by Gideon Defoe
* Obviously being able to change your clothes ‘to look like an old woman’ isn’t that impressive. In World War I, French soldiers disguised themselves as a (papier-mâché) horse carcass to get close to the German trenches.
The Quilombo of Palmares
1606–94
Population: circa 11,000
Cause of death: outside of Hollywood plucky underdogs don’t actually win
Today: part of Brazil
///physics.butter.duck
INT – HOLLYWOOD STUDIO – DAY
HIGH-POWERED EXEC: Hit me with the pitch, kid.
HACK WRITER: We open in Brazil. Misty forests, very exotic. A baby – our hero, Zumbi – is stolen from a besieged micronation of escaped African slaves. He’s brought up by a kindly priest. There’s an exciting training-montage, and then, as a teen, he runs away from his adopted home, back to the place of his birth, where he proves to be a brilliant soldier, ultimately leading a bold resistance against an evil, racist empire. Plus, there’s a sad bit at the end to keep it Oscar-worthy.
HIGH-POWERED EXEC: I like it.
HACK WRITER: Great! I was worried it might be a bit too on the nose.
HIGH-POWERED EXEC: This heroic black slave, do we think Scarlett Johansson might be a good fit?
By the end of the sixteenth century, Brazil was dominated by two European powers, Portugal and the Netherlands, both big fans of slavery. Many of the slaves tried to escape. A few were successful. A steady trickle of former plantation workers headed for the forested interior, and by around 1606 some of them had established a quilombo – a conglomeration of 'towns', or mocambos, ruled by a single king – near Recife. To all intents and purposes this was a tiny country of its own, a piece of Africa in South America. It was christened ‘Los Palmares’ because of the preponderance of palm trees. A bit like the indomitable Gaulish village in Asterix, a wooden palisade surrounded the settlements. Within the palisade ran ditches filled with spikes.
The few descriptions we have are all from people who were trying to attack Palmares. The quilombo got battered; between 1654 and 1678 we know of at least 20 Portuguese expeditions against it. In between these raids, the little state would take a breather and trade with its neighbours: food and crafts for salt and weapons. But the plantation owners were keen to be rid of such an obvious beacon for their workforce to escape to.
It was during a Portuguese raid in 1655 that the infant Zumbi was captured and given to Father Melo, a priest living in the coastal town of Porto Calvo. There, Zumbi was raised as the priest’s protégé. After he ran away back to Palmares he would sometimes secretly slip out to pay his old mentor visits.
The Portuguese attacks continued unabated. Zumbi fast became the kingdom’s best fighter, ‘skilled with firearms, swords, lances and arrows’. In 1678, tired of constant war, the King of Palmares, Ganga Zumba, sought a deal with the Portuguese: a treaty would guarantee his sovereignty, but it required fugitive slaves to be returned to their former owners. The populace was unimpressed. The details are vague, but some sort of regicide went down, and Zumbi was crowned the new king.
Under Zumbi’s leadership, the kingdom survived another 15 years. But in a final cinematic flourish, the Portuguese turned to a hired gun: ‘Bush Captain’ Domingos Jorge Velho, a famous ‘wilderness tamer’. His band of brigands besieged Palmares for three weeks. In a climactic battle, 500 Palmarinos were captured and another 500 killed – 200 of whom were hurled off a precipice. According to some accounts, Zumbi himself escaped and continued to wage a guerrilla war against the Portuguese until – betrayed by one of his own men – he was finally ambushed and killed. His reputation was such by this point that the Portuguese felt it necessary to display his head on a pike in the local capital, as proof that he wasn’t a god.*
* Today, Zumbi has an international airport named after him. He also gets a mention in a Sepultura song.
The Free State of Bottleneck
1919–23
Population: 17,000
Capital: Lorch
Language: German
Cause of death: debt collection by France
Today: part of Germany
///nationality.engineer.skulls
Another war, another attempt to redraw the map, another total mess. The ‘will this do?’ back-of-an-envelope approach with which these post-cataclysm conferences went about things is both impressively louche and depressingly familiar.
This time, in the aftermath of World War I, the Allies had occupied German territory west of the Rhine. They got out their pairs of compasses, sharpened their little pencils and drew three circles – an American zone, a French zone* and a British zone – each with a radius of 19 miles, each centred on a nearby town.
Two of these towns – Mainz and Koblenz – were about 40 miles apart from each other. Very basic maths meant that the circles almost but didn’t quite touch. And with the Rhine to the south and no roads to the mountainous north, a weird unloved strip of land found itself cut off from the rest of Germany. Somebody with an active imagination decided the shape looked a bit like that of a bottleneck, and so the Free State of Bottleneck was born. The largest town in the bottle, Lorch, was declared the capital.
But the sort of great powers who couldn’t be bothered to draw maps properly certainly weren’t bothered by what happened to a few thousand stranded Germans, and Bottleneck found itself unable to trade or do legitimate business with anybody, because officially it wasn’t a thing. The populace was forced to make ends meet by smuggling and the odd train-hijacking. They issued an emergency currency, which featured a picture of locals having a much-needed drink. Sometimes they would moon the French troops garrisoned on their eastern border.
