by Caleb Carr
skulls … piled as high as mountains Gibbon writes, “This mention of the infamous piling of enemy skulls, usually associated with later leaders such as Genghis Khan and Tamburlaine, is of use in dispelling those same legends: it demonstrates that the notion of enormous piles of skulls is a far older bogey for children than has previously been imagined, thus weakening the idea that it was ever anything other than a useful nursery tool.” In fact, the exact truth may never be known about such infamous and dramatic tales concerning the warriors of the East and their kings, caliphs, emirs, and emperors; but since, in this same passage of the Manuscript, we find mention of another legendary practice for which there is actually a good amount of reliable evidence—the cooking of meat between the legs of Eastern riders and their horses’ backs—we cannot agree with Gibbon’s skepticism too quickly, simply to obey the imperatives of political correctness or a more basic revulsion at the very idea. Certainly, for instance, the great Turkic Emir Timur (or “Timur the Lame,” often contracted, variously, to Tamerlane or Tamburlaine, A.D. 1336–1405) had his own spies disseminate rumors of “mountains” built of tens of thousands of skulls among populations he hoped to conquer, as a way to weaken resistance and sow panic, a trick practiced more than two centuries earlier by Genghis Khan; and in both cases, we have reliable accounts to prove that these men at least sometimes made good on their threats—as they must have done, in order to be sure that the threats themselves carried weight. “Mountains” is doubtless an exaggeration; but a pile of human skulls numbering in the tens of thousands must surely have seemed a mountain, to horrified onlookers. —C.C.
Allsveter and Wodenez Two of the most common terms used to describe the deity whom Gibbon has already and correctly (but not adequately) termed “the patriarch of the Norse gods,” Odin (also known, as in Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, as Wotan). He had even more obscure names among the Germanic tribes, since their adherence to this faith (again, contrary to much popular and even some scholarly opinion) predated the arrival of the Norse invaders, perhaps and importantly explaining the German people’s consistent fascination with the myths. For the purposes of these examples, however, Allsveter is almost certainly the Broken dialectal term meaning “All-father,” or “Father of all,” a concept that, we should note, is not, in any of its variations, synonymous with “all-powerful” or “supreme being,” as in the Christian sense of God: Wotan, like all the other great polytheistic patriarchs, had challengers, mistresses, and weaknesses; could suffer defeats; endured not only self-doubt, but regrets; and enjoyed the distinction of having been the only pagan patriarch to endure facial disfigurement, when he traded one of his eyes for Wisdom. —C.C.
“the runes” Evidently, Gisa taught Isadora not only the practices of a skilled healer, but other talents, as well, talents that, under the old, traditional faith of Broken, would have gone hand in hand with healing: those of a seeress, a woman (and such divining figures were almost universally women, among the Germanic tribes) who could cast runes—anything from collections of bones and sticks to chosen stones carved with runic symbols—and gain, not specific details of the future, but an idea of general trends, most importantly for her tribe. —C.C.
the family’s modest litter Gibbon writes, “Although this was doubtless another of Oxmontrot’s attempts to ape Roman customs, it also served, as so many of his policies did, a secondary and pragmatic purpose: Romans rode litters borne by slaves, as opposed to horses, as both a mark of status and as a method of limiting the amount of horse dung and urine that cluttered their already narrow, foul streets. The imperative for the second of these purposes in a city of stone, built upon the summit of a lone mountain some three and a half thousand feet in elevation, would have been even greater.”
