The Storied City
In 2013, Charlie English, then international news editor of The Guardian, became obsessed with the news coming out of Timbuktu. Jihadists were destroying the city's religious monuments because they were not properly Islamic and librarians were smuggling medieval books out of the city in order to preserve them from the jihadists. He was not the first Westerner to be obsessed with the city and its treasures: throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries European explorers had tried to find their way to the legendary golden city of Africa.*
In The Storied City: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, English intertwines the history of Europe's relationship with and quest to "discover" a city that few Europeans had ever seen and first-hand reporting on the threat to Timbuktu's historical heritage. The result is a parallel set of adventures, both of which are shaped by personal danger, the search for funding, the difficulties of traveling across the desert, the possibility of being stopped by armed bandits, the frustrations of dealing with international cultural organizations, and a passion for medieval documents.
The contemporary story will be familiar to readers of The Bad-ass Librarians of Timbuktu. English adds a layer of complexity to that story by placing it in the context 100 years of European attempts to reach a city that had taken on a mythic quality in the collective imagination and their failure to understand Timbuktu's continued importance as a treasure trove of knowledge.
*If English leaves you with a taste for a more in-depth account of European explorers in the Sahara, I strongly recommend Steve Kemper's A Labyrinth of Kingdoms, one of the best works of historical non-fiction that I've read in recent years.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings
These days I'm not reading many Big Fat History Books that I'm prepared to recommend to the Marginalia. It's not that I'm not reading. At the moment I have five different library cards on active rotation in my wallet and carefully segregated piles of books from three different libraries on my study floor. When I reach the point where my brain is too bleary to write or brainstorm, I settle down with the latest BFHB and a stack of slightly used sticky notes, prepared to learn more about the woman warrior who is next in the queue. For the most part, they (the books, not the warriors) are solid, scholarly works, written with thought and care and impenetrable prose. They come with a full complement of footnotes, bibliography, maps, and genealogy charts. They are very good, but they are not the kind of books that I review here.*
But there are exceptions. Last Sunday I settled down on the porch with a glass of ice tea and read Katharine Scherman's The Birth of France: Warriors, Bishops and Long-Haired Kings. I was on the track of Brunhild and Fredegund, a pair of rivals queens in the sixth century CE who stood at the heart of forty years of war between the Merovingian kings in what would later become France. I came to the conclusion that for my purposes they were not women warriors, though they often appear in biographical dictionaries of the same.*** Brunhild was embattled, which is not the same as going to battle. Fredegund appears to have led troops into battle on occasion, but she is best know for hiring assassins**** to get rid of her political rivals, not to mention people who just irritated her.
Scherman not only convinced me that Brunhild and Fredegund were critical historical figures, she placed them beautifully in the complex world of post-Roman Europe. ***** She combines lively prose with a gift for explaining complex events and ideas. I came away with a clearer sense of Roman Gall, the Germanic tribes, the confusion of new kingdoms that arose out of the dust of empire, the role of the Church, and the transition from the Merovingian kings to their Carolingian successors. By the end, the Dark Ages were a little less dark as far as I was concerned.
I'm happy to have spent an afternoon with Scherman, even if it mean voting Brunhild and Fredegund off the island.
*I'm also spending time with another breed of book that I don't review: special pleading built on sloppy scholarship. These are largely useless, though carefully reading will sometimes produce a thread back to something interesting, usually in the footnotes.**
**Always read the footnotes. Especially in books built on sloppy scholarship.
*** Which may simply mean the authors/editors are working from a different definition of what constitutes a woman warrior. As I discussed in a recent edition of my newsletter, the definition is a matter of debate. (And speaking of my newsletter: if you're interested in discussions about the process of writing history and hot off the presses news about speaking gigs, etc, you can subscribe here: http://eepurl.com/cobpk9 )
****Or perhaps seducing them into doing her dirty work. Contemporary accounts suggest she was a femme fatale in the metaphorical as well as the literal sense.
*****For those of you who like to place things in the Big Timeline: The western Roman Empire officially "fell" in 476 CE, when the Germanic leader Odacer deposed the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus. The eastern Roman Empire (aka Byzantium) survived, and even thrived, for another thousand years.
From the Archives: Road Trip Through History-Driving the Ypres Salient
Normally I'd hesitate to describe something as a road trip that begins with a transatlantic flight. The driving tour of the Ypres Salient* is an exception.
The Belgian town of Ieper (Ypres in French, "Wipers" in British Tommy) was the center of a series of bloody battles in World War I. The kind of battles where 500,000 men die to gain eight kilometers of ground and a lush green landscape is reduced to black mud. By the end of the war, Ieper and the surrounding towns were no more than rubble. (Winston Churchill suggested that Ieper should be left in ruins as a war memorial. A local minister responded, "Belgium does not need to keep its ruins to remember its misfortunes." I wonder if Winnie remembered the exchange after German bombers destroyed large portions of London in WWII?)
Today thousands of visitors, most of them from the UK and the Commonwealth, drive through along a well-organized tour of Ypres Salient. For many it is an act of pilgrimage.
My Own True Love and I set off in the morning, planning to drive the north loop of the tour in one day and the south loop the next. We had a self-guided tour brochure, a battlefield map, two Belgian road maps, and a great deal of enthusiasm. We immediately overshot the first stop on the tour by 30 kilometers, thanks to a badly written tour brochure (honest!) and our own confusion about the scale of things in Belgium. (It's a really small country.)
Driving the Ypres Salient is very different from touring a Civil War battlefield in the United States. Instead of battlefields you see cemeteries, memorials, cemeteries, the occasional reconstructed trench, and more cemeteries. The British Commonwealth War Graves Commission does an amazing job. More than 160 small cemeteries are beautifully maintained. The largest of them include interpretive displays that use modern museum technologies to bring the war, the destruction, and the young men who were lost to life.
Highlights (if you can describe war memorials with such a jolly word) include:
- The Essex Farm Cemetery, located at the site of the medical dressing station where Canadian doctor John McCrae wrote the poem "In Flanders Field", which inspired the use of the poppy as the symbol for remembering those lost in foreign wars.
- TheTyne Cot cemetery, where a solemn female voice intoned the names of the dead as their pictures were displayed, life-sized, on a wall
- The Deutcher Soldatenfriedhof at Langemark, where 45,000 German soldiers are buried in a mass grave and we saw poppies growing wild against the memorial wall. (I was close to tears for much of the day. Those dang poppies did me in.)
- The Yorkshire Dugout Site, an archaeological site that made the misery of trench warfare more vivid than any trench reconstruction or war memoir ever could. The water was up to the edge of the dugout. Even with constant pumping, the trenches and dugouts were wet all the time. We knew this in our heads before; now we know if for real.
By day's end, we were heart-sore, overwhelmed, and very glad we'd made the trip. We abandoned the southern loop of the driving tour.
If you make it to Ieper, be sure to visit
- In Flanders Field Museum. Probably the best World War I museum I've ever visited. (And given our interests My Own True Love and I have been to a few.)
- The Last Post: Every night the volunteer fire brigade of Ieper plays the traditional bugle salute to the fallen soldier at the Menin Gate. The gate itself is an imposing memorial to soldiers whose gravesites are unknown. The nightly ceremony is moving. Bring a hanky.
* In military terms, a "salient" is a battlefield feature that is surrounded by the enemy on three sides, making the troops occupying the salient vulnerable.