Bad numbers by Karl-Ferdinand Werner

I’m not sure how true this is in this third decade of the twenty-first century, but if like me you were first learning about the Carolingian empire of Charlemagne and sons in the last decade of the previous one, you probably didn’t get far before you encountered the name Karl-Ferdinand Werner (1924-2008). Some of the really major studies of how that empire worked, administratively, came from his pen or typewriter, and he always seemed to be capable of understanding that the administration had to rely on and even create loyalty to operate, and so made affective response as much part of his thinking as procedures and law.¹ He was, in short, quite important in the field, had a very interesting career between Germany and France, and was respected in both, and this post is not intended to diminish his legacy in any substantial way. It is just meant to suggest that like sadly far too many historians, he was far safer with words than with numbers…

Portrait photograph of Karl-Ferdinand Werner

The evidence for this comes from a conference paper he gave at the annual Settimane di Studio held at Spoleto by the Centro Italiano di Studi sull’alto medioevo, in 1967. So he was a little bit younger than I am now, for whatever that may be worth, and surrounded by the great and good of the field of that time, and the theme of the year’s conference was matters military. The reason I was reading this, back in 2021, was because after you get more than a couple of works deep, almost everything there is on the vexed question of how much of the population went to war in the post-Roman kingdoms of Western Europe cites or even just rests on the papers presented at this nearly sixty-year-old conference, and Werner’s perhaps most among them.² So I was a bit surprised it was as free-flying as it is, since I had never read anything else by him that suggested he could jump so far from his evidence. And since I have a pedigree in calling account on bad numbers in history, and since this can’t go into my article on this whenever it finally comes out, I thought perhaps it would be entertainment for my erudite readership here.

What Werner really wanted to know is something that others have wanted to know since as well, and if David Bachrach is reading, well, thank goodness you did that work, Professor Bachrach, as certainly no-one should have let things rest where Werner did.³ The object of enquiry was the size of army that the Carolingians’ successors in Germany, the dynasty we call the Ottonians, could put into the field, and Werner wanted it to be big; his paper had been provoked by a work by a guy called Delbrück which wanted to minimise the war effort of which these sub-Roman kingdoms were capable, and to which Werner thought a response was needed.⁴ His starting point was a document from Salzburg called the Indiculus Loricatum, roughly ‘List of Armoured Men’, which does actually give some viable figures for an Ottonian call-out, probably in 981 (though Werner thought 983), and it’s a better source than we might hope to have.⁵ But it doesn’t quite deal with the situation Werner wanted, and so it had to be, well, stretched…

What it’s not

The problems Werner faced lie in what the Indiculus isn’t, some of which are obviously related to what it actually is. So, for example:

1. It seems to be a count of troops summoned to a campaign in Italy by Emperor Otto II, which means it’s not a call-out for the defence of Germany by Otto I, which would probably have been as close to a theoretical maximum as the numbers for service ever got. (One of the odd things about this paper is that it was in pursuit of that theoretical maximum despite occasionally admitting that that probably never happened).⁶
2. It is a count only of armoured cavalry, which means it is possibly not a count of all the soldiers going, which one might expect to have included infantry, though I’ll come back to that.⁷
3. It is a levy primarily from Saxony, which means it is obviously not the figures for the whole empire.⁸
4. It is clear that not even all the known Saxon nobles were called, so that it’s not even a full levy from Saxony.⁹

All of that, of course, means that the figure it gives, which by Werner’s mathematics was 2,112 cavalrymen – remember that number, now – is necessarily a lot smaller than the figure Werner was after would have been. (It doesn’t help that the actual total seems to be 1,972.)¹⁰ And so the struggle begins to multiply it up to the "right" figure. Now, you know how I feel about this probably, but in case not, let me just quote once more the words of the late, great, Ted Buttrey:

When we enter on these kinds of calculation, we can be confident of two things. First, the answer will be wrong. Whatever it is, it will be wrong, since it cannot be right—once you are guessing, the number of possible permutations is gigantic. Worse, where the errors lie, and how serious they are, cannot be determined…¹¹

And if we needed another example, this paper was it. Let me break it down, take it to the bridge and generally set the funk out (if I may)…

Multiplying up

How then shall we compare thee, o Indiculus, to a hypothetical full-scale imperial mobilisation? Let me count the ways.

1. Firstly, we adopt a method already used by the rather later, but also great, Ferdinand Lot, who took early modern administrative divisions in France and their populations to give something like accurate multipliers for the fragmentary French records he was using for a similar, more pessimistic, exercise.¹² Werner had some really quite good figures for known palaces, cities, fiscs and so on in Germany, and so some basis to repeat that, but…
2. … they weren’t comprehensive, so he imposed an additional percentage as a guess for how many might not be included. First arbitrary alteration of the data…¹³
3. The Indiculus figures also didn’t account for people who would not turn up, and neither did Lot’s.¹⁴ Firstly, obviously, we can’t know what that percentage in fact was, as this document only sets out what was expected, but it should make the real figure for turn-out lower than the Indiculus ones, you’d think; but Werner actually used this flaw as his excuse to go for the theoretical maximum hereafter.
4. Then, going back to his early medieval administrative divisions, of course Werner didn’t have population numbers for these places as Lot had had from his anachronistic but proportional ancien régime data. So Werner just guessed, I’m afraid.¹⁵ Second arbitrary alteration…
5. This had already got him to an empire-wide figure of 30,000 heavy cavalry that we can’t trust, but it was still only heavy cavalry, so he multiplied that by 3 to add the infantry. No basis for that multiplier was apparently thought necessary; just 3, you know, sounds about right.¹⁶ Third arbitrary alteration…
6. Now, the Italian campaign factor. Here he made several assumptions: that troops would have been left at home for defence (extremely likely, I’d say, but of course unquantifiable except by step 1 above and that not really), that the campaign really was that of 983, not 981, and that therefore troops already sent to Italy in 982 might still be there, for a further discount; and that the nobility who are not listed should actually be included, even though the author of the source obviously didn’t think so. All of those, of course, need numbers making up to patch the gaps…¹⁷ Arbitrary alterations four, five and six.
7. And lastly, because apparently none of this was enough, at around the twenty-five-page mark, the base number he got from the Indiculus in the first place, 2,112, suddenly becomes 4,000 for no obvious reason and without remark, which of course nearly doubles all his subsequent sums!¹⁸

But what if… ?

So just by way of illustration of where this gets us, we start with that actual early medieval figure of 2,112 people we could maybe even call knights, whom we know were expected to go to Italy, maybe in 983, on the emperor’s command, mainly from Saxony, and probably not all of whom did. By the time Werner had finished stretching this that expedition had become a force of 20,000 men, which as Carlrichard Brühl pointed out (and others have since repeated, mainly the late and also great Timothy Reuter), means that some of the armies we’re talking about exceeded the populations of most medieval cities.¹⁹ The potential error is therefore rather more than a full order of magnitude, but of course as Ted observed, we have no idea what it actually is. Werner could even have been right about all this, though I think the top end of the range is unlikely. But that is only to apply my own subjectivities in balance against his, and his basic assumption that the person responsible for the service would have brought people with him in support is probably fair. I am therefore temperamentally inclined to agree that the Indiculus isn’t a full picture, but…

Speaking of full picture, here is the actual thing, Bamberg Staatsbibliothek Msc. Patr. 107 fo. 1, manuscript of the Indiculus Loricatorum, which was written into the leading blank page of a codex otherwise full of theology, largely Augustine. Image from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek MDZ, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

But let’s, just for a moment, try the counter-case. A different highly-respected German historian of this period, Hubert Mordek, once wrote another of my favourite methodological quotes, „[M]an muss der Überlieferung immer die Chance geben, recht zu behalten“, which we might translate loosely as, “You always gotta allow for the possibility the sources are just right”.²⁰ And the source says, 2,112 mounted soldiers with mailcoats, almost all from Saxony. Not just that, either: Werner brought in numerous other sources from later or different German contexts to suggest that this was, indeed, roughly the sort of level at which kings in Germany could demand such service; another weird thing about this paper is that it itself gives you all the tools you need to dismantle it.²¹ So what if it is right? What if it was 983, there already was an army in the field in Italy, and Otto II felt it was necessary temporarily to weaken defence in Saxony and raise what could be raised from there to supplement the Italian force, with strictly mobile troops who could therefore get there soon enough to make a difference? What if therefore it was actually only cavalry and supporting grooms and so on that went, and from there and in that number because that was all they could safely levy? What if this was the operational maximum? It does still imply quite a large Ottonian army in total, what with a presumably-larger force in Italy with an infantry component and remaining defences in various places; but it doesn’t require us to think that an Ottonian Germany already at war could suddenly fling another 20,000 men at the problem. And I’m not saying that caution is right either. I’m just saying it’s a way way simpler conclusion than the one Werner reached which requires no messing with the numbers. And those, by and large, are the conclusions I prefer.

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1. I guess I think here especially of K. F. Werner, "Missus – Marchio – Comes: entre l'administration centrale et l'administration locale de l'empire carolingienne" in Werner Paravicini and Karl Ferdinand Werner (edd.), Histoire comparée de l'administration (IV^e–XVIII^e siècles) (München 1980), pp. 191–239, reprinted in Werner, Vom Frankenreich zur Entfaltung Deutschlands und Frankreichs: Ursprünge, Strukturen, Beziehungen. Ausgewählte Beiträge: Festgabe zu seinem sechzigsten Geburtstag (Sigmaringen 1984), pp. 121-161.

2. K. F. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung im deutschen Königreich des 10. und 11. Jahrhunderts" in Ordinamenti militari in Occidente nell'alto medioevo (Spoleto 1968), 2 vols, vol. II pp. 791–843 with discussion pp. 849–856.

3. Referring here of course to David S. Bachrach, Warfare in Tenth-Century Germany (Woodbridge 2012).

4. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", p. 813, referring to the original publication of Hans Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskünst in Rahmen der politischen Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Berlin 1920), 4 vols, transl. Walter J. Renfroe Jr. as History of the Art of War (Lincoln NB 1975), 4 vols, vol. II in both editions, the German 1st ed. being in the Internet Archive here.

