by Mary Gentle
Now, we include the other problem – Carthage! The original North African Carthage, settled by the Phoenicians, WAS eradicated, as you point out. The Romans rebuilt a city on that site.
The interesting thing is that, after the last Roman Emperor was deposed in AD 476, it was the Vandals who moved in and took over Roman North Africa – the Vandals being, like the Visigoths, a Gothic Germanic tribe.
They moved in as a small military elite, to rule and enjoy the fruits of this great African kingdom, under their first king, Gaiseric. Although they remained somewhat ‘Germanised’, Gaiseric did bring in an Arian priesthood, make Latin the official language, and build more Roman baths. Vandal Carthage became a great naval centre again, Gaiseric not only controlling the Mediterranean, but at one point sacking Rome itself!
So you can see that we already have had a kind of ‘Gothic Tunisia’. The last (usurping) king, Gelimer, lost Vandal Africa in three months to the Byzantine Empire in AD 530 (and was last heard of enjoying several large Byzantine estates). The Christian Byzantines were duly driven out by the surrounding Berber kingdoms, and Islam (chiefly by the military use of the camel) in the 630s. All trace of Gothic was eradicated from Moorish culture from then on; not even occasional words survive in their language.
Ask yourself, where could Germanic Gothic culture have survived after AD 630?
In Iberia, close to North Africa, *with the Visigoths*.
As you are aware, I believe that the entire field of academic research on Northern European history is going to have to be modified once my ASH is published.
Briefly: I intend to prove that there was a Visigothic settlement on the Northern coast of Africa as late as the fifteenth century.
That their ‘resettlement’ took place much later than Vandal North Africa, after the end of the Early Middle Ages; and that their period of military ascendancy was the 1400s.
I intend to prove that in AD 1476 there was an actual, historical mediaeval settlement, peopled by the survivors of the Roman Visigoth tribes – with no ‘golems’, no legends about ‘twilights’.
I believe it to have been peopled by an incursion of Visigoth-descended Iberians from the Spanish ‘taifa’ (mixed/border) states. One might reasonably think this, from the racial type described here. The Fraxinus text calls the settlement ‘Carthage’, and indeed it may have been close to the site of the original Phoenician or Roman or Vandal Carthages.
I believe that this Gothic settlement, intermingling with Arab culture (many Arab military terms are used in the del Guiz and Angelotti manuscripts) produced something unique. And I believe that it is perhaps not the fact of this settlement’s existence that is so controversial, so much as (shall we say) what this culture did, and their contribution to our culture as we live in it today.
There will be a Preface, or Afterword, perhaps, setting out the implications fully, that will go with the ASH documents; this is as yet unfinished.
I am sorry to be so cagey about those implications at this stage. Anna, I do not wish someone else to publish ahead of me. There are days when I simply cannot believe that no one else has read the ASH ‘Fraxinus’ manuscript before I saw it – and I have nightmares of opening THE GUARDIAN to a review of someone else’s new translation. At the moment, I would rather not put my complete theory on electronic media, where it could be downloaded. In fact, until I have the whole translation complete, word-perfect, and the Afterword at first-draft stage, I am reluctant to discuss this editorially.
Bear with me, please. This has to be rigorous and water-tight, or I shall be laughed out of court – or at least, out of the academic community.
For now, here is my first attempt at transmitting translated text to you: Section 2 of the del Guiz LIFE.
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #12 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, historical theory
Date: 04/11/00 at 02.19 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Vandals, yes, but I can’t find *any* hint in my books on European or Arabic history, no matter where I look – *WHAT North African ‘Visigoths’?*
Are you SURE you’ve got this right?
I have to be honest and say that we don’t need any controversy about the scholarship associated with this book. *Please* reassure me on this. Today if possible!
* * *
Message: #19 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash, historical theory
Date: 04/11/00 at 06.37 p.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
Initially, I had all the same doubts that you have. Even the Vandals had, by the fifteenth century, been gone from an entirely Islamic Tunisia for nine centuries.
