Note: Unpublished Spanish sources are referred to as Document, with a number, and are listed in full at the beginning of the Sources and Select Bibliography. For published works cited here in a shortened form only, the complete bibliographic details appear in the Select Bibliography. Other published sources appear here in full, and not in the Select Bibliography.
PREFACE
1. And of course, we do not have Urban’s precise words, but only the memory of them through a number of different writers.
2. This is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement in the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), that “what can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” But this translation does not really capture the resonance of the original (“Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen”).
3. See Lance St. John Butler, Registering the Difference: Reading Literature Through Register, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.
4. Iliad, bk. I, l. 201.
5. Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, London: Pan Books, 1979, pp. 144–5.
Part One
CHAPTER 1: “WE PRAISE THEE, O GOD”: LEPANTO, 1571
1. Twenty-four feet long by thirteen feet wide.
2. Cited in Rodgers, Naval Warfare, p. 179.
3. Although the French were not present, popular emotions in France seem to have been with the forces of the Holy League. In the Protestant states, sentiment likewise seems to have been united with the arms of Catholic Europe.
4. “Christendom” and “Islam” are both complex terms, which many theorists might (appropriately) term “discourses.” I have certainly used “Christendom” in this way, not just as a term meaning a monolithic Christian society, which never existed after the early days of the faith, but rather to describe cultures derived from a long history of Christian belief. Islam is not exactly a comparator of Christendom in its structures, but we have no single word in English to encompass that discourse either. The phrase Dar ul-Islamhas been variously translated as the abode, house, or Domain of Faith, Righteousness, or Peace. The basic point is that for a sincere and committed Muslim all that is good and necessary exists within the world of Islam, while all outside is of a lower order. But what is outside can often be brought inside and rendered good. On these topics see Hentsch, Imagining.
5. They escaped, by this papal decree, 200 years of purgatory.
6. The banner, which was long kept as a trophy in Spain, was destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century.
7. Ali had formerly been second in command to Piali Pasha.
8. Genesis 4:14. The traditional explanation, that the Arabs descended from Ishmael, the elder son of Abraham, and his concubine Hagar, elided with the legend of Cain, also the elder son and also cast out. For the instability and mutability of these legends of origin, see Freedman, Images, pp. 89–96.
9. The leader of the poor warriors of the First Crusade, the king of the Tafurs, called Muslims “sons of whores and of the race of Cain”; see Cohn, Pursuit, p. 67. The people of the West, it was believed, were descended from Adam’s third son, Seth, via Noah and his lineage.
10. See, for example, Christian Augustus Pfaltz von Osteritz, Abominatio desolationis Turcicae, Prague: Carl-Ferdinand Druckerei, 1672, pp. 81–3.
11. France adopted the alternative approach of seeking alliance with the Ottomans, and Spain also sought an accommodation after 1580.
12. The paradox and ambiguity between Islam as part of God’s intended plan—to bring his people to self-awareness—and Islam as pure evil was never properly resolved. Many writers embody both attitudes.
13. Some, like the grand vizier Sokullu, preferred to use diplomatic means.
14. So called from the three banks of oars on each side.
15. Increasingly, also in the artillery carried aboard. This proved to be a decisive advantage for the Christian ships in battle. But the guns could only sink or disable an enemy ship. Like infantry ashore, a galley battle usually depended on hand-to-hand fighting.
16. This numbered about sixty-five soldiers in the Spanish galleys of the 1530s, but this had risen markedly by the 1570s. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 227.
17. Ibid., p. 221.
18. This practice was especially common among the Maltese captains.
19. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 63.
20. See I. A. A. Thompson, “A Map of Crime in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” EHR second series, XXI, no. 2 (August 1968), pp. 244–67.
21. Often false “debts” were created to allow them to be kept at the oar.
22. See Ruth Pike, Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
23. See Bracewell, Uskoks.
24. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 99.
25. This was the case with Ulch Ali, or Kulic (“the Sword”) Ali; a Calabrian kidnapped from his village, he became the Kapudan Pasha after Lepanto.
26. This was a form of inflammable liquid (like napalm) devised by the Byzantines that would burn even under water. Its exact formula remains unknown to this day.
27. The first forms were Venetian merchant galleys adapted to carry cannon. Later forms evolved toward becoming longer and broader in beam.
28. See Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, p. 234.
29. Strictly speaking, he lost the use of his arm.
30. For example, the sixteenth-century French jurist and philosopher Jean Bodin (now best remembered for his writings on political sovereignty) denied that it was a sufficient cause for a just war.
31. Qur’an, Surah 61:4.
32. See Renard, Islam, pp. 43–65.
33. The Patent Number 418 of May 15, 1718, for Puckle’s machine gun, however, shows that it was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Muslims. This was perhaps the last effort at this kind of control on sectarian grounds. See W. H. B. Smith, Small Arms of the World, Harrisburg, PA: Stacpole Publishing Company, 1957, p. 92.
34. Artillery was used in innovative fashions, as, for example, Mehmed the Conqueror employing siege artillery to destroy the walls of Constantinople, but it was manufactured by renegade Hungarian Christians.
35. As, notably, at the battle of Dettingen in 1743.
36. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 385, citing Don John to Don Garcia de Toledo, September 16, 1571.
37. Ibid., pp. 384–5.
38. The 100,000 men included new contingents that arrived in early spring. See Beeching, Galleys, p. 175.
39. Ibid., p. 176.
40. However, Suleiman the Lawgiver had allowed the Knights of St. John to evacuate Rhodes after a five-month siege that cost between 50,000 and 100,000 Turkish lives. But on that occasion hostages were exchanged and both parties fulfilled the stipulations of the agreement to the letter.
41. See Bohnstedt, “The Infidel Scourge,” p. 19. One German Reformation pamphleteer, Veit Dietrich, described the Turks thus: “Of such merciless, wild murdering there is no example in history, not even in that of the pagans, except for the doings of the Scythians and other barbarians at times when they are exceptionally angry. But the Turk does such things all the time, for no other reason than that the devil drives him against the Christians.”
42. Some sources suggest that he was whipped every day. My account is based on Stirling-Maxwell, who in turn bases his reconstruction on Paolo Paruta, Storia della guerra di Cipro, part of his contemporary Historia Venetiana, published in 1605, and on Nestor Martinengo, taken prisoner at Famagusta, and whose Relazione di tutto il suceso di Famagusta was published in Venice in 1572. All these sources reflect viewpoints acceptable to Venice, but there is no reason to doubt their accuracy. I have not been able to find an Ottoman source that covered these events in any detail. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 370.
43. C. D. Cobham (ed.), The Sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta: With a Sketch of the Earlier History of Cyprus, edited from Midgley’s translation of Bishop Graziani’s History of the War of Cyprus (1624), London: St. Vincent’s Press, 1899, p. 17; and The Sieges of Nicosia and Famagusta in Cyprus Related by Uberto Foglietta, trans. Claude Delaval Cobham, London: Waterlow and Sons, 1903.
44. Flaying was seen to be the ultimate degradation, partly for its cruelty but also for its slow stripping of identity. It was rare among the Ottomans, where other cruel punishments were more common. It was no doubt for the shock effect that Lala Mustafa ordered this frightful form of lingering death. The point of reference here is the story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of Apollo ordering the flaying of his rival Marsyas. The scene was depicted most graphically by Titian in c. 1575, and also by Raphael, Giulio Romano, Melchior Meier, and in numerous engravings. The horror felt at the flaying process was evident in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of the Metamorphoses:
For all his crying ore his earses quite pulled was his skin
Nought else was he then but one whole wounde. The grisly bloud did spin
From every part, his sinewes lay discovered to the eye, The quivering veynes without a skin lay beating nakedly. The panting bowels in his bulke ye might have numbred well, and in his brest the shere small strings a man might tell.
See Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, London: Routledge, 1995, pp. 186–7. It was noted that Bragadino did not cry out but murmured the words of faith until he fell silent.
45. See the dispatch from Don John to Philip II, describing the taking of Galera, reprinted as Appendix I in Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. 2, pp. 364–71: “In the place itself the defence was so obstinate that it was necessary to take it house by house and the taking of it lasted from nine in the morning, fighting going on the whole while in the houses, in the streets and on the roofs, the women fighting as well and bravely as their husbands.”
46. This was Stirling-Maxwell’s conclusion about the battle: “Although in numbers, both of men and vessels, the Sultan’s fleet was superior to the fleet of the league, this superiority was more than counterbalanced by other important advantages possessed by the Christians. The artillery of the West was of greater power and far better served than the ordnance of the East.” See ibid., vol. I, p. 423.
47. My translation from M. Antonio Arroyo, Relación del progresso della armada de la Santa Liga (Milan, 1576), cited ibid., vol. I, p. 410. Maxwell translates Hermanos as “Friends,” but “Brothers” makes better sense.
48. Putti blowing onto the Christian ships to fill the sails were shown in paintings of Lepanto.
49. Some of the commanders on the wings had already made the decision for themselves and gave the galleasses a wide berth.
50. Of the 170 Ottoman galleys captured most were so badly damaged as to be useless. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, pp. 430–31.
51. Ibid., p. 407, citing Girolomo Diedo, Lettere di principe, vol. III, p. 266.
52. See Stirling-Maxwell, Don John, vol. I, p. 427.
53. Ibid., pp. 445–6.
54. Fray Josef de Sigüenza, Historia del Orden de San Geronimo (1605), cited ibid., p. 448.
55. As he wrote to Don John six days later, “I thought I should never have arrived but have been made into relics in Italy and France as a man sent by your Highness.” With a studied impassivity, the king asked nothing about the battle at first. “For the first half hour he did nothing but ask ‘Is my brother certainly well?’ and all sorts of conceivable questions that the case admitted. He then ordered me to relate everything that had happened from the beginning, omitting no single particular, and while I spoke, he three times stopped to ask me for further explanations; and when I had ended, he as often called me back to ask for further explanations; about your Highness’s care for the wounded, and how you gave away your share of the prize money to the soldiers, at which he was not a little moved.” See Rosell, Historia, Appendix xiv, p. 208.
56. See Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998, pp. 101–6.
57. See Rosell, Historia, p. 208, for the report of Don Lope de Figueroa.
58. I owe this observation to John Brewer.
59. Reproduced in Göllner, Turcica, vol. I, p. 234.
60. This was recalled in an etching of the triumphal entry made in the mid–nineteenth century, now in the Museo de Roma, Gabinetto Comunale delle Stampe.
61. It had been also, of course, the site of the inconclusive battle of Prevesa in 1538.
62. The traditional puppet theater of Sicily also enacts these stories.
63. See Musée de la Corse, Moresca.
64. Cited in Lewis, Discovery, p. 43.
65. See Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Histoire de l’empire Ottoman: Depuis son origine jusqu’à nos jours, trans. J.-J. Hellert, 18 vols., Paris: Bellizard, Barthès, Dufour, 1835–43, vol. 6, p. 434.
66. As in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721).
67. The Dungeons of Algiers, act 3.
68. Muley Malek was modeled on reality, from a Moroccan prince, Muley Maluco, living in Spain.
69. Alfred, an Epick Poem, “In Twelve Books,” by Sir Richard Blackmore, London, 1723, bk. I, p. 24.
70. The last early modern Mediterranean “crusade” was not Lepanto, but this Portuguese expedition that ended in disaster on August 4, 1578, not far from Tangier. See Braudel, Mediterranean, pp. 1178–9, and Hess, Forgotten Frontier, pp. 96–8.
CHAPTER 2: FIRST CONTACT
1. In 1575, in his dedication (to Howard of Effingham) of his version of Curio’s Notable Historie of the Saracens, Thomas Newton declared that “this Babylonian Nebuchanezzer and Turkish Pharoeh [are] so near under our noses … Now they are even at our doors and ready to come into our Houses … this raging Beast and bloody Tyrant, the common robber of all the world.” See Coelius Augustinus Curio, A Notable Historie of the Saracens, trans. Thomas Newton, London: n.p., 1575, rep. Amsterdam: Walter J. Johnson Inc., 1977.
2. The first “Mad Mullah” was the Somali leader Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, against whom the British fought from 1899. “Mad Mullah” has now become a common insult.
3. The tenth-century writer Hamza al-Isfahani listed only five great nations, from China in the East to the Berbers in the West, plus the Byzantines. Cited in Khalidi, Arabic Historical Thought, pp. 117–18. There was a Muslim polemic against Christianity, and against Western Christians in particular, but before the late eighteenth century it was not accompanied by any strong curiosity about those whom it attacked. Jacques Waardenburg also notes that while the Muslims had “a lingering curiosity for those non-Muslims outside the dar-ul-islam, there was a near-complete absence of interest in the dhimmis [local Christians and Jews] in Muslim lands.” See Jacques Waardenburg, “Muslim Studies of Other Religions: The Medieval Period,” in van Gelder and de Moor, “The Middle East and Europe,” pp. 10–38.
4. This was the “persecuting society,” first identified by R. I. Moore, subsequently challenged and modified, but still solid in all its essentials. See Moore, Formation, and Laursen and Nederman, Beyond.
5. This very quality was condemned by Islam: the term jahillya described the dark ages before Islam brought order and light to the world. But Arab poetry still used the bellicose qualities of the tribe to depict nobility. Robert G. Hoyland notes, “Islam was born among town dwellers and started out with a town dweller’s stereotyped view of nomads … In early Islamic literature nomadic Arabs were often represented as uncouth. All this was soon to change, however, and they would become characterised as ‘the root of the Arabs and a reinforcement for Islam.’ ” See Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 243–7. Hoyland’s earlier book, Seeing Islam…, contains a very extensive range of negative statements on early Islam, but also establishes there was not a completely uniform response. However, he notes (pp. 24–5): “In Greek writings the Muslims were never anything but the enemies of God … the image that an average Byzantine had of the Arabs was conditioned by more than a millennium of prejudice … And their Biblical ancestry, as descendents of the slave woman Hagar, tarnished them religiously as ‘the most despised and insignificant of the peoples of the earth.’ ” (This scornful condemnation is contained on the Syriac Chronicle of 1234, based on an eighth-century source.)
6. For example, at Duma in 634. See Glubb, Conquests, p. 132.
7. Mark Whittrow has pointed to multiple problems with the sources for the first Islamic conquests. See Whittrow, Making, pp. 82–9.
8. Cited in Gil, History, p. 41.
9. Ibid., pp. 38–9.
10. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 422. Gibbon uses the often fanciful chronicle of Al Wakidi, and Ockley’s History of the Saracens. But although the details are embellished the essence of the battle seems plausible.
11. See Gil, History, pp. 42–4.
12. This was the pass that Alexander the Great and his armies had traversed.
13. Gil, History, p. 170, asserts the contrary: “One should not assume that the Moslems were in a majority during this period.” However, his Muslims are peninsular Arabs, “tribes who derived their income from taxes from the subdued population,” and so converts do not figure.
14. See Zernov, Eastern Christendom, p. 84.
15. This had been miraculously rediscovered by the emperor Constantine’s mother, St. Helena.
16. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 183.
17. Matthew 24:15–24.
18. See Constantelos, “Moslem Conquests,” p. 325.
19. Cited in Christades, “Arabs,” p. 316.
20. These monstrous creatures were first described by Pliny the Elder in his Historia naturalis, completed in A.D. 77. See Moser, Ancestral Images, pp. 36–7. See also C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942), pp. 201–25.
21. See Sahas, John of Damascus.
22. De fide orthodoxa, IV, 11; cited in Khoury, Polémique, p. 11. John’s father had been among those who formally surrendered Damascus to the Muslims.
23. See Jane I. Smith, “Islam and Christendom: Historical, Cultural and Religious Interaction from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford History of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 322. She observes: “Scholastic writings coming out of the eastern part of the empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, especially from Byzantium, tended to be contemptuous and even abusive of the Prophet. In general this polemic was apocalyptic (prophesying the end of the Arabs) and highly uncharitable. The work produced in Spain … provided the first attempt at a comprehensive view of the religion of the Saracens, despite its predilection to see Islam as a preparation for the final appearance of the Antichrist.”
24. See Khoury, Polémique, pp. 360–61.
25. See Sherrard, Constantinople, pp. 8–9.
26. Cited in W. R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, Sancta Sophia Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, London: Macmillan & Co., 1894.
27. Revelation 21:2–3.
28. However, it was difficult to use effectively, except in limited defensive situations. For a balanced view, see Whittrow, Making, pp. 124–5.
29. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p. 8: “The winter proved uncommonly rigorous. Above an hundred days the ground was covered with deep snow, and the natives of the sultry climes of Egypt and Arabia lay torpid and almost lifeless in their frozen camp.”
30. Theodosius Grammatikos, in Spyridonos Lambros, “Le deuxième siège de Constantinople par les Arabes et Théodosius Grammatikos,” Historika Meletemata, Athens, 1884, pp. 129–32, cited in Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 133.
31. See Brubaker, Vision, pp. 19–58.
32. Zernov, Eastern Christendom, p. 86.
33. See Rotter, Abendland und Sarazenen, pp. 68–9, and Tolan, Saracens, passim.
34. See History of Heraclius, cited in Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 28. The best translation is The “Amenian History” Attributed to Sebeos, trans. Robert Thomson, 2 vols., Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
35. Revelation 4:7–8.
36. Ducellier, Chrétiens, p. 28.
37. Revelation 6:1–17.
38. In fact, Sebeos’s attitude, although hostile, shifted in register between a historical narrative and making an apocalyptic connection. Thus in chapter 30 of his History he begins by saying, “I shall discuss the [line of the] son of Abraham: not the one [born] of a free [woman], but the one born of a serving maid, about whom the quotation from Scripture was fully and truthfully fulfilled, ‘His hands will be at everyone, and everyone will have their hands at him’ [Genesis 16:12].”
39. Ibid., chapter 38.
40. See Michael McCormick, “Diplomacy and the Carolingian Encounter with Byzantium Down to the Accession of Charles the Bald,” in B. McGinn and W. Otten (eds.), Eriugena: East and West, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994. However, the outcome of these connections can be seen in the cluster of chronicles concerning the seventh century of Spain: the Chronicle of 754, the Continuatio Byzantia Arabica or Chronicle of 741, and a lost Historia Arabica. The historiographical connections between them and their relative importance is contested, but it is clear that Christians in Spain were fully aware of events in the eastern Mediterranean during the conquest after 634, and related these to the conquest of Spain. For a good discussion of these issues see Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 52–65. Dubler, “Sobre la crónica,” is suggestive of a wider range of connections.
41. Alcuin, Opera, in J. P. Migne, Patrologiae series Latina, Paris: Migne, 1863, vol. 100, letter 164.
42. This becomes how Lacan in Ecrits described the manner in which concepts and ideas adhere. Jacques Derrida also noted the complexity of these attachments and the way in which the accretions (and their interpretation) grew over time: “The dissimulation of the woven texture [of a text] can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading”; Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone Press, 1981/1993, p. 63. See also Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977. I found Lacan extraordinarily difficult to understand, even in translation, although the original French edition (Editions du Seuil, 1966) was a useful point of cross-reference. However, some of the papers in Mark Bracher and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan (eds.), Lacan and the Subject of Language (London: Routledge, 1991), proved helpful.
43. On Saussure and Lacan, see Martin Francis Murray, “Saussure, Lacan and the Limits of Language,” University of Sussex Ph.D. dissertation, 1995. On Lacan’s approach, see Nancy and Lacoue-Lebarthe, The Title.
44. Cited in Bat Ye’or, Decline, p. 419, Blunt to Bulwer, July 14, 1860.
45. See Qustandi Shomali, “Church of the Nativity: History and Structure,” www.unesco.org/archi2000/pdf/shomali.pdf.
46. There is also a Muslim story of desecration, with the Crusaders stabling their horses in the Al-Aqsa mosque after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Are the two stories connected or reciprocal?
47. Mary Eliza Rogers, Domestic Life in Palestine (1862), London: Kegan Paul International, 1989, pp. 41–2.
48. Matthew 7:14. “Gate” and “door” are synonymous. See also Luke 13:23–4: “Then said one unto him, ‘Lord, are there few that be saved?’ And he said unto them, ‘Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in and will not be able.’ ”
49. Lacan said, “Doubling a noun through a mere juxtaposition of two terms … a surprise is produced by the unexpected precipitation of an unexpected meaning: the image of twin doors symbolizing, with the solitary confinement offered Western man for the satisfaction of his natural needs away from home, the imperative which he seems to share with the great majority of primitive communities by which his public life is subjected to the laws of urinary segregation.” See Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud,” Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1977, p. 151.
50. Dr. Dane Kusic suggests an essential difference between the fundamental paradigms of Christendom and Islam: “Rather than functioning in a way of Western dichotomies and strict definitions of mutually exclusive antipodes, Muslim religious and other terminologies often function in a way of synecdoches, where pars pro toto can be supplanted by the totum pro parte and vice versa.” He has developed his model in part from Pierre Bourdieu’s outline of the multiple and overlapping uses of the Kabyle home in Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16, trans. Richard Nice, London: Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 96 sqq. See Dane Kusic, “Discourse on Three Teravih Namazi-s in Istanbul: An Invitation to Reflexive Ethnomusicology,” chapter 7, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Maryland, 1996, http://research.umbc.edu/~dkusic1/chapter7.html.
Part Two
CHAPTER 3: AL-ANDALUS
1. In his Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), reprinted in Richard Ford, Granada: Escritos con dibujos inéditos del autor, Granada: Patronato de la Alhambra, 1955.
2. But he also recognized the essence of the unforgiving terrain: “But where Spaine has water and Valleis there she is extraordinarily fruitfull”; James Howell, Instructions for Foreign Travell, 1650.
3. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 355.
4. See W. Montgomery Watt and Pierre Cachia, A History of Islamic Spain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 9–10, on the alternative possibilities of expansion.
5. The Christian Mozarabic Chronicle and the Continuationes Byzantia-Arabica date from a few decades after the conquest. The first Arabic sources are later. See Collins, Arab Conquest, pp. 710–97. Ron Barkai makes the valid point that Byzantia-Arabica is less negative toward the Muslims in its language, and many of the more positive passages do not appear or have been altered in the Mozarabic Chronicle. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes, pp. 24–5.
6. Tarif gave his name to the first Muslim town in Spain, built close to the former Roman citadel of Julia Traduce.
7. See the Continuatio Isidoriana Hispania ad annum 754, commonly called the Mozarabic Chronicle, trans. Colin Smith, in Smith, Christians, vol. I, pp. 12–13. This chronicle is the first version of the story.
