Confucius (c. 551-479 BCE)
“[A gentleman] does not grieve that people do not recognize his merits; he grieves at his own incapacities.”
- The Analects of Confucius (Book XIV, section 32) translated by Arthur Waley (Vintage Books, 1989).
Confucius
The Succession War Over The Bishopric Of Uzès
In the year 581, Bishop Ferreolus of Uzès died, creating a power vacuum that would lead to a succession crisis. Various candidates were put forth to lead the bishopric, with the locals of Uzès, the clergy, and the monarchy all favoring different people for the job. The locals, or more particularly the local government, made the first move. They put an ex-governor of Provence, by the name of Albinus, in command of the bishopric, presumably with the consent of the local clergy. The monarchy, however, was not at all happy at being cut out of the conversation and, therefore, sent another candidate, named Jovinus, to usurp power in the bishopric from Albinus. In case the people and government resisted this new candidate, the monarchy put Jovinus in command of an army.
As it happened, Albinus died that very year in 581, only three months after he had been proposed for office by the local government of Uzès. Despite the loss of this candidate, the regional powers in Uzès still did not want their bishopric to be ruled by Jovinus. Therefore, the clergy and the local government rushed through another candidate, a certain deacon named Marcellus, and consecrated him as their bishop before Jovinus arrived in the vicinity with his army.
According to the writings of Bishop Gregory of Tours (c. 539-594), Uzès became quite a tense place when Jovenus arrived and found another bishop firmly entrenched in the city. A confrontation ensued, and when Marcellus refused to give way, Jovinus brought his borrowed army into play and besieged the city. Uzès seemed to completely side with Marcellus, however, and its garrisons and local forces were willing to fight to keep their chosen bishop in power. Now that Marcellus had his own army manning the defenses of Uzès, the siege ground to a standstill. According to Gregory of Tours, Jovinus eventually became disillusioned with his mission and, after taking a bribe, admitted defeat to Marcellus and relinquished any claim to the bishopric of Uzès.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Bishop Absalon at Arkona, painted by Laurits Tuxen (1853–1927), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
Sources:
- The History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, translated by Lewis Thorpe. New York: Penguin Classics, 1971.
- https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/ferreolus-uzes-st
Saint Teresa of Avila
Saint Teresa of Avila (c. 1515-1582)
“My head sounds just as if it were full of brimming rivers, and then as if all the water in those rivers came suddenly rushing downward; and a host of little birds seem to be whistling, not in the ears, but in the upper part of the head, where the higher part of the soul is said to be.”
- From Interior Castle (Fourth Mansions, chapter I) by St. Teresa of Avila, translated by E. Allison Peers (Dover Publications, 2007).
Saint Olaf Carved His Own Figurehead For His Flagship
Around 1016, King Olaf II (Saint Olaf, r. 1015-1028) of Norway pulled together a fleet in preparation for the upcoming sea battle of Nesjar against his rival, Jarl Sweyn Hákonsson. It was a modest armada, reportedly numbering only seven or eight ships at the beginning, of which only three could be classified as warships. Before the day of the battle, Saint Olaf would recruit more ships and crews, yet his force was said to have still remained far fewer than that of Jarl Sweyn. What Olaf’s force lacked in quantity, it made up for in quality—before barging into Norwegian politics, Olaf had spent years as a Viking, giving him ample battle experience and enough treasure to equip his most trusted men with the day’s latest armors and weaponry. As such, even though Saint Olaf’s fleet in 1016 was not the largest sea force in the north, it was still a formidable fleet that Olaf was proud to call his own.
With the fleet formed, Olaf picked out which vessel was to be his flagship, but no ship, especially a flagship, could be complete without a figurehead adorning the prow. In this regard, Saint Olaf reportedly decided to give the ship a personal touch. Instead of commissioning an artisan, Saint Olaf was said to have procured a set of woodworking tools for himself and promptly set about carving his ideal figurehead with his own hands. The historian Snorri Sturluson (c. 1179-1241), claimed that Olaf “was skilled and had a sure eye for all kinds of handicraft work,” so the final product must have been an admirable piece of art (Heimskringla, Saint Olaf’s Saga, 3). Interestingly, out of all the fearsome creatures he could have chosen to depict, the king decided to adorn his prow with a simple kingly head. When the figurehead was complete, Saint Olaf gave his flagship the unimaginative name of Man’s Head. The regal wooden visage apparently became the next big ship-fashion trend, and, before long, other chieftains put in orders for their own ships to be decorated with various wooden faces. Nevertheless, Olaf’s nautical tastes would eventually change. He later had a new flagship built, which he called the Vísund (or the Bison).
