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+{"text":" \n# ALSO BY WILLIAM BOYD\n\n# NOVELS\n\nA Good Man in Africa\n\nAn Ice-Cream War\n\nStars and Bars\n\nThe New Confessions\n\nBrazzaville Beach\n\nThe Blue Afternoon\n\nArmadillo\n\nNat Tate: An American Artist 1928\u20131960\n\nAny Human Heart\n\nRestless\n\nOrdinary Thunderstorms\n\nWaiting for Sunrise\n\nSolo\n\nSweet Caress: The Many Lives of Amory Clay\n\n# SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS\n\nOn the Yankee Station\n\nThe Destiny of Nathalie \"X\"\n\nFascination\n\nThe Dream Lover\n\nThe Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth\n\n# PLAYS\n\nSchool Ties\n\nSix Parties\n\nLonging\n\nThe Argument\n\n# NON-FICTION\n\nBamboo\n\nTHIS IS A BORZOI BOOK\n\nPUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2018 by William Boyd\n\nAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britian by Viking, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2018.\n\nwww.aaknopf.com\n\nKnopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.\n\nLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data\n\nNames: Boyd, William, [date]- author.\n\nTitle: Love is blind : a novel \/ William Boyd.\n\nDescription: First North American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2018.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2018015401 (print) | LCCN 2018019292 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655275 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525655268 (hardcover)\n\nClassification: LCC PR6052.O9192 (ebook) | LCC PR6052.O9192 L68 2018 (print) DDC 823\/.914\u2014dc23\n\nLC record available at https:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/\u200b2018015401\n\nEbook ISBN 9780525655275\n\nThis is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.\n\nCover image: bifocal spectacles, ca. 1885. Dorling Kindersley \/ UIG \/ Bridgeman Images\n\nCover design by Megan Wilson\n\nv5.3.2\n\nep\n\n# Contents\n\nCover\n\nAlso by William Boyd\n\nTitle Page\n\nCopyright\n\nDedication\n\nEpigraph\n\nPrologue\n\nPart I: Edinburgh\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nPart II: Paris\u2014Geneva\u2014Nice\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nChapter 12\n\nChapter 13\n\nChapter 14\n\nPart III: St. Petersburg\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nChapter 7\n\nChapter 8\n\nChapter 9\n\nChapter 10\n\nChapter 11\n\nPart IV: Biarritz\u2014Edinburgh\u2014Nice\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nChapter 6\n\nPart V: Paris\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nPart VI: Geneva\u2014Vienna\u2014Graz\u2014Trieste\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nPart VII: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands\n\nChapter 1\n\nChapter 2\n\nChapter 3\n\nChapter 4\n\nChapter 5\n\nEpilogue\n\nGratitude and Acknowledgements\n\nA Note About the Author\nFor Susan\n> During the last year of his life Anton [Chekhov] thought of writing another play. It was not quite clear in his mind, but he told me that the hero, a scientist, loves a woman who either does not love him or is unfaithful to him. The scientist goes to the Far North. He pictured the third act thus: a ship is icebound; the sky is ablaze with the Northern Lights. The scientist stands, a solitary figure, on the deck amidst the utter silence and grandeur of the night, and against the background of the Northern Lights he sees the shadow of the woman he loves.\n> \n> \u2014Olga Knipper-Chekhova, _The Last Years_\n> \n> Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world. The effect is out of all proportion with the cause.\n> \n> \u2014Robert Louis Stevenson, _Virginibus_ _Puerisque_\n\n# PROLOGUE\n\n> Port Blair\n> \n> Andaman Islands\n> \n> Indian Empire\n> \n> 11 March 1906\n> \n> Dear Amelia,\n> \n> There was an attempt to escape from the jail last night and a small riot ensued. Most unusual. Three of the prisoners were killed but a number managed to flee. Consequently we have a twenty-four-hour curfew imposed on the town so here I am in my house at luncheon writing this long-overdue missive.\n> \n> All is well, my leg is much better (Dr. Klein is very pleased, he says, though I'm walking with a stick\u2014very elegant) and the new tribe we've found is slowly becoming accommodating. Colonel Ticknell, the British superintendent here, is most helpful. \"Your every need, Miss Arbogast, is mine. Please don't hesitate, the merest trifle, etc., etc.\" And I don't hesitate (you know me). Transport, bearers, diplomatic postal facilities\u2014even a firearm\u2014have been supplied. I think Col. Ticknell has a soft spot for me and he imagines diligent concern will win my heart. No harm in thinking, I suppose. You will call me a calculating minx, but needs must out here.\n> \n> And, mirabile dictu, the advertisement I placed in the local newspaper and that I personally affixed to the wall in the post office has been answered. I have a new assistant\u2014finally!\n> \n> A policeman is knocking on the door. The curfew is over, I suspect. I will write again, later.\n> \n> In the meantime, with my love as always, your sister,\n> \n> Page\n> \n> P.S. By the way my new assistant is a tall Scotchman, about thirty-five years old, called Brodie Moncur.\n\n# PART I\n\n# Edinburgh\n\n1894\n\n# 1\n\nBrodie Moncur stood in the main window of Channon & Co. and looked out at the hurrying pedestrians, the cabs, carriages and labouring drays of George Street. It was raining\u2014a steady soft rain driven slant from time to time by the occasional fierce gust of wind\u2014and, under the ponderous pewter light, the sooty facades of the buildings opposite had darkened with the water to a near-black. Like velvet, Brodie thought, or moleskin. He took off his spectacles and wiped the lenses clean on his handkerchief. Looking out of the window again, spectacle-less, he saw that rainy Edinburgh had now gone utterly aqueous. The buildings opposite were a cliff of black suede.\n\nHe replaced his spectacles\u2014hooking the wire sides behind his ears\u2014and the world returned to normal. He slipped his watch from his waistcoat pocket. Nearly nine o'clock\u2014better start. He opened up the glossy new grand piano that was on the display dais, propping up the curved lid with its inlaid mirror (only for display purposes\u2014his idea) the better to present the intricate machinery\u2014the \"action\"\u2014inside a Channon grand. He removed the fall from over the keys and undid the key-block screws. He checked that no hammers were up and then drew the whole action forward by the flange rail under the front. As it was a new piano it drew out perfectly. Already a passer-by had stopped and was peering in. Drawing out the action always compelled attention. Everyone had seen a grand piano with the lid up but having the action on display somehow altered every easy assumption. The piano no longer seemed familiar. Now all the moving parts were visible beyond the black and white keys\u2014the hammers, the rockers, the jacks, the whippens, the dampers\u2014its innards were exposed like a clock with its back off or a railway engine dismantled in a repair shed. Mysteries\u2014music, time, movement\u2014were reduced to complex, elaborate mechanisms. People tended to be fascinated.\n\nHe untied his leather roll of tools, selected the tuning lever and pretended to tune the piano, tightening a few strings here and there, testing them and resetting them. The piano was perfectly tuned\u2014he had tuned it himself when it had emerged, pristine, from the factory two weeks ago. He tuned F a modicum on the sharp side then knocked it in\u2014back into tune\u2014with a few brisk taps on the key. He supported a hammer-head and needled-up the felt a little with his three-pronged voicing tool and returned it to its position. This pantomime of tuning a piano was meant to lure the customers in. He had suggested, at one of the rare staff meetings, that they should have someone actually playing the piano\u2014an accomplished pianist\u2014as they did in showrooms in Germany, and as the Erard and Pleyel piano manufacturers had done in Paris in the 1830s and drawn huge crowds. It was hardly an innovation\u2014but an impromptu recital in a shop window would surely be more enticing than listening to the mannered repetitions of a piano being tuned. _Donk! Ding! Donk! Donk! Donk! Ding!_ He had been overruled\u2014an accomplished pianist would cost money\u2014and instead he was given this job of display-tuning: an hour in the morning and an hour after luncheon. In fact he did attract spectators, although he had been the single beneficiary\u2014he wasn't sure if the firm had sold one more piano as a result of his demonstrations, but many people and not a few institutions (schools, church halls, public houses) had slipped into the shop, pressed a calling card on him, and offered him out-of-hours piano tuning. He had earned a good few pounds.\n\nSo, he played A above middle C several times, to \"get the pitch,\" pointedly listening to the tone with a cocked head. Then played a few octaves. He stood, slipped some felt mutes between strings, took out his tuning lever, set it over a wrest pin at random and gave it some tiny turns, just to deliver torque, then eased the pin slightly to \"set the pin\" and hit the note hard, to deliver a cast-iron tuning, feeling it in the hand through the lever. Then he sat down and played a few chords, listening to the Channon's particular voice. Big and strongly resonant\u2014the precision thinness of the sounding board (made from Scottish spruce) under the strings was the special Channon trademark, its trade secret. A Channon could rival a Steinway or a B\u00f6sendorfer when it came to breaking through an orchestra. Where the spruce forests were in Scotland that Channon used, what trees were selected\u2014the straighter the tree, the straighter the grain\u2014and what sawmills prepared the timber, were facts known only to a handful of people in the firm. Channon claimed that it was the quality of the Scottish wood they used that made their pianos' distinct, unique tone.\n\nBrodie's feigning over, he sat down and started to play \"The Skye Boat Song\" and saw that the single spectator had now been joined by three others. If he played for half an hour he knew there would be a crowd of twenty looking on. It was a good idea, the Continental idea. Perhaps, out of that twenty, two might enquire about the price of a baby grand or an upright. He stopped playing, took out his plectrum, reached into the piano and twanged a few strings, listening intently. What would that look like to anyone? A man with a plectrum playing a grand piano like a guitar. All very mysterious\u2014\n\n\"Brodie!\"\n\nHe looked round. Emmeline Grant, Mr. Channon's secretary, stood at the window's framing edge, beckoning at him. She was a small burly woman who tried to disguise how fond she was of him.\n\n\"I'm in full tune, Mrs. Grant.\"\n\n\"Mr. Channon wants to see you. Right away. Come along now.\"\n\n\"I'm coming, I'm coming.\"\n\nHe stood, thought about closing the piano down but decided against it. He'd be back in ten minutes. He gave a deep bow to his small audience and followed Mrs. Grant through the showroom, with its parked, glossy pianos, and into the main hall of the Channon building. Austere unsmiling portraits of previous generations of Channons hung on olive and charcoal-grey striped wallpaper. Another mistake, Brodie thought: it was like a provincial art gallery or a funeral parlour.\n\n\"Give me two minutes, Mrs. G. I have to wash my hands.\"\n\n\"Hurry along. I'll see you upstairs. It's important.\"\n\nBrodie went through the back, through a leather, brass-studded door into the warehouse area where the workshop was located. It was a cross between a carpentry shop and an office, he always thought, the air seasoned with the smell of wood shavings, glue and resin. He pushed open the door and found his number two, Lachlan Hood, at work replacing the centre pins on a baby grand\u2014a long job, there were hundreds of them.\n\nLachlan glanced at him as he came in.\n\n\"What's going on, Brodie? Should you no be in the window?\"\n\n\"I'm wanted. Mr. Channon.\"\n\nHe slid up his roll-top desk and opened the drawer where he kept his tin of tobacco. \"Margarita\" was the brand name: an American blend of Virginia, Turkish and perique tobacco, made by a tobacconist called Blakely in New York City and to be found in only one retailer in Edinburgh\u2014Hoskings, in the Grassmarket. He took one of the three cigarettes he had already rolled and lit it, inhaling deeply.\n\n\"What's he want you for?\" Lachlan asked.\n\n\"I don't know. Darling Emmeline says it's 'important.'\"\n\n\"Well, it was nice knowing youse. I suppose I'll get your job, the now.\"\n\nLachlan was from Dundee and had a strong Dundonian accent. Brodie made the sign of the evil eye at him, took two more puffs, stubbed out his cigarette and headed for Ainsley Channon's office.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAinsley Channon was the sixth Channon to head the firm since it had been established in the mid-eighteenth century. On the landing was a 1783 Channon five-octave spinet\u2014the first Channon model to be a true success and which began the firm's fortunes. Now it was the fourth-largest piano manufacturer, some said the third, in Britain, after Broadwood, Pate and\u2014possibly\u2014Franklin. And, as if to confirm the length of this lineage, Ainsley Channon dressed in a style that had been fashionable half a century before. He wore luxuriant Dundreary whiskers and a stiff wing collar with silk cravat and pin. His receding grey hair hung down long behind his ears, almost touching his shoulders. He looked like an old musician, like a stout Paganini. Brodie knew he couldn't play a note.\n\nBrodie gave a one-knuckle knock and pushed open the door.\n\n\"Come away in, Brodie. Brodie, my boy. Sit ye down, sit ye down.\"\n\nThe room was large and gloomy\u2014the gas lamps lit even though it was morning\u2014with three tall, twelve-paned windows looking out over George Street. Brodie could make out the high, thin spire of St. Andrew's and St. George's West Church through the still-falling smear of misty rain.\n\nAinsley stepped round from behind his partners' desk and pulled up a chair for Brodie, patting its leather seat.\n\nBrodie sat down on it. Ainsley smiled at him as if he hadn't seen him for years, taking him in.\n\n\"You'll have a dram.\"\n\nIt was a statement, not a question and Brodie didn't bother to reply. Ainsley went to a table with a clustered, light-winking collection of decanters, selected one and poured two generous glasses, bringing Brodie's over to him before taking his place behind his desk again.\n\n\"Here's how,\" Ainsley said and raised his glass.\n\n\" _Slangevar,_ \" Brodie replied and sipped at his amber whisky. Malt, peaty, West Coast.\n\nAinsley held up a puce cardboard dossier and waved it at him.\n\n\"The Brodie Moncur file,\" he said.\n\nFor some reason Brodie felt a little heart-jig of worry. He calmed it with another sip of whisky.\n\nAinsley Channon had a somewhat dreamy and disconnected air about him, Brodie knew, and so was not surprised at the meandering path the meeting took.\n\n\"How long have you been with us, Brodie? It'll be about three years now, yes?\"\n\n\"Actually six, sir.\"\n\n\"Good God, good God, good God.\" He paused and smiled, taking this in. \"How's your father?\"\n\n\"Well, sir.\"\n\n\"And your siblings?\"\n\n\"All fit and well.\"\n\n\"Have you seen Lady Dalcastle recently?\"\n\n\"Not for a while.\"\n\n\"Wonderful woman. Wonderful woman. Very brave.\"\n\n\"I believe she's very well, also.\"\n\nAinsley Channon was a cousin of Lady Dalcastle, who had been a close friend of Brodie's late mother. It was through Lady Dalcastle's good offices that Brodie had been taken on by Channon's as an apprentice tuner.\n\nAinsley was looking at his dossier again.\n\n\"Aye. You're a clever boy, right enough. Very good grades...\" He looked up. \"Do you parley-voo?\"\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\n\"Speakee zee French? Ooh la-la. _Bonjour monsieur._ \"\n\n\"Well, I studied French at school.\"\n\n\"Give us a wee whirl.\"\n\nBrodie thought for a moment.\n\n\" _Je peux parler fran\u00e7ais,_ \" he said. \" _Mais je fais les erreurs. Quand m\u00eame, les gens me comprennent bien._ \"\n\nAinsley looked at him in astonishment.\n\n\"That's incredible! The accent! I'd have sworn blind you were a Frenchie.\"\n\n\"Thank you, sir. _Merci mille fois._ \"\n\n\"Good God above. How old are you now, Brodie? Thirty? Thirty-two?\"\n\n\"I'm twenty-four, sir.\"\n\n\"Christ alive! How long have you been with us? Three years, now?\"\n\n\"Six,\" Brodie repeated. \"I was apprenticed to old Mr. Lanhire, back in '88.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, right enough. Findlay Lanhire. God rest him. The best tuner ever. Ever. The very best. Ever. He designed the Phoenix, you know.\"\n\nThe Phoenix was Channon's bestselling upright. Brodie had tuned hundreds over his six years.\n\n\"I learned everything from Mr. Lanhire.\"\n\nAinsley leaned forward and peered at him.\n\n\"Only twenty-four? You've an old head on your shoulders, Brodie.\"\n\n\"I came here straight from school.\"\n\nAinsley looked at the dossier.\n\n\"What school was that?\"\n\n\"Mrs. Maskelyne's Academy of Music.\"\n\n\"Where's that? London?\"\n\n\"Here in Edinburgh, sir.\"\n\nAinsley was still computing numbers in his head.\n\n\"'88, you say?\"\n\n\"September 1888. That's when I started at Channon's.\"\n\n\"Well, we've got a Channon challenge for you now...\" He paused. \"Top us up, Brodie.\"\n\nBrodie fetched the decanter and topped up their two glasses and sat down again. Ainsley Channon was staring at him over his steepled fingers. Again, Brodie felt vague unease. He sipped whisky.\n\n\"You know we opened that Channon showroom in Paris, last year...\" Ainsley said.\n\nBrodie admitted that he did.\n\n\"Well, it's not going well,\" Ainsley confided, lowering his voice as if someone might overhear. \"In fact it's going very badly, between ourselves.\" He explained further. Ainsley's son, Calder Channon, had been appointed manager in Paris and although everything was in reasonable shape, seemed well set up, contacts made, stock warehoused, regular advertisements in the Parisian press placed, they were losing money\u2014not worryingly\u2014but at a steady, unignorable rate.\n\n\"We need an injection of new energy,\" Ainsley said. \"We need someone who understands the piano business. We need someone with bright ideas...\" He paused theatrically. \"And we need someone who can speak French. Calder seems incapable.\"\n\nBrodie decided not to confess how rudimentary his grasp of the French language was and let Ainsley continue.\n\n\"Here's the plan, Brodie, my boy.\"\n\nBrodie was to go to Paris as soon as possible\u2014in a week, say, once his affairs were in order\u2014and become Calder Channon's number two. Assistant manager of the Paris showroom. There was only one thing to have on his mind, Ainsley said: sales, sales, sales\u2014and more sales.\n\n\"Do you know how many major piano manufacturers there are in Europe? Go on, have a guess.\"\n\n\"Twenty?\"\n\n\"Two hundred and fifty-five, at the last count! That's who we're competing with. Our pianos are wonderful but nobody's buying them in Paris\u2014well, not enough of them, anyway. They're buying trash like Montcalms, Angelems, Maugeners, Pontenegros. They're even starting to make pianos in Japan! Can you believe it? It's a fiercely contested market. Excellence isn't enough. It's got to change, Brodie. And something tells me you're the man for the job\u2014you know pianos inside out and you're a world-class tuner. And you speak fluent French. Good God above! Calder needs someone like you. Stupid old fool that I am for not realizing this.\" He sat back and took a gulp of his whisky, pondering. \"Calder was too confident\u2014overconfident, I now see. He needs someone at his side, help steer the ship, if you know what I mean...\"\n\n\"I understand, sir. But, if the language is a problem, why not employ a Frenchman?\"\n\n\"Sweet Jesus, no! Are you losing your reason? We've got to have one of our own. Someone you can trust absolutely. Member of the family, as it were.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"Can you do it, laddie?\"\n\n\"I can certainly try, sir.\"\n\n\"Try your damnedest? Try your utmost?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nAinsley seemed suddenly cheered and assured him he'd have a significant increase in salary, and his position\u2014and his salary\u2014would be reviewed in six months, depending on results.\n\nAinsley came round from behind his desk and poured them two more drams, the better to toast the new Parisian enterprise. They clinked glasses, drank.\n\n\"We'll meet again, afore you go, Brodie. I've a couple of wee tips that might be useful.\" He took Brodie's glass from him and set it on the desk. The meeting was over. As he showed Brodie to the door he squeezed his elbow, hard.\n\n\"Calder's a good boy but he could do with a staunch lieutenant.\"\n\n\"I'll do my best, Mr. Channon. Rely on me.\"\n\n\"That I will. It's a great opportunity for us. Paris is the centre for music, these days. Not London, not Rome, or Berlin. Apart from Vienna, of course. But we could be number one in Europe\u2014see them all off: Steinway, Broadwood, Erard, B\u00f6sendorfer, Schiedmayer. You'll see.\"\n\nBack in the workshop Brodie smoked another cigarette, thinking hard. He should be pleased, he knew, incredibly pleased\u2014but something was bothering him, something indeterminate, naggingly vague. Was it Paris, the fact that he'd never been there, never been abroad? No, that excited him: to live, to work in Paris, that would be\u2014\n\nLachlan Hood sauntered in from the shop.\n\n\"Still here?\"\n\n\"Not for long,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"I knew it. Tough luck, Brodie. Hard cheese, old pal.\"\n\n\"No. I'm to go to Paris. Help Calder with the shop there.\"\n\nLachlan couldn't conceal his shock, his disappointment.\n\n\"Why you? Fuck! Why not me? I've been to America.\"\n\n\" _Mais est-ce que vous parlez fran\u00e7ais, monsieur?_ \"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Exactly.\" Brodie spread his hands, mock-ruefully. \"The benefits of a good education, sonny boy. I happen to speak excellent French.\"\n\n\"Liar. Fucking liar. You speak opera French.\"\n\n\"All right, I admit it. The key thing is I speak _enough_ French. Which is about one hundred per cent more French than you do.\" He offered Lachlan a cigarette, and smiled patronizingly.\n\n\"If it all goes well, maybe I'll send for you.\"\n\n\"Bastard.\"\n\n# 2\n\nBrodie hailed a cab that was trotting by Channon's and asked to be taken up to Charles Street by the university where the Bonar Concert Rooms were. He sat back in the cab and drew the curtains a little, enjoying the darkness and the reassuring clip-clop of the nag and the squeak of the springs over the cobbles as the cab took him east through the city. Some woman had been in the cab before him, he realized, smelling her scent\u2014rosewater or lilac\u2014masking the odour of old leather and horse shit. Now he had some time alone he thought further about Ainsley Channon's proposition, aware that he had accepted that proposition without thinking. Should he have asked for some time to reflect? But who would have thought for more than a second? To swap Edinburgh for Paris. To swap being senior piano tuner for assistant manager. To swap four guineas a week for eight. It was hardly a difficult decision.\n\nHe paid off the cab and went looking for the stage door. The management that night had asked for an old Channon concert grand and stipulated that it be regulated to the maestro's requirements, whatever they might be. The house manager of the Bonar Concert Rooms\u2014a solemn, bald fellow with an odd smell of mildew about him, Brodie thought\u2014led him through dark passageways backstage towards the concert hall itself.\n\n\"Who's the artiste?\" Brodie asked, forgetting.\n\n\"Georg Brabec.\"\n\n\"Never heard of him.\"\n\n\"Aye. He's the talk of Prague and Budapest. So he keeps telling me. A big cheese in Leipzig, and all.\"\n\n\"God protect us.\"\n\nBrodie felt a slight dulling of the spirits. It was the second, third and fourth level of concert pianist that gave the most trouble to a tuner; problems ascending pro rata as the rank diminished. He had tuned a piano for Gianfranco Firmin himself when he came to perform at the Assembly Rooms; Firmin, who was one of the most famous piano virtuosos in Europe, yet a humble, charming, self-deprecating man. Every request preceded by \"If it isn't too much trouble\" or \"Might it be possible for\"\u2014no arrogance, no assumptions of overweening genius. Brodie had a bad feeling about Georg Brabec.\n\nBrodie climbed the short flight of stairs to the stage and wandered through the crowded seats and music stands already in place for the orchestra towards the Channon, set before the empty amphitheatre. Georg Brabec stood beside it. Long hair to his shoulders, Brodie saw, with a dramatic streak of grey. A downy moustache. School of Liszt, Brodie reckoned, it did not bode well. Brabec was smoking a cigarillo.\n\nBrodie shook hands and introduced himself. Brabec interrupted before he could mention his surname.\n\n\"The piano is not tuned,\" he said in a somehow dubious, thick Mitteleuropean accent. Brodie couldn't place it.\n\n\"And very echo in treble register.\"\n\n\"I tuned it this morning before we sent the piano over, sir,\" Brodie said politely and patiently.\n\nHe sat down and played a few chords: C major, F sharp minor, E flat diminished. He had played in octaves. The piano was perfectly tuned.\n\n\"And I asking for old piano.\"\n\n\"This is an old piano, sir. Forty years old.\"\n\nBrabec banged some keys with one hand, loudly.\n\n\"Listen: here is thin. The hammer is...\" he searched for the word. \"The hammer is not hitting true. Truly.\"\n\nBrodie sighed inwardly. Smiled, outwardly.\n\n\"Let me have a look at it, sir.\"\n\nHe opened his little Gladstone bag and took out his canvas roll of tools.\n\nBrabec pointed the ashy end of his cigarillo at Brodie's chest, aggressively, almost touching his jacket lapels.\n\n\"And the keyboard is clean. I didn't not ask for clean piano.\"\n\n\"Let me deal with that, sir.\"\n\nBrodie removed the fall, and pulled the action out. Most concert pianists he knew\u201499 per cent of them\u2014had absolutely no idea what happened between their striking a key and the note being produced. The vital factor was to reveal the arcane complexity of the moving parts. Brabec stared at the action for a moment, blinking.\n\n\"Let me work on it, sir,\" Brodie said. \"I'll inform you when everything is in order.\"\n\nThe manager reappeared and led Brabec off to his dressing room.\n\nAs soon as they disappeared Brodie pushed the action back in and put away his tools. In his Gladstone bag he had a small glass bottle containing a thin solution of honey and water. With a fine badger-hair brush he painted the keys with this solution then wiped them down with a rag. He checked the merest trace of tackiness that was left. Accumulated finger grease was what some pianists wanted when they demanded an old piano\u2014the tiniest hint of something sticking so the palps of the finger would grip ever so slightly. All was well: the Channon perfectly tuned and regulated. Georg Brabec would be even more pleased with himself.\n\nBrodie went in search of the manager and found him in his office with a small glass of port and water on the go.\n\n\"Not the most accommodating of fellows, our Signor Brabec,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"Aye. Total bampot,\" the manager said flatly. \"And he now tells me he wants you in attendance for the recital, in case he needs you to retune at the interval.\"\n\n\"Tell him I'll be here,\" Brodie said. \"But in fact you probably won't be able to find me...\"\n\n\"Right enough.\" The manager actually smiled and held up his port and water. \"Will you have a wee snifter?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie\u2014carrying his glass of thinly acidic claret\u2014followed Senga up the stairs to her room. She kept looking back over her shoulder as if she couldn't quite believe he'd actually come to see her. Brodie had left the Bonar Concert Rooms as soon as Brabec had marched on stage and taken his bow and had gone directly to Mrs. Louthern's \"house\" in its side street off the Royal Mile down towards Holyrood Palace. He had sat in the small parlour for ten minutes with two of the other girls while he had waited for Senga to come free. The girls silently played bezique and paid him no attention although he was the only man waiting in the house.\n\nWhat he liked about Mrs. Louthern's establishment was that there was a rear exit into a close behind the tenement. You didn't leave the way you arrived, through the parlour, and so he would have no idea who Senga's last client was. He was under no illusions\u2014she had a job to do and the busier she was the better for her. Still, it was all the more welcome not to have to encounter some grinning, flush-faced farmer up for the agricultural fair fresh from her bed and, thereby, become pointedly aware of his own place in the queue.\n\nMrs. Louthern topped up his glass of inferior claret and suggested that if he was in a hurry either Ida or Joyce here could happily oblige. No thank you, Brodie said, I'd rather wait for Senga. And Senga duly arrived.\n\nIn her bedroom upstairs Senga kissed him on the cheek and said she'd missed him. He hadn't been to Mrs. Louthern's in over two months so it may have been true. Brodie put his glass down and began to undress. Senga undid her skirt and hauled off her frilly blouse, standing there in her cotton shift and ankle boots watching him strip off his clothes down to his vest and drawers.\n\n\"I'll be wanting the shift off, Senga,\" he said.\n\n\"It's another two shillings,\" she said. \"Even for you.\"\n\nHe didn't care, he wanted them both to be naked. Senga was from South Uist, a girl who had come to Edinburgh to work as a housemaid in a big house in the New Town. She had become pregnant, had been promptly sacked, and had ended up at Mrs. Louthern's establishment earning another, somewhat more profitable, living. She was younger than him, twenty or so, he supposed, and there must be a child cared for somewhere, he supposed further. He hadn't asked: it was Senga who provided all the information about herself.\n\nShe was fair, slim and heavy-breasted\u2014which was why she was so popular\u2014though he had heard some clients say they didn't want the \"squinty lassie.\" Her right eye was a so-called \"lazy eye\" and it obviously put some people off. Brodie, with his own acute eyesight problems, didn't care. She still affected the good manners she had learned at the New Town house\u2014despite the straightforward carnal nature of their encounters\u2014and was always polite and she genuinely seemed to like him. More to the point, she aroused him. Maybe it was the lazy eye, he sometimes wondered.\n\nBoth naked now, Senga drew him to the narrow cast-iron bed and they sat beside each other while she gently worked at his penis with both hands, making it hard.\n\n\"Why have ye no been to see me, Brodie?\"\n\n\"I've been busy,\" he said, watching her breasts sway.\n\n\"Busy doing what?\"\n\n\"Writing.\" He had told her he was a composer.\n\n\"Writing a song for me?\"\n\n\"Maybe.\"\n\nSeeing him ready, she rolled onto her back, spreading her legs and Brodie eased himself on top of her, resting his weight on his stiff arms.\n\n\"Can I kiss you?\" he asked.\n\n\"I don't like kissing,\" she said. \"You know that.\"\n\n\"I'll give you a shilling.\"\n\n\"I don't want another shilling. I don't like kissing.\"\n\n\"All right. Have it your way.\"\n\nHe eased the weight off his arms and she reached for him and guided him into her\u2014so easy, he thought. How many times has she done that?\n\n\"Take your specs off, Brodie.\" She had a lilting Highland accent.\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Go on.\"\n\n\"I want to see you, Senga. You're a pretty girl. I like to see the pretty girl I'm fucking.\"\n\nShe eased her knees back. She was familiar with the routine and the banter.\n\n\"You say that to all the girls. A handsome bastard like you with your enormous big graith on ye, like a shinty bat. You want to see us girls as you take your pleasure, don't you, fine sir? Like to see us shidder, don't ye?\"\n\n\"I certainly do.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie sent down for a bottle of claret. A ridiculous, overpriced five shillings but he didn't want to leave just yet. As long as you were spending then Mrs. Louthern's house never closed. Sometimes he'd walked out of Mrs. Louthern's into a refulgent Edinburgh morning, all sharp-angled sun and scouthering breezes, and gone straight to Channon's, stinking of drink, tobacco and fornication\u2014or so he thought\u2014unshaven and greasy-haired and then ducked out at lunchtime to a barbershop for a shave and slap on some pomade before Mrs. Grant could complain to Mr. Channon about his staff's debaucheries.\n\nHe poured Senga a glass and she drank the wine avidly. They had both dressed after their exertions. She was called Agnes McCloud but she didn't like the name Agnes and so had simply reversed it.\n\n\"I'm going away, Senga.\"\n\n\"No! Where's better than Edinburgh?\"\n\n\"Paris.\"\n\n\"Ah. Right.\" She looked sad for a moment. She couldn't compete with that.\n\n\"What'll ye do in Paris?\"\n\n\"Write a symphony or two, I suppose.\"\n\n\"And there'll be lots of they French girls for you to dally with.\"\n\n\"I'll always think of you, Senga.\" He poured more wine.\n\n\"No ye won't, you'll forget me in a flash.\"\n\n\"No I won't, I promise. You're very special.\" He touched her cheek below her right eye. \"That's why I want to tell you something.\"\n\n\"What's that, then?\"\n\n\"You know your funny eye? Your right eye. You can get it fixed.\"\n\nThis had never been brought up before and it made her seem suddenly discomfited, vulnerable. The strange unspoken decorum of their transaction\u2014her trade with him; money for services rendered\u2014was suddenly present in the room. She had been objectified, somehow, and Brodie felt obscurely ashamed for mentioning the matter, trying to be helpful.\n\n\"What's wrong with my eye?\"\n\n\"It's just 'lazy,' so they describe it. But they can fix it, nowadays.\"\n\nHe took out one of his calling cards and wrote the name and address of his optician on the back.\n\n\"I'll pay. Just go and see this man\u2014show him this card and he'll know it's from me\u2014and he'll sort you out.\"\n\n\"Will I have to wear spengtacles like you? Those awfy bottle-bottoms.\"\n\n\"For a while, and maybe a patch, till your eye gets stronger...But life will be better, Senga, believe me.\"\n\n\"Life will be what life will be, Brodie. Nothing much we can do about it.\"\n\n\"I'll be back one day. Have some more wine.\"\n\nHe poured more wine into their glasses. She looked at him\u2014winnel-skewed\u2014harder somehow.\n\n\"Aye. Maybe. Maybe not. Well, I wish you luck,\" she said, standing and going to the door. \"Thanks for the wine. I'd better be getting on with things.\"\n\n# 3\n\nBrodie paid off the rest of the month's rent he owed to the landlord of his lodging house in Bruntsfield. The landlord, a surly fellow called McBain, was irritated to lose a long-term lodger at such short notice and wanted to penalize him further, Brodie realized. He searched Brodie's room diligently for signs of damage or neglect but could find none.\n\n\"It's so sudden because I'm off to work in Paris, you see,\" Brodie said, keen to make McBain envy him.\n\n\"Rather you than me. It's a sink, Paris. A sewer.\"\n\n\"So, you've been there, Mr. McBain. To Paris.\"\n\n\"I don't need to step in a sewer to know what a sewer is.\"\n\nBrodie lugged his cabin trunk to the end of the road and waited for a cab to come by. Paris was the great opportunity of his life, he realized, but it provided its own set of concerns. One in particular was beginning to stand out\u2014Calder Channon. Brodie knew him a little from the short time he had spent in the George Street showroom before the Paris opening beckoned. A flighty, complicated individual had been his assessment, and very pleased with himself, moreover. Still, Paris was Paris\u2014Calder Channon couldn't ruin an entire city.\n\nHe caught the 10:45 train from Waverley station to Hawick and sat in the window seat of a smoking compartment looking at the rolling countryside of the Borders as they headed south out of Edinburgh. _Vallonn\u00e9_ was the word the French used for this type of landscape, he suddenly remembered. The hills were softly rounded, not jagged or rocky, carpeted with tough blond grass and heather. Nothing forbidding or awe-inspiring\u2014just nature at her most pleasing and easy on the eye. And between the hills at their foot were swift shallow rivers, woods and copses, small fields of corn and barley, sheep and cattle grazing in pastureland. Clouds slid to reveal the sun and for a moment the valleys were exposed in a perfect fanfare of light. Brodie felt his heart give a thud of applause. It was beautiful countryside but he was heading homeward.\n\nAt Peebles station he threw his trunk into the back of a dog cart and told its driver to take him to Liethen Manor, a village some three miles away from town off the road to Biggar. The driver, a boy in his teens, gladly accepted Brodie's offer of a cigarette, broke it in half and lodged the half he'd smoke later behind his ear.\n\n\"I think I ken you,\" the driver said after twenty minutes, the rest of Brodie's cigarette now smoked down to his fingernails.\n\n\"Well, I've lived in Liethen Manor most of my life.\"\n\n\"You're a Moncur. That's it\u2014you're Malcolm Moncur's son.\"\n\n\"I am, for my sins.\"\n\n\"Aw, no! No, no\u2014he's a great man.\"\n\nAs they turned off the Biggar road, crossed the three-arched bridge over the Tweed river, Brodie felt that sinking of spirits that returning home always seemed to engender. They headed along a single-track metalled road between drystone walls running between farmland and woodland, meandering up the Liethen Valley towards the small village that was Liethen Manor. The village sat snug on the north bank of Liethen Water, a small, fast-flowing tributary of the Tweed. Brodie looked about him at the round hills that framed the valley and duly recalled his many ascents of them\u2014Cadhmore, Ring Knowe, the Whaum. This was his home\u2014there was no denying it. And he thought of a new definition of the word. \"Home\"\u2014the place you have to leave.\n\nThey arrived at the outskirts of Liethen Manor. An abandoned tollbooth and then a few low, slate-roofed, small-windowed workers' cottages. On this side of the village there was a shop, a public house, a livery yard and blacksmith, an agricultural supplies depot, a dame school and a post office. In between these establishments was an untidy assortment of cottages and larger houses set in their vegetable gardens. The village was made important by its unusually large church and manse, both built only thirty years before, further down at the end of the main street, such as it was, on the western side. These were imposing buildings of red sandstone, somehow out of scale for this modest hamlet in its gentle valley. The big church and its grand four-storey adjoining house seemed more suited for a prosperous suburb in a big city.\n\nThe dog cart clip-clopped through the village and led them past the church, St. Mungo's, still looking new\u2014pure Gothic Revival with flying buttresses, finials wherever a finial could be placed and a tall bell tower with no steeple. Its rowan- and yew-dotted cemetery was crowded with ancient graves, former parishioners, the late, good folk of the Liethen Valley. Then they turned into the gravelled carriage drive of the manse, set in a wide dark garden filled with ornamental conifers\u2014monkey puzzles, larches and cedars\u2014and beech trees. Beeches grew well in the Liethen Valley soil.\n\nBrodie's mood slumped further as the dog cart pulled up outside the porticoed front door of the manse and he glanced back at St. Mungo's, built on the site of the old Liethen Kirk that had been completely demolished to make way for the new church. The church and the manse had been constructed to his father's design and financed through a complicated Tontine scheme. The Reverend Malcolm Moncur had put Liethen Manor on the ecclesiastical map and these dominant, inappropriate buildings were brash evidence of his power and sway.\n\nBrodie paid the lad his sixpence and gave him another cigarette.\n\n\"Is Moncur preaching this Sunday?\" the boy asked.\n\n\"I'm sure he is,\" Brodie said and, thus reminded, told the boy to come back and collect him at 6 a.m. prompt on Sunday. As the dog cart turned round on the gravelled sweep, the front door opened and two of Brodie's six sisters rushed out to welcome him. He turned to greet his family with the broadest smile he could manage.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie sat on the bed in his old bedroom on the third floor under the eaves of the manse. He had gathered up the few belongings he had left there\u2014a pair of heavy boots, a tweed overcoat, some photographs, some books\u2014and had already packed them away in his trunk. Two nights at home, he thought to himself, surely it can't be that bad...\n\nThere was a knock on the door and his brother Callum appeared. They looked at each other, blankly.\n\n\"Are you a stupid, miscreant bastard or are you a terrible, poor lunatic fit for the loony bin in Penicuik?\" Callum said, apparently not joking.\n\n\"Well, I'm here,\" Brodie said. \"So, you're probably right. I am insane. But, then again, so are you.\"\n\nThey shook hands warmly and Callum punched him on the shoulder and Brodie punched him back. It was what they did when they saw each other.\n\n\"I'll have one of your fancy American cigarettes, thank you very much,\" Callum said. Brodie dug out his tin of Margarita from his trunk and they lit up.\n\nCallum was two years younger than Brodie, shorter and more muscled, with a soft blond moustache. He worked in Peebles as a clerk to a Writer to the Signet. He lay back on Brodie's bed and crossed his ankles on the bed-end, smoking histrionically, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling.\n\n\"Your telegram informed us you were going to Paris,\" Callum said.\n\n\"I am. I'm here to pack up my things and say goodbye to my stupid brother\u2014and the rest of the Moncurs, of course.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, you'll be fucking French girls, lucky dog.\"\n\n\"I've got a very serious job to do. Where's Malky?\"\n\n\"Malky has gone to Glasgow. He'll be back tonight.\"\n\n\"Glasgow...\" Brodie thought. \"Why does he keep going to Glasgow? Has he a woman there?\"\n\n\"Because nobody knows him in Glasgow\u2014he's safe. And there's no particular woman\u2014he just goes a-whoring with his cronies, I'll wager. Incognito.\"\n\nCallum talked on, salaciously denigrating their father. Only between the two of them was he referred to as \"Malky.\" Brodie walked to the small dormer window and looked down over the garden spread below him. Three of his sisters sat on wicker chairs darning and sewing. Doreen, Ernestine and Aileen. The three oldest Moncur children, all in their thirties, and all unmarried. He and Callum referred to them as the \"Eens.\" He looked at the Eens as they worked and chatted. It was like a moment from a Russian novel, he thought: Tolstoy or Turgenev. He had six sisters, four of them older than he was, yet none was married. Why, he wondered? He turned away. Come to that, he wasn't married either, nor was Callum\u2014and the third Moncur son, Alfie, was only nineteen. Perhaps they'd all be married in the fullness of time...The key factor was to put as much distance between yourself and Malcolm Moncur, he knew. That was why he so wanted to go to Paris, he suddenly realized\u2014Edinburgh wasn't far enough away. Of all the Moncur children he was the only one who had fashioned and made good his escape. Perhaps he'd be an inspiration to the others.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie came down to dinner promptly at six. He had shaved, and had oiled and combed his hair flat. He wore his charcoal-grey suit, a white soft-collared shirt and his Channon & Co. bow tie with its jocular symbols of musical notes, like polka dots. A bow tie made him feel older, somehow. He remarked to himself that he felt unusually nervous for someone who was meant to be welcomed to the bosom of his family.\n\nHe stepped into the big drawing room. Callum was there and five of the sisters.\n\n\"Where's Electra?\" he said. \"And Alfie?\"\n\n\"They'll be here,\" Doreen said sharply. \"We'll all be here to greet the Prodigal Son.\"\n\n\"What's prodigal about him?\" Callum said. \"Prodigal Idiot, more like.\"\n\nAileen came over and took Brodie's arm. Perhaps he liked Aileen best, he thought.\n\n\"He's prodigal because he went away and now he's home,\" she said.\n\n\"And how long will you be gracing us with your company?\" Doreen asked. She was the oldest and occupied a position somewhere between housekeeper and surrogate wife. Certainly Malcolm Moncur talked to his eldest daughter as rudely as he had talked to his wife when she was alive, Brodie remembered.\n\n\"Two nights,\" Brodie said. \"I leave for Paris at dawn on Sunday.\"\n\n\"You have to stay for the sermon,\" Ernestine said, shooting worried glances at Doreen. \"Papa will want you to stay.\"\n\n\"Alas, alack\u2014I don't control the steamer timetables.\"\n\nBrodie could hear voices and laughter\u2014men's voices and laughter\u2014coming down the corridor from his father's sitting room. His \"receiving room,\" as he sometimes termed it.\n\n\"Who's with Papa?\" he asked Doreen.\n\n\"The mayor of Lyne and some friends who've come up from England for some sport.\"\n\n\"And what sport would that be?\" Callum said. \"Not fish or fowl, I bet you.\"\n\n\"Callum!\"\n\nThey listened to the laughter growing louder from the sitting room and heard Malcolm Moncur's booming voice shouting: \"...and he's not fit to wash my shoes!\"\n\nBrodie felt briefly nauseous, turned away and walked over to his sisters.\n\n\"Any chance of a preprandial drink? A sherry or Madeira?\"\n\n\"Papa has locked the pantry and has the key.\"\n\nAll alcohol in the manse\u2014and there was a copious supply\u2014was locked in a large walk-in butler's pantry off the drawing room. Only Malcolm Moncur had the key; only he dispensed liquor in his house.\n\n\"There'll be something to drink in the receiving room,\" Callum said. \"If they haven't finished it already.\"\n\n\"Sneak in and grab a bottle,\" Brodie said to Isabella, the second youngest. She was a quiet girl who wore spectacles like him. \"He's never cross with you. Tell him we're all dying of thirst out here.\"\n\n\"I don't dare, Brodie. He'll belt me.\"\n\n\"You're seventeen years old, Isabella!\"\n\n\"He still belts me when he's roused.\"\n\n\"Sweet Jesus. Are we allowed to smoke?\"\n\nHe took out his pewter cigarette case with his pre-rolled cigarettes and passed them around. All his older sisters\u2014the Eens\u2014smoked, he was glad to see. Small acts of rebellion in this household were important. He lit their cigarettes, then Edith, his fourth older sister, decided she would like one as well and, when he and Callum lit up, they were all smoking, all six of them (only Isabella declining), as they made small talk, creating quite a fug, so that Electra, when she came in, followed by Alfie, opened the French windows onto the back lawn to provide a bit of air, she said. They greeted Brodie shyly, as if he were a stranger.\n\n\"I hear you're leaving us,\" Electra said. She was petite and the prettiest of all the Moncur girls.\n\n\"Aye. Off to Paris.\"\n\n\"You'll never come back,\" she said.\n\n\"Of course I will,\" Brodie said. \"It's just a job. I'm not emigrating.\"\n\n\"I'd emigrate,\" she said, lowering her eyes.\n\n\"And where would you emigrate to?\" came a loud voice from the doorway. \"Darkest Africa? You'd be chicken soup in a second, my darling. Best to bide with your old papa. Eh? Eh?\"\n\nElectra slid behind Brodie as Malcolm Moncur stepped into the room and scanned his large family as all the women severally stubbed out their cigarettes.\n\nBrodie glanced at Callum. They knew the signs, the descending stages, of Malcolm Moncur's intoxication\u2014four-fifths drunk, Brodie calculated: it could be a difficult evening.\n\nThe Reverend Malcolm Moncur was a short, burly man\u2014going to fat\u2014with a big strong-featured head, almost out of proportion to the rest of his stocky body. He was sixty years old but his light reddish-brown hair was just greying at the temples and he had a dense well-shaped moustache, like something cut from coir matting, a darker gingery red. Callum thought he had some barber colour-tint it.\n\nMalky Moncur, Brodie thought, in your cups as usual, waiting for his father's eyes to settle on him, as they duly did.\n\n\"Talking of Africa\u2014look! The darkie's come home. Well, well, well.\"\n\n\"Hello, Papa,\" Brodie said, his voice staying calm.\n\n\"How's my wee mulatto?\" he said, coming up to Brodie. Brodie was a head taller than his father and the pointed height difference always seemed to agitate Malky, Brodie had noticed, as if it were some kind of personal genetic affront. Brodie was very dark\u2014his hair ink-black, his eyes brown, his skin sallow\u2014alone in this family of fair-haired, light-eyed, pale-faced Moncurs. His father had commented on this discrepancy all his life. Brodie rather hoped that he was the result of an affair his mother had enjoyed with some olive-skinned Latin visitor to Scotland. It was a fantasy, he knew.\n\n\"You're as black as ever, I see. Black as the day you were born.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Papa,\" he said, levelly. \"You seem well. Glasgow must have been invigorating.\"\n\nThe two of them looked at each other. Brodie kept his features impassive, his eyes dead. You may control the others but you do not control me, Malky Moncur, he thought: I am my own man.\n\n\"Agonizing Christ!\" Malky Moncur turned on his oldest daughter. \"Are we going to eat or starve, Doreen? I'm dying of hunger!\"\n\nAnd at this the Reverend Malcolm Moncur marched into the dining room, the Moncur sisters and brothers silently following, looking sharply at each other, unspoken messages darting between them.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe dinner passed off relatively well, Brodie thought. Doreen carved a big side of mutton\u2014boiled potatoes and carrots as supplements\u2014served by the Moncur housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Daw. A short grace was said (by Alfie) before the family picked up their knives and forks and ate with hungry enthusiasm. Jugs of water were served as drinks and Brodie, for once, was glad of his huge family\u2014there were ten of them round the table\u2014therefore many conversations took place outwith Malky's orbit. Doreen and Ernestine flanked him and on the whole managed to confine him to his end of the table. But from time to time Malky would rise to his feet and leave the room for a couple of minutes; or he would wander down the table and affectionately squeeze the shoulders of one or other of his daughters and whisper in her ear; or, if he needed it, he would personally go in search of the salt cellar or water jug and carry it back to his seat. He seemed to like this perambulating way of dining: his mood improved\u2014he seemed mellow, almost paternalistic, Brodie thought, as the meal progressed.\n\nBut it all changed with pudding\u2014blancmange with raspberry jam\u2014an offering that prompted Malky to expostulate that \"I may be a confirmed bloody fool but I will not eat that shite!\" and he strode out of the room, leaving the rest of the family to their dessert. The mood lightened, instantly.\n\nAfter dinner the women all slipped away to their bedrooms but Brodie, Callum and Alfie decided they might confront Malky in his den if there was the prospect of something to drink. When they wandered into the drawing room the door to the butler's pantry was open and Malky was inside.\n\n\"Anything to drink in this pub?\" Callum called out and Malky appeared, jacket off, braces hanging round his rump.\n\n\"Is that the donsie loun clerk of a third-rate Peebles notary speaking?\" Malky said aggressively, swaying slightly, brandy bottle in hand. Five-fifths drunk, now, Brodie thought.\n\n\"We're away to bed if there's no drink,\" Callum continued, bravely.\n\nMalky grudgingly provided them with small tumblers of brandy and they sat down on armchairs facing him as he sprawled on the Chesterfield.\n\n\"Here's how, Papa,\" Brodie said, raising his glass.\n\n\" _Sl\u00e1inte,_ \" Malky replied. \"And I'll have none of your Anglo-Edinburgh, pretentious claptrap in this house.\"\n\n\"I'm allowed to wish you 'good health,' I assume.\"\n\n\"Weeping God!\" he said theatrically. \"Weeping God that I should have three such sons.\"\n\nBrodie passed round his cigarettes and Malky reached forward to take one.\n\n\"And how is Ainsley Channon?\" he asked Brodie. \"The fornicating bottle-washer.\"\n\n\"He's very well,\" Brodie said. \"He asked me to convey his very best wishes to you.\"\n\n\"He can shove his best wishes up his narrow arse, I say.\"\n\nCallum now had the brandy bottle and was refilling everyone's glass.\n\n\"Ainsley Channon is a good friend to this family,\" Callum said, keen to provoke more profanities. \"Look what he's doing for Brodie.\"\n\n\"He's an Edinburgh counter-jumper,\" Malky said, \"who had the good fortune to inherit a family business when his cousin died young. He sits on his bum in George Street and counts the money coming in.\"\n\nBrodie covertly signalled Callum to drop the topic but Malky spotted the gesture and turned on him.\n\n\"Just because he's sending you to Paris doesn't change a thing,\" Malky said, coldly. \"You black bastard.\"\n\nBrodie drained his brandy.\n\n\"Goodnight, Father dear.\"\n\nHe left, not closing the door and not listening to the imprecations following him and climbed the stairs to his bedroom on the top floor. He didn't feel angry\u2014he felt strange. Why did his father\u2014a complicated man, admittedly\u2014resent him so? He went to the small oak bureau set opposite his bed and opened a drawer and took out the cameo of his mother that he kept there. Moira Moncur, 1842\u20131884.\n\nShe had died in childbirth when he was fourteen years old so at least he had strong fixed memories of her: a wan, loving but harassed figure burdened by her many children and constant pregnancies. From 1861 to her death twenty-three years later, Brodie had recently calculated, she had given birth to fourteen children, five of them stillborn or dead within days of their parturition. He wondered what his father thought about this woman, his wife. Was she just some sort of child-factory, a breed-cow? First came four daughters in five years, then the initial two stillbirths, then his, Brodie's, arrival in 1870. She was twenty-eight years old. Two other boys followed (Callum and Alfie, with a dead brother between them) before the female cycle resumed again with the appearance of Isabella and Electra, also on either side of a dead infant. The stillborn child that hastened her death was another son, unnamed. Nine children living and she was dead at forty-two years old.\n\nHe looked intently at her face in the oval cameo but the dated formalities of the pose, the exposure's long hold denied any sense of the real person emerging from the portrait. It was a mask, this image, really, not any depiction of a living, breathing human being. What was she like? What if she were alive now? She would have been fifty-two. How would things have been different? It seemed unimaginable: how could she have lived alongside the monstrous, self-obsessed spectacle that was Malky Moncur today? And he thought, not for the first time, that her premature death may have unleashed some devilry in her husband. Though that was too charitable, he corrected himself\u2014Malky Moncur was a dark singularity, unique. He had always known which direction he was heading in: his destination was fixed.\n\nBrodie put the cameo away safely in his trunk, wondering vaguely about his five dead siblings. He wasn't entirely sure of their sex, he had to admit\u2014they had been boys and girls, some named\u2014a Hector, he recalled; a Marjorie\u2014some just anonymous foetuses, as far as he was concerned. He felt guilt over his ignorance. There must be a parish record somewhere, he supposed. Maybe he should do their tiny memories a modicum of justice by finding out whatever bare facts there were about these lost children. But the prospect suddenly seemed overwhelming, futile, and he slumped on his bed, weary, exhausted by the multiple tensions of coming home. Think of Paris, he told himself\u2014that is the gift that the gods of chance have given you. Paris was waiting.\n\n# 4\n\nThe next morning, Saturday, Brodie\u2014freshly shaved, nails cleaned with his penknife's point, smoking his first Margarita of the day\u2014walked the mile or so up the Liethen Valley to Dalcastle Hall to meet Lady Dalcastle. He had had a note delivered to her on his arrival and she had suggested by reply that a rendezvous at eleven o'clock in the morning would be ideal. She was \"looking forward with anticipation\" to seeing him again.\n\nDalcastle Hall was a strange hybrid of a manor house. Brodie walked through ornamental gates past a neo-Gothic lodge with polygonal chimneys, ridge tiles, gingerbread eave-trim and wheel-windows and then down a potholed drive through an avenue of ancient beech trees towards the hall. The first glimpse through the trees revealed what seemed like an old fortified tower, thick-walled, castellated, with small high asymmetrical windows. It was in bad repair. Moss and small ferns grew from the pointing of the stones and some of the windows were boarded up. But as he approached, the Georgian wing came into view\u2014white stucco, three storeys, symmetrically placed sash windows and, adjoining that, was the extensive stable block and beyond the stables the high grey walls of two gardens, one for a lawn, flowerbeds and glasshouses, the other for fruit and vegetables. Lady Dalcastle lived here alone\u2014alone with her staff, that is. Her husband, Hugo Dalcastle, had died in his thirties (\"Of drink and debauchery,\" Malky said) and their only child, Murdoch, a captain in the Scots Greys, had perished ten years later of yellow fever in Ashanti in West Africa in 1870 aged twenty-four. In her grief Lady Dalcastle had found solace and company with the minister's wife, Moira Moncur, and the two of them had become fast if unlikely friends.\n\nBrodie was born in the year Murdoch Dalcastle died and Lady Dalcastle had taken a special interest in him, as if somehow the soul of her dead son had transmuted into the infant Brodie. She singled him out for treats and presents and he was regularly sent to Dalcastle Hall to \"play.\" When it was discovered that he had perfect pitch and he began to sing in the St. Mungo's Church choir it was Lady Dalcastle who had paid for further lessons and, as the pure integrity of his voice was recognized, it was she who had come up with the fee for him to be sent to Mrs. Maskelyne's Academy of Music in Edinburgh when he was nine years old. There was talk of a foreign conservatoire; prospects of a brilliant operatic career beckoned. But when, at the age of thirteen, Brodie's voice broke it became clear that the incandescent treble had mutated into a mediocre baritone. Brodie switched to the piano but although perfectly competent\u2014he tried hard\u2014he had no special gift. He could have taught the piano but the world was full of moderately talented piano teachers, he swiftly realized. His perfect pitch\u2014his ear\u2014was still there, however. It was an asset that could be cultivated. Lady Dalcastle spoke to her cousin, Ainsley Channon, and Brodie was taken on, after his leaving certificate examinations\u2014he was a bright, intelligent boy\u2014as an apprentice piano tuner at Channon & Co. It was a steady job that quickly became a vocation. He was eighteen, it was 1888.