A wealth of detail in this you-are-there look at life in medieval England. Just dipping in at random:
When you draw closer to the city walls you will sA wealth of detail in this you-are-there look at life in medieval England. Just dipping in at random:
When you draw closer to the city walls you will see the great gatehouse...And then you notice the smell. Four hundred yards from the city gate, the muddy road you are folowing crosses a brook. As you look along the banks you see piles of refuse, broken crockery, animal bones, entrails, human feces, and rotting meat strewn in and around the bushes. In some places the muddy banks slide into thick quagmires whhere townsmen have hauled out their refuse and pitched it into the stream. In others, rich green grasses, reeds, and undergrowth spring from the highly fertilized earth. As you watch, two seminaked men lift another barrel of excrement from the back of a cart and empty it into the water. A small brown pig roots around in the garbage. It is not called Shitbrook for nothing.
and
Medieval society thinks of itself like this: there are three sections of society, or "estates," created by God--those who fight [the aristocracy], those who pray [the clergy], and those work the land [the peasantry]...Between 1333 and 1346 it is systematically shredded by the English longbowmen, who, although ranked among "those who work," show that they are a far more potent military force than the massed charging ranks of "those who fight."
and
...women are blamed for all the physical, intellectual, and moral weaknesses of society.
and, delightfully
If you find yourself speaking English with the locals do not be surprised if their language gets a little rough around the edges. Just as fourteenth-century place names are direct descriptions of localities (for instance: "Shitbrook Street," Pissing Alley"), so daily speech is equally straightforward and ribald...So if someone slaps you on the back in a hearty way and exclaims, "Your breeches and your very balls be blessed" do not take it amiss. It is a compliment.
Lots of interesting detail and funny asides, but I fear a careless scholar. On pp 60-61 he talks about Anne Boleyn and the charges of adultery that brLots of interesting detail and funny asides, but I fear a careless scholar. On pp 60-61 he talks about Anne Boleyn and the charges of adultery that brought her down, including Anne's alleged affair with minstrel-poet Mark Smeaton. In conclusion Jones writes
And the queen [Elizabeth I] under whose rule they flourished, the daughter of Anne Boleyn, was said (very quietly) to bear more than a passing resemblance to Mark Smeaton.
Two things: One, I've seen many portraits and reproductions of portraits of Henry VIII and Elizabeth, and I'd like to know who she got that hair from if not him. Two, that rumor of Elizabeth's likeness to Smeaton can be traced directly to Elizabeth's half-sister Mary Tudor, who had a gigantic axe to grind, and of whom Jones makes no mention. It was difficult to take anything he said seriously after that. He also got Edward III's age wrong later on, which I admit I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't just read Dan Jones' The Plantagenets....more
Packed with detail useful to the scholar of the era and the writer who only pretends to be one, and in places hilarious, as regards the comments aboutPacked with detail useful to the scholar of the era and the writer who only pretends to be one, and in places hilarious, as regards the comments about smiths as undesirable neighbors. But as bad as the smiths were
A spin-off branch of the trade was found even more objectionable. The spurriers (spur makers) were reputed to "wander about all day with working," getting drunk and "blow[ing] up their fires so vigorously" at night that they blazed, "to the great peril of themselves and the whole neighborhood.
Worth reading if you're interested in the evolution of human technology....more
Henry II to Richard II, 250 years' worth of Plantagenet kings in 500 plus pages. Written briskly and with humor, the narrative hits all the highlightsHenry II to Richard II, 250 years' worth of Plantagenet kings in 500 plus pages. Written briskly and with humor, the narrative hits all the highlights of this era in British history without missing the low points, of which there were plenty, and debunking myths along the way. Henry II hid out in Ireland for a year to let things cool off after his knights killed Thomas Becket, before appearing in Canterbury to collapse sobbing on Becket's tomb.
He spent the rest of the day and also the whole of the following night in bitterness of soul, given over to prayer and sleeplessness, and continuing his fast for three days...With this extraordinary show of public penance Henry had won the most important propaganda battle of the war.
