Seminar CCXXVI: Ottoman professional network maintenance

Returning in somewhat subdued fashion to my seminar report backlog finds me still somewhat out of area, as you can probably tell from the title. My tenure in Birmingham as Interim Curator of Coins at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts sort of ex officio made me welcome at the General Seminar of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies in the University, and that welcome was warm enough that I tried, when I could, to get along to the Ottoman papers as well as the Byzantine ones. So it was that on 29th January 2015 I was there to listen to Dr Christine Woodhead give a paper entitled, “Friends, Colleagues and Grand Vezirs: the Ottoman art of letter-writing”, and it had enough crossover with things I’m interested in that it seems worth a report.

The only portrait of our star, Azmizade Mustafa Efendi, that I can quickly dig up, and I have no idea of either provenance or date, so it could be very misleading but it sets us up, anyway, doesn’t it?

Dr Woodhead was working on a translation of the letter collection of one Azmizade Mustafa Efendi, a senior judge in Ottoman Istanbul who died in 1631, and she was running into many questions arising.¹ Apparently Ottoman letter collections are not uncommonly preserved, but like early medieval ones they tend to have been preserved not for historical but for literary interests, as examples of writing to be imitated, making such minor details as date and addresses uninteresting to copy and thus they often have to be worked out from context, not always possible. It also means that the letters that are selected by preservation are highly stylised, often very poetical, fairly formulaic in terms of the emotions that they express or the occasions chosen on which to write (and thus, not least, quite hard to render into modern English that still sounds purposeful). Dr Woodhead argued that these are anyway very valuable sources for outlooks and worldviews, but even as she presented the questions that kept coming to the surface were more basic ones about to whom Azmizade was connected by these letters and when and why they were written.

I really am struggling for images here but, here is another unprovenanced undated portrait that seems to be of the right man…

In particular, there is very little in the collection from after his appointment as qadi in 1614, either to him (much rarer in any case) or from him. Was this because having risen to a top spot the networks of grace and favour which had sustained him thus far were now less important, or was it just that that was when he became important enough for someone to compile his letters as examples (perhaps itself an expression of flattering attention by an underling), or even, did he just start a fresh volume at that point and we don’t have it or it hasn’t yet been found? Answering any of these questions is very hard to do from the collection itself, and so what one winds up wanting is other letter collections from his correspondents so that the missing voices in these exchanges can tell us something to condition and contextualise the literary posturing that is the first thing these letter collections were made to preserve. There were lots of other issues to explore here, such as the genuineness of the emotions expressed (and whether they are naturally filtered by the fact that letters were apparently mainly written to people long distant whom the writer hadn’t seen for ages, whereas a more jovial tone might have been used to a friend easier of access), but these seemed so familiar from what reading I’ve done about Carolingian and, actually, Byzantine letter collections that it was nice to be reminded that as we’ve suggested before sometimes the early modernists are really not facing anything very different from we medievalists, even in a world where all could be thought to have changed between the two periods.²

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1. Setting up this post has let me come across C. Woodhead, “Circles of Correspondance: Ottoman letter-writing in the early seventeenth century” in Journal of Turkish Literature Vol. 4 (Syracuse 2007), pp. 53-68, online in preprint here, which suggests that perhaps not all of these were new questions to our speaker.

2. For my home period and area my stock references are Mary Garrison, “‘Send more socks’: on the mentality and the preservation context of medieval letters” in Marco Mostert (ed.), New Approaches to Medieval Communication, Utrecht Studies in Medieval Literacy 1 (Turnhout 1999), pp. 69-99 and Matthew Innes, “Practices of Property in the Carolingian Empire” in Jennifer Davis & Michael McCormick (edd.), The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: new directions of in early medieval studies (Aldershot 2008), pp. 247-266, but really the wellspring for both of them and also cited by Dr Whitehead is Margaret Mullett, “Writing in Early Mediaeval Byzantium” in Rosamond McKitterick (ed.), The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Europe (Cambridge 1990), pp. 156-185, which joins up the circle quite nicely I think.

Signs of the End Times, or, Rock’n’Roll is Dead

This was not what I had planned for this post, but as has regrettably happened often before events outstrip my backlog. The unthinkable has happened: Lemmy, founder of Motörhead and an occasional voice of popular wisdom cited on this blog, is dead, of cancer he hardly had time to know he was facing. We enter 2016 with the army of snarling rock’n’roll sadly weakened. So first and foremost, those to whom this news matters, raise a glass and turn it up.

Now keep that channel running on autoplay and consider this. As I’m sure you know, it was widely considered that Lemmy should have died of general rock’n’roll excess in the seventies or eighties so that his continuing survival could only be some peculiar expression of Providence. That this is suddenly otherwise can surely only be a sign of the encroaching End Times! At which rate, CAN IT BE COINCIDENCE that this is this blog’s 1000th post? I didn’t want to use it for this purpose, but in some ways it’s more fitting than what I had planned; a significance will now attach to it that I will remember. I was lucky enough to see Motörhead live a good few times, once even with Hawkwind supporting and Lemmy guesting on ‘Silver Machine’. An era in which that was possible is now over. I hope for nothing so monumental changing as the blog enters its eleventh century and indeed its tenth year, but these things also should be marked and if they travel only in the wake of Lemmy’s passing, well, that’s as it should be; the breaking of so great a thing should only come with a full-sized helping of what another dead rocker I once knew called The Big Noise.

