The vanished sport of fox tossing

When we read historical novels, or fantasy novels with a historical setting, do we want to know what it was really like?  Do we want to see our characters behave in ways actually consistent with their time?

I'm reading Tim Blanning's excellent The Pursuit of Glory, an history of Europe 1648-1815.  Not a strictly chronological history, but a largely material and cultural one, starting with an informative discussion of roads, and how incredibly hard it was to get from one place to another, no matter who you were.

But it's the entertainments of the past that sometimes make clearest its distance from us.  In a chapter on the incredible prominence of various types of hunting in the lives of the rulers and aristocrats, Blanning tells about a popular sport in German lands:  fox tossing

...in which a fox was tossed in a net or blanket held by hunt servants or gentlemen and ladies of the court until it expired.  This usually took place in the courtyard of the prince's palace with the assembled courtiers looking on from the palace windows.  The Saxons seem to have been particularly fond of this form of entertainment:  in the course of 1747 Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, had 414 foxes, 281 hares, 39 badgers and 9 wild cats tossed to death.  It could also be found at the imperial court at Vienna, where in 1672 the Swedish envoy found it odd that the Emperor Leopold I should join with the court dwarves and small boys in delivering the coup de grace to the tossed foxes by clubbing them to death

I have to admit, I'm not clear on what the cause of death was.  Did the animals suffocate?  Get smashed on the ground?  Or was post-toss bludgeoning always required?  I suspect that this is not high on a list of sexy research topics for history graduate students, but surely someone can be persuaded to dig into it.

In this period these lands also favored a form of hunting where animals were herded by beaters into an enclosure on a lake or river, so that hunters in boats could kill huge quantities of them without needing to do anything other than pull a trigger.

All good fun.  A historical fiction where the character pursued the actual pleasures of his or her age could be both disturbing and informative.  Imagine a cheery nobleman, a good master, who cheers his crew up with an entertaining fox toss before dinner.  Not only is it fun, it gets rid of foxes.  Clubbing them, however, makes you absurd.  Leave that to the boys.

Lepanto, Manzikert, and the rusty hinge of history

Last discussion of Lepanto and the 16th century battles for the Mediterranean, I promise.  At least for now.

An incredibly divided multinational force--Venetian, Spanish, Italian, and the Knights of St. John--internally hostile and suspicious, started late in the year.  If the Ottoman commander, Uluch Ali, had chosen not to leave his harbor within the Gulf of Patras, there was no way the Europeans could have gotten him out.  And, though the battle on October 7, 1571 went heavily for the Christians during the day, it could easily have gone the other way.

Lepanto, dramatic as it was, was not decisive.  Ottoman domination of the eastern Mediterranean continued.  Cyprus had fallen.  As long as a century later, in 1683, Ottoman forces were seriously threatening Vienna.

The hinge here is if the Europeans had lost.  Then Venice, and all of Italy, would have been open to Ottoman invasion.  A Rome under Turkish rule is one of those interesting counterfactuals we science fiction writers like to play with.  The entire Reformation would look quite different with the heart of Catholicism taken out and turned over to a resurgent Islam.

The Turks did not pursue their expansion into the western Mediterranean after Lepanto, so maybe it did check them.  But they did not really regard it as a strategic defeat.  When do nations recognize defeat?  How do they recognize it?

After Hannibal's invasion of Italy, the Romans lost at Trebia, Lake Trasimene, Cannae.  Massive, incredible defeats.  But they did not recognize them.  Hannibal was probably hoping for them to cave in, as any Hellenistic monarchy of the time certainly would have.

When Romanus IV Diogenes loast the battle of Manzikert, in Anatolia, in 1071 to the Seljuk Turks (slightly different folk than the Ottomans), the period of Byzantine ascendancy was over.  But the battle, while a defeat, was not a gigantic one.  Most Byzantine forces survived.  Anatolia, the heartland of Asia Minor that was a source of wealth and troops to the empire, was lost over the following years, piecemeal.  The battle seemed more a symbol of defeat than anything else.  It had been a sign that their time was over.  The Ottomans did not see Lepanto as a sign, and the Romans did not see their repeated defeats as a sign either.

Writers of history and writers of fiction like "decisive battles".  It makes for a good story.  And the nation that loses the battle is always seen as decadent, collapsing, riven with internal struggles, on the way down.  Losing the battle is seen as a judgment, even as a sort of justice.  But wealthy powerful nations sometimes have bad luck, bad commanders, or even, as it happens, bad soldiers.  It is what they do with the battle that is usually more important than what happened in the battle itself.

Long book, great crime

A couple of days ago I mentioned lengthy titles and subtitles, a style now vanished.  I was reminded of a favorite takedown of a long-winded writer by Thomas Macaulay (no stranger to length himself), in a review of a book on Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister for decades, by the unfortunate Rev. Edward Nares.  Macaulay writes:

The work of Dr. Nares has filled us with the astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when he first landed in Brobdignag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys.  The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale.  The title is as long as an ordinary preface;  the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book;  and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library.

