The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean
Page 79
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5Odyssey, Book X.
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6 Barely heard of before the end of the nineteenth century, the Hittites are now known to have created a powerful kingdom during the second millennium BC; their civilisation was related, however, more to the Anatolian uplands than to the Mediterranean.
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7 The treasure was looted by the Russian army from the Berlin Museum during the Second World War. For many years it was thought to have gone forever–possibly melted down by some Russian soldier. Only recently have the Russians announced that they have it in safe keeping.
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8 Self-contradiction, it must be said, is not unknown in modern literature either. All it proves is that Homer had a poor copy-editor.
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9 Although the architect Harry Goodhart-Rendel, seeing it after the Second World War for the first time, remarked to Osbert Lancaster, ‘Well, I don’t think we can call it a complete success.’
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10 It was in the Phrygian capital, Gordium, that Alexander was confronted with the Gordian knot, said to have been tied by Gordius, founder of the dynasty, to attach the yoke to the shaft of an ancient farm wagon. According to long tradition, whoever succeeded in unravelling it would become master of Asia. Alexander solved the problem by drawing his sword and slicing it down the middle.
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11 Our modern marathon race of 26 miles, 385 yards is based on the story of the messenger Pheidippides, who is said to have run that distance to carry news of the victory to Athens, but this story is in turn based on a misconception. Herodotus–our only authoritative source-tells us that Pheidippides in fact ran the 140 miles from Athens to Sparta, to seek its help. He is said to have covered the distance in two days.
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12 It was one of these satraps, Mausolus, governor of the province of Caria from 377 to 353 BC, whose sister-wife Artemisia built him the great tomb at Halicarnassus–the Mausoleum that was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Its remains were removed in the early fifteenth century by the Knights of St John, to make room for the castle which still dominates the bay, but the great statue of Mausolus survived–more or less–and is now in the British Museum. The stepped tower on which the statue stood inspired Nicholas Hawksmoor when he designed the neighbouring church of St George’s, Bloomsbury (now magnificently restored); here, however, the statue is–rather less appropriately–of George I.
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13Hellenistic is the word normally applied to the period immediately following the death of Alexander.
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14 According to Herodotus, the Etruscans had arrived in Italy from Lydia in Asia Minor towards the end of the ninth century BC. Their language, which is not even Indo-European, has recently been largely deciphered, but the few Etruscan documents that remain give us all too little information. Much weightier evidence is provided by their surviving works of art-their sculptures (particularly on their tombs), paintings and exquisite jewellery. They were certainly far more gifted artistically than the Romans who expelled them.
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15 These elephants–and Hannibal’s after them–were presumably African; and African elephants, unlike the Indian variety, are always said to be untamable. Did Pyrrhus and Hannibal know something that we don’t?
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16 ‘Punic’ comes from the Latin poeni, which has the same root as ‘Phoenician’.
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17 This area of western Asia Minor had been bequeathed to Rome in 133 BC by King Attalus III of Pergamum.
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18 A Triumph was in essence a formal procession of a victorious Roman general to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol. It depended on a special vote of the people, with the additional advice of the Senate. The triumphator rode in a four-horse chariot; he was followed by eminent captives (probably destined for execution), freed Roman prisoners of war, the major spoils captured, the army and finally animals for sacrifice.
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19 I use the word loosely and with a small ‘t’; though the three have often been dubbed ‘the First Triumvirate’, they were never so described at the time.
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20 Pompeia had been in charge of the rites of the Bona Dea. This goddess was worshipped in an annual service held at night, from which men were strictly excluded. In December 62 BC, one Publius Clodius Pulcher slipped in disguised as a woman–it was said in order to approach Pompeia in her husband’s absence. Caesar, who liked Clodius, stoutly proclaimed the innocence of both, but divorced Pompeia anyway on the grounds that she ‘must be above suspicion’.
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21 It was in the following year, and again in 54 BC, that he invaded Britain, staying there for eighteen days and three months respectively. He achieved little, however, except a show of strength; Britain was to have almost a century’s grace before the Romans returned.
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22 Surprisingly, this stream has never been certainly identified. The modern river Pisciatello is the most likely candidate.
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23 According to Suetonius, Caesar was so pleased with this remark that he had it emblazoned on a banner for his subsequent Triumph in Rome.
