Dominic Sandbrook
Appearances
The Rest Is History
561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And to quote Ivan Morris, "...the composition, change and quotation of poems was central to the daily life of the Heian aristocracy, and it is doubtful whether any other society in the world has ever attached such importance to the poetic versatility of its members."
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so this is a crucial part of, say, Shonigan's fame at the court is she's not just a brilliant poet, but she's also very, very knowledgeable about poetry. And so if someone sends in a quote, she can rework it. She can refashion it in a kind of exquisitely witty way. And it's no wonder that Furusaki hates her because she's just brilliant at it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
It imposes incredible strain because if you mess it up, you know, if you misquote something, if your poem is felt not quite to hit the mark, then that's terribly damaging to your reputation. And even say Shonagon admits this. So somebody sends a poem, you become very anxious when you have to make a quick response to someone's poem and you can't come up with anything.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
If it's a lover, there's no particular need to hurry to send a reply. But there are times when circumstances make it necessary. And if it's some exchange with a lady, nothing special, and you feel you can just dash something off, that's precisely when you're inclined to make an unfortunate blunder.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So it gives a really vivid sense of, you know, the tension of not losing status and rank by sending out a kind of dud few lines.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
You know, when you're at the top, every slip will be fatal because there are lots of people who want to replace her as the queen. Well, not the queen, I mean, but the queen bee perhaps among the ladies in waiting. And a further cause of anxiety is it's not enough just to compose it, but you have to write it as implied in the passage that you quoted.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And writing, calligraphy, is also a crucial part of establishing yourself as civilized. So Genji, for instance, in Murasaki's novel, takes for granted that calligraphy is the surest window into a person's soul that you can possibly find and that beautiful writing equates to a kind of moral beauty.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And there's a whole chapter in the tale of Genji where he and his mates just sit around and talk about calligraphy. I mean, for them, it is one of the most important things in the world. And they agree everything is going to the dogs except for calligraphy, which has hugely improved. And Seishonagon, likewise, I mean, it's often features in the list of things that she loves.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So things that make you feel cheerful, something written in very delicate strokes with just the tip of an almost impossibly thick brush on a lovely, clean white sheet of Michinoku paper.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, it's kind of like opening proceedings on social media when you never actually met the person. It's a little bit like that because the poem is seen as your window onto the world. An erotic adventure at the court is a crucial part of kind of the broader social dynamics. And it's celebrated by Seishonigan, who, again, seems to have been tremendously good at it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, she certainly gives that impression. But Murasaki as well, even though in her personal relations, she seems to have been viewed actually as a bit of a prude. And it reflects the way in which women are given a degree of kind of license that I think in the Muslim or Christian world would have prompted a lot of anxiety on the part of male moralists. There are absolutely rules.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, very strict rules. But the whole point is, is that you master the rules and then, you know, all kinds of opportunities open up. And that's precisely the thrill and the fun of it. So for women especially, the reason that you want to be very good at poetry is that you are not supposed to show yourself to men who are courting you. You stay behind a screen.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so how then are you meant to establish relations with a man if the man can't actually see you, if you have to stay cloistered away behind a screen? And This is where the poetry comes in. You kind of exchange verses. And if this goes well and if the man thinks, yeah, that's witty, that's well expressed or whatever, then other markers of taste can be unleashed.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And this is what Genji is so good at. He is, in Murasaki's novel, the absolute master of these kind of arts of courtship. So poetry comes first. Then you might have incense mixing. So remember, Genji is perfumed. Seishonagon is very good on how wonderful, beautiful scents are and how awful hideous ones are. It's clearly very, very important in the court. Calligraphy, of course.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
There's a passage in the Tale of Genji where the war minister literally sobs over Genji's calligraphy. And, you know, you can't kind of imagine, I don't know, Pete Hegseth weeping over J.D. Vance's handwriting. That's such a great image. It's not going to happen. And then, of course, there's the exquisiteness of dress and so on.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So the woman would wear perhaps very, very long sleeves and she would very decorously allow perhaps just a glimpse from behind the screen. So it's that kind of thing, a glimpse of ankle. And in due course, a woman who decides that she is happy to allow a man to pay court to her This would initiate a series of secret nighttime visits.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And when I say secret, it's not really secret because there is effectively no privacy in these.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah. So the screens operate as walls within rooms. But I mean, they're not permanent walls. So ultimately, there isn't really any privacy. And it means that in poetry, in prose, in both Tale of Genji and The Pillow Book, the coming of dawn is a repeated theme because it's absolutely touched with a sense of the erotic. And Seishonagon is predictably brilliant on it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So she writes, summer provides the most delightful setting for a secret assignation. The nights are so very short that dawn breaks before you've slept. Everything has been left open all night and there's a lovely cool feel to the expansive view. The lovers still have a little more they must say to each other as they sit there murmuring endearments.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
They're startled into a sudden panicky sensation of exposure by the loud caw of a passing crow. A delightful moment.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
It obviously reflects different social, cultural, sexual expectations. And Christian Europe is a monogamous culture. That's not the case in Japan. So these courtships might lead to marriage or it might lead to a kind of polygamous relationship, a kind of secondary degree of marriage of the kind that Genji is so fond of. Or it might just be a fling. I mean, it's perfectly...
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
fine to just kind of have an affair. And obviously women are absolutely not passive actors in this. They have to project their erotic appeal as well, which is very difficult when you start behind a screen. So there are certain things that are obviously very important to them. We touched on one of them already, and that is smell. So it's an abiding theme in the tale of Genji.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yes. The woman was called, say, Shonagon. And Murasaki Shikibu, the author of the tale of Genji... knew Seishonagon and didn't like her. So she wrote in her diary, Seishonagon was dreadfully conceited. She thought herself so clever and littered her writings with Chinese characters. But if you examine them closely, they left a great deal to be desired.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Women are worried about their perspiration, that they might be giving off body odour where Seishonagon typically riffs on this. I mean, she's kind of original. So she says, you know, it's charming, a lightly padded kimono that gives off a faint whiff of perspiration. She thinks that's actually quite erotic for a man.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And also she gives advice on, in short, because obviously it's a problem if a man is coming and the woman is behind a screen. How is he to know that the woman is there? I mean, she might've gone to bed or something. So Seishonagon advised, shift slightly to let the rustle of clothes alert him. So all these kind of rules that I suppose are freighted with the erotic.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And gowns and mantles and jackets and all kinds. And I mean, that's in large part, as we will see in due course, because it's very cold in winter. But it means that clothing becomes a way, again, like poetry, in which they can project their personality.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so it's not surprising that Seishonigan and Murasaki are obsessed by clothes because the fabric, the cut, the style, the colouring, the pairing of colours, these are ways in which you can project your personality, I suppose.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And I think also the Japanese understanding of what makes a woman physically attractive is very different. So obviously, if the courtship goes well, the key moment comes where a woman has to reveal herself. The man hasn't seen her until this point. And there are very distinctive standards of beauty. So teeth have to be black.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And this is a kind of recurrent theme throughout the tale of Genji, women blackening their teeth, eyebrows plucked and then painted back on. And you have to have a degree of plumpness, I think. If you're thin, this is viewed as very, very erotically off-putting. And there's a sense, I think, almost in which the naked body is seen as unattractive.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So Murasaki writes, the naked body is unforgettably repulsive. It really does not have the slightest charm. So this is not a society in which nakedness is seen as something appealing in any way. And the real obsession is with hair. And the longer it is, the smoother, the glossier, the better. And again and again in the tale of Genji, I mean, Genji only has to see a glimpse of hair and he's off.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
he's unleashed and in fact what he will do the moment he gets a glimpse of hair that's when he will start writing his poems you know he'll start kind of pestering the woman with his poetry and it's hard to think i you know of another culture in which the literary and the erotic are so interfused and i think that's a crucial part of explaining why the writings of women in this period are so potent in their effect and so admired by men as well as by women
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
She's celebrated as the greatest poet of her period. Yeah. And the sense that she is a femme fatale is a crucial part of that. So over the course of her life, she burns her way through two husbands, numerous lovers. Two of these lovers are royal brothers who succeed each other in turn and both in turn then die. So there's a slight quality of the vamp to Izumi Shikibu.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So like a kind of negative review of our podcast. Left by the hosts of an inferior Goldhanger podcast. No doubt. Although, of course, I mean, you know, Murasaki and Seishonagon are both transcendent geniuses. Right. So actually the analogy doesn't work at all. It breaks down there.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And it's a measure of her kind of glamour that within only a few generations, people are writing novels about her. And it's a measure two of the high premium that is set on literary genius that her scandalous reputation never threatens her reputation as a great writer. In fact, just the opposite. So, you know, we talked about how the Japanese love a list.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
There is a list that is drawn up in the Middle Ages of the 36 immortal poets. And I think Izumi Shikibu is number three on that list. I mean, she's very high ranking.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So this for Japan is the classical age. It's the equivalent of Periclean Athens or Augustan Rome. And in Periclean Athens, the writers are all men. In Augustan Rome, the writers are all men. But in Heian Japan... So early 11th century, almost every noteworthy author of this golden age of Japanese literature is a woman. And so it's, I think, unprecedented.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I can't think of another period that is rated as one of the great ages of literature where all the writers pretty much are female.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
really amazing. And so it's not surprising, I guess, therefore, that Murasaki Shikibu or Seishonagon should have kind of been in love with a culture that gave them such a voice and absolutely taken for granted that this is the only place to be. That if you're not at court or What are you? That everything beyond the court is kind of darkness and barbarism.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
There is nothing beyond Heian Kiyo that is worth seeing, that is worth knowing, that is worth visiting. So in the tale of Genji, Genji gets exiled. And it's not terrible. I mean, it's kind of the equivalent of being packed off to Bournemouth or something. But the way he goes on about it, I mean, you'd think it was the worst thing ever, like he was Odysseus or Sinbad or something.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But I mean, it's really not that bad. And Seishonagon, in her list of Japan's top mountains, doesn't name Mount Fuji, the most famous of Japanese mountains. Because it's too far. You know, who'd be interested in seeing it? And in the same way, there's an incredible tone of snobbery that runs through. It's in the tale of Genji.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So... I think what you get there is a clear tone of envy. I mean, you know, we're concerts of tones of envy. We are. I guess it's not surprising, actually, because the two women are in lots of ways quite alike. So say Shonagon, say is a family name, but Shonagon, like Shikabu, so Murasaki's kind of second name, is the name of a post in the Imperial Civil Service.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, where basically no one who isn't from an aristocratic background gets a look in. But Seishonigan makes an absolute art form of it. And so, you know, inevitably she has a list of vulgarities and top of her list of vulgarities is snow on the houses of common people. Because the sight of snow is exquisitely beautiful. It's charming. It's delightful. You see it on the house of common person.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Awful. And I think that she is kind of mocking herself there, but obviously she's also simultaneously, it's coming from deep wellsprings of snobbery. And so effectively not to be part of Heian Kiyo is, you know, you might as well be dead.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Well, I think there is absolutely a sense that the very exquisite quality of life at the court can never be taken for granted and that it is always shadowed. And in the second half, perhaps we could look at some of those shadows. Very good. We'll see you after the break.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So like Murasaki, Shikabu, say Shonagon is the daughter of a functionary, of a civil servant. And Murasaki knew about Seishonagon because they had both served as kind of ladies-in-waiting to an empress in the imperial court. And also, like Murasaki, Seishonagon knew Chinese. We talked about this in the previous episode, that for a woman to know Chinese is seen as very unladylike, very unbecoming.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah, so the nose of the Akashi princess is celebrated in Japanese culture. You know, kind of drawings of it for centuries and centuries. And I guess that this portrait of the Hitachi princess is a counterpoint to say Shonigan's portrayal of aristocratic life in Heian Kiyo as delightful, charming, exquisite, because she lives a completely miserable life. Her parents are dead.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
She has no living relatives. So she is lonely, isolated, I mean, scared. She's a very nervous woman. She's so old fashioned that she wears a comb in her hair. And Murasaki just thinks this is hilarious. And it's, as you get, you know, she's not only, she doesn't look white, she looks blue. Everybody is freezing. Her servants are all sat around her kind of shivering and chattering.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And the princess herself is reduced to wearing furs from Siberia, which as everyone knows, is the kind of thing that only a very old lady would do. And so she's a fright, but Genji is sorry for her and anxious for her. And so he rescues her and installs her in his palace. And so in that sense, everything works out for the best.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah. And I think a darkness, a literal darkness as well, because if you're spending most of your time stuck behind a screen, the way that the architecture functions, you know, there's a good deal of shadow and then you stick up a screen. You're spending a lot of your time in a kind of twilight.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And we know this from the tale of Genji because there's an episode where Genji goes in to seduce one woman and and ends up accidentally seducing the Empress and getting her pregnant, which is a key moment in the novel and actually results in his exile. So it's dark, but also, of course, it's cold.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And having just come back from a holiday in Japan and stayed in a traditional Japanese house while it was snowing, I mean, it really is cold. And the kind of the style of architecture means that when an icy wind is whistling, you really feel it. And so that is why women in the Heian court are wearing the large numbers of layers that they are.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But I think even with those layers, they're probably freezing a lot of the time. And so the reality of life probably for most women at the Heian court is that it's very cold. It's very dark and it's pretty boring because you're not having men coming and calling on you most of the time.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But I don't think that that means, say, that, say, Shonigan in The Pillow Book is lying when she portrays the Heian court as exquisite and delightful and charming.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And in the translation that we've been quoting from, the Penguin classic translated by Meredith McKinney, she places the pillow book in the context of a political crisis at court that was directly threatening, say, Shonigan's position there and the empress that she was serving. And so Meredith McKinney describes the pillow book as,
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
as a work that not only resolutely refuses to acknowledge these sorrows, but that largely refuses to acknowledge sorrow itself and gives us in its place a world of exquisite delight. And it'll sound a weird parallel, but I thought of P.G. Woodhouse writing Bertie Worcester in the 30s. that this world of kind of genial humour has no place really for depressions or wars or whatever.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And I think it's similar with the Pillow Book. There's a deliberate determination not to admit the darkness.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Murasaki... tried to keep her knowledge of Chinese secret. She was embarrassed by it. Her fellow ladies in waiting teased her about it. But Seishonigan did not veil it. She absolutely paraded her knowledge of Chinese. She's absolutely unafraid to make a show of her brilliance. And she does it with such style and charisma that it clearly makes her a kind of a massive star at court.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah, and it's hinted in the very first sentence of... The Tale of Genji, which you read out in the previous episode. And people may remember it. It starts, in a certain reign, whose can it have been? And this introduces a theme that runs throughout the novel, which is that the figure of the emperor himself is kind of anonymous and passive.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And they're always kind of being retired and replaced by another one. And they have no real personality. And this reflects the fact that that when the Emperor Kanmu, people who listened to the last episode may remember that he had been in a capital called Nara and had felt that he as emperor was coming under the shadow of the great lords of Japan.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And he had gone off and founded Heian Kiyo in an attempt to restore imperial authority. What this suggests is that that effort hadn't worked, that over the course of the 10th century, following the foundation of Heian Kiyo, the emperor had continued to be leeched of his power. And although he remains the center of the government and the state, it's not in kind of any active sense.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So he has taken on the Chinese title Tenu, which we might translate as emperor. And Tenu, we said this in the previous episode, means the pole star. And as Joshua Friedman in his book on Japanese mythology puts it, The pole star does not do anything. It simply sits. And by virtue of what it is, everything else rotates around it. The tenno is theoretically the same.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
He exists at the centre of the government and all things orbit around him. But he himself does not need to do anything other than simply be. And there's another word that is applied to the emperor. which could be translated as emperor, which is Mikado, as in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera. And this is a bit like Pharaoh. So Pharaoh means literally the great house.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
It's identifying the figure of the ruler with the architecture of where he lives. And Mikado literally means gates of the inner palace. And these are the gates that keep the people out, but keep the emperor in. So again, it's this idea that he's being kind of closeted away. He's like a prisoner at the heart of the system. Yeah, almost.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And when you go to Tokyo to this day, the palace has this amazing moat. It has these great walls you can't see inside. I mean, the emperor feels a kind of very invisible center, which I guess is what he is even back in the 11th century.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So who's in charge? At the time we've been talking about, it's basically a single family, the Fujiwara. And they are very ancient, very distinguished. So even back in the time of Nara, with all the faction fighting there, they had been kind of leading players. But by the middle of the 10th century, they've effectively established themselves as the rulers of the court itself.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And therefore, by extension, the whole of Japan. And they do this not by kind of throwing their weight around. You know, they don't have samurai at their beck and call. They're not great military leaders. They do it because they are brilliant at politics and at faction fighting and specifically at what Japanese historians call marriage politics.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And the essence of marriage politics is to get the emperor married to your daughter so that you will be related by marriage to the figure who sits on the throne. So to quote Yvonne Morris, By the 10th century, the Fujiwaras had imposed on the emperor a type of life cycle that was almost bound to keep him under the family's thumb.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
He came to the throne as a callow youth and was promptly married to a Fujiwara girl. Their son would be appointed crown prince. And when his father was obliged to abdicate, usually at the age of about 30, this crown prince would succeed him and the cycle would start again. So there's no way for the emperor to break free of the kind of marriage chains that the Fujiwaras are fettering them with.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And the effective ruler of Japan, when say Shonagon comes to court, is a man who by now is not unofficial, it's formal. He is ruling as the regent for the emperor. And he's done this by marrying his daughter, who is a woman called Teishi, to the emperor Ichijo, who is only 11 years old. So very, very easy to be manipulated. Yeah.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So unlike Murasaki, she boasts of how ready she is to kind of stand up and be the center of attention. So she writes in the Pillow book, I am not renowned for my modesty or prudence.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Ichijo is always under Michitaka's thumb, partly because he's a boy, partly because there are three retired emperors on the scene. You know, they've all been kind of retired off. So that dilutes his authority, obviously. And I think partly because he's raised and educated never to oppose the Fujiwara. He just sits in his palace and, you know, plays his former role and that's it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Seishonigan thinks Teishi is great. You know, she thinks she's funny, she's smart, she's stylish. And in exchange, the presence of Seishonigan at Teishi's side as part of her retinue adds greatly to Teishi's prestige because Seishonigan is that famous, that celebrated. Right. But obviously the position of both women is kind of precarious.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, both of them are completely aware of this because it depends on Michitaka and remaining on the scene and keeping hold of power. And I think despite the pretty consistent tone of sunniness and lightness that you get in the pillow book, occasionally there's the odd hint from Satonagon that she is aware of this. It's a little bit like the black shorts in Bertie Worcester.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
There's kind of little hint of the darkness off stage. So there's a scene where Seishonagon describes Michitaka. She thinks he's great, looking wonderfully slender and elegant, pausing to adjust his ceremonial sword. And then she describes how Michitaka's brother, the commissioner Michinaga, did not just bow before his brother, but sank to his knees.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And she goes and relates to Teishi what she's seen and says, oh, it's marvelous. Such a beautiful scene. And then she writes, when I kept mentioning to Her Majesty how Commissioner Michinaga, so the younger brother, had bowed before the region, she smilingly teased me by referring to him as that perennial favourite of yours.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
If she could have lived to witness the greatness he later attained, she would have realised how right I was to find him so impressive. So she's writing at a time where Teishi has died. and where Michinaga has replaced Michitaka as regent. And that happened in, so Michitaka died in 995. And what happens then is that the next brother in line succeeds Michitaka, dies within a few days.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so Michinaga then becomes regent. And for Teishi and Seishonagon, this is very bad news because obviously Michinaga is going to want to marry one of his own daughters to the emperor Ichijo.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
He's not going to bump Teishi off. He's not going to set her aside. But what he is going to do is essentially ensure that there is a second empress. So there will be two empresses of equal rank. But this obviously destabilizes Teishi's position massively. And it happens in the year 1000. So Michinaga has a 10-year-old daughter called Shoshi. And she gets married to the emperor.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And there are now two empresses and there are two courts. And Michinaga obviously knows Seishonagon well. You know, they've been kind of bantering and Seishonagon's been going on about how brilliant he is when he kneels before his brother and all that kind of stuff. And he basically wants his daughter, Shoshi...
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
to have a literary superstar as a lady in waiting as well and this is where murasaki shikibu comes in because she is not just celebrated for her learning and her her literary genius but she's actually a fujiwara herself albeit from quite a kind of minor branch of the family so she's perfect
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So Murasaki comes in and you can see why this would add an extra dimension to the rivalry between the two women. And it's Murasaki, it turns out, basically who has backed the winning side because a few months after Shoshi has been promoted to the rank of joint empress alongside Teishi, so marrying Ichijo, Teishi dies in childbirth. And so all eyes now are on Shoshi.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Will she be able to give her husband a son and thereby ensure her father's hold on power? She's only 10 when she marries. It's eight years before she finally gets pregnant. And then again, there's massive tension because will she survive childbirth? And if she does, will she deliver a boy? And it's amid this mood of tension that Murasaki begins her diary. I
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so she describes her majesty listens to her ladies in waiting, engaged in idle gossip. She must be in some distress. Amazing. It's an account of, you know, an event that is so important in monarchies throughout history and across the world. Will the wife of a ruler give that ruler a son? And here you have one of the greatest writers of all time describing it in journalistic fashion.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah, and so he stays securely in power until he dies in 1028 and no one thinks to challenge him. And by the time he dies, he has been brother-in-law to two emperors, uncle to one, uncle and father-in-law to Ichijo, so that's another one, and grandfather to two more emperors. So, I mean, he is absolutely at the center of power in the imperial palace.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
For Seishonigan and Murasaki Shikibu, for the former, the death of Teishi spells the end of her time at court. And so you can see, I think, therefore, that the Pillow book, much of which she must have written in retirement, actually, it is written with a real consciousness of bereavement, almost.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And if it's a eulogy to joy, which it undoubtedly is, it's one of the most joyous books you could possibly read. I think it is also testimony to the fleeting nature, the insubstantiality of joy. Murasaki, I mean, she seems to have come out as a winner.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So she ends up so close to Michinaga that there are all kinds of far-fetched stories told in the decades and centuries that follow that she'd actually had a relationship with him And I think there's no doubt that Genji as a character and his rise to greatness is kind of modeled a bit on Michinaga. And Ichijo, he loves stories and so he loves the tale of Genji.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And it may well be that it's this that encourages Murasaki to write it at the length that she does. And of course, Michinaga is delighted about this because it intensifies Ichijo's devotion to Shoshi, to Michinaga's daughter. So you can see the way in which literature isn't at a remove from power politics, but is absolutely kind of woven into it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
You know, does this make Murasaki happy? happy i don't think she's a particularly happy person and much more readily than say shonigan is in in her diary but even more so and more powerfully in the tale of genji the fleeting nature of joy and the pain that you can feel in in recalling moments of joy is kind of one of her great themes
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Well, they're lines that are drawing, I guess, on the kind of the primal beliefs of Japan, the Shinto beliefs. So you have pines that are so ancient that like so much of the natural world, whether it's rivers or mountains or whatever, that they must be held divine. You have the God's own time, which equates to eternity. And therefore you have a sense that love itself can cheat time.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But the thing is that even as Genji is composing these lines, he doesn't actually in his heart believe it. And the reason for that is that all the manifestations of Chinese culture that we've been describing, the writing, the poetry, the fashions, the song, the dance, the stars of government, these are not the only legacy of that kind of, you know, those centuries of Sinomania because...
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And we haven't yet touched really on the sacral. There is another aspect of Chinese culture which takes off in Japan to a momentous degree, and that is Buddhism.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yes, you are absolutely right. But let's call it Buddhism for want of a better word. And it arrives in Japan probably in the 6th century. It flourishes at Nara in the 8th century. Nara boasts the most wonderful Buddhist temples, astonishing statues. I mean, you're just about to go to Japan, aren't you, I think?
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I hope there won't be white lotus style. behavior. So Nara is a kind of great Buddhist city. And that's one of the reasons actually why the capital gets moved is because the monks there are wielding such power that the emperor is feeling in their shadow as well.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And by the ninth century, going into the 10th and 11th century, native and Buddhist traditions are kind of merging to create a definitively Japanese form of Buddhism. And this is manifest everywhere in Heian-kyo. So that temple bell which Seishonagon hears ringing in the dead of night when she's tucked up under her bedclothes. That's a Buddhist bell.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Murasaki, when she's describing how the Emperor Soshi is preparing to give birth to her child, she describes hearing voices in ceaseless recitation of sutras, which are the voices of Buddhist monks. And there is a town called Uji, which is about 10 miles south of Heian-kyo, where the final chapters of the Tale of Genji is set.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, I can't think of any work of ancient or medieval literature where charm and wit, as you say, is manifest on every page. I mean, it's not what you associate really with kind of ancient literature. And as you say, her personality is so vivid that you feel like you completely know her. And I agree that like the tale of Genji, it feels dislocating.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Michinaga buys a villa there, which is then converted by his son into a great Buddhist temple. This temple appears on one of the Japanese coins, and it contains what is one of the few surviving masterpieces of Heian art, which is this colossal wooden sculpture of the Buddha. So Buddhism is an absolutely fundamental part of Heian Kiyo, this world described by the great writers of the period.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah, I mean, it's really striking having written so much about Christianity and its emergence in antiquity and pagan antiquity. Buddhism in Japan is such a contrast So whereas Christianity banishes the ancient gods of the Mediterranean, that doesn't happen in Japan. I mean, there are definitely tensions. There are elements of the native traditions that really oppose the introduction of Buddhism.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But they are not driven out. So in the time of Murasaki and Seishonagon, the emperor, as the emperor today does, is still claiming descent from the sun goddess. His virgin daughter will be serving as the sun goddess's priestess in what is the greatest shrine in Japan. And you still have this sense that the divine is imminent in the natural world that was evident in that poem that Genji writes.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But Buddhism, although it is able to coexist with these beliefs, it does teach that the gods worshipped in these various shrines or whatever are themselves part of the illusory world, along with the beauties of the natural world, love, the world itself, in fact. And this is what everybody that we've been talking about in this episode and the previous episode believes. So Shainagon does.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And it's said, we don't know with what reliability, but it's often repeated that at the end of her life, she follows the example of what lots of other people at court, including emperors do, which is to renounce the world. And she throws away her beautiful clothes and she shaves off her beautiful hair and she becomes a nun.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And this is something that Murasaki, we know, was very tempted by because she feels dread that as a woman, she is fated not to attain enlightenment, that she's bound to be reborn, that she'll have to be reborn as a man before she can have any prospect of enlightenment. And she writes about, I think, very painfully and movingly.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Someone with as much to atone for as myself may not qualify for salvation. There are so many things that serve to remind one of the transgressions of a former existence. Everything conspires to make me unhappy. And I think it's that...
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
It's that capacity to worry that everything that is beautiful and a cause of happiness is itself an illusion that gives the tale of Genji its distinctive character, that it expresses such love for the beauties and joys of the moment, but also such a sense of sorrow that these beauties and joys will ultimately vanish. And in fact, you have to reject them.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
You have to keep pinching yourself and reminding yourself, this is someone who's writing, you know, keep saying this. In England, this is the Anglo-Saxon period. I mean, it is amazing. So how did she come to write it?
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
if you are going to attain the eternal beauty and joy of enlightenment. And so Murasaki, she says, I want to give it all up. I want to become a nun, but she also dreads it. And she writes, supposing I were to commit myself and turn my back on the world, I am certain there would be moments of irresolution before Amida came for me riding on his clouds.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
He's a version of The Buddha, is that right? So he is a Buddha. He is the Buddha to whom the Heian courtiers seem particularly to have prayed. So in Uji, this great temple, the great statue carved out of wood and gilded there is Amida. And the appeal of Amida, I think there are two aspects to it. The first is that he seems to promise enlightenment to everyone.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So this is why he's particularly popular with women. He seems to offer the promise to women that they don't have to be reborn necessarily. But also he seems to promise that love can survive death because what he is supposed to have done is that when he attained enlightenment,
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
The Amida Buddha creates a paradise in the uttermost West, and that people who pray to him for salvation can attain this paradise, this Western, pure land. They will be reborn there, and they will live in this, essentially, it's a kind of paradise that precious metals are living, jewels grow from the ground. And people themselves, when they are born, they emerge from lotuses into eternal light.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
They're free from any sort of sin. And though in due course they will die, then they will attain enlightenment. So it's a kind of, it's a final stage, a beautiful final stage before finally attaining the enlightenment that is the desire of every Buddhist. And this is the paradise that Murasaki believes could be hers, right? Yes, and Genji.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yes, and may well be made up. So this is part of the fun of reading the Pillay book is that Sage Onagin is very, she's very playful. You can never entirely trust what she's saying, I think. So the name Pillow Book, it comes from the story of how she comes to write it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And they hope that they will meet and be able to renew their love there. So on her deathbed, Murasaki mourns that she would go alone into the unknown and the thought filled her with great sorrow. But she has consolation from the thought that in due course, Genji will be able to join her. And Genji tells her, that one day we will share one lotus throne in the life to come.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
That is the hope that he cleaves to, even while he's shadowed by anxiety, that of course he may not attain it. And so this sense of the yearning for things that have gone, a sense that things that go must go, a sense that everything is insubstantial, an awareness that time is a kind of treacherous dimension that
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
All these things that kind of echo, you know, great modern European writers, Proust and so on. I mean, they derive in the context of Murasaki from the very specific cultural context in which he is born, lives and dies, as you would expect. Right.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah, I did. One of the additional reasons why I've so enjoyed doing the series is, as we said earlier, I cannot think of a greater contrast to the six-part epic that you are going to be leading directly after this, which is on Peter the Great.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So the story she gives is that a minister comes to the Empress, who is, say, Shonagan's mistress, presents the Empress with a great sheaf of paper. And the Empress makes a gift of it to, say, Shonagan. And she uses this paper to start recording observations, thoughts, experiences, whatever. And she seems to have kept the sheaf of papers either under or next to her pillow.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And she then leaves the court and continues to write it. And then one day, oh me, oh my, she is disturbed by a governor who comes to pay his respects to her. And so she pulls out the pillow for the governor to sit on. And there are the sheaf of papers. And Seishonagon is so mortified.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I scrambled to try and retrieve them, but he carried them off with him and kept them for a very long time before returning them. That seems to have been the moment when this book first become known. And she says, I'm mortified, mortified that it's got out. It's terrible that people have read this masterpiece that I've written.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And clearly she's making play with the expectation that she, as a woman, was supposed to be mortified. And this is kind of typical of the, I guess, the kind of the subtlety and the ambivalence that characterizes her humor throughout the book.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I mean, The Tale of Genji, you can recognise it as a novel. But The Pillow Book is unlike really anything that's been written since. And I guess if you had to compare it to anything, perhaps to a blog, perhaps even to the best kind of podcast you could possibly imagine, where it's constantly going off on various tangents, but every tangent is completely fascinating.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So the genius of it for Seishonagon is that essentially it's a framework in which she can write about anything that interests her. So you get lyrical descriptions of the kind with which you open. And often these are descriptions of things that make her happy. And the sense of happiness that she conveys is something that I think people could still identify with today.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So how delightful it is in winter on a fiercely cold night when you're lying there listening, snuggled far down under the bedclothes. and the sound of a temple bell comes to you with such a deep and distant reverberation that it seems to be emerging from somewhere buried. So you're simultaneously there in 11th century Japan, the sense of a bell ringing.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But also, I mean, that is a universal experience, isn't it? I mean, the joy of being warm in bed in a cold night. I mean, it's incredible. Exactly. The other thing She loves a list. And actually, when I was in Japan, I realised that this is a continuing thing in Japan. So you go to a castle and say, this is the fourth best castle in Japan or that kind of thing. You know, they love it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And it clearly begins with, say, Shonagon. So she will list, you know, top mountains, top ponds, top horses, all that kind of thing. Her list of top birds. She's not keen on the heron. She says the heron looks horrible. Horrible, yeah. Very keen on the mandarin duck. which he says is very touching in the way the pair will change places on cold nights to brush the frost from each other's wings.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And I think the Japanese generally are very keen on the Mandarin duck because it seems to have been an emblem of marital fidelity. So Genji, in Murasaki's novel, he's walking out under the moonlight with Murasaki, his great love, and he hears a Mandarin duck. He has this great Proustian rush of memory, thinking of all the times that he's spent with Murasaki.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And it brings back fond memories of times now gone by.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Yeah. It's kind of almost like Oscar Wilde, isn't it?
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And embarrassing things. And this will be so familiar, I think, to anyone who has ever been at the school gates. Someone insists on telling you about some horrid little child carried away with her own infatuation with the creature, imitating its voice as she gushes about the cute and winning things it says. And Seishonigan generally doesn't seem to be very fond of children.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
So she also accuses three-year-olds of being smug and cocky, which is... I mean, she's not wrong.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And also, there are kind of brilliant anecdotes about court life. So there's an amazing story, for instance, about how there's a great snowfall and the gardeners sweep up all the snow and they make a huge snow mountain. And the Empress and all her ladies-in-waiting, including Seishonagon, have a kind of sweepstake on how long this snow mountain will last before it melts.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Seishonagon says, oh, it'll last for weeks, weeks and weeks. And everyone says, no, that's mad. You'll never do that. And she has a bet with the Empress. And Seishonagon described, you know, every day she goes to inspect the state of this snow mountain. And gradually over the course of the weeks, it gets dirtier and dirtier and dirtier until it's completely black.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But it's still very solid there. And she has a gardener who comes to report to, you know, on the state of the mountain and everything. And the evening before, it's still there. She's clearly going to win the bet. And in the morning, the gardener says, it's gone. It's been vanished. And it turns out that the empress has had people come in and sweep it away and cheat.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And Seishonigan goes and complains to the emperor about this. And he smiles and remarks, well, I suppose she just didn't want to see you win. And to think that this is an 11th century court, I mean, that kind of anecdote, you know, we said this in the last episode, what wouldn't you give for a story like that from the court of Edward the Confessor or something?
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And she is clearly a product of the court culture that she adorns. And I think it's evident that she is giving court culture the best spin that she possibly can. And I think that's probably because she does love it, because she is such a brilliant figure at court. I mean, that's, you know, that's wonderful.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And so there's this word, apparently, again, marshalling my fluent Japanese, akashi, which can be translated as delightful, amusing, charming, fun, I suppose, exquisite, whatever. And this is essentially the word she uses to describe so many things that happen at court.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But when you look at Murasaki's diary, which is a kind of parallel to the pillow book, she's much more introverted, much more morose, I think. And she gives a darker portrait of life at court. So Seishonagon adores gossip. I mean, she praises it. What could possibly be more fun than talking about other people and criticising them? She writes. Yeah, she's not wrong.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Whereas Murasaki beats herself up about being a gossip. And unlike her rival, she confesses to loneliness, to isolation.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
Well, yeah, you're probably right. But I think when you combine, say, the writings of these two extraordinary authors, what you get is a sense that... This court is kind of, if you want to say, civilized to the nth degree. I mean, it's kind of the epitome of civilization.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And when the Japanese, as they have done ever since the 11th century, celebrate the Heian court as the kind of the great classical age of elegance, of sophistication, of style, I mean, they're not wrong. And Dominic, after this episode, we're going to be embarking on a six-part series on the life of Peter the Great.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
And there is a lot of kind of malarkey with drunk bears and bellows being shoved up bottoms and things. Correct. Peter the Great's court is not elegant. This court absolutely is.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
I suspect Seishonigan would have done quite well, but Murasaki probably would have hated it.
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561. The Golden Age of Japan: Secrets of the Imperial Court (Part 2)
But also of your ability. People today have to have a mastery of IT or whatever. In the Heian court, you have to have a mastery of poetry.
The Rest Is History
569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und gleichzeitig hat Hannibal Spione in Rom, also hält er auf die verschiedenen Entwicklungen auf. Und dies reflektiert den Fakt, dass natürlich die Eröffnung einer Landeinwaisen von Italien klar ein riesiger Wandel ist. Und er ist versäumt, das ohne all die Informationen, die er bekommen kann, zu tun. Und er geht auf große Länge, um diese Informationen zu bekommen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und dies wird wiederum ein Thema seiner Strategie sein. And it's one of the reasons why Roman historians, of which Livy is the exemplar, later will basically say he cheats, because he's always on top of information. You know, he has this kind of almost supernatural ability to know what is going on. And the Romans see this as basically not being fair, really.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es könnte sein. Und deshalb ist es nicht nur wichtig, dass so viele neutrale Triebe zu ihm kommen, wie möglich. Aber ebenso wichtig ist, dass er die Begeisterung der Götter braucht. Wir haben in der vorherigen Episode erwähnt, dass Livys Begeisterung gegen Hannibal, dass er die Götter nicht respektiert, dass er keine Zeit für sie hat, dass er sie beurteilt. Ich meine, das ist absolut nicht wahr.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und in Wahrheit. Livy selbst schreibt einen sehr momentanen Beispiel von Hannibals Bereitschaft, Respekt vor den Göttern zu zeigen, weil er schreibt, wie bald nach dem Fall von Saguntum, also wahrscheinlich im Frühjahr von 218, Hannibal eine tolle Erklärung seiner Truppen darstellt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und dann, nachdem er das getan hat, und ich bezeichne Livy, ging er nach Gardes, das ist Cadiz, dort, um seine Wünsche an den Tyrian Herkules abzuschalten und sich mit weiteren Wünschen für den fortschrittlichen Erfolg seines Wunsches zu befinden. Der Tyrian Hercules ist ein Gott, der Melkart genannt wird. Gardez ist einer der ältesten phönischen Einrichtungen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Melkart ist ein Gott, der von Tyre in was jetzt Libanon gebracht wurde. Melkart ist der göttliche Patron von Tyre, aber auch von Hannibals Dynastie. Und er geht wahrscheinlich da in den Frühjahr, was ein Zeitpunkt ist, in dem Melkart, ein bisschen wie Jesus, von den Toten gerissen wird.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es ist also diese Idee eines großartigen Helden, der zurückkehren muss und die Parallelen mit Carthage, die zurückkehren muss zu ihrer ehemaligen Hegemonie im Westen der Mediterranen, ist sehr, sehr offensichtlich. Aber es gibt einen weiteren Grund, warum Hannibal sich mit Melkart identifizieren wollte und Melkarts Begründung bekam.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
ist, weil es einen enormen Propaganda-Wert gibt, nicht nur für die Karthaginier, sondern auch für die Romäner und für den breiteren griechischen Welt, weil Melkart über die Mediterranen universell mit vielleicht der berühmtesten und vermutlichsten aller griechischen Helden, Herkules, identifiziert ist. Also der starke Mann mit dem Club und der Hühnenskinn.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und natürlich ist Herkules ein großer Schläger von Monstern. Das ist, was er macht. Er schlägt die Welt, um Monster zu töten. Und eine dieser Abenteuer, laut griechischer Mythologie, hat ihn von Griechenland bis zum Atlantik gebracht. Und das ist, weshalb die Strahlen von Gibraltar den Griechen als die Pillar von Herkules bekannt sind. Herkules soll dort Pillar setzen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und dann von den Pillar von Herkules reist er zurück. durch Spanien, über die Pyrenäen, durch den südlichen Gaul, über die Alpen. Und er kommt nach Italien und stellt sich auf die Italiener ein und besiegt Italien. So kann man sehen, warum diese Idee, dass es eine Straße von Herkules ist, die von einem alten Helden besiegt wird, der von Spanien nach Italien reist und ein großer Besieger ist.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Man kann sehen, warum Hannibal sich damit identifizieren würde. Und ich denke, dass, obwohl wir nicht Carthaginien haben, Direkt Propaganda. There is a garbled story in Livy that enables you to kind of get a handle on what Hannibal might have been doing with these kind of stories and myths.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
So the story in Livy is that Hannibal is coming back from Gardez, where he's been making sacrifice to Melkart, a.k.a. Hercules. Und er führt seine Armee auf dem Weg von Herkules nach Neukarthus, nach Ebro, der Frontier von Karthaginien und Spanien. Und dann hat er einen Traum.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
In diesem Traum sah er einen Mann mit einem göttlichen Ausdruck, der besagte, dass er von Jupiter, dem König der Götter, geführt wurde, um Hannibal nach Italien zu führen. Und dieser göttliche Mann sagt Hannibal, schau nicht hinter dich hin, aber Hannibal kann sich nicht helfen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und er sieht hinter ihm einen Knall einer unglaublichen Größe, der sich herumschlägt und massive Zerstörung von Bäumen und Bäumen verursacht, einen störenden Windsturm folgt in seinem Wachstum. Hannibal fragte den jungen Mann, was die monströse Apparition war und was das Portent bedeutet.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Er wurde informiert, dass es die Zerstörung von Italien war und dass er einfach weitergehen sollte auf seiner Reise, ohne weitere Fragen zu fragen und das Leben in der Dunkelheit zu verlassen. Und die Leute fragen sich vielleicht, was ist das alles um?
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es gibt ein brillantes Essay von Richard Miles, das, glaube ich, konklusiv demonstriert, dass diese Geschichte mit Hannibal und seinen Propagandisten originierte. und dass der unbekannte Supernaturschein, dieser junge Mann, der Hannibal im Traum erscheint, Herkules ist. Und dass der Monster, den er sieht, der Hydra ist. Und der Hydra hat diese großen Nächte.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das ist richtig, ja. Also Juvenal dort in diesem Vers, sehr berühmt, beschreibt Hannibal, die Alpen zu brechen, die Bouldern und den Rock zu entsorgen mit Vinagre, die Italien zu invadieren. Aber im Langfristigen verliert er das Krieg der Romänen und endet als verletzter Fugitur.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Du nimmst den Nacken aus und ein weiterer wächst zurück. Und es ist sehr wie die römischen Legionen. Und in Wahrheit hat Pyrrhus, der König von Epirus, der Italien invadiert hat und die Römer und die Karthaginier zu Elefanten vor ein paar Jahrzehnten vor der ersten Punischen Krieg, He had explicitly compared the Roman Republic to the Hydra.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And I think Hannibal and his propagandists are making kind of play with that. Hannibal is being told, you will kill the Hydra. You will be able to cut off all its necks and it will become just a kind of bleeding stump.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, also diese Männer, die meisten von ihnen sind nicht eigentlich Carthaginianer. Wie du gesagt hast, sind sie die höchsten rankenden Offiziere. Sie sind sehr leidenschaftlich zu Hannibal. Sie haben sich mit ihm gekämpft. Sie wurden von Hannibal und von Hannibals Voraussetzungen ermutigt, immer Initiative zu zeigen, immer die Angelegenheit der Aktion zu zeigen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ich denke, da gibt es eine Legitimation von Hannibals frühen Rekord als Kavalierkommandant. Ein Emphasis darauf, den Moment durch den Hals zu bewegen. und immer die Möglichkeiten, wo sie entstehen. Und ich glaube, der am meisten gefeierteste dieser Offiziere ist ein Mann namens Mahabal, der sich nach Hannibal in den Beinen verletzt hatte. Er ist für ihn deputiert worden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Er ist vielleicht Hannibals Bruder gewesen. Er scheint sich, wenn nicht, vielleicht mit der Barkid-Familie verheiratet zu haben. Er wird ein sehr großer Kavalierkommandant werden, wie Hannibal selbst. Und so wird auch Hannibals jüngster Bruder Mago sein, der, wie Hannibal, von seinem Vater geboren wurde, ein sehr profizienter Militäroperator zu sein.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also, es ist wie das Kader der jungen Männer um Alexander. Hannibals Offiziere sind unglaublich kämpft. Ich meine, sehr, sehr effektiv, wie das Zeitgeist bezeichnet. Aber die Masse von Hannibals Armee, diese sind nicht, wie es in Rom ist, eine Art Bürger.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie sind im Allgemeinen entweder Menschen, die von nativen Menschen verabschiedet wurden, also Libyen aus Afrika, Iberien aus Spanien oder Soldaten. Also sehr, sehr multikulturell. Und traditionell Ich erinnere mich immer an die Bücher, die ich als Kind darüber gelesen habe, dass das als ein echtes Problem dargestellt wurde.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und Dr. Johnson in seinem Updating davon, ähm, er, sein Äquivalent von Hannibal war, wie du gesagt hast, Charles XII., der heroische König von Schweden, dessen Karriere eine sehr ähnliche Trajectorie zu Hannibals folgte. Der größte General seiner Zeit, aber letztendlich von Peter der Große verdammt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Dass die karthaginische Armee ein Babel von verschiedenen Sprachen war, anders als die Romer, die alle dieselben Sprachen sprachen und die gleichen zivilen Ideen teilen. Aber ich denke, es ist ziemlich klar, dass die multikulturelle Qualität Hannibals Armee ihm eigentlich hilft. Diversität ist seine Kraft in diesem Sinne.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Weil es so viel mehr unterschiedlich ist und weil alle verschiedenen Truppen, die er von den verschiedenen Elementen des westlichen Mediterranen erzeugt hat, alle Spezialisierungen haben. Also die Iberianische Infanterie, zum Beispiel, sehr berühmt für ihre Schwangerschaft. Und die Romer werden in der Lange Zeit tatsächlich den spanischen Schwert, den Gladius, benutzen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Stabbedrohende Schwerte, die sich verwisselten, die die Blüten öffnen. Die Iberianer haben auch den Falkata, welcher eine Art eleganter, eine kurve Schwanz, die für die Zerrung und die Zerrungung gebraucht wird. Also sehr, sehr furchtbare Böden von Schwanzmännern. Dann gibt es die Balearik-Slinger. Und als ich ein Kind war, war ich überrascht von Balearik-Slingern. Ich liebe das Wort Balearik.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und ich glaube, für Für viele Leute, die Balearik hören, werden Bilder von Ibiza und Clubs und so ausgesucht. Wahrscheinlich nicht von UWA. Und dann gibt es die Cavalry aus Numidia in Nordafrika, die Berber, glaube ich. Also leben sie in dem, was heute Marokko, Algerien sein würde. Und sie sind im Grunde ein bisschen wie die Mongolen, leben auf Horsenback.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und es wurde von ihnen bemerkt, dass sie keinen Bridal oder Bitt und Rode-Bear-Back benutzen. Aber sie sind fast wie Centaure, sie leben einfach auf ihren Pferden. Und diese sind so leicht wie die beste Cavalry der Welt. Also gibt es eine unglaubliche Vielfalt dort. Viel mehr verschiedene militärische Kräfte, als die Romanen beherrschen können.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und natürlich ist Hannibals Begegnung am meisten berühmt mit Elefanten. Und wir haben erwähnt, wie Pyrrhus, der König von Pyrrhus, der griechischen König, sie nach Italien gebracht hat. Aber er ist inspiriert von dem Beispiel von Alexander, der sie in Indien getroffen hat.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
When he's fighting Porus, yes. And since that time, elephants have become the most fashionable thing that any self-respecting kind of Greek warlord would want. I think the reason for that is that they are so expressive of sheer power. They terrorize. Du bist ein Infanterie-Mann, der dort steht, und du hast einen riesigen, großen Elefanten, der dich rutscht. Ich meine, es ist überwältigend.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und wenn du also Gargantuan-Ambitionen hast, wie es griechische Generäle und Könige tun, dann kannst du sehen, warum ein Elefant das perfekte Ausdruck davon ist. Und daran ist es interessant, dass Rom, was eine Republik ist, nie wirklich Elefanten besitzt. Es scheint nicht wirklich mit ihren Taktiken verbunden zu sein. Aber die Karthaginier benutzen sie, weil ihre Armee viel mehr vermischt ist.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Du nimmst ein bisschen das, du nimmst ein bisschen das. Und sie haben sie seit mindestens den 260er Jahren benutzt. Also sind sie in Hannibals Zeit ziemlich gewohnt, sie taktisch zu deployieren. Sie wissen, wie sie genutzt werden können. Und die Leute werden vielleicht fragen, woher kommen diese Elefanten her?
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also auf einem Niveau, du weißt, ein exzellenter Parallel und ein Parallel, den ich hoffe, unsere Zuhörer However, on another level, I think it doesn't work at all because essentially there are very few people except perhaps you and the Swedes who really remember Charles XII. But Hannibal is one of the great brand names of history. So we've already mentioned Vin Diesel.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es gibt sicherlich einen Elefanten in Hannibals Expedition, der aus Indien kommt, weil er Cyrus genannt wird. Er hat einen Hügel, der anscheinend ein echter Brüder ist. Und er heißt Cyrus, was den Syrienern bedeutet. Natürlich, weil er aus dem Osten kommt. Also letztendlich aus Indien.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber die meisten der Elefanten in Hannibals Trainung scheinen von den Atlas-Mauern aus dem Norden von Marokko hergekommen zu haben. Und sie, es gibt natürlich keine Elefanten da jetzt, sie sind verschwunden. Aber damals gab es, gab es ziemlich viel.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Nein, also sie sind aus Nordafrika. Und sie sind etwas kleiner als die indischen Elefanten. Also acht Fuß dicker als neun Fuß dicker. Und sie, anders als Cyrus, wo man es strecken kann, so wie das Elefanten-Kastel, man kann ein Kastel auf dem Hintergrund setzen, wie in Return of the King, diese massiven Elefanten. Ein Elefant. Ich meine, sie sind nicht ganz so groß wie das.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber Hannibal kann auf Cyrus reisen, weil man ein großes Kastel auf Cyrus' Rückseite setzen kann. Aber man kann sie nicht auf die Rücken der kleineren Nordafrikanischen Elefanten setzen. Also in einem Sinne sind die Elefanten selbst die Tauern. Sie sind wie Tanks, glaube ich.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und wiederum, ich denke, einer der Gründe, warum Hannibal so ehrt, sie zu nehmen, ist für die propagandistischen Gründe, als auch für die nur militärischen Gründe. Weil es expressiv ist, wie eine gewisse Ambition. Ich meine, wer würde denken, dass er die Elefanten über die Pyrrhides, über die Alpen, ich meine, unerhört.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das ist der Art von Ding, den er machen würde. Ja. Also will Hannibal, er will auch Schock.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, also es wird von ältere Gründe aus estimiert und ich denke, dass sie generell ziemlich vertraut sind. Also die 90.000, die Infanterie hatten, die aus New Carthage verlassen haben, sind etwa 50.000 übrig und von den 12.000 Cavalry sind etwa 9.000 übrig. Und der Grund dafür ist, dass das Gehen ziemlich hart war.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also die Regierung von Carthage über die Ebro, aber von der Ebro bis hin zur Pyrenäen ist, weißt du, es ist eine ziemlich schwierige Reise. Also müssen sie Menschen auf dem Weg verletzen. Es gibt offensichtlich Verletzungen. Dann muss man Garrisonen bauen. Es gab wahrscheinlich auch Verschmutzungen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Weißt du, wenn es Leute aus Iberien gibt, die nicht besonders wollen, können sie sich einfach wegmelden. Und das ist ein bisschen potenziell erstaunlich, nicht nur, weil die Zahlen zerbrochen wurden, sondern auch, weil, wie du gesagt hast, es ist jetzt etwas später, als Hannibal es idealerweise wollen würde. Es ist eine Art invadierende, du weißt, Russland im frühen September.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Denzel Washington, they both want to play him. Ian Botham, the great England cricketer who crossed the Alps with an elephant for a charity walk. And that thing of Botham doing his charity walk with an elephant, it's pinpointing the single most famous thing about Hannibal, which is the episode highlighted by Juvenal, which is that he crosses the Alps.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das ist wahrscheinlich nicht, was du tun möchtest. Aber der Grund, warum Hannibal weiterholt, ist nicht nur eine Art verrückter Verrücktheit. Es ist, weil er immer noch Vertrauen in seine Fähigkeit ist, seinen Plan zu verfolgen. Die Kräfte, die er jetzt mit ihm hat, diejenigen, die ihn nicht verlassen haben, diejenigen, die nicht aufgestellt wurden, um seine Kommunikation mit Spanien.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Diese sind die Besten der Besten. Diese sind absolut verabschiedet und leidenschaftlich zu ihm. Und so sagt er, lasst uns dafür gehen. Er hat die Pyrenäen übernommen und ist nun in Südgau, Südfranz. Und es gibt zwei direkte Herausforderungen, die ihn befinden. Die erste ist, wo sind die Roma? Was ist mit Scipio passiert? Scipio hat seine Legionen, seine Cavalry, seine Schiffe.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Hannibal weiß, dass er westwärts fliegt. Wird er nach Sardinien gehen? Wird er nach Spanien gehen? Wird er nach Südgau gehen? Was wird er tun? Es gibt noch nichts von ihm. Dann gibt es das andere Problem, das ist, wie man den Rhône-River überschreiten kann, der riesig ist. Es gibt keine Brücke. Es ist ein echtes Problem.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es ist ein sehr, sehr breites Meer und seine niedrigeren Rechte werden von der griechischen Stadt Marseille kontrolliert. Also wird das Marseille werden. Und Marseille ist ein Verein von Rhône. Und Hannibal... Er kann nicht auf die Massilianen verlassen, um ihre Brücke zu nutzen. Also muss er nach oben hin, um einen passenden Kreis zu finden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und das ist sehr schwierig, weil es die Lande um die niedrigen Rechte der Rhône ist. Es ist eine Kombination von Marsch und Strömung, also nicht zufrieden. So they keep going up the river Rhône for four days from the sea. And finally he arrives at a place where he thinks, yeah, this might be possible. We could probably make a crossing here.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And it's probably near the site of what a century later will be the Roman foundation of Arles.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, also sehr, sehr romansch, aber es gibt nichts da an diesem Punkt. Und es ist immer noch ziemlich schwierig, weil der Fluss immer noch sehr weit ist. Der Strom ist ziemlich schnell. Und am schlimmsten ist es auf der anderen Seite. Es gibt eine gallische Treppe, die Volkai.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
die Hannibals Gold nicht gepockert haben, oder wenn sie Hannibals Gold gepockert haben, haben sie ihre Verschwörung verurteilt, dass sie ihm einen sicheren Crossing geben werden. Und sie haben sich über die Großen Bank gesteigert und sich entschieden, die Karthaginier nicht überhaupt willkommen zu machen, wenn sie den Crossing machen. So, these are real challenges.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And we have, fortunately, what is probably an eyewitness account, probably from the Spartan Saucilus, who was accompanying Hannibal on his trip. And if it is Saucilus, he writes, Hannibal used every resource to make friends with the natives living by the bank. And he bought up all their canoes and boats, of which there were a large number.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Since many of the inhabitants of the Rhone Valley are engaged in seaborne trade, he also obtained from them the kind of logs which are suitable for building canoes, so that within two days he had mustered an innumerable quantity of small ferry boats.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And you can see there that on this side of the bank, clearly his gold and his agents have worked because he's been provided with the wherewithal to get across the river. But he's still got this problem with the Volkai. How are you going to deal with them? So he waits. Five days pass since he's arrived on the bank. The Volkai lined up on the far bank.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And even though Juvenal doesn't mention it, he crosses the Alps with elephants. And I would say, I mean, wouldn't you? It's not just... Das ist wahrscheinlich die berühmteste Szene in der heutigen Geschichte. Es ist einer der berühmtesten Szenen in der ganzen Geschichte.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And then on the morning of the sixth day, Hannibal's standing on the bank and he's looking upriver and he sees rising from there, from a point upriver, a plume of smoke. And this is clearly a signal because he then gives orders for his troops to start making the crossing.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And again, to quote this eyewitness, the large boats were placed the furthest upstream and directly against the current and the lighter ones below them so that the heavier craft should absorb the main force of the water and the canoes be less exposed to risk in crossing. So very, very kind of sensible. And the horses.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie müssen auf beiden Seiten der großen Boote schwimmen, mit einem Mann auf jeder Seite, der die Regen behält, um sie nicht auf die Strömungen zu stoppen. Und es ist alles sehr erstaunlich. Die Boote fahren einander. Es gibt viele Begeisterung, viele militärische Banter, Dominic. Richtig, ich liebe es. Und mittlerweile, natürlich, warten die Völkern. Also sehr, sehr intensiv.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Was wird passieren, wenn die Kräfte der karthaginischen Boote und Kanäle gegen den Gravel der Nahen Fläche starten? Ja, aufregend. Sehr aufregend. Nun, was passiert, ist ein erstaunlicher Zwischensatz, der immer mehr mit Hannibals Kampagnen zu tun hat. Denn sobald die karthaginischen Pfeile auf der Nahen Bank landen,
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
The Volkai are alarmed to hear on their right flank a sudden pounding of hooves and wild Numidian war cries. Oh my word. Because what Hannibal has done is he has sent his Numidian cavalry, the best light cavalry in the world, auf den Berg, um einen geheimen Kreis höher hoch zu machen. Denn natürlich können sie da hoch galloppen, den Kreis machen und dann wieder runter galloppen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und die Blume von Schmuck, die er gesehen hatte, war das Signal, dass die Numidianen bereit waren, zu tauchen. Und die Völkern wurden völlig überrascht. Sein Camp ist gebrannt. Sie fliegen weg. dass die karthaginische Armee es ermöglicht, eine Brücke zu bauen, und die Männer sind bereit, sich zu befinden. Und du weißt, wie gut ich auf Brücken bin, wenn eine Brücke zu weit ist und all das.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Hier gibt es keine Brücke, weil sie Räder und Boote und solche Sachen haben. Es gibt natürlich eine letzte Herausforderung, nämlich wie man ein Elefant auf einem Boot bekommen kann.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber wie machst du das? Ich bin interessiert. Nun, du bietest eine Gruppe von riesigen Rädern und dann schiebst du sie zusammen und du ziehst sie aus dem Meer und dann schiebst du sie mit der Erde, damit sie nur Teil des Meerbanks sind. So dass die Elefanten nicht realisieren, als sie von der Bank nach den Rädern geführt werden, dass sie sich auf etwas bewegen, das auf dem Meer fließt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und dann, nachdem sie das gemacht haben, kommen sie auf die weitesten Räder. Sie schneiden die Mauerringe, die Räder gehen über den Meer. Und die Elefanten paniken an diesem Punkt, aber sie werden von ihren Mahouts, den Jungs, die sie stehlen, entschlossen. Und einige davon werden in den Meer geworfen und sie sterben, was sehr traurig ist. Die Elefanten, alle 34 von ihnen, machen es über.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Natürlich. Also, das ist ein großer Dramatik. Sie haben ihren Weg über die Rhône gemacht. Das ist, du weißt, ein weiterer physischer Bereich über. Und dann am nächsten Tag gibt es noch mehr Dramatik, weil News Hannibal erreicht, dass Scipio und seine Legionen in Massilia, in Marseille, gedockt haben. Richtig.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Hannibal sendet also eine Gruppe von Numidianen nach dem Meer, um Reckonoita zu finden, um das Land zu finden. Scipio hat eine Gruppe von Horsen nach dem Meer gesendet, um zu finden, was Hannibal tut. Die zwei Kräfte der Kavallerie treffen sich. Die Numidianen bekommen das Schlimmste davon, aber die meisten von ihnen können wegkommen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und sie kommen zurück zu Hannibal und sagen, dass die Romäner gerade unter dem Meer sind. Was willst du tun? Und das ist eine wichtige Entscheidung für Hannibal. Kämpft er die Romäner in Gaul oder fährt er über die Alpen? Er weiß, dass er Scipio übernimmt. Scipio hat nicht so viele Truppen und Hannibal würde sich auch zurückhalten, um Scipio zu verletzen, denke ich.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
But the danger obviously is that if he fights a battle and it's already getting late in the summer, then it will be very difficult for him, having done that, to advance into Italy and secure winter quarters before the end of the campaigning season. And he can't risk being stranded in hostile territory that isn't even Italy all winter. I mean, that would be a disaster for him.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
No, he wouldn't be the master of Gaul because he's not interested in conquering it. His reason for going to Italy is to get the backing of the subject peoples there to Rome. So he needs to be on the spot, his agents working, getting the Gauls in northern Italy, hopefully getting some of the cities in lower down Italy to start moving over to him.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Because if that doesn't work, then the whole strategy is not going to work. Er kann Rom nicht selbst verletzen. Er muss den italienischen und gallischen Verteidigung gewinnen. Also muss er physisch auf italienischem Boden sein. Und also macht sich das essentiell seine Meinung für ihn. Aber was er endlich, denke ich, schlägt,
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
ist, dass die Ambassadoren aus einer gallischen Treppe namens die Boii kommen, die auf der linken Seite des Alps leben, also in Italien, die von den Romanen verurteilt wurden, und sie sind besorglich für seine Unterstützung. Und das ist ein wirklich gutes Zeichen, weil es zeigt, dass seine Strategie einen guten Ausblick auf das Arbeiten hat.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und die Boii, diese Gallic Envoys, sagen, wir können dir einen Weg über die Alpen zeigen, sodass du nicht auf den romänischen Straßen gehen musst, die die Alpen bewegen. Du wirst in den romanischen Rücken kommen können. Und natürlich ist das, was Herkules gemacht hat.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und ich denke, Hannibal erkennt, dass der propagandistische Einfluss seiner Armee, seiner Elefanten über die Alpen zu nehmen, sich in den Römern zurückzuziehen, stupefierend sein wird. Und wiederum muss das Teil seiner Strategie sein, weil er die Italiener und die Römer überwinden muss. Er muss sie überwinden. Also denkt er, ja, lasst uns dafür gehen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
It absolutely is a risk, but he's the heir of Hercules. He's a gambler. But it's not an unreasonable gamble, I think. I mean, he's playing for high stakes, but it's not a wholly mad gamble.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And so three days after Scipio's cavalry have had the brush with the Numidians, Scipio himself at the head of his army arrives at the place where Hannibal had crossed the Rhône and he discovers that the Carthaginians have gone.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And to quote Polybius, this Greek historian who you mentioned earlier, Scipio was astounded to find that the enemy had already pressed on as he had felt certain that they would never venture to advance into Italy by this route, partly because of their numbers and partly because of the fickle nature of the barbarians who inhabited the region.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
However, when he learned that they had taken this risk, he hurried back to his ships and immediately began to embark his forces. So he's going to take his ships back to Italy so that he will be ready to meet Hannibal when Hannibal comes down from the Alps, if he comes down from the Alps.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, und das ist das, was wir heute schauen werden. Wir werden fragen, warum Hannibal Italien invadieren wollte, warum er seine Armee mit seinen Elefanten und allem über die Alpen genommen hat. Ich meine, ist es der offensichtliche Weg? Und ist es ein brillanter Strategie oder ist es ein Desaster? Also das ist es, was wir heute finden werden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Yeah, so there's a kind of microbe, which is found in horse and interesting elephant manure. And it can survive for thousands of years in soil. So there are scientists going through mountain passes in the Alps, looking basically for elephant shit.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Persönlich denke ich nicht besonders, welche Route Hannibal nimmt, ähm, die präzise Route. Und du musst nicht wissen, um sich überrascht zu fühlen, auf der Ebene, auf der er versucht.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und ich denke, ich denke, es ist egal, weil It doesn't matter which precisely they are, because the basic outline we know, we can be fairly confident, is accurate. Because again, I think it derives from eyewitness accounts. And again, chiefly this guy, Sosilas of Sparta, Hannibal's Greek tutor.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And they were used by this guy, Polybius, who we've already mentioned, this Greek historian, who is by far the best and most reliable historian of Hannibal's campaigns. Und er selbst ging nach den Alpen, er versuchte Hannibals Route zu beheben. Also Polybius, bei den Standards der heutigen Geschichte, sicherlich verglichen mit Livy, ist sehr vertraut.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und so werden wir Polybius' Erkennung des Hannibals, der die Alpen überschritten hat, beobachten, um die Geschichte zu erzählen, was dann passiert. According to Polybius, Hannibal hat die Rhône geflogen und er geht nach Norden in die oberste Bank. Er geht also weiter nach Gaul.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Vier Tage nach dem Ausflug kommt er in ein Gebiet, in dem es eine Art fratricidales Wurzeln gibt zwischen zwei Brüdern, die versuchen, sich der König dieser Brüder zu machen. Hannibal schützt einen der beiden Brüder, setzt ihn auf den Thron der Treue und gewinnt die Gratitude des Siegers, unerwartet.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und so ist Hannibal dann in der Lage, seine Männer zu retten, um Essen zu verkaufen, neue Waffen zu verkaufen, um alpine Kleidung zu bekommen. Sie gehen in die alpinen Geschäfte und bekommen Skigear und all diese Art von Sachen. Und dann, nachdem er das getan hat, schwingt er dann nach Osten, in die Alpen. Und es ist hier, dass er zuerst in Probleme kommt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
weil er nun in die Lande einer sehr hostilen und sehr aggressiven gallischen Treppe genannt wird, die Allobroges. Und zu Beginn, weil die Allobroges von der karthaginischen Kavallerie und Elefanten furchtbar sind, schadet sie nur den Verbrechern. Man kann also vorstellen, dass Hannibal und seine Männer fahren und aufschauen. die schädeligen Figuren von Gallic Horsemen auf den Höhen zu sehen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber dann, zehn Tage nach seinem Eastwoods-Marsch aus der Rhône, beginnen sie zu steigen und vor ihnen liegen die Alpen und Polybius beschreibt die Alpen, als würden sie über dem Landschaften steigen, wie eine gewaltige Zitade über eine Stadt. Also dieser Gedanke von mächtigen natürlichen Schwierigkeiten, die ihren Weg blockieren. Ich meine, sehr, sehr faszinierend.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und als sie folgen der Straße, finden sie, dass sie auf einer Fläche gefunnelt werden. Ich meine, natürlich, um die Alpen zu steigen, wirst du sich fast unerwartet auf eine Fläche gefunneln. Und je weiter es sich schließt, desto länger beginnt Hannibals Linie zu werden, weil es weniger und weniger Raum gibt, um Menschen an der Brust zu bewegen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also letztendlich ist es vielleicht fünf, sechs Meilen lang. Und in der Zeit, in der Die Wälder zerstören sich und Hannibal findet sich an den Gästen einer sehr geringen Gorge. Und unvergesslich pausiert er hier, weil geringe Gorge und hostile Treibhäuser keine gute Kombination sind. Und natürlich ist Hannibal ein guter Mann für Intelligenz, also hat er Sklaven vor ihm geschickt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und diese Scouten kommen zurück und bringen sehr erstaunliche Nachrichten, nämlich, dass die Allobroges die Position über die Höhe aufgenommen haben, über die Gorge übersehen, weil es ein perfekter Ort für einen Angriff ist. Und Polybius schreibt, wenn die Allobroges nur ihre Pläne gehalten hätten, hätten sie die katholische Armee komplett zerstört.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber sie haben es nicht getan, weil Hannibal zu gut ist, ein Mann, der die Intelligenz zur Verfügung stellt, um das zu passieren. Und glücklicherweise hat Hannibal eine Strategie. Sobald es dunkel ist, gibt er Befehle, dass Massen von Campfires aufgelöst werden. Überall über dem Terrain, das die Armee besitzt, um so ein größeres Show als möglich zu machen. Und so sehen die Allobroges das.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie glauben, okay, sie haben sich für die Nacht gebettet. Wir müssen uns nicht darüber kümmern. Und so klopfen sie auf und gehen zurück nach Hause für die Nacht. Hannibal hat eine Kracksquad von handpickten Männern und sie gehen in die Höhen und sie besiegen die Kontrolle der Höhen, die die Allobroges besitzen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und das bedeutet, dass, wenn die Allobroges am Morgen zurückkommen, oh nein, wir wurden von diesem großen General verletzt. Und natürlich, wie Polybius sagt, bedeutet das, dass Hannibal seine Armee vom absoluten Schlimmsten der Angelegenheit verlassen hat, die sonst passieren würde.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber das bedeutet nicht, dass die karthaginische Armee völlig sicher ist, weil im Grunde genommen die Laufbahn einfach zu bedrohlich ist. Und so fangen verschiedene Krieger an, sich aufzumachen, aufzumachen. Und Polybius hat eine sehr witzige Erkenntnis davon, wie es war. He says, the road leading up to the pass was not only narrow and uneven, but flanked with precipices.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
And so the least movement or disorder in the line caused many of the animals to be forced over the edge with their loads. So these aren't the elephants. It's the mules and also the horses and the pack animals. And Polybius writes that...
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
In their fear, they would wheel around and collide with the baggage mules, these are the cavalry horses, while others rushing on ahead would thrust aside anything that stood in their way on the narrow path and so through the whole line into disarray. So you're starting to get men falling off the precipice as well. Ah, splat.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das ist genau so, wie es klingt. Aber glücklicherweise ist Hannibal auf den Höhen. Er hat seine Elite-Squad von handpickten Männern. Sie sind in der Lage, sich zu schlagen und die Situation zu stabilisieren, um die Alibro-Gate zu entfalten, die den Angriff machen. Finally, when they emerge from the gorge, the disaster isn't as total as it might have been.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Hannibal is able to lead a squad of cavalry onwards up the roads. They find the deserted stronghold of the Alibrogues. It's deserted because they've all gone off to nick stuff from the Carthaginian baggage train. Here he finds lots of his own men. He finds pack animals who've been taken prisoner. He is able again to So they rest for a day. Then they keep going. And...
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Hannibal würde sagen, dass diese Stadt in der Spanien-Area ist, in der die Romer verabschiedet haben, dass sie Carthaginien sein sollte. Und die Romer sagen, ja, aber Saguntum ist eine Auszeichnung, weil es ein Teil unseres war. Und Hannibal hat es jetzt gesackt. Eine romische Embassy geht nach Carthagen, um zu beurteilen, dass Hannibal übergeben wird. Und die Carthaginier verabschieden sich.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, also wiederum, um Polybius zu beurteilen. Also wiederum, er sagt, dass, wenn dieser Angriff erfolgreich wäre, dann würde Hannibals Armee ausgeschlossen werden. Aber Hannibal war nervös über das, was passieren könnte. Er hat also seinen Mühltrainer und seine Kavallerie am Kopf der Kolumne befestigt. Und er hat die schwere Infanterie am Hinterkopf befestigt.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das bedeutet also, dass wenn die Barbarianen, die Gauls, im Hinterkopf attackieren, sie nicht in der Lage sind, zu zerstören. Sie werden mit den Stabsäulen der Spanier und der Spanierinnen getroffen. die Speer der Libyen. Polybius schreibt, dass der Desaster weniger ernst war, als es sein sollte, aber auch ein großer Anzahl von Männern, Tierwesen und Pferden zerstörten sich im Angriff.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Das andere, was Hannibal ermöglicht, die Situation zu stabilisieren, ist, dass die Elefanten an diesem Punkt auf sich hineinkommen. Die Gulden haben nie etwas wie sie gesehen. Sie sind viel zu Angst, sich an die Strecke des Kolumns zu bewegen, wo die Elefanten fliegen. Die Präsenz der Elefanten auf diesem Krieg über den Alpen ist Hannibals Vorteil.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Es ist tatsächlich militärwahrscheinlich geworden. Und in der Zeit, als die Angriffe dieser Gallic-Krieger wegfallen, die Salis ihrer Krieger zerstören und die Boulders, die sich immer wieder auf der Seite des Hills runterrollen, durch die Leute, die die Carthaginianer besiegen, gedrängt werden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie stoppten sich auszudrücken und die Angriffe von den Nachbarn des Alps kamen im Grunde zu einem Ende. Aber klar, das war eine Helle, du weißt, Alpine-Werke gehen, das war ein Horror-Show. Hannibal's Männer sind in einem müde Zustand, sie sind zerstört, sie sind demoralisiert, sie haben Freunde verloren und es beginnt kalt zu werden, weil es jetzt im Sommer ist.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie haben die Alpen seit neun Tagen gestiegen, also die Höhe ist etwa 2000 Meter. Und so beginnt es zu schneien. Und das ist sehr schlechte Nachrichten für Hannibals Männer, einige von denen können, weißt du, Frosbitte bekommen. Aber es ist auch schlechte Nachrichten für die Pferde und besonders für die Elefanten, weil es wirklich nichts gibt, um sie dort zu essen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also ist es eine schreckliche Situation. Aber dann, am Ende, kann Hannibal sagen, wir haben den Summit erreicht. Und er pitcht sein Camp am Summit des Passes. Und er wartet da für zwei Tage, um all die verschiedenen Stragler zu beitragen. Und sie campen aus dem Schnee. Gale schreit überall um sie. Es wäre schrecklich, aber Hannibal ist so schwer, dass er sich nicht interessiert.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und er setzt natürlich ein Beispiel für den Rest seiner Männer. in der Weise, wie Vin Diesel oder Denzel Washington Dallas das auch tun würden. Oder Vince Vaughn. Ja, oder Vince Vaughn, oder indeed Ian Botham. Aber er weiß, dass es nicht genug für ihn ist, nur in der Öffentlichkeit zu schlafen, wie alle anderen. Er weiß, dass er auch seine Männer aufnehmen muss.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und so, wie er das, laut Polybius, tut, ist, dass er all seine Männer um ihn herum sammelt und sich aus dem Po-Wall ausstrahlt. Du weißt, Italien, Norditalien strecken sich unter ihm heraus und er sagt, da ist es, Roma wartet auf uns. And there is a problem with this, which actually there isn't a pass from which it's possible to look out from the summit and see Italy.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber ich denke, dass der Witz der Geschichte wahr ist. Was Hannibal seinen Männern erzählt, ist, dass wir in Italien, wir müssen nicht mehr hochklappen, wir können jetzt runtergehen. Wir haben Begleiter, die warten, um zu unseren Kräften zu fliehen. Die Lande da unten sind reich an Gold und Essen und Frauen. Und dann sagt Polybius uns, dass er in die Richtung von Rom selbst geblickt hat.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und so erklären die Romer Krieg und die Carthaginier sagen, okay, wenn du Krieg willst, dann gehen wir dafür. And the obvious point to make about that is that you don't opt for war unless you think you can win it. So the fact that both sides are happy to return to this titanic conflict. Both sides think, yeah, we can win this.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Italien wartet, aber offensichtlich sind da immer noch verschiedene Fragen, die auf dieser Expedition hängen. Wie einfach wird der Abflug sein? Denn oft kann ein Abflug zumindest so herausfordernd sein wie ein Abflug. Was sind die Romer? Wo sind sie gegangen? Welche Kämpfe wird Hannibal treffen? Wird er es in Rom machen? Dominic, wie können Leute darüber herausfinden?
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
So we should probably just look at the two sides to kind of work out why first the Romans and then the Carthaginians think that they're going to emerge triumphant from it. So, the Romans first. It's important to emphasize that to a degree that is exceptional, even by the standards of ancient states in the Mediterranean, they love a war.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
I mean, there's a sense that war is the purpose of the Roman Republic. They are used to winning. They expect to win. And they are looking forward when they declare war on Carthage to the consequent profits. Das kombiniert mit einem Sinn, fast einem Mafiosi-Sinn, dass sie es niemals akzeptieren sollten, disrespektiert zu werden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und ich denke, wenn du die Römische Republik als eine Art massiver Extortion-Racket denkst, You're not so far removed from the truth.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
So to quote Simon Hornblower, a very distinguished scholar of antiquity, in his wonderful book Hannibal and Scipio, modern analysis suggests that the cause of the changed attitude towards Carthage was that the Roman officer class needed fresh outlets and theatres for aggression, now that control of peninsula Italy was secure.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
So essentially the republic depends on the oiling of their wheels with money, with cash. with loot. And that's why so many of them are prepared to say, yes, let's go to war with Carthage, even though the costs may be enormous.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie haben definitiv die vermutlichste Infanterie. Und das ist vermutlich, weil es die Ausprägung einer hoch militärisierten zivilen Gesellschaft ist. Eine Legion, ein Legio, ist das Levee der ganzen Masse. Und diese Legionen sind hochgegrillt, gut gearmt, sie haben ein immenses Esprit de Corps, sie gehen in den Kampf, ziemlich sicher, dass sie gewinnen werden. Also eine sehr hohe Moral.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie sind sehr, sehr beängstigend und beängstigend. Aber außerdem gibt es viele von ihnen. Die Romer haben große Manpowerreserven. Und der Grund dafür ist die Art und Weise, wie ihr Empire aufgewachsen ist. Denn die Romer sind sehr geniesslich zu verletzten Feinden, die ihren Verletzten in der Art und Weise akzeptieren.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
A mafia boss is generous to the shopkeeper who hands over a proportion of his takings. They are offered protection. So some of the cities in Italy who've been defeated, some are enrolled as Roman citizens, which obviously then swells the numbers of men who can serve in the legions. Others are granted kind of associate forms of citizenship, which again accrue kind of benefits.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
So the number of citizens... dass die römischen Regierungen nicht nur die Menschen sind, die in Rom leben. Sie sind immer mehr in Kolonien und alliierten Städten in Italien. Und mehr Bürger natürlich bedeutet größere Arme. Und größere Arme bedeuten mehr Kriege. Und mehr Kriege bedeuten mehr Bürger. Also ist es ein sehr, sehr virtuelles Kreis. Also ist die Infanterie sehr, sehr profizient.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber natürlich gibt es jetzt eine weitere Dimension an der römischen Macht, die vorher nicht existierte, die ist, dass sie Carthage am Meer verteidigt haben. Also haben sie also die Kontrolle der Schiffsläne, die bisher nie geschehen ist. Die traditionelle flächendeckende Kriegsfreiheit von Carthagen wurde in der ersten großen Krieg mit Rom zerstört.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und erinnere dich auch daran, dass die Romer die Kontrolle nicht nur von Sizilien, der offiziellen Startplatte für jede römische Invasion von Afrika und Carthagen, haben, sondern sie haben auch Sardinien und Corsica, die Steppensteine nach Spanien, genommen. So the Roman strategy effectively is pretty obvious. It's a two-pronged attack.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
You move legions to Sicily, where they can potentially threaten Carthage. And you have Sardinia, you have Corsica. They can be used to launch attacks on Hannibal in Spain. So kind of two-pronged. And that requires two commanders. And this is where the Roman Constitution kicks in, because Rome is a republic of Und anstatt eines Monarchs, der in 506 B.C.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
ausgeworfen wurde, gibt es jetzt zwei Städte, also die Macht des Königs, die zwischen zwei Magistraten verteilt werden. Jedes von ihnen wird für ein Jahr gewählt und diese Magistraten sind die Konsulen. Und diese beiden Konsulen, diese beiden gewählten Führer, die in Frieden, aber auch in der Kriegspolitik vertreten sind, sind natürlich absolut ideal für die militärischen Ziele Roms.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und in 218, der erste Konsul ist ein Typ namens Tiberius Sempronius Longus. Und er wird nach Süd-Sizilien gesendet. Er hat 24.000 Infanterie, er hat 2.400 Kavallerie, er hat 160 Kriegsschiffe. Das ist sehr, sehr bedrohlich für Carthage über die Strahlen von Sizilien. Und so ist das, was er im Sommer von 218 macht. Er vorbereitet sich im Grunde genommen, um Afrika zu überwachen.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Dann gibt es einen zweiten Konsul, einen Jungen namens Publius Cornelius Scipio. Und er wird verantwortlich für das Handeln von Hannibal und das Potenzial, eine Invasion von Spanien zu eröffnen. Also bereitet er sich dafür vor, aber dann gibt es noch eine Gallische Überraschung in Norditalien. Die Gaulen, die auf jeder Seite der Alpen sind und immer ein sehr furchtbarer Feind sind.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Sie haben sich nur letztens von den Romanen gepassifiziert, aber sie mögen nicht den romänischen Geist und wollen ihn wegwerfen. Und es gibt eine Rebellion in den ersten Monaten von 218. Scipio hat 22.000 Infanterie, 2.200 Kavallerie, 60 Schiffe, aber er ist verlangt, westwärts nach Spanien zu setzen. Und er geht nicht bis August.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Aber man hat einen definierten Sinn, dass die Räder dieser romischen Kriegsmaschine hier wirklich anfangen zu grinden. of just how intimidating a state it is.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ich denke, teilweise, weil er die Romans nicht in Spanien öffnen will. Und teilweise, weil er die Romans nicht in Spanien öffnen will, weil Spanien der Schlüssel für seine Macht und die Macht seiner Stadt ist. So it has provided him with mineral riches. And as the Romans famously know, the sinews of war are gold. Hannibal has lots of precious metal.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
He has probably the most highly trained, the most battle-seasoned army anywhere in the Mediterranean. You know, he's absolutely honed it. The other thing he has honed is his own capacities as a general, which he has been in the saddle since childhood.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ja, weil er eine Strategie hat. Und das ist eine Strategie, von der ich glaube, dass er sich klar informiert hat, von sich selbst, von seinem Vater Hamilcar, von den ganzen Körperschaften in Spanien. auf die Gründe für die Verletzung von Carthage in der ersten Puniten-Wahl zu reflektieren. Sie haben natürlich gearbeitet, was das Problem ist.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und sie haben realisiert, dass die Grundlage für Roms militärischer Erfolg, die Grundlage dafür, dass sie aufgreifen kann, egal wie viele Verletzungen sie verursacht hat, diese unglaublichen Manpowerreserven sind, die auf ihre Kontrolle in Italien abhängig sind.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und der einzige Weg, den Heidras Kopf aufzuhalten, ist es, die Staaten und Städte in Italien, die zu Rom verabschiedet sind, zu verlassen, ihre Vereinbarung zu verlassen. Und der einzige Weg, mit dem Hannibal das tun kann,
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
ist, die Romäner zu attackieren, wo es schmerzen wird, nämlich in Italien selbst, was die Karthaginier nicht gemacht haben oder sogar gedacht haben, in der ersten Punik-Wahl zu tun. Es ist eine Strategie, die sofort grösser ist als alles, was die Karthaginier vorher versucht haben.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Und natürlich ist der andere Vorteil davon, dass, wenn Hannibal eine erfolgreiche Invasion von Italien eröffnen kann, dann wird es die Romäner von Spanien und krügerweise Afrika zerstören. Denn selbst wenn Hannibal die römische Invasion von Spanien übernimmt, wird er die Römer nicht von Afrika überwinden und Carthage blockieren und sie vielleicht auch überwinden.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Also denke ich, dass er sich darauf eingelassen hat, dass er die einzige Möglichkeit hat, dass er gewinnen kann. Aber das ist natürlich ein riesiges Problem. Wie wird er eigentlich nach Italien kommen, wenn Rom die Seen kontrolliert und Corsica und Sardinien besiegt? Denn es wird nicht sicher sein, dass Hannibal seine Truppen auf Schiffen nach Italien fährt. So he's got to travel by land.
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Nun, es gibt einige Gauls in Norditalien, die von den Romanen gekämpft wurden. Und natürlich können die Gauls die Ruinen lesen. Sie wissen, dass die Romanen sehr expansionistisch sind, also sind sie nervös. Und Hannibal denkt, dass hier etwas zu spielen ist, und er schickt Ambassadoren. um mit den verschiedenen Truppen zu diskutieren und zu sagen, schau, kannst du mir den Glaubensschutz geben?
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569. Hannibal: Elephants Cross the Alps (Part 2)
Ich bin an deiner Seite, ich werde die Romanen verletzen. Und ein paar seiner Agenten kommen zurück und sagen, ja, die Gauls sind interessiert in diesem Thema. Weitere Truppen, nicht alle, aber verschiedene Truppen werden dir Hilfe bieten. Und sie haben Gold und Silber versammelt, um die Sicherheit des Glaubensschutzes zu ermöglichen.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
they are also with Charlemagne. And you have the sense there that Charlemagne has become the arbiter of both the Roman emperor and of the Pope, these two intimidating figures who had always viewed the King of the Franks as an absolute parvenu. And he greets them in this kind of
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
fresh, rough-hewn fortress called Paderborn, which had been built back in the 770s as a base for prosecuting the Saxon Wars, but which Charlemagne, just the year before, had founded as a bishopric. So you can see him presenting himself
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
to the leaders of the ancient world as this vibrant go-ahead figure who is raising fortifications and churches in the wilds that had never been conquered by the ancient Romans. And it's very, very impressive. And markers of his prowess as a warlord, therefore, are kind of very much being pushed in the noses of both the Byzantine ambassadors and of the Pope himself. Now,
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
What the Pope and Charlemagne discuss, we don't know. We don't have a record of it, but we can probably take a guess because we do know what Alcuin thought about it. Alcuin, he's in distant tour, he's in this monastery, this Yorkshireman who had been Charlemagne's great teacher, but he still very much got his finger on the pulse of geopolitics. He writes a letter to Charles before
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
the arrival of both the papal and Byzantine ambassadors. And in it, he points out how extraordinary what is happening actually is. Because as he says, there are three great figures of authority whom God has appointed to rule the world. And these are the Pope, the Emperor in the second Rome, so Constantinople, and Charlemagne himself. And he says, you know, the Pope is caught up in a scandal.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
The emperor in Constantinople is a woman. This imposes on you a massive duty to God to do what is right for the Christian people. And he says, Alcuin says this specifically, the Christian people depend upon the excellence of your power, the luster of your wisdom and the loftiness of your dignity as a ruler.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Behold, upon you alone rests the entire health deteriorated as it is of the churches of Christ. And it's hard to imagine that the implications of that letter are not very much on Charlemagne's mind as he consults with the Pope. at Paderborn.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So two or three years pass and we are now in the summer of AD 800. So the turning of the century. And that summer, I think it's really telling. Charlemagne decides to head westwards to Tours, where, of course, Alcuin is abbot. He holds a summit there with his sons. So he's consulting with his great teacher and advisor. He's consulting with his sons.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And of course, he has the opportunity to pray the Shrine of St. Martin, the most significant of all the patron saints of the Franks. He then heads for Paris, which had been the capital of Clovis, the Frankish king who had first converted to Christianity. Interestingly, Notre Dame has just opened as we're recording this episode.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
In front of Notre Dame, there's a great equestrian statue of Charlemagne. I think he's brandishing a sword. This is the only visit that Charlemagne makes to the ancient capital of the Franks. But again, you're thinking, Is he going to places that are significant in the history of Franks because he's gearing himself up for a spectacular innovation?
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
He wants reassurance that he's got God and kind of Frankish history on his side. Anyway, be that as it may, autumn is now starting to close in. And so he heads southwards and he makes for Ravenna, again, a very historically significant city. Yeah, of course. You know, it had been the seat of the last Roman emperors of the West. It's where the Byzantine governor of Italy had been at his capital.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So again, kind of a place saturated in Western ideals of Roman imperialism. And then he goes across the Apennines and he approaches Rome. And he's met on the 23rd of November, 799 by Pope Leo, about 15 miles outside Rome. He's entertained, we're told by Chronicler, with great honour. And then the following day, he makes a splendid entry into Rome.
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We're not told how many people he's got with him, but no doubt it's a very impressive and intimidating experience. escort. So Charlemagne is now in Rome. There's a month to go before Christmas Day. And the most pressing issue in front of both Charlemagne and the Pope is what to do about the charges that have been levelled against Leo.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Fortunately for Leo, and indeed probably for Charlemagne, Alcuin has prepared a legal case arguing that Popes can't be tried. And so therefore the charges of adultery and perjury that Leo's rivals had brought against him are basically swept under the carpet. Brilliant. you know, all is good as new. Leo is ready to go. And so this is the background to the coronation on Christmas day, 800.
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And so the big question, you know, that we framed at the beginning of this episode is, did Charlemagne know what was going to happen? Or is Einhard right when he says that it came as a complete surprise? And I don't know what you think, Dominic, but I mean- Pretty obvious.
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I mean, it is pure power politics, but it's pure power politics intermingled with, I think, Charlemagne's sense that he is fulfilling God's purpose, that this is what God wants him to do because he has arranged the affairs of the nation to make it the obvious thing to do.
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And I think we have a sense of what Charlemagne was thinking from a kind of analytic account, so a kind of year-by-year account. that is the nearest to the actual event, so the actual coronation. And this account of the coronation specifically says that the Pope offers the imperial to Charlemagne for two reasons.
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And the first of these is, in the land of the Greeks, there was no one who held the name of emperor. So Irene doesn't qualify. The imperial throne in Constantinople is vacant.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But it adds that Charlemagne deserves a title because he's the master of Rome, which in ancient times had been the seat of the Caesars, and that also he has made himself the ruler of Italy, of Gaul, and of Germany, as the Caesars had been. And therefore, clearly, by merit, he has been chosen by God to take up the mantle. of the Caesars in Rome.
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And as you say, Dominic, what could possibly be more festive than that scene? An imperial coronation in Rome. The empire has struck back. It has indeed. So as you prepare your sprouts and do your turkey and all that kind of stuff, I hope that you will enjoy our explanation of what the hell is going on here.
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And this chronicler does go on to say King Charles was reluctant to deny the Pope's request. And so in all humility on that same day, the nativity of the Lord Jesus Christ, he received the name of emperor with the blessing of the Lord Pope. And it must be that use, you know, it's that sense that he does it with a show of modesty and reluctance.
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I think you absolutely could argue that. And I think you can also see the care and thought that has gone into this moment from the fact that even though he is hailed by the people of Rome when he's crowned as emperor of the Romans, This is not a title that Charlemagne himself ever uses.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And the reason for that is that he knows that he'd be crossing a red line there in Constantinople, that they would never be able to accept him if he did that. Because the emperor in Constantinople has always called himself emperor of the Romans. And so for Charlemagne to usurp that would essentially be a declaration of war. And so instead, Charlemagne has come up with Alcmin. I mean, who knows?
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I mean, there's clearly a lot of thought gone into it with a different phrase, which is that he is the emperor governing the Roman Empire. You know, this is clearly the kind of formulation that requires a lot of top level discussion. You know, it's the kind of thing that today people, you know, debating EU law in Brussels would be all over it. It's that kind of order of formulation.
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So I think, and Dominic, you probably agree, it's pretty clear that Charlemagne is not taken by surprise by the Pope, but that he had recognized his opportunity and seized it. And the result of this, an astonishing festive development. For the first time since AD 476, there is an emperor in the West.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So, in the previous episode, we heard about Charles' rise to greatness, how he comes to be Charles the Great Carolus Magnus Charlemagne, as he's known in English. And he commands by far the most potent war machine in Europe. He has extended his empire beyond the Pyrenees in the West and eastwards into what is now Hungary. and all the way up to the River Elbe in the north of Germany.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Well, so some of it must be true. I mean, Einhard knew Charlemagne and in the last years of his life was close to him, was very proud of it. Clearly aspects of it are true. The whole, you know,
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hanging out in baths with Alcuin and his crew and all that kind of stuff I mean that does seem to be true and there is evidence for quite a lot of what Alcuin is describing of his personality actually in anecdotes that are told about him and on occasion I think in his own kind of distorted words so his sense of humor for instance which occasionally you know you kind of get senses of it
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Although, as Ginty Nelson in her biography of him describes his jokes, actually not as being particularly good humoured, but as hinged on humiliation and cruelty. So perhaps he wasn't quite as jolly as Einhard is making him out to be.
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But equally, you're right that we can't really be sure which aspects of this description are completely drawn from life and which are drawn from Suetonius, the biography of the Caesars, who provides Einhard with his great model.
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But certainly the physical descriptions, there's a problem because almost all of them are drawn pretty much word for word from descriptions of the Caesars in Suetonius' biographies. So whether he's chosen phrases from Suetonius that map onto Charlemagne, we don't know, or whether he's just kind of constructing a portrait of the king from various fragments.
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Yes. And this is a kind of process that you see elsewhere in Charlemagne's empire, not least in the palace that Einhard mentions in that description, the one with the baths at Aachen. which is still there. It's a wonderful place to visit. You've been to Aachen, Dominic? I've never been to Aachen. Is it nice? Yeah, it is. And it's kind of right on the western-based border of Germany. Yeah.
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Basically Belgium, the Netherlands. It's where they all kind of join up. So the heart of Europe, you might say. And certainly it was in the heart of Austrasia, which was the ancient Frankish sub-kingdom that was the Carolingian heartland. So that's one of the reasons why Charlemagne chooses it.
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But the other reason is, I think, that he begins it in 791 when the war against the Avars and the Saxons are really kicking off. And I think he, you know, he wants it to be readily accessible with the Eastern Front. And in fact, all the loot that gets taken from the Avar.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So in the previous episode, we described Ironheart watching it, you know, the wagons rumbling in piled high with jewels and all kinds of stuff. Essentially, it's this loot that enables Charlemagne to build Aachen. You know, he can employ the very best. He's got all this sudden windfall. And a bit like Einhard cannibalizing Suetonius for descriptions of Charlemagne.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
This palace, which also includes a great church, it too consists of various fragments of architectural salvage. The bathhouse had originally been a Roman one. It gets repaired and installed into the palace. The layout of the roads in the palace, they too are Roman. Charlemagne wants for his palace and for his church authentically Roman pillars.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
He has them brought to him from Rome and Ravenna, where, of course, you have imperial standard architecture waiting to be plundered. There is a sense in which it is a Frankenstein's monster building. But when you go there, I don't think you feel that it is ersatz. I don't think you feel that it's a pastiche, and certainly you don't get any sense of this at all from contemporary chroniclers.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Visitors to this complex marvel at it, and they are impressed, and they are intimidated by the sense it gives them of... just how great a king Charlemagne is. So again, to quote Nelson, Arkan emanated power through its design and architectural style, through gardens, parks, and forests, through relics and altars, through ceremonial entries, and through rituals whereby rulers were made.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
When you read books of general history about this period, it will often be sneered at. Historians will say, oh, you know, it's laughable, it's contemptible. And obviously this comes with the perspective of how impressive and imposing and cosmopolitan history
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Constantinople is, Baghdad, Cordova, the great capital of Byzantium and the two great capitals of the rival caliphates, the Abbasid Caliphate based in Baghdad and the Umayyad Caliphate based in Cordova. And Aachen can't compare to that. And Baghdad especially, it's the center of the world. It's not just the great cultural center, it's the great trading center.
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And he has sponsored a great program of education and learning. So he's a very, very formidable figure. And people may wonder, well, if a man like this wants to be emperor, why not? Why shouldn't he be? Go ahead. But the thing is, of course, Charlemagne is not the only player in this particular game. So mentioned in that passage that you read, Dominic, is another key player,
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And so it's rich beyond the wildest imagining of the Franks. And this is why both in Einhard and in other chronicles, They are particularly impressed by embassies that get sent to Charlemagne by the caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid. So the famous caliph from the Arabian Nights. And there are two embassies in particular, which the Franks are really wowed by. The first one comes in 802.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So that's two years after Charlemagne's coronation. And Harun sends him an elephant. which is given the name Abul Abbas. And he arrives in Aachen in 802 and is a great favorite. And Charlemagne's very, very keen on him. In 807, again, an embassy comes and it's full of amazing treasures.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And this kind of very touching account from Einhardt, who'd obviously seen it, of a clock, which it's clearly nothing like he's ever seen before. And he describes it in enormous detail, a brass clock constructed with marvelous mechanical skill in which the passage of the 12 hours depended upon a water clock
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
with 12 little copper balls and 12 horsemen, one of which would emerge from one of 12 windows. And it's easy to imagine that these gifts are being sent by Harun to intimidate Charlemagne, to patronize him as a kind of expression of condescension. But I don't think that's right. I think they are sent as genuine markers of respect, both because Harun can respect
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an emperor who's been crowned in Rome. The fame of Rome still endures in the lands of Islam, and that is quite something to be, an emperor crowned in Rome, even in Baghdad. It's also because Harun needs Charlemagne, because Harun as the Abbasid caliphate has a rival in the form of the Umayyad caliph who's emerged in Spain, in Muslim Spain. And the Umayyad Caliph is their common enemy.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And the fact that Harun is a Muslim and Charlemagne is Christian, that's less significant than the fact that both of them have an interest in allying with one another against the common foe. And in fact, shortly after the arrival of the elephant in Aachen, Charlemagne shows that this investment has been worth Harun's while because he starts a war
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beyond the Pyrenees, which he'd left alone since the disaster at Roncesvalles. In 1804, Charlemagne's son, Louis, captures the great city of Barcelona. This will remain in Christian hands from now on. That's good news for Charlemagne. Weirdly, it's also good for Rune. I think in a similar way, even in Constantinople, I think there's a sense that Charlemagne probably deserves the imperial title.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
In 1812, You know, there's been a long delay over a decade. But in 812, Byzantine ambassadors do come to Aachen and they bring acknowledgement of Charlemagne's rank. And the compromise is one that Charlemagne had prepared for, that the emperor in Constantinople will be the emperor of the Romans. Charlemagne is just emperor. Both sides are content with that.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I think it's the fact that the Byzantines at this point, their empire is very ragged. They've been fighting for survival for almost a century at this point. Whereas the Empire of the Franks is incredibly intimidating and impressive.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So I think this is Charlemagne's great political achievement, that he is the first ruler in what had been the western half of the Roman Empire to be acknowledged in Constantinople and also in Baghdad as an heir to Roman rule. Of course, neither the emperor in Constantinople nor the caliph in Baghdad prepared to acknowledge him as an equal. I mean, neither of them would do that.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But the fact that they're sending him ambassadors and elephants and clocks and all this, I mean, it's an acknowledgement that he has arrived, that he is a worthy heir of Rome. which is what the Franks had always wanted to be, Charlemagne has finally kind of sealed the deal. And they are responding to measurable kind of indices of greatness.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And that is the man referred to as Pope Leo. And this is the first time we've heard of him. So who is he? And it's worth diving into his backstory, I think, because according to a key source, the whole idea of this coronation, this proclamation of Charlemagne as Augustus, as emperor, was his and his alone.
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So, you know, lands conquered, plunder taken from defeated enemies, diplomatic muscle exercised, military muscle exercised. But you are right equally, of course, that he does remain an upstart. He's a king who's had to make himself an emperor. He's got a palace that's built with all kinds of stuff nicked from other palaces. Bits of other people's palaces.
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And the towns that he rules, even Rome, even Aachen. even Paris, even Tours, compared to Constantinople or Baghdad. I mean, these are just tiny primprinks. They're kind of nothing. And so there's this disconcerting sense when you look at Charlemagne and his empire, that his achievements seem simultaneously, imposingly solid.
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You know, this is a figure like a Roman emperor making the earth shake beneath his tread. And yet at the same time, it seems weirdly insubstantial, like a kind of phantasmagoria that might just melt on the mist.
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I think that's a key fact. There isn't the kind of institutional muscle memory. that you get in these empires that are drawing on very ancient traditions of imperialism. Charlemagne, you know, he's kind of making it up as he goes along, really.
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That's true. There is a kind of concentration of scholars and very, very literate and impressive people in Aachen. But there isn't, you're right, the concentration that you would get in Constantinople or Baghdad. But in a way, what you do have is a pointer to the future of medieval Europe.
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You have people who are scattered across the Frankish empire and indeed in Britain as well in the monasteries there. And thanks to Charlemagne's long and very productive reign, these people are now joined by a common culture in a way that had not previously been the case. And so this looks forward
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to the culture of the high middle ages, when people in Scandinavia or in Spain or in Iceland or whatever will all feel that they're part of a common culture. And in that sense, we said in the previous episode, Charlemagne is the father of Europe. And this cadre of scholars, of administrators, of monks, they are impressive, I think.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So just to quote Peter Brown in his book, The Rise of Western Christendom, Altogether with the scholar administrators of the Carolingian Empire, we're dealing with a singularly purposeful body of men. In their writings, many of them appear as the first technocrats of Europe. So it's no wonder that people in the EU are so keen on Charlemagne.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I mean, they're always kind of instituting prizes and stuff. In a sense, he has presided over the creation of a tradition that will endure long after his death, through the Middle Ages, survive the Reformation, and in a sense is manifest to this day in the European Union. But of course, all of that is far in the future. The immediate question is what will happen after Charlemagne dies.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And in the autumn of 813, so one year after his claim to the imperial title has been acknowledged by the Byzantines, he falls ill. He continues to go hunting, and this just makes him worse. Late November, he retires to bed, stays there, and he dies on the 28th of January, 814, at the ripe old age of 65. His body is wrapped by his daughters in a great shroud of gold and purple silk.
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And this key source is one that we've been referring to a number of times over the course of this series. and that is Einhard, the biographer of Charlemagne.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
It's been woven in Constantinople, illustrated with patterns showing charioteers. And he's then placed in an ancient Roman sarcophagus, probably decorated with scenes showing the rape of Proserpina by Pluto. And he's then buried in his chapel at Aachen. And he is succeeded by his son, Louis, the guy who had captured Barcelona, both as king of the Franks and the Lombards and as emperor.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And Charlemagne had made really sure that Louis would inherit the title because the year before his death, he had had Louis crowned joint emperor the previous September. And It was Charlemagne who had done the crowning, not the Pope. And in fact, the Pope hadn't even been invited. And so there seems to be a deliberate policy on Charlemagne's part to exclude the Pope from the ritual of coronation.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And in his biography, Einhard writes, Charles made it clear that he would never have entered the cathedral that Christmas day, even though it was the greatest of all the festivals of the church, had he only known in advance what the Pope was planning to do. So in other words, if Einhard is to be trusted when he says this,
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
He wants to kind of hug it to his own dynasty. And then just for good measure, a month after Charlemagne's death, when Louis arrives in Aachen, he has himself crowned as emperor again. This is a considerable achievement. The empire is handed over intact to a son. Listeners may be wondering, well, that's great, isn't it?
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Surely, with such a fair wind, the empire of the Franks, as constituted by Charlemagne, will endure for decades and centuries to come.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Well, I think the issue is that Frankish kings, whether they're Merovingian or Carolingian, this is a trend that has been operating since the time of Clovis, cannot help themselves from dividing their kingdoms up between their sons and heirs. So although Louis has inherited Charlemagne's empire in its entirety, That had not originally been Charlemagne's intention.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Charlemagne had three sons and he was planning to divide the empire up between them. And two of those sons die before Charlemagne does. So that's why Louis is able to inherit it and also able to inherit the title of emperor, which initially Charlemagne had not seen as hereditary. He hadn't been planning to hand that on. Oh, right. So...
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Essentially, the fact that Louis inherits the empire intact and the imperial title is an accident. Louis' problem is that, like Charlemagne, he has three sons, but all of them survive him. Through his reign, these sons are very badly behaved. They're endlessly kind of causing civil wars, trying to kind of grab chunks of the empire.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And after Louis' death, they basically tear the Frankish empire into pieces. So in 843, Louis' three sons meet up for one of the most politically significant meetings, conferences in the whole of European history. And they meet at Verdun, as in the great First World War battle. Ironically, given what's going to happen. Yeah, very ironically.
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Because what is negotiated at Verdun essentially will result in the permanent division of the Frankish Empire into three parts. Because Louis' three surviving sons, Charles, Louis, again, so he will rule as Louis II, and Lothar, a kind of ancient Merovingian name, They each take a massive chunk of the Frankish Empire. So Charles receives the western portion of Francia.
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This is the future kingdom of France. Louis receives the more German speaking lands to the east. So that includes Saxony, the Duchy of Franconia, a Frankish land that's been planted on the eastern banks of the Rhine. and this will be the future Germany.
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When Charlemagne goes in and the Pope kind of plonks the crown on his head and hails him as Augustus, Charlemagne is taken completely by surprise. It's come as a total bombshell. I mean, who knew this was going to happen? I mean, it's intriguing. Is this likely? Is this plausible? And I think that's what we're going to explore now.
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Lothar, who is the eldest son and who inherits the imperial title, also inherits this kind of rackety inheritance, which is a whole tranche of disparate territories running from the Low Countries, so the Netherlands and Belgium, down through Burgundy, across the Alps, and including Italy. What makes this inheritance even more rackety is that Lothar then has three sons of himself,
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And he divides his kingdom up into three. Absolute madness. And the eldest of Lothar's sons, who again is called Louis, he gets the kingdom of Italy. That's his sole inheritance. And he gets the title of emperor. He hasn't really got any kind of launchpad for it. He doesn't have the muscle that an emperor properly should have. And because his geopolitical power is now so attenuated,
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Getting kind of religious sanction becomes all the more important. And so this Louis, the emperor who rules only this chunk of northern Italy, he goes back on the intentions of Charlemagne and he gets the Pope involved again because he needs the Pope basically to burnish his credentials. And so he goes to Rome and the Pope crowns him.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And this essentially establishes as a precedent for future emperors the fact that you can't really be an emperor unless the Pope crowns you in Rome. So it's brilliant for the Pope, but Louis, it doesn't really help him at all. And the measure of this is that in 871, he gets a very gloating letter from Constantinople, which openly jeers at his claim to be an emperor.
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Byzantines had respected Charlemagne, but they're not going to acknowledge that this guy who just rules a chunk of Italy, he's an absolute loser. They're not going to allow him to be an emperor. And they say, there is only the single empire, there is only the single emperor The Franks have no claim to it. We do not respect your claim. Forget it.
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They do it because that's what Frankish kings do. And they're the heirs to the traditions of the Carolingian and then before them, the Merovingian monarchy. They do it because that's what their ancestors have always done. And you might think, well, that's a kind of mad barbarian habit.
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Did it come as a complete surprise to Charlemagne or was it actually basically his idea?
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I mean, I do think that. People who've stuck with us throughout this entire series may remember that back in episode one, we said, which had come as kind of news to me when I looked into it, that this tradition was not a kind of mad barbarian habit. It actually originated in the desire of Clovis to copy Roman practice.
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because it was the habit of the Roman Empire in its final centuries that it was too big. And so it needed to be divided up into various parts. Yeah, of course. That's the kind of one of many ironies that shadow the final centuries of the Frankish Empire is that they kind of do destroy themselves, but they do it ultimately for Roman reasons. So ironic.
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That is one reason, I think, why the Frankish Empire starts to disintegrate. The other, however, is that the age when the Franks could go on the offensive comes to a stop. In fact, it is outsiders who start to prey on the Frankish Empire. There are two bodies of raiders in particular who cause havoc all along the line of the Frankish dominion.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
The first of these, the Arabs, come back on the offensive. Their launchpad this time isn't Spain, as it had been back in the age of Charles Martel. but North Africa, and then after the conquest of Sicily, Southern Italy. And throughout the 9th century, the coastline of Italy is subjected to repeated raids.
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I mean, this is why today so many Italian cities on the coast, especially in Southern Italy, are up on hills. There is no option but to retreat from the depredations of the Saracen pirates, as they're described. And in 846, it's the measure of what a menace they are, They actually sail up the Tiber. They can't break through the walls of Rome, but St. Peter's in the Vatican is exposed.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
The cathedral is sacked and a particularly humiliating emblem of how low Frankish power has fallen. A great silver table that Charlemagne had presented to St. Peter is is stolen by the pirates and carted off. So that's very bad. But even worse, of course, are old friends, the Vikings. And they had actually arrived on the scene back in the final years of Charlemagne's reign.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So 793 is the famous raid by the Vikings on the shrine of St. Cuthbert on the island of Lindisfarne off Northumbria. And Alcuin as a Northumbrian He was in Francia when the news came to him. He was appalled. And he writes to the Bishop of Lindisfarne, full of distress, kind of, you know, offering his sympathies and prayers. And by 808, the Danes are starting to launch raids on Saxony.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And Charlemagne actually, in his final years, is preparing to go to war against them. And in the end, the only reason he doesn't is that the Danish king, Godefrid, is murdered by one of his own military guards. And so that puts off the Danish attack for a few years, but it's not long before the Vikings and the Danes are back.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And I think there is a case for saying that one of the factors in the emergence of the Vikings may well have been the intrusion of the Franks directly onto the borders of Scandinavia that rather like Roman power abutting Germany had kind of inspired German militarism and German raids. So the Frankish empire has a similar effect on the Vikings.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Their particular focus is West Francia, so Gaul as was. And yeah, I mean, they sail up the Loire, they sail up the Seine, and it is a king of West Francia, the great, great grandson of Charlemagne, Charles the Simple, who in 911 gives away a substantial chunk of what had been the great kingdom of Neustria, so ruled by Fredegund.
The Rest Is History
525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So after the great emperor. And as you say, most... popes at this point are from the Roman nobility. Hadrian, he'd been a subtle, clever political operator. He was the guy who had got Charlemagne to come down and conquer the Lombards and remove that threat to the autonomy of the papacy.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But he gives it away to a Viking chieftain, and this will become the land of the Northmen, Normandy, so to Rollo. So as in the kingdoms of Britain, so in West Francia, royal authority disintegrates in the face of these Viking raids. the heirs of Charlemagne still cling on to the throne of West Francia throughout the 9th century into the 10th century.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But then in 987, the great grandson of Charles the Simple, so the great, great, great, great grandson of Charlemagne, dies without an heir. So there is no heir of Charlemagne now to succeed to the throne of West Francia. And so a king from a new family emerges. And this is Hugh Capet.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And the Capetians will be the great medieval dynasty that rules a kingdom that is no longer called West Francia, but France. And of course, in the long run, it's the name that will be given to Louis XVI after he's deposed by the revolutionaries.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So you could say that it's with the extinction of the Carolingians, the emergence of this new dynasty, the Capetians, that maybe West Francia becomes France. The Carolingian line is now extinct. The Frankish line is now extinct in what had been West Francia. So what about Lotharingia, which is the name given to the great central tranche of lands that have been ruled by Lothar and East Francia?
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
There too, the lines of Charlemagne go extinct. The Lotharingan kings have inherited the title of emperor, but it's pathetic. It's a spectral thing. They have no authority. They rule as phantasms. In 901, the last of these Lotharingan kings to be crowned as emperor I mean, is treated as an absolute joke. And four years after his coronation, he's captured by a rival warlord.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
He's blinded and he's banished to a monastery in Burgundy where he, for the rest of his life, he just kind of withers away. And of course, there's another irony here is that this is pretty much the fate that Pepin, the first Carolingian king, had visited on the last Merovingian king. So what goes around comes around.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
This witnesses the biggest irony of all. Because the lands in East Francia, these include, as we said, Saxony. And in 911, the last descendant of Charlemagne to rule East Francia dies without a child. And so there is no descendant of Charlemagne to rule them. And so the lords of East Francia, they still want a Frank.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
He'd been a good Christian, a good pope in that sense, built lots of churches, but he'd also been a good administrator of Rome in a slightly older sense, a more kind of Caesar style sense. So he'd repaired the city walls, for instance, and he'd also renovated the four main aqueducts that brought water into the heart of Rome.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So he's ruled for what? Eight years. He's severely injured in a battle. He's stretched off the battlefield, brought to bed, and it's clear he's going to die. So on his deathbed, he gets all the noblemen and advisors around him. And he says, look, you should give the royal title to a duke called Henry Heinrich, who had been a perennial rival of Conrad's.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But Conrad, as he faces death, he wants to do right by his kingdom. And he can recognize that Henry is by miles the ablest man. the man who is best qualified to hold the kingdom together. And so Henry is duly elected as king and messengers are sent out to tell him. And according to tradition, these messengers find Henry fixing birding nests. And so he is known by posterity as Henry the Fowler.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Henry the Fowler does indeed prove to be an excellent king. Conrad had read his man correctly. And he in turn has a son, Otto. And Otto proves to be an even more impressive king than his father. So Otto inherits the throne in 962. And he scores up a whole list of achievements that are kind of very, very reminiscent of the great days of the Carolingian Empire, of the Frankish Empire.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
In 955, there's a massive invasion by pagan Hungarians, which seems to threaten the entire future of Eastern Christendom. Otto leads his mailed horsemen to the rescue, and it's all very Lord of the Rings, riders of Rohan descending onto the fields of Pelennor. Otto smashes them up, saves Christendom. The Hungarians are wiped out, and in due course, their remnants will be converted to Christianity.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
and a victory fit to rank with that of Charles Martel at Tours. And Otto's reward for this in 962 is to be crowned in Rome by the Pope, as emperor, so just as Charlemagne had been. And in due course after his death, just as Charlemagne was, Otto is remembered as the Great, so Otto the Great.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So in that sense, I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that Charlemagne does have an heir, and that heir is Otto the Great and the line of emperors that Otto establishes. And that line, unlike the line that had been established by Charlemagne, will endure unbroken
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
for centuries and centuries and centuries, right the way up to the time of Napoleon, who gets rid of this Holy Roman Empire, as it's come to be called. But of course, this is where the irony comes in, because where did Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great come from? Of which portion of East Francia were they the Duke? And the answer is Saxony. The very people that Charlemagne had been smiting.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Absolutely. So you could say this is proof that the policy of Correctio had worked, that Charlemagne's military efforts, that the efforts of Christian schoolmen and evangelists had succeeded so brilliantly that the true heirs of the Franks were actually the Saxons in exactly the same way that the Franks had been the heirs of the Romans.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So in that sense, a kind of secular figure, and even more so because he does what Roman nobles generally do, even if they're Pope, which is to shamelessly advance his own relatives. So all his kind of various cousins and brothers and so on. have been given plum positions in the administration of the city.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
They're still Franconia, I guess.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I think the Franks, as a coherent people, kind of dissolve rather like Charlemagne's empire does. Yeah. And that, I think, is what gives their empire its sense of insubstantiality. It's because we know that they ultimately will vanish from the pages of history. I think that's why they are less well known than perhaps they might.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Often people have a sense that there's the Roman Empire and then there's the Middle Ages and it's all castles and knights and things. And quite what lies in between is hard to get a handle on. And I think that reflects the fact that the Franks do kind of basically vanish. But of course, there is one further irony, which is that...
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
by the Greeks, by the Muslims, Otto the Great and his heirs, and in fact, the kings of France. And in fact, all Latin Christians will be known as Franks. And the episode that we did, what, kind of 700 episodes ago? about the origins of the Franks, we began with people in Thailand calling black Americans, black Franks.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And that reflects the fact that in Baghdad, in the cities of the Caliphate, the memory of Charlemagne and the Frankish empire endures. And so when they meet with Latin Christians, Muslims call these people Franks. And that's a word that then ripples out from the Near East, out across Asia, to Thailand, to China, wherever. And so in that sense, the Franks do still exist. We are the Franks.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I don't think that's how the Franks themselves would have seen it, but I think that that is the effect. That because the Franks identify themselves with the Roman inheritance so effectively, the potency of that Roman inheritance tends to blot out what was Frankish about them. I think that's right.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And when he dies in 795, again on Christmas Day, so today, back in 795, the vote unexpectedly for Pope doesn't go to a Roman, but goes to a man of relatively humble background from the south of Italy. And this is the guy who takes the name of Leo III. And his election has been unanimous
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Wishing everyone, all of you, a very happy Christmas and we'll see you for Mozart and Beethoven and then in the new year. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
But out in the halls and the villas of the Roman aristocracy, there's consternation because you don't want some bloke from the south of Italy turning up. Right. His epiphany. Yeah. I'm putting his oar into... you know, the local government.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And the people obviously who particularly resent this are Hadrian's relatives because they've not only lost their patron, but they've got this guy coming in and trying to do reforms and bringing his own people in. And this is a problem because they are still in control of, you know, large amounts of the administration of Rome.
The Rest Is History
525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
The Rest Is History Returns, available now in all good bookshops.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And so Leo, who knows that he has a problem here, unsurprisingly is very, very keen to get on the right side of Charlemagne. who's a kind of brooding presence north of the Alps. And so he makes sure the moment he's been elected... to send a messenger to the king of the Franks and kind of formally announce that he has been elected Pope.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Now, what Leo does not do, which his forebears had been doing for a fair old time until about 50 years previously, is send a messenger to Constantinople to tell the Roman emperor in Constantinople, who rules there as the heir of Constantine, that he's been elected Pope. So he doesn't do that? No, he doesn't do that.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And of course, the emperor in Constantinople, since the collapse of the empire in the West, since 476, he's been the only Roman emperor there is. And the Pope traditionally had always seen himself as a subject of the Roman emperor in Constantinople. And Because the emperor in Constantinople can lay claim to the inheritance of the Roman Empire. I mean, in a sense, it is the Roman Empire.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
There's never been a break. The habit of people in Constantinople is to look on leaders in the West with a fair measure of auteur and often contempt. Yeah.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So the Pope first, obviously a very significant figure and acknowledged as such even by people in Constantinople, but he has traditionally been viewed as a subject of the Roman Emperor in Constantinople and not of the King of the Franks, which is essentially what he's become. So this alliance that previously
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
had been between the Pope in Rome and the Emperor in Constantinople has now become an alliance between the Pope in Rome and the Frankish King. And of course, the people in Constantinople are very bitter and resentful about this. Also, traditionally, the Byzantines, the Romans of Constantinople, have viewed the Franks as basically just barbarians.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And treated them in a very kind of imperial manner. So if they behave well, they'll give them nice titles and robes and kind of various things like that. But they also make sure if they possibly can to grab members of the Frankish royal family, keep them as hostages in Constantinople as guarantors of good behavior.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So they are not in the habit of viewing the Frankish king as in any way an equal, still less a superior. And essentially, seen from Constantinople, both the Frankish king and the Pope are kind of, you know, they're rubes, they're hicks.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
I think they do. And I think it reflects not just Frankish strength, but also a Byzantine weakness. The empire has been going through a very rough stage. Its glory seems very diminished and particularly in contrast to Charlemagne's realm. And so in fact, in 781, the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VI... had been betrothed to one of Charlemagne's daughters.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And this was a kind of long-term investment because Constantine VI was only 10 at the time and Charlemagne's daughter was only six. So the wedding was going to happen down the line. But then in 787, it's Charles who cancels the engagement. So this really offends Byzantine amour propre. You know, they've
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
kind of very offended by this and constantine's mother irene who is very much on the scene is furious about this and dominic you introduced irene onto the rest of history didn't you in i think was it the second love island she was a contestant on that do you remember that really
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So you're like that priest in the previous episode.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Forgotten everything he ever learned. Yeah. Well, in which case I will just give you a quick sketch of Irene. Very formidable. She's from a very aristocratic Athenian family. She's come to Constantinople. She put her husband in her shadow. She's put her son in her shadow. She is essentially ruling as co-empress with her son. And she's very, very indignant on his behalf.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And the following year, she sends a kind of marker to Charlemagne that she's not going to be pushed around by sending an expeditionary force to southern Italy, which is obviously in the Frankish sphere of influence, but also traditionally has been occupied by the Byzantines. So it's interpreted by Charlemagne as a hostile move.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And when Leo III, having become Pope, then neglects to inform Irene and Constantine VI of his election, it kind of rubs salt in the wound. And then... In 797, there is a really spectacular crisis in Constantinople because the problem is that Constantine VI basically is useless. He is politically maladroit. He is impulsive. He's cruel. He's a very unpleasant young man.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Even Irene thinks this, and so she takes very firm measures And we're told what these firm measures were by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, who writes, on the 15th of August 797, the emperor Constantine VI was terribly and irrevocably blinded by the will of his mother and her counsellors with the intention of killing him. In this way, his mother Irene took power.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So parenting hints from the court of the Caesars in Constantinople.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
A very robust approach to disobedience from children. And as a result of this, Irene becomes the first and in fact the only ruling empress in the whole sweep of Roman history. And she is acknowledged as such grudgingly in Constantinople. But elsewhere, there are people who feel, well, you can't have a woman ruling the Roman Empire.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
Yes. Really good book. Yeah. But in the West, essentially the assumption is that she has not adopted the purple, that she can't have done because she's a woman. Yeah. and that therefore the throne of the Caesar sits vacant. Nice opportunity there for somebody who fancies himself as a bit of an emperor. You might think that. And all the more so because in Rome, as in the new Rome, a crisis brewing.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And this too is a crisis that, according to some sources, will involve a blinding. And Essentially, the context for this is what Rosamund McKittrick, in her recent book on Charlemagne, describes as the squalid local politics of Rome. And it's all about local faction fighting. It's all about the resentment of... Hadrian's relatives at this Parvenu Pope who's come in and is sticking his oar in.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So that's still simmering, right? That's absolutely still simmering. And on the 25th of April, 797, so that's the same year that in Constantinople, poor old Constantine VI is being blinded by mum, the Pope is ambushed as he rides out of his palace to go to mass and And the people ambushing him are thugs who have been hired by the late Pope Hadrian's kinsmen.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And we have a quite detailed account, very favorable to Leo, written after his death. And it describes how the Pope has pulled off his horse. He has all his clothes ripped off him. His assailants try to put out his eyes and to cut out his tongue. They then drag him into a monastery right in front of its altar. And again, They blind him. They hack at what remains of his tongue.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
So hold on, they blinded him twice at this point. He's definitely been blinded, right? It's unclear. I mean, it seems that the first attempt at blinding didn't work. I mean, I don't know how you could, if you really set on blinding someone, it seems quite easy. Yeah, come on, it's not that complicated. But anyway, he's definitely blinded, or is he? And he's in a terrible way.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And he gets formally deposed by his enemies in Rome. He's accused of adultery and perjury. And he's then taken off to a monastery where he's put under lock and key. But then Dominic, an absolute miracle. So it's recorded in his life. It happened that through God's foreknowledge and action, Leo recovered his sight and his tongue was restored to him so he could speak. So amazing.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And as he goes, of course, the news of what's been happening ripples out before him. And it has to be said that sympathies are overwhelmingly on his side. Even before the Pope has reached Charlemagne, there are people saying, oh, well, hold on. you know, we've got these reports that he's been blinded and then his tongue pulled out.
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525. Charlemagne: Emperor of the West (Part 3)
And now we gather that he can see and talk what's going on there, perhaps as a bit of exaggeration going on here. But certainly when Leo reaches Charlemagne, he's greeted with great sympathy. And by a kind of unfortunate coincidence, ambassadors from Irene, who claims to be the Empress of Constantinople, but in the opinion of lots of people in the West, you know, isn't an Empress at all.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And the man at the door is Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley of the West Sussex Constabulary. And Dominic, he's come basically to search the house and to arrest as many Rolling Stones as he possibly can, hasn't he? Make an example of them.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And the impact of fame as well, because isn't there by 1966, is it Donovan? There's a documentary on ITV and he's the first kind of big musician to talk about taking cannabis. Yeah. Or the Beatles, of course. But the Beatles don't kind of officially admit to taking drugs until, I think it's Paul McCartney talking about LSD in 67. Yes, I think it is 67.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
So actually just before the Redlands trial, interestingly. Yeah. But there is a sense that if you want to be groovy and with it and like your heroes, then you should be smoking pot.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And it's about the intersection of poshness and seaminess, isn't it?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
But the tragedy is that probably he'd have got on brilliantly with Keith Richards and they could have talked about tactics at the Battle of Aberkeir Bay. Yeah, camper down.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And it's interesting that they're going for the Stones and not, for instance, for the Beatles. Because I just checked the date when Paul McCartney gave that ITN interview talking about taking LSD. And it's the 19th of June. So it's pretty much a week before the Stones are brought to trial.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
What are they, mid-twenties? Does Richards get that severe a sentence because of his petty morals comment, do you think? Or is he seen as somehow the most satanic of the lot? Or what's happening there?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
But I think he's been truculent in the dock. And also your theory about the house, perhaps. Is it his house, perhaps?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Oh, yeah, just from where I'm sitting. Yeah.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Sure, but, I mean, the establishment isn't just the government, is it? And you could say that it's the intersection of the media, the police, and... JPs and judges.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And it wouldn't be, I mean, you wouldn't say that they'd all met up in a gentleman's club and drawn it up, but we've talked about how they, you know, people are ready to go after the stones in a way that they're not after the Beatles, for instance. So there is a sense that a sniff of an opportunity is, And various segments of the British establishment are going to go after them.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I would say that's not an exaggeration.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And the man who makes this case most powerfully is, as I said, the father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the ex-Tory MP now, William Rees-Mogg, who's editor of The Times. And he picks out this perfect quotation from Alexander Pope, who breaks a butterfly on a wheel. Yeah, exactly.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I think also it's tied up with the sense of the stones as the embodiment of cool, because if you are not cool, your resentment and dislike of those who are cool is all the greater, wouldn't you say? Whereas William Rees-Mogg in his pinstripes doesn't have to worry about that. That's not an issue for him.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
So we're in February 1967, 1967, the summer of love of psychedelia. So not natural territory for the Stones, certainly as they promote themselves, one might argue. And this will be a bit of the context for the story we're about to tell, isn't it? So what's the broader political context?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Why should they have all this fun when I have no fun at all? Right. And again, I would imagine that the sense of the poshness of the house would play into that. Yeah, I think you might be right. You know, if you're in your mid-twenties, the opportunities to own a house, let alone a 16th century house in Sussex, fairly limited, I'd have thought.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I wouldn't. I would be sorry for them because I'm a nicer person than you. I get the force of your observation, Dominic.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And he judges his look perfectly. He looks cool. Yeah. But it's not kind of aggressively... 1967. Kind of white suit, I think.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Yeah, he staged John Lennon's first art show. Yeah, they all really liked him.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Now listen, will you just cool it for a minute? Because I would really like to say something for Brian. I'd really dig it if you would be with us. Just cool it. About how we feel about him just going when we didn't expect him to. Peace. Peace. He is not dead. He doth not sleep. He hath awakened from the dream of life.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Tis we who lost in stormy visions keep with phantoms an unprofitable strife and in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings. We decay like corpses in a charnel. Fear and grief convulse us and consume us day by day. And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. Mick Jagger, of course, reading Adonis, Shelley's elegy on the death of Keats.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And he is there comparing John Keats to Brian Jones, who has just died. And he's talking at Hyde Park Festival. I think that comparing Brian Jones to John Keats is flattering Brian Jones. I think it is. But we'll come to that. So, Dominic, you mentioned the Hyde Park concert held on the 5th of July 1969.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
At least a quarter of a million people gathered there to hear it as one of the Stones' two most famous concerts. But what gives it its fame and its resonance is the circumstance. The fact that Brian Jones is found a member of the Stones is dead. So what's the backdrop there? Because we haven't actually really mentioned Brian Jones up to now because he was not at the party.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Well, and that is one for our Welsh listeners who are always complaining that we never do any Welsh history.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I was worrying about the other way. Interesting.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Yeah, but that's the Horsham Plowing Agricultural Society for you, Tom. Exactly. Well, that's my point. It's the difference between Chelsea and Horsham. I'm not sure about that. I mean, no offence to anyone in Horsham.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Do you like that? It's not a great album, but it does have one brilliant track, We Love You, where they take the piss out of the trial. Yeah. And they model it on Oscar Wilde. So Mick is Oscar Wilde. Keith is the High Court judge. And Marianne Faithfull is a frankly sensational Bosie. She kind of looks like... cross between Twiggy and Alfred Douglas.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
rather than for musical merit. And music and swagger. There's a great visual joke where there's a fur rug and Marianne Faithfull lifts up the fur rug to reveal Mick. Oh, great banter. And also the other thing about that particular track is that it has a very good Mellotron in it. Right. And that is played by Brian. And it's his, I think his last kind of contribution.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
He's got a lovely stripy blue T-shirt, hasn't he?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
That's a Breton T-shirt, isn't it?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Do you think so? Yeah, I do. Generally, in these kind of dramas where somebody's doing the building.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
So you're sticking to that, are you? No, I'm floating it out, but I'm saying that this is probably what would happen if this were a Sunday evening detective drama. Like Bergerac. No, not Bergerac. Bergerac's brilliant. You can't be dissing Bergerac on this show. No, what's it? The one where they're always killing each other. The Village. Midsummer Murders.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
He'd have stayed in on a Sunday night. He would actually. A cup of cocoa, settled down. He'd have loved it.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Well, probably, probably accurate. Yeah, well, maybe. He doesn't sound... I mean, clearly he was very, very... Ill. And not treating his illness in a sensible way.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Because it's the first time this has really happened. Something like this. It's surely up there with Gene Shrimpton's appearance at the Battle of Melbourne as one of the great turning points in world history. It's up there with the Cressy, isn't it?
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Well, there's, I mean, literally a Faustian pact in that sense, isn't it?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
No, I think you said that. Yeah. But I mean, it's definitely up there with... decisive moments.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
That they have cast themselves as devils when, in fact, in all kinds of ways, they're not really devils. You know, they like collecting cricket memorabilia.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
He didn't dig your insistence on washing machines.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Well, the Stones are not in favour of high taxes. No. And Mrs Thatcher was also not in favour of high taxes. So in a sense, you could say that the Stones' decision to leave Britain and go to France... is a prefiguring of the Thatcherite tax-cutting regime.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Isn't it because the Stones are the people playing at Altamont and they have provided the soundtrack over the previous two years for the process by which the Summer of Love kind of fades away that gives Altamont its kind of symbolic resonance?
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Yeah. So, I mean, they're playing Sympathy for the Devil and that has kind of allusions to the Kennedys, doesn't it? And who is it shot them? You and me. And then you've got Gimme Shelter, which is, I mean, I know that it's Keith Richards, isn't it? He was watching people run from a thunderstorm. Actually, I think in Robert Fraser's flat, actually. But I mean, they say overtly it's about Vietnam.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
You know, that death and murder is just a shot away. And if they had not... produced songs of that caliber talking about violence, linking it into Vietnam. And then the fact that it happens symbolically at the end of the 60s, I can see why people give it this mythic resonance in California.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I mean, they greatly resented that. Of course they would. I mean, they would absolutely repudiate that. I think it is actually a tribute to the incredible power and resonance of the songs that they're putting out over 68 and 69. that it comes to have this resonance. But I understand why the Stones themselves wouldn't like it. Yeah, I think that's fair enough, Tom.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
What do you think, Tom? I completely agree. And I think that, as with the Beatles, it's the combination of incredible music with... an ability to serve as a lightning rod for very broad cultural trends that gives them the status they have. Yeah, agreed.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Yeah, but bear in mind, that's 1976 and punk is about to come. Yes, that's true. And by that point, he must be feeling... I mean, the kind of the tension between his growing years and the fact that he's supposedly the embodiment of the youth revolution, which to this day remains probably what people best now know the Sloanes for. But it's good to get back and be reminded of what they were.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Yeah, I agree. Because now they're a parody. of that kind of youthful anarchy and rebellion. But at one point, they were the embodiments of it. They were, exactly. However complicated a way.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Let's do that.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
I mean, the thing about this is it's interesting. They are kind of classier houses than the houses, say, the Beatles buy, apart from Paul, who lives in central London. Yes. They're more the kind of houses that working class people who've suddenly come into money would buy because they're not familiar with the world of what you would buy that people who hang out with old Etonians would have.
The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
But they're alert to history and to the kind of the cachet that a house would have because maybe someone who had formerly lived there in a way that buying houses on an estate on a hill in Surrey, a gated community in Surrey, wouldn't have that kind of patina.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
So Keith Richard's house, Redlands, is part of this kind of Sussex, Lutyens-esque, Edwardian, Tudor beams kind of stuff. So it's actually 16th century, isn't it? But it's got that... You could imagine a murder mystery happening in the 1920s there.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
And do they avoid treading on them? They do avoid treading on them. With their massive policeman's feet.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Which is unfortunate for her, isn't it? Because it enables an element of prurience to creep into the subsequent reporting.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
unmistakable tones there of Keith Richards, of course. And he was being interviewed in Rolling Stone on the 19th of August, 1971, about one of the most notorious episodes, really from the 1960s, one of the kind of iconic moments. And it is the evening of the 12th of February, 1967. The scene is Keith Richards' country house at Redlands in Sussex,
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
Edwardian... What was it? Lord Kitchener's Valet. Yeah, Lord Kitchener's Valet. Exactly. But psychedelic and groovy at the same time.
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559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
But that's not quite true, is it? Because amphetamines are prescribed quite regularly. Aren't they called the housewife's friend? As Theo says, mother's little helper. Rolling Stones. Yes. So the sense of what drugs actually are, I guess, is evolving as well.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Peter always forgives him. Peter was furious about all this corruption in the abstract. And at one point, he dictated an order one day to his chamberlain, Pavel Yaguzhinsky, who was actually famously not corrupt. And Peter said, right, I want the death penalty for anyone in my government who so much as steals a piece of rope.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yaguzhinsky said to him, does your majesty wish to live alone in his empire with no subjects? Because we all steal. Some take a little, some take a great deal, but all of us take something.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I think so. Peter is a very serious person. He has great ambitions for Russia. But of course, his ambitions are colliding with reality, I guess. He needs to let off steam, perhaps. He needs to let off steam. We're not unfamiliar with it now, of course, that there are politicians whose appeal is partly based on making fun of the established rituals of
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
They're sort of having their cake and eating it. And actually two really good examples of that are Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. They're sometimes self-mocking. They sometimes make fun of the conventions and the expectations that other politicians have adhered to.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
No, he can do what he likes, can't he? I mean, that's the thing. And he just thinks... You know, when he went on his grand tour, he didn't want to be constrained by protocol, which is why he went in disguise. And I think... There is a kind of restlessness to him. You can't imagine Peter, knowing what we do with him, just knuckling down and obeying the rules and conventions.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He has a kind of, is it a way of coping with the terrible traumas of his first 10 years or so?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute tightrope. It is. So an interesting question about Peter is how much he's an enlightened despot. You know, it's a classic kind of A-level question. And I think there are lots of ways in which he does anticipate them.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So you could see him as part of a tradition that reaches its kind of most obvious flowering with people like Frederick the Great and Joseph II of Austria. The suspicion of organized religion, the dislike of obscurantism, fascination with science and geography, enthusiasm for kind of top-down modernization and whatnot. If you sort of stretch the definition of enlightened despotism,
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
you can see him as the start of a line that leads all the way to Napoleon, I would say. There is a comparison to be made between Peter and Napoleon, an autocrat, a modernising autocrat. I mean, Napoleon obviously isn't messing around with dwarves and pies and bears and whatnot in the same way.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yes. There's a lot of darkness to come in this episode when we get to his son. The one thing he does definitely have in common with Napoleon, though, is he's a genuine celebrity, a continental celebrity. There's a wonderful description of him. He made a second tour of Western Europe in 1716-17, when the war was largely won, and he went to France this time. He stayed at the Louvre.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He visited Louis XV at the Tuileries. Louis XV then was only a little boy, seven years old. And Peter made a great fuss of him, hugging him and kissing him. And there were wonderful sort of descriptions of him going to meet scientists and going to talk to Catholic theologians. He's drinking a lot.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
There's a wonderful description by the Duke of Saint-Simon, the great memoirist of 18th century France. He's always asking questions about everything from the tax system to the police, just like he was almost 20 years earlier when he went to Amsterdam and London. Yeah. We've mentioned a few times Robert K. Mass's book, which is about 20,000 pages long or something, just an enormous biography.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he gives some lovely sort of portraits of Peter in his prime. And you can see why people found him such an infectious character. He would get up at four o'clock in the morning and he carries a notebook and he's always writing stuff down. He loves playing chess. He loves messing around with his lathe. He likes sailing, all of this. He's got some very peculiar quirks.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He has an obsession with cockroaches. Whenever he goes to stay in a room, it has to be fully checked and swept for cockroaches. And of course, the thing that a lot of people will know about Peter the Great, because we've referred to it in previous episodes of The Rest is History about other things, is this whole thing about curiosities. You mentioned that the giants.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So in 1718, he sent out a demand. He said, I would like people to send me, and I quote, freaks and monsters. That was his words. Lindsay Hughes in her book says this produced, and I quote, a three-legged baby, a two-headed baby, a baby with its eyes under its nose and its ears below its neck, Siamese twins joined at the chest, a baby with a fish's tail, two dogs born to a 60-year-old virgin.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I think that's not plausible, frankly. and a baby with two heads, four arms, and three legs. And then she says, but the response was not as good as Peter hoped. What was he after? That sounds a pretty good haul to me. And he would exhibit these in his Kunstkammer, his Cabinet of Curiosities.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Petersburg I mean this sort of stuff is quite unsettling I think very unsettling and actually there is a very very unsettling and dark side to Peter's character Peter is not just hot-tempered. He is unbelievably violent. So you go in and you report the taxes from such and such a province are not great this year, and he will beat you with a stick or something.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He would often, at feasts, when the dwarves are leaping out of pies and there's great japes, he will punch his friends in the face if they say the wrong thing. There's occasions where he would draw his sword and attack them and have to be physically restrained. It's sort of like Alexander the Great and Clitus the Black.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I would say he's one of the worst fathers you could wish to have, actually. And this brings us to the sort of meat of this story, which is such a sad, sad business. So his son, Alexei, or Alexis, as he's usually called, was born in February 1690 when Peter was only 18 years old and he was married to Eudokia. If you remember, Eudokia was very conservative. The boring one. Yes.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Who he packed off to a nunnery. So he was forced off to a nunnery when Alexis was eight. So Alexis lost his mother when he was eight, and he had a succession of German tutors. And he studied all the things that you would expect, maths and foreign languages. He's taught how to ride and to fence and whatnot.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
This is so tragic because all the reports of him as a young boy are that he's very bright, studious, eager to please, all of this.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yes, undoubtedly. Peter despised his wife, Eudokia. And I think as a young man was just simply not interested in Alexis at all. And Alexis always had the taint. I think, of his mother and indeed grows up and ends up living up to that, doesn't he?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I think so. I think so. And I think what's a terrible sign is that Peter seems to have given his pal Alexander Menshikov, the very blingy, hard drinking friend of his, special responsibility for Alexis and says, oh, why don't you take my son under your wing? And there are stories of Menshikov punching Alexis or dragging him by his hair along the floor in front of Peter. Bloody good laugh.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Make a man of him. Making a man of him. When the war breaks out, Peter would sometimes summon him to sort of set piece moments like the storming of Narva. But then he would just forget about him for long stretches, like months or years at a time. So that leaves Alexis in Moscow. And unlike his father, he loves Moscow. So he loves all the icons, the chanting and the candles and all of that.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He does. He's a sort of dreamy teenager and he's very close to his mother's family and they're more conservative. And he falls in with lots of priests and stuff. And I think they encourage this because they see him a champion of the old ways and orthodoxy. And one day he will succeed and they will be able to turn the clock back on all Peter's reforms.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
No, not at all. But also temperamentally, they're so different. Peter, as we've discussed, is so physical, he's so energetic. He's so self-confident and gregarious. And not bookish. His education had been with the lathe. Exactly. And Alexis is very bookish and he's very anxious and melancholy. He's clearly terrified of his father.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So when Peter would summon him, he would often make himself ill by necking medicine to try to get out of meeting him. Like getting out of PE. Exactly. And there's a brilliant example of this. He went off to study in Dresden. And Peter sent him a message and said, I look forward to seeing your geometrical drawings. You can draw me a fort. Classic Peter.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Alexis was so terrified that he wouldn't be able to do it, that he tried to shoot himself in the hand, but he missed. He was shaking so much. He ended up really badly burning himself with the sort of the pistol. Anyway, in 1710, so when Alexis was turning 20, Peter arranged for him to marry a German princess called Charlotte of Wolfenbüttel. And at first, everything seemed fine.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Alexis said, well, she's quite nice. Yeah, we get on all right. They got married in Saxony, but they didn't see each other much for the first couple of years. They married in 1711. They sort of see each other off and on. And then by 1713, when they're reunited in St. Petersburg, Alexis has started drinking a lot. And he starts to be very rude to her and to abuse her in front of the servants.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he says, I wish I'd never married you. I actually don't like you at all. But they are still sleeping together because in early 1714, she's heavily pregnant with their daughter. And Alexis walks out of the house with the words, goodbye, I'm going to Carlsbad, Spartan. And he goes off to Carlsbad and he doesn't write to her for the next six months.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Exactly. And she writes to him, oh, I've had a daughter, blah, blah, blah. And he returns her letters unread. Then in December 1714, he returns to Charlotte, but things are worse than ever. He's now drinking loads of brandy a day. He's also got this girl, a Finnish girl, who was a prisoner of war from the Great Northern War. who we met at a friend's house. This girl is called Afrosenia.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he moves Afrosenia, she's a teenager, he moves her into a wing of his house and he spends all his time with Afrosenia. Charlotte, who's living in the other bit of the house... He doesn't talk to her at all. She has a terrible leak in her bedroom and water is pouring in and he won't even pay to repair the leak.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And yet, once a week, he will still pad along the corridors to Charlotte's room, as Robert K. Massey puts it, coming grimly to make love in hopes of fathering a son to secure his own succession to the throne. So Charlotte is very miserable. She's had a terrible time. She gives birth to a second child in 1715, who's going to end up becoming Peter II.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But nine days later, she dies of postpartum fever. That's the end of her. It's a tragic story. Now, on the day of her funeral, Peter hands Alexis a letter. And he says, I mean, imagine you had this letter from your dad. It says, look at me. I'm absolutely brilliant. I've done all these things for Russia. I'm a tremendous man. You, you're an absolute shower of a man. You're a terrible person.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And it's not because of your treatment. He doesn't even mention Alexis' treatment of his wife, who's dead. You have no inclination to learn war. You don't apply yourself to it. Again, Peter's obsession with the fate of Constantinople. We don't want to follow the Greeks with whom we're united by the same profession of faith.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Idleness and repose weaken them and brought them to that slavery to which they are now so long since reduced. And if you don't mend your ways, says Peter, I will deprive you of the succession as one may cut off a useless member. So that must have helped him with his lack of self-confidence. Yeah, with his mental health.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Well, Alexis goes straight to his friends and says, what do you think about this? And they unanimously say to him, do you know what? You should just walk away. You are not suited to be the Tsar. Tell your father you just don't want it. So Alexis writes back to Peter and he says, I don't want it. The strength of my mind and of my body is much decayed by sicknesses.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I do not think myself fit for government. Please exclude me from the succession. Just let me go in peace to be a private citizen. Peter is livid. A month later, he's been brooding for a month and then he writes back to Alexis and he says, you're going to throw away everything I've done for Russia.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I cannot resolve to let you live on according to your free will, like an amphibious creature, neither fish nor flesh. Change therefore your conduct and either strive to render yourself worthy of the succession or become a monk. And he says, when you get this letter, Answer me straight away. If you fail to do it, I shall treat you as a criminal. God, no wonder he was drinking.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So Alexis says, I will become a monk, actually. Now you mention it. And Peter is shocked by this because Alexis has called his bluff.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Exactly. At any point. This is win-win. And Peter says, oh, well, actually, becoming a monk is not easy for a young man. Think about it a little more. I will wait six more months. So six more months pass. Peter's off on campaign in the West, in Germany. Alexis is in St. Petersburg, holed up miserably with Afra Senior, his sort of teenage mistress. Drinking like a fish. Drinking like a fish.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Not like an amphibious creature. No. Genuinely like a fish. And then on the 26th of August, 1716, Peter writes to him from Copenhagen. And he says, I need your final answer. Monk or crown prince? Make your mind up. And he waits, waits, and there's no reply. And then he hears reports that Alexis has left St. Petersburg and he is coming west to Pomerania. And he thinks, well, fine.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's coming to tell me his answer in person. Great. I look forward to it. And the weeks pass, and Alexis is nowhere to be seen. And then comes, not for the first time in this series, bombshell news. Alexis has got as far as Danzig, Gdansk. but nobody has seen him since and nobody knows where he is.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And with a guy called Count Schoenborn, who's the vice chancellor of the Habsburg Imperial Court, and he's just retired to bed shortly after a day stuffing himself with schnitzel cake and listening to nice classical music or some such Austrian behavior. And a servant comes in and says, you know, my lord, there's a man at the door. He says he's Grand Duke Alexis, son of Peter the Great.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Schoenborn kind of gets back out of bed and he starts putting his clothes back on. And suddenly the door swings open and this man bursts in. He's hysterical. He's sobbing. He's pacing the room like a madman. He is Alexis. He has fled Russia in terror for his life and arrived in Vienna. So this is great news for the Austrian emperor.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So the Austrian emperor is called Charles VI, and he's now in a very difficult position. What the hell am I going to do now? Do I house him? Do I send him back to his father? What do I do? I mean, I can't think of many examples in history where something like this has happened. And he says, well, we'll just keep the whole thing top secret.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he sends Alexis to a remote castle in the northern Tyrol called Ehrenberg. And so for the next few months, Alexis is housed in this Austrian castle in the strictest secrecy. He's traveled with four Russian servants. He's traveled with loads of books because we said he's very bookish. And this girlfriend of his, Afra Senior, this Finnish girl, who's disguised as a boy.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Right. Mozart would make an opera out of this. They love a girlfriend who's disguised as a page. Exactly. So he's treated very generously. He wants for nothing, but no one is allowed near the castle and the grounds are patrolled by Austrian bodyguards.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Now, Peter has gone absolutely ballistic that his son has vanished and he has sent Russian agents and diplomats across Central Europe to search for him. And one of these men who's been told to look for him is the ambassador to Vienna. He's a man called Veselovsky. And he personally tries to retrace Alexis's steps. He goes up to Danzig and he asks questions. Have you seen this man?
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And eventually he finds that a man who was calling himself Korkansky clearly spoke with a heavy Russian accent. had stayed at various posthouses on the road down south towards Austria. And Veselovsky enlists a Russian guard captain called Rumyantsov, who's a huge giant of a man, another giant, to look into this.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Rumyantsov manages to bribe a man in the imperial chancery in Vienna who says to him, I think you should look in the Tyrol. Rumyantsov goes to the Tyrol and he asks around and he hears rumors of this stranger at Ehrenberg Castle. And he goes as close as he can to the castle. And he catches a glimpse of somebody who looks suspiciously like it might be Alexis.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I think that's right, Tom. And we'll be unpacking that a little bit in the first half of today's episode. So people who've been with us since the very beginning of this Peter the Great epic will know that we've had lots of war, lots of diplomacy and battles. We had the Great Northern War. We had Charles XII's rise and fall.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
The Russian ambassador, armed with this news, goes to see the Habsburg Emperor Charles and gives him a letter from Peter. A very polite letter, not an ultimatum, saying, could you please send back my son? And the emperor sends a secretary to the castle to break this news to Alexis. Alexis bursts into floods of tears and says... I will not go. I will not go back to my father.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And so the emperor says, okay, well, I will move you in secret to the opposite end of my empire, which is Naples. And so in this bonkers scene, Austrian imperial agents load Alexis and Afrasinia and their servants onto a coach and they send them off towards Naples. And Afrasinia is still disguised as a boy, right? Still disguised as a boy, but... It's pregnant. It is pregnant by Alexis, exactly.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And what is worse, they're meant to be traveling incognito, but they're drinking like fish again on the coach, generally drawing attention to themselves. Anyway, they get to Naples in May 1717, and they are put up in the Castel Sant'Elmo, which overlooks the city. By this point, Afrosina is clearly very heavily pregnant.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
The months go by, and actually, they breathe a sigh of relief, and they think, great, we've got away. We've pulled this off. But in fact, they had been spotted on the ride south, of course, because they've drawn attention to themselves. This giant, Rumyantsov, and his agents have been tracking them the whole time.
The Rest Is History
567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And when they're certain that they're in Naples and they've got them, they send a message to Peter and they say, this is where they are. So Peter now sends another representative to Vienna, and this is his very best man. This is a guy called Piotr Tolstoy, Count Tolstoy, from the great novel-writing dynasty. And Tolstoy is your dictionary definition of a wily old fox.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he's also, for people who've been listening to the rest of his history for a long time, he is the guy who had procured the services of that man... Hannibal. Yes, of course. The Cameroonian slave general of Peter the Great, I think the title of that episode was. Of course, yeah. So it was Tolstoy who had got him. Yes, he found him in the slave markets of Constantinople. Exactly.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Well, Tolstoy went straight to the Habsburg emperor and he said, look, as a sovereign and as a father, Peter really insists that you should give his son back. And the emperor says, listen, I can't force him. Alexis is a grown man, but you have my permission to go to Naples and talk to him yourself. So Count Tolstoy goes down to Naples.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
We had the Battle of Poltava and Russia's ascent to join the ranks of the great powers. And in this final episode, we'll look at the last years of Peter's life, and above all, the terrible and tragic story of what happens to his son, Alexis. And there will, yes, be some misconduct with dwarves to come.
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And on the 26th of September, 1717, Alexis is invited to the viceroy's palace. And when he gets there, listeners who enjoy this kind of thing, it is like the moment in The Empire Strikes Back, when Lando Calrissian betrays Han and Leia and co. to Darth Vader, because... The door opens and Alexis sees to his horror that Count Tolstoy is there.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Tolstoy has brought a letter from his father, from Peter. And Peter says to him, if you come back, I will pardon and I will love you better than ever. If you refuse, then I curse you forever and I will declare you a traitor and find a way to treat you as such. Meaning, I will send men with Novichok or something to bump you off. This is the threat. Alexis is clearly terrified.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He asks for time to make up his mind. And then he decides, I can't do it. I just can't face my father. I don't want to go back to Russia. And Tolstoy now turns the knife. He says, well, actually, if you don't go, your father has decided to march on Italy at the head of an army to bring you back. But crucially, Tolstoy bribes Afrosenia to persuade her lover to go back home.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He is a wily old fox, isn't he? He is a wily old fox. And Afrosenia, I don't think, is overburdened with moral scruples, I think it's fair to say. So... Alexis breaks down in tears and he says, all right, I'll go back on two conditions. One, that I can live quietly in the country. And two, that I can live with Afrosenia because I love her so much and she's so important to me.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Peter says, yeah, fine, whatever, as long as you come. So off they go. north from Naples. They get to Venice and there Tolstoy persuades him to leave Afrosenia behind. He says, she's heavily pregnant. She doesn't want to be crossing the Alps. So they leave her behind. By January 1718, they've reached Riga, of course, now occupied by Russian troops.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Alexis is immediately kind of loaded into a carriage and sent to Tver, which is near Moscow, to await his father. And when Alexis' old friends hear that he's coming back to Russia, they are horrified. One of his friends, Prince Vasily Dolgoruky, said, what a mug Alexis is. He will have a coffin rather than a wedding.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So 3rd of February, 1718, all the bigwigs of Russia assemble in the great audience hall of the Kremlin. Clergy, noblemen, public officials, the place is surrounded by battalions of guardsmen. Peter comes in and he takes his place on the throne. And then Alexis is escorted in by Count Tolstoy and he falls to his knees and begs his father for pardon.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Peter denounces him and then he says, I will pardon you. But there is one condition which Peter hasn't actually mentioned until now. He says, you must reveal the truth of your flight and the names of all your fellow conspirators.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Exactly. So here I think we come to the nub of this story. which is a kind of a link between the very first episode we did, which is about the feud between Peter and Sophia and the Streltsy and that kind of paranoia and stuff.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But the reason we started with that guy, Friedrich Christian Weber, and his reaction to the wedding feast... is because he's a nice guide to what St. Petersburg, what Russia would have felt like to a visitor from the West.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And now I think this, it looks back to that, but also so many of the themes of this anticipate, frankly, 20th century Russian history. Show trial, suspicion, paranoia, an obsessive search for enemies within. Because Peter is clearly, I guess, for understandable reasons, given his boyhood, he is obsessed with the idea of a conspiracy against him.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And if there isn't one, he almost feels the need to invent it because there must be one. So a few days after this great sort of assembly, he says to Alexis, I need you to list for me everybody you've ever spoken to about our relationship. And Alexis, who is completely gullible, produces this huge list of relatives and courtiers and friends and tutors.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And as soon as Peter has the list in his hands, he sends orders to Alexander Menshikov in St. Petersburg, close the gates and seal off the city. And now send your agents out to round up every single person on this list. So that's aristocrats, it's bishops, it's officers, all Alexis's former servants. We're going to interrogate them all and get to the bottom of this conspiracy.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Now, one of the people on this list is Alexis's mother, Peter's ex-wife, Eudokia. So she's still around. She's been in the monastery in Suzdal for the last 19 years, but she has been writing to Alexis. And there is worse. Peter had just forgotten about her, but when his agents arrive, they find she's given up being a nun. Oh, so she's grown her hair back. Her hair has returned.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And what is more, she has been living in a relationship with the captain of her guards, the man who's meant to be guarding her, who's a man called Stepan Glebov. And so Peter says, what? And he has Glebov arrested, as well as the head of the convent and some of the nuns. Dominic, I would not want to be in Glebov's boots. You absolutely would not, for reasons that will now become apparent.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So now they begin the show trials. These are held in the Great Hall of the Kremlin. Peter himself acts as chief prosecutor, and he makes the case against all of the names on this list. To give the example of Eudokia in the convent, the nuns, who have done nothing, are sentenced to be publicly flogged. Eudokia is sent to a really remote convent up in the north.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But some of the other prisoners are sentenced to death or beaten with a knout or exiled. Because what judge can resist the appeal of the prosecutor if the prosecutor is the Tsar? Exactly. So a lot of the sentences were carried out in Red Square.
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I mean, it's the classic, you know, Peter the Great carry on of people being broken with hammers on the wheel, people having their noses sliced off, having their tongues ripped out. But the worst fate of all is reserved for this bloke, Stepan Glebov. the captain of the guards guarding Eudokia. And remember, he has done nothing wrong. Well, he has slept with Peter's ex-wife. But she's his ex-wife.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
I wouldn't sleep with Peter the Great's ex-wife. No, fair enough. Well, I mean, you don't want to end up like this. So Gerboff is lashed with the knout and he's burned with red hot irons. He's stretched out on a plank with spikes driven into his flesh and left there for three days. And they keep saying to him, confess. And he says, confess what? I was never part of any conspiracy.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And finally, they take Lebov and they impale him on a wooden stake, which some accounts say was so artfully inserted that it missed all his vital organs. And then he's left on the stake to sort of slowly descend, I suppose. I don't know what happens to you if you're impaled on a stake. And it took him 14 hours to die. Oh, God.
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I mean, there may well be grimmer ways to die, but I can't think of many.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And even though he's found no evidence of the conspiracy, Peter, It never occurs to him that there isn't one. And none of his henchmen ever argue with him about it. Then they would come under suspicion. Exactly. It feels very much reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. Because how can you prove your innocence of a conspiracy that never actually existed?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Exactly. Because that wedding was at the end of 1710. And four years later, when he arrived in 1714, The diplomatic corps are still talking about it as a sign of how weird and outlandish and extravagant Peter's court is. So when he actually arrived Weber in St. Petersburg, he finds it still a building site. So we talked in a previous episode about how the land was captured from the Swedes in 1703.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Now, as for Alexis, the best that he can probably hope for at this point is to be exiled to a monastery. But of course, if Peter believes he was really the center of a conspiracy, then the implication is that the conspiracy would continue. That even if he's in a monastery, he'll be the focus for plots and opposition. So for the time being, Peter keeps him under house arrest in St. Petersburg.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And all the time, Alexis, poor Alexis, who's such a tragic figure and is so... is so much his own worst advocate. He's begging and begging, please can I see Afrosenia? You promised me that I could live with her. I love her so much. And finally, she is brought to the Capitol and questioned. And it all goes horribly wrong for Alexis. Does she stand by him? She does not, Tom. She does not.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
She does not stand by her man. So in her luggage, Peter's agents find drafts of letters that Alexis had written to various kind of bigwigs in Russia complaining about his treatment. And Peter has Afrosenia. He questions her personally. He has her brought to see him. And he sits down and questions her. It must have been terrifying for her. And she cracked straight away.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
She said, I never wanted to go. Alexis forced me. I only slept with him under duress. He was always whining about you, always complaining. He was always criticizing you to the Habsburg emperor. Whenever he heard of a mutiny or rumors of mutinies in the Russian army, Alexis was delighted. He often talked about what he would do when he became Tsar. He said he'd scrap all your reforms.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He would abandon St. Petersburg. He'd give power back to the church. He hates lathes. He hates ships. He'd give away all your foreign conquests. And Peter says, well, this is the proof. Here we go. He has Alexis brought in. What happens to Aphrodite? She's not punished at all. Not punished at all. And when Alexis is brought in, he collapses. He has a kind of nervous breakdown.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He says to his father, yes, I did write to the Habsburg emperor about you. I did speak ill of you, but only when I was drunk. Yes, I did talk about what I would do when I rule Russia, but I never plotted against you or meant to kill you. And then Peter says, well, what about this business about you rejoicing when you heard reports of mutinies and rebellions?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And now Alexis gives a dementedly self-destructive answer. He says, I was excited at the talk of mutinies, but I believe they would only call for me when you were dead because they planned to kill you. I didn't believe they would dethrone you and let you live. But if they'd called me in your lifetime, probably I would have gone if they had been strong enough. Yeah, that is mad.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
It's a rambling but incredibly self-incriminating answer. So Alexis is arrested and he's imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, which as you said, Tom, is the sort of foundation stone of St. Petersburg. And his show trial begins in June, 14th of June. And again, Peter acts as the prosecutor himself. He says, Alexis, he fled to Austria as part of a plot.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He was plotting with the Habsburg Emperor. He was intending to seize the throne with Russian mutineers and rebels and with foreign military aid. And he's been lying about it ever since. And when Peter's made the case, Alexis doesn't deny it. He confesses. He confesses to a conspiracy that I don't believe and I don't think any historian believes existed. So why is he doing that?
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Why did people do it in the 1930s? They're broken and they hope this is the only way to get clemency because it's very clear that the court will not accept clemency. his claim that he's not guilty. So maybe the best thing to do is to pretend that he is guilty and beg for forgiveness. But Peter doesn't forgive him. At Peter's request, the court orders further interrogation.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And what this means is the darkest chapter of all in many ways in Peter's story, I think. So on the 19th of June, Alexis was given 25 lashes of the knout. That will often be enough to kill you. You're beaten with this giant leather whip, chunks of flesh off your back. Five days later, he's given another 15 lashes and his back has now been completely destroyed.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
It's just a sort of mass of bleeding flesh. And now he's confessing to anything. He tells Count Tolstoy, yes, I wanted my father dead. I would have paid the Austrians to intervene militarily against him. And so that evening, armed with that, the court sentences him to death.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Peter began work on the fortress, and they had these gigantic teams of conscript laborers who were all being carried off by scurvy or malaria and whatnot. What did you call it, Tom? A city built on bones. Yeah, that's the famous description of it. Yeah.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's guilty, they say, of a horrid double patricide, first against the father of his country and next against his father by nature. And all of Peter's cronies and henchmen sign their names on this sentence. So the question is, will Peter order the sentence against his own son, who really deep down has done nothing wrong, to be carried out? And everyone's waiting to find out the answer.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And then on Tuesday, the 26th of June, the rumors sweep St. Petersburg that Alexis has dropped dead of a stroke of some kind. And the story is given out that he had this stroke once, Peter rushed to his bedside in the prison. Alexis made a full confession. He repented. Father and son embraced. Alexis was given the last rites, and that was the end of that. But actually, this isn't what happened.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
We know what happened from the logbook of the fortress. Actually, earlier that morning, Peter and his closest cronies, including Count Tolstoy and including Alexander Menshikov, gathered in the torture chamber and had Alexis brought to them, and they worked on him for three hours. And a few hours later, Alexis died, effectively having been tortured to death by his own father.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So it's just an unbelievably horrifying story. And in his biography of Peter the Great, Robert K. Massey compares it with Ivan the Terrible killing his own son, which is a very famous scene in Russian history. It's a very famous painting by Ilya Repin. And the difference is that Ivan the Terrible killed his own son by lashing out against him in a fit of rage. And then was...
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
full of remorse that he had killed his son. But the torture is kind of premeditated. I mean, if you think about the torture, the interrogations, the public humiliation, that had gone on for weeks and arguably was part of a pattern that had gone on for years.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yeah. Hard to imagine, I think, any father doing that to their own child. But Peter often behaves in ways that rather stretch the imagination, I guess. Alexis was given a state funeral and the reports that Peter wept at it. But we know that he also that week went to loads of banquets and balls to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Poltava.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But by the 1710s, so moving forward 10 years or so, Peter's sort of, if you went into his papers, they are full of kind of specs and plans for churches and palaces and offices and canals and things. By 1712, he's effectively moved the capital to St. Petersburg, even though it's not finished. The census claims there are tens of thousands of buildings. I think that might be a bit exaggerated.
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And afterwards he had a medal struck as if he was celebrating a victory with the image of the sun breaking through clouds and the inscription read, the horizon has cleared. I mean, imagine doing that about the death of your own child.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's got a couple of daughters, teenage daughters, Anna and Elizabeth. And he's got Alexis's son, Peter, who's only three. But actually, none of them are quite right. And so he has Catherine, his wife, the former Marta Skavronska. The jolly one. Yes. He has her crowned as empress. He has a big coronation for her. This is in 1724.
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This is clearly a marker that she is going to be his successor, which is an amazing thing. I mean, she's an illiterate Lithuanian peasant girl who had come to Russia as a prisoner. But it's a sign of Peter's dominance, his autocratic sway. Yeah. You know, something unthinkable. In the 1680s, when he was growing up.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's not an old man. He's younger than you, Tom. He's old. But I think it's fair to say he's not a lean, fit, honed figure as you are. He's a very moody, depressed figure. And there's endless corruption scandals which are really getting him down. So there's a very famous one when Catherine Chamberlain, who's called William Mons, who is the brother of Peter's old mistress, Anna.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's been in a huge bribery scandal. Peter has him beheaded and he gives Catherine Mons' head in a jar. Preserved, like all the babies in the museum. Yeah, preserved. Odd thing to do to your wife, but there you go. Peter at this stage is really not a well man. So he's been boozing constantly for decades, and that has taken its toll. And he has also, we promised sort of spa-related action.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He's been drinking colossal amounts of ferrous mineral water. So he would drink 21 glasses of ferrous mineral water every morning. And would he do this for his health? Yeah, but I don't think it does do you any good. I think even the most enthusiastic habitué of a German spa would say, come on, that's a bit much. And does it have any malign consequences?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Well, now we're going to get into the thorny issue of Peter's bladder. Peter has a long-running urinary infection, which probably left him in agony for two years. And by the late summer of 1724, he's in unbelievable agony. He can't go to the toilet at all.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And they finally get a surgeon from England who inserts a catheter up him and manages to extract a huge amount of blood and pus from Peter's bladder.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But nor would you want to be at the other end of the doctor's catheter, I think. No, you wouldn't. So eventually he passes this huge stone and things seem to improve. But then in January 1725, he collapses. The doctors investigate. There's more catheter action. And they find out something has gone terribly wrong with his bladder. And they manage to remove two litres of putrid urine.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But by 1716 or so, he's got an Italian guy called Domenico Trezzino who's building up a grid of canals. And he's got a guy called, a Frenchman called Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Leblanc who draws up a street network on a very Enlightenment, rationalist, ordered plan.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Well, Peter seems to recover a little bit, but then he goes into massive convulsions. And on the afternoon of the 27th of January, 1725, he asks for a writing tablet. And on the writing tablet, he writes the words, leave everything to... Then he falls down. Hollywood timing. He passes out, drops the pen, and never wakes up again.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And he died at six o'clock the next morning with Catherine at his bedside. And a last nice detail for you. When he was dead, the doctors cut him open and they found his bladder had been infected with gangrene. And I quote from Robert K. Massey, his sphincter muscle was so swollen and so hard that only with difficulty could it be cut by a knife. Oh, God.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So just as he wanted, Catherine succeeded him. But Menshikov was the real ruler of Russia. So he's the bling oligarch guy. The bling oligarch. That continued for another, what, two years? And then she died of TB. Then Alexis's son, Peter, became a boy emperor. He didn't last long either. He died of smallpox when he was 14. Then Peter's niece, Anna, became Empress for 10 years.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And then her baby son, Ivan, became Emperor for a year. And then finally, Peter's daughter, Elizabeth, became Empress. There's a lot of babies and women there. So four decades after Peter's death, Russia, which had never been ruled by a woman before,
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A wry smile, but also a sense of frustration, because she would have probably done a better job than any of them. Yeah. But the thing is, I suppose this is testament to Peter's extraordinary achievements. that if you'd said this to a Russian in the 1680s or something, this will be the succession. They said, what? Oh, that'll be terrible for Russia. We'll fall apart completely.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But of course, even though the faces at the top keep changing and none of them are quite right, Russia's status is now so established as a great power that it endures. And presumably also the institution of the saddam. Exactly.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Yeah, I think that's a really good way of putting it, actually. That The very process of modernization, which is so top-down, entrenches the power of the autocrat and the kind of centralization of Russia and concentrates power even more in the capital. And maybe also because he was succeeded by such obviously lesser figures, figures it was easy to dismiss, I guess.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
That meant that his star, even posthumously, burned even more brightly. So that even 100, 150 years later, people still look to Peter as the exemplar, as indeed they still do today to some degree. So in her brilliant book about Peter the Great, Lindsay Hughes quotes a Pan-Slav historian called Mikhail Pogodin in 1841, one of the great 19th century historians of Russia.
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And he said, wherever we look, everywhere we encounter that colossal figure, a figure which is still stretching, as it were, his arms over us, and which it seems will never disappear from sight, no matter how far we advance in the future. And people did subsequently try to downplay him a bit.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So if you were a really enthusiastic kind of Slavophile, in the mire of orthodoxy and the old ways and stuff, you might distrust Peter as a pro-Western modernizer. The first communist historians tried to downgrade great men and said, oh, he's just a sort of a vehicle for mercantile gentry capitalism. But Stalin invoked him.
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And Vladimir Putin has invoked him, discussed how Putin has explicitly compared the war in Ukraine with the Great Northern War and compared himself with Peter recapturing what was always Russia's and all of this kind of business. What do you make of him, Tom?
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Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I mean, I think in many ways there are greatly attractive parts of his character. The curiosity, the energy, the enthusiasm for novelty, the sailing and the love of going to lectures in Holland or in London and stuff.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And yet, especially when we've done that final episode, the cruelty, the paranoia, the autocracy, they seem so obviously to anticipate the cruelties of Russian history that followed. Well, there are two great bouts of cruelty, aren't there? So there's the Streltsy as well. Yeah, the Streltsy as well. And the truth of the matter is, he is a very violent, often angry man.
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I mean, for me personally, a father who tortures his son to death, I think that's inexcusable.
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Tom, I don't disagree with you at all. You know I love a Swedish empire. Anyway, I've quoted a brilliant book on which I've relied very heavily, which is Robert K. Massey's biography of Peter the Great, which is one of the most capacious. And it's an incredibly readable, swashbuckling story. It's as much about Charles XII as it is about Peter, and I really recommend it.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
So it seems only fair to end with his very last lines, which I think are beautifully judged. He says of Peter, He was a force of nature, and perhaps for this reason no final judgment will ever be delivered. How does one judge the endless roll of the ocean or the mighty power of the whirlwind?
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Yeah, I agree with you completely. It is a remarkable place. There's nowhere quite like it in the world. And yeah, the interesting thing is it's meant to be the window on the West. It's meant to be a model of European modernity, of rationalism. It's sort of anticipating so many of the themes of the Enlightenment.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And yet this guy, Weber, the guy who you began with that reading, what struck him when he arrived in St. Petersburg was not how European it was. It was actually how non-European. So at the very first public function he went to, he commented on what he called the foul language and the rudeness of the guards. And he was really struck by the fact that he was dressed quite modestly.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He realised that everybody else was dressed in what he called trimmed with gold and silver. In other words, what Russians wanted, what they rewarded and valued was not modesty and humility, but bling, basically.
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Yeah. And that combination of suspicion of the West, but also... The obsession with extravagance and bling as a marker of status. I mean, that would be very familiar to anybody who's visited Russia since the 1990s. I mean, that's effectively the vibe in Moscow or St. Petersburg now. Also, a constant of Russian history is the drinking. So Weber couldn't believe how much people drank.
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He said, I drank a dozen glasses of Hungarian wine at this function. And then Fedor Romodanovsky, the mock czar, came up and said to him, I want you to drink a full quart of brandy. Of course, Romodanovsky has a history of getting a bear to strip you if you don't drink all this.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And Weber said, you know, I lost my senses, although I had the comfort to observe that the rest of the guests lying asleep on the floor were in no condition to make reflections at my little skill in drinking. kind of gives you a sense of exactly what is expected of you if you turn up as a diplomat. You basically have to put on gold robes and just start drinking brandy.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
A couple of other things that caught his eye. He noticed that people were wearing the latest fashions. So French hooped petticoats, he said, so that a visitor might think he was in London or Paris. So Peter has won that battle with the elite to get them to wear the latest Western fashions.
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Yeah, I guess that's probably true. But what also really strikes him, you know, this is not an ordinary European court.
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His description is a little bit like a man who's gone to a kind of a gathering of the Intergalactic Federation or something, and there are kind of aliens there because he's really astonished by the sight of Uzbeks or Kalmyks with turbans and long robes, their envoys from the courts further east, or people bringing gifts of Chinese silk and Persian cloth.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
In other words, his description is a perfect example of that common cliche of Russia as the crossroads of kind of Europe and Asia, East and West.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Exactly. So the fascination with exoticism, this is kind of where the dwarves come in. Now, dwarves are part of the formula of any European court in the late 17th, early 18th century. So most European monarchs will have dwarves on hand. If you think of Diego Velázquez's great painting, Las Meninas, painted about 50 years before this, obviously that's all about the dwarves at the Spanish court.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But there is something unusual about Peter. He has an absolute fixation on this. He would go to church with an escort of dwarves. He always had dwarf acrobats and jesters on hand, and he was very keen on having dwarves hiding inside pies. Yes, of course. They're always kind of bursting out of pies, aren't they? So we were talking about this en famille yesterday.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
You presumably can't bake the pie with the dwarf already inside, but how do you then insert the dwarf into the pie without making a hole in the crust?
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
Is it more like a quiche? Yeah, it's like quiche, I guess. Okay. Theo says you put the top on last, so he agrees with you. Yeah. Well, anyway, I think there's a slight political meaning to this, though. All his life, Peter has liked undermining the seriousness and piety of Orthodox Moscow, going right back to the days with the revolt of the Streltsy and all that stuff.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
And that dwarf wedding that we opened with came two days after his niece Anne had married the Duke of Corland. And I think the dwarf wedding was clearly a self-conscious parody of the wedding that had happened two days earlier. And apparently Peter was sobbing with laughter throughout this dwarf wedding. He has a sort of... I don't know whether it's unconscious...
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
whether he's reflective about it, but he has a kind of fascination with mimicking the rituals of Russian kind of elite life. He's always engaged in this kind of game of parody and play acting.
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Yeah, exactly. I mean, maybe there's an argument that some of the Roman emperors, like the Julio-Claudians, like Caligula or Nero, they were testing taboos all the time, aren't they? That's part of their so-called depravity, is that they're kicking against the conventions of Roman life. But there's something more obviously ludicrous and parodic about what Peter is doing, I think.
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Well, here's a really good example. So this Weber was on hand to see. It was in January 1715. His old tutor, his childhood tutor, who was called Nikita Zotov, he'd made the mock pope of the all-drunken synod, as he called it. Zotov was 84 and he got married to a 34-year-old woman. And to give you a flavour, this is how Weber described the marriage ceremony.
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The four persons appointed to invite the guests were the greatest stammerers that could be found in all Russia. Old, decrepit men who were not able to walk or stand had been picked out to serve for bridesmen, stewards and waiters.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
There were four running footmen, the most unwieldy fellows, who had been troubled with gout most of their lifetime and were so fat and bulky they needed others to lead them. The Mokzar was brought into this ceremony in a float carried by bears. I was wondering if bears would appear. Of course. Because that's been another running theme of the series. The priest, Peter organised the priest.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
He said, I'll sort this out. They found a man who was 100 years old and had lost his eyesight and his memory. The whole thing just seems like a tremendous lark and a spoof. And yet it is a real wedding. And it's an example, I think, for us of how hard it is to get into the mindset of Peter's world.
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I mean, it does feel like if you were dropped in there through a time machine, you would find it very hard to work out exactly what's going on. And actually, maybe people themselves find it hard to work out. I think Weber does, doesn't he? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Now, this makes it sound like it's all just sort of madness and bellows and bears and stuff.
