Gonzo History Project

2007-08-08T03:41:00.000-07:00

The thing is, here's the thing: 99.9% of all people who bitch about movies or TV or what-have-you being historically inaccurate are either just trying to exercise some kind of know-it-all superiority or are your typical shrieking nerds desperately striving to create a factual basis for a subjective dislike. That's natural. However, in many cases they're right.

Not because of the boneheaddery, not at all. But because, in most cases, historical "accuracy," whatever the christ that means, is part and parcel of a larger problem, which is that the past is being packaged to viewers as familiar, and that's about the worst fucking thing that could ever happen to you.

I was going to talk about Warren Ellis's Crecy, but what are the odds that any of you here have read it? It has one really good thing going for it, which is that it portrays the English army of the Hundred Years' War as essentially terrorists. That's a worthwhile endeavour; the cognitive dissonance of empathizing with a terrorist is a good experience for the brains. But the rest of it is just a bunch of cock, regurgitating half-understood myths about medieval warfare.

That's not a criticism; that's par for the course. Instead, let's talk about something you've all seen, Mel Gibson's film Braveheart, which is a fucking pile of nads. In slow motion.

So you're expecting to hear a bunch of elitist whining here about how the film is nuh historically accurate, and I hope you won't be disappointed, but there's a deeper message I'd like to communicate. Filmical bullshit falls into some different categories:

a) easy/lazy/artistic. The soldiers in the film wear these scale-mail or jack-of-plate trousers, and it looks fucking stupid. But this is clearly a choice made by some ridiculous twat of a costume designer who thinks it looks "medieval," or at worst doesn't think that Americans can take a film seriously where the bad guys have no pants on. Whatever.

b) inspired by ignorant Hollywood notions of "dramatic necessity", i.e. the romantic relationship between Mellington Mellorson and that one French chick, which is impossible, etc. Sure, but film got to have a love story! Love story am of the goods! I'm just amazed there isn't a demeaning stereotype of a black person in this film. So this is horseshit, but it's horseshit that is fundamentally nothing to do with history, so whatever.

c) an explicit load of revisionist bullshit. And this is where it fucking matters. If you portray the conflicts of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries in this way, you're portraying them as part of an ongoing conflict between two types of people. English people are like this, and Scottish people are like that, and the conflict will always go on because They Hate Our Freedom. See also The Patriot.

Now that's easy to think. But in fact, the real history is complicated and weird, and involves Norway and Sweden and stuff. Scotland's relationship to England changes, and there are weird questions of identity, and the Scots claim to descended from the Scythians, and Robert the Bruce murders someone in a church. It's not easy to think.

And therefore fuck all attempts to portray the past in this reassuring light, because your ancestors were not just like you. They were in some ways, but in other ways they were huge fucking weirdoes, and the sooner you begin the process of trying to get your head around that, the smarter you'll be, especially if you're able to come to the conclusion that you also are a giant weirdo and half of what you do makes no sense whatsoever.

Viva Mexico, I guess

2007-04-06T04:30:00.000-07:00

You know, on my good days I think of the Conquest of Mexico as one of those periods that don't bother me too much. It's the same reason I like the First Crusade, the eastern front in WWII, and the Russian Civil War. Which of these packs of cunts am I supposed to feel sorry for?

Take the First Crusade for example. Subsequent crusades really involve the Crusaders either spending a lot of time roughing up people who don't deserve it (well, so does the end of the First, but as a Bohemond fanboy I seldom think past Antioch) or foolhardily taking on people they should never in a million years fuck with, like Saladin. But the first is pretty evenly matched, and pits a bunch of venal military adventurers and dopey religious fanatics against a barbarian invader, a meddling empire, and a popular general who basically staged a coup. Every faction involved are a bunch of goddamn swine, and there's no reason to feel bad if (as is inevitable) something shitty and awful happens to one of them.

Same, in principle, goes for the conquest of Mexico. Cortés and the Aztecs seem to be in some kind of race to see whether the Conquistadors can possibly be a more bloodthirsty bunch of theocratic bullies than the Aztecs.

All of this came into my mind recently when reading Bernal Díaz del Castillo's Conquest of New Spain, which I seriously recommend everyone here should read, although the first part is actually pretty boring. You're well into the thing before they even get to Mexico, or maybe Guatemala. I don't remember. Point is, it's an account of the savage bastards of history written by one of the savage bastards himself, now a broken-down old man trying to earn a little cash for his old age by telling about his part in one of the great fucked-upednesses of history.

Problem is, I've found I can't really not care about the Conquest of Mexico anymore. Plus, although it isn't really anything to do with the Conquest, that piece of fucking filth Apocalypto (which has some brilliant action scenes, and which to be honest I really enjoyed, but is still a bunch of fucking garbage from the perspective of an angry historian, which is of course the perspective of this blog) has added to the "actually getting a little annoyed by motherfuckers trivializing the bits of the past they don't belong to" pile.

None of which is to the normal purpose of this blog, which is to present first-person accounts of the big fear or whatever. So allow me to recommend some reading whose every word will harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, and so on, right up to the part about thy knotted and combined locks to part and each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porpentine. With me so far? Good! To begin:

* Ho! Check that shit out! It turns out Bernal Diaz's book is available on the intertron! You speak Spanish, right? I know I don't. The rest of your lazy asses are just going to have to buy a cheap Penguin paperback like I did.

