously stylised athletes and supermen:
the Palais de Chaillot in Paris, Vigelands Park in Oslo, Jacob
Epstein and Henry Moore. Their ubiquity shows that there
was no specifically Nazi art or architecture. Nor communist:
Stalins palaces for the people, built in the years after the
Great Patriotic War, were pastiches of American structures
of 20 or 30 years before given a bewilderingly promiscuous
dusting of classical, Baroque and panto-oriental gestures:
postmodernism avant la lettre.
The architecture of Mussolinis 22-year-long dictatorship
provides an even greater hurdle for the champions of this
flawed notion of cultural isolationism. While he censored
journalists and writers, film-makers and playwrights, Mussolinis treatment of visual artists was laissez-faire, benign
going on slothful. Part of the job description for any dictator
is surely to build to his own glory. He duly fulfilled the
Clockwise from opposite

page: the Palazzo delle
Poste, Naples, by
Giuseppe Vaccaro and
Gino Franzi, 1936; the
Palazzo delle Poste,
Palermo, by Angiolo
Mazzoni, 1920s; the First
World War memorial at
Redipuglia, north-east
Italy.
building part of that contract. He commissioned all sorts of
construction. He prescribed building types, commanded infrastructure, had marshes drained so that new towns might
be built (the water went, the mosquitos remained). Yet
he was largely indifferent to self-advertisement through
brick and stone. Architectural style did not preoccupy him
as it preoccupied his fellow dictators. In this regard he was
unique among autocrats down the ages, self-sanctioned
cleansers who will invariably favour classicism of one sort
or another: something, no doubt, to do with symmetrys
supposed equation with strength, power, supremacy.
Mussolini was not scared of what we are now obliged to call
vibrant diversity.
HERE WERE INDEED exercises in bloated, mannered classicism as well as in the pared-down, skin
and bones classicism, whose origins were to be
found in Sweden and Finland. There were Armando
Brasinis impressively dotty evocations of the Baroque. At
Monte Grappa and Redipuglia there were startlingly grand
First World War memorials that are precursive of land art.
EUR the suburban Roman site of an international exhibition that would never take place is today well known as
the backdrop for countless advertisements. These exceptions account for only a fraction of the work that was made
in those two decades: they are much mediated for the very
reason that they are exceptions. Due to their consequent
familiarity they have come to be taken as typical. (It is by
the same process that England is supposed to be composed
exclusively of limestone villages and gentle chalk streams.)
The powerful mainstream of architecture in the fascist
era was modernist and modernism was a broad church. The
Italian variety was bereft of the quirks that are characteristic of Belgium and Holland and of Germany before 1933. It
was crisp, austere and seldom overtly sculptural. It was an
architecture of pragmatism, practicality and abstraction,
The First World

War memorial at
Monte Grappa
in the Venetian
pre-Alps.
which has caused certain problems for scholars who have

been less than enthusiastic about admitting that many of
its most able practitioners were members of the Fascist
party. The alliance between progressive architecture and
progressive politics is ruptured by this uncomfortable combination of building and ideology. Of course, just because
their authors are true believers or fascists of convenience
does not make the buildings fascist. There is no such thing
as a fascist building, or fascist car, or dish of fascist spaghettini. To ascribe dicta and creeds to them is feebly anthropomorphic. Cars rust. Pasta is ingested. Buildings, should they
survive, change their uses and meanings with the passing
of years. At a push one might concede that they once represented the fascist state.
Mussolinian fascism was a precursor of Islamofascism.
They share a taste for gratuitous statist violence as a norm.
But they do not make much of a job of it. There is nothing
pragmatic, nothing practical, nothing advantageous,
nothing in the national interest about war for the sake of
war, war as its own validation. Italy went into wars in the
name of a dictator who believed himself to be a god but was
not, while Islam goes into wars in the name of a god who
cannot believe in himself because he is fictional. Mussolini
prosecuted war he frivolously prosecuted war in order
to show off the ability to prosecute it. For him war was
nothing more or less than the expression of ostentatious
bellicosity and martial can-do, an end in itself. This was the
nearest thing he had to an ideology. The wastefulness, the
loss of personnel and the geopolitical pointlessness demonstrate the frailness of this supposed strongmans grasp
of realpolitik just as his failure to exploit architectures
expressive potency suggests that as a living god he was fated
to be forever stalled on the foothills of Olympus.
Jonathan Meades documentary Ben Building: Mussolini, Monuments and
Modernism is available on BBC iPlayer for viewers in the UK.
CIVIL WARS
Wheelchair of Sir
Thomas Fairfax,
parliamentarian
commanderin-chief.
ISTORIANS OF THE Civil Wars are beginning to

take notice of these bloody conflicts as a critical moment in the history of welfare. Previous
conflicts had seen commanders demonstrate little
concern for the welfare of sick and injured soldiers and they
devoted few resources to them. Yet during the Civil Wars,
Parliaments concern for the commonweal led to centralised care for those who had suffered in the States service.
These innovative measures were immensely significant as,
for some, they led to improved medical treatment, permanent military hospitals and a national pension scheme.
Many historians consider the Civil Wars to be the most
unsettling experience the British and Irish peoples have
ever undergone. It is estimated that between 1642 and 1651
around 180,000 to 190,000 people, including civilians,
died from combat and war-related diseases in England and
Wales. This represents a population loss of three per cent.
The percentage population loss in Scotland and Ireland
was probably far higher. The First World War is generally
regarded as the conflict that resulted in the greatest loss
of British lives and the Second World War as the one that
had the greatest effect on the civilian population. Yet if the
above estimate is even approximately correct, then a far
larger percentage of the population of the British Isles died
as a direct result of the Civil Wars. The impact of the world
wars was immense and has continued to resonate through
British and Irish society right up to the present day. How
much greater must the influence of the Civil Wars have
been upon the far smaller 17th-century populations?
Some of those injured were still petitioning for relief
as late as the 1690s. There are also indications that thousands of veterans and civilians were afflicted with mental
health problems as a result of the conflict. The impact of
this is all too easy to imagine when we consider how
British society was traumatised by the psychological
legacy of the world wars.
Welfare
for the
WOUNDED
The Civil Wars of the 17th century

prompted pioneering medical care and
welfare, provided by the state not just for
soldiers but for the widows and children
they left behind, as Eric Gruber von Arni
and Andrew Hopper show.
CIVIL WARS
There is a popular misconception that 17th-century
medical treatments were incompetent and ineffective, that
medical practice was riddled with charlatans and quack
doctors and that, in an age lacking modern antibiotics,
those suffering from infection were doomed. Medical ideas
were still based largely on the work of the Classical Greeks,
Hippocrates and Galen, and the theory that sickness resulted from an imbalance in the human bodys four humours:
black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Yet much medical
practice was also based on practical experience, observation
and the use of specific drugs according to the teachings of
the Swiss physician Paracelsus. Herbal remedies were also
administered. Most English towns had apothecaries, from
whom drugs, potions, herbs and spices were available.
Civilians, as well as soldiers, could not avoid the effects
of war and increased numbers died from diseases spread
by marching armies, such as plague and typhus, for which
there was no effective treatment.
VOLUME of Gerards Herball (1597), a popular

book of herbal remedies, which belonged to a
Nottinghamshire royalist family, the Coopers of
Thurgarton, is annotated throughout with 244
manicules or hands in the margins pointing to ailments
curable by certain plants. The majority pick out six medical
matters: bleeding; spitting blood (a possible sign of typhus);
bloody flux (a form of dysentery); laske (diarrhoea); green
wounds; and ulcers all conditions associated with early
modern siege warfare. It would seem that this book was
used by the Coopers to treat injured and ill soldiers from the
sieges of Newark, perhaps using their garrison at Thurgarton House as a royalist field hospital.
Affordable manuals of self-help were
also purchased by soldiers for use in the
field. In his Approved Medicines of Little
Cost (1651), Richard Elkes recommended
treatments for typhus, scurvy, scabies and
lice, as well as shot wounds. He described
low-cost items that could be carried by
a soldier, or kept by a householder, to
help prevent or treat disease, especially
the bloody flux, a common disease in
crowded military camps with poor sanitation. A peece of steele could be heated
to red-hot in a camp-fire, then dropped
into a drink of water, milk or beer to heat
(and sterilise) it before drinking. Crushed
leaves or bark from oak or blackthorn
trees in a stew helped settle the stomach.
Salt and oatmeal were recommended for
the flux. Salt might replace lost electrolytes from the body during diarrhoea and
oatmeal might help solidify the patients
stool, much as products such as Dioralyte
and Immodium do today.
Medicine had a significant effect
on lowering the death toll. Physicians,
doctors, surgeons, nurses, apothecaries,
herbalists and midwives all played their
part. Many of the inherited work traditions and practices
among hospital personnel remained similar over centuries, in some cases right up to the present. The use of spa
treatments was increasingly recommended, as advocated by
Dr John French, a military physician at Ely House Hospital,

in his book the Yorkshire Spaw (1652). During the 1650s,
hundreds of recovering parliamentarian wounded from
Londons hospitals were sent on organised trips to take the
waters at Bath, a practice that became enormously popular
in the following centuries. Many medical textbooks were
also published during the period. Yet not all the lessons
learned in the Civil Wars were applied more widely. For
example, the medical support for colonising ventures in the
Caribbean in the 1650s was underfunded and appalling.
Even without antibiotics, military surgery saved
many lives. The Civil Wars witnessed advancements in
bone-setting, prosthetics and medical cleanliness. Military
surgeons accompanied the armies at regimental and even
company level. Many surgical treatises were published to
share new medical practice, such as The Marrow of Surgery
by James Cooke, the parliamentarian surgeon at Warwick
Castle. This treatise illustrated the use of various surgical
instruments. Early forms of plaster and splinting were
devised to support fractured limbs while they healed.
Numerous amputations were performed and hospital
carpenters produced prosthetic limbs, some of which were
Military surgery saved many

lives. The Civil Wars witnessed
advancements in bone-setting,
prosthetics and medical
cleanliness
Ely House, London. From a

print by F. Grose, c.1783.
Left: title page of the

1676 edition of The
Marrow of Surgery by
James Cooke.
Below: James Cooke.
Engraving by Robert
White, 1676.
remarkable for their sophistication and craftsmanship.