5. Printed as “Indiculus loricatorum Ottoni II. in Italiam mittendorum” in Ludovicus Weiland (ed.), Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum) I (Hannover 1893), pp. 632-633, online here, transl. W. North as “Indiculus Loricatorum (Index of Armored Contingents)”, Amazon Web Services, online here.

6. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", pp. 823-824 and 817.

7. Ibid., pp. 820-821.

8. Ibid., pp. 831-832.

9. Ibid., pp. 806-808.

10. Ibid., pp. 817-819. The lower total I get by adding the figures given by North, “Indiculus Loricatum”. I probably should have added them myself from the manuscript, but come on guys, this is enough work already.

11. T. V. Buttrey, "Calculating Ancient Coin Production: Facts and Fantasies" in Numismatic Chronicle vol. 153 (London 1993), pp. 335–51, on JSTOR here, at p. 349.

12. Ferdinand Lot, L’art militaire et les armées au Moyen Âge en Europe et dans le Proche Orient (Paris 1946), 2 vols.

13. Werner, "Heeresorganisation und Kriegführung", pp. 817-820.

14. Ibid., p. 816.

15. Ibid., p. 820.

16. Ibid., pp. 820-821; he repeated this argument pp. 833-834 with a reference to an eleventh-century French call-out from Moyenmoutier where each knight was accompanied by a manus, a hand, of other troops, but that was somewhere else somewhen else and still doesn’t specify 3 as a multiplier.

17. Ibid., pp. 824-826 & 831-832.

18. Ibid., p. 829.

19. 20,000 men: ibid., p. 829; Brühl, in discussion p. 851; Reuter, in "Carolingian and Ottonian Warfare" in Maurice Keen (ed.), Medieval Warfare: a history (Oxford 1999), pp. 13–35.

20. Mordek, "Karolingische Kapitularien" in idem (ed.), Überlieferung und Geltung der normativer Texte des frühen und hohen Mittelalters (Sigmaringen 1986), pp. 25-50 at p. 30.

Not what the textbooks usually mean by ‘manuscript illustration’

Thankyou all those who have encouraged me to keep going with the blog! Plans remain afoot, but for now you can certainly have this little gem (not a lettuce) which apparently I stashed for future writing up in May 2021. It speaks to some of the blog’s oldest themes, to wit protochronism, micro-histories in administrative documents and, not least, medieval sex, and I owe it to the sharp observation of Rebecca Darley, who had she known she was going to be doing the blogging thing herself after a while might well have kept it; so thankyou Rebecca, but it’s mine now!

Cover of Lucy Blue, Fred Hocker and Anton Englert (edd.), Connected by the Sea: Proceedings of Tenth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Roskilde 2003 (Oxford 2006)

Right, so, we’re out of my usual territory now, because of Rebecca reading her way through the proceedings a Festkonferenz held at the Viking Ship Museum (as it then was) at Roskilde, no less, for archæologist of boats and ports, the late Seán MacGrail.¹ Obviously not everything in the resulting volume is in either of our areas of interest, but it is nice all the same to read what you own and find out what others are interested in, and thus she came across Professor David Hinton, who gave Professor MacGrail a paper on tax returns from East Anglian shipowners as of 1344. That is apparently the first point at which we have that sort of record, as part of a series of occasional taxes on people’s movable property to pay for the Hundred Years War called lay subsidies.² The 1344 returns go down, in some places, to individual shipowners, their named ships and it’s all very interesting, but midway through dealing with King’s Lynn Professor Hinton, who is at this point chasing a distinction between the texts seem to make sizes of ship, jumps to a fifteenth-century overseas tax record from the town, in which one of the smaller vessels, batelli, is recorded.³ And this is where the blogpost suddenly comes from:

"… overseas customs lists include a 15th-century account of a vessel in a creek, its forfeited cargo interesting for its mixture of wool and rabbit-skins, hardware, jet and glass beads, harp strings, lewd calendars and such-like, said to have been ‘in magno batello vocato kele‘…"

Professor Hinton is in many ways a better man than I, as is clear from the fact that he really is in this only for the boat-related philology and does nothing further with any element of that heterogenous cargo. Whereas I, and perhaps you, immediately reacted with: "lewd calendars?!"

So, perhaps these are well-known to scholars of high medieval England, but a long time ago in the history of this blog, and indeed others now long gone like The Naked Philologist and Got Medieval, we had quite the discussion about medieval pornography, largely because we kept getting searches for "medieval sex pictures" and the like.⁴ As I recall, the tentative conclusion was that there really wasn’t any, or at least none that survives or is referred to. Carl Pyrdum of Got Medieval, who had invented the rod for his own back that was Google Penance, where you try and post what people actually came to your blog looking for rather than what they found, eventually found one manuscript illumination of Lancelot and Guinevere in bed together where as well as their heads you can see, like, two naked upper chests, and that was about it. But we obviously just weren’t looking low enough (in society, I mean).

That image is actually pretty easy to find, being in Le Livre de Lancelot du Lac, British Library Additional MS 10293, fo. 312v. Unfortunately, because the British Library’s digitised manuscripts are still unavailable after the cyber-attack there last October, this Alamy clip is the best currently out there. I reproduce it anyway, however, since the real image is public domain.

But the news that in fifteenth-century England there was actually enough of a market for the saucy calendar that you could ship them in, albeit in a ship whose crew were trying, apparently badly, to smuggle their cargo in rather than pay duty, raises all kinds of questions. Where were these calendars actually being made? Amsterdam leaps to mind but for completely anachronistic reasons – unless they’re not! and so on. Also, are we talking just a count of days to the month, each with perhaps a seasonally-disattired woodcut, a list of festivals and dates? All the actual medieval calendars I know of are roughly page-per-month of almanackish text, saying what there is about the month that is notable, including feast days and so on, and they’re overall much more like books. In some cases they have marginal illustration, however, and the marginalia are presumably where, in this case and if you’ll forgive the phrase, the action was.

I know this isn’t very lewd, but we’ve already sailed quite close enough to the wind there thankyou, plus which, as I say, I’m not sure we have any of that sort of calendar. Instead, here are some labourers working at the top of February in London, British Library, Labourers clearing land, in a calendar illustration for February in London, British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, f. 3v

So the "classic" pin-up calendar on the wall of a King’s Lynn chandler is probably not what we have here. But what did we? Professor Hinton is probably right that it’s not the important thing to focus on here – apart from anything else, it leaves cruelly ignored the question of what market there was in Lynn for black-market harp-strings… – but I can’t help but wonder, and then feel slightly prurient for doing so. Still. Anyone know more? If not, I hope at least this is some good old 2012-style entertainment for you all!

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1. Lucy Blue, Fred Hocker and Anton Englert (edd.), Connected by the Sea: Proceedings of Tenth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Roskilde 2003 (Oxford 2006).

2. David Hinton, "Ships and Subsidies" in Blue, Hocker and Englert, Connected by the Sea, pp. 205-209.

3. Hinton, "Ships and Subsidies", p. 206.

4. The Naked Philologist clearly won that round by observing, of a search for "naked medieval people", "How are you going to tell? They’re naked."

Seminar CLXXXII: John of Nikiû on persecution

I promised something more substantial and so here it is, a note about a paper of late May 2021 that is, I think, still interesting stuff. Two levels of background you need: first, that what with our seminar series at the University of Leeds being forced online like everything else we did in that time of pandemic, the then-Director of the Institute of Medieval Studies, Dr Alaric Hall, took the chance to broaden our reach a bit, both in terms of nationality of speakers and of topics of discussion, which is how on 25th May we were hearing from Dr Felege-Selam Solomon Yirga, then and now at the University of Tennessee, with the title, “The Chronicle of John of Nikiu”. Second, John of Nikiû—who?

There are basically no images of either John of Nikiû or of anything of his era left from his old city, so the fact that Dr Yirga has given a paper or two about him now means that he himself is the main response to image searches for John. So I thought, why not. Here is Dr Yirga at Dumbarton Oaks ahead of giving a different paper about John there the year before.

OK, you have possibly just heard of Bishop John of Nikiû if you studied the era of Islamic conquests for more than a week but otherwise chances are poor. Nikiû is in Egypt, and a history that John wrote, a universal history in good Church tradition (though which Church? coming to that) running from Adam to the arrival of Islam in Egypt, is one of the earliest sources we have for that latter event. Unfortunately, it also exists only in quite a late Ge’ez version of an Arabic translation of what was probably originally a Coptic text based on Greek sources, and we don’t have all of it.¹ Phew. But better than nothing, am I right?

Now, Dr Yirga did his Ph. D. on John and his chronicle and so is better equipped to answer that question than most, and the way he chose to go about it was to say, let’s stop for a moment trying to work out what John was doing in his text about the events for which he is the immediate primary source, and see what he does with older events where we have some outside idea what happened and can thus work out his agenda. And that proves to be interesting, if not very conclusive.

There are several busts and statues supposedly of Diocletian, which show at least three clearly different men, so as is my wont, I’m going for an inarguably contemporary, if stereotypical, image of him, in the form of this billon nummus struck at Heraclea in 295-296 CE, which is in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library, Thackray Collection, olim CC/TH/ROM/IMP/812

The episode that Dr Yirga took for examination was the persecution of Christians under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, the only Roman emperor ever, I think, to retire and die peacefully at home.² (Tetricus I might also count, but I digress.³) Naturally you would not expect Diocletian’s persecution to receive a neutral press in Christian sources written after the eventual victory of their religion in the empire, and indeed it usually does not, because apart from anything else it has historically been an excellent period in which to situate the careers of martyrs whose lives need, um, filling out for lack of information.⁴ But John went somewhere else with it. Firstly, he made Diocletian himself Egyptian; secondly, he originated the persecution in a rebellion against Diocletian in Alexandria, making the anti-Christian measures part of how Diocletian suppressed this rising in his homeland; then thirdly he gave him this Nebuchadnezzar-like divine madness and illness which sent him off to the West as a hated exile, from which he returned when cured but never to rule again. (Actually he just went on and off with the persecutions until his retirement and in most other respects is regarded as one of Rome’s great reformers and generally a success.⁴) Now, some of this has at least some connection, either to history as we currently reckon it or at least to sources John had: thus, though Diocletian was from the Balkans by birth, I believe, he did face a rebellion in Egypt in 284 by one Domitius Alexander (though there was nothing Christian about it as far as we know, but John’s spin is coming here partly from older chronicler John Malalas); and of course, from a point of view in Egypt he did head off to the West and stop ruling as a result, even if the causation John put in there was all his own.⁵ But mostly, not.