* Chipping away at my cruel objectivity about World War II was an accessible collection of the works of Vasily Grossman, who kept all kinds of notebooks and diaries about his experiences as a war correspondent on the Eastern Front in WWII. As you can maybe guess by the name, he was Russian and Jewish, so these experiences include fun stuff like the Germans killing his mom. If the Germans killed my mom, I'd probably write a book with a title like The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland as well. I've always wondered if that kind of goony Stalinist bullshit sounds better in Russian.

Of course, everything sounds better in Russian to me; such a beautiful language. TO make yourself feel better after all that Russian doom and gloom, why not enjoy this hip recasting of one of the world's best national anthems in a groovy, feathered-mullet 1990s version?

Sorry, guys. Next time an actual historical thing and less of my ranting.

Weird shit you find in the trash I: The Coppergate Helmet

2006-12-31T19:38:00.000-08:00

Yeah, yeah, over two months. Suck my nuts; I don't work for you. You want to hear about the Coppergate helmet or not?

So, you know, some people will throw out a perfectly good pair of shoes, or maybe an apple that still has a couple of bites left on it. You might throw out pens that don't write very well but probably have some use left in 'em because you're too lazy to draw all those fucking pages of little circles. People's moms are always throwing out their invaluable baseball cards or comic books that would have been worth a fortune if they had kept 'em, unless everyone else's moms had also not thrown theirs out, in which case they wouldn't be worth shit.

But you are extremely unlikely to have ever thrown anything like the Coppergate helmet into the garbage. As a side note, if you have, please contact me at once, because you are clearly both rich and out of your fucking mind, and you sound like my kind of people.

Anyway, yeah, in 1982 some archaeologists were watching construction going on at this site in York where they were gonna build a mall -- it's actually a pretty nice mall, I guess, has a little whisky shop in there and a cool Viking museum where you can see a guy pooping -- when there's a clang as the shovel of the mechanical digger hits something. The boss dude runs over, thinks it's a rock. Instead it is this thing here:

Now, you don't have to know much about archaeology to know that's pretty old with the chain mail and whatnot -- in fact, it's over a thousand years old -- and that it's in pretty good nick. In fact, it's in stunningly good condition for an Anglo-Saxon helmet. There are two other ones known from England. The first is the famous Sutton Hoo helmet, which you may recognize from heavy metal album covers or whatever:

Pretty rad, huh? But in fact, it doesn't look a goddamn thing like that keen replica. It looks like this, after meticulous restoration:

A bunch of rusty-ass metal attached to a mock-up frame. And what do you want? 1300 or so years in the ground will fuck your shit right up unless you get the right kind of soil and whatnot. And don't even get me started on the Benty Grange helmet, which looks like fucking this:

Check out that fucking nasty-ass pig hat.

Anyway, by comparison the Coppergate helmet is like the Rolls-Royce of Anglo-Saxon helmets, with its fancy Latin inscription and that badass duck glowering at you from between the eyebrows, and all kinds of curlicues and gold and whatnot.

Now, the Sutton Hoo and Benty Grange helmets both come out of burials, where some high muckity-muck would get buried with all his gold and jewels and unidentifiable metal shit that archaeologists call things like "standard" and "axe-hammer" in order to cover up the fact that these items are totally unique and nobody knows what the fuck they are -- at all, in the case of the Sutton Hoo standard. At least that hammer-looking thing is pretty clearly for caving motherfuckers' heads in. But I digress.

But this Coppergate helmet doesn't come out of anything fancy like that. Let's take a look at the contents of the pit this bad boy was found in to see if we can establish some context. We like context, right?

A sword-beater, a churn dasher, a crucible fragment, a fragment of hearth lining, seven little bits of slag, three fragments of iron, a piece of antler, and a rubbing stone. You don't need to know what a sword-beater or a churn-dasher are (I do, depressingly enough), but suffice it to say that this is basically a bunch of junk. Although the dating of what went into where when is not totally clear and probably never will be, this is basically a bunch of trash in a hole in the ground.

So you're some kind of eighth-or-ninth-or-whenever century Anglian dude, important and wealthy enough to have this awesome helmet with the chain mail and the gold and that menacing-ass duck. How does that go from pride of place atop your ruddy, bearded nogging to being in a dirty hole in the ground full of garbage and no one taking it out again?

I am trying to imagine a version of that story that doesn't involve someone getting their shit fucked up hardcore, and it really just isn't coming to me.

Profiles in Toadying IV: the aforementioned Sulpicius

2006-11-17T05:48:00.000-08:00

The only thing I can say about that shiny, purple-haired bishounen version of St. Martin is that it is not the kind of thing that would be out of character for Sulpicius to write. Hagiography is definitely an uncritical type of writing, but the bits of Sulpicius's Life of St Martin where he talks about meeting the saint read like self-insertion fanfic.

