Dr. Metablog

The Pazyryk Rug

 
I've been reading about rugs. I'm ignorant, but fortunately, there are dozens of eaily-available and learned books, and I'm happy to say that our local university library is going to keep me busy until my enthusiasm flags.

Everyone interested in rugs knows that the Pazyryk carpet (which I didn't know about until a month ago) is the oldest known rug and about three thousand years older than the next contender. It was discovered in 1949 near the Mongolia-China border, in a Scythian tomb that had been flooded and frozen since about 2500 BCE. It's magnificent and it's mind-expanding. It's been a long time since something has created in me such a reverent sense of gaga-hood and wowage. 

Although older than old, it's anything but primitive. Centuries, perhaps millenia, of experimentation, learning, intelligence, craft, and effort preceded its making. First our ancestors had to domesticate sheep, which, I've learned, had to be selectively bred to become wooly rather than merely hairy. Then came the invention of spinning and weaving. And dyeing, which is a sophisticated and complicated art all of itself. Moreover, it's obvious that the Pazyryk rug did not spring whole out of someone's brain --it's the climax of a long artistic tradition. While some scholars detect Persian influences, others think it wholly a creation of the steppes. The red dye, it's recently been discovered, is Polish cochineal. How did the dye get to Mongolia?  I've not read anything about the blue, but it looks like indigo, and if it is, the process of getting wool to take indigo is extremely complicated.  

   

The detail, though faded (fifty-five hundred years of refrigeration take its toll) is worthy of the closest study: mounted horsemen, saddle blankets and trappings, even the decorated manes of the horses, are rendered, knot by knot, with great power. 

And then there are the happy moose (or possibly elk, or some ungulate that I don't know).

 

The rug now resides at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.  I intend to visit it some day, but if the museum should want to put it out on permanent loan to my living room, I would promise to treat it with the utmost respect and appreciation.     

Fragment of a Genuine Telephone Conversation

The grand-daughter (now age eleven), studying the Darmstadt Madonna (1528) by Hans Holbein the Younger that is reproduced in q previous post:  "It doesn't look like Madonna."

Grandpa:  "I think it may be a different Madonna."

"Holbein" Rugs

What is this remarkable object? It's a seventeenth-century Turkish rug that now resides in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It's of a type called a "Holbein."  And just why, pray tell, should a class of rugs be named after a sixteenth-century German painter? Was Holbein a closet weaver? Or an importer of rugs?  No. The answer is that rugs of this sort appear prominently in paintings by Holbein, and, inasmuch as textiles deteriorate more rapidly than oil paintings, much more is known about early Turkish rugs from their representation in European art than from the bits and fragments that have managed to survive. Hence "Holbein."

It may be not be easy to see in the picture (rugs need to be seen and handled in person) but on closer inspection, it's clear that there's a repeating geometric pattern in the field within the rug's borders.  That pattern is the hallmark of the "Holbein" rug.

Look again at Holbein's best-known picture, "The Ambassadors."

 
The canvas is loaded with realistic and iconographic detail, and, moreover, it's easy to be transfixed by the floating magic-realism-ish anamorphic death's head that dominates the bottom quarter of the canvas. But look, on the table, under the very up-to-date scientific instruments, a Turkish rug!  Look again.

 
The rug that's depicted is comprised a series of squares of which the right side of one and the left side of the other are clearly visible.  It's a very handsome "Holbein." 

There's an even clearer example in Holbein's "Darmstadt Madonna." 
There it is, in its full anachronistic glory -- a lovely example of a "Turkey carpet" enriching the very  bottom of the picture.  The repeating geometric pattern is fully revealed.  It's not the same rug as the one in the "Ambassadors" portrait, but it's clearly in the same style.  

"Holbein" rugs don't just appear in Holbeins.  There's a great example in Andrea del Verrocchio's "Madonna with john the Baptist and Donatus" (c. 1480).

 
A sixteenth-century Turkish rug right at the feet of the madonna and child. Anachronisticissimus.   

I pause here for a bit of autobiography. in the summer of 1968, Mrs. Dr. Metablog, struck by a sudden infatuation, bid for and won at a country auction in rural Vermont a small geometric ( 4' x 5') rug. It's been with us now these forty years and  has been a constant source of visual pleasure. No, it's not a Holbein, but it's in the same phylum. it's a Konakghend prayer rug, perhaps dating from the late nineteenth century, and like many Kuba or Shirvan rugs, it's geometrical (rather than swirly or floral) in design. Something like a "Holbein" but not quite. I would love to have a "Holbein" on one of my otherwise blank walls. There's something mighty intriguing and suggestive about their cross-cultural links. But in the matter of antique rugs (as in other areas of art), my taste is infinitely in advance of my wallet. Instead of purchasing, we gratify our enthusiasm for rugs by going to exhibits, visiting the museums (including the almost unknown Textile Museum in DC), wandering into the better rug stores (NOT the ones that are declaring bankruptcy and in which EVERYTHING is now 70-80% off) where we pretend to be wealthy, and we study the rug books. Let me testify: "oriental" rugs are one of the great, great, great art forms.

