Academic Exercises (53 page)

Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur
is a glorious evocation of what might have been. About three-quarters of the book is blow-by-blow accounts of imaginary tournaments, really fine sports journalism. Wonderful knights knock each other off their horses, beat each other insensible with swords, are set upon by twenty enemies simultaneously and still prevail; and (provided they’ve got their armour on) nobody gets killed or maimed or seriously inconvenienced; the most debilitating injury Lancelot suffers is when he’s accidentally shot in the arse by a lady archer. 

Malory lived during the last, brightest blaze of glory of the noble warrior. In his day, armour was better than it ever had been, or would be again, and noble warriors were fighting the Wars of the Roses, the last self-destructive gasp of the independent barons before the Tudor monarchy sorted out the over-mighty aristocracy once and for all and established a modern state protected by gunpowder and low-class professional sailors. You can tell from the way he writes that he knows it’s all a fantasy, even though he desperately yearns for the values and certainties of the imaginary world he claims as history. Malory gave us the image of the knight in shining armour, of Lancelot, able to prevail over any earthly danger provided his cause is just, whose function is to protect the weak against the strong and pursue the Holy Grail of spiritual perfection. There never was such a creature
¹⁰
but modern palaeontologists can nevertheless examine his fossilised remains, his steel shell which remains after his imperfect flesh has long since rotted away. The evolution of that shell doesn’t obey the usual Darwinian rules; in a sense, the evolution of armour is the survival of the unfittest, because the Gothic and Vandalic chieftains didn’t want to evolve into the most efficient killers they could possibly be. Instead—according to their own values, which aren’t ours—they wanted to be the best men they could be; brave fighters, superior to those who depended on them, men of honour. Laugh all you like; call them Klingons, and charge them with an impressive catalogue of crimes against humanity, including all the customary offences of the rich against the poor, the proud against the humble. But then you might care to consider the things that have been done since, by standing and conscripted armies serving duly elected governments, by soldiers, at the taxpayers’ expense; at which point you might start to wonder if the rich men who wanted to lock antlers and not get killed were quite so misguided after all.

NOTES

¹
The hoplite’s rigid bronze body armour (known to military historians as the ‘bell corselet’) stayed in use for centuries, but was gradually replaced by the linothorax, a form of body armour whose name means ‘linen breastplate’. We have pictures of these things, but very little hard data. A recent academic study at the University of Wisconsin concludes that the linothorax was a three-piece breastplate (front-and-back; two shoulder straps) made out of 18+ layers of linen, glued or quilted together, ending up about half an inch thick. The Wisconsin tests suggest that this model would have turned arrows and sword-cuts.

The advantages over the bell corselet are obvious. It’s cheaper, which means more people can afford one. It can be made by semi- or unskilled labour; even modern university students can make one. The shoulders move, which means the fighter has a better chance of using his weapons. What it doesn’t do is provide a rigid shell to protect you from having your insides squeezed out through your ears in a 10,000 body pileup. It also goes against all the principles I’ve claimed or will claim for Greek hoplite warfare in this essay.

Consider the context. As far as we can tell, the linothorax comes into general use around the time of the Persian wars. Instead of fighting other Greeks in hoplite formation to settle specific points in a sort of armed referendum, the Greek cities are fighting for their existence against the Persian empire; a different war, against different enemies, with a totally different agenda. Suddenly, there’s a strong, unprecedented incentive to innovate, and the stakes had never been higher.

The linothorax appears to have been the dominant form of armour in the Peloponnesian War, the longest and nastiest war in ancient Greek history. During that war, a great deal changed. Basically, the alarming growth and unacceptable behaviour of the Athenian empire so terrified the Spartans that they decided that Athens had to be brought down, and the majority of Greek states outside the Empire agreed with them. This was a very unGreek war—its length, its objectives, its bitterness, the damage and disruption it caused—and during its course the rules changed forever, so that in the final stages, during the Sicilian campaign, light infantry with bows and javelins—the poor, the scum of the earth—were used to pick off, exhaust and harry to death an Athenian hoplite army.

The tactics used against the Athenians in Sicily could have been used at any time in the preceding three centuries. They’re not exactly rocket science. To my mind, they were used in Sicily in the same way that nuclear weapons were used against Japan in WW2; because of desperation, moral exhaustion, an overwhelming desire to get the war over with and the unspeakable enemy beaten, even if it meant changing the rules and unleashing a force that could destroy the world, or at least the world as they knew it.

