QI: The Second Book of General Ignorance

by John Lloyd

  Maybe it’s time to revise our ideas. We have recently learnt that the genetic information packed into the single nucleus of Amoeba proteus is 200 times greater than our own.

  They may be brainless, but you can hardly call an amoeba ‘simple’.

  What do Mongolians live in?

  Don’t call it a yurt. They hate that.

  Yurt is a Turkish word meaning ‘homeland’. Mongolians live in a tent called a ger, which means ‘home’ in Mongolian.

  In recent years, ‘yurt’ has come to be used indiscriminately to refer to any of the portable, felt-covered, lattice-framed structures that are common to many cultures across the Central Asian steppe.

  It’s a great insult to a Mongolian to call his ger a ‘yurt’. The English word ‘yurt’ comes from the Russian yurta, a disparaging term for the kind of jerry-built hovels you find in shanty towns. The Russians borrowed it from the Turkic languages where its original meaning was ‘the imprint left on the ground by a tent’. Mongolian is a member of an entirely separate language family from Turkic and Russian, and the whole of Mongolian culture is built around the ger. To call their beloved dwelling a yurt is akin to calling a Yorkshireman’s home un chateau or ein Schloss rather than his castle.

  Two-thirds of Mongolians still live in gers – not out of bull-headed national pride, but because they are such practical structures. The walls are circular, made from a lattice of willow held together with leather strips, and topped with a domed roof made from slender, flexible poles. The whole thing is covered in layers of felt and they can be put up or taken down in less than an hour. Their aerodynamic shape makes them very stable in the howling winds of the steppe and their thick felt lining keeps them incredibly warm. Rural Mongolia has the widest temperature range in the world: from a sweltering 45 °C in summer to winter lows of –55 °C. Even those Mongolians who do own houses tend to move into a ger for the winter, just because they are so cosy.

  There are strict rules governing layout. To minimise draughts, the door always faces south. The kitchen is to the right of the door and the traditional Buddhist altar is at the back. The beds are to the left and right of the altar. Guests sit at the top left end of the ger; the more honoured you are, the further you sit from the door. Family members sit on the right. In the middle is the wood-or dung-burning stove with its flue poking through the central roof vent. In summer the walls can be rolled up for extra ventilation.

  When a Mongolian couple gets married, their families buy or build them a brand-new ger.

  The earliest archaeological evidence for the ger only dates back to the twelfth century, but rock carvings, and accounts of ancient travellers like Herodotus, suggest that something similar has been in use on the steppes for at least 2,500 years.

  The armies of Genghis Khan (1162–1227) were housed in similar collapsible structures, and the great Khan himself administered the whole of the Mongol empire from a huge ger known as a gerlug. It was permanently mounted on a cart pulled by twenty-two bulls.

  STEPHEN What do Mongolians live in?

  ROB BRYDON They’re called something like yak … it’s like a yult or a yak.

  JO BRAND Do you mean a yurt?

  ROB Yes, that’s the one.

  **KLAXON**

  ROB No, that’s *not* the one. No, no.

  Can you name a tapestry?

  Go to the top of the class if the medieval Apocalypse Tapestry from Angers in north-west France sprang to mind. Or the second-century  ancient Greek tapestry found in Sampul, western China; or the four fifteenth-century Devonshire Hunting Tapestries hanging in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

  But it’s minus 10 if you said ‘Bayeux Tapestry’. This isn’t a tapestry at all: it’s embroidery. A tapestry is a heavy textile with a design woven in as it’s made on a loom, while embroidery is the business of stitching decorations on to a piece of existent fabric – in this case, coloured wool on linen.

  The Bayeux embroidery is long and thin. It’s 70 metres (230 feet) long but only 50 centimetres (20 inches) high. It’s a piece of Norman propaganda and the person most likely to have commissioned it is William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Odo (1037–98), Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, who features prominently in the narrative. Today it hangs in France, but the workmanship is English and it was probably made at Canterbury.