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567. The Great Northern War: Murder in Moscow (Part 4)
But obviously, there is a seriousness to Peter. So there's a brilliant book by Lindsay Hughes, which is all about Peter the Great and his times, where she talks a lot about Peter's reforms, if you're interested in that. Because of the Great Northern War, that turbocharged his efforts to modernize Russia. It's not quite a total war, but it's not far off.
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So he had to put loads of money into new factories and textiles and iron and copper works and new canals to basically mobilize Russia's natural resources and its manpower for the war. He has a new tax system, a bit like a poll tax called the Sol tax. He has a new Senate to replace the Council of Boyars.
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He has a system of new government ministries, which are called colleges, which are modeled ironically on the colleges system in Sweden. And the presidents are always Russian, but he brings in foreign vice presidents to run this, to basically run the machinery of government. And above all, I think there's a general ethos that had not really been the case before in Russia.
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It's not quite a meritocracy, but it's approaching that. And it's symbolized by something called the table of ranks. So there are three ladders, one military, one civilian, and one for the court with loads of rungs. And you basically move up this. And this is an obsession in all Russian literature, isn't it?
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So if you read any story by Chekhov or something, people are always like, what rank are you? Can I move up and can I move down? All of this stuff. It's not a complete meritocracy, of course, and it's not a complete temple to Enlightenment values. Russia is still very corrupt and very authoritarian.
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The classic example of this is Peter's great drinking pal, Alexander Menshikov, who was at Poltava, who was the guy who'd introduced him to his wife, Catherine. Menshikov, he would fit right into Putin's Russia. He's incredibly corrupt. He's incredibly ambitious. He's sort of accumulating palaces and jewels and bling. He's always getting government contracts and stealing government money.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And this is now the fate that is visited on Wessex, which is the heartland of England, of course. It's the kingdom that had been ruled by Alfred and by... Athelstan, and it was the great stronghold of the Godwins. Harold had been Earl of Wessex.
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And so William is making, he is rubbing the noses of the English in the fact that the heartbeat of the English kingdom is now his to do with as he pleases. And so he ravages the whole way westwards as far as Wallingford in Oxfordshire. And as the name of Wallingford suggests, it's a fortified fort across the Thames. Alfred had built walls around it. It was one of his kind of fortified burrs.
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But the local thane surrenders it to William. He's just one glimpse of William at the head of his army and he's, hey, please come in. I'm not hanging around here. And so William occupies Wallingford and it is there that he receives a key submission. And this is Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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Well, bear in mind that Stigand is a very controversial figure. The fact that he is simultaneously the Bishop of Winchester has been used as one of the reasons for why William should be given a papal banner. So the fact that Stigand, who knows that he is in the crosshairs of William, that he chooses to surrender is, I think, doubly significant.
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As you say, he represents the English church, but also he's a figure who has every reason to try and continue the fight. And he hasn't. He's basically kind of given in. Edgar, though... Still no sign of him. And so William continues with his ravaging. And from Wallingford, he now turns back eastwards towards London, kind of closing in on the city from the north.
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And the news of what is happening, of course, reaches London. Everyone is thrown into a state of absolute terror. You've got refugees fleeing the advance of the Norman Knights. They are bringing tales of all the horrors that are being inflicted by the invaders. People beg Edwin and Morka to march and defend them. They refuse. And clearly the whole situation is hopeless.
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And Edgar essentially realises he has no prospect of holding out. And so he... Aeldred, the Archbishop of York, Edwin, Morca, they all congregate and they go in procession to Berkhamstead in Hertfordshire, where William's army has camped. There isn't a burr there. And so they're busy building a motte, great mound of earth on which they will build a bailey, a fort. You can still see it to this day.
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And in fact, Geoff, my fishing coach, lives there and he's very proud of the motte and bailey there. So good to get Geoff in. Anyway, so Edgar Atheling and all the chief men of London, Edwin and Morka, the Archbishop of York, they all come to William at Berkhamstead. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes their submission in tones of naked contempt.
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They submitted out of necessity after most damage had been done. So that's all the ravaging that William has inflicted. And it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier, since God would not make things better because of our sins. And they gave hostages and swore oaths to him, and he promised them that he would be a gracious liege lord.
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And yet in the meantime, they ravaged all that they overran.
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I think they would have had to be a very serious man because William, he is a very, very serious man. I mean, he is completely ruthless. He is completely convinced of his own justice and he feels that he has a license from God to do whatever it takes to force the English to submit.
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And when you're up against someone as able as that and with as formidable a war machine behind him, I mean, as I say, you've really, really got to... To be a serious person. And I think it's clear that Edwin and Morka both probably look in the mirror and think, I don't really think I've got what it takes.
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No, because I think you home in, from the English point of view, the great tragedy of the situation. They could have fought if someone had been there to command the resources that England still undoubtedly has. But because they don't, because William has a strategy, a campaigning plan that is tried and tested, and the English don't know what's hit them.
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They have never come up across armoured horsemen with the capacity to build castles. And this, of course, was what Harold had been so worried about. It's what had led him to make the ultimately disastrous decision to go and fight the Normans in front of Hastings. But Harold had understood what the English were facing. I don't think anyone else had.
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And so I think the impact of reports coming into London of towns and farms on fire. I mean, it's a kind of war of the world situation. Terrifying invaders coming burning all around. These are more formidable, more terrifying even than Harold Hardrada's army. So you can see why they would submit.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And of course, with the submission of London and of Edgar Atheling, we come to the climax of 1066, of this most fateful of years. William has achieved what he set out to achieve. He has secured the heart of the kingdom and before winter sets in very badly. And by the time it is Christmas, so Christmas was the day that Charlemagne, of course, had been crowned.
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William is ready to be crowned himself. So he enters London a few days before Christmas. There is a massive military presence. No one in London can have any doubt that they are living in a city under occupation. And immediately and inevitably, William orders the construction of a castle on the southeast corner of the city walls by the Thames.
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And this castle is the castle that today we know as the Tower of London. Right. But of course, it's not only London itself behind its Roman walls that has fallen into his hands. So too has the great palace complex built by Edward the Confessor to the west of London. And it's not just a palace, it's a minster or an abbey. So Westminster.
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And it is in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day that William is crowned. Almost a year since Harold had presumably been crowned there. And everything seems utterly changed. So outside the Abbey, as William is being crowned, you have ranks of mailed French-speaking foreigners standing guard over the coronation of a King of England.
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Inside the Abbey, you have another French innovation, the Archbishop of York and then a Norman Bishop both step forward and ask the congregation if they will accept William as King. Eldred, the Archbishop of York in English, of course, but the French Bishop in French. And there is a great answering acclamation from the congregation in the Abbey.
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And outside the Abbey, this results, it is reported in chaos. William of Poitiers claims that the guards who are standing outside the Abbey interpret the acclamation as English treachery. I mean, it's equally possible, in fact, probable that they've already, they're just going on the rampage, that they've just begun attacking people.
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And certainly whatever the reason for it, there is looting and there is burning of houses around Westminster Abbey. An incredibly ominous and dramatic scene. Very ominous. And members of the congregation hurry out to help fight the flames.
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And Alderic Fatalis, who is this Anglo-Norman, identifies as English, writing in Normandy, he says of this that only the bishops and clergy, along with the monks, stayed terrified in front of the altar.
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But the service still goes ahead and William is anointed, crowned, and then he sits on his throne, even though the pews are pretty much empty and there are screams and the crackling of flames coming from outside the abbey doors. But he could sit there and think, well, you know, my gamble, the odds were so immense, but his gamble has succeeded. He's no longer a duke. He is now an anointed king.
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And when his followers salute him, as they do now that he's been crowned, they do so in terms that place him on a level basically with only two other rulers in Latin Christendom. And that is the emperor. and the king of France.
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So this man has gone from being a duke to being an anointed king whose followers hail him in these terms, to the most serene William, the great and peace-giving king, crowned by God, life, and victory. So for William to be hailed in this way, I mean, it is the ultimate fruit of conquest. And yet the weird thing is, So we talked about whether Hastings finishes Anglo-Saxon England off for good.
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The weird thing is that William's coronation in Westminster Abbey is actually a symbol of continuity as well as of rupture. Explain that. Well, let's see what William is thinking. So Audric Vitalis tells us that as he's being consecrated, so as he's being anointed, he trembled violently. And people have often wondered why. And
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Lots of people have suggested that perhaps he was reflecting on everything he'd done to seize the throne. He knows he's going to hell. And maybe the flickering of flames outside the doors of the Abbey only enhanced that. But I think it's unlikely.
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I don't think William is the kind of person to have doubts at the climactic moment of his triumph, because I think it's much more likely that he is feeling awe before the God-given scale of his responsibilities that God has entrusted into his hands against all the odds. So he is a conqueror. He will come to be known as the conqueror, but he's not being crowned as a conqueror.
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I think that the sense in which, in William's own opinion, he is being crowned as the heir of Edward the Confessor tends to be obscured because everything about that coronation is is proclaiming that he is being crowned not by virtue of the victories he's won with his sword, but by right.
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That he is the legitimate heir, not just to Edward the Confessor, but to the line of kings that stretches back to Alfred all the way to Kurdic. That he is truly the anointed king of England. So it's being held in Westminster Abbey, built by Edward the Confessor.
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The coronation ritual, although there are a few interpolations that come from French practice, in the main, it's exactly the consecration rite that had been staged at Bath when Edgar had been crowned, right back at the beginning of our story. And he is consecrated. as the ruler of the Anglo-Saxoniki, the Anglo-Saxons. And this is a formula that goes back to Alfred.
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Yeah, so I'm very much your kind of guy. He loves Harold Godwinson. He writes enormously long books. You just go on and on and on and never stop. Yeah, very much your kind of guy. So clearly he is mourning the death of Harold. He sees the two as being, you know, interfused. Harold is the one man who could have guarded and saved England and now he is dead.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So he is being crowned as king of the Anglo-Saxons, of England.
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And I think you're right to fix on that. I mean, it doesn't gel with our sense of what the Norman conquest is about, that William is being crowned as king of the Anglo-Saxons. And that's because, of course, 1066 is probably the profoundest rupture in English history. It's a year of invasion, of bloodshed, absolutely, of conquest.
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But it is also a year which ends with this very public, very ringing insistence that there is continuity as well as rupture. And even though it's obvious that William's rule depends on mailed force, that's what all those soldiers are doing outside the Abbey. it does also depend on him showing respect for the history and the traditions of his new kingdom.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Because it's that history, it's those traditions that give him his status as a consecrated king. If he dumps on them, then that status means nothing. For William himself, clearly a very difficult balance to strike. And I don't think that we can...
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really finish an account of 1066 this remarkable year without looking at how in the years that followed 1066 William did try to strike a balance between his role as conqueror and as anointed king brilliant let's do that after the break Tom so come back after the break to find out how William strikes the balance and ends up ruling his kingdom
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So is he right that Hastings was a catastrophe for England? I mean, did it result in the extinction of her? ancestral freedoms? Was everything that Anglo-Saxon England had been destroyed at Senlac Hill?
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So always good to get Wiltshire and the Salisbury area into the podcast. But also because this is a key moment in understanding what has happened to England and how William's regime is functioning today.
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And I think we can begin by trying to work out what has changed by imagining that we are riding with the great crowds of landowners who have been summoned to Salisbury and are flocking from all corners of the kingdom. And if we imagine ourselves riding with them, we could look around and see, what do these landowners look like? Well, they don't have moustaches. They don't have long hair.
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Lots of them are wearing their hair in a fashion that derives ultimately from hipsters in Aquitaine in the south of France. So they have a kind of floppy fringe and the back of the head shaved. And this marks them out as Normans, not as English. And why is it that there are no English? Why is it that all the landowners are Norman?
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And we get an answer from Henry of Huntingdon, this Anglo-Norman historian, so like William of Malmesbury, writing in the early 12th century, about 50 years later. He spells out in a single sentence what has happened over the course of William's reign since his coronation in 1066.
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There was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, Henry writes, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English. But is he exaggerating? Is that really true? OK, well, so let's look at the facts and the figures. So the great dynasties who had dominated England in 1066 before Hastings, they have gone.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So the Godwins, Harold, Tostig, Lerfwine, Girth, they all died in 1066. Harold's mother, Gither, who had tried to get their bodies and probably been refused by William, she had fled into exile in 1067 after encouraging an abortive uprising in Exeter. Various of Harold's sons who had fled to Ireland and there tried to raise armies to reconquer England.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
They've either been killed or taken prisoner and are languishing in William's jails. Really, the only prominent member of Godwin's family who has survived is is Edith, so Edward the Confessor's wife. And she survives because she is Edward the Confessor's wife. So that gives her a status. Williams claims his descent from Edward.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And so that enables Edith to kind of continue to enjoy a sort of spectral authority in Winchester as Edward the Confessor's widow. And she had lived in Winchester and had died in 1075, so 11 years before this great ceremony in Salisbury. What about the great mercenaries? So Edwin and Morcar, we've been talking a lot about them.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Well, they had missed their chance, I think it's fair to say, to stop William. They could have done it in 1066 perhaps, but they definitely can't by the time that William has established his regime more securely. And 1071, they try and raise a rebellion and it all goes horribly wrong. And Edwin is forced to flee to Scotland.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
But en route, he is murdered by a member of his own retinue and Morka is captured and again is imprisoned and is languishing in prison in England. 1086. They were not serious people? No, they were not. And also a man not as serious as his father is this guy called Waltheof, who was the son of Earl Seward. So Seward was the Scandinavian Earl who had helped overthrow Macbeth.
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He appears in Shakespeare's play, had died and had left a son who hadn't succeeded him because of course Tostig has. But William had looked after Wolfeoff, had kind of talent spotted him, had thought that he could employ him as the Earl of Northumbria. So in 1072 had appointed him in that role. But three years later, he's implicated in a plot against William, perhaps a little bit unfairly.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
We'll be doing a bonus on the way that 1066 and the Norman conquest was interpreted. So there will be more about that if you're a member of the Restless History Club. But for now, we're going to try and answer some of those questions that I just put. But a reminder, first of all, of where we ended the previous episode. So it is 1654 on the 14th of October.
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It seems that he confessed that he had been approached. He hadn't actually participated in it, but William is having none of it. So Wolfeoff had been arrested, tried, convicted and beheaded. So all the great earls have been eliminated in one way or the other.
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And in fact, of the 1000 richest landowners in England, so these are all the people who are coming towards Salisbury in 1086, only 13 are English. So the thanes, this body of the elites, have effectively been destroyed as a social order. And there is barely a corner of England where Norman lords have not replaced the native landowners. And there are some amazing figures to illustrate this.
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So 200 Normans hold half the land in England and 10 Normans hold a quarter of it.
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And so where have the English landowners gone? Well, lots of them have fled to Constantinople, where they have enrolled in the Vrangians, as Harold Hardrada had done.
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Yeah. So the Normans in that are kind of Nazis. He's casting it as the equivalent of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And I mean, the stories of the English lords who flee to Constantinople, I mean, are really very dramatic in themselves. The Byzantines often find themselves fighting the Normans and the poor old English keep losing.
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There's one terrible battle where they all get trapped in a barn and get burnt to death. And some of them end up in Crimea, where they found a city called New York. So it's the first New York to be founded. Yeah, I love that fact. That's a very good fact. So it is effectively a complete decapitation of the native aristocracy. And was this always William's plan?
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So was it always his intention to replace the English aristocracy with his own men? Yeah. Or was he aiming to do as Canute had done and try and arrive at accommodation with the native aristocracy? What makes this different? Because that's 1016, right? I think the evidence makes it pretty clear that William did not want to eliminate the English aristocracy.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I mean, clearly he had to reward his followers with lands and the death of the Godwinsons gave him perfect opportunity to do that. But he was hoping that the English aristocracy would collaborate with him. But instead, they just keep rising in insurrection after insurrection. And so year after year, there are these bushfires of rebellion across England. And year after year, brutal man that he is.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
William stamps them out. And it's not just the native aristocracy who suffer terribly from this process. So lots of the peasantry in England suffer as well. And the most notorious example of this is a series of campaigns that were waged in Northumbria, southern Northumbria, in the winter of 1069 to 70, which is remembered as the harrying of the North.
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Very, very notorious kind of mass destruction, mass looting, the deliberate targeting of food supplies so that over the course of the winter, maybe 150,000 people may have died of starvation, 80,000 oxen. These are the kind of the likely figures. And even William's admirers were shocked. So to quote Aldrich Vitalis, famous, famous passage.
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He wrote, my narrative has frequently had occasion to praise William.
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but for this act which condemned the innocent and guilty alike to die by slow starvation i cannot commend him for when i think of helpless children young men in the prime of life and hoary greybeards perishing alike of hunger i am so moved to pity that i would rather lament the grief and sufferings of the wretched people than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy
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saint calixtus's day 1066 and the sun has just set and the sun dominic has also set on the fortunes of the godwins and of england oh terrible the slopes and the summit of senlac hill are piled with the bodies of the dead and the dying and the mud reeks of blood and emptied bowels. Cries fill the darkening twilight and already you've got to imagine pillagers creeping up
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Well, the other thing, and this again is a contrast with Harold Hardrada or indeed with Canute, is that the harrying of entire populations, which Harold Hardrada absolutely had done, is not the only thing that William can do to secure his rule over England. Because, of course, William comes as the representative of this new military culture that is hugely investing in the construction of castles.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So again, let's go back to imagining that we're travelling with the Norman landowners to this great assembly convened by William in Salisbury on the 1st of August, 1086. And what would we see ahead of us? So we are not, those who know Salisbury, now the town is down by the water meadows where the great cathedral with its tall spire stands. There's nothing there at this point.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Salisbury is a great Iron Age hill fort at the place that is now known as Old Sarum. And it had been re-fortified by Æthelred and he'd set a mint up there. So it was a fortified point for the Anglo-Saxon kings. But William has inevitably made it even more impregnable. He's built a massive modern bailey right in the centre of Old Sarum, and it is ruled directly by the king.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So we've mentioned the Norman landowners, but by far the largest landowner is William himself. So huge, huge direct control over vast arrays of estates and fortifications. And Salisbury is one of them. Windsor is another. The Tower of London, another. Still royal fortresses to this day. But William, of course, is not the only castle builder. Pretty much every Norman landowner is building them.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And of course they're doing this because they're a tiny minority surrounded by exceedingly hostile natives. And the fact that they are able to protect themselves in these fortifications, I mean, that sets them apart from, say, the Viking warlords who had done this before and who very rapidly... had kind of merged into the mass of the English who surround them.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
This is not the case with these Norman landowners. They are very obviously physically separate from the people they're ruling because they're surrounded by these ramparts. And this is recognised by the English themselves straight away. So the entry for 1066 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
It recorded how Norman warlords built castles far and wide throughout this country and distressed the wretched folk and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And so again, if you're coming up to Old Sarum, you're coming up to Salisbury, you'd see the castle. but you would also see a half-completed cathedral, which is massive. Workmen have been toiling away for pretty much a decade. And as you say, it's part of a huge programme of church building in England that is completely unprecedented in the scale of its ambition. And
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Most of the medieval cathedrals that still dominate English cathedral towns to this day were almost all of them either founded or actually constructed in the main in the immediate wake of the conquest or a generation or so after it. And of the Anglo-Saxon minsters, I mean, barely a brick of those was left standing.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And the Norman cathedrals that were built on the site of the Anglo-Saxon cathedrals, they don't just obliterate the memory of the Anglo-Saxon church, but they establish an imprint on the country that was designed to last.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And in fact, the cathedral that's being built on Old Sarum, it's one of the very few examples of a cathedral over the course of the Middle Ages that gets replaced in its entirety because ultimately people decide that Old Sarum is too inconvenient to And so they moved down to the lowlands below Old Sarum, which is where Salisbury Cathedral, as it stands today, is then kind of rebuilt.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So this program of church building is the kind of the physical expression, as you said, of a kind of great revolution in the affairs of the English church more broadly. And so just as the aristocracy, the English aristocracy, has been eliminated, so too have English bishops been removed from the commanding heights of the church.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
through the dark, starting to strip corpses of their mail shirts, their weapons, their clothes, anything that might be of any value. And the killing is not yet over, even though darkness is now over Sussex, because the English have turned and fled. But this, of course, is when the Norman cavalry comes into its own because they can pursue the fugitives and hunt them down.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And in fact, by 1086, you have only a single English bishop still in office. And the justification for this is the sense that the English church had been very, very sick and corrupt. So the fact that Stigon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had surrendered to William doesn't stop him from being deposed in 1070.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And he gets replaced by this Italian monk who had been talent spotted by William and recruited to serve him in Normandy as the abbot of an abbey in Caen. And this is a guy called L'Enfranc. And if Stigand had been a byword for corruption, L'Enfant is the greatest theologian of his day. I mean, an incredibly impressive figure.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And he is the embodiment of everything that is most radical, most innovative, most kind of spiritually impressive, to be honest, about this kind of process of reformation that is associated with Gregory VII, the extraordinary pope, and this kind of reform movement. and which the English, now that they've been defeated, have no choice but to submit to.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And I think because they are demoralized, every time we quote an English chronicler commenting on their defeat, they all say, this is because of our sins. This is what God wants. We are being punished for our sins. And so I think for that reason, they are prepared to accept the fact that Clearly their church was not pleasing to God and therefore perhaps the Aegean stable has to be cleansed.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So that is also part of the great revolution that the Normans have brought. And that castle, that half-completed cathedral, they are absolutely symbols of the rupture that the conquest has precipitated.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And a further evidence for the scale of the rupture is there in the reason that these landowners have been summoned to Salisbury on Lammas, so the first harvest of the year, so the 1st of August, 1086. So we're told by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, why were they gathered there? To submit to him and swear oaths of allegiance to him that they would be faithful to him against all other men.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So this is, again, a consolidation of William's power as king that is radical and revolutionary. The Anglo-Saxon king, we've talked about this, did not hold all of the land of England. But effectively, this is what William is instituting. Because with this oath, every landowner in England is now accepting publicly that he holds his land directly from William.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So let's not use abstract nouns. I mean, you'll find it unusual for me to say that. Let's just look at what it means in practical terms for these landowners who are coming and swearing this oath. So what it does is these landowners have gone through... enormous turbulence.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
You've had rebellions, you've had the native aristocracy kind of rising up, being eliminated, being forced into exile, whatever. And so the legal documents that might enable these new Norman landowners to feel secure in their possessions are not really there. This is what William has been trying to rectify.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
For seven months, his agents have been going around England and recording who owns what land. These agents are recording two key details. They're recording who owned the land when Edward the Confessor died on the 5th of January 1066. And who are the landowners now? And observant listeners will note that that completely eliminates Harold. So Harold has been erased from the historical record.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And these records, after this great meeting at Salisbury, will be copied out by a single scribe and come to be known in due course as Doomsday Book. And it's likely that that name is being applied to it very, very early on.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
You'll be glad to hear, Dominic, they don't have it all their own way because it does seem, despite the garbled nature of the various accounts, there seems confusion as to exactly what happens. But it's clear that a body of English warriors, either fugitives or perhaps new arrivals, make a stand perhaps on some ancient earthworks. It's not entirely clear.
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And it is called Doomsday Book because the presumption is that what has been recorded is unalterable, like the judgments that will be delivered at the end of days, the day of judgment.
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Yes, maybe. Although one of the things that has precipitated William's desire to compile this great legal record is the fact that for about a year, William's hold on England has actually seemed quite precarious. And the reason for that is one that you touched on in your account of Harold Hardrada, where you said, is he the last of the Vikings?
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Well, actually, no, he's not, because there are still Scandinavian kings who aspire to conquer England. And this is very evident in the circumstances that give birth to the Doomsday Book. So what prompted it is the prospect of an invasion by the Danish king Canute.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So this is the Canute, the nephew of the famous Canute, who'd been the great adversary of Harold Hardrada and is still very much on the scene and is threatening to launch a full-born amphibious invasion of William's kingdom. And so William, very like Athelred, wants to know how much money he's got and where he can obtain it from.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And he does this in the full consciousness that Scandinavian warlords are still on the scene. So in 1069, Sweyn, the Danish king, had sailed up the Humber and William had paid the Danes off, just as Athelred might have done. And obviously, William is not Athelred.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
But again and again throughout his reign, he is doing as Athelred had sought to do, which is essentially to exploit to the full the incredible wealth and administrative know-how of his kingdom. And so in that sense, the Doomsday Book...
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as well as being the final nail in the coffin of Anglo-Saxon England, as you said, kind of a public proclamation that everything has changed, is also the kind of the last hurrah of that Anglo-Saxon state. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle writing about it, I mean, he expresses shock at how intrusive William's agents are.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So very narrowly did he have everywhere investigated that there was no single hide, nor yard of land, nor indeed, it is a shame to relate, but it seemed no shame to him to do, one ox, nor one cow, nor one pig was there left out and not put down in his record.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
But even as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is complaining about this, what it is recording is a measure of governmental sophistication that is only possible in a kingdom like England. Doomsday Book could not have been compiled anywhere else in Latin Christendom, which is why it's so exceptional. And it marks William out not just as someone who is...
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
a conqueror, but also as someone who is exploiting the resources of his kingdom far more ably than Athelred or Edward the Confessor had been able to do. In a sense, the strength of his monarchy is a reflection of the very kingdom that he's conquered. There are other examples as well where things that are notorious as markers of William's conquest of England
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And they inflict a number of casualties on the Normans. And there is one report that Useless of Boulogne William's mate, who, according to the earliest account we have, was actually responsible for the death of Harold, that he received a blow between his shoulders that led to blood gushing out from his nose and mouth in a great fountain.
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you can place it in a line of descent from what Anglo-Saxon kings were doing. So the harrowing of the North, for instance. I mean, the most notorious episode of his reign as king. But he's behaving as Edgar had done. You know, we began this series with Edgar. Edgar the Peaceable. Edgar the Peaceable, the Pacificus. And Edgar is called Pacificus because he guaranteed order.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And William is called Pacificus. You know, those anthems that get sung to him after his coronation, he's hailed as peacegiving, exactly as Edgar had been. And William is peacegiving because he also deals out death and destruction to those who rebel against him. And that is very Anglo-Saxon.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I think it's pretty clear that William does suffer a slightly guilty conscience about it. So we've already mentioned how he pays penance for the slaughter at Hastings by building a great abbey on the site of the battle with the altar supposedly marking the place where Harold had made his last stand.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And according to Audrey Fatalis, on his deathbed, he confessed that he had persecuted the people of England beyond all reason. But it is traumatic. It's devastating, particularly if you're, you know, an Anglo-Saxon landowner. I mean, completely traumatic. But I think it is something to put in the counterbalance that the Norman conquest was
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
does end up bringing an end to many of the tribulations and evils that we have been describing over the course of this entire series. So William's reign does effectively see the end of Viking invasions, of disputed successions, of feuding among rival magnates within the kingdom of England. There's no equivalent of the rivalry between the have gone.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And more than that, I think it's a mistake to see the new regime that the conquest ushers in purely as characterized by brutality and greed. So Julian Rathbone in The Last English King compares the Normans to the Nazis in Poland. I think that is grotesquely unfair on the Normans.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I mean, they are fearsome adversaries, but they are also, and this may sound very strange to people, but they are the embodiments of a change in attitude towards victory and conquest in war that will become hugely significant over the course of the centuries to come.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So we talked about the possibility that William may personally have been involved in the butchery of Harold at Hastings, but possibly covered it up. And whether that's true or not is by the by. That it can even be countenanced as a theory reflects the fact that the age when slaughtering your enemies and cutting them up into pieces is
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And this could be praised that this is fading into history because the codes of what will become chivalry are already making their mark in France. William does not actually slaughter large numbers of magnates. The only one he has executed is Wolfeoff, the son of the Earl of Northumbria, who had been in rebellion against him.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Edgar Atheling, despite being implicated in countless insurrections, kind of lives to a ripe old age. He's the kind of the Richard Cromwell of Anglo-Saxon England. Even Stigand, I mean, he's in prison, but he's not executed. And when Aldrich Vitalis condemns the harrowing of the North... He's judging it by William's own standards.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And there are later accounts that report an entire ditch ending up filled with Norman casualties and that it was called the Malfos. So the evil ditch, a great ditch that had been covered with brambles. So the killing does go on through the night.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
The standards that had prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon period no longer prevail. It's no longer seen as acceptable to go around harrying entire counties.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I don't know. I mean, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports a lot of harrowings and ravagings. I mean, just to quote a really fascinating essay by Malcolm Strickland in a recent book of essays on the Norman Conquest. And he observes how in Britain and Scandinavia, in the 11th century.
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Enemy warriors were generally killed without quartering combat or executed on capture, while women and children were enslaved. And any who might hinder the effective transport of this human booty, such as the old, sick or very young, were put to the sword.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
By contrast, in Normandy, as in France, the enslaving of captives in wars between fellow Franks or other Christians had become regarded as unacceptable. And in that light, it's interesting to note that one of the most vivid social changes that is revealed by Doomsday Book is the decline of slavery.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
We know that the English kings, the Anglo-Saxon kings, were absolutely in the habit of enslaving their enemies. Bristol, long before it became a great centre for the Atlantic slave trade, was a massive booming entrepot for slaves who'd be exported to the Caliphate or wherever. And lots of these are harvested from England.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So Harold at Hastings is certainly not defending the freedom of the 10% of the population of England who lived as slaves, whereas William as king does take active steps to prohibit the slave trade. So William, in a sense, is the first great abolitionist in English history. This is a direction I did not expect this series to take in. Woke William the Conqueror. It highlights why this story...
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is so brilliant i mean it is clearly a thrilling story we've you know we've we keep harping on that it's one that extraordinary tales of heroism and sodden through with bloodshed but it is i think a morally complex one too um which is what makes it so fascinating
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
But when dawn comes on the 15th of October, what it reveals is a spectacle of carnage that is so terrible that even the Normans are kind of stunned by it. A bit like the English after Agincourt. And we should remind ourselves that the English will go on to win a victory over the French in due course.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Well, we might as well carry on the story. So we could look at how William dies. Famously horrible. Yeah. Horrible accident involving a swelling corpse in a coffin. So that's fun. And his two sons, William Rufus and Henry I, are great figures. And then England gets torn to pieces in another civil war by Henry I's daughter, Matilda, and William's grandson, Stephen.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So we've got that to look forward to. There's an extraordinary story of how the Norman adventurers, who we've occasionally been referring to in southern Italy and Sicily, conquer a great kingdom there. And also lurking behind all this, the notion of holy war, the idea that warriors can do God's purpose by felling their enemies, is the extraordinary story of the First Crusade.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And that also we must definitely do at some point. But I think in the meanwhile, we've had enough of Normans. So we will say goodbye.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
William of Poitiers writes about the battlefield of Sednacale. Far and wide, the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth drenched in gore. And William orders the Norman dead to be buried. But does he order the English dead to be buried, Dominic? He does not. He leaves them as food for worms and wolves, birds and dogs, as the Carmen puts it.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
He does, however, give orders for the bodies of Harold and his two brothers, Geirth and Leofwine. to be found and they are treated with more respect, although there are so many differing stories about what happens to them and how William chooses to treat them. It's actually, again, very hard to make sense of what may actually have happened. So there is one brilliant late story
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
that harold's body has been left so mangled that no one can identify it and so they send for edith swan neck his uh his lover mistress concubine first wife whatever you want to call her yeah in the words of the chronicler she had a more intimate knowledge of his body than anyone else
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
We don't know. The Carmen, which is the source closest in time to Hastings, recounts how William has Harold's body wrapped in purple linen. And then Harold's mother, Githa, comes and offers to pay William Harold's weight in gold if she can be given the body. Again, a possible classical allusion there to Achilles and Hector and everything. I mean, is it being modeled directly on them?
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Is Githa thinking of that? We don't know. But according to the Carmen, William doesn't give Githa her son's body. And instead, he orders it to be buried on top of a cliff looking out over the channel to And somebody raises a stone, one of the Normans, and scribes on it, by command of the Duke, you repose here King Harold, so that you may remain guardian of the shore and ocean.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And if that's true, I mean, what's interesting is that William is being described as a Duke and Harold is still being described as a King. So I don't think that would have lasted very long. There are other accounts of what happens to Harold's body.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So a late account says it was given to Gither, who buried it in Waltham Abbey in Essex, which Harold had refounded under his own kind of patronage in 1060. So that's, I mean, we don't know. And there is a modern theory that it's in the Sussex port of Bosham, which had been Harold's birthplace and is shown in the Bayeux Tapestry. Harold sails from it for his disastrous trip to France.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So he'd have been all over the fact that in 1954, an Anglo-Saxon coffin was found in the church there. And it apparently was the skeleton of a formidable looking warrior.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I think Mick Jagger, more of a Norman. Agreed. Very interested in money.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
There are Norman accounts that the English, on the night before Hastings, spend it... Getting wasted. Brilliant. There you go. That's quite Rolling Stones. Anyway, however, all these stories, we don't really know which of them is true. There's inevitably an also report that Harold survived the battle and became a hermit, which is traditional in such cases. But whatever the truth, he is gone.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And the big question that everyone presumably is asking at this point is, does this mean the war is over?
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Well, we laugh perhaps at the way that Victorians insist on great men, the fate of great men affecting the course of nations. I think in this case, he's not far wrong. I think the war absolutely could have still been prosecuted and won. Had there been anyone left in England competent to continue the resistance to William and by implication be accepted as king?
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So you need someone who's competent and can rule as a legitimate king. But the problem is, is there isn't really anyone. So Geirth and Leofine are dead. Edwin and Morca, if they were at the battle, nobody mentions it. They certainly haven't hung around.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
Whether they're coming from Hastings or whether they're coming from the Midlands, they go to London and they rescue their sister, Harold's widow, and take her away up to Chester. There is Edgar Atherling, who is Edward the Confessor's great nephew. You know, he has the blood of the West Saxon kings in his veins.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And we're told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Archbishop Aeldred, so that's the Archbishop of York, and the people of London wished to have him as king, as indeed was his right by birth. But he's a teenager. He lacks any military resources of his own whatsoever. And he is now facing the best general in Europe who's just won a very, very bloody battle.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So I think that when Freeman says the one man who could have guarded and saved England was taken from her, namely Harold, I mean, he's not exaggerating, really. Had Harold survived, even the loss at Hastings might not have been fatal.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I mean, that's the salient thing. And presumably they don't because they feel they haven't got backing. Does this mean then that William has won? Again, not necessarily. Because as you said, England is huge. It has immense resources of manpower. William's force relative to the manpower available to a native English king.
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is small and smaller than it was when it landed because lots of people have died in the Great Battle. He still has no declared allies in England. And of course, winter is closing in. So he's still not in a secure position.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And effectively, he has to seize command of the kingdom, which means being recognised by the Witan, by the magnates and the leading bishops and archbishops of the kingdom before winter sets in or he's in real trouble. So what does he do? First of all, he sits and waits. for the Witan to offer him the crown. And a week passes, two weeks pass, and still there is nothing from the Witan.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So he decides, hang this, I'm not putting up with this. So he raises camp and he heads eastwards for Dover. And on the way... He makes sure to proclaim to the English what the fruits of opposing him will be. So they go past the coastal town of Romney, where some of the Norman ships had landed by mistake and the locals had slaughtered them.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And William now exacts a terrible vengeance on them by putting the town to the torch. He then advances on Dover, which surrenders at the very site of his army. And so clearly, despite all the casualties that the Normans had suffered at Hastings, they're still a very, very intimidating site. And William stays there maybe for a week.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
One source says for three weeks, improving its fortifications, getting reinforcements. Dover, of course, is, you know, I mean, it's the shortest crossing. So a very useful stronghold for an invader of England to control. And then having secured Dover, he then goes on to secure two crucial prizes. So the first of these is Canterbury, which submits to him in person.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
So William is marching from Dover to Canterbury towards London. And Canterbury, of course, is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. So the great focus of English sacrality. And he also gets Winchester, which falls to a flying column of men that he sent. And Winchester, you know, it's the capital of Alfred the Great.
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It's been slightly displaced as the capital by London, but it's still a very, very significant place for the West Saxons. And so to control that, that's a very good sign. And it's all the more significant because it is now, as both Canterbury and Winchester submit to him, that news reaches William that Edgar Atherling has been elected king by the Witan.
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And William had been a teenager when stamping down resistance in Normandy.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
I suppose he's kind of the Anglo-Saxon Lady Jane Grey. You're never quite sure whether to include him in the list of English kings or not. I mean, I think the answer is that clearly he lacks the charisma and the resources to meet William in the field, which is why when William marches on London, he stays immured within the walls.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
William occupies Southwark, so the southern stretches of the Thames, south of London Bridge. does not try and force London Bridge and enter London, but he makes sure to put Southwark to the torch so that everyone in London who are around Edgar can witness the fact that this new king is powerless to resist William's advance. And he then carries on heading westwards into the heartlands of Wessex.
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557. 1066: The Norman Conquest (Part 4)
And he adopts this policy that we've already quoted, but I'll quote it again. William of Poitiers describing the Norman way of war. striking fear by laying waste to the crops, fields and domains, capturing all the towns that lay in his path, putting garrisons in them, in short, to assault a given region relentlessly and engulf it in a great multitude of troubles.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Not because he's like an Italian.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Dominic, this is classic territory for armies that invade Russia, isn't it? Soldiers losing their feet to frostbite. probably kind of eating straw, all that kind of thing.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
He's actually adopting Charles' tactics.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
You know, target one of your enemies and leave the other, and then... Yes, target the weaker one, deal with that, and then we'll... Exactly. Yeah.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
This doesn't seem a display of master strategy. No.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Is this what inspires the Swedes to make alcohol so expensive?
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
But can you? I actually imagine his face not falling. Yeah, you're probably right. He would preserve his mask of sang-froid. But inside, there'd be maybe a little twitch of his mouth. Or maybe he would give a kind of cold half-smile, as he realised. Like Svein Fortbeard.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Goodness, Dominic, another staggering twist. And we will take a break now to cope with the excitement of this moment. And when we come back, we will be continuing with the Great Northern War.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. Charles XII is marching southwards and he is marching towards a country that has, of course, been in the news a great deal recently. And that is Ukraine. And Dominic, if there's one thing that people know about the history of Ukraine, it's unbelievably complicated, isn't it?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Because these are the old stamping grounds of the Scythians, isn't it? Yes, that's right. So it's very suited to horse-born raiders and all that.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
He did, and a brilliant poem. And we might come on to what exactly Byron is writing about in due course, because Mazepa supposedly has quite an active adolescence, doesn't he?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
So actually, all these Latin speakers, I mean, him and Charles, they all chat away in Latin.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And Byron writes a poem about that. And his journey on the back of the horse is emblematic of the romantic spirit.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Crashing across the steps. And do you know what? This never happened at all. I know. I know. But it's a great poem nevertheless.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And so that's the kind of the marker of the political skills that you were talking about and which you need to...
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And I imagine that Mazepa has a tremendous moustache.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
But, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that they will therefore side with a Lutheran invader, right? No, not at all. You know, there's a lot of clean-shaven Swedes. I mean, they're all clean-shaven, I imagine. Exactly. Apart from, what's his name? Benny. Benny from Abba. He had a beard. Yeah. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And so did Bjorn Borg, the great tennis player. So actually, it's not an absolute rule, is it? We should definitely do.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
No, he definitely doesn't want that. I mean, I guess it's like the situation he faced with Sophia and Peter. You know, you've got to time your betrayal expertly, haven't you?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And Charles is not aiming to rule. No. So there's a serious prospect of him being given full independence, I guess. Yes, exactly right.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Dominic, how is he going to do this? Because I guess it's a very delicate process, isn't it, to portray someone like Peter the Great? It is.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
It does seem that Peter is getting the hang of war by this point.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Yeah. But the Swedes are still a formidable adversary. I mean, he's a guy who learns, doesn't he? Yes, absolutely. Well, we saw going around shipyards in Amsterdam and London. I mean, he's a man who enjoys learning things.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Baturyn must be full of all kinds of supplies and goodies, which is what they need. Supplies, gunpowder, food.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I saw His Majesty King Charles XII a great way off, with a suite of some fifty horsemen, riding along a column of wagons. His Majesty came at last to mine and inquired who I was. The Colonel replied, This is the unfortunate Ensign Piper of the Guards, whose feet were frostbitten. His Majesty then rode up close beside the wagon and asked me, How is it with you?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I mean, what is clear is that Charles XII and Peter the Great are two of history's great grudge holders. I mean, they are titanic in the grudges that they hold.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
But surely also, I mean, on the geopolitics of the war, it also means that it's mad that that Charles XII is in Ukraine when he's a Swede who's aiming to march on Moscow. I mean, he's now essentially completely the wrong end of Europe. He is. He's gone massively out of his way. And with nothing to show for it. I mean, he's in as big a hole as he ever was.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And also a lot of their artillery, of course, is buried hundreds of miles to the north. What's his name who left them?
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Or heroic, depending on your perspective, or maybe both.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
So it's quite like the kind of forts that you get in the American West in the 19th century.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Yeah, kind of one of those white beaches, but a black sky overhead.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
We are approaching one of the great battles in world history, and here we are talking about Swedish tourist spots. Come on.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
He's ridden the horses off cliffs. He's wrestled with bears. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I mean, if I had a blister, I'd be straight back to the camp and demanding medical attention. He's a proper hero in that sense. I mean, if a hero is a kind of someone who is midway between the mortal and the divine, I mean, that is superhuman.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Oh, you see, I feel like fainting just hearing that.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I know. So anyone who's prone to kind of moaning, bear that in mind. Exactly. Think of the Swedish king. And man up.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I just feel Charles is, you know, he's being let down left, right and centre by all his... I suppose, I mean, he's appointed them, so it's his fault to that extent.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I wonder if, I mean, he's almost died, but he hasn't. Has God preserved him?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Well... Who will win it? There's only one way to find out. And that is if you are a member of the Restless History Club to go on and listen to our account of this epic battle right away. If you are not, then you can still do that by heading to therestlesshistory.com and signing up. Or you can wait until next week. Yeah, don't wait.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
But whatever you choose, we will be back next time for the final showdown. Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I mean, that's something he's very into, isn't it, that he's picked up in Amsterdam, is watching how corpses can be either stuffed or preserved in the equivalent of formaldehyde. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Why do they keep doing this?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
But it still seems mad.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
It does just strike me, though, that Charles XII... Napoleon, Hitler, they all launched their invasions kind of late.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
I replied, ill enough, your majesty, for I cannot stand upon either foot. His majesty asked, have you lost part of your feet? I told him that heels and toes were gone, and to this he said, a trifle, a trifle.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
So that is, I mean, again, it's very Operation Barbarossa. It's very Operation Barbarossa. Did you know that just before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Swedes sent Hitler a statue of Charles XII to mark his birthday?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
It would be definitely a lesson.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And so presumably this is confirming Charles in his sense that the Russians are hopeless. Of course, the Russians are useless. Here's the thing.
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And resting his own leg upon the pommel of his saddle, he pointed to half the soul, saying, I have seen men who lost this much of their foot, and when they had stuffed their boot, they walked as well as before. Turning then to the Colonel, His Majesty asked, Perhaps he will run again? The Colonel replied, He may thank his God if he can so much as walk. He must not think of running.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
Are the Russians attacking him? Are they kind of picking off foragers and that kind of thing?
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And so who do they recognise as king, Dominic?
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565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
As His Majesty rode away, he said to the Colonel, He is to be pitied, for he is so young. So that was Ensign Gustav Peiper of the Swedish guards who had lost both his heels and most of his toes to frostbite talking to Mr. Motivator himself, Charles XII of Sweden in April 1709. It's a trifle, a trifle. I love that. Half his foot gone.
The Rest Is History
565. The Great Northern War: Revenge of the Cossacks (Part 2)
And that is presumably, it's not just because they are in the depths of Russia, but also because the reserves of manpower back in Sweden are flat.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The fleet is assembled. Before leaving, he goes to visit the shrine of his late brother, St. Olaf, in a place called Nidaros, which is today Trondheim. And St. Olaf has already been turned into a slightly implausible patron saint of Norway as a way of buttressing the Hardrada dynasty regime. And he supposedly, I mean, why you would do this, God knows you'll know more about this than me, Tom.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He trims the hair and nails of the body of his brother and then bizarrely throws the key of the tomb into the river.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Right. Now, a very bad blow for Hardrada is that just as they're preparing to sail, his men are afflicted by a series of terrible dreams. And Tom, you may scoff at this, but I have no reason to doubt that this happened.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So first of all, there's a man called Geard, and he dreamed of seeing ravens perched on the prows of all their longships and a sinister witch wife singing that all the men would soon be a feast for crows. That's not good, is it? Unfortunately, there's another bloke called Thord, and he says, well, he's also had a dream.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He saw two armies lined up for battle in the fields of England, another of these witch wives riding between them on a wolf, And I quote, the wolf had a man's carcass in his mouth and the blood was dripping from his jaws. And when he'd eaten one body, she, the witch wife, threw another corpse into his mouth until he swallowed them all. Again, I mean, it's, you know, it could be the English.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But then, unfortunately, the crowning dream, Harold himself has a dream that his brother Olaf, with his nails nicely trimmed, turns up during the night wearing the same armour that he had worn at the fatal battle of Stiklestad. which we did in that Harold Hardrada series. Well, he's chopped to pieces, isn't he? Yeah.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So Olaf, bleeding, turns up in this armour and sings to him, Thy death is near, thy corpse I fear, the crow will feed, the witch wife steed. So this is a bad, bad development for Harold Hardrada. You can imagine him shivering as he stands on the prow of his ship. Do you think he would shiver? He would shiver. He'd give a little imperceptible shiver, I think. An internal shiver.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He'd draw his bare skin out, You know, his wolf skin cloak tighter around him.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
This is literally what happened. So August 1066, it's now or never, they set sail. Now, at first, they seem to have headed northwest towards Orkney, and Orkney is part of Harold's empire. And we are told by Heimskringla, the King Harold saga, that there he collected more men,
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And he left, the saga says he left Queen Elisif, that she's the one from Yaroslav's daughter, and her daughters Maria and Ingergerd in Orkney. But historians now think that's unlikely, that she might have been dead by this point anyway. And that actually he had a second wife called Tora, and that maybe it was her who he left in Orkney. Anyway, we don't need to worry about that.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Yeah, it's slightly confusing where Tostig is at this point because the sagas give different explanations. But Tostig is definitely doing something up in Scotland. He's with Malcolm. I mean, that's what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says. So Harold now turns south. He sails down the east coast of Scotland towards the ancient kingdom of Northumbria.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Of course, the part of England with very, very strong Scandinavian roots and the Scandinavian traditions. And in the middle of September... Hardrada makes landfall on the coast at a place then called Cliffland, what we would now call Cleveland, North Yorkshire. And this is very Danish territory.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So the first villages that he comes to, which are now suburbs of Middlesbrough, today they are Ormsby, Stainsby, Tollsby. They are Danish names. They are named after Vikings called Orm, Stain, Toll. And the people there were told offered Hardrada no resistance. Now, that may be. I mean, you wouldn't, would you? You wouldn't.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But also, these are places where they probably have trade with Scandinavia, where the arrival of Scandinavians is not maybe as terrifying and outlandish as it would be had they landed in Devon, let us say. So they do a bit of messing around there.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Then they sail 40 miles south to a place called Scardy's Fort, Scardaborg, which is named after a brilliant man called Thorgil Scardy, Thorgil's the hair-lipped. And Scardy's Fort, Scardaborg, we now call Scarborough. So they land at Scarborough. Now Scarborough is a larger town. It's fortified.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And the people here clearly seem to have felt more English because they actually do try to resist Hardrada. Hardrada takes the town anyway. And we're told by the saga, the Northmen killed many people there and took all the booty they could lay hold of. There was nothing left for the Englishmen now if they would preserve their lives, but to submit to King Harold.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And thus he subdued the country wherever he came. So in other words, he's made an example of Scarborough. He has looted it, sacked it. And this sends a message to all the towns of Eastern, Northeastern England. You stand in my way. and I will hammer you. But you do right by me, and I'll do right by you. Exactly.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So now he turns into the mouth of the Humber, and by this point, we can be pretty sure he has joined forces with Tostig. And Tostig has some Flemish mercenaries, probably, and he definitely has men from Scotland, from King Malcolm.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And this is a standard thing, right? This is not unusual. So far, Hardrada is following the playbook that so many Vikings have done so often. He probably has about 12,000 men at this point. This includes his own son, Olaf, and Tostig's son, who's called Skuli. They go up the Humber, and then they turn into the River Ouse.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
People remember how they'd use the networks of rivers in what are now Russia and Ukraine. Now they're using the network of rivers in northern England, and they row up the Ouse northwards until they reach the village of Rickle, which is 10 miles from York. Now, so far, everything Harold has done has made complete sense, has been very well planned.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He has gone for the area of England that has the longest and deepest Scandinavian connections. He doesn't seem to be just interested in raiding. I think he's probably serious about conquest, which is why he's going for York, because York is one of the two biggest urban prizes, really. London is the only one that compares. It's formerly Jorvik. massive Scandinavian heritage.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
It'd have been the capital of Erik Bloodaxe. You know, there are a lot of people there who would have Scandinavian family connections, roots and so on, trading connections.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So a terrifying place. Slightly more excitingly, it also has a mint. So it's one of the only places, it's the only mint in Northern England. So if you take York, you're taking a proper seat of kind of royal authority. Anyway, York is guarded by the two northernmost earls, and we've talked about them a lot. They are Morcar, the Earl of Northumbria, and Edwin, Earl of Mercia.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
They are the grandsons of Leofric. They are the dynasty that have been the great counterweight to the Godwinsons.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, they are both much younger than Hardrada and much less battle-hardened. They're both in their 20s. And it may be that Hardrada thought they would come to a deal, that they would panic and run away, that they would surrender, but they don't. Now, an interesting thing here is why don't they stay in York? Because York has stone walls that are built on kind of Roman foundations.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Everybody knows the one thing the Vikings don't like doing is besieging towns. They're not terribly good at it. They don't enjoy it. Why don't Edwin and Morcar just stay in York and wait for Harold Goldwinson to come in with his army and relieve them?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The obvious answer is that, as you described last time, Harold Gobinson has been waiting on the south coast for ages for the Normans and his men have become restless and he has released them to go off and bring in the harvest. So Edward and Morcar probably think, first of all, that his men are all gone. So maybe he's not going to come and relieve us anyway.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
It was, yeah. It's a forensic reconstruction, I think it's fair to say, of what happened at that battle in Adventures in Time, Fury of the Vikings. So that is literally exactly what Harold Hardrada thought. He thought back to that moment when he was a little boy, which listeners will remember from the Harold Hardrada series.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But crucially, our own men have not brought in our harvest. So we don't have a lot of food in York. The city is reliant on what small stocks of food we have. And if we stay cooped up in York, Hardrada's men, they'll ravage the fields or they'll eat all of the harvest themselves and we will starve. So we basically have no choice but to force the issue. Yeah. They are bold, these pups.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Is that Harold Hardrada joining us? Yes. Brilliant. So now we come to Wednesday, the 20th of September. So that morning, Harold and Tostig are marching north along the River Ouse towards the hamlet of Fulford, which is now a suburb of York, southern suburb of York. And at Fulford, they find, according to the sagas, they find their road blocked by a shield wall of about 4,000 men.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And these are Edwin and Morcar's house gulls. So in other words, they're trained professional soldiers. And they're sort of levees. And a real ragtag farm. People with pitchforks. Up on a zow, I've got out my pitchfork. Exactly. People with an axe, a bloke who's got a sling, all of this kind of thing. To describe the terrain, the terrain is very wet.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And we know that because we can tell from the name of the place. Fulford, it means foul water ford. So as the Norsemen are looking at it, They have on their left the River Ouse, and on their right it's a very kind of muddy, swampy area.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The Norsemen are going to go uphill between these two things, and they're basically going to head up, and they have to cross this deep, muddy ditch towards the Saxons. Now, I have to say, the saga's descriptions of this battle are exceedingly confusing, and historians who claim they know what happened are obviously talking balderdash.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And to be honest, the same is kind of true of Stamford Bridge as well. Right, exactly. But what seems to have happened is this. Basically, at first, Harald Hardrada's men are going slightly uphill through all this mud. The Saxons are throwing spears and firing arrows at them. The bodies pile up. People are stumbling in the ditch and whatnot.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The right wing of Hardrada's force, where Tostig's mercenaries are, they start to waver, we're told. Now, maybe is that because everyone hates Tostig? Or is this the sagas just trying to buttress Harald Hardrada's reputation and dissing Tostig? Who can say? According to the sagas, more car begins to push them back. The Northumbrians end up crossing the ditch.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, some people say, well, maybe was this a ploy? Was this a Battle of Hastings style ploy? Or has it been lifted from accounts of the Battle of Hastings? Exactly. King Harold's saga says, Harold Hodrada commanded the charge to be sounded and urged on his men. He ordered the banner, which was called the Land Waster.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And, you know, the enemy was singing their war songs and he could see Harold Godwinson coming on. And that's exactly what happened, Tom.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
to be carried before him and made so severe an assault that all had to give way before it. Land waster, his banner, very famous emblem of kind of his power. This would have been a white silk banner with a black raven on it. You know, a little nod there back to their traditions. And it said that it brings victory to whomever it proceeds into battle. Exactly.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So now Hardrada orders his men into this great charge, into the gap that's been left by Morcar. There's a lot of ferocious hand-to-hand combat. And basically the Norsemen are much better at this than the Anglo-Saxons are, than the English are. And the sagas are explicit about the scale of the slaughter. So this is King Harold's saga. He made so severe an assault that all had to give way before it.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And there was a great loss among the men of the earls. And they soon broke into flight, most of them leaping into the ditch, which was so filled with corpses that the Norsemen could cross it without getting wet. Then a lot of the English seem to have fled towards the river and, you know, bodies piling up in the river.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Another saga, Morkinskin, and no greater slaughter will ever be inflicted on a brave army. So the sagas say the English did their best. They fought very bravely. But basically, our guy was far too good for them. And in the end, their military power is totally broken. Now, both Edwin and Mork are getaway. But now there's nothing between Harold Hardrada and York. He marches on York.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And on Sunday, the 24th of September, after a couple of days of faffing around, city fathers have opened the gates and Harold and Tostig convene a thing, an assembly outside the city walls. And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, they offered to grant a lasting peace to the citizens as long as they all march south together to conquer this kingdom.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So what Harold is basically, Hardrada is saying to York, the York sort of city fathers here is, You know, I'm not going to sack the city. I'm not going to pillage and loot it. Let's collaborate now. You join with me and we will take England. And actually, do you know what? There are probably a lot of people in York who think to themselves, we could actually come out quite well from this.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Right. And if they've pitched him with Harold Hardrada, what kind of benefits will flow Northumbria's way, York's way, as opposed to London, which will be a conquered city? Yeah.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Yes, exactly. So Hardrada says... Okay, fine. This is what we'll do. You can give me 100 people as hostages as a guarantee of your good behavior. I will offer you 100 people as well. I mean, historians disagree about whether these are hostages or whether actually this is basically a token garrison. Kind of collaboration. Yeah, I'll leave 100 armed men here.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Anyway, and he says, tomorrow morning, which is Monday the 25th, I will collect the hostages and some supplies from you. And when I do that, I will name the people who are going to rule over the town. and who are going to sort out the laws and who are going to give out land and all of that. So we'll make the final arrangements tomorrow, Monday.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, in the meantime, my men and I are going back to our ships, which are still on the river at Rickall on the River Ouse, which is 10 miles away. We're going to sleep on the ships. And we'll be back tomorrow. We won't come back to York. We'll get the hostages from a river crossing, an old Roman river crossing, actually, called Stamford Bridge, which is eight miles east of York.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
That is where we will meet. And they all say, fine, we'll see you tomorrow at Stamford Bridge. So as night falls on this Sunday, Hardrada and his men have marched all the way back to the river Ouse and Rickle. And you can imagine the scene. Tom, you can deplore your laugh if you like. There is much feasting. Right. There's much feasting, war stories.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
They're telling anecdotes about, you know, I smashed this bloke's head and it was absolutely brilliant. Loved it. And do you know what? Harold Hardrada is living the dream. It's all gone swimmingly. He's back on the road. Yeah. Great gig. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Now for the South and for the Crown of England.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But, Tom, as they drain their wine cups and their drinking horns, what none of them knows is that 12 miles to the west, out of sight, entirely undetected, another army is waiting. And Tom, within just a few hours, Harold Hardrada's final adventure will reach its dramatic, heart-stopping conclusion.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Hello. Now, I'm sure you're already aware of this, but if you're not, we have some absolutely thrilling news for you. Last October, Tom and I did a live show at the Royal Albert Hall in London with an orchestra and a choir. And we enjoyed it so much that we're coming back to the Royal Albert Hall again with an orchestra to do not one, but two live shows, a matinee and an evening performance.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
This speaks to your fundamental lack of self-confidence, I think, Tom.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
That's right, Tom. And here is the really, really good news. The very last tickets have just been released and there are still one or two available. And they are both for the matinee and for the evening performance. So if you're an early bird or a night owl, there are still tickets available for you.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Whereas I'm not burdened by the same doubts and anxieties.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
In almost every general English language history of the Vikings, this is the last chapter. There may be a sort of epilogue, an envoi, farewell to the Viking age, but this is the last great narrative set piece. And you can see why, because although there are, as we'll discuss, there are subsequent attempts by Scandinavians to raid or indeed invade England. This is the last great one.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Tostig says, rather bizarrely, I cannot deny it. And this man says, your brother King Harold greets you and sends you this offer. He would prefer not to fight you and offers you all Northumbria, a third of his kingdom. Tostig, my brother should have offered me that last winter instead of his enmity and spite. That would have been better for England.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
It's the one that comes closest. And it has, it really does have the quality of myth. because at its heart are two irresistible, colourful, doomed characters, Harold Hardrada and Harold Godwinson. And both of them stand for things greater than themselves, i.e. a civilisation, Anglo-Saxon England, as you put it, with mead halls and moustaches. Yeah, and the Vikings, dragon ships and booming laughs.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And booming laughs, exactly. So let us start with the man at the centre of the story, Harold Hardrada, who we talked about last week. So last week we left him as king of Norway. The beginning of 1066, he's probably 50 years old. So he's the oldest of the contenders in this story. He's had the most extraordinary life.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And then Tostig speaks again. If I accept this offer, what will my brother give Harold, son of Sigurd? meaning Hardrada. And then the Englishman has the absolutely excellent line, he will give him seven feet of English ground or more if he really is so much taller, but no more than that. So for his grave. For his grave.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now Tostig, who has been a complete snake so far in the story, then he doesn't take the deal. He says, tell my brother to make ready for battle and never let men say that Tostig betrayed Harold Sigurdsson when he came west to fight for England. for we have vowed to win the kingdom or die with honour.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, the Sargers, who have no vested interest in being nice to Tostig, they're very kind to Tostig at this point. They're saying, Tostig, actually, you know, he doesn't take the deal. He doesn't betray Harold Hardrada. Well, they do love an epic exchange, don't they? They love an epic exchange.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And then the splendid bit, Hardrada, who hasn't understood a word of this because he doesn't speak English. He says to Tostig, who was that man who spoke so fair? And Tostig says, that was my brother, Harold Godwinson. And Hardrada says, he is a small man, but he stood well in his stirrups. It's so brilliant, isn't it? Everybody is so great in this story.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Why is this not the most popular Amazon TV drama of all time? So now they make their final preparations for battle. The English, remember, have about 12,000 men. The Norwegians, about 8,000. They have not been transformed by the same military revolution that has taken place in Normandy. So this is not going to be a battle with knights and with great cavalry charges and stuff.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
There is some of that in the sagas, but most people think these are anachronisms. These are later embellishments borrowed from the Battle of Hastings.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Yeah, exactly. It's like two time periods colliding. That's what makes it such a brilliant story. So the odds very clearly, if you think they're going to have, they've got the same military technology, they're both kind of tired. The odds clearly favour the English, especially if the Norwegians don't have any armour.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And in good epic style, the sagas have Hardrada murmuring, composing poems as he draws up his men. Tom Shipley's translation, I've slightly adapted it. At first, Hardrada says, forward we go in formation, without armour against blue steel edges. Helmets shine. I don't have mine. Now our armour lies down with the ship's. Now, this is quite depressing for him. Nice internal rhyme scheme, though.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Very nice. Very nice rhyme scheme. But then, apparently, the saga says, Hardrada says, oh, come on, that's a bit defeatist. I'll compose a better verse. And this is Tom Shipp's translation again. Again, I've slightly adapted it. We should not creep into battle behind the hollow of our shields because of the crush of weapons. So commanded Faithful Hill, the Valkyrie.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
A lot of what we talked about last week, you know, was in that sort of fuzzy area between myth and history and fiction. But we know that, you know, he was exiled as a teenager. He went off to be a mercenary in Kievan Rus'. He was a Varangian guard, messing around with the emperor and the empress, possible eye gouging, comes back. Snakes. Snakes, great scenes, becomes king of Norway.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The woman once told me to hold my head high where ice blades meet skulls in the clash of swords. And what that basically means is, let's do this. Let's do it straight. Let's not hide behind our shields. Let's meet this face on. Now, I don't think for a moment that Harold Hardrada is genuinely standing there composing poems. But I think this does capture something of the essence of the man.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
This is great that you've dropped your scepticism. See, I want to dial up the melodrama. I think Harold Hardrod had definitely composed poems.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Well, on the details of the battle. So the Battle of Stamford Bridge, one of the great battles in English history. What do we know about it? If you read King Harold's saga, Snorri Sturluson, written in the 1230s, there are knights charging, people running away, all kinds of twists and turns. It's the Battle of Hastings. It's the Battle of Hastings.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
If you read the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, you're like, well, what did the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle say? I shall tell you what it said. It said, they continued fighting all day... Come on, give us more detail.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Yeah, ravens. Right. Whistling of arrows. Yeah, all of that. So let's go with the sagas. I'm just going to try to have some fun with the sagas and see what we think could have happened. Hardrada wants to hold off the English for as long as possible before, let's say, 4,000 men arrive from Rickle. They'll take four hours, so he's got a long time to fight.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But, as you said, that bridge is going to come in very useful. So it's a narrow wooden footbridge, we're told. We're also told the banks of the river are too steep and the water is too deep to cross anywhere but the bridge. If you're on the other side, the English have to, they can only use the footbridge to cross. So he puts most of his men, the sagas say, on the far sort of southeastern bank.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And then he orders his elite, his vanguard, his houseguards, his trained professional soldiers to form a shield wall at the far end of the bridge, the western bank. And basically, if they can hold the bridge, they will be all right. And then, say the sagas, there is this long struggle.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The English are firing arrows at them, throwing spears at them, basically trying to dislodge this shield war from the narrow footbridge. Because once they've got the bridge, they can then pour across and attack the rest of the Norwegians. And in the English sources that we have, later chronicles, let's say 100 years later, some of them,
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
They tell the story, again, it does feel a little bit like a well-known formula, that one by one, the Norsemen are whittled down until there is just one anonymous Norseman holding the bridge alone against the English. So this is Henry of Huntingdon. He was born in about 1088. So he's born about 20 years after the Battle of Might he have heard eyewitness accounts? I mean, it's hard to know.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But anyway, this is what he says. A single Norwegian, whose name should have been remembered, posted himself on the bridge and chopping down more than 40 English with a battle axe, his country's weapon, halted the advance of the whole English army. And this is William of Malmesbury. And you said, Tom, I think that he's about the same generation, isn't he?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And we ended the Harold Hardrada series talking about how he earns the reputation Hardrada. So there's a kind of chilling ruthlessness to Harold Hardrada. Adam of Bremen, who we've mentioned before, called him the Thunderbolt of the North, a William of Poitiers, who we mentioned on Monday, said he was the strongest living man under the sun.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So he might, again, just have heard eyewitness accounts.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Well, let us believe him. He says, And then this very memorable moment. One Englishman gets under the bridge. Some accounts say he's sort of made a makeshift boat for himself and is kind of floating under the bridge. And then he stabs his sword up through the planks of the bridge. That gap between the boards that we mentioned before? The gap between the boards into the Norseman's... Nether parts?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Nether regions, exactly. The Norseman falls... A great cheer erupts from the English army. And then like kind of the orcs at the end of the Fellowship of the Ring, they pour across the bridge. Dominic, you're not comparing the English to the orcs. Yeah, but Tom, I don't actually think that. This is what a great historian does with his imagination. I'm seeing it from the Norwegian perspective.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
I can't compete with that because actually my art teacher when I was that age said I was the single worst person she'd ever taught in her 40 year career. Mrs. Salt. That was her. That was her verdict. So I can't compete with Major Morris, I'm afraid. So what happens next? The English are piled across the bridge. What can we tell from the sagas? What probably happened?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Almost certainly the Norwegians would have formed a shield wall, a defensive shield wall and tried to hold out. And we can assume that effectively the English surrounded them again.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So to explain, we're told in the sagas that Harold decides on one final charge without his helmet, without his armour. And again, yeah, the mark of a great historian, Tom, is their use of the imagination as well as the sources.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So even if you strip away the inventions of the sagas, Harold Hardrada is a frighteningly ruthless, vengeful, effective... avaricious, impressive man. He is the distillation of the Viking ethos, I think. And that's why his story makes such a wonderful conclusion to any history of the Vikings.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Unbelievable. But you know, it's method writing because I'm imagining my own mood before we do one of our Restless History live shows on tour. That is very much what you're like. You kind of froth at the mouth, don't you? Yeah. Well, read the next bit and people will see exactly what I'm like before a show.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He had never been happier. That's literally how I feel just before we go on stage to answer the listeners' questions. What's your favourite historical dinner party? Who would win a fight between Jacko Macaco and Napoleon? Yeah, that's exactly how I feel. How I feel. So this is literally what happened to Harold Hardrada, to be clear.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
In the sagas, he is killed either with an arrow or with a spear in the throat. I think these details are very clearly taken from the Battle of Hastings. But you know what, Tom? He deserves an ending like that. He does. I think he died just like Boromir at Parth Garland at the end of the Fellowship of the Ring. So I think he is surrounded by English bodies. He's in a pile of bodies.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So Harold Hardrada falls and dies, let us hope, in this incredibly dramatic and worthy way. Snorri Sturluson says at this point, Harold Goldwinson paused and he said to the remaining Northmen and Tostig, who's still alive, we will give you peace and quarter if you surrender. And again, Tostig behaves very gallantly. He says, no, I won't. No, let's finish this. Let's go to the end.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So there's a skull called Arnor who's quoted by the sagas. The gallant men who saw him fall would take no quarter, him being Harald Hardrada. One and all resolved to die with their loved king around his corpse in a corpse ring. I think that's terrible. Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I actually almost started crying when I was reading that. I was so moved.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So by now, the Norwegian reinforcements are finally arriving, but it's far too late. Many of them are cut down too. And a few survivors, dozens, hundreds, it's hard to tell, do make it back to Rickle. They flee across the countryside. There's 24 ships. go, and it was 300 ships that had arrived, isn't it? Exactly. Harold, Hardrada, and Tostig's sons were not in the battle.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
They'd stayed with the ships. And the next day, they rode under flag of truce to York, where Harold Gobinson had installed himself victorious. And he was, as you would expect from Harold Gobinson, who's one of the greatest men who ever lived, he's very generous to them. And he says, look, it's a fair fight. You know, all's fair in love and war.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
You can sail back to Norway as long as you don't do this again. But he wants them to go. And as you said, Tom, it takes them only 24 of their 300 ships to take the survivors back because so many have fallen.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Crikey. Well, Tabby, Tolkien fans, and I are all delighted by that, I imagine. So this is the last gasp, Tom, of the Viking Age. Or is it? Well, is it? Is it, actually? Because you could make two arguments here. One, you could say the Viking Age is already over. Because, of course, Christianity has already begun to transform Scandinavia. We've had towns arriving in Scandinavia. We've got kings.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The days of, you know, freebooting raiders are gone, actually. And Harold Hardrada, in many ways, is not a Viking. The other way you could say it is actually the Viking Age still has some time to run because there will be more Scandinavian attacks. Svein, who sensibly turned down Tostig's offer, he does actually launch two raids after the Norman conquest.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And in fact, I was surprised when I looked this up. The last really serious attack, it was as late as 1152. A guy called Einstein II, who was Harold Hardrada's great-great-grandson, raided the east coast of England. So retro, isn't it?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Come on, mate. It's the 12th century.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
But you can understand completely why people call Harold Hardrada the last Viking and why people always use this to end their kind of Viking survey books, because there is something about him, the mad adventures of his life, his travels, but also his sensibility, composing all these poems in the face of danger, kind of laughing uncontrollably for no good reason. Yeah.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
You've got to admit, Tom, they don't quite have the same cultural cachet as Harold Ardrada.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Tom Shippey has a lovely line where he's talking about the way he dies. He says, even the way he dies at Stamford Bridge, this hubristic end where he's left his armour behind, or has he? Let's assume he's left his armour behind and he's surrounded by the English, but he fights on to the end. Tom Shippey says, this feels like the embodiment of the Viking spirit.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Arrogant, unlucky, self-possessed to the last and accepting his fate with wry defiance. So that's the end of Harold Hardrada. But what of the victor? What of the man who's beaten him? I think Harold Goldwinson has won an astounding victory. It is one of the greatest victories at this point in the history of the English people.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
I mean, surely equivalent to any of the victories won by Alfred or Athelstan. To have defeated a Norwegian army led by arguably the most famous warrior in Northern Europe, in all Europe, To have killed him, to have won such a crushing victory, there is no chance the Norwegians will come back. I mean, Norway is out now. It is a great tribute to the potency of Anglo-Saxon arms.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Well, I mean, Harold Goldwinson can feel very, very pleased with himself. For a few days, he remains in York to rest. You can imagine his overwhelming relief. He's had months of waiting, months of uncertainty. And he knows now, for the time being, his kingdom is secure and his crown is safe.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And then at the turn of October, a messenger arrives in York. And when he's shown in to see Harold Goldwinson and he stammers out the words of the message. The blood drains from Harold's features because Tom, against all the odds, William of Normandy has landed at Pevensey. And now for Harold and for the English, the road leads to Hastings and our final showdown.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So if we were doing this as an HBO series, we would start this episode with Harold in his hall in Viken, which is near basically the Oslo region in Norway. And his days of war appear to be over. He's fought this interminable war with the Danes. that has basically ended in a stalemate. You can sort of see how you would shoot the scene. He's sitting there at the end of his hall, grizzled.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
The old wolf. The old wolf, exactly. And one day in the summer of 1066, I mean, this must have been effectively what happened, a man walks into his hall, a man the sagas describe as, quote, a tall, strong man, a big talker and warlike with an enormous English moustache.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
I'm going with the sagas, Tom. I'm always, by the way, in this episode, going to go with the sagas. So this is Tostig. And as we described last time, Tostig is seething with resentment against his brother, Harold Godwinson. who he blames for his exile from England, the fact that Morcar has become Earl of Northumbria, that everybody hates him, all of this.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, Tostig in the last episode had been raiding England. He described him messing around in the Isle of Wight and the Humber and whatnot. But I think it's pretty clear that after he's gone off to Scotland and he's been blown around, he's looking for something more than raiding. I mean, by going to get help, he is signing up effectively to regime change in England.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
It's clear to him his brother's never going to take him back. There's no possibility of a rapprochement. Now, if the sagas are to be believed, Harold Hardrada is not Tostig's first choice because the sagas say initially he goes to see somebody you mentioned very briefly last time, Svein of Denmark.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And Tostig in the saga says to him, why don't you come with me and win the country, win England as Cnut, your mother's brother did. And I think this has the ring of absolute plausibility. Svein says, no, I'm not Cnut. I don't have Cnut's capabilities. Only with difficulty can I defend my own Danish dominions against the Northmen, against the Norwegians, which is absolutely accurate.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Had Svein taken Tostig up on his offer and gone to England, there's no doubt in my mind that Harald Hardrada would have immediately invaded and conquered Denmark. So Svein would have been bonkers to take that up. Tostig, we're told, reacted contemptuously. He says, I expected more of so gallant a man.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And I will look for help, he says, from a king who isn't frightened of a great enterprise as you are.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And to be fair, the record of history suggests that everybody despises Tostig. Yeah. But Tom? Tostig will redeem himself at the end of this episode and behave, I think, in a very impressive and gallant way. So now Tostig crosses the Skagorak to Vicken and he finds Harold Hardrada in his hall. Now, at first, Harold Hardrada too is dubious.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
You talked last time about how some of William of Normandy's advisors said, England, really? That is a tough nut to crack. That is a hell of a gamble. And Hardrada hesitates. We're told, the king replied that the Northmen had no great desire for a campaign in England. People say that the English are not to be trusted. Who says that? You know what this is? Outrageous.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Everyone knows that an Englishman's word is his bowl. Right. This is fools in Norway. Idiots. Remember, Harold Hardrada has never been to England, so he knows not whereof he speaks. Yeah, true. And Tostig says, hold on. Remember, you have a claim to the English throne. He reminds...
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Hardrada, that a quarter of a century earlier, during the succession crisis after the death of Cnut, there was this story that Harthacnut and Hardrada's brother Magnus had done a deal that whichever of them died without an heir would inherit the other's kingdom, all of his kingdoms. And Tostig says to Hardrada, Magnus was your brother and you've inherited that claim.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Edward the Confessor has died without an heir. And under the terms of that deal, England is yours. Now, whether they'd really made that deal, it's not written down anywhere, so who knows. But it's convenient for Hardrada. And Tostig goes on, according to the sagas, if you want it, England is yours. I can talk most of the lords there into supporting you. That, as we know of Tostig.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
is a dubious claim to say the least. Tostig goes on and he appeals to Hardrada's vanity. Everybody says that never in all the Northlands has there been a warrior king to compare with you. So it seems odd to me that you spent 15 years trying to conquer Denmark and yet you shrink from the chance of ruling England when it is yours for the taking. Oh, he's subtle there, isn't he?
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Now, the sagas then say that Harold and Tostig talked long and frequently together, which undoubtedly they must have done. and Harold has to weigh this up right because this is a gamble Now, until this moment, he has never shown the slightest interest in England. And people who listen to our Harold Hardrada two-parter will know that basically all his career was spent in the East, not the West.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So this is a novelty for him. He's never really thought about England before. Some of his chief advisors, we're told, said, look, you can do anything. You're the thunderbolt of the North. Why not? Let's go for it.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Others, and this echoes again what the Normans said to William, others again said that England was difficult to attack, that it was very full of people, and that the men-at-arms were so brave that one of them was better than two of Harold's best men, which actually, again, bears out what you were saying last time, that the English are generally underrated.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
We tend to think, oh, the English were rubbish because they were very peaceable, but actually... They're more formidable than you think.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Yeah, exactly. So Harold sits and thinks about it, and eventually he decides he'll do it. And I think there are three reasons why. Number one is the great traditional Viking reason, which I think does then sort of cement his last Viking reputation, and that is basically money.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He has had terrible trouble in Norway raising taxes to pay for his wars, hence the name Hardrada, because he's basically been harrying people who won't pay their taxes. But England, as we've established, is very, very rich. And even if he didn't get the crown, imagine that he lands... There's a lot of battles.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
There's a kind of stalemate, a little bit like it was with, you know, Svein Fortbeard and Canute in the early days. He might just go home with loads of Dane gold. The English would buy him off. The English would buy him off. So that's the, you know, that could be a worst case scenario. He doesn't think he's going to die.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
I mean, it's not the worst case scenario, actually, as it will turn out, is it? But yes, I mean, that's what he could get. Then I think there's a geopolitical reason. It's very clear that Harold has always wanted to, you know, Norway's not enough for him. Basically, if you're a Norwegian or Danish king, your ambition is obviously to try to be the next Cnut, to build a kind of North Sea empire.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
It would make complete sense that you might want to try to do that.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
He's been playing for Real Madrid and now he's managing Burnley. And he probably thinks to himself, ideally I'd be managing a bigger club.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
And the third thing I think is... Psychological. And there's no reason to doubt the evidence of the sagas that Harold Hardrada is a very restless, warlike man who basically, he's a bit like Alexander the Great. He doesn't like building bridges and discussing tax returns. What he really likes doing is fighting people.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Massive midlife crisis. Snorri says he yearned to conquer new realms. And again, if you're doing this as your TV series, he's sitting there on his throne, grizzled one last time. Will you join me? You know, that kind of thing. So the orders go out. They assemble a fleet in the western fjords. We're told 200 longships and 100 transports.
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555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
So if you assume about 50 to 60 men per longship, that would be about 10,000 men. That's plausible because that's similar to the force that he threw against Denmark. It's actually bigger than the fleet that Canute used to conquer England in 1016.
The Rest Is History
555. 1066: Slaughter at Stamford Bridge (Part 2)
Oh, yeah. If you're a young man from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or indeed New East or from Flanders or wherever it might be, and the word has gone out, Hardrada. Sales again. Yeah. It's like something from a Western, isn't it? The dragon boats shall roar at last time as the sun sets in the West. It's Théoden in The Lord of the Rings, right? One last time. You know, with all that stuff. So...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
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The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So there are multiple reasons why he wants to do this, because this is an extraordinary thing. No Russian czar has ever traveled outside Russia, except when they're fighting, before. It's unprecedented. Now, one reason is he wants to get allies to strengthen the alliance against the Ottomans, because he's very keen on this Black Sea kind of breakthrough.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But the more obvious kind of personal reason is that he is just absolutely fascinated with the West, with Holland and England in particular. He wants to go to their dockyards. He wants to study their ship building techniques. And he clearly knows, I think, as so many Russians know, that the gap between Russia and the West has never been greater.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
That in the West, this is the age of Newton, of Leibniz, of the financial and scientific revolutions, of stock exchanges and newspapers and things. And Russia is in danger of falling centuries behind. And he has a seal made that has the inscription, I am a student and I am looking for teachers. You know, so he's pretty explicit about it. Why...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
A fairly obvious reason I would have thought is that... He's Orthodox and he's not Catholic. So if you're a Protestant power, he could conceivably be an ally against Louis XIV, right?
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah. He doesn't go to France in this trip. He goes to the two great Protestant adversaries of France. I think they're flattered, England and the Dutch Republic. by Peter's attentions. And maybe they're hoping to, well, Gilbert Burnett.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
For Anglicanism, as we will see. As we will see, people in England thought, this is brilliant. We could basically get an ally in Russia. We could have an Anglican ally. Exactly. I know that sounds bonkers, but is it any more bonkers than the Tsar of Russia going in disguise on a massive gap year to the West? I don't think it is. I suppose not. So he decides he's going to set off.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
His mother, by the way, is dead at this point. Actually, his brother Ivan has died as well. So he leaves his mate Romodanovsky, the guy who has the bear. So the Prince Caesar. The Prince Caesar, as he's called. He says, you're commanding the troops. You have basically command of law and order while I'm gone. As he leaves, he has a farewell banquet.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he hears that there's been some bitching among the Streltsy about him. They've been saying, oh, he's going off to the West. You know, he's going to betray us all to foreigners. And he has this Streltsy colonel and two noblemen executed. He has their limbs cut off with an axe and then they're beheaded. And then he gets the coffin of Sophia's uncle, someone of the Miloslavsky family.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He gets this coffin dragged by pigs into Red Square.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Kind of stables full of pigs who are trained to drag things. Right. And the coffin is opened beneath the chopping block where these guys have been executed so that their blood will spatter the face of Sophia's dead uncle. I mean, this is by no means the most sadistic thing that Peter will do. He loves a really, really horrendous kind of sadistic jape. And there are a lot of them to come.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So after he's done this, he sets off. He's traveling as Peter Mikhailov. There's 250 people, loads of noblemen, musicians, coachmen, priests, secretaries, four dwarfs, of course. He's Peter Mikhailov. If you tell anybody who he is... He will kill you. But he wants people to kind of recognize him and be polite to him at the same time.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So he's using the incognito thing basically as a way to get out of formalities. Yeah, all the boring stuff. But he still wants to see fireworks displays in his honor and for people to present him with enormous goblets of wine. He's a cakist. Yeah, he's a total cakist. He wants to have his cake and eat it.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So they set off, they cross the frontier into what's then called Livonia, which is kind of Estonia, Latvia, which is part of the Swedish Empire. And they arrive in Riga. Peter does not like Riga at all, and he hates the Swedes, because the Swedes take the incognito thing very seriously, and they say they don't have a banquet for him. The Swedes respond exactly as you would expect the Swedes to.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Very sober. Very sober. They say, well, if you're not Peter the Great, great, no fireworks. By the way, you have to pay for your own board and lodging. This he's really offended by. The Swedish lack of hospitality. He's shocked at this. But also, he's fascinated by fortifications and things. So he goes off to inspect the defences of Riga.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But because he's incognito, a Swedish sentry spots him and threatens to shoot him.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
No, right, exactly. If Vladimir Putin turned up at a British submarine base in disguise, clearly, obviously Vladimir Putin... And then was offended when people challenged him. But he hated this. He hated Riga. And 13 years later, when his army was attacking Riga, he insisted on firing the first shells into the city. I do like a man who bears a grudge.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He said, I thank God for allowing me to see the beginning of our revenge on this accursed place.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
You wouldn't want him as a friend either, frankly, if he comes at you with some bellows. No. He goes into a place called Courland, which is now kind of Lithuania. He goes to Königsberg, now Kaliningrad. He meets the Elector of Brandenburg, who is the future Frederick I of Prussia. They have a great time. They go hunting. They have the fireworks displayed. They watch bears fighting.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
They stage a bear fight.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
When we get onto Augustus the Strong, all kinds of activities with animals there. Well, foxes. So he meets Sophia of Hanover, who is the mother of George I. So she's going to be Queen Anne's heir to maintain the Protestant succession. Exactly. And this is a very funny scene because he'd never met aristocratic Western women before. And he's shown in to see them. he's very embarrassed.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He doesn't know what to say. He literally covered his face with his hands in embarrassment, and he sort of muttered from behind his hands, I don't know what to say. And Sophia and her daughter are very nice to him. They say, oh, come on, it's fine. They have some music. They bring in some Hanoverian children, including the future George II. And he loves George II.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He hugs him and kisses him and sort of puts him on his lap and stuff. I mean, George II is 14.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
There's a lot of laughing. And actually, they are quite fond of him. They were worried that he would get very drunk. And he always restrains himself in the presence of aristocratic women. But then the people that he's traveling with, so all his mates and hangers-on, all the lads, jolly company, they get massively drunk and they make up for it. And this is definitely a theme of the trip.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So eventually, he gets to Holland. And he is so excited about this. It's actually quite sweet. He goes on ahead of the rest of his party because he just can't wait. And his destination is a place called Zandam, which is a great kind of shipyard. And they claim in this place that they're the best shipyard in Holland. There are 50 different companies and they make more than 300 ships a year.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So this is like, for Peter, this is Disneyland. Ship heaven. It is. It absolutely is. So he arrives on a Sunday. And immediately he bumps into a bloke who'd once worked for him in Moscow, a blacksmith called Gerrit Kist. And Peter hugs him, kisses him and stuff. And Kist says, come and stay in the house next door. I mean, Kist just can't believe it.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
It's just mind boggling to him that the Tsar of Russia has turned up in his town and says, I'll move in next door to you. Which is what happens. And the next day is a Monday morning. Peter gets up. he's obviously got some money. He goes off and he buys a load of tools. And then he goes to a shipyard run by a man called lynched Roger.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But the thing is, of course, Peter is very conspicuous because he's so tall. And also he's got a very strong Russian accent. So crowds gather to watch him, you know, as he's walking to the shipyard. And this happens within days and he gets very upset. And he's particularly upset because the youth of the town rather let Holland down, don't they? Because the boys pelt him with mud.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Maybe it is. So he has to hide in an inn and the town's burgomaster has to issue an order banning people from harassing, and I quote, distinguished persons who wish to remain unknown. That's nicely phrased. It is. However, it doesn't really work because by the end of the week, he's only been there a week.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And it's absolutely ludicrous scenes because by now, hundreds of people have come from Amsterdam to watch him working. When he gets up in the morning, he opens his front door and there are people sitting on the roofs of the neighbouring houses, kind of, you know, with picnics, waiting to see him. Everywhere he goes, there are people basically mobbing him and stuff.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
By Sunday, he's become a prisoner in his own cottage and he's very upset about this. And eventually he says, right, enough. I've given up on Zandam. I'm going to go to Amsterdam. So he moves to Amsterdam with his entourage and they stay there for four months.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
The Dutch East India Company. Yeah. So he would be cancelled today for his associations with the Dutch East. Well, not just the beheading. I mean, I think there are other things as well. He'd be cancelled. Yeah, the bellows. Yeah. So the Dutch East India Company is closed off. The shipyard is barred to the public by these big high walls. And they say to him, look, come and work for us.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
We'll have a new frigate laid down specially so you can work on it and you can observe our shipbuilding techniques from start to finish. He shares a house with the other Russians who say they'll come work at the yard with him. He arrives at work every day like a normal shipbuilder with his tools. He says to everybody, call me Carpenter Peter. Don't call me the Tsar or anything like that.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he works hard. It's not just kind of, you know, Marie Antoinette-ing. No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. So when he's not at the shipyard, he goes and meets one of his great heroes, William of Orange, William III. Who by this point is also the King of England. Also the King of England.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Peter has grown up listening to stories about William of Orange fighting the French, and he loves all these stories. He goes to see factories, he goes to laboratories, he goes to museums, he goes to botanical gardens. He's basically... absorbing everything that he can. He particularly is very keen on anatomy. He makes all his mates go with him to watch a corpse being dissected.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And one of many great lines in the Robert K. Massey book, to the horror of the Dutch, he ordered his comrades to approach the cadaver, bend down and bite off a muscle of the corpse with their teeth. Oh, my God. So, yeah, I mean, it's all fun and games with Peter the Great.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Well, as we will see, he loves a cabinet of curiosities, doesn't he?
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah. So anyway, he finally builds his frigate. The Dutch say, we will give this to you as a gift. You can have it shipped to Archangel. They're going to call it the Amsterdam, which is all very nice. However, he's a bit disappointed by his time in Holland because the Dutch, when they build a ship, they sort of do it intuitively. They don't have blueprints. They just know what they're doing.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
They're not big fans of the process, I think it's fair to say.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And like a kind of Ikea kit. That's what he wants. Exactly. He says, come on, do you not have blueprints? And they say, no, we don't. That's not how we do it. They say, maybe the English. The English are more blueprint people. And so he says to William, can I go and visit your other kingdom, please? And William says... I'd love nothing better.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And so on the 8th of January, 1698, Peter sets sail for God's own country, for England.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I mean, it's great to have Wiltshire in the Salisbury area on the show. Dominic, I'll be honest, my worry when you suggested doing Peter the Great was that Salisbury wouldn't get a look in, but how wrong I was. The weirdest thing is not just that he's chatting about Christian doctrine with people from the Salisbury area, it's the fact that he's doing it under a false name. So he's travelled...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, it's a great scene, Peter arriving in London. London is a big city at this point, 750,000 people. It's a really interesting moment in London's history, actually, this. I think if you're going to go back to London at any point in time... This is as good as any because it's still a very kind of raucous, disputatious city, a city of kind of public flogging and cockfighting and stuff.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But we're at the point in history where the Bank of England has been created, where party politics is starting, where England is becoming a maritime kind of commercial empire. So it's interesting. It's coffee houses and newspapers. And a scientific power as well. Isaac Newton and Royal Society and all of that. Exactly. There's Christopher Wren churches being built. There's all of this stuff.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And Peter, when he arrives, he stays in a place called Norfolk Street, which doesn't exist, I think, anymore, which is just off the Strand. And basically, it's like a student house. He moves in with all his mates into the student house.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Incognito. I mean, this is such a mad story. The czar of all the rushes has basically taken an extended gap year to travel anonymously to Western Europe and to hang around in shipyards and in taverns, interfering with actresses and kind of behaving in ludicrous ways, wheelbarrow races. We both love a wheelbarrow race. We've only told that story 20 times on The Rest is History.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
There's a wonderful historian of Peter the Great, a biographer called Lindsay Hughes, and she describes how the Prince of Denmark heard that he was in town and went to visit him. and was horrified when he arrived at Peter's house to find Peter still in bed and four other people in the room as well. And I quote, they had to open all the windows to clear the terrible stench.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
They're very student digs. Very student digs. He goes around London. He meets the future Queen Anne at Kensington Palace. William III, William of Orange introduces him. The Thames is frozen. There's a great frost. So he can't get into shipbuilding straight away. So he goes shopping. He goes to a watchmaker to see how watches work and to get watches. He's very impressed by English coffins.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
That's good to know. He says, this is brilliant. I never imagined people could make coffins like this. He has a coffin shipped specially to Moscow. He buys a swordfish, a stuffed swordfish, and a stuffed crocodile. He wants to send them to Moscow as well.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Exactly, our taxidermist is second to none, I think it's fair to say. He becomes friends with a bloke called the Marquess of Carmarthen, and he goes to the pub with this bloke so often that the pub is renamed the Tsar of Russia. And Carmarthen says, oh, I know who you'd like to meet, and he introduces him to an actress called Letitia Cross.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
who becomes his mistress while he's in England and moves in with him in the student house. And what language do they speak? Is it the language of love? The language of love, Tom. They speak the language of love. Great. Anyway, he's off the strand, so he's very central and there's more trouble with crowds. And so William III's government say... Look, we'll find you a house across the river.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And this is where we come to... A single favourite episode in all of history. Yeah. So the essayist and kind of diarist and whatnot, John Evelyn, has this house in Deptford. And Charles II had given John Evelyn a lease on this house. And Evelyn had owned it for 45 years. And he had set out what was regarded as arguably the greatest garden in England. His pride and joy. It had a bowling green.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
It had a terrace walk. It had kitchen gardens. It had a walled garden. Now... When it was first mentioned to John Evelyn that Peter the Great might move in, he said, brilliant, because he's actually been renting it to a man called Admiral Benbow. The pub in Treasure Island. As in the pub. Admiral Benbow had not been a good tenant.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
There'd been a little bit of wear and tear and he hadn't looked after the garden properly. So John Evelyn said, oh, well, great. I mean, these Russians, they can't be any worse than Admiral Benbow. Yeah. And we will find out later in the episode exactly what went on. But it's very clear something has gone wrong when Stuart, after a few days, says the house is full of people and right nasty. Yeah.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But how nasty we will discover. Anyway, while he's not smashing up the house, we mentioned Bishop Burnett from Wiltshire and the Salisbury area. He's been trying to convert Peter to Anglicanism. But the people that Peter really loves meeting are very much friends of the show. Richard Nixon's favourite people, the Quakers. Always good to have a Quaker on the rest of his history.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So Peter can't get enough of the Quakers. He goes to prayer meetings. They're quaking and doing what they do, being very sober and quaking. He says, this is absolutely amazing. I love this. He meets William Penn of Pennsylvania. Well, presumably if they're quaking and Peter is given to convulsions, he'd feel quite at home, wouldn't he? Yeah, he fits in. For once, his twitching is not noticed.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So William Penn of Pennsylvania fame, he is in between trips to Pennsylvania. He goes to the house at Deptford to talk to Peter, and they have a great chat in Dutch about Quakerism. And afterwards, Peter says to his Russian friends, whoever could live according to such a doctrine would be truly happy.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And now we're going to tell it again. Brilliant. So, shall we get back to where we left off? So, the summer of 1689, Peter has deposed Sophia. He's 17 years old. He is now, we haven't actually described him physically. He is a massive bloke. He's six foot seven. He's very kind of angular. He's got long brown hair and he's got a moustache. Interesting. Not a beard. Yeah, not a beard.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, but not in a sort of freak show way, right? No, they're impressed by them. They're impressed by it. He takes it really seriously. He does loads of fun tourist things. Yeah. He basically follows the itinerary that you would follow if you came to London on holiday now. He goes to Greenwich. He goes to the Tower of London.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yes. And my favourite tourist thing that he does, he goes to Parliament and And he says, I'd love to see it. And he doesn't want to draw attention to himself. So he climbs up to the roof and he watches through a kind of upper gallery sort of skylight style window. And the roof is William III is giving a cent to tax bills in the House of Lords.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he says afterwards to his friends and whatnot, he says, well, we obviously couldn't do this in Russia. Because, you know, we have the absolute power of the Tsar in Russia. We couldn't have any limitations. However, and I quote, it is good to hear subjects speaking truthfully and openly to their king. This is what we must learn from the English.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Now there's a lesson here for Vladimir Putin, isn't there?
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
There's an interesting episode from history.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Well, Peter did get knowledge and experience, to be fair. I'll tell you one thing he picked up was smoking. Smoking previously banned in Russia, except in the German suburb, he signs a deal with this bloke, Kamathen, that he goes drinking with, so that Kamathen can import tobacco to Russia.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And also, he does manage to get about 60 mathematicians, shipwrights, engineers, and he persuades them to come back with him to Russia, as well as to Barber's. Right.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So, 2nd of May... He says, look, I've been here for ages. It's time to go on. He loved England. We're used to the Russians being incredibly disobliging about our beloved country, aren't we?
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
That's true. They like our... Bijou West End houses. Nationalist commentators were always going on Russian state television, aren't they? And sort of doing mock-ups of how Britain would be annihilated by a nuclear weapon. Or a tsunami. Or a tsunami, exactly.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But Peter the Great would not have approved of that because he told a captain later, he said it would be a much happier life to be an admiral in England than a czar in Russia. I mean, I'm so happy to be quoting this. He said, England is the best, the most beautiful and the happiest place on earth.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
No, he's a man of tremendous taste. Now, sadly, not all Englishmen are as keen on Peter the Great as he is on them. Because as soon as he's left, John Evelyn goes to see what's happened to his house. And it is most nasty. And it was very nasty. He's so appalled. He then goes straight to the Royal Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, and the Royal Gardener, who's a man called Mr. London.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Now, Bishop Burnett mentioned his convulsive motions. So some people say, well, maybe he's just very restless. He's very impatient and stuff. But other people say maybe he's got a kind of a nervous tick because don't forget when he was 10 years old, he saw his family chopped up and stamped on. That would give you bad mental health, wouldn't it?
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he says, come to my house immediately. The government's going to have to compensate me for this. And when they get there, they find it has been utterly trashed. Ink everywhere, grease everywhere. All the doorknobs and locks have been pried off. The windows have been smashed. The chairs have all been smashed up and used as firewood. The pictures have been ripped up.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And the garden, Evelyn's pride and joy, the greatest garden in England, absolutely destroyed. The claim is, I think there's some dispute among sort of scholars about whether this is invented or not, that they'd been having wheelbarrow races.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
That's basically in earnings terms more than a million pounds today that Evelyn was given as compensation. That tells you just how much damage there was. So Peter, by now, is long gone. He goes to Dresden. He goes to Vienna.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Exactly. Exactly. So he has a nice time in Vienna. And then he's preparing to move on to Venice in July when bombshell news. He has a letter from Moscow from his mate, Romadonovsky. Terrible things have been happening in Russia. Four regiments of Streltsy were being transferred from the Sea of Azov to the Polish frontier. and they have mutinied.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
They are now marching on Moscow, and they are only 60 miles away. And of course, this letter has taken a long time to reach Peter. Peter can't believe it. So what this means is that while he's been messing around with Cabinet Securistas in Dresden and dancing at balls in Vienna, the Streltsy may well have taken Moscow, He may have been deposed and proclaimed a traitor. He says, oh, my God.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So he scraps his plan. The gap year is over and he rushes east and he's riding through Poland day and night, stopping only to change horses. And then he gets to crack off and another messenger comes riding up from the east. And Peter sort of rips open the message. A massive sigh of relief. Ramadanowski reports that their troops have intercepted and defeated the Streltsy rebels.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I think BetterHelp or any mental health provider would have had a field day with Pete's the Great, to be completely honest with you. But I think it's also possible he's mildly epileptic. There are lots of descriptions of him when he's in Europe having... sort of fits on the left-hand side of his face or his arm, his eyes rolling back in his head, all of this sort of stuff.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Although he's going to carry on going home, he can slow down a bit and he heads to meet somebody who will play a big part in this story, who is Augustus the Strong. And you love him, don't you? I love Augustus the Strong. He's one of your favourite characters from all of history. He is.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So he was the Elector of Saxony, Augustus, and he'd been elected King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1698. And we said we'd get into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It's this great sort of ramshackle state of 8 million people, vast, culturally fascinating, a real mix of Catholics, Jews and whatnot, fascinating kind of mosaic. Even Muslims. Even Muslims, exactly.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Because there are Muslims who've been settled there. Sort of heretics of various kinds go there because it's so tolerant. It's sort of an experiment in multiculturalism in some ways. But it's beginning to fall apart a bit, and it's got a bonkers political system. Because diversity is not necessarily its strength. It's not its strength, I think it's fair to say.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Now, Augustus has been elected to rule this kingdom. He's a gigantic man like Peter. He looks like a bear. His party trick, well, he has multiple party tricks. He likes to amuse his courtiers by snapping horseshoes with one hand. I don't know how you do that, but he does it anyway. Presumably with fingers.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
His fingers. You could just snap your fingers and snap a horseshoe. Maybe. Yeah. I guess. If you're just doing it with one hand. He loves collecting porcelain. He has dozens of mistresses. He fathered 354 illegitimate children, which I think is a lot. Wow. He collected lions, hyenas, monkeys, and meerkats. Meerkats? Yeah, meerkats. Is he the first European royal to collect a meerkat?
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I think he probably is. They were always shipping animals to him and they'd open the box and the animal would be dead. That was the usual scenario. It's pretty tough on the animals. And he's not one of history's greatest animal lovers because his real...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
You know, his real party piece, his specialism, the thing for which he goes down in history is he's probably history's most proficient fox tosser. So if you're interested in tossing a fox, Augustus the Strong is the absolute model. So once, when he was receiving the King of Prussia... To greet the king of Russia, he tossed 200 foxes, six wildcats, two badgers, and two beavers.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And when I say tossed, he tossed them to their deaths. That's what he does. Oh, my God. So basically, his servants will line up with these beavers and badgers. He just grabs them, throws them up in the air. Throws them in the air? So high that they come crashing down to earth and die. It's like, brilliant. So he doesn't catch them? No. Are they splattered over the ceiling?
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And I think it's also fair to say, Tom, he doesn't have the best and healthiest lifestyle. No. Because actually, although he's taken supreme power, he then sort of gives it away because he says to his mother, you know, can you run Russia for me, please? Because I just want to hang around with my mates, with my soldiers. And his lathes. And lathes. And he wants to spend a lot of time
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Surely he does this outdoors. Oh, right. Okay. So you go into the garden. There's a menagerie there all lined up. And everyone applauds politely. It's just throwing foxes around. I mean, it seems bonkers. Hurrah for your majesty. Yeah. The late 17th, early 18th century. This is very high class entertainment.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
so don't knock it and actually to be fair let's not knock it until we've done it because we've never tried it or seen it Peter loves this of course he does very much his thing isn't it of course the strong will throw a beaver to his death and then Peter will embrace him kiss him and say oh you're brilliant I love this I love you does Peter have a go at the fox tossing
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I don't know that he does, actually. Maybe he would have used his bellows or something. I mean, it seems very much his kind of sport. I'd like to think he tried his hand at it, wouldn't you? Yeah, he'd try to toss a bear probably knowing him. Peter said to his nobleman, I prize Augustus more than the whole of you put together, not because he's a king, but merely because I like him.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Which is quite sweet. And actually, in between killing all these animals, Augustus takes the opportunity to pitch an idea to Peter that will have massive, massive long-term political consequences. Because both of them hate and fear their northern neighbours, the Swedes. They can't stand the Swedes. The Swedes, the most formidable and modern military power in northern Europe.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And Augustus says, listen, The Swedish king has died and his successor, who's a bloke called Charles XII, he's a total nobody. He's only 15. He's a teenager. Let's join forces against the Swedes and divide up their Baltic empire between us. And Peter...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
who we know loves Augustus the Strong, says, you know, that sounds brilliant because actually my war against the Ottomans is a complete non-event. Total damp squib. I'm never going to beat the Ottomans. Forget the back sea and we'll move on to the Baltic. Let's keep working on this idea and one day let's do it. Now, in the meantime, he has to go back to Moscow, which he does.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He goes back to Moscow with all his kind of shipwrights and whatnot, and all his sort of, he's fired with enthusiasm for his westernizing project. He goes to his estate at Preobrazhenskaya. Very good. I was looking forward to that. I could see it looming in the notes. I thought, okay, I've just got to go for it. And he arrives on the night of the 4th of September, 1698.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And the next day, the 5th, all his noblemen say, oh, brilliant, you're back. They come to go and greet him. He embraces them. He kisses them. And then out of his back pocket, he pulls out a razor. And then just starts shaving them, cutting off their beards. They are so stunned. They don't know how to react. And he's like very violently, forcibly shaving them.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Now, the thing is, we did a whole episode, didn't we, about beards and about this business. And for people who missed it, to very briefly explain, to Orthodox Russians, the beard was a gift from God. And to shave it was a sin. Ivan the Terrible had specifically said, it's a sin that the blood of all the martyrs cannot cleanse because it is to deface the image of man created by God.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And Peter says, no, this is nonsense. A beard is backwards. And he makes everybody shave off their beards. And in the long run, if you want to have a beard, you have to pay a special tax and you get a medallion with a picture of a beard on it. I love that. And then you're allowed to have a beard. And this is just one of a host of changes.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He loves the German suburb, so this place we talked about last time, which is full of kind of Scotsmen and Dutchmen and things. And they're all smoking pipes outside Protestant churches and talking to women. Which the Orthodox Church doesn't approve of at all. Which the Orthodox Church doesn't approve of at all. And his closest friends, or some of them at least, come from the German suburb.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So basically, up to this point, Russian noblemen had worn these caftans, floppy colored boots, very exotic garb. But also appropriate to the cold weather. Right. I mean, it does keep you warm, right? So layers. They believe in layers. Peter does not believe in that. He says this is backwards. Again, it's Asiatic. It's not right. He cuts the sleeves of people's robes off.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Like you turn up to a state reception or something. Peter the Great will come at you with a razor and a pair of scissors, probably Dutch or English scissors, and will be cutting off bits of your clothing. He says, I want people to wear what they call French or German style coats. He says, I want to see waistcoats. I want to see britches.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I want women to wear bonnets and skirts, all of this kind of thing. What about corsets? If you go to Moscow, they hang up models of the approved costumes. And Peter says, when people are coming into the city... The guards have to have pairs of scissors as well. And if people are wearing long caftans, the guards will cut them. Snip, snip. Snip, snip. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So it obviously didn't work among the great mass of the population at all. But among the elite, it did, because foreign ambassadors say that by the middle of the first decade of the 18th century, at balls and at banquets and things, people will be dressing in the German manner. It must have been so cold, though.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, but that's fine. But I mean, would you rather do that, or would you rather take your chances with Peter the Great, a razor, scissors? No, I wouldn't. I mean, it's an invidious choice. It's not the only thing he changes. He changes the calendar. So up till this point, the Russians have dated time from the creation of the world. And Peter says, well, that's rubbish.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Let's do it from Jesus's birth like everybody else does in Europe. So they adopt the Julian calendar. They don't really have very good coinage. They were just using bits of other people's coins. They'd kind of cut up. And he says, come on. He loves the English coinage. Because he'd studied the mint, hadn't he, in the Tower of London? He'd been to the mint. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He says, you must have coinage just like the English do. Now... For him personally, there's a big change as well. And all the time he'd been gone, 18 months, he had not written once to his wife, Eudokia. So people may remember from the last episode. She's pink. Yes. Pink, hopeless and helpless, I think was the description. Yeah. He sees her as the embodiment of conservatism and orthodoxy.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And while he's been away, he's obviously thought to himself, I can't stand her. She's got to go. So he basically summons her. She's like, oh, great, you're home. And he says, well, I am. You've got to go, I'm afraid. You're off to a nunnery. And he takes his son, Alexis, from her and gives him to his sister.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And this, as we will see in our final episode of this series, is a very traumatic moment for young Alexis. And their relationship will be difficult, I think it's fair to
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So we talked last time, we promised we'd talk about General Gordon. We always like General Gordon on the show. This is a different General Gordon, not the bloke who died in Khartoum. But still a friend of the show. Yeah. He's a Scottish mercenary who came from the Highlands. He came from a Catholic family, so he basically left Scotland. And then he had an amazing career, actually.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
It is. And poor old Eudokia, she was forced into a carriage and sent to a convent in Suzdal and her head was shaved. So like the Japanese. Exactly. And she was renamed Helen and she had to become a nun with the name of Helen. Now,
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Of course, he has come home because he's heard about this mutiny among the Streltsy, the people who had carried out that horrendous massacre in front of him when he was 10 years old. And he is clearly determined that he will use this as a pretext to finish them off forever. There's a really paranoid side, I think, to Peter. He reminds me of Henry VIII.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
You know, in insecurity, in Henry VIII's case, I guess it's because his father won the throne at Bosworth on the battlefield and he's always worried about the dynasty. In Peter's case, it's because he had to fight. Right. I mean, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you. No.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he is determined to make a massive example of the mutineers and to show that it was... He believes that this is part of a massive conspiracy orchestrated by his sister, Sophia, who's, of course, in a nunnery herself. And so he has all the mutineers...
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
brought to his estate at Praia Brasanscuia there you go Tom loving it I'm just going to do it unnecessarily now even when it's not relevant I'm probably not even pronouncing it correctly to be honest and at his estate this is the dark side of Peter he commissions his men to build 14 special torture chambers so they bring the mutineers
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And every week for six days a week, the Streltsy mutineers are interrogated. They are beaten with sticks. They're roasted over open fires. And above all, they are lashed with a thing called the knout, which is this massive leather whip. 25 strokes of the knout will kill you. And it literally kind of rips the skin from your back. And it's kind of like an assembly line.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And Peter and his friends and his cronies and his jolly company are the people doing the torturing. So not so jolly now. Not jolly now. And he would absolutely join in and he will be beating these people with an ivory-handled cane. And it's so violent that the patriarch actually says to Peter, this is too much, stop. And Peter is livid about this.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he says to the patriarch, no, Russian society is infected with the disease and I am burning it out. And actually, what he gets out of the Streltsy, they confess and they say, we'd planned to storm the capital. We were going to burn down the German suburb. We were going to get rid of the foreigners. And we were going to get Sophia to rule over us again.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, they're saying what he wants to. Sophia almost certainly didn't know about this. It's not that she had instigated the plot. But Peter has never forgiven her. He goes and interrogates her person at her convent. He says her head must be shaved. She must take religious vows and become a nun. And she basically is locked away and is never seen again. She dies when she's 47, 1704.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
She had previously, of course, been in the nunnery, but had been relatively well treated. And now she's effectively a political prisoner. And that's not the end of it. So Peter is determined. And here I think you see loads of countries have a violent history or a history of they have show trials or whatever. I mean, we've done a series on the French Revolution and whatnot.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He fought for the Swedes against the Poles. Then he fought for the Poles against the Swedes. Then he fought for the Swedes against the Poles again. And then he fought for the Poles against the Swedes again. That's fine, isn't it? That's legitimate. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, nobody really minds about that. That's how 17th century warfare works. It's basically like being a star footballer.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
But there's a definite theme, I think, in Russian history. of a kind of a fear of enemies within, and a conspiracy, and a foreign influence, and a belief in show trials and public punishment. Yeah, well, show executions as well. Show executions. So he says, well, the Streltsy, you know, they've got to go. And hundreds of them are arrested, brought in carts to his estate at Preobrazhen Square,
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And they are hanged on a special gibbet in front of a crowd. Others are beheaded over an open trench. Quite a few are broken on the wheel, aren't they? Which is a hideous death. In Red Square. Yeah. And actually a really sort of chilling thing. About 200 of them are taken to the convent, Novodevici Convent, where Sophia is locked up.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And Peter has the most prominent members hanged and strung up outside her window, and they are dangling there. One of them is holding a piece of paper, and that's meant to symbolize their petition that they were going to issue, asking her to rule over them. And they are left to hang there outside her window all winter, kind of just dangling, kind of swaying in the wind.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And whenever she looks out the window, there they are. I mean, you can only imagine. How horrific the sight, stench or whatever that must have been for her. I mean, actually, that isn't the most shocking thing. The most shocking thing is he says he insists that all his friends take part in the executions.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So there's an Austrian diplomat who actually describes Peter himself wielding the axe, beheading five people. you know, in public so that everybody can see. I mean, an incredibly gruesome scene. So he did it, Dominic, but was he right to do it? Well, Robert K. Massey, his biographer, he doesn't say he was, but he says this was a public demonstration. of Peter's seriousness about his project.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He eliminated the one great obstacle to his modernizing mission, which was the Streltsy. And effectively, yeah, he was right to do it. That it's a terrible thing, but he was right to do it. I mean, I personally don't think publicly beheading people is the way forward.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
No, I wouldn't do that. So he ends up disbanding the Streltsy completely the year later in 1699. That leaves him really in a position of absolute power. And at first, how does he spend that political capital? He actually just has endless parties and feasts. Huzzah. Yeah. So there's a lot of like mad costumes, mocking religious rituals. They'll do the sign of the cross with two pipes.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Is there bear action? Lots of bears. Bellows. Dwarfs jumping out of pies, all of this kind of thing. And Peter often, he'll get incredibly drunk and then he'll have a massive fight with his friends. I mean, there's stories of him kind of drawing his sword and attacking his friends. He's very, very hot tempered. I do urge people to watch The Great if they want to see this on a television screen.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Right. But what's on his mind clearly the whole time is this idea that Augustus the Strong had suggested. You know, why don't we have a crack at the Swedes? Why don't we try to carve up the Baltic between us? Now, the thing is, he's still normally fighting the Ottomans, so he's got to finish that off first. And in July 1700, he agrees a 30-year truce with the Ottomans.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
You transfer from team to team. I think you can't fight against your own country, but you can fight for others. And that's completely legitimate. And he ended up serving the Tsars. And this guy, General Gordon, becomes basically Peter's chief military advisor, his tutor, I suppose.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Peter will keep his conquest at Azov that we talked about at the beginning of this episode, but he will give up all hope of access to the Black Sea. Because now his eye is on the Baltic. Exactly. So the news of the treaty reaches Moscow on the 18th of August 1700, and they have a massive fireworks display in celebration.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And the very next day, the 19th of August, 1700, Peter declares war on Sweden. And with that... The Great Northern War begins. And for Peter, for Russia, and for the whole of Northern and Eastern Europe, the world will never be the same again.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Goodbye. Hi, everybody. You're still here. Right at the end of the episode, I'm very impressed by your commitment. But listen, I have a question for you. I want to ask you something in confidence. Do you sometimes listen to the adverts on these episodes? And do you sometimes think, do you know what? I wish that the listeners to this podcast
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I wish they were listening to an advert about my brand rather than the other stuff that Tom and Dominic are promoting on here. If you have thought that, there is, of course, only one way to find out what that would be like. You can disrupt the procession of adverts. You could be the next HSBC Premier or the many other tremendous companies that have advertised on The Rest Is History.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And then there's another mercenary who is called France Lefort, who's from Geneva, who basically is a massive drinker and a dancer, charming. His house, we're told, is always full of women, who Peter's broker for Robert K. Massey describes as rollicking, buxom, sturdy wenches who did not take offense at Barak's language or the admiring touch of rough male hands.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And you could put your brand in front of millions of like-minded listeners by advertising on The Rest Is History and, indeed, the other shows on the Goldhanger Network. Now, you may be thinking, I don't know what the Goalhanger Network is. Goalhanger are the company behind this very show. And if you are in the market to increase the value of your brand, Goalhanger would love to hear from you.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
You can register your interest or indeed your company's interest by going to goalhanger.com right now. And that is goal, G-O-A-L, hanger, H-A-N-G-E-R, .com.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So that kind of gives you a sense of the general vibe at these occasions. I think it's fair to say. Yes.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Right. Because it's been like chopping stones or whatever he's doing.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He is. He's very proud of them. In an age when people would be proud of not having calloused hands, he's quite the reverse. So over time, Peter and this bloke, Lefort, and their pals, so actually he picks up Lefort's girlfriend, who's called Anna Mongs, and she loves a drink and a laugh, and she becomes his mistress.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Anyway, Peter and all these pals, they basically, they form something that they call the Jolly Company. I feel, I don't actually think either of us would have really enjoyed life in the Jolly Company.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
I think you might enjoy it for a day. It's basically a stag do, a massive stag do. I hate stag dos. There's often about 80 of them, sometimes as many as 200. And remember, Peter is the Tsar of Russia and he's 17 years old. They will roam the land, basically turning up at Russian noblemen's houses and saying, you know, put us up. And they'll have these enormous feasts.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
The feast normally starts at midday. It's actually very much like our working lunches at The Rest Is History with the production team. Yeah, it is. The feast starts at midday and it lasts till the next day. They have a pause every now and again to have a smoke or to play bowls or to shoot muskets or let off fireworks. And isn't this kind of shenanigans with bears and bellows and things?
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Right, exactly. So there's a lot of beer drinking. It's very like The Rest Is History working lunches. There's a lot of beer drinking and toasts, but there's also pranks. We love a prank. So if there's a fat man there, they'll often strip the fat man and drag him across ice on his bare bottom. They would shove candles into you, insert candles and light them.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
At least one man is killed by having air blown up him with bellows. So they insert bellows into him and blow you up. That's what I remember. The bellows. Jape. Would you burst?
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, this is what's happening. Now there is a slight, you could say there's a slight political side to this because we talked last time about how Peter loves to kind of do this role playing and quite subversive role playing. He loves giving people like fake titles and nicknames and stuff.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So the Jolly Company have their own sort of what's called a mock czar, a guy who he calls the Prince Caesar, who's a friend of his called Fedor Romadonovsky. And Peter calls him your majesty. When Peter writes a letter to him, he always signs himself, you know, I'm your slave, I'm your bondsman and stuff. And this guy, Romadonovsky, has to preside over the meetings of the Jolly Company.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He almost pretends to be the Tsar. But he loves a prank. So his great prank, you would love this, Tom, if you turned up. When you arrive, especially if you're kind of a newbie, you have to drink a large cup. Peppered brandy that is offered to you by a trained bear. And if you say, oh, it's not for me. I don't like peppered brandy. I don't like trained bears either while we're at it.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
The bear has been trained not just to offer you cups of brandy, but to strip you naked. Imagine being stripped by a bear. That's not the kind of thing that Wojtek got up to, I'm glad to say. No, no, our previous bear. We don't know the name of this bear, but it sounds absolutely splendid. So as time goes on, this becomes more and more formalised and ritualised.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So by the 1690s, the Jolly Company has been organised into what Peter calls the all-joking, all-drunken synod of fools and jesters. This clearly does have a slight political edge because it's a parody of the church. So they have cardinals, they have bishops, they have deacons. Peter is just a deacon.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, he can. I think what lies behind this. So actually, he started doing this, the all-drunken synod, after there was the accession of a new patriarch. who was very anti-Western, very traditionalist. He was called Adrian. And Peter despised Adrian. And I think he clearly wanted the all-drunken synod to mock the Orthodox Church, but he knew he couldn't do it directly.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So the rituals are Catholic, exactly as you say, because it would be far too subversive.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
No, he's not at all. He is still pious, but he's fascinated by other forms of Christianity as we'll see. When he goes abroad, he wants to find out all about them. He's curious. Yeah, so that's why he's talking to Gilbert Burnett. I think it's fair to say he's a very violent man. He's very impatient, but he's not intolerant of other ideas.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He's interested in other ideas, I think, which makes him different from a lot of Russian czars. But you still wouldn't want to see him coming towards you with a pair of bellows. A pair of bellows and a bear. That's terrifying. So he has a mock prince pope, who's his old tutor, who's a man called Nikita Zotov, who presides over this synod.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
So on feast days, on religious feast days, to mock the church, they have their biggest kind of antics and rituals. And the pope wears gloves made of mice skins. It's bonkers. So on Christmas, they ride around on sleighs, a sleigh drawn by 12 bald men. The mock pope is wearing a tin hat and a costume made of playing cards, which seems bonkers.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And the others are all wearing their clothes inside out, as you said, gloves of mice skins. Oh, I thought it was the pope who wore them. So everyone's wearing it. That's a lot of mice you've had to be killed. Oh, yeah. And their sleighs are pulled by pigs and bears. Such a lot of bears. I don't believe you could train a bear to pull it. Well, maybe you could.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Surely not the same bear who's stripping people naked.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so is Peter doing anything other than sort of blowing people up with bellows and things? Yes. He's doing loads of naval stuff. So he goes up to Archangel. You mentioned Archangel in the previous episode. It's on the White Sea. It's the only Russian outlet to the sea. It's a little bit of a forerunner of St.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Petersburg, actually, because it has English and Dutch sailors who live there. It has sort of churches, Protestant churches. Yeah. When you go to Archangel... There's taverns full of Dutch sea captains smoking pipes and talking about William of Orange. And he loves that. And he goes up there and it's actually at this point that he designs a flag for his sort of navy.
The Rest Is History
563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Because he's very interested in Holland, he models it on the flag of the Dutch States General, but he reorders the colours. So it's the white, blue and red flag of today's Russian Federation. So it's basically Dutch. It's Dutch, exactly.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
Yeah, he doesn't play that up as much as he could. So his first war is he thinks I'll have a little crack at the Ottomans because they'd still got this deal with the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and co. They're meant to be fighting the Ottomans. So he decides he wants to capture Azov on the Black Sea. The first go at it in 1695 doesn't work, but in 1696...
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He goes down the River Don with loads of Cossacks and he captures Azov from the Ottomans. And this is the first Russian victory for 20 years. So it's a great moment. And he has his outlet now. It's not quite on the Black Sea. It's on the Sea of Azov. So he needs to go a little bit further to get into the Black Sea. However, it's a start. He has a triumph in Moscow.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And here again, you see his kind of westernizing ambitions. Because previously, when Russian Tsars had triumphs, they were very orthodox occasions. There's lots of sort of chanting and waving around of icons. So very second Rome. Exactly. But Peter's is really very first Rome. He has statues of Hercules and of Mars.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
They put Julius Caesar's, I came, I saw, I conquered, Veni, Vidi, Vici, on kind of classical gates. As always, Peter... His role playing, his performative humility is on display. So he gets this bloke who was the Prince Pope, who presumably is not now dressed in playing cards with kind of my skin gloves to lead the procession.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
And he walks with the captains of his galleys wearing an ordinary German captain's uniform.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
He had. He'd done well. He'd done very well. And then just weeks after this victory comes an unbelievable announcement from the foreign ministry. Peter is sending a great embassy to Europe, to England, to Denmark, to the Dutch states, to Brandenburg, to Venice.
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
This embassy is going to be led by his mate, the Franz Lefort, and they're going to recruit officers and shipwrights and sailors to come back to Russia and to build a fleet, and they're going to learn from the advanced nations of the West. Now, this is an extraordinary thing for Rizal to do, to send some of his closest mates. But then...
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563. Peter the Great: Bloodbath in the Kremlin (Part 2)
A rumor goes around Moscow, Peter's actually going to go with them. And he's not going to go with them as the Tsar. He's going to go as a member of the diplomatic staff in disguise. So this is his business about pretending he's not the Tsar, which he loves to do. Even though he's by miles the tallest member of the embassy. He's the tallest person.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Long had the snake lived in the dungeon, coiled in the black and filthy water, bloated from feasting on the Empress's prisoners.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Because serving alongside them was a soldier called Cacaumanos, who later wrote a military manual. And in this manual, he wrote, Araltes campaigned with the emperor and performed great deeds of valor against the enemy, as was fitting for one of his noble race and personal ability, Araltes Harold.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And it's fascinating because that suggests that there are people in Constantinople now who are aware of Harold's noble descent. So, though I think they see the manual is probably written after he's become king. So after he has, spoiler alert, after he's returned to Norway. Anyway, they smashed the Bulgars. They captured the Bulgar king. They cut off his nose. They gouged out his eyes.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
They led him back in chains to Constantinople. And Cacaumanos says that the emperor rewarded Auraltes for his valor and gave him the title of spatharocandidatos, which is a court rank, not a military one. So a kind of rank at court, very prestigious for any foreigner, let alone a barbarian from the wilds of the north.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So he now gets an even fancier sword and he gets a special golden torque called the Maniakion, which he gets to wear. It's a bit like the Ottomans giving Nelson that massive great jewel. Yeah, and Harold's only 25 at this point. So he's clearly made a name for himself and he's done extremely well and it's all very exciting.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
But now this is where the sort of Game of Thrones side replaces the Lord of the Rings. So the Emperor Michael, he's Michael IV. He's called Michael the Paphlagonian. He's from the Black Sea coast of Anatolia. And his brother John, who was the eunuch kind of Lord Chamberlain, had got him a job at the court. He's got all his brothers a job, hasn't he? And basically all his cousins and stuff.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So there's one called Anthony the Fat, who becomes the Bishop of Nicomedia, thanks to John's string pulling. And John is essentially the kind of prime minister, isn't he? He is. Littlefinger. Littlefinger or Varys. He's a eunuch, so he's Lord Varys, isn't he? Yeah, he's Varys. From Game of Thrones. So this guy, Michael, he had seduced Zoe. He'd possibly murdered her husband in his bath.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He's now been emperor for six years. He's in his late 20s. Michael Sellers says he was as fresh as a blossom, bright eyed and apple cheeked. Nice. So that's nice. Unfortunately, Michael's good looks are starting to curdle. Because he's always suffered from epilepsy and it's getting much worse.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And when he has fits, this is hidden from visitors to the court behind a series of elaborate curtains which can be deployed at any moment. But he's now suffering from edema, dropsy, which means that his body is being grotesquely swollen with fluid. And by late 1041, it's pretty obvious that he's dying of this. There's no cure. They don't know what to do.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And now he has come to the golden city of Caesar, Constantinople, and he is a recruit in the Varangian Guard. And we will be finding out how giant serpents feature in the story later on. But for now, we are in 1035. And what is going on?
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Although I suppose they could try and drain him, but that doesn't work. Now, John, the eunuch, says to him, look, you're going to have to name a successor, and ideally from our family, because we want to stay on top. And as luck would have it, they have another Michael, who is their sister's son. It's brilliant, isn't it, how everyone is called Michael? We've got loads of Michaels. Or Harold.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He says, why don't you adopt this Michael? You and Zoe adopt him as your son. He'll be named Caesar and we'll put him in a townhouse in the suburbs and he can hang around. And when you die, he'll come in as Michael V. So we come to the 10th of December, 1041. Michael IV is bloated, he's swollen, fluid everywhere, shambles. So his loving days are over. His loving days are over.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He's taken to the monastery of St. Cosmas and St. Damien. And there he's given holy orders, actually. It's not just kind of confession. He's given holy orders. He's tonsured like a monk. And then he dies. Meanwhile, Michael V, he's brought to the palace. It's really smooth succession. It works perfectly. So everything looks great. However, there is a twist. So we've mentioned only in passing Zoe.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Zoe is now in her late 50s. She is the one person in the palace who has the blood of the Macedonian dynasty. I kind of imagine her as looking like Diana Dawes. Yes, who would she be played by now? She's quite sort of... Blousy. I was going to say blousy. Well, I can tell you what Michael Sellers says. Zoe was well-rounded, though not very tall.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
She had hair of gold and her entire body glowed with the paleness of her skin. There was little sign of her age. In fact, if you noticed the perfect proportions of her limbs and did not know her, you would have thought she was a young woman, for her skin was unwrinkled, glossy and smooth, with no lines anywhere." I think it's fair to say Michael Sellers is slightly objectifying Zoe.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He is, isn't he? He's behaved poorly. He's let himself down. Or he's paying compliment to the power of the unguent merchants of Constantinople. He is, because as we'd established last time, she loves a potion or cream. So hence, wrinkle-free? Wrinkle-free. Ointments. She's basically massively into ointments.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
She is, Michael Sellers says, a woman of passionate desires prepared equally for life or death.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Now, she had placed a bet on Michael IV, and actually that had gone horribly wrong because once he'd... I mean, you say his loving days were over when he became swollen with dropsy, but actually his loving days had ceased before that because as soon as he became emperor, he basically locked her in the women's quarters and said, I've had enough of you. Don't come out.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So now she's back, and she's got this Michael V, who's her adoptive son. Do things work out better with Michael V? They do not. He is determined to have a break with his predecessor and bring in all his own people, Scythian eunuchs. So these may well be Slavs or Pechenegs, and he'd get rid of the old guards. But the person he really hates with an absolute passion is Zoe.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
What Michael Sellers says, once he had addressed her as mistress, but now the very idea made him want to bite off his own tongue and spit it away in disgust. So we'll put him down as undecided. Yeah, he's not a fan. And he waits for a few months till Easter 1042 and then he makes his move.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So we left Harold in the last episode at the point in which he has just enlisted in the Varangian Guard, this kind of special forces unit of largely Scandinavian mercenaries. Very baggy trousers. With great silk trousers, exactly.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So on Easter Sunday, these Scythian eunuchs burst into her chamber and they drag her out and they drag her before him. And he says, I know you've been trying to poison me. You know, you're clearly as guilty as hell. You're going to be sent off to the Prince's Islands in the Sea of Marmara, just off Constantinople. And you'll be sent to a nunnery. Get thee to a nunnery. I mean, literally.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So very reminiscent of what's going to happen to Edith. a few years later, when Edward the Confessor packs her off to a nunnery. I mean, nunneries are obviously very useful if you want to get, you know, an unwanted queen. Exactly. So we're told she was immediately put on a ship along with certain men who were given free hand to insult her.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
She stripped of her purple robes and her head was shaved, and I quote, as though she was a common whore. That's very harsh. Very harsh. And I imagine her hair. Golden hair. Golden hair and much treated again with all kind of ointments and...
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
salves and pomades and now casually thrown aside very poor now Michael has clearly made a massive miscalculation here because Michael Sellers the chronicler who knows a lot about kind of court politics says you know everyone despised him he was regarded as a slave to his emotions erratic and all this And Zoe was very popular in the city.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So she has been the most glamorous person in the life of Constantinople since she was basically born in 978. She'd been born in the purple. Her father was an emperor. Her uncle was an emperor. Her grandfather was an emperor. She's part of the furniture. She's a great favorite of the crowds. So on Easter Monday, the next day, the word spreads to the city. Everyone was worried about the Empress.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Deep down, men knew matters had got out of hand and they were not afraid to speak up about it, says Michael Sellers. The Emperor Michael V, he sends the city's prefect to read out a statement in the...
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
in the forum to explain what he's done and the crowd go absolutely berserk smashing everything up rioting and whatnot they end up breaking into the cathedral Hagia Sophia they get the patriarch to start ringing the bells they rouse the city there's general sort of chaos and fighting and looting and stuff there's actually a fragment in the sagas
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
by a guy called Valgaard, who was a guardsman, a Varangian guard from Iceland, who ended up becoming a Skald, a poet, who says, You see, I think that's brilliant. And I was saying earlier how I prefer kind of blank verse to rhyming verse when it's Vikings.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Now, no sooner has he enlisted, Tom, the news reaches the imperial city that Arab corsairs have sailed into the Aegean, raiding the towns of the Greek islands and carrying the men, women and children. off into slavery. And so for Harold Hardrada, the adventure begins. Brilliant. Very exciting. So actually, he's now going to be on campaign for the next six or seven years.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Also, Dominic, just to say about the patriarch, Alexios, that John the Eunuch, the Varus of Constantinople, he had tried to get rid of him and replace him. And there's all kinds of weird political currents that we can only vaguely glimpse, I think, that are going on, including the Varangians. So the Varangians, their loyalty is pledged to the imperial family.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
They're mercenaries working for the imperial family. And I think it's a fair assumption that they feel very put out about the arrival of these Scythian eunuchs. The Pechenegs. And there's some form of power struggle, I think, between the two of them. And my guess is that they are probably in on this riot. And it's all being planned.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And it's actually a little bit more of a counter-coup than it is really a riot. Anyway, by the Monday afternoon, it's become a massive street battle. It's Michael and his Scythians against the mob and the Varangians. And on the Tuesday, I mean, this would be a superb kind of HBO series or something.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Because on the Tuesday, the attackers break into the palace, partly through the emperor's box in the Hippodrome, which has a tunnel leading through to the palace or corridor. They kind of fight their way into the imperial quarters. And guess what? Michael has escaped. He's gone off with his uncle Constantine. They've gone down to the dock. The palace has its own dock.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
They've rushed down to the dock. They grab an imperial yacht. I love it that they have yachts. They have imperial yachts. I know a lot. And then they head off in this yacht. But it's obviously not an ocean-going yacht because they can only go so far. So actually, they just go down. They don't even really get out of the city.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
They dock by the Studios Monastery, which is near the city walls, and they get out and they go to find sanctuary in the monastery. Now, in the meantime, the rioters have got hold of Zoe. She's been brought back from the island, shaven head, which is sad. They've also dug out her sister, Theodora. Who's been in a nunnery for eight years. She's been in a nunnery for ages. Willingly or?
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
No, I think slightly unwillingly. Yeah, okay. So they dug her out. They've got the two of them and they say, right, we want you to rule as co-empresses. Let's just get rid of this Michael bloke. We hate him. So what to do with him? A load of rioters and Varangian guards break into this monastery, totally ignoring all the stuff about sanctuary. They drag him and his uncle outside.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Now, at this point, I have to say, Michael, who's behaved poorly, I think, throughout, he completely shames himself. He does not react as a Viking would react. A Viking would meet his death with a quip and a poem. So how would you react in this situation? With a quip and a poem. I've already told you. Yes, I think I would.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
There's no doubt in my mind. I hope the opportunity doesn't come about for me to hold you to that. Well, if I'm ever taking sanctuary in a monastery in present-day Istanbul and rioters and Scandinavians drag me out, I hope I don't do what he does, which is he clings to the altar sobbing like a baby.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Then he clings to the pillars, weeping, praying to God, and worse, saying, it was all my uncle's fault. I never wanted to do it. That's low. I would do that. That would be me. So they take him outside. They hold him down. This is a bit that younger listeners will very much enjoy. He's screaming and shouting and they gouge out his eyes. So the point of doing that is if you're mutilated...
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
you can't continue to be emperor. Right. As with kings. So it's what Godwin has done to Alfred back in England, gouging out the eyes. As with that, there's always the risk that you may end up killing the person you blinded. Well, risk. Is that a risk or is that an added bonus, Tom? Well, yes, I suppose. I suppose. So listeners may be wondering more about Harald Hardrada.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
The sagas say the person who does the eye gouging is Harald. He's the person who did it. So this is in King Harald's saga. It's a scowl called Theodolf. He wrote this, And Snorri, the chronicler, writing two centuries later, he says,
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
In these songs and many others, it is said that Harold himself blinded the Greek emperor and they would surely have named some Duke, Count or other great man if they had not known this to be the true account. And King Harold himself and other men who were with him spread this account. So the historical method in operation there.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Can't be sure exactly how long, but let's say roughly six or seven years. As that Adventures in Time book, which I recommend to our listeners, describes his life is a blur of action, racing into battle on the deck of a war galley, storming ashore on an island at dawn, scaling the walls of an enemy castle, dealing out death with a sweep of his sword.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So there is the historical method at the heart of the Icelandic sagas. Men said it, numerous sources. We've sifted the sources, and it's very clear that Harold Hardrada did this gouging. So you may well say, all's well that ends well. Michael, sans eyes, he dies of his wounds a few months later. There may also have been some castration involved. The sources differ on that.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
I don't know if Harold was also responsible for that. Let's say he was. So he didn't write a poem about that? No, he didn't. He scattered the genitals far. Yeah. If listeners want to send in their own poems, I wonder what that poem would be like. Harry in for the ravens. Address them, please, to Tom Holland, courtesy of Goldhanger.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Zoe and Theodora reign briefly as co-empresses, and then Zoe marries a nobleman, and he becomes Constantine IX. Now, clearly, the Varangians have really benefited from this. They regain their old position at the top of the tree. Harold is their commander. We're told that a lot of gold changed his hands, so Michael Sellers.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
The revenues budgeted for the military were set aside for the use of others, a cluster of sycophants and those who were appointed to guard the empresses. So that's Harold. Harold and the Varangian guards. So... Things appear to have worked out brilliantly for him. He's now very rich. He's more powerful than ever.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He's the right hand of the Empress, a genuine player in the politics of Europe's most glittering empire. All looks good. And then, Tom, one day, he is woken by a ferocious hammering on his door. When he opens it, he sees guards outside and their faces are cold.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And admirers of Dominic's Adventures in Time series will know that when guards with cold faces appear on the scene, excitement is bound to follow. A giant snake is never far away. And so adventure will follow in the second part of this super-sore-away episode. We'll see you then. Hello, I'm William Durimple.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Now, actually, the truth is we're getting most of this from the Icelandic sagas, which, as we said last time, were written down at least 200 years later. by people living in a different world. I mean, living in Iceland, I couldn't really be further away from Constantinople and still be in Europe. That's right. And they're also much more obviously Christian.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. So, Dominic, cold-faced guards have intruded on Harold. Absolute cliffhanger. What's going on? Well, this is a good point to stop and ask ourselves how true any of this story is. So, as we said in the first episode, any biography of Harold Hardrada has to rely on these very colourful sagas that have three massive problems.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Number one, they're written down centuries later. Number two, they often wildly contradict each other and the stuff in Constantinople is often incredibly confused and contradictory. And number three, as we've said before, many of the elements of them are clearly fantastical. So,
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
For the stuff we would have been describing, effectively what biographers of Harold are doing is trying to stitch together a plausible narrative out of disparate elements in the sagas. And that is assuming that any of it might be true. That any of it. But we know that some of it clearly is true because of, for example, the stuff about Auraltes. Right.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
But his involvement in what was clearly a very celebrated episode... If he's your hero, you would want to intrude him into something like that. I mean, it would be like, you know, kind of Flashman or something. Yeah, the eye gouging. There's a bit of a Flashman quality, isn't there, to Harold Hardrada's life? Slightly.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
So there are three elements that we haven't fitted in that appear in the sagas that historians and biographers have sort of grappled with. Number one, at some point, Harold is imprisoned. possibly by Zoe. Number two, there is some kind of love affair, possibly with Zoe, but probably not, probably with an aristocrat called Maria.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And number three, there is a death-defying escape by ship from Constantinople. And they could be completely made up. But they might not be. Can I just ask, Dominic, I mean, the key thing for Harold has been to get gold. Yes.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And so the question hanging over all of this, if there is, you know, he does get locked up and escapes and makes a death-defying escape on a ship, as we will explore, where is his gold? How is he getting his gold out? Has he sent it back already? Or what is happening there? Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And they are doing an awful lot of projection. There's a lot of fictionalization. And there is a lot of use of literary formulae, which means it is very difficult for us to be certain, to have any degree of certainty about what he did. However, we have what people at the time would have called Roman sources, what we would call Byzantine sources.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And the guy in Denmark is a Jarl called Svein, who is Knut's nephew. So it's still a family kind of row, really, isn't it?
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
They give a sense of the kind of campaigns the empire was fighting. So we can sketch out a very tentative narrative, I think. We do know that they did fight pirates in the spring of 1035. So Snorri Sturluson's saga, King Harold's saga, which is part of the cycle called Heimskringla,
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
That tallies with the account of a Greek chronicler called John Skylitzes, who talks about ships from North Africa attacking the Cyclades. So there probably was a bit of action in the Aegean.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And then probably later that summer, 1035, the Varangians are sent to the far eastern borderlands of the empire, so Armenia, where the imperial army is besieging a city called Berkri on the shores of Lake Van.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Now, this is a world that is very kind of fragmented and confusing because the Abbasid Caliphate is largely broken up, and there's all kinds of rival emirates across the Middle East, kind of Arab, Turkic, Kurdish, and so on. So it's sort of all very confusing. The Roman army is besieging this city. The Vikings normally hate sieges. They're no good at them.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And one of the things that I always thought was intriguing is that, Ellis, if so, Harald Hardrada's wife, one of her sisters has married Edward the Exile, who is the half-brother of Edward the Confessor. So even England is part of this snarl of even Scandinavian matrimonial alliances. I mean, it's so odd, isn't it?
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Theo and Tabby were telling me about a series called Vikings Valhalla, which I've never seen, which has some of this in it. Oh, really? But I think this should be like a much bigger budget and more exciting thing. So I think all of this stuff is... This makes Game of Thrones look kind of footling and trivial. So just on the north, Norway and Denmark have been locked in this long-running struggle.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Magnus in Norway, Svein in Denmark. And for Harald, this offers an opportunity but also a threat. If he can get back to Scandinavia quickly, he can profit from this and become a third player and profit from the uncertainty. But if he waits too long and Magnus of Norway wins and rules both, then it'll be much harder for him to get a foothold. So perhaps early 1045, late 1044, hard to say.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Around about this time, he makes his move and he goes north. And we do know that in about 1045, he arrives in Sweden in a place called Sigtuna. And there he receives very bad news. Magnus has got the upper hand. He's left it too late. Magnus has been crowned king of both Norway and Denmark. And Svein has agreed to be his jarl, basically his deputy in Denmark. Now Magnus is a serious player.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He's half English, always a good sign. His mother was an English slave and he'd become king of Norway at the age of just 11. But he proved really good at it. He was brilliant at winning support. He's actually an incredibly skillful politician. And he got this nickname, Magnus the Good. And this is in part, it's not because he's kind. Yeah, he's good at politics.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
He was well-spoken and quick to make up his mind, noble in character, most generous, a great and valiant warrior, says the Heimskringla Sagas. So Harold, he's got all this cash, but he's the underdog. And they finally meet, uncle and nephew, in Skuna, which was then in Denmark and now is, of course, in southern Sweden, that autumn, 1045.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And the sagas describe how Magnus is there with his fleet and he sees this ship coming from the east with gilded dragon's head, you know, covered in gold and jewels. And this huge messenger. In this story, in 1066 generally, there are always these messengers who actually turn out not to be, you know, the sort of mouth of Sauron who turn out to be Sauron.
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This messenger comes and says to Magnus, would your Uncle Harold be welcome? And Magnus says, yeah, sure. And then the messenger says, I am Uncle Harold. Good fooling. And Harold says, you know, hello, nephew. How would you like to divide the kingdom between us? Not really.
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Well, we're told Magnus gave his uncle a friendly answer, saying he would take the advice of his chieftains and the wishes of his subjects. He gives him a diplomatic answer. I said he was good at politics and they part on quite good terms. But it's pretty obvious to Harold that Magnus is going to give him nothing.
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They don't really enjoy them because they don't obviously have many towns and castles in Scandinavia, so sieges aren't really their thing. But this one goes very well. And the sagas say, oh, that's Harold. Harold's just a brilliant man and he's responsible. But in reality, the overall commander who plays a bit of a part in Harold's story was a Greek general called George Maniarches.
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So Harold sends a messenger to this bloke, Svein, in Denmark and says, let's restart that war. Let's divide Norway and Denmark between us. Now, Magnus, he doesn't fancy the war starting again because... Norway is not a rich country. You know, it doesn't have many towns and markets. It doesn't have especially rich farmland.
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I mean, that's one reason they've got involved in the whole Viking business. But Dominic, it is rich in giant men with double axes. It is, but they require payment. And he struggles. It's a big problem for Norwegian kings to raise tax because they don't really have the same infrastructure as somewhere like England. Yeah. So Magnus thinks, I can't compete with all this gold.
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I just don't fancy a war. So eventually he sends a message to Harold and he says, look, Actually, I will share the kingdom if you will share your gold. And Harold thinks, well, fair enough, because I don't really have many Norwegian contacts, and it would be a massive hassle fighting this war. So they have this meeting, this very entertaining meeting to share the gold.
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Harold makes a huge display of all the gold. He gets a huge ox hide, and he pours all the chests out, massive piles of gold. And he says very loudly, I have traveled to many lands and taken many risks in order to earn all this gold. And then they're going to get their men to weigh and divide all the gold equally. But the point is they've both got to put in what they've got.
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And he says, nephew, what gold have you to add to all this? And Magnus says, oh, well, I've actually spent all my money on these wars. I've got one thing, which is a golden arm ring, one ring. And he puts it in. Harold, this is not much for a king of two kingdoms. And some would say it is not rightfully yours. And Magda says, my father Olaf gave it to me the last time I saw him. True.
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But only after he took it from my father for no good reason. Massive tension in the air. Harold is dissing. He's dissing Olaf, actually. He's a brother. And saying that Olaf had taken it from his own father, Sigurd the Sow. So everybody's very anxious about this. And everybody says, oh, this clearly is not going to last. Like, clearly at some point...
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Harold is going to turn on Magnus or vice versa. One of them is going to go. But we never get to that point because you remember in the Road to 1066 series, so the last couple of weeks, people were always dropping dead unexpectedly. Yeah, convenient moments. Convenient points when their acting contract had come to an end.
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Well, in 1047, end of 1047, Magnus is off the coast of Denmark fighting Svein. And he has a dream in which Olaf appears, his father. And Olaf says, look, you've got a choice. You can live to a ripe old age. But you will commit a crime that will damn you to hell. Or you can die young now and join me in the afterlife. And Magnus, I think foolishly says, well, I'll die young.
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I'd like to join you in the afterlife. Do you think that's foolish? I think that you don't know what the nature of the crime. I mean, I'd want to know more about the crime, I think. But this is happening, what, a thousand years ago? And he'd still be in hell now if he'd gone for that. With no prospect of release. It's like those experiments they do on toddlers.
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Do you want instant gratification now or you get two cakes later? I'd probably take the cake now. I'd opt for death and heaven. Well, in that case, you would have exactly the same fate as Magnus. He wakes, immediately comes down with a fever, and on the 25th of October, 1047, he dies. And in one of the sagas, there's a lovely bedtime scene. Deathbed scene. Bedtime scene?
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He was another giant like Harold Hardrada. So Harold Hardrada, I think we established in the last episode, was he seven and a half feet tall? Seven and a half feet, yes. Maniarches, I'm going to read you the description by the monk and courtier Michael Psellus.
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I mean, I suppose it is bedtime in a sense. Harold comes in to see Magnus. Ah, nephew, I see you're dying. And Magnus says, leave Denmark alone. Leave it to Svein. Let them go in peace, the Danes. Harold obviously has no intention of doing that. He's now one. He's King of Norway. It's all he ever wanted. It's all he ever wanted.
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Everything has been the fighting with snakes, the gouging out of eyes. And do you know what? Yeah. You've written these Adventures in Time books to inspire your young readers to follow their dreams. And Harold has followed his dream. And now he's King of Norway. So there's a lesson there, isn't there? But you know what the real lesson is?
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It hasn't made him happy because his time as King of Norway is a little bit sad, I think, because it's basically 20 years of really boring war against the Danes in which nothing ever happens. Just constant raiding. And I imagine quite a lot of stuff involving cow buyers and that kind of thing. Yeah. Kind of burning people's cottages and stuff in a desultory way. Yeah. Really bad weather.
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He just fights for so long. He's got a massive warship. I mean, the best thing about it is this warship called the Great Serpent. I mean, Freud would love this. So Olaf Tryggvason had had a ship called the Long Serpent, but Harold Hardrada insisted on having a ship called the Great Serpent. And he commands this ship.
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There's one battle, a battle at a place called Nisor, which is off Western Sweden between the Norwegians and the Danes. The Norwegians win, but they're all just miserable and cold, and they've both massive losses. No one's ever going to win this war. But the Great Serpent is still erect and proud. It is. But there's just a sense of joylessness to it at this point, I think it's fair to say.
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So basically, this war has gone on for, what, 15 years or something. And eventually, Harold gives up his ambitions. It's fine. Spain can have Denmark. I've had enough. And all this has been very, very expensive. Now, during all this, Harold has clearly been trying to turn Norway into...
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into a more centralised, kind of nationalised, tax-paying kingdom like, dare I say, England, or to some degree, I guess, in the future, Denmark. Or, more obviously, I'd have thought Constantinople. Oh, Constantinople, which he's seen. Yeah, but it's going to look more like England, I suppose, in the long run. Yeah. Because he's also doing other modernising things.
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Michael Sellers said Maniakis was a wrathful man, fully nine feet tall and possessed of a violent temper, a fiery whirlwind with a voice of thunder and hands strong enough to make walls totter and shake gates of brass. He had the quick movement of a lion and the scowl on his face was terrible to behold.
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He tries to develop a national coinage. And although he himself is clearly not a, you know, if he is pious, he's definitely not a turning-the-other-cheek kind of man. He does encourage Christianity and he brings in priests and monks from Kiev and Rus. And of course, you can see why he would do that. He likes the idea of one God, one ruler, one church, state power. He's got his brother, hasn't he?
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Olaf, who is well on the way to becoming Saint Olaf, who gets enshrined in the Great Cathedral. And it's interesting, a lot of the kingdoms that are formed at about this point in time have patron saints who are from the ruling family. Olaf is the paradigmatic example, who are just massively, massively important to the regime because they give divine legitimacy to the dynasty.
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But it's a difficult process in Norway. I mean, Norway, the terrain isn't ideal for trying to impose a kind of a nationalizing regime. There's constant tension with the landowners in the north and in the centre of Norway. It's not hanging out with glamorous blonde empresses, is it? It really is a bit miserable.
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And also I think there's an element of Harold is becoming possibly a little bit insufferable. Snorri Sturluson, who writes this very admiring biography of him in the saga, says King Harald was an absolute monarch. And the more secure he felt on the throne, the more imperious he became so that hardly anyone dared to differ with him. And the big issue, as always, is money. It's tax.
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He has been trying to raise taxes to pay for this incredibly boring war with the Danes. In 1064, the last full year of the war, the farmers of Norway's uplands basically refused to pay their taxes. It was a tax revolt. So it's like he's turned into Keir Starmer. He's having to deal with angry farmers. Angry farmers. It's the same old story. Well, don't forget angry farmers had killed his brother.
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Angry farmers and people in reindeer magic cloaks had killed his father. We seem a long way now from magic reindeer cloaks. And I have to say, slightly the poorer for it. Yeah, we are the poorer for it. There's no doubt in my mind. Things have got worse, and this is the point at which they do.
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So 1065, when the war is over, Harold launched a savage harrying campaign against the uplanders that in some way actually anticipates William of Normandy's harrying campaign. I mean, this is what, there's a definite similarity here that when you have kind of, these are very, very ferocious, merciless monarchs.
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who when they are challenged by provincial, perhaps more small-c conservative interests that are resisting the modernizing efforts of the monarchy, they react with lethal and terrifying force. Snorri Sturluson, the king ordered farmers seized, some of them maimed, others slain, and most of them robbed of everything they owned. The peasants pleaded for mercy, but his verdict came with fire.
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So again, advice and lesson there from history for Keir Starmer. his scowled Theodulf. No scowl can find words for the royal vengeance that left the Oplands ravaged and empty. King Harald's deeds will be remembered forever. And exactly that, as you said, Tom, this is the origin of the nickname Hard Rada, which at school I can remember being told it was Hard Ruler. It's kind of severe, isn't it?
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But Michael Sellers says that all, basically all Varangians are, I mean, at least nine, ten feet tall. Yeah. Sometimes you just have to trust the sources, don't you?
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That's the translation now. Or even tyrannical or, I mean, some people might say robust, of course, Tom. That's... If you admire a strong leader as I do, you would say robust, like our own greatest ruler in the 1650s. But anyway, that's by the by. We've got to the end now of 1065. Harold is now probably 50 years old.
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Elisif has born him two daughters, but she has pretty much vanished from the sources. We know he has a second wife called Tora, who has had two sons, but we know virtually nothing else about her. I think there's a slight sense of Harold of, I don't know, ambitions unfulfilled or frustration. It's a very powerful scene, isn't it? And I guess it would require...
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not just a great historian, but a great historian with an incredible command of the English language, fully to evoke the mingled glory and pathos of the scene. And I wonder, Dominic, if you can think of such a writer and whether perhaps you have a passage of his prose to hand.
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Do you know, Tom, it's extraordinary that you asked that question because by a remarkable coincidence, I can think of such a person. Shall I read it? Yeah, why don't you? Because I think you'd give these readings the power and the majesty that they deserve. Yeah, and when I finish it, people can try and work out who they think wrote it. Yeah, and maybe order the book.
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An air of scepticism. You can carry scepticism too far. Well, there's kind of a hint of Samson there, I think, in his description. They're shaking the gates of brass, making walls totter, exactly. So Maniakes and Harold didn't get on at all. And the sagas say the Varangians demanded that Harold be put in command, said this Maniakes has got to go.
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The golden sheen in his hair had long since faded, and he could feel a stiffness creeping into his bones. Though Harold would never have admitted it, he seemed a figure out of time, waiting for the end. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever again know the thrill of adventure, the joy of battle. And then, one cloudless day... A ship rounded the headland and turned into the fjord.
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And Dominic, that author is, of course, yourself. Your thrilling book about the Vikings, available from all good bookshops. And we know it's a cloudless day. We know this ship has rounded the headland and turned into the fjord. And I think it's fair to say that with that ship and the advent of the year 1066, everything will change, won't it? It will change, Tom.
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It was a colossal, greedy, pitiless thing, a creature of nightmares. Already it had sensed their presence, and even now it was rising for the kill. Its cruel head loomed from the shadows. Its yellow eyes glittered with hatred. Its fangs glistened with beads of poison. Its forked tongue flickered with pleasure. Harold moved fast, groping among the corpses, scrabbling through the filth.
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So to give people a little preview of what is coming, 1066 is upon us and next week we'll begin our climactic series on the epic events of that year. The death in England of Edward the Confessor and the accession of Harold Godwinson. Harold Hardrada invades England and the great showdown at Stamford Bridge and then the invasion of William of Normandy and the battle to end all battles at Hastings.
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And Tom, there's some amazing news, isn't there, for members of the Rest Is History Club. Would you like to share that news with them? Yeah, incredible news. You'll never have heard anything like it before, ever, while listening to this podcast. But just to break it to you, if you're a member, you will hear all four episodes immediately.
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And Dominic, more stunning news that, again, will come as a total revelation to listeners, that if you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club, There is a website where you can sign up and that is therestishistory.com. It's what Harold Hardrada would have wanted, isn't it? Yeah, it is. I mean, he would definitely be, he'd be one of the elite Varangian guard of the Restless History Club.
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Of that, there is no doubt. All right. On that bombshell, we'll return next time with 1066. Goodbye. Bye-bye.
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But actually, Maniakes had Harold recalled to Constantinople. But that worked out well for him. Because if this story is even remotely accurate, he then got sent on a very exciting expedition. So we do know that the emperor had concluded a deal with the Fatimids in Egypt to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which had been semi-destroyed by a mad caliph. In 1009.
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So Al-Hakim, who features in my thrilling vampire novel, The Sleeper in the Sands. Really? Yeah. Is he a vampire? No, Al-Hakim isn't. But vampires are present. Vampires are definitely present. But also, Dominic, just to say that the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which had been built by Constantine and was pretty, you know, I mean, it's the great focus of Christian devotion.
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it has a massive impact, not just on Byzantium, but on Latin Christendom. And the news of it going back to Latin Christendom stirs up all kinds of millennial anxiety. So it's part of this kind of swirl of apocalyptic dread that in the long run will feed into the First Crusade. So Urban II, when he does his great sermon, kind of summoning the First Crusade, he makes mention of
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Exactly this, the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. And it may not surprise Jewish listeners to discover who a lot of Christians in Latin Christendom blamed for this. And it wasn't Al-Hakim. Oh, really? So does this give rise to a lot of pogroms and stuff? It gives rise to one of the first kind of big outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence in Latin Christendom, yeah.
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So it really reverberates. Right. So anyway, the emperor has concluded this deal to go and rebuild it. And he sends a team of architects and carpenters and stuff and bishops and monks and Roman bigwigs who want to go and see the church. And a Varangian escort was sent with them, and the sagas say Harold was one of them.
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Jerusalem is a bit of a building site when they get there, if he does genuinely go. It had been very badly smashed up by this mad caliph and by the Fatimids generally, but there'd also been a series of earthquakes in the 1030s. So if they got there, a lot of the stuff was in ruins.
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The sagas say that Harold is there as part of this escort, and he, and I quote, generously gave donations, so much gold that no one knows the amount. The sagas also say he'd left all his gold in Constantinople before he left. So those things can't both be true.
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And given that he's saving all this money in his saver account, I think it's highly unlikely that he traveled with enormous quantities of gold. Snorri Sturluson in King Harold's Saga says, Harold went to the Jordan and bathed in the water in the manner of all pilgrims. Might be true, mightn't it? Yeah, there's absolutely no reason to believe that wouldn't be true. That's exactly what he would do.
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But his longest posting, so probably after this, was to Sicily. And this seems to have been from about 1038 to 1041. And Sicily, of course, as you will note, Tom, is one of the great strategic prizes in the Mediterranean. And we did the series about Carthage versus Rome. Remember, you were taking us through all the battles there. I mean, basically, that hasn't changed at all.
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Sicily is very fertile. It's very rich. It's perfectly placed. It's been under Islamic rule for, what, 140 years, something like that? The Kalbid emirs, who are based in Palermo, and they're the people who introduced oranges, lemons, sugar, silk, and all sorts of exciting irrigation systems. We do love an irrigation system. On the rest is history. Do we not? Oh, I love it. I love it.
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Can't get it. I mean, history is basically the story of irrigation systems, isn't it? In a very real sense, yes. Yes. So the Roman army landed probably about 10,000 troops under George Maniarches, nine feet tall. Must have been very displeased to see Harold Hardtruck. Yeah, I know. Now, this is where the sagas really get stuck in. They have some great fun with all this.
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So to give you a sense of the sort of stories they tell, we've got bird action. So Harold gets the Varangians to collect birds. They fix bits of burning sulfur to their feet and send them out over the town. You know, they land on all the thatched roofs, the graves have been flamed. The slight drawback with this story is that it's been told about every commander in history.
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Well, but more specifically, Dominic, it's been told about St. Olga. Of Kiev. Of Kiev, who's the grandmother of Vladimir. And she was the very first Kievan ruler to be baptized. Right. And she played exactly that trick, didn't she? And I think it was the Drevlians. It was. It was the Drevlians. So I think you can see a certain influence there, I would say. Well, hold on.
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You could say, therefore, the story is clearly made up. This is just the Olga of Kiev story. Or you could say... He's been influenced because he's been in Kiev and he's picked up these important military techniques involving birds. You could say that. Then there's tunnel drama. So this is outside a town near Mount Etna.
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And the sagas, which always paint maniarchies with his nine feet of flesh as an absolute fool, he says, oh, we can never take this town. And Harold says, no, if you allow me the loot when I get in, I shall show you. And he and the Varangians dig a tunnel all the way from a nearby ravine They burst out of the tunnel into the great hall of the defenders while they're having a feast.
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Who would have thought it? Slaughter them all, throw open the gates. That was good killing that day. And my favorite one is the coffin ploy. Oh, this is brilliant. This is the Syracuse one. This is in Syracuse. So they can't take this town. The Romans don't know how to take this town. He says, I got a brilliant wheeze. They spread the word. Harold is very seriously ill. Then the word spreads.
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His fingers found a broken piece of wood. But the monster was faster. Suddenly it was on him, its horrible coils winding around his chest, pulling him down towards the water, squeezing the very last breaths from his lungs. So that was J.R.R. Tolkien in his brilliant book, Adventures in Time, Fury of the Vikings, a chapter entitled The Return of the King.
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He's dead. And the Varangians send messengers into the city where there are Christian churches as well as mosques. And they say, look, we'd love to give our commander a church funeral. I know we've been besieging you, but would it be okay if we came in? And the local churchmen, very kindly people, say, oh, yes, okay, as long as you can only bring 12 men in to bury this guy.
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But Tom, it would astound you to know this is all a cunning trick. And actually, Harold is not dead. He's one of the 12 pallbearers. And they're all slightly implausibly wearing armor and carrying swords under their silk mourning clothes. And they're all 12 foot. Yeah. So at this point, actually, his great friends in the Varangians, they're also part of the pallbearers.
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And these are two splendid men called Ulf and Haldor. They're both from Iceland. They are described as men of exceeding strength and superb warriors. And the amazing thing is the three of them map perfectly onto Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli from the Lord of the Rings. So Ulf, we are told, a man of great understanding, clever in conversation, active and brave, and with all true and sincere.
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So he's clearly Legolas. Whereas Haldor, very stout and strong, he was not a man of many words, but short in conversation, told his opinion bluntly and was obstinate and hard. So he's Gimli. Yeah, he's a dwarf. So Dominic, so they're both from Iceland. Yeah. Do you think that this makes the story less or more plausible?
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So in other words, is Snorri Stelarsson kind of making it up and making them be Iceland because he's an Icelander? Or is it preserving authentic memories handed down by the... The people of Iceland. There's no doubt in my mind that this is preserving authentic memories that have never been embellished and are scrupulously accurate. So the story that follows is true.
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They get inside the gatehouse with this coffin and then apparently they drop the coffin. They blow a trumpet. The coffin blocks the gate. So then the rest of the army can pile in after them. There's incredibly fierce fighting. All three of them are wounded. Harold's standard bearer is killed. And Harold says to Haldor, pick up the standard, pick up the standard.
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But Haldor is fighting off a dozen men at that point. And he says to Harold, let the devil carry the standard for you, you coward. And Harold... Do you want to do Harold's laugh? He gives a great belly laugh, doesn't he? He does. You are talkative today, Helder, but fearless all the same. And then he smacks off another head with his axe. This is exactly what happened.
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I'm afraid I might have broken the microphone with that mighty laugh. Yeah, I think you've broken the sound barrier with that. Now, the sagas say that as a result of all these wheezes, they managed to take Sicily. And people can gauge the accuracy of the sagas by the fact that, in fact, Sicily was never taken. And the Romans ended up with just a pitiful foothold in the northeast.
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And actually, Sicily didn't... Here's the irony. Sicily didn't fall till the end of the century, and it fell to the Normans. Because it does fall to people of Scandinavian descent. Yeah, but not these guys.
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So we've been talking about this in our previous series, about the Normans, adventurers, who've been going to the south of Italy at the beginning of the 11th century and building their castles there. employing their armor, their horses in a predatory manner, and they start looking at Sicily. Amazingly, they launch an invasion. There is another famous bird-related story in this.
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In 1066, Roger de Hauteville, the great who will become the ruler of Sicily, defeats a Muslim army, and the Muslims have brought along carrier pigeons And Roger takes these carrier pigeons and he orders the paper that they'd been carrying to be dipped in the blood of the Muslim dead, given back to the carrier pigeons, who then fly back to Palermo with news of the great Muslim defeat.
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And the Normans then capture Palermo. Wow. So there's a lot of bird-related action in this episode. People of Scandinavian descent interfering with birds for military purposes. Yes, it's the theme. So they don't take Sicily, but everyone says that Harold has done brilliantly. And when he gets back to Constantinople, he is, we are told, promoted to an elite bodyguard of the emperor.
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553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
Manglovites, as it's called, and he has a special golden sword. And then the emperor, Michael IV, who you may remember from the previous episode was the emperor's toy boy, who has basically strangled his predecessor to become emperor. He's going off to fight the Bulgars in 1040. And we know, we really do know that he takes Harold Hardrada with him.
The Rest Is History
553. The Last Viking: Warrior of the New Rome (Part 2)
And obviously, Dominic, it wasn't really J.R.R. Tolkien, was it? It was you! It was an even better writer. It was an even better writer. Yeah. And you are describing there one of the countless thrilling scenes in the epic life of Harold Hardrada. fugitive from Norway, mercenary captain for the Grand Prince of Kiev.
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So if you were pointing purely on merit... Tiberius is obviously, obviously the best qualified, the outstanding candidate to succeed Augustus when the time comes as emperor, as master of the Roman world. But we know from Suetonius' account that Augustus basically tries to do everything possible possible
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Not everything possible to avoid it, but he's constantly looking at other candidates from his own family. So Tiberius is his stepson, not his son. And what Augustus really wants is his own flesh and blood. So his grandsons to succeed him, because he's had a daughter, hasn't he, Augustus, called Julia, who is not his daughter by Livia, but by a previous wife. Exactly.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And he wants her children to succeed him, not this guy who's somebody else's son. Right.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
A few days after his arrival on Capri, Tiberius was enjoying his seclusion when a fisherman unexpectedly came up to him and presented him with an enormous mullet, whereupon, alarmed that someone had been able to negotiate the most inaccessible reaches of the island by climbing a pathless cliff, he ordered that the man's face should be scrubbed with the fish.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
But in reality, they die of natural causes.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Okay. So he's had the most fantastic apprenticeship to become emperor. And then we get into the stories in Suetonius' account. We get into the story of how Tiberius actually does. And actually, it's not all attacking people with fish. Perving on islands and stuff. A lot of it is he's actually really good at being emperor, and he's a very proficient and serious and impressive one.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
I only thank my lucky stars, cried out the fisherman as he was enduring this punishment, that I didn't bring Caesar the huge lobster that I also caught. Whereupon Tiberius gave orders that the lobster should be used to grate the man's face to shreds. So what a shameful moment in Roman history this is.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Right. And that takes us back, obviously, to that introduction, the business with the fishermen, which we will come to. Take the cruelty first. I recently reminded myself reading your excellent translation of Suetonius, that he particularly targets his rivals. So the other descendants of Augustus, the rest of the family, people who might be a plausible threat to him.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And he does that actually quite late, doesn't he? So he's been emperor for 15 years. He's actually been off on his pleasure island on Capri for two years. And now he decides, okay, I'm going to get rid of all Augustus's other descendants. That seems a bit weird to me.
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
The only one left is this youngest one, Gaius Caligula. And of course, we will be coming to him next week. So not content with that, according to Suetonius, Tiberius then becomes even more savage and brutal, doesn't he? Because there's been a failed coup against him, hasn't there? His former right-hand man, a guy called Sejanus, who has supposedly been carrying out this reign of terror in Rome...
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
turns against Tiberius. He's accused of leading the coup. Tiberius gets rid of him. And then Tiberius just goes mad and starts killing everybody. Is that basically the gist of it?
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
It's a notorious incident in the life of the Emperor Tiberius, who, of course, ruled from AD 14 to AD 37. And it's recorded in Suetonius's great biography of the Caesars. now translated by our very own Tom Holland. So, Tom, this is a very famous story.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
I'm actually struggling to work out how physically that would work. But it's fair to say that either Tiberius or Suetonius has a very strange imagination. Do you think that's fair, Tom?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
No, it gets worse, doesn't it?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
It's the story that sort of captures the capriciousness and the cruelty of the aged Tiberius as he sits there on his pleasure island in the Bay of Naples. So what's going on here? Unpack this story for us. So...
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
All right. Well, let's explore that a little bit more after the break. Tiberius held the rule of earth and sea for 23 years without once permitting so much as the merest spark of war to smoulder in the lands of either the Greeks or the barbarians. And he bestowed upon the world both peace and the blessings of peace right the way up to his dying day.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And he did so what is more with an ungrudging generosity of spirit. He was a man of deep common sense, the most skilled in penetrating to the heart of a person's secret intentions of all his contemporaries, whom he surpassed in wisdom as in rank. No one on both sides of his family had a nobler ancestry. No one was more sagacious or better read. So that's not Suetonius.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
That's Philo of Alexandria, who is a Judean philosopher. And that's an obvious corrective to all the stuff about minnows and assaulting people with lobsters and killing all these people and whatnot. Now, Philo obviously is not as close to the circles of power as Suetonius would later be. So Philo is from Alexandria. But he'd been to Rome, hadn't he? He'd been there a year after Tiberius's death.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So he might well have spoken to people who knew Tiberius. And, you know, he's not completely to be discounted. So, Tom, what's going on here? Why does that account differ so much from the lurid kind of, I mean, I was going to say Hello Magazine, but of course it's not Hello Magazine. It's far, far more scandalous than anything in Hello Magazine than that version of Tiberius.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Well, in your introduction to the 12 Caesars, which I was talking about in the last episode we did, about how interesting it is, you make the point that the biography of Tiberius is the most unstable and the most unsatisfying in some ways of all the biographies in Suetonius' book. Yeah.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
because he never strikes a balance between, I mean, he just, you know, first we have all the stuff that says Tiberius is brilliant. He's doing loads of stuff with grain. And then we have all the stuff that says he's absolutely terrible. He's throwing people off cliffs.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
But there's no attempt by Suetonius really to make any psychological sense of the fact that you've got these two different versions of the same man's character.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So that idea that you get from Suetonius that Tiberius is a man with two faces, that there's the good Tiberius and the bad Tiberius, that's not then psychologically implausible, is it? If he's a man torn between two very different roles that he feels from birth he has been appointed to play.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
One of them is the Claudian, the heir to the Republic, and the other is the heir to Augustus, who's basically going to inherit this autocracy. Yeah. So it would make sense then that he's somebody who is himself a very complicated, torn, possibly quite unhappy man.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So just to remind everybody, Tiberius is the second Roman emperor. Augustus has been the first, and now Tiberius has succeeded. So he spends time in Rome, and then he arrives in Capri, and he settles there in the year 27, doesn't he? When he's quite old.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So to give a modern analogy, which will appeal to our American listeners, it's a little bit like very, very senior American politicians who accept the vice presidency and are therefore reduced to just sort of hanging around in the president's shadow. But it's that, but magnified to an extraordinary degree. The Romans take that very seriously, don't they? The idea of father and son.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And if he's been reduced to the level of Augustus' son and heir, he's not nothing, but he's a pale shadow of what he once was.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
By the standards of most rulers in history, not tyrants, but most rulers of any kind, that's a pretty meagre death toll. I mean, that's hardly the work of a sort of blood-crazed maniac, is it?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
I mean, it's not Stalin.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
You could put your coat on near a statue of Augustus. No one would cut your head off. Exactly. You could go and have a pee with one of his coins in your purse and you're not going to be arrested. And as for the people, so he does despise the people, doesn't he? But that's the norm for a Roman patrician, right? Goes to the territory. Of course, you're going to look down on the people.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
That's completely natural and normal.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And to be fair, Tom, his reign is 23 years long, and it is a reign of great stability, prosperity, and above all, peace. Think about all the civil wars, the chaos on the frontiers that is to come in Roman history. Yeah, Tiberius's reign is a kind of oasis of stability compared with what before and after.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
How then do we reconcile that with the attacking people with fish, throwing them off the cliffs, interfering with children, all of this stuff that is so shocking and horrible?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
But hold on, how do you reconcile that then with the
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So actually what these stories are, therefore, they're almost, maybe this is too simplistic, but they're part of a literary formula that is establishing Tiberius as somebody who is, I was about to say, he's not exactly more than human. But he is maybe a degree more than human. He is exceptional. He has that very kind of unsettling sense of the divine about him.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Because, of course, he's part of the divine family, isn't he? The imperial family.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Right, that's a big claim. So Tiberius died on the 16th of March, 37, and he was 77 years old. And he was succeeded by that little boy that we talked about earlier, who he had spared, the brother of Nero and Drusus, who was Gaius, who's better known by the nickname Little Boots, Caligula. And Caligula, I mean, if you think Tiberius is a good character...
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
My words, we're going to have some fun with Caligula. And the good news for members of the Rest is History Club, Tom, our very own Praetorian Guard, is that they can listen to that episode on Caligula right away. If you want to join the Rest is History Club, it is, of course, at therestishistory.com. But if you don't, we will be back on Monday with...
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Well, was he the most blood crazed depraved maniac in ancient history or is the reality more complicated? I have a terrible feeling that Tom is going to say it's a little bit more complicated, but we will find out on Monday. Time will tell. Yeah, time will tell. See you then. Bye bye. Bye bye.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So there are sort of two things I would say that people who know anything about Tiberius know about Tiberius. One is he's up to... Terrible, terrible sexual misconduct on this island, which we'll get into.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And then the other is that while that is happening, there's a kind of reign of terror in Rome by the head of the Praetorian Guard, this guy called Sejanus, who basically has deluded Tiberius and has secretly kind of taken all his power and is killing everybody in Rome.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So Tiberius is simultaneously a sort of depraved old goat, but also a stupid old fool who's got no idea kind of what's going on and in whose name all these terrible things are happening. And I guess the question is, because Tiberius, we know that Tiberius was a serious person. Very serious. That he was a very, I mean, he was genuinely very serious. Yeah, wasn't he?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Quite humorless. Not humorless. But he has a sort of dual reputation, doesn't he?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Yeah. We know that he's regarded as a very proficient military commander, that he's a serious politician. You know, when he succeeds Augustus's emperor, nobody thinks it's bizarre or outlandish that such a man is in command of the Roman world.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
So the question is, is all this stuff about attacking people with fish and doing terrible things to people in swimming pools, is all this just spin and mad propaganda? Is it fake news? Or does it get to some truth about Tiberius' character or about the nature of imperial power and power corrupting? And I guess that's the... question at the heart of this episode, isn't it?
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
And what's even worse for Tiberius, or better, depending on your viewpoint, is is that both his mother and his father descended from branches of the Claudian family, aren't they? So the Kennedys have been going for 200 years, and both of your parents are from different branches of that family. So he is born two years after the Ides of March.
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535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Everything has kicked off, civil war, and actually his father, for all his prestige and all the grandeur of his name, has backed the wrong side, hasn't he, in the civil war after Julius Caesar's assassinations?
The Rest Is History
535. Emperors of Rome: Tiberius, Slaughter and Scandal (Part 2)
Yeah, a quick question. So are we to believe that Augustus has genuinely fallen in love with this bloke's wife? It's a genuine love match. I mean, that's the only explanation, isn't it, really?
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Harold, eldest in birth as in wisdom, was by the king's favour appointed to the earldom in his father's place.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
So to pursue that thread, the issue for Henry VIII, of course, was that he was setting himself against the king of Spain, the pope and so on and so forth. The issue for Edward is that he is setting himself against, in the short term, a more dangerous opponent because that, of course, is Godwin, the most powerful person in the kingdom. So, well, he does have allies, doesn't he?
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
I mean, that's one thing we should say because there are other magnates who don't like Godwin.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Best thing that's ever happened in Coventry.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And then what about the Normans? Because Edward, of course, has spent so many years in Normandy and he brings some Normans with him when he comes, doesn't he?