All That Glitters, Experiment 1

Almost the last academic thing I did last year before breaking for Christmas was the first two sessions of a project that is now nearly finished, All That Glitters, announced here so long ago. It was so long ago that it might be worth reintroducing. Basically, by great happenstance one of my predecessors in taking care of the coin collection at the Barber Institute had run into two people at a conference who were presenting about the ability of the X-ray fluorescence (XRF) equipment their company, Bruker Industries Ltd., produced to do metal analyses. That predecessor, Rebecca Darley, also knew Robert Bracey at the British Museum, who had done work with XRF on the coinage of the Kushan Empire, and now I was in charge of the Barber’s coins. None of us are archæometallurgists and our knowledge of archæology and numismatics didn’t necessarily combine with the metals analysis expertise upon which we could call so as to somehow make a composite archæometallurgist out of us all, but Robert could borrow the British Museum’s handheld XRF scanner, Bruker had a new machine they wanted to test against real problems, the Barber is on the same campus as several much larger and more expensive machines also supplied by Bruker some of whose host departments proved happy to let us use them and to tell us about them; a project seemed obviously to exist in potentio and our task was to work out how to make it tell us something useful.

I’m not sure if this is the exact machine we were using but its resemblance to a phaser seems impressively reminiscent

It’s too early to say whether we achieved that, pending actual publication of our results and conclusions which we are even now working on writing up, but right from the beginning it was clear to us that before we could have any historical conclusions we would have to have methodological ones. This is because there are so many potential problems with XRF analysis, problems which not all publications using it consider, and when they do, consider most often for silver alloys rather than the high-purity gold we would be testing, that the first priority had to be not to find things out, but rather to find out what we could find out.¹ Accordingly, our pilot experiments were designed to evaluate the machinery more than the coinage, and we started on the 3rd December 2014 when Robert brought the British Museum’s handheld scanner up from the British Museum, along with its calibration standard, and Mike Dobby and Colin Slater from Bruker brought in their new M1ORA energy-dispersive scanner and we put some coins through their x-rays.

The first coin to go under, a gold solidus of Emperor Anastasius I struck at Constantinople (in the Eta officina) between 492 and 507, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B0005

We had chosen a test set of ten coins running from Anastasius I (491-518) to Constantine VI (785-797), with two coins for each ruler from the same mint and if possible, the same workshop of the mint (if that’s what officinae were), hoping that whatever results we might obtain would thus be internally secure against outlier coins from a bad day at the mint or similar.² All of those got zapped on both sides with both handheld and the microwave-like M1ORA. Both of these use a spot beam, but with the M1ORA it’s possible to target it precisely, so we aimed for flat surfaces wherever possible.

The M1ORA at work in the Barber’s Coin Study Room, with team members in eager attendance

The initial results of this made the handheld device look like much the poorer sibling, as its readings were extremely variable. Robert worked out, however, that this was related to how much of its expected sample it had been able to observe—this in turn probably down to surface relief but already we were into unknowns—and when the figures were all normalised to a notional 100% of sample they came out much more like what the M1ORA was seeing. The M1ORA was able to dump its readings straight into a laptop equipped with suitable software, and did this levelling-up in that software, so made things immediately clearer for us by automating that step, solely an issue of configuration but we still needed to be aware of it. I keep stressing variables and difficulties because I don’t want to imply that we were getting actual true results, but that said, once they were both talking to us in the same framework the message of the machines was pretty consistent: all these coins were being analysed as very high-purity gold, 97% or more, which is astonishingly high for any pre-modern metallurgy. However, other than silver and copper, which occurred in about the proportions one would expect (i. e. not very much and even less), the only other element that was consistently detectable was iron. That was in part a factor of what we had asked Mike and Colin to make the machinery look for but if you have to do that at all, there is obviously a restriction inherent in your question-setting…

So then for something rather different, a gold dinar of Sindh imitating a Persian dinar of Shah Shapur II (309-379), struck at an unknown mint and date, Barber Institute of Fine Arts S0073

The very high fineness was sort of what we might have expected, anyway, as it is roughly what earlier analyses of Byzantine gold coins by a number of methods have suggested.³ It still made me uncomfortable for its lack of variety, however, and so since we had run-time left in the day I started hauling other things out of the cabinets. These included two Persian gold dinars, of Shahs Shapur II (309-379) and Varhran IV (388-399), and the above piece which is pretending to be something like the former, as well as an Arab-Byzantine solidus from Carthage and some more Byzantine pieces. Mainly I just wanted to be sure that the machinery actually would report lower gold finenesses, and so it duly did, with the Persian pieces both lower (but not by the same amount) and the Sindh piece even less fine (which, to be honest, was already apparent in its colour, but that was why I’d chosen it). The Byzantine stuff, and the coins imitating that, remained high in the machinery’s estimation.