Are genuine "Holbeins" still available?  (I mean old Turkish ones, not new sweatshop or machine made jobbies from India or China.)  Here's one that was recently sold on Ebay.

 
It's a mid-nineteenth-century beauty and, to judge from the picture, in remarkably fine shape for its age. It's described as a "Yuntdag," which is a region in West Anatolia. If I had the cash or even the credit, I'd jump on it. And then I would let a photographer take my picture while I pose in front of it, and by doing so connect myself to Holbein and Verrocchio-- to the aesthetic part of the tradition, that is, not to the Virgin part.

 

 

Muff and Spot, Once Again

Every little once in a while, a mountain lion creeps into the fold and snares a lamb, a calf, or a German shepherd. At even more infrequent intervals, a mountain lion attacks a human being (usually a child).  Whenever there's a human-lion interaction, there comes a deluge of letters to the local newspaper demanding that the authorities exercise “lethal control" over the big cats. Killing catamounts is neither hard nor dangerous. They were hunted nearly to extinction in the nineteenth century. Dogs chase the animal up a tree. The brave hunter takes aim and fires.

But Is it a good idea to extirpate the mountain lion? In the United States, there’s an average of one death by mountain lion a year. Here in our county, there’s been one such death in the last hundred years. One is a very low number, especially when, in the country as a whole, snakes cause a dozen deaths each year, lightning claims seventy-five, bee and wasp stings a hundred. Dogs, when they’re not out hunting mountain lions, account for between twelve to twenty deaths a year – a couple of hundred a decade-- many of these, it's sad to say, infants in the crib. Given the numbers, It’s hard to believe that calls for the extermination of mountain lions aren’t motivated less by facts than by fear.

Domesticated dogs are responsible not only for a dozen to a score of deaths, but also for an estimated 4 to 7 million (that’s right, million!) cases of dog-bite a year, almost 800,000 of which require medical attention. Dog bites cause 368,000 emergency room visits, or (do the math!) one thousand such visits a day.  The social cost of dog bites is estimated variously, but the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta claims that the direct medical costs of dog bites per year is $165 million, with many more millions in ancillary expenses. 

Mountain lions, which are relatively harmless, inspire terror, but dogs, which are far more dangerous, are our sacred cows -- loved, in my opinion, beyond all propriety. It’s hard not to cringe when otherwise sensible people – good decent people --tell me in all seriousness that Towser is a full member of their family, or that Fido is about to undergo surgery to replace a hip -- an operation the cost of which is more than the annual medical budget of whole villages in Africa or Asia. The run-of the-mill doggie in America enjoys a better diet and better medical care than half of the human beings on the planet -- a thoroughly indefensible skewing of resources. Dogs are not human beings, and it’s immoral sentimentality to treat them as such. It’s embarrassing.

The ancients, following Aristotle, divided their possessions into three categories: an object was an instrumentum mutum, an animal was an instrumentum semivocale, and a slave was an instrumentum vocale.  By eliding the differences between humans and animals, the Greeks and the Romans made slavery both easy and natural. Aristotle's notion underlay serfdom.

I used to worry that people who treated animals as humans would be tempted to treat humans as animals. But it's not so; the people I know who are sentimental about animals and "animal rights" are extraordinarily sensitive to human rights -- but then, perhaps my sample is skewed. All of my friends are sensitive to human rights; if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be my friends.

I wonder whether the love of dangerous dogs and the fear of the cats who are by and large indifferent to us isn’t an instinct acquired slowly over the last half million years. Our ancestors, armed, at best, with flint-headed spears, spent countless millennia at the mercy of feline predators larger, more powerful and more terrifying than 100-pound mountain lions (the extinct European lion, panthera leo fossilis, was taller, stronger, and and a foot and a half longer than the modern African lion). It was only some 50,000 years ago that an ancient Einstein conceived the idea of domesticating wolves and selecting their population for useful traits. Humans and proto-dogs started to cohabit; dwellings and caves came to be littered with coprolites. Co-evolution began, and over the course of time, dogs and humans came to be sensitive to each other's traits. Those early dogs were our first allies on this lonely, hostile planet. They could raise a ruckus when a couple or three lionesses prowled about the entrance to the cave.