Selke and Egenrich Although evidently inscrutable in Gibbon’s day, the names of Keera and Veloc’s parents can now be traced more certainly: Selke—like Elke, in Frisian, from which the name was derived—is apparently a Broken “pet name” for the Germanic Adelheid (or Sedelheid, in the Broken dialect), the usual meaning of which is “kind and noble.” But in the Broken version, “noble because kind” would be closer, and the fact that Selke appears to have been a name used only by the Bane reminds us that compassion was a quality found in greater abundance among the exiles in Davon Wood than in Broken. Besides being a virtue, for the Bane, compassion was also good sense—it kept the tribe open to new outcasts, who thus increased their numbers, brought new blood into the breeding pool, and increased the Bane’s strength and good fortune accordingly. Egenrich, meanwhile, is the Broken version of the very common German name Heinrich, by way of the Old High German version, Haganrich, all three of which mean roughly the same thing, “strong ruler.” Thus, the couple together stand for “compassion and strength”: not only the highest of Bane virtues, but an apt description, to judge by their actions, of the role they played in the lives of their two natural children and their one adopted (if wayward) son. —C.C.
INTERLUDE
the title Interlude: A Forest Idyll It is unclear whether Gibbon detected any note of either irony or outright sarcasm in the title of this section of the Manuscript: whatever the case, while the subject matter broadly resembles what we would expect to find in a typical “idyllic” pause between more narrative episodes, and while the central relationship between the two characters introduced in these pages would certainly seem to justify such a label, each of the histories of those characters is so marred by tragedy and violence, the examples of which are so carefully, indeed graphically phrased (and with so little concern for the elements of poetics or aesthetics), that it seems probable that the narrator, rather than attempting a true idyll, is attempting an earnest—indeed, a grim—broadside against some of the most fatuous popular misconceptions and literary foibles of his time. —C.C.
the forces of revolutionary destruction Gibbon refers to the growing Romantic movement, and particularly to that school most obviously represented by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), whose theories centered on the Natural World, the “Social Contract,” and what is perhaps unjustly dismissed as the theory of the “Noble Savage.” Rousseau’s views on social and societal relationships among humans were indeed twisted and prostituted to the cause of excessive, unchecked violence during the French Revolution, as well as other unsavory episodes during that period and others to come. The most sensible of Romantics recognized the limitations of the philosophy, to say nothing of its dangers, during the French Reign of Terror; but many held on to the ideas tenaciously, rationalizing brutal behavior among human societies that any animal species would certainly have disdained. —C.C.
neura Gibbon writes, “This is, of course, a term taken from Greek antiquity, one originally employed by [the fourth century B.C.] physician Praxagoras of Cos to describe what he thought were a special set of arteries that transmitted the ‘vital force,’ or ‘divine fire’ which all progressive Greek medical minds called pneuma, an invisible substance in the air that is inhaled and traveled from the lungs to the heart, vitalizing the blood that was to be sent to the various appendages and organs of the body, making function and animation possible. However, Praxagoras’s student, Herophilus of Alexandria [335–280 B.C.], building on his teacher’s work yet pushing well beyond it, realized that the neura were in fact not arteries, but instead represented an entirely separate method of transmitting the pneuma. In the modern age, of course, when we have learned through the work of the chemists Lavoisier and Priestley that it is oxygen that in fact fulfills the role assigned to the pneuma, such opinions may seem quaint; but we ought not underestimate their importance as steps along the way to the truth.” One need only add that we ought, too, to recognize that the work of the ancient Greeks is remembered in the name eventually and correctly given to that other “special set of arteries,” the nervous system, or nerves, the adjectival root for which is, of course, neural, and whose basic units of signaling all sensations are neurons, using electrochemica
l transmission. —C.C.
the thirl A term used by various northern tribes—including, apparently, the old man’s unnamed steppe horse people, who were likely from the Ukraine or some other pseudo-European area—in the same sense that we use the word “thrill” today. Indeed, there is an obvious etymological connection between the two, and a behavioral one, as well: the old man’s tribe, like many modern people, actively sought such experiences. —C.C.