8. See the Chronicle of Alfonso III of the Asturias, written in 883: “Because they had abandoned the Lord, and had not served him in righteousness and truth, they were abandoned by the Lord and were not allowed to dwell in the promised land [terram desideratam]”; ibid., pp. 24–9.
9. See the Historia pseudo-Isidoriana; ibid., pp. 14–16. This twelfth-century text introduced the trope of illicit sexuality into the foundation myth of Spain. In the Mozarabic Chronicle (754), the moral flaw of the king (Roderick) was that he “violently usurped” the crown; ibid., pp. 10–11.
10. The two connected in a confused and uncertain fashion in what, since Julia Kristeva, we have called “intertextuality.” My suggestion here is that Roderick’s story is depicted, by a succession of clerical authors, in markedly Davidic terms.
11. The Estoria de España was written in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, when this mythic description of the conquest reached an extraordinary efflorescence. Moreover, this was written not in scholar’s Latin but in Romance (Castilian). See Smith, Christians, vol. I, pp. 21–2.
12. Ibid.
13. Américo Castro recognized the significance of these stories: “Because Castile for centuries bore the brunt of the struggle against a people judged to be lascivious, a people that spoke of love and orgies in their literature, she imagined that violation of a maiden and the polygamy of the clergy were the determinants of a triumphant Saracen invasion.” See Castro, Structure, p. 328.
14. This image of Muslim lust became paradigmatic. Thus Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados noted, “Long after Christ was crucified there arose a certain false man named Muhammad … As part of his teaching he offered them wholesale indulgences in order that they could gratify their whims lustfully and to an altogether unreasonable extent.” Cited in Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5.
15. Cited ibid., vol. I, pp. 26–9.
16. See Angus MacKay, “Ritual and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Castile,” Past and Present 107 (May 1985), pp. 3–43.
17. Ana Echevarria rightly observes that fifteenth-century Castilians showed a special identification with their ancestors, and evidently a knowledge of the epics that portrayed them. See Echevarria, Fortress of Faith, p. 121. The events at Simancas are outlined in W. D. Phillips, Enrique IV and the Crisis of Fifteenth-Century Castile, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1978.
18. See also the explanation for the instrumentality of the Muslims offered by Juan Manuel in the Libro de los estados; Smith, Christians, vol. 2, pp. 94–5. This same theme emerged in the letter written by Alfonso VIII to Innocent III lamenting that so few Christians had died in the triumph over the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212: “There is one cause for regret here: that so few in such a vast army went to Christ as martyrs”; ibid., p. 23.
19. The periods of central Muslim authority in Al-Andalus were as follows: Governors of Al-Andalus: 711–55
Umayyad Emirate: 756–912
Umayyad Caliphate: 912–1031
Almoravid Caliphate: 1086–1145
Almohad Caliphate: 1145–1224
I have followed the periodization given in Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal.
20. Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 479.
21. It was also known as the battle of Poitiers.
22. Isidore of Beja, Chronicle, cited in William Stearns Davis (ed.), Readings in Ancient History, Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1912–13, vol. 2, pp. 362–4.
23. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain, citing Elías Téres, “Textos poéticos Arabes sobre Valencia,” Al-Andalus 30 (1965), pp. 292–5.
24. The number of converts is still a matter of controversy. The best calculation, by Richard Bulliet, has been questioned but not overturned. But it is clear that the immigrants from North Africa, even allowing a high rate of natural growth, still could have formed only a minority of the Muslim population. See Glick, Islamic and Christian Spain.
25. The language issue is even more hotly disputed than the issue of conversion. The degree to which Berber remained a language of the hearth cannot conclusively be established. Whether Romance as spoken by the Mozarabes became a lingua franca is also in dispute. Popular oral practice is harder to establish than written textual practice, but even the latter is uncertain. But there is some evidence: by 1085, for example, when the Christians captured Toledo, the large Mozarabic population in the city all spoke Arabic. On trade languages and lingua franca, like Sabir, see J. E. Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996.
26. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 110–20.
27. See Barkai, Cristianos y Musulmanes.
28. See Ross Brann, Power in the Portrayal: Representation of Jews and Muslims in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Islamic Spain, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
29. See Guichard, Al-Andalus, pp. 171–2.
30. The Jews were expelled in 1492 from Castile and Aragon, and from Portugal and Navarre in the sixteenth century. Muslims were converted by decree in 1499, and those who adhered to their faith were forced to leave. The Christianized descendants of former Muslims were deported between 1609 and 1614.
31. From al-Wansharishi, Abul Abbas Ahmad, Kitab al-mi’yar al-mugrib, Rabat: 1981, p. 141. Translated from the Arabic in Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 58–9.
32. See Ibn Abdun, Hisba manual [market codes], translated in Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, p. 178.
33. Ibid., p. 179.
34. Douglas, Purity and Danger, p. 41.
35. First, in his Manual de gramática histórica Española elemental (Madrid: Suarez, 1904), but the idea of a culture built up from many different intertwined sources suffuses Menéndez Pidal’s later work, especially Orígenes del Español, estado lingüístico de la península Ibérica hasta el siglo xi, Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1926. The extended concept of caste, casticismo, meaning purity of essence, has a powerful and somewhat malign meaning in Spanish history. This was in part the topic of Miguel de Unamuno’s volume of essays En torno al casticismo (1895). Hence the use of the idea of caste in the Spanish context has a strong resonance. Américo Castro took Menéndez Pidal’s notion and translated it into a theory of Spanish particularism; see Castro, Structure, pp. 607–15.
36. The definition is that of David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 38.
37. The “oppositional” statements predominated from the mid–eleventh century, at a point when the confrontation between Islam and its Christian enemies became acute.
38. Nirenberg, Communities, p. 127.
39. See Geertz, Meaning, pp. 141–2.
40. The code envisaged that even after such a punishment, the woman might not be able to resist temptation a second time. “For the second offence, she shall lose all her property and … she shall be put to death.”
41. Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1991, p. 139.
42. Ibid., pp. 139–40. Peter Damian referred specifically to clerical acts of sodomy, but the tone is analogous to the general abhorrence of transgressive acts. The Seville market regulation of Ibn Abdun, for example, declared that catamites were “debauchees accursed by God and man alike”; see Olivia Remie Constable, Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim and Jewish Sources, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, p. 179.
43. The great Castilian law codes created by Alfonso X, the Siete Partidas, for example, were never promulgated at the time of their creation. They were not so much law codes as a representation of an ideal state.
44. Mark R. Cohen cites the study by A. L. Udovitch and Lucette Valensi on the modern Jewish community of Djerba (Jerbi) in Tunisia, to the effect that “although the ethnic and religious boundaries separating Muslims and Jews are by no means absent or obliterated in the market place, it is here that the lines of demarcation are most fluid and permeable.” See Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross, p. 118.
45. Francisco Benet, “Explosive Markets: The Berber Highlands,” in Louise E. Sweet (ed.), Peoples and Cultures of the Middle East, Garden City, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970, pp. 171–203. Benet is writing principally of modern Berber culture, but Islamic Spain was predominantly Berber in culture, and the parallels drawn seem appropriate.
46. David Nirenberg has pointed out that in Spain, where the three castes lived side by side, meat (which had to be slaughtered to prescribed standards for Jews and Muslims) became a focus for violence and dispute; see Nirenberg, Communities, pp. 168–72. At times attempts were made to produce shared but segregated facilities, but this was rarely successful in the long term, unless they could be divided by time, as in the case of access to the communal bathhouses in ninth-century Cordoba, at least in the view of Janina Safran; see her “Identity and Differentiation.”
47. “If I give the name integralism to certain features that are common to Spanish and Moorish existence … In spite of the similarities between Spaniards and Moslems, the two people were differently situated inside the vital whole wherein are integrated the activity of the mind and the awareness of the objective and subjective—the ‘dwelling places’ of their lives were different.” See Castro, Structure, p. 239.
48. It is curious that he uses “Spaniards,” rather than “Christians,” as the parallel term to “Muslims.”
49. Castro, Structure, pp. 248–50.
50. Spanish has retained a rich vocabulary of locality, which perhaps echoes this tradition of segmentation: barrio (neighborhood), rincón (quarter), querencia (favorite place; now usually a bullfighting term).
51. See Dana Reynolds, “The African Heritage and Ethnohistory of the Moors,” in Van Sertima, Golden Age, pp. 93–150.
52. This is Derrida’s dissémination. Typically, he denies its meaning: “In the last analysis, dissemination means nothing, and cannot be reassembled into a definition.” But the word “dissemination” is a Derridean pun, filled with multiple connotations. It embodies the sexual act of in-semination, and no one can tell as a consequence how heritable qualities will change or transmute down the generations. However, dissemination is itself the act of spreading, and not knowing where the seed will fall or where it will implant and grow. Thus there has to be a common framework of meaning if communication is to take place at all, but the consequences of dissemination mean that this transfer of meaning is always subject to distortion. See Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 44–5. I am grateful to Professor Nick Royle for drawing my attention to this relatively clear statement of a Derridean position.
53. Américo Castro observed that “nothing is more revealing than language.” But equally, nothing is more confusing and uncertain. Anwar Chejne, who has written a useful history in English of the Arabic language, also presents a picture of the particular development of Arabic in Al-Andalus; see Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 182–95. But even Chejne’s presentation is uncertain about the exact interconnection between the languages. The linguistic mélange of Al-Andalus included a great variety of spoken dialects—Arabic, Berber, and Romance—and written Arabic and Latin, the former advancing and the latter declining. There is later evidence that many northerners had some knowledge of spoken Arabic. There is no real support in Spain for Norman Daniel’s suggestion, in respect of Norman Sicily, that the “continued use of three languages” created a multicultural or tolerant society. See Daniel, The Arabs, p. 146, and Buxó, “Bilingualismo y biculturalismo,” pp. 177–92.
54. Alvarus wrote profusely. His main works were his letters (Epistulae), Memoriale sanctorum, Vita Eulogii, and Liber apologeticus martyrum, all contemporary with the events he described. On the effect of martyrs in Cordoba, see Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 268–9.
55. Jessica Coope, in her excellent account of the martyrs movement and of Perfectus, draws rather different conclusions. She notes that the Church of St. Acisclus was a center of “radical” Christianity, and that the Muslims sought deliberately to entrap Perfectus. However, rather than resisting their entrapment, he participated in it with fatal results. The same body of evidence (and that provided by partisans, Eulogius and Alvarus) is capable of a number of interpretations. But all the sources tend toward the volatility of the religious situation in Cordoba at the time. See Coope, Martyrs, pp. 18–19.
56. Ibid.
57. The material for this section is drawn from Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 268–307.
58. Wolf, Christian Martyrs, analyzes the movement in depth. He makes the case that the movement was not masterminded by Eulogius but, rather, that he portrayed the events in a way that would make their message more powerful. In particular, he countered the arguments that they were not true martyrs because they performed no miracles, and that they brought their deaths upon themselves, as indeed the authorities in Cordoba, both Christian and Muslim, clearly believed.
59. Eulogius, Epistula ad Alvarusum, 1, cited and translated in Coope, Martyrs.
60. R. A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 24.
61. Coope, Martyrs, p. 52.
62. Ibid., p. 69.
63. Alvarus, Indiculus luminosus, cited and translated ibid., p. 49.
64. Ibid.
65. Cited in Safran, “Identity and Differentiation,” p. 583.
66. Ibid. Abu Abdullah, Malik bin Anas, was born in Medina in 715. He produced the Kitab-al-Muwatta, the earliest surviving book of Islamic law, and made an important collection of hadith, oral traditions of the Prophet. The Malikite legal tradition followed in Al-Andalus “disliked marriage with dhimmi women but did not forbid it. He [Malik] disliked it because the dhimmi wife eats pork and drinks wine and the Muslim husband kisses her and has intercourse with her. When she has children, she nourishes them according to her religion; she feeds them food that is forbidden and gives them wine to drink. Malik disapproved of intermarriage out of concern for purity and also because he feared for the religion of the children.”
67. Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 445–6.
68. See Las Andalucías de Damasco a Córdoba, Paris: Editorial Hazan, 2000.
CHAPTER 4: “THE JEWEL OF THE WORLD”
1. See Dodds, Architecture, pp. 94–6.
2. In much the same way that the Ottoman Turks centuries later adapted the architectural traditions of the Byzantines in building their state mosques. See Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
3. From a Spanish translation of Ibn Idhari, Al Bayan al Mughrib.
4. Excavations have now extended to some ten hectares, less than 10 percent of the 112 hectares that comprised the whole palace. The palace was built on rising ground overlooking the river Guadalquivir, with the caliph’s personal quarters like a mirador looking out over the countryside. See Las Andalucías de Damasco a Córdoba, Paris: Editorial Hazan, 2000, pp. 64–5.
5. For Abd al-Rahman’s palace reception and its impact, see Dozy, Spanish Islam, pp. 446–7. The entry of Caliph Omar into Jerusalem and, specifically, whether he was riding upon an ass, a horse, or a camel has its own hotly disputed symbolism; see http://answering-islam.org/Responses/Al-Kadhi/ro6.14.html. The significance of his riding an ass is that it would have echoed the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9—“Behold, thy King cometh unto thee; he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.” It was widely known that Christ had entered the city on an ass, in fulfillment of that prediction. Another echo was that of al-Buraq, a magical beast that had carried the Prophet Mohammed to Jerusalem on his night journey, and which was often depicted as part winged ass and part mule. These complex resonances also have a more modern context. In 1918 General Allenby, followed by his staff, had deliberately dismounted from his horse so as to enter Jerusalem respectfully on foot, unlike the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who on his visit ten years before had been driven through the Jaffa Gate in great state. Allenby’s Christian humility was ordered by the Foreign Office to contrast with the emperor’s apparent Teutonic arrogance.
6. Ibid., p. 447.
7. See R. A. Fletcher, Saint James’s Catapult: The Life and Times of Diego Gelmírez of Santiago de Compostela, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 56–8.
8. Castro, Structure, pp. 130–45.
9. See Dozy, Spanish Islam, p. 519.
10. Ibid., p. 520. Castro, Structure, says that the bells were melted down to make lamps for the mosque.
11. Bruce Lincoln gives some sense as to what was intended in attacking the symbolic aspects of the shrine when describing the attack on the emblems of the church at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936: “It is their [the enemies of the church’s] intent to demonstrate dramatically and in public the powerlessness of the image and thereby inflict a double disgrace on its champions, first by exposing the bankruptcy of their vaunted symbols and second, their impotence in the face of attack.” See Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Social Boundaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 120–21.
12. Historia Silense, written in Leon in about 1115.
13. In the case of the Wahabis of Arabia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they desecrated even Muslim sites, proclaiming them idolatrous.
14. This was against the law and practice of Islam.
15. E. Lévi-Provençal, “Les mémoires de Abd Allah,” Al-Andalus 4 (1936), pp. 35–6.
16. Their name is a version in Spanish of Al-Murabitun, meaning those who came from the ribat. These were closed encampments where the chosen warriors of Islam could lead pure lives. The first military towns of the Arab armies, such as Kufa or Cairouan, had served much the same function, as did the Wahabi settlements in Arabia in more modern times.
17. Like their modern descendants, the Tuareg.
18. See Chejne, Muslim Spain, pp. 69–72.
19. Ibn Idhari, Al Bayan al Mughrib, cited in Chejne, Muslim Spain, p. 72.
20. Few terms are more confused or misused than jihad. Not all wars fought by Muslim armies were holy wars, nor was the term applied only to warfare, for the “struggle” could be interior and moral as well as military. Similarly, the Christian conflict of “crusade” was replete with ambiguities: there were crusades against secular enemies of the papacy or the church hierarchy, against heretics, as well as against Muslims. But the concept of jihad could be invoked by a ruler, and once this was done the nature of any conflict altered. There is a large literature on this topic, but for a broad perspective see Johnson and Kelsay, Just War.
21. María Jesús Rubiera Mata has pointed out that the “tolerance” of Toledo is a misnomer, being much more an accommodation between Muslims and Christians. Against that should be set regular attacks on the Jews of the city. See “Les premiers Mores convertis ou les prémices de la tolérance,” in Cardaillac, Tolède, pp. 102–11.
22. The Poem of the Cid (anonymous), trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 55.
23. Ibid., p. 71. (Corneille produced his own version of the heroic deeds of Rodrigo in his play Le Cid of 1637.)
24. Ibid., p. 98.
25. For this transition see Fletcher, Quest, pp. 193–205. Plainly, at this distance in time, the boundary between the history and legend is blurred and subject to interpretation. But the desire to construct an ideal type of Hispanity, through the Cid or even Don Quixote, who has also been made to serve a similar typological purpose, is a persistent characteristic of the Spanish past.
26. See Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Creation of a Mediaeval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, Eighth to Eleventh Centuries,” in Power and Standen, Frontiers, p. 52.
27. Cited in O’Callaghan, History, pp. 344–5.
28. Many Muslims had lived in Old and New Castile and the Kingdom of Aragon for several generations, and though in a minority, were a settled part of the population. They were very different from the newly conquered communities in the south. See Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 51–2.
29. Cited ibid., p. 66.
30. See Smith, Christians and Moors, vol. 2, p. 94 (my translation).
31. In 1408, Queen Catalina, regent for the young Juan II, ordered that Moors should wear a blue moon on their clothes and, four years later, that no one should address a Moor with the courtesy title Don. She even decreed that all Moors and Jews should live within their own communities and should not work for Christians. But the decrees were not effective, and in 1418, the status quo ante was restored; see Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, p. 129.
32. This story is told in Nirenberg, Communities, pp. 146–8.
33. From the Siete Partidas. The Muslim and Jewish communities were even more anxious to preserve the separation of the communities.
34. This is the point that Gabriel Martinez-Gros raises against Pierre Guichard’s Structures sociales orientales et occidentales dans l’Espagne Musulmane, Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1977. Martinez-Gros regards an “Andalusian identity” as a form of Orientalism: “About the first hundred pages of Pierre Guichard’s book are devoted to defining the characteristics of “Occident” and “Orient” as a benchmark from which we can judge the society of Al-Andalus … The “Occident” is derived from the Carolingian epoch, where we return to the first centuries of the history of Al-Andalus. The “Orient,” by contrast, finds its essential framework and definitions in the studies of modern anthropologists, well versed in understanding the mountains of the maghrib, the marshes of Southern Iraq, or the deserts of Arabia, as if a sort of Eternal East existed, eternally preserved for good or ill within history.” He suggests that the evidence used by Guichard will not sustain the elaborate superstructure built upon it; see Martinez-Gros, Identité Andalouse, p. 117.
35. See Mikel de Epalza, “Pluralisme et tolérance, un modèle Tolédan?” and Jean-Pierre Molénat, “Mudéjars, captifs et affranchis,” in Cardaillac, Tolède.
36. See Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Como, pp. 67 sqq. Logically, Jews should also have been called kafir. No doubt they were, but more often it seems were referred to as yahudun or hudun; see Rubin and Wasserstein, Dhimmis.
37. See Lapiedra Gutiérrez, Como, pp. 189–247.
38. This usage referring to human beings defined, from a negative perspective, a xenophobic hatred of the “Other,” directed toward a barbaric and uncivilized being; it is a usage that has an obviously humiliating connotation. By contrast, the Muslim Arabic speakers possessed, implicitly, the opposite qualities—that is, they were cultivated, civilized; they did not abandon themselves to their brutal passions; they were formed by the constraints of an education and culture that taught them to control their primitive instincts; ibid., p. 193.
39. Abdullah Thabit, “Arab Views of Northern Europeans in Medieval History and Geography,” citing Shams al Din al-Ansari, Kitab Nukhbat al-Dahr fi ‘Ajaib al-Barr wa al-Bahr, in Blanks, Images, pp. 74–8.
40. A modern view is: “As regards the people of the Book [i.e., the Jews and the Christians] who do not accept the Prophethood of Prophet Muhammad bin Abdullah (Peace be upon him and his progeny), they are commonly considered najis, but it is not improbable that they are Pak. However, it is better to avoid them.” See section on kaffir, www.al-islam.org/laws/najisthings.html.
41. “Islamic tradition has long identified the baser human tendencies, referred to collectively as ‘nafs,’ with wild beasts such as the dragon or wolf”; see Renard, Islam, pp. 213–14.
42. For a remarkable and wide-ranging analysis of the “meaning” of the pig, see Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast. Despite its title, much of its content has a resonance for the reaction in Muslim societies to the pig. However a “sea pig” is not najis. See clarification of najis, www.al-islam.org/laws/najisthings.html.
43. Cited in Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, pp. 138–9.
44. Ibid., pp. 142–3.
45. Cited ibid., p. 140.
46. See Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 32–6.
47. Ibid., p. 35, note 37, citing Alonso de Cartagena, Defensorium unitatis Christianae.
48. Ibid., p. 26.
49. Pope Nicholas V condemned the Toledo decree as against the laws of God. I owe the recension of Christian attitudes to the Jews to Professor Robert Michael.
50. The range of occupations open to Jews was restricted.
51. Cited in Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 116–17. He found various manuscript copies of similar letters from the Jews of Spain to those of Babylon. The original texts were attributed by some authorities to Juan Martinez Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo.
52. This episode is described in Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 232–3.
53. Cited ibid., pp. 258–9.
54. See Hillgarth, Spanish Kingdoms, vol. 2, pp. 363–4.
55. “Judaizers” was a term first used in the early church for a group that sought to hold Christianity to the Mosaic law and Jewish traditions. In the hands of the Spanish Inquisition, from the fifteenth century, it became a device to interrogate and control New Christians of Jewish origin. Benzion Netanyahu, in The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth-Century Spain (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001, 2nd ed.), has assembled a mass of evidence and argues fervently that “Judaizers” were largely a chimera, constructed to control the mass of converts and prevent them from taking their place in Christian society. The Inquisition presented the vision of a “Judaizing” conspiracy, but it is much more likely that many converts knew little of Christian doctrine and still lived within a culture that carried a strong resonance of their origins. On this view, see David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 174 (February 2002), pp. 3–41.
56. See the works of Dechado Iñigo de Mendoza, Madrid: Nueva Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 1902–28, 19:72.
57. See Edwards, Spain, pp. 222–3.
58. Cited in D. Nicolle, Granada 1492: The Reconquest of Spain, London: Osprey Publishing, 1998, p. 16.
59. Washington Irving, Tales of the Alhambra, Granada: Miguel Sánchez Editor, 1976, p. 19.
60. Ibid.
61. Edwards, Spain, p. 169.
62. Cited by Prescott, History, p. 191.
63. This was a Sufi image. For Shi’ites, each seed represented the tears shed for the murder of Hussein at Karbala. See Malek Chebel, Dictionnaire des symboles Musulmans: Rites, mystique et civilisation, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995, pp. 186–7.