The linothorax, like the Sicilian light infantry, should, in my view, be seen as part of the breakdown and collapse of the unspoken conventions of gentlemanly hoplite warfare, forced on the Greek cities by circumstances—a foreign enemy, followed by an unprecedented domestic ‘total war’ that proved unwinnable for both sides by conventional means.
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²
Raising is the most useful, and the most difficult, of the armourer’s skills. It’s used to form a deeply concave shape – a helmet, a breastplate – out of a single sheet of metal. In order to do this, you need to work from the outside of the piece rather than the inside; squashing the metal onto a form rather than stretching it into one. Basically, you hold the sheet against an upright steel stake and make a dent in it with your hammer; then you deepen and widen this dent, making the metal flow like an extremely thick, sluggish liquid, continually turning it, until the sheet sort of flows downwards from the place where you started into the shape you’re trying to make.

I can’t do this, though God knows, I’ve tried. I can only do dishing (where you hold the sheet over a hollow scooped out of the top of an oak log and hammer the metal down into it). That’s OK. You can make a full suit of armour without knowing how to raise. The Greeks raised all their helmets and probably their bell-corselets too; the Romans didn’t bother with it; they could do it in Dark Age Europe, but it seems to have been largely forgotten about in Europe until the 14
^th
century.
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³
An evil genius called Themistocles put an end to all that by turning Athens into a sea power, building ships and enlisting the poor to row them. His excuse was defeating the Persians; the outcome was democracy, followed in short order by ruthless imperialism, the enslavement by Athens of half the Greek world, the Peloponnesian war (qv), the defeat and abject humiliation of the Athenian people and the Macedonian conquest of Greece. But there you go.
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⁴
Lamellar appears to have originated in China around the 3rd century BC; it’s worn by the First Emperor’s terracotta warriors. In the 13th century, an Italian traveller in Asia wrote this description of Mongol lamellar:

“They make a number of thin iron plates, a finger’s breadth wide and a hand’s breadth long, piercing eight holes in each plate; as a foundation they put three strong, narrow straps; they then place the plates one on top of the other so that they overlap, and they tie them to the straps by narrow thongs which they thread through the holes; at the top they attach a thong, so that the plates hold together firmly.”

With minor variations, all lamellar was made that way, from China to Constantinople, for over a thousand years.
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⁵
I’ve wilfully ignored the other fields of endeavour where progress and innovation flourished in the ancient world—shipbuilding and military architecture—because both of these developed in the same way and for roughly the same motives.

I’m lying, by the way, about ploughs, and agricultural equipment in general. Roman aristocrats, owners of vast agricultural estates, were into increased profitability through mechanisation, and were well on the way to inventing the combine harvester. With the fall of the West, however, these advances were quickly forgotten.
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⁶
The text of which should be tattooed on the face of any western politician advocating getting involved in a land war in Asia.
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⁷
There’s a justifiable tendency to confuse beautifully-made with efficient. Take, for example, the pattern-welded sword. In the western European dark ages, and in medieval Japan, there was precious little high-carbon steel capable of being heat-treated to produce a hard, flexible blade that would (a) cut (b) not snap like a carrot; furthermore, although they could make steel, they didn’t understand how they made it. So, to get hardening steel, they went through a complex rigmarole of forge-welding folded strips of different sorts of iron together, a process involving infinite skill and patience, and a side-effect of which was the most exquisite patterns in the finished blade. Pattern-welded swords are inferior to swords made from a single piece of high-carbon steel, and when the latter became freely available, pattern-welding died out in Europe. But not in Japan. There, both the design and the manufacturing process got fossilised in the early Middle ages, and modern Japanese swordsmiths still forgeweld their raw material together out of bits of naturally-occurring carbon steel dredged up from riverbeds. Their products are fine swords, not because the design or the material has any inherent superiority over the alternatives, but because if you’ve been doing something non-stop for over a thousand years, you get to be pretty good at it—in spite of, rather than because of, the design and the materials.
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⁸
Genoa produced the best crossbowmen, and they were very good indeed. They were not, however, used in the field to mow down armoured knights, even though they’d have been perfectly capable of doing so. They were, after all, mercenaries, and armoured knights were paying their wages. Crossbows were mainly used in siege warfare, where the rules and conventions were quite different.
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⁹
It really was that good. When NASA was trying to figure out how to articulate a space suit, to be worn on the Moon, one of their principal sources of inspiration was a suit of armour made for Henry VIII. This extraordinary outfit covered every inch of the royal body (and there was an awful lot of it to cover) while allowing practically unimpeded movement.
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¹⁰
Indeed. But there’s a tendency these days to dismiss the medieval knight as a steel-clad thug, which may not be entirely fair. If taste in music is any sort of index of civilisation, the 12th century patrons of the troubadours and trouveres were civilised men. Knights could be poets and composers; as witness Jaufre de Rudel and William X of Aquitaine, examples of whose exquisite work is among the heartbreakingly small body of medieval music that has survived. Richard the Lion-heart, rightly condemned as a lousy king, could play all the musical instruments in use at the time.
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We could always invent God,” I suggested.