A cynic and a pragmatist, that was our Henry, but there was evidently no wearing of a hair shirt or walking barefoot to the shrine. Jones also proves absolutely my theory that everything in history is personal. Geoffry of Anjou was
a tall, bumptious teenager [who] liked to wear a sprig of bright yellow broom blossom (Planta genista in Latin) in his hair...Despite all this [his bride, Henry I's daughter] Mathilda was underwhelmed. Geoffrey was eleven years her junior, and Normans saw Angevins as barbarians who murdered priests, desecrated churches, and had appalling table manners.
Boy, it's those table manners that will get you, every time. From this joyous union came the aforesaid Henry II, who with Eleanor of Aquitaine spawned first Richard I, aka the Lionheart, who it turns out wasn't gay after all, who spent a cumulative one year of his eleven-year reign in England, and who was killed at the siege of Châlus-Chabrol by a defender wielding a crossbow and carrying a frying pan as a shield (I just eat this stuff up with a spoon).
Henry and Eleanor also parented, badly, the execrable John I of Magna Carta fame. John reigned for seventeen years. To the English it must have felt like seventy. The Magna Carta, however much we look backward today and see it graven in stone as a monument to the beginnings of the rights of man, was not a done deal. Jones writes
This was nothing more than a contractual basis for civil war. Stating that a king should govern according to the law and making sure that he did so were, it turned out, quite separate matters. These questions would lie at the heart of every major disagreement between king and country for centuries to come.
John himself started chipping away at it immediately, as did every Plantagenet king who followed him, which gave rise to uprising after revolt after rebellion, and to more than one French invasion welcomed with open arms by the locals, who had had about enough of the English nobles turning their back yards into abattoirs. One of the rallying cries for the rebels was the death of young Arthur, the nearest claimant after John to England's throne, and whom John most likely killed with his own hands in a drunken rage at Easter 1203. Contrast that John to the John who was fascinated by the law and who in his capacity as supreme judge of the land
...gave a reprieve to a little boy who had accidentally killed a friend by throwing a stone. He dismissed a case against a mentally deficient man who had confessed to a crime of which he was clearly innocent.
You could get whiplash, reading through John's reign. Next up was Henry III, John's nine year old son, a self-made saint and a man more comfortable with the outward pomposity of kingship than the hard work it took to maintain it. His son Edward I began his reign in prison and it would be ten years before he was crowned king but when he finally assumed the throne he kicked Scots and Welsh ass and built a bunch of castles that forever cemented England's grip on the Welsh Marches, but whose expense bankrupted England time and again. And, Jones writes
Edward's inability to empathize with the pressures brought to bear on his opponents was the cause of most of the rebellions and crises of his reign. In 1295 he managed to drive together two enemies that were to remain in each other's arms for the following 365 years. In February 1296 the Scottish government ratified a treaty of friendship with France. The Auld Alliance was born.
See Elizabeth I of England and Mary Queen of Scots, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, for whose failed attempt at the throne the Scots had to thank for Butcher Cumberland's Highland Clearances, which today would be called ethnic cleansing.
Edward I's son, Edward II, had a positive knack for listening to all the wrong people and for showering money and lands on them in a manner that infuriated his barons to, you guessed it, civil war, time and again, and didn't do the treasury any good either. He was deposed and murdered (possibly) by his wife and her lover in favor of his son, Edward III, in whose name they reigned until he deposed them in their turn. (Really, the Plantagenets might have taken the old Greeks for their template, as the only thing they didn't do was feed their children's flesh to their parents, although I wouldn't put anything past them.).
Edward III lived long and his reign mostly prospered, but his son the Black Prince of Crécy and Poitiers fame predeceased him and the Black Prince's son Richard II succeeded him, presiding over a 22-year reign of incomparable ineptitude that ended, some might even say justly, in his usurpation and murder (possibly, again) by Henry IV, son of the first of the Lancastrian dynasty.
