Travelogue 1131 – 29 April
Strange Bedfellows

The negotiations over Malta in the 1520s were fascinating. The Knights Hospitaller were homeless, having been expelled from Rhodes by the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522. They were officially guests of Clement VII, who was an honorary Hospitaller himself. They had installed themselves in Italy, and their Grand Master, rather grandly named Philippe Villiers de l’Isle Adam, travelled Europe more or less begging for a home for their order.

The idea of Malta was raised early on, suggested by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. The Knights were surprisingly picky about the offers made them. They refused Cerigo, Elba, Suda in Crete, Minorca, Ponza and Ischia. They weren’t too crazy about the Malta idea when it was first brought up in 1524. The harbours were good, but the soil was infertile; there wasn’t enough running water. The natives barely grew enough food for themselves. So they took a pass. It’s amazing to remark all the doors that still opened for the old Crusading order. It demonstrates something of the power of the medieval paradigm of Christian knights and lords, courts and privilege, surviving well past their practical lifespan, into the commercial age.

In 1527, the German troops of Charles V sacked Clement VII’s Rome in a bizarre narrative turn during a dispute among these two allies against Protestantism. The German troops who dominated this army were in mutiny against Charles over lack of pay. Many of those soldiers (of the Catholic emperor) were Lutheran, and they found a certain righteousness in doing violence to the papal city. Charles V had been unhappy with Clement because of his politicking against the emperor in northern Italy. He had never intended an attack on Rome, but he found himself holding a terrible power over the Church, a power he was not going to disavow or sully with apologies or defences.

It's one of the sad ironies of history that a nice guy pope was elected just as the Lutheran cry of “anti-Christ” was reaching a crescendo. A century of decadence in the Vatican was laid on the shoulders of this cultured and moderate man. He did what he had to: he paid off the German soldiers, he surrendered territory to the Emperor, and he bided his time.

He didn’t abandon the Knights Hospitaller. He interceded with Charles on their behalf when the Grand Master finally decided to negotiate in earnest for Malta. The Knights wanted autonomy. The emperor sought feudal servants. In the end, Charles decided he could forego all traditional tribute but the gift of one Maltese falcon every year.

Travelogue 1130 – 25 April
The Knights

Suleiman the Magnificent came to power in 1520, almost seventy years after the Ottomans had taken Constantinople. The Turks had become a force for Europe to contend with. Before the end of the same decade, Suleiman and his armies would be laying siege to Vienna.

In 1522, it was the island of Rhodes that would fall to the Turks. The Christians had held on there remarkably long, considering that it was just off the coast of Asia Minor, already surviving one siege in 1480. The enemy the Turks faced on that island was the order of the Knights Hospitallers, who had retreated there from Palestine two hundred years before. They were still a formidable force.

Suleiman was triumphant, riding a wave of manifest destiny for the Turks. With the graciousness of a conqueror who had history behind him, he offered clemency. He allowed the Knights Hospitallers to leave the island in orderly fashion after their defeat. They moved to Italy first, but they moved again when they were gifted Malta by Charles V and a pope who was himself a Knight.

Suleiman ruled the Turks until 1566, roaming Hungary, challenging the Persians, taking war to the Abyssinians. In 1565, the Turks paid a visit to the Knights Hospitaller again, besieging Malta unsuccessfully. I’m thinking a few people sighed with relief when Suleiman passed away a year later. It wouldn’t be until 1683 that another attempt at Vienna could be mounted.

Advance a few generations, and the Knights of Malta are led by their 54th Grand Master, a proud man named Alof de Wignacourt, a French nobleman who had fought in the siege of 1565. He was much revered by the Maltese and by the Knights, resolute and generous. He built fortifications and an aqueduct. He was a patron of the arts. In 1608, he obtained permission from the pope to admit an artist into the order who would normally not have been eligible. He would not have been eligible because he had been charged with murder in Rome and was fleeing justice.

Within months, Caravaggio would be on the run again, having participated in, or perhaps instigated, a brawl in which a number of Knights were injured. Fleeing to Sicily, he would leave behind in Malta a number of brilliant pieces, like “The Beheading of St John the Baptist” and several portraits of Wignacourt, one as St Jerome writing and one standing beside a pretty page boy, suggestively looking at the painter. The canvases are huge, rich in the dark colours of a century.

Travelogue 1129 – 13 April

Bombs in the East

Bombs are dropping in the Middle East, and I’m reading about the invasion of Egypt. That’s the invasion in 1798, the one that most people know about from the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. The conquest of Egypt was the odd and disfigured brainchild of two men, Napoleon, inspired by his fetishist reading about Alexander the Great, and that cunning old fox and consummate survivor, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. The idea had, in fact, been bandied about since the 1770s, since before the Revolution, but it took the overheated atmosphere of the Revolution to bring gravity to the crazy. (We think we live in a time of extremism. Many of us could measure our likely survival in the furnace of 1790s Paris in terms of weeks.)

