A Letter on Ethnogenesis to Patrick W. Geary

Dear Professor Geary,

I am an amateur historian whose interests include the myths peoples invent in order to justify various courses of action, and I have just read your splendid book, The Myth of Nations, which addressed (and often exploded) several questions and answers I had had about the era around the so-called Fall of Western Rome - such as why the Arian heresy lingered so long, and only among certain ("Germanic") populations, and then vanished so entirely, and how the Germanic tribes maintained a separate existence among the groups they ruled when they cannot have been very numerous. Your suggestion that this was done on purpose to keep an elite under the king's particular command from being subsumed in the great mass makes new sense of the confusion, as does your theory of the actual origin of the manpower involved.

(Aside: I noticed recently some spokesman for the Italian government comparing foreign immigrants to the invasions of the Goths, the Huns and the Normans - specifically NOT mentioning the Lombards among the foreign invaders of the peninsula. On the other hand, in a recent article in the NYTimes on the Elgin Marbles controversy, a Greek minister cheerfully admitted, "We were all speaking Albanian and calling ourselves Romans until Winckelmann and Goethe and Ingres and Byron told us we were the heirs of Socrates and Plato and ought to be Greeks." Let's hope he keeps his job - indeed, his life.)

Ethnogenesis is not a word I had been aware of, but it is such an obvious and intriguing concept, the invention of a nationality and the myths to support it, the common ancestry and the divinely favored dynasty, etc. One can see it at work from the very beginnings of Rome, in the legend of a city formed by free men, refugees, bandits seeking out an altar that liberated them and allowed them to join the new state, and on a recent visit to Turkey, I began to study Ataturk's far-ranging experiment to "invent" a Turkish citizenry - was he a Clovis or a Theodoric? It seems the former.

The one footstep in your overall analysis that puzzled me was in understanding how the proto-Slavic nations could have become so very widespread (Novgorod to Macedon) while still speaking so comparatively similar a range of tongues (compared to, say, the dispersal of Germanic or Romance languages, which are far more distinct from each other) without some coherent invasion from a coherent entity. The separation of the Slavs by the Avar entity is perfectly clear, but this part puzzles me. That is one question I wished to ask you.

Another question, which you may not have given much thought to (it being a mere thousand years out of your period, and a thousand miles from Europe), but which intrigues me (as a Jew), is how the process of ethnogenesis that you outline might account for the "state history" and racial legends recorded in the books of Genesis, Exodus, Judges, Samuel and Kings - a tale that, in its first chapters, has no contemporary written and very little archaeological backing, and in its later (post-Davidic) chronicle shows clear signs of creative tampering and ethnic myth-making of just the sort you record for the Franks, the Goths, and so on.

A minor but semi-professional point, if the book is reprinted (I hope it will become very well known, and taught, and taken into consideration by students of the period), is that whoever copy edited/proofread the hardcover edition I have read (2002, Princeton) was careless to the point of annoyance about the spelling of unfamiliar names, Slovene becoming Slovine, for example, and Breton indistinguishable from Briton. I'd be delighted to send you my list of errata!

With great admiration and pleasure,

John Yohalem

The Wheel of Dates

It's a wheel in my head. It spins and you insert a date. The date should be four numbers, and the first one should be 1, though leaving it blank will also (usualy) work. It works best for CE, but there is a certain general sense in which it works for BCE.

I had no idea it was in place, though I put it in place myself over long years. It was much harder to install than a piece of software in my computer (installing software in my body ... well, that's a discussion for someone else's blog, isn't it?), but also a great deal more fun or I'd never have done it, would I?

Any year, and I will tell you roughly (stress that) who was alive and what was going on anyplace on earth, focus especially on Europe. Certain places remain dark to me, but I'm always eager to add more facts. I tend to remember things in their proper order, too. At my present age, I am having senior moments, but not so many about previous centuries as I do about this one. My specialty is political history, but I am pretty competent on military history and artistic-literary history as well. Musical history does not begin until the invention of musical notation (twelfth century, Italy? yes, Virginia, there are things dead white European males did do better than any other civilization, and notating music so that we can recover a lot of tunes from five or seven or nine hundred years ago is one of them), but I can give you a decent proximate timeline on that from 1600 to 1950. Don't ask me which year which band produced which top hit in the last thirty years because I probably never heard of the stuff (actually, I have, but did not pay attention to which group did which song). Am I into eighties music? someone asked me. I said: 1680s or 1780s?