Indeed a 17th-century prosthetic leg compares very favourably to those given to soldiers returning from Afghanistan
in the 21st century.
The most feared wounds were those inflicted by musket
balls or cannon shot. These were more difficult to treat
than sword cuts and required the use of excruciating bullet
extractors in a period before modern anaesthetics were
available. Sir Thomas Fairfax, the parliamentarian commander in chief, was shot at least twice: once through the
wrist at Selby in 1643, then in the shoulder at Helmsley
Castle the following year. He received many additional
wounds, including a sword cut across the face at Marston
Moor. In 1645 he wrote to his father: I am exceedingly
troubled with rheumatism and a benumbing coldness in my
head, legs and arms, especially on that side I had my hurts.
His cousin Brian Fairfax recalled how from 1664 he resorted
to his wheelchair: he sat like an old Roman, his manly
countenance striking awe and reverence into all that beheld
him. Fairfax was fortunate to survive so many wounds.
For those shot in the chest or belly there was little hope of
recovery. John Hussey was shot with a musket ball into his
upper chest at Gainsborough in 1643. The armour he wore
at the time clearly shows the bullet hole in the upper rim of
his breastplate. Husseys right lung would have collapsed,
leading to his eventual death within a few hours as a result
of haemorrhage, heart failure and suffocation.
The best military surgeons were influenced by the
work of the Frenchman Ambroise Par (1510-90), whose
teachings recommended the precise application of ligatures
to arrest haemorrhage instead of the drastic cauterisation

advocated previously. Additionally, he recommended
the application of egg-yolk, oil of roses and turpentine
to gunpowder burns and pioneered the development of
several innovative surgical instruments and prosthetic
limbs. It is distinctly probable that Thomas Trapham, Oliver
Cromwells personal surgeon, followed Pars teachings
and methods at the Savoy Hospital but, sadly, there is no
surviving record of his operative procedures. Fortunately
the royalist surgeon Richard Wiseman published works
of advice to fellow surgeons that, in the main, closely
followed Pars teaching. The popular idea that military surgeons were little better than torturers, inflicting damaging
and unnecessary treatments on their patients, might be
challenged when faced with the successes of some of their
techniques. These successes in saving lives are reflected
in the thousands of recorded petitions that survive from
maimed soldiers detailing the terrible injuries from which
they survived, the effects of which they carried for years,
even decades, afterwards.
Contrary to the popular imagination, the history of
British military nursing did not begin with Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War. Similarly, nursing in the Civil
Wars was not restricted to the haphazard efforts of camp
CIVIL WARS
Reproduction of
a Civil War bullet
extractor.
Diets were far

more generous
than those of most
of the population
and compare
favourably with
those endured
under rationing in
the Second World
War
followers and members of the poorest classes of society.

Instead the wars led to the establishment by Parliament
of Britains first permanent military hospitals. This was in
contrast to the approach of those loyal to Charles I, which
only provided lip-service to casualty care and varied in
worth according to the concerns of individual commanders
and the availability of casual local facilities. Although both
sides established military hospitals and there was little
difference between the practices of the doctors, surgeons
and nurses on each side, Parliament achieved greater levels
of care through superior administration, legislation and
clerical support.
At considerable expense, Parliament established some
of the first professionally staffed, permanent military hospitals such as at the Savoy in the Strand in 1642 and at Ely
House, formerly the London residence of the Bishop of Ely,
in 1648. Their location on the banks of the Thames aided in
the waterborne transit of patients. A revolutionary and innovatory building in its time, the Savoy has been described
as the first of the modern hospitals. Ely House boasted
a cloistered quadrangle and a herb garden of medicinal
plants. The nursing and medical practice in these hospitals
aided the soldiers recovery. High moral standards were
enforced to promote spiritual welfare, while diets were far
more generous than those experienced by most of the population and compare favourably with those endured under
rationing in the Second World War. A structure of staffing
and codes of conduct were established, which helped shape
hospital practice today. In contrast to popular misconceptions about unhygienic and deplorable conditions,
at the Savoy and Ely House significant investment in
decent bedding, laundered sheets and prepared linen for
bandages all helped contain infection. Individuals such as
the pamphleteer Elizabeth Alkin, nicknamed Parliament
Joan, emerged to organise nursing care in London and the
south-east.
ESPITE THE foundation of permanent hospitals,

the majority of care for the wounded took place
in settings such as houses, inns and temporary
hospitals. How far these places lived up to the
standards in Londons regular hospitals requires further research. Although the Savoy and Ely House were shut down
upon the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, their example
provided a blueprint for the future, with the establishment
of later hospitals for soldiers and sailors at Greenwich and
Chelsea in 1692.
The day after the Battle of Edgehill, the Long Parliaments ordinance of October 24th, 1642 acknowledged its
duty of care not just to soldiers maimed in its service but
also to the orphans and widows of their war dead. This was
immensely important. For the first time in history Parliament publicly assumed responsibility for such matters. This
was not entirely altruistic, as it did so to rally support and
encourage men to volunteer for its armies in the knowledge
that their dependants would be looked after. However,
when the war dragged on for longer than many imagined,
Parliament gradually found the financial burden of paying
such pensions increasingly difficult to meet. Nevertheless,
a genuine attempt was made to meet these obligations.
Military relief was granted by Parliaments county
committees, provincial military governors and at Army
Headquarters. Parliament established a Committee
The application of surgical instruments from the 1676 edition of The Marrow of Surgery.
CIVIL WARS
Reproduction of
the seal of the
parliamentary
Committee for
Maimed Soldiers.
Most claimants
received their relief
through a county
pension scheme,
first established
during the reign of
Elizabeth I in 1593
for Maimed Soldiers; a reproduction of its seal bears the
moving motto Justice to the Maimed Soldier. Yet most
claimants received their relief through a county pension
scheme, first established during the reign of Elizabeth I in
1593 and modified by a series of parliamentary ordinances
in the 1640s. Payments were made through the local
county courts the Quarter Sessions where claimants
appeared in person to petition civilian Justices of the Peace
for financial relief. Many of these petitions survive, with
thousands of pensions and one-off payments of gratuities
being recorded in court order books for about 30 years from
the mid-1640s onwards.
Most of these petitions were not written by the maimed
soldiers and widows themselves, many of whom were
illiterate. They were usually written for them by a paid
scribe, clerk, schoolmaster or clergyman. However, the
petitioners had to swear the details in their petitions as
true by appearing in person with them before the Justices
at Quarter Sessions, which could prove a daunting experience. If successful, they might receive a pension of several
pounds per annum from the County Treasurers for Maimed
Soldiers, who supervised the schemes administration.
These pensions were worth the considerable trouble they
often took to obtain, though they tended only to provide a
fraction of the cost of living for their recipients, who might

also depend on customary rights, by-employments and
parish relief to eke out their livelihoods. Pensions often ran
into arrears, as funds provided by the county rate imposed
on parishes proved insufficient to meet demand.
As Parliament consolidated its victory and the kings
cause collapsed, only petitions from parliamentarian
soldiers and widows were accepted, with their royalist
counterparts being thrown back on the poor rate and the
charity of their home parishes. Parliament had used the
pension scheme to encourage men to volunteer, but also
to shore up support for its right to rule. Claimants became
skilled in spinning their stories and crafting the language in
their petitions to satisfy the justices expectations. In many
counties, widows only received what income was left after
the maimed soldiers had been dealt with. For the first time
ever, war widows were entitled to relief not from Christian
charity but because their contribution to the parliamentarian cause warranted it. Some now saw themselves as part of
the political nation. They were encouraged in this belief by
godly sermons, polemical print and the pronouncements
of parliamentarian commanders. In 1648 Colonel Algernon
Sidney, a noted republican, supported the petition of one
gunners widow as not only an act of justice and mercy
but an encouragement to others to adventure their lives

for the state in hope of the like relief for theirs. Richard
Deane, General-at-Sea, reminded Sir Henry Vane in 1653
that victory is purchased with the blood of those who were
precious in the eyes of the Lord. In April 1659 Lord Fairfax
presented a petition to Parliament on behalf of 2,500
maimed soldiers and 4,000 war widows and orphans.
NDER such circumstances,