We're indebted to dogs and so we tolerate their bad habits.  By the same token, we have inherited from our ancestors a primordial fear. Hence the over-hasty cry to exterminate the mountain lion. 

Secession Nostalgia

The Sons of Confederate Veterans celebrated themselves with a $100-per-person Secession Ball on Dec. 20 in Gaillard Municipal Auditorium in Charleston.  The event centered on a play highlighting key moments from the signing of South Carolina’s Ordinance of Secession 150 years ago.  Jeff Antley, who organized the event, said that the Secession Ball honors South Carolinians who stood up for their rights.  “The secession movement in South Carolina was a demonstration of freedom,” said Antley. “What I’m doing is honoring the men from this state who stood up for their self-government and their rights under law."

Is the act of secesion a "demonstration of freedom?"  What sort of freedom?  Let us now read from South Carolina's Articles of Secession, which asserts that the federal government has impinged upon states' rights. 

"The right of property in slaves was recognized [under the Constitution] by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

For twenty-five years this agitation has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety."

Yes, it's true.  Citizens of some states have not captured fugitive slaves or returned them to their owners, have denounced slavery as sinful, have elected a president who is hostile to the "peculiar institution," and have (horror of horrors! even granted citizenship to former slaves. 

The South Carolina document is extraordinarily clear.  Can anyone fairly doubt that there would have been no secession and therefore no need for a Secession Ball except in defense of slavery?  The "demonstration of freedom" is nothing more than a celebration of the  freedom of one person to own another.  

Nowadays, when slavery is no longer defensible, "conservative" South Carolinians are reduced to protecting their guaranteed right to make life difficult for gays and immigrants.  And keep women in their places.  A far cry from their glorious past. 

 But they continue to nurture that nostalgia for the great old antebellum days.  

News from the World of Nose Ornamentation

Although youngsters sometimes try to piss off their parents by inserting into their nose a modest jewel or a gold circlet, we (as a nation or as a civilization) aren't terribly enthusiastic about decorating the old schnozzola. While the English language has words for many kinds of jewelry (ring, earring, brooch, bracelet, necklace, tiara, pectoral), it is vacant of vocabulary for objects that are affixed to or hang from the nose. Consequently, this magnificent piece of gold jewelry, crafted in Peru two thousand years ago, which certainly bore a name in proto-Quecha or whatever was spoken at the time, is now simply called a "nose ornament."

It's spectacular, isn't it? The four jolly, fat spiders in their intricate communal web of mesh are truly lovely. We moderns can't compete.  We have nothing to offer. 

Here's another beauty, this one from the area that is now Columbia.

This nose ornament is five inches long from top to bottom, which means that it would cover the mouth and hang well below the chin. The small gold discs and the long flattened cylinders are loosely attached, so the ornament was designed both to catch and reflect the light and to jingle. This one, like the spider ornament, is glittery, ostentatious, and unapologetic.

I imagine that like most such jewelry, these nose ornaments were designed to say, "I''m rich, I'm powerful, and I'm sexy. Come mate with me." To me, they also say, very loudly, "I can endure massive rhinal discomfort." It appears that these nose ornaments were inserted between the nostrils and attached to the septum. To wear such an ornament would be painful even if the wearer never sneezed or blew his nose, but to insert and remove it would be sheer nasal agony. Those sharp points would dig into the tender flesh. And the object must have been frequently removed,  because with the ornament in place, drinking or eating would be impossibly messy. While the nose ornament might get a guy a date, it would certainly inhibit chat or flirtation, and would also become a major impediment if he got lucky.

I'm not impressed by the pitifully small nose ornaments worn by modern teenagers, but I would definitely respect the child who was willing to brandish something equivalent to these wonders. Especially the one with the spiders.      

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of a New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees. Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton. Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride. Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation. When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe. They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye. More like a father welcomed by his children than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring. She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good. As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate. Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre. It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off. When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting. De Lord never made us look like dem. We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat: He knows best, I 'spise. Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow; what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses. Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons. Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for? I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect. The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states. One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does. I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity. I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead but continue to appear in VFW halls, in bowling alleys, in union halls, and in truck stops all over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Lessons from R. B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president.  It's a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo.  He should have fought much harder. 