\n\nAll these memories clustered around him as he approached the front door of the hall, as familiar as the manse in its way, and with happier associations\u2014he owed Lady Dalcastle almost everything, he acknowledged, including whatever good manners and gentility he possessed. There was a family joke that Brodie was destined to inherit the Dalcastle estate but every time the idea was entertained Malky would mock him, vigorously. \"She's in debt up to her oxters,\" he would sneer. Hugo Dalcastle had drunk and gambled away the family fortune. The estate was mortgaged ten times over. \"Ask your dunderhead notary-public brother. He knows all about it. You'll not get a brass farthing, laddie!\"\n\nThis information made Brodie relieved rather than cast down. He didn't want to live in the Liethen Valley under an insuperable burden of debt a mile away from his family home and Malky Moncur. What a circle of hell that would be! He liked Lady Dalcastle and would be forever grateful to her that she had provided the means for his escape. The only aspect of her life that troubled him was that she was a constant attendee of his father's Sunday sermons. She never missed a single one; she thought Malcolm Moncur was inspired and inspiring. Malky in his turn became atypically demure whenever he spoke to her. Brodie found this very amusing and, at the same time, somewhat repulsive.\n\nHe knocked on the front door and was admitted by Broderick, Lady Dalcastle's butler, and led upstairs to the small drawing room. Broderick was an elderly man, he'd been in Dalcastle service for over fifty years and had a slight stammer. He paused on the landing.\n\n\"Lady D-D-D-Dalcastle is not well, Mr. Brodie.\"\n\n\"I'm sorry to hear it.\"\n\n\"She mustn't get tired.\"\n\n\"I understand. I won't tire her. Ten minutes\u2014just to pay my respects.\"\n\n\"Ten minutes maximum, Mr. Brodie. She mustn't be fffffffatigued.\"\n\n\"Consider it done.\"\n\nBroderick led him into the drawing room and left him there. Brodie wandered about, suddenly craving a cigarette. The room was panelled in a very light wood\u2014ash? walnut?\u2014and there were small dark landscapes hanging on the panelling from a picture rail. Two windows looked out over the walled garden. To Brodie's eye it appeared somewhat neglected. A tree had fallen. The herbaceous borders were full of weeds, willowherb and nettles. There was a whitewashed glasshouse and a couple of tethered sheep grazed on the lawn\u2014it was well cropped.\n\nBrodie heard a polite cough behind him and turned to see that Lady Dalcastle had crept silently into the room. She offered her hand to be kissed. Since Murdoch's death she had decided to wear only the gayest colours. Today she had on a cerise velvet jacket over a wide plum-coloured skirt. Her grey hair was tied back with a yellow silk scarf. She wore her hair long like a girl's.\n\nShe was pleased to see him, she said, though it had been\u2014what?\u2014two years now, he was a scoundrel for neglecting her.\n\n\"But I'll forgive you, come and sit beside me.\"\n\nThey sat down together on a small sofa and Broderick brought in a tray of tea. He set the fine china cups and saucers out with such a rattle that Lady Dalcastle dismissed him and poured from the silver teapot herself, chatting away, talking about replacing Broderick but she hadn't the heart, it would be the death of him, so she had to do more and more herself, _C'est la vie._\n\nShe was incredibly thin, Brodie saw, thinner than ever, as if her wrists might snap from the weight of the full teapot she lifted. But she was bright and eager, eyes shining, a little lip rouge applied, her scent\u2014of lime-tree flowers, Brodie thought\u2014subtle yet pungent.\n\nThe tea was tepid; the shortbread biscuits crumbled under his fingertips like damp sugar.\n\n\"Do please smoke if you wish, Brodie. I know you like a cigarette.\"\n\n\"No thank you, Lady Dalcastle. I'm trying to give up\u2014it's an expensive habit and I've foolishly developed a taste for American tobacco. There's only one shop in\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you seen your father's advertisement?\"\n\n\"No. What advertisement?\"\n\n\"In the _Scotsman,_ no less.\" She reached for a folded newspaper on the side table and handed it to him. There was a black-framed square advertisement in the bottom right-hand corner. \"The Reverend Malcolm Moncur will preach on Sunday at St. Mungo's Church, Liethen Manor. Transportation available at Peebles railway station. The text is from the Book of Baruch (Apocrypha). Admission free.\"\n\n\"Callum told me about these advertisements,\" Brodie said. \"Sometimes they get five hundred in the church, I hear. Folk coming from Edinburgh, Selkirk, Biggar\u2014\"\n\n\"There are dozens of carriages. Dozens. The streets of the village filled. Charabancs at Peebles station. He's quite the draw. Oh yes.\"\n\n\"Well, he always wanted to attract\u2014\"\n\n\"I wouldn't miss it,\" Lady Dalcastle said firmly, in case there was any doubt about her zeal. \"It can be quite fascinating\u2014his interpretations of these very obscure bits of the Bible. Very intuitive what he digs out.\"\n\n\"Alas, I'm going to miss it, I'm afraid. I have to leave very early tomorrow morning.\"\n\nShe wagged a skinny finger at him.\n\n\"You're not an atheist, are you, Brodie?\"\n\n\"To be honest...I do have doubts, Lady Dalcastle. I find my father's faith...a paradox.\" Brodie was happy to let her know he might be saved. But he was the son of Malky Moncur, therefore his atheism was devout, implacable.\n\n\"Do you know the poetry of Swinburne, Algernon Swinburne?\"\n\n\"No, I don't. I know his name but\u2014\"\n\n\"Very beautiful verse. He is an atheist, I believe.\"\n\n\"Right. Aye. No. It's just that\u2014\"\n\n\"Paris, Brodie, Paris! The city of light. _La ville lumineuse._ How I envy you!\"\n\n\"It's a rare opportunity. I'm excited to be going, I admit.\"\n\n\"But is it an opportunity? Truly?\"\n\n\"I believe so, yes,\" he said. \"I have to help Calder Channon with\u2014\"\n\n\"Or is it a trap?\"\n\nBrodie felt the cigarette craving come upon him again. He drank some of his cold tea.\n\n\"How could it be a trap, Lady Dalcastle?\"\n\n\"Ah, Paris, Paris. She can be a difficult mistress. Hugo\u2014my late husband\u2014spent a lot of time in Paris. Yes, he was often there, towards the end.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"It was his undoing.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\nShe wagged her finger at him again.\n\n\"Don't let it be _your_ undoing, Brodie. Promise me.\"\n\n\"I won't. I promise.\"\n\n\"Have another cup of tea. I'm so enjoying our conversation.\"\n\nShe showed him to the front door herself, half an hour later, making Brodie swear he would write to her from Paris and she would do the same by return. She squeezed both his hands and looked up at him, saying, \"Bless you, dear boy, bless you. Your darling mother would have been so proud. So tall and handsome.\"\n\nThen she dug in the small reticule hanging from her belt and gave him a gold sovereign, pressing it into his palm and reminding him, in a whisper, as if it was their secret: \"I await all the news from Paris.\"\n\nBrodie wandered up the pitted drive away from Dalcastle Hall feeling exhausted, a puzzle of conflicted emotions. The sun was breaking through a sky that had seemed full of lumbering, cumbersome clouds and the June day now appeared set fair. Back at the manse he went into the kitchen and drank three glasses of water.\n\nMrs. Daw was peeling potatoes, and a scullery maid was stirring a steaming cauldron on the range.\n\n\"I hear ye're off tae Paris, Brodie,\" Mrs. Daw said.\n\n\"That's the plan, Mrs. D. I've been given a job there.\"\n\n\"So we'll ne'er see you back here again, like enough.\"\n\n\"Of course I'll be back. Why does everyone assume I'll be gone forever?\"\n\n\"Oh no. You willnae be back,\" she said confidently. \"No, no. You'll get a taste for that life. I've seen it afore.\"\n\n\"What life?\"\n\n\"Foreign life. It's nothing like our life here. Simple, strong, God-fearing.\"\n\n\"So what's it like there, Mrs. Daw? In Paris?\"\n\nShe pointed her knife at him.\n\n\"It's dangerous. It'll make your head reel!\"\n\n\"Maybe that's good. Maybe it's good to have your head reel from time to time.\"\n\n\"Not for the likes of you, Brodie Moncur. I know you. If your mother was alive she'd be agreeing with me.\"\n\nBrodie assured her he had an important and responsible job to do in a piano shop. There was nothing head-reeling about that. Mrs. Daw shook her head and smiled sadly.\n\n\"Mark my words, my bonny boy. Mark my words.\"\n\nBrodie wandered into the hall, bemused, and found Callum there.\n\n\"I think we need to go fishing,\" Callum said.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie and Callum sat on the high bank of the Liethen Water in the shade of a big old willow tree looking down on one of the largest pools that the small river possessed. This was where they would come to swim or plunge when they were children on the rare hot days of summer. Callum had filched two slices of veal and ham pie from Mrs. Daw's kitchen and they ate this hungrily, washed down with handfuls of cold Liethen water. They had fished upstream, away from the village\u2014wet fly\u2014and had been successful. There were a dozen half-pound brown trout in Callum's wicker fishing basket, covered in wet dock leaves.\n\nThey had started off fishing on the edge of the meadows around Liethen Manor then followed the river as it flowed through a kind of Scottish wilderness, the banks dense with hazel and alder where casting was tricky. The grass was thigh-high, full of teazles, willowherb and thistles, unmown, uncropped for years. The Liethen Water was shallow and brown, like unmilked tea, fast-flowing over its pebbled, stony bed, but, where the river swerved, the current cut deep, narrow pools and Brodie knew that if you carefully floated your fly into them then the Liethen trout often took the bait.\n\nBrodie had been fishing this small river since he could remember\u2014Callum also. They knew every bend and pool, every potential crossing point, every placid, midge-hovered eddy. It had a calming effect on him, walking up the Liethen Water, casting his line; memories skittered through his mind, came and went like butterflies or sun dapples beneath breeze-shifted branches; he saw himself as a little boy with his first rod, remembered the charge and thrill of his first catch. Maybe this small river in its wilderness should be \"home\" to him, he thought, not the manse or the village. He should carefully store the memories of this day away and recall it whenever he felt lonely or homesick. Sick for home...\n\nHe threw the last of his dry pie crust into the gloomy tangle of the big pool and offered Callum a Margarita. Callum lay back on the turf and looked up at the dusty sunrays angling through whippy branches of the willow, drawing on his cigarette. Upstream a heron yanked itself skywards. Brodie turned to watch it beat slowly up the valley. He felt the moment cohere, solidify. A breeze fingered his hair. Remember this, remember this. Callum was saying something.\n\n\"What'll become of us, Brodie? You and me?\"\n\nHe turned back. \"I'll go off to Paris and meet a beautiful French countess who'll set me up in her chateau. You'll become a Writer to the Signet and marry an ugly rich Peebles lassie. Buy a big house in the country and have ten bairns.\"\n\n\"I'd rather die.\"\n\n\"Well, you know there are other options.\"\n\n\"Run away to the circus,\" Callum said with a dry laugh.\n\n\"That's the general idea. Head out of town. Go anywhere.\"\n\nCallum turned on his side, resting his weight on an elbow.\n\n\"All very well for you. You've made the break.\"\n\n\"We're lucky,\" Brodie said. \"The girls are stuck. And Malky seems to have Alfie dancing to his tune.\"\n\n\"Are you coming to church tomorrow?\"\n\n\"Am I hell. I'm being picked up at six in the morning.\"\n\n\"Malky will be furious.\"\n\n\"Malky can boil his head.\"\n\nBrodie stood up and dusted the grass seeds off his trousers.\n\n\"Let's head back to the village and have a pint at the Howden.\"\n\n\"Maybe I'll come to Paris with you,\" Callum said, clambering to his feet. \"But I'll want a mysterious beautiful countess of my own.\"\n\n\"Paris is full of them. You'll be fighting them off.\"\n\nThey walked off downstream, the Liethen Water on their right side, the tilted fields on their left, their rods easy in their hands, talking of possible futures for themselves, then, when the bell tower of St. Mungo's came into view, they cut across some pastureland towards the village. The lukewarm June sun shone on their backs when it appeared between the scudding clouds and Brodie recalled his injunction to himself\u2014remember this, remember this almost perfect day: he and Callum at the end of an afternoon's fishing, striding home together through the wind-combed meadows of the south of Scotland. Store it away, he told himself, it would be a salve whenever his soul needed some consolation.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe Howden Inn was on the Peebles side of Liethen Manor, at the opposite end of the village from the church and the manse. It was a low slate-roofed cottage, whitewashed, the stone dressing of its windows painted black\u2014a drinking den for the drovers, shepherds and farm labourers of the Liethen Valley. It was the only public house between Biggar and Peebles, was its particular boast, and it was often busy.\n\nCallum pushed open the low door and Brodie followed him into the bar-room. Low-ceilinged and smoke-foxed, it had a curious smell: part beer, part cold fireplace ash, part pipe tobacco. Two old men sat in a window booth playing dominoes and drinking whisky. A young girl was washing down the flagstones with a mop. No fire burned in the fireplace as it was June and the sun was shining.\n\nBrodie and Callum found a table in a corner, placed their broken rods behind their chairs and ordered two pints of Ethelstane pale ale from the young innkeeper. His name was Campbell Wishart\u2014the brothers knew him. He was a burly fellow with a broad wild beard, already greying, even though he was still in his twenties. He had grown a beard to disguise a badly repaired harelip that gave him a lisp and that made him sound almost effeminate sometimes.\n\n\"Brodie Moncur,\" he said. \"By God, I havnae seen you in a year or two. More. Where've you been?\"\n\n\"I'm a busy man in Edinburgh, these days, Campbell.\"\n\n\"Aye, I heard. Tuning pianos, I'm told, isn't it?\" He pronounced it \"fianoths.\"\n\n\"Pulling pints, tuning pianos\u2014we all have to make a living.\"\n\n\"Aye, right enough.\"\n\n\"And I'll have a wee half of whisky,\" Callum said, \"seeing my brother's doing so well. He's away to Paris, you know.\"\n\n\"Aye and I'm away tae Rio de Janeiro,\" Campbell said, unimpressed.\n\nThey sat down and drank their beer, Callum downing his whisky in one go, and idly watched the young girl swabbing the floor. Brodie felt a contentment spread through him and he wanted to prolong the pleasures of the day.\n\n\"Here's an idea,\" Brodie said. \"We've got a dozen trout in that basket. Give six to Campbell and ask him to fry up the others for us.\"\n\n\"We're wanted at the manse for dinner,\" Callum said. \"We'd better be on our way.\"\n\n\"What if we've been detained?\"\n\n\"What will Malky say?\"\n\n\"Callum, Malky isn't our lord and master.\"\n\nBrodie went to the bar with the wicker creel, showed the fish to Campbell and made his suggestion. Food was to be had at the Howden, pies and bridies, the occasional roast fowl, a stew of mince and carrots. Campbell's wife did the cooking.\n\n\"I think we can do that,\" Campbell said. \"I'd want a shilling or two, mind.\"\n\n\"Of course. Have you potatoes?\"\n\n\"No, but we've bread\u2014and vinegar.\"\n\nBrodie and Callum ate their fried trout with slices of bread and butter, washed down with another pint of Ethelstane. Callum ordered another whisky chaser. Brodie looked at him knowingly.\n\n\"Christ, man, it's the weekend,\" Callum protested. \"And I've got bloody church the morrow.\"\n\nBrodie scribbled a note on a scrap of paper and summoned the young girl who had mopped the floor.\n\n\"What's your name?\" he said.\n\n\"Constance.\"\n\n\"Well, Constance, I'm going to give you a penny and ask you to deliver this note to Mrs. Daw at the manse. Can you do that for me?\"\n\n\"Aye. I'm no stupid.\"\n\n\"Make sure she gets it and I'll give you your penny when you come back.\"\n\n\"I want my penny now. Else you'll be gone when I get back.\"\n\n\"Fair enough.\" Brodie gave her a penny. \"I trust you, Constance. You've an honest face. Give it to Mrs. Daw, now.\"\n\nConstance skipped out on her errand.\n\n\"I've excused us from dinner,\" Brodie said. \"Unavoidably detained. Drink up and have another whisky.\"\n\n# 5\n\nBrodie wrote another note for his father early the next morning.\n\n> Dear Papa\u2014\n> \n> I greatly enjoyed my stay. It was grand to see you again in such fine form. My apologies for missing the service and your sermon but I have to catch the evening packet to Antwerp. I will write once safely installed in Paris.\n> \n> Ever your affect. son,\n> \n> Brodie\n\nHe folded the paper, scribbled his father's name on the outside flap and propped it on the hall table next to his father's homburg.\n\nHe opened the front door quietly\u2014no one else was about, only the two housemaids were stirring in the kitchen\u2014and hoicked his cabin trunk out onto the gravel of the driveway. It was cool and the rising sun was intermittently visible through the hurrying clouds.\n\nThere was no sign of the boy with the dog cart from Peebles. Brodie swore and looked at his watch. Ten past six. Where the hell was he?\n\n\"He was here half an hour ago but I sent him on his way.\"\n\nBrodie turned slowly.\n\nHis father, in a long black greatcoat, was walking across the back lawn between the conifers. He was smoking a small cigar and Brodie remembered it was Malky's habit to rise early on a Sunday and collect his thoughts before his sermon. He decided to remain calm.\n\n\"Why did you send the boy away?\" he asked. \"You had no right.\"\n\n\"Because I want you in church.\"\n\n\"I have to catch a boat to Antwerp this evening.\"\n\n\"You can catch another bloody boat any day of the week.\"\n\nMalky stepped up to him. Brodie closed his eyes, smelling the acid reek of his father's cigar\u2014unpleasant, sour, fouling the sweet early morning air.\n\n\"Look,\" Brodie began. \"I don't want to be\u2014\"\n\n\"No, you look. Just be in church\u2014then you can go to Paris and be damned, you blackamoor.\"\n\n\"It's just a fucking job. I'm not descending to hell.\"\n\n\"Keep your filthy profanities to yourself. I want my family in church. All ten of my children.\"\n\n\"Nine, actually, at the last count.\"\n\n\"Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. I don't give a fig. I want you all there.\"\n\n\"You can whistle for it, Malky.\"\n\nThey stared at each other, the mutual hate in their eyes entirely candid.\n\n\"You've forgotten what day it is, haven't you, Brodie?\"\n\n\"It's a Sunday. Malky Moncur does his preaching act.\"\n\n\"It's the day your mother died, you Hottentot! Show some respect. Pray for her immortal soul in your parish church. Your family church. Lay some flowers on her grave before you go on your merry way to your own dissolution. Shame on you!\"\n\nThis information had taken Brodie aback. He had forgotten\u2014and he felt sudden unfamiliar tears salty in his eyes.\n\n\"I feel no shame,\" he said quietly. \"I had nothing to do with her death, but you did. You're the one who should be praying for forgiveness. I'll see you in church\u2014but that's the last favour you'll ever get from me.\"\n\nMalky allowed a brief look of triumph to animate his face then turned and strode off back into the garden. Brodie lugged his trunk into the hall and stood it by the door, feeling confused and upset. Malky knew how to rile him, how to work on his feelings, and he was annoyed that he'd let him see his emotion. And a pin-scratch of conscience nagged at him. He had forgotten about his mother...And he had no choice, anyway, now his transportation had been dismissed. He would go to church with his brothers and sisters and hear the great man in his pulpit.\n\nCallum was surprised to find Brodie at the breakfast table, drinking tea\u2014he had no appetite.\n\n\"I thought you'd be long gone,\" Callum said, helping himself to scrambled eggs from the chafing dish on the sideboard.\n\n\"I should have been but Malky had other plans. He wants his entire family in attendance.\"\n\n\"Jesus. It must be fire and brimstone today, then.\"\n\nThe sisters began to arrive for breakfast, dressed up primly for Sunday and the kirk. The mood was subdued as the family gathered. Brodie had made his farewells the night before, returning late from the Howden, and everyone was surprised\u2014and pleased\u2014to see he was still present. Brodie told them he'd decided spontaneously to stay for the sermon\u2014he hadn't heard his father preach for two years, after all. It all sounded rather hollow but everyone happily went along with the pretence.\n\nAs they filed out of the dining room Doreen tugged at Brodie's elbow and drew him aside.\n\n\"What did you say to him?\"\n\n\"Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing I haven't said before. It was what he said to me that was shocking.\"\n\n\"I've never seen him in such a mood. You must have said something to him, Brodie. You know how you get under his skin. You should apologize, calm him down.\"\n\n\"I won't apologize. And I do my utmost not to get under his skin. Why do you think I stayed away from dinner last night? He just...reacts to me. I don't need to do anything.\" The idea struck him. \"I believe he can read my mind\u2014he knows what I'm thinking about him. I don't need to say a thing. That's what angers him.\"\n\nFrom ten o'clock onwards the carriages, traps and dog carts started arriving\u2014and the charabancs from Peebles station bringing the railway passengers from Hawick, Melrose and Galashiels. Slowly the throng grew on the churchyard lawn in front of the main entrance, people chatting quietly to each other, greeting acquaintances. It was more like the crowd at a ball or a prize fight, Brodie thought: there was nothing devout about the mood; it was more one of expectation, little tremors of excitement apparent, occasional laughter.\n\nTen minutes before the start of the service the rest of the family wandered over from the manse. Seven of them. Alfie and Electra were required in church as ushers. As a group, the brothers and sisters took their reserved places in the second row from the front to the right of the aisle. The Moncur boys and girls, in their dark clothes and neat hair, a credit to their father and the memory of their mother.\n\nBrodie let the others slide in and took his seat at the end of the pew and looked around. It wasn't beautiful, St. Mungo's\u2014strong and austerely confident in its faith, Brodie would have said. The walls were cream plaster with one row of polychromatic tiles at head height being the only gesture at decoration, the pointed nave windows were clear glass. The organist was playing a fugue by Buxtehude and the choir was in place on either side of the altar. St. Mungo's was Church of Scotland, but it was Malcolm Moncur's version. On the altar was a half-life-sized, wooden, painted Christ on the Cross\u2014commissioned by Malky\u2014and as detailed as a Grunewald crucifixion. Real nails were hammered through the wooden palms and feet, the body was a flat greyish white, the better to contrast with the lurid blood, raised globules of scarlet paint dripped from the metal crown of thorns onto the chest, and the white flash of a rib could be glimpsed through the wide spear-wound in Christ's side. The simple wooden pulpit was set unusually high on the nave wall to the left of the chancel. It was hung with a backdrop of crimson velvet that hid the steep stairs leading to it from a small anteroom behind the wall. It looked more like a small balcony than a pulpit. It contained a brass lectern with a vast black Bible, six inches thick, open at the text for the day. There was no sign of the Reverend Moncur.\n\nBrodie turned and looked as the church quickly filled. It was a big crowd\u2014the whole gallery was occupied and there were a few dozen people without seats gathered at the back of the nave. It was a 500-day, he reckoned, full house, standing room only. The organist came to the end of the fugue and on an invisible cue the choir began to sing \"The Lord Is My Shepherd\" and the congregation grew quiet. There was a choirmaster, Brodie now saw, half hidden by a pillar, a young bald man who conducted with histrionic vigour. Brodie's own musical career had begun here, singing in the St. Mungo's choir under the direction of old Kenneth McGilchrist. He closed his eyes and listened to the music, trying to let the growing agitation in him subside. The choir was good but there was an alto singing a semitone flat.\n\nThe hymn ended and an apprehensive, rustling half-silence ensued. There were a few nervous coughs and some audible whispering. Regulars turned the pages of their Bibles looking for the verses that Malky had chosen as his text for his sermon. It was, Brodie saw, very obscure, even for Malky. From the Apocrypha, the Book of Baruch, chapter six, verses ten to twelve. He could see people vainly flicking through their Bibles, searching for it. Not every Bible contained the Apocrypha, he realized.\n\nBrodie remembered what was due to happen next. After a minute or so of this anticipation, Malcolm Moncur would appear, as though miraculously, in his pulpit, sliding through the crimson curtains, arms spread in benediction. And, sure enough, he was suddenly there, in a black surplice with a white linen stock with two long bands at his throat. There was a distinct gasp from the congregation before Malky boomed out in his deep bass voice, \"Let us pray!\"\n\nThe prayer was a form of warming up\u2014extemporized, treating of events in the world at large and garnished with the odd \"In the name of the Lord\" or \"In the memory of suffering Christ,\" and so forth. Brodie could sense Malky's inspiration growing as he considered the mishaps and calamities of contemporary history. He was like a boxer sparring in the gymnasium before the championship bout or a thoroughbred doing a few furlongs on the downs before the big race. Today he covered the opening of the Manchester Ship Canal, the occupation of Bulawayo, Matabeleland, the French anarchist whose bomb had gone off outside the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, expressed his regret at the absence of William Gladstone from the political arena, combined with mockery of Lord Rosebery's performance as prime minister, then, scarcely concealing his glee, contemplated the shocking death toll\u2014over a thousand\u2014of last year's hurricane in Mississippi. Implicit in all this, as he admonished governments and statesmen, deplored conflicts far and wide, gave advice to kings to be prudent, presidents to think twice, emperors to restrain their imperial ambitions, was the sub-theme that, somehow, St. Mungo's Church, Liethen Manor, Peeblesshire, Scotland, was the centre of the turning world\u2014it was from here that all wisdom was dispensed and the deity urged to take note and intervene. So, when Malky's long prayer ended, the congregation was poised and ready. He said \"Amen,\" blessed them all, made the sign of the cross several times and looked them in their collective eye.\n\n\"Our sacred text this morning will not be found in every Bible.\" He turned the page. It was to be found in his huge Bible, however. \"From the Apocrypha. The Book of Baruch, chapter six, verses ten to twelve.\"\n\nHe paused. Then began to read\u2014slowly, stentoriously.\n\n\"Now, whereof Nerias knew that his son Sedacius was caught in the snares of harlots and indeed had lusted after his brother's wife, Ruth, and his brother's daughter, Esther, and showed no remorse, yet Nerias suffered his son to live in his own house, yea, and fed him and his servants also. For Nerias, the Levite, was a righteous man. And the people saw the wisdom of the righteous man and Sedacius was spurned by the Levites, they spake not of him. There was a void, thereof. He was forgotten as a cloud melted by the force of the noonday sun, as smoke dispersed by a breeze. He was shadowless, a nothing, less than a mote of dust.\"\n\nMalky paused again, then launched into his exegesis and why this forgotten text from a forgotten book of the Bible had relevance to the lives of the good folk gathered here in St. Mungo's Church. Brodie sat back, listening. He had heard dozens of these sermons over the years and had come to regard them as Malky's own brand of vaudeville or end-of-the pier variety turn. It was a way for Malky to unleash the showman in him. He no more believed what he said than any mountebank or street shiller. For him it was an exercise in power and acclaim. He would tell them a few home truths and send them back to their dreary lives shriven and enlightened\u2014and often titillated and even shocked. The texts Malky chose were often about sins: adultery, sexual envy and concubinage, or of wars, murder, mutilation and fratricide. There had been a memorable sermon on the Sin of Onan. And at the mention of semen being spilled on the ground a dozen people had walked out, offended by the subject matter. But like any barker at a fairground Malky knew that licentiousness was a powerful draw, especially when it had the protective gloss of religiosity.\n\nBrodie raised a hand to conceal a yawn. Malky was rambling on about Nerias and the poisonous ingrate that was his son Sedacius. He looked at the front row of pews, reserved for the great and the good. Lady Dalcastle was there in lemon yellow and Lincoln green, rapt. And so were the mayors of Peebles, Innerliethen and Melrose. And somebody from the Ministries Council of the Church of Scotland, he had been told. There were Edinburgh lawyers and their wives, aldermen and magistrates and a few adventurous socialites who had heard of this firebrand preacher in the Borders and were keen on a bit of diversion on a boring Sunday.\n\nHe turned his head to study his brothers and sisters sitting along the row from him, all with their heads bowed, contemplating their clasped hands. Malky's sway in his church was absolute. To pass the time, Brodie began to think of Paris\u2014where would he stay? Perhaps a small hotel, first, then find some lodgings or a boarding house near the showrooms. He'd need to take some French lessons also. But then at the edge of his hearing he registered a tonal change in Malky's delivery.\n\nNormally Malky spoke in a resonating bass monotone\u2014he had a fine, powerful voice, effortlessly captivating, avoiding inflection, whimsy, irony\u2014allowing the sheer weight of his seriousness to ram the words home. But now there was an air of the histrionic. Most unusual. Brodie looked up to the pulpit.\n\n\"But this is it, I tell you, my friends, dear friends. This is the key distinction. 'Nerias was a righteous man' the Book of Baruch tells us. Therefore, therefore what was his son, Sedacius? Sedacius was a _self-righteous_ man. It doesn't seem too severe an appellation, does it? Self-righteousness, what can be so wrong with that? But I tell you, my friends, it is the threshold to the vilest sins. The primrose path to vainglory, to arrogance, to intolerance\u2014this is the sin of SELF-LOVE!\" He almost shouted, now. \"This is the sin of Narcissus, so we might term it. To be enraptured by your own self, your own wonderful self to the exclusion of the rest of the world. Me! Me! Me! This is the sin of the self-righteous man. The sin of Sedacius who had fallen into the snares of harlots!\"\n\nAnd, on cue, Malky turned his eyes on Brodie. He might as well have pointed his finger at me, Brodie thought, feeling a kind of lucid panic. Even Callum glanced at him.\n\nMalky was now in full rhetorical flow.\n\n\"The righteous man believes in the rule of law, in the love of God, in the fundamental honesty and good nature of his fellow human beings. But the self-righteous man believes only in himself. Everything in the world exists only for him and his greater glory. But the sin of self-righteousness is a cancer, it devours all that is good and noble. The self-righteous man is a hollow man. The self-righteous man is a husk. Empty. Worthless.\"\n\nBrodie had to lower his head\u2014people were aware of this staring contest going on between father and son and were beginning to turn their heads to see who was the object of Malky's wrath and disdain. Brodie let the tide of vituperation wash over him. Now he knew why Malky so desperately wanted him to be in church, present at his sermon. It was his act of revenge; his public castigation of his errant son. The only member of his family who dared to confront him, to disobey him and go his own way.\n\n\"And what will be the fate of this self-righteous man, this scarcely human being?\" Malky continued, his vehemence unabated. \"He will be damned, damned by his corrupt self-love. As the holy text declares: 'He was shadowless, a nothing, less than a mote of dust.'\" Brodie was aware of pages being turned as people searched vainly for the text and he suddenly realized that these last words were Malky's own interpolations to the Book of Baruch. He looked up at the pulpit again but Malky had gone. His exits from the pulpit were as sudden as his entries: like a hint of magic, he slipped back through the crimson hangings. There was a steep wooden stair that led down to the anteroom and he was never to be seen after his sermons. The silence in the congregation was eloquent, Brodie thought, as if the men and women gathered there in St. Mungo's sensed the extra-textual personal element to the wrath they had witnessed. There were glances right and left. Were they blissfully righteous or horribly self-righteous people, they wondered nervously? Brodie closed his eyes and breathed deeply as the choir broke into a rousing oratorio\u2014the prologue to Sullivan's _The Light of the World_ \u2014and the whispering among the congregation grew louder.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nCallum accepted one of Brodie's Margaritas and Brodie lit their cigarettes. They watched the congregation file out of the church through a gauntlet of choirboys, each one holding long, deep, crimson velvet collection bags. This was the principal object of the exercise. Money. Alfie was entrusted with the collection of the collection, Brodie knew. After all donations had been made, the collection bags were brought to the vestry, locked in a cupboard and the key was handed to Malky. Callum had once asked Alfie how much money they gathered in after a big crowd had attended a sermon and Alfie had told him it was usually over \u00a320, cash\u2014occasionally close to \u00a350. Malky gave around forty sermons a year. Brodie did the calculation: forty times twenty equals 800. So around \u00a31,000 a year, give or take. Brodie thought: I earn approximately \u00a3400 a year as an expert piano tuner. He remembered something Malky had once said to him, in all seriousness: \"Religion is a splendid way of getting on in the world.\"\n\n\"What do you think he does with all that money?\" he asked Callum.\n\n\"He must be paying off someone with some of it, that's for sure. He can't be pocketing it all himself.\"\n\n\"It's a kind of extortion. Like a reverse simony,\" Brodie said. \"Suppose he gives this person a hundred a year to keep quiet, to let the Malky pantomime continue...What does he do with all the rest?\"\n\n\"I wonder,\" Callum said. \"But he only really started making real money a few years ago, that's when he became famous and the big crowds started coming, not just the locals. That's why he advertises, now.\"\n\nBrodie watched people leaving, chatting, smiling, exhilarated, climbing into their waiting carriages like a first-night crowd. Now they were off to their Sunday lunches.\n\n\"It's very clever the way he disappears like that,\" Brodie said. \"He doesn't stay around to lap up the applause. Keeps his mystery.\"\n\n\"What was all that shite about the 'self-righteous' man?\"\n\nBrodie felt a thin silt of resentment gather in him. He dropped his cigarette on a flagstone and stepped on it.\n\n\"That was his particular message to me. Now, how do I get out of here?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThree days later, Brodie stood on the quayside at Leith docks. There was a light drizzle falling through the night air and the gas lamps on the dockside wore shining haloes of luminescence. His trunk was aboard the steamer to Antwerp and his cabin secured for the crossing but he wanted to spend these last moments with his feet on the ground, as it were, before taking to sea. From Antwerp he would catch a train to Paris, to the Gare du Nord, and thence to Channon & Cie on the avenue de l'Alma, where the new life of the \"self-righteous man\" would begin.\n\nHe lit a cigarette, thinking back to that last Sunday at Liethen Manor. He had left\u2014securing a ride to Peebles in a cart from the Howden Inn\u2014without seeing his father again. The same note he had placed on the hall table would have to suffice as a farewell. It was a bitter parting, he supposed, but all the bitterness and resentment flowed from the paternal side of the equation. Anyway, he said to himself, who gave a bean\u2014a hoot, a brass farthing\u2014for Malky Moncur? He, Brodie Moncur, had his life to lead and he owed nothing to that scheming, manipulative, self-fabulating monster that was his father.\n\nHe told himself to calm down. He had used his three days wisely. He had had his conference with Ainsley Channon where various fiscal objectives had been made plain to him and his authority in certain matters confirmed. He had managed to see Senga for another carnal farewell. He had been to his optician, Mr. Fairchild, to buy and assess his new Franklin spectacles. He was wearing them now\u2014two thick lenses of different strengths set above each other in the same oval metal frame: the higher one for long distance; the lower for closer matters. They seemed to work well and he was growing used to the thin line where the lenses met at the lower edge of his vision\u2014he barely noticed it, now. He took out his fob watch and looked through the lower lens to confirm the time. Ten minutes to departure\u2014he felt his chest swell with excited anticipation\u2014and the markings of the watch face were admirably sharp and clear.\n\nHe had a lot to be thankful for, he told himself: a solid profession that he could travel with worldwide, should the inclination take him\u2014or at least anywhere there were pianos\u2014good health, apart from his eyesight, and a good education, thanks to the generosity of Lady Dalcastle. So what did he owe to Malky Moncur? A lifetime of grievances, unpleasantness and potent irritations. And the death of his mother, possibly...No, he was well rid of him, St. Mungo's and Liethen Manor. Too bad about his siblings\u2014though he would miss Callum\u2014they had to make their own way in life, make their own choices and live with them as best they could. He was off to Paris and the future.\n\nThe packet's steam whistle tooted breathily, signalling the time for final boarding. Brodie flicked his cigarette into the wharf's oily black water and strode up the gangway. He stayed on deck to watch the sailors cast off the thick ropes round the mooring bollards as the steamship's engines thrummed loudly into life and it began to wheel away from the quayside. Somewhat self-consciously\u2014the self-righteous man that he was\u2014he bade a formal, silent farewell to his native land. For the first time he had a powerful conviction he would never see Scotland again.\n\n# PART II\n\n# Paris\u2014Geneva\u2014Nice\n\n1896\u20131898\n\n# 1\n\n\" _Non, non, C'est beaucoup mieux, Monsieur Moncur. Vous avancez vraiment bien. Vraiment. Impeccable._ \"\n\nBrodie's French teacher, Monsieur Hippolyte Lorette, gave his usual stiff little bow and showed him to the door of his small apartment high under the eaves of a building on the rue Saint-Dominique. To the east, such was the height of the block, there was a good view of the new railway station at Les Invalides. Consequently many of their educational conversations were about transport and railway journeys as Brodie essayed some of the harder tenses and complicated locutions of this elegant language he was attempting to master. Monsieur Lorette was a bachelor, a retired teacher from the Lyc\u00e9e Henri IV. He was thin and stooped and had a grey pointed beard and no moustache, an omission Brodie found odd and made him think that Monsieur Lorette was a member of some strange religious order. His manners were immaculate and rigidly formal\u2014Brodie had no impression at all of Hippolyte Lorette, the man, behind this impregnable facade. He spoke his perfect French slowly and clearly as if talking to a child. Brodie had been studying French with him now for many months\u2014they were both familiars and absolute strangers.\n\nBut Brodie was pleased with his progress. They met three times a week at eight o'clock in the morning for an hour's conversation, except in the months of July and August when Monsieur Lorette returned to his family in Rheims, and Brodie felt, more than eighteen months on from his arrival in Paris, that he could justifiably say he spoke a fluent though error-littered French. Masculine and feminine nouns and agreements still defeated him\u2014was it \" _le_ \" or \" _la_ \"? \" _Un_ \" or \" _une_ \"?\u2014but Monsieur Lorette assured him, sadly, that \" _C'est normal chez les Anglais._ \" He felt conversationally at ease in French, nonetheless; comprehension virtually 100 per cent; with expression hovering around 90, he would have calculated.\n\nBrodie stepped out onto the rue Saint-Dominique and hailed a victoria, asking to be taken over the river to the Channon showroom on the avenue de l'Alma, just off the Champs-Elys\u00e9es. It was a cold February day with a cloud-packed sky and he was glad of his old tweed greatcoat and the tawny woollen scarf Doreen had knitted for him. Brodie unreflectingly glanced at the Tour Eiffel\u2014he wondered how long you had to live in Paris to ignore it, to take it for granted, like Notre-Dame or the Arc de Triomphe\u2014and noted its summit was obscured by unmoving clouds. It seemed a shame that the whole thing was going to be dismantled in a few years' time, but maybe it was too much of a monstrosity for any city to cope with. The highest man-made structure in the world! _Incroyable!_ _Magnifique!_ He had been up to the top, twice.\n\nHe fished in his pocket for Callum's letter, glad of some distraction before he faced the complications of the morning ahead. He was apprehensive. Ainsley Channon was in town and today, Monday, was designated as being reserved for \"a review of the business.\" A lunch had been booked at a nearby restaurant. There had been clear successes since Brodie's arrival in Paris. Successes that were all down to him. And there were ongoing problems, seemingly unsolvable, all down to Calder Channon. It had every sign of being an uncomfortable encounter.\n\nHe took Callum's letter out of its envelope.\n\n> Dear Brodie, brother mine, O wise one,\n> \n> Married life is bliss, isn't that what they say? You half predicted it\u2014but not a Peebles lass, a Galashiels one. Why weren't you at the wedding\u2014scoundrel, ingrate? Sheila longs to meet you as I talk about you all the time. We've just moved to a big new house called Edenbrae on Venlaw Hill (thank you father-in-law) and a little Callum Moncur is on his or her way, I'm delighted to report. Can you believe I will furnish Malky with his first grandchild? The baby's imminence seems to have unsettled him\u2014your mortal clock is ticking loudly, Malky Moncur. By the way, he still talks foully, evilly of you\u2014turncoat, traitor, bottle-washing \u00e9migr\u00e9. I know you've asked me this before but I still have no answer. Malky seems obsessed with you for whatever perverse reasons and he\u2014\n\nBrodie folded the letter away\u2014all this talk of Malky wasn't helping his mood. Callum had married a young woman called Sheila Anstruther-Kerr, the only daughter of a wool merchant in Galashiels. They had been married\u2014by Malky\u2014in St. Mungo's in October 1894, a few months after Brodie's arrival in Paris. He had thought about returning home for the wedding but it was too soon. He wanted a long stretch of time to intervene before he revisited Liethen Manor. And now there was a child on the way\u2014perhaps he'd go home for the christening.\n\nHe called for the driver to stop the victoria, paid him and walked the rest of the way to the showroom, gathering his thoughts.\n\nChannon & Cie was an imposing shop with two wide windows giving on to the street on either side of an ornate, pillared, arched _porte d'entr\u00e9e._ Above the glass of the cartwheel transom was an angled flagpole flying the Saltire. Another of his ideas\u2014flaunt the Scottishness, reference the \"auld alliance.\" Brodie paused across the street so he could prepare himself and imagined how things might look to Ainsley. This was only his second visit to Paris during Brodie's sojourn but he would have been pleased with what he saw, Brodie surmised. There was Dmitri in the left-hand window playing away on a baby grand (new model). In the other window on a canted dais was a semi-dismantled Channon grand, all the intricate workings of the action on display: the fall removed, the action extended, the hammers and strings perfectly visible to the curious onlooker. Like a corpse on an anatomical table, was the comparison Brodie had made. It was a prize specimen and stuck here and there were printed cardboard notices in French and English explaining some of the finer points of the Channon\u2014the wood used, the number of miles of wire that made the strings, the astonishing seventeen tons of tension of said strings, the cost of ivory and ebony for the keys, and so forth. Both educational and fascinating, Brodie had claimed, when he'd suggested the idea. It lured passers-by all day, many of whom then wandered into the shop to look at the pianos on show. Calder Channon had strongly opposed the idea\u2014a waste of space, he claimed\u2014as he opposed every idea Brodie advanced. Brodie would then write and complain to Ainsley; Ainsley would write back and overrule Calder and so the relationship between manager and assistant manager of the Paris showroom steadily diminished; currently running, so Brodie estimated, at \"cool,\" on a good day, to \"icy\" on a bad.\n\nBrodie urged himself across the street and into the shop, striding through the large showroom space behind the picture windows and on into the workshop area at the rear. This was his demesne\u2014Calder rarely ventured in\u2014and where the tuning side of Channon's Paris business was flourishing. Brodie had interviewed, tested and hired two accomplished tuners ( _accordeurs_ )\u2014Ren\u00e9 Dujardin and Romain Lebeau\u2014and was training up two apprentices to supplement them, such was the increasing demand. They were constantly busy, the days and rosters filled, and Brodie found he had to help them out himself from time to time as the workload increased. Yesterday he had left the office and gone out of town to Neuilly and Fontainebleau to tune\u2014word was spreading. All monies from the tuning side of the business were of course paid into central accounting at Channon & Cie, a department run by a curious little man called Thibault Dieulafoy, closely supervised by Calder. Brodie knew the tuners and the workshop were making a significant contribution to the firm's turnover but he had absolutely no idea of the amount. Calder was extremely secretive when it came to financial matters.\n\nRomain had already left and Ren\u00e9 was about to leave when Brodie arrived. None of his tuners and apprentices spoke English so Monsieur Lorette's lessons had been vital. They greeted each other and shook hands. Brodie enquired about Ren\u00e9's wife (eight months pregnant), was reassured that she was in excellent health and so went into his little office. Through the glass panes he could see Murray Dodd (also shipped over from Edinburgh) showing the two new apprentices how to fix the pedal rockers on a Channon Phoenix. Murray ran the small workshop at the back of the avenue de l'Alma showroom. More serious restoration required the Channons being crated up and shipped back to Edinburgh to the factory. Brodie's latest suggestion was that they acquire and set up an interim warehouse and larger repair shop somewhere on the outskirts of Paris where the rates were lower and substantial buildings were to be easily had. Calder had vetoed the idea.\n\nAfter ten minutes, having verified that all was well with his world, Brodie decided it was time to face Calder Channon. No point in prevaricating. He slipped up the back stairway to Calder's office on the first floor and knocked on the door.\n\nCalder Channon was about ten years older than Brodie and twice his size. For a youngish man not yet in middle age he was surprisingly corpulent but his height\u2014he was almost as tall as Brodie\u2014disguised the real extent of his increasing obesity. He was dark and had grown a dense soup-strainer moustache that almost covered his lower lip and had the effect of making him look permanently doleful. It was as if his face could muster no other expression, so dominant was the moustache in its middle. He was married to a young, timid English woman called Matilda\u2014whom Brodie liked\u2014and they had a small son, Ainsley junior, who had just turned two.\n\nCalder ushered Brodie into his office.\n\n\"There's no need to knock so hard,\" Calder said.\n\n\"I didn't knock hard.\"\n\n\"I'm surprised your knuckles aren't bleeding.\"\n\n\"I just rapped on your door, Calder. No more, no less.\"\n\n\"What's that saying? 'A loud knock, false friend.'\"\n\n\"I'm not familiar with it. Sounds very unlikely.\"\n\n\"Think about it,\" Calder almost sneered.\n\n\"Or, 'Loud knock\u2014deaf neighbour.' That makes more sense.\"\n\nCalder looked at him.\n\n\"Take a seat. My father will be here presently.\"\n\nCalder's office on the first floor had three large windows that looked out onto the avenue de l'Alma. It should have been light and airy but it was dimmed by black velvet curtains hung half-drawn at the windows and there was a darkly patterned Persian carpet on the stained parquet floor. The room was dominated by an enormous wide desk\u2014more like a dining table than a desk\u2014and there was a complicated compressed-air tube system to one side of it for delivering messages throughout the shop and the offices behind. Lithographs of Edinburgh scenes\u2014the Royal Mile, Arthur's Seat, St. Andrew's Square\u2014decorated the walls. The tone was rich, solid, sumptuous. Channon & Cie was doing well, the decor seemed to whisper.\n\nBrodie offered Calder a cigarette but he declined, lighting a small pipe instead, and the two of them sat and smoked in silence\u2014Calder studying some papers on his desk\u2014while they waited for Ainsley to arrive.\n\n\"You know what this meeting's all about, don't you?\" Calder asked eventually.\n\n\"A progress report, I assume.\"\n\n\"That's the sunny optimistic view. More like: do we close down the Paris showroom?\"\n\n\"Surely not. I thought we were doing well.\"\n\n\"We're just about breaking even. Just about.\"\n\n\"We've sold eighty-seven pianos in the last six months. I can't keep up with the tuning. I don't see how we\u2014\"\n\n\"Of course you don't see how,\" Calder said, irritated, pluming a thin stream of pipe smoke at an engraving of George IV Bridge. \"How can you see the greater scheme of things? Only I can see the whole panorama.\"\n\n\"Perhaps if you let me talk to Monsieur Dieulafoy I could see the whole panorama as well.\"\n\n\"That's not your responsibility. Only the manager confers with Monsieur Dieulafoy.\"\n\n\"Which is my point. We're meant to be working as a team.\"\n\n\"This is going nowhere, Brodie.\"\n\n\"Fine, fine. Let the matter stay in its limbo.\"\n\nThe conversation ended as Ainsley Channon was shown in. Ainsley dressed up for his Paris visits, as if he were a young blade out on the town. He wore bright silk waistcoats and patent shoes, his whiskers were trimmed, his hair oiled. He greeted Brodie with a warm two-fisted handshake and a brisk pat on the shoulder.\n\n\"Take me on a tour,\" he said to Brodie and Calder. \"We'll talk business over lunch.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThey lunched at the Laurent on the Champs-Elys\u00e9es, a five-minute walk from the shop. It wasn't busy and they were given a table at the window with a fine view of the wide boulevard. Brodie flapped out his napkin and looked around, feeling a familiar sense of well-being flood through him\u2014despite the fact that business was going to be discussed. The Laurent was an excellent restaurant\u2014he knew they would eat well, drink well and be served well. The napery was crisp and dazzling white, the silverware winked and glinted, reflecting the bulbs of the electric chandelier above their heads, elegant ladies in the latest fashions were seated right and left. This was Paris, the culinary centre of the world. It was just a shame he wasn't more hungry.\n\nBut Calder clearly was. He ate two bread rolls before his consomm\u00e9 with poached eggs arrived, followed by calves' brains with brown sauce and a pur\u00e9e of potatoes. Ainsley ordered a plate of radishes and a fillet of pike. Brodie picked at a cucumber salad and an oyster vol-au-vent. Calder called for a bottle of Ch\u00e2teau Gruaud-Larose but Brodie said a glass of Apollinaris would be sufficient for him\u2014he wanted to keep a clear head.\n\nThey paused after their main course to consult the menu again. Calder requested another bottle of Gruaud-Larose and a plate of lentils to keep him going while he decided on dessert. Brodie picked some pith from his bread roll and chewed it slowly.\n\nAinsley looked at the two of them and smiled.\n\n\"Well, lads, there's good news and there's bad news. I'll take another drop of that wine, Calder.\"\n\nBrodie sipped his water. Calder lit his small-bowled pipe. For some reason the smallness of the bowl irritated Brodie in the same way as Calder's unnecessarily large moustache did. What was the point? The pipe's bowl was the size of a thimble and could contain only a finger-pinch of shag. Ainsley accepted a proffered cigarette.\n\n\"The good news,\" Ainsley said. \"Turnover up sixty per cent. Bad news. Profits of less than one hundred pounds. What's going on?\"\n\nCalder pointed the stem of his pipe at Brodie.\n\n\"Ask him, Father. Four tuners, three pianists on shifts, Monday to Saturday. Do you know how much that costs?\"\n\n\"Do you know how much money the tuning brings in, Monday to Saturday?\" Brodie responded, calmly. \"When you can't sell a piano you can always tune a piano.\"\n\n\"When you can't sell a piano doesn't mean you must play a piano. Those three pianists you hired are\u2014\"\n\n\"Boys, boys,\" Ainsley interrupted. \"We know the problem. Let's see if we can come up with a solution.\"\n\nThey ordered dessert\u2014 _tarte du jour_ for Calder, ices for Ainsley and Brodie\u2014and talked about possibilities. Brodie raised his idea about warehousing in Paris, not Edinburgh. A proper repair workshop would save shipping costs and increase revenue. If they had more stock in or near Paris it could be highly advantageous, he argued.\n\nCalder ordered a supplementary _omelette au rhum_ as they pondered the pros and cons. Calder was vehemently against\u2014why introduce expensive new systems when the old ones worked efficiently? Ainsley, Brodie could sense, was warming to his Paris warehouse idea. Brodie kept quiet as father and son debated. He noticed that Calder had a gaudy jewelled ring on the little finger of his left hand. That must be new\u2014he hadn't seen it before, and the unwelcome thought crept into his mind\u2014as Calder shovelled omelette into his mouth, leaving eggy deposits on his moustache\u2014that Ainsley's son might just be defrauding him...\n\nAs they left the Laurent, after coffee and brandy, nothing resolved, Calder having abandoned his pipe for a cigar, Brodie chose his moment (Calder was walking behind) and asked if he might come and see Ainsley privately at his hotel.\n\n\"I'm at the H\u00f4tel du Rhin, place Vend\u00f4me,\" Ainsley said. \"Why do you want to see me alone?\"\n\n\"I've an idea, sir. It may make every difference. But I'm sure Calder won't agree.\"\n\n\"Come by tomorrow at nine,\" Ainsley said. \"And I'll not mention it to Calder.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nCalder took his father off to look for a barber's shop and Brodie wandered back to the showroom mulling over his embezzlement supposition. If true it would explain the firm's baffling, poor performance. But how to prove it? And what and how was Calder embezzling?\n\nWhen he arrived at the shop, Dmitri, the young piano player, was packing up for the day, sliding his sheet music into his thin case. His name was Dmitri Kuvakin and he was a Russian student at the Paris Conservatoire. Brodie had placed an advertisement at the conservatoire offering ten francs an hour for piano demonstrations in the showroom windows and had received over two dozen applications. He chose Dmitri and two other French students and worked out a simple rota system so there was always a piano being played during the shop's opening hours. Once again the idea had been popular and successful. Over the weeks he and Dmitri had struck up a good friendship. He was a couple of years younger than Brodie and seemed to have a genuine talent\u2014at least one that could provide him with a career as a concert pianist. He was a slim wide-eyed young man who had a permanent air of being startled, somehow. An enthusiast who knew Paris well, he took Brodie out on the town, visiting restaurants and theatres and, when the appetite took them, to various _maisons de tol\u00e9rance._\n\n\"What're you doing on Saturday night?\" Dmitri asked. He spoke good French and German but little English. He and Brodie spoke French to each other. Brodie said he had no plans.\n\nDmitri lowered his voice. \"I've found this new place\u2014not in Clichy\u2014nice girls, cheap.\"\n\n\"I don't think 'nice' and 'cheap' go together somehow.\"\n\n\"Ah, but they're not French. They're Spanish\u2014that's the difference. Come and see.\"\n\nThey made a date to meet up.\n\n\"Where is this place?\" Brodie asked. \"Montmartre?\"\n\n\"Close by. You'll be surprised. It's a real discovery.