some widows became adept
at addressing authority and
manipulating the system.
The portrait of Katherine, widow of
the parliamentarian Lord Brooke, slain
at Lichfield, presents her as a model
of godly piety and stoic forbearance,
bearing her bereavement and suffering
with patience for the sake of the cause.
The House of Lords readily voted for her
to receive 5,000 for the education of
her infant son. In contrast, the concerns
of most war widows were more pressing,
as nearly all endured a loss of status and
many faced destitution. Jane, the widow
of Colonel John Meldrum, presented
herself as in a starving condition, destitute of friends or means. She appealed to
Cromwells millenarian religious fervour
when she pleaded with the Lord Protector in 1655 that her husbands blood and
services may not be buried in oblivion
and that your highness will be graciously pleased to number her amongst
your distressed widows whom God hath
drawn forth of your pious heart mercifully to relieve. And Christ will put it to
your account on the Great day.
Other widows manipulated the
memory of the wars, being selective about what they included in their petitions. After the Restoration in 1660, the
Devon Quarter Sessions stipulated that relief would only
be granted to those who had never been in arms against
the king. So Grace Batishill pleaded that her husband
George had been unjustly and inhumanely hanged for his
loyalty to Charles I, whereas in fact he had been hanged
by Plymouths parliamentarians for having deserted them
and having changed sides. Local Justices endorsed her
claims despite this deliberate spin and distortion of her
husbands past. Others adopted the strategy of shaming the
authorities into action. At Walsall, then in Staffordshire,
in 1653, the uncle of the orphaned children of Colonel
Tinker Fox claimed he was too impoverished to continue
supporting them, warning one parliamentary committee of
their shame if he was forced to turn the children onto the
streets to beg: Lest otherwise in their want, your and the
Commonwealths enemies say in reproach and especially
in the county where his service was so eminent These are
the children of Colonel Fox.
Following the Restoration, maimed parliamentarian
soldiers were stripped of their pensions. Their places on the
county lists were taken by maimed royalist soldiers, who
now petitioned in their thousands. Among them was John
Tinckler, a gunner from Hartlepool in the north-east of
Portrait of
Katherine,
2nd Lady Brooke,
attributed to
Theodore Russell,
c.1643.
England, who in 1643 lost both his eyes and arms whereby
he is become a very sad spectacle. His position was considered so desperate and exceptional that he had continued to
receive a small pension during the Interregnum despite
his known royalism.
After 1660, the right of widows to petition for pensions
was rescinded, leaving most of them reliant upon charitable relief in their home parishes. Many royalist widows
petitioned nevertheless but they tended
to receive one-off payments rather than
regular pensions. Maimed soldiers continued to petition as a result of Civil War
injuries into the 1690s.
These thousands of surviving petitions of maimed soldiers, widows and
orphans provide an extensive resource
for the medical history of the Civil Wars.
They also constitute a powerful reminder that the consequences and human
costs of war do not end with treaties
and peace settlements, but linger on for
generations. They tell us much about
how common people remembered the
wars and articulated their losses and
sufferings in the subsequent decades.
Parliaments efforts after the Civil Wars
to provide pensions to the widows and
orphans of its servicemen was revolutionary. For the first time the government considered a group of women to
be part of the political nation, having
shared in the sacrifices made for the
Good Old Cause. Yet after the return
of Charles II, this unique precedent was
ignored and statutory military pensions
were denied women for more than 200
years. By changing the understanding
and perception of medical care and
welfare during the Civil Wars, we can reflect upon whom
the responsibility should fall of caring for those maimed
and bereaved in todays wars.
Eric Gruber von Arni is an Honorary Visiting Fellow and Andrew Hopper is
a Senior Lecturer in the Centre for English Local History at the University of
Leicester. They are curators of the Battle-Scarred exhibition at the National
Civil War Centre, Newark Museum, which continues until October 2nd, 2016.
The Centre was opened in May 2015 by Newark and Sherwood District Council
with help from the Heritage Lottery Fund. The exhibition builds on a grant
from the Wolfson Foundation and comprises four rooms allocated to the
themes of civil-war medicine, surgery, aftercare and welfare.
FURTHER READING
Eric Gruber von Arni, Justice to the Maimed Soldier: Nursing,
Medical Care and Welfare for Sick and Wounded Soldiers and
their Families during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum,
1642-1660 (Ashgate, 2001).
Mark Stoyle, Memories of the Maimed: The Testimony
of Charles Is Former Soldiers, 16601730, History, 88
(2003), pp. 204-26.
Early Modern Medical Practitioners in England, Wales and
Ireland: http://practitioners.exeter.ac.uk
Portrait
of the
Author
as a
Historian
The Austrian writer, whose
short stories and novellas have
recently enjoyed a new burst
of popularity, used history to
remind us that a better life is
possible, as Alexander Lee
explains in his new series.
Ideal and imagination: Stefan

Zweig, c.1940.
No.1
Stefan Zweig
Born: November 28th, 1881, Vienna.
Died: February 22nd, 1942, Petrpolis, Brazil.
STEFAN ZWEIGS PLAY Jeremias was

performed for the first time at the Stadt
Stadttheater in Zrich on February 27th
27th, 1918.
The Old Testament prophet was returned
to life to deliver again his prophecy of
Jerusalems destruction. Castigating the
people of Judah for having abandoned
the faith of their fathers, Jeremiah
warned that their punishment was at
hand. His words went unheeded. At the
instigation of the Temple priests, he was
beaten and put in the stocks. When war
with Babylon broke out, some urged
King Zedekiah to put him to death. But
as he was hurled into a cistern, they saw
the terrible truth of his warnings. After
a long siege, Jerusalem fell to the Baby
Babylonians, its Temple was destroyed and its
people were scattered. All that was left
was for Jeremiah rescued from his well
by a Cushite to mourn the citys fate;
in the final scene, he held its past up as a
mirror to the present, in the hope that it
might strengthen the exiles faith.
Written at the height of the First
World War, Jeremias was an attempt
to articulate Zweigs growing sense of
foreboding. Employed in the Austrian
ministry of war, he was appalled not only
destrucby the loss of life, but also by the destruc
tion of European culture. What alarmed
him most was the silence of those who
longed for peace. He felt he had to speak
out, to warn of what lay ahead. Unable
to say in plain terms what [he] felt
and thought, [he] chose the only way
left open to [him], that of historical
allegory. Turning to the Hebrew Bible,
the primal source of his Jewish faith, he
found in Jeremiah sublimest among
the adversaries of war the perfect
subject for his play.
Jeremias was emblematic of Zweigs
attitude towards history. Though now
best known for the psychological depth
of his short stories and novellas, he was
expressdrawn to the past as a means of express
ing his cultural hopes and societal fears.
Condemned to witness the destruction
of all that he held most dear and forced
to wander the earth as an exile, he came
to see himself as a modern Jeremiah:
looking forward, looking back, weeping
and warning.
Zweigs outlook had been forged by
the radical transformation of Germanic
historiography during his youth. For
much of the 19th century this had been
dominated by the empiricism of Leopold
von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen.
Reacting against Hegels idealism, they
had argued that it was historys task to
reconstruct the past wie es eigentlich
gewesen (as it actually was). Though this

approach was to have a lasting influence,
its dominance was shaken by political
and social upheaval in the decades before
Zweigs birth.
As Prussia led the charge towards
German unification and Austria-Hungary
allowed its territories greater autonomy,
two separate visions of history emerged.
The first, pioneered by the Frenchman
Hippolyte Taine and the Austrian Heinrich Friedjung, embodied the liberal
and nationalistic fervour sweeping the
Continent. Drawing on the sociological
positivism of Auguste Comte, it was
grounded on the belief that culture was
shaped predominantly by race, milieu
and moment. By analysing the past in
such scientific terms, it was hoped that
history could serve to strengthen national identity and thereby accelerate the
nations progress. But the second, developed by Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich
Nietzsche, was diametrically different.
Rejecting positivism, it grew out of a
more individualistic understanding of
life. As Nietzsche explained, man was not
created by his environment; nor, indeed,
could he ever be defined objectively.
His nature was inherently and ineradicably subjective. Any attempt to force
human experience into a nationalistic
straightjacket was to deny the essence
of humanity. If history had a purpose, it
was not to record the past but to counter
the tide of nationalism, to idealise the
European spirit and to illustrate the
spiritual heights to which the individual
could rise.
Inflame the soul
Growing up in fin-de-sicle Vienna, Zweig
was, from his earliest days, a cosmopolitan modernist. Enthralled by the
poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Emile
Verhaeren, he came to share their preference for a dream-like state of ideals and
imagination over the gritty realities of an
industrial age. Like his friend, Hugo von
Hoffmanstahl, he evinced a profound
faith in the individuals creative potential
and believed that the function of literature was not to petrify a spirit in words,
but to inflame the soul. This applied to
history, too. In his 1904 doctoral thesis
on Taines philosophy, he found the
Frenchmans positivism unsatisfactory.
It seemed inconceivable to him that the
human mind could be determined so
exclusively by race, milieu and moment;
it seemed absurd that history should be
conducted on such a basis. Instead, he
like Nietzsche saw history as a means of
exemplifying that spirit of individualism

that he most admired.
Seeing his beloved Europe torn
asunder in the Great War, its importance
was brought home to him. As he later
recalled in a preface to Jeremias, it was
then, amid the rage of battle, that he realised not only how precarious the future
of his cultural ideals were, but also how
the past could reveal the dangers of war
and nationalism to the present. In the
hope that Jerusalems fate might warn
of what lay ahead, he formed a present
out of the past and translated the present
back into the past for the first time.
Yet it was not until the postwar
period that Zweig turned to writing
history in earnest. Alarmed by the
nationalistic violence that erupted after
the fall of the Habsburg Empire, he was
deeply troubled when fascism began
to raise its ugly head in Austria. Setting
himself against the vlkish histories
of Otto Brunner and his ilk, he began
writing not only a memoir Die Welt von
Growing up in
fin-de-sicle
Vienna, Zweig
was, from his
earliest days, a
cosmopolitan
modernist
Gestern (The World of Yesterday, published posthumously) but also a series
of biographies, including Der Kampf mit
dem Dmon: Hlderlin Kleist Nietzsche
(1925), Marie Antoinette: Bildnis eines mittleren Charakters (1932) and Triumph und
Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam (1934).
Taking for their subjects individuals
who embodied the intellectual freespiritedness, bold imaginativeness and
European-ness that he believed to be
imperilled, they were an unapologetic
attempt to show that a different way of
living was possible and a call to action.
Hope against hope
Like Jeremiah, his words were in vain.
After the assassination of Chancellor
Engelbert Dolfuss on July 25th, 1934,
Austrias fate was sealed. Zweig fled:
first to Britain, then to America, settling
finally in Brazil. For a time, he continued
to cling to his hope that history could
turn back the tide, or at least point the
way towards a future beyond Europe. He

