Lucille Turner's Blog

It was an English philosopher, William of Ockham, who is credited with the principle of Occam’s razor, also used by scientists such as Einstein. The Occam's razor principle says that the simplest solution is normally the right one, and it rests on the same rational, empirical view of science that Aristotle and others were promoting in the third century BC and beyond. The Greeks were looking for simplicity, not truth – and in the discipline of astronomy this became the guiding factor. Certain aspects of Greek thinking in geometry must have inspired Isaac Newton, whose understanding of the force of gravity led on from the motion of the plants, which Greek astronomers after Aristotle had worked on – but ultimately it was the work of Greek mathematicians like Archimedes (from the third century BC) that gave science the tools it needed to move on, and allowed Einstein to arrive at his theory of General Relativity.

Still, if the Greeks did not managed to grasp the influence of natural forces on planetary movement (which Newton later understood), they were even further from accepting the kind of universe that Einstein postulated two thousand years later. Einstein’s theories might have made perfect mathematical sense to Aristotle and his successors, but the universal chaos they suggested would have had them throwing up their hands in horror in the academies of Athens.

At the time of the Ancient Greeks, Christianity as we know it had not yet been born. There was not one god but many. But there was at least order. The gods of the Greeks presided over a universe that made sense. Its planets moved in perfect circles, orbiting the sun. There were no issues about whether the earth moved around the sun or the sun moved around the earth, it was enough that there was harmony, and that the gods inspired it. It was only centuries later, when Christian doctrine took over from the Greeks, that the idea of a heliocentric universe, where the sun is at the centre, became a problem. The Christian Church must have feared that scientists were harking back to the old pagan days of sun worship when in the 16th century men like Copernicus (who based their ideas of the work of Aristarchus, a Greek astronomer of the third century) were banging this new model of the universe down on the table, to the general horror of all.

After all, Christian belief demanded that the earth, not the sun, lay at the centre of the universe, and that God had created Earth and the people on it as part of His ‘bigger plan’ (whatever that was…). To place the sun at the centre of a solar system within a much bigger universe stuck a major spanner into theological works, and when the Roman Inquisition suddenly woke up and smelled the trouble, Galileo was arrested and forced to recant his Copernican heresy. ‘And yet it moves’ he apparently famously added, with reference to the Earth. Aristotle would surely have sympathised.

Nevertheless, as history has shown, the Greeks were right to worry about the impact of science on theological thinking, and in the end they shied away from challenging the gods. Although they made huge leaps by, for instance, successfully putting forward the theory that the earth is spherical and not flat, they continued to cling to the idea of divine perfection, and viewed the cosmos as eternal, unchanging and perfect, like the gods themselves. It is hardly surprising that with such imperfection on the ground people should seek it in the heavens. We are not living in a world of earthly harmony, and never have been. The Heavens provided that harmony, for a while at least; they represented an ideal, and the concept of heavenly paradise, which settled in Christian doctrine centuries later, was nothing less than a continuation of this way of thinking – a need that people have for order. When Einstein and his successors finally got to grips with the reality of chaos – now the accepted model of our universe, it destabilised this ideal. The universe decays, changes, and does not move in perfect harmony. And there is an awful lot of it.

Modern science has now delivered the final blow to the idealistic divine view; we all know our insignificant place in the grand scheme of things (whatever that is...), and must deal with it as we can. We do not necessarily like it; an ordered heavenly paradise continues to have its appeal and nobody likes the hard truth. Einstein may have been the heir to the mathematics of Ancient Greece, but he had to cast the perfect universe aside in order to find the real one.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

GREEK PHILOSOPHY BOILED DOWN PART IV
READ PARTS 1 TO V at www.lucilleturner.com/books

Around the same time that Pythagoras was reflecting on the impossibility of irrational numbers and the apparently numerical nature of eternity, across the Aegean Sea in the city of Athens other ideas were taking shape. The gods of Ancient Greece had up to now been given human form, but philosophers were starting to seriously wonder whether a god should have a form at all.