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Construction of longships, painted by Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
Sources:
- Heimskringla, by Snorri Sturluson and translated by Lee Hollander. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964, 2018.
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/religion
- https://avaldsnes.info/en/informasjon/olav-den-hellige/
- https://weaponsandwarfare.com/2018/12/03/the-battle-of-nesjar/
- https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100229885
Montezuma II’s Apartments Of Amusing Persons
In its heyday, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) was a huge and beautiful place, featuring wide causeways, bustling markets and navigable canals. For the Aztec rulers, the city was also a land of many amusements. Montezuma II, the first Aztec emperor who had the misfortune of meeting Europeans, devoted great amounts of resources to collecting and maintaining items, creatures and people that he found entertaining. Several villas and palaces, located both in and outside of Tenochtitlan, were reportedly used to house the Aztec emperor’s collection of oddities. From birds, to snakes, or weapons and armors, the emperor had space set aside for all sorts of animate and inanimate interests—including certain kinds of humans.
Hernán Cortés, in a letter to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1520, mentioned a “palace that contained a number of men and women of monstrous size, and also dwarfs, and crooked and ill-formed persons, each of which had their separate apartments” (Second Letter to Charles V, 1520). Each apartment had its own care team, tasked with seeing to the needs of those who were housed in the building. The residents of the apartments were brought out as entertainers when Hernán Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan. The Spaniards likened the role these people played in Montezuma’s feasts as something akin to the jesters back in Europe.
In a different palace, where Montezuma kept his huge collection of birds, the Aztec emperor also housed another type of people who caught his interest—albinos. At that bird-adjacent apartment, wrote Cortés, “are men, women and children, whose faces, bodies, hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes are white from their birth” (Second Letter to Charles V, 1520). In his letter, Cortés was not explicit about the care given to these people, but the birds, alone, had a crew of reportedly over 300 Aztec keepers.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Map of Tenochtitlan, printed 1524 in Nuremberg, Germany, [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
Sources:
- The Conquest of New Spain by Bernal Díaz, translated by J. M. Cohen. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.
- https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1520cortes.asp (Cortes’ Second Letter)
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Montezuma-II
- https://www.biography.com/political-figure/montezuma-ii
The Bizarre Death Of King Pyrrhus
Pyrrhus of Epirus is a bizarre figure to study. His was a very human character—a chaotic mix of short-term mastery and long-term flaws. Pyrrhus was the type of political schemer who knew how to pit his foes against each other, yet he could never quite deliver the final masterstroke. In his generalship, Pyrrhus could win battles with awe-inspiring military innovation and strategy, yet still lose the overall war. Not even Pyrrhus’s death was free of a certain sense of peculiarity. In fact, the way King Pyrrhus died may have been the most bizarre event of his life.
King Pyrrhus (r. 306-272 BCE) thrived in the political chaos brought about by the death of Alexander the Great. He came to power in a time when the late Alexander’s generals and their successors were fighting amongst themselves for different pieces of the lands that Alexander had conquered. From his seat of power in Epirus, King Pyrrhus was able to grow his domain by taking advantage of the Kingdom of Macedonia’s conflicts with the other splinters of Alexander’s empire. Yet, Pyrrhus’ greatest fame (or infamy) would come when he sailed with an army over to Italy in 280 BCE, intending to attack both Rome and Carthage. He won several ‘Pyrrhic victories’ there, which were so costly and indecisive that the victories did little to help his war effort. By 275 BCE, his Pyrrhic victories had become true defeats, and he finally decided to withdraw back to Greece.
King Pyrrhus’s death came in 272 BCE. That year, he was campaigning in the Peloponnesus as a result of his ongoing meddling in Macedonian politics. This campaign brought King Pyrrhus to Argos, which would be the last place on earth that the king would see. As the story goes, while King Pyrrhus was fighting in the city streets, he was attacked by an odd weapon, hurled by an even more unusual assailant. The mighty King Pyrrhus was reportedly cracked across the head by a soaring roof tile, supposedly thrown by an old Argive woman. Details of his final moments vary—some say the old woman killed him with the tile, while others say she just dazed the king long enough for warriors on the street to finish him off. Either way, it was a fittingly odd death for the strange life of King Pyrrhus.
Written by C. Keith Hansley
Picture Attribution: (Scene from the life of Pyrrhus, by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
Sources:
- The Beginnings of Rome by T. J. Cornell. New York: Routledge, 1995.
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pyrrhus
- https://www.ancient.eu/pyrrhus/
- https://www.livius.org/articles/person/pyrrhus-of-epirus/pyrrhus-3/
- https://www.ancient.eu/Wars_of_the_Diadochi/
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342-1400)
“You’re wearying me
to death, I say, with your illiterate stuff.