Another part of the starting sample, a gold solidus of the second reign of Emperor Justinian II, struck at Constantinople between 705 and 711, Barber Institute of Fine Arts B4464

This bit was fairly unsystematic sampling, but it did give us some reason to believe that the machinery was observing something consistent with our expectations, and which therefore fitted into existing understandings of the early Byzantine gold coinage. That is circular, though, obviously! This and the likely effect on the readings of differences between the surface of the coins and their cores, because of both manufacturing factors and subsequent environmental exposure, meant that we weren’t willing (and still aren’t) to say that these figures are actually how fine those coins were. We also weren’t seeing a range of trace elements which we had expected on the basis of older work, and which might have suggested things about changes in metal supply and treatment that would potentially be historical evidence.⁴ So, while these machines might serve other people’s purposes, we ourselves were going to need some bigger kit. And that would be Experiment 2, about which I shall write in a couple of posts’ time. In the meantime, however, here is some shiny metallic blogging for the Christmas season and I wish you all a happy holiday!

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1. Part of our problem was that so much of the literature about these problems was old enough to relate, potentially, only to a much more primitive incarnation of the technique. Nonetheless, Michael F. Hendy & J. A. Charles, “The Production Techniques, Silver Content and Circulation History of the Twelfth-Century Byzantine Silver Trachy” in Archaeometry Vol. 12 (Oxford 1970), pp. 13-21, William A. Oddy, “The Analysis of Gold Coins—A Comparison of Results Obtained by Non-Destructive Methods”, ibid. Vol. 14 (1972), pp. 109-117 and J. Tate, “Some Problems in Analysing Museum Material by Nondestructive Surface Sensitive Techniques” in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Part B Vol. 14 (Amsterdam 1986), pp. 20-23, all suggest that differences should be observable between surfaces and cores of coins and between methods that measure only the surface and those that measure total composition, and L. Beck, S. Bosonnet, S. Réveillon, D. Eliot & F. Pilon, “Silver surface enrichment of silver–copper alloys: a limitation for the analysis of ancient silver coins by surface techniques”, ibid. Part B Vol. 226 (2004), pp. 153-162, DOI: 10.1016/j.nimb.2004.06.044 and Vasiliki Kantarelou, Francisco José Ager, Despoina Eugenidou, Francisca Chaves, Alexandros Andreou, Elena Kontou, Niki Katsikosta, Miguel Angel Respaldiza, Patrizia Serafin, Dimosthenis Sokaras, Charalambos Zarkadas, Kyriaki Polikreti & Andreas Germanos Karydas, “X-ray Fluorescence analytical criteria to assess the fineness of ancient silver coins: application on Ptolemaic coinage” in Spectrochimica Acta Part B Vol. 66 (Amsterdam 2011), pp. 681-690, DOI: 10.1016/j.sab.2011.08.001, give some explanations of why that should be so. (I have to thank Dr Eleanor Blakelock for some of these and several other useful references.) All of these except Oddy and Tate were working with silver alloyed with base metal, however, and so another of the problems we have is in knowing how far the same applies to gold and if it does, whether if alloyed with base metals only or also with noble metals such as we expected to see. And the mess only gets worse from there…

2. Barber Institute of Fine Arts B0005 & B0006 (Anastasius I, Constantinople, officinae Eta and Iota), B2761 & B2762 (Heraclius, Constantinople, both officina Eta), B4384 & B4385 (first reign of Justinian II, Constantinople, former marked Theta), B4464 & B4465 (second reign of Justinian II, Constantinople, no control marks), B4598 & B4599 (Constantine VI and Eirini, Constantinople, no control marks).

3. Those earlier analyses being principally those gathered and conducted in Cécile Morrisson, Jean-Noël Barrandon & Jacques Poirier, “La monnaie d’or byzantine à Constantinople : purification et modes d’altérations (491-1354)” in Morrisson, Claude Brenot, Jean-Pierre Callu, Barrandon, Poirier & Robert Halleux, L’or monnayé I : purification et altérations de Rome à Byzance, Cahiers Ernest Babelon 2 (Paris 1985), pp. 113-187.

4. The kind of conclusions, indeed, that were coming out of ibid. and another study there, Jean-Pierre Callu, Claude Brenot, Jean-Noël Barrandon and Jacques Poirier, ‘”Aureus obryziacus”‘, ibid. pp. 81-111, albeit with a rather more variable sample of evidence!

Seminar CCXXV: an attempted rehabilitation of the Emperor Honorius

On 28th January 2015, I was once again in the Institute of Historical Research for the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, which turned out to be one of the more impressive double-acts I’ve ever seen in academia, with Graham Barrett and George Woudhuysen taking the stage with a paper entitled “Small Wars in Faraway Places under the Emperor Honorius”. I say ‘double-act’ and ‘stage’ deliberately; the paper was not just scripted but choreographed, with each speaker stepping forward for a few lines then stepping back to let the other take the spot; slick was not the word. So what was it that was being so slickly imparted?