...

Compared to the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar plantations, is agreeable recreation.

He goes on from there, destroying in detail once the ground is softened up with rhetoric, and Dr. Nares, no doubt, never showed his face again.

Macaulay is also irritated with Nares for his extoling of Burghley's moral virtue, and his account of a politic and wily minister amid the shifting sands of the Reformation can't be bettered:

He never deserted his friends till it was very inconvenient to stand by them, was an excellent Protestant when it was not very advantageous to be a Papist, recommended a tolerant policy to his msitress as strongly as he could recommend it without hazarding her favour, never put to the rack any person from whom it did not seem probable that useful information could be derived, and was so moderate in his desires that he left only three hundred distinct landed estates, though he might...have left much more.

For a politician, this is virtue.  The rest of the essay is a delicate anatomizing of the perils of the period, and of how the Tudors ruled, "a popular government, under the forms of despotism".  Nares is forgotten, as the ostensible reasons for Macaulay's essays so often are, except for a last smack when Macaulay says he must stop, lest his essay

...swell to a bulk exceeding that of other reviews, as much as Dr. Nares's book exceeds the bulk of all other histories."

Is there such a thing as personal nonfiction?

Nonfiction exists as a category, of course.  I'm reading Roger Crowley's Empires of the Sea, about the 16th century struggle in the Mediterranean between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans, and have no reason to doubt Crowley's account of the siege of Malta or the fall of Cyprus.

But personal memoirs are also fall into "nonfiction".  That is starting to seem much more dubious.  Many supposed memoirs (James Frey, Holocaust memoirs of being raised by wolves or fed by girls throwing apples across the fence, J T LeRoy, etc.) have recently been shown to be partly or largely fictional.  I don't think the truth-quality of memoirs has dropped.  I think the revelation of their falseness has been made easier.

One of my favorite blogs, prairiemary, recently mentioned something that has been out for a few years that, I will admit, did disturb me.  On Thursday she mentioned that the opening of Annie Dillard's memoir, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, where her tomcat comes through her window at night with bloody feet and leaves bloody pawprints on the bare skin of her chest didn't happen to her, but to a male student of hers, who gave her permission to use it as her own.

That book is wonderfully written, but I'd always doubted the "some mornings I'd wake in daylight to find my body covered with paw prints in blood".  My body?  Covered?  Some mornings?  I'd buy some blood on a nightgown once, and some dead animals (as Mary mentions) at other times.  The most common way memoirists distort events is to take the occasional or unique and make it habitual and characteristic of a period.

So:  did I "always doubt" it?  Or did it just occur to me, thinking back?  Here's the real problem of truth-in-memoir.  Even I can't quite be sure.

Now I know it didn't happen to Dillard.  And, most likely, it didn't happen to her student either, at least not exactly as described.  And how voluntary was the transfer of the story from student to teacher?

Whenever something like this comes out, there are those who say it doesn't matter, that they responded to the quality of the prose, or the psychological truth.  I can never figure out what these people are talking about.

I tell lies.  That's what my books are.  They are not true.  They didn't happen, and, in fact, could not happen.  I like to think that there is quality prose and psychological truth in what I write.

But it matters if something happened, or if it didn't.  The Turkish fleet really was repulsed at Malta, and really did conquer Cyprus.  Discovering that the dramatic defense of the fortress of St. Elmo at Malta was a fictional creation intended to boost the spirit of a beleaguered Europe would meaningfully change our perception of 16th century history.

Maybe that doesn't matter to some people.  It does to me.

The Ultimate Critic

I'm currently reading Rodric Braithwaite's excellent Moscow 1941, an account of the German invasion of the Soviet Union with a focus of the life of the city itself.

Russia had been in the grips of the Terror since the start of the big purges in 1937:

In the four years before the war more than thirty-two thousand people died at the hands of the secret police in Moscow and the surrounding Region.

Two corpse disposal zones had been set up outside the city, one at Butovo, the other at Kommunarka.  Most of the elite, including artists and writers, were killed at the NKVD dacha at Kommunarka.  And it's here that I learned of a figure I had not heard of before, but about whom I intend to learn more, Vasili Blokhin:

Many of these executions were carried out by a squad under the command of Vasili Blokhin, a specialist in such matters.  Blokhin is said to have personally killed the theatre director Meyerhold, the writer Isaak Babel and Mikhail Koltsov, the journalist and hero of the Spanish Civil War.

Blokhin also took a key role in the 1940 Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps, "wearing a leather apron and cap and long leather gloves":  he apparently carried out many of the killings of the Polish POWs personally, with a German Walther pistol he favored because it didn't jam when hot, at Mednoe, north of Moscow.

How is it that Blokhin is not better known?  The winnowing of writers in those years was brutal:  first silenced, then tortured and killed.  And if Blokhin did indeed carry out the killings personally, he was probably the last person to see them before they died.  Whether they saw him, I don't know.