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie shaved in his room at the Pension Bensinger. There was a flushing lavatory with a plumbed-in sink at the end of the corridor but he preferred the privacy of the chamber pot and the jug and ewer. He considered, as he always did while shaving, leaving his upper lip untouched and growing a moustache. But then he thought it was more \"modern\" to be clean-shaven these days, more in tune with the rapidly approaching twentieth century. And, besides, most of the people he admired were clean-shaven\u2014or so he thought\u2014but, annoyingly, no clean-shaven idols came biddingly to mind. Thomas Hardy\u2014no. Randolph Churchill\u2014no. Walt Whitman\u2014no. David Livingstone\u2014no...Perhaps he should recast the prejudice: people he _didn't_ admire tended to sport facial hair. Calder Channon for one. The tsar of Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm with his absurd W-shaped moustache...Brodie cleaned his razor and put it away in its leather case\u2014there would be plenty of time to grow a moustache if he wanted to, one day.\n\nThe Pension Bensinger\u2014situated on rue d'Uz\u00e8s, near La Bourse \u2014was very reasonable, 120 francs a month with half board and, when he'd chosen it, he imagined staying only a few weeks until he found rooms of his own. Yet here he still was well over a year later, one of Madame Bensinger's _habitu\u00e9s._ It was ideal for him, and, whenever he decided to dine in, he found the food was copious and tasty. His fellow lodgers were discreet and perfectly friendly and he was saving money.\n\nHe combed his hair, put on a clean shirt and his navy-blue suit and, forgoing breakfast, he decided to walk to the H\u00f4tel du Rhin on the place Vend\u00f4me\u2014it would take him only twenty minutes.\n\nHe discovered Ainsley Channon taking breakfast in the dining room, eating a plate of soused herring accompanied by a glass of hock. His waistcoat this morning was caramel-coloured with little royal-blue embroidered squares superimposed. He had had his moustache waxed also. It was as if, once free of Edinburgh and temporarily installed in Paris, another Ainsley Channon was cautiously allowed to emerge and thrive before being chased back into his lair for the return to Edinburgh.\n\nBrodie ordered a coffee with hot milk and waited while Ainsley ate a souffl\u00e9 and then various small cakes from a stand in the centre of the table.\n\n\"I don't know how you stay so damned skinny, Brodie,\" Ainsley said, reaching for a final _chocolatine._ \"There's something about Paris and food. I seem to have a terrible hunger all day.\"\n\nAinsley suggested they walk off their breakfasts so they sauntered across the place Vend\u00f4me to the rue Saint-Honor\u00e9 and turned left towards the Palais-Royal. The business was back on the agenda.\n\n\"We've got to come up with something, a plan, a scheme,\" Ainsley said. \"I can't understand why we're not making money hand over fist. We're in the business of selling pianos and, God's blood, we _are_ selling pianos. Lots of them. But...\" He glanced at Brodie. \"What about this fellow Dieulafoy who does the accounts?\"\n\n\"I've met him,\" Brodie said carefully. \"But I'm never shown any figures.\"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Calder likes to keep things, you know, close to his chest.\"\n\nAinsley grunted, then frowned.\n\n\"So what's your big idea then?\" he said.\n\nBrodie counted to three and launched in.\n\n\"It's simple. We need a famous pianist to play a Channon at his concerts and recitals. We will then publish this fact and he will endorse the Channon. But\u2014it has to be someone of the very top rank. The very top.\"\n\n\"Like who?\"\n\n\"Like Pabst or Arensky or Sauter.\" He paused, thinking of other names. \"Or de Pachmann or Paderewski.\"\n\n\"Good God! I see what you mean by the very top. But how in hellfire do we get someone like that to play our piano?\"\n\n\"We pay them.\"\n\nAinsley stopped. Theatrically, he leaned against a lamp post, hand to brow. A man in shock.\n\n\"Why do all so-called 'good' ideas end up costing more and more money?\" he asked, pleadingly. \"We're trying to make money, Brodie. Not spend it.\"\n\n\"There's more,\" Brodie said. \"We not only pay them to choose a Channon, we make them a Channon to their precise specification. I can supervise all that. And we ship that piano\u2014at our expense\u2014to the concerts wherever they happen to be. France, Germany, Austria, England.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, of course. We'll pay for his hotels as well.\" Ainsley shook his head and started walking again. \"How much do you suggest we pay this maestro?\" he said.\n\n\"Fifty pounds a concert.\"\n\n\"Sweet suffering Jesus!\"\n\n\"It makes sense, Mr. Channon.\" Brodie's tone was insistent. \"That's how we move up to Steinway, B\u00f6sendorfer level. And if one great virtuoso is playing Channon, why, then others will follow. It'll make our name.\"\n\n\"Have you mentioned this 'bright idea' to Calder?\"\n\n\"No. He'll reject it. He's rejected all my ideas, as you know. The French tuners, the display piano, the pianists in the windows, the need for a Paris warehouse. It's almost like a reflex.\"\n\n\"He's very cautious, Calder. It's in his nature. Too cautious. That's why I knew I needed you here, Brodie. Someone with vim.\"\n\n\"I tell you, Mr. Channon, it'll work. Imagine. Just imagine if Liszt had played a Channon...What renown. The \u00e9clat.\"\n\n\"The what?\"\n\n\"It's a French word. No, if we have one of these giants playing a Channon then the Channon name will spread without us doing anything. We just have to find the right genius...\"\n\nThey had reached the little square with the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre-Fran\u00e7ais opposite them. Ainsley Channon was thinking hard. He rested his hand on Brodie's shoulder, gave a squeeze.\n\n\"You may be on to something, Brodie. Start making investigations and I'll have a quiet word with Calder. And mind, no more than fifty pounds per concert. Daylight robbery though it is.\"\n\n# 2\n\n> Pension Bensinger\n> \n> 23, rue d'Uz\u00e8s\n> \n> Paris\n> \n> 5 October 1896\n> \n> Dear Lady Dalcastle,\n> \n> I was thinking of you last Sunday as I walked the entire length of the avenue des Champs-Elys\u00e9es and then on to the avenue du Bois-de-Boulogne. These new boulevards must be the finest streets in Europe. When the trees are fully grown they\u2014\n\nBrodie stopped writing. His eye had been caught by the recent telegram from Ernst Sauter rejecting his Channon proposal. He added it to the file that contained the six other rejections. Arensky had declined, as had Palomer and de Pachmann. Several had not even replied. Even Constant de Villeneuve, a man in his late sixties and at the very end of his professional career, had said no\u2014or rather some managerial underling had said no on his behalf. It was humiliating: months had gone by since he'd made his proposal to Ainsley Channon. These virtuosi took an age to reply\u2014weeks. In the case of de Pachmann it had been three months. Brodie had been patient\u2014feeling he needed a reply from one, even in the negative, before he could approach another. That had been a mistake, also, he now realized, ruefully: he should have sent all his offers out simultaneously, scattered his Channon bread on the waters.\n\nHe was sitting at his desk in the small glassed-in cubicle that was his office in the workshop. Eighteen-ninety-six was in its last quarter and it seemed as if nothing had changed. He was still living in the Pension Bensinger; Channon & Cie was still making a nugatory, insignificant profit despite the burgeoning success of the tuning side of the business. He now had four full-time tuners and another two new apprentices. His new warehouse and repair shop in Saint-Cloud was up and running and already making significant savings. Piano sales were steady but the profit margin remained very small, not to say minuscule. However, Brodie was now convinced that Calder and Dieulafoy were embezzlers. There could be no other explanation for this consistent underperformance. The clever aspect of it all was the very modest profit\u2014Channon was not in deficit\u2014for if there had been years of loss the shop would have been closed by Ainsley, surely. Somehow Calder and Dieulafoy were siphoning off the majority of the profits that should have been registered\u2014Brodie just couldn't understand how it was being achieved.\n\nHe lit a cigarette and wandered out into the showroom. The gleaming new pianos stood there on the parquet under the electric lights\u2014the grands, the baby grands, the uprights\u2014precision machines, glossy and black. In the window Dmitri was playing something familiar yet modern\u2014Debussy, Brodie thought, or Faur\u00e9\u2014and went to take a look. The usual small crowd stood on the pavement looking in, marvelling, enjoying the free concert. He felt a sudden bitterness as he watched Dmitri play, feeling that all his efforts had been wasted because of clever, covert larceny in high places. Channon should have been a triumphant success in Paris, a success amplified by his own shrewd innovations, but it limped along, just surviving\u2014only Calder and his henchman enjoying the dividends.\n\nHe looked at his watch. Six o'clock, time for Dmitri to finish and, on cue, Dmitri played his final chord, stood, took his bow, closed the fall and the lid and stepped back into the showroom where he spotted Brodie watching. They shook hands and went back to the workshop office where Brodie opened the cash box and paid Dmitri the thirty francs he was owed. Dmitri slipped the notes into his wallet.\n\n\"Are you all right, Brodie?\" he asked. \"You seem a bit, I don't know, cast down.\"\n\n\"I've had a frustrating day. Very.\"\n\n\"So we should go to Number 7 and have some fun, don't you think?\"\n\nNumber 7 was a _maison de tol\u00e9rance_ that they patronized\u20147, rue des Ardennes up by the large abattoir in Villette. Brodie went there with Dmitri, and sometimes on his own, once a month or so. There was another \"house\" near the Pension Bensinger which he and one of the other long-term lodgers\u2014a Belgian engineer called Didier Neuch\u00e2tel\u2014sometimes visited. But Number 7 was his favourite and he had a favourite girl there, Encarnacion, a sometime dancer\u2014so she said\u2014from Pamplona. It seemed like a good idea.\n\n\"Yes, let's go,\" Brodie said, with new enthusiasm. \"I owe myself some amusement.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nEncarnacion did her best to rejuvenate his low spirits but sensed nothing much had changed. She said\u2014in her heavily accented French\u2014as he was dressing after their swift and unsatisfactory coition, \" _Toute la tristesse du monde ce soir, Brodie?_ \" He said he'd had a difficult day and she reminded him that all days were difficult when you thought about it. He admitted the truth of the statement.\n\nShe put on her tight little bolero jacket, tied her sash around her waist and walked down the stairs with him to the salon. Brodie tipped her the usual five francs extra and she wandered away to join the other waiting girls. Brodie looked around for Dmitri but there was no sign of him so he ordered an absinthe from the bar and picked up a newspaper.\n\nThe distinguishing feature of Number 7 was that the \"girls\" waited for their clients in the salon naked or semi-naked. Brodie noticed that the plumper and less attractive girls seemed to elect to wear nothing but others had realized that partial nakedness was more titillating than complete nudity. That was why he had been drawn to Encarnacion that first night. Her dark brown nipples were fleetingly exposed by the tiny jacket she wore, unbuttoned. The red sash she tied round her waist was another sign of Iberian exoticism and served somehow to emphasize her dense pudenda. She waved at him now from the banquette where she was sitting and opened her jacket to show him her breasts\u2014to cheer him up, he supposed.\n\n_Triste est omne animal post coitum,_ he said to himself, feeling his self-pity and melancholia return as he waited for Dmitri\u2014where was he? What was taking him so long?\u2014but he knew his mood wasn't caused by his unsatisfactory ten minutes with Encarnacion. It was deeper and darker than that. He looked around to distract himself. The salon was busy: payday at the March\u00e9 aux Bestiaux next door\u2014auctioneers and managers, stockmen and farmers all eager for some Parisian hospitality. He saw Encarnacion heading back upstairs with a new customer and felt the usual illogical spasm of jealousy and resentment that another stranger was about to enjoy her favours.\n\nHe had no moral objection to going to these houses and paying for prostitutes. Number 7 was a licensed brothel, after all, licensed by the city of Paris. He was a young, virile man, also, and how else was he to satisfy sexual urges and rid himself of sexual frustration? Pleasuring yourself was all very well but sometimes you needed to hold another naked body in your arms\u2014flesh on flesh, breast to breast, thigh to thigh. That was another reason why he liked Encarnacion\u2014she let him kiss her for an extra five francs. Lip to lip. Usually, kissing seemed to make a difference to the simple commercial transaction of money for sex, but not tonight.\n\nNo, his mood was caused by the job at Channon\u2014it was beginning to wear him down: the constant war of attrition with Calder; the sense of stasis, the failure of his \"grand plan.\" Even Paris's beauties were beginning to lose their power to inspire and cheer. Sometimes he found himself hankering for cold austere Edinburgh with its black castle on its rainy crag.\n\nFinally Dmitri appeared and they wandered out into the night. Dmitri's girl had been Japanese, he said, and he had wanted to linger as it was all so different, happily paying for an extra half-hour.\n\n\"She was very polite,\" Dmitri said. \"Very attentive. Not like the French girls. Are English girls polite? I would imagine so.\"\n\n\"I only know Scottish girls, in fact,\" Brodie said. \"They're polite enough, most of the time. I've never been with an English girl, now you come to mention it.\"\n\nThey strolled southwards, keeping to lit streets, heading towards the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, looking for a caf\u00e9 or a bistro that was still open. They found one on the rue Secr\u00e9tan and hurried inside\u2014the night was cold and dark with a persistent light rain. Brodie ordered a hot rum and water, Dmitri had a glass of red wine and they found a corner table near the stove.\n\n\"You still don't seem so happy,\" Dmitri said. \"It's Friday night. I thought you liked Encarnacion. We're meant to be out on the town having fun.\"\n\nBrodie apologized. He ordered another rum and water and told Dmitri of his grand plan and its months of frustrating rejections.\n\n\"I've approached seven,\" he said, \"seven famous pianists.\" He listed their names. \"They've all turned me down.\"\n\n\"Even for an extra fifty pounds a concert?\"\n\n\"Do you think it's not enough?\"\n\nDmitri thought for a while.\n\n\"Do you know John Kilbarron?\" he asked.\n\n\"John Kilbarron? Of course. The 'Irish Liszt'\u2014what about him?\"\n\n\"He came to the conservatoire last month to give a recital. It was amazing.\" Dmitri raved on\u2014the incredible speed, the emotion. The most difficult pieces effortlessly mastered.\n\nBrodie was thinking hard. John Kilbarron\u2014a bit pass\u00e9, perhaps, but one of the real old-school _klaviertigers_ ten or twenty years ago. He remembered a few details\u2014Kilbarron had been a child prodigy; his great years were the 1870s and 80s. Perhaps he was perceived as a bit old-fashioned today but the reputation had endured. Everyone knew the name of John Kilbarron\u2014an astonishing virtuoso on the piano, hence his nickname of the \"Irish Liszt.\"\n\n\"It's not a bad idea,\" Brodie said. \"But I thought he was based in Vienna.\"\n\n\"No, he lives in Paris now.\"\n\nBrodie thought further. Maybe an Irish virtuoso might look more favourably on a Scottish piano manufacturer...Yes, it might be worth a final try.\n\n\"Do you know where he lives?\"\n\n\"I can find out. I can ask at the conservatoire.\"\n\nBrodie pressed Dmitri for more information. Dmitri said Kilbarron must be in his late forties. He still seemed to be playing with miraculous panache, evidently.\n\n\"I mean,\" Dmitri said, \"he played the 'Rondo Fantastique' as if it was a one-finger exercise. I've never seen anyone play like that. I wouldn't even attempt that piece. I just can't do it,\" he shrugged. \"I'm not bad, but compared to Kilbarron I'm just a beginner.\"\n\n\"No. You're good, Dmitri. Very gifted.\"\n\n\"You see Kilbarron play like that and you wonder why you bother.\"\n\nNow it was Dmitri's turn to be cast down while Brodie's mood was improving as he thought on. John Kilbarron, here in Paris...Yes, maybe this was the gift of good fortune he was owed. He would write to him\u2014the letter of all letters\u2014and what a bonus that he could write to him in English. He had a sudden premonition\u2014John Kilbarron plays Channon. It already had a ring to it and, in his mind's eye, he could see the advertisements they would take in the newspapers. Everything was going to change.\n\n# 3\n\nDmitri found Kilbarron's address through the office of the conservatoire. Brodie wrote his letter of letters outlining his proposal\u2014hinting that all terms were potentially renegotiable\u2014and had it hand-delivered to Kilbarron's address. He was living in an apartment on the ground floor of a _h\u00f4tel particulier_ on the boulevard Saint-Germain on the left bank. Dmitri also told Brodie that Kilbarron was participating in a concert\u2014a _soir\u00e9e russe,_ as it was advertised\u2014taking place in two weeks at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de la R\u00e9publique. Brodie bought a ticket\u2014eight francs in the _fauteuils d'orchestre,_ as close to the stage as he could manage, and waited impatiently for the day to come around.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie stood outside the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de la R\u00e9publique reading the poster. The orchestra\u2014L'Orchestre de l'Acad\u00e9mie de Musique\u2014was one he'd never encountered before. They were playing Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 3 and a tone poem by Panin with one Lydia Blum (soprano) as soloist. Then there was the interval, after which John Kilbarron (\"Le Liszt irlandais\") would perform Rimsky-Korsakov's Piano Concerto in C sharp minor followed by variations and _fantaisies_ on themes by Borodin arranged by Kilbarron himself. All very Russian, apart from the Irish Liszt, Brodie thought.\n\nIt was a cold grey day, darkened by rain, on and off, so Brodie took his seat early, feeling an unusual apprehension. He had left his calling card for Kilbarron at the stage door with a note scribbled on the back\u2014\"It would be an honour to meet you and discuss our mutual interests\"\u2014but he was beginning to sense this potential encounter was somehow misguided. Had Kilbarron received his letter, delivered a fortnight ago? If so, why had he not replied? If he hadn't received the letter what would he make of the note on the calling card? Why, after a gruelling recital, should he receive a complete stranger in his dressing room? The questions continued clamorously as he sat there staring at the stage, with its empty seats and music stands, trying and failing to make out the manufacturer of the piano that was set to one side. Women weren't allowed in the _fauteuils d'orchestre_ as the seats were too close for them to slip decorously by, unbrushed-against, so he found himself surrounded by men, men whom he recognized as the so-called _chevaliers du lustre_ \u2014the \"knights of the chandelier\"\u2014a claque of paid applauders. He wondered if Kilbarron had spent money to obtain this noisily enthusiastic crowd. Even after the concert had begun they talked quite loudly amongst themselves, uninterested in the Tchaikovsky or the tone poem.\n\nAnnoyingly, the soprano, Lydia Blum, stood at the very limits of both the lenses in his Franklin spectacles\u2014move his head and squint as he might, he still couldn't quite bring her into focus. That she was unusually tall and fair-haired was all he could distinguish from the indeterminate blur of her figure. Her voice was good but a bit underpowered, he thought\u2014she must have been almost inaudible in the higher galleries. The applause at the interval as she took her bow was muted\u2014everyone was waiting for the Irish Liszt.\n\nBrodie stepped outside and was surprised to see how dark it had become. He had a glass of wine at the next-door caf\u00e9 trying to ignore his mounting trepidation. Trepidation was the wrong word, he decided. It was a sense of something impending, unsure if it was good or bad. _Impendingment,_ would do as a nonce word. He sipped his wine and tried to ignore his feeling of impendingment. He did sense that here was a chance, an opportunity, if only he could handle the situation adroitly enough. He felt, impendingmently, that what happened in the next hour or two might change his life, either for good or for bad.\n\nHe took his seat again, dry-mouthed. The piano had been moved to centre stage\u2014there was no dais for a conductor. The piano was a Pate, he now noticed, and felt pleased. Pates were good\u2014good for the salon, not for the theatre\u2014no match for Channons.\n\nThe orchestra players slowly took their seats and tuned up\u2014and then John Kilbarron suddenly strode on stage at an unusually brisk speed, taking everyone by surprise, even the _chevaliers du lustre._ But they quickly began their bellows of approval and rose to their feet, clapping energetically. Kilbarron didn't look at his claque as he took his dramatic low bow and moved to the piano.\n\nKilbarron was closer so Brodie could see him clearly. He had long dark hair combed back from his forehead and tucked behind his ears, and there was a sunken, somewhat ravaged handsomeness to his features. Clean-shaven. Medium height. Deep lines on his face cutting through his cheeks. He was impassive as he sat there waiting to start, allowing the applause to engulf him. He was wearing a tailcoat and a white tie of unusual looseness and volume. The style was brooding romanticism. A cold person\u2014Brodie thought\u2014almost menacingly arrogant in demeanour. But this impression may have been purposefully manufactured for the stage, he realized.\n\nThe crowd quietened, the audience was ready and so Kilbarron gave the upbeat to the first violinist and launched into the Rimsky-Korsakov. Brodie sat back and closed his eyes, listening. After about five minutes the piano began to lose its tuning\u2014but of course he was the only person in the theatre who noticed. He doubted if Kilbarron was even aware he was playing a piano that was slightly out of tune.\n\nStill, the Rimsky-Korsakov was good\u2014albeit surprisingly short\u2014and Kilbarron played with exemplary control and interpretation. It was when he started on the Borodin arrangements that the full Kilbarron genius was revealed. Brodie now had his eyes open, marvelling. Astonishing speed and dexterity; intense concentration and great dramatization\u2014a lot of head-tossing, eyes-closing, vivid expressions, arm-raising, swaying on the stool. One of the variations was in the so-called \"three-hand technique\" popularized by Thalberg in the 1830s. Left and right fingers played swooping arpeggios and other complex figurations while the thumbs of both hands played the melody\u2014hence the illusion that the pianist had three hands not simply two. It was phenomenally difficult but Kilbarron spent most of the variation not even looking at his hands on the keys. A hank of his hair fell over his brow and he left it there. His face soon had a glaze of sweat. Kilbarron ended the third Borodin variation with a series of keyboard-length black-note glissandos. When he stood to take his bow\u2014the audience rapturous, yelling, baying\u2014Brodie could see drops of blood falling from the fingernails of his right hand. The audience had no need of the paid-for claque to encourage them: they were on their feet shouting, bellowing their appreciation, clapping their hands sore. Flowers were thrown on stage. Kilbarron ignored them, not even smiling his thanks. He wiped his face with a handkerchief and then wrapped his broken fingernails in it. He left the stage without a backward glance.\n\nBrodie had to admit he was somewhat stunned. In Edinburgh he had been to countless concerts and recitals and seen many virtuosi but this was a...He searched for a word: this thunderstorm was something new, and he wondered if this was what it had been like at a Liszt recital or a Thalberg concert. You could be a fine and talented piano player, like Dmitri, but artists such as John Kilbarron were at another, unattainable, near-superhuman level.\n\nBrodie stepped out of the theatre and lit a cigarette. Concentrate, concentrate, he told himself\u2014now it's your turn. He wandered down the side of the theatre towards the stage door where he found a crowd of about a hundred gathered, so he quickly reckoned. He pushed his way through to the harassed doorman and explained he had left his card earlier and was expected by Maestro Kilbarron. He was let through and found himself following two dozen excited people down a corridor, all heading for Kilbarron's dressing-room suite, he supposed. He stopped\u2014this was pointless. How could he introduce himself properly and privately with all these admirers milling around? He saw a sign\u2014ARTISTES\u2014pointing up a flight of stairs. The two dozen Kilbarron aficionados had reached a dead end and were now retracing their steps. Brodie saw his opportunity to go to the head of the queue and dashed up the stairs to find himself in a corridor on an upper floor. There were no names on the doors that flanked the passageway, just numbers. He made his way to number 1 and knocked, pleased by his subterfuge. Surely this would be where\u2014\n\nThe door was opened.\n\nA young woman stood there in a Japanese-style dressing gown. Black scaly dragons, large pink flowers, it reached to her ankles. Brodie took in tousled curly blonde hair. In one hand she held a cigarette; her other hand held her kimono-robe closed at the neck. He knew\u2014his male senses told him\u2014that she was naked under her lurid gown. And somehow this knowledge changed everything.\n\n\"Yes?\" she said. \"Can I help you?\"\n\nShe spoke French with an accent Brodie couldn't place.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Brodie said. \"But I'm looking for Maestro Kilbarron.\"\n\n\"One floor up,\" she said, pointing with her cigarette. As she raised her hand Brodie registered unthinkingly the clear shift and rearrangement of her small breasts beneath the silk. He was stirred. He swallowed, his throat dry.\n\n\"My apologies,\" he said as other details crowded swiftly in. Heavy-lidded eyes as if she were half asleep. A strong pointed chin. It was a Russian accent, yes. Ah. This would be the out-of-focus soprano, Lydia Blum. Brodie stood there trying to think of other words to utter. Blue eyes. Pink lips. Full pink lips. Cigarette now placed between full pink lips. Strong inhalation. Slight head turn, eyes still on him. Powerful exhalation through side of mouth. Shred of tobacco picked from tip of tongue.\n\nBrodie said: \"I thought your solo was remarkable.\"\n\n\"Thank you. One floor up. Follow the crowds.\"\n\nShe closed the door on him before he could apologize again for the interruption.\n\nHe wandered back to the stairway, feeling confused and conscious of a trapped bubble of air in his chest, in his oesophagus, like a fist. So that was Lydia Blum...He felt his sphincter loosen and the bubble of air expand to fill his lungs. He exhaled and became dizzy for a second. What was going on? Forget Lydia Blum\u2014find Kilbarron.\n\nBrodie had to wait twenty minutes in Kilbarron's crowded sitting room until the admiring fanatics thinned. A waiter stood at the door with a tray filled with green-stemmed glasses of wine and Brodie helped himself to one\u2014and then another\u2014as he watched Kilbarron receive the plaudits of his madly overenthusiastic admirers. Men and women.\n\nHe was indeed a handsome man, Brodie saw, but\u2014now he was just feet away\u2014he noticed the bags under his eyes and that the skin of his face was slightly pocked, giving his handsomeness a coarser, less refined look. He had combed his hair and his face was pale as he nodded and smiled fleetingly at the extravagant compliments that were being paid him. For a moment or two he stood alone as a group left and Brodie seized his opportunity.\n\n\"Mr. Kilbarron, sir. I'm Brodie Moncur. I sent you a letter from my firm.\"\n\nKilbarron turned his eyes on Brodie.\n\n\"A letter?\"\n\n\"A letter hand-delivered\u2014with a proposal. I work for Channon, the piano makers.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes. I seem to remember, now. What do you want?\" Kilbarron had a pronounced Irish accent.\n\n\"Might I pay you a visit? It's an important and complicated matter. Now's perhaps not the best time. You must be exhausted.\"\n\nKilbarron looked bored. He took a glass off the waiter's tray and drained it.\n\n\"There is a significant financial element to the proposal,\" Brodie added swiftly, quietly.\n\n\"You sent me a letter so you must know where I live.\"\n\n\"I do indeed, sir.\"\n\n\"Come and see me on Monday morning. Eleven o'clock.\"\n\n\"I'll be there.\"\n\n\"Not any earlier.\"\n\n\"Prompt. Eleven o'clock, Monday morning.\"\n\n\"Where are you from?\"\n\n\"Scotland. Edinburgh.\"\n\n\"As long as you're not English.\"\n\nThen an elderly woman swept in and embraced Kilbarron and Brodie realized, to his amazement, that he had achieved all he could have hoped for. He stepped back. Monday morning, eleven o'clock. Excellent. But why did his contrary mind turn to thinking of Lydia Blum and not John Kilbarron?\n\n# 4\n\nOn Monday morning, five minutes before eleven o'clock, Brodie presented himself at John Kilbarron's apartment in the _h\u00f4tel particulier_ on the boulevard Saint-Germain. He went through a small door in tall green double doors and found himself in a capacious courtyard, finely gravelled. Two bay trees in terracotta pots stood on either side of an ornate front door with a half-shell pediment. A maroon, dying Virginia creeper, clinging to the sandstone walls, shed its few remaining leaves. He knocked on the door and was admitted by a dozy, unshaven manservant who hung his coat on a stand in the hallway and showed him into a sizeable drawing room.\n\n\"I have an appointment with Mr. Kilbarron,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"What? Right. Are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yes. At eleven o'clock.\"\n\n\"Mmm. Yes. I'll tell him,\" the manservant said uncertainly and left him alone.\n\nThere was a fire lit, though barely, just a flame-twitch through orange embers. Brodie allowed himself to rake it into life with a poker. The curtains\u2014thick olive-green damask\u2014were drawn and there was a smell of stale tobacco smoke in the air. Bottles and glasses stood on the tables, some still filled with wine. Brodie parted the curtains to let some light in and saw that the tall windows of the drawing room gave on to a small formal garden of gravelled paths and clipped box hedges leading to a feature of two curved stone benches flanking a fountain\u2014Cupid in a lead basin. No water flowed.\n\nTurning back, Brodie saw there was a grand piano at the end of the room and he went to investigate it. A Feurich, interestingly, not a Pate. He opened it and quietly played three octaves on A, C and D sharp. Badly out of tune. He began to wonder about Kilbarron's ear...Then again, maybe he never played this piano.\n\nHe sat down on a creaking cane armchair and smoked a cigarette. Ten minutes later he opened the windows onto the garden and strolled around the pathways several times, feet crunching. There was an empty wine bottle in the Cupid fountain, he saw. He left it there and went back inside, feeling cold.\n\nFifteen minutes later he was leafing through the sheet music he'd found in the piano stool\u2014Brahms, Mozart and someone called John Field\u2014when John Kilbarron came in. He was looking ill, Brodie thought, white-faced and red-eyed, two days' stubble, his thick hair lank.\n\n\"Top of the morning,\" he said. \"And who may you be, my good sir?\"\n\nBrodie reintroduced himself. \"We met at your recital at the R\u00e9publique. I had written to you about a proposal from Channon, the piano manufacturers.\"\n\n\"Excellent pianos,\" Kilbarron said. \"Yes, indeed. Excellent...\" He began to roam about the room as if looking for something. He was wearing an embroidered floor-length charcoal-grey gown over an open shirt and trousers. His feet were in unmatching leather slippers, Brodie noticed.\n\nKilbarron found what he was looking for\u2014a carafe half-filled with red wine. He chose an empty glass and poured some wine into it.\n\n\"Can I tempt you to a glass of wine?\" he asked. \"Strangely, it sometimes tastes better the morning after.\"\n\n\"No, thank you.\"\n\nKilbarron emptied his glass in two gulps and pulled at his nose. He topped himself up and crossed the room towards Brodie, now seemingly focussed on him and his mission.\n\n\"Where are you from? Where's that accent from?\"\n\n\"I'm Scottish,\" Brodie said. \"I was working in Edinburgh before I came to Paris.\"\n\n\"A Scotsman, eh? Never trust a Scotsman with a proposal. That's what my pappy told me, may he rot in eternal hellfire.\"\n\n\"You can trust me, sir.\"\n\n\"Remind me of your famous proposal.\"\n\nBrodie outlined the plan\u2014the new, bespoke piano, shipped to every concert at Channon's expense; the \u00a350 supplementary fee for every concert or recital; the use of Kilbarron's name in all advertisements. And the contract to be renegotiated after six months by both parties\u2014this being a new clause Brodie thought it wise to be introduced.\n\nKilbarron drank his wine in silence, thinking.\n\n\"Fifty pounds per concert\u2014on top of the fee I'm already being paid?\"\n\n\"Yes...Initially.\"\n\n\"What's in it for Channon?\"\n\n\"The best kind of advertisement. An endorsement to be dreamt of. 'John Kilbarron plays Channon pianos.' And you would have a wonderful piano, sir\u2014precisely adapted and regulated for your playing style. I would see to that myself.\" Brodie added that he was Channon's senior piano tuner.\n\n\"A piano tuner? You're a piano tuner? Now you tell me. Are you any good?\"\n\n\"I'm also the assistant manager of the Paris showroom.\"\n\n\"You can find assistant managers in every street but a decent piano tuner is a rare bird,\" Kilbarron said, topping up his glass. \"Assistant manager, you say. Why didn't they send the manager? I'm insulted.\"\n\n\"He's not a musical man.\"\n\n\"And you are.\"\n\n\"After a fashion. I am a very good tuner\u2014in all modesty.\"\n\n\"You mean, 'in no modesty.' It's one of those slippery self-promotional phrases. Like 'my humble opinion.' My arrogant un-humble opinion, don't you know.\"\n\nBrodie said nothing. Kilbarron was appearing livelier by the second, fuelled by his overnight-stewed wine.\n\n\"And are you a good assistant manager, in all modesty?\"\n\n\"I do my best for the firm.\"\n\n\"A good company man. Solid as a rock. Steady as the day is long.\" He turned away.\n\nBrodie sensed his contempt and thought he had an opening.\n\n\"By the way,\" he said, \"your piano at the R\u00e9publique, your Pate, went out of tune after ten minutes.\"\n\nKilbarron whirled round.\n\n\"Fuck you, Scotsman, whatever your name is!\"\n\nBrodie pointed. \"And that piano there is completely out of tune.\"\n\nKilbarron advanced on him and Brodie smelt the miasma of wine, sweat and tobacco clinging to him. He braced himself. Then Kilbarron smiled\u2014both rows of teeth exposed. It was oddly disarming.\n\n\"I thought there was something wrong with that piano. Now you tell me. Jesus Christ on the Cross.\"\n\n\"For example,\" Brodie continued, \"that last black-note glissando you played. I can weight and lighten the keys precisely for you. Your nails wouldn't bleed. It would be like...\" He thought. \"It would be like running your fingers through soapsuds.\"\n\n\"Is that right?\" _Roight._ The Irish accent. \"I'll be damned. Soapsuds, eh?\"\n\nHe showed Brodie his right hand. Perfect undamaged nails.\n\n\"I'll tell you a secret, Mr. Scottish-man,\" Kilbarron said. \"I have a little pocket in my waistcoat lined with oil cloth. I just tip in a splash of red poster paint. Nobody notices when I slip my fingertips in at the end of the concert but the audience does like to think you've damaged yourself in the name of art. Blood dripping. Drip, drip, drip. Works like a charm. Always.\"\n\nHe ranged around the room again, his long robe widening and billowing in the draught he created. He stopped at the fireplace and shook the coals with the poker so that the flames rose.\n\n\"Fifty pounds a concert or recital. On top of the establishment's fee?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Brodie said. \"Guaranteed.\"\n\nKilbarron stood up from the fire and smiled his smile.\n\n\"Well, I've thought about it, young fella, whatever your name is\u2014and the answer is no.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie stood in the hallway and put his coat on slowly. Had he said something wrong? Had he been too bold, too bumptious? No, surely not...He felt a depression settle on his shoulders like a heavy cape. Who next? Francobelli? Or Klinger? He was advancing into the second tier, now, lower\u2014hopeless. Nobody would care or pay any attention to the piano they were playing. He had to have the _cr\u00e8me de la cr\u00e8me,_ nothing else would\u2014\n\n\"Excuse me?\"\n\nHe turned.\n\nLydia Blum was coming down the stairs.\n\nShe was wearing a white blouse with a pie-crust neck and a cameo at her throat. Her long cherry-red skirt was cinched at the waist with a thick, diamant\u00e9-buckled black belt. Her curly blonde hair was held up in a loose bun secured with two long wooden pins. He took all this in immediately in a split second as other questions began to yammer in his brain.\n\nShe stepped on to the chequerboard marble of the hallway. She was tall for a woman, he thought, almost lanky. Nearly as tall as he was. He felt his throat tighten and wondered if he'd be able to form words. Her heavy-lidded blue eyes scrutinized him.\n\n\"Can I help you?\"\n\n\"I...No, honestly. Just. I was just...\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"I just had, ah, a...Ah, a meeting with Mr. Kilbarron. Thank you. I'm leaving. About to leave. Now.\"\n\nShe cocked her head, puzzled. Her lips were full, almost as if she were pouting. Strong pointed chin.\n\n\"Have we met before?\" she asked. \"You seem familiar.\"\n\n\"I knocked on the door of your changing room at the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de la R\u00e9publique. A few days ago.\"\n\n\"Are you English?\"\n\n\"Scottish.\"\n\n\"You speak excellent French.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Most kind.\"\n\n\"I remember now. You were looking for John.\"\n\n\"Yes. I was.\"\n\nSilence. They stared at each other. She smiled.\n\n\"Well, you obviously found him.\"\n\nBrodie felt now as if his innards were molten\u2014as if he might melt in a puddle of sizzling magma on the floor. What was it about this woman? How could a tall, Russian, mediocre opera singer be having this effect on him?\n\n\"Lika!\" Kilbarron roared from the drawing room. \"Are you there?\"\n\n\"Yes!\" she shouted back.\n\nLydia\u2014so diminutive \"Lika.\" Right. More information\u2014Lika Blum.\n\n\"Where are my cigars?\"\n\n\"Where they always are!\" she called back. \"In the humidor on the bookshelf.\"\n\n\"Someone has moved them.\"\n\n\"Excuse me,\" she said to Brodie. Then added in English. \"I wish you very good morning.\"\n\nThen she went into the drawing room to search for her lover's cigars.\n\n# 5\n\nJanuary 1897 seemed an exceptionally, cruelly, perversely cold month, Brodie thought\u2014blood-freezingly cold\u2014though nobody else to whom he voiced this opinion appeared to concur. It was winter, therefore it was cold and damp like all winters, but nothing exceptional, was the general opinion. It must be my mood, Brodie thought, my black mood making me feel the cold.\n\nHe had travelled this Wednesday morning in mid-January to the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Gymnase on the boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle to tune their grand piano for a comic opera based on a play by Scribe. The piano was in poor condition\u2014there was bad hammer block and he had to replace the felt and reposition the rails\u2014and it had taken him a full morning's work to restore it to playability. The manager popped out of his office from time to time to see how the work was progressing and tut-tutted at Brodie's exertions.\n\n\"You should get a new piano,\" Brodie said and handed him one of the printed Channon flyers (another of his ideas) that he carried with him. It showed small photogravures of a range of models and prices and various ways of purchasing a piano with a deposit down and monthly payments. \"If you come by the showroom I'm sure we can manage a modest discount.\"\n\nThe manager seemed intrigued and said he might indeed pass by. Another potential sale, Brodie thought as he shoved the action back in place, and what do I gain? He closed the fall and sat down on the stool for a moment, his mood darkening again. He must try not to feel bitter.\n\nHe heard his name called and he looked round to see Beno\u00eet, the office boy from the showroom, walking down the aisle between the stalls.\n\n\"Beno\u00eet? What're you doing here? What's happened?\"\n\n\"A man came into the shop looking for you. He said it was important. Monsieur Dmitri said I should come and find you.\"\n\n\"What man?\"\n\n\"His name is...\" He consulted a scrap of paper in his hand. \"Monsieur Kilbarron.\"\n\nEverything changed in an instant. It was extraordinary how that could happen, Brodie thought, getting to his feet, exulting. Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle indeed! It was astonishing how everything could alter in a day, an hour, a minute, a second. He would never forget that\u2014never let his pessimism get the better of him again. He said goodbye to the manager, urging him to purchase a new piano and promising a 20 per cent discount, such was his new generous mood, and he and Beno\u00eet jumped in a cab and raced back to the avenue de l'Alma. There a calling card had been left on his desk. \"John Kilbarron\" and, scrawled on the back, a note: \"Please come to the Saint-Germain apartment tomorrow at 6 p.m. K.\"\n\nThis can only mean good news, Brodie calculated. A change of heart. The initial \"no\" had been so final, so unpleasantly final. But the Channon offer was generous\u2014a lot of money\u2014so obviously second thoughts had begun to gather. He went through to the front of the shop and signalled Dmitri to stop playing so he could relate this fantastic turn in his fortunes to him. Kilbarron wanted to see him again. Perhaps there might even be a chance for a reunion with Lika Blum...\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe next evening, promptly at six o'clock, Brodie was back at the Kilbarron apartment in the _h\u00f4tel particulier._ The manservant\u2014smarter, less dozy\u2014took his hat and coat and showed him into the drawing room. It was far tidier than his last visit with no traces of wassailing visible and a good fire burned in the grate. Brodie stood in front of it as he waited, enjoying the spreading warmth on his thighs and buttocks.\n\nThe manservant reappeared. \"Monsieur Kilbarron,\" he announced.\n\nAnother man came into the room. He was handsome but heavy, a strong-boned man and swarthy with a grey-flecked, dense, black goatee. He had bags under his brown, watchful eyes. He was dressed in a dark grey suit with a crimson waistcoat whose buttons were straining from the considerable belly they had to retain.\n\n\"Malachi Kilbarron,\" the man said in a deep, raspy voice and strong Irish accent. \"I'm the great man's little brother.\"\n\nThey shook hands and Malachi Kilbarron offered Brodie a glass of port. Brodie accepted. Drinks poured, Malachi lit a long, thin cheroot; Brodie lit a Margarita.\n\n\"You should never talk business with my brother,\" Malachi said, taking a seat. \"He considers 'money' a dirty word\u2014even though he thinks about it all the time like most artistes.\" He used the French word as if to underline the feckless, pretentious aspect of the profession. He chuckled. \"John has a dirty mind, anyway, so everything is smirched and degraded, consequently.\" He seemed to find this idea amusing and chortled again to himself as he drew on his cheroot. They had the same accent but otherwise the resemblance to his brother was a displaced one\u2014skewed. John Kilbarron was handsome in his haggard, debauched way. Malachi\u2014handsome enough, even-featured\u2014looked far heftier and, if it were possible, more sinisterly debauched. John was lean; Malachi broad, muscle going to fat. John clean-shaven, Malachi bearded. It wasn't that unusual, Brodie supposed: two brothers similar but dissimilar. He and Callum didn't really look like brothers either, now that he thought about it.\n\n\"No, if John hadn't mentioned your meeting in a casual, throwaway manner, like, I'd never have known. John says: Sure, I was offered a brand-new piano by some young Scotch fella, he says to me last week. Oh, yes, says I, and how did that come about? And so he told me the story of your encounter, plus your interesting offer. Refused only by John Kilbarron's pig-headedness, I should say. It's the story of my life. I go around and put the broken pieces back together again.\" He poured more port wine into their glasses.\n\n\"So you, on the other hand, do find the offer interesting,\" Brodie said, cautiously.\n\n\"I'd find the offer more interesting if there was more on offer. If you catch my drift.\"\n\n\"I'm authorized to offer up to sixty pounds per concert and recital,\" Brodie said spontaneously, knowing he was authorized to do no such thing, but he was a desperate man. \"Subject to a review every six months,\" he added, as a cautious rider. Malachi didn't respond to this, fortunately. \"Everything else is on the table. The new Channon grand, all shipping and transportation costs to be met by the company.\"\n\nMalachi puffed vigorously at his cheroot, looking at the smoke he made as if it were some wondrous apparition.\n\n\"And what if you sell a thousand pianos as a result of John's endorsement?\"\n\n\"That's our risk and our dividend. We would be paying a great deal in advance.\"\n\n\"And if you sell two thousand pianos, what then? We'll look a right couple of eejits.\"\n\n\"What're you trying to say?\"\n\n\"We want a royalty on every piano sold after the first concert.\"\n\n\"It might be possible. Every grand piano, though, no uprights.\"\n\n\"That seems fair enough to me.\"\n\n\"I'll have to consult Mr. Channon, of course.\"\n\n\"Let's say twenty pounds for every new grand sold.\"\n\nBrodie concealed his relief. \"I'm not authorized to settle on that. But I'm sure Mr. Channon will take everything into consideration.\"\n\nMalachi stood and hitched up his trousers, which had slipped below his belly.\n\n\"I'm sure you'll do your best, Mr. Moncur. Let's not allow a few pounds here and there come between us and our enterprise.\"\n\nThe meeting was over. Malachi walked him to the door.\n\n\"You have a chat to your Mr. Channon and draw up a contract. Then we can meet again and set the whole wonderful show in motion.\" He clapped Brodie on the back, quite hard. \"I'll await your earliest communication. We will be here in Paris for at least another month.\"\n\nBrodie stood in the hall putting on his coat, experiencing that strange sense of life repeating itself\u2014the same situation but altogether different. He picked up his bowler. Now, if Lika Blum would only come down the stairs again then everything would be perfect. But she was never going to appear, of course. Brodie stepped out into the courtyard to confront Paris in January. It seemed decidedly warmer.\n\n# 6\n\nAinsley Channon came back to Paris to sign the Kilbarron contract himself. Matters had been resolved relatively swiftly, letters and then telegrams whizzing to and fro finalizing terms. To Brodie's surprise and relief Ainsley had quickly conceded the rise in Kilbarron's concert fee though the royalty on piano sales was reduced to \u00a310 per grand piano, initially, with an ascending scale as sales mounted up. The crucial clause about a six-month period had been retained. The Kilbarrons seemed unconcerned by this, though Calder maintained a sulky resentment throughout all discussions, objecting to every suggestion and counter-proposal almost as a matter of reflex. He particularly disapproved of Malachi Kilbarron's insistence that Channon & Cie's accounts could be audited by the Kilbarrons so they could determine the exact number of piano sales. Ainsley was again unperturbed, remarking that they had nothing to hide and that if they happened to sell another 1,000 pianos on the back of Brodie's excellent idea then what could possibly be wrong with allowing the brothers to see for themselves?\n\n\"We're honest brokers,\" Ainsley said. \"We're not trying to cheat them. It's a joint enterprise\u2014the better we do the better he does, and vice versa.\"\n\n\"It's a matter of principle,\" Calder snapped back.\n\n\"It's something entirely new\u2014therefore matters of principle don't apply, yet,\" Ainsley said. \"I'm sure you agree, Brodie.\"\n\n\"I do,\" Brodie said. \"John Kilbarron is our golden goose. We don't want to trim his wings.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear!\" Ainsley said. \"Let alone kill him!\" He seemed to find the idea very amusing.\n\nJohn and Malachi Kilbarron came to the showroom and signed the contract. A bottle of champagne was opened and the Channons and the Kilbarrons toasted each other and the success of this unique collaboration.\n\n\"Now, about my own new piano,\" John Kilbarron said. \"I have some particular requests.\"\n\n\"I suggest you speak to young Brodie, here,\" Ainsley said. \"I'll leave you in his very capable hands.\"\n\n\"Why don't you come and see me tomorrow morning,\" Kilbarron said, turning to Brodie, \"and we can make a start?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie sat on the piano stool beside Kilbarron in the drawing room of the Saint-Germain apartment. Kilbarron's hands rested on the keys.\n\n\"There are three things you need to be a pianist of my standing,\" Kilbarron said, with no trace of arrogance. He seemed more thoughtful, more subdued, today, Brodie thought. Kilbarron hit a key with his forefinger, as if to punctuate his statement.\n\n\"Sensibility, difficulty and speed,\" he went on. \"If you have mastered all three you can become a true _klaviertiger._ \" He paused, played another note. \"Now, 'sensibility' is easy. It's just acting. A tear, a grimace, a head shake, a backward lean.\" He leaned backwards and held his right hand up, poised dramatically. \"Then 'difficulty.' I can play anything\u2014the most complex pieces. But 'speed'...I used to be so fast.\" He flexed the fingers of his right hand. \"But now I have pain in the hand, in the arm and the shoulder.\"\n\nHe played a series of arpeggios with his right hand, running up the keyboard, his fingers a blur of movement. He turned his face to Brodie, wincing. \"It's sore. I'm slowing down.\" He paused. \"And if I get slower then 'difficulty' begins to become an issue. That's why I'm writing my own adaptations now, paraphrases, variations, fantasies. They may seem difficult but they're not. Well, not to me, that is.\"\n\n\"I can solve the problem,\" Brodie said, bravely. \"When we come to voice and regulate your own Channon I can do things to it that'll make a huge difference.\"\n\nKilbarron looked sceptical.\n\n\"Can you fix a piano for me so I won't feel pain?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Brodie said. \"I can make it so much easier to play, certainly. It'll be unlike any other piano you've ever played. I use weights, tiny ribbons of lead weights, dry lubrication. The contact will seem minimal, the pressure you use will be hugely reduced.\"\n\n\"Like soapsuds.\"\n\n\"Exactly.\"\n\nKilbarron gave him his big two-rows-of-teeth smile.\n\n\"Well, if you can do that, my lad, then you may just get the job as my guardian angel.\"\n\n\"I thought that was my role.\"\n\nThey both turned to see Malachi saunter into the room.\n\n\"He can be your assistant guardian angel, then. Brodie, here, is going to work some magic on our new piano, he tells me.\"\n\nBrodie stood. \"I'd better be away,\" he said.\n\nMalachi came up to him and cupped his cheek\u2014roughly.\n\n\"Are you going to be our saving grace, Mr. Moncur?\"\n\n\"Depends what you mean by 'saving grace,' I suppose.\"\n\n\"Just make sure you are,\" he said and gave his odd barking laugh, looking at his brother. \"We like saving graces, don't we, John?\"\n\n\"Sure, we like anyone that makes our lives easier.\" There was more fraternal laughter.\n\nThe dozy manservant showed Brodie out, holding the front door open for him and, as a matter of course now, Brodie looked up the stairs in case Lydia\/Lika might descend. But no.\n\n\"Is Mademoiselle Blum in town?\" Brodie asked.\n\n\"No, sir. She's in Dresden singing in an opera.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe new Channon warehouse and workshops were situated on the rue Gounod in the centre of Saint-Cloud. Brodie met Kilbarron at the Gare Saint-Lazare and they caught a stopper the ten miles or so to Saint-Cloud and walked to the warehouse from the station along the northern edge of the huge park.\n\nKilbarron seemed somewhat astonished to be in a building that contained over one hundred pianos. They were parked in tight lanes with corridors between, and as he and Brodie wandered through the maze of uprights Kilbarron looked about him in obvious wonderment.\n\n\"It is a business, isn't it?\" he said to Brodie. \"We forget that, we piano players. A factory for piano-making. And all over the world there are other factories making hundreds and hundreds more. You could be churning out galvanized iron buckets.\"\n\n\"I hardly think so,\" Brodie said. \"Think of these pianos as Swiss chronometers, as the most intricate machines designed to produce melodious sounds. Not buckets, no, no.\"\n\nThey had arrived at the row of grand pianos. Brodie quickly removed the dust sheets. A dozen grands stood there on their solid three legs: wide, pristine, gleaming.\n\n\"Should we go for the latest model?\" Kilbarron asked.\n\n\"Can I suggest this one?\" Brodie said, walking towards an older model and resting his hand on it. There were scuff marks on the legs and the lid creaked as he opened it.\n\n\"This piano is twelve years old and was one of the last to be designed and built and supervised in production by the man who taught me everything I know: Findlay Lanhire.\" Brodie played the C major chord. \"It's a beautiful thing,\" he said. \"Findlay Lanhire's finest. I'll just tweak it for you. Personalize it.\"\n\nKilbarron stood above the keyboard, leaned forward and played a few bars of Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 9 in D.\n\n\"The treble register,\" he said. \"That's where the pain kicks in. The left hand is fine.\" He played a continuous five-finger tremolo in the higher octaves. \"I can feel it,\" he said. \"Already. The pain starting to come up my arm.\" He stopped and flexed and unflexed his fingers, massaged his palm.\n\n\"People think you sit down on your stool and twiddle your fingers and the music comes out,\" he said. \"But every muscle in your body's in action. It's a very physical business playing the piano at my level. Your back, your shoulders, your thighs, your feet on the pedals.\" He paused. \"Not to mention your nerves and your guts.\" He looked at the keys. \"And I've been doing it since I was six years old.\" He cracked the knuckles on each hand. \"Every day, almost, for decades...There's wear and tear. It takes its toll.\"\n\n\"I can make those keys feather-light, sir,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"Oh, yes. Soap bubbles.\"\n\n\"Goose-down.\"\n\n\"Dandelion fluff.\"\n\n\"The air that we breathe.\"\n\nKilbarron leaned forward and played a series of loud chords\u2014 _bang, bang, bang_ \u2014the sound echoing through the steel rafters of the warehouse.\n\n\"All right, young Brodie. This is the one for me. Now, can we get a decent lunch in this godforsaken town?\"\n\nThey found a restaurant, Le Pavillon Bleu on the place d'Armes. Kilbarron asked for a table at the back and they studied the menu. Kilbarron said he wanted only a _plat du jour._ He lit a small cigar and ordered a brandy and iced water, insisting Brodie join him in a toast to the new piano. Kilbarron was wearing a dark grey tweed suit, a white shirt with a high stiff collar and a cobalt-blue tie. With his long hair brushed back and falling to his shoulders he looked very much a personage, Brodie thought, a person of consequence, even if you didn't recognize him. Brodie was aware of fellow diners looking curiously at them. Who is that man? A woman timidly approached and asked if Monsieur Kilbarron would sign her menu. Kilbarron put down his cigar and obliged. He was very charming.\n\nKilbarron was served veal kidneys but barely touched them, being more interested in the wine he ordered. Brodie ate a skate wing with black butter and, when Kilbarron called for a second bottle, realized he was not going to remain compos mentis for much longer. While Kilbarron had his wits about him, Brodie asked after Mademoiselle Blum.\n\n\"She's in Dresden,\" Kilbarron said. \"Singing In\u00e8s in _L'Africaine._ \"\n\n\"She has a very...\" Brodie chose his words carefully. \"Pure voice.\"\n\n\"Her voice is all right. That's not a problem. The problem is her height\u2014she's too tall.\"\n\n\"Too tall?\"\n\n\"She towers over most tenors and they don't like that. And her voice may be pure enough but they can't hear her at the back.\"\n\nHe forked a chunk of kidney into his mouth, chewed and washed it down with a gulp of wine. He topped their glasses up, brimful.\n\n\"I can get her work for now but it won't last long.\" Kilbarron pushed his plate away, half eaten. \"The law of diminishing returns will kick in.\"\n\n\"Really? I didn't realize\u2014\"\n\n\"Why are you so interested in Miss Blum, Mr. Moncur?\"\n\n\"I'm not. No.\" Brodie tried to disguise the fact that he was suddenly flustered, feeling his cheeks burn. \"Rather I'm curious, you know, having heard her sing.\"\n\n\"Right. I'll buy that for now.\" He looked shrewdly at him. \"Are you a married man, Brodie, my fine fella?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Steer well clear of it, I'll tell you that for nothing. It's a waste of time\u2014a waste of everything. And there's no need, either, in this day and age.\"\n\n\"I suppose so. But what if you fall in love?\"\n\n\"Love?\" Kilbarron said, blankly. \"What's that? Can you eat it? Can you drink it? Is it of any use to man or beast?\"\n\nBrodie called for the bill.\n\n\"Have you any idea of your concert programme?\" he asked, trying to bring the conversation back to work. \"When might you start?\"\n\n\"Malachi deals with that side of things. I just show up and play.\"\n\n\"Are you thinking of a full orchestra\u2014or just solo piano?\"\n\n\"I leave that up to Malachi. And the hall, of course. They have their own ideas of how to get the people in.\"\n\n\"Fine. I'll wait to hear from him.\"\n\n\"But I will tell you one thing, young Brodie.\"\n\n\"Yes?\" He felt a distinct sense of foreboding.\n\n\"I'll be wanting you with me along the way. Your wonderful, personally regulated piano\u2014and including your good self.\"\n\n\"I'm not sure I can\u2014\"\n\n\"Oh, I'm sure you can. I want you there tuning my intricate machine.