The four elements of Thales and AnaximanderThe Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer and the Natural Law they stood for had been quietly germinating into something even more radical: secularism.
The only reason, they said in Athens, we make a god a man is because we see him in our image. But what if we were sheep or cows – would our gods be human then? God, the Athenians decided, was the force that controlled the cosmos and the elements within it. But what was tolerated in Athens was not tolerated everywhere, and as Athenian philosophers tried to take their point even further, and claim that perhaps there was no god at all, things started to turn nasty.

At this time, also in Athens, a new kind of philosopher was emerging, one that was by nature more pragmatic. Sophist was the name given to those who began to see the merits of using their knowledge for influence, money and power. These were individuals who often acted as tutors and orators. They were good at public speaking, sometimes too good. Protagoras was one of them. Like a Greek Shakespeare he also turned his talents to writing plays, and he used them to vehicle his ideas. People, he said, are nothing more than animals, and because they are by nature savage, they invented their gods out of desperation, to tame them and punish their wrong doings. Such profoundly atheist speeches got Protagoras into serious hot water. His plays were burned and he was forced to flee the city. But there were other sophists that crawled out of the woodwork to take Protagoras’ place. Pragmatists as they were, these orators became adept at crowd pleasing and pocketed a healthy salary teaching the sons of the wealthy and grooming them in the rhetorical art of persuasion. They were in fact, the first lawyers in the world; the only problem was that Greek society was not quite ready for them. Accused of being impious and profiteering, the sophists became the targets of other people’s anger. Nothing much has changed, you might think, and in a way it hasn’t. The sophists were ready to make a case for anything, regardless of ethics. They called it a search for truth; others called it a search for supremacy. What it really boiled down to may depend on the view you choose to take of it, but before too long Athenian society had started to complain about them.

So, atheism fell out of favour. What would come next? As usual, in the Ancient Greek world, there was always going to be a backlash. At the close of the fifth century BC a new star was born in the world of Greek Philosophy, a man who held fast to his beliefs until the bitter end, and died for them. His name was Socrates, and perhaps he was in some ways also a sophist, because he did, at times, take on students in return for payment — a habit that would one day drive the final nail into his coffin when he was accused of corrupting the young men of Athens with his radical ideas. Socrates is a mysterious character, hard to pin down. But whatever he was or wasn’t, the record of his thoughts show him as something of a cynic.
I know that I am intelligent, because I know that I know nothing. True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing. Likewise, let him that would move the world first move himself — all of which stinks of a major rebellion against the society of his time. His influence on Plato, who must have worshipped him because he writes so much about him, laid the foundations for the rest of Greek philosophy, and therefore for the rest of Western Philosophy as a whole. After all, where do you go when your muse and model is sentenced to death for thinking ‘outside the box’? The simple answer has to be: you get back into it.

From the very first time that pen was set to paper, poets and writers wrote about the subject that probably preoccupies us the most: fate. The past is over; we know it can’t be altered, but the future is still changeable. What we do now, will affect what we become tomorrow. This has largely become the modern view, but many people, and particularly more religious thinkers, feel that our fate is not in our own hands but mostly out of them. In other words, try as you may, you cannot change what has been set down, and possibly even since the moment you were born. This view of fate sets aside the idea of free will, the belief that we can shape our own destiny, in favour of a more deterministic, resigned approach, characterised in some cultures by the words, ‘if it pleases God’, or ‘if God wills it.’

At the time of the Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, this belief was standard thinking. In very early Greek literature, the poet Hesiod writes about three women who spin the fabric of destiny for the mortals. The Spinner makes the thread of life; the Allotter puts it together and the Unalterable one cuts it where it has to end. That is your lot; deal with it as you can. The heroes of Greek poetry were convinced that they could not change their fate, even though they did their best at times, pleading for a bit of slack from the gods when things turned nasty. Not that it did them much good, since the gods had the last word, and that word was immutable. But what about the Ancient Egyptians, whose civilisation predates the Greeks by at least a couple of millennia?