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And last time we were talking about Duke William of Normandy, the villain of this story. And today we're on somebody who I've always... Held a candle for. Held a candle for, exactly, exactly. Do you see yourself reflected in his character and his prowess? The terrible face of a lion, endowed with mildness of temper and a ready understanding. He could bear contradiction well.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
So to some degree, the Norman, I mean, people always say, what if the Norman conquest never happened? But the integration of the English and the Norman worlds has already started long before 1066.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Isn't that interesting that they're already anticipating the possibility of... that, you know, neighbouring predators might make a move.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
I mean, it's all adding up. It's all there, isn't it? Yeah, it's uncanny. It's uncanny. So this is actually from a biography of Edward the Confessor, not of Harold. That's right. So Harold is a supporting character in this book. Yes.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Right. So here we are at the end of 1051. The Godwins, it looks like they're out, they're down. But I guess the issue for Edward now is that by kicking out the Godwins, he has thrown his lot in completely with Seward and Leofric. And he's in their power to some extent, isn't he? I mean, basically because there is now no counterbalance to them.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But some historians do doubt it though, don't they? I mean, some historians are like, well, we cannot be certain what the arrangement was And it may have been much less, you know, he may have made noises, but not been definitive. I mean, the fact that it's so vague in the sources.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Well, I mean, all of the people, almost all the people we talk about spend time in exile, don't they? And make astonishing comebacks.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Now, there are 15 years to go. The clock is ticking towards the point at which these combustible circumstances will ignite, and we will speed up that process after the break. Beyond the walls of London, beside the River Thames, there stood a monastery dedicated to St Peter. It was an insignificant place, and under its abbot, only a small community of monks served Christ.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
The king, therefore, devoted as he was to God, fixed his attention on the spot. for not only was it close to a rich and famous city, but it was also a delightful spot, surrounded with fertile land and green fields and near the main channel of the river, which bore abundant merchandise of wares of every kind for sale from the whole world to the town on its banks.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Right. Or that bloke Harold Harefoot. I mean, make up a nickname later if necessary.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
So that's an account in the life of King Edward about how Edward the Confessor came to build a great abbey or a minster, as the Anglo-Saxons called it, to the west of London. So it's to the west of London and it's a minster. And guess what they end up calling it? Westminster. Duh. Wow. Amazing. So, Tom, this is the origin of Westminster Abbey.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And not only that, but because if she paints Edward as this sort of, you know, he's thinking about God and his mind is on higher things and all of that. I mean, people, yeah, they're like, oh, brilliant. But it sort of emphasises that her family is, Godwin and his sons have been the people who've actually been making the machine work and keeping England going.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And he chokes to death. But there's no suspicion here of foul play, is there? I mean, this just seems like an occupational hazard. Are they just eating enormous amounts of ill-cooked meat? Very tough meat.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But there is a bit of a balance of power thing going on here, isn't there? Because Harold had been Earl of East Anglia, but now he's taken over the kind of premier job, which is Earl of Wessex. So he's got the heartland region. But... He's replaced in East Anglia by a guy called Elfgar, who is the son of Leofric. So you've got Leofric in Mercia. You've got Elfgar in East Anglia.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
You have this boat, Seawood in Northumbria and Harold in Wessex. And Edward can kind of play them off against each other, presumably. There's a bit of a balance.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
So we're talking today about this family, the Godwinsons, who we left out of the previous episodes because we wanted to do them all today. And they're obviously massive players in the story of 1066 because we've already had three members of the family. We've had Harold, we've had Tostig, and we have had Edith.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And behind them, hence the name Godwinson, is this bloke Godwin, who is not massively well-known, I would say, in English history today, but is a titanic figure. in English history in the 11th century. So tell us a bit about Godwin and why his name carries such significance to people in the 11th century.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
And to make matters worse, he's put taxes up, hasn't he? So people are not happy about that.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Isn't there an interesting shadow story here in the Norman Conquest, which is we always think of it as kind of Normans versus Anglo-Saxons and Danes. But actually, there's this rivalry between these two families, the family of Leofric and the family of Godwin that runs through. I mean, we're talking about decades of English history leading up to the Norman Conquest.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Lovely to get the Salisbury area in.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Well, we will be back next week with a new series, a two-part series, Looking North, and we'll be looking at that somebody else. We will be telling the story of, I think, the most thrilling, the most terrifying, and the most glamorous man that the Viking world ever produced.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
We'll be going to Norway, to Eastern Europe, to Kiev, to Constantinople as we follow the life and adventures of the last of the Vikings, Harold Hardrada. And you can, of course, hear both of those episodes at once by signing up to the Rest Is History Club at therestishistory.com.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
In the strength of his body and mind, he stood forth among the people as a second Judas Maccabeus, a true friend of his people and his country. He wielded his father's powers even more actively and walked in his ways, that is, in patience and mercy and with kindness to men of goodwill.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
So in that sense, I guess they are really good embodiments of Anglo-Saxon England because, of course, for centuries, Anglo-Saxon England has had a huge Danish component to it, hence the place names and the people's personal names and the Thor's hammers and all of those kinds of things. So just on Godwin, you could say about Godwin, yes, he's a symbol of upward mobility.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
He's also a symbol of collaboration with an occupier.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But disturbers of the peace, thieves and robbers, this champion of the law, threatened with the terrible face of our lion. Well practised he was in endless fatigues and doing without sleep and food, and endowed with mildness of temper and a more ready understanding. He could bear contradiction well, not readily revealing or retaliating, never, I think, on a fellow citizen or compatriot.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But maybe there's an explanation for this, which is that Edward, as we will discuss, has been in Normandy for the great majority of his adult life. So he doesn't have the affinity, the connections, the networks in England. Whereas Godwin, he may hate Godwin and he may think... I think it's completely reasonable that you might have a grudge against somebody who tried and mutilated your brother.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But Godwin does have all the patronage networks, all the connections, and it's presumably hard to do without him.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
But obviously the biggest symbol of this is who Edward marries, because when he arrives, he needs a wife. And January 1043, he gets married. And three months later, his wife is crowned queen. And the identity of this woman is Godwin's daughter, Edith. I mean, you could hardly have a more powerful, you know, physical, visual symbol of the reconciliation of the two men.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Indeed, the fault of rashness or levity is not one that anybody could charge against him. So Tom Holland, the name of this paragon, this patriotic icon. Dominic Sandbrook. This hero, this enduring hero of the English people, a man worthy to stand as England's last true-born king. It is, of course, Harold Godwinson. Earl of Wessex, the man who falls at the Battle of Hastings.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
There is one issue. which is there's one thing anybody who's ever heard of Henry VIII knows there is one thing a king has to do, and Edward does not do it because they don't have any children.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Don't believe it. I just don't believe that story. I think if she's that beautiful, you'd overlook your animus against the father. In fact, the animus against the father might be an incentive.
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551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
Tom, if we adopted that attitude, I mean, our podcast would be about 20 minutes shorter by and large.
The Rest Is History
551. The Road to 1066: Countdown to Conquest (Part 4)
We normally say that after we've spent the previous eight minutes. I agree. I agree.
The Rest Is History
543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And that does not go down well with the other people in the expedition. As Fréz Simon says, the people were in such a state of ill humour that they almost mutinied. And this is before they've left. This is before they've left. Anyway, they set off. After a few weeks, they reach a river called the Maragnon, which is the main source of the Amazon.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So that runs from the Andes, sort of down and eastwards, deep into the jungle. So if they follow it, they will be swept along ultimately towards... The Atlantic. Yes, they're going from west to east. Yeah. From left to right, exactly. I mean, it's a heck of a way. It's 4,000 miles. Yeah. They're not intending to go to the Atlantic by any means.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They think they'll go into Amazonia and there'll be a sort of Aztec-style kingdom. Yeah. And they can seize its gold, make themselves the masters of it, then go back to Peru and say, brilliant, we've done it. And so they're not particularly worried about how they're going to go to get back coming upriver against the current.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They have not thought this through, I think it's fair to say, because we shall see quite quickly they start to, some of them say, how are we getting back? Yeah. I think for some of them, it probably is always an option that they may have to continue all the way and then loop around the top of South America. And we shall return to this idea.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Anyway, after a while, they find their first native villages. Fray Simon reports that, you know, the people were very impressive. They had woven cloth sort of shirts and things. So they had, you know, this is not a totally unsophisticated civilization by any means, but they don't find any gold. And the Spaniards become increasingly restless. Surprise, surprise.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
As the weeks go by and they go deeper and deeper into the jungle, there's a lot of muttering that Ossua is more interested in dallying with Doña Inés than finding gold. There's no hint of gold. What's going on? Clearly, Ossua finds it very difficult to impose his authority on all these hundreds of kind of ex-cons.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah, and he has a series of lieutenants that he employs who are constantly bickering and feuding among themselves. I mean, these are people who... It's not a military expedition. These are not people who are used to following orders. These are people who are used to being... They're mercenaries. They're kind of adventurers. I don't want to speak out of turn, Tom.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I feel that you would be very uncomfortable in this environment. I wouldn't like it at all. No. I'd stand on the margins wringing my hands. I mean, I've been on tour with you when there was just four of us. Yeah. And I just can't see you enjoying this atmosphere. No. The sweat and the lack of shaving, if nothing else, because you're always a clean-shaven man. I am.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Anyway, they proceed down the river. Fray Simon says of Ursula, he's too merciful, and at times his acts savoured of weakness. But then he does that classic thing that quite weak leaders do, which is from time to time he kind of lashes out and inflicts severe punishments on people randomly. And so people say, well, you don't know where you stand with him. You know, he's not consistent. Yeah.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So they're not happy. They capture an Indian girl at one point and they say, these people that Oriana met who were called the Amagua, you know, all these years ago when he went down the Amazon, where are they? And she says, well, I've never heard of these people. And they realise with a sense of horror, we could be hundreds of miles from where these people live.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
If El Dorado exists, it could be 2,000 miles away.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah, no sense of anything really, but just the sort of the green vastness and the sound of the snakes slithering in the undergrowth and strange monkeys screaming. Screaming in the night. You know, that's basically what... Sleuths. Snoring. Exactly.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Now, after a while, this other brigantine, their shipwrights were clearly massively incompetent because this other brigantine springs a leak and they have to move everything out of there onto these rafts. So the German film version bears very little resemblance to reality. But the one thing it does have is a lot of raft action. Yeah. And that is true to life because they are on these rafts.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
It starts pouring with rain. It's in the rainy season. By Christmas, 1560, it's the rainy season. It's constantly raining. They've got no shelter. They're soaked. They've run out of food. They're really miserable. And they are totally and utterly lost. And this is when Aguirre really enters the story. He and one of his mates...
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
who's a man called Sal Duendo, are going around and muttering to the others. First of all, Aguirre says, this business about El Dorado is clearly absolute total tosh. Like, this is just a stupid children's story. We should go back to Peru and just start rampaging through Peru and steal the gold of Peru. if we really want gold that badly. And secondly, he says, Ashura is a terrible leader.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He spends all his time with his mistress, Donya Ines, who's basically the real mistress of the expedition. He is selfish, and I quote, an enemy of giving away and a friend to receiving, which I quite like as an expression. And he is going to force us to stay in the jungle until we're grey-haired old men. And, you know, if we don't act...
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We're going to get deeper and deeper, and we're going to be just completely lost, and we'll all die. I mean, he's got a point with both, hasn't he? I mean, he's not wrong there. Aguirre is a madman in many ways, and we shall see. He does behave unbelievably badly, even by Restor's history standards. But in this, he's not actually wrong.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So when he goes around saying this, people say, well, who's going to be in charge? And Aguirre, to his credit, he doesn't say myself. He says, there's a young nobleman who's traveling with us called Don Fernando de Guzman. His birth and merits are worthy of greater honors.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And he says to Guzman, he goes to Guzman, he says to him, look, if we get rid of Ursua and you take over the leadership of the expedition, Philip II may well initially be annoyed, but when he hears the circumstances, he would consider it a good service and he will specially reward you.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And he says to Don Fernando at this point, look, we won't kill Ursula, we'll just leave him by the side of the bank or something. I mean, by the way, I mean, that would be effectively to kill him, I imagine. I mean, it's not like he's going to make a new life for himself in the jungle.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Anyway, Don Fernando, as I think you can expect with a man who goes around calling himself Don Fernando, he's a very vain man. Right. And he is, and I quote, swelled up by the wind of ambition. He gave thanks for what they offered him and assented to all their projects. There was something in the air that night. There was. A star so bright. Alan Partridge's son is called Fernando. Yeah.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I imagine these people as being very similar. Right, so Don Fernando says, right, I'm in. Okay, let's get this plot started. And at that point, Aguirre says, yeah, there's one slight change, actually. We probably will kill a sewer after all. And Don Fernando is shocked by this, but he's in too deep. He's implicated in the plot, so he can't back out.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I would have hardened up by this point. You and I are completely on the same page on this. So on New Year's Day, 1561, they're camped in this village by the side of the river. Assua has sent some of his key lieutenants to scout ahead, and that gives his opponents the perfect opportunity.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And as darkness falls, a group of Aguirre's men gather outside Assua's hut, and they find him lying in his hammock talking to a pageboy. And he says to them, sort of in a friendly but suspicious way, Caballeros, what seek ye here at this hour? And they kind of, I imagine there's a lot of cackling. Well, They draw their knives and swords, plunge them in, and that is the end of Pedro de Ossua.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He is dead. And then they start shouting. It's interesting what they shout, actually. They start, liberty, liberty, long live the king, the tyrant is dead. So at this point, they're trying to dress it up as an act of loyalty to Philip II. They've had a bad leader, they've got rid, and the king will be very happy. Sic semper tyrannis. Exactly.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
The camp is in total uproar because people can hear the shouting and screaming. They butcher another of Ursula's lieutenants, who's a man called Vargas, who's come out in his cotton armour. So this is one thing the German film gets wrong. They're all wearing enormous metal armour in the German film, but in reality they'd have worn sort of Aztec or Inca-style cotton padded quilted armour.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But the metal makes them look sweatier. I mean, it's good for the visuals, I think. And wearing a quilt in a film just looks ridiculous.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
No, no, no. So then, of course, with staggering predictability, they immediately break into the wine stores. They all drink this wine and get absolutely wasted. They round up Asu as other mates. They kill them as well. They don't kill Doña Inés.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So she's just hanging around in her own hut. She's not mentioned at this point, but we know she's mentioned later on. So she's just presumably quaking in her hut, very anxious.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I have to tell the listeners, if they've already formed a great attachment to her as a character, the second half will make challenging listening. So they then assemble the next day with massive hangovers. And Don Fernando is the new leader.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And he says, I've decided we'll continue the search for El Dorado because when we find all this gold, the king will forgive the murders and he will give us handsome rewards. So we should draw up a document explaining... The Spanish are so legalistic, aren't they? They did this all the time in the conquest of Mexico. Do you remember when we did that series?
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They're always drawing up requirements and reading out legal documents to people who don't understand them and things.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I mean, it just seems a bit odd. There's lots of them. Remember, they travel with 400 people. I suppose they think the news will come out.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And because some of the people there were not party to the plot and perhaps a little bit displeased about it, so they think it's better to have an excuse. So they draw up this legalistic document. Don Fernando signs first, and then Aguirre steps up, and he signs his name as follows. He writes, Lope de Aguirre, the traitor. Wow. And there's great gasps and shock, and Aguirre laughs.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And how does he laugh, Dominic? I imagine a demonic laugh at this point. Ha ha ha! I'll do a variety of laughs later on. There'll be a lot of opportunities. That was terrifying. He says, you have killed the king's governor, one who represented his royal person, clothed with royal powers. We have all been traitors. We have all been a party to this mutiny.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
No. See, again, there is an alternative explanation, which is the only sane person in a world of fools.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah. Well, because of what he says next, he then says to the assemble company, this business about El Dorado is demented. Even if we found it, there is no way Philip II would allow us to keep it. He would send in viceroys and governors and bureaucrats, It's madness to be wasting our time on this. We should go back to Peru. There's a load of treasure there.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Let's kill everybody in Peru and take the treasure. That's just a much more sensible way of proceeding. There's a huge argument. The council breaks up and this issue is unresolved. So they set off downstream again, deeper and deeper into the Amazon. Now, by this point, Aguirre has clearly realised what perhaps some of the others have not yet woken up to.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
There is no way, actually, that they're going to be able to get back upstream. Because by now the current is getting stronger and stronger. It's really strong. You know, the Amazon, these are big rivers. There is no way with these terrible rafts that they're going to be able to go back the other way. You know, the more I hear about him... The more you like him.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Well, we'll see if you can maintain that position in the second half.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So they now discover they've got massive holes in their rafts. They have to stop by the side of the river and build new ships. That takes them three months. I mean, day after day, hammering and stuff, you know, cutting down trees to make nails and planks and things. They've got no food. They're living off wild fruit. And I have to say their own horses because they had horses on these rafts.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So they're now eating them. And Aguirre actually is quite pleased about this, because he thinks, if we eat all our animals, there's no way we can sort of settle down or be tempted to capture towns and, you know, all this stuff. We'll just have to keep going all the way to the Atlantic and get out of here, which is basically what I want to do.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And it's holding a mirror up to the carnage of the original 16th century expedition. Exactly. It's very like Apocalypse Now in that sense. So they shot it in the early 70s, as you say. They shot it on location in the Peruvian Amazon. And Herzog at one point threatened to shoot Kinski, his lead actor, and then turn the gun on himself.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And I think it's about this point that the mood really, really starts to darken. What do you mean, starts to darken? Yeah, because that was all prelude. That was all quite jolly. Because previously, when they'd got on reasonably well with the native population, they had done a bit of trading. Of course, there'd been a bit of violence, but nothing completely off the scale.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Now, there's a lot of fighting. And basically, the word spreads that the Spaniards are bad guys. And whenever they go out to look for food, they're often ambushed by Indians. There's also a huge row, one of endless huge rows inside the camp. Some of Don Fernando's friends say, look, you actually need to get rid of Aguirre. But he doesn't have the guts. He demotes him as second in command.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And the problem is, Aguirre, as we've established, is a very vengeful man. So Aguirre just notes this slight, he hides his fury and resentment, but he's determined one day that he will get his revenge. So we come to March 1561. Don Fernando and Aguirre call another meeting. You can sense that the mood is getting very paranoid.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They begin by demanding that every man pledge his loyalty to Don Fernando by God and the Virgin. And then Aguirre addresses the men and he says, look, we've been talking, the plan has changed. We are going to forget about El Dorado now.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We are going to seize the wealth of Peru and we will crown Don Fernando Guzman, our general, by the grace of God, Lord and Prince of Peru, the Maine and Chile, to whom by right these kingdoms belong. Wow, there's a twist. He says, we forswear our allegiance to the king of Spain. And Aguirre makes this huge pronouncement.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He says, from this day forward, I pledge myself to my prince, king and natural lord, Don Fernando, and I swear and promise to be his faithful vassal and to die in his defence. So that's a death sentence, isn't it? And then he turns to Fernando. He bows. And in front of everybody, he kisses his hand as the new Prince of Peru.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And Tom, I hate to tell you, but with that traitor's kiss, the real nightmare begins. Brilliant, Dominic.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Guess what? The clock is ticking for Don Fernando, I think it's fair to say, Tom. So he's the Prince of Peru, but they're lost in the middle of the jungle, so it's fair to say his title is purely nominal at this point. And Aguirre says, look, this is how we're going to get out. I've got my plan. We'll finish building these brigantines, these ships.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
When they're ready, we will sail all the way down the Amazon, another 2,000 miles or whatever to the Atlantic. Dead easy. Then we will head to an island called Margarita, which is off the coast of Venezuela. There is a Spanish base. We will take that base. We'll get supplies. We'll recruit people there. Then, he says, we'll sail up to Panama. We'll seize the capital.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And that's sort of been reported as he was basically forcing Kinski to film scenes at gunpoint, which I think is a slight exaggeration. But the filming of it was demented. But that actually, of course, reflected the subject matter, which is, as you say, this expedition. Yeah. That's very, very Heart of Darkness, actually. The 16th century expedition.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We'll kill all the royal officials. We'll take control of the Spanish fleet based in Panama. We will rally the colonists of Central America. And we will cross the Isthmus of Panama and launch a seaborne invasion of Peru and seize the gold of Peru. Now, if you were standing in the middle of the jungle, soaked with rain, you've only eaten kind of overripe fruit for the past month and a horse.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And Dominic, I'm imagining a lot of leeches. Yeah, loads of leeches. When someone outlined this plan to you, which involves a lot of travel... A lot of capturing of implausible capturing of fleets, crossing of isthmuses and multiple South American countries. You might say, I find this implausible. You might equally say, well, what's the alternative? Yeah, well, that's what they say.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They say, fine, let's give it a go. Why not? What's the worst that could happen? I think it's fair to say they haven't really thought that through because the worst that can happen is probably a lot worse than they're imagining.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And as we'll see, maybe they had a few laughs along the way. So they set off. They go into the river network again of Amazonia eventually. They built the ships. We're in April 1561. This is the point at which Robert Silverberg says in his book, in all the records of South American conquest, Aguirre stands out as the only man who ever went to great lengths to avoid finding El Dorado.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Because whenever they see an interesting looking tributary, He says, don't even look at it. Keep going. He's got his plan. He doesn't want anything to interfere with it. Again, he's right. Of course he is. They don't want to get lost in this maze of rivers. It's a terrible sort of labyrinth, sort of riverine labyrinth. They're eating fish. They are living off turtles and manatees. That's terrible.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Manatees are endangered. Perhaps this is why. El Loco. They're all incredibly emaciated. They're all going a bit mad. After a few weeks, Don Fernando, who's still hanging around, some of his friends say to him, this is mad. I mean, the El Dorado thing was pretty mad. But this idea about looping around and conquering Peru is absolutely bonkers. It's never going to work. Let's get rid of Aguirre.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But they delay too long. They talk about it, but they don't do it. They have a sort of complicated plan. They're going to invite him aboard a ship and stab him and all this. And in the meantime, word leaks out. And so Aguirre finds out about it, and he decides he will strike first. So the first person that he gets rid of is his friend, Senor Salduendo, who had been his ally earlier on.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He's started sleeping with Doña Inés, and Aguirre finds that disgraceful. And he denounces his former friend as a traitor. He sends his men to overpower him and to butcher him with knives, which they do. He says, actually, Doña Inés is a massive drain on this expedition and a distraction. She's got to go. And he sends two of his henchmen, who are called Carrion and Yamoso.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yamoso will be reappearing in this story in a colourful manner. These two guys turn up with daggers to kill Doña Inés. And the various chroniclers and eyewitness accounts really go to town on this. They're said to have stabbed her so ferociously that she drowned in her own blood. One account says they took an unnatural delight in mangling what had once been so beautiful.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
It's about European colonizers, colonialists, conquistadors. In Heart of Darkness, which we did a podcast on a few weeks ago, they go up the Congo. Joseph Conrad, his narrator, Marlow, goes up the Congo. He's in search of this guy, Kurtz, who's lost his mind. Well, in this story, it's the people who are going up the river who lose their minds.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Another, even the most hardened men in the camp at the sight of the mangled, that word again, the mangled victim, were broken hearted. For this was the cruelest act that had ever been perpetrated. But Aguirre, he doesn't mind. He thinks it's great. I mean, it's what he wanted. It's what he ordered. So that's not true.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah, that's true, actually. You're quite right. And you've pointed out a terrible discrepancy in the sources. I have. Oh, Tom, this is the kind of forensic detail that marks us out as a great history podcast. So Don Fernando has been sort of watching all this impotently and is horrified. But as our sources say, he now has just become a quivering jelly of a man.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He became fearful and changed in appearance, but he didn't protect his person with more care, nor take Aguirre's life, nor seek to rally more friends, for he had become so timid and listless that for care of his own life he took but little note. It seemed that he carried death in his eyes. So the end comes for him a few days later. They're camped on an island in the middle of the river.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre's men burst into his hut. They kill his chaplain first, stabbed him so ferociously that the sword pinned him to the mattress. Then they go by Don Fernando's kind of hammock and he wakes. And Aguirre said to him very gently, don't be alarmed, your excellency. And then they killed all Don Fernando's friends while he was just sort of lying there in his hammock looking mournful.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then they shot Don Fernando with their arquebuses and hacked him to pieces with their swords and threw him in the river. So that's the end of him. So he never becomes King of Peru. He never became King of Peru at all. He just floated down the Amazon in bits. It's a warning never to have dreams above your station.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
You should always be kept in check. Accept your lot. Don't aim high. Don't follow your dream. So the next morning, everybody wakes up and Aguirre addresses the whole camp. And he says, look, I did this for the safety of the army. Because if Don Fernando had been allowed to live, we'd all have perished. He says, please, everybody.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He says, please consider me, from now on, your friend and companion. You will not be disappointed, for you can scarcely conceive how much I desire to administer to your pleasure and contentment. Of course he does. And he says, to maximise everybody's pleasure and contentment, a few quick ground rules. From now on, all private conversations are outlawed, and you can no longer go around in groups.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
To stop conspiracy. To stop conspiracies. We can have no more of this plotting. I mean, that's rich, given from the chief plotter, but he says, look, there's been far too much plotting. And he also appoints a kind of Praetorian guard for himself of Basques with arquebuses.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So actually behind that, I think there may be a sort of serious point, which is that there are clearly internal feuds and rivalries. Aguirre is a Basque himself, and it may well be that, very hard for us to detect, there is perhaps an issue here between Castilians and Basques, or something like that.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And particularly this bloke, Aguirre, who I think it's fair to say is one of the strangest and most unsettling characters we've ever done on this podcast. It's really interesting. The books about him are often written by, some of them are by professional historians. But one of the best, for example, is by a guy called Robert Silverberg, who's actually a science fiction writer. Yeah, he did.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They are Castilian by and large. And as we will see, the sources, I do believe that a lot of this happened, that a lot of what is being reported is true.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But I think the spin they are putting on this is very particular, as we shall see, because these are eyewitnesses who have been part of a rebellion against the King of Spain and want to excuse themselves by explaining how they were being misled by a madman. So it may be that Aguirre isn't... Less mad.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Right. Not a madman. Not a madman at all. A very good manager. But you would follow him into the jungle, Tom, would you not? I absolutely would. I'd do whatever he said. But I mean, if it all went wrong... Would you then smear him as a loco? Claim that he had a limp and stuff? I'd like to think I'd stay loyal. Right. Well, some of Aguirre's people did say law rights at the end. That would be me.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I mean, if he was like Unai Emery. I mean, not if he was like Klaus Kinski. Yes. Just putting that on the record. Fine. Yeah, you wouldn't follow a German, is what you're saying. I wouldn't follow a very sweaty guy with bulgy eyeballs who's wearing too much armour.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
No, he doesn't. Very kind of dapper coat and...
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
scarf do you know what he is he's courtly yeah he is a word one would often use of a spaniard yeah courtly is absolutely the word you're right he actually has kind of quite a 16th century face i think like a kind of cavallero in a an el greco painting right they're now in i guess where are they they are in northern brazil they've got completely lost do we know how far they've got to get to the atlantic now
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They're well over halfway. They are now probably go round about a river called the Rio Negro. So they're heading across the border into what is now Venezuela. And just to ask, no one has ever done this before? No, they have no idea where they are. Now, actually, at one point they see campfires. They saw lights burning on the horizon. And they have a few guides left, a few native guides.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Some of the guides say, God, this could be it. This could be the land of the Amagua, these people who are very rich. And Aguirre is furious at this. He says, on pain of death, nobody is to look at this town or talk about it or mention the Amagua again.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Because he's really wedded to this plan of sailing around the top of South America and then crossing the Isthmus of Panama and then seizing the gold of Peru. He's right. Well, he's also at this point very, very paranoid.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So Fray Simon says, so many were the fears that disturbed the wicked conscience of Aguirre, that although he'd killed those whom he feared, he never felt secure from the survivors. And I think that's definitely true. At this point, he really starts getting into his garrotting.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So there hasn't been a lot of garrotting so far, but now, I mean, I can't stop the narrative every five minutes for all the garrotting. Just assume that it's constant. I mean, it's a more merciful way to go than stabbing someone to death. So perhaps he's...
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
coming around to him well this I think you would disagree with Tom because I think there's a hint of a kind of satanic nihilism I love a satanic nihilist so Fray Simon says that Aguirre at this point banned his men from praying and he said throw away your rosary beads you don't need them he said if you're worried about your souls you should play dice with the devil It's a good phrase.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then he says, he's very Friedrich Nietzsche, actually. He said, he told his men that God had heaven for those who chose to serve him, but that the earth was for the strongest.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He knew for certain there was no salvation and that being in life was to be in hell and that he would commit every species of wickedness and cruelty so that his name might ring throughout the earth and even to the ninth heaven. He's like the judge in Blood Meridian. Yeah, Blood Meridian. Or the Marquis de Sade or something.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah. And he wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The Golden Dream, a history of quests for El Dorado. Like, very scrupulously researched, very serious book. And he describes Aguirre in this book. He says he's the single most villainous figure in the annals of the Spanish conquest, which is, you know... It's quite a high bar to clear. Yes, it is.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
There's a kind of ideological sadism to him, I think, at this point, if this is to be believed. They now enter the Orinoco River, and the river is widening, which is great news for them, because it means that they're clearly approaching the Atlantic. It's really hot and humid in Venezuela in July, which is when they're there. And Aguirre is very hot tempered.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He says, we've got all these porters and guides with us. Let us abandon them here. So they abandoned them on the riverbank and they're crying and they're desperate. And there's nothing there. I mean, it's nothing there at all. Kind of dangerous animals and mudflats. And a couple of the Spaniards say, come on, this is a bit harsh. I mean, we've been travelling with these guys for months.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And Aguirre says, right, you've got to go. And he has them garrotted or shot, people who try to protest. And then at last, on the 1st of July, 1561, they enter the Atlantic. This incredible voyage, they've covered 4,000 miles in nine months. They've lost about half of the original party at this stage. But they're still alive. 17 days later, they glimpse the island of Margarita.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
When they see the island, Agri says, brilliant. And he celebrates by garroting two more of his men, who he thinks could conceivably betray him to the authorities when he gets there. And then they sail to the island and he sends a messenger ashore to ask for help with the words, we are ordinary sailors lost at sea.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And presumably this is quite convincing because they must look an absolute mess after. Yeah.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Nine months. Nine months. They've been there nine months. They're emaciated. They're sodden. They're filthy. The governor completely believes this. So he turns up with his officials. It's all very, very friendly. And Aguirre says, would it be all right if we came on shore? Can we take some exercise and bring our weapons just to practice? And the governor says, yeah, great.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So they march ashore as though they're kind of on parade. It's very well planned. And then they sort of unsheathe their swords and level their guns and they take the governor and his officials hostage. So this is obviously not a huge place. You know, you're talking about hundreds of people rather than thousands.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But because, as we said at the beginning, the Spanish presence is quite thin, it's quite thinly spread. So they march into the main town of Margarita. They seize the fort. They lock up the governor and all the other bigwigs. They break into the treasury. They steal all the gold that's been stored, ready to be shipped to Spain.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They burn the account books, which to me is a sign that there is clearly some kind of serious political motive behind all this. It's not just kind of insane nihilism. Because clearly, this is an attack on the idea of authority and royal authority. And what I think, as we'll see runs through this, is Aguirre and some of the others clearly have a deep resentment.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He's already said, if we capture El Dorado, Philip II will take it from us and give it to...
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
aristocrats and viceroys and bureaucrats and of course that had you know for cortez in mexico when we did that episode that that series a couple of years ago that had kind of happened to him he'd conquered it all and then been sort of pushed out and so i think that's at the back of their mind i wonder also is there a kind of element of basque nationalism would be anachronistic because the basques are proud mountain people
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I mean, a lot of these people are from the kind of Spanish periphery. So, you know, famously, Cortés and his allies in Mexico, a lot of them had come from Extremadura, the sort of borderlands. And again, Aguirre is from a borderland. He's not from metropolitan Spain, Castile, from, you know, one of the great cities. And I think there probably is a fair bit of resentment, actually.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then there's the great historian of the Amazon, John Hemming, who wrote a brilliant book about the fall of the Incas. And he says of Aguirre, simply, cruel, psychopathic, a man of unmitigated evil. Yeah, so people are going to enjoy this. Yeah. Yeah, it's always good to have a character like that on the podcast.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
of kind of royal officials. But also Spanish, Castilian kind of authority. Exactly. And actually, we'll see, there'll be more proof of this in a second. One great problem for them is that a missionary is visiting Margarita, has stopped at Margarita while they're there, a man called Montesinos, a guy from Santo Domingo. And he has a big ship and he gets away in the chaos. Bad news for Aguirre.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
It's very bad news. He goes off to the mainland. And this is the point at which word of Aguirre's and his kind of misconduct begins to spread across the Spanish colonies. So from this point onwards, he has lost the element of surprise that I think was so important to him. And I think this is the point at which, dare I say, he really does begin to lose the plot.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So up to this point with all the garrotting, I think there has still been an element of rationality. But we're told that at this point, some of his men tried to defect and he was, quote, furious and raved like a madman, foaming at the mouth with rage and passion. He has them captured. He garrots them.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Their bodies are displayed with the message, these men were executed because they were faithful vassals of the king of Castile. Perhaps another bit of evidence for your point, Tom. Or of kind of class resentment, perhaps. I think there definitely is a bit of class resentment.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And actually, sort of jumping ahead, in the 20th century in particular, some Latin American historians said, this guy's not a madman. He's a class warrior. He's a socialist. He is a Marxist avant la lettre. possibly going a little bit far. Is that based on the evidence so far? But he issues orders.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He says we must round up all the, and I quote, bishops, viceroys, presidents, auditors, governors, lawyers and procurators, as well as the caballeros of noble blood. In other words, the gentlemen. These people have been sucking the Indies dry. And he doesn't mean from the native inhabitants. He means from us. We have won through our sweat and our blood Violence.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We have won this land and this gold and it is being sucked from us by pen pushing bureaucrats, you know, elitist establishment types, chinless toffs. And I think that is definitely there. So at this point, there's a bit of a reign of terror in Margarita. The richest citizens are locked up. Their money is stolen. The governor is garrotted and his officials are garrotted.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre is now ruling with a kind of rortifier. So if anybody hesitates to garrot somebody, he garrots them as well. He says, you know, you've got to be in on this. And now there's a really, really terrible moment. We talked about this on stage, didn't we? And I always used to really enjoy this part of the story.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He hears a rumour that the royal troops have landed, which is not true, and he goes out to face them. And he leaves his chief lieutenant, who's a guy called Martin Perez, in charge of the fort. And when he gets back after this false alarm, one of his other men, they're all feuding the whole time, one of his other men says, Martin Perez has been plotting against you, which is not true.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre says, right, bring him in. He comes in. Aguirre's men kind of leap out from behind the furniture or something and stab this man and shoot him with an arquebus. But Perez is not killed. He's hideously wounded. Blood and entrails are everywhere. And he manages to, like a sort of Frankenstein's monster, he lurches out of the room. Imagine this lovely colonial mansion. Holding in his guts.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Wooden balustrade. Leaving this... And he's lurching like a monster down the corridor. People screaming and running in terror and stuff. And... Aguirre's men are chasing him, still trying to stab him and shoot him and stuff. And eventually they corner him, I mean literally in a corner, and they manage to finish him off, they cut his throat. And it's a terrible scene.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I mean, his entrails are everywhere. Aguirre spots one of the men clearly looking a little bit green. Yeah. And this is a guy called Anton Yamoso, who had been one of the murderers of Doña Inés. And Aguirre says, you don't look like, you know, you don't seem to be enjoying this. Were you part of his conspiracy? Do you hold so lightly the love that I feel for you?
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And Yamoso is terrified, and he protests his innocence. And Aguirre seems completely unmoved, and he's kind of reaching for the garrote. And Yamoso drops to his knees by the disemboweled body of Martin Perez. You know, he basically wants to prove his loyalty. He shouts, curse this traitor. I will drink his blood.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then, as Fray Simon reports, putting his mouth over the wounds in the head with more than demoniac rage, he began to suck the blood and brains that issued from the wounds and swallowed what he sucked as if he were a famished dog. And Aguirre says to him, oh, brilliant. You know, you and I are very much on the same page. You're clearly on the side of the angels.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And so Yamoso has proved his loyalty, which is great. On the one hand, it seems so grotesque as to be an exaggeration.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
They wouldn't make it up. And it's a very detailed story. It's a very detailed story with names, kind of dates, places. So it's so hard to tell what the truth of this is. But undoubtedly, there is a lot of very genuine violence. And I don't think there's any doubt that they have gone, because he would often say to his men,
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
If you're thinking now the King of Spain can take us back, you are greatly mistaken. We are in so deep now that we just have to keep going. Well, that signature, the traitor, I mean, that's really what kicks it off, isn't it? It is. I mean, he's not wrong. He recognised, I think, straight away, there's no way back from this. When we're in, we're all in.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So now he decides, right, we're going to have to carry on with the rest of the plan. We'll cross to the mainland. He has an exciting new flag, which he's had specially made. A pirate flag, of course. It's black with red crossed swords on it. I mean, honestly, if you were... You were at some New World port and you saw a ship with that flag sailing towards you.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I don't want to be having to either have my brains drunk by somebody or drinking somebody else's brains. No. I mean, I wouldn't even drink your brains, Tom, to be frank. Oh, I'm glad that's on the record. So they cross to the mainland. It takes them eight days. On the 7th of September, 1561, they arrive on the coast of what's now Venezuela. And it's deserted.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
The word has spread that he's coming and the people have been told, evacuate the towns. We're sending troops that this madman is on the loose. We'll sort this out. He burns his ships, a very kind of, you know... Alexander the Great's. Alexander the Great's detail, exactly.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He burns his ships and he says, he orders, he's got heralds and he says, go and proclaim a war of fire and blood against the king of Castile and his vassals. He marches on this town called Valencia and he's in a very sort of Mr. Kurtz mode at this point. So he's been carried in a hammock. It's incredibly hot. He's got a fever. He's completely emaciated.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We're told by the sources he was reduced to a skeleton at the point of death. And I suspect at this point, some of his men are thinking, oh, I really hope he dies. If there's some way we could get out of this. But he doesn't die. And fortunately, he recovers from the fever madder than ever. You keep saying this, that he gets madder than ever. Yeah. You don't think he was mad before?
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I think there's still some way to go, frankly. I mean, the whole drinking brains stuff. The drinking brains is poor. I agree with that. I think you have to be pretty mad to be madder than that. He let the Basque country down there, I think. Yeah, he did. So he celebrates his recovery by executing a man called Gonzalo.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And Gonzalo's crime is that he'd gone off without permission to catch some parrots. That's the laugh. I think at this point there's a lot of crazy laughter. As parrot fancy as slaughtered. Slaughtered around him. They get to Valencia and he writes this mad letter to Philip II, which many historians have written about this, say it was one of the maddest letters in Spanish history.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Well, all history, you might say. I mean, let's pick it up. It is properly mad. It says, King Philip, son of Charles the Invincible, I, Lope de Aguirre, thy vassal, am an old Christian of poor but noble parents of the town of Oñate in Biscay. Actually, an old Christian is an interesting line because it's a reminder that actually Spain was not entirely Christian until relatively recently. Yeah.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So he's contrasting himself with the Jews and the Muslims who've converted. Exactly. So his identity is saying, I am of loyal, you know, Spanish stock. And he says, for 54 years, I did the great service in Peru in the conquest of the Indians. And I did all this in your name. And I didn't ask your officers for payment.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But you have been very cruel and ungrateful to me and my companions for such good service. Again, the hint of the political resentments that may lie behind this. We won these lands while you remained quietly in Spain. Remember, King Philip, that thou hast no right to draw revenues from these provinces, since their conquest has been without danger to thee. Again, that point.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He complains a lot about the cruelties which thy judges and governors exercise in thy name, the oppression of thy ministers, who give places to their nephews and their children, who dispose of our lives, our reputations and our fortunes. So, you know, there are all these kind of nepo babies coming over here and taking the big jobs.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Also in a very 16th century theme, resentment of the religious orders. The corruption of the morals of the monks is so great. They pretend, they tell you that they're converting Indians, but actually they are enemies of the poor, they're avaricious, gluttonous and proud. The poor, by that he's again not speaking about the Indians, he's speaking about Aguirre and his compadres. Yes, exactly.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then there's an ending which I very much enjoy. Because the great thing about this is he lurches from one thought to another in the same sentence. So he says, my comrades and I pray to God that thy strength may ever be increased against the Turk and the Frenchman and all others who desire to make war against thee. But because of thy ingratitude, I am a rebel against thee until death.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Signed, Lope de Guire, The Wanderer. So, as John Hemmings says, an extraordinary document, a mixture of rebellious defiance, megalomania and self-pity. Robert Silverberg says, few kings had ever received such a message from a subject. Shifting kind of attitudes within the space of sometimes the same sentence. And the tragedy is, Philip II probably never even got to read it.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And that's Aguirre. Yeah. There's an argument possibly he's the only sane man on the expedition. Isn't there some historian who says that he's the only man in history to look for El Dorado who didn't want to find it? Exactly. Exactly. Well, we'll come to that. In fact, he tries to dissuade other people from trying to find it.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Because there's no evidence that you did read it. It must have been intercepted by a royal official who filed it under M for mad. I mean, to be fair to Philip, though, I mean, he does love reading a letter. That's basically all he's doing, isn't it? Yeah. He's sitting in a very gloomy in El Escorial. Yeah. This would have livened up his day, I think. I know.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And then suddenly you get that. Let's get to the end of the story. Aguirre ends up cornered in this town called Barquisimeto in Venezuela. A lot of his men have deserted. There's an awful lot of foaming at the mouth. There's a very famous incident while he's marching into Barquisimeto. It's pouring with rain and the horses are slipping and sliding in the mud.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
He shakes his fist at the heavens and he shouts... Does God think that because it rains in Torrance, I'm not going to reach Peru and destroy the world? Then he does not know me. Brilliant. I compared him to a Shakespeare hero, but actually he's now turning into a kind of Marlowe hero. He totally is, isn't he? So he gets to Barclay's Meadow. They're surrounded by royalist troops outside the town.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
I mean, they are literally, Tom, they're literally eating the dogs. They're like the people of Springfield, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Supposedly. The local governor issues promises of amnesty to Aguirre's men, so some of them start to slip away. He says, the time has come, I think we should garrote some more of my men. The sick and the unwilling, let's have a little purge.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
We'll be a leaner, more efficient outfit. And even his lieutenants, his loyalists, say to him, oh, come on, that's going too far. What about the bloke who drank the blood? The bloke who drank the blood actually stays there. Well, you'll see, he literally is the last person with him. So actually the drinking of the blood. Yeah, it was a genuine sacrament. Yeah, it kind of was.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre has a massive meltdown in the middle of October. He summons all his men, what remain of them. He puts a dagger to his chest. He says, why don't you cut out my heart? He says, I have killed a lot of people, but I quote, I want you to understand that I did it in order to protect your lives and for the benefit of all. It's a real kind of self-pity here.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
This does not unfortunately impress them. So most of them defect. And on the morning of Monday, the 27th of October, 1561, Those who are left say, could we please go out and make a last stand against the Royalist Army? He says, fine. They go out of the town. As soon as they get out of the town, they kind of drop their weapons and start shouting, long live the king, God save the king.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And they defect as well. Aguirre is gutted by this. The only person who's left is this boat, Yamoso, the blood and brains man. And Aguirre says, why are you still here? You know, why haven't you left me? And Yamoso says, so moving. He says, we were friends in life. I will live or die with you. And Aguirre, we're told, made no reply. He was crestfallen and lost. So that, I think, is lovely.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So let's give everybody a bit of context because there'll be lots of people who are not familiar with this story at all. So we're in the Spanish Empire in the late 1550s. So that means the Aztecs and the Incas have been conquered a generation ago. Loads of silver is flowing back to Europe from Mexico and Peru.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
What follows, perhaps less so, Aguirre goes to his room and he gets out his arquebus, his gun, and he goes to find someone we haven't mentioned, Elvira, who has been there the whole time. Age, what's she now, 14? God, she must be so embarrassed. Yeah. Oh, Dad. He's really let her down. And he goes in and he says to her, my daughter, my love, I thought I should see you married and a great lady.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But my sins and my great pride have willed it otherwise. Commend yourself to God, my daughter, and make your peace with him. For I can't bear that you would be called the daughter of a traitor. And that's quite moving. Perhaps a little more prosaic is he then also says, I don't want you to become a mattress for the unworthy. Which, you know, we know what that means.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Elvira is extremely disturbed by this, falls to her knees and starts pleading. She says, father, father, Satan is misleading you. And she's got a maid called Juana who manages to wrestle the gun from his hands. But then he really lets himself, Elvira and the Basque country down because he pulls out a dagger and stabs Elvira through the heart.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Yeah, it kills his daughter. There's a twist. I thought that he was going to kill himself. No. Well, you would think it would be a more satisfying story in a way if he now turned the dagger on himself, but he doesn't. Actually, what happens is moments later, royal troops burst into the apartment.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Aguirre picks up the arquebus again, but he's shaking so much that he can't fire it, and he bursts into tears. After all that, he has a soft heart, after all. The soldiers lead him outside. There is talk of a trial, but actually, here's the important thing. Loads of his old cronies who defected are there, and they say, oh, no, no trial, no trial. We should just kill him straight away.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Because they don't want the truth to come out. Because, of course, they don't want the truth to come out of their own complicity. And two of his old gunners volunteer to do it. You talked about Shakespeare. or sort of Jacobean drama or something. So in true Jacobean drama style, the first shot doesn't quite kill him, but he's still able to talk.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And he says, that has done the business, even though it hasn't. So then they have to shoot him again. He's now dead. They cut off his head and they put it in an iron cage. They cut off his hands. They wanted to send his hands on a kind of tour. So they sent his hands to the towns of Merida and Valencia. But the soldiers got bored of carrying them.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But if in your mind you're thinking, OK, well, South America has been conquered by Spain. The story is over. That's not right at all. Spanish rule is very fragile and it's really just confined to the coasts. And Spain itself, although it's very rich and powerful, it's in a kind of world of trouble. So the emperor Charles V abdicated in 1556 and Spain and its empire passed to his son Philip II.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
One of the hands ended up being thrown in a river, and the other one was thrown to the dogs to eat. So that's payback for his men eating all the dogs. Yes, I suppose so. So the dogs have had the last laugh, which is nice. They have, yeah. So that's the end of Lope de Aguirre, and I guess the question, very briefly at the end, is what it actually means.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
like a bit of a meaning? Do you not like a meaning, Tom? You love a meaning! This is very out of character. It's just the random madness. But maybe it isn't, you see. So for some people, so I guess for Werner Herzog in that film, it's not random madness. You could say it's Joseph Conrad-style Heart of Darkness.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
You go into the heart of the jungle, your complicity in colonialism leads you into evil. I mean, that's how some people have interpreted the story. Alternative explanation, of course, is that it's rather like Mr. Kurtz. It's about the human condition, and it's about you know, we've all got a Lope de Aguirre, a brain-sucking, daughter-murdering madman inside us, whether we like it or not.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
And that's actually how most historians, they have said he represents human evil in its purest form. Or there's the, he's a revolutionary. Well, that's, I think, the more interesting explanation. And there's a very recent book by an American writer called Evan Bulkin. I think it was his PhD, called Wrath of God. And he argues he was the first revolutionary, I mean, South America revolutionary,
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has loads of revolutionaries, Che Guevara most famously, he argues that Aguirre makes sense politically, that you put him into the context of mid-century Spanish America, very flimsy colonial control, endless feuds, endless revolts, huge resentment of royal authority. And Bulcan points out all the accounts we have of him are from people who were complicit in the revolt.
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And what they needed to do afterwards was to convince the Spanish authorities that it hadn't been political, that they had been coerced by a uniquely demented and demonic leader. Well, the demonic, presumably, because then it would explain how they had been seduced, that effectively they've been the victims of witchcraft. Exactly.
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That Aguirre represents, that's why that point, the thing about, oh, he doesn't want to go to heaven. He's determined to throw himself into this kind of Sardian pursuit of all that is cruel and brutal and all of this. That's why I think it was very important to them to make that point, to say there was no political context to this at all. It was an exercise in pure demonic evil by a madman.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
But there clearly was a political context. It's the signing his name as a traitor that kicks off the whole... Well, I mean, it's a coup, isn't it? It's an attempted coup. It is. And as Evan Bulkin says in his book, Latin American history is a saga of rebels and populists and strongmen who appeal to the... common man against overweening royal or state authority.
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You know, Simon Bolivar or Juan Perón or whoever it might be. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, the country with which Aguirre is most closely associated. So Hugo Chavez's culture ministry, I read in Evan Bulkin's book, I think, had a section on its official website praising Aguirre as a, quote, soldier, traitor, pilgrim, father, lover, dreamer. I think father is a bit of an ironic one there.
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He appears to be very rich and powerful, but he inherits a great mess. There's huge inflation thanks to all of this silver. Spain has been fighting all these wars in Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. He has to default on Spain's loans straight away. He's got no money. He's struggling to raise taxes in Spain itself. And the obvious place to look is the New World.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
There definitely is a magical realist, and maybe this should be our last, our closing point. The most famous of all European travellers who went to Latin America was a guy called Alexander Humboldt, German. He went to Venezuela in 1799, and he reported that the locals there said to him that at night, strange ghostly fires danced over the plains.
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He wrote, This fire, like the willow the wisp of our marshes, does not burn the grass. The people call these reddish flames the soul of the traitor Aguirre, and the natives believe that the soul of the traitor wanders in the savannas like a flame that flies the approach of men.
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And of course, Tom, members of the Rest Is History Club will get all four episodes of that series on Monday. And if you want to join them, you merely have to sign up at therestishistory.com. Adios. Very exciting. Hasta luego. Goodbye.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Let's get more gold and silver from the New World. But the problem is that his authority, and this is going to be really important in explaining the political context of this story, his royal authority is very weak in the Spanish colonies.
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So in Peru, for example, the Incas have, as it were, fallen, but there are still only about 4,000 European Spaniards in Peru, in Lima and whatnot, and they are fighting these endless civil wars and there are little rebellions and feuds and things. And in 1556, a new viceroy called the Marquis of Cañete, arrived in Lima from Spain.
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And Dominic, when he arrives in Lima, does he find the lilting of a Spanish guitar? He doesn't actually, Tom. He hears the sound of screams and chaos. Because law and order have slightly broken down in Lima. This is not the world of Paddington Bear. It's a much darker world. The place is in chaos. There are unemployed soldiers and ruffians everywhere. Total sort of feuds and vendettas.
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And he has to try to sort this out. He wants to find money.
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A weapon with a personal nickname. Exactly, yeah. Gut splitter. Yeah, the widow weeper or something of that kind. Anyway, at about this point, when the Marcus of Canete arrives in Lima, an Amazonian Indian chieftain arrives in Peru from the east. And it's very like the sort of barbarians on the periphery of the Roman Empire.
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There are all kinds of movements of people who are pushing other people because of the arrival of the Europeans. So it's caused kind of chaos among the tribes. And this bloke is taken, the leader of this tribe, is taken to see the Spanish authorities. And he says, we've traveled a long way. We've traveled along the Amazon. And I have seen lands rich in gold.
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And the Marcus of Canete's eye, you know, he raises his eyebrows at this. Yeah, he's, oh, brilliant. And this tallies with two things that people in the two great colonial cities of the western side of the continent, which are Lima and Quito, now in Ecuador, this tallies with two things that they believe.
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First of all, 10 years or so earlier, a man called Francisco de Oriana had led one of the great expeditions in all history. The first European expedition on the whole length of the Amazon. And he had traveled for 4,000 miles. And he, Oriana, reported that he had seen very large, very rich settlements.
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people who lived in towns, people who wore fine woven clothes with great pottery, and loads and loads of silver. And for centuries people have assumed, since then, that this was all nonsense and just a fable.
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But actually now the trend among historians of Amazonia is to say, actually Amazonia probably was more built up than we think, and there were more people there, and they were more sophisticated, and they were all killed in the long run, a lot of them by disease and things. So they've been discounted ever since. But archaeologists now think there's a lot of truth in this.
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And then the second thing is that in Lima and Quito, people have been swapping stories about this place called El Dorado. And this seems to have originated as a very garbled and exaggerated and confused report of what the Spanish were doing on the other side of the continent in Colombia, where they were conquering a people called the Muisca. And these Musco are quite rich.
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And this basically became embellished and garbled into a story of a land so rich that the king could sort of paint himself in gold dust, throw a load of gold into the lake every year in a religious ritual. And there's gold everywhere and there's a lake full of gold and all of this kind of business. Because El Dorado is literally the golden man, isn't it? The golden one. Exactly.
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So, the Marcus de Canieta, anyway, he arrives in Lima, and there's all of these different rumours hanging around, all the stuff out there in the Amazon, who knows, and his great brainwave is, and it's really smart, I'll get rid of all these ne'er-do-wells with their scars by saying to them, lads, why don't you go off on a massive expedition to go and find El Dorado?
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Because if they do find it, he'll be the man who saved Spain's finances. He can send all the gold back to Philip II, and that's great. If they don't find it, and they all die, brilliant, he's rid of them. It's win-win. So to command the expedition, he appoints a fellow called Pedro de Ossua, who is a knight from Navarre, from Pamplona.
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Everyone says he's very brave, he's very gallant, he's very headstrong. He's actually not without experience. He has been serving in New Granada, which is Colombia, for about 10 years. He's already gone on some El Dorado expeditions. No joy, really. But he's not a complete idiot. So he is appointed to lead the expedition.
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He is told, when you conquer the province of Amagua and Dorado, you will rule it as governor. And he thinks, well, brilliant. Because this is, of course, what conquistadors want. They want a slice of territory and they want an official appointment so that they can make money out of it. That's what all this is about. It's what Cortes, Pizarro, all of these people.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
So Ossua, over the next year or so, he gathers his team. He gets a very, very large expedition by the standards of the day, about 400 Spaniards and thousands of Peruvian Indians, native Peruvians, I suppose people might call them now. And it's the largest European force for the next two centuries to enter Amazonia.
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I have to say most of the people on this expedition are not people with whom one would choose to go on holiday. They're kind of gangsters, mercenaries, ex-cons. They're hard men, I think it's fair to say, Tom. And they start building all these rafts and brigantines on the edge of Amazonia that they will use to go into the kind of river network. It's kind of a spaghetti western only in a jungle.
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Exactly. It's a spaghetti western or... So we're going to be doing some episodes about Harold Hard Roger going into the lands of the Rus. And I think there's a slight Viking element to this. Kind of slightly terrifying men who would be no strangers to a facial tattoo. Yeah. Kind of venturing in search of gold and hopefully some slaughter. A lot of stubble, though. Exactly, yeah.
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This is a slightly sweatier version, I think it's probably fair to say. Anyway, in the summer of 1560, before he sets off, a sewer gets a letter from a friend. And the friend says to him, look, you're making two dreadful mistakes. Mistake number one, you are taking your mistress. What? Please tell me she is incredibly ugly. No. Please tell me she's not absolutely gorgeous. Tom's so gallant.
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Well, but it's for our own good and for the good of the expedition. So, no, she's said to be the most beautiful woman in all of Peru. That is mad. Disastrous. 400 desperados and one woman. Yeah, so she's a young widow. She's probably mixed race and mestizo. There were like four or five eyewitness accounts written after the event. On this issue, they're frustratingly inconsistent.
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So some say she's a woman of unimpeachable honour. Others say she's a little bit free with her affections. It's hard to say. So it's hard to know the truth there, Tom. I think listeners just make up their own minds. Anyway, a Suez mate says, you are mad to take her with you. Nothing good will come of it. And I quote, greater evils will follow than you can possibly suppose.
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And I have a sense they're not wrong. Yes. Well, especially as the friend also says, you're not just taking quite bad men. Some of the men you're taking are unbelievably bad men. And he says the worst is a man called Lope de Aguirre. So we know from a letter that Aguirre later wrote to Philip II, which we shall come on to. Aguirre had been born in 1510 in the Basque country.
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He'd come to Peru in his early 20s. He'd worked as a horse breaker and a general enforcer. That's a terrifying CV, isn't it? And... There's a wonderful account based on other accounts by a Franciscan monk called Fray Simon. And Simon said of Aguirre, he was of short stature and sparely made, ill-featured, the face small and lean, beard black, the eyes like a hawk.
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And when he looked, he fixed his eyes sternly, particularly when angry. So he's generally a slightly unsettling presence. Yeah. All the chroniclers agree that he talks a lot, he's very roughly spoken, he's incredibly bad-tempered, and he's incredibly vengeful. And when you think this is in the context of... The conquest of South America. Yeah.
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And people are saying, now this bloke, you know, he's crossed the line. That's very disturbing. So he's always been kicked out of towns. He really is a spaghetti Western character. And as Fray Simon says, he has a limp, which I always think is an unsettling sign in a conquistador because he's been shot in the leg.
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Fray Simon says he was driven from one province to another and was known as Aguirre el Loco, the madman. Right. So he's signed up to this expedition. And the other thing is, he's brought with him his daughter. So his daughter, he had a daughter with an Indian woman, and his daughter is called Elvira. And how old is she? Thirteen. Thirteen years old. Oh, so he's taking her out of school.
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Well, she always travels with him, and apparently he is completely devoted to her. Like, this is his real soft spot. Right. You know, he takes Elvira very seriously. But, I mean, should anyone be listening and think you've taken their children out of school? Don't. Just don't do it. You have to pay a fine, don't you, in England?
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543. Death in the Amazon: Aguirre, the Wrath of God
This is a salutary warning, I think, of what could happen, what could go wrong. Certainly don't go to the Amazon with a group of ne'er-do-wells. No. Pedro de Ossua, the commander of the expedition, completely ignores this letter, which is madness. And on the 26th of September 1560, he sets off with his expedition into the tributaries of the Amazon.
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And right from the start, surprise, surprise, things start to go wrong. They've built all these ships, but there are massive leaks on them, and he has to leave all but one of them behind. What, so he's setting off, and he's got all these ships built, and then he can't take any of them, except for one? He can take one brigantine, and then loads of rafts.
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Because it takes ages. And, you know, because the people are getting very impatient. And to be honest, I've had to cut out already a lot of feuding. Okay. There's been a lot of feuding already. I'm getting a really bad feeling about this. Right. So they all cram into these rafts. But a sewer insists on keeping one cabin just for himself and Donya Ines.
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Polish families, taking them to railway stations, cramming them into cattle wagons, sending them off eastwards towards Siberia. And these are scenes that are very reminiscent of the fate of Jews in occupied Nazi Europe who were being rounded up and put in cattle wagons, unheated, women, children, as well as men, no food, no drink, freezing cold. And it's been estimated that by early 1941,
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about one and a half million Poles have been driven into exile. And that of these, by the summer of 1941, between a third and a half of all these Poles who've been deported are dead, either from malnutrition or from the cold or from exhaustion or, of course, from disease. So it's the same process of... genocidal expulsions that you're seeing in Nazi Germany, which are much better known.
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Yes. So there's a Polish government in exile by this point in London. which means that they're unable really to resist British pressure. And Britain wants this Polish government in exile essentially to ally itself to the Soviet Union, which of course is really tough for the Poles to do.
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I mean, you know, the Soviet Union has dismembered their country, stabbed them in the back, deported millions of their fellow citizens. But they do it. And one of the reasons that they do it is that they see that this is a way to secure the release of the Poles who have been kept prisoner in the Soviet Union.
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And among these prisoners is one of the very few Polish officers who had been deported to have survived Soviet captivity. And this is a man called Vladislav Anders. And he had spent, so he hadn't been taken into a wooden shot. He'd been taken to the Lubyanka, the NKVD prison. And he'd spent months there, kind of horrendous experience of imprisonment. But then he's released.
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And initially he thinks, if I'm going to carry on the fight against the Germans, then I'm going to have to do it with the Red Army. But he realizes very rapidly that Stalin is not going to allow an autonomous Polish military force to assemble in the Soviet Union. You know, the risk in Stalin's opinion is too great. And so therefore, Anders starts thinking, well,
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we should try and get these guys out of the Soviet Union altogether and see if we could maybe fight with the British. And Stalin is also very keen to see the back of them. And so Stalin and Anders agree that Stalin will allow Polish prisoners to travel down to the Caspian Sea, to sail across the Caspian Sea and land in Iran together.
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And the reason for that is that there is a British military presence in Iran because at this time Iran is under joint Soviet, US and British occupation. And specifically the rendezvous is a port called Pahlavi on the Caspian Sea that I gather is now called Bandar-e-Anzali. And
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Throughout the spring and summer of 1942, over 100,000 Poles, and this includes women and children, are ferried across the Caspian Sea. They've travelled all the way across the Soviet Union from the camps that they've been kept in. They've travelled there and they're now being ferried across the Caspian Sea And they arrive in Parlevi and they're in a terrible condition.
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You know, they're hunger ravaged, they're disease ridden, they're shattered. They've traveled vast, vast distances. And I think British officers looking certainly at the men think, oh, God, I mean, how are we ever going to get there? these people in addition to fight. But the British have brought food, medicine, ambulances.
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And although lots of Poles do die, there are also lots who then start on the road to recovery. And civilians are sent to camps outside Tehran and Esfahan in Iran. And then they are sorted out and they're sent onwards to various territories within the British Empire. So Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Kenya, and lots of these poles.
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I mean, actually, they kind of end up settling in these various countries and staying there for good. But the plan for...
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the young men, these Poles who have come to join the British to fight the Nazi enemy, the plan for them is to send them from Iran through Iraq to Palestine to train them, to get them ready to join British forces, and if needs be, to join the fight against Rommel, who at the time is kind of advancing across North Africa towards Egypt.
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And this force of Poles, they can't call it the First Polish Corps because the First Polish Corps is, you know, that's the body of Poles who were stationed in Britain. So they become the Second Polish Corps. And the nickname that they get given is the Anders Army.
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I mean, it has the force of a kind of folk tale, I think. And as with a folk tale, there are various accounts of exactly how Wojtek comes to be a part of this movement of Polish troops to Palestine. But I think the basic outline is clear. So there's a group of Polish soldiers, maybe officers, maybe private soldiers, accounts differ.
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And they're in the wilds outside Tehran and there they meet a young Iranian boy and he has a sack tied around his neck and he opens up the sack and inside it there is a tiny bear cub. And the boy tells the Poles that the mother of this cub had been shot by hunters. And the cub had been abandoned and the boy had found it.
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And it's something that he can sell because it's the customary fate of abandoned cubs to be sold to trainers who will raise them as dancing bears. And to be a dancing bear is hideous. I mean, you're chained, you're kind of whipped, you're prodded, you have a miserable life.
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So the Poles know this and obviously have a sense of fellow feeling for an animal that has suffered bereavement and faces a terrible future. So they buy it from the boy.
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Probably barter or food or maybe they've got a few coins. Anyway, they come into possession of this bear cub. And what happens next? Various stories. So one story says that this this cub is bought by a Polish officer who gives it to the niece of another officer. And this niece is called Irina. And she looks after the cub for three months in the civilian transit camp where she's been stationed.
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And then. The bear is kind of very mischievous, full of fun. It's clearly not a good place for a kind of wild animal to be kept. And so Irina gives it to the army as a mascot. And the bear ends up being given by a lieutenant in... and as his army to Polish soldiers in the second transport company. And these have already reached a base at Gedera in Palestine. So that's one account.
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Another account, and this is the one you'll get in Eileen Orr's book, which is a wonderful account of Wojtek. And she says that actually it was Polish privates in the second transport company had come into possession with Wojtek right from the beginning, that they were the ones who had negotiated with this
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Iranian boy, and that they had kept the bear with them as they traveled to Palestine because they weren't really allowed to have a bear with them.
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And when the commanding officer is told, we're really sorry, sir, we've got this bear cub, he allows them to keep it because he recognizes that it's really good for their morale, that the soldiers are devoted to the cub and that it's kind of raised their spirits.
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So the bear is variously known, I think, by Poles as Wojciech or Wojtek. So Wojciech is the formal, Wojtek is the informal, and it means happy warrior. Right. And in due course, Wojtek grows up to full size. He's an absolutely enormous bear. And then another Wojtek joins the company. And so the bear is called Big Wojtek and the soldier is called Little Wojtek. So his full name is Big Wojtek.
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But as a cub... Wojtek is given a kind of carer, one of the Polish soldiers in the Second Transport Company. And this is a guy called Peter Prendis. And most of the soldiers in Second Transport Company are young. They're kind of teenage or early 20s. But Peter is he's 46 and he's probably the oldest soldier in the company. And that is why he is given responsibility for the bear.
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It's thought that he is he's the guy who will prove the best parent. But actually, the role that Peter plays is not that of a father, but of a mother. Daddy bears, I gather, do not bring up their babies.
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No, cubs are raised solely by their mothers. And so Peter comes to be nicknamed by his comrades Mummy Bear. And, I mean, you read the accounts of it and... Wojtek, he's a little cub. He might get frightened. He might get scared. Whenever he does, he runs to Peter and Peter picks him up in his arms and cradles him, cuddles him, gives him his finger for Wojtek to kind of suck on.
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It's all very sweet. But then gradually, of course, Wojtek starts to grow up and he's a great laugh.
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is he yeah bears are like that though aren't they he loves it so there's um initially there's there's great fun and games with a dalmatian that's owned by uh by the british liaison officer he is uh he's always climbing trees and then finding that he can't he can't climb down so he just drops down and falls on passing soldiers and this is all great fun yeah and um he's he's um
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Well, I'm not going to call him a perv because, of course, he's a bear. But he's very keen on stealing the underwear of Polish female soldiers.
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So to quote Eileen Orr, the women, part of a Polish signals unit, were furious because after months of living rough in their isolated camp in the dusty desert, they had only recently taken a rare trip to Tel Aviv to acquire the much cherished underwear. And Peter has to go and... Get it back. Get the underwear back.
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Trying it on. Who knows? I don't know. The thing he really loves is swimming. And this is obviously a problem if you're in a kind of dusty, parched land in Palestine. So whenever he finds water, whenever he finds a kind of river or a pond or mud or whatever, he'll kind of roll in it.
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And the larger he gets, the more his use of water has to be rationed because, of course, it's a very precious commodity. And so he's always trying to sneak into the shower hut. This is another example of his mischievous nature. Right. And on one occasion he does this and he finds that there's an Arab spy in the corner. So he's cornered.
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So his reward for this is he gets an extra long shower plus lots of fruit and beer. And beer. So he's tanked up half the time. So he loves beer and he loves cigarettes and he loves coffee. The cigarettes have to be lit, but he won't smoke them. He eats them. But I think the reason for this is is that at no point does it cross Wojtek's mind that he's a bear. He assumes that he is a Polish soldier.
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I mean, he has no reason to think otherwise. He's been brought up by them. He lives among them. He adopts their habits and he marches with them. He kind of learns to kind of salute. I mean, he does this without being instructed. He just kind of picks up on it.
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You do it. And so you can see why he would become a massive, massive favourite, not just with the 22nd Artillery Supply Company, as the 2nd Transport Company has now become, but with the whole of Anders Army, the whole of the 2nd Polish Corps. Obviously, really, really good for their morale. You can completely see why officers are going, yeah, let's keep this bear. It's good.
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Well, maybe not if your underwear has been stolen and he's trying to get into the shower with you. Yeah, maybe not. But I think in general, very good for morale. But then in December 1943, there is a crisis because Wojtek and his company are moved to Egypt, to Alexandria.
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And the reason for that is that by this point, Rommel is, you know, he's gone and the British have invaded Sicily and going up Italy and they need the Poles to help them in this terrible war. And the crisis is that soldiers are... forbidden to transport pets or mascots. There is no room in the transport ship for such animals.
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So their solution to this is to draft Wojtek officially into the Polish army as a private. And the British authorities approve this. They stamp Wojtek's military papers. He is now enrolled as a Polish soldier officially. And on the 13th of February 1944, Wojtek and his comrades, they're in Alexandria, they board a troop ship and they set sail westwards across the Mediterranean.
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And their destination, Dominic, is Taranto. And from there, Monte Cassino.
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So after your virtual visit, Amazon will deliver your prescriptions directly to your door.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Yes. So one of the most celebrated monasteries in the whole of Latin Christendom, founded in AD 529. It had been rebuilt and rebuilt. It kind of had this glorious heyday in the 11th and 12th centuries. 14th century, there'd been an earthquake. It had been rebuilt again.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So it's a great emblem of the kind of the ability of the Catholic Church to rise above all the disasters that could be thrown at it. And now it is in the eye of this terrible storm because the allies have to knock it out, essentially.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Because the Germans have occupied it and the Allies feel that they have to destroy the German positions if they're going to have a hope of breaking through and getting on to Rome. And we actually spoke to my brother in an earlier episode about the build-up to the Battle of Monte Cassino. But Wojtek arrives right in Rome.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And I think every Polish friend I've got has said... Do you know the story of Wojtek? So a particular shout out, if she's listening to this, to Bozena, who first mentioned Wojtek to us and in fact gave us a children's book about it. Maybe it was the one that you saw in the shop in Gdansk. And This is about a bear, but important to emphasise that it's about a Polish bear.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
the middle of it as it's kind of reaching this terrible climax and as you said in my brother's reading anders and his army are given the opportunity to storm monte casino to capture it and you know this is a mark of great honor because as my brother says it's the toughest of nuts. And there have previously been three attempts to take the monastery. It's failed.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
The monastery itself has been bombed completely into rubble, which actually means that it's now harder to take because there are more places to kind of hide. Three offensives have failed. The Poles will now take part in the fourth offensive, Operation Diadem, and in fact will kind of spearhead it. So the task of the Poles is to capture a mountain that has defied all the previous Allied troops.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
They've smashed themselves against it and broken against it. So can the Poles do it? So 24th of April 1944, they start moving up the foothills to take up positions for the final assault. And it is the job of Wojtek's company to keep the Polish artillery supplied with shells, with ammunition, as the Poles make their advance towards Monte Cassino, so inching forwards.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And they do this for three weeks and it's an exceedingly perilous and dangerous job. So they are having to drive at night to avoid, you know, enemy artillery, kind of sheer hairpin bends, people always kind of driving off cliffs and things like that.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So to quote a Polish veteran who's cited by Eleanor in her book, when we finally pulled into the positions of our artillery, we unloaded the ammo and fuses and after a short rest turned round and got out as fast as possible. In spite of all our precautions, a number of trucks crashed into the steep gorges, killing their drivers. So it's a very perilous business.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Well, he's terrified and he stays in the lorries kind of whimpering, covering his eyes with his paws, you know, completely shell-shocked. But then he starts to get his his kind of mojo back and he climbs out of the lorry that he's been hiding in. And he kind of looks around and wanders over to a tree and he climbs up the tree and he kind of watches the action.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So he's down seeing his friends carting, you know, shells up to the guns and carrying crates and things. So he drops down from the tree. And he walks over to his fellow soldiers and he holds out his paws to indicate that he'd quite like to join in the fun. He doesn't really know what it's about, but his friends are doing it, so why wouldn't he want to join in?
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
He's never, of course, been trained to...
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
to to handle heavy boxes of munitions but he's a bear so he's very strong and so actually he turns out to be absolutely brilliant and he he does this with all his mates and the boast is that he never drops a single shell and he does it kind of for as long as he wants to and then if he gets bored he'll go off and maybe have a you know have a have a sleep or something or right have a bit of a dose.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And if they want to get him back on, they give him a lit cigarette or bar of chocolate or something, and then he'll join back in. And he puts in really, really sterling work. And he contributes to the softening up of the German defences that enable Anders Army on the 11th of May to begin the long-awaited fourth offensive. And it's an absolutely murderous battle.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So in the account that you read about those British officers walking the battlefield of Monte Cassino, the bear is helping Polish gunners. And these Polish gunners are fighting on the British side against the Germans. And so in a sense, this is what I said at the end of our previous series, that we wanted to give a kind of coda to that story. Terribly dark, bleak, somber story.
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It lasts, you know, days and days and days. So just to give a description again for my brother's book, this is just one passage. On one occasion, a Polish lieutenant had been standing behind three men. A shell came over and exploded right on top of them. He commented, two of the men disappeared into thin air. There was nothing left.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But on a bush nearby, I saw the ammunition belt in the stomach of the third. That was all that was left. Soon after, he spotted a soldier sitting down close by, simply staring into space. The man was covered in dust and had a glazed expression on his face. The lieutenant bent over and touched his back and saw that it was covered in blood. The man, he realised, was dead.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Yes. No, he doesn't get hit. So he carries on throughout this. I think, I mean, obviously, if he'd been in the forefront of the battle, it would have been rather different because that is, I mean, really brutal. And on the 17th of May at last, Anders leads the Poles in a second attack on Monte Cassino. The Germans withdraw. 18th of May,
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
the Poles see a white flag flying over the ruins of the monastery and they're so shattered by what they've been going through that it takes them time to find enough men who are strong enough to go up to the height to take possession of the rubble of the monastery.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But they get there and they raise the Polish flag over the scene of desolation and a bugler plays St Mary's trumpet call, which, according to legend, had first been played on the walls of Krakow to warn of the Mongols.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And so it's hard not to think of all the emotions that must have been felt in Polish breasts hearing that and thinking of the fate of their own country, looking around at the rubble of this ancient dynasty.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
I mean, Wojtek would be an amazing subject. Of course. Do a CGI bear.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Well, Paddington, I mean, you do have a kind of track record. I missed out on Paddington, but I think Wojtek, I was born to play that part. So the Poles have lost a lot of men. Second Polish Corps have lost 1,150 killed. 3,050 have been wounded. The 22nd Artillery Supply Company, so that's the company that Wojtek's been serving with, you know, they have suffered casualties.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So, you know, Wojtek undoubtedly has been, you know, he's been in the line of fire. But they have done heroic work. So to quote Orr, during the Battle of Monte Cassino, Wojtek's company supplied approximately 17,300 tonnes of ammunition, 1,200 tonnes of fuel and 1,100 tonnes of food for Polish and British troops. Oh, good on them. And he gets a badge or something. There's a...
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So they all get the badge? They all get the badge. So it's a badge featuring Wojtek carrying an artillery shell. And he's got, you know, it looks as if he's marching off to go to battle. And this becomes the badge of the 22nd Company. It's kind of one of the most sort of pieces of military memorabilia that you could possibly have.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And it becomes the kind of the, I guess, the emblem of the 22nd company. And it gets copied and copied. And it kind of obviously serves to broadcast Wojtek's fame far beyond the limits of his own company. And if Wojtek is promoted to corporal, this is the moment where it happens. I mean, it's contested. I think the military records have been lost.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So we will say he gets promoted to corporal at this point.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
The war goes right the way on till Bologna, which is the last town that the Poles capture. And as you say, Wojtek is with them throughout this whole campaign. And he does, you know, he does have kind of brushes with danger, but these tend not to be from German bullets. So he... He finds a pack horse and he thinks this is great fun. So he stalks the pack horse and corners it.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And the pack horse lashes out and kicks him in the face with its hooves. And this does him some damage. And maybe the time he comes closest to death is where he wanders into a base that's been set up by Indian soldiers serving with the British army. And he wanders into a tent and curls up with a Sikh soldier who wakes up and discovers this huge bear. Lying next to him.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And he's so alarmed that he reaches for the gun and realizes that it's a tame bear, a pet bear, in time not to kill him. So the war ends. And this is a great time for the 22nd Company because they're stationed on the Adriatic. Very nice. The war is over. It's summer. There's a beach. So they all go down to the beach. Wojtek, again, I'm afraid, disgraces himself with girls.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But I guess this is also a palate cleanser. It's a way of... kind of plunging back into the heart of darkness, but coming out perhaps the other side.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So he has this trick where he swims underwater towards a group of unsuspecting women. And then he'll suddenly surface in the midst of them. And there's lots of kind of screaming and splashing. And Wojtek thinks this is absolutely hilarious. And, of course, for the Polish soldiers... who then have to come over and explain to the Italian women who this bear is.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
You know, it's a great way of meeting girls. Let me introduce you to my bear. Yes. He's a babe magnet. I think might be one way to describe him. So he's having a lovely time. His fellow soldiers are having a lovely time. It all looks great. But then of course, the shadow of Stalin falls over their prospects again, because we are now into the, you know, the onset of the Cold War.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And Stalin does not want seasoned soldiers who have fought with the British going back to Poland. And he doesn't even want them on the continent of Europe. And this is expressed to the British government. And the British government say, OK, well, we will, you know, we'll take them back to Britain. So they go back to Britain and specifically they go back to Scotland.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And in September 1946, the 22nd Company arrive on Clydeside. They march through the streets of Glasgow. They're cheered as heroes. And among their ranks is Wojtek. And these soldiers are now the responsibility of the British government. And the reason for this is that that they're very conscious of the debt they owe the Poles.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And I think, I mean, I don't want to speak for Polish people, maybe they can correct me, but I think that is a huge part of why the incredible story of Wojtek, the bear who basically becomes a Polish soldier, why it has the kind of resonance that it does. So before we come to Wojtek, We've also done a number of episodes on famous animals in history.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And again, I think it's this thing that has been shadowing British attitudes throughout the war, which is a feeling of guilt. And for the British government in particular, this guilt is, of course, compounded by the fact that Churchill has signed Poland over to Stalin at the Yalta Conference. So there's been, you know, yet another British betrayal of Poland.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And to quote Neil Acheson on how the British government feel about this, they hope to soothe their consciences by handling the problem of the Polish armed forces in a generous and humane way. An interim treasury committee for Polish questions was set up immediately after the London government was de-recognized. So that's the Polish government that had been in London throughout the war.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
The British government has recognized the kind of the puppet government that Stalin has set up in Warsaw in their place. Yes. So to continue quoting Ashton, in effect, this meant that Britain, although exhausted and bankrupt at the end of nearly six years of war, was taking on the duty to pay and maintain and house the Polish armed forces in the West.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
The problem is that Stalin will not take back people from these Polish brigades unless they actively volunteer to go back. So in other words, they have to be communist sympathizers to do it. And in the event, I think only seven officers go back, something like 14,000 privates opt to head back. There are a few of these from the 22nd Division and they want to take Wojtek with them.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And there's a massive row about this. But the vast majority of soldiers from the 22nd Division opt to stay in Scotland and they get to keep Wojtek. The commanding officer says you cannot take him. And instead, where do they go? They go to Winfield Camp, which is this camp above the Tweed, just down from Berwick. And initially, there is some hostility from the locals.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
You know, they're all suffering from rationing and things. But there are two things that help, I think, to thaw the relations. And the first is, again, this sense of how much people in Britain owe the Poles. And the second is that the 22nd Division have this bear. And Wojtek is the kind of perfect ambassador because he remains as amiable and as full of fun as ever.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
He's still got Peter with him, you know, so kind of mummy bear. He's got all his mates. And I think it just never crosses his mind that he's not one of them. In his own mind, he's a pole, not a bear. Absolutely. And so... They take him to dances. And when he goes there, Wojtek gives the local children rides on his back. He amuses them by doing huge farts. They all find this hilarious.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Again, kind of breaks ice with the local girls. Right. Wojtek is taken swimming in the tweed. So he's brought down from the camp and he's led on a chain because they can't risk him being kind of swept out into the North Sea. And he goes swimming beneath the Union Bridge, which is this wonderful bridge built in 1822. It's the oldest functioning suspension bridge anywhere in the world.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And Wojtek has a wonderful swim beneath it. And I've actually been to see the camp, the site of the camp where Wojtek stayed. And there's a big pool there. And you know how much Wojtek likes pools. And all around it are trees and they're still marked with his claw marks.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So we've done dogs, we've done monkeys, and we have actually already had a number of bears on The Rest is History. So we did an episode on the inauguration of the Colosseum in AD 80. and that featured a bear from Caledonia. There's the polar bear that was given to Henry III by the King of Norway in 1252, and which was kept in the Tower of London.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And I just want to give a shout out to Livy, who I know will be listening to this, who took us up there and showed us where the trees were. The paw marks of Wojtek. On the living tree. It's a kind of wonderful thing. And it's so odd. This is a story, as I said, begins with all this darkness and horror that you were describing on Monday.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And yet there is a link that takes us to a tree above the tweed that is marked with the claw marks of a bear.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
They do. And the measure of this is, of course, that there's very strict rationing at this point. And Wojtek is a bear with a huge appetite. And it's not just the Poles, it's all the locals kind of, you know, they get together and they make sure that he has enough food.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And maybe it helps that on the far bank, so on the English bank opposite the Scottish side of the Tweed, there is a honey farm in the village of Horncliffe, which is excellent. And again, a shout out to them. Brilliant. So they're able to keep Wojtek in half. You genuinely could not make that up. But then, Dominic, I mean, you know, this heartwarming story, but then tragedy. Oh, no.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Because in 1947, the 22nd Division start to be demobbed. So they found settlement across Britain. The camp is going to be closed down. The men leave for civilian life. And... The question is, what is going to happen to Wojtek? He can't get a job, can he? He can't get his job. You know, he can't be reunited with his loved ones because his mother's dead. You know, real problem.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So it's decided that he will be taken to Edinburgh Zoo.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And on the 15th of November, 1947, you know, he's loaded into a cage. The cage is put on the back of a truck and he's driven off to Edinburgh. Oh, that is quite sad. And everyone who watches him go in 22nd Division is devastated, none more so than Peter. And from this point on, it is said that if anyone ever mentioned Wojtek's name to him, he would burst into tears.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And his comrades as well are devastated. They are repeatedly making trips to the zoo.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
He'd lost his family and now he's losing Wojtek.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And that is why, genuinely, the Polish soldiers who'd been his comrades are always visiting him. And sometimes they'll break into his enclosure and wrestle with him, like in the good old days. And when they leave, Wojtek tries to clamber out through the bars. And it's not just the Poles who feel the tragedy of this.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
I mean, so the director of Edinburgh Zoo, this guy called Thomas Gillespie, I mean, he wrote, I never felt so sorry to see an animal that had enjoyed so much freedom and fun confined to a cage. Oh. There are shards of light in this story. So one is that Peter, who had lost his family, he is reunited with most of them.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
His two older sons are lost for good, but the rest of his family, they do come and join him in London. Right. And Wojtek also, it's not total misery because I'm very happy to say that he becomes obsessed by penguins. So he takes a huge interest in them. And whenever they kind of march past, he'll watch them with huge fascination. And also, of course, Poles continue to visit him.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And it's not just his former comrades, because by now, Wojtek has become an emblem for Poles in Britain of everything that they've been through. And so they will come and watch and talk to him. And he always perks up.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And then there was Lord Byron, who kept a bear when he was a student at Trinity, because he'd been told he couldn't have a dog. So he wrote in his diary, I've got a new friend, the finest in the world. When I brought him here, they asked me what I meant to do with him, and my reply was he should sit for a fellowship. So Byron and his bear.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And this is a story that starts to get resonance in Britain as well, particularly, I think, in Scotland, in the Borders region and in Edinburgh, to the extent that ultimately Wojtek is always appearing on Blue Peter. The children's TV programme. Children's TV programme. So he's a kind of a regular star. Yeah.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But towards the end of his life, so going into the 60s, he does start to become very depressed. He goes into a steep decline. And on the 15th of November, 1963, by which point he's been in the zoo for 16 years, he's put down.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Yeah, so... I think that he is a worthy hero for an episode of our podcast. Definitely is. And I think it... For a number of reasons. So we've talked about how... This is a story that spans a vast range of places. So it begins in Poland, it takes us to Siberia, to the Middle East, to Italy, to the woods above my Scottish estate.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
It reminds you just how much of a world war the Second World War was. I think also Wojtek is a very moving symbol of Polish-Scottish friendship. So I know that he is hugely famous in Poland, but he's pretty well known on the borders as well. Schoolchildren there know all about him. There's a statue of him in Duns, which is just up from the Tweed.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And there's a statue in Edinburgh commemorating his presence there. Quite right, too. But I think above all, and the reason why it's good to have this as a coda to the terrible story that we've been telling in our previous three episodes, is that Wojtek's career does kind of rub up against the horrors that overwhelm Poland in the war.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But because he was wholly innocent of them, knew nothing of them, he somehow seemed to provide, the Poles who were with him, with a way of kind of staring into the abyss of their own grief and everything that they'd lost, their bereavement, in a way that was kind of less painful than staring into that heart of darkness directly, I think.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
I mean, again, I don't want to kind of put words into the Polish soldiers who went through all that, but that's the sense that I get from reading about the obviously very profound bond that they felt. with this kind of, this innocent animal.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And that is surely why... you know, these bereaved homesick, grieving men had adopted him in the first place. It's why the Polish officer said, yes, let's keep him. It's why the British high command recognized this and said, yes, we will, you know, enroll him as a private. And it's why they invested such love in him.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And I think it's why to this day in Poland, Wojtek does remain kind of very loved.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
There are actually other examples of bears who served as mascots in war. Probably the most famous of these is an American black bear who was called Winnipeg. And Winnipeg came into the possession of a guy who originally had come from Birmingham. So he was a Brummie who'd emigrated to Canada. And he'd settled in Winnipeg in Manitoba. And there he'd become a vet.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And then in 1914, war broke out and the news came to Canada, you know, dominion in the British Empire. So lots of Canadians signed up to fight for king and country. And Harry Colborne, he got the train from Winnipeg to get shipped for Britain and at a station in Ontario.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
He got off the platform and there, for reasons that are not entirely clear, because it seems quite an odd thing to be for sale, but he gets an orphaned bear cub. And because he's already feeling homesick for his native town of Winnipeg, he calls this bear Winnie. Takes him, this orphan bear, with him to Britain, trains with the Canadian unit that he signed up to.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And then in December 1914, he crosses the Channel to go and fight on the Western Front. And he can't take this orphan bear with him. So he donates it to the London Zoo. So Winnie becomes one of the star attractions in London Zoo. And Winnie is there the whole way through the First World War and stays there after the First World War. And in 1924, a writer called A.A.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Milne takes his son, who's a little boy called Christopher Robin, to see Winnie, this Canadian black bear. And Christopher Robin thinks this bear is wonderful, goes back home and changes the name of his teddy bear from Edward Bear to Winnie the Pooh. That's Winnie the Pooh.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Okay, so there is another famous bear that does see action because this is a bear who gets taken up in the Korean War by a US paratrooper unit... And she's bought as a cub from a Japanese zoo, say right at the beginning of the Korean War in 1953. And the paratroopers, you know, they go to Korea and they take her up in planes and make her do paratroop jumps.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
I mean, does she do it? Does she like it? Well, she hates it. I mean, she absolutely hates it. I mean, you know, you're a bear and you're being chucked out of a plane. Of course you're going to hate it. And on her second jump, understandably, she's so upset that she starts biting the soldiers as they try to push her out. And then on her fourth attempt, she actually chews up the boot of a soldier.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But they keep doing it. They keep chucking her out of the plane with her parachute. And she ends up garlanded with honours. So she wins a parachutist badge. She wins a Purple Heart. She wins a Korean Service Medal. But I think it's fair to say that she's not an enthusiastic paratrooper. She doesn't enjoy it.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And in 1954, so she's only seized a year's service, she's discharged and sent to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. So we could have gone to Lincoln Park Zoo when we were in America, couldn't we? We were in Chicago.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So those, I guess, are the two bears who serve as mascots and who have kind of won a certain measure of fame. But Wojtek's story is a different order. I think it's the strangest, it's the most moving, and it's definitely the most historically resonant of any bear, not just a military bear, but any bear in history. Because Wojtek isn't just a mascot.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
He's literally enrolled in the Polish army as a private for reasons that we'll come to. And rises, right? And is promoted. Probably gets promotion to a corporal. There's kind of debate about this, but I think almost certainly becomes a corporal in the Polish army.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And the reason that it's a moving story is that Wojtek, who is, again, like the two previous bears that we talked about, is bought as a cub. He grows up and he provides an emotional focus for soldiers who had been uprooted from their homeland. Many of them lost their families, had suffered unspeakable traumas.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And this bear provided them with a focus for kind of wellsprings of love that perhaps otherwise wouldn't have had a focus. And I think that this is a huge part of why Wojtek is so famous and celebrated in Poland. But I have to say... There's also a personal link for me because, as we will find out, Wojtek ends up very close to the banks of the Tweed. Right, where you've got your house.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
My Scottish estate. Yes. So, I mean, it's kind of mad to say this about a bear. Yeah. But I think his story really does provide a window onto the kind of the miseries of Polish history in the 1940s. But it is also, it's a kind of charming story at the same time. And it's one that feels like it has a kind of personal connection to me. So it's a story I've wanted to do for a very, very long time.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
OK, so as you say, Poland is defeated. It's carved up. It vanishes from the map. But there are Poles who want to continue the fight. And basically, there are three ways in which Poles are able to do this. And the first, and I guess the most dangerous, is to continue the fight in Poland itself.
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And as you said in the previous episode, the German occupying forces have targeted the Polish elites for complete elimination. And their aim is to reduce the mass of the Polish population to kind of helotage, to the status of the helots that the Spartans used as their slave labor. That's what the Germans want to make the Poles become. And so effectively for...
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533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Lots of Polish young men, they feel that resistance, I mean, why wouldn't you resist? Because the alternative is either enslavement or extermination. And this is something that they are kind of facing up to very, very early on. So in April 1940, forced conscription in Germany is introduced. Polish young men are kind of rounded up and taken as slave labor into Germany.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And so rather than submit to that, lots of Poles take to the forests. And this is the genesis of the Polish resistance. Yeah, of course. It's like something out of medieval history. They're centered in the vast woods and forests that spread over much of Poland. And by 1943, the Polish resistance numbers almost half a million.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
which is by far the largest resistance movement in Nazi-occupied Europe. But its ultimate fate is miserable because it's destroyed by the Germans. I mean, they're embroiled in the Warsaw Rising and all that. And then, of course, by the Soviets who are invading and who are not friends of the Polish resistance, want to see it wiped out. Yeah, it's a terrible story.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And I'm sure one day we'll come to that awful story. The other option, if you have managed to get outside Poland, is to continue the fight by signing up perhaps with the French and then after the fall of France with Britain. And the Polish forces in Britain come to number almost 80,000. So we talked yesterday about how...
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
Lots of Polish pilots fight for the RAF in the Battle of Britain, perform heroically. Polish sailors join the Royal Navy. Churchill admires them hugely. I think that they garner a great deal of sympathy in Britain, both for the fate of their country, for the evident heroism with which they're defending Britain, and I suspect a measure of guilt at the failure of Britain to come to Poland's rescue.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And these soldiers are stationed, lots of them are stationed in Scotland. They are posted along the eastern Scottish coastline to ward off a possible invasion from Norway. And one of the places where a camp is set up is above the Tweed, just downriver from Berwick. And this camp is called Winfield Camp. It's a centre for lots of Poles there.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
So there is, of course, a third reservoir of potential soldiers that is waiting to be tapped on when the Soviet Union enters into alliance with Britain in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, which in turn means that the Poles and the Russians are then fighting on the same side. But before that...
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
The fate of Poles in Soviet-occupied Poland is pretty much as grim as it had been for the Polish elites in Germany because the Soviets want to eliminate them just as much as the Germans do. And you described how in your Brevora format, the episode that you did before this. how the Soviet forces had invaded Poland on the 17th of September 1939 in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
It comes as a total surprise to the Poles, to the Western allies. The Polish forces are already disintegrating and this just completes that process. 200,000 prisoners of war are taken, 15,000 of these are officers, and these are taken to three camps in Russia and Ukraine, and then they vanish. And no one is really sure what happens to them.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
And the truth is only discovered later in the war, in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, when the Germans are invading, going into Russia, into Ukraine, and in a forest called Katyn, they discover the corpses of 5,000 murdered people.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
polish officers and the germans the germans with supreme hypocrisy trumpet this as an example of soviet war crimes which of course it is but it ignores the fact that the germans are doing committing even worse crimes And these officers who were found in Katyn, they'd been killed in March 1940, along with all the other Polish officers on Stalin's personal orders.
The Rest Is History
533. Wojtek: The Bear Who Beat the Nazis
But it's not just, as we said, it's not just the officers who are dispatched. So in February 1940, the Soviet authorities had begun the kind of mass expulsion of the Polish civilian population. And the NKVD, which is the kind of the predecessor of the KGB, had begun herding up
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Strange tales were told of Olaf Tryggvason's return to Norway. One day it was claimed the new king was in a fit mood to be entertained.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And, Tom, he wants to bleed England dry, as so many raiders have done, but also he's after...
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
I have no time for Wessex's saints, to be honest with you.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So now we really are into the routine of Danegeld, aren't we? Because... The issue now is that Svein knows he can just come back again and again, hit England, get more Dane Geld, and use that Dane Geld. I mean, this is your Kipling lines.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Well, that riveting passage, finely wrought prose, that was produced by none other than our very own Hollywood's own Tom Holland in his book Millennium. It's about the end of the world and the forging of Christendom. Is that the subtitle of the book, Tom? Yeah, that kind of stuff. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
If you pay Dane Geld, you will never get rid of the Dane because Svein uses that to beef up his army, beef up his fleet, and then come back the next year or two years later for more money. Yeah, it's like going to a cash point with somebody else's card. Right, because every time the Danes return, 1006, 1009... They are better equipped, more formidable, more terrifying.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
I have to say, there's an absolutely brilliant book on this that I read a few years ago by a Norwegian historian called Tora Skaer called The Wolf Age. And it does this in basically kind of week by week narrative. And it just goes on and on and on. Of all of these conquests. And one of the key characters is a guy called Thorkell the Tall. And he is very tall. And he's called Thorkell.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
We've established that. He's really brutal and effective, isn't he? I mean, he keeps looting and pillaging all these towns. And so in 1011, they go for a place that's even more significant than Wiltshire and the Salisbury area, which is Canterbury. Yeah. The seat of Christianity in England.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Do you know the name of the man who, this is so Tolkien, the name of the man who finished the archbishop off, he was called Thrum. Yeah. Thorkell and Thrum. Yeah. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So in the long run, Æthelred's solution is yet again financial. He can't fight... It's interesting, isn't it, that England, despite being so wealthy, just doesn't have the martial tradition, the martial culture?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
They're a perfect match. We ended last time. With a reading from Fury of the Vikings, listeners may remember that Danish refugees, in the wake of a terrible massacre in the towns and villages of England, have fled across the North Sea to Scandinavia to bring the news to the Danish king, and revenge is coming. So today, in this mighty series about the events of 1066, we turn from England...
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
sticking into the heart of england because it leads to york the great second city of england and which for so long had been a viking capital there's loads of danes in this area i mean there are people with danish surnames uh there are danish place names yeah there are all these people who perhaps for whom it is perhaps not such a stretch to imagine having a danish overlord rather than
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
An English one. And it seems pretty clear at this point, doesn't it? Do you agree that Svein... This isn't another raid. He's like, right, let's finish this now. I'm actually just going to take this over and this is going to become part of my empire.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And this will be really important later on. The fact that these children, one of whom is called Edward, so listeners should remember him, are disappearing into exile in Normandy to her homeland.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So now the dynasty that has ruled England for so long, the dynasty of Alfred and of Edward the Elder and of Athelstan, has gone off into exile. The Danes are the masters of England. And a Danish king. And a Danish king. Yeah, in Svein Forkbeard. And then an unbelievable George R.R. Martin style twist happens. The 3rd of February, 1014. Tell us what happens to Svein Fortbeard, Tom.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So listeners, make up their own minds. Was he killed by St. Edmund in a dream with a pole? Or did he, as I read in another book, have a stroke in his scunthorpe? Basically, you can divide the human race into people who go with the stroke and scunthorpe or the pole people.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
to Scandinavia, to the Northlands. We look north to the world of the Vikings, which is now beginning to change. And that opening reading about Olaf Tryggvason rejecting Odin's beef is a reminder of the throes of cultural and social change that are transforming Scandinavia. So, Tom, you talked last time about this guy, Olaf Tryggvason.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Previously done. Yeah, that's not really an endorsement, is it? But Arthur Redd does obviously come back. He does. So Thorkell switched sides by this point.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
When we make this as a TV drama, he should be played by an AI de-aged Sean Bean. That will give people a clue as to what happens to him. As to whether he's going to win.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
He is a terrifying, slightly sinister Viking leader who had beaten an English army in 991 at the Battle of Malden, who had led all these pillaging raids across southern England, and has extorted a huge amount of silver from England's king, Æthelred the Unready. But... Olaf Tryggvason is an embodiment of change in himself, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Only a boy, you ship batterer, when you launched your boat, no king was younger than you. So those were lines, lovely lines, written by a praise singer about the Very young, very impressive, very frightening son of Svein Forkbeard. And this is a man familiar to anybody who enjoys anecdotes about waves, because he is a young man called Knut. And Knut came with his father Svein to England in 1013.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
He's probably battle-hardened even at that point. He'd probably been on previous raids. His father has been struck in a dream by St Edmund with a pole and has died. And so Cnut is now the leader of, well, he's the leader of what? Is he the leader merely of a war band or does he want to be the claimant to a grand North Sea empire that includes England as well as Denmark and Norway?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
He's got a dilemma, hasn't he, Tom? Does he give up and basically go back to Denmark? Or even at this young age, does he go for it as his father was going to do?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Because he's converted to Christianity and he's been paid off by Æthelred and he has gone back to Norway. So tell us a little bit about him and why he matters.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And they arrive in the summer of 1015. Ethelred is dying but not quite dead. So the question in everybody's mind is this. Is it going to be Edmund Ironside who succeeds, his heir, or is Cnut going to finish what Svein Fortbeard started and basically assimilate England into the world of the Scandinavian Empire?
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So he's very much the little finger of this story, isn't he? Because he's always changing sides and betraying people. And basically, you never can be entirely sure. Well, he's on his own side and he is constantly swapping from Edmund to Knut and back again.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
It's sort of true, isn't it, that basically everybody who dies in this period, there's always an account that claims that it was while they were relieving themselves in some way. Not everyone, but it's certainly a running theme. It's a feature, isn't it? Yes. So we're in 1016, exactly half a century before the very famous conquest of 1066.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
But this is a conquest just as complete and just as remarkable in some ways as the Norman conquest. This is a Danish conquest. The dynasty of Alfred the Great has been, it appears, definitively driven off the throne. And the Danes, I mean, they really are the masters of England now under Canute.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Since we raised the comparison with the Norman conquest, here's the crucial question. What happens in England? So my sense is that actually Cnut, the top jobs, obviously he gives to his own supporters, to Danes. So he keeps the heartland of Wessex. But Thorkell, the very tall guy who's swapped sides a few times but has now ended up on the winning side, he gets East Anglia.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And another Dane, a guy called Eric, gets Northumbria. So they're parceling out the kingdom, rather as William will go on to do after 1066. And these guys aren't eldermen like the Anglo-Saxons. They're something new, aren't they? Jarls.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
That's exactly the kind of thing that you look for in a series like this, isn't it? Yes, exactly. So that's about the jobs. What about the crucial thing, which is about the money? The attraction of England is that it's so rich. Yeah. All of these men, these mercenaries who have flocked to Canute's banners, they have done so because they thought they were going to get the money.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
What happens to the wealth of England? Is it basically just parceled out and looted? Can I quote from Millennium? Do you want to quote from yourself?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Regular listeners will be disappointed if I don't mention Dennis Healy at this point in his 83% top rate of tax in the early 1970s. So Dennis Healy, exceeded only by Knute. But, so here's the question. Top jobs given to Danes. The money parceled out and basically the entire income of England for a year taken and put into Danish coffers.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Why is it, therefore, that nobody remembers the conquest of 1016 when it must have been psychologically pretty devastating, particularly for the English elite, Many of whom must have lost not just their money, but their power, their status, their prestige, their self-worth, all of those kinds of things.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So the first one, she's from Northampton, isn't she? And she's an elder woman's daughter and she has the brilliant name of Elf Gifu.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So let's just park her onto one side. So there's Elf Gifu and her son, who is Harefoot. Harold Harefoot. Yeah. Now, you said that there were two wives of Canute, and this really is a twist. Yeah, it is. Great twist. Because he has married the widow of his father's former adversary. Æthelred, he has married Emma of Normandy. He has, in 1017.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So this speaks to Cnut's political sensitivity and sophistication, doesn't it? He's not just a Viking warlord. He has, you know, as you put it in your notes, he's waded through blood. He has ruled by the sword and by terror. He's won his crown. And yet, once he's done that, he is sufficiently skillful to recognize that there are continuities he wants to preserve.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
He wants to work with the existing traditions. He clearly wants to conciliate is the wrong word, but ultimately he knows he will have to work with the English. England is his prize and he wants it to thrive under his overlordship. And I guess... He's also Christian, which means he's got a lot in common with the people of England.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So in that sense, there's a slight Charlemagne aspect to this, isn't there? Somebody from ultimately a barbarian pagan lineage who now is standing there in Rome in the city of the pope and the Caesars. You know, winning respect and recognition from his peers. Yeah. I mean, Canute is a tremendously, you know, I know this is a violent age and he's paid very violently.
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549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
But as a politician, as a statesman, he's a very impressive figure.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Because Normandy itself at this point does not look a terribly formidable proposition because it's become bitterly divided.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Yeah, I think it's important for people to get that into their heads, isn't it? That the Christianisation of Scandinavia is the moment that really marks the end of the Viking Age. But it's not because these warlords think kindness is brilliant and I love turning the other cheek and all that kind of thing. It's because they think Christianity is a winner's religion.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So, ladies and gentlemen, will England remain happy and united and forward-looking under the reigns of Knut and his successors? Will Normandy fall apart and what will happen to this seven-year-old boy, William? What prospects for him? Well, you can, of course, find out.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Right now, if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club, because you can listen to our next episode, which is all about the rise of William of Normandy. But if you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club and you want to, you can sign up at therestishistory.com and, you know, Bob's your uncle.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
But, Tom, for those people who don't want to do that, we will be back on Monday with the next thrilling chapter of this epic story. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
People who are Christians are rich, they're powerful. And also, if you're a king, to have one religion, one god... That sounds great. You know, get everyone to believe the same thing and therefore believe in you.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
At his side, there suddenly appeared an old man, cloaked and white-haired, with only a single eye. Entering into conversation with the stranger, Tryggvason found that there was nothing the old man did not seem to know, nor any question to which he could not give an answer.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Yeah, it's an amazing site, actually. I'll tell you what, it's accessible within half a day from Legoland. I know, I remember it well. It's an excellent trip. The Danish Tourist Board, if they want to sponsor us, they really ought to because I recommend it to the listeners. It's a long weekend. You can knock off Legoland and the Yelling Stones in the same trip.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And of course, this matters because these stones, the guy who set them up, King Harold, you mentioned, his nickname is Bluetooth. And these stones showing the integration of of pagan and Christian, and of course, all Denmark and Norway being joined together, are the inspiration for Bluetooth technology, would you believe?
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
All evening the two of them talked, and even though the king was eventually persuaded to retire to bed by a twitchy English bishop who had grown suspicious of the one-eyed stranger, Trigvason could still not bear to end the conversation, but continued it even as he lay on his furs late into the night. At last the old man left him, and the king fell asleep.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
In his cold blue eyes, Tom, there was only death because Svein Fortbeard has just heard the news of the massacre of Danes in England. And he has also, according to some sources, heard that one of the victims is his own sister, Gunnhilde. Right. And this is a man with whom you do not want to mess. So Tietmar, the Bishop of Merseburg. said that he was, and I quote, not a ruler, but a destroyer.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
And Svein Fortbeard, he may be, you know, a new kind of Dane in that he is a king in a Christianizing world and he has more bureaucracy behind him and all of this kind of thing. So he's not a Viking raider or a Viking warlord, but he's just as frightening and formidable as the most sinister and blood-drenched of Alfred the Great's adversaries or whatever.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Right, than either the boneless.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Yeah, the one that you tell in your book. Not necessarily the truest, but the one that you enjoy the most, Dom, I think it's fair to say.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So Svein had been a comrade of Olaf Tryggvason, the guy who rejected Odin's beef. But they are rivals within the world of the North Sea, aren't they? One of them is Norway, the other is Denmark, basically.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
But his dreams were strange and feverish, and waking up abruptly he cried out for the stranger again. Even though his servants searched high and low, however, the old man could not be found, and Tryggvason, brought to his senses by daylight, shuddered at his close escape.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
Right. So this is a thing. Svein Forkbeard at this point, who is this very formidable character, of course, famous for his beard. We should stress this. He has this forked beard, which I think in itself is quite intimidating. Yeah. So he is the man that Æthelred the Unready has basically chosen to It's mad. But I guess Æthelred thought he had no choice.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
He thought the Danes were a fifth column and he just had to get rid. But, I mean, you've said in your notes that if he'd been facing somebody else, it might have been a reasonable calculation. But as it is, because word is bound to reach Svein Fortbeard, it's, and I quote, the worst policy decision in the whole of English history.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
I mean, Bridget Philipson might have something to say about that, Tom. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
When it was reported to him that two sides of beef, a gift from the stranger, had been used in a stew, he ordered the entire cooking pot flung out. A godly and responsible act, for clearly it was out of the question for him, as a follower of Christ, to feast on meat supplied by Odin.
The Rest Is History
549. The Road to 1066: Revenge of the Vikings (Part 2)
So let's get into Svein Forkbeard's revenge. So he clearly spends the next few months mustering his forces, assembling his fleet, sharpening their swords. And then a few months after the St. Brice's Day Massacre in 1003, He lands in Wessex, in the heartland of the English kingdom, at the head of this gigantic fleet and a massive expeditionary force.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hi, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History here.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think occasionally you as well. I accept. Maybe me more often than you. Tom who speaks English like it's his third language. But Conrad as a man, he's very reserved. He's very sensitive. He has this deep sense of irony and kind of scepticism that runs through everything he does. Very sceptical about human nature. He is intensely, in many ways, intensely conservative.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Indeed, quite anti-democratic in many ways. When people sometimes say you can't create great art or great literature... You know, if you're of a very reactionary disposition, I think Conrad's is one of those people who probably proves that comprehensively wrong. Anyway. 1889, he's been off in the South Seas. He comes back to London. He starts writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Right. And there's so many great stories. So, obviously, JFK, you and I disagree about JFK because I, of course, think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone and you think differently. But there are other stories. You mentioned attempted assassinations. So, for example, FDR. FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Then at the beginning of 1890, he goes for the first time back to his homeland, Ukraine. And it doesn't go well. He doesn't get on with his family when they're there. You can well imagine he's probably built it up in his mind about what it would be like. It's very disappointing because he's quite aloof and because he's had all these strange experiences, he doesn't quite fit.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Well, also, he's got sea legs now, hasn't he?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Possibly. Because when he gets back, and it's disappointing, the first thing he does is to go to sea. Now, before he'd gone to Ukraine, he'd been talking to a company in Brussels about a Belgian shipping firm, about joining one of their ships, and he's actually already signed a contract. Now, this company, people will be reminded of all these companies from the episode we did about E.D.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Morel, all these steamship companies with concessions and contracts. This company is called the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Congo. So it's handling the commerce from the Upper Congo, and it had been founded a year earlier to export ivory and rubber from the interior. So it runs a steamer service and it has a series of trading stations of its own.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And why does Conrad sign up with this company? Well, obviously, one reason is he needs the money. He's effectively, you know, a mercenary. He will take the money to go on various voyages all over the world. But as his great biographer, Zizisov Naida, who's a Pole, his book is absolutely, it's quite hard to get hold of. So this is your third language, Polish? Yeah, exactly. Excellent.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Excellent, Tom. Thank you. Fluent pronunciation there. Thank you. It's not like I'd been preparing for hours. Nida points out that Conrad had always dreamed of Africa. As a boy in Ukraine, aged about nine, he had pointed his finger at a map where there was a blank space, as there was in those days, and he had said, when I grow up, I'd like to go there.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, he gives that line to Marlow, doesn't he, in Heart of Darkness, and there's no reason to doubt that Conrad himself thought like that. Anyway, there's also no reason to believe, by the way, that he doubts the civilising mission, because he actually writes about this in letters to his uncle at the same time.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Anyway, May 1890, the 10th of May, he boards the ship, the SS Ville de Maceo of Bordeaux, for this journey that his biographer Nida says is the most traumatic journey of his life. They go off down the coast of Africa. Even before they get to the Congo, one passenger says to him, you're going to the Congo? That's an absolute nightmare. That's not what you want to hear, is it? Yeah.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He says, basically, everybody who goes there, they either die or they come home early because it's so terrible. And Conrad actually says, and I quote, I'm a Polish nobleman cased in British tar. Doesn't get better than that. No, that's the best thing you can possibly be. So anyway, about a month later, they reach the capital of the Congo Free State, Boma. So it's just 50 miles inland.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history because no FDR. Does the United States still enter the Second World War? Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently? So... There is so much to talk about, and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it. What are you looking forward to most, Anthony?
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And here, if people remember from the previous episodes, there's the various complicated ways you have to move up the river. Because of the rapids and all that malarkey. Because of the rapids. So he gets a steamer upriver to Matadi, and Matadi is the last point before the rapids where you have to get off. Now, at Matadi, he meets somebody that we talked about on Monday.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And this is somebody who we're going to be hearing about from John Banville in next week's bonus episode. And this is Roger Casement. So the British consul, great Irish patriot, an amazing character. And Conrad really took to Casement, didn't he? He said, it's a great pleasure to have met him. He thinks, speaks well, most intelligent and very sympathetic.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And there's a lot of talk that you find about Conrad and Casement and what they did. Conrad himself seems to have misremembered what they did. He said, we shared a room together. They undoubtedly didn't because Casement wasn't there for a lot of the time.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But they definitely spent a lot of time together and they probably made trips together to see some of the local villages to find porters and things to carry all Conrad's stuff. So I think it's probably at this point that Conrad starts to see some of the terrible scenes that we've quoted in the previous episodes. So, for example, Tom, you read that passage about the six blokes
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, they are. I mean, what does Conrad say? He said at one point, his book was, when he was pitching it to Blackwoods, he said it was a portrait of inefficiency and incompetence in Africa. Yeah. It's like getting a train in Britain. So he's on a rail replacement bus. That's what he's on.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So he hangs around with Casement for a couple of weeks and then they've got the porters and he's ready to start overland from Matadi. And he wrote a diary in English in his third language, which gives you some sense of what it was like. Mosquitoes at night when the moon rose, heard shouts and drumming in distant villages past a bad night. No water. Camped on an exposed hillside near a muddy creek.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
No shade. Tent on a slope. Sun heavy. Wretched. Night miserably cold. No sleep. Mosquitoes. And on they go. And at one point, he definitely passes a skeleton tied to a post, which is a very... Imagine seeing that when you... Yeah. So that's a sign, you know, remember, Conrad is very, very, very well-travelled.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I mean, admittedly, most of his travels have been at sea, so he hasn't often gone inland in the places he's visited. That's so interesting, isn't it?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And the deeper he goes inland, the more the violence becomes apparent. apparent to him. Perhaps violence that you don't see to the same extent on the coast, it's hard to say. So at one point, he sees a government official beating porters, blows with sticks, raining hard, stopped it. In other words, he intervenes to break it up.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The 2nd of August, he arrives at Leopoldville, now Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And there, as you mentioned in the novel... his proposed steamer has been damaged. So he has to transfer to another steamer, which is called, with sublime irony, the Roi des Belges. You often read that he's the captain. He's not the captain.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
There's a guy called Koch, a Dane, who is the captain. And Conrad is going to be the number two. And we know... from his correspondence, he's already disillusioned because his uncle, Tadeusz, writes to him at this point and says, don't walk out on the contract. You'll lose all your money and you'll get a bad reputation among the companies as somebody who can't be relied upon.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So he's clearly been writing home and saying, this is terrible. I'm actually thinking of breaking my contract. And his biographers think that This is probably because he's fallen out with the company manager who he's going to have to give a lift to. So he's been travelling with him. And the company manager is a Belgian called Camille Delcommune.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And he really is in Heart of Darkness because there's the company manager in Heart of Darkness who is modelled directly on this bloke, Delcommune.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Exactly. So on they go upriver. They go very quickly. They're covering 1,000 miles in a month. I mean, these don't mess around, these steamers. And on board the ship, there's Captain Koch, there's Conrad, there's a mechanic from Belgium, there are 25 African crewmen, Del Commune, and three other company agents. And we know from traders' accounts that the passage upriver, it's very lonely.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
You don't pass many of the ships. The countryside is desolate. There are burned-out villages. You know, the people are hiding in the bush. Depredations of the force publique. And so, as Ziziswaf Naida says in his biography...
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The atmosphere of Heart of Darkness clearly is inspired by this kind of oppressive, claustrophobic isolation that Conrad must have felt on this boat going up river with just the silence and the emptiness.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Definitely do. Definitely. So on the 1st of September, they get to the last navigable point on the river. This is what's then called Stanley Falls. Now it's called Kizangani. And this is basically, you know, now in the heart of Central Africa. And, And Conrad wrote later, I said to myself with awe, this is the very spot of my boyish boast.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
What an end to the idealized realities of a boy's daydreams. So this is the point that he pointed to on the map all those years ago. And he's got there and the sense of not just crushing disappointment, but more than that, dare I say, the horror of what he has seen. Like Musk arriving in Mars. That wasn't a comparison I expected, to be honest. Right.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
They stay there, Stanley Falls, for about a week, and they pick up the local agent, who's a guy called Klein, a Frenchman, Georges-Antoine Klein. He's in his late 20s. We know very little about him. He had terrible dysentery. And they decide, well, we're going to take this guy Klein back. So then they turn back. Now, Klein died on the return journey. He died after a couple of weeks.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
To the listeners, if you're not excited by that, I don't know what would excite you, frankly. So the good news is pre-sale tickets are available this Friday, the 21st of February from 10 o'clock in the morning, exclusively for our Rest Is History Club members. You will get an email with the link before the sale begins.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And his story is clearly the model in some way for the story of Kurtz. And Kurtz, when Conrad first sat down and started writing the book, he was called Klein. But apart from that, there is nothing to connect them. There's no sense that this guy Klein was a... A madman, a bad guy, a guy who'd stared into the depths of the human soul. He's just a French bloke who's got terrible dysentery.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But here is the sort of the germ of the idea of Mr. Kurtz, I guess. Yeah. Anyway, they get back to Kinshasa after about three weeks. And here, Conrad writes to a friend of his back in Belgium called Marguerite Porodowska. And he says to her, I've actually now got terrible dysentery and fever. And I'm incredibly miserable. He says, I regret having come here. I regret it bitterly.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I find everything repugnant. Especially, he says, the people. And he's talking about the Europeans. And I am repugnant to them too, from the director in Africa, who has taken the trouble of telling a good many people of his intense dislike of me down to the lowest mechanic. Basically, everybody hates me. Now, the interesting thing is he never mentions the Congo itself.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And the violence in the Congo is a reason for his unhappiness. And do you think that's... He's burying it? Well, possibly, because Sajisrof Naida says in his book, and I think this does make sense, he says he thinks that Conrad had basically failed to hide how unhappy and how shocked he was with what he could see. And that the other people, the del Comune, the other agents, saw that and
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
and took against him. He was kind of a livid liberal. Yeah, that he basically is spoiling their fun and he's judging them. And you can see, therefore, it would sort of make sense that they would find him repugnant because he's a walking rebuke to their project. So he's definitely ill for the next few weeks. And then he vanishes. So Conrad vanishes.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The paper trail disappears and he vanishes from sight. As Nida puts it, the image becomes confused, blurred, obscure, which is actually very appropriate given the way Conrad writes. And actually, the next time we come across him, he's back. He's in Brussels in January 1891. And then the next time we see him after that, he's in London in February. There's no diary entries. There are no letters.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
There is nothing. And it's as though I think whatever has happened in those last days or weeks in the Congo, he wants to forget it, whatever it is.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And I think it's plausible that it's during those last weeks that he really reaches his verdict on the Congo Free State. Yeah. When he attains what he called the distasteful knowledge of the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration. And there are sort of fragments in later letters and whatnot that give a sense of what he thought.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So in 1903, just a few years later, he told his friend Cunningham Graham that a founder, Tom, of the Scottish National Party, so a man with whom you'd have a lot to talk about. He said to Cunningham Graham that Leopold and his three state agents were, and I quote, a gigantic and obscene beast. So that's fascinating, isn't it?
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And if you're not a member of the Rest Is History Club, just go to therestishistory.com to sign up and to get your email with the link.
The Rest Is History
541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Because again, we're talking about this idea of going into a prehistoric landscape. That is the beast. That is the beast. And he actually ends a letter to Cunningham Graham saying, you know, if you want to find out about this, you should talk to my mate, Roger Casement. He could tell you things, things I've tried to forget, things I never did know.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
You know, there's this kind of sense of like the stuff at the periphery of his vision, half glimpsed, half understood that's going on. And he doesn't really want to think about it because it's so terrible.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Absolutely. And the book absolutely has that flavour. So for the next three years, Conrad goes back to the Merchant Marine. He sails around. And then in 1894, he retires from the sea and he devotes himself to writing. And he writes a couple of novels and he writes lots of stories in magazines like Blackwoods and The Strand, famously where Sherlock Holmes started.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And in the middle of December 1898, he starts his third piece for Blackwoods magazine. And he says to the publisher, it's a narrative about a bloke who's on a river in Central Africa. I'm thinking of calling it The Heart of Darkness, but the narrative is not at all gloomy.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
which is clearly I mean that's not true and he obviously doesn't want the publisher to say yeah not for us mate yeah it's like us with Theo trying to persuade him to do an episode it's really upbeat and jolly and people will love it full of fun and Conrad says to him the theme is the criminality of inefficiency and pure selfishness when tackling civilising work in Africa
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, interestingly, this is Conrad's own thing. He's not been inspired by E.D. Murrell's campaign or anything like that, because that hasn't even started yet. Yeah, it hasn't begun, has it? No, nowhere near. So it's obviously something that he feels he has to do or wants to do. And it's presumably the time where everyone still thinks it's brilliant and it's civilising and hooray. Exactly.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, the most shocking thing for people like us, Tom, is how much Conrad is being paid. Blackwood's paid him £60 for this. So in relative income terms, that's about almost £50,000 today, which is a sign of how well this kind of writing was paid back then. And how highly rated Conrad is, I assume. I mean, he's not Conan Doyle, I accept, but at this point, he's not that highly rated.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
There's just so much money in short stories and journalism and Far, far more than there is today. Great days. Yeah, great days. So he turns it around. By the 6th of February, he delivers 38,000 words to Blackwell's, which I think is quite slow. I think it's pretty fast. That's three weeks' work. That is three weeks' work. Come on, mate. Anyway, it's published in February, March, and April 1899.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So just before we go to the break, for people who are not familiar with the book or need reminding, what has he produced? Most accounts that you read say that it's narrated by this guy, Marlowe. That's actually not true. Marlowe is not the narrator. It's Russian dolls, isn't it? Yeah, there are narratives within narratives.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So basically, the narrator is part of a group of people who are on this ship, the Nelly, off Gravesend in the Thames. So in England and night is falling and they're all just hanging around on this boat, but they've got to wait there for the turn of the tide. Haven't they? They can't, they can't go home yet.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah. And Marlow is kind of leaning against the mast. He's sort of sitting down leaning against the mast. He's a sort of weather-beaten sort of sea dog, you know, hard-faced sea dog character. And he kicks off suddenly. They're all just sitting around in a desultory way as night is falling. And he doesn't talk about the Congo. He talks about Britain.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And he says very famously, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth. And then he starts musing. You talked about this, Tom, a long time ago when we did an episode about Roman London. I think we opened with this message. He says, what must it have been like to be a Roman in Britain? The feeling, you know, to be sent north from Italy or wherever.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So if you're a patriotic Brit who loves the special relationship, if you're an American living in London, or if you're an American who just loves getting on planes across the Atlantic to see the very highest quality entertainment, we absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a friend of the show, Anthony Scaramucci, who is on his island, surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealth. He is, of course, the host of The Rest Is Politics US. And Anthony and I have a very special announcement. on Sunday the 30th of March.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And you arrive in Britain and you have this feeling that the savagery, the utter savagery had closed around him. All that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But then he's very unsentimental about the Roman Empire. He says, "...it was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind, as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness." And then he kind of goes on from that to think about empires in general.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. That it's kind of a noble ideal... But in practice... Well, in that, he has switched from the Romans to Europeans, hasn't he? He has indeed. He has indeed.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And this then leads him to tell them a story. And this is the story of Heart of Darkness. And it's a story set in the past. So it's not set in 1899 when they're getting rubber. It's back in the heyday of ivory. And he says, you know, the word ivory rang in the air. You would think people were praying to it. Of course, that's as we'll discover. Literally true. That's literally true.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Marlow, like Conrad, is hired to take a steamboat up the Congo, although the Congo is never named.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So, but it's clear, you know, there's no, it's clear, I think, where we're talking about.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yes, I think so. I mean, it's... I think so. Exactly. Yeah, I think it definitely universalises it, which is why I think it's completely reasonable to set it in Vietnam in a bulk lips now or whatever. Yeah. So his job is to go up the river to collect this agent, Mr. Kurtz, from the interior. Everybody says to him, are you going to see Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz is absolutely brilliant.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Mr. Kurtz is half English, he's half French, although people say all Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz. He's a brilliant writer. He's painted this beautiful oil sketch.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
of a woman holding a torch kind of a figure of progress of course he is and I quote an emissary of pity and science and progress he is the enlightenment he is western civilization you know he's just absolutely brilliant but
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And to tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth about behind the JFK assassination.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So there is a darkness there right from the start. There is indeed. And quite early on, Marlowe starts to get some kind of sense that all is not well with Mr. Kurtz. And at one point later on, he discovers that Mr. Kurtz has written this enormous report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. And it's a brilliant piece of work. It's amazingly well written.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But it ends with this weird scrawled phrase, exterminate all the brutes. which kind of sets alarm bells ringing, I think. Another of those kind of terrifyingly quotable phrases. Yeah. So Marla gets the boat upriver. He has a series of quite scary adventures. I say adventures, but they're... They're not really, are they?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The thing is, they're riffs on the kind of adventures you would see in boys' stories, but they're told in a really unsettling... Like, he can't understand what's going on.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Well, there is an attack when they reach the station. Remember, there's all the spears that are thrown at them and the bloke next to him is killed, actually.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
No, it's not at all. Marlowe is just standing there basically doing nothing, doing all of it. He's not a sort of active, exciting protagonist. Loading his rifle or that kind of thing. Anyway, they get to Kurtz's station. All the worst suspicions are confirmed. The station is surrounded by posts with severed heads.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And I don't want to spoil the story completely for people who haven't read it, but as the company manager puts it, Kurtz's methods have proved unsound. He's been going about his business in an unsound manner. I mean, he's basically being worshipped by the locals as a god, but he's behaving very violently. Kurtz himself is a very sick man. He's an emaciated ghostly figure on a stretcher.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So not like Marlon Brando. Not like Marlon Brando at all, but very like this bloke Klein that Conrad himself had picked up. Marlowe and Kurtz have a series of chats, slightly strange chats, very elliptical, elusive, hard to work out exactly what they're talking about. Kurtz is dying, clearly. Kurtz says to Marlowe, oh, it's a terrible shame.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I'll never have the chance to carry out my... I had immense plans, he says. It's going to carry out great things. But we never really find out what those immense plans add up to. Anyway... They finally head back downstream with Kurtz, who is dying. And then we get to that scene that you opened with Tom, where Kurtz, his final words, is lying there.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And he says, it's like he's looking into the distance. And he says, or is he looking into his own soul? We don't know. And he says, the horror, the horror. It's a really famous death scene. There's a brilliant essay for people who are interested online by the New Yorker's critic David Denby. He first wrote it in 1995. And he calls it the most famous literary death scene since Shakespeare.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And I think it's very famous now because of Marlon Brando, because of Apocalypse Now.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now in Apocalypse Now, for people who've seen the film, this is basically the end. Kurtz dies, end of the film. But interestingly, that's not the end of Heart of Darkness. Marlowe comes back to Europe and something in him has changed. He talks again and again about feeling loyal to Kurtz.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He says that Kurtz will have a bit of the reading in the next half, I think, that Kurtz has stepped over the edge of something and seen something profound. We don't know what it is. As a result of this, Marlowe comes back and he goes to Brussels and he feels completely alienated from life in Brussels. He's had an experience that has changed him.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, Kurtz has given him a packet of papers, entrusted it to him, and the very last scene of the novel is him giving the papers to Kurtz's grieving fiancée.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
She's got kind of a crazy headdress or something. And I felt kind of slightly out of tune with everything else in the novella. I totally agree with you. I think that's the one moment in the book where Conrad yields to kind of late Victorian African melodrama. Agreed. In this woman who's like... incredibly impressive and statuesque and sort of, she stands there, you know, lamenting loudly.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Waving spears and... Yeah, and all of this. Kind of Boudicca figure. Anyway, he hands over these papers to the fiancée and to his horror, she says, tell me about when he died. What was the last thing he said to you? And the very last thing that Marlowe does in the whole story is he looks her in the eye and he lies to her and he says, the last word he pronounced was your name.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, before we get to the break, I would really like to tell you about another Goalhanger podcast, Legacy, hosted by Peter Frankopan and Afua Hirsch.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And this season, they are looking at perhaps one of the most famous leaders of all time, Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader whose empire expanded from Korea to parts of Eastern Europe.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Do you know, Tom, that's an amazing revelation to me. I didn't know that. You did not know that.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And yet, Tom, that's only one side of the story, isn't it? Because did he not also develop the Yam postal system across his empire? And his treatment of women, I read, was entirely inconsistent. Yeah.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And the series is a really extraordinary listen, in no small part because Peter wrote the bestseller The Silk Roads, which is all about Genghis's part of the world, and you will be hard-pressed to find someone who knows more about the Mongols than Peter Frankopan.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah, we'll answer all those questions in this. You have 45 minutes. Pick up your pen. Start now. Literary scholars have tried for more than a century to answer those questions. And finally, we can reveal the answers. Brilliant.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So on Kurtz himself, loads of scholars have tried to argue that he's a real person. And they've tried to find out who Conrad was inspired by. And I think there are three or four candidates that come up again and again. So one candidate is a bloke called Major Edmund Bartolot. And he, I'm sorry to say, was a British officer.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He had gone with Stanley, Henry Morton Stanley, to rescue... It's such a complicated story, basically. They went to rescue an Egyptian governor called Emin Pasha, who didn't need rescuing, in the Sudan. And this guy Bartolot behaved, it's fair to say, very poorly. He went mad. He started flogging people wildly. He put loads of people in chains and he started running around biting women. Really?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah. Very bad behavior. And eventually, this African bloke shot him dead, and that was the end of him. And everyone said, God almighty, what a terrible advert for Britain. Let's never speak of this again. So there's that guy, Bartolot. He possibly is an inspiration for Kurtz. Then there's a Belgian called Arthur Hoddister. Strange name for a Belgian, I always think, but there you go.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He was an ivory trader and was brilliant at it, like Kurtz. He was ruthless. He had a harem of local women. There were rumors that local people worshipped him as a god, but he came to a very different end from Kurtz. He was tortured, beheaded, and according to some accounts, eaten by Swahili slave traders for intruding on their patch. That would have been a good end to Heart of Darkness.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
It would have been an unexpected end. Yeah. Then there's a guy called Carl Peters, who was a German. He was basically Germany's answer to Henry Morton Stanley. He launched his own expedition to rescue this bloke, Emin Pasha, who didn't need rescuing. He discovered ancient sites along the Zambezi River. He's basically got a bit of the Indiana Jones. Unfortunately...
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Even Germans were embarrassed by this. He also went a bit mad. He was incredibly violent. His nickname was Hangman Peters, because basically, you know, you said good morning to him and he hanged you. He was very violent.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And even the Germans who were behaving quite badly, it's fair to say, or indeed very badly in southwest Africa at this point, even they're ashamed of him, which tells his own story. And then the final candidate, which Adam Hochschild mentions in his book, King Leopold's Ghost, is a guy called Léon Romm. Romm was a Belgian. He was a captain in the Force Publique.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Like Kurtz, he liked painting and writing, and he collected butterflies, which is nice, like Vladimir Nabokov. And Maximilian. Emperor Maximilian of Mexico. But also he was an obsessive hunter. He had loads of African concubines. He had, at the time, and I quote, the reputation of having killed masses of people for petty reasons. And he kept a flower bed at his station ringed with human heads.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
That's very Kurtz. Which is very Kurtz. So as Juswaf Naida says in his biography of Conrad, Conrad may well have drawn on all these examples, but it's clear that Kurtz is all of them and none of them. As Nida says, the model for Kurtz comes from literary and philosophical tradition as much as it does from real-life African behaviour.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
You mentioned what I think is the obvious thing, which is Faust. Yes. So Faust has sold his soul to the devil. And it's not just Marlow, but obviously Goethe wrote about Faust and then Thomas Mann will write about Faust a few decades after Conrad. And there are a few references Marlow says at one point in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz has taken a high seat among the devils of the land.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And later on, he talks about how the powers of darkness are about to claim him for their own. So this idea that Kurtz's soul is sold to the devil, you know, it's a very old idea and kind of European. But there's also something,
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
knew about Kurt he's the embodiment of progress remember that he's so talented he's so he is the epitome he's the embodiment of civilisation and there is an argument I think that what he's doing in that long remember he writes that very long report yeah so exterminate all the brutes exactly There's an argument that that report is in itself the embodiment of the European project in Africa.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
To categorise, to set down on, to turn everything into accounts and ledgers. Which began with Napoleon going to Egypt. Exactly. To put Africa down on paper and control it and map it. Very Edward Said. Yeah, that is the act of colonialism, effectively. Well, European colonialism. European colonialism.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So is this, therefore, a story about colonialism and is Kurtz the embodiment of all that's wrong with it? At one level, I think the answer is obviously yes. Marlowe at the beginning is given those lines about taking the earth away from people with flatter noses than ourselves that are kind of very pointed.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Later on in the book, only a little bit later, before Marlowe actually goes to the Congo, he goes to visit his aunt. And his aunt has been reading newspaper stories about Africa and empire. And she says, oh, it's brilliant. Love this project. Weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways. And Marlowe actually says to her, this is even before he's gone, he says, it's about money.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The company is run for profit. You know, he's unsentimental about what is...
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think that's absolutely right. And I think the beginning of the book, by transposing what happens to Britain, it makes it very obvious that Conrad is conscious that this has a wider implication, that this is a kind of universal message. But here's the complication within the complication.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The framing narrator is very keen on the British Empire because while he's at Gravesend, he muses on the knight errants of the sea, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire, the dreams of men, the seed of commonwealth, the germ of empires. People have sailed out from here with the spark of Britishness. And isn't that brilliant?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Marlow, the other narrator, he also thinks the British Empire is brilliant. He says at one point he sees a map with a lot of Africa splashed with British imperial pink or red. And he said, oh, that's good to see because one knows that real work is being done there, i.e. the British Empire is different from other empires. So very Kipling. But we know that Conrad himself thought that.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So just after he's finished Heart of Darkness, the Burr Wall breaks out and his Polish relatives say to him, what do you make of this? You know, an empire against a little people at the Burrs. You know, it doesn't ring any bells. And he says, well, the British are brilliant. Liberty can only be found under the English flag all over the world. So he's for the Burr War.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And then after he died, his great friend and collaborator, Ford Maddox Ford, said a line that always amuses me. The British Empire was for Conrad, the perfection of all human perfections. So Conrad, obviously a brilliant judge of empires. But this has led some people to say, well, hold on. You can't celebrate this book as a criticism of empire. In fact, let's go further.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
This book is itself massively tainted with the crimes of empire. It's a tainted example of imperialist literature.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Well, there are at least two critics who think you would. So one of them, I think you mentioned him already, didn't you? Edward Said, Palestinian-American critic, one of the most famous literary critics of the last half century. He wrote a brilliantly influential book, shall we say, called Orientalism, which some scholars think is a terrible book. I think it's brilliant.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think you say it's brilliant. Anyway, Said says, yes, you would recognize Comrades as an imperialist because he doesn't ever reject imperialism in his book. His book should end with people being given their freedom or some savage critique of the imperialism that has enslaved them. I mean, that is what you get. That is what you get. What? A savage critique? Yes.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Well, maybe it's not savage enough for Edward Said. And Edward Said is also really disappointed that Conrad doesn't give the Africans a chance of redemption or a chance of escape. And I mentioned in the essay by David Denbigh, The New Yorker, He had a little passage in this essay in 1995 imagining, saying, well, how would that work?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Like at the end of the book, you know, Kurt rises from his deathbed and says to an African chief, one day your people will be free and the clouds clear and the sun shines and everybody's singing and dancing. It'd be ridiculous.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I totally agree with you about that, Tom. But there's a more substantial critique. Now, this is by an African writer called Chinua Achebe. So Nigerian, isn't he? Yeah, born in 1930. And in 1975, Achebe gave this lecture at the University of Massachusetts.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
To people who don't know, this will sound like such a trivial and footling thing, but this is one of the most influential lectures ever given about literary culture at all. It's one of the great demolition jobs, and it's actually a foundational moment for what's called post-colonial literary studies. And Achebe said, I hate this book.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I hate Conrad and I hate this book, basically because he just sets up Africa as the heart of darkness. It's the place where Europeans go to find the evil within themselves. Conrad's message is keep away from Africa or else. You'll fall victim to the allure of the jungle. The darkness will find you out. You'll become evil if you go to Africa.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And he said, and I'm going to quote him, the point of my observation should be quite clear by now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist. And he goes on to say, can a book which dehumanizes Africans, which treats Africa as the heart of darkness, et cetera, et cetera, can it be called a great work of art? My answer is no, it cannot.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And this has always been incredibly contentious, this argument among scholars and enthusiasts for Joseph Conrad. Is this basically a racist book? And now on college campuses, you will find a lot of people who say it is and either don't teach it or who teach it as an example of literary racism.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, a lot of people listening to this will expect, because with the rest is history, that at this point we kind of turn our guns on Chinua and Chibi and say, this is terrible, Conrad's brilliant, blah, blah, blah. Actually, there are elements of his critique, I don't know what you think, Tom, but that I think are justified. So, first of all,
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
The book does present Africa as primeval, as unfathomable, as prehistoric. Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. Okay, I accept that.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I agree with you, but you might not know that reading Conrad's book.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yes, I suppose so. I suppose so. But those two passages are quite far apart and you might not draw the connection.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, the second charge, I think slightly harder to quibble with, I would argue, is that this is a book about Africa that has no serious African characters at all. And when they speak, they don't speak. They chant, they grunt, they make, and I quote, a drone of weird incantations, strings of amazing words that resemble no sounds of human language, like the responses of some satanic litany.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And even the physical descriptions that are quite harrowing They're quite dehumanizing. So the porters that you mentioned, you know, the people who are carrying the stuff in their heads and they're chained together, they had the complete death-like indifference of unhappy savages. Or the railway workers dying in the grove. Black shapes, black shadows of disease and starvation.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Would you talk like that about white European characters? I'm not entirely convinced that you would. That I would accept.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Well, I mean, first of all, there's a real complication here, which is that this isn't actually Conrad talking. This is Marlowe talking.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
fix your critique. You can, but I think you have to... So Achebe basically says in his lecture, I'm going to just basically treat Marlowe as if he's Conrad. But Marlowe isn't Conrad. Conrad is the character listening to Marlowe, if Conrad is in the story at all. So I think you just have to be a bit careful by always assuming that an author and their main character are the same person.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Absolutely, Tom. Yes. Hi, everybody. So Heart of Darkness, Conrad's great novel or novella, has kind of overshadowed the series that we've done on the Congress. It would be weird not to have an episode talking about it because it's arguably one of the most influential works of literature ever. written in the last 120 years or so. We are not, the rest is literature.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think that's absolutely right. Now, actually, ultimately, I think this question about is it a racist book or is it not is actually quite a boring one. I don't think it's... Conrad clearly, I mean, it's such a terribly cliché thing to say. Conrad obviously is a man of his age. He reflects the assumptions that he has grown up with
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
both in Russian-occupied eastern Poland and Ukraine, and later on sailing around on British merchant ships. I mean, he's not outside time. Of course, he has prejudices and assumptions of his own, and they are expressed in his writing.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But the overall effect of this book is obviously not a... I mean, it's a book that clearly makes you think really seriously about the moral issues of imperialism and the civilising mission and colonialism and whatnot. I mean, how can it not?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Couldn't agree more. I mean, whether or not, of course, Conrad may have been racially prejudiced. I mean, he may mean, he may not have been. It's, as you say, it's actually, I think, an incredibly boring question because this is such an interesting book and there's so many more things to say about it.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And I think that going beyond that, The lasting appeal of the book is obviously it's about more than the Belgian Congo. It's about more than King Leopold's free state or anything like that.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
To me, the key line in the book is actually that line that we quoted earlier, right at the beginning before they even got to the Congo, where Marlow says to the people on the boat, and this also has been one of the dark places of the earth. And he's talking there about England. He's not talking about the Congo.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And the darkness is there even before the steamboat has started its journey up the river. The darkness is not in the Congo. It's not even in England. It's in humanity. It's the human soul. That's what I think the book's about.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And I don't think it's even that he thinks this is what imperialists do. I think it's what human beings do. Conrad had an... I find it very attractive because I share it, a remarkably bleak view of human nature. In his letters to his friend Cunningham Graham, the SNP bloke that we mentioned earlier, he says of mankind, the year before he wrote Heart of Darkness,
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
But purely in a literary sense, in a kind of purely literary cultural sense, it's an enormously important book. It's a brilliant example of literary modernism. So the prose is very, you know, it's dreamlike. It's like a hallucination. It's very overwrought. There are shifts in time, narrators within narrators. And the effect of all this is when you're reading it,
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He wrote to Conor Graham, he said, mankind is silly and cowardly, a wretched gang. We're born initiated and succeeding generations clutch the inheritance of fear and brutality without a thought. And another letter he said, people go on, he said, about honour, justice, compassion, but nobody really believes in them. People believe only in, and I quote, gain, personal advantage, satisfied vanity.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And words vanish, nothing remains, absolutely nothing, only a drop of mud, cold mud, dead mud, launched in black space, turning round an extinguished sun. I love those lines. Conrad has a view of mankind, of human beings that is unbelievably sceptical, ironic, bleak, dark. Conservative.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Definitely. But I think the interesting thing about that is it's not just temperamental, but it's of his time. Because I was thinking about the literature of the 1880s, 1890s.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So in 1890, the year he went to the Congo, one of my favourite books, La Bête Humaine by Émile Zola, which is about basically, I know it sounds very unpromising, it's about a Parisian train driver who turns out to be a sex-crazed homicidal maniac. Yeah. He published this book, and it's basically about the evil that is lurking within us all. Even the most banal person is actually deep down.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
We could all be serial killers and rapists and whatnot. This is such a popular idea in very late Victorian culture.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah, absolutely. Or 1899, the same year Conrad... publishes Heart of Darkness. That's the year that Freud publishes the Interpretation of Dreams. The idea that buried deep down in this kind of very primal and unfathomable way are anxieties and ghosts and terrible urges that we try to repress in our kind of civilized daily lives, but will always come to claim us at night.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I mean, again, all of this sort of stuff is simmering away in the European imagination at the time that Conrad is writing.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
It's quite a short book, isn't it, Tom? But you feel unsettled the whole time. There's a kind of sense of anxiety. And it's very influential. So T.S. Eliot, the great poet, he loved Conrad's Heart of Darkness. He had a poem called The Hollow Men that begins with a quotation later on in the book, Mr. Kurtz, he dead.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think. I think it's not just harsh. I think it's a total waste of time. I think it's a complete and utter waste of time when the book is so rich. And we've talked for too long. And actually, we're not in the business of preaching to listeners. Listeners can make up their own minds. They should read the book. If you think it's racist, great. Crack on. If you don't, brilliant.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Tom, why don't we end with the end of the book?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Anthony is over in the UK and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Haven't we, Anthony?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And that passage that you read at the beginning, ending with those famous words, the horror, the horror, He wanted that, didn't he? His original epigraph for his great poem, The Wasteland.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah, I completely agree with you, Tom. I think it's a really good point. I think you can argue the heart of darkness prefigures so much of the kind of cultural commentary of the 20th century about, and we'll get onto this in the second half, about man's capacity for evil. Fartic, you might call it. Exactly. Gazing into the future and seeing the horrors that await.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Now, if you're not interested in literature at all, you may be thinking, well, so what? Who cares? I mean, here's a good answer to that. Heart of Darkness, I would argue, is by far the preeminent cultural representation of Western imperialism, particularly in Africa. More than King Solomon's mines? I think it's Heart of Darkness now.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I think Heart of Darkness and King Solomon's Mines are kind of the polar opposites, aren't they? Yeah, they really are. King Solomon's Mines is the journey into the heart of Africa that is swashbuckling, that is ultimately an optimistic story, that is jolly, that never questions, I think, ultimately, the right of the adventurers to be there. This is an adventure that goes horribly wrong.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And it's very much about the dark side of that.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And actually rather liking Solomon's Minds, Heart of Darkness has had a massive cultural footprint. So everything from video games like the Far Cry series, which basically riffs on Heart of Darkness, to most famously Francis Ford Coppola's film Apocalypse Now, which came out in 1979 and transposes it to Vietnam War.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And Apocalypse Now, even the making of it. Yeah. turned out to be a kind of riff on Heart of Darkness because they made a film about the making of it called Hearts of Darkness. And very famously, Francis Ford Coppola said about the making of Apocalypse Now, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane. Yeah, the horror, the horror.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Absolutely, absolutely. And then there's a third dimension, I think, of this book that makes it incredibly interesting. And that is that initially... In the first few decades after its publication, it was seen as a book that was very critical of imperialism. It was seen as the great literary assault on the civilising mission.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Exactly. 1890s, 1900s is the high point of the discourse, as it were, of imperialism, both pro and anti-imperialism. But now, in the 21st century, Heart of Darkness is seen not as an attack on imperialism by a lot of critics, but as an example of it, as a book that is fundamentally imperialistic and, above all, very racist.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And it's probably the one book that has come to symbolize the attack on the Western canon, I suppose you might call it, or the criticism of the Western canon. So if you're at all interested in what people think about imperialism, Europe in the world, literary history, cultural history in the last century, Heart of Darkness is at the center of a lot of those kind of debates, isn't it? So...
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
We'll get into a lot of these issues, particularly in the second half. But in the first half, I think we should set out two things. The first of all is, who is Joseph Conrad? And what's he doing in the Congo at all to inspire this book? And secondly, what is the book about for people who don't know? So just very, very quickly, very swiftly to summarise.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
If you've never read the book, it's the story of a sea captain called Marlow. He takes a steamboat up the Congo, and he's looking for a brilliant agent of this what appears to be a concession company called Mr. Kurtz, who's a great ivory trader. He's up there in the interior, and he seems to have lost his marbles.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And when Marlowe gets there, he finds out that... All kinds of stuff has been going on. Yeah, all kinds of stuff has been going on. We'll unpick all that a bit later on. Now, Conrad was asked, what's the book about? And he said, Heart of Darkness is experience pushed a little and only very little beyond the actual facts of the case. In other words, you really want to understand what it's about?
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
It's a true story. It's a true story exaggerated.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Exactly. So let's start with Conrad himself. His name actually isn't... I mean, Joseph Conrad's fiction is full of kind of holes and mirrors and, you know, stories within stories. His name actually isn't Joseph Conrad. His name is Józef Teodor Konrad Kozienowski. And he was born to a Polish noble family, an impoverished family in what's now Ukraine in 1857.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
And this was a sort of very rural world that had once been part of the eastern borderlands of Poland and has now been swallowed up by the Russian Empire. His mother, Ava, died when he was seven. His father, who had the brilliant name Apollo, who was a poet. I love that. Yeah, and a Polish revolutionary. So he's a tremendous man, Apollo Korzeniowski. He died when Yusuf was 11.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
So he's brought up by relatives. He's very bored at school. He's obviously, you know, he's not in the best of form. And he says he wants to go away to sea.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Exactly. Exactly right. So in 1874, his relatives clubbed together and they get together the money to send him to, what is he, 1617, to send him to Marseille to join the French merchant marine. This is a weird thing that he shoots himself at the chest, but it seems to have been a little bit performative.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
Yeah. As I guess so much is in his fiction. I think that's absolutely right. And I think he's, Conrad is always a very, I think a troubled man is too strong, but he is a man with a deep sense of deep melancholy to him, I think, throughout his life. He sails all over the world, Caribbean, South America, and then he goes up in the world.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He joins the British merchant marine and he stays there for until 1889. And he has all kinds of adventures all over the world. He goes to Australia. He goes to Bangkok. He goes to India, Singapore. And you can see a lot of that reflected in his fiction. Lots of tales of adventure in the South Seas and all of this.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
They are indeed, exactly. So there is something, when his books first came out, people reviewed them as kind of slightly sea stories, you know, classic tales of the sea, but a bit weirder than usual, and only over time did people kind of work out exactly what he was doing. So at this point, he's still using the name Korzyniowski. English is his third language. I mean, this is the amazing thing.
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541. Heart of Darkness: Fear and Loathing in the Congo
He starts writing in the late 1880s. He writes his stories in English. But I mean, imagine writing in your third language.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So this is surely a key moment in the transition from late antiquity to early medieval, right? That a vestige of kind of Roman cultural, spiritual life has been smashed. More power has been concentrated in the hands of the warlords who are now making themselves kings.
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Okay, well, that's good enough for me. Okay, but not everybody in the church thinks Charles is a bad guy. And in fact, there are bishops who think, oh, he's brilliant, aren't there?
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
The Merovingian dynasty, from which the Franks were accustomed to choose their kings, is thought to have lasted down to King Chilperic III, who was deposed on the order of Stephen II, the Pope of Rome. His hair was cut short and he was shut up in a monastery.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Who on earth would that be? We'll find out after the break. What a cliffhanger. Who is this person? Don't go away.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
okay i have to tell you i was just looking on ebay where i go for all kinds of things i love and there it was that hologram trading card one of the rarest the last one i needed for my set shiny like the designer handbag of my dreams one of a kind ebay had it and now everyone's asking ooh where'd you get your windshield wipers ebay has all the parts that fit my car no more annoying just beautiful
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Though this dynasty may seem to have come to an end only with Chilperic III, it had really lost all power years before and it no longer possessed anything at all of importance beyond the empty title of king. The wealth and the power of the kingdom were held tight in the hands of certain leading officials of the court who were called the mayors of the palace and on them supreme authority devolved.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Head to Blinds.com now for up to 40% off select styles plus a free professional measure.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back to The Rest is History. We ended with one of the great cliffhangers, not merely in the history of this podcast, but I think in the history probably of all human civilization. Who or what is the possible source of authority that could bestow kingship on Carloman and Pepin? These people who are ruling Australia and Neustria in the realm of the Franks.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Massive questions. Massive question. And you gave a little spoiler, I felt, disappointingly. You said our eyes would be turning to Rome. So tell us, who is this person?
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523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Yeah. Well, they're not entirely wrong, to be fair.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
All that was left to the king was that content with his royal title he should sit on the throne with his hair long and his beard flowing and act the part of a ruler. Whenever he needed to travel, he went in a cart which was drawn in rural manner by yoked oxen, with a cow herd to drive them.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So Ravenna, to be fair, had been an imperial capital for a while.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But the Pope is not entirely devoid of assets, is he? He's got his spiritual assets. He's still a prestigious person. He's still the preeminent head of any church in the Christian world, right? He's got a palace that was given to the papacy by Constantine. And he's the heir of St. Peter. So he's not nothing. He's not nobody. Yeah, you're absolutely right.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
In this fashion, he would go to the palace and to the General Assembly of his people, which was held each year to settle the affairs of the kingdom, and in this fashion he would return home again. That's the opening to the life of Charlemagne by Einhardt, the Frankish scholar and courtier. And he wrote that just after Charlemagne's death.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Right. And is this where we get back to the Franks? Because surely, and one very obvious person, is one of the sons of Charles Martel. And in particular, Pepin. We talked about Pepin in the first half. So Pepin is going to step forward as the sword and shield of the papacy, is he?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And he's describing the greatest, the most famous of all Frankish kings, one of the titanic names in all European history. Lots of people, I think, Tom, will have heard the name of Charlemagne. But to be completely honest, I think a lot of people have heard the name and have no real sense of who he was. Was he French? Was he German? Obviously, he was neither.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He's got John Adams's voice, President John Adams.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
He's like Richard Nixon. Right, right. I think we agreed that Nixon was from Somerset.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So he's talking about the Merovingian bloke who's still hanging around. He's saying, let's get rid of him. Give me the crown. Enough of the Merovingians. Who cares about them?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Well, he's the father of both and yet was neither. Now, Einhardt, let's just talk about Einhardt for a second, because he writes this very extraordinary biography of Charlemagne, doesn't he? Yeah, pretty unique, really. Yeah. And he was very proud of the fact that he was so familiar personally with Charlemagne, wasn't he?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Oh, yes. We love a short man on The Rest Is History. We do. Yes.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And so do the Franks live up to their side of their bargain? Because obviously he's looking to them to protect him against the Lombards, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
You know, everything is ready for even more impressive conquests. But there's an obvious problem, this issue of two sons. So the Franks have a history of dividing up their realms, but to avoid fighting, to divide them up between different brothers. And when you've got two brothers here, Charles and Carloman... Is there not an enormous latent potential for a civil war between the two of them?
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Wonderful. So if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club, you can hear the next episode and indeed the third episode in our Charlemagne trilogy right away. If you're not, you can hear them by signing up at therestishistory.com. What better Christmas present to yourself could there be? Literally can't think of any.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
But if you're Scrooge or the Grinch, then I'm afraid you're going to have to wait till next week because we'll be back on Monday and then on Christmas Day with the final two episodes of our mighty series on the life of Charlemagne. Tom, a veritable tour de force. Thank you very much and goodbye. Bye-bye.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Well, here is a reminder that we at therestishistory.com offer gift memberships. So if you're good at dropping hints, or if you're short on a present for a family member, for a friend, or for a partner, Tom and I would like to remind you of the ultimate Christmas stocking filler. And it is, of course, a subscription to the Rest Is History Club, which is full to the brim with bonus episodes.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It's got access to the much-loved Discord chat community. It's got newsletters. It's got all kinds of goodies. Simply go to therestishistory.com and look for gifts.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
And we have some incredibly exciting news to tell you, don't we, Dominic? We do. So we often say we've got exciting news, but this is genuinely very, very exciting news. We are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year, The Rest Is History will be returning to the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May to perform live once again with an orchestra.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience. And we are hoping that this, too, will be an unforgettable night. There'll be great music. We'll be telling great stories. We'll be delving into the history. So you had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
That is the Rest Is History live with the Philharmonia Orchestra Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It's at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May. Now, the tickets are available for members on Wednesday, the 18th of December and for the general public on Thursday, the 19th of December. And please make sure that you don't miss it.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
After all, Christmas is just around the corner. And a very happy coincidence, our first official Rest Is History book is now out as the perfect stocking-sized paperback.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
It's sure to make the festive period much more entertaining for all involved, and it is available in bookshops everywhere now.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
A lot of people find it very hard to pin down neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, famously said about it.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power, and only one person can stop them. Indiana Jones. Adventure Calls.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Okay, let's get going and let's get a sense of the context. In the last three episodes, we talked about the rise of the Franks, the warlords of the West, and we ended with the Battle of Tours. And people who listened to the first episode will remember that Charlemagne is not, in fact, the first Frankish warlord to have the title of Augustus.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
They will remember that three centuries earlier, another Frankish warlord, that is to say Clovis, had been hailed as Augustus, but not in Rome, in Tours, in the Shrine of St. Martin. He wasn't crowned by the Pope. He was crowned by himself, like Napoleon. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
Out now on Xbox Series X and S, Game Pass and PC. Rated T for Teen. Copyright and trademark 2024. Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. This episode is brought to you by Google Gemini. For anyone new to Gemini, it's an AI assistant that you can have real conversations with. I'll give you an example. If you have a job interview coming up, you can ask Gemini to help you prep.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
So Charles Martel, the hammer. And he's the bloke who won the Battle of Tours, of course. He absolutely is.
The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
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The Rest Is History
523. Charlemagne: Return of the Kings (Part 1)
They've got St. Martin. They've got all that stuff.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
They've been primed to swallow this actually by decades, if not centuries, of prejudice against the Poles.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I suppose, I mean, Danzig, there had been tough periods where Danzig had been Polish, so it had changed hands. So maybe Berwick. Yeah, maybe Berwick is a good example. Danzig, don't forget, the population is 90% German, and most ordinary Germans would absolutely say Danzig ought to be part of Germany. It's bonkers that it's a free city. They don't like the Poles.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
They are really the one nationality that most Germans are united in regarding as backward and dirty and all of that kind of thing. And most people... that they simply can't conceive that the Western powers would fight for Danzig. After all, they didn't fight for the Sudetenland. Why would they fight for what is obviously a German city? That's the way they think about it.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So while all that's going on, Hitler is planning this diplomatic coup. So if you're Hitler and you look at this, the one thing you fear most is that you would fight Britain and France in the West and Poland and the Soviet Union in the East. Now, a deal with the Soviet Union, obviously it would be a massive U-turn because so much of Hitler's ideology is based on anti-Bolshevism.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But all this time, Ribbentrop has been saying to him, I mean, just think if we did have a deal with Stalin, it would solve so many problems. Is it really so outlandish? Isn't it a good idea? You know, shouldn't we think about it? And the good news for the Nazis is, is that from Stalin's point of view as well, the timing is absolutely perfect. Because Stalin has just had this, the great terror.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He has just killed almost a million people in two years, including almost all of the top brass of the Red Army and the people who run all the munitions factories and all of the technical experts and all of these people. He's killed all these people. The Red Army is in an absolute mess, total shambles. He knows that one day Hitler will attack him because Hitler has been saying that for two decades.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He knows he's in no state to resist. So he thinks, well, why not? I mean, why not buy ourselves a little bit more time? Because, although he knows as well, of course, that Britain and France, you know, they've made informal kind of feelers about a deal with Stalin, but he knows that they despise him. And he also thinks they're weak, right?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
The British and French do send a military mission to talk to Stalin. Have you seen this? And it was led by a man called Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett Ernal Earl Drax.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But this guy is quite a junior guy. And the French send, I think, an even more junior person. And Stalin's like, what? These people are not serious. I mean, they're never going to give me a proper deal. Like, it would have to answer to their parliaments and all that. This isn't going to go anywhere.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But who cares? They'll just have to lump it. Yeah, exactly. That's the thing. So Stalin that spring started to send out signals to the Germans. He started to make speeches attacking the West. He sacked his long-serving foreign minister, Maxim Litvinov, who was Jewish and hated the Nazis and had been trying to work for years for better relations with the West.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And he replaces him with Vyacheslav Molotov, named after the hammer.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, like Charles Martel. Molotov means hammer in Russian. So Molotov is the ultimate kind of Stalin, ultra-loyalist. And he's not Jewish. And the Nazis take that as a very promising sign. Ribbentrop loves this idea of a deal because, of course, A, it would stab Britain in the back, which, I mean, he hates Britain and he can't wait. What a coup that would be.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But also for Ribbentrop, Ribbentrop is the ultimate courtier. He wants to cement his position as Hitler's most effective and most loyal underling, especially vis-a-vis his great enemy, Goering. So Ribbentrop is kind of working very hard on this all through the summer. And on the 5th of August, a Soviet diplomat says to him, you know, Stalin is actually quite interested in this. This could happen.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then they get this great breakthrough on the night of the 19th of August. So the first of all, the Soviets agree after months of on-off talks, they agree a trade deal.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
with the nazis they will sell them raw materials in return for german manufactured goods and then hitler and ribbentrop are at the eagle's nest they're overlooking this amazing sort of panorama of the mountains on the german austrian border and they get a call stalin would like to open talks about a deal A non-aggression pact.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
We know what they're worth, but more importantly, a deal to divide up Poland between them. And he's inviting Ribbentrop to Moscow to conclude the deal. Now, Ribbentrop, as you can imagine, is absolutely thrilled by this. Stalin says, I'd like you to come in a week on the 26th of August. And at that Hitler's face falls a little bit when he hears the news. He says, oh, that's very late.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I really need the army to strike Poland, you know, latest 1st of September. Because once it starts raining, that will turn the flat fields of Western Poland into a quagmire and that will be very bad for our tanks. So really, we would ideally like this deal earlier. And Hitler does something extraordinary. He intervenes personally.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He sends a personal message to Stalin via the German embassy in Moscow. Please, can Ribbentrop come earlier to Moscow? This makes an incredible impression on Stalin. Stalin has always been treated by the West as a complete pariah, as a kind of madman, you know, an animal, loose in the world of civilized human beings. And here is Hitler, who has demonized Stalin for so long.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Treating him as an equal, treating him with respect, saying, asking very politely, please, can my foreign minister come a week earlier? So a tribute to the efficacy of good manners. Yes, I guess so, Tom. Because two days later, on the afternoon of the 21st of August, Stalin sends a telegram back and he says, oh, that would be lovely.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Ribbentrop will be very welcome here in two days' time on the 23rd of August. And Hitler inevitably is with Albert Speer at the eagle's nest when he hears architectural chitchat. Yeah, balustrades or something, when he gets the news. And Speer wrote an account of this. He said, Hitler stared into space for a moment. He flushed deeply. Then he banged on the table so hard that the glasses rattled.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And he exclaimed in a voice breaking with excitement, I have them. I have them. And then he called for champagne.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I was thinking about that. I think it's Britain and France. I think at this point... Or the Poles as well? Possibly the Poles as well, of course. But I think... He is maddened with hatred now of the West, Hitler, because he feels they cheated him of his war and then they gave the Poles their guarantee. You know, he's a bitter, he's a bad man out of Hitler, Tom, what can I say?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Anyway, the news breaks. They announce the news in Berlin just a couple of hours later, so just before midnight. So they don't keep it secret? No. This is an interesting thing. Until I'd read up on this, this was a revelation to me. I'd always thought it was done kind of back channels. No, that the reaction to the Nazi-Soviet pact actually comes before the pact is formally signed.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So they announce the news. Ribbentrop would be flying to Moscow to conclude a deal with Stalin. And now some old, long-standing Nazis are appalled. And actually, there are stories of people throwing down their badges outside party headquarters in Munich. Munich, where the Nazi party began. People who would be very, very anti-Bolshevik and would have been for 20 years. who are like, what?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
The Bolsheviks are our greatest enemies and they're throwing their badges away. But lots of Germans actually think, oh, brilliant. Now we won't have a war with Russia. And that's such a relief. Isn't that wonderful? You know, great news. Because, of course, they don't want war.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I think bewildered and confused. If you're a Stalinist, of course, you just say, well, Stalin is the great genius. But there are definitely a lot of communists who are proper Marxists who are appalled by this and who are really troubled by it. But then lots of people make up excuses. They say, well, Stalin had no choice. He was abandoned by the West, all of that kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So the next day, the 22nd, Hitler convenes a big summit at the Berghof, at the Eagle's Nest. He gets 50 senior officers and Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop has packed his bags and is poised to fly. And Hitler says, this is a really important meeting. I don't want anyone to take any notes. It is absolutely top secret. But because it's so important, some of them write down their recollections afterwards.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So we kind of know what Hitler said. And even by his own standards, it's an extraordinary performance. He says, I'd always planned for a European war, and I'd always thought we'd fight West and then East. But I've changed my mind. It's because of the economic situation, because the wheels are about to come off our economy.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And he says to them, the reason we're doing this now is because of me, because I'm actually such an extraordinary person. Everything depends on me because of my political talents. There will never again in the future be a man with more authority than I have. I mean, imagine listening to this from your boss. I could be eliminated at any time by a criminal or a lunatic.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
No one knows how much longer I shall live. Therefore, we'll have to have the war now because, I mean, I could be dead in a year. Who knows?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
You would. Now, this is when he comes out with his line about Britain and France being little worms. He says, I saw them in Munich. They won't fight.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah. I've looked into their eyes and I've seen that they're wimps. Yeah, exactly. And then as for the deal with the Soviet Union, he says, yeah, I mean, it's an unusual departure for a fascist. However, he says, I know that Stalin is a very sick man. I mean, talk about projection. Stalin, he says, is a very sick man. After Stalin's death, we'll rip up the deal and we will break the Soviet Union.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then there will begin the dawn of the German rule of the earth. Imagine listening to that with a straight face. I mean, obviously, these guys do listen to a straight face. Now, after lunch, he outlines the plans for how they're going to fight the war in Poland. We'll talk about that next week in Monday's episode about the war in Poland itself. So we'll just leave the speech at that point.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Because this is the point when Ribbentrop leaves. Ribbentrop excuses himself after lunch. He flies to Berlin. Then he gets on Hitler's, he changes planes to Hitler's private Condor plane and he flies to East Prussia. He spends the evening in East Prussia and he's nervously going over his notes for the meeting with Molotov the next day.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then on the early morning of the 23rd, Ribbentrop flies on to Moscow. What an extraordinary moment this is. I mean, imagine what's going through his mind. And he takes with him, by the way, Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who's a great source on this. And we'll be talking about some of the comic activities with photographs later on.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Cigars and photographs and drinking. So Ribbentrop finally lands in Moscow and he is met by sort of grim-faced men with cars straight away. and he is driven directly to the Kremlin, the seat of communism on Earth. I mean, what an incredible moment this is. And he's escorted into this long, sort of gilded marble hall with chandeliers and whatnot. And waiting at the end, there's Molotov.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But to his surprise, there's also another man, a small man, with very familiar features. Because he has a moustache. A gigantic moustache and is, of course, Stalin. Now, Ribbentrop didn't know that Stalin was going to be there to meet him, so he's a bit taken aback. And Ribbentrop comes out with his sort of polished, diplomatic... You know, we're lovely to be building a new relationship.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
We're looking forward to this moment for years. And Stalin is very relaxed and jovial. And Stalin says, we've poured buckets of filth, he uses a much more earthy word than filth, over each other for years. He says, but there's no reason we can't bury the hatchet now. Come on, let's bury the hatchet. And Ribbentrop kicks off with a very, very Hitler idea.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Let us stun the world with a non-aggression pact to last 100 years. Very Dr. Evil. That's very Dr. Evil.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And Stalin kind of laughs. And he says, if we say this pact will last for 100 years, people will laugh at us for not being serious. I suggest 10 years. 10 years is more reasonable. There's the difference between Hitler and Stalin, right? But both of them must... Equally, no, it's not going to last.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Of course they do. That's the amazing thing. Absolutely it is. So the pact is one thing, but of course the really important thing is the secret protocol to divide up Europe between them. And Ribbentrop says, here's Hitler's offer. You can have Finland. You can have Estonia. You can have most of Latvia. You can have eastern Poland up to the River Vistula and the San.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And you can have the Romanian region of Bessarabia, which is modern-day Moldova, which, of course, they do get. And Stalin says, that's all great, but I would also like the coast of Latvia. And that's a bit of a stumbling block. And Ribbentrop says, I'll have to ring Hitler. I can't agree to that. I'll have to ring Hitler. Now, Hitler is at the eagle's nest.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And it's an extraordinary scene, actually. He's pacing up and down very nervously on the terrace. He's very tense. His adjutant was with him, Nikolaus von Beloff. And he described, he said it was a beautiful evening, an August evening in the mountains. And the sun was setting.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Von Beloff said, as we strolled up and down, the eerie turquoise-coloured sky to the north turned first violet and then blood red. At first we thought there must be a serious fire behind the Untesberg, the mountain. But then the glow covered the whole northern sky in the manner of the northern lights. I was very moved. And I told Hitler that it augured a bloody war. Oh, that's nice.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
That's a moving, moving thing to say. And Hitler replied that if it must be so, then the sooner the better. For the more time went by, the bloodier it would be. And at that point, the phone rings. And everybody's like, oh, my God, the phone's ringing. It's the news from Moscow. And Hitler picks up the phone. And he just listens in silence and he doesn't say anything.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then he puts the phone down and he still says nothing. And then he says, bring me a map. So a map of the, of all the states. And someone brings him this map and Hitler stares at it. And then half an hour later, he's like, okay. And he rings back and he says, yes, agreed. Now, back in Moscow, Ribbentrop puts down the phone and he says, it's on. So they finalize the details.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
At midnight, Stalin's servants bring in caviar and vodka and Crimean sparkling wine. So Ribbentrop would have enjoyed that.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Maybe he could have a... Maybe they did a little tasting. Put me in touch with your supplier. Yes. And they light up a load of cigarettes and they start making toasts. Stalin incredibly makes this toast. He says, I know how much the German nation loves its Fuhrer. I should like to drink to his health. And he leaves. He keeps that quiet in 1943. He does indeed. Yes, he did.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He didn't talk often about that toast. Now the documents are ready. They've been finalized and they're prepared to sign. At this point, Hoffman, the photographer, comes in and he sets up this huge tripod and his camera and everything. And Stalin says, hold on, hold on, hold on. You can't take photos like this.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
We have to clear all the glasses away, all the caviar, because otherwise people will say they signed this pact when they were absolutely wasted. And that's really bad publicity. So... They clear the stuff away and then Hoffman takes the photos. And these are the photos that you see if you Google it.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So you see Molotov and Ribbentrop, very smart suited, actually, given the abuse we've given Ribbentrop about his suits. They're signing and Stalin is in the background beaming, looking very jolly because he's tanked up on vodka and sparkling wine in his kind of beige tunic. Moustache bristling. And then Ribbentrop rings Hitler again.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Hitler inevitably has been watching a film with Goebbels, but he's not really been enjoying it because he's too nervous. He wants to find out how it's going. And Ribbentrop says, brilliant. It has been a complete success. We have everything we wanted. And Hitler says, congratulations. And then Hitler says, that will hit them like a bombshell.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
There is, I think, a lot of stress. I think Hitler's not the devil. He's a human being. He's made of flesh and blood. And at this crucial moment in his career, the moment that his life, his political career has been building towards, the outbreak of the war in Europe that he has been predicting for so long. I think he's in a bit of an emotional state, actually.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Well, Ribbentrop flies back to Berlin to a hero's reception, not surprisingly. Hitler hails him, says, you know, well done, mate. Brilliant. You are second Bismarck. And of course, to Ribbentrop, that is music to his ears. Ribbentrop and Hitler now... They're absolutely convinced this has guaranteed them a free hand against Poland.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
With the Soviet Union out, there is no way Britain and France will fight. They're convinced of this. Now, I mentioned the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. He has come back to and he's been developing his photographs of the signing, which Stalin had said, clear the glasses away. And he goes into the Reich Chancellery to show them to Hitler. Hitler is obsessed with Stalin. He is absolutely obsessed.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's his only peer, isn't he? Yes, I think so. Hitler said there are only three great men in the world. They are me, Stalin and Mussolini. And Mussolini is definitely third. So Stalin is the other great man. And he's just fascinated with Stalin. And he says to Hoffman, does he order people? Does he order them? Or does he cloak his orders in the guise of wishes? What about his health?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Does he really smoke so much? How does he shake hands? What's his handshake like? It's just a shame they never met, isn't it? Oh, they'd have got on so well. A lot of the Nazis, we know this from Ted Heath. Did you know this? Ted Heath went to a Nuremberg rally, the future British prime minister, when he was on a kind of gap year in Germany. Yeah, in 1938. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And he said he met Himmler and Goering. He said they had terrible handshakes by and large, very limp, drooping handshakes. And I would imagine Hitler had a poor handshake. Stalin, I don't know. I think he'd have a crunching handshake. Stalin's a bear hug kind of man, isn't he?
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
The thing that Hitler is really fixated on, have you seen this? Stalin's earlobes. Yes, because that's a sign of Jewishness, isn't it? He says, are they ingrown and Jewish or are they separate and Aryan? And the photographer Hoffman says they're separate. And Hitler apparently is delighted by that. He says, oh, that's brilliant. I'm so pleased. I'm glad that Stalin's got Aryan earlobes.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's in a bit of a mess because he doesn't know whether Britain and France are going to enter the war or not. Everything is in play. And yeah, he actually got the time wrong. So he said 5.45, but it was actually 4.45. He stumbled there and said the wrong time. And he was very, very hesitant and with good reason, right?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then they get out the photographs and Hitler's face falls to the floor. What? He says, oh, what a pity. There's not a single one of these photographs we can use. And Hoffman, who considers himself quite a good photographer, is quite displeased by this. Why? And Hitler says, well, in every single photograph, Stalin is smoking. And he says the German people would take offense at this.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, exactly. Hitler wants to reduce nicotine in cigarettes.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's a health and safety Nazi. Exactly. He's a nanny state Nazi. What can I say? Hitler says, the signing of a pact is a solemn act. Which one does not approach with a cigarette dangling from one's lips? Such a photograph smacks of levity. See if you can paint out the cigarettes. And so the photographs that are released to the press by Hoffman have been doctored
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And Stalin's cigarettes will be taken out. It's so Orwellian, isn't it? First they came for the cigarettes. That's true. Yeah. Then, yes. So Stalin's reaction is, it's fair to say, is a little bit less eccentric. So Stalin met his entourage the next day and his underlings had gone out and shot a load of duck. He loved eating duck. So they're eating all this duck and Stalin's in brilliant form.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's never been happier. And he says, you know, he's a smarter man than Hitler, frankly. He says, of course, it's all a game to see who can fool whom. I know what Hitler's up to. He thinks he's outsmarted me, but it's actually me who has tricked him. Well, is that true? I mean, you know, Hitler... Hitler's the one who launches a surprise attack. Yeah, but who's got the last laugh, Tom? True.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I mean, yeah. Anyway, they're both bad men, let's be frank about it. Now, in the rest of the world, the reaction, of course, is total shock. among the communists, in British newspapers and French newspapers and so on. Neville Chamberlain is a broken man because of this. Joseph Kennedy, the American ambassador, said, he looks like a broken man.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He said he could think of nothing further to say or do. He felt that all his work had come to naught. I can't fly again because that was good only once. In other words, Chamberlain recognises there's no possibility now for any more appeasement. The whole constellation has changed. However, Britain will not change its approach. So this is one thing that Hitler really misjudged.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Hitler was convinced that this marked the end of the British and French guarantee to Poland that there's no way they would fight. But actually, the 22nd of August, the day that the news of the signing of the pact reached London... the British cabinet reaffirmed its commitment to Poland.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
This is the moment that he throws the dice and we all know what the consequences for Europe will be, but also the consequences for Hitler himself. He looks ahead there to his own death. I won't take this uniform off unless either victory is won or I am dead. And he's already, I think, anticipating what he will do if things go wrong, i.e. the Wagnerian fate.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And they decided to send the ambassador in Berlin, Neville Henderson, to the eagle's nest with a letter to Hitler to say, don't get this wrong. We are not going to change. We are still completely committed to Poland. And how does this go down with Hitler? Poorly, I think it's fair to say. So we talked about Henderson last time. He loves a carnation. He's an old Etonian.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's got a gigantic moustache. He's very elegant. Family link to Alice in Wonderland. Exactly. So Henderson turns up at the Eagle's Nest and Hitler just starts ranting and raving about it. He can't believe that the British are doing this. Hitler says, you know, we've wanted to be friends with you. You clearly hate us. We will fight you to the last man.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And Henderson is very upset by this because he has spent his career trying to get in with the Nazis. He sees that as his task.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He's not right at all. He's a brilliant lesson in self-delusion. And Henderson is really upset by Hitler's reaction. He basically storms out in the verge of tears or verge of a massive outburst. outburst of rage or something.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
You don't think so? You don't think Roy Stewart would break down in such similar circumstances? Yeah, Roy Stewart's a later Etonian.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
All right. Well, Henderson, I think, is very emotional at this point because all his work has come to nothing. And when he goes out, do you know what Hitler does? He literally slaps his thigh. This was Hitler's great thing. Does he chortle? He does chortle. He says, ha, ha, ha, ha, Chamberlain won't survive this discussion. His cabinet will fall this evening.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
It does really feel like a kind of board game, doesn't it? Kind of like diplomacy or something. It does. But also in which one person has now completely lost sight of reality because there's no way Chamberlain's cabinet is going to fall apart. I mean, Hitler is completely deluded. So I think at this point, Hitler has just completely lost the ability to read what's going on in Britain and France.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I mean, he's all over the shop because the next couple of days go by and he gets all these reports from London. The British are actually preparing for war. They've made coastal defence preparations. They have requisitioned merchant ships. They put their air raid on standby. In France, almost a million men have been called up to the colours. Hitler can't get his head around this. What?