CHAPTER XXV.
Intercourse of Sulpitius with Martin.
FOR since I, having long heard accounts of his faith, life and virtues, burned with a desire of knowing him, I undertook what was to me a pleasant journey for the purpose of seeing him. At the same time, because already my mind was inflamed with the desire of writing his life, I obtained my information partly from himself, in so far as I could venture to question him, and partly from those who had lived with him, or well knew the facts of the case. And at this time it is scarcely credible with what humility and with what kindness he received me; while he cordially wished me joy, and rejoiced in the Lord that he had been held in such high estimation by me that I had undertaken a journey owing to my desire of seeing him. Unworthy me! (in fact, I hardly dare acknowledge it), that he should have deigned to admit me to fellowship with him! He went so far as in person to present me with water to wash my hands, and at eventide he himself washed my feet; nor had I sufficient courage to resist or oppose his doing so. In fact, I felt so overcome by the authority he unconsciously exerted, that I deemed it unlawful to do anything but acquiesce in his arrangements.

I'm just saying.

Yeah, yeah, calling early medieval hagiographers a bunch of emotional fanboys is hardly tough work; I will, however, get a more substantial post going on the Conquest of Mexico once I finish Bernal Diaz del Castillo's The Conquest of New Spain. Firsthand accounts, that's what we live for here at the GHP. Also, that shit is fucked up. I'm just saying.

I know I say this a lot...

2006-11-16T18:48:00.000-08:00

but there are times when I worry about Saint Sulpicius's mental stability. Presented without comment:

In these circumstances, I seemed suddenly to see St. Martin appear to me in the character of a bishop, clothed in a white robe, with a countenance as of fire, with eyes like stars, and with purple hair.

-- letter to the Deacon Aurelius.

No time for love, Doctor Jones!

2006-10-26T08:19:00.000-07:00

Busy at the moment, but a mini-post to help pass the time. You think of the Classical period -- you know, Greece and Rome, shit like that -- as being a period we actually know a lot about. But what you never hear about is where that information comes from. One of the things that we know about the period is that they had lots of horses, and they gave them names. But where do you think we got that list of horses' names? Baby's First Book of Greco-Roman Equestrian Names? My ass.

Where we got them from is curse tablets. These are little tablets of lead that people scratched magic spells onto and dropped down wells or buried in graveyards or whatever. Their texts are rad. And our largest source of horse-names are these tablets, where desperate gamblers or ardent racing fans have placed a curse on the horse they want to nobble in the chariot races.
It's a wonderful world. Also, cool pictures here.

England demands more women's names

2006-10-14T02:41:00.000-07:00

So when Emma, daughter of Count Richard I of Rouen, married King Æthelred II ("the Unready") of England in 1002, she found that the English had trouble with her name. Instead, they called her Ælfgifu. She certainly enjoyed more status at court than the king's previous wife, Ælfgifu. But when Æthelred died in 1016, she married the conquerer, Cnut "the Great," King of Denmark, Norway, England, and "part of Sweden." She had to compete for his affections, however, with his previous concubine/wife, Ælfgifu.

OK SERIOUSLY PEOPLE WHAT THE FUCK.

I know, I know...

2006-10-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time since the last update, and I never wrote that stuff about Snorri I said I was going to. On the one hand, I've been very busy, and on the other hand, until you start paying me to write this stuff, you can basically suck my nuts.

But since I'm here anyway, I might as well hit you with a brief episode of Inappropriate Reaction Theater, in which historians, antiquarians and archaeologists, on encountering the past, behave like a pack of goddamn lunatics.

Case #1: Thomas Browne (1605-1682), English scholar, antiquarian and so on. In those days if you spoke some Latin and had an appropriately fruity-looking Van Dyke, you could basically set up as an authority on whatever the hell you liked. I'm particularly enamored of his heavy-lidded gaze. That is the gaze of a man who's just emerged from a session of debauchery to sit for the title-page engraving of some book he's written where he's going to talk about how historical and philosophical topics allow even the most jaded of 17th-century courtiers to get his jollies. Case in point: Browne's Hydriotaphia, or Urne Buriall, in which the great man looks at some cremation burials from Norfolk, misidentifies them as Roman, and has some odd thoughts about them. To wit:

When the bones of King Arthur were digged up, the old Race might think, they beheld therein some Originals of themselves; Unto these of our Urnes none here can pretend relation, and can only behold the Reliquesof those persons, who in their life giving the Law unto their predecessors, after long obscurity, now lye at their mercies. But remembering the early civility they brought upon these Countreys, and forgetting long pased mischiefs; We mercifully preserve their bones, and pisse not upon their ashes.

"Pisse not upon their ashes?" I mean, as a mission statement it's not bad -- when I'm dead and gone I certainly don't want anyone to pisse on my ashes. But it's the mere fact that he even thought it was worth mentioning that's weird. I mean, let's say you're standing next to a dude at a bus stop, and he just turns around to you and says "don't worry, buddy; I'm not gonna poke the eyes out yer head." Now, you'd think that would be reassuring -- I mean, to hear that your eyes are safe. But instead, you just kind of wonder why he thought it was important to mention it at all. Seriously, did Thomas Browne look at clay jars full of cremated human remains and the first thing that popped into his head was "you know, I bet a clever fella could pisse on those?"

Because, if so, that's pretty cold.

Why gonzo?

2006-10-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

OK, I swear one of these days I'm going to talk about Snorri again. But today I want to briefly address why this is called the Gonzo History Project. I'm not going to go into the background of gonzo journalism, as advocated and, more to the point, embodied by Hunter S. Thompson. If you don't know what that is, you're unlikely to care that there are some obvious dissimilarities between the two.