penned passionate, moving works on
Sebastian Casteillios defence of religious
toleration against Calvins authoritarian
Protestantism (1936), on Ferdinand Magellan (1938) and on Amerigo Vespucci
(1942). But as Nazi Germany went from
triumph to triumph in the early days of
the Second World War, his relationship
with history changed.
This was illustrated by the enigmatic
Dr B. in Schachnovella (Chess Story,
1941). Kept in isolation by the Nazis,
Dr B. occupies himself by endlessly replaying the greatest games of chess ever
played. After memorising every move in
the book he has been using as a guide, he
begins playing himself and, as his psyche
begins splitting into two distinct personalities, suffers a nervous breakdown.
After being nursed back to health, he
flees. On his journey across the Atlantic
he finds himself on board a ship with a
group of chess enthusiasts and is drawn
into playing the reigning world champion. The first game develops quickly
and Dr B. scores a brilliant victory. But
when the tempo slows in the second,
he has the time to think more carefully
and returning to his memories of great
games past runs through every move
that could possibly be made in his mind.
Unable to free himself from the past and
the possibilities it creates, he loses and
plunges once again into madness.
In the same way, history had come to
torment Zweig. While it seemed to hold
out hope of another way of life, he felt
powerless, torn and depressed whenever
he paused to think about it more carefully. Looking at the past, there seemed to
be so many possibilities; but looking at
the horrors of the present, the unreality
of those possibilities became a form of
torture. As he worked on his memoirs
during the darkest days of the war, the
last of his belief was destroyed. In despair
at the unbridgeable gulf between past
and present, he and his wife committed
suicide on February 22nd, 1942.
Though his critics of whom there
are sadly many might say that his death
is a warning against his vision of history,
precisely the opposite is true. As war
and nationalism again come to blight
out lives, we are in need of exactly such
a modern Jeremiah to warn us of what
we stand to lose and to remind us that a
better life is possible.
Alexander Lee is a fellow in the Centre for the Study of
the Renaissance at the University of Warwick. His book
The Ugly Renaissance is published by Arrow.
Key works
Amok (1922), Beware of Pity
(1939), Chess (1942), The
World of Yesterday (1942)
A best-selling writer in his day
Zweigs novellas, short stories and
biographies sold more copies than
contemporaries Thomas Mann
and Joseph Roth, both of whom
envied his success. However, his
star fell dramatically postwar. In
2012, English Heritage decided
against commemorating with a
Blue Plaque the London house
in which he briefly lived, stating
that a critical consensus does not
appear to exist regarding Zweigs
reputation as a writer. A recent
resurgence in interest in Zweig,
however, was helped by the release
of Wes Andersons film The Grand
Budapest Hotel (2014), which was
a paean to the author. His work is
now widely available in English,
published by the Pushkin Press.
Oren Margolis in praise of Aldus Manutius Patrick J Murray on the Scottish Covenant
Jennifer Altehenger on a peoples history of Maos Cultural Revolution
REVIEWS
EUROPEAN HISTORY
A Stable,
Successful,
Imperial
Europe?
Peter H. Wilsons account
of the ideas, events and
institutions that shaped
the 1,000-year history of
the Holy Roman Empire
will surely long remain
unrivalled in its field.
IN HIS 2014 radio series,

Germany: Memories of a Nation,
Neil MacGregor used coinage
to introduce his listeners to
the complexity of the Holy
Roman Empire. Holding a gold
five guinea piece, he pointed
out that there was only one
currency minted in Great Britain
under George I. However, in
the German lands from which
he came there were nearly
200 different currencies, each
representing a particular state
with its own forms of government, laws and traditions. The
British Museums coin collection

provided a wonderfully immediate way of visualising the early
modern Empire, a patchwork of
territories that was, in the eyes
of some contemporaries and
many later historians, a failure,
because it did not centralise and
did not generate national loyalty
in the manner of its European
neighbours. The narrative of
delayed nationhood, with its attendant implications for modern
German history, has long been
discredited. Peter Wilsons The
Holy Roman Empire rides a wave
of recent scholarship, of which

he shows a truly prodigious
grasp, which argues that the
Empire was, in fact, a stable and
successful political structure. The
books most immediate counterpart, Joachim Whaleys Germany
and the Holy Roman Empire (2011)
presents a broadly chronological
account of the Empires last 300
years. Wilson offers something
very different: a thematic history
of the Empire from its medieval
origins to its demise in 1806.
In the first of four sections,
Wilson shows the power of the
imperial ideal: the emperors

assumption of the ancient
Roman mission of protecting
Christianity, which gave him a
status above that of an ordinary
king. This ideal remained important, Wilson suggests, well into
the early modern period: Maria
Theresa may have described
the imperial crown as a fools
hat, but the title still conferred
symbolic power. In the second
section, belonging, Wilson
explores how the Empires
various peoples and lands related
to it and it is one of the books
great strengths that it takes the
Empires peripheries (including
Italy and Bohemia) seriously
throughout. While political and
legal frameworks and intellectual culture and symbols created
a shared sense of belonging,
Wilson argues that the Empire
also successfully preserved particular identities and freedoms.
In section three, governance,
he examines the Empires rulers,
institutions and resources, emphasising that its history must
not be written in terms of a failed
attempt to create a unitary state.
In the final section, society,
Wilson addresses what he rightly
sees as the largest gap in writing
on the Empire: the relationship
between its governance and the
lives of its inhabitants. Through
examining various forms of
authority and association, he
shows the extent to which the
political and social structures of
the Empire were interwoven.
Key concepts emerge from

the book: the idea of the Empire
as a status hierarchy and the
strength of its corporate social
order. In constitutional terms,
Wilson suggests that the Empire
should be equated with a mixed
monarchy. It developed in ways
that diffused power though
various authorities, making them
dependent upon one another.
Few other historians could
convey such a long and complex
history so effectively: for an
account of the ideas, institutions
and events that shaped the medieval and early modern Empire,
this book is, and will surely long
remain, unrivalled. Wilsons
other major theme, identity, is
more elusive. As he acknowledges, it is easier to study the
symbols and arguments deployed
to foster identity than to recover
any sense of the subjective
self-definition of the Empires
Wilson offers a
thematic history of
the Empire from its
medieval origins to
its demise in 1806 ...
few other historians
could convey such
a long and complex
history so effectively
inhabitants. Did Zwickau burghers or Brandenburg peasants
really see themselves as belonging to the Empire? Here Wilsons
case rests on his conviction that
the Empires decentralised structure created numerous layers of
engagement and identification,
from the Reichstag at the top
to peasant associations at the
bottom. He argues for the significance of appellate justice in the
early modern Empire and points
to the pride that cities such as
Nuremberg showed in their imperial traditions and to peasant
petitioning. Yet, as he admits,
social and economic regulation
the forms of governance that
shaped the day-to-day experiences of most people developed at
a local, not an imperial level.
In the Holy Roman Empire

as described by Wilson there is
much to admire. As a collective actor, the Empire was not
bellicose or expansionist, unlike
Louis XIVs France. Wilson
praises its ability to manage both
political and legal problems,
using methods that were more
realistic and often more humane
than those employed elsewhere
in Europe. He stops short of
suggesting that the Empire really
functioned as the protector of
the weak, but he emphasises
the emperors (less than reliable)
guardianship of Jewish communities and the system of justice
that inserted courts between
ordinary folk and lordly exploitation. He writes of a common
political culture, of small,
cohesive urban communities
and of decentralised politics that
created opportunities for social
mobility. The fact that a review of
the book in the Economist picked
out the story of the 11th-century
Emperor Conrad II, who stopped
on the way to his coronation
to listen to petitions from the
dispossessed, is indicative of the
message that some readers will
take from this book. It will speak
to a contemporary audience
preoccupied by debates about
Europes future and Wilson uses
this opportunity wisely. Yet the
desire to show that effective polities do not always require their
inhabitants to surrender local
identity and autonomy should
not lead historians to oversell the
Empire. Wilson acknowledges
only in passing, for example,
that imperial courts could do
little to prevent the misuse of
law that helped make Germany
the heartland of early modern
witch-hunting and we must
remember that the Empires progressive religious diversity came
about only against the wishes
of its rulers and as the result of
prolonged and bloody conflict.
Just like the European Union, the
Holy Roman Empire could divide
as well as unite.
Bridget Heal
The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand
Years of Europes History by Peter H.
Wilson
Allen Lane 942pp 35
Romes
Revolution
Death of the Republic & Birth

of the Empire
by Richard Alston
Oxford University Press 385pp 20
RICHARD ALSTON traces the
transformation of the Roman
state, from the tribunate of
Tiberius Gracchus in 133 bc to the
accession of Tiberius in ad 14.
The years in between witnessed
the collapse of the old Republican political system, the bloodletting of almost 20 years of civil
war and the consolidation of a
monarchical system of power
through the long years of the
reign of Emperor Augustus.
Alstons title rather

invites comparison
with one of the
most distinguished
works of classical
scholarship, Ronald
Symes The Roman
Revolution
This story is not new and
Alstons title rather invites comparison with one of the most
distinguished works of classical
scholarship: Ronald Symes The
Roman Revolution (1939). Early on,
Alston acknowledges the greatness of Symes contribution but
thereafter he avoids direct reference to it: the section heading
Octavians Coup: The March on
Rome reads like a nod to the
titles of chapters nine and 13 of
Symes masterpiece, but there
is no explicit engagement with
his thought. Other scholars will

