Lucille Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "renaissance"
The Barbarian of Europe
The girl who helps me with my ironing is Polish. She’s clever - too clever for ironing, but she does it because it’s not that easy to come over to Western Europe and find a job just like that. Really, she’s an engineer. Mechanical. I found that out the other day as I watched her push the iron across a shirt, suddenly compelled to take it from her hand and give her a hard hat and iron toe shoes instead. They work hard, these people. Harder than us. They form part of a group of people we have designated as Eastern Europeans. We know, without even having to say it, that the economies of their countries are less developed than ours, but we do not stop to wonder why, just as we do not stop to examine how it is that they have become a sort of poor European cousin, relegated to the back seat while we drive on in the front, as though it is our birthright.
Poland is situated on the fringes of Eastern Europe, west of Russia and north of the Balkans. Together with the Balkan countries below it, which include Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria - not to mention Greece to the south, Poland has a turbulent history. All the Balkan countries do; when you delve into the past of these regions it is as though you are reading the substance of a never-ending nightmare. How did this nightmare come about, and what did it mean for the people who had to endure it?
Amusingly or not, the people of the Balkan countries were once considered, by the people of Western Europe, as barbarians. The term, ‘barbarian’ is an old one, used to describe a people who are ‘uncivilised’. The Goths, from whom many of the Balkan people descend, were once called barbarians because of their wild appearance and manners, and their warrior culture. The Germanic tribes, of whom the Goths were part, lived to the north, in Scandanavia, and the word ‘barbarian’ was once reserved for them. But, as Larry Wolff says in his book, ‘Inventing Eastern Europe’ (Stanford University press, 1994), in the eighteenth century ‘barbarism shifted from the north to the east’, and the concept of an Eastern Europe was born in our consciousness. By then, the Balkans had had a good deal to endure. They had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. They had been forced by circumstance and destiny to change their faith and adopt a new system, which was entirely feudal in its construction. While the rest of Europe emerged from the Renaissance and headed towards the Enlightenment, with all the scientific and industrial progress that came with it (not to mention the economic growth) the Balkan countries were still locked in a kind of never-ending system of serfdom. In the end, they had to fight their way out of it - and they did, with the Serb Uprising from 1804 and a second ten years later. Then there was the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1830. The Greeks were still smarting from the fall of Constantinople, which had further fuelled animosity between the two old enemies, and bloody battles raged between the Turks and the Greeks for years. But the worst was yet to come. Just when the Balkan countries thought they had earned their right to growth and change, other empires stepped in to cause yet more havoc. Worried about who would gain control over the Balkans once the Turks had left, the Austro-Hungarians and Germany, the Russians, Britain, France and the US began to intervene, turning the Balkans into a powder keg that was just about ready to ignite in 1914, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo, and Germany made its secret pact with the Ottoman Turks.
The Balkan Wars, first between Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria against the Ottomans, and then between Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria, were dreadful. The effect of the subsequent two world wars on the Balkans would deliver the final blow to the aspirations of a downtrodden people, and even when the Western countries tried to make things better, all they did was make them worse. The region fell under the yoke of dictatorships; all hopes of democracy and self-determination became the dream of a future that would never come. The so-called barbarians of Europe had come to understand the real meaning of barbarity: politics.
Poland is situated on the fringes of Eastern Europe, west of Russia and north of the Balkans. Together with the Balkan countries below it, which include Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria - not to mention Greece to the south, Poland has a turbulent history. All the Balkan countries do; when you delve into the past of these regions it is as though you are reading the substance of a never-ending nightmare. How did this nightmare come about, and what did it mean for the people who had to endure it?