The fact of the matter is that the GHP was originally intended to be far more explicitly gonzo: I still think it captures the exaggeration and whatnot, and I've done plenty of pieces about historians and the way they were involved with the histories they write, which is kind of related to Thompson's rejection of the practice -- hell, even of the idea -- of journalistic objectivity. And it's definitely written in an unedited, off-the-cuff way, with me just sitting down and mashing the keyboard until I think it's a good length. On the other hand, in that sense all blogs are gonzo.

But the fact of the matter is that up here on the soapbox, I find that I just can't stop talking. So while the very first GHP -- a history of the First Crusade written only from first-person accounts -- is pretty in-keeping with that mission statement, the blog just tends to fill up with shit that I find funny. And thus the dilution of purpose. But I'm only human.

More comedy tomorrow, anyway.

Procopius: crazy little bastard?

2006-09-30T07:45:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I'm going back to talking about Snorri, because I think I've failed to convey fully what a fucking mensch he was. But today we're going to talk about an earlier historian who wrote possibly the most lunatic work of the late antique/early medieval period. Don't believe me? Read on!

Procopius of Caesarea was, in his own weird way, awesome. Procopius was a Byzantine historian, born sometime around AD 500. From 527 onward, he served as legal advisor to this guy Belisarius, who was a general in the Byzantine army, Emperor Justinian I's right-hand man except when the Emperor was suspecting him of being a threat to his power and recalling him to Constantinople in disgrace. It was that kind of relationship, you know?

Anyway, Procopius wrote histories, including an exhaustive (and exhausting) eight-volume History of the Wars, chronicling Justinian's various campaigns against the Persians, Vandals, and Ostrogoths. He was sometimes critical of the Emperor's treatment of Belisarius, but in a very restrained, implied way. Byzantine society just didn't roll like that.

I like to imagine that the strain of being polite about a guy he despised who could ruin his career or even have him killed built up and up inside the guy until he just couldn't take it anymore, and the end result is the document we call The Secret History. It is fucking awesome.

Let me set you up with a little contrast here. Here's the kind of thing Procopius has to say about Justinian in History of the Wars:

This twenty centenaria [tribute] Isdigousnas [a Persian envoy] wanted to take with him, but the Emperor wanted to pay four each year so that he would have a guarantee that Chosroes would not break his agreement. But later the Romans gave to the Persians the whole amount of gold on the spot, so as not to appear to be paying a yearly tribute. Men are usually ashamed of dishonorable names, not actions.

Check out that sly little dig there! He's just makin' a general observation on human nature, him.

But the Secret History, well... that's a horse of a different color. Observe:

At least, though the plague ... fell on the entire earth, as many men escaped as perished from it, either through never having caught the disease or else having survived it after they had contracted it. But no Roman whatever succeeded in escaping from this man -- he fell like a disaster from heaven over the whole race and left no one whatever untouched. Some he killed without cause, others he left contending with poverty, more wretched than the dead, praying to him to release them from their present troubles, even by a cruel death.

Whoah! What kind of person could do that? Let's ask Procopius:

He was extremely stupid...

Come on, Pro! There's got to be more to it than that!

dissembling, treacherous, false, secret in his anger, two-faced; a clever man, well-able to feign an opinion ... always deceiving ... an unreliable friend; an enemy who would not keep a truce; a passionate lover of murder and of money ... he was easily led to evil, but never for any reason did he turn to good ... nature seemed to have taken away wickedness from all other men and put it all in his heart.

Lord! Sounds more like a monster than a man to me!

They say that Justinian's mother told some of her friends that he was not the son of her husband Sabbatius, nor of any man. Before he was conceived, and unseen spirit came to her ... Some of those who were ... undoubtedly with him in the palace, men of pure sould, thought they saw a strange demonic apparition instead of him. One said that ... suddenly the face took on the appearance of featureless flesh, for the brows and the eyes were no longer in their place, and it had no other recognizable feature at all.

So that's Procopius's view of Justinian in a nutshell -- a superhumanly evil monster. But what did he think of the Emperor's lovely wife, Empress Theodora?

Frequently, she conceived but as she employed every artifice immediately, a miscarriage was straightway effected. Often, even in the theater, in the sight of all the people, she removed her costume and stood nude in their midst, except for a girdle about the groin: not that she was abashed at revealing that, too, to the audience, but because there was a law against appearing altogether naked on the stage, without at least this much of a fig-leaf. Covered thus with a ribbon, she would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat. When she rose, it was not with a blush, but she seemed rather to glory in the performance. For she was not only impudent herself, but endeavored to make everybody else as audacious. Often when she was alone with other actors she would undress in their midst and arch her back provocatively, advertising like a peacock both to those who had experience of her and to those who had not yet had that privilege her trained suppleness.

So perverse was her wantonness that she should have hid not only the customary part of her person, as other women do, but her face as well. Thus those who were intimate with her were straightway recognized from that very fact to be perverts, and any more respectable man who chanced upon her in the Forum avoided her and withdrew in haste, lest the hem of his mantle, touching such a creature, might be thought to share in her pollution. For to those who saw her, especially at dawn, she was a bird of ill omen. And toward her fellow actresses she was as savage as a scorpion: for she was very malicious.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the foremost historian of his age just claimed that the Empress fucked a goose. You see why this is such a fascinating historical period?

