Ash: The Lost History Part 12

"Barbarian!" The older Visigoth amba.s.sador, Daniel de Quesada, spluttered incredulously. "Barbarian!"

Asturio Lebrija looked up with difficulty from where he was pinned, on his knees. "I spoke no lie, Daniel: these d.a.m.ned Franks30 are children playing in ruins, destroying whatever comes to their hands! Hapsburg, you have no idea of the value of-"

Frederick's knights slammed Lebrija face-down on the tiles. The sound of blows echoed through the vaulting heights of the cathedral. Ash took a half-step forward, only to be nearer, and caught her foot in the brocade hem and stumbled, grabbing G.o.dfrey's arm.

"My lord del Guiz," the Emperor Frederick said mildly, "you will escort these men to our nearest port, in chains, and ensure they are deported by s.h.i.+p to Carthage. I wish them to live to carry their disgrace home with them."

"Your Majesty." Fernando bowed, still something coltish about him for all the breadth of his shoulders.

"You will need to take command of your new troops. Not all, not all. These men-" Frederick of Hapsburg lifted his fingers very slightly, in the direction of Ash's lance-leaders and men-at-arms, crowding in at the rear of the cathedral. "-are now by feudal right yours, my lord. And as your liege lord, they are also ours. You shall take some of them upon this duty, and we shall retain the remainder: we have tasks that they can do, order not yet being secure in Neuss."

Ash opened her mouth.

Robert Anselm, without moving his rigid eyes-front gaze, rammed his elbow into her ribs.

"He can't do this!" Ash hissed.

"Yes. He can. Now shut up, girl."

Ash stood between G.o.dfrey and Anselm, her heavy brocade gown stifling her. Sweat dampened her armpits. The knights, lords, merchants, bishops and priests of the Imperial court began to move off in Frederick's wake, talking between themselves; a great throng of richly dressed men, their voices travelling up into the silence of the fan-vaulting and the saints in their niches.

"They can't just split us up like this!"

G.o.dfrey's hand closed painfully tightly around her elbow. "If you can't do anything, don't do anything. Child, listen to me! If you protest now, everyone will see that you lack the power to alter this. Wait. Wait. Until you can do something."

The departing Imperial court took as little notice of one woman and a cl.u.s.ter of soldiers as they did of the stone saints above.

"I can't leave it!" Ash spoke so that only the priest and Anselm could hear. "I built this company up from nothing. If I wait, now, either they're going to start deserting, or they're going to get used to del Guiz in command!"

"You could let them go. It is their right," G.o.dfrey said mildly. "Perhaps, if they no longer wish to be men of war-"

Both Ash and Robert Anselm shook their heads.

"These are men I know." Ash wiped her hand across her scarred cheek. "These are men hundreds of leagues from whatever poxy farm or town they were born in, and fighting's the only trade they've got. G.o.dfrey, they're my people."

"Now they are del Guiz men-at-arms. Have you considered, child, that this may be better for them?"

This time it was Robert Anselm who snorted.

"I know young knights with their a.r.s.es on their first war-horse! That young streak of p.i.s.s and wind couldn't restrain himself in battle, never mind his men! He's a heroic disaster looking for a place to happen. Captain, we've got time. If we're leaving Cologne, that's good." Anselm stared after Fernando del Guiz, walking down the nave with Joscelyn van Mander; never a glance back for his bride. "See how you like it out on the road, city boy."

Ash thought, s.h.i.+t.

They're splitting up my company. My company isn't mine any more. I'm married to someone who owns me - and there's no way I can play court politics to change the Emperor's mind, because I'm not going to be here! I'm going to be dragged off with disgraced Visigoth amba.s.sadors to Christ alone knows where- Ash glanced out of the cathedral's open doors, under the unfinished west front,31 out at the sunlight. "Which is the nearest southern port from here, on Empire territory?"

G.o.dfrey Maximillian said, "Genoa."