Madrid, Real Academia de Historia, Codex 78, otherwise known as the Codice de Roda, fo. 190r, showing the opening of our text in question, the De Laude Pampilona Epistula

Well, those who know Graham or have read of him here will know that he is in his normal appearance a scholar of post-Muslim Northern Spain, whereas George is a late Roman person, and the point of this paper was in something that concerned them both, a misunderstood text in the Codex Rotensis. This is a tenth-to-eleventh-century manuscript made for the court of Pamplona that contains a version of Orosius’s Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, to which were then added Isidore of Seville’s History of the Goths, the Chronicle of Alfonso III in its simpler version and the Prophetic Chronicle, some noble genealogies and a bunch of ephemera, these including a Visigothic poem of praise for the city of Pamplona which, crucially for the paper, incorporates a letter of Emperor Honorius (393-423) whose rubric says that it was brought to Pamplona by an otherwise unrecorded patrician.¹

A portrait of Emperor Honorius in the consular diptych of Probus, dated to 406, “Consular diptych Probus 406“. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.

The letter has, claimed our two speakers, been dismissed as unintelligible, but confrontation with the actual manuscript helps with this—and it is of course now online, which makes that a lot easier—and George and Graham interpreted it as a tax break for local soldiery, not identified but not Gauls as they were being granted the same privileges as the Gauls. There apparently follows an additional provision that actually mentions Spain and establishes a retirement fund for the soldiers addressed. In other words, it looks like an attempt to reward loyal soldiery or buy back intransigent ones. Now, I have been very cautious about how I phrase all that because despite all the preparation one thing that Graham and George did not give us was a text, or sight of one, so my notes are based only on what they told us it said.² If they’re right, however, then this all probably fits in with the fairly recent rebellion of the prefect in charge of the Spanish army, Constantine the-would-be-III, who had also held Britain and Gaul against Rome for a while between 407 and 409. Honorius is generally held to have been unable to regain the provinces he lost in that rebellion, so this letter, if it’s correctly interpreted and its associated texts mean that it really does belong in Spain, show some attempt on his part to put things back in place.

The opening of the sixth book of Zosimus’s New History, not in the oldest manuscript (Cod. Vat. Gr. 156 of the tenth century) but in a sixteenth-century paper copy that is now London, British Library, Add. MS 10970; my late medieval Greek palæography is not good enough to find you the right bit, I’m afraid, but the rest of the MS is linked through if you want to try

Now this may all sound strangely familiar to those who know their Bede, because Britain is another province which Honorius is supposed to have lost, and indeed abandoned; the sixth-century historian Zosimus mentions a letter of Honorius to the Britti telling them to look to their own defences. George and Graham therefore then turned their attention to that, reminding us that other interpretations had been offered but thinking that the letter probably was meant for Britain but has also been misread; in Zosimus’s actual Greek, sadly not (yet) digitised in its oldest version which is likewise eleventh-century, it just tells the British to be on their guard against the emperor’s enemies.³. The context here, noted George and Graham, was the deployment of the Gothic army of Alaric against Constantine, permitting the interpretation that Britain, too, was a loyal province to whom Honorius could offer nothing but words but did so hoping that they would be enough. Consequently, arguing that Britain left the Roman Empire in 410 would be misguided and we should assume that it too simply fell apart under the pressure to defend itself with whatever non-Roman forces were making themselves available.

Silver siliqua of Emperor Honorius, struck probably at Milan between 383 and 402 but found near Colchester in Britain

I’m not, per se, against the decatastrophising of the end of Roman rule in the West here; as the speakers put it, there was no Waterloo moment, just a long series of too many problems. All the same, this is an awful lot to try and base on two letters, both of whose attribution is debatable and whose preservation context is dubious in the extreme—an eleventh-century collection of texts perhaps referring to Pamplona and Zosimus, preserved in a manuscript no older and far less directly informed, are not where one would wish to find unalloyed depictions of fifth-century imperial strategy. Questions therefore centered not least on whether other evidence could be available: Rebecca Darley asked about the preservation of Honorius’s coinage in these areas, and Graham admitted that they more or less cease to turn up after 410 but argued that the dating of those later coins may well be wrong; Wendy Davies however added that in Britain at least these late issues are found only in a very few places, like Caerleon, anyway, so in fact the coinage doesn’t really help either side of the argument except by supporting the idea that Honorius had no actual resources to commit to preserving the empire. Graham and George may still be right, however, that that didn’t stop him trying.

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1. The standard edition of this text, and not the only one, is José María Lacarra (ed.), “Textos navarros del Códice de Roda” in Estudios de Edad Media de la Corona de Aragón Vol. 1 (Zaragoza 1945), pp. 193-284, online here, at pp. 266-270; for further and more up-to-date references see Esteban Moreno Resano, “Cultura jurídica e instituciones cívicas entre la Antigüedad Tardía y la Alta Edad Media: observaciones a propósito de De laude Pampilona epistola” in VII Congreso General de Navarra: Arqueología, Historia Antigua, Historia Medieval, Historia del Arte y de Música volumen I, Príncipe de Viana Vol. 72 no. 253 (Pamplona 2011), pp. 193-205 at pp. 193-194 n. 1.

2. I could of course now provide you the text from Lacarra or even try and read one myself off the facsimile, but to be honest, I’ve linked you to both and it’s been quite a difficult few days, you can manage, or at least, will likely do as well as I can; I don’t find the facsimile especially easy going.