Anyway, there's lots more of this stuff and you can read all about it in the man's own words, available to you by the magic of the internet.

Historians: also bad motherfuckers?

2006-09-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

Your modern historian is a pretty sedentary sort. Happiest in an archive full of the great smell of books, or perhaps thinking Deep Thinks in some kind of Starbucks, absent-mindedly counting his change to see if he can afford that muffin and deciding that it would be better, more virtuous, not to have it anyway. Occasionally, he'll visit some exotic part of the globe and return with cautionary or hilarious anecdotes.

Things were different in Olden Days, I tell you what. Allow me to begin with the example of Snorri Sturluson.

Born in 1178, Snorri wrote some of the greatest quasi-historical stuff you're ever going to read in Icelandic or any other language -- in between being a wealthy landowner and lawspeaker of Iceland, of course. For an appetizer, let's take a gander at the Prose Edda, also known as the Snorri Edda. This is both a quick primer on Norse mythology (as over-educated scholar Snorri understood it) and a guide to writing praise poetry so that the King of Norway will give you expensive presents. It contains lots of gripping stuff about gods and battles, and also tedious lists of names and something called "kennings," which are stupidly elaborate Old Norse metaphors. Here, for instance, is a list of the names of dwarfs:

Nyi, Nidi, Nordri, Sudri, Austri, Vestri, Althiolf, Dvalin, Nar, Nain, Niping, Dain, Bifur, Bafur, Bombor, Nori, Ori, Onar, Oin, Modvitnir, Vig and Gandalf, Vindalf, Thorin, Fili, Kili, Fundin, Vali, Thror, Throin, Thekk ...

Hey, wait a minute! JRR TOLKIEN JOO GOT SOME 'SPLAININ TO DO

Anyway, in addition to this catalogue of traditional poetic nonsense, Snorri also wrote the wicked awesome Heimskringla, a history of the kings of Norway. Specifically, the ways in which the kings of Norway were hard as nails. I'm talking about stuff like:

King Harald laid his ship against King Arnvid's, and there was the sharpest fight, and many men fell on both sides. At last King Harald was raging with anger, and went forward to the fore-deck, and slew so dreadfully that all the forecastle men of Arnvid's ship were driven aft of the mast, and some fell. Thereupon Harald boarded the ship, and King Arnvid's men tried to save themselves by flight, and he himself was slain in his ship. King Audbjorn also fell; but Solve fled.

Now when King Harald Sigurdson saw this, he went into the fray where the greatest crash of weapons was, and there was a sharp conflict, in which many people fell on both sides. King Harald then was in a rage, and ran out in front of the array, and hewed down with both hands; so that neither helmet nor armour could withstand him, and all who were nearest gave way before him.

That's two different King Haralds, by the way. Snorri is also thought by many to be the anonymous author of Egils Saga, which, if true, would make him the author of the manliest work in European literature. No brag, just fact.

But the really great thing about Snorri is that he forgot the advice a great artist once gave: "don't get involved in politics; just play the gig." Snorri spent some time in Norway, where he got pally with people with names like "Hakon the Mad." And back in Iceland he was making enemies, feuding with his relatives. And when I say feuding I don't mean not sending a Christmas card; I'm talking about murdering each other's servants with axes. Snorri backed the wrong horse in one of Norway's interminable political struggles, and as a result he got assassinated by one of his own kinsmen.

It was a saga way to go out, anyway.

Next time: the long-awaited Procopius of Caesarea entry! Or maybe not!

A dream about the king of Sweden

2006-09-21T07:47:00.000-07:00

I recently returned from a short research trip to Sweden, where in the tourist office of the old university town I was visiting I saw a picture of the current royal family. The Swedish royals seem like they're OK; I was watching the Olympics a couple of years back, and there was the King of Sweden in the audience when they were playing, I dunno, team handball or something. Sadly, he didn't have a giant blue and yellow foam hand.

Now, some people don't have as high an opinion as I do of the Swedish royal family, so let's take a moment to review some of their hardcase antecedents, just as a little reminder that behind every meek, gray public-building opener and his brood of dashing and/or disposable wastes of money there lies someone who is a fucking hardass.

For starters, check this shit out: the current Swedish royal family, the House of Bernadotte, is no more fucking Swedish than I am. They're descended from a French guy, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who was one of Napoleon's Marshals. He was also king of Norway, although that came a little later.

The thing about Napoleon's Marshals is that they are, almost invariably, hard as a coffin nail. The chaos of the Revolution let good soldiers rise to the top in some cases, so although Bernadotte was a private in 1780, he was a colonel in 1792. Further advancement followed, and just for the fucking icing on the cake he married Bonaparte's sister-in-law, which is basically like having your own seat on the gravy train. So despite it all, he basically manages to fall out with Napoleon -- the most powerful man in Europe, for those playing along at home -- but, long story short, the Swedes he'd worked with before liked him so much they elected him crown prince, and in due time he became king Karl XIV. Talk about landing on your feet.

Didn't speak a word of Swedish either.