To boil it down, Henry II created the vast Plantagenet empire and his heirs spent their reigns losing it through ineptitude and hubris, with a comparatively brief hiatus during the reign of Edward III. But in the meantime, in those Plantagenet years between 1154 and 1485, Jones writes
The office of kingship was utterly transformed...Government could be scrutinized, inadequate ministers could be impeached, and ultimately a king might be removed from office...The business of government was no longer the exclusive preserve of churchmen and clerks attendant on the king and the great magnates dominating their own territories. It was carried out by a combination of trained, bureaucratic professionals at Westminster and laymen in the shires who were drawn from the community but worked on behalf of the Crown...The principles of the Magna Carta, whose successive reissues had been pinned to virtually every church door in the realm during the thirteenth century, had permeated the consciousness of men of all classes and backgrounds.
The Plantagenet kings changed the face of war, too, Crécy and Poitiers leading to Agincourt in 1415 and cementing the English archer in the annals of military history. They changed the face of England architecturally, building Dover Castle, Westminster, Windsor, the Welsh Marcher castles, cathedrals like Salisbury (which today houses one of the last remaining copies of the Magna Carta). Linguistically, French was Henry II's first language, but Geoffrey Chaucer was a contemporary of Richard II, and read by everyone who could read in England, who were now reading, writing and speaking in English.
I'm pretty sure I prefer reading about it to living through it, especially this book. Recommended....more
The title is something of a misnomer, as this isn't about pilgrims to Jerusalem so much as it is about what pilgrims wrote about going to Jerusalem. IThe title is something of a misnomer, as this isn't about pilgrims to Jerusalem so much as it is about what pilgrims wrote about going to Jerusalem. It is unfortunately written by a scholar with a positive genius for omitting the fascinating detail, as on page 42
...the sly Agostino Contarini, the scion of a large patrician family, thumbed his nose at the prohibitions and defied the decrees by carrying merchandise worth its weight in gold.
and then doesn't tell us what merchandise that was. And on page 56
This is what became of the unfortunate Denis Possot, who was threatening to infect the whole ship.
With what? She doesn't say. And page 84
He had his reasons for mentioning this detail.
Which were?? Again, Chareyron doesn't say. Maybe it's a running inside joke for scholars only.
And then she quotes a lot from Sir John Mandeville, a fabulist who could give Baron Munchhausen a run for his money. I skipped whenever I saw his name.
On the plus side there is a lot of useful local color from the letters of the pilgrims themselves about the journeys these people took in a time before Boeing, even if after a while it feels like the interesting stuff crept in there by accident when she wasn't looking, and even if it gets really repetitive.
If you have to read it, brew up a very strong pot of coffee and dive in. Otherwise run for your life.
No stars for this one. Didn't like it but it was useful, and I can't trash a book that was useful to me....more
The picaresque story of a Persian Tom Jones, written by an Englishman with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Morier is determined to elicit the right kiThe picaresque story of a Persian Tom Jones, written by an Englishman with his tongue firmly in his cheek. Morier is determined to elicit the right kind of laughter from the right kind of reader in 1937 (as you might expect from an English gentleman with the middle name Justinian), to wit
"Tell me, Mirza Ahmak [said the king], by what extraordinary arrangement of Providence does it happen, that we Mussulmans should be the only people on earth who can depend upon our wives, and who can keep them in subjection..."
"...with respect to what your majesty has been pleased to say concerning women, it appears to the meanest of your slaves, that there must be a great affinity between beasts and Europeans, and which accounts for the inferiority of the latter to Mussulmans. Male and female beast herd promiscuously together; so do the Europeans. The female beasts do not hide their faces; neither do the Europeans. They wash not, nor do they pray five times a day; neither do the Europeans. They live in friendship with swine; so do the Europeans; for instead of exterminating the unclean beast, as we do, I hear that every house in Europe has an apartment fitted for its hog. Then as for their women indeed!--What dog seeing its female in the streets doe snot go and make himself agreeable--so doubtless does the European. Wife in those unclean countries must be a word without a meaning, since every man's wife is every man's property."