recognise similar acts of homage
in sections entitled Caesars
Legacy and the Formation of the
Revolution and The Cultural
Revolution. Some will react
badly to Alstons tendency to
refer to the mistaken approaches of conservative thinkers or
elite historians without actually
identifying with whom he is
picking a fight.
Throughout Romes Revolution the impression is given of
a study in denial about its true
identity. Published in a new
series of narrative histories
aimed at a wider market, it
provides a vigorous, swift-paced
account of events and is particularly strong at describing the
military campaigns leading to
crucial battles, such as Philippi
in 42 bc and Actium in 31 bc. It
has some interesting analyses of the financial aspects of
the brutal proscriptions of the
second triumvirate and of the
massive investment involved
in settling retired legionaries
or ensuring the grain supply
to Rome. Alston also draws
effectively on his knowledge of
Roman Egypt and is an informed
and intriguing guide to Octavians treatment of that countrys
people in the aftermath of the
defeat of Antony and Cleopatra.
One figure of particular interest
is the poet and first prefect of
Egypt, Cornelius Gallus, who
contributed to the adornment
of Alexandria by transporting
an obelisk from its home city
of Heliopolis, saw off a significant local revolt and erected a
boastful trilingual inscription
recording his achievements.
Alston then follows Gallus back
to Rome and writes well about
his prosecution by the odious
Valerius Largus: so perilous was
it to speak openly in front of this
scoundrel that his contemporary
Proculeius would theatrically
cover his mouth with his hand
whenever Largus drew near.
This is handled with aplomb,
but Alston seems conscious that
he should be doing more. That
something more is developing a new way of describing
social and political relations at
REVIEWS
Rome. Rejecting others talk of
classes, institutions, constitutions, and political structures,
Alston borrows the sociology of
contemporary African states in
his analysis of patrimonial networks as a vehicle for the distribution of power and resources.
There is considerable overlap
here with the distinctive role of
the patron-client relationship
(clientela) and political friendship
(amicitia), but Alston argues for
the patrimonial network as the
conceptual basis for offering a
more global account of power at
Rome. Yet to make this work he
needs more than a single footnote to explain what the model
offers and then more explicitly
to address the similarities and
differences between contemporary Africa and ancient Rome.
Pompey could have been used
here, who, aged just 23, mustered a private army of 15,000
men from his native region of
Picenum to fight for Sulla. In fact
Alston says of this extraordinary
episode simply that Pompey
rose to prominence with Sullas
second march on Rome.
The final impression is of
two very different books forced
into one. The first is the riveting
narrative with which the blurb
draws in the non-specialist
reader and which Alston successfully provides. The second
is the innovative account of
Roman society that might have
been. It resurfaces in sentences
that insistently repeat the buzzword network as if repeatedly
using the word will itself make
the concept more compelling.
This is both intellectually disappointing and stylistically aggravating. Alston is much better
when he sticks to the basics and
keeps the story ticking over.
When he reaches for aphorisms
and asserts universal truths,
bathos almost inevitably results.
The book has a variety of
maps and illustrations and
closes with a timeline, a cast of
characters, some slightly patchy
endnotes, a bibliography and an
index. The proliferation of misprints should put the publisher
to shame.
Matthew Leigh
ANCIENT ROME
Romes
most
erotic poet
Daisy Dunn brings to
life the ancient Rome
experienced by the
poet Catullus and, in
her new translations of
his work, captures the
elegant simplicity of
his poetry.
THE CATCHY subtitle of Daisy

Dunns biography of Catullus
does not do justice to its scope.
Catullus short life (84-54 bc)
covers the period when Rome
stood on the brink of a civil war
that would result in the Republic
being swept away to bring to
power Romes first emperor,
Augustus. Catullus Bedspread is
loosely structured around the
story that Catullus first-person
lyric tempts us to reconstruct
(but never explicitly tells),
namely his love for the woman
he called Lesbia, probably the
aristocratic Clodia, married sister
of Ciceros nemesis, Publius
Clodius Pulcher. Catullus brings
a wide range of characters into
this drama of infatuation and
betrayal, a love story appropriate
to the turbulence of the late
Republic and touching on some
of the great events of the time
without directly engaging them.
Around Catullus poems Dunn
weaves a picture of his world that
is full of evocative detail: one of
the chief pleasures of this book
is its attention to the material
and sensuous aspects of Roman
life, which refreshes the rather
abstract ancient Rome of most
history books. Whether it be the
novelty of Romes first permanent theatre, built by Pompey,
the recipe for the ubiquitous fish

sauce garum or Roman attitudes
to baldness, Dunn shows us the
world that Catullus would have
experienced.
She is also a sensitive and
knowledgeable critic of Catullus
poetry, quoted in excerpts from
her translation of his work.
Catullus covers a broad range of
emotional and stylistic registers;
Dunn weaves a
picture of Catullus
world that is full
of evocative detail
... which refreshes
the rather abstract
ancient Rome of most
history books
his love poetry veers from the
tender to the obscene and the
violent and, in the poem which
gives Catullus Bedspread its
name, we find a long, extravagantly mannered description
of the coverlet of a wedding
bed, which depicts the story of
Ariadne. Dunns translations are
not equally successful with all of
Catullus modes, but where she
scores is in the ability to capture
the elegant simplicity of his
poetry, which often suffers from

the translators desire to make it
more poetic.
Reconstructing Catullus life
is difficult, as we have little to go
on apart from his poems. Ciceros
letters help Dunn to put flesh
on the names of the friends and
enemies that Catullus poetry
celebrates and excoriates, and
on the fragile political alliances
formed, broken and re-formed
under Catullus sceptical eye, but
even the loquacious Cicero has
nothing to say about Catullus.
Perhaps Dunns biography takes
Catullus the poet too much at his
word. In ancient Rome, firstperson poetry was even less constrained by truth than it is now. I
am not sure that we can say with
any confidence, for instance, that
Catullus was partial to cunnilingus, as Dunn tells us, but she
gives us a good sense of what his
peers might have thought of him
if he were, which is characteristic
of the range of this most enjoyable book.
William Fitzgerald
Catullus Bedspread
The Life of Romes Most Erotic Poet
by Daisy Dunn
William Collins 320pp 16.99
Gaius Valerius Catullus
The Poems of Catullus, a New
Translation by Daisy Dunn
William Collins 176pp 8.99
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
Venice and the birth of the modern book

Aldus Manutius is celebrated as the publisher who transformed
book production from a mechanical skill to a liberal art.
Aldo Manuzio
Il Rinascimento di Venezia
Gallerie dellAccademia, Venice,
runs to July 31st, 2016
THE MAJOR EXHIBITION at the Gallerie
dellAccademia the temple of Venetian
painting is dedicated to a man who never
lifted a brush. Aldo Manuzio (c.1450-1515),
better known in the English-speaking world
as Aldus Manutius, was an Italian Renaissance humanist. Born south of Rome, it was
as a teacher at princely courts in northern
Italy that he began to develop his ideas
about the importance of studying Greek
as well as Latin. Still, these beliefs hardly
marked him out as exceptional. However,
a mid-career move to cosmopolitan Venice
and a switch to printing allowed him to act
on his ideas and resulted in the achievements for which he is celebrated today:
more first editions of the classics than any
publisher before or since, including much of
the Greek canon; formal innovations such
as italic type and the pocket-sized octavo
volume that unchained books from desks
and revolutionised reading. His commitment to excellence and accuracy in layout
and content transformed a mechanical skill

into a liberal art. With his books bearing the
famous device of a dolphin coiled around an
anchor, the Aldine Press earned the admiration of Europes greatest luminaries, including Erasmus. Today, Aldus is recognised as
the father of the modern book.
The catalyst for this exhibition was last
years 500th anniversary of Aldus death,
although he is only one of this shows stars:
the other protagonist is La Serenissima
Innovations such as the

pocket-sized octavo format
unchained books from desks
and revolutionised reading
herself. It was Venice with its established
printing industry and European mercantile
networks, its scholarly community of Greek
and other expats and its wealthy and educated patriciate that provided Aldus with
the infrastructure, manpower and ideal
audience for his enterprise. It was in Venice
that artists Carpaccio, Giovanni Bellini,
Cima da Conegliano, Giorgione, Titian and
foreign visitors such as Drer responded
to many of those same cultural impulses
that inspired Aldus. This is a multimedia

exhibition, in which paintings, sculptures
and books are displayed in thematic
clusters, telling the story of cultural
ferment. A Greek grammar, printed by
Aldus and corrected by hand in the shop, is
displayed alongside the so-called Cleopatra
Grimani, an ancient sculpture restored by
Tullio Lombardo, speaking to a recovery of
antiquity that encompassed equally obsessive accuracy and creative reinterpretation;
while octavo volumes of the ancient Roman
poets illuminated for private patrons testify
together with small allegorical and mythological panels by Bellini and Cima to the
contemporary domestication of literature
and art. The portrait, attributed to Jacometto Veneziano, of the mathematician Luca
Pacioli with his patron Guidobaldo da Montefeltro reminds us of Aldus attendance at
Paciolis lectures given in Venice on Euclid
and of the divine proportions behind the
layout of his books and types. The mysterious Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), the
erotic romance-cum-architectural treatise,
was Aldus typographical tour de force
(inset); the curators identify the two artists
behind the 172 woodcuts as Benedetto
Bordon and the anonymous Master of the
canzoniere Grifo.
This is an exceptional exhibition and
the small size of many exhibits rewards
close looking a book-like experience and
offers a feeling of intimacy. Even some
of the most studied masterpieces of the
Renaissance appear in a new guise. For
example, Giorgiones Tempesta is treated
as part of a discovery not just of landscape
but also of countryside; not just the Arcadia
embodied by Virgils Bucolics but the place
of agricultural labour of his Georgics (both
published by Aldus). Increasingly inhabitants of the lagoon city were turning away
from the sea and towards the countryside,
building villas on the Terraferma. One such
villa was the Villa Giustinian, of which a
1536 plan is displayed alongside Fra Giocondos studies of Roman villas and the edition
of the ancient agricultural writers that the
scholarly friar published with Aldus in 1514.
Sophisticated and accessible, this exhibition displays its imaginative cross-sections
of the Venetian Renaissance in ways
designed not merely to impress but to
stimulate its various audiences. In so doing,
it also shows just how much a man who
signed his name Aldus Romanus was truly
Aldus of Venice.
Oren Margolis
REVIEWS
Historys People
Personalities and the Past

by Margaret MacMillan
Profile Books 270pp 14.99
IN HER LATEST BOOK, based on
a series of broadcasts delivered
in her native Canada, Margaret
MacMillan focuses on individuals
who played a pivotal role in the
history of their times and others
who, more humbly, have left us a
vivid chronicle of what they saw
and experienced.
In her own words, MacMillan

moves from those who changed
the course of history ... to the
sort of people you might want to
have dinner with because they
would be so entertaining. MacMillan, Warden of St Antonys
College, Oxford, is clearly one
of the latter: a scholar distinguished by not only the wide
range of her interests but also
the engaging way in which she
communicates them. Previous
books include a study of British
women in the Raj, works about
the outbreak of the First World
War and the peace conference
that followed and an examination of Nixons breakthrough
in China. However, her reach
extends further: in Historys
People we not only encounter
such 20th-century leaders as
Hitler and Stalin but are also led
into worlds as diverse as Mughal
India, pre-Colonial Canada and
early 20th-century Albania.
Some of the figures MacMillan considers, such as Bismarck,
Franklin Roosevelt and the
Canadian premier Mackenzie