The Ancient Egyptians allotted the role of fateful decision-making to not three but seven elderly ladies, who again decided the moment of death at the moment of birth. There was, however, one glimmer of hope on the horizon. If you knew your fate, there was a chance that you could change it. But you would still have to petition the gods to have any hope of success.

Eventually, the Greeks modified their approach. Philosophers such as Aristotle felt that people should take greater responsibility for their fate, and that absolute determinism (the conviction that the gods or a God controls our destiny from A to Z) took away individual freedom and was therefore undesirable and even potentially dangerous. Astronomy was a growing discipline at the time, and universal law was just beginning to be examined by Greek scholars; they drew their inspiration from the Babylonians who had already conceived of astrology as a more ‘religious’ interpretation of astronomy. Epicurus, a Greek scholar living in the third century BC, went as far as saying that there were ‘swerves’ of fate, that some things happened because they had to, and so were unchangeable, others happened randomly, and some could be controlled by humankind. Fate was finally removed from the lap of the gods and placed neatly in our own. What were we going to do about it?

Without a doubt, resignation to one’s fate is a good deal simpler than taking responsibility for it. The idea that we are directly responsible for everything that happens to us can be liberating to some, uncomfortable to others. It can, at worst, make us paranoid; at best it can make us dynamic. Once Epicurus had put pen to paper, people did not waste much time in tipping the question of fate back the way of the gods, or the one God, specifically. Christianity was more than ready to welcome us back from the brink of free will with open arms; as divine will took over again, the relief must have been great. But there were other cultures that took up the matter of fate and wove their own conclusions into the cloth. One of these was Anglo-Saxon, a culture of Germanic/Celtic origin, which had a radically different take on the subject of when and how and why.

The Norse gods were a driving force in Germanic culture, but they did not have the final word. The three wise women came back on the scene, and they carved the destinies of children into the tree of the present that grew from the well of the past — but what about the future? The carvings on the tree were seen as a possible future, but not a fixed one. The tree took its water from the well, but it then branched out however it saw fit. The present has the power to change the future. Interestingly, not just the future of one person, but also the future of many, as one branch can feed into other branches, on which those branches then depend. Fate deepens, branches out. The choices that we make suddenly become that much more significant because their range is greater. What we do as individuals can have a greater or lesser impact on those we come into contact with, and sometimes even indirectly. In this model, humankind is bound together in a web of fate; one touch here or there, and things will change for someone.

We all feel this, intuitively, but the desire to see the future as having been already preconceived remains strong. Astrology continues to have a broad appeal, and many turn to clairvoyants to get a handle on the future, for better or for worse. In which case whatever we may learn from them could once again alter what we do. Would the carvings on the tree then be rewritten? And if so, have we really gained more control, or simply changed one set of possible outcomes for another?

The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

As John Edgar Browning says in his collection of essays, ‘Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms’, “the story of the birthing of Frankenstein’s monster, in many ways, is about our hopes and anxieties about the brave new worlds science can potentially make possible. In contrast, the narrative of Dracula seems its converse: it is about the primordial, dark matter that resists the rationalism of science – the “old magic” that science, as the “new magic”, cannot completely counter…”

When Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818 (anonymously at first) it was a time of major social change. The Industrial Revolution had started; science had begun to show us that more things were possible than we had ever imagined. The steam locomotive had just been invented; the first photograph had just been taken; the first battery had just been made, the first plastic surgery had just been carried out in England, the stethoscope had just been invented. The inner workings of the human body began to lose their mystery. Hardly surprising then that author Mary Shelley should conceive of her monster: a new human being constructed from the body parts of the deceased. It brought old questions to the surface, this creation of Shelley’s, such as what is soul, and, what makes us human? Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, remember, was not the name of the monster, but the name of his creator) harnesses the power of electricity, that mysterious new force, to breathe life into his creation. Science appears as all-powerful, God-like, capable of answering every question, solving every puzzle. But does it?