Napoleon had survived the Terror, his Jacobin credentials bonafide. He had served Robespierre’s regime in suppressing rebellion in the south of France. He had survived the reaction after Robespierre’s fall, although just barely. Then the Directory had entrusted him with the Italian campaign, which had made him a celebrity. Now he schemed with Talleyrand to cut an Alexandrian figure in the exotic East. It didn’t work out so well.

Napoleon and his army were made for the big set pieces, and when they were offered opportunities for those, they won. They ‘conquered’ Egypt. But it was an ephemeral sort of victory. After the artillery went quiet, there was plenty of culture shock to go around. The day-to-day news was awfully modern in tone. Napoleon stepped clumsily all over Muslim sensitivities. The Egyptians proved quite impervious to the grand ideals of the French Revolution. Furthermore, as a people who had been ruled by Greeks, Romans, Turks, and Mamluks for quite a few centuries, they showed a disappointing lack of interest in the romance of a new Alexander. They resisted. Horatio Nelson appeared with the British fleet shut and down the Nile Delta. The French were trapped while the locals rebelled and the Ottomans prepared an offensive. So far from home, the enlightened conquerors turned rather quickly into cruel oppressors. Many people died for the sake of this vanity project.

There was a strategy of sorts behind it. The French had visions of disrupting English trade with the East, of establishing for themselves a trade route along the future course of the Suez Canal, of fomenting resistance to the Brits all the way to India. Napoleon had an image of Alexander on banks the Indus River etched indelibly into his imagination.

But the only waters Napoleon crossed were the Nile and the Mediterranean. He crossed each first in triumph and then in disgrace. His triumphs in the Mediterranean were in Malta and Crete; he swept up these islands like forgotten treasures, as he had gathered ancient cities in Italy several years before.

The Revolution boldly positioned itself as new, as opposed to all things medieval. Napoleon inherited this mission and executed it with a vengeance. He walked the continent as Reaper to all institutions feudal, aristocratic, religious, or mercantile. In the previous year, he had brought down the thousand-year Republic of Venice. In 1798, he invaded the shores of Malta, bringing modern war to the Knights Hospitaller. They couldn’t resist him. After the French took over, the order left the island, many to settle in Russia as guests of the czar.

Travelogue 1128 – 30 March
On the Water

It is Easter weekend, and the town is quiet. The early morning is particularly subdued because a drizzling rain is falling. I decide on a trip to the store before the girls wake. I throw on my running gear because it is easily available. I pull rain gear on over that, and I am ready for the bike.

I enjoy cycling in this weather, provided I don’t have far to go, provided I am not pedalling toward my work. A light, misty spring rain is refreshing. It dampens sound, and it slows time. It is contemplative. I slow as I cross the Beukelsbrug, taking a moment to catch my breath and look at the river. I see something there in the surface never still.

When I return, Little Ren is up and no one else. She is busy drawing. She has found a cartoon of a fairy that her big sister finished yesterday. In the quiet of the morning, she wants to replicate it. She asks my help. She stops me when I’ve done enough, and she carries on. She sings while she draws. She can’t sit still. She rolls back and forth on her knees. She tosses her head to the left and the right.

I feel obliged to record every stage of our girls’ growth. Things change so quickly. What I find to be the essence of this little girl now, aspects of her that I can’t imagine ever changing, her songs, her restless fidgeting, they will slip away. I’ll be reminded of them years from now, and I will be overcome with gratitude and sorrow, regret for things gone; we are allowed nothing in the transit of time.

When she has done something well, when she has played a song well for her piano teacher, when he praises her, Little Ren has a smile that is radiant and innocent. It is burned into my imagination. I think it is a part of everything I do. It’s an image floating on surface of the river in the morning.

Travelogue 1127 – 20 March
Lighting the Set

Napoleon never woke up with “Ziggy Played Guitar” looping in his mind. I’m comfortable saying that this experience separates me from the Emperor of the French. I don’t remember where or when I heard the song, but the central guitar riff has become lodged in my brain, and I cannot let it go. I sing the song to my girls in the mornings as we prepare them for school. I sing, “Oh yea-ah, Baby plays vio-o-ol.”

There are more substantial life circumstances, you may counter, that separate me from Napoleon Bonaparte. I have never led an army, it’s true. I’ve never been to Corsica. I have not yet been chased out of Russia. But then again, I could be. These are things I could do. Though the odds are so long that they approach infinity, the chance remains. And still there survives not one chance that Napoleon heard David Bowie sing. He never once heard an electric guitar. Through all the shouting and screaming in battle, he never heard an electronically amplified voice. He famously pleaded with Goethe to join him in Paris, but he never even once asked Bowie.

That guitar riff is my privilege, living two hundred years later than Napoleon.