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Why are they sticking by the mad pledge to Poland? Why haven't they yielded to reality? And so he says, well, I'm going to have to change tactics, clearly. So on the Friday, which is the 25th of August, he's moved back to Berlin and he says, get Henderson back. So Henderson comes back to the Reich Chancellery and he says, look, I've changed my mind. I will make Britain a very generous offer.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
If you let me solve this Polish problem, I promise that will be it. And I will guarantee the integrity of the British Empire. And actually, I'll even lend you German forces to defend the British Empire, as long as you let us have some of our pre-1914 colonies back. So come on, that's a brilliant deal. We can be friends. And he says, do you know what? It's such a good deal, actually.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I think you should take my private plane and go to London and offer it to Chamberlain personally. And then he says, I mean, this is shameless. He says to Henderson, the thing is, I actually hate war. I'm not a warrior. I'm an artist. When this Polish business is settled, I'll probably give up and just go back to art because that's what I'm really all about.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, dead at the funeral pyre of his capital. Exactly. So this is the second episode of our trilogy about the Nazi war on Poland. And we ended last time, Tom, as you may remember, with Hitler and his generals drawing up their plan of attack. On the 11th of April 1939, the Poles have resisted their attempts to persuade them to give up Danzig and to turn themselves into a satellite state.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah. Just an artist. You're going to slap your thigh and chortle. Almost certainly. But once the recording is finished, I think, just privately. Just imagine, Tom, imagine there's no religion. Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. That's what Hitler said afterwards. He just loves art. Come on.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So the irony is, of course, while Hitler is pontificating about art, imagine this and that and the other. His generals are preparing to launch the invasion of Poland the very next morning. The very next morning, Saturday the 26th of August. Everything is ready. The final decision is delayed because Hitler is still talking to Henderson about his love of watercolours.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But at last, that afternoon, he gives the order. We'll go in tomorrow, the 26th, 4.30 in the morning. The British will be taken by surprise. It'll be a fait accompli. They'll just have to suck it up. Brilliant. Everything is ready. The wheels are put in motion. The generals are ready. And then, unbelievably, at 7.30 that evening, they get a new order from Hitler. It's off. It's cancelled. What?
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
What's happened? What's happened? Unbelievable twist. Well, Mussolini. Mussolini once again has thrown a spanner in the works. Late that afternoon, he sent Hitler a message. This war you're planning against... Actually, I don't fancy this war at all. Italy's not ready for a war. We don't fancy this. Hitler can't believe it. What? The Pact of Steel is for nothing?
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He says, Mussolini has betrayed me. The Italians are behaving just like they did in 1914. You can never rely on the Italians. So, I mean, it's all right for Hitler to rip up...
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
pacts and treaties but when it's done to him he doesn't like it at all yeah on the other hand Tom you could say the Italians had let Germany down in 1940 so Hitler could you know should perhaps have been forewarned anyway it's too late to stop all the preparations the army are outraged I mean they do stop most of the preparations but some units do go ahead so there's a there's an attack on a railway tunnel in the Carpathians that is actually beaten back by the Poles overnight and
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
The Poles wanted to order general mobilisation of their own, but the British and the French say, don't do it, don't do it. Don't provoke Hitler. And as we will discover next time... That's really, I mean, terrible for the Poles. This is terrible for the Poles, because it means when the war does start, they are not properly ready.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So, as a result of Mussolini dragging his feet, the timetable is sort of frozen. Everybody is still in place, but, you know, the war has been postponed. And that gives Hitler one last chance to find a deal with Britain. Now, at this point, he has given up on traditional diplomacy. The stuff with Henderson isn't going to work, clearly. Ribbentrop says, look, it's pointless.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
They're not going to abandon Poland now. But Goering is still hanging around in his white suit. He kind of likes the idea of a deal. Not least because it would kind of stiff Ribbentrop, right? Exactly. He has this mate who's a Swedish industrialist called Berger Dalarus, who Goering uses often as a kind of go-between with London. And Hitler says, well, let's maybe use this bloke, this Dalarus.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So he's drawn up this plan for an attack on Poland. And it's about the same time in April that Joachim von Ribbentrop, very much not somebody admired by the rest of history, it's fair to say, for all kinds of reasons, sartorial and ideological reasons,
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So he sends this Swedish guy off to London with an alliance offer. An alliance offer for Britain. So he still hasn't given up on that old idea.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
It is. I was just thinking about that. The Kaiser's various attempts at the last minute to have a deal with the British. And he says, look, Dalarus's offer is Germany gets Danzig. Germany gets the Polish corridor. Germany gets its old colonies in Africa and stuff. But it will guarantee Poland's borders and it will do all this deal with the British Empire and it will defend the British Empire.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
The difference this time is Hitler says, we'll have this deal first and then we'll only worry about the Polish business afterwards. It's so important to me to be friends with you in Britain. Now, there's a lot of faffing around with this offer that we don't really need to go into because basically the underlying reality is that all the time Hitler is still making plans for the invasion.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He has not given up on the invasion idea. So after Dalarus has been sent off to London, he gathers the Nazi top brass, the leaders of the SS, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, all these bad guys. And Hitler at this point is really strung out. He's exhausted. He's massively stressed. His voice is cracking. And he says, OK, we're going to do it on Friday the 1st of September.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
There'll be no more postponements. I made up my mind, you know, enough faffing around. This is going to happen. And he says, this is going to be brutal. But for as long as I live, there will never be any. We would never surrender.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
It's interesting that at this point, even at this point, before it's even started, he's contemplating, at least in part of his mind, his own death and the possibility of defeat. And actually, Goering says to him privately at one point, he says, listen, we don't actually need to fight the British. We don't need to do this. We don't need to gamble everything.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And Goering has not, I think, been completely honest with Hitler about the Luftwaffe's capabilities for obvious reasons. And he says to Hitler, look, we don't need to do this. You know, you don't need to prove anything. And Hitler says to him, all my life, I've always put my entire stake on the table, which is true. He gambled and gambled and gambled and won and won and won until he didn't.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Until he didn't. Exactly. So the evening of Monday, the 28th. Henderson pitches up again. He's drunk half a bottle of champagne to steady himself. Champagne? What is it with sparkling wine and these people? Before meeting Hitler. And he says, look, we've got the latest stuff from this Swedish guy. We're not going to do a deal with you while this Danzig thing is dragging on.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Tailoring very high on the list. That he suggests an idea that on paper seems completely unthinkable, which is why don't we do a deal with our ideological arch enemy, Stalin, and divide up Poland between us? And we'll be following that story in today's episode. But... The man you've been ventriloquising there, in an impression that may get you cancelled, is kind of hard to tell, isn't it?
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Fine, we can talk about Danzig, but there is no way that you can invade because if you do that, we will fight you. And Hitler says, OK, I'll think about it. So a day goes by. Then on the evening of Tuesday, the 29th, Henderson comes back for his answer. And Berlin now is in darkness. The government in Berlin has ordered a trial blackout.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
There are hundreds of people waiting outside the Reich Chancellery because they know that this is kind of the last chance for peace. And Hitler, I mean, I was going to say unbelievably, but of course it's perfectly credible. he decides to try the same trick that he had done in Bad Goudersberg. With Chamberlain. With Chamberlain.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He decides to just completely change the rules of the game and raise the stakes. And so instead of being Mr. Nice, he starts ranting and raving, oh, I'm sick of you British, you don't care about Germans, you don't care if we're being slaughtered. And he says, oh, you've encircled Germany, you've tricked us, you've betrayed us, all of this kind of thing.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Henderson, for the first time, probably in his diplomatic career, really, with Hitler... completely loses his temper and he says, ''I won't listen to this language from you or from anybody. How dare you insult the British government. If you want a war,'' says Henderson, ''then you will have it.'' And Hitler says, well, fine.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I mean, the Poles should come send someone tomorrow to give me everything that I want. And if they don't, I'll send in my army. I'm not waiting any longer. Now, actually, amazingly, Henderson at this point, he walks out and he's steaming with rage. But he's still, because he's an appeaser and has always been an appeaser, he's still partly, you know, part of him still wants a deal.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And so he actually says to London... Maybe we should get the polls to negotiate. Maybe we shouldn't give up completely. And Chamberlain back in London says, no way. We're not going to be bullied again by Hitler. Chamberlain by this point has, I think, definitely run out of patience with the policy of appeasement. He says, we are not going to yield on this point. There is nothing more to discuss.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So the stage really is set now. The next day, Wednesday the 30th, the Poles begin to mobilise. They should have done it earlier. They had delayed the request of the British and the French to avoid provoking the Germans. That will cost them very dear, I'm sorry to say.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
No, I don't think so. They'd still have fought. I think they would probably still have fought. I think they can't conceive that the British and the French won't intervene. Right. Okay.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah. But I think the British and the French have sent slightly mixed signals. They've sent a military mission. They've sent some sort of pretty pitiful supplies. The British and the French have been saying to them, you know, it'll be a long war. They've been sort of hinting that they... Their intervention will not exactly be as game-changing as the Poles might like.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But Polish national pride, Polish public opinion, they will make it very, very difficult for any kind of compromise, I would say. So where are we? Thursday the 31st of August 1939. First thing that morning, Hitler says to his generals, the invasion will start tomorrow. He signs the attack order just after midday, and then he confirms it an hour later.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I don't think so. You don't think so? No. I think there was a lot of gusto there.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
That afternoon, early that afternoon, Ribbentrop arrives at the Reich Chancellery, and he says, look, no give from Britain. It's looking pretty bleak on the British front. And Hitler says, well, I've already given the order. De zacker roller, things are rolling. And Goebbels writes in his diary that afternoon, it looks as if the die is finally cast. An analogy that will appeal to you, Tom.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And late that afternoon, a very ominous sign, they cut the telephone lines to and from the Polish embassy in Berlin. And at 11 o'clock that evening, the 31st, you have the first reports of incidents on the Polish frontier. The most famous one is at a radio station at a place called Gliwice, now Gliwice in Upper Silesia.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So this was basically a radio station generally used for kind of weather forecasting. And there are reports that Polish troops have stormed a German position, that they executed the staff and they broadcast Polish nationalist slogans. Actually, what happened was the attack was organized by the SS. It was planned directly by Reinhard Heydrich.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Both the attackers and the defenders were SS men and they were actually firing blanks. And when they left, they left three bodies behind them.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Canned goods, exactly. Is the sort of the jargon. Two of these guys were concentration camp inmates. They'd been killed with lethal injections and dressed in Polish uniforms. And the third man was a Pole, a Pole who was a German citizen. He was a local farmer, and his name was Franciszek Choniok. And he had been arrested the day before. He was well known for being a very patriotic Pole.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I suppose you do. Yeah, I suppose you do.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And he was arrested, thrown into prison. And then he was taken out of prison and put to sleep with an injection. And then he was taken asleep to the radio station. And then he was shot dead. And his body was dumped there. And he is the first of the six million Poles who will be killed by the Nazis in the next six years. So we'll get on to the fate of Poland in Monday's episode.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But just to tie up this bit of the story. The war proper began at 4.45 the next morning, Friday the 1st of September, when an elderly German battleship called the Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military depot on the Westerplatte, which is a peninsula that commands the entrance to Danzig's harbour.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And the same time that happened, 60 German divisions, about one and a half million men, spearheaded by tank divisions, began to cross the border, flood across the border from Germany into Poland. And by the afternoon of that day, Friday, you have the first reports of bombings, of Stuka attacks coming in from Western Poland, and the Polish army is already beginning to fall back from the border.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, method acting. Anyway, Hitler himself, he's 50 years old. He had celebrated his 50th birthday on the 20th of April 1939, so just nine days after the plan was drawn up for the destruction of Poland. And to mark the big day, I mean, it is one of the most extraordinary birthday parties in history. Goebbels organised what Ian Kershaw, Hitler's great biographer, called...
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Hitler addressed the Reichstag that morning at 10 o'clock. As you described, Tom, he was wearing his Wehrmacht uniform and he never takes it off. I mean, presumably he takes it off to sleep. To have a shower. Yeah, but he never dresses again in civilian clothes. And you did that performance with gusto because that's what we associate with Hitler. But actually, as we said, he was very nervous.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He stumbled over his words. He's very downbeat. He gets the time wrong. And even that line, looking forward to his own death, is a hint, I think, at the doubts that must have been there, if only subconsciously. It was a very gloomy day in Berlin. There was no public enthusiasm at all. The American journalist William Shira described the, quote, astonishment, depression on the faces of the people.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
No excitement, no hurrahs, no cheering, no throwing of flowers, no war fever, no war hysteria. Of course, they're all still waiting to find out what Britain and France will do. And Hitler did make one last attempt, another attempt through this Swedish guy, Dalarus. When Dalarus went to meet him at the Reich Chancellery,
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
In Kershaw describes the scene in his biography, Hitler, probably as a result of stress and tiredness, Not the gun oil. Not the gun oil. His breath was so repellent. The odour from his mouth was so strong that Dalarus was tempted to move back a step or two. So, you know, Hitler's hygiene has kind of collapsed. His halitosis is... Yeah.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And Hitler says, you know, tell the British, this is their last chance to avoid a fight with me. I will fight them for 10 years if I need to, which is not a very... Yeah, it's not very emollient. No, not very emollient and obviously doesn't work. The next day, the second Britain and France, by now, had ordered full mobilisation. They begin evacuating children from the cities.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Chamberlain is in talks about drawing up a war cabinet, bringing Winston Churchill back as First Lord of the Admiralty. And that evening is the evening of the very famous debate. Chamberlain gives... as he so often does, a very ill-judged speech in which he says, if the Germans pull back from Poland, maybe we could still talk to them. What a mad thing to say.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And this is the moment at which famously, as the Labour leader Arthur Greenwood stands up to reply, one of Churchill's sort of allies called Leo Amory shouts, speak for England, Arthur. And this is a great shock to Chamberlain, the sense that he's lost touch with the public.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
With many of his own party. And indeed with his own cabinet, because afterwards his cabinet say to him, look, enough. You've got to give an ultimatum. And Henderson goes to give the ultimatum first thing the next morning. So it's Sunday the 3rd of September, 9 o'clock in the morning. Henderson goes to the foreign ministry in Berlin. Ribbentrop.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Do you remember when we did the series on the First World War? All those scenes of the ambassadors crying and foreign ministers shaking hands. Yeah. None of that now. It's really kind of moving, actually. Really moving. Well, Ribbentrop is cut from a very different cloth. He will not even meet Henderson. He refuses even to see him. And Henderson gets interned, doesn't he? He does indeed, yes.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
So Henderson has to make do with the interpreter, Paul Schmidt. So he gives him the ultimatum. As surely everybody listening to this podcast will know, the ultimatum expired at 11 o'clock. The Germans didn't reply. And a few minutes later, Chamberlain made that very famously gloomy speech. And no such undertaking has been received. And consequently, this country is at war with Germany.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
You know, announcing the beginning of the Second World War for Britain and for France. But let's end with the interpreter, Paul Schmidt. He said, I took the ultimatum to the chancellery where everyone was anxiously awaiting me. There was something of a crush and I had difficulty in getting through to Hitler. When I entered, Hitler was sitting at his desk and Ribbentrop stood by the window.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Both looked up expectantly as I came in. I stopped at some distance from Hitler's desk and then I slowly translated the British government's ultimatum. When I finished, there was complete silence. Hitler sat immobile, gazing before him. He was not at a loss, as was afterwards stated, nor did he rage, as others allege. He sat completely silent and unmoving.
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531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
an astonishing extravaganza of the Fuhrer cult. So they have a huge parade of limousines down this new road, this new avenue in Berlin called the East-West Axis, which has been planned as the main boulevard of the new capital of Germania. Berlin will be renamed in time Germania. That's Hitler's plan.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
After an interval which seemed an age, he turned to Ribbentrop, who had remained standing by the window. And Hitler asked, What now?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Drawing up little plans and big domes and things. Exactly. They have huge torchlit parades. And at midnight, so midnight's the moment basically that Hitler's birthday begins, Speer presents him with a big model for the new triumphal arch that they are planning, which would be the biggest triumphal arch in the world. Yes. So much bigger than the Arc de Triomphe. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then the next day, there's a gigantic military parade, a five-hour military parade, and Hitler stands there. You know, he doesn't sit down. He stands and watches the whole thing and he's clearly delighted. And again, this is a reminder of how strange Hitler is, because I think for most dictators, this would be the apotheosis, the climax. You've turned 50.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
You've conquered, you know, everything. You've achieved all the foreign policy goals of any German nationalist, pretty much. This is the point to stop and slow down and enjoy it.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, absolutely. But as Ian Kershaw points out, 50 is an age where a lot of people tend to take stock. It's your classic kind of midlife crisis moment.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Well, that's Hitler, as Kershaw said. He spends all the time thinking about his own approaching death. Death is on his mind all the time. He has a sense of loss of vigour, great anxiety about his health and this tremendous sense of time running out. It's really important to him to strike soon. Most of his high command are ultimately desperate to avoid war with the West because they think
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
why gamble everything why risk everything when we've achieved so much you know we're in power we enjoy being in power we don't want to throw that away that's what that's how most authoritarians and dictators think not hitler he must have his war so eight days after his birthday he gives a landmark speech at the reichstag he renounces the non-aggression pact with poland so tom this is picking up your point from last time about what these pacts were the answer is nothing
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He also tears up the naval treaty with Britain. And for the first time, he publicly lays out the grievances that he and Ribbentrop have prepared. So that's Danzig, which we heard about last time, and the Polish corridor. And then a month goes by and he summons his commanders to the Reich Chancellery and he gives them the full Adolf Hitler bingo card. So we're being strangled economically.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
We need more living space, our racial destiny, all of this kind of stuff.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, the Jews are behind everything, of course. He says Poland is the target. Absolutely, there will be war. But here he goes beyond anything that he has said to his generals before. For the first time, he does not talk. He explicitly rules out, in fact, a friendship or alliance with the other Anglo-Saxon Germanic world power, which is Britain or England, as he always calls it.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He had always talked in the long run about some kind of deal with England. You know, that basically was part of his vision. Germany rules Europe. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Exactly. But now for the first time, he says explicitly, England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death. So he's already beginning to recalibrate his attention a little bit from the east towards the west to see the west as an ideological archenemy as well. And for the first time, we have a preview of what's going to happen in 1940.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He says, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot. We will have to take Holland and Belgium. We'll take France. We can easily take France. Of course, he is right. They do easily take France.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah. And as we will see in next week's episode, as the war begins, there is a case that, you know, if the French had shown a little bit more gumption. Had gone in.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
gone in hard yeah it would have been a very different outcome but he says we can take France we'll take the Atlantic seaboard and the channel and that will allow us to blockade England we'll strangle England and bring them to their knees the only question in his mind is the timetable I think at this point he's still thinking we do Poland this year
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And then maybe, you know, the West, Western Europe in a couple of years time.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And that will run through today's episode. His misjudgment, Hitler has judged his foreign policy coups very cleverly up to this point. But I think from this point on, or rather from the final attack on Czechoslovakia that we did last time, From that point on, I think he completely misreads London. Do you think that's because he's actually met the British and French leaders in person?
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
That's a good point, actually. It's funny that he starts to get them wrong after he's met them. Yeah. I think that's part of it. I think vanity is part of it. He feels... He was so affronted by Chamberlain and Chamberlain getting applause in Munich and so on. And he has such personal contempt for Chamberlain that he just can't take him seriously at all.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But also, I think by this point, A, Hitler's off his head on gun oil. But B, he has completely drunk the Führer Kool-Aid. You know, he now thinks all this business about I've been chosen by Providence. Yeah, he's all into that. You don't want a leader who thinks like that. I mean, that's mad. Anyway, that spring and summer, Ribbentrop's diplomats lay the foundations.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
They make all these more non-aggression pacts, which, as you will know, Tom, are worthless, with people like the Danes, the Latvians, the Estonians. We shall see, of course, what these non-aggression pacts are worth. He does a deal with Yugoslavia for its copper. He does a deal with Romania for its oil and its wheat. So these are clever deals. These are stocking up. It's like playing a board game.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I think you're absolutely right. And I think that's been running through the 1930s within the democracies themselves, of course. All these bright young men at Cambridge who are Stalinists, for example.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
They look stuffy. They look boring. They look dithery. They look weak. And if you're, as you say, if you're a government in Eastern Europe looking for an ally, you say France, really? I mean, they were great allies at Czechoslovakia. And where are they now? Whereas you think Hitler wins, you know, he judges things correctly. He's decisive. He's strong.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
You know, that's the calculation that a lot of these people are making.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah. Seductive. It's glamorous. It seems modern. Exactly right. Yeah. Exactly. Now, one person who has it a little bit ambivalent is Mussolini. Mussolini doesn't want a war at all, but he's basically tricked into signing the Pact of Steel, a renewed, deepened military alliance.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
With a load of people who've got skull and crossbones on their hands.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
I mean, you know, there are clues there. But Ribbentrop says to him, listen, don't worry. I mean, we're not thinking about war for five years, which is, I mean... That's all right, then. And Mussolini says, oh, well, fine, fair enough. Yeah, we'll do it.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
All that summer, Hitler does his usual trick that he'd done last time of basically trying to pretend that he hasn't got any military plans at all. So he just goes on a tour of his childhood haunts in Austria. He goes to Bayreuth to listen to Wagner. I know you're a great devotee of Wagner, aren't you, Tom? So again... a disturbing similarity.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Yeah, and you love the Mitfords. Oh, my God. Yeah, it's all stacking up.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
It's all quite odd. And of course, he spends loads of time in the eagle's nest going for walks and talking to Speer about triumphal arches and watching terrible films and stuff. Meanwhile, just as in the Czech crisis, Goebbels' propaganda machine has cranked up pouring out all these grievances.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And what they will do, just as in the Sudetenland, they'll take a genuine, often a local grievance with a grain of truth and then massively amplify and exaggerate it into a colossal injustice. So this time, remember last time it was a guy who was basically a PE teacher called Konrad Henlein. Yeah. And now there's a fellow called Albert Forster. He's the Nazi party chief in Danzig.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
He came from the same town, interestingly, as Henry Kissinger called Fürth. in Franconia. Kissinger, of course, a refugee from Nazi Germany. I mean, a huge part of Kissinger's makeup is that experience.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
Anyway, there's this huge stream of stories saying basically, you know, ethnic Germans in Poland are being beaten up. They're being attacked, all of this kind of thing. Now, it is true that Poland has a much more nationalistic government than Czechoslovakia did.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
But as Richard Evans says in his book on the Third Reich, these stories are nevertheless massive exaggerations at best and complete inventions at worst. And what Forster's goons will do is they will stage provocations to try and get a Polish counter reaction. So they take a great offense at the fact that Poles have things like customs offices and post offices in Danzig.
The Rest Is History
531. Hitler's War on Poland: The Pact with Stalin (Part 2)
And they're always claiming that Polish postmen and customs inspectors are kind of beating up Germans and all of this kind of thing. And the thing is that this has a very ready audience in Germany. We talked before, didn't we, in the Munich episodes about what ordinary Germans make of all this kind of thing. Do they believe it? And I think a lot of ordinary Germans absolutely swallow this stuff.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Frenchman, where now are those qualities which once distinguished you? Where now is that national character of greatness and loyalty?
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
I mean, you could say she might be being naive because by leaving him alive, you would create problems for the future. But, you know, she's being commendably compassionate, Tom.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
who was on trial for his life, was the erstwhile King Louis XVI. And this, Tom, is one of those speeches that defines the French Revolution. The French Revolution is a great rhetorical event. And we've done a lot of great orations. We had Saint-Just last time saying that you can't reign innocently and the king must die. And here we have Romain de Cez saying that
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
I mean, obviously, he had his head cut off, but he was always going to. But historians would generally say that that was very clever from Charles because actually he was right. The court was illegitimate. And he basically said, come on, everyone knows this is a put-up job. And has no legal foundation. And he wasn't wrong, and he got a lot of sympathy for that. Right.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
I suppose there are two interesting things there. So number one is, the weird thing is that answering point by point, it is madness because on some of those points, he is clearly guilty. He did flight to Varennes. He did get in touch with the Austrians. He has been in touch with counter-revolutionaries. He has been conspiring against the revolution.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
But the interesting thing is that in his own mind, clearly, Louis doesn't think he's guilty. He thinks these guys are bad people who have done a coup and have seized control of the revolution. Actually, I am blameless. I mean, that's the interesting thing. He wouldn't choose that strategy if he didn't have absolute confidence in his own innocence.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
But in the long run, very bad move for the Girondins in this. I mean, and one of their own goals that they have been scoring for the last few months, right, that they keep coming up with these wheezes that don't quite work. Right. And which make them look royalist.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
You should fear, lest you efface humanity from your heart, and you should find the compassion for this man who has suffered enough. And basically, nobody listens.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
At that point, some of them are hoping he might bring them back into his ministry and that they wouldn't have to have this kind of coup.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
I vote for death because I'm so kind, is basically what he's saying.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
The worst man in this story. Who's that? This is Philip Equality, who is the king's own cousin. What a terrible man he is. I mean, at least abstain or at least say exile or something like that. But to go all in in this way for your own cousin, I think is very, very bad behavior.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
People pay good money for that these days. Yeah, it's a brilliant idea. Marie Antoinette would love that, wouldn't she? That's a honeymoon holiday.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Death. Well, what a moving scene. And actually, I'm embarrassed but moved to report to the listeners that Tom actually can't continue because he too has dissolved into tears. So we're going to have to take a break. And we'll return after the break when Tom has regained his composure to tell you about Louis' fate. This episode is brought to you by Vanguard.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Throughout history, people have always looked for ways to make life easier. Just think about the Romans. They built aqueducts to bring water straight to their cities so they didn't have to haul it themselves.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
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The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Welcome back to The Rest Is History. The good news is that Tom has dried his tears. The bad news is that Louis Capet is facing an appointment with Madame Guillotine. So, Tom, we ended with Malzeb sobbing, announced the verdict to Louis, and then the convention themselves sent a delegation to Louis, don't they, to sort of formally read the verdict to him. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
So that's three days after the trial. And he remarkably still is very composed and indeed serene when he receives them.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
The novelist, yeah.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
And she's a teenager, isn't she? She's, what, 15 or so? Yeah. So that's that.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Because he's part of a, he's the sixth generation, I think, of Saint-Saëns who've been executioners, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Again, this is very Charles I in Whitehall, isn't it? Absolutely the same scenario.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
If the guillotine doesn't work, they can turn their cannons on him.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Well, they're doing it deliberately.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Crikey. What a moment. So you mentioned the crowd. The crowd, of course, are mainly troops because the ordinary people of Paris have been kept away from this moment. But within a couple of hours of this, am I not right in thinking that the troops have moved away? People come into the streets. It's a little bit like on a public holiday. People are strolling around and
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
you know, I know it's January, so it's not exactly that they're enjoying the sunshine, but people are acting as though it's just an ordinary Sunday or something sort of taking the air as though nothing has happened.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
It's interesting how that has escalated from an opposition to this king, which would have been the case a year earlier, that this king is complicit with counter-revolutionaries and foreign infiltrators and all that kind of thing. But it has widened, hasn't it? They've self-radicalized. So now it is an opposition to all kings and to kingship more generally.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Yeah. Because of course he'd been fasting because for religious reasons. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Wow. What a dramatic end to the third series on the French Revolution. Season three has come to an end with the execution of Louis XVI. But many of the big players are still around and in play. Marie Antoinette, Rob Spierre, Danton, Marat. In season four, which will be coming later this year, we will find out what happens to all of those characters. A little spoiler alert for you.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
None of them make it into... Well, they definitely won't be around in season six or seven, will they? That's for sure. So there's an awful lot of drama, a lot of bloodshed to come. No doubt in our forthcoming bonus episodes for the Manchester's History Club members, we'll be talking about some of the issues that have come up in this series. But thank you for listening.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
We will return to the French Revolution later in the year. Tom, merci beaucoup et au revoir. Au revoir.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Would you show your powers in overwhelming with misfortunes the man who had the noble resolution to repose such confidence in you? Have you no more respect for the sacred duties of hospitality? is no commiseration due to such unparalleled misfortunes.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
And so this has become more than just a case about Louis and his own personal misdemeanors. He is on trial as a symbol of worldwide despotism and monarchy.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
He was later on strictly come dancing.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
They want a big set piece.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
It's the ritualistic kind of kickoff, isn't it? And you say if he's found guilty, there is no doubt that he will be found guilty from the beginning. I mean, we're going to be talking about the trial, but I don't think there's any doubt in anybody's mind that he's not going to be walking out a free man, kind of punching the air and stuff outside the Old Bailey. No.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
No, I just wanted to maintain the suspense. Yeah, okay.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Okay, very good. Dramatic tension.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
Do you not think that a king who ceases to be one is not a victim sufficiently striking without its being necessary to add such accumulated miseries to his fate? Frenchman, this revolution which regenerates you develops great qualities. but fear, lest it should at the same time efface humanity from your heart, without which every other virtue is lost.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
So the trial is doing two things simultaneously, right? It's trying Louis as a private individual who has betrayed the revolution, but it's also doing that Saint-Just thing of trying him as a symbol of monarchy. He stands in effectively for all the monarchs that France has ever had.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
This is very execution of Charles I, isn't it? We did two episodes about that with our friend Ted Valance. Remember, there's all that business where a bit of Charles' cane falls off and no one picks it up. Yeah, and he has to get it. Yeah, this is all exactly the same thing again.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
And obviously, they all know the story of Charles I, so there must be a slight element of role-playing on all sides, actually, that they're kind of conscious that this has happened before.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
So that was the somewhat florid concluding statement of a fellow called Romain de Cez, who was a lawyer from Bordeaux. Tom writes here that he was celebrated for his sonorous eloquence. As I think you can tell. As you can tell. There he was standing on the 26th of December 1792 before the National Convention in Paris. And of course, the man he was defending.
The Rest Is History
547. The French Revolution: The Execution of the King (Part 4)
But there's also an issue... He's got an issue, to be fair to him, with his weight, hasn't he? He says, basically, I'm too fat to stand up in court. That's his excuse.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
No, no, that's a very critical report by this Belgian guy. But there's actually worse to come because that first quotation, the Free State official mentioned an overseer twirling a whip. And this whip becomes the supreme symbol abroad of King Leopold's model colony because this is a whip called the chicotte. And it's basically a strip of hippopotamus hide that's been dried in the sun.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It has a very sharp edge, doesn't it? Yeah. So it breaks the skin. 25 strokes of that you will pass out. 100 strokes of that will almost certainly kill you. And there are all kinds of accounts of from people who see Leopold's soldiers, his enforcers, flogging children who are sometimes as young as seven or eight.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
There's an official called Stanislas Lefranc, a Belgian magistrate, who arrived in the Congo. He saw these boys being flogged. These are like eight-year-old boys. And the reason is that they had all laughed in the presence of an official. And he was so across, he told his men to flog every boy, every servant boy in the town, 50 lashes.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So that's very like the SS officer in the Polish village with the schoolboys. Yes, it is. Flogging them. Yeah. And Lefranc complained and it was stopped. But afterwards, Lefranc was called in by his superiors and they said to him, don't do that again because that undermines discipline. We need discipline in this town. And most Europeans just seem to have taken the use of the chicotte for granted.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
They don't wield it themselves.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Absolutely, you do. So the enforcers, this is a private army called the Force Publique. I mean, an absolutely terrifying organization. By the mid 1890s, there were about 19,000 men in it. It's the biggest army in Central Africa. And it's a private army with a small group of white officers. And the men are all black Africans. The officers tend to be Belgian.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
The ordinary soldiers initially, they are mercenaries from West Africa or from Zanzibar. But over time, they're replaced with conscripts from the Congo. I say conscripts. But there is an argument that these are effectively slave soldiers.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
There's all kinds of evidence in the Belgian files of orders for chains and things, chains required to bring young men or boys from the interior to work in the force publique. We know that agents were paid a bonus for how many men they provided for the force publique. Some of them would buy teenage boys from friendly chiefs.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And these teenage boys, when they were maybe chained, led to barracks, told they had to join the army. They would serve a seven-year term. They were incredibly badly treated. I mean, they themselves have flogged with a chicotte. And they spend an awful lot of time fighting among themselves, basically fighting mutinies.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So in the book King Leopold's Ghost, there are long narratives of these hideous, bloody mutinies where false public units have turned against their officers and then other units have to be brought in to deal with them. And if they're not fighting mutinies, they're fighting rebels. Because we said last time how ethnically fragmented the Congo is.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It has a long history of ethnic violence before the Belgians ever arrived, a history that never really goes away. And you could argue that the force publique and indeed the free state generally is just a new and deadly player in an endlessly shifting world of rivalries and alliances.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
No. I mean, these campaigns, these rebellions and kind of guerrilla campaigns and counterinsurgency operations can last for 10, 20 years. And they involve, I mean, when Francis Ford Coppola turned Heart of Darkness into Apocalypse Now, there was a real logic to that because actually these counterinsurgency campaigns look very much like the Vietnam War.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Villages being burned to the ground, civilians being rounded up and murdered, women being raped, children being enslaved. It's kind of hideous, hideous scenes.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It is indeed. It is indeed. Now- Some people listening to this may say, you're presenting a very, very dark picture. You've obviously read this book that presents a very bleak picture of life in the Congo. Is there a more positive side?
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Next week, we'll do a bonus episode for our Restless History Club members talking about the critics of the Adam Hochschild's book and people who have said, oh, there's actually another side to the story. But just one note on this. Leopold, of course, had promised... a civilizing mission. But it's fair to say there is actually very little evidence of that.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So there are no state-funded schools for African children, for example. There are some religious foundations, but there's no attempt whatsoever to set up a state educational infrastructure. He does, however, have children's homes, which are called children's colonies. But the point of them is merely to provide recruits for the force publique.
The Rest Is History
539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So the world is told that these are orphanages for children with no parents, but often these are the surviving children of people who have been killed in the kind of counterinsurgency operations and dragged back in these hideous forced marches in which maybe a third of the children will die. And then they're put in these children's homes.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
where discipline is enforced with the chain and with the chicotte, about half of the children in these homes die. And if you live, you then join the force publique in your turn. So the cycle continues. How are the people who are organising this feeling about this? They feel great about it, by and large.
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Well, some do, of course, and we'll get on to this. I mean, Conrad does, famously. Yes, but Conrad... We will do an episode on Heart of Darkness next week in which we'll discuss how when Conrad went on his journey, on the way back, he writes letters home to friends and relatives. And he says, nobody talks to me. Everybody hates me. I'm very isolated. Everybody regards me as repugnant.
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And an obvious explanation for this is that he has shown his shock and at what he sees and his disgust. And other people say he is unsound. He's not to be trusted. He's not one of us. Because he comes out of that absolutely traumatized, doesn't he?
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But I can't believe that there aren't other people who... There are other people. I mentioned that magistrate, Lefranc, who said, stop flogging the boys and is then told off for it and said, you're undermining discipline. Right. So there are such people.
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You're speaking as somebody who's unaware of history. I mean, people often behave like this.
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There are voices of conscience, and we will come to some next week. We will come to the people who give information. to the campaigns against King Leopold.
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The military men, they were all for it. I mean, there are lots of accounts of military men who say, the Congo is actually brilliant. You can do what you like. It's much better than being at home in Europe. You can be a big man. Remember that quote? You can be a warlord if you want. I think that the truth of the matter is we're not talking about huge quantities of men. Remember, 500 maximum.
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By and large, if you go and if you stay more than a few weeks, you're signed up to the project. If you don't like it, you go home straight away if you don't like that project, I would say. You find a reason to get out. But if you go, you become desensitized very quickly. I mean, it's rather like asking how did Wehrmacht officers justify what they're doing in 1941? They find a way of doing it.
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That is a huge question. But you see, I don't think that's a very hard question to answer because I think human beings often behave like that in history because I have a very bleak view of human nature. It's not a puzzle to me because I just see it recur again and again.
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You can argue that there are two things we have. I mean, there's an imperialistic mentality and there's, of course, a racist mentality. So they don't regard the Africans as people like themselves and they believe they have a right to treat them as they choose.
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You don't go to the Congo to work as a mercenary if you've got a bleeding heart, I think it's fair to say.
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said oh i'm not sure about this but i think that tells its own story i mean that's the thing that they're self-selecting and the weight of their prejudices their cultural baggage means that they are perhaps predisposed to think it's okay it's also kind of what heart of darkness is about that i say we will come to that but just before we go to the break there's one thing that we've completely missed in this episode and that is an african voice
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And the truth is they are really hard to come by because as we said before, people aren't writing things down. We do get fragmentary sources collected in interviews. So here's a really good example that also answers your question. There was a free state agent who I think was American born called Edgar Canisius.
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And later on, he ends up basically turning against the free state and giving a lot of information to campaigners against it. And he collected stories from people. And one of them is a woman called Ilanga from the east of Congo who had been kidnapped by the force publique. And she told her story to Canisius and he repeated it.
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He was convinced that she was telling the truth because he also met the men who had kidnapped her. So he said, I believe her when she's telling me what happened. I'll just read an extract before we go to the break to give people a sense of what this was like on the ground. So this is Ilanga.
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She says, We were all busy in the fields when a runner came to the village, saying that a large band of men was coming and that many white men were with them. Three or four came to our house and caught hold of me, also my husband Alika and my sister Katinga. We were dragged into the road and tied together with cords about our necks.
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We were all crying, for now we knew that we were to be taken away to be slaves. We set off marching very quickly. My sister Katinka had her baby in her arms, but my husband Alika was made to carry a goat. We had nothing to eat, for the soldiers would give us nothing.
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On the fifth day, the soldiers took my sister's baby and threw it in the grass, leaving it to die, and made her carry some cooking pots. On the sixth day, we became very weak from lack of food and from constant marching, and my husband, who marched behind us with the goat, sat down beside the path and refused to walk more. The soldiers beat him, but still he refused to move.
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Then one of them struck him on the head with the end of his gun and he fell upon the ground. One of the soldiers caught the goat, while two or three others stuck the long knives they put on the end of their guns into my husband. I saw the blood spurt out and then saw him no more, for we passed over the brow of a hill and he was out of sight.
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Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn.com slash restishistory. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
The link is also in the episode description box.
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That's absolutely right. And we'll get onto the railway and the people who died working on it a little bit later. But to go back, Conrad made his journey up the Congo in 1890. And it was about this point that this terrible story entered a new chapter that was even darker than before.
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And this new period, this terrible period in the Congo's history, traces its origin not to Belgium, actually, but to Belfast in Northern Ireland. So in October 1887... An inventor called John Dunlop had attached a pneumatic rubber tire to his son's tricycle as an experiment to see if this would work. And within three years, the Dunlop company were making tires commercially.
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And from that point onwards... There's a huge bicycle craze, a bicycle boom with these rubber pneumatic tyres.
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Yeah, I think something like that. I mean, people have known about it certainly for decades, but it's only at this point in the early 1890s that the worldwide rubber boom really gets underway. And I guess it's because people need rubber insulation for the new telephone, for telegraphs, for electrical wiring, for electrification.
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It promotes rubber, the enthusiasm for rubber in bicycles, but also it's used in tubes and in factories and all these kinds of things. So it's the great more of industry. Absolutely. Now, where do you get rubber? You can get wild rubber or you can get plantation rubber. In the Congo, in the forests of the Congo, rubber vines are very plentiful. The costs, as with ivory, are very low.
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You don't need to cultivate it. You don't need fertilizers. You don't need equipment. You just need people to go and collect the rubber. And I'll explain how they do that in a second. So for Leopold, this is amazing. A rubber boom has started. And as luck would have it, he has one of the world's great supplies of rubber. But...
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He knows he's only got a limited window in which to do this because investors were already pouring money into plantations of rubber trees in Asia and in South America. And rubber trees are much easier to tap than rubber vines. And that would give him what, about 20 years? He's got 20 years to tap the rubber vines in the Congo before these trees become, as it were, operational.
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Absolutely right. Now, how do you get the rubber? Here's the catch. While rubber comes from these gigantic vines that wind their way around these trees. And these vines can grow so high, 100 feet high, they go up to the sunlight. And then once they're there, they'll sort of corkscrew for hundreds more feet through the kind of jungle canopy, the forest canopy.
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And to get the rubber out of the vine, you basically have to slash the vine with a knife, and then you hung a pot or a bucket to collect this kind of milk, the sap. And
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that comes from the vine now the downside of doing that in the Congo is when you go into the forest a lot of it is swamp so it's kind of flooded you're wading through it and you're surrounded by snakes crocodiles and all this kind of thing so it's a health and safety nightmare I think it's fair to say Tom now once you've got the sap the milky stuff You need to dry it.
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You want it to coagulate into the rubber. So what a lot of gatherers would do is they would get it, they'd cut the vine, the stuff comes out, then they spread it. I know this sounds really weird. They spread it on their own body. They wait till it's dried and then they kind of rip it off their body. Imagine how painful that is. Bits of hair in it. And then they put it into baskets.
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and carry it with the baskets on their heads. They will walk for tens and tens of miles down to the river to the nearest European agency. And here the rubber will be again left out to dry and then it will be loaded onto barges for the coast. So as all of that makes clear, it's quite an operation for the person who's actually gathering the rubber. I mean, you don't want to be eaten by a crocodile.
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Yeah, it's not a great job, is it? No, it's not something you choose to do. Podcasting is a better career choice, I think it's fair to say. Basically, nobody wants to do it. The only way you'll get people to do it is to force them to do it.
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Definitely. Self-accusatory. Absolutely. A very self-lacerating irony there, the high unjust proceedings. And today's episode will be quite a dark subject. So we're going to get into the realities of the Congo Free State under the regime of King Leopold.
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And there you have it. So this is where the force publique, the sort of mercenary force, the private army of King Leopold, and the various militias that have been enlisted by the concession companies... where they come in. Their job is to round people up and get them to go and get this rubber. And we know how they did it from the British vice consul who wrote this report in 1899.
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And he said, an officer told me what they do. They go into a village and The inhabitants all run away. They start looting the village, the sort of mercenaries who've gone in. Then they seize the women of the village. They chase them, they seize the women, and they keep them as hostages until the men have gone and got enough rubber. And then when the men have got the rubber, they sell the women
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back to the men, and then they move on to the next village. So they're basically hostages. It's the systematic, deliberate, planned taking of hostages. In the manual that was given to Congo Free State from the company agents... There are instructions about the best way to take hostages. Do they use the word hostage? No, they don't use the word hostage.
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They say it's a way of bargaining, it's a good way of negotiating, all this kind of thing.
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They don't want this manual to fall into the wrong hands, exactly. So basically, you take the hostages and then you would say, look, we need four kilograms of rubber every two weeks. And when you hit your quota, you can have your hostages back. Are people paid to collect rubber? Some chiefs are paid with beads or with salt. Some chiefs are paid with slaves.
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We know that in 1901, a chief told a Belgian official, he said, oh yeah, I was paid. I was given six women and two men. And I was told, quote, I could eat them or kill them or use them as slaves as I liked. Eat them. But that's what he said. I mean, maybe that was the Belgian being, you know, the Belgian official saying, mocking the chief, it's impossible for us to know.
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Cannibalism is not totally unknown in the Congo, but equally, it could be something that the Belgian, the Europeans are projecting on. Now, in some areas, it really is a police state. Workers would need a permit to leave their village because they're required for the rubber quota. In other areas, workers are actually given numbered metal discs. to wear around their necks.
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I say workers, of course, that you could argue workers is the wrong word. They are effectively, this is slave labor. And so these are slave collars, basically. Slave collars. And we are talking about enormous numbers of people. So one company, One of the biggest concession companies, the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, ABIR.
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In 1906, in its account books, it listed 47,000 Congolese workers, workers again in inverted commas, who are collecting rubber for it. And again, that's that weird thing that you're talking about, Tom. Do they even need to make a list? Why are they doing it? Because they're still so addicted to the formal legal paraphernalia.
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They want to believe that what they're doing is not naked exploitation, but is good business practice, I suppose. And can I ask about the Anglo in that? Yes. It had once been a British company. It is actually no longer at this point. Its shareholders, I think, are almost exclusively Belgian by the early 1900s. So there's one more thing.
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And this is the single most notorious aspect of life in the Congo, which many listeners may have heard of. A guy who describes this very well is, you mentioned missionaries, an American missionary called William Shepherd. In 1899, Shepherd was based in a region called the Kasai, which is in the south of the Congo.
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A lot of horrors in this. There are indeed. Before we get into them, let's remind ourselves what happened last time. The central character was King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, this lonely, awkward, selfish, ruthless man whom we likened in that episode, Tom, to you. And he has carved out his own private colonial fiefdom, a huge chunk of Central Africa with the Congo snaking through its heart.
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And this was an area that was plagued by fighting between loyalists to the Congo Free State and rebels. Shepherd went deep into the forests and he found abandoned villages that had been burned to the ground and were littered with corpses. And he was horrified.
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And he kept going and he got to the camp of Leopold's loyalists, to kind of tribes that were loyal, that had collaborated with the Congo Free State. And he was struck as he approached straight away by the smell of something being smoked, like meat being smoked. And he said the chief took him to a sort of wooden framework of sticks under which there was a fire burning.
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And on the framework, on the sticks, on the kind of frame, were hands, 81 right hands, human hands. And the chief said to him, see, here is our evidence. I always have to cut off the right hands of those we kill in order to show the state how many we have killed. And the point of smoking them was that they wouldn't rot.
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The Congo is very hot and humid, so you smoke them means you can preserve them. The chief could show them to Congo free state or concession officials and then get his reward. Now, this is a very, very controversial subject among people who write about the Congo. Some people say it's a kind of long established practice.
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It's a practice that comes from African and Arab slave traders who've been cutting off people's hands. And it's unfair to blame this on King Leopold. Well, I mean, it's a practice that goes back to ancient Egypt.
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Others say actually what happens is that under the free state, other historians, under the Congo free state, this becomes institutionalized and sort of systematized in a way that it had never quite been before. That it almost... It becomes part of the box ticking, the accountancy. It becomes industrialised. It becomes industrialised, exactly.
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One common misconception that people will have is that these were cut off living people. That's perhaps because you'll have seen photos of living people whose hands have been cut off. Because it happened in Sierra Leone, didn't it? Notoriously. But most of the victims were already dead. There's another great book on the Congo by David van Rebroek, a lot of it based on oral history.
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That makes very clear that most of the people who had their hands cut off, I mean, they're already dead. They're corpses. Leopold himself, when there's a great storm, as we will come to next week, about the cutting off of hands, he was very annoyed that people criticized him for it. He said, cutting off hands, that's idiotic. He said, I'd cut off the rest of them, but not the hands.
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That's the one thing I need in the Congo. is people's hands to collect the rubber. I mean, that gives you some sense of Leopold's cynicism. But I think what happened is that among the force publique, cutting the hands off corpses does become almost an end in itself because they take them back to their officers. They're European officers. And this says, I'm taking the job seriously.
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I've killed lots of people. Here is the evidence. And there was some suggestion, and I think it's correct, that forced public officers were paid bonuses based on how many hands. So it's like scalp hunting in the Wild West. Exactly. It is. That's a really, really good comparison. Now that we're at this point, I think it's fair to say that we really are kind of morally in the heart of darkness.
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I mean, this is the kind of thing that really, if you're a sensitive listener, you've probably already stopped listening. There are some writers who think a lot of this has been exaggerated and sensationalized.
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For me, I mean, we will talk about this a lot in next week's bonus, but for me, I think there are far too many accounts of European agents forcing people to eat excrement or to drink castor oil or shooting holes in people's earlobes and using them for target practice and stuff like that. I think there are far too many examples for them all to be exaggerated or indeed made up.
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I think you have to believe that all these missionaries are inventing stories. There are some notorious examples. There was a guy called Leon Fievez. He collected more rubber than anybody else. He was from a farming family in Wallonia in Belgium. He was the commissioner for the Équateur district. We know that he boasted about his methods. He told his men, cut off heads.
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Somewhere between 8 and 12 million people may be living there.
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And he cut off heads to inspire loyalty and discipline because people weren't giving him food. He cut off a hundred heads. He would ask people to bring baskets full of hands. He was completely open and unashamed about it.
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His agent, his operative, Henry Morton Stanley, the great explorer, though bloodstained explorer, has signed treaties with 450 different settlements, giving their land, their economic rights, and crucially their labor to the International Association of the Congo, which has proved to be a front for the Congo Free State, which has been set up from May 1885.
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Exactly. So let's move the clock forward to 1895. The Congo Free State is now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Leopold is also celebrating his 60th birthday. His life, in many respects, is absolutely miserable. His wife hates him. She spends all her time riding horses. And laughing. Well, she doesn't laugh anymore, actually. Laughter has fled, I think it's fair to say.
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His oldest daughter, Louise, has married a German prince, and their wedding is, if anything, even worse than Leopold's. She tried to run away on her wedding night, and she ends up being locked in a nursing home for six years. So that's a bit miserable. Second daughter, Stephanie, she married Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, and he killed himself at Meierling in a murder-suicide pact with his lover.
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It would make an amazing play, the home life of Leopold II. But also, he's...
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pretty bonkers in his own way he's very lonely he's a massive hypochondriac he's such a hypochondriac that every day they have to boil the tablecloths to kill germs and he wears when he goes outside and it's raining he wears a waterproof bag over his beard to stop his beard getting wet which seems very peculiar why didn't he shave his beard off Good question.
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I think he thinks the beard is a sign of his tremendous masculinity, I think is what he thinks. His great pleasures, you mentioned one of them last week, which is he has a special ironed copy of the Times every day. His other great pleasures are spending money on monuments and pavilions and parks and stuff. Golf courses. Golf courses. He loves a golf course. He does like a golf course.
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And his other great pleasure is sleeping with very young girls. So in 1885, he was actually named in a British court... as a client of a disorderly house in London, and he was accused of paying £800 a month to have a supply of girls in their very early teens. He's a bad man. I think we can conclude that King Leopold II was a very bad man.
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Now, all of his spending, of course, reflects his big earnings from rubber. It's really hard for us to know how much money he made from all this rubber. But I mentioned one concession company, Anglo-Belgian India Rubber. They made a profit on their rubber of more than 700%, and their stock price rose 30 times in four years after they started investing in rubber.
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So I think it's a fair assumption that Leopold is making tens of millions, maybe more, in today's money, an enormous, enormous sum of money. And things are only going to get better for him. His railway, by the time he turns 60, his railway is finally nearing completion. It has been a gigantic and a hideous project. 60,000 people have worked on this 200-mile railway. They've built 99 bridges.
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But the project has eaten people because of dysentery, because of yellow fever, smallpox, and so on. They've had to bring in workers from West Africa. They've brought in hundreds of Chinese labourers from Hong Kong and Macau. These people have been brought often under false pretenses. They're chained together. They're flogged if they falter. There are constant rebellions.
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The death toll is impossible to estimate. The official figures say 1,800 Africans and Asians died, but it could be far greater. There are some historians who think maybe hundreds were dying every single month.
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It's all about the kindness. It was said afterwards that every single sleeper on the railway, that's what Americans call the tie, which is the wooden slat that basically goes between the rails, that every single one of those planks cost one African life. And I don't think that's such a tremendous exaggeration.
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In all this process, Leopold has assured the world, and in particular the other governments of Europe, that his motives are philanthropic. Even six years later, he told the Belgian prime minister, the Congo state is certainly not a business. If it gathers ivory on certain of its lands, that is only to lessen its deficit.
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So Leopold, he thinks, well, when the railway is done, I can dream bigger with all my money. We can push maybe the railway up to the Valley of the Nile. We can have a railway that goes up to the Sudan and to Egypt. He starts putting feelers out to Gladstone, the British prime minister. Would you be interested in selling me Uganda? And he says to his courtiers, Belgium is an up and coming country.
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Spain, Portugal, the hated Dutch. They're decadent. We can move in on their colonies, actually.
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Yes. Now, there are the first glimmers of criticism. The very first critic really is an African-American missionary called George Washington Williams. He went to the Congo to try to save souls. Well, he's an amazing man, isn't he?
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Exactly. And this bloke... George Washington Williams, right? He's had this meeting with Leopold. Then he goes to the Congo. He goes up into the interior and he's like, what? This is awful. This is a complete con and a fraud. And he publishes an open letter. And he says, this is unbelievable. The forced public are out of control. They're killing everybody.
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Your Majesty's government is engaged in the slave trade, wholesale and retail. It buys and sells and steals slaves. And is that where he uses the phrase crimes against humanity? I think he does. Yes. And now Leopold organizes a massive press counterattack, says this guy's an attention seeker, he's mad. And unfortunately for George Washington Williams, he dies of tuberculosis just months later.
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But this is the very first little dent in the edifice that Leopold has very carefully constructed. And there are more. So in 1896, another missionary, a Swede, tells an audience in London that the force publique are collecting human hands. There's an even bigger scare, and this tells its own story, the biggest scare of all.
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In other words, we're paying out so much money because we're so committed to the philanthropic civilizing mission that we promised that we need to gather a little bit of ivory to make ends meet. This, it is worth saying very starkly, is completely untrue. From the very beginning, Leopold is really interested, I think, only in one thing, and that is maximizing his profits.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
The forced public hanged an Irish ivory trader called Charles Stokes because they said they'd caught him selling arms to Arab slave dealers. And the fact that they had hanged a white man, very shocking. And the European papers start to say, well, hold on. If they would hang a white man with impunity, what are they doing to the Africans if that's how they behave?
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So actually, Leopold deals with this, again, very cunning. He sets up a fake commission for the protection of the natives with missionaries on its board. And he says they'll look into this. I mean, they never actually really travel to the Congo. They don't really have a proper meeting. But they issue a report. Brilliant. All sorted. Necessary reforms have been made.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So then, as now, if you've got a problem, set up a commission. Set up a commission, yeah. In 1897, Leopold arguably reached his apogee. A World's Fair opened in Brussels. There were two great sites built and decorated in the Art Nouveau style of the day. One of them was completely devoted to the Congo Free State.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
There were stuffed animals, there was coffee and chocolate and tobacco, there were ornaments and woodwork and all this stuff. But the highlight was 267 human beings that were exhibited in specially built villages like animals in the zoo.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
There was even a sign, the blacks are fed by the organizing committee, said the sign, because people were giving them sweets, throwing sweets to them, which was making them ill.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And people just taking it completely for granted. A million people went to see this exhibition in Brussels. And we have no indication that any of them thought anything but that it was absolutely brilliant. They loved it. And when the Africans were finally taken home to
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
the congo one newspaper said the soul of belgium follows them and like the shield of jupiter protects them may we always thus show the world an example of humanity the smugness and the sort of right sense of righteousness um off the scale so leopold what could possibly go wrong he's got his colony he's got his rubber he's got his money you know everything looks great
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Nothing could spoil it, or could it? Because it's about this time that a young clerk on the docks at Antwerp where the rubber is being unloaded, begins to wonder about the trade. He sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded, and he thinks it's weird because it's not really showing up in the company's accounts, like somebody's skimming off the top.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
What he also can't understand, this young shipping clerk, if we're getting all this rubber and ivory in, what are we paying for it with? What are the people of the Congo getting back? And when he looks into it, he finds something that really shocks him because the ships that are going back to the Congo are not being loaded with trade goods.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
They're being loaded exclusively with rifles and ammunition. And it's at that point that this young bloke- Yeah, the light bulb. The light bulb goes off. And as he later puts it, he said, "'It was bad enough to stumble upon a murder, but I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader.'" And this young man's name was Edmund Dean Morell.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And as we'll find out next week, he is going to change the world.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And the proof of that is what he does on the very first day of the Congo Free State's existence. So on the 29th of May, 1885, the day that it is proclaimed, He issues a decree that all vacant land now belongs to the state, i.e. to him. But because the word vacant is not defined, what is vacant land?
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Now, Tom, as you know, I'm not just a man of history. I'm also known for my involvement in the performing arts. Are you now? I must confess that early on in my acting career, my stage presence did come under a little scrutiny from Britain's finest newspapers.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Yeah, and I will remind the listeners that in Scotland, they order their reviews in a different way. So one is at the top and five stars is the worst review you could get. So we were very happy with that one-star review. But like a lot of great masters of their craft, Tom, I learned from it. I grew. I evolved. I knew I would bide my time before returning to the boards. And guess what? You're not.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
No. Yes. Tom, I have to tell you, I have returned to the boards. I'm performing once again. And the brilliant news for our listeners is that you can go and you can be transfixed by my performance right now because I am honoured and privileged to appear in the latest Sherlock & Co adventure, The Adventure of the Norwood. Builder. Please tell me that you are playing the Norwood Builder.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
I'm playing a much better character. I'm playing Hector McFarlane, a solicitor from Blackheath accused of murder. Goodness, as Lestrade's officers bear down on me, Tom, I have nowhere else to turn but to 221B Baker Street.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Well, very much like this one, we were better acting, I think it's fair to say. It's a stable mate of ours. They are a massive show. They get 10 million downloads. Outside, I believe, The Archers, this is the biggest audio drama in Britain.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It genuinely is brilliant. So My Son is a massive Sherlock and Co. aficionado. It basically goes through all the original short stories and the short stories that are often forgotten in modern day adaptations. It transposes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's narratives to the modern day. So Watson himself is making the podcast while they're doing the adventures. You can pick up any adventure you want.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
You don't have to follow the whole series to get stuck in. It is absolutely brilliant. Do you know who else thinks it's brilliant, Tom? The Guardian newspaper. One of those prized one-star reviews? No, a five-star. They said, and I quote, very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular. Do you want to know what the Times said?
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It said a breakneck series that Gen Z, or Gen Z as members of it say, that Gen Z is hooked on. Wow. And now that you're appearing on the show, I mean, that will confirm the hook, won't it? It absolutely will. And the Guardian listeners will be beside themselves with joy. So, everybody, please listen to Sherlock & Co. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder. It's multi-part. It's brilliant.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Part one is out now. Jump right in wherever you get your podcasts. And here is a clip from that very episode.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
What does that mean in a world like the Congo, where the locals don't necessarily have the same concept of property rights as Belgians do? That effectively means the entire land of the Congo.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
The decree. Yeah. The decree is an order being sent out to operatives in the Congo. It's not a question of... He's issuing orders to his officials. That's how it works.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
As he has done with the treaties, right? He needs to have something to show the other European... If anyone asks, as we will discover next week when people do start to ask, he needs to have a paper trail that he can show to say, I'm doing it all completely above board. Right.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
What now happens is that the territory of the Congo Free State – remember, 67 times the size of Belgium, the size of Britain, Spain, Italy, France, and Germany put together – this is carved up into gigantic territories, which are awarded as concessions to private companies.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Now, most of these companies are owned by Belgian shareholders, but in most cases, at least 50% of the shares belong to King Leopold himself. In other words, even where he's handed out concessions, and it's not the Congo Free State running the territory itself, he is going to get the lion's share of the profits. And what is more, when those companies pay tax or they pay tolls, they pay it to him.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So he wins everywhere you look at it. So how is the free state going to work? It is slightly different from other European colonies because it has a tiny, tiny infrastructure. So if you think about India in the same period, there was an Indian civil service in Britain. Thousands of people applied to it. There were exams. It was very sought after.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
prestigious and thousands of people were sent out to work as kind of district commissioners and officials and all of this kind of thing. And it's all very obvious what it is. It's very public.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
It's not the case in the Congo, and the numbers are far, far smaller. After five years of the Congo Free State's existence, there are still fewer than 500 Europeans working in the Congo as traders, soldiers, missionaries, officials, and so on. The biggest of these groups – and it's no more than 80 people – are based in this new capital, which is the port of Boma.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
That's pretty much where Stanley had finished his famous trek across the heart of Africa. And so in Boma, they have built docks, they've built warehouses, there's a hotel, there's a military base, there's a hospital, there's a post office, and so on. The governor general is based there, but the governor general really is a cipher.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
We won't be mentioning any governors general because they're not important. All the decisions are made in Brussels by a tiny cabinet of officials who are answerable to Leopold. So in effect, he rules the Congo. I've written in the notes an absolute monarch, but that's not quite the right term. Actually, the right term is a proprietor. He is the owner of the Congo and he runs it as the proprietor.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
As the chairman of the board, he has the final decision. As for the other white men in the Congo, they are strung out along the river in a line of these kind of makeshift stations. So often these stations are no more than a handful of thatched huts and kind of block houses with the flag of the Congo Free State, the blue flag with the gold star flag.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And it's in one of these stations that Mr. Kurtz in Conrad's novella is based. Exactly. The inner station, right in the heart of the interior. Now, if you are sent out there, if you go out there, you will have servants. Your contract stipulates that you can have a bottle of wine a day, and your contract also promises you
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
A regular supply of marmalade from England, butter from Denmark, foie gras, which would appeal to the airway producer, canned meat and so on and so forth. But whether or not a lot of the men get these supplies regularly is, of course, a very different matter because it depends on the steamboats. Almost all of the men who go are single. Very uncommon for them to take wives.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Most of them take up with local women. And they're not necessarily Belgian, are they? In fact, most of them aren't Belgian. No, most of them are not Belgian because, as we said in the last episode, most Belgians are not interested in having a colony. They're not… Imperially-minded people. No, and they're not particularly maritime people either.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So the idea of getting on a ship and going out… Belgium doesn't really have a merchant navy at this point.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
He's not Belgian, Mr. Kurtz. The one group that is very heavily represented among the people who work for the Congo Free State is people who have been in the military. And that, as we will see, tells its own story.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So these guys have two things that other Europeans don't have, because people who listened to the last episode may be wondering, if other Europeans found this so difficult and didn't go up the Congo, what do these chaps have? They have two things. One, they have automatic machine guns. So the Maxim gun, which was the first automatic repeating gun, was invented in 1884.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
That was the year that Stanley completed all the treaties for Leopold. So whatever happens, we have got the Maxim gun and they have not. Exactly. And the second thing is modern medicine. So the thing that would always pull people off going up the Congo was the threat that you would die of disease.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
In 1881, scientists had proved that yellow fever was carried by mosquitoes, so people are now travelling with mosquito nets. They're also travelling with enormous quantities of quinine to fight malaria, which they have imported from plantations in the Dutch East Indies, a sign of the globalisation of the world. Of course. Also, they've got steamboats.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
They do indeed. All of that said, the death rate is still actually quite high. So the question is, why on earth would you go? And I think the answer is that the Congo appeals to the kind of people who might otherwise have gone to the Klondike or to the Rand in South Africa, or indeed might have joined the French Foreign Legion or something like that.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So if you want adventure, this would be perfect. Exactly so. So Adam Hochschild, in his brilliant book, King Leopold's Ghost, that we've mentioned quite a lot, he says, "...someone fated for life as a small-town bank clerk or a plumber in Europe could instead become a warlord, an ivory merchant, a big-game hunter, and a possessor of a harem."
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And he quotes a brilliant letter from a Belgian officer to his family in 1894. Vive le Congo, says this guy. There is nothing like it. We have liberty, independence and life with wide horizons. Here you are free and not a mere slave of society. Here one is everything. Warrior, diplomat, trader.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
Exactly it is. He uses the word trader, that Belgian officer. And of course, what lies behind that and what lies behind the entire project is the single word ivory. That is what they are here for. Getting ivory is dead easy. You just shoot and kill an elephant and then rip out its tusks. The hard part is getting the ivory out of the Congo.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So Leopold so far is relying entirely on steamboats, but there is that 200 mile section around the rapids where you can't use the steamboat. So here you have to go over land. And ideally what you need is not team supporters trudging up and down the trail. You want a railway. Yeah, of course.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So by 1887, he has a team of surveyors sketching a route around the rapids, and it will take a very long time. They don't actually start laying tracks until 1890 because the terrain is so difficult and because of the threat of disease and so on. So for now, he has to rely on tens of thousands of porters, hence what we talked about in the introduction.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
They're building a railway in their own interests. It's kind of progressive hard labour. Yeah, because once we finish the railway, they'll have a brilliant life because there won't be porters anymore. That's basically the logic.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And of course, what they're carrying, they're carrying the steamboats, but they're also carrying the marmalade, the foie gras, the rifles, machine gun ammunition, all of this stuff. They're not paid because under the Congo Free States laws, there is no money for Africans. Africans are not allowed money.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
So they are being paid generally in brass, sometimes in cloth, but in these kind of brass rods, which is a kind of strange makeshift currency. And we've quoted from Heart of Darkness already, but we don't need to go to fiction to know how they're treated. A Free State official in his memoirs, and it's This is a quotation that's so like Conrad's quotation. It's extraordinary.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
A file of poor devils chained by the neck carried my trunks and boxes towards the dock. He says there are a hundred of them, trembling and fearful, the overseer walking by with his whip. For each stocky and broad-backed fellow, how many were skeletons dried up like mummies, their skin worn out, seamed with deep scars, covered with separating wounds.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
And then he says, again with a kind of bitter irony, no matter, they were all up to the job." And then a Belgian senator visited in 1896. Again, he says, everywhere we went, unceasingly, we meet these porters, black, miserable, with only a horribly filthy loincloth, frizzy and barehead, supporting the load. They come and go like this by the thousand.
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539. Horror in the Congo: The Crimes of Empire (Part 2)
requisitioned by the state armed with its powerful militia, handed over by chiefs whose slaves they are and who make off with their salaries, dusty and sweaty, insects spreading out across the mountains and valleys, their task of Sisyphus, dying alongside the road or the journey over, heading off to die from overwork in their villages. So that's not an entirely positive report, is it?
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
It's kind of amazing to think of this being carried on in 6th century Gaul, decades after the Roman Empire has fallen there. But it also means that he needs a queen who is commensurate with the status that he thinks should be his. And clearly, you know, a slave girl doesn't measure up at all.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So not long after he's taken Fredegund into his bed, he's already looking around for a suitable bride to replace Audevere. And he fixes on a princess from the one kingdom that can rival that of the Merovingians. And that's the kingdom of the Visigoths, which is centered in Spain. Again, a very powerful barbarian kingdom.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And his chance to press for a Visigothic princess comes in 567, when the oldest of the four brothers, a guy called Charibert, dies of natural causes. And his lands are then divided up among the three surviving brothers. And the result is a kind of completely mad, unworkable patchwork of kind of territory. It's a bit like the Holy Roman Emperor. You know, bits of towns here, chunks of land there.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So Paris is left neutral. That's a kind of safe space between the three brothers. Sigbert, who's the king of Austrasia, so that's the kind of the eastern chunk, he gets the Loire, which is obviously the opposite end from him, and that includes Tours. Oh, right. So he gets St. Martin. Yeah, so very important territory.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
The eldest surviving brother, so this is a guy called Guntram, his power base is in Burgundy. He gets Aquitaine, which again is on the opposite side of Gaul from him. But the key thing for Chilperic, you know, he's been penned in in the north and there's no way that the Visigoths would give him the time of day if that was all he had to offer.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
His sway is extended all along the line of the channel as far as Brittany, which remains independent. But he also gets most of southwestern Gaul. And that, of course, abuts the Pyrenees, which means Spain. And so that does make him a person of interest to the Physigoths. Initially, in the wake of Charabert's death and his getting all these new lands, he gets up to his normal tricks.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
He tries to grab Tor, because with its tomb of St. Martin, it's so important. But Sigbert manages to beat him off. But then he opens marriage negotiations with the Visigoths, and he gets what he wants. He gets it. A princess. And in 568, the eldest daughter of the king of the Visigoths, a princess called Galswintha, duly sets off from Spain northwards to Neustria.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And she arrives on the banks of the Seine. She's come up the river, a bit like Marie Antoinette did. And she steps out from the boat and she's greeted on bended knee by Chilperic and his entire army. He's brought them out as a gesture of honor.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
throne scene isn't it very and gregory of tor describes this moving and romantic moment king chilperic loved her very dearly for she had brought a huge dowry with her
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
It's very, very bad news for Fredegund because reports of Chilperic's enthusiasm for her have reached the Visigoths. And so it's become a specific clause in the marriage negotiations that Chilperic will chuck her out and not have any other woman other than Galswintha, the Visigothic princess. So Chilperic really wants this princess. So he's chucked Fredegund out.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
You know, she loses her status as the royal mistress. And rather than kind of throw a hissy fit and risk her relationship with Chilperic, you know, she goes back to her former duties. But as Shelley Puhak puts it, she made sure Chilperic caught glimpses of her in passageways and courtyards, enticing reminders of an easier and more blissful time. So she is still flaunting her. Her curves.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And it turns out Chilperic can't resist her. You know, she is irresistible to him. And so a few months after the wedding, Galswinther finds Chilperic in bed with Fredegund. And there's an absolutely massive row. Galswinther threatens to leave for Spain, which would obviously be mortifying for Chilperic. One morning, Galswintha is found in her bed and she has been strangled.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And Gregory of Tor writes, King Chilperic wept for the death of his queen. But then a few days later, he goes to the church and there at the altar, dressed in splendid jewels in the robes of a royal partner, is Fredegund. And they get married. And the scandal of it echoes across Gaul. It echoes across Christendom. And everyone, of course, is thinking what Gregory of Tor puts into words.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
It was Chilperic. who had ordered Galswintha to be garrotted by one of his servants.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Well, the place where it particularly reverberates is in the court of Austrasia, where Chilperic's brother Sigbert is king. And the reason for that, why it particularly reverberates there, is partly because Sigbert and Chilperic really detest each other. But it's also because Sigbert is also married to a Visigothic queen.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And this queen is the younger sister of Galswintha, so the princess who's just been murdered. And she had arrived in Austrasia the year before, so in 567. And the name of this princess, this Visigothic princess married to Sigbert, is Dominic Brunhild.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
She really is. Very like Fredegund. So she's in a difficult situation. She's a foreigner in a Frankish court, but she's already in the space of a year showed herself to be a very shrewd, a very tough political operator. And she's made a point of forging alliances with the kind of, you know, the leading men at Sigbert's court. So that's one thing that she's done.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
But the key thing she's done, and it's what basically queens are there for, in the opinion of their husbands, is that she's fulfilled her prime duty, which is to give Sigbert a son. And Sigbert's son is called Childebert. And he is born at Easter. He's baptized at the great Christian festival of Pentecost. And this seems to everyone in Austrasia an absolute marker of divine favor.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So Brunhild is very much in everyone's good books in Austrasia. And she works on Sigbert and says, look, my sister has been murdered by your brother's mistress, who is now kind of posing around in my dead sister's robes and clothes. And this is unsupportable. You know, you have to have vengeance. I think that's a reasonable position, to be fair. I think it is. Yeah, I think it is.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And so Sigbert, he turns to his brother Guntram, the king of Burgundy, so the elder brother. And he says, look, let's take this to trial. You should summon Chilperic to answer for what is clearly a terrible crime and we will try him so that everything will be above board. And Guntram says, yeah, fair enough. Clearly something terrible has happened. We need to get to the bottom of this.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So Guntram summons to Chilperic to come and stand trial and Chilperic refuses. So he's tried in absentia and found guilty. And this, of course, then provides Sigbert with the perfect legal, religious sanction to invade Neustria. and know that everyone in Gaul basically will be on his side.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
He's got Guntram on his side, he's got all his own followers on his side, and he's got quite a lot of people in Neustria who are, of course, very anxious about the crime that their king might have committed. They are also very prone to go over to him. And so when he launches his campaign in 575, it's an absolute triumph. Chilperic and Fredegund are forced to flee Soissons, their capital.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
They have to take all their treasure with them. You know, they can't risk losing that. They also abandoned Paris, which Chilperic had occupied. Sigbert moves into Paris, the place where Clovis, the founder of the Merovingian dynasty, is buried. And he summons Brunhild and his little boy Childebert and various daughters who Brunhild has also given birth to by this point.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And so the whole family, they move to Paris. They move into the great palace on the Ile de Paris. And the Bishop of Paris hails Brunhild as Praecelentissima Regina, the most excellent queen. So she is being hailed as queen in the very heart of the Merovingian dynasty. And this is looking brilliant. And meanwhile, out in Neustria, all the nobles are starting to defect to Sigbert.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And so Sigbert decides he will go north and meet them. He leaves Brunhild and his children behind in Paris. He goes northwards. He goes to one of Chilperic's royal villas, where all the nobility of Neustria have assembled. The nobility of Austrasia join them. There's a massive great assembly. They hail Sigurbert as king. He's lifted up onto a shield. He's paraded through their ranks.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And it seems that Chilperic and Fredegund are absolutely doomed. But that, Dominic, is to reckon without Fredegund's determination and cunning.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Well, let's find out. So Sigbert's been paraded around in his shield. All the nobles of the two kingdoms have hailed him. It's all looking brilliant. So he steps down from his shield. He's kind of wandering around his camp. And he is approached by two young boys. And they're very small. They look to be no threat whatsoever. They're clearly slaves. You can tell that from their dress.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
They have no armor, no real weapons apart from pretty blunt hunting knives that everyone as a matter of course in Gaul kind of wear on their belts. So they seem to be no threat at all. And they kneel before him and say that they have a message for him. And so Sigbert stops, waits to hear what they have to say.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And they reach for their knives and they strike him on both sides, Gregory of Tours tells us. But these are pretty blunt knives. It shouldn't be enough to kill him. But Sigbert, even though he's really only got a kind of scratch, within minutes, he has collapsed onto the ground, starts to froth at the mouth. And within hours, he's dead. And it's clear the knives were poisoned.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And who in Gaul would have had the ability to know how to command poisons, the daring to come up with such a scheme, the powers of persuasion to get two boys to sacrifice themselves, because of course they're immediately put to death. And the assumption is that there is only one person who fits that bill. And that person, Dominic, is Fredegund.
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Well, I think it provides the academic perspective on all these shenanigans. And it also sums up why Fredegund and Brunhilde, one a slave girl, one a princess, are actually, you know, you can reckon them worthy adversaries because the princess, like the slave girl, faces incredibly daunting challenges. And that is what makes it so amazing that their feud, it endures decades.
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But their struggles, I guess, are not only against each other, but also the circumstances that both of them, as the most powerful woman in their respective kingdoms, are facing as women. And even though we can't follow every twist and turn of their rivalry, I think the details, the kind of the broad outline that we'll go through in the second half, I mean, it's so extraordinary.
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Do you want to tell everyone what it is? It's so accurate. A great many things keep happening, some of them good, some of them bad. I mean, that's the whole of history there, isn't it?
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So kind of jaw dropping at points that it will become clear just how remarkable both these figures are, both these women are.
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Yeah. I mean, we don't know for sure that she did it, but she definitely benefits from it. And as we will see, it does have her kind of fingerprints all over it. So she's clawed everything back, both for herself and for Chilperic, because with Sigbert gone, his heir, Childebert, is, I mean, you know, he's a little boy, about five years old, so no conceivable threat whatsoever.
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And all the Neustrian nobles who had pledged their loyalty to Sigbert, you know, they think, well, we're not going to pledge our loyalty to a foreign child. So they immediately swing back to Chilbrick. And actually, some of the Austrasians do as well. So the nobles who'd been following Sigbert and the vast mass of the Austrasians, the nobility, the men at arms who'd been following them.
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they all withdraw to home territory. They feel there's no point in carrying on this war. And I think one of the reasons for thinking that Fredegund is behind this is that Chilperic, from this point on, seems to have treated her with an unusual degree of respect and devotion, almost as though he's kind of acknowledging what he owes her.
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And not only, I think, does he recognise that he's found in Fredegund a partner for his own ambitions, similarly kind of determined and ruthless. But also Fredegund, like Brunnhilde's done, has provided sons. So two in Fredegund's case. And so her position now seems completely secure. She's completely reversed the seeming abyss that she was about to fall into.
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She is now looking at kind of very solidly ensconced as the most powerful woman in Neustria. Which isn't to deny that the assassination of Sigbert comes with pretty high costs for her. So she is now seen not just as a slave, but as treacherous, as cowardly, as underhand. Actually, for Franks, this is the epitome of what it is to be a slave and for what it is to be a woman.
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So Fredegund in that sense is the kind of the embodiment of everything that they most fear and despise. But Gregory of Tor, who is absolutely, as we said, team Brunhild, he goes further and accuses Fredegund of having practiced witchcraft. How else would she have known to apply the right amount of poison?
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How else would she have been able to suborn these two boys who were clearly going to their deaths? And this is a very serious charge. So Shelley Puhak in her wonderful book, The Dark Queens, points out that the fine in Gaul for slandering a woman as a whore was 45 solidi. I'm not quite sure exactly what that is, but respectable amount, I guess.
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But if you falsely accuse a woman of witchcraft, then the fine you have to pay is 187 and a half solidi. So, you know, that's quite an imbalance.
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So does Fredegund care? Fredegund does not seem to have cared and neither really does Chilperic. At no point in their lives, so far as we know, do either of them ever deign to respond to the accusations that are levelled against them. They never deny having committed murder. They never deny having practised witchcraft. And I guess Fredegund feels that it's better to be feared than to be loved.
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And she certainly does become feared.
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Yeah. So Fredegund has gone from zero to hero and Brunhilde has gone from hero to zero. She has been left stranded in Paris. She's surrounded by a hostile population. And her priority, of course, is to ensure the survival of her son, Childebert, because everything for her future depends on him living.
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According to tradition, she puts him into a bag and smuggles him out of the palace into a boat, crosses the Seine, and they managed to get him back to Austrasia. And sure enough, Childebert, even though he's kind of only five or whatever, he's crowned in Australia on Christmas Day, 575. So he, at least, that's something that Brunhild can cling on to.
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But for her, things are looking very bad because she has fallen into Childebert's hands. And he does what he always does to unwanted women, which is to pack her off to a convent and And it's a very particular convent in Rouen, kind of great masses of stone, very highly protected. So it's effectively a prison.
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And this is where he sent Aldevera, his first wife, the one that Fredegund had supplanted. And it's a terrible place. It's fully cloistered. You know, there are no servants. You have to wear rough, coarse robes. You have a regulation pudding bowl haircut. It's not at all Brunhild's scene in any way. And she's looking around for opportunities to escape.
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And so she starts talking to Alderweire, and they obviously swap notes about what a terrible person Fredegund is. And talking to Alderweire gives Brunhild an idea about how she can escape. And this idea becomes manifest in the spring of the following year, so 576. And that spring, the army of the Neustrians arrives in Rouen.
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And it is led by Chilperic's eldest son, who is called Merovich, so as in the sea monster. And he is one of two surviving sons of Aldevera. And he has been ordered by his father, Chilperic, to march on the Austrasian holdings in the Loire. So that would include Tours. But Merovich has directly disobeyed these orders and instead has gone to Rouen.
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And he claims that it's to see his mother, Aldovera. But it's clear that his real object is Brunhild. And it's pretty clear that Brunhild has written to him and said, look, why don't we get married? You know, we can have an alliance. Fredegund is clearly out to get you. You are a rival to her sons. She's going to want you out of the way.
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And so actually is Brunhild. But there's no question that Gregory of Tor, on whose account we chiefly depend for the lives of Fredegund and Brunhild, he is absolutely Team Brunhild. She's never really accused of anything bad. Whereas Fredegund to Gregory, she is an absolute monster. So he accuses her of terrible crimes, multiple assassinations, witchcraft.
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This is a person who is ready to practice poison at the drop of a hat. If we get married, I can go back to Austrasia and, you know, serve as regent for my son. You can get rid of Fredegund, establish yourself as Chilperic's heir, and then we can join the two kingdoms and rule effectively as king and queen.
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Well, I think more to the point, Fredegund doesn't like him, because Fredegund's power depends on her son becoming king rather than him.
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If you can't get your head around it, don't worry, because neither can I. Well, I think the key point there is that you're right, that this is technically incest. Right. And you would think that, for instance, holy bishops would not be keen to give their stamp to incest.
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But fortunately, the Bishop of Rouen, who is a man of very holy reputation, very venerable, a Gallo-Roman aristocrat called Praetextatus, he thinks, OK, fair enough, I'll do it. And probably the reason that he does that is that he is the godfather of Merovich. And so he kind of feels obliged by that relationship. And so he goes ahead with the ceremony.
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Brunhild is sprung from this convent in which she's been imprisoned. She gets married and she is loose.
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Captures him, shaves off his long hair, which, of course, is the mark of his royal status. So he basically goes bald. And this is a terrible humiliation and sends him off to a monastery on the assumption that there he will be no harm. But Merovitch, he's not taking that. So he grows his hair back.
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He escapes the monastery, tries to continue the fight, but he ends up cornered in a village that actually isn't far from Agincourt. So right up in the northeast of France. And he knows that now, you know, he's rebelled twice. He can expect no mercy from his father. And so he gets his servant to kill him. And back in Austrasia, Brunhild is now being left a widow for the second time in two years.
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That's bad. But on the plus side, she's no longer in the convent. She's escaped that. She's back in Australia where her son is the crowned king. And not only that, but she's managed to persuade King Guntram of Burgundy, so the elder brother of Sigbert and Chilperic, to adopt her son Chilterbert as king. And I'm aware that there are an enormous quantity of mad names. But basically...
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Brunhild has got her son adopted by the King of Burgundy and Fredegund has not managed to get her sons adopted. So she, to that extent, is one up. And in fact, as Brunhild's wheel of good fortune goes up, so Fredegund's starts to descend. And, you know, you may wonder, well, why would King Guntram in Burgundy adopt his nephew? As king, hasn't he got sons of his own?
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Well, he did have, but they had died in one of these endless dysentery epidemics that is always sweeping Gaul at this time. And in 580, there is another dysentery epidemic, and this claims the lives of Fredegund's two sons. And This is devastating for her. It's devastating on a personal level.
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And it's devastating because she has now lost the guarantees that she as Queen Mother would have when and if her husband dies. And she, if you trust Gregory of Tours accounts, she seems to have been crazed either by grief or by frustrated ambition. I mean, maybe both.
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He even accuses her of having murdered a bishop in his own cathedral. And he has the bishop turn to Fredegund as he's dying. He's been struck down by daggers. His blood is spilling out over the floor. As long as you live, you will be accursed. For God will avenge my blood upon your head. And does Fredegund care? She does not care at all. She just stands there and gloats.
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And according to Gregory of Tor, Fredegund accuses Aldovera's last surviving son, Clovis, so that's the brother of Merovich who had married Brunhild, of having conspired with one of Fredegund's own servants to kill her sons by means of witchcraft. And Clovis supposedly been having an affair with this servant girl. Her mother was a witch. It's all a kind of very dark conspiracy.
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So Fredegund goes to Chilperic, says, look, your son, he's plotted against our two boys. He's engaged with a witch. This is terrible. You know, you've got to sort him out. So Chilperic is obviously, I mean, it's a measure of if this story is true of how obsessed he is by Fredegund. He has Clovis stripped of his weapons. This is his own son. Yeah.
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Stripped of all his finery, chained up, turned over to Fredegund. Fredegund then has him removed to a private estate. He's locked up there, chained, and supposedly stabs himself to death. Although, as Shelley Puhuck points out, how he managed to do this while alone in a cell with his hands bound behind his back was never explained. Okay. So it's likely that, again, you know, Fredegund has struck.
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Yes. And so she also has the purported witch and her mother tortured and executed. And she also has Aldervera murdered as well. So she has now destroyed both her rival as queen and her two stepsons. So to that extent, she has managed to clear the decks. But obviously it's a problem. She needs to give Chilperic a son. I mean, everything depends on that.
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And fortunately for her in 582, she manages to do that. So a third son, and he dies of dysentery too. Oh no.
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I think witchcraft. I think by this point, both her and Chilperic, her husband... They keep having sons. The sons keep dying of dysentery. They think it must be witchcraft. And so Fredegund accuses a local dignitary of having done it. He's tortured horribly. They take little shards of wood and drive them beneath his nails, his fingernails and his toenails.
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And that's something that I would always give in to any torturer who threatens to do that to me on the spot. So really horrible. And she also, she rounds up various women who were probably midwives. And she has some of them beheaded, some of them burnt at the stake, others broken on the wheel.
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And then as a climactic demonstration of her grief and her despair and her anger, she does something that will reverberate down the centuries. And Geoffrey of Tours describes it.
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the queen now collected together anything to belong to her dead son and burnt it all his clothes some of them silk and others of fur and all his other possessions whatever she could find it is said that all this filled four carts any object in gold or silver was melted down in a furnace so that nothing whatsoever remained intact to remind her of how she had mourned for her boy.
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And Dominic, we talked about how Fredegund, as well as Brunhilde, feeds into the figure of Brunhilde in Wagner's great opera. She immolates herself on a pyre. And I think that this is, you know, clearly kind of distorted echo of this great bonfire of everything that had reminded Fredegund of her son. And so, you know, it's a devastating moment for her.
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So I guess in Gregory's account, she is a baggage. But she might also seem what I believe Americans call a badass.
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She does. So because she and Chilperic are so nervous of witchcraft, when she gets pregnant, she keeps it secret. And when she gives birth to her son, she keeps that secret as well.
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So this means that when in September 584, Chilperic, who's been out for a day's hunting, returns home to his villa, he gets down from his horse and he is greeted by a servant who rushes up to him and stabs him to death. No one knows that he has a male heir.
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So this boy is at this point a few months old.
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Well, there are people who accuse her of having murdered her own husband because whenever a mysterious assassination happens, Fredegund always gets accused of it. But if you think about it, that would be mad because for her, everything depends on Chilperic staying alive. She needs him at least until this baby boy that she's got has grown up and come of age, able to succeed his father.
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The loss of Chilperic leaves her fortunes hanging by a thread. So if you had to say, well, who's the likeliest person responsible, you would probably say Brunhild, which isn't to say that Brunhild did it. But I mean, she must be the chief suspect because she, of course, doesn't know that Chilperic has this male heir. And so she would assume that with Chilperic out of the way,
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There isn't anyone to claim the Neustrian throne. And so presumably she's now kind of plotting to take over Neustria. But Fredegund has one last card to play. So she writes to Guntram, the king of Burgundy. She reveals the bombshell news that she has this baby boy. And she says, let my lord come and take charge of his brother's kingdom. I have a tiny baby whom I long to place in his arms.
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I mean, you could be both at once, surely. Or possibly just been badly misrepresented by a guy who just doesn't like her. Misunderstood.
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At the same time, I shall declare myself his humble servant. So she's reading Guntram like a book. She's being submissive. She's being subservient. She's saying, you know, you can have the rule of Neustria. You can look after this boy who is your nephew. And Guntram is, you know, he's charmed by this. And Brunhild doesn't dare go against Guntram's wishes. And so she has to play quiet.
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And so Fredegund lives to fight another day. And so Fredegund has played a blinder. She's plucked security from the jaws of danger, Dominic. And for the next eight years until Guntram dies in 692, Fredegund and her son, who she calls Clothar, essentially are secure from Brunhild's vengeance. And in that time, Fredegund essentially rules Neustria as her son's regent.
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So we will discuss that. But I think two things are absolutely clear, even from Gregory's account of her, that her life is dominated by two things. And really important to keep these two goals in mind. One is she wants to see one of her sons rule as king and to see the end of her sister-in-law, Brunhild.
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You know, this is remarkable for a former slave to be doing this. And it's a measure, I think, of how respected and feared she is by the Neustrian nobility that they allow her to do that. Simultaneously, Brunhild is kept on a tight leash by Guntram. She has signed a treaty with him at a place called Ondelot. And this is the oldest surviving medieval treaty. We still have it.
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And it's signed on the 28th of November, 587, the oldest surviving medieval treaty ever. And this confirms that Childebert, who is Brunhild's son, will inherit Burgundy on Guntram's death. So that's one up for Brunhild. So both of them have what they want. Brunhild has expanded her son's territories when Guntram dies. And Fredegund is secure from Brunhild's revenge while Guntram is alive.
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Right. So Fredegund, all the while, is kind of practicing a kind of Putin-style dirty war in the background against Brunhild. She incites a revolt against Brunhild, which Brunhild personally, you know, she marches out in armor to put down. In 586, this is when Bishop Praetextatus is murdered in the cathedral. So that was the one who'd married Brunhild to Merovich.
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And this is the one we said at the beginning where Fredegund supposedly gloats over the bishop as he dies and the blood spills across his cathedral. But at the same time, she is brilliant at keeping justice herself. So just as she deals death from the shadows, so she deals justice from the shadows. And there's one extraordinary story that is told about this.
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that there's a vendetta has broken out in a particular family and they're all kind of killing each other. And so she invites three of the leading members of this family, the kind of heads of the various factions in this blood feud to a great banquet. And the three feuding members of this family are sat down in her great hall. They have to hand over their weapons.
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They have to be polite to each other for the length of the banquet. Lots of food is served, lots of drink. The ice starts to melt. By the end of the evening, the three men are all kind of chatting away as though they've kind of buried the hatchet. And then Fredegund, who's been watching this from the high table, gives a signal.
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Three men, each man holding an axe, comes up to the three feuding members. Swish, swish, swish, their heads are sent bouncing across the table. Fredegund stands up, walks out of the room, and everyone in her hall knows that she has literally executed justice. So this, I think, is you can see why she's respected and feared by people in Neustria.
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But all the while, of course, this isn't helping her against Brunhild, because she knows when Gudrum dies, that Brunhild is going to come on the attack.
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Absolutely. And this happens the year after Guntram's death. Brunhilde orders her forces to capture Soissons, which is the main centre of Neustrian power. It's where the treasury is and everything. And this is very bad for Fredegund because Brunhilde now has the forces of Burgundy as well as Austrasia at her back. So massively outnumbering anything that Fredegund could summon.
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And the feud between Fredegund and Brunhild is not widely known, certainly in English-speaking countries. But it absolutely bears comparison with that between Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots. I mean, in all kinds of ways, it's much more bloody and ferocious. Yeah. And even though neither of them ruled as queen in her own right, they both are hailed by their admirers as queens.
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And so Fredegund has been studying Roman military manuals, and she has read there that the only way that an outnumbered force can hope to defeat a larger one is to take it by surprise. And so she decides to do exactly that, to try and ambush the Australian forces before they can attack Soissons. So she leads her hugely outnumbered forces in person. She is the war leader.
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out from Soissons, and she finds that the Austrasian forces are camped out at a village called Doisy. And Fredegund orders her troops to fasten bells to the bridles of their horses so that the Austrasians will think that they are their own horses who are out grazing, because that's what you would do. You would have your horses belled so that they won't wander off.
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So when they hear the Neustrian horsemen approaching, they think, oh, it's just our own horses kind of grazing. And the other thing that she does, she orders them to disguise themselves by carrying tree branches. And this is, of course, very, very Burnham Wood.
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And there are theories that this is ultimately where the story in Macbeth comes from. And it's a brilliantly successful strategy. The Austrasians are taken completely by surprise. They're put to the sword, massacred. Fredegund then leads a raid deep into enemy territory. And she returns to Soissons in triumph, absolutely loaded down with booty.
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And this is the last great confrontation between the two rivals, between Fredegund and Brunhild. And they've been enemies for so long that essentially by the end of their life, they have become the mirror image of the other. So this becomes even clearer in March 595 when King Childebert, so Brunhild's son, king of Burgundy as well as of Austrasia, He's aged 25. He dies of dysentery.
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So, you know, yet again. And he leaves behind two sons. And listeners will be thrilled to know that they also have mad names. So they are called Theuderbert and Theuderic. Very young. And Brunhild now rules on their behalf as regents. And so both Fredegund and Brunhild are now regents. And Shelley Buhack in her book, The Dark Queens, points out how extraordinary this is.
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So she writes, when Brunhild assumed the regency for her two grandsons, She ushered in one of the most unusual periods of European history, one of dual female rule. She and Fredegund reigned as regents at exactly the same time, and the empire they shared encompassed modern-day France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, western and southern Germany, and parts of Switzerland.
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Only Charlemagne would briefly control more territory than these two women.
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Yeah, he does. And, you know, he's still pretty young. He bides his time. So all the way through his teenage years into his 20s. And meanwhile, in Austrasia, Brunhild's two grandsons, Theuderbert and Theuderich, have fallen out with each other. Theuderich, the younger son, murders his elder brother. Of course he does. He then has a drink from a well and he gets dysentery. He dies.
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So he's out of the way. He leaves behind three sons and a daughter. They're all underage. And so Brunhild now has to kind of step forward and become regent again. And by this point, she is 70. Yeah. And essentially her nobles, the nobles in Austrasia, I mean, they look at this and they say, a 70-year-old woman and, you know, an infant king, this is hopeless. You know, we can't have this.
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And so they turn to Clothar, Fredegund's son, in Austrasia, and they say, look, this isn't good enough. And the two people who lead this approach are two of the leading figures in Austrasia. One of them is a nobleman called Pippin. Mm-hmm. And one of them is a bishop called Arnulf. He's the bishop of Metz. And these are significant figures in the subsequent history of the Franks.
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And they say, look, we will take Brunhild and her great-grandchildren and we will secure them and we will hand them over to you. And that's what they do. And Brunhild and her great-grandchildren are taken in carts to the great camp that Clothar has set up in northern Australia. They're brought into his presence.
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Their role is as wives and mothers of kings who, I mean, pretty much without exception, are vastly their inferiors in terms of ability. And the measure of that is the length of their rule. So Fredegund is queen, inverted commas, for 29 years. And Brunhilde rules for an astonishing 46 years.
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The two eldest boys are beheaded, the girl is packed off to a convent, and the youngest boy, because Clotharis, his godfather, is spared and is sent away to grow up as an Austrian nobleman. And what does Clothar do to Brunhilde? Brunhilde, I think, would be expecting that she too would be sent to a convent. That's what had happened before when she was captured.
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But Clothar has inherited this vendetta from Fredegund, his mother, and he has not forgotten it. And so he has Brunhilde arraigned on charges of murdering no less than 10 kings, including Sigbert, Merovich, Clovis, her own two great-grandsons, which is mad. I mean, it's clear Brunhilde hadn't killed any of those. Essentially, it's a way of kind of whitewashing Fredegund's reputation.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Brunhilde, unsurprisingly, is found guilty and her punishment is an absolutely terrible one. So in front of all this kind of serried ranks of the Austrasian and Austrasian nobility, she's publicly stripped of her jewellery, her robes, all her finery. She's then beaten. She's tortured. This goes on for three days. She's then paraded on a camel facing backwards and led through the entire army.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
She's 70 and she's being paraded around on a camel.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
You know, this isn't the old age that she was expecting. No. And then after she's been paraded around on the camel, she is bound to either a single wild horse or maybe several horses, perhaps to their tails, perhaps to their hooves. The wild horses, you know, a lash is given to their rumps. They go galloping off. Brunhild is tied to them and she is very rapidly reduced to a bloody pulp.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Her head, it is said, is sent flying. Her limbs are scattered far and wide. Clothar then sends out servants to gather up the bloody remains. They're brought to him and they are ceremonially burnt so that nothing remains of Brunhild.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Clothar watches, feeling that he has at last triumphed over the great enemy of his mother, but also watching are those two greatest of Austrasian noblemen, the lords whose treachery had doomed Brunhild and her great-grandchildren, and they are Pepin, and the Bishop of Metz, Arnulf, and their joint descendants, they will have a very, very bright future indeed.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
A future so bright that in due course, it will come to blot out the very line of the Merovingians.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Yeah. And it's not surprising that ultimately both of them end up as kind of figures of myth. So Brunhilde in Wagner's opera, The Valkyrie, she's essentially a compound of the pair of them. In myth, these two inveterate rivals are joined and united.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So about two generations after the end of the Western Roman Empire, approximately. Two generations after Clovis has made himself king. And the reason essentially why we don't know when Fredegund is born, and this is the remarkable thing about this woman who becomes such a powerful figure in Gaul, is that she seems to have begun her life as a slave.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So I will quote from The Dark Queens by Shelley Puhak, which is a wonderful account of the rivalry between these two queens, the great narrative account in English. She writes, where exactly had she come from, this Fredegund, this strawberry blonde slave queen? Was she left on a doorstep? sold to satisfy a debt, or more likely captured as a child.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
We just don't know because the early details of a slave's life are lost to oblivion. But what we do know is that she is born at a terrible time in history. So what Michael McCormick, the great historian of the economy of late antiquity and early medieval Europe, describes as one of the worst periods to be alive. And the reason for that, we've actually kind of touched on this before.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
The mid-6th century is buffeted by natural disasters. So there's a volcanic eruption in 536, which is probably the decade that Fredegund is born. And that sees temperatures drop by as much as two and a half degrees. Then you get the great plague, the Justinianic plague, because it originates in the reign of the emperor Justinian, which sweeps eastwards and westwards as well.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And you also have other epidemics and particularly epidemics of dysentery. And these just keep hitting Gaul. And Gregory of Tor writes of one in very moving terms. It attacked young children first of all, he writes. And to them it was fatal.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And so we lost our little ones who were so dear to us and sweet, whom we had cherished in our bosoms and dandled in our arms, whom we had fed and nurtured with such loving care. As I write, I wipe away the tears. And any notion that people in the early Middle Ages didn't care about their children, I mean, I think that that absolutely... demonstrates that's not the case.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And it is absolutely the case as well that the deaths of children by dysentery will play a key part in this story, particularly in the life of Fredegund.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Yeah. And so I think people would have the sense, you know, this is the dark ages. The Roman Empire has collapsed. These are warlords. It's just endless violence and things. I mean, the thing to emphasize is that what you've just said, that it is a time of war, but it's quite a Roman style of war. The Frankish kings... are really the heirs above all to Rome's military traditions.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And so the military tradition in Gaul was for the Romans to impose their power on the eastern banks of the Rhine. And so that is what the Frankish kings do. So having conquered Gaul, they then do as the Roman emperors had done throughout the course of Roman history. which is to send military expeditions into Germany. And actually the Franks do it in a way more effectively than the Romans ever did.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
So for instance, in 531, Clovis' son, a guy called Clothar, conquers the region that will come to be known as Thuringia. So a great swathe of East Germany. And he brings back enormous quantities of slaves to Gaul. And Clothar is a king very much in the mold of Clovis. He is simultaneously Roman and barbarian. He's also very fecund, and he has four sons, three of them by one sister, one by another.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
The Rest Is History Returns, available now in all good bookshops.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And when he dies, he divides the kingdom up four ways between them. And I have to say that I always thought of this, this tendency of the Frankish kings to divide their kingdom up between their sons as being a barbarian practice.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
But then I read Patrick Geary, the great historian of this period on it, and he writes, the solution of dividing the kingdom among his four sons seems less a Frankish than a Roman one. So again, this idea that he's behaving like a Roman, not a barbarian.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
Clothar's territories were divided along roughly Roman political boundaries, and each brother was established with his own and Roman advisors centered in a major city. But of course, if you think about it, the Roman Empire was endlessly being divided up. Yeah, never worked. And this fostered war.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And the problem is that exactly the same thing happens, you know, this third generation on from Clovis, these four sons of Clothar, because they don't necessarily get on with each other very well. And there was one of them in particular, who's the kind of... if you like, the runt of the litter, who is particularly embittered, particularly resentful.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And this is the youngest of Clothar's sons, a guy who is called Chilperic. And Chilperic is not just the youngest, but also the half-brother of the other three. And so he's the only son of Clothar's second wife, who's the sister of the other wife who's given him the three sons. Right.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And I think what's also very Game of Thrones, I mean, it's an absolute kind of trope from fantasy fiction, is that the youngest son, who's bitter and resentful, is also the keenest to try and elbow his brothers out the way and grab everything. Always the most hungry and ruthless. Exactly. So when their father dies, Chilperic immediately moves to try and seize the entire kingdom.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And he does this by grabbing both Paris, so the capital, and the royal treasury. And if you control the treasury, which is mobile, you know, it's a kind of great repository of gold and loot, then brilliant, you know, you can employ men to follow you. But he's foiled by his brothers and in the division of Gaul, he's left with this kind of rump of territory in the northeast of the country.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And this had actually been the old Frankish heartland. So Soissons was where Clovis had beaten Cyagrius, the last Roman ruler in Gaul. And Soissons becomes Chilpric's main base. And there's Amiens where Saint Martin had cut his cloak and given half of it to the beggar. There's Tournai where Chilpric was buried. But it is the smallest of the four kingdoms.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And it comes to be known by the Franks as Neustria, which translates from Frankish as the Western Lands.
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521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
They will. And at this point, Austrasia is much, much larger than Neustria, centered on Reims, on Metz, on Strasbourg. And that is ruled by the third of Clothau's four sons. And he is a guy called Sigbert. And Chilperic detests Sigbert. And that may be partly because they are the closest in age, but it's also because they have a long 300 mile border.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And Chilperic is endlessly maneuvering against Sigbert, desperate to kind of drag him down. And this is the background to the emergence of Fredegund as a player in this great game of Thrones. So we said she's a slave in his household. Right, in Chilperic's household. In Chilperic's household. She's absolutely at the bottom of the pile. We've said it's a dangerous, plague-swept, war-torn world.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
But I guess that, you know, where there is peril and upheaval, there is also opportunity, particularly if you are a woman of remarkable abilities, which I think even Gregory of Tall would acknowledge Fredegund was. So she's clearly very sexually attractive. I mean, that is... Probably the single most important attribute that she brings to the party at the beginning of her career.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
But she's also clearly very, very intelligent. So even though she's a slave, she seems to have taught herself letters and also to speak Latin as well as Frankish. She's incredibly daring. She's incredibly determined.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And she also has, so Shelley Puhat puts this, I think, wonderfully, the honing of small talents, the ability to slip in and out of a room unnoticed, to intuit which cook or lackey was likely to let slip a choice bit of information. So throughout her career, her ability to read people, to manipulate them, to pick up secrets.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
This is a key part of how she keeps on top of all the tumultuous events that will typify her life.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
The story about her being promoted from the kitchens, it's quite late and is maybe gilding the lily of the inherently kind of dramatic story of her rise. But I don't think there's any question that it is her curves, if you want to put it that way, that appeal to Chilperic. And definitely that this queen out of error is packed off to a convent.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And Fredegund does become, you know, the kind of the chief royal concubine. But of course, to be a concubine is absolutely not to be secure because you are very, very expendable. And the problem for Fredegund is that Chilperic is not only resentful and ambitious, but he's also very, very willful.
The Rest Is History
521. Warlords of the West: Killer Queens (Part 2)
And he is absolutely determined to do whatever it takes to break out of this tiny corner of Gaul that he's been penned into. and kind of strut his stuff in an authentically Roman way. And he clearly does have overtly Roman ambitions. So of all his brothers, he, so far as we know, is the only one who builds amphitheaters and stages spectacles in them, like a Roman emperor.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Because what happens is that basically after a few days, they give in. Under unrelenting French and British pressure, on the 21st of September, They get a message from Prague. The Czechoslovak government sadly accepts the French and British proposals, but they say that on the condition that you will do everything to safeguard our vital interests, i.e.,
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
The Sudetenland will be given away, but you will maybe give us a guarantee or give us a pledge. You'll give us something anyway. Yeah, which would obviously not be worth the paper it's written on. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? So meanwhile, what's Hitler been doing during all this? He has been doing his usual thing, which he does when he's stressed.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He has massive lions, watches these terrible films. Works out holes in flagpoles. Exactly. Does all this kind of thing. He thinks that the Czechs probably won't give him what he wants, but he now, having seen Chamberlain, He thinks, hey, that guy's not going to fight. That guy's never going to go to war. So he says to Goebbels, I think we can probably push for a bit more, actually.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I think let's up the ante. So let's get to the 22nd of September. Now we welcome back to the rest is history.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
A great theme of all our series about Germany between the wars, which is the spa hotel theme. So people will remember we had a lot of spa hotels in the last season.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Well, it's like a fan favourite location. We're revisiting one of the Night of the Long Knives spa hotels because the next meeting between Chamberlain and Churchill is scheduled for a spa hotel in Bad Godesberg on the Rhine River near Bonn. The whiffs of sulphur. Enormous sweating Germans beating each other with birch twigs or whatever they do. Mugs of hot water.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah, drinking filthy water, laughing at nothing. Just dreadful. Anyway, Chamberlain lands at Cologne Airport just after midday. He's got his umbrella as is traditional. He has to inspect a detachment of SS troops. Then he's driven to this hotel on the right bank of the Rhine, the Petersburg Hotel.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It's been decorated for him by Ribbentrop, who stuffed it, I read, with fruit, cigars, hydrangeas and eau de cologne. So common. So, yeah, exactly. You turn up and there's a load of eau de cologne. That's common.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Hitler was on the other bank of the Rhine at fan favourite, the Dresden Hotel. This was where he had planned the murder of Ernst Röhm. It's a happy memories for him. But he's in terrible form, Tom. He's all nervous. Chamberlain's coming. The journalists are there, the place is swarming with press, and they see him looking strained and twitching.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And it's at this point that they start a rumour, some of the press, the German press actually, says, that he'd choose the carpet. So they nicknamed him the Teppichfresser, which means the carpet biter. And this becomes a big nickname for Hitler in the kind of 1930s, 1940s among the press. People say, oh, Hitler, he's always biting the carpet. Anyway, so Hitler's there biting the carpet.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Finally, that afternoon, Chamberlain comes over to the spa hotel to the Dresden. Chamberlain's delighted with himself. Chamberlain thinks, well, I've done a brilliant thing here. I've done a great bit of work. The Czechs have given in. You can have the Sudetenland. We will give a guarantee to the Czechoslovakia for the rest of its borders.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And he says, maybe it would be a nice thing if you signed a non-aggression pact with Prague as well to show your good intentions. And then job done. We can all go home. Hooray. Brilliant day's work. And Hitler says, I'm sorry. Actually, I've changed my mind. The circumstances have changed and I have more demands.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He says, my friends in Hungary and Poland also have territorial demands on Czechoslovakia and I need them to be satisfied. And actually, now that I think about it, I don't really want to wait for the Czechs to give me the Sudetenland because they're mistreating our people every hour. I'm actually going to send in, I would like to send in my army right now, please. That's my plan.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So I'm actually just going to go for it. And Chamberlain, he sits there and the kind of blood drains from his features. He says... Yes, but Reich Chancellor, exactly. Herr Hitler. He is outraged by this, and he basically storms off back to his hotel and refuses to come out again. So they're in their kind of rival hotels. Power play. Very, very much.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Chamberlain doesn't show up the next day, the next day's meeting. He sends a letter instead, and he says... A firmly worded letter. A firmly worded letter. He says, British public opinion will not stand for this. This is very poor. He says also... The Czechs will fight you if you try to go in without a deal. Hitler sends him a letter back, quite a polite letter actually by Hitler's standards.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And eventually they agree that they will meet that evening. So back at Hitler's hotel. Chamberlain goes in and Hitler says, I've changed my mind. Actually, they can have four days. They've got to be out on the 28th. And then I'm going in. They've got to be out. Otherwise, it's war. And Chamberlain's very shocked at this. And then another twist. We do like a twist in this series.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
A man comes in with a note for Hitler. Hitler opens this note and he says, ah, my God, the Czechs have mobilized their army. And there's this long silence. And Chamberlain apparently thought that Hitler was just going to go absolutely berserk and order an invasion right then and there on the spot. And then Hitler says, fine, they can have a bit more time. They have to be out by the 1st of October.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I'll give them more days.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
We're not the chief villains in this.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And, of course, it sells to Chamberlain by appealing against Chamberlain's vanity. He says to him... This concession that I'm making that they can have till the 1st of October, I'm only making this for you because of how much I respect you. I wouldn't make this for anybody else. And of course, he loves this because he thinks I am the star of the show. I have once again pulled off this coup.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So Chamberlain goes back to London. Hitler goes back to Berlin. Hitler spends that next day, which is Sunday, strolling in the gardens of the Reichstrasse with Goebbels, and he says, look, what we're going to probably end up with now is we'll get the Sudetenland, we'll probably have to leave it at that, and then we'll come back next year or whenever for the rest of Czechoslovakia.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Meanwhile, Chamberlain is meeting his cabinet, And many of them are actually really shocked. They're much more shocked than Chamberlain was that Hitler had been asking for more. Hitler had kind of changed the terms of the game.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And they say, well, what we'll do is we'll send Horace Wilson to Chamberlain's kind of right-hand man, civil servant, send him back to Berlin, and we'll tell Hitler, look, we'll stress to him, you cannot attack the Czechs. We have to get the deal. If you use force at all, then the French will enter the war and Britain will support France.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yes, absolutely there is. 26th, 27th of September, this is when they start making really serious preparations. You know, kind of anti-aircraft batteries are being called up and there's thoughts about evacuating people from cities. Gas master children and things. Exactly so, exactly. So the next day, Monday the 26th, Horace Wilson gets to Berlin. He gets there in the afternoon.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He finds Hitler in a very peculiar mood because Hitler has got a big speech that evening at the Sportpalast in Berlin. Oh, sport again. It's this endless PE theme. Yeah, exactly. It's going to be all these people in the stadium, indoor stadium. With medicine balls. Hitler's going to address 20,000 people. He's going to address them. And Hitler's in a very, you know,
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
sort of grumpy mood and he says to Horace Wilson I'm sick of all this like negotiations and hotels and stuff he says basically the cheques have to be out by the 1st of October or if they're not I'll attack them and he says and I quote if France and England want to strike let them go ahead I don't give a damn And he says to Wilson, do you not think that we want to fight? Come and see my speech.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So Wilson goes along to see this speech. And Hitler is absolutely ranting and raving like a lunatic. William Shira, the American journalist we've quoted a few times, he was there and he said, Hitler was shouting and shrieking in the worst state of excitement I've ever seen him in with a fanatical fire in his eyes.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And he's screaming about Germandom and the Germans being oppressed and we will stand and fight and all this kind of thing. And his audience, who are keen Nazis, go absolutely berserk. Every sentence they applaud. And at the end, they chant for minutes forever. Führer befehl, wir folgen. Leader, command, we will follow. You know, this sort of quite chilling scene.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So not the way that Chamberlain would address the good people of Birmingham. Not at all. I've picked up a rather nice tea cozy. Yeah, exactly. People of Birmingham would enjoy a kind of an indoor arena. They could do it at the NEC in Birmingham. Villa Park. It's not indoors though, is it? It's not the same. No, it's not, I suppose. Anyway, this is spiralling off.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
The next day, Horace Wilson goes back to the Reich Chancellery and he says, look, I've had a new message from Chamberlain. Chamberlain says, don't use force. If you don't use force, we will guarantee, Britain will guarantee that the Czechs will clear out of the Sudetenland. So Britain is actually really now... Yeah, get out of your well-prepared fortifications. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Britain is letting itself down, I think, at this point, Tom, it's fair to say. And Hitler actually is very sulky at this point. He says, oh, I don't care what Britain does. I don't care what you do. All I care about is the Czechs have got to be out by the 1st of October. He says, look, I want an answer in two days. Are they going to clear out or not?
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
If they do not clear out, he says, I will smash the Czechs. He repeats that again.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
two more times i will smash the czechs and wilson who is a very tall man he kind of draws himself up to his full height he says i am warning you if you do that and if france feels on a bound to fight in defense of its obligations to czechoslovakia quote the united kingdom would feel obliged to support her and hitler just stares in with those cold blue eyes and he says
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
If France and England strike, let them do so. It's a matter of complete indifference to me. I am prepared for every eventuality. It is Tuesday today, he says. And by next Monday, we shall all be at war.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Now, Tom, you and I often hear about the red flags that we should avoid. But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in our friends and in our partners, indeed, in our producers? Now, if people aren't sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It can allow you to actively wave them and identify them in your own relationships. So, Tom, can I ask you, do you have any relationship green flags?
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
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The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah, he's not the most stirring of... No, no, listen to that. You're not going to like, you know, reach for your gun and rush to the battlefront, are you? I mean, Chamberlain, you know, he was never a war leader. He said explicitly, I am a man of peace to the depths of my soul. Armed conflict between nations is a nightmare to me. He's completely upfront about that.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I think because people... probably deep down know that it's shameful. And yet at the same time, they think we must do anything to avoid a rerun of the Great War. It would be worse, wouldn't it?
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
London and other cities would burn. Exactly. Now, even as Chamberlain is preparing that speech, People are queuing up for gas masks in British town halls and village halls. The first children, blind children, are being evacuated from London. They've installed anti-aircraft batteries on Westminster Bridge. There is this sense that a war that nobody wants is coming and will happen within days.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Interestingly, the mood in Germany is very similar. So that same day, the 27th, that Chamberlain made that speech, Hitler had arranged for a motorised division to pass through Berlin towards the Czech border. And this was basically, he wanted really to impress the diplomatic corps with Germany's readiness for war and Germany's war enthusiasm.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And there's an amazing description of it by William Shira, the journalist we've mentioned a lot, and he talks about how the motorized division goes through the tanks or the armored cars or whatever they are, and people won't look at them. People turn away. They duck into the subway. They don't cheer. There is total silence.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He says it was one of the most striking demonstrations against war that I've ever seen. And actually, you know, Goebbels and the Nazi high command, they're all quite disappointed with the Berlin reaction.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah. War with Britain and France. Really?
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah. As they would be in 1939. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Well, we'll see about this point about the Nazi high command is a really important one. And it's about to produce another of these twists in the story. So the next day is Wednesday, the 28th of September. The House of Commons in London holds an emergency debate.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And at this point, most people think we will probably be at war within, could be within hours, because if Hitler gives the go ahead, France will feel honour bound to defend Czechoslovakia and we will feel honour bound to fall in behind France.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So Chamberlain is giving this enormous speech, this slightly plodding speech to his fellow MPs, explaining the whole backstory, all the negotiations with Hitler, all being for nothing, all this kind of thing. And then there's an amazing, I mean, it really is an amazing moment. He has passed a note. It kind of comes down the chain along the bench. A piece of paper. A piece of paper.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Sir John Simon, who's sitting next to him, hands him this piece of paper. And it's news from the British ambassador in Berlin. And he stops talking. He reads it. He pauses. He clears his throat. Very theatrical. And then he says, I have something further to say to the House. He says, I've got an invitation. I have an invitation from Herr Hitler to meet him in Munich tomorrow morning.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's also invited Signor Mussolini and Monsieur Deladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted. I've no doubt Monsieur Deladier, he's the French Prime Minister, will also accept. I need not tell you, he says, what my answer will be. As in, I'm definitely going to go. And when people hear this, There's this colossal roar of relief. Peace in our time.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I mean, people are literally shouting because people credit Chamberlain with this, right? They say he wanted to, he called for peace to the last moment and Hitler has blinked and they are cheering. They're waving their order papers. People are literally shouting, thank God for the prime minister. Hurrah for the prime minister and all this kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And the debate is brought to a premature conclusion and People are crowding around Chamberlain. They pat him on the back. And actually the last person to go up and shake his hand is Winston Churchill, who says to him, Godspeed. Because he's going to go off on this mission to try and bring peace to Europe. And actually what lies behind this is,
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
is an intervention from a character who's well-known to our listeners. He's been very quiet in the last few episodes. I think it's fair to say... He's been off hunting. A bad man, but a memorable man, because we finally welcome back to the rest of history the sweating, white-suited bulk of Herman Goering.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So Goering at this point is an absolutely enormous man. If you see him in this suit, the suit is like multiple sizes too small for him.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah. So Goering, who's a sweaty man as it is, he's been sweating like a beast for the last few days because he's in a massive funk about the idea of a European war. He thinks a European war is bonkers. Like, we're going to get the Sudetenland. What do we want to fight France and Britain for? He hates Ribbentrop with an absolute passion.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He keeps saying to Ribbentrop, stop asking for a war, you fool. And at one point they have a massive row. Goering says, well, I know what war is. He says, if Hitler wants a war... I'll be on the first plane over Britain. But he says to Ribbentrop, I'll make sure you're strapped in next to me on that plane. Imagine if you were on that plane. What a terrible nightmare that is.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's so large, isn't he, that he's going to crash the plane. I'm in the middle of the three between Goering and Ribbentrop. What a nightmare. Anyway, what actually happens? Goering goes behind Hitler's back. He sends messages to Mussolini and informal messages to London and Paris. And he says to Mussolini, I think you should call. If you call for a peace conference, you're Hitler's ally.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Hitler will have to go along with it. And actually, if Mussolini calls for a peace conference, it's a brilliant way for Hitler to kind of back down a bit on the war thing without losing too much face. He will look like a person who in the final analysis was prepared to be reasonable and because he gave in to his great pal's request. And so this is exactly what happens.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Earlier that day, the Italian ambassador had gone to see Hitler and said, oh, the Duce thinks you could postpone the invasion, have one more meeting with the British, invite the French along. And Hitler's kind of trapped. He could ignore Mussolini completely, but that would risk his alliance with his biggest ally in Europe. So Hitler says, yeah, fine.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah. You would take him for the house painter he once was. Which he wasn't, was he? No, he was never a house painter. He was a postcard painter. The fact that Chamberlain is describing it in such banal detail to his sister, this extraordinary meeting, is a reminder of an unprecedented moment it is, right? People don't normally do this. So in the last episode...
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
All right. So that is the cue. That is what lies behind the infamous Munich Peace Conference, which begins the very next day. And I think at this point, we've been leading up to Munich, but it's actually worth pausing to make a point that I think is often lost. If you've been listening to all their story, it should be obvious at this point that Munich is not the great turning point.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
The British and French have already basically told the Czechs to give over the Sudetenland and made it very clear they will not fight for the Sudetenland. So actually, what's happened at Munich is not Chamberlain and Delatier backing down. It's Hitler backing down. It's Hitler not forcing his war on the Czechs and on the world because of Goering and Mussolini going behind his back.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Furious about it. Yeah, Hitler feels cheated. And this will run through the rest of this episode and indeed next week's episodes. Hitler's sense of being cheated of his war. Now, Chamberlain doesn't get this at all. Chamberlain still thinks, I'm the star of this story. I mean, everyone in Britain kind of treats him like he's the star of the story.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
When he flies out the next day, the whole cabinet comes to the aerodrome to see him off. The high commissioners of Australia, Canada, Ireland, and South Africa, they all come to see him off. Godspeed, good luck, all that kind of thing. They think he is the architect of this, which he absolutely isn't. And Chamberlain loves it. He says it has this... Quotation to the cameras.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
When I was a little boy, I used to repeat, if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again. That's what I'm doing. When I come back, I hope I will be able to say, as Hotspur says in Henry IV, out of this nettle, danger.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It's not a good omen. But on the other hand, It's kind of nice to think that we once had prime ministers who would randomly quote from Henry IV. Yeah, I can't imagine Starmer doing that. No, I can't imagine Starmer doing that. So, as soon as he lands in Munich, the conference opens straight away.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
They're meeting in Hitler's Munich headquarters, the Führerbau, it's called, which is this huge neoclassical building that was built especially for the Nazi party. It's not a hotel, but it's basically... Got that vibe. It's got that vibe. It's full of kind of marble and flowers. And I'm sure Ribbentrop has sprayed it with eau de cologne. Yeah, of course. Champagne.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
the first of our two-part series on Munich, we talked about how rare it is for European statesmen to do this, to fly to each other's countries at the drop of a hat for an emergency summit. This didn't happen in the build-up to the First World War. Chamberlain is doing something extraordinary here. He's boarded his plane. We ended last time at Heston Aerodrome.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So the delegates all go straight up to Hitler's private study. And they're sitting around these sort of little table beneath a portrait of Bismarck.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Because that's where the peace with honour, peace in our time line comes from. He's quoting Disraeli after 1878, I think it was. So they're around this table. Hitler is there. Mussolini is there. Edouard Deladier, we haven't mentioned him. He had actually fought at the Battle of Verdun. So he's a serious person, but he's very, very miserable.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Everyone said he looked like a snail, which I can kind of see, actually.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
What tremendous judges of character they are. But they'd have a sense of who they thought were. I suppose they would, yeah. They would. Now, of course, the people who aren't there, the Czechs. No one's invited the Czechs. Hitler has said, there's no way the Czechs are coming. And the Czechs are outraged at this. And Chamberlain said to Edvard Benes, the Czech president, well, I'll represent you.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I mean, that's like classic British arrogance, isn't it? The conference, actually, I didn't really know this about the Munich conference until reading up on it. It was a complete shambles. German efficiency, it was not. They didn't have enough pens and pencils. They forgot to bring any paper. It was a complete mess. And the phones didn't work properly.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Ribbentrop was going mad about the phones not working. He said it was a great embarrassment for Germany. And the British had to go back and use the phones in their hotel because the phones didn't work properly. Anyway, as we said, I think the weird thing about the Munich conference is so well known, but it's such a non-event because it's basically just kind of nothing to decide, really.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
They've decided. They've already decided. Hitler's going to take the Sudetenland. Britain and France are going to let him do it, and that's it. And it takes them 13 hours to go through all the technicalities. Chamberlain and Deladier are obviously a little bit downbeat. Hitler's just bored. He doesn't speak any language but German, so he can't understand what's going on.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
But I'll tell you who does speak a lot of languages, who's a real master of tongues. Like you. Very like me. Very similar people. Journalist. Yeah. A certain strut. Thanks. Yeah. Physical resemblance. I mean, come on. Mussolini speaks German. He speaks English and he's fluent in French. So Mussolini is like doing a bit of translating. He's having a great time. Is that how he's doing it?
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's doing it like a guy from a restaurant in New Jersey. Yeah. Welcome, willkommen, bienvenue. So at about two o'clock in the morning of the 30th of September, the deal is done. The Czechs will have 10 days to get out of the Sudetenland. 10th of October, the Germans will march in. And when you say the Czechs, I mean, you mean it's not just the Czech army. It's literally the Czechs.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Well, this is unclear, right? A lot of Czechs flee the Sudetenland. It's not laid down that they have to. And they're not being offered any compensation or anything?
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It's a very bad deal. Anyway, the deal is done. There's no point in you complaining about it now. They bring out, they say there has a big signing. Hitler dips his pen in the special inkwell that he has to sign the deal. There's no ink. There's no ink in the ink. Well, Ribbentrop's face, furious. What would Freud make of that? Yeah, another disaster for Germany.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Actually, I watched the final scenes, the Pathé newsreels on YouTube. Hitler looks exhausted. Mussolini is having a brilliant time, clearly. But actually, the person who's also loving it is Goering. Goering is in this unbelievably tight white suit. And he's kind of cracking jokes and slapping people on the back and stuff. Because, of course, he regards this as a victory for himself.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's launching this remarkable kind of diplomatic coup in a desperate attempt to avoid war over Czechoslovakia, a war that Hitler is planning to launch on the 1st of October, which is just two weeks away. And which Chamberlain doesn't know that, of course. No, Chamberlain doesn't know that at all. So just on Chamberlain and his flight,
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
They've gone out shooting together. He's having a wonderful time. Hitler, though, is very gloomy and despondent. He's actually not got what he wanted, which was his war. And the next day, he has one last meeting with Chamberlain. They're obviously very tired because they've been up until very late. Chamberlain goes in to see him. This is where he presents his piece of paper. Piece of paper.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Chamberlain surprises him.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
We promise that we will never go to war. Britain and Germany will never go to war again with each other again. No fairy will ever die again. Now, in Robert Harris's novel about Munich, which is brilliant, he presents this as quite a... Chamberlain isn't clearly emotionally invested a lot in this piece of paper.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
If nothing else, it is actually a useful political prop because I think it is important, that piece of paper, and in the decline of appeasement. Stiffening British. Stiffening British resolve. Hitler has made an explicit promise that he goes on to break. And so I think it is an important piece of paper. Hitler at the time sees the piece of paper. He's baffled by it.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He thinks it's a complete waste of time. He says, sure, I'll sign it. I mean, I don't care. And he signs this piece of paper. And Ribbentrop says to him afterwards, what was that piece of paper? And Hitler says, it was of no significance whatsoever, which I think is wrong.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I think it really mattered in terms of British public opinion because this is the piece of paper that Chamberlain waves when he gets back to Heston Aerodrome. The paper that bears his name upon it as well as mine. You know, the promise. Peace with honour. Peace for our time.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Which is, of course, what Chamberlain says when he comes back, and he's greeted by great crowds, and he's invited onto the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and he's the absolute hero of the hour in Britain, and indeed in the English-speaking world. More generally, there are messages from America, from Australia, Canada, well done, but presumably not from Prague. But not from Prague at all.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
The news of the deal reached Prague on that same morning, so the 30th of September, and President Benes was having a bath when the news was brought to him. And he said, very presciently, he said, it's a betrayal which will be its own punishment. They think they will save themselves from war and revolution at our expense, and they are wrong. He did think about fighting anyway.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So here's an answer to your question. The Czechs did think about fighting anyway, and they thought about asking the Soviet Union for their help. And eventually they decided, look, we're bound to lose. We're not going to condemn our people to so much suffering. And they said, Benes said, we've been defeated not by Hitler, but by our friends, our so-called friends.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
There are huge demonstrations in Prague, people saying don't do it. But of course they do do it. The German army crosses the border, just as Hitler had planned. Huge crowds of Sudeten Germans throwing their flowers and giving Nazi salutes and all this kind of thing. And his answer to your other question, About the Czechs. So there's a huge population flight from the Sudetenland.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Chamberlain left with the goodwill of the British press kind of ringing in his ears. Every newspaper in Britain said it was brilliant that Chamberlain was doing this. They were so excited. The news from Paris, you know, Paris sent him messages of support. The French are delighted that he's doing it.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
By the time the Germans crossed the border, about 25,000 Czechs had already fled. Leaving their homes, leaving their possessions. Leaving everything. You know, the classic thing of people with their thing on carts.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Exactly. And in the next two months, another 150,000 people, including obviously the Jewish population of Sudetenland, who know exactly what Nazism will mean for them. This was a catastrophe for Czechoslovakia. They lost 3 million people. They lost 11,000 square miles of territory. They lost a fifth of their industrial production.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And crucially, they lost those frontier defences that you've been talking about, which have now fallen to the Germans without a single shot being fired. So if the Germans do want to finish the job, if they want to go deeper into Bohemia, nothing to stop them at all.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
What is worse, or as bad, Hungary and Poland both nibbled at the borders of Czechoslovakia and took more bits, as we'll talk about the Polish bit next week. And Czechoslovakia, the whole balance of it was kind of upset. So the Slovaks demanded more autonomy. Basically, they end up with a much weaker, more federalized country.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
There's a Czech bit, there's an autonomous Slovakia, and the Far East, there's a bit called Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which is now in Ukraine, which is kind of a Ukrainian majority. And there, the German consul is basically the big man. So in other words, the process of dismemberment has begun and Hitler can basically move in to claim the rest whenever he fancies it.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
No. So that plot, which we talked about last time, Ludwig Beck, Admiral Canaris, Oster, all these other characters who are thinking about moving against Hitler, that's completely fizzled out. Hitler's done it again. Another foreign policy coup. So there's no mileage for a conspiracy against him. And they say Chamberlain saved Hitler. We would have moved against him.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Whether that's the case and whether it would have worked, I don't know. But they definitely think that Chamberlain saved Hitler.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It's a kind of ancestor of the Stauffenberg plot, which is what slightly leads me to think it probably wouldn't have worked because, of course, the Stauffenberg plot fizzles out within a day.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
As it is, people across Eastern Europe in particular think Hitler wins. Hitler is the master now. So two countries, in particular Hungary and Romania, from this point onwards, they basically say, well, there's not much point in this. The French are trying to build all these alliances. They're a complete waste of time. They'll never fight for you. We want to be in with the Germans.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Crucially, I think, for Britain, the Dominions, that is Australia, Canada, and so on, New Zealand, they have made it clear to him they are very, very reluctant to be dragged into a war in Central Europe.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
They're the big men now. But the person who isn't happy is Hitler. He wanted his war, and he's been betrayed, as he sees it, by Mussolini and by Goering and by Chamberlain.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
In the last episode, I quoted Ian Kershaw saying about how cunning Hitler's foreign policy coups had been, how brilliantly planned, how ruthlessly the propaganda had been cranked up. What a great judge of timing Hitler had been. This is really the first point at which I think you can say his instincts completely begin to desert him. He believes his own publicity and he misreads the situation.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I think you're dead right. I think he completely misreads Britain and France after this. I mean, all the stuff like they will never fight, they're weak, all that. He is dead wrong. He's running out of time now before they do fight. And he doesn't see that, I think. He doesn't see that at all. One thing about Hitler, though, he feels that the German people have let him down.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's really discomforted that there was not more enthusiasm for war in the autumn of 1938. He was shocked that people cheered Chamberlain as he drove through the streets as a peacemaker. So they've let Germany down, they've let Hitler down, but worst of all, they've let themselves down. They've let themselves down. They've let the school down. And he says...
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So I wonder whether the pogrom of Kristallnacht, the Night of the Broken Glass, against the Jewish population of Germany, which happens just a few weeks afterwards, November 1938. We did an episode on it in our previous season. The violence of that, I think, and the violence for which Hitler, you know, he personally was responsible. He ordered it.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I wonder at some level whether his sense of frustration that he hasn't got his war, his obsession with... He's like a kind of spoiled, very violent toddler.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I mean, that's the impression you get with this. Lashing out, exactly. On the second night of Kristallnacht, he summons a closed meeting of German newspaper editors and he says to them, I'm sick of all this stuff about peace, world peace, peace propaganda, or peace is the most important thing. And he said, it isn't the most important thing. You know, we need war. We should arrange things, he says.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Exactly. So off he goes with their goodwill. It's actually not his first flight. This is one of the things that people think about Chamberlain that is wrong.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So in a quote, the inner voice of the people itself slowly begins to cry out for the use of force. And from this point, he is already thinking about the next conquest. This is the thing with Hitler. He just cannot. He's addicted. He's like a drug addict needing his next hit. Yeah, he needs the next hit. So the next thing he thinks... I'll get the rest of Czechoslovakia.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He wants a port called Memel, which was a Baltic German seaport that's now basically been swallowed up by Lithuania. But he's also now, for the first time, thinking about another target. And this would be his biggest target yet. And this... would be Poland.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
It is. And they'd only like gone, circled the field and then landed again. But he had been in a plane before. It was great fun. Anyway, he's travelled this time with his closest aide, who is a guy called Sir Horace Wilson, who is one of the civil servants, who is one of the key architects of the appeasement policy.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Basically, let's solve the European issue by giving in to their more reasonable demands. That's how they see it. So they have ham sandwiches and they drink whiskey on the flight. I think that's an excellent combination, actually. I think more airlines should offer that as an option. It's a smooth flight, but then they get into Munich and there's a bit of a storm, a bit of turbulence afterwards.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Oh, it's an omen there, yes. It is an omen, yeah. They are escorted by a German plane to the ground. Chamberlain comes out of the plane and he's very happy. He's smiling for the cameras. He's very confident. In his own mind, I think it's really important for people to get this in their heads about Munich. Chamberlain is not doing all this...
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
sort of reluctantly, grudgingly, like he is the victim in all this. He's seizing the moment. In his mind, he is the star. He is the hero of the hour. He is the man of destiny, the modern politician who has seized European history by the scruff of its neck. The arbiter of the continent's fate. That's exactly how he sees himself. Although that said, the anti-appeasement MP, Harold Nicholson,
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
said that Chamberlain and Horace Wilson arrived in Germany with, and I quote, the bright faithfulness of two curates entering a pub for the first time. That's a brilliant description. Which I think is pretty close to the mark. So you sort of get a sense of that from Chamberlain's, from that reading, right? There's a big sort of... It's very pooterish quality. Yeah. There were lots of cars.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
People were saluting. Hitler had some smart shoes on.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So he arrives at the Berghof, Hitler's Eyrie, his eagle's nest. It's pouring with rain. It's very cloudy, which is why he says he can't see Salzburg. He's not the first British visitor to go there. David Lloyd George. And the Duke of Windsor, who had been Edward VIII, notoriously had been. Had been there, exactly. And Hitler, as he describes, he's waiting from the steps. They shake hands.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
If you look at the photos, they both look very jolly. Chamberlain, of course, has his umbrella and his hat. He obviously makes this remark about... Hitler looking like a house painter. And actually, he's even more damning. I mean, British snobbery is a great theme of these episodes.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
When he goes back to the cabinet later on, he says Hitler wasn't, I quote, the commonest little dog he had ever seen, though it was impossible not to be impressed with the power of the man. So he despises Hitler, and yet at the same time, he recognizes that there is a kind of demonic quality to Hitler.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Though, as we will see, I think Chamberlain completely misreads the balance of power between himself and Hitler. Anyway, he's arrived at the eagle's nest. Hitler says, come into my study. They go into his study. Ribbentrop, who is hanging around, is not invited in. So that would have improved his mood. No, no. He hates Chamberlain, hates Britain, loves German sparkling wine, but hates Britain.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He's not allowed in, says Ray Cross. And for three hours they talk and there's this storm raging outside, very kind of Wagnerian. Hitler is speaking quite softly. It's all been translated by his interpreter, who's a guy called Paul Schmidt. And he's going on and on about how badly the Sudeten Germans are treated.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And Chamberlain says, look, if you will rule out force, I will consider anything to make you happy. Now, we can talk about any kind of solution, but you must not fight. Hitler, at this point, loses his temper. And he says, well, I mean, you talk to me about force. But he says, but Benes and the Czechs, they're already using force against my countrymen in the Sudetenland. I will not accept this.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
I will settle this question, all this kind of thing. And then he starts a trouble with Hitler. He can't control himself. Yeah, he goes off on a rant, doesn't he? Goes on a massive rant.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He says, I don't care if there's a world war. You know, if I want to settle this, I'd rather have a world war, frankly. Let's have a world war. And Chamberlain is very cross at this point. Chamberlain does not give in to him. Chamberlain is not a wimp and a weed. Chamberlain says, well, if you think like that, then I've completely wasted my time. There's no point in coming.
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529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He says, if that's your intention, why did you have me coming to Berchtesgaden at all? Under these circumstances, I think it's better if I leave straight away. And amazingly, Hitler backs down at this point. People don't normally talk like this to Hitler. Hitler says, oh, well, Well, let's go back to your previous thing. You said you would grant self-determination to the Sudeten Germans.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Well, maybe we could. Maybe let's talk about how that would work in reality. And Chamberlain obviously thinks to himself at this point, you stand up to this bloke. And he will back down. He will be reasonable. How are we getting this?
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So this is a combination of Schmidt wrote memoirs later on where he talked about all this. I mean, Schmidt is an amazing source. But also Chamberlain reports all this to his cabinet. And he also writes about it to his sisters. So the letter to Ida that we began with. So we get kind of different... So there is a possibility that he might be slightly bigging up his...
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Oh, I think throughout this, Chamberlain is definitely bigging himself up a bit. I don't think there's any doubt about that. In Chamberlain's version of the conversations, he is always the star and he is playing Hitler. Whereas I think in reality, it's the other way around. Anyway, they agree. Chamberlain will go back to Britain and will talk to his cabinet.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And Hitler says, fine, I'll wait for that. And I won't order any precipitant military action. And so Chamberlain goes off and he goes down and stays at a hotel down at the bottom of the mountain in Berchtesgaden. Now Chamberlain thinks, great, I've got a good result. Hitler, once Chamberlain's gone, is delighted. And he's rubbing his hands with glee, literally rubbing his hands.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And he says to Ribbentrop, well, I've got Chamberlain to give me this Sudetenland. He says, it's win-win. If the Czechs refuse... and won't go along with this, then we'll have a war. And if they say yes, then I'll take the Sudetenland and maybe I'll just come back for the rest of Czechoslovakia later.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He'll be poorly treated in his own mind.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
So he never does. So that never happens. No. I think probably best for Britain's image that we never had Hitler over. He went to Liverpool, didn't he? Yeah. So the thing about Hitler's offer here, right, is that it is quite a departure from what he previously wanted. Up to this point, he's been talking about the Sudetenland merely as a pretext to get the whole of Czechoslovakia.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He doesn't just want the Sudetenland. He wants to break up the whole of Czechoslovakia. But now he's saying, well, maybe I will just take the Sudetenland and I'll come back for Czechoslovakia for the rest later. So to that extent, he has kind of slightly blinked. Anyway, Chamberlain goes back to London. Everyone says, oh, you've done brilliantly. Well done. What a tremendous man you are.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
And he goes straight in to brief the cabinet. And here I think it's sometimes very tempting to just be unremittingly hostile to Chamberlain. But here is a point where I think it's very difficult to be anything but hostile because he clearly has completely misread the situation. Because he says... I've met Hitler. I'm absolutely convinced that Hitler's objectives are strictly limited.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
He says, I believe Hitler when he says he only wants to bring German speakers into the right. It's like George Bush gazing into Vladimir Putin's eyes.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
This is exactly what he says. He says, well, in spite of the harshness and ruthlessness I thought I saw in his face, I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word. I mean, given what we know about Hitler, so they know about the light and the long knives. They know about the Anschluss. They know all this. That's a mad thing for Chamberlain to say.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah, the Czechs, they feel absolutely furious.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah, I mean, you could say exactly. If you're a Czech listening to this podcast, you're like, the British are behaving with complete arrogance here. They're just basically signing half our country away. I mean, that's the story of Munich, isn't it? The Czechs, the story of the next few days is actually really simple.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
The British, with very enthusiastic French backing, say to the Czechs, right, you've got to give them the Sudetenland. And no, you can't. You probably shouldn't even organize a referendum. Just just hand it over. That's the quickest thing.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Because, well, first of all, they don't know that about the German economy, but also they will lose. The Germans have done their war games. They're pretty confident they can win in a matter of weeks. But they're going to lose anyway. I guess they think they're being put under enormous pressure by their supposed friends. Be reasonable. Give them the Sudetenland.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Tom, you're quite right. You are quite right. And lots of listeners to this podcast will no doubt say you were right. I think it's because they think, given that we'll lose either way, maybe if we get an international guarantee, we give them the Sudetenland and then we get a guarantee that By the French and the British.
The Rest Is History
529. The Nazis' Road to War: Showdown in Munich (Part 2)
Yeah. And the Czechs are arguably in a stronger position than the Poles were a year later. For sure. Poland, that took about a month. Could the Czechs have held out for two months or longer? I mean, ultimately, I think the Germans would have won. And the Czechs with no allies?
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Marianne is the embodiment of the French Republic.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And it's, of course, at this point that people are singing the Marseillaise, the marching song of the Army of the Rhine that has swept through the capital. But it's also at this point that people alight upon a new symbol of France, which is this figure of Marianne.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
But is it not because of that image, I would say, the chilliness and the... I think that is the draw, isn't it? The women think, I could be the one who melts the ice-cold, incorruptible heart. All that... But actually, we're just talking about women as spectators here, watching men. But there are, well, we've had one woman in particular.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So we talked about Marion Swinette, but on the side of the revolutionaries, we've had one woman in particular that we've mentioned a few times in the more recent episodes, who actually is an agent. She has genuine political influence, and that is Madame Roland. So tell me about Madame Roland.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
They literally say, She is the new Madame de Pompadour. She's the new Madame du Barry. She is the overmighty female favourite who has corrupted and seduced this sort of slack-minded, gullible men who flock around her. I mean, she fits it basically into a standard demonology, doesn't she? She does.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Right. That's the way that which blue collar Trump voters talked about Hillary Clinton, for example, nagging. She's only got where she has because of her husband. She's always telling us off and telling us what's good for us. All of that kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And we know what the Romans thought about women being involved in politics. They thought it was a terrible thing.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Well, the good news for people who like the rest is history is that there are such women because otherwise there would be no second half. So return after the break and we will meet two of them. See you then. Today's episode is brought to you by A Thousand Blows, the new original series premiering exclusively on Disney+.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
We did indeed. So I don't know who yours is, Tom, but the person who we've talked about in the rest of this history that I often think about is a young woman called Sophie Scholl, who grew up in Germany in the late 1930s, early 1940s. And she was a young woman of enormous sort of earnestness and kind of moral seriousness.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And she and her brother Hans joined and were key parts of an organisation called the White Rose Group, which distributed pamphlets and leaflets across Germany attacking the crimes of the Third Reich. And as you'll remember, Tom, Sophie came to a very sad end. that she and Hans were captured and they were interrogated and tried and executed by the Nazis.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And the story of her in prison, in the Stadelheim prison, in the last hours before her death, and she's sort of praying and she's completely unapologetic about standing up against the horrors of Nazism. I think it's one of the most inspirational stories in all history, not just in 20th century history.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
It's brilliant, isn't it, Tom, that women's stories like these are being restored to their proper place in recent history. And that's one reason I'm looking forward to this new series so much. So this segment was brought to you by our friends at Disney+.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Dominic, what do you find useful about Nord? Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn.com slash restishistory. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
The link is also in the episode description box. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Before the break, Tom promised you, he said he'd got binders full of women who were pushing for full political rights. And actually, one of them is an old friend of the show. So a tremendous character who was very prominent in the Women's March on Versailles, cut a very flamboyant figure.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And that is Terroir de Merricourt. So she had kind of pistols in her belt. She looked a bit like a pirate. She had a kind of... Like Adamant, yeah. She looked like a new romantic. Exactly. She had a kind of liberty cap. She had a fancy hat. She's on a horse. Cut scrape figure. But actually, she then gets into a bit of a mess, doesn't she? Terrible scrape. Yeah, a scrape. Is that what it is?
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
It's a scrape. So she's captured by Austrian agents. Tell us about that. Well, because she's actually Belgian.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So just before you move on to the other person you want to talk about, there are other people who agree with her, other women who agree with her and say, especially when war is declared, they want to join the war effort. So there are two sisters called the Furnig sisters who took up arms in the defense of Valenciennes in the east of France.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
The general was so impressed by them, he promised to put them in the line of fire at the first opportunity. And then there's a petition put up by an activist called Pauline Leon, which was read out to the Legislative Assembly. So this is summer 1792. Our fathers, husbands and sons may perhaps be the victims of Erin and Miss Fury.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Could we be forbidden the sweetness of avenging them or dying at their sides? You cannot refuse us. Society cannot deny us this right, which is given us by nature, unless it's claimed that the Declaration of Rights does not apply to women. And the Legislative Assembly, do you know what it does? It just ignores them because people are embarrassed.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And actually, in April 1793, the convention bans women, officially bans them from going into battle. But that issue of the Declaration of Rights brings us to the other great character that you're going to talk about today, who is a great favourite of mine, and her name is Olympe de Gouges. So tell us about her.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Or maybe she's really his daughter after all.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Oh, right. So she's his... What does that make her? His... Step-sister. Yeah, step-sister. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
If you were worried about your standing in revolutionary Paris.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
She translated Adam Smith. Yeah. Tremendous. And Thomas Paine. And Thomas Paine. And she actually runs her salon. Unlike Madame Roland, she allows other women to come to her salon. Including Olympe de Gouges. So that's where they would all have met.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And isn't it interesting that the more hardcore Jacobin, the Montagnards they call, Rob Spierre and his circle, people like that, They're often among the most contemptuous and the most scornful.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And you would think in other respects, I mean, it's a really good example, I guess, of what some listeners may say is the kind of the patriarchal attitudes, the misogyny, that in other respects, they are so democratic. But on this issue, they say women. Are you joking? I mean, ha ha ha. Women voting. Wouldn't that be a great wouldn't that be a thing?
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Yeah, I don't find it inspiring at all. Well, I don't think everybody should have the vote, so that's the difference between me and the French revolutionaries. So who do you think should not have the vote? I probably wouldn't give it to anybody. But I'd definitely raise the age thing. I think probably 30, 40. And also property. I think you need to be a property.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Marianne represents the permanent values that found her citizens' attachment to the Republic, liberty, equality, fraternité. The earliest representation of a woman wearing a Phrygian cap, an allegorical figure of liberty and the Republic, made their appearance at the time of the French Revolution. The origins of the name Marianne are uncertain.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
I mean, you could translate patrie, right, as homeland or as fatherland, couldn't you? You absolutely could.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
You need to own property, don't you? Fine. Okay.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
can't really believe that that's it's not just that there is it so if you think a hundred years hence when there are going to be huge arguments about women voting often among the most vociferous opponents of it are other women You know, opposing suffrage campaigns, not just in France, in Britain, in the United States, wherever.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And don't historians think that effectively a lot of women had internalized the assumptions of the age, that they have come to believe, they come to believe what they're told, that they have their domestic sphere, which is their domain, right? And that there is the public sphere, which is the domain of men.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Tom, I could not agree with you more, I think, actually. By far, she's the most radical. So all that the men are arguing for, the Robespierres, the Marats, whatever, it's within the bounds of the imagination. There have been republics, right? I mean, England executed its king. There has been the Dutch Republic. There's the Roman Republic. It is perfectly plausible to imagine that.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
You might think it's a bad thing, which a lot of people in France obviously did. But you can imagine it. It's not making your head hurt to think about it. But I think with this, what's clearly the case when she presents that Declaration of the Rights of Women…
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
When she unveils it, the ridicule, the contempt, the disbelief that greets it is a sign that a lot of people just simply cannot imagine a world in which women exercise political power. Including women. Yeah, including women themselves, exactly. That they are, as it were, I don't want to say prisoners of the same imagination, because that casts people in the past... are somehow lesser than us.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
We're more enlightened. And I don't generally like that kind of language. But I think it is fair to say that just as we are trapped by our own preconceptions in ways that we don't even recognize, they are absolutely trapped by theirs.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Well, Tom, there are a lot of people in the world right now, when we're recording this, who would listen to this episode and would say they are mad. I mean, there are people right now, you know, in the people who are currently administering Afghanistan or indeed Iran, who would say, you know, a lot of what Olympe de Gouges was arguing was bonkers.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So maybe we shouldn't be entirely complacent about it, I guess.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Well, I'm not saying something good about the revolution. I'm saying about Olympe de Gouges, because as we will discover in a future episode. Revolution doesn't treat her well, does it? No, it does not treat her well, which is yet another black mark, I'm afraid. So, jolly good, Tom. That was absolutely fascinating. And kind of overdue, we should have done a lot about men in the revolution.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
We've done quite a lot about women as well. Well, we have. We did start with a woman, I guess. So next week, we will be getting back to the narrative, won't we? Because I think we left it last time with the Prussians. Cliffhanger. They were approaching Paris. They're 120 miles away, and they've just turned to finish off the last French army at Valmy.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And listeners will be excited to hear that there is going to be a thrilling twist to the story. We love a thrilling twist on The Rest is History. Can't wait. So, Tom, what could people do if they wanted to hear that episode now, literally now?
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And just to be very clear, we are a mixed club. And Tom, do we treat our male and female members equally? We're all about equality. We treat them equally badly. And on that bombshell, we will see you next time for the most exciting twist in European history. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Now, Tom, as you know, I'm not just a man of history. I'm also known for my involvement in the performing arts.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Are you now? I must confess that early on in my acting career, my stage presence did come under a little scrutiny from Britain's finest newspapers. Oh, yes, this is the famous, notorious one-star review in the Scotsman, is it? Yeah, and I will remind the listeners that in Scotland, they order their reviews in a different way. So one is at the top and five stars is the worst review you could get.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So we were very happy with that one-star review. But like a lot of great masters of their craft, Tom, I learned from it. I grew. I evolved. I knew I would bide my time before returning to the boards. And guess what? You're not. No. Yes. Tom, I have to tell you, I have returned to the boards. I'm performing once again.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And the brilliant news for our listeners is that you can go and you can be transfixed by my performance right now because I am honoured and privileged to appear in the latest Sherlock & Co adventure, The Adventure of the Norwood. Please tell me that you are playing the Norwood Builder. I'm playing a much better character. I'm playing Hector McFarlane, a solicitor from Blackheath accused of murder.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Goodness, as Lestrade's officers bear down on me, Tom, I have nowhere else to turn but to 221B Baker Street.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Well, very much like this one, we were better acting, I think it's fair to say. It's a stable mate of ours. They are a massive show. They get 10 million downloads. Outside, I believe, The Archers. This is the biggest audio drama in Britain. Well, I have no doubt, Dominic, that it is more interesting than The Archers. It genuinely is brilliant. So My Son is a massive Sherlock and Co. aficionado.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
It basically goes through all the original short stories and the short stories that are often forgotten in modern day adaptations. It transposes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's narratives to the modern day. So Watson himself is making the podcast while they're doing the adventures. You can pick up any adventure you want. You don't have to follow the whole series to get stuck in.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
It is absolutely brilliant. Do you know who else thinks it's brilliant, Tom? The Guardian newspaper. One of those prized one-star reviews? No, a five-star. They said, and I quote, very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular. Do you want to know what the Times said? It said, a breakneck series that Gen Z, or Gen Z as members of it say, that Gen Z is hooked on. Wow.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And now that you're appearing on the show, I mean, that will confirm the hook, won't it? It absolutely will. And the Guardian listeners will be beside themselves with joy. So, everybody, please listen to Sherlock & Co. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder. It's multi-part. It's brilliant. Part one is out now. Jump right in wherever you get your podcasts. And here is a clip from that very episode.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
But the Élysée Palace thing that I read at the beginning is wrong. Am I not right in thinking that we know better than the Élysée Palace? No one. So the Élysée Palace said... You know, who knows where the name comes from? We know precisely where the name comes from. The name comes from this poem that is written in, I think, October, is it? October 1792? To mark the founding of the Republic.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
And interestingly, the poem is not in French. I mean, that's what makes it so fascinating.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So the figure... Of liberty. We've talked so much about the influence of the Romans in particular on the French revolutionaries. So this is a very obviously classical figure, basically a goddess holding the fasces with an axe. and a liberty cap. That's right, isn't it? So, is there a little bit of Athena about this figure, maybe?
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Marianne was a very common first name in the 18th century, and she thus came to represent the people. The counter-revolutionaries used the name derisively when referring to the Republic. So, Tom, that was the website of the Élysée Palace talking about the great symbol of the French Republic. Marianne.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
Right. She's classless, I suppose, isn't she? I mean, she's not defined by any. And because she's antique, she doesn't represent any particular group in contemporary France. She's universal. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So we started the entire cycle of French Revolution series thinking with a woman, with Marie Antoinette, and the extraordinary misogyny of the attacks on her. And then, although virility, masculine friendship, martial virtue and all of that, these masculine ideas have mattered enormously to the ethos of the French Revolution.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
There have been moments, haven't there, when women have taken centre stage. So I think you did an episode about the women's march on Versailles, when the market women go and bring back the King and Marie Antoinette. And the symbolism of it being the market women, I think, is really important there, isn't it? Yeah. And then, of course, you've got women who are prominent in the sans-culottes.
The Rest Is History
545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
So this is a symbol that emerges at the point that we've just got to in the great narrative of the French Revolution, the summer and autumn of 1792. We heard last time about the terrible September massacres that took place as the Prussians were advancing on Paris.
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545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)
who are storming the Tuileries, who are shouting slogans in the streets. So it's not just a man's revolution by any means.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
But actually, I tell you, he's really nice to him. And this bears out my view that actually, I think you're very hard on this person and you paint him in an unduly dark light. And that is Augustus. Augustus is ultimately a kind man and is lovely to Claudius. Except when slaughtering senators. Yeah, but who cares about them? He's very nice to Claudius, isn't he? He's very nice to Claudius.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
He's not very nice to Claudius. Yeah, but compared with the rest of the family, Tom.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
OK, now, you said to give a talk about this academic subject. Now, it's true you can be academically very prominent and a complete and utter fool. And I think we can all think of people who tick that particular box. But this business that Antonio said, oh, anyone who's really stupid, I call him a bigger fool than Claudius. And Claudius is an absolute dribbling idiot.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
If he's a dribbling idiot, how is it he's giving academic lectures? I mean, again, people who've spent time at our great universities may find that question easy to answer. But no doubt you'll have your own answer, Tom.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
When the conspirators who were lurking in wait for Caligula moved everyone else along on the grounds that the emperor wished to be alone, Claudius retreated to a wing of the palace known as the Hermaeum. Not long afterwards, alarmed by the distant shouts of murder, crept away to a nearby balcony where he hid himself behind the curtains hanging in front of the door.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Yeah, a slobbering, twitching, socially incompetent historian. Who would have thought it? I mean...
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Sometimes it's good to write an improperly immersive, well-textured history. And that takes multiple volumes. What can I say?
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And he's a historian. He's a contemporary historian.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
That's absolute rank idiocy. I mean, that is rank idiocy from him to... Yes, I think it is. ...to rake all that up again.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Oh, my God. So I'll tell you one thing. Theo would never forgive me if I didn't remind everybody that this is actually what happened to our erstwhile producer, Don Johnson, when we went to New Zealand. Remember he sat on that bench and it collapsed?
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
There he cowered, and as he did so, a soldier who happened to be wandering past noticed his feet and dragged him out, intending to ask him who he was. But then, as he sank to his knees in terror, recognised him and hailed him as Emperor. The soldier then led him away to where the other Praetorians were all milling around, uncertain what to do.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Which must be proof that Caligula thinks of his uncle as a harmless fool because he wouldn't be promoting him in this way as a potential rival if he thought he was a serious, formidable person.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Oh, dear. Some people who listen to this podcast say there's too much banter, but I think if anything, there is not enough.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Yeah, because Caligula will want to get rid of him.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
The soldiers put him in a litter, and because his own attendants had run away, took it in turns to carry the unhappy and fearful man on their shoulders to their camp, and all the crowds they passed on the way pitied him on the assumption that he was an innocent being bundled off to execution.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So is it possible the stuff about the curtain is nonsense and an invention, a folk tale, too good to be true, and that actually he's in the conspiracy from the beginning, he's been paying these blokes, and actually all this... He may not be acting out of ambition so much as fear. He thinks, I'm next for the chopping block, Basically, I've got to act now. I'm not such an idiot.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
I'm going to act now because otherwise Caligula's going to have me killed.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Received within the ramparts, he spent the night under the protection of the Praetorians, but in a mood of relief rather than of any great expectation. But as the next day passed, so large crowds of people gathered outside the Praetorian camp, agitating for a single man to be given rule and calling for Claudius by name.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
High stakes. So come back after the break to see if this stammering, twitching, socially inept historian turns out to be a good emperor.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
is reliable. That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn.com slash restishistory.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan, and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Now, Tom, you and I often hear about the red flags that we should avoid.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in our friends and in our partners, indeed, in our producers? Now, if people aren't sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags. It can allow you to actively wave them and identify them in your own relationships. So, Tom, can I ask you, do you have any relationship green flags? I certainly do.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Well, Tom, therapy can help you identify red and green flags. It can help you learn positive coping skills, and it can teach you how to set boundaries and enforce them. It can help you work through anything. and empower you to be the very best version of yourself.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
These chants prompted him to allow an armed assembly of the Praetorians to swear allegiance to him, and to promise each one of them 15,000 sesterces, thereby becoming the first of the Caesars to win the loyalty of the military by paying them a bribe.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Claudius, written off for half a century, an idiot, a fool, a stammerer, unfit to be exhibited in public, is now the master of the Roman world. And Tom, how does he do? The answer is actually he does all right, doesn't he?
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And there are plenty of examples of politicians who are laughed at a lot of the time, but actually are big enough to ignore it and end up being pretty successful.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So that last sentence, I'm not sure whether that's really true, but that's Suetonius in his life of Claudius, as translated in the New Penguin Classics edition by our very own Tom Holland. And Tom there, Suetonius, is taking the story forwards from where we left it last time. We left it on a cliffhanger.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
It's a really important thing for any politician at any point in history, I would say. Massively important. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Now, probably the single most famous thing that he does that people who've listened to a lot of the rest of his history will remember is he orders the invasion of Britain. He doesn't personally lead it because he's hardly a kind of obvious military man, but he associates Britain He's associated with it. Right. And it's his invasion.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And presumably he's doing that because he knows from his study of history that nothing is better calculated to stir the emotions of the populace than a military victory, even if it's against a people as useless as the Britons.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
The Emperor Caligula, mad or not, definitely a populist, has been assassinated by Cassius Kyria and the Praetorian Guard. And the question is, is Rome going to turn back the clock 60 years to the time of the Republic and all the chaos at the end of the Republic? Or is it going to continue with the family of Augustus, known as the Caesars? So take us forward.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Yeah. But it's not just military, is it? He likes a grand projet, public works, sort of a lot of hydraulic action, I think it's fair to say.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
I think Ostia is one of the best places you can go. If you go to Rome... My single recommendation to the listeners is to go to Ostia Antica. It's as good as Pompeii and there's nobody else there. There you go. You've heard it.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Putting money into the economy. So the other thing is that Claudius is not – although he's quite old school – He's not like a Tiberius kind of dour killjoy who sneers at the pleasures of the populace. So you said Claudius would like a chapter on snooker. He'd enjoy a night out at a smoke-filled snooker hall.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So these are the people, like anyone who's read I, Claudius, will remember Narcissus and Pallas and people like that, who presumably, they're very bright and they're very good, but I would guess... they must attract a lot of haters, of course, because everyone in the Senate is massively resentful.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Now, I was hoping we'd get on to Messalina. So Messalina is, he basically has his pick, I guess, does he? And he picks a very young, beautiful and crucially very blue-blooded wife.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
I think the beauty and youth, these are perks. She's the great-grandniece of Augustus, right? So she helps him to sort of say, I'm the heir to the greatest emperor, the first emperor.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Well, if you've seen or indeed read I, Claudius, you will remember that there is, I mean, it's one of the great scandals, not just in Roman history, but all history. When Claudius, he's at Ostia, isn't he? He's looking around that splendid site that I was recommending to the listeners. And if the Ostia tourist board want to get in touch, I'd be very keen to hear from them.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So he's looking around Ostia and somebody, a concubine of his, comes up to him and says, Messalina is carrying on behind your back. And not just carrying on, she's up to all sorts, Tom.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Yeah, maybe people have, there's been a bit of an internal power struggle that we can't really glimpse and that maybe the bureaucrats, the freedmen have, you know, turned against her.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So like the last days of Boris Johnson, where there was rival briefing between his wife Carrie and some of his aides, remember?
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And that's what explains these incredibly lurid stories. Again, iClaudius has great fun with these, that she has been, you know, you describe it in your notes as an all-day sex-a-thon with Rome's top courtesan.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Just to give people a sense of it, he is 59, she is 34. So a 25-year, exactly 25-year...
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Yeah, so this isn't going to end well. I mean, to be fair to Agrippina, she might well be thinking, if I don't do this, one day Britannicus will become emperor and he'll probably kill my son because my son will be a rival claimant. I think that's exactly what she thinks.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
She's like Lucy Worsley.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Let's go back to Claudius for a second. He died in October 54. Yes. So that's what, four years after he'd adopted Nero as his heir. And it's always thought, isn't it, thanks largely probably to Suetonius and also to I, Claudius, that he was poisoned by Agrippina and Nero with mushrooms. Suetonius says he was poisoned with a dish of mushrooms. Do you think that's true?
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
No, I agree. I agree completely. But actually, where I'd slightly probably disagree with you is I don't necessarily think this is actually as different from modern history as you would think. Because modern history, too, is freighted with all kinds of assumptions, folk myths, urban myths. And actually teasing out what really happened is the impossible goal for any historian of any period.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And also, which wouldn't solve the, you know, wouldn't end the conversation. I mean, because these things don't. So if people want to make up their own minds, what they should do is to buy Tom's new translation of Suetonius' book, The Lives of the Caesars, which is available now from all good bookshops with Penguin Classics. Tom, a great translation, a great series, I have to say.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
A tour de force, I think, is the approved Restless History terminology. So that was absolutely tremendous. And by the way, the book is brilliant, so people should absolutely go and buy the book. And we will be back next week with something very different, another of history's great monsters, actually, and another story in which it's actually quite difficult to get at
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
as it were, the truth of what really happened because there are so many different accounts. And that is the story of King Leopold and the Belgian Congo. So we will be telling that story next week. The Heart of Darkness, indeed. Okay, on that bombshell, goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And she's a lovely, sweet-natured girl, isn't she, by all accounts? Yeah.
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So let's get back to this moment of the curtain. This bloke in the Palatine, Praetorian, he sees these feet sticking out under the curtain. He takes Claudius to the Praetorian camp. And presumably the Praetorians at this point are thinking of Claudius purely as their puppet. He's somebody from the family, so they feel a sentimental attachment perhaps. And they think, we need a figurehead.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Here's this bloke. Who cares what his backstory is? He's got the right bloodline. Great, bring him in. Well, we...
The Rest Is History
537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
And actually, I said he's got the right bloodline, but that's not quite right, isn't it? Because now it comes back to this issue that Suetonius was very interested in with Caligula, which really loomed large for Suetonius then, and I guess must do now again, which is exactly whom are you descended from?
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So just to recap for people who don't have the family tree in front of them, Claudius is the nephew of Tiberius. He is the brother of Germanicus who never got to become emperor. He's also the grandson of Mark Antony. I mean, he's very well connected. Yeah. And he's the step-grandson of Antony's great rival, the first emperor Antony.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
So he has all kinds of connections, although the crucial one, the one with Augustus, is not a blood connection.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
I was about to say Kamala Harris. People gave her a lot of hard time, but I didn't mind her laugh, actually. I thought it was quite endearing. Well, you might have liked Claudius's then. But I wouldn't say hers was a bray. If his was a bray, I would dislike it because I don't like a braying laugh.
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537. Emperors of Rome: Claudius, Paranoia and Poison (Part 4)
Suetonius says he stammers and twitches. Yeah. And when he gets angry, he drooled and snorted mucus. And I hate that in a man, Tom, the snorting of mucus.
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519. The World's First City
And if you're going to irrigate the mudflats beyond them, you need great workforces to dig the irrigation canals. And the only way that this could have been organized would be by having a powerful elite who could organize the masses to do it for them. And this in turn, once it's been done, would generate surpluses and these surpluses could then start to be spent on, you know, massive walls and...
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temples towers and stuff yeah and of course also keeping the elites in the comfort to which they're becoming used right and so for the elites of uruk this would be brilliant it would be a kind of virtuous circle because they get richer and richer and the oppressed masses get more and more enslaved to them more and more obliged to labor to keep them in the style that they're accustomed to
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Now, this theory also has fallen by the wayside. And that's because today there is a recognition that what is happening in the fourth millennium BC, and it's only really recently been conclusively proved, is a process of climate change. and you have rising sea levels.
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And the Persian Gulf, back in the 5th millennium, going into the 4th millennium, it reaches inland about 200 miles higher than it does today. So much higher up into the flatlands of what is now Iraq. And the spread northwards of seawater means that you have an unbelievably rich variety of potential foodstuffs.
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You have sea fish, you have mollusks, you have marshlands, and in them you have kind of waterfowl. You have the floodplain, of course, where you can grow wheat. And then you have kind of more arid, almost kind of semi-desert regions where you can keep livestock. So essentially, it's potentially a massive great larder.
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And so it's understandable that as the seawaters spread northwards into what's now Iraq, so people start to congregate along its shores and to go out into the marshes and to kind of build settlements there.
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And the result of this, the fact that you have this whole range of ecosystems, is it seems in the fifth and then into the fourth millennium, you're starting to get a greater concentration of people than anywhere else on the planet.
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I'll actually quote Ben Wilson. I've got to lift a passage from his wonderful book Metropolis on this. This is a shrine that's built around 5,400 BC. And Wilson says of it, "...on a sandbank beside a lagoon where the desert met the Mesopotamian marshes, perhaps at first people saw this place as sacred because the lagoon was a life-giving force."
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The earliest signs of human life here, in the sandy island that would be called Eridu, were the bones of fish and wild animals as well as mussel shells, suggesting this holy spot was a place of ritual feasting. In time, a small shrine was built to worship the god of fresh water.
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and then the centuries pass and eridu is built and rebuilt and rebuilt and it becomes larger and larger and larger and it comes to be seen by the people who live around it as the holiest place in the world the place where the world itself emerged into being dry land is fashioned out of the primordial waters kind of shaped and molded out of mud by the great god enki
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The temple of Eridu is raised to Enki, and it serves as a symbol not just of the victory of order over chaos, of eternity over oblivion, but it's the very place where the great god Enki, the creator god himself, actually lives. So if the God who ensures that order is preserved, that the lands around the sea don't just melt back into the chaos of the waters, you need to keep him on board.
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You need to keep him happy. And so inevitably, this results in the emergence of a kind of priesthood. And they have authority over the people who are contributing labor and goods to this temple. Because they can say, well, if you don't do what we say, then the world will collapse and melt away.
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What it reminds me of is Stonehenge, which is built much later, but a similar process of a site that is clearly very holy, not just to locals, but to people from far across Britain. And you get people coming for great feasts at the site of Stonehenge. The temple itself remains kind of sacrosanct, but you do get signs of large villages, large settlements.
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But again, the comparison with Stonehenge only focuses the puzzle. How do you get from this temple on an island in southern Mesopotamia to the emergence of the first city, to the emergence?
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519. The World's First City
Yes. So Enki is in his temple. And basically he's being selfish. He's not sharing the gifts of civilization, the fruits of his knowledge. In Greek myth, he's a bit like Zeus hoarding fire. And in the Greek myth, Prometheus, the Titan comes and steals fire and gives it to humanity and then human civilization can begin.
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And that role in Mesopotamian myth is played by the goddess we've already mentioned, Inanna, who will become Ishtar to the Babylonians. And she steals the secrets of civilization from Enki by getting him drunk on beer. So she, you know, she gets him pissed. And she steals everything that he knows. I mean, if you like, it's a kind of data theft. She moves in and she recognizes knowledge is power.
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And she takes these secrets and she takes it to the house of heaven that we mentioned as being this great temple in uruk and this is the place where she settles and it establishes a second focal point for the peoples of southern mesopotamia only this is one in which the god is not kind of hugging knowledge to himself but is generous with it wants to share it with the whole of humanity
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Beautifully. This is why it's so wonderful. I mentioned these two great temples that get founded about 5000 BC, Dayana and the neighbouring temple, the temple to Anu, the sky god, the Calaba. And they are like the temple to Enki on Eridu, that they are constantly being built and rebuilt and rebuilt. And each time they are rebuilt, the existing structure is kind of incorporated within it.
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So Gwendolyn, like in her book, says the past and the memory are sealed and a new foundation laid quite literally upon the leveled remains. And the result, as the centuries and then the millennia pass, is architecture completely on an absolutely unprecedentedly monumental scale. These are by miles the larger structures that any humans have built at that time.
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Well, the thing that's fascinating is that it does seem to be more voluntary than perhaps the kind of more pessimistic takes on the emergence of urbanism would have it. So there's a brilliant scholar of this whole process called Pieter Steinkeller. He describes these kind of these cylinder seals, which are kind of tubes and you roll them in clay. They give you a kind of strip cartoon.
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So they're not exactly writing, but they are images encoded with meaning. And he refers to an assembly of cylinder seals and he describes them as being the only evidence of a potentially historical nature that survives from late prehistoric times. That's amazing. I mean.
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Before the invention of writing, there are pictorial representations that you can extrapolate information about what the people who lived in that period were doing. And what these seals suggest is that the construction of these great temples at what will become Uruk is a collective activity. It records gifts of commodities and, in fact, labor as well, to Inanna, the deity of Uruk.
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But what this also implies is that it's not just Inanna who is the beneficiary of this, but Uruk itself. So to quote Steinkeller, it now becomes clear that Uruk, rather than being merely one of the participating settlements, was the focus and beneficiary of the system. So I absolutely love this because it turns out that the origins of urbanism, Dominic, lies in the dimension of the sacral.
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And the sacrality is merely a pretext for what's at the heart of history, which is power. Well, you could say that the sacral and the manifestations of power in the here and now are so interfused that it becomes almost impossible to distinguish them.
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Well, into the fourth millennium, the landscape is being reshaped by the climate because the sea is starting to retreat again. So it's gone right the way up into Iraq. And now in the fourth millennium, it is starting to retreat back to where the Persian Gulf begins now. And as a consequence of this, the marshes are drying up.
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And so people who had been dependent for their food on the wildfowl in the marshes or the fish and the mollusks in the sea are are now having to look for other ways to sustain themselves. And so what they do, you know, it's obviously a terrible crisis for them, but they have these two great temples, which by now are millennia old. And
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They serve as reassurances, symbols that the gods will look after them, that they will uphold the order that emerged back in the beginning with Enki. So they flock to Uruk because it seems the safest place to go. It's a kind of refuge.
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And the people who are coming are people who are very, very familiar with irrigation, with using water to sustain themselves and probably have the engineering skills necessary that will enable Uruk to be sustained by building canals, by starting to fertilize the fields with water, and so on. And Al-Ghazi, in his book, fascinatingly compares this process to how Chicago emerged in the 19th century.
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He says that Chicago initially lived in what he describes as its natural landscape. So in other words, Chicago is built as a Great Lakes port. That's what initially enables it to become a major settlement.
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But then in the 19th century, developments like expansion of the railroads, the opening up of the Wild West, refrigeration, enable it to serve as a focus for what Agassiz calls a created landscape. You can see the parallel there with Uruk. Initially, it's there because you have all these lagoons, you know, the sea and everything.
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But when it retreats, you have to create a new infrastructure, a new environment for And Uruk proves able to deal with that as well, and not just to survive, but to flourish.
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So it's a very mysterious place. As he said in his book, it's called Warka, and it's in southern Mesopotamia. It had been a frontier post of the Persian Empire back in the age of Muhammad. But when the Arabs had conquered the Persian Empire, it had effectively been abandoned. And it's a site like Ozymandias, nothing beside remains. You know, you have the lone and level sands stretching far away.
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So it's a purpose-built capital. Sargon is the first great imperial conqueror. And that poem describes the fall, not of Uruk, but of Akkad around 2000 BC. So that's 3000 years after the founding of Uruk. And the reason that that poem describes Inanna as the foundress of Akkad
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is that Sargon and his heirs had attempted to appropriate everything that Uruk was and kind of attribute it to this new upstart city of Akkad. So he describes Sargon in one inscription, describes himself as the overseer of Inanna, another as the anointed one of Anu. And it's an illustration of the way in which the path that is blazed by Uruk
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is followed by countless cities countless conquerors countless great leaders in the millennia that follow it and i guess there would be a parallel with you know the barbarians who conquer the roman empire or china once they have subdued the empires they want a bit of it this is why they've come they want the wealth they want the sophistication they want the character and the color and the mythology of these great societies but there is a difference because the debt
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519. The World's First City
that the cities of Mesopotamia, like Akkad, O to Uruk, is infinitely profounder. I mean, Uruk is the prototype, not just of a civilization like Rome or China, but of civilization itself. There has been nothing like it ever.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah. The other parallel with AI is that the real transformation is in the dimension less of hardware than of software. So in the rewiring of the brain itself. And in fact, you could say that the city is kind of like an enormous brain, a collective brain. And the existence of this brain kind of requires new ways of thinking, but it also generates new ways of thinking.
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And these new ways of thinking in turn result in new forms of social organization, of communication, and maybe just of conceptualizing the very nature of what it is to be human and how humanity relates to the broader cosmos, the broader universe.
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So these are on the technical level, the technological level. So this is hardware rather than software. And one of these is the domestication of the humble donkey, which the people of Uruk seem to have been the first to domesticate. And the stats on this are striking. So it's been estimated that a train of, say, 40 donkeys could carry almost 7,000 pounds of cargo over 20 miles a day.
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And Loftus actually says that it's the most desolate spot that he had ever visited. But he does sense that there's something important about it, something strange about it. And there absolutely is. And people who are watching this on YouTube will realize that we're not recording this at home. And we are, in fact, in Manhattan.
