The Histories on My Shelf
27 April 2009, 3:15 p.m.
49°17' 28.4" N, +8°36' 8.8" E
Well, I’m getting a little more comfortable driving the Zafira down the autobahn. I just saw a sign for a place called “Spanferkel.” Or maybe it’s a thing, not a place, a thing you can find somewhere around here....
Maybe I’ll look it up later, when I’m not driving, and my phone isn’t busy being a GPS, and this minivan isn’t stuck in “quiet time” and the driver, the one who is generously paying for all the transportation costs out of his own pocket, is allowed to maybe ask a question or two!
You know something, this is not at all what I expected this journey would be like.
So what was I expecting?
And that question leads me not to an answer, but to my “Canossa shelf,” as I call it, the one-fifth of a bookcase in my apartment back home where I keep all the books and media I’ve acquired in the last couple of months as I prepared for this journey.
Last night, for example, I watched Enrico IV by Luigi Pirandello, starring Marcello Mastroianni and freely adapted and directed by Marco Bellocchio, whom I had never heard of, although according to the IMDB he has a long list of director credits....
Wait a minute. That wasn’t last night—that must have been two nights ago, if you count that night over the Atlantic, those foreshortened hours of fitful half-sleep. Well, it was the last night that counts for me, the last time I slept in a bed.
So that night, Saturday night, two nights ago by the calendar, last night according to my biorhythms, I watched the movie of Enrico IV and then put the DVD on the right end of the shelf, almost all the way over. I put it next to Tom Stoppard’s translation of the same play, which is called Pirandello’s Henry IV—I suppose that’s to help the book-buyer or theatre-goer tell this Henry IV apart from all the other Henry IVs that float around in our historical and literary memory. The last time I checked, by the way, the disambiguation page on Wikipedia listed 15 rulers named Henry IV, 15 guys with that name and numeral—let’s see if I remember—one Holy Roman Emperor, three kings, six dukes, two burgraves, one count, one prince and one Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. I might be off by a burgrave or two, whatever those are. I tried to learn the list by heart, at least the aggregate summary, because as I was planning this trip everyone I talked to kept getting mixed up about just which Henry was going to be involved.
Now, the biggest sources of confusion are, of course, the other kings. For example, we speakers of English, when we hear “Henry IV,” usually think first of the Henry who gave his name to two plays by Shakespeare, which are really about his son, the future Henry V, about the Prince Hal who is either squandering his youth or growing into greatness in the company of Sir John Falstaff. Of course the reigning monarch, that would be the English Henry IV, did get a lot of stage time in those plays—as I vaguely recall from a BBC video, he’s the central character in all those boring blank-verse scenes where some minor knight interrupts with news of some offstage battle—the high-minded political scenes that alternate with the low physical comedy and incomprehensible insults that Falstaff and Hal exchange while drinking in Mistress Quickly’s tavern, the scenes we all wait for, even if we don’t get all the jokes, if the right actor is playing Falstaff.
Now for continental Europeans, I get the impression that their default Henry IV is a different king—in fact, this particular confusion happens to a character in Pirandello’s play—it’s Henry of Navarre, the moderate Protestant who switched to Catholicism to take the throne of France in 1594, pissing off all the extremists of both sides during his life but who became, after his death, a hero to moderates everywhere, if we moderates can be said to have heroes.
And we can’t forget Henry IV of Castile, Isabella’s older half brother and predecessor, a big athletic guy with a broken nose but politically weak and seriously turned off by his wife, his cousin Blanche of Navarre, a marriage that was eventually annulled on the grounds of sexual dysfunction caused by some kind of spell or curse. Not much of a king, but what a great situation for a telenovela: a big macho guy who is either gay or addicted to brothels or drugs or something—incestuous marriages being arranged or defiled on a daily basis—an inquisition into an unconsummated matrimony—witchcraft, lots of witchcraft—and a clever little sister who will soon grow up to be half of the top power couple of 1492, maybe the greatest power couple of all time, Ferdinand and Isabella. I figure that we’re going to see Henry the Impotent on the Encore!!! Network sometime very soon.