\"\n\n# 7\n\n> H\u00f4tel de l'Europe\n> \n> Rue Auguste Bottin\n> \n> Gen\u00e8ve\n> \n> Suisse\n> \n> 15 May 1897\n> \n> Dear Married One, Callumius Rex, Imperator\u2014\n> \n> Is it bliss? Still bliss? I hear it is reputed to be. Kilbarron thinks it an unnecessary state in this day and age. All very well for him with forty fine ladies swooning in his dressing room after every concert. Once everything has calmed down I will be home to meet Mrs. Callum Moncur though to tell you the truth I'm not sure when that might be. As you can see from my writing paper I am in Geneva, our last stop on a six-city tour. Brussels, Berlin, Vienna, Milan, Rome. The Kilbarrons are making a small fortune but so are we. The news from Paris is that piano sales have already doubled\u2014so the great Brodie Moncur scheme appears to be working. My concerns are all to do with shipping the Channon itself hither and thither. I have to hire a gang and a wagon to take it to the station and load it on a train. Then when we arrive another gang and a wagon has to take it to the theatre. Then I pay the stagehands there to unload and set up. And I have to retune, of course. My days are filled and I've seen very little of these beautiful cities we've visited. But Kilbarron is pleased, playing well and to large crowds. The pain in his hand and arm is negligible so his mood is affable. His brother, Malachi, is a less congenial travelling companion\u2014always complaining about something: the compartment, the hotel, the food, the weather\u2014but I don't allow myself to get over-bothered by him.\n> \n> Last concert tonight. Pack up piano, ship to Paris and then I'll see where we stand. Malachi Kilbarron is booking more dates for a second tour in the summer. I think he knows time may be running out. We renew everything contractual after six months. I have a feeling Ainsley Channon will call a halt if he thinks we've achieved all we can _(_ id est: made lots of money _)_.\n> \n> Give a respectable brother-in-law's kiss to your lovely spouse.\n> \n> Ever your affect. bro.,\n> \n> Brodie the Wanderer\n\nBrodie sealed the envelope and wrote Callum's address down, feeling a little pang of nostalgia as he wrote \"Ecosse.\" He had been away for nearly three years now. He never thought he would hanker to be back in the Liethen Valley\u2014maybe it was all this travelling that was causing this fleeting homesickness. He looked at his watch\u2014half-past five\u2014he should make his way to the theatre for the final checks. He slipped on his coat, picked up his hat and his Gladstone bag and walked down the corridor to knock on the door of Kilbarron's suite.\n\n\"Come in. No, wait,\" came the call. \"One minute.\"\n\nBrodie waited until he heard a key turn in the lock and Kilbarron let him in. His jacket was off and the left sleeve of his shirt was rolled up to the bicep. On the desk Brodie saw a saucer, a leather strap and a hypodermic syringe.\n\n\"Brodie, my good companion, what can I do for you?\"\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Brodie pointed to the hypodermic syringe.\n\n\"It's just a painkiller. Remarkably efficient. So, yes, I am all right. In fact, more than all right.\"\n\n\"Has the pain returned?\"\n\n\"A twinge. So I thought it better to act now.\"\n\n\"Right...I'm off to the theatre. See everything's in order.\"\n\n\"I think Malachi wants a word. After the show.\"\n\n\"Of course. See you about six thirty.\"\n\nThe theatre\u2014the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre des Ducs de Savoie\u2014was a ten-minute walk from the hotel and Brodie headed straight there, taking the back streets. The manager met him and led him to the stage. Findlay Lanhire's Channon stood there, opened, ready.\n\nBrodie enjoyed being in empty theatres. He had fine-tuned the Channon that morning but, just to ensure all was in order, he sat down and\u2014to the empty seats\u2014played the little ditty that he used to check all was well as far as the tuning was concerned. It was a folk song that he remembered his mother used to sing to him and he had adapted and embellished the simple melody so that every octave and almost every note was played. The Channon was perfectly tuned and he noticed once again how his little artifices were working smoothly. The keys in the treble register were incredibly light\u2014the slightest touch made the note sound truly. He had glued thin strips of lead below the front of the keys\u2014out of sight\u2014a measure that had reduced the up-weight to less than half an ounce\u2014a third less than was normal. Findlay Lanhire would have been proud. He pulled out the action and, with some fine-grade sandpaper, minutely sanded the hammer-heads on the top two treble octaves. He played his little tune again on these high notes and, seeing it was the last concert of the tour and everything had gone so perfectly in a musical sense, he went through his final checks once more. He knew Kilbarron was finishing tonight's recital with an encore of ferocious difficulty, one of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes, \"Mazeppa.\" Brodie had looked at the sheet music with its dense clusters of black notes, like ripe bunches of grapes hanging from the staves. He had tried to play a few bars but had given up\u2014he felt he would need four hands just to manufacture these sounds, let alone play them with any competence or flair. He thought again\u2014maybe that was why Kilbarron was administering a painkilling injection. He knew what demands would be made on his fingers tonight.\n\nBrodie stayed for the concert as he had done every night of the tour. Kilbarron played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 3. Then after the interval he played his party pieces as he called them\u2014 _fantaisies_ and paraphrases that he had adapted and arranged himself, the better to show off his astonishing technique. Brodie closed his eyes and listened as Kilbarron ended with the Liszt. Flawlessly good, he thought, also noting the Channon's rich sound as it flooded through the large auditorium. Kilbarron bowed deeply, receiving the obligatory standing ovation, thanked the conductor, shook hands with the first violinist and strode off stage. Tour over.\n\nBrodie hurried round to the dressing room and knocked on the door.\n\nIt was opened by Lika Blum.\n\nSilence. Consternation. Her smile of welcome.\n\n\"Mr. Moncur, how lovely to see you. Come in, come in.\"\n\nBrodie stepped in, feeling a faint sheen of sweat breaking out on his face already, brain empty. They were in a small oak-panelled sitting room, a little shabby but with dim electric lighting in sconces that hid the shabbiness somewhat. A door led to the dressing room. On a central table was an ice bucket with a champagne bottle and half a dozen glasses. No sign of Kilbarron. Sometimes he dozed after a concert, stretched out on a divan.\n\n\"Can you open this for me?\" Lika held up the champagne bottle. \"I broke my nail.\"\n\nBrodie was glad to busy himself with a simple task.\n\n\"I had no idea you were coming,\" he said. \"I didn't see you in the audience.\"\n\n\"I was in a box,\" she said. \"All very last minute. I was in Nizza. I mean Nice. Do you know Nice? Full of Russians\u2014and English, of course. But I decided to come up here and escort John back to Paris. I hear it's been a wild success.\"\n\nBrodie agreed and summarized the events of the tour as he poured champagne. He and Lika clinked glasses.\n\n\" _Za vashe zdrovie,_ \" she said in Russian.\n\n\" _Slangevar,_ \" he replied in Scottish.\n\nShe was wearing black, top to toe. A jet-beaded dress, alive with winking lights, with a little black fur capelet and a five-row collar of pearls around her throat. Her hair was held up by two jewelled ebony combs. Ravishing and vaguely Spanish-looking, he thought ineptly.\n\n\"Oh, yes,\" she said. \"You must meet C\u00e9sar.\"\n\nShe crossed the room to her bag and returned with a small puppy in her arms. The dog\u2014white with brown patches\u2014blinked at Brodie and licked its chops. It was very small\u2014small as a baby rabbit, he thought.\n\n\"John bought him for me,\" she said. \"Isn't he adorable?\"\n\n\"What kind of dog is it?\" Brodie said, feigning interest\u2014dogs meant nothing to him. \"The breed, I mean.\"\n\n\"He's an English dog, called a 'Jack Russell.' Am I saying that right?\"\n\n\"Russell\u2014not Roussell.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I decided to call him C\u00e9sar, for some reason. Spontaneously. Nothing to do with C\u00e9sar Franck, by the way. John can't stand Franck.\"\n\n\"It's a good name\u2014for a dog,\" Brodie said, lamely. He was pleased to see her put C\u00e9sar back in her bag and pick up her champagne glass again.\n\n\"Are you planning another tour?\" she asked. \"Do you have a cigarette?\"\n\nBrodie found his cigarette case in his jacket pocket. She took one and he lit it for her.\n\n\"There is talk of another tour\u2014in the summer\u2014yes. Mr. Malachi is keen to capitalize on the success of this one. Indeed.\" He wondered why he was speaking with such ridiculous formality, like a functionary being interviewed for a superior position. It was a measure of the disturbance going on inside him\u2014he had indigestion also, the champagne burning\u2014this was the effect of being alone with Lika Blum.\n\nBut not alone for long. There was a rap on the door and Malachi Kilbarron entered, big-chested and flushed, cigar on the go.\n\n\"Talk of the devil,\" Lika said. \"I'll go and see how John is getting on.\" She flitted into the dressing room, closing the door behind her softly.\n\n\"Talking about me, eh?\" Malachi said, helping himself to champagne.\n\n\"I was just telling Miss Blum how well the tour had gone\u2014and that you were keen on another.\"\n\n\"Very apposite\u2014because I wanted a private word with you, young Brodie. So you can whisper in that wily rascal Ainsley Channon's ear with confidence and clarity.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"We do want another tour. Yes. But not on the same terms. It'll be a hundred guineas. Guineas, mind. Per performance.\"\n\nBrodie realized that such an increase would mean the end of the Channon\u2013Kilbarron association but said nothing, other than, \"I'll certainly pass that information along.\"\n\n\"And talking of information,\" Malachi said, stepping closer, \"we have our own. We know how well the piano sales are going\u2014hence our new negotiating position.\"\n\n\"Then you know more than me,\" Brodie said. \"I'm not au fait with sales.\"\n\n\"And I wouldn't expect you to be,\" Malachi said. \"I just want you to let that old buzzard Ainsley know that we are 'au fait,' as you put it.\"\n\nHe smiled and turned away as Kilbarron and Lika emerged from the dressing room.\n\n\"Ah, Brodie,\" John Kilbarron said. \"I thought the old Channon was in fine voice tonight.\" He looked tired\u2014just as well the tour was over.\n\n\"Impeccable,\" Brodie said. \"The 'Mazeppa' was stunning.\" He knew Kilbarron liked praise. \"I've never heard it better. Never\u2014I swear.\"\n\nKilbarron nodded sagely in agreement. \"Yes...Have you had your quiet word with Malachi, here?\"\n\n\"I have. Fully informed.\"\n\n\"Excellent. Final task of the evening\u2014will you walk this young lady back to our hotel? Malachi and I have other business to conclude.\"\n\nBrodie and Lika opted to return to the hotel by the lakeside. The night was cool and the street lights of the promenade wriggled and shimmied in the still, tideless water as they walked back to the hotel along the quai des Eaux-Vives. Brodie tested various possible conversational openings but none felt right. The sound of their footsteps seemed enough, filling the silence down by the lakeside. Out over the black water the night appeared vast, immeasurable, he thought, meriting silence. Lika, in any event, was preoccupied with her puppy in her bag, talking to him in Russian. Eventually the dog settled and Lika took Brodie's arm, a gesture that made him feel he might fall over. He remembered something he could say.\n\n\"Any luck with your audition?\" he asked. He knew she had gone up for Laura in _Luisa Miller_ at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Monte Carlo, hence her presence in Nice.\n\n\"Pretty compliments, but I know nothing will happen.\"\n\n\"Surely not?\"\n\nShe asked for another cigarette so they paused to light up. As she shifted her bag, concerned her little dog might tumble out, it actually fell to the ground. She managed to grab the puppy but the bag clunked heavily on the pavement. The hard ring of metal.\n\n\"Oh dear, I think you've broken something there,\" Brodie said. He picked the bag up and handed it to her. Lika took out a small drawstring maroon velvet purse. From it she removed a tiny pistol\u2014two short barrels, no more than three inches long, one set above the other, and a curved mother-of-pearl handle, like a baby goat's horn.\n\n\"It's my hotel-gun\u2014at least that's what John calls it. He gave it to me.\" She handed it to him. It was small but surprisingly heavy\u2014its weight seemed to confirm its lethal potential. He gave it back and she put it away. They resumed lighting their cigarettes.\n\n\"Why would he give you a gun?\" he asked.\n\n\"For when I'm on tour alone, to protect myself. In case someone tries to rob me, or breaks down my door and tries to ravish me.\"\n\n\"Is it loaded?\"\n\n\"Of course. Two barrels, two bullets, two triggers. It's called a Derringer.\"\n\nShe put her cigarette in her mouth and resettled her puppy in the bag, then puffed smoke into the night sky. They resumed their promenade.\n\n\"I know it's very bad manners for a young lady to smoke in the street,\" she said. \"But I don't think I'll be recognized, somehow.\"\n\n\"You were saying: why will nothing happen?\" Brodie felt the warmth of her palm in his elbow crook. \"You have a wonderful voice,\" he added gallantly.\n\n\"Because I'm too tall to be an opera singer, so they tell me. All the tenors are short and they don't want a tall soprano standing beside them, making them look small.\"\n\n\"But that's ridiculous, Miss Blum,\" Brodie protested.\n\n\"You must call me Lika, Brodie\u2014but only when we're alone, if you don't mind. I don't think John would approve of such familiarity.\"\n\n\"Thank you...Lika.\" It was wonderful to say her name out loud. \"As I was saying, Lika, that's preposterous. What has a person's height to do with the quality of their voice? It's like saying no one with a beard can play the piano.\"\n\n\"Ah, but you talk as a tall man, Brodie. If you were a little, short, vain tenor you would think differently. You're taller than me so you don't see it as an issue. The little tenor doesn't want to stand beside a Russian giantess.\"\n\nThey both had to laugh at this. Brodie felt a level of happiness invade him that he thought he had never experienced before. To be walking with this mesmerizing, beautiful woman\u2014this tall woman\u2014arm in arm, beside the lake in Geneva, talking as equals, as friends. He felt tears smart in his eyes.\n\n\"If only you were a tenor, Brodie,\" she said. \"Then we could sing together.\"\n\nThey had arrived at the H\u00f4tel de l'Europe. Lika threw away her half-smoked cigarette and they separated, walking inside together, greeting the doorman, who doffed his hat, familiarly.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie lay in his bed, an hour later, the lights switched off, thinking about Lydia Blum. Lika Blum. Lika. What was she doing consorting with someone like Kilbarron? Did she think it would help her career, he thought, unkindly? And then he rebuked himself. Who knew what attracted one person to another. It was a mystery, something entirely individual and personal. What had attracted his mother to Malky Moncur? Maybe there were aspects of John Kilbarron that he would only reveal to a lover. The ignorant spectator's guesses were futile and irrelevant. Love, mutual attraction, sexual obsession were all fundamentally personal, utterly private evocations of an individual's desires and innermost longings. He should know that. Look how he desired Lika Blum, already, a woman he'd met only three times...\n\nHe imagined her naked. He imagined himself in bed with Lika, naked, entering her, staring down at that face surrounded by its unruly blonde hair. Those lips. Those hooded, sleepy eyes.\n\nHe reached down and touched himself. Gripped himself. He looked at the ceiling then closed his eyes and thought of Lika.\n\n# 8\n\nAinsley Channon had cut off most of his Dundreary whiskers and appeared ten years younger, Brodie thought. With that great spread of grizzled beard gone the features of his face were properly revealed and one could see that father and son did actually resemble each other, to a significant degree. The comparison was made all the easier as they were sitting beside each other\u2014opposite him across Calder's vast desk.\n\n\"No, it's an unequivocal, not to say raging, success,\" Ainsley said, beaming. \"And we won't forget it was your idea, Brodie. No, no. Brodie's Smart Idea...\" He looked at papers in front of him. \"Sales compared to last year are up two hundred and seventy-eight per cent. We're actually thinking of opening a branch of Channon in Vienna. Take the battle to Steinway and B\u00f6sendorfer on their own ground. Why not? If we can do it in Paris\u2014\"\n\n\"We're only thinking about it,\" Calder interjected coldly. \"Nothing's been decided.\"\n\nAinsley continued, regardless. \"We've had approaches from Door and Julius, and others. They all want to play Channons.\"\n\n\"Aye. For cartloads of money!\" Calder scoffed.\n\nAinsley ignored him. \"It couldn't have gone better, Brodie. _Bravissimo._ \"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Brodie said. \"My other news is that the Kilbarrons are looking to do another tour as soon as possible. Ten cities, maybe twenty concerts.\"\n\nCalder gave an incredulous, screeching laugh.\n\nAinsley nodded his head, judiciously. \"Mr. Kilbarron is free to play as many concerts as he wishes, wherever he wishes. The fact is...\" He blinked a few times. \"The astonishing fact is that if we contract with the likes of Julius, Door and Stimmer and whoever else, then the services of John Kilbarron are no longer really required. He's rather...What's the French phrase?\"\n\n\" _Pass\u00e9,_ \" Calder said. \" _Fini._ \"\n\n\"No. _Vieux jeu_ was the one I was thinking of. How would you translate that, Brodie? Colloquially.\"\n\n\"Old hat.\"\n\n\"Exactly. John Kilbarron is now rather old hat.\"\n\nBrodie felt the familiar shawl of foreboding envelop him. He interlocked the fingers of both hands and leaned forward, as though almost at prayer, to emphasize his seriousness.\n\n\"The thing is, I had a conversation with Malachi Kilbarron\u2014he's the financial, manager-figure, as you know. What he says is more important than John Kilbarron's opinions. He said he would be happy to continue the association with Channon\u2014on condition the concert fee is raised.\"\n\n\"Oh, would he indeed?\" Calder said, indignation colouring his plump features.\n\n\"To a hundred guineas. He insisted on guineas.\"\n\nAinsley smiled, sadly. \"Now _that_ is what I call killing the golden goose. Do you mind how we talked about that, Brodie? We were worried about it and now Kilbarron has put the knife to his own throat.\"\n\nHe stood and went in search of a decanter of brandy and poured three glasses. He toasted Brodie.\n\n\"It was a brilliant stroke, Brodie. Well done. Costly\u2014but it paid off, royally. You watch the other piano manufacturers\u2014they'll be running to catch up...\" He looked thoughtful for a moment. \"Calder and I want to recognize your contribution. We want to create a new department in the company that you will lead. You will continue your efforts\u2014recruiting piano virtuosi who will play Channon pianos. You'll run the whole show\u2014supervise the tours, shipping, the travel arrangements\u2014and all the tuning required, of course.\" He paused. \"And you will benefit financially, of course.\"\n\nBrodie smiled back as though in perfect accord, noting that the precise financial benefits of running this new department were not actually mentioned. He saw his life changing in a way he'd never envisaged and he wasn't sure if it was the best turn in his fortunes.\n\n\"What do I say to Malachi Kilbarron?\" he asked, casually.\n\nAinsley frowned and scratched his new trim sideburns, thinking. Then said, firmly, \"It's very simple. He can stay on at the same rate for another six months. Take it or leave it. It wouldn't be seemly to dispose of him too abruptly. Then it's over.\"\n\nCalder reached for the decanter. \"And you can tell Malachi Kilbarron to put that in his pipe and smoke it.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie kept his distance from the Kilbarrons for a week until a note was delivered to the Channon showroom asking him to come and tune the piano in the Saint-Germain apartment. He could hardly refuse.\n\nJohn Kilbarron answered the door himself. He looked somewhat unkempt, even by his standards. He had a small, scabbed sore on a corner of his lower lip; he needed a shave and had one of his thin cigars in his hand. But he seemed pleased to see Brodie and confirmed that there was no other motive than to get the wretched piano properly tuned.\n\n\"I know, I know,\" he said. \"You've been telling me for months that it's horribly out of tune. But I need it now\u2014I'm trying to write something ambitious, damn my eyes. And I can hear how off it is.\"\n\nHe showed Brodie into the drawing room and Brodie set his Gladstone bag down, opened the piano and went to work. At lunchtime the dozy manservant said a meal was to be served in the dining room. Brodie went through to find only one place set. Where was Lika? Or Kilbarron, come to that? He was provided with a bowl of cauliflower soup and a mushroom omelette. He declined the offer of wine.\n\nIt took him another two hours after lunch to finish the tuning. He slid the action back into the piano and played his usual Scottish folk song several times in different keys, listening hard for the hammer strikes and the dampers working properly.\n\nHe felt a hand come to rest softly on his shoulder and turned to find Lika standing there, a tear running down one cheek, wordless.\n\nBrodie jumped to his feet. \"Lika! My God, is everything all right?\"\n\n\"That music. That tune...\" she said, wonderingly. \"What is it? I heard it. I was standing in the doorway, listening\u2014and it made me cry. Look.\" She wiped her tears away, smiling. \"How strange. It was like an instinct, a reflex. I heard you playing and the next thing I knew my eyes were full of tears.\"\n\nBrodie explained. \"It's a folk song from Scotland. My mother used to sing it to me when I was young. I've changed it a bit\u2014but I use it when I'm tuning. At the end, you know, just to see if everything is fine. If the piano's ready.\"\n\n\"But it's beautiful. Play it again, will you?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nBrodie sat down and played the song through, all two minutes of it.\n\n\"What's it called?\"\n\n\"It's called 'My Bonny Boy.'\" He said the title in English and translated it. _Mon beau gar\u00e7on._ \"There are words to the song\u2014just three verses.\"\n\nLika frowned. \"It's most extraordinary. There's one bit of it\u2014one transition. Is it a key change? It makes me want to cry, instantly. How can that happen?\"\n\nThen they heard the front door open and Kilbarron appeared, having handed his hat and coat to the manservant.\n\n\"Well, hello, hello,\" he said. \"All done, Master Brodie?\" He looked at Lika. \"Are you well, my sweet?\"\n\nLika, in some excitement, explained about the effect Brodie's folk song had had on her. A completely new, unheard piece of music that seemed to provoke a direct attack on her tear ducts.\n\n\"Good Lord above. What miraculous music is that?\"\n\nBrodie recounted the story once more. \"It's just an old Scottish folk song that I've adapted,\" he added. Kilbarron was intrigued and asked him to play it again. So Brodie sat down at the piano and ran through the song once more, Kilbarron listening intently.\n\n\"See! There!\" Lika exclaimed. \"That moment, those few bars. Don't you feel it? So much emotion.\"\n\n\"I do\u2014in a way,\" Kilbarron said and asked Brodie to play it again.\n\n\"Yes,\" he said when Brodie had finished. \"It's very simple but effective. An interrupted cadence on a rising scale\u2014accented passing notes. Play it again if you will, Brodie, old man.\"\n\nBrodie did so.\n\n\"You expect the tonic, you see. Every instinct is telling you which way the music will go,\" Kilbarron said, almost to himself. \"But it's unresolved\u2014that's where the emotion springs from.\" He smiled. \"An old trick. But old tricks are the best.\"\n\nHe budged Brodie away from the piano and sat down at the stool and played the song himself.\n\n\"See?\" he said to Lika. \"Rising sevenths, falling fourths\u2014suspensions, passing notes...There! A falling sixth, a rising ninth.\" He took his hands off the keys. \"G flat major to D flat major then\u2014this is what you don't expect\u2014D flat minor ninth. The unexpected chord...\"\n\nHe played the three chords and seemed untypically thoughtful, suddenly.\n\n\"An old folk song, you say.\" Kilbarron stood and moved away from the piano.\n\n\"It's as much an act of memory,\" Brodie said. \"I've fiddled around with it so much over the years. I suppose I've invented half of it. I needed more range...My mother used to sing it to me\u2014but she died when I was fourteen. So...\"\n\nKilbarron stood by the fireplace, frowning. \"Still, very effective. Nice little melody, also. That's important\u2014then you can fiddle around with it, as you say.\" He opened a silver box and took out a cigarillo and lit it. \"D'you know who wrote it?\"\n\n\"Traditional. Nobody knows. Somebody wrote words to the old tune and it entered the folk-song repertoire. I remembered the tune and so I took it and made some\u2014\"\n\n\"We have the same kind of songs in Ireland,\" Kilbarron said. \"These Celtic songs use the same tricks. You expect a tonic resolution but it's held back in various ways, deliberately unresolved. The unexpected chord,\" he repeated. He pointed his cigarillo at Lika. \"But it made you want to cry. Astonishing. All very visceral and nothing to do with the intellect\u2014which is where the tear ducts come into play.\"\n\nBrodie stepped forward, closed the piano and gave it a pat. \"Well, it's in fine tune. And about time.\"\n\n\"I'm very grateful,\" Kilbarron said, vaguely\u2014his mind seemed to be on other matters. \"Charge it to Channon _p\u00e8re et fils._ \"\n\n# 9\n\nBrodie wandered into the workshop and hung his boater on the hook to the side of his desk. He blew his nose for the hundredth time that day. He had a chest cold that seemed unusually tenacious. It was warm, the sun was shining and he had a cold. He was returning from the Saint-Cloud warehouse where he'd been helping Karl-Heinz Nagel select a piano. Nagel was now the third virtuoso to be signed up by Channon since the arrival of John Kilbarron\u2014Ernst Sauter had been the second (having suddenly changed his mind)\u2014and after Kilbarron and Sauter now Nagel was joining the team. Others were interested but Nagel was a real coup. And the others would follow, now.\n\nNagel was a small grey-haired man in his fifties, charming and reserved, and he had seemed very happy with the piano that Brodie had steered him towards. He had also insisted that Brodie accompany him on tour. He had grand ambitions\u2014a sequence of German and Scandinavian cities in 1898 and then a whole series of concerts in Berlin for the turn of the century. Brodie had kept his affirmation very vague. Everyone now under contract to Channon wanted him to tune their new pianos, as if he were some sort of accessory that came with the instrument\u2014like a stool or a music stand.\n\nBrodie lit a cigarette and felt his life disappearing under an avalanche of work. Simply co-ordinating these dozens of concerts and recitals was more than enough for one man; but then there was the crating, the shipping, the administration, the training of new tuners to his own exacting standards...It was going to be impossible, he now saw, and Ainsley had raised his salary by five pounds a month. It wasn't enough, in fact it was\u2014\n\nDmitri knocked on the door frame.\n\n\"Somebody to see you out front,\" he said. Dmitri now worked three days a week as a junior manager for Channon as well. Brodie stubbed out his cigarette and strolled through to the showroom.\n\nLika Blum stood there looking at a Channon Phoenix covered in tortoiseshell inlays. She had her little dog with her on a lead. What was it called? Brodie felt that inner somersault of gut-spasm, the heart-swell.\n\n\"Lika,\" he said, smiling blandly. \"Good afternoon. How lovely to see you. What can I do for you?\"\n\nShe came over to him tugging her little dog behind her.\n\n\"Brodie\u2014is there a caf\u00e9 or a tea room near here? I need your advice.\"\n\nLa Loge des Dames L\u00e9gendaires was a small tea room a fifty-yard walk down the avenue de l'Alma at the corner of the rue Pierre Charron. There was glass everywhere. It was panelled in smoked glass and the metal tables had glass tops. A huge Venetian glass chandelier dominated the small salon. It felt a very fragile place\u2014you entered it with care, Brodie thought, feeling large and clumsy\u2014and it boasted that it served over a hundred varieties of teas, tisanes and infusions.\n\nBrodie and Lika found a table with a view of the street. A child was running up and down the pavement spinning a metal hoop with a stick that made a rather irritating, grating noise. Brodie drew the muslin curtain to obscure it. He blew his nose.\n\n\"Apologies,\" he said. \"I've a chest cold. A hot tea is just the thing.\"\n\nThey ordered their teas\u2014a rose-petal infusion for Lika; a Darjeeling with honey for Brodie\u2014and a plate of pastries. Lika was wearing a severe charcoal-grey suit with a tight skirt that came down to her ankle boots. It had bottle-green lapels and many silver buttons and looked vaguely Germanic, militaristic. Her straw hat had a matching green feather in its band. As usual he thought she looked almost unbearably beautiful as she talked\u2014perhaps because she was so animated, he wondered: there was clearly something on her mind and he was touched as well as pleased that she had come to him for advice.\n\nTheir teas and pastries arrived. She ate a tiny chocolate \u00e9clair, the size of her little finger; he said he wasn't hungry and sipped his soothing, honeyed tea, feeling its sweet warmth spread through his chest, easing the constriction. He began to sense an unusual relaxation, sitting there, seeming to lose all sense of himself as a person with needs, bodily functions and a demanding job to be done. He would happily have stayed in this tea room with Lika forever.\n\n\"...because, you see, I think you can help me, Brodie,\" she was saying.\n\n\"What? Yes, anything.\"\n\nShe explained: she was going for an audition for an oratorio in English. Handel's _The Triumph of Time and Truth._ She was up for the role of \"Truth.\"\n\n\"It's more of a mezzo-soprano but John says I can do it easily. In fact I sing mezzo roles all the time.\"\n\n\"I don't think I know it,\" Brodie said. \"The _Messiah,_ yes, of course, _Alexander's Feast._ But this is\u2014\"\n\n\"I thought it would be good to sing something in English for them. For the audition.\"\n\n\"Excellent idea.\"\n\n\"So I thought of your Scottish folk song.\"\n\n\"Yes...Yes, it might be perfect. It's very short, easy to learn.\"\n\n\"Exactly,\" she said, then added in English, \"for my English is not so good. Approximately.\"\n\n\"It's a very simple song. You can do it, easily.\"\n\n\"Do you know the words?\"\n\n\"Yes, I think I can remember them. Three verses. My mother sang this song to me all the time.\"\n\n\"Can you write them down for me?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Then we can practise together\u2014I can be word-perfect.\"\n\nBrodie said yes to every proposal. Lika set a date for the rehearsal\u2014Thursday afternoon.\n\n\"I'll be there.\"\n\n\"And the music?\" Lika asked. \"Can you transcribe that? So I can give something to the accompanist.\"\n\n\"I'll jot something down. We'll run through it.\"\n\n\"And if I could make them cry, Brodie. Do you see? Melt their hearts. And they'd have to give me the role...\"\n\n\"Ah-ha! Very cunning. I see your plan.\"\n\nThey chatted on\u2014Lika bemoaning the impossibilities, the endless difficulties of her chosen career, wondering if there was any way of disguising her height. Brodie listened and made the odd remark, entranced, looking at her face as she expostulated and gestured across from him. Was it the lips or was it the eyes? Or was it some more subtle equation of the face? The distance between eyes equalling distance between nose and top lip. Or the precise setting of the lips between nose and chin...How did such fascination occur? One saw a thousand women's faces in a month, say. Why was your eye\u2014your heart, your loins\u2014enthralled by just one?\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was an unusually warm day, even for early summer, Brodie thought, wishing he'd worn a lighter suit. He felt he was perspiring and worried that he'd smell of sweat. The streets of Paris were pungent with horse shit decomposing in the hot sun. Every crossing meant parting a way between thousands of hovering black flies. He thought of hot summer weather in all the large cities of Europe with their hundreds of thousands of horses defecating in the streets. A Sargasso of shit. It was a relief to step through the doors of the Kilbarron _h\u00f4tel_ and find oneself in the quiet courtyard. As he crossed the gravel parterre to the front door he checked again that he had his music with him.\n\nLika opened the door, a virginal vision in white cotton and lace. White billowy blouse, a lace shawl, a wide cream flannel skirt, her hair tied up loosely. For the first time Brodie really took in the Russian woman in her.\n\n\"So hot!\" she said. \"I've made some lemonade.\"\n\nThey went into the drawing room where the glass doors were open to the small garden so they could hear the sound of the Cupid fountain plashing. There was a jug of lemonade and a dish of sweet biscuits set out on a round table and Lika poured them each a glass. Brodie asked where John Kilbarron was.\n\n\"He's gone to Dublin with Malachi\u2014some family business about a house\u2014he'll be back next week. Oh, yes, they both want to talk to you about the new tour. They're full of plans.\"\n\nBrodie munched on a biscuit to suppress the sudden shiver of worry he was experiencing. \"Full of plans...\" He had no idea at all how he was going to deal with John Kilbarron, let alone his sinister thug of a brother. Concentrate on the here and now, he told himself. He took out his sheaf of papers\u2014the words of the song and the simple melody he had written down on a sheet of manuscript paper\u2014a melody simple enough to be picked out by one hand but there was enough there for any tolerable pianist to work out a left-hand accompaniment. He handed the words of the song to Lika and she read them out slowly in her heavily Russian-accented English. It sounded both strange and enchanting to Brodie\u2014his country's folk culture rendered through the lens of another.\n\n> \"My Bonny Boy\" (trad.)\n> \n> Arranged by Brodie Moncur\n> \n> My bonny boy has gone tae sleep\n> \n> He dreams of worlds he cannae know,\n> \n> I watch him and I want tae weep\u2014\n> \n> He has a journey far to go.\n> \n> My bonny lad has gone tae sleep\n> \n> Our bairns are sleeping too.\n> \n> We live our lives and try to keep\n> \n> Our bearings as we journey through.\n> \n> My bonny man has gone tae sleep,\n> \n> His journey o'er\u2014he's heard the call.\n> \n> Birth tae death is the shortest leap,\n> \n> The grave is waiting for one and all.\n\nHe explained the Scottish dialect words\u2014bonny, tae, cannae, bairns. He had memories of his mother singing the song but they were imprecise\u2014he had written down the words as best he remembered. No doubt there were some lines of his own composition\u2014just like the melody. The crucial melodic change\u2014the unexpected chord, as Kilbarron called it\u2014took place between lines three and four in each verse. This was the transition that had brought tears to Lika's eyes.\n\n\"Shall we give it a go?\" he said.\n\nShe took her position by his side, standing, one hand resting on the piano, the other holding the lyrics, and together, slowly, he played through the song and she sang the three verses. Her voice was very soft, he remarked to himself again, pure but with no projection\u2014fine for the drawing room but inadequate for a theatre of any size. He wondered if those impresarios who said she was too tall to be an opera singer were simply being kind.\n\nAfter three goes she seemed to lose confidence.\n\n\"Perhaps it's not such a good idea,\" she said. \"My English is so bad and I can hear my accent. So Russki.\"\n\n\"Nonsense,\" he said. \"You just need to practise it more. We can do it together any time. You tell me when.\"\n\nShe sat down beside him on the wide piano stool and picked out the melody with her right hand.\n\n\"Yes, it's that bit here,\" she said. \"That change. Lines three and four.\"\n\n\"What did John say? You expect a kind of affirmation\u2014\"\n\n\"The tonic.\"\n\n\"And you get that different chord. The unexpected chord. D flat minor ninth.\"\n\nHe played D flat major then the D flat minor ninth.\n\n\"That's what makes it sad,\" she said. \"And that's why you get tears in your eyes.\"\n\n\"And it's a sad story, I suppose. But true. Sadly true.\"\n\n\"Life is sad,\" she said, softly, thinking. \"And complicated.\"\n\nHe could feel a warmth on his left-hand side, where she was sitting, an inch away from him, as if some sort of force\u2014electric, magnetic\u2014was emanating from her, like these X-rays he'd read about. He had never been so close to her for so long, except for that walk along the lake that night in Geneva when she had taken his arm and he had felt the heat of her palm in his elbow crook.\n\n\"Take your spectacles off, Brodie.\"\n\n\"What? Why?\"\n\n\"I want to see what your face is like without them.\"\n\nHe slipped his spectacles off, feeling his throat contract. He swallowed.\n\n\"You're just a blur,\" he said.\n\n\"Close your eyes.\"\n\nHe did. And then he felt her face press gently up against his. Like the palm of a hand set softly on a cheek. Very deliberate but soft. A coming-together of two faces. Her nose was next to his nose, on the left; he could feel her eyelashes batting on his; her chin touching his chin. And her lips were on his lips, touching.\n\nHe froze, not breathing. It was just contact\u2014the ultimate proximity. And everything about that ultimate proximity was possible, implicit. The unfolding, tactile moment seemed unending, blissful.\n\nHow long did they stay like that, face to face, lips to lips, he wondered later? Ten seconds? Twenty? He could hear her breathing in and exhaling, levelly, calmly, and of course the softness of her full lips was a constant small pressure on his own. Then she pouted slightly\u2014lips tightening\u2014and he responded. The pressure increased. He breathed in deeply. Then he felt the tip of her tongue probe. He opened his mouth and the kiss was conceived and fully executed. Her arms went round his neck and he slipped his free arm round her waist to pull her to him.\n\nThey broke apart and he put on his spectacles. She was in focus again, smiling, lovely, lips shining.\n\n\"Did you like that?\" she asked.\n\n\"Yes, very much.\"\n\n\"It's my invention. I call it the Lika-kiss.\"\n\n\"Well, it's a pretty damned amazing damn invention. I would say. Yes.\"\n\nShe reached for his hand and stood up.\n\n\"Shall we go upstairs?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie decided to walk home after his three hours in bed with Lika Blum. Dusk was gathering as he walked along the boulevard Saint-Germain and turned to cross the Seine on the Pont de Sully. He walked like an automaton, a slight smile on his face, bemused, exultant, astonished at what had come to pass. He stopped in the middle of the bridge, deliberately, to collect his thoughts, looking downstream to Notre-Dame then upstream towards the Pont d'Austerlitz and the Jardin des Plantes.\n\nBut he saw nothing of Paris\u2014only images of Lika. Her thick curly hair down and unrestrained; her small heavy breasts with near-invisible pink nipples. Her long limber body squirming beneath him. The way she grabbed her knees and pulled them towards her so he could go deeper. How she slipped out of bed and walked across the room to find his cigarette case and lighter in his jacket on the floor and stood there, naked, one haunch cocked, clicking the recalcitrant lighter\u2014 _click, click, click_ \u2014until it caught.\n\nLater she went downstairs to fetch a bottle of wine and they drank, smoked and talked until they became aroused again. Lika bit his shoulder, not so gently, as he orgasmed. Then they lay in bed as the afternoon sun squeezed through the gap in the curtains and sent its vertical bar of horizontal gold on a slow clockwise patrol of the wall beside them. He didn't ask any questions. Where were the servants? Had this been planned? How long had she known that Kilbarron would be away? Stay with these precious moments, he told himself as he stood on the bridge over the Seine as the dusky light thickened. Store them away in your memory's treasure house. It was entirely possible, he realized, that they may never happen again.\n\n# 10\n\n\"Think of it this way,\" Brodie said to Malachi Kilbarron, in as convincing a tone of voice as he could muster. \"You're a victim of your own success.\"\n\nThey were sitting in the office of Thibault Dieulafoy, the firm's accountant, who happened to be away visiting his aged mother in Vichy. Brodie sat in Dieulafoy's chair behind the desk, a desk that was immaculately tidy. Three paper knives parallel with the desk edge; a rectangle of blotting paper in its leather border, virgin white; steel-nibbed pens ranked like soldiers on parade; a glass inkwell, empty and gleaming. Brodie did not dare touch a thing.\n\nMalachi took in Brodie's last statement and frowned. Then he stood and went to the three wooden filing cabinets against the wall, testing their top drawers, as though absent-mindedly. They were all locked tight.\n\n\"There you have it,\" Malachi said, in his rasping, hoarse-sounding voice. \"The thing is, Brodie, me old china, that I don't want to be the _victim_ of my success\u2014I want to be the beneficiary. What's the point of success, otherwise? That's how the world works: you're a success and you benefit thereby.\"\n\n\"The trouble is you're too successful for us, now.\" Brodie persisted, feeling weak. \"We can't afford you.\"\n\n\"But you're successful, also. As successful as we are. You've sold hundreds of pianos. Hundreds since the tour began in February. Two hundred and twenty-three grand pianos, to be precise.\"\n\n\"How do you know that?\"\n\n\"I just happen to know, Mr. Moncur. The point is we want to continue this...this story of success. Another tour: forty concerts in ten cities. We will all emerge winners, don't you see?\"\n\n\"There is another problem\u2014a direct consequence of your success\u2014in that we have now contracted with three other pianists. All playing Channons, all with long tours in mind\u2014but not at the rates you're demanding.\"\n\n\"So, you're saying that we, the Kilbarrons, the instigators of this lucrative scheme, should be penalized for making Channon all this money?\"\n\n\"One firm cannot bear this large burden.\"\n\n\"I could take you to court.\"\n\nBrodie closed his eyes for a moment. This was going as badly as he feared. He sensed Malachi's growing animus.\n\n\"Mr. Kilbarron,\" he said. \"This is a business. We have a contract. I suggest you look closely at our contract with you. There is a clause in it that states everything is renewable, or not, after six months. We are within our rights. Litigation would be pointless, costly and, ultimately, the worse for you and your brother.\"\n\nMalachi sat down again opposite him and, unthinkingly, reached for one of Monsieur Dieulafoy's paper knives that he then twiddled in his fingers as he pondered. Brodie thought: he is capable of stabbing me with that knife.\n\n\"We will gladly renew your contract for six months on the old terms. That's the best I can do,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"That is unacceptable.\"\n\n\"Well, then...\"\n\n\"What are you saying?\" Malachi asked quietly.\n\n\"If you refuse, then our contract is terminated. You have been paid in full. Well paid. You may keep the piano. Gratis.\"\n\n\"You are a horrible Scottish bastard of a whoreson cunt.\"\n\n\"There's no need for that, Mr. Kilbarron.\"\n\n\"After everything we've done for you.\"\n\n\"It was a business arrangement. Not a favour.\"\n\n\"You travelled with us, Moncur. For weeks, months. We were a team. We counted on you. You saw the notices, the adulation. We made the name of Channon in Europe.\"\n\n\"I hope you realize that, at the end of the day, it's not my personal decision.\" Brodie had a sudden urge to defecate\u2014this was getting very much out of control.\n\nMalachi put the paper knife down.\n\n\"You'll regret this, you and your Scottish cunting usurers.\"\n\n\"Accept the old contract, Mr. Kilbarron,\" Brodie almost pleaded. \"You'll have another six months. It's very generous. It's a lot of money.\"\n\n\"Hell will freeze over before I do that.\"\n\nThen he spat at Brodie. A gobbet of phlegm hit the left lapel of his jacket, like a soft badge. Malachi Kilbarron walked out.\n\nBrodie tore a strip off Monsieur Dieulafoy's virgin blotter and removed Malachi's parting gesture. He felt unmanned, trembly, almost tearful.\n\nThe rear door of the office opened and Calder Channon appeared.\n\n\"How did that go?\" he said. \"Is he clear of the shop yet?\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie sat in the small glass-walled cubbyhole that was his office in the workshop, the electric light off, happy to be in the gloom, smoking a Margarita, calming down. That had been possibly the most unpleasant half-hour of his life\u2014and he felt anger building. Why hadn't Calder dealt with Malachi Kilbarron? He was the damn bloody manager\u2014and it had been his father who had signed the contract, not him, Brodie Moncur, the company scapegoat.\n\nThere were other concerns nudging into his mind, personal concerns. This bitter rift with the Kilbarron brothers might make it impossible for him to be with Lika again, he realized. He hadn't seen her since that unforgettable afternoon...He tapped ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. Perhaps he should write to her. He made a mental effort and called her to mind, called to mind the intimate details of that afternoon, trying to remember everything, what they had said and done, her naked body. Yes, he would write to her and explain what had occurred, how it was not his fault. He drew on his cigarette and coughed harshly. That cold had never properly left him. He reached for his pen.\n\nIt was a sensation of drowning\u2014he thought later\u2014as he felt his throat fill with fluid and then his mouth. His lips parted and he sensed the gush of vomit burst out. Except it wasn't vomit\u2014it was dark blood, splashing on his desk and the books ranked on the far side against the wall. Like a breakwater against the blood-tide. A break-blood against...\n\nHe stood and reeled back. Blood dripped from his chin onto the floor. He saw a slowly spreading puddle of his blood pool on his desktop and ease over the sides, pattering. He staggered and fell to the ground feeling another wave coming, cascading out of his mouth, this time wetting the floorboards and the square of carpet that lay there. A huge whooshing, uncontrolled surge. He was on all fours now, spitting, his mouth rank with the salty, metal taste of his blood. Stay calm, he told himself. Some kind of brutal vomiting, an ulcer, something he'd eaten poisoning his innards, rotting them. He spat again.\n\nJesus. Bloody hell...he sensed it had passed, this fit, this seizure. He clambered to his feet, using the back of his chair as a support. So much blood. He was breathing fast, like a man who'd run a mile. He felt sweat pouring from him, his face slick, his armpits a swamp. Jesus Christ, what's happening? He went to a wicker basket where they kept yards of cotton waste and threw the thick shreds of cloth on the floor and the desk in an attempt to mop up all the awful gleaming redness that was congealing there. He felt light-headed, terrified. What if it happened again? He should go to a doctor, take a day or two off. He was being worked too hard\u2014like a dog, like a slave\u2014and there was all the terrible tension associated with terminating the Kilbarron contract. It wasn't fair.\n\n# 11\n\nDr. Maisonfort frowned, looking at Brodie's dossier, and the few pages of notes it contained. He was a small bald man with pince-nez spectacles.\n\n\"No, it's certain, I'm sorry to have to tell you\u2014but you have developed tuberculosis.\"\n\nBrodie sat in his dressing gown and pyjamas, his chair facing the doctor across his desk, feeling his body shrink, as if he had suddenly become a smaller person.\n\n\"Am I going to die?\" he said.\n\nDr. Maisonfort laughed airily. \"We're all going to die, Monsieur Moncur\u2014we just don't know where, when or how. You speak excellent French, by the way. The accent is charming.\"\n\n\"Thank you. Let me put it this way\u2014am I going to die soon?\"\n\n\"No, no, absolutely not. No, no, no. We have many cures.\"\n\nBrodie felt his body regain its natural size. His sphincter eased and he farted, silently.\n\n\"It was a terrible shock,\" he said. \"So much blood. Like a fountain.\"\n\n\"Yes, haemoptysis, we call it\u2014it can be quite spectacular.\"\n\nDr. Maisonfort explained, though Brodie sometimes thought he wasn't entirely sure of his own diagnosis.\n\n\"You have this tubercle in your lung. Possibly several. Think of it like a small abscess growing slowly, and, as it grows, filling with necrotic cells.\"\n\n\"What're they?\"\n\n\"Dead cells. Caseatic cells is the precise name. Slowly, they\u2014\"\n\n\"Caseatic?\"\n\n\"Like 'cheese,' so to speak. The dead tissue looks like a kind of crumbly cream cheese. The caseation reaches the artery branch, 'consumes' it, erodes it\u2014hence the haemorrhage you suffered.\"\n\n\"I have a tubercle?\"\n\n\"In fact you may have more than one, quite conceivably.\"\n\n\"Have I?\"\n\n\"I think so. Anyway, slowly they begin to consume the lung tissue. Your lung capacity diminishes. Which is why the disease is sometimes called 'consumption.'\"\n\n\"But why all the blood?\"\n\n\"The tubercle has grown and reached a branch of the pulmonary artery\u2014or a vein in the lung. It ruptures. And the haemorrhage occurs and fills the cavity. It has to exit, to overflow, if I may put it like that. It can be very distressing. It depends on how large the vein or the branch is and the aneurism that has formed, and the pressure of the blood, of course. There is some evidence that a sudden increase in pressure provokes the rupture.\"\n\nBrodie thought: the meeting with Malachi. The tension; the pressure.\n\n\"What causes it? Tuberculosis, I mean.\"\n\n\"There are new theories. It's a bacteria, we think, a microbe that lodges in the lungs or other parts of the body. The gut, the spine, the brain. I think it's better for you that it's in the lungs.\"\n\nBrodie half-listened, not very reassured. He was twenty-seven years old and, despite the shock of the haemorrhage, his crucial death-question having been answered\u2014\"No, no, absolutely not\"\u2014put an end to the subject as far as he was concerned. The tuberculosis diagnosis was a setback, an inconvenience, but he felt reassured: it was simply a matter of time, and whatever medication was required, before he felt his old self again, surely.\n\nA porter led him back to his room. He was in the Maison Municipale de Sant\u00e9 in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis in the third arrondissement. It was now ten days since his attack. It had been Dmitri who had found him lying unconscious on the floor of his blood-hosed office\u2014whence he'd been rushed by cab to the hospital. For some days he felt feverish and an incredible sense of weakness and had been strictly enjoined not to leave his bed\u2014bedpans and chamber pots ensuring that he stayed put. His diet was heavily milk-based: either a kind of porridge or rice cooked in milk, or fish cooked in milk\u2014then milk puddings, milk jellies and blancmanges. He was beginning to crave red meat\u2014which he took to be a positive sign.\n\nHe had had many visitors. All his pianists from the shop\u2014Dmitri came every day\u2014and even Calder had passed by for ten minutes, pointedly mentioning that they had been obliged to employ a specialist cleaning service to remove the bloodstains from the floorboards of his office. While he lay in bed waiting for visitors, Brodie read newspapers. He read about the continuing animosities of the Dreyfus Affair, the celebrations being organized around Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the economic tribulations facing President McKinley, and a review of a shocking new novel called _Dracula._ He slept a lot, ate his three milky meals a day and wrote letters. After the first week the visits diminished, though Beno\u00eet, the office boy, was sent round every day to see if there was anything he required. Dmitri seemed to have all the impending touring business under control. And, as he began to feel better, stronger, his thoughts turned to Lika.\n\nHe gave Beno\u00eet a note for her\u2014saying that he was in hospital\u2014and precise instructions. Beno\u00eet was to wait outside the Saint-Germain _h\u00f4tel_ and hand the note to Lika but only when she was alone. Brodie made him repeat the instruction and then repeat it again. Beno\u00eet protested: I'm not stupid, sir. But Brodie wanted to minimize the risk of interception absolutely and was taking no chances. A day later Beno\u00eet reported that the note had been delivered and that the mademoiselle had been entirely alone apart from a little dog. Brodie relaxed somewhat; at least now Lika knew where he was and what had happened. He fantasized about her visiting his bedside. Perhaps she might slip her hand under the sheet and...\n\nThe shock was all his, however, when\u2014three days after Beno\u00eet had delivered the note\u2014unannounced, John Kilbarron knocked on his door and sauntered in. Lika followed a second later, making alarming faces and incomprehensible gestures behind Kilbarron's back.\n\nWooden folding seats were unfolded and they sat by his bedside. Brodie buttoned the top button of his pyjama jacket.\n\n\"So, what the hell's wrong with you?\" Kilbarron asked, cheerfully.\n\n\"They think an ulcer, some sort of rupturing,\" Brodie lied. For some reason he didn't want Kilbarron to know the real diagnosis\u2014he would tell Lika himself at the right moment.\n\n\"Spitting blood?\"\n\n\"Yes. Quite a deal of blood. All very disturbing.\" He glanced at Lika, hearing a kind of panicked keening whistle in his head. It was difficult having her here in his room with Kilbarron\u2014he couldn't help remembering the last time they had been together.\n\n\"You know we've sacked Channon,\" Kilbarron said. \"We're having nothing more to do with your cheapskate firm.\"\n\n\"I didn't know, in fact,\" Brodie said. \"I'm sorry to hear that. I thought we had a very good\u2014\"\n\n\"We're negotiating with Pate and B\u00f6sendorfer for the next tour.\"\n\n\"As I said to your brother\u2014\"\n\n\"He sends his best wishes.\" Kilbarron leaned forward, as if confidentially. \"We've nothing against you, young Brodie. You've always been fair and square.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\n\"And I may be calling on you, privately, like, on piano business. Can you tune me a Pate or a B\u00f6sendorfer like you did the Channon?\"\n\n\"Of course. Any piano in the world.\"\n\n\"It's a rare gift\u2014lucky you. Is one allowed to smoke a cigarette in here?\"\n\n\"Yes. Please have one of mine.\"\n\nKilbarron took Brodie's cigarette case from the bedside-table drawer and lit it. While he was engaged Brodie and Lika stared at each other, eyes full of messages. Lika pouted, blew him a kiss, and Brodie thought he might faint.\n\nKilbarron exhaled smoke at the ceiling.\n\n\"You know all my little foibles, you see. And they will remain something entirely between the two of us, young Brodie, on the quiet, like. Understand? No need to let those bastard Channons know.\"\n\n\"I understand, Mr. Kilbarron. Anything I can do to help.\"\n\nHe stood and patted Brodie on the shoulder.\n\n\"Hurry up and get well, now.\"\n\nLika stepped forward and they shook hands.\n\n\"Very happy to see you making such a good recovery, Mr. Moncur.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Blum.\"\n\nHe slipped the note she had palmed him under the sheet. She followed Kilbarron out and, as she left the room, she turned to him and smiled. Conspirators again.\n\n> My dear Brodie,\n> \n> I think of you all the time but if you wish to contact me be very careful. Write to me at Poste Restante, Paris VI, and please don't send any more messages to the Saint-Germain apartment. We will meet soon.\n> \n> With all my friendship,\n> \n> Lika Blum\n\nBrodie lay back against his pillows, tears in his eyes. Tears of gratitude, he thought. He was in love and his love was being reciprocated. Maybe that was enough? Maybe one couldn't ask for more in an individual life. Simply to know that Lika was in the world and that she thought fondly of him and wanted to see him...He folded the note carefully and slipped it between the pages of his copy of Algernon Swinburne's _Poems and Ballads,_ a gift from Lady Dalcastle.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nDr. Maisonfort studied him through his pince-nez spectacles. Brodie stood\u2014dressed in his suit, shirt and tie\u2014in his consulting room. Dr. Maisonfort left his chair and circled Brodie twice.\n\n\"Do you know you have lost more than four kilos of weight? You look very thin.\"\n\n\"I feel not too bad.\"\n\n\"And there lies the danger, sir. You feel 'not too bad'; you feel you can return to your old life, your old habits. No, no\u2014not with tuberculosis. In your case I recommend at least six months of convalescence. At least. You're young, you're strong. If you were a man in your forties I would advise a year or more.\"\n\n\"Right.\"\n\n\"To try to return to your normal life\u2014now, after such a big haemorrhage, would be very, very dangerous. Suicide.\"\n\n\"Perhaps I could do an hour or two a day\u2014back at my work, I mean\u2014until my strength returns.\"\n\n\"It would be catastrophic.\"\n\nDr. Maisonfort sat down and began to write something on a sheet of paper.\n\n\"I've spoken to your employers and they fully understand.\"\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"They will give you leave of absence. Unpaid, of course.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\nHe handed Brodie the sheet of paper. There was an address on it\u2014in Nice, Alpes-Maritimes.\n\n\"I send all my tuberculosis patients there\u2014a wonderful establishment. It's a medicinal boarding house. The diet is correct, there is nursing supervision and they monitor your progress. Every week they send me a written report.\" Dr. Maisonfort smiled and removed his pince-nez. \"Think of it as a forced holiday, an obligatory vacation. You eat, you rest, you do nothing. It's warm; the Mediterranean is at your feet. In six months or so, I assure you, you will feel that all this shock is behind you.\"\n\n\"I assume this boarding house is not free.