Men at arms' hostility to archers – more from the Chronicle of the Good Duke

Have you ever heard a cliché so often that you begin to doubt that it could possibly be true?

One such cliché for me is the hostility of men at arms in the late Middle Ages to archers and crossbowmen. Men at arms being of course mounted well armored soldiers who in a different era would be called knights.

Today I was reading the Chronicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon, a fascinating account written in the 15th century about one of the best French war leaders of the late 14th century, and his retinue. While doing so I ran across this story which tends to lend credence to the cliché:

They [Duke Louis and his men]went before a place called le Faon, which...was strongly assailed, and it was not taken that day, besides only the low court, where there were many good men wounded; for there was  a Cordelier [A Franciscan friar]  who did marvels of shooting from a rock thrower, to the point that he killed four gentlemen, and one said that he was the strongest arbalester in Poitou. And the next morning the Poitevins and Bourbonnois assailed the donjon, and there was a fierce assault and strong one, and those of the tower defended themselves, and the Cordelier was shooting but they [Louis's men] fought in the manner so that it was taken by good assault and they killed so many of the men inside, with the exception of the Cordelier-arbalester who had taken his habit and had fled to the monastery. And then everyone in the army demanded to know where the Cordelier was: and it was said that he was in the church on his knees before the altar. And so Messire Jean de Roye ran there because the Cordelier had killed in shooting one of his squires, and Jean took the Cordelier with his habit and went to hang him from a tree, concealing himself well so that the Duke of Bourbon should not know of it.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what Duke Louis's men thought was most offensive about this archer.

Mahdis! Mahdis! Mahdis!

Brian Ulrich forwards this from the Economist:

Earlier this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil on earth. A website based in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and “petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March. Many of the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000 fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the Mahdi,” she says. 

I've heard that Jerusalem has a similar problem with its Messiahs.

Image: The Mahdi hangout in Jamkaran.

Painting world religions in broad strokes

Just about every day my first read is Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment. Cole is a historian of the Middle East and has taken it on as his personal duty to comment every day on important issues. When it comes to the Middle East and Islam, you can hardly have a better source.

Today Cole posted one of the best things he has ever written, a response to another blog in which the claim is made that Islam is uniquely violent, and that there is a big difference between the Christian approach to worldly power and the Islamic one.

What Cole says here corresponds to my own understanding of the relationship between the formal doctrines of religion, what the founding documents say about it, and what people actually do in the context of their religion. My own understanding results from reading about 20 years ago a short world history of Buddhism, in which it was sufficiently demonstrated to me that just about any thing that could be called Buddhism had been called Buddhism, including the interesting notion that no one should be a monk and everybody should be married and that was true Buddhism. I concluded from that experience that if a religion wants to be more than just a local cult in an isolated village, it will have to diversify and eventually become a single religion in name only.Further, that if you really want to understand what a given religion means in a given context studying Scripture and theology will not do the trick.

Cole provides us today with a detailed discussion of Christianity and Islam in regards to their promotion of violence or their relationship to political power. I am giving an extensive excerpt here but there is quite a bit more and all of it good.

Jesus and Muhammad and the Question of the State
Posted on 04/25/2013 by Juan Cole

I’ve always liked Andrew Sullivan even when I disagree with him. I’m going to disagree with him, or more specifically Alexis de Tocqueville and one of his readers who quotes him:

“Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.”...

You can’t compare Christianity and Islam on the basis of this kind of characterization of the founders of the two religions. The characterization is in any case unfair (the New Testament texts imply just as many ‘scientific principles’ as does the Qur’an, e.g. They think the world has three levels, that there are demons and angels, etc. etc.)

First of all, we know very little about the lives of Jesus (d. circa 30-33 CE) or Muhammad (d. 632 CE). ...

 The idea that, as de Tocqueville alleged, very early Christianity made no doctrinal demands about the relationship of the believer to power is not clearly in evidence. Take St. Peter (2 peter 2:1-2:17: “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions.”) Wouldn’t that be a community problem that would have to be dealt with collectively? Also very surprised by this allegation would have been the masses of Christians killed by Christian states for being heretics. And, just for instance, Charlemagne had 4500 Saxon followers of Woden (you’ve all seen the movie Thor) beheaded in 782 because they wouldn’t accept Christianity. That is a lot of heads to be lost to a religion that makes no power demands. Not to mention that modern Christian fundamentalism has cleverly found ways of re-importing selective legal injunctions from the Hebrew Bible into Christianity.

...

The Qur’an, contrary to what some researchers such as John Wansbrough suggested, seems to be pretty well attested as an integral text fairly early on, maybe even better attested than the entire New Testament in the first century after its composition. The sayings attributed to Muhammad were not collected and written down for some 200 years after the Prophet’s death, and I personally don’t consider many of them historically reliable.