64. See Ladero Quesada, Granada, pp. 171–4.
65. D. Nicolle, Granada 1492: The Reconquest of Spain, London: Osprey Publishing, 1998, p. 47.
66. But Ferdinand and Isabella were fortunate when Mohammed XII, known to the Spaniards as Boabdil, who was the son of Granada’s emir, was captured in a skirmish. They signed an agreement with him and thereafter fostered his growing sense of rivalry with his father.
67. It eventually succumbed in 1486 when an incendiary projectile blew up the arsenal.
68. Prescott, History, p. 258.
69. Ibid., p. 264.
70. “Nubdhat al-asyr,” cited by Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 299–300.
71. Prescott, History, p. 269.
72. Ibid., p. 282.
73. Ibid., p. 292.
74. Ibid.
75. Cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, p. 321.
76. See Dupront, Mythe, vol. 2, p. 791.
77. Cited in Harvey, Islamic Spain, p. 290.
CHAPTER 5: ETERNAL SPAIN
1. Washington Irving, A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, London: John Murray, 1829, vol. 1, pp. 648–50.
2. In El Escorial, the royal figures at prayer face the altar.
3. See John Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition, Stroud: Tempus, 1999, p. 88.
4. The account is by the Genoese Senarega, cited in Prescott, History, p. 322.
5. See Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, pp. 131–8.
6. This putative child of La Guardia was canonized in 1807.
7. See Yerushalmi, Assimilation, p. 10.
8. See Sicroff, Controverses, pp. 26–7. See also Antonio Domínguez Ortiz, La clase social de los conversos en Castilla en la edad moderna, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1955, p. 13. For the complex vocabulary linking pigs and Jews, see Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast.
9. See Harvey, Islamic Spain, pp. 314–21. The easiest source of the full text of the capitulation is in García Arenal, Los Moriscos, pp. 19–28.
10. Caro Baroja, Los Moriscos, p. 9.
11. Ibid., p. 12.
12. Caro Baroja indicates that most of the Muslim inhabitants appeared content with these arrangements.
13. See Miguel Angel Ladero Quesada, “Spain 1492: Social Values and Structures,” in Schwartz, Implicit Understandings, pp. 101–2.
14. Columbus’s Journal, cited in Liss, Isabel, p. 291.
15. “The calamitous century” was how Barbara Tuchman described it in her popular book A Distant Mirror (1978).
16. See Philip Ziegler, The Black Death, London: Folio Society, 1997, p. 245. The comparison he refers to was made by J. W. Thompson in “The Aftermath of the Black Death and the Aftermath of the Great War,” American Journal of Sociology 26 (1920–21), p. 565.
17. Anwar Chejne observes that the term Morisco was less used than the traditional Moro, Saraceno, Agareno, etc. The term Morisco was also used earlier than 1502, as for example in the fourteenth-century Libro del buen amor. See Chejne, Islam and the West, p. 176.
18. See Arturo Farinelli, Marrano (storia de un vituperio), Geneva: L. S. Olschki, 1925.
19. Pérez de Chinchon, Antialcorán (Valencia, 1532), cited in Cardaillac, Moriscos, p. 355.
20. “Almost nothing is known about the history of Granada from 1492 to 1499, but this period has survived in the ‘folk memory’ as a golden age of peace and prosperity. Disputes over the interpretation of the terms of the capitulation were settled by Zafra to the satisfaction of both Muslims and Christians; Talavera made every effort to convert the Muslims through education and example, established a seminary to train priests in Arabic and in the missionary traditions of the church, and accommodated the new converts’ Muslim dress, customs, and language. This period of peace was possible because both sides were willing to live in mutual toleration of one another, an attitude rooted in tradition and in the personalities of [the count of] Tendilla [the military commander] and Talavera”; Helen Nadar, The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance 1350–1550, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1979, pp. 157–8.
21. Alonso de Santa Cruz, Crónica de los reyes Católicos, ed. Juan de Mata Carriazo, Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos de Sevilla, 1951, vol. 2, pp. 191–2.
22. See Lea, Moriscos, pp. 27–8.
23. He came from a Jewish converso family.
24. Luis del Mármol Carvajal, Historia del rebelión y castigo de los Moriscos del reyno de Granada (1600), Madrid: Sancha, 1797.
25. Ladero Quesada, Mudéjares, p. 77.
26. Cited in Liss, Isabel, p. 331.
27. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 461.
28. His brother served under Tendilla in the Alpujarras and went on to become one of the greatest soldiers of the age: Gonzalez de Córdoba, el gran capitán.
29. Ladero Quesada, Mudéjares, p. 81.
30. Liss, Isabel, p. 332.
31. Decree of May 12, 1511 (Seville), of Ferdinand the Catholic, authorizing new converts to use knives with a rounded point (cuchillos de punta redonda), Colección de documentos in-éditos para la historia de España, 113 vols., Madrid, 1842–95, vol. III, p. 568. The issue of bearing arms, whether for hunting or for other purposes, was a key area of contention between the Moriscos and the authorities. See Documents 1–6, 9, 11, and 13–17.
32. See Mercedes García-Arenal, “Moriscos and Indians; A Comparative Approach,” in van Gelder and de Moor, “The Middle East and Europe,” pp. 39–55.
33. Casas, Apologética, p. 1037, cited in Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1992, p. 212. See also Document 20.
34. See Casas, Apologética.
35. Ibid., p. 1039.
36. See Richard Konetzke, Colección de documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamerica 1493–1810, Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1953, vol. 1, pp. 32–3.
37. There are well-attested cases of ceremonial consumption of human flesh, especially in early European accounts of the New World. They became an extremely popular form of literature, like Hans Staden’s True History of His Captivity (1557). But at roughly the same time, the nature of the body and blood of Christ, which formed the essence of the ritual of the Holy Eucharist, became hotly contested between Protestants and Catholics. It was established at the Council of Trent that for Catholics “the bread and wine are transformed by the ordained priest into the flesh and blood of Christ so that only the appearance of bread and wine remains.” The nature of this transformation was theologically complex, but it was clear that this was a “real” and not merely a symbolic transmutation. This has resulted in the notion that Christians also practice a form of cannibalism.
38. Tomás de Vio Cayetano, Secunda secundae partis summae totius theologiae d. Thomae Aquinatis, Thomas a Vio Cajetani comentariis illustrata (1517), part 2, 2.66.8; cited by Luis N. Rivera, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas, Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1992, p. 214.
39. See Bartolomé de las Casas, Del único modo de atraer a todos los pueblos a la verdadera religión, 2nd ed., trans. Atenógenes Santamaría, Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1975, p. 465.
40. Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 16–17.
41. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
42. Genesis 16:11–12.
CHAPTER 6: “VILE WEEDS”: MALAS HIERBAS
1. See Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998, pp. 80–81.
2. See L. P. Harvey, “Los Moriscos y los cinco pilares de Islam,” in Temimi, Prácticas, pp. 93–7.
3. See John Lynch, Spain 1560–1598: From Nation State to World Empire, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, p. 313.
4. See Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 2, pp. 376–82.
5. Nigel Griffin makes the point that there was a constant shortage of competent missionaries, and many were being absorbed by the missions in America. See Nigel Griffin, “ ‘Un muro invisible’: Moriscos and Cristianos Viejos in Granada,” in Hodcraft, Mediaeval, pp. 133–66. He also observed that the records of the Granada chancellery and the archives of the Alhambra are “still incompletely utilized by historians.” This was certainly true when I was working there almost twenty years earlier. Before my time in Granada only K. Garrad (among Western scholars) had used the material in a systematic way. And Garrad’s splendid thesis has never been published.
6. Cited in Kritzeck, Peter, p. 161.
7. Ordered on October 12, 1501. The limited effect of his ordinance may be gauged from a decree of Ferdinand on June 20, 1511, issuing a pardon to Moriscos who had books in Arabic and ordering them to hand them over to the authorities. They were to examine them, to pass on the books of philosophy, medicine, and history, and to burn the rest; Colección de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, 113 vols., Madrid, 1842–95, vol. XXXIX, p. 447.
8. See Document 21. There was a further decree in 1523 against attempts by Moriscos to bypass this provision. Then there was a further letter issued in 1530 on the enforcement of the regulations.
9. See Document 22.
10. See for example a copy of a 1530 letter from the empress in the archive of the cathedral of Granada that the Moriscos should alter their form of dress; Document 24.
11. See Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Historia, pp. 25–33.
12. Decree of December 7, 1526, cited in Gallego y Burin and Gámir Sandoval, Moriscos, pp. 206–13.
13. See Document 23. See also Antonio Garrido Aranda, “Papel de la iglesia de Granada en la asimilación de la sociedad Morisca,” Anuario de Historia Moderna y Contemporanea 2–3 (1975–76), pp. 69–103.
14. Ribera’s second “Memorial,” translated and cited in Hillgarth, Mirror, pp. 206–7.
15. See Cabenalas Rodriguez, El Morisco Granadino.
16. Cardaillac, Moriscos, pp. 36–43.
17. On this process, called taqiyah or dissimulation, and the mufti of Oran’s advice, see Chejne, Islam, pp. 24–5.
18. See Fabre-Vassas, Singular Beast, pp. 112–19.
19. The age at which boys were circumcised varied: “Jurists are not unanimous regarding the age at which circumcision should be carried out … Al-Mawardi suggests that circumcision be done at 7 years of age at the latest, but preferably at 7 days or at 40 days, except in case of inconvenience.” See Sami A. Aldeeb Abu-Sahlieh, “To Mutilate in the Name of Jehovah or Allah: Legitimization of Male and Female Circumcision”; http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/600/610/617/Circoncision_anglaise.html#RTFToC18.
20. See Bernard Vincent, “The Moriscos and Circumcision,” in Cruz and Perry, Culture, pp. 78–92.
21. Juan Aranda Doncel, “Las prácticas Musulmanas de los Moriscos Andaluces a traves de las relaciones de causas del tribunal de la Inquisición de Córdoba,” in Temimi, Prácticas, pp. 11–31.
22. See B. Vincent, “Les bandits morisques en Andalousie au XVIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 1974, pp. 389–400, and Reglá, Estudios, p. 44. The military headquarters in the Alhambra at Granada received reports of monfies and Moriscos attacking fishermen on the beach at Velez Malaga in 1564 (see Document 10); of Christians being taken prisoner by monfies in 1566 (see Document 12); and of murders Moriscos are supposed to have committed in La Cuesta de Cebeda (see Document 7).
23. Cited in Chejne, Islam.
24. The full text is in Lea, Moriscos, pp. 434–7.
25. For these symbolic meanings, see Malek Chebel, Dictionnaire des symboles Musulmans: Rites, mystique et civilisation, Paris: Albin Michel, 1995.
26. All these appear in E. Saavedra, “Discurso,” Memorial de la Real Academia de la Historia 6 (1889), p. 159.
27. See Document 14.
28. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 263.
29. Ibid., citing Relazioni Venete, serie 1, tom VI, p. 408.
30. The Moriscos in the capital itself had already been expelled in June 1569.
31. Lapeyre, Géographie, p. 125.
32. Domínguez Ortiz and Vincent, Historia, p. 58.
33. Ibid., p. 62.
34. He gave some thought to the problem of limpieza and concluded it was not an obstacle.
35. See Boronat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 1, p. 634. The bishop proposed that these people without a land should be taken to a land without people: “Este gente se puede llevar a las costas … de Terranova, que son amplissimas y sin ninguna población.” That would finish them off and, to make sure (specialmente), there would be “capando [gelding] los masculos grandes y pequeños y las mugeres [the adult males and boys and the women].” This could be done in sequence, taking those from Valencia to one place, those from Aragon to another, those from Castile to another. These solutions have remarkably close echoes to book IV of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the Houyhnhnms debate the respective merits of exterminating or castrating the Yahoos. See Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, London: Folio Society, 1965, pp. 215 and 240.
36. “Informe de Don Alonso Gutiérrez acerca la cuestión Morisca, Sevilla 5 Sept. 1588,” cited in Boronat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 1. p. 346.
37. Ibid., p. 627.
38. AHN Inq. Leg. 2603 I. Cited in Cardaillac, Moriscos, p. 62.
39. See ibid., p. 60.
40. See Maria Soledad Carrasco, El Moro de Granada en la literatura del siglo XV al XX, Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1956. The bulk of this was first published in English as “The Moor of Granada in Spanish Literature of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, NY, 1954.
41. See Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Dialogue of the Dogs in Exemplary Novels, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1992.
42. For a clear parallel, see Caro Baroja, Formas, p. 459.
43. Pedro Azanar Cardona, Expulsión justificada de los Moriscos Españoles y suma de las excelencias Cristianas de nuestro rey D. Felipe el Católico tercero deste nombre (Huesca, 1612), translated in Chejne, Islam and the West, pp. 177–8.
44. Boranat y Barrachina, Moriscos, vol. 2, p. 172.
45. Ibid., p. 189.
46. Ibid., pp. 192–3; expulsion decree, clauses 9–12.
47. See Lea, Moriscos, p. 391. Others suggest that these were not Moriscos but Muslim slaves or servants.
48. Sanchez-Albornóz, Spain, vol. 2, p. 1245.
49. “Popular imagination was so horrorstruck at these terrible events [the Ottoman successes in the Mediterranean and Balkans] that thereafter the word ‘Turk’ was substituted [in traditional village plays] for the old terms used to designate evil-doers and bandits who had formerly been termed the ‘Saracens’ or ‘Moors.’ ” See Georges Hérelle, Les pastorales à sujets tragiques considerées littérairement, Paris: Librairie Champion, 1926, pp. 108–9.
50. Marlène Albert-Llorca, “Le Maure dans les fêtes Valenciennes de Moros y Christianos,” in Musée de la Corse, Moresca, p. 341.
51. Harold Lopez Mendez, España desconocida: La Alpujarra, rincón misterioso, Madrid: n.p., 1967, p. 90.
52. I am very grateful to David Nirenberg for introducing this whole area to me. In a private communication, he contrasted the performances in the Spanish Holy Week celebrations with Moros y Cristianos. In Spain, certainly, Moros y Cristianos was a performance of the established and public order, reenacting ancient triumphs, and legitimating the nature of the victory. However, in my view, once outside the controlling dialogue in Spain, and where the traditional subject—or alien Other—had been removed, they could acquire a different, and subversive, potency.
53. See Harris, Aztecs, passim.
54. Calling for “thick description”? See Geertz, Interpretation, pp. 6–30.
Part Three
CHAPTER 7: TO THE HOLY LAND
1. This is different from the “national” history common to many societies. In Spain, two conflicting interpretations competed for the same native land. See Glick, Islamic, pp. 3–15, and Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000. There is also a good chapter by Béatrice Caseau, “Sacred Landscapes,” in Glenn Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Grabar (eds.), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 21–59.
2. See Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 22.
3. Many of the cities of the Levant and Anatolia had sites associated with the heroic early days of Christianity and were accordingly treated with reverence.
4. Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, cited in Dupront, Mythe, vol. 3, p. 1361.
5. The common Arabic term for the city, Al-Quds, refers to its sanctity. Later the sacred terrain was extended to the area immediately around the city to become the Holy Land, al-ard al-muqaddasa. After Saladin’s reconquest this latter term was used to include the whole “Holy Land,” roughly as Christians conceived it. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 301–2.
6. See Gil, History, pp. 622–6.
7. Jerome, Epistle 46:9: “Time forbids me to survey the period which has passed since the Lord’s ascension, or to recount the bishops, the martyrs, the divines, who have come to Jerusalem from a feeling that their devotion and knowledge would be incomplete and their virtue without the finishing touch, unless they adored Christ in the very spot where the gospel first flashed from the gibbet.”
8. Jerome, Epistle 108, which is the longest of his letters and where he describes Paula’s journey through the Holy Land.
9. Cited in Gil, History, pp. 285–7.
10. It has been estimated that it cost a year’s income or more to undertake a pilgrimage. See J. Sumption, Pilgrimage, London: Faber, 1975, pp. 169, 205–6.
11. R. Röhricht, Die Deutschen im Heiligen Lande: Chronologisches Verzeichnis derjenigen Deutschen, welche als Jerusalempilger und Kreuzfahrer sicher nachzuweisen oder wahrscheinlich anzusehen sind c. 650–1291, Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1968 (new edition of 1894 edition), cited in Gil, History, p. 483.
12. This is Sir John Keegan’s image, in our joint book Zones of Conflict, and I am grateful to him for it.
13. The Fatimid rulers of Cairo were Shia Muslims, but Al-Azhar always attracted students and teachers from the entire Muslim world.
14. There is a huge literature on the various patterns of belief in Islam, and I do not propose to define the differences here. I would suggest that they represented different tendencies in belief, political and social practice, within the overall framework of Islam that altered over time, sometimes leading to further divisions and subdivisions. Modern historians of Islam also emphasize the traditions of Sufi practitioners, the various dervish traditions, and “folk Islam,” which bonded local cults and practices into the faith. In addition, there were later ascetic traditions such as the Wahabis in eighteenth-century Arabia. For a clear outline see Lapidus, History.
15. Although sectarian issues played some part, Sunni rulers fought Sunni rulers with the same verve that they confronted the Shia ones.
16. This is from the fifteenth-century Kitat by Al-Maqrizi, cited in Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, pp. 22–5.
17. Gil, History, pp. 379–80. He notes that Al-Hakim may have regarded himself as the mahdi, “redeemer,” who had come to save and rescue Islam. Others simply considered him insane.
18. The history of this document is checkered. Carl Erdmann considered that it was contemporary with the destruction wrought by Al-Hakim. Later scholars, like Gieysztor, suggested that it was confected by the monks of Moissac at the time that Urban II was promoting the First Crusade. However, more recently Schaller has reinterpreted the whole issue and considers it authentic. Regardless of its date, it indicates the horror with which the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre was greeted. See Erdmann, Origin, pp. 113–17; A. Gieysztor, “The Genesis of the Crusades: The Encyclical of Sergius IV (1009–1012),” Medievalia et Humanistica 5 (1948), pp. 3–23, and 6 (1950), pp. 3–34; H. M. Schaller, “Zur Kreuzzugsenzyklika Papst Sergius IV,” in H. Mordek (ed.), Papsttum, Kirche und Recht im Mittelalter: Festschrift für Horst Fuhrmann zum 65 Geburtstag, Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991, pp. 135–53.
19. Marshall W. Baldwin, A History of the Crusades: The First Hundred Years, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958, pp. 76–7.
20. See Gil, History, p. 487.
21. “The centrality of the bare scriptural word in liturgy, catechism and sermon receded before the elaboration of the church liturgical tradition. Thus the Word was available to the rank and file mainly through the evolved forms of the liturgy, biblical storytelling, or biblically inspired art, and much less, if at all, through substantial reading, recitation and study of the holy words themselves.” See Graham, Beyond, p. 120.
22. The only parable that lacks a sense of precise topography is where Jesus was tempted by the devil.
23. I am grateful to the Reverend David Batson for explaining the issue of relics to me.
24. See Cohn, Pursuit, pp. 64–5.
25. This is taken from the account of Urban’s Clermont speech by Robert the Monk from a work called the Historia Hierosolymitana. He was present at Clermont, but the text was written much later. I have used the online version, www.norton.com/nael/nto/middle/crusade/clermontfrm.htm.
26. Robert the Monk claimed to have been present on the day although he composed his version about a quarter of a century after Clermont, and with the Gesta Francorum (The Deeds of the Franks, written about 1100, an account of the First Crusade) before him. But the details unconsciously reveal Urban’s rhetorical skill and are thus convincing. See August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921, pp. 33–6.
27. “This, made of any kind of cloth, he ordered to be sewn upon the shirts, cloaks, and byrra of those who were about to go.” See ibid., pp. 36–40.
28. According to Robert the Monk, when Urban heard his call to arms greeted with cries of “God wills it, it is the will of God,” he “gave thanks to God and commanding silence with his hand, said, ‘Unless God had been present in your spirits, all of you would not have uttered the same cry; since although the cry issued from many mouths, yet the origin of the cry is as one. Therefore I say to you that God, who implanted it in your breast, has drawn it forth from you. Let that then be your war cry in combat because it is given to you by God. When an armed attack is made upon the enemy, this one cry be raised by all the soldiers of God: “It is the will of God! It is the will of God!” ’ ”
29. Curiously, the anthropologist Roy Wagner, who coined the phrase “symbols that stand for themselves,” bypassed the cross when searching for the core symbol of the West. In fact it meets his needs much better than the Eucharist, which he selected. See Wagner, Symbols.
30. Cited by Dana C. Munro, Urban and the Crusaders: Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, vol. 1:2, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1895, p. 20.
31. They had conjured up the image of an infidel enemy who had to be defeated and destroyed whatever the cost. The first to suffer from this effusion of ferocious enmity were the Jews of the Rhineland towns. The pilgrims’ prime motives were theft and pillage, but underlying the savagery of their attack, which emerges in all the sources, Latin and Hebrew, was a hatred for a people who, like the infidels occupying Jerusalem, had denied Christ. More than a thousand Jews, men, women, and children, were killed in Mainz and many more in cities as far away as Prague which opened their gates to the pilgrims. When they passed on into Hungary on the road to the East, the pilgrims treated the local inhabitants as they had the Jews. In one village they impaled a young Hungarian boy who could not tell them where they could find food. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, p. 116.
32. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 106–7.
33. There were many foreigners in Byzantine service, most notably the Varangian Guard, composed first of Norsemen, and later of Normans. After 1066, many Anglo-Saxons left England and made a new life in the East.
34. Nor did the church approve of the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland by the popular Crusade. See Jacob R. Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book 315–1791, New York: Harper & Row, 1965, pp. 115–20.
35. Lyons, “Crusading Stratum,” pp. 147–61.
36. An Arab-Syrian Gentleman and Warrior in the Period of the Crusades: Memoirs of Us-amah ibn Munqidh, trans. Philip K. Hitti, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, pp. 120–21.
37. Gesta Francorum, cited in France, Victory, p. 277.
38. The Church of St. Peter was being reconsecrated after its use as a mosque. Some doubted the authenticity of the relic but kept silent, because this manifest token of divine favor suddenly restored the spirits of the Crusaders.
39. Even the fresh horses that had been gathered along the way had mostly expired and been eaten.
40. Kerbogha’s army comprised many different detachments, including infantry spearmen and archers.
41. H. A. R. Gibb, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, Extracted and Translated from the Chronicle of Ibn Al-Qalanisi, London: Luzac and Co., 1932, p. 47.
