Europe: A History (85 page)
The ramifications of the movement were noted by a Florentine merchant, Buonocorso Pitti, who was present at the French court:
The people of Ghent rebelled against their overlord, the Count of Flanders, who was the father of the duchess of Burgundy. They marched in great numbers to Bruges, took the city, deposed the Count, and robbed and killed all his officers … Their leader was Philip van Artevelde. As the number of [Flemish rebels] increased, they sent secret embassies to the populace of Paris and Rouen … Accordingly, these two cities rebelled against the King of France. The first insurrection of the Paris mob was sparked off by a costermonger, who, when an official tried to levy tax on the fruit and vegetables he was selling, began to roar, ‘Down with the
gabelle
.’ At this cry, the whole populace ran to the tax-collectors’ houses, and robbed and murdered them …. The
popolo grasso
, or men of substance, who in French
are called
bourgeois
, fearing lest the mob might rob them, too, took arms and managed to subdue them.
21
ALTMARKT
O
N
Shrove Tuesday 1349, the
Altmarkt
of Dresden, the Old City Square, was filled with the smoke and flames of burning pyres. The Margrave of Meissen had ordered all the city’s Jews to be burned, probably on a charge of spreading the plague. This veritable
auto-da-fé
is described in the
Chronicum Parvum Dresdense
.
1
Six hundred years later, at 10 pm on the evening of another Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 1945, Dresden’s Old City was illuminated by a phosphorescent Primary Flare dropped by a high-flying pathfinder plane of 83 Squadron RAF. The
Altmarkt
had been selected as the base-point of the Target Area of the most destructive bombing raid in Europe’s history.
Despite the public stance, which affirmed that only military and industrial targets were selected, both the RAF and the USAF had followed the German
Luftwaffe
into a strategy of indiscriminate ‘area bombing’. In a bitter controversy over the priorities of the Allied Bombing Offensive, the advocates of area bombing, led by Air Vice-Marshal Arthur Harris, had won out. The technique was to send massed fleets of heavy bombers repeatedly against one city, and to wreak a crescendo effect of devastation.
2
As Harris was to boast: ‘We shall take out one German city after another, like pulling teeth.’ The first 1,000-bomber Raid was launched against Cologne on 31 May 1942. But the desired effect was not fully achieved until the night raid on Hamburg on 27/28 July 1943, when the resultant firestorm killed over 40,000 people.
Dresden, the capital of Saxony, had reached 1945 virtually intact. The medieval
Altstadt
was ringed by elegant squares and boulevards, lined with Renaissance and Baroque monuments. The Royal Palace, the
Georgenschloss
, dated from 1535. The Catholic
Hofkirche
(1751) commemorated the Saxon Elector’s conversion to Catholicism. The Protestant
Frauenkirche
(1742) had been built to deplore it.
Dresden was now selected for a Main Force Raid in response to Soviet requests for Allied air support. The city was the main reception centre for hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the Soviet advance, and for their relief teams, mainly young women.
Ten minutes after the Primary Flare was dropped, the first wave of 529 Lancasters began to arrive from the south-west on a flightpath of 68°. Undeterred by flak or fighters, they dropped a lethal cocktail of high-explosive blockbusters and incendiary clusters. Within 45 minutes, the firestorm was raging. Dresden’s ancient heart, and everyone in it, was consumed.
3
In the morning, as relief columns approached on the ground, a second wave of 450 Flying Portresses of the 1st Air Division of the US Strategic Air Force arrived. Fighter escorts strafed anything that moved.
Huge discrepancies divide estimates of the damage. The British Bombing Survey reported 1,681 acres totally destroyed. The post-war Dresden Planning Report counted 3,140 acres 75% destroyed. The local
Abteilung Tote
or ‘Death Bureau’ reported 39,773 identified dead by May 1945. This figure did not account for missing or unregistered persons, unrecorded burials, or the contents of numerous mass graves. It must be reckoned an absolute minimum. The chief of the Bureau later ventured an estimated total of 135,000 deaths. A British historian has suggested a range of 120–150.000.
4
No one knows how many uncounted corpses were disposed of behind the SS cordons, as an endless stream of carts fed the pyres blazing once again on the
Altmarkt
.
The strategic impact of the raid appears to have been slight. Trains were running through Dresden within two days. Vital war factories, such as the electronics plant at Dresden-Neusiedlitz, were unscathed. The Red Army did not arrive until 8 May.
An information battle ensued. An Associated Press report, later disowned, announced ‘Allied air chiefs have made the long-awaited decision to adopt deliberate terror-bombings of German population centres.’ A Nazi communiqué agreed: ‘SHAEF war criminals have cold-bloodedly ordered the extermination of the innocent German public.’ In the House of Commons, on 6 March 1945, Richard Stokes MP asked ‘Was terror-bombing now part of official government policy?’ The official reply was: ‘We are not wasting time or bombers on purely terror tactics.’