The New Testament picture of Jesus is full of contradictions. At some points he says to turn the other cheek and forgive enemies. At other points he says, “I come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Scholars have wondered if Jesus was a Zealot, a highly political and revolutionary movement. Or was he a mystic similar to those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Frankly we have no idea whether he intended to build a state or not... No two academic books I’ve ever read on the life of Jesus and early Christianity have agreed about these issues.

 Even if Jesus really was an apolitical pacifist, only a tiny number of Christians in history has ever agreed with him about that. Even if his statement about rendering to Caesar implied a separation of religion and state (unlikely), most Christians in history haven’t been willing to do that....

So these ideas in very early Christianity are anyway irrelevant to practical politics in later Christianity, which saw all kinds of political arrangements...

As for Muhammad, it is not entirely clear what his position was in Medina. He is often depicted as a theocrat. But it appears from the Qur’an that when he first went there in 622 he was more like a community organizer, balancing the needs of the Muslim, Christian, pagan and Jewish communities in the area. The stories of how he allegedly fell out with the Jews there are very late and have been questioned by some scholars. The view of him as a kind of king could well be a projection back on him by later writers of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, after forms of Muslim kingship and empire had emerged. Common assertions that the Qur’an disallowed paganism or allowed aggressive war on pagans are not borne out by the Qur’an. There is, contrary to de Tocqueville, very little law or politics in the Qur’an.

Much of fundamentalist Muslims’ ideas about religion-state relations are shaped by the Hadith literature, the oral sayings and doings attributed to the Prophet, which, as I said, were collected centuries after his death and I doubt most academic historians would consider them reliable. (I know saying so will offend some of my readers, but, well, I’m a historian.) ...
As with Christianity, there are almost no forms of political organization Muslims haven’t tried out, from monarchy to republic, from anarchism to democracy. So all those laws and political principles in the Hadith haven’t actually been determinative. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalism does dream of using them as a blueprint, but since that enterprise isn’t actually practical, they don’t get very far. Even Iran and Saudi Arabia are mostly governed by modern bureaucratic rationalism of a sort Max Weber would readily recognize.
...
Contrary to what de Tocqueville imagined, the Muslims have been just as adaptable as Christians to the main forms of social organization that came out of the Enlightenment. He was writing at a time when many Muslims lived under the Ottoman Empire, which seems to have shaped his image of the religion. Somehow Islam has handily survived the Ottoman demise. And what de Tocqueville rather dishonestly did not bother to mention was that Christianity has had just as much trouble with those principles as Islam has. There was that little Syllabus of Errors when the then Pope condemned democracy, popular sovereignty, separation of religion and state, scientific rationalism, etc. Later Popes even tried to prevent Catholics from voting in elections because democracy was considered a modernist heresy. As late as Franco’s Spain, the Spanish church was a pillar of dictatorship. Eventually the church made its peace with democracy (partly through Vatican II, which largely repealed the Syllabus of Errors). Islam is likewise coming to terms with democracy, however contentious and uncertain that process has been (Indonesia, Turkey, Tunisia, etc. etc.)

Many 19th century Christians imagined that Islam was on its last legs and that all the Muslims would convert to Christianity. They thought the same of Hinduism and Buddhism. They mostly were very wrong. De Tocqueville’s arrogance and simplistic view of the original ‘essence’ of the founders of the two religions was a profound set of errors. In fact, by the end of this century, some 30% of the world could well be Muslim, whereas Christianity will likely be a shrinking proportion of humankind, just for demographic reasons. Not to mention that most “Christian” countries contain pluralities of non-religious people. Many, such as Sweden or Eastern Europe, have non-religious majorities. Significant proportions of Turks, Tunisians, Uzbeks, etc. in the Muslim world also report that they aren’t interested in religion.
It is not impossible that modern consumerism, individualism and technology might gradually undermine religion, so that 200 years from now neither Christianity nor Islam will be central to most peoples’ lives.

So, a) Muslims aren’t more prone to violence or terrorism than members of other religious communities because of the character of very early Islam and b) you can’t read off the differences between Christians and Muslims from a superficial depiction of the two founders.   

Headline of the day

From Human Rights Watch:

"New Campaign to Stop Killer Robots"

Life in the future, indeed.

Teenagers

It is easy to classify today's teenagers, if you are older, as disappointing, irresponsible, and even crazy. This is true enough in some ways but give those teenagers a good script, maybe a good set of music and see them shine. I saw a student production of Les Miserables last night and if  it was far from perfect it was extremely stirring. One thing that really struck me is that the streetwalkers and the revolutionary students about to be gunned down were played by people of the same age as the characters they were portraying. And that's what really struck me of course. In some sense I was looking at reality.

Update: I've talked about this before.