So where did this leave the search for agenda? This was where most of the questions went, because the answer seems to be: to understand this bit you have to know the rest of the text as well. An awful lot of its agenda elsewhere appears to be to defend Christian Orthdoxy as it was mostly seen from Coptic Alexandria (that is, the Maiophysite persuasion of Christianity) against the deviant creed of the wider Empire (what is usually called Chalcedonian Christianity, including modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy both). How either Diocletian or the Islamic conquests fitted into that for our chronicler thus became slowly less clear. Matters were complicated here by one of the other people who does, Philip Booth, turning up in the virtual audience and giving a short spontaneous response, which suggested apart from anything else that the whole thing might really be an older Greek chronicle given only a gloss and translation by John of Nikiû. Dr Yirga thought that the work was all John’s and his sources’, but that this gave him a very complex identity, whose general position was roughly to reject Chalcedon but really want the Empire back, and thus try to make Egypt, and Alexandrian Christianity, central to its history where possible. And I could buy that, though I’d need to, you know, read it to be sure. And this has definitely pushed John’s Chronicle up my reading list, just because overall it sounds considerably odder than I’d expected!

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1. You can read it as John, Bishop of Nikiu, The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu, translated from Zotenberg’s Ethiopic Text, trans. R. H. Charles (London 1913), on the Internet Archive here.

2. There are many works on Diocletian and his colleagues, because one of the things he did was recruit trusted co-emperors, another thing of which he seems to have been uniquely capable until Constantine I succeeded one of them. Of those I’ve seen I’d recommend Roger Rees, Diocletian and the Tetrarchy, Debates and Documents in Ancient History (Edinburgh 2004), on JSTOR here, over most of the others.

3. There isn’t actually much on the Gallic Empire as a phenomenon, oddly, so you might have to start with John F. Drinkwater, The Gallic Empire: separatism and continuity in the northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire AD 260-74, Historia 52 (Stuttgart 1987).

4. For the normal representation of Diocletian in Christian sources, see Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, trans. J. L. Creed, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford 1984). Nonetheless he has the reputation as a grand reformer with a true vision for the empire who may have saved it, if not from either of almost-caste-like restrictions on social mobility or hyper-inflation. See as samples of the new panegyric Stephen Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London 1985); Bill Leadbetter, Galerius and the Will of Diocletian (London 2009); Alan Bowman, “Diocletian and the First Tetrarchy, A. D. 284-305” and Elio Lo Cascio, “The New State of Diocletian and Constantine: From the Tetrarchy to the Reunification of the Empire”, both in Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron & Peter Garnsey (eds), The Crisis of Empire, AD 193-337, The Cambridge Ancient History 12, 2nd edn. (Cambridge 2005), pp. 67–89 and 170–183; and as an answer to one of my sidewipes there, A. J. Boudewijn Sirks, “Did the Late Roman Government Try to Tie People to Their Profession or Status?” in Tyche – Contributions to Ancient History, Papyrology and Epigraphy Vol. 8 (Vienna 1993), pp. 159–175.

5. Malalas can be found (if you’re lucky) in John Malalas, The Chronicle of John Malalas: a Translation, transl. Elizabeth Jeffreys, Michael Jeffreys & Roger Scott, Byzantina Australiensia 4 (Melbourne 1986).

Some of what’s been going on

Hullo again; we might be back on air…

So, if you’re still reading after all this time, I want to firstly to thank you for that; thankyou all, you are my reassurance that I have some kind of an interested public at times when this is otherwise hard to determine. Secondly, I want to say something very brief by way of outline about what was behind this hiatus; and then thirdly I want to reflect, likewise briefly, on the utility of this blog. And then I want to get another post up pronto so as to move all this depressing stuff off the top! But some kind of account, all the same, is probably required.

I can and probably should be very short about the reasons behind the hiatus, and as it happens they probably can be summarised as, in recent years (as readers here know well) I have been seeing less and less future in the life academic, at least in the UK, and have been working up side hustles. As yet, these have not been going very well, probably only an extra couple of grand a year, but to find time to make them go I cut down my hours at work at the beginning of the academic year. My workload was accordingly cut down in proportion to that reduction in hours, but, well, it doesn’t feel as if that made much difference except that now I had one fewer days in which to manage it, or else didn’t do the new stuff. The point at which I declared hiatus was roughly when January marking landed, and I’ve been trying ever since then to get out from under that and still keep the other stuff going. Various family problems or needs have also arisen – the one I reported here was the unexpected one – and in the middle of it we’ve had to give up our car which, of course, means a whole range of things become more difficult or expensive or both, not helped by the fact that my bike has been out of commission for most of that time as well and I’ve had no time to fix it. So, blogging has come a perpetual fourth in a race where only three runners can place.

Now, some of this difficulty, I admit, I have made for myself, because I’ve also been trying to keep research projects alive. I have been told both to stop this and to carry on by different people in authority, admittedly – but because no-one else outside Leeds will stop work if I do, I have nonetheless slowly been co-editing a journal issue, though my co-editor is sadly having an even worse time than I am. We’re running late, consequently, but it’s still moving. So that has also been going on behind the scenes, and when it reaches some definitive stage I will write about it on the project blog and signal that here. Alongside shepherding that to press, I now have only one article left to finish, hopefully both done by the time of the International Medieval Congress, and then I might even be able to return to Borrell!

But, when you have to overcome so many obstacles just to do that stuff, and it’s so unclear that anyone will read it when it does come out – I’m watching my H-index drop, my royalties for reproductions shrink and what few other indications there is that one has an audience dwindle likewise – it is very hard to see the point. I am of course temperamentally inclined to see the worst in everything, a known problem for which help is being sought, but why in this day and age anyone should care about my corner of tenth-century Europe, or even the other corners of the tenth century and its neighbours in which these days I take an interest, I honestly don’t know most of the time. And if I don’t, how’m I gonna convince anyone else?

Now, in time past a lot of the answer to that question has been this blog. Over the, erk, nearly eighteen years this blog has been running, it’s been a perpetual reassurance that at least some people are interested. And it still is, and I’m grateful for your readership, I am, but the sad fact is that you are a fraction of what there used to be. In fact, that fraction is about a fifth: in 2012, at its peak, this humble blog drew in 191,727 page views, and saw 641 comments. I know (I have published saying) that that is a very empty statistic, especially since half the comments will have been my replies and actually it’s sometimes been a busier conversation since then, but in 2023 the Corner got 37,617 views, total, and that on a steady downward trend from 2012 bar a drop and bounce during 2020-2021, presumably because of the pandemic.¹ I do, admittedly, now have 700+ subscribers as well, and I guess that those of them who are not selling something or just hoping I will link back are the real core audience; hi folks! And I suppose that you fine and discerning people probably rarely actually load the site, so that my stats are really only capturing second-level engagement. Still, 700+ extra page views per post, so about 3,000 a month, 36,000 a year, would not, sadly, turn back the clock very far.

So I have been thinking hard about how far this platform still serves me in my quest for public intellectualhood. By way of perspective, one of the postgraduates at Leeds runs a Substack newsletter on early medieval stuff. Their focus is trendier than mine, and they put much more time into networking on X and elsewhere than I ever would; but they publish on average between once and twice a month, and have over 30,000 subscribers. And y’see, that looks like an audience in a way that this, by now, does not. The interest is out there, but this isn’t finding it. But of course I hardly have the time to start a third blog when I can’t manage to keep up my first (or second), and neither is it clear why a new one would fare differently… (One of my colleagues also has a Substack on early medieval matters or even earlier, for example, and they have been going for a year and a half, posting weekly pretty much, and have, I understand, about 20 subscribers, no typo.² So I don’t mean to suggest that Substack is a magic bullet.)

None of this, as you see, resolves yet into an answer. But the general place I find myself is "this isn’t working", whether it be the academy, my own work in it, my side hustles or this here blog. And this has made it harder than I would have liked to break this hiatus. But still: I have a queue of stuff I wanted and mostly want to write about, and some people who want to read it, and while I definitely do need to find some more of those, you are still here and I wouldn’t wish to disappoint you! So, shortly – tomorrow, in fact, I’ve just scheduled it – something more substantive and less whiny. But I thought you ought to know at least some of what’s been going on, and when it becomes clearer what is going to go on, of course, I will let you know that too.

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1. Jonathan Jarrett, "Views, Comments and Statistics: Gauging and Engaging the Audience of Medievalist Blogging" in Literature Compass Vol. 9 no. 12 (Oxford 2012), pp. 991–995, DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12016.

2. I haven’t provided links here, against my habit, because for various reasons I can’t go into I deem it safer not to in one of these cases and therefore not fair to only in the other. But the successful one is pretty easy to discover even with such search terms as this gives you. The other one, not so much, and therein is some of the rub.

I’m sorry to come back in this new year of 2024 only to announce a stop, but, January has really hit hard. Quite apart from publication deadlines set as if maliciously to coincide with the beginning of teaching – the worst bit of which is that I set at least one of them – there has also been a loss in my family, which entailed a long drive to and from a deathbed, after which the car dramatically failed its MOT, and now there’s still the geographically distant but temporally imminent funeral to go to, involving coordinating bits of the family who normally don’t speak to each other, plus which… Well, that might be most of it, but it’s enough. I can’t, honestly, see when I can get a substantive post out before February, and so I should at least let you all know, and then I can submerge in slightly better conscience to deal with things. Sorry for "deprioritising" you like this, but it’s just one of those times when everything that can give must do so that everything which can’t can happen. Au revoir…

Jo Johnson’s New Domesday

When I promised you a post this weekend it hadn’t, I admit, fully dawned on me that that would be the New Year’s weekend. But I was ready, ready to give you a report on an interesting paper about Bishop John of Nikiu and the chronicle he wrote that is one of our earliest sources for the Islamic conquest of Egypt… and then I left the notes at home, so now that will have to be next week’s. Instead, let’s inaugurate 2024 by having a go at an erstwhile minister of government!