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24 It is hardly surprising that the most common Latin name for the Mediterranean was mare nostrum, ‘our sea’. No previous power had ever been in a position to make such a claim; nor has any been able to do so since.
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25 King Herod is known to have died in 4 BC.
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26 The English title is misleading. The Latin one, Carmina (‘Songs’), is a much better description of what are essentially lyrics.
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27 This sublime work, found in 1887 in the necropolis of Sidon, is thought to have been intended for the body of the city’s last king, Abdalonymous, who was appointed by Alexander in 332 BC. On its sides are representations of Alexander himself, in peace and at war.
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28 ‘It is not easy,’ he adds, ‘to express his vices with dignity, or even decency.’
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29 Such is the inspired phrase of Philemon Holland, translating Suetonius in 1606.
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30 Gibbon again: from the first sentence of The Decline and Fall.
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31 All his life Hadrian was mocked for his Spanish accent.
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32 It is said to have been an inspiration to–of all people–Cecil Rhodes.
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33 A Byzantine province extending from the Asiatic shore of the Bosphorus along the southern coast of the Black Sea.
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34 In 307 Constantine had put away his first wife to marry Maximian’s daughter Faustina.
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35 The old bridge still stands. It has been restored many times, but much of its original second-century fabric remains.
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36De Vita Constantini, I, 28. The story is not quite as straightforward as it sounds; another version by the scholar Lactantius raises a number of intriguing points. I have gone into the matter a good deal more fully in Byzantium: The Early Centuries, pp. 38–43.
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37 Licinius was married to Constantine’s half-sister Constantia.
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38 Acts, i, 18.
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39 The scene is most enjoyably portrayed in Verdi’s opera Attila–despite the fact that Pope Leo is disguised–as was required by the censorship–as ‘an old Roman’.
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40 After its destruction in 146 BC, Carthage had remained virtually deserted for over a century, until in 29 BC Augustus made i
t the capital of his Roman province of Africa.
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41 Sometimes known as Odovacar. He was a Scyrian, member of an obscure Germanic tribe which will not trouble us again.
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42 To take but one example: ‘Often in the theatre…she would spread herself out and lie on her back on the ground. And certain slaves whose special task it was would sprinkle grains of barley over her private parts; and geese trained for the purpose would pick them off one by one with their beaks and swallow them…’
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43 From the early sixth century, the title of Patriarch was accorded to the bishops of the five chief sees of Christendom: Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem. (The Bishop of Rome, being Pope, seldom if ever used it.) In more recent times the title has also been given to the heads of certain autocephalous Orthodox Churches (Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Georgia) and also–in view of the city’s historical associations with Byzantium–to the Bishop of Venice.
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44 He had by then already built the ravishingly beautiful little church of St Sergius and St Bacchus, just below the southern end of the Hippodrome, which was to provide the model for his magnificent S. Vitale in Ravenna. It is now a mosque known as Little St Sophia–Küçük Ayasofya Camii.
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45 The smallest type of Byzantine warship, designed for lightness and speed, with a crew of about twenty oarsmen.
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46 The Emperor’s attitude towards Belisarius was always ambivalent. Jealousy obviously played its part, but so did suspicion. Despite countless proofs of loyalty given by the general, Justinian never quite trusted him. Robert Graves’s novel Count Belisarius–which is well worth reading for its insight into their two lives–is particularly interesting in this connection.
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47 E. M. Forster tells us that Amr was ‘an administrator, a delightful companion, and a poet–one of the ablest and most charming men that Islam ever produced’. He goes on to tell a lovely story of how, when Amr lay on his deathbed, ‘a friend said to him: “You have often remarked that you would like to find an intelligent man at the point of death, and to ask him what his feelings were. Now I ask you that question.” Amr replied, “I feel as if the heaven lay close upon the earth and I between the two, breathing through the eye of a needle.”’
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48 The theory, however, that the Muslims were responsible for the destruction of the great library is almost certainly without foundation. Everything we know about Amr suggests that he would have treated it with immense respect.
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49 The first of the two great Arab empires of the Middle Ages: the Umayyad, based in Damascus, which lasted from 661 to 750, and the Abbasid, based in Baghdad, which continued until its destruction by the Mongols in 1258.
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50 The rock was known to the Arabs as Jebel al-Tariq (Mount Tariq), whence comes its modern name of Gibraltar.