I don't know who he is mocking more here, Mussulmen or Europeans. Or women, for that matter. A little of this goes a long way. I picked up this book at an estate sale in Ireland, and in my imagination it was originally bought by a veddy raj type who spent a career in the Foreign Service looking down a very long nose at the Great Unwashed he was aiding the Empire in crushing beneath a British heel. In retirement he read this book at his leisure by his fireside, and every other page snorted out a laugh from beneath a handlebar mustache, in between knocking back shots of only the very best Scotch. For that much entertainment, I thank Mr. Morier. The illustrations are fun, too....more
The Knights Templar began in 1113 when Frankish knight Hugues de Payen volunteered his and nine (unless it was Herewith The Knowledge I Have Gleaned:
The Knights Templar began in 1113 when Frankish knight Hugues de Payen volunteered his and nine (unless it was thirty) other knights' services to King Baldwin of Jerusalem to guard the safety of pilgrims traveling from where they landed on the coast to the Holy Sepulcher. Unless they were founded in Easter of 1119, when a group of pilgrims was massacred by Saracens. Unless you don't think they were really Templars until the Catholic church anointed them as such at the Council of Troyes in 1128. And if you thought they weren't Templars until they were granted the right to wear a red cross on their mantles, that wouldn't be until 1147.
The Templars were founded as a community of warrior priests, bound to celibacy and poverty. Unless they were international financiers on the order of Jamie Dimon. They were verray, parfit, gentil knights, like Parsival and Lancelot. Unless they were some of the richest landowners in Europe. They took oaths to serve only God and were sworn to kill only Muslims. Unless they were swords for hire, indeed, Assassins in Christian clothing, and even colluded with the actual [Muslim] Assassins now and then.
The Templar order was suppressed in 1312 by papal bull, its Grand Master burned at the stake in 1314, a victim of a jealous Philip the Fair of France who wanted all their money and possessions. Unless they were guilty of idolatry, heresy and sodomy as charged.
I've read two other books on the Templars, and a quick search of Amazon yields forty-eight individual titles. Everybody's got an opinion, apparently, but at least this opinion if older than some is shorter than most and very well referenced, albeit with a distressing recurrence of that scholarly phrase, "As we shall see." Worth reading. ...more
Brown really does make an actual story out of the evolution of map-making. The chapter on the Middle Ages is espOne of my top ten 2014 favorite reads.
Brown really does make an actual story out of the evolution of map-making. The chapter on the Middle Ages is especially fun because he's just so indignant that faith supplanted reason following the collapse of the Roman Empire
Since the year 27 B.C., when Octavianus became Augustus Caesar, the Empire of the Romans had flourished...the Mediterranean had become a Roman lake ringed by Roman provinces and territories...cleared of pirates, and coasting trade was brisk. In fact travel, either for business or pleasure, was safer in that region than it ever was again until the introduction of steam navigation.
But the empire did collapse, and into the vacuum stepped the Catholic Church, which abhorred science since it conflicted with What Was Written and known to Be The Truth. The church didn't approve of cartography because the Bible told them what the world looked like (a rectangular flat twice as long as it was wide) and they didn't approve of travel much, either (Why go see for yourself when you could just stay at home and believe what we say?). From about 300 A.D. until Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1487, Brown writes
The lamp of scientific knowledge, a tremulous flame at best, was obscured for a time by the blinding light of religious ecstasy.
Nice, eh? Wish I'd written that.
Some of the maps he describes are pretty much made right up and would have been screamingly funny, if they hadn't helped shroud mankind in an impenetrable darkness for so many centuries.
Well worth reading, and a pretty easy read, too....more
Excellent overview of a people, place and time, even if I do suspect that Lewis is a wee bit undiscriminating inOne of my top ten favorite 2014 reads.
Excellent overview of a people, place and time, even if I do suspect that Lewis is a wee bit undiscriminating in her love of her subject. It begins with a brief history
In 1390, however, Sultan Bayezid began his conquests in Asia Minor. His Muslim troops were unwilling to fight their co-religionists, whom, anyway, they could not loot with a clear conscience...