I can think of another person who never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Old Scaliger pottering around his garden in Leiden in the early seventeenth century never heard of Ziggy Stardust. Maybe he whistled some old folk tune in the morning, a hymn, or a madrigal that haunted him when he woke. I like the image of the ageing professor alone in his garden, kneeling among the cabbage, poking at the dirt, pulling up weeds. In the garden, he might grumble about politics among the faculty. He might labour over some point of Latin grammar. Or he might just feel the dirt between his fingers, breaking apart the clods, looking for signs that Death had been creeping around his window again. He glances up at the misty sky, wondering how long he has.

I don’t know if anyone else has the impression that each century of the second millennium has a characteristic light. I have been to too many museums, I think. The seventeenth century is definitely darker than most. The light is Rembrandt’s and Caravaggio’s, full of shadow. The weather is Dutch, attenuated daylight under scudding clouds.

The nineteenth century is also dark. It’s Neo-Gothic and Heathcliff-on-the-moors dark. The exception would be Napoleon’s era, during which the atmosphere is early-spring-morning-before the-battle. It’s a holdover from the summer of the eighteenth century.

Travelogue 1126 – 15 March
Napoleon in a Wig

Baby Jos is bringing home news from the world. She is old enough to be learning names and facts and ideas. She has told me about Keith Haring, of all people; she has told me about dresses during the Victorian era. She has told me about rain and condensation; she has told me about planets and stars. She is telling me about Napoleon.

“He was selfish,” she says. “He brought back slavery.” This is what her teacher has told her about Napoleon Bonaparte. It is an interesting pair of factoids about the Emperor of the French. Neither factoid can be discounted, but the historian in me is instantly irritated. “Tell me more.” There is one more: many people died in war.

Coincidentally, the Little Corporal has been on my mind. I had had a certain fascination for the man when I was a child. And the recent trip to Paris has brought him back to my thoughts. It is hard not to think of him at the Louvre (named the Musée Napoléon during the Empire) even if only in the salon with the huge canvases by Gros and David, depicting grand battles and the glorious coronation. (“That’s the Empress Joséphine!”)

“Napoleon was a selfish man,” she said. That is true enough, Baby Jos, but please just remember that history is more complicated.

Why does it bother me so much? I get protective. History is like the abandoned house where kids cannot help but play reckless pranks. People are children when it comes to history; they are seduced by their power over it. They emotionalize history; they sentimentalize it. They gather facts under umbrellas to make pretty terraces among the wild garden. They psychoanalyse historical figures. They twist history into morality tales.

This latter, the moralizing, is the trend of our day. It is an embarrassing and a frustrating practice; embarrassing because it is the most transparent and clumsy sort of editorializing the human mind employs. We are in a sad state if we think we have an edge on the people of eighteenth-century France, whether in wisdom or in experience. And it is frustrating because it occludes clear sight. Moralizing is the woman with the tall wig at the theatre, succeeding less in getting attention than in forcing everyone to crane their necks to see around her.

Travelogue 1125 – 3 March
A Spring Cloud

Thermometer readings are slightly different than they have been. The clouds come and go. But it’s a Sunday, and there are a few hours in the early afternoon when the clouds retreat into a haze, and when the sun imparts a certain warmth on the back. The people of the city respond incommensurately, shucking jackets, appearing in shorts, sitting on terraces outside. They sense a change. Elianne’s papa informs us, before ballet class, that meteorological spring, unlike astronomical spring, begins on the first of March. It’s spring! That’s certainly the consensus of the people outside, to judge by their behaviour.

Change is like that, a judgement formed by impressions, impressions founded on vapours.

Yanis Varoufakis argues that capitalism is already dead, that we are living in a new age. He cites a historical example. The Greek writer offers the year 1776: all evidence surrounding the observer would suggest it was an age of feudalism. There were kings and queens, lords and ladies. Lords lived on great estates of land, worked by peasants born to peasant families who had worked the lands for hundreds of years. The nobility seemed to be in charge of politics and of all opinion and fashion. By outward signs, it was a feudal society, but in fact the capitalist age had dawned, and was already firmly in charge of humanity’s destiny.

Change is like that, the germ inside constancy. Every moment steals in under guide of sameness.

Varoufakis has a theory he’s promoting, and the narrative serves that purpose, but it does still make sense. His theory is that we have entered another feudal age, effectively falling back in evolution. But this forma of feudalism serves a different set of lords, this time the tech aristocracy. Effectively, according to Varoufakis, doomed capital opted to take its own life, funding the turnover itself. It’s a theory, and not a very romantic one. But it’s as good as any other. There’s obviously something in the air, meteorological, if not astronomical. Consider the dubious Lord Musk, nudging the Ukraine war this way and that with his satellite services, offering them to one combatant and then the other in a partisan bid to seem above the fray, far above, high as the spring cloud.