The Bottleneck technically came to end when the French decided to occupy the entire Ruhr valley – a response to Germany repeatedly defaulting on their World War I reparation payments – but, in 1994, some inhabitants of the former state tried reviving it, appointing ministers and even issuing passports. These are not recognised anywhere but do include a voucher that gets you a three-course dinner plus a discount on the locally produced wine.†
* Just outside the Bottleneck, in the former French zone, you’ll find the Mäuseturm, or ‘mouse tower’, where a local legend claims the cruel and much despised Archbishop of Mainz was eaten alive by mice.
† Today, Lorch’s exciting tourist attractions include a ‘Leprosy House’ and a ‘Witches Tower’. The Rhine Gorge, where the Bottleneck was situated, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It has its own microclimate.
The Tangier International Zone
1924–56
Population: circa 150,000
Currency: Moroccan franc, Spanish pesetas, pound sterling
Cause of death: too louche
Today: part of Morocco
///swinging.melon.widest
If someone pointed a Bizarro ray at the whole concept of the nation state, then the Tangier International Zone is probably what you’d end up with. Not quite Europe, not quite Africa; not a country, not a colony; a marginal anything-goes airport lounge of a place. The perks included cheap cigarettes and three different postal systems to choose from. The drawback: more sleazy beat poets than you could throw a carpet at.
Like most port cities, Tangier had always been a bit sketchy. It lies only 20 miles from the Spanish coast – according to legend, Hercules tore the two continents apart as a favour to the North Africans. Samuel Pepys recorded his time there as ‘a hell of brimstone and fire’ and called it ‘the excrescence of the earth’. He complained that the city had no morals, which is rich coming from Mister Five-extramarital-affairs-a-day.
The International Zone was the result of Europe, as usual, not being able to agree on anything at all. Spain and France, the two big regional powers, both staked a claim to the city, and obviously Britain didn’t want to be left out. In the end, France, Spain, Britain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium,
the United States, Sweden and the Netherlands all agreed to ‘jointly administer’ the 144-square-mile ‘interzone’. The treaty they drew up agreed a permanent neutrality, a police force no larger than 250 (enforcing only those laws shared by all the signatories) and ‘no games of chance’. That last one seemed to get forgotten over the next few years. Beyond this vague semi-governance, it was a delinquent free-for-all.
Fashion designers, artists, loaded expats, spies, smugglers and arms dealers all bumped elbows at the cafés lining the Petit Succo. The smugglers liked it because, as a ‘free port’, nothing could be considered contraband. The bohemians liked it because of all the drugs flowing in from the Rif Mountains. Tangier was one of the few places in the world you could be openly gay without winding up in prison. The best thing was that, in a place without an identity, nobody had to think of themselves as a foreigner. Predictably, the feelings of the more local ‘Tangerinos’ didn’t register as a high priority.
The fabulously wealthy Barbara Hutton outbid Franco for a house there and proceeded to enjoy lots of vodka-based breakfasts.* In the evenings, she would throw decadent parties. The unhappy Woolworth heiress had her own pick-and-mix of celebrity guests to choose from: Truman Capote, Cecil Beaton, Matisse, Ian Fleming, T.S. Eliot, Orson Welles and Tennessee Williams were all hanging about at some point or other. Nobody needed a work permit, and lots of writers moved there, but very few produced any actual work until they left again. William Burroughs (fresh off ‘accidentally’ shooting his wife dead while attempting the William Tell apple trick) claimed that this was something to do with the spirit of the city, that the ‘air was slack’, that everything had ‘a lack of vigour’.† This is very much in the tradition of lazy writers blaming anything but themselves for failing to hit their word count.
When the French exiled the popular Moroccan king Mohammed V to Madagascar, the population began to riot. An upsurge of nationalism put the interzone on borrowed time: a debauched anti-country couldn’t carry on inside the borders of a new Islamic nation state, even one as comparatively laid-back as Morocco.
* Barbara Hutton would phone up the American consul at all hours of the day to complain the Coca-Cola available in the international city didn’t taste right.
† Tangier – Iain Finlayson.
Ottawa Civic Hospital Maternity Ward
19 January 1943
Population: 2, sort of
Cause of death: a birth
Today: back to being a bit of Canada
///cautious.swaps.tube
In the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, an unexploded bomb belatedly goes off in London, unearthing a document that reveals the streets above to be a long-lost part of the House of Burgundy.* Suddenly free from the United Kingdom’s legal jurisdiction, and not subject to post-war rationing, a black market of illicit goods quickly springs up and things escalate from there. It seems like a fictional version of Cospaia, or maybe Neutral Moresnet, but in fact the film’s screenwriter was inspired by an even more obscure bit of international territorial wrangling: a wartime hospital ward.