42. Harold S. Fink, Fulcher of Chartres: A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem 1095–1127, Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1969, pp. 112–13.
43. Ibid., p. 106.
44. Cited in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 71.
45. For the images of Jerusalem, see Dupront, Mythe, vol. III, pp. 1361–4.
46. There are suggestions that a Crusader embassy was negotiating in Cairo for a Christian protectorate over the city, such as the Byzantines had previously exercised, and as Emperor Frederick II was to conclude in 1229 for a period of ten years.
47. See Runciman, History, vol. 1, pp. 226–7.
48. The often quoted statement that the Crusaders walked “up to their knees in blood” was a metaphor. The similarity between so many of the descriptions of killing and atrocity, notably in the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204 and then by the Ottomans in 1453, suggests that many of these statements are stylistic and not intended to be taken literally. See August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921, pp. 257–62.
49. Gesta Francorum, cited by Elizabeth Hallam (ed.), Chronicles of the Crusades: Eyewitness Accounts of the Wars Between Christianity and Islam, Godalming: Bramley Books, 1996, p. 93.
50. See France, Victory, p. 356.
51. See Runciman, History, vol. 2, pp. 237–64.
52. For a good introduction to this topic, see Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998. By the late eighteenth century, the future president of the young United States Thomas Jefferson had turned the word into a figure of speech, calling for a “crusade against ignorance.”
53. “A holy war fought against those perceived to be external or internal foes of Christendom for the recovery of Christian property or in defence of the Church or Christian people”; see Riley-Smith, Short History, pp. xxviii–xxix. There were attempts to limit this plenary power, and Marsilio of Padua was only the most notable figure who attacked papal misuse of this right to initiate a Crusade.
54. Meeting of the bishops at Narbonne, 1054, cited in Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962, p. 413.
55. It was possible for a nation to be Islamic in belief but not under true and authorized Islamic rule. Thus rebels or Islamic enemies are often characterized as “apostates” (ridda) and falling outside the protection of the faith. On this topic see the references cited by Fred M. Donner in his article “The Sources of Islamic Conceptions of War” in Johnson and Kelsay (eds.), Just War, pp. 31–69. In their survey article “The Idea of the Jihad Before the Crusades,” Roy Mottahedeh and Ridwan al-Sayyid present convincing evidence that there was a multiplicity of interpretations for the lesser jihad. See Angeliki E. Laiou and Roy Parviz Mottahedeh (eds.), The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslim World, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001.
56. The concept of war to enforce this peace was criticized by Moulavi Cheragi Ali in A Critical Exposition of the Popular Jihad, Karachi: Karimsons, reprint of 1885 edition, n.d., pp. 157–9: “It is only a theory of our Common Law, in its military and political chapters, which allow waging unprovoked war with non-Muslims … The casuistical sophistry of the canonical legists in deducing these war theories from the Koran is altogether futile … Neither of these verses had anything to do with waging unprovoked war and exacting tributes during Mohammad’s time nor could they be made a law for future military conquest.”
57. That is, al-jihad al-akbar.
58. That is, al-jihad al-asghar.
59. See Peters, Islam, pp. 4–5. He goes on to make the more contemporary point: “Nowadays that image has been replaced by that of the Arab ‘terrorist’ in battledress, armed with a Kalashnikov gun and prepared to murder in cold blood Jewish and Christian women and children.” The popular film The Siege (1998), which depicts the United States traumatized by Arab terrorism in New York, is a powerful example of this tendency; the mass murders at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, come into the same category as the killings in Jerusalem in 1099 in the history of atrocity.
60. See Johnson, Holy War.
61. The division between the Sunni and Shia branches of Islam in the seventh century had already created major divergences within Islam. Thus Shia scholars never accepted that interpretation was a closed issue.
62. This is Bernard Lewis’s expression. See Lewis, Political Language, p. 129.
63. See Bonner, Aristocratic Violence, pp. 155–6.
64. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 304–8, and Lewis, Discovery, p. 22.
65. The point at which they came to be called saliba, “cross,” is difficult to determine precisely.
66. Gabrieli, Arab Historians, pp. 77–8.
67. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 280.
68. “Tale of Umar b. Numan,” The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, 4 vols., trans. J. C. Mardrus and Powys Mathers, London: Routledge, 1994, vol. 1, p. 442.
69. Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, Kitab al-fath, cited and translated in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 290. I wonder whether the stabling of horses in Al-Aqsa was either the source of the story for the Ottomans stabling horses in the Holy Sepulchre or a memory that provoked them to do it.
70. Ibn Wasil, Muffarij al-kurub, cited and translated in Hillenbrand, Crusades, p. 291.
71. On the building of Muslim Jerusalem and its transformation, see Oleg Grabar, The Shape of the Holy: Early Islamic Jerusalem, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
72. For the near-complete separation of Muslim and Latin Christian societies in Palestine, see Benjamin Z. Kedar, “The Subjected Muslims of the Frankish Levant,” in Powell (ed.), Muslims, pp. 135–74.
73. Postilla super librum Sapientiae, c. 5, lecture 65: “Non enim est possibile docere vitam Christi nisi destruendo et reprobando legem Machometi.” On Holkot, see Kedar, Crusade, pp. 188–9.
74. It had been much copied in the scriptoria, and the early editions appeared in Reutingen, Speyer, Cologne, and Basel; Holkot remained in print well into the seventeenth century.
75. Translated and cited in Throop, Criticism, p. 122.
76. See Kedar, Crusade, p. 189.
77. Dupront, Mythe, vol. 2, p. 976. The more than 2,000 pages of Dupront’s work Le mythe de croisade constitute one of the great works of modern historiography, but Dupront understood (and the book was published after his death) that he was able to explore only part of the vast spider’s web of connections that he uncovered.
CHAPTER 8: CONQUEST AND RECONQUEST
1. See Penny J. Cole, “ ’O God, the heathen have come into your inheritance’ (Ps. 78:1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents 1095–1188,” in M. Shatzmiller (ed.), Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993, pp. 84–111.
2. Cited in Prawer, World, p. 91.
3. Richard G. Salomon, “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Opicinus de Canistris: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XVI (1953), 1, pp. 45–57. The full treatment of the Opicinus MSS and his life appeared in Richard G. Salomon, Opicinus de Canistris: Weltbild und Bekenntnisse eines Avignonesischen Klerikers des 14. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., London: Warburg Institute, 1936. The second volume consists of a set of images of the various elements within the MSS. Opicinus de Canistris was obsessed with impurity, to the degree that Richard Salomon classed him a sexual psychopath. But he also observed, “Of course, not everything in the work of a psychopath is pathological.” The supremely diabolical quality of the carnal connection between Muslim Africa and Christian Europe offended doubly against the law of God. There was no better (or more readily identifiable) means of depicting the corruption of the world than by suggesting a sexual union between a Christian and an infidel. In Opicinus’s day, the loss of Jerusalem to the Muslim enemy was still an open wound. He struggled vainly to present the complexity of the political and theological world that confronted him; inevitably, his sheets remained a work in progress, unfinished and experimental. They were littered with images of God, Jesus Christ, doves with vast embracing wings, the Virgin Mary, strange and mythical beasts; yet in his own mind all were worked back into the themes embodied in his texts and captions.
4. See Jörg-Geerd Arentzen, Imago mundi cartographica: Studien zur Bildlichkeit Mittelalterlicher Welt- und Ökumenkarten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Zusammenwirkens von Text und Bild, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984, p. 315. Chapter 4, “Die Karte als Sinnbild in den Zeichungen des Opicinus de Canistris,” pp. 275–316, is the most thorough recent treatment of Opicinus. Commisceo has the sense of mixing or mingling, in this case perhaps relating to seminal and vaginal emissions.
5. Richard G. Salomon, “A Newly Discovered Manuscript of Opicinus de Canistris: A Preliminary Report,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XVI (1953), 1, p. 53.
6. Ibid., p. 52.
7. His sexual obsession has caused one scholar to observe that “for Opicinus, earth cartography is tantamount to exposing the fornicating world … a cartographer’s attempt to represent the world as a netherland that embodies—incorporates—corruption and sexual sin.” See Gandelman, Reading Pictures, pp. 84–5. Richard Salomon also noted “his tendency towards prurience” and cited Opicinus’s remark in his text: “While I was working on this, a simple priest from Lombardy came to see me, and I had to cover the abdomen of the woman with a piece of paper in order not to shock him.”
8. H. Hagenmayer, Die Kreuzzugsbriefe aus den Jahren 1088–1100: Eine Quellensammlung zur Geschichte des ersten Kreuzzuges, Innsbruck: Wagner, 1901, p. 147. Cited and translated in Riley Smith, First Crusade, p. 91.
9. Cited and translated in Peters (ed.), Christian Society, p. 141.
10. Cited in Kedar, Crusade, pp. 161–2.
11. See Hillenbrand, Crusades, pp. 141–61, for the growing importance of Jerusalem within Islam.
12. Cited and translated ibid., p. 112.
13. William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, trans. James Brundage in The Crusades: A Documentary History, Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1962, pp. 79–82.
14. Runciman, History, vol. 2, p. 234.
15. 2 Thessalonians 2:4.
16. For the heroic self-image, see Renard, Islam, and Bridget Connelly, Arab Folk Tale and Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 4–6. The Sirat al-Zahir Baybars chronicles the wars of the Mamluk Sultan Baybars against the Mongols, Persians, and Christian Crusaders. The Dhat al-Himma recounts deeds of the Arabs against the Byzantines and the Franks. “However, while the fourteenth-century polemicist Philippe de Mézières praised the chivalry of the Turks it was a means only to condemn the ‘Saracens’ who occupied Jerusalem and to chastise the failures of Christians who behaved worse than the Turks.” See Petkov, “Rotten Apple.”
17. Malcolm C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic, 3 vols., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, vol. 3, p. 112.
18. Cited in J. A. C. Brown, Techniques of Persuasion: From Propaganda to Brainwashing, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963, p. 19.
19. Pavlov’s experiments 1901–1903 demonstrated that specific behavior could be “conditioned.” His research investigated how dogs digested their food and he wanted to see if external stimuli could make them salivate. At the same time as he fed them he rang a bell. After a while, the dogs—which had previously responded only when they saw and ate their food—would begin to salivate when the bell rang, even if no food were present. When he published his results he called this response a “conditioned reflex.” This kind of behavior had to be learned, and Pavlov described this learning process (where the dog’s nervous system linked the sound of the bell with food) as conditioning. But, just as significantly, he also discovered that this conditioned reflex weakened if the bell rang repeatedly and there was no food. If that happened, the dog eventually stopped salivating at the sound of the bell. If the stimulus was not effectively “reinforced,” the conditioned reflex decayed and failed. See Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Essential Works of Pavlov, ed. Michael Kaplan, New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
20. Dupront, Mythe, vol. 1, p. 19.
21. Emmanuel Sivan demonstrates convincingly that in the Muslim world malediction based on “Crusade” vocabulary was a product of secular modernism. The words “Crusade/Crusaders” then mobilized and revived the earlier antagonism to the image of the cross. See Emanuel [sic] Sivan, “Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades,” Asian and African Studies: Journal of the Israel Oriental Society 8 (1972), pp. 109–49. Similarly, jehad or jihad was first recorded as being used in English in 1869, although knowledge of the Muslim Holy War had existed since the later Middle Ages. Thus the concept was used avant la lettre.
22. See Sivan, Islam, p. 7.
23. For the crusading period, see Michael A. Köhler, Allianzen und Verträge zwischen fränkischen und islamischen Herrschen in Vorderen Orient: Eine Studie über das zwischenstaatliche Zusammenleben vom 12. bis 13. Jahrhundert, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991.
24. See Smail, Crusading Warfare, p. 215: “Every strong place had, however, the same fundamental importance. Wherever it stood, it was the embodiment of force, and therefore the ultimate sanction of the Latin settlement.” Saladin acquired a curious position as the “noble Arab” in Western eyes. Gladstone in his attacks on the Turks in 1876 talked of the “noble Saladins,” meaning the Arabs. But Sultan Baybars did not attract anything of the same favorable Western response as Saladin.
25. See Adrian J. Boas, Crusader Archaeology: The Material Culture of the Latin East, London: Routledge, 1999, pp. 91–120.
26. Cited by Colin Imber, “The Ottoman Dynastic Myth,” Turcica 19 (1987), pp. 7–27.
27. See Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971, p. 35.
28. Cited by Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Ottoman Empire, New York: Morrow, 1977, pp. 46–7.
29. Ransoms were demanded for the most eminent and profitable captives.
30. This was remarkable, because in 1402 the Ottomans were beaten by the Mongol ruler Timur in Anatolia, and Bayezid was taken prisoner. A long period of Ottoman political turmoil ensued, when a Crusade could have retaken the Ottoman possessions in Europe. However, after Nicopolis there was little enthusiasm for a new enterprise.
31. Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 54.
32. His ally the Albanian Skenderbeg arrived just too late to turn the tide of battle in Hunyadi’s favor.
33. Vlad Tepes believed in a puritan moral order, and in addition to many of his political rivals and the wealthy classes of Wallachia, what he deemed “unchaste” women suffered the most terrible deaths under his rule.
34. See Mitchell B. Merbeck, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacles of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, London: Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 126–57.
35. Doukas [sic], Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks: An Annotated Translation of “Historia Turco-Byzantina,” trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1975, pp. 231–5.
36. Letter of Bessarion, July 13, 1453, to Doge Francesco Foscari.
37. See D. C. Munro, Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, series 1, vol. 3:1, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1912, pp. 15–16.
38. Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks: An Annotated Translation of “Historia Turco-Byzantina,” trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1975, pp. 231–5.
39. Babinger is dubious about the motives for killing Notaras. He points out that Kritoboulos (a fifteenth-century historian and governor of Imbros) discounted Mehmed’s sodomitical lust and replaced it with a political rationale. See Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Life, ed. William C. Hickman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 96–7.
40. Some, like ardent enthusiast for the war against the infidel Philippe de Mézières, came to blame the sinful schismatics, the Orthodox, for the triumph of Islam. See Petkov, “The Rotten Apple.”
41. Cited in Robert A. Kann, A Study of Austrian Intellectual History from the Late Baroque to Romanticism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1960, pp. 74–5.
42. On some of its nineteenth-century forms see Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
43. Over 170 million copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern were sold over a period of 120 years.
44. These were processions that accompanied the traditional Whit Monday festivals in Yorkshire.
45. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s “crusade against ignorance” of 1786 eventually becomes the presidential “Crusade in the Classroom” in the first year of the third millennium. This was the title of a school test volume in the United States. The description read: “ ‘Crusade in the Classroom’ is a practical nonpartisan guide to the changes and choices you can expect from the Bush administration. In clear, jargon-free language, Dr. Douglas Reeves explains the Bush policies for school reform, predicts how these new programs will change our schools, and helps parents understand their options.” Captest catalogue, 2001, http://www.Captest.com.
46. Midian was, like Ishmael, a son of Abraham, but born to Keturah. However, the Ishmaelites were elided with the Midianites, as in Judges 7:12, where “all the children of the east lay along in the valley as numerous as locusts.” Later “Midianites” became for Christians another term for the desert Arabs, like Agarenes.
47. Thomas Moore’s hymn of 1816—
Come, ask the infidel what boon he brings us,
What charm for aching hearts he can reveal,
Sweet is that heavenly promise Hope sings us—
“Earth has no sorrow that God cannot heal.”
—was given a new concluding verse in 1831:
Here see the bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing
Earth has no sorrow but heaven can remove.
48. There were numerous Protestant and Catholic missions—English, Scottish, French, German, Italian, American, and Austrian—to Palestine but they concentrated on winning over the Orthodox and did not seek to convert Muslims, which could have endangered convert and missionary alike.
49. The “King’s Cross Victory Crusade” has reported with pride that between 1976 and 2001 it has delivered more than one million Bibles to India. The nature of the victory was not specified. See Bibles for India campaign, http://victorynetwork.org/VictoryIndia.html.
50. Al’Akhbar al-saniyya fi’il-hurub al-salibiyya, Cairo, 1899. See Emanuel Sivan, “Modern Arab Historiography of the Crusades,” Asian and African Studies: Journal of the Israel Oriental Society 8 (1972), pp. 124–5.
51. The archbishop of Beirut wrote of the al-Ifranj al-Salibiyyun in the sixth volume of his History of Syria in 1901.
52. Especially in the works of Sayyid al-Qutb.
53. Joseph-François Michaud, Histoire des croisades (4th ed., Paris, 1825, vol. 1, p. 510), cited and translated in Kim Munholland, “Michaud’s History of the Crusades and the French Crusade in Algeria Under Louis Philippe,” in Chu and Weisberg (eds.), Popularization, p. 150.
54. Ibid., p. 154.
55. Ibid., p. 164, citing the Salle de Constantine in “Versailles et son Musée Historique.”
56. The Congregatio de Propaganda Fide was established in Rome by Pope Gregory XV in 1622. It was charged with supporting missionary activity and was at the center of a large system of colleges and other educational institutions.
57. Reissued in the 1920s and twice more in the 1950s.
58. Even today, the high passes are a severe challenge to an ill-prepared automobile.
59. In 1537, the Tyrolese cartographer Johann Putsch produced a map of Europe called “Queen of Europe.” It was subsequently reproduced in the 1588 edition of Sebastian Munster’s famous Cosmographia. In Putsch’s design, the Balkans are on the fringe of Europe, the queen’s “skirt,” but with Greece, “Scythia,” and Muscovy, they are unquestionably “Europe.” “Tartary” to the east is conveniently separated by a river from Europe proper, and Constantinople is depicted as a Western city on the hem of the queen’s garment.
60. John Hale, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, London: HarperCollins, 1993, pp. 5–6. Hale is citing Denys Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1957, p. 109.
Part Four
CHAPTER 9: BALKAN GHOSTS?
1. Jephson, With the Colours, pp. 158–62.
2. In some sources it is the Landstraße.
3. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 32.
4. Ibid., p. 227.
5. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Time of Space and the Space of Time: The Future of Social Science,” Tyneside Geographical Society Lecture, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996, Political Geography XVII, 1 (1998).
6. Ibid.: “They are arguing in terms of episodic geopolitical TimeSpace … the Serbians [asserted that] current population figures and current boundaries are simply irrelevant; Kosovo was part of Serbia morally because of things that happened in the fourteenth century. These are arguments using structural TimeSpace. Kosovo’s location in Serbia was said to be structurally given. There is no way of resolving such a debate intellectually. Neither side can demonstrate that it is right, if by demonstrating it we mean that the arguments are sustained by the weight of the evidence in some scientific puzzle.”
7. Ibid.: “It was assumed (and one has to underline the verb ‘assumed’) that, if they were ‘primitive’ in the present, there could have been no historical evolution, and therefore that their behaviour in the past must have been the same as their behaviour in the present. They were therefore ‘peoples without history.’ For this reason, ethnographies were written in what was called ‘the anthropological present.’ ” The anthropological present has produced one important study on the differential concepts of time, by Johannes Fabian, and a notable spat with another anthropologist, Maurice Bloch. But both Fabian and Bloch operate within the same spectrum, both accepting that time is relative, to varying degrees, depending on the character of an individual culture. See Fabian, Time and the Other, and Maurice Bloch, “The Past and the Present in the Present,” in his Ritual, History and Power, pp. 1–18. His foreword describes his disagreement with Fabian. Both these approaches are extremely important in the kind of myth-history with its own time structures that emerged in the Balkans.
8. See Franjo Tudjman, Horrors of War: Historical Reality and Philosophy, New York: M. Evans and Company, 1996. The original version was entitled Bespuća povisjesne zbiljnosti: Rasprava o povijesti i filozofiji zlosija (Wastelands of Historical Reality: Discussion on History and Philosophy of Aggressive Violence) and was published in May 1989, and the second edition in November 1989, then a third and fourth in April and October 1990. On each occasion, Tudjman changed the emphasis of the book, often using his own neologisms to present his ideas. The English-language text published in 1996 was, in the words of his translator, “substantially revised” to appeal to a U.S. audience. I am very grateful to my colleague Dr. Dejan Jović for talking to me in detail on the issues embodied in this chapter, and letting me see the text of his own book prior to publication.
9. See Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Balkans’ relationship to Europe was essentially detached, sandwiched between West and East, or even between the West and Africa.
10. Harry de Windt, Through Savage Europe, Being a Narrative of a Journey Undertaken as Special Correspondent of the “Westminster Gazette” Throughout the Balkan States and European Russia, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907, pp. 15–16. His book was a considerable success, with the first edition sold out in less than a month.
11. Robert D. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, New York: Vintage, 1994, pp. 33–4.
12. Creagh observed that the “very pretty girl of about nineteen” who came to his room at Neusatz “was not the least abashed at my Highland costume.” See Creagh, Over the Borders, p. 52.
13. Ibid., p. 15.
14. Ibid., p. 38.
15. Ibid., p. 82.
16. Ibid., p. 88.
17. Ibid., pp. 124–5.
18. Ibid., pp. 274–5.
19. Ibid., p. 276. Creagh misunderstood or misread a Montenegrin tradition. It was considered among the mountain warriors dishonorable to die “in bed like a woman.” To the news of a tribesman’s death the proper response was, “Who killed him?” If he had not died honorably at the hands of an enemy, the euphemism was “God, the old executioner.” See Alan Ferguson, “Montenegrin Society 1800–1830,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, p. 209.
20. Sam Vaknin, www.balkanland.com/index.html, December 20, 2001.
21. From the German Balkanhalbeiland, used by the German geographer August Zeune in the first decade of the nineteenth century. See Todorova, Imagining, pp. 25–6.
22. In Imagining the Balkans, Maria Todorova cites Jobus Veratius, who believed that mountains stretched in a chain from Mesembria on the Black Sea to the Pyrenees. See ibid., pp. 26–7.
23. Four-fifths of Italy is taken up by mountains or hills. See Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1986, p. 15.
24. W. G. Blackie, The Comprehensive Atlas and Geography of the World, London: Blackie and Son, 1882.
25. Cited in Todorova, Imagining, p. 22.
26. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 15.
27. The Scottish wilderness where John Buchan set his novel The 39 Steps was not some barren northern glen but the bare and desolate mountains of Galloway, just north of the English border.
28. Armatoli were a form of occasional militia; hajduks were bandits.
29. Cited in Anzulović, Heavenly Serbia, p. 50.
30. For example, Spain’s bloodthirsty “El Cid,” or the murderous Celtic anger of Rob Roy MacGregor’s vengeful wife, as described by Sir Walter Scott in his novel Rob Roy, or the folktales of Sicily and Calabria.