So, I stubbed this to write in May 2021 when Jo Johnson, brother of our lately-demitted Prime Minister whom one of my foreign friends calls Bojo the Clown, had just been promoted to the House of Lords after his second brief stint as Universities Minister. Lord Johnson of Marylebone, as he had thus become, was then back in the press for taking some strong lines in his speeches to the effect that academic links with China were bending academics’ and universities’ politics, as part of the Conservative party’s more general (and bemusing) preoccupation with limits on free speech on British university campuses. One of these got reported in an article in Times Higher Education that I read, but what caught me was not, sadly for Lord Johnson, his actual point but this quote from the article:¹

“Lord Johnson called for a ‘Domesday Book‘ of research links with China to give ‘early warning’ of fields where ‘dependencies’ on China are emerging.”

And, as the kids used to say, I was like, huh.

The manuscript of Greater Domesday

Now, at one level it’s nice to see that someone’s default reference for a tool of use or an exercise of effective power is medieval rather than ancient or Victorian (or Churchillian). But is this a good one? It would be fairly easy to say, “well, that depends on what you think Domesday Book was for, doesn’t it?” It has been seen as a tax register, as a record of military service, as the final say on any issues of disputed land tenure (whence its name, from “Doom” as in judgement), (famously) as an ownership claim placed upon the entire country by William the Conqueror which put him at the top of all land tenure in it, and more recently (and compellingly) as a way of making almost all landed communities in the country gather to swear in solemn circumstances to the state of play on the ground at royal command.² And it is probably quite important to realise that, whatever the actual inquest process of assembling that information was intended to do, the actual “Book”, which is (currently) actually four books plus related documents, representing at least three different levels of the recording process, none of them complete – and with no sign that London or Winchester were ever included at all – may well not actually reflect it terribly well.³

But of one thing we can be reasonably sure, which is that it was not an early warning system of any kind. I mean, I guess it might have been possible to comb through it looking for potential flashpoints of tension and then seek to avert them; but given the number of disputes that are recorded in it which we’ve no sign were ever addressed, I don’t think anyone has ever thought Domesday did in fact serve that purpose.⁴ And I guess therefore that Lord Johnson of Marylebone meant to invoke by his reference to it some kind of totally complete record which omitted nothing. But Domesday probably wasn’t ever that either (although Marylebone, as it happens, was included).

Domesday Book entry for the land of Barking Abbey at Marylebone, Middlesex, image from the Open Domesday project, linked through

But I’m not sure there’s any early warning to be derived even from that. Domesday was not a future-looking record; indeed, it covers so much that it must perforce have been becoming out of date even as it was written up. So my sad conclusion is that Lord Johnson, at least by 2021, didn’t really know what Domesday Book had been or was, or possibly even is. And perhaps that shouldn’t really be expected given that it must have been nearly thirty years since someone had taught him about it, even though he did get First Class Honours on a History degree which could have covered it, as I know because a mere seventeen years later I was teaching Domesday Book on that same course, with at least one person who must have taught his Lordship. I still think they might be a bit disappointed…

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1. John Morgan, “Jo Johnson: self-censorship on China ‘biggest free speech issue’” in Times Higher Education (THE) (12 May 2021).

2. I remember well a seminar at the Institute of Historical Research n which John Gillingham said by way of preamble to a question that since retirement, one of the few luxuries he’d permitted himself was to stop keeping up with the scholarship on Domesday Book. I feel similarly about having left behind teaching England in 2015, and I’m conscious that the most recent references I have for any of this are a decade old. Plus which, it’s New Year’s Eve guys! So permit me just two references, David Roffe and Katherine S. B. Keats-Rohan (edd.), Domesday Now: new approaches to the inquest and the book (Woodbridge 2016) and Stephen Baxter, "How and Why Was Domesday Made?", English Historical Review Vol. 135 (Oxford 2020), pp. 1085–1131, DOI: 10.1093/ehr/ceaa310, and an assurance that between them you could gather at least where the debates stood quite recently. For much much more see David Roffe’s website…

3. Here see David Roffe, Domesday: the inquest and the Book (Oxford 2000), and the review by Stephen Baxter in Reviews in History (30th September 2001), online here, with Roffe’s response here.

4. Here I think I’d look at Robin Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law: society and legal custom in early medieval England (Cambridge 2003), but I’m conscious that Stephen Baxter thinks or thought that there was much about Fleming’s work on Domesday Book (including a book I think is great, her Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge 1991)) that stood in need of revision, and I don’t know if Baxter, “How and Why”, deals with that or if you’d be better looking in Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: lordship and power in late Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford 2007).

Happy end of the Latin calendar year to you all! (And if it hadn’t occurred to you that the timing of our winter break was a medieval legacy, I’m here to help.¹) Since preparations for the festival press upon me as doubtless also many of you, I hope you’ll forgive the lack of a substantive post this week. I’ll be back next week! And may you all also enjoy a good break and thankyou for reading.

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1. Don’t believe me, check out Carl Philipp Emanuel Nothaft, “From Sukkot to Saturnalia: The Attack on Christmas in Sixteenth-Century Chronological Scholarship” in Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 72 (Philadelphia PA 2011), pp. 503–522, DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2011.0028, or the slightly friendlier write-up in Scott McLemee, “War on Christmas: The Prequel” in Inside Higher Ed, online here. And now that my footnote is longer than my text, I’ve probably done my thing…

Bad lessons from Roman handouts

One of the more unpredictable ways of learning in my job is to pay attention to what turns up in the footnotes of my students’ written work. I work quite hard at putting together reading lists of recommended material, and there is no doubt at all that my good students’ researches beyond that have broadened my awareness of such material considerably. But not everything that my students find is so useful. There has often been a general tendency among the lower achievers not to use, or to assume that they must go beyond, the reading list, which I blame partly on A-Level (though without really knowing), and this comes in two forms, one less pernicious than the other. The less pernicious form goes beyond the reading list by searching JSTOR, or sometimes our own Library catalogue; that is usually safe enough, though quite vulnerable to not noticing when something was written a century or more ago (or, more dangerously, originally published then but recently reprinted).

Are you following Edward Gibbon on Amazon? Granted, he hasn’t really done much since 2000, but you never know!

The most dangerous form of this research technique, however, just searches the web, and it is sometimes amazing what they find. One such find made me stub this post in May 2021. I think if you teach the Roman Empire, especially maybe the late Roman Empire, you may be especially vulnerable to this happening because of how very ready people who know little about the Roman Empire still are to use it in parallels. I could cite you some stuff…¹ But this is a classic case. What the student found was a lecture originally given in 1979 to the Michigan Association of Timbermen, goodness knows why, whose author, Lawrence E. Reed, as Interim President of a body called the Foundation for Economic Education, had put it online as a thinkpiece on their site.² I don’t know exactly when he did that, as he posted it under the original lecture date and the site doesn’t honour last-modified dates, but the bio note at the end says that he ceased to be the FEE’s actual President in 2019, so presumably this went up in 2019 or after. So a first problem is that it was already fifty years out of date at point of publication, but there’s much more to find problematic.

Perhaps the first necessary piece of background is what the FEE is and does. Their site helpfully explains:

"The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) is a 501(c)3 educational foundation and has been trusted by parents and teachers since 1946 to captivate and inspire tomorrow’s leaders with sound economic principles and the entrepreneurial spirit…"

Now, I have nothing against that mission, but it is possible that Professor Reed (he was, at time of posting, identifying as Assistant Professor of Economics at the Northwood Institute, Midland, Michigan, now Northwood University, and he may still be though their website has no notice of him) represents a certain strand within the Foundation, as his essay is basically determined to show that excessive charity brought down the Roman Empire. Using a folk argument that no-one will work if they can get their living for free, he tries to show that the Roman Welfare State (always with capitals) completely rotted Rome’s political power and more or less forced the repeated sale of the Empire to the imperial candidate who would promise the biggest handouts. Early on, he summarises:

"When Romans abandoned self-responsibility and self-reliance, and began to vote themselves benefits, to use government to rob Peter and pay Paul, to put their hands into other people’s pockets, to envy and covet the productive and their wealth, their fate was sealed."

The fact that the men he names in his metaphor were put to death by the Empire is an irony that seems to escape Professor Reed. Three moralising quotes from all over the temporal map follow, anyway, and then he concludes:

"Nothing but evil can come from a society bent upon coercion, the confiscation of property, and the degradation of the productive."

You might ask how all this is being argued, and from what. Well, I count a total of six actual facts in this essay, as opposed to baggy assertions about the behaviours of whole societies, so let’s list them. None of them are sourced, I should say – and to be fair, it’s a society lecture, not an article, so why would it be? – so the notional fact is all we get. They are these:

1. "In 49 B.C., Julius Caesar trimmed the sails of the Welfare State by cutting the welfare rolls from 320,000 to 200,000. But forty-five years later, the rolls were back up to well over 300,000."

   I have to say that I’ve no idea where this is recorded but I have no reason to suppose it’s not, and there are certainly sources in which I might go and look, like Suetonius’s Lives of the Twelve Cæsars or Cicero’s letters.

2. "Emperor Aurelian, wishing to provide cradle-to-grave care for the citizenry, declared the right to relief to be hereditary. Those whose parents received government benefits were entitled as a matter of right to benefits as well. And, Aurelian gave welfare recipients government-baked bread (instead of the old practice of giving them wheat and letting them bake their own bread) and added free salt, pork, and olive oil."

   This, I have seen, and I think it must be in Aurelius Victor, who is not always right about the third century, when Aurelian ruled.³ But I believe this fact to be on record.