At first, you see, I thought the answer must lie in the mediaeval mindset – let me explain. For them, history isn’t a progress, a sequence of things happening in a particular order. The fifteenth-century artists who illuminated histories of the Crusades put their twelfth-century soldiers into fifteenth-century clothes. Thomas Mallory, writing his MORTE D’ARTHUR in the 1460s, puts his sixth-century knights in the same armour as his own Wars of the Roses period, and they speak as knights in the 1460s spoke. History is *now*. History is a moral exemplar of the present moment.
The ‘present moment’ of the Ash documents is the 1470s.
Initially, therefore, I thought the ‘Visigoths’ referred to in the texts must be, in fact, Turks.
We can’t easily imagine, now, how *terrorised* the European kingdoms were when the vast Osmanli Empire (that’s Turkish to you!) besieged and took Constantinople (AD 1453), the ‘most Christian city’. To them, it literally was the end of the world. For two hundred years, until the Ottoman Turks are finally beaten back from the gates of Vienna in the 1600s, Europe lives in absolute dread of an invasion from the east – it is their Cold War period.
What I thought at first, then, was that it was not too surprising if Ash’s chroniclers decided that she (simply because she was a famous military commander) *must* have had some hand in holding the Turks back from defenceless Europe. Nor that, fearing the Osmanli Empire as they did, they concealed its identity under a false name, hence ‘Visigoths’.
Of course, as you know, I had later to revise this.
– Pierce Ratcliff, Ph.D.
* * *
Message: #14 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash
Date: 05/11/00 at 08.43 a.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
I have no idea how I can explain to my editorial director, never mind sales and marketing, that the Visigoths are actually Turks, and that this whole history is a farrago of lies!
* * *
Message: #20 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 05/11/00 at 09.18 a.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
No, no, they’re NOT Turks! I just thought that they MIGHT be. I was WRONG!
My theory posits a fifteenth-century Visigoth enclave on the North African coast. It is my *point* that the evidence for this has been shuffled under the academic carpet.
This happens – it happens with many things in history. And events and people not only get deliberately written out of history, as with Stalinism, they seem almost to slip out of sight when the attitude of the times is against them – I could cite Ash herself as an example of this. Like most women who have taken up arms, she vanishes from history during patriarchal periods, and during more liberal times, still tends to appear only as a ‘figurehead’ warrior, not involved in actual killing. But then, this happens to Joan of Arc, Jeanne de Montfort, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and hundreds of other women who were not of sufficiently high social class that their names couldn’t be ignored.
At various times I’ve been fascinated both by the PROCESS of how this happens – cf my thesis – and by the DETAILS of what gets written out. If not for Charles Mallory Maximillian’s ASH (given to me by a great-grandmother who, I think, had it as a school prize in
1892), then I might not have spent twenty years exploring ‘lost’ history. And now I’ve found it. I’ve found a ‘Lost’ piece of sufficient significance that it will establish my reputation.
I owe it all to ‘Fraxinus’. The more I study this, the more I think its provenance with the Wade family (the chest in which it was found supposedly brought back from an Andalusian monastery, on a pilgrimage) is accurate. The mediaeval Spains are complex, distant, and fascinating; and if there were to have been some Visigoth survivals – over and above the bloodlines of these Roman-era barbarians in the Iberian ruling classes – this is where we might expect to find it recorded: in little-known mediaeval manuscripts.
Naturally, the ASH manuscripts contain exaggerations and errors – but they contain a coherent and ESSENTIALLY true story. There WAS at least a Visigoth city on the North African coast, and possibly a military hegemony to go with it!
– Pierce
* * *
Message: #18 (Pierce Ratcliff)
Subject: Ash, theory
Date: 05/11/00 at 04.21 p.m.
From: Longman@
Pierce –
Fine.
MAYBE.
How could something of this magnitude just VANISH out of history???
