Fritz Jennings, Poet Laureate of Ethnohistory

 

I had the privilege of meeting Francis Jennings - "Fritz" to his friends - at a party hosted by two of my doctoral advisors in 1996. Our conversation touched on such matters as Bernard Bailyn's late-career discovery that Native Americans existed (this counted as news among ethnohistorians) and Jennings's then-new book on Benjamin Franklin, which proved (IMHO) one of the better biographies of the man. I regret that I did not get to repeat the experience; Fritz entered managed care a year or two later and died in 2000.

Jennings was best known as a scholar and historical writer, but he made at least one foray into poetry. The advisors who hosted the aforementioned get-together, Mike Green and Theda Perdue, had previously co-directed with Jennings an ethnohistorical seminar at UNC Chapel Hill. The seminar seems to have generated some heated methodological arguments between historians and anthropologists, which Jennings finally commemorated in verse:

 

Of ages seminarish, I sing my plaintive lay

When the Anthros and the Histos went forth in great array

To battle fierce on issues large, resolved to clear the mystery:

"Historical anthropology," or merely "ethnohistory"?

 

As ever with each other, the Anthros' fight was bitter

Until the Histos hove in view and at the sight did titter;

Then closed the Anthro ranks, and soon against the foe

Their armament of jargon for bafflement did snow.

 

Upstreaming fast, they flanked the line. A fog enveloped all

While emic-etic bombadiers strafed hard the awful brawl.

"They're in the field!" howled Histos. "We cannot follow there."  

They ran and hid in archives deep -- dense darkness in their lair.

"The fight's not fair," the Histos growled, "we dare not come to grips."

"For if we do, the chronicheit will spread to cripple quips.

"We'll document with dates and data until they beg for ruth."

And so they fought until the field was littered with the truth.

It was a famous victory at the setting of the sun.

The only issue unresolved remained the rude, "Who won?"

It won't make the Norton Anthology, but it is a far better thing than I have managed for any of my own classes.

No Amount of Praise Is Ever Enough

 

Longtime fans of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight will recall his episode (12 Aug. 2019) on Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, the incumbent autocrat of Turkmenistan. President Berdimuhamedov’s egotism and eccentricities - including his single-minded love of horses -  and his cavalier attitude (cough) toward civil liberties seem fairly typical of post-Soviet dictators. What Oliver failed to capture in his segment was the modesty and transparency of Mr. Berdimuhamidov’s regime when compared to that of his predecessor, Saparmurat Niyazov, alias Turkmenbashi. At some point in his career, someone must have handed Comrade Niyazov a biography of Caligula and challenged him to outdo the mad emperor in sheer dictatorial excess. Turkmenbashi did so. During his fifteen-year reign (1991-2006), the Autocrat of All the Turkmen made these contributions to the annals of megalomania:

 

1 Added “the Great” to his official name, and claimed descent from Alexander (an early member of the Great family) and Muhammed.

2 Emblazoned his portrait on all the nation’s currency and in the top corner of every state television broadcast.

3 Renamed the months of the year after members of his family.

4 Outlawed all institutions and practices that he considered detrimental to the spiritual health of the Turkmen people, or just offensive to him personally, e.g. circuses, ballet, Internet cafes, long hair on men, and makeup on TV actors.

5 Wrote* a national bestseller, Ruhnama, The Book of Wisdom, an encomium to the Turkmen and their Father, Turkmenbashi. The Ruhnama became the subject of a giant monument in Turkmenistan’s capital, the principal text used in high school and college classes - replacing such inferior subjects as the humanities - and an obligatory text in mosques. Driving tests, too.

6 Financed his expensive remaking of the capital city, Ashgabat, by firing 110,000 teachers and health workers.

 

Turkmenbashi wishes you Bon Voyage!

Most of these policies were ended by Turkmenbashi’s dentist and successor, the aforementioned Gurbanguli Berdimuhamedov. The new president continued Niyazov’s suppression of dissent and imprisonment of political rivals; modern Turkmenistan has won no accolades from Amnesty International, and it rivals North Korea in its attitude toward press freedom. Still, in an age when many of us can only look forward to the next dictator, it is comforting to know that some dictators are less chaotic and vicious than others.

 

* They always write a book, these dictators. Mussolini even wrote a romance novel, The Cardinal's Mistress (1910). I understand its obscurity is not entirely undeserved.

 

 

Source:  Erika Fatland, Sovietistan (Pegasus, 2021), 48-56.

Winter, and the Wolf

Modern climate scientists remain uncertain about the cause of the Great Frost, an exceptionally severe and deadly winter that afflicted Europe in 1709. Their educated guesses point to volcanic eruptions elsewhere in Eurasia, reduced solar activity, and a deepening of the contemporaneous Little Ice Age. About the season’s severity one cannot doubt. In France, crops failed, livestock perished, and trees exploded from frost. The coasts of Italy froze, trapping unsuspecting sailors and binding Venice to terra firma. In the northeast, the Baltic Sea remained a solid highway of ice until April. Throughout the continent, one million people died of exposure and starvation before the year was out. No one who survived had ever seen anything like it, the coldest winter in five hundred years.