  Apart from King Harold himself, it’s easy to tell who’s who: the English are depicted with lavish moustaches while the Normans are clean-shaven. French commentators at the time were shocked by the long-haired English ‘with their combed and oiled tresses’, calling them ‘reluctant warriors’ or ‘boy-women’ (feminei iuvenes). The French, on the other hand, look like skinheads.

  The battle of Hastings didn’t take place at Hastings but several miles away on Senlac Ridge, just outside the helpfully renamed village of Battle. The English king mustered his troops at a vantage point on the crest of the hill known as the ‘Hoary Apple Tree’ and the Saxon line held until he was lured down to his death by a faked Norman retreat.

  Harold is traditionally supposed to be the figure shown with an arrow in his eye, but there are two other figures near where his name is stitched – one with a spear through his chest, and one being cut down by a horseman. He could well be both, or neither, of these people.

  In August 1944 Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s second-in-command, ordered the head of the SS in France to bring the Bayeux Tapestry with him as the German Army retreated from France. Four days later, the SS tried to snatch it from the Louvre, but they were too late – the Resistance had occupied the building.

  If Himmler had acted faster, the so-called ‘tapestry’ of Bayeux would have left France on a Nazi truck – an ordeal it might very well not have survived.

  Who became king of England after the battle of Hastings?

  Edgar the Ætheling.

  There were four kings of England in 1066, one after the other. Edward the Confessor died in January and was succeeded by Harold. When Harold was killed at Hastings in October, Edgar the Ætheling was proclaimed king. He reigned for two months before William the Conqueror was crowned on Christmas Day.

  Among many things the Normans brought with them that the English didn’t like was the idea that a king’s eldest son automatically succeeded him. Anglo-Saxon kings were elected, not born. The duty of organising this fell to a council of religious and political leaders called the Witan (short for Witangemot, or ‘wise-meeting’).

  Royal blood was only one of the factors taken into account. The king had to be able to defend the country and a dying king could nominate anyone as his heir. When Edward the Confessor died childless and without naming his successor, there was a constitutional crisis. His reign had ended thirty years of Danish rule (begun with Cnut’s conquest of England in 1016) and his mother was a Norman. This gave both Cnut’s great-nephew, William, Duke of Normandy, and King Harald Hardrada of Norway and (in his opinion) Denmark, claims to the English throne.

  Edgar was Edward the Confessor’s great-nephew. The word Ætheling (‘prince’) marked him out as a potential king, but he was only fifteen. With invasion imminent, the Witan rejected him as too inexperienced and opted instead for Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex and Edward the Confessor’s brother-in-law.

  Harold promptly marched up to Yorkshire where he defeated (and killed) Harald Hardrada at the battle of Stamford Bridge, before having to rush all the way back down again, to lose his own life near Hastings on the Sussex coast. As soon as news of Harold’s death reached London, the surviving members of the Witan met to elect Edgar as king. But their heart wasn’t really in it. They soon rescinded their decision and surrendered the boy to William. He hadn’t even been crowned.

  But Edgar, like Harold, was no milksop. Born in Hungary, son of Edward the Exile, he escaped Norman custody and became known as Edgar the Outlaw. He tried several times to recover the English throne, invaded Scotland, attempted to conquer parts of Italy and Sicily, took part in the First Crusade (in 1098) and may even
have joined the Byzantine Emperor Alexios I’s elite band of axe-wielding, sea-going mercenaries known as the Varangian Guard. Based in Constantinople, feared across the Mediterranean, it was mostly composed of exiled Englishmen.

  When Henry I (1069–1135), William the Conqueror’s fourth son, married Edgar’s niece Matilda, he pardoned the former boy king. Edgar died in Scotland in 1126, at the venerable age of seventy-five. Unmarried and childless, he was buried in an unmarked grave: the last Anglo-Saxon king and the last of the male line of the House of Wessex, England’s first royal family.

  Who invented Gothic architecture?

  Not the Goths. It was the French, if anyone.