31. Albanians took pride in the roots of both dialects (Gegë and Töske/Arvanitika) in the ancient Illyrian language. From the latter dialect name came the title “Arnauts,” by which they were usually known. It was a Latinate tongue, as was the language of the Vlachs, a people displaced by the advance of the Slavs from the sixth century onward.
32. The majority of Orthodox believers used the Cyrillic script, brought by missionaries dispatched by Bulgarian rulers after their nation had abandoned pagan beliefs.
33. A further element of linguistic diversity was that the Bulgars, with a different ethnic origin, adopted Slavic speech.
34. See, for example, the catalogue of claims for Bulgaria in Stephanove, Bulgarians. The construction of unitary nationalism owed much to R. W. Seton-Watson, both in his academic writing and as adviser to the 1919 Peace Conference. See H. Seton-Watson et al. (eds.), R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 1906–1941, 2 vols., London: British Academy, 1976.
35. Also as Poturice. On identity, see Ivo Banac, “Bosnian Muslims: From Religious Community to Socialist Nationhood and Post-Communist Statehood 1918–2002,” in Pinson (ed.), Muslims, pp. 132–3.
36. I have adapted some of the ideas developed by Mark Patton in Islands, pp. 179–90. These same concepts can also be applied, I believe, to the stages of Balkan development. Banac, National Question, also uses the “island” or “pocket” vocabulary, and it is implicit in his analysis; pp. 43 sq.
37. Durham, Burden, p. 153.
38. Individualism was also ascribed to many other groups elsewhere: Highlanders in Scotland, fishermen in the Adriatic, muleteers in Iberia. But outsiders were certainly strongly conscious of this quality in southeastern Europe.
39. See Hitchins, Romanians, p. 1.
40. Depicted in Mraz, Maria Theresia, p. 315. The cartoon was widely circulated, especially in Austria and Germany.
41. The status of Russia was ambivalent. In this context she was part of the West, and not of Slavic “barbarism.” Russia showed what could be achieved from the raw material by the application of the values of the Enlightenment.
42. Translated in Davies, God’s Playground, p. 419.
43. His second chapter in Inventing Eastern Europe is entitled “Possessing Eastern Europe: Sexuality, Slavery and Corporal Punishment.”
44. For Ségur and Coxe, see Wolff, Inventing, chapter 1.
45. This is my interpretation. Larry Wolff, in correspondence, was cautious about taking it too far.
46. Macbeth (1606), act 4, scene 1, line 26.
47. St. Louis of France in 1270: “Either we shall push them back into Tartarus whence they came or they will bring us all into heaven.” Cited in OED under “Tartar.”
48. Cited and translated in Wolff, Inventing, p. 318. Wolff sees the role of the Tartars as seminal: “The most overwhelming eastern vector of influence upon Russia, viewed unequivocally as a force of barbarism, was that of Tartary and the Tartars. China, Persia and Turkey could be regarded in the age of Enlightenment as possessing their own Oriental civilisations, but the Tartars received no such concession. If Russia belonged to the Tartar empire in the age of Batu Khan, Tartary belonged to the Russian empire in the age of Peter [the Great], but the relation, even reversed, still weighed in the balance between Europe and Asia, civilisation and barbarism”; pp. 190–91. Conversely, the Spaniards had always regarded the Tartars as noble savages by comparison with the greater evil of the Ottomans. See Bunes Ibarra, Imagen, pp. 91–2.
49. Cited in Wolff, Inventing, pp. 192–3.
50. Abbé Fortis cited and translated in Wolff, Venice, pp. 126–7.
51. Ibid., pp. 152–3.
52. Cited in Bracewell, Uskoks, p. 188.
53. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 31.
CHAPTER 10: LEARNING TO HATE
1. “Relationi di Petro Foscarini,” in Nicolò Barozzi and Guglielmo Bercht (eds.), Le relazioni degli stati Europei lette al senato dagli ambasciatori Veneziani nel secolo decimosettino, 5th series, Turchia (Venice, 1866), part 2, pp. 89–90; cited and translated in Lucette Valensi, Venice and the Sublime Porte: The Birth of the Despot, trans. Arthur Denner, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993, pp. 1–2.
2. Cited in Mary Lucille Shay, The Ottoman Empire from 1720–1734 as Revealed by the Dispatches of the Venetian Baili, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1944, p. 34.
3. For example, successful plays on the London stage included The Christian Hero (1735), Zoraida (1780), and The Siege of Belgrade (1791), all of which deployed these themes.
4. The writer of these words, Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger, was a skeptical young French civil engineer and savant much admired by Diderot. He died at the age of thirty-seven in 1759, but one of his last works, published secretly after his death, tackled the controversial topic of despotism. His treatise Recherches sur l’origine du despotisme oriental was considered seditious in France, and so was published in the Netherlands in 1761. Although Boulanger considered that Europe had its own share of despotisms, and despite his well-honed critical sensibilities, nonetheless he held to the traditional and unquestioning view about the East, which included the Near East as well as the Far East. My text source can be found at http://www.vc.unipmn.it/~mori/e-texts/.
5. See Lewis, Discovery.
6. See A British Resident, p. 308.
7. With so many young women dying in childbirth or from disease, many Western widowers made a series of marriages. (Thus the wicked stepmother became a literary stereotype.)
8. Possibly Skene’s experience of many years had not been with Constantinople sophisticates like the general, but with more traditionally minded provincials.
9. Skene was the British consul in Aleppo.
10 The concept of “recovered memory” was developed in the 1990s as a means of enabling children and adults to recall memories of events they had forgotten or repressed. The use of these powerful psychotherapeutic methods also elicited recollections of events that had never taken place, or manipulated recollection to produce a desired outcome. While most of the research has focused on sexual abuse in childhood, the wider implication of this research sheds light on the process of generating social “memories” about the distant past. See Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Imagining the Past,” The Psychologist 14 (November 2001), 11, pp. 584–7. Moreover, “memories that have had time to fade are particularly susceptible to distortion” by imprinting ideas; see Kathryn A. Braun, Rhiannon Ellis, and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past,” Psychology and Marketing 19 (January 2002), pp. 1–23.
11. The concept of collective memory derives from the work of Maurice Halbwachs in the 1920s–30s; born in 1877, he died in Buchenwald in 1945. His principal work has now been translated as On Collective Memory, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Halbwachs asserted (page 50) that “if certain memories are inconvenient or burden us, we can always oppose to them the sense of reality inseparable from our present life. We are free to choose.” Part of the lesson of the Balkans in the 1990s is that this freedom to choose may well be heavily constrained.
12. The number who actually migrated is, like most other elements of this history, still violently contested. For a reasoned revisionist view, see Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 139–40.
13. “An Abbreviated Biography of Prince Lazar,” translated and cited in Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, pp. 62–3.
14. The Serbian capacity to transmute disaster into victory had deep cultural roots and carried through into the twentieth century. The retreat of the Serbian army through Montenegro before the Austrian army in 1915, losing 100,000 killed or wounded, was followed at the end of the war with the creation of a South Slav kingdom.
15. Il regno degli Slavi hoggi corrottamente detti Schiauoni historia di Don Macro Orbini in Peso: Appraise Girolamo Concordia, 1601.
16. The translator was a native of Herzegovina named Sava Vladislavic; see Ante Zadic, “Strossmayer y los Búlgaros,” Studia Croatica 1971, no. 42–3.
17. Emmert observes that the Austrian authorities tried without success to prevent copies entering the Habsburg domains.
18. See Bringa, Being Muslim, p. 165. Her fine book encapsulates the tragedy of modern Bosnia.
19. Thomson, The Outgoing Turk, p. 156.
20. Balkan Muslim cultural traditions were expressed in almost all the languages of the region, for most of the Muslim communities used an Albanian, Slavic, or Greek dialect, although some of the Tartar and Anatolian migrants used Turkish among themselves. Greek and Albanian were more or less interchangeable in many areas. At the court of the most successful (and certainly best-known) local Ottoman ruler in the Balkans—Ali, pasha of Janina—Greek was the official language, not Ottoman Turkish; Ali himself preferred his native Albanian. Indeed, it is uncertain that he was at all proficient in the complexities of Ottoman, for when he made corrections to documents, he used the Greek script. See Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte, pp. 24–5.
21. Albert B. Lord, “The Effect of the Turkish Conquest on Balkan Epic Tradition,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis (eds.), Aspects, pp. 298–9.
22. The Albanian traditional hero Skendarbeg was shared by both Muslim and Christian communities, but each tribal group constructed “its” hero in different ways.
23. See Banac, National Question, pp. 46–9.
24. I have found Lawrence Stone’s categories—presuppositions, preconditions, precipitants, triggers—a very useful matrix for tracing a way through the complex history of events in the Balkans. See Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529–1642 (2nd ed.), London and New York: Routledge, 2002.
25. See Davison, “Turkish Attitudes.”
26. The Muslim communities had their own local officials who were likewise responsible for the good order of their own community.
27. Halil Inalcik discussed some of the long-term causes of the deteriorating position of the raya in “The Ottoman Decline and Its Effects on the Reaya,” in Birnbaum and Vryonis, Aspects, pp. 338–53.
28. One parallel in the West is how many accusations of witchcraft or heresy were eventually found to be rooted in wholly secular causes.
29. There was a literature about the horror of the devshirme as though it took place within living memory, rather than centuries before. The devshirme was the forced recruitment of non-Muslims into imperial service. The males were taken as soldiers (janissaries) and some were trained as officials and administrators. It did not extend, at the latest, beyond the early eighteenth century. Most converted to Islam but often retained a loyalty to their native communities and kept contact with their families. Apart from the element of religious conversion, so abhorrent to Christians, it did not differ very greatly from military recruitment in Russia or the Habsburg lands.
30. They governed Bosnia and Herzegovina with about 120 officials; the bureaucratic Austrians who took over from them in 1878 employed 600 by 1881. By 1897 this had risen to 7,379. See Sugar, Industrialization, p. 29.
31. See Irwin T. Sanders, “Balkan Rural Society and War,” cited in Rhoads Murphy, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700, London: UCL Press, 1999.
32. See Ralston, Importing, pp. 43–68.
33. Britain replaced the French in the Ionian Islands.
34. At some points they sought to ally with the Ottomans, at other times to work against them. However, the French presence, their revolutionary ideology and activist government contrasted profoundly with Ottoman torpor, and undermined the Turkish position in the eyes of Christian subjects. The border was permeable, and Greeks, Albanians, and Serbs were well aware of what was taking place in the Ionian Islands and, later, in the Illyrian provinces.
35. J. Savant, “Napoléon et la libération de la Grèce,” in L’Hellénisme Contemporain, July–October 1950, p. 321. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 211.
36. Perhaps the best and most succinct statement of the libertarian viewpoint came much later, not from a left-wing ideologue, but from a conservative: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!” Barry Goldwater, U.S. Republican presidential candidate, July 16, 1964.
37. In the case of the Greek Revolution, I do not intend to discuss the uprising in Moldavia and Wallachia, or the later conduct of the war, but to focus on the events of 1821–22.
38. As they could in other clan societies—the feud between the Campbells and the MacDonalds in Scotland originated in 1297.
39. This too had its echo in local customary law, which assumed collective and clan responsibility for any act. This could be found just as readily among the Arabs of Jordan and the Arabian peninsula, in the Druze and Maronite Christian communities of Lebanon, and in Italy and Spain.
40. See Petrovich, History, vol. 1, p. 84.
41. See Stevan Pavlowitch, “Society in Serbia 1791–1830,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, p. 144.
42. Gordon, History, vol. 1, pp. i–ii.
43. He gave many examples of individual Turks who had behaved with a great sense of honor, better than the Greeks.
44. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 143.
45. See W. Alison Phillips, The War of Greek Independence 1821 to 1833, London: Smith Elder, 1897, p. 48.
46. Gordon, History, vol. 1, p. 149.
47. At Patras, on Palm Sunday, the Turks “amused themselves at their leisure in impaling or beheading prisoners and circumcising Christian children”; ibid., p. 156.
48. Ibid., pp. 244–5.
49. “Their [the Greeks’] insatiable cruelty knew no bounds, and seemed to inspire them with a superhuman energy for evil … Every corner was ransacked to discover new victims and the unhappy Jewish population (even more than the Turks an object of fanatical hatred) expired amid torments which we dare not describe. During the sack of the city, the air was close, dull and oppressively hot”; ibid.
50. “Never were firmans obeyed with more alacrity; intelligence of the revolt of Scio [Chios] excited very strong feeling throughout Asia Minor, detachments of troops covered the roads, and the ancient fervour of Islamism seemed to revive. Old and young flew to arms, and a regiment composed entirely of Imams was seen to march through the streets of Smyrna”; ibid., p. 356.
51. Ibid., p. 192.
52. “Those who are best acquainted with the Greeks cannot fail to remark the numerous and striking features of resemblance that connect them with their ancestors … The Grecian character was, however, long tried in the furnace of misfortune, that the sterling metal had mostly evaporated and little but dross remained; having obliterated whatever was laudable in the institutions of their forefathers, their recent masters had taught them only evil”; ibid., p. 32. It was the “worthiest” of the Athenians who sought to prevent the deliberate massacre of the civilian Turks in the city, while “the system of the worst and most degraded Greeks, of exterminating, per fas et nefas [by fair means and foul] every disciple of Islam who fell into their hands”; ibid., pp. 414–15.
53. Ibid., p. 4.
54. Ibid., p. 231.
55. Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto 2, stanza 84.
56. Ibid., stanza 77.
57. For a new insight into Byron’s attitudes, see Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism, pp. 136–7: He notes Byron’s comment: “The Ottomans are not a people to be despised. Equal, at least, to the Spaniards, they are superior to the Portuguese. If it be difficult to pronounce what they are, we can at least say what they are not: they are not treacherous, they are not cowardly, they do not burn heretics, they are not assassins …”
58. On the pamphlet literature see St. Clair, That Greece, pp. 372–3. At that time the publications in English and German diminished. He also noted how there was a flood of books on Greece after Byron’s death, and in a number of these Byron and Missolonghi were mentioned in the title; see ibid., pp. 386–7.
59. The stronghold of the revolution was not in Greece itself, but in the Danubian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, where the ruling class was made up of Greeks from Constantinople, many of whom patronized secret Hellenic patriotic societies. The role of the Greek secret society, or “Friendly Association” (Filiki Etairia) is still unclear. At most individual members orchestrated, rather than provided a detailed plan for, the killings in the Peloponnese in 1821.
60. See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images, pp. 11–12.
61. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer draws a strong connection between the two: “By joining regular to irregular, and classical to expressive, Delacroix’s cartoons reveal a balanced dualism—sublime and grotesque … the prints are significant as early exemplars of similar solutions observed in Delacroix’s painting. In … Massacres on Chios for example conventionally constructed scenes are punctuated by elements of the grotesque … possibly derived from graphic satire.” Part of the success of this picture was that it appealed to “the street.” See Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Eugène Delacroix, p. 112.
62. Massacre of the Greeks at Missolonghi (1827).
63. François-Emile de Lansac, Scene from the Siege of Missolonghi (1828), in Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, French Images, p. 81.
CHAPTER 11: “A BROAD LINE OF BLOOD”
1. The words are Gladstone’s in Bulgarian Horrors.
2. Skene describes how this was decreed for the Ottoman navy, but in theory to be extended more generally: “Everything had, however, been done to eradicate these apprehensions [Christian fears of Muslims], even to the prohibition of the terms Raya and Ghiaur, which were made punishable offences in the navy, where Christians and Turks were thrown together, and it can now only be the effect of time.” The legislation was not effective. See Skene, A British Resident, vol. 2, p. 332.
3. Perhaps “Turcophilia” implies too much amity. Most of those who sympathized with the Turks were also fierce critics of what they considered their deep and inherent weaknesses.
4. I suggest that through most of the eighteenth century, attraction rather than repulsion was the rule, while the balance shifted early in the nineteenth century; but in the second half a degree of attraction had returned.
5. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, p. 15.
6. Ussama Makdisi has convincingly shown how the traditional acceptance by Druze, Maronite Christians, and Muslims of their neighbors of other faiths was overthrown by the external pressures of Ottoman modernization and Western missionaries (with the consuls and navies ever present in the background). See Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism.
7. See Kamil S. Salibi, “The 1860 Upheaval in Damascus,” in William R. Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds.), The Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968, pp. 185–202. The Ottomans held Arab Muslim notables responsible in exactly the same way that they had Christians and Jews in other incidents. Sixty-one were hanged and 111 shot in a meadow outside the city. Other leading Damascenes were exiled. Others complained that after 1860 “Christians and Europeans, patriarchs and bishops were given undue precedence.”
8. See Magris, Danube, p. 327.
9. See Engin Akarli, The Long Peace.
10. Public Record Office FO 78/1520, “Report of Cyril Graham Esq., on the Conditions of the Christians in the Districts of Hasbeya and Rasheya,” in Brant (consulate, Damascus) to Russell (London), August 13, 1860.
11. Shannon, Gladstone, p. 22. Shannon’s book is an exemplary study of the process by which publications generate political actions and attitudes.
12. E. A. Freeman, “The English People in Relation to the Eastern Question,” Contemporary Review, February 1877, cited in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 14.
13. In a letter from Stuart Poole to Henry Liddon, February 4, 1877; cited in Shannon, Gladstone, p. 33.
14. See Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny, London: Penguin, 1997. The official investigation after the mutiny produced no evidence of sexual violation. Copulation with an Englishman would have caused a catastrophic loss of caste for a Hindu, and there is no record of Muslims raping Christian women in India. However, the implication of sexual molestation was omnipresent, in both text and image.
15. The revolutionary group that organized the uprising south of the Danube on May 3, 1876, at Panagurishte was disorganized and ill-coordinated. Apart from persuading a woman teacher who had learned embroidery to make them a flag showing a yellow lion with his paw on the crescent and the motto “Liberty or Death,” and holding a public meeting, they seemed to have no coherent plan. Nevertheless, the excited crowd that listened to fierce speeches and sang revolutionary songs went on to murder all the Turks they could find in the vicinity. These seem to have totaled about 1,000; see Stavrianos, Balkans, pp. 377–80. Mark Mazower suggests they found little support among the peasants, who had proved utterly resistant to the clarion call of Bulgarian nationality; see Mazower, Balkans, pp. 88–95. However, Justin Macarthy suggests that they deliberately targeted Circassian villages so as to engender reprisals; see Macarthy, Death, p. 60.
16. The excuse that the murders were committed by forces outside the control of the Ottoman authorities is unconvincing. The authorities in Constantinople were wont to use terror by whatever means came easily to hand.
17. Malcolm, Bosnia, pp. 131–3.
18. Cited and translated in Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 379.
19. Cited and translated in Harold Temperley, The Bulgarian and Other Atrocities 1875–8: The Light of Historical Criticism, London: Humphrey Milford, 1931, pp. 7–8.
20. Ibid., p. 9.
21. Eugene Schuyler (1840–90) was both a scholar and a diplomat. His biography of Peter the Great was the first in English based on Russian sources. His longest and most fruitful period was his years in Russia during the 1860s and 1870s. The book of his journeys through Turkestan is a classic work of travel literature.
22. MacGahan remarks that its prosperity had excited the envy and jealousy of its Muslim neighbors. “I elsewhere remark that, in all the Moslem atrocities, Chiot, Bulgarian, and Armenian, the principal incentive has been the larger prosperity of the Christian population”; from Sir Edwin Pears, Forty Years in Constantinople 1873–1915 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1916), pp. 16–19. I have used the text from the Internet Modern History Sourcebook, in which the spelling has been modernized. Pears’s own report outlining the atrocities was sent to London in June 1876.
23. News began to appear in the Manchester Guardian and in reports to The Times from Gallenga, its correspondent in Constantinople.
24. For the composition of the pamphlet, see Shannon, Gladstone, pp. 106–9.
25. A second and wholly new pamphlet appeared in the following year.
26. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13.
27. Gladstone’s diaries, February 2, 1859. I have taken this account of Gladstone’s attitudes and presuppositions about the Ottomans both from Mark Nixon’s unpublished paper on the topic and from conversations. I am extremely grateful to him for allowing me to use his material.
28. Gladstone was preoccupied, as were many of his contemporaries, with the cruel eroticism of the Turks. Six pages of J. L. Farley’s pamphlet Cross or Crescent dealt in prurient detail with the ravishment and massacre of Christian women by the bestial Turks. Much of Gladstone’s copy of this text was, according to Mark Nixon, underlined or highlighted with marginal notes.
29. His second pamphlet, Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria, Since May, 1876, published in the spring of 1877, was vintage (and slightly sententious) Gladstone.
30. See Shannon, Gladstone, p. 110.
31. October 28, 1876.
32. May 5, 1877.
33. See Fabian, Time and the Other, pp. 80–87.
34. On the Balkan past, Mazower, Balkans, and Todorova, Imagining, provide the best introductions.
35. Banac, National Question, pp. 202–14.
36. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, p. 132, citing and translating Duško KeČkemet, Ivan Meštrovic, Zagreb: 1970, pp. 1–3.
37. For the position of the Turks of Bulgaria, or Pomaks, see Karpat (ed.), Turks.
38. In my view, population transfer as practiced in the 1920s (and subsequently) exists along the same spectrum as ethnic cleansing by extermination. But they are not identical. For a good discussion of these issues, see McGarry and O’Leary (eds.), Politics. The Ottomans practiced forced resettlement, but the aim was usually to create colonies that would strengthen their hold on a region. For the origins of the term “ethnic cleansing,” Dražen Petrović writes in “An Attempt at Methodology,” European Journal of International Law, 1994: “Ethnic cleansing is a literal translation of the expression etnicko ciscenje in Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian. The origin of this term … is difficult to establish … Analysis of ethnic cleansing should not be limited to the specific case of former Yugoslavia. This policy can occur and have terrible consequences in all territories with mixed populations, especially in attempts to redefine frontiers and rights over given territories. There is a new logic of conflict that relies on violent actions against ‘enemy’ civilian population on a large scale, rather than on war in the traditional sense, i.e. between armed forces. Examples of this logic and policy abound today (the extreme case being Rwanda).” The original use of the term was applied by Serbs to Albanian attacks on Serbs in Kosovo and only later was it used (by Croats and Bosnians) to describe actions taken by Serbs. I am grateful to Dejan Jović for explaining this complex etymology. Only Slovenia has been largely exempt, but the Slovenes suffered a great deal of suspicion and pressure from the Habsburg authorities and later from the new Austrian state in the 1920s.