\"\n\n\"Your employer has volunteered to contribute half the expenses. Have you the wherewithal to cover the rest?\"\n\n\"I think so,\" Brodie said, hopefully.\n\n\"Then bon voyage,\" Dr. Maisonfort said. \"Do you know Nice?\"\n\n\"Only by reputation.\"\n\n\"A charming town. The season will start soon, but it will be peaceful\u2014full of invalids and the English. Come back and see me in the spring.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nCalder Channon looked more than unusually surly, as Brodie sat patiently opposite him across his vast desk. Calder was having difficulty lighting his small pipe but finally he got it going and he leaned back in his chair, snorting thick smoke from his nostrils onto his dense moustache where it seemed to be momentarily trapped and then filtered forth to be whisked away by the forceful exhalation from his mouth. Brodie thought it was all rather disgusting: pipe-smoking was not for him.\n\n\"It wasn't my idea, I have to tell you,\" Calder said.\n\n\"I'm not surprised.\"\n\n\"It was my father's. He seems to have a soft spot for you, for some reason.\"\n\n\"Well, whatever the reason, I'm grateful.\"\n\n\"We'll not pay your salary until you return.\"\n\n\"Of course. That seems entirely reasonable.\" Brodie kept a faint smile on his lips while silently cursing, as foully as he could, the want of human charity in Calder Channon. Fucking horrible, ugly, fat, self-satisfied, shit, bastard evil fat fucking fat bastard shite of hell.\n\n\"I'm most grateful for everything,\" Brodie said, his slight smile fixed. \"Luckily I have some savings.\"\n\n\"You've left us in a difficult position. Sauter's tour begins in a week. Julius starts in a month.\"\n\n\"Dmitri has everything under control\u2014he's more than capable. And we have six tuners now. I can always be written to or telegrammed in an emergency. I'm in the same country, after all, not in Timbuktu.\"\n\n\"There's no need to adopt that cynical tone.\"\n\n\"I'm using the same tone as you. I'm adopting nothing.\"\n\nCalder had no riposte. He put his pipe down in the wide glass ashtray on his desk and thought for a few seconds.\n\n\"Have you seen anything of the Kilbarrons?\"\n\n\"John Kilbarron visited me in hospital\u2014for about five minutes.\"\n\n\"I had a most unpleasant encounter with Malachi Kilbarron. At one stage I thought I might have to call the police.\"\n\n\"He's a violent man, I believe.\"\n\n\"He insisted we pay his brother two hundred guineas per concert. I told him to go hang.\"\n\n\"They seem to have come to another arrangement with Pate.\"\n\n\"Good luck to him. And them. Anyway, we don't need John Kilbarron any more. God rot him.\"\n\n# 12\n\n> Pension Deladier\n> \n> 73, rue Dante\n> \n> Nice, Alpes-Maritimes\n> \n> France\n> \n> 19 February 1898\n> \n> Dear Lady Dalcastle,\n> \n> Having spent a few months here I now feel myself a passable Ni\u00e7ois, so familiar have I become with the town. Yesterday, I went to a march\u00e9 aux cochons in a village to the north, keen to have a change of scene\u2014the sea and its horizon after all these weeks afford decreasing stimulation.\n> \n> I couldn't have wished for greater contrast. The small square was strewn with hay and the pigs lolled and grunted as the black-suited peasant buyers wandered around. Pigs are much bigger than one imagines, and there were over 200 of them, washed and pink, unbesmirched by mud. Many of the peasants selling their pigs, men and women, were barefoot, a few wore heavy wooden clogs. They spoke an incomprehensible patois that my French\u2014very good now\u2014couldn't penetrate. I felt I had travelled back in time to the middle of the century or even further. So, after my adventure, I was pleased to catch the diligence back to Nice, an agreeable small city of almost 100,000 inhabitants, with every modern convenience. Fine hotels and casinos, museums, bathing establishments, tramways and a sophisticated international population during the season. The Promenade des Anglais that fronts the wide Baie des Anges is full of the most elegant and rich crowds of visitors. Yet, apparently, in the summer months it's deserted. The only disappointment is the strand\u2014a few yards of large pebbles\u2014called the \"beach\" but one searches in vain for a patch of sand.\n> \n> It is a quiet life, however diverting. I've made a few acquaintances amongst my fellow pension-dwellers. We are all, to a man and a woman, ill in some way, and it's somewhat dispiriting as all conversations quickly diverge to a discussion of symptoms. I leave the pension after breakfast and walk down to the Promenade des Anglais and read my newspaper, look at the Mediterranean and watch the world go by until lunchtime. I have a \"siesta\" in the afternoon, then go for another stroll while I wait for dinner (served promptly at six). More reading time in the pension's comfortable, well-lit salon and then it's time for an early bed. I seem to have slept for years but it is working\u2014I do feel better and stronger and have regained most of my weight. All being well I'll return to Paris and my old life in a month or so. But only Dr. Maisonfort can secure my release\u2014we exist in a form of benign imprisonment. I will write again from Paris when I return.\n> \n> Sending my sincere good wishes, affectionately,\n> \n> Brodie Moncur\n\n* * *\n\nIn fact, everything about the Pension Deladier suited Brodie\u2014its situation, the food, the service, his large room. The other guests kept to themselves\u2014everyone was convalescing\u2014except for one other occupant, an Englishman. Normally the pension was filled with French invalids\u2014consumptives in the main\u2014but Monsieur Deladier had taken to advertising in English journals\u2014the _Illustrated London News,_ the _Athenaeum,_ _Bart's Weekly_ \u2014in order to exploit the English enthusiasm for Nice and the C\u00f4te d'Azur. And, as if to spite Brodie, his publicity had snared one Cuthbert Leache who, inevitably, gravitated towards the only other anglophone in the establishment. Leache\u2014a former surveyor in the Royal Engineers\u2014was also a consumptive. A man in his forties, he seemed to make his living from various family properties that he rented out in London, Birmingham and Cornwall. \"I'm not a landlord,\" Leache insisted to Brodie. \"I'm simply managing the properties I inherited. What else is a chap to do?\" Leache didn't look ill\u2014he had a square face with a large nose and a thick bull neck. His greying hair was low-browed and curly, parted in the middle. He was always touching his hair gently with his fingertips, as if he wore a toupee and it might have slipped. His other habit was to spell out his name on being introduced. \"How do you do? Cuthbert Leache. L,E,A,C,H,E. Very pleased to meet you.\" It was as if he wanted swiftly to distance the Leache family from the bloodsucking homonym.\n\nBrodie made every effort to avoid Leache but, as the weeks in Nice progressed, contact was inevitable. Brodie would be in the salon, quietly reading the latest _Hearth and Home_ or the _Savoy,_ and would hear a polite cough and there would be Leache. \"May I join you, old fellow?\"\n\nA typical Leache anecdote usually moved along the following lines.\n\n\"Have you ever been to Manchester, Moncur?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"I go there regularly. And I always stay in the same hotel. The manager there is a fascinating cove. Jack\u2014no, James. No, Jimmie, he calls himself. Or is it Johnnie?...Let's call him James. Anyway, this James, most amusing chap, told me this story about a time he went to Stoke-on-Trent. No, not Stoke. I think it was Macclesfield. I forget exactly where it was but he went to this place on business and before he left on his journey back to Manchester he decided to buy himself a...what do you call those things, you know? Now I remember, it was Stockport, that's the place. He wanted something to eat\u2014not a sandwich, not a pie. A pastry, yes, but folded over, half-moon shape. What are they called? Dialect name...A pastie? That's Cornwall\u2014now there's a lovely spot. Long story short, he bought himself something to eat on the journey home. He decided to go by train. But when he looked at the timetable he saw it was cheaper if he changed trains at...What's the name of that place? Between Manchester and Stockport? That place where they make that kind of pottery...Is it Doncaster? No. Derby. Could it be Derby? In any event it doubled the time of his journey but it was half the price. Can you believe it? Extraordinary, isn't it? Most amusing fellow, James. Yes, delightful company, full of stories like that one. You'd like him, Moncur.\"\n\nConsequently Brodie began to avoid the salon after breakfast and luncheon. He tipped the staff to tell him if Monsieur Leache was in the vicinity and he'd slip away to his room. In the mornings he'd take his book or his newspaper down to the Promenade des Anglais and find a bench facing the Mediterranean and sit and read undisturbed, pausing to watch the crowds go by. Nice was exceptionally busy in the winter months of the \"season\"\u2014October to March\u2014and there were always interesting sights to be seen along the Promenade. Old men with young women; old women with young men; ancient, just-living creatures in wheelchairs pushed by exotic-looking servants in turbans, tarbooshes and fezzes. Yachtsmen strolling in their caps and boating coats looking for carnal distraction; painted ladies looking for yachtsmen. Life in all its strange variety was here on the Promenade, Brodie came to realize, glad to be free of Cuthbert Leache.\n\nAfter a week or so, Brodie became aware of another man also absorbed in his newspapers and journals of a morning, usually sitting on a bench a few yards away. It was curious, Brodie thought, given the hundreds of benches available on the Promenade des Anglais, how you always wanted to return to your familiar one. On the few occasions when \"his\" bench had been occupied by others he had felt almost affronted.\n\nSlowly, the familiarity and regularity of their almost-encounters during these many tranquil mornings\u2014the sun shining just warmly enough, the shift and rattle of the pebbles on the narrow beach as the modest waves hit the shoreline\u2014meant that after a while the two of them began to acknowledge each other's presence with a smile or a nod or a finger to the hat brim, a near-imperceptible bow. Yes, here we both are again, was the implication, but we are so respectful of our individual privacy that nothing will extend beyond this, the very slightest formal greeting. Brodie both understood and welcomed the unspoken rules and so did the stranger. If only the ghastly Leache had a similarly circumspect bone in his burly body...\n\nAnd then one day in March the stranger on the other bench suddenly put down his newspaper, put his hat on the newspaper, and walked down the concrete steps\u2014somewhat abruptly\u2014that led to the beach. Brodie couldn't quite see what he was doing but it seemed as if he had recognized someone and had gone to meet them.\n\nSuddenly a gust of wind tipped the man's hat off the bench and the newspaper went flying. Brodie raced to retrieve it before it blew to shreds, gathering up the pages and folding them together. A Russian newspaper, he noticed. He picked up the hat also\u2014a pearl-grey homburg\u2014that was beginning to bowl along the Promenade, and he was about to replace them discreetly on the bench when the man appeared up from the beach.\n\n\"Excuse me,\" Brodie said in French, \"but the wind blew your hat and newspaper away. I managed to catch them in time.\"\n\n\"Thank you so much,\" the man replied. His French was thick with a Russian accent, much stronger than Lika's. He was older than Brodie\u2014late thirties, early forties, Brodie calculated\u2014well dressed in a long-jacketed dark suit and a stiff collar, and quite tall and slim with a full, pointed beard. He took back his hat and newspaper and asked if Brodie would care to join him for a coffee by way of recompense, to thank him for saving his possessions.\n\nThey crossed the Promenade and walked towards the H\u00f4tel West-End that had a roomy glassed-in caf\u00e9 on the front. They found a table and ordered two coffees with hot milk. Brodie introduced himself and the Russian did so as well, but Brodie couldn't pick up his exact name as his Russian accent was so thick. And he must also have used his patronymic as all that Brodie could hear was a rush of mashed syllables. \"Archibald\" was as close to any name as he could make out, but this man was clearly not called Archibald.\n\nTheir coffee was served and they added milk and sugar.\n\n\"Are you here on holiday?\" the Russian asked in his somewhat faltering French.\n\n\"I'm convalescing,\" Brodie said. \"At least six months' rest, my doctor insisted, somewhere warm.\"\n\n\"I am the same. May I ask your condition?\"\n\n\"Tuberculosis.\"\n\n\"Yes. I too have the same problem.\" The Russian gave a sad smile. \"May I ask your age, sir?\"\n\n\"Twenty-seven.\"\n\n\"How many haemorrhages?\"\n\n\"Just the one. Severe.\"\n\n\"I had my first haemorrhage at the age of twenty-three. And now I'm thirty-eight. So you see you have a long life ahead of you.\" The Russian peered at him. \"May I ask your profession?\"\n\n\"I'm a piano tuner.\" This took some further explanation as the word _accordeur_ was not familiar.\n\n\"How fascinating,\" the Russian said. \"I'm sure you must have some interesting stories to tell.\"\n\n\"Oh, I certainly do. What about you, sir?\"\n\n\"I'm a doctor,\" the Russian said. \"But this doctor is sick. Where are you staying?\"\n\n\"The Pension Deladier.\"\n\n\"I hear it's very good. Naturally, I'm staying at the Pension Russe. Full of Russians. Sick Russians. Annoying Russians.\"\n\nThey talked further about their mutual disease and the doctor mentioned a particular Russian cure\u2014a constant diet of _kumys,_ which was fermented mare's milk. He had tasted _kumys_ once and knew about its effect.\n\n\"It looks like a kind of milk but has a somewhat strange taste\u2014but the good thing is you put on a huge amount of weight, apparently. And of course getting fat makes you feel better\u2014you think it's working: you think, how can I die when I'm getting so fat?\" He shrugged. \"We all have to die some day and who's to say when that day will come?\"\n\n\"That's exactly what my doctor in Paris told me.\"\n\n\"So you live in Paris. An Englishman in Paris.\"\n\n\"A Scotsman, sir.\"\n\n\"A Scotsman. I'd like to go to Scotland. Somehow I doubt I'll ever get there.\"\n\nThey talked a bit about Paris\u2014the doctor had been there once\u2014and the mention of the city gave Brodie an idea.\n\n\"Would you be so good as to write something down for me, in Russian?\"\n\nThe doctor took a fountain pen from his pocket and a small notebook. He tore out a page.\n\n\"It's a bit personal,\" Brodie said, \"but would you write 'I miss you and I love you'?\"\n\nThe doctor wrote it down and handed the page over.\n\n\"I have very bad handwriting so I have written it as clearly as I can,\" he said.\n\nBrodie looked at the extraordinary letters: \"\u0421\u043a\u0443\u0447\u0430\u044e \u043f\u043e \u0442\u0435\u0431\u0435, \u043b\u044e\u0431\u043b\u044e \u0442\u0435\u0431\u044f.\"\n\n\"I'm no detective,\" the doctor said, \"but I assume this isn't for your grandmother.\"\n\n\"No...I...\" Brodie considered and then said, candidly, \"I've fallen in love with a young Russian woman, you see, an opera singer.\"\n\n\"Oh my God! Actresses! Russian actresses, even worse! Don't go near them, I implore you.\"\n\n\"No, sir. This is different. This is a real passion.\"\n\n\"Yes, yes, of course it is. I always said the same myself, always. 'But this time it's different.' At least for the first ten actresses I knew\u2014and then I stopped saying it.\"\n\n\"There are, it has to be said, complications.\"\n\n\"Naturally\u2014she's an actress.\" He laughed wryly to himself. \"Complications. Oh, yes.\" The doctor reflected and then said, \"I always think a life without complications isn't really a life, you know. In life things go wrong, nothing stays the same and there's nothing you can do about it. Friends betray you, family is a nightmare, lovers are fickle. This is the norm, no?\" He smiled to himself, as if remembering something pertinent. \"What kind of a world would it be where nothing ever went wrong, where everything stayed the same, life followed its designated path\u2014family was adorable, friends and lovers were faithful and true?\" He paused. \"You know, I don't think I'd like that kind of a world. We're made for complications, we human beings. Anyway, such a perfect world could never exist\u2014at least not on this small planet.\"\n\nUnusually, Brodie felt he could unburden himself to this amiable, cynical, melancholic doctor. He had tired, kind eyes.\n\n\"What would you say to me, sir? There are many obstacles between me and this young woman, this young singer. Am I wasting my time?\"\n\n\"Is she free to be with you?\"\n\n\"Ah...She's living with another man.\"\n\nThe doctor nodded and smiled.\n\n\"I could give you lots of excellent, sensible advice, based on long experience,\" he said. \"But what would be the point? You'll do exactly what you want to do. Nothing I say will make any difference.\"\n\nThey fell silent and sipped their coffee, Brodie pondering the brutal wisdom of the statement. Yes, he needed Lika\u2014she was the only one for him. Ever. To hell with Kilbarron\u2014there was obviously no love left between the two of them.\n\n\" _S'il vous pla\u00eet, monsieur._ \"\n\nBrodie looked round. A young woman was standing at their table looking intently at the doctor. She was very young and quite pretty in a simple rose-coloured dress with a fringed, darker rose shawl. He saw a small oval face with a retrouss\u00e9 nose. _Gamine,_ the French would say. How old? Nineteen? Twenty? He noted that the dress was cheap and the shawl had a stain. She looked like a housemaid on her day off. The doctor looked at her intently, almost angrily, and stroked his beard, pulling at it with his right hand. The girl's eyes were red, as if she'd been crying.\n\nBrodie felt he should do something so he stood and introduced himself. But before the girl could reply the doctor stood also.\n\n\"This is Margot,\" he said. \"And she is going to leave us. Now.\"\n\nHe led her off a few steps and tersely instructed her, Brodie could see. The doctor fished in his pocket and slipped her some money, notes and coins. She gave Brodie a brisk curtsey and hurried off out of the caf\u00e9.\n\nThe doctor sat down.\n\n\"You were talking about complications,\" he said, with a vague smile. \"I have a great many of my own. I'm an expert.\"\n\n> Pension Deladier\n> \n> 73, rue Dante\n> \n> Nice, Alpes-Maritimes\n> \n> France\n> \n> 23 March 1898\n> \n> Brother!\n> \n> Bonjour! Are you still in the land of the living? Now this is the fourth letter I've written to you and still no reply. Stir yourself, O lazy one. Think of your poor brother languishing in this beautiful, sunlit Mediterranean city with nothing to do but wander down to the sea, read his newspaper, eat a delicious lunch, drink some wine, take a nap, then go out and find a caf\u00e9 for an aperitif, all before another excellent dinner. What torments! You see how I suffer but you never correspond.\n> \n> Last week, I was so bored I went to Monte Carlo\u2014to the casino. I took a brake along the Grande Corniche (10 fr\u20148 shillings). The views of the coast are spectacular. We stopped for lunch in Beaulieu and arrived in Monte Carlo in the afternoon. I only played roulette\u2014you know what a hopeless gambler I am. I played a simple martingale system: doubling my stake (2 fr) when I lost and pocketing my winnings when I won. You only bet on 2 to 1 odds. Red or black, odd or even. By the law of averages you will win at some stage. The only strange thing\u2014if you double your stake each time you lose\u2014is that sometimes you can be betting 40 francs to win 2\u2014so you need a substantial float. I cashed in 50 francs but I never needed more than 10 that day\u2014it was a lucky day. To my surprise after an hour and a half (I moved tables from time to time) I had made 180 francs, just over \u00a37. I suddenly saw how I could live down here on the Mediterranean. Gamble for a few hours per day in the martingale style while living in a simple hotel. You could make, I calculate, going hard at it, maybe \u00a320 per week. Even gambling for two hours a day, five days a week (the casinos are open most of the year) I think I could earn over \u00a3200. It's not very exciting\u2014there is no thrill of a big win\u2014just a steady accumulation of 2 francs\u2014but it would be a living, an independent living, and no taxes to pay, just the odd tip to give to the croupier. Something to think about. I left the casino feeling liberated, walking on warm Mediterranean air. I treated myself to an excellent dinner in Les Fr\u00e8res Provinciaux and bought myself a \u00a32 bottle of wine. Then I took the rest of my winnings back to Nice\u2014by train, first class.\n> \n> Write, brother, or you will inherit nothing!\n> \n> Yours affectionately,\n> \n> Brodie _(_ le gagnant _)_\n\n* * *\n\nBrodie sat, his shirt off, in Dr. Roissansac's consulting room, breathing in and out as requested, feeling the cold, then warming steel circle of Dr. Roissansac's stethoscope range over his back listening to his lungs. Dr. Roissansac\u2014a young, serious man with a toothbrush moustache\u2014was the recommendation and colleague of Dr. Maisonfort. Brodie sensed there was a financially useful quid pro quo going on.\n\nBrodie dressed himself as Dr. Roissansac wrote down his notes.\n\n\"Well you have regained the weight you lost so we should interpret that as a good sign. There's no significant congestion, as far as I can judge.\"\n\n\"I feel well,\" Brodie said. \"Full of energy.\"\n\n\"Ignore your energy. Everything must proceed very cautiously, in the case of tuberculosis. Cautiously, carefully.\"\n\n\"Yes, I know, Doctor. I will be cautious.\"\n\n\"Then I think you can go back to Paris, Monsieur Moncur.\" Dr. Roissansac's wide smile made the bristles of his moustache flip up for a moment, touching his nose.\n\nBrodie walked down the rue Hal\u00e9vy to the seafront at the big Jet\u00e9e Promenade with its small casino. For a moment he was tempted to go in and see if the good luck of his health might extend to a quick martingale session, but he decided it wasn't the moment. He wandered westwards\u2014a few brave souls were bathing in the sea, the sun was shining weakly\u2014and felt happy: I can go home, home to Paris and Lika. He called her to mind, as he did constantly, regretting he had no photograph of her. What was she doing right now? Was she with Kilbarron? Dmitri had written to him saying Julius's tour was under way and they were preparing Door's. Sales were very good indeed. The \"Channon Recitals\" already seemed almost established through the key cities in Europe, as if they'd been taking place for years. Ainsley Channon had authorized increased expenditure on newspaper advertising. Ren\u00e9 was with Sauter; Romain would travel with Door. All was more than well.\n\nBrodie was pleased that his months of absence hadn't seemed to hold the Channons back but he slightly resented the fact that he was clearly not as indispensable as he thought. Why, despite Malachi's aggressive bluster, had Kilbarron not signed up for another six months with Channon as he had been offered? It seemed vainglorious to throw away so much money, so easily earned...To hell with Kilbarron, he thought, as he climbed aboard an electric tram that would take him close to the rue Dante. The only person he cared about in this wide world was Lika.\n\n> Pension Deladier\n> \n> 73, rue Dante\n> \n> Nice\n> \n> 28 March 1898\n> \n> My dearest Lika,\n> \n> I hope you received my letters and postcards\u2014I have written to you once a week, at least, to the Poste Restante. Don't worry, I know how difficult it must be for you to reply.\n> \n> My good news is that my health is stable and my doctor here in Nice\u2014Dr. Roissansac\u2014has declared me fit to return home. All being well I should be back in Paris next week when I'll resume my old job at the Channon showrooms. Obviously I want urgently to see you. Where and how shall we meet? We must find a way.\n> \n> \u0421\u043a\u0443\u0447\u0430\u044e \u043f\u043e \u0442\u0435\u0431\u0435, \u043b\u044e\u0431\u043b\u044e \u0442\u0435\u0431\u044f.\n> \n> A Russian doctor who I met here wrote this down for me. I hope I have transcribed it correctly. Its message is absolutely sincere. I long to see you and hold you in my arms.\n> \n> Your Brodie Moncur\n\n* * *\n\nBrodie posted his final letter to Lika at the central post office in the place de la Libert\u00e9 as if, somehow, it would arrive sooner having been deposited centrally rather than locally. He felt light-headed as the letter slipped from his hand into the slit of the postbox, a lover's insane fantastical joy invigorating him for a few seconds, making him shiver. Love was indeed a kind of madness, he realized, it defied all logic\u2014a naked flame of illogic\u2014the intensity of the feeling you experienced was the only vindication necessary. Despite these long months without seeing her he knew with absolute conviction that not only was he in love with Lika Blum, but that that state of affairs was the only significant fact about his life.\n\nHe called to mind some lines from a poem by Algernon Swinburne that he had memorized, from the book Lady Dalcastle had given him. They fitted his mood perfectly:\n\n> We shone as the stars shone, and moved\n> \n> As the moon moved, twain halves of a perfect heart.\n> \n> Soul to soul. You loved me, as I thee loved,\n> \n> And our dreams began, dreaming our life would start.\n\nHe wandered back to the _pension,_ repeating the lines to himself as if they were some sort of votive incantation. The streets were busy, the sun was shining, Nice's season was drawing to a close. Dinner was served promptly at 6 p.m.\u2014an hour Brodie had always thought was irritatingly early\u2014but this evening he was happy to join the other diners (glad to see no sign of Leache in the room) because (a) he was leaving Nice for Paris the next day, and (b) he would never see Cuthbert Leache in his life again. Leache was booked in for another three months\u2014he had suffered a minor haemorrhage and had been taken to the Clinique Sturge, a private hospital connected to the _pension._ Again Brodie sensed wheels within wheels\u2014ill health meant money to healthy people. He was sorry for poor Leache but pleased he was going to miss him on his final night as an invalid.\n\nBrodie ate fillet of turbot in a cream and caper sauce followed by an _\u00eele flottante,_ all washed down with several glasses of mineral water (the Deladier was teetotal). He was waiting for his coffee when Madame Deladier crossed the dining room towards him, a frown making her already severe face even more severe.\n\n\"There is someone to see you, Monsieur Moncur,\" she said disapprovingly. \"The message I have to deliver to you is that it concerns a 'Russian doctor'\u2014if that makes sense.\"\n\n\"Yes, it does,\" Brodie said and hurried to the _pension_ 's large hall by the front door where visitors were received. He hadn't seen the Russian doctor since their shared coffee in the H\u00f4tel West-End. What could have brought him to the Deladier, he wondered?\n\nBut it wasn't the Russian doctor waiting for him in the hall\u2014it was the young French girl who had approached them that day. What was her name? Marie? No, Margot, that was it. Brodie greeted her, puzzled. She had changed, colouring her fair hair a rather harsh auburn and she was wearing a black suit piped with gold. She wore a little straw bonnet pinned rakishly to the side of her head. Everything seemed garish and cheap and the scent of her perfume seemed to fill the _pension_ 's hallway, farinaceous and powerful\u2014spikenard, musk\u2014it could almost be tasted.\n\n\"Do you remember me?\" she said, obviously very nervous.\n\n\"Yes. You're Margot\u2014aren't you? I met you with the Russian doctor. How did you find me?\"\n\n\"My friend\u2014the Russian doctor\u2014told me you were staying at the Pension Deladier.\"\n\n\"Did he? Oh...Right. Does he need help?\"\n\n\"No. It's I who need help. Or, rather, I was wondering if I could be of some assistance to you, monsieur. I could keep house for you. I'm a good cook. I can do laundry and sew. And, of course...\" She looked down at her cracked leather boots. \"I would be there...At night.\"\n\nBrodie felt his mouth dry.\n\n\"What about your doctor friend?\"\n\n\"He has to go back to Russia. I can't go with him, he says.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"So, he thought that maybe you would...\" She didn't finish her sentence.\n\n\"How old are you, Margot?\"\n\n\"I'm nineteen.\"\n\n\"Where are you from? Are you from Nice?\"\n\n\"I'm from Biarritz. I came here with the doctor from Biarritz when he moved to Nice.\"\n\n\"I think you should go back to Biarritz. Go back to your family.\"\n\n\"My family won't receive me,\" she said. \"I can't do that,\" she added gravely, as if he were asking her to climb Mont Blanc.\n\n\"Well, I'm so sorry, but I can't help you,\" Brodie said. \"I'm going back to Paris tomorrow.\"\n\nMargot's eyes opened wide and she stiffened with a kind of suppressed glee.\n\n\"I long to go to Paris! I could come with you. I could look after you, monsieur.\"\n\nBrodie fumbled in his pockets and found some coins\u2014a twenty-franc gold coin and a silver five. He handed them to her. She took them.\n\n\"It's impossible, Margot. I'm engaged to be married. I'm going back to Paris to marry the woman I love.\"\n\nHe watched her recoil at this\u2014this lie\u2014as if it were the cruellest news in the world and he saw tears form in her eyes, all faint hopes gone. She clenched her fist around the coins, knuckles blanching.\n\n\"I wish you and your fianc\u00e9e every happiness, monsieur,\" she said, adding quietly, \"You're a very lucky man.\"\n\n# 13\n\nIt was as if Brodie's months of convalescence in Nice had never happened. He felt well in himself, not unduly tired or lacking in energy, and he took up his duties at Channon & Cie as if he'd been away for a long weekend.\n\nOn his return to Paris, he went almost immediately to see Dr. Maisonfort. Brodie was requested to undress to his drawers and vest and he was then weighed, asked to touch his toes, his reflexes were tested with a rubber hammer and his heart and his lungs were listened to through Dr. Maisonfort's stethoscope.\n\n\"You have gained an extra two hundred grams,\" Dr. Maisonfort said. \"That's good, no weight loss, that's a good sign.\"\n\nBrodie said that he felt very well.\n\n\"We made the right decision for you,\" Dr. Maisonfort said. \"Immediate rest, a regular diet, warmth, sunshine, tranquillity. It was very cold here in Paris while you were away in Nice, very. And no more haemorrhages? Spitting blood?\"\n\n\"Nothing.\"\n\n\"Excellent. You know, I have a patient\u2014consumptive like you\u2014who just celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday.\"\n\n\"That's encouraging.\"\n\n\"But of course your English poet, Kaytes?\"\n\n\"Keats. John Keats.\"\n\n\"He died from his tuberculosis at twenty-five. It's unpredictable.\"\n\n\"Yes. At least I'm older than he was.\"\n\nDr. Maisonfort prescribed him a tincture of camphor to be taken in dilution twice a day. It was vital to avoid overwork and over-exercise. Ten hours' sleep a day\u2014siestas at every opportunity. Brodie said he'd be especially careful. Dr. Maisonfort booked him in for another appointment in a month. Brodie felt\u2014though he knew it wasn't true\u2014that, in a sense, however, he was cured. His life could begin again.\n\nTwo days after his appointment he regulated and tuned the piano for Karl-Heinz Nagel's recital in the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre du Ch\u00e2telet. Unlike most virtuosi, Nagel seemed to take a genuine interest in what Brodie was doing to his new Channon, almost marvelling as he watched Brodie shave off the hammer-heads with emery paper.\n\n\"I mean, you don't even take off half a millimetre,\" Nagel said. \"Will it make any difference?\"\n\n\"You'll see the minute you begin to play,\" Brodie said. \"What I do to the hammers is my special trick, if you like. You're lucky I'm letting you see what I do.\" He picked up his needle and loosened the felt, then shaved it down a touch.\n\nNagel chuckled. \"Magic arts, eh?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\nWhen the tuning was finished Nagel invited Brodie to accompany him on his Scandinavian tour in the summer. Brodie was flattered but cautiously replied that it would depend on Mr. Channon and what was going on in the business. There were many upcoming tours that he had to organize\u2014he wasn't sure if he could get away.\n\n\"Are you still tuning for Kilbarron?\" Nagel asked.\n\n\"Ah, no. Mr. Kilbarron and Channon have separated,\" Brodie said. \"They didn't renew the contract.\"\n\n\"What a shame,\" Nagel said, smiling. \"Have a think about my proposal, Mr. Moncur. I'll make it worth your while.\"\n\nBrodie took a cab back to the shop and called for Beno\u00eet.\n\n\"Well?\" he said, impatiently, when Beno\u00eet appeared. He had sent Beno\u00eet to the Kilbarron apartment in Saint-Germain on some footling errand.\n\n\"It was empty,\" Beno\u00eet said. \"No one was there apart from the servants. They said they thought Monsieur Kilbarron was in Germany.\"\n\n\"What about Mademoiselle Blum? Where is she?\"\n\n\"I didn't ask.\"\n\nLika hadn't replied to his last letter\u2014with his Russian declaration of love\u2014and Brodie wondered and worried whether he might have gone too far. After the shop closed he took a horse tram to Saint-Germain.\n\nThe dozy manservant answered the door, recognizing Brodie after a second or two of blank staring. Brodie explained that on his last visit some months ago he had left some sheet music behind\u2014in a green folder\u2014and he wondered if it had been kept safely aside somewhere. He now had need of it.\n\nThe manservant said he knew nothing of any sheet music and no specific instructions had been given.\n\n\"You can understand, sir, in a house like this\u2014the place is full of music.\"\n\n\"Perhaps Mademoiselle Blum has it.\"\n\n\"She is in Weimar, appearing in _Le Roi d'Ys._ \"\n\nThere was the sound of a soft, gruff bark and a little dog trotted into the hall. Brodie recognized it\u2014Lika's dog\u2014and felt his spirits rise. She was clearly coming back to Paris after her Weimar engagement. He crouched and the little dog came and sniffed his fingers. He scratched behind its ears and the dog immediately rolled over onto its back. Brodie stood.\n\n\"That's Mademoiselle Blum's dog, isn't it?\" he said to the manservant.\n\n\"Yes, sir.\"\n\n\"What's its name?\"\n\n\"C\u00e9sar. He's a good dog.\"\n\n\"C\u00e9sar, that's right.\"\n\nThe dog C\u00e9sar had righted himself and now wagged his short curved tail vigorously.\n\n\"When is Mademoiselle Blum returning?\"\n\n\"I have no information, sir.\"\n\n\"Is she well?\"\n\n\"Very well.\"\n\n\"Please give her my sincere good wishes when she returns. Tell her I was asking for her.\"\n\n\"Certainly, sir. What's your name?\"\n\n\"Monsieur Moncur.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe only unusual aspect about Brodie's return to Channon & Cie, he realized, was that he saw little or nothing of Calder Channon. There had been an impromptu encounter on the stairway one morning that gave rise to a brisk handshake and an insincere \"Very glad to have you back with us, Brodie,\" but that, apart from a few glimpses around the shop, was the extent of the welcome. If he had known any better he'd have said Calder was trying to avoid him.\n\nHe came out of his office one day and saw Calder turn and scuttle back up the stairs to the first floor. This is ridiculous, Brodie thought, what's going on? He knocked on Calder's door and was, after a pause, invited in. Calder seemed almost sheepish, embarrassed. He offered him a glass of vermouth\u2014Brodie accepted\u2014and asked him a flow of questions: how was his health? How was Nice? Was the weather good? Was there a hotel in Nice he could recommend? Brodie answered them all until they dried up. There was a silence. Brodie sipped at his vermouth.\n\n\"So that should be the end of it,\" Calder said. \"Your illness, I mean.\"\n\n\"No. Unfortunately there's no 'end' to tuberculosis. One hopes to keep it at bay by this means or that.\"\n\n\"Goodness,\" he said, seemingly genuinely surprised. \"That's a heavy burden.\"\n\n\"It's not like getting over influenza,\" Brodie said. \"These capsules are there in your lungs, growing very slowly, one day one of them might make an artery or a vein burst, or not. It's a lottery.\"\n\n\"A bad business,\" Calder said vaguely, reaching for his horrible little pipe.\n\n\"Is everything all right, Calder?\" Brodie asked directly.\n\n\"Yes...Dmitri has done pretty well in your absence. The Nagel tour is booked; the Sauter tour is going well. The tuning diaries are full to bursting.\"\n\n\"And sales?\"\n\n\"Sales are through the roof.\"\n\n\"Why do I sense something's wrong, then?\" Brodie said, emboldened. \"Why do I feel you're avoiding me?\"\n\nCalder wouldn't meet his eye, concentrating on thumbing tobacco into his pipe bowl.\n\n\"My father will be here the day after tomorrow. He'll explain everything.\"\n\nBrodie didn't go into the shop the next day, sending a note to say he had a toothache and had to see a dentist. He ate a solitary lunch in the _pension_ and then, having a sudden urge to leave the city and see some countryside, took a train to Saint-Denis. He wandered away from the village to discover that the fields and hamlets and woods of the Paris environs were dominated by massive low reinforced stone bastions with gun-emplacements and watchtowers, Les Forts D\u00e9tach\u00e9s. He strolled on and came across other redoubts, regularly spaced, realizing that Paris was encircled both by huge ramparts and these mighty fortresses. They stood there, brooding\u2014implicit with violence, somehow\u2014with their moats and glacis slopes, scarps and cordons, destroyed in the war of 1870\u201371, but since rebuilt, ringing the city, north, south, east and west. It rather shook his impression of Paris\u2014the City of Light, of pleasure, beauty, of artists and self-indulgence\u2014preparing for future conflicts. His trip to the countryside was less than uplifting. Then it started to rain.\n\nThat evening he went to the Gare de l'Est and enquired about the price of a ticket to Weimar. For a mad few moments he had thought about taking a train to Germany, finding the opera house in Weimar and surprising Lika. But what if Kilbarron was with her?...He returned to his quartier and drank too much brandy in the Caf\u00e9 Americain, his thoughts endlessly returning to Ainsley Channon. What could Ainsley have to say to him? What could have provoked Calder's strange evasive mood? His own mood darkened as he speculated. Whatever it was it wouldn't be welcome, he felt sure, and he wandered homewards feeling very sorry for himself. The imminent Ainsley confrontation, the absence and silence of Lika, and the permanence of his tubercular state cast him down thoroughly. What had the Russian doctor said to him in Nice? It wouldn't be a real life without complications.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAinsley Channon had changed again since their last encounter. His hair was cut _en brosse_ like a Prussian officer and his sideburns were gone. The moustache was wider and waxed into horizontal points. He wore a cerise waistcoat and mustard-coloured ankle boots with his usual blue suit, shirt and tie. His visits to Paris were obviously still having a transformational effect on him.\n\nThey were sitting in Calder's office but there was no sign of Calder. Ainsley had brought a bottle of malt whisky with him from Edinburgh and he poured Brodie a small dram before he took his place in Calder's seat. His demeanour was calm and thoughtful\u2014he was not his usual jolly, amiable self. There was some polite conversation about Brodie's health, about the delights of Nice and Monte Carlo, the best hotels there, but both men knew this was only postponing the crucial moment.\n\nAinsley tapped his fingertips together.\n\n\"This is very difficult for me, Brodie. I hope you know that.\"\n\n\"I'm completely in the dark, sir.\"\n\n\"Aye, but I'm not. I now know what's been going on.\"\n\nHe opened a drawer and took out a sheaf of papers with columns of figures written on them.\n\n\"Thibault Dieulafoy has got to the bottom of your little scheme.\"\n\n\"What scheme?\"\n\n\"What shall we say? 'Repairs in transit'? 'Degeneration in shipping'? 'Damage owing to transportation'? Many innocent, vague phrases have been used...Of the...\" He consulted the papers. \"Of the four hundred and eighty-three pianos we have shipped and sold since Channon opened in Paris, a remarkable two hundred and sixty-three required repairs owing to 'damages in transit,' or however you would have it.\"\n\n\"With great respect, I don't know what you're talking about, sir. This is absolutely\u2014\"\n\nAinsley held up his hand for silence and continued.\n\n\"Sometimes it's no more than a few pounds and a few shillings\u2014cracked veneer replaced, new brass castors required\u2014sometimes it's considerably more: new sounding board, new lyre, replacement of all ebony keys, total restringing of the instrument. Tens, twenties, thirties, occasionally hundreds of pounds. It all adds up to two thousand four hundred and thirty-five pounds.\" He patted the documents. \"That's where our precious profits have gone\u2014on your chimerical repairs of mysteriously damaged pianos!\"\n\n\"What has this to do with me?\" Brodie said, feeling sweat break out on his body.\n\n\"All these repairs were authorized by you.\" Ainsley's voice was now raised, intemperate. \"All these dockets from the Saint-Cloud warehouse\u2014which you advised us to set up\u2014have your initials on them. B.M.\"\n\n\"Who is making this accusation?\"\n\n\"Thibault Dieulafoy and Calder. They scrutinized all the accounts while you were away, convalescing. They noticed that in your absence there was\u2014surprise, surprise\u2014absolutely no damage to pianos being shipped, not a single repair docket issuing from the Saint-Cloud warehouse. It roused their suspicions. It was very clever, Brodie, small amounts, random, nothing drawing attention to itself. Just a drip-drip-drip of embezzlement. But your own illness gave you away. Revealed the culprit. A bitter irony for you, no doubt.\"\n\nBrodie closed his eyes. He knew what was coming next.\n\n\"This is all desperate calumny,\" he said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. \"Where are the corresponding figures for the tuners and the workshop? Where is a record of the savings made by the establishment of the Saint-Cloud warehouse? How many sales have been generated by the Channon Recitals\u2014something I inaugurated? I've not stolen money from this firm, sir\u2014I've made thousands of pounds for this firm. Thousands. I think you know that in your heart. Someone else has been stealing from you and has made it seem my responsibility\u2014it's a terrible lie and a slander!\"\n\n\"There's no need to shout, Brodie. I have the evidence in front of me.\"\n\n\"You have the evidence but I am not the guilty party. The culprit is elsewhere.\"\n\n\"The culprit is sitting right opposite me,\" Ainsley said with a certain lack of conviction.\n\n\"Then call the police,\" Brodie said, confidently. \"Let's have some lawyers in and do a proper investigation. I'll not submit to this Star Chamber. I know my rights as someone falsely accused.\"\n\n\"There's no need for that,\" Ainsley said, all composure leaving him and suddenly looking a bit flustered. \"For your own sake I'm going to draw a line under this matter. I appreciate some of the things you've done for this firm\u2014I really do, Brodie\u2014that's why this...\"\u2014he searched for the words\u2014\"this very unfortunate business will go no further than this room. My lips are sealed and I hope yours will be also.\" He reached into the drawer again and took out a banker's draft. \"This is a year's salary. I give it to you in lieu of notice. You are dismissed from our employ.\"\n\nHe pushed it across the desk. Brodie could see his hand was shaking.\n\nFor a moment Brodie thought of taking it, tearing it up and hurling the pieces in Ainsley Channon's face\u2014but he knew that only he would be the victim of such a dramatic, foolhardy gesture. He picked up the draft.\n\n\"Can we speak candidly, Mr. Channon?\"\n\n\"Of course, Brodie. Of course.\"\n\n\"We're not being overheard, I hope.\"\n\n\"No, certainly not.\"\n\n\"Well, in that case, you know as well as I do who the thief is. The thieves, I should say, are Calder and Dieulafoy. They're the two with their hands in the till, not me.\"\n\nThere was a silence. Ainsley inhaled and exhaled loudly. He looked at his hands, looked at the ceiling, looked back at Brodie, abashed, rueful. He stayed silent for a few more seconds, frowning, as if weighing up the consequences of what he was about to say. He sighed and managed an apologetic smile.\n\n\"Aye. You're absolutely right. Calder's been feathering his nest ever since I sent him here.\"\n\n\"So why am I being dismissed? The injustice is\u2014\"\n\n\"Brodie, Brodie, you're not being dismissed, you're 'resigning.'\"\n\n\"Oh, I am, am I? That's very good of you.\"\n\n\"Think about it...Calder's my only son. He's the father of wee Ainsley, my only grandson. What am I to do in these ghastly circumstances? He comes to me with incontrovertible 'evidence' of your guilt. He swears on his child's head that he's done nothing, that it was all you\u2014wily, thieving Brodie Moncur. He then hands me a sheaf of dockets with your initials on them.\"\n\n\"Initials are not very hard to forge, I would argue.\"\n\n\"I'm not a fool, Brodie. I kept smelling a rat so I sent George McIver from the bank down here from Edinburgh. It was while you were away in Nice. But before he could go to work Calder popped up with the evidence.\" He shook the papers in the air. \"A father can't call his only son a fat brazen lying bastard to his face without that relationship between father and son ending. Forever. Do you see where I stand?\" He spread his hands helplessly. \"It was either you or Calder that had to go. It was a pretty straightforward decision, however unjust, however unfortunate.\" He smiled bitterly. \"Calder won't be stealing from me again, that's for sure. And I'll be showing Thibault Dieulafoy the door very shortly. But I don't suppose that's any consolation for you, the man who has to carry the can.\"\n\n\"No. It's no consolation at all. I like my job. I like being here in Paris.\"\n\n\"Ah. But the great thing about your job, Brodie, is you can do it anywhere. You've got a year's salary; you can set yourself up anywhere. You'll be fine, I know that.\"\n\n\"Thank you for your confidence.\"\n\nBrodie stood up. It was over. Ainsley walked him to the door, his arm around Brodie's shoulders.\n\n\"I would say you've been like a son to me, Brodie. All these years at the firm, all your hard work, all your bright ideas. But at the end of the day you're not my son\u2014you're my valued employee whom I have to sacrifice for the sake of my wretched real son. I'm very sorry it's come to this. But give it a couple of years and slip by and see me again, discreetly. We'll see how the land lies then.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Mr. Channon.\"\n\nHe shook Brodie's hand firmly and closed the door on him. His Channon days were over.\n\n# 14\n\n> Pension Berlinger\n> \n> Paris\n> \n> 2 May 1898\n> \n> My dearest Lika,\n> \n> Are you back? Are you in Paris? I need to see you. I have been dismissed from Channon\u2014on trumped-up charges but there's nothing I can do. It's a scandal but the real culprit is a member of the family, so he is protected and I am the scapegoat. I've been given a year's salary so at least I can live an independent life of sorts for a while. I am still at my old address above or you can contact me through Channon\u2014through Dmitri or Beno\u00eet if that seems more circumspect. I hope and pray you received my letter from Nice. Please write to me and tell me what your plans are.\n> \n> I kiss your beautiful hand,\n> \n> Brodie\n\n* * *\n\nBrodie slowly succumbed to a form of despondency. He felt listless, bored, nothing gave him particular pleasure. Even the thought of a year's salary gaining interest in the bank seemed an irrelevance in the face of the vast injustice he'd experienced. He contemplated the idea of waiting outside Calder's apartment and accosting him one morning on his way to work. To try to shame him, he supposed; to make him confess. But he realized such a ploy would only end badly. Then there was Dieulafoy, Calder's semi-invisible accomplice who had furnished the forged and damaging documents, no doubt, the dockets and the repair slips\u2014could he be exposed somehow? Was there a professional body of accountants\u2014some league or syndicate\u2014who could be approached and a malpractice complaint made to have him disbarred? But all these plans and questions ran into the same quicksand of inertia. He decided that anything he attempted to do to right the wrong he had suffered would probably only bring more discomfort on his head. Maybe accepting Ainsley's banker's draft would look like evidence of culpability. Perhaps he should have refused it\u2014walked away and then mounted his campaign for retribution against the firm, his integrity uncompromised...But what to do, otherwise? How would he have lived? And there was always the overriding matter of Lika. Lika and Brodie. Brodie and Lika...\n\nDespite his low mood he filled the days somehow. Like a tourist he took omnibus and tramway-car drives, sitting on the top deck, being transported to the Madeleine, the Bastille, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Panth\u00e9on. One day he managed a great sweep of the \"new\" boulevards, not even fifty years old, planned and constructed by Haussmann: Strasbourg, S\u00e9bastopol, Saint-Michel, de Magenta, Voltaire. He kept his distance from Saint-Germain. Sometimes he descended when the traffic became impossible and had a _petit caf\u00e9_ in the various establishments on the avenues that bifurcated from the wider roads. Then he would walk and pick up another omnibus and continue his meanderings. He managed to fill the days, though his mood didn't lighten.\n\nSome ten days after his \"resignation\"\u2014it seemed more like a month\u2014Beno\u00eet appeared at the _pension_ with a note. Brodie gave him two francs and opened it. It was unsigned:\n\n> Go to the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers, rue Racine, 6\u00e8me, on Monday and book a room in the name of Beaufils. Take a suitcase. I will come to you in the evening.\n\n* * *\n\nSo, as Monsieur Beaufils, Brodie made a reservation at the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers in the rue Racine. It had four narrow floors and twelve rooms and he was given the only available room on the top floor under the eaves. The bed sagged in the middle but the linen was clean. He placed his empty suitcase behind the door, put his hip flask of brandy on the bedside table and settled down to read Guy de Maupassant's account of his voyage along the Mediterranean littoral, _Sur l'Eau._\n\nAt six in the evening there was a brisk rap on the door and the receptionist showed in Lika, also with an empty suitcase. She strode confidently into the room, tall and limber, and Brodie felt his guts squirm as he stood up, overcome.\n\n\"Here is your Madame Beaufils,\" the receptionist said, trying to keep the smile off his face.\n\n\"Hello, darling,\" Brodie said. \"Was your train late?\"\n\nThe receptionist closed the door on them and they stood looking at each other for several moments, Brodie sensing almost overwhelming emotion\u2014an urge to shed tears, his chest tightening, then filling, feeling enormously strong then limply weak\u2014considering all that had happened since they had last been alone together. He straightened his back, squared his shoulders. He stepped towards her and put his arms around her. She adjusted his tie minutely and scrutinized his face.\n\n\"You don't look ill,\" she said. \"I'm surprised.\"\n\n\"I'm not ill. I'm cured.\"\n\nShe was wearing a short crushed-velvet buff jacket and a long black skirt with a front fold. White, laced bootees, he noticed, and her hat was a jaunty pseudo-military style with a peak in black leather. She took it off and threw it on the bed. A thick lock of her hair tumbled free. Brodie now felt weak with desire.\n\n\"Will you give me the Lika-kiss?\" he asked, taking off his spectacles. \"I've been dreaming about it for months.\"\n\n\"Of course, my darling,\" she said, and she pressed her face to his, nose to nose, lip to lip, chin to chin\u2014still and unmoving until her tongue began gently to probe.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThey lay in bed, naked, in each other's arms, warm, snug. Brodie moved his hand to cup a breast and bent his head to take her nipple in his mouth, tonguing it hard. She kissed his brow. He kissed her neck, marvelling that they were here together again, all these months on...All the nagging doubts that had always troubled him\u2014that he would never be alone with her again, that their affair would fizzle out, unfulfilled\u2014disappeared. He reached down and touched her, his fingers on the thick blonde furze of her pubis, cupping it under his palm. He felt hugely aroused again, massively potent. He\u2014\n\n\"Brodie?\"\n\n\"Yes?\"\n\n\"When I die will you come to my funeral? If I die before you, of course.\"\n\n\"You're not going to die! You're young, full of life.\"\n\n\"But if it happened, would you come?\"\n\n\"I'm not going to answer that question.\"\n\n\"It would make me pleased to think that you would be there.\"\n\n\"Don't talk like this, Lika.\"\n\n\"Would you say some words about me?\"\n\n\"There's going to be no funeral.\"\n\n\"I would come to your funeral, if you died. I'd speak about you, if they'd let me.\"\n\n\"Lika, please! Stop this!\"\n\nHe sat up in bed and poured brandy from his flask into a tooth glass. He had a sip and handed it to her.\n\n\"What made you choose this hotel?\" he asked, keen to change the subject, all potency gone, now.\n\n\"It was the first hotel I stayed in when I came to Paris. I liked its name. Full of foreigners. They can't tell us apart so it's very discreet. Russian, German, Swiss, Italians\u2014we're all the same to them. I had a nostalgia for this hotel.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"And John Kilbarron will never come to the Latin Quarter\u2014so it's safe, also.\"\n\n\"What's he doing? Where is he?\"\n\n\"He's in Russia with Malachi. Talking to some impresario about a tour, I suppose.\"\n\nBrodie thought about this.\n\n\"Why Russia? Where in Russia?\" he said.\n\n\"He wouldn't tell me. They went two days ago, by train. It's a long journey\u2014I've done it myself many times.\"\n\n\"But Russia? It doesn't make sense. The money isn't there\u2014it's here. Germany, Austria.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, you're wrong. There's plenty of money in Russia. And he needs money.\"\n\n\"Does he?\"\n\n\"Yes. Things are very difficult. I think we may have to leave Saint-Germain.\"\n\n\"He should have signed for Channon for another six months\u2014he would have made thousands.\"\n\nLika reached over him for his cigarette case on his bedside table, her breasts hanging free for a moment. He picked up his lighter and lit her cigarette. She pulled the sheet up to her chin, suddenly demure.\n\n\"He knows he should have signed,\" she says. \"And it makes him angry. I think he blames you.\"\n\n\"Why? I advised him to sign.\"\n\n\"He has to blame someone.\"\n\n\"Then blame Malachi\u2014he was the one who turned it down.\"\n\n\"No. He'll never blame Malachi for anything.\"\n\n\"Why? Malachi can be a fool.\"\n\n\"I don't know. Some childhood secret. Perhaps some pact they made together. They are very close, extremely close, even for brothers. It's strange.\"\n\n\"I don't want to talk about John Kilbarron.\" He took the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out in the ashtray. \"In fact I don't want to talk about anything any more.\" He reached for her and they kissed.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOver the next weeks Brodie waited patiently for Lika's notes\u2014now sent directly to the Pension Berlinger. He structured his life around their meetings at the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers, both arriving with their empty suitcases under the futile pretext that they were trying to catch a few hours of sleep before their train was due. The manager, the various receptionists and the porters seemed to enjoy the pretence and started greeting them warmly: Monsieur and Madame Beaufils, welcome back! How was your journey? A pleasure to see you again. Twice they stayed a whole night together. Then John Kilbarron returned from Russia and the encounters ceased for a while. Brodie resumed his long promenades of Paris and its environs. He was content, he realized, caught in a kind of benign limbo. He had no job but he was in love and in the full conspiracy of a covert affair with the woman he adored. In the hours they contrived to spend together they made love with regular and shared enthusiasm. He felt blessed but he knew this benediction couldn't last forever. Something would happen, he knew, and then everything would change\u2014possibly for the better. With luck it might even allow him and Lika more time together. That, he was somewhat shocked to realize, was all he actually cared about in life.\n\nThen, after a long gap, a note arrived. \"BEAUFILS. 10 July.\"\n\nBrodie took a tram to the Latin Quarter and went to the Grand H\u00f4tel.\n\n\"Monsieur Beaufils\u2014a great pleasure. It's been a while but we have your usual room for you, I'm happy to say.\"\n\n\"Excellent.\"\n\n\"And Madame Beaufils, is she well?\"\n\n\"Very well, thank you.\"\n\n\"And she will be joining you later?\"\n\n\"Yes. She's arriving by train from...\" He thought of a place, randomly. \"Poitiers.\"\n\n\"A most beautiful town.\"\n\n\"So I believe. She has a cousin there,\" he improvised.\n\nHe paid for the room in advance, took his key, declined any assistance with his suitcase and headed up the stairs to \"their\" room.\n\nHis suitcase was no longer an empty prop. It contained food and drink, should the opportunity arrive for a more protracted stay. He unpacked a bottle of red wine, two glasses, a tea towel, a _saucisson sec,_ a clasp knife, a small jar of gherkins and a fresh baguette and laid them out on the tea towel.\n\nHalf an hour later Lika arrived. They kissed, then Lika sat on the bed and broke the baguette in two.\n\n\"I'm starving,\" she said. Brodie began to slice the sausage. \"But I can only stay an hour,\" she said, munching. \"Now John's back it's difficult. He thinks I've gone for an audition.\"\n\nBrodie began to undress, throwing his boots across the room. He helped Lika off with her jacket and began to unbutton her skirt at the back.\n\n\"Oh yes,\" she said, her mouth full. \"And he wants to see you, he said.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"John.\"\n\nBrodie stopped his unbuttoning and straightened, alarmed. Lika stepped out of her skirt.\n\n\"Don't look so stern,\" she said. \"It's nothing to worry about.\"\n\n\"Why does he want to see me?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He went to find you at Channon and they told him you didn't work there any more.\"\n\n\"He can't be suspicious about us, surely?