3. For those other interpretations see Edward A. Thompson, “Fifth-century facts?” in Britannia Vol. 14 (London 1985), pp. 272-274.

Beat this for impact!

In the English academy it’s all about impact these days, unless it’s all about networks or public engagement, those are very hot too. But mainly impact, by which we mean, for those not reading in the language of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (may it live forever?), changes in the way people outside the university environment do things on the basis of our work. This is sometimes seen as hard for medievalists to produce; not a lot of people do things on the basis of their understanding of the Middle Ages in the first place, so first we have to make them do that. Of course we do produce this effect via both our teaching and our book sales outside the Academy but we’re not allowed to score those, don’t ask me why. So this is rightly attacked as not fit for purpose yet we still look, desperately, for ways in which we might be able to show impact as so defined. Well, check this out for a direct influence on modern economic behaviour from my work:

Ovelia modiale, nou nascut

“Ballachulish has given birth to a new Ripollesa lamb, born yesterday:

“I’ve named her Ovelia Modiale in honour of my brother-out-of-law, Jonathan Jarrett whose paper on the use of cows, sheep and possibly pigs as monetary units in 10th century Catalonia is a must read. Our tiny new lamb (3.8kg at birth, so small) probably is not yet worth a modius of grain, but I’ll love her all the same….”

And you can click through the picture for more details should you really want them; he refers, of course, to my most recent actual publication, a while ago now and something I hope will be changing soon. Now, admittedly there are problems with this as an impact case study. Firstly, it’s in Catalonia, though the people involved are still UK voters; secondly, as far as I know they only named one animal on the basis of the paper, so it’s not exactly public policy; and thirdly, of course, this was December 2014, so loved or not that lamb is still long-eaten chops by now, though you could claim that that just represents the propagation of the effect of my work into the local environment… But still: I’m betting not many other medievalists can claim this kind of impact! Thankyou to the Crofter and the Croft…

Seminar CCXXIV: being more careful about William Rufus

The seminar backlog now moves forward to 21st January 2015, when none other than John Gillingham was speaking to the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar of the Institute of Historical Research with the title, “Eadmer of Canterbury and William Longsword”, which was fun. The William Longsword in question, you see, was none other than King William II, otherwise known as William Rufus, but that is not what Eadmer, otherwise better known as biographer of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury, calls him. John was, for this reason and several others, out to argue that Eadmer was an under-appreciated, if very difficult, early source for William’s reign.¹

I think, the earliest depiction of William II that’s not one of his coins (not very helpful in conveying the ‘inner man’ alas), from British Library MS Royal 14 C VII, fo. 8v, though here grabbed via Wikimedia Commons, “William II of England” by Matthew Paris – http://molcat1.bl.uk/IllImages/BLCD%5Cbig/c131/c13122-35.jpg, licensed under Public Domain via Commons. Click through for the MS, however. Note his portrayal as a supporter of the Church…

This is not to say that Eadmer liked William II at all; he has many terrible things to say about the king who supposedly forced his patron archbishop into morally-justified exile. Another way to see that, of course, is that Anselm’s hardline adherence to a private principle left England without the benefit of its chief clergyman’s guidance and help for years on end, whereas the responsible thing to do might have been what Anselm’s predecessor Lanfranc did and stay in the system, working with the king for change. This was, John argued, precisely the charge that Eadmer was protecting Anselm against, which meant making the other side of the argument, the king’s, correspondingly less reasonable. This is the axe which John sees Eadmer a-grinding.

Our culprit, Eadmer, probably at least, since it is a scribal portrait in a manuscript of Eadmer’s On the Life and Conversation of Anselm of Canterbury, now Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, MS Ludwig XI 6, fol. 44v, again here from Wikimedia Commons, by Unknown (illuminator, [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons but again linked through to the source

With this identified, the interesting thing is how Eadmer doesn’t identify the same failings of the king as later writers do, most notably William of Malmesbury. For example, it is often suggested that William Rufus was gay, an idea which largely stems from accusations levelled by Church writers of sodomy at his court. Leaving aside the very broad way in which medieval writers could use that word, this turns out to come from Eadmer, although in reporting these evil stories he does say that they were untrue.² William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis subsequently both say that Rufus’s courtiers were effeminate but call the king an adulterer and fornicator, and the Brut says that he spent his energies on concubines. And the earlier writer Hugh of Flavigny instead condemns clerical sex, of the most heterosexual kind, at William’s court, in which obviously William was not a participant. But somehow it is the stories which Eadmer denies, though still reporting, which have stuck even among modern historians.³

You see what I mean… A silver penny of William II struck at Rochester by Guthrothr between 1089 and 1092, York Coins H4095, now in a private collection

The other side of this coin—ah-ha-ha—is that when one starts looking for other, more positive, appraisals of William’s reign, they’re not hard to find. Vernacular literature is usually positive and he seems to have enjoyed especial popularity in Normandy, perhaps just by not being his grim Crusader brother Robert Curthose but still: Orderic Vitalis, despite his other attacks, has a story about William landing in Normandy and spontaneous parades of people forming to run alongside his horse, cheering. Richard Sharpe, who was present, did put forward some other early and hostile sources like, not least, the law collection known as the Quadripartitus, but it does seem that, while it’s indubitable that William Rufus annoyed a lot of people, so many of them were apparently later churchmen that we probably can use a reappraisal of the reign, which it is therefore to be hoped John will give us!