3. Then, a good chunk of fact with an actual source:
   

   "The Roman coin, the denarius, was cheapened and debased by one emperor after another to pay for the expensive programs. Once 94% silver, the denarius, by 268 A.D., was little more than a piece of junk containing only .02% silver. Flooding the economy with all this new and cheapened money had predictable results: prices skyrocketed, savings were eroded, and the people became angry and frustrated. Businessmen were often blamed for the rising prices even as government continued its spendthrift ways.
   
   "In the year 301, Emperor Diocletian responded with his famous ‘Edict of 301.’ This law established a system of comprehensive wage and price controls, to be enforced by a penalty of death. The chaos that ensued inspired the historian Lactantius to write in 314 A.D.: ‘After the many oppressions which he put in practice had brought a general dearth upon the empire, he then set himself to regulate the prices of all vendible things. There was much bloodshed upon very slight and trifling accounts; and the people brought provisions no more to markets, since they could not get a reasonable price for them; and this increased the dearth so much that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside.’"

   Here my inner, indeed my outer, numismatist wants to point out that by 268 you’d have been hard pressed to find a denarius as they’d been replaced by the larger coin we call an antoninianus, but since its value had fallen similarly, I don’t suppose Professor Reed would see this as an argument against and indeed he’d be right.⁴ And the Edict of Prices, as it’s more usually known, is a thing, and Lactantius does say what he is said to here. Of course, the Edict makes no mention of the dole or any trouble meeting it; its concern is expressly and exclusively for soldiers’ pay and how far it was currently going. The army was the state expense that was actually giving the state difficulties. But that wouldn’t make Reed’s argument work, so he slips away from it. This is the point at which he begins to unstick from documentable reality.

4. Another chunk:
   

   "The Christians were the last to resist the tyranny of the Roman Welfare State. Until 313 A.D., they had been persecuted because of their unwillingness to worship the emperor. But in that year they struck a deal with Emperor Constantine, who granted them toleration in exchange for their acquiescence to his authority. In the year 380, a sadly-perverted Christianity became the official state religion under Emperor Theodosius."

   The bit about toleration in exchange for acquiescence is a bit odd here – the Edict of Milan which legalised Christianity, alongside all other religions as is often forgotten, makes no such demand – but the rest is true enough. It doesn’t seem actually to form part of the argument, though, even in its original context. I read this mainly as something Reed has internalised from Gibbon that he didn’t feel could be left out.

5. "In 410, Alaric the Goth and his primitive Germanic tribesmen assaulted the city and sacked its treasures. The once-proud Roman army, which had always repelled the barbarians before, now wilted in the face of opposition."

   Really quite a few problems here, starting with the words "Germanic", "primitive", "tribesmen" and "always", and going on to omit the numerous victories by Roman forces against "barbarian" groups both shortly before and for a while after this, but also the fact that in 410 the army was not even sent against Alaric, as Rome was expected to hold out. Admittedly, the city was indeed sacked, and had not previously been for seven hundred years, except of course by numerous Roman armies with their variously ethnic auxiliary troops, but that never counts for some reason. There’s still something here, but it’s not all what it is said to be.

6. "The end came, rather anti-climactically, in 476, when the German chieftain, Odovacer, pushed aside the Roman emperor and made himself the new authority."

   Here we could take issue with the fact that the Roman emperor in question had himself pushed aside his still-living predecessor, but actually what Reed has done here is a bigger rhetorical play, and it offers purchase to stick a wedge in the whole log, so, let’s step out and analyse.

What has happened here, of course, is that what had been a story of the whole Roman Empire has shrunk to become a story of the collapse of Roman rule in central Italy alone. It’s not as if Reed is the first person to do this and he wasn’t going to be the last either, but it does rather ignore the entire surviving Empire beyond that area. When Odoacer took power in the city of Rome in 476, what was his first move? (Admittedly, this is according to Procopius, but hey, no worse than Lactantius amirite, so let’s go on.⁵) Odoacer wrote to the Emperor. Yes, that’s right, Emperor Zeno, in Constantinople, who was still ultimately in charge. Odoacer wrote that he didn’t think they needed another emperor here in Rome given how small its territory now was and that he would be happy to be King of Italy under Zeno. And Zeno, fairly new on the throne with problems of his own, nonetheless told Odoacer to get stuffed, as there was still a ruling emperor in the West too in the person of the displaced Julius Nepos, then ruling from Diocletian’s old palace in Split where he would die four years later. And subsequently Ostrogothic troops who were being a nuisance around Constantinople were given the task of removing Odoacer, which they duly did under their leader Theodoric, about whom much has been written and much claimed but whom one author has called "the barbarian who might have saved [the Empire]" because of his rôle in bringing the various kingdoms of the West back into a single network more or less recognizant of imperial authority, albeit in a mostly symbolic way.⁶

But Theodoric was good with symbols, as we know. Here is the obverse of the famous Semigallia medallion of Theodoric, showing his allegedly "invincible" and supposedly highly symbolic moustache (see n. 6 below).

But this is basically now the debate about whether Rome really fell or not. All I’m trying to show here is that the basic political and economic structure of the Empire can’t have been the decisive problem that Reed thinks it was, as it continued working from Constantinople for at least another 750 years, despite some very substantial challenges.⁷ If charity and welfare killed Rome, it should also have killed Constantinople, but it didn’t. Why not?

Well, because it’s not what killed Rome either, is it? Reed plays a trick here, knowingly or not, and again it’s this trick of shrinkage. As far as I can see, from the whole essay, what he means by charity and the "Welfare State" is the food dole to which citizens of Rome (and Constantinople) were entitled. That was indeed pretty big! But even in Rome it was restricted to people above a certain economic level; it wasn’t poor relief, or welfare as we’d usually understand it, but instead a species of subsidy for economic activity, something a lot more like the "London allowance" academic jobs in the UK’s capital get added to their salary to deal with how expensive it is to try and exist in London.⁸ And secondly, it didn’t really exist outside the two capitals. The vast majority of the Empire’s citizenry were not chowing down on imperially-provided pork every day. They were, in some loose way, paying to keep these two megalopoloi running, even though by 410 Rome wasn’t itself a capital any more. But it’s hard to construct from this enshrined privilege of the urban lower-middle class in only the Empire’s two biggest cities, huge though they were, a picture of an entire continental society sapped of enterprise and vigour by government handouts. And indeed, Reed is going for bigger than the European continent: for him, when it all went wrong at Rome in the 5th century, "the world was plunged into darkness and despair, slavery and poverty". By this point, one social bracket in one Mediterranean city has become the barometer of the history of the entire globe and we can easily see that at this extent it’s ridiculous.

There are alternative arguments one could make, of course. One could – people have – say that the real problem, or at least a really big one, was in fact handouts to the peoples beyond the borders, who were thus taught to see the Empire as the source of their wealth and of the status symbols which constructed their social hierarchies.⁹ Even that, it’s hard to see as a problem as long as the Empire could in fact pay those subsidies, but the relationships it created obviously did play into subsequent developments.¹⁰ Or there’s the one I tried above about continuity in the East. But for Reed’s purposes none of this would answer because the article isn’t really about the Roman Empire at all. You may already have guessed where it finishes up…

"History does seem to have an uncanny knack of repeating itself. If there’s one thing we can learn from history, it is that people never seem to learn from history! America is making some of the same mistakes today that Rome made centuries ago.

"In many ways, the American Welfare State parallels the Roman Welfare State. We have our legions of beneficiaries, our confiscatory taxation, our burdensome regulation, and of course, our inflation."

And from there it’s three paragraphs on increase in the money supply and three more blaming this on the ballooning demands of the USA’s welfare system. You may have heard this tune before.

So what we have here is a piece of a long tradition of writing about the Roman Empire which is not actually about the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon (remember him?), who constructed the original "Decline and Fall" argument but with Christianity in the rôle that Reed here gives "Welfare", was arguably talking about Georgian England at least as much as about Roman history, but he did do so through seven to eight volumes of copiously evidenced historiography based on Roman sources, so it’s hard to keep him in the same box as Reed here even if Reed is consciously or unconsciously borrowing the strategy.¹¹ But in recent decades, it’s been very much more usual for these arguments to be broken out about the modern-day USA instead.

For example, the cover of Cullen Murphy, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America (Boston MA 2007). I love this as an obvious example.

Now of course there would be rather less point to doing history if you couldn’t try and draw lessons for the present from it. But if you start with the lesson you want to teach and then go looking for support in the past, of course you find it. In fact, that conditions what you find. No-one sets out to write a piece like this, or like Murphy’s book above, unless they already think something is rotten in the state of Denmarkthe Union. There is therefore zero chance that such an author will go back to what history they know or look up and conclude, "actually, the past suggests that it’ll probably turn out fine", or at least, since they then wouldn’t have a thesis, zero chance that anything we see on these themes presents anything but echoes of doom from their sounding of fathomless antiquity. But sometimes, as here, you can find weak links in the chain that links their metaphorical diving bell to the present surface, and have at it.

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1. I mean, you get some odd studies using the Roman Empire as their base. To pick but three, how about: Fred Parkinson, "Cohabitation between Barbarians and Romans, A.D. 400–800: The crystallising process in European public international law" in Diplomacy & Statecraft Vol. 1 (London 1990), pp. 71–83, an example of that ‘We Are Rome’ tendency that will return to focus towards the end of this post; Joseph Homer Saleh, "Statistical reliability analysis for a most dangerous occupation: Roman emperor" in Palgrave Communications Vol. 5 (London 2019), no. 155, DOI: 10.1057/s41599-019-0366-y, historically accurate but why do it? or Nicholas Lyall, Dmitry Brizhinev and Roger Bradbury, "Rome as a Hegemon: A Portrayal and Database of its Power Projection over Seven Hundred Years" in Cliodynamics Vol. 11 (Riverside CA 2020), pp. 59–71, DOI: 10.21237/C7clio11248308, validating a model for something else by measuring the unmeasurable, and therefore of course finding the figures which work.

2. We should probably make clear that Reed has continued making these same points, in Lawrence W. Reed and Marc Hyden, "Rome: Money, Mischief and Minted Crises" in Foundation for Economic Education (21st May 2015), online here, and eidem, "The Slow-Motion Financial Suicide of the Roman Empire" in Foundation for Economic Education (17th August 2015), online here, so I don’t think we need worry that his views have changed much since 1979.