Shelley’s time saw the rise of a particular kind of literature, which began to gain popularity: Gothic Fiction. The use of the word Gothic came from the architecture these works of literature often used for their settings. Ancient, medieval castles, monasteries and dungeons all feature: places that the light of science had not yet illuminated, but needed to. Frankenstein’s monster was reborn in a gothic setting in the 1994 adaptation, which starred Robert de Niro as the monster. But the ultimate failure of Scientist Victor Frankenstein to answer his monster’s persistent questions is very significant. The monster may live, breathe and walk, but his creator, Victor, offers no reply to his creation’s ultimate question, What am I? It would be another sixty years at least before an answer would finally be found. Meanwhile, enter Count Dracula.

Bram Stoker empowered the Dracula legend with his novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The book was a Gothic triumph, and still is, with its sinister settings and the ominous presence of the Count, a man on whom the words ‘I must be getting home now’ have no real impact. Where Frankenstein had exposed questions unsolvable by rationalism and science, eighty years later Dracula did something entirely different. He answered them.

John Browning, a specialist in the field of vampire studies, refers in his essay to a form of ‘old magic’, which the ‘new magic’ of science cannot counter, and which Dracula apparently personifies. To put this in perspective, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. The ‘new magic’ of science had big hopes. Man no longer needed God; he could become God. Shelley’s Frankenstein thought himself possessed of divine power when he gave life to his creation. But the gift of life came at a price and Frankenstein’s monster in the end destroyed itself. Dracula, by contrast, appears to live forever. Resurrection makes him stronger. He transcends time, ignores it. But let us remember that Stoker did not invent the vampire; it had inhabited popular imagination long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The vampire was as old as death itself; the ‘old magic’ it represented had been part of the fabric of mankind ever since the dawn of time, and it was called instinct.

Scientific rationalism has always had a problem with instinct. Gradually, and in order to deal with the conundrum it presented, which was the conundrum of human nature, scientific thought evolved a new discipline to deal with it: psychology.

Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, a man called Sigmund Freud gave instinct a name. He called it the Id. These instinctive impulses, Freud claimed, competed with rationality: the Ego, for control of our mind. The Id resided in the unconscious mind, while the Ego was present as a part of the conscious mind. The Id was timeless, and had inhabited us since birth; the Ego came later, as we grew. The Id harboured the impulses of sex and aggression, while the Ego struggled to regulate them. These old instinctive urges appear associated with the persona of the vampire. He is seductive; he is cruel. Perhaps more importantly, he is elusive, hard to pin down; he is timeless, eternal. The rational mind would deny him; the unconscious says he exists.

The Industrial Revolution, in full swing at the time Dracula the novel was published, had already begun to yield to the forces of evil. The brave new world that science had built was crumbling round the edges. Crime grew apace with the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The persona of the vampire lurked in dark corners on the streets of London.

Perhaps Bram Stoker was unaware that he had plumbed the darkest corners of the human psyche with his resurrection of the vampire myth, but he was certainly conscious of having based his vampire character on a real person: Vlad Dracula, a man who lived some three hundred years earlier in Romania. Psychology may not yet have made its appearance on the world stage, but the human psyche did not need to; it was as old as humankind — as old as the vampire.

The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

There has never been, in the history of popular culture, such a successful phenomenon as the vampire. Love the fangs or hate them, the vampire remains an icon of seductiveness, a monster we can’t seem to escape. The association of desire with devour, which the vampire incarnates, is a persistent myth. Its real roots are in antiquity; it is far older than Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula, on which the contemporary vampire is based. Vampires have appeared throughout human history under different names and designations in cultures the world over. What is behind the myth, and why is it so persistent?