Eight concise chapters (the book is only 197 pages long) follow which concern themselves with government
A request for the investigation of the surreptitious fixing of pipes and taps to divert public water for private consumption was sent to the Superintendent of Waterways and the Cadi of Istanbul; a command to warn off the poachers who had been stealing the exclusively royal fish from the waters near Bursa was sent to the Cadi of that town, and to the Cadi of Istanbul a complaint about the requisitioning for postal couriers of the horses and mules belonging to guests of a kahn, thereby scaring off customers with consequent loss of revenue, concluding 'This must stop!'...
religion
Writing of any kind, originally revered by the illiterate because it might be the Koran or was at any rate in the same script as the Book, became a charm of the greatest magic.
and civil life
All the markets, covered and uncovered, were constantly patrolled by inspectors of weights and measures, and in Istanbul the Chief Inspector was the Grand Vizier himself, who made a circuit of the markets each Wednesday in the company of the Chief Cadi and the Agha of the Janissaries, and on two other days independently, to enure the proper observance of the craft and trade regulations and to punish anyone found guilt of infringing them.
Below which paragraph is an illustration of a street-trader being beaten for selling short weight. The Ottomans were no believers in justice delayed.
In the chapter on family life we learn that Girls were married without either their consent or their approval, and boys were not much consulted either, and that the midwife brings her own birthing chair, the appearance of which signals the menfolk of the household to remove themselves. The year progressed from one Muslim holy day to the next, and, interestingly, few men lived at leisure.
The exercise of some skill was considered an honourable duty, to such a degreee that every Sultan was obliged to learn a craft.
I remember our guide in Marrakesh last year, a jovial man named Mohammed, walked us around the city right through noon prayers, and when we asked he said firmly, "Work is prayer, too."
It is impossible, writes Lewis
to over-estimate the importance in the social structure of the role of the guilds...The guilds of beggars, prostitutes, pickpockets and thieves, who paid their taxes to the police and observed faithfully the discipline of their organisations, were among the oldest established and dated from well before Ottoman times. The guild of thieves also acted as a kind of clearing-house for 'lost' property: when a man had been robbed he made representations to their sheikh, offering a sum of money for the safe return of his valuables. If the price was fair and the thieves had nothing against the man, his property was inquired for, collected, and returned to him.
That last sounds like the direct ancestor of ransomware, doesn't it?
And then Lewis moves out into Anatolia and the provinces. The Ottoman overlords practiced a kind of benign neglect when it came to territory not right under their actual gaze, so long as those territories paid their taxes.
The book ends with a brief but comprehensive glossary. Altogether the most efficient account of a six-hundred year empire I've ever read....more
I wish some mention had been made of Marcus Agrippa's map, made of stone and in the Roman Forum for all to see from 5 A.D. on, but otherwise an exhausI wish some mention had been made of Marcus Agrippa's map, made of stone and in the Roman Forum for all to see from 5 A.D. on, but otherwise an exhaustive (and on occasion exhausting) examination of how map makers created physical representations of the world we live in, many with kings and popes looking over their shoulders, which could and did affect what was shown to be at the center of the world and where the borders went (see page 375, one of many propaganda maps made by Nazi Germany). A book made for map geeks like me who skim until a name like Eratosthenes or al-Idrisi jumps out. Lavishly illustrated, you can spend a lot of time drooling over the maps and wishing you could pinch them out....more
In 1930 and 1932 Freya Stark, a British woman in her 30s, traveled into Persia (Iran) as far as the rock of Alamut, the One of my 2014 favorite reads.
In 1930 and 1932 Freya Stark, a British woman in her 30s, traveled into Persia (Iran) as far as the rock of Alamut, the stronghold of that madman who seduced his followers with hashish into carrying out for-hire assassinations from Jerusalem to Marseilles. She went alone, on the proverbial shoestring, hiring guides as she went. Everyone thought she was mad as well, but when she came back from her second trip she wrote this book, which was an instant sensation and deservedly so. "In the wastes of civilization," she begins
Luristan is still an enchanted name. Its streams are dotted blue lines on the map and the position of its hills a matter of taste...I spent a fortnight in that part of the country where one is less frequently murdered...