39. See Sugar, Industrialization.
40. Incorporated in the Slav state, the Bosnian Muslims had an ambivalent status. It was only in the 1960s, when Bosnian Muslims were recognized as a national group by Tito, that their collective position began to improve. The appeal of a “Yugoslav” identity rather than Serb or Croat affiliation proved seductive. See Friedman, Bosnian Muslims.
41. See Andrić, Development.
42. “At the most critical stage of its spiritual development, at the time that the fermentation of [Bosnia’s] spiritual forces had reached a culmination, invasion by an Asian warrior people whose social institutions and customs meant the negation of Christian culture and whose faith—created under different climatic and social conditions and unfit for any kind of adjustment—interrupted the spiritual life of a country, degenerated it and created something quite strange out of it.” Cited and translated by Tomislav Z. Longinović, “East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo Andrić” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Ivo Andrić Revisited: “The Bridge Still Stands,” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, p. 124.
43. Vuk Stefanović Karadžić was born in 1787. The bulk of his active life was spent in Vienna. Petar Petrović Njegoš was born in Montenegro in 1813. His four main books of poetry were The Voice of Mountaineers (1833), The Cure for Turkish Fury (1834), The Song of Freedom (1835, published 1854), and The Serbian Mirror (1845). His major work The Mountain Wreath was published in Serbian in Vienna in 1847.
44. Tomislav Z. Longinović, “East Within the West: Bosnian Cultural Identity in the Works of Ivo Andrić,” in Wayne S. Vucinich (ed.), Ivo Andrić Revisited: “The Bridge Still Stands,” Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995, p. 126.
45. See Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, pp. 262–3.
46. Emmert, Serbian Golgotha, p. 141. The famed “blackbirds” of Kosovo Polje were no doubt crows or similar scavengers.
47. See Wachtel, Making, pp. 129–34.
48. Cited and translated in Tanner, Croatia, p. 75.
49. Cited and translated in Banac, National Question, p. 59.
50. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 4. It is curious how Frankenstein, set in the original in Switzerland, was moved in one of the first filmic treatments (1931) to Bavaria. Then in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), Frankenstein had moved east (into “Dracula territory”?) to a “nineteenth-century Balkan village.”
51. Njegoš’s Mountain Wreath; see http://www.rastko.org.yu/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html (the gusle is a traditional folk instrument).
52. In Lady Wilde, “Speranza,” Ancient Legends, Mystic Charms & Superstitions of Ireland with Sketches of the Irish Past, to Which Is Appended a Chapter on “The Ancient Race of Ireland” by the Late Sir William Wilde, London: Ward and Lock, 1888.
53. See Mertus, Kosovo.
54. Ibid., p. 100.
55. Andrić is quite specific that those who impaled the victim, the peasant Radisav, were Gypsies. Martus cites the source as M. Jankovic, “Zlocin kao u vreme Turaka” (“Crimes as in the Time of the Turks”), Politika Ekspres, January 14, 1991; see Martus, Kosovo, p. 119. The most moving account of the continuing plight of the Balkan Gypsies is Isabel Fonseca’s fine book, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, New York: Vintage, 1996.
56. Mertus cites the author as žirovad Mihajlović.
57. Mertus, Kosovo, p. 112.
58. Weine, When History, pp. 107–9. Weine was an American psychiatrist who spent five years interviewing in Bosnia on memories of ethnic cleansing.
59. He liked to carry the gusle, with which Njegoš and other poets are often depicted. One of his colleagues in the Kosovo Day Hospital at Sarajevo described how “I heard his first talks in the villages and on television. He was very familiar with the language. He was making jokes … He used much more his knowledge of the culture, of the spiritual archetypal needs of the Serbian people than psychiatry to seduce them. He was using stories, legends, gusle and religion”; Weine, When History, pp. 114–15.
60. Robert Browning, “The Pied Piper of Hamlin,” in Browning, Poetry and Prose, selected by Simon Nowell-Smith, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1950, p. 110.
Part Five
CHAPTER 12: “TURBAN’D AND SCIMITAR’D”
1. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, writing with V. N. Volosinov in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, looked at the emblems of their own day. A hammer and a sickle were just tools. But put them together, and they become a symbol, the insignia of the nascent Soviet Union. “Any consumer good,” Bakhtin and Volosinov observed, “can likewise be made into an ideological sign. For instance, bread and wine become religious symbols in the Christian sacrament.” There is a long-running debate as to whether this was written by Volosinov or by Mikhail Bakhtin under Volosinov’s name, or by them jointly. I have given them both credit. See Morris (ed.), Bakhtin Reader, p. 50.
2. It was first published in a large Latin folio at Basel in 1559, and in English in 1563. It went through four editions in Foxe’s lifetime: there was a corrected edition in 1570 and two more in 1576 and 1583. Six further editions appeared in 1596, 1610, 1632, 1641, 1684, and 1784. Further versions came out in 1837–41 and 1877, growing larger and more weighty. The edition of 1684 was published in three folio volumes of 895, 682, and 863 pages.
3. Impalement was a significant and evolving trope in Western depictions of the Muslim East. Impalement is a dominant visual element in Lamenta et ultima disperatione di Selim Gran Turco … Venice, 1575: see “Ahmad I and the Allegories of Tyranny in the Frontispiece to George Sandy’s Relation of a Journey Anno. Dom. 1610,” in Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World, ed. Gülrü Necipoğlu, Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001, p. 208. Later, in Jean de Thévenot, Voyages de M. de Thévenot tant en Europe qu’en Asie et en Afrique (Paris: Charles Angot, 1689), vol. 2, there is an image of impalement in Ottoman Egypt. It depicts an Arab on a camel with burning brands strapped to his arms (so that boiling fat would drip down and burn his skin). In the background are two pyramids, and in front of these two impaled men, one smoking a pipe. The text in chapter LXXIX, “The Punishments,” criticized Egypt. However, in the Dutch edition of 1723, illustrated by Jan Luyken, the image is changed. It now depicts a European or Anatolian setting (the dominant camel has vanished and the extraordinarily brutal visual details of the impalement appear in the foreground). See Alle de gedenkwaardige en zeer naauwkeurige reizen van den heere de Thevenot, trans. G. van Broekhuizen, 2nd impression, Amsterdam: N. ten Hoorn, 1723, p. 441.
4. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Roy, 16 G VI. f. 412.
5. See the cartouche in window 11, of the Saracens climbing the walls of Assisi, reproduced in Marcel Beck, Peter Felder, Emil Maurer, and Dietrich Schearz, Königsfelden: Geschichte, Bauten, Glasgemälde, Kunstschätze, Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1983.
6. A fifteenth-century French image distinguished Arabs from Crusaders by presenting the former as half-naked savages. The image is in Les chroniques de France ou de St. Denis, British Library, MS Add. 21143. f. 90.
7. As can be seen in the crest of the medieval Lords Audley, whose ancestors came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066. Their arms, in the quaint language of heraldry, consisted of an arm couped at the shoulder, embowed, and resting the elbow on the wreath, holding a sword in pale, enfiled with a Saracen’s head. The crest depicts a hand holding a sword on which is spiked the head of a bearded man of “Eastern” appearance. The motto given below the crest, Mors ad inimicum (death to the oppressor), makes the point clear.
8. A. W. Kinglake, Eothen, London: J. Ollivier, 1847, p. 180.
9. For the range, and significance of early images, see Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, and Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. The interrelationship between the image and text is not generally well covered: Hélène Desmet-Grégoire’s study of eighteenth-century French images of the East is a notable exception. See Hélène Desmet-Grégoire, Divan magique.
10. The OED gives the first usage as Edward Hall’s in The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre and Yorke, published in 1548: “Aparaled after Turkey fashion … girded with two swords called cimitaries.” It cites Christophorus Richerius, De rebus Turcarum, published in Paris in 1540, for the statement that the janissaries called their swords “cymitharra.” Adolphe Hatzfeld and Arsène Darmesteter in their Dictionnaire général de la langue Française du commencement du XVIIe siècle jusqu’à nos jours, précédé d’un traité de la formation de la langue (Paris: Librairie Delagrave, 1890–1900) say it has a fifteenth-century origin but are not specific.
11. The Turkish incident was inserted at the personal insistence of Louis XIV, who had become entranced with the Ottomans after an embassy to Paris in 1669. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 72–3. Göçek gives a full account of the mutual effects of the links between France and the Ottoman Empire.
12. G. Horton, The Blight of Asia, 1922, chapter 19, www.hri.org/docs/Horton/hb-29.html.
13. “Outlandish” moved from its late medieval usage—meaning “external”—to the later use, which had become a term of abuse. See OED.
14. That is, it seemed to represent the stereotypical medieval Christian view of the Jew.
15. These included an edition printed by Mikulas Bakalar in Pilsen; a Lyons edition of 1488 printed by Martin Huss (freely adapted with new illustrations); another by Anton Sorg in Augsburg, also in 1488; another brought out by Pablo Hurus as Viaje de la Tierra Sancta in Saragossa in 1498; see Clair, History, and Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976.
16. Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes in Five Books, London: William Stainsby for Henry Fetherstone, 1625. The copy I have used is British Library BL 984 h. 5.
17. One, Lithgow, opined that “the nature of the Arabs was not unlike the jackals,” decried the “villainy of the Armenians” while noting “the constancy of the Turks,” ibid., p. 1846. “Sir John Mandeville” was the author of the most famous (and widely read) medieval travel narrative. Mandeville—supposedly an English knight, but this was probably a pseudonym—made his “travels” in the first half of the fourteenth century. He plainly did go east, but much of his book is the purest fantasy.
18. Othello, act 5, scene 2, lines 357–61.
In Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turbaned Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him thus.
19. On Beham, see M. Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500–1550, vol. 1, New York: Hacker Art Books, 1974, pp. 268–75.
20. Türcken Biechlin, which is written in a south German dialect; see Bohnstedt, “The Infidel Scourge,” pp. 10–11.
21. This topic is not well covered, but I have found useful elements in the chapter “Towards an Emblematic Rhetoric” in Manning, The Emblem, pp. 85–109.
22. See Certeau, Writing, p. 94: “We admit as historiographical discourse that which can ‘include’ its other—chronicle, archive, document—in other words, discourse that is organised in a laminated text in which one continuous half is based on another disseminated half.” The “dissemination” of an image is implicit in the multiplicity and coordination of its visual elements, arranged in predetermined order.
23. See Anna Pavord, The Tulip, London: Bloomsbury, 1999, p. 80.
24. Ibid., pp. 48–52.
25. See Dufrenoy, L’Orient romanesque, vol. 3, p. 687.
26. See Marquis de Sade, 120 days of Sodom, London: Arena, 1989, pp. 263 sqq.
27. The figure was given in a paper by Professor Gary Schwarz at a colloquium led by Professor John Brewer at the European University Institute, Florence. More recently, Schwarz has extended these impromptu remarks. See Gary Schwarz, “The Shape, Size and Destiny of the Dutch Market for Paintings at the End of the Eighty Years War,” in Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (eds.), 1648: War and Peace in Europe, vol. 2, Art and Culture, Münster: Veranstaltungsgesellschaft 350 Jahre Westfälische Friede mbh., 1998, pp. 240–42.
28. The text volumes, with their 72,000 articles by 140 contributors, were often held up by censorship. But the plates did not seem to interest the censors and were published at the rate of about one volume a year from 1761. Many of the 2,569 pages of plates showed images on a double-page spread.
29. The 1783 Amsterdam and Paris edition was enlarged to eleven volumes, in a “Nouvelle édition, enrichie de toutes les figures comprises dans l’ancienne édition en sept volumes, & dans les quatre publiés par forme de supplément par une société des gens de lettres [a new edition, enriched with all the images in the old edition in seven volumes and the additional four published in the form of supplements by a group of literary gentlemen].”
30. “Let the Protestant burin of Bernard Picard exert itself as it will in tracing to us hideous representations of real or imaginary tortures inflicted by the judges of the Inquisition; it signifies nothing, or can only be addressed to the king of Spain.” Cited in Richard Lebrun, “Joseph de Maistre’s Defence of the Spanish Inquisition,” www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/arts/history/spanishinquisition.html.
31. On the development of the frontispiece see Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, pp. 1–47.
32. Part of the caption reads: the “successor of Mahomet, Ali, explained the Alcoran to the many people who make up the Mahometan Religion,” translated from “Le tableau des principales religions du monde,” in Bernard Picard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, représentées par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picard avec une explication historique, et quelques dissertations curieuses, Amsterdam: J. F. Bernard, 1733–43.
33. He went back in 1691–92.
34. Marsigli had created his own institute in Bologna and a printing house to prepare his published works. However, he had a number of them published in Amsterdam. See Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe, p. 309.
35. Copy in the Library of Congress listed as Voennoe sostianie Ottomanskiia Imperii s eia prirascheniem I ipadkom. Vse ukrasheno grydorovanrlistami, St. Petersburg: Imp. Akademii nauk, 1737. I have not yet seen this text.
36. Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, Travels into Turkey … Containing the Most Accurate Account of the Turks, and Neighbouring Nations, Translated from the Original Latin of the Learned A. G. Busbequius, London: J. Robinson and W. Payne, 1744. This was successful enough to reissue in 1774. The first edition of Busbecq in English had been edited by Nahum Tate and printed by J. Taylor and F. Wyat in London in 1694. It was published as “The four epistles of A. G. Busbequius concerning his embassy into Turkey; being remarks upon the religion, customs, riches, strength and government of that people. As also as a description of their chief cities and places of trade and commerce. To which is added his advice how to manage war against the Turks. Done into English Epistolae quatuor.” However, Latin editions of Busbecq were also still being published—for example an Oxford edition of 1771.
37. Cited and translated in Findley, “Ebu Bekir Ratib,” p. 48.
38. The page size of an elephant folio volume is twenty-three by fourteen inches.
39. My historical data on d’Ohsson is taken from the extended version of Findley’s paper “A Quixotic Author.” I am extremely grateful to Carter Findley for letting me use his impressive work, which deserves a much wider audience.
40. Çirakman, “From Tyranny to Despotism,” p. 58. Dominique Carnoy presents a rather different picture in her study of French images in Représentations.
41. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors, pp. 12–13. By his second pamphlet of the following year, Gladstone was less violent and more circumspect in his utterances. See Lessons in Massacre or, The Conduct of the Turkish Government in and About Bulgaria Since May 1876, London: John Murray, 1877.
42. And as Joseph Conrad observed at the beginning of his Eastern novel Under Western Eyes (1911), “This is not a story of the West of Europe.”
CHAPTER 13: THE BLACK ART
1. The history of print is in a state of rapid transformation. New theories and objectives have become dominant. In my view, apart from key texts such as those of Elizabeth Eisenstein, Lucien Febvre, and Henri-Jean Martin, Robert Darnton, Rudolf Hirsch, and most recently Adrian Johns, the most helpful restatement has come from Gérard Genette in his construct of the “paratexte.” This connects the physical forms of the text to its audiences, potential and actual. However, even Genette himself gracefully demurred from discussing the issue which concerns me here—the role and effect of images. “I have likewise left out three practices whose paratextual relevance seems to me undeniable, but investigating each one might demand as much work as was required here in treating this subject as a whole … [the third] constitutes an immense continent: that of illustration.” I can here only allude to the issues involved but I am taking the topic up in more detail in a forthcoming work. See Genette, Paratexts, pp. 405–6.
2. This appears in “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”; see William Blake, Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, London: The Nonesuch Library, 1961, p. 187.
3. See Çirakman, “From the ‘Terror of the World.’ ”
4. Volney, Travels, vol. 2, pp. 177–9. Volney is in error in one small particular: Arabic letters change in terms of where they come in the word rather than in the sentence.
5. He wrote On the Simplification of Oriental Languages in 1795, and The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of Asia in 1819.
6. See C. F. de Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empire and the Law of Nature, rep. New York: Twentieth Century Publishing Company, 1890, p. 81.
7. Ibid., p. 76.
8. I find the whole idea of counterfactual history, of which Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (1991) was a pioneering approach (and unjustly criticized when it first appeared), an invaluable critical tool. The collection edited by Niall Ferguson, Virtual History(1997), makes the case for the approach, especially Ferguson’s long introduction, pp. 1–91.
9. Jonathan Bloom in his sparkling survey of paper in the Islamic world (Paper Before Print) can cite only one book: Dard Hunter’s Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft, first published by Knopf in 1943, revised and republished in 1947, and reissued in 1978. Hunter’s is still the sole general overview available in English.
10. A short-lived mill was set up in France at Troyes a little earlier.
11. Little is known of this first paper mill, while much more is known of the eighteenth-century mill set up at Yalova, on the southern (Asian) side of the Sea of Marmara in 1744. This spa town has a constant supply of high-quality water necessary for any volume of production. See Fatma Müge Göçek, East Encounters West: France and the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 114–15.
12. Most of the Ottoman sources are not contemporary with the first fifteenth- and sixteenth-century prohibitions. See ibid., pp. 110–11.
13. Thevet’s life of Gutenberg, in Histoire des plus illustres et savans hommes de leurs siècles (Paris: Manger, 1671), vol. VII, p. 111, cited by Gdoura, Début, pp. 86–7.
14. The Taliban’s and the “Islamic Emirate” of Afghanistan’s attitude toward images was aniconistic. Comparisons have been drawn with Byzantine iconoclasm as state policy, and it is hard to find so radical and coordinated an Islamic equivalent in modern times. Even the murderous excesses of the Ikhwan in the capture of Mecca and Medina (and the destruction of tombs and images) were not acts of state. The Taliban’s policy plainly was. The supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar ordered the destruction of all statues in the country, which resulted in the notorious and highly public blowing-up of the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan. The official statement made through the AP agency stated that “in view of the fatwa [religious edict] of prominent Afghan scholars and the verdict of the Afghan Supreme Court it has been decided to break down all statues/idols present in different parts of the country. This is because these idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps may be turned into gods again. The real God is only Allah, and all other false gods should be removed.” It was also asserted that photographs and electronic images were likewise forbidden, but Taliban officials themselves photographed the destruction of the statues. Many Taliban leaders allowed their photographs to be taken, and it has been suggested that their “image policy” was religious in theory but selectively political in practice.
15. See David Talbot Rice, Islamic Painting: A Survey, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971, pp. 21–6. For the Abbasids, see Richard Ettinghausen, Arab Painting, New York: Rizzoli, 1977, pp. 41–53. The classic statement is Arnold, Painting in Islam.
16. Iconoclasm in Reformation Europe was directed not so much at images but at art used in a religious context. See, for example, Philips, Reformation.
17. See Goffman, Ottoman Empire, p. 91. This short book, which is innovative both in its structure and in its insights, is a mature and compelling correction to a long tradition of misrepresentation. I am extremely grateful to Virginia Aksan for drawing it to my attention.
18. See Lewis, Discovery, especially his account of the Egyptian scholar Sheikh Rifaa Rafi al-Tahtawi’s five-year stay in Paris.
19. The stage of final reading, when a written text is read out loud, is still an essential part of the legislative process in the United States and the United Kingdom.
20. Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici financed the establishment of the Typographia Medicea Linguarum Externarum by Raimondi in 1585.
21. The first book to be printed in Ottoman Turkish was George Seaman’s translation of the New Testament. He was the interpreter to Sir Peter Wyche, English ambassador to Constantinople, and the book was printed at Oxford in 1606. In 1734 William Caslon was commissioned by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Literature to cut an Arabic font for a New Testament to be used in missionary work.
22. See Bloom, Paper, p. 116.
23. For the prevalence (and design) of libraries, see Godfrey Goodwin, A History of Ottoman Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
24. See Dov Shidorsky, “Libraries in Late Ottoman Palestine Between the Orient and the Occident,” Libraries & Culture 33, 3 (summer 1998), pp. 260–76. See also Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
25. Müteferrika had already begun to print by 1719. He sent a map of the Sea of Marmara to the grand vizier Damad Ibrahim Pasha, with a note to the effect that “if your Excellency so commands, larger ones can be produced.” For the document from the Sultan setting up the printing press in Constantinople, see “The Firman of Ahmed III, Given in 1727 Authorizing Said Effendi and Ibrahim Müteferrika to Open a Printing House Using Arabic Script,” trans. Christopher Murphy, in Atiyah (ed.), Book, pp. 284–92.
26. He was by then himself the ambassador to the court of France.
27. It has been estimated that from 1455 to 1500 between 6 and 20 million copies of publications were printed in Europe. Six million is a very cautious estimate, and probably about 12–15 million might be a good working figure. Between 30,000 and 35,000 separate editions of books from this half century still survive, representing various versions and reprints of some 10,000 to 15,000 different texts. See the estimates for editions in Europe and the useful analyses of content in southern and northern Europe in Gerulaitis, Printing, pp. 17–18 and 57–129. Hirsch, Printing, pp. 133–5, uses J. M. Lenart’s figures from Pre-Reformation Printed Books (New York: 1935). Assuming that about 500 copies (on average) of each edition were produced, then printing in aggregate 15 million copies is reasonable. So who read or bought all these books? This question has never been answered satisfactorily. The calculations of copies printed are of necessity approximate, hence the wild discrepancies. See also Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, trans. David Gerard, London: Verso, 1976, p. 248.
28. There had been several attempts to set up printers’ workshops in the Balkan lands, all of which failed. In the centuries of Ottoman rule, only a handful of books were produced in the southern Slav lands. The first were printed in Cetinje in Montenegro in the 1490s by a monk named Makarije. Eight other short-lived presses were later set up, but their total output was eleven slender titles. From the sixteenth century Slavic books were produced in other lands and brought across the frontier. Many were printed by a succession of specialist printers in Venice, beginning with the Vuković family from Montenegro in the early sixteenth century. Another major center developed at the same time in Wallachia; but it was not until the 1770s, when recognizing the demand for texts for the Serbian market, that printers in Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Leipzig competed to supply Serbs both in the Vojvodina and in the lands under Ottoman rule. However, supplies were irregular and many printers could not be bothered with the effort of sending them south of the Danube, where trade was erratic and often risky. See Michel Lassithiotakis, “Le rôle du livre imprimé dans la formation et le développement de la littérature en Grec vulgaire XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” and Nathalie Clayer, “Le goût de fruit défendu ou, La lecture de l’Albanais dans l’empire Ottoman finissant,” both in Hitzel (ed.), Livres.