This was segregation

David Frum reviews Crespino's book on arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond :

The old Democratic South was not a very democratic place. In 1932, South Carolina gave 98.03% of its vote to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt gained a further half point in 1936. Yet that astonishing percentage was produced by an equally astonishingly tiny electorate: in a state of 1.7 million souls, only 105,000 cast a ballot in 1932 and only 115,000 in 1936. The one-party landslide was produced by one-party methods: I learned from Crespino that South Carolina did not adopt the secret ballot until the year 1950.The all-white electorate of South Carolina enthusiastically welcomed government intervention in the economy, so long as that intervention concentrated its benefits on whites. Crespino:Southern congressmen were among the most devoted supporters of New Deal largesse, yet they never failed to safeguard the prerogatives of Jim Crow. Categories of work in which African Americans were heavily represented, notably farmworkers and maids, were excluded in the 1930s from laws that created modern unions, set minimum wages and maximum work hours, and instituted Social Security. Southern congressmen ensured that local officials administered New Deal programs, and they defeated efforts to include anti- discrimination provisions in New Deal legislation.(p. 36.)As a state senator in the 1930s, Strom Thurmond aligned himself with this program of energetic government for white benefit. He supported federal job creation programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration, so long as participation was restricted to whites. He supported New Deal farm programs on the same condition.

Creating enemies

 Tom Englehardt at Tomdispatch.com has long offered an analysis of the post-9/11 world emphasizes the need of the American security establishment for enemies to fight in the post-Cold War world. In his most recent essay, he discusses how elites who want to manipulate the public through fear must first manipulate themselves into believing their fear-based analysis.  This strikes me as of interest to historians of any era, for instance the Albigensian crusade of the 13th century. Some very good historians think there never was a Cathar heresy until heresy hunters invented it. For a long time, the origins of the great witch hunt have also been ascribed to a fear of Satan's ever-growing influence on earth, a fear of satanic power seen first in intellectual treatises, and only later in the actions of actual witch hunters. See what Tom Englehardt has to say on the subject.

So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance.  They created an al-Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally.  They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.
For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.  It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us.  And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place.  As it happens, it’s not.  Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way.  Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves.
I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council -- from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy.  As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early U.S. response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.  It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world.  (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)
They were indeed manipulative men, but before they influenced other Americans they assumedly underwent something like a process of collective auto-hypnotism in which they convinced one another of the dangers they needed the American people to believe in.  There is evidence that a similar process took place in the aftermath of 9/11.  From the flustered look on George W. Bush’s face as his plane took him not toward but away from Washington on September 11, 2001, to the image of Dick Cheney, in those early months, being chauffeured around Washington in an armored motorcade with a “gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat, you could sense that the enemy loomed large and omnipresent for them.  They were, that is, genuinely scared, even if they were also ready to make use of that fear for their own ends.
Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq.  Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.  After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.  They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs.  They spoke in the most open ways of potentialmushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.  They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus.  Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.
In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites.  “Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.  Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier.  One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’  At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”
In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears.  This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.
A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear.  After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100% “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world -- terrorism.  The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public -- but also the American security state -- in its grips.  After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens?  Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?
They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.

The brother of Bliomberis Loup

...was named Blain Loup. Both men fought on the French side in the campaign of 1380-1.

Just so's you know that Bliomberis was not an isolated Wolf.

A beehive cell

Darrell Markewitz, historically inspired metalworker par excellence, starts thinking about sacred enclosures and monastic beehive cells. Have a look!

Corey Robin on that Thatcher quotation

As the heat around Margaret Thatcher's death begins to cool a bit, I thought I would post something that addresses some larger questions around her career. Here is what Corey Robin had to say about the famous quotation about the nature of society.

Left critics of neoliberalism—or just plain old unregulated capitalism—often cite Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration “There is no such thing as society” as evidence of neoliberalism’s hostility to all things collective. Neoliberalism, the story goes, unleashes the individual to fend for herself, denying her the supports of society (government, neighborhood solidarity, etc.) so that she can prove her mettle in the marketplace.

But these critics often ignore the fine print of what Thatcher actually said in that famous 1987 interview with, of all things, Woman’s Own.  Here’s the buildup to that infamous quote:

Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…

It’s that last phrase (“and there are families”) that’s crucial.  Contrary to popular (or at least leftist) myth, neoliberals are not untrammeled individualists. In many ways, they’re not that different from traditional conservatives: that is, they see individuals embedded in social institutions like the church or the family or schools—all institutions, it should be said, that are hierarchical and undemocratic.

Thatcher isn’t alone in this.  For all their individualist bluster, libertarians—particularly those market-oriented libertarians who are rightly viewed as the leading theoreticians of neoliberalism—often make the same claim.  When these libertarians look out at society, they don’t always see isolated or autonomous individuals; they’re just as likely to see private hierarchies like the family or the workplace, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.  And that, I suspect (though further research is certainly necessary), is what they think of and like about society: that it’s an archipelago of private governments.