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And again, if you think of the parallel with Chicago, the invention of the railroads opens up vast, vast stretches of territory that the people of Chicago can now exploit. And in its own humble way, the donkey is kind of doing the same. And the other thing that seems to have been developed in Uruk is the wheel and the axle.
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And again, that's responding to a need, but it's also because you have people who would be qualified to come up with this kind of invention. You have very skilled craftsmen who can shape wheels, who can shape axles and so on. So again, it's not surprising that it's in Uruk that this kind of momentous innovation emerges.
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Well, this is much debated. There are scholars, so Agaze, he's very keen on the idea that there is a kind of colonial system that gets established. There are others who say it's largely a trading network. But again, I mean, this reminds me of debates around Britain's role as the first industrial nation.
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519. The World's First City
Is the process of industrialization what enables the colonial system to be established? Is it the other way around? Is it a bit of both?
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
And it's clear that as with Britain, so with Uruk, being the brand leader, the first to develop a way of organizing your society in a way that maximizes what you can produce, it massively opens up trade links because you can control those trade links and you then have things to sell. So
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
What is also happening in Uruk is that things like pottery, things like textiles, things like metals are being developed on a scale and with a degree of sophistication that again has never been seen ever in history. So potters in Uruk seem to have developed the potter's wheel, kilns that enable more and more pots to be developed.
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519. The World's First City
Very, very distinctive kind of pottery is made in Uruk and it's been found across, you know, in Syria, in Anatolia, even as far as what's now Pakistan. And of course, this encourages foreign communities to model themselves on Uruk. You know, a great exporting power is able to shape the tastes of those who are importing them. And in that sense, there's a kind of cultural colonialism, isn't there?
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519. The World's First City
We're in New York City, I guess, in lots of ways, the archetype of a great modern international metropolis.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah. You know, I said how it's really in the dimension of software rather than hardware that Uruk's potency is most vividly displayed. And there are two real kind of innovations in that field. So the first is in the field of what we would now call data management.
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519. The World's First City
And Uruk, and specifically the great temple to Inanna in the heart of Uruk, is home to the earliest surviving writing found anywhere in the world, if we discount that writing that we talked about in Serbia as not actually being writing.
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519. The World's First City
this essentially is where writing is invented and we can trace its evolution in some detail so those cylinder seals that i described those kind of circular tubes that you inscribe details on drawings and so on and you then roll them in clay yeah these are illustrated with kind of motifs that are starting to move towards kind of pictograms so images that are conveying
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
Quite a lot of information that will be understood by quite a broad array of bureaucrats. And then you have things that are called bullae, so little balls, little hollow clay balls. And these contain little clay tokens. And these tokens, a bit like, I suppose, items on a Monopoly board or something.
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519. The World's First City
and there is a link joining new york london tokyo beijing all the great cities of the world to this desolate spot but it's not immediately obvious just how significant a place this is and it takes a process of archaeology stretching right the way up to the present day so loftus himself he does come back he does some kind of desultory excavations and then he leaves waka And then Germans come in.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah, they are shaped to represent a kind of, you know, something that you want to sell, a commodity. So, I don't know, a roll of cloth or a pot or a jar of oil or something like that. And these are basically contracts.
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519. The World's First City
So you have an agreement, you know, if it's to deliver a load of pottery, you have a pot, you put it in this bullae, in this kind of clay ball, and then you take it to the temple, you leave it there, and then once the contract has been completed... You crack open the clay ball and the accounting tokens are removed.
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519. The World's First City
And this demonstrates that the contract has been fulfilled and the agreement can be legally terminated. Over the course of time, these various images start to evolve to become what we would recognize as writing. So they kind of evolve into, well, famously kind of wedge shaped images. So from the Latin, this comes to be called cuneiform.
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519. The World's First City
And this will be a form of writing that will endure for thousands and thousands of years. And the thing that I was as an enthusiast for literature and poetry. Yeah. The thing I always find sobering about this is you realize that literacy and writing begins not with poets. It begins not with storytellers, as I'd always imagined, but with accountants. Oh, Tom, I love this.
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519. The World's First City
And amazingly, we probably have the name of one of these accountants. So sometime in the late fourth millennium, a scribe writes a receipt. By this point, writing has developed that you can put it into writing. And this scribe wrote down 28,086 Bali, 37 months, Cushim. So what or who is Cushim?
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519. The World's First City
So Cushim could be the name of the holder of an office or a particular institution, but it's much more likely that it is an individual. And so to quote Ben Wilson, if so, Cushim is the very first person in history whose name we know. Crikey. And he's an accountant. So any accountants out there listening to this, pat yourselves on the back.
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519. The World's First City
But now, a slightly darker perspective on the role played by accountants in the emergence of urbanization. Because I said that there are these two innovations. The other one is what you can only really describe as the mass exploitation of labor.
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519. The World's First City
Well, to be discussed, yes, there is definitely slavery by this point. And we know this from another receipt that's written maybe a couple of generations after Cushim wrote that very first receipt. And it's on a tablet and it's a record of ownership. And the owner is a man called Gal Sal. Crazy name, crazy guy. Well, but the name of his male slave is even crazier. It's NPAPX.
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519. The World's First City
I mean, it's kind of like a rapper, isn't it? It's something from the future. Yeah. in PAP-X and there's a female slave called Suk Al-Gir and This is the second, you know, these are the second group of people named in history, and two of them are slaves. And it demonstrates how writing and urbanism and civilization coexists with slavery right from the beginning.
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519. The World's First City
And the reason that I said it's not just slavery, it's much broader than that. It's about the exploitation of what you might call the working classes more generally. And it reflects the fact, essentially, it seems... impossible to have a system of living as complex and vast as a city without having people who are exploited by the rich to do the dirty jobs. And they might be slaves.
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519. The World's First City
They might be, you know, people from a particular caste. They might be serfs. They might be oppressed laborers. But right from the beginning, they are there. And Algarze sums this up brilliantly and very sinisterly. So he writes, early Near Eastern villagers domesticated plants and animals. Uruks, urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.
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519. The World's First City
They're excavating here just before the First World War. They continue after that. Obviously, there have been kind of interruptions for the various Iraq wars over recent years. But the process of archaeology has revealed that Loftus' initial sense that this was a really key spot was absolutely true.
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519. The World's First City
Definitely by the end of the fourth millennium, you were starting to get images on seals in Uruk that do show kind of prisoners tethered, their hands bound up, guarded by armed soldiers, by armed warriors. But there are also native-born slaves as well. And
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519. The World's First City
Again, to quote Algarze, you get foreign and native-born captives used as labourers, and they are described by the bureaucrats, by the accountants, with age and sex categories identical to those used to describe state-owned herded animals, including various types of cattle and pigs. So you're getting humans as commodities,
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519. The World's First City
know that are on a level with livestock and in fact not just livestock but commodities more generally so in all the various texts that we have from uruk bali is the commodity that gets the most mentions 496 but the commodity that comes after that is female slaves really and you get 388 mentions of them
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519. The World's First City
And you might wonder why particularly female slaves. And I think the answer to that is the importance of the textile industry, which again is such a comparison with the industrial revolution in Britain, that the textile industry is massive in Uruk. So it's no longer really flax that they're using. They're using wool by now taken from the sheep and they need female slaves to do it, weaving the
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519. The World's First City
manufacture of commodities is seen in Mesopotamia stereotypically as the role that is played by women. And if you're going to do it on a vast scale, then effectively, it seems from the evidence, the people of Uruk felt that they needed slaves to do it. So yeah, kind of grim.
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519. The World's First City
Yes, but the development of a further kind of worrying trend, which is, of course, that by this time, so the end of the fourth millennium, when you're starting to get the evidence of transportation of captives to Uruk, you are also starting to see that the people of Uruk are no longer the single city anymore, that rivals are starting to grow. And in due course, you know, Akkad will be one of them.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah. So these great city walls are built around 3000 BC. And this seems to kind of indicate the fact that by this point, Uruk is coming under threat from rivals. And Uruk survives, you know, another 700 years after that. But when Sargon turns up in around 2300, he destroys the walls, levels them to the ground.
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519. The World's First City
And by that point, the Ayana, the great temple to Inanna, had already been leveled for reasons that nobody knows, you know, why this had happened. It seemed to have been for internal reasons, but we don't know why. And with the conquest by Sargon, Uruk basically, its ancient glory, its ancient supremacy is lost forever.
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519. The World's First City
And as you say, it is a place so full of mystery that you might say that this is one of the great mysteries in the entire story of human history.
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519. The World's First City
It remains a significant place, but the memory of its status as having been the first city is forgotten. The Mesopotamians don't remember Uruk as being the very first city. But having said that, not everything about Uruk's ancient glory is forgotten. So I'll read you lines from a poem written about Uruk.
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519. The World's First City
One square mile of city, one square mile of gardens, one square mile of clay pits, a half square mile of Inanna's dwelling, three and a half square miles is the measure of Uruk. And those are lines from Gilgamesh.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah. By Miles, the most famous of Mesopotamian poems in a great work, great epic. We have it in many different versions. And Gilgamesh doubly derives from Uruk. So first of all, he seems to have been a real person. He seems to have been a king who lived maybe around 2900. And the fact that you are now having kind of big men, big bosses, the Lugal, they're called, the big man. Right.
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519. The World's First City
So like Mayor Daly. Mayor Daly of Mesopotamia. Yeah. Yeah. So that's who Gilgamesh was. But the other way in which Gilgamesh could not have been written without Uruk is, of course, the fact that it is being written, that writing has been developed. And so what had been used for accountancy is now being used to write poetry and so on. The accountant's tool has become the poet's tool, Tom. Exactly.
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519. The World's First City
So it's not all bad. And the other thing that Gilgamesh does for the Mesopotamians into the age of Babylon and so on, is that it preserves the association of Uruk with Inanna, because Gilgamesh in the poem is often cast as the particular servant of Inanna. In fact, in the very earliest version of the poem, he comes to the rescue of Inanna's sacred tree, which is being menaced by a sinister bird.
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519. The World's First City
So that's what Gilgamesh does originally. We do like a sinister bird. We've talked about how the gifts of urbanism are dark ones. that it imposes on humanity a new way of living, which you might think maybe we'd have been better off carrying on as hunter-gatherers or whatever.
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519. The World's First City
But Inanna, right the way up to, I don't know, the age of the Persians or the Greeks or the Romans, is remembered as the goddess of pleasure. So she's not just the goddess of the arts of civilization, but of everything that makes a city fun. So Uruk is celebrated as a place of festivals, of singing and dancing.
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519. The World's First City
And I'll just finish by quoting from Gwendolyn Lyke on this aspect of Uruk, the role that Inanna plays in her mythology. Inanna, Gwendolyn Lyke writes, stands for the erotic potential of city life. which is set apart from the strict social control of the tribal community or the village.
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519. The World's First City
She frequents the taverns and alehouses where men could meet single women, and she is said to prowl the streets of Kulab in search of sexual adventure. Copulation in the streets was apparently a normal and joyful event, And young people sleeping in their own chambers is singled out in a late poem as a most worrying state of affairs.
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519. The World's First City
And so I guess you could say of a rook that maybe there are worse things to be remembered for.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah, because it's the site for one of the, if not the, greatest turning points in the whole history of human civilization. So, what is it about Waqqa that makes it so significant? There are two dimensions to it. The first is, it is incredibly old. I said that it gets abandoned in the age of Muhammad, so around a few generations after the Arab conquest, so about AD 700.
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519. The World's First City
But we now know that the origins of this place stretch all the way back to 5,000 BC. So it's been continuously inhabited for almost 6,000 years. And we now know that it was a place originally called Uruk, but you can see that, you know, Waka Uruk, it's clearly the same place now.
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519. The World's First City
But the other thing about it, it's not just that it's old, but that it is by the standards of every other settlement, say around 4,000 or 3,000 BC, it is enormous. So imagine you are approaching this place, Uruk, in 3000 BC. And what do you see? As you approach it, you are surrounded by canals, by irrigation systems, by fields. The fields are full of crops. They're also full of livestock.
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519. The World's First City
As you draw nearer to it, you then see something that you would see nowhere else on the face of the planet at this time. And it is a thing of wonder. And there are writers later from Uruk who will praise it in these terms. This fastness thrusting high above the Asia plain around, this city sprouting tall from earth to sea, this Uruk whose very name gleams like the rainbow.
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519. The World's First City
Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
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519. The World's First City
Everything about it is hyperbole. It is the wonder of the world. There are vast city walls. So these are the walls that Loftus sees.
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519. The World's First City
They're about 23, 24 feet tall, six miles in circumference. Within the walls, as you approach it, you can see that there are two towering temples. The first of these is called the Ayana, which literally means the house of heaven. And it is sacred to the goddess who, in the opinion of the people of Uruk, founded the city.
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519. The World's First City
And this is a goddess called Inanna, who the Babylonians subsequently would call Ishtar. Great, powerful civilization bringing goddesses. The other temple is a temple to the great sky god Anu, and this is sheathed in gleaming white plaster. It's radiant. It catches the lights of the sun. So that's what the meaning of the phrase gleaming like the rainbow.
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519. The World's First City
Again, a stupefying sight if you've never seen anything like this. You then go in through the gates. You're surrounded by market gardens. So, you know, dates and various things like that. There are industrial zones, so brickmaking factories, potteries, all this kind of stuff. And then you go into the actual city itself. And it is, again, I mean, this is a place that...
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519. The World's First City
It has no comparison anywhere. It's cramped. It's labyrinthine. The houses have no windows so that it keeps the heat out, so it remains cool even in the heat of summer. And these are carefully zoned districts, so a lot of thought has gone into the urban planning. The population may be as high as 80,000. I mean, 80,000 people concentrated in a single space.
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519. The World's First City
And the total area of the city within the city walls is about three square miles. And just for a point of comparison, The walls of Imperial Rome in its heyday, so around AD 200, contained an area only twice that size.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah. This is where urbanism begins. This is where the story that culminates in the city we're in now, New York, this is where it starts. And in the fourth millennium, to quote Gwendolyn Lyke, who wrote a book called Mesopotamia, tellingly the subtitle is The Invention of the City, I mean, she describes it as being the only really large urban center in the fourth millennium.
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519. The World's First City
And so the question then is, how did Uruk begin and why was it Uruk? Why was it this particular place? And the arguments around it and the fascination of this kind of puzzle actually remind me of the arguments that people have about why industrialization began in Britain.
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519. The World's First City
There are lots of places that you might think of where industrialization could have happened and they don't. So why does it specifically happen in Britain? And likewise, why does urbanization happen in Uruk? And then there is a further question, a further mystery, which is how does this process of urbanization change humanity?
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519. The World's First City
Because if this is the first experience in history of people living together in a city, does it change what it is to be human? Does it kind of rewire the brain? Does it set up patterns of behavior and social intercourse that have no precedent when Uruk is built, but which we now take for granted? So it's just such an amazing story, I think.
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519. The World's First City
Yeah, so Mesopotamia is part of the Fertile Crescent, but the Fertile Crescent consists of more than Mesopotamia. So you've also got the uplands of Anatolia, what's now Turkey. You've got Syria going down into Israel, Palestine. And the thing about the Fertile Crescent is that it has an incredible array of soil types, of variations of climate, of altitude.
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
So that means that there are lots of different crops, lots of different plants growing. And this is the home of... Lots of different varieties of wheat. You get barley, you get lentils, peas, you get flax, which of course is quite useful for making clothing. But also, as well as plant life, you also have fauna.
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
And you'll remember, we talked about this in the context of the Aztecs, as why the Americas do not develop in the way that Eurasia does. They don't have draft animals. And also they don't have animals that they can domesticate. So the ancestors of sheep, of goats, of cows, of pigs, all of which are part of human agriculture today. I mean, this again, this is where it begins.
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519. The World's First City
And if you're a hunter-gatherer, if you're kind of roaming around, and then you find a spot where there's wild wheat growing, and also you have herds of animals, then why would you continue roaming? You might as well kind of settle down and enjoy the fruits of nature. And that is what people do start to do very, very early on. And these camps then start to become kind of settled communities.
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519. The World's First City
So probably the oldest, certainly the most famous of these kind of hunter-gatherer camps that become a permanent settlement is Jericho
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519. The World's First City
It's the oldest continuously inhabited because it's a city to this day. It's not initially what we would call a city. It shows there are kind of developments that will become features of urbanism. So Jericho, people first settled there about 11,000 years ago. And by about 9,000 BC, you've got reliable winter rains, you've got productive harvests and abundant wild game.
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519. The World's First City
So these are the words of Stephen Mithin in his book, After the Ice. And he says the Jericho people had no need to leave. And they start to build walls and they even build a tower. And Mithin says that such architecture was completely unprecedented in human history. So there is kind of foreshadowings of urbanism there. But it doesn't become a city. There's no urban liftoff.
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519. The World's First City
It's just a large village. I mean, in due course, it will become a city, but not for many, many thousands of years in the future. And this is true of other settlements as well across the Fertile Crescent that are kind of starting to sprout up in a similar way to Jericho. There's a very famous one called Chattel Hayuk. In Turkey, maybe about 5,000 inhabitants there.
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519. The World's First City
So this is in the 7th millennium. It seems to be quite an oppressive place. They love a skull. They do. I think you get the sense that the people living there, I mean, they're menaced all the time by a sense of the supernatural around them. So not, I think, a particularly pleasant place to live. Yeah, like New York. Yeah, but that doesn't take off.
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519. The World's First City
And there is also, down in Mesopotamia, you're also starting to get these kind of proto-cities, large villages developing, both in the north and the south of Mesopotamia. So an example of a city in the north is a place called Tel Brak in what's now Syria. Merges about the same time as Chattel Hayuk, so the 7th millennium.
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519. The World's First City
And by the fourth millennium, it seems to be ready for liftoff, rather like you might say the Netherlands is ready to industrialize in the 17th century, but it doesn't. It remains basically a large village. And then by the end of the fourth millennium, it goes into remission. It's kind of contracting, it's disintegrating, it's collapsing.
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
But this is the very time down in southern Mesopotamia that Uruk is starting to enjoy takeoff. So to quote Guillermo Algaze, and I hope I've pronounced his name right. It might be Algaze, but I'll call him Algaze, who's written a book, Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization.
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519. The World's First City
And he puts it in this way, a decisive shift in favor of Southern Mesopotamia of the balance of urbanization, sociopolitical complexity, and economic differentiation that had existed across the ancient East until the onset of the fourth millennium. So something is happening in southern Mesopotamia, the place where Uruk will emerge, that is happening nowhere else.
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519. The World's First City
Hadn't happened in Syria, hadn't happened in Palestine, hadn't happened in Anatolia, hadn't happened in northern Mesopotamia. So why? So, I mean, this is obviously a fascinating, very, very pressing question. And so there have been lots of very broad brush theories about it. And the earliest theories were that Uruk, where it emerges, that it's the result of conquest by outsiders.
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519. The World's First City
And these outsiders have been called the Sumerians. And the analogy that is often pursued is with the emergence of where we are today, Manhattan, over the course of the 17th into the 18th century, because there had to be no sign of urbanization here. And then with the coming of European colonists, you start to get the city that we're now sitting in.
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
So is this proof that the Sumerians had come and they had founded, planted this great city in the middle of nowhere? But that's not really an answer because it's just kicking the problem down the can down the road because where did the Sumerians get the idea for urbanism from? It doesn't really answer the puzzle.
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519. The World's First City
And also recent archaeology, so over recent decades, has demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt that there were no newcomers, that the people we call the Sumerians were very, very anciently rooted there. The parallels of the culture of Uruk are easily traceable to the archaeological remains that precede the emergence of Uruk. So that theory is no longer accepted.
The Rest Is History
519. The World's First City
And then there's another theory, which I think is probably on the popular level. It's one that lots of people, I think, would probably assume is the explanation. And that is that although Mesopotamia is very fertile, it's also quite difficult to channel that fertility. You know, you've got these two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Sure, yes. So obviously for Beethoven, Vienna is much more foreign than it is for Mozart. It's the capital of the Habsburg dynasty. It is at this point by far the biggest German-speaking city in Europe, with about a quarter of a million people, so that's twice as big as Berlin. It's a city at war. So from 1792, Austria is at war on and off for the next 22 years or so.
The Rest Is History
527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
It's twice occupied by the French. There are stories about Beethoven literally sheltering under his bedclothes as the shells are kind of raining down overhead. And also, of course, for him, it's the city of Mozart. And when he arrives, Mozart has been dead for a year. And people are already saying, who is going to be the next Mozart?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
You have a sense, I think, that if the next Mozart doesn't exist, they're going to invent him anyway. And very soon after Beethoven's arrival, they say, call off the search. We have found him. In fact, after his first year, his teacher, Joseph Haydn, wrote to the Elector of Cologne, and he said, he will be one of the greatest artists in Europe, and I will be proud to call myself his teacher.
The Rest Is History
527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And the lovely thing is that is exactly what Tom's teachers used to say about James Holland. Sorry, Tom. Sorry. No, I'm used to this.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Four long years. Now, he can't just be Mozart because the context has changed. For example, the way you make music is changing. Beethoven literally has different instruments to play with. For example, pianos that have a much greater range and a richer sound. So if you've wondered why Beethoven might sound different from Mozart, that's one of the reasons.
The Rest Is History
527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But even more importantly, I think, the way you make money from music has changed. So until this point, as Tom was describing in the first half, most musicians depended on an aristocratic household. So Beethoven's teacher, Haydn, depended on the Esterházy family. He lived at the Esterházy Palace over the border in Hungary. He was dressed in Esterházy livery as effectively a servant.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
He was a servant. But Beethoven moves in a new world. Beethoven is supported by a whole range of different aristocratic patrons, not as a servant, but as a kind of business client. So a good example of this is one of his first great patrons, who is a bloke called Prince Lichnowsky.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
They did indeed. It's a bit like our Restless History tours. And Lichnowsky offered Beethoven an annual allowance plus board and lodging, and Beethoven said, yes, but on the condition that I'm absolutely not coming as a servant. I'm coming as somebody who is almost an equal of yours. In other words, Beethoven is very, very protective of his status and his independence.
The Rest Is History
527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
There's a very famous episode in 1808 So Napoleon Bonaparte, not a friend of the rest is history, has set up his brother Jerome as the king of Westphalia. And to bolster his regime, a bit like a kind of Saudi billionaire with a football club, he wants to get a star player. And the star player he has in mind is Beethoven.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
He offers him a massive salary to come and be his kapellmeister, his director of music. And Beethoven tells everybody this in Vienna. Of course he does. He wants a counteroffer. And he gets one. Three of his patrons, Archduke Rudolf, Prince Kinski, and Prince Lobkowitz, club together, and they offer Beethoven an amazing deal.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
4,000 florins a year for the rest of his life if he stays in Vienna, and he doesn't even have to write another note. The contract says this is in recognition of his extraordinary genius as a musician and a composer. They want to liberate him from the mundane cares of earning a living so that he can get on with writing works that ennoble the arts.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Now, nobody had ever done this for a composer before, a deal of this magnitude. And it means that Beethoven has more security and more freedom, arguably, than any composer who has ever lived to this point. He doesn't have to work to order. And this obviously goes to his head a little bit. His status, his independence means so much to him. There are two wonderful stories that illustrate this.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So one in 1806. He goes with his mate, Prince Lichnowsky, for a country weekend. There are a lot of officers staying there as well. And Prince Lichnowsky says to Beethoven, Ludwig, I would like you to play the piano for these guests. And that's how Prince Lichnowsky spoke. And Beethoven says, I'm not in the mood. I don't want to play. I don't want to play on cue. They have a massive row.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And afterwards, Beethoven says to Prince Lichnowsky, listen, yes, you're a prince, but you are a prince because of an accident of birth. It's very figurative. Very figurative. I am who I am because of what I have done. There are thousands of princes and there always will be. But there is and there only ever will be one Beethoven.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Then, 1812, it's the kind of thing that I have to put up with from you. 1812, Beethoven and the German writer Goethe are strolling arm in arm through the park.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
It's just like us. Kensington Gardens, before this show. Exactly, exactly. And they see coming towards them the Emperor Francis I and his son, the Archduke. And Goethe goes to get out of the way and to bow. And Beethoven supposedly says to him, what are you doing? We don't make room for them. They will make room for us.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And whether or not these stories are true doesn't really matter, because what they tell you is about the image of Beethoven and the conception of him, his own conception of himself, not as a servant, but as a star. I think he's probably the first composer who genuinely believes that every note that he writes will be played for as long as people are making music. So every work really matters.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
These are not throwaway commissions. They're expressions of his soul, his intellect, his genius. You can look at the number of symphonies he wrote. Mozart wrote 41. Haydn wrote 104. Beethoven wrote just nine. Because to him, this wasn't just entertainment. It wasn't something that you listened to while people were playing cards. This was art. This was serious.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So it was first performed in 1804. It's twice as long as any of Mozart's symphonies. Everybody agreed that it was extraordinary, a work of genius. But people also said, many of them, that it was too long, that it was too loud.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Like the General Custer series, exactly. Tom, there were mugs then and there are mugs now. But they all recognised it was a work of genius, right?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
I mean, that's what matters. And people said of the Third Symphony, this is so radical, so glaring. It is a work of anarchy. And of course, this has a political dimension, because at the time, the Austrians are fighting against people that they believe represent the forces of anarchy.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Yeah, it's a little bit more complicated. Is it?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
That's astonishing. So, at first, Beethoven was sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, and he was fascinated by the figure of Napoleon, a self-made man who blazed like a comet across the sky of Europe. And originally, a very famous story, he was going to dedicate this third symphony, the Eroica, to Napoleon.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But then, in December 1804, he heard that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor. And he said, what? He's just another politician. He will sacrifice the rights of man on the altar of his ambition. He will become a tyrant. He wasn't wrong, Tom. And he rips the manuscript in two, and he scratches out the dedication to Bonaparte on the first page. So no dedication to Napoleon. But good news.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Tom, we are and we always have been a patriotic podcast. And I'm very pleased to say that Beethoven never wrote a piece called Napoleon, but he did write one about the Duke of Wellington. And this is famously terrible, isn't it? Well, I mean, it's patriotic, but you've got to be honest. Why does he hate Britain? This was called Wellington's Sieg, Wellington's Victory.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
He wrote it in 1813 to celebrate our brave boys' victories in the Peninsular War. Tom, you'll be pleased to hear that it incorporates both Rule Britannia and God Save the King. So the EU went for Beethoven's Ninth, and they could have had that. Absolutely madness. How different history would have been. You don't hear this, but the rest is politics. Anyway...
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
The following year, 1814, Napoleon is temporarily booted out to Elba. Vienna explodes in celebrations and festivities. There are balls, there are receptions. This is Beethoven's most successful year. It's the year in which he makes most money. It is the year in which his pieces are performed more than any other. And it is now that he stages the final version
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
of his one and only opera, which is called Fidelio.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
is is
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
O'er the land of the free O'er the land of the free O'er the land of the free
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Haltet euch zurück!
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Now, as you've been listening to this episode, you might have noticed that this episode had something a little extra special, didn't it, Tom?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And if you were there, you will remember how absolutely extraordinary their performance was. We are thrilled to have them featured on this episode. And frankly, we're even more thrilled to be able to make that recording of that event open free to everybody in the podcast who wasn't able to attend in person.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Surprise, surprise, it's more complicated than that. So, Beethoven had been working on Fidelio for years, and he got the idea from a French play about a bloke who's rescued from prison by his wife. But it seems pretty likely that the French play is actually set during the Terror, and this bloke may be an aristocrat.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And I think the politics of Fidelio may be a little bit more complicated, more conservative, maybe, than people think. So remember, this is taking place, this premiere, in Vienna in 1814, in an atmosphere of conservatism, of reaction. The old order has won. And at the end of Fidelio, When the hero gets his freedom, he doesn't get it because the mob has stormed the prison, not at all.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
He gets it because of the intervention of the kind-hearted, benevolent governor, effectively the emperor. In other words, this is a victory for the old order. It's the old order that has prevailed. And the freedom that the opera is celebrating, Tom,
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
In 1814, those first audiences in Vienna, to them it's freedom from the war, freedom from the tyranny of Napoleon, freedom from the despotism of the French. The despotism of the French.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Yes. Exactly, exactly. But I think there's another aspect of Fidelio that is actually more interesting.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Some of Beethoven's biographers suggest that this picture of this bloke who's locked up in a prison, cut off from the outside world, is a kind of nightmarish self-portrait, because as many of you will know, at the time that Fidelio goes on stage, Beethoven has been going deaf for probably at least 12 years, the cruelest punishment possible for a composer.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Now, his deafness probably starts at the end of the 1790s, when he's in his late 20s, We don't know really what caused it. We do know that in the summer of 1802, he went to a place called Heiligenstadt for the summer, and he wrote a letter to his brothers, explaining, apologizing for his horrendous form in recent months.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And he said, listen, the truth is, I'm losing my hearing, and that one day I will be cut off from the outside world. I'll have to live like an exile in my own head. And he says, I've thought about ending it all, about ending this wretched existence, but it was my art that held me back. It seemed impossible to me to leave this world until I'd written all the works that I was capable of.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And that brings us back to something that's been running through this story from the very beginning of the show, which is the idea of art as something special and something sacred, dare I say sacral, Tom? Go for it. It is art that saves us, that gives our lives meaning.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And this, of course, becomes one of the foundational ideas of Romanticism, the idea that art is the supreme good, the summit of human existence, that it is art that makes life worth living. Now, of course, that's not much consolation to poor Beethoven who is losing his hearing. His hearing, in fact, gets worse and worse.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
By 1814, the year of Fidelio, if you sit down to listen to something and it's Ludwig van Beethoven playing the piano, you know you're not in for a brilliant evening because he can't tell if it's been tuned properly and he also can't tell if he's making mistakes. So actually at the end of the year, he gives up playing in public and at this point he starts carrying these conversation books.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So when he meets you in the street and you're talking to him, you have to write down in the book what you're saying. So, sad to say, by the mid-1810s, Beethoven has, to some extent, ended up in that dungeon. Now, he had a very unhappy and lonely love life. Some of you may know that he wrote a letter to a woman that he called his immortal beloved. It's a great film, Gary Oldman.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Which he made into a Gary Oldman film, exactly. In which he said, you know, you're the love of my life, but we can never be together. And we don't really know, again, who that was. His family life was a nightmare. For a lot of the 1810s, he's locked in this dreadful custody battle over his nephew, Carl. In 1820, he turned 50. And by this point, I think he's a very disconsolate figure, Beethoven.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
When he goes out, he's very scruffy and distracted. At one point, the Viennese police arrested him for being a tramp. And part of the problem, of course, is they're talking to him, and he can't hear what they're saying. It's a bit of a problem. But the weird thing is that all this is actually great news for the Beethoven brand.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
because it perfectly captures the ethos of the Romantic age, the idea of a lonely hero who is battling with his demons in a kind of spiritual exile. Now, all the time, Beethoven is still making music. He is making music that is more demanding, more challenging than ever before.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Some people say it's too challenging, so you have a sense of an emerging breach between the masses, who like the kind of fun, easy operas that are coming from Italy, and the connoisseurs, who think that if it's difficult, that means it must be profound. And Beethoven himself was in no doubt about who he was writing for. He said, I don't write for the masses.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
I write for people who are cultured, like you. But even though people find his stuff very difficult, they never doubt that Beethoven is a star. And by the 1820s, he really does have a brand. People are painting his portrait. They're making busts of him.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Images of Beethoven are going all over Europe, and they're appealing to people who had never really existed before in the history of classical music. They're not admirers. They're not supporters. They're not patrons.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Yeah, absolutely. And I think part of the reason for this is that Beethoven's image perfectly fits the demands of the times. This is a conservative age, an age of reaction. So people love the idea of tradition. They love the idea of Beethoven as the culmination of a tradition that began with Mozart and Haydn. But what's more, his German-ness is really important.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
The French Revolution was a foundational moment in the history of German-ness. That moment when French troops crossed the Rhine is when modern German identity is born. So people are looking for a German hero, and Beethoven perfectly fits the bill. But all the time, his health is getting worse,
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
By the end of 1826, he's got pneumonia, he's got jaundice, he's got liver issues, and of course he can barely hear anything at all. But apart from that, he's doing fine. Yeah. Apart from that, he's in great form. Now, we described his final days earlier, the presents and the wine and whatnot.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But sad to say, on the 26th of March, 1827, in the middle of a tremendous thunderstorm, he takes his final breath. And it is said that at the very end, he opens his eyes, he lifts his right hand to heaven, he clenches his fist. And then he collapses, the artist defiant to the end.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
It's almost as if we'd scripted it. And as we said before, his death was an extraordinary public occasion. People were literally queuing up to take snippets of hair from his head to wear in lockets around their necks like religious relics. Now, there was a very revealing eulogy at the cemetery gates, and it was made by Vienna's greatest playwright, a man called Franz Grillparzer.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Tom, are you familiar with his work?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Well, Grillparzer in the eulogy did not mention God at all. Extraordinary. He mentioned only the gods of music and art. He was an artist, he said of Beethoven. That's how he spoke again. That's how all Germans speak when they're talking about art, Tom. And all that was his was his through art alone. He was an artist and who shall arise to stand beside him? Who indeed?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And this, I think, was Beethoven's greatest legacy. You talked about Mozart as a genius. I think what Beethoven, rather, creates is the idea of the Artist with a capital A, the individual who suffers and overcomes, the martyr, the man who stands alone from the masses, somebody whose work, like mine, is long and difficult and therefore profound.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Tom, he can see things and hear things that you and I can't. Well, he can't actually hear them, can he? I mean, that's the whole point. No, that's true. We'll always have that over Beethoven, won't we? So let us end with the passage that for many people represents the climax of Beethoven's genius.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Beethoven began his Ninth Symphony in 1822, and at its heart is Friedrich Schiller's Ode to Joy, which he'd first written in 1785, a kind of hymn to Enlightenment values. As always, it's a complicated story. Wow. Schiller... Schiller was horrified by the excesses of the French Revolution. He was horrified by the execution of the king and the terror.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And he actually toned down his original Ode to Joy to make it less radical, to make it more conservative. And this is the version that Beethoven used. But my favorite story about the Ode to Joy and about the Ninth Symphony is one that many of you will know. Lots of you who know the story of Beethoven will know this story.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Because when the symphony was first performed in 1824, Beethoven stood at the front, waving his arms next to the conductor, even though he could not hear a note. And when it was all over, he couldn't hear the applause behind him. And very gently, the singer Carolina Unger turned him round so that he could see but not hear the standing ovation.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And Tom, let's be honest, it's hard to admit it, but we would be nothing without our own aristocratic sponsors. So a huge thank you to Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, the Habsburg emperors of our hearts.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you to our Viennese aristocratic patrons, the brilliant Tabby Syrett and Anoushka Lewis, and to our Parisian friend, the peerless Theo Young-Smith, and all of their colleagues at Goldhanger Podcast.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thee, O men, thee, O Israel, the world, thou givest.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you for watching.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
© BF-WATCH TV 2021
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Absolutely.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
When I wrote that joke, I knew you would laugh. So, Tom, you ended with Mozart's death and funeral in 1791. No great send-off, a slightly lackluster occasion. And let's start by fast-forwarding three decades to March 1827, to the death and funeral of his great successor Ludwig van Beethoven. And it's a completely different scene. As Beethoven lies dying, also in Vienna,
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Presents, cash, cakes are coming in from all over Europe. Beethoven's last recorded words greet the arrival from Mainz of a case of his favorite Rhineland wine. And his last words were, pity, pity, too late. And then he died. And when he did die on the evening of the 26th of March, it was the news story of the year.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So when they held the funeral three days later, crowds had gathered outside Beethoven's apartment. There was a choir outside to see him off. The schools were all given the day off. On the way to the church and then to the cemetery, the crowds were so thick, it took them ages to pass through.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And all the way, some of the best-known people in Vienna were holding a kind of torch-lit parade, most famously, the young composer Franz Schubert. So clearly, something had changed since the death of Mozart, and a lot of that has to do with Beethoven himself. So many of you, I guess, will already have an idea of Beethoven in your mind.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
The wild hair, the ferocious frowning expression, the unkempt appearance, the papers falling from his pocket. An intellectual, an artist. Mozart is fun, and Beethoven is serious. That's the stereotype.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And I think this is really important because I think it is Beethoven, more than anybody else, who invents this idea of the creator, the artistic genius, as a lonely, difficult, unhappy, but brilliant man, a bit like Tom. Now, One difference between Beethoven and Mozart, obviously, is that Beethoven is not Austrian. Beethoven is German. He was born in Bonn in the west of Germany in December 1770.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Bonn was a small town that belonged to the electorate of Cologne. And music was the family business. Beethoven's father was a singer, but his alcoholism stymied his career. Now, as with Mozart, his father pushed him ferociously. He started giving him regular keyboard lessons when Ludwig was just five. He would make him practice until he cried. He would make him practice until midnight.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And he would beat him when Ludwig made a mistake. And did it work?
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
No. No. It didn't, because although Ludwig was clearly very good, he wasn't a prodigy on the scale of Mozart. When he reached the age of 10, he was still barely known within his own town. Nobody effectively had noticed him on a continental scale. But then, at the age of 11, he got a new piano teacher, a massively important figure in his life, who rejoiced in the name of Christian Gottlob Nefer.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And Nefer was a Protestant. The Beethovens were Catholics. And Nefer was tied in to the Enlightenment. So he was full of ideas about reason and virtue and reform, full of the writings of Voltaire and Kant. And he passes these on to the young Beethoven. Now, through his Enlightenment enthusiasms, Nefer is very well connected. And one of his friends is a chap called Count Ferdinand Waldstein.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
who lives in Bonn and is very friendly with the Elector. And it's Waldstein who gets Ludwig a job playing the organ for the Elector. They think this is tremendous. They have great ambitions for Ludwig. In 1787, when he's 16 years old, they send him to the city of music, to Vienna. And there, legend tells, he meets the great man. He meets Mozart.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And the story runs that Mozart got him to play the piano. Ludwig played, improvising brilliantly. And Mozart stood there impassively. And when the last note died away, Mozart said nothing. He just went into the next room where his friends were sitting. And he said to them, keep an eye on that young man. One day, he will give the world something to talk about.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And do you think that actually happened? I think that happened. And that's how he spoke. That is just how he spoke. Well, maybe it did happen, maybe it didn't, but the fact the story exists at all... Yeah, that's the important thing, right? The fact the story exists at all is proof of how desperate people were to see a connection between them. But that first trip didn't last long.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So Beethoven came home after two weeks because his mother was ill. But then in the autumn of 1792, he came back to Vienna for good. Why? Because the French Revolution had broken out. French armies were rampaging across the map of Europe, spreading perturbation and despair. The court fled Bonn. Bonn was no longer safe, and Beethoven was sent to Vienna.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Now, of course, by this point, Mozart was dead. So Beethoven is going to study with that other great Austrian composer, Josef Haydn. And before he left, Count Waldstein wrote him a note. Mozart, he said, is dead. But Mozart's genius is still alive and is in mourning. And it is waiting for somebody. It is waiting for you. And from Haydn, you will receive the spirit of Mozart.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And so off he goes to Vienna, the city where he will compose his greatest works.
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527. Beethoven: Napoleon and the Music of War LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
so so
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Now, we'll come back later in this episode to this side of things. But basically, for 200 years, this has been the kind of wild east of the Viking world. They've got all this network of forts and towns and so on. They're going all the way down the rivers into Ukraine towards the Black Sea and Constantinople, which is obviously the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And Olaf has taken shelter, probably in Kiev, with the Grand Prince Yaroslav of Kiev, who's basically of Scandinavian descent.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So Olaf has been gone for two years. And then in the spring of 1030, a dramatic twist, one of many in the story, word reaches Norway that Olaf is on his way back. He's got about 200 warriors who are kind of Slav mercenaries and Norwegian exiles.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It's a phrase that you definitely want to be using on a podcast. When you're talking about Slav mercenaries, you're living the dream. So he goes back and he arrives in Sweden. And the Swedish king, who's called Onund Jakob, he gives him some more men. And then he recruits some more troops in Sweden, some more Norwegian exiles and so on. And so Olaf has this force of about 2,500 men. And then...
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Harold, his younger brother, turns up. So Harold, at this point, is about 15 or 16 years old. Please, brother, may I fight with you? I think his voice broke when he was about eight. Oh, maybe when he was three, playing with his Viking ships. I imagine he's pretty formidable. Massively hairy? I think it's more he's got a mane of blonde hair, so he tosses in the wind.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
I hope one day, brother, to have a moustache like yours. LAUGHTER And he will. Well, he will. Well, hold on. Hold on, actually. I can't believe I didn't read this out. Snorri Sturluson says at this point he was very stout and manly as though full grown. As though full grown, Dominic. Yeah, but very stout and manly. What, so he's fat?
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
No, because stout in these days... So Olaf the Stout is not that he's fat. It's actually that he's sort of sturdy. Like me. So... Right. Harald has raised a couple of hundred men from the uplands of central Norway. He's crossed the mountain spine of Scandinavia and he's gone down to Sweden to meet his brother. So they all assemble... And then they decide they'll set off back to Norway.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And they're hoping to get more recruits as they go. And they cross the spine again through the passes into the Norwegian uplands. Now, there are some accounts, because this is the age of Christianization, that say that Olaf forced recruits to be baptized and he made them paint white crosses on their shields. We must depend on God. Only with his power and mercy should we gain victory.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And I cannot have pagan men in my army. But actually, most of the historians' accounts that I've read of this say this is probably nonsense. That actually this is a back projection by later Christian chroniclers. And that actually, almost certainly, it's a mixture of all kinds of random people in this army at this point.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Oh, they do. I'm not saying that he doesn't shout about Christ and have a cross. What I'm saying is his very ragtag army, I don't think it has the quality of a crusade.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah. Anyway. They come down into the height of summer, 1030, and they come down into the most fertile bit of Norway, which is called the Trondelag, and surround the city that we now know as Trondheim, which at the time was called Nidaros. And they're going through this valley, and at the end of the valley is the village of Stiklestad, Stikler's Farm.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And this is the setting for this great battle, probably the most famous battle in Norwegian history. I don't know how many Norwegian listeners we have, but they'll be very excited about this. And as they advance down this valley, they see at the end a huge army waiting for them.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So this army, their enemies, these are A, Canute loyalists, and B, basically local farmers and local peasants who hate Olaf. And they are horrified that all these Slav mercenaries have turned up and they're about to pillage their lands and sort of, you know, attack their families and stuff.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
I think they've disappeared from the story completely. Gothorm and Halfdan. I don't think they've turned out. No, no, no.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
They wouldn't, but they're actually too busy tending their crops, Tom. They've got no time for this kind of nonsense. Now, in the sagas, there are some absolutely splendid people involved in the enemy army. So the head of it, the head of this kind of loyalist army, is a local strongman called Kalf Arneson, who's a sort of Canute loyalist.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Then there's a bloke called Thorstein the Shipwright, and he has a grudge against Olaf because Olaf confiscated a ship from him as punishment for murdering somebody. Snorri Sturluson says that Thorstein the shipwright was, quote, very ardent and a skilled killer of men. That's nice. Which is nice.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
But by far the most terrifying person who you mentioned in that wonderful reading at the beginning of the show is this guy who's called Thorir the Hound. And Thorir the Hound, I'm sure he existed. He's a warlord from the northern coast of Norway. So he's been in touch with the Sami people. And he's wreathed in mystery and magic. He's a sorcerer as well as a hound.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, I really, really like it. This bloke bears it out. He's wearing a Sami cloak of 12 reindeer skins with, and I quote, so much magic that no weapon could pierce them. And if people doubt that... We will have evidence for it later on in this story. He's got good medicine. He's also got a magic spear. He's got a magic spear, and he said, I will use this magic spear to kill Olaf.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Now, they outnumber Olaf's men four to one, and they are absolutely pumped. They are gagging for battle. Kalf Arneson, he raises his banner, and he addresses his men, and he says... He who does not fight bravely today shall be held a worthless coward. Spare none, for they will not spare you. Now Olaf, who's massively outnumbered, he raises his banner. You mention it in the reading.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
The Sea Serpent. He unsheathes his sword, which is called Hnitir, Striker. And he gives his own speech. Of course he does. And he says, They may have more men, but it is fate that decides victory, not numbers. I swear that I will not flee from this fight. I will triumph or I will die. Argh! And all his men assemble.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It's got his great lieutenant standing at his side, who obviously is called Bjorn the Bear. He's there. Doesn't Bjorn mean bear? Yeah. Well, yeah, it's just a tautology. But I mean, you know, it's there to... Don't forget the Slav mercenaries there. They might not know that, Tom. Yeah, fair enough. So it needs to be explained.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It's also got a kind of Lancelot character who's called Roggenvald Bruceson, who's the son of the Earl of Orkney. You're a big fan of Orkney, aren't you?
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
you know, deep into the Middle Ages. So he's there, Rogenwald, and everyone should remember him because he'll be important in this story. But Harold, what about Harold? Olaf says, I do not think my brother Harold should be in the battle for he is still a child.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Certainly I should be in the battle for I am not too weak to handle a sword. And if necessary, you can tie my hand to the hilt. That's what he says. He's stout and manly.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
He did not speak like that. So anyway, this is the first time that he comes out with one of his poems in the face of death. He says, um, my arm is wing. Well, I shall stand. I will hold good with heart and hand. My mother's eye shall joy to see a battered bloodstained shield from me. That's great. There's no doubt. I think in any listener's mind that this absolutely happened. Um,
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So at about one o'clock, according to the sagas, these two lines advance on each other. Thorough the Hound is shouting. Olaf is shouting. They're kind of the tension mounts. It's very Bernard Cornwell. And then the two lines crash together and sort of try to work out from the sagas, which, as we said, written much later with masses of kind of fictionalization and back projection.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, so Tom, we've done a lot of great characters and the rest is history, but I think Howard Hardrada has a claim to be the most exciting. Certainly his life is the most dramatic and unexpected. So you and I, when we studied 1066 at school, yeah, Howard Hardrada is really an exciting supporting character, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Olaf's men are almost certainly more skilled, more experienced than all these farmers and peasants. So when the sagas say they made initial headway, that's very plausible. But over time, the sheer weight of numbers four to one tells against them. So in King Harald's saga, which is part of a big cycle called Heimskringla, says, the peasant army pushed on from all quarters.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Those in front hewed down with their swords, those behind thrust with their spears, and those in the rear shot arrows, cast spears, and threw stones, hand axes, or sharp stakes. Soon many men began to fall. So in other words, Olaf is very embattled. And Harold. And then, remember you said, Tom, the heavens proclaimed their verdict.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
as is oddly so often the way in decisive battles in history, guess what happens? There is a total eclipse. So we're told the saga say the sky and sun became red and then as black as night. And to read from a thrilling version of this story for younger readers, blood-curdling roars rose from the peasant army. The gods had spoken. The king must die.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Now they surged forward, emboldened, triumphant, closing in on their former master, their faces twisted with demonic rage. That also definitely happened. So a very prosaic version of what happens next is basically the peasant armies, whether the initial surge,
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Olaf is outnumbered, his men are cut down, his standard bearer is cut down, drops the sea serpent banner, the morale breaks, people start running, and at some point Olaf himself is slaughtered among the piles of bodies. But the sagas tell a very exciting story. So basically all boils down to this duel between Olaf and Thorir the Hound.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
He lands this fantastic blow on Thorir, he slashes at him, but... Thorir is wearing that sami reindeer skin coat. It was as dust flew from this coat and Olaf's sword just glances off it. And then Thorstein, the shipwright, hacks at Olaf's leg with his axe. Olaf falls over a boulder, which apparently you can still see on the field, called Olaf's Stone. And you were driving very near the site.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
You opted not to go and look at it. I just don't like stones. I find them very dull. I find them disappointing. And also, I had a brilliant image in my mind of this battle. Yeah, you didn't want to be disappointed. I didn't want to be disappointed by some prosaic stone. Anyway, Thoreau the Hound, remember, he's got a magic spear. He plunges it up through Olaf's male shirt into his chest.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And then Kalf Arneson hits him in the neck.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
He's one of the three contenders in the great Game of Thrones, arrives suddenly in the middle of 1066. He crosses the North Sea, he leads an army into York, and then he faces Harold Goldwinson in this sort of thrilling showdown at Stamford Bridge.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah. A Viking would know that, though. They wouldn't need to be told.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It would be a reassurance. You're right. That's true. That's true. Oh, that's nice. Anyway, he probably dies with a smile on his lips, I like to think. A grim smile. Now, almost everybody else we're told in the sagas is killed, too. But not Harold. Harold has somehow been wounded and put out of action. So he's kind of lying among the piles of bodies.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And this guy, the Earl of Orkney's son, Roggenvald Brussersen, He helps him up and he drags him off the battlefield into the woods. Now, Thorir the Hound is leading a kind of mopping up party to kill all the survivors, but they managed to evade him and they reach a woodsman's hut.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And there, the woodsman, a kindly forester, he takes them in and he says, listen, I will look after young Harold until he's well enough to travel. So I think it's probably fair to say at this point, this probably didn't happen. This feels a bit fairytale to me, Tom.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah. He's a patron saint of Norway. We've had a few implausible saints on the podcast. He's definitely one of them. He's got a church in London. Yeah. So, Rogenvald goes off and he leaves Harald with this woodsman. And days or weeks we don't know go by. Harold's wounds heal. And eventually the woodsman's son says, I will guide you through the forests and over the mountains to Sweden.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
We're told that they stayed off the roads. They made their way through the woods. And Harold wore a hooded cloak to hide his face. So he's very much kind of the ranger of the north. I like to think he travels under the name Stroider. Yeah, Trotter. Yeah, Trotter. That's Tolkien's original name. And he devises one of his lovely poems during the journey. Now from wood to wood I slink, rated little.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Who knows? But I may win better fame later. I mean, it's not really... As poems go, it's probably not the best, but...
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Anyway. Yeah, he's really tired. Yeah. He's just lost his brother. He's also a teenager. He's also a teenager. Come on, don't be hard.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, I'm being too hard on him. I feel ashamed of myself now. Anyway, they go through all this wild country. He goes down into Sweden. The Baltic Sea lies beyond. He meets up with Rogenvald. And that winter, they hunker down, brooding on their defeat. And then, says the saga, the spring came. And Harald and Rogenvald hired a ship and that summer they sailed east to the lands of the Rus.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
But his story before that is so colourful that I think, I would be interested to know what you think, I think it's surely a contender for the most exciting life in medieval history.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So... For the last 200-odd years, the Vikings have been going east as much as they've been going west. They've been sailing across the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland to what's now Russia, Estonia, and Latvia. We did a couple of episodes about this in the early days of The Rest is History.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
But just to remind people, the Vikings would head up the rivers, they'd carry furs and slaves, they'd go deep into Eastern Europe, and then they would make their way through the river network to the Black Sea and then south to Constantinople. And over these 200 years, they have built a chain of trading stations and forts and settlements stretching for 1,300 miles.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And this becomes known as the Kingdom of Cities, Garderike, but it's better known today as the Land of the Rus. That word probably, there's lots of academic arguments about it, which we talked about before, but it probably comes from an old Norse term that means rowers, because they often rowed down these or up these rivers.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And obviously it's from that that we get Ruthenia, Russia, Belarus, and so on and so forth. Now, we can pretty much guess which way Harald went because there's a set route, there's kind of a highway. So he and Rogenvald would have crossed the Gulf of Finland to roughly near modern St. Petersburg, and then they'd have taken the River Neva upstream to Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest freshwater lake.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And here on the southern side is basically the gateway to the Wild East, which is a place called Storaia Ladoga. which is this sort of, it is like a wild west town. And you mentioned Neil Price, Tom, the great historian of the Vikings. He calls it a muddy riverine deadwood with greater ethnic variety plus swords and a multitude of gods. It's such a great description.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Exactly. So to give people just a little preview... He fights that first battle when he's a teenager. He flees Norway into exile. He ends up as a mercenary for the Grand Prince of Kievan Rus'. He crosses the Black Sea to Constantinople. He joins the Varangian Guard. He fights everywhere from Sicily to Armenia. He becomes engulfed, quite literally, in the snake pit of Constantinople politics.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. by far the biggest city in Europe. So in the summer of 1034, Harold and some companions, we're told the suspiciously round number of 500 companions, go south down the Dnieper, very well-traveled path, past the rapids of Zaporozhye to the Black Sea, down the Bosphorus, and then up the Golden Horn into the city of Constantine.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
One might say the dragon pit. Exactly. And then he returns to claim the throne of Norway. So it's a very kind of Aragorn trajectory. The guy who disappears into exile as a sort of mercenary or a ranger from the north and then returns to reclaim his throne.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Olaf and Harald crashed into the enemy line like a storm ripping into a forest. Men were falling on every side, shards and splinters and splatters of blood flying into their faces.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yes. Aragorn. A bit more wading through the blood of other people, I think it's fair to say. But I think there are two important dimensions of it, sort of more seriously. So one is, as you've said, it is a brilliant reminder of the interconnectedness of this world. So 11th century Europe. So these trading networks, cultural networks, political and so on, that link the fjords of Norway together.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Not an unfamiliar place for Norsemen to go. They've launched attacks, haven't they, in 860, 941, 944?
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
The Romans had seen them off with a combination of Greek fire and icon intervention. They paraded with icons with magic powers. Not magic powers, I should say, divine powers. Indeed, supernatural. And seen them off. So the historian Kat Jarman has a book called River Kings. Read that book, Tom? About following beads. The Amber.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And she has loads of stuff in there about what we know about customs. They're all kind of customs arrangements and special regulations for Norse travellers arriving in Constantinople. So he's not, you know, an incredibly unfamiliar figure.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
No, he's going to fight. So for Harold, what is he, 19 years old? This must have been an absolutely jaw-dropping experience. The Golden Horn, the huge walls, the markets, everything. the bathhouses, the forum, the hippodrome, the massive palace complex of the Caesars. I mean, we know there's the famous story about when emissaries from the Rus went into Hagia Sophia
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
which was then 500 years old, and they said, we didn't know if we were in earth or in heaven, for surely there is no such magnificence or opulence anywhere in the world. Yeah, we cannot forget that beauty. Exactly. And actually that reflects a deeper picture, or a wider picture, which is that actually... the Byzantine Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, for once it's actually doing pretty well.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It's at a kind of medieval peak under the Macedonian dynasty who are ruling it. They've crushed the Bulgars. They've recaptured a bit of territory in Syria. They've recaptured a bit of territory in Sicily and in Georgia. They're going through a kind of literary and artistic renaissance. So actually things are looking quite good for them and they're quite self-confident and quite buoyant.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
to the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and so on. These are not completely different spheres of action. People move between them.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Now, Harold will get very, very involved in kind of Constantinople politics, and we'll get onto that in the next episode. But just to give listeners a sense of the picture, there has just been a change of emperor at the top. So the emperor in the early 1030s had been a guy called Romanus III, who was basically a bureaucrat. He was in his mid-60s.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And he was married to the Empress Zoe, born in the purple, so from the imperial family. She's younger. She's in her mid-50s. And Zoe, I think it's fair to say, she's a character, isn't she, Tom? Yeah, she is. She's a memorable character. We'll discuss her in more detail on Thursday. She's blonde. She's very voluptuous. She's very clever. She's incredibly vain.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
She's always sort of taking strange potions and sort of smearing creams on herself. Unguents. Unguents. She loves an unguent. Now, she's been having an affair with a younger palace official called Michael, who's in his 20s, very good looking.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And in April 1034, so just before Harold arrives in Constantinople, the emperor's officials, Romanus' officials, came into his bathroom and found him dead in his bath, strangled probably. And almost all the sources say it was Michael who did it. He had murdered this bloke. And he has now become emperor because he's married Zoe and become emperor himself, Michael IV.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And actually, the empire is being run by his brother.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
John the Orphanetrophus, I think is his name. Anyway. He's running the show. Michael, this kind of handsome toy boy, is now the emperor, and Zoe is still on the scene as empress. And it's fair to say, I think, a nest of vipers, Tom. And I choose the serpentine analogy for good reason.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
They do indeed. But for the time being, you know, Harold, there's no reason he should really worry about all this. He's just an obscure Scandinavian mercenary. His name will mean something to Scandinavians, but it won't really mean anything to the Romans.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And he is heading not for the palace, well, not for the center of the palace, but for a building that may well adjoin it, which is the barracks of the most glamorous warriors in Christendom. And these are the Varangian Guard. So the Varangian Guard, I mean, they're the sort of sexiest of all medieval elite warriors, aren't they?
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
They are a bodyguard established in 988, at the point when Volodymyr the Great of Kiev had decided to embrace Christianity and to do this marriage deal with the emperors. And Volodymyr had sent, we're told, 6,000 Norse and Slavic mercenaries who became known as Varangians after the Norse word Va, which means oath. So they are literally called the Oath Keepers.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And then the other thing is, you described him, as people do, as the last Viking. And we'll discuss that in more detail later on. And his life undoubtedly is a window into... the last sort of embers of the Viking Age, so a changing Scandinavia. We've hinted at this in the last series we did about the roads, 1066.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Exactly. So the idea that you would swear an oath and you would become a kind of team. A blood brother. Exactly. These over time, we've now moved on sort of 40, 50 years from this, but they're still going and they've become a kind of special forces unit. Right. So they will be sent across the empire to Syria, to Sicily, wherever, you know, to take part in sieges and stuff like that.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Parachuting in. Exactly. Most of them are Scandinavian, not all. So there are Anglo-Saxons and certainly later on. Well, there will be quite a few more in due course. And Slavs. They become famous. There are sort of hints of them in Roman sources. Yeah. They are famous for drinking, for having double-headed axes, and general sort of berserker ferocity, I think it's fair to say.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
The most famous relics of them are in Hagia Sophia, and there's a bit of graffiti that says Halfdan. In other words, a guardsman guarding the imperial family worldwide. would have written basically Halfdan was here. And there are scrawled longboats, aren't there, in the upper galleries? I mean, an amazing thing to see.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
We have a sense of them from picture stones on the island of Gotland and also things that have been found in graves in Scandinavia that they might have worn sort of baggy silk trousers and had kind of armour in rectangular little plates, rather like step nomad kind of armour.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Like you, Tom, after you went to India and you returned an Indian garb. Yeah. I guess maybe. Yeah, I think there's an element of that plus the French foreign legion. Yeah, they've seen things. All of that. And I mean, you don't come back from a gap year with your pockets loaded with gold. No. But these blokes absolutely do.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So to be a Varangian guard, you were paid 40 gold solidi for a regular guardsman. And if you get to guard the imperial family, you get 44 solidi. That's as much money, if not more, than you would get from a really, really good Dane Geld payout. And of course, it's much more reliable. Basically, you've signed a contract. As long as you don't get killed. And gold is better than silver.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, of course. Remember we had Eleanor Barraclough on talking about the sagas. So in one of her books, I think it's Beyond the Northlands, she describes these people as strong, silent types dripping with gold, swayed in expensive fabrics and weighed down by top-of-the-range weaponry. And she compares them with the Rangers of the North in the Lord of the Rings.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So, you know, the Rangers, when they turn up in the Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn and whatnot, they're kind of these strong, silent, battle-hardened, mysterious figures behind their hoods with suspiciously fine swords. But not prone to berserk. No, I guess not. But we just don't see that. Feats of violence. I like to think it's happening offstage in Tolkien's world. Don't you? Yeah, I suppose.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
The massacres of orcs or something. Yeah, I guess. All those little orc babies. Right, exactly. So Harold, it makes complete sense that he will do this. If he is able to not get killed and to save his money, he'll be able to go back to Kiev, a rich man. He'll be able to marry Elisif.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
He'll have the blessing of the Grand Prince of Kiev, and then he can think about going back to Norway to reclaim his throne. So he goes to their barracks, and we're told brilliantly that he signs on under an assumed name, very Strider-like, and his name is Nordbricht, North Bright. That's what he chooses. And so, Tom, he's joined the Varangian Guard, and the stage is set for adventure. Hooray.
The Rest Is History
552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So the way in which villages are becoming towns, warlords are becoming kings, pagans are becoming Christians, and the Viking Age is passing into history, and his life seems to be the perfect punctuation point, I would say. Now, the other point, we shouldn't perhaps labour too much. You've alluded to it.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Ahead... Fly Sicily, Armenia, Jerusalem, the murder of an emperor, eye gouging and a terrifying encounter with a giant snake. But will Harold ever make it back to avenge his brother and reclaim his throne? Tom, will he put aside the ranger and become who he was born to be? We'll find out next time.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
The best sources for his life are these sagas, like Heimskringla, great sagas sometimes written by Snorri Sturluson, the great kind of saga writer, written in Iceland centuries later. What are we talking, sort of 12th, 13th century sagas? So they're written long after the event. And as we will see, there are a lot of fictional and fantastical elements, which some scrupulous historians would cut.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
You know, they would do their best to eliminate from the podcast. We've done the opposite. Well, I've certainly done the opposite. I think it's best to play those up because, Tom, as we always say, it's important to see the world as they saw it, isn't it?
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
But the good news for everybody is this is a podcast and not a PhD.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So if you're hoping for giant serpents... You'll get them. Berserkers covered in birds screaming, you know, at the top of their voices, this is the podcast for you. But let's start in history with what we know of the historical Harold Sigurdsson. So he's born in the uplands of Norway, probably in 1015. His father is a kind of local king, what they call a petty king, a kind of regional big man.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And his father had the brilliant name Sigurd Sir, Sigurd the Sow. And he had this nickname, the Sow, because he preferred farming to fighting. And sometimes people think, well, obviously this is derogatory. They imagine him as a kind of, you know, a lazy man who doesn't, you know... doesn't go out and smite his neighbours or whatever.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
But actually in the sagas, the portrait of Sigurd is quite generous. And I quote, he was a careful householder who kept his people closely to their work and often went about himself to inspect his crops and meadows, the cattle and the smithies.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, I think that's fair. Much loved by his vassals or whatever, I would imagine. Respected.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And he is married to this woman called Auster. She's the widow of another kind of provincial bigwig in the Westfold of Norway. And she's had a son with this guy called Olaf the Stout. Now, when Harold is born, so Olaf, his half-brother, is about 20. He's going to play a massive part in Harold's life because Harold is going to hugely look up to him.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So Olaf, we know more about Olaf at this point than we do Harold. Olaf has been involved in war from a very young age. Supposedly, according to the sagas, he first went into battle when he was 12. And he fought in Finland and Estonia. He was part of that Scandinavian horde who descended on England in the years of Æthelred the Unready.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So he served with this bloke, Thorkell the Tall, who we talked about last time. And he actually was one of the people who ended up as a mercenary fighting for Æthelred the Unready. Yeah. He's the guy who supposedly pulls down London Bridge. Exactly. Thereby inspiring the nursery rhyme.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Now, he's also spent time in Normandy, a place we talked a lot about last time, a crucial sort of node in the network across the sort of North Sea and the Channel. He'd been baptized a Christian in Rouen, and he later becomes a great champion or he's seen as a great champion of Christianity in Norway. But whether he's very pious, I think, is dubious.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
I think for him, Christianity is about power and about status and about generally smiting his enemies and making himself king.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
For a moment Harald lost his footing, but then a hand was dragging him back up, and Ulf the Icelander flashed him a grim smile. Olaf raised his voice again, rallying his men for another charge, the sea serpent waving proudly overhead. Yet in the corner of his eye, Harold could see the terrifying figure of Thorir the Hound.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Right. Jesus wouldn't like that, Tom, would he?
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
It is. His scalds, his poets, said that he was the ember breaker of battle. He gave gold to his loyal men and carrion to the ravens. That's what I like. I like that in a king. And actually, in all the poems that were composed about him when he was alive, there's no mention of being kind or turning the other cheek. There's an awful lot of mention of smashing people's heads in with hammers and stuff.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So anyway, thanks to this head-smashing, Olaf has actually stamped his authority on the different kind of strongmen of Norway. And around the time of Harald's birth, so 1015, he's recognised as the king of Norway. So another brilliant example of the way in which the Viking Age is passing into history and being replaced by a kind of more ordered, more structured kind of world.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So Harold, at this point, he's still only a little boy. Our first anecdote about him as a boy is in 1018 or so. His father has died, so Sigurd has died, and Olaf comes to visit his mother. So this early 20s guy who's become king, his half-brother, he comes to visit their hall in a place called Ringarike.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And the story is that Harald is there with his older brothers, Gothorm and Halfdan, and they're very shy of their relative, the king, and they can't meet his eye. They have the hearts of girls. They do. But Harold, who is three years old, sits on Olaf's lap and tugs his moustache. The mark of a king. Yeah. Olaf says, brother, you will be a fighter one day. And then the next day...
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Olaf is walking with his mother. They're having a chat in the sort of the fields and they come across the boys playing by the stream and the other boys are playing as farmers. But Harold Hardrada, the future Harold Hardrada, is sort of playing with long, ten long ships. And Olaf says to him, the day may come, brother, when you command real ships.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And then he says to them, and I'm sure this definitely happened, Tom. He says, what would you like? What would you like most in life? And Gutthorne says, I would like a lot of fields. And Halfdan says, I would like cows. And Harald, age three, says, house cows. So many they would eat all Halfdan's cows at a single feast.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And Olaf says to Auster, his mother, he says, well, well, mother, you are bringing up a king. So this is all very impressive, and I'm sure that this all happened. But actually, all the sources agree, and there's no reason to doubt them, that Harold is an exceptionally formidable character.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So Snorri Sturluson in King Harold's Saga says, Harold was a handsome man of noble appearance, his hair and beard yellow. He had a short beard and long moustaches. Peculiarly, the one eyebrow was somewhat higher than the other. So he's kind of Roger Moore-like in that respect. You know, he can raise an eyebrow, At a merry quip. Yeah, he's brutal, but suave. Suave, exactly. His height was five L's.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
He was stern and severe to his enemies and cruelly punished all opposition or misdeed. So five L's, as historians point out, that would make him seven and a half feet tall. And the sources do say he's very, very tall. But he's probably not seven and a half feet.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
I mean, the one thing that people know is that Stamford Bridge, at the Battle of Stamford Bridge, he says of Harold Gobinson, what a small man.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
His teeth bared with savage laughter, his black spear dripping with blood, cutting through the crowd towards his brother. And it was now, as the battle hung in the balance, that the heavens proclaimed their verdict.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yes. So he's blonde haired. He's incredibly impressive. And the portrait we get of him generally, I think in the sagas, captures that last of the Vikings feel. There's definitely a sort of, he's huge, he's ruthless, he loves gold, he likes fighting. And the sagas always have him. There's a brilliant book called Laughing Till I Die.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
by Tom Shippey, the great kind of expert on kind of Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature. He's written a lot about Tolkien. And Tom Shippey says one of the defining things about Harald Hardrard and the Salkers is he's always making quips and composing poems in the face of danger and stuff. The Vikings took that. That's very much a Viking sensibility.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
That, you know, there's a fatalism coupled with a sort of, I laugh in the face of death. which I don't doubt because you can tell that from the way he behaves. I don't doubt that that's true to his character to some degree.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
As he sits around the hearth, Tom, listening to the... to the bards or the skulls kind of telling their stories about Ragnar Lothbrok or whatever.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Yeah, so they're not really going on those piddling little raids anymore. What they're doing are launching proper invasions and seizing kingdoms and piling up gold on the skins of oxes. That's what they're doing. So he next appears in the sagas in the spring of 1030 when he's 15 years old. And a lot has changed since the days when he was, you know, tugging people's beards.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So his brother Olaf, Olaf the Stout, this guy who'd united Norway, has had a massive falling out with Cnut, the king of Denmark and England, who we talked about in the last series. Now, we know that Cnut and Olaf did know each other. Their paths had undoubtedly crossed. in England back in the days of Svein Fortbeard and so on.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
And some Scandinavian historians think that what had basically happened is that Olaf had probably promised to be Cnut's vassal and had reneged on the deal, which is a big theme of Danish and Norwegian history. Well, because they'd fought each other on opposite sides in England. Exactly.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
So in 1028, so two years before 1030, Cnut had sailed from England with 50 warships and had actually been welcomed by the Norwegians with open arms. So it's pretty clear that in the north, in particular of Norway, the local magnates actually didn't like Olaf and wanted him out. And Canute, we're told, when the sagas had bribed them with enormous quantities of gold and silver.
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552. The Last Viking: The Saga of Harald Hardrada (Part 1)
Every man who came to him and wished to be his friend had his hands filled with coins. So Olaf, Harold's brother, has fled. He flees over the mountains to Sweden with a handful of his closest friends and his son Magnus, who will come up again on Thursday. And from Sweden, he took a ship across the Baltic and he vanished into the forests of what is now Russia.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Isn't that nice? I mean, the measure of that is that he never abandons a woman who he has seduced. He's not a Don Juan. He doesn't kind of seduce and dump. Right. And over the course of his life, he installs all his various conquests in this kind of vast palace that he has. Even those he no longer fancies, which I think shows that he's, you know.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Well, there's almost a supernatural quality to it. And in fact, Genji dies about three quarters of the way through the novel. And it continues with details of what his son does and his grandson. And they both have this kind of perfumed quality as well. But Genji is absolute knockout. It's kind of almost pheromonal.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So all the women in his palace wonder, how does he manage to be as though in him blooms opened on spring willow fronds?
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah, right. And at the heart of the novel, so he has all these women, but there is one woman in particular who is the great love of his life, devoted to throughout the novel. And she is called Murasaki. Lady Murasaki. Murasaki means lavender. In his relationship with her, both his appalling qualities and his charming qualities are kind of intermingled.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And I think this is the measure of how psychologically complex this is as a novel. It's not a novel in which Genji is a type. He is a complex living psychological figure in exactly the way that you might meet in a Tolstoy or someone like that. So who is Murasaki? So she, rather like Genji's mother, she's socially unimportant. So she's the daughter of a prince by a kind of minor consort.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And so she has no prospects at all in life. Genji meets her when she is a young girl and he adopts her. And some, frankly, appalling behavior then ensues. So why does he want to adopt her? It's because Murasaki, and she's just a girl at this point, reminds him of the empress. And by this point, Genji has already seduced and got pregnant the Empress because the Empress reminds Genji of his mother.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
For this rather dubious reason, Genji's very taken with her, adopts her, raises her, And then when she comes of age, he forces himself on her. And Murasaki finds this a deeply traumatic experience. How old is she at this point? Coming of age? 15, I suppose. Okay.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And we're told she had never suspected him of such intentions. And she could only wonder bitterly why in her innocence she had ever trusted anyone with such horrid ideas. And she's devastated. Genji's a bit offended, goes away, comes back. She's still sobbing. Yeah. And his response is, well, what a fuss you're making. Oh, Genji has let Japan down.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Because it's clearly not anachronistic to see this as appalling behaviour. Right. It's written into the fabric of the novel that Murasaki is traumatised, that Genji is doesn't seem to understand why. But Murasaki remains devoted to him, I suppose in part because she is dependent on him. She knows that she would be suffering penury without him.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
We're told throughout the novel that a young girl without prospects who outlives her parents' faces, to quote, becoming a nun or drowning herself in the sea. So neither option is one that Murasaki wants to embrace. So she sticks with Genji and Genji remains devoted to her. She forgives him, becomes devoted to him.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And although there are all these kind of various women in his house, everyone knows that Murasaki, despite her kind of low social status, is the real chief wife. She's referred to as the lady who reigns over Genji's household. And their love...
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
very movingly, I think, kind of deepens over the course of the years because it's so long that you are tracking them going from, in Genji's case, from birth to death. Their relationship is drawn with incredible subtlety and richness and compassion. Shortly before his death, Genji gazes at Murasaki.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
How, he wondered, was it possible that year to year and day to day, she always had about her something marvelous, something new. And when she dies, it breaks him and he dies himself. soon after. And it's the complexity of the way in which he seduces her, he behaves appallingly, and yet simultaneously you have this sense of an incredible love affair by the end of their life.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It does everything that you'd want from a novel, I think. And this is happening in the 11th century.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Right. And this is something that is entirely acceptable. It's entirely acceptable for a great nobleman in this period in Japanese history to have a main wife, subordinate wives, people you seduced. Right. And all these relationships likewise are drawn with great kind of subtlety and complexity. And it's often very funny.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So it's a bit like, you know, Mr. Darcy has settled down with Elizabeth Bennet, but he's also got Emma there. He's got, I don't know, Fanny Price. He's got Miss Bates. He's got a whole range of women gathered around him. So you have all that. But also the other thing is that because you have this passage of time, because you see Genji himself and all the various women that he loves ageing,
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Two answers. So as you said, this is the great classic of Japanese literature. I guess the obvious parallel might be with Don Quixote.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
The novel is very moving about the passage of time and about how the kind of intense experiences of joy and sorrow and love are repeatedly portrayed as being kind of as ephemeral as cherry blossom, which is the great metaphor in Japan. I mean, they love that. A cherry blossom metaphor in a Japanese novel, Tom. Yeah. You astound me. Well, I think that this novel is blazing the path for that.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Right. And again and again, these characters are kind of in search of lost time, which of course is the title of another great modern European novel, À la recherche du temps perdu, in search of lost time, by Marcel Proust, which is widely held to be, I guess, one of the two or three greatest novels of the 20th century.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah. And I thought kind of reading it, I was endlessly being reminded of it. And I thought, am I just imagining it? And again, I went and kind of Googled it when I got back home and discovered that the comparison is absolutely not original to me. I mean, there is loads and loads of kind of writing on this.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And I found actually that this is a comment by J. Keith Vincent, who is professor of Japanese studies at Boston. And he gave a lecture on this very topic about three months ago, apparently. And this is the praise he gave in his advert for it.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
talking about Tale of Genji and Proust's novel, that both novels tell of the suffering caused by desire of the way human beings seek replacements rather than renouncing their earliest loves and how everything withers, everything perishes, including grief itself.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
and the role that it plays in Spain. I mean, maybe even with the plays of Shakespeare in England. I will quote the novelist who, in 1968, won Japan's first Nobel Prize for Literature, Yasunari Kawabata, in his acceptance speech. He described it as the highest pinnacle of Japanese literature.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I think that question of how is it that a literary form that achieves its canonical status in Europe in the 19th and 20th century, how is Japan producing an equivalent novel in the early 11th century? That's why I think it belongs on a history podcast, because that's a fascinating question. I think also that trying to answer that question
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
will open a window onto the politics, onto the culture, onto the society of Japan during its first golden age. So that's what we'll be doing in the second half, kind of trying to answer those questions. And we will begin it by answering perhaps the most obvious question of all, which attentive listeners will have realised, you know, has been left hanging. Very obvious question.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Who actually wrote the tale of Genji?
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And the reason for that is that in the imperial society of the Japanese court, only servants tended to be called by their real names. And this is true of men as well as women. So men are called by their titles.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So Genji, to take the obvious example, over the course of the novel, he is called successively, I'll just read some of them, the captain, the commander of the right, acting grand counsellor, his grace, the palace minister, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And of course, he ends up as the honorary retired emperor. And throughout the novel, people tend to be referred to by their titles.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And this can be quite confusing because, you know, someone gets promoted midway through a chapter.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Right the way up to the present day, but going all the way back through medieval Japan, because this novel is, by the standards of the Western novel, I mean, unbelievably ancient. So it's written in the... early years of the 11th century. And it has profoundly, profoundly shaped the Japanese sense of what it is to be Japanese. So it's kind of a historical artifact in its own right.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And we will explain why, because there are kind of slightly different rules governing how women in the Japanese court are named. So they have kind of a range of nicknames. They don't tend to have titles. So Genji's mother, for instance- who we introduced you in that opening paragraph. She is initially called the Kiritsubu Intimate because she's sleeping with the emperor, so hence intimate.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And she lives in a section of the palace called the Kiritsubu. And anyone who's familiar with the palace will know that this is not a bad place to be, but it's not the best bit. So it immediately establishes her kind of position in the pecking order. And then when she delivers Genji, her name changes and she gets called the Kiritsubu Haven. Okay.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
A haven is a kind of unofficial title for a woman who has born a child to either an emperor or an heir apparent. And literally, it means, I kind of read up on this, it literally means a place in which the august seed has found rest. Okay. The feminist critics must enjoy that. Yeah, exactly. So if you are a haven, that's what's happened to you. Right.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But obviously not everyone gets pregnant by an emperor, so not everyone's a haven. So what of women who don't have that status? You might be given a nickname that comes from kind of almost anything. So Murasaki Shikibu, Murasaki comes from the name of her heroine in the novel. She's identified with Genji's great love. So that's where it comes from.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And Shikibu, it's the place where her father worked. So he was a court official working in the Ministry of Ceremonials. So he's responsible for all the kind of parades and things like that. And so hence, that's why we call Tabby, rest his history, Foreign Office, because her father was a diplomat.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And she is very, very aware of the opportunities that are open to men that are shut to her as a woman. And she clearly has been since she was a child. Because in her diary, which you quoted from, her self-description.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
She wrote that for a couple of years in the first decades of the 11th century, so while she is in the midst of writing the tale of Genji. She recorded this incredibly telling episode from her youth. It was when her brother was being taught by her father the lessons that would be appropriate to him as a boy who's destined for imperial service.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Murasaki wrote, I was in the habit of listening with him, and I became unusually proficient at understanding those lessons with which he was struggling. My father, a most learned man, was always regretting this fact. Just my luck, he would say. What a pity she was not born a man.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
People may remember we have the life of Edward the Confessor that was clearly inspired by Edith, his wife, but she doesn't write it herself, even though she's very educated.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Whereas Murasaki, you know, there's no issue with that. And it is amazing. I think that, I mean, it would be anachronistic to call it feminist, but clearly the sense of resentment that men are monopolising education.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But I think also it opens an absolutely brilliant window onto what is often described as the classical age of Japan, the first great golden age, 10th and 11th centuries in Japan. And this is A Japan that is emerging for the first time, really, as a distinctive civilization. So it's long existed in the shadow of China, but this kind of cultural cringe that it had long had, it's got rid of.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I mean, you get that through in China or in the Caliphate or in Latin Christendom, but you don't have anyone, I think, as far as I know, expressing it quite so personally as Murasaki does there.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah. So I think there are kind of deep structural reasons for it. And they're well worth exploring, not just for their own sake, but because they tell us a lot about how Japan kind of emerges as a distinctive civilization. So just sticking to Murasaki for a moment.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
One of the nicknames that she's given at court, and it really upsets her because it's meant kind of mockingly, almost cruelly, is Lady Chronicle. And the Chronicles in Japan are the two oldest surviving texts ever. that we have. They were written in the early 8th century AD. The first of these was written in Japanese, and the second was written in Chinese.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Between them, they give a history of Japan that actually begins with the creation of the universe. A lot of it is about the doings of the gods in the early years of the creation. It goes all the way up to the end of the 7th century. They are very clearly written to explain the origins of the imperial line, the line of the emperors, and to justify its rule as something that is divinely sanctioned.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So what you get from the Chronicles is the fact that every emperor is descended from Amaterasu, who is the goddess of the sun. And this is something that is still part of Japanese imperial culture to this day. I mean, so Charles III doesn't boast about being descended from Woden. But the current emperor, absolutely. I mean, he's descended from the sun. This is part of imperial ideology.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
What we're told in the Chronicles is that the first emperor, a guy called Jimmu, which I think is a great name, is the great grandson of the sun. He is sent down from heaven and he conquers all the various peoples of Japan, including men whose arms and legs are so long that people call them the earth spiders. He reigns over Japan and he then dies at the age of 170.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And he is followed by a succession of 15 emperors, all of whom are very anonymous. They don't really seem to do anything except to have kind of madly, improbably long lives, kind of like the patriarchs in the Bible. They're living for kind of 400, 300 years, all that kind of thing. People do live for a long time in Japan though, don't they? Yeah, but not that long. Okay. Not that long.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And when you add all these very long-lived emperors to the list of more recent emperors in the Chronicle, so those who did exist, who are historical, Japanese history is made to stretch back thousands of years. And the reason that this matters is precisely because it doesn't stretch back thousands of years. Ah, interesting. It's actually very, very parvenu.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's actually appeared very recently on the scene. They're protesting too much. They are protesting too much because the imperial family until pretty recently, you know, a few hundred years before, had only been one of a number of kind of great competing families in central Japan and specifically the Yamato Basin. Mm-hmm.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's the kind of southern central region of Honshu, which is the largest island. So the island that Tokyo is on. Yeah, the middle bit. And even by the time of Murasaki, not all of Honshu had been conquered. So the northern reaches were still kind of unstable. And Hokkaido, which is the northernmost island, the barbarians were still kind of roaming there. Yeah.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
This is why it's incredibly important for the imperial dynasty and for the entire Japanese system that depends on it to big it up as divine, as ancient, as universal. In the 7th century, you get this ringing decree, there are not two suns in the sky nor two lords on the earth. This is aimed at the other Japanese families. There is only the one imperial family.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It is expressing ideals of beauty and grace that will, again, run throughout Japanese history. And to be honest, if you're a historian of, say, ancient or medieval history,
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
In the middle of the 7th century, the Yamato monarch starts to call himself Teno, which means heavenly sovereign. By the early 8th century, what had previously been Yamato, the region where this imperial family has come from, is starting to be called the Root of the Sun, which in Japanese is Nihon, from which the English word Japan ultimately derives.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And so you said, you know, this is quite a familiar story. I mean, there are perhaps elements here of Charlemagne crowning himself in Rome and aping the titles of the emperor in Constantinople. But China is a much more domineering superpower than... Byzantine Empire is in the age of Charlemagne. I mean, it is the preponderant cultural influence in the region of Asia that Japan is attached to.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And so that very decree that is issued saying that the Japanese emperor is the only sun in the sky, I mean, that is lifted absolutely from the Chinese. And the word tenno, the title that is often translated as emperor, this also derives from China. It's a Chinese word and it means the pole star, which the Chinese saw as being the throne of heaven.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And so this being so, the Chinese are a bit like the Byzantines with Charlemagne and they treat the pretensions of the Japanese with utter contempt.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah. So the Yamato court sends a letter to China in the early 7th century. And they say, the child of heaven of the land where the sun rises. So again, that's this idea of Nihon, the root of the sun. Sends a letter to the child of heaven of the land where the sun sets. So that's China.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And this is supposedly brought to the attention of the Chinese emperor who retorts, this letter from the barbarians contains improprieties. Do not call it to my attention again. I love that. So that's the Japanese kind of dealt with. But these rebuffs,
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
do not stop the Japanese monarchy from aping the Chinese model and, in fact, from consciously trying to model almost everything in Japan on the example of China. In the early 7th century, this introduction of the Japanese monarchy on a Chinese model is termed by historians the Great Reform. As part of it, scholars and officials are sponsored to go to China
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
To read it is quite a mind-blowing experience because you are being given an insider's vision of an imperial court that is much, much richer, I think, than anything that we have from, I don't know, ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or Persia or Rome or Baghdad or even China. And I've just been to Japan. I read it while I was in Japan.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
to study it, and then to come back and report. They bring back Confucian ideals, so this idea of a great civil service serving the emperor, a centralized monarchy, a meritocratic civil service, all the things that we're familiar with from Chinese history, but also with the literary culture. So very rapidly, Chinese becomes, I suppose, what Latin is in medieval European courts.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's the language that anyone with any pretension to education, anyone with any hope of rising in the service of the emperor, has to be able to read and speak. When written Japanese is developed, it uses Chinese writing. Those chronicles which are describing and praising the antiquity of the Japanese monarchy. The first one's written in Japanese, as we said, but the second one is in Chinese.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I mean, it's amazing that a patriotic history is being written in a foreign language.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And in the early 8th century, when the first permanent capital in Japan is founded, so up until that moment, the convention had been that every time an emperor died, the court would move to another location. But this is clearly not the Chinese way. The Chinese have a massive great capital, Chang'an. And so the Japanese monarchy founds its own capital, which comes to be called Nara, which
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So again, in the region of Yamato where the family had emerged. And it's directly slavishly modeled on the example of Chang'an. It has this kind of grid system. Large numbers of immigrants are invited over from China and from Korea. So these are not just scholars, they're also artists, architects, dancers, musicians, writers, complete Sinomania.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And in fact, people who want to study early Chinese dance or music, because so much of this was wiped out by the Mongols, In China itself, if they wanted to learn about it, they look at Japan, where it was better preserved. Just to quote Ivan Morris, who's written a brilliant book on the tale of Genji, The World of the Shining Prince.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
He writes, "...rarely in the history of the world has a country entirely free from external pressure as Japan was during this time, so avidly acquired the fruits of an alien culture." I guess the only other real example would be the Meiji Restoration, which is when Japan had shut itself off from the world for 250 years. Then in the 19th century, it opens itself up to the world of the West.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And also there's kind of massive pressures on society because the nobility haven't gone away and the Confucian supposedly meritocratic bureaucracy gets set up. But the nobles aren't interested in this at all. You know, they're not going to subordinate themselves to a load of civil servants who've passed an exam.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Throughout the 8th century, while the monarchy is resident in Nara, they are furiously competing with one another, not to overthrow the monarchy, but to dominate it. The way they do this is they're all competing to try and marry off their daughters to the emperor. If the emperor then has a son, their son will become emperor. It breeds escalating factionalism on the streets.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
The emperor finds it very difficult to keep control. And he finds his own authority being submerged by the intensity of noble factionalism. So in the 790s, an emperor called Canmu decides enough is enough. Nara is hopeless. We can't maintain our control here. So we're going and found a new monarchy. It's actually rather like Louis XIV abandoning Paris.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And I have to say, it was one of the great reading experiences of my life.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And he comes across the site of Versailles when he's out hunting. And Kanmu, likewise, comes across the site where he wants to plant his new capital while he is out hunting. And it's a location that seems to him ideal. So it's about 30, 40 miles from Nara. And it is defended to the north, to the east, to the west by mountains thick with trees. It's linked by rivers to the sea, very navigable.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
The soil is very, very fertile and it's perfect. So Kanmu establishes his new capital there. He calls it Heian Kiyo. The city of peace and tranquility. So Kyo is city. And this is the city that in due course will come to be called Kyoto.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah. So you have this great palace, which is in the north. You have markets to the south, a bit like Manhattan. You have great avenues and streets crossing each other at right angles. It's supposed to be entirely symmetrical. In fact, it very rapidly doesn't because it drifts to the right and the left gets slightly abandoned.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I think that that's the perfect metaphor for what is happening with Japan generally, that they continue to model themselves on China. everything is being kind of transmuted into something kind of subtly different. So Chinese institutions do remain the great model of government. The prestige of Chinese culture remains paramount. Chinese merchandise continues to flood Japan.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But increasingly, people in the Japanese court are thinking, well, we've got everything that we need now. Again, a bit like Japan in the 20th century, having gone through a process of westernization, then thinks, fine, we don't need the West anymore, we'll improve it.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And exactly a century after the founding of Heian Kiyo in 894, the Japanese government therefore decides, as a matter of policy, that it will no longer send embassies to China. It cuts itself off, rather as it would go on to do in the 17th century. By the time that Murasaki is born, the number of foreigners coming to Japan has kind of slowed to a trickle.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's really telling that in the tale of Genji, actually the only foreigner who speaks in the entire vast sweep of the novel is a Korean physiognomist who reads a child's future in his face. He's introduced to the seven-year-old Genji and says, wow, he's amazing. But For some reason, he's not going to be an emperor. And this is one of the things that prompts the emperor then to do what he does.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Yeah. And specifically of masculine status. So remember that passage where Murasaki describes her brother, who's clearly not as bright as her, struggling with his lessons. What he's struggling with is learning Chinese. Right. Murasaki learns Chinese to a great degree of facility. She loves it. But this is seen
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
In the Japanese court, as unladylike, almost as freakish, a lady who speaks Chinese is, you know, faintly off-putting to men. Right. And so at court, she tries to keep her knowledge of Chinese a secret, which is why she's so upset at being called Lady Chronicle, because clearly her fellow ladies-in-waiting have discovered it and are kind of mocking her, I suppose, as a kind of nerd.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's that kind of idea, I think. Right. And she's very upset by this, but she loves Chinese so much that she's not going to stop reading it. And in her diary, kind of very moving passage, if you have ever been a bookish child, you can kind of absolutely identify with it.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Who Dares to Win is your great book on the first two years of the Thatcher government. Even longer than the tale of Genji.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
She describes how she copes with a sense of loneliness and unhappiness by raiding this great stash of Chinese texts that she's found a scholar has got. And she says how much pleasure it gives her to read them. But then she describes... It's like a bookish child being bullied at school. The other women gather behind my back. It's because she goes on like this that she is so miserable.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
What kind of lady is it who reads Chinese books? When she goes on to teach the empress who she's serving Chinese, again, they do it in secret. And in the tale of Genji, she portrays the daughter of a great scholar who teaches her lover to do the same. So that's, I mean, a real gender inversion that it's the woman who's teaching the man Chinese.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But again, it has to be kept an absolutely kind of deadly secret. And the implication of this that Chinese, its script, its literature is for men, means by implication that to write in Japanese is for women. And by Murasaki's time, the Japanese have developed a kind of phonetic script. So hiragana, still called back to this day. But in Murasaki's time, it was called anade.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So Woman's Hand, it's a script that is associated with women, whereas Chinese characters are so associated with men that they are called otokomoji, which apparently, my fluent Japanese kicking in, means men's letters. There's men's writing, Chinese, and there's women's writing, which is this kind of Japanese phonetic script.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
There's no rules. So they can do what they like. Absolutely. And it's clear that Murasaki is writing a kind of diary. There's clearly a sense that the court is the great focus of attention. And it's not much of a leap for Murasaki to say, well, I could make up a great courtier. I could make someone up and situate him in a kind of a world that's faintly removed from reality. And there it is.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
There you have, you know, the great novel that she goes on to write.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And the evidence of the freedom to experiment that women have in the Heian court is... The fact that she is not the only woman there to write a masterpiece, because in the next episode, we will be meeting a woman who writes another extraordinary work of literature. She's one of the wittiest, most elegant, most brilliant women who's ever lived. I mean, and again, kind of reading it is...
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Just an amazing experience. The sense of an alien world being brought so vividly to life is just unbelievably exciting. This woman, who is so elegant, so brilliant, Murasaki hated her. perhaps unsurprisingly, because I think Murasaki, clearly you get the sense from her diary that she's much more introverted.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And what's fascinating is that the rivalry between these two great literary figures, these two extraordinary women, mirrors a very deep political rivalry at the very heart of the imperial court, the Heian court.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So in the second episode, we will be looking at this rivalry, we'll be looking at the Heian court itself, the emperors, the ministers, the extraordinary women who are at this court, and which
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
thanks to Murasaki and thanks to the other extraordinary women in this period who are also writing, I think we know in richer and more intimate detail than any court in history that had existed up until that point.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Well, I mean, there are kind of various pointers to the character of the Japanese court in this period, even in that opening paragraph. So we have this emperor, but he's not named. I mean, he seems peculiarly anonymous. And he's in the early 11th century, just to be clear. So the 10 hundreds. The Tale of Genji is actually a historical novel. So it's set in the 10th century.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
We're told whose reign can it have been? It's deliberately anonymous. Mm-hmm. He clearly has a kind of harem. There seem to be two orders of women. So there are consorts who are clearly higher ranking. And then there are intimates who seem to be slightly lower. And the emperor, he's obsessed by a low ranking intimate. And this is clearly offending court etiquette.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
but he's pursuing the affair anyway. And I mean, anyone who's read, you know, the Arabian nights or something like that will feel that it's, it's the kind of story in which this intimate is going to get pregnant and give birth to a prince. And this will set the whole dynamics of the, of the story and trade. Of course.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
The Rest Is History Returns, available now in all good bookshops.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And initially it seems that this is the kind of book that we're reading because it only takes three more paragraphs before the intimate is indeed pregnant by the emperor. And she delivers him a son and, And, you know, as would happen in any kind of folk tale, the baby turns out to be kind of luminously good looking.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So to quote from the tale of Genji, his majesty had the child brought in straight away for he was desperate to see him and he was astonished by his beauty. His elder son, born to his consort, the daughter of the minister of the right, enjoyed powerful backing and was feted by all as the undoubted future heir apparent.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But he could not rival his brother in looks, and his majesty, who still accorded the heir apparent all due respect, nevertheless lavished his private affection on the new arrival.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
Right. So you feel that you know the rules of the game. Yeah. The emperor dotes on this kind of beautiful younger son, but he knows that it's impossible to appoint him as his heir because the intimate is not of sufficient social standing. The boy grows up. He becomes ever more handsome, so much so that his nickname is the Shining Prince. Yeah.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And as well as being stunningly handsome, he has incredible dress sense, amazing style, but also luminous talents. And in due course, he will be renowned for his genius as a poet, as a musician, as a calligrapher, as a mixer of incense, all these great qualities that are fated at the imperial court.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And he's even good at football, which is described in the novel as a rough game, but lively and requiring skill.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I'm not entirely sure what the rules were, but it clearly involved kicking a ball. Right. So this younger son, he's very, very talented. And his father is desperate that he doesn't waste his potential. Because the problem is, is that if he just remains a prince, the emperor worries that he'll be a kind of drone because he will never get to inherit the throne.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And so the emperor takes a drastic step. he officially removes the boy from the imperial family. And he does this by giving the boy what no emperor ever has, namely a surname. And the surname the boy is given is Genji. And as a Genji, he now belongs to two realms. So the realm of his father's palace,
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
the great center of Japanese imperial life, but also the realm of the nobility who provide the great public figures who serve the palace. And the novel of which he is the hero, The Tale of Genji, is in large part the story of how he negotiates these ambivalences. His role as a prince who is kind of simultaneously a nobleman, one of the great kind of ministerial figures of the court.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
This isn't operating at this time? Right. Because the tale of Genji is much earlier than all that. Right. And to be honest, it's older than kind of most of the traditions that I guess in the mind's eye people have about medieval Japan.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
There probably is people drinking tea. Yes.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But I mean, this is just a measure of how old it is. And you said how extraordinary it is, is that this is the same time as all the events we were describing in our series on 1066. The tale of Genji is being written while... In England, Æthelred the Unready is busy extorting silver to pay off the Vikings.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So in Europe, I guess the first novel of modern Europe is Don Quixote. So Tale of Genji is 600 years older than that. It's 700 years older than Robinson Crusoe, which is generally thought to be the first English novel. It's often called the world's oldest novel. It's not strictly speaking because the Greeks and the Romans had fictions written in prose.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But I think it is indisputably, as Royal Tyrell, whose translation we're using, describes it in his introduction, the oldest novel still widely recognised today as a masterpiece. But for all the reasons that you're touching on, the fact that you are getting a glimpse into such a distant, alien, ancient world, to me, it seemed one of the most extraordinary works of literature that I'd ever read.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I mean, and obviously, I don't speak Japanese. I'm not familiar with Japanese history at all. Really? Yeah. So, you know, Keats writing about, you know, he couldn't speak Greek and then he comes across this translation by Chapman and he talks, doesn't he, about being like Stout Cortez with eagle eyes staring at the Pacific or whatever.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
I mean, I felt a bit like that, that this was a glimpse into a world that I had never imagined seeing. And it's incredible. And it's a bit like I don't know, discovering that somebody had been recording rock and roll in the 14th century, or that there'd been cubists in Renaissance Florence or something. I mean, it seems weirdly out of time.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And all the more so when you think about Japan as an island off Eurasia, and you think of all the other works of literature that have been produced across Eurasia in this period. In Persia, you have the great poet Ferdowsi. He's writing the Shahnameh, the great epic of the Iranian people. It's an epic that has sorcerers and giant talking birds and Alexander the Great and all that kind of stuff.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
In Baghdad and Cairo, you're starting to get the Arabian Nights in this period, and that's all kind of gin and... You know, all that. People hiding in vases. All that. And in France, you have the Song of Roland, the story of the great heroic figure in Charlemagne's court who sees off attacking enemies. And it's kind of presaging the romances of chivalry that will emerge throughout Europe.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And they're all kind of centered around either the supernatural or masculine heroism or both. But the tale of Genji actually, despite the sense you get from the opening page, actually, it's nothing like any of those at all. So you might expect that he's going to end up fighting a murderous civil war against his brother or something like that. He doesn't. There is no real...
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
tension between him and his brother whatsoever. He doesn't go around fighting monsters. He doesn't roam the world seeking out adventures. In fact, aside from a single spell of exile, he spends pretty much his entire life in the imperial capital in Japan. And the novel is basically about the things he gets up to in the palace and in the city that surrounds it.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And there are essentially two things he gets up to. So the first of these, he serves his father as his father had wanted him to as one of the great public servants of Japan. Yeah. You can trace him going through all the various levels of the imperial bureaucracy. And he begins as a kind of very junior official. And then ultimately he arrives as a kind of honorary retired emperor.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
You know, he's given this kind of honorary post. He's reintegrated back into the imperial family. And this is tracked in immense detail. So if you are interested in how... politics functions in the imperial court, The Tale of Genji is absolutely for you. The Anthony Trollope. Exactly. And it's drawn in that kind of detail. Right. And that kind of subtlety.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And it's a very vivid, very sophisticated portrait of how the imperial court actually functioned. You know, what wouldn't a historian of ancient Egypt or... Oh, yeah.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
He would die for something like that. But the other thing he does, so I will quote from a friend of the show, Chris Harding, who's got a history of Japan that's coming out. I got sent a preview of it.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
It's a very good book, A Short History of Japan. Yeah. And in it, Chris describes Genji as irrepressibly amorous. Which is basically to say he's a massive shagger. Right. He never stops. Basically, he only has to see a woman and he's trying to seduce her.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
And it doesn't matter if the woman is married to the emperor or she's only 12 years old or she's his ward or she is the daughter of his ex-lover. Okay. Or, I don't know, the daughter of his best friend. Genji or Palin. He's all for it. Right. Can't hold him back.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
So he's not very me too. I mean, you very much get cancelled today. I was kind of reading up on this because I was kind of interested to see what Japanese feminist critics today think of it. And apparently there's a whole trend. It's called Genji Girai, which means Genji bashing.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
No, I'm afraid I'm not. But, you know, it's a great classic of Japanese literature, so there's plenty in English on the tale of Genji. Of course there is.
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560. The Golden Age of Japan: Lady Murasaki and the Shining Prince (Part 1)
But the thing about Genji, why he is so fascinating as a character, why the novel is so kind of complex and subtle, even while he's often behaving terribly, he has simultaneously served the Japanese for, you know, a thousand years as the kind of, I suppose, the definitive model of charisma. Right. I mean, I suppose today we would call him a sex pest. He's a very generous, caring, kind sex pest.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
We don't know their names, but we do know that one of them is married off to Hamilcar's closest political ally in Carthage, who is a guy called Hasdrubal the Handsome. And people who remember our first series may also remember the fact that basically there are only about three names in Carthage, of which Hasdrubal is probably the most common.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So this is Hasdrubal the Handsome, because he's such a good looking guy. So good news for Hamilcar's daughter. And in 237, when Hamilcar leaves Carthage for Spain, Hasdrubal is sailing with him. Hamilcar also has three sons. The youngest of these is called Mago. Then inevitably there's a guy called Hasdrubal. So that's Hamilcar's son. And the oldest is a young lad called Hannibal.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So in 237, when Hamilcar is preparing to leave for Spain, Hannibal is only nine years old. And you might think, you know, that's probably too young to be taken to a war zone. But Hamilcar thinks not. And there is a very, very famous anecdote with which we finished our last series on Carthage. But I think it bears repeating because it is very, very revealing about what will motivate Hannibal.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And he tells it to various people later in life. So it almost certainly comes from his own lips. And he describes how he joins his father in the great temple of Baal in Carthage, where his father is making sacrifice. And this is supposedly how Hannibal described it. The omens proved favorable.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Hamilcar poured a libation to the gods and performed the customary ceremonies, after which he ordered all those who were present at the sacrifice to stand back a little way from the altar. Then he called Hannibal to him and asked him affectionately whether he wished to accompany the expedition. So that's to Spain. Hannibal was overjoyed to accept and like a boy begged to be allowed to go.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
His father then took him by the hand, led him up to the altar and commanded him to lay his hand upon the victim and swear an oath that he would never become a friend to the Romans. Strong stuff. Strong stuff. And it's a promise that he will keep all his life.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He is raised in this colonial environment, this process of conquest, then of rule in Spain. And in due course, he will come to take command of it. But first, of course, he has to serve his apprenticeship. And he does this under two formidable men in succession. And the first, of course, is his father, Hamilcar Barca. And even though Hamilcar is probably the most formidable man in Carthage,
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
There's no guarantee of success. He doesn't have that many men. This is Carthage's whole problem, that they don't have a huge citizen body. So generally they rely on mercenaries, but now they don't have much money. So they can't afford many mercenaries.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So the estimation of Dexter Hoyos in his very good book on this Hannibal's dynasty, he reckons probably Hamilcar is sailing to Spain with about 20,000 men. So not that many at all. And it's not surprising, that being so, he needs money. He sails to Gardez, to Cadiz. And what he wants is the silver and copper mines along the Rio Tinto that lie about 60 miles inland from Gardez.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And it's rich across the whole of the Mediterranean. So it features in the Bible as Tarshish, a land of fabled wealth. According to tradition, the tribes who live there are so rich that their cattle troughs are made of silver. So obviously, if you're a colonial administrator in desperate need of cash, this is exactly the kind of place that you would go straight for.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yes, this strategy of surrounding your enemies and then massacring them. And if young Hannibal is at his side when he's pursuing these tactics, I mean, this is something that clearly Hannibal will bear in mind in due course, because it becomes a favourite tactic of Hannibal himself. And Hamilcar is very brutal in the process of conquering and pacifying Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Because it's a story that would involve him taking an army, including 37 elephants, over the Alps, winning three of the most celebrated battles of all time, slaughtering enormous numbers of Romans. Yeah. and bringing Rome almost to her knees. And it is so epic that I imagine the costs would be prohibitive.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So the leaders of tribes who oppose him are tortured and crucified, and the Carthaginians are very good at torture. as anyone who's listened to our episode on the war with the mercenaries will know. And the men of the tribes that have been defeated will be enrolled into his own forces and they will be given incredibly lavish pay.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So this is the other side of the conquest that Hamilcar is very brutal to those who oppose him. Those who back him, he will lavish all the gold that he's annexed and conquered. And so this enables him to start spreading Carthaginian rule inland from the coast and And after about a decade of operations in Spain, Hamilcar has a garrison there that's probably around 50,000 men.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So he's more than doubled it in the space of a decade. And he's incredibly wealthy. His coffers are overflowing with silver. And unsurprisingly, the Romans are not really very thrilled about this. So by 231, they're sufficiently alarmed that they send an embassy to Hamilcar, basically saying, you know, hey, what's going on here?
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Hamilcar, his reply is, well, I'm raising funds to pay off the war indemnity that you illegally raised. And, you know, the Romans have to suck this up. Because I mean, it's a good reply. And also, you know, as Hamilcar can point out, it's none of their business. what he's getting up to in Spain. You know, this isn't covered by the treaty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So the Roman ambassadors, you know, they're forced to bite their tongues and go back and accept the existence of this growing Carthaginian empire in Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
In battle against whom? Against a Spanish tribe in the interior. And the stories about how he dies become ever more extravagant as time goes by. So one historian is relatively close in time to the event and tends to be more sober.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He reports in very vague terms that Hamilcar ended his career in a manner which formed a fitting climax to his achievements, for he lost his life after fighting gallantly and with complete disregard for his personal safety in a battle against one of the strongest and most warlike of the tribes. So it's a good death. It's a heroic death.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But accounts of exactly how he dies then start to get inflated.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So a later report says that he is betrayed by a local chieftain while undertaking a siege, that Hamilcar's forces are taken by surprise and they're forced to withdraw, that his two eldest sons, so that's Hannibal and Hamilcar, they are sent off by Hamilcar along one road and he then deliberately draws away the mass of the enemy by taking another road.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
he's about to be overtaken by his pursuers and ahead of him there's a raging river and he plunges into the river on his horse and drowns so essentially he sacrifices himself for his two sons i mean whether true or not we don't know yeah but he's like a kind of a lion defending his cubs i think that's you know dying rather than seeing his cubs exterminated that's the theme
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, and a kind of military education as well. I mean, there is a difference, though, that Hannibal, unlike Alexander, doesn't succeed his father immediately because he's still only 18. He's not a king. You know, they don't have kings. So the leader of the Carthaginians in Spain is an elected post, essentially by the army, by the Carthaginians in the army.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And actually, the person who put me on to Vin Diesel's enthusiasm for Hannibal, Marina Hyde, as I rest his entertainment, very wittily commented on this, that to make these films would cost only marginally less than an independent nuclear deterrent. Oh, that is witty. I think she's not exaggerating. But Vin is obviously still dreaming.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And I think that people feel, well, an 18-year-old, he's too young. So they opt instead for Hasdrubal the Handsome, who is the young Hannibal's brother-in-law, Hasdrubal's son-in-law, very good looking, Hannibal Carr's close political ally, has been with him in Spain, knows the ropes. And Hannibal Carr the Handsome is... very effective. I mean, he's a worthy successor to Hamilcar.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And like Hamilcar had done, he kind of adopts this carrot and stick approach to the Iberians, to the peoples of Spain. So he marries the daughter of an Iberian king. So you asked about the dynastic quality. I mean, they're There's a sense that this Carthaginian dynasty is starting to marry into local royalty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He has himself proclaimed not just by the Carthaginians who have voted for him, but by the Iberians as a general with unlimited power. So he's rooting his authority in the colonized as well as the colonizers. And even as he's doing that, he's continuing this policy of absolutely brutal suppression of any hint of rebellion. And his first target, obviously, is the tribe that had killed Amilcar.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
They all get wiped out. So he is able to push Carthaginian control ever northwards towards the River Tagus, which is the great river that kind of flows through central Spain. And... This empire needs a new capital, Hasdrubal decides. And so this is what he does. He founds a new capital and he calls it, stunning originality, Carthage, which of course means new city.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But the Romans in due course will call it New Carthage, which effectively would be new, new city. But we'll call it New Carthage because otherwise it's very confusing. But the Carthaginians in Spain just called it Carthage.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Which to this day I gather is still one of the kind of the main centers of the Spanish Navy. So it's clearly as the original Carthage is a natural port, a great stronghold. And it stands, there are kind of four hills dotted around this great natural harbour. On the largest of these, Hasdrubal builds a great temple to the Carthaginian god of healing.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And on the second largest, he builds his own vast palace, which is adorned with all the wealth of Spain. And from there, he can sit and look down at the harbour and see growing numbers of ships, some of the military, but lots of the merchant ships swelling his coffers. He's got the silver mines inland. He's got the shipping routes descending on his great capital.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He's able to employ the most cutting edge military architects to build him walls around the city. And so it's not surprising that it comes to be hailed by a near contemporary as the chief ornament and the centre of the Carthaginian empire in Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
What happened to him? In 221 BC, he gets assassinated by the slave of a disgruntled Iberian ally.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so, you know, that's the end of him. But as you say, he has absolutely played his part in reconstituting Carthaginian power, possibly on a scale that is even greater than the power that Carthage had enjoyed before the first war with Rome. So absolutely, Carthage is back. She's a great power. She can go eyeball to eyeball with Rome again.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But there is obviously a slight paradox here, which is that All the power is now focused in Spain and Carthage herself back in Africa is slightly pallid in comparison. It lacks the reserves. It lacks the wealth that is now starting to develop in New Carthage.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So that means that whoever is elected by the Carthaginian army to succeed Hasdrubal as the leader of Carthaginian power in Spain is probably in a position to prosecute almost an independent foreign policy. The fact that it had always been a problem for the Carthaginian ability to project wars, that the Senate back in Carthage is full of rival power brokers who all hate each other,
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Now, the Barkids, the dynasty of Hamilcar Barker, they don't have to worry about that. They have their wealth. They have their army. They can essentially do what they like. And so, obviously, the crucial issue now is who will succeed Hasdrubal the Handsome? Who will take command of these incredible military resources?
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
I think this one may be kind of more in the works. I think it's for Netflix. So it may be coming soon, but I mean, again, no, no sign of it as yet.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, the only physical description we have of Hannibal is Livy's and Livy's writing in the age of Augustus. So almost 200 years after. Yeah. And Livy says that he has a face expressive of dynamism and fire in his eyes. Yeah. But this, you know, I mean, it's kind of pretty generic, I guess. Right. He doesn't say whether Hannibal is tall or short, whether he's bearded or clean shaven.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
There are silver coins that are minted and there's a figure of a man on it that that some people have suggested might be Hannibal, but it's almost certainly a god. So we don't really know what Hannibal looked like. You asked, does he look like Vin Diesel or indeed Denzel Washington? Absolutely not, because both of those are not as young as they were. Hannibal is very young.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He's only in his mid-20s. We know on top of that that Hannibal was proud of his descent from one of the original colonists that had settled Carthage way back in the dawn of time when they had sailed from Tyre. So presumably, I mean, he has a kind of look of the Lebanese, maybe a young Nassim Nicholas Taleb, perhaps.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And the thing is, I entirely understand the obsession because it's one I completely share. And if I were a massive Hollywood star, I would be pushing to do a Hannibal film as well. Cause basically I would say, We're going to be doing this series on Hannibal. This is what I've been looking forward to doing since we began the podcast.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Or my friend George Saab, who is Lebanese. And I can't see him doing it either.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, again, Livy gives a famous description of him and claims that he's a compound of extraordinary qualities and terrible, kind of malignant faults. Very much like us. So his qualities, Livy says that he's brave, he's very tough, indefatigable, both physically and mentally. He could endure with equal ease extremes of heat or cold. Is he very like Alexander? And indeed you, Dominic.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, pointing to yourself. He dressed, ate and drank like a common soldier. He didn't have a special tent. He'd just roll himself up in his cloak, no matter how cold it was. Very, very smart. So again, like you, deep, penetrating intelligence. And then, Dominic, his vices.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So Livy says he has inhuman cruelty, a more than punic perfidy, a total disregard of truth, honor in the gods of the sanctity of an oath and of all that other men hold sacred. So again, it's uncanny, eerie, very eerie. I mean, I think several things to say about that portrait. Obviously, Livy is a Roman, and so he's giving a very Roman perspective. We just don't have any Carthaginian records.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
The Romans always, and Livy being the exemplar, always emphasize and acknowledge his qualities, which are, of course, self-evident from his record because Hannibal would prove himself one of the greatest generals of all time. But there's also the fact that the more impressive Hannibal is acknowledged to be, the more impressive the feat of the Romans in defeating him.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And Hannibal, of course, as a military commander, is in a slightly elevated position to Cleopatra. For the Romans, it's humiliating to be fighting a woman, whereas Hannibal is a foe who's kind of equal. He's a worthy adversary. What about the Punic perfidy, though? Punic, the word that the Romans used to apply to the Carthaginians, this is a stereotype.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Their sense that all Carthaginians are treacherous and tricky is absolutely standard. And I think in Hannibal's case, it comes from the fact that he is indeed very cunning, that he has an incredible mastery of stratagems and traps. And essentially what Livy is complaining about is Hannibal's consistent ability to make a succession of Roman commanders look absolute idiots.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And if you'd asked me when I was eight, what would I want to be doing when I'm 57? This is basically it.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So you can kind of see where that's coming from. The other accusations that he's an oath breaker that has no respect for the gods. We will see whether that's fair or not in due course.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, I already mentioned the idea of Hamilcar as a lion and his three sons, Hannibal, Hasdrubal and Mago, as his cubs. And there's a famous saying that the Romans attribute to Hamilcar that these are the lion cubs I am rearing for the destruction of Rome. I think that's an exaggeration. As we will see, I don't think Hannibal ever aimed to destroy Rome.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Destroying your enemies is something that the Romans do. The Carthaginians, I don't think were planning to do that. But indisputably, Hamilcar's ambition in raising his three sons for war is
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
is to restore carthage's status as great power and if this involves going to war with rome as hamilcar clearly suspects it will then so be it you know it will be the ultimate trial for his dynasty and for his city and so hannibal needs to be prepared for that trial and it has to be said that hamilcar you know prepares his elder son for this great test unbelievably well right
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
No, Hannibal even more than Chatham High Street, because I think this is one of the greatest stories, not just ancient history, but history full stop.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
No. And again, there's a comparison with Alexander, who as a young man commands Philip's cavalry. By the time that Hannibal becomes supremo in Spain, he has established himself as a very formidable cavalry commander. But more than that, I think it's given him a sense of the importance and the potential of cavalry in expediting a sense of mobility.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And this again is something that he will display throughout his career. And probably, you know, it's hard to think of a contemporary cavalry commander who could outclass Hannibal by the time he becomes kind of supremo in 221. And this is, again, significant for Carthage's prospects in any land war with the Romans because the Roman cavalry is definitely secondary to their infantry. Right.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
which are heavy, heavily armored, and therefore potentially ponderous. So there is scope there. There are things that Hannibal can make play with. And again, just to reiterate this comparison with Alexander the Great, he's inherited this war machine. He's got this kind of early training as a cavalry commander. He's obviously personally very, very charismatic. When he pointed out that Hasdrubal
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
doesn't in any way seem to have been jealous of him. He clearly admires and respects Hannibal, even though he's younger and his obvious successor. He has all these young officers who've grown up around him, one of whom, Mago, his youngest brother, seems to have been particularly close to him.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And he even has a Greek tutor who's a Spartan called Saucylus, who will accompany Hannibal on his campaigns and write up a biography. Again, that's very Alexander, isn't it? Having your own historian.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, Alexander's influence is manifest to the degree that Alexander is an influence on every general in the century that follows his great course of campaigns. But I don't think that Hannibal has anything like Alexander's desire to just push eastwards, ever eastwards. Hannibal's goals are much more succinct, much more circumscribed.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He essentially wants to re-establish Carthage as the greatest power in the Western Mediterranean. That will obviously require Rome to be humbled to a degree. And so Hannibal is prepared to do that, but he doesn't, I think, want to obliterate Rome. So if this means war with Rome, then Hannibal is prepared to go to war with Rome.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But I think his preference would probably be, I'd rather not have war if we can possibly avoid it. He wants his empire in Spain. And if he can develop that empire in Spain without war with Rome, then all the better.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, we say that, but actually the first treaty that establishes the relations between Carthage and Rome in Spain It's brought about by a Roman position of weakness. So in 225, the Romans are facing an invasion of Gauls. So Gaul, what's now France. And the Gauls had already a century or so before invaded Italy and actually captured Rome. So the Romans are very, very anxious about Gauls.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
They know that they're a menacing enemy. This invasion in 225 causes them great alarm. And they're anxious that if the Gauls do invade Italy, then this will provide scope for the Carthaginians to start messing around. So they sent an embassy to Hasdrubal, who's still alive at this point, and they sign a formal treaty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And by its terms, the Carthaginians pledge not to cross the river Ebro, which is a great river that joins the Mediterranean south of where Barcelona is today. And then it flows from the northwest in a line parallel to the Pyrenees. And it's agreed that the Romans will accept everywhere south of the Ebro as being Carthaginian.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And in the north, the Carthaginians will not kind of intrude north of the Ebro.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But having signed this treaty, the Romans then can't help hedging their bets. And so shortly after they've signed this treaty with Hasdrubal, pledging that they won't poke their noses into Carthaginian affairs south of the river Ebro, they annihilate the Gallic invasion, which means that that threat is removed and they start... slightly regretting this treaty that they've signed.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so it's around the same time, and surely not coincidentally, that they establish friendly relations with an Iberian town called Saguntum, which lies on the coast. So very good communications with Rome by the sea. And the Saguntines become the kind of the Romans' eyes in Spain, kind of sending the Romans intelligence updates on what the Carthaginians are up to.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And they are qualified to do this because they lie just beyond the reach of Carthaginian control. However, there is no guarantee that this will be permanently the case because Saguntum lies five miles south of the Ebro, which means that according to the treaty that the Romans have signed with the Carthaginians, they are within the Carthaginian sphere of influence.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
It absolutely is. And it's absolutely kind of classic. This is traditional Roman mischief making. There is massive scope for a bust up. However, the crisis does take time to brew because to begin with, Hannibal's focus is not on Saguntum.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
What he wants to do is secure Carthaginian control deep into central Spain, along the line of the River Tagus, this river that flows through the centre of the peninsula. And he's essentially following Hasdrubal the Handsome's policy. So he too takes a Spanish wife. He wants to make sure of the loyalty of the Iberians as well as of the Carthaginians.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Again, he's very happy to take the fight to those Iberians who oppose him. He fights two brilliant campaigns in 222, 221. He wins his first major pitched battle. It's against enemies who massively outnumber him. He wipes them out by drawing them in. He tricks them, divides them up. surrounds them, wipes them out with elephants.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So again, there's lots of kind of pointers there to the kind of military courses he'll be adopting. He storms towns, he takes loot, he rewards his troops very, very lavishly. And it becomes apparent that His men really adore him because he gives them victory. He makes them rich. And it's evident that he cares for them kind of very, very deeply.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So the more campaigns Hannibal conducts, the more he can be confident that his war machine is really primed and ready to go. And now that he's got almost the whole of central Spain conquered, his eye turns to the last stretch south of the Ebro, by which, according to a treaty with Rome, he's entitled to conquer. And that's the coastal stretch, which, of course, includes Saguntum.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Hannibal is up there with Alexander as one of the great commanders of ancient history of all time. But I think it has a kind of more tragic quality than the story of Alexander because Hannibal's desire to take on Rome is inspired less by a longing for glory and conquest. Carthage is a much less militarist society than Macedon or even more Rome. And kind of more for...
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so in the year 220, at the end of the campaigning season, he returns to New Carthage. Everybody knows that Saguntum is ready for the following year and he finds a Roman embassy waiting for him.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
They issue him a formal caution, and to quote Livy, that he should leave the people of Saguntum in peace as allies of the Roman people. And Hannibal treats this with absolute scorn. I mean, he clearly finds the tone of the ambassadors very offensive. Carthage and Rome have this treaty. He can do what he likes to Saguntum by the terms of that treaty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And I think more than that, it would have reminded him of how the Romans had played this trick before, because essentially the war in Sicily that kicked off the first Punic War, so the first great conflict between Rome and Carthage, the Romans had pulled exactly the same stunt. They had invaded Sicily with the defense that they were defending friends that they'd recruited in Sicily.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And that had obviously ended up with the Romans conquering the whole island. And Hannibal... knows the Romans have form here, he's determined not to allow the Romans to get a foothold in Spain and to try and play the same trick there. So he plays the Romans at their own game. And he says that he has friends in Saguntum and they're being menaced by our staff faction, by the Romans.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So basically it's his moral duty to attack and capture Saguntum. I mean, he's clearly studied Roman diplomacy as well as military techniques very closely.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, because I think it's clear that in 219, Hannibal is absolutely set on attacking Saguntum.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, so it was said in the wake of the war, Hannibal's war, that he could have asked the Romans to hand back Sardinia, for instance, and to remit the indemnity that had been illegally imposed on them.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Right, that's obviously why Hannibal never even thought to adopt that policy, because it was never going to happen. Right. The Romans would never have agreed to surrender Sardinia because that's not what the Romans do. And anyway, Hannibal is probably thinking, suppose I do attack and annex Saguntum. What are the Romans going to do about it? Rome is a long way from Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Are they really going to risk war over this one city? And even if they do... bring it on. You know, I've got this amazing army. I'm ready to go. It's clear that Hannibal is not alone in thinking this. The Senate back in Carthage think this too, because the Roman embassy that had been to see Hannibal then go to Carthage to complain about Hannibal's behavior.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And the Senate there, even though lots of them don't particularly like Hannibal and are kind of jealous of him, they basically say, you know, piss off. We're not having this, you know. So essentially there is a Carthaginian united front. And this means that in the early summer of 219, Hannibal embarks on the siege of Saguntum, knowing that he has the full backing of everyone in his native city.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
No, it's a disaster, actually. He gets wounded in the thigh, which isn't very helpful. And I think, in general, Hannibal is better in the field than he is kind of laying siege to cities. So all through the summer, all through the autumn, into the winter, Saguntum still hasn't fallen. And had the Romans intervened, then it could potentially have been a real problem for Hannibal.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But the Romans don't intervene. And the reason for that is essentially... It's a bit like Britain in the 30s. There's massive disagreement. There's a kind of war party and they're saying, we've got to do this or else it's going to lead to disaster. And there are others who say, oh, I'm not sure about that.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so these disagreements in Rome enable Hannibal to prosecute the siege until in early 218, the city finally falls. The city is stripped of all its treasure. The population are either slaughtered or sold into slavery. It's an absolute triumph for Hannibal. And back in Rome, the news of this prompts intense feelings of anger, but also, I think, of shame.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
a desire to save his city from a threat that he knows is only going to be growing, namely Rome. And also, undoubtedly, he wants revenge because Carthage has already received a very bloody nose from Rome. And the tragic element is that his very attempt to try and defeat Rome and thereby save his city in the long run dooms it. And this is the second series about Carthage.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And from this point on, the Romans will never cease to characterize the capture of Saguntum as a terrible war crime of the kind that they themselves would never commit.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Absolutely is. So the hypocrisy of the Romans in this, I think, is quite something. And I think that there are still elements within the Roman Senate who recognize this. So there is still... It's not exactly a peace party, but... But it's a faction that says, oh, are we really sure we want to go to war over this? Yeah.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And this faction is led by a very distinguished senatorial figure called Quintus Fabius Maximus Berucosus. So warty. A bit like Oliver Cromwell. He's got a wart on his nose. Right. And he says, look, before we declare war, let's put out the peace feelers again. Let's send an embassy to Carthage. Let's see if we can open feelers to Hannibal's enemies in Carthage and just try and avoid open war.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And I think this is partly because they think the war might be quite difficult, but also because genuinely the Romans are a very kind of moralistic people and they don't want the guilt of starting the war. They're trying to absolutely pin the blame for any conflict on the Carthaginians. Right. So the Roman embassy goes to Carthage and they arrive there.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But despite this kind of, you know, let's go negotiate with the Carthaginians, they're Romans. They're not really there to negotiate. And their starting demand is so obviously impossible that effectively they're wasting their breath. And the starting demand is that Hannibal should be surrendered to the Romans. And there's no way that the Carthaginians are going to do this.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Even Hannibal's bitterest enemies can recognize that if they hand over the guy who's in charge of Carthaginian Spain, that will be the end of Spain. You know, the Romans will move in. No question. Yeah, of course. And so negotiations go nowhere. And the leading Roman ambassador, who may be Quintus Fabius Maximus, or perhaps his cousin, the sources are contradictory.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He stands up, a very famous scene, and I'll quote a Roman source that describes it. He pointed to the bosom of his toga and declared to the Carthaginian senate that in its folds he carried both peace and war and that he would let fall from it whichever they instructed him to leave.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
The Carthaginian chief magistrate answered that he should bring out whichever he thought best and when the envoy replied that it would be war, many of the senators, so those of the Carthaginians, shouted at once, we accept it. It was on these terms that the senate and the Roman ambassadors parted.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, Dominic, in a stunning innovation, we've set up a private club which enables you to access all four episodes. And it's very simple. You go to therestishistory.com and very, very reasonably priced, isn't it, Dominic? It's incredible. Very reasonably priced. Basically giving it away. Yeah, basically.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So we will in due course be coming to the story about how Rome triumphs over Carthage and ends up burning it to the ground. But in this series, fans of Carthage, fans of Hannibal can just sit back and enjoy the ride because everything in this is... Hannibal at his absolute peak. Everything's going brilliantly for him.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So we're going to be covering his invasion of Italy, the Alps, the elephants, all of that. We're going to be looking at his first two great victories that he wins at the River Trebia and Lake Trasimene. Then he has a cat and mouse game with a Roman dictator who's appointed to save Rome in the teeth of disaster, Fabius the Delayer.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And then we will be culminating in our final episode in Rome's bloodiest and most terrible defeat at the Battle of Cannae. So it is non-stop drama.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so they call it the new city, which in Punic, the language spoken by the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians is Carthadash, so that becomes Carthage. And it has every advantage going for it. So it has magnificent natural harbours. It has very fertile hinterland, so it can be fed very easily. And essentially today, the ruins of Carthage are part of the suburbs of the city of Tunis.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so that means that it can command the crucial straits in the Mediterranean between what is now Tunisia and Sicily. And for centuries, you mentioned that Carthage is a great naval power. It is by miles the most formidable and the richest naval power in the Western Mediterranean.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And in the third century BC, the beginning of the third century BC, it has an empire that includes much of North Africa, a chunk of Sicily, it has Corsica, it has Sardinia, and it's also the mistress of a whole array of Phoenician colonies that dot the kind of southern coast of Iberia, of Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah. And as you said, Rome is the great military power. So it's the elephant against the whale. It's a military power against predominantly a naval power. And partly because the determination not to yield on both sides is completely implacable. The war just goes on and on and on, 23 years in all. So it's the longest continuous war ever. in the whole of antiquity.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
It bleeds both sides white in terms of manpower and in terms of wealth. But in the end, it is the Carthaginians who are forced to sue for terms. And in 241, a treaty is signed that ends the war. And by its terms, Carthage surrenders all its holdings in Sicily, where it had been a major power for centuries and centuries. It has to clear out.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And Sicily then becomes the first overseas province ruled by Rome. So for the first time, Rome is no longer merely and Italian power. Carthage is also obliged to pay a massive indemnity. And the combined effect of these terms imposed on the defeated city essentially is to neutralize her as a naval power. So what had traditionally been her strength.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So Carthage hasn't been destroyed, but she's definitely been crippled. And so the obvious question for the Carthaginians is, how is she going to come back from this? And this is the great challenge that obsesses her leading men.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Yeah, so expressive of his speed, his ability to incinerate his opponents. Even the Romans acknowledged that Barca lightning bolt was an excellent description of him.
The Rest Is History
568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So to quote Cornelius Nepos, who was writing a couple of centuries afterwards, looking back at this time, he wrote about Hamilcar, wherever he had personal command, he would never yield to the enemy nor give them opportunity to inflict damage on his forces. Quite the opposite indeed, for he would often go on the offensive should the opportunity present itself and invariably emerged victorious.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And that kind of Roman emphasis on Hamilcar's ability to go on the offensive. Firstly, that is a Roman recognizing a Roman quality in a Carthaginian. Most Carthaginians are not aggressive militarily in the way that, say, a Roman would be.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
But also, I think he is looking ahead to Hamilcar's ability to muster resources in a way that will enable him to prepare for revenge against the Romans for defeating Carthage in the First Punic War. And Hamilcar himself is a very seasoned Roman fighter.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So it's Hamilcar in the dying days of the First Punic War who had led the desperate attempt by the Carthaginians in Sicily to defeat the Romans there. It fails basically because the Carthaginian fleet is defeated and so therefore Hamilcar can no longer be supplied from Carthage.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And when Carthage is thereby forced to surrender in the war, it's Hamilcar who is entrusted by the Carthaginians to negotiate the terms. And people who listen to our episode about this may remember that in the wake of Carthage's defeat, they're so skint that they can't afford to pay the mercenaries who provided them with the bulk of their army. The mercenaries rebel.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
At one point, it looks as though Carthage is going to fall to them. And it's Hamilcar who returns from Sicily, leads the campaign against the mercenaries and ends up defeating them and executing them all in very horrible and bloody ways.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
He resents Rome as an opponent in war who has defeated Carthage. So that's understandable. But in due course, his resentment of that, I think is definitely spiced by a personal sense of betrayal because Hamilcar has negotiated these terms with the Romans. And the Romans take advantage of the mercenary war to tighten the screws on Carthage. So essentially exploiting her misfortune.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So in 237, that is the year after the defeat of the mercenaries, the Carthaginians want to go and stabilize their position in Sardinia because there have been kind of mercenary uprisings there as well. So they raise an army to go and do that. And the Romans, in a display of coarse and brutal cynicism that is entirely typical of their statecraft denounce this army as being in breach of the treaty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
They say, you're raising this army to come and attack us. And so a Roman embassy arrives in Carthage to demand revisions to the peace treaty because they say that the Carthaginians have broken it. They haven't broken it at all. And the Romans say, you've got to surrender Sardinia and Corsica to us. This was never part of the original treaty.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And we are going to increase the indemnity that you need to pay us. So essentially, it is massively exploiting Carthage's hour of need and weakness. And so they have no choice but to accept these terms. And Hamilcar is left incredibly embittered. So to quote a historian of the period, resentful of the injustice, but powerless to prevent it.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
So this is not a kind of man who is going to take it lying down.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Well, so they've lost their land empire in Sicily, in Sardinia and Corsica. But there is another obvious place where Hamilcar can start building a power centre. And this is Spain. So I mentioned that Phoenician colonies have been planted along the southern coast of Spain and actually beyond the Pillars of Hercules at the Straits of Gibraltar.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
Probably the oldest of the lot is Gardez, which will become Cadiz. And these settlements are very strategically positioned. So the As with Carthage, very rich agricultural hinterland, so there's opportunity there to expand. But even more, it is potentially incredibly rich because there are a lot of precious minerals just waiting to be mined.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And also, if these minerals can be kind of turned into gold to pay for mercenaries to conquer more territory, then that conquered territory can supply further troops because Spain is obviously a massive, massive reserve of manpower. Carthage has never actually established a land empire in Spain.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
To repeat, it is not a city that is interested in establishing kind of direct rule over vast swathes of territory in the way that the Romans have shown themselves to be. But Hamilcar, having looked at the way that Rome has risen to power, recognizes, I think, that the only way that Carthage can really survive, let alone defeat the Romans, is is to play that game as well.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
And so his plan essentially is to transform the kind of loose hegemony that Carthage had always exercised over these Phoenician colonies in Spain into a kind of direct rule, and then using these Phoenician ports as bases to expand inland and carve out a Spanish dominion that will be able to replace the empire lost in Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. And hopefully...
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
to provide even greater reserves because of the mineral wealth and the possible reserves of manpower.
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
I think almost certainly. Politics in Carthage is pretty carnivorous. The penalty for failure is very serious. Generals who lose battles are often crucified. So I think for Hamilcar, who has had personal experience of people trying to stab him in the back while he's been busy fighting the Romans...
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568. Hannibal: Rome's Greatest Enemy (Part 1)
I think the chance of establishing a great center of power, not just for Carthage, but for himself and establishing a dynasty there, win-win. Everything is great about it. And it's very clear that Hamilcar is an extremely enthusiastic family man. So we know he has at least three daughters.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
It is indeed. So initially he gets into Cheltenham Art College, but then after news of his poor conduct emerges, he's kicked out and he ends up taking a succession of odd jobs. Because Brian Jones, he'll dominate these two episodes, it's worth pausing for a moment on his personality. He's a very bright boy. He's sensitive. He's very needy. And he's very, very difficult.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Bill Wyman and his autobiography, Stone Alone, which is well worth reading, actually. It's a really, really interesting book. Bill Wyman said he was a preening peacock, gregarious, artistic, desperately seeking assurance from his peers. Mick Jagger said of Brian Jones, I've been practicing. I can't really do it. It's so hard to do. No, it's impossible. He was an extremely difficult person.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
There was something very, very disturbed about him. He was very unhappy with life, very frustrated. He was talented, but he was a very paranoid personality, not suited for show business. Keith Richards. This is the most printable thing I could find. He said of his former friend and bandmate, he was a bastard. Like Harold Godwinson on Willing the Conqueror. Yes, I guess so. Yeah.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, I think the thing about Brian Jones is clearly a very nasty man. He's got a very nasty streak. He has something in common with John Lennon. He enjoys beating up women. He beats up women a lot. John Lennon did not enjoy beating up women and he repented it. But he does beat up women. He does it multiple times.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Oh, poor him. What a victim. What a victim.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
God forbid. Let's not get bogged down into an argument about John Lennon. God forbid. So in Cheltenham, there is a little bohemian set, as there is in so many towns in Britain in the early 60s. Art college, coffee bars, people who are students, who are members of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Duffel coats. Yeah, who are aspiring musicians.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They will meet up and they will listen generally to jazz music or to folk music.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So he's ready with his clarinet.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He's a talented musician. Now, through listening to jazz and folk, people are starting to get into blues music. So blues music, for people who are not massively familiar with music, The music of the rural Mississippi Delta in the late 19th century, and it spreads to the cities of the American South in the 1920s or so, Atlanta and so on.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And then through the Great Migration to Chicago in the 1940s, you get people like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Exactly. And this is a sort of the Chicago blues, which is the kind that becomes very popular in Britain, is there's an electric guitar, there's a harmonica. It's a kind of more urban sound. In the late 1940s, the American magazine Billboard started calling it rhythm and blues, as in R&B. And that became a sort of vague euphemism for black music generally.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And obviously, this music was very influential on people like Elvis Presley in the United States. But it doesn't go through into the white American mainstream because record company executives believe that white audiences will never take black music.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So in other words, when people like the Stones take it to the United States or the Animals or whoever, a lot of white audiences have not heard it before, which is an important thing in their success. But Britain is different. In Britain, white jazz and folk enthusiasts are not hidebound by the same racial inhibitions as in the United States. So they start listening to blues as well.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And a good example of this is the best-known jazz band leader of the day who's called Chris Barber. He went to St. Paul's, Tom. So many of these people... Yeah, so many of these people are either grammar school boys or public school boys. It's a really strange and interesting phenomenon. Chris Barber played a lot of blues with his touring band.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And in October 1961, they go to Cheltenham, where Brian Jones lives, and they play at the Town Hall. And he's 19 years old, Jones, and he goes to see them, and he is absolutely transfixed by it. And afterwards, he goes to one of these clubs, the Waikiki Club, to talk to Chris Barber's guitarist, who's a man called Alexis Corner, who's a very influential person in the small British blues scene.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Who knew? Who knew? So Brian Jones plays his guitar for Alexis Corner. He says, I'll show you what I can do. Alexis Corner says, oh, brilliant. You know, you can come to London anytime and stay with me. So let's move on a bit to 1962, Harold Macmillan's last full year as prime minister. In March 1962, just giving people a bit of political context, Tom. Never had it so good, Dominic. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
In March 1962, Alexis Corner starts the first regular blues night at the Ealing Jazz Club with his own band, which is called Blues Incorporated. And other clubs start to copy that. They're in places that are sort of on the suburban fringe of London.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So Guildford, Andover, Richmond, Twickenham, quite affluent little sort of places, towns that have been absorbed into the great sprawl of Greater London. And I think what's basically happening is that the art school, bohemian, arty people, who would previously have listened to jazz or folk music three or four years earlier, they're now listening to blues.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And among them, at least three future Rolling Stones who we will come to. And actually, what distinguishes blues from its predecessor, jazz, is hotly debated by these people. There are furious arguments. Love it. And Brian Jones himself writes a letter to Jazz News in October 1962 to explain what he thinks the difference is. And he says, I think it's actually a pretty good definition.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He says, jazz is the music of the intellect, but blues can only be emotional. Yeah, that's good, isn't it? There's something earthier. That's the difference. It's in the kind of the atmosphere and the sound, I guess. And is he wearing a duffel coat at this point? Almost certainly he is. The fact that he writes that letter speaks volumes about his obsession.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yes. Hello, everybody. The headline on that article was, but would you let your daughter marry? Marry one. And that was inspired by an article that had run a few weeks earlier in Melody Maker. Would you let your sister go with a rolling stone? And I think that captures, Tom, the stone's enduring image. So even today, I mean, they're in their 80s, aren't they? Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He is more into the blues than any future Rolling Stone will be by a huge degree. So by this point, spring 62, he's in London. He's working as an appliance salesman. He's sometimes playing with Alexis Corner's band, Blues Incorporated, but he's desperate to set up his own blues group. So on the 2nd of May, 1962, he puts a classified advert in the Jazz News. He says, I want to form an R&B band.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I'm a guitarist. I'm looking for harmonica or sax. I'm looking for piano, bass, drums, et cetera, et cetera. He gets the first recruit, who's a chap called Ian Stewart, who's a Scottish jazz pianist. Got an absolutely enormous jaw, hasn't he? He does, he does, which actually, yeah, dooms him, I think it's fair to say, like a Habsburg. Looks like Desperate Dan.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And then in June, he picks up three more recruits from the kind of Blues Incorporated milieu. And these are two teenage friends from Dartford in Kent, and they are Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and a guy called Dick Taylor. So now we come to Mick Jagger.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He's Michael Jagger, but he has by this point renamed himself Mick. Jagger was born a year later than Brian Jones. He was born in 1943. His father was a gymnast and a PE lecturer. Oh, like that sinister bloke in the Czech Republic. I knew that comparison was coming. Yeah, Conrad Henlein. I mean, they're very different people. I just want to put that on record in case Mick is listening.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
His mother was a hairdresser and a very keen conservative activist, I read. Mick, like Brian Jones, is very middle class. He sings in the church choir. He does very well at school. I think this is really important. He passes the 11 plus and goes to grammar school and then continues to do really well and wins a place at the London School of Economics. And people often sort of pass that off.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
That's amazing, isn't it? That's an interesting little detail. Actually, it's more than an interesting little detail. It says that Mick Jagger is both very bright and must be extremely dedicated and hardworking.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Because to get into the LSE, which is one of those prestigious places in Britain, at a time when nine out of ten people don't even go to university at all, and especially where he's come from, right, Dartford and Kent, that's an impressive achievement. He always comes across as very, very smart. Yeah, he's very smart. He'll be very smart throughout these two episodes.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, at Dartford Grammar School, he'd become friends with a plumber's son, another very bright boy to be at grammar school at all, called Dick Taylor. And they're massively into their jazz and their blues, the Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, the Chicago stuff, all this. They form their own teenage band, basically playing in their bedroom.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And it's at this point that Mike Jagger, he affects this accent. I mean, even now, his accent is so variable. Yeah. You know, sometimes he's very well-spoken, and sometimes it's just the kind of weird, strangulated, estuary voice that he does. And he obviously starts calling himself Mick, doesn't he? I mean, not Mike, because he thinks Mick is cool. Well, he's not wrong. Is he not wrong, really?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yeah, right. Exactly. The Andrew Luke Oldham of podcasting. Yeah. So... Very famously, in October 1961, Mick, as he now calls himself, is on his way to the LSE and he's standing at Platform 2 in Dartford Station when he notices a boy from primary school who he remembers from a long time ago. And this is Keith Richards. Keith Richards is from a much more working-class family.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
His father worked in a lightbulb factory. His mother worked in a baker's shop, and he has grown up on a council estate. He is not a good boy. He did not go to grammar school. He played truant from school. He was expelled from Dartford Tech, and he ends up at Sidcup Art College. And he's also very into the blues.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So they're standing there, and Jagger notices him and comes over and sees that he's got these records, that Keith is carrying these records. And we know this because Keith wrote a letter to his aunt Pat right afterwards and described, I was holding one of Chuck Berry's records when a guy I knew at primary school came up to me. He's got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I mean, amazing. Keith Richards is still around in his 80s. I know, amazing. But to people like our producer, Theo, who loves the Rolling Stones, they're still symbols of... kind of defiance of authority, of rebelliousness, sort of sexual excess. Everything that Theo embodies. Everything that we like our producers on The Rest Is History to embody, exactly.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They're all Rhythm and Blues fans, et cetera, et cetera. So they have this little chat. And Mick says to Keith, oh, do you know Dick Taylor? He does know Dick Taylor. What are the chances? Brilliant. Why don't you come and play with us? We can have our own little band. And they set up their own little band called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. It's a terrible title. It is a terrible title.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And they answered the advert and the band is born. They played, they met up, they played their first gig together at the Marquee Jazz Club, then in a basement in Oxford Street on the 12th of July, 1962. They decided to call themselves after a Muddy Water song and they call themselves the Rolling Stones. So no G. No G. And they are unambiguously, basically a Chicago blues tribute band. Right.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So when they sort of announce themselves to the world, the Jazz News asks them about their name. And Mick Jagger says to Jazz News, I hope people don't think we're a rock and roll outfit. Right. So it's only R&B, but I like it. Exactly. It's only R&B, but I like it. And you know what? They're not very successful. No one likes them. They are too loud. They're too raucous. They're too sort of raw.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They play in church halls and in sports clubs, and nobody cares. So at the end of 1962, Dick Taylor goes off to art college. Jagger and Richards are basically, you know, they're like, well, this is quite good fun. We'll keep doing it. And they move in with Brian Jones in this flat in Chelsea. It's the coldest winter in modern British history. The third coldest in all British history.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The big freeze. All their water pipes freeze. They've got no money. Keith Richards' mum has to send them food parcels. And they are all very close to their mums, aren't they? They are very close. Yeah, absolutely. It's very sweet. So they're absolutely freezing and really miserable and nobody likes their music. But somehow over the winter, they acquire two new members.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
One of them, they get a bassist. He's called Bill Wyman. He's also a grammar school boy, but he's a fair bit older. This is really important, actually, in Stone's internal dynamics. Bill Wyman was six years older. Well, he likes hanging out with people who are younger than him. He does indeed. He enjoys the company of young people. I think it's fair to say.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He'd done his national service in Germany, so he's been in the army. He was married. He had a baby son, and he has a steady job. He lives in Penge. But he's happy. He likes the music, and he thinks, yeah, fair enough. Although, that said, he is always more conservative than they are, and he's always suspicious of what he sees as their bohemian, arty side, which he doesn't trust.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So he's the Dominic Sandbrook of the Stones. Well, is he or is the next person Charlie Watts? So Charlie Watts is a lorry driver's son. Yeah, maybe you're more Charlie Watts. And also the Bill Wyman comparison is one I want to encourage. All right. Charlie Watts is a lorry driver's son from Wembley. He's a trained graphic artist. His passion is jazz. He's a brilliant jazz drummer.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He does not like rock and roll, and he doesn't even like R&B. That's the amazing thing about Charlie Watts. I know. They have to persuade him to join the band, and he only does it because he can see that blues is becoming more popular than jazz. And actually, throughout the whole career, Charlie Watts is basically playing music he doesn't really like. I just...
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, some people, I guess, may be thinking The Rolling Stones and a history podcast, really. But I think there are two dimensions involved. in which they're really important. The first is obviously pop cultural. So I think it's the Stones, more than any other band since the 1960s, who came to define the look and the sound and the style of rock music. And I say rock music deliberately.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And he's, again, a very different character. He was married to his wife, Shirley, for 57 years. He's not interested in the groupies. He doesn't like going on tour. He collects model soldiers and memorabilia from the American Civil War. And cricket memorabilia as well. Yeah, he's a great memorabilia man, generally. He loves cricket, as actually Mick Jagger does.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Mick Jagger's a big cricket fan, isn't he?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He is very well dressed. I think actually the Stones generally are very well dressed. Yeah, they are. I think they're very well turned out. So 1963 comes and they get their big break on the 24th of February when Brian Jones, who basically spends all his time writing to blues promoters and jazz people and stuff like this, he gets them a gig at the Station Hotel in Richmond.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So near the railway station in Richmond. On Sunday nights, they have a club night called the Craw Daddy run by an emigre from Georgia in the Caucasus called Giorgio Gomelski. And the Stones come on and they play in this station hotel.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And there's a rival promoter called Vic Jones who was there who said of that night, I honestly didn't know whether to laugh at the Stones or call for an animal trainer. I had never seen anything like them. Because they're just so sort of loud. There's a lot of shouting. Obviously Mick Jagger's style is very... He's kind of Leonine, isn't it? Yeah, Leonine.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Later on, Andrew Lou Goldham compared him with a Puma. Actually, yeah, Puma. Puma's better. But he has this kind of mane, I guess. Yes, exactly. And Kamelsky, the promoter who's doing this, he thinks they're very loud and raucous and disorganised, but... You know, they've got something.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And his adverts for this night, which is every Sunday, start to play on the fact that stones will be there and their reputation. And he writes this incredible kind of bullion copy, the inexhaustible purveyors of spontaneous combustion, the unmitigating ebullient perturbing rolling stones or warning R&B sound barrier to be broken by rolling stones.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Right, all sex of them. Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, we get the first press cutting ever about the Rolling Stones in April 1963 in the Richmond and Twickenham Times. And this newspaper says, there's a thing going on at this station hotel. 300 people they're getting now every Sunday with long hair, suede jackets, gaucho trousers and Chelsea boots. I don't actually know what gaucho trousers are.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
No, but you've been to Argentina, surely you...
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I actually went horse riding in Argentina. Did you? But I don't remember any special trousers. There might have been some chaps or something like that. God, I don't want to imagine you in chaps. Brilliant. The other thing is that this point, the first appearance in the press, is also the first point where people comment on their appearance.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Their hair worn Piltdown style, brushed forward from the crown like the Beatles pop group. And Piltdown style? Piltdown Man. Yeah, Piltdown Man, friend of the show.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Exactly. So the comparison with Stone Age Man, which you hear a lot in the 60s, but also obviously the comparison with the Beatles. So right from the beginning, they're being held to that standard. And as it happens, the very next day, who should come to see them play but the Beatles.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The Beatles have been filming for TV nearby in Teddington, and they've heard that there's this band, and they come to see them at this hotel. It's a sign, actually, of how relatively unfamous the Beatles are at this point. They're famous enough to be filming for TV, but not so famous that they can't go to a hotel to watch a little local band.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Obviously, the Beatles are enormously influential in all kinds of different areas. But in terms of pure rock music, I think the look of the Stones in particular in their as it were, dare I say, their vibe, Tom? Their vibe, yeah. Their vibe. It's the Stones who establish, as it were, the vibe.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And they go there and the Stones are very excited that the Beatles, who are what, a year or so older maybe, little more than that, roughly the same age, but far more famous. The Stones are very excited. They actually try to impress the Beatles afterwards by saying, listen to this, and they'll play random blues numbers that the Beatles have never heard of and are not interested in.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So the Stones are desperately trying to sort of suck up to them. But the Beatles are very nice to them. The Beatles say, look, we're playing at the Royal Albert Hall in a couple of weeks. Would you like free tickets? The Stones don't find that condescending. They're delighted. They're very excited. I mean, but it is a brilliant thing to play at the Albert Hall, isn't it, Dominic? It is.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
We should do that to other history podcasters. I don't want to because I don't want to set up a Rolling Stones to our Beatles. That would be terrible. Bill Wyman in his memoir says, Jagger and Richards idolized the Beatles and were starstruck by them. And I think this, you can argue, this is a key moment for them.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Because this is a point when they, for the first time, meet people who have had the success of which they dream. And it's a point at which they glimpse, perhaps, for the first time, what it would be like to become stars. And then, just two weeks later, comes the moment and the meeting that really changes their lives.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I'd never seen anything... How does a Dutch person whisper? He says, for sure, a lot. And does that sort of strange... They do that, don't they? That's what I was trying to convey. Maybe it didn't work. Well, he was the son of a Dutch-American air officer. He didn't actually talk with a Dutch accent. He went to private school.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He definitely didn't come out of a British private school speaking like a Dutchman. That would have been beaten out of him. He'd have been beaten with his own clogs, surely. So Andrew Lou Goldham, who's their first manager... He goes to see them play on the 28th of April, 1963. He is a tremendously amusing character. His autobiography, like Bill Wyman's, is a cracking read. He's a very wily man.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He's very driven and ruthless. His own autobiography approvingly quotes one of his critics calling him calculatedly vicious and nasty, but as pretty as a stoat. Is a stoat that? Is a stoat the look that you strive for? I don't know. Maybe it is. If it's a hot stoat. Yeah, I guess. So after private school, he'd left early.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Right, he's going to prison. That's an odd ambition.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They become the first tribute act. To themselves. Yeah, in rock music history, to themselves. But they're also, I mean, you mentioned the logo, they're huge commercial pioneers. And in the second episode, we'll talk about... There are later tours of the United States where they charge higher ticket prices than anyone had ever charged. They recognize the business potential of this.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Look, I mean, I'm not approving of it. I'm just saying that's what, you know. That's where he was at. That was his dream. I'm just reporting history, Tom. That's how it is. People make bad choices. What can I say? He wants his own band to rival the Beatles. He's heard from a sort of music industry insider. Go down to the Station Hotel in Richmond.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So if that hadn't been on the same line, he wouldn't have gone and history would have been different. History would have been different. Never heard of Mick Jagger. What would he be doing now? Who knows? He'd be an English teacher, wouldn't he? He would. He'd be a PE teacher, maybe, like his father. Not at the LSE, though. He wouldn't go to the LSE, in it. No, he'd be teaching economics.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yeah, he would. He'd be a top economist. He goes down to this hotel. On the way in, he bumps into a young man who's having an argument with his girlfriend. He describes the young man. He was thin, waistless, giving him the human form of a puma with a gender of its own. That is a brilliant sentence. And this is Mick Jagger, you see. And it's a very good description of Mick Jagger.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
You can really write. If you read that sentence, someone said, who's this? That's clearly Mick Jagger. Anyway, he goes in. Half an hour later, the band start playing. Now, Andrew Lou Goldham knows nothing at all about music. He's only interested in this as a vehicle to make money. I like that in the music promoter. Yeah. I mean, he's got his eyes on the prize.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And he goes in and then he says, oh, this is absolutely amazing. That quotation that you read in your lovely Dutch accent. He persuades them to sign a three-year contract. Now, I should say, he's only 19 years old. I mean, it's bonkers that they have signed a three-year contract with this man who knows nothing about anything.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
But he talks the talk and he finds a partner, an old school partner called Eric Easton, who's from Lancashire, like our own beloved executive producer, Tony Pastor. So he knows all the nuts and bolts of the music industry. He's the kind of person that all bands had, but that doesn't fit into the sort of, oh, the 60s was an age of revolution.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
count so he's not groovy no but he's you know he's the kind of person who says hey and by the way you know I know how this works you sign this deal you do this you know that's what you need Tom do we not have that with the rest of history we absolutely do so Eric Easton Andrew Lou Goldham arranged a meeting with Dick Rowe at Decker and you mentioned him in the first half he's the man who turned down the Beatles and Dick Rowe is looking for groups he wants as many groups as he can get and
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And as it happens, Dick Rowe has recently been judging a talent show in Liverpool with George Harrison. And George Harrison had said to him, I went to see this band at the Station Hotel in Richmond the other day. They were quite good, the Rolling Stones. And so when the Rolling Stones come to him, he says, great, right, brilliant. You know, what's not to like? And he signs them.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, at this point, Andrew Lou Golder makes two changes. First of all, he says, the name is rubbish. The Rolling Stones. Yeah, you see, he's worrying about that as well. Yeah, like you. Yeah. Well, he said, and I quote, how can you expect people to take you seriously when you can't even spell your name properly? I mean, he's not wrong. So the second thing is, so they become the Rolling Stones.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I mean, of course, famously, they become tax exiles. Yeah, they go to the south of France, don't they? Exactly. So there's that. If you're interested in pop culture, the Stones are obviously really important. But also in a more conventional historical dimension. The Rolling Stones become emblematic in Britain in particular of the 1960s.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, the next thing is that he says six people in the band is far too many. Someone's got to go. And he says, Ian Stewart, like you, Tom, again, very similar people you and Andrew Lou Goldham. He says, Ian Stewart, he's ugly. He's too ugly and he's got to go. Get rid.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now they say to Stuart, oh, I'm so sorry, you've got to go. And he says, well, fine, I'll stay on and I'll drive you about and I'll be your road manager, which is so sweet.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yeah, they did indeed. So that's good. Yeah, and he drove around and did stuff for them and helped look after them for 20 years. I have to say, Brian Jones promised him that he would get a sixth of everything. And did he? No, he didn't. That's bad. Anyway, we've now got to about May 1963. Now, this is the point where Beatlemania is taking off in Britain.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And obviously Andrew Lou Golden does the obvious thing. He decides to make them just like the Beatles. So he takes them to Carnaby Street. He gets them velvet sort of jackets and little ties and Cuban heels. And they absolutely hate it. Matching uniforms. He gets Keith Richards to change his surname to Keith Richard. So he will sound more like Cliff Richard. I mean, that's mad, isn't it?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
It has a more pop sound. They're often confused. And he starts placing articles in the music press. So a very good example, Record Mirror, May 1963. Their style, it says, is, quote, the new jungle music. They sing and play in a way that one would have expected more from a coloured US group than a bunch of wild, exciting white boys. And this is actually important.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I said we would explain why the Stones are so controversial. I think this is actually really important that people say from the very beginning they are playing black music. This is unprecedented. Well, that's the great quote in the rock and roll swindle about Mick Jagger. Exactly. Unquotable, I think, on this podcast, Tom. Very much unquotable, yes. But it's a very slow start.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They spend the summer of 63. They're doing this long provincial tour. And this is how rock worked in those days. They're supporting people like the Everly Brothers touring Britain, and they are playing the maddest, tiniest venues. So my favorite one, I'll always love this story. They played the co-op ballroom, Nuneaton.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And I think their story, their rise and rise, normally we do rise and fall in history podcasts, but this is rise and rise. Their story becomes a brilliant window, I think, into the world of 60s Britain. So we can explore all kinds of things like social class, economic and social change, attitudes towards drugs and whatnot. And we'll do this over two episodes. So in today's episode...
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And they were booked to play at an afternoon tea for the town's primary school children. And when they came on stage and they start playing this music, these children who are literally eight years old all threw cream cakes at them. Oh, dear. It's only rock and roll. Bill Wyman mentions this in his memoir. He said, you know, it was terrible. I hate it. We're standing there.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Pastries raining down from these eight-year-olds. Yeah, people go on about Altamont, but this non-eating is the real dark moment. Anyway, this actually works because this is how you build a national reputation. So their very first single, which was Come On, a Chuck Berry cover, had only peaked at number 21 in June.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
But by December, their second single, which is I Want To Be Your Man, which was given them by Paul McCartney, gets to number 12. And people are starting to notice them at this point. So the Daily Sketch, national newspaper, January 1964, says to its readers, watch out for this new band with heads like hairy pudding basins. Got to say, the standard of music journalism in the 60s was superb.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Well, it's brilliant. There's more of it, I think, and it's more... It's wittier. Yeah, it's fun because it's all new, you see. It's all new. It's gear. Yeah. Now, there's one really big development at this point, hugely important for the Rolling Stones, which is the rise of Mick Jagger and the decline of Brian Jones. So Mick Jagger has all this time been at the LSE.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He's been a registered student at the LSE and he doesn't drop out until the end of September 1963 when he writes a letter to his tutors. I've been offered, I can't do his voice, I've been offered a really excellent opportunity in the entertainment world, he says. Now, up to this point, they had very obviously been Brian Jones's band, a blues band. Jones had put them together.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Jones had booked the gigs. Jones had collected the money and doled it out, keeping the lion's share I have to say for himself. But at exactly this point, he starts to lose his position. He starts to be pushed out a little bit. Basically, because he's a complete flake, he doesn't have the temperament or the stamina to tour and play full-time. He keeps collapsing with nervous exhaustion.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The other Stones say he's a hypochondriac. They're always making jokes about, oh, has he got a doctor's letter? Has he got a letter from his mum to let himself off rehearsing or whatever? But crucially... Andrew Lou Goldham says to them, playing old blues classics will not cut it. We're in a new age and a new audience expects people to write their own songs as the Beatles do.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So, you know, Jagger and Richards say, oh, brilliant. We'd love to try writing our own songs. And Brian Jones doesn't want to do that. In fact, Mick Jagger, slightly ungallantly, I think it's fair to say, said later, Brian couldn't do that. To be honest, Brian had no talent for writing songs, says Mick. None. I've never known a guy with less talent for songwriting. Which is harsh, right?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
About a man who now can't answer back. Anyway, Jagger and Richards move into a flat with Andrew Lou Goldham. Brian Jones is left on his own. So he's even more marginalised. And as Bill Wyman says in his autobiography, Brian would try to ingratiate himself by crawling first to Mick and then to Andrew, which didn't do any good. He should simply have been strong in himself.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
We look at where they came from, what they represent, why they're so controversial, which I think is a really interesting question, and how they end up being cast as the yin to the Beatles' yang. That Beatles versus Stones thing, which is obviously massively contrived, but which runs all the way through the 1960s and becomes a big cultural signifier, I would say.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They're terrible, aren't they? Honestly, they're such a bunch of bullies. Poor old Brian Jones. You see, I think Brian Jones is terrible and they behave remarkably patient given his poor behaviour. But anyway, there you go.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Now, from the start, I said we'd get into why they're so controversial. They had been controversial from the moment they stepped onto the national stage. So they'd made their television debut at the very bottom of the bill on a kind of variety show called Thank Your Lucky Stars in July 1963. They were still in their matching outfits.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They were in checked jackets and slacks, like lecturers at a Midwestern university, history lecturers at an American university. nice chinos or something, ironed with creases down the middle. And even though they were wearing these outfits, ATV, who made the show, were deluged with letters, people saying, absolute disgrace.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And I quote, it is disgusting that long-haired louts such as these should be allowed to appear on television. Their appearance was absolutely disgusting. The whole lot of you should be given a good bath and all that hair should be cut off. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country. Do you know, the sense that Britain was a much more fun place. I know.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Very slightly long hair.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And everyone's a winner. No, absolutely, Tom. Everyone's having a great time, I think. They've got so much money, I think, by comparison with what they had before. So they're all excited. Now, this is, of course, the summer of the Beatles. And I think the context of this really matters. But the Beatles are mainstream. The Beatles, thanks to Brian Epstein's marketing, their huge popularity.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And then, of course, especially when they do things like the Royal Variety Performance or when they go to America and conquer the American charts, they become kind of national heroes. You were laughing earlier about Sir Alec Douglas Hume. Sir Alec Douglas Hume goes out of his way to praise the Beatles. He says, if anyone asks why the Beatles are successful, I can tell you.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
It is because they are a band of very natural, very funny young men. That thing about them being funny, by the way, that is one massive difference between the Beatles and the Stones. The Stones are never... They're unintentionally funny, but they're never... Really funny, are they?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Amazing banter. So I think what's happened is because the Beatles have occupied the centre ground, there is clearly a gap in the market for a group that is more unsettling, more rebellious. And this is where the hare comes in. Almost every single article about the stones in their first 18 months or so mentioned the hare. In mid-century Britain,
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I think in large part as a legacy of the Second World War and the mass conscription involved in national service in the 1950s. Long hair is viewed as dissident, dirty, licentious, subversive, bohemian, all of these kinds of things. What's not to like? And people really are offended by the stone's hair. So in spring 1964, this is an amazing photo.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The National Federation of Hairdressers held its annual conference. Well, they're staring down the barrel, aren't they, with this? The President of the National Federation of Hairdressers devoted his speech to an assault on the Rolling Stones' slovenly, dirty and downright ragged appearance.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And today we'll be looking particularly at the man who founded the band, who I think is often a little bit forgotten today, and that's Brian Jones. Originally, it's not Mick Jagger's band, it's not Keith Richards' band, it's Brian Jones' band. So we'll talk about him. But first, Tom, would you like a little bit of historical context?
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Theo's very keen that we make the joke that basically the story of this episode is the stones versus big hair. So it's basically big hair versus big hair. Or big hairdressing, I should say. Anyway, the puzzle actually is that the Beatles also have long hair. But that's clean. It's fun. Yes, it's clean and wacky and fun. Here's, I think, the difference.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The Beatles, because they present themselves as funny and cuddly and child-friendly, their long hair is eccentric and quirky and entertaining, whereas the Stones' long hair is dangerous and threatening. But I think it's also because of the nature of the music. The Beatles' music is already familiar. It's a familiar style.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
It's not an alarming style of music because it's the beat music that has been around for a couple of years. The Stones' music is rhythm and blues, which has no chart history before 1964. And when people do talk about it, they say, what is it? Oh, it's the music of poor black Americans. And so people talk about it as kind of scruffy music, rebellious music.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And so I think even before the Stones have conquered the charts, before they've actually done anything wrong... The press are talking about them as bad boys, rebellious, outlaws, and so on. And for me, Andrew Lou Golden's genius as a manager is having started out thinking, I will make them like the Beatles.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
He ditches that quite quickly and realizes we cannot possibly compete with them because they have such a massive head start. The gap in the market is for the anti-Beatles. It's for a group teenagers can have for themselves that will shock their parents.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
In his memoir, he says at the end of 1963, he consciously decided to turn the stones into, quote, the group parents love to hate, dangerous, dirty and degenerate. And he said to them, be as nasty as you can be in your interviews and your public performances.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Exactly. And that's the interesting thing, right? People always at the time and afterwards have said, well, the Beatles were very commercialized. They were manicured. The Stones are more authentic because they're more rebellious. Actually, that is totally wrong. The Stones' rebelliousness is completely contrived and manufactured.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The contrivance, the manufacture, is the lack of contrivance, if you know what I mean. There's a story, Oldham gets a guy called Gerard Mankiewicz, a very well-known photographer, to photograph them. And he says, you know, snarl more, make it more... More piltdown. More piltdown, more moody. You know, look more angry and difficult.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Whereas, in fact, actually, they're not especially angry and difficult offstage. But the media love this. Everyone's happy. It works for everybody. So by early 1964, the media are playing along. The Daily Express, February 64. They look like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
But the Rolling Stones, five tough young London-based music makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair, are not worried what mums think. So Mick must be thrilled at being called a tough young Londoner. Right. But a weird thing is, of course, as we will see, they do worry about what mums think, meaning their own mothers, because they're very filial.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Brilliant. I'm so pleased. This is why you're the perfect person to do this podcast.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And the contrast to the Beatles becomes so explicit, it becomes a cliche. Here's the news of the world, November 1964. The Beatles bubble with laughter. They make jokes. They wear neat clothes. They get along with royalty. But it's different with the Stones. They leer rather than smile. They don't wear natty clothes. And at the end of the piece, the journalist...
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
notes correctly the extraordinary thing is that more and more youngsters are turning towards the stones the beetles have become too respectable and it's that very respectability that the beetles clearly do have in 1963-64 that gives the stones their opportunity to cast themselves as the antithesis of it had the beetles been less respectable actually there would be much less room i think for the
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yeah. But all that has been buried. That has been buried, as has the Stones. The LSE and all of that. The Mick Jagger going to the LSE. The fact that Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts had held steady, serious jobs. The fact that Bill Wyman was married with a child.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The fact that when journalists interview them, they say offstage they are quiet and modest and Mick Jagger, their leader, Brian Jones would not have been happy with that. Mick Jagger, their leader, is unusually friendly and intelligent. That's from a book called The Teenage Revolution by Peter Lorre, 1965. Their parents, their family, are really surprised at the criticism of them.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Charlie Watts' mother, he's always been a good boy. We've never had police knocking on the door. He's always been terribly kind to old people. Which is good preparation for going on tour with the Rolling Stones. The Rolling Stones, yeah. Bill Wyman's mum says, what's going on here? And Bill Wyman says, she asks about his hair.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So the Rolling Stones first become famous in 1964, and that's the end of 13 years of conservatism in Britain. The premierships of Winston Churchill, Sir Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and finally Sir Alec Douglas Hume.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And Bill Wyman says, I love this quote because it expresses, it basically expresses my worldview, like how I approach everything. Bill Wyman says to his mum, mum, it's only for about three years off his hair and I'll get a nice car and a nice house fully furnished out of it. And you've put fully furnished in italics. Well, I think the fully furnished... It's like there's the banal practicality.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Exactly. Keith Richards always kept in touch with his mum when he went on tour and used to send her presents from the countries that he visited. Charlie Watts arranged to have his mum receive her favourite chocolate cake every Friday night. Isn't that nice? Yeah. John Lennon never behaved like that, Tom. He bought Aunt Mimi a house in Bournemouth. He did. That's true. He did.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The media, of course, aren't interested in any of that. It doesn't fit the personas, and Oldham downplays it. And all that happens is their rebellious image becomes greater and greater. Every little incident, and of course there are bound to be lots of incidents because these are young men surrounded by adoring girls that drink, they're having fun. Later on, of course, there will be drugs.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So it's not like there aren't any incidents. It's not like there isn't any bad behavior, but it's massively magnified. And it's a strategy that works. In April 64, their album, The Rolling Stones, knocks With The Beatles off the top of the album charts. In July, It's All Over Now becomes their first British hit single.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
In December 64, Little Red Rooster becomes the only blues song ever to top the British singles chart.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I would agree with that. That said, theirs is not the musical journey of the Beatles, but in the next 18 months or so, they do have a pretty amazing run of singles. Heart of Stone, Play With Fire, Satisfaction, Get Off My Cloud, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Paint It Black, and so on and so forth.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Exactly. Brian Jones is more and more unhappy with this because actually what they're no longer doing is playing Chicago blues. They are evolving into a rock band, into something new, something that hasn't actually really existed before. I mean, imagine being unhappy that you've... They've released Satisfaction as a single. So Satisfaction was their first US number one in 1965.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Then they have their first US number one album, Out of Our Heads, a month later. In October 1965, when they released in America, December's Children and Everybody's, which was their next album, the US title, it was advertised by a huge David Bailey poster in Times Square. So this is two years after they had been on that stage in Nuneaton. with those kids having bums by eight-year-olds.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
By eight-year-olds. I mean, that is bonkers. Because we now take their rise and that of the Beatles and groups that are for granted, we underestimate, I think, What an extraordinary thing that was, not least because stuff like this had never happened before and certainly never happened to a British group.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
It might happen now all the time, so we're used to the trajectory and there's a sort of formula. But at the time, people like the Rolling Stones had never even been to America on holiday. So to go and have your poster in Times Square at the age of what – 22? 23? I mean, it's a mind-boggling experience for them.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And the interesting thing is, when the Beatles did this, the Beatles came home and they were national champions, patriotic heroes. Hurrah! You know, banner headlines. But the Stones never enjoy that reputation because they appear more cynical, more confrontational.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
What they've done is they've established something that I think is new, which is the image of the rock group as insolent, as representing aggression, sensuality, confrontation, generational discord.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
digging what you're into yeah but nobody had had that conversation before this point no so they invent that they effectively invent that they i mean the generation gap i think is massively inflated in the 60s but there clearly is a market for a group that will annoy your dad yeah And the Stones fill that gap perfectly.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
That's the classic kind of move, isn't it? It is. It's the juxtaposition. So in that period, the British Empire has largely disintegrated. Everyday life in Britain has been transformed by full employment, by massively rising wages, by free mass education. In other words, this is the absolute high point of what people call at the time the affluent society.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And actually, at the point when they're conquering America, something happens in Britain that I think if you'd ask most adults in Britain in 1965, what's the one thing you know about the Rolling Stones? It is this story. So we'll end with this. Does it involve micturation? It does. Micturation. Oh, that's what they pay you the big bucks for, isn't it, Tom? That kind of wordplay, witty wordplay.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So in March 1965, they'd been giving a concert at the Romford Odeon. That's the other great thing about the 60s, right? Yeah, you come back from Times Square and you're in the Romford Odeon. That one minute you're doing something brilliant. And the next thing you're in that ballroom in the Neaton again. And their Daimler, their chauffeur-driven Daimler is bringing them back from Romford.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And they, late at night, and they stop at a service station, a garage, a gas station, as our overseas listeners would call it, in Stratford, East London. And the garage manager, whose name is Charles Keeley, just later told a court... that a shaggy-haired monster got out of the car and asked, quote, in disgusting language, if he could use the toilet.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And Keeley said, no, this person was Bill Wyman, by the way, married with a child living in Penge. That's... And then the other members of the band got out of the car too and started to argue with Charles Keeney and said, come on, you know, can you let him use the toilets? We piss anywhere, man. Yeah, Jagger comes out with this terrible line. We piss anywhere, man.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
But still, they're not insisting. They're bargaining with the petrol station staff. And Charles Keighley lost his temper and shouted, get off my forecourt. At which Brian Jones started dancing around this forecourt station, shouting and singing, get off my foreskin at the station, ma'am. Not get off my cloud. No, not get off my cloud.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Anyway, this episode, inglorious as it may sound, ended with Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones urinating on the wall of the forecourt and then driving off in triumph in their Daimler. Charles Keeley brought a private prosecution against them. They were dragged into an East London courtroom and convicted of insulting behaviour liable to cause a breach of the peace.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
and handed a very small fine. And was this all arranged by Oldham? Well, this is a brilliant, this is an amazingly trivial and pathetic story, but it was like front page headlines, stones, shame. But massive for their reputation. Massive, massive for their reputation. So a magistrate, a Scottish magistrate in a totally unrelated trial,
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
about a week later, went off on a massive rant about the Stones. Some incidents happened in Scotland. He said it's basically all the fault of people like the Stones. He said they are, quote, complete morons who wear their hair down to their shoulders, wear filthy clothes and act like clowns. And the news of the world came out with a wonderful verdict.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
They wallow in a swill tub of their own repulsiveness.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And the people who benefit arguably more than anybody are young people. So there are about five and a half million teenagers in Britain by the early 60s, and they are defined economically. In other words, they are an economic group really for the first time who are spending more than £800 million a year,
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Coin phrases like that. Yeah, that's exactly the kind of stuff I would come out with. Right. That's not the end of the story with the news of the world and the Rolling Stones though, Tom. Because next time we will be moving forward to the end of the 60s. We will talk about the great scandal of their arrest at Redlands, Keith Richards' house, and their trial on drugs offences.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
We'll talk about the fate of Brian Jones, who's being pushed out of his own band. And we'll come to the moment that for many people marks the very end of the 60s, the death and darkness at the Altamont Raceway.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And they are supporting a huge infrastructure of cinemas and dance halls and music magazines and record shops.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Yes, absolutely. Girls spend the most money. Girls are the most important. If you are a record promoter or you run a dance hall or you're a magazine editor, it's girls that you think about far more than boys. And it's girls who dominate who are really important in the record market. So teenagers make up half the market for records and record players, and they buy singles, not albums.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So in 1955, there had been 4 million singles sold. In 1963, 61 million. This is big, big money. And for the first time, I think, you have a genuine national youth culture through television. So a really good example of that in August 1963, the BBC launched a program called Ready Steady Go, which is a kind of national pop program.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And it means that basically if you live in Scotland, if you live in Aberystwyth, if you live in Cornwall, wherever, you're watching the same thing, the same fashions, listening to the same music. It is a genuine nationwide phenomenon in a way that was unimaginable in the 1890s or something. And it's unimaginable now, I guess. Exactly. It is a much more national, homogenous kind of story.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Basically, to separate these young people from their money... Record promoters on both sides of the Atlantic have come up with a succession of musical crazes. So the famous one in the mid-50s, rock and roll. Bill Haley and his Comets, Elvis Presley and so on. But that doesn't last forever. By the turn of the 60s, that's over and record company executives are looking for something new.
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558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
And actually, it's really funny if you look at the first years of the 60s, the mad things that they think might happen. take over. So Calypso or Cha-Cha or Yodeling.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Right. Comedy songs done by people in bowler hats, you know, Ackerbilk kind of thing, whatever. Digging holes in roads and things. Exactly. Window cleaners. And actually, as everybody listening to this podcast surely knows, even if they don't think they know it, they know that the big winners are actually the Beatles, Beat Music. And they rise incredibly quickly.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
So in October 1962, their first single, Love Me Do, didn't even get into the top 10. But a year on from that, they totally dominate the charts in a way that is unimaginable, really before or since, I would say. So nobody has ever had the hegemony. since that the Beatles had in 1963, 64.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Maybe Taylor Swift is the only person who comes close, but now the market is so fragmented, it's no comparison really. Now, why this happens, I would say some people may disagree. This is not because of the Beatles' unique genius. It is because the conditions have been established. So in 1963, the economy is roaring on all cylinders because Harold Macmillan and his chancellor, Reginald Maudlin,
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
have unleashed a pre-election dash for growth. So there's tons of money around, and more teenagers are spending more money on records than ever. So in other words, if the Beatles had not existed, or if Brian Epstein hadn't discovered them, or George Martin hadn't taken them over, or whatever...