God bless my soul! I’ve had about enough.
My ears are aching from your frowsty story!
The devil take such rhymes! They’re purgatory!”
- The Canterbury Tales (Host’s interruption of the Tale of Sir Topaz) by Geoffrey Chaucer, translated to modern English by Nevill Coghill (Penguin Classics, 2003).
The Tale Of King Rodolf’s Oblivious Defeat
A clash between the Lombards and the Heruli occurred sometime between the years 494 and 508 in the middle Danube region. The conflict was noticed by scholarly circles in Constantinople, and the historian Procopius (c. 490-565) made mention of it in his History of the Wars. In addition to Procopius, the Lombard traditional account of the war would later be preserved by Paul the Deacon (c. 720-799) in his History of the Lombards. Both sources detailed the same general outline and outcome in describing the conflict, yet their proposed reasoning for the war and their accounts of the resulting battle differed widely.
In the folkloric account of Paul the Deacon—the more entertaining, but likely less historical version of the story—the conflict between the Lombards and Heruli began with an argument between a man and a woman. According to the tale, Rumetruda, an outspoken daughter of King Tato of the Lombards, decided to invite the brother of King Rodolf of the Heruli over for a drinking party. At the time, the Heruli were a populous and powerful people, known for their military prowess. This reputation for power and might apparently gave Rumetruda a faulty preconception of what a Heruli man looked like. Therefore, when her guest turned out to be quite a short and scrawny fellow, the talkative Rumetruda openly began to belittle the Heruli nobleman. In turn, the outraged guest returned fire at the Lombard princess by criticizing her own looks and behavior. As might be guessed, the drinking party did not turn out well, and, before the end of the event, the Heruli king’s brother was eventually murdered at the instigation of the wrathful Rumetruda. Paul the Deacon claimed that this alleged murder was the cause of the war between the Heruli and the Lombards between 494 and 508, as King Rodolf supposedly attacked the Lombards as soon as he discovered that his brother had been killed.
Paul the Deacon’s account of the war, itself, was as quirky as his account of the war’s origin. In the History of the Lombards, King Rodolf of the Heruli was presented as an incredibly lazy and arrogant king. As had happened with Princess Rumetruda, he placed too much stock on the reputation of might and power that the Heruli people had cultivated. Therefore, when the forces of the Heruli and the Lombards finally clashed in a full-scale battle, King Rodolf was said to have let his army go off without its leader, as it was inconceivable that the renowned Heruli would lose the battle. Instead, according to the tale, King Rodolf chose to stay at his camp and play games with his aides. He did, however, place one observer in a tree, where the person could watch the ongoing battle. Yet, this scout was commanded to only report good news about the fight—negative news, according to the tale, was punishable by death.
As readers may be expecting, this blind confidence and obliviousness did not turn out well for King Rodolf. While the leader of the Heruli supposedly played games in his camp, King Tato of the Lombards personally led his troops on the battlefield and managed the ebb and flow of the fighting masterfully. As the Heruli lines began to bend and break, the scout in the tree continued to call down for his liege a fictitious and glowing account of how the Heruli army was performing. It was only when the Heruli forces were shattered and the Lombards were charging for King Rodolf’s camp that the scout brought himself to tell the king that the battle had been lost. Through indecision or last-minute bravery, King Rodolf reportedly decided to stand his ground in the camp, dying in battle against the victorious Lombards.
In contrast to Lombard tradition, the historian Procopius toned down the drama in his own account of the war between the Lombards and the Heruli. Like Paul the Deacon, Procopius agreed that the Heruli declared war on the Lombards—yet, instead of a scandalous murder being the cause of the conflict, Procopius claimed that King Rodolf simply declared the war to appease his warmongering warriors and to prove his own mettle in battle. The King Rodolf of Procopius’ account did not wait until the end of the battle to stand his ground against the Lombards; instead, Procopius claimed that Rodolf led his forces from the very beginning. Nevertheless, the two accounts end the same way, with the Heruli defeated and King Rodolf lying dead on the battlefield.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture Attribution: (Battle of Stamford Bridge painted by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831–1892), [Public Domain] via Creative Commons).
Sources:
- History of the Lombards by Paul the Deacon, translated by William Dudley Foulke (c. 1904). University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907, 1974, 2003.
- History of the Wars by Procopius, translated by H. B. Dewing. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1919.
- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Heruli
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Procopius-Byzantine-historian
Thucydides
Thucydides (c. 460-400 BCE)
“It is more disgraceful, at least for those who have a name to lose, to gain one’s ends by deceit which pretends to be morality than by open violence.”
- From a speech attributed to Brasidas in the History of the Peloponnesian War (Book IV, section 86) by Thucydides, translated by Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1972).