To my eyes, the connection between this and Ron and Rand Paul is pretty clear.

Image:  ...as in "A man's home is his…"  That's "a MAN'S home!"

Condemned out of his own mouth – Rand Paul

A few days ago Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the great hope of the new libertarianism, went to Howard University and spoke to mostly African-American students in an attempt to show them that it was the Democrats back in the 1850s who showed themselves to be hostile to African-American interests, and one should never forget that, while nothing the Republicans have done since 1964 should be held against them.

When challenged on this, Sen. Paul said, according to Salon

 “The argument that I’m trying to make is that we haven’t changed — there are some of us that haven’t changed,” Paul said. “We don’t see an abrupt difference” between the party of Lincoln and the party of Richard Nixon.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between those two parties, or says he can't, should not be trusted as far as you can throw him.

Look for a red shoe

Couple of weeks ago, to my great surprise, a writer named Ted Gioia wrote an article about science-fiction author Cordwainer Smith for the Atlantic. It was a good article, but what I found most remarkable about it was the fact that it was written at all. Cordwainer Smith was highly praised by those who appreciated him, but he was always very much a minority taste. Part of this was the fact that he wrote exclusively about a time 14,000 years in the future, and his style was if clear and accomplished, very eccentric. Think Iain Banks's Culture series for the scope and futuristic science, but with a society which is a lot stranger and an author who makes more demands on his readers' imagination. (Though the Player of Games might well be a Cordwainer Smith story.)


I have some of Smith's work sitting around the house, and today I  picked up a book of short stories – Smith's forte was the short story – and was creeped out. I remember why I don't read read him very often.

I think the easiest thing to say is that Smith had an intense appreciation of how cruel the universe and humanity are. Maybe because he was a China expert working in the first half of the 20th century? Today's story was "Think Blue, Count Two" which superficially concerns the dynamics between three human beings trapped in a ship sailing between the stars and dragging thousands of frozen emigrants behind it. The one woman who's awake is the most beautiful person on earth, who is being sent to a distant colony to boost the average genetic beauty quotient. She also in the view of future scientists has a high daughter rating, meaning that the vast majority of human beings will instantaneously adopt her as a daughter-figure do anything to protect her. And even so it is almost not enough. She has to be saved by a mouse brain turned into a ceramic computer.

Well, this may give you some idea of whether you want to read Cordwainer Smith.Or maybe not. My description is a mere shadow of the reality. I could work all day and not get any closer to it.


If there is one further thing to be said, it's that Smith does not write in any detectable way as someone working in the 1950s and 60s. He is amazingly contemporary in his concerns and his style. He may be equally strange or equally familiar 100 years from today.

The Big Chill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian Ulrich alerted me to this:

The Big Chill and the Eastern Mediterranean

Among the solid contributions to Middle Eastern environmental history which have come out the past couple of years is Ronnie Ellenblum's The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072.  Its topic is the effects on the eastern Mediterranean of the protracted period of cold spells which Richard Bulliet termed the "Big Chill," and which was part of the global climate shift which also gave rise to the Medieval Warm Period in the North Atlantic which is well known to historians of medieval Europe.  Ellenblum convincingly ties enough major developments into the "Big Chill" that it deserves to be considered a major watershed in the region's history.

What are these developments?  One is the rise of nomadic powers, such as the Seljuqs in the Middle East, the Pechenegs in the Byzantine Empire, and the Banu Hilal in North Africa.  Multiple dynasties fell or were weakened with the collapse of bureaucracies and the agrarian base to sustain organized military power.  Major cities witnessed a decline in their population and infrastructure, marking the sharp final decline of the urban life developed in the region during the Hellenistic period.  Finally, population shifts, both in-migration and out-migration, led to religious change as Muslim nomads took the place of Christian peasants in agriculturally marginal regions.

Some will probably accuse Ellenblum of environmental determinism, but this is not his argument.  In his own words:

Civilizations are altered and transformed by calamities, although they usually succeed in finding, when the crisis is over, ways to reconstruct new stable societal structures and a new equilibrium that resemble, to a certain degree, the pre-calamity social order. Differences between pre- and post-calamity cultures, however, are often discerned.

In other words, in periods of environmental catastrophe, people adapt in a variety of ways, and even when the catastrophe is over, those ways continue to exist and leave their own historical legacies, whether in demographic shifts, institutions, or settlement structures.

Sounds interesting!

Image:  Snow in Damascus, January 2013

Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagine!

"Spring" in the Near North, 2013

Morning temp:  -14 C
Snow: 6-9 inches on the ground
Trees: barely any budding
In the air:  a bug.

Yakutia laughs.

Oddball 14th century herald's name of the day

Moniquot, an "honorable" herald (is there any other kind?) who brought a message from King Henry of Spain (= Castile) to the Good Duke.
.
Image: More AEMMA.