\"\n\n\"No, no. I said I had met you in the street one day\u2014quite by chance\u2014and you had given me your visiting card.\"\n\n\"It didn't make him suspect anything?\"\n\n\"Brodie. I know you. He knows I know you. It's a coincidence\u2014in a city people bump into people they know.\"\n\n\"But it's not a coincidence, that's the point.\"\n\n\"He thinks it's a coincidence. You'll find a letter waiting for you at the _pension,_ I'm sure.\"\n\nShe was naked now. She ran her fingers under the crease of her breasts and wiped the sweat on the coverlet.\n\n\"Phoo! It's hot in this room under the roof. Hurry up. Take your clothes off.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nJohn Kilbarron poured him a glass of champagne.\n\n\"What're we celebrating?\" Brodie asked, cautiously. They were alone in the salon of the Saint-Germain apartment.\n\n\"The answer to our problems, I hope,\" Kilbarron said, and clinked glasses with him. Kilbarron seemed in good spirits. The lines on his face seemed deeper, more obvious, like the creases in his dirty linen shirt. There was a French phrase that summed up his look perfectly, Brodie remembered: _visage burin\u00e9._\n\n\"I hear you've parted company with Channon.\"\n\n\"Yes. It was a...misunderstanding. But it was impossible for me to stay on. They've been very generous.\"\n\n\"Something to do with that lazy fat sot, Calder, I'll wager.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"Well so much the better for me\u2014and for you, young Brodie. Your lucky day has arrived!\"\n\nHe went to search for one of his cigarillos and some matches. Brodie felt very uncomfortable\u2014very conscious of his hypocrisy, his subterfuge\u2014praying that Lika wouldn't come in. Kilbarron returned, puffing smoke.\n\n\"Sit, sit\u2014and I'll tell you what's happened.\"\n\nBrodie sat and Kilbarron paced the room, smoking and drinking, recounting what had transpired. He had a new sponsor, he said\u2014an extremely rich Russian woman, a philanthropist, who wanted him to come and be the virtuoso-composer-conductor at her own private theatre in St. Petersburg.\n\n\"Stacks of money,\" Kilbarron said. \"Barns full of money. Doesn't know what to do with it all. But,\" he whirled round, \"she's a music lover, bless her. She wants to do something for Russian music and I'm her man.\"\n\n\"Congratulations.\"\n\n\"I have to give a few concerts, write some masterworks, devise a season or two of great Russian music for the good folk of St. Petersburg and she'll pay for everyone.\" He smiled. \"Including my entourage. Malachi, Lika and\u2014if you've a sensible bone in your lanky great body\u2014you.\"\n\n\"St. Petersburg...\" Brodie said, playing for time.\n\n\"We'd all have to go and live there\u2014for a while, like. A year or two, just to get the whole show up and running. What do you say, Brodie, my lad?\"\n\n\"Who is this woman?\"\n\n\"Her name is Elisaveta Somethingovna Vadimova. Her late husband\u2014now sitting on the right hand of God Almighty\u2014was Russia's fourth-richest man, so I'm told. Or third\u2014who cares? Rich as the tsar, by all accounts. Iron, ships, coal\u2014you name it, he profited mightily from it. And now old Mrs. Vadimova controls the family fisc. And being such a music lover she's decided to become a patron of the arts. Built her own theatre, hired her own orchestra\u2014all she needs is a bona-fide star of the European concert hall.\" Kilbarron gave a little bow. \"Just to add the final touch of credibility.\"\n\n\"Where do I fit in\u2014to your entourage?\"\n\nKilbarron held out his right hand. It was trembling.\n\n\"It's got worse, see. I need you, Brodie boy, to work your Moncur magic on the pianos I'll have to play. I insisted you were part of the _\u00e9quipe._ Och, aye. Insisted. I can't play more than twenty minutes otherwise. And the pain is getting...intense.\" He flexed his fingers, his eyes tightening with remembered agony. \"It's a fucking nightmare.\"\n\nHe turned away and crossed the room to fill his champagne glass with brandy. For some reason it was only now that Brodie realized Kilbarron was actually quite drunk.\n\n\"But the Channon was perfect for you,\" Brodie said. \"I regulated it so precisely. Bespoke, tailor-made.\"\n\n\"Alas, alack, I had to sell the Channon. Damn shame\u2014but I got a very good price for it, you'll be pleased to hear. I was in a temporary financial bind, shall we say. It was me or the piano, if you catch my drift.\" He wandered back over to him, picking up the champagne bottle as he approached. \"So, are you with me?\"\n\n\"I suppose I'm free, but\u2014\"\n\n\"Whatever they're paying you at Channon's I'll double it\u2014or rather Madame Vadimova will double it. And free accommodation, by the way. Everybody's on a salary\u2014Malachi, Lika. Then there's the concert fees on top. It's the golden goose, Brodie, I tell ye.\" He topped up Brodie's champagne. Brodie had noticed how Kilbarron's accent thickened as he grew more drunk. The golden goose again...Brodie wondered at the prevalence of this particular fable in his life. It didn't augur well, he thought, all this talk of golden geese. But he didn't need to think further. If Kilbarron went to St. Petersburg then Lika would go with him. And Brodie had to go where Lika went\u2014it was as simple as that.\n\n\"Count me in, Mr. Kilbarron. I'm very grateful to be asked.\"\n\nThen, as if on cue, Lika came into the room. She was wearing one of the newly fashionable tea gowns, full, diaphanous and swirling, a pale apricot colour embroidered with scarlet flowers.\n\nBrodie stood. Tense.\n\n\"Miss Blum,\" he said. \"Delighted to see you again.\"\n\n\"Mr. Moncur. A great pleasure.\"\n\nThey shook hands. Brodie squeezed hard. He felt a blush creeping from his neck to his cheeks, as if his betrayal of Kilbarron was written on his forehead. When he thought of his last encounter with Lika\u2014what she had done to him; what she had asked him to do to her...And now there she was, calmly accepting a glass of champagne, standing opposite him in her tea gown.\n\n\"Brodie is to come with us to St. Petersburg,\" Kilbarron announced. \"I managed to persuade him.\"\n\n\"That's excellent news,\" she said and raised her glass. \"Here's to our new life in Piter.\" She wandered round behind Kilbarron and pointed to herself as if to say it had been her idea. _Mon id\u00e9e,_ she mouthed.\n\nBrodie turned away and forced himself to listen to what Kilbarron was saying. He was complaining: he had to compose, not just perform: Madame Vadimova wanted a \"World Premiere\"\u2014a symphony, a concerto\u2014most tiresome. Brodie nodded, encouragingly he hoped, but all he could think about was that he was going to St. Petersburg with Lika, that their clandestine love affair would continue somehow in Russia, come what may. But, as the three of them stood there\u2014the cuckold, the lover and the mistress\u2014in the Saint-Germain apartment, drinking, enthusing, he had a sudden dark premonition that life in St. Petersburg was going to prove more dangerous than Paris.\n\n# PART III\n\n# St. Petersburg\n\n1899\n\n# 1\n\n> Apartment 4b\n> \n> Malaya Morskaya, 57\n> \n> St. Petersburg\n> \n> Russia\n> \n> 17 May 1899\n> \n> Dear Lady Dalcastle,\n> \n> Please forgive the epistolary silence but the picaresque travels of Don Brodie Moncur continue. I have quit Channon (amiably enough\u2014a long story) and Paris and have been engaged as \"secretary\" to Maestro John Kilbarron, the famous pianist. He has taken up an appointment in St. Petersburg that is contracted for some five years. So here I am and here I will stay for a while.\n> \n> Kilbarron's patrons are a mother and a daughter\u2014the Vadimovas\u2014heirs to an immense fortune and who have built their own theatre on an island in the bay of St. Petersburg (or \"Piter\" as the locals call it). They plan to offer a season of concerts, concentrating on Russian music, that will be organized by John Kilbarron who will very often perform himself. The repertory is his to choose but the excitement in the city is palpable. Great things are expected. My role is to give advice (hardly required) and to regulate and tune his piano (very important). I am, I blush to report, being exceptionally well remunerated.\n> \n> Furthermore\u2014the Russian bounty knows no end\u2014I have been given free use of a vast apartment owned by the Vadimov family in a street just off Vosnesensky Prospekt, one of the city's great thoroughfares. Think of Edinburgh's Princes Street transposed to Russia and double the width. Shops, apartments, grand hotels\u2014and there are three of these great boulevards radiating out from the Admiralty complex of buildings on the southern bank of the Neva river. Perhaps Piter's Champs-Elys\u00e9es might give you a better sense of the huge scale of these streets. My apartment has seven rooms and I have a couple\u2014Nikanor and Fyolka\u2014who cook and generally look after my every need. I have to travel with John Kilbarron when he gives concerts in Russia and abroad and these last few months since arriving I have been to Stockholm, Moscow, Kiev, Berlin and Prague. But, for the main part, I reside here and this will be my address for the duration of my stay.\n> \n> Petersburg is an astonishing city with a great river dividing it and then dividing it again into a kind of delta filled with islands crossed by innumerable bridges. My guidebook says that the buildings (very large) are somewhat \"monotonous in style.\" I don't agree. They are painted in bright colours\u2014yellow, pink, pale green, pale blue, ochre, terracotta. Imagine Edinburgh (or Peebles!) similarly bedecked\u2014it would change everything.\n> \n> It's a large city of over 2 million people. There are 10,000 Germans living here and 2,000 British, astonishingly. French will easily get you by in most bourgeois or intellectual environments. The locals may speak a few words of German or French but no English at all. Consequently I am trying to learn a few elementary Russian phrases so I can communicate with Nikanor and Fyolka but it's a d\u2014nambly difficult language, Russian, what with its different Cyrillic alphabet (33 letters) and nouns that decline, like Latin. Progress is slow. Thank goodness I can speak French.\n> \n> By the way, it is best to write to me care of my bank: the Russian and English Bank, Nevsky, 28, St. P.\n> \n> Wishing you good health, wealth and happiness (as they say in Russia).\n> \n> Affectionately yours,\n> \n> Brodie Moncur\n\n* * *\n\nBrodie came through to the dining room in his dressing gown with a scarf at his throat. As he had shaved he felt he had a cold coming on\u2014his throat was scratchy and his chest felt a bit constricted and of course that always gave him cause for worry. He had survived an entire Russian winter in St. Petersburg without the trace of a cold or sniffle\u2014let alone any haemorrhage. It was face-numbing, eye-watering, snot-freezing winter cold of a sort that he had never encountered, even in the remotest Scottish glen\u2014a ringing, shivering cold, almost audible, as if some vast ice gong had sounded, freezing the earth. He had managed to explain to Nikanor that he needed warmth and so Nikanor had obligingly lit the stoves in every room of the apartment, stoking up a winter-long fug of heat\u2014tended assiduously all day by Fyolka\u2014and consequently when Brodie was at home he basked in a near-hothouse atmosphere, often removing his jacket for more comfort. There was no question of the fuel expense involved in keeping the apartment thus heated\u2014the Vadimovas' largesse seemed limitless. But now summer was arriving the stoves went unlit and perhaps the unfamiliar cool had brought on this irritating little cough. He was also suddenly aware of damp. The apartment was old and he suspected he was its first tenant in many years. Certainly Nikanor and Fyolka seemed delighted that he had moved in and that they actually had someone to look after and fuss over.\n\nBrodie pushed open the door to the dining room and saw that his place had been laid out at the end of the huge table\u2014it could seat twenty, easily. In the far corner in a wooden armchair sat Kyrill, reading a newspaper. Kyrill was an elderly man in his sixties with a thin, always smiling face, clean-shaven, almost bald, smartly dressed in a threadbare suit, a clean white shirt and tie. He spoke a little French and was a useful interpreter. Brodie had no idea who he was or what function he served but he seemed to live in the apartment, somewhere in Nikanor and Fyolka's quarters. He was often to be found in various rooms, reading or playing an elaborate form of patience with two packs of cards. He was an entirely benign, inoffensive presence. Like a plant in a pot, Brodie thought, moved from room to room.\n\n\"Bonjour, Monsieur Kyrill,\" Brodie said and sat down.\n\n\"Bonjour, Monsieur Moncur,\" Kyrill said in reply and returned to his newspaper.\n\nFyolka emerged from the kitchen with a tray and spoke to Brodie in garrulous Russian. She placed a glass of milk and a plate of cold herring in front of him and left. Why had she given him milk today? She had given him tea at every breakfast she had served him. He didn't want milk; he needed something hot for his throat.\n\n\"Fyolka?\" Brodie summoned her back through the small door that led to the kitchen and their living quarters. He had never been through that door.\n\n\" _Du th\u00e9?_ \" he said. Kyrill had sworn that she understood some words of French and German. Fyolka said something in Russian back to him. She was obviously not familiar with _th\u00e9._ He looked round for Kyrill's aid but the man had silently slipped out of the room. What was the German for tea? He had left his small transliterated English\u2013Russian dictionary in his room and couldn't be bothered going back for it. He remembered the German for tea.\n\n\" _Eine Tasse Tee, bitte._ \"\n\nNo reaction. Where was Kyrill when you needed him? He mimed pouring from a teapot and stirring a cup of tea and then drinking from it. Fyolka disappeared and returned a minute later with a cup of coffee. At least it was hot. Brodie asked for bread and jam in French and German and handed her the cold herring to take away. She brought him a greyish bread roll and some gooseberry jelly. It was progress of sorts, he supposed. He ate his breakfast, bumped into Kyrill who was returning to the dining room for his newspaper, went back to his room, dressed and headed out into St. Petersburg to his office.\n\nStrolling through Piter to work always invigorated him\u2014it was exciting: he couldn't quite believe it was he, Brodie Moncur from Liethen Manor, walking along these broad quays by the wide Neva, only recently thawed, past the coloured cliff-like facades of these huge ornate buildings with their spires and cupolas and countless flags flying, moving through these crowds, two-thirds of whom seemed to be in some kind of uniform. Some of them were military or naval types but it appeared to Brodie that having a job that required you to wear a uniform of sorts was somehow every Russian's dream. And almost everyone favoured the same style of hat\u2014a variation of a forage cap made of felt, he assumed it was, with a little leather peak. He was aware of being very much the foreigner\u2014his clothes, his shoes, his hat and coat seemed to shout \"I am not Russian!\" and he could spot the other foreigners as he passed them and they too spotted him. It was an odd kind of solidarity amongst strangers. St. Petersburg was meant to be Russia's most European city but, to Brodie, it always seemed very Russian indeed. He had come to feel at home in Paris, unreflectingly occupying and using the city like a Parisian. He doubted he'd ever experience something similar in Piter.\n\nBrodie crossed Nikolaevsky Bridge, then Tuchkov Bridge, before arriving at what was known as the Petrograd Side and turned left until he came to the beginnings of Petrovsky Park where the New Russia Theatre was situated. His office was in the theatre building itself. The theatre had been built only two years previously, a 500-seat auditorium with stalls and two galleries, made entirely of wood (painted white) and fitted with electric power. His office, however, was something of a misnomer\u2014a very small room on the top floor with a skylight. It had a desk and a chair and an empty pine filing cabinet. His name was on the door in Russian and English. He suspected he had been furnished with these modest premises as a result of Kilbarron's negotiations with the Vadimovas. In truth, he wasn't Kilbarron's secretary at all\u2014he was his piano tuner, his piano fixer\u2014but in order to seem like a secretary, and justify his salary, he had to be provided with minimal secretarial facilities.\n\nElisaveta Ivanovna Vadimova, like many a rich music lover in St. Petersburg (Count Sheremetyev, Boris Liskov, Mikhail Berkesh), had her own theatre and her own orchestra. She was therefore in a position to establish tastes and advance reputations, all in the cause of celebrating the genius of Russian music. Brodie now knew that she had seen Kilbarron's recital at the _soir\u00e9e russe_ in the Th\u00e9\u00e2tre de la R\u00e9publique where she had been so overwhelmed by his playing of the Rimsky-Korsakov concerto and then by his own \"paraphrases\" of Borodin that she had decided that, despite the fact that he was Irish and his star was dimming somewhat, he was the ideal person to be the guest artiste-cum-conductor-cum-composer of her New Russia Theatre in Petrovsky Park, St. Petersburg. Money was the least of her concerns\u2014anything Kilbarron wanted he seemed to be instantly provided with. Brodie wondered if it had been the ongoing negotiations with the Vadimovas that had made Kilbarron so bullish with Ainsley Channon. He could ask Ainsley for 200 guineas a concert, take it or leave it, because he knew he had Elisaveta Vadimova in St. Petersburg ready to grant him anything.\n\nBrodie closed the door to his office and sat down at his desk. He took off his spectacles, polished the lenses, replaced his spectacles and took out the novel he was reading from his desk drawer\u2014 _The Master of Ballantrae_ by Robert Louis Stevenson. He had read a great deal since his arrival in St. Petersburg because there was practically nothing else for him to do until a new concert was forthcoming. The concert piano at the New Russia Theatre was a three-year-old Zollmeyer. Though he didn't regard it as a marque of the top rank, Brodie had voiced and regulated it for Kilbarron in the same way he had regulated the Channon, carefully weighting the treble octaves for his ailing right hand. Once that was done there was nothing to do but await Kilbarron's summons. Kiev, Prague, Berlin or wherever he might be off to\u2014a concert here, a recital there\u2014as he prepared for the inaugural season at the New Russia. In any other circumstances, after a few months, Brodie would have resigned, such was the sheer lassitude and boredom of his existence\u2014but he couldn't resign. Only by being present in St. Petersburg did he have a chance of seeing Lika. And so he had to stay, however tedious his days were\u2014he would never leave her.\n\nLika lived with Kilbarron\u2014and Malachi\u2014in what seemed a semi-palace on Nevsky Prospekt. It was an entire house with stabling and kitchens on the ground floor and a grand sweeping staircase in a separate foyer that led you up to the public rooms and the living quarters on the four floors above. Malachi had his suite of rooms on the third floor. The _piano nobile_ contained two drawing rooms\u2014one large, one small\u2014a billiard room, a dining room (seating up to forty) and a small ballroom with a minstrel gallery. Above on the second floor were Lika and John Kilbarron's spacious apartments\u2014two bedrooms, dressing rooms, a sitting room, a bathroom. Staff were plentiful: doormen, chambermaids, a coachman and grooms, a butler, a cook and numerous kitchen maids were all laid on, courtesy of Elisaveta Vadimova. Kilbarron revelled in the luxury and splendour. The problem for Brodie was that he could hardly ever be alone with Lika.\n\nThey had travelled to Petersburg in September the previous year\u2014delays in leaving Paris were inevitable as the Kilbarron brothers made frequent trips to Petersburg to meet the Vadimovas, mother and daughter, and sort out the fine details of this job of jobs. And, while Kilbarron was away, Brodie and Lika availed themselves of the freedom of the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers. It had been perhaps the happiest period of their relationship\u2014all fear of discovery absent\u2014and one week they spent three uninterrupted days together. But now they were in Petersburg everything became highly complicated again. Brodie kept a running calculation: from September 1898 to May 1899\u2014no sexual congress with Lika. They had managed the odd seized kiss and carnal fumble in corridors and theatre dressing rooms but nothing more. And Brodie was often away himself with Kilbarron on his concert and recital tours. The frustration mounted steadily as Brodie, when he was in the city, saw Lika several times a week but always in Kilbarron's company. Masturbation was only the briefest consolation. Somehow they would find a way, Brodie knew, but Petersburg wasn't Paris, everything was different, more complicated.\n\nHe had slipped her a note once\u2014\"Meet me in the H\u00f4tel d'Angleterre tomorrow, room 113. I'll be there all day.\" He waited, slept the night there, but she never appeared. In the few whispered moments when they were alone she had said, just be patient, something will work out\u2014I'm thinking, planning. It was scant solace that she was missing him also. But whenever Kilbarron left Petersburg Brodie left with him, Lika staying behind. It was a maddening conundrum. What had seemed like the perfect solution\u2014they would be together constantly in Petersburg\u2014was proving incredibly disheartening.\n\nHe put down his novel at midday and went out to find something to eat.\n\nThe Restaurant Fran\u00e7ais Dominique had, at least, a French ma\u00eetre d' and Brodie liked going there if only to speak French and drink expensive French wine with his pike in the Jewish fashion, stuffed eel or boiled bream with horseradish (the Dominique specialized in fish dishes). There was a small garden at the back and, as the weather warmed, they laid out tables there. The ma\u00eetre d'\u2014his name was Z\u00e9phyr Dommecq\u2014greeted him familiarly and said they had some excellent Chablis, just arrived. Brodie didn't even ask how much it cost and ordered a bottle. He was, by his standards, richer than he'd ever been. His accommodation was free and he was earning double the amount that Channon had paid him\u2014and yet he had little to spend his money on. In Paris the days and nights at the Grand H\u00f4tel had diminished his savings severely. But now his account at the Russian and English Bank had several hundreds of pounds in it, untouched.\n\nHe sat down at his table in the garden and looked around, lighting a cigarette. He could hear that two other tables were occupied by Germans. The May sun warmed his thigh and the Chablis was ideally cold. Here he was in St. Petersburg eating an expensive lunch with an entire bottle of wine to himself. Life was good, he supposed, except...As he sat there waiting for his first course\u2014a cherry soup with buckwheat\u2014he realized that personal happiness was such a fickle, fragile thing. He should be happy, yet he was unhappy because he couldn't be with Lika, the woman he loved beyond all reason. But to quit Piter and leave her would only make him more unhappy. Desperately unhappy. So, he told himself, better to be less unhappy, however unhappy that made him. He was trapped in a maddening cycle of strange unhappiness. He ate his soup and Z\u00e9phyr promptly brought him his boiled carp with red wine and topped up his glass of Chablis.\n\n\"I can recommend the sour cream pie for dessert,\" Z\u00e9phyr said. \"Completely delicious.\"\n\nBrodie wandered back to the theatre after lunch feeling full and a bit wine-numbed. Perhaps a whole bottle of Chablis was somewhat self-indulgent, however mildly unhappy he happened to be.\n\nHe went into the theatre through the stage door to find it full of young women\u2014tiny young women in the corps de ballet come for rehearsal. They quickly parted to make way for him\u2014this strange giant\u2014and fell silent. As he left the foyer he heard them erupt in giggles and laughing chatter, like a gibberish of songbirds. The ballet season was starting at the New Russia so, for him, it was even quieter than usual. More time for RLS.\n\nBut in his office he found two notes on his desk: one from his doctor reminding him of his appointment, and the other from Malachi Kilbarron announcing a meeting at the Nevsky Prospekt house at six o'clock that evening. Brodie's mood lifted\u2014suddenly his day was full and he would probably catch a glimpse of Lika.\n\n# 2\n\nDr. Varia Alexandrovna Sampsoniyevskaya sat down at her desk and said he could put his shirt back on. She was in her late thirties, Brodie estimated\u2014this was only their third meeting\u2014and she had a bony handsome face with a strongly hooked nose. But it was an unsmiling severe face as if Dr. Sampson, as Brodie referred to her, had little joy in her life. Perhaps she was as mildly unhappy as he was. She spoke excellent French and had studied in Paris for a year under Th\u00e9ophile Roguin. She was wearing a knee-length white cotton coat over her suit and her hair was held up in a loose bun secured with many hairclips.\n\n\"You have some congestion in the right lung,\" she said. \"Just a cold, I would say. I'll give you a camphor inhalant to clear your throat and nose. Keep warm.\" She scribbled something down on a notepad and sat back, looking at him as he buttoned up his shirt.\n\n\"So\u2014you had no problems this last winter?\"\n\n\"No. I felt well. Now that it's spring I feel ill.\"\n\n\"You're very lucky. Next winter I advise you to leave Piter. Go to the south of Europe\u2014or even North Africa. Lisbon, Seville, Marrakesh, Algiers, Biarritz, Nice. Wait until the Neva thaws before you come back.\"\n\n\"I've been to Nice,\" he said. \"That was my French doctor's recommendation.\"\n\n\"Well, if you know somewhere agreeable I would book yourself a room from December to May.\"\n\n\"I don't think my employer would permit such a long absence.\"\n\nShe shrugged. \"Then you will have to 'trust to luck.'\" She said the last three words in English. \"Is that the right expression?\"\n\n\"It is. But isn't that life for us all? Trusting to luck?\"\n\n\"You can always try to give luck a helping hand,\" she said and pulled out a drawer to take out a cigarette case and opened it to offer him one. He saw they were Russian cigarettes\u2014yellow paper with a long cardboard filter.\n\n\"If you don't mind,\" Brodie said. \"I'd prefer one of my own.\"\n\n\"What do you smoke?\" Dr. Sampson asked.\n\nBrodie explained. \"They're called Margaritas, imported from the United States of America.\"\n\n\"May I try one?\"\n\nThey both lit up a Margarita and sat there savouring the American blend, doctor and patient. Brodie felt the mood shift in a subtle way\u2014from professional rectitude to a kind of amiable curiosity.\n\n\"This is the first time I've smoked American tobacco,\" she said.\n\n\"It's the best,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"Do you like it here in Piter? Are you enjoying the city?\" Dr. Sampson asked, picking a shred from her tongue tip.\n\n\"Yes. Very much. It has its frustrations but so does everywhere.\"\n\n\"And you're a musician.\"\n\n\"I'm the secretary to a great pianist\u2014John Kilbarrron.\"\n\n\"John Kilbarron! Yes, I've heard of him. The 'Irish Liszt.'\"\n\n\"That's him.\" Brodie explained about the move from Paris to St. Petersburg. \"Are you a music lover?\" he asked.\n\n\"Of course. I'm Russian.\"\n\n\"Then I must invite you\u2014as my guest\u2014to one of Kilbarron's recitals. He's extraordinary. They'll be starting up at the end of the summer.\"\n\n\"Thank you, that's very kind,\" she said. \"I'd like that very much.\" Her face transformed itself briefly as she allowed herself a genuine smile.\n\nThere was something oddly attractive about Dr. Sampson, Brodie thought, as she walked with him to the dispensary. In another life, a life without Lika, he might have been drawn to her handsome melancholic reserve and would have enjoyed the challenge of trying to break it down. She left him at the dispensary as his powdered camphor was being measured out and thanked him again for the invitation.\n\n* * *\n\nThe butler, Sergei, showed him up to the main drawing room of the Nevsky Prospekt house on the first floor. Kilbarron had had it redecorated in varying shades of red. There were red velvet curtains, a maroon carpet and vivid scarlet Chesterfield sofas. He had also hung a large collection of ancient exotic weapons on the walls\u2014swords and sabres, falchions and scimitars, claymores and axes, shields, halberds, pikes and lances, flails and morning stars. Helms and helmets were displayed on the occasional tables. It was not a comfortable room to be in, Brodie always thought: the assorted weapons, their blades polished and gleaming, hinted at a barely suppressed anger, the hues of red affected your mood, strangely, put you on edge. There was no piano in the room, nor any pictures. One would have thought it a military museum. Brodie had never found the time to ask Lika what she felt about it.\n\nMalachi Kilbarron welcomed him. Brodie hadn't seen him for some weeks and, to his eye, Malachi appeared distinctly bulkier. It wasn't so much that he was corpulent\u2014he just appeared to carry more weight, took up more space than most men\u2014a block of solid flesh. He offered Brodie vodka but he declined, still feeling the effects of his lunchtime Chablis.\n\n\"Wonderful stuff,\" Malachi said, pouring himself a small tumblerful. \"You can drink it any time of the day.\"\n\n\"That's what they say about whisky,\" Brodie said, considering that if you were so inclined you could justify drinking anything at any time of the day.\n\nThen John Kilbarron came in\u2014Brodie sensing instantly that he was not sober at all. He was perfectly steady as he crossed the floor but there was something unfocussed about his gaze, as if what was going on in his head was more interesting than what might be available in this room.\n\nHe shook Brodie's hand warmly, a two-fisted shake, and clapped him on the shoulder, as he accepted Malachi's offer of a cut-crystal glass of vodka. Kilbarron sat down carefully. Brodie saw there were food stains on the front of his jacket.\n\n\"We're going on a trip,\" he said. \"Tomorrow. Elisaveta Vadimova has given me a dacha.\"\n\n\"Has loaned you a dacha,\" Malachi corrected.\n\n\"We're going to be _dachniki_!\" Kilbarron exclaimed excitedly, almost shouting. \"Why aren't you drinking, Brodie? Get him some vodka, Malachi, we don't take no for an answer in this house.\"\n\nMalachi handed him a glass with an inch of vodka in it. Suddenly Brodie was grateful for more alcohol. The mood was febrile. He took a sip and his lips burned.\n\n\"You can have your own room, Brodie,\" Kilbarron yelled at him. \"Summer is a comin' in and we'll have our own house in the country. Going to be country folk! Gentry!\"\n\nHe hauled himself to his feet and went to refill his glass. Malachi sidled up to Brodie as Kilbarron went searching for his cigarillos.\n\n\"We need to talk about the New Russia programme.\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"John says he wants to conduct, not play.\"\n\n\"I think he has to play,\" Brodie said. \"We're sold out.\"\n\n\"Well you'd better work some magic on the piano,\" Malachi said. \"He can barely last five minutes.\"\n\nBrodie thought: maybe he should stop drinking so much. Maybe he should stop injecting himself with his \"painkiller.\" However, the concert season was still months off. Perhaps country life was the answer\u2014peace and quiet, plenty of time to rehearse. Brodie switched his mind away from the prospect\u2014it was Malachi's problem, not his.\n\nAnd then Lika came in.\n\n\"Mr. Moncur, what a pleasure to see you.\"\n\n\"Likewise, Miss Blum.\"\n\nThey shook hands, Brodie squeezing hers as hard as he dared. He felt the pulse-race, the oxygen-need. It was astonishing the physical effects her presence wrought on him.\n\n\"May I have another glass, Malachi? You're right, it is wonderful stuff.\"\n\n\"We're all going to the dacha tomorrow,\" Kilbarron declaimed. \"Ten o'clock, the Warsaw station.\"\n\nLika turned her back to Kilbarron and Malachi and mouthed to Brodie, \"You must come.\" Then she turned back.\n\n\"What fun,\" she said. \"Our very own place in the country.\"\n\n# 3\n\nIt took only thirty minutes by train from the Warsaw station to Dubechnia, the nearest stop to Nikolskoe, the Vadimov estate, south of Petersburg.\n\nA short journey, Brodie thought, a bonus. Kilbarron, after the exuberation of the day before, seemed taciturn, morose\u2014and he didn't look well. Brodie sat opposite Lika in the train and from time to time would press his foot on hers while taking care to be looking out of the window, or at Malachi puffing on his thin cheroot. The compartment soon filled with smoke as Kilbarron roused himself to light one of his cigarillos. Brodie offered Lika a cigarette and they both lit up. Smoke was the best way to combat smoke.\n\nThe train slowed\u2014today it was clearly going to be more than half an hour to Dubechnia. Brodie took out his _Blue Guide_ from his bag and read about Dubechnia. The station (third class with a buffet) was just over a verst from the small town that boasted five hotels (two \"very bad\" and another one under the management of Poles, so the guidebook said), six churches, eight schools, a nunnery and a library with a free reading room. But, when they arrived at the station twenty minutes late, it transpired that it was another hour to the estate by coach and horses. They were met by the estate manager, Philipp Philippovitch Lvov, a heavily bearded, reserved man. He had with him a four-horse carriage and, once boarded with their luggage on the roof, they were trundled through the town on its unpaved main street, past a few stone houses and then many wooden ones and then past a steam flour mill, an abattoir, a rope mill, a tannery and many warehouses before they reached open country.\n\nThey travelled fairly comfortably along dirt roads through growing rye fields towards a place that was called Maloe Nikolskoe\u2014\"Lesser\" Nikolskoe\u2014the dacha that Elisaveta Vadimova had lent to Kilbarron. Kilbarron himself perked up on the journey as Malachi passed around a hip flask of vodka. It was a sunny May day with a thin baggage of clouds hurried by a brisk breeze. Warm air flowed by him through the open window. From time to time Brodie's knees bumped against Lika's\u2014she was opposite him in the carriage\u2014and they stared at each other whenever the two Kilbarrons were in conversation. Brodie's eyes were saying\u2014I want to be in bed with you, naked. Lika toyed provocatively with her hair and at one stage deliberately touched her lips with her forefinger for a good minute, her tongue licking out from time to time, driving him almost insane with desire, his erection a buckled L behind the straining barrier of his buttoned flies.\n\n\"Where is C\u00e9sar?\" he managed to ask, as innocently as possible, at one stage.\n\n\"Oh, I left him behind,\" she said. \"I have to see what dogs they have here. They might eat him alive. I know these farm dogs\u2014monsters.\" She turned to Philipp Lvov and spoke to him in Russian.\n\n\"Yes, he told me that they have half a dozen dogs at the farm,\" she said. \"A city dog like C\u00e9sar would stand no chance.\"\n\nThe day was warm and both Lika and Kilbarron fell into a doze as the carriage progressed steadily through the countryside. Brodie looked out of the window and felt that he might have been driving through the Borders of Scotland. Rye fields, valleys, copses, wooden bridges over small rivers dense with riverine trees and shrubs. It was only the villages they passed through that made the landscape strange again\u2014made it Russian\u2014with their thatched wooden shacks, small gardens with picket fences, the occasional stuccoed, onion-domed church. Then he was reminded that he was a thousand miles from home\u2014but at least he was only three feet away from the woman he loved. Malachi was speaking to him.\n\n\"What's that? Sorry?\"\n\n\"What're you smoking there, Brodie? I've always meant to ask.\"\n\nBrodie explained, offered him one and Malachi lit up.\n\n\"Very nice, very smooth,\" Malachi said. \"There's no burn. You could smoke these all day long.\"\n\nBrodie told him about the shop in Edinburgh: Hoskings in the Grassmarket. Mr. Hoskings would send anywhere in the world, but cash with order. Malachi took a little notebook from his pocket, unscrewed his pen and wrote down the details.\n\n\"You're a mine of useful information, Brodie Moncur. I shall be ordering from Mr. Hoskings.\"\n\nHe peered out of the window.\n\n\"Nearly there, I think. I wouldn't like to do this road in winter, begod, I'll tell you that for nothing.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nMaloe Nikolskoe was actually quite a large house made of green-painted planks with a rusty corrugated-iron roof. There was a fancy four-pillared porch over a wide veranda with an elaborate gingerbread verge-board and a mezzanine floor above, similarly overdecorated, with a disproportionately large weathervane. It was, so Philipp told them in his halting French, the house of the old estate steward, converted and improved. Behind it was a wide farmyard fringed with various wooden barns, storerooms and stables, where the farm animals were kept and where the servants slept. It was fenced off with high palings so it could not be seen from the house.\n\nThey clambered out of the carriage and their luggage was carried into the main house by a couple of lackeys that Philipp had summoned from the house. Brodie stretched and walked to the edge of the gravelled driveway. Here a small river had been dammed to create a large pond\u2014more of a semi-lake\u2014fifty yards across with a bathing house and a jetty with a boat tied to it. Through a copse of silver birches on the far side he could make out the roofs of the buildings of a small village half a mile beyond. Turning, he could see the dense woodland behind the main house, whence the small river flowed. Dogs barked, roosters uselessly crowed, cows moo-ed. The sun shone down. He felt, surprisingly, very at home. However much he enjoyed his urban existence, he was, he realized, still a country boy at heart.\n\nSet beside the lake, not far from the bathing house, was a two-storey wooden cottage, also made of planks, also painted green. Philipp Lvov told them that the \"big house,\" Nikolskoe itself, was about two versts away, through the woodland. Having looked around they all went inside.\n\nThey found simple, airy rooms, sparsely furnished. Rugs on polished wooden floors, sofas and armchairs and bare wainscoted walls except for a small icon in one corner. The main thing, Lika declared, was that it was clean. No bugs, no cockroaches. They were each apportioned a room\u2014or at least he and Malachi were. Lika and Kilbarron, it transpired, were to sleep in the cottage by the pond.\n\n\"I'm getting a piano shipped in,\" Kilbarron said to Brodie. \"You'll need to get it regulated for me. I've got a devil of a lot of work to do.\"\n\n\"What work?\" Brodie said without thinking.\n\n\"I've got to write a fucking symphony in three months,\" Kilbarron said. \"It's part of the contract, remember?\" He smiled a dead smile. \"Busy summer for me.\"\n\nPhilipp introduced them to the staff: the housekeeper, the cook, her assistant, two maids, two lackeys and the coachman who would transport them here and there. Outside there were gardeners and farm labourers. Maloe Nikolskoe had everything that might be required.\n\n\"And now lunch is served,\" Philipp said and opened the door to the dining room.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIn a significant way the arrival of Maloe Nikolskoe in the life of John Kilbarron and his entourage made everything worse for Brodie, he realized. Kilbarron decided that he and Lika would live there, not in Piter, much to Brodie's frustration. He was invited out at weekends, along with Malachi and various other friends and associates, and a form of Russian _dachniki_ house party would ensue. A lot of eating and drinking, charades and games\u2014there was a croquet lawn and a tennis court\u2014walks and bathing. Brodie hoped these weekends would distract Kilbarron and allow time for him to be with Lika but it proved incredibly difficult to be alone with her\u2014there was always someone hovering or sitting nearby or opening doors. Their fear of discovery made them ridiculously prudent\u2014the occasional two-second kiss, tongues deep in each other's mouths; a brief, fervent holding of hands. Otherwise Brodie had to be satisfied with staring at her across a busy conversation-filled room or brushing against her as they passed on the croquet court. It was beginning to drive him mad. Then one day he had an idea.\n\nIt was their third weekend at Maloe Nikolskoe. In fact \"weekend\" was something of a misnomer. True, the weekends would start on Friday afternoon with guests arriving from Piter, ferried in from Dubechnia, but the stay was open-ended and usually drifted on to Tuesday or Wednesday before the party finally broke up. Annoyingly, Kilbarron didn't seem to want to leave\u2014and he insisted Lika stay with him. He had weeks before the New Russia concert season would begin and until then, he said, there was nothing to take him away from the country. Here lay inspiration and less distraction.\n\nBrodie's idea took shape when, one sultry Friday afternoon, he spotted some fishing rods in the \"games room\" of the dacha. He prepared his rod and reel, tied on his three hooks, dug up some earthworms from the dunghill in the farmyard and wandered up the river along a brambly path looking for a large enough pool where he could fish, glad to be away from the house and its rowdy guests.\n\nThe river\u2014he should ask what it was called, he thought\u2014was shallow but slow-flowing, nothing like the rushing, burbling Liethen Water. As soon as he left the farmland the vegetation thickened round it\u2014aspens and birches, tall grass and thistles grew densely on the banks and made the going tricky. Flies buzzed around his head and the sun was hot on his face but he felt a familiar happiness settle on him. This was a world he knew and was at peace in. After about half an hour he found a place where the river made a big swerve and where a deep pool had formed. Here the slow river's lazy chestnut sprawl turned lithe as it poured over some rocks into a deep shadowed pool. There was no willow, but a tall ash tree leaned over the turbid dark water casting useful shadows. He baited his fine small hooks. There was a slight breeze and the coins of dappled sunlight on the water's surface shifted and merged. He walked up to the head of the pool where the running water slowed and deepened. He cast his line out to the head of the pool and let the current bumble the line and the worms downstream into the pool. He stripped off lengths of line from the reel, rod balanced in his hand, and let the line run free, floating the worms down with the current into the shadow cast by the ash. Blue damsel flies hovered over the watercress and ferns that edged the pool. A bite! He jerked on the line, turned the reel\u2014not a big fish, he knew at once\u2014and landed a small gudgeon, or so he thought. He wet his hands in the running water and unhooked it and threw it back in.\n\nHe set his rod down and lit a cigarette, taking a short stroll around, getting his bearings. Bushes and trees, many saplings, grew close to the river here, but under the ash was a turfy green patch where you could spread a blanket and picnic, he thought. Or spread a blanket and make love...\n\nThat night during dinner he slipped Lika a note with a small map, detailing the route he had taken up the river. The pool with the ash tree was underlined. \"I go one way. Thirty minutes later you go another. We meet by the ash-tree pool.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThe next day after lunch\u2014the other guests playing croquet, lying in hammocks reading, or sitting drinking and smoking on the veranda\u2014Brodie picked up his rod and fishing basket and announced he was off to catch their supper. Nobody gave him any notice and, anyway, Kilbarron had retreated to his cottage to sleep off lunch, soused on wine. Brodie imagined that in twenty minutes or so Lika would idly go off for a walk with C\u00e9sar. C\u00e9sar was now allowed to visit Maloe Nikolskoe as the farm dogs were mostly confined to their yard and, anyway, seemed uninterested in Lika's little dog.\n\nIn his fishing basket Brodie had a cotton tablecloth snaffled from the kitchen linen cupboard. When he reached the ash-tree pool he spread this on the grassy patch under the ash and sat down and waited. Thirty minutes later he saw Lika coming\u2014but from upstream, to his surprise, emerging from a copse of silver birches. He stood up as she advanced through the high blond grass. She was wearing blue-lensed glasses against the sun and as she made her way towards him she left thistle-floss trailing, dancing in her wake. For him it was a wholly numinous encounter. Standing by this small river in the dense, natural countryside, on a hot day in June, seeing this vision of the woman he loved picking her way through the teazle and thistle clumps, her straw hat in her hand, her hair down, caught by the erratic warm breezes, C\u00e9sar straining at his lead.\n\n\"Well, hello,\" she said. \"Fancy meeting you here.\"\n\nThey kissed. The Lika-kiss\u2014and then they tore at their clothes. Lika hauled up her cotton skirt; Brodie hauled down his trousers and drawers, his erection craning free. And then they went to it\u2014C\u00e9sar's lead knotted to a low branch of the ash as he looked on, panting, bemused.\n\nLater they stripped naked and swam in the pool. They moved the tablecloth into the sun and lay there, drying off, until they felt like making love again.\n\n\"We're like Adam and Eve,\" he said. \"The Garden of Eden.\"\n\n\"Where's the serpent?\"\n\n\"In a drunken stupor sleeping off his lunchtime wine.\"\n\nBrodie touched her face and she kissed his fingertips.\n\n\"We're actually alone, Lika. Can you believe it?\"\n\n\"We can come every day, every afternoon.\"\n\n\"No, no! We have to be careful. I'll tell you when. Nobody must suspect. And you can't just go for a walk every day with C\u00e9sar...I'm fishing\u2014so you have to do something. Sketching, watercolours. Collecting wild flowers.\"\n\n\"You're right,\" she said, thinking, frowning. \"Malachi will be watching us.\"\n\n\"Malachi? Why would he be watching us?\"\n\n\"Because...It's in his nature. He checks up on me.\"\n\nBrodie held her damp pale body in his arms and kissed her breasts\u2014thrilled in an obscure, unfathomable way to be naked on this riverbank with her. It seemed even more daring, somehow, more exciting than a room in some second-rate hotel. She hunkered into his side and reached down, taking his thickening penis in her hand, loosely.\n\n\"You've missed me,\" she said, \"haven't you?...\"\n\nLater when they dressed they elaborated their plans. If Kilbarron was really drunk then there would be no problem; but if he was still at the lunch table when Brodie went fishing they would have to be more heedful. Brodie would leave with his rod then Lika should wait an hour before she set off herself. And then they had to come back separately, again divided by a significant period of time.\n\nBrodie kissed her goodbye as she was about to set off homewards with C\u00e9sar. He would fish on for another half an hour, he said, and try to come back with some sort of convincing catch.\n\n\"You know I never asked you,\" he said, suddenly remembering. \"After all this time. How did the audition go?\"\n\n\"What audition?\"\n\n\"The Handel. _The Triumph of Time and Truth_ \u2014or whatever it was called.\"\n\n\"Oh...Yes. A disaster. I couldn't sing.\"\n\n\"Not even our little song?\"\n\n\"I made a mess of everything. I was so nervous.\"\n\n\"Never mind. Here we are. That's the main thing.\"\n\n\"I think I was too terrified\u2014singing in English, you know.\"\n\n\"Do you still have the music?\"\n\n\"What music?\"\n\n\"The sheet I wrote out for you.\"\n\n\"No...No, I left it at the theatre. I wasn't thinking. In a state. Why do you ask now, for heaven's sake? It was such a long time ago.\"\n\n\"I don't know. It came into my mind. Anyway\u2014it doesn't matter. I suddenly remembered, for some reason. I can write the song out for you again one day, if you want.\"\n\n\"I think my career is slowly dying. Best not to try to revive the corpse.\" She kissed him once more, touched his nose with a finger and wandered off back to the dacha, glancing back twice before she disappeared into the birches.\n\nBrodie picked up his rod. He looked at the river where a flimsy smoke of caddis flies wavered in a sunbeam. He shivered, feeling a contentment fill him, like a powerful liquor; like some ambrosial, aphrodisiacal tonic invading every blood vessel and capillary in his body\u2014his skin prickling with a sense of well-being, of unimprovable tactile happiness.\n\n# 4\n\nLike all practised lovers their subterfuges became more sophisticated as the summer wore on. Lika returned from a trip to Piter with sketchbooks and watercolours. Brodie paid Pyotr, a kitchen lackey, fifty kopeks to place four or five fresh fish in his fishing basket each time he went fishing so he never returned from their trysts empty-handed. In her room Lika would make sketches and drawings of notional rivers and woods, flowers and ferns. She had no talent for drawing and her ineptitude made each scene equally badly homogeneous. Kilbarron asked to see her sketches one day (she had returned later than Brodie, as planned), looked at them and said: \"Charming\u2014but you've a long way to go, my dear.\" The key fact was that the fishing trips and the _en plein air_ sketching seemed entirely authentic.\n\nAs June progressed into July they managed to visit the pool by the ash tree at least once every weekend, sometimes twice, keeping scrupulously to their timings and artifice. They became familiar lovers once again\u2014like the days of the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers\u2014rediscovering the nuances of their lovemaking. There were some days when Lika said no\u2014not today. She had a terrible fear of conceiving. Her menses were exceptionally regular\u2014she said she knew precisely which days to avoid. On those days she would masturbate him with particular care and attention, stopping and starting, allowing the session to be drawn out over ten minutes or so (or as long as Brodie could contain himself), both of them naked on their blanket\u2014they had moved on from their tablecloth.\n\n\"I could get a _capote,_ if you'd prefer,\" Brodie said. \"To be on the safe side.\"\n\n\"I have some,\" she said. \"Good idea. I'll bring one next time.\"\n\nShe had some...This set Brodie thinking.\n\n\"Do you fuck with Kilbarron?\"\n\n\"No. Not any more\u2014not for the last two years, more or less. He's too drunk. He tries but he falls asleep. And of course now he's injecting himself with this coca.\"\n\n\"But you sleep in the same bed.\"\n\n\"We have a bed\u2014but there's another bedroom. He snores so loudly the plaster falls from the ceiling! I get into bed with him but when he's asleep I go to the other bedroom.\"\n\nIt consoled him, this information. He wondered if it were true.\n\n\"So why do you stay with him?\" he asked one day, a little cruelly.\n\nBut she took the question seriously, thinking about it.\n\n\"In the beginning it wasn't too bad. And, I must admit, without John, in the early days, you know, I'd have had no career. He was incredibly helpful\u2014got me all my first jobs. Malachi told me\u2014John will make all the difference, just you wait.\"\n\n\"Malachi?\"\n\n\"Yes...I knew Malachi before I knew John, you see. Malachi introduced me to John. Didn't I tell you?\"\n\nShe seemed suddenly uncomfortable with these memories and started talking about other matters. Brodie didn't pursue this line of questioning but logged away the fact that Malachi had been in Lika's life, in some capacity, longer than Kilbarron had. What did that signify? How had that happened?\n\nOne day when he was coming back down the river, stepping through the high grass in the water meadows that led down to Maloe Nikolskoe he saw Malachi\u2014out with a shotgun with two of the yard dogs running around trying to set up birds.\n\nThey approached each other. Malachi was wearing a long fawn canvas duster coat that seemed to increase his bulk somehow, making his heft and presence more physically palpable, as if he were displacing extra volumes of air. He broke his gun and took out the cartridges, slipping them in his pocket.\n\n\"Thought I might set up some snipe or a partridge,\" he said. \"Fat chance. How about you? Any luck?\"\n\nHe tapped the wicker fishing basket slung over Brodie's shoulder. Brodie undid the buckles and showed him the four gleaming fish lying there\u2014Pyotr's fifty kopeks' worth.\n\n\"Looks like tench to me,\" Malachi said.\n\n\"Gudgeon,\" Brodie corrected.\n\n\"I'll take your word for it,\" Malachi said.\n\n\"They're always biting upstream,\" Brodie said. \"I don't think anyone fishes this river apart from me.\" He smiled, though his mouth was dry. He worked his tongue to make more saliva.\n\n\"Have you seen anything of Lika?\" Malachi asked, casually. \"She seemed to head out your way, I thought, to do some more of her terrible drawings.\"\n\n\"No,\" Brodie said. \"I just stuck to the river.\"\n\nMalachi looked at him.\n\n\"What is it?\" Brodie asked.\n\n\"You might drop in on John if you've a moment. I think he wants a word.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Brodie said. \"I'd better head back then.\"\n\n\"I'll come with you,\" Malachi said. \"These dogs are rubbish.\"\n\nThey headed back through the meadows towards Maloe Nikolskoe, the dogs bounding around them in the long grass. Malachi seemed brooding, thoughtful, and Brodie had no idea what to say to him. He remembered walking back with Callum towards Liethen Manor, that last afternoon he'd gone fishing in the Liethen Water\u2014it seemed like another world, another life, centuries ago. He closed his eyes for a second conjuring up the memories of that day, the peace he'd felt. Malachi was saying something.\n\n\"Sorry?\" Brodie said.\n\n\"I was wondering...How do you find Lika? As a person, I mean.\"\n\nBrodie was suddenly wary.\n\n\"I think she's very nice,\" he said, glad of the bland adjective. \"Very easy to talk to.\"\n\n\"She's a very special person,\" Malachi said, almost fiercely, as if Brodie had said something uncomplimentary. \"She's a precious person.\"\n\n\"Precious?\"\n\n\"To John, I mean. John relies on her more than he realizes, I think.\"\n\n\"I see.\"\n\n\"She gives him confidence.\"\n\n\"I don't think John's short of confidence,\" Brodie said, suppressing a laugh.\n\n\"No, I mean, because she's there in his life he can concentrate on his work. It reassures him, if you know what I mean. Without Lika he would have gone to pieces. And if John had gone to pieces it would have been a disaster. For me as well\u2014I owe everything to John, everything.\"\n\n\"I see,\" Brodie repeated. It wasn't making much sense to him. It was as if Malachi was working out some personal argument in his head through this baffling conversation.\n\n\"You knew Lika before John did, I believe,\" Brodie said, unguardedly.\n\nMalachi stopped.\n\n\"Who told you that?\"\n\n\"I think John must have mentioned it\u2014casually, in conversation.\"\n\nMalachi looked down at his feet.\n\n\"I knew her, yes\u2014a little,\" Malachi said, his voice suddenly almost inaudible. \"She was very young\u2014eighteen, nineteen. Then John heard her sing and saw her talent. He was the one that saw her...her promise.\"\n\n\"She has a lovely voice,\" Brodie said, keen to get off the subject. Malachi seemed to be in some sort of turmoil and Brodie wondered if he suspected something and was deliberately trying to make him blunder into an error, give a crucial detail away.\n\n\"We'll have fish for supper,\" he said, lamely.\n\n\"What?\" Malachi looked up. \"What're you blathering about?\" The old Malachi had returned.\n\n\"Supper. Fish. I've caught our supper.\"\n\n\"You can catch fish. You can tune pianos. You're not entirely useless, Moncur.\"\n\nThey turned around the edge of a copse and Maloe Nikolskoe lay before them.\n\nBack at the house, Brodie put his rod away and took the fish to the kitchen. He went to his bedroom and smoked a calming cigarette before wandering over to Kilbarron's cottage. There was no sign of Lika, he was glad to notice: still out sketching.\n\nKilbarron had shipped a grand piano out to Maloe Nikolskoe\u2014a B\u00f6sendorfer\u2014and had it set up in the middle of the modest but high-ceilinged salon in the cottage. Two bedrooms and a small study led off the central room. Kilbarron was practising more, now the date of his inaugural concerts was approaching. He could be heard playing from the veranda of the main house.\n\nAll was quiet as Brodie knocked and pushed the door open.\n\n\"Mr. K.?\" Brodie called. \"Are you there?\"\n\nHe stepped in. Kilbarron was sprawled in an armchair, his feet on a stool. There was a glass of vodka on the table beside him.\n\n\"The piano's out of tune,\" he said. His voice was hoarse, slurred.\n\nBrodie went to the piano and played his usual octaves. It was perfectly in tune. He noticed a handwritten title and some manuscript pages set on the music rack. \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee.\" What did that mean? He'd have to ask Lika.\n\n\"Is this your composition?\" he said. \"For the concerts. A sonata?\"\n\nKilbarron sat up and thought for a moment, coming to his senses slowly.\n\n\"It's a tone poem,\" he said. \"I'm going all modern.\" He stood and swayed over to the piano, snatching the manuscript off the rack. \"Work in progress,\" he said.\n\n\"I'll retune the piano later,\" Brodie said, diplomatically. \"Malachi mentioned you wanted a word.\"\n\n\"We're going back to Piter on Monday\u2014you and I. We have to set up the New Theatre piano. I'm getting rid of the Zollmeyer. I want a new piano\u2014and you can go to work on that. To perfection, mind. Absolute perfection. I think I know my programme now. And of course I have to make a grand show of it.\" He flexed his right hand and held it out, trembling. \"Except this bastard's not doing what it's told to any more.\"\n\n\"I'll sort the piano, sir,\" Brodie said. \"Don't give it another thought.\"\n\n\"Soapsuds.\"\n\n\"Feather-light.\"\n\n\"Snowflakes.\"\n\n\"Light as air.\"\n\nKilbarron laughed at this and put his arm round Brodie's shoulder.\n\n\"What would I do without you, Brodie, boyo?\"\n\nAt rare moments like these when he sensed Kilbarron's affection for him Brodie felt the sharp bite of his betrayal. He tried not to think of what he and Lika had been up to a couple of hours previously.\n\n\"Now\u2014you're going to have a drink with me, Brodie, me fine fella,\" he said, turning to look for the vodka bottle. \"And, by the by, we're all going up to the big house on Sunday. She who pays the piper has summoned us.