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I think it's reasonable to assume that some other band would have played that part because the market is sitting there waiting.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
First of all, it almost was a solo singer, a guy called Frank Ifield, who becomes the first person, I think, to sell a million records and has the first person of three number ones in a row. In other words, the potential for hegemony for dominance of the charts is greater in 1963 than at any point before.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
But I think the fact that it's groups that come through and the groups that then dominate for the next 10 years... And British groups. ...suggests that there's something, a latent potential in the group, because you can market four or five people more successfully and more appealingly to more people than you can market one, I would argue. Anyway, we could get massively bogged down in this.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
One other point about this, I think it's really important to remember, is... It is very clear at this point that the appeal of pop music is not just, and perhaps not even primarily, about the music. It is also, and I think especially about the attitude and about the atmosphere. The critic Ian McDonald, who wrote a brilliant book about the Beatles, is really good about this.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
That it's actually about what we would now call, as it were, the vibe. Because a lot of people don't really listen to the lyrics. They're using the music only to dance to. Or famously, just go and scream. Exactly right. And not hear any of the music at all. Now, there are two other elements of this boom that I think are really important for the Stones story.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
For the first time in the early 1960s, you have a cult of amateurishness. So in the 1950s, there was an expectation that a group or even a singer would have been picked and groomed and manicured by their management and their songs would be written for them by professionals. But by 1963, there's an expectation that a young performer will write their own material. It's meant to come from the heart.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
That does reflect the influence of the Beatles, doesn't it? Yeah, the Beatles are obviously really important in that. The Beatles are the model. And secondly, the other thing that is very unusual in 1963 is the overwhelmingly and unusually positive coverage of the Beatles. So rock and roll had always been treated with great anxiety.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Famously, the Daily Mail in 1956 had called it the Negroes' Revenge, African tom-tom and voodoo dance music. He called it. Even Cliff Richard, you mentioned Cliff Richard. So for non-British listeners, he's the kind of Christian mainstream, you know, the housewife's favourite. He is now regarded by people in Britain as the sort of the acme of the sort of diluted. How would you put it, Tom?
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The sort of safe, boring, bland. White bread. White bread. Yeah, white bread pop star. But at the time, the NME, the great kind of music Bible, condemned his indecent vulgarity, his violent hip swinging, hardly the performance any parent could wish her children to see. So this kind of sexual anxiety in particular is always there. but not there with the Beatles.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Brian Epstein has packaged them to appeal to the widest audience possible. So by the autumn of 63, when they're approaching their peak, the newspapers are constantly saying, isn't it amazing? We have this band and they're really funny and likable. And the Evening Standard, October 63, they've won over the class snob, the intellectual snob, the music snob, the grownups and the husbands, i.e.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
the two groups snobbed. who are least likely to approve of any pop musician that their daughters are listening to. And then an amazing editorial. I love this. The Daily Mirror in November 1963. Hair will be a big feature of today's episode, by the way. The Mirror said, the fact is that Beatle people are everywhere from Wapping to Windsor, aged 7 to 70. And it says it's plain to see why.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
The Beatles are very cheerful, they're very high-spirited. Quote, they wear their hair like a mop, but it's washed in capital letters. It's super clean. So is their fresh young act. They don't have to rely on off-colour jokes about homos for their fun. So what are they thinking of there? Exactly. This is the mystery. What are they thinking of there?
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
I've often thought of writing some essay about what lies behind that. It's a mystery. It is a great mystery. Let's get back to the Stones themselves. So we'll kick off with the real founder of the group. And this is a person who I think is a bit overlooked today. And this is Brian Jones. So Brian Jones is born into a very middle-class family in Cheltenham in 1942.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
His father works at the local aeronautical engineering factory in He's got a very suburban background, very respectable. He is, like so many people in the story of 60s music, very clever. He passed his 11+, which for overseas listeners is the test that you have to do at the age of 11 to decide which kind of school you will go to in your teens?
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Will you go to a grammar school for the bright kids, aspirational kids, or will you go to a secondary modern where the government basically dump everybody else? He passes. He does very well at school. He passes lots of exams and does well. But... He is badly behaved. He is, depending on your viewpoint, either extraordinarily reckless or extraordinarily selfish.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
In 1958, he gets a 14-year-old girl pregnant. In 1960, he gets a married woman from Guildford pregnant. In 1961, he gets another girl pregnant. By the time he's 22 and the Stones are becoming famous, he is already the father of five different children.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Well, that's his hair, isn't it? That's a strange sort of bowl haircut.
The Rest Is History
558. The Rolling Stones: Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll (Part 1)
Well, in the next episode, we will discuss the Pallenberg-Jones relationship, which I think it's safe to say is tangled, Tom.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
The truth is, we've probably missed out. Because, remember, we skipped over a lot of the Great Northern War. There were an awful lot of Swedish victories against the Poles and the Saxons or whatever. Okay, well, he's not covering himself with glory here. Have you ever commanded a Swedish infantry division in battle, Tom?
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
I don't think you'd behave quite as courageously as Leuvenhaupt has. Because... Okay, I mean that's courageous, but courage doesn't necessarily equate to military competence. No, no, that's true. But it's an extraordinary sign of the Swedes' self-belief, which often really matters and is such a huge factor in battle. I mean, the test is whether it's going to work out well. So let's see. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Anyway, Löwenhap gets the message, break off the attack. And we'll never know, because he does break off that particular attack. So he says, fine, all right. He disengages. He orders his men to rejoin the main force. So that's two miles to the west. So it's now six o'clock. At six o'clock, around about now, Peter's guns open up from the Russian camp, hammering the Swedish army.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Die Schweden, natürlich, können nicht mehr schießen. Sie haben ihre Artillerie hinter sich gelegt, wegen der Geschwindigkeit und wegen der Wasserverschmutzung. Sie sind wie Hühner, und an einem Punkt schießt sich ein Kanonbord aus Charles' Strecher, aber es tötet ihn nicht. Also ist Gott jetzt wirklich auf ihn lachend. Die Schweden nehmen eine lange Zeit, um sich auszutauschen, etwa eine Stunde.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Es regnet kalt, sie senden Messengel zurück zu Roos an der Redoute, die sagen, komm schon, hurry up, was machst du? Lass sie allein. Eigentlich ist es so, dass Roos komplett unterbrochen wurde. So that's very Battle of the Little Bighorn, isn't it? Exactly the same kind of scenario. At that point, Menshikov's dragoons come thundering in with their sabers drawn and it's an absolute bloodbath.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
About 2,000 of Rus' men are cut down or captured. So that means... Richtig, etwa ein Drittel der schwedischen Infanterie wurde von diesem Punkt an verabschiedet. Ein sehr kleiner Preis für die Russen. Ein sehr kleiner Preis für die Russen. Die Russen haben bis jetzt nicht viele Männer verloren. Und natürlich können die Russen aufhören, viel zu verlieren, weil sie viel haben.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Also ist Rainskjöld auf den Graslanden, wartet und wartet, und diese dritte Division wird nie wieder aufhören. Und um neun Uhr sagt er, ich werde eine Entscheidung machen müssen. Nun, wir könnten den russischen Camp planen, aber er ist wie du, Tom, er ist ein bisschen mehr vorsichtig. He says, the Russian guns are causing absolute carnage. I'm thousands of men short of what I should have.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Actually, do you know what? I think the odds are too great. Let's fall back a bit. Let's rejoin the troops that we've left with the baggage and whatnot. And then we'll see where things stand. Let's not risk everything in a sort of reckless throw of the dice. And he gives the order to retreat. He says, all right, prepare to march out and march backwards.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und es ist an diesem Punkt, dass Peter der Große, der gerade in seinem Camp sitzt, dass er schießt und dass er die Dicke schießt. Es ist die einzig wichtigste militärische Entscheidung Peters Lebens und die Zeitung ist absolut perfekt. Ich denke immer, es muss so sein, dass die Szene ist,
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
In The Return of the King, when the doors of Minas Morgul crash open and the Witch King appears and the great army of Mordor marches out for the attack on Minas Tirith. This is what happens. So basically suddenly the entrances of Peter's camp crash open, the bridges crash down over the defensive trenches and then tens of thousands of Russian troops arrive.
The Rest Is History
566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Sie fliegen aus dem Camp und legen sich für den Kampf ein. Sie haben ihre Waffen, sie haben ihre Muskeln und ihre sehr modernen Bayonetten. Sie sind bereit.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Absolut. Jeder hat immer gesagt, die Russen seien unnötig. Jetzt haben sie diese schönen grünen Uniformen. Sie sind sehr gut gedreht. Sie sind sehr gut organisiert. Das ist der Art der russische Armee, die die Schweden noch nie gesehen haben. Und Peter ist da. Er ist so bescheiden. Er ist auf einem arabischen Horsen, das ihm der ottomanische Sultan gegeben wurde.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Er trägt ein grünes Guards-Uniform. Er hat seine schwarze Trikot-Hatte. Er hat seine großen Schuhe. Er ist so groß. Er sieht unglaublich beeindruckend aus. Und Field Marshal Rainskild sagt den Schweden, stoppt den Retreat, wir haben keine Wahl mehr. Wir müssen umdrehen, umdrehen und vorbereiten für den Kampf. Also ist es jetzt 10 Uhr. Das ist die wichtige Stunde.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Die Schweden sind unglaublich übernommen. Die Zahlen, die sich momentan befinden, sind etwa 5.000 Infanterie der Schweden, ohne Artillerie, gegen 24.000 russische Infanterie mit 70 Kanonen. And the Swedes, you know, they know that they're really up against it.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And the only way they can win is A, if God is on their side, and B, they're just their spirit and their training and their courage and all of that. Or if Frodo drops the ring into the crack of doom. It's the only way. Exactly. And there's a wonderful scene, which you, you know, a sort of Ridley Scott-style director would love this.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Rainskjöld rides up to Count Löwenhaupt, the man who, you know, with whom he's had this massive, long-running feud. So they've made up. It's an amazing scene. Very touching. And he gives the signal. And the Swedish drums start beating. And they begin to advance, this kind of thin blue line against this vast green crescent. The Russian guns are firing faster and faster.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
They're ripping holes in the Swedish line, but the Swedes just keep coming. They're not firing, they're just advancing, you know, onwards and onwards. The Russian musketeers start firing, so there's a kind of hailstorm of musket balls. But still the Swedes keep coming. They don't fire a single shot. They want a kind of close action. Very Nelson at Trafalgar, actually.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und sie sind näher und näher, nur stetig aufwärmen. Und dann, endlich, sind die Schweden auf ihnen. Und wie immer, wenn die Schweden angriffen, ist es diese Art von Sturm von Muskeln und Bayonetten und Schlagschwaden. Sie sind nicht die besten Soldaten in Europa für nichts. Sie schlagen in die russische Linie. Sie beginnen, es zurückzuführen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Auf der rechten Seite, sie drücken die grünen Schuhe zurück. Für einen Moment fühlt es sich an, als würden die Schweden es tun. Und tatsächlich, in der Mitte von all dem, Peter is supposedly three times brought close to death.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So once a Swedish musket ball knocks off his hat, another Swedish musket ball hits his saddle, and a third Swedish musket ball, I can sense what you're going to say about this, Tom, is deflected by a cross around his neck that once belonged to the Emperor Constantine the Great. That definitely happened. Yeah, of course that happened. That's not a story from Russian propaganda at all.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Hat Peter natürlich gefallen, dann hätte das Resultat sehr anders aussehen können. Und die Karte von Jürgen könnte heute anders aussehen. Aber er fällt nicht. Gott ist mit ihm, nicht mit den Schweden. Und was nächstes passiert, ist eine sehr bekannte Geschichte aus anderen Kriegen, die wir in diesem Podcast gemacht haben.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Als die Schweden vorbeiführen, werden die Gapen zwischen links und rechts größer und größer. Peter schließt mehr Reserven ein. Die Schweden werden eingeladen und umgekehrt, besonders auf der rechten Seite. Their momentum slows and as they slow and as the Russians kind of swarm around them, their morale begins to waver and then to break. And then the first weeds begin to run.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And then it proves infectious. It's like their momentum has carried them so far, but no further. Kind of like the adrenaline suddenly dropping. Exactly right. So much of, when you read A Cancer Battle, so much of it is about self-belief. And their self-belief has sustained them to an extraordinary level, not just in recent hours. But all through that terrible winter.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
But now they've reached, everybody has a breaking point. Leuvenhaupt sagte danach, ich habe gebeten, gezwungen, gegrüßt und getötet, aber alles war in Weinen. Es war, als ob sie mich weder gesehen, noch gehört hätten. Und erinnere dich, dass diese die meisten disziplinierten Truppen in Europa sind, wenn nicht in der Welt.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Nein, er kann sie nicht. Und tatsächlich ist es wie die Wälder, die über den Topf von ihnen brechen. Du weißt, diese Art von Wälder auf Wälder von kinderlichen grünen Schuhen. Ein Tsunami. Ein Tsunami, genau. And in just half an hour, this Swedish infantry that had advanced with such courage has been almost completely destroyed. And the cavalry has been decimated by Russian cannon fire.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Rainskild was captured. Charles is almost captured. His stretcher bearers are shot down. Another officer... Remember, Charles has got this terrible foot. Another officer drags him onto a horse. But in the chaos... The bandages come off his foot, the wound reopens and blood starts pouring out of his foot. This first horse that he's put on is shot from under him.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
They have to drag him up and put him onto another horse. There's blood everywhere. Somehow they get away with him and they meet up with Löwenhaupt, who's also managed to get away. And they gallop south with what is left of their army. So in just a few hours the Swedes have lost 10,000 men, killed, wounded or captured. The Russians have lost just 1,500 killed and they've had about 3,000 wounded.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So a stunning victory for Peter's army. Peter has the captured Swedish officers brought to his tent. Und Field Marshal Rainskild ist entzockt, vermutlich in Blut und Schmerzen und so weiter. Er wird in seinen Tent gebracht. Und Peter sagt, warum hast du so ein riesiges Land mit so wenigen Männern invadiert? Wie konntest du das tun? Wie konntest du das tun?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und Rainskild sagt, mein König hat es geordnet. Es war mein Anliegen, es zu beurteilen. And Peter loves this answer. He calls for wine and he says, a toast, gentlemen, to my teachers in the art of war. Und Rainskjöld sagt ihm, wer ist das, Ihr Majestät? Und Peter sagt, ihr Damen und Herren. Sehr gallant, sehr beeindruckend.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und Rainskjöld sagt, dann haben die Pupillen gut zurückgekommen, dank ihrer Lehrer. Es ist alles sehr gut gespielt. Nun, was ist mit Charles? Charles regroupiert später in der Nacht mit den Kosaks. Ich meine, sie hätten die Kosaks wirklich nehmen sollen, glaube ich. Es bleibt das schwedische Armee und sein Bagagetraining. They all need to get away, because obviously they're going to be destroyed.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
The only route, ironically, is even further south, even further away from Sweden. So they say, well, let's do it. They're riding through the afternoon and the evening. They're exhausted. They're obviously utterly crushed. They are frightened. I don't think Charles is frightened. Probably not. No, everybody else is frightened. Well, it's ridiculously hot, so they're all dripping with sweat.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
I mean, God, they can't win. It's either they're either freezing or they're just absolutely boiling. Charles is delirious. His wound is in a terrible state. He's slipping in and out of kind of sleep. He keeps saying, where's Rainskild? And everyone says, he's been captured, your majesty. And he just doesn't seem to register that.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
After two days, they reach the river Dnieper and they don't have many boats. They don't have enough boats to get across and the Russians are chasing them. Es gibt ungefähr 14.000 von ihnen. Sie werden nicht alle ankommen. Wer geht da hin? Und Charles sagt, dass er nicht gehen wird. Er bleibt hier. Und seine Offiziere fallen auf ihre Knie und bitten ihn, zu gehen. Man muss gehen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Man kann nicht enttäuscht werden. Wenn man enttäuscht wird, ist Schweden in der Kriegskrise. Unsere einzige Chance ist, dass man wegkommt und vielleicht die Tatars oder die Ottomäner unterstützen kann. Das ist unsere einzige Chance.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und sehr belastend, sagt Charles, und er wird über den Dnieper-River transportiert, mit den Verletzten und den Kosaks und dem Rest seines drabanten Elite-Bodyguards, den wir vorhin gesprochen haben. Er geht über den Berg und sie gehen westlich über die Graslande, Richtung dem Berg-Bug. Das ist ein guter Name für einen Berg, ist es nicht? Es ist der Berg-Bug.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und das ist ein wichtiger Berg, weil das die Frontier ist mit den Balkanern und dem Ottoman-Empire. He's entered the Ottoman Empire now. He's entering the Ottoman Empire. And the men on the other side watched him go. Watch and watch until finally he disappears from sight. And what will become of him? We will find out, Tom, after the break.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ja, absolut, Tom. Und es ist interessant, nicht wahr, dass in der englischsprachigen Welt, ich denke, dass die große Norden-Wahl jetzt vergessen oder etwas überlebt ist. Ich denke, es ist ein Eklips, nicht wahr? Die Spanische Succession, dann die Napoleonic Wars und dann natürlich die Weltkriege des 20. Jahrhunderts.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ja, das ist absolut richtig. Aber es ist arguably viel mehr als das. Es ist der letzte Stein in der Foundation von Russland als großartiger Macht. Russia had been a basket case for a long time. It could easily have been won again. So if Charles had won, there would have been nothing to stop him advancing on Moscow. Imagine he had taken Peter prisoner. He would have ridden into Moscow.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He would possibly have installed a kind of Swedish client, like he did our friend Stanislaw Wleszczynski in Poland. He might have gone for Sophia, Peters sister. He might have brought Sophia back, exactly. Possibly, after he had gone, there would have been a rising against Sophia, or whoever it might be.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There might have been civil war, there might have been Peter's camp against Sophia's, who knows.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Right, the Ottomans, the Poles, and so on and so forth. Certainly, Russia would have lost the Baltic and probably would have lost Ukraine.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, which would have been blamed, right? We lost our soul and we lost the war. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think what it would also have done is it would have left Sweden as the paramount power, probably in the Baltic.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So Sweden would conceivably have kept Estonia, Latvia, the provinces of Livonia, as they were called, which, you know, when you get to the Napoleonic Wars and the Swedes are a much bigger player and the Russians aren't, Vielleicht haben sich die Dinge zwischen den beiden Punkten verändert, aber ich denke, dass die Geschichte sehr anders aussehen würde. Absolut.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
But at the time when Byron was writing, these characters, Peter the Great, Charles XII, and the character who gives his name to that poem, so that's Ivan Mazepa. The Hetman. The Hetman of the Cossacks, who we talked about last time. These are great romantic heroes, aren't they? They are individuals standing astride the course of history and shaping it to their will.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und Peter weiß das, denke ich, weil das ist, warum Poltava so wichtig für ihn ist. Und er feiert den Anniversarien des Kampfes jedes Jahr für den Rest seines Lebens.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Genau. Peter hat also einen formalen Triumph am Ende des Jahres in St. Petersburg gehalten. Und wie immer, ich meine, das ist dein Punkt, Tom, über das westernisierende Imperativ. It's based on the Roman model. The troops march in beneath classical arches. They drag all the Swedish battle flags to the dirt. They make the Swedish officers march.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
As in all such events with Peter, there's this weird element of play acting and role play. He marches as an ordinary officer and it's his friend Fedor Ramadanovsky der über den Triumph als Mokzar besitzt. Und was passiert mit den Schweden, mit den Gefangenen? Das ist ein interessanter Side-Note. Die Generäle wurden sehr kürzestlich behandelt. Sie wurden oft für russische Gefangene gehandelt.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Oder sie wurden als Messenger von Peter mit Friedensoffizieren nach Hause gebracht, was natürlich die Schweden komplett ignorierten, so wie sie es wollten. Einige jüngere Offiziere wollten tatsächlich in die russische Armee einsteigen. Das war nicht ungewöhnlich. Sie wollten nicht, dass sie ihr eigenes Land kämpfen. Aber sie würden von den Kazakhs oder Tatars oder so gekämpft werden.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Die restlichen Junior-Offiziere wurden von Sibirien gekämpft. Und sie sind dann im Grunde gesammelt worden. Sie wurden Lehrer, Goldschmiede, Thälere. Sie brachten mit ihnen Träger, ihre vorherigen Träger.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Sie haben sich gewechselt. Aber wenn man ein gemeinsamer Soldat war, war es nicht ein großartiges Leben. A lot of them were sent to the mines in the Urals or they were sent to work in the dockyards of St. Petersburg. A lot of them probably died eventually because those are grim fates.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So when peace finally came in 1721, out of the 40,000 men who had marched into Ukraine with Charles XII, only about 5,000 ever went home. So that kind of tells its own story. Now you mentioned about Peter writing to everybody. He becomes now an extraordinary European celebrity.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So the British, who had previously thought, you know, Charles XII is the great man of the age, now have to hastily recalibrate. The Duke of Marlborough actually wrote to his ally, Lord Godolphin, he said, what a melancholy reflection it is, that after constant success for ten years, Charles XII should in two hours mismanagement and ill success ruin himself and his country.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und all diese Leute, die früher Charles XII-Fans waren, werden plötzlich Peter-Stans. Peter-Stans. Also der schämlichste Beispiel ist der Philosoph Leibniz, der vorher sagte, er liebte die Schweden so sehr, dass er wollte, dass ihr Empire bis nach Mongolia streicht. And now Leibniz said, oh, Peter's victory was for the good of the human race. He is a man whom God has destined for great work.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And he wrote to Peter and said, would you like me to design the medal for you to celebrate your victory? Shameless. Yeah, it is shameless. It's very kind of tech billionaire after November 2024, isn't it? Invited to Peter's inauguration. Sit in the front row. Everybody now wants to ally with Russia. So the Danes re-enter the war, they invade southern Sweden.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Augustus the Strong, our fox-tossing friend, he cancels his abdication as King of Poland. He invades Poland from Saxony and he reclaims his throne from the puppet Stanislaw Fleschczynski. who now leaves this story sadly, so I won't get the chance to say his name. So he tosses foxes, but he is himself a jackal. He is a jackal.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
I mean, that's how people like Byron thought about it. Yeah, and they are heroes with a deep shade of darkness. Well, we've already had the tremendous business of Charles XII's Foot, which we were entertaining our assistant producers with just now, because they missed yesterday's recording.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There's a very funny scene when Augustus and Peter meet for the first time after this in a place called Torun, which we talked about in our episode about the Wonders of Poland, famous for its gingerbread. They meet in Torun. Und Peter sagte zu Augustus, oh, wie geht es dir? Gut, dich wiederzusehen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und Augustus ist sehr überrascht und sagt, oh, ich liebe diesen Schwanz, aber ich habe ihn in Dresden hinterlassen. Und Peter sagt, was für eine Schande. Aber wie Glück würde es sein, habe ich noch einen für dich. Und er rechnet für diesen Schwert und handelt es Augustus. Und es ist der originelle Schwert, den die Russen in Charles XII. Baggage in Poltover gefunden haben. Red Faces all round.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Red Faces all round. Und von diesem Punkt an war Augustus, der vorher Peter's Equal war, oder vielleicht sogar Peter's Senior Figur, sehr offensichtlich ein russischer Klient. Und tatsächlich Polen von diesem Punkt an Yes, exactly, exactly. Now... What about Charles? You see, because we left him riding into the Ottoman Empire. What's happened to him?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Well, as soon as word reaches Constantinople, Charles XII has crossed the river Bug and is in the Balkans. The Sultan, Ahmed III, he's a very amiable person. He loves a bit of poetry and painting and flowers. He's your kind of bubbling fountain. Yeah, Sherbert. Yeah, Sherbert's kind of school of Ottoman Sultan.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And he says, well, you know, Islam tells us we should be very generous when we welcome refugees. And he says, we'll put Charles and his men up. We'll build a refugee camp for them on the River Dniester, which is near the splendidly named town of Benda in Moldova, in modern day Moldova. So Charles... I mean, his wound is slowly getting better. He's very downcast.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He's not as downcast as Ivan Mazepa, who's come with him. He dies, effectively, of a broken heart, I think. Just depression. So, Charles is in Benda, in his camp, and everybody thinks, well, he'll be there for, you know, weeks, a few months.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah. So, the obvious way home really is by sea, because Peter and Augustus block him on land. Louis XIV of France offers him a ship. He could turn to the English or the Dutch. They also talk about offering him ships. But with all of these things, the price would be Sweden must join that particular side in the war of the Spanish succession. Which is raging. Yeah, which is now raging.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And Charles doesn't want to do that because he's already fighting the Great Northern War. He doesn't want to fight two wars. And actually Charles thinks to himself, well, Maybe this isn't such a bad thing. Charles is so madly optimistic. I admire this about Charles, this sort of India rubber, you know, he'll always bounce back. So he says, maybe this is all for the best.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There's loads of blood and splintered bones to come in today's episode, Anne, indeed. der letzten Episode dieser Serie. Und hinter all dem ist ein wirklich großer politischer und diplomatischer Wandel. Denn das, worüber wir heute sprechen, ist einer der entscheidendsten Kriege in der europäischen Geschichte.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
You know, I can talk to the Ottomans, persuade them to enter the war and it'll work out okay. So he doesn't stay for a few weeks and he doesn't stay for a few months. Er bleibt in Benda für drei Jahre. Das ist enttäuschend. Als das passiert, enden die Ottomänen mit Russland in Krieg. Peter sagt immer, dass er die Schweden auslösen soll.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Er kann nicht tolerieren, dass ein schwedischer König in einem Camp in seiner Grenze lebt. Endlich schickt er ein Ultimatum in 1710. Der Sultan sagt, dass wir das nicht haben. Er erklärt Krieg auf Russland. Peter drew up a very ambitious plan to march into what is now the part of Romania, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which are Ottoman vassals.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And he said, I will liberate the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
I don't think that was ever...
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, he is. Dead right. And I think this is in the long run enormously significant. Because this is really the first time in history that the Russians claim themselves to be the champions of all Orthodox Slavs and particularly Balkan Orthodox Slavs.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
It is. Absolutely it is. And although... It doesn't go well at all. In fact, it goes disastrously wrong for Peter.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
It will have, I think, huge consequences, because if you think back to the series we did about the road to the First World War, the origins of the First World War, this idea of Russia as the protector of the Slavs, even though they're hundreds of miles away, and protector of Orthodox Christians in the Balkan Peninsula, and that Russia has this kind of tenuous claim to Constantinople, this would be enormously significant in the build-up to 1914.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Anyway, the expedition at the time goes horribly wrong. Peter ends up being cornered by this massive Ottoman army. Fortunately, the Grand Vizier, who's called Baltaci Mehmet Pasha, ist ein ganz älterer Figur und er mag keine All-Out-Wars. Er lässt Peter mit minimalen Konzessionen gehen. Peter muss Azoth abgeben, was so viel für ihn bedeutete. Das ist im Norden der Kriminell. Ja, genau.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Es ist die Todesnähe eines Empires, des schwedischen Empires, der Geburt eines anderen, des russischen. Und es wiederholt die Karte von Ost- und Nordeuropa für Jahrhunderte zu kommen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Er muss das abgeben und seine südliche Flut und alle seine Ambitionen im Black Sea abgeben. Aber das ist es. Und Peter ist sehr begeistert darüber. Now, when Charles hears that Peter's been allowed to get away... He must be livid. Well, he disgraced himself. He rode to the Grand Vizier's camp and he burst into his tent in muddy boots. which the Turks regarded as a dreadful social faux pas.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And Charles said, what are you doing? You're mad to let Peter go. The Turks by this point, I mean, Charles has been hanging around for a lot longer than they expected. And they're actually sick of him. So they just ignore him. We'll come back to the growing rift between Charles and the Turks. So Peter has to give up on the Black Sea and he devotes himself to the campaign in Europe.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Now the crazy thing is, the Swedes, you would think, are now out of the war. You'd be quite wrong. The Swedes have lost most of their empire. Ingria, Finland, Riga, Tallinn, the Baltic. Sweden was ravaged by famine after that terrible winter of 1708-9. Then there was a plague. Sweden has lost unbelievably about a third of its population during this war. Everybody else has piled in against them.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
It really is like a kind of computer strategy game, which has gone horribly wrong for the player. Because they are now facing a coalition of Russia, Saxony, Poland, Denmark. Hannover and Prussia are about to join in. Und Charles schickt eine Botschaft von seinem Camp an Bender und er sagt, perfekt, die Chancen sind in unserer Verfügung.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ich werde nicht einen einzigen Schmuck von schwedischem Boden verabschieden. Keine Art und Weise. Und tatsächlich kämpfen die Schweden sehr wütend. Also bewegt sich die Krieg jetzt in Norddeutschland, Bremen und Pomeranien und so weiter. And Peter piles in against the Swedes there, which is great for him because he loves going to the West. He visits a spa. Yeah. Oh, he does go to a spa.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Well, in the final episode, we'll find some very peculiar goings on with Peter and mineral water. So that's something to look forward to. I'll tell you what he also does in this sightseeing. Do you see this? He goes to Wittenberg to commune with Martin Luther. So, he went to Luther's grave. Did you go to Luther's grave?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
They are indeed, absolutely. So, Tom, shall we remind ourselves where we've got to for those people who are not members of the Restless History Club and are not continuing directly from Episode 4? Go for it. So the Great Northern War has been raging since 1700. People remember that the Swedish Empire are facing this coalition of Denmark, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Russia.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So when Peter goes to Luther's house, the curator showed him an ink spot on the wall. And the curator said, this is where Martin Luther saw the devil and he threw an ink pot at him. And Peter, he did not behave appropriately. He behaved scornfully. He said, ha ha. Did such a wise man really believe that the devil could be seen? Und der Kreator sagte, würdest du den Wall neben dem Ink-Spot signen?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Peter the Great war hier, sehr beeindruckend, wie ein Besuchersbuch. Und Peter schrieb neben dem Ink-Spot, dieser Ink-Spot ist ziemlich frisch, also ist die Geschichte offensichtlich nicht wahr. Das ist sehr ungeheuerlich. Ich dachte, Luther sah den Teufel, als er in einem Kastel geschlossen wurde. In seiner Taube. Ja, in einer Taube.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So Peter's off signing ink spots. Charles is in Moldova. The Ottomans are absolutely sick to death of Charles now. He's turned this temporary camp into a permanent Swedish base. He's built a brick compound. He's got a chancery. He's got officers' quarters, a stables. The Turks are like, what? This is bonkers.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und diese verrückte Geschichte erreicht einen Klimax im Januar 1713, als der Sultan und sein Vassal, der Khan von der Krim, ein Schema erzeugen, um Charles aus seinem Camp zu kidnappen und ihn aus seinem Land zu bringen. Was, ihn auf einem Schiff zu holen? Ja, ihn in Polen zu holen. Sie können ihn über den Polenboden holen und ihn einfach zerstören. Sie sind müde von ihm.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Die Schweden werden von dem überwacht und sich für eine Siege vorbereiten. Und verrückt, endet es in einem riesigen Kampf mit 12.000 Tatars und ottomanischen Janissarien, die dieses schwedische Camp attackieren. Wie viele Schweden sind da?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ja, es sind ein paar Hundert, denke ich. Charles ist in seinem eigenen Haus unter Feuer von türkischer Artillerie. Die Türke stürzen in und starten, all seine Besitzungen zu looten. Charles schießt sie an. Er hat seinen Fuß zurück, was großartig ist. Er rennt sie durch mit einem Schwert oder so etwas. Die Janissarien setzen sein Haus auf Feuer.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Charles dann beginnt, viele Brandy zu knacken, das ist der erste Alkohol, den er getroffen hat. Ja, er macht das nicht normalerweise, oder? Nein, er ist einfach so gespannt auf die Idee eines Kampfes, glaube ich. Weil er Battles liebt. Glücklich, würde ich denken. Er ist glücklich. Er führt diese Männer in eine Verbrechung des Kampfes. Und sie werden von Türken verbrannt. Tausende von Türken.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There's a lovely description of this in Robert K. Mass' book on Peter the Great. He says, Well, he's happy again, isn't he? He's back in his element. Und nach all dem ist der Sultan sehr überrascht und sagt zu Charles, ich bin so entschuldigt, dass die Dinge aus der Hand gelaufen sind. Ich verspreche dir, es wird nicht wieder passieren. Und hier ist eine unglaubliche Sache an diesem Thema.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ich liebe diesen Detail. Dieser Verstand wurde von den Türken genannt, der Kalabaluk. Es kommt aus einem türkischen Wort, das bedeutet eine Gruppe. Und der Term Kalabaluk wurde in Schwedisch und Finnisch verwendet, wo es bis heute ein Ruckus oder Chaos bedeutet, weil dieses bizarre Verständnis.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Charles XII had invaded Russia in the summer of 1707, planning to reach Moscow and dictate terms to end the war there. But everything went wrong. People remember that his supply column under Count Löwenhaupt was routed. There was a lot of poor behavior from the Swedes. They got drunk, didn't they? Indiscipline, I think it's fair to say.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So Charles hangs around in Turkey for another 18 months and then finally the Sultan agrees a deal with the Habsburg Emperor that will allow him to travel overland through the Austrian Empire and through Germany without being intercepted.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
No, Charles behaves exactly as you'd expect. So he's got a big group of men of Swedes who are riding. He insists on riding ahead of them with just one man and he insists just for the sort of... The larks. Okay. Yeah, it's bonkers. And what is even more bonkers is, so he doesn't go to Sweden.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He makes straight for this city called Stralsund, which is one of the remaining Swedish footholds in northern Germany, under siege. He arrives late at night in November 1714, banging on the door. The guard opens up. Oh my God, it's the king. I can't believe it. Charles has ridden for 1,296 miles at a pace of more than 100 miles a day.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Very impressively, he has not taken his clothes or his boots off once during this ride. During this trip.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
No, I don't think so. Bits of splinter. And they say to him, oh my God, your majesty, unbelievable that you're back after so long. Would you like to go to Stockholm? He says, no, I've come here to take part in the siege. Were you mad? So it's yet another doomed cause, because the city is clearly going to fall.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He stays there for 11 months and literally sort of hours before it falls, he is finally persuaded to leave. And for the same reason that he doesn't want to be taken captive. He doesn't want to be taken captive. And so on Christmas Eve 1715, he sets foot on Swedish soil for the first time in 15 years. And he finds Sweden in an absolutely ravaged condition.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So the Russians have been raiding it incessantly. Its farms have all been destroyed. What men are left are hiding in the woods to avoid being conscripted. They've lost control of Finland. And actually, I fell down a massive rabbit hole reading about this. I ended up reading academic articles about the Finnish demography in the early 18th century.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
This is a period of Finnish history known as the Great Roth. I mean, who knew?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And actually, Finland is ravaged by famine and by plague. But also the Russians, I think it's fair to say, behave very badly in Finland. So they flog thousands of people in public. There's a lot of rape. There's a lot of murder. They, I think, rather distastefully, they bake Finns in ovens, which I think is poor.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So Charles decided to change his plan and to go on a massive diversion. South, away from Sweden. Yeah, away from Sweden and away from Moscow into Ukraine, where he would team up with the Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa. They had that terrible winter. 3,000 men froze to death. And now Charles has been cornered outside the town of Poltava, some 200 miles east of Kiev.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, they enslave tens of thousands of women and children, sell them to the Crimeans, take them down to the Crimea. And some Finnish historians, this is the rabbit hole down which I fell, think the Finnish population fell by half during this period. Now you would think, Confronted with this on his return to Sweden, Charles might say, maybe now is the time to end this war.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
But no, he says, now is the time, you know, now is the time to invest. The stocks will only rise. So he gets a new chief minister called Baron von Goertz. I mention him only because I was pleased to see that he has an artificial eye, which is exactly as you would expect from a chief minister at this stage in the war. He says massive new taxes. Let's go back to the old strategy.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
We'll knock our enemies out one at a time. Denmark first, then we'll do a Hanover, then we'll do a Prussia, and then we'll build up to invading Russia again.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Some of his ministers said to him, how long do you think this will take, your majesty? I mean, really? We've been fighting for so long. And he said, I think maybe 40 years should do it. I mean, you don't want to hear that. So he says, well, we'll start against the Danes and we'll start in Norway. So, Oktober 1718, he marches on Christiana, which is now Oslo.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And in his way, there's a fortress called Frederiksten. Und er, wie immer, ist sehr nelsonisch. Er setzt sich in den Thick der Aktion. Ich denke, partly, weil er weiß, dass es keine andere schwedische Armee gibt. Er muss seine Männer inspirieren, weil es das oder nichts ist. Also setzt er sich ständig in Schmerzen. Und am Abend des 30. November ist er in den Tränchen außerhalb von Frederiksten.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und die Norwegier schießen Feuerbomben aus ihren Kanonen, die den Himmel leuchten. Und dann können ihre Sniper, ihre Scharpschütter, an den schwedischen Sappern schießen. Um 9.30 Uhr am Abend steigt Charles auf den Parapet eines Trenns. Und einige seiner Begleiter sagen, oh, sei vorsichtig, deine Majestät, schau es dir an, komm runter. Und er ignoriert sie komplett.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und er lehnt sich auf den Topf des Trenns. Er hat seinen Kopf auf seiner Hand, schaut raus, als sie einen Geräusch hören, wie einer von ihnen es sagt, als ob ein Stein von großer Kraft in ein bisschen Müll eingestiegen wäre. Und Charles' Hand fällt von seinem Kopf weg und er ist komplett still, nur auf diese Fortress zu schauen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und dann sagt einer der Offiziere, Herr Jesus, der König hat geschossen. Und er hat geschossen. Er wurde von einem norwegischen Musketball in der Kirche getroffen, der ihn sofort getötet hat. Und das war der Ende von ihm. Also, ich meine, er geht, wie er es wollen würde, glaube ich. Genau, nur in einem Moment. Das war es. Die Schweden verabschiedeten die Kampagne.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And for the first time in 18 years, Charles returned to Stockholm, albeit in an embalmed condition. And the news spreads across Europe. This extraordinary meteor of the age is dead. Peter was in St. Petersburg when the message arrived with a group of officers. And the story goes that he was visibly moved and tears sprang to his eyes. And he said, my dear Charles, how much I pity you.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Does it sound like Peter could have done it?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, do some performative weeping. And there was also a lot of performative mourning. So he ordered the Russian court into a week of mourning for his great rival. Even now, crazily, the war didn't end for another three years. What? Yeah, the Swedes fought on for another three years and madly, madly, Britain joined the war on Sweden's side. George I piled in. Why?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Because he was worried about the balance of power in the Baltic. As a lecturer of Hanover, the Baltic mattered to him. And he was worried that the Russians were too powerful. And here's the maddest thing. You know what actually ended the Great Northern War? It wasn't the death of Charles XII. It was the South Sea Bubble. How so? It was the stock market crash in Britain.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And he is outnumbered at least two to one. He has had this terrible foot injury and nearly died, but then he's come back from the dead. And on Sunday, the 27th of June... He summoned his generals and said, come on, let's do this. Let's just go for it. Death or glory. A final showdown to decide this war once and for all. And Dominic, that was always what he was going to do.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
that brought Sir Robert Walpole to power as the first Prime Minister. And Walpole, his whole policy was based on no foreign wars, sort of peace and prosperity at home, a polite and commercial people, let's make loads of money. He sold out a British ally who's been fighting against Russia. Well. Is that what you're saying? That kind of is what I'm saying.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, exactly. So he basically says to the Swiss, look, I'm not going to fund this war. You're clearly going to lose. It's mad. So the new Swedish king, who was called Frederick, decided he would settle. And in September 1721 at Nystad in Finland, his envoy signed a treaty that basically dismantled the Swedish Empire, gave it all away to Russia, pretty much, in the Baltic.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
But Sweden itself retains its integrity, does it? Sweden itself maintains its integrity, exactly. But... Karelia, Estonia, Latvia, Ingria, they all went to Russia and its footholds in Germany were all lost as well. So we'll end with Peter. The news of this treaty, I mean the Great Northern War, which really did live up to its billing. I mean it's gone on for what, more than 20 years?
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Huge celebrations in St. Petersburg. Free wine and beer and fireworks and masked balls everywhere. And at the end of October, so a month later, Peter went to the Senate, which was a new institution he had set up in St. Petersburg. And he said, I will cancel all unpaid taxes to celebrate the war. And the Senate and the Holy Synod said to him, wonderful, your majesty.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And in return, we'd like to offer you a new title. Peter the Great, Father of the Fatherland and Emperor of all Russia. So in Latin, which would appeal to you, Tom. Pater Patriae Imperator. Also sehr Augustus. Augustus, genau. Vater seines Landes und König. Nicht nur Caesar, sondern Augustus.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Genau. Und er stimmt. Und es gibt große Schreie aus dem Publikum. Viva, viva, lange lebe der König. Und dann gab Peter eine Rede, die uns wiederum dieses römische Herzens erinnert. Er sagte, And we must never grow weak in force of arms. And those are words that I suspect would resonate in the Kremlin today.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Because if in doubt, he attacks. Exactly. He's very much of the Custer and Alexander the Great and Nelson school of thought. He absolutely is. And these are tremendous friends of the rest of history. It's fair to say that Custer does sometimes let himself down, doesn't he? So, darkness falls on the Sunday evening and let us sketch the scene. The Swedes are camped west of this fortress of Poltava.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There's about 30,000 Swedes.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Yeah, and he's been hoping for all these reinforcements from the Crimean Tatars and the Poles and whatnot, who, remember, didn't turn up at the end of the last episode.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And that's pretty much everybody's assumption, because the Swedes are the finest fighters in Europe. Der Vorteil ist natürlich, dass sie gefroren sind, sie sind sauer, sie haben keine Beine, sie haben keine Pfeife und kein Essen. Aber auch so, sie haben ihre Chancen immer noch gewünscht, weil sie so gut sind.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Jetzt hinter der Fortress, auf der anderen Seite, ist der Worskler-River, der nach Norden nach Süden läuft. Also, Sie müssen sich das auf der rechten Seite der Bildung vorstellen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Weiter nach Norden, auf der gleichen Seite des Rivers, der westlichen Seite, wie die Schweden, sind 80.000 Russen unter Peter der Große, sein General, Top-General Boris Sheremetov und sein großer trinkender Freund Alexander Menshikov, den wir vorhin gesprochen haben. Wenn die Schweden sie attackieren wollen,
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Sie werden nach Norden nach den Russen reisen und sie werden über sechs defensiv-Earthworks, die Redoubts genannt werden. Ich liebe es, wenn du über militärische Bedingungen sprichst. Ja, ich liebe es. Das ist schön. Also werden es mehr Redoubts geben. Jeder dieser Redoubts ist ca. 100 Meter groß und die Russen haben sie auf der Straße von Poltava gebaut.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Also sind sie wie Makeshift-Forts, glaube ich. Wenn die Schweden über diese Redoubts reisen können, werden sie Peter's Camp erreichen. Und Peters Camp wurde mit seinen Ramparts, Trennungen und vielen, vielen Kanonen fortgeführt. Es ist also effektiv ein Fort. Die Schweden haben alles, was sie brauchen. Peter ist sehr sicher, dass er gewinnen wird.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Für das erste Mal in dieser ganzen Geschichte haben die Russen die Oberhände. Denn wenn sogar ein Wettbewerb für ihn ein Gewinn ist, weil er riesige Mannschaft hat, riesige Ressourcen, er ist auf Home-Turf. All he has to do is to avoid defeat. Und er hat diese Proklamierung, die du in dieser Serie am Anfang sehr stark gelesen hast, gelesen. Erinnere dich an die Begründung zu den Truppen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Du machst das für deine Kindheit, für Russland. Ja, die, die Putin so freundlich ist. Die, die Wladimir Putin so freundlich ist, genau. Jetzt, was denkt Charles? Charles, er weiß, dass seine Männer müde sind. Sie haben sechs Monate lang nicht gegessen. All das.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He is still confident that their superpower, which is their discipline, their training, their extraordinary fighting spirit will be enough. And partly because of that, he says to Ivan Mazepa, look, you stay out of this. We don't need the Cossacks because they'll just get in the way and they're undisciplined and they'll be riding around shouting and stuff and firing randomly into the air.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
We don't want that. We don't need your men, which is an extraordinary thing to say.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Genau, 80.000. Also wird Charles selbst nicht kämpfen, weil er nur einen arbeitbaren Fuß hat. Er ist nur ein Streicher. Er wird mit der Infanterie sein, aber er wird die ganze Zeit verbracht und er wird von 24 Körpergärtern umgebracht. So he's not even really able, he can't even really sit up, so he can't actually see the battlefield.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Well, do you know what? I think you're being too harsh there, Tom. Because actually his deputies, I mean, we can talk about them. So the field command is going to go to Field Marshal Carl Gustav Reinskjöld, who we talked about last time, who has, if you remember, he's full of shrapnel. He was wounded randomly and he's full of shrapnel.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He is actually reputed to be one of the best cavalry commanders in Europe. He's very brave. He has that sort of Swedish stoicism. The downside with him is that he's exhausted and not very well because he's full of shrapnel. And he's very bad tempered, as you might expect. Well, you would be, wouldn't you? Every time you sit down, you feel a bit of shrapnel digging into your bum.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Der andere Mann ist Count Löwenhaupt, der Mann, der eine schreckliche Masse mit dem Nahrungsflugzeug gemacht hat. Er ist auch ein sehr, sehr kompetenter Kommandeur. Er ist Schwedens bester Infanteriegeneral. Das Problem ist, dass Rheinskild und Löwenhaupt absolut einander enttäuschen. Sie sprechen nicht wirklich mit einander.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und normalerweise ist es okay, weil Charles in Kontrolle ist, aber Charles liegt unten und schaut in den Himmel.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Ich denke, das ist recht. Ich kann das überhaupt nicht unterschätzen. Which Charles XII so far had provided. Exactly. So, as dusk falls, they make ready to strike the next morning. And their plan is this. Just before dawn, they will move out very quickly. They will leave their artillery behind because it will slow them down and because their gunpowder is waterlogged.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
They'll just rush past these redoubt, ignoring the fire from the defenders. And then they'll form up on the plain beyond.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
The Swedish cavalry will clear out Alexander Menshikov's dragoons and then the Swedish infantry will pin Peter's troops back inside this sort of encampment and either they will lure Peter's troops out to be destroyed, which is quite a big ask, I think it's fair to say, or they will blockade them in this fort until they starve.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And the Swedes think, well, this is a great plan, this is obviously going to work. So, at about 11 o'clock night falls, we're in summer, remember, so it gets dark very late. The Swedes break camp, they move to their assembly points. Charles has got dressed in his full uniform with a sword, even though he's lying down on the stretcher.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He's carried to the front, where Rainskild and Löwenhout and co. are waiting. The watchword is exchanged, it's with God's help in Swedish, because as we said last time, that that's a really important element of this. These Swedish Lutherans think they're doing God's work and that God is smiling on them.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
While they're waiting for everyone to arrive, Rainskild and Löwenhaupt have this gigantic row before they've even started. Rainskild shouts at Löwenhaupt and he's overheard by officers saying, Where the hell are you? He says. Can't you see that everything is in confusion? I don't need your help. I expected better of you, but I can see that I was wrong. Das ist nicht gut für Moral.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Wenn Theo das zu uns gesagt hätte, bevor wir auf der Bühne waren, wäre das nicht eine ideale Präparation. Er sagt es. Er sagt das zu uns. Ich würde einen Ausbruch haben. Ich würde weinen. Ich würde weinen. Die Schweden weinen nicht. Also, während die Schweden nicht weinen, They hear this hammering sound out in the darkness. And Reeds Gould sends scouts to investigate. And they come back.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
They've made a shocking discovery. In the night, the Russians have been building yet more earthworks, these redoubts, right in the path of where the Swedes plan to advance. And the Swedes will have to go around them. And that means they would have to break into kind of two wings passing on either side of them.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And just as the scouts are kind of digesting this, they are spotted by the Russians in the darkness. And they hear there are pistol shots in the night. They hear the ominous sound of a drum beating far away in the night. So they get back to the Swedish lines and they tell this to Rainsgild. And he says, look, we're clearly going to lose the element of surprise here. We have to ride now.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
bevor es leuchtet, oder wir werden niemals wieder diese Chance haben. Und Charles XII sagt, geh schon, brillant. Also verabschieden sie ihren Plan. Im Grunde werden sie sich in drei Divisionen dividieren, die Armee. Auf der linken Seite ist die Feuerwehr-Rennskirche mit der Kavallerie und einem Drittel der Infanterie. Sie werden über die Redoubts auf der linken Seite gehen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Sie rutschen über sie und formen sich auf den Graslanden weiter. Auf der rechten Seite, also auf der anderen Seite, ist Löwenhaupt mit sechs Infanterie-Bataillons. Sie gehen also auf der anderen Seite dieser Rettungen, am nahesten zu Peters Camp, und dann treffen sie sich mit Reinskjöld.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Und das verlässt eine Art Mitteldivision von sechs Infanterie-Bataillons unter einem Mann namens Major General Roos. Und sie sagen ihm, du handelst mit diesen Pforten, diesen Art von Erde-Werken in der Mitte, und zerstörst sie, während wir auf jeder Seite passen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Um all das zu erklären, haben sie wahrscheinlich länger gedauert, als ich, und haben es vielleicht in mehr Details und einer kohärenten Weise erklärt. Sie haben viel Zeit verloren. Es ist also jetzt um vier Uhr morgens, und die Sonne beginnt zu steigen, und sie hören die ersten Geräusche von Kanonen, die von den russischen Redouten fliegen.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Die Schweden beginnen endlich voranzutreten, und es ist wirklich eine unglaubliche Szene. Es ist wie eine Szene aus einem Ridley Scott-Film oder so etwas. Die Sonne steigt über den Grasland der Ukraine auf. There's these orderly blocks of Swedish musketeers. They're marching over the steps in their blue uniforms.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
There's the cavalry in their kind of blue and yellow coats, cantering and trotting on ahead. Soon they get to the first earthworks. And just as planned, the Swedish army kind of divides and they sort of go around them like the sea kind of parting around them. While in the middle, Major General Roos' battalions get stuck in. gegen den Redout und werden tatsächlich ein bisschen direkt aufgedrückt.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
Also kämpfen die Russen sehr stark zurück und Ruses Battalionen werden in einem langen Feuerkampf gedrückt. Also werden sie hinterlassen. Sie steigen in diesem Kampf gegen die Pforte ein, was bedeutet, dass die anderen zwei Wände gedrückt wurden und ein Drittel der schwedischen Infanterie von Anfang an hinterlassen wurde, zusammen mit den Kosaks.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
So now it's about five o'clock and the sun is fully up. As planned, most of the Swedish troops, not this group under Rus, but most of the Swedish troops are now moving on to the grasslands behind the Russian redoubts. And at first, Rainskild and his men are absolutely delighted. They think everything is going to plan. Charles is brought up on a stretcher.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
People are redressing the wound on his foot because it's bleeding all the time. And some of the officers actually say, Your Majesty, congratulations, everything is going according to plan. This is going to be a great day. And then Rainscold looks around. He says, well, where's the right wing of the army under Löwenhaupt? They should have joined us by now.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
And actually what has happened is that Löwenhaupt has swung off more than a mile to the right, partly to keep away from the Russian fire from the little forts, but also because he cannot wait to get stuck into Peter's camp. And he doesn't even care that he has become detached from the main body of the army.
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566. The Great Northern War: Slaughter on the Steppes (Part 3)
He says to his officers, I'm actually sick of Field Marshal Rainskill talking to me like I'm a lackey or a servant or something.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think it goes back to what we talked about in a previous episode, that William knows the only way he can possibly secure the crown of England is by defeating and killing Harold in a pitched battle. And to draw Harold into a battle, he has to give Harold the serious prospect that he'll be able to wipe William out. So in a sense, what William is doing is offering himself and his army up as bait.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And of course, it is a completely desperate gamble because he knows that he's staking everything he's achieved over the course of his rule. In fact, he's staking his own life. But he has invaded England in the conviction that God is on his side. And what he is aiming to do is to put that conviction to the test.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I mean, it is excruciatingly dangerous. But he has no choice, I think. He knows how formidable the resources that England commands are. And he, I think, doesn't trust his capabilities to defeat them with winter closing in. So therefore, he has to have the battle.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Right. He needs to bring the English to submit before winter kicks in. And there's a further dimension to this, which is that there's a kind of game of bluff and double bluff being played between William and Harold. Because, of course, Harold has been on a spying mission to Normandy. So he has seen the Norman way of war. He is going to act on his expectations as to what the Normans will do.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
What Harold thinks the Normans will do is to send their horsemen fanning out across the heartlands of Wessex, plundering granaries, seizing the harvest, torching villages and rough and ready castles. being built along the kind of the trace lines of all this devastation. That is Harold's nightmare.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And when the news is brought to him in York, that must be what he immediately thinks is going to happen. And so he thinks, you know, he's got to spare his folk and fold and his people and his native land. from such a fate. And I think it's possible to imagine that William is kind of outsmarting him and thinking, yeah, that is what Harold will think. That is what will draw him south.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
That is what will lure him into staking all on a pitched battle that actually Harold otherwise probably would not have risked.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
All the sources agree that Harold returns from York at a pretty furious pace. And when he reaches London... He does not wait for troops that he has summoned. He's not prepared to sit it out. And both his mother and his brother Geath urge him to delay his advance, but he won't. I think the reason for that is that he wants to keep William bottled up.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And the reason that William is staying where he is, is because... William is thinking that this is what Harold is going to be doing. So I think William is outsmarting Harold. And so Harold, he has his brother Geath with him. He has his brother Leofwine with him. I don't think he has Edwin and Morka with him. Maybe he does. It's not clear. Their presence isn't mentioned.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah, I think so. Anyway, he decides that he's going to accept the bait. He's going to go and confront William. And so it is on the evening of the 13th of October that scouts come galloping into the Norman camp, reporting that white dust has been seen in the distance and the usurper is closing in.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah. So he has to call back all the people out foraging. He gives his men a kind of hurried command to prepare for battle that evening. And so as thus settles over the Norman camp, it's swept by clamor and confusion. And William, it is said, puts his male shirt on the wrong way. And again, this is seen as a potentially a bad omen.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But the sense in which William and Harold are playing chess with each other continues because William, rather than staying in Hastings, he is now resolved to try and take Harold by surprise. So what he says to his men is to take the road from Hastings, even though it is now getting dark.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
to advance along this road with the marshes on either side and to go out from Hastings with its castle, with its ships, with its opportunities for escaping back across the Channel, to go inland and to try and meet the English before the English are ready for battle. So they march through the night, three, four, five miles and steadily to their right, beyond the dense woods on their flank.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The sky is lightning, dawn breaks, still no sign of the enemy. And then at around eight o'clock, this incredible scene that you read from the Carmen, the sight of the English emerging from a wood onto a hill, their spears glittering.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And I think it's hard not to imagine that William at that moment, as you might have said, if you've done this in Adventures in Time, permitted himself perhaps a thin, wolfish smile. Yeah, his cold eyes glittered with greed. Because what he is seeing is that Harold's men are still assembling. They haven't drawn up their battle line. And
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Clearly, they are assuming that they're going to have time to advance on Hastings and take the Normans by surprise. But instead, it's the Normans who have taken the English by surprise. And William doesn't hesitate. He sends his archers, he sends his horsemen towards the hill on which the English are massing. And they haven't yet kind of formed their shield wall.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So they are very vulnerable to arrows to see what can be inflicted on them before the shield wall is fully formed. It is shortly after 8 a.m., on the 14th of October, 1066, and the Battle of Hastings has begun.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Well, clearly there are problems with it because we do know that the battle actually begins with William's archers raining arrows on the unformed shield wall of the English. And as you say, Taillefer's juggling sounds like something that you get from a chivalric romance. And in fact, later accounts of it make it explicit.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So one of them says that Taillefer sang before the Duke of Charlemagne and Roland, you know, this great epic. of chivalry and knighthood that was so popular in France that he's consciously modelling himself on that. And this echoes a trend that you definitely see in William of Poitiers, who is always comparing William not so much to figures from chivalric romance, but to figures from antiquity.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Later historians do that too. William of Malmesbury, there's an absolutely classic example. He describes how William steps out from his ship, wades through the English waters onto the beach at Pevensey, and that as he lands, he stumbles. A knight watching him says, it's all right. Look, he is holding up sand in his hands. He has England in his grasp.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And this echoes a scene from Suetonius' Life of Julius Caesar, where Julius Caesar does exactly the same. And it may well influence a similar story in Snorri's account of Harold Hardrada. So there's a sense of these kind of episodes being recycled and recycled.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But there is an alternative explanation here. which is maybe the Normans are actually knowingly influenced by, say, chivalric romance or the lives of Julius Caesar or whatever, and that it's impacting their behaviour. And you might say that a pitched battle, precisely because it is so rare, is the perfect opportunity to make a name for yourself.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And again, just to reiterate, the Carmen is written probably only a few months after the Battle of Hastings. is it likely he'd have made it up completely? I don't know. So I am less sceptical about this than I might normally be. And I like the idea, you know, that knights, and maybe even William himself, are consciously modelling themselves on figures from the past.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And it is interesting that, again and again, William is being compared to Julius Caesar because, of course, Julius Caesar had led a successful invasion of Britain.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And also the wyvern. Yes. So the wyvern is a two-legged dragon. And again, this is a banner that reaches back centuries. So just as the Normans may well be modelling themselves on figures from ancient Rome, Harold is drawing on traditions that derive from his Danish side. So his mother is Danish, the fighting man, the banners, all this kind of stuff.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But also these are traditions that reach back centuries and centuries in Wessex. And on both sides, the combatants are aware of themselves as protagonists in very, very ancient traditions. That is why it is hard, I think, to distinguish the element of overt melodrama from the narratives, because I think that many of the fighters are themselves kind of consciously playing with that.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The other thing about Harold's banners, we know that they are definitely there because they are described as being planted on the highest point of the hill below which the Norman army is gathered. And in due course, Harold will die there and William will build a great abbey and the altar of this abbey will be planted on the site where Harold died.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
That is the one kind of aspect of the English dispositions that we can be relatively confident in. But what about the rest of the English army? How are they kind of drawn up? And this is very, very contested. It's a topic that's been kind of a live one for well over a century.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So Freeman, the Regis Professor of History at Oxford, who we opened this whole series with, he thought that the English battle line stretched from the summit of the hill all the way down the slope to a valley at the foot of the hill where there was very boggy terrain. And that's one theory.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The other theory, which became much more popular in the 20th century, is that the English were bunched on the crest of the hill and that their flanks were kind of protected by the rough vegetation that the author of the Carmen mentioned specifically. And opinion on this has kind of swung this way and that. And I would say probably...
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
the consensus is shifting back to the idea that the English battle line wasn't just on the hill, but went right the way down to this kind of slightly boggy valley. And that is under the influence of Michael Lawson's definitive book on the battle, came out in 2002, mentioned it several times. And he points out that Carmen explicitly states that the English occupied the valley as well as the hill.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I've mentioned that the hill is called Senlac. Yeah. There are historians who say, well, this is a totally made up name. It's very late. Improbable that this was the name by which it was known. And they point out that Saint-Lac, I mean, it could be a lake of blood, so it could be a name that is applied to it after the battle.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But Lawson suggests that in Old English, it would mean Sandy Brook, and that perhaps this is what the English were defending at the foot of the hill. Because right to this day, if you go to the battlefield, you'll find that the foot of the hill is kind of very boggy.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And he points out as well that there's evidence in the Bayeux Tapestry, which has a scene in which French cavalry are being brought down by what look like stakes in a body of water. So... The implication of that, if Lawson is right, is that Harold's army must have been pretty large. I mean, you know, numbering in the tens of thousands.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
It is true that the English sources that are written in the early 12th century, Sir William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntington, all these people we've had cause to mention. They say that Harold's army is small, that it's small relative to the Normans. But I think you'd have to say they would say that because they don't want to admit that a large English army has been wiped out.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And it is certainly the case, as we've talked about before, that it is well within the capabilities of the English state to summon an army in tens of thousands. And even though we're told that Harold didn't wait for all the men that could have come Even so, I think there's no reason to doubt that he could have been in command of a really sizable army.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But the honest truth is, is that certainty on this is impossible. We just don't know.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Well, but I think also with Hastings, there is one thing that we definitely know, which is that the English have occupied a position which William and his forces find impossible to outflank. So I think that's kind of the debate. You have to explain how and why that is the case, because clearly that is the key to the whole course of the battle.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Oh, this is such a tragic story, this is. So the job of the English is to hold the hill. Yeah. And by holding the hill, you're blocking the advance on the road to London. Yeah. You're bottling the Normans up. And if you hold the hill, then you can wait for reinforcements and you can wait for that fleet that is sailing towards Hastings.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Well, we'll see. There are twists still to come. But clearly, the Normans know this and they know that their job is not just to clear the English out of the way, but I think specifically to kill Harold. because Harold is the key. Eliminate him, and then the way to the English throne is open for William.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Absolutely. And the one I would say that is most familiar probably to anyone who has even the faintest interest in history in England, certainly. Scenes from the battle will be familiar to most people who live in this country. The idea of the English battle lying on Senlac Hill, this great hill outside Hastings. The Normans serried in their armour on their horses at the foot of the hill.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And everything that happens on the 14th of October 1066, this terrible blood-soaked day, I think is determined by those two mutually opposed objectives. And the key to the English defence is something we've already mentioned. It's this shield war. Trained infantry, probably several, maybe many ranks deep,
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And certainly in the front line of the shield wall, the English infantry are at least as well armed and armoured as the Normans. So they've got spears, they've got swords, they've got their famous axes. They're wearing chain mail, helmets, shields.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And even though many undoubtedly do fall to the Norman archers as they're struggling to form their shield wall, once they have taken up position, once those shields have been locked, then their position is pretty, I mean, pretty formidable. And, you know, I mean, it's kudos to the Normans because they're at the foot of the hill. They've got to go up this very rough terrain. There's this
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
shield war. They know how formidable English infantry is. Blaring of trumpets. The English are beating their weapons on the shields. They've got their brilliant war cry of, oot, oot, oot. Right. I mean, terrifying. Like a Canadian talking 20, say the word out. Yes. Yes, ice hockey team. So what are the Norman tactics faced with this? They obviously have their war trumpets too.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
They have their battle cry, Deus A, which is kind of basically gods on our side, I think is less intimidating than Oot myself. But also William has two particular divisions, two particular types of men that Harold doesn't. So these are archers, including crossbowmen. The English don't have crossbowmen. They don't seem to have had many archers.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Certainly on the Bayeux Tapestry, there's only one English archer. And of course, the Normans have cavalry. And as the author of the Carmen said in that opening passage, they have left their horses at the rear. So they have horses for riding to battle, but they don't use them actually in battle.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The traditional understanding of how Hastings plays out is that the archers fire volleys at the English lines. Presumably, people fall and the cavalry then charge up the hill to try and inflict damage on the resulting gaps in the shield wall. This is what is shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. It's what's shown in the Lady Bird book. which was my kind of introduction to this.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
It's pretty much taken for granted that this is the rhythm of the day. But again, to quote Michael Lawson, who's being cheerily revisionist about this, he writes, "...as far as cavalry goes, one can acknowledge that possession of it gave William tactical options not available to Harold."
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
and that at points in the battle it may have been of great importance, without concluding that it was inevitable that its actions would prove decisive. So what's he mean by that? What's he basically saying? So essentially what he's saying is that cavalry may well not have played the key role in the battle that traditionally people have thought, and he gives various reasons for thinking this.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So the hill is pretty steep. The terrain is rough. This is always being highlighted. And I think that the combination of those circumstances would have made it difficult for cavalry to make the kind of charge that you see illustrated on the Bayeux Tapestry. Also, the fact the battle lasts as long as it does, because spoiler, basically it goes on all day from early morning to sunset.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
It suggests that If the Norman cavalry are galloping up the hill and attacking the English army, they're not being very effective. They are probably not doing mass charges with their lances couched beneath their arms in the manner of King Arthur's knights. That's a style of fighting that hasn't yet been perfected.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And also bear in mind the horses are not wearing armour, so they are very, very vulnerable to, you know, if they're going up into close quarters, you've got all these kind of terrifying people with their moustaches and their axes.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And so the implication of that is that actually Hastings may have been much more of a clash of infantry against infantry than has traditionally been assumed.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So again, to quote Lawson, could it be despite the prominence given by the Bayeux Tapestry to the French cavalry that Hastings was so long and hard fought because much of the day was taken up by struggles between dense bodies of infantry on both sides of a type with which the Anglo-Saxons had long been familiar and because the Normans had retained their Scandinavian ancestors' practice of deploying their foot soldiers in this fashion too.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The Norman knights charging the English shield wall. King Harold, as the shadows lengthen over the battlefield as the sun sets in the west, struck by an arrow in the eye. And the accounts of the battle that we have, you mentioned one, possibly written only a few months after Harold's death. are detailed and vivid in a way that the sources for Stamford Bridge simply aren't.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
again, we can't know for sure, but I think, I mean, when you read it, you think, yes, actually that does instinctively make sense simply because the battle goes on so long.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Right. So the basic rhythm of the day, as you said, is not in dispute. William of Poitiers sums it up that it was an unheard of kind of combat with one side launching ceaseless attacks and manoeuvres. The other standing firmly as they're rooted to the ground. And I think the sporting...
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
metaphor is very good it's a football team you know solid wall of defense trying to keep out strikers it's you know all of that but as you say there are then two dramatic developments and the first of these we don't know exactly when it occurs but presumably after a good deal of fighting williams left wing is in trouble it's flagging against the english battle line and it starts to break and run down the hill and at the same time a rumor sweeps the norman lines and
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
that William himself is dead. And William rides up to where his men are running in route down the hill, and he supposedly takes off his helmet. He cries out that he is alive, and he manages to halt the route. And William of Poitiers, writing about his hero, says that he strengthens his men in resolve, and they then return to the attack with renewed vigour.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So that seems to have been a genuine rout, right? But then following that, the French lines, the Norman lines, they seem to break again. And this happens twice. And these two breaks, we're told, are feigned. They are designed to lure the English out of position so that the shield wall is broken.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And sure enough, the English, rather than holding to their defensive positions, think that there is a chance to finish the battle off once and for all. And they follow the retreating enemy down the side of the hill. But it's a trap. Their ranks are broken and they are now easy prey for the Normans on their horses. And this is where cavalry really comes into its own.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And perhaps thousands are killed. I mean, we don't know, but certainly the slaughter is very great. And this is the great error the English make. And it's an error that people may remember we did an episode on the Battle of Tor, where Charles Martel and the Franks are praised for not breaking their line, even though they know they've won.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And likewise at Agincourt, Henry V does not let his line break. He keeps his men to their positions. When you're holding a defensive position, breaking that defensive position is to give the enemy the chance of victory. And that is essentially what seems to have happened. And presumably this is happening in the late afternoon.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Because we know that as the shadows lengthen, as the sun starts to set, the fighting becomes more and more intense. William, we're told, has three horses killed unto him. The fourth horse that he's given is presented to him by Eustace of Boulogne, who people may remember a few shows back, which precipitated the exile of the Godwins. So he's a guy who has form with the Godwins and the Godwinsons.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So he gives William his fourth horse and And it's now perhaps that Harold's two brothers, Leofwine and Girth, are both slain. And according to the Carmen, Girth is killed by William himself. So William's feats of arms, we will be looking at them. So Girth and Leofwine are both dead. But even with them cut down, it still seems that the English line is holding.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And we have to presume that Harold at this point is still alive. Because it seems that as long as he is there, the English have hope. By this point, it's clear the English are not going to win. But as we said, if they can just hold their position, win through to the night, force a draw, that effectively would be as good as a victory. And William would then, you know, he'd be isolated.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So we talked in the previous episode how King Harold's Saga, the great account by Snorri Sturluson, dates to almost two centuries after 1066. But we have accounts of Hastings that are incredibly close to the battle. So most famously, we have the Bayeux Tapestry, which is not a tapestry, but a great embroidered cloth over 200 feet long.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Lots of his men would be wounded. He'd have the sea at his back. He'd have a fleet coming towards him. You know, he can't afford this stalemate. And so it is crucial for him and for the Normans. to finish off Harold. Absolutely essential. And this is why I think the death of Harold has this kind of iconic, almost legendary quality to it. Homeric quality to it.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Homeric quality to it, because it really is the key moment in the battle, and therefore in the whole process of the conquest. And of course, the story of how he dies is one of the most famous in all of English history. That an arrow hits him in the eye. And... Where does this story come from? So famously, it is supposedly shown on the Bayeux Tapestry.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
You have two figures, one seemingly with an arrow in his eye. He's got his hand to the shaft of the arrow, it looks like, trying to pull it out. And then there's another is being struck down by a Norman horseman. And above these two figures, you have the Latin text. Hick Harold Rex Interfectus Est, here King Harold is killed.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Is this evidence for the fact that Harold was killed by an arrow in his eye? You might think so when I tell you that around 1080, just over a decade after the Battle of Hastings, a martyrs of Monte Cassino, the guy who wrote about how brilliant the Normans were, the monk of Monte Cassino, He reports that Harold had died after being hit in the eye.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And William of Malmesbury in the following century, the English writer, he reports that the arrow point had gone straight through his eye socket and deep into his brains and that this had finished him. So listeners might think, well, this seems to be an open and shut case. But this is medieval history, so obviously it's not. That would be far too easy.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So the Bayeux Tapestry, there are problems with it. So first of all, which of the two figures is King Harold? Is it the one with...
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
the arrow in his eye or is it the one who's being cut down with people often say these are two scenes involving the same person so like a strip cartoon like a strip cartoon but they're not because they look different is that right they've got different kit they're clearly not the same person I mean unless you know Harold's put down one weapon and picked up another after being hit by the I mean I don't think so there's an even more damaging detail
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
which is that we know the tapestry was very heavily restitched in the 19th century. And we have an illustration, a copy of it that was made in 1730. And this shows that the warrior who seemingly has the arrow in his eye seems actually to be holding a spear. And obviously that is kind of problem if you're adducing it as evidence that Harold was hit in the eye.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Amartas, so I mean, he's writing in 1080. So is that evidence? Again, a problem that we don't have the original Latin text. We only have a much later French translation. So again, that may be untrustworthy. And the intriguing thing is, is that the very earliest sources, so that's the Carmen and William of Poitiers, they do not make any mention at all of the arrow in Harold's eye.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah, so let's forget him. Well, no, let's not forget him because I think, you know, the dog that doesn't bark in the night is a clue. Well, here's a dog that does bark.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And it illuminates not just the battle, but the events leading up to it. We've already had reference to it and indeed to its aftermath. And another source we've also already mentioned in this series, William of Poitiers, who had served William as a soldier before becoming his chaplain. And he gives, again, a detailed account.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah, so this is so interesting. So it is very, very different to the traditional arrow in the eye story. So what the Carmen says is that William and Eustace of Boulogne, so those two again, the Normans and their French allies are pressing for victory. And William and Eustace see Harold standing undaunted, and to quote the Carmen, fiercely hacking to pieces those Normans who were besetting him.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And William and Eustace are joined by two other men, both of whom are named, two other warriors. And the four men, So led by William, then attack Harold en masse. And to quote the Carmen, the first, that would be William, cleaving his breast through the shield with his point, drenched the earth with a gushing torrent of blood. The second smote off his head below the protection of the helmet.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And the third pierced the innards of his belly with his lance. The fourth hewed off his thigh and bore away the severed limb. And adding to the general quality of the violence of the scene is the strong likelihood that thigh is a euphemism for genitals in that.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I mean, what are we to make of this? It has to be said that this account has been widely discounted on the basis that if William really had taken part in this attack on Harold and failed him, you know, this would be a feat of arms to be bruited across not just Normandy, but the whole of Christendom. But...
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
There is a slight issue because actually, is it the kind of feat of arms that William would want to be promoted and sung about? One historian who did trust the story in Carmen, who did believe it and was utterly disgusted by it, like you, Dominic, was our old friend E. A. Freeman, the Regis Professor of History at Oxford in the late 19th century.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
He wrote this great six-volume history of the Norman conquest. In his third volume, which recounts the Battle of Hastings, He observes that William himself seems to have been ashamed of what had happened. And citing William of Malmesbury, Freeman writes about the mutilations inflicted on Harold. He writes, I mean, the Welsh might disagree with that, but whatever.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But we must add, in Justice to the Conqueror, that he pronounced the last and most brutal insult to be a base and cowardly act, and he expelled the perpetrator from his army. So that would be the guy who is supposedly carrying off maybe the genitals. We don't know. And there is a more recent historian, Mark Morris, in his book on the Norman Conquest, who likewise believes the story and believes
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
points out further reasons for doubting that William, if he really had taken part in the butchery of his great rival for the throne, why he would not have wanted it proclaimed abroad. William is fighting beneath a banner that has been given him by the Pope himself. And we've talked about how this is very controversial, the papal backing for the invasion of a Christian country.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
But as you said, amazingly, we have an account that is even more contemporary. Probably written in around Easter 1067, so fewer than six months after the battle. And for a long while, the authenticity of the Carmen, the song of the Battle of Hastings was furiously debated. It kind of appeared almost from nowhere in the 19th century.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And for William to cut down and butcher an anointed king would only have enhanced the criticisms. Dominic, you described the death of St. Olaf, the martyrdom at Stiklestad, and actually the description of the death of Olaf at that. is very similar.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think that it's reminiscent of a kind of brutality, a style of fighting that was celebrated by the Vikings and is still being celebrated in the sagas in the 12th and 13th centuries, but is no longer celebrated in a Latin Europe that has become increasingly chivalric. William is behaving like a hero from a Norse epic in the common. He is not behaving like a chevalier.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think that you could see, therefore, that there might be reasons why, in the wake of Hastings, he might have wanted to cover it up. This may even be a reason why the Carmen ends up buried for as long as it does. It's a bit of an embarrassment the author hasn't got the memo. Personally,
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think the Carmen's account, again, it's the earliest, is likelier than the fact that Harold died with an arrow in his eye.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I suppose. But the quality of brutality, I mean, is very, very true to the brutality and horror that is the fate of the English in the battle. Because with Harold dead, the English are clearly defeated. And the strong probability is that it's going to be difficult for the English to carry on the fight now against the victorious Normans.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
You'll note that I heroically resisted the temptation to open this episode with a reading from Millennium. but I can't resist the temptation to finish it. So... Go for it. We don't know how Harold died exactly, but one thing is certain.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
That Norman Horseman, trampling Harold down, left him as just one among a heap of corpses piled around the toppled royal banner, just one among the fallen on a day of slaughter fit to put even Stamford Bridge into the shade. As darkness fell and what was left of the English turned at last and fled into the gathering darkness to be hunted throughout the night by William's exultant cavalry,
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
it was the reeking of blood and emptied bowels together with the moans and sobs of the wounded that bore prime witness to the butchery william had gambled and he had won
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And there were lots of people who thought it might have been a medieval fake. But I think it's now pretty widely accepted to have been written by a bishop who served William's wife, Matilda, as her chaplain. So we have these two chaplains, William of Poitiers and this bishop who wrote The Carmen.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And this enables us to get up close to the build up, the actual events, the aftermath of Hastings in a way that, well, I mean, to quote Michael Lawson, whose book on the battle is probably the best one that there is. He's written about it. The more is known about Hastings than any battle fought in the West since the end of the Roman Empire. But inevitably, having said that, there are caveats.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So all those things that people think they know about the Battle of Hastings. Did the English really confine themselves to just standing on a hill? Did the Norman knights really charge the shield wall? Was Harold really slain by an arrow hitting his eye? I mean, as we will find out, these are all issues that are furiously debated.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And so to match that quotation from Michael Lawson about us knowing more about Hastings than any battle since the end of the Roman Empire, here's one from John Gillingham. Almost the only thing about the Norman conquest that isn't controversial is the fact that the Normans won the Battle of Hastings. So there is lots to discuss.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think the alternative theories are just as exciting and thrilling. Right. There's no question. This is an extraordinary, terrifying, bloody conflict. No doubt about that. It's just that some of the details are up for debate and we'll be looking at them.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Well, I imagine that the news that Harold across the channel in England has stood down his men. has reached William. And it's four days after Harold has sent his men back to get the harvest in and so on, on the 8th of September. On the 12th of September, William decides, I think, that this is too good an opportunity to miss, even though the winds are still against him.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So he orders his fleet on the 12th of September to leave port and to sail out into the Channel. But these winds, as we've said, are still contrary. They're still very, very difficult to navigate. And people may remember that Harold had sent his fleet back to London and it gets caught up in a terrible storm and large numbers of ships are shipwrecked.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
It seems that the same storms that damage Harold's fleet so badly...
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
blows Williams off course some of his ships are wrecked and the vast body of the fleet have to take refuge not in an English port but in a port further up the French coast so specifically a place called Saint-Valéry-sur-Somme so that's north of Normandy itself and it is closer to the English coast than William had previously been but it is still separated from England by kind of 50 miles of storm-lashed seas and
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
William is chastened, I think, by the near disaster that his fleet has suffered. And so he decides he's not going to risk that anymore. And the contrary winds blow for a further fortnight. You know, this is a huge problem. He's no longer in Normandy for a start. So he can't command resources in the way that he'd been able to do previously. He's lost lots of his ships.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
His supplies are running out. There's all that issue with getting rid of the horse's urine, all that kind of stuff. So it's an incredible tribute, I think, to his powers of leadership that he does seem able to hold this expedition together. But you can imagine him. Well, in fact, he's described as looking up at the weathercock on top of the church in Saint-Valéry.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
kind of just waiting for the winds to change.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I'm sure he must have done. Right. It seems the only explanation for why he would have risked sailing out four days after Harold had done that.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah. I mean, I think he absolutely feels, you know, it's now or never. And so on the 27th of September, at last, the weathercock turns. The winds have changed. The sea stands fair for England. And so William gives his men orders to embark. And at high tide, which is in the mid-afternoon, the horses are led up ramps onto the transport ships.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
The carman describes William's men rushing to take their places like a flock of doves heading to a dovecote. And just before sunset, the Norman fleet is ready to set sail. And William's own flagship leads the way. And this is a ship called the Mora, which is a gift from his wife. The stern post has a wonderful figurehead, the figure of a boy blowing a trumpet and
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And we're told a lantern was slung high on the masthead as a guiding beacon and the sound of a horn signaled the advance. So William leads the fleet out into the darkening channel as the sun sets. And the Moira is a very streamlined ship. And in fact, it's so swift that by next morning, as the sun rises over the channel to the east, William finds that he's completely on his own.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
He can't see any other ships. And rather than panic, he displays immense sang-froid. He has a hearty breakfast, which we're told he waters down with wine. And by the time he's finished it, he goes back up onto deck and there behind him is a great forest of masts. The Norman fleet is still with him and on they sail to England.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think the difference, though, is that these are being told by people... Who were there. Who were there or who were absolutely familiar with the details of the expedition.
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556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
No, because Arian was writing centuries later, whereas these are people who are writing a few years later and are surrounded by people who'd been on the... But you're saying, leave everything that they tell you. I think it's unlikely... that they would just make up details that everyone would have been able to scoff at. The details may be slightly spiced up.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
I think that probably the details we're getting from the Carmen and from William of Poitiers in the main are fairly accurate because there are so many people who'd be reading them that they would know if they weren't.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Yeah. And Pevensey Bay, it's a natural harbour. It's kind of lagoons, really. And it's tidal. And it's protected by a spit of land that sticks out on the western side. And on the western side, there's a crumbling Roman fort. And there's a little port. And that's Pevensey itself. But there's a problem, which is that Pevensey and this Roman fort...
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Although the Normans are very quick to fortify and kind of boost the defences, it's not easy to get from there to the main road that leads to London. Because essentially, you have to ride all the way around the lagoon, and it's about 20-odd miles to do that. So some of the ships are pulled up there, but there's the real sense that actually Pevensey itself is not a good base. And so...
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
what they do is start looking further east to the town of Hastings. And Hastings is much more conveniently linked to London. So the main road from Hastings goes along a kind of high ridge and it's surrounded on either side by trees and then down by mudflats kind of leading down to the lagoon of Pevensey Bay and on the other side as well. So it's kind of like a peninsula.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And William decides that he will make this his base. And he and his relative and a childhood friend of his called William Fitz Osborne, then having reached Hastings, reconnoiter the terrain. And they realise very rapidly that Hastings is a kind of natural trap because it is open to attack from the sea. Equally, this single road leading northwards to London is so fringed on either side by creeks
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
that it is the only way out from Hastings. There is no other way to escape it. And that in turn means that if there is an amphibious attack, so if Harold comes down along the road from London with his infantry, and if a naval force attacks Hastings from the south, then the Normans will be surrounded. So in lots of ways, it's an insane place for him to stay.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
William orders, inevitably, a castle to be built at Hastings. So the Normans have now built one at Pevensey, they've now built one at Hastings. And he sends his horsemen out to ravage the villages that surround Hastings. Hastings is in Sussex, and Sussex is Harold's native county.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
So there's clearly good propaganda value to be had for William in burning down the villages that Harold properly should be defending. But it does seem kind of madness for the Normans to stay in Hastings. Because the risk of being trapped there is so enormous. And why, having brought all their horses, all this proficiency they have in building makeshift castles, why would they stay there?
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
Why are they not spilling out across Sussex? Because they are massively risking a pitch battle if they do stay there. And the Norman way of war is to avoid battles. You know, we'd mentioned William had only ever fought in one battle.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And William of Poitiers describes the Norman way of war, that it is to strike fear by frequent lengthy expeditions across enemy territory, to lay waste harvests, fields and halls, to plant castles and garrisons wherever they would cause maximum damage, to overwhelm the enemy by engulfing him in a great multitude of troubles.
The Rest Is History
556. 1066: The Battle of Hastings (Part 3)
And Harold, when he's brought the news of William's landing, he knows that is the Norman way of war.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
That's right, they did get a bear drunk.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
That's right, yeah. This was called the Gotthorp Fury. It was like this was one last binge. It was like a bit of a stag do. One last binge before a life of domesticity. By the time Charles turned 18 in 1700... He's put all the pranks behind him. He's become very serious. He's given up drinking strong liquor. He sleeps half of every night on the floor to toughen himself up.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
In winter, he sleeps in a barn to prepare himself for life on campaign. And he's also ashamed of being very fair-skinned and spends loads of time trying to get sunburned in order, again, to kind of toughen his skin up. So very, very Spartan sort of ethos. Now, if you were a Dane or something, you would say this is absolutely typical of the Swedes, wouldn't you?
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Because the Danes have very disobliging views of the Swedes. They think they're all sort of cold, driven, obsessive. And there is a little bit of that, I think, about Charles. And possibly you could argue about Sweden generally at this point, because you could argue... I think it's very impressive. A commitment to ascetic militarism. I'm not a very ascetic person deep down, but I kind of...
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Wish that I was. You know, I'd like to be more Swedish generally, I think. There is a downside to this, and this is partly what brings on the Great Northern War. Sweden held the province of Livonia, which is now kind of Estonia and Latvia since 1660. And it was dominated by Baltic German barons who were the descendants of the Teutonic Knights. We do love a Baltic German baron.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, you've got to love a Baltic German baron. But over time, the Swedes had been kind of whittling away at the powers of these Baltic German barons and confiscating their lands and generally making themselves very unpopular. And the spokesman for the Baltic barons was a guy called Johan Reinhold von Patkel. And he was a tremendous fellow. He's very intelligent. He's very brave, dashing.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He's fluent in Greek and Latin. And the Baltic chaps sent him to Stockholm. They said, go and plead our case in Stockholm and say, like, stop confiscating our lands and being nasty to us. And when he arrived in Stockholm, the Swedes, living up to their reputation in Europe in the 17th century, they said, you're obviously a terrible man. No one cares what you think. And they sentenced him to death.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So he fled west in disguise and he then spent the next sort of months and years plotting to build an anti-Swedish coalition. And he went first to the King of Denmark, Frederick IV. The Danes hate the Swedes. They want to get the province of Skåne in southern Sweden back. That's the place you see in Wallander in the TV series.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah. So they want to get Skåne back and the Danes are well in. Then he goes to see our old friend, fox-tossing champion, Augustus the Strong. Augustus the Strong has only recently been elected King of Poland, and he's very keen to impress their Polish nobles. And so that's on top of him being Electro-Saxony. Electro-Saxony, that's right. He's stacking up the titles. Exactly.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And he loves the thought of conquering Livonia, Estonia, and Latvia. And Pat Cole says to him, look, you know, when we build this coalition, this will be dead easy. I mean, he genuinely says you'll be in Riga for Christmas. He's not aware of Peter the Great's Riga obsession. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So Frederick and Augustus agree this deal.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The Danes will attack the Swedes in North Germany and then Skuna, southern Sweden. And Augustus will march troops from Saxony, his Saxon army, and maybe some Poles into Livonia. So the Swedes will be fighting two different adversaries on two different fronts, and they'll be overwhelmed. And then Pat Cole, the guy who's put this together, says, look, we can actually go one better.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Why don't we get Peter the Great in on this as well? will get the Russians to attack in Ingria, the area now around St. Petersburg. And that will distract the Swedes from defending Riga. And this will be great. Now, the thing is that when they put this deal together, everybody thinks of the Russians as a sort of slightly ludicrous junior partner because the Russians never win wars.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And Pat Cole actually says to the Poles, the Russian infantry would be most serviceable for working in the trenches and for receiving the enemy's shots. In other words, they really will be cannon fodder.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They don't think this is, I mean, a kind of foolish step. They're aware that there's a slight risk, actually. So Pat Cole says to the Poles at one point, We have to bind the hands of the Tsar so he doesn't get in ahead of us. Obviously, we don't want him to take Estonia and Latvia. We don't want him to take Tallinn and Riga and all of that because that's really destined for Poland.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So they are kind of where I think... That there's a danger.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
But right at the very end of the Baltic. It doesn't occur to them that he would end up with Estonia and Latvia as well. But they'll give him a little foothold. That's the bribe, basically. By the beginning of 1700, the deal is done. The Poles, well, I said the Poles, it's actually Saxon troops that Augustus the Strong is using. He sends them in first into what's now Latvia to besiege Riga.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
A few weeks later, the Danes strike into Holstein, so North Germany. And as we've seen in August, Peter the Great joins the war as well. Now, they think Charles is only a teenager. We can wipe the floor with this bloke. He's just a stripling. And they're quite wrong, of course. Charles is in the forest, and guess what he's doing? He's hunting bears. Oh, God, more bear murdering. I know.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
When news comes that Augustus has struck, he greets the news completely calmly, and he says, well... We'll make King Augustus go back the way he came. And then later, he gets the news a few weeks later, the Danes have joined the war as well. And he says, it's curious that both my cousins, Frederick and Augustus, wish to make war on me. So be it. But King Augustus has broken his word.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Our cause then is just, and God will help us. There's a sort of very admirable stoicism, certainty, and calm about Charles, which, as we will see, has a dark side if you're too certain of victory and war.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He says, I will not stop until I've got my revenge. and these cousins of mine who've attacked me, you know, have paid the price. And a big spoiler alert, Charles will have multiple opportunities to end the war on not terribly disadvantageous terms, but he refuses them all. He says, no, no, no, we go right to the end on this.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
You know, I've been wronged and there'll be absolutely no compromise whatsoever. So on the 13th of April, 1700, Charles leaves Stockholm, says goodbye to his closest relatives, who were his grandmother and his sister. And believe it or not, he will never see them or Stockholm again. But at first, the war goes brilliantly for Charles.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
It's pretty obvious that this allied coalition have completely underestimated him and miscalculated him. Instead of dividing his forces as they thought he would, he does the sensible thing. He keeps his forces together and he deals with his enemies one by one. So first, he smites the Danes.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They've sent all their army into Holstein to try and capture it, which means that when he lands his army in Zeeland and marches on Copenhagen, they're completely helpless. Right. So within months, he's knocked the Danes out of the war completely. I mean, they've had what Theo would call, they have had a shocker. Next is Peter the Great.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Peter the Great's initial objective was the coastal fortress of Narva, which is now, I think it's on the border of Estonia and Russia. And Russia had ruled it fleetingly, I think, in the 16th century. It had a very sort of classic kind of Baltic story. Originally Danish, Baltic German, but had briefly been Russian. And now it's Swedish. And Peter turns up. He arrives with 40,000 men.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Now, most of these or a lot of these are his play soldiers that he had had in the previous episodes. So the people he'd been training in his teens. But I guess the majority are serfs, conscripted Russian serfs. They're not really professional soldiers at all. They look good because he's put them in what he calls German uniforms. They wear dark green coats and they wear black tricorn hats.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So no caftans. No caftans. Absolutely no caftans and no beards. But they really just don't know what they're doing. They arrive outside Narva at the end of 1700. The siege goes very, very slowly. It's raining. They're all very miserable. And then stunning news. To their disbelief, Charles has landed in southern Estonia with 10,000 men, and he's marching on Narva. And they've got 40,000.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
But this thing, you see, when we go through all these numbers, the Russians always have more, but they're absolutely terrified of the Swedes. Because everybody says, well, you can't beat the Swedes. You could have 100,000 men and you won't beat 10,000 Swedes because they're brilliant. They're so well organized. They've got the latest muskets. They've got bayonets. They've got God.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
You know, you might as well just run away right now. They are super troopers. They are super troopers. Very good. I like to think there'll be a lot of ABBA puns in this series. By the time Charles reaches Narva, Peter himself was already gone. He's actually gone to get reinforcements from Novgorod. But this is a very bad look because it looks like he's run away. No.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, Peter the Great, he's insanely brave. He is. But you know what? I mean, this is terrible PR for Peter. The Swedes, as you said, are outnumbered four to one. But they basically absolutely wiped the floor with the Russians. The Russians lost 9,000 men killed and wounded and 20,000 men captured and all their artillery captured. The Swedes lost fewer than 700 men.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So the Swedes just win a massive victory. It's a huge humiliation for Peter. And the Swedes then struck a medal, a medallion, that showed Peter running away. And it had two biblical quotations. On one side, it said, Peter stood and warmed himself. And on the other side, it says, he went out and wept bitterly. Very good. And obviously for Peter, who's very proud, this is a big deal.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Being teased by Lutherans. Yeah, an Orthodox Tsar of Russia would not like that at all. For Charles, who's obviously 10 years younger than Peter, he's won his first big battle and he absolutely loves it. And he's been doing exactly as you would expect. He's been riding around in full view of the Russian guns. He's been taunting their gunners and snipers. He's had horses shot from under him.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He is living the dream. It's just what he's always wanted. There were descriptions of him at the time by other Swedes. They say he seemed drunk with happiness at the end of that battle. But he complained. He said, there is no pleasure in fighting with the Russians, for they will not stand like other men, but they run away at once.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The massive downside, I think this first battle gives Charles a total contempt for Peter and for the Russians. and a really, really dangerous belief in his own invincibility. He just thinks that I will never lose. I love this. This is brilliant. It's everything I've dreamed of, and I can't possibly lose. I'd like as much of it as possible, please.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And actually, one of his officers said, even at this point, a guy called Count Stenbock, He said, the king thinks now about nothing except war. He no longer troubles himself about the advice of other people, and he seems to believe that God communicates directly to him what he ought to do.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So our Catholic and Orthodox listeners may well say this is the great downside of having a Protestant military leader, because he's in direct communication with the Almighty, and this can lead you astray. Robert K. Massey, Peter's great biographer, says, in this sense, while Narva was Charles's first great victory, It was also the first step towards his doom.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
That's right. So we're about to get into the Great Northern War, a 21-year war that completely reshapes the map of Europe. And as you said, Tom, we had two episodes last week about young Peter the Great. What an extraordinary character he is, inserting bellows into people. All the carry on with the Streltsy, these kind of murderous pikemen.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
It has indeed. So we don't normally do this, but the Great Northern War is so long that we've skipped two years in the break. Yeah. So what's happened in the meantime is that Peter has not panicked after losing the Battle of Narva. He has got a top general, a commander-in-chief, who's a veteran diplomat, who's very pro-modernizing and whatnot, who is called Boris Sheremetyev. So he's the Zhukov.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He is. He is. Exactly. He is. He is the guy who is going to basically marshal Russia's enormous manpower to try to fight off this kind of supposedly invincible Swedish killing machine.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So the Russians have been trying to modernize in their army and drilling and kind of trying to conscript more people and whatnot. Meanwhile, why didn't Charles just strike into Russia right away? Now, some of his officers after the Battle of Narva said, why don't we go on now to the Kremlin? Why don't we depose Peter?
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
We could bring back Peter's sister Sophia to rule because she's still knocking around in a monastery. They can see all the downsides straight away. The weather, they don't have supplies, they've all got dysentery, the classic things that you have in wars in Eastern Europe. Charles says, no, no, no, we'll leave Peter for the time being. Actually, I want to really knock out Augustus the Strong.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah. His whole life. His whole life. You know, it really is. I don't want to go into the kind of Game of Thrones ice and fire cliche, but there is a little element of that, isn't there? Because Charles the 12th, who I guess in the English-speaking world is not as well-known as he used to be, but certainly in the 18th and 19th century, he seemed an absolutely titanic and a romantic hero.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Because it's personal there, isn't it? It's personal. Let's knock out Saxony and Poland. So actually, this is a really, really fateful decision. He leaves Peter alone because he underestimates Peter. And he says, let's concentrate on Augustus. And he thinks, God has appointed me, actually, to punish Augustus. Augustus promised him that he would never go to war with him. Then he broke his word.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Augustus has been hurling foxes around and killing badgers and stuff. And breeding an enormous number of children.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, I think so. I think he regards Augustus as faithless, sort of shiftless. False fleeting perjured. Exactly. So for various reasons, it takes a long time for this to get going. In 1702, he marches on Warsaw. He smashes Augustus' army. But, you know, Poland is a big place. And basically... He ends up chasing Augustus around Poland for what seems like months, if not years.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And while all that's happening, that's great for Peter because Peter can now work on this new army, which is conscripted from Serfs and Ukrainian Cossacks. He can get his factories to start producing thousands of the latest flintlock muskets. It teaches men how to use the latest bayonets. They melt down loads of church bells for artillery.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
By the summer of 1782, the Russians have sorted themselves out And with Charles gone, they're able to now move their troops into inland Livonia, Latvia, Estonia, and they're burning farms and villages and taking thousands of civilian prisoners.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, that's a very good point, Tom. This is really the first moment in history that you have the Russian state realizing that its strengths lie in its colossal reserves of manpower and mobilizing that. And also the terrain. And its size. Yeah, size, exactly, sheer size. Now, I've said the Russians are rampaging through Livonia.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The Cossacks are often doing a lot of the rampaging and taking lots of prisoners. And I said that deliberately because there's one prisoner in particular that becomes incredibly important. There's a town in Latvia today called Aluksna, which at the time I think was called Marienburg, kind of German name.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And there, the Russians captured, among their prisoners, was a 17-year-old girl who was probably called Marta Skavronska, or in Russian, Skavronskaya. So when they captured her, she was the girlfriend or mistress of a Swedish dragoon. And before that, she'd been a servant girl for the local priest.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He is the perfect antagonist for Peter. He similarly enjoys a prank when he's a young man, but then he becomes this very icy, sort of obsessive, driven, and brilliant military commander. And the clash between these two men, their rivalry, is going to change the destinies not just of Russia and Sweden, but of Poland, of Ukraine, of huge swathes of Northern and Eastern Europe.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And before that, she had probably been born into a Catholic peasant family in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. So that's the sort of eastern half of this great Polish Commonwealth. Marta Skowronska can't read, she can't write, but she clearly has some kind of je ne sais quoi. Because Sheremitev, the commander, takes her on at some point as a servant girl.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And then in 1703, she's taken up by another guy called Alexander Menshikov. Now, we haven't mentioned Menshikov really yet, but he has a massive part to play in Peter's life. He had possibly been a stable boy at the royal estate. We don't really know. We definitely know that he had served in all those sort of war games that Peter liked to do.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And he had quickly become Peter's great favorite and his closest friend. He is the sort of Charles Brandon, figure of Peter's court.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
France Lefort. Exactly. He has become his great drinking partner, his buddy, his carousing partner and he's very greedy and ambitious Menshikov. He becomes an important commander for Peter but he's kind of always festooning himself with kind of, he loves bling, he loves titles, all of that. A bit kind of goering. Yeah, I suppose. But only not as fat. Yes, and not as evil, I think it's fair to say.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
But acquisitive. Yeah, very acquisitive. Anyway, Martha becomes his maidservant and probably his mistress. And while she is living with Menshikov, she converted to Orthodoxy and she took the name Ekaterina Catherine. And then he took her to Moscow and she met Peter. And Peter says, oh, what a tremendous woman, young girl. I'd like her as my mistress. and takes her up as his mistress.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
What it was about Catherine that appealed to Peter is, I guess, slightly unclear. His biographer, Robert K. Massey, calls her a sturdy, healthy, appealing girl in the full bloom of youth.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
A sturdy, handsome girl.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
A buxom wench. There's a lot of that. I think he does use the word buxom quite a lot. He does. So she's not like tremendously glamorous or good looking, but there's something about her. Her sort of, dare I say, her kind of rustic simplicity. I don't know. Well, doesn't he call her mother? Yes.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Possibly. She's many years his junior, but she does kind of mother him. They become very close very quickly. She bears two sons, Peter and Paul, in 1704 and 1705. They both die in infancy. And then in 1707, an extraordinary thing. Peter and Marta, or Catherine as she now calls herself, are married in secret. They're married privately. And when you think that she is not even Russian...
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
She's an illiterate Lithuanian peasant girl who was subsequently converted to Orthodoxy. And you think about all those bridal shows that they would have when he was growing up. I mean, this is a massive, massive departure from convention. It must have been unbelievably shocking. But maybe again, for Peter, that's part of the fun of it. I think that is probably part of the fun of it.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Again, it's breaking a taboo. Actually, the thing is, everybody really liked her. So people would say, she's so jolly. She's very generous. She loves a drink. She loves a joke. She would go on campaign. So very unlike Charles XII. Oh, he would have hated her. I mean, they would not have got on at all.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And whenever Peter has one of his fits or his tantrums or his rants, she will kind of calm him down, stroke his head and, you know, all this sort of thing. Because he's presumably still having his twitching. He's twitching all the time. And actually the twitching becomes very bad when he's under pressure in the war because the war's going badly for him for a long time.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So he's twitching like, I mean, he's twitching like anything. So you need someone to just kind of rub and calm him down. Exactly. Like a startled horse. Exactly. So that's one great addition to Peter's life. And the second is not a person, but it's a place. And this is massive, isn't it? It's huge. Historically, I mean, it couldn't be bigger.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
With Charles off in Poland, the Russian army were able to rampage a bit around Ingria, this area. The Russians are rampaging around Ingria. Yeah, I love it. That is what this podcast is all about. So in 1702, they capture a Swedish fortress called Nöteborg, which is on Lake Ladoga. So people who listen to a Harold Hardrada series will remember Harold Hardrada passing this way centuries earlier.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
You do love a Northern War, don't you? I love a Northern War. I love a Northeastern War. I can't get enough of this. I guess if you spent so much of your professional career trapped in Harold Wilson's mind... In 1973 or something. Bear killing in the frozen wastes of the North. Yeah, could not be a more refreshing change.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
In 1703, they take a second Swedish village, which is called Nianskans, which is just inland from the Baltic. And this now gives Peter... The whole province of Ingria, which was one of his key war aims, he gives them access to the Baltic and it gives them the entire course of the River Neva.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
When he gets this, he thinks to himself, well, my goal, my real goal was to capture Riga, which would be the ideal Baltic port. But the Swedes still have it. So now I'm just, since I've got the River Neva and access to the sea, I might as well just build my own version of Riga, a new port. It's an extraordinary thing to do because, of course, this land might only be briefly occupied.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, the Swedes might try to get it back. The war is still going and the surroundings are incredibly desolate. Well, doesn't Neva in Finnish literally mean swamp? Yeah, it's swampland. It's swampland. It's full of mosquitoes. It's incredibly boggy and miserable. The weather is terrible. It's windy. It's kind of foggy. It often gets frozen. He doesn't care.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
On the 16th of May, 1703, he says to his sort of sappers and workmen, get cracking on a fortress. We'll name it after St. Peter and St. Paul. And he stays nearby because he loves a lathe, doesn't he? He loves a bit of carpentry. So he stays in a log cabin, which you can still see today, by the way, nearby.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, exactly. Well, as we'll see, he never loses it. So by the autumn of 1703, the first merchant ships are arriving from England and Holland. Peter says, if you keep coming, I'll give you massive tariff reductions. He's the very opposite, isn't he, of that chap in Washington, D.C. Because whereas President Trump likes a tariff, Peter the Great does not like a tariff.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So by 1704, he's building a shipyard. And over time, he clearly begins to expand his ambitions. And he thinks, well, rather than just a trading port, why don't we build a real city that will actually end up eclipsing Riga? And so year after year, he's issuing these edicts saying, I want carpenters. I want masons. I want laborers. Bring them north to work on this new city.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
We're going to build houses. We're going to build churches. We're even going to build palaces. And just to be clear about this, they are working in horrendous conditions and tens of thousands of them die.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
sunk into the bog exactly and died of hypothermia of dysentery of scurvy they died of malaria even because of the mosquitoes everybody says this is literally the worst place on earth this is a terrible terrible place and but peter is unrelenting and he even says to his sisters to his courtiers to the nobility of moscow come and live in my new city because he hates moscow he does hate moscow
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And one of his sisters said, this place is absolutely, unbelievably dreadful. And I quote, it will not endure after our time, may it remain a desert. But of course it does endure, Tom, because the name of this city, St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg, exactly.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Absolutely. And his invasion of Russia... is arguably the bizarrest of them all because he just ends up wandering hundreds of miles in the wrong direction. He ends up in the Ottoman Empire. He does indeed. Let's remind ourselves where we ended last week. We were in August 1700. Peter has been home, got home from his great embassy, his travels to England and the Dutch Republic and so on.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So I think there are two reasons. One, obviously, in the Baltic, generally, places had German names. But also, is it not perhaps Peter's... Window on the West. Window on the West, yeah. His modernising ambitions. The fact that it is always from the beginning. It's looking westwards, not eastwards, I think. Because it's conceived as the equivalent of those great cities...
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
You know, along the Baltic, those kind of Hanseatic style cities of Riga and Tallinn and whatnot, all of which at the time had German names. What's happening in the rest of Russia? It's fair to say that Peter's hand lies very heavy because to pay for all this and to pay for his war in his new city is levying all kinds of new taxes. There's a tax on...
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
on births, on funerals, on wheat, on beds, on hats. There's even a tax on moustaches, as we knew there was already a tax on beards. But he's got a moustache, Peter. Yeah. Is he taxing himself? I would doubt very strongly that the Tsar would pay tax. He's also conscripting absolutely unbelievable numbers of men.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So 300,000 men into the army, 30,000 men to build fortifications at Azov down in the south, Hundreds of thousands brought to work in St. Petersburg. There's a lot of discontent. So he has a new secret police under his mate Fedor Romodanovsky to publish, and I quote, treason by word or deed. By word. By word. That's slightly ominous. So that's the spoken word as well as the written word.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yes, exactly. Exactly. And there are rebellions and the rebellions tend to follow a set pattern that people will say Peter is too authoritarian. He is unorthodox. He is too pro-German, all of this.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah. Well, I mean, you can be both. He can in many ways. I mean, I think we'll get into this maybe in our final episode. How much is he a progenitor of the enlightened despotism that we associate with the later 18th century that arguably reaches its culmination in Napoleon? So somebody who is simultaneously authoritarian and reforming.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And he's set up new schools, newspapers, printers and so on. In some ways you would say, well, that will encourage freedom of thought and freedom of speech and so on. So a kindly man. But robust, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, so there were these rebellions. So it's entertaining to read the justification.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So in Astrakhan, 1705, the rebels say, we're standing up, and I quote, for the Christian faith and against shaving and German dress and tobacco, and because we and our wives and children were not admitted into God's church in the old Russian dress. So these things that we've talked about as other trivialities, beards and clothing and so on, they are very important to people.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He has signed a peace treaty with the Ottomans. News of that treaty reached Moscow on the 18th of August and then on the 19th, the Kremlin issued a proclamation. The great Tsar has directed that for the many wrongs of the Swedish king, and especially because of the Tsar's journey through Riga, you may remember that his gap year in Riga didn't start well.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, they symbolize something deeper, which is Russia's, what they see as Russia's distinctiveness. And its place is the Third Rome, as they're carrying the candle of the true faith. A rebellion by Cossacks in 1707 on the River Dorne. provoked because of rumors that he was going to outlaw beards completely.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
We cannot be silent on the account of the evil deeds of wicked men and princes and profit makers and Germans. We cannot forgive them for diverting us from the true Christian faith with their signs and cunning tricks.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I think so, and I think there are always people, there have always been people in Russia, probably not so much today, but for a long time there were people in Russia who thought... This was the wrong turn. You know, this is a symbol of where we went wrong, where we lost our Slavic traditions and our kind of orthodox roots.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So that's Peter. But what's happened to Charles? What's Charles been up to? So we left Charles heading into Poland to deal with Augustus the Strong, winning loads of battles against Augustus. He'd captured Krakow, the kind of ancient royal capital of Poland. But Augustus keeps kind of melting away. And as time goes on, there are sort of worrying reports coming in from the Baltic.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So Charles hears that Peter has got his act back together, that he has captured these towns, that he's founded St. Petersburg, that he does end up capturing Narva in the long run.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
he gets reports from sweden charles people are hungry they're tired they've lost the grain supply from livonia they're becoming exhausted of the war but charles just will not stop i mean he's won far more battles than he's lost and you know he's seen off any this coalition effectively but he will not come to terms he says to his courtiers
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Augustus broke his word to me and I have to punish him even if I should remain here that's in Poland for 50 years I will not leave this country until Augustus is dethroned and eventually in 1704 he bullies the Polish sort of parliament the same into deposing Augustus he gets them to meet outside Warsaw he rings the field with Swedish musketeers and
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They vote Augustus out, because remember, in Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, it's an elective monarchy. And they install a Swedish puppet who's called Stanisław Leszczynski. So impressed. You enjoyed that.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah. That's all I'll say. Love it. I wasn't practicing all weekend, honestly.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Now, Augustus, he doesn't give up. I mean, he's a great character, really, with his fox tossing and his... Bending horseshoes. Yeah, 6,000 children. He escapes into Hungary in disguise. He rendezvous with the Russians in what's now Belarus. He slips past Charles and gets back into Poland, presumably hoping to head back towards Saxony, because, of course, he's still king of Saxony.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So by 1706, I mean, this really is turning into like a game of a mad game of risk that's got completely out of hand. Yeah. Off to invade Kamchatka. Yeah. Charles thinks, well, I'm just going to invade Saxony as well now. So he invades Saxony. And his logic here is this is Augustus's heartland, Saxony. This is the only way to knock him definitively out of the war. And again, it goes brilliantly.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He considered that Swedes had been very inhospitable.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The Saxons are absolutely knackered, too. The people of Saxony, when they hear the Swedes are coming, remember the Thirty Years' War. And they're just like, oh, no, this is the worst thing that could possibly happen. So within weeks, Charles and the Swedes have occupied Leipzig and Dresden. You wonder why he didn't do it before, to be honest. Yeah, faffing around in Poland.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Going into woods and bogs and things. I suppose. But I mean, it is a mad thing, isn't it? The Swedes occupying Leipzig and Dresden. I mean, we're sort of mentioning that as though it's nothing. But they're hundreds of miles away from Sweden at this point.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They love it. In Wittenberg. The transformation of the Swedish psyche after this. I mean, I guess it's because it's so traumatic what happens. So Saxony is now prostrate before him. And after a lot of military and diplomatic faffing around, which you don't need to go into, Augustus finally surrenders. He abdicates as king of Poland formally, and he breaks his alliance with Russia.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah. He suffered obstacles and unpleasantness at the hands of the people of Riga, and so his soldiers shall march in war on the Swedish towns. And they say at the beginning they have two war aims – provinces of Ingria and Karelia. So that's the area around what is now St. Petersburg and the area, the sort of the Finnish Russian borderlands.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And what is worse, I mean, Augustus is very faithless. Because what is worse, one of the conditions for this surrender is he has to hand over this guy, Johann Reinhold von Patkel,
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Baltic Baron who'd put this whole thing together. And that's Charles insisting on that, is it? Charles insists on that. He's very vengeful. After promising that he wouldn't, Augustus has him locked up without food and water for five days. I guess a lot of people have a stereotype that the Russians are unbelievably ruthless. But actually, in this, Peter is quite sentimental.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He says, I don't think you should give this guy Pat Cullover. I mean, that's really bad form.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, I'm not having this kind of... But in this respect, he's kindly. He's a kindly man. He's not. But in this respect, Peter says, I don't think we should hand Pat Cole over. I think that's really bad. And Augustus specifically promises, I'll never do that. And then literally the next thing he does is to hand him over. So it's not just the Russians who love a bit of torture.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The Swedes had Pat Cole broken on the wheel by an executioner with a sledgehammer who hit him 15 times with the sledgehammer to break all his limbs.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And Pat Cole was screaming and shouting, take off my head, take off my head, because he wanted them to put him out of his agony. But then the executioner was not very good with the axe. He was better with the sledgehammer. He was a sledgehammer man, really. And it took him four goes with a country axe before Pat Cole's head was off.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, no, don't. So at this point, we're entering 1707. And let's be honest, everything has gone brilliantly, really, for Charles. I know there's St. Petersburg. He's lost that. But apart from that, Danes are knocked out. Poland and Saxony are basically his puppets. His men adore him. They think he's invincible. All across Europe, Charles XII is seen as the celebrity, the superstar of the age.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And tales of his adventures, rather like with Alexander the Great or Hannibal or whoever, spread all over Europe. He doesn't wear armor. He won't wear a hat. People are amazed by this. He won't wear a hat for his own campaign. He doesn't wear warm clothes when it's snowing. He dines on bread and water. He sleeps on bed boards with his men.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He reads every night from the Bible and he makes his men kneel to pray. The army, while they're marching, they have to all kneel and pray. In the snow. Yeah, twice a day. All of this kind of thing. He's like Oliver Cromwell on steroids, basically. From all over Europe.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
people send ambassadors to basically get him on side so louis xiv sends an ambassador and says look you know why don't we the french and the swedes team up we'll divide germany between us divide europe between us wouldn't this be brilliant just to be clear i mean france is has 20 million people yeah sweden has 1.5 yeah whatever it is exactly and they're treating as equals exactly
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And then the other great man of the age, the Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill, the great hero of English arms, he went personally to Charles's headquarters in a place called Oldtrenstedt in Saxony with a letter from Queen Anne to basically say, please don't get into bed with the French. Yeah. Marlborough thinks Charles XII is amazing.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And Dominic, the key thing about that is that they, about the Baltic Sea.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, Marlborough, who we think of as the great commander of the age, he can't get enough of Charles XII. But Charles XII thinks Marlborough is overdressed, doesn't he? He does. A bit foppish. His language is flowery. Really? His language is too flowery. God. But the Swedes still say that about everybody, don't they?
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, you wouldn't have Charles XII building himself an enormous palace like Blenheim, would you? No, you wouldn't. You absolutely would not. So I think even at this point, 1707, even Peter...
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
thinks you know i'll probably never beat this guy but this guy really is alexander the great there's no point in fighting on and actually peter starts looking around for someone to mediate he went to the french first and he said if you will sort out a peace deal for me i'll actually help you against the english what
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
But get this. Then he sends his ambassador to go and see the Duke of Marlborough. And he says, look, if you can get Queen Anne to mediate with the Swedes, I will give you Marlborough. You can have your pick of the principalities of Kiev, Vladimir, and Siberia. I'll give you 50,000 ducats a year. I'll give you the highest Russian honor, the Order of St.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Andrew, and I quote, a ruby as large as any in Europe.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So the Duke of Marlborough could be the overlord of Kiev.
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564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I mean, that would be a diplomatic solution, wouldn't it? That would be amazing. I wonder if anyone thought of that. It would have been an amazing thing if it had happened. But it doesn't happen because they will never reach a truce because Peter will not give up St. Petersburg. He's invested so much in it, not just emotionally. And Charles will never concede St. Petersburg.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And the claim there is, Peter says, these provinces have always historically belonged to Russia and we are just reclaiming what is rightfully ours. And actually, Vladimir Putin invoked this very proclamation a few months after launching his war in Ukraine. He said, I'm doing exactly what Peter the Great did in 1700. I'm reclaiming what was taken from us and what is rightfully ours. Now...
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
But also, Charles doesn't want peace. Charles just thinks, I have the best army in Europe. I never lose. Why would I give up anything in the Baltic? Why would I make the slightest concession? Because when I turn finally to deal with the Russians, I will wipe the floor with them.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And so as he's sitting there in Saxony, Charles, in the summer of 1707, he has a much better idea than a deal with the Duke of Marlborough. His idea is, I'll lead my invincible army east through Poland, into Russia, into Moscow itself, and I'll sit in the Kremlin and I will dictate the terms myself.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
herring around poland and finding it impossible to pin down his enemy there and also why doesn't he just march on st petersburg because i think he thinks that if he takes st petersburg so what you know peter will still be he wants to crush peter he wants to decapitate the russian state he wants a war of destruction total war total war i think exactly i think he's at this point slightly believing his own publicity he wants a campaign like an alexander style he wants to go into persepolis
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
What he does have is the example of the Poles who occupied Moscow. Of course. A hundred years earlier. So it's been done. At this point, it is totally doable. It's been done. Now, there are people who say, really? So his Polish puppet, there's been an opportunity to show off again. His name, of course, Tom, is Stanislaw Leszczynski. His Polish puppet says, really? The Kremlin, are you sure?
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And Charles says explicitly, listen, you can't live next door to this unjust czar who begins a war without any good cause. The power of Muscovy must be broken and destroyed. In other words, kill the snake. And he draws up this plan.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He will march with majority of the Swedish force through Poland, through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and he will be drawing off Russian troops from the Baltic that way. That will allow a second Swedish advance to come south from Riga with supplies from Sweden. These two armies will meet in Western Russia before the final advance on Moscow.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So all summer he makes his preparations, recruits tens of thousands of extra volunteers from the Protestants of Saxony and Silesia. He has Swedish reinforcements brought to Poland. They have the latest swords. They have blue and yellow Swedish colored uniforms. They even have new Bibles and hymn books. Because, of course, there's a religious dimension to this. Very new model army, isn't it?
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Very new model army. The spirit could not be higher. And so on the evening of the 26th of August, 1707, there's a big prayer service, a final prayer service for Charles's troops. And the next morning, he rides out of Altenstadt, his Saxon headquarters, at the head of his army. He's commanding the largest army ever commanded by a Swedish king.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
It is the most lethal military machine in Europe, victory after victory, and they are bound for Moscow and what will surely be a triumph. that will resound down the ages.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
As this might suggest, the Swedes and the Russians are old enemies. So the Swedes have been fighting the cities of Novgorod and Moscow, the ancestors of Peter's realm, since at least the 13th century. And in recent years, the Swedes have very much had the upper hand. So in what was called the time of troubles in the early 1600s, They had bitten off a chunk of northern Russia.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And for the whole of the 17th century, the Swedes have controlled Finland. They've controlled the Baltic coast of Estonia and Latvia and these two provinces, Ingria and Karelia. And that, as you say, Tom, basically means that Russia is, it sounds weird to say it, it's effectively landlocked because it only has one port, Archangel. And that port is frozen for half the year.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So that's the only way that the trade to Holland and England, the two countries that Peter really cares about, can be carried on. So let's talk a little bit about Sweden. You know I'm a great Scandifile. I like the joylessness of the Swedes. I like the grim, ruthless, I like that aspect of their personality. The Shard of Ice. The Shard of Ice, exactly.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So their empire, I mean, it sounds mad now to a lot of people, no doubt, to talk about the Swedish Empire. But their empire is an amazing institution because Sweden is such a small country. You've got one and a half million people. So what's Russia about this point? Eight million or something? The Swedes, they have this very agricultural population, farmers.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They're spread across the vastness of the Swedish landscape. I mean, even today, Sweden is not densely populated at all. They have some natural resources. They have silver and copper and iron. And those they export through Stockholm, which in the 17th century becomes one of the great ports of Northern Europe. So for anyone who's been to Stockholm, to the old town. Gamla Stan. Gamla Stan.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
It's beautiful. It's amazing, isn't it? With the sort of orange buildings and the sort of copper roofs and the churches and all that. And so this is basically a 17th century creation. They get very rich from exporting all these things. And they pour all that money into these military adventures. Wow.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So most famously, Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years' War, which is a sort of forerunner, I think, of the Great Northern War in that when you look at the map, you're kind of, what are the Swedes doing in Bavaria or wherever they are? It's kind of just roaming madly like they're basically playing a video game or something.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They are marauding all over Europe. They're incredibly fearsome. I mean, if the Swedes turn up, if you're living in a sort of small German town and the Swedish army appears on the hill, you're like, oh no, because they always behave with unbelievable brutality and sort of no quarter and all that kind of thing. Anyway, by 1700, they control not just the Baltic, they control much of Norway.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They control parts of northern Germany as well. So Bremen, Wismar, Western Pomerania, these are all effectively Swedish possessions. And so the Baltic effectively is a Swedish lake. It is, exactly. And what lies behind all this is what's probably at the time the world's most advanced, most efficient killing machine, the Swedish army.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So the 17th century, early 18th century, the age of the military revolution, as it's called, firearms, forts, huge armies, you know, far, far bigger than anything at the dawn of the 17th century. And Gustavus Adolphus is the guy who's really the kind of, he's the great military innovator. He is one of the great progenitors of this. And what backs it up? You need an infrastructure system.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
of organisation, of training, of drilling and finance, an estate and a bureaucracy. So in other words, the military revolution rewards countries with very well-organised tax-raising bureaucracies. So Sweden and then England later on, of course.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, modern, I think. It's also a really modern military machine. So the Swedes are pioneers of, so your brother's podcast would enjoy this, combined arms operations. So infantry, cavalry, and artillery working really closely together. And you can only do that if they're perfectly drilled, very well organized. Everybody knows their place in the plan.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The Swedes also, I think, have a kind of, there's a religious dimension. Well, that's why they're in the Thirty Years' War. That's why they're in the Thirty Years' War, exactly. So they're Lutherans. Some historians say it gives them a sense, not just a mission, but a kind of fatalism.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Charles XII, who we'll come to, famously said, I shall fall by no other bullet than that which is destined for me. And when that comes, no prudence will help me. In other words, there's no point in me trying to protect To save myself or to worry about the risks, God has already decided and that bullet has been prepared somewhere and there's no point in me even stressing about it.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
Yeah, I think absolutely. And nobody incarnates it better than Charles XII. So he was 10 years younger than Peter the Great. He was born in 1682. His father, Charles XI, was very pious. and had trained him from birth, effectively, for war. So when he's four years old, he's riding behind his father at military reviews.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
At six years old, he's taken away from his mother and the ladies of the court, and he's given to military and male tutors. At seven, he shoots his first fox.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
The kings of Northern Europe are just terrible towards foxes. Yeah, Augustus the Strong, the fox tosser from the last episode. He'll be reappearing in the next couple of episodes. So when he was eight, Charles killed his first deer. When he was 10, he killed a wolf. And when he was 11, he killed his first bear. He loves killing bears.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He's a very terse, serious, stoical man, a young man. He's obsessed with honor. He's obsessed with his own integrity. He's very bright. He reads Latin. He reads Moliere and Racine in the original. Every morning, he spends an hour discussing the Bible with a bishop.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And he carries a biography of Alexander the Great with him wherever he goes, which is rather like, didn't Alexander the Great have a special box? Then he traveled with the Iliad. So this is effectively, you know, he models himself in Alexander. And you can actually see his mad campaigns do have that sort of Alexandrian spirit to them, don't they?
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So when he's 15, Charles, he succeeds the throne because his father dies young. And originally they say, well, they'll have a regency council because he's so young. Within months, he scraps that and says, no, I want to run everything myself.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And a sign of his character is that when he rides to his coronation, he says, I will not be crowned king at my coronation because I consider myself king already. So no one else will crown me. And he actually rides to the service with the crown already on his head, which a lot of people find quite shocking. But it's a sign of his sort of willfulness.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
You know, he will shape history to his designs rather than allow history to kind of happen to him, as it were.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And I think that sense of being chosen by God also fuels his extraordinary courage. That point about, you know, the bullet has already been chosen that will kill me. Because as a teenage king, you know, he ignores all the advisors who say, who's your heir? You need to kind of take care of yourself, all of this kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
He will get up early and he will go off riding through the snow with a page kind of leaping over walls. He loves to sledge, to have kind of sledge races. He loves hunting bears armed only with a wooden pitchfork.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So people who worry, you know, that sort of teenage boys are spending too much time in their basements playing on video games and not getting it. I mean, they would learn. This is the model of somebody who gets out, enjoys the great outdoors, tests himself, finds an outlet for his kind of burgeoning masculinity.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
There's a lot of stuff like that. He loves, like Peter the Great, he loves war games and he'll have war games at sea with kind of water cannons instead of real cannons. And at one point he sees one of his friends swimming and he says, and he can't swim. And he says, that looks like it's quite easy, is it? And says, yeah, it's very easy.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
And he jumps into the Baltic and then almost drowns and has to be dragged out. But that's exactly his vibe. I mean, just jumping into the Baltic on its own is mad. Now, the interesting thing, some historians have subsequently said they think he was gay because he never married and he never had any, as far as we can tell, any relationship of any kind.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
I think that's probably wrong because there's no evidence that he was gay. Because he said again and again, I am married to the army. I will not settle down until I've wiped the floor with the rest of Europe. There was a moment when it looked like he might have an interesting career as a prankster on the level of Peter the Great.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
So in 1698, his cousin, the Duke of Holstein, Gotthorp, came to Stockholm to marry Charles's sister. And they got up to all kinds of amusing japes. They set wild hares loose in the Swedish parliament and chased them through the parliament. They used the palace windows for pistol practice. They threw cherries at Charles's ministers.
The Rest Is History
564. The Great Northern War: The Battle of the Baltic (Part 1)
They rode through the streets knocking people's hats off and stealing their wigs. And they also, the best bit, which I think is apocryphal, to be fair, is they had a competition to see who could behead the most... The most sheep in a specific stretch of time.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. This episode is brought to you by Vanguard. History's greatest minds knew when to let experts handle the details.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
But I guess they think the Norwegians and the Danes have been fighting each other in the war, which we described last week as one of the most boring wars in history. So they probably think, well, they're too busy worrying about each other to be interested in England.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Well, they're probably even less keen on a Norman king because a Scandinavian king would be at least a vaguely known quantity, whereas the Normans represent something unsettling and new, right?
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Alfred the Great, right. So there are a few people hanging around from that family, aren't there? Because although Edward the Confessor famously had no children, he does have a nephew. So Edmund Ironside, so people may remember him from the series we did before Harold Hardrada. on the kind of last days of Anglo-Saxon England, Edmund Ironside had a son called Edward who'd gone off to Hungary.
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554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
And that person, Tom, is obviously Harold Godwinson, the Earl of Wessex. But just before Harold Godwinson. So they know that they're going to face an invasion, right? Which means that they must take William's claim very, very seriously. Or at least know that William takes it incredibly seriously. So right at this point, they know if we don't choose William, he is definitely going to invade.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Kind of confusing for him, but also convenient they're both of the same name. Kind of. Yeah. It helps with Valentine's Day, I guess.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
I think this reflects very well on Harold. He's like, yeah, whatever, who cares? He takes the same attitude towards the bones of saints that I would, Tom. I think it's fair to say. So brilliant, though not brilliant in another way, because as you say, Harold must know, as everybody else knows, that once he accepts the crown, it makes invasion as close to inevitable as you're going to get.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So presumably that's why they're in a great rush. They want to get this done and dusted and they get on with their military preparations.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Right. And this is Harold's brother, Tostig. So tell us a little bit about Tostig.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So what does all this mean for England? Because it means not only is there the looming threat of William, there is the possible threat – at this point seems quite unlikely – of an attack from Scandinavia, but there's also Tostig hanging around. So there must be a massive sense of uncertainty, anxiety, dare I say dread, as the months pass.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Oh my word, what a terrifying moment. So that's Halley's Comet, isn't it? Halley's Comet has appeared. Everybody knows what that means. Bloodshed is coming. And do you know what? We might have a little bit of it after the break. See you then.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Now, Tom, as we know, history is full of spectacularly bad financial decisions. The South Sea bubble, tulip mania. Do I need to go on?
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Head to investengine.com slash history or use the promo code history for a welcome bonus of up to £100. For a limited time, they're also offering a further bonus of up to £4,000 if you transfer your ISA or invest in their pension account.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So that was the audiobook of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, and that was read by none other than Sir Winston Churchill, Tom, the top Briton of all time. And that book, interestingly, was published in 1956. But I read from a very reputable historian, that's you, that Churchill wrote those words, or I quote, reportedly wrote those words.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are in the weeks after Easter 1066. England has just been visited by Halley's Comet. So Halley's Comet was named after the astronomer Edward Halley, who in 1705 calculated that this comet reappeared about every 75 years. However, that's not how people view it in 1066, is it, Tom? Because they say, Comet 1066.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Yeah, I mean, he's got one terrible foreign menace on his mind by the Normans and another looming just on the horizon. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
He's also about the natural metier of a Frenchman. So even with all this, even with all his carts of dung and his hard-faced greedy Frenchmen and whatnot, It's still a big, it's still a challenge, isn't it? He's got to basically get them across the channel. He's got to land. He's got to win battles. He's got to get to London, all of that stuff.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
She, like me, has forgotten about the Welsh. Anyway, obviously this is now Tom Holland bingo. Yeah, right. Because not only is there military technology that puts the Normans ahead, but dare I say there's also spiritual technology or at least a sort of ideological technology.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Defeating foreign enemies, smiting them. Smiting Germany, the French, or sometimes the Spanish. Or the Germans. Yeah. A whole range of people getting defeated.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
The more I hear about this Hildebrand, the less I like him. He's a man who plunges... England into 500 dark years only reversed in the 1530s. I think it's fair to say, Tom.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
He's going to be killing an anointed king, more Tom Holland bingo. And killing an anointed king is a big deal. But not maybe if this king is steeped in sin. Is that basically the claim?
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
You could burst on your deathbed. That could happen to you. And let's see if that happens to William.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
He's done it. He's got exams on it next week on 1066. I mean, all the time we're talking about Harold Hardrada and William and Harold and all that stuff.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Oh, my word. Harold Hardrada is back. Unbelievable scenes. What a bombshell. Do you know, I'm so excited that if I was a member of the Rest Is History Club, I'd listen to the next episode right away to see what happens when Harold Hardrada lands. What's Harold Gobinson going to do? Well, I know. Amazing stuff. Heart-stopping drama.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
And if I wasn't a member of the Restless History Club, I would head immediately to therestlesshistory.com because I would be agog with excitement to find out what happens next in this extraordinary epic story of 1066. So, Tom, that was so exciting. I just can't wait for the next episode. And on that bombshell, yeah, goodbye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
It speaks to our extraordinary self-confidence and self-assurance as a people that we enjoy this story so much.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Well, it was like, I mean, Game of Thrones, right? Whereas armies from different continents are suddenly all fighting for the same, the Iron Throne. I mean, this is clearly one of the inspirations for that. Rival warlords competing with their vast armies that represent different civilizations for one prize, and only one is going to win.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So just to remind people, we talked about the Godwins and we talked about Edward the Confessor's reign before we got into Harold Hardrada. So you had Godwin. He was a great collaborator with Cnut, wasn't he? Basically a self-made man who had risen as Cnut's, not exactly his right hand, but one of his hands. Subtle, ruthless, plausible. That's like me, Tom. Then you had the Godwinsons.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So if you've been putting off sorting out your ISA, or if you are new to investing, Vanguard's managed ISA makes it simple. You know, life is busy and figuring out investments can be really overwhelming. But with Vanguard, you don't have to do it alone. They will help you work out your risk appetite. They'll match you to an investment plan that is right for you. And then...
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554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So Harold, he's Earl of Wessex. He's succeeded his father.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Right, let me just stop you there. So the Anglo-Saxon monarchy does not proceed on the automatic assumption that, That the next person in the, you know, as it would now, the next person in the family tree automatically, unquestionably gets the crown. There is a degree, there is maybe an expectation that they'll be seriously considered, but there is a degree of flexibility in the arrangements.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So now we have this kind of conclave-style scenario where the different... earls, bishops and whatnot are gathered in Westminster, they have to decide and they have to do it obviously pretty quickly because nobody likes nature abhors a vacuum. So the Godwinsons are obviously the key players, Harold, Goethe and Leofwine. They've never been unchallenged, have they?
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Because there's always been a counterbalance, which is this Mercian dynasty that goes back all the way to, what was his name? Leofric.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
Yeah. And they've been serious players all through this period, the Leofric people.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So this is the balance of forces. These people assemble on the 6th of January, and as they survey the scene... They effectively have three main candidates, I would say, for the throne of England. Well, possibly four. Possibly four. Let's say three and a half. Okay. So they've lived in the shadow of a conquest already, which is the conquest of Canute in 1016. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
So from the moment they assemble, they must be thinking, well, we don't want that to happen again.
The Rest Is History
554. 1066: The Shadows of War (Part 1)
And there is a slight possibility that could happen again, isn't there? Because they know that there is a very powerful contender across the North Sea in Norway. And that person is Harald Hardrada. And he does have a little bit of a claim, doesn't he?
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's like Claudius only. Yeah, slightly more so. Anyway, their mother, Maria Miloslavskaya, had died and Alexis had to choose another bride. And the rules are she has to be Orthodox. So she basically has to be Russian. And they would always have a kind of bridal show of candidates.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So these women would be from the noble families, the boyar families, would be brought to the court and they'd have to prove their virginity.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He has. It's been a real kind of coup de foudre. It hasn't. Well, so basically it's very Henry VIII. His chief minister, who's a guy called Artemon Matveyev, has pushed forward his ward, who is called Natalia Naryshkina. Now, she's supposedly very beautiful, very dark, very sort of demure. And Alexis took a massive shine to her. She's Peter the Great's mother. So they get married.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And obviously, you know, this is brilliant news for the chief minister, who's Matt Vaev, who is a really interesting character.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
No, he's not called Matt Veyer. His name is Artamon Matt Veyer. Exactly. He's interesting because he really anticipates Peter because he is a meritocrat and a modernizer. He's the son of a diplomat. He collects books. He has his own laboratory and his own private theater. He's really interested in kind of Western innovations. And what is more, he is married to somebody from our own island.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So his wife is called Mary Hamilton.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Exactly. And actually, so that story about the Chief Minister Matveyev being married to this woman, Tells a wider story. So during the 17th century, merchants and diplomats have been arriving in Russia in ever greater numbers. And Alexis had established a segregated quarter outside Moscow, which comes to be known as the German suburb.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yes, exactly. And they say all these Germans, whether they be Dutch, Scottish, English or whatever, or indeed German, they have to go and live there. There's about 3,000 people there, and there they're allowed to keep up. I guess it's a bit like living in one of those compounds in the Middle East, you know, in Saudi Arabia or something. There they can put on plays.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They can smoke tobacco, which is disapproved of in Russia. They can mix with women, again, which is the mixing of the sexes is disapproved of in Russia. And we know that their influence is spreading outside, that people are copying them, because when Peter was three years old, Alexis had to give a rollicking to his courtiers and said to them, you know, stop adopting German customs.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Stop cutting your hair and wearing hats of foreign design. So the Russians take all this stuff, which seems so comical, they take it incredibly seriously. If you turned up smoking and wearing a foreign hat... You would be in enormous trouble with the Tsar.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah, that's right. I mean, literally. Yes. Or has he been clean-shaven? Yeah, even worse. Yeah, that would be regarded as very poor behavior. Now, there are hints that Peter's mother, Natalia, also likes this fascination with Western habits. She's probably got this from Matveyev because she's been spending so much time in his house.
The Rest Is History
562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So she clearly doesn't really like the atmosphere of the Kremlin, which is all bells, incense, marbles. beards, you know, sort of dark corridors. So when Peter's a little boy, he and his mother spend most of their time outside the city. And we only have a couple of kind of glimpses of him. There's a story about him riding with some dwarfs on a coach.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I mean, there are a lot of dwarfs in this story. But then the first of many bombshells in this story. His father catches a chill and dies at the age of 47 in 1676. So that's what was Peter. He's about three and a half, something like that. And he is succeeded by...
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're older of Peter's two half-brothers, so this bloke Fedor, who's now 14, and he is so sickly that he had to be carried to his own coronation. So that's actually really bad news, you would think, for Natalia and for Peter, because the old family, the previous wife's family, are now in the driving seat, the Miloslavskys.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And running through this story is a sort of rivalry between these two clans, the Miloslavskys, who were the first wife's family, and Natalia's family, who were the Naryshkins. And Matt. So Matt Vaev, the chief minister, he is stripped of all his property. He's arrested and he's sent to an obscure town in the Arctic Circle. Oh, God. So that's bad news for him.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So now Peter disappears from sight inside the Kremlin. You know, it's not that bad. Fedor is actually his godfather and is actually quite nice to him and makes sure he's educated and all this sort of thing.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
No, no, no, no, no. On his kind of rivals? No, not at all.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I think the sort of, so some of these people you think, oh, they must be the most awful butchers and kind of callous, cruel. This is not the case at all. So Fedor is quite nice to Peter. And he's a little bit of a reformer, Fedor. But he dies young as well. So he rules for six years, and then he dies. And now we have a big succession crisis. So 1682, Peter is 10 years old.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's this big, big boy, huge and bright. But he's only a child, of course. And he has one remaining half-brother, who is Ivan, who is 16 years old. He can't walk. He can't see. He speaks only with difficulty. So he's also not an outstanding candidate. And there are two camps, basically. There's the Miloslavskys who want Ivan and there's the Naryshkins who want Peter. And there's great arguments.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
There's actually arguments around Fedor's deathbed. And the Patriarch goes out onto the red staircase and he says to the crowd, who do you want to rule? Do you want Ivan Alexievich or do you want Peter Alexievich, son of Alexis? And the crowd shout for Peter. Oh, we want Peter. The Patriot says, brilliant. He goes back inside.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He kneels before the 10-year-old Peter and says, will you be Azar with your mother Natalia as the regent? Yes. Brilliant. Get that bloke back from the Arctic Circle. Matt. Yeah, Matt Vaev. Get him back. He can be chief minister again. So it all looks great for Peter. Okay, he's 10, but everything has gone his way. What could possibly go wrong, Dominic? There is a twist.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
There is an extraordinary twist. So I mentioned offhand that Peter's father's first wife, Maria Miloslavskaya, had had a lot of daughters. Now, normally these daughters were just shoved into a place in the palace called the Terem, like the kind of harem, and never let out again. It's princesses. But there's one of them who is clearly a really exceptional woman. She's called Sophia.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
She's almost 25. She's very clever. She's very brave. She had been educated alongside her brother Fedor, which is very unusual. And when Fedor was Tsar, she had gone to his council meetings. She had talked to his ministers.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Now you're in charge. Your turn. Yeah. There you go. It's terrible. So from Sevilla's point of view, the accession of Peter, her half-brother, that's terrible news. Like she's going to be shoved into this sort of corner of the palace and never come out again. And she's a spirited... Yeah, who's been attending the council and stuff. Right. So kind of death.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And so she basically says to the patriarch, what's... at least have joint monarchs, Peter and my brother Ivan, because if you don't, that's the end of me kind of thing. So she makes a massive spectacle of herself. She goes to Fedor's funeral. She breaks down in tears very conspicuously. She says, Fedor was actually poisoned. My sisters and I are in danger for our lives, all of this kind of thing.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So she's sort of reminding everybody that she's still there. But what's crucial is that she has very powerful allies. And these allies are effectively the Praetorian Guard of Moscow, who are the Streltsy. And the Streltsy are Russia's first ever professional kind of standing army. They were founded by Ivan the Terrible a century earlier. There's 22 regiments of them.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're musketeers and pikemen.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're stationed in Moscow. They wear the most amazing outfits. They have these kind of long... They wear kaftans, don't they? Kaftans, yeah. And yellow boots and kind of fur hats and stuff. They look brilliant. You see, fur hats.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah. It's a bit Narnia, I think. Yeah. Anyway. Summer of love, isn't it? It is. That's exactly what it is. It's actually San Francisco in 1967. Yeah. They basically become a hereditary caste. So you pass down your place in the Streltsy from father to son. But the Streltsy are always falling out among themselves. The officers treat their men like absolute dirt.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And what is more, the officers get the men to basically do things like dig their gardens for them and kind of do odd jobs. And the men hate doing that. So by coincidence, while Fedor has been dying, there's been a mutiny among some of the Streltsy. They're sort of pikemen and musketeers. They accuse their officers of abusing them, stealing their money. And Sophia and her allies use this.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're like, brilliant, we can use this. We can use these mutineers. And they go to the Streltsy. They clearly spread rumors among them. They say, listen, Fedor was poisoned by foreign doctors working for the Naryshkins. If Peter becomes Tsar, then foreigners will be given all the commands in the army and orthodoxy will be undermined.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And actually Natalia, Peter's mother, is planning a massive crackdown against you, against the Streltsy. So you should do something about this. So this clearly begins to seep into the Streltsy's imagination. And then the denouement comes on the morning of the 15th of May.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So two of Safiya's mates, her sort of aristocratic mates, ride into the Streltsy Quarter in Moscow, and they say, the Norishkins are taking over the Kremlin. They have murdered Ivan, which is actually not true. They're going to kill the whole royal family. Quickly to the Kremlin, to arms! And the Streltsy rush out of bed. They put on their armor. They get their weapons.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And they march into the center of Moscow, their banners flying and their drums beating. And they're shouting, we're going to the Kremlin. We're going to the Kremlin. We're going to kill the traitors. They get to the Kremlin. The guards at the Kremlin let them in and they swarm into Cathedral Square, which is in front of this palace with the red staircase. And they're shouting.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
This is basically a mob of men waving pikes and shouting, give us the Norishkins, give us Matveyev, death to the traitors, death to the foreigners, all this sort of thing. Inside, Natalia, Peter's mother, Peter, this guy, Matveyev, they're all there. Oh, gosh, what are we going to do? And Matveyev says to Natalia, look, you have to calm them down. You have to tell them this is all nonsense.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Go out onto the red staircase. Take the two boys, Ivan and Peter. Show them to the streltsy. So, Dominic, this is quite like Marie Antoinette confronted by the women from Paris. It's exactly what it is. It's exactly what I was thinking that myself. Natalia shows tremendous courage. She takes the two boys, 16-year-old Ivan who can barely walk. And he's meant to be dead.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's meant to be dead, but he's not dead. She takes them out onto the staircase. There's priests and kind of the boyars, noblemen behind her. And below, there's this massive mob of men in yellow boots. Yeah, waving their pikes and shouting for her blood. And she says, here are the Tsar and the Tsarevich. There are no traitors. You have been deceived. And some of the Streltsy don't believe her.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And they go up the stairs. They go right up to Ivan. They say, are you really Ivan Alexievich? And he says, yes, I am. I am, kind of thing. And they're like, hmm. And then eventually they go back down the stairs. Matveyev steps forward. He's the chief minister. And he says, look, chaps, you've been misled. This is all a massive misunderstanding. I will give you all a pardon. You should go home.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And do you know what? It works. They seem to listen. He says, brilliant. He goes back inside.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Well, and also what goes wrong now is one of their commanders steps out onto the Red Staircase. So one of the nobles who's normally in charge of them, who's a guy called Prince Michael Dolgoruky, And he says, well, you've been told now. You've disgraced yourselves. You've let yourselves down. You let Moscow down. You've let the good name of the Streltsy down. Go back home to your barracks.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And if you don't do as you're told, I will flog you. And this is very, very, this is a foolish move from Prince Dolgoruky. Because when the Streltsy hear this, they say, what? Oh, actually, we're not going to... No, forget it. The mutiny's back on. They charge up the stairs, they grab him, and they throw this bloke over the balustrade onto the pikes of the men below. So he's impaled on the pikes.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Well, that's him told. Yeah. Now, there's a wonderful book about Peter the Great by Robert K. Massey, and I've had to restrain myself from just quoting enormous chunks. But it's one of my... He really goes for it in this passage. He says, the crowd roared its approval, shouting, cut him to pieces. Within a few seconds, the quivering body was butchered, bespattering everyone around with blood.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
That's my kind of prose. This is just the beginning. So the Streltsy now go absolutely mint. They go berserk. They charge up the stairs. They've drawn their weapons. They burst him. The first person they see is Matveyev, who's stunned to see them because he thought everything had passed off successfully. He thought he did that.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's chatting to Natalia, who's still holding the hands of the two boys. They grab Matveev. They drag him outside. He's kicking and screaming. They throw him over the balustrade, too, onto the waiting halberd points. And he is hacked to pieces, too. So the square is covered with the bloodied pieces of Prince Dolgoruky and this bloke, the chief minister.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And now the Streltsy are like, well, in for a penny, in for a pound. So now they really kind of turn it up to 11. And what about Natalia and Peter and Ivan? Well, she's there quivering with the two boys while the Streltsy are charging into the palace around them. They're basically in a corner, kind of sobbing, terrified. And the weird thing is that they're almost ignored.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
The Streltsy are just like, let's go through the palace and kill everybody. So they round up. They do what you would always do in this situation. I think you round up the dwarves. They round up the court dwarves. And they say to the dwarves, if you don't tell us where the Norishkin family are, all the members of the Norishkin clan...
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
um we will kill you so the dwarves rather let that good name of dwarves down i think because they do betray a lot of the nourishkins i think you're being very harsh there on the dwarves i mean what would you do in that situation I'd have thrown my lot in with the Streltsy hours before, I think it's fair to say. Yeah, I would. So the Streltsy are kind of rampaging through the palace.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're thrusting pikes into the cupboards and stuff in case there's anyone hiding there. To quote Robert K. Massey again, "...those who were caught were dragged to the red staircase and thrown over the balustrade. Their bodies were dragged from the Kremlin through the Spassky Gate into Red Square, where they were tossed onto a growing pyramid of dismembered human parts."
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So this goes on all afternoon. They're just killing dozens of people. And at nightfall, at last, the Streltsy get tired. It's quite tiring work, I think, hacking people to pieces with a pike or something. So they get tired and the violence begins to die down. But, Tom, the whole crisis is far from over and we'll find out what happens next after the break.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Of course, because the Streltsy have kind of gone for a rest. But the next morning they come back for more. So Natalia and Peter and Ivan are still sort of in this corner kind of crying and whatever. They've had a sleepless night, terrified that they're going to be thrown into pipe points as well.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I love the Great Northern War. It genuinely is a great war.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
The Streltsy return, they say to Natalia, well, there are probably loads of your relatives still here, and we're going to kill them too. And they have a particular hatred of her brother, who's also called Ivan, confusingly. And they basically say, we're not going to give up until we've found him, we've chopped him into pieces too. And so for the next two days...
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They're all trapped in the palace while the Streltsy are just searching like drawers, cellars, behind the wardrobe, under the bed, looking for Natalia's brother. And eventually the Streltsy say, oh, this is ridiculous now. This is massively out of hand. Look, if you don't give up your brother, we will kill everybody. We will literally kill everybody in the palace, including the royal family.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And Sophia, who's sort of been behind all this, but it's the sister who sang hanging around as well. She goes up to Natalia in front of everybody and she says, your brother will not escape the Streltsy. There is no way out to save our lives. You must give up your brother. And poor Natalia, she's in floods of tears. And she basically says to her servants, go and get him.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And it's a war. It ticks every box.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And they dig him out from whatever kind of cupboard he's been hiding in.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So it looked like they'd already searched it. That's it. Yeah. So she takes him into the palace chapel. He's given communion for the last time. She gives him an icon of the Virgin to hold. And then she leads him outside. And maybe, you know, if this was a film, there'd be a lovely twist now where the Streltsy actually, they're moved by this scene and the sight of him with his eyebrows.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But they're not. But no, they're not. They drag him out into Red Square. They torture him.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
horrible scene dreadful scene they do this weird thing where they lift his body up on their on their spear points and kind of parade him around and then they just cut him up and then they stamp on all the pieces which just seems unnecessary I think yeah it's I think it's I would call that that's robust even by Russian standards isn't it
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I think it's fair to say the Streltsy's methods are a little bit unsound. Would you agree with that, Tom? I think I would. So anyway, they've completely won. They end up being appointed as the palace guard. The Kremlin's silver is all melted down to give the Streltsy 10 rubles each.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah, but too late. But too late, right? They're given a triumphal column in Red Square in which the names of all the people they've killed are inscribed as common criminals. So Peter is not actually deposed, but Sophia gets her way so that her brother, Ivan, is raised to joint Tsar and is going to be listed first. And she will be the regent instead of Natalia. But Natalia is fine, isn't she?
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah, she's not executed or anything like that.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So there's a coronation two weeks later, joint coronation of Peter and Ivan, and this gives you a sort of sense of Russia's culture at the time. So they are crowned with a thing called the Golden Cap of Monomakh, which is a sort of skull cap ornamented with gold and pearls and trimmed with fur, and it's got a golden cross on the top.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And the story, legend has it, that this was presented to Vladimir II of Kyiv by the emperor Constantine IX Monomachus. And this is obviously, I mean, this is actually nonsense. It probably wasn't. But the claim is that this is the incarnation of Moscow's role as the third Rome, that this is a kind of symbol of its lineage, I guess.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But interestingly, this is the last time that cap, which still exists, this is the last time that cap is ever used to crown a czar. Because for Peter, this whole business has been so traumatic and so defining. He's seen about 40 of his relatives slaughtered in the most horrendous circumstances.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And he, even as he's being crowned, I think he's burning with this tremendous hatred of the Streltsy, but also of what they represent, which is precisely this. Russia's medieval past, its heritage from Constantinople, what he sees as its kind of barbarism and superstition.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
A golden icon kind of glimmering in the murk. with smoke from candles in front of it and men with gigantic beards chanting. This, which a lot of people find very attractive about Russian culture and is part of the sort of slightly orientalist fantasy of Russia, Peter despises this. He says, actually, in reality... Well, I think fair enough, to be honest. Yeah.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Because just off camera are a load of blokes with pikes chopping my relatives into pieces. Jumping up on the kind of body parts. Exactly. So I think this is the world that he is determined to destroy. And this becomes a defining feature in his life because he's had this, you know, this horrendously upsetting experience when he was just 10 years old.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Anyway, so he's slightly out of the picture because Sophia is now the mistress, I think you could say, of Russia. Now, unfortunately, we have only really one good description of her. And it came from the French envoy. And he wrote an unbelievably... I don't think you can get away with this now. It's not gallant. It's not at all.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He really lets France's traditions of chivalry down, so Theo, close your ears. He wrote, "...her mind and her great ability bear no relation to the deformity of her person, as she is immensely fat, with a head as large as a bushel, hairs on her face and tumours on her legs."
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But, he then said, in the same degree that her stature is broad, short and coarse, her mind is shrewd, subtle, unprejudiced and full of policy. So she is an impressive person.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I like the fact that you're defending Sophia's... Well, I quite like her.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So she has two very impressive lieutenants. She has a new Streltsy commander who's a guy called Shaklovity. And her chief ally is a man called Prince Vasily Vasilyevich Golitsyn. So the Golitsyns are one of Russia's most prominent noble families. And this guy, Golitsyn... becomes her chief minister. And he later on becomes one of Peter's great antagonists.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And yet Galitsin as well is a kind of westernizer. So he's fluent in Latin and Greek. His palace in Moscow is full of kind of Western artworks and German maps and Venetian mirrors and things. He's a huge admirer of Louis XIV. He's sort of saying, oh, we should really modernize ourselves. We should have religious tolerance. We could emancipate the serfs.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
We could have a new army, all of this kind of stuff. And so actually he and Sophia, who are the kind of villains in the Peter the Great story, they run Russia really well for the next kind of decade or so.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah. Well, it's mad and it's a massive tribute to her political deafness, isn't it? To her dexterity. Because actually Russia in the next few years is quite quiet. Galitsin, however, he gets sort of trapped by foreign policy.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Exactly, exactly. And they actually read this speech or they often recite it to recruits in the Russian army. So even today, it kind of has a political resonance, I guess. And Vladimir Putin has compared himself with Peter the Great. he has compared the war in Ukraine with the Great Northern War.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
His big achievement is he negotiates a treaty with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after years of war that gives Russia a lot of territory, including Smolensk and Kiev and eastern Ukraine. So this is the first time that Muscovy gets its hands on Kiev. Exactly, exactly.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But the price for this treaty is the Poles say, well, you have to join with us and our allies who are the Habsburgs and Venice fighting the Ottomans. That's the price. And Galitsin said, well, fine. I mean, I don't really want to fight the Ottomans, but we will. We'll attack the carnate of Crimea because, you know, that's an Ottoman vassal and that's kind of doable.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And as we will see, this becomes a decisive moment in the story of Sophia and Galitzin. Now, meanwhile, before we come to what happened about that, let's look at what's been going on with Peter. So Peter's only 10 years old. He's kind of just a figurehead. He's always been dragged out for banquets and things to meet ambassadors. And the ambassadors write reports of him.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They always say, oh, he's a very likable lad. He has a frank and open face. his great beauty and his lively manner, his half-laughing mouth, he's a remarkably good-looking boy, all this kind of thing. These are kind of quotes from German doctors and Swedish diplomats and things. So people say, you know, he's very impressive. One day he'll be a good czar.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
The good news for him is basically he can spend a lot of his time actually hanging out with his mum. They go to this... His father had a hunting lodge at a place called Preobrazhenskoja.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Preobrazhenskoja, Tom. Do you want to have a go? So he's hanging around on this country estate. And this is the point at which he gets into one of his great passions, which is kind of bonkers war games.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah. I mean, he has been obsessed with war since he was a boy. He has always had sort of play soldiers. His friends were chosen for him from other noble families and boyar families. And he basically, when he goes to this hunting lodge, he rounded up all his dad's old servants, the kind of falconers and the kind of hangers-on at the hunting lodge.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And he said, you know, I'm going to make you an army. And by the time he's in his sort of mid-teens, the word has spread around the area that the Tsar, because he is kind of still joint Tsar, he wants people to join his kind of play army. And so loads of young men turn up at this estate, some from noble families, some who are serfs, some who are grooms, all of this kind of thing.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
If you're 20 years old and you want a bit of a laugh, You turn up at this place because also, of course, it ingratiates you. Of course.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
It's tricorn hats and... Right. And a big green coat. Like a green coat and a kind of tricorn hat, exactly. Exactly. And there's about 300 of them. They live in, he says, well, I'll build you a barracks. So they're given ranks. They're given a soldier's pay.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So in the long run, these two regiments evolve into the Preobrazhensky and Semyonovsky Guards Regiments, which become the oldest regiments in the Russian army. And they were only disbanded, Tom. After the Russian revolution. So there you go. Such vandalism.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So, so basically they spend all their time like digging trenches, playing war games and Peter joins him, but he insists, and this is a defining thing about him. He says, I'm not going to be a commander. I'll just be a common soldier. He loves this kind of play acting this role playing. So he says, I'm a drummer boy. And every now and again, he gives himself a promotion.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So he advances slowly up the ranks. He becomes a bombardier, doesn't he? He becomes a bombardier. But they do really matter. I mean, when we say they're kind of play soldiers, they spent a whole year building a fort and then they held a siege, attacking it with cannons. And Peter playing on his drum.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yes. Not surprising. Although the interesting thing, of course, the Great Northern War, lots of people won't know this, is that the Swedes were the overdogs and Russia the underdogs in the Great Northern War, which seems completely bonkers.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I think he is. I think it definitely has a political meaning. I think there's no way in a society that is so conservative and so hierarchical as 17th century Muscovy or Russia, there is no way that could not have a kind of political significance.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And as we'll see, he does this in very peculiar ways in other forms. Like he sets up his own kind of mock church, doesn't he? In his own mock court. And all of this stuff, this is when they're doing the sort of dwarf tossing and like playing terrible practical jokes on people with bellows. And stuff like this. Bears. Yeah.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But all this sort of strange role-playing runs all the way through his life. Like when he goes in disguise, sort of incognito, to Holland or to England.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
That's right, although the funny thing is he'll subvert it kind of only so far. Up to a certain point. Yeah, because if you really did treat him with no deference... I mean, he would kill you. Of course. He'd personally behead you or something.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
No. But he wants to reconfigure it. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I think that's right. And I think what's remarkable about him, it's not just the role-playing, it's also his enthusiasm, his tremendous energy and his curiosity for You know, he has insatiable appetite for learning things and for doing things.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Right. So he does things like when he's a teenager, when he was not sort of attacking fake forts and stuff. He has a big sort of clock, like a grandfather clock, ordered and brought so he can take it apart and put it back together. He has a carpenter's bench. He's the kind of boy who, you know, he said, what do you want for Christmas? He'd say a lathe. He loves a lathe.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's always messing around with lathes and stonemasons tools. He learns to carve ivory. He learns to turn wood. He basically does a lot of things that I would hate to do because I have no interest in lathes. I'll just put it out there. But his biggest passion is the sea and ships. So in 1688, he, When he's what, 16? Somebody gave him a sextant, but nobody knew what it was or how to use it.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And they said, oh, there's some bloke in the German suburb. He's a Dutchman. He's called Franz Timmerman. He smokes a pipe. He'll show you. This boat Timmerman turns up and he says, I'll show you how to use the sextant. And he ends up teaching Peter geometry and geography. And they go for these long walks together talking about geography.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And one of these walks that summer, they're in this state and they find this shed full of junk. And they go into the shed. What's all this? And they find a boat upside down. And Dominic, where has that boat come from? Do you know where it's come from? It's come from our own country. It's come from England. It's an English boat. It's got masts and it's got sails and it can go against the wind.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
This is what Timmerman tells Peter. He says, look, if we sort this out, you could go sailing on this and, you know, it'd be amazing. And Peter, oh, brilliant. He says, could you know anyone who can fix it? Tim says, well, I know another Dutchman called Carsten Brandt. He could repair it. Peter says, brilliant. They get this bloke Brandt to do this. They get this boat. They take it to the river.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And then he goes sailing every single day. And do you know... That boat is in the Naval Museum in St. Petersburg to this day. The boat is called the Grandfather of the Russian Navy.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So everybody says, what's going on here? What's all this business? They're baffled by it. But Peter basically gets permission to go to a lake. He builds a boatyard on this lake. He says to this bloke, Brant, this Dutchman, build me more, build more ships. And they start building like frigates and yachts and all this kind of thing.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And I don't think you have to be a tremendous amateur psychologist to to work out that actually this is about Peter's, he dreams of escaping the suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere of Moscow and of the Kremlin. And the sea, the salt, you know, the breeze, all of that stuff, that's his dream.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
It's one of those historical stories. We don't get them that often, but it genuinely is one of those historical stories that a fantasy novelist would hesitate to invent it. So to give people a sense of the sweep before we get into the details, Peter became Tsar of Russia when he was 10. His early life was scarred by the most horrific violence. There was a struggle for power with his own sister.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Had ever done before. And a lot of people are very concerned about this. And actually, his mother, among them, she says, what's he doing? He's hanging around with all these Dutchmen in boats. He needs a good Russian wife. And so... They have one of these bride shows. They assemble the candidates at the Kremlin. She picks one for him. He says, I don't care who you pick. I'm not interested.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And she picks this 20-year-old girl called Eudokia Lopukhina, who's from a kind of conservative Moscow family. So what's her take on lathes and Dutchmen? She hates a lathe. She loathes a Dutchman. She hates a boat. Robert K. Massey describes her as pink, hopeful, and helpless, which is a very nice description.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Anyway, she and Peter, they clearly do have a relationship of sorts because they end up having a son, Alexis, but they don't really get on at all. When he's away on his boat, he never writes to her. She has a second son who dies as a baby. Peter doesn't even bother turning up to the funeral. He basically has no real interest in Udoku at all. And as we shall see, the story does not end very well.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Anyway, so he married Eudokia in 1689, January 1689, which is the year he turned 17. And sort of halfway through the year, his mother says, stop messing around with your boats, come back to Moscow. We've got a chance now to get rid of Sofia and Galitsin and regain power, and you can take your place as the rightful, unchallenged master of Russia. Because, remember we'd said,
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
As a price for that deal with the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, Galitsin had said, I'll go and have a crack at Crimea. Well, that went horrendously badly wrong. The first expedition they did in 1687, they didn't even get there. They got halfway through Ukraine, and then they basically gave up and went home. The Tatars, who are the kind of the masters of Crimea, are always raiding Ukraine.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They take loads of prisoners and slaves and stuff. Very humiliating for the Russians. In the summer of 1689, Galitsin had a second go, an absolute shambles and a disaster. They got stuck on the isthmus that connects Crimea to kind of mainland Ukraine. And they had to retreat with about 20,000 people killed and 15,000 people taken prisoner.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
This is happening to them. Anyway, Galitsin and his bedraggled kind of remnants get back to Moscow and they declare victory. They say, well, we want to join this victory against the Tatars. You know, we're delighted with ourselves. Peter refuses to go to the kind of victory party. He says, this is obviously nonsense.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And it's clear that because he's 17, because he has the kind of play, the pretend army now. Yeah, but how pretend is it? Exactly. There's growing tension. And Sophia's allies say to her, in fact, the guy who's the commander of the Streltsy, this guy Shklovity, he says to Sophia, if you don't strike against Peter now, you have to kill him now because otherwise he will strike against you.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
But she hesitates. She doesn't want to lose the moral high ground. And then on the 7th of August, she gets a note, an anonymous note, saying that Peter is going to attack you. He's going to attack you with his boy soldiers and kill you. Now, no one really knows where this note is from, but she sort of panics and she orders the Streltsy onto kind of full alert.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Then he got power. Then he did a mad thing. He went in disguise on a gap year to Western Europe where he worked in the shipyards in Amsterdam and hung around with bishops and stuff in London and in Oxford.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Meanwhile, some of Peter's mates say to him, Sophia is going to strike against you. She's mobilized the Streltsy. So I think what's clearly happened is that people behind the scenes have been stirring up trouble and sort of turning the two against each other. And they say, you must flee for your life.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So Peter and his friends do flee for their lives and they flee to the most important and the holiest of all Russian monasteries, which is called the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius. So this is about 40 miles outside Moscow. And he holds up in this monastery with his friends basically issuing proclamations saying, I'm the Tsar, my sister is sort of, and the Streltsy have been plotting against me.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
She's saying the same about him.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
It's like a fortress. So you have this weird situation all the way through August where Sophia is in the Kremlin. Peter is in this monastery. They're both describing the other one basically as a traitor or are they planning a coup against me, all of this kind of business. And it reminds me a little bit of the, in a sort of much more protracted form, of the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev in 1991.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
where, you know, the coup plotters had seized Moscow, but they weren't very powerful. You could see they weren't really up for it. They'd mobilized some of the army, but it was all very uncertain. And hour by hour, if people remember that coup, the momentum was shifting away from them towards Boris Yeltsin. So Peter in this is Yeltsin. So at first you think, oh, well, he's fled to the monastery.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Sophia's clearly going to win. But actually, because she doesn't manage to move against him over time, momentum moves more and more towards him. Lots of people are going to the monastery and say, actually, I'm on your side, mate.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I'm sure. No doubt at all. So... In early September, she decides to break the deadlock. She goes off to the monastery. And actually, it's blocked by musketeers, the road. And they say, look, Peter's not going to see you. He doesn't want to see you. You've got to go back to Moscow. She goes back to Moscow. She goes back to the Kremlin. She has a massive meltdown, floods of tears, raging.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
She says, oh, Peter and his family, the Norishkins, they're going to kill us. It's all a disaster, all of this kind of thing. And then eventually the stalemate, the deadlock is broken, not by Russians, interestingly, but by the foreigners in the German suburb. Because the Russian army, the high commander, generally foreigners, because they're the only people who know what they're doing.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And yet again, Tom, it's a man from our own beloved country. It's a Scotsman called General Gordon.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Not that one. Not Chinese Gordon. No. No, this bloke is Russian Gordon. So we'll talk about him in the next episode, about his background, because he's an interesting character. He is a Scotsman, isn't he, General Gordon? And he has been serving in the Crimea and all this in his campaigns. He's been torn between the two camps for a long time. But he's very fond of Peter.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He'd helped him with his war games. And what makes Gordon's mind up is he says, look... It's clear that actually only one of these people, only one of these camps has real ruthless killer instinct. And you always should back that person, the more ruthless, the more dangerous of the two parties. And that is Peter. And so one night he leads all the foreign officers to this monastery.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Are we going to do it again in this series? But never in as much detail as we're going to do it this time. And then he comes back. He cuts everybody's beards off. He fights this colossal war against the Swedes. He found St. Petersburg. He fights the Ottoman Empire. He tortures his own son to death.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They get there at dawn and one by one they line up and they kiss Peter's hands. It's like the sort of Al Pacino and the Godfather or something. Very, very Godfather. So the news of this reaches Moscow and the Streltsy in their yellow boots say, oh, clearly Peter's going to win. So they change sides as well. And they arrest their own commander, this bloke Shklovity, and he is beheaded.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Prince Golitsyn, who actually was a very good ruler of Russia.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He's stripped of all his property, he's exiled to the Arctic, and he basically spends the next quarter century of his life, 25 years, he just lives in the Arctic and no one knows what happened to him. That's a terrible fate for a man who likes a harpsichord, isn't it? Exactly. And poor old Sophia. I mean, we're quite fond of Sophia, aren't we?
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
She was exiled to a convent and she lived there for 15 years and was never seen in public again.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
No, she just has to hang out with nuns.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
A little bit, yes. For now. For now. For now, because we will see what happens later on. So now Peter, only when she's safely gone to this convent, does Peter ride into Moscow in triumph. And it's an amazing scene. This is kind of the end of your season one of the kind of Apple TV series or whatever. He rides in past lines of Streltsy, kind of kneeling in the dust to ask for his forgiveness.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He goes through the gates of the Kremlin. He goes up to the cathedral, to the Dormition Cathedral. His brother Ivan is still there. He's still kind of hanging around. And he embraces Ivan. And then he goes into the palace. He puts on the robes of state. And then he steps out onto the red staircase, the very place where so many people had been butchered when he was 10 years old.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
He steps out to receive the acclamation of the crowd. So at long last, he's 17 years old. He is the master of Russia. His mother is going to serve as regent, but he really wields supreme power. And Tom, in the next episode, we will find out how he intends to use it.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And after all this, he dies peacefully in his bed, but he becomes the embodiment of Russia's aspiration to join the top table of the world's powers and to rank alongside the nations of Western Europe. So Peter has become this enduring symbol of the struggle for Russia's soul, caught between East and West, Europe and Asia. But as you said, it's not just about Russia.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Bye bye. Hi, everybody. You're still here. Right at the end of the episode, I'm very impressed by your commitment. But listen, I have a question for you. I want to ask you something in confidence. Do you sometimes listen to the adverts on these episodes? And do you sometimes think, do you know what? I wish that the listeners to this podcast
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
I wish they were listening to an advert about my brand rather than the other stuff that Tom and Dominic are promoting on here. If you have thought that, there is, of course, only one way to find out what that would be like. You can disrupt the procession of adverts. You could be the next HSBC Premier or the many other tremendous companies that have advertised on The Rest Is History.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And you could put your brand in front of millions of like-minded listeners by advertising on The Rest Is History and, indeed, the other shows on the Goldhanger Network. Now, you may be thinking, I don't know what the Goldhanger Network is. Goldhanger are the company behind this very show. And if you are in the market to increase the value of your brand, Goldhanger would love to hear from you.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
You can register your interest or indeed your company's interest by going to goldhanger.com right now. And that is goldhanger.com.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So it's about Poland, it's about Sweden, it's about the Ottoman Empire. And it's about Western Europe as well, isn't it?
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah. It's like a late 17th, early 18th century version of Risk with a strong element of Game of Thrones and a strong element of succession all kind of mixed together.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So Peter's born in Moscow at one o'clock in the morning on the 30th of May, 1672. And he is the son of the second Romanov Tsar, Alexis, and his wife, Natalia Naryshkina. And Peter's defining physical characteristic is that he's incredibly tall. And he was a very big baby.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And we actually know exactly how big, because what they would do is they would kind of paint an exact reproduction of the baby, life size, on a board with an image of St. Peter. So you can kind of measure this image and you know exactly how big the baby Peter the Great was. And there's all kind of bells ringing in Moscow. There's cannons firing to celebrate the arrival of the Tsar's son.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So Moscow is also a kind of character in this story. So Moscow is at this point, well, it's a few centuries old. It was founded in the late 12th century. What had happened is that the Mongols had swept over what is now Russia.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And amid the chaos, the principality of Muscovy or Moscow had risen and swallowed up its neighbors, a bit like kind of Rome, I suppose, in the Italian peninsula, had become the sort of defining power. of the area, of the region. And so by now, it's a city of about 200,000 people, mainly out of wood.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And European visitors say, basically, it's a pretty terrible place. It's full of fires. It's full of plague. It's very dangerous. The streets are full of kind of footpads and beggars and whatnot. But there's a kind of exoticism to it, even then. So the culture of Moscow, of Muscovy, is this really interesting fusion of the legacy of Kievan Rus, the kind of...
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
the semi-state that Harold Hardrada visited a few weeks ago that had been established by the Vikings when they'd gone east. And it's that and it's the Mongols' golden hoard that has swept over it. But above all, orthodoxy. So it sees itself as carrying the sort of precious gift of Christian orthodoxy especially after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. So it's come to call itself the Third Rome.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
The Third Rome. So we have basically inherited the flame from Constantinople that they had inherited from Rome, and we are keeping it alive. And Muscovy has expanded and expanded. By 1547, the Grand Prince Ivan IV, who we know as Ivan the Terrible, had crowned himself Caesar, not just of Muscovy, but of what he called all the Russias. So now you have people talking about Russia, in other words.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And Caesar is Russified to Tsar. To Tsar, exactly. So he did that in the late 16th century. But by the late 17th century, so by 1672, when Peter the Great is born, Russia is now the largest country on earth. It has expanded at a colossal rate. So at this point, they've already gone all the way across the forests of Siberia, largely uninhabited, all the way to the Pacific,
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They've gone down to the Caspian Sea, and their borders go as far as basically Eastern Europe. So it's a huge country, by far the biggest on Earth, but it is a kind of lumbering, weak giant. I think that's how most people perceive it, because it's surrounded by enemies. all of which you would think are more deadly, more powerful, more impressive.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So there are three countries in particular that will play a massive part in this story. So to the west of Russia, you have a country that is very dear to the hearts of members of the Restless History Club, And it's the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Very exciting.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Yeah. So the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which is this very strange state, all we need to say about it at this point is the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth has basically been kicking the Russians around for quite a long time. They'd actually occupied the Kremlin in Moscow in 1610. However, the Poles have passed their peak and are now in kind of a long-term decline, as we will see.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Now, to the south, there is the Ottoman Empire. They are a massive superpower. So they control the Black Sea. They control the Balkans. Through their vassals, the Tatars, they control Crimea. And their influence goes well into Ukraine.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
They have. So the Ottomans are a serious, serious player. And basically, the Russians have never challenged the Ottomans. They are kind of frightened of them. And then to the north... there is the great rival, which is Sweden.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So the Swedish Empire has only recently become a great power, but at this point in time, 1672, it controls Finland, Estonia, and Latvia, as well as parts of northern Germany. And the Swedes are regarded as by far the most potent and formidable fighting force in Western Europe.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
Absolutely, it does. Absolutely. So orthodoxy is probably the single defining thing about Russian culture. So to give you a sense of what Russian society is like, It has four times as many people as, let's say, Sweden. But about the same number as Poland, right? Right, exactly. And not nearly as many, say, as France. No, no, nowhere near as many as France.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And very, very few of these people live in towns. There are very few Russian towns. The vast majority are illiterate peasants. And sort of culturally, it feels very different from, let's say, Sweden or Poland, because frankly, to use a word that academics don't like to use now, it is very backward.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So because the Orthodox Church has such a stranglehold, it has no universities, it has no schools, it has no playwrights, it has no scientists, it has no parliament, it has no newspapers, it has no navy. Right. And the navy...
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
That's right. So... A way to think of Russia is as quite effectively a landlocked and isolated country. When people go to Russia, they say, you're European ambassadors and whatnot. They say it is like going a little bit backwards in time. Even the way in which people talk about the Tsar, he's a magnificent figure. He is the father of the Russian family.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
His noblemen prostrate themselves in front of the Tsar. They use this sort of language, I'm your humble slave, I'm but a lowly worm, all of this sort of thing. If you talk to the Tsar, you have to use his full official title at all times, and you can never repeat what the Tsar has said to you. There is this sort of pervasive culture of conservatism and deference, I guess.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And nowhere is that more pronounced, of course, than the Kremlin itself. So again, as with Moscow, I think we should give a sort of portrait of the Kremlin so people who are not familiar with it can get a sense of what it's like. The word means a citadel. It's a citadel within the city. It is cut off from the rest of the city by a moat and by huge walls.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
And at the centre of the Kremlin, where a lot of the dramas of Peter's life will play out, there is Cathedral Square, and there are three cathedrals. If you've ever been, I have been, and it's an amazing, amazing place to visit.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
There's these medieval cathedrals and there's a palace called the Palace of Facets, which still stands, with a grand staircase running down the outside, which is called the Red Staircase. And there's going to be some very exciting action to come.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
It will indeed. So let's talk about Peter's family. His father is called Alexis. His nickname is Tishaisi, which means the quietest. He's monkish and kind of pious and modest and whatnot. And Natalia, his wife, is his second wife. So it's this classic thing where the Tsar has had two wives and there's a little bit of tension between the two sides of the family.
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562. Peter the Great: The Rise of Russia (Part 1)
So the first marriage was to a woman called Maria Miloslavskaya, and she had two surviving sons, lots of daughters and two surviving sons. And one is called Fedor, and he's 11 years old, and he is bright, bright and a nice chap, but he's very sickly. And the other one is called Ivan, who is five and who is, he's kind of half blind. He's got a very serious speech impediment.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
¶¶ ORCHESTRA PLAYS
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Wow. Thank you, Nardis. That was amazing. And thank you, Mozart. So remember, Mozart was just 14 years old when he wrote that piece. Yeah, amazing.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So, Tom, this is very like our situation, isn't it? This is how we are treated. They're in the audience tonight. Our executive producers, Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, they treat us like employees, don't they? And we, like Mozart, feel humiliated, treated like servants. And this is exactly what happens to Mozart when he goes back to Salzburg, right?
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Now, as you've been listening to this episode, you might have noticed that this episode had something a little extra special, didn't it, Tom?