  The Renaissance artist and historian Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) invented the term ‘Gothic’ for the now much-admired style of architecture in 1550. He meant it as an insult. In his opinion, pointed arches and huge vaulted ceilings were ‘monstrous and barbarous’ horrors of bad taste that he blamed on the Goths, the Nordic invaders who had sacked Rome and defiled Italy’s classical past.

  Best known today for his Lives of the Artists – short biographies of contemporary painters, sculptors and architects such as Leonardo and Michelangelo – Giorgio Vasari was also an architect himself. He designed the Uffizi Palace in Florence for Cosimo de’ Medici (1519–74). Now world-famous as a museum, it was originally an office block for lawyers (uffizi is Italian for ‘offices’).

  Vasari thought the northern French medieval style that reached its peak in the great cathedrals of Chartres, Reims and Lincoln was ugly, fussy and old-fashioned, denouncing it as ‘German’ as well as ‘Gothic’. In fact, it had no connection with either and had evolved out of Romanesque, the simpler, rounder, sturdier style known in Britain as ‘Norman’ architecture. If you’d asked a medieval cathedral mason what he was doing, he’d have said opus Francigenum: ‘French work’.

  But Vasari’s contemptuous nickname stuck, just as the words Baroque, Cubist and Impressionist (all once terms of abuse) would later do. The ‘Gothic’ style soon spread all over Western Europe, but it wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that it lost its negative connotations, as artists and writers looked to the Middle Ages for inspiration. In architecture the ‘Gothic Revival’ led to buildings like Augustus Pugin’s Houses of Parliament (1835) and in literature to a new school of ‘gothic’ novels, full of ghostly ruins, haunted houses and fainting heroines. It was this literary sense of the word that led (in 1983) to teenagers who wore black clothes, painted their faces white and listened to gloomy music being called Goths.

  The original Goths came from southern Sweden (still known today as Götaland) and the name ‘Goth’ simply meant ‘the people’ (from Old Norse gotar, ‘men’). Over four centuries, they migrated east and south to conquer large areas of France, Spain and Italy. In AD 410, Alaric, the military commander of the western branch of Goths (known as Visigoths) attacked and looted Rome – the first time the city had fallen to a foreign power in 800 years. Although the emperor Honorius (AD 384–423) had transferred his capital to Ravenna eight years earlier, it was still a psychological shock and a key moment in the long decline of the Roman Empire.

  But the Goths weren’t all doom and gloom. They founded cities, converted to Christianity and established a written legal code that was still used in Spain centuries later. By the end of the sixth century, however, defeated by other Germanic tribes in the East and driven out of Spain by Islamic invaders from North Africa, the Goths gradually started to fade from history.

  The last traces of the Gothic language were written down in sixteenth-century Crimea. All that survives is a list of eighty words, and a song whose meaning no one now understands.

  JACK DEE I was a Goth for a while.

  STEPHEN Were you?

  JACK Yeah. I was asked to leave because I was just too miserable.

  Which country do Huns come from?

  Neither Hungary nor Germany. The original Huns were more of an army than a tribe, so no modern country can claim to be descended from them.

  The Huns arrived in Europe from Central Asia in the fourth century AD. In just eighty years, they built an empire that stretched from the steppes of central Asia to what is now modern Germany, and from the Black Sea to the Baltic. They rode small, fast horses, and spent almost all their time on them. The Romans said that the Huns fought, ate, slept and carried out diplomacy on horseback – so much so that they became dizzy when they set foot on the ground.

  We don’t know exactly where they came from or what language they spoke, but most historians now believe the Huns were a multi-ethnic, multilingual army. All they had in common was their loyalty to their great leader, Attila (about 404–53), and their superlative technique as mounted archers.

  After Attila the Hun died, his three sons quarrelled and his empire disintegrated almost as rapidly as it had formed. The remnants of his armies were defeated in 454 by an alliance of Goths and other German tribes at the battle of Nedao (now in western Hungary). Since there was no Hun state – no buildings, laws, culture or common language – almost nothing of them has survived except stories. This has allowed many people across Europe and Asia to claim Hun blood (the implication being, of course, that they are related to the heroic warrior-king Attila). Given the racial diversity of the Huns, this is meaningless. If the Huns can be said to live anywhere today, they live everywhere.