Hayes' most famous sentence dates from his 1877 inaugural address: "He serves his party best who serves his country best."  It's an admirable principle -- and one that that has been thoroughly violated by Mr. Bush and the pack of clowns and schmegeggies that he has installed to ruin our government.

After Hayes left office, he wandered to the political left.  Although as president he had intervened to crush the railroad strikes, he later came to believe (according to Trefousse) that "the taxation system was unfair, taking a much smaller share of the estates of millionaires than of ordinary people." "The real difficulty," Hayes wrote, "is that vast wealth and power reside in the hands of the few and unscrupulous.  Hundreds of laws are in the interest of these men and against the interest of the workingmen.  Lincoln was for government of the people.  The new tendency is for government 'of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.'" 

These are words of remarkable pertinence.  It woult appear that we haven't moved very far from the mark -- the more shame to us.  If Hayes had said these same words today, he would not doubt have been accused of fomenting "class warfare."  (Class warfare: redistributing money from rich to poor.  Normal state of affair (not class warfare):  taking money from the poor to give to the rich.)

Nanny State! Nanny State!

According to Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, American men were constantly masticating tobacco.  He was thoroughly shocked by the "two odious practices of chewing and expectorating" -- a habit that he found to be both "offensive and sickening."

"In all the public places of America," wrote the novelist, "this filthy custom is recognized.  In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his."  They all spit "incessantly."  Worse still, In the hospitals the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject there tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolor the stairs."  A further horror:  "in public buildings visitors are implored ... to squirt the essence of their plugs... into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns.  This custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.  The stranger will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness."

It must have been horrible.  Dickens says that every floor, staircase, carpet was disfigured with traces of "tinctured saliva."  It's hard to imagine that our revered ancestors lived in such a foul, smelly, slippery environment or that your doc would have a spittoon at his feet while he discussed your symptoms.

Eventually, there was a movement to ban public spitting, but it took almost a century before the odious custom was conquered (except on the baseball field, where it flourishes today in all its ancient glory).  There were those who resisted change, of course.  To prohibit spitting was to regulate and ultimately to deny a human freedom.  If the catchword had been invented, the right-wingers of the day would have been shouting, the way they do now when it's not the spitting but the smoking of tobacco that's in question:  "Spitters' rights!  Spitters' rights!  Nanny state!  Nanny state!"   

When Sir Simonds d'Ewes visited Paris two centuries before Dickens toured America, he was shocked to find the steps of the Louvre littered with "a thousand ordures."  Defecating in public was the French custom and a human freedom.  Eventually, however, laws and customs changed.  But I'm absolutely positive that 1640s libertarians were out there on the barricades, screaming "Shitters' rights!  Shitters' rights!  Nanny state! Nanny state!"

Favorite Royal Cognomina and Sobriquets

Reading an introductory history of Spain (I'm appallingly ignorant about the Iberian peninsula), I learned of the dark age king with the excellent name of Wifred the Hairy. Wifred stimulated me to recall other monarchs with colorful sobriquets: Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred the Unready, Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Fat, Edward the Confessor, Pippin the Short, Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Joanna the Mad, Suleiman the Magnificent. When my learning and memory failed, wikipedia rode to the rescue: Sviatopolk the Accursed, Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Ivailo the Cabbage, Alfonso the Chaste, Louis the Indolent, Denis the Farmer, Piero the Gouty, Fulk the Ill-tempered, Edgar the Outlaw, Louis the Pious, Eric the Priest-hater, William the Silent, Olaf the Stout, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, Garcia the Tremulous, and Alfonso the Wise. Then I thought, how sad that in this formal age of first and last names we no longer make use of such picturesque appellations. Let's return to the earlier tradition. I propose, as a start, Mel the Bigot, Mike the Ear-biter, Rush the Blowhard, George the Truculent (or George the Decider), Alberto the Forgetful, and Dick the Dick. Suggestions are very welcome. The world is all before us, where to seek. 

May 15.  Pauline Harlem, acclaimed author of The Joy of Anagrams, suggests these two: Woody the Perplexed and Warren the Promiscuous.

May 16. Spike Schapiro comments:  "Who in the living heckola is 'Ivailo the Cabbage.'  Did you make that up, Vivian?  Do the rules of your game allow me to invent vegetable sobriquets?  Suppose I said, 'Ivana the Beet' or 'Penelope the Melon'?  Would that be amusing or pertinent?  What's the deal here?

Vivian replies:  Spike -- Ivailo the Cabbage, King of Bulgaria, was also known as "Ivailo the Lettuce" and "Ivailo the Radish."  Why would I try to deceive you?  Besides, I'm not nearly so inventive.  For more info, click  here.