King, were master persuaders
while others monsters like
Hitler and Stalin, but also such
well-intentioned democrats as
Woodrow Wilson and Margaret
Thatcher were characterised
by hubris: an unquestioning
confidence in what they intended to achieve. Some of those
MacMillan considers were more
daring than most, prepared to
run immense risks if necessary:
Churchill and Nixon had a touch
of this, as did two more figures
with Canadian connections, the
press magnate Lord Beaverbrook
and the early explorer Samuel
de Champlain. Yet others, many
of them women, are important
to our understanding of history
because of their insatiable
curiosity: the diarist Elizabeth
Simcoe, for example, wife of
the first Lieutenant Governor of
Upper Canada, or the memoirist Fanny Parkes who recorded
what she saw of early 19th-century India. As for the observers,
how vivid and evocative, says
MacMillan, are the recorded

observations of Babur, the first
Mughal emperor or that courageous German-Jewish diarist of
Nazism, Victor Klemperer.
Margaret MacMillan has
given more thought than most
to the very nature of history
(and is author of what has
become a classic on the ways
people use and abuse the past).
A major theme running through
Historys People is the question
of how far individuals can
make history and how far they
are its tools. The essays are a
treat to read, the personalities
leaping off the page. Margaret
Thatcher, we are reminded,
was nicknamed Attila the Hen
while Charles Ritchie was an
elongated and elegant Canadian diplomat (who) skewers
everyone, starting with himself.
Ultimately, says MacMillan, she
loves history because it provides
such a marvellous combination
of enlightenment and fun. So
does her new book.
Daniel Snowman
REVIEWS
INDIAN HISTORY
The Makers
of Indian
History
Sunil Khilnanis protagonists
surprise, break conventions,
defy orthodoxy, change minds,
innovate and make history in
the process. Would that he
had chosen more of Indias
powerful, fascinating women.
PROFESSOR KHILNANI is an
academic historian, but this book
is a more populist take on 2,500
years of Indias history. As a collection of miniature biographies,
ranging from the Buddha in
the fifth century bc to business
tycoon Dhirubha Ambani in the
1990s, this format works remarkably well for a country whose
culture and history have been so
individualistic and diverse, far
more centred around personalities than Confucian China.
Khilnanis choice of people
is a balance of the political and
the cultural and of Indias mosaic
of religions, castes and regions.
The one major exception is the
abysmally low score of women:
only six out of 50, among them
the already ubiquitous figures
of the Rani of Jhansi (Indias
Boudicca) and Indira Gandhi,
its woman prime minister. Why
not Razia Sultana, the tragic
medieval Muslim monarch? Or
Noor Jehan, the Mughal empress
who ruled her husband and
his empire? Or Sarojini Naidu,
the charismatic, 20th-century
nationalist leader and poetess?
Or Nargis, Bollywoods greatest
ever actress? Just a few of Indias
powerful, fascinating women.
Khilnanis incarnations are

chronological, reflecting the continuities and contrasts of a subcontinent evolving from its classical Hindu and Buddhist past,
through the Muslim kingdoms of
the early modern period, into the
British Raj and the emergence of
a modern national identity. The
qualities which Khilnani most
Like the best

after-dinner
speeches, they leave
you informed,
entertained, amused,
wanting to hear more
admires in his protagonists are
their capacity to surprise, break
conventions, defy orthodoxy,
change minds, innovate and
make history in the process.
These themes recur throughout
the myriad lives, giving them
meaning and purpose.
The Buddha and Mahavira,
founders of major religions, are
obvious choices and Khilnani
adds little to their extant biographies. Less predictable are figures
such as Panini, the fourth-
century bc Sanskritist, whose

linguistic codes laid the foundations of Indias success at
computer software; the political
theorist Kautilya, anticipating
Machiavelli by more than a
millennium; and Aryabhata, the
fifth-century mathematicianastronomer who, long before
Copernicus or Galileo, discovered
that the Earth rotates on its axis.
Khilnani has little time
for the muscular, organised
Hinduism which, he tells us,
arose in response to Muslim
and Christian proselytising. His
own Hinduism is a religion of
early morning doubts, which
embraces Muslims such as the
ill-fated Mughal crown prince
Dara Shikoh, executed by his
Islamist brother Aurangzeb, and
the British orientalist Sir William
Jones, both inspired by a passion
for Indias classical, Sanskrit
language and heritage.
Khilnanis treatment of
modern Indias national leaders
acknowledges that they were as
much the children of the Raj as
its opponents. We hear about the
Anglicism of Raja Ram Mohun
Roy, who welcomed British
education and social reforms in
the mid-19th century. Then there
are the contradictory thoughts

of Swami Vivekananda, dallying
between Kali and Kant, who embodied Hindu nationalism, but
recommended beef-eating. More
recently, we get the anglicised
Dalit leader, B.R. Ambedkar,
cooperating with the Raj against
Mahatma Gandhis populist
campaigns. Conspicuous by his
absence is independent Indias
Harrow and Cambridge-educated
first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, possibly because Khilnani
has yet to produce his long-awaited mega-biography of him.
This book is best in its
portrayal of artists and cultural
leaders. We hear about the medieval anti-Brahmin poet Basava,
who was admired by Ted Hughes.
Then theres the singer-saint
Mirabai, whose erotic hymns to
Krishna are still among Indias
most popular concert repertoire. We hear why Rembrandt
admired Mughal minatures and
how British orientalists rediscovered the Sanskrit Shakespeare,
Kalidasa. Most intriguing of all is
the legacy of the Nobel laureate,
Rabindranath Tagore. His dislike
of cultural nationalism and of
Gandhian civil disobedience
made him unpopular in some
Indian circles, while many in
the West, including Bertrand
Russell, found his writings a bit
vacuous. But Khilnani reminds
us of his gigantic role in promoting the libertarian ideals of the
Bengali Renaissance and credits
him with inspiring 21st-century
battles for individual freedom,
including the ongoing campaign
for gay rights.
The art of the miniaturist has
thrived in India for many centuries and Khilnanis incarnations
are its literary equivalent. What
they lack in historical rigour,
they make up for in intelligence,
wit, originality and elegance.
Like the best after-dinner
speeches, they leave you informed, entertained, amused and
wanting to hear more, especially
about some of the unsung
makers of Indian history.
Zareer Masani
Incarnations: India in 50 Lives
by Sunil Khilnani
Allen Lane 636pp 30
REVIEWS
SCOTLAND
Tracing
Scotlands
Revolutionary
Impulse
Laura A.M. Stewart deftly
explores the roles of revolution
and reaction in the political
and social history of mid-17th
century Scotland.
THE IMPERIAL PROJECT of the

Anglo-Scots Union, established
under one Stewart lineage in
1603, was barely one and a half
monarchs old when periodic outbursts of unrest turned into fullblown revolutionary convulsions.
In England, Oliver Cromwell
emerged from middling Cambridgeshire gentry with chief
propagandist John Milton in tow
to enact revolution, regicide and
republic. In Ireland, the Confederate Wars of 1641 onwards
opened a new and bloody chapter
in a country long scarred by
conflict. Meanwhile, in Scotland,
there manifested a singular
type of revolutionary upheaval,
culminating in the appearance of
a document in 1638 entitled the
Scottish National Covenant.
According to Laura A.M.
Stewart in her Rethinking the
Scottish Revolution: Covenanted
Scotland, 1637-1651, the Covenant
was one of the most controversial documents in Scotlands
history explicitly intended to
be national in scope and binding
in all perpetuity. Fittingly
for such a tract, the Covenant
sparked over a decade of political,
social, cultural and religious
upheaval. Stewart takes the
reader through the era, exploring

events leading to the Covenants
publication, the government it
initiated and its consequences
for Scotland at home and abroad.
What emerges is a picture of
the Covenanter movement as a
multi-faceted and complex civic
endeavour, with roots going back
to the Reformation of 1560 and
beyond. Beginning with an ex-
Stewart provides
a narrative that is
broad in scope and
rich in scholarly
detail
ploration of People, Politics, and
Publics and moving through indepth surveys of the Covenants
reception on a parish-by-parish
basis before considering the
functioning of the Covenanted
government, the author provides
a narrative that is broad in scope
and rich in scholarly detail.
The book begins with an examination of the nature of public
participation in the movement.
As recent political polling has
demonstrated, capturing the
public mood is no easy task and
such difficulties are multiplied

exponentially by the various
fogs of history. Stewart is careful
to assert that the notion of the
Scottish Revolution as a class war
waged by democratically minded
multitudes against a tyrannical
elite is overly simplistic. The
framework of modern democracy
was largely absent from 16th- and
17th-century Scotland. Instead,
the Covenanters culture of
dissent manifested itself in
demonstrations of civic protest
(the glorious organes in the
Chapel Royal, Holyroodhouse
were dismantled in a careful and
orderly manner), the production
of localised petitions and proclamations in defiance of monarchical decrees and the growing
dissemination of anti-Episcopalian tracts from continental
printing presses.
If its emergence was characterised by a variety of historical
events with a tinge of the
folk-heroic the aperu of the
female servant throwing a stool
at the clerics of St Giles Church
as they attempted to impose a
new Prayer Book devised in the
London court is a touchstone of
Scottish Protestant folklore the
Covenanting government was
marked by one of the humdrum