– Anna
* * *
Message: #21 (Anna Longman)
Subject: Ash
Date: 06/11/00 at 04.07 a.m.
From: Ratcliff@
Anna –
Apologies for answerphone. I’d left this line switched over to fax. I want to reassure you, but
You see, the thing is, it’s EASY to vanish from history. BURGUNDY does it, for God’s sake. There it is, in 1476, the wealthiest, most cultured, most militarily organised nation in Europe – and in January 1477 their Duke gets killed, and Charles Mallory Maximillian was right, NOTHING EVER GETS WRITTEN ABOUT BURGUNDY AGAIN.
Well, no, that’s not entirely true. But most educated people’s concept of European history is that north-west Europe consists of France and Germany, and has done from the fall of the Roman Empire. Burgundy is the name of a wine.
You see, what I’m trying to say is
It actually took Burgundy about a generation to vanish totally, Charles’s only child Mary married Maximilian of Austria, and they became the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs, which last until World War One, but the POINT I wanted to make is
The point is, if you didn’t know Burgundy was a major European power, and that we came THIS close to having five hundred years of Burgundy instead of France – well, if you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t learn it. It’s as if the whole country is FORGOTTEN the moment that Charles the Bold dies on the battlefield at Nancy.
No one has ever satisfactorily explained this! Some things just don’t get into history
I think something similar happens with the ‘Visigoth’ settlement
Here I am babbling away at the keyboard in the early hours, you’re going to think I’m an idiot
Excuse me, please. I’m exhausted. I’ve got a seat on a plane at Heathrow, I only have an hour to pack, the taxi’s due about now, and then I decided to check my phone, and found your last message.
Anna, the most amazing, wonderful thing has happened! My colleague Dr Isobel Napier-Grant telephoned me. She’s in charge of the diggings outside Tunis – the GUARDIAN’S been running stories on their latest discoveries, you may have seen – and she’s found something that may be one of the ‘clay walkers’ in the del Guiz text!
She thinks it *just might have been* an actual *mobile* piece of technology!!! – maybe mediaeval – post-Roman – or it may be complete nonsense, some weird Victorian invention or forgery that’s only been in the ground a hundred years
Tunis, of course, is near the historical ruins of Roman Carthage
Taxi’s here. If this damn thing works, I’ve sent you the next translated section Ash. Phone as soon as back from Tunisia.
anna – if the golem are true – what else is?
PART TWO
1 July–22 July AD 1476
Nam sub axe legismus, Hecuba regina1
I
Afloat on the Rhine river, the barge shifting underfoot, Ash lifted her chin and unbuckled her sallet. “What hour is it?”
Philibert took it from her. “Sunset.”
On my wedding night.
The little page-boy, with the help of the older Rickard, unbuckled the straps of her brigandine, unlaced the mail standard around her throat, unbuckled her sword-belt, and took her weapons and armour off her body. She sighed, unconsciously, and stretched her arms out. Armour is not heavy when you put it on, weighs nothing ten minutes afterwards, and when you take it off is the weight of lead.
The Rhine river barges presented problems enough: two hundred men of the Lion company detailed off – at Fernando del Guiz’s perfectly legal insistence – as escort for the disgraced Visigoth ambassadors, travelling from Cologne to the Swiss cantons, over the pass and down to Genoa. Therefore two hundred men, their gear and horses, to be organised. And a deputy commander to be left behind with the rest of the company: in this case, her unilateral decision appointed Angelotti, with Geraint ab Morgan.
Outside, there was a solid grunt and the sound of weight slumping to the deck: her stewards, poleaxing the last of the bullocks to be brought on board. She heard footsteps, water sloshed from leather buckets to clean the barge’s deck, where basins do not catch all the blood: the rip of skin as the butcher’s knife is taken to the carcass.
“What will you eat, boss?” Rickard shifted from one foot to the other, obviously anxious to get out on deck with the rest of the company. Men gambling, drinking; whores enjoying the night on the slow-flowing river.