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1. Eadmer’s two works of relevance are his Historia Novorum in Anglia, transl. Geoffrey Bosanquet as Eadmer’s History of recent events in England: Historia novorum in Anglia (London 1964) and his De Vita et Conservatione Anselmi Cantuariensis, ed./transl. Richard Southern as Eadmer, The life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (London 1962). On William Rufus, until John gets his new work published, the standard works are Frank Barlow, William Rufus (New Haven 2000) and Emma Mason, King Rufus: the life & murder of William II of England (Stroud 2008).

2. I need a go-to cite on the medieval definition of sodomy, but for now Ruth Mazo Karras, “The Latin vocabulary of illicit sex in English ecclesiastical court records” in Journal of Medieval Latin Vol. 2 (Turnhout 1991), pp. 1-17, looks pretty relevant.

3. Named culprits here were Richard Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer: a study of monastic life and thought 1059-c. 1130 (Cambridge 1963) and Barlow, William Rufus.

Entrevista a mi en Català

The seminar reports are catching up but reports on my other activity seem still to be mired in busy busy November 2014. At the very end of that month, I had the unusual honour of being interviewed for a Catalan history news website, a sort of recognition I’m very flattered to receive although I wish I could have given them a better photograph. Should you be interested, it’s here:

• http://www.elprincipat.cat/entrevista-jonathan-jarrett-professor-britanic-expert-en-el-comtats-catalans-del-segle-x/

I should probably post the English, shouldn’t I? But I am writing this on a train to Birmingham to x-ray more coins and time and wi-fi are both scant, so I’ll wait to see if anyone wants it. Meanwhile, speaking of Birmingham, even while posting was sparse here I was still cropping up in other places on the Internet, not least the blog of the Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages, as follows:

• https://cesmabirmingham.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/inheriting-rome-the-imperial-legacy-in-coinage-and-culture/, on my little exhibition at the Barber (extended till March, so you still have time if you haven’t seen it…)
• https://cesmabirmingham.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/down-the-rabbit-hole-of-tenth-century-church-history/, an introduction to my now-infamous Manresa project
• and I have one more still somewhere in the pipeline, which I’m waiting for before I write the other two I still owe them (oops).

And then lastly, though I will write properly about All That Glitters soon I promise, even as Cross Country Trains carry me towards the next session, here is a snapshot about one of those we already did:

• https://mobile.twitter.com/chembham/status/623795077421338624

I have never been so twitterfied! Anyway, with that I must get back to what I am doing now, but here at least is some record of what I have been doing that you didn’t have before!

Seminar CCXXIII: hackweights, cut coins and secret knowledge in Viking England

Sing hallelujah, for I have brought my seminar reporting backlog under a year again at last! Witness: the date of the seminar involved in this post is 13th January 2015, when my old colleague and Viking metal expert Jane Kershaw came to Birmingham to tell the Research Seminar of the Centre for the Study of the Middle Ages about “The Bullion Economy of Viking England”, and I was there.

Part of the classic example of hack metal from the British Isles, the Cuerdale Hoard, on display at South Ribble Museum

The starting premise here is a duality long accepted by scholars of early medieval Scandinavia between monetary economies, where value can be measured, stored and exchanged in coin that is guaranteed to some extent by an outside agency like the state, and a bullion economy in which precious metal (or other metal) is dealt with by weight to perform the same functions. This is a concern of Scandinavianists because Viking Age Scandinavia operated on the latter terms whereas the places it was preying on usually had money, so whereas a ninth-century hoard in, say, the Paris basin would usually be coins, a ninth-century hoard in Sweden is classically many many Samanid dirhams, coins yes but often cut into non-arithmetic fragments, along with bits of jewellery, ingots and other lumps and bits of cut-up metal, or hacksilver as it’s usually called. Even the intact coins in such a hoard will very often bear peck marks from where their metal content was not taken on trust but tested with a knife-point or similar.

Reverse of a penny of King Æthelred II of England showing ‘peck’ marks in the upper right quarter. The coin is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Now of course, sometimes you get ‘Viking’ hoards in ‘victim’ areas, and this is especially the case in the areas of England that were subject to Viking settlement. But these were money-using areas, so what happened when people who worked a different way moved in? This was the subject of Jane’s paper, because while hoards have told us mainly that settlers seem quickly to have adopted coin, to the point of making their own proper-standard stuff in the name of locally-culted saints, the single-finds that are continually being recovered by metal-detector users these days, the bits and pieces that people dropped or lost and which therefore presumably represent the everyday better than an emergency deposit like a hoard, tell a different story, because what they dropped and lost looks much more like the kind of cut-up bullion we expect from a non-monetary situation. In other words, people were doing both.