And then there’s our Henry. I mean the Henry who is Bertha’s husband, Conrad’s father, and the principal subject of the writings of Lambert and Bruno—and, I guess, now of my own, if you can call this writing. So anyway our Henry, the one who’s out there on a motorcycle someplace, I mean the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of the Romans, the King of Italy, and the King of Burgundy, that Henry—well, he has the distinction of being at the top of the chronological list: the first Henry (or Enrique or Heinrich or Enrico or Henri) to have the Roman numeral IV attached to his name. Of course those numerals got attached later on, so in the 11th century you would just say “King Henry” or “the Emperor” and everyone would assume you just meant “the one who is alive now.”
Anyway, Pirandello’s play isn’t really about Henry and his trip to Canossa as such, but instead it’s about an Italian nobleman who thinks he’s Henry, or at least acts that way, because twenty years before he was riding in a carnival pageant when he fell off a horse and banged his head on a rock, and ever since that accident he has been forcing everyone around him to act out a goofy costume drama. It’s basically a cosplay game, which I guess was a hobby only the very rich could afford in the early 20th century. For this guy, this madman, the life of Henry IV and what happened at Canossa provides a juicy set of characters ready for role-playing. The role he’s picked for himself is Henry, the German king who has come to Italy to beg forgiveness from the Pope, and the other big role, the romantic lead, you might say, is Matilda, his beautiful Italian cousin, the ally of the Pope and the leader of the papal armies. But of course Matilda is a lot more than just an opposing general. She’s the real object—in this story, anyway—of Henry’s quest. Pirandello’s madman—or his fake madman, it’s kind of complicated—still has a crush, after all these years, on the woman he has cast to play Matilda of Canossa.
Several characters feel obligated to point out that there’s no historical evidence of any romantic or sexual goings-on between the original Henry and the original Matilda, and of course those characters are right—there’s absolutely no evidence. But I still think that Pirandello is on to something—after all these centuries (800 plus years in Pirandello’s case, more than 900 in mine) the sexual tension between Henry and Matilda is part of the story. Or at least, part of the fascination. Let’s see, Matilda was four years older than Henry…. Did they ever? In some castle when they were kids? Would they ever, if they had the chance? I think that’s something that anyone with even a moderate level of sexual curiosity starts wondering when you read a few books about what happened at Canossa.
So I put the DVD and the book by Stoppard and Pirandello about seven-eighths of the way over, almost all the way toward the right end of my Canossa shelf, next to the DVD boxed set of The Meek Shall Inherit, you know, that Encore!!! Network telenovela about Bertha of Savoy, the one that stayed pretty much historically accurate until it got to the end of the first season—spoiler alert—the decapitation scene. Because of that season finale—well, yeah, and then the entire rest of the show, in which Bertha becomes Bertha the Great, the first Holy Roman Empress to really rule—that I decided to place The Meek Shall Inherit on the right end of my shelf.
You see, my shelf is ordered, left to right, roughly on a scale of scholarly respectability. Trustworthy, reliable, and well-researched on the left end and outrageous, outlandish, and unfettered on the right. (If you want to see a correspondence with a certain political spectrum, that’s your problem—my system began with me putting the more believable books closer to my reading chair, even though I’d often end up reaching for more entertaining stuff at the other end.)
The left end starts with books that are Well-Researched but Boring (the kind where the footnotes are more interesting than the text, like a certain standard biography of Henry, of which I will say no more), then there’s Stylishly-Written Surveys of the 11th Century (several appeared in the early 2000s, inspired, I suppose, by parallels with Y2K and 9/11), then the Good Stories (pretty slim pickings, except for a feminist biography of Hildegard of Bingen), then the Completely Unreliable Narratives (like The Song of Henry, that fake medieval poem, or Warrior, Daughter, Saint, the ultra-Catholic version of Matilda’s life, aimed at pre-teen girls, two books which occupy opposite poles of the continuum of reactionary opinion that seems to attach itself to Canossa, with macho-pagan bullshit on one end and super-holy-the-church-is-always-right Catholicism on the other).
Just a minute, exit ramp coming up, the one I’ll be taking onto A6... Okay. Not too difficult, if you’re the slowest minivan on the autobahn, and always stay in the right lane.
