History

Norman London — William Fitz Stephen

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Norman London
William Fitz Stephen
109 pages including index
published in 1990

Now here’s an interesting little booklet. The meat of it consists on a treatise on Norman London, originally written by one William Fitz Stephen for his Life of Thomas Beckett, sometime before 1183. It’s therefore as close an eyewitness account of Norman London as we could ever get. Though interesting, this in itself is not enough to make a book of course. It is therefore partnered by another, more modern essay on the city, written in 1934 by Frank M. Stenton, a renowned historian of Anglo-Saxon England. These two pieces combined from the basis for what’s perhaps the most useful feature of the book, the maps of Norman London at the back of it.

There’s not really much more to say about Norman London. It’s an informative little booklet, but nothing more than that. What’s more, as the Stenton essay is more than seventy years old, it can’t help but be outdated, as new insights, more archaeological research and new theories will have altered our views of the period. I don’t think this would give a good picture of what we thought the Norman city looked like anymore. But this doesn’t make it worthless, if only because it still includes that eyewitness account of London, one of the few if not the only one we have of London at that particular point in time. The Stenton essay on the other hand is more of interest now for its own inherent historical value than for its accuracy.

Fitz Stephen’s depiction of London is that of the civic booster, the Londoner proud of his city, painting a rosy picture of the daily life of its inhabitants. It’s written with a naive enthusiasm, which is tempered by Stenton’s much more business-like summing up of what the city of London was like around 1100. His picture is based on not just Fitz Stephen’s account of course, but other sources as well, combined with archaeological research. So yeah, I bought this for a couple of euro on a book fair and read it in about an hour. An interesting curiosity, great to get a quick picture of Norman London, if not perhaps the most up to date picture.

The Empress Theodora — James Allan Evans

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The Empress Theodora
James Allan Evans
146 pages including index
published in 2002

Ken MacLeod once said that “history is the trade secret of science fiction”, but sometimes it’s abused and nowhere more so than in the cribbing from early Byzantine history that has been ongoing ever since Isaac Asimov first put in thinly disguised expys of emperor Justinian and general Belisarius in his Foundationtrilogy. Largely overlooked in these sort of appropriations is the empress Theodora, who as James Allan Evans shows in The Empress Theodora – Partner of Justinian was just as important as her husband in determining the course of the Byzantine empire.

There were quite a few strong woman emperors in Byzantine history, but most of them either ruled through their weak husbands, or as regents ruling in place of their still minor children. Theodora on the other hand ruled together with Justinian, a strong emperor himself. Their rule was a true partnership and it’s this relationship and Theodora’s role in it that Evans wants to examine here. At the same time The Empress Theodora is also a concise biography/history accessible to lay people like me.

The main problem with writing a biography of somebody who died in 548 CE is of course finding reliable sources. Archaeology won’t really help you much in pinning down the details of any given individual ruler’s life, though it can help with establishing the broad outlines of their reigns (e.g. through coins minted during their rule, or statues dedicated to their thriumps). Therefore the biographer needs to depend on the fortitious survival of primary sources dealing with their chosen subject. For Theodora luckily there are several such sources; contemporary histories, religious treatments and so on, but there’s one source that throws its shadow over the rest: the Secret History of Procopius.

Procopius was an official on the general staff (so to speak) of Belisarius and a gifted writer and historian. As such he wrote a history of Justinian’s wars, The History of the Wars in which he of course biggened up both the emperor and Belisarius, which is the most important reason why the latter is still so well known. As what you might call a court historian he was of course full of praise for the emperor and Theodora both, but in private his opinions were much less flattering. The Secret History is where all this saved up bile spewed out and Theodora does not come out looking well.

According to Procopius Theodora was born and raised in the theatre, a whore who used her sexual favours to become empress and kept using it to keep Justinian in her thrall and through him ruin the empire. Nonsense obviously, the rantings of a jealous man with the usual accusations against any woman who gains any sort of power in a patriarchal society like the Byzantine Empire, but not without a grain of truth, as Evans argues. That Theodora was of a humble background, even a theatrical background has been claimed in other sources as well, sources not as obviously hostile to her. Procopius therefore is likely to have been largely right about her background, just very slanted in how he presented it and biased in his interpretations, which has coloured later views of her.

James Allan Evans tries to look past the bias of Procopius and other sources to the real Theodora and the pictures he sketches of her is appealing. He argues that she was a true partner to Justinian as empress, also functioning as a sort of “loyal opposition” to him, the one person who could stand against him when necessary without fear of her life. This was especially important in the religious conflicts that dominated Justinian’s reign.