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
And if you were there, you will remember how absolutely extraordinary their performance was. We are thrilled to have them featured on this episode. And frankly, we're even more thrilled to be able to make that recording of that event open free to everybody in the podcast who wasn't able to attend in person.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So, Tom, Mozart has left Salzburg. Does his gamble pay off?
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Right, so there's the famous moment, for those of you who've seen Amadeus, which apparently is reflected in some of the sources, that Joseph II, the emperor, sees one of Mozart's productions and says, it's great, but there are too many notes. LAUGHTER
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But Tom, let's get down to what really matters. The point of going freelance is often to make more money. Is Mozart making more money? He is making more money, yes.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Shameless.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Well, the wonderful news is that Tom will not be singing that aria. It's going to be sung by William Thomas, thank God. And the aria is called, ,, which means, I believe, open a little bit your eyes. William.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Tom, ladies and gentlemen, I hate to say it, but that is how a professional does it. Gotta start somewhere. So, thank you very much. That was wonderful. So, Tom, Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni are both great successes. And obviously, the image that we often have of Mozart is this sort of ludicrous spendthrift.
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But don't they show that actually he's an extremely capable entrepreneur as well as a magnificent composer?
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So the traditional version of this story is that it's a very strange and eerie and haunting moment in his life, isn't it?
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526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Good evening, and welcome to The Rest Is History.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
But even so, Tom, this is surely the most tragic moment in the history of classical music, of music generally.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
It was played by the brilliant orchestra that I have behind me, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. We have the Philharmonia Chorus. And above all, the most important person who's on the stage tonight, the person whose idea for this evening this was, the person who has made it possible, and that is our majestic conductor, Oliver Zeffman.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
Thank you, Oliver. Thank you. Now, those of you who've seen the film Amadeus will know that it is the story of a brilliantly talented man who is hounded to his death by a mediocre rival. Yep. That's what it's about. And Tom, this is very much the dynamic. at Goldhanger Podcasts, is it not?
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
A genius with a capital G. Absolutely, and that's why the lives of Mozart and Beethoven are a brilliant window onto the world of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We'll be exploring in this show the emergence of the idea of the genius and the idea of art with a capital A, and the way in which that reflects political and social change, and also, frankly, the way that people make money.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So it's a continuous story that we've got for you tonight, but we're going to tell it in two halves. We will be coming to Beethoven in the second half. Now, can I just ask, are there any members here of the Rest Is History Club? Very good. So you can listen to that second half right away.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
It is. That is Theo's joke. Theo is very cross if people tell that joke and they don't give him the credit, so well done, Theo. Because in his own way, he's a genius. So, for now, in the first half, it is the story of Mozart, and that will be told to you by Mr Tom Holland. Tom, take it away. Right, so... Mozart.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
He did. He did, and people laugh, and they shouldn't laugh, because it was a sublime performance.
The Rest Is History
526. Mozart: History's Greatest Prodigy LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall
So this is very like the scenes at the Northamptonshire regional poetry competition.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So to go to this thing about it being a drama, you make this point at some length. You talk about this in your introduction to the new translation.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And also to pick up your point about Augustus being the godfather, you make the point that Augustus from the very beginning, arguably his greatest political skill, is that he's brilliant at playing lots of different parts and he has lots of different kind of masks and personas. And you describe him as Rome's greatest actor.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And there's this very, very famous scene, which is from Suetonius, where Augustus is on his deathbed.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
and he has himself all kind of primped and whatnot he does his hair and he he has his jaw set straight and then he has all his friends in and he says to them do you think i played my part in the comedy of life well and then he says he quotes lines from a play if the play's been a good one clap your hands and let me leave the stage to the sound of your applause it's a brilliant brilliant ending yeah if if it really happened i mean who knows whether it happened or whether it's a
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
folk tale that was told about Augustus.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So this idea of the Caesars as actors, that kind of runs through Suetonius, doesn't it? That they're playing parts on a stage.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And as these things were being done, so he wept, and cried repeatedly, that I should die a mere artisan. When, during the delay caused by these preparations, a letter was brought to his freedman by courier, he snatched it and learned by reading it that the Senate had proclaimed him a public enemy and ordered a search made for him so that he might be punished according to the ancestral fashion.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
That thing about Augustus as an actor, This is also a brilliant kind of primer in politics and how politics works. And politics as, I mean, it's something that actually, you know, Donald Trump instinctively knows and Keir Starmer doesn't, which is that politics is about performance and about display and ritual and so on. And show business, I guess, to an extent.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And Suetonius is brilliant on politics as show business. That runs right through the 12 biographies, doesn't it?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And obviously Augustus establishes the template for what it is to be a good emperor. And to some extent, I guess you could argue the story of Suetonius' book is the story of people struggling to fill his shoes.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Definitely the case of Tiberius, I guess, with the Caligula and Claudius, the initial successors. They're all part of his family. I mean, this is the remarkable thing, isn't it? That it's a kind of monarchy in all but name. Yeah. At first, purely for dynastic reasons, not because they've won power. Well, Tiberius is a very accomplished man. The others are not so accomplished.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But as long as that family endures, which it does to the time of Nero, the line of succession, it kind of makes some sense. But when Nero is killed, and then you have the year of the four emperors, and then the rise of the Flavian dynasty, how do they see themselves in terms of their succession? I mean, they're still trying to become Augustus, aren't they?
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And when, after asking what this punishment might be, he learned that a man sentenced to it would be stripped naked, have his neck put in a fork, and then be beaten to death with rods, so terror-stricken was he that he grabbed two daggers he had brought with him and tested the blades of both, after which, on the grounds that the fatal hour had not yet arrived, he put them away again.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
In a very chaotic world.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But then came the horseman, who had been commissioned to bring him back alive, closing in upon him. When he heard their approach, he said in a shaking voice, quoting Homer, The thundering of swift-footed horses echoes in my ears. Whereupon, with the assistance of his secretary, Epaphroditus, he slit his throat.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So a slightly quieter age, I guess, but without the excitement and the histrionics. Of the first Caesars. Yes. Now, by the way, listeners who are interested in those first Caesars, we have three episodes to come on Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius. And obviously, if you're a member of the Restless History Club, you can hear those straight after this.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But we will be back after the break to hear about Suetonius himself, because this is a fascinating story about the man who wrote these biographies, and actually the man from whom we derive so much of our understanding of the early Roman Empire. So we'll be back after the break.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
As a boy, I obtained a small bust of Augustus, an old bronze which had the name Thurinus, inscribed on it in letters of iron, albeit almost faded away. I made a gift of this statuette to the Emperor, who now keeps it in his private chamber as an object of reverence. So this comes from Suetonius' biography of Augustus. And Suetonius is, of course, talking about himself.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And it's a very rare glimpse of the author himself. He's telling you a little detail about the statue that he gave to the emperor, as we will discover the emperor is Hadrian. So Tom, unpack this a little bit for us.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So what else do we know about him? So do we have any sense, for example, of when he might have been born or where his family came from?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Although still on the margins of consciousness when a centurion came bursting in and pretending to have come with the aim of helping him, held a cloak up to staunch his wound, he only muttered, too late and such loyalty. With these words, he died, and so fixedly did his eyeballs bulge from their sockets that onlookers were filled with horror and dread.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Cranky. That's a strange memory.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And people have kind of played with that to go backwards, to say, well, if he was a young man then, then he was probably born round about the time of the death of Nero, because that would place him as a very young man during the reign of Domitian and Domitian's campaign against the tax evaders and so on and so forth. And he's from... Is that right?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
What, his family are from North Africa originally?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But luckily for Suetonius, he doesn't end up in the north of England. In Vindolanda. He ends up working very closely in the Imperial Archive. Is that right? So in Rome, in the libraries in Rome.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But this is a problem, isn't it, in the long run? Because in 122, so this is the thing about going to Britain, you should basically never go to Britain because Suetonius and Septicius Clarus gone to Britain as well with Hadrian.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So that tremendous passage is describing the death of Nero. On the 9th of June, 68, it was written by the Roman scholar Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus in his great collection of biographies, The Lives of the Caesars, The Twelve Caesars, depending on what you call it. And I'm delighted to say that that was translated by a top amateur translator.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Something terrible happens in Britain and they're sacked.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Have they been rude to Hadrian's wife? Is that it?
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So just on this issue of sex, this is the thing that when people first read The Lives of the Caesars, especially if they're young and they're sort of really into the Romans. So I remember having this book when I was 13 or so, having it for Christmas. I went to my grandfather's house and I had it with me. It's, you know, oh, very good. He's reading a Penguin classic.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And I can remember sitting there reading through it and kind of going really red. Blimey. Yeah, kind of, oh God, I hope they don't find out. It's really, really strong stuff, some of it. It really is, yes. Is Suetonius, do you think, peculiarly fascinated in it or is he typical? Does he tell us something about Roman society and culture more broadly?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And you make the point in the introduction, don't you, that the Romans didn't have the distinction that we had between private and public. So the idea we have, which is that you have a public face, but you also have a private life and you have a right to a private life, would have struck them as absolutely bizarre, absurd and meaningless.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Because to them, the idea of privacy in and of itself was perverted and sinister and weird.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And that gifted young amateur, Tom, is yourself because this is your new translation of Suetonius coming out in Penguin Classics on the 13th of February. Very exciting.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Right. And that brings us on to those characters that we'll be doing in the next three episodes, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius. Because in each case, Suetonius makes a series of kind of punchy allegations about what we would call their private lives. And how much can we trust what Suetonius is telling us? So, for example, about Caligula getting up to no good or Tiberius' filthy habits.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Is this part of a kind of literary tradition? So, in other words, it's just invented, it's propagandistic, it's political spin, effectively. And how much do you think it's grounded in the reality of what must have been a very different kind of sexual culture to our own?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Well, on that point about cultural context, obviously one problem that we have reading this is that our understanding of sexual morality, as it were, and in fact, our understanding of sexuality more broadly, is completely at odds with the Romans' understanding. So, for example, you made the point that they would have had no sense of the terms that we use, heterosexual and homosexual.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
That would have just seemed weird and baffling to them. Is that right? Yeah.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
But the taboo for them is if that's turned on its head and somebody who is a powerful person allows himself to be exploited or yields to others in some way or debases himself.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
That's unbelievable. But I'll tell you what, the interesting thing is that the life that kicks off the volume, the 12 Caesars, the first of the 12 lives... is obviously that of Julius Caesar. But this was a suspicion that was attached to Julius Caesar, was it not?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Was it not claimed that as a young man he'd gone off to Bithynia and the king of Bithynia had had his way with Julius Caesar and everybody said, well, that shows that Julius Caesar is an absolute nothing and a weakling and he's a nobody.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
One small slip when I was a young man and they judged me forever, that kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
They're endlessly readable and endlessly fascinating. And so, as we said, in the next three episodes, we are going to dig in, dig deep into three of them. And they are two of the most notorious of all the Caesars. So Tiberius on his island on Capri getting up to no good or not. and Caligula. I mean, Caligula's is one of the great biographies in all history.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
I mean, one of the most fascinating lives in all history, let alone Roman history. And then we'll also look at the Caesar who inspired I, Claudius, the book and the series, and that is, of course, Claudius himself. So if you want to listen to those episodes right now and you're not already a member of the Rest Is History Club, just head to therestishistory.com and sign up.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
You get a host of unbelievable benefits. You do. But you also get to listen to Tom's dissection of these extraordinary lives immediately. But we will be back for the rest of you on Thursday with the sordid, or not, life of Tiberius. Tom, thank you so much. That was an absolute tour de force. Great fun. And we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Yeah. So let's just run through very quickly for those people who don't know. We kick off with Julius Caesar, crosses the Rubicon. Yeah. Sort of topples the Republic, but famously is not the first emperor, as everybody thinks. So he's the one we kick off with. Then it's Augustus, the first emperor, arguably the greatest politician in Western history, who establishes the template for what follows.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Then we have Tiberius. We will be doing an episode about Tiberius, won't we? We will. And how would you describe him in a sentence? Grizzled, experienced general who misbehaves on the island of Capri. Or does he? Right.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So the fascination of these stories is both that they describe the evolution of Rome, so from republic to empire. Mm-hmm. But the other element of it is the extraordinary vividness and richness of the lives that it describes and the details.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So many of the things that people best know, that people immediately reach for about the Roman emperors, particularly the sex and violence, many of these things come from these these biographers, don't they? So we mentioned Tiberius. So Tiberius, when he's in retirement, unbelievable sexual depravity, or is it, on the island of Capri, or Nero, or Caligula.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
I mean, these stories all come from Suetonius by and large, don't they?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Well, you made this point in your introduction. For people who are hesitating whether or not to buy your translation, I have to say, it obviously pains me to say this, especially to say it publicly, but it's prefaced by a brilliant introduction by you. Oh, you're very kind, Dominic. where you explain all the context and whatnot.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
And you make the point that the pharaohs of Egypt or the great rulers of Persia, these people are just names, really. It's very hard for us to get a sense of their personalities. But thanks to Suetonius, you have a real sense. You know what Augustus said.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
his appearance of modesty and simplicity. You know the tastes that Nero had, what clothes he wore, all of these kind of details that allow them to speak to us as flesh and blood, three-dimensional characters in a way that's not really the case with any other people or very few other people from the ancient world.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
There's quite a lot of beastliness in your translation, isn't there? Because obviously the first thing I did when I saw your translation was to check for all the beastly bits. And they're very much present and correct. You haven't gone for the asterisks.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Though I have to say, if there are people listening to this podcast with 10-year-old children who love the Romans, this probably is not the ideal book because there's some quite pungent behavior, isn't there? I think it's fair to say.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
So Robert Graves obviously turned the raw material from the 12 Caesars into his novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God. And iClaudius then became a BBC TV series in the 1970s, hugely successful. And the appeal of it, I guess, both in iClaudius and actually in Suetonius' original, is it's got a little bit of the soap opera about it, hasn't it?
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
The sex and the violence, the narrative twists, the melodrama, because it is a family. Certainly the first few lives are a family melodrama, the family of Augustus and the crazy things that happen. Yeah.
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534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
Now all Nero's attendants urged him to place himself beyond the reach of the indignities that were closing in on him. And so he ordered them, as he watched, to dig a hole the size of his body, and to collect such fragments of marble as could be found, and to bring water and firewood ready for the disposal of what would very soon be his corpse.
The Rest Is History
534. Emperors of Rome: Sex Secrets of the Caesars (Part 1)
You've said it in the American way, Tom. You've absolutely shamed yourself.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. At the end of France, there is a plain filled with woods and fruit trees.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Right. These are tools of dominance and oppression. They're tools, they're symbols of surveillance and control, but they're also, you know, they're impregnable. You put them on a hill or on a rocky outcrop or whatever it might be, and there's no way that the people in the surrounding countryside can storm, or very difficult for them to storm it.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And as you have pointed out in your notes, this is very reminiscent of the way that... you know, when the Greeks wrote about the intrusion on the world scene of the Romans or the Chinese about the coming of the Mongols, they would say, oh my God, there's this extraordinary new people who are absolutely formidable, very frightening, very brutal. They kill everybody.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
You control that territory now once you put down your castle.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But because, of course, France is such a competitive arena, Anjou's neighbours then have to follow suit, don't they? So that by this point, or certainly by the time Robert goes off on his jaunt to the Holy Land, Normandy too has lots of castles. So you have to, because it's basically a harms race.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But I guess the question then is, is there a kind of human dimension to this? And this is a really interesting story.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
They, you know... Where they come from. Yeah, where they come from. And the Normans... are greeted by writers beyond Normandy's borders with the same kind of awe and terror, aren't they?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But the paradox, though, right, is that if you have your Fultnera or whoever who controls all this stuff, this makes him, you know, much more powerful and the potential, therefore, for a very strong and domineering state indeed. On the other hand, if they're not controlled... They could easily be tools for complete fragmentation.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
You could have independent castles and independent groups of knights and all this kind of thing. So if you have a weak king or a weak count or duke or whatever, then the potential for complete anarchy, an armed and violent anarchy, is surely greater than ever before.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
All of which means that for Robert the Magnificent, for all his magnificence, going off on his pilgrimage is kind of risky and, dare I say, irresponsible. I mean, he is the authority figure. If he leaves, isn't there a danger that all the different mercenary bands, as it were, will set up their own private fiefdoms?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
It's literally as if you'd been on holiday with Dan Snow. I would never poison Dan. No, he'd poison you. No, Dan would never poison me. You would put him in the shade, Tom, with your enormous download figures. Come on. And my pistachios.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
I'm not reading that. You can read it. Absolutely, you can read it.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
What an unbelievably thrilling cliffhanger. Join us after the break to find out what happens to William of Normandy. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. And so at last we come to one of the great monsters in all history, Duke William of Normandy, the man who shamed himself and his country by winning the Battle of Hastings and carrying out the Norman Conquest.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
So we're in July 1035, and this bloodstained figure is at this point only eight years old. He's William the Bastard. Everyone calls him William the Bastard because he's not legitimate. And basically, the odds are massively against it. I mean, he probably won't live to the end of the year. You see, I'm surprised you don't admire William. Really?
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
I think we said recently that I, in this series, there's nothing I like more than law and order. And he's very much a law and order man.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
They like the Rolling Stones.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Well, no one does doubt, although William is only eight years old. So inevitably... The early years of his, in inverted commas, reign are going to be very bloody and contested. I mean, whatever he does and how many eight-year-olds are prepared to take the reins of this warrior state?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
So these are the castles being used as tools of anarchy, basically.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And what about William? I mean, he's only eight. What's he doing in all this? He's presumably not going around castrating people.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And the fact that he is observing this from Italy is a reminder to us in England, we tend to think of the Norman conquest as the Normans are going one way. he has seen a great stream of Norman freebooters, adventurers, rogues, you know, mercenaries, whatever, heading south into Italy and beyond.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Yeah, it's a good... But we should think about this a little bit more carefully with our own royal family. There may be a similar... Thank you. Thank you.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And actually, for me, one of the great fascinating stories of Normans is how they expand southwards and become a Mediterranean power.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Oh, you wouldn't. I mean, that's not a mother you want to be reunited with, frankly. But here's the thing, right? So this has been a mad story so far. All these people called Harefoot and Harthacanutes and whatnot, and just ridiculous twists. But now there is another...
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
insane twist to this story, which, you know, if you were the Game of Thrones script writer, you'd say, come on, this is a bit much. So Harold Harefoot basically has won. Yeah. He's king. The years go by. He is 25 years old. He could live for another 40 years. You know, a lot of English listeners to this podcast may be thinking, I've actually never heard of this bloke, Harold Harefoot.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
I don't believe this man was ever king of England. And the reason for that is the sources are so kind of fragmentary and vague, but also unbelievable twist. He drops dead out of nowhere for no good reason.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Let's just sow that seed. If later on there's another king of Norway hanging around and there's an English succession crisis, he might dig this out and say, whoa, I am actually entitled. Yeah, I'm in. I'm the king of England now. So how does Harthacnut do? He's terrible.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
That's only a demi-truss. That's more a kind of Rachel Reeves. That's a Rachel Reeves, but then a truss effect.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
This is why you could never really make a drama of this, because people would say, I've invested so much in these two characters, this feud between Hereford and Harthacnut that I assume will dominate the rest of the series. And then, no, they're both dropped dead for no obvious reason.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But that doesn't work out. So she just basically then, what happens to her?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
In this narrow place, there lived a great number of very tough, strong people, the name of whom was Normans. Such were their numbers that in time, as the population grew, the fields and orchards of Normandy proved insufficient to keep them all fed.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But that's all very unlikely, right? Because this guy, Edward, who's finally become king, he's hale and hearty. He could have sons. And if that were to happen, you know, there would be no opening whatsoever.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
I wonder who you could be thinking about there, Tom. Well... We will find out in our next episode when we turn to one of the glittering stars of English history, the last English king, hero to all who knew him, the story of Harold Godwinson. Now, if you want to hear that episode right now, and why wouldn't you? You can if you're a member of the Rest Is History Club.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And if you're not already a member, then just go to therestishistory.com and sign up. But we will be back next time with the next thrilling chapter in this epic saga. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Okay. Well, let me just pause you there. So last time we heard about how Normandy was established. So that's under a guy called Rollo or Rolf. Rolf. So we're talking about Northmen, Vikings effectively, who have carved out and semi-being granted this territory in northern France by Charles the Simple. And that was in the early 10th century. So Rollo died probably about 930.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But now we've moved on a bit in time. So the last person that we met who was the leader of the Normans was a guy called Richard II, Richard the Good. So he's the brother-in-law of two other characters that we met last time, Ethelred the Unready and Knute. And he had kept Normandy pretty settled, stable, secure.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And he's, of course, the brother as well of Emma of Normandy, who's got herself mixed up in all kinds of exciting dynastic shenanigans over in England, which it would take another hour to explain. Yeah. So... Richard II in Normandy, things actually have been very ordered and secure under him, right?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Therefore, the Normans scattered here and there throughout all the various parts of the world, making their way into numerous regions and countries, abandoning what little they had in order to obtain very much more. These people departed their homes, but they did not follow the custom of most people who go through the world, entering into the service of others. rather like warriors of old.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And to give people a sense, I mean, it's far more than, let's say, I don't know, being the governor of a US state or something, because you're also an international player, aren't you? You can almost run your own foreign policy. Is that fair?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
And yet Normandy itself is not remotely as rich and powerful as the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, not least because Normandy is embattled, right? It's surrounded by predators and rivals.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Well, you know, my views on that. My sister-in-law went out with a man called Paddy and he only drank milk. We went with them to Lisbon and he only drank milk. And the Portuguese aren't really into drinking milk. So it was a total washout. And I've always been bitter about it since then. I mean, I didn't drink milk.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
This is what happens if you get involved with this milk drinking business.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Their aim was to make everybody subject to them and under their lordship. And so they took up arms and broke the bond of peace. And whether as a mass of infantrymen or on horseback, they proved themselves great in deeds. So that was the terrifying opening to the history of the Normans, written, Tom, in the mid-11th century by a monk called Amartas.
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
Fulk the Black. That's a great name.
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550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
But also what Fulk represents and people like him represent is something bigger than just the sort of the dynastic soap opera of 10th century politics. He's not a blowhard. He's not just a kind of wild barbarian. There is a, is it fair to call it a revolution?
The Rest Is History
550. The Road to 1066: Rise of the Normans (Part 3)
There is a massive transition in European military life underway at this point, of which the Normans will be the great beneficiaries and the embodiment. And that transition comes about because, and here's what I think a crucial difference between France and England. France is so divided and fragmented. It's competitive. It's militarily competitive. And that breeds technological change.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hi, everybody. Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest Is History here.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Exciting. But before we get into all that, before we get to the shadows and the deadly peril, what we haven't done is actually tell people exactly where we are and who we're dealing with. So let's do a bit of that. John Dee is born in the summer of 1527. He's born in London in the shadow of the Tower of London. But actually, he is of Welsh descent, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So his father is called Roland, and he's from Radnorshire.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Right. And there's so many great stories. So obviously JFK, you and I disagree about JFK, because I, of course, think it was Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone, and you think differently. But there are other stories. You mentioned attempted assassinations. So for example, FDR. FDR was almost shot before his inauguration in 1933.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And we know that John Dee must have been an extremely bright boy. And of course, because his father has done very well, he's able to send his son to a grammar school and then sent him to Cambridge University, where Dee, again, is brilliant. And it's at Cambridge. It's a mixture, isn't it? Because there are some people there who are hot Protestants, very evangelical at his college, St. John's.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
It's famous for its evangelical Protestants. But it's quite a lot of diversity. There are loads of Catholics as well. So he's getting ideas and whatnot from everywhere. And he's quite ecumenical by nature.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And that's an attempted assassination that really could have changed the course of history, because no FDR. Does the United States still enter the Second World War? Does the story of the 20th century play out completely differently? So There is so much to talk about, and I'm really, really looking forward to doing it. What are you looking forward to most, Anthony?
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
But as we will see, Dee is being very disingenuous here, isn't he? Because there are other very good reasons, more obvious reasons, why he gets this reputation as a conjurer. So before we get on to the fact that he is genuinely a conjurer, part of this is religious, because he's kind of an ecumenical fellow by temperament.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
His more evangelical, hot Protestant friends think, oh, you've got Catholic sympathies and they love a bit of magic. And you're mixed up in all that, aren't you?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
But if that's not sinister and un-English enough... He's also really interested in maths, isn't he? Which is also very sinister. So calculating and conjuring are synonyms at the time. Yes. And so doing a lot of complicated equations and whatnot is an unmistakable sign that you're in league with the devil.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So alchemy and astrology are two obvious ones, but even more exciting is the language of the angels, which he's absolutely obsessed by, isn't he?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And this guy Kelly is going to come into view eventually, isn't he? But before we get to that... It's all kicking off politically. And this is very challenging for Dee himself because he could be facing a very brief appointment with either a funeral pyre or whatever or the chopping block. And this comes back to Edward VI, ultra-Protestant, you know, four years old or whatever he is. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
He dies in 1553, and we did a podcast about this. We did a two-part about Lady Jane Grey. There are Protestants who want to stop Edward's sister Mary, who is Catholic, becoming queen, but that fails, and Mary, who is determined to turn back the clock and restore Catholicism, is back on the throne.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
If you're a patriotic Brit who loves the special relationship, if you're an American living in London, or if you're an American who just loves getting on planes across the Atlantic to see the very highest quality entertainment, we absolutely expect to see you there in the West End on Sunday, the 30th of March.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And encompassing the death of a king or queen is a dodgy thing. And he doesn't manage to keep this a secret, does he? So the word gets out. And when people know that he's done this, I mean, he's in real trouble. He really is.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So surely he's now massively exposed himself. I mean, he's changed sides enough times now for everybody to distrust him. But He's been this bloke's sidekick. He's been interrogating Protestants. Why is he not punished? Why is there not a massive backlash against him?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And to tell you the truth, what I'm really hoping is that on the night, Anthony will finally reveal the truth behind the JFK assassination.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Does he not still have some credit with Elizabeth for doing that horoscope? I mean, is she not still grateful to him for that?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, I'll just actually look into this mirror that I've got next to my computer. Yeah, do some scrying. Ask the angels. It was actually Sunday the 15th of January, 1559, which is, funnily enough, that's the date I would have chosen. So, good choice. Wow.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, that's very like me because I did it through the language and the secrets of the Daily Mail. He did it through the language and secrets of angels. Some people would say the same thing. We'll take a break and we'll return with more John Dee. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn.com slash restishistory. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan, and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
The link is also in the episode description box. At four of the clock in the morning, my mother Jane Dee died at Maud Lake. She made a godly end. God be praised, therefore. She was 77 years old.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
The Queen's Majesty, to my great comfort, came with her train from the court and at my door, graciously calling me to her on horseback, exhorted me briefly to take my mother's death patiently, and withal told me that the Lord Treasurer had greatly commended my doings for her. She remembered also how at my wife's death it was her fortune likewise to call upon me.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So that's John Dee's diary for the 10th of October, 1580. So his mother, Jane, has died at 77 years old. Very good innings. And it's a sweet little moment. Elizabeth I, you know, was she going to be the empress of all Catholics and Protestants? But she's still not too grand to stop off and see how he's doing. Doesn't that reflect well on Good Queen Bess?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Tickets for this event are on sale now. To buy yours, just go to therestershistory.com. Unfortunately, this is not the book you seek. I discovered it in my boxes on my return from Bohemia. But one treasured book was missing. I believe Edward Kelly replaced it. A rare text, larger than this one. It contained many mysteries which Edward could understand with divine assistance.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Now, as you can probably tell from the noise of the pool, I am joined by a friend of the show, Anthony Scaramucci, who is on his island, surrounded by the luxurious trappings of wealth. He is, of course, the host of The Rest Is Politics US. And Anthony and I have a very special announcement. on Sunday the 30th of March.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And a great example of that is this project that he's fascinated by, or he has been fascinated by for most of the preceding decade, which is this idea that you mentioned in the first half of a British empire. It's so interesting that he's using those words before there is even really a British empire. Yeah.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
But the funny thing is he's obsessed by the sea and cartography and all of that, but he's never been to sea himself. Well, as you know.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Yeah. And the second thing that he has, he's got lots of books about occult science, alchemy, astrology. Of course he does. And then the third thing, antiquarian books. Now, why are these antiquarian books? So they're going back to the time of King Arthur and Welsh princes and stuff. Now, why are they so important for... for the future.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
As is Elizabeth. Right.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
But those books that Dee has on Prince Madoc, I mean, let's be frank, they're works of fiction.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
The Emperor Rudolf took great interest in both him and this book. Edward said it contained a secret method for obtaining immortality. So that, everybody, was Dr John Dee, who is a character in the TV drama A Discovery of Witches. which is a series based on the All Souls trilogy by Deborah Harkness.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Yeah, so it actually genuinely matters, and it inspires particularly Walter Raleigh, doesn't it? Yes. You mentioned in the first half him going off to El Dorado, or of course he famously went off to Virginia and founded the Roanoke colony. And he's been reading or listening to Dee. These ideas are rattling around Walter Raleigh's brain. So this actually has real-world consequences.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So he's the bloke who's talking to the angels. Yes. And we can't be entirely certain where he came from. He's probably of Irish descent, hence the name Kelly. But he's from the Midlands, right? From Worcester, possibly.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Hard to imagine how you'd measure that.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And those people who've seen it will know that the series begins with a historian who goes to the Bodleian Library and because she's a witch, she discovers all kinds of amazing stuff. So a vampire from Downton Abbey who is at the fall of Carthage. So it's a time travel story. And in season two, Tom, which I don't believe you've got to yet because you've just started watching this.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
I mean, you made the noise of the angel there, but Dee can hear nothing. And Dee, I think it's fair to say, can see nothing. No. So some listeners may say Dee is, for an intelligent person, he is being unbelievably credulous. in basically believing this bloke who says, I've seen an angel and I've heard him talking to me. I mean, you can neither see nor hear him, but I assure you he's there.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Why is he so gullible?
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
In season two, they go back to London in the time of Elizabeth I. And this is when they meet the person I was just ventriloquizing, Dr. John Dee. So tell us about Dr. John Dee.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
No angel would really have that name.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, I mean, it's fair to say everything goes wrong, right? Everything does go wrong. What follows is an absolute and utter disaster. Yeah. So four months they're on the road and they get to Lasky's hometown, which is called Lasko. And it's when they get there that Lasky realizes that the angels have been misleading him because basically he's not going to become king of Poland.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
So just for a second, your own personal view, like what's going on with Kelly? He's conjuring up this, or he's pretending he can see like this weird girl and all that. Is he mad or is this a colossal con?
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Which neither of them can see.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Two things to say. One, Dee surely is the most gullible person we've ever had on this podcast. And two, I mean, his wife has no say in this. What is this, like, indecent proposal?
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Lovely, Tom. What a fascinating, what a richly fascinating story. Some would say the story of a wise and wondrous sage. That's Tom, who is a much kinder person than I am. Some would say the story of an absolute mug, which is what I would say. But listeners, you can make up your own minds. Yeah, you decide. That's the story of John Dee.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And we'll be back next time with something completely different. Thank you very much, Tom. And goodbye. Bye-bye. Now, Tom, as you know, I am not just a man of history. I'm also known for my involvement in the performing arts.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
I must confess that early on in my acting career, my stage presence did come under a little scrutiny from Britain's finest newspapers.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Yeah, and I will remind the listeners that in Scotland, they order their reviews in a different way. So one is at the top and five stars is the worst review you could get. So we were very happy with that one-star review. But like a lot of great masters of their craft, Tom, I learned from it. I grew. I evolved. I knew I would bide my time before returning to the boards. And guess what? You're not.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
No. Yes. Tom, I have to tell you, I have returned to the boards. I'm performing once again. And the brilliant news for our listeners is that you can go and you can be transfixed by my performance right now because I am honoured and privileged to appear in the latest Sherlock and Co. adventure, The Adventure of the Norwoods. Please tell me that you are playing the Norwood Builder.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
I'm playing a much better character. I'm playing Hector McFarlane, a solicitor from Blackheath accused of murder. Goodness, as Lestrade's officers bear down on me, Tom, I have nowhere else to turn but to 221B Baker Street.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, very much like this one, we were better acting, I think it's fair to say. It's a stable mate of ours. They are a massive show. They get 10 million downloads. Outside, I believe, The Archers, this is the biggest audio drama in Britain. Well, I have no doubt, Dominic, that it is more interesting than The Archers. It genuinely is brilliant. So my son is a massive Sherlock and co-aficionado.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
It basically goes through all the original short stories and the short stories that are often forgotten in modern day adaptations. It transposes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's narratives to the modern day. So Watson himself is making the podcast while they're doing the adventures. You can pick up any adventure you want. You don't have to follow the whole series to get stuck in.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
It is absolutely brilliant. Do you know who else thinks it's brilliant, Tom? The Guardian newspaper. One of those prized one-star reviews? No, a five-star. They said, and I quote, very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular. Do you want to know what the Times said? It said, a breakneck series that Gen Z, or Gen Z as members of it say, that Gen Z is hooked on. Wow.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And now that you're appearing on the show, I mean, that will confirm the hook, won't it? It absolutely will. And the Guardian listeners will be beside themselves with joy. So, everybody, please listen to Sherlock & Co. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder. It's multi-part. It's brilliant. Part one is out now. Jump right in wherever you get your podcasts. And here is a clip from that very episode.
The Rest Is History
542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Well, just to be clear to the listeners, we're not really about making amends on the rest is history because we do whatever we like. Today, we'd like to do Dr. D. And Dr. D, I mean, one reason for doing him, quite apart from what a fascinating person he is,
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
He is a brilliant way of getting into the story of 16th century England because he lives right the way through from the final days of Henry VIII all the way through to the advent of James I, James VI of Scotland and the dawn of a new era, doesn't he? So this is the age when England is sort of seesawing wildly from Protestantism to Catholicism and back again.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Anthony is over in the UK and we have decided to do a live show together at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London. Haven't we, Anthony?
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And part of that is because he's fascinated by cartography, astronomy, exploration. So the idea of looking west across this vast expanse of sea kind of comes naturally to him because it's intellectually fascinating to him.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
And just to be clear for listeners who perhaps are puzzled by the combination of these things, what we would call sort of magic, the occult arts, and what we would now call science, so the stuff you do in school, these in the 16th century are not at all separate genres. They are seen as part of the same body of learning and people don't really distinguish between the two.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Hence alchemy and chemistry, for example.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
I mean, the irony is that we now know that that was at Hogwarts, but they didn't know that then. Yeah, they didn't know that, did they? Anyway, so Dee, he knows about all these things, doesn't he? So you mentioned alchemy, astrology, astronomy. He knows about maps. He knows about all this stuff. But this is quite dangerous at the same time, isn't it?
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Because in a Protestant age, a lot of people are very suspicious of all of this knowledge.
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542. Elizabeth I’s Sorcerer: Angels and Demons in Renaissance Europe
Right, because how do you tell the difference?
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
I think a bit of both. I think if his honour had not been insulted, perhaps he might have taken the money and settled for peace. Really? Okay. Yes, I think so. I think. The sense that he's been shamed before the eyes of his own people and of Christian Europe generally was clearly very strong. And so he decides that he's going to fight. And so war breaks out.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Charles descends from the Alps into northern Italy. And his immediate target is Pavia, because that is where Desiderius has set himself up. But it's also because, according to reports, that is where the two nephews are, the two princes, who I'm sure have been kept in a tower. However, when he gets there, Charlemagne finds that he's too late, that the princes have been sent away to Verona.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And so he splits his forces. So the life of Hadrian, the Pope, we're told Charles left most of his forces at Pavia and with a number of his bravest Franks moved rapidly towards Verona. And this is a move that clearly takes the defenders of Verona by surprise. And Calamans' sons and his wife, who has the brilliant name of Gerberga.
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They all surrender themselves to Charlemagne, although according to the life of Hadrian, Carloman's wives and sons immediately handed themselves over of their own free wills.
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So it sounds slightly like there's some special pleading going on. And the intriguing thing is that from this point on, that is the last dimension of them.
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Well, I mean, they may have been, you know, tonsured, so had their hair shaved off and packed off to the monastery. But if they were, we don't hear about it. They're probably being killed. They've been killed. I mean, you know, maybe Charlemagne Richard III did. I mean, we don't know.
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Yes. Right the way through the winter. Desiderius holding out. And Charles seems to have had a slight wobble. He abandons the siege and he goes south to Rome. So it's his first visit to Rome. And he goes to St. Peter's tomb and he prays there. And whether it is for St. Peter to intercede with God to help him in the siege, or maybe, I mean, maybe it's the expression of a guilty conscience.
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I mean, maybe he feels bad about what he's done to his nephews. We don't know. But it's clearly the case that when he goes back to Pavia, his morale has been boosted. He's back in the saddle. He's full of vigor. And he prosecutes the siege with a kind of renewed sense of aggression. And if he was praying...
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for God's assistance, then God gives it because a terrible plague breaks out in Pavia and it causes such devastation that Desiderius basically surrenders. He has no choice. Wow. So again, quoting from the life of Hadrian. the wrath of God raged and stormed against all the Lombards in that city.
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And they were so enfeebled by disease and death that the excellent king of the Franks captured the city together with Desiderius. And that essentially is the end, not just of Desiderius' ambitions, but of the independence of the Lombard kingdom. And Desiderius is taken back to Francia. He is tonsured. He is sent to a monastery. And Lombardy, the kingdom isn't erased.
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Charlemagne becomes king of the Lombards. So from this point on, he is described in his charters as king of the Franks and of the Lombards. But Lombardy is now clearly a part of Charlemagne's empire and his power now extends right the way to Rome. So it's a significant advance of the Frankish frontier.
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I mean, back to the time of fall of the Roman Empire in the West. Yeah. The Alps had always been a kind of frontier. So the early fifth century. Yeah. So that's an extraordinary achievement. It is. And when you consider that on top of that, at this point, he thinks he's conquered Saxony, you know, and those are reaches of land that the Caesars hadn't even ruled.
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I mean, he's starting to look very, very impressive. And the truth is that Charlemagne is a very great war leader. Indeed, he leads his men personally into battle. He conducts campaigns personally. The strategy is all his. And it's very rare that there isn't a campaign being fought somewhere on the frontiers of the Frankish realm.
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So in 790, one of the annals of Charlemagne's reign, so these are histories that record the doings, you know, in terms of what happened each year. The entry for 790 is simply, the Franks did nothing. Right. i.e. they didn't go to war. You know, this is the shortest entry we have in this annul, and it reflects the fact, you know, this is an amazing thing. There were no wars this year.
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It's the only time it happens. So every other year there is military action. And it is taking place on all the various frontiers of Charlemagne's empire. So there's Spain. So we talked in the episode we did on the Battle of Tours and in the previous one about how the Frankish kings have been pushing, let's call them the Arabs, back from the Loire region. back beyond the Pyrenees.
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And Charlemagne actually crosses the Pyrenees and takes the fight to the Arabs in Spain itself. He captures the town of Pamplona, pulls down its walls so that it can't be used against him. And then he returns across the Pyrenees.
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And this is a retreat that is very, very famous because as his rear guard, which is guarding his baggage, is going through the pass of Roses Valles, Rosivo, it is ambushed. And the baggage is taken.
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And the commander of this baggage train, who is one of Charlemagne's palatini, so the people who attend him in his palace, paladins, as they will come to be called, Roland, the great paladin, he has a horn and he blows on the horn to signal to Charlemagne the disaster that is befalling him. And this will become the theme of one of the great, great medieval epics.
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I mean, it's a wonderful story and we could perhaps at some point do an episode on it, but it's not strictly relevant to the life of Charlemagne himself because all of that romance is massively overblown. It's not the great disaster that the poets would make it seem. Although having said that, I mean, it's obviously not brilliant that he's lost all his luggage.
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And actually from that point on, Charlemagne is pretty much content to leave the Pyrenees alone. at least until the beginning of the 9th century, as we will see.
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Well, the thing is that I think for a long time, the assumption has been among people like the Avars that it's cost-free to go and raid a monastery or something or to attack a town. There's nothing anyone can really do about it because they're so mobile. But this isn't Charlemagne's perspective at all. If people raid his kingdom, then he's going to go after them.
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And so that's exactly what he does. And in 791, he leads what seems to be a very intimidating invasion, which he then has to abandon because there's a massive horse plague. So all his horses, about 90% it's estimated of his horses get wiped out. And this seems to be really bad for him. However, it's much worse in the long run for the Avars because, of course, the plague spreads to Pannonia.
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And if they lose their horses, then they're completely screwed because without horses, they can't do anything. Their entire offensive capability depends on their ability to fight. shoot arrows from the saddle. So by the mid 790s, the Avars are being harried by the Franks, but their kingdom is starting to implode. So in 795, the Avar Khagan, so the kind of Avar chieftain, is killed by his own men.
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One of his deputies then opens negotiations with Charlemagne, writes to him to surrender his land, his people, and himself to the king. And to accept the Christian faith at the king's command, a Frankish strike force then advances against the great central palace of the Khagan.
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It's called the Ring, a great kind of structure full of all the loot that's been taken from northern Italy and from Bavaria. And the Franks take the whole lot and they pile it onto great wagons. And it's driven back to Charlemagne's court back in Austrasia, the Eastern Frankish kingdom.
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And Einhard probably saw it, Charlemagne's biographer, because he gives this description of all this treasure coming into town, drawn in 15 carts, each pulled by four oxen and carrying great piles of gold and silver and precious robes of silk. And Einhard thinks this is great.
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He describes Charlemagne's victory over the Avars as the greatest and most terrible that he ever fought, but with one exception. And that exception is the war that Charlemagne fought against the Saxons. Because in fact, the hope that Charlemagne had had and that Paulinus had had when writing that poem was
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the war against the Saxons was over, that they had accepted defeat and had accepted baptism, this proves to be massively over-optimistic, because in fact, the war rages for decades. It rages for decades for the same reason that the Romans had found it so hard to conquer Germany, because despite their overwhelming military strength,
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The Franks find it a real struggle to kind of pin their opponents down, to force them to accept defeat once and for all.
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Yeah. And this ultimately is what had defeated the Romans. But Charlemagne, in a way, I mean, his policy is kind of even more unyielding, even more unstinting, even more merciless than the Romans had been. So pretty much every spring, the Franks are riding out. to harry the Saxons. If they've broken treaties, then they will be punished really brutally.
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Every autumn before they retreat back to their bases, the Franks torch the harvests of the Saxons so that they will then starve through the winter. Wherever they find a settlement in a rebellious area, they will torch it. And from 795 onwards, and again, this is very Roman, the Franks adopt a policy of mass deportations. So they are
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taking entire peoples, entire communities and transporting them deep into the Frankish empire. When they capture the Saxon elites, they're taking them as hostages, which again is very kind of Roman and bringing them back to Charlemagne's court and kind of educating them as Christians.
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As I say, these are atrocities on a Roman scale, but the truth is that Charlemagne's inspiration is probably not Roman, but in the Old Testament, because the Pope, when he had crowned Pepin, Charlemagne's father, had hailed the Franks as a new Israel. The example of Israelite warfare actually offers... A king like Charlemagne who wants to extirpate a pagan people, quite a lot of inspiration.
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So in 782, there's a famous atrocity after a particularly violent uprising by Saxons who had supposedly accepted baptism and submitted to Charlemagne and then kind of turn against the Amasca priests, destroy churches and all of that. So Charlemagne orders that 4,500 prisoners be beheaded on a single day.
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And the likelihood is, is that in ordering this punishment, he is inspired by the example of King David in the Old Testament, who similarly, you know, we have this description in the Bible, every two lengths of captives were put to death and the third length was allowed to live. So it may be that there were even more prisoners and Charlemagne spared those.
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Well, Roman and biblical. I mean, it's the fusing of the two great inspirations on the Carolingians. He's bringing it to bear on the Saxons. And it's a prosecution of total warfare on a scale that is so brutal that by the late 790s, Saxon resistance finally is over. starting to be broken. This is a victory of an order that the Romans in Germany never really succeeded in winning.
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To that extent, Charlemagne can celebrate it. But of course, there is an obvious and unsettling question that is hanging over the entire war and the particularly brutal strategy that Charlemagne's been adopting in the final decade of that war, which is that the triumph might be worthy of Augustus, but is it worthy of a Christian? What does Christ think about all this?
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This really matters to Charlemagne because Charlemagne is a very devout Christian. What he is doing, he's doing as that poem written by Paulinus suggested that you quoted at the beginning of the show, he's doing it in the hope of winning eternal life. What if the violence and the horror that he's inflicted actually is opening the gates of hell to him. And that is a very pressing question.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
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Well, partly because I always enjoy hearing your Yorkshire accent. Right. But also because the author of that letter was from York. He was a Northumbrian, so an Anglo-Saxon, called Alcuin. And Alcuin was a very distinguished scholar in the noblest traditions of the great achievements of Northumbrian scholarship. Venerable Bede. So he had been taught by a disciple of Bede, exactly.
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So there's a kind of scholarly link between those two extraordinary people. And Einhard, again, the biography of Charlemagne, he thought Alcuin was brilliant. He described him as the most learned man to be found anywhere. And the thing that's impressive about Alcuin is that he's also very, very good at politics. He's kind of a very seasoned diplomat.
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So in 781, he gets sent by the Bishop of York, who basically wants to be an archbishop. And there's some doubt about this. And so Alcuin goes to Rome to negotiate the absolute confirmation that the Bishop of York is actually an archbishop and Alcuin succeeds in doing that.
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And then he's going back through Italy when he runs into Charlemagne and Charlemagne is all over him and says, please come and stay with me, stay in my court. And the reason for that is that Charlemagne, as well as being a very successful and on occasion brutal warlord, is also a man who is devoted to learning, to scholarship,
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to kind of broadening the cultural horizons of himself and of his people. And he essentially, he wants a teacher. And Alcuin is a brilliant teacher. And so he stays at Charlemagne's side. He goes back to England for a couple of years. But otherwise, he stays in Francia from this point onwards. And from his letters, you can see he's a bit scared of Charlemagne. He's a bit nervous of him.
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But they do seem to have become genuinely good friends. So Charlemagne has this massive bath complex and they hang out in the baths together, kind of making jokes about Virgil. And Alcuin's a great japester. He's a great one for a nickname. So he calls Charlemagne perhaps tellingly David, as in King David. And it's all great banter and they get on tremendously well.
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And Alcuin is by Charlemagne's side pretty continuously throughout this period. And then in 796, he's quite elderly by this point. I think he's about 60. He retires to Tours, which of course is the great shrine of St. Martin. So it's the most significant of all the Frankish shrines. And there he becomes the abbot.
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But he continues to take an interest, obviously, in what's going on beyond the walls of the monastery. And In 796, which is the year that he's gone to Tor, there is one thing more than anything else that is worrying Alcuin. And essentially, it's Charlemagne's policy in the East, his policy to the Saxons.
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It's because what Charlemagne is doing is a very radical policy. It's not something that Christian kings and emperors have been in the habit of doing, kind of imposing conversion at the point of a sword.
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People may have a vague sense that this is all that medieval kings did, but certainly in the early Middle Ages and even back in the final years of the Christian emperor, this wasn't what was happening. Because the Roman assumption, which the Franks seem to have inherited... It's basically that to have faith in Christ is both a kind of a marker and a perk of being civilized.
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And the Christian God is so powerful. Why would you want to share him with your enemies? I mean, it's much better to keep him for yourself. But I think that the longer that Charlemagne fights the Saxons, the more obdurate the Saxons seem to be, the more he comes to think that his enemies are fighting in the shadow of demons.
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He is making war not just against the Saxons themselves, but against these monstrous demons that they worship. Therefore, he will never defeat the Saxons until he has also banished these terrifying and demonic gods from their lands. In addition to his military strategy, he imposes this strategy essentially of trying to wipe paganism out with extreme prejudice.
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So in 776, Charlemagne imposes a treaty on the Saxons that obliges them to accept baptism. They don't have any choice. And there's this kind of mass baptism in the River Lippe, kind of thousands and thousands are baptized. But then, of course, the moment he's gone, they all revert. And this then seems apostasy and Charlemagne is made even more furious. And so it becomes a kind of hideous cycle.
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In 785, he pronounces that scorning to come to baptism, so refusing the offer of baptism, will henceforward merit death. And he also lists a whole host of other practices that have been part of Saxon traditional way of life for goodness how long. And these two are capital offenses. So offering sacrifice to demons, as Charlemagne describes it. Cremation, so you're not allowed to do that.
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Yeah, so Charles, he rules the Franks. He's the son of Pepin, who's made himself king, getting rid of the Merovingian kings. He's the grandson of Charles Martel, great warlord. And Charles in Latin is Carolus. And so the dynasty that Pepin has founded and that Charlemagne belongs to is known by historians as the Carolingian dynasty. So Charles is top Carolingian. He's top Frank.
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You have to bury a body. Or eating meat during Lent, so the 40 days before Easter. And this is by miles the most brutal program for bringing a people to Christ. that anyone has ever attempted. This is why Alcuin objects to it. He feels that this is not what a Christian king should be doing at all. I think what sharpens this sense for Alcuin is that he is an Anglo-Saxon.
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The Anglo-Saxons remember how they had been converted, which is essentially by the example and the inspiration of holy men, not warriors. Whether it's Irish monks in the north who convert Northumbria, or the missionaries sent from Rome, under Augustine, who founds the Archbishopric in Canterbury. And I think the Anglo-Saxons also have a feeling of kinship with the Saxons.
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There's a sense that they're cousins. And so this had been an inspiration for a lot of Anglo-Saxon missionaries over the course of the 8th century to go to pagan Germany. So we talked about one of them in the previous episode, Boniface from Devon. Boniface had gone out there and he'd certainly given no quarter to paganism.
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Like Charlemagne, he had been confronted with a great holy tree that had been sacred to Thor, and he'd chopped it down and turned it into a church. But the thing about Boniface is he does this without mailed men at his back. He is doing it as someone who is not carrying weapons.
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And even though Boniface was sponsored by Charles Martel, he never turns to the Frankish warlord and says, can you give me some men? The whole point is that if you are confronted by armed warriors, then you allow them to cut you down. And this is what actually happens to Boniface. So in 754, he's hacked to death by Frisian pirates.
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The prayer book that he had in his hand in which he held up to try and stop the blow of the sword. gets cuts all the way through it and is preserved as a holy relic. And it's an example to Christians of how you should properly convert pagans. You shouldn't be going in and, you know, massacring them, burning villages and things.
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Yeah. And of course, unspoken is also the thought that, you know, you are going against God's will in doing this. And I agree, it is brave of Alcuin to do it. I mean, they may hang out in the baths and, you know, banter. But Charlemagne is still a very intimidating figure. But Alcuin does write to him. And what's amazing is that Charlemagne seems to have taken it on the chin.
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So that same year, 796, he orders the program of forcible baptisms to be eased. And then the following year, he issues a new charter for the Saxons, kind of easing off the prescriptions. I wouldn't say making the laws against paganism more liberal, that would have That would be an anachronistic way of putting it, but making them slightly less punitive, I guess.
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So Alcuin's take is that essentially you should rely on monasteries rather than on kind of military forts to pacify the Saxons. Charlemagne doesn't go that far. he continues to harry and burn and whatever.
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But I think there is a sense in which the monasteries that are built in the rear of the Saxons and which Charlemagne starts to plant over the eastern reaches of his kingdom, they have been compared by scholars to the great Roman legionary bases. These are centers of Christian power from which Christianity can reach outwards and spread eastwards.
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And in that sense, it kind of perfectly fuses the double meaning of correctio, this Latin word for, you know, bringing order where there's disorder. that it is a matter both for warriors with swords and for scholars and monks with pens. So there's this phrase, the Carolingian Renaissance.
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And to be honest, he's top guy in Europe because he has put the whole of the old heartlands of the Roman Empire in his shadow. And he is now pushing eastwards. And that, I think, excellent poem that you read by Paulinus, who in due course, as we said, will go on to become a saint. This is celebrating the conquest and the conversion of the Saxons. And these were a pagan people on the eastern flank.
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The Carolingians don't think that what they're doing is a Renaissance because they think that what they're doing is simply carrying on traditions that reach back to the Christian Roman Empire, but that things need to be corrected. And so that's what the program is all about. It's not a Renaissance. It's a program of correctio.
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and himself, which is why he had got Alcuin. He wanted a great teacher by his side. I think the reason for this, it's a bit like listeners may remember a while ago, we did an episode on Alfred. After Alfred's victories over the Vikings, his first aim is to restore the monasteries because he sees learning as fundamental to bringing his people to heaven, to winning them eternal life.
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That is his duty as king. If he doesn't do that, if he doesn't succeed in bringing the souls under his charge to Christ, then he will answer for it at the day of judgment. I think the same shadow hangs over Charlemagne. It's a really urgent, pressing mission for him. It is kind of education, education, education, but it's not just education for its own sake. It's about getting his people to heaven.
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That's why I think he's so keen on Alcuin, because he has inherited from his father Pepin and his grandfather Charles Martel a sense that actually the Anglo-Saxons are best at this kind of thing.
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So Boniface, when he had gone out to convert the pagans, he'd actually also had to work quite hard among the people on the eastern flank of the Frankish Empire, who supposedly had been Christian for centuries, because he finds that they're in a terrible state. So he writes of the Frankish clergy. They spend their lives in debauchery, adultery, and every kind of filth.
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And he's not writing that in any tone of jealousy.
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That's the first example, perhaps. And the other thing also that's very striking about Anglo-Saxon scholars when they come to Francia which was Gaul, a Roman province where people supposedly speak Latin. The Anglo-Saxon scholars have learned their Latin from books. they arrive in Gaul and they find the Latin being spoken by the Franks basically unintelligible.
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And the reason for that is that it's on the verge of becoming French. You know, it's evolving. But to Alcuin and his compadres, it's a sign that the Franks, you know, are hopelessly uneducated, that they've let their inheritance from the Romans slip and that therefore it's not just their morals that need improving, it's also their ability to speak Latin.
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That matters because to the Anglo-Saxons who had been converted by Roman missionaries, the association between Christianity and Romanitas is much stronger than it is among the Franks. We talked about this before. For the Franks, Christianity had always been Gallic, It had always been self-sufficient within Gaul. It hadn't looked to Rome for its example.
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But for the Anglo-Saxons, Rome is the great example. It's a Pope who converted them. And so the fact that it's an Anglo-Saxon like Alcuin who is in charge of the most significant monastery in Francia is really important in integrating Frankish notions of Christianity into a kind of Europe-wide understanding and making it Roman.
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So it's from this point onwards that you really start to have a kind of common Latin Christianity rather than one that is a Christianity that consists of multiple different versions of it. Right. You know, one in Rome, one in Gaul, one in wherever.
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of the Frankish Empire. Relations with the Franks had been terrible for ages and ages. They'd endlessly been raiding Frankish lands, licking their cattle, all that kind of stuff. This had been a grumbling cause of complaint under the Merovingians and then under the Carolingians. But Charlemagne, he's very much a guy for a radical solution.
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So the word Bible comes from the Greek word biblia, which means books. And Christian scriptures consist of lots of different books. And it had not previously been the habit to gather them within a single text. But Alcuin is all over this. There is a tradition of doing this, say, in the Northumbrian monasteries. And he brings this to Tor.
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And it's from this point on, really, that these collections of books, which are being assembled within the covers, you know, within a single set of covers, start to be known collectively as Biblia, i.e. a Bible. So it's from this point on that you start to get Bibles. And Alcuin's aim is to get as many of these Bibles out as he possibly can. And it's actually quite kind of information technology.
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There's a monk in Tor, he picks up one of these Bibles and he's amazed that you get all the different books of the Old Testament and the New Testament in a single text. And he kind of exclaims, this is a library beyond compare.
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And it's a bit like when iPhones or iPads or whatever first came out that people would say, you know, all the knowledge of the world is on this tiny little tablet, this tiny little phone.
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And Alcuin is quite Steve Jobs because he has a massive emphasis, not just on the volume of data, but also that this data, these books should be easy to use, easy to read, that they should be beautiful, that the production qualities should be completely streamlined. And so the Bibles and other books as well that are being produced in the scriptorium at Tor are
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are written to be as user-friendly as possible. And essentially, when you look at a block of text now written in the Roman script, so the script that English and French and German and everything uses, you are looking at a script that has been mediated by Carolingian scholars, by Alcuin and his fellow monks. So it's under Alcuin's guidance that for the first time, words don't run into one another.
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So if you think of a Roman inscription, you know, there's no spaces, but now you start to get spaces. Also the use of capitals to indicate new sentences. Again, a complete innovation. And my favorite innovation, the Carolingians start to introduce new punctuation marks.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And in a sentence where there is doubt being expressed, they start to use a kind of lightning flash, which over the course of time will evolve to become the question mark. Wow. It's brilliant. So again, Alcuin, you know, he's all about the milk of doctrine and all that, but he also, he's the inventor of the Bible and the question mark.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
He's piling right in and saying, okay, I'm not going to put up with this. I'm going to conquer them. So he had gone to war against them in 772. So that's the year after he's become sole king. And this has lasted on and off for five years. And now it seems to Paulinus that Charlemagne has succeeded in his aims, that the Saxons are conquered. It's absolutely brilliant. And so he salutes Charlemagne.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Yes, he's creating a common Christian culture. And of course, texts are for those who can read. So these Bibles are kind of going to monasteries or whatever. But Charlemagne and Alcuin are both very, very concerned to reach out into the countryside. So people may wonder, it's a long time since Clovis was converted. The Frankish elites, the aristocracy, all of that are clearly very, very Christian.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
But what about the peasants out in the countryside? What do they know about it? Probably very little. Yeah. And these are the people that Charlemagne is also very, very concerned to reach. And the key people here are the parish priests. And Boniface had complained about the fact that they're hopeless, they don't know anything.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And Alcuin also actually says he worries that the priests, they don't really know what they're talking about. And so again, he devises kind of little books, little format books that can be slipped into a pouch or something. that give the basics of Christian doctrine, give the Lord's Prayer, give the Creed, give various key passages from Scripture or whatever.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
These are sent out into the parishes, out into the countryside. It's an unprecedented experiment in the West in mass education. Within a few decades, the bishops in Francia are able to assume that priests should have a basic modicum of knowledge.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And in fact, there's this wonderful account of a priest in about the kind of the 840s who gets imprisoned by his bishop for having forgotten everything that he had learned, which always kind of sticks in my mind. Wow. I mean, if you got punished for forgetting everything you'd learned. that would be a real problem.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And this again, it's hard to emphasize how significant a moment this is in the history of Western Europe, because this is the moment when the process of Christianization really starts to happen. It's not just for the elites anymore. It's reaching out into the whether it's kind of annual or whether it's from cradle to grave, are starting to be marinated in Christianity.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
So if you're drawing up a charter, a legal agreement, if you're tending to a sick animal, if you're working out where you should dig a well, when you should begin the harvest? All of these questions are starting to be framed in Christian terms by priests who have been given the kind of intellectual know-how and ammunition that enables them to do this.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Yeah, and Charlemagne has prescribed that every priest should know the Lord's Prayer and should know the Creed, and that they should in turn instruct everybody in his kingdom in the Creed and in the Lord's Prayer. And so that is giving to people kind of fundamentals of familiarity with Christianity that they hadn't previously had. And it has a kind of saturating effect.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
The consequences of that are utterly profound for the future of European culture. It means that people start to take for granted assumptions that are rooted in Christianity to the point where they don't even realize where these assumptions have come from. And I think it's in this sense that you can call Charlemagne the father of Europe.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
So this is a phrase that is being applied to him within his own lifetime. I mean, in all kinds of ways, it's a ridiculous thing to call him because as we will see, his empire actually doesn't last very long. But I think in this one sense, the Christianization of people out in the reaches of the countryside, he does deserve that title.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
But of course, Dominic, father of Europe is not the only title that he will end up with.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
May God grant the Clement Prince as his reward for achieving such a victory, the sweet pastures of eternal life. It's all looking good.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And we will be bringing you a brand new show, and this time discussing two more of history's most extraordinary, fascinating, and iconic classical composers, in this case, Tchaikovsky and Wagner. And these extraordinary lives will be brought to life thanks to the accompaniment of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by the celebrated Oliver Zeffman.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
royalalberthall.com on Thursday the 19th of December with a pre-sale for the Rest Is History club members and Royal Albert Hall friends and patrons 24 hours earlier on Wednesday the 18th of December at 10am.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Are you a fan of The Rest Is History, but yet to dive into the weird and wonderful world of The Rest Is History Club? Or is there someone dear to you who won't stop banging on about the show?
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
If the history buff in your life is always regaling you with the same old facts about Churchill or Napoleon, why not get him or her, and let's face it, you, a present?
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
It is packed to the brim with the most bizarre historical questions you never thought to ask, like what was the most disastrous party in history? Which British politician plotted to feed his lover to an alligator? And why was a Brazilian emperor mistaken for a banana?
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
It's just that he is more impressive and he has more resources to draw on. Therefore, he can behave in a way that hasn't been seen in Western Europe for a very long time. Peter Brown, the great historian of late antiquity, says of Charlemagne that he was not a warrior chieftain in a fragile, epic mode. He trod with the heavy tread of a dominus, so a Roman lord, a lord of Roman determination,
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
capable of deploying resources on an almost Roman scale. And these resources are preeminently military because he has inherited from Pepin and from his grandfather, Charles Martel, by far the most menacing war machine in Europe. But he adds to that some very, very kind of distinctive personal qualities. So in the previous episode, we heard from Einhard, who was this very short scholar who
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
who wrote a biography of Charlemagne. And Einhard summed up Charlemagne as having two particularly striking character traits. He said that he had greatness of soul and a constant firmness of mind.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And I guess you could, if you were not as prone to praising Charlemagne as Einhard was, you could say that these qualities correspond perhaps to having very broad horizons, a capacity to see things on a very large scale, and also a capacity to take a very, very long view. And to Einhard, these qualities remind him of perhaps the greatest of all Roman emperors, who is Augustus.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And this is why Einhard models his biography on Suetonius' biography of Augustus. And there is something Roman about the approach that Charlemagne takes to the Saxons. So anyone who knows how the Romans behaved to the Germans, or indeed to the Gauls when they conquered them, they are murderous in their response to perceived slights or insults.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And certainly Charlemagne's policy of outright conquest, we've got these kind of fractious barbarians, let's go and conquer them and pacify them. That is a very Roman approach. And there's an account from a chronicler describing Charlemagne's early campaigns against the Saxons. And it will sound to people, I think,
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
like the historians of Rome describing the onslaught of the legionaries against the barbarian people. So this chronicler writes, Charles devastated the lands of the Saxons with fire and sword and left them emptied of people. And when he targets a particularly celebrated Saxon shrine, he's described as destroying it utterly and taking away all the gold and silver he found there.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And I think even when we say the Saxons, that again is a Frankish formulation that reflects the tendency that the Romans had, which was to kind of perceive pagan peoples, tribal peoples, peoples on the fringes of their civilization in terms that they would understand. And of course, that's what the Romans had done to the Franks.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And now the Franks are doing it to these people that they kind of bundle together as Saxons.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
I think he does. I mean, not actually to Augustus, but to the Christian emperors who had ruled a great Christian realm. And of course, that is one point of difference between Charlemagne and Augustus, is that Charlemagne is not just a great conqueror, but he is a Christian conqueror. And there's a kind of quality of paradox to that, because there hasn't really been such a figure before.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
So when he advances into the lands of the Saxons, he's not aiming just to conquer them. He wants to save their souls. He wants to bring them to Christ. And this great shrine that I described Charlemagne as destroying in 772, it's not just that it's rich. It's obviously the fact that it is a pagan shrine. It's flamboyant. fearsome. It's phallic.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
It's basically a massive great pole sticking up out of the Saxon earth, famed across Saxony and believed by the Saxons to uphold the very heavens themselves. Charlemagne chops it down to demonstrate that this isn't true, that it has no sacral potency whatsoever. I guess even the looting of its treasures can be justified in terms of what churchmen in Charlemagne's realm
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
are coming to describe as a process of correctio. It's a Latin word which means the bringing of order where there is disorder, burnishing what has been besmeared and besmirched. Can I, at this point, quote for myself from Millennium? Do. This program, here was a program to whet the ambitions of warlords as well as scholars.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And to send men into battle beneath the fluttering of banners, the hiss of arrows, and the shadow of carrion crows, quite as much as into the mildewed quiet of libraries.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
You can see that he's been a great influence on me. prose. But there is this idea that Charlemagne cleaves to very, very passionately that in bringing sword and fire to the lands of the Saxons, he is also bringing order. And essentially, it's all for their own good. It's all for their own benefit.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Well, in the previous episode, we heard how the Pope in Rome had anointed Charlemagne's father, thereby providing him with the religious legitimacy that he wanted. So it's become very important to the Carolingians. The papacy basically has licensed them to become kings. So a very important figure. But he's been menaced by the Lombards.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And essentially, the quid pro quo between the Carolingians and the papacy is that the Pope will anoint kings and all that kind of stuff. And meanwhile, the Carolingians are expected to keep the Lombards, who are these very impotent people in the north of Italy, keep them on a kind of tight leash.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And Charlemagne, whose ambitions are clearly considerable in a way that not even his father's had been, even when he's in Saxony, is thinking about what could I do against the Lombards. Maybe I could just swallow up their kingdom. When he strips this great pagan shrine of all its treasure, I think he is thinking, this is great. I can use this to essentially fund a war against the Lombards.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
He will need it because the Lombards occupy a stretch of land that is dotted, as you said, with ancient Roman cities that have walls that are impressive. The Lombards are a kingdom a bit like the Franks. I mean, on a smaller scale, but kind of a challenge of a different order to the Saxons. And they're also Germanic. Is that right? The Lombards? They are Germanic. They command the Alpine passes.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
So that's a potential problem. And there is also bad blood between Charlemagne and the Lombard king, who's a man called Desiderius, because Charlemagne had been married to the daughter of Desiderius for a year and then basically had dumped her. I think for diplomatic reasons rather than personal reasons, because he needed to marry someone else from Central Europe.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
Well, I think that is probably actually the biggest consideration of all, because Charlemagne knows that the one thing that could really cripple his offensive capacity and the integrity of his empire is kind of factional rivalry with rival members of his own family.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And we know that this is weighing on his mind because we have a life of Hadrian I, who's become Pope shortly after Charlemagne's come to power. And in this biography, it says that the wife and sons of the late Carloman king of the Franks had taken refuge with Desidius, who was trying hard to make good his contention that these princes should assume the kingship of the Franks.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
in the hope of stirring up dissensions in the kingdom of the Franks. And in fact, Desiderius writes to the Pope and says, look, I've got these two boys, crown them, anoint them, give them your legitimacy. Hadrian refuses because he essentially has to weigh up which of these two guys is likelier to win. And he decides that Charlemagne is the likelier.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
But he's still in an awkward position because Desiderius is between him and Charlemagne. And in fact, when Hadrian sends a messenger to Charlemagne saying, you know, please come to my rescue, I'm being menaced. He can't actually use the Alpine passes because they've been shut off. And so he has to send the messenger via Marseille, which then goes up to Charlemagne. And...
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
When Charlemagne gets this message, it confirms his worst anxieties, essentially that Desiderius will be using these two nephews to strike at him. And so he thinks, okay, I've got to go to war. So the summer of 773, Charles summons his peers, his warriors, his advisors to Geneva, in Switzerland, holds a great council there. He wants to get the support of his followers for the war that's to come.
The Rest Is History
524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And then having got that, he advances southwards. He seizes control of the two main mountain passes over the Alps. And once he's done that, he then sends ambassadors to Desiderius. And you can see what his main target is, because even at this point, His prime anxiety is to get hold of the nephews.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
And he says to Desiderius, look, I am willing to hold off war and I'm willing to pay you a frankly enormous amount of money if you will hand these boys over to me. And Desiderius refuses. And Charlemagne, I think, is really quite surprised by this. Janet Nelson, in her brilliant biography of Charlemagne, offers an explanation for why Desiderius should have refused Charlemagne's offer.
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524. Charlemagne: Pagan Killer (Part 2)
She writes, Charles underestimated one thing that was beyond price, the Lombard king's honour. What father does deals with the man who has repudiated his daughter?
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532. Hitler's War on Poland: The Fall of Warsaw (Part 3)
I wanted Warsaw to be great.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. The Norman Conquest is the great turning point in the history of the English nation.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
The great threat to any realm is a succession crisis, is the death of a king. And when Edgar dies, he dies in 975. And so the question is, what's going to happen next? And what is worse, if you're living in the medieval period, the one thing you don't want to see is a comet. Right. Because you know that that brings absolute shambles and disaster. And Edgar dies. They look up.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Jeez, what a comet blazing overhead. Terrible scenes.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And it was published. It took him 13 years to publish it between 1867 and 1879. And Tom, finally in the rest is history. we come to the greatest narrative of English history. And at its centre is the most famous year in our history. It's the astonishingly thrilling and unpredictable events of 1066.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
The illegitimate guy, the teenager.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So now this means that the other bloke, Ethelred, ready or not, is going to become king. But he's only 10, and what's worse... They're consecrating him as king. And it's at this point that people see a bloody cloud. I mean, that's literally what they call it, a bloody cloud. So this is in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. It must be true. It must be true. Many times in the likeness of flames.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And it appeared most of all at midnight. And it was formed of various beams. And then when it became day, it glided away. I mean, that's a terrible portent, isn't it?
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So, big spoiler alert, he ends up having a very, very bad reputation. as a king of England. And some scholars think this is incredibly unfair. And actually in your notes, you give an example of how he's wielding the machinery of government in a very effective and competent and well-thought-out way. So you mentioned the coins.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So they will recall all the silver coins and they will re-stamp them and then he will take a cut and they will reissue them. And this is basically to maintain the integrity of the coinage and to eliminate forgery and fakes. And also to back up the royal treasuries, because he's always taking a cut.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And this is the kind of thing you can only do if you are running a really, really well-oiled, well-organized machine. And you can do this in maybe the Eastern Roman Empire in Constantinople, or you can do it in...
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
you know, the caliphate or in Cordoba or whatever, but you can't do it in a shambolic divided realm like that of the Franks where they're all just stabbing each other in the back and it's all very chaotic.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
But here you have the problem, right? Because we've been describing the victim, as it were, of this crime, if it is a crime. The prize, which is England. But it's from this point, the reign of Æthelred, that people overseas start looking at all this and saying, oh...
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
England, very peaceful, you know, so they obviously are not, you know, as accomplished at fighting as other people because they're too busy messing around with their coins and thinking about silks. Let's get some of this. Let's have some of this. And this this starts to become a problem. What about the 980s? Yeah. And you have escalating. You must have been always piracy.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
There must have been always raids, small scale raids that probably don't even show up in the Chronicles. It's from this point that the Danes, for want of a better word, the Vikings come back into the story.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Do you want to know a fact about that, Tom? Yeah, tell me. So obviously the Battle of Moulton is one of the most famous old English poems, but you know who was obsessed with the Battle of Moulton? J.R.R. Tolkien. And the stand that Beardnought makes at the Battle of Malden is apparently the inspiration for the stand that Gandalf makes at the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. I did not know that.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
He wasn't ready. They turned up and he wasn't ready. So the thing about him, you could argue he is so hard done by. And indeed, there are historians like Simon Keynes who say... You know, actually, all that we think about him is just pure propaganda. He's been really, really maligned by history. He's not the first person to ever try to pay off raiders. No, Alfred did it.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Alfred had done it, exactly. I mean, he's paying off... God, I saw an amazing fact. The first payment of Dango, which was £10,000... To pay that off, he would have had to have handed over two and a half million individual coins.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
I mean, enormous piles. But you could argue, what else can he do? They don't have coastal defences of a kind that would protect every last village along the English coast. I mean, you can do your best, but the Danes are mobile. They could strike at any point. Maybe paying them off is actually the more sensible thing.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Every great drama needs terrible villains. And finally, we come to the villains of this story. We will take a break and then we'll return with a man called Rollo. See you in a second.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Rollo had a dream, and in it he saw himself placed on a mountain higher than the highest mountain, in a house of a Frankish style. And on the summit of this mountain he saw a spring of sweet-smelling water flowing, and he washed himself in it and was cleansed by the water of leprosy.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Then, around the base of the mountain, he saw many thousands of birds of different kinds and various colours, but all with red wings. And these birds went one after the other in perfect harmony to the spring on the mountain and washed themselves in it. When they had all been anointed by the waters of the spring, the birds all flocked together as though they were friends sharing food.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And they carried twigs in their beaks and worked as fast as they could to build nests. So that is a lovely story of a dream had by this guy, Rollo. And it's by a historian who was writing in the time of Ethelred the Unready and was explaining how Normandy, this wretched hive of scum and villainy, came to be founded. So, Tom, before we get into this bonkers dream, Rollo...
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
We call him Rollo, or the Normans call him Rollo, but I read the other day that back in his native Scandinavia, his name was Ganger Rolf. Yeah.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Rolf. That's a kind of H on the front, doesn't it? Yeah, like the Muppet. Ganger Rolf. Anyway, tell us about Rolf or Rollo.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So Tom, we're going to get into this story in tremendous and thrilling detail in the weeks that follow. But first of all, you said British history. So obviously this happens in England, but it's enormously significant in the long run for Wales and for Scotland, but also for Ireland too, am I right?
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
about the ceremony. Yeah, go on. They had to queue up to kiss Charles the Simple's foot. Yeah, because he's in his stirrup, isn't he? He's on his horse. And Rollo said, I'm not going to kiss this bloke's foot. And he said in his stead, one of his thugs would do it instead. And this bloke went forward to kiss this king's foot.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And then he jerked the foot up so quickly that Charles the Simple fell off his saddle and fell over backwards. And all the Vikings...
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So, you know, I only told that story because I knew you wouldn't resist the opportunity to do your trademark laugh.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
This is the key thing, right, about the Normans. The thing that people always argue about. Are they Northmen, hence the name? Or as Theo, a producer, would say, and indeed lots of listeners to this podcast would say, actually, that Northmen stuff is all just English, sort of the English trying to make excuses. And actually, these people are really French.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So there's a lot more of that laugh, basically, in the world of William Longsword.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And yet there is another side to the story, which is that As you said, as time has passed, these people have been slowly, dare I say, Frenchified. They've become a little bit more Christian over time.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Yeah, because we have a lot of overseas listeners in Australia, in the United States, whatever. And they might be saying, well, you know, who cares who rules England? Why is that a big deal for me?
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Right, because could you not argue, if you're him, you could say, instead of just buying these people off year after year, or maybe trying to fight them, why don't I say to them, you know, I don't know, a bit like the Romans with the Germanic tribes. Why don't you say to them, guys, you know, why don't you just come and live here and you can police the coast for me?
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
That's basically what Charles the Simple had done with the Normans.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Right. Well, we'll get into this a little bit more when we do our episodes about Norway and about Harold Hardrada later on. And about how much is he motivated, as you said, by wanting to copy the Prince of Peace? And how much is he really thinking Christianity is the prestige religion? It means status. It means power. It means kingship. It means authority. And that's what I'm buying into.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
But just to go back to England. So there are Vikings left in English waters, aren't there? Because Æthelred has actually bought a large part of Olaf's army and possibly some of his fleet. So there are probably thousands of troops of Danes basically hanging around and we will come to what happens to them. But also I know this is absolute Tom Holland bingo. So, you know, yeah, let's go for it.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So enjoy yourself. The millennium is coming and people at this point. So at the end of the 10th century, people at this point start to think, well, when the year 1000, when we get to the year 1000, that probably be the end of the world. So we should start making our dispositions accordingly.
The Rest Is History
548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And there's actually, there's a lot of this, isn't there, in the final decades of the century. And whether or not churchmen believe it, it's kind of irrelevant because the person who definitely seems to have believed it, who maybe thinks...
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
I've actually been appointed by fate, by God, to be the person who's in charge at this crucial moment in human history, in the history of the universe, is Æthelred himself.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Well, that sounds lovely. Now, we'll come back to Emma in this series because she is a massive fan. massively interesting and important figure. It's a shame we don't actually know more about her in her life because she's one of those women whose story kind of blazes across medieval history. However, I enjoyed your wheat field metaphor. Did you? You picked that up. I did pick that up.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And I'm thinking... I can see where you're going with it. And I can see that Ethelred is also somebody who enjoys a wheat field metaphor because he is going to develop this metaphor himself in an excitingly bloody way.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And they keep rebelling, don't they? So I had a look. They rebel in 997, 999, The year 1000. I mean, they are very disputatious and difficult because they are thugs.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So this is what sets the scene for the massacre of St. Bryce's Day, which is on the 13th of November, the year 1002. I mean, the amazing thing about it, I guess, is that in a more disorganized state, it would not have been possible. But precisely because England is centralized, well-run, a well-oiled machine. Æthelred can send out his orders across the kingdom.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
We can't be sure how many people are killed, but to people across the kingdom and to say on such and such a day, you round up the Danes and kill them all.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Well, Tom, do you want to know what a bestselling recent history of this period for younger readers makes of this moment? So sometimes historians are criticised for not using enough imagination. And I don't think you could say this about this passage. Let's hear it. So this is from your book for children on the Vikings. As darkness fell over the Thames, a ship pulled away from an old wooden jetty.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Since the first settlement of the English in Britain, the introduction of Christianity is the only event which can compare with it in importance. And there is this wide difference between the two. The introduction of Christianity was an event which would hardly fail to happen sooner or later.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And not just that, but also the Norse element too, right? All those three people, Harold Hodrada, Harold Goldwinson, and William of Normandy are all reflected in the words we're using. Absolutely.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Huddle the board wrapped in their cloaks was a group of young Danish men who had managed to escape the flashing knives. For days they sailed east, chilled by the gales and soaked by the waves, grief and shock written all over their faces. Only when they glimpsed the dunes of the Danish coast did they breathe a sigh of relief.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
When they stood there in the hall of the king, panting out their dreadful story, he said nothing. But in his cold blue eyes, there was only death. The next morning the word went out. All men must make ready. When spring came, the king was sailing west. Swain Forkbeard would have his revenge. And this time, there would be no quarter. Cold blue eyes.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
there amazing so next time spain fortbeard has his revenge goodbye goodbye here's that clip we mentioned earlier on
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
What it has in common with the French Revolution or with, I don't know, a TV series like Game of Thrones, say, with which it might be compared, is it's a thrilling soap opera. There are all kinds of twists and turns in the narrative. There's all kinds of courage and duplicity and treachery and extraordinary acts of bravery and resistance and whatnot.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
But at the center of it are these three fantastic characters. And they're all three are warlords. And each of them stands for, I guess, in the public imagination, a wider kind of civilization, I guess. So the Saxons, the Norse, and the Normans.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So at the heart of this is the prize, right? Like the Iron Throne and Game of Thrones, the prize is England. And you mentioned, oh, who should care about England? It's on the edge of Eurasia, all this kind of thing.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
But actually, the really important thing that listeners should get into their heads is that England is such a prize because it's an incredibly precocious nation state that is peaceful, well-run, and crucially rich. That's what makes it so tempting for overseas predators to
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
In accepting the gospel, the English only followed the same law which sooner or later affected all the Teutonic nations. But the Norman conquest is something which stands without a parallel in any other Teutonic land. If that conquest be only looked on in its true light, it is impossible to exaggerate its importance.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So I guess the first question is, why is England so exceptional in the kingdoms of Europe? So when the Franks are all fighting each other and divided and whatnot, when Germany, what becomes Germany is obviously, you know, so divided. Why is England exceptional in being so rich, so peaceful, so well organized, so centralized, all of those kinds of things?
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So he's the guy who had saved Wessex from the Danes, from the pagans, in the middle of the 9th century, in the late 9th century. And he had begun the process. I mean, he hadn't completed it, but he had begun the process of welding together all the different Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, hadn't he? And he'd invested in towns, in fortifying the towns and all of these kinds of things.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
He's Athelstan's nephew. Yes. So when Edgar is crowned in Bath, he is becoming king of something that lots of historians actually now say is one of Europe's very first, one of the world's very first nation states. People who think they're all part of one big national family, the Anglican, the English, and this is England. And one of the things that defines it is law and order. You pay your taxes.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
There's a state. This is how it works. It's not anarchy. It's centralized. This is how it works.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
And yet, there is no event whose true nature has been more commonly and more utterly mistaken. So that was Edward Augustus Freeman, who is the Regis Professor of History at Oxford University. And this is the opening of his gargantuan six-volume history of the Norman Conquest, which was commissioned to mark its 800th anniversary, the 800th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
I think that's completely reasonable. I have to say, for the people who wonder how the rest of this history works, I will just say that while Tom has been talking about the unique, exceptional wealth centralisation sophistication of England, he's actually been trolled by our producer, Theo, who's writing in the chat, looking forward to the French invasion. which is poor from you, Theo.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Well, is it French? I mean, this is something that we will be discussing. So Theo's trying to throw Tom off piste. I know he won't because I know, Tom, you want to talk about Edgar. Now, Edgar is always known as Edgar the Peaceable, which makes him sound like a lovely... He's a lovely guy, likes flower arranging and watercolours.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
But in reality, people call him Edgar the Peaceable because if you step out of line, he will probably blind and scalp you.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Yeah. I think people generally like ravaging in history podcasts. So, you know, time will tell. And Dominic, they like Law and Order, don't they? They do like both. And I really, I like Law and Order a lot. So Edgar's your kind of guy? He's absolutely the kind of guy that in my previous incarnation as a newspaper columnist, I would have very much applauded. You'd have been all over him.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
Yeah, I'd have been all over him like a rash.
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548. The Road to 1066: Anglo-Saxon Apocalypse (Part 1)
So to put Theo back in his box, this is a brilliant example of the contrast between what's happening in England and what is happening in what's now France. On the one hand, you have centralization, bureaucracy, and uniformity, and on the other, you have a sort of gibbering chaos, all kinds of nonsense. Yes, exactly. However, however...
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
It's always been the boast of this country, says Herbert Samuel, not only that our own native subjects are governed on principles of justice, but that ever since the days of Wilberforce, England has been the leader in all movements on behalf of the backward races of the earth.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Here is an occasion when those responsible for our policy might pursue these great traditions and add to the annals of the good deeds of this country.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Exactly, exactly. So its supreme irony is that it's Britain's imperial position that allows it to take this view, which, of course, some listeners may say is rank hypocrisy, but others may say is an example of the kind of ambiguity of empire, right? Well, we'll be talking about this, won't we, in our bonus episode. Exactly. Now, the Foreign Office, when it hears about this debate, says, OK...
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
You know, let's not rush into anything. Let's actually try to get some hard evidence ourselves rather than relying on this activist. We have a man on the ground in the Congo and we'll ask him to find out exactly what's going on. And now we come to the other great hero of this story. And this is a man called Roger Casement.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And next week, Tom, I know you're going to be talking to the Irish novelist, the great prize-winning novelist, John Banville, about Roger Casement's story. He's an extraordinarily interesting figure. There's a richly fascinating life.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Because we should mention he's the British consul, but he is Irish. Yes. So just very quickly on Casement, because we'll be doing him next week. Casement's born to a Protestant family in Dublin. He went to the Congo when he was 19 years old. He is implicated. He had worked for Henry Morton Stanley as a surveyor. He'd worked on the route for Leopold's Railway.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Casement is a very handsome, striking man, an enormous black beard, great sense of natural dignity, very polite. He's a great talker. Everybody comments about his voice, says what a beautiful voice he has. No sense of humor whatsoever, I think it is fair to say, which is always a good thing in an activist, by the way. You don't want them to be sort of ironic. You want them to be earnest.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And everybody always remarks how kind and gentle he is. Even when he first arrived in the Congo, people said he's very nice to the Africans. People said he was too nice. He gives away too much. Joseph Conrad had met him in his journey in 1890. Well, they'd gone together on the Rue de Belge, the steamship. They had hung out together.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Conrad had written in his journal that Casement was most intelligent and very sympathetic. And Casement undoubtedly had heard stories about the darkness because we know that in 1887, he'd been on the steamboat with a Belgian officer who said, life in the Congo is brilliant. I pay my men five brass rods for every severed head they bring me.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
So Casement had joined the British Colonial Service. He'd worked elsewhere in Africa. And then in 1901, the Foreign Office sent him back to the Congo as Britain's consul. And before going to the Congo, he went to see King Leopold in Brussels. King Leopold said, oh, brilliant. I hope you have a great time in the Congo. If you've got any issues, come to me first. You know, if you saw anything wrong.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
I'm the father of the Congolese. Exactly. Casement goes to the Congo and quite clearly he's very disturbed by what he sees. He says it's beastly. He starts asking the Foreign Office if he can go on a fact-finding trip to the interior. And for various reasons, it doesn't happen. But then after this Commons debate, they say, OK, you can go. Please go and find out what on earth is going on.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
So Casement goes off on this mission. He is not, I think it's fair to say, a happy or a well man. He's got malaria. He's got dysentery. He's also plagued. I'm sure you'll talk about this with John Banville, Tom. He's plagued by doubt and guilt because Casement is gay. And his sexuality is a kind of a torment to him in many ways. He has all these sort of agonies of fear and doubt and whatnot.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Well, the one thing that was missing – so two things that were missing. Morel was born in France, and his father was French, and then he went to boarding school in England. So you should have done an accent that was a cross between... Oh, like Theo Young-Smith. Right, like Theo Young-Smith. That's the voice you should have done. Theo has many qualities, but he's not barrel-chested.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Anyway, he goes upriver by steamboat. He spends three months in the interior. Have you seen this? So for company, he has a bulldog called John, and he has a servant called Hairy Bob. And Hairy Bob can cook only three dishes, chicken, custard, and boiled sugar. Chicken and custard is delicious. Well, I mean, if you've got dysentery, is this the ideal diet? That's my question.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
No wonder his case was so miserable. So he goes into the interior, and what he finds is even worse than he feared. And we know this from his daily diary. The country a desert, no natives left. I walked into villages and saw the nearest one. Population dreadfully decreased. Only 93 people left out of many hundreds. And then a really sort of moving entry in his way.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
August the 30th, 16 men, women and children tied up from a village in Boye, close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison. The children let go at my intervention. Infamous, infamous, shameful system. Now, all the time he is sending dispatches back to London and he says, oh, this is dreadful.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Leopold has, and I quote, put the natives on a path to their final extinction and the universal condemnation of civilized mankind. And you can well imagine the Foreign Office getting these and thinking, oh, come on. Oh, no. Because they don't want to cause a huge fuss.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Exactly, exactly. Because that, of course, is the worry for the Foreign Office and for the British government generally, is that, you know, sure, look into the Congo Free State, but stop there. You know, you shouldn't be looking into other colonies because, of course, our colonies are perfect. Anyway, he gets back to London eventually, goes back to England in 1903. He writes his report.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He actually finished the report coming home from a country house weekend with his old pal, Joseph Conrad. Now, his report is written in this kind of legalese.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He's not barrel-chested. He's not barrel-chested. So yes, I think you captured the barrel-chest very nicely there, Tom. Congratulations. Thank you, Dominic.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But you mentioned the depositions. So at the end, he has kind of witness statements that go into all the horrors. And the Foreign Office are really shocked by the witness statements. The British ambassador to Belgium says, I can't believe that the Belgians would have done this. They're cultivated people, even under a tropical sky. Surely the Belgians couldn't have lowered themselves to this.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Anyway, this report is finally published. Britain sends copies at the beginning of 1904 to every signatory to the Conference of Berlin. Even Leopold can't ignore this. I mean, this is a big story. And he says, well, I'll set up my own commission to investigate it. That's his usual ploy. And in the second half, we'll see how that turns out for him. But Casement is not yet finished.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He now really has the zeal of a convert. He gets in touch with Morell. They have dinner in London and they talk until two o'clock in the morning. And Morell gave a wonderful, a wonderful, vivid account of their first meeting. which I will read. He said,
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Morell said in his memoir, you know, I often see him, Casement, now in imagination, as I saw him at that memorable interview, crouching over the fire in the otherwise unlighted room, unfolding in a musical, soft, almost even voice, in language of peculiar dignity and pathos, the story of a vile conspiracy.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And as Casement talks in this beautiful voice of his, Morel said, I believe that I saw those hunted women clutching their children, flying panic-stricken to the bush, the blood flowing, the ghastly tally of severed heads, and all this kind of thing. You know, Casement's skill as a storyteller is so important. This voice that everyone talks about. Exactly.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Now, Casement says to him that night and afterwards, look, I think we should set up a big new organization devoted to the Congo. And Casement says to him, you know, the Congo is different from other campaigns. The Congo is a unique evil. And if we can rouse the British people, the world might be roused. Britain had played that part before, meaning in the campaign against slavery.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Could we raise a throbbing in that great heart of hers? This is a tremendous story. It's about kindness, but it's also about how brilliant Britain is.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Yeah. And listeners will discuss this in the bonus episode. Is the Congo unique or is the Congo symptomatic of the crimes of imperialism? And this is an issue for historians to this day. And indeed for moralists and theologians. Exactly. Ongoing debate at the moment. Very, very, very bitter debate, I think it's fair to say.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
So anyway, Morel says, look, I mean, the new organization, I don't really have the money to set this up. Casement says, here's a check for £100, which he can't afford. It's more than a month's salary for Casement, a lot of money. Morel uses this to buy a typewriter, and the Congo Reform Association is born, one of the great human rights campaigning organizations.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Now, after this, Casement slightly drops out of the story. The Foreign Office give him a promotion. They promote him to consul in Lisbon. So off he goes to Portugal. Which he doesn't like because he finds it too civilised. Yes, it's boring. He and Morel are still great pals. They had a code. They had nicknames for each other. So Casement was Tiger. Morel was Bulldog.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And Leopold was the King of Beasts.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But Morel is more. He looks like a bulldog. Yeah, he looks like a bulldog. And maybe there's a sort of patriotic thing there. You know, he's kind of British bulldog with his barrel chest. Maybe. But I think of John. Okay. I don't think Casement is a tiger. If you're going to be an animal, Casement's not a tiger. No. I think he's a puma. A puma? Yeah.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Because he goes to South America and he's a kind of man of the shadows. Yes, I suppose.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Anyway, that's. But it's good to have a dog. In the story. I love a dog on the rest of history. We're very keen on dogs. So Morel throws himself into this new association. It has its first meeting in Liverpool, of course, the great shipping port in 1904. And it gets 1,000 people. Now, it's slightly different from other human rights campaigns, and this is perhaps why it's more effective.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
It's a very establishment campaign. He has all kinds of endorsements from earls and viscounts, especially bishops. He loves a bishop, and he loves an MP. Bishops are very big in the antipartheid. Indeed. He loves an MP. And he never, Morel never criticises the British Empire or colonialism per se. He loves Britain. He loves Britain's empire. So that's not just a tactical move.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He genuinely thinks Britain is top nation and also top nation for kindness. And that's why Britain is peculiarly well equipped to lead this campaign. I think he genuinely thinks this. And he is, for somebody who basically was a shipping clerk, he turns out to be absolutely brilliant at running this campaign. He works incredibly hard.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Yeah, he absolutely is. He is the link between the abolitionist movement that fought slavery in Britain, America and elsewhere a generation before and the human rights campaigns of the later 20th century, the anti-apartheid campaign and so on and so forth. And today's episode really is the story of how he and his friends and his allies bring down Leopold's regime.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He writes 600 letters a month, which is 20 letters a day on average. He's a brilliant speaker. He will talk without notes to audiences of thousands week after week after week. He's great at tailoring his message to different audiences. So to businessmen, he will talk about Leopold as monopoly betrays free trade. To bishops, he says, it's our Christian duty.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
To audiences of the sort of common people, he says, it's Britain's responsibility as top nation to lead the world. He always makes sure he has MPs from different parties sitting on the platform, as well as all the local bigwigs. He's great at wooing rich supporters. So the Cadbury's Chocolate Family, we did a podcast about them last year. They're Quakers.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
They see themselves as great philanthropists. He gets loads of donations from them. He likes a celebrity. So Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes creator. He gets Conan Doyle to rallies. He gets him to write his own book on the Congo, The Crime of the Congo.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
What a perfect recruit. Probably the most famous writer of the day. Very patriotic. You know, you can't write him off as a do-gooding, bleeding-hearted. You know, he loves a campaigning cause, Conan Doyle, but there's no doubt that he also loves Britain. So the perfect, perfect person to have. And Morell also knows the value of the modern image.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
So it's Morell who really pioneers the use of slideshows with all these pictures of people with their hands cut off. And this is, in a way, the highlight of his rallies. It's the bit that everyone's been waiting for and that everyone will remember. He shows them the pictures, and that's the thing that really, really has an effect. A.J.P.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Taylor, the great historian, himself from a dissenting background, said that Morell was, in his view, the single best historian most effective activist, most effective leader of a campaign in British history. And I don't think he's wrong, actually.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But as kickers go, he's probably the best kicker or one of the best kickers. The Johnny Wilkinson. Yes. Moral kicking. And not just in Britain. So by the middle of the 1900s, there are branches of his association in France, in Germany, in the countries of Scandinavia, in Switzerland, in Australia, in New Zealand.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And he has put the issue of the Congo Free State on the front pages of newspapers in almost every country on earth. So the question is, Is this enough to trouble Leopold? How will the king fight back?
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Last week, we heard about how since 1885, King Leopold II of Belgium has presided over this reign of terror in the Congo Free State in pursuit of ivory and rubber and, of course, money. And this is the story of how he loses his grip. The Congo doesn't become independent or free, of course. It passes into Belgian government hands.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
The fattest men in history. Come back after the break to meet this extraordinary man.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Definitely. So we'll come to Twain in a little bit because Twain joins the campaign against the Congo Free State campaign. But first of all, well, how's Leopold? How has he reacted to all this? I mean, I think it's fair to say he probably does think what the words that Twain has put into his mouth. Leopold is now, he turned 60 in 1895. He's a very rich man, but he's very unpopular in Belgium.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He has all these villas on the French Riviera. He's got a massive yacht. He spends a lot of his time in the south of France. A lot of Belgians say to themselves, well, he's got this massive colony, all this money, but we're not seeing any benefits from it. Dominic, what about his love life? Well, he's disgraced himself, Tom, I think. He's let Belgium down.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
So he has got this new mistress who is exceedingly controversial. She's a young French prostitute called Caroline de Lacroix, or Lacroix, the different versions of her name. They probably met when he was 65 and she was 16. They probably met at a brothel or hotel in Paris.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But Leopold loses this prize that he has spent all his life trying to seize and then trying to sort of hide from the world's gaze. So, yeah, this is Edmund de Morel's story, really. So let's talk a little bit about him, Tom. He is born in Paris in 1873. Father French, mother an English Quaker, which may be relevant. His father died when he was young. He went to boarding school in England.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Now, Leopold's wife, who of course he hated, died in 1902, and he now becomes completely obsessed with Caroline. He installed her near his castle at Lachen outside Brussels. He spent millions of francs on jewels and clothes for her. He gave her a retinue of servants. I mean, disgracefully, Tom, he took her with him to Queen Victoria's funeral, which was an enormous scandal.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
She bore him two children in 1909 and 1910. And actually, far more than the issue of the Congo Free State, this is what destroys his reputation in Belgium. But the two issues become slightly conflated in the world's press. So when her second son was born, there was some issue with his hand. I'm not exactly sure what it was, but whether he had a withered arm or what it was.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But anyway, there's an issue with his hand. And Punch magazine in England, then very, very popular, published a cartoon showing Leopold holding this baby with a kind of injured hand. And he's surrounded by African corpses with severed hands. And the caption says, vengeance from on high. In other words, God has punished you for what you've done to these people. Yeah, that's pretty punchy. Yeah.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Well, literally. Literally, yeah, exactly. So now Leopold is very upset by all this, of course. And he does something very modern. He employs a PR campaign of his own. They place articles in the newspapers about abuses in British colonies, i.e. he's saying, you are the most dreadful hypocrites. You know, you think I'm bad. Look at what you're doing in Nigeria or Sierra Leone or Africa.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
He's got a point. Well, we'll discuss whether he's got a point in the bonus episode. But it's fair to say, I think it's absolutely fair to say, all European empires have skeletons rattling around in their closets. He's not wrong about that. That's for sure. He gets his tame shipping companies to sponsor books and articles. He sets up lobby groups with, I mean, all with these sort of comical names.
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The Committee for the Protection of Interests in Africa. Yeah. The Federation for the Defense of Belgian Interests Abroad. You know, all of these groups that, again, sound very contemporary, don't they? I mean, the kind of thing you see all the time.
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Of course it is. Of course it is. Or they subsidise magazines, which he does. He has a magazine called New Africa, The Truth About the Congo Free State. This is classic. It's so common now, but at the time it is groundbreaking. And he spends a lot of money on journalists. And we know about this because we have the paper trail of his attempts to bribe the German press.
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And entertainingly, his chief agent in Germany, who was a guy called Ludwig van Stuyp, claimed that the Belgians were very slow about handing over, about reimbursing him for his costs. And he wrote to Brussels and said, where's my reimbursement? And he said, now you keep asking me for receipts. Obviously, I don't have any receipts. Yeah, it's all underhand.
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Because I'm giving people cash, brown envelopes or whatever. By the way, one issue for Leopold is that our old friend, the Kaiser, In Germany, the Kaiser absolutely despises Leopold. He called him Satan and Mammon in one person.
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That's the man. Right. Okay. Yeah. I think there's a fair bit of double standards. Exactly. Now, the battle moves in about 1904 to America. America, of course, was the first country to recognize the Congo Free State. It's a bit of an embarrassment, do you think? Yes, I think so.
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And Edmund D. Morel says, you know, the United States has a special responsibility to address this because they are the country that basically opened the door to Leopold getting this territory.
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Absolutely. So missionaries will often do tours, speaking tours, British missionaries in America, American missionaries in Britain. There is a sense of, dare I say, a special relationship, a sort of moral relationship on this front. So in 1904, Morel goes to America. He meets Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He recruits Mark Twain. Twain is then in his 60s.
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He ended up becoming a British subject and becoming a clerk. And he's an obscure man. When he's 18 years old, he starts work for a Liverpool shipping company called Elder Dempster. And... As luck would have it, this shipping company has the contract for the steamship trade to the Congo. They have a monopoly. So they handle all the steamships that go to and from the Congo.
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He's probably the most famous author in America. He's all in on the campaign.
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And he's a great activist. He's a great campaigner, Twain. He goes to Washington three times to lobby the president, to lobby Congress. And it becomes this huge crusade, petitions signed by thousands of people, by governors, by senators, university presidents, and so on. Now, Leopold, again, doesn't take this lying down. He fights back. He mounts a lobbying campaign in America.
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He offers Congo concessions to the Guggenheim family, to John D. Rockefeller. He gives artifacts to the American Museum of Natural History because he knows that J.P. Morgan is on the board. And he pays American academics to defend him.
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So to give you just one example, a guy called Frederick Starr from the University of Chicago, he's paid by Leopold to write a series of articles for the Chicago Tribune called The Truth About the Congo Free State. But then Leopold makes a terrible mistake and Tom, we promised a very large man. And now he rumbles, he looms into view.
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He's about 21 stone. I don't know what that is in American measurements.
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Exactly. President Taft is famously large. He's the fattest president in American history. And this bloke makes Taft look like a kind of gymnast. Exactly. So this guy is called Colonel, I mean, you couldn't make it up. He's called Colonel Henry I. Kowalski. And Leopold takes him on as his chief lobbyist and pays him the equivalent of about a million dollars a year today, 100,000 francs.
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Now, Kowalski has a series of problems. One, he's a total fraud. And two, he's a narcoleptic. And this may be related, I think, Tom, to his fatness. So he will fall asleep unexpectedly. He's a lawyer. He'll fall asleep in court. He falls asleep when he's waiting to meet people in hotel lobbies. And he also, I read, falls asleep in the street. So he'll be like walking down the street or something.
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And, well, I don't know, is he still standing up? Does he fall over? I mean, he's a large man. Don't sheep go to sleep standing up? Standing up, exactly. So you'd hope that he wouldn't fall. The sort of tremors. Yes. Echoing across New York. Anyway, the Belgian ambassador, when he hears that Leopold has employed this guy, says, what? This man is a notorious fraud. What are we doing?
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So basically, after the first year, the Belgians don't renew this guy Kowalski's contract. Actually, no, we've changed our minds. Kowalski, when he's not asleep, is outraged by this. And do you know what he does? He goes straight to the newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst, and he says, I've been working as a paid lobbyist for King Leopold II of Belgium. Would you like the story?
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And to Leopold's horror, in December 1906, the New York American, one of Hearst's papers, banner headline on its front page. King Leopold's amazing attempt to influence our Congress exposed. And Kowalski has told them everything, including the fact that he's been paying a staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to basically derail congressional resolutions on the Congo.
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And for every day for a week, Hearst's papers lead with the Congo. Pictures of the severed hands, shocking missionary accounts, the works. It's a massive story. And basically, by the time it's all over, Leopold has comprehensively lost American public opinion.
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actually just makes him seem even worse in American eyes. Yeah, an evil, corrupt European king. I mean, he's the perfect villain, isn't he? With his sort of 12-year-old mistress or whatever she is. I mean, it's a terrible... He is a very bad standard bearer for European colonialism, I think it's fair to say. So Leopold has probably only one card left now.
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Remember that he had set up one of his little fake commissions to investigate the casement report. So this has three judges on it. There's one Italian, there's one Belgian, and there's one Swiss. And Leopold is pretty confident that they will fall into line because the Italian bloke already works in the Congo as his chief appeal court judge. So he thinks, well, what could possibly go wrong?
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Exactly. They have been given the contract by the Congo Free State, and obviously they don't want to lose it. It brings them in a lot of money. Now, by the late 1890s, at which point Morel is in his mid-20s, they are sending him often every month to Antwerp because, of course, he speaks French. So, you know, he's a useful employee.
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And unbelievably, to his complete horror, the judges, they take it far too seriously. They say, well, we'll obviously go to the Congo and we'll investigate the abuses. It's like, you know, oh no. They go up the river by steamboat. Joseph Conrad style. They talk to 400 witnesses. They talk to Africans who've been flogged with a chicot.
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They talk to people who've been held hostage, all of this kind of thing. Leopold, meanwhile, is lurking back in Brussels, waiting for their report. And he starts to hear rumors that one of the judges, we don't know which one, has started crying during the interviews, has been so moved by the stories. That's a very bad sign for Leopold. Then a terrible sign.
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The judges come back and they go to brief the governor general. So that's in Leopoldville. I guess it's in Leopoldville at this point. Or Boma, the original capital, I'm not sure which. This is a guy called Mr. Kostermans. They go to brief him about their findings. Kostermans, when they leave Kostermans' office, Kostermans is so shocked that he doesn't speak to anybody for days.
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And then two weeks later, he cuts his throat with a razor and kills himself.
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Well, of course, if he's the governor general, he probably hasn't even gone up river into the interior and seen what's going on.
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I think there are people who probably work in the, who are, as it were, civil servants, who perhaps have just closed their eyes. Do you think? I don't know. He perhaps, in part of it, I think it's... It's very common in history. You have people who are part of their mind. They kind of know what's going on. But they've closed that door. Maybe it's guilt. Maybe it's guilt, yeah. As well as shock.
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I don't know. So the report came out in November 1905. And again, it's a very lawyerly kind of...
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He's the ideal person basically to stand there at the quayside supervising the arrivals and departures of all these steamships. He's already interested in Africa. Why wouldn't he be? You know, Africa is a very exotic and exciting subject in the 1890s. He thinks the Congo Free State is brilliant. He believes what he reads in the newspapers about its civilizing mission.
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So that report really was Leopold's last chance to recapture the narrative. And obviously he completely failed. By this point, he's become an even more grotesque figure than ever. He's in his early 70s. He's a massive hypochondriac. He's riding around Belgium on a gigantic tricycle, drinking decanters of hot water, which he thinks are good for his health. Everyone in Belgium hates him.
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And once this Kowalski business comes out in America and then the reports, obviously by his own tame judges, he realizes the game is up. And effectively at this point, he realizes I'm going to have to get rid of the Congo and I want my money back. And so he decides he's going to sell it to the Belgian state. The one thing, of course, that at the beginning he didn't want to do.
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Now, unfortunately, for those of us who would like to see justice done. Leopold is in a very strong position here. This has been horrendous publicity for Belgium.
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Of course, especially when there are Belgian politicians who are absolutely mortified by this and horrified that the name of their country has been associated with this. Absolutely. I mean, this isn't... Because this has been King Leopold's project. There have been Belgians involved. You're absolutely right.
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There have been Belgians who have blown the whistle and there have been Belgians who have been really, really shocked and campaigned against it. But for the Belgian government, I mean, could you get worse publicity for a small country? Obviously you couldn't. And the British and the Americans are putting them under intense pressure. You cannot let Leopold sell this to France or Germany.
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We don't want the French or the Germans to get hold of the Congo and all of its rubber and all of this. So the Belgians decide under this Anglo-American pressure they're going to have to buy it off him themselves. And they do.
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Because of his dodgy accounts, the negotiations take ages, more than a year, but in March 1908, they finally agree they will pay him 50 million francs, which is the equivalent of billions of pounds or dollars today. Thankfully, Leopold doesn't have very long to spend his winnings because he died in December 1909, probably of cancer.
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Of course, Leopold being Leopold, his death is a massive scandal because it turned out that he'd secretly married his mistress, Caroline, just before his death, and he'd left her most of his fortune, not his daughters.
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There's a massive scandal, a huge legal battle, three-way legal battle between Leopold's daughters Gareline and the Belgian government for control of his estate. I can't believe Robert Harris hasn't written a novel about this. But the thing is, it ends up being forgotten because just five years after his death, plucky little Belgium becomes the casus belli for Britain in the First World War.
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He actually writes articles about Africa and about the Congo Free State for industry magazines because he fancies himself as a bit of a writer. And he says, it's got a great future. King Leopold, what a tremendous fellow, all of this kind of thing.
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And it has a new king now, his nephew, Albert. And he becomes the great symbol of Belgian resistance, doesn't he?
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They do get, yes, they do get great war washed. Exactly. So let's just say very quickly about what happened to the other characters in this story. Stan Lee... at the time, actually, came out of this pretty untainted by the Congo scandal. He'd become an MP, a Liberal Unionist MP. He died in 1904. So round about the time the furore is reaching its peak.
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But it never really seemed to sort of engulf him. Although, of course, now, you know, modern historians and biographers, when they write about Stanley, I mean, obviously, the Congo plays a very large part in his story.
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So Casement, who we'll be hearing lots more about next week with you and John Banville, he ended up becoming the champion of another great humanitarian campaign. So Rubber Workers in the Peruvian Amazon, he's a great champion of them. He's knighted in 1911, but then he becomes absorbed by another cause, which is Irish freedom. Extraordinary story.
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And he ends up on a U-boat with a load of guns, trying to smuggle weapons in. Kind of three days before the Easter Rising. I mean, spoiler alert, he's hanged for high treason. Most of his Congo allies plead for clemency. Morel pleads for clemency. Conan Doyle pleads for clemency. But interestingly... Joseph Conrad did not and refused. And Conrad said Casement had taken honors from Britain.
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He'd represented Britain. We've got a knighthood, haven't we? He had then betrayed Britain and, you know, he got what was coming to him. So Conrad's a pretty conservative figure, so that's not necessarily surprising. Morell carried on campaigning about the Congo, even after being taken over by the Belgians. We'll come to that in just a second.
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But he was radicalized eventually, a little bit like Casement. So in the First World War, Morell is probably the best known pacifist in Britain. And he ended up being sent to prison for sending pacifist pamphlets to Switzerland, which was in breach of the Defense of the Realm Act. He ends up joining the Labour Party. He stood for Labour in Dundee in 1922. He beat Winston Churchill.
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at the House of Commons. It's amazing how all these figures kind of intersect. They connect. I know there's a great book to be written about, you know, imagine a book with your characters like Conrad, Casement, Morell, Churchill, all of these, Mark Twain, Anyway, he died tragically of a heart attack two years after being elected to Parliament when he was just 51. So that was the end of him.
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But his legacy, of course, is a tradition of human rights activism that never really goes away. And obviously, we're still very familiar with to this day. But before we close, we should just a word about the Congo. Because the real question, of course, is how does it change? What changes after Leopold is gone?
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It's definitely true that when the Belgians take it over, there are fewer reports of atrocities. We don't have the same reports of burned villages, people being taken hostage. It doesn't seem to have been the severing of hands, all of that stuff. However, a lot of the caste in the Congo are the same people, the same officials, the same station chiefs.
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Absolutely. Absolutely. But he's standing there on the quayside at Antwerp and he's watching that scene that we described earlier. And he starts to become suspicious of the ships that he sees. Because as we described at the end of last week's episode, he sees all this rubber and ivory being unloaded from the ships. But nothing is going back the other way.
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The force publique continues with the same name. The rubber trade continues, and there is still forced labor. Even after the First World War, the Belgian Congo is notoriously brutal. They're still using the chicots. They're still using forced labor. The focus has moved now to mining copper, tin, and gold. But the conditions in those mines are pretty horrific and thousands of people die.
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And he goes there and it turns out all to be the fault of Al Capone. Yeah, and Tintin in the Congo, you can't get it. You have to order it specially. You can't get it now. It's been withdrawn from sort of general sale in children's bookshops. It's seen only as a kind of historical curiosity because the portrait of Belgian colonialism,
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and of the people in the Congo is seen as inappropriate for 21st century children, which I can completely understand, I have to say. Even in the Second World War, when obviously Belgium is one of the allies, there's still forced labor, and the colonial government demands 120 days
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per person of forced labour from its African population to meet the Allies' demands for rubber for their trucks, for their jeeps, for their tyres of their aeroplanes and so on. So, you know, there is that dark side to the Allied war effort. Now, some scholars have tried to make a case for the
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And I've said, you know, great public health campaigns, trying to eliminate sleeping sickness and yellow fever and things like that. And there's perhaps a degree of truth in that. But one thing that people always say about their colonies is, you know, look at the results, judge us on the legacy.
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And the truth of the matter is, if you look at what became of the Belgian Congo after 1960, after independence, I think it would be very, very hard to say that's a record to be proud of.
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He is indeed. He is indeed. So there's obviously still loads to talk about. And actually in Thursday's episode, we'll be going back to the book that we began with, which is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. A great subject for a history podcast because it's one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. Conrad himself is a A fantastic character. Extraordinary man.
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And the impact of that book is really, really worth talking about. So that's what we're doing on Thursday. But for Arrested History Club members, a day earlier on Wednesday, we'll be discussing the deeper questions from this series. So we'll be asking about the death toll. How many people died in the Congo Free State? And is it fair to call it, as some people do, a genocide?
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Is it fair to see it as representative of European colonialism generally? So in other words, does this tell us something very dark about European imperialism? And should we perhaps revise the sort of canonical version? And what are the controversies that surround Adam Hochschild's book, the book on which we base so much of the series? So that's for Restless History Club members.
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And if you want to join, you can just head to therestishistory.com and then you'll hear it. Thank you very much, Dominic.
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So he kind of thinks, well, what are we trading for? Four, what are we giving them in return? Now, at one point, he's called in by the Secretary of State of the Congo, who describes as a man thin to emaciation, inhuman, bloodless, petrified. I mean, there is a quality of Bram Stoker to quite a lot of what he's writing about. Sinister things in crates. Exactly.
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I was about to say there was something of the Hollywood melodrama, but actually the comparison with Dracula is a really nice one. This man calls him in and he's absolutely furious. He says the newspapers have reported what was in one of our recent shipments back to the Congo, a huge consignment of guns. And this sort of stuff shouldn't be appearing in the newspapers.
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Make sure it doesn't happen again. And Morel is confused by this. He thinks, well, why are we shipping so many guns back to the Congo? And why can't the newspapers report it? Why is it such a big deal? I mean, it's interesting that the guy assumes that Morel would understand. Yes, exactly. Isn't that so interesting? Well, I think a lot of people perhaps would not have been curious.
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Morel is curious. So he goes away and he starts just idly almost looking into the account books, looking into the figures in the office. And he thinks this is weird. Nothing really adds up. The accounts that he sees, the figures written down, the ledgers, don't match what he can see coming off the ships, the massive consignments of rubber and ivory. And that's not reflected in the earnings.
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And it becomes obvious to him that there's a lot of fraud going on. Somebody is skimming off the top. And the answer, of course, is King Leopold. King Leopold is lying about the amount coming in and about how much money he's making. But the other thing that becomes obvious to him once he starts going through all these kind of dusty ledgers is that consignment of guns was not the exception.
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It was the rule. They are sending thousands and thousands of guns and rounds of ammunition to the Congo and nothing else. And we ended last week's episode with his great moment of revelation, a very kind of Hollywood scene. I was giddy and appalled at the cumulative significance of my discoveries. It must be bad enough to stumble upon a murder.
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I had stumbled upon a secret society of murderers with a king for a ringleader. I mean, it would make a great film, wouldn't it? It would, absolutely. Tabby, our assistant producer, said it reminded her of the Robert Harris novel about the Dreyfus case. An officer and a spy. And it very much has that quality. Yeah. Yeah, kind of whistleblower. Exactly.
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So Morel goes to see the head of the company, who's a man called Sir Alfred Jones, the head of the shipping magnate. So he must be thrilled. Of course. Sir Alfred Jones is horrified when Morel says, I found all these discrepancies and I'm extremely concerned. Jones says, well, listen, I'll go to Brussels myself and I'll talk to the king about it.
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Then Jones calls in Morel a few weeks later and says, well, I've been to Brussels. I saw the king. The king said, yes, he's very disturbed about what you've discovered. He'll set up a commission. Exactly. Reforms will be carried out. And Sir Alfred says to Morel, don't worry. The Belgians are doing great things, and we have to give them time to get their African house in order.
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In the next few months, Morel finds that he's being frozen out. He's not going to Antwerp as much as he was. Then he's offered a promotion. Great news, you've done so well, and you're going to be posted overseas. And then he says, no, I don't want to go overseas. I want to stay in Britain. And then he is offered another promotion to become a consultant, pushed up the ladder of the company.
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And it's very clear to him that the company are now trying to shut him up. Or to offer him a bribe. Effectively, both. I mean, that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to either get him out of the picture or push him upstairs, push him into a back office, well-paid, stay quiet.
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So in 1901, at the age of 28, he resigns from Elder Dempster and he resigns to become a full-time writer, but not just any writer. As he wrote himself, his goal was, and I quote, to do my best to expose and destroy what I then knew to be a legalized infamy, accompanied by unimaginable barbarities and responsible for a vast destruction of human life.
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In other words, he has quit the company to become a full-time campaigner, to become an activist. effectively. Now, the real puzzle is why? What is it in him? that makes him want to do this. See, I don't think it's a puzzle at all. I know what you're going to say.
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Well, that's the only, that is one possible explanation. The only downside with that is there's absolutely no evidence for it because we do know that he's in no way personally religious and there's no evidence that his mother did have this influence on him. So it's a supposition and it's not an unreasonable one, but it's only a supposition. He has values. Yes, he does.
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And where do these values come from?
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Maybe they come from his boarding school, Tom. You're underplaying the importance of the score, which is sad. I don't think so.
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Well, the truth of the matter, of course, is we don't know. What we do know is he does feel personally responsible. because he has worked for the company. And I think that's a huge part of this story. And it is also with his great ally, who we'll come to later. This is the story of two men who both felt implicated because they had both been perhaps naive in some way.
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I think the parallels are very, very clear. It's a very common story, actually. Some of the keenest abolitionists tend to be people who've been involved with the trade in some way. Anyway... At first, he struggles. And this is something actually that Adam Hochschild's book doesn't really capture, that actually at first...
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He succeeds only because he gets funding from a rival Liverpool shipping tycoon. And this is a guy called John Holt, who's a rival of Sir Alfred Jones and gives him the money to found his own paper, the West African Mail. So there's a really good article on this by a scholar called Dean Clay. And he points out that basically this is a question not just of altruism, but of business rivalry.
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This rival tycoon wants to bring down Elder Demester, or at least do them down a bit. So he gives Morel the money to do his campaign. And Morel starts to pour out not just, you know, dozens of articles, thousands of words, but millions of words. So an enormous quantity of what we have been saying in this podcast about the Congo is
The Rest Is History
540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
comes from Edmund D. Morell because he is the single biggest source. He's publishing books, he's publishing articles, editorials. When you look behind so many of the anecdotes and the quotations and indeed the statistics, they come from this one man. And he never goes to the Congo, that's the thing, rather like King Leopold.
The Rest Is History
540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
But the extraordinary thing is he is absolutely brilliant at persuading insiders, even people within the mercenary force, the force publique, to leak material to him, which goes back to your question, Tom, last week about are there people who feel guilty? Are there people who have regrets or have doubts?
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There clearly are because from 1901 they are feeding this guy information, the facts and figures and anecdotes and all of these kinds of things.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
Exactly. He gets so much information, he starts to taunt the administration of the Congo. He'll print lists of... of things that their own employees have offered to sell him. He'll say, basically, here's the bullet-pointed list of the things that I'm being offered. At one point, they issue an instruction to their subordinates.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
They say, stop writing things down because Morella's reprinting them in his newspaper. He gets hold of that order, and he prints that in his newspaper as well. So he's mocking them the whole time. But his single most powerful source, actually, this will please you, Tom. Doesn't please me, but it doesn't surprise me. Let's put it like that.
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It's not from within the administration, but it's missionaries. So many of the most shocking stories that we mentioned last week about floggings, about beatings, about these horrendous atrocities. These are from Protestant missionaries, often British, American or Scandinavian.
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They are seared on the mind, and that's partly why his campaign is so effective. So by about 1903, within two years of leaving his job, Morell has managed to, by writing and writing and writing, and he's got all these great journalistic contacts, he places pieces everywhere, he's managed to make this a political issue in Britain.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And in May 1903, the House of Commons actually holds a debate on the Congo Free State. There is a motion to call upon the signatories to the Conference of Berlin to take measures to ensure that the Congolese people are going to be treated with greater humanity. And the motion is introduced by the Liberal MP Herbert Samuel.
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540. Horror in the Congo: A Conspiracy Unmasked (Part 3)
And he, in his speech, so I had a look at Hansard for the text of the debate, he deplores what he calls the seething turmoil and barbarous acts of repression under King Leopold. You know, he doesn't hold back. But the brilliant thing for us, Tom, is that he presents this as a great patriotic British endeavour to clean this up.
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Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Perhaps the interpretation of the Quran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Muhammad. From such calamities was Christendom delivered, by the genius and fortune of one man.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Right, so Char Martel, although there is a Merovingian king, we don't need to really worry too much about him. He's called Theuderic IV.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But Char Martel is the ruler of huge swathes of what was once Gaul, Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, and so on. But that leaves one other place in the southeast of France, which is Aquitaine. and Aquitaine stands against Charles Martel. Is that right? And this is going to be very important for our story of the Battle of Tours. So Aquitaine has got a duke called Odo, or Odo. Let's call him Odo.
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So tell me about him. He's a very grizzled, experienced bloke.
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Charles, the illegitimate son of the elder Pepin, was content with the titles of Mayor or Duke of the Franks, but he deserved to become the father of a line of kings. That was Edward Gibbon in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, one of the most famous passages of historical prose ever written.
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And they are launching raids all the time northwards as far as Burgundy, right?
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Can I just stop you right there? So a lot of listeners may find that really interesting because that obviously undermines the idea that this is a sort of titanic clash of civilizations and that people are consciously engaged in a clash of civilizations. Because here you have an alliance between Christian and, in inverted commas, Muslim and a marriage alliance along with that.
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So there's no sense that they've crossed some kind of tremendous ideological divide in doing that.
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He is describing the legacy of the Battle of Tor, which was fought on the 10th of October 732, or perhaps 733, nobody is entirely sure. between the Franks and what he called an invading force of Saracens. So Tom, great passage, great book, great subject. Just bring some of it alive for us. So who is Charles? Who are the Saracens? Where are we and what's going on?
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Okay, so what will happen? Will they strip it bare? Will there be a great battle? Who knows? Come back after the break and find out.
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Head to Blinds.com now for up to 40% off select styles plus a free professional measure.
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Rules and restrictions may apply. In this year, two comets appeared around the Sun, striking great terror into those that saw them. One went before the Sun, rising in the morning. The other followed it, sinking in the evening, as if foreboding dire calamity for East as well as West.
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Certainly, one anticipated the day's beginning and the other the night's, so that they might act as a sign that evils threatened mortals at both times. They bore a fiery torch to the north as if to start a fire. They appeared in the month of January and remained for nearly two weeks. At that time, a very serious plague of Saracens plundered the Gauls with miserable slaughter.
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So that was the venerable Bede, writing in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Now Bede, not brilliant at dates, to be fair to him. He said this happened in 729.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
He's at least three years out here. Probably. So he dated the comets to 729, but there wasn't any Saracen invasion of Gorn in 729. Most scholars think he's got in a muddle and he's actually talking about 732. Which is a bit odd because he actually claimed that he finished his book a year earlier. So maybe he put this in afterwards.
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Saladin in the Ladybug.
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I was about to say, it's one where the limbs of the bow kind of curve away. So it's a sort of more elaborate curve. Yeah. So they kind of curl back on themselves. Like a horn, almost.
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Yeah, Arabian Night kind of bow. And because of that, because of the extra sort of tension or whatever, you can have a shorter bow. So in other words, it's easier to fire when you're on horseback.
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So it's a bit like the images of fighting that you get in Bernard Cornwell's books, which are, again, not a massively dissimilar period. People packed in a kind of shield wall, stabbing with their swords relentlessly through the gaps in the enemy line.
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Kind of impassable, immovable, indomitable.
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So that's it. The invaders, the raiders have been beaten off and they've vanished with their stuff because they don't want to lose their, what plunder they've already gained.
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But what it isn't is a long-planned, cold-blooded, coordinated, massive invasion. No. It's not that.
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The one thing I would say is if they have that, they have to keep supplying it with men and whatnot from beyond the Pyrenees, which does look like a pretty significant natural barrier through most of history between France and Spain.
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You've made a massive leap in the course of a sentence from they'd probably got Aquitaine to suddenly Italy has fallen as well. Like your dominoes are falling very quickly.
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And this is an argument that people made particularly in the 19th and early 20th century, isn't it? That the Battle of Tours, if it was fought in 732, was one of the genuinely pivotal moments when history might have gone differently. That had the Franks lost to the Saracens...
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Which is so common. That's what Christians think of them in the early years of Islam, isn't it?
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then Islam, the advance of the Arab armies would have continued up into France and that the entire course of European and world history might have been different. And in fact, all Europe might have fallen within the kind of Islamic world. And people genuinely made that argument very vigorously, among them Adolf Hitler, right?
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Are there not some other reasons why you could question the idea about the momentousness of this battle? So, for example, the Mayad Chronicles often mention big defeats. So they mentioned defeats in the early stages of the Reconquista, for example, but they never mentioned this at all. Like it doesn't even feature.
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They treat it as a raid that just, you know, just one raid among many and beaten back. I looked this up. There were more raids in 734. There was a raid in 736. And there was actually, some people think, an even bigger raid, even bigger invasion in 739. when the Umayyads got to Burgundy, only to be beaten back by the Franks. So in other words, this was not the end of their incursions.
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So in that sense, it's not really a turning point. It doesn't change anything because they just keep coming.
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But there's one other thing which is even more important, which I think is arguably much more important than the Battle of Tours, and that's in 740, a huge revolt breaks out in what's now Morocco, Great Berber Revolt. And that basically cuts off Umayyad Spain from the sort of Arab heartland.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
It means that the age of raiding kind of comes to an end because they can't keep raising all the, you know, there's so much internal dissension and the Emirates can't keep raising all these Berber troops.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So that would seem to undermine the idea that, oh, they get Akutay and then they get this and they get this and they get this because actually they've got so many problems in their own kind of backyard, as it were, that they were actually never going to be able to do all that because of the massive ructions going on in North Africa.
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All right, well, if people want to listen to that, we've got an episode on Umayyad Spain, which I greatly recommend. But for the time being, we're going to be going on with the story of the Franks, right, Tom? So what's coming up next?
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Brilliant. So next up is our Charlemagne trilogy, one of the most epic stories we've ever done on The Rest Is History. Now, the good news, if you're a member of The Rest Is History Club, is that you should have all three parts of that trilogy right now.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Now, if you're not a member of the club and you'd like to get your hands on them, all you need to do is head to therestishistory.com and sign up and you can have that Charlemagne trilogy straight away. If not, I'm afraid you'll just have to wait. See you then. Bye bye. Bye bye.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Well, here is a reminder that we at therestishistory.com offer gift memberships. So if you're good at dropping hints or if you're short on a present for a family member, for a friend or for a partner, Tom and I would like to remind you of the ultimate Christmas stocking filler. And it is, of course, a subscription to the Rest Is History Club, which is full to the brim with bonus episodes.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
It's got access to the much-loved Discord chat community. It's got newsletters. It's got all kinds of goodies. Simply go to therestishistory.com and look for gifts.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
We do. So we often say we've got exciting news, but this is genuinely very, very exciting news. We are thrilled to announce that after the sellout show that we did earlier this year, The Rest Is History will be returning to the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday, the 4th of May to perform live once again with an orchestra.
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So that first show that we did this year was a truly glorious experience. And we are hoping that this, too, will be an unforgettable night. There'll be great music. We'll be telling great stories. We'll be delving into the history. So you had better get your hands on tickets for the show as soon as you can.
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That is the Rest Is History live with the Philharmonia Orchestra Tchaikovsky and Wagner. It's at the Royal Albert Hall on Sunday the 4th of May. Now, the tickets are available for members on Wednesday the 18th of December and for the general public on Thursday the 19th of December. And please make sure that you don't miss it.
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After all, Christmas is just around the corner. And a very happy coincidence, our first official Rest Is History book is now out as the perfect stocking-sized paperback.
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It's sure to make the festive period much more entertaining for all involved, and it is available in bookshops everywhere now.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
But this is not what the vast majority of historical scholars now think, is it? Most agree now that the Battle of Tours was massively overblown. It was kind of a propaganda victory above all else, partly because the Arabs are not trying to launch a massive invasion of what was once Gaul. It's a raid, one among many that they launch.
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And the consequences are perhaps not as great as is often thought.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
I do think when you read an academic on the Battle of Tor, academics who say, oh, it's a terribly important moment, it's a pivotal moment in world civilization, a battle that changed everything, they always do tend to be of a very particular political persuasion.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
All right. Well, let's start with the Arabs. So Gibbon calls them Saracens, which is not a word that you often hear these days. But actually, they're not really Arabs, are they? Most of that army are almost certainly Berbers from North Africa, from what we'd once have called Mauritania, or probably a lot of them from Spain. So they're not Arabs. And actually, are they even Muslims?
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
Because, of course, at this point, Islam is still in the process of kind of being formed, isn't it, to some degree?
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
It's a raiding party and not, I guess, totally unlike Scandinavian raiding party in a not massively dissimilar period.
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522. Warlords of the West: A Clash of Ice and Fire (Part 3)
So now beyond that is the land of the Franks. And that's the kingdom we talked about last week. It's ruled by the Merovingian dynasty. We left it with Clothar II. He's won his victory over Brunhild and he's basically got a monarchy over the whole of what was once the Roman territory of Gaul.
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So all the different kingdoms are now acknowledging him as their, all the different bits rather, are now acknowledging him as their king. But I read that the seeds of the Merovingian's downfall had already been sown. It's
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A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the Rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire. The repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the highlands of Scotland. The Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates. and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames.
The Rest Is History
530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That's true. So maybe it does. Who knows? Maybe if more Czechs had read Three Men and a Boat, the story. The story would have ended very differently. Right, we shouldn't laugh about this because it's a very tragic story. Hacher, his daughter and the foreign minister travel by train to Berlin. He's asked for a meeting with Hitler.
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It takes them five hours and they arrive in the evening of the 14th of March. Hitler behaves, he's a very poor host, I think it's fair to say.
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Yeah, exactly the same. He keeps him waiting in this hotel. Always hotels with Hitler. What is it with Hitler and hotels? Keeps this bloke waiting in a hotel for ages while he is finishing watching a film, a comedy, I think, called Ein Hoffnungsloser Fall, which means a hopeless case. An ominous, ominous title there for the Czechs. Finally, at midnight, Hitler says, right, I finished the film.
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Get this bloke over to the Reich Chancellery. So Hacher is brought to the Reich Chancellery and there they make him inspect the Guard of Honour. They have all their guns and stuff and their steel helmets. A sort of humiliation for him. Do they have the skulls at this point? Yeah, there's probably a lot of skulls. To be fair, the Kaiser had all sorts of uniforms with skulls on, didn't he?
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So even great associates of the rest's history have kind of got a bit of skull decoration. At 1am, Harker is shown into Hitler's massive study in the Reich Chancellery. It's absolutely rammed to people. So all the bad guys are there. Ribbentrop's there. Goering is there. Wilhelm Keitel, the general, is there. And Harker, this guy, is very, very nervous.
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Is he polishing his glasses as they steam up? He undoubtedly isn't thinking about Jerome K. Jerome. Thinking wistfully about comic songs. Exactly. Hitler launches into this massive rant against the Czechs. He says, I've had enough of you. You know, you're terrible people. And to protect our security, I'm going to impose a protectorate over Czechoslovakia.
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I'm going to absorb it into the Reich and it'll become a protectorate of Germany. My troops, he says, are on their way. Too late. They can't be recalled. They're going to cross your border at six o'clock in the morning. I want you to ring Prague, tell your people to offer no resistance. And if they offer any resistance, we'll kill you and we'll crush them.
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And Goering, he chimes in for good measure. He says, oh, my air force, the Luftwaffe, will be over Prague by dawn. And it's up to you whether they bomb your city into dust or not.
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No, I don't think he does. It's not exactly an empty threat, but it's pure blackmail. And at that, I mean, incredibly, although not incredibly, you might say, Harker collapses. He just collapses. He falls to the ground in a dead faint. Some sources say he may well have had a heart attack at that point. And he drops to the ground. And the Nazis are...
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They're actually quite thrown by this because they're terrified that everybody will say they've murdered him, which is very bad PR for them to murder the president. Yeah, it's a very bad look. Of course, Hitler's doctor, Dr. Morell, who's the guy who's always giving him cocktails of amphetamine. Amphetamine. So he gives them some speed. Yeah, he's on hand with an injection.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They managed to bring Hacher back to life, get him back up. He says, oh, fine, I'll ring Prague. He goes to ring Prague. It's very like the Munich conference. Telephones don't work. The phones aren't working. And the Luftwaffe are heading towards Prague. At this point, Ribbentrop has a massive strop at this point, a massive meltdown. He says, oh my God, the phones never work here.
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It's like Britain in the 1970s. The phones aren't working. Nothing works here. Everything is rubbish. You know, he's kind of ranting and raving. Actually, he's being a bit harsh on his own phone system. It turns out the problem is actually with the exchange in Prague, not with Berlin. So Ribbentrop is being too harsh towards German telephone engineering. He's talking Germany down.
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Why does Wibbentrop hate Germany? It's sad. Shocking. Anyway, finally, Harker does get through to Prague and he says, okay, don't fight, don't fight, don't resist. And at four o'clock in the morning, under tremendous pressure, I mean, it is a really, really tragic scene, he signs a declaration that he is putting his people under the protection of the German Reich.
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So Harker kind of collapses again.
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Pure colonial conquest. And Hitler is probably as excited and happy about this as he's been about anything because he goes in to see his secretaries. They're called Christa Schröder and Gerda Daranowski. And he famously says to them, one of them, I can't remember which one it is, tells the story. He goes in, he says, so children, to the secretaries, and he points to his cheeks of his face.
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He says, I want each one of you to give me a kiss here and here. This is the happiest day of my life. What has been striven for in vain for centuries, I have been fortunate enough to bring about. I will go down as the greatest German in history. He's no longer crippled by self-doubt at this point. No, I think it's fair to say he's not crippled by self-doubt.
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So two hours later, right on time, the first German units crossed the border into their new protectorate. Again, this is the first time that they have not been greeted by cheering crowds. So that, again, is a reminder how different this is from the Rhineland or from Austria or even the Sudetenland. There's nobody cheering. There's nobody with flowers. There's nobody saluting.
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By and large, the Czech people stay indoors. They are horrified. It's a misty, snowy day. It's a funereal atmosphere. Hitler crosses the border later that day by train. Then he transfers to this kind of fleet of Mercedes cars. And now he can go to Prague, which is...
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I mean, his ultimate object. He's got his arm outstretched in the salute as he passes all his troops who are columns of troops heading into Czechoslovakia. He reaches Prague. Night has fallen. He goes right up to the castle. If anyone's been to Prague. Amazing. Dominates the city. Dominates the city. The kings of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperors, Rudolf II had been there. He goes up.
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The castle is dark and abandoned. To his great displeasure, it's like when Ted Heath became prime minister and arrived at Number 10 Downing Street. There's no food. This was the case, Tom, in 1970. There's no food at the Prague Castle in 1939. And Hitler sends his military escort out to find food. They bring back ham and bread and some Czech beer, lager.
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Hitler doesn't like the beer, which is madness, because Czech beer is very good. He says it's too bitter. Not pleased at all. So to add to Hitler's many faults... It's an inability to appreciate Czech beer. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Add that to the charge sheet.
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He issues this proclamation which he says, the Bohemian and Moravian lands have belonged to the living space of the German people for a thousand years, which is not really true. And he says, now they've been reunited with their masters.
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Bohemian Moravia. Yes, exactly.
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They do indeed. Yes, they do. The Bohemian Moravia becomes part of the Reich. The Slovak state becomes, under Monsignor Tissot, becomes a kind of clerical fascist puppet state of Germany.
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And the last bit of Czechoslovakia, which is over in the east, subcarpathian Ruthenia, is taken initially by Hungary and then it actually ends up being part of Ukraine in the Soviet Union later on and remains Ukrainian to this day. So the Czechs never get it back. And a first in the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, there is a sort of pretense of autonomy.
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So there's still a Czech president, still a prime minister and so on, the Czech courts. But over time, of course, all this begins to disappear. Jews are repressed. The state's assets are plundered. And it really becomes worse when Heydrich from the SS becomes the deputy protector in 1941. And then he gets shot, doesn't he, in their terrible reprisals. Exactly.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So Hitler returns to Berlin in triumph. Sort of Roman style, like a conqueror. Great crowds. Goering is there with kind of great tears on his fat face. And now everyone's happy. Everyone in Germany kind of happy, are they? Well, this is the interesting thing, right? So the Nazi high command are happy. Nazi true believers are very happy. They've got a conquest. But...
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
For ordinary Germans, I don't know that they care very much about Bohemia and Moravia. I mean, nobody thinks that these are an integral part of the right. They've never been part of Germany. In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw quotes a teenage girl from Paderborn. Oh, where the Pope went to meet Charlemagne. Right, exactly. I think this is from a girl's diary.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
The girl's mother said, is he never satisfied? Can't he get enough? And the girl herself writes in her diary, she says, I completely understand why we took the Sudetenland because it's full of Germans, but why are we taking over an entirely alien people, those are her words, who cannot possibly be turned into Germans? Because, of course, the 1930s, it is an age of nationalist thinking.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
You know, when ethnic nationalism is so important to people, it constructs the way they view the world. So for Germans who've been brought up on ethnic nationalism, and linguistic nationalism, to suddenly have all these Czechs in the Reich doesn't make any sense. What are they doing there? And I suppose also more Jews.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And of course more Jews, exactly, which will be even more the case when we turn to Poland later on. And even Nazi Party reports themselves slightly sort of reluctantly said most people are actually pretty They don't quite understand this. They're grudging. They're even critical. They don't understand why it was necessary.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Richard Evans, in his book on the Third Reich, he quotes a worker who said, we were always winning these days, but we were always winning once before, and that came to a bad end. So in other words, there is a slight sense of foreboding about all this.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I think this is Hitler's first really, really serious misstep because I think much more than Munich, this is the moment that destroys the case for appeasement. Because if you were massively pro-appeasement, even after Munich, you could say, well, we've avoided war and really the Sudetenland is full of Germans.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I mean, I think this is what you might say would be the revisionist case for appeasement, which is if you give Hitler every possible chance, then when the crunch comes... You will have a united country where everybody says, look, clearly we gave him every opportunity. Apart from unity, of course. Apart from unity, Medford and Oswald Mosley.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We gave him every opportunity and he showed himself to be a total and utter shyster. And the same reaction in France. Absolutely the same reaction in France. So in France, Deladier, the prime minister, who had been there in Munich, of course, looking like a snail, looking very miserable, said, He says to his Chamber of Deputies, right, okay, fine. It's very clear now. We have to prepare for war.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And they vote him emergency powers in the nation's defence after this moment. In Britain, every newspaper, the Observer, which had been a pro-appeasement newspaper, had said this was, and I quote, the most shameful and ominous page in the modern annals of Europe. The brilliant diarist, the Tory MP, Chips Channon, he'd been an ultra-appeaser, a massive admirer of Chamberlain.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No bolder, bolder departure from the written bond has ever been committed in history. The manner of its surpassed comprehension and Hitler's callous desertion of the prime minister is stupefying. I can never forgive him. So in other words, this business, I think, is not as famous actually as Munich or the attack on Poland. I think really, really matters.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And Chamberlain at first doesn't quite get it. He gives a speech in the House of Commons that's very perfunctory and doesn't quite match the mood of the moment. But then two days later, which is the 17th of March, he goes to give a speech in Birmingham, of course, the Chamberlain stronghold. And he clearly, by this point, has changed his tune because he strikes his hardest line yet.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He says, it's very clear now, Hitler intends, and I quote, to dominate the world by force. If that's right, we will stop him. He says, Britain will take part to the utmost of its power in resisting such a challenge if it were made. And I think here, actually, as in 1938, He speaks for the nation. He's reflecting the public mood.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
You can see it in papers and letters and diaries in Britain and in France. With this attack on Czechoslovakia, Hitler really has crossed the line and there is no going back now. We know what kind of man he is.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Exactly. He's saying, where are we going to draw the line? And the very next day, 18th of March, he meets his cabinet and he says exactly that. Like, okay, we draw the line now. One more step and it is war. Where will Hitler's next challenge come? And Chamberlain is in no doubt the key to the future of Europe, he says, will be Poland.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yes. So Poland, Polish history 101. Poland had vanished from the map of Europe after 1795 for more than 120 years. It had been partitioned between the empires, as lots of people will know, between the empires of Russia, Prussia and Austria. And Poland got its independence back at the end of the First World War. And it's one of the largest countries in Central Europe. It's 31 million people.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
But Poland, unlike Czechoslovakia, is very, very rickety. So because it's been carved out of three different empires, nothing is joined up. It doesn't even have a joined up railway network. Because they've all got different gauges. Yeah, exactly. It's very rural by and large. A lot of it is very poor. A lot of the First World War in the East was fought in Poland, so it's scarred by war.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Like a lot of Central European countries, it has an issue with minorities. Basically, it's meant to be an ethnic nation state, but you can't draw the boundaries perfectly. So they don't feel that diversity is their strength. They do not feel the diversity is their strength. Only about two-thirds of the population are ethnic Poles. So if you look at the census, there's about 4 million Ukrainians.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
There are 3 million people who are identified in the census as Jews. There are a million Belarusians. There are almost a million Silesian Germans. And that, I guess, is the key thing for Hitler. Of course. In fact, again, unlike Czechoslovakia or far more than Czechoslovakia, none of Poland's neighbours like it. Everybody thinks it's illegitimate. Everybody contests its borders.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And it's an extraordinary thing that in the three years after 1918, the Poles fought six separate frontier wars.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Of course it is. They pretty much fight every single one of their neighbours, most famously the Soviet Union. They turn them back in the miracle on the Vistula when they defeat the Bolsheviks. You know, it's a terrible thing for the Poles. They're trapped between two much larger, much richer neighbours, both of whom regard Poland as illegitimate, and they are Germany and the Soviet Union.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That was how Goering welcomed the New Year, Tom. And of course, we always like to welcome the New Year in the company of these terrible people. So New Year 1939. And Goering there, I think it's fair to say, is speaking for tens of millions of ordinary Germans. They all love their Fuhrer. Well, Hitler is very popular. And of course, there are people who have issues with the regime of various kinds.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No, it's not. To pick up an analogy that we mentioned in the last week's series about Munich, it's rather like you're on that plane strapped between Goering and Ribbentrop. And actually things don't get any better for the Poles. They suffer massive inflation and unemployment in the 1920s and 30s. A million people emigrate, mostly to the United States. They can't sustain their democracy.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So there's a coup in 1926 by the great wartime nationalist hero, Marshal Pilsudski. And then they have an authoritarian regime called the Sanatsia regime, which means the kind of healing regime. And this is a kind of nationalist authoritarian regime. The key person in this is probably the foreign minister called Josef Beck. Beck is a Calvinist, very unusually for a Pole.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And he's a kind of very clever satanized man, but everybody hates him.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Is that an issue? I don't think it's a massive issue deep down. Because, of course, there are lots of countries at this point that are not democracies. And I think it would have been an easier sell if it was. But actually, the French, for example, the French are very Polonophile and have been for a very long time. Yeah, Chopin.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They regard themselves as having a kind of special relationship with Poland. And in Britain, do people say, oh, the Poles, really? They're not a democracy? I don't think they do, actually. I don't think they give it that much thought deep down. Don't really know anything about the Poles. I don't think they really care what kind of government they have.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
The interesting thing is what Hitler and the Germans make of the Poles. So most Germans... hold the Poles in very, very low regard. So in the 19th century, when a lot of Poland, of course, had been part of the Wilhelm Ein Reich, the Kaiser's regime, they had looked down on the Poles. Germans had said, well, the Poles are very backward. The Poles are very superstitious. They're very stupid.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They actually had an expression, Polenwirtschaft, a Polish business, which meant kind of muddle and incompetence. You know, they sort of looked on them, I suppose the analogy would be how people in the late 19th century in Britain talked about Ireland, actually, as a kind of, you know, oh, they can never govern themselves.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They're so disorganized and they're so backward and primitive and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how Germans think of the Poles. Even in the 1920s, lots of Germans said, look, in the long run, Poland will have to cease to exist again. There's no way we can live with a country called Poland on our eastern border.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I mean, the head of the army of the Weimar Republic, General Hans von Siegt in 1922, said Poland's existence is intolerable and incompatible with Germany's vital interests. It must and it will disappear through its own weakness and, with our help, through Russia.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
But even though it's actually, of course, not Russia anymore, it's the Soviet Union. But they think, you know, it's kind of the law of nature and of history. that the Poles never govern themselves. A bit like, you know, the Kurds don't have a state.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Well, this is fascinating. Hitler, who, of course, later on is perceived as incredibly anti-Polish, he doesn't have a strong view about Poland at all before 1938. He barely mentions Poland in Mein Kampf. And the obvious reason for this is that, of course, Hitler is not German.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yeah. So he never really thinks about the Poles. Why would he? When he's in Vienna, the Galician Poles aren't massively playing on his mind. He doesn't care. Think about Warsaw and all of that kind of stuff. And actually, in January 1934, he had overruled conservatives in the Foreign Office to sign a non-aggression treaty with Poland because he wanted to secure his eastern flank.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
There are things that are wrong with the regime. But a lot of ordinary Germans, I think at the beginning of 1939, would say that Hitler's six years in power have brought a series of great achievements. They've rearmed. The worst hardships of the Depression are over. They've reoccupied the Rhineland. They've unified with Austria.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No, unless you're Neville Chamberlain, in which case you love a piece of paper. But I think it's fair to say Adolf Hitler is not a man who adheres to a non-aggression pact. I think that's the one lesson we can all take from these three seasons on the Nazis.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I think if I signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin, I wouldn't necessarily have a great deal of confidence in his word. If I signed a non-aggression pact with Neville Chamberlain or Deladier... Then you would. I would. Wouldn't you?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They've wasted their time, Tom. I think it's fair to say. Good.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Right. So what does Hitler want to do with Poland? He's absolutely, even at the beginning of 1939, I'm not sure he's thinking about attacking and conquering it. He's thinking that Poland will just be a satellite, basically turn it into a client state, which is what he does with Slovakia and what he does with Hungary. Bind Poland to him as a loyal ally in the crusade against Bolshevism.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And actually, you can see why he thinks he could do that. They have an authoritarian nationalist regime. The Poles had rather let themselves down at Munich. Yeah, so Hitler's given them a chunk of Czechoslovakia. He has. The old Silesian Duchy of Teschen. Not the Silesian Duchy of Teschen. Yeah. The Czechs and the Poles had fought each other for this in 1919, and the Czechs had got it.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Right. And actually, there's a very famous moment. So two days after Munich, they got it. And the Poles went in. And the Czech general who handed it over to them, he said to the Polish general, well, you better make the most of this because I'll tell you what, you're going to be next. And the Poles said, ha, ha, ha, that will never happen. And how wrong they were.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Anyway, three weeks after that moment... Ribbentrop asks the Polish ambassador, a man called Mr. Lipski, to come and see him. And he says, we actually have a bit of a problem that we need to discuss. You can imagine the blood draining from the Polish ambassador's face. So here is the problem. After the First World War, when Poland had been carved out of these empires, the peacemakers at Versailles
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
realized that Poland wasn't going to get any access to the sea at all, because it was on the northern flank of Poland. It was all East Prussia, which is German, and Lithuania. And they realized that they needed to give Poland an outlet to the sea. Otherwise, Germany in particular would have a complete stranglehold over Poland's trade, its exports and imports.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And now, most recently, they have annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. And they've done all of that without provoking the one thing that most of them fear, which is their a European war. However, against that, it's not all good news, is it?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So they'd carved out this Polish corridor, as they called it, which is quite narrow. The narrowest point is about 20 miles across. It went through West Prussia. So basically dividing Germany into two parts, into the main bit of the Reich and then East Prussia. And there's the Polish corridor between them. And that's not the kind of thing that Hitler would approve of, is it? Not at all.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Because the population of the Polish corridor is mixed. It is majority Polish, probably. I mean, this is very contested at the time by kind of rival census takers. But there's a very sizable German minority. And at the north end of this corridor on the coast is the city of Danzig, or Dansk as it is today. And there is no doubt what kind of city Danzig is. It is a Hanseatic League German city.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
It looks kind of German. Now, it had belonged to Poland. It had belonged to the Teutonic Knights. It had belonged to Poland again. And then it had belonged to Prussia. The population of Danzig is definitely majority German-speaking, at least 90%. I mean, you can go to Gdansk today, which I have. It's the most amazing city to visit. It's incredibly rich architecturally and in history and whatnot.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And it looks like a Hanseatic League city. However... You know, Poland needs its outlet on the sea. So what the Versailles peacemakers did was they made Danzig a free city, an independent city-state under the supervision of the League of Nations. So very Hanseatic. Yeah, very Hanseatic.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
It was governed by a Senate, basically a German Senate, but the Poles had the right to use the harbour and they were given a post office there and customs posts. And on this sort of peninsula across the harbour called the Westerplatte, which we'll be talking about a fair bit in the next couple of episodes, there was a Polish military garrison. And this was a massive running sore.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
This was a massive affront to German nationalist conservatives, especially if you're Prussian or something.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yeah, absolutely. You're like, this is a Prussian city. These people are Germans. It's not right that it's a free state. You know, it should really be part of the Reich. And who cares about the Poles? That's basically the German position. So this is what Ribbentrop says to this ambassador. He says, right, we've had enough. We want Danzig back.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We also want to be able to build a motorway and a railway across the Polish corridor, which we control. We'll extend the non-aggression pact for another 25 years. Tom, I know your views on non-aggression pacts. There's a good deal. And we'd like you to join the anti-comintern pact to basically bind you into our alliance, our anti-Bolshevik alliance.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Well, as we all know, and as is very well chronicled at the time in the newspapers of the world, there is the dark side to the Nazi regime, the concentration camps, the murders, the repression, the persecution above all of the Jews, symbolized by the Nuremberg Laws and the the pogrom, the Kristallnacht at the end of 1938. All of that is very well known.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
The Polish guy says, all right, well, I'll take this back to Warsaw, see what they say. And the Poles reply very quickly and they say, absolutely no way. We can't allow ourselves to be cut off from the sea.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Of course you are. Neville Chamberlain joins us now on the podcast.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Correct. They are.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No. And the reason is because if they do this, they turn themselves completely into a satellite of Germany, which they are never, ever, ever going to do. Right. Okay. They think if we give them Danzig, we totally lose control of our trade. Germany will now control everything we export and everything we import because it has to go through this port pretty much.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Or if it's going to go by land, it's got to go through Germany. So we just turn ourselves completely into a puppet. If we join the anti-comintern pact, we are on Germany's side against Russia. Again, we lose control of our foreign policy. Yeah, and they're bordering Russia. We're not going to do that.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
The point is Polish independence, which they fought for, which their forefathers have fought for for more than a century, they're not going to give that away like that. Now, Hitler at first thinks, oh, the Poles, they're being very difficult. But he doesn't immediately think, I'm going to attack them. He thinks they will see sense eventually. He invites Beck to the eagle's nest.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Beck goes along to the eagle's nest where Chamberlain went. And Beck says, look, you know, I can't help you. Polish public opinion will not allow us to give you these concessions. At this point, Hitler hasn't yet entered Prague. So he says to his aides, well, when I crush Czechoslovakia and I enter Prague, that will frighten the Poles and they will be more cooperative. So let's see if it does.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Let's go forward in time to March. Six days after Hitler has entered Prague as a conqueror, Ribbentrop again meets the Polish ambassador. And he says, right, I need Beck to come to Berlin. We're running out of patience. Our newspapers have had enough. They're really putting pressure on us. If you give us Danzig, maybe we'll give you a little bit of Slovakia.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We'll get a bit of Ukraine for you or something. Tell Beck to come anyway. We'll talk to him about it. And the ambassador five days later says, you know, Beck's not going to come. He doesn't want to come. You're not interested. He says he's not interested in anything that you could possibly offer him. And if you attack us, we'll fight you. Now, you may say, this is your point here, Tom.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
This is reckless. This is incredibly bold. Beck's argument and the polls argument is we saw what happened to Czechoslovakia.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
However, Hitler is genuinely popular at this point. It's a police state, of course, so it's hard to be certain. But all the evidence we have from journalists, from reports by the Social Democratic Party that were sort of smuggled to their leadership in exile, are that people are delighted at Hitler's foreign policy achievements. And had he stopped...
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
The Poles think, look, we saw with the Czechs what happened when you appease Hitler. When you give in to him, he just nibbles more and more and more and eventually he comes back for the lot. The only way to stand up to him is just to draw a red line and to say no, and then maybe he'll back off. And Beck gives this amazing speech, actually, to the Sejm, which is the Polish parliament.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He says, Peace is a precious and desirable thing. Our generation bloodied in war certainly deserves peace. But peace, like almost all things of this world, has its price, a high but immeasurable one. We in Poland do not know the concept of peace at any price. There is only one thing in the lives of men, nations and countries that is without price. And that thing is honour.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And that's the attitude that a Prussian nobleman should respect. And it reflects poorly on Prussian noblemen. They don't respect it in this case. Now, Beck is confident that he can back this up because he has sent feelers out to London saying, will you back me up here? Please, will you support me?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Now, we heard before the break, Chamberlain has already changed his policy and he thinks we need to deter Hitler. And his military chiefs are quite keen on an alliance with Poland because, of course, what they want is if there's a war with Hitler, they want Hitler to be fighting on two fronts, west and east.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
But, of course, there's no real practical possibility of British armed aid reaching Poland. No, and we will come to this in the next couple of episodes, that unfortunately there is a difference of opinion between London and Warsaw about whether or not Britain can actually help Poland. As we shall see, Britain doesn't. Now, the French are also keen on an alliance with Poland.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They've got a long history of friendship. And Deladier says to London, yeah, we'll fight for Danzig. You know, that's our red line. That's fine. That's the context for Chamberlain going to the House of Commons on the 31st of March, 1939.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
and delivering his famous guarantee that if Polish independence is threatened and if Poland resists, his majesty's government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish government all support in their power. Now, you made this point just a second ago. What does that actually mean? What could the British actually do? Britain is a long way from Poland and Germany is in the way.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So realistically, what can we do? And actually, even at this point, Chamberlain's military chiefs say to him, if Hitler does attack Poland, we're probably not going to do anything. There's nothing much we can practically do to help the Poles. But I suppose what Chamberlain would say in his defense is he doesn't see this as a last step, but as a first step. So he is thinking...
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We'll get Poland, then we'll maybe get Romania in an alliance, and ideally, maybe the Soviet Union.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yes, agreed. Of course, that's a very difficult card for any British government, especially a conservative government, to play. They regard the Soviet Union really as the ideological archenemy and have done for 20 years. You know, the Bolshevik, Stalin's regime, a blood-soaked regime, rumors, reports of the Great Terror coming out. There's been rumors of the famine in Ukraine and the Holodomor.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
If the 1st of January 1939, he dropped dead or he'd stopped right then and said, what we have, we hold, we consolidate. I think Goering's verdict, ludicrously delivered as it was, would have resonated with millions of ordinary Germans.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
You know, there are big obstacles to a deal with the Soviet Union. And one of the biggest, by the way, is the Poles. The Poles, when they hear talk of this, they're like, what? The Russians? We hate the Russians.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yeah, they know that. They know that Hitler has ranted and raved about the Soviet Union for, you know, more than a decade.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yes, absolutely. Somebody like Neville Chamberlain would have said to you, that's the dream. That basically they'll destroy each other. They're both terrible regimes and I hope they fight and I hope they both lose. That's exactly what a lot of people in Britain and indeed in France would have said, I should say.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So I think at this point, in March 1939, when they give the guarantee, they realise, of course, the next war is not going to be Hitler versus Stalin. The war that they're trying to avert is Hitler versus Poland. So Hitler versus Stalin is off the table as a war, realistically, at that point.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No, I don't think they think sitting back is an option at this point because they think they've sat back too much already. There's no appetite for sitting back at all at this point. All the momentum, all the kind of psychological momentum, political momentum is for deterrence. They feel they have to make a stand here and they can't just sit this one out.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That's the mentality that got them into this mess in the first place would be the argument.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Do you know who would probably make that argument? John Charmley. The historian John Charmley. Are you familiar with him?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Mearsheimer. John Mearsheimer. He might make this argument, but I wouldn't make it personally. I think they were right to try to deter Hitler in the States.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
You know who's a big fan of Mearsheimer? The realist Putinophile. Theo.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's a massive fan of John Mearsheim. It's one of Theo's worst takes, I think, in my mind. Anyway, that's by the by. Right. Hitler hears about the guarantee to... Don't cut that out, Theo. You're better than that. Hitler hears about the guarantee to Poland and he is stunned. See, this is Hitler misreading things, which he's doing at this point. Hitler can't believe it.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He can't believe that the Poles would stand up to him and he cannot believe that the British would be so... in his mind, deranged as to give Poland a guarantee. And Admiral Canaris, the intelligence chief, was with him at the Reich Chancellery when he heard the news and he has this description of Hitler. Hitler flew into a passion.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
With features distorted by fury, he stormed up and down his room, pounded his fists on the marble tabletop and spewed forth a series of savage imprecations. Then with his eyes flashing with an uncanny light, he growled the threat, I will brew them a devil's potion. I've always been struck by that because it just seems such a bizarre threat to make. I will brew them adept.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Must be some German expression, no? Do you think, Tom?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I mean, it's not an expression that people are bandying around in the 1930s. Hitler's been spending too much time with Wagner. That's what it is, isn't it?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So inevitably now he tells his generals to draw up their plans for war. And they present him on the 11th of April with a plan for Fallweiss, Case or Operation White.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They're always colours, yeah. Green, white and so on. The blueprint for the invasion of Poland, which their plan is to begin in September. And the army chief of staff, General Halder, he briefs the senior officers. He said, we're going to destroy the Polish army at record speed. We're going to stop the British intervening. He says, the Poles are no serious opponents.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We know we can defeat the Poles. But even at this point, Halder says to the other officers, This is not going to be an ordinary war. We are going to take the SS and we are going to take Nazi paramilitary formations with us. We must ensure that, and I quote, Poland as rapidly as possible is not only defeated, but liquidated. And do we have a sense of what that means?
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Well, we'll come to this in the next couple of episodes, exactly what that means. At this point, it is vague.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And the short answer is no. Now, first of all, it's because, of course, they haven't assimilated the whole of the Czech economy. They've only taken the Sudetenland, which is, what, about a fifth of Czechoslovakia's industrial capacity. But actually, after they've done that, November 1938, Göring says to the rest of the Nazi high command, do you know what? We're actually in a terrible mess.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
We're going to do it in three weeks, Halder says, and then we will be ready either to confront Bolshevism or to hurl our army against the West. So at this point, there is still a question mark there. After we've finished with Poland, do we go West or do we go East? And now, we had a few twists last week. Here is the biggest.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
One of the most momentous, ominous and extraordinary twists in world diplomatic history.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
It is. Because it's about this point, April 1939, that some of Hitler's courtiers begin kind of quietly to discuss a U-turn that would change everything. And they mention it to Hitler. And when they first mention it to Hitler, he says, I don't know about this. That would be a massive ideological shift. I'm not sure about it.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And then a couple of weeks later, in early May 1939, the story goes that Ribbentrop shows him footage of another world leader reviewing a military parade. And Hitler watches this footage intently and he's staring at this bloke's face. Like it said, like he had taken a fancy to him. And then at last he says, he looks like a man that you could do business with.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So exactly as you say, Tom, Goering's four-year plan, as it was called, was predicated on constant conquest, on the constant acquisition of new resources, new labour, all of this. And actually, the wheels are about to come off, and they're only keeping inflation at bay. So the inflation generated by their massive arms spending They're only keeping it at bay with price controls.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And as lots of people listening to this podcast will know, once you get into that world of kind of price controls to stop inflation, you're often in a bit of a death spiral, a kind of economic death spiral. And actually Goebbels writes in his diary in December 1938 that, The financial situation of the Reich is catastrophic. We must look for new ways. It cannot go on like this.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And the obvious answer is, well, we just acquire new territory. We acquire new resources. Just take stuff from, if we haven't got enough workers, if we don't have enough currency, enough tungsten or whatever it might be. Or enough factories. We just nick the factories. Everything. Take it from somebody else. And of course, the other thing that is propelling Hitler onwards, Hitler cannot stop.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I mean, this is the thing. He is not an ordinary dictator. He is not even an ordinary German nationalist. A.J.P. Taylor, very famously and controversially, in his book on the origins of the Second World War, published, I think, in the 1960s, said, well, Hitler was just a common or garden German nationalist. His goals were those of German nationalists down the decades and the centuries.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That obviously is wrong, completely wrong. Hitler had said all this stuff in Mein Kampf and all his speeches in the 1920s, all of this stuff about nature, the law of struggle. We talked last time that quotation about people have to fight.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So there's a thing that clearly separates him from another dictator of the same period, like a Franco or a Salazar or somebody like that in Spain and Portugal.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Yes, he does. There's like a revolutionary dynamo inside Stalin. But Stalin is clearly much more pragmatic than Hitler is. Stalin doesn't have Hitler's Wagnerian urgency, I suppose, which we know that Hitler has. And this, of course, is one reason that Hitler is so disappointed... when Munich doesn't give him a war. And he's particularly disappointed. We ended last time.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's so disappointed with the German people. They've let themselves down because they were against war and they cheered Chamberlain because they thought he was a peacemaker. And for Hitler, that suggests that they're on the road to degeneracy. Yes. So the longer you leave it, of course, the more degenerate they might well become.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Of course, the longer you leave it, the more likely it is that Britain and France will rearm and it'll make Also, that Germany's economy will fall to pieces. So he really feels like that window is kind of closing all the time and he must move now.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
No, I don't think they do have that sense, Tom. I've never read anything that suggests that they do. Foreign visitors, when they go to Hitler's Germany, are struck by what they think of as his economic miracle, I would say. They're like, oh gosh, he's found the magic trick.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's put all these people back to work and Germany is humming again and everybody is happy and the streets are clear and all of that kind of thing. Springtime for Hitler in Germany. Springtime for Hitler, exactly. I think there's much more of a sense of that, actually, and a sense of great self-doubt in the democracies that maybe democracy doesn't really work. Maybe dictatorship is the future.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So no, I don't think there's anything like that sort of sense. So beginning in 1939, I think it's fair to say that Hitler is determined to get his war sooner or later. The accent very firmly on sooner. And the most obvious unfinished business is in what he would call, what everyone calls at the time, Czechoslovakia. It has been renamed after Munich.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
So to emphasize the fact that it has become a bit unglued and the Czech and Slovak parts have become unglued. So if you remember from last week, Hitler didn't just want the Sudetenland. He wanted the lot, and he feels cheated. That fellow Chamberlain has spoiled my entry into Prague, he said. Is it not passing brave to be a dictator and ride in triumph through Prague? Exactly.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That's part of his kind of Wagnerian fantasy in a life, isn't it? He sees himself riding up to the castle as a conqueror. So just three weeks after Munich, Hitler says to the Wehrmacht, to the German army, Please draw up plans now for the liquidation of the remainder of the Czech state.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Now, the thing about this, of course, which reminds us how unusual Hitler is, is anybody else would say that this was completely unnecessary. Czechoslovakia is now no threat to you. You can really turn it into your puppet eventually. You don't need to risk everything by swallowing the rest of it. It's just supine at your feet. But he wants to have his conquest as a matter of pride.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Secondly, I think, as we talked about last time, he really, really hates the Czechs. He's hated them ever since his days in Vienna before the First World War. And there is that economic thing that you talked about, Tom. So they have the big Skoda works. They have all this foreign currency. They've got loads of gold. And they've got this massive military arsenal.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
They have enough weapons in Czechoslovakia for 20 divisions. So that is about, if you think there's about 15,000 men in a division, I mean, that's a hell of a lot of guns. It is. And the Czechs have them. And their guns are better than anybody's. They've been made in this, in Pilsen, in this massive factory. And they're brilliant. And Hitler, for Hitler, there was no question in his mind.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's going to come back and get a lot. So straight away in the new year, as soon as the Goering's splendid oration, the last echoes are dying away, Hitler starts to lay the groundwork with the army. He does three big speeches, the 18th of January, 25th of January, 10th of February, where he meets groups of officers, starting with the younger ones and then moving up to the senior commanders.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And he says to them, you know, he's completely explicit to this point. He says, I want to make the German right the dominant power in Europe. I want to ditch the democratic, pacifist, defeatist mentality that I associate with Weimar. At one point, he says to these guys, the German heroes of the past embraced brutality, meaning the sword, if other methods fail.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
It is time for Germany, and I quote, to stake its claim to the domination of Europe. So this isn't the talk of revising the Treaty of Versailles. No, it's not the kind of thing you could discuss with Neville Chamberlain. Yeah, a sympathetic journalist from the Daily Telegraph. You couldn't lay out these plans and hope to get a warm reception in the drawing rooms of Britain.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And then the final one is at the Kroll Opera House, his senior commanders, and he says to them, Look, I am determined to get this living space in the East. And he says, as long as I live, this thought will dominate my entire being. I will never draw back from the most extreme measures. And I will need you to put your fervent trust in me. So there's no doubt about where all this is leading.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
This sort of slightly apocalyptic thought. you know, teenage boy planning and conquering the world, sort of Alexander the Great style vision.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
I mean, this is the amazing thing, by the way, about Chamberlain's self-delusion. There's that phrase that people say, isn't there? They say it on social media when they're trying to be nasty to somebody. They say, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them. I mean, Hitler had showed people who he was. for 20 years and people continued to underestimate him and to not believe him.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
But it's pretty open. Anyway, 13th of February, he tells his aides, right, we're going to do this. Let's start with Czechoslovakia and let us finish the job. Now, it's going to be easy. The Czechs, we talked about a lot last time, you were very agitated about this, Tom, as I recall. Very agitated.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
But they've abandoned their fortified border positions in the Sudetenland. And Czechoslovakia has federalized itself so he can basically use the Slovaks. He's going to use them as his pawn to kind of pull the whole thing apart. So the Slovak leader is a guy called Monsignor Josef Tiso. And Tiso is a kind of Catholic priest. He's ultra conservative. He's anti-Semitic.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's been the prime minister of the autonomous Slovak region since Munich. And he has terrible relations with the government in Prague. And they're always falling out. And on the 9th of March, they have a big row. And the Prague government says, we've had enough of you, mate. And they send their police into Bratislava to dissolve Tiso's cabinet.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And Hitler's like watching this and he says, oh, this is absolutely brilliant. This is the pretext we need. And he says to his inner circle, well, we'll strike on the Ides of March. Hitler loves a bit of a classical.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He deliberately phrases that like that. Yes, exactly. He does. He references the Ides of March himself. Isn't that nice? So stabbing the Czechs in the back. Stabbing the Czechs in the back. On the 13th of March, Tiso is flown to Berlin, this Slovak priest. Hitler says to him, right, I want you to declare independence and I want you to put Slovakia under German protection.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And Tissot actually says, really, German protection? And Hitler says, well, if you don't, I'll give Slovakia to Hungary. The Hungarians can't wait to get Slovakia back. So make up your mind. Tissot goes back to Bratislava and slightly sort of, you know, under duress, he proclaims Slovakian independence. But he doesn't follow through with the next part of it, which is calling for German protection.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
Hitler thinks this is very poor. So he sends German warships down the Danube. They train their guns on Bratislava.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
And basically they say to Tissot, we'll fire on you unless you ask for our protection. Tissot asks for their protection. So the Czechs have been watching all this. Now the Czechs, Benes, he was left after Munich. So they have a new president and he's called Dr. Emil Hacher. And he is not the ideal person to take on Hitler. He's a lawyer, very experienced. He's in his late 60s.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
He's a very clever and gentle and kind of cerebral man.
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530. Hitler’s War on Poland: Countdown to Armageddon (Part 1)
That stuff with the dog and the cheese. Yeah. Brilliant. And the picnic hamper. Yeah. Amazing. And I heartily recommend Three Men and a Boat to our listeners. But, I mean, you don't want an expert on Three Men and a Boat. It doesn't prepare you for confronting the Third Reich. No, it does not. Although you could say all of Britain had read Three Men and a Boat and we defeated the Third Reich, Tom.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
But no, General Kellerman takes off his hat with its trickler cockade and he lifts it up on his sword and he shouts, Vive la nation! And then the French will start singing the Satyra, one of their revolutionary songs.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Right, exactly. I think the revolutionists would love to rewrite this. This is Sainte-Colotte singing the Marseillaise. And indeed they do in subsequent years, but that's not true at all. So they're blasting away. The Prussians keep coming. The Prussians can't believe the French are so full of vim and vigor.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And then basically the Prussians waver and Brunswick says, call them back, call them, you know, enough. And the French, against all the odds and all expectations, because they performed so abysmally at the beginning of the war, They have actually, they haven't quite won, but they have survived to fight another day.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
I think it is a bit like that. But after you've, it's the draw that you need that keeps you alive in the group, I think is what it is. But that's because it's come unexpectedly. It's fated as a great victory. It's fated as a great victory. Exactly. That's exactly what it is. The Prussians actually have killed more Frenchmen than the French have killed Prussians.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Yes, I imagine that is. Well, he's always got Cable Street, hasn't he? So yes, this is a massive moment in French and European history, isn't it? Because the French monarchy, I guess, one of the oldest in Europe. If you take it back to Clovis, who we talked about just before Christmas, didn't we? So yeah, I mean, that's the end of that story. Yes, it is. So it sends shockwaves across Europe.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
But for the first time, the Prussians have been stopped. They haven't been able to dislodge the French. And their reactions to the two sides could not be more different. So the Prussians are absolutely gutted. They can't believe it.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Something like, gentlemen, you have witnessed the dawning of a new age. I felt you were gearing up to do him as Jeremy Corbyn there, which would have been a shame. So Goethe says, there's a wonderful scene. It's the great vanity of great writers. He says, they all sat alone around this fire. They were all really miserable. They couldn't meet each other's eye.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And he says, everybody asked me what I thought about the events of the day as, and I quote, my little sayings had often interested or amused our little company. And you think, what an unsufferable bore he must have been to all the other soldiers. So he said to everybody,
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
From this place and from this day forth commences a new era in the world's history and you can all say you are present at its birth. Now, shall I tell you something? I don't believe he did say that. I think that's far too good to be true. And he writes this a considerable time afterwards. So I'm suspicious of Goethe here. I think he's playing fast and loose with the facts.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
It is what they do. Anyway, for the French, this is massive. So there's a peasant soldier who writes to his father and he says, I've been electrified with a new courage that will make despots tremble. Oh, liberty. Oh, equality. Oh, my country. What a wonderful transformation.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
I don't know. Yeah, no, fair. That's fair. So lots of people say, gosh, this is a tremendous victory for the new republic, for our revolutionary virtue. And of course, when the news reaches the convention, they're all waving their hats in the air and delighted. And they say, absolutely brilliant. History has begun again. It is a new chapter in the story of the human race.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Yeah, as soon as we took those blokes into the courtyards of various prisons and dispensed summary justice, and as soon as we locked the king up in the temple fortress, surprise, surprise, we start winning battles. You know, quadrat demonstrandum, the king was a traitor and was undermining the war effort.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
We will be talking about what it means. And of course, we'll be talking about what it means for Louis XVI. And we'll get to his story in our final episode. Nothing good. Nothing good. But before we get to the moment when they actually do abolish the monarchy, we should set the scene a little bit, Tom. We love setting the scene on this podcast. Well, we did in the previous episode.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Maybe this is an ironclad law of history, Tom. Or maybe it's just a coincidence. Anyway. Well, it is because they actually win the battle before the proclamation of the Republic, right? Yeah. Well, it's not that they don't really win the battle. It's just a draw. So you would think that this would fill them all with great bonhomie, sense of harmony.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Come on, let's bury that ideological hatchet and work together for the common good. You would be wrong. Because actually, from the beginning, I know you wouldn't be wrong, Tom. I know you know that what's going to happen. The convention is riven by the most unbelievable faction fighting. So basically, there are three blocks.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And maybe we don't need to spend an eternity discussing them, but a little bit of context. First of all, you have Brissot and the Gironde. So if you remember, these are not really a Parisian party. They're a party of the kind of big provincial cities like Bordeaux. Because that's where Gironde comes from, isn't it? It's the northern bank. Exactly.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They're all hanging around having dinner with Madame Roland in her apartment and swapping witty aphorisms. And they've basically got about 150 deputies in the convention that will always support them. And they can call on some independents to give them a majority. Then you have the great mass of people who are kind of in the middle.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They are called, they're either called the Marsh, which seems a very, you know, it's not very, I wouldn't want to be part of the Marsh. Les Pères Centristes. What's that? Centrist Dads. Oh, right. Okay. Very good. Yeah. Well, they're not really centrist dads, are they? Because everybody's now on the left.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
But they are the marsh or the plain, people call them, because they sit in the middle of the hall. And they basically, you know, they can lean one way or the other. But at this point, they are generally swayed by the Girondins. And then you have the radicals on the far left. They're called the Mountain, the Montagnard, and they sit high up in the left of the hall, hence the mountain.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
There's about 200 of them, 150 to 200. They're very Parisian, Robespierre, Danton, Marat. All the famous guys, the ones that people have heard of. They dominate the Jacobin Club now because the Girondins don't bother turning up to it. And they also appeal to two groups. Very young deputies are much more likely to be Montagnard.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They're likely to be kind of more impatient, more ambitious, more radical.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
I think that's absolutely right. They also appeal to deputies, interestingly, who come from very isolated kind of places, who've basically been the one radical in their village, who therefore feel very embattled. And when they arrive in Paris, they're delighted to find friends. And their being embattled has made them more radical, I guess. That must be very exciting for them.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Oh yeah, I think there's a definite sense of excitement. And of the Montagnards, basically now we think of them as being a party ruled by the triumvirate of Robespierre, Danton and Marat. I mean, they really are the big three of the French Revolution, aren't they? The triumvirate, you might almost say. But they're not like a triumvirate. They actually don't really get on with each other.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Rob Spear hates Marat, doesn't he? Rob Spear despises Marat. Won't have anything to do with him. Refuses to have anything to do with him. I think because Rob Spear is so chilly and he's so worried about his wig and... his kind of boniness.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Right. Both Danton and Mara have terrible skin, don't they? Danton is too busy stuffing himself with chicken legs. Yeah. And also taking brown envelopes of cash. Marat is just shouting about killing everybody and being very over the top and stuff. So actually, they're all quite suspicious of each other, these three. They don't work together as a tight-knit unit.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
What are the lads up to? Let's set it in the context of Prussians and cannons. Oh, Prussians. So the situation in Paris, people will remember from the last episode, but one, Paris is preparing for an attack. There are church bells ringing. There are cannons on the River Seine that are calling people to prepare for war.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
I guess the other question is, are these kind of ideological political parties of the kind that we would recognize today? And the answer, again, I think, no. The Montagnards and the Girondins to outside observers seem to have loads in common. They're all Republicans. They all believe in the war, all of that stuff. There are two things I think that are really important that are differences.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So one of them is the idea of the people. The Girondins, because they're kind of merchant class from Bordeaux and stuff, They basically think that people like them should be running the revolution. You know, people who go to literary salons and quote poetry to each other. Yeah. Whereas Robespierre and the Montagnards, they think, they're suspicious of that. They are pure populists.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They're all about the common people, the virtues of the street. You know, the people of Paris know better. Yeah. A poor urchin knows much better than a, you know, it's that kind of. It's Rousseau, isn't it? It's very Rousseau. It's very Rousseau. It's almost very Christian. Is it not? I'm surprised you didn't say that. Of course.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
But I mean, you know, this is what I think about everything in the French Revolution.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
The other thing that's perhaps a little less Christian is the Montagnards are much keener on violence. No, but you see, I think that is pretty Christian.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Yeah, fair enough. So obviously the most visible sign of violence virtuous violence has been the September massacres, which the Montagnards were all for. But the Girondins are actually a little bit conflicted about the September massacres. Robespierre thought all this was brilliant. He loved the attack on the Tuileries. He loved the September massacres.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He thinks the fact that the Girondins are being a bit squeamish shows that they are suspects, counter-revolutionary and all that kind of thing. Tom, I can see you're itching to say something.