When I was inspired to write The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer, it was in part because I wanted an answer to these questions. There had to be something more to the vampire myth than popular culture was serving up, and I set out to uncover it. What I learned from researching the vast, and often obscured subject of Romanian folklore was fascinating, and quite disturbing. In many ways, the Romanian vampire is very different from its present-day counterpart. There are no fangs, which came as rather a relief, no blood-sucking, another bonus, but there were other similarities. Resurrection, for example, was a common factor, a happening that Romanian folklore deals with in an almost matter-of-fact way. According to Romanian tradition, the dead are significantly un-dead, and this more than anything else, was rather a shocker. It is easy to dismiss the fanged demon of a story, but harder to set aside beliefs that have been part of Romanian culture since long before medieval times.

I do not think I am mistaken when I say that superstition has been endemic in Romania until relatively recently. Of course these days most folklore is dying out. It is being denied by a younger generation keen to take its place in the modern world, and that is entirely understandable. But even if the new generation has moved on from the folklore, can it really forget about the vampire? Perhaps not. Even if folklore can be assigned to the past, the myths return to haunt us because they are embedded in our consciousness, both national and international, in ways we often have not even thought about.

We all know the expression, ‘a love-hate relationship’. The idiom reveals the common ground of the two strongest urges that characterise the human mind, the urge to create and the urge to destroy. Freud understood these urges, or impulsions; he knew that love and hate, or to use another set of words, life and death, co-exist together in the human psyche, and that it is the outcome of this struggle that defines us as individuals.

Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, Freud was examining patients who had returned from the trenches of the First World War stricken by the trauma of grim battle. What he found was a revelation, and it leads us back to the vampire myth in quite unexpected ways.

Freud understood that what these war victims had in common was an unavoidable urge to revisit trauma. Rather than forget about the terrible things they had lived through, these soldiers were compelled to revisit them again and again, and Freud called this compulsion the ‘death drive’. He described it in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The death drive, Freud wrote, was a force "whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path to death".

Of course, this does not seem logical, but the human psyche is not always logical either. Bear in mind that it is not just as old as one person; it is as old as human time. It is a product of human evolution, and its complexity is the result of many factors, which we cannot always understand as individuals. The death drive that Freud described was equally as old; wherever it came from was bound to be lost in the mists of time, but the question is, to where or what was it leading?

It took another period of research and another book before Freud could find this out. Because we are hard-wired for survival, he said, the death drive is projected away from the individual by the individual. In other words, whether we like it or not, the death drive becomes a negative force for evil, a destructive force that can only be restrained if our compulsion for good is stronger. It is this struggle that has become incarnated in the persona of the vampire, which is why the vampire elicits such a reaction of fear.

Many have tried to exorcise this fear. The Catholics called it ‘The Problem of Evil’; the Greeks understood it utterly, and linked the death drive to the power of fate. It was, said the Greeks, inescapable. To struggle against one’s destiny was simply a waste of time, to the extent that the gods themselves were seen to punish mortals who believed that they could set themselves higher than the unstoppable forces of destiny.

These days, such attitudes are labelled fatalistic, negative and counter-productive. Modern culture demands that we stand against the power of fate, that we take control of our destiny and assert free will. But behind this facade of will and effort, the old resilient myths continue to stalk us. The vampire lingers in dark corners, waits in the shadows and warns us that free will is an illusion — that there are other forces at work in the human psyche, over which we have far less control than we think. The vampire represents, in fact, the ultimate struggle: humankind over itself, which is why it cannot be dismissed as fiction.


The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

When it comes to writing historical fiction, character is everything. It is character that helps a writer understand events and interpret them, simply because every historical event, unless it's a natural disaster, is man-made. Battles are a consequence of human nature, and it is individuals that bring them about at the end of the day. In spite of the social and geographical context behind a battle or a war, it often takes just one individual to set the flame to the tinder, one act to set history in motion. The assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire sparked World War I, even if the seeds for conflict had already been sown.