“Bread; wine.” Ash gestured abruptly. “Phili will get it for me. I’ll call for you if I need you.”
Philibert put a pottery plate into her hands, and she paced up and down the tiny cabin, cramming the crusts of bread into her mouth, chewing, spitting out a crumb and washing it all down with wine; all the time frowning, and moving – with a memory of Constanza, in her solar in Cologne – not like a woman, but like a long-legged boy.
“I called an officer meeting! Where the fuck are they?”
“My lord Fernando rescheduled it to the morning.”
“Oh, he did, did he?” Ash smiled grimly. Her smile faded. “He said ‘not tonight’, and made bad jokes about bridal nights – right?”
“No, boss.” Phili looked pained. “His friends did. Matthias and Otto. Boss, Matthias gave me sweetmeats. Then he asked me what the whore-captain does. I don’t tell him. Can I lie to him, next time?”
“Lie yourself blue in the face if you like.” Ash grinned conspiratorially, to an answering pleased wicked grin from the boy. “That goes for Fernando’s squire Otto, too. You keep ’em guessing, kid.”
What the whore-captain does…? Well, what do I do?
Be a widow. Confess, do penance. People do.
“Fucking Christ!” Ash threw herself down on the cabin’s box-bed.
The wood of the Rhine barge creaked, gently. Night air breathed off the unseen water, making the canvas-roofed cabin pleasantly cool. A part of her mind registered the creak of ropes, horses shifting their hooves, a man praising wine, another man devoutly praying to St Catherine, other barges; all the night noises of two hundred men of the company travelling south upriver, as the long train of barges pulled away from Cologne.
“Fuck!”
“Boss?” Philibert looked up from sanding a rust-spotted breastplate.
“This is bad enough without—!” Without everybody confused about who they’re supposed to be taking orders from, me – or him. “Never mind.”
Slowly, unaware of the boy’s fingers undoing her points, she dragged off doublet and hose together, and sprawled back in her shirt. A burst of laughter on deck shattered the comparative quiet. She was not aware that she flinched. One hand unconsciously tugged the hem of her long gathered shirt down over her bare knees.
“Boss
, you want the lanterns lit?” Phili rubbed his knuckle into his eye-socket.
“Yeah.” Ash watched without seeing as the scruffy-haired page hung the lanterns on their hooks. A buttery yellow light illuminated the opulent quarters, the silk pillows, the furs, the box-sided bed, the canvas canopy with the green and gold colours of del Guiz quartered with the Hapsburg yellow and black.
All of Fernando’s travelling chests were thrown carelessly open, crowding the small cabin; his doublets spilling out, every surface covered with his possessions. She inventoried them automatically in her head – a purse, a shoeing horn, a bodkin; a cake of red wax, shoemaker’s thread; a bag, a silk-lined hood, a gilded leather halter; sheaves of parchment; an eating-knife with an ivory handle…
“I could sing for you, boss.”
She reached out with her free hand and patted Philibert on the hip. “Yeah.”
The little boy pulled his caped hood off over his head, and stood in the lamplight with his shaggy hair sticking up. He squeezed his eyes shut and began to sing unaccompanied:
“The thrush she sings from the fire,
‘The Queen, the Queen’s my bane—’”
“Not that one.” Ash swung her legs over and sat on the edge of the box-bed. “And that’s not the beginning of that song. That comes near the end. It’s okay, you’re tired. Go sleep.”
The boy looked at her with stubborn dark eyes. “Rickard and I want to sleep in here like always.”
She has not slept alone since she was thirteen.
“No. Go sleep with the squires.”
He ran out. The heavy tapestry curtain let in a burst of sound as it opened, cut it off as it swung to. A far more graphic and biologically descriptive song than Philibert’s old country tragedy was being sung out on deck. He probably knows the words to this one too, she thought; but he’s been walking around me today like I was Venetian glass. Since this morning, and the cathedral.