5
At 10.10 pm on 13 February 1946, church bells tolled in remembrance throughout the Soviet Zone of Germany. Of all Dresden’s churches, only the solitary shell of the
Frauenkirche
, with its shattered cupola, was still standing. On that same day, ex-Air Marshal Harris boarded a ship at Southampton in a bowler hat, bound for a civilian career abroad. Though he received a belated knighthood in 1953, he was not honoured like his peers until a monument was unveiled in London’s Strand on 31 May 1992. It was the fiftieth anniversary of the raid on Cologne. The Oberbürgermeister of Cologne lodged a public protest: ‘In my view, it makes no sense to commemorate war heroes like Arthur Harris’, he wrote, ‘although he fought on the right side and for the right cause.’
6
Anticipating Dresden’s own anniversary in 1995, Germany’s President Herzog reflected further. The bombing of Dresden, he said, ‘was an example … of the brutalization of man in war … History written by individual nations in which each one selects what he has done well cannot be allowed to continue. If we really want to unify this Europe, then history must be unified as well.’
7
USURY
E
ARLY
in 1317 in Marseilles, a certain Bondavid de Draguignan was charged in court for continuing to demand payment after the capital of his loan to one Laurentius Girardi had already been repaid. Bondavid was a Jew and a moneylender, and was suspected of breaking the laws against usury. Here was one well-documented incident amongst countless others which reinforced the medieval stereotype of the Jew as a heartless swindler. Bondavid was a real precursor of the fictional Shylock, whom Shakespeare immortalized two centuries later in
The Merchant of Venice
.
1
Usury—the taking of interest, or of excessive interest, on money lent— was regarded in Christian Europe as both a sin and a crime. Churchmen pointed to Christ’s teaching: ‘
But love your enemies, and do good, and lend nothing hoping for nothing again … Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful
’ (Luke 6:35–6). Repeated attempts were made to ban interest or, later, to limit it to 10 per cent per annum.
Jewish practice, in contrast, whilst forbidding usury between Jews, permitted a Jew to charge interest to a non-Jew: ‘
unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon interest; but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend on interest
’ (Deut. 23: 20). This distinction supposedly gave Jews an edge in the medieval money-markets, and loan business. It also gave rise to one of the sharpest points of antagonism between Christians and Jews, captured in Shylock’s provocative aside about his rival, Antonio:
I hate him for he is a Christian;
But more for that in low simplicity
He lends out money gratis, and brings down
The rate of usance here with us in Venice….
He hates our sacred nation; and he rails
Even there where merchants do most congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift
Which he calls interest. Cursed be my tribe
If I forgive him.
(
The Merchant of Venice
, 1. iii. 37–47)
In reality, the laws on usury were observed in the breach. Christian bankers could conceal high interest rates by not recording the sums borrowed, only the sums repaid.
2
Jewish moneylenders probably drew the greatest opprobrium because they concentrated on petty loans with the populace at large. Hypocrisy, and a measure of animosity, were perhaps inevitable, and one of the essential techniques of capitalism was inhibited for centuries. Even so, the prominent role of Jews in European credit and banking is a fact of history.
The Peasants’ Revolt in England cannot be attributed to the desperate rage of paupers. The chronicler Froissart said that the common people who led it were living in ‘ease and riches’. Their demands for an end to servitude were made amidst improving material conditions. They harboured special grievances about a third poll-tax in four years; and they expressed a strong sense of moral protest, as befitted the era of the Lollards. Their fury was directed against the clergy as well as the gentry. Popular preachers, like the rebel priest John Ball, had been spreading egalitarian ideas: ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?’
For a few days in June 1381, therefore, it looked as though the entire social hierarchy was under attack. Wat Tyler and his men poured into London from Kent. Jack Straw marched in from Essex. They burned the home of John of Gaunt at Savoy House. They burned Highbury Manor, and a Flemish brothel by London Bridge. They strung up the Archbishop, and beheaded a number of citizens. At Smithfield they came face to face with the young King and his entourage; and in a scuffle Wat Tyler was killed. After that, they turned into a rabble. The ringleaders were seized and executed. The rest dispersed, to be pursued at assizes through the shires. No one cared to boast of their achievements. Chaucer, who had been present, never raised the subject; nor did Shakespeare in his play
Richard II
. Not till the nineteenth century did the Revolt receive sympathetic consideration.