Message: #5 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash, historical doc.u.ments Date: 02/11/00 at 08.55 p.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - Sorry to contact you out of office hours, but I *must* talk to you about the translation of these doc.u.ments.

I have very fond memories of 'doing' Ash at school. One of the things I like about her, which comes through strongly in your translations of these texts, is that she's a jock. Basically. She doesn't read, she can't write, but boy can she hit things. And she has a complex character despite that. I love this woman! I still think that a modern translation of ASH, with your new doc.u.ment discovery, is one of the best and most commercial ideas that's come my way in a long time. You know I'm supporting you here, in the editorial discussions, despite not being fully briefed yet.

However. These sources - I can cope with the odd mistake in dating, and with mediaeval legends. This is, after all, how those people *perceived* their experiences. And what we have here, with your prospective new theory of European history, is brilliant stuff! - But it's for this very reason that each deviation from history must be carefully doc.u.mented. Provided the legends are clearly noted as such, we have a cracking good history book for the marketing department to sell.

*But* - *GOLEMS*???!!!.

In mediaeval Europe?!

What next - zombies and the undead? ! ! This is fantasy!

HELP!.

- Anna * * *

Message: #1 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash, historical doc.u.ments Date: 03/11/00 at 06 . 30 p .m.

From: [email protected] Anna - This is what comes of getting connected to e-mail, one then forgets to check it! I am *so* sorry not to have answered you yesterday.

About 'golems' . I am following Charles Mallory Maximillian's translation here (with a little FRAXINUS) . He refers to them in 1890 as 'clay walkers' , very much the legendary Cabalistic magical servant as featured in the legend of the Rabbi of Prague. (We should remember that when Maximillian did his translation, the Victorian era was gripped by the fin-de-siecle occult revival craze.) Vaughan Davies, in his later translation, rather unfortunately calls them 'robots' , a reference which in the late 1930s was not as hackneyed as it now appears.

I intend to use the term 'golem', in this third edition, unless you think it too unscholarly. I am aware that you would like this book to have a wide readers.h.i.+p.

As regards what these 'golems' or 'walkers' may, historically, have actually been, I think they are a mediaeval confabulation of something undoubtedly real with something legendary. The historical reality is mediaeval Arabic engineering.

You will no doubt be aware that, as well as their civil engineering, the Arabic civilisations practised a kind of fine engineering, making fountains, clocks, automata, and many other devices. It is quite certain that, by the time of al-Jazari, complex gear trains existed, also segmental and epicycle gears, weight drives, escapements and pumps . The Arabs' celestial and biological models were largely water-powered, and invariably - obviously- stationary. However, the European mediaeval traveller often reported the models to be *mobile* figures of men, horses, singing birds, etc.

My research indicates that the del Guiz LIFE has conflated these travellers' tales with mediaeval Jewish stories of the golem, the man of clay. This was a magical being with, of course, no basis in fact.

If there *had* been a 'walker' or 'servant' of some sort, I imagine it could conceivably have been a *vehicle*, wind-powered like the sophisticated pole-mills of the period - but then, it would require wheels, sophisticated road-surfaces, and a human driver, to function as any kind of message-carrying device, and could perform no indoor tasks at all. And you may say, rightly, that this is stretching historical speculation unjustifiably far. No such device has ever been discovered. It is chroniclers' licence.

As a legendary part of the Ash cycle, I like my golems, and I hope you will let me keep them. However, if too much emphasis on the 'legendary' aspect of the texts is going to weaken the historical *evidence* which I am drawing from the del Guiz text, then let's by all means cut the golems out of the finished version!

- Pierce Ratcliff * * *

Message: #6 (Pierce Ratcliff) Subject: Ash, historical doc.u.ments Date: 03/11/00 at 11. 55. p.m.

From: [email protected] Pierce - I wouldn't know a segmental gear if it bit me! But I'm prepared to credit that these 'golems' are a mediaeval legend based on some kind of reality. Any study of women's history, black history, or working cla.s.s history soon makes you see how much gets dropped from conventional histories, so why should engineering history be any different?