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Absolutely. You're totally right. That sort of ratchet effect. And in fact, I was just thinking if somebody missed a couple of episodes of this series, you know, if they'd skipped ahead, they'd be like, hold on, those people were on the far left two episodes ago. Now you're describing them as counter-revolutionary reactionaries. Because as you say, the center of gravity is always moving leftwards.
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The streets are packed with volunteers who are streaming towards the gates of the city to the front. People are pulling down the grills of churches. They're digging up their coffins to use as lead for musket shots. There are everyday contingents of troops marching through the National Assembly, singing patriotic songs and shouting slogans and stuff. So it's all excitement.
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What's on the Girondins' mind as well, by the way, is the fact that during the September massacres, there is some evidence that Robespierre and Marat had actually toyed with the idea of killing them too.
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So Robespierre, on the day the massacres had broken out, the 2nd of September, he had been giving a speech in the commune, the sort of city council of Paris, in which he had said that the Girondins were secret agents of the Prussians and perfidious intriguers working against French liberty.
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Now, anyone who's listened to the whole of this series will know how bonkers that is because the Girondins were the key people in getting France into the war in the first place. But of course, at the time, everybody believes in this idea of the mask of patriotism, that the more patriotic you appear to be, the more likely it is that you are in fact a traitor.
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So the commune had issued a warrant for some of the Girondins' arrests, which was never carried out. But Brissot and Roland and these people, they know about this and they say, my God, Robespierre wants to kill us. He wanted to kill us and it's just luck that he didn't. And so they become convinced, well, they are now convinced that basically it's kill or be killed.
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So in that sense, right from the moment the convention meets, which is 21st of September, It's not like a normal parliament that we would know today because there is no sense of pluralism. There's no sense that they're going to be having discussions and you win some, you lose some, all that kind of thing. No sense of a loyal opposition. None.
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So by definition, this is about virtue versus corruption. It's about the Republic versus counter-revolution. To be a dissenter is to be a traitor. And so I think from the very first moment they take their seats, it is obvious there is absolutely going to be a showdown and that whoever loses that will probably end up on the guillotine.
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And if you had to put your money on somebody at this point, September 1792, you would probably put it on the Girondeau. They have a bit more of a majority. They have a bit more self-confidence. They control the presidency of the convention. And so right from the beginning, with the September massacre so fresh in their minds, they say, right, let's settle this once and for all. Let's do this.
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And right away, they go for the Montagnards' throats.
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So they make their move, Tom. Two days after the Battle of Valmy, 22nd of September, the convention's only really been up and running for a day and a bit. And a dozen speakers, one after the other, Jean Rondin, get up and lay into the Montagnard. And their plan is to convince the convention the Montagnards are traitors and they should be arrested and thrown out of the convention.
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They say they are anarchists, they are murderers, they are levelers, interestingly. Oh, right. A word that will be very familiar to people who know about 17th century England.
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They do. They're very promiscuous with their historical analogies, I think it's fair to say. Because Brissot says, on the one hand, he says they're the hydra of anarchy. They want to level everything. And on the other hand, he says Robespierre, Marat, and Danton are the new Crassus, Caesar, and Pompey, exactly as you said. And Rob Spear and Daunton say, oh, this is absolute nonsense.
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Jeremy Corbyn would actually have loved it. But it's not a Sandbrook vibe, is it? Not really a Sandbrook vibe, I would say. Although slightly more Sandbrookian, somewhere out there...
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You know, I don't even like him. I have no, we're not a Trump vote at all. Mara, he obviously is, this is, he's making his debut effectively in frontline politics. Wow, what a way to do it. And he says, I'm not a traitor, but if you're accusing me of trying to set up a dictatorship, well, I'll be frank with you. I think a dictatorship would be brilliant. I'd love a dictatorship.
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And he then says, he pulls a gun out of his pocket and he holds it to his own head. And he says, if you vote to condemn me, I will blow out my brains in front of you. Better than threatening to blow out the brains of Girondins. I guess so. People are very impressed by this. They say, well, this obviously shows the mayor is a tremendous fellow.
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And the result of this is that they're not kicked out. So the Montagnard have made a bit of a mistake here. I was about to say they've wounded but not killed their opponent. They've barely even wounded them. Yeah, I mean, if you're going to shoot at the king, you better kill him. Exactly. So it is clear from this point that this feud is only ever going to get worse.
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And a few weeks go by, the Girondins basically are sort of constantly niggling at the Montagnard, but never bringing them down. Also, the Girondins, as time goes by, they're actually beginning to lose a bit of support from the plain, from the independent people, because the independent people actually are a bit sick of this. And also, the Girondins are quite corrupt. And they're very overbearing.
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And they're very kind of hungry for power and bossy. They've got all their dinner parties, haven't they? They go to their dinner parties. High-flying dinner parties. Exactly. Not inviting the normal people. Right. And if you're just a bog-standard deputy from provincial France, you're sick of being lectured by Brissot and having him slagging off the Montagnard and stuff.
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You just become very impatient with all this. And I think that Jean don't know this. So towards the end of October, they decide to have another go. And this time they will just go for Robespierre and they'll go for him personally. And they get a newspaper editor called Jean-Baptiste Louvet to stand up and accuse Robespierre of trying to make himself dictator, of having a personality cult.
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Now, again, they reach for a Roman parallel, interestingly. Of course they do. So Louvet deliberately models his speech on Cicero unveiling the Catalan conspiracy. And of course, that's the analogy that everybody knows. They've all grown up with it. They've all done it at school. It's been on their minds. How long will you abuse our patience, Robespierre? All of that stuff. Exactly.
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And Louvet says, come on, France has a choice. There are only two parties and France must choose. There is the party of us, the Girondins. We're the party of philosophers. Exactly.
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and on the other hand there is the mountain they're the party of murderers put like that yeah exactly if i was facing attack from the prussians and i had to choose one of those two parties to represent me i definitely wouldn't choose the philosophers but you know who's there for this well you do know because i know you've got the notes but also i know this uh because i'm a big fan of his um it's the great pert william wordsworth he's basically on his gap year isn't he yeah he is he's on a holiday because
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Well, that would improve your French though, surely. Yes, it would. Give us a bit of poetry, Tom. I know you love a bit of Wordsworth.
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So on the 20th of September, so that's the day before the reading that you began with, the new national convention meets for the first time. Now, some listeners, if they've made it all the way through the series, may be like, I've lost track of all the different assemblies and whatnot. So if you remember, There had been the stormy of the Tuileries in August.
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It is an embarrassment, exactly. Wordsworth, in a very convoluted way, is quite right. And actually, Robespierre completely wins the day. So a week later, Robespierre, he bides his time and then he makes his response. And he says, I have encouraged violence, he says, but I did it because it was the only way to save the country.
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And he says to everybody, do you want to have a revolution without a revolution? I mean, we have to, you know, I did it and I was right to do it.
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And as we discussed in the September massacres episode, a majority clearly agree with that. They think we're at war. We've always executed people. It's not like public executions and the public display of violence is a novelty. It's completely reasonable for us to use violent measures to preserve the republic. And so Robespierre wins the day. He gets torrents of applause in the convention.
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Brissot and the Girondins are kind of fuming. They're sort of like cartoon characters, kind of clenching their fists with braid. You pesky Montagnards, kind of on the benches. And Brissot writes to Dumouriez, and he says, this is absolutely intolerable.
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He says, I spend all my time fighting these miserable anarchists, that's a direct quote, when I should be concentrating on the uprising of the entire planet. I mean, which is a bonkers thing to say, but... Quite Trotsky, isn't it? It's very Trotsky. But you can see why he's saying it, because we're now six weeks after the Battle of Valmy.
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And since then, Tom, there have been some unbelievably dramatic scenes on the battlefield.
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Excitingly, yes. Oh, bless him. So for once, somebody in the story has actually got what he wanted. So basically, here's what's happened. I know you love military history, Tom. The Prussians have been hanging around outside Valmy pouring with rain after this kind of draw. And the Duke of Brunswick eventually says, right, listen, we don't want to be cut off from our supplies.
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We're obviously not going to get to Paris. Let's cut our losses, head back towards Germany for the winter. So in scenes of great sort of degradation and misery, which kind of Goethe writes about, he withdraws all the way back. And he even goes all the way back across the river Rhine. Now that really matters because what that means is that the Prussians
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The western bank of the Rhine is now completely undefended. With German cities and towns on it, it is completely undefended from the French. So by late October, the French, who were on their uppers a bit ago, are now advancing on German cities, places like Mainz, Worms, Frankfurt.
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And out of these German cities, the prince bishops and the electors and all of these bigwigs are kind of fleeing as fast as they can with all their kind of Germanic books and whatever marzipan on carts.
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And since then, France has been in political limbo. And they have basically summoned yet another semi-constituent assembly. This one has unlimited powers to remake the nation. And it is by far the most democratic yet. So all men over the age of 21, except for servants, can vote. Because we talked about that last time and you said that you weren't in favour of it.
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Right. The world lies open before us. By the way, in the long run, this will be a massive moment in European history because it's basically the birth of German identity and German nationalism. Because loads of people couldn't wait for the French Revolution to get to Germany. When the revolution does turn up, they say, oh, God, this is terrible.
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all these French people kind of living in our houses, looting all our stuff and bossing us around. And so you get the German identity, you can argue, to some degree, dates from this moment as a kind of political force. Anyway, the French don't just stop at the Rhine. They're advancing everywhere. So they invade the Swiss Federation. They're heading for Geneva.
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They invade Savoy, and they take all the lands west of the Alps, and they create a new department called Mont Blanc. They also seize the county of Nice. We always think of Nice as, I mean, most people think of it as French. It's actually been part of Savoy since 1388.
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Yeah, Avignon, exactly. But above all, Belgium. So Dumouriez had always dreamed of this. He beats a small Austrian army at a place called Gemap, which is just south of Mons on the 6th of November. And the Austrians have to pull back. He takes Mons. He's in Brussels by the 14th of November. By the end of November, I mean, this is the extraordinary thing, the seesaw momentum.
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He has taken Liege and Antwerp, and he is heading towards the borders of the Dutch Republic.
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I think this is the moment, actually, when you can say that patriotic revolutionary fervour is born, really. Born in victory. This is the point at which you have patriotic festivals across France, sort of fest feasts and bonfires and people singing things like they're singing the Marseillaise in the streets.
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Yeah, absolutely. But here's the thing, right? They're not just winning. They're winning victories now. And because the Prussians and the Austrians had basically not bargained for this, overextended themselves, not properly prepared, the French are now winning victories that are really unprecedented in the last few generations, victories that eclipse even the victories of Louis XIV.
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And so deputies back in Paris are now beginning to ask themselves, Well, where will we stop? Where would the revolution stop? Because, of course, they've always thought of it as not just a French nationalist project, but a universalist one. Again, this is what Brissot's saying. This is a global issue. He's the arbiter of the world. Exactly.
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Some people say, well, our borders, our obvious borders are geographical, the Pyrenees, the River Rhine, etc.
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the the channel the mediterranean song but other people are saying well really i mean if we stand for liberty if we stand for these kind of um uh timeless it's you know eternal values why would we stop at some mountains why wouldn't we go beyond and have they not enrolled as french citizens
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Tom Paine would be the famous example. On the 19th of November, they vote France will assist anybody, anybody who wants to, and I quote, recover their liberty. And a month later, they agree that everywhere French armies go, they will take the revolution with them. So that means they will abolish feudalism. They will attack the privileges of the Catholic Church.
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Yeah, I don't agree with this at all. I mean, I'm with the Duke of Brunswick on this. I think it's a dangerous innovation. Failed experiment. Yes, exactly. So it's a very complicated electoral system, a series of electors and kind of almost like an electoral college, and then they choose the 749 deputies. But as you said, Tom, Their turnout is really poor.
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They will institute a republican system. So it's a war on the monarchies of Europe. So this has never happened before in European history. States have fought wars with each other, of course, and taken each other's territory. But the idea that you would go into somebody's country and completely rewire their system so that it looks like yours. Ideologically reboot them.
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This, to a lot of people, is profoundly, profoundly shocking. So Cromwell hadn't done that? No. I mean, there'd be no sense of, let's export the English Revolution. Exactly. Exactly. And what is more, I mean, I think this is very French. They decide that they will make everybody else pay for this. So there's a guy called Pierre-Jacques Combon, who's a Protestant merchant from Nîmes.
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And he says, listen, there's an obvious way to fund this. When we occupy a given country, they should be so grateful for their liberty that they should pay us a tax to pay for their own occupation. Yeah. And the convention says, this is an absolutely great idea. Now, you might think this sounds very over-the-top and hubristic, but they, I think, really believe in this.
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Brissot is standing there at the convention, November 1792, and he is saying, we will liberate Naples, we will liberate Spain, we will liberate Poland, we will be in Berlin probably this time next year, we can go all the way to Moscow. It's like they're basically drunk on their own rhetoric. His friend Vernieu, remember we had him talk about the – there was a great quote from him.
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He was a great orator talking about the declaration of war in the first place. He now says, this will actually be the last war. This will be the end of history. Men have died, he says, but they have died so that no men will ever die again.
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I swear to you in the name of the universal fraternity which you are creating, that each battle will be a step towards peace, humanity and happiness for all mankind.
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Very good. I mean, the thing is, nobody has ever talked like this in European history before. You know, when France was fighting its wars in Italy in the early 16th century, nobody said this is the war to end all wars. This will bring a new age of happiness. They just said, brilliant, let's pile into Milan and loot and pillage. You know, did Henry V say this in the Hundred Years' War?
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Did Edward III? Of course they didn't.
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We do indeed. But of course, among other things, there's a very obvious problem that they have, which is it's a problem left over from before the Republic. And it's that they have still in their midst, not just any old traitor, but the traitor of traitors. You know, a rallying point for counter-revolution.
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That's tantalizing. Tom, if I wasn't already a member of the Restless History Club, I'd sign up now so that I could have to wait. So just the last sort of five minutes or so before Theo explodes with rage that we're going on too long. Where has Louis been all this time? He's been in the temple in this medieval keep. He's been with Marie Antoinette, his sister Elizabeth and his two children.
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So in some places it might be a fifth, but generally it's probably one in ten. And the reason for that, I think, is there's a war on. So it's, you know, people have got other things in their mind. But it's also harvest time. So in the countryside... People have definitely got other priorities. And actually, a lot of people are now completely confused.
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They've been reading loads of books. They're basically living like a middle class English family during COVID and lockdown. So Louis and Marie Antoinette have been homeschooling the children. They've been teaching them to recite kind of great reams of Racine and Corneille and stuff, great French dramatists. Louis loves his geography.
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So they've been colouring in a map of the new departments of France and tracing and doing all this stuff. It's actually quite sweet. They play badminton in the garden. And at night, Louis, this will please you, Tom, he reads passages of Roman history to them. But presumably not the establishment of the Republic. No, I don't think so.
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But apparently he reads passages that somehow mirror their own predicament. So people who've been locked up but are very noble and long-suffering and all this kind of thing. They are quite tightly restricted. Marion Swinette's not allowed to sew in case she's sewing a code. Louis is not allowed to shave because people are aware that he might kill himself.
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And the guards, it's very like the Romanovs in 1918. The guards were always kind of scribbling graffiti on the wall that shows a fat man being hanged or guillotined or something. So that's a bit ominous for Louis. Now, the convention, you might say, why do they have to take any proceedings against him at all? Because he's just a citizen now. This is the point of Louis Capet.
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He's just like anyone else. But of course, there are two reasons. One is if they really think he's been betraying them to foreign enemies, they really ought to punish him. And number two, they know there are loads of royalists in France. They can't leave such an obvious focus for counter-revolutionary rebellion alive.
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And the sans-culottes on the streets of Paris still blame him, remember, for the fighting at the Tuileries and the Swiss guards and all of that sort of business. So they have a huge discussion about whether constitutionally they are allowed to put him on trial. Because under the old constitution, if the king transgressed, It laid down what you do and you remove him from office.
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But once you do that, it's done. So can they punish him further? And basically, they get a constitutional lawyer, a guy from Toulouse called Jean-Baptiste Mailly. And he says, Louis is clearly guilty of terrible crimes. And the law of nature overrides the constitution. The constitution actually was given by the nation.
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And if the nation gives the constitution, the nation has the right to withdraw it. And the law of nature demands that Louis is punished.
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There again, very Rousseau, very Rousseau. So they have a sort of debate about how this will work. A few people, a very small group of kind of what I suppose you would say people on the right of the convention, on the right of the Girondin group, say, I just think we should leave him alone. Let's not do this at all. But most people say, we should probably have a trial.
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There are some Montagnards, whoever, who say a trial is mad. We should just kill him straight away. He doesn't even deserve a trial. And the most famous one of those, a character who we should now introduce, is a young man, the youngest deputy in the whole convention. He's only 25 years old, and he stands up to make his maiden speech in November. So this guy is called Louis-Antoine Saint-Just.
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They're probably even more confused than listeners to the podcast. They have no idea what's going on. They don't know who anybody is.
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He's from a small town in Picardy. He's basically a massive Robespierre fan. He's been sending him fan mail since 1789. And I kind of think about Saint-Just that here's the point at which Rousseau and romanticism kind of meet. He's got... Long, lank hair. He's got an earring. He's very pale. He's never seen smiling or laughing. He's Shelley with political power. Yes, I guess he is.
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Was it Shelley who was pursued by his classmates around Eton? Yes, the Shelley Hunt. The Shelley Hunt, yeah. I would have loved to have seen that with Sanjus, because I hate Sanjus. He wrote an enormous poem, didn't he, about his sexual frustration. Surprise, surprise! Yes, he did. And he prides himself, he basically loves Rob Spierne, he prides himself on...
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being even more virtuous, more emotionless, more logical. Rationalist.
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He absolutely is. Again, he loves the idea, the very word terror. It's a very Saint-Just word. But his rationalism, his kind of icy rationalism, is the icy rationalism of somebody who is throbbing with suppressed emotion, isn't he? I mean, basically. He's an incel. He is a total, he is a man who just needs to go for a walk, meet some girls. Hang out with Danton. Yeah, exactly.
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Tonton was showing a good time. Anyway, of course, that relationship doesn't end terribly well, does it? No. Perhaps not coincidentally. So Sanchez gets up and he says there was no need for a trial because the point he says is that Louis is not guilty because of anything he's done. He is guilty. And this really brings out your point.
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This absolutely anticipates so much of the revolutionary stuff of the 19th and 20th centuries. Sanchez says he's guilty because of what he is and what he has been. A virtuous republic cannot allow somebody who has been a king to live. And I quote, no one can reign innocently. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. So there's no middle ground. This man must reign or die.
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That's another aspect to it. Of course. Remember we did that episode about mad elections in Britain where people being carried on chairs and whatnot and lots of throwing of cats. Well, similarly in France for the national convention, the voting is public and it is oral. You say who you want to vote for.
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He must die to assure the repose of the people. Right.
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Yeah, I think that's a really good point, Tom. Because it does, it is one of the two or three most famous speeches of the entire revolution. It makes Saint-Just's name and it also, as you say, seems to serve as a kind of departure point, as a punctuation point in kind of France's constitutional journey.
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Anyway, the funny thing about this speech is actually it doesn't work because they decide they will have a trial. So while they're making the plans for the trial, just before we get into that, just as they're finalizing the plans for the trial, there is a really, really important development.
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Monsieur Roland, the husband of Madame Roland, the interior minister who's a Girondin, on the 20th of November is taken into the Tuileries Palace by a locksmith called Gamin. Gamin was the guy who had taught the king all about his locks. And Gamin says to Monsieur Roland, no one knows this, but I'm going to show you something.
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And he takes him and he shows him a secret iron safe hidden behind the paneling. Roland opens it and it's full of confidential papers and documents. And he now makes a terrible mistake, a mistake that I think will kill him. He takes the papers out and he goes through them himself in secret. He doesn't share them with anybody. And then he goes to the convention. He says, well,
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Well, I've made an amazing discovery. I have found all these confidential documents. And they, I can, let me tell you, there's some pretty interesting things in them that will incriminate some of you. And you will, you won't be laughing then. And lots of deputies are really shocked and frightened and outraged at this, especially the Montagnard. They're like, what are these documents?
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How do we know that you haven't, you know, forged them? Exactly. They're absolutely furious. So all this will come back to really haunt Roland and the Girondins. But in the meantime, the documents prove two things. First of all, they prove now beyond any possible doubt that Louis was conspiring against the revolution. He was in touch with the Austrians.
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He was writing to counter-revolutionary groups. He was doing all of this kind of stuff. Because his signatures are all over these papers. His fate is sealed from this point. He is done, I think.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
The second thing, the documents also prove beyond any possible doubt that all that stuff about the mask of patriotism, which we've discussed as though it's so paranoid and such a mad conspiracy theory, is indeed quite accurate.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Because one of the great heroes of the early revolution, Mirabeau, another man with terrible skin, by the way, there's loads of letters from him showing that he was conspiring against the revolution, taking loads of money from the courts, etc. And his reputation is shredded. They go and take his ashes out of the Pantheon. They take his bust out of the Jacobin Club.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They're like, well, this proves the point. Can't trust anyone. Can't trust anybody. So a few days after this, the 1st of December, the convention votes, first of all, anyone who calls for the return of the monarchy, anyone who makes any, and I quote, infringement on the sovereignty of the people, which is very satisfyingly vague if you are...
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
if you're a big fan of revolutionary terror, will face punishment by death. And two days later, they vote that this man, Louis Capet, we can discuss his name next time, will be brought before the National Convention to answer for his crimes. And Rob Spier gets up at the tribunal and he says, remember, your task is not to pass a sentence for and against a man.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
It is to defend the safety of the public and to take an act of national providence. I pronounce this fatal truth with regret. But Louis must die because the homeland must live.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Who are like holding clubs and stuff and sort of leering at you in a sinister way. So clearly a lot of people just don't want to turn out. So in Paris... The voting has coincided with the September massacres. That's what we began this little kind of mini series with.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So the atmosphere is very grim because as people are voting, there is the kind of stepping over corpses, the dull sound of hacking coming from inside the walls of the converted convent just down the road. So what is worse, the second round of voting is held at the Jacobin Club. So if you are a royalist or reactionary, this is not the ideal place to go and to sort of pin your colours to the mast.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And that round of voting, the Jacobin Club, they've got a lot of kind of electors, but they start by agreeing that they'll purge all electors who are foyant, who are moderates, or who are royalists. So 200 electors are kicked out. There's 800 left. And they vote for 24 deputies. And of those deputies, a lot of those are very big revolutionary names.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So the top of the list, number one, their top choice for Paris is Robespierre. And then you've got people like Danton, Desmoulins, Santerre, the butcher, the sans-culottes who'd led the attack on the Tuileries. Marat, for the first time, this firebrand radical journalist, he is going to have a seat in the convention. So...
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
There will be a place for the most extreme, the most violent, the most paranoid revolutionary sentiments.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
I mean, we've talked about this before. This is Prince Harry calling himself Harry Diversity or something, renaming himself. And actually... No, Harry Equity. Harry Equity, yeah. While living in his palace. Yeah, that's what he'd call himself. Yeah, Harry Equity. Anyway, so everybody goes to the Tuileries on the 20th of September to register, and they do so in an atmosphere of apocalyptic dread.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Because they know that 140 miles away, the Prussians are there and that their troops, their Francis troops, have basically caught up with the Prussians.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He has, yeah. A vengeance which will be forever remembered, or words to that effect. So, yes. Now, of these guys who've turned up to register... About half of them are lawyers. We've got a lot of lawyers who are members of Arrested History Club, so they will love all this. They will say this is a very good sign. There's also loads of doctors, loads of civil servants, loads of actors, journalists.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They're very young by and large. About half of them are under 40. About a quarter of them are under 35. The younger they are, the more committed and more militant they are by and large. So these aren't A lot of them have got experience in kind of local governments and stuff, but these aren't incredibly seasoned people. They are excited and excitable. I think it's fair to say.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Kind of quite a student union vibe. Definitely. I mean, this is the birth of the student union, really, isn't it? I think it probably is. Yeah. Motions, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, they love it. And they're there all night, you know, just endlessly arguing and showing off in that student union. And drinking. Exactly.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Next day, 21st of September, they assemble at the riding school, the Manège, for their first proper session. And this is the bit that you started with, Jérôme Pétillon, because they've come straight to the central question. Let's reboot France. And it must be a republic. There's an actor, of course, called Colu de Bois. He ends up on the Committee of Public Safety later on.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He says, let's just abolish the monarchy right away. No need for referendums and all that stuff. Let's just go for it. Some of the deputies say, really? No, no. You wouldn't let the people have a say on this? Such a massive question. And then the Bishop of Blois.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So this is an interesting thing, because again, it complicates the slightly sort of stereotypical sense of the French Revolution, because it's a bishop, Henri Gregoire, who says, kings are in the moral world what monsters are in the physical world. Their courts are the workshops of crime and the lairs of tyrants. In other words, No referendum. Let's just get rid. And they vote.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And then, of course, as so often happens in these kinds of scenarios, very student union, once people work out which way the wind is blowing, they all pile in. Yeah, they all pile in. So they make the vote unanimous. They all start shouting, vive la nation. They're all terribly excited. The world has started again.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Yeah, I think that's a very fair point, actually, that there is a sense of... There's a sense of historical time beginning again, but they don't really know what they all want. Because I suppose, Tom, they don't all want the same thing, as we shall see in this episode. So if you enjoy political factionalism, this is definitely the rest is history episode for you.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Anyway, one of the interesting things about the French Revolution that we've talked about so much is the way it faces two ways. On the one hand, they're looking back to the Roman Republic, as you have described so many times. And on the other hand, they're genuinely thinking this is not just a whole new chapter, but it's basically a new volume. world history.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So they say from September the 20th, all state documents must bear the date year one of the French Republic. So this is where we get the beginning of the sort of French revolutionary calendar, the numbering system, year one, year two, and so on and so forth. But of course, whether they actually get beyond year one, is not in their hands. It depends on events out on the battlefield.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
So let us now, let us leave Paris. Turn the camera. Turn the camera, exactly. You know how my mind works. So remember where we got to. The Prussians have been marching all the way west from the border. They've got to the Argonne Forest. That's 130 or so miles away from Paris. It's pouring with rain. Very Agincourt scenes, Tom. There's only one man who can stop them.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And that man is a guy called General Charles-Francois Dumouriez. So listeners may remember, he's this kind of grizzled ex-secret agent, ex-Seven Years' War veteran who was foreign minister under the Girondins. He got France into this mess in the first place. Basically, he's in charge of the Eastern Front. He loves fighting Belgians. He loves attacking Belgium. That's his dream.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He wants to liberate Belgium. But the convention has basically said, forget about Belgium. There are a load of Prussians advancing on Paris. Get to the Valley of the Marne and stop them. There's a lot of maneuvering and faffing around. Do you want to go into detail about that? Do you know what? I could, but I won't because I don't want to try the patience of our less military-minded listeners.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Exactly. How many divisions are there on both sides? Loads. So to cut a very long story short, the two armies end up faffing around and maneuvering, and basically they end up on the wrong side of each other. So the Prussians are nearest Paris, and Dumouriez is behind them with his back against the Argonne forest. Now, the Duke of Brunswick could just ignore Dumouriez.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He could have just dashed on, couldn't he, to Paris? He could, but he doesn't want to do that because that would mean Dumouriez could cut his supply lines, basically cut him off from the German states. And his men are very muddy and it's pouring rain. They're knackered. They're short of food. They're ravaged by illness. It feels a little bit Henry V before Agincourt.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
And he says, right, what we'll do is we'll stop here, we'll turn, we'll finish off Dumouriez, and then we can secure our supply lines, and then we can go on to Paris. Dumouriez is massively outnumbered, but very good news for him. So on the 19th, the day before the national convention, they meet to register. He is reinforced by a second French army under General Kellerman. Who has a German name.
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It's a massive moment, Tom, and I think the only voice that really is appropriate to the moment is the one you did there. I mean, because I detected more than a hint of our old friend, Jeremy Corbyn. Is that right?
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
He has a German name. Very confusing. Yeah, that is confusing. So... These troops that they have, by the way, everybody always thinks this is a great victory for people in red bonnets shouting about the revolution. But it's not, is it?
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
They are. These are like regular troops. And they also have a brilliant kind of new canon. They do indeed. They have a very exciting new cannon. We love military technology on this podcast. They have new lightweight cannons that were specially designed after the French had shamed themselves in the Seven Years' War. Gets Britain. Exactly. They'd lost to everybody, hadn't they?
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
It'd been a kind of world war. They'd been fighting the Prussians or whatever. So on the 20th, So this is the day that the National Convention were registering. On the 20th, it's a misty, foggy morning. Kellerman, outside this windmill outside the village of Valmy, he lines up his men on this ridge and he's got his lovely lightweight cannons that he's very keen to show off.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
The Prussians start firing with their cannons. Kellerman fires back with his. There's hundreds of guns blazing away through the fog. Now, do you know who was fighting for the Prussians? I do. It was Goethe, the great German writer, the greatest German writer. Germany's top writer, Goethe. He was fighting with his patron, who was Grand Duke Karl Augustus Sachs Weimar.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
Well, this is the thing. I think there's no evidence, I think, of him actually shooting anybody. I can't imagine him in a uniform. That seems very odd. He must have been wearing uniform, though, because as we will discover, he's exchanging banter with the lads of the battalion and stuff. Goethe said, I mean, you expect great prose from a great writer, don't you? Do you know what he said?
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
The earth literally trembled.
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546. The French Revolution: The Monarchy Falls (Part 3)
What scenes. This goes on for hours and hours and hours. Then the Prussians eventually say, okay, enough. We've definitely softened the French up now. And Brunswick sends his infantry advancing in these kind of long lines, blue uniforms. They're advancing up the hill. They're convinced that the French are about to collapse.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Stanley and Livingstone become international celebrities far beyond Britain and America. So they're making front page news in Belgium. And King Leopold, we know, follows the story very closely and actually kept a sort of scrapbook, including handwritten notes that he was making following Stanley's journey.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
For celebrity and for money are two things which will play a big part in this story. So the question for Leopold is, he wants a colony that will turn a profit. Can he make money from Africa? And the answer is yes. Not through slavery, as you once could, but through something that is extremely fashionable and very lucrative. And that something is ivory. Now, the Victorians are obsessed by ivory.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's exotic because, of course, it comes from elephant tusks, but it's also unbelievably useful and malleable because it's really, really easy to carve ivory.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So if you went into a sort of genteel Victorian household, anywhere in the Western world in the 1870s or 1880s, there would be the handles of cutlery, there would be billiard balls, there would be combs, fans, there would be brooches, there would be chess pieces, piano keys, false teeth. All of these kinds of things are made of ivory.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Exactly, exactly. And you can make so much money from it. So two elephant tusks will give you... hundreds of piano keys or thousands upon thousands of false teeth. And it sounds comical, but there is an awful lot of money to be made here.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And Stanley, after returning from his expedition, has gone around telling people, my God, there is so much ivory in equatorial Africa that the people there use it for their doorposts because it's just so plentiful.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But the difference between the 16th century and now is that to acquire a colony, I think you have to try much harder to present it as part of a civilising mission.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So this is the high point of high Victorianism, the belief in kind of moral uplift and Europe's right to the moral leadership of the planet and all these things that we may well think of now as being freighted with hypocrisy or of kind of patronizing condescension. But at the time, people do actually take genuinely seriously.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So Leopold knows that he will have to, I think, tick three boxes if he wants a colony. First of all, he has to present it as a scientific project, an intellectual project. So literally filling in those blank spaces, mapping what has previously been unknown. Secondly, I think he has to tick the moral uplift box.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So he has to say, well, I only want a colony because I want to spread the gospel of Christianity. Of course, something that matters tremendously to the Victorians.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yes, that's the third thing.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
I think you're absolutely right. I think he absolutely sees what's going on with the other empires. I think in Leopold's case, what makes him slightly unusual is that all the evidence we have of his letters and so on is that for him, the profit motive is all and that the rest of it is effectively just a justification for making money. I mean, he's pretty shameless about that, I would say.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So this is how he proceeds. And I have to say, he's a terrible man, King Leopold, but he really is a cunning and a methodical and a clever man. A vulpine figure. He is. So his first step is to convene a big geographical conference in Brussels at the end of 1876. And he invites all the big celebrities of the Africa industry of the day. So there are explorers from France and Germany.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He's got a celebrity explorer called Gerhard Rolfs, who had actually had himself circumcised so that he could pass for a Muslim in the Sahara. So, you know, somebody who had suffered for his life. quest, his exploration. He's got the president of the British Anti-Slavery Society, Sir Thomas Fowle Buxton. He's got the president of the Church Missionary Society, Sir John Kenway.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He's even got the bloke who used to command the Royal Navy's Indian Ocean Anti-Slavery Squadron. So he is ticking all of those boxes. He's inviting a lot of people who are genuinely animated by what we might call humanitarian as well as imperialistic concerns.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And he welcomes them and he says, you know, I dream of a crusade worthy of this century of progress to open to civilization the only part of our globe which has not yet penetrated to pierce the darkness which hangs over entire peoples. That word darkness again, which is going to come up throughout this series. And he says to them, don't think that I want anything for myself, he says.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
I have nothing. I have no idea of it. Shocking. No ambition other than to serve Belgium. Now that, as we've seen, is a lie. He despises Belgium and he, as we will also see, he doesn't want to serve Belgium at all. He only wants to serve himself.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And he says to them, look, I've assembled you because I think it would be nice for us to identify places in the blank spaces of Africa which could be bases, which could be kind of They could be hospitals. They could be scientific research centers. They could be trading stations. With an emphasis on the trading aspect of it. And these will be run.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
I don't want to, I mean, Belgium won't run them, because we don't want to. The last thing we'd want is a colony. He says, we'll set up an international African association. Why not base it in Brussels, actually? And for its first chairman, I mean, if no one else wants to do it, I'd very happily put myself forward. And everybody, you know, they all fall for this. Oh, what a lovely idea.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's got to be one of the first, hasn't it? One of the early ones. One of the most eye-catching early ones, definitely. Because it is a brilliant manoeuvre. Of course it is. If you have global ambitions. And all these people believe it. They completely believe it. And here's the thing. The International African Association, which sounds like it's a charity and which they have all endorsed,
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
is actually a private company run by Leopold himself for his benefit, for his benefit. So the only thing he doesn't have actually is the colony. He's got the association, but he doesn't have the colony. And where is he going to get the colony? Well, the answer is from the one person who wasn't there at that meeting in Brussels. And this is the most famous of all African explorers.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
We've already mentioned him, Henry Morton Stanley. Now, we'll just sketch Stanley very briefly because he really is worthy of a Restless History series in himself. He had an amazing life, Stanley. He was born in Wales in 1841, and he was born as John Rowland's bastard. He was the illegitimate son of a housemaid. That's the entry that is in the Book of Births.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He spends his childhood in a workhouse. He emigrates to New Orleans when he's 18 years old. He fought for the Confederates. Then he fought for the Union. Then he joined the Union Navy. Then he renamed himself Henry Morton Stanley after a New Orleans businessman. And then he became a journalist. He went to the Ottoman Empire. He went to Persia. He went to the Crimea.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He went to Abyssinia with the British expedition. But most famously, the New York Herald sent him to Central Africa. to find Dr Livingstone, which he did in Lake Tanganyika in 1871. And then he invented, almost certainly invented, this fantastic line. So disappointing. I know, it's disappointing. Let's pretend that he said it.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Dr Livingstone, I presume, when he met Livingstone, which flashed around the world and made him a household name, a genuine international celebrity.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
That's very familiar. Nothing wrong with that, Tom. I commend that kind of behavior. Very familiar. So then he went on another expedition three years later, sent this time by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph in London to map the Great Lakes and to look for the source of the Nile. And that's where he's been during Leopold's conference.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Exactly. An incredibly well-publicized journey. One that was followed by newspaper readers across the world, as you would follow reports of great sporting fixtures or something. Tremendous excitement. In August 1877, Stanley reached the trading post of Boma, which is on the right bank of the Congo River near the coast. An extraordinary, extraordinary achievement.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
7,000 miles, Tom, in three years, he did on foot. Now, Leopold has been following this with great interest. And as soon as he hears the news that Stanley has got to the West Coast, he sends him a telegram of congratulations. And then Leopold says to his ambassador in London, this is the man. This is the man I need to get me this colony in the heart of Africa. However,
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
leopold says we have to be careful and i quote if i quite openly charged stanley with the task of taking possession in my name of some part of africa the english will stop me i don't want to risk losing a fine chance to secure for ourselves a slice of this magnificent african cake so i will just give stanley some job of exploration which will defend no one and will give us the bases and headquarters which we can take over later on oh
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Oh, the fox. The fox. So Leopold's intermediaries and emissaries keep offering Stanley. They write to Stanley and they say, you know, the International African Association, this fake charity, would love to offer you a job. Now, Stanley turns it down at first because he wants to go back to England and to see what he could get there.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But when he gets back to London, although, of course, he's a big celebrity... The establishment are very suspicious of him, the royal family, the foreign office and so on, because they have heard reports that Stanley has treated people extremely brutally. And I think reports that are completely justified.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
About half of Stanley's porters, African porters, had died on his trip of starvation or disease and he had flogged them mercilessly and basically he'd driven them into the ground. And this makes people very anxious.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It is indeed, Tom. Yeah, absolutely. And we'll get on to Heart of Darkness next week because we'll do an episode about Joseph Conrad and about this book, which is one of the most influential books, I would argue, of the modern age.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Exactly. Because they will often marry somebody else while he's gone. And you can sense he comes back and he pretends to be disappointed, but actually he's quite relieved. Anyway, and there's also a class issue. He says, they despise me because I'm Welsh. You know, the English are not giving me any credence at all. They don't listen to a word I say.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
They make up these lies about me and all this kind of thing. So... In the summer of 1878, Stanley is very disappointed by his reaction and he gets an invitation from Leopold to visit him in Brussels. And he says to himself, why not? Okay, I'll go and see him.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And so on the 10th of June, 1878, Stanley walks into Leopold's office in the Royal Palace in Brussels for the meeting that will seal the fate of the Congo.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And it's a book that I think anticipates so much of the culture of the 20th century in wrestling with kind of man's capacity for evil and the possibilities of violence and brutality that have been opened up by kind of globalization and by history. And so we'll get onto that next week. It's a book rooted in Conrad's own experience.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yeah, it's a very controversial passage. It's a very evocative passage. The deeper and deeper they go into Africa, the further and further they're going back in time. And for Conrad's critics, sort of post-colonial critics... they say that is so loaded and so dodgy to be basically saying that to visit Africa, the deeper you go, the further backwards you travel to this kind of primeval world.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But we'll unpack all that next week, Tom. But first of all, the Congo. So when Leopold and Stanley sit down that day in June 1878, which we ended the first half with, what do they actually know about this world that Conrad himself visited, this landscape, the jungle, the river and whatnot? Europeans have known about the existence of the River Congo for 400 years.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So the first to lay eyes on it was a Portuguese captain called Diogo Cao in 1482. And he had been sailing south along the coast of Africa like so many Portuguese sailors did. Remember, Tom, their caravels with their triangular sails? That's right. And they're putting up little kind of stone markers, aren't they? They're putting up stone markers.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So he put one on the far bank of the Congo in what's now Angola. that King Zhao II of Portugal did order this land to be discovered and this pillar of stone to be erected by Diogo Cao, a squire of his household. But of course, they weren't really discovering.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
I mean, they were discovering it from their own perspective, but they weren't the first to discover it because, of course, there were a lot of people there already. So when the Portuguese arrived at the end of the 15th century, there were probably about 3 million people who were subjects of the Kingdom of the Congo, with a capital K,
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And that was ruled by a monarch called the Mani Congo, and his capital was probably just over the border in what's now Angola. And the people of the Congo, they were farmers. They raised pigs and yams and stuff. They didn't have wheels. They didn't have writing. But they did have a kind of state system. They had judges. They had a calendar. They had a tax system. They used shells as currency.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So just to give people a sense, he had visited a specific place at a specific point in time. That place is the Congo Free State under the rule of King Leopold II of Belgium. Conrad had visited it nine years before he wrote the book as a merchant seaman steering a boat, as Marlow does, into the heart of Africa. And we'll talk about his experience, as I said, next week.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And they already had slavery. which was to prove a disaster for the Congo because the Portuguese were delighted to find people, to find chiefs who were happy to sell them human beings that the Portuguese could put to work, particularly in Brazil. So Congo becomes a huge supplier of slaves to the Portuguese.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
By the 17th century, the Portuguese are probably shipping 15,000 slaves a year in horrific conditions, initially to Brazil. Later on, they start selling them to North America as well. So in the American South, About one in four of the slaves in the 19th century had roots in equatorial Africa, which includes the kingdom of the Congo.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
What the Congolese made of this is very, very hard for us to tell because until the modern era, the Congolese had no written language, which is why this episode so far has been from a European perspective. Even in King Leopold's time, in the time of the Congo Free State, there is not a single memoir written by a Congolese African.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So that's a problem for us as historians, because it means that African voices are silent compared with European ones.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
No, he wrote to the Portuguese king and he said, you're taking too many slaves, there's nobody left. And the Portuguese king actually wrote back to him, sent him a letter and said, I've heard there's loads of people in the Congo. What are you complaining about? Shut up. And that was the extent of this meeting of minds between these two kings.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
In the years that followed, the Congo became prey to all kinds of inroads in the Portuguese, the Spanish, the Dutch. There's lots of factualism, the civil wars, and basically the kingdom falls apart. But much of this is a mystery to Europeans. Europeans can't get into the interior. They know that the Congo River is a vast river.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's the second largest river in Africa, third largest by volume in the world. But they can't go up it. Because once you start to go upstream, once you go upriver, Very quickly, the river gives way to 200 miles worth of rapids and gorges and canyons and so on. So you have to get out of your ship and walk. And at that point, it's very rocky terrain, what's called the Crystal Mountains.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And Europeans, as soon as they started to do that, they would get malaria or yellow fever and they'd basically all die.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But he's a good example. He only gets a little bit of the way, and then they basically have to go back because they all fall horribly ill. So even in the 1870s, the vast basin of the Congo, we're talking about 1.5 million square miles of territory. That's about what, the size of India? Yeah. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But this week, we're going to look at the real history that underpins that story. So the story of the Congo Free State, probably the darkest stain in the history of European colonialism, what Conrad himself called, and I quote, the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience. So to give people a sense, we are in Central Africa between 1885 and 1908.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's the country that is now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an enormous country, a country that is as big as Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain put together. Indeed, it's as big as the entire United States, east of the Mississippi, and is actually largely unknown outside its own borders, isn't it, Tom?
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Leopold has enlisted the aid of the former Regis Professor of Law at Oxford University, who rejoices in the name Sir Travers Twiss. That's not a real name. A very Dickensian name. Yeah, that's from a novel. Sir Travers Twiss has provided him with a legal opinion that a private company, i.e.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
I would, absolutely. I would. I think lots of people would say that this is a kind of foundational moment for the Congo from which nothing ever goes right thereafter. In that 23-year period when King Leopold is in charge of the Congo, there's a fair claim that it's one of the worst places to live that has ever existed.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
the International Congo Association, is within its rights to sign treaties with African chiefs just as a sovereign country can. When Leopold has got that opinion, he sends orders to Stanley. He says, right, start signing the treaties, make them as brief as possible. And in a couple of articles, these chiefs have to give us everything.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So as they go at River, Stanley will stop and he will get out and he will start talking to the local bigwigs. Of course, when he raises the issue of treaties through various interpreters, The local chiefs have no idea what he's talking about. Remember, most of them have never seen writing before.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So when Danny says, I'd like you to make your X, your cross on this document, they have no idea what they are giving away.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Absolutely. Yeah. But there's a brilliant example in the book King Leopold's Ghost, a terrifying example. On the 1st of April, 1884, the chiefs of Ngombi and Mafela signed a deal with Stanley. Leopold would give them each one piece of cloth per month. So they're very excited at getting this cloth.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
In return, they give him the rights to all their territories, all tax and toll rights, all game, fishing, mining and forest rights for all time. They're giving these rights to the Congo Association. And here is the really crucial thing.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
The treaty that they have signed with their mark says they will assist by labour or otherwise any works, improvements or expeditions which the said association shall cause at any time to be carried out in any part of these territories. And this is the real kicker. And this is what actually makes it different from the treaty signed with, let's say, Native Americans, the Plains Indians or whatever.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Because Stanley and Leopold have not just bought their land, they've bought their labor forever, for all time. Any improvement, any work that the Congo Association wants to be carried out, you have to do for them. And there's no mention of what you'll get in return here. I mean, this is a really kind of... They've given away everything. So as a trade deal, not brilliant.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
There's a brilliant book on this called King Leopold's Ghost by the American writer Adam Hochschild. We'll be borrowing from that book very liberally. So a big shout out to Adam Hochschild's book at the beginning. Not an uncontroversial book itself. And in next week's bonus episode, we'll talk about some of the arguments about that book.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's a very poor trade deal, I think it's fair to say. Stanley is great at getting these deals. By June 1884... He has signed contracts with more than 450 different chiefs. He sails home to Europe with the treaties in his pocket, giving these people's land and labour to King Leopold.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yes, I think it would have made a difference. These treaties are not really, they're not done because Leopold cares what the Africans think. They're done to show to the rest of Europe. So these are publicised? Yes, I've done all these deals with local chiefs. I'm very friendly with the local chiefs. This is going to be for their benefit. Everybody wins. This has been done completely legally.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It is not 16th century style conquistador conquest. So a bit like the Chinese with their... Belt and Road. Belt and Road, yes. I suppose so, though Chinese listeners might... I might raise an eyebrow in parallel, Tom. But yeah, no. I mean, it's a deal that Leopold is selling as it's a deal that benefits Africa. It benefits me. It's great. Everybody wins. Whether everybody does win, we will see.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So he's got the treaties. He's got his steamboats going up and down the river. What he needs now is somebody to recognize this as his. Because... There is a problem. While Stanley has been up the Congo, a French explorer has landed on the other side of the river, a guy called Count Pierre Savignon de Brazza. De Brazza has established his own trading post on the North Bank.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And this becomes known as Brazzaville, which today is the capital of the formerly French Republic of the Congo. So a rival Congolese territory. And there's a massive media row between Stanley and Brazza. The Portuguese hear about this and the Portuguese say, what? We were the first to the Congo. What's going on here? Get out.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And the British say, well, if there's any dispute about this, we would really much prefer that the Portuguese have the Congo. So this is a problem for Leopold. He needs somebody to back him. And he does something here very clever. He goes outside Europe to another relatively new country like Belgium and another country that has a history of signing treaties with indigenous peoples.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Slightly one-sided treaties, some people might say, that end up not being worth the paper they're written on. But complemented by a love of liberty. Right. And this country is, of course, the United States of America. And he has the perfect intermediary, another Dickensian character called Henry Shelton Sanford, who had previously been the American ambassador to Brussels.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But anyway, in King Leopold's Ghost, he says this is one of the great mass killings in human history. A death toll, he says, of Holocaust dimensions. Exactly how many people die in the Congo Free State is disputed. But it's millions, isn't it? It's millions. It's almost certainly millions. And some estimates would go as high as 10 million. It's not just a story about horror.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And Henry Shelton Sanford, if you look him up, he's got a big stovepipe hat. He's got the moustache. He's got the kind of gold pince-nez glasses. And he's got the title General, hasn't he?
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yeah, and he's lost loads of money in Florida, Florida railroads. So he needs money, which makes him the perfect pawn for Leopold. He needs a rich friend. Leopold sends him to Washington with a personal letter to the Republican president, Chester Arthur. And Leopold says, I'm setting up this colony in the Congo. And really, it's about two things. It's about fighting slavery and about free trade.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And as it happens... Arthur is a Republican, and that's basically what the Republican Party in the 1870s and 1880s stands for. Arthur says, oh my God, this sounds absolutely brilliant. And so in April 1884, the US State Department issues the very first official recognition of Leopold's colony.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And they don't understand what it is, because at this stage... Because they think it's going to be like the United States, only in Africa. They absolutely think it's going to be the United States, and what is worse, in the official statement, they muddle up the International Association of the Congo and the International African Association, they use both names within about three sentences.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And of course, that's exactly what Leopold wanted. That was why he did it, because he wants everybody to be confused. He is cunning, isn't he? He is a fox. He is a fox. Now, at this point, when the Americans have recognised it, The French are the next to get on board. Why?
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Because even though they want it themselves, they become paranoid that Leopold is going to run out of money and sell it to the British. And is that because of Stanley? Exactly. The Stanley would be the intermediary.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
No, I guess not. I guess not. And they kind of are still thinking, well, if the Belgians get it, at least it's not the Germans. Right. Next are the Germans. Now, Bismarck, the Chancellor of Germany, the great statesman of Germany, he sees through Leopold, I think, a little bit. Because on the documents that he gets, he writes the words swindle and fantasies. And he's not wrong, is he?
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But Bismarck thinks, I don't want the French to get the Congo or Britain. So maybe if little Belgium gets it, yeah, fine.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Even though Belgium is not going to get it. But Leopold himself, that's the great irony of all this. All this comes to a head at the conference in Berlin that opens at the end of 1884. So this is the great conference that marks the sort of high point. The Scramble for Africa. And there are You know, delegates from America, from Russia, from the Ottoman Empire.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Of course, no Africans deciding their own destiny. Nobody thinks that would be remotely appropriate. Now, actually, Stanley is there as an advisor to the American delegation. And it says something that Stanley himself feels a little bit queasy about this spectacle.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It's a story about celebrity, about international relations, royalty. There's a lot of sex in it. There's loads of politics. It's a story about modernity as well, because this is a new age. It's the age of the camera. So lots of photography. Photography is really important. Newspapers, telegraphs, and so on. And actually, as we'll get into in our third episode...
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He says that the sight of all the delegates rushing to carve up Africa reminded him of when he was on an expedition and they would kill some sort of beast. And he says, my porters, you know, they would rush with gleaming knives for slaughtered game. And that's what these delegates are like. Well, I suppose to hack off the ivory. Exactly, the tusks. Yeah.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So by February 1885, the conference has reached an agreement. And for Leopold, it is the perfect result. It's a total triumph. All the powers agree that they will recognize the International Congo Association as the owner of almost all of the Congo Basin. And that's the dodgy one, not the humanitarian one. Exactly, the dodgy one. Leopold's private company.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So he has got a territory 76 times the size of Belgium, and it will belong not to Belgium, but to Leopold personally. So at last he has the fiefdom he wanted. And three months later, in May 1885, he drops all the fiction. The International Congo Association is allowed to lapse. The only thing that remains of it is its flag, the blue flag with the gold star.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And on the 29th of May, by royal decree, its lands, this huge stretch of territory, is renamed the État indépendant du Congo, the Free State of the Congo, and Leopold is named as its founding sovereign.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yeah, be very hot. Very sensible wearing. Inappropriate garb. Banks of the Congo. Exactly. But now that the Congo Free State has been set up with Leopold as its monarch, for the people of the Congo, the real horror begins.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It proves the provocation, the cause, for one of the great human rights campaigns in all history, arguably the foundational human rights campaign of the 20th century.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
It is indeed. Yeah, it's such a rich and interesting story. So it definitely merits a series. And like all good series, it needs a riveting central character. In this case, a villain. And history has absolutely provided us with one.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And this is King Leopold II of Belgium, who Hochschild says is as interesting, as multilayered, as greedy, as cunning, as charming and as untrustworthy as any of Shakespeare's villains. And if he is the villain, the great irony is he never, ever sets foot in the Congo. He never lays eyes on the Congo. His villainy, as it were, is carried out from afar, which makes him a very 20th century figure.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
You think of all these dictators who kill so many millions of people without ever shedding blood themselves.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He is indeed. He is. And we'll absolutely get into that. This is the classic example, you might say, of the rapacity of corporate capitalism carried to its ultimate murderous extreme. But let's start with Leopold himself. So he was born in 1835, when Belgium had been independent from the Netherlands for five years. So he's the son of the very first king of the Belgians, who's also called Leopold.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He's brought up at a castle called Lachen, which is outside Brussels, where he spends most of his time. He speaks French and German and English, not interestingly Flemish, which is the language of most of his subjects. Now, Leopold's parents, Leopold and Louise, had a pretty miserable, loveless marriage, and they treated their son very, very coldly.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So if he wanted to talk to his father, he had to apply through a secretary for an audience. And when his father wanted to tell his son something, he got a secretary to do it for him. To be fair, that is how I communicate with Katie and Eliza. So you know what? When I was reading this, the parallels between you and King Leopold were leaping off the page. Unbelievable.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Yeah, it's chilling. So Leopold, maybe this will ring a bell with you, Tom. He grows up a moody, kind of gangling and humorless boy. That's me. But the thing is, even at the time, his father says of him, he's very cunning. His father compares him with a fox, says Leopold is like a fox. He slowly and stealthily picks out his path. Stalks the chickens. Exactly. And then he makes his move.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
So by the 1850s, Leopold is in his teens. He's becoming, I think it's fair to say, an extremely awkward and unattractive young man. Yeah. People always comment on how unbelievably tall he is. He's a bit like Baron Trump. He's massively tall and awkward looking. But with less knowledge of crypto, presumably. Presumably, yes.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He's got an enormous beard, and everybody comments on his absolutely enormous nose. So Disraeli said of it, it's such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, thanks to the intervention of a malignant fairy. So he's not a looker, I think it's fair to say, and he's very, very charmless. So he has to compensate for that with his cunning.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
When he's 18 years old, his father takes him to Vienna to get a Habsburg bride. And this is a 16-year-old called Archduchess Marie Henriette. And she's great.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
She's got a great laugh. That echoes around Belgium. And she loves laughing. She loves laughing. And Leopold is shocked by this because he hates laughing. They go to Venice on holiday and he behaves really coldly to her. He won't let it go on a gondola that she's booked and all this. And she bursts into tears. And people see this in public. They say, oh dear, this is an all-starred marriage.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And a month after they got married, she tells one of her friends, if God hears my prayers, I shan't go on living much longer. Which is not what... That's not what you want to hear after honeymoon. So much of Leopold's colonial ambitions, there is an argument that basically it stems from his own insecurity and misery. It's a massive kind of displacement exercise.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Anyway, he doesn't actually become king of Belgium until 1865. So he spends a lot of time waiting for his father to die. And while he's doing that, he has this kind of gnawing insecurity that he's going to be inheriting a country that is just a sort of pathetic minnow on the world stage. Of course, Belgium is kind of squashed between France and an increasingly unified Germany.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And Leopold feels this very keenly. He says of Belgium, petit pays, petit gens, little country, little people. And he thinks, you know, I deserve better than the Belgian people. And what he really wants is is an empire. He wants colonies and he's very aggrieved that he's inheriting a kingdom that doesn't have any.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Three years before he becomes king of the Belgians, he goes on holiday to Spain and he goes to Seville and he spends his time in Seville. He spends weeks at the great archive of the Indies going through the records, looking at just how much money Spain had made from its colonies. So this is the 16th century, isn't it? The conquistadors. The conquistadors.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
How much money they had made from the territories they exploited. And this fires his imagination. He makes trips to Ceylon and to Burma to see how the British make money from their colonies. He reads a book called Java or How to Manage a Colony, which is all about the Dutch in the East Indies. And this is written unbelievably. Have you seen the bloke who wrote this book? Yeah, very funny.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Would you? JWB Money Bank. Yeah. Invest your money in it. Well, you should advertise his book. Money's book is all about how you get a colony to turn a profit. You see, that's what Leopold is interested in. Even more than the prestige and certainly a lot more than any possible civilizing mission aspect of colonialism, what he cares about is cash.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And in this book, JWB Money says the Dutch have turned a profit from Java by using forced labor to have plantations and all this kind of thing.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
The Dutch. Awful. So he looks at the Dutch and he says, yeah, they're very unsentimental. They've used forced labour. And it is clear, he writes, the only way to civilise and uplift these indolent and corrupt peoples is basically by forcing them to work so that we can make money. So here's the great paradox. Other Belgians don't really care about colonists.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
They are very conscious they're only a small and newly independent country. They don't even really have a merchant navy of their own. So how could they possibly maintain a colonial empire? But for Leopold... All of his misery, all of his loneliness and awkwardness, I think he has poured into this great project of acquiring colonies. And he believes this is the only thing that will make him happy.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He absolutely does indeed. He reminds me, reading the book by Adam Hochschild, I was reminded of Scrooge. So Scrooge who, you know, deep down what Scrooge wants, Scrooge wants love. And he's become a miser and a terrible person. You are a sentimentalist. Well, no, I don't think you can be sentimental about King Leopold II, as we will see.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
But you're saying that all the horrors of the Congo is because he didn't have love as a child. I think his loveless life and his obsessiveness, he's not just an ordinary colonialist, as we will see. Mm-hmm. There is something really weirdly obsessive about him.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And I wonder how much of that, I mean, also the way he behaves, the stuff with, as we will see, his obsession with hygiene is very, very peculiar. And with very young ladies. And with very, very young girls. Exactly. There's a lot of bad things to be said, I think it's fair to say, about King Leopold II. Anyway, 1865, he becomes king at last.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Now, for the next 10 years, he doesn't actually manage to get the empire he wants. He investigates various schemes. He'd like to buy a bit of Argentina. He'd like to buy a bit of the Nile Delta. He even talks about acquiring Fiji, but he doesn't really get anywhere. But not Greenland. They're not Greenland, no. But in 1875, he thinks he might be onto something.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
He's offered Spain cash for the Philippines for the second time. And to his deep disappointment, they turn him down again. And he says to one of his courtiers... Okay, I'm going to have a look at Africa now. Maybe Africa's the place. So now at last in this story, we come to Africa.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
Now the great scramble for Africa, which people think of as a 19th century thing, is actually really only concentrated in the final decades of the 19th century. So at this point, 1875, it hasn't happened. The French are in Algeria. The Portuguese are in what become Mozambique and Angola. The British and the Boers both have footholds in South Africa.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And various countries have kind of trading ports and enclaves on the coast of West Africa. But about three quarters of Africa... really meaning the interior, has not yet been penetrated by European empires.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
People just think, well, it's just impenetrable jungle. What could possibly be there? It's a blank space, as Conrad puts it. But by this point, the mid-1870s, Africa is making the news in a way it hasn't ever done before. There have been a series of very eye-catching expeditions.
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538. Horror in the Congo: The Nightmare Begins (Part 1)
And of course, the most famous one, which lots of listeners will have heard of, is the expedition by the journalist Henry Morton Stanley to find the missionary David Livingstone in modern-day Tanzania in 1871, which was financed by the New York Herald. And thanks to these new innovations of cheap newspapers and the telegraph,
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
Does it lie with the imploding Roman Empire or does it lie with the Germanic peoples?
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And indeed, in due course, become the kings.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So they are going to play a key part in this process of transformation, which takes place through the 5th century. But before we get to that, there is also another massive process of transformation that's been taking place in the Roman Empire in the 4th and into the 5th century. And this also will have a transformative impact on the Franks over the course of the succeeding centuries.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And again, I think the best way to kind of introduce this great transformation is to go back to the 350s and the campaigns of Julian in Gaul. Because there is one particular soldier who is serving with Julian's armies in that campaign. And this is a man from Pannonia, so from the Hungarian plain, a man of pretty humble lineage, certainly not high class in any way.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And he is called Martinus, or as we would call him today, Martin. And he is stationed one winter in Amiens, which is very much in the region where the Franks are being stationed as well. So kind of what's now northeastern France.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
Would you enjoy that? I would, because I actually wrote it. It's in Dominion.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So that, Dominic, was Guilty Pleasures by Deborah Mello. I'm sure you'll have read it. It's a romance novel describing the rivalry between two American brothers, both of them black, as we heard, Alexander and Zachary the Hammer Barrett. And they're both absolute fitness fanatics like me. And they're both obsessed by the beautiful Sarai Montrai, who is a personal trainer of
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So a very dramatic moment, Christ appearing to this soldier, Martin, who's given away half of his cloak. And Martin is convinced by this appearance of Christ essentially to give up on his military career. So he's offered a donative by Julian, along with all his other men, and he refuses to accept it. And he demands to be released from the army.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And he supposedly tells Julian, until now, it is you I have served from this moment on. I am a servant of Christ. But Julian didn't like that. That was a shocking display of l'es-majesté. Yeah. The truth is, Dominic, that it is Martin and not Julian who embodies the future because Julian is better known as Julian the Apostate, the last emperor to worship the traditional Roman gods.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And Martin, of course, is a Christian and the future of the Roman Empire is a Christian one.
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But the thing about Martin is that he is a Christian of a peculiarly radical kind. Because even though Julian is very hostile to Christianity, Constantius, his cousin, he's a Christian. Most of the Roman elites are starting to kind of jump ship and become Christian. They can tell the way that the wind is blowing. And when they become Christian, they don't give up their wealth.
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or their snobbery or their kind of contempt for the poor. Instead, they see the church as another opportunity for self-advancement. So whereas a previous generation of the elite might have become consuls or whatever, now they might become bishops because to be a bishop is to be the late Roman Empire, the Christianizing Roman Empire, is to be a figure of immense authority and power.
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And they retain all the appurtenances of power. They keep their palaces, they keep their slaves, they keep their fine clothes. But Martin, that's not what he's into at all. He completely rejects this kind of conviction that you can be Christian and be rich.
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So an admirer of his, who is himself an aristocrat, who is converted to Martin's understanding of Christianity, writes of Martin, his looks were those of a peasant, his clothes shoddy, his hair a disgrace. And Martin's ambition is to become what the Greeks call a monarchus, so literally one who lives alone, i.e. a monk.
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And he's one of the first monks in the western half of the empire because they kind of originate in the eastern half. And he settles on a grassy plain named Mamoutier, which is three miles down river from the Gallic town of Tours. And he subjects himself to incredible austerity. So as a soldier, of course, he'd gone through vigorous military training.
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But now as a monk, he's basically living on nothing. He's enduring extremes of cold and heat, living a very, very tough life. But this becomes a source of huge admiration for lots of people in Gaul. So there are people in the elites who come to admire him, not despite, but because of his rejection of everything that they represent, all the kind of, you know, the worldly standards of greatness.
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And it wins him the ability to perform spectacular miracles that further kind of increases his fame. And so you start to get people of immensely wealthy backgrounds giving up the kind of traditional path to greatness and to rank and coming to join him and they camp out in caves or in wooden shacks. Just a question about the miracles. What are the miracles?
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He's healing the sick, people with twisted limbs. He's straightening them. He's giving sight to the blind. He's giving voice to the mute. Wow. Amazing. Absolutely happening. And the proof of this, Dominic, and I can see you looking sceptical, is that in 371, Martin is elected as the Bishop of Tours.
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and the former Miss Thailand.
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And this is absolutely stupefying because, as we've been saying, bishops are people from the absolute elite of society. And it comes as a complete shock to the elites, but it also comes as a shock to Martin, who doesn't want to be a bishop at all. And he runs away and hides himself in a barn and the geese go and tell the people who've elected him where he is.
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And so he has to come out and become a bishop.
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Okay. Yeah, they're not talking. No. That would be too miraculous. Okay. So anyway, but the miracles continue. And this means that Martin, you know, he has a source of power that does not derive from the traditional standards of Roman life. It's coming directly from heaven. And so that means that his person... is charged with an incredible source of power.
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And it means that when he dies, his body, his relics will continue to be a source of power. And so he dies in his cell. And two groups of people, one from Tor and one from the neighboring city of Poitiers, they both decide that they would like to have the body. And so they all camp outside his cell. And the people of Poitiers basically block off the entrance so that the people of Tor can't get in.
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Well, I'm sure what will have stuck out for you was the use of this phrase, Farang Dam, which literally means Black Franks. And it was first used in the 60s to describe Black American servicemen who were being stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War.
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and stand guard over it but they then all fall asleep and the people of tor who've stayed awake they sneak in through the window grab the body take it to tor in great triumph and they keep it there and so from that point on the relics of martin are kept at tor isn't it a funny thought that if that little confrontation worked out differently the french might not have shamed themselves in 1356 the battle of poitiers because he would have been on their side
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Well, Dominic, it's another example for French history of people falling asleep in Opetian times.
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Very sad. So Martin's body is taken in triumph to Tours. The people are thrilled to have it. The elites of Tours less so. The bishop, for instance, who succeeds Martin, he's very sniffy about it. He builds a small shrine over Martin's tomb. He doesn't do anything much more than that. And essentially to the elites for several generations, Martin remains an embarrassment.
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But his relics do continue to perform miracles. And his fame grows and grows and grows. And essentially, he embodies a kind of source of power that is so uncanny, so unsettling, that the Christian elites of Gaul don't quite know what to do with it. It's in excess of their ability to control.
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But a time is approaching when a new people will emerge as the masters of Gaul, and they will recognise in Martin exactly what they need. A celestial patron who has been despised by the traditional masters of Gaul, but is perfectly suited to their needs. And those people, of course, are the Franks.
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And Thai is just one of a number of Asian languages that uses variation of this word Frank to describe Europeans and Americans.
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So people who haven't read The Da Vinci Code or seen it or read The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail, which is the book purporting to be history on which The Da Vinci Code was based. The theory in this is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene get married. They have children. This is a holy bloodline, sangraal, the holy blood.
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And that, as Lee T. Bing says, that it marries into Frankish royalty and they create this family called the Merovingians. And you may wonder where has this come from? And the answer is that there's a Frankish chronicle which is written in the 7th century, which claims that the Merovingians, who are absolutely a historical dynasty, will be looking at them.
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that they took their name from a guy called Merovech, who was a Frankish king whose mother had been out for a swim in the ocean, where she had encountered a mysterious sea creature that was part sea monster, part human, and part bull.
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I don't think that is explained. But according to the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which informs Dan Brown's novel, this sea creature was actually a fish and an early Christian symbol for Jesus was a fish. Yeah, still is. And so that proves that the Merovingians are actually... So this creature was Jesus. Yeah, descended from Jesus.
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So that's the theory, but there is an alternative and I would say likelier explanation.
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What's this alternative and no doubt very drab explanation? And the explanation probably is that Merovich, if he existed at all, was a Frankish leader who was a Roman voiderati commander in the age of Attila. And he fights with the Romans against Attila in the great battle that sees the Huns turn back. But equally, I mean, he may have been completely legendary.
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There's all kinds of debate about this among historians. But in either case, I mean, people may be wondering where on earth did this kind of mad story about the sea monster come from? And I think it comes from the fact that over the course of the 5th century and definitely into the 6th century, these Frankish warlords who previously had...
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proclaim their power in Roman terms are having to find alternative sources to manifest their greatness. And essentially they are looking for ways to market themselves as kingly and to have a kind of mad origin point, a third bull, a third human, a third sea monster. I mean, that's a great way to say that you belong to a dynasty that is somehow kind of out of the ordinary.
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Yeah. So the Greeks used to, the Arabs still do. It's a word that's used in Urdu, in Hindi, in Chinese, in Malay. And you'll have noticed in that passage of Immortal Prose I just read, the use of the word farang to describe guava fruit. And the reason for that is because it was introduced to Thailand by the Portuguese in the 16th century. So it's basically a kind of a Frankish fruit.
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Did you know that our Sunday Times bestselling book, The Rest Is History Returns, is now out in paperback? From finding out who British history's biggest lad was to tracing the admittedly hazy ancient origins of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it's filled cover to cover with more curious historical moments than you can crack a lasso at, plus puzzles and a pub quiz.
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And we know that by the end of the fifth century, Frankish warlords are starting to proclaim themselves kings. And the first person that we absolutely know did this is a guy called Childeric, who'd been a commander of Frankish Feuderati. He may actually have been a son of Merovich. There are historians who argue this. And he is taking on himself all the symbols of royalty.
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So among the Franks, the particular symbol of royalty is to grow your hair longer than anyone else. So, you know, if you're the guy in the prog rock band, your hair is right the way down to the back of your knees. Yeah. And so the Merovingian kings come to be called the reges criniti, the long-haired kings.
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And the reason that we know that Childeric called himself a king is that his tomb was found near Tournai in Belgium in 1653. And it was kind of full of sumptuous grave goods. He had this cloak that was decorated with lots of golden bees. And these golden bees actually provided Napoleon with with the symbol for the French empire that he wanted.
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So it was designed to kind of replace the fleur-de-lis, the royal symbol. And as well as all these golden bees, there was a ring that had the inscription, I belong to Childeric, the king.
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Absolutely. So Gilderick is succeeded by his son, who's a guy called Clovis. And Clovis, the great Frankish warlord, who claimed himself as a king, he's only one of a number of would-be warlords who at this point are scrapping over the corpse of what had been Roman Gaul.
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The most formidable of these are the Visigoths, the Goths of the West, who have conquered much of Spain, but they also rule a huge swathe of southern Gaul. There are others as well. So there's the Burgundians, who had crossed over the Rhine in 411 and conquered all the area around Strasbourg. There are our friends, the Alemanni. They're also very much on the scene.
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And there is also a Roman renegade, a guy called Cyagrius, who calls himself King of the Romans, so Rex Romanarum. And he is Clovis's most immediate rival and neighbour.
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And the town that he has taken as his capital is a city that from early times in Roman Gaul had been called Lutetia Parasorum, so Lutetia of the Parisi, that's the local Gallic tribe, but which by this point has come to be known as Paris. And so it's unsurprising with Cyagrius right on his doorstep that the first person that Clovis targets is this so-called king of the Romans.
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And similarly in Cambodia, I gather a turkey is a Frankish chicken. So essentially anything that comes from what today we might call the West is Frankish. And it's absolutely bizarre because the Franks are a people who... You know, they take us back over a millennium and a half, back to an incredibly distant age and an incredibly distant part of the world.
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And in 486, Clovis wins a great battle at Soissons, defeats Cyagrius. Cyagrius runs away, escapes. He turns up in Toulouse, which is the capital of the Visigoths in southern Gaul. The Visigothic king returns him to Clovis, who imprisons him and then has him murdered. And you might say that actually, you know, we did a whole series, didn't we, on when the Roman Empire in the West ends.
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This might be an alternative point because Sagres had been ruling as a Roman and with him gone, there are no more people claiming to rule Gaul in a kind of Roman way. And Paris from now on will be the capital of the Franks. This is where Clovis puts down his own base. So he's conquered northern Gaul with the exception of Amorica of Brittany, which he kind of leaves alone.
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He then decides he's going to advance southwards and try and conquer all these other peoples who are lurking in the south. So his first target are the Alamanni, and he defeats them in a great battle at a place called Tolbiac in the Rhineland. Very, very close run.
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At one point, as we will see, Clovis thinks that he's going to lose, and he makes a vow that has a seismic impact on the future course of European history, but we'll come to that in due course. He then turns on the Burgundians. He forces them to pay him tribute. And then finally, in 507, he's ready for the big one, the kind of heavyweight championship.
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And that is to take on the Visigoths in the south of Gaul. So he marches southwards just by Poitiers, so very close to Tours, the shrine of Saint Martin, to a place called Vuillet. He meets the Visigoths under their king. The Visigoths are wiped out. The king is killed. Clovis continues southwards. He lays Toulouse, the Visigothic capital, under siege. 508, Toulouse falls.
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And all that remains to the Visigoths of their former enormous swathes of territory in southern Gaul is a tiny strip of land. And... It's an astonishing achievement because the Franks, who in lots of ways had been the most inferior of all the kind of various Germanic confederations, have emerged as the masters of Gaul, the most prosperous of all the provinces in the Western Empire.
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And the lands that for 500 years pretty much had been ruled by the Caesars are now subject to a Germanic warlord who's got his long hair. He's got his genitals bolting out of his tight pants. He's got his bees. He's got all this kind of stuff. And, you know, it's quite the transformation.
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Well, we know for a fact that it does because we have a letter that is written by the Bishop of Reims in northern Gaul, a guy called Remigius, who is clearly Roman. You can tell that from his name. Also very, very holy. He's a man who supposedly can raise the dead back to life.
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And he writes to Clovis when Clovis succeeds his father, Childeric, essentially hailing Clovis not as a king, but as the new governor of the Roman province of northeastern Gaul. And we have the letter that he writes to him. And he says, the bestowal of your favor must be pure and honest. You must honor your bishops and must always incline yourself to their advice.
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And this is exactly as he would have written to a Roman governor.
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Absolute continuity.
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Yes. Now, there is, of course, a complication here, which is that Clovis, like his forefathers, he's not a Christian. He worships the Roman gods. And that is unlike the other barbarian kings who seized power in Gaul, who have adopted Christianity, but tellingly a heretical form of Christianity.
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And the Franks today, and for the next few weeks, are going to be our great theme. And it is an amazing, amazing story.
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Yeah. So God the Son, so Christ, is not held to be of one essence with God the Father. He's subordinate to God the Father. And that enables them to kind of buy into the fabric of Christian civilization, but to be a part, and as they see it, superior to their Roman subjects. What will Clovis do?
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Because the more he advances southwards into Gaul, so in a way, the more pressing it is that he arrives at an accommodation with the Christian elites of Roman Gaul. And you can see him over the course of his life kind of doing this in a gingerly way, like someone, you know, kind of inching his way into a very cold swimming pool.
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So he has married a Burgundian princess called Clotilde, who, unlike most of her compatriots, is an Orthodox Christian. So a Catholic Christian, as we would call them, not an Aryan. She baptizes the two sons that she bears Clovis. One of these dies and Clovis says, well, this proves that your God can do nothing. Where is your power now?
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But the second son survives and Clovis is happy for that son to be baptized. And then comes the decisive moment, according to tradition, at the Battle of Tolbiac, where he defeats the Alemanni. And people remember that this is the moment where He thinks he's going to lose and he raises a vow. And the vow is to the Christian God.
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And Clovis says, if you allow me to win this battle, I will turn to you. I will convert. And he wins the battle and he is true to his vow. And not just Clovis, but 3,000 of his followers, it is said. And we get that report from the great historian of 6th century Gaul, a guy called Gregory of Tours, who's the bishop.
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writes this incredible history, and we'll be drawing on it a lot in our next episode. But Gregory does also write about Clovis, and he reports that Clovis and his 3,000 followers are baptised on Christmas Day by Remigius, this holy bishop who can raise the dead back to life, in Reims.
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And Gregory writes, like some new Constantine, Clovis stepped forward to the baptismal pool, ready to wash away the sores of his old leprosy, and to be cleansed in flowing water from the sordid stains which he had borne so long. And this, Dominic, of course, is why we've been doing this series on the French Revolution. That's why Louis XVI was crowned and anointed in Reims.
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And it's actually why Louis is called Louis, because Louis is a variant of Clovis.
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I don't think they're mutually exclusive. No. You can feel that your own needs and those of God are compatible if you are the chosen one of God. So often the way. Yeah. But of course, the key thing is, is that the form of Christianity that Clovis has converted to, unlike that of the Visigothic or Burgundian or Alamanic kings, it is an Arianism.
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It's the Orthodox form of Christianity, the Roman form of Christianity. And this means that Clovis can be acknowledged not just by his rival barbarian compadres, but by the Roman emperor who still prevails and presides over a Roman empire in Constantinople. And so the key indicator of this comes in 508 after he's captured Toulouse, the capital of the Visigothic kingdom.
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And he's heading southwards, tellingly to tour the shrine of St. Martin. And on his way, he's met by emissaries of the Roman emperor, Anastasius, who presents him with this official document that honors him and recognizes him as a consul of the Roman people. So this is official recognition from the new Rome.
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And this is brilliant for Clovis because, you know, he's this barbarian warlord, but he's also now a Roman consul. And so he then heads to the shrine of Saint Martin, this unbelievably potent saint of Roman Gaul. And he goes into the shrine and Gregory of Tours writes, he stood there clad in a purple tunic and the cloak of a Roman general, and he crowned himself with a diadem.
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So again, I mean, very much as Napoleon in due course will do. So kind of providing a role model. And it's a sumptuous setting. So by this point, you've got a great complex of churches and courtyards and towers that have been built around the tomb of St. Martin. And over the tomb itself, there's this glittering, gilded dome.
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Clovis comes out from the shrine and he scatters gold and silver coins as he rides through the streets to the cathedral where he's welcomed by the bishop. And Gregory writes, from that day onwards, he was hailed as Consul or Augustus. And it's such a genius move. I'll read you what Patrick Geary, who's one of the great historians of this whole process of how Gaul becomes France.
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Now, no cult barrier separated the army from the indigenous inhabitants of Gaul. the peasants, artisans, and most importantly, the Gallo-Roman aristocracy and its leaders, the bishops, for whom religion was an essential element of their identity.
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Christianization made possible not only the close cooperation between Gallo-Romans and Franks, but a real amalgamation of the two peoples, a process well underway at all levels by the sixth century. So a massively significant maneuver on the part of Clovis with kind of epical consequences.
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Yeah. And Martin is this guy who can perform incredible miracles, and that has given him power. And... power is kind of equivalent to lordship. And it's a lordship that stands outside the traditional power structures of the Gallo-Roman elite. And so it's brilliant for Clovis to identify himself with that. He can be Christian, he can be completely Orthodox. It's all, you know, very Roman.
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The other comparison to fantasy novels is that everybody pretty much in the story has completely mad names. Right. Gundabad. That's a good name. Wulfagund. I think my favourite, Chimney Child, which is a girl's name. So anyone out there looking for a name for a daughter, I think that's a brilliant name.
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But at the same time, it's outside the kind of the frameworks of snobbery and prestige of of that kind of class of bishops who essentially remain the arbiters of power in all the various cities of Roman Gaul. But Clovis, by identifying himself with Saint Martin, is kind of putting himself over and above them.
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It's an absolutely brilliant move and it's reflective of his absolute determination to acknowledge no rivals, let alone any equals. He is absolutely the superior. And just as adopting Saint Martin enables him to put the bishops of Roman Gaul in the shade,
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So also does he spend the last years of his life, so in the wake of his conversion, basically going around like a kind of mafia boss and exterminating all the other Frankish chieftains. And again, Gregory of Tours has a very funny passage about this. So he describes Clovis one day when he had called a general assembly of his subjects.
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He is said to have made the following remark about the relatives whom he had destroyed. So all the other Frankish chieftains. He's a ruthless man. He is. But, you know, ruthlessness pays dividends in the troubled circumstances of the early sixth century. Right. By 511, when he dies, he gets buried in Paris. So he's the first Frankish king to be buried in Paris.
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He has established the most formidable kingdom in what had been the Western Roman Empire. And his dynasty... The Merovingians, like Clovis, they will rule both as the sacred, long-haired descendants of a sea monster, but also as the descendants of an Augustus, of a Roman consul. And of course, they have in St. Martin this... this patron of unbelievable potency.
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And even the Merovingian kings who follow Clovis will be a bit intimidated by Saint Martin. So they tend to avoid his tomb because they're nervous of him. They don't want their own charisma to be blotted out by the much greater charisma of the saint. And in due course, they obtain that cloak, Dominic, which Saint Martin had cut in half and given to the beggar.
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But it is also a hugely significant period historically, because basically it's about how one age passes away. Another is incubated. And you could say it's the great hinge moment in European history because it's the story of the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West and the emergence of what will become medieval civilization. So at the beginning, we are in Gaul.
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And it becomes the kind of the great totem of Merovingian power, the badge of Frankish greatness. And they set up a special class of priests to look after this cloak, capella in Latin. And these priests are called the capellani or chaplains. And this cloak, this capella, as it's called in Latin, comes to be guarded by a special class of priests who are called the capellani or chaplains.
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And this is in due course where we get the word chapel from. And these capellani, these chaplains, will follow it when the Merovingian king rides into war. And it bears stunning witness to the way in which Roman military power and Christian sacral power have been fused by this barbarian king to become a source of unbelievable potency.
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And it's that fusion of the Roman, the Christian, the barbarian that will typify the emergence of the Frankish kingdom in the sixth century.
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And by the end of it, we are in France. And of course, France, it is the land of the Franks, Francia. That's where the word France comes from.
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Yes. So let's look at a particular moment. It's the winter of AD 357, going into 358. We are in the aftermath of Constantine, the great emperor who has reunited the empire after it had been kind of divided up. And in Constantinople, we have Constantine's son, Constantius II. And he has sent his cousin, a man called Julian, to stabilize the Rhine frontier, the frontier of Gaul.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And the most menacing enemy that Julian faces is a great confederation of peoples called the Alemanni. And in the summer of 357, he has met with them outside Strasbourg in a great battle. Julian and his force has been massively outnumbered. But as the Romans so often do, he has won a crushing victory over the barbarians. The king of the Alemanni has been captured.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
He's been sent off to Constantius in Constantinople. And it's all looking good. However, to the north of Strasbourg, so higher up the Rhine, Another group of barbarians have been taking advantage of Julian's distraction to pillage the line of the Meuse Valley. So that's through what's now Belgium. And these, Dominic, are the Franks.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
The Rest Is History Returns, available now in all good bookshops. Zachary was still shaking his head. Welcome to Thailand. Now let me school you. What you and Sarai could do and get away with in Boulder can't be done here in Phuket. Not if she's going to save face and honor her father. She's a good girl. And here in Thailand, good girls don't fool around with or get involved with farangs.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So the Franks have been kind of a constant on the Roman frontier since the 3rd century. We'll look at exactly where they come from in a minute.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
But just for now, this is a kind of particular instant which illustrates the Roman reactions to them and the kind of the relationship between these two people, the Roman superpower and this kind of, essentially at this point, they're just an annoyance on the flank of the great Roman monster, the behemoth. And these Franks, there are only about 600 of them.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
They've taken possession of a couple of abandoned fortresses on the line of the Moors. And Julian wants to nail them down. He doesn't want them to kind of cause trouble. So he lays them under siege, even though it's beyond the campaigning seasons, the snows are coming down.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And in fact, as the winter comes on and there's the risk of the river freezing over, we know from a historian called Ammianus Marcellinus, who's a great fan of Julian, great historian of this period. And he writes, thereby breaking up the ice and denying the barbarians the chance to escape. And this is very effective. Finally, the Franks have no choice to surrender.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And you might think that Julian would then put them to the sword, but he doesn't. He settles them on the northernmost line of the Roman Empire, so kind of by the mouth of the Rhine, to serve as allies of the Roman people, what the Romans called foiderati. And the following summer, So the summer of 358, there are more Frankish war bands who intrude. Julian defeats them again.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And again, he settles them in, you know, what are now the low countries.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
I think they are genuinely scary looking. You know, they want to kind of scarify. They make themselves look as intimidating as possible. So we have a record of how they looked to a Roman poet writing in the following century. So in the fifth.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And you might say it's propaganda, but I don't think so. So this poet writes, these monsters have red hair which descends from the top of the skull in a knot while the back of their head is shaved and shines baldly.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
Yes, I suppose. They're clean shaven, this poet writes, except for locks of hair which descend from the nose and are combed. So again, this is something we've talked about before on the podcast, the inability of the Romans to find a word for what we would call moustaches.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
No, they don't have a word for it. And also the detail that they comb it. And then this brilliant detail. The clothes they wear over their immense genitals are exceedingly tight. Right. So.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
Yes, and also like prog rockers, they have fearsome throwing axes.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So the Franks are not, I guess, a tribe in the way that the Romans of earlier centuries would have recognised the tribe. They're a kind of confederation.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
That is a pattern that has been developing over the course of the centuries because the impact of Roman gold, of Roman military techniques, but also of the desire of the Romans to understand barbarian peoples in a way that corresponds to the Roman world vision has kind of been creating ever larger tribal entities across the Rhine.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
I think the Germanic peoples start to recognize the Roman standards as the measure to which they should conform. And so they start to mold themselves into people like the Romans, which of course makes them actually, ironically, much more menacing. So the Alemanni who we mentioned, I mean, that is all the men. That's all the people who've been gathered together.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
They're a particularly large confederation. The Franks compared to the Alemanni are not as large, certainly not as large as the most famous confederations of all. So the Goths, the Visigoths, the Western Goths, the Ostrogoths, the Eastern Goths. Compared to them, they're low rent. And I think that that is why Julian and other Roman emperors
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And generals are prepared to kind of install them along the frontier as foederati, as allies. And as I said, this is a process that doesn't begin with Julian. It goes back to the third century. So from the late third century, we have a funerary inscription in which the buried warrior has written, I belong to the Frankish nation, but as a soldier under arms, I am a Roman.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So there you have this idea that you can be both a Frank and a Roman. Even under Constantine, a Frank is registered as having served as a general in the Roman army. And I think that reflects the fact that there is something in this trade-off for both peoples. Because just as the Franks get the benefits of Roman civilization, you know, wine and central heating and all that kind of stuff.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So the Romans get these fearsome guys with their very tight pants and their throwing axes to fill a massive manpower shortage. There are a lack of people who want to serve in the Roman army and the Franks are kind of brilliant at that. And the broader question of who the Franks are, where they come from, this is one that the Franks themselves later will struggle to answer.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So one story which will develop much later is that they come from a place called Pannonia, which is basically the Great Plains of Hungary. But I think that's unlikely because it's telling that that's where the Goths come from. So basically, the Franks are identifying themselves with the Goths.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And then much later, there's an even more improbable claim that the Franks came from Troy, which, of course, is where the Romans also came from.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
So they're equating themselves to the Romans. So basically, I think what that tells you is that the Franks are pretty low rent as a group of people. They don't have a distinguished ancestry. They can't really remember where they come from. And even the name that they give themselves. So Franks means literally the brave ones, the war hungry ones. Yeah.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
What the hell is a farang? It's the Thai word for Europeans or non-Thai men. It's mostly used to describe white guys. Since we're black, you and I are actually farang dam. Alexander stared at his twin for a moment. Well, damn, he said, suddenly laughing. Laughing with him, Zachary shrugged. Farang is also the word for guava fruit. Go figure.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
In due course, they will say that the Franks means the free ones, but that is actually under the Romans exactly what they are not. They're not free. They are subordinate.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
I think there's a real kind of reversal of what happened early in the Roman Empire, where the army, which is stationed along the Rhine, is basically the agent of turning these frontier regions Roman. Increasingly, in the third, the fourth, the fifth centuries, The army, because it is becoming more and more barbarian, is barbarianizing those frontier regions.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
But that doesn't mean that the Franks are the equivalent of the warriors in the Trojan horse waiting to come out and destroy the Roman Empire. So they're not the enemy within? They're not the enemy within. Because actually, by the end of the 4th century, they are clearly very loyal as foederati. By the end of the 4th century, they've been serving Rome for several generations.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
They are even willing to fight other Franks who lie beyond the Roman frontier. And I think they remain loyal basically because their warlords, their leaders, remain loyal. And these Frankish leaders... On the one hand, they are very, very Roman. They speak Latin. They read Virgil. They're highly cultured. The gods that they worship are the traditional Roman gods.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
But at the same time, their authority depends on the fact that they are Frankish warlords, that they are respected by their troops. And so you have this sense of a Romano-Frankish identity which doesn't really require the warlords or indeed their soldiers to choose between the Franks or the Romans.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
Because they have moustaches, have their tie bands. Yeah. I think their leaders are able to kind of migrate between both worlds. I think the mass of the warriors are kind of more recognisably Germanic, but they are absolutely integrated into the Roman military system.
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520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
And so that means that in the early fifth century, when basically the Rhine frontier collapses, the Franks are very implicated in the kind of the great catastrophe, the great drama of this story. So, I mean, the highlights of this process, 406, you get large groups of barbarians crossing the Rhine. 410, the Visigoths sack Rome.
The Rest Is History
520. Warlords of the West: Barbarian Heirs of Rome (Part 1)
The following year in 411, a great confederation called the Burgundians cross the Rhine, conquer stretches of the river. And they conquer all the regions that Julian had been defending 50 years previously, so including Strasbourg. And this is a situation in which the Franks have to play a crucial part because they have to decide where their loyalties lie.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Yes. And he's very rude to tailors in Britain. So he'll summon them to come and, you know, measure him and then he won't turn up. So his name is Mudd. His name is Mudd on Savile Row.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So that's very poor. And also the other thing, his name is Mudd in the Church of England because he gives a Nazi salute in Durham Cathedral.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And has to be almost forcibly restrained. Yeah. Absolutely disgraces himself.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
German sparkling wine. Who wants that? No one. Oh, dear.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Yeah, that's harsh on Tonya Harding, who's subject to a very good film that made me more sympathetic to her.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I apologise. You can't equate Margot Robbie to Ribbentrop.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
No, we want to put it on the record.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Because I write that with the Anschluss, so Austria is now part of a greater Reich, that Czechoslovakia is basically kind of sticking into the gut of this Reich. So purely on a map, it looks like it should be swallowed up.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Where everyone drives a Skoda Yeti. Do they? Yeah, Sadie bought one.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So we're very pro-Skoda. Are you touting for sponsorship?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
If Skoda want to give us a free Yeti, we are, you know, we're here. But the other thing which I hadn't realized is that Skoda made the Bren gum, which I always thought was British.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I mean, I'm amazed by that.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And Dominic, don't they also, on the borders where the mountains abut Germany... They've built a fairly impregnable series of defences. I mean, can you imagine a line but in a mountain chain?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And Dominic, as I mentioned, lignite. I don't really know what that is, but whenever I see it in this kind of book, I want the lignite.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And the fact that France is an ally, if France goes to war, then Britain is obliged to go to war.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And so we're back to a kind of pre-First World War, you know, mountaineers all tethered up by a single rope kind of thing.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
that Hitler has potential allies himself because both the Hungarians and the Poles have kind of irredentist ambitions. They want to carve out a chunk.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So that, Dominic, was very much not friend of the show, Adolf Hitler. And he was speaking to the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg on the 12th of September 1938 about Czechoslovakia, as he frames it. And it's the beginning of the year. We're into 2025 now. And on the rest of history, if it's the new year, it must be Nazis.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So they are the Slavs with whom Hitler had grown up, kind of having a personal experience of. Exactly. So not the Poles.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
But also he has a kind of artist's yearning to ride in triumph through Prague, doesn't he? This great, beautiful city with its incredible churches and, of course, synagogues. The great castle. So a bit like Paris, I guess. It kind of haunts his imagination as a foreign city that he would love to have as a prize.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
But I mean, more than that, he's a racist PE teacher. He's a racist PE teacher. They're the worst kind of PE teacher.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So the British ambassador, he's Sir Neville Henderson. And he's, I think, the first of two British performers in this story who don't turn up absolutely brilliantly called Neville. If you're called Neville, it's not good for you. And he is basically a guy who is calculated to rub Ribbentrop up the wrong way because he has impeccable tailoring. He's always seen wearing a carnation.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I wanted to evoke the sense of Hitler through the power of my acting and my oratory. So I hope people got that sense.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
In fact, did you know his uncle married Alice in Wonderland? So Alice Little. Really? Yeah. So he's the embodiment of an English gentleman. Yeah, Ribbentrop would hate that. You know, he likes going shooting, so would get on very well with Goering. In fact, does get on very well with Goering, I think. They all go off and kind of shoot elk together.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
But in all kinds of ways, he's a terrible man to have sent. to Berlin because there's no way that Ribbentrop will get on with him. And in fact, I think, am I right that he has been sent because he's basically the person in the foreign office who people think he is most sympathetic to autocracies?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Well, this is what comes when people who have different views on tailoring get to meet up in the chanceries of Europe.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I also hope that people who may be watching this on YouTube will enjoy the hand gestures, which I thought were very Hitlerian.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So the stage is set for war. I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we will see what the upshot is.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
One of my green flags is if I meet someone who loves John Lennon, I know we're going to be great friends.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
As the largest online therapy provider in the world, BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Discover your relationship green flags with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash rest is history. That's betterhelp.com slash rest is history.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Hello, welcome back to The Rest is History. We are looking at the development of the Munich crisis. Hitler wants to dismember Czechoslovakia. And Dominic, we heard just before the break how he has summoned his generals, told them, draw up a plan. Let's get on with this. What happens next?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
He wrote for the Daily Mail. Konrad Henlein? Yeah.
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528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
They featured a splash from him. Did they? And he came out of it very badly. Really? Yeah. Joseph Konrad wrote for the Daily Mail.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Well, can I also ask you about whether there is... So quite aside from the fact, do they want to go and conquer a country that does not contain German speakers? Do they feel any sense of kind of identity with the Sudeten Germans? I mean, do they feel this is their kith and kin?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I mean, a dog that doesn't bark in the night is the Germans in the Tyrol, which is part of Italy.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And they're much worse treated, aren't they?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
The fact that the Germans, you know, go on and on about the Sudeten Germans, but not the ones in the Tyrol. They don't really care about them. I mean, is this all just a... I mean, do they passionately believe in... I mean, or is it just an excuse?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
But I was wondering about the Nazi high command, the fact that they don't raise a peep over the Tyrol Germans, but the Sudeten Germans, they do. Are they just using them or do they genuinely think that this is disgraceful?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Goering's kind of torn, isn't he? Because he does want all the arms factories and the lignite and stuff. I mean, that would be brilliant because that would help out his various four-year plans or whatever they are, five-year plans. Yeah. But obviously he doesn't want Germany to be crushed by Britain and France.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
So it's the Kaiser who's in exile in Holland, is he?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Because Hitler hates the monarchy by this point, doesn't he? Because he's just been to Rome where he feels he's been humiliated by the king of Italy.
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528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
He conducts himself like Theo. Well, except Theo, of course, is not hanging out with the Mitford sister. No. Which Hitler is. Yeah. And I think this is when he's seeing her most of all. They go to Bayreuth together, to Wagner. Yeah. And then they have to leave early because Hitler wants to go to a gymnastics contest.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
He takes unity to that as well. I don't know whether the Sudetenland guy, whether the PE teacher is there.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
I mean, I would say it's possibly the incident from history that has had the greatest influence on the way people, certainly people in the West, have approached international affairs since the war. I mean, basically, it kind of lies behind everything from the Suez crisis to the invasion of Iraq. It absolutely does. We don't want to be Neville Chamberlain. We want to face down dictators.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Are there people in Britain and France who worry about this, who think we'd rather Hitler had it than Stalin, Czechoslovakia?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Maybe you think quite in those terms.
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528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Partly because he seems, compared to, say, the Nazis, an old-fashioned figure. So his wing collar, his umbrella, which kind of becomes his emblem. Yeah. The fact he's only once in his life been up in an aeroplane, whereas Hitler spent the whole time winging his way around Germany in aeroplanes. And there is a feeling... So I was just looking up on this, because I...
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
read a great book about Chamberlain years ago. So I just looked it up and there was this comment from Ernst von Weizsäcker, who's a diplomat, who's part of that plot, isn't he? Part of the general's plot. And actually father of the Weizsäcker, who then became president of Germany, I think in the 90s.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And he wrote, if Chamberlain comes, these louts, by which he means the Nazis, will triumph and proclaim that some Englishman has taken his cue and come to heel. They, the English, should send an energetic military man who, if necessary, can shout and hit the table with a riding crop, a marshal with many decorations and scars, a man without too much consideration.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
The guy he wanted was a general literally called General Ironside. He thought this was the guy who should go. So I think there is a sense that Chamberlain's image is a problem, that he does seem fusty and Edwardian compared to the go-ahead kind of fascist.
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528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Of course. I mean, they might care about Australia if they're playing cricket, but otherwise, I mean, they don't really care about the empire very much.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
There's something. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't have thought that a sociology lecturer was the kind of person who would basically be suited to standing up to Hitler. No, you'd be right. But actually, Benes, I mean, he's pretty tough. Yeah, well... Hitler, I mean, kind of ends up saying, well, he's a lot tougher than the Austrians were.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Of course he has. But I guess while he's been out there in the heather... He's been working out what could we do. His mighty mind. His volpine, cool, chill, calculating brain has been at work.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And it's kind of, again, looking for, I guess, kind of, it's looking forward to the summits that will be held between the Americans and the Soviets. Yeah, exactly. And the Cold War.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Well, Dominic, you said that this is a story full of twists and cliffhangers, and this is definitely a cliffhanger. So if you want to find out what happens next, how will Chamberlain get on with Hitler? Will there be peace in our time? You can hear the episode, the next episode right away. And if you are not a member of the Restless History Club, you can join and get it at therestesshistory.com.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
But if you'd rather wait, we will be back on Thursday with the story of Chamberlain's three flights to Germany, the Munich conference, and, well, I'm giving it away here, the fall of Czechoslovakia. Goodbye. Goodbye.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And so the Nazis come to power kind of in alliance with the conservative militaristic elites who had been, well, had been the elites, you know, since the time of the Kaiser and before. And in 1938, are they still... They're still on the scene, right? I mean, they've kind of been slightly sidelined, but they're still part of the makeup of the state.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Right, but make Germany great again and get our borders back, but not necessarily to go into other countries that don't contain Germans and conquer them as well. And if Czechoslovakia contains a minority of Germans, then the majority are Czech or Slovaks.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
National self-determination. Because that's Hitler's genius, isn't it? Is that the League of Nations... which has been set up after the First World War, it's all about national self-determination. It's the progressive thing to be in favour of. So why shouldn't Germans have self-determination like everyone else?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Yes, it may not be making the trains run on time necessarily, but he does get chunks of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had never belonged to Germany before. You know, we've now got them.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Well, but I mean, it's kind of more supernatural than that, isn't it? He feels appointed by some inchoate spirit to guide his nation to glory. He totally does. And he believes that literally. Yes, he does. I mean, it's not just a kind of abstract spirit. It's... He feels ordained by some supernatural power.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
He is. We talked about that in the previous episode. And I think we both agreed that although we don't have medical backgrounds, we didn't feel this was the wisest thing for him to be drinking.
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
Well, I hope that people sense the presence of amphetamines in that performance I gave at the start of the show.
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528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And foreign currency as well has gone, hasn't it?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And aren't there international boycotts, which the Nazi high command can then blame on international jury?
The Rest Is History
528. The Nazis' Road to War: Hitler Prepares to Strike (Part 1)
And a European war would include taking on Britain and France and attacking the Soviet Union. So, I mean, basically taking on everyone. I mean, what are his plans at that point?
The Rest Is History
544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
The Rest Is History
544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So what seems to have happened is that some of the sections, these are the kind of neighbourhood councils in Paris, discussed... how we eliminate these people in the prisons. And there are a lot of people saying it's an unpleasant necessity, but basically somebody has to do it. Now, that's not to say the section's ordered it, but the tone has kind of been set.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
About this point, the chief prison inspector comes to Danton in the Hôtel de Ville in City Hall, and he says, I'm genuinely worried about the safety of the people in the prisons. And Danton says, je me fous bien des prisonniers. I don't give a damn about the prisoners, like basically let them fend for themselves.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Tom, I'm so surprised at this. I think I thought you were going to be on the other side of this equation, but it's very clear to me now from the way you've conducted yourself in this whole episode. That, you know, you're going to take a very Dominic Sandbrook, princes in the tower line on this issue, are you?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, fair enough. And also, don't forget, everybody thinks the prisoners are total villains and traitors and all of that stuff. Of course.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Listeners can make up their own minds, can't they? I have to say Theo agrees with you. He's written in the chat, well said, Tom. So that's nice. So let's get into the story. Sometime about 2.30 that afternoon, the 2nd of September, the news has come in from Verdun. There was a group of prisoners being escorted through the city from the Palais de Justice to the Abbey prison.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And they are royal officials, they're courtiers and they're Catholic priests. The streets are obviously packed with people because of the war panic. And a lot of people shout abuse at them as they pass in these kind of carriages. As they get towards the Abbey prison, which is in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it's a former abbey, hence the name, a group of people stop them.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
These people are National Guardsmen, sans-culottes, a mixture of characters. They stop the carriages, they drag the prisoners out, and they drag them into the nearby section headquarters, which is a convent. And there's a great crowd of people there, and the people are shouting, these are enemies of the people. Why take them to the prison? Why not just get rid of them now?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Two or three of those prisoners try to break out, try to get away, or fight for their lives or whatever. There's a scuffle, they're beaten up, and they are hacked to death with knives, and their bodies are left in the courtyard. The rest of the prisoners are just... 20 people or so are just standing there absolutely traumatized and shocked, wondering what's going to happen.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
An impromptu tribunal is set up and it declares them guilty. Then one by one, in a very methodical way, they're led down the steps into the garden and there a group of men has assembled with knives, axes, hatchets. There's a guy who's clearly a carpenter because he's brought his saw. And one by one, they are hacked to death.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It's important to say right from the beginning, this is the first incident. It is not a mad frenzy. It's not an orgy of violence. It is quiet. It's considered. The guys take their time. It takes about half an hour to kill all these men. And then it is done. And upstairs, the people who are still there, the room is absolutely full of people.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And they are debating, now that we've killed these people, why don't we just go into the Abbe prison and do the same with everybody who is in there? But again, not necessarily to kill them, to sit in judgment on them. As we'll see, not everybody is killed. You're absolutely right.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
While that crowd is all debating and arguing about how they're going to do it, a separate group breaks into another prison about a mile away called the Qarm. It's a former Qarmalite convent. So a lot of these prisons are convents and abbeys and religious houses that have been converted. In this prison, there are about 160 priests. This crowd again organises a kind of improvised tribunal.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
They call out the prisoners' names one by one. They take them out into the garden. Some of them are shot. Most of them, though, are hacked to death again. Some of them try to climb over the walls or they even climb trees to get away. But they are dragged back and finished off with knives. Again, just to say, I mean, a quarter of them are spared. Well, hold on.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
115 people out of 160 are killed in this.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Agreed. And by the way, we both get different figures. That's not because one of us is right and the other is wrong. It's because every history book gives different figures on this. So, yeah, there is a lot of confusion about the figures. Now, meanwhile, the death squad has got started in the Abbe prison and also in some of the other prisons. And in all of them, it is the same kind of routine.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think actually death squad is better than mob prison. They're often described as mobs, but these are kind of organized teams of men. They almost always hold this kind of tribunal. They bring people out into the courtyard once they've been found guilty, and then they stab them or hack them to death. And we only know one of the names of the people who organized this.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, it does have a huge resonance in France. So those words in French, il nous faut de l'audace, encore de l'audace, toujours de l'audace. We need daring, more daring, always daring, to dare, to dare, to dare again, or however you translate it. They're very famous. Lots of French school children will know those words.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
a guy called Stanislas Maia, who was a clerk. He'd been at the Bastille. He'd been a big figure in the Women's March on Versailles. And he seems to have been one of those people who's thrown up by these periods of revolution and kind of chaos. So a bit of a bully. You know, you could say he's the kind of person who would be a paramilitary leader.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he loves all this, and obviously this is his moment.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think they're absolutely right, Tom. I think he is being organised. Insofar as there is a sense of organisation, it's at a very, very sort of low level. It's these kind of neighbourhood councils. The commune, we know that they talked about. That's an instructionary council that's taking control of Paris.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
We know they talked about it and they said, your point, there weren't enough men to protect the prisons. We need them on the barricades. One of the communist committees issued a statement signed by Marat, the prisoners are brigands who will slaughter our children and our women. These acts of justice are indispensable to deter through the use of terror these legions of traitors.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, I think so. I mean, and we'll talk about in the second half about what the population of Paris think of it. But I think you're absolutely right that basically they are pretty representative of the city and of the streets, I guess. It is the vengeance of the streets. That's what historians who are more sympathetic to the September Massacre say. I mean, on the bigwigs...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The bigwigs know this is happening, but they don't do anything about it. Danton says to Brissot, Girondin leader, the deaths are an indispensable sacrifice to appease the people of Paris.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The interior minister, Jean-Marie Roulon, the husband of Madame Roulon, the great sort of linchpin of the Girondin sort of social circle, he says the people terrible in its vengeance is exercising a kind of justice. You know, they're making excuses for it and kind of, I mean, they do nothing about it. That association of terror with a kind of justice, I think, is exactly what's happening.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, I think that was very French Revolution, isn't it? So that's the first day. But of course, it's just the first several days. The next day, you get to Monday the 3rd. The men at the Abbe prison, the first prison to be targeted. They're there for about 24 hours working away. And meanwhile, other men are moving on to other prisons. There's a seminary called Saint-Femin, which holds priests.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And that, I think, gives you a sense of the position that we're in as we begin season three of the French Revolution. This episode is very, very gory. So listeners should be warned. It is absolutely revolting, particularly if you have children, be warned.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
There's a convent called Saint-Bernard. There's an asylum at Bicetre, which holds petty criminals. Perhaps most shockingly, the Saupetrière women's hospice, which holds prostitutes. And people have been joking, haven't they? We should send Marie-Antoinette to the Saupetrière. So there, we're not talking about priests or courtiers or, you know, royalist journalists.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
These people are actually poor, petty criminals, prostitutes and so on. And this is, I think, where it gets particularly shocking. So be set. They killed probably 150, 160 people. A lot of them are very young. About 40 of them are probably under 18. One of them is 12. Two of them are 13. Three of them are 14 and so on.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Saint Bernard, the people who were killed there, perhaps 70 of them, they're forgers. And the Soncolot hate forgers because of the paper money. They think the paper money is all a plot. They think that the forgers have been working with counter-revolutionaries to undermine it and to drive up grain prices. So if you're a forger, you've got to go.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And not a good time to be a prostitute. So Saul Petriere, probably 40 prostitutes.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think actually, Tom, since 1789, maybe I don't know enough about pre-revolutionary Paris, but I think certainly since 1789, we talked about the grand peur, the great fear in the countryside. And that's a huge fear of brigands, isn't it, who are going to ride over the horizon and trample your crops and burn, because they're working with the local aristocrats.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Well, I think in Paris, there has been the same thing with criminals. An anxiety about street crime and a belief that crime in some obscure way is connected with the court.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Because in today's episode, we will be turning to, I would say, perhaps the most horrific episode of the whole revolution, the September massacres. So to give people a sense... This is a moment when mobs are going to storm, basically burst into the prisons. Or are they mobs?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, absolutely. Now, actually, you made a really good point earlier on. You were keen to emphasize that not everybody is killed. The single most famous kind of insider account, the one that was best known in 1790s France, came from somebody who did survive. He was an army officer and a royalist journalist called François-Jorniac Saint-Méar. And he was in the Abbey of Saint-Germain, a prisoner.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he wrote a book afterwards with a brilliant title called My agony of 38 hours. I'd buy that. And he says in that, basically, he was in the prison and he was in his cell and his cell had a little window and he couldn't see into the courtyard, but he could hear. And he said, basically, that was the execution ground.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And for hours, he was just sitting there in his cell, listening to people being murdered. And he said the killers worked in silence and that made him even more terrifying. He could hear people being led out and then the kind of grunting and the hacking of the blows and all that kind of thing.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he said all that he would hear, the only speech was that basically after everybody was killed, the killers would shout, long live the nation, and then they would move on to the next. Now a guard, he'd made friends with a guard, and the guard said to him, I'll let you watch some of the interrogations before the tribunal so you can work out the right answers.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So eventually, 4th of September, at 1 o'clock in the morning, it's his turn. Imagine that. I mean, that's terrifying. Somebody shouts out your name and you're led down the corridor. And then you go into this room, which is packed with people, a lot of stubble, a lot of sweat, and a group of men at the end. You have to answer these questions.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he said the men who took him in had blood all over their shirts. So he goes in, and if his account is remotely true, and of course it may be exaggerated, he did really well. He was very calm. He said, listen, I used to be a royalist, but I'm not anymore. The circumstances have changed, and of course I've changed my mind, as we all have. I've never plotted and conspired with anybody.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I've never been interested in politics. I was just a journalist, and it's bad luck that I'm here. And they acquitted him. And they sent him home with an escort of sans-culottes. And when he got back to his boarding house, his landlord, who saw him coming with these men covered in blood, got out his pocketbook to give these men money to basically pay them off.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And the men said, oh, we don't do this for money.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So it depends. I mean, it's so interesting. It depends which book you read. I can tell you've been reading David Andrus's book because he's very much of the glass half full, isn't he? He's like, well, look at all the prisoners who survived. Nobody talks about them. Anyway, so this guy gave the right answers.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
But of course, there are some people who cannot bring themselves to give the right answers. And after the break, let's come to the most celebrated of all of those. And that's somebody you've talked about before, Tom. And I know you have a bit of a tendresse for this unfortunate lady. I do. It's Marie Antoinette's friend, the Princesse de Lamballe.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So we'll be coming to her story after the break and be warned, things are going to get ugly. And that is a very serious warning.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Mobs or death squads. And they are going to club or hack a thousand people to death. Some of them in very gruesome circumstances. And we'll be debating all that later, but Tom, perhaps first of all, we should remind people where we have got to. Now, obviously, by reminding people, we don't need to do the whole previous two series again. That would be too meta. But, yeah, it would.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
That's one of the things that make me so passionate about NordVPN. So to stay secure online, you really should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. You really should, you know. All you need to do is to go to nordvpn.com slash restishistory. When you sign up, you can receive a bonus four months on top of your plan and there is no risk with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The link is also in the episode description box.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, that's right, Tom. So just to give people a sense of what is coming, we had a big debate, didn't we, about what reading we would come in with this half. That is actually one of the less bloodthirsty, one of the least horrible of all the potential readings that we could have chosen, because nothing good is going to happen to her. She's 42 years old at this point.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
We'll never get out of it. Okay, to give people a sense, we're in 1792. Tuileries has been stormed. France is at war, and it's been at war since April, and it's gone incredibly badly so far. So France has basically lost those little battles. So politics in Paris is defined by a feud between two rival groups of Jacobins.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I'd always imagined her as being quite young. But of course, Marion Toinette herself is not terribly young at this point. She's been with Marion Toinette all this time. She'd had a pretty terrible life, the Princesse de Lambelle. Married at 16, widowed at 19. Her husband probably gave her syphilis so she couldn't have children. And her father-in-law had banned her from remarrying.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So she's sort of stuck there. hanging around Marie Antoinette. And as you say, she is extremely loyal. She's perceived as very haughty, isn't she? I think that's because she's shy. Yeah. She's a nervous person. Sickly. Socially maladroit. Yeah, absolutely.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
But as you've said, and as you brilliantly described in those episodes about Marie Antoinette at the very beginning of the whole French Revolution story, cycle. She has always played a very prominent part in the kind of pornographic demonology of the court.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah. So on the 3rd of September, which is the second day of the massacres, the killers came to a prison called La Force, where she has been taken with the other ladies-in-waiting and with the royal children's former governess, Madame de Tourzel. And there's a tribunal set up. There are seven people. The most famous of them is a radical journalist called Jacques Hébert.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
He basically makes Marat look like a... A columnist for The Guardian. He's kind of very extreme. He's a bit Trump-esque, isn't he? He has nicknames for his opponents. Yes, incredibly aggressive. So this tribunal has been working its way through the prisoners of the force. They have a very strange sort of code. If they say at the end of your hearing, vive la natione, then you are spared.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
You're free to go. If they say you're free to go, you are killed. So it's slightly confusing. Anyway, the process to Lombelle is brought out and it's all actually very quick. They say, did you know anything about the plot to kill the people by the Swiss guards at the Tuileries? So again, harking back to the sense that it's the guards who are at fault and it's a royal conspiracy against the people.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And she says, no, I knew nothing about this. Will you swear to liberty and equality and hatred of the king and queen? She says, yes, I'll happily swear to liberty and equality, but I cannot swear hatred to the king and queen. It's not in my heart. Now, at that point, by some accounts, there was a friend or an agent of her father-in-law or something like this.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
who was in the room, who whispered to her, just said, say you swear it and they'll let you go. And she said, I have nothing more to say. It's indifferent to me if I die earlier or later. I have made the sacrifice of my life. And the tribunal says, very well, let Madame be set at liberty, which means you're for the chop. And then she is led outside into the courtyard.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And now what happens next is the subject of innumerable, undoubtedly sensationalized, exaggerated, and probably entirely fictional accounts. Many of them exaggerated, and many of them, frankly, probably fictional. What do we actually know? What we know is that the same day, the 3rd, a group of Sankulot delivered her body to Sans head to one of the sections.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Later, the head was retrieved and these were buried privately by servants of her family. That's what we actually know.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Correct. So there are a couple of issues and how she was killed, which is the subject of an enormous sort of very prurient, frankly, pornographic speculation in the 1790s and afterwards. And then there is what happens to her head afterwards, which becomes a very, very famous part of the French Revolutionary story.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So the first faction are called the Girondins, and they're under Brissot, who you really liked, as I recall. I did like Brissot, yeah. Yeah, a do-gooder. That's Brissot, isn't he? He's an abolitionist. He likes a literary salon. He likes dinner with metropolitan people. He's a good man. Yeah, that's Brissot. And then on the other end, another very Tom Holland figure, actually.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
She wasn't actually there at the time. I think she wasn't in the room. There's a story that the governor of the prison's wife sees it and faints. And people thought that was Marion Tournette. I think it's possible they put the head on the pipe, by the way, to the temple prison. I think that sounds like something they might have done. Yeah, I agree.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
One of the worst people who's ever lived. But again, I don't believe this story. There's a story that he's at the Palais Royal and he's having dinner with some English friends, English guests. And somebody brings in the head and he looks at her and he says, oh, that's Lombard. I know her by her long hair. Anyway, let's have dinner. Again, I don't think that happened.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think he's such a terrible man that I'd like to believe it did happen.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It's like the battle for your soul this time. I know. This is why I find it so fascinating. It's the Montagnard, the mountain as they're called, under Maximilien Robespierre, the kind of bony, Rousseau-loving. Another do-gooder. Bewigged. Yeah, bewigged do-gooder. Hates capital punishment. Yeah, like you. The streets of Paris are full of armed young men.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, like the stuff of a Gilray cartoon. Yes, exactly. So my take on this is these stories are incredibly controversial among historians. And as we will see, because we'll get into that in a little while, my view is a lot of these stories are clearly made up. The stories of the most grotesque torture, the stories of cannibalism, people drinking blood, all of that kind of stuff.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It's part of a tradition of political invective to invent these stories. But I think it's implausible to imagine that 1,000 people were killed without, as it were, people overstepping the mark, without mutilation, without rape. Because there were suggestions that some of the prostitutes, for example, were abused or raped. Is that inherently implausible?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
No, I think a lot of these are horrific killing. They're not entirely surgical. However, I do agree with you that a mad frenzy is the wrong way to think about it. that it is pretty clear from a lot of these accounts, like that account that we quoted before the break of that guy who let go, there is a kind of semblance of justice.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
We know that the killers took these tribunals, that they're not all just sort of dancing around wearing people's body parts as hats or whatever, covered in blood, that they are actually trying to take these tribunals quite seriously. We know that the crowds listened to the evidence, And we do know that the killings were carried out in silence because so many people talk about it.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Solemn, yeah, solemn atmosphere. I mean, some people have talked about it. They've said it was almost like they were ritualistic killings, that there was a kind of... I dare I say to him, I don't want to give you a massive gift, but it's kind of sacral dimension to it, that it was a purge. It was a kind of purge of sin.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So these are the Federés from Marseille and elsewhere. Tom, last time you talked about their importance in bringing the Marseillais.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Oh, I totally agree with that. I think that the people who do it think they're doing the right thing. They think it's a necessary purge.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think actually the pornographic kind of mode is the one that people instinctively reach for because Paris is awash with it. I think it's the natural genre to pick.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Okay, let's just sum up the story. So it takes four days. The massacres and the prisons... Lasts for four days. They die down on the morning of the 6th of September. To give you a sense of what Paris looks like, the place is absolutely full of bodies. There are bodies in the streets. There are bodies in the courtyards. There are bodies in the kind of corridors of the prison.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The rest of the prisoners, of course, have been set free. So the prison's empty. And the commune eventually sends in people and says, please scrub them down and wash them with vinegar. get rid of the stench, get rid of the stains. But in some of the prisons, La Force, for example, there's so much blood, they can't shift the bloodstains.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Of course, a Tom Holland would say, some of the rooms are stained with blood, but some of them are pristine and perfectly clean. Why not talk about those rooms? Anyway. We'll get into this in a second, Tom, because we're going to talk about the historiography. There are copycat killings elsewhere in France. So there are 44 people, for example, that are killed in Versailles.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
A horrendous atrocity, actually. They are lynched, they are beheaded in public, and their heads are stuck on the spikes of the palace gates. So probably about 100 people are killed across France. But then... In the next few weeks, things die down. In the future episodes, we'll talk about why that happens, the political transformation in Paris, and a very dramatic change on the battlefield.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It was indeed. And people will remember that the episode before that was the story of how these guys, the Federés and the sans-culottes on the streets of Paris, the people who wear trousers, the kind of artisans, the radicals, they stormed the Tuileries Palace. They launched a second revolution. They slaughtered the Swiss guard. They effectively toppled the king and queen who'd been carted off
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Just to move towards a close on the September massacres. One question is, what did people in Paris think of them? And we know people in Paris thought they were fine. They were completely fine. David Andrus, who you've mentioned before, he makes a very good point that Parisians are used to public violence. I mean, you talked about it, Tom, in that excellent episode you did on the guillotine.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The hideous rituals of the public executions, the idea of humiliating, degrading and destroying somebody in public.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Well, it's interesting that the papers at the time, they're not embarrassed about it at all. This is a moderate paper, the Courrier Francais. The people made it their duty to purge the city of all the criminals, to prevent a prison breakout that would have fallen on the women and children. Moralical paper, Révolution de Paris.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The people took the extreme measure, but the only appropriate one, of forestalling the horrors that were being prepared against them and of showing no mercy to those who would not have shown any to them.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Of course. I mean, we have diarists, we have letter writers. There's a brilliant example of a guy, a merchant's son, an 18-year-old in Peter McPhee's book on the French Revolution. And he wrote home and he said, there has been a horrible massacre. He says, wherever you go, you see the bloody remains of mutilated bodies in open graves.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And then in the next line, he says, but it was the right thing to do. The prisoners were plotting with the Prussians. We had to do it. And that diarist, Rosalie Julien, she said, again, an atrocious necessity. The people, terrible in their fury, are avenging the crimes of three years of vile treachery. And she talks in her diary. She says people have had their heads cut off.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Priests have been eviscerated. But it's the right thing to do because we had to save France. Now, the thing is, historians have grappled with this ever since. Because, of course, most historians, by and large, I would say, who write about the French Revolution, especially in France, have been sympathetic to the revolution.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And here you have an episode which is, for me, much more shocking than the terror. I mean, the victims in the terror, a lot of them are people involved in politics, players in the games. They're players. These people are often young, very poor, the criminals, the petty thieves, the women, the prostitutes, the prince de Lambat. So...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
From the 21st century perspective, I know Theo says, oh, you're always harder on French exponents of violence than you are when the British do it. But I think even with that said, it's hard to contemplate this and to say, oh, yeah, they had to go, as Theo clearly thinks.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I mean, I probably would choose the guillotine over being hacked to death by a carpenter with a saw. At one o'clock in the morning? Yeah. So the definitive French historian of this was a guy called Pierre Caron. And he was writing in the 1930s. He was the head of the National Archives in France. And he said, you have to understand it in the context of two things.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
One, the fighting at the Tuileries and the thirst for vengeance. And the other is the mood of panic and hysteria as the Prussians advanced on the capital. And that you have to understand the war, the pressure and all of this kind of thing. And Caron, for years, everybody said, he's the top man in the September Massacres. He knows what's what.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
to a prison called the Temple Fortress. But they also crucially arrested about a thousand people who have since been crammed into the prisons of Paris.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And then 50 years later, our old friend Simon Sharma wrote his book, Citizens. Have you read the passage where he talks about Caron? I have. He says his book is, and I quote, a monument of intellectual cowardice and moral self-delusion. And he said, Caron is being far too kind. This is basically anticipating the genocides of the 20th century.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The same themes, we have to get them before they get us. The same emphasis on what Sharma calls an armed sanitation, on purging France of crime and sin. And you can see why Sharma, writing in the 1980s, very conscious of what had happened in Europe 40 years earlier. Why he looks at September and says, hey, don't make excuses for this. This is unbelievably horrible and bestial.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he doesn't deny that there's a kind of efficiency and a clinical nature to it. But he says that's what makes it all the more frightening.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So in this case, right, I agree with you, it didn't happen. The thing is, do you take all the revolutionary sources on trust and say the counter-revolutionary ones are propagandistic exaggerations? Or do you say that the truth probably lies in between the two and that both of them are party-prey? And actually, the truth is that we'll never really know.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And this is the frustrating thing about this story. It's a classic example of historians projecting onto it their own political preconceptions. We talked about David Andrus. David Andrus is very much a man of the left. In his book on the terror, he says the September massacres are terrible. But then in the next breath, he has a sentence like this.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
This is where he introduces the September massacres. The people in arms exercised their right of self-defence against those they felt were betraying them to the counter-revolution. You cannot imagine Simon Sharma writing that sentence, can you?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Well, are you not the person who did an episode about how the Nazis thought what they were doing was right, and they were on the right side of history, and on the right side of morality?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So there's another brilliant book on the French Revolution, the most recent English language survey published. It's by a guy called Jeremy Popkin, American historian, professor at the University of Kentucky. And he is much more positive about the revolution than Sharma is.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And he says in his section on this, he says, listen, if you think the French Revolution is better than the experiments of the 20th century, for example, communism, or indeed, Nazism, if you think the French Revolution is more progressive... As he clearly does, he says, you should have a massive problem with the September massacres.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Because he says, the thing that is so frightening about them is that they are so cold-bloodedly political. That they are people sitting down in committee rooms and saying, yeah, these people have got to go. Go ahead and do it. Somebody organised the death squads. I mean, of course, they were bottom-up to some degree.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
but there were people who led them, there were people who condoned it, there were people who didn't intervene, all of that kind of thing. In his version, and indeed in Timothy Tackett and other historians, they say this is a key step towards what we call the reign of terror.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
The idea that maybe you'll make some mistakes and some innocent people will be rounded up and killed accidentally, but it's actually better to purge than to allow...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Well, because obviously we're going to be talking about this an awful lot when we get the terror itself. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The elections to the National Convention have been happening all this time, and all the big names are standing. Brissot, Robespierre, Danton, Marat.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
This new convention is going to meet on the 20th of September, and it is going to decide the future of France, and in particular, something I know you'll be talking about in a couple of episodes' time. the future of the royal family. But the question is, will this convention even get the chance to do that? Because all this time, the Prussians have been coming closer and closer and closer.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So Verdun fell. The Duke of Brunswick is coming on. He's got 80,000 men. Every day, he is coming closer to Paris. He is now being pursued by a smaller French army under General Dumouriez, who is the foreign minister who got France into the war in the first place. And by the third week in September, the Prussians reach a place called Valmy, which is in the Argonne forest.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It's about 120 miles from Paris. And rain is falling, the skies are overcast, and it's against this very kind of turbulent backdrop. that the Duke of Brunswick and the Prussians turn to finish off the French and to clear the battlefield for their final assault on the capital. And Tom, what happens next will change the course of European history.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Exactly right. That's exactly right. So to give people a sense of the politics, with the stormy of the Tuileries, politics have been plunged into total chaos. The king and his family are in the temple. In their place, the Legislative Assembly has set up this executive, which is basically dominated by the Girondins and by Danton, Minister of Justice.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Now, Tom, as you know, I am not just a man of history. I'm also known for my involvement in the performing arts.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I must confess that early on in my acting career, my stage presence did come under a little scrutiny from Britain's finest newspapers.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, and I will remind the listeners that in Scotland, they order their reviews in a different way. So one is at the top and five stars is the worst review you could get. So we were very happy with that one-star review. But like a lot of great masters of their craft, Tom, I learned from it. I grew. I evolved. I knew I would bide my time before returning to the boards. And guess what? You're not.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
No. Yes. Tom, I have to tell you, I have returned to the boards. I'm performing once again. And the brilliant news for our listeners is that you can go and you can be transfixed by my performance right now because I am honoured and privileged to appear in the latest Sherlock & Co adventure, The Adventure of the Norwood. Please tell me that you are playing the Norwood Builder.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I'm playing a much better character. I'm playing Hector McFarlane, a solicitor from Blackheath accused of murder. Goodness, as Lestrade's officers bear down on me, Tom, I have nowhere else to turn but to 221B Baker Street.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Well, very much like this one, we were better acting, I think it's fair to say. It's a stable mate of ours. They are a massive show. They get 10 million downloads. Outside, I believe, The Archers, this is the biggest audio drama in Britain. Well, I have no doubt, Dominic, that it is more interesting than The Archers. It genuinely is brilliant. So My Son is a massive Sherlock and Co. aficionado.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It basically goes through all the original short stories and the short stories that are often forgotten in modern day adaptations. It transposes Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's narratives to the modern day. So Watson himself is making the podcast while they're doing the adventures. You can pick up any adventure you want. You don't have to follow the whole series to get stuck in.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
It is absolutely brilliant. Do you know who else thinks it's brilliant, Tom? The Guardian newspaper. One of those prized one-star reviews? No, a five-star. They said, and I quote, very funny, mildly sweary and hugely popular. Do you want to know what the Times said? It said, a breakneck series that Gen Z, or Gen Z as members of it say, that Gen Z is hooked on. Wow.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And they have said, listen, we are going to have to have yet another constitutional kind of reboot. We're going to call for a national convention. Now, this will be elected for the first time in near universal male suffrage. And everybody knows this is basically going to call for a republic, that the monarchy is finished.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And now that you're appearing on the show, I mean, that will confirm the hook, won't it? It absolutely will. And the Guardian listeners will be beside themselves with joy. So, everybody, please listen to Sherlock & Co. The Adventure of the Norwood Builder. It's multi-part. It's brilliant. Part one is out now. Jump right in wherever you get your podcasts. And here is a clip from that very episode.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yet, but... Now, listen. You said you would hear me out, didn't you? Do you want to just dial it down a bit, Hector? Would you? Would you dial it down when you're smeared over every paper? Look at this. Look at this. In the Times, here, look. Solicitor suspected for contractor disappearance. The Telegraph. Solicitor faces long arm of law. The Daily Mail. Bully of Blackheath.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Elite London lawyer facing murder charge. I mean, this is just... This is... This is... The Guardian, here, look at this. Old Acre murder. How neoliberal materialism and Kirsty Allsop home renovations are the real killers of the working... Oh, well, that one goes on a bit. Yeah, we get the point. Do you? Do you? I'm not sure you do. The Daily Sport. Big job love.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
McFarlane's wife's steamy romp with missing builder. I mean, look, there's a thought bubble above my wife's head saying, knob the builder, can he fix it? Hector. The speech bubble as well. Here's your extension, love. I mean, this is just... The son. Cannibal Hector. Macfarlane confesses to eating Norwood tradesmen. You confessed to what? Sorry. I didn't confess to a damn thing.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I said I was hungry for justice. That's all. It is slander. It's disgraceful. It's bloody humiliating.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
But the Girondins who dominate this committee and who really dominate the assembly, it looks like they've got everything their own way, but they don't because now they're having to kind of share power in Paris with this new body that's been set up called the Insurrectionary commune, which is the local council, which is dominated by much more radical people, and in particular by Robespierre.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And if all this isn't confusing enough, Robespierre says the Girondins, who are the people who got us into the war, they're actually much too weak and too soft.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
They'd be much too soft on the royal family and on the enemies within, and they may actually be part of the foreign conspiracy, which sounds bonkers, but that gives you a sense of the kind of the faction fighting, the paranoia that is around in this point in 1792?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah. Although really, actually, you could argue that the fight is between two left-wing groups.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yes, I guess you could make that point. And it's really important to say the atmosphere in Paris is haunted by fear and by a sense of coming catastrophe and apocalypse. Because all the time, the Prussians, they've crossed the border, they're coming west. And the Duke of Brunswick, the Prussian commander, has issued a manifesto in which he says...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
explicitly, there will be an exemplary vengeance against the people of Paris. Paris is in the firing line. I'm coming for you. And, you know, I'm basically going to wipe the floor with you. And so this is hence the Churchillian quality of Danton's defiance, defying the German invasion. Yeah, exactly so. Exactly. And all through Paris, there are these mad rumors.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
People are saying there are loads of noblemen hiding in the sewers. They're poised to strike. They have hidden weapons caches in churches, in the pantheon. And particularly, one of these rumors is that there are criminals in the Paris prisons are going to break out. They're going to launch an uprising. They are in league. with these foreign villains.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And the commune, the assembly, the neighborhood councils, which are called the sections, they are meeting almost permanently around the clock. The city is lit up at night. There are surveillance committees. There are troops in the streets. It is an extraordinary atmosphere. Everybody is waiting for something to happen. And if we pick up the story on the 26th of August.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So on the 26th of August, 1792, terrible news reaches Paris from the Eastern Front. The Prussians have been advancing for seven days and they have just taken the fortress at Lungi. After barely a fight, Longuier surrendered and there's only one fortress left, which is Verdun. So it looks like treason. It looks like treason, exactly. And it looks like the Prussians can't be stopped.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Some of the Girondins at this point say, listen, you know, effectively it's 1940. We need to evacuate the government to Tours.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, it looks weak. Well, it looks royalist. It looks like they're not invested, actually, in the defence of Paris. Robespierre says, no way, we should stand and fight in the defence of liberty. And, of course, the Minister of Justice, this sort of big, fleshy, sort of corrupt, but very charismatic revolutionary leader.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think it's fair to say of Donzano, he's got terrible skin and he's got a taste for a brown envelope. He likes a backhander that he can spend on a mistress and a massive selection of starters. That's Danton's modus operandi. Danton basically seizes the moment and he says, close the city gates of Paris, put up barricades. I want volunteers. I want recruiting stations everywhere.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And his charisma, his Churchillian charisma is really important, I think. Sort of steadying the nerves. I mean, he really rises to meet the moment. But there is a dark side to all these preparations because the provisional government, with Danton as its kind of leading light, issues an official proclamation at this point. And it says...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Yeah, watch out for the Prussians, but also watch out for the enemies within. Citizens, you have traitors in your bosom, but for them the fight would already be over. Your active surveillance cannot fail to defeat them. Now, what do they mean by the traitors within? They mean corrupt former advisors to the king, ladies-in-waiting at the court who they say are all lesbians.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
speculators, hoarders, criminals, the old Swiss guards, priests who have defied the civil constitution of the clergy, journalists who have written in defense of the monarchy. All these people, they think, are in the pay, effectively, of the sinister Austrian committee that is masterminded by Marie Antoinette. and her friends in Vienna. I mean, that's pretty much the case, isn't it, Tom?
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
That's the thing. I mean, it's important to say that. So by the 28th of August, two days later, Danton has now ordered raids across the city, raids on people's houses. They're searching for guns. They're searching for enemy agents, stolen documents, letters. So...
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
If you've ever seen documentaries or films about the French Revolution, you've seen this sort of quite stereotypical image of a group of sans-culottes with their kind of red hats and their pikes banging on people's doors. Thick stubble. Right. You've got an aristo hidden in the cellar or something. That's where this is coming from.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Lots of historians at this point cite a diarist called Rosalie Julien. She's a brilliant diarist, actually, on this period because she is married to a Jacobin deputy. Now, she is somebody who really complicates your sense of the French Revolution. She's a very likable character. She's very well-read. She's very educated. She's a big fan of Rousseau, a massive do-gooder and a reformer.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
But she is always writing in her diary, the city is full of traitors and we have to root them out. Still more traitors, still more treason. And I think those words are really important to understand what's going to happen. Because she and so many other people are saying, they're all in the prisons. All of these prisons are stuffed with traitors.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And as soon as our troops, these volunteers, march out to face the Prussians, The traitors will seize their moment. They will break out and massacre the women and children of Paris.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I think there totally is, Tom. Yeah, I think there's a sense of the stab in the back is coming. And there were all these rumours about breakouts in the prisons. So all through August, actually, there had been rumours, the Paris police had been reporting rumours that people were about to break into the prisons and, I quote, render prompt justice to the people inside them.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And in fact, it's not surprising that the Paris police are reporting that because some newspapers and radical pamphlets and posters and things are very, very explicit about what they think we should do. And I'll just give you two examples.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
So one is a newspaper called The Orator of the People, and it was edited by a guy called Fréron, who's a friend of Camille Desmoulins, who we've talked about before. Fréron wrote this. The first battle we shall fight will be inside the walls of Paris, not outside. All the royal brigands clustering inside this unhappy town will perish in the same day. The prisons are full of conspirators.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Let the world see how we judge them. I mean, that's ominous, but not as ominous as this. This is from a guy called Fabre d'Eglantine, who was a friend, a great friend of Danton, and who was a poet. He's not a great ornament, I think, to the poetic profession when you read his words. Let us clear the ranks of these vile slaves of tyranny. Let the blood of traitors be the first holocaust to liberty.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
I mean, he literally used the phrase, le premier holocaust. So that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us. And actually Marat, one of the most outspoken of all these journalists. And has the worst skin. Not coincidentally, I think. Marat says, basically, citizens should go to the Abbey prison. get the prisoners, and I quote, run them through with a sword.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
And some of Mara's kind of defenders in the historical profession say, oh, that's just Mara. You know, he talks. He doesn't really mean it. But as Simon Sharma says, you know, how do you know? How are people supposed to tell the difference? So this is the climate. On the 29th of August... The Prussians reach Verdun. And Verdun is the keystone of France's eastern defensive line.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
If you get past Verdun, you're into the Valley of the Marne. And once you go through that, you are heading towards Paris. And Verdun surrenders after three days to this impregnable fortress. Yeah. The garrison commander, who'd said he'd never surrender, either kills himself or is killed by the people of Verdun, who basically don't fancy a siege at all. We're like, yeah, we'll let the Prussians in.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
Fine. So Verdun surrenders and the news arrives in Paris on Sunday, the 2nd of September. The Prussians are broken through. And now you've got, I mean, it's an extraordinary scene. You have kind of church bells ringing. There are cannons on the River Seine sounding the alert. And this is when Danton gives his Churchillian address. Exactly. Danton gives his address.
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544. The French Revolution: The September Massacres (Part 1)
There are posters going up across the city to arms, to arms. The enemy is at the gates. Now, that afternoon, we can be pretty sure that something else happened, but we can't be exactly certain what, because the documents were later destroyed. They were destroyed in the events of 1870-71. It's ironic, isn't it? Another Prussian day trip to Paris.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Although at that point, if he's the obvious successor, the post of princeps, of emperor, has clearly degenerated into a monarchy, hasn't it? If the obvious successor is the only person left from the dynasty and the only thing that makes him an obvious successor is his bloodline.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And there's also this stuff about... So Suetonius has obviously painted a picture of Tiberius and Capri that is very... damning, shall we say. And Suetonius also says that Caligula was able to suck up Tiberius because he shared his cruelty and deviant appetites, doesn't he?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
He likes watching people being tortured and he dresses up in drag and, you know, all of this kind of thing, which I'm guessing you will say is part of the sort of the fake news edifice that has been constructed around Tiberius.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
The enormity of his crimes was all the worse for the outrageous quality of the things he said. When his grandmother Antonia sought to give him some advice, he not only ignored it, but told her, When he exiled his sisters, he warned them that he had swords as well as islands.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And right from the start, Caligula proves himself a master, doesn't he, of playing to the people, to the gallery. He reminds me a bit of the guy who's the ruler of Chechnya, who's called Ramzan Kadyrov. who also succeeded, you know, he succeeded his father. It's not really a monarchy, but he's always like wrestling bears and trying to hang out with Hollywood film stars and stuff.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
When he had someone killed, it was invariably by means of repeated delicate incisions so that, as he notoriously liked to express it, a man would die knowing that he was being put to the blade. When a case of mistaken identity led to the wrong man being executed, he declared that the person put to death had no less deserved to die.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And Caligula is very much of that ilk, isn't he? He likes a sensational, melodramatic, crowd-pleasing gesture.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Those are three people who aren't often bracketed together.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
24, has never held a senior command, has never held a senior office, and they must be thinking, this is mad. I mean, why is this bloke ruling Rome? He's completely out of his depth, but also he's against everything that we stand for, which is tradition, integrity, seriousness, all of these things.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
He liked to quote the proverbial line from the tragedy, "'Let them hate, provided they fear.'" Once, at an elegant banquet, he suddenly burst out laughing, and when the consuls who were reclining nearby politely inquired of him what had prompted such laughter, he answered, Why, only that with a single nod I could have either of your throats cut here and now.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Angered, when a crowd cheered on contestants who were competing against his own favourites, he cried out, If only the Roman people had a single neck! So that is from the biography by Suetonius of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, who many listeners will better know as Caligula.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So the monster is coming and we will be back after the break. This is an ad by BetterHelp Online Therapy. Now, Tom, you and I often hear about the red flags that we should avoid. But what if we focused more on looking for green flags in our friends and in our partners, indeed, in our producers? Now, if people aren't sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify green flags.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
It can allow you to actively wave them and identify them in your own relationships. So, Tom, can I ask you, do you have any relationship green flags? I certainly do.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Well, Tom, therapy can help you identify red and green flags. It can help you learn positive coping skills, and it can teach you how to set boundaries and enforce them. It can help you work through anything. and empower you to be the very best version of yourself.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Well, Tom, as you know, I am absolutely passionate about NordVPN. One of the things I love about them is their Threat Protection Pro, an absolutely brilliant antivirus tool. It is so effective and so powerful. It is integrated directly into the NordVPN app. So what it does is it protects you from phishing and other cyber threats.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And the brilliant thing about it is it allows you to browse safely and smoothly.
The Rest Is History
536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
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The Rest Is History
536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Caligula's name, Tom, is one of the most notorious, not just in Roman history, but in all history, as a byword for sadism, tyranny, depravity and debauchery. And today... we're going to find out how much of this is propaganda and how much of it is rooted in political reality.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Welcome back to The Rest is History. Enough of the princaps. What remains to be described is the monster. So, Tom, you described this as your favourite line in the history of biography, and we are moving now. Caligula has been clearly... very shocked by the speed with which people move to associate themselves with a potential successor when he fell ill.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And, you know, politically that makes sense that he would be insecure and he would wish to, you know, he's looking for enemies. But from this point onwards in the biography, Suetonius is really going beyond that. And he is basically saying Caligula is a dyed in the wool, inveterate, debauched, depraved monster. And talk us through some of the examples, Tom, that he gives of this kind of behaviour.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So let's put into context from the first century AD, Caligula is the third emperor and he succeeds Tiberius, who he did last time, in the year 37. And he only rules for four years, right? That's right.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So let's dig into this a little bit. So obviously, because we don't have many other sources here, it's pretty hard for us to get a sense of how grounded in reality these accusations are. You make the point, don't you, that Suetonius doesn't present this as a continuous chronological narrative. It's just a sort of bullet-pointed list of the bad things that Killigiller is supposed to have done.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Crikey. So my question to you, Tom, so I compared him with Ramzan Kadyrov in the first half. You could compare him with Kim Jong-un in North Korea. Again, hereditary, but not in a monarchy, right? So my question is, what's the power base for doing this? So he hasn't had a command. He doesn't have powerful allies yet.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
or before he became emperor, he didn't have powerful allies in the Roman establishment. How can he possibly do this, stand up to these very powerful, prestigious patrician people and boss them around in this way?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So this is the moment, really, for the first time since... Really, for the first time since Augustus... inaugurated the empire, it's the first time that somebody has torn away what Augustus had worked so hard to create, which was the veil of legality and tradition. And somebody has just said, that's all rubbish. This is a pure military dictatorship. I am the dictator. And I will humiliate you.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
I will torture you. And I will kill you if you step out of line.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Yeah. Albert Camus wrote a play about him.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
You do that with Theo.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So possibility number one, obviously, and this I'm sure is the case for some of the stories, is that they're just not true. That they're either propaganda or they're literary formulae or they are... you know, sort of folk urban myths, rather like there are loads of urban myths about politicians today that people believe, aren't there?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
I mean, you know, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, you know, Donald Trump, whoever it might be. There are lots of stories that people tell and swap, but we know ourselves that there might be a kind of metaphorical truth to them, but no literal truth.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Yeah, that makes total sense.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And that's purely because of the order of Suetonius' biography, is it? That Suetonius basically says it's after that. But I suppose it's more likely, isn't it, that he's politically either emboldened or more insecure after he knows that people have been flirting with a successor.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Which matches what we know of 20th century dictators. I mean, Hitler, Stalin and so on. They may have been horrendous, but they're not clinically insane. It's too easy to say they're mad, basically.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
A nasty piece of work.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And part of this is the assault on a series of conventions and taboos, presumably. So you talked before about him, the stuff with the gods or demanding that he's worshipped as a god. Or, most obviously, the story that goes right back to when he was on Capri with Tiberius, that he dresses as a woman.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And this is about him taking the taboos that mean so much to the established senior, you know, blue-blooded people and ripping them up and presumably delighting the mob, as it were, in doing so.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
In that sense, Nero and Caligula are remarkably similar, aren't they? Because they're basically part of the same political tradition. They're playing to the same audience and they're kicking against the same taboos and the same class, the senatorial class.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
don't need you i'm you know i am this godlike figure i can ride over water if i want to and then the final and most famous thing making his horse a console so i know you have a very actually i've heard you explain before i think it's a very persuasive explanation of exactly what this is because effectively this is just a very very this is a satirical joke it's a joke
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
But for all Caligula's spectacle and his dark humour and his kind of populist touch, I should say. He only lasts four years and he ends up dead in this extraordinary set piece, this great narrative set piece. He's been stabbed and stabbed again by Cassius Caria and his men, abandoned in an alley, And what's going to happen next? Are they going to bring back the Republic?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Is the Empire going to continue? If so, who on earth could possibly succeed? Is there anybody left from the Imperial family? And Tom, we will be answering that question next time. But of course, there's only one way that people can hear that right now, isn't there? And that's if they're members of the Restless History Club.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
If they're members of our very own Praetorian Guard, they'll be able to hear it. And if you're not and you'd like to join up... you can go to therestishistory.com and hear right away what happens next after the assassination of Caligula, who comes next, and what kind of emperor he was. So, Tom, thank you very much for that.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
And on that bombshell, we'll be back next time with the story of the Emperor Claudius. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
No waiting in line with people who are sick with who knows what. Thanks to Amazon Pharmacy and Amazon One Medical, healthcare just got less painful.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Right, exactly. And we are, for Caligula, unusually dependent on one source, aren't we? Because we have Tacitus for Tiberius, but we don't have Tacitus for Caligula. There are fragmentary sources or smaller sources like Seneca or Josephus for Caligula, but Suetonius is the only full one. And it's from Suetonius' biography.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
I mean, it is actually in many ways one of the great biographies in all literature. I think it really is, yes. It is from Suetonius' biography of Caligula, really, arguably even more so than his biography of Nero, that we get the sort of stereotypical image of the demented Roman emperor who has been driven into total depravity by absolute power. I mean, that's what this is, isn't it?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
It's a model of absolute power corrupting.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
So he's a guy who never gets to become emperor, but Suetonius really goes into his story. So tell us a little bit about Germanicus, because basically Suetonius thinks that Germanicus is the best man who's ever lived, brilliant at everything, top of the class, brilliant speaker, brilliant scholar, all of this kind of stuff.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
I'll tell you, I think Theo, our producer, has a fake Reddit account and I think he goes onto a Reddit and just slags us off. And he would probably say this next thing because Suetonius says of Germanicus that he has very spindly legs. That's his only drawback. Right.
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Right, yeah. I was going to say, it seems a bit unlikely. If you're really serious about having a mutiny, the sight of a child is unlikely to... They don't have the soul of Hallmark greetings card writers, do they?
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536. Emperors of Rome: Caligula, Incest and Insanity (Part 3)
Right. So going back to his childhood, he and his family, so Germanicus is sent out to the east by Tiberius to be the big man in the east, isn't he? Right.
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And you have to do this all, yeah, within a question of seconds, minutes maximum, in the dark and with shoals all around. And the point is, if it works, you'll be perfectly placed to hammer the French. You'll have stopped right next to them, broadside on, and bang, you can go for it. If it doesn't work, you are totally vulnerable and the French will be able to blast you out of the sea.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Or you might run into an island or a shoal or a sandbank or whatever.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And Nelson knows that nobody else in the world can do this, that there is only one fleet that is so well trained, so disciplined, so well provided for, so well prepared, and that's the Royal Navy. Nobody else could dream of doing such a maneuver under such intense pressure. So on they go. That is the instruction. At about 10 to 5, one more signal.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He says, concentrate your fire on the enemy front and center. When we've dealt with them, we move on to the enemy rear, which is under Villeneuve, as you said.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So now they're approaching the shoals and sandbanks at the entrance to the bay. And once they're past them, they can turn to engage the French. The sun is now beginning to set. You imagine the scene captured in so many paintings, actually, afterwards. this blood-red glow across the shore of Egypt.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And it does have a really, I mean, when I was writing about this in the book, you're blown away by the epic feel of it, because this is the kind of territory for which Rome and Carthage fought. Yeah.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And of course, both Nelson and Napoleon see themselves as actors in a drama to rival the greatest stories of the classical world, don't they? So it's the most appropriate setting.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Absolutely it is. So 5.30, Nelson sends another signal. Form the line as most convenient into the line of battle. The first ship to go around the sandbanks is Thomas Foley's ship, Goliath.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So Foley's leading the way with Samuel Hood, no relation. Well, he is a relation, but he's not the same as the Samuel Hood from a couple of episodes ago in The Zealous Close Behind. Now, Foley has a map of the shoals published in 1764, a map published in Paris by a Frenchman, The Irony.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And as he goes round the sandbanks into the water, he realises this thing about Prueys' line, that the French have left a gap between themselves and the shore.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So what you'll need to do is glide between the French and the shore. That would allow you to open fire from the shore side onto the French where the French crews have not bothered to prepare their guns because it hasn't crossed their minds that the British could outflank them and therefore kind of
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So what Foley does in the Goliath, he goes around the leading French ship, he's raking it as he goes, and then he does exactly as Nelson planned. At the given moment, they furl the sails, the sailors drop this massive 20-ton anchor, and then they sprint downstairs to the gun decks,
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
to their cannons and open fire, pouring fire, all this metal, the cannonballs, the metal, the shrapnel, whatever, into the sides of the first French ship.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yes, because as Foley anchors, other British ships are continuing past him. So each ship will take the next position further on in line next to the French ship.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
But I think you could argue in his defense, somebody was always going to do that. And he is able to then signal to the two ships behind, watch out. Yeah. I mean, somebody had to do that at some point, I guess. So Nelson does not blame him, as we will see in due course for this at all. Yeah.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So five ships have done that flanking movement that we were talking about, Tom, going on the side nearest the shore. And meanwhile, Nelson's vanguard leads the attack from the other side, the seaward side. So what that means is, is the French are now trapped. They're sandwiched between two lines of British ships taking damage from both sides.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And if we just take a minute to imagine the scene, what an unbelievable kind of canvas this is. This huge red setting sun, Nelson's ships
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
blasting away the gun crews presumably at this point absolutely sodden with sweat i mean to be down there below decks the cannons the thunder the soot the gun smoke that's choking your lungs your people are shouting and screaming the whole time as the french of course are firing back splinters flying through the air, blood everywhere, bodies piling up on the decks around you.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
It is an incredibly melodramatic scene, Tom. The sun setting over the coast of Egypt. The Nile. And the Nile. Yeah, this place of legend, this place of classical history, which is the classical history that has fascinated so many people in the late 18th century. And now on the greatest stage of all, Horatio Nelson is meeting his moment of destiny.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And yet this is what the Navy does. They are so disciplined. They are just loading and loading and loading and firing and firing and firing.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
They don't at all. And they're inflicting great punishment, by the way, on the British ships. So there's a story about on the Goliath, for example, there's a boy sailor who is just about to put his match to his gun. When the French opened fire, the enemy broadside literally tears his hand from his body.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And the story goes, and it's one of those stories that, you know, Hollywood wouldn't invent it, is that he just reaches down with his surviving hand. He picks up the match, which is still burning, and fires the gun. He makes sure to fire the gun with his other hand before going downstairs to find the surgeon with the kind of blood streaming from where his right hand had once been.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The pluck of British youth, Dominic. Absolutely it is, Tom. And I would hope that reading this book, British youngsters will feel inspired to behave similarly under pressure. Sure it will. So meanwhile, Nelson's vanguard is also taking horrific punishment. French fire rips through the rigging. There is shrapnel and splinters everywhere. The timbers are soaked with blood. And then... Nelson is hit.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
At 8.30, a jagged piece of iron among the hail of splinters and shrapnel comes spinning through the air so fast that there is no time to duck. And it smacks into Nelson's head. And he is down, blood pouring from a gash in his head. And like a character in an opera, he shouts, I am killed. Remember me to my wife. And the men rush to his side. They carry him down to the cockpit.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The surgeon wipes away the blood. It's actually just a surface wound. It's an extremely gory surface wound because the shrapnel has sliced open his head for three inches. But it's effectively a flesh wound. As long as it's not infected, he shouldn't have any trouble. It's not like he's lost his arm, is it? He hasn't lost his arm or indeed another eye.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And it's nothing compared with the shattered bones and severed limbs of his comrades. And he will soon be back on deck. for the endgame.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So listeners who've stuck with us from the beginning of this series will remember that Nelson had been sent into the Mediterranean with a squadron of 14 ships of the line to search for Napoleon Bonaparte and the armament, this enormous fleet and expeditionary force that has been sailing south. The British didn't know where it was going. They missed the French by an hour and a day.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Oh, Tom, it's so moving. Thing is, a lot of people genuinely kind of scoff at that and say, madly overwrought Victorian verse. I can quite see why Victorians listen to that with tears running down their cheeks. I think it should be on the GCSE syllabus. Absolutely, it should. So that's the fate of L'Oreal. And at the time, one of the most famous stories in the world.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
You know, the story of this boy. In the English-speaking world, everybody did this poem in school. However, we'll come back to Orion. I mean, it is one of the most spectacular and tragic moments in naval history. The knight is falling across the sands of Egypt. Tom, knight is also falling on the ambitions of Napoleon Bonaparte.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
It is. But Nelson's band of brothers are up for it. So the first to emerge through the smoke and the chaos is Bellerophon, captained by Henry d'Estaing at Derby. And this anchors at the stern just as planned, all guns blazing beside the French flagship. It is dwarfed by Lorient. But for half an hour or so, Derby is just firing and firing and firing. And he's taking horrendous punishment himself.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Almost 200 men dead or injured. The sail slashed to ribbons, the mast cut down. Darby himself is knocked senseless with a head wound. But then after half an hour, two more British ships. As each British ship kind of cleans up a French ship, they can then move on to the next. So the Alexandre and the Swift Shore also close in on Lorient. By about nine o'clock, Lorient was in terrible trouble.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So the deck is covered with splinters of wood and basically bits of French sailors. Now, among them is the Admiral Ruys himself. He has stood there the whole time under the most punishing withering fire. He was hit by British fire in the head and in the arm.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The French landed in Alexandria. They seized control of Egypt. Napoleon marched into Cairo as the master of the sands. Really? And then Nelson arrived in Alexandria on the morning of the 1st of August. He saw the tricolour flags flying over the city, the city founded by Alexander, the city of the Ptolemies.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
unbelievably he takes a shot to the stomach that almost rips his body in two and his men try to carry the sort of two semi-detached bits of him down and he says somehow through kind of blood pouring from his head he says no i will die as i've lived on the deck of my ship and he actually lives for another 15 minutes i mean amazing and the commander of le tonneau as well i mean
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
just unbelievable he loses both his arms and a leg and he carries on fighting as he slowly bleeds to death I mean I have to say throughout this story indeed throughout Nelson's entire life and career without exception the French adversaries that he faces
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
perform with outstanding courage under fire because they're always outperformed by the british they always know they will be but they never give up they don't run away they don't haul down their colors straight away they are fired by patriotism and a dedication to the service just as much as their british opponents are so it's nice to say something nice about our gallic friends isn't it tom
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah, it's the Corinthian spirit, isn't it really? So it reflects well on the French, but even more on us. So that's good. So let's get back to Lorient. What did happen to the captain of Lorient, Casablanca? He was probably, some sources suggest, hit in the face by debris, and he probably was knocked unconscious. And his son was on the ship with him. There are various accounts.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Some say he's 10, some say he's 12, some say he's 13. He probably actually had, this is a horrible detail, had his leg torn off by a cannonball as he was standing next to his father. So he probably didn't stand on the burning deck. Now, at some point, a midshipman on the Alexander spots a glow on the poop deck of Lorient, a lurid orange glow. Lorient is on fire.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And there are different theories about what happened. Some historians think that Lorient was not properly cleared for action and it had some jars of paint or oil on the poop deck that ignited in the chaos, in the flames. But Alexander Ball, the captain of the Alexander, said that he had prepared a kind of sort of Greek fire style Byzantine liquid napalm. Yeah, combustible preparation.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He had prepared in case of the direst emergency. And he said one of his lieutenants, without his knowledge, threw it at Lorient. The interesting thing there is... There's a sort of sense that if that happened, it was illegitimate and it was unsporting. It was cheating. Isn't that extraordinary that they've got this thing, which clearly was a super weapon.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And they're like, oh, it would be very bad form to say that we used it. So the tenant did it, but I didn't order it. That kind of body line. Anyway, it's possible that it happened, right? Some bloke threw this through the windows. of the Alexander onto Lorient.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Because this fire starts to spread very quickly. It goes up the rigging. Now, the French, of course, have fire pumps aboard. All ships have fire pumps to try and deal with this. But the fire pumps have been smashed to pieces by a British shot. A second fire begins at the bow, and that means that hundreds of sailors are trapped now in the waist of the ship, and they can't get out.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The British, of course, keep firing and firing all the time. The flames are leaping up the rigging of Lorient. Black smoke starts to pour from Lorient. And at this point, some of the sailors start trying to jump. They're kind of on fire or they're screaming or whatever.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Now, Nelson has been brought specifically back up, even though he's got blood pouring from his head, he's got a kind of bandage on, to see this. And he can see at once, as everybody can, that the French flagship, this enormous kind of leviathan of the waters, is doomed, that the fire is now raging unchecked.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And it will eventually, as you've said, Tom, it will reach the magazine and ignite this enormous amount of gunpowder that the Orient is carrying. And so at about this point, when it's clear that the fire can't be stopped, the British and French captains on all sides are kind of rushing to cut their own anchor cables. Yeah, because they don't want to be caught in the blast.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Nelson sends a couple of ships east to see if by any chance the French fleet are still there. And the lookouts spot the fleet in Aboukir Bay. The midshipman, George Elliott, 16 years old, up there on the yards, sees the masts.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
They need to be carried away immediately. Because when the fire reaches the magazine, there'll be an explosion, the like of which they have never seen before. And Nelson, to his great credit, I think, Tom, says to his lieutenants, prepare to pick up survivors. You know, this is what we do.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
I mean, this is, again, it's this odd thing about fighting at sea that there is this code, isn't there, of kind of nobility, I guess.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So about half nine, hundreds of men are trying to jump from Lorient. But actually, of course, a lot of these sailors cannot swim. I mean, this is a theme of the Master and Commander series, isn't it? The Patrick O'Brien books.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And then, according to one account at least, it's at 9.37 that the fire reaches the magazine of L'Oreal. And that is the most unbelievable explosion ever. It's as though the entire French flagship just suddenly turns into this gigantic fireball and the searing kind of white heat of the explosion is felt by everybody across the bay.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
If a Hollywood filmmaker is listening, there are the most amazing descriptions. The whole thing is lit up suddenly. It is like it's midday because of the heat and light of this explosion. And the sailors can see suddenly for the first time that on the shore there are dozens, hundreds of of Mameluke and Arab spectators who have been watching the battle unfold.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Captain Miller of Theseus, he said, a most grand and awful spectacle such as formerly would have drawn tears down the victor's cheeks. But, he says, pity was stifled as it rose by the remembrance of the numerous and horrid atrocities that their unprincipled and bloodthirsty nation had been and were committing.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And when she blew up, although I endeavoured to stop the momentary cheer of the ship's company, my heart felt scarce a single pang for their fate. Nelson is softer hearted, isn't he?
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
and the hunt is over they have found them and the signal reaches the rest of the fleet at 2 45 in the afternoon signal from the zealous 16 sail of the line at anchor bearing east by south and for nelson's captains who have been despondent that they missed the French, it is a moment of almost transcendent excitement that they have at last found them.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
What's more, all they can hear is there's a steam, the hiss of the steam, but also the sound of thousands of fragments. raining down on the waters.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah, an anchor fall on top of your head. That's not good, is it? No, not at all. There's an account by one lieutenant who wrote an account afterwards and he said, he wrote it in the present tense. So after about 10 minutes, as you say, they hauled themselves up from the decks where they'd been taking cover and start firing again.
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And he wrote, and so the battle recommences and the roaring of the guns, the crashing of the masts and the shrieks of wounded and the jargon of surrendering Frenchmen. Fill up the remainder of this most memorable night.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And this is so important because from this moment onwards, the gossip in Paris is that Villeneuve was frightened and he ran away. And he, instead of standing and fighting, he fled. Now, Villeneuve was very upset by this. His argument was, you know, I got away and everybody else was destroyed or captured. I didn't behave dishonorably. I did the right thing.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
But this will play a part in the Battle of Trafalgar and in his decision. Because he doesn't want to retreat again, does he? Exactly. So Nelson lost just over 200 men. The French lost somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000. And as you said, Tom, this is the most cataclysmic defeat for the French Navy. The most obvious effect is on Napoleon Bonaparte.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He was in Cairo at his headquarters, which was in a kind of converted, you know, Ottoman townhouse.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Would he have even known of Nelson's heroism at the Battle of Cape St Vincent? He might have heard of it, but he probably wouldn't have. Probably he doesn't, actually. Because the news comes to him and it is said that he basically takes the note and puts it aside. But the next morning... He's talking to his lieutenants, Napoleon this is, and he says to them, it seems you like this country.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Well, that's lucky because now we don't have any fleet to take us back to Europe. And actually, the remarkable thing is he stays for another year in the Middle East.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He delays the inevitable by launching his disastrous Gaza campaign, which basically sees the French army causing utter carnage in Gaza and then wandering hither and thither across the desert, stricken by plague and behaving very badly. Basically, Napoleon, this is the first time that he does what would be a feature of his career.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He scuttles back to France, abandoning his army, and he leaves them in the desert. So 40,000 men who went to Egypt with Napoleon leave. 15,000 were killed or very seriously wounded, and the rest all ended up as British prisoners. So the whole campaign, which is, as you said, an extraordinary landmark in human history, is nevertheless an utter disaster.
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And from the British point of view, brilliant, because India is now secured as well. Exactly. But beyond that, the Battle of the Nile, naval historians have often said, this is a real turning point. in world history.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Ben Wilson in his history of the Royal Navy says it was undoubtedly the greatest victory in British naval history because the French had control of the Mediterranean and they have definitively lost it. Napoleon's army is trapped. It has broken the image of Napoleon's invincibility and it has permanently shattered the confidence of France's navy.
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
There was a French academic study in 1998, and they wrote about the Battle of the Nile. The Battle of the Nile is a battle of which French historians never speak.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Britain needs to keep winning victories at sea to get the Austrians and the Prussians back into the war. to prosecute the defeat of the French on land. And of course, that will take a very long time. But in the long run, the British strategy does work. So Nelson holds a service of thanksgiving aboard the Vanguard. And as a good vicar's son, he says, this is God's victory.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The hand of God was visibly pressed on the French. It was not in the power of man to gain such a victory. So an Achilles, but a Christian Achilles. Yes. But his officers are in no doubt As Summeray writes to Napoleon, it was the most glorious and complete victory ever obtained, the just recompense of your zeal.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And it has pleased Providence to give you the sight of these vile miscreants who have now received the just punishment due to their past crimes. But Summeray is in no doubt, it's Nelson's personal victory. He calls a meeting of the captains and they say, we will found an Egyptian club in honor of the victory. When we get the club room, we will have a portrait of Nelson and we will hang it there.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And we will club together ourselves to buy Nelson a sword to thank him for leading us to this amazing, amazing triumph.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah. And Nelson, you know, he's such a romantic deep down, isn't he? That Band of Brothers stuff that lots of people might scoff at. He loves that. And you can just imagine his officers telling him about this Egyptian club they're going to set up with a picture of him. And you can imagine kind of the manly tears springing to his eyes, Tom. You know, he would have absolutely adored that.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The news reaches Gibraltar and then Cadiz. And then it travels to the Admiralty in London. It arrives on the 2nd of October, my birthday. A messenger is sent to the king, George III. I love this. This is always...
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
There's nothing better than this. The messenger to George III is crossing Hounslow Heath and is stopped by a highwayman. And when the messenger tells the highwayman what the packet contains, which is news of Nelson's victory at the Nile, the highwayman without a word. hands him back the package and says, be on your way. What an amazing story.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
There are bonfires and bells and fireworks in every theatre. People are singing Royal Britannia. It is the most extraordinary moment of national celebration. And relief. And relief, of course.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
It's El Alamein and Mafeking and Port Stanley rolled into one. Nelson is awarded a barony. He's a bit disappointed. That's the thing with Nelson. He's always after more. He hoped he would be made a Viscount. But he hasn't got the money for it, has he? He hasn't got the money. This is the reason that he can't support a Viscount's lifestyle. However, he's not going to go home just yet.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
He now divides his fleet into three. So one group will remain at Alexandria to blockade the French. And people who love blockades, Tom, you've said how much you like blockades. Perhaps you'd like to treat them to the story of that blockade in a bonus episode at some future point. Yeah, that'd be fun. I won't be there for that recording because I find blockades very boring.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah, Napoleon's hubris, frankly, Tom. It's a theme that runs right through Napoleon's career. Obviously, most people regard Napoleon as one of the most brilliant commanders in history. But he is often reckless and heedless of danger, I think it's fair to say. And in this occasion, it's his sailors that will pay a very heavy price for that.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
A second group escort the captured French ships to Gibraltar so they can claim the prize money. Really important, of course, for anyone in the Royal Navy. And finally, Nelson himself will take the battered Vanguard, Alexander and Culloden to Naples so that Britain's only real allies in the Mediterranean can hear the news of the battle at first hand.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Now, this is the end of the first season of Nelson. We'll be returning to his story in the spring. Would you like a little teaser, Tom, for the second season of Horatio Nelson? Yeah, I'd love one. And so, on the 22nd of September, the vanguard limped into the Bay of Naples. Ahead lay the third largest city in Europe, simmering with danger.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
although Nelson could hardly have known it, one of the darkest chapters in his life was about to begin.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
I have to say, I think we will be doing Naples. So people may want to skip that one if they don't want to hear anything bad about Nelson.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Because right from the beginning, the British, there's no doubt in their minds at all. I think this is the extraordinary thing. We talked about this in our episode about the Battle of Capus and Vincent, where they'd fought the Spanish. There seems to be, of course, they're nervous as they know the battle is coming. But there's an extraordinary expectation of inevitable victory, isn't there?
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Hi, everybody. You're still here. Right at the end of the episode, I'm very impressed by your commitment. But listen, I have a question for you. I want to ask you something in confidence. Do you sometimes listen to the adverts on these episodes? And do you sometimes think, do you know what? I wish that the listeners to this podcast
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
I wish they were listening to an advert about my brand rather than the other stuff that Tom and Dominic are promoting on here. If you have thought that, there is, of course, only one way to find out what that would be like. You can disrupt the procession of adverts. You could be the next HSBC Premier or the many other tremendous companies that have advertised on The Rest Is History.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And you could put your brand in front of millions of like-minded listeners by advertising on The Rest Is History and, indeed, the other shows on the Goldhanger Network. Now, you may be thinking, I don't know what the Goalhanger Network is. Goalhanger are the company behind this very show. And if you are in the market to increase the value of your brand, Goalhanger would love to hear from you.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
You can register your interest or indeed your company's interest by going to goalhanger.com right now. And that is goal, G-O-A-L, hanger, H-A-N-G-E-R, .com.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
There's a scene on the Orion, the ship of one of Nelson's most talented captains, James Summeray. They've been having dinner. So dinner is early afternoon. And the story is that literally the steward is clearing the table in the captain's cabin. And they hear the news. They all jump to their feet. They're kind of shaking hands and slapping each other on the back. They're so excited.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Huzzahs, I believe, are heard. Huzzahs are heard. And they drink a toast. They drink a bumper, as they call it, to victory. because they're so certain that this is their moment. And then they clamber up the ladder and Sommelier gets up onto the deck and the crew have heard the news too. And the crew are roaring out three cheers for their captain, for their country and for their certain victory.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or Alexander Ball, the Robinson Crusoe fan. Another officer said, we felt the utmost joy that the hunt was over. Now they're going to fight and they are absolutely buzzing with excitement.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Because this is the interesting thing, right? It is now almost three o'clock in the afternoon. It's the first of August, but there's probably only about four hours of daylight left before the light really begins to fade. Even if Nelson rushes from Alexandria, it will still take him about two hours to reach the enemy.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
So in other words, they don't have much time and they will be doing a lot of the fighting in gathering darkness. And also they don't know the waters, do they? They don't know the waters. One or two of them have French charts of the waters, but this is unfamiliar territory.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yes. I know you're very excited about your opportunity to show off your knowledge of the sandbanks of Abu Ghirahim Bay, Tom.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Wonderful. You know, people love cutting edge research and you've been doing it since 2020.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Wow. People like Roger Knight, John Sugden, Andrew Lambert, the great naval historians in it, they will be listening to this podcast in awe. Wrapped.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
It's very Alexander the Great at the Battle of the River Granicus, Tom. You know, he arrives and it's dark and he says, attack anyway. This is the same thing. Nelson said... I knew I could go for it because I had total trust in my captains and my men. I had the happiness to command a band of brothers. Therefore, night was to my advantage.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Each knew his duty, and I was sure each would feel for a French ship.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
all the way from from sicily yeah and who now get chucked into abakir bay right because the order goes around beat to quarters it's like the scene in master and commander at the beginning yeah what that means is everybody rushes into action they stow the hammocks they stow every bit of furniture they pour water on the timbers because they want to stop any possibility of fire spreading they throw down sand on the decks to stop people from slipping again it's
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
If you see Master Commander, you'll know the scene that the surgeons are laying out their saws, the carpenters get their tools.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
And on the gun decks, which are the most important bits, of course, of the ship, people are getting everything ready, preparing the cannons, getting their balls, getting their power, everything ready. And meanwhile, you know, slowly but surely, they are moving east towards the anchored French fleet. So let's turn now to the French. The French have 13 ships of the line.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
The flagship is this enormous ship called Lorient, the Orient, commanded by Vice Admiral François-Paul de Pruys.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
A tax resistor. Yeah, so there's an incentive. Yeah, definitely. Kill two birds with one stone there. The best British ships are their 74s because they're the perfect balance between firepower and speed and maneuverability. Some of these hulking monsters that the French and the Spanish go in for, as we will see... in battle are actually not as effective.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah. His thinking is that the British attack will come from the seaward side because his line is kind of parallel to the coast and there's no way he thinks the British can get round between his ships and the land and attack from that side. So all the preparations are towards the sea.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
That's right. So Prue is his plan, basically. He knows that his crews aren't as good as the British crews. They've been short of food and fresh water. They haven't been terribly well treated by Napoleon. Morale is not brilliant, but he thinks, you know, the last thing therefore I want to do is to sail out and face the British in the open seas. Because it's a defensive position. Yeah.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
We're nicely against the bay. We'll stay where we are, let the British come onto us, and then we just blast them out of the sea and they will disperse.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yeah, so he gives his order. So he gives his order. And the French are all rushing to their battle stations, but all on the side facing the sea. With the wind. And the wind is blowing the British fleet towards them. That's right. So now it's half past four. The sun is sinking fast. On they come, Tom. The pride of the Royal Navy sailing in perfect order towards the lengthening shadows.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
That's just a taste. Is that another teaser? Of the pros you can expect in this landmark book. Nelson flies his favourite signal. Prepare for battle. And then he flies a second crucial signal. And I think everybody would enjoy it, Tom, if you explain precisely the technological and tactical nuances of the second signal, which is to anchor from the stern once within range.
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518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
Yes, and he's developed the signal for it himself because it's never been done before. And the thing is, it sounds like, well, why is that so complicated to just stop in front of the enemy and shoot at them? But actually... To anchor by the stern means basically you come on, you come on, you come on. And at a given moment, the sailors have to furl the sails to slow the ship.
The Rest Is History
518. Nelson: The Battle of the Nile (Part 5)
They drop this massive anchor, 20 tons, from the stern of the ship.