Hitler was uniquely able to garner the unconditional support he needed from his countrymen to enter into conflict with the rest of Europe two decades later. These are examples of major historical upheavals, but the same applies to the smaller ones. There is always one individual who tips the apple cart, opens up Pandora’s box and sets off a chain of events that will define the lives of hundreds of people for years to come.

But wars can be prevented as they can be started.
There are also individuals who have had a positive, rather than a negative effect on the course of history. Think of Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and politicians such as Gorbachev, who ended Communism and made the world a safer place, if only for a while. Those who claim that one person cannot change the world are mistaken. History tells us that much.

In researching an idea for an historical novel, there are known facts you can’t change, such as dates, battles, outcomes etc. And if you are using real historical figures in your novel, there are certain things there too that you cannot alter, such as what they did, and how they were perceived by those around them. But that does not mean that there is no room for manoeuvre — not at all.

Think of an iceberg and its tip and you can imagine the potential. What history tells us about the individuals that made it, may often be read in biographies, many of them excellent.

An historical fiction writer will always read a biography if there is one available to them. Sometimes, if the historical figure lived too long ago, there may be very little in the way of written records. Go even further back in time and all you might have is archaeology. While archaeology is a fascinating discipline, it leaves a lot to guesswork where individuals are concerned. But even if biographies may help writers flesh out characters, the role of the historical fiction writer is not the same as the role of the biographer or the historian. A writer of historical fiction aims to bring the historical figure back to life as a living, breathing person. The historian or biographer usually aims to place the individual in the context of their time, not necessarily in the context of their skin. What was going on in the head of a particular individual in a particular context of time or moment of history is mostly about detective work. Sometimes even guesswork. The historical fiction writer must be a bit of a detective.

In my latest novel, "The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer", Vlad Dracula’s father (Dracula and his family were all real historical figures) puts his sons' lives at risk in a political game of cat and mouse with the Ottoman Sultan Murad II. At first sight, it seems like a case of paternal negligence or even betrayal, but what it represents is the meat of characterisation. Look into the depths of such actions and you find conflict at the heart of them. Use that conflict to build your character and you have a flesh and bone person, complete with dilemmas, motivations and baggage.

There are other examples of character building in historical fiction, which are geographically closer to home for a British writer. Thomas Cromwell for instance, has provided Hilary Mantel and others with a golden opportunity to re-create a fictional character of great complexity, a man who bends himself to the will of notorious English monarch King Henry VIII only to find himself betrayed in turn by the king he served so devotedly. The beauty of characters like Cromwell, is that the complexity is almost a given. The contradictions of Cromwell’s own life provide it in abundance.

As the king’s henchman, Cromwell was renown for his cruelty. Mantel presents him as a man hardened by an early life of struggle. Cromwell the boy became Cromwell the killer because he was a survivor. His father beat him as a child. To escape his father he went to war young. To survive, he had to be resourceful and ruthless, the characteristics that made him so indispensable to the king.

Why then, did he end up on Tower Hill with a blade to his throat? To find that out, the writer would have to look more closely at the character of the one who sent him to the block, King Henry. And so it goes on.

I am currently putting the finishing touches to my third historical novel, "The Summer Country", which is set in Roman Britain. More on that in subsequent blog posts, but the protagonists have shown me that even with very little in the way of historical fact, it is possible to re-imagine the inner lives of individuals as far back as the first century AD.

There is a good deal of detective work involved, and inevitably a certain amount of guesswork, but once the characters start to move, almost of their own accord, towards the destiny that history has assigned them, you know you’re on the right track.
Lucille Turner
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
Gioconda

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'

Present-day Istanbul was once called Constantinople, and it was in Greek hands until it fell to the Ottoman army in 1453. For centuries the city was the principal capital of the Christian world, until Rome replaced it little by little, exerting its power through the Pope. It was named for Constantine the Great around AD 330, and he was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, finally bringing an end to the bitter persecution of Christians throughout the Roman Empire. But although the city was Roman, it was also Greek, and the focus of Greek Byzantine culture, and the difference between the two: Roman and Greek, soon became clear.