  In nineteenth-century English, ‘Hun’ meant much the same as ‘vandal’: someone given to mindless acts of destruction. It wasn’t until the very beginning of the twentieth century that ‘the Huns’ came to mean the Germans – and it was a German who started it. On 27 July 1900, Kaiser Wilhelm II was addressing his troops on their way to join an alliance of colonial powers putting down an anti-Western revolt in China. He urged them to show no mercy to the ‘Boxer’ rebels (the sarcastic Western name for the movement who called themselves ‘The Righteous Fists of Harmony’). ‘The Huns under the leadership of Attila’, he told them, ‘gained a reputation that is still remembered today. May the name of Germany become equally well known in China, so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to look askance at a German.’

  When the First World War began in 1914, Allied propagandists seized on this remark. An editorial in The Times, headlined ‘The March of the Huns’, set the tone. It painted the Germans as even worse than the barbarians of old. Unlike the Kaiser, the article thundered, ‘even Attila had his better side’.

  By the Second World War ‘Kraut’ and Jerry’ had become the popular British nicknames for the Germans, although Churchill (a keen historian) still preferred ‘the Hun’. In a 1941 broadcast he described the German invasion of the Soviet Union as the ‘brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts’.

  STEPHEN You’ll find Alans on the Russian border in the northern Caucasus Mountains, where the Alan tribe has lived since being driven there by the Huns in the fourth century.

  ALAN That was a bad weekend.

  STEPHEN Yeah.

  ALAN We still talk about that.

  STEPHEN You, and Alan Coren, and Alan Bennett, and Alan Parsons …

  ALAN We get together. We conference call.

  STEPHEN Yeah.

  ALAN And if someone mentions the Huns, quite often there’s a lull in the conversation, and we have to gather ourselves.

  How did Attila the Hun die?

  Leading his army to victory on the battlefield? Laying waste to a Roman city? Murdered by a scheming henchman? No. Attila the Hun – the greatest warrior of his age, the man the Romans called flagellum Dei, ‘the scourge of God’, died in bed. Of a nosebleed.

  We know this from the Roman historian Priscus, who visited Attila’s court in AD 448. According to his account, Attila was celebrating his marriage to a young Gothic woman called Ildico and retired to bed drunk. Next morning his new wife was found weeping over his corpse. The blood vessels in his nose had burst while he slept and he had drowned in his own gore. Attila was about forty-seven years old and he had led the
Hunnish army for almost twenty years.

  Attila owed much of his success to the devastating speed and manoeuvrability of his troops. Unlike other land armies of the time, they could fight in any weather, not just in summer. In a battle or siege Hun archers could unleash 50,000 arrows in the first ten minutes. But Attila was more than just a ruthless general: he was also a shrewd negotiator. As city after city fell, he liked to pose as a reasonable man, accepting gold in exchange for his victims’ future security and building an empire on fear, like a mafia boss or a drugs baron. He didn’t want land or power, just obedience and booty. Because of this pragmatic approach, even today his name means barbarism and chaos for some people, but heroic defiance for others.

  To manage his set of shifting alliances, Attila had to make sure there was always a plentiful supply of gold (which meant more fighting to acquire it). From his base in Hungary he switched his military focus from the Persians to the Eastern Romans in Constantinople, and then to the Western Romans in Italy and Gaul. Finally, in AD 451, at the battle of Châlons in Gaul, the Huns clashed head-on with the Roman forces of the West. Such was the range of Attila’s deal-making skills that almost every tribe in mainland Europe found themselves on one side or the other.

  This battle marked the beginning of the end for both the Huns and the old Roman Empire. The Romans and their Gothic allies won, but only just: the Roman legions were decimated and never fought again. Rome was sacked once more in 455 (this time by Vandals) and the Empire relocated to Constantinople, where it stayed for the next 800 years. The complex network of allegiances Attila had built up didn’t survive his death two years later and, a year after that, the much-reduced Hun army suffered their final defeat and were scattered, never to return.