From every page wafts up the rich aroma of that delightful, understated humor the British are known for, as in
He himself had never done so illegal a thing as to open a grave, said 'Abdul Khan, picking at his opium pipe with a bronze bodkin two or three thousand years old, and looking at me with the calm innocence of a Persian telling lies.
and
...there is a certain advantage in travelling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards.
and
The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid that one is and no one is surprised.
Which gets Stark through many a tight situation with the local authorities, who also think she is mad but who think she might be a spy, too.
Stark has a tremendous gift for describing the beauty of her mountain surroundings
As we left our sleeping-place, a fine ibex stood above us on a crag, its horns lit by the sun...We now rode easily, in a country where trees began to appear. They showed at first on the high skylines on either side of us, and gradually, descended to where, through white and crumbly limestone soil, our path went along with small ups and downs. There was broom and tamarisk, thorn and oak, a small-leaved tree called keikum, and the wan or terebinth with broad leaves, aromatically scented, and peacock blue berries good to eat.
With each turn of the page Stark introduces us to a new scene and new people in a new village and a life lived that probably no longer exists. It's a mesmerizing read.
On her return Stark reported back to British Intelligence and forwarded her maps to the Royal Geographical Society, which rewarded her with a grant. In 1934 she published this account of her travels, which became an international bestseller. She continued her travels into her eighties, writing many more books and eventually being knighted as a Dame of the British Empire, if that is the correct phrase. And I am now going to read her biography, Passionate Nomad, by Jane Fletcher Geniesse....more
It's always fun to read a book where in the writing of it the author learns something to confound the expectations with which she began it. In the penIt's always fun to read a book where in the writing of it the author learns something to confound the expectations with which she began it. In the penultimate chapter White writes
Before I started researching it, I had intended to name this chapter 'The rise and fall of a profession'. It was to chart the glorious rise of accounting in the second half of the twentieth century to the lofty heights of the professional Olympus and then trace its collapse in the wake of scandals like Enron and WorldCom, and in Australia, HIH, ONe.Tel and ABC Learning. However, not only has no such fall ensued but it turns out that these accounting scandals are a regular feature in the landscape of accounting. They are as old as the profession itself...And they all stem from significant accounting misstatements orchestrated by influential senior managers.
From its beginnings in Venice in the early 1300s
...[where] scholarly Europe rejected and even outlawed Hindu-Arabic learning, the new mathematics found a ready audience among the merchants of Italy, where it became known as 'abbaco' mathematics.
to its use down to the present day
...the figures produced by Pacioli's double-entry bookkeeping to create the four financial statements that are the raison d'etre of modern accounting--the balance sheet, the income statement, the cash-flow statement and the statement of retained earnings--today run the international economy and drive its share markets.
double-entry bookkeeping, White says, has created the world as we know it. And, she adds in the last chapter, can destroy it.
It seems that if we want to bring our infinitely voracious consumerism into line with the resources of our finite planet, we must consider giving our planet a value that the market can recognize and account for, assign a monetary value to the oceans, air, forest, rivers, wildernesses...unless we start accounting for our transactions with the earth, we will bankrupt it for all future human habitation.
An interesting read filled with enticing screenshots to bolster her thesis, like this one
As early as the ninth century a Muslim merchant could cash a cheque in China drawn on his bank in Baghdad.
and that horrible Ford Pinto cost-benefit analysis of paying out insurance on lives lost versus the cost of installing a safety device that would keep the Pinto from blowing up, with the result that at minimum 500 people burned to death in Pinto crashes. And the group who after our fine, fine Supreme Court declared that corporations were people, too
decided to treat the corporation like the person it legally is and test its psychology profile. Using the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of mental Disorders (DSM-IV), they found that the corporation shares many of the characteristics that define psychopaths. That is, corporations break the law if they can, they hide their behaviour, sacrifice long-term welfare for short-term profit, are aggressively litigious, ignore health and safety codes, and cheat their suppliers and workers without remorse.