The Romans had a habit of doing the things other people only talked about, which was partly why they were so successful. The Greeks conceived of democracy; the Romans put it into effect by founding the first Republic. The Greeks conceived of great cities through classical architectural design; the Romans built them. The Romans were great pragmatists, the Greeks great thinkers. And this caused problems once they united under the ensign of one religion: Christianity. It lay at the root of what is still called The Great Schism, when the Christian world became forever divided by disagreements over the Word of God. These disagreements were never cleared up, and because of them, Constantinople became Istanbul.

Very soon after Constantinople was founded, the Greek way of thinking began to differentiate itself from the Roman one. While ancient Rome was a formidable force in the world, Romanising one fifth of the world’s population at the height of its power, and joining it together with 80,000 km of roads, the Empire was also a power-thirsty machine that eventually imploded. Nevertheless, it continued to thrive indirectly through Catholicism, the very religion it had once persecuted, and which now became its principal means of influence throughout the world – for better and for worse. But the division between Greek and Roman continued to deepen over the Word of God, and the interpretation of Scripture. The rift had begun to form since AD 325, at the first Council of Nicaea. Everyone was there, even the British. But the real bone of contention was between what became the Church of Rome and what was then the Church of Alexandria. The Latin (Western) clergy considered Christ to be more human than divine (which is interesting when you consider that Christ was crucified on Roman soil) while the Eastern, Orthodox clergy considered Christ as more divine than human. These may seem like minor points to some, but they were fundamental really, and irresolvable for generations.

For centuries too, the taking of the city of Constantinople, the metropolis of Byzantine Greece, was considered almost impossible. The city walls were formidable: 40 feet high by 15 feet thick, but first the invading Ottoman army had to get to them. And that was no mean task either because the Greeks had hauled a great chain beneath the surface of the water across the mouth of the Bosphorus straits to prevent an army from landing men directly at the foot of the citadel walls. Armies quailed before its wall; ships floundered in the straits. Nevertheless, the Ottoman army conquered the city, walls and all, sending a shock wave rippling through the Christian world — because even though Western Christendom had as good as abandoned the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate to its fate, nobody apparently really believed that the city would ever fall. Or did they?

When the time came for a show of hands in support of the Greeks, the Pope did not give Constantine XI, the last emperor of Constantinople who was named for its founder, the support he needed to defend his city from the Ottoman army. One could almost say that it boiled down to this: if you want our support, it must be on our terms. The clergy, of course, refused to budge on either side, and as a result, thousands lost their lives, including the Emperor Constantine XI, who died defending his city at the gates in the uniform of a foot soldier. It was a tragic day in the annals of Greek history, and a day that is still remembered by many. And even though it happened over five hundred years ago, five hundred years is not that long ago in the grand scheme of things.

The fall of Constantinople had the effect of destroying one half of the body of the Christian Church, the Eastern half, and leaving the Western half in a position of greater power. This was the tangible outcome. From that moment on, Constantinople became Istanbul, and the fate of the city changed forever. The loss of the Greek Orthodox influence on the Christian Church meant that the Catholic Church enjoyed a period of hegemony, interrupted only by the Reformation. The final blow to the Byzantine Greeks had been delivered, and the unity of the Church, which had always been compromised by old theological disagreements between the Eastern Church and the Western one, was now assured — at least until the rise of Protestantism.

How might the world have been different if the city of Constantinople had not fallen, and the Patriarchate had remained? It is hard to say, but the legacy of the Greeks was not forgotten. It gave rise to the European Renaissance, inspiring generations of scholars to challenge old beliefs and find new answers to old questions, such as, what is mankind’s place in the grand order of things?
From then on, science began to answer them.

The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer

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 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.