It’s hard to judge the importance of Christian dogma in the politics and daily life of the Byzantine Empire, but it’s fair to say these were more than academic debates. Once the Roman Empire had become an explicitely Christian one it was always going to become monoreligous, with only one kind of Christianity allowed. Which kind was decided by the ruling emperor and Justinian followed his immediate predecessor by supporting the Chalcedonian doctrine, against the Monophysites, who were now heretic. Theodora on the other hand was herself inclined towards Monophysitism and supported and protected them, to the point where she was later made a saint. Evans argues that she also functioned as a lightening rod, drawing dissenters towards her, with the end result being that Monophysite dissent could largely be channeled, rather than run wild. Theodora played the same roles in more down to earth political matters as well, as Evans e.g. shows how she influenced Justinian into putting more effort in his Italian campaigns to retake the old Western Empire.

At just under 120 pages, The Empress Theodora is more of a sketch than a full biography of course, but it’s a great way to start. Evans is a clear and careful writer, taking care to note the limits of his sources. Glad I took this out of the library.

Charlemagne — Rosamond McKitterick

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Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008

I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.

Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.

Charlemagne is divided into five chapters. In the first McKitterick tackles the problem of how Charlemagne has been represented in late eight century and early ninth century sources, like the Annales regni francorum produced during his lifetime and revised shortly after, as well as purely posthumous sources like the Vita Karoli. The largest problem with these sources is of course the dating of them, which is far from easy; obviously it makes a difference if a source is truly contemporary or written several decades after his reign, with memories having become unreliable in the meantime and political useful interpretations of it having been developed…

The second chapter: Poppinids, Arnulfings and Agilolfings: the creation of a dynasty, is the closest this book comes to a narrative history as McKitterick gives a short overview of the rise of the Carolingian dynasty and Charlemagne’s own rise to the throne, first as ruler together with his brother Carloman, then on his own. The assumption underlying much of Carolingian history is that Charlemagne had fallen out with his brother at some point, but as McKitterick shows, this is actually not easy to prove using contemporary sources. From there on, she moves on to Charlemagne’s own succession as well as the growth of the empire during his lifetime.

The third chapter introduces another important aspect of Carolingian history where the orthodox interpretation might not quite be in synch with what can actually be deducted from the historical documents available: the royal court. She first looks at the representations of the court in various types of texts, then at what we might be able to conclude from these, in the context of whether the image of Charlemagne’s court as an itinerant one, travelling with the king between palaces, is actually correct. She also looks at Charlemagne’s own travels, the political and diplomatic space in which he operated and on a more meta level, at the survival and redaction of royal charters and what information these can give us.

The fourth chapter builds on this, examing the king’s own communications both within and outside the empire and what they reveal about the Carolingan political identity and programme, if there was such a thing. This and chapter five, looking at the religious aspects and ideology of Charlemagne, were the hardest chapters to finish, as McKitterick’s analys of the primary documents on these subjects is somewhat less than gripping, to be honest.

On the whole Charlemagne wasn’t quite the history book I was looking for, but it is obviously a valuable contribution to Carolingan studies.

Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company — Wil O. Dijk

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Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006

I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!

Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.

It’s not for lack of sources that this subject has been neglected for so long: the Dutch East India Company’s (VOC) archives are largely complete and extensive, recognised as long ago as 1939 by D. G. E. Hall of being a rich source of informaetion of the VOC’s trade with Burma. It’s this data that forms the basis for this book, painstakingly gathered by Wil O. Dijk for her dissertation. This is the sort of tedious, labour intensive research that’s sometimes dismissed as beancounting by more trendy historians, but which is essential as a foundation for further research. It does perhaps make Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 somewhat dry at times therefore, but that can’t be helped.

The Dutch East India Company had been founded in 1602 as a monopoly for the Dutch trade with Asia. Its mission was to exploit the trade potential there to establish itself in the lucerative spices trade with Europe and to muscle out the enemy, Spain and Portugal. In this early stage it was not yet the colonising power it would become in later centuries, depending more on intra-Asian trade to finance the spice trade, which is where Burma came in. Burma was both a place where the VOC could sell (e.g. clothes and textiles from India) and buy (gold, long peppers, tin, rice, various kinds of wood) and make a profit at both ends. What’s more, getting into the Burmese trade would also win one over the Portuguese, who had been in the Gulf of Bengal for decades. In fact, one Portuguese adventurer had carved out its own kingdom in Burma, but came to a sharp end and was impaled, once this kingdom was reconquered by the Burmese.

The Burmese trade promised rich rewards to the VOC, but trade was never straightforward. The kingdom of Pegu, as the VOC knew it, was ruled by strong kings who kept trade restricted and who at all times were concerned about the stability of their own power, determined not to undermine e.g. the royal monopoly on rubies. They kept prices for import goods artificially low, prices for export products high, quantities of many goods restricted and on the whole the VOC was very much dependent on the sometimes arbitary decisions of the Burmese king.

Which is why it was hesitant at first to get into Burma, despite its rich potential, as it could not be certain of steady, year on profits. After the first few hesitant years though this worry was no longer a concern and while the trade did decline somewhat in later years, it wasn’t this that got the VOC to withdraw in 1680, but more the increased competition of other European (and other) trading companies and more importantly, its own internal restructuring. In the later part of the seventeenth century the VOC more and more focused on the direct trade with Europe, rather than the intra-Asian trade, starting to become a true colonial power with imperial holdings in Indonesia and the Spice Islands. While the Burma trade was very profitable, it no longer fitted its strategy, so it was abandoned. Some halfhearted attempts would be made a few decades later to reopen it, but this came to nothing.