And he is hardly the only fire-eater who's held onto that crown. To make my friend Ted very happy, I'll mention Gustav II Adolf, better known as Gustavus Adolphus, a hard-riding, hard-fighting kind of guy. The sort of cheerful, amiable character that acquires affectionate nicknames like "the Lion of the North." The Thirty Years' War is one of those tedious goddamn European affairs about Protestantism or something, and I hate to get into it, but there's something to be said for any war in which the king can get capped because, while leading a cavalry charge into a dense cloud of gunpowder smoke, he temporarily got separated from his men. Those were the days when a king might just up and cut your head off if he didn't like your tone of voice, or at least the language you wanted him to hear mass in or something.

He also has a special pastry made just for his holiday, Gustav Adolf Day.

Now I'm hungry.

OK, OK, last one, I swear. Actually, this is a twofer, because it would be wrong not to include at least a mention of Erik the Victorious, just for the name. A threefer, actually, because the king I want to talk about is actually two kings, Erik VII (king 1066-7) and Erik VIII (1066-7). So, yeah, for a short time, Sweden was allegedly torn up by a civil war between two claimants to the throne, both of whom were called Erik.

Man, this European royalty stuff is easy. I should do some more of it.

Profiles in Toadying III: Asser

2006-09-13T12:52:00.000-07:00

And the change-up! Last time I mentioned Alfred the Great, it was in the context of making fun of Robert Powell's disgusting piece of toadying, The Life of Alfred. In this post, we're going to take a very brief look at the one that started it all, Asser's Life of King Alfred. When you're the king, you attract all sort of toadies and flatterers, and this nauseating little Welsh goblin was one of Alfred's. It worked, too, in that he got made Bishop of Sherborne and probably heaped with riches and so on.

Anyway, there is some debate at how much of Asser's Life was actually written by who and when, but if we assume for the moment that it was produced by someone in Alfred's circle, I'm going to go ahead and assume that Alfred, who had a bunch of elder brothers, had kind of an unhappy childhood, as evidenced by this passage:

Now, he was loved by his father and mother, and indeed by everybody, with a united and immense love, more than all his brothers, and was always brought up in the royal court, and as he passed through his childhood and boyhood he appeared fairer in form than all his brothers, and more pleasing in his looks, his words and his ways.

Bear in mind that all these brothers are dead. You can just see Alfred looming over the shoulder of this hapless monk, stabbing a Viking with one hand and building a cathedral with the other, all the while yelling "and don't to forget to mention how I was prettiest and everyone liked me best!"

That's a long time to hold a grudge, that's all I'm saying.

A brief note on unlikely parentage.

2006-09-12T16:25:00.000-07:00

It's traditional to claim descent from Woden, or Zeus, or some other badass god. Julius Caesar claimed to be descended from Venus, which may seem like an odd match to you if your mental model of Roman religion and mythology is, like most people's, miles off. Not that I'm an expert or anything. Later writers thought that Merowig, or Merovech, or Meroveus, ancestor of the Merovingians, was partly descended from a sea monster. And an eleventh-century Anglo-Danish earl named Siward was later said to have had, as his great-great-grandfather, a bear.

A polar bear, if I recall correctly.

A real update soon, I promise.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is very odd sometimes.

2006-09-10T14:02:00.000-07:00

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is occasionally a highly entertaining document. For instance:

668. In this year Theodore was consecrated as archbishop.

669. In this year King Egbert gave Reculver to the mass-priest Bass, to build a minster in it.

670. In this year Oswiu, king of the Northumbrians, died, and Ecgfrith reigned after him; and Leuthere, Bishop Agilbert's nephew, succeeded to the bishopric over the land of the West Saxons, and Bishop Theodore consecrated him. Oswiu was the son of Æthelfrith, the son of Æthelric, the son of Ida, the son of Eoppa.

671. In this year there was the great mortality of birds.

...

What?

KNEEL BEFORE ZOG

2006-09-06T15:04:00.000-07:00

Just a quick rundown on the monarch with, hands down, the coolest name in modern history, HM Zog I, Skanderbeg III of Albania (1895-1961, r. 1928-1939). The icing on the awesome-cake is that Zog I, in addition to having a killer barbarian-type name, was a fucking gangster.

Born to a minor gentry family in a nasty-ass stone castle in the Albanian hills, Ahmed Zogolli was educated in Ottoman schools, became governor of his region at 16, and basically lived the life of an Albanian hill-chief. When Albania became independent in 1920, he held a bunch of government posts, including Minister of the Interior. Prime Minister in 1922, President in 1925, and, oh yeah, King in 1928. His closest royal ancestor was this guy Skanderbeg -- a pimp in his own right, about whom I'll talk some other time -- in the middle ages, but he didn't let a little thing like his claim to royalty being totally spurious stop him.

Plus, he wore his big stupid hat at a jaunty angle.

Now, when Zog was just a chief, he'd been engaged to another chief's daughter, as you do. But when he became king, he figured that he could just ditch the girl and get himself a royal bride. It didn't really work out, because no respectable European royal was going to marry someone whose claim to the crown was basically that he said so. The paint was still a little wet on that one.

Anyway, the point is that the father of the bride, by ancient Albanian custom, decided to put a cap in Zog's ass, and his partisans -- along with other factions who hated the king -- tried to assassinate Zog. A lot. By one estimate, Zog survived over fifty assassination attempts.