A cut fragment of a silver Permian ring from a Viking context and now in the Fitzwilliam Museum; photograph by Jane Kershaw

To an extent, this shouldn’t surprise us, as several people opined in questions. When your smallest available monetary unit is a penny cut in half or quarter, quite a rare thing to find but still in the realm of, say, five or ten pounds sterling as of 2015—total fudge figures because we can buy so much more and get money so much more easily, but an approximation for thinking with—some smaller ways of handling value must have been desirable, for the basic everyday level of exchange that we mostly can’t see but assume was usually done with produce. But Jane gave us two other important things to consider.

A smooth, ‘regular’ ingot with rounded ends and test marks (PAS ‘Find-ID’ SF-144CA2, photo: PAS), says Jane on her blog

Firstly, many of the lumps of metal we find are much bigger than this, including ingots of around 50 grams, with a buying power on the same scale of more like three to five hundred pounds. So the bullion economy could supplement the top end of the monetary one as well as the bottom one, and perhaps better since really tiny pieces of silver and gold such as might make for low denomination currency would be awfully easy to lose!

Viking copper alloy collapsible weights from 1000-1200. Photograph by Klaus Göken/Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte/Berlin State Museums.

Secondly, operating in a bullion economy requires learned skills that a monetary one displaces: you as trader, on whatever scale, need to be able to weigh, test, evaluate and value all kinds of metal object or fragment to be sure that you are receiving what you think fair and paying no more than you have to. Coin which you can trust gets rid of those problems and leaves you only haggling over a fair price, without needing to work out how to express that, demand it or ensure that you’ve really received it. Small wonder that many graves of people from this period with strong Scandinavian connections include small sets of weights and balances!

A carefully-sorted assemblage of finds from Torksey, Lincolnshire, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Obviously they didn’t come in looking as tidy as this!

This all sounds somewhat chaotic, and assemblages like the above, pulled together from twenty-five years of metal detecting over the area of a short-lived Viking fortified harbour, tend to corroborate that impression: how could anyone manage all this stuff? Well, among all the stuff above that seemed clear and sensible and somewhat like someone pointing out the floor under a carpet I had got very used to walking on, Jane also had some hints of a system being used to manage the chaos, by possibly setting weight standards in some metals. The hints here are cubo-octohedral weights, square lumps with the corners cut off, which are found in various sizes from just above a gram to just below four, and are numbered with spots, like dice with only one face. They are found numbered all the way from one to six, and their weights are roughly in proportion to those numbers but so far no example has been found with five spots.

A number four weight of the type Jane was discussing, photographed by her and discussed on her blog (click through)

It’s hard not to see a system there, and Allan McKinley bravely suggested that a dirham might be about the right weight to be the five-spot unit, though I checked this later and dirhams seem usually to have been too heavy. But the problem is variation and regulation: the weights aren’t exactly consistent, and how could they be? What reference could there have been except someone else’s weights? That need not preclude an aim to be consistent, but it makes it impossible for us to verify: the error margins of the weights of something so small could very easily exceed a step in the scheme. If a high-weight two-spot one weighs more than someone else’s light three-spot one, we have to ask not only how could this work but how can we be sure they really should be the other way round? I’m not saying Jane’s not right about this, but early medieval metrology is notoriously unverifiable except by constructing models that then guide your sense of what the objects ‘should’ weigh, and given that, I’m not sure what she will have to do to convince me we can really know that one of the models is sustainable…

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Jane’s cite for the bullion economy system was Dagfinn Skre (ed.), Means of exchange dealing with silver in the Viking Age, Norske Oldfunn 23 (Århus 2008), and it’s a good one, though I feel that we have to mention Mark Blackburn, Viking Coinage and Currency in the British Isles, British Numismatic Society Special Publication 7 (London 2011) too; for more local examples, see now Jane Kershaw, “Viking-Age Silver in North-West England: hoards and single finds” in Stephen E. Harding, David Griffiths & Elizabeth Royles (edd.), In Search of Vikings: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Scandinavian Heritage of North-West England (Florence KY 2014), pp. 149-164.

Images from Montserrat!

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Readers who’ve been here a little while may remember that since about 2012 I have been mounting a sporadic attempt to quantify and locate the various members of the clergy attested in the tenth- and early-eleventh-century documents from around the … Continue reading →

Seminar CCXXII: counterfactuals and computer games

There were more seminar series at Birmingham than I could easily keep track of, and less well advertised than would have made it easy, but I was delighted nonetheless to see the name of old acquaintance and general nice guy Robert Houghton, now of Winchester, on a poster at some point in late 2014 and made a point of making it to the paper on 11th December 2014 even though I had no real idea what the seminar, the History and Cultures Workshop, was. It transpired to be one of the many postgraduate-run events and I think I surprised them by being a staff member (just about) there at all, but perhaps they were no more surprised at me than I was at Rob’s title, which was “Modelling the Middle Ages in grand strategy computer games”.

Not my screen, I don’t play, but this seems to be game-start condition for Charlemagne and you know, it could be a lot less accurate…

It transpired that Rob had, while teaching at St Andrews, also managed to find some extra work advising the makers of the grand strategy game Crusader Kings II—so if you play it and have been favourably impressed by its apparent accuracy that may be his fault—and the coincidence of his two rôles had made him start to think about how such games might be used as teaching tools, and whom that would reach, and he had started doing some very informal research among his teaching groups. After all, if it can work then games are an interactive and exploratory tool that are quite unparalleled by anything we can offer by more conventional means; I remember an admissions interview at Oxford in which the candidate was courageous enough to say that there was probably no better way of getting a sense of what it was like to walk around medieval Florence than playing Assassins Creed, and although I’m pretty sure it should be easier to kill yourself falling off the Duomo than it seems to be, I got and get their point.