But I guess it's safer to leave them out. Let's not confuse mediaeval legend with mediaeval fact.

One of my a.s.sistants has raised a further query about the 'Visigoths' today. She's concerned that, since they were a Germanic tribe who died out after the Roman Empire, how can they still be around in 1476?

Another query, from me - I'm not a Cla.s.sicist, it's not my period, but don't I remember Carthage being *wiped out* in Roman times? Your ma.n.u.script speaks as if it still exists. But it makes no mention of the ARAB cultures of North Africa.

Is all this going to be made clear? Soon? PLEASE?!

- Anna * * *

Message: #3 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash, historical doc.u.ments Date: 04/11/00 at 09.02 a.m.

From: [email protected] Anna - I didn't realise that publisher's editors worked such unnatural hours. I hope you aren't working too hard. : ) You ask me for a statement of my theory - very well. We probably can't proceed in our working relations.h.i.+p without one. Bear with me for a moment, and I'll give you some necessary background: The arrival of what the LIFE calls the 'Gothic' amba.s.sadors DOES present an apparent problem. I believe that I have solved this problem, however; and, as you imply, it is a key factor in my rea.s.sessment of European history.

While the amba.s.sadors' presence at Frederick's court is verified by references in both the CHRONIQUE DE BOURGOGNE and the correspondence between Philip de Commines and Louis XI of France, I at first found it difficult to see where these 'Goths' (or, as I prefer Charles Mallory Maximillian's more precise translation, "Visigoths': the 'n.o.ble Goths') might originate.

The Germanic Gothic barbarian tribes did not so much 'die out' , as your a.s.sistant suggests, as become absorbed into the ethnic mix of the lands they moved into after Rome fell. The Ostrogoths in Italy, for example; the Burgundians in the Rhone Valley, and the Visigoths in Iberia (Spain) . They continued to rule these territories, in some cases for centuries.

Maximillian thus suggests these 'Visigoth' amba.s.sadors are Spanish. I was not completely happy with that. CMM's rationale is that, from the eighth century on, Spain is divided between a Christian Visigoth knightly aristocracy, and the Arabic dynasties that follow their own invasion in AD 711. Both the numerically inferior Muslim and Visigoth aristocratic cla.s.ses ruled over a great ma.s.s of Iberian and Moorish peasantry. Therefore, Maximillian says, since there were 'Visigoths' of this kind left until well into the late fifteenth century, there might also have been mediaeval rumours that either these Christian Visigoths or the 'heathen Saracen' (Muslims) retained some 'engines and devices' of Roman technology.

It is actually not until fifteen years after Ash's death that the last Arab Muslims are finally driven out of the Iberian peninsula in the 'Reconquista' (1488-1492) . The Visigoth amba.s.sadors to the court of the Emperor Frederick *could* therefore be supposed to come from Iberia.

However, I personally then found it very puzzling that the ASH texts directly state that they come from a settlement which must have been on the coast of North Africa. (Even more puzzling since they are plainly not Arab! ) The author of the 1939 second edition of the ASH doc.u.ments, Vaughan Davies, basing HIS theory on not much more than the text referring to Northern Europeans as 'Franks' , treats the Visigoths as the standard Saracen knights of the Arthurian legends - the 'Saracens' are mediaeval Europe's idea of the Arab cultures, mixed with folk-memories of the crusades to the Holy Land. I don't think Davies does anything at all scholarly to address this problem.

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 47 6, 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 ma.n.u.scripts) 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 doc.u.ments; 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' ma.n.u.script 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: [email protected] 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 scholars.h.i.+p a.s.sociated with this book. *Please* rea.s.sure me on this. Today if possible!

Message: #19 (Anna Longman) Subject: Ash, historical theory Date: 04/11/00 at 06.37 p.m.

From: [email protected] 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 doc.u.ments 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 ident.i.ty 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: [email protected] 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: 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses - this is where we might expect to find it recorded: in little-known mediaeval ma.n.u.scripts.