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOn Sunday a carriage took them\u2014Kilbarron, Malachi, Lika and Brodie\u2014the mile or so to Nikolskoe. It was early evening and the light was rich and golden as they were driven through the beech and birch woods. They rounded a corner into the park and saw the house sitting on its small bluff behind the glassy stretch of its reflecting lake. Mirrored palaces. It had a high portico with four-yard-thick Doric columns supporting a tympanum crowded with mythic figures in bas-relief. Flanking the portico long symmetrical wings stretched to each side. The facade was white stucco with the wooden window embrasures picked out in forest green. It was at once imposing and unreal, almost like a vast stage flat set down in these cleared, manicured acres of countryside. Behind the house, Malachi explained, was a hamlet of the usual outbuildings\u2014stables, kitchens, storerooms, servants' quarters, and, for good measure, a Chinese pavilion, a grotto at the foot of a plashing artificial series of waterfalls, a neo-Gothic chapel and the family mausoleum\u2014bigger than the chapel.\n\nThe carriage pulled up and uniformed lackeys opened the doors. Tall braziers burned palely at the foot of the twenty wide steps which led up to the massive brass doors that gave on to the hall. Like entering a cathedral, Brodie thought. He felt transported back in time\u2014to the era of Catherine the Great, or Great Peter himself\u2014yet he knew Nikolskoe was only fifty years old. This house and its clutter of extravagant outbuildings, its thousands of acres of forests and farmlands, was the realized dream of a bourgeois millionaire who wanted to let the world know that Nikolai Sergeivitch Vadimov had well and truly arrived.\n\nBrodie followed the others into the towering hall, two storeys high with a domed ceiling. Marble was everywhere\u2014white, black, beige and rose, veined and pure\u2014whole quarries must have been emptied. He looked left and right and saw an enfilade of rooms disappearing into their own perspectives.\n\nMore liveried servants showed them up the curving white marble staircase into the main drawing room. Champagne was available at the door, served by tray-bearing waiters. They joined about twenty other guests\u2014local landowners and neighbours, an important painter, lawyers and bankers and their wives from Piter. Kilbarron was the guest of honour\u2014there was a little ripple of applause as the maestro entered. Brodie held back, feeling his tie and stiff collar choking him, and looked around for Lika, hoping for a glance of collusion and understanding, but she had already been led away and was talking animatedly to someone she appeared to know. She looked very beautiful, he thought\u2014once again in a variation of her \"vision in white\" style. Her hair held up by jewelled pins, her waist cinched tight, her d\u00e9collet\u00e9 perfectly poised on the border of decorum and allure.\n\nBrodie saw that people were smoking so he took out his cigarette case and lit a Margarita. He drained his glass of champagne and looked around for a waiter. Maybe the answer to this evening was to become pleasantly, persistently drunk.\n\n\"May I please to trouble you for cigarette?\"\n\nThe question was in English, heavily accented with Russian.\n\nBrodie turned to find a small, slim young woman in a formal midnight-blue suit. She was wearing spectacles.\n\nBrodie offered his case and explained about his foreign cigarettes.\n\n\"Do you speak French?\" she asked.\n\nBrodie repeated himself in French. He lit the small woman's cigarette.\n\n\"I am Varvara Nikolaevna Vadimova. You must be Monsieur Kilbarron's secretary.\"\n\n\"I am. Brodie Moncur.\"\n\nThey shook hands. She had small close-set eyes that were oddly offset by full, painted lips, and a frowning, serious demeanour, he thought, that said do not take me lightly, despite my painted lips, for I am rather formidable. Large emeralds were clipped to her earlobes. Money and intellect.\n\n\"Come,\" she said. \"Let me introduce you to my mother.\"\n\nBrodie followed her through the room to find a small plump woman in her fifties with a dramatic badger's white stripe in her blue-black hair. This was Elisaveta Ivanovna Vadimova, the patron who was paying for everything. Brodie gave a small bow and smiled as Varvara introduced him. Madame Vadimova was polite but soon turned away\u2014she wasn't that interested in the employees.\n\n\"You're not important enough, you see,\" Varvara said candidly. \"Why would she speak to Kilbarron's secretary when she can speak to Kilbarron himself?\"\n\n\"Fair enough,\" Brodie said. He didn't care, anyway.\n\n\"But at least you can say that you've met her.\"\n\n\"Something for the grandchildren to ponder.\"\n\nVarvara smiled.\n\n\"I'd rather talk to you. I find 'great' men very disappointing on the whole. So predictable. Have you ever met Tolstoy?\"\n\n\"Not yet.\"\n\n\"You haven't missed a thing, I promise you. No, I'm much more interested in who these paragons choose to be around them. You gain more insight. You're sitting beside me at dinner, by the way. We'll talk then.\" She wagged her finger at him, then smiled and drifted off to talk to someone else. Brodie lifted another glass of champagne from a passing tray, depositing his empty one. Yes, steady inebriation was the only solution.\n\nThe dining room was in a long, barrel-vaulted chamber, bright with many chandeliers and with walls crowded with portraits\u2014mythical Vadimovs from centuries past. The ceiling was decorated with putti sporting amongst pink-hued clouds. They ate several courses\u2014starting with _pirozhki_ stuffed with smoked fish, crayfish tails in aspic, fried snipe, roast venison, a cress salad, then a cream _plombir_ for dessert. Along with the wine, many flavoured vodkas were offered: clove, anise, cinnamon, caraway. Brodie tried everything and began to enjoy himself more as he struggled to keep up with Varvara's somewhat intense conversation.\n\n\"You know my grandfather built this house,\" Varvara said. \"It's not old at all.\"\n\n\"Yes, I had heard that.\"\n\n\"It was in the 1850s. I find it pretentious.\"\n\n\"Well, I think if you've got all that\u2014\"\n\n\"He was a simple engineer\u2014a talented engineer\u2014who built bridges. That was his speciality. He built more than four hundred bridges, all over Russia. The railway expansion, you know.\"\n\n\"Goodness.\"\n\n\"He made a lot of money. Then he bought coal mines and made another fortune and so purchased this estate. He demolished the old house and built Nikolskoe.\"\n\n\"What you might call a monument to his success.\"\n\n\"Then he bought ships and became even richer.\"\n\n\"Amazing.\"\n\n\"Before the emancipation\u2014of the serfs, you know\u2014there were two thousand servants in this house. Two thousand 'souls.' He built a theatre and plays were put on. It's astonishing isn't it? Just forty years ago\u2014to think life was led in this way.\"\n\n\"Nothing stays the same.\"\n\n\"And now we have only two hundred servants.\"\n\nBrodie\u2014such was the mood the cinnamon vodka was encouraging\u2014immediately thought of five witty rejoinders but was still sober enough to say something bland.\n\n\"You've kept up the grand style, all the same. Extraordinary. I must say I\u2014\"\n\n\"Have you worked with many virtuosi, like Kilbarron?\"\n\n\"Ah, yes,\" Brodie said and mentioned a few names: Firmin, Sauter, Nagel.\n\n\"Fascinating. Would you come and give a talk at my salon? This is what fascinates me, you see. The oblique view\u2014the view from the side, not face on. Not the view the world thinks it sees, or the view we're presented with: the official view. I'm not interested in the 'official' view of anything.\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"It's far more revealing\u2014the view askance, you might say. My guests will find it fascinating.\"\n\nHe wished she would stop using that word. Fascination wasn't really in his repertoire.\n\n\"I haven't ever spoken at a salon,\" he said. \"I'm not sure I'll be able to\u2014\"\n\n\"It's very informal. You introduce yourself and people\u2014sympathetic, intelligent people\u2014will ask you questions. In French, of course\u2014and you speak excellent French, may I congratulate you. Think of it as a conversation. A conversation with one subject. You.\" She rested her hand on his arm for a second. \"We meet at my apartment in Piter. After the summer is over, of course. It's very congenial.\"\n\n\"I'd be delighted,\" Brodie said, weakly.\n\n\"I'll be in touch.\"\n\n\"Let me give you my visiting card.\"\n\n\"I have all the information, Monsieur Moncur, don't worry.\" Now she squeezed his forearm. \"I very much look forward to consolidating our new friendship.\"\n\n# 5\n\nThree days later Philipp Philippovitch Lvov dropped him at Dubechnia station. Brodie was sure he was still feeling the ill effects of the Nikolskoe dinner and the truly hill-cracking hangover it had engendered. After the meal, the guests had moved into another smaller salon where coffee was served along with more flavoured vodkas\u2014something called Crimean vodka was pressed on people\u2014along with Holland gin, cognac and arak. Brodie tried everything and paid the price. Even today his mouth felt oddly dry and he was mildly photophobic\u2014the watery sun seemed unduly bright. He was returning to Petersburg to regulate the new piano that had arrived at the theatre, a Steingraeber, to make it ready for Kilbarron and Kilbarron's season. Lika had slipped a note into his hand as they had said their formal goodbyes (there had been no chance for another meeting at the ash-tree pool). As Philipp turned the carriage out of the Maloe Nikolskoe driveway, Brodie opened it. It was in Russian. \"\u041a\u0430\u043a \u044f \u0445\u043e\u0447\u0443, \u0447\u0442\u043e\u0431 \u0442\u044b \u0432\u0441\u0443\u043d\u0443\u043b \u0432 \u043c\u0435\u043d\u044f \u0442\u0432\u043e\u0439 \u0431\u043e\u043b\u044c\u0448\u043e\u0439 \u0445\u0443\u0439.\"\n\n\"Can you translate this for me, Philipp?\" Brodie asked, handing it over. Philipp spoke reasonable French.\n\nPhilipp glanced at it, looked away, glanced at it again and blushed through his beard.\n\n\"Someone is playing a joke on you, sir.\"\n\n\"No, please\u2014just translate it.\"\n\n\"It's very indelicate, sir.\"\n\n\"I asked for it to be copied from a book,\" Brodie said, improvising. \"Someone told me it was an old Russian saying.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, I don't think so. It's extremely...\" He paused. \"Extremely explicit. It must be a joke.\"\n\n\"We're two men alone, Philipp. What have we to be embarrassed about?\"\n\n\"All right, sir. If you insist. It says...\" He concentrated. Coughed twice. \"It says: 'I long to feel your very enormous penis inside me soon.'\" He cleared his throat again and looked up at the sky.\n\nBrodie took the note back from him and slipped it in his jacket pocket. They rode on the rest of the way in silence. Brodie couldn't help breaking out in a smile from time to time. Lika Blum\u2014irrepressible\u2014that was why he loved her so.\n\nAt the station Brodie was informed that the Petersburg train was running two hours late because of repair work further down the line, so he decided to wander into Dubechnia\u2014about half a mile from the station\u2014to see what the town was like.\n\nHe sauntered down Dubechnia's main street. Low houses, some with small mezzanines with dormer windows, were set behind front gardens with white picket fences, split paling fences, wicker and willow hurdles or irregular, diagonally laid logs between thin uprights. Brodie was struck by the variety of fencing on show in a small Russian town. Poplars and lilacs were planted on the roadside\u2014a dirt road, beaten rock hard by the summer sun. He was glad of his straw hat. As he approached the crossroads that formed the modest square at the centre of town the road began to be paved with wood\u2014thick oak planks set flush in the dirt\u2014that rumbled loudly as carriages passed over them.\n\nHere at the crossroads there was a small white wooden church with a pale blue cupola, the town hall and the best hotel (there was another inn\u2014\"tolerable\" his guidebook said\u2014on the outskirts by the road north to Piter). Brodie read its name slowly, deciphering the Cyrillic: the Evangelical Society Hotel. He was finally making some progress with his Russian, but could that be correct? From the outside it looked well maintained\u2014there were window boxes full of blue flax on the first floor\u2014but, stepping inside, it seemed less appealing. There was an overriding smell of cooking fat and everything was brown. Brown walls, brown rugs on stained brown floorboards. Even the huge stuffed bear by the reception desk was brown\u2014though it was becoming piebald as time advanced.\n\nBrodie wandered into the dining room set off to one side of the brown foyer. Half a dozen locals, all wearing their various hats, were sitting drinking, talking, playing dominoes. Brodie found a table by a window and asked the pot-boy for vodka and bread and gherkins. He looked around. There was a huge samovar on a table and a small cluster of icons behind it. Bunches of dried flowers were tied up against the cornice that was painted black to distinguish it from the general brown. His order arrived surprisingly swiftly accompanied by a small plate of rusks and crackers. Perhaps the hotel was better than his first impressions suggested. He munched at his dry cracker and sipped his vodka, an idea forming in his head. He wandered back through to reception. Behind the desk he saw a row of keys with heavy pear-shaped weights hanging from them. Six rooms, he thought: there must be at least one good one. He spoke in French to the clerk who appeared\u2014French didn't work. He tried his rudimentary German.\n\n\" _Das beste Zimmer, bitte,_ \" he said. Comprehension was achieved.\n\nHe was taken up the creaking stairs and shown into a large three-windowed room on the first floor, the one that had the flax window boxes. There was a wide wooden bed with a plump, soft eiderdown. The walls were pine, planed smooth and painted brown and there were Tatar rugs on the bare floorboards. It seemed clean enough. His plan was taking shape: he was beginning to see the Evangelical Society Hotel in Dubechnia as the Russian equivalent of the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers in Paris...\n\nHe went back to the taproom, finished his vodka and gherkins and paid\u2014an exhilaration filling him. Lika would approve of this idea, he felt sure. It was safer, that was the main thing, away from prying eyes, far from Kilbarron and Malachi. Everything was falling into place.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie crossed Dvortsovy Bridge heading for Varvara Vadimova's apartment on Nevsky Prospekt. He was a bit late\u2014held up at the theatre. There was a large crowd gathered in front of the Admiralty for some reason, so he ducked down to the canal and swept round Moika Street. Varvara's apartment was about halfway down the Prospekt\u2014he'd be there in ten minutes.\n\nHe was stopped by a row of policemen, barring the way. There had been some sort of an incident. Over the heads of the curious onlookers he could see a droshky turned on its side, a visible wheel shattered, and the horse lying still, immobile on the ground. There was a curious smell in the air, smoky, like a burning fabric, and not far off he could hear women, wailing.\n\nHe found someone\u2014an official in his uniform, wearing a top hat\u2014who could speak French and he was informed that a bomb had been thrown at a Cabinet minister who had just left the Ministry of Finance. He was alive, it seemed, but gravely wounded along with a few innocent passers-by. The bomb-thrower had been arrested.\n\nBrodie doubled back and cut through Mikhailovskaya Place until he reached the Fontanka canal and rejoined Nevsky there. Traffic was moving slowly up the wide boulevard as if nothing had happened\u2014another day, another bomb. He looked for the number of Varvara's apartment and found it opposite the public library. He composed himself and then rang the bell on the main door. He had absolutely no idea what he was letting himself in for.\n\nVarvara greeted him as he handed a lackey his overcoat. She looked quite different: her hair was down, thick, a lustrous auburn, and she wore a vivid yellow blouse over a black skirt. Red shoes with high heels\u2014she was significantly taller\u2014completed the ensemble. Her yellow blouse was satin, like a second skin, and very clinging and Brodie felt ashamed as his gaze was instantly drawn to the way it revealed the shape of her breasts. He quickly looked her in the eye and smiled.\n\n\"I'm late, I know\u2014I apologize. There was a problem up by the Admiralty, some kind of bomb went off.\"\n\n\"You're not late because tonight you are the timekeeper,\" she said, then, adding in English, \"Everyone is here, Mr. Moncur, drinking, eating, having a wonderful occasion.\" She led him down a dark corridor to a large drawing room that contained about thirty people, most of them women, Brodie noticed instantly, and most of them young\u2014in their twenties and thirties, he estimated. He did spot one elderly gent with a shock of white hair smoking a pipe.\n\n\"Is your mother here?\" Brodie asked.\n\n\"No, no! She disapproves of my soir\u00e9es\u2014she thinks they're decadent.\"\n\nDecadent? Brodie thought to himself as Varvara gripped his elbow and steered him towards a table with a punchbowl. He was served with a glass of punch by a white-jacketed waiter, took a sip and turned to see\u2014with a sudden depression\u2014that a chair had been placed on a dais at the end of the drawing room. Beside it was a small table with a carafe of water and a glass. Sofas and armchairs had been pushed back against the wall and a semicircle of wooden seats faced the dais. Varvara introduced him to smiling enthusiastic people\u2014everyone seemed to speak French\u2014but he was taking nothing in, in a mild daze of panic, trying to ignore the auguries of defeat and humiliation that were crowding in on him, cursing himself for agreeing to subject himself to this ordeal.\n\nBrodie emptied his punch glass, set it down and smoked a Margarita as quickly as possible, muttering pleasantries, smiling and nodding at these people who seemed unusually keen to meet him. He must have shaken a dozen hands before Varvara left him and went to the dais, clapping her hands for silence. She then spoke in Russian for a minute or two, very fast, Brodie understanding nothing except the mentioning of his name and Kilbarron's. Then Varvara turned towards him and held out her hand.\n\n\" _Je vous pr\u00e9sente Monsieur Brodie Moncur!_ \"\n\nBrodie stepped onto the dais to an enthusiastic round of applause and sat down. He prayed to the gods of improvisation and, at Varvara's urging, began to tell the semicircle of rapt listeners what it was like to work for a man of unquestionable genius like John Kilbarron. He managed five minutes or so and sensed himself floundering so switched his speech to the mysterious art of piano tuning, talking of his apprenticeship and then his career, mentioning the names of all the master-pianists whose pianos he had tuned in Edinburgh and Paris.\n\nA hand was raised in the audience. Brodie's relief was intense\u2014the focus had shifted.\n\nA young woman whose hair was so blonde it might have been white asked him what exactly he did when he tuned a piano for someone like Kilbarron or Karl-Heinz Nagel. Bless you, lovely blonde woman, he thought, as he launched into a potted description of his m\u00e9tier.\n\nAfter that the questions began to flow and he began to relax. Also the audience began to debate amongst themselves. They were particularly intrigued by what he didn't disclose.\n\n\"So you have magic powers, then,\" the white-blonde woman teased him.\n\n\"Let's say I have a few special tricks, known only to me,\" he said, using the word _astuces._ \"If I told you what they were then everyone would copy me\u2014and I'd be out of a job.\"\n\nThere was laughter at this and, as he seemed to relax, so too did the mood in the room, as if the serious intellectual import of the evening was over and now people could concentrate on enjoying themselves. After a few more questions Varvara clapped her hands for silence again and thanked Brodie for his most fascinating disquisition. Fascinating\u2014that word again...\n\nHe stepped down, acknowledging the applause, feeling his shirt damp, clinging to his back, and headed for the punchbowl. Varieties of vodka were now being served as well and canap\u00e9s of blinis and caviar. He was congratulated on every side. He drank some orange-flavoured vodka and smoked another cigarette, Varvara standing beside him almost as if she owned him, somehow. He was aware of Varvara being congratulated as well.\n\n\"It was ideally relaxed, ideally informal and full of insight, Monsieur Moncur,\" she said in an aside. \"This is more unusual for us. It was intimate. Personal. Most evenings it is rather forbidding and serious.\"\n\n\"I hope I haven't lowered the tone,\" Brodie said. But he sensed the social temperature in the room changing, now the business of the evening was over. Intimate was the right word. Suddenly there seemed more men in the room\u2014late arrivals?\u2014and the noise level rose and the laughter increased. And it was laughter of a certain recognizable sort\u2014licentious, fun-filled\u2014unmistakeable. He saw hands being held, hands being kissed, hands going round waists, men whispering in women's ears. It was contagious.\n\nVarvara left his side for a moment and he turned to look at a picture on the wall behind him. It was of a river in winter, its banks flooded, stark, leafless trees silhouetted in a silver light. It reminded him of Maloe Nikolskoe\u2014of the river he fished in and beside which he and Lika fucked. Maybe it looked like this in winter...The ash tree bare. He suddenly missed Lika with a palpable ache. How could he contrive to go back to Maloe Nikolskoe? They had to set his plan in motion.\n\nVarvara was back at his side.\n\n\"Do you like this picture?\" she asked.\n\n\"Very much.\"\n\n\"It's by a painter called Levitan. He's a genius. I have a better one in my study\u2014would you like to see it?\"\n\n\"Well, if it's not too much trouble.\"\n\n\"Follow me.\"\n\nVarvara led him through the parting crowd of guests up the dark corridor and into a room next to the apartment's hallway. It was a study: neat glassed-in bookshelves, a desk, a daybed, many pictures on the cream-papered walls. Varvara was pointing to a particular picture. He approached and saw the canvas was of a vast expanse of flat steppe and a thin, chalky cart-track disappearing into the distance where bulging clouds massed on the horizon, blue-black with rain. Some rooks were flying low to the ground above the yellow grasslands. He could almost hear their raucous yells.\n\n\"Very impressive,\" he said.\n\n\"It's called _The Gathering Storm._ \"\n\n\"Goodness. Extremely well painted. I must\u2014\"\n\nVarvara had flung herself at him, grabbing his head between her palms and flattening her lips on his, her tongue pushing through his parting teeth searching for his tongue, their spectacles clashing so fiercely that Brodie's went flying. They kissed fiercely like this for a full minute then broke apart, panting. Varvara was a misty blur of yellow satin.\n\n\"My glasses,\" Brodie said. \"I can't see a thing. Sorry.\"\n\nVarvara found them and handed them to him. Focus returned. Trepidation arrived.\n\n\"You will disapprove of me,\" Varvara said, smiling modestly, unperturbed.\n\n\"Look...It's...There are moments...Sometimes...\"\n\n\"Are you betrothed?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" he said immediately, inspired. \"There is someone. In Scotland.\"\n\n\"Then it doesn't matter. You're here in Russia. It's so far away. She might as well be on the moon.\"\n\nShe took both his hands and drew herself close to him, looking up. Then she placed his hands on her breasts and held them there. Brodie felt her breasts yield slightly through the yellow satin. \"Come tomorrow,\" she said softly. \"Eight o'clock. We'll dine here, just the two of us.\"\n\n\"Miss Vadimova, I should tell you\u2014\"\n\n\"Call me Varvara.\"\n\n\"Varvara. I'm not well. I have tuberculosis.\"\n\nThis took her aback and she let go of his hands. He let them drop to his side, welcoming his opportunity, boldly.\n\n\"I'm seeing a doctor here in Piter. They have high hopes, I'm glad to say. I'm being treated.\"\n\n\"I know the best doctors. We'll talk about this. I can help you.\"\n\nBut the mood had changed as suddenly as it had erupted. She looked at him intently, differently.\n\n\"You have a line across your lenses.\"\n\n\"They're called Franklin spectacles. Two lenses of different focus. One for close work, one for distance.\"\n\n\"Most interesting. I think this could be useful for me.\"\n\nShe was walking to the door. Brodie followed.\n\n\"Shall we have some more vodka?\" she said. \"And talk about optics?\"\n\n\"I think that would be an excellent idea.\"\n\nThey walked silently down the long corridor approaching the surging noise emanating from the drawing room. It was almost strident, swelling. Astonishingly, there seemed almost more people present. Where had they come from? Brodie now had the sense that the talk and the salon were simply the pretext to set an entirely different evening in motion. Varvara looked at him sadly, squeezed his arm and went to chat to other people. Brodie felt a terrible exhaustion descend on him. If only Lika were here; if only he could somehow summon her here in a second from Maloe Nikolskoe. He pushed all thoughts of what had happened away and edged through the throng, making for the punchbowl.\n\n\"Most interesting talk.\" The compliment was in English. Brodie looked round.\n\nA tall young man, gangly, balding, with a receding chin, a neat fair moustache and amused, twinkling eyes stood there.\n\n\"George Vere,\" he said, holding out his hand. \"I'm at the embassy here in Piter. I'm an old friend\u2014which is to say a new friend\u2014of the impulsive Varvara.\"\n\nThey shook hands.\n\n\"Did she jump on top of you?\" Vere asked.\n\n\"No. Not at all.\"\n\n\"Lucky you. I had to tell her I was married with four children back in England.\"\n\n\"Are you?\"\n\n\"God no. Confirmed bachelor, actually. But, you know, in a crisis, necessity being the mother of invention and all that.\"\n\n\"It's quite a salon,\" Brodie said. \"If it can be described as such.\"\n\n\"Fair point. Anyway, you set the tone admirably,\" Vere said. \"It's usually deadly dull and serious. But look at the fun everyone's having tonight. Can I invite you for lunch one day? We could go to the Imperial Yacht Club if you don't mind being surrounded by diplomats. French chef.\"\n\n\"Thank you. I'd like that.\"\n\nVere took his visiting card out of a slim flat silver box and gave it to Brodie.\n\n\"You can always get me at the embassy on Dvortsovaya. If not, they'll know where to find me.\"\n\n> Nevsky Prospekt, 23 (1a)\n> \n> St. Petersburg\n> \n> Dear Mr. Brodie,\n> \n> Please excuse my appalled English. Thank you for last night. You were, without any doubting, our most cherished speaker so far in two years of salon. And I liked our kiss. Did you not also like? \"And where a kiss may lead may one not permit to follow?\" I think this is English saying. Please come to dinner at my apartment on Sunday 16th. There will be six or eight guests. Sehr gem\u00fctlich.\n> \n> With affection,\n> \n> V. N. Vadimova\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie made an excuse by letter, by return. He was needed at Maloe Nikolskoe with Kilbarron, many abject apologies. And, as July progressed, Kilbarron indeed seemed reluctant to leave the estate. He practised every day for at least four hours, as if he had suddenly realized the demands of the inaugural concerts\u2014in early September\u2014of the Kilbarron Season. As Brodie walked by the cottage he could hear Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Tchaikovsky. From time to time he was called in for further tuning and voicing. Kilbarron's weak right hand was proving a liability. \"Thank God for my painkillers,\" he would say, closing his eyes.\n\nOne afternoon Philipp Lvov returned from Dubechnia with a package for Kilbarron. Brodie was alone on the veranda and there was no sign of Malachi. He knew these were scores sent for from Piter: Kilbarron, despite his assurances, was still fretting about the programme for his inaugural concert.\n\nBrodie sauntered across the patchy lawn towards the cottage. No sound of music emanated. Kilbarron had drunk his fill at lunch and was no doubt sleeping it off, Brodie thought. But the front door was ajar and peering through the gap Brodie saw that the piano was closed. He pushed the door open and slipped through, placing the package of scores on the piano stool, and turned to tiptoe out.\n\n\"You're just a fool,\" Brodie heard. \"A stupid young fool. Why should I do anything for a fool?\"\n\nHe stopped, thinking he was being addressed, then heard Lika bravely reply.\n\n\"You've always said I was a 'fool.' What's the difference now?\"\n\nBrodie froze, realizing that Kilbarron and Lika were in the bedroom. He felt sick.\n\n\"The difference,\" Kilbarron said, \"is that I've got a job to do. An enormous demanding task in front of me\u2014I can't be worrying about you and your foolish dreams.\"\n\n\"I don't care what it is but I need to sing something, anything. I haven't sung for over a year. I need to\u2014\"\n\n\"So what?\" Kilbarron suddenly shouted. \"Who gives a brass farthing for you? You're a third-rate chorus singer perfect for a third-rate chorus. Go and sing in a church choir if you want to exercise your vocal cords. I haven't got time to get you a job. Why do you want a job\u2014you've got a salary. You're my musical assistant, for fuck's sake! A well-paid musical assistant. People would kill for your job. Cut off their right hand to work with me, John Kilbarron. But instead it's all me, me, me! Lika this! Lika that! Don't you ever give a thought for what I have to do? For what I stand for here in this country? What my responsibilities are? No\u2014you're besotted with yourself and your thin little squeaky voice.\"\n\nAt this Brodie heard Lika begin to sob, helplessly. He thought he might faint and took some steps to the door. He should never have stopped to listen. Overhearing like this was a shock\u2014too raw, too unguarded, too private and personal. Slowly he pulled the door open, hearing it creak on its hinges and, to his consternation, heard Kilbarron suddenly pleading\u2014his voice childlike, wheedling.\n\n\"Lika, darling, darling, don't cry, my lovely. I'm a horrible man. Horrible, shameful. A shameful monstrous drunk old man. I love my Lika\u2014come to me my Lika-lovely. I'm so sorry, I should never have said that. I'll get you a job, I'll get you a role, whatever you want, an opera, an oratorio, we'll have a recital just for you, show the world what a beautiful person with a beautiful voice you are\u2014I'll look after you, my darling.\"\n\nBrodie closed the door behind him and walked briskly away, feeling a shiver of disgust run through his body. He forced himself to think of Lika\u2014poor Lika, what she had to go through, what she had to suffer. No one should have to endure this sort of humiliation. He felt his resolve solidify: he was going to find a way to free Lika from John Kilbarron. They had to escape, both of them, one way or another.\n\nThat evening before dinner he managed to snatch a moment alone with her. Her eyes were red, her face slumped from her crying.\n\n\"What's the matter?\" he whispered. \"What happened?\"\n\n\"My mother's not well,\" she said. \"I had a letter. It made me upset. Stupidly.\"\n\n\"Right,\" Brodie said, realizing that secrets were being kept.\n\n\"I'll be all right. It's not serious. I'm being oversensitive.\"\n\n\"Are you sure? There's nothing else you\u2014\"\n\n\"We'd better go in.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThey decided\u2014mutually\u2014that it was wise to be even more cautious about meeting by the river, Brodie claiming that he sensed that Malachi thought something was afoot. So, some days Brodie went fishing as usual and Lika stayed at the house, playing croquet and reading. Some days she went off sketching and Brodie made a point of being seen by Malachi mooching around the pond or practising his casting on the lawn. In any event they both felt the riverbank encounters were coming to an end, their days of sun-favoured lovemaking over. And the weather was proving less than perfect that summer as it continued: sudden thunderstorms drenching them and then a few days of unseasonable coolness before the timid sun appeared again.\n\nThere was one odd moment that confirmed this prudence had been right. He was returning from the bathing hut after a swim in the pond and he saw Malachi and Lika down at the foot of the orchard, in conversation, Lika with a basket full of windfalls on her arm. Brodie saw Malachi\u2014who was talking intently to her\u2014suddenly reach forward and take her free hand. Lika snatched it away and said something brusque to him. Malachi turned and marched back to the house, rebuked in some way, eyes fixed ahead. Brodie heard the door to his room slam. What had happened in the orchard? What had Malachi said and why had he taken her hand like that? Had he accused her of something\u2014something that angered her? Brodie sensed he'd get no answer from Lika\u2014what went on between her and the Kilbarron brothers was not something she ever seemed to want to reveal to him.\n\nBrodie's new plan had taken firmer shape and Lika was aware of its intricate details. He had instructed the manager of the New Russia Theatre to send him a telegram on a certain day, a week hence, saying that he was urgently required to restring the bass section on the new concert piano. The telegram duly arrived and Brodie informed the Maloe Nikolskoe household that he had to go back to Piter for a few days. The following morning he was taken in a pony and trap to the station at Dubechnia and from there he walked into town and checked into the Evangelical Society Hotel and was shown to the _beste Zimmer_ on the first floor. In his halting German he told the manager that his wife would be joining him the next day.\n\nBrodie had a spare evening in Dubechnia. At dusk he went for a stroll, turning off the main street at random. He passed a club\u2014he could hear the click of billiard balls, laughter and some music playing\u2014a milliner's, a shop selling bagels. Then he found himself in a surprisingly kempt and tidy park with a small rushing river flowing through it, planted out with sick-looking saplings lashed tightly to stout raw pickets. At one end of the park behind a high wall was a substantial stone mansion that he was told was the governor's house. A hawker selling various types of brooms and dusters engaged him in conversation but they could not communicate. He tried to enter the largest church in Dubechnia\u2014the \"cathedral,\" so-called\u2014but it was locked. There was a beggar outside the main door, asleep.\n\nHe turned away and spontaneously selected another street that, very quickly, he saw brought him to the edge of the town. Here the mud road was thickly rutted and on either side were the meanest lean-to wooden shacks with their collapsed thatched roofs, boxy hovels with turf and plank roofs, a blackened smoking stove pipe protruding. Animals\u2014dogs, hens, pigs\u2014sniffed, picked and rummaged at steaming rubbish heaps and the few people he saw looked like aborigines, burnt black by the sun or their skin darkened by accumulated filth, their bulky clothes cut from some sort of thick felt or leather. Half-naked children stared at him\u2014their eyes white in their bronze faces\u2014as if he were a visitor from some distant planet, standing there in his suit and tie with his polished shoes. Brodie raised his hand in vague salutation\u2014they were fellow human beings after all\u2014and quickly retraced his steps. An old woman, draped in rags, bent double, bared toothless gums at him and tried to grab his sleeve. He threw some coins on the ground and strode away, managing to find his way back to the hotel where he dined on mutton chops with a caraway sauce followed by apple _kissel,_ a kind of moulded pudding thickened with potato starch, that he thought delicious. He went to bed and dreamt of Lika.\n\nOn Lika's side the deception was meant to commence a good twenty-four hours later so that Brodie's departure seemed long gone and unconnected with her own. A nagging toothache\u2014she had better see her dentist in Piter. So she too was taken to Dubechnia and deposited at the station. Once the Petersburg train had left she made her way into town and the Evangelical Society Hotel where her lover was waiting impatiently.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie told the concierge that his wife wasn't feeling well so they would like some food sent up to their room. They were sent a cold roast capon, bread rolls and a green and white bean salad. They asked for wine but there was only Ukrainian champagne available. Brodie and Lika ate their food naked in bed, setting out their feast on a towel between them. They toasted each other and congratulated themselves on their clever scheme. It was so different being in a hotel with a bed\u2014like Paris\u2014a whole night together.\n\n\"What will we do, Brodie?\"\n\n\"What do you mean?\"\n\n\"What will become of us?\"\n\n\"Let's not think about anything until this first concert season is over. Kilbarron knows I can't stay here forever\u2014there's practically nothing for me to do.\"\n\n\"What then?\"\n\n\"We'll leave. Go away\u2014back to Paris, anywhere. We could go to America. You can sing; I can tune pianos.\"\n\n\"It's easy for you to say,\" she said, reaching for the bottle. \"It'll be harder for me to leave.\"\n\n\"Just tell him it's over. These things occur. Love dies, all that.\"\n\n\"And then it'll be a new century,\" she said, thinking and frowning as if the idea troubled her in some way.\n\n\"What's that got to do with anything?\"\n\nShe pulled the soft centre from a bread roll and munched on it.\n\n\"I mean\u2014what will it be like, the twentieth century? Will we even notice? Will it seem that nothing has changed\u2014just a date in the calendar?\"\n\n\"Automobiles,\" Brodie said, thinking about the twentieth century. \"There'll be no more horses in a few years, I bet you. No horse trams or horse cabs. Our children will be amazed that we needed horses to get from here to there. Millions of horses. That the streets of the grandest, richest cities in the world stank of horse shit. It'll seem like a fantasy.\"\n\n\"And there will be no more wars,\" Lika said. \"No diseases.\"\n\n\"Well, I'm not so sure about that,\" Brodie said. He thought further: \"People will travel the world in balloons, giant balloons\u2014I read about them in a newspaper.\"\n\nShe lay down, resting her head on his knee. He leaned and kissed her forehead.\n\n\"I know one thing the next century will bring for sure,\" she said in a quiet voice.\n\n\"What's that?\"\n\n\"Our deaths. We will die in the twentieth century, Brodie, you realize.\"\n\n\"Please don't talk like that!\"\n\n\"But it's true. We'll both die in the twentieth century.\"\n\n\"Everybody has to die at some time. Everything dies\u2014trees, animals, stars...\" He cupped her sweet, troubled face. \"Don't think about that, Lika. Think about us, here in this room, now. This is our world. Time has stopped. That's all that matters.\"\n\nIn the morning, Lika said: \"Let's stay one more night. Let's not leave this room the whole day.\"\n\nBrodie thought about it.\n\n\"It might be risky.\"\n\n\"I'll send a telegram\u2014say I have to have a tooth out.\"\n\n\"How can you send a telegram from Dubechnia to Dubechnia?\" But Brodie was thinking hard\u2014perhaps there was a way...\n\nHe dressed and went out to the post office. On the telegraph form he wrote, \" _Complications avec dent. Revenir demain. L. V. Blum._ \" He asked the postmaster if there was a commissionaire in Dubechnia who could deliver the form to Maloe Nikolskoe. The postmaster, a thin man with a truly massive moustache, looked at him sadly.\n\n\"This is not Petersburg, sir. We have no commissionaires here.\"\n\n\"I would pay a rouble for someone to deliver this to Maloe Nikolskoe.\"\n\n\"There's a boy who could deliver it. I'll see to it.\"\n\n\"Oh\u2014would you stamp the telegram?\"\n\nThe postmaster reached for his stamp and banged it down on the form. Brodie handed over the rouble, folded the telegram and wrote \"J. Kilbarron, Maloe Nikolskoe.\"\n\nHe then handed another rouble to the postmaster.\n\n\"With thanks for your trouble, sir.\"\n\nHe walked slowly back to the hotel pondering this duplicity. Another night\u2014they should be safe, then Lika would reappear at Maloe Nikolskoe, toothache cured. He would wait a day and a half and return himself. Why would anyone suspect anything? Just more comings and goings amongst the constant comings and goings. And then guests would be arriving for the next weekend. He bounded up the stairs to their room, two at a time.\n\nThey stayed put all day, as Lika wanted. They ordered a lunch of forcemeat _pirogi_ and a bottle of vodka. They drank too much and smoked cigarettes. They made love when they felt aroused. They chased flies round their room. They looked out of the window at the good people of Dubechnia passing by and speculated about them, making up stories. As dusk arrived they felt hungry again and ordered more Ukrainian champagne, blinis and pressed caviar. Then they extinguished the oil lamps and lay in bed in the darkness, holding each other.\n\n\"I'll never forget these hours, here,\" Brodie said. \"Never.\"\n\n\"Neither will I.\"\n\n\"Our time in the Evangelical Society Hotel.\"\n\n\"It's been...\" She thought. \"Enchanted.\"\n\nBrodie decided it was time to make his declaration.\n\n\"You know I love you, Lika.\"\n\n\"Yes. Yes, I do, my darling.\"\n\n\"I want to spend my life with you. I can't be without you any more. I can't imagine ever being without you. We have to find a way to\u2014\"\n\n\"Stop! Don't say any more, Brodie. It's very complicated, my situation\u2014you've no idea. Our situation is complicated as well. There'll be times when we have to be apart\u2014you know that.\"\n\n\"Then we should uncomplicate it. It'll be hard\u2014there'll be bad feeling and we won't be forgiven. But you see what it's been like these last two days together. Imagine if this was the way it always was\u2014no hiding, no lying. Just you and me. Free.\"\n\n\"It's a nice dream, Brodie. Let me dream about it.\"\n\nThey slept in each other's arms under the soft eiderdown, facing each other, her head on his shoulder, knee to knee.\n\nAnd then in the night he felt cold and reached for the eiderdown to pull it over him\u2014and it wasn't there. He opened his eyes to see a candle burning and beyond its halo of orange light stood Malachi Kilbarron.\n\nBrodie knew he wasn't dreaming. He sat up, his hands quickly concealing his groin. Malachi kicked the bed and Lika woke. She gave a little scream, covering her breasts with her arms.\n\n\"Well, well, well,\" Malachi said, unpleasantly. \"The happy couple.\"\n\nHe stared at Lika and she avoided his gaze.\n\n\"Pretty as ever, my sweet,\" he said. \"Those lovely titties.\"\n\nLika tore the sheet from under her and wrapped it around her body. Malachi turned to Brodie.\n\n\"I'll see you downstairs, Moncur. In two minutes. Get your cock and balls into a pair of trousers. Make yourself decent.\"\n\nHe strolled out of the room.\n\nLika could hardly speak. She seemed in a strange kind of shock, dry retching, coughing as she dressed as quickly as possible. They hugged each other before he went downstairs to confront Malachi.\n\n\"You know,\" Brodie said softly, trying to calm her, \"maybe this is for the best. Everything has to change now.\"\n\n\"No,\" she said in a small voice. \"You don't know Malachi. Everything will become worse now. Everything will be bad.\"\n\nBrodie kissed her and went to meet Malachi Kilbarron.\n\n# 6\n\nLika had been right: everything was indeed worse than before, but in varying degrees. Sometimes it seemed, for a minute or two, as if nothing had changed. But then a remark would be tossed into a conversation, or a statement made, or a look deflected, that reminded him how life had been better before the awful discovery.\n\nDownstairs that night in the taproom of the Evangelical Society Hotel, Malachi had sounded surprisingly reasonable as he had laid out his terms\u2014his conditions for remaining silent. He was drinking vodka and didn't offer any to Brodie. Brodie was aware of Philipp Lvov lurking in the lobby, also. Malachi said he wouldn't tell Kilbarron\u2014poor brother John\u2014about this betrayal as it would destroy him. And particularly at this moment as he prepared for his inaugural concerts and the opening of his first season\u2014and every reward attending on it\u2014such a revelation would be devastating. So, Malachi said, condition one: the Brodie\u2013Lika \"affair\" was over. Condition two: Brodie and Lika had to do everything Malachi told them. There was to be no independent activity or initiative, everything had to be referred to Malachi.\n\n\"You are my creatures,\" Malachi said, straightforwardly. \"Got that? My creatures henceforth and until I tell you that you are released. And you will do my bidding. Understand?\"\n\nBrodie could only agree to the terms and Malachi went away, leaving instructions. Lika was to return to Maloe Nikolskoe in the morning. Brodie was to wait the day out and return in the evening.\n\nBrodie felt he had to ask a question.\n\n\"How did you know? How did you know we were here?\"\n\nMalachi smiled.\n\n\"I recognized your handwriting on the telegram. The way you do your 'C' and your 'R.' I thought\u2014hello? Brodie Moncur's sending us a telegram from Piter about Lika's teeth. Funny. Then I looked at the stamp. Dubechnia. It wasn't difficult to find you.\"\n\nAll so simple, Brodie thought. If only he'd asked the postmaster to write the telegram...\n\nWhat did change was John Kilbarron's attitude. Malachi had said he wouldn't tell him but Brodie felt Kilbarron was suddenly noticeably cooler towards him. Just a nod of the head when they met and he seemed to want to keep his distance. But, on the other hand, nothing appeared changed between Kilbarron and Lika. She sat beside him at meals; she slept in his bed at night, or so Brodie assumed. He calculated further that Malachi had probably said something vague to his brother\u2014along the lines that Brodie was not to be trusted\u2014hence Kilbarron's _froideur._ Brodie survived on the margins for a few more days as guests came and went. There was another dinner up at the big house but Brodie wasn't invited this time\u2014only Kilbarron, Malachi and Lika.\n\nBecause of the pressure they were under he only dared risk a few snatched conversations with Lika. She seemed calmer.\n\n\"He doesn't know,\" she said. \"I'm absolutely convinced. But he's on edge, tense, because of the concerts. In fact he's being quite sweet to me.\"\n\nFor the first time in their relationship Brodie regretted that he and Lika had to converse in a second language. His good French wasn't quite good enough to make clear the nuances of his suspicions. Surely Lika sensed something, he asked. Has he said anything about me? No, she replied: \" _Il est absolument comme d'habitude._ \" It wasn't enough. And Lika's reassurances were also troublingly bland. \"I've seen him like this before. It's always the same when he prepares for big concerts.\" But Brodie wasn't reassured. Their shared language was at variance.\n\nThree days after the Malachi confrontation Brodie walked past the cottage and could hear Kilbarron practising\u2014Brahms, he recognized, the \"Paganini-variationen.\" The technique was flawless but he could tell at once that the piano was slightly out of tune and, before lunch as they gathered in the dining room, he mentioned this.\n\n\"It's fine,\" Kilbarron said. \"It serves its purpose. Doesn't bother me.\" He looked searchingly at Brodie and Brodie wondered again what it was that Malachi had told him, sensing Kilbarron's orchestrated concentration of his antipathy.\n\n\"Are you all right, Brodie? Fit and well, I hope?\" There was something taunting and sneering about his enquiry\u2014not concern.\n\n\"Yes. Very well, thank you.\"\n\n\"Good. I want you to go back to Piter tomorrow. I know my programme now. I'll be coming back for first rehearsals soon. Feather-light on the treble octaves. Feather-light, mind.\"\n\n\"Of course. But tomorrow\u2014are you sure?\"\n\n\"Yes. First thing. I want everything ready. Tip-top.\"\n\nHe turned brusquely and walked away. Lika had come into the dining room and he took her hand and led her out. For Brodie that confirmed everything: Malachi had concocted and told his brother some story or other that reflected badly on Brodie. Brodie Moncur was no longer in the inner circle\u2014he was being banished from Maloe Nikolskoe.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie couldn't sleep that night\u2014trapped in a delicate balance of indecision and misgiving. It would be his last night at Maloe Nikolskoe, he assumed. His mind was alive, running through possibilities, probabilities, the future, what to do\u2014and where in the world would he and Lika go? He left his bed as dawn approached, dressed and packed up his few belongings.\n\nHe stepped outside. Not even the kitchen staff were stirring and no smoke rose from the brick chimney in the farmyard. He walked up the path by the lake in the nacreous light, glad of his hat and overcoat. This was the track that Lika would take to the ash-tree pool. Out of sight of the house, it curled its way round the farm buildings and disappeared into a wood of silver birch. In the leaf-linked darkness of the wood there was an eerie silence, as if Brodie were the only breathing creature alive in the landscape. He stepped out of the gloom into the lacy light of dawn, confronted by the swelling contours of a harvested wheat field. At the side of the field was a two-horse reaper-binder, its reel-slats damp with dew. Brodie glanced at its gearing and wheels and chains, marvelling at the solidity and heaviness of agricultural metal. Somehow this machine cut the corn and miraculously laid the stalks behind it in tied sheaves. He'd seen them at work on the bigger farms of Liethen Valley.\n\nBrodie looked around\u2014he was entirely alone in the thinning dawn light and felt he was in a painting by\u2014what was his name?\u2014the one he had seen in Varvara Vadimova's apartment. \"Dawn at Nikolskoe\"...The wheat field's empty acres undulated easily to the fringe of trees. The wheat had been cut, the sheaves stooked then carted away, winnowed, and the rest used to make a hayrick somewhere. The stubble glittered as if dusted with frost in the angled early-morning light\u2014maybe more magical machines would be brought for harrowing, he wondered. The field harrowed, left, then ploughed up before the winter frosts made the ground iron-hard and\u2014\n\nBrodie froze.\n\nA hundred yards away a young deer was eating the green shoots of emerging grass growing between the stubble. Delicate, nervy, it would eat for a second or two then look up sharply and scan the field, alarmed for a second. Then, all well, it would resume eating\u2014then repeat the process. Brodie stood motionless. The deer looked up and turned its head to him. If he didn't move or make a sound he would be registered as just another immobile feature in the landscape. For long seconds the two of them held their positions, the deer constantly looking up, seemingly staring straight at Brodie. Brodie rigid, staring back. The deer seemed a thing of absolute perfect natural beauty, he thought, quiveringly alive, both fragile and athletically graceful on its slim legs, its pelt glowing like caramel as the first rays of sun hit the wheat field. Why would anyone want to shoot a creature as beautiful as that, Brodie found himself wondering? A wood pigeon made its husky fluting call from the birch wood and suddenly\u2014perhaps some scent of human on the breeze\u2014the deer was off, leaping away in great bounds until it reached the safety of the trees and disappeared. Brodie felt both oddly stirred and shriven by the encounter. He had been perfectly still but the animal had sensed something was amiss and had bolted. The moment seemed freighted with symbolism\u2014but a symbolism that was lost to him. An omen, then, perhaps\u2014a bad omen.\n\nBrodie turned and walked solemnly back to the house. The staff were stirring now\u2014a clatter of pans, the gong of a ladle on a pot coming from the kitchen in the yard, the dogs barking at the cocks crowing. In the empty dining room he asked a sleepy serving maid for a pot of coffee and confirmed that the trap that he had ordered would be there in half an hour to take him into Dubechnia to catch the Petersburg train. He realized, with a sudden whelm of chagrin, that he wouldn't be able to say goodbye to Lika.\n\n# 7\n\nBrodie did exactly what Kilbarron asked. He spent a day on the new concert grand\u2014the Steingraeber\u2014now set firmly on centre stage, the ballet season over. He retuned the piano, then worked on every hammer-head with his needles and hammer-irons, and weighted the treble octaves with his thin sheets of lead\u2014an operation of elaborate precision\u2014so that the tiniest pressure delivered by the brush of a finger would produce a clear, true note. With his miniature India-rubber bellows and his own mixture of dry lubrication\u2014a concoction of talc, graphite and, his special touch, finely ground molybdenite from Norway\u2014he dusted the rollers and the key bed. The piano was ready, perfectly set for Kilbarron's touch. It wasn't the ideal instrument for him, as the old Channon had been, but it was close. He would be pleased, Brodie hoped.\n\nAs he was leaving, the manager of the theatre showed him the proof of the poster announcing the Kilbarron Season. Here were the details of the inaugural concert. First up was Kilbarron's own composition\u2014\"Der Tr\u00e4nensee\u2014Tondichtung f\u00fcr grosses Orchester.\" Then Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 3, then Balakirev's \"Islamey.\" A heavy evening for Kilbarron\u2014bravura stuff, but exhausting\u2014but designated a night to remember, clearly. He might have to retune at the interval, he realized. Kilbarron had asked for three full days of rehearsal with the orchestra\u2014there was a lot at stake.\n\nHe had lunch with George Vere at the Imperial Yacht Club. The walls were heavily overhung with clustered photographs of yachts and yachtsmen, trophies and pennants. The tables were crowded and the style was French\u2014crisp white napery, ostentatious \"good\" service, by tail-coated waiters. During lunch Brodie came to realize that, actually, he liked Vere\u2014he had an easy smile and that Englishman's feigned air of polished self-deprecation and absent-mindedness that, in fact, just failed to entirely disguise a shrewd and observant mind.\n\n\"Are you all right, Moncur?\" he asked after their first course. \"Bit under the weather?\"\n\nFor some reason Brodie felt the need to unburden himself of his problems.\n\n\"An affair of the heart,\" he said. \"I'm in love and it's not going well.\"\n\n\"Do I know the young lady? No need to tell me, if you don't want to.\"\n\n\"She's not Varvara Vadimova, if that's what you were wondering.\"\n\n\"Well, that's a bonus. But I'm no use to you on that score,\" Vere said.\n\n\"I'm experiencing feelings of impending doom,\" Brodie said. \"I have this horrible, growing conviction that everything is going to turn out very badly and I don't know what to do.\"\n\n\"Funnily enough, that's exactly my state of mind when I wake up every morning.\"\n\nBrodie had to laugh.\n\n\"I assume she's married,\" Vere said.\n\n\"No. But there is another man in the picture.\"\n\n\"Well, seriously, anything I can do to help,\" Vere said in a genuinely kindly way. \"If things get really bad, just let me know, if you want.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThere was a quiet knock at his bedroom door. Brodie was reading Lady Dalcastle's gift of Swinburne's poems, musing over the lines, thinking that Swinburne was a bit florid and verbose and wondering if he was too rich a dish for his current mood. He closed the book, called \"Come in\" and Kyrill's smiling face appeared.\n\n\"A boy has delivered a note, sir.\"\n\nBrodie took it from him. It was from Lika.\n\n\"We are coming back,\" it said. \"Write to me at Poste Restante, General Post Office, window 43.\" It was unsigned.\n\n\"Is there a reply for the boy?\" Kyrill asked.\n\nBrodie fished in his pocket for some kopeks and handed a few coins over.\n\n\"With respect, sir, this is too generous. Ten kopeks is enough for a boy.\"\n\n\"You decide, Kyrill. Buy yourself a drink with the rest.\"\n\n\"You're extremely kind, sir.\" He was about to withdraw then paused. \"We enjoy having you here, sir.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Kyrill.\"\n\nBrodie immediately wrote to Lika.\n\n> Malaya Morskaya, 57\n> \n> 23 August 1899\n> \n> My darling Lika,\n> \n> It's perhaps too risky to try to meet at the moment, but let us make plans to leave Piter as soon as we can\u2014perhaps after the first concert. I have plenty of money and will withdraw the cash from the bank so we're properly ready to travel. We can go anywhere\u2014Paris, Buenos Aires, New York. Just let me know and I will organize everything. Once this concert is over\u2014and the money begins to flow in\u2014Kilbarron won't care about us any more.\n> \n> I love you, my darling.\n> \n> Your Brodie\n\nOn the Monday following he went to his office at the theatre as usual. He could see the orchestra arriving for what must be the first rehearsal. Could Kilbarron be back already? They were professional musicians hired on contract for this New Russia Symphony Orchestra, as advertised. There must be over a hundred, Brodie calculated\u2014Kilbarron wanted huge volume, apparently. But there was no sign of the maestro himself; Brodie assumed he must be somewhere in the building, however. An hour later in his office he could hear the orchestra tuning up\u2014now Kilbarron must be there, conducting from the piano. He wandered down backstage but found the door to the amphitheatre locked. He tried another, also locked. He went to find the manager\u2014an amiable fellow called Ardeyev\u2014and told him that, mysteriously, all the doors into the theatre were locked. The man looked abashed.\n\n\"Yes, it's Maestro Kilbarron's instructions, sir.\"\n\n\"I understand. But I work for Maestro Kilbarron. He will need me for the piano.\"\n\n\"I think a new tuner has been employed, sir.\"\n\nBrodie took this in. The exclusion was becoming a totality.\n\n\"All the same, I would like to hear the rehearsal,\" Brodie said.\n\nArdeyev looked at the ground. His fingers twitched with embarrassment.\n\n\"I'm afraid you're not allowed, sir. The doors are closed against you. It is a specific demand.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie went back to his office, waited ten minutes then walked calmly along the corridor, up a flight of narrow stairs and through a small unlocked door (he had to crouch) that led to the fly-tower high above the theatre's stage. He closed the door carefully behind him. It was dim up in the fly-gallery, light only came up from below, and all the backdrops from the ballet season were hanging there like huge curtains, adding to the gloom. He waited, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the near-darkness. Webs of tight hemp ropes secured with cleats held the backdrops like so many clothes in a giant wardrobe. Ahead of him he could now make out a narrow catwalk stretching across the grid-deck filled with wooden battens that weren't being used.