So. At the extreme right end of my shelf, the Totally Off-the-Wall end, there’s a book that sets forth the arguments of a crazy Russian mathematician who maintains that the Middle Ages never happened at all—or to be exact, that the years between 500 and 1500 actually took only about hundred years to occur. This Russian guy’s idea is one of those almost-believable but in the end completely nutso theories that could only have emerged from the latter decades of the Soviet Union, when it seems that lonely geniuses were encouraged to outdo each other with denunciations of the decadent Western belief system. This mathematician starts off by arguing that our modern chronology, our historical timeline, was an invention of the Enlightenment. Here he’s completely on point. There were in fact two scholars—Joseph Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius were their names—who built the timeline, the one we all still use, back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. You see, until the last few centuries nobody really knew what year it was, so even the official scribes of the ancient world and Middle Ages, the ones who wrote what we now regard as the primary sources, they would just date their documents with something like “in the fourth year of the reign of Henry, son of Henry, son of Conrad.” So Scaliger and Petavius did the historical profession the incredible service of building a single master timeline on which everything else could hang. Now the danger of this system is that as soon as everyone in the world started using the timeline, it became self-confirming and almost impossible to check: nobody went back and questioned their original assumptions. Scaliger and Petavius were great scholars, sure, but they also made a lot of judgment calls, and maybe some of them were wrong.
But the thing is, now that we’ve got this timeline, this single master set of years going back to the Romans and the Greeks and the Egyptians and the Sumerians, nobody questions it. It’s like we assume that everyone in the past had clocks and calendars on the walls, that everyone knew the time and date, but of course they didn’t. It just seems that way because some relatively recent historian has given whatever event she or he is talking about a precise date somewhere on the timeline provided to us by Scaliger and Petavius. Of course there are still discrepancies: some dates are just wrong. But what happens now is that when historians find a discrepancy, they fix the year of the event, not the system of years: they say this really happened in 767, not 764—it never occurs to anyone to argue that it really did happen in 764, but the chronology, the calendar, was wrong. Why don’t they say that? Because that would throw off the work of every other historian in the world, at least those who have written about the years 764-767, not to mention every year after that, and the profession of history is a guild in which the individual historian survives—and sometimes prospers—based on the goodwill and respect of his or her colleagues. So we just reassign individual events to different years, different dates, and never question the chronology itself.
I just said “we,” didn’t I? Like I’m actually a professional historian myself? I gotta be careful about that.
So anyway, up to this point, from my lofty status as an amateur history buff, as an engaged and enthusiastic reader of history, I’m willing to follow the Russian’s argument. I’m willing to grant that Scaliger and Petavius might have made a few mistakes, and the whole system could possibly be off by a couple of years, maybe even five, six, seven years, and we’ll never catch the mistake because we are locked into a frame of reference. For example, if somebody told me that, based on the rings of some redwood tree, they had proved that this isn’t really the year 2009, it’s really 2003, or even 2016, I might be willing to concede the point. But the thing is, I’d also argue that it doesn’t really matter, because the whole system is kind of arbitrary, and since we’ve been keeping really good records since the year 1500 or so, so why not keep calling the years the same names we’ve been calling them?
But this Russian mathematician, he makes a more sweeping argument, an argument that is much wilder in every possible way.
He basically disregards all the chronological cross-checking that all the historians in the world have ever done, and accepts the reports of a few ancient and medieval stargazers as precise and well-documented facts—as the only data points, in his view, worth considering. And from these (for him) iron-clad facts, these reports of ancient astronomical observations, he deduces that this or that solar eclipse or passing comet must be the one, according to his calculations, that would have occurred at such-and-such a date. Usually many centuries later. And from that irrefutable reasoning he shows, quod erat demonstrandum, that the Middle Ages never happened at all. Or rather—since something, undeniably, did happen—he figures that it happened at a ten-to-one compression ratio, in a kind of time-lapse video: the events we used to spread out over a thousand years now must rush past us in a hundred.
It’s kind of fun to work through these ideas, as a thought experiment, but in the end, I don’t buy it. Not at all. I absolutely believe that the Middle Ages were real, that the 11th century lasted damn close to a full one hundred years, and that Henry and Bertha and Conrad really went to Canossa, 932 years ago. Or thereabouts.
That’s why I’m here, on this autobahn, right now.
Next episode: The Pitch Meeting
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