In one particularly exciting one, a bunch of goons tried to take Zog out while he was leaving an opera house in Vienna in 1931. As you do, Zog drew down on the attackers and started returning fire. You don't get that much with monarchs, that willingness to throw some brass if need be.

Anyway, Albania is tiny and poor as shit, so it was a natural place for Fascist Italy to want to take over. They spent a lot of time bolstering the Zog regime, and when he finally got wise and chucked them out they invaded and turfed him out. He seems to have absconded with the royal treasury and spent the rest of his life bumming around as king in exile.

Zog was basically a goon, a jumped-up bandit chieftain with unacceptable pretensions and a big, strong neighbor who picked on him. He's kind of a sad figure in a way; because his rank was so exalted, and because so many people were trying to kill him, he seems to have spent a lot of time just hanging out, playing cards with his sisters.

But for a man with that hat, and that moustache, and for the kind of approach to governance that leads to gunfights outside opera houses, I think we can spare a kind thought for old King Zog. Because if we had unkind thoughts about him, he'd probably cut our fucking throats.

Profiles in Toadying II: Anna Comnena

2006-09-04T13:05:00.000-07:00

Anna Comnena is a towering figure in medieval history, one of the few women who had the opportunity to set down their thoughts on the events in their lives and have them survive to the present day. And since she was the daughter of the Emperor of Byzantium, the events in her life were pretty keen. Her Alexiad is worth a read for anyone interested in medieval history.

Today, however, we are going to talk about her thing for her Daddy, Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1048-1118, r. 1081-1118). Now, the Byzantines had a higher standard of toadying than we do, especially when it came to the Emperor. A scathing criticism of Imperial policy in the 11th century would come off to us as pathetically servile. But even so, it's hard not to feel a little shudder when you read this stuff:

Alexius was not a very tall man, but broad-shouldered and yet well proportioned. ... When one saw the grim flash of his eyes as he sat on the imperial throne, he reminded one of a fiery whirlwind, so overwhelming was the radiance that emanated from his countenance and his whole presence. His dark eyebrows were curved, and beneath them the gaze of his eyes was both terrible and kind. A quick glance, the brightness of his face, the noble cheeks suffused with red combined to inspire in the beholder both dread and confidence. His broad shoulders, mighty arms and deep chest, all on a heroic scale, invariably commanded the wonder and delight of the people. The man's person indeed radiated beauty and grace and dignity and an unapproachable majesty. When he came into a gathering and began to speak, at once you were conscious of the fiery eloquence of his tongue, for a torrent of argument won a universal hearing and captivated every heart; tongue and hand alike were unsurpassed and invincible, the one in hurling the spear, the other in devising fresh enchantments.

I mean, you know? Daddy!

Profiles in Toadying I: Robert Powell

2006-09-01T02:11:00.000-07:00

Robert Powell, mostly unknown lawyer and legal historian who, in 1634, decided to write The Life of Alfred, Or, Alvred: The First Institutor of Subordinate Government in this Kingdome and Refounder of the University of Oxford. Together with a Parallell of our Soveraigne Lord, King Charles, untill this yeare, 1634.

It is basically a brief and fanciful life of Alfred the Great (d. 899), one of Anglo-Saxon England's exceptional guys. Where it falls down is that it tries to tie in Alfred's great deeds with those of King Charles I, a king who was really not so Great. Powell is perfectly aware of this, and has to try to weasel out of it.

It is said of Alfred, that ad crastina bella victor pavebat, victus parabat; If unjust peace is to be preferred before just warre, we having the happy fruition of a just and honourable peace with all the Christian world, and having no need in the times of conquest, to dread adverse approaches, or of defeatures to prepare for fresh onsets, may glory in his Majesties assiduous and vigilant supervising of his military munition and provision both by Sea and Land, remonstrated [sic] by his frequent visiting his greatest Storehouse of his Ordnance, and other martiall supply, as also his godly number of Ships in severall harbours.

What now? Okay, let's get this comparison straight here: Alfred, having had all his brothers die on him, his father killed and his army smashed by the marauding Vikings, who by this time had overrun most of England and were pushing into Wessex, rallied a ragtag band of supporters around an island in the Somerset Levels and came back to kick some Viking ass at the Battle of Edington, following which he fortified towns, founded a navy, and expanded the kingdom a bit, capturing London. Charles visits the Ships in severall harbours.

That's OK, though, right? I mean, we can't all be fightin' men. Maybe Charles was Alfred's equal in more scholarly pursuits, right? Maybe he translated classical texts into his native language, or spearheaded the restoration and reorganization of a church shattered by years of constant fighting?

...his Highnesse pursuing the example of his deare Father ... hath by his Princely declarations vouchsafed a liberty to his subjects, concering lawfull sports to be used that day ... prohibiting the same to all wilfull and negligent Recusants, that shall not resort to their owne Parish Churches to heare Divine Service before their going to the said recreations

Um... lawfull sports, eh? I mean, I guess ... people like sports.

no rash oathes, nor temerous execrations breathe out of his sacred mouth...

It's important not to breathe out any temerous execrations, all right, but is this really the equal of Alfred's legendary learning and piety?

his highnesse in his commission directed to the then Lord Arch-Bishop, and others of his honorable Counsell, amongst many gratious directions is pleased to descend to the Stewards of Leets and to charge them, what they shall give in charge in their turnes and half-yearley viewes of Franckpledge touching Forestallers, Regrators, and other the obvious and enormous offences of the Countrey.