We’d pooled our money. It lay on the table in front of us; forty of those sad, ridiculous little copper coins we used back then, the wartime emergency issue—horrible things, punched out of flattened copper pipe and stamped with tiny stick-men purporting to be the Emperor and various legendary heroes; the worse the quality of the die-sinking became, the more grandiose the subject matter. Forty trachy in those days bought you a quart of pickle-grade domestic red. It meant we had no money for food, but at that precise moment we weren’t hungry. “What do you mean?” Teuta asked.

“I mean,” I said, “we could pretend that God came to us in a dream, urging us to go forth and preach His holy word. Fine,” I added, “it’s still basically just begging, but it’s begging with a hook. You give money to a holy man, he intercedes for your soul, you get something back. Also,” I added, as Accila pursed his lips in that really annoying way, “it helps overcome the credibility issues we always face when we beg. You know, the College accents, the perfect teeth.”

“How so?” Razo asked.

“Well,” I said—I was in one of my brilliant moods, when I have answers for every damn thing; it’s as though some higher power possesses me and speaks through me—“it’s an established trope, right? Wealthy, well-born young man gets religion, he gives everything he owns to the poor, goes out and preaches the word. He survives on the charity of the faithful, such charity being implicitly accepted as, in and of itself, an act of religion entitling the performer to merit in heaven.”

Accila was doing his academic frown, painstakingly copied from a succession of expensive tutors. “I don’t think we can say we gave all our money to the poor,” he said. “In my case, most of the innkeepers, pimps and bookmakers I shared my inheritance with were reasonably prosperous. Giving away all our money to the comfortably off doesn’t have quite the same ring.”

I smiled. Accila had made his joke, and would now be quite happy for a minute or so. “Well?” I said. “Better ideas, anyone?”

“I still think we should be war veterans,” Teuta said stubbornly. “I used to see this actress, and she showed me how to do the most appalling-looking scars with red lead and pig-fat. People love war veterans.”

I had an invincible argument. “Have we got any red lead? Can we afford to buy any? Well, then.”

Accila lifted the wine-jar. The expression on his face told me that it had become ominously light. We looked at each other. This was clearly an emergency, and something had to be done. The only something on offer was my proposal. Therefore—

“All right,” Teuta said warily. “But let’s not go rushing into this all half-baked. You said, invent God. So—” Teuta shrugged. “For a start, which god did you have in mind?”

“Oh, a new one.” Not sure to this day why I said that with such determined certainty. “People are hacked off with all the old ones. You ask my uncle the archdeacon about attendances in Temple.”

“Precisely,” Razo said. “The public have lost interest in religion. We live in an enlightened age. Therefore, your idea is no bloody good.”

I knew he’d be trouble. “The public have lost interest in the established religions,” I said. “They view them, quite rightly, as corrupt and discredited. Therefore, given Mankind’s desperate need to believe in something, the time is absolutely right for a new religion; tailored,” I went on, as the brilliance filled me like an inner light, “precisely to the needs and expectations of the customer. That’s where all the old religions screwed up, you see; they weren’t planned or custom-fitted, they just sort of grew. They didn’t relate to what people really wanted. They were crude and full of doctrinal inconsistencies. They involved worshipping trees, which no rational man can bring himself to do after the age of seven. We, on the other hand, have the opportunity to create the
perfect
religion, one which will satisfy the demands of every class, taste and demographic. It’s the difference between making a chair and waiting for a clump of branches to grow into a sort of chair shape.”

“Not sure about that,” said Zanipulus; his first contribution to the discussion, since he’d been clipping his toenails and had needed to concentrate. “You walk around telling people that Bong just appeared to you in a dream. They give you a funny look and say, who’s Bong when he’s at home?” He sniffed; he had a cold. “There’s no point of immediate engagement, is what I’m saying. You need that instant of irresistible connection—”

“Of course.” A tiny sunrise in the back of my head produced enough light for me suddenly to see clearly. “That’s why this idea of mine is so absolutely bloody inspired. Of course we can’t expect customers to believe in some nebulous entity that nobody’s ever heard of. We need to create a deity that everyone can see, plain as the noses on their faces, every day of their lives.”