3. He is, apart from anything else, the source for the idea that the Emperor Gallienus forbade military command to members of the Senate, which is not true as far as we can tell and has thus become one of those tells for me for when an author has been lazy in their research. For evaluation of that issue, see Inge Mennen, Power and Status in the Roman Empire, AD 193-284, Impact of Empire 12 (Leiden 2011), pp. 193-240 and esp. pp. 238-240, who concludes that there was no prohibition required as senators had been more or less isolated from military influence in a process going on for more than a generation; the few who may still have held such office were not normal or significant.

4. For my money – er, sorry – the best treatment of this issue may still be Andrew Burnett, Coinage in the Roman World (London 1987), which I don’t have to hand so can’t cite page numbers, sorry, but there’s lots more recent, such as Sylviane Estiot, "The Later Third Century" in William E. Metcalf (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage (Oxford 2012), pp. 538–560.

5. Procopius, History of the Wars, Books VI (continued) and VII, ed. & transl. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library 173 (Cambridge MA 1968), V.1.

6. That writer and his work being James Joseph O’Donnell, The Ruin of the Roman Empire: The Emperor Who Brought it Down, the Barbarians Who Could Have Saved It (New York City NY 2008); but for a more recent, nuanced and quite unexpected treatment of the Ostrogothic régime, try Jonathan J. Arnold, "Theoderic’s Invincible Mustache" in Journal of Late Antiquity Vol. 6 (Baltimore MD 2013), pp. 152–183, DOI: 10.1353/jla.2013.0007!

7. Why the West fell and the East didn’t is of course hardly a new question, but posing it does force us to consider only explanations for the West’s fall which can accommodate it, an obvious idea but one which still struck me as novel when I first read Chris Wickham, "The Other Transition: from the ancient world to feudalism" in Wickham, Land and Power: studies in Italian and European social history, 400–1200 (London 1994), pp. 7–42, where see pp. 26-29 and 36-40. As evidence that it’s not just me that didn’t get that straight away, one could compare Stephen Williams and Gerard Friell, The Rome that Did Not Fall: The Survival of the East in the Fifth Century (London 1999) with Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London 2008), reading pretty much the same material from entirely the other direction.

8. On the actual Roman dole, see for short Paul Erdkamp, "The food supply of the capital" in Paul Erdkamp (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Rome, Cambridge Companions to the Ancient World (Cambridge 2013), pp. 262–277, DOI: 10.1017/CCO9781139025973.019, and for long, Boudewijn Sirks, Food for Rome: The Legal Structure of the Transportation and Processing of Supplies for the Imperial Distributions in Rome and Constantinople (Amsterdam 1991).

9. E. g. Peter Heather, "The Late Roman Art of Client Management: Imperial Defence in the Fourth Century West" in Walter Pohl, Ian Wood & Helmut Reimitz (edd.), The Transformation of Frontiers from Late Antiquity to the Carolingians, The Transformation of the Roman World 10 (Leiden 2001), pp. 15–68.

10. E. g. Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568, Cambridge Medieval Textbooks (Cambridge 2007).

11. See Peter Ghosh, "The conception of Gibbon’s History" in Roland Quinault & Rosamond McKitterick (edd.), Edward Gibbon and Empire (Cambridge 1996), pp. 271–316, DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511599491.014, or indeed Stephen Paul Foster, Melancholy Duty: The Hume-Gibbon Attack on Christianity, International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d’histoire des idées 154 (Heidelberg 1997).

Seminar CLXXXI: avoiding colonisation with medievalism

First I should apologise for a late post; last weekend was very full of family business and I didn’t have a post even started before Sunday night, and then once I had, I realised I’d written the text for a post ahead of the one I’d meant. So that should speed things up this weekend, but what I meant to report first on was this online seminar, which actually fits well with the last post even though the timing was mostly a coincidence. On 28th April 2021 the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Leeds and the Leeds Law School at Leeds Beckett University jointly played virtual host to Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters for a presentation entitled "Into the Motherlands: creating just and resilient communities". This turns out to have been part of a kind of tour of the Internet that Ms DePass, at least, was doing at that point to boost the attention then being paid to Into the Mother Lands, which the publicity for this paper explained as, "a tabletop role playing game set within a world unmarred by legacies of colonial violence". This sounded unusually geeky for my place of work; I was right then embroiled in this decolonisation initiative and also vaguely interested in gamifying my research for a funding bid that in the end failed. Also, I’ve played a game or two in my past, and we were in the middle of lockdown still and it sometimes seemed like a licence to go to anything at all, since it still didn’t mean leaving the house. So I attended, and it was fascinating.

DePass and Walters had, you see, been trying to write a different world. They had gathered a group of likeminded creators and built themselves a scenario and ruleset in collaboration. Once they had what they wanted, they got a group of people together and turned their playtesting into a TV stream. When they had enough people interested from that, they put together a Kickstarter to turn the thing into a real published game, and this was the phase in which I met the project in this paper. The aim with which DePass and Walters had set out, you see, was to try and capture the fun of rôle-playing games without carrying on board the worse tropes of the fantasy genre about gender and, especially, race. The pair, who did the paper more or less as a duologue, had some very sharp things to say about how those lines usually play out down pale=good or intellectual or magical and dark=bad or physical or monstrous.¹ Into the Mother Lands tries to get round that by three means: firstly, it has no limits on the characteristics of the various species that inhabit the world where it’s set, Musalia. Secondly, all the creative work is done by people of colour (the term used in the seminar); and thirdly, all the humans in the game are themselves people of colour who have never known colonialism. As my notes have it, in what is presumably a paraphrase rather than a quote, "framing a world like this lets us carry over the idea that a better world can exist" (Walters), "and avoid the narrative of murder achievements" (DePass). And as aims go that seems fair enough to me.

The Internet Movie Database masthead for the Into the Motherlands</cite< TV stream

The creators apparently found it very hard to get their key concept off the ground in development, however. A lot of the issues were with gameplay and the conflict and tension necessary to drive plots, which now had to be created some other way. The thing that caught the interest of this listening medievalist, though, was the scenario they’d had to imagine in order that this phenomenon, always-free black humans, could be conceptualised in this game, because their answer was medievalism, and there, you see, comes the relevance to the blog. Have you ever heard of Mūsā I, Emperor of Mali?

Mansa Mūsā I depicted in the so-called Catalan Atlas by Abraham Cresques, Paris, Bibliothèque national de France, MS Esp. 30, fo. 6, public domain claimed by Wikimedia Commons. The Atlas was made in 1375 CE and he died around 1337, so this is something like contemporary renown.

I had, very dimly, maybe once heard of Mansa Musa, as he is more usually known, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about him at this point. More people probably ought to have heard of him, though. He ruled Mali in the fourteenth century and may have been the wealthiest man the world has ever known. He is most famous for going on hajj to Mecca and distributing so much gold on his journey, particularly during a three-month stay in Cairo, that it caused hyper-inflation and kept the price of gold down for a full decade. There is much much more that could be said about him, too, including that he established something like non-Egyptian Africa’s first university.² However, here we actually need to focus on his predecessor and brother, Mansa Abū Bakr. Mansa Abū Bakr was interested less in the East and more in what might lie in the West, and equipped an Atlantic expedition to find out, which never returned. Undeterred, he therefore kitted out a more serious one and abdicated to lead it himself, setting up Mūsā in his place. And then off Abū Bakr sailed and what happened to him, no-one knows.³ There were some exciting theories in the 1970s about how this might mean Africans got to the Americas before Europeans did (Vikings not included, of course). I spent a while looking for where these had got to after this seminar, having tripped over them while trying to get more about Mansa Mūsā for the bibliographic mill, and it seems they died on the vine, or more specifically, that they dropped out of academic discourse and into popular discourse while the scholars still interested in this idea preferred to try to leave Africa out of it and focus on Asia instead.⁴ But DePass and Walters were, less seriously, working in that earlier tradition, because their answer to the question, how do we get a world where free black humans play on equal terms with the other inhabitants? was, in the end: what if Abū Bakr’s expedition was lost because it passed through a wormhole and ended up on a different planet? And thus was Into the Mother Lands given its back-story, and it may not be great history; but the point is, that’s how far out and how far backwards one has to think to unseat the present race dynamic between the ex-or-still-colonial nations and their erstwhile subjects. This struck me quite hard.

Now, shortly after they’d explained this, I had to run off for a meeting with, as it happened, Adam Kosto. I didn’t, therefore, get to hear the discussion, much less contribute to it, though I’m not sure I would have dared. What I also didn’t do, I have to say, is subscribe to the project’s Kickstarter or (because it was funded in 90 minutes) actually get or play the game, though that may not in fact have been possible because the publisher they had in mind part-folded shortly afterwards. (They now have a new one and the game is probably coming out next year.) I didn’t even watch the stream, I’m afraid, but I did keep thinking with it. I also searched up a lot of literature about Mūsā I and precolonial Afro-American contact, as we see in n. 4 below. But mainly what I keep thinking is twofold: on the one hand, how alarming it is that it should even be plausible that to envisage a world in which black is not generally the victim of white, you have to think back six hundred years; but, on the other hand, that this means the world really really does need medievalists. It’s possible it doesn’t need exactly the ones it’s got, but we can work on that, and it would be lovely to think we could have anywhere near as much fun as Tanya DePass and B. Dave Walters seemed to be doing their part of it back in April 2021.

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1. Starting reading on this would be Paul B. Sturtevant, "Race: The Original Sin of the Fantasy Genre", Race, Racism and the Middle Ages 36 in The Public Medievalist (5 December 2017), online here, which makes it clear it’s not just Dungeons and Dragons.