Of course we are not complete strangers to walk-around visualisations in historical teaching, but it's obviously not as interactive as a game environment and you can hardly climb anything

Rob’s findings, anyway, with a very small cohort as he freely admitted, were more or less that most people don’t get their medievalism this way but for those that do it may actually influence their understanding very deeply. In that case it may matter what they are playing, because what’s available gives a rather Eurocentric, ultra-violent, male-dominated picture (although this is not unique to computer games, of course). However, there are limits on what can be done and still have a playable game. Particularly with grand strategy games the player has a level of abstraction, information and control that no medieval ruler ever did, but the gradation from there to single-handed sword swinger is very shallow. Also, the computer can’t create the environment without solid parameters. Where you don’t know something, you can’t just leave it blank; that pixel, that bit, must be present. There were other issues usefully pointed out too, both by Rob and the others present, but I got particularly engaged with the issue of counterfactuals.

The pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee burning off Montevideo, 17th December 1939

Again I should preface this with a tale of an Oxbridge admissions interview but this time it’s my own. You see, at school, for the sins I mostly had yet to commit, I ran a paper-based wargame of my own invention for a year or so. I more or less stole the combat system from Fighting Fantasy and made it work for World War II and imagined-World-War-III air and sea combat. Because my path was probably already clear, I got interested in trying to recreate certain battles as tests of the game system, and especially the above, the Battle of the River Plate. I got it to the point where I could, with all kinds of reservation, make River Plate come out about right two-thirds of the time. Now, I must have mentioned this in my application form as most of what I remember about my Cambridge interviews is the late lamented Clive Trebilcock pushing me for five minutes or so on whether I thought such things could be used as tests for counterfactuals; if I could make River Plate come out right two-thirds of the time, for example, did that mean that this gave some basis for saying that the odds were genuinely against the Germans despite appearances? And I gave no ground: no, I said, because firstly I know the desired outcome and so can make player decisions that are likely to create it; also, because I can’t test for how important chance ought to be. I have set the parameters of the system—damage delivered by weapons, ability to minimise and inflict it, resilience of ships and crews—to give what seem to be like the ‘right’ outcomes, but the more accurate I get with that the less of a rôle chance has, and the more it slides from being a test of alternatives to just a recreation with dice. On the other hand, the more room for actual play there is, the less testably accurate it will get. I probably didn’t put it as eloquently even as that while 18 and nervous as hell, and there are ways I can now see to refine it—retests varying single factors, for example—but I still think it wouldn’t work.

Not quite Rob’s example, but a situation in which something alternative has quite clearly and thoroughly happened whose story would be quite fun to know

More to the point, though, it wouldn’t be much fun if you could make it into a useful predictor system. And here Rob was on the same page. He had a marvellous Crusader Kings II screenshot in which someone playing as the ‘Duke of Alba’ had managed to conquer or otherwise gain control of basically all of north-eastern Europe and the Baltic. Now, I can just about think of ways something like that could be set up in fiction—royal Scottish exile during a succession crisis who has a monastic conversion and joins the Teutonic Knights, rises to be Grand Master and then gets recalled to the throne and, like Ramiro II of Aragón marries, for the sake of the dynasty, an heiress to Brandenburg whose brother dies soon after…—but it really is fiction, this could never have happened (even if ‘Duke of Alba’ were a real title). But should the game exclude it? Many reasons why not come to mind, not least trying to program for all such eventualities, but most obviously that one of the ways people treat computer games is to try and bring about heroically unlikely outcomes, winning through with the least likely playable character or from the weakest starting position and so on, and that this is one of the things that makes such games fun, because you can win against great odds. In Assassins Creed, I don’t believe it helps you particularly but you can climb the Duomo.

Go on…

Now, obviously sometimes in history people did win through against what seem to have been great odds, but as far as we are concerned as historians there was actually only one possible outcome of all the actual variables in play, and part of what we’re doing is trying to account for what seems to have been unlikely by identifying the significant variable. But even at age 18 I could see some reasons why a game will probably never be a tool for testing such outcomes; too much must be preset by assumptions about the outcomes. In some ways it might be better for teaching them, because then the presets are actually part of what we want to teach, but if the Duke of Alba can’t wind up ruling the entire southern Baltic coast or the Aztecs somehow reverse-conquer the Spanish Empire, then I’m still not sure I wanna play…

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My only halfway reputable cite for using counterfactuals in medieval history is Jes Wienberg, “Europeanisation around the Baltic Sea: a counterfactual perspective” in Jörn Staecker (ed.), The Reception of Medieval Europe in the Baltic Sea Region: papers of the XIIth Visby Symposium held at Gotland University, Visby, Acta Visbyensia XII (Visby 2009), pp. 421-429, but that has a good go at defending the practice.