Silence, which I allowed to continue for a moment or so, during which Razo dribbled the last few drops out of the jar into his cup; drip-drip-drip. “Well?” Accila said.

“Simple,” I told him. “We worship the sun.”

Razo yawned. “Been done,” he said. “To death, in fact. If you’d been to Cartimagus’ lectures on recurring motifs in late Mannerist epic, you’d know that practically every hero in legend is your basic solar metaphor.”

“Sure,” I said. He was starting to annoy me. “But not the big shiny yellow disc
per se
. I’m talking about the Sun with a capital S. One single supreme deity; no pantheon, no bureaucracy, no waiting. Someone you can look in the eye and talk to directly, man to God—”

“Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Zanipulus said with his mouth full. Apparently the treacherous bastard had a private reserve of cashew nuts he hadn’t seen fit to declare to the rest of the Commonwealth. “Makes you go blind.”

“Metaphorically speaking. Come on, you know I’m right. That’s why the old religions fell apart, too many gods, too damn
fussy
. The old thing about government by committee. One god, it’s like monarchy, it’s the only way to get things done.”

“The Divine Sun,” Accila said thoughtfully. “You know, he might just have something.”

“Not the Divine Sun,” Teuta said. “No buzz. No snap. Also, there’s the redundancy. What’s the leading characteristic of our god? That he’s divine. Yawn.”

“All right,” Accila said. “So, right now, what do people really want? Apart,” he added, “from money.”

“Peace,” said Zanipulus. “An end to the war. That’s a no-brainer.”

The word sort of catapulted itself into my mouth. “The Invincible Sun,” I said. “Well, how about it?”

Razo wiped his mouth. “Actually,” he said, “that’s not bad.”

“It’s magnificent,” I said. “Implied promise of victory followed by a sustained peace.”

“Which isn’t going to happen any time soon,” Zanipulus pointed out.

“No,” I rounded on him, “because Mankind is sinful and refuses to follow the path laid out for it by the Invincible Sun. As disclosed,” I went on, “by His true prophets. Us.”

Another silence. Then Razo said, “We’ll need a list of thou-shalt-nots. People like those.”

“And observances,” said Accila. “Top of the list, I would suggest, should be giving generously to the poor. Instant merit for doing that.”

Pause. They were looking at Zanipulus, which offended me rather. Just because he doesn’t say much, people think he’s smart. Whereas I talk all the time, and you just have to listen to me for two seconds to realise how very clever I am. “Well,” Zanipulus said, “it’s got to be better than war veterans. For a start, there’s too many of the real thing.”

At that moment, in the brief silence after those words were spoken, I believe that the Invincible Sun was born. And why not? After all, everything has to start somewhere.

It was a real stroke of luck that general Mardonius contrived to wipe out the whole of the Herulian Fifth army at the battle of Ciota ten days after we took to the streets to preach the gospel of the Invincible Sun. I’m not inclined to give Mardonius all the credit for our success. Obviously we’d made some impression over the preceding nine days, or nobody at all would’ve known who we were, and nobody would’ve made the association between the latest street religion and the entirely unexpected, heaven-sent victory. We were helped enormously by the coincidence that one of us—I think it was me, but it’s so long ago I can’t be sure—had been predicting a mighty victory for the forces of light on the ninth day of Feralia, which just happened to be the day when the news of Ciota reached the city. Not, please note, the day of the battle itself; fortunately, nobody pointed that out at the time. Anyhow, that was our breakout moment. We were the crazy street preachers who’d predicted Ciota; and there’s a weird sort of pseudo-logic that operates in people’s minds. If you predict something, in some way or another you’re responsible for it, you made it happen. Suddenly, out of (no pun intended) a clear blue sky, the Invincible Sun was a contender.

Forgive me, I’m forgetting my manners. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eps. At least, that’s what it was then, before we started the whole names-in-religion thing, which we did basically so as to protect our real identities in the event that we made ourselves unpopular with the authorities and had to retire prematurely from the theology business. Of course, if you’re a cleric or come from a clerical family, the irony of the name I was born with won’t have been lost on you;
eps
is now, has become, the recognised shortening for
episcopus
, which is the word for high priest in Old Aelian, which we chose, more or less at random, as the language in which we were going to write our holy scriptures. Which would’ve made me Eps
eps
on official documents; quite, except that I adopted the name-in-religion Deodatus (yes,
the
Deodatus; that’s me) some time before we decided on Old Aelian. For what it’s worth, Eps is a traditional and not uncommon name on Scona, where my family originally came from. It means, so I’m told,
the chosen one
.