2. The main primary source for the Cairo story appears to be the Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār of the Mamlūk administrator Ibn Faḍl al-‘Umarī, available as Ibn Faḍl Allāh Šihāb al-Din Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā b. Faḍl Allāh al-‘Umarī, Masālik alabṣar fī Mamālik al-amsār, ed. & transl. Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid, Textes arabes et études islamiques 23 (Le Caire 1958), of which parts are translated into English in Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyá Ibn Faḍl Allâh al-ʿUmarī, Egypt and Syria in the early Mamluk period: an extract from Ibn Faḍl Allāh al-’Umarī’s Masālik al-Abṣār fī Mamālik al-Amṣār, transl. D. S. Richards (Abingdon 2017), but I don’t right now have access to either of these so can’t say where in Fu’ad’s version it occurs or if it does in Richards’s. For Mūsā I more generally, see J. E. G. Sutton, "The African Lords of the Intercontinental Gold Trade Before the Black Death: al-Hasan bin Sulaiman of Kilwa and Mansa Musa of Mali" in Antiquaries Journal Vol. 77 (Cambridge 1997), pp. 221–242, DOI: 10.1017/S000358150007520X. There must be something else but that’s what I know about. I mean, there’s always D. T. Niane, "Mali and the second Mandingo expansion" in Niane (ed.), Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 4 (London 1984), pp. 117–171 & M. Ly-Tall, "The decline of the Mali empire", ibid., pp. 172–186, the whole volume online here…

3. This is also from al-‘Umarī, which I find from Jean Devisse, "Africa in inter-continental relations" in Niane, Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, pp. 635–672 at pp. 664-666, the only pages in the whole chapter that deal with Africans looking out rather than other people looking in, and dismissing it as economically insignificant (though, interestingly, prepared to believe that they might have made it to South America, p. 666). However, Devisse used some other translation of al-‘Umarī, so I can’t give you a uniform cite. I can give you the English version of it he quotes (pp. 664-665), though, and that goes like this, in the voice of Mūsā I himself speaking of his predecessor:

"He [Mansa Abū Bakr] did not believe that the ocean was impossible to cross. He wished to reach the other side and was passionately interested in doing so. He fitted out 200 vessels and filled them with men and as many again with gold, water and food supplies for several years. He then said to those in charge of embarkation, ‘do not return until you have reached the other side of the ocean or if you have exhausted your food or water’. They sailed away. Time passed. After a long time, none of them had returned. Finally one vessel, only one, returned. We asked its master what he had seen and heard: ‘We sailed on and on for a long time until a river with a violent current appeared in the middle of the sea. I was in the last vessel. The others sailed on and when they reached that spot they were unable to return and disappeared. We did not know what had happened to them. For my part, I came back from that place without entering the stream.’ The sultan rejected his explanation. He then ordered 2000 vessels to be fitted out, 1000 for himself and his men and 1000 for food and water. He then appointed me his deputy, embarked with his companions and sailed away. That was the last we saw of them, him and his companions."

So make of that what you will!

4. This is now kind of a zombie debate, which isn’t to say it’s been resolved. However, in each of its phases it’s primarily been driven by a single scholar at a time. In the 1960s and 1970s that was one M. D. W. Jeffreys, who may have started this work with "Pre-Colombian Negroes in America" in Scientia: Rivista di Scienza Vol. 88 (Bologna 1953), pp. 202–218, online here, but then got the idea that maize could be attested in Europe prior to Columbus, necessitating some pre-Columbian contact; he did several articles on that but I think Jeffreys, "Maize and the Mande Myth" in Current Anthropology Vol. 12 (Chicago IL 1971), pp 291–320, on JSTOR here, completes them all. His work was already provoking reaction by then, as witness Raymond Mauny, "Hypothèses concernant les relations précolombiennes entre l’Afrique et l’Amérique" in Anuario de Estudios Atlánticos Vol. 1 (Gran Canaria 1971), pp 369–389, online here, A. R. Willcox, "Pre-Columbian Intercourse between the Old World and the New: Considered from Africa" in South African Archaeological Bulletin Vol. 30 (Wits 1975), pp. 19–22, on JSTOR here; and Almose A. Thompson, "Pre-columbian black presence in the western hemisphere" in Negro History Bulletin Vol. 38 (Washington DC 1975), pp. 452–456, on JSTOR here. Then things seem to have gone quiet again until a guy called Carl L. Johnannessen revived the maize question. Initially he was doing that from some quite thin art-historical evidence (and, importantly for us, steering the question away from Africa): witness Carl L. Johannessen and Anne Z. Parker, "Maize ears sculptured in 12th and 13th century A.D. India as indicators of pre-columbian diffusion" in Economic Botany Vol. 43 (New York City NY 1989), pp. 164–180, on JSTOR here, and this understandably met some pushback: you can read it through the collection of counter-evidence amassed by a supporter, J. Huston McCulloch, in "Maize in Pre-Columbian India", in Some Archaeological Outliers: Adventures in Underground Archaeology (Columbus OH 2006), online here, but you can find it done most thoroughly in Bernard Ortiz de Montellano, Gabriel Haslip-Viera and Warren Barbour, "They Were NOT Here before Columbus: Afrocentric Hyperdiffusionism in the 1990s" in Ethnohistory Vol. 45 (1997), pp 199–234, on Academia.edu here, with a host of related papers showing up there I can’t index now – but note that one of their concerns is that attempts to assign particular archæological and technological phenomena to African influence can only work by removing it from the Native American record, which is a point. The wave they’re trying to stem there must be as much or more Jeffreys’ fault, as his work became accessible on JSTOR and suchlike, I assume, as anything that’s happened since. None of this deterred Johannessen, however, who subsequently went big and added 69 other species of plant and 8 of various sorts of creature to the list of things he wants to explain by pre-Columbian contact, in John L. Sorenson and Carl L. Johannessen, Scientific Evidence for Pre-Columbian Transoceanic Voyages, Sino-Platonic Papers 133 (Philadelphia PA 2004), online here. A fairly recent review of the situation might be Richard V. Francaviglia, "’Far Beyond the Western Sea of the Arabs…’: Reinterpreting Claims about Pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas" in Terrae Incognitae Vol. 46 (Abingdon 2014), pp. 103–138, DOI: 10.1179/0082288414Z.00000000033. But I bet you could find another one which disagreed entirely…

A Forgotten Effort of Decolonization?

The window behind which I was having the thoughts which begin this post is the uppermost leftermost gable in the building on the left of the neo-classical one, all of this being the Queen’s College, Oxford, and borrowed from their website

I think this story begins in Oxford, although it doesn’t stay there long. At the time I was teaching in Oxford the History syllabus’s foundation was two sets of “papers”, one in British History, covering the sceptred isles of my birth (in theory; in practice, really just England unless someone made special efforts to include the Home Nations) and one in General History (everything beyond Britain). This has now changed, to rebrand General as European and World, and I leave it to you to decide if that’s better. The point is that if you offered a General paper, which I did, the syllabus made almost anything a possible topic or area. The late lamented Mark Whittow, despite being a Byzantinist by training, regularly made his students study T’ang China for a week, because he found it fun and thought it would do them good. That could go the other way round too: I drew a particular intake of breath the first time a student took me up on having included the Mongols in my lists, but it was good for me in the end even if we did spend that week effectively competing for books so that I could mark whatever he wrote.¹

Cover of J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2: from c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge 1978), DOI 10.1017/CHOL9780521215923

However, I didn’t include South Asia or Africa in what I thought I could teach. I know why I generally stay off South Asia now, which is that I have become aware that there is a dense Indian historiography largely based in or reacting to a particular Indian flavour of Marxism which I’d have to master. Critical historiography and polemic therefore overlap there in such a way that it would take me a long time to get to where I could try and find my own balance without just accidentally repeating one or other side of each dispute. I am getting there, but I’m not yet.² Then, I suspect it just didn’t occur to me, as it so often seems not to to people. But I did think about including Africa, and that idea fell over pretty much at the point of assembling reading lists. I could find really very little. I asked one of my more learned and globally-minded colleagues, and they said, “Well, there’s the Cambridge History…” Now if I include here a citation for the most relevant volume of that, J. D. Fage (ed.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Volume 2: from c. 500 BC to AD 1050 (Cambridge 1978), you’ll see an obvious problem here, which is: a lot has changed since 1978. You’d hope some of it had changed in African historiography, too. Granted, when I started teaching the British History papers in Oxford in 2010 I was given bibliographies written by the late lamented Patrick Wormald, retired 2001 and sadly dead 2004, so updating was in general slow; but still…

“Why is My Curriculum White” banner

Now, flash forward to the School of History, University of Leeds in 2019, whose views or positions of course are not represented by anything I write here, these being my own views only. But in that school a 2014 campaign called Why is my Curriculum White? had (still has) posters in many of our corridors and had already provoked a certain amount of pressure to respond in some way; and then a man called George Floyd got shot by police in the USA and the world’s media, social and otherwise, took fire for a while with the slogan “Black Lives Matter“.³ This was also the sort of time that what had till then been calling itself Anglo-Saxon studies also got into turmoil over its own alleged racism.⁴ And I was in charge of an ageing medieval survey module called Medieval and Renaissance Europe that was our incoming students’ first experience of university content teaching. I thought we should probably do something. I couldn’t decentre Europe, because it was in the module title and syllabus, but I tried to make it possible to look at Europe from the outside by adding comparative readings for each topic looking at the same sort of issues in other societies. With one or two topics excepted, none of my colleagues were much better placed to provide those than I was, so I had a lot of searching to do. Somewhere in the course of it, I suspect while looking for an entry-level reading about the Sogdian trading groups of Central Asia in English, I came on a PDF with an obscure file title which turned out to be part of a thing called the UNESCO History of Civilizations of Central Asia, itself part of a project called the Multiple History Series.⁵ That got me curious and set me looking for other things in that series, and that then led me to discover the existence of the UNESCO General History of Africa.⁶

Cover of the second volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa

Now if you’ve never heard of this, you’re not alone; the only other person I’ve found who has, including several historians of Africa I’ve asked about it, is my learned colleague Iona McCleery. And yet it looked like just what we needed and had needed for some time. Firstly, it covered in three volumes what the old Cambridge History covered in two, meaning more detail.⁷ Secondly, it was marginally more up-to-date, and importantly past the threshold of use of radio-carbon dating as the Cambridge History could not have been. But thirdly and most importantly to someone busily trying to diversify his reading lists so that there was at least some voice in them that wasn’t white and Anglophone, it was all written, or at worst co-written, by scholars from Africa, organised by a huge committee. So I pulled down PDFs of the volumes wherever they could be found (all legit. and above-board, I should say, just not necessarily obvious, as they might have been, say, on the UNESCO website…) and started working them into Zotero so as to be able to find them when relevant.