It is a stretch to call a maternity unit an extinct country, fair point, but as we’ve seen, definitions of nationhood are such a legal mess maybe we can just let this one slide. In 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands, and the Dutch royal family went into exile. Princess Juliana fled to suburban safety in the Canadian capital, Ottawa. While living there, she got pregnant with her third child. This created a gigantic problem: the Dutch constitution was airtight on the issue – nobody could take their place in the line of succession if they were born on the soil of another country.
Contrary to popular belief, embassies – while having diplomatic immunity – are still territorially considered part of their host nation, so if you were thinking about getting your kid citizenship of a less terrible country than your own by having a baby in the Swedish ambassador’s waiting room, forget it. Princess Juliana faced a dilemma, because obviously going back to the Nazi-controlled Netherlands wasn’t an appealing option.
So, the Canadian government, and a number of high-powered lawyers, came to her rescue. They passed a law that would create an ‘extra-territorial’ zone for the baby to be born in. A simple option might have been to earmark a particular place, but presumably that would have left open the possibility of the princess being out for a stroll, suddenly going into labour and the baby accidentally being born on Canadian soil after all. The wording of the proclamation solved this issue by providing ‘an extra-territorial character to any place in which the heir presumptive to the throne of the Netherlands may be confined and in which an heir to such throne may be born’.
This amounted to a roaming bubble around the baby that became, in legal terms, a strange non-Canadian zone. It wasn’t Dutch territory either, officially, though they did hang a big flag in the maternity ward, which itself happened to overlook Holland Avenue. The bubble was in effect a non-territory, a micro-sized repeat of the Tangier experiment in some ways, though with less in the way of bad poetry and hipster drug addicts.
At no point during the lengthy back-and-forth that led up to the proclamation did anyone turn round and say, ‘I don’t know, are our entire concepts of nationhood and citizenship and the rules of royal succession … are they maybe a bit ludicrous?’ Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was successfully delivered on 19 January 1943. If the pregnant Juliana had decided to murder someone at the exact moment of giving birth, it would have been an exciting legal grey area – but, perhaps distracted, she didn’t take this opportunity. As a thank you to Canada, she later sent them 100,000 tulip bulbs.†
* The last ruler of the actual Duchy of Burgundy was Charles the Bold.
† If she’d given this gift 300 years earlier at the height of tulip mania, those 100,000 bulbs would have been worth 800,000 fat swine, 1,200,000 fat sheep, 400,000 tons of beer, 100 million pounds of cheese and 200,000 tons of butter.
Lies & Lost Kingdoms
The Republic of Goust
19th Century, sort of, if you believe what you read in the press
Population: <100
Cause of death: probably not existing in the first place
Today: part of France
///sweetens.borders.refreshment
Goust is the supposed microstate that didn’t know it was a microstate. A single village, barely one square mile in size, located a thousand metres up a mountain near the border between France and Spain, it could only be reached by a narrow and precarious footpath that crossed the forbiddingly named Pont d’Enfer – BRIDGE OF HELL. The local population claimed remarkable longevity* (including several unverified centenarians) but, even so, they still tended to eventually die, same as the rest of us.
Mountainous, out-of-the-way Goust did not lend itself to easy burial. The Democratic Standard newspaper of 1894 explained the solution:
The pass which leads to the adjacent Spanish parish of Laruns is so steep that the carrying of heavy burdens is an impossibility. The inhabitants of this tiny mountain republic have built a chute, therefore, down which they slide heavy articles, and the bodies of their dead.
A tiny country with a big slide to get rid of dead bodies is exactly the kind of detail that gets picked up by journalists looking to compile the nineteenth-century version of clickbait. The question is: was Goust actually a country at all? Dubiously researched fake news might seem very modern and topical, but it’s as old as the newspaper business itself. Goust became a minor sensation, even if the inhabitants never realised it. A trawl through the archives turns up dozens of articles mentioning ‘The Smallest Republic in the World!’. In part, the popularity can be explained by those newspapers’ particular agendas. The Hawaiian Gazette, for example, was preaching to an undersized kingdom that wasn’t entirely sold on becoming part of the United States – and so had an obvious incentive to run stories about how isolated, independent nations could successfully go it alone.
The idea that G
oust was never a part of France isn’t entirely daft: Charlemagne’s empire bumping up against the Moorish Empire had led to lots of strange little buffer states between France and Spain. But Goust’s supposed status seems to have stemmed from the French minister of the interior, in 1827, referring to it as a ‘republic’ in an entirely metaphorical way. Everyone then ran with that, and either deliberately or innocently forgot about the ‘metaphorical’ bit.
Setting that aside, there’s a semi-philosophical argument to consider: to all intents and purposes, somewhere as remote as Goust might as well be an independent state. Like the proverbial tree falling over with no-one around to hear it, if people think a place is a republic – and that place is so cut off from anywhere that political changes elsewhere barely affect it – then do any of our legal definitions and categorisations even mean anything? Maybe. Possibly not. Have a biscuit.
Today, Goust has been made slightly, but only very slightly, more accessible by a road built 50 years ago. They no longer throw bodies down a chute.†