29. A modern analogy is the way in which the People’s Republic of China has (as of 2002) modernized its publishing industry while at the same time maintaining government supervision. I owe this analogy to a number of my Chinese students, notably Xiaoyang Chen, whose help I gratefully acknowledge on this topic.
30. See Daniel Roche, “Censorship and the Publishing Industry,” in Darnton and Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print, pp. 3–28, and Jean-Pierre Levandier, Le livre au temps de Marie-Thérèse: Code des lois de censure pour les pays Austro-Bohémiens (1740–1780) (Berne: Peter Lang, 1993), and Le livre au temps de Joseph II et de Léopold II: Code des lois de censure pour les pays Austro-Bohémiens (1780–1792), Berne: Peter Lang, 1995.
31. Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux’s frightening narrative of how Jiri Janda, a Czech peasant, was executed for reading a forbidden book shows that the printed word was still reckoned as a deadly threat in the Habsburg domains in 1761; see “ ‘Reading unto Death’: Books and Readers in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia,” in Chartier (ed.), Culture of Print, pp. 191–229.
32. Klaus Kreiser citing Jale Baysal, Müteferrika’dan Birinci Mesrutiyet’e kadar Osmanli Türklerinin bastiklan kitaplar (Istanbul: Univertesi Edebiyat Facültesi, 1968), in Lehrstuhl, Beginnings, pp. 15–16.
33. Although there were few books, printed religious images played an important role in the Christian communities in the Balkans. Religious images were a strong focus of Christian belief. The devout would brave the perils of travel to visit a monastery and see its icons. Famous icons had long been copied in monasteries, and simple woodblocks of these were produced and sold to the faithful. But by the eighteenth century, much more elaborate work emerged. Skilled monks in the Orthodox monasteries of Mount Athos and Mount Sinai engraved plates for printing, or sometimes drew master copies of the holy images. These would be sent to Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, or Rome, where local Greeks would pay for their reproduction. Some of the images were obviously produced for a predominantly Slav audience because they bore both Slavic and Greek captions. The printed sheets would be returned to the monasteries, where they were given to traveling monks, who distributed them to the Orthodox faithful in villages throughout the Balkans. Catholic religious texts and pictures circulated widely in the Catholic districts. By these means—word of mouth, written texts, and visual images—the Christians of the Balkans preserved their sense of social and religious identity under Ottoman rule. Details are taken from the exhibition notes for “Orthodox Religious Engravings 18th and 19th Centuries” at the University of Toronto Art Centre, and from the records of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture on Athonite paper icons, www.culture.gr/2/21/218/218ad/e218adoo. A study of books published in Greek between 1749 and 1821 suggests that only about 7 percent were bought by Greek speakers within the lands that eventually formed the independent Greek state. Most of these works were prepared for a highly literate audience, and although there were schools on Patmos and Chios, in the large Greek community of Smyrna, as well as on Mount Athos and in Thessaly, there were not many readers in the southern Greek lands. See Philipos Iliou, “Pour une étude quantitative du public des lecteurs grecs à l’époque des lumières et de la révolution,” in Association d’études du sud-est Européen IV (Sofia: 1969), pp. 475–80, cited by Peter Mack-ridge, “The Greek Intelligentsia 1780–1830: A Balkan Perspective,” in Clogg (ed.), Balkan Society, pp. 68–9.
34. There was a subculture of printed books from the outside world even before local printing got under way. In the Ottoman lands Christians and Jews had access to imported liturgical texts printed in Arabic from an early date. A Greek Orthodox metropolitan established the printing house that printed in Arabic script in Aleppo in 1707. A generation later the Maronite monastery at Al-Shuwayr in Lebanon began to print books for their community. Printing religious books in the Armenian script began in Constantinople, also in the 1730s. But all this activity was invisible to the majority Muslim population, which had no interest in the liturgical texts of other faiths. The Christian and Jewish printers were careful to do nothing to anger the Ottoman authorities by printing work of a more contentious nature. But Armenian commercial printers, who until the nineteenth century were printing in a script incomprehensible to Arabic readers, by then had the equipment and the skills to take a major role in the general printing market. The best studies of Ottoman lithography still remain two short pamphlets. One is Grégoire Zellich, Notice historique sur la lithographie et sur les origines de son introduction en Constantinople, Impr. A. Zellich Fils, 1895. Anton Zellich, the author’s father, was a Croat printer from Dalmatia, who began work with the Cayols in 1840, and set up on his own account in 1869. The other is Nüzhet Gerçek’s Türk tas basmaciliği (Istanbul: Devlet Bashimevi, 1939), which is useful because he had access to the library of the Cayols’ patron Khusrev Pasha’s library at Eyub, which contained many examples of their early lithographic work in the Ottoman Empire.
35. Mehmed Ali had sent Nikola Masabki to Italy in about 1811 to learn the craft of printing. He set up the new government press at Bulaq, with Arabic and Persian fonts. The development of printing in the Middle East (and Masabki’s visit to Milan) has now been covered comprehensively in an important work of collective scholarship edited by Eva Hanebutt-Benz, Dagmar Glass, and Geoffrey Roper: Middle Eastern Languages and the Print Revolution: A Cross-Cultural Encounter, Westhofen: WVA–Verlag Skulima, 2002.
36. On the Cayols, see Johann Strauss, “Le livre Français d’Istanbul (1730–1908),” in Hitzel (ed.), Livres, pp. 276–301.
37. Women’s magazines were especially successful, and some included engravings and (after 1908) photographs of fashionable women. See Kadin Eserleri Kütuphanesi, Bibliografiya Olushturma Komisyonu, Istanbul; Kütüphanelerindeki eski harfli Türkçe kadin dergileri bibliyografyasi (1869–1927), Istanbul: Metis Yainlari, 1993.
38. See Messick, Calligraphic State.
39. This oral system also constituted a very active (and controlling) form of the interpretative community proposed by Stanley Fish. There was much less of the individual forming his or her own singular ideas, as Kevin Sharpe describes in his study of the reading habits of Sir William Drake in seventeenth-century England. As Sharpe put it, Drake “constituted himself … as a thinking and feeling entity, an ego, a ‘conscious self,’ and as an entity to be so conceived; and he did so through writing and reading.” In the “calligraphic state,” texts were formed communally and more often than not reinforced collective views. Other ways of reading came later, with the greater profusion of printed texts. See Stanley Eugene Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), and Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 340.
40. I find Madigan’s The Qur’an’s Self-Image very persuasive on this topic.
41. See Esin Atil, “The Art of the Book,” in Esin Atil (ed.), Turkish Art, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980, pp. 138–238. This remains an essential introduction, but much work has been done in the last twenty years. Many of these books were state art, and the collective volume The Sultan’s Portrait: Picturing the House of Osman (Istanbul: Isbank, 2000) has contributions by all the main specialists in the field.
42. See The Rescue of Nigbolu by Sultan Bayezid, in Lokman, Hunername, vol. 1, 1584–85, Istanbul: Topkapi Saray H. 1523. fol. 108b.
43. Private citizens also commissioned pictorial art but, like the ruler, kept it out of sight.
44. De Hamel, The Book.
45. See Manguel, History, p. 95.
46. For “vectors and forces,” see Kress and Van Leeuwen, Reading Images. For “icontexts,” see Alain Montandon (ed.), Icontextes (Paris: Ophrys, 1990), and Peter Wagner, Reading Icontexts.
47. James Elkins writes of a Renaissance engraving that it “evokes writing, it has the feeling of writing, or language, not because of some nebulous or unrecognised habits of seeing, but on account of a dozen or so specific qualities that are also shared by writing.” The engraving (from a picture by Mantegna) “is an image that evokes pictures as it evokes writing … Whatever narrative we might want to see here will be the result of a certain reading of the relation of signs.” See Elkins, On Pictures, pp. 160–61.
48. See Gilbert, Reading Images.
49. On the use of images in Protestant propaganda, the work of R. W. Scribner is the basic source. See, especially, Scribner, For the Sake.
50. See Madigan, The Qur’an’s Self-Image.
51. A very good description of this process of learning a language of faith, Arabic, in a culture where the national script is Roman, can be found in Baker, “Presence,” pp. 102–22.
52. See Fabian, Time and the Other.
53. See Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour: Clocks and Modern Temporal Order, trans. Thomas Dunlap, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996, pp. 251–8.
54. See Henry C. Barkley, Bulgaria Before the War During Seven Years’ Experience of European Turkey and Its Inhabitants, London: John Murray, 1877, p. 181.
CHAPTER 14: MALEDICTA: WORDS OF HATE
1. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 145.
2. Ivo Andrić, Bosnian Chronicle, or The Days of the Consuls, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, London: Harvill Press, 1996, pp. 20–21.
3. The act of speaking is described by linguists as possessing three phases. All speech is a dialogue, even if you are listening only with your own interior voice. The first “speech act” is a locution: something is being said. The second is the intention that may be embedded in the utterance. This is described as the illocution. The third is the consequence that the locution has on the hearer, or perlocution. So, a statement like “Go to the devil” has a clear illocutionary force; it is unlikely that the listener will oblige. The perlocutionary outcome might more likely be anger, contempt, or amusement. The relationship between illocution and perlocution is uncertain and unstable. Moreover, even if the exact verbal content of the speech act is not understood, the same process of communication applies.
4. The Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (writing with V. N. Volosinov) described “spreading ripples of verbal responses and resonances around each and every ideological sign.” See Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Volosinov, London: Arnold, 1994, p. 52. There is an animated debate as to whether Bakhtin or Volosinov wrote this, or whether both were involved. For the sake of clarity, I have put Bakhtin’s role first.
5. The italics are my addition, for clarity. See Michael Holquist’s paraphrase of Bakhtin in Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, 2nd ed., London: Routledge, 2002, pp. 21–2. The fable is explained at greater length in Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 68–9.
6. Bakhtin, despite his preoccupation with Dostoyevsky and Rabelais, always regarded himself not as a literary critic but following a line of thought in Kant, as a “philosophical anthropologist.” This seems to me to express very well his preoccupation with the world as perceived, and not the remote fastnesses of theory. See Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin, pp. 277–8. “Enemies in the mirror” is the central theme of Ron Barkai’s remarkable Cristianos y Musulmanes en la España medieval: El enemigo en el espejo, Madrid: Rialp, 1984.
7. This “never-meeting” is also a central theme of both E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India (1924) and of Paul Scott’s novel sequence The Raj Quartet (1966–74). But both suggest that “never-meeting,” although replete with dangers of violence, does not inevitably lead to hatred.
8. Morris, The Bakhtin Reader, pp. 86–9, quoting Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. V. W. McGee, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986.
9. This is the subtitle of a valuable study by Keith Allen and Kate Burridge, Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. I am grateful to Dr. Judy Delin for drawing my attention to this approach.
10. These are terms used in the contemporary Middle East. In 1983 Israeli general Rafael Eitan famously described the Palestinians as drugged cockroaches. More recently another senior figure, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, called Palestinians snakes. More recently still (1997) a senior Palestinian mufti, Ikrama Sabri, described Israeli settlers in the West Bank lands as sons of monkeys and pigs. An Iraqi official, Izzat Ibrahim, used the same terminology in August 2001. For Eitan and Yosef, see American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, news update, message ID mvki2$jkv$1atnnrpl.deja.com, August 11, 2001. For Sabri, see Jay Bushinsky, Jerusalem Post, July 14, 1997. For Ibrahim, see Irish Times, April 2, 2002. For pariah communalism, see Ernest Gellner, Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 100–106.
11. We should not forget that in Rwanda (central Africa) it was Radio and Television of the Thousand Hills (Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines)—RTLM—that promoted the idea that the Tutsi caste were “cockroaches” (inyenzi). This message contributed powerfully to the subsequent genocide, the most disgusting of the twentieth century, post 1945. See Linda Malvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s genocide, London: Zed, 2000.
12. Speech, Reichstag, December 5, 1876.
13. The genesis of this book lay in three lectures given in Vienna in 1999, and other material dating from 1995, 1992, 1980, and 1998. This perhaps accounts for the slightly dated nature of much of the material. Of 116 references, fewer than five date from work published later than the mid-1990s, at a time when there has been intense and productive scholarly activity, illuminating many of the areas with which Lewis concerns himself.
This is a short book—the text no more than 157 pages—but its influence has been out of all proportion to its length. Its propositions are often bizarrely idiosyncratic. Lengthy examples of what went wrong include the Middle East’s failure to adopt Western music, highly significant to Lewis because it required combined and unified action by different performers. This produced a “result that is greater than the sum of the parts.” From this, he says much follows. “With a little imagination one may discern the same feature in other aspects of Western culture—in democratic politics, and in team games, both of which require the cooperation, in harmony if not in unison, of different performers playing different parts for a common purpose. In parliamentary politics and team games, there is a further cooperation in conflict—rival teams striving to defeat their opponents but nevertheless acting under an agreed set of rules, and in an agreed interval of time. One may also detect the same feature in two distinctly Western literary creations, the novel and the theatre.”
The nub of the issue is that “polyphony, in whatever form, requires exact synchronisation. The ability to synchronise, to match times exactly, and for this purpose to measure times exactly, is an essential feature of modernity and therefore a requirement of modernisation.” Unpunctuality has nullified many of the bright prospects in the East. What Went Wrong, pp. 128–9.
There are examples of a Middle Eastern “faltering of cultural self-confidence” in admitting Western innovations into the centrality of Islamic culture. However, his fundamental premises keep shifting back and forth. Where on page 136 the East has failed to adopt the novel and theater, eleven pages on we learn that “the European forms of literature—the novel, the short story, the play and the rest—are now completely adopted and absorbed. Great numbers of original writings of this type are being produced in all these countries and more than that, become the normal forms of self expression.” But unexpectedly this is not evidence of progress and modernization, but of a further “faltering of cultural self confidence.” “Some modern writing in Middle-eastern languages … reads like a literal translation from English or French.” In sports, too, the Arab Middle East falters. “It was the English who invented football and its analogue—parliamentary politics.” There are, he tells us, “remarkable resemblances between the two and both stem come from the same national genius” (p. 150).
14. John Adamson, Sunday Telegraph, May 25, 2003. His review concluded: “President Bush may let slip the C-word in his press conferences, but what is at stake in the current conflict is something far more pervasive in its implications than the religious feuds that fed the binary hatreds of old.”
15. One of the first books printed by Ibrahim Müteferrika in Constantinople was entitled Rational Bases for the Polities of Nations (1731). It described the various forms of government practiced in Europe, and in particular the popular representation that underpinned the Dutch and English polities. Yet Müteferrika held the common view that the success of the Western nations lay in their military strength: it answered his question “Why do Christian nations, which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations, begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?” Cited in Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 42–3. The Ottomans engaged in what Dankwart Rustow neatly terms “defensive modernization”: see Rustow in P. M. Holt, Ann K. S. Lambton, and Bernard Lewis, The Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1970, pp. 676–86.
16. There existed a clear parallel in Western society. The religious transformation of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was still perceived in two quite distinct ways three centuries later, depending entirely upon whether you were a Catholic or a Protestant. For a Protestant, winning the liberation of human souls from the antique shackles of a tyrannical, decrepit papacy was a war worth fighting. For a Catholic, the negative consequences of this sundering of Christendom far outweighed any benefits. This unbridgeable void continued through the nineteenth century, and on into the twentieth. The Catholic Church eventually evolved its own response to modernity and democracy. In sanctioning popular Catholic action (Christian democracy) Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891 (on the right and duties of labor and capital), declared: “It will be easy for Christian working men to solve it aright if they will form associations, choose wise guides, and follow on the path which with so much advantage to themselves and the common weal was trodden by their fathers before them.” In accommodating to modernity, the church assimilated what it needed, and then ignored the rest.
17. Professor Carol B. Stapp first drew my attention to the long persistence of non-Darwinian science teaching in Tennessee. “The Butler Act forbidding the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools was not repealed until 1967 … The issue was not long dormant, however. In 1973 the state legislature passed an ‘equal time’ law which legitimised the use of the bible as a scientific reference. The law was challenged in state and federal courts by civil liberties and teachers groups, and was overturned by the Federal Court of Appeals.” See “The History of Evolution in Tennessee,” http://fp.bio.utk.edu/darwin/essays/history.html (November 9, 2003). In the U.S. Supreme Court the case of Loving v. the State of Virginia of 1967 overturned the conviction of Richard and Mildred Loving under a 1922 Virginia statute that “if any white person intermarry with a colored person or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony.” The Lovings were sentenced to a year in prison, suspended provided they left the state. Thirty states had passed similar laws, and sixteen were still in force at the time of the Supreme Court decision.
18. David Kelley suggests how this sometimes persists into the twenty-first century in the United States. See “The Party of Modernity,” Cato Policy Report XXV, no. 3 (May-June 2003).
19. Conversely, those who did not turned to social resistance. The rural minority adopted anarchism in Andalucia, vagabondage and armed resistance in southern Italy. See T. Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868–1903, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Stuart Woolf, A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints of Political Change, London: Methuen, 1979; John Dickie, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999.
20. Charles Kurzman depicts modernism as “the imperialist expansion of Christian Europe, which threatened Islam in at least five registers,” that is, militarily, economically, cognitively, politically, culturally. See Charles Kurzman (ed.), Modernist Islam 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 6–7. His introduction (pp. 3–27) to the collection of texts is an excellent, succinct statement of the issues.
21. The Islamic modernists used lectures, newspapers, and the burgeoning periodical press to publicize their ideas, rather than the scholarly texts, replete with citations and authorities of the traditional literature of argument and dispute. See ibid., pp. 14–16.
22. Hodgson, Venture, 3:274–5. For another view, see Elie Kedourie’s sardonic squib Afghani and ‘Abduh: An Essay on Religious Unbelief and Political Activism in Modern Islam, London: Frank Cass, 1966, reissued 1997.
23. The most readable source remains Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age: 1798–1939, Cambridge, 1970. Two valuable collections of material in translation by a wide range of thinkers are edited by Charles Kurzman. Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. On an earlier period, Modernist Islam: A Sourcebook 1840–1940, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
24. For a brief statement of these ideas, see Understanding the Evil of Innovation: Bid’ah, Riyadh: International Islamic Publishing House, 1997.
25. This was much more akin to Christian traditions of disputation and argument, as in the Spanish debates over the Moriscos in the sixteenth century.
26. See Edward Mortimer, Faith and Power: The Politics of Islam, London: Faber, 1982, pp. 113–7.
27. See Emad Eldin Shahin, Through Muslim Eyes: M. Rashid Rida and the West, Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1993.
28. See Dilip Hiro, Holy Wars: The Rise of Islamic Fundamentalism, London: Routledge, 1989, pp. 60–87.
29. Cited in John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 135.
30. See Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East, New York: Macmillan, 1986, p. 193.
31. Johannes J. G. Jansen, “Tafsir, Ijma and Modern Muslim Extremism,” Orient 27, no. 4 (1986).
32. Jansen stated in an interview: “I don’t know when it was written: probably in the spring preceding the murder of Sadat. Five hundred copies were printed. The group started to distribute and sell the book, but then realized that the Egyptian secret police would be able to locate the group by tracing these copies. So they burned 450 copies. Fifty copies survived, and photocopies of these are bound in libraries all over the world. After the murder of Sadat, the prosecutor added the document to the case file, so the lawyer of the accused also got a copy. He gave it away to an Egyptian newspaper, Al Ahram, which printed it. The article appeared in December 1981. It was sold out within hours and was never reprinted in that form. If people are sentenced to death, the Egyptian State Mufti has to condone the sentence. The Mufti gave a long fatwa explaining why the murderers of Sadat were wrong. But as a footnote to this fatwa, he added the full text of the document The Neglected Duty. That appeared in a series of thousands of pages, but the fascicule in which that document was reprinted sold out quicker than the rest of the volume. Then there was a third edition which was made probably in Jordan or Israel: it made use of the newspaper text, but left out a number of things that may have seen sensitive in the context of an Islamic kingdom, as Jordan is.” Religioscope, P.O. Box 83, 1705 Fribourg, Switzerland, February 8, 2002.
33. Osama bin Laden extended the doctrine still further in his pronouncement of February 1998. “These crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger and Muslims. And ulema [Muslim scholars] have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad [holy war] is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries.
“On that basis, and in compliance with God’s order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims.
“The ruling is to kill the Americans and their allies is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it, in order to liberate the Al Aqsa mosque [Jerusalem] and the Holy Mosque [Mecca] … This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God … We call on every Muslim who believes in God and wished to be rewarded to comply with God’s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.”
Bin Laden’s interpretation is false and misleading. The tradition of jihad is as a collective and not an individual duty, to be imposed only through proper authority. Even then it has to be carried out within limits so as to be lawful. His interpretation sets aside all limits and constraints.
34. For a thoughtful (but controversial) view of “Islamism” see Francis Fukuyama and Nadav Samin, “Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam? A Modernizing Force? Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2002.
35. December 8, 1986.
36. “Satan” and Shaitan sound the same but their meaning is not identical. See The Light of Islam: The Infallibles, chapter 4, at http://home.swipnet.se/islam/imamsajjad.htm (November 9, 2003).
37. Khomeini had always viewed his revolution as pan-Islamic, transcending Sunni-Shi’i historical divergences, directed against the common enemy—namely, the twin forces of modernity and secularization and their nominally Muslim admirers, the “Westoxicated” (gharbzada in Persian; mustaghribun in Arabic). Hopes for such a pan-Islamic revolution were high in Tehran at the beginning of the 1980s. See Emmanuel Sivan, “The Holy War Tradition in Islam,” Orbis, spring 1998.
38. English, German, Hebrew, Italian, French, Spanish, Turkish, and Russian.
39. See MEMRI Special Dispatch Series no. 486, March 25, 2003.
40. See MEMRI Special Report no. 10, September 26, 2002, “Friday Sermons in Saudi Mosques: Review and Analysis.”
41. To say nothing about the vicious insults that, say, militant Protestants use about Catholics, or how mainstream Muslims attack Islam’s schismatics.
42. Jefferson wrote to the Virginian George Wythe, who held the first chair of law in the United States, on August 13, 1786, “Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish & improve the law for educating the common people.” See Gordon C. Lee (ed.), Crusade Against Ignorance: Thomas Jefferson on Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
43. Pastor Dino Andreadis, the senior pastor of Park Road Church, Ontario, at http://www.brokenhearted.org/india.html (November 9, 2003).
44. He is based at the First Church of the Gospel Ministry, Wooster, Ohio.
45. The outreach of the Victory Network may be found at http://www.victorynetwork.org (November 9, 2003).
46. Le Roy Finto on Jerris Bullard’s India. This site has moved and reconstituted. On November 9, 2003, it was to be found at http://www.manassaschurch.org/india_6.htm.