Cover of volume 3 of the UNESCO General History of Africa

Several interesting things became clear out of that. The first, perhaps inevitably, was how the historiography of the continent which this collection set out to detail was broken up by periodizations from elsewhere, but not a consistent elsewhere. The first part of the second volume (which is called Ancient Civilisations of Africa) is more or less Classical in focus, counting Egypt and Rome as part of Africa’s history, albeit with Nubia included in that world; but the second part of it is basically prehistoric archæology, and is where all the sub-Saharan coverage is. That gets us up to the seventh century CE, where the third volume begins, and then suddenly that stuff is fighting with Islamic history for space and loses. Then the fourth volume is basically a history of empires and begins to take on its own shape. In between Classics and Islam the only other periodizers are linguistic and material culture migration. This is, obviously I suppose, led by the evidence; where there is evidence from Greek, Carthaginian and Roman sources, and to an extent Nubian and Aksumite materials, the Classicists handled it; where there’s Arabic-language evidence the Islamicists handled it; and the archæologists did what was left, which is of course really quite a lot, but specifically they had to cover the areas not in contact with external recording civilisations. So the period divide works out disciplinary which works out geographical, and the intersections are quite hard to map.

Cover of the fourth volume of the UNESCO General History of Africa

But the other thing that I couldn’t help notice, as I grabbed at headings for tagging purposes, was the concentration of the archæological and linguistic work both on race. And by that I mean, the main research question often seems to have been: what biological category of African can we tell from this evidence moved where when? Who were they ethnically? Everything else, everything visible, was aimed at that question rather than being answers in itself. And perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising; sometimes, the political debates which were driving that scholarship are evident within the chapters.⁸ But when that work can lead to a 20-page annex reporting on a conference about the “Peopling of Ancient Egypt” that ends with a plea for UNESCO funding to allow better categorisation of ancient African peoples into races, it’s hard to think that this is what I need to make my curriculum less racist.⁹ It’s not, of course, as if these are specifically African questions: they presumably arrived in Africa directly from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European scholarship that was also deeply, disturbingly even, interested in categorising people by “race”, including by language and material culture despite both of those obviously being things people can take or leave. And we still fight with that stuff in Europe; I found a new modern piece trying to do ethnic identification from skull measurement only the other day, in fact (though for what it’s worth, that too was about Egypt and Nubia, as well as being logically pretty much senseless).¹⁰ Usually I have to look to French or Croatian scholarship for people still doing this.¹¹ So in a forty-year-plus-old history of Africa it’s probably unreasonable to expect them to have been doing what I was hoping for in 2021; I felt a bit like a hippie gone abroad looking for enlightenment for all the wrong reasons.¹² Nonetheless, it left me with the basic quandary: what was I to do, having gone searching for the voices of those missing from the conversation, on finding they weren’t saying what I hoped? Was that actually my problem?

Now, in practical terms this was a very short-lived problem. I ran that module for only one more year, and in the most relevant reading list, which for expertise reasons needed to be focused especially on West Africa and the beginnings of the slave trade, I had room for maybe three or four readings on deeper history, and only one of them could be set as required reading. And as it happened I had already read long ago a pretty good and more recent single-chapter coverage of much of what is outline-known about that area’s development by an African scholar who subsequently did a keynote at the 2021 International Medieval Congress, so I was pretty confident it was OK.¹³ Meanwhile, I do use one or two chapters from these volumes in other reading lists where relevant, but I do do so gingerly, on the grounds that by now they are probably (indeed, hopefully) an anachronistic representation of African scholarship. It’s just that everyone else I can set is not from Africa… and when some day I have the chance to teach something a bit more like world history, this problem will arise again. Now, it may in fact be solved by the UNESCO General History of Africa, because there is apparently an update volume even now in process which will represent actually-current work on these issues. But I don’t think the particular problems I met with these volumes are why they have apparently been so thoroughly forgotten, or even a reason why they should not have set the world sufficiently alight in the 1980s as to replace the even-then-tiring Cambridge History of Africa. I think that might actually have been our problem, whether the previous one was mine or not…

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1. I got him to read David O. Morgan, The Mongols, The Peoples of Europe, 2nd edn, (Oxford 2007), though probably still in the first edition, as well as some articles, and tried to get by myself on Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1221-1410, The Medieval World, 2nd edn (Abingdon 2018), though likewise in the first edition not that one. It just about worked…

2. For example… it’s hard for someone with my academic persuasions not to like the look of Harbans Mukhia, “Was there feudalism in Indian history?” in Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 8 (London 1981), pp. 273–310, DOI: 10.1080/03066158108438139; but if you then happen to run across D. N. Jha (ed.), Society and Ideology in India: essays in honour of professor R.S. Sharma (New Delhi 1996), Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Colonial Indology: sociopolitics of the ancient Indian past (New Delhi 1997) or even Sadashiva Ramachandra Gowda, “The feudalism Debate in the point of view of Harbans Mukhia” in Tumbe Group of International Journals Vol. 4 (Tumkur 2021), pp. 26–29, online here, you have to admit that one view won’t be enough…

3. Why is My Curriculum White has been written about in Michael A. Peters, “Why is My Curriculum White?” in Educational Philosophy and Theory Vol. 47 (Abingdon 2015), pp. 641–646, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1037227 and Michael Adrian Peters, “Why Is My Curriculum White? A Brief Genealogy of Resistance” in Jason Arday and Heidi Safia Mirza (edd.), Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (Cham 2018), pp. 253–270, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_14.

4. Mary Rambaran-Olm, “Misnaming the Medieval: Rejecting ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies” in History Workshop (4th November 2019), online here; Renato Rodrigues Da Silva, “The Uses of the ‘Anglo-Saxon Past’ between Revolutions, Imperialism and Racism” in Práticas da História: Journal on Theory, Historiography and Uses of the Past No. 12 (Lisboa 2021), pp. 129–160, DOI: 10.48487/pdh.2021.n12.24965; Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade, “What’s in a Name? The Past and Present Racism in ‘Anglo-Saxon’ Studies” in Yearbook of English Studies Vol. 52 (Cambridge 2022), pp. 135–153, DOI: 10.1353/yes.2022.0010.

5. B. A. Litvinsky, Zhang Guang-da and R. Shabani Samghabadi (edd.), The Crossroads of Civilizations, A.D. 250 to 750, UNESCO History of Civilizations of Central Asia 3 (Paris 1996), on Academia.edu here.

6. The program is discussed by Bethwell A. Ogot, “African Historiography: From colonial historiography to UNESCO’s General history of Africa” in Groniek No. 122 (Groningen 1993), pp. 71–78, online here, and Jan Vansina, “UNESCO and African Historiography” in History in Africa Vol. 20 (Cambridge 1993), pp. 337–352, DOI: 10.2307/3171979.

7. Those volumes being, respectively, G. Mokhtar (ed.), Ancient Civilizations of Africa, UNESCO General History of Africa 2 (London 1981), online here; M. El Fasi with I. Hrbek (edd.), Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 3 (London 1988), online here; and D. T. Niane (ed.), Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century, UNESCO General History of Africa 4 (London 1984), online here.

8. Clearest in Cheikh Anta Diop, “Origin of the ancient Egyptians” in Mokhtar, Ancient Civilizations, pp. 27–82 at pp. 27-40, which all deal with whether the ancient Egyptians counted as black or not. The author concludes that it has been shown that they were but the editor of the volume felt he had to contradict this in a following note, p. 51 & n. 74. Of course the debate is still a very live one: the relevant Wikipedia page is relatively polite, overall, but still has 341 notes…

10. Diop, “Origin of the ancient Egyptians”, pp. 59-78, inc. this on p. 77:

It is desirable… that an international inquiry be organized by UNESCO, either by consulting universities in a sufficient number of countries, or by consulting individual experts of international repute, or alternatively by convening a symposium, with a view to establishing very precise standards on the strictest possible scientific principles for defining races and for identifying the racial type of exhumed skeletons.

In case that sounds unlikely to have been entertained, it should be pointed out that UNESCO had already paid for the conference.

11. Stuart Tyson Smith and Michelle R. Buzon, “Cross-Frontier Interactions in Roman Europe, AD 100‒350: the graphic model applied” in Ulrike Matthies Green and Kirk E. Costion (eds), Modeling Cross-Cultural Interaction in Ancient Borderlands (Gainesville FL 2018), pp. 89-113, on JSTOR here. Their criterion for telling Egyptian from Nubian skulls is, would you believe it, variation; “Egyptian” ones vary little from some typological average and “Nubian” ones vary lots. By this logic, basically Nubians are weird Egyptians, and any Nubian in the right range would be Egyptian. And this got published.

12. Mario Šlaus, Zeljko Tomicić, Ante Uglesić and Radomir Jurić, “Craniometric relationships among medieval Central European populations: implications for Croat migration and expansion” in Croatian Medical Journal Vol. 45 (Zagreb 2004), pp. 434–444, on ResearchGate here. For France, see references in Bonnie Effros, Merovingian Mortuary Archaeology and the Making of the Early Middle Ages, The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 35 (Berkeley CA 2003), pp. 141-154, not doing it herself, I should make clear, but critiquing those who are, with gender deduced from skulls additionally in her sights over pp. 161-162.

13. Not least because decolonising our curriculum is arguably missing the biggest point of all anyway, made forcefully by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a metaphor” in Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society Vol. 1 (Toronto 2012), pp. 1–40, online here and very important reading.

14. Innocent Pikirayi, “Gold, Black Ivory, and Houses of Stone: historical archaeology in Africa” in Martin Hall and Stephen W. Silliman (edd.), historical archaeology, Blackwell Studies in Global Archaeology 9 (Malden MA 2006), pp. 230–250.