When I normally think about the VOC and Dutch exploration in Asia, the picture I get is one of imperialism and colonalisation, with the native civilisations as the inferior, exploited party. But what Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 shows is a situation in which the Burmese, far from inferior, are actually the superior power, with the VOC as just one of many trading parties, neither particularly welcome, nor particularly feared, quickly replaced by others once it upped sticks. The Burma trade for a few decades was very important to the VOC, but the VOC was never all that important to Burmese trading…

So all in all, Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680 does well both in sketching what these five-six decades of Dutch-Burmese trade looked like, its impact on VOC and Burma both and in presenting the data that support these conclusions.

African Trilogy — Alan Moorehead

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Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa
Alan Moorehead
642 pages including index
published in 1941, 1943,1943, compilation 1945

If journalism is history as first draft, then these three books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa; published in one volume as African Trilogy are history as second draft. Written while the Second World War was still ongoing, each of these books tell the story of one year of war in the desert, as seen by one of the preeminent war correspondents of the era. Written largely without the benefit of hindsight, from the notes that Moorehead took at the time, these three books together not only provide an interesting look at an important period in World War II, which England largely had to fight on its own, but also at how people at the time thought about the war, when the outcome was by no means certain yet.

If you’ve heard of Alan Moorehead, it’s probably for his post-war books on the exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Daily Express, following the war in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the war in Italy. As becomes clear from reading these three volumes, Moorehead wasn’t one of those journalists content to stay at headquarters, but went chasing down the front whenever he could. Some of the incidents here certainly read like Boy’s Own Adventures stuff, several times barely escaping running into the enemy at several moments. Moorehead is a born raconteur, aimable, slightly understated, though with some of the attitudes and language use of the time that might seem strange to modern readers.

Mediterranean Front is the story of the first year of war in the desert, from 1940 to 1941, at time when the UK stood alone against Germany, and in the Middle East, Italy. Italy had only declared war on England in June of 1940, had overwhelming numerical superiority over the British and Commonwealth forces and was poised to overrun not just Egypt from Libya, but also much of the British Empire in East Africa from Italian Somalia and Ethiopia. For obvious reasons, there wasn’t much chance of reinforcement from home, nor was the equipment available first rate. Despite this, never in Moorehead’s account do you get a feeling of despair or that the troops were particularly worried. Concerned yes and the commanders certainly were aware of their limitations, but they come over as determined to overcome these without being reckless.

In that first year of battle the see-saw nature of war in the Western Desert already is clear. The Italians are the first to go on the offensive, get into Egypt but can’t go further, a smart counteroffensive by Wavell manages not only to get them out of Egypt, but overruns most of Italian Libya, but in turn can’t quite get to Tripoli. This gave the Germans the chance to come to the aid of their allies and in turn they drove back the British and Commenwealth forces. This pattern would last throughout the war in the desert, up until the Allied landings in French North Africa broke the deadlock.

In that first year of battle the British had more to deal with than just the Western Desert. There’s the struggle in East Africa, the British occupation of French ruled Syria that concludes the first volume, a pro-Axis coup in Iraq and most importantly, the British expedition to support Greece in its defence against the Italians, which goes disastrously wrong. Moorehead is there for most of these secondary campaigns, following them for longer or shorter times, making an effort to show how they influenced the main effort in Libya and Egypt.

But he always returns to the Western Desert, as in the second volume, a Year of Battle, which starts with the joint British-Russian takeover of Persia/Iran, which Moorehead witnesses from nearby. The struggle in the second year of desert warfare is simpler, as with the British failure in Greece and success in East Africa, Syria and Persia only the Western Desert remains as an active theatre. This time it’s the British who have the succesful offensive only to run out of steam and the Africa Korps who manages to successfully counter and overrun almost all British defences, including Tobruk. Again, despite the seriousness of the situation Moorehead shows no despair on the side of the British, though there is panic as the Germans seem poised to take Alexandria and Cairo. Since this book too was published during the war, you do wonder briefly how much here has been (self) censored, but Moorehead seems remarkably honest about the mistakes and faults of the British and their commanders.

Moorehead is no longer in the desert at the start of the third book, having left the Middle East behind for some assignments in America, missing the start of the invasion but making use of this to sail to Africa with an escort to a convoy. Once in Africa, he has to split his time between the First Army moving up from North Africa into Tunesia and the Eight Army doing the same from Egypt. He does this well, slighting neither even if the Eight is still his favourite.

The three books of the African Trilogy obviously do not tell the whole story of this part of World War II, but it’s as close a look at it as you can get from any historian. Moorehead was often close to the battles he writes about and it shows.