the endless steppes The background of this character (prior to his becoming a traveling scholar, apparently well known throughout what we today call the Middle East, Europe, North Africa, and even parts of India for his expertise in fields ranging from medicine to warfare) remains obscure, although certain logical conclusions may be reached that are important to the tale, as it contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the old man’s character and behavior. We can safely rule out any chance that he came from one of those known horse peoples who dominated the critical southern and central regions of the Pontic-Caspian steppe well before and then through the early Dark Ages: the Scythians, Sarmatians, and Goths during the Roman era, as well as the Huns and Alans from the fourth to the eleventh centuries A.D. None of these were noted trading tribes; farther north, however, there were peoples who not only better matched the old man’s physical description, but whose history at this time accounts for his ancestors having become apparently changed from horsemen to successful tradesmen, with ships and caravans that visited the Mediterranean basin and northern Europe, as well as the Middle and Far East, in the latter case using what was already being called, in the old man’s time, the “Silk Path” (later the Silk Road), the only known land route to China. Now referred to as “proto-Balts” (possibly of Finnish origin), in their earliest incarnation these tribes were Indo-European peoples who had, by the eighth century, been pushed into concentrated communities, first inland, to protect themselves from coastal raiders, but, when they grew strong enough, on the Baltic Coast itself. The exact nature and range of goods available in these important ports and towns—known as “emporiums”—is not known, but it was certainly extensive: soon after the establishment of the Islamic empire during the same era, for example, Islamic silver was being traded in Baltic ports, marking their inhabitants as distinctly different from the Slavic tribes that were coming to dominate lands to their south.
Among the most noteworthy Baltic peoples were (and in many cases remain) Lithuanians and Latvians to the east, as well as Pomeranians and Prussians to the west. These last two regions are of special interest in determining why the old man may have found Broken such a congenial home: Saxony (the German region in which Brocken was and is located) was close by, and may also have been “close,” in ethnic and environmental characteristics, as well as general feel, to those places where the old man’s family and tribe had been forced to go when they were pushed away from the great steppe, and became tradesmen rather than a horse people. —C.C.
still understood and respected Here is the first solid reference on the part of the narrator to the notion that scholarship and learning have been disappearing in the “known” world, suggesting that he is writing toward or after the end of Broken’s history (ca. the early eighth century), rather than toward the beginning (sometime in the fifth century): while the fifth was certainly not a century renowned for scientific advances, it would still have been too soon for a scholar to declare the onset of a long “dark age,” whereas by the early eighth century, that pattern was clear and unarguable, and had not yet been reversed by the establishment of the great Islamic centers of secular learning in Spain and Iraq. —C.C.
Wearmouth The fact that Gibbon feels no need to identify these characters both demonstrates the high level of even a “basic” education among the “educated classes” of his day, and is a special tribute to the historical awareness of Edmund Burke: Herophilus is explained in this note, above, while Galen (A.D. 129–216) was the most important figure in medicine between the legendary Hippocrates (ca. 460–ca. 370 B.C.) and the advent of the Enlightenment in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. True, Galen based his work on the humoral system: the idea that the body had four primary organs of importance—heart, liver, spleen, and brain, the last considered directly tied to the lungs—that produced four basic fluids (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), the harmonious balancing of which was the definition of good health. But he also made leaps and strides concerning anatomy and other areas of practical medicine so significant that he became the only doctor by whom more than one Roman emperor would consent to be treated. In addition, by telling us that Galen wrote his famous work on dreams “nearly five hundred years before the old man’s time,” the narrator would seem to be making an unusually definite statement that the old man we are now meeting lived during the early eighth century (although he may have been born in the last years of the seventh), which fits with all other actual chronologies in the Manuscript.