affairs of governance: taxation.
However, even in this there
was a degree of the iconoclastic:
according to Stewart, the Covenanted government brought
in new reforms, meaning it was
able to introduce a new system
of taxation that for the first time
in decades, perhaps centuries,
was capable of reflecting in
some measure real economic
activity. Such fiscal organisation was rendered vital by the
governments most substantial
move: the signing of a treaty in
1643 entitled The Solemn League
and Covenant. The articulation
of religious autonomy in Scotland, it had far-reaching implications: in exchange for support
for their ongoing colonialist
project across the Irish Sea, as
well as reinforcement during the
English Civil War, the English
parliamentarians granted the
Scottish presbytery preservation
from broader church reform. Yet
it drew Scotland into the tumult
of civil wars in England and
Ireland and ultimately led to its
downfall, first under Cromwell
and then the restored monarchy
under Charles II.
The complex strands of revolution and reaction are deftly
teased out by Stewart. However,
the books last section, which
explores the legacy of the Covenanters for modern Scottish
consciousness and identity, is
its most interesting. Here,
Stewart skilfully shows how
the legacy of the Covenanters
and their perceived traits
radical, Protestant, democratic,
universalist, anti-authoritarian,
republican have been appropriated by differing groups from
the Glorious Revolution to the
present day. Such appropriations
reflect the central role of the
revolutionary impulse within
the Covenanting movement
and, more broadly, within the
political and social history of
Scotland, both in its success and
its failure.
Patrick J. Murray
Rethinking the Scottish Revolution:
Covenanted Scotland, 1637-1651
by Laura A.M. Stewart
Oxford University Press 336pp 65
REVIEWS
EXHIBITION
Sydney Cockerell, confided to his biographer after retirement: I often wished
Id got a machine-gun mounted at the
The Fitzwilliam Museum houses an extraordinary collection and top of the stairs to mow down the people
has a lustrous reputation. It also has an intriguing history.
who tried to make me accept second-rate
and third-rate objects. Yet, it is generally
accepted that Cockerell was the museums
did the museum begin a programme of outreach to children, schools and adult learners most influential director, who rescued it
The Fitzwilliam Museum
from congested mediocrity and established
(although the Friends of the Fitzwilliam
Trumpington St, Cambridge
its lustrous reputation. Cockerells impact
dates from 1909). In 1966, the director
www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk
on the Fitzwilliam is impossible to overresponsible for the manuscripts exhibition,
state, writes Burn. None of his successors
after being criticised by the Cambridge
as director has questioned the truth of
student journal Varsity for the museums
IN 1966, to mark its sesquicentenary, the
Cockerells assertion: I found it a pigsty: I
falling attendance figures, defiantly reFitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge held a
turned it into a palace.
sponded: I dont care if an undergraduate
special exhibition of more than 100 of its
According to Burn, persistent
own illuminated manuscripts,
understaffing by Cambridge
which were at the heart of the
Granite lid of the
University (unlike the Ashmolean
collection of its founder, Vissarcophagus of
Museum at Oxford), tensions
count Fitzwilliam (1745-1816).
Rameses III
surrounding its responsibilities to
It was very favourably reviewed
(d.1155 bc)
Cambridge students and faculty
and attracted big crowds, notes
versus the public and controversy
the current keeper of antiquities,
about the place of archaeologiLucilla Burn, in her well-illuscal objects in a predominantly
trated, admirably thorough but
fine art collection have recurred
thoroughly readable study, The
throughout the Fitzwilliams
Fitzwilliam Museum: A History,
history.
published for its bicentenary,
Consider the story of the
along with an elegant, handmassive carved and inscribed
sized guide book to the museum,
granite lid of the sarcophagus of
lavishly illustrated with fold-out
Rameses III, presented to the unifloor plans and masterpieces,
versity by the excavator Giovanni
which accompanies a small
Belzoni in 1823: the very year of
exhibition on the museums
the decipherment of the Egyptian
history currently on display in
hieroglyphs. In 1954, the Louvre
its Octagon. Perhaps the success
Museum proposed to unite this lid
of the 1966 exhibition explains
with its box, held at the Louvre,
why the Fitzwilliam has arranged
in exchange for a stone statue of
another major manuscript exhibithe Egyptian goddess Sekhmet.
tion for the second half of 2016,
The Fitzwilliams honorary
Colour: The Art and Science of
keeper of Egyptian antiquities
Illuminated Manuscripts. This will
supported the Louvres proposal,
display 150 of its manuscripts,
as did the Fitzwilliams direcranging from the prayer books of
tor, partly because the lid was
European royalty and merchants
damaged and took up so much
to local treasures, such as the
space. But the exchange was
Macclesfield Psalter, and from an
Cockerell was the museums most
strongly opposed by some of the
alchemical scroll to the ABC of a
museums syndics (trustees) and
five-year-old princess.
influential director ... I found it a
it went nowhere. Then in 1967,
Much has changed at the
pigsty: I turned it into a palace
under a new director, the keeper
museum, and in the museum
of antiquities triumphantly and
world generally, since 1966, as
dramatically resolved the issue of space by
spends three years here without setting
Burn vividly documents. Not until 1967
foot in the place: what I want is a nucleus
did the Fitzwilliam agree to lend to an
standing the lid up vertically in the centre
of people who take a real interest in the
exhibition abroad, whereas in 2013-14 it
of the smaller Egyptian gallery, notes Burn,
lent more than 120 items to over 50 venues museum and come here often. No museum where it remains today: testimony to the
director today could espouse such frank
in 12 countries. Until as late as 1969 some
variety, quality and intriguing history of the
elitism for better or worse.
of its key galleries lacked electric lighting.
Fitzwilliams undoubtedly extraordinary
More trenchantly still, the Fitzwilliams
Only in 1975 was a centre for conservation
collections.
longest-serving director (1908-37), Sir
established. Only from the 1980s onwards
Andrew Robinson
Celebrating the Fitzwilliam at 200
REVIEWS
Kathmandu
by Thomas Bell
Haus Books 463pp 17.99
HIGH IN THE Himalayas there
is a parasitic fungus that grows
out of the body of small caterpillars and is worth more than its
weight in gold. Today, harvesting
these mushrooms is bringing
much needed cash into Nepal
and is part of the countrys new
political economy, most palpably
so in its capital city, Kathmandu
The old has never really been

revered in the city, we are told
by Thomas Bell in Kathmandu.
This is why old structures have
historically been smashed and
spliced into new buildings. In
his impressive debut book Bell
traces the layers of Kathmandus
past through to the present,
from the remains of old doorways and windows, temples
and palaces, statues and carved
inscriptions.
Most readers would think
of Nepal as a peaceful, poor
country, especially after the horrifying earthquake of 2015. But,
Bell shows, life in Kathmandu
has steadily become increasingly
restless. Frustrated with monarchical rule, Maoists were
engaged in a prolonged, bitter
civil war that spilled out of
Kathmandu and into the
countryside. In 2008, after
experiments with establishing
a constitutional monarchy,
Nepal finally transitioned from
the Hindu kingdom established
by Prithvi Narayan Shah in the
mid-18th century to a secular

republic. The Maoists won the
majority of parliamentary seats
and formed an uneasy coalition
government, but inter-party
bickering has led repeatedly to
coalitions falling and having to
be reconstituted.
Woven through the book is
the history of this infighting, the
conversations and encounters
behind the news stories that the
author, as a foreign correspondent in Nepal, relayed back to
readers of the Daily Telegraph and
the Economist. These appear as a
series of vignettes, sandwiched
between episodes from the journals of the East India Company
officers, British residents and
western travellers in Kathmandu
from the late 18th century
onwards. Nepal was not a site
commonly connected to the
intrigues and proxy wars of the
Cold War. Yet, Nepals neutrality
and its geostrategic location
meant that funds poured in
from the USSR, the US, China
and elsewhere. In more recent
times, the flow of aid monies has

continued but without tangible
results, which Bell attributes to
aid agencies techno-bureaucratism and aid workers unfamiliarity with the peculiarities and
particularities of the country.
At times, the tone is unsympathetic, cutting, the language a
little crude. The authors ire for
destruction and death is understandable but the ways in which
Nepali customs and traditions
are described as backward or
irrational is surprising in light of
the authors love for the country
(and his Newari wife) and
occasionally makes for uncomfortable reading. This is, perhaps,
precisely the point; to make
sense of the horrors for himself
and also to relate that which
he could not commit to copy as
a journalist in a foreign land. A
book full of feeling, it provides
personality and narrative
texture to complement other
works on the history and politics
of Nepal.
Jagjeet Lally
REVIEWS
MODERN CHINA
A Peoples History of
Maos Revolution
Frank Diktter asks how and why Maoism came
to be buried at the end of the most drawn-out
of all mass campaigns: the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution.
WHEN MAO ZEDONG died, he
was not buried, but displayed
in a glass sarcophagus. Next,
people across the country, from
party leaders to villagers, buried
Maoism. With this, Frank
Diktter ends the introduction
and opens the third volume of his
trilogy on the Peoples Republic
of China, which takes the reader
from the Seven Thousand Cadres
Conference in 1962 to the death
of the Great Teacher, Great
Leader, Great Supreme Commander, and Great Helmsman
Mao in September 1976. This
final volume asks how and why
Maoism came to be buried at the
end of the most drawn-out of all
mass campaigns: the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. And it
finds its main protagonists in the
people, at large and individually.
With elite politics and
conflicts as the starting point,
this peoples history of the Cultural Revolution traces how such
politics and conflicts affected
individuals, how people were mo-
bilised and how they responded