47. I have deliberately chosen examples that related the modern idea of “crusade” to both Hindu and Muslim communities.
48. Bernard Lewis, “Jihad vs. Crusade: A Historian’s Guide to the New War,” Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001. See http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=95001224 (November 9, 2003). Here, as he often does, Lewis begins with the combative statement, and then goes in a more contemplative vein. However, the printed responses to his piece, which reflected a wide range of differing opinions, did not suggest any acceptance of his view that crusades were now only “a vigorous campaign in a good cause.”
49. At Princeton University in April 1999, the president of the university Christian group, Phil Belin, was widely quoted as saying: “We know the negative connotations associated with crusades turns people away from associating with us and listening to the gospel message.” The context of Belin’s observation was reported in Yale Daily News, April 8, 1999. The Yale chapter of the Campus Crusade for Christ had changed its name to Yale Students for Christ. The reason, as its president, Dave Mung, observed, was “We wanted to have a name that more accurately reflected the nature of our group. Sometimes the CCC name connotes preconceived negative notions.” Belin was commenting on this change.
50. There is good reason for this. In Indonesia and elsewhere, civil strife between Muslims and Christians is often termed a jihad by Muslim groups, even though its causes are largely political and economic.
51. The term “fundamentalism” is often used in a very broad sense, but I believe it should be applied only to those Christian communities and communicators that root their thinking in the literal truth of the Bible. It derives from the twelve short books, collectively entitled The Fundamentals, which were published between 1910 and 1915. Each had a print of 3 million copies, with a free copy sent to every pastor, teacher of Christian religion, and theology student in the United States. Many more were sold to the public. See Nancy T. Ammerman, “North American Protestant Fundamentalism,” in Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, Fundamentalisms Observed, Fundamentalism Project vol. 1, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
52. In 1919, the World Christian Fundamentals Association was founded to advance the cause of a pure biblical Christianity. One of its progenitors was A. C. Dixon, an editor of The Fundamentals. Like the new jihadists, the Christian fundamentalists (a term which they applied to themselves after 1920) were connected by a chain of personal connections, discipleship, and institutions like Bible colleges, Bible study institutes, seminaries, and “crusades.” The name was coined by Curtis Lee Laws, editor of the Baptist Watchman-Examiner. Details of current crusades may be found via http://www.christianitytoday.com.
53. These details are drawn from the Faith Defenders Web site at http://www.faithdefenders.com (November 9, 2003).
54. It still has a modern resonance. Recently the curse was turned into an art object. It was carved on a large stone and placed in the center of Carlisle, the last city in England before the Scottish border. In the foot and mouth outbreak of 2001, it was publicly suggested that the disease was a result of the ancient curse, and the current archbishop was asked to lift it. The whole curse extends to some 1,500 words. The powerful General Commination remains in the repertoire of the Church of England and is still occasionally pronounced. See http://www.cathtelecom.com/news/111/29.php (November 9, 2003). For the text, see http://www.geocities.com/~betapisces/academy/glasgow.htm (November 9, 2003).
55. In 1989 Monsignor Philip Reilly set up his movement Helpers of God’s Precious Infants, based on peaceful prayerful public witness at the abortion sites—or “Calvary” sites as he calls them. See http://www.iol.ie/~hlii/helpers_of_infants.html (November 9, 2003). Reilly’s movement was nonviolent but for the wider range of activities, violent and nonviolent see http://www.fyleserva.com/cgnews (November 9, 2003). More recently, the Reverend Alan Perkins’s sermon is a typical example of a traditional Christian discourse. “God is not at peace with your sin. He is at war with your sin. And if you choose to abandon the field of battle; if you refuse to engage the enemy of your soul in mortal combat, then the result will be destruction, and not salvation. Do you think that kind of imagery is exaggerated or overblown? Peter didn’t. Listen: ‘Dear friends, I urge you, as aliens and strangers in the world, to abstain from sinful desires, which war against your soul.’–1 Peter 2:11, NIV. Sin is at war with your soul. That isn’t just rhetoric; it’s reality.” “At War with Sin,” February 9, 2003, http://www.journeychurchonline.org/messages.htm (November 9, 2003).
56. For example Townhall.com, which calls it the Evil Empire speech, but the words were not used in the text. See http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/reagan/speech/empire.html (November 9, 2003).
57. For Ronald W. Reagan speeches see http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/resource/speeches/rrpubpap.asp (November 9, 2003).
58. Reagan did quote Schiller—“The most pious man can’t stay in peace if it doesn’t please his evil neighbor”—in his speech to the Bundestag on June 9, 1982. This appears in a footnote in the Public Papers of Ronald Reagan.
59. Many of his misspeakings related to memory, which may well have been the early manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease. Thus he forgot Princess Diana’s name and called her “Princess David.” But when working from a script, he gave reliable performances.
60. The term was first coined of Reagan.
61. He had some connections. In 1970, five members of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship prayed with then California governor Reagan at his home in Sacramento. One, a former Lear executive, was overcome with the Spirit and began to speak in the voice of God. He compared Reagan to a king, and prophesied that Reagan would “reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” if he continued to walk in God’s way. It was suggested that Reagan took the prophesy very seriously. See http://www.pir.org/gw/fgbmfi.txt (June 10, 2002). Clinton had his “spiritual advisers” and was rooted in a Southern Baptist heritage. See http://www.llano.net/baptist/presidentsadvisers.htm (November 9, 2003). During the Monica Lewinsky crisis he turned to the Reverend Jesse Jackson for spiritual support.
62. See Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, “The Spirituality of President Bush,” http://www. pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week421/news.html (November 9, 2003).
63. Bob Woodward, Bush at War, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002, p. 16.
64. Ibid., p. 38.
65. Washington Post, May 31, 2000.
66. This text subsequently was massaged to change the text as delivered. At a commonly used Web site, Quoteworld, the word “crusade” does not appear in the transcript of the speech; http://www.quoteworld.org/docs/gbrem926.php (November 9, 2003).
67. “This President regards words as unusually binding … The President likes a language of very clear moral meaning. He thought the word evil was the word he wanted to use.” Eddie Mair interview with David Frum, BBC Radio 4, Broadcasting House, June 23, 2002.
68. Presidential News and Speeches, September 16, 2001, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010916-2.a.ram (November 9, 2003).
69. The linguistic technique of conversational analysis (CA) suggests that seeking the word in this way indicates that it is problematical. Nowhere else in the conference does Bush use the same pattern of phrasing. On the practice and potential for CA, see Paul ten Have, Doing Conversational Analysis, London: Sage, 1999, pp. 28–34. I am grateful to Bethan Benwell for introducing me to this form of analysis and for helping me through its complexities.
70. See http://whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/01/20020129–11.html (November 9, 2003).
71. Woodward, Bush, pp. 141–3.
72. Ibid., pp. 52–3.
73. “The Evildoers and the Misled,” December 6, 2001, http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/120601.html (November 9, 2003).
74. Mark 5:9.
75. Bassam Tibi, Islam Between Culture and Politics, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, p. 6.
76. Charles Kurzman (ed.), Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 25.
77. Fareed Zakaria spoke in these terms on Start the Week, BBC Radio Four, presented by Andrew Marr, May 16, 2003.
78. And of course Egypt, and some of the states of North Africa.
79. See Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Standardized official “national” dress for gulf Arab men has in fact evolved in its current form only in relatively recent times. See Andrew Wheatcroft, Bahrain in Original Photographs: 1880–1961, London: Kegan Paul International, 1988, pp. 72–81. For the issue of dress see Easa Saleh Al-Gurg, The Wells of Memory: An Autobiography, London: John Murray, 1998, p. 54.
80. For the nineteenth-century response to the Ottomans see Reinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in 19th Century Turkey, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.
81. For example his analysis of General William G Boykin’s “dissembling” in Newsweek, October 27, 2003. He concludes, “Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Boykin’s remark is its utter ignorance.”
82. Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, April 21, 2003, based on The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
83. See Marion Farouk Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, rev. ed., London: I. B. Tauris, 2001, pp. 179–80.
84. For a full treatment of the game see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone,_Paper,_Scissors (November 9, 2003).
85. The reasons for this pattern of misconception are not clear. It is not for lack of high-quality research and study. For example, an informed and carefully analytical approach to the issues in Iraq from a U.S. perspective has been produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. A report by project director Frederick Barton and Bathsheba Crocker, “A Wiser Peace: An Action Strategy for Post-Conflict Iraq,” outlines ten key actions that the United States and the United Nations must take to prepare to rebuild Iraq’s security, governance, justice, and economic sectors. The study “Postwar Iraq: Are We Ready?” may also be found at www.csis.org (November 9, 2003).
86. I first heard this in the Texas Panhandle, but this version comes from a Methodist sermon: A Texas farmer had a new mule he needed to have trained; it would not do anything he wanted it to—not even go into its stall in the barn. In exasperation, he hired a muleskinner to come out and break the mule in. The old mule tamer arrived out at the farm and had the owner explain what he wanted done. The old man looked at the mule, then at the farmer, reached down, and picked up a fence post that was lying on the ground, and swinging the post as hard as he could, hit the mule right between the eyes. The mule shook its head, braced its two front legs just as stubbornly as before, and refused to move. The mule tamer swung the post and again hit the mule between the eyes, this time twice as hard as before. The blow knocked the mule to his knees. As it struggled back to its feet, the old man went around to the back of the mule and hit it on the rear with a third blow. He then dropped the post onto the ground, caught the mule by its halter, and calmly led it into the barn. By this time, the farmer was furious; he threw his hat down on the ground, cursed, and yelled at the old man, “What are you doing!? I hired you to come out here and tame my mule, not to kill him!” While he ranted and raved, the old man just stood there. He looked up at the sky, then down at the ground. Finally, he just spat some tobacco juice to the side (he was chewing Red Man), and looked the farmer squarely in the eyes. “It appears to me that you’re a mighty good farmer,” said the skinner. “You got a good stand of cotton in the field out yonder, and your rice paddies look mighty good—but you don’t know nothin’ about taming mules!” “What do you mean?” asked the farmer. The old mule tamer continued, “You see, when I want to teach a mule something, the first thing I do is get his attention.” See http://www.cmpage.org/texasmule.html (November 9, 2003).
87. But of course some viruses, like smallpox, can be prevented by inoculation or vaccination. For a coherent view for the recent evolution of terrorist methods see Laden and Roya Boroumand, “Terror, Islam and Democracy,” Journal of Democracy, April 2002.
88. See United States Institute of Peace, “Special Report: Islamic Perspectives on Peace and Violence,” January 24, 2002. “What is often viewed as a clash of civilizations is really a clash of symbols … The symbols on one side are headscarves, turbans [my italics] and other symbols of Islamic expression that Westerners often find repellent, just as fundamentalist Muslims view much of Western culture as anti-Islamic.” For an elaborate analysis of the clash of civilizations from a highly nuanced radical “Islamic” perspective, see The Inevitability of the Clash of Civilization, London: Al-Khilafah Publications, 2002.
89. See the convenient collection at http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/AmericanIdeal/yardstick/pr8_quotes.html (November 9, 2003) for the debate on the idea of happiness. For example, the “Kings or parliaments could not give the rights essential to happiness … We claim them from a higher source—from the King of kings, and Lord of all the earth. They are not annexed to us by parchments and seals. They are created in us by the decrees of Providence … It would be an insult on the divine Majesty to say, that he has given or allowed any man or body of men a right to make me miserable. If no man or body of men has such a right, I have a right to be happy. If there can be no happiness without freedom, I have a right to be free. If I cannot enjoy freedom without security of property, I have a right to be thus secured.” John Dickinson (Reply to a Committee in Barbadoes, 1766).
90. See http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres16.html (November 9, 2003).
Conclusion
CHAPTER 15: THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
1. It was much more successful than the comparable effort in China.
2. See this page–this page.
3. See R. D. Kloian, The Armenian Genocide: News Accounts from the Armenian Press (1915–1922), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, p. 266.
4. It is neither a new Rome nor (even more implausibly) some kind of restoration of Britain’s global sway.
5. Letter to W. S. Smith, November 13, 1787, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd, vol. 1, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1955, p. 3.
6. See Michael Kammen, Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992, p. 4. There were several other images of apotheosis for the first president.
7. See “The Apotheosis of George Washington: Brumidi’s Fresco and Beyond,” by Adriana Rissetto et al., http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/gw/gwmain.html (November 9, 2003).
8. On the address and its rhetorical context, see Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America, New York: Touchstone, 1992.
9. See William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
10. Talking to the public in a Fireside Chat on December 9, 1941, FDR called the Japanese “powerful and resourceful gangsters.” See Russell D. Buhite and David W. Levy, FDR’s Fireside Chats, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.
11. See John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, London: Faber, 1986. As Bakhtin observed, we always have a choice as to which register we use.
12. Morgenthau presidential diary, August 19, 1944, cited in Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan, 1941–5, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 159.
13. See Morris’s summary prologue to TR at the beginning of his biography, which captures this complexity and his subject’s seeming contradictions. See Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, New York: Modern Library, 2001, pp. 9–29.
14. Rather arbitrarily, I have classed as substantial works books of more than 176 pages that were not simply reprints of material that had first been printed elsewhere. There are several discordant views on Roosevelt’s literary talents. Unquestionably, his best work is his four-volume study The Winning of the West.
15. See Stephen Ponder, Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897–1933, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999, p. 18. Ponder begins with the relationship between McKinley and the press; but the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt in the White House provided a complete shift of gear. As one of Roosevelt’s aides said: “He was his own press agent and he had a splendid comprehension of news and its value.”
16. Roosevelt’s “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress available at http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/national/speeches/spch2.html (November 9, 2003).
17. See Buhite and Levy, Fireside Chats.
18. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/bush.statement (November 9, 2003).
19. I am not thinking here so much of the verbal idiosyncrasies that have occasioned so much innocent humor, but the words that are “wrong,” off-key, for the circumstances in which they are spoken. President George W. Bush is much more prone to this kind of misspeaking than his father.
20. Official transcript. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/07/20030702-3.html (November 9, 2003).
21. Ibid. I have changed “them” to “ ’em,” because this clearly is what the audio recording presents rather than the tidied-up version of the transcript. These minor variations in tone are significant.
22. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. The whole final section is significant. “There is neither a first or a last word and there are no limits to a dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future). Even ‘past’ meaning, that is, those born in the dialogue of past centuries, can never be stable (finalized, ended once and for all)—they will always change (be renewed, in the process of subsequent, future development of the dialogue). At any moment in the development of the dialogue there are immense boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings, but at certain moments of a dialogue’s subsequent development along the way they are recalled and invigorated in a new form (in a new context). Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”
23. See Allen Brill, The Right Christians: “It is time for the Christian Right to meet the right Christians. Prime Minister Mahathir’s main point was a valuable one: Muslims must embrace modernity. That was bitter medicine for fundamentalists who would like to go retreat into some idealized past when Islam was dominant throughout the Mediterranean world, so Mahathir took the seemingly easy course of adding plenty of the ‘sugar’ of old-fashioned anti-Semitism. While the broader world audience would have been ready to applaud him for his condemnation of terrorism, his giving in to the temptation to tell his audience what it wanted to hear—Jews are evil and powerful—made that impossible.” See October 18, 2003, http://www.therightchristians.org.
24. For Mahathir’s full address, see the version reported at Millat Online, October 16, 2003, http://www.millat.com/events/oic/index.htm (November 9, 2003). The whole address totaled some fifty-eight sections, and the three sentences about the Holocaust which principally appalled Western opinion was in section 39 (“We are actually very strong. 1.3 billion people cannot be simply wiped out. The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million. But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them.”) In section 34 he said, “It cannot be that there is no other way. 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews. There must be a way. And we can only find a way if we stop to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategise and then to counter attack.” But in section 42 he declared: “We also know that not all non-Muslims are against us. Some are well disposed towards us. Some even see our enemies as their enemies. Even among the Jews there are many who do not approve of what the Israelis are doing.”
25. See Jerry Chamkis at http://lists.gp-us.org/pipermail/texgreen/2003-August/002924. html (November 9, 2003).
26. See Brill (note 23): “At the time, what he said produced not criticism but accolades. Now that a broader community has heard what he said while in uniform, it’s a different story.”
27. There is an Encyclopaedia of Dr Mahathir Bin Mohammad, Prime Minister of Malaysia. At the book’s launch “Dr Mahathir in his recorded appreciation speech that was aired to the audience, thanked everyone concerned for their willingness to put together all the important thoughts, ideas and vision in one book. He said the encyclopaedia was a multi-volume work that contained his speeches and ideas during his tenure as the Prime Minister of Malaysia which reflected his views, concerns and ideas on important issues. He also hoped that the encyclopaedia would be one of the important references on the modern Muslim world in the future.” See Barisan Nasional at http://www.bn.org.my/cgi-bin/newsdetail.asp?newsID=989 (November 9, 2003).
28. Allen Brill, October 18, 2003. See http://www.therightchristians.org/archives/week_2003_10_12.html.
29. John Torpey talks—rightly—of a rapidly developing “memory industry”: “Memory emerges with such force on the academic and public agenda today, according to one critic, ‘precisely because it figures as a therapeutic alternative to historical discourse.’ Such discourse is constrained by the unpleasant facts that bestrew the canvas of the past, whereas memory talk allows for a subjective reworking of those events combined with the bland prospect of ‘healing.’ The excavation of memory and its mysteries salves buried yearnings for a presently unreachable future.” See John Torpey, “The Pursuit of the Past: A Polemical Perspective,” in Peter Seixas (ed.), Theorizing Historical Consciousness, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. John Torpey was kind enough to allow me to quote from a final draft of his chapter. He is citing Kerwin Lee Klein.
30. Understanding how historical memory works—how these ideas of the past are formed—is now becoming imperative. At Harvard, the twentieth-century historian of Europe Charles S. Maier has drawn a useful metaphor from nuclear physics for the way that historical memory functions. He proposes that there are two kinds of memory, hot and cold; some memories are like a “hot” isotope—plutonium—that remains dangerously radioactive for a very long time. He suggests that memories of the Nazi atrocities will remain “hot” for far longer than those of equivalent Soviet crimes against humanity. Cultural or social memories are formed in different circumstances, and it is those circumstances which define whether they are inherently long-lasting. He contrasts the carefully organized and closely targeted terror of the Nazis with the more random—stochastic—murderousness of the purges and deportations in the USSR. The memories from the former, he speculates, will prove “hotter” then those created by the latter. “To borrow a metaphor from nuclear physics, between a traumatic collective memory with a long half-life—a plutonium of history that fouls the landscape with its destructive radiation for centuries—and a much less perduring fall-out from, say, the isotope tritium, which dissipates relatively quickly. This paper is not an argument about which experience was the more atrocious, but about which has remained engraved in memory—historical, personal—more indelibly.” He then distinguishes between the closely planned strategy of “targeted” terror used by the Nazis and the more aleatoric, or “stochastic” terror of Stalinism. Targeted terror, Maier suggests, produced “hot” or long-term memory, stochastic terror created “cold” or short-term memory. See Charles S. Maier, “Hot Memory … Cold Memory: On the Political Half-Life of Fascist and Communist Memory,” Transit Europäische Revue, 2002. This is available online at http://www.iwm.at/t-22txt5.htm (November 9, 2003). But with some of the memories that I have discussed, “a long time” means not decades but centuries. Over that length of time, they have not behaved quite as Maier’s nuclear half-life model would suggest. Over time “hot” memories do not slowly transmute and diminish; rather they become more like an epidemic disease: lying latent for long periods and then, suddenly, when conditions are right, producing a new outbreak. While nuclear half-life represents an inexorable process, a slow and unalterable change, epidemics occur only when the right conditions are present. Nor do epidemic diseases remain static. Influenza, for example, mutates, and each epidemic may result from a different variant of the virus. There is a continuing uncertainty as to how epidemics spread. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, in The Transmission of Epidemic Influenza (New York: Plenum Press, 1992), effectively transformed the older notions of simple person-to-person transmission into a much broader theory dependent on climate, time of year, and context. See Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, who, in “The Dilemma of Influenza,” Current Science 78, no. 9 (May 10, 2000), pages 1057–9, suggest it may be related to sunspot activity.
31. David Frum, after quitting as a presidential speechwriter, became a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a prolific columnist. Richard Perle, who chaired the Defense Department’s Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003, resigned from the board in February 2004. He too is a resident fellow at the AEI. As the authors say, An End to Evil was “written at high speed through high summer”—presumably 2003. See David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, New York: Random House, 2003, p. 284.
32. See George Orwell, “Appendix: The Principles of Newspeak,” in Orwell, 1984; http://sami.is.free.fr/Oeuvres/orwell_1984_newspeak.html.
33. Frum and Perle, An End to Evil, p. 9.
34. There is a huge literature on the Holocaust, but on this specific aspect, the most dispassionate work is by Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. But see also Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2003.
35. Frum and Perle, p. 279.
36. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, The Malleus Malleficarum, trans. Montague Summers, London: Pushkin Press, 1948, Part 1, Question 14.
37. Sir Keith Thomas, in Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), presents a world in which magical cunning was one way to counteract a dangerous and uncertain world. However, a wise or “cunning” woman skilled with herbs and folk medicine could easily be constituted “a witch” by authority, often as a result of jealousy or a local denunciation. Thus it was possible to be a valued member of village society one week, and a witch the next. “Witch” was thus an unstable category, dependent less on what you did and much more on how authority and your neighbors decided to regard it.
38. According to Ian Bostridge, in “Witchcraft Repealed,” the intellectual foundations for the existence of witchcraft had “slipped” by the 1720s. See Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (eds.), Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 316.
39. First, through the inquisitor Alonso de Salazar in 1612. While he had no problem with dispatching heretics, he did not believe in the existence of witches or witchcraft. See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition, 1609–1614, Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 1980. Charles Williams in his study of witchcraft honors his “immortal memory.”
40. Chadwick Hansen, Witchcraft at Salem, London: Arrow, 1971, p. 260.
41. Maier, Doing History, Doing Justice, is talking about the Israel-Palestine conflict. He here (274–5) lays out a strong argument for the “historical” narrative in the context of analyzing one recent “rational” attempt to resolve the problems of a malevolent past through truth and reconciliation commissions (TRC). He provides a convincing analysis of both the strengths and weaknesses of this approach. See Robert I. Rotberg and Dennis Thompson, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 261–78. I am grateful for Geoffrey Best’s lead to this material.