Bede, in the meantime, often called “the Venerable Bede,” was a monk who was indeed born in the important monastery of St. Peter at Wearmouth, in the present British county of Durham, in A.D. 673. However, although often identified (as he is by the Broken Manuscript’s narrator) with that institution, he completed his adult works—most importantly his History of the English Church and People (A.D. 731)—in nearby Jarrow, at the newer monastery of St. Paul, which one expert (Leo Sherley-Price) identifies as a “joint-foundation” with St. Peter’s. The library apparently shared by the two monasteries was one of if not the most extensive in Britain, and Bede played an important part in translating and critiquing great authors of the past, particularly those of Greece and Rome, and he had a mastery of subjects ranging from music to medicine. He was at the height of his powers when he would have received the visit from the Manuscript’s old man, who had been roaming the Far East, North Africa, and Europe; it is possible, in fact, that the old man crossed the “Seksent Straits”—again, almost certainly the English Channel at its narrowest point, between Calais and Dover—with the specific purpose of seeking out both Bede and the library at Wearmouth-Jarrow. —C.C.
Galen the Greek Apparently unnoticed by Gibbon (or perhaps, again, deliberately ignored, so as not to call attention to an apparent inconsistency in the Manuscript) is the use of “Greek” here, rather than what we will soon discover was the Broken dialectal term for that nationality, Kreikisch. This sort of shift occurs too repeatedly, throughout the “Idyll,” to be mere accident—it seems, instead, to clearly indicate a desire on the part of the narrator to display the far more learned, cosmopolitan background and personality of the old man. —C.C.
from their dreams It is both amazing and frustrating to note how very close such early scientific minds as Galen’s and the old man’s came to unlocking the secrets of dreams, and thus stealing Sigmund Freud’s (as well as Carl Jung’s) thunder, at least a thousand years before those pioneers of psychiatry, psychology, and dream interpretation completed their work on the subject: had those earlier authorities only been able to realize that dreams are particularly revealing symptoms of mental and physical disorders, rather than analogous identifiers of disease, one is tempted to wonder how much earlier the development of Western psychology would have commenced, and thus how very different the course of Western history would have been. —C.C.
Roma Again, the use of the proper Latin name for the eponymous capital of the Roman Empire raises questions about when exactly the narrator chose to use particular forms of words, and in what languages, to achieve desired effects: that effect once more being, here, to underline the great learning of the old man. —C.C.
the Cilician Dioscorides The narrator refers to the eminent first-century pharmacologist, Pedanius Dioscorides, author of the five-volume On Materia Medica. Thought to have lived between about A.D. 40 and 90, Dioscorides traveled throughout the world known to Western scholars, gathering samples of botanical, mineral, as well as what we would today call animal-based homeopathic remedies, although it is as a medic
al botanist that he was chiefly known and would be remembered. To provide practical tests of the various cures he either discovered or compiled, he sometimes campaigned with (and may actually have served in) the Roman army. His monumental work, published in about A.D. 77, was definitive enough to remain what Vivian Nutton, in his Ancient Medicine, calls “the bible of medical botany,” one that was still in use “well into the seventeenth century”; and, as we shall see, Dioscorides’ life certainly served as an example for the old man, just as Galen’s did; but the old man was able to include, in his own (unfortunately lost) pharmacopoeia, plants gathered in both Afghanistan and India that Dioscorides had heard tales about, but never encountered. —C.C.
museum Gibbon writes, “The ‘museum’ at Alexandria was, in fact, a building that reflected the early and literal meaning of the word, which is to say, a structure dedicated to the Muses, or to artistic and scholarly endeavor. It would be flattering to think that our own ‘museums’ have retained this character; plainly, it is not always or even usually so.” Yet this note does not seem aimed at Edmund Burke, who likely knew the classical meaning of “museum” as well as Gibbon did; and it’s therefore hard to shake the feeling that Gibbon was at least considering publishing the Manuscript, before he received Burke’s reply. —C.C.
the patella Gibbon writes (with the possible end, as stated in the next note, of distracting Burke’s attention from the horrors immediately following), “Here is proof, validated by the off-hand nature in which it is mentioned, that both the narrator and the priests of Kafra knew far more of human anatomy than we today associate with those ages we call ‘dark’: the patella is the Latin classification of the ‘knee-cap,’ a fact that the narrator of the Manuscript—whose expertise does not seem to have extended into medical realms—nonetheless seems to have taken as commonly understood.”