Amusingly or not, the people of the Balkan countries were once considered, by the people of Western Europe, as barbarians. The term, ‘barbarian’ is an old one, used to describe a people who are ‘uncivilised’. The Goths, from whom many of the Balkan people descend, were once called barbarians because of their wild appearance and manners, and their warrior culture. The Germanic tribes, of whom the Goths were part, lived to the north, in Scandanavia, and the word ‘barbarian’ was once reserved for them. But, as Larry Wolff says in his book, ‘Inventing Eastern Europe’ (Stanford University press, 1994), in the eighteenth century ‘barbarism shifted from the north to the east’, and the concept of an Eastern Europe was born in our consciousness. By then, the Balkans had had a good deal to endure. They had been conquered by the Ottoman Empire of the Turks. They had been forced by circumstance and destiny to change their faith and adopt a new system, which was entirely feudal in its construction. While the rest of Europe emerged from the Renaissance and headed towards the Enlightenment, with all the scientific and industrial progress that came with it (not to mention the economic growth) the Balkan countries were still locked in a kind of never-ending system of serfdom. In the end, they had to fight their way out of it - and they did, with the Serb Uprising from 1804 and a second ten years later. Then there was the Greek War of Independence from 1821 to 1830. The Greeks were still smarting from the fall of Constantinople, which had further fuelled animosity between the two old enemies, and bloody battles raged between the Turks and the Greeks for years. But the worst was yet to come. Just when the Balkan countries thought they had earned their right to growth and change, other empires stepped in to cause yet more havoc. Worried about who would gain control over the Balkans once the Turks had left, the Austro-Hungarians and Germany, the Russians, Britain, France and the US began to intervene, turning the Balkans into a powder keg that was just about ready to ignite in 1914, when the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne was assassinated on the streets of Sarajevo, and Germany made its secret pact with the Ottoman Turks.
The Balkan Wars, first between Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria against the Ottomans, and then between Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria, were dreadful. The effect of the subsequent two world wars on the Balkans would deliver the final blow to the aspirations of a downtrodden people, and even when the Western countries tried to make things better, all they did was make them worse. The region fell under the yoke of dictatorships; all hopes of democracy and self-determination became the dream of a future that would never come. The so-called barbarians of Europe had come to understand the real meaning of barbarity: politics.
Nationalist - Monster or Hero?
Given the slightly Gothic flavour of The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer, my account of the inspiration behind the book should really begin in a castle of thick walls, suits of armour and cobwebs on a snowy night in winter. But it doesn’t – quite the opposite in fact, which is only right, since the real story of Vlad Dracula’s life contains a mix of the exotic and the gothic, the Ottoman summer and the Carpathian winter: heat and frozen chill.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
The Templars, the Cathars and the Bloody Inquisition
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the SoothsayerWe tend to forget that in the twelfth and thirteenth century in Europe, we had our own band of seriously zealous extremists, the church inquisitors – the body of clerics, monks and secular priests charged with seeking out and punishing heretics throughout the medieval period and well into the Renaissance, when the machinery of persecution gradually ground to a halt. But by the twelfth century they were only just limbering up to the task that lay ahead of them, which (to use the words of the Bishop of Lincoln who spoke out against ecclesiastical abuse in the thirteenth century) meant the punishment of those who held “an opinion chosen by human perception, created by human reason, founded on the Scriptures, contrary to the teachings of the Church, publicly avowed, and obstinately defended”. It seems astonishing to us now that reason and perception could be incriminating, but it was the act of upholding a position that undermined the church, which really fanned the flames. That said, the decision to pursue and punish these so-called heretics was not welcomed at first by every member of the clergy. It was only later, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that the Inquisition really got off the ground, and the procedures for seeking out heretics became more like a legal inquiry, with evidence being produced for and against. But whom were these inquisitors really pursuing, and what made them such a threat?
The main purpose of the Inquisition initially, was to eradicate the Cathars. The Cathars were crusaders, who, returning through Eastern Europe, had been converted by the Bogomils of Bulgaria and other Balkan countries. The Bogomils themselves were a predominantly Manichean sect, whose belief in the dual power of light and dark, good and evil, posed a threat to the doctrine of the Catholic Church for two principal reasons. The first is because the Bogomils and the Cathars they converted acknowledged the power of evil over good. This was already problematic. The God of the Catholics was all-powerful, and an all-powerful God does not share power. Then, besides claiming that Satan held equal sway to God, the Bogomils refused to take of any form of religious oath. This effectively meant that they rejected the role of the clergy as the representatives of God on earth. The Cathars bought into these ideas, and took them north to Italy and France, where they spread with a ferocity that surprised even the bishops, who claimed that the Cathars of Europe were worse even than the Saracen armies they had first been sent to combat.
So bloody were the punishments meted out to the Cathars, that ordinary people at last began to realise that something was rotten in the couloirs of church power. Hundreds of thousands of suspected Cathars were killed in France alone. We still bear the memory of this inquisitional ‘field day’ of violence in popular culture. If Friday the 13th is ‘unlucky for some’ it is because it was on such a day in 1307 that dawn raids were conducted throughout France against not only the Cathars but the Templar order too, which like the Cathars had been forced underground. The men and women who were rounded up were burned at the stake, on a day that turned the sky red. In such an atmosphere of fear, it would only be a matter of time until Protestantism gained the ground it needed to challenge the Catholic Church. And yet, interestingly, France, the country that suffered the most in the thirteenth century remained nevertheless staunchly Catholic. Or did it?