Not your usual winter in Venice. (Le Lagon Gelee, Wikimedia)

The monumentally brutal weather and subsequent famine did not help France’s financial and military fortunes in the ongoing War of the Spanish Succession. It certainly contributed to the decisive defeat of Swedish forces in the Great Northern War. Charles XII of Sweden, until then undefeated, set himself against an unconquerable adversary when he chose to winter over in Ukraine. Thousands of Charles’s troops died of cold, and many more succumbed to starvation thanks to Tsar Peter’s methodical despoliation of his own countryside. When the main armies met at Poltava that July, a well-rested and well-fortified Russian force faced a drastically weakened Swedish one.* The Swedes put up a good fight for several hours, but eventually their battle lines buckled and split, and Russian infantry fell upon and destroyed them.

Poltava gold medal (1709), via coinsweekly.com

Charles lost 9,000 men, his dreams of imperial glory, and very nearly his throne. He fled to Moldavia, then a Turkish protectorate, and did not return home until 1715. The Swedish king's loss did not, however, become the Russian monarch's immediate gain. Peter decided to pursue his adversary into Ottoman territory, forgetting that offensive warfare is particularly risky in a place and time when roads were scarce, supplies ruinously expensive, and soldiers a wasting asset. Voltaire believed that the tsar had "too poor an opinion of his [new] enemy," and that enemy would eventually correct him: a Turkish army under Balaci Mehmet Pasa managed to capture Tsar Peter and his troops at the Battle of Stanilesti (22 July 1711). The Turkish government obliged Russia to sign a treaty surrendering the port of Azov and destroying several border forts. Perhaps the Ottomans could extracted better terms, but their officials seem to have realized what Peter did not, that human fortunes could prove as fickle as the weather, and one would do best not to follow Charles and Peter along the paths of hubris.

What of those too humble to merit the verbiage of Classical tragedy, the French peasants who starved in the countryside, the Prussian widows who froze to death in their cottages, the Swedish soldiers who sickened in their camps or bled out on the battlefield? The sovereigns who fought the Great Northern War built monuments to the Battle of Poltava and its fallen, who had traded their lives for a tiny share of glory. The civilian dead of the Great Frost and famine got at most a burial entry in a parish record. The cheapness and anonymity of their lives the annalists of the eighteenth century took for granted. The revolutions that ended the era had many goals, but one of them was, perhaps inevitably, the re-valuing of those humble lives and the giving of names to the nameless.          

Sources:

Jeremy Black, Warfare in the Eighteenth Century (Smithsonian Books, 1999), 164-63; Stephanie Pain, "1709: The Year Europe Froze," New Scientist, 7 Feb. 2009; Voltaire, History of Charles XII, King of Sweden, trans. Winifred Todhunter (E.P. Dutton, 1908), quote p. 215.



* The Swedes also had a significant disadvantage in artillery: they had only four field guns to the Russians’ 100.

An End-of-Year Scrapbook

As the year draws to a close, I offer here a few anecdotes and observations that caught my attention from 2019's reading. Some may form the basis of future blog posts. I hope the rest prove as interesting (or startling) to my readers as to me.

Ashoka at Ramagrama, courtesy of Photo Dharma, Thailand

On the transmission of knowledge between Hellenistic Greece and India: Ashoka, the founder of the Mauryan dynasty, knew a fair amount about the “Yona” (Ionians, i.e., Greeks) living to his west and sent Buddhist missionaries to convert the subjects of “Antiyoho…and Turumaye” (Antiochus and Ptolomy). Apparently, they met with little success. Perhaps a fan of Harry Turtledove's could turn this episode into an alt-history tale. (Peter Thonemann, The Hellenistic Age: A Very Short Introduction (2018), p. 74.)

On live-action Dungeons and Dragons in the Middle Ages: To defend their subjects in southern Anatolia from Arab raiders, the Byzantines in the ninth and tenth centuries built “vast subterranean citadels” in which fleeing peasants could take refuge. These they carved into the soft rock in the vicinity of modern Cappadocia. (Peter Sarris, The Byzantines: A Very Short Introduction (2015), pp. 69-70.)

On bling: Like the modern Hmong, the medieval Norse literally wore their money. When purchasing goods, they would cut pieces off of the silver collars and arm bands they wore, and merchants would then weigh the “cash” they had received to determine its value. Archaeologists have found these merchants’ weights in sites from tenth-century Ireland, among other places. (Fintan O’Toole, A History of Ireland in 100 Objects (2013). ch. 37.)
 

Drogheda Massacre (1651), courtesy of Wikimedia.

On making Ireland less attractive to tourists: After Oliver Cromwell’s scorched-earth campaign of 1651-52, a traveler in Ireland observed that “You may ride twenty miles and scarce discern any thing…but dead men hanging on trees and gibbets.” (ibid, ch, 63.) Unpleasant fellow, that Cromwell.

On Tsar’s Alexander’s misunderstanding of the relationship between autocracy and popular ignorance: During an 1814 visit to England, Alexander I of Russia saw a display of the new “Lancastrian” method of education, whereby older students helped train newer and younger students. He was sufficiently impressed that he opened a Lancastrian school for Russian soldiers billeted in France. It proved very effective. So began a slow but dangerous climb in Russian literacy rates. (Christine Haynes, Our Friends the Enemies: The Occupation of France after Napoleon (2018), ch. 6.)

Roughly, "Shut up and win the war."

On Spanish antecedents to famous English novels: During the Civil War in Spain, George Orwell likely saw a Spanish communist poster “emblazoned with the image of a boot stamping ‘on all who resist forever.’” (D.J. Taylor, On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (2019), p. 38.)

**

Happy holidays to all.