The Holy Lance

In 1098, crusaders were trapped inside the walls of Antioch and their mission to capture Jerusalem was gravely jeopardized. When things were at their worst, one of the crusaders -- a Provencal peasant named Peter Bartholomew -- was visited by St. Andrew, who revealed to him that the lance with which the Roman soldier Longinus had pierced the side of Jesus was hidden in Antioch's Basilica of St. Peter. St. Andrew informed Peter that "he who carries this lance into battle shall never be overcome by the enemy." 

Bartholemew's claim met with initial skepticism because it was an established fact that the Holy Lance lay safely in the relic collection of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Nevertheless, the authorities agreed to investigate. Twelve men dug until overcome by exhaustion at the spot to which Bartholomew pointed, but they could find nothing. Finally, Peter himself dropped into the hole and brought forth a shard of metal. "All across the city there was boundless rejoicing." Suddenly invigorated by the possession of this powerful relic, their morale euphoric, the crusaders broke out of the city, overcame the armies that surrounded them, and proceeded to Jerusalem.

Some months afterward, Peter Bartholomew had another vision: that the entire crusade  was compromised because some of its soldiers were polluted by pride or cowardice. He announced that he himself would choose and put to death soldiers of the cross who were steeped in sin. There was a backlash against Peter and the authenticity of the Holy Lance was challenged.

Peter decided to prove his truth in a trial by ordeal. After fasting for several days, he ran, carrying the Holy Lance, between two piles of burning olive branches four feet high and thirteen feet long. He was severely burned and died several days later. The Holy Lance lost its magic and morale plummeted. The crusaders were forced to seek an alternative. The ingenious Raymond of Toulouse dispatched his follower Hugh of Monteil to Latakia to retrieve a fragment of the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. In the end, the discrediting of the Holy Lance proved to be only a temporary setback.    

The facts in this and the previous essaylet come from Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade, a New History (Oxford University Press, 2004). 

Adolf Award for Worst Person of the Century

The winner of the Adolf for worst person of the century goes to Pope Urban II. The century in question is the first one of the previous millennium, or 1000-1100. Like many other Adolf award winners, Urban perpetrated evil deeds that have continued to provoke hatred, war and suffering even to the present day.

HIs principal crime: Pope Urban fabricated a litany of Muslim atrocities in order to incite Christians to wrest Jerusalem from a “race” that he called “absolutely alien to God.” In November, 1095, in Clermont in the south of France, Urban told an eager audience that Muslims had circumcised Christians and spread their unspeakable blood on baptismal fonts; that they had “cut open the navels of others, tearing out their vital organs” and that they had committed appalling atrocities upon women “of which it is more evil to speak than to keep silent.”

Some say that his catalog of mutilations and barbarities was based on faulty intelligence but most think it was his own invention. Urban did not just incite and condone warfare, he sanctified it. His crusade would be a pilgrimage -- and therefore a form of penance. Combatants who died in its course would be purified. God, it was claimed, has instituted “holy wars” so that knights might find a new path to salvation.

Roughly one hundred thousand crusaders answered his call and set out for the Levant to take Jerusalem from the infidels.On the way, they warmed to their task by conducting genocidal attacks of unprecedented brutality upon the Jewish communities of the Rhineland (communities that had been in place before the advent of Christianity). These quasi-sanctioned raids are now known as “the first holocaust.”

The passage of the crusaders to the middle East was made easier because the Muslims were divided into two factions --Shiite and Sunni -- that were perpetually at daggers drawn. The crusaders laid siege to Antioch in October, 1099, and when they took the city, slaughtered its entire Muslim population. In possession of Antioch, they found themselves entirely surrounded by hostile armies. But God was on their side. The timely intervention of “countless armies with white horses… led by the saints George, Mercurius, and Demetrius“ allowed them to fight their way out of the city.

The crusaders headed south and in midsummer of 1099 besieged Jerusalem. Muslim defenders taunted the crusaders by setting up crosses and urinating on them; in response, the Christians catapulted the bodies of captured Muslims over the walls. When Jerusalem fell, the celebration was euphoric. The Provencal crusader Raymond of Aguilers reported that “some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others were tortured for a long time and burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feet lay in the houses and streets. Infants were seized by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles, and dashed against the wall, breaking their necks.” Covered with gore, weighed down with plunder, “rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness," the crusaders "worshipped at the Sepulchre of Jesus the Savior.”

Although Pope Urban II died just two weeks after the fall and sack of Jerusalem, there is no question but that his Adolf was well and truly earned and that his legacy lives on.