1 post tagged “middle ages”

It can be easy to forget, when reading the Inferno, just how tall an order it was to create a hell that exceeded the extremes of contemporary military and political violence on earth.  The lovely Middle Ages of modern nostalgists aside (no names, but you people know who you are), it was hideous.  I am reading a brief history of the Catalans— alongside desultory reading about Spanish history in general and 14th-century Florence and so forth— and, seriously, yuck.  I'd never have the stomach to work on this period; I don't care how magnificent the troubadours were.  Under the banner of a peculiar seafaring German, a nasty band of Catalan mercenaries, the Almogàvers, sailed to Constantinople in 1303 and briefly overpowered it; on the way back they captured Athens and much of the rest of Greece.  Did you know about this, Catalan hegemony in Greece and Asia Minor?  No?  My source is Jan Read's The Catalans (Faber & Faber, 1978).  It was a bloody, gory, gruesome messy mess, and no one misses the Catalans in Greece today.  From there we move on to a chapter on the great era of Catalan preeminence in the Mediterranean, presided over by a king who made his enemies drink molten metal.  This is all too obvious to be worth mentioning, but it isn't as though Dante was wandering around Bella Tuscany eating goat cheese and dreaming up nightmare scenarios with which to smite his enemies; he needed only to take notes and extrapolate.

It is far from clear what lessons one can derive from this.  The idea of Necessity lurking in the past really does seem dangerous.  Also, Jesús Moncada = good, although I don't know what's been translated etc.  Also, expect me to be an utter sniveling wreck by the end of two weeks or so, when my papers come due.  At least I am learning to conceive of worlds distant in time and space...  even if "when the papers are due" is a misty one...