Lest you think she is overstating things a tad, remember the Enron tapes?
...Enron employees are seen watching the Californian forest fires on television. As they watch they can be heard celebrating the destruction of electricity pylons and shouting, 'Burn, baby, burn"' All in the name of corporate profit.
Which will remind you of what St. Augustine said about mathematics, as previously quoted by White
'The good Christian should beware of mathematics and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell.'
Wow. Reminds me a little of Robert Reich: "Economists exist to make astrologists look good."
Like too many other academic writers White overuses the phrase "As we shall see," but other than that no complaints. There is a lot of rage vented at corporations nowadays, justifiably so (how does Jamie Dimon still even have his job?). This book will confirm the pessimists' view of plus ça change, but it is also a wake-up call to those optimists who think maybe, possibly, as capitalists we can do better. And we should.
Lots of detail and maps and an excellent index, and the writing isn't so dry it parches your mouth, either.Lots of detail and maps and an excellent index, and the writing isn't so dry it parches your mouth, either....more
Lavishly illustrated, which initially led me to regard this book with some suspicion, but in the end lots of interesting information of harem life andLavishly illustrated, which initially led me to regard this book with some suspicion, but in the end lots of interesting information of harem life and history. That the author has a family history that reaches back to the seraglio and that she has included a photo of her great-uncle with his odalisque is convincing in and of itself.
In 1790, one sale document reads, you could buy seven women slaves for 1,000 to 2,000 kurush. One horse would cost 5,000 kurush. Kidnapped or sold by their parents, the trip to the harem was one-way--once you went in you never came out. Unless the sultan didn't like you or you refused to convert to Islam or failed to learn Arabic, in which case he could post you for resale on the medieval equivalent of eBay.
If in the rare event you became the favorite of the sultan, your troubles were not over. Your rivals might poison you or have you tied in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorous (one particularly mad sultan had his entire harem so disposed of). If you had a son, you became the automatic enemy of every other woman in the harem who also had a son with aspirations of succeeding to his father's power.
The rest of your time, always supposing you survived, was spent in gossip, eating and smoking opium, and going to the baths.
The very first paragraph of the introduction is the most poignant, written by an anonymous woman of the harem:
I am a harem woman, an Ottoman slave. I was conceived in an act of contemptuous rape and born in a sumptuous palace. Hot sand is my father; the Bosphorus, my mother; wisdom, my destiny; ignorance, my doom. I am richly dressed and poorly regarded; I am a slave-owner and a slave. I am anonymous, I am infamous; one thousand and one tales have been written about me. My home is this place where gods are buried and devils breed, the land of holiness, the backyard of hell.
Life in a harem must have been unutterably boring. Seldom have I been so glad to have been born in the here and now....more
The guy who took out the Templars in the Middle East? Is the same guy who took out the Assassins. Name of Baybars. That was after he murdered his sultThe guy who took out the Templars in the Middle East? Is the same guy who took out the Assassins. Name of Baybars. That was after he murdered his sultan and usurped the throne. Ambitious and determined kinda guy, Baybars.
Lots of likewise interesting tidbits here, including an excellent chapter on the legendary aspects of the assassins, including the name, which Berman says appears in the written record as early as 1290. The "leap of death," wherein the Old Man of the Mountain commanded followers to jump over a cliff to demonstrate their obedience to his word? True. Dope? True, maybe, or at any rate a convenient way to knock out aspiring assassins so they could be transported all unknowing into the Old Man's garden and wake up surrounded by what looked like Paradise, sort of a carrot for the joys to come should they fulfill their mission. The gold dagger? Nope.
The book begins with a detailed history of the religious split of Islam following Mohammed's death and the beginnings of Sunni and Shiite, which split gave rise to the Assassins and the fortress at Alamut....more
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