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51 It was disgracefully vandalised in the early sixteenth century when a Christian chapel–now the cathedral–was erected in its centre. The Emperor Charles V, seeing it in 1526, made no secret of his feelings. ‘You have built here,’ he said to the assembled chapter, ‘what you or anyone might have built anywhere else, but you have destroyed what was unique in the world.’
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52 It is often suggested that flamenco, the traditional music of Andalusia, is another legacy of the Muslim occupation. It may well contain Arabic elements, but it seems essentially to be the creation of the gypsies who began to settle in the area in the later fifteenth century.
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53Estoria del Cid, trans. P. E. Russell.
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54 His contemporary James I of Aragon had done the same at Valencia ten years before.
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55 Not, of course, to be confused with the Pope of the same name.
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56 The dynasty of Merovius, which ruled over the Franks from the sixth to the eighth century.
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57 The word ‘Saracen’ was applied by medieval writers to all Arabs.
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58 After the death of the last of the Carolingian line, Charles the Fat, in 888, the Empire of the West was dismembered and Berengar of Friuli was elected King of Italy; but he was in no sense a national ruler.
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59 The statue was subsequently moved by Michelangelo to his newly-designed Campidoglio, and has more recently been transferred to the Capitoline Museum.
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60 It is fascinating to speculate on how history would have been changed if he had survived, and if his expedition had been successful.
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61 The word ‘admiral’ is derived from the Arabic emir al-bahr, ‘lord of the sea’. It comes down to us directly from Norman Sicily, where the title was first used.
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62 Sicily did not, however, keep her African conquests long; all were lost by 1160.
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63 Alas, there are one or two more recent replacements, including an appalling representation of the Virgin in the centre of the apse that should be removed at once.
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64 See above, Chapter VI
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65 A small lozenge of black marble set in the pavement beneath the central doorway of the Basilica marks the precise place at which he did so.
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66 Which is presumably why we see, among the mosaic saints depicted in the apse of Monreale cathedral, the somewhat surprising figure of St Thomas of Canterbury. He must have been included at the Queen’s specific request, as further atonement for his murder. As a child, she would have known him well; it seems likely, therefore, that she would have described him to the artist and that the portrait is a fairly accurate likeness.
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67 He was actually the bastard son of Roger II’s eldest son, Duke Roger of Apulia, who had died before his father.
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68 They left behind them in Cairo the ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun, perhaps the loveliest in the city.
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69 It was to last a total of 176 years–until 1375, when Turks and Egyptian Mamelukes together drove out the last Armenian king, Leo VI, who ended his life an exile in Paris.
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70 It is now possible to speak of France as a political entity. The breakdown of Charlemagne’s empire had led to the formation of a number of minor principalities, one of which, centred on the Paris–Orleans axis, was later known as the Ile-de-France. Here there arose the Capetian dynasty of kings, the first of whom, Hugues Capet, came to the throne in 987. This was the nucleus of the France we know today, though it was to be another 300 years before it covered even approximately the same amount of territory.
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71 A Turkoman dynasty whose founder, the Emir Danishmend, had appeared in Asia Minor some fifteen years before and ruled in Cappadocia and the regions round Sebasteia (now Sivas) and Melitene. Over the next century the Danishmends were to play a significant part in the history of the area, but after the Seljuk capture of Melitene in 1178 they vanished as suddenly as they had appeared.
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72 Bohemund’s son, Prince Bohemund II of Antioch, had been killed in 1130, leaving his principality to his two-year-old daughter, Constance. She had been married off at the age of eight to Raymond of Poitiers, younger son of Duke William IX of Aquitaine.
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73 He was effectively the Holy Roman Emperor, but since he was never crowned in Rome he could not claim the title.
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74 Eleanor’s marriage to Louis VII had be
en duly annulled in 1152. Just two months later, she had married Henry Plantagenet, Count of Anjou and Duke of Normandy, the future Henry II. The relationship was stormy–she was released from prison only on her husband’s death–but she nevertheless bore him five sons and three daughters. Richard was her third son.
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75 The castle, which now houses the Medieval Museum, was rebuilt by the Templars in the thirteenth century. There is, however, some reason to believe that the altar in the present east chapel may be the one used for the double ceremony.
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76 See Chapter X.
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77 See Chapter VII.
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78 The descendants of the Lords of Boudonitza still survive in the distinguished Zorzi family of Venice. At Salona, the ruins of Thomas de Stromoncourt’s castle constitute the most majestic Frankish remains in the country.