across a selection of Chinas
many and diverse provinces.
Familiar narratives structure the
book. From the formation of the
Red Guards to the Campaign to
Smash the Four Olds, the Shanghai Commune, the Mao Cult,
the involvement of the Peoples
Frank Diktters
accessible peoples
history succeeds in
linking national and
elite histories with
personal experiences
and human drama
Liberation Army, the sent-down
youth, the affair surrounding Lin
Biao and his death and the rise
and fall of Maos wife Jiang Qing
and her closest allies. Examples
from archival and party-internal
documents, interviews and
a series of English language
memoirs of Cultural Revolution survivors and participants

then show what these famous
moments on the Cultural Revolutions political timeline meant
to ordinary people.
Many of these ordinary
people remain anonymous. Their
histories and fates are often conveyed through statistics rather
than personal trajectories, local
contexts and particular backgrounds. They are offset by quite
a few published English language
memoirs of selected individuals, including Jung Chang, the
author of Wild Swans. These are
colourful, though less ordinary.
In the end, the book compels
readers to reassess the early
1970s not as a phase of uniformity but as one in which human
agency at the grassroots laid
the foundations for the economic and social changes commonly
associated with Deng Xiaoping
and his post-1978 reforms. For
beyond sartorial uniformity
there were no seas of blue or
green ants. People reorganised
local economic networks, black
markets thrived, some land
was privately cultivated, religious activity flourished and
plenty of people were listening
to foreign radio and reading
banned books.
For years after the end of
the Mao Era, the countrys flea
markets were treasure troves
of discarded archival documents,
handwritten diaries, personal
letters and other memorabilia
that told a rich history of this
extraordinary decade. Together
with the knowledge of contemporaries, they made possible a
wealth of new studies that vastly
extended and complicated what
we thought we knew. Diktters
accessible peoples history
succeeds in linking national and
elite histories with personal
experiences and human drama.
Still buried under the weight
of the Cultural Revolutions
political timeline lie more personal histories, ready to be told
in future years.
Jennifer Altehenger
CONTRIBUTORS
Jennifer Altehenger is Lecturer
in Contemporary Chinese
History at Kings College
London.
William Fitzgerald is Professor
of Latin Literature and
Language at Kings College
London and author of How to
Read a Latin Poem: If You Cant
Read Latin Yet (Oxford, 2013).
Bridget Heal is a Senior
Lecturer in the School of History
at the University of St Andrews
and Director of the Reformation
Studies Institute.
Matthew Leigh is Professor
of Classical Languages and
Literatures at the University of
Oxford.
Jagjeet Lally is a Lecturer in
the History of Early Modern
and Modern India at University
College London.
Oren Margolis is a
Departmental Lecturer in
Early Modern History at the
University of Oxford and
author of The Politics of Culture
in Quattrocento Europe: Ren
dAnjou in Italy (Oxford, 2016).
Zareer Masani is the
biographer of Indira Gandhi
and more recently of the Whig
historian-statesman Lord
Macaulay (Bodley Head, 2013).
Patrick J. Murray is a
Researcher at the College of
Arts, University of Glasgow.
Andrew Robinson has written
many books on the arts and
sciences, most recently, EarthShattering Events: Earthquakes,
Nations and Civilization (Thames
& Hudson, 2016).
Daniel Snowman is a Senior
Research Fellow at the
Institute of Historical Research,
University of London.
The Cultural Revolution: A Peoples

History by Frank Diktter
Bloomsbury 380pp 25.00
NAPOLEON
FromtheArchive
In April 2002, Robert Knecht wrote an article in History Today about his quest to find Napoleonic
treasure. Now, suspecting the letter which prompted it might be a hoax, he revisits the evidence.
A Napoleonic Hoax
WHEN IS A HOAX not a hoax? is
a question not commonly faced by
historians but I encountered it with a
vengeance in 1982 when I set out to
solve a problem that my grandfather,
Joseph Knecht, had encountered in
1904 when he controlled the archives
of the French embassy in London.
Among many strange objects that
landed on his desk was a parcel sent by
a bookseller in Erfurt. It contained an
18th-century edition of Latin poems.
Concealed in its binding was a letter
dated December 13th, 1813
and addressed to Ellen. It
was unsigned but written
in English, ostensibly by a
high-ranking officer in Napoleons army who referred
to my horse artillery and
described the Prussians as
being on my heels.
He explains that on October
21st, following the battle of Leipzig,
he and his soldiers retired to Jena,
where he decided to hide a treasure
of gold coins, bars of silver and gold
and jewels, looted from a church
in Moscow. With the help of some
soldiers the treasure was buried in a
ravine called Swbisch Grabe outside
the town. Fearing that his retreat was
cut off and that he might not see Ellen
again, he instructed her to follow a
Florentin (his aide-de-camp?), who
was about to escape. She was to go
with him to Jena, buy the ravine and
retrieve the treasure. A sketch on the
back of the letter showed the ditch and
an oil-mill close by.
A search in the French military
archives at Vincennes confirmed the
existence of Florentin, who was aidede-camp to a Polish general, Krukowiecki, who commanded horse artillery in Napoleons army. He had fought
at Jena in 1806 and at Leipzig in 1813,
after serving in the Russian campaign.
Once peace had returned, he was
sent to England by Tsar Alexander I

to secure the repatriation of Polish
prisoners of war, a task which he was
given on account of his command of
English. He was accompanied by a
Russian captain called Piotr Florentini.
In August 1831 Krukowiecki became
head of the Polish government.
I visited Poland to consult the
Krukowiecki family archives but
found quite conclusive evidence ruling
him out as the author of the letter.
Despite this setback, I visited Jena
Is one to conclude that

the letter is a complete
hoax? If so, who was the
target?
in order to see the ditch for myself. It
turned out to be exactly as described
in the letter. I also submitted the letter
for forensic examination by a Home
Office laboratory, which concluded
that the paper and ink were consistent with the date of 1813.
After publication of my article in
2002, Holger Nowak, Director of the
Stadtmuseum Ghre in Erfurt, investigated billeting slips showing the
presence in Jena of an entire Austrian
general staff between October 21st
and 23rd, 1813. The French had been
forced to retreat after the Austrians
had occupied Naumburg on October
19th, barring their retreat along the
River Saale to Jena. Thus it seems that
our letter-writer could not have been
in Jena on October 21st.
Pierre Juhel, a French military
historian, has raised other doubts
about my histoire rocambolesque, my
incredible story. He does not believe
that a treasure of such magnitude
could have been brought back from
Russia, given the fact that the French
had abandoned much of their artillery

and had lost or devoured most of their
horses. Juhel also invoked a truce
signed by Napoleon at Pleiswitz on
June 4th, 1813, which led to a cessation of hostilities until August 11th.
Why, he asked, did the author of the
letter not take advantage of this lull to
dump his treasure and contact Ellen?
Is one to conclude that the letter
is a complete hoax? If so, who was the
target? And why, if it was written in
or soon after 1813, did it only come to
light in 1904?
It was presumably discovered by
the Erfurt bookseller, who may have
acquired the book as part of a library.
By 1813 the oil mill near the ditch had
become a gasthof much frequented by
students of the University of Jena. If
our letter were a hoax, could it have
been perpetrated by a student hoping
to make a fool of some venerable professor living nearby?
For all my efforts, the letter, now
in the possession of the Stadtmuseum
Ghre in Erfurt, remains an enigma.
Robert Knecht is Emeritus Professor of French
History at the University of Birmingham.
VOLUME 52 ISSUE 4 APR 2002

Read the original piece
at historytoday.com/fta

History Today 07-2016

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

History Today 07-2016

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

July 2016

Publisher Andy Patterson

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Total Average Net Circulation

2 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016

FROM THE EDITOR

Willoughbyland Dissection Theatres Byzantine Lessons Pieter Geyl

Aphra Behn found

to subdue the island, Willoughby determined to resist, asking why Barbados

an expedition to the Wild Coast of

unnecessary Charge and Trouble to

Matthew Parker is the author of Willoughbyland:

anatomical theatres affiliated with the

awash with anatomical theatres. Putatively designed for educational purposes,

By the mid-17th century the

Anna Jamieson is a masters student of History of

6 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016

was Asia Minor 11 centuries ago.

time, resources and people to maintain

The USAF like the Byzantine

always be problems on the periphery, so

Psellos created some of the treasures of

Peter Frankopans The Silk Roads: A New History of

On the 50th anniversary of

lands, and paid regular visits to Belgium

Geyl in Britain. The Institute of Historical Research

The first day of the Somme, July 1st, 1916,

British and German walking wounded

JULY 2016 HISTORY TODAY 11

Clockwise from above: the 20th Deccan Horse

12 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016

From the 1980s onwards scholars began a full-scale reassessment of

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME was the consequence of Allied

Haig (in cap) and Rawlinson leaving the

Allied strategy for 1916 agreed

German offensive at Verdun begins

Allied artillery bombardment on

Allied offensive on Somme begins

Germans go onto defensive at Verdun

British dawn attack captures

Australians capture Pozires

French nearly break through

British capture Delville Wood after

British launch battle of

Oct 1st-Nov 11th

Battle of the Ancre Heights

Battle of the Ancre begins

Battle of the Ancre and entire Somme

Battle of Verdun comes to an end

14 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016

THREE OTHER CHARGES are often made against Haig. First,

Goughs Mobile Army was the victim

Welsh Guards in a reserve trench at

cavalry could be highly effective, as was demonstrated on July 14th,

Haig intended all-arms groups of Hubert Goughs Reserve Army

On June 30th, Haig wrote to his wife: I feel

Men of the Royal Field Artillery haul an

16 HISTORY TODAY JULY 2016

victim of a fundamental disagreement between Haig and Rawlinson

ALTHOUGH RAWLINSON remained in command of the

From top: the first official photograph of a British tank in action,

A German photograph of the Somme

the Somme, Rawlinson proved an outstanding success as the Fourth

COULD HAIG CLAIM CREDIT for these consequences of the