Oh, well, now that changes th... wait, what?

No, the summary is clear: Robert Powell, you are a craven little ass-kisser, and for comparing your bitch-ass king with Alfred the fucking Great you ought to be laughed at in the marketplace like a clown.

Gonzo History Project Activity Corner

Use each of the following words or phrases in a sentence:

Recusant
Regrator
View of Franckpledge
Oblectations

You're not cool.

2006-08-31T07:03:00.000-07:00

You probably think you're a pretty well-rounded person, with a diverse skill set. You're an expert in whatever it is you do for work, but you have hobbies and interests. You sing pretty well, maybe you play the guitar. Maybe you draw, or used to have a weird job, or picked up some odd skills when you were in the Navy, or speak Japanese.

I give you Samuel F. Cody: cowboy, jockey, trick rider, playwright, actor, expert marksman, Buffalo Bill impersonator, man-carrying kite inventor, fake Colonel, aviation engineer and Britain's first dirigible pilot.

CVs had to be a lot longer in those days, I tell you what.

Medieval bishops were bad motherfuckers

2006-08-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Ranulf Flambard is my example here, but you could pick a dozen more -- starting with Adhemar of Le Puy, for example, the papal legate on the first Crusade. He got shot with an arrow by a Pecheneg horseman while on the way to Constantinople and basically just toughed it out. You brought your A-game on Crusade or you didn't go home. Some of the time you didn't go home no matter what. But Flambard, yes.

Flambard's dad was a priest -- they were a little laxer about this stuff in those days -- and his mom was, get this, a witch. With one eye. Or at least that's what contemporary chroniclers, who couldn't stand the pushy, grasping son of a bitch, wrote. Whoever she was, she raised a young cleric who was resolved not to take any shit. In the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, Flambard worked his way up through the ranks until he became one of William Rufus's royal chaplains, in the sense of the hatchet-men assigned to chisel as much money out of the country as possible. I don't think you can chisel with a hatchet, but whatever. Eventually, he got made Bishop of Durham, which is not like being bishop of just anywhere -- the bishop of Durham was a prince-bishop, one of the most powerful men in the north. He saw a lot more of the King of Scotland than he did of the King of England, and sometimes the King of Scotland was strapped.

But to summarize, some stuff that Flambard allegedly did during his career:

- got kidnapped by pirates
- and talked his way out of it.
- got locked up in the Tower of London (first person to be so imprisoned, actually)
- and then busted out (another first).
- ran off to Normandy, hooked up with a rival claimant, and organized an invasion of England
- but eventually made up with the king and swanned back to Durham smelling like roses.
- died at home in his old age, surrounded by his relatives, with whom he had packed the Durham cathedral community.

Here's what people had to say about him:

- St Anselm of Canterbury called him "not only a tax collector, but the most infamous chief of the tax collectors," which is pretty harsh. Pope Paschal II send him a badass letter at Anselm's instigation, in which he accused Flambard of committing "many illegal acts." Which was a fair cop. There was also some concern about his having been irregularly made bishop, which was a big deal in a period where one of the key issues relating to church and crown was who had the right to appoint their venal, worldly cronies to positions of ecclesiastical power.

- Liber Eliensis: "the iniquitous plunderer..."

- Orderic Vitalis: "by his cunning accusations and obsequious flatteries [he] obtained authority over all the royal officials from the king."

- William of Malmesbury: "but when he had committed this and that sin and not been punished, he grew so bold that he did not hesitate to ... [dare] a crime unheard of in all the years of the past."

And let's not forget the fascinating Life of Christina of Markyate, in which Flambard, who used to have a little action on the side with Christina's aunt, tries to have his dirty dirty way with the virtuous young holy woman:

The shameless bishop took hold of Christina ... and with that mouth which he used to consecrate the sacred species, he solicited her to commit a wicked deed.

Damn. Anyway, Flambard gets some good press from his own guys at Durham, where he was bishop for 29 years (although for some of those years he was on the run from the law), especially in the period after his death, when the Durham community is getting the hell beat out of it by the Scots and by some other unscrupulous characters I won't go into here. Flambard, you can hear them thinking, would not have put up with this kind of bullshit.

To recap: mom was a witch, all about the cheddar, talked smack to pirates, busted out of jail, engaged in armed rebellion against his king and walked away scot free, despised by the 12th century's most notorious player-hater, built a big-ass cathedral and died still wearing the big hat.

Ranulf Flambard: bad motherfucker.

2006-08-25T05:12:00.000-07:00

Gonzo history brings you manifestations of the fear throughout history, specifically dedicated to looking at the way real people, with flesh as real as yours, died in horrible agony, screaming out with their last breaths to an uncaring universe, and presenting it to the reader as a form of light entertainment because otherwise we would all go mad. I am not making some kind of "whoah-ho-ho, we're all kerayzeee!" thing here, like that guy from the office or a teenage girl. I am as sane as the next guy. Hopefully, you will soon see why.

Because I am lazy, and because I am vain, I think we'll begin this bad boy with some material from the Gonzo-Historical slush pile. Today or tomorrow, look out for some material from the short-lived and rare print version of the Gonzo History Project. Hopefully you will laugh.