22
[
TABARD
]
The Papal Schism, which lasted from 1378 to 1417, followed hard on the popes’ return from Avignon. There had been anti-popes before, of course; but the spectacle of two men, both elected by the same College of Cardinals and each preaching war and anathema against his rival, proved a grave scandal. The two original claimants, Urban VI and Clement VII, could hardly be described as holy men. The former turned out to be a deranged sadist who read his breviary in the Vatican garden whilst supervising the torture of his cardinals. The latter, Robert of Geneva, had once ordered the appalling bloodbath at Cesena. In 1409, when both the Urbanite and the Clementine parties declined to attend a council designed to reconcile them, the College elected a third. The Schism was not ended until the Council of Constance dismissed all three existing pontiffs and unanimously acclaimed Cardinal Odo Colonna as Martin V (1417–31) in their place.
The Council of Constance (1414–17) saw the culmination of the conciliar movement. Professors of the University of Paris had been calling for such an assembly for half a century. It was summoned by the German King, Sigismund of Luxemburg, and invitations were sent to all cardinals, bishops, abbots, princes, friars, teachers. Eighteen thousand clerics, fired with a mission of unity, converged on the tiny lakeside town. Among other things, they were supposed to limit papal power. They ended the Schism by confirming the election of Martin V
as sole Pope. But they burned Jan Hus, on the grounds that an imperial safe conduct was not valid in the hands of a manifest heretic; and they did nothing to reform their own abuses. A further conciliar meeting, envisaged at Constance, finally met at Basle under the protection of the Duke of Savoy in 1431, and dragged on for years. But it fell into conflict with Pope Eugene IV, and ended by confirming the Duke himself as anti-pope. Ironically enough, the final outcome of the conciliar movement was to reinforce the conviction that the Church needed a strong Papacy.
TABARD
A
STATUTE
of Richard II in 1393 made it compulsory for every inn in England to display a sign. The result is a great open-air gallery of picturesque names and signboards.
1
Medieval inns were often connected with pilgrimages. Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims started from the
TABARD
in Southwark. The
TRYPPE TO JERUSALEM,
which took its present name in 1189, is still extant in Nottingham. London’s inns were decimated by the Great Fire of 1666. The thirteenth-century
HOOP AND GRAPES
in Aldgate claims to be the oldest survivor.
Very many inn names denote the heraldic arms of their patron. Richard II’s arms bore the
WHITE HART.
The
RISING SUN
recalls Edward III; the
BLUE BOAR,
the House of York: the
GREEN DRAGON,
the Earl of Pembroke; the
GREYHOUND,
Henry VII. Many others were founded by crafts or guilds, hence the
BLACKSMITHS’ ARMS
or the
WEAVERS’ ARMS.
The
BEETLE AND WEDGE
or the
MAN AND SCYTHE
recall craftsmen’s tools. Connections with transport were legion. The
PACK HORSE,
the
COACH AND HORSES,
and the
RAILWAY TAVERN
reflect improving means of travel. The
BLUE POSTS
in St James’s, London SW1, marks an eighteenth-century system of litter stops. Sporting connections are also numerous. Some, like the
HARE AND HOUNDS
or the
FALCON,
refer to hunting, others, like the
DOG AND DUCK,
the
FIGHTING COCKS,
or the
BULL,
to cruel sports long since banned.
More modern inns have often been dedicated to popular heroes and to literary figures. These include everyone from
LILY LANGTRY
and
LADY HAMILTON
(WC2) to the
ARTFUL DODGER, ELIZA
DOOUTTLE, and, in Bromley, the BUNTER. Historical battles, such as
TRAFALGAR,
gave frequent inspiration, as did the
ROYAL OAK,
which hid Charles II in 1651. Less dramatic events find an echo in
THE CARDINAL’S ERROR
(the suppression of Tonbridge Priory in 1540),
THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN
(the discovery of Australia in 1683), or
THE TORCH
in Wembley (the Olympic Games of 1948).
Corrupted names abound. The
CAT ‘N’ FIDDLE
is reputedly a corruption of ‘Caton Ie Fidèle’, a knight who once held Calais for England,
BAG O’NAILS
comes from the Latin ‘Bacchanales’ or ‘drinkers’, the
GOAT AND COMPASSES
from a Puritan slogan, ‘God Encompasses Us’. Patriotic references were popular—hence the
ALBION,
the
ANCIENT BRITON,
the
BRITANNIA,
and the
VICTORIA.
The
ANTIGALLICAN
(SE1) was the name of a famous man-of-war of Napoleonic vintage.
But foreign countries are not neglected. The
KING OF DENMARK
(N1) recalls the visit of Christian IV in 1606. The
HERO OF SWITZERLAND
commemorates William Tell; the
ANGERSTEIN
honours the Baltic German who refounded Lloyd’s; and the
INDEPENDENT
(N1) the Hungarian leader Kossuth. The
SPANISH PATRIOT
in Lambeth was founded by veterans of the International Brigades of the 1930s,
[ADELANTE]
None the less, an undecipherable residue remains. It is anybody’s guess what to make of the
MAGPIE AND STUMP
(Old Bailey), the
WIG AND FIDGET
in Boxted, or the
GOAT IN BOOTS
(NW1).