Like the Cathars, the Knights of the Templar had broken away from the church – or perhaps it might be safer to say that they had turned against it right from the early days, establishing themselves as a renegade band of pious men, whose first aim was to serve the people, not the institution that the church had gradually become. When the last remaining Knights Templar were rounded up and put to death in France, many escaped by boat to unknown destinations of safe harbour. From there, rumour has it that they orchestrated even the French Revolution, as a way of taking back the power and returning it to whom it rightfully belonged: the people. From that day on, France became a secular state, the Republique it is today, and which most French people who fight tooth and nail to uphold.
Many people believe that these underground Gnostic* groups, the Cathars and the Templars, have reformed as freemasons, and that they continue to work for the good of common people, in much the same way that the ancient Templar order had taken a vow of piety and service in defence of ‘the Man in the Street’, or in the early days of the crusades, the pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land. It is quite ironic really, that it would one day be the church itself that would persecute these Defenders of the Faith to extinction.
- In 1738 the Catholic Church banned Catholics from Masonic orders and other secret societies. The French Revolutionaries had not yet stormed the Bastille, but the cauldron of discontent was already on the boil.
*Note: The word Gnostic is derived from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge.
Learn more about the Manicheans and Bogomils in 'THE SULTAN, THE VAMPYR AND THE SOOTHSAYER'
The main purpose of the Inquisition initially, was to eradicate the Cathars. The Cathars were crusaders, who, returning through Eastern Europe, had been converted by the Bogomils of Bulgaria and other Balkan countries. The Bogomils themselves were a predominantly Manichean sect, whose belief in the dual power of light and dark, good and evil, posed a threat to the doctrine of the Catholic Church for two principal reasons. The first is because the Bogomils and the Cathars they converted acknowledged the power of evil over good. This was already problematic. The God of the Catholics was all-powerful, and an all-powerful God does not share power. Then, besides claiming that Satan held equal sway to God, the Bogomils refused to take of any form of religious oath. This effectively meant that they rejected the role of the clergy as the representatives of God on earth. The Cathars bought into these ideas, and took them north to Italy and France, where they spread with a ferocity that surprised even the bishops, who claimed that the Cathars of Europe were worse even than the Saracen armies they had first been sent to combat.
So bloody were the punishments meted out to the Cathars, that ordinary people at last began to realise that something was rotten in the couloirs of church power. Hundreds of thousands of suspected Cathars were killed in France alone. We still bear the memory of this inquisitional ‘field day’ of violence in popular culture. If Friday the 13th is ‘unlucky for some’ it is because it was on such a day in 1307 that dawn raids were conducted throughout France against not only the Cathars but the Templar order too, which like the Cathars had been forced underground. The men and women who were rounded up were burned at the stake, on a day that turned the sky red. In such an atmosphere of fear, it would only be a matter of time until Protestantism gained the ground it needed to challenge the Catholic Church. And yet, interestingly, France, the country that suffered the most in the thirteenth century remained nevertheless staunchly Catholic. Or did it?
Like the Cathars, the Knights of the Templar had broken away from the church – or perhaps it might be safer to say that they had turned against it right from the early days, establishing themselves as a renegade band of pious men, whose first aim was to serve the people, not the institution that the church had gradually become. When the last remaining Knights Templar were rounded up and put to death in France, many escaped by boat to unknown destinations of safe harbour. From there, rumour has it that they orchestrated even the French Revolution, as a way of taking back the power and returning it to whom it rightfully belonged: the people. From that day on, France became a secular state, the Republique it is today, and which most French people who fight tooth and nail to uphold.
Many people believe that these underground Gnostic* groups, the Cathars and the Templars, have reformed as freemasons, and that they continue to work for the good of common people, in much the same way that the ancient Templar order had taken a vow of piety and service in defence of ‘the Man in the Street’, or in the early days of the crusades, the pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land. It is quite ironic really, that it would one day be the church itself that would persecute these Defenders of the Faith to extinction.
- In 1738 the Catholic Church banned Catholics from Masonic orders and other secret societies. The French Revolutionaries had not yet stormed the Bastille, but the cauldron of discontent was already on the boil.
*Note: The word Gnostic is derived from the Greek gnosis, meaning knowledge.
Learn more about the Manicheans and Bogomils in 'THE SULTAN, THE VAMPYR AND THE SOOTHSAYER'