This wheel gives me great pleasure and it was quite some time before I realized most people have nothing of the sort. (Too busy dancing to Top Forty or collecting football stats or making money or raising children or doing something else pointless.) When I look at a painting or a building or listen to a tune, I have a context to put it in - which does keep me a handsbreadth from just reacting to the thing as art (I yield - and deplore - the point), but does allow me to make connections that help me understand my reactions, or understand the artist. The point of art, I have always believed, is to communicate with others, and when I look at old art (or read it, or listen to it),, I am trying to open my satellite dish to the transmitter be s/he ever so anonymous or long dead. I want to share the joke, which is easy with jolly sorts like the anonymous sculptors of Romanesque cloisters, or composers like Rossini or Mozart, but can be tough with austere types like Mimar Sinan (the Ottoman architect) or George Eliot.

Go ahead, pick a year, pick a country. 1375, Sweden. The king was Albrecht of Mecklenburg (I think), to the great resentment of the Swedes, who ended up deposing him, besieging him and his German troops in Stockholm (a German city at the time) and offering their crown to Margarethe, the Danish regent of Denmark and Norway, in 1387. The greatest power in the Baltic was the Hanseatic League, a band of mostly German merchant cities (often in non-German places, like Bergen and Riga and Danzig and Tallinn, but based on Hamburg, Bremen and Lubeck), grown rich on the furs and lumber and grain and nautical supplies of the sea, which they exported to the entire continent. The local nationalities were thus under outside control and resented it; this ended in 1397, when the three Nordic monarchies were united by Margarethe under the nominal rule of her grandnephew, Erik of Pomerania. (Not a Scand, but at least not a German either.) This lasted until 1523, sort of - then Sweden dropped out (taking Finland with her. The Union of Kalmar was a great success in its way, as it was strong enough to hold off the Germans in the Baltic and allowed the Danes and Swedes, at any rate, to have local cultural development properly - but it was a bumpy sort of deal, sometimes with separate monarchs who still subscribed to the "union." The lessons of its breakdown should probably be studied more carefully by the EU in Brussels than, I fear, they are.
The Hansa never recovered from the Reformation, which hit Germany hard after 1517 - suddenly there were reasons other than national or mercantile for groups to stick together.

Do you want to know WHY Albrecht of Mecklenburg was King of Sweden? I'm so glad you asked. His mother was Euphemia, sister of King Magnus Smek (the word means a slobbery sort of kiss and there's a great story there, as usual), whose sons were Erik XIII of Sweden (o.s.p.) and Haakon VI of Norway (married to Margarethe of Denmark, vide supra; their son was Olav IV of Norway and Denmark, who died at the age of 17. Women could not legally reign in any of these countries, but Margarethe just kept on ruling anyway until her death in 1412, and the present Danish sovereign is named Margarethe II in her honor).

Of the other kings who were about just then, my favorites are Gedyminas of Lithuania and Pedro the Ceremonious of Aragon-Catalunya, the latter simply because of his cool nickname. There's a story about it. Go ahead: ask. (Charles the Bad was king of Navarre - or had he been succeeded by his spoilsport son, Charles the Noble?. You don't get many kings called "the Bad," and he did deserve it. Go ahead: ask.) (The Holy Roman Emperor was Charles IV of Luxembourg, who is fondly remembered in Prague if nowhere else. Historians like him because he was an intellectual and wrote an autobiography. Very few medieval monarchs did.) (The king of France was Charles V the Wise, one of the two Valois kings with any political sense. The tyrants of Milan and Pavia were the brothers Bernabo and Galeazzo Visconti;. The tyrant of Ferrara was wicked Marquis Niccolo d'Este, famous for murdering his bastard son and his second wife who were making eyes at each other. The pope - I think - was Gregory XI, who returned from Avignon to Rome. Not at all sure about that.)

(When figuring out which pope reigned when, it is generally reliable rule that the numbers increase as time passes. I cling to that. So if you know Gregory IX was the bane of Emperor Frederick II, who reigned in the 13th century, you can be pretty sure any later Gregory had a larger number. I cling to that.)

I'm not making all this up, you know. And I did just pick a date out of thin air.

That was dry, wasn't it? It's livelier when I have you in person and you want to know (my friend Doug rings me up and says, "Yohopedia?") why the Iconoclasts in Constantinople upset the pope so much that he crowned Chalemagne emperor or something like that. I've got a million of 'em. Literally. It's especially good if I've been to the site of events (Istanbul, Ferrara, Prague) and can tie things in that way, with architecture and painting and why this building exists and that one doesn't.

I am always putting more reasons in for things that happened, from books, from research, from lectures, from deductions of my own. "Simple explanations are for simple minds - I've no use for either." - Joe Orton (True, he puts this line into the mouth of a maniac, but it still has relevance)

I'm in Vancouver now and it's raining so I can't ride my bike in Stanley Park and see how much is left, but I was sort of in the mood to work on my novel anyway. Back in New York on the tenth. Not looking forward to that. There are mice in my storage closet, yclept The Gulag. Any advice for getting rid of the smell will be appreciated. I can get rid of the mice okay, but the smell is problematic.