\n\nSlowly, he inched forward along the catwalk and steadily, below him, his view down on the orchestra and the stage was revealed. He could see Kilbarron, sitting at the piano, an interpreter beside him. Kilbarron was speaking but he couldn't make out what was being said. The smell of the hemp ropes was powerful\u2014he felt he was high in the rigging of a tall-masted ship looking down on the deck below.\n\nHe had reached the middle of the catwalk and he sank down on his knees. Kilbarron was back at the piano again and gave the time to the orchestra. The sound of the music rose up to Brodie in the fly-gallery\u2014prodigious, palpable, rich and romantic. He didn't recognize it and Brodie realized they must be rehearsing Kilbarron's own composition, the tone poem. A bit like Richard Strauss, Brodie thought, or even Wagner\u2014remembering Kilbarron's own words: \"I'm not a composer, I'm an arranger.\"\n\nAnd then he heard the orchestra take up the central melody, massed strings and French horns only\u2014the refrain.\n\nIt was \"My Bonny Boy.\"\n\nThen it was strings only, and then the piano joined and took over the melody at the crucial juncture. Brodie felt the tear-itch in his eye, spontaneously. Tears of shock, injustice, of massive betrayal. He felt a kind of treacly loathing clot his throat. He wanted to spit but he knew he couldn't. He closed his eyes and swallowed the bile.\n\nHe stayed in the fly-tower for forty minutes or so listening to Kilbarron take the orchestra through his tone poem, stopping and starting, going back to the beginning, concentrating on certain passages. It was masterfully done\u2014the adaptation, the transfiguration\u2014he had to admit, every emotional stop pulled out to the full, the final minutes a marked diminuendo leading towards a final reprise of the ballad's simple melody\u2014piano, strings, French horns\u2014the dying fall of the conclusion\u2014and his key sequence of notes played on the piano, solo. G flat major to D flat major and then the surprise shift to D flat minor ninth. Plangent, moving, overwhelming. And not a dry eye in the house, he would wager...\n\nHe saw Kilbarron halt the rehearsal and leave the stage. Brodie sensed now was the only time for a confrontation. Back in his office he quickly packed up his few possessions\u2014his blotter, the theatre's notepaper, his pen, his novel\u2014stuffed them into the Gladstone bag that contained his tuning tools and implements and walked downstairs to the floor where the dressing rooms were. He felt surprisingly calm\u2014though he knew the feeling was possibly very temporary.\n\n\" _Oui, entrez,_ \" he heard Kilbarron call in response to his knock.\n\nHe pushed the door open and found Kilbarron stretched out on his divan with a bottle of brandy on the table beside him. He was very surprised to see Brodie.\n\n\"What're you doing here, Moncur?\" he said, sitting up and swinging his legs off the divan. \"I haven't got time to talk to you.\"\n\n\"It won't take long,\" Brodie said. \"I just heard your tone poem\u2014despite your best efforts.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes? What did you think?\" He wasn't smiling.\n\n\"Congratulations\u2014it's wonderful. There's only one problem. A big problem.\"\n\n\"And what's that?\"\n\n\"You stole it from me.\"\n\n\"Don't be ridiculous.\"\n\n\"It's my song. 'My Bonny Boy.' You heard me play it in Paris. You sat beside me at your piano and played it yourself.\"\n\n\"I've no memory of that. Sorry.\"\n\n\"I wrote the words and the music down for Lika.\"\n\nMention of her name seemed to rile him.\n\n\"Well maybe I heard Lika sing it.\" He knew at once he shouldn't have said that. \"Or maybe not,\" he added quickly. \"In fact it's based on an old Irish folk tune, if you'd like to know\u2014'Cail\u00edn fionn.' I don't need to steal anything from the likes of you, Moncur.\" He looked at Brodie, his anger at being caught out now beginning to distort his face. He stood up.\n\n\"Mon Cur,\" he said. \"My cur. You dog. You mongrel whelp. How fucking dare you! You fucking dog, get out of here!\"\n\n\"You can't play without me,\" Brodie said, his voice trembling now. \"You need your dog. Otherwise you'll be a one-handed pianist in a month.\"\n\n\"You're just a piano tuner, Moncur. They're ten a penny. I've got a new one, a Russian. He's done an exceptional job on the piano. Makes you look like an apprentice.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid that's impossible. There's no one better than me. No one.\"\n\n\"Vainglory!\" Kilbarron shouted. \"You vain little cretin! The world's full of piano tuners but there's only one John Kilbarron!\"\n\nKilbarron stepped up to him and Brodie could smell the brandy on his breath.\n\n\"Fuck off out of my life, you dog, you insect. Fuck off and die somewhere, miserably.\"\n\nBrodie closed his eyes. Opened them.\n\n\"When you crawl back to me with your useless hand and you beg me\u2014beg me\u2014to tune and regulate your piano for you, know what I'll do, Kilbarron? I'll spit in your face.\"\n\n\"But I don't care any more because after this concert I'm stopping playing. You stupid fucking idiot!\" He was yelling in triumph now. \"I'm going to conduct.\" He made grotesque conducting movements like a man in front of a marching band. \"One and two and three and four! Yes, I'm going to beat time like Mahler and Weingartner and B\u00fclow. Any fool can do it and make a fortune. This is going to be my last concert. And you're not invited!\"\n\nHe reached to grab Brodie, but Brodie stepped back and Kilbarron stumbled and swayed, regaining his balance. Brodie turned and slammed the door behind him as he left. He walked out of the New Russia Theatre into a fine rain. He knew he'd never be back.\n\n# 8\n\nBrodie decided to walk home, he was in such a turmoil, needing to clear his head. He was thinking: was it Kilbarron who had stolen the sheet of music he'd written down for Lika? Was that how it had really disappeared? He thought back to that afternoon in the Saint-Germain apartment, remembering how intrigued Kilbarron had been with the song and how he had so skilfully analysed how its effects were achieved. \"I'm an arranger, not a composer,\" he always said and, hearing the song, he had seen an opportunity. Brodie had unwittingly provided him with the key to his tone poem. \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee\"...It came to him now: \"The Lake of Tears.\" Of course, the evidence was there in the title. He had a horrible feeling it would make Kilbarron's name.\n\nHe crossed the Neva on Nikolaevsky Bridge. It was a chilly day for late August. Autumn not far off and winter hard on autumn's heels. He paused in the middle of the bridge, aware of a slight tremble in his body. The shock, he supposed, all the raw emotion of the encounter, the insults, the threats. He looked across the water at the wide quays of the city's magnificent waterfront\u2014the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, the Hermitage\u2014as the light tarnished and thickened with evening coming on. Then he saw, in the distance, a flight of geese, a dozen or so, flying low over the river, coming towards him in a loose chevron\u2014just feet above the grey choppy water, their heavy wings beating in near-unison. The flight rose slightly as the geese reached the bridge and they flashed over, almost within touching distance of him, the sound of their wings audible\u2014 _whoomph, whoomph_ \u2014effortlessly occupying the air. He felt moved and overwhelmed and turned to watch them disappear into the coppery sunset, heading for Vasilievsky Island.\n\nHe leaned on the parapet, feeling the hard stone on his elbows, and looked at the dark flowing water below him, thinking of his future and how precarious it was, how everything now depended on Lika.\n\nAnd then he felt something stir in his chest and rise to his throat. He had time to grab his handkerchief and he coughed fiercely into it, feeling a loosening in his lungs. He knew what he would find when he opened it\u2014bright blood. A growing tubercle had eroded an artery branch and blood was flooding his lungs. He cursed John Kilbarron. The thieving bastard. The bastard thief. All this agitation, the unseemly malice and hate had made his body break. He spat blood into the Neva, trying to breathe calmly, evenly, throwing his red soaking handkerchief into the water and watching the current carry it away. The haemorrhage was over\u2014a short one, thank God. He should go home, have something warm to eat, go to bed, think about leaving, think about leaving Petersburg with Lika.\n\n> Malaya Morskaya, 57\n> \n> 28 August 1899\n> \n> My darling Lika,\n> \n> I have broken with Kilbarron. We had a terrible confrontation\u2014very bitter, very unpleasant\u2014and I have left his employ. The trouble is I have no idea how long I can stay in this apartment. No doubt Kilbarron will have Elisaveta Vadimova evict me as soon as he remembers. The only good news is that he seems to know nothing about us. Obviously Malachi has kept his mouth shut for the moment\u2014but, I'm afraid, not for long.\n> \n> Come away with me, my love. Leave him. He's insane\u2014destroying himself\u2014and he'll destroy you. I've withdrawn all my money from the bank. We can live comfortably for a year\u2014travel, be together with no concerns. Free yourself, my darling. Come with me.\n> \n> I love you.\n> \n> Your Brodie\n\n* * *\n\nFyolka set the dish of fried calves' feet with brown sauce in front of him.\n\n\" _Danke sch\u00f6n,_ \" Brodie said.\n\n\" _Das ist gut,_ \" she said. \" _Wunderbar. Magnifique._ \"\n\n\" _Merci infiniment._ \"\n\nFyolka was excelling herself in the kitchen, spoiling him with new dishes every day since his haemorrhage. He had asked her, through Kyrill, for robust hot meals to build up his strength. It was almost as if she knew he was going to be leaving and wanted to provide him with fond memories of her Russian cuisine.\n\nHe began to eat the calves' feet\u2014surprisingly tasty with a sauce that was both honeyed and sour, somehow. It was very hot, that was the main thing. He went quickly to his room and poured himself a glass of vodka from the bottle he kept there and returned to his meal. Hot food and the burn of vodka\u2014he was feeling better already. But something nagged at him as he ate his calves' feet, something Kilbarron had said during their bitter row.\n\n\"I've got a new tuner, a Russian. He's done an exceptional job on the piano. Makes you look like an apprentice...\"\n\nBut what could another tuner have done that he hadn't done already? Who was this Russian prodigy? Brodie knew how much care he'd put into regulating Kilbarron's piano for the inaugural concert. The tiny calibration of the minute weights on the keys of treble octaves. Slivers of lead cut to fit the underside of the keys giving the lightest possible down-weight. No piano in existence had such light action. Then his precise positioning of the dampers and the elaborate preparation of the hammer-heads, softening or hardening as required with his pins and the damper-iron. The dry lubricant. What could any tuner do that was better? What expertise could excel his?\n\nBrodie knew the concert was now just a few days off: on Friday at four in the afternoon. There was some time left for him to find out.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nOn Thursday evening Brodie stood in the shadows opposite the New Russia Theatre watching the last of the musicians and the stagehands leave. He waited another half-hour and no one emerged. He crossed the road and headed for the stage door, Gladstone bag in one hand and several feet of rolled-up piano wire in the other. He knew all the men who manned the reception desk at the stage door: Boris, Radislav, Mstislav. And it was Mstislav on duty when he rushed in, flourishing the wire.\n\n\"Disaster. A real crisis!\" he said in French. Then repeated it in German. \" _Katastrophe. Eine echte Krise!_ \"\n\nMstislav\u2014a simple, earnest man\u2014saw the roll of wire, jumped to the correct conclusion, hurried him into the theatre and switched on the lights. Brodie opened the piano, hauled out the action and flipped apart his Gladstone bag, laying out his tools like a surgeon about to operate.\n\n\"Thank you, Mstislav,\" he said. \"It'll take me half an hour.\"\n\nMstislav left and it took Brodie twenty seconds to realize that nothing was different. No one had touched the workings of this piano since he had regulated it for Kilbarron days before. This was his handiwork; all his little _astuces_ were present. The graphite in the lubricating dust from his bottle still gleamed on the rail and the levers. He played some octaves, notes in unison\u2014perfect. He began to suspect there was no Russian tuning genius at all\u2014it was simply a way of scoring another malign point, another perverse slap in the face.\n\nBrodie felt a sudden nausea. A bitter sickness of real resentment, of betrayal, after everything he had done for Kilbarron: how he had extended\u2014maybe even saved\u2014his career as a virtuoso pianist of the very first rank through his finesse, his expertise as a tuner. Any other pianist might have been forced to retire...As he slid the action back into position he had an idea\u2014now he was here, alone with the piano, unobserved, not likely to be interrupted\u2014and he tugged the action out again.\n\nBrodie brought to mind a saying that his old teacher and mentor, Findlay Lanhire, had told him: namely that of all the miraculous mechanical components that went into the superbly sophisticated machine that is a modern piano, the most remarkable is the \"repetition action.\" Discovered and patented in 1821, it was an arrangement of levers that allows a note to be repeated without the key returning to its position of rest. The ability to strike a note, the same note in rapid succession, and have it sound true and discrete each time it was struck was what had transformed the instrument entirely. Pianists like Liszt, Thalberg and Kilbarron could strike the one note six times in a split second, such was their virtuosity. But it was the complicated assemblage of pins, screws and jacks beneath the hammer, all controlled by the tension in the repetition spring, producing the necessary torque, along with minute movements of the component parts, that allowed them to do so\u2014that allowed the note to be played in apparently effortless repetition and that permitted the virtuoso's brilliance and dexterity such easy display.\n\nWith the tip of a fine screwdriver he tapped and pushed out the brass centre pin on the jack of note D in the fifth octave so it extended a tenth of an inch\u2014loosened inevitably therefore from its snug tight hole\u2014so it was just touching the adjacent note. Then he ran in the entire action, tested the note a few times\u2014sounded normal\u2014and closed the piano with the fall.\n\nThe jack pin was now touching the adjacent lever of the action of the next note, E. Vibrations caused by any fortissimo passage would cause it to jam up against E and when it jammed up, and then bent under the pressure, it would bind to the next note so that when you played D, you would actually sound two notes, D and E, and then moments later both notes would stick. It would be impossible to continue.\n\nIt would take, he reckoned, around fifteen or twenty minutes of John Kilbarron's playing before the strain on that tiny pin would become acute and effectively make the piano malfunction irreparably. The beauty of the little sabotage, he thought further, was that it showed no sign of tampering. Alas, under the extraordinary pressure of fortissimo concert performances, these sorts of accidents occurred from time to time, inevitably. It was highly complex machinery\u2014and highly complex machinery could go wrong. Why would the jack pin on the D action work loose? Who could say? _Force majeure,_ filthy rotten luck\u2014just deserts.\n\n\"Thanks, Mstislav,\" Brodie said as he left, giving him a smile and pretending to wipe his brow in relief, \" _alles ist in Ordnung._ \"\n\n# 9\n\nBrodie was back in position opposite the theatre the next afternoon\u2014it was a gusty day with sudden showers\u2014standing in his mackintosh and with trilby pulled low watching the carriages arrive and the dignitaries hurry into the theatre. _Le tout_ Piter was present for John Kilbarron's inaugural concert to launch his season of Russian classical music, all excitingly led off by the world premiere of Kilbarron's own composition, the tone poem \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee.\" The excited laughter and chatter carried to him across the street. The carriages, barouches and landaus were backed up as far as Tuchkov Bridge. Once everyone was inside and the concert about to begin, Brodie went home to his apartment and finished packing his belongings into his two cabin trunks. He had received no reply from Lika to his last letter so he wrote her another and took it to window 43 in the central post office, the Poste Restante window. On his way back he waited an hour outside the house on Nevsky Prospekt and then realized that, of course, she would be at the New Russia Theatre herself, no doubt with Malachi at her side, observing the apotheosis of John Kilbarron.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nIt was in the French-language _St. Petersburg Gazette_ the next day.\n\n> The inaugural Kilbarron concert was abandoned after ten minutes owing to a sudden technical malfunction in the grand piano (manufacturer Steingraeber). The full concert programme will take place in a week's time. All ticket holders are cordially invited to present themselves at the box office if a refund is required.\n\nThere was more. Apparently, after approximately ten minutes of \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee\" Kilbarron had abruptly stopped playing, stood, bowed briefly to the audience and left the stage, leaving the orchestra and the audience baffled. In the midst of the general consternation, a manager had appeared and had made an announcement. It was impossible to continue for technical reasons\u2014a defect in the piano\u2014and the concert would reluctantly have to be postponed. There were some boos and programmes had been thrown and the audience had dispersed, reluctant and displeased. There had been no further comment from John Kilbarron nor the concert season's sponsors, Elisaveta and Varvara Vadimova.\n\nReading this, Brodie felt a simultaneous thrill of pleasure and a deeper twinge of alarm. The dog\u2014the cur, the mongrel whelp, Moncur\u2014had had his day. But, Brodie knew, it wouldn't end at that. In any other circumstances he would have left Piter instantly, caught a train to Paris\u2014that very evening, if at all possible\u2014but he couldn't leave without seeing Lika. All plans included Lika. Lika Blum was anchoring him to St. Petersburg until further notice.\n\nIn the morning he went to keep his appointment with Dr. Sampsoniyevskaya. They both lit cigarettes as they discussed his case and the recent haemorrhage.\n\n\"It was more like a large ball of blood,\" he said. \"Not the full haemorrhage that I had before. More like spitting blood, but from deep down, you know.\"\n\n\"I think you'll be spitting more blood, I'm sorry to say,\" Dr. Sampson said, smiling ruefully. \"And winter is coming. I think it's time to fly south to the sun.\" She frowned. \"I tell you in all honesty, Mr. Moncur, that the only cure\u2014the only cure I really believe in, though I prescribe many cures, many various cures\u2014is warmth and rest. If you've started spitting blood then Piter is the last place you want to be. You've been to Nice, you told me?\"\n\n\"Yes, I spent some months there.\"\n\n\"Go back to Nice for the winter. Or Biarritz. Do you know Biarritz?\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Very popular with wealthy Russians and English royalty. I know a doctor in Biarritz whom I can recommend.\" She scribbled his name and address on a piece of paper. \"Come back to Piter next summer and we'll meet again,\" she said, handing it to him.\n\nThey shook hands and Brodie felt that sad premonition that farewells bring\u2014that this would be their last one. He was reluctant to let the moment go, for some reason, hesitating to say a final goodbye to this stern but warm physician.\n\nShe smiled, led him to the door and patted him reassuringly on the back.\n\n\"Good luck,\" she said. \"All will be well.\"\n\nBrodie walked homewards in low spirits, unconvinced by her optimism. More blood-spitting, she had said, and despite her assurances and smiles he had a sense that she had foreseen the inevitable progression of his disease. How much time do I have? Brodie asked himself. A year? Two years? A decade, a quarter of a century?...It was too depressing to contemplate; it made everything fragile, everything was now no more than a vague possibility\u2014all probability and certainty had gone from his life. But then he reflected further: when had probability and certainty ever played a reliable part in the human condition?\n\nAs he let himself into the apartment he heard\u2014bizarrely\u2014a dog bark. More like a yap. _Yap-yap-yap._ He stepped into the sitting room and saw Lika was there with C\u00e9sar, who was barking excitedly at him. Nikanor was serving tea.\n\n\"Hello,\" Brodie managed to say, as if seeing Lika in his own sitting room was an everyday occurrence. \"I can't tell you how pleased I am that you managed to drop by.\"\n\nNikanor left and they kissed. He hugged her to himself\u2014suddenly everything was all right again. It was miraculous how it happened, he\u2014\n\n\"He's thrown me out,\" Lika said, bright-lashed with tears, then flowing. She was in a state, he saw, febrile, panicked.\n\n\"Kilbarron? Why?\"\n\n\"Malachi told him about that night he found us in the hotel in Dubechnia.\"\n\nPart of him was exulting but he said, \"But why, for God's sake? Why would he do that now?\"\n\n\"Do you know\u2014I think it was to distract him from the fiasco of the concert. To make him think of something else. Anyway, he was horrible, called me the foulest names. Of course he's been drunk for twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"My God...\" Brodie was thinking.\n\n\"My trunks, my luggage, are in your room. I've left so much behind, but he gave me no time. Your man\u2014Nikanor?\u2014was most helpful.\" She paused and took his hand. \"I had to come to you, Brodie. I couldn't stay, couldn't reason with them.\"\n\n\"This is the best thing,\" Brodie said firmly. \"The very best. We're free, Lika, my darling. No ties any more. It's over. He's gone. We leave Kilbarron to his miserable fate and go away and make our own life.\"\n\n\"But...\" She paused. \"He wants to see you,\" she said. \"He insists. That's the last message he gave me. You have to go and see him tonight. You have to.\"\n\n\"I'll do no such thing. He can go to hell.\"\n\n\"Or else he'll go to the police and have you arrested.\"\n\n\"On what charge, for God's sake?\"\n\n\"I don't know. He just kept talking about the police,\" she said, taking his hand. \"You'd better go.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie stood uneasily in Kilbarron's red drawing room, hung with its arsenal of ancient weapons. He had refused the offer of a drink from the butler and instead was smoking a cigarette, avidly, drawing the smoke deep into his lungs. He thought he was prepared for anything\u2014insults, tears, fisticuffs. This, he hoped, was the last time he'd ever see John Kilbarron. He was only here because of Lika\u2014time to make his final brief farewell.\n\nBut it was Malachi who came in, smiling, almost swaggering, somehow on show in a lurid emerald-green waistcoat, as if he was going to a costume ball. He looked neater: his hair and beard were trimmed\u2014for the concert, probably, Brodie thought. He didn't offer his hand.\n\n\"Well, I almost have to give you a round of applause, Moncur,\" he said. \"I didn't think you had it in you. But you buggered us up well and truly, royally buggered us up, you devious rascal, you.\"\n\nBrodie wasn't fooled by the pseudo-jocular tone\u2014it was underpinned by Malachi's high-tension aggression.\n\n\"I don't know what you're talking about.\"\n\n\"We know everything. Mstislav confirmed it\u2014the man at the stage door. Your emergency repair job.\"\n\n\"I was just checking to see all was in order. The man barely speaks any German. He must be confused.\"\n\n\"Of course you were\u2014and your hand slipped.\"\n\n\"Why don't you ask your new tuner? The Russian genius. He'll tell you these accidents sometimes happen to the best pianos. Wear and tear.\"\n\n\"Because there is no 'new' tuner. You stupid arse.\"\n\nBrodie turned to see it was Kilbarron who'd spoken. Raging drunk, Brodie also realized instantly, swaying slightly.\n\n\"I was just trying to get your goat, boyo,\" Kilbarron said, leeringly. \"And I succeeded. How did I succeed!\"\n\n\"Look,\" Brodie said, coldly, brazening himself. \"You know what you did. You know what you stole from me. We both have\u2014what shall I say?\u2014grievances with each other. You can hardly\u2014\"\n\n\"Grievances!\" Kilbarron shouted. \"Oh, yes. Let's start with my grievances, if I may. Here's one. What about you topping Lika Blum when I wasn't looking, you filthy whoreson urchin. I assume she's come running to you. You're welcome to her.\"\n\n\"Keep Lika out of this. This is a personal matter\u2014\"\n\n\"I can go to the police, you fool,\" Kilbarron said, crossing the room unsteadily towards him. \"Deliberate sabotage. I have witnesses. Cause and effect. Evidence.\" He stopped by Malachi and rested his hand on Malachi's shoulder for support. \"Do you know how much your little act of vengeance has cost us? Madame Vadimova is most displeased. It's a perfect Petersburg scandal\u2014everybody's talking, laughing behind their hands\u2014which is hardly what she wanted.\"\n\n\"Say what you have to say and I'll leave you alone,\" Brodie declaimed, a little self-consciously. \"I don't think Madame Vadimova would like to hear of your act of plagiarism, either. That might dent the reputation of her wonderful Maestro Kilbarron. The world premiere of his tone poem.\"\n\nKilbarron was in front of him now; his gaunt pale features were limned with a fine sweat. He looked ill. The dew of ill health.\n\nHe slapped Brodie's face\u2014hard, stingingly.\n\n\"That's my challenge to you, you Scottish guttersnipe. I demand satisfaction. Get your seconds to talk to Malachi. You have twenty-four hours. Otherwise I go to the police and have you prosecuted for sabotaging my concert.\"\n\nHe swayed out of the room, banging into the doorjamb as he left.\n\n\"What's he talking about?\" Brodie said, rubbing his smarting cheek. \"Challenge? Seconds? Has he gone mad or is it just the drink?\"\n\n\"He's challenging you to a duel,\" Malachi said reasonably. \"And he's not joking.\"\n\n# 10\n\n\"It's completely absurd,\" Brodie said. \"Here we are four months away from the twentieth century and he's challenging me to a duel. It's insane.\"\n\nGeorge Vere shrugged and made a face. \"His brother told me that Kilbarron has actually fought two duels\u2014one in Ireland and one in Germany\u2014and he's made a dozen challenges over the years. He's a bit obsessed with the whole ritual. You know: reputation besmirched, debts of honour repaid\u2014man-to-man stuff. _Un vrai bretteur,_ as they say in French.\"\n\n\"But I can't go through with this, seriously.\"\n\nBrodie had asked George Vere to be his second. He felt it presumptuous as they hardly knew each other but Vere said he'd be delighted. Very grateful. He seemed genuinely excited by the prospect.\n\n\"I think you can relax, Moncur,\" he said. \"His brother\u2014what's his name?\"\n\n\"Malachi.\"\n\n\"Yes, Malachi says you just have to participate in the rigmarole. This is modern duelling. There are two options: you can make your peace 'under the gun' as they say\u2014shake hands at the last minute and leave. Or you deliberately shoot to miss. This is what happened before in Kilbarron's other duels, apparently. You both fire in the air\u2014and go your separate ways. Symbolic, you know.\"\n\nVere was pacing about the sitting room in Morskaya Street. Brodie sensed he was looking forward to this absurd sham duel.\n\n\"The thing is\u2014at least this was the drift I caught\u2014is that if you don't go through with this duel, however preposterous it seems, then he will go to the police. Don't tell me anything, by the way. All I know is some accusation of sabotage\u2014a concert ruined. Shame and humiliation pouring down on everyone.\" He paused to light a cigarette. \"I think this ritualistic settling of scores is the answer. Very Russian, of course.\"\n\n\"And neither of us is Russian. As it happens. A Scotsman and an Irishman fighting a duel. It's preposterous.\"\n\n\"Fighting a duel in Russia, though\u2014here we live\u2014we're all under the influence.\"\n\nBrodie thought on unhappily. Nothing was clear: no solution, no alternative, presented itself.\n\nVere was talking again.\n\n\"The other issue, as Mr. Malachi Kilbarron quietly pointed out, is Madame Vadimova. She's a very powerful woman, very influential. And if you were to find yourselves in the hands of the authorities\u2014the police\u2014detained, say, even charged. A court case. She might make it very awkward and difficult for you.\" He spread his arms. \"Play his game, Moncur. Act out this duel fantasy. That should end the matter. Kilbarron\u2014Malachi\u2014assured me that no one wants to get hurt.\"\n\n\"So what happens next? If I play his game.\"\n\n\"We meet at dawn tomorrow in the Yelaginsky Park. I'll pick you up here at five thirty. It'll take us half an hour to get there.\"\n\n\"Don't I need two seconds?\"\n\n\"I'll bring someone along from the embassy. There's an arbiter, also. Colonel Somebody. It's all very proper. Every aspect observed. I think that's part of the satisfaction.\" Vere said he had to go and Brodie walked him to the front door where they shook hands.\n\n\"Think of it as a strange adventure,\" Vere said, consolingly. \"Something to tell your grandchildren. 'I fought a duel in the Yelaginsky Park in St. Petersburg in 1899.' I'd swap places with you if I could.\"\n\nVere left and Brodie went back to his room. Lika was there, smoking, jittery, waiting, C\u00e9sar sitting at her feet. He saw Brodie and ran to him and Brodie picked him up, unthinkingly.\n\n\"That dog likes you,\" Lika said. \"I can't think why\u2014you hardly know him.\"\n\n\"Maybe I smell nice.\"\n\n\"Do you like dogs?\"\n\n\"I've never really thought about it. I suppose so.\"\n\nHe told her what was going to happen\u2014this pretence of a duel that was going to take place at dawn in the Yelaginsky Park.\n\n\"Let's just run away, Brodie.\"\n\n\"Then he'll go to the police and I'll be arrested\u2014at the very least. This is the quid pro quo. This is the only way we can be free, be rid of him.\"\n\n\"But I just don't like it. It makes me worried.\"\n\n\"Malachi has assured my man, my second\u2014he's from the British Embassy, by the way\u2014that it's a gesture. It's something Kilbarron does, or needs to do in some perverse way.\"\n\nHe sat beside her and kissed her neck. Already he was seeing the dividends of all this _Sturm und Drang._ He and Lika were together, now. She lived with him, now, not Kilbarron.\n\n\"Your servants have made up a bed for me in the room across the corridor.\"\n\n\"That's fine. I'll creep in later.\"\n\n\"Who's that elderly man that sits quietly in the corner of every room, it seems?\"\n\n\"He's called Kyrill. I've no idea why he lives here.\"\n\nLika went to her bedroom with C\u00e9sar. Brodie waited half an hour and then slipped out of his room.\n\n\"Good evening, sir.\" Kyrill was walking through the hall, newspaper in hand.\n\n\"Good evening, Kyrill Denisovitch. I'm just going to see if Miss Blum has everything she needs.\"\n\n\"A delightful young lady. I wish you goodnight, sir.\"\n\nLying in bed with Lika, Brodie could tell there was something troubling her.\n\n\"What're you thinking?\" he asked softly. \"What's wrong?\"\n\n\"I'm thinking about John Kilbarron and tomorrow,\" she said.\n\n\"It's just a 'show,' a harlequinade, to satisfy him. Then we can leave and start our life together.\"\n\nShe hunched into him, holding him close.\n\n\"No,\" she said. \"I think he really wants to kill you.\"\n\n# 11\n\nBrodie was waiting outside the apartment on Morskaya Street. The air was chilly and he wore his hat and overcoat and wished he'd brought a scarf. It was five o'clock and he hadn't slept at all and it was still dark, more or less, a tarnished moon-sliver in the sky, the street lamps glowing brightly down Morskaya, no one stirring. He had felt nervously alert all night. And now that he had to be fully awake he felt tired. He heard horses' hooves and then saw a landau approaching. It stopped and Vere jumped out, followed by another man.\n\n\"This is your other second,\" Vere said. \"Michael Rubenstein, a colleague from the embassy.\"\n\nBrodie shook hands with Rubenstein and thanked him for coming. They climbed into the landau and headed off.\n\nBrodie felt anxious, subdued, but Vere and Rubenstein were in fine spirits.\n\n\"There's a duel in Tolstoy, of course, _War and Peace,_ \" Rubenstein said.\n\n\"And Dostoevsky...And Lermontov and Turgenev, come to think of it,\" Vere added. \"And there's a Chekhov story called 'The Duel.' Not forgetting poor Pushkin, of course.\" He smiled sadly at Brodie.\n\n\"There's a duel in the novel I'm reading, coincidentally,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"What novel's that?\" Rubenstein asked.\n\nBrodie told him about the Stevenson, _The Master of Ballantrae._ The disturbing thought came to him that he might never finish it.\n\n\"Pistols?\" Vere asked.\n\n\"Swords.\"\n\n\"Well, you're spared that,\" Rubenstein said. \"A blessing.\"\n\n\"You could say,\" Vere mused, \"that, looking at it from one angle, you're having an amazing Russian literary experience.\"\n\n\"Or you could say,\" Brodie responded, \"looking at it from another angle, that I'm a stupid benighted fool for going through with this. What am I doing? What am I playing at?\"\n\n\"It's a full stop,\" Vere said. \"Think of it that way. Kilbarron has his fun and games. All talk of police and lawsuits is over.\"\n\n\"I could sue Kilbarron myself,\" Brodie said with sudden anger, \"for plagiarism.\"\n\n\"What do you mean? What's he stolen?\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" Brodie said, slumping down in his seat. \"The whole thing's a farce. I just want it to be over.\"\n\nHe looked out of the window of the landau as it crossed the Neva on Nikolaevsky Bridge and then rumbled over Tuchkov Bridge as they headed for Yelagin Island and its so-called park. It was an untamed wilderness as far as Brodie could see. Dawn was silvering the view as they reached the outermost limits of the city and there were no street lamps here on the wooden road they were trundling over. Vere spoke to the driver in excellent Russian confirming their route and soon the landau turned off the road and progressed down a dirt track. They stopped at the edge of a grassy meadow flanked with mature beech and silver-birch woods. Beyond the meadow was a narrow strip of lake and beyond that what looked like forest with no sign of human habitation. They could have been in the vast hinterlands of Russia, Brodie thought, feeling sick as he stepped out of the landau and buttoned his greatcoat tightly around him. It seemed colder here on Yelagin Island, cold and damp.\n\nVere had spotted the others standing round a trestle table in the lee of some huge pines and he and Rubenstein wandered down to meet them. Brodie, following slowly, took his spectacles off and polished them, thinking for the thousandth time that this was possibly the most ridiculous act that anyone could commit in their lives. What did Kilbarron gain, what satisfaction did he achieve by going through this charade? He repeated to himself: in half an hour it will be over. You and Lika will be free. You'll be with Lika, the woman you love. You can make your life with her anywhere you want. You have enough money; you have your skills; you're twenty-nine years old and all your life is ahead of you. The incantations appeared to work. He put his spectacles back on and felt a new vigour in his body. Let's get this nonsense over and done with, he thought, and went to join the small group at the meadow's rim.\n\nBrodie saw Kilbarron and Malachi and another man whom he didn't recognize. The second second, he assumed. He was introduced to a moustachioed man in a dark suit: Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Ilyichov, he was told\u2014the duel's arbiter.\n\nThe colonel led him to the table where three sets of long-barrelled, single-shot duelling pistols were on display, snug in their velvet moulds, set in their chestnut coffers. Kilbarron was staring at him intently; Malachi was smoking a cigar, its reek rancid and unpleasant in the crisp dawn air.\n\n\"Choose your weapon,\" Vere whispered to him.\n\nBrodie tapped one of the pistols at random and Vere selected it, checked that it was loaded and that the percussion cap was properly in place and told Malachi that he was satisfied. He handed the gun to Rubenstein, who glanced at it and handed it on to Brodie. Then Kilbarron chose his pistol.\n\nColonel Ilyichov had two sabres. He advanced into the meadow\u2014the grass was knee-high\u2014contemplated the direction of the rising sun (so that no one would be blinded), skewered one sabre into the turf, and strode out another fifteen paces before pronging the other sabre into the ground.\n\nHe summoned the duellists and addressed them in heavily accented French.\n\n\"You will be fifteen paces apart, and you both will have one shot when I drop my handkerchief. Is that understood, gentlemen?\"\n\nBrodie said yes, feeling somewhat faint, again overwhelmed by the ridiculous formalities of this game Kilbarron had chosen to play. Was it the theatricality that he relished? Somehow feeding off the gathering tensions and animosities concentrated in this archaic ritual? To think, Brodie reflected, that for centuries quarrels and affronts had been settled like this. It defied belief\u2014and yet here he was participating in this burlesque role-playing. It struck him that for Kilbarron the very fact that he had him here and was putting him through this ridiculous palaver\u2014that Brodie Moncur, his enemy, was doing his perverse bidding\u2014was maybe enough to make him feel he had won.\n\nBrodie told himself to stop thinking\u2014no more questions\u2014become an automaton. This would all be over in a few moments and they would climb into the landau and be driven to Morskaya Street. He would kiss Lika and they would go to the Warsaw station and their new life would begin.\n\n\"Positions, gentlemen!\" Ilyichov called.\n\nBrodie walked, as in a dream, towards his sabre planted in the turf. It was an old sabre, he saw, its blade badged with rust, the leather binding of its hilt mildewed and worn. He looked up to see Kilbarron, fifteen paces away, arrive at his sabre. The rising sun flashed off its cage-guard, a sudden dazzling sunburst that made Brodie blink.\n\nThe seconds consulted for the last time. Vere and Rubenstein came over to him, clustering close.\n\n\"When the colonel drops his handkerchief, simply raise your pistol and fire into the air,\" Vere said. \"Kilbarron will do the same. You'll shake hands\u2014if you want, no obligation\u2014and we'll go off for a slap-up breakfast at the Hotel Astoria. I've booked a table.\" Vere winked at him. \"Everything's going to be fine.\"\n\n\"Hear, hear,\" Rubenstein agreed.\n\nThen he and Rubenstein stepped away and left Brodie alone by his sabre that had now begun to cant over somewhat. He felt the gun heavy in his hand. Preposterous, ludicrous, shameful.\n\nColonel Ilyichov stepped into view, a white handkerchief in his upheld hand.\n\n\"On the count of three,\" he said. \"One, two, three.\"\n\nHe dropped the handkerchief.\n\nBrodie raised his arm vertically and fired his shot, sending his ball of lead high into the pale blue immensity of a St. Petersburg dawn sky. He felt quite a recoil, juddering his elbow and shoulder.\n\nHe looked over at Kilbarron who still had his pistol held low by his thigh. Then he pointed it directly at Brodie's face.\n\n\"No, sir! This is unacceptable!\" Brodie heard Vere shout\u2014a split second before Kilbarron fired.\n\nBrodie felt something tear at his left ear, tugging at it, and he spun round in a reflex, clapping his hand to the side of his head. Blood! His hand was slick with blood. He could see the blood dripping from his torn ear, like a tap left running. The blood pattered onto the dry blond meadow-grass of summer. Faintness overcame him and he fell to his knees, then his hands and knees. He could hear shouting and sounds of a scuffle. Malachi and the other second were holding back Vere and Rubenstein. Colonel Ilyichov was shouting furiously in Russian. Brodie shook his head, causing more blood to fall and looked around. Kilbarron was walking over to him, standing over him. He threw away his pistol and reached into his greatcoat and drew out another, cocked. Brodie felt the muzzle press against the back of his head. Cold for a second. He tried to turn.\n\n\"Don't do it,\" he said to Kilbarron, over his shoulder.\n\nKilbarron was smiling. Two rows of teeth.\n\n\"I'll deal with you first, you Scottish bastard, and then I'll deal with that bitch-whore of yours.\"\n\nThere was nothing for it. Brodie turned quickly, squirmed round and shot Kilbarron square in the chest with Lika's hotel-gun, her little Derringer\u2014both barrels.\n\n# PART IV\n\n# Biarritz\u2014Edinburgh\u2014Nice\n\n1900\u20131902\n\n# 1\n\n\" _Bonsoir, Monsieur Balfour. A demain._ \"\n\nBrodie said goodbye to Madame Grosjean and heard her close and lock the front door of the shop behind him. He crossed the place de la Libert\u00e9 and headed for Biarritz's central post office. It was early May and finally, he saw, workmen were taking down the strung bunting from the lamp posts, last vestiges of the centennial celebrations. May 1900, he thought: it still seemed strange to be in a new century. It should feel different, he imagined, but it didn't. He still felt trapped in the nineteenth century, somehow. It would not let him go.\n\nHe presented himself at the Poste Restante window, gave his name and was handed a small packet wrapped in brown paper\u2014this was what he was waiting for\u2014and, to his surprise, a letter. The packet changed his mood absolutely. He knew what it was, a pound of Margarita tobacco blend from Hoskings in Edinburgh. He had run out some weeks ago and, to his vague self-disgust, had found himself searching the crevices of his jacket and trouser pockets in the hope that he might retrieve enough rivelled strands that had fallen there to furnish the slimmest of rolled-up cigarettes. He had been successful. Of course he smoked other cigarettes and used other tobaccos\u2014but his heart belonged to Margarita.\n\nThe letter, however, was unexpected. Talk about the nineteenth century, he thought, looking at the Russian stamps\u2014here it was pursuing him. It was addressed to \"Monsieur B. Balfour, Poste Restante, Biarritz, Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Atlantiques, France.\" Brodie wandered back to the Caf\u00e9 Terminus-Olympia by the railway station right in the heart of town, found a table in the shade, ordered an anisette, rolled and lit a cigarette and opened the letter. It was from George Vere.\n\n> St. Petersburg\n> \n> 27 March 1900\n> \n> Dear Balfour,\n> \n> I was very glad to hear from you after these few months. Excuse my many errors on this typewriter and the absence of a signature at the end. I know you'll understand my discretion.\n> \n> Here, as you requested, is my account of the aftermath of the events in the meadow at Yelagin Island. After you left with Rubenstein to seek medical aid, I reminded Malachi Kilbarron and his second that all the people involved in this unfortunate incident were British citizens and that, in St. Petersburg, I was their representative on earth. Therefore they would be well advised to do what I said. As far as I could see, I told them, this was as clear-cut a case of self-defence that could be presented in any court of law. I, Rubenstein and Colonel Ilyichov would all testify to that effect. Equally the late JK was guilty of a premeditated act of attempted murder. Again, we would all testify to that effect. I gave Malachi twenty-four hours to come up with an explanation for the demise of his brother\u2014otherwise I would go to the police. He and his second would certainly be arrested as accessories to this attempted murder. It was clearly an elaborate plot to kill Mr. Brodie Moncur. They seemed to register the intent and force of my message, though Malachi was in something of a state of shock (JK's body was lying ten feet away covered in a greatcoat). Colonel Ilyichov vouchsafed the same opinion though I sensed he was more outraged at the violation of ancient duelling codes rather than the loss of life. He was incandescent and incredulous.\n> \n> In due course Malachi and his second removed JK's body to their carriage and drove it away. Somehow, by some means, the body was transported the eighty or so versts to the estate of Maloe Nikolskoe. And it was from there, two days later, that JK's death from a heart seizure was announced to the world. It was widely reported in Piter and Moscow but not, I believe, in any British newspapers. I imagine you are ignorant of this official \"cause of death.\" It was in everybody's interest that it should be so described. From the Petersburg perspective there was and is only sadness and mourning\u2014no hint of scandal, no suspicion of anything underhand. JK died prematurely, melancholy and true, but all too typical of human mortality. I think you can assume, as far as you are concerned, that the matter is closed.\n> \n> The only irony\u2014and one you won't appreciate\u2014is that two months after the death of the composer there was a memorial concert in the New Russia Theatre featuring \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee.\" It was a monumental success. There have been other subsequent performances and the sales of sheet music have been very impressive. Word is spreading throughout Europe where other concerts are planned. Funny old life, one is tempted to say.\n> \n> I think you and Mrs. Balfour can consider yourselves safe. The matter has been completely hushed up. Please stay in communication. I am always pleased to afford any assistance I can.\n> \n> Wishing you the best of good fortune,\n> \n> Yr obt servant,\n> \n> G\n\nBrodie rolled another cigarette, thinking back to that terrible morning when he'd killed John Kilbarron...He felt a retrospective horror cool him suddenly and his hand went unreflectingly to his torn, diminished ear. Kill or be killed, he reminded himself sternly, though he noticed how the flame of his lighter trembled as he held it to his cigarette's end.\n\nBrodie thought back. Forced himself.\n\nKilbarron's face was animate enough after the impact of the two bullets in his chest to register his utter shock. His mouth gaped, he staggered, dropped his own gun, and fell to his knees and then toppled slowly over on his side, apparently dead. Brodie heaved himself to his feet and saw Colonel Ilyichov, Vere, Rubenstein and Kilbarron's second holding Malachi pinioned. He was bellowing incoherently. He saw Vere then hissing words in Malachi's ear and very quickly he quietened and was led away a few paces by the other second. Vere, Rubenstein and Ilyichov then came over to see how Brodie was. His shirt collar and shirt front were sopping with blood from his wounded ear. He was given two handkerchiefs and held them to the wound to stop the bleeding. He felt no pain worth speaking of. The absurd thought came to him\u2014who would have guessed that an injured human ear could bleed so much?\n\nHe was led shakily to the landau, asked the name of his doctor and then he and Rubenstein\u2014leaving Vere behind to sort out the mess\u2014made their way to Dr. Sampson's consulting rooms.\n\n\"So,\" Dr. Sampson asked neutrally, as she cleaned the wound on his ear, \"what happened?\"\n\n\"I...Ah. Yes. A hunting accident. A foolish, careless mistake. Hunting rabbits at dawn. It's the best time. I tripped, fell, the gun went off.\"\n\n\"Mmm, really?\" Her scepticism was manifest. \"Lucky escape.\"\n\n\"Yes. Indeed.\"\n\nShe stitched his left ear up\u2014his lobe had been shredded\u2014and wound a length of bandage round his head. She stepped back to admire her handiwork.\n\n\"You look surprisingly romantic.\" She handed him his spectacles and he put them on. \"And there I was never expecting to see you again.\"\n\n\"You never know in life,\" Brodie said. \"Strange things can happen.\"\n\nShe helped him into his jacket. While Brodie had been attended to by Dr. Sampson, Rubenstein had gone to Lika to tell her what had happened on Yelagin Island. When Brodie arrived back at the apartment she was still crying with relief. She held her body tight against his, as if she was trying to meld herself to him.\n\n\"Is he really dead?\" she whispered.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"I warned you didn't I? I knew he wanted to kill you.\"\n\n\"Thank God you gave me your gun. He was going to shoot me in the back of the head like an animal.\"\n\n\"You see\u2014I knew it, I knew it about him.\"\n\nShe turned away and with the heels of her hands crushed tears from her eyes. What must it be like for her, Brodie wondered? Kilbarron dead\u2014killed by her lover. All this terrible information.\n\n\"What about Malachi?\" she asked, not turning.\n\n\"What about him?\"\n\n\"Is he dead?\"\n\n\"No, of course not. He was the second.\"\n\nShe stepped back and turned now, her face an odd half-crying, half-smiling grimace.\n\n\"You should have killed him too.\"\n\n\"How could I possibly have done that?\"\n\nShe seemed suddenly galvanized.\n\n\"We have to go. We have to leave this place, now.\"\n\n\"Go where? Why?\"\n\n\"Because Malachi will come looking for us. We have to leave Piter, now.\"\n\nBrodie didn't argue. There was a strange determination about her as they swiftly completed their packing.\n\n\"Where are we going?\" Brodie asked.\n\n\"To Narva. We can catch a train to Riga and Warsaw and Berlin from there.\"\n\n\"Why Narva?\"\n\n\"Because he'll be looking for us here in Piter and he won't find us in Narva.\"\n\n\"Who?\"\n\n\"Malachi! Believe me, Brodie. This is how we escape.\"\n\n\"Listen, Lika, my darling, there's no hurry. Vere told me. Everything is under control.\"\n\nLika closed her eyes as if she was talking to an imbecile.\n\n\"We have to go to a police station. Have you your passport? Your certificate of residence?\"\n\n\"Of course.\"\n\n\"Then we go. We pay for the stamp and then we wait in the police station and then we go to Narva. Just listen to me\u2014I know what I'm doing.\"\n\nIt took most of the rest of the day to have their documentation authorized, passports stamped, forms filled in, money paid (five roubles, fifty kopeks) for the foreigner's travel permit. It seemed odd, as a British citizen, to have to ask official permission to leave St. Petersburg and go home, but this was Russia, Brodie realized.\n\nTheir documents in order, they returned to the Morskaya apartment and Lika sent Nikanor to find a troika that would take them the three hours to Narva. The troika secured, Nikanor, Kyrill and Fyolka helped them load their cases and trunks in the rear, where the driver roped them down.\n\nThe sense of something being wrong, seriously amiss, underlaid all their banter and chatter. Kyrill seemed almost tearful and Fyolka was very concerned about Brodie's bandage around his head.\n\n\"Tell them we're going to Riga and we'll be back in a month,\" Brodie whispered.\n\n\"Good idea,\" Lika agreed and told them so. This seemed to make the mood ease, somewhat, and the final exchange of handshakes and a kiss for Fyolka appeared to normalize the farewells\u2014though Brodie's kiss on Fyolka's cheek sent C\u00e9sar into a brief barking fit before Lika silenced him with a slap.\n\nAnd then they boarded the troika, the driver gave a crack of his whip and they set off with a lurch on the beginning of the long journey that had brought them across Europe all the way to Biarritz.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBiarritz...Brodie paid for his anisette and looked at his watch. Lika wouldn't be home for an hour yet so he wandered down to the Grande Plage. The tide was out and the small perfect crescent of sand was as large as it would ever be. Brodie stepped down to the beach beside the row of bathing huts set in front of the salt baths with their strange Moorish architecture. There was quite a crowd on the terrace; tricolours flew from every flagpole. La Belle France, he thought, consoled by Vere's letter. Perhaps the nineteenth century was finally loosening its grip on him.\n\nThe crash and fall of the heavy surf also soothed him as he walked down over the softly yielding sand to the waves' edge. He believed, more and more, that it was important to acknowledge and recognize these moments in your life\u2014these moments of absolute calm and security\u2014however long or short your lifespan might be. Brodie realized that, now they had escaped from Russia and the Kilbarrons, now that he and Lika, although unmarried, were living as man and wife, he had actually never been as happy in his life before.\n\nHe trudged back along the beach towards the casino on its bluff\u2014a useful source of income to them both and handily placed, a mere ten-minute walk from their apartment. He climbed the steps up towards the Grand H\u00f4tel and idled. Thinking about the duel had reminded him and he detoured to a shop on the rue Broquedis next to the Anglican church, St. Andrew's. It was called \"Rochefoucauld. Chasse-P\u00eache.\"\n\nInside, the walls were lined with glass cabinets full of shotguns interspersed with stuffed hunting trophies from land and sea. The head of a wild boar beside a six-foot-long basking shark. A polished turtle shell next to a ten-point antler. A chalk-white whale's jawbone sat on the counter like a strange piece of sculpture. Monsieur Rochefoucauld was glad to see him and said his order had arrived over two months previously. Brodie apologized, paid what he owed\u2014rather expensive, he thought\u2014and Monsieur Rochefoucauld, a tall, unsmiling man with a neatly trimmed grey beard, unwrapped the rag that contained the cleaned and oiled Derringer and then took a small cardboard box out of a drawer and handed it to him. Brodie read the English label: \".41 Short Rimfire. Oilless non-Mercuric Cartridge. Navy Arms Company.\"\n\n\"How many are there in the box?\"\n\nMonsieur Rochefoucauld wordlessly pointed to the number fifty circled in each corner.\n\n\"I don't need all these,\" Brodie said. \"Can you sell me ten?\"\n\n\" _H\u00e9las,_ no,\" Monsieur Rochefoucauld said. \"I'm afraid you must pay for the full order.\" He shrugged. \"After all, what would I do with forty bullets for a muff-pistol?\"\n\nBrodie pocketed his small gun and his bullets and walked homeward along the rue Gambetta, pausing to look in shop windows, then past the covered market until he reached the junction of their street, the rue Duler. They had rented two floors above a milliner's shop. They had a small kitchen, a flushing toilet and bathroom and above that, on the top floor, a sitting room and a bedroom. Lika had decorated the rooms with bright fustian curtains\u2014banana yellow\u2014and had placed pots of flowers and houseplants on windowsills and occasional tables. Brodie began to feel a typical petit __ bourgeois and rejoiced in it.\n\nHe heard C\u00e9sar give his short welcoming bark at the sound of Brodie's key in the lock and he pushed the door open and picked the excited little dog up, scratching him behind his ears as C\u00e9sar tried to lick Brodie's face. Lika would be home soon, her lessons usually ended at five in the afternoon. He set C\u00e9sar down and raked up the coals in the small range and set the coffee pot to brew. Perhaps they would go to the casino tonight after supper and make a few francs. He heard Lika's step on the stairway coming up from the shop floor below and went to open the door for her.\n\n# 2\n\n> 17 bis, rue Duler\n> \n> Biarritz\n> \n> Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Atlantiques\n> \n> France\n> \n> 15 January 1900\n> \n> Dear Callum, brother, silent one, hopeless correspondent,\n> \n> I thought you should know that I have left Russia and St. Petersburg and am now back in France, living in a town on the Atlantic coast, not far from the Spanish border, called Biarritz. Get your atlas out! I have a job in a piano shop and I'm also tuning, of course, building up a little business. Write to me Poste Restante, Biarritz, Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Atlantiques, France\u2014but address your letter to \"Monsieur BALFOUR.\" That is the name I am currently living under. It would be a long and complicated story to explain why but there is nothing to worry about\u2014it's just a precaution.\n> \n> I am in love with and living with a young Russian woman. For the sake of decorum and a quiet life we've established the pretence that we're married\u2014Mr. and Mrs. Brodie Balfour, if you please. She's a lovely girl\u2014you would adore her and congratulate me enviously. One day we'll be married but\u2014alas\u2014elements of her previous private life make that currently impossible.\n> \n> I look forward to hearing from you. Yes, I do. Give my fondest wishes to the family (excluding Malky).\n> \n> Yr affect. bro.,\n> \n> Brodie\n\n* * *\n\nMadame Grosjean managed a faint smile as Brodie said goodbye and that he would see her tomorrow, _comme d'habitude._ Madame Grosjean was a recent widow\u2014a widow of two years. She was a severe sharp-faced woman who spent more time than was necessary reminding people that her husband was dead. Two years on she still wore black and her bitterness over the death of her husband, Norbert (aged sixty-seven), had shaped her features: it was as if his death were a personal provocation. She seldom smiled, her regular expression one of stoic suffering. Brodie had never known Monsieur Grosjean and so was incapable of estimating the scale of the loss. The Grosjeans' one son, Fabrice, was a pharmacist in Rennes and had no desire to take over the family business of selling and repairing pianos.\n\nBrodie had noticed the shop on the place de la Libert\u00e9 as he had wandered about Biarritz when they first arrived in early October 1899. It was positioned between a tailor's called \"Henry\"\u2014with a sign in the window that said, simply, \"English\"\u2014and a photographer's. Above the small parade of shops\u2014there was a patisserie and a _tabac_ \u2014ran the upper terrace of the Caf\u00e9 Terminus-Olympia that also had an entrance on the railway station behind. The place de la Libert\u00e9 was a bustling busy rectangle with newly planted plane trees and, at certain angles, a view down streets to the creaming surf of Atlantic Ocean beyond, a fact that added to its particular charm.\n\nHe had entered the shop, asked for the proprietor and duly met Madame Grosjean\u2014who immediately informed him that she was a widow and her husband had passed away two years previously. He offered his condolences and told her he was a fully qualified piano tuner and repairer who had worked for Channon in Edinburgh and did they have any work going? Madame Grosjean asked him to wait ten minutes. He went up to the terrace of the Terminus and had a coffee. When he returned to the shop Madame Grosjean said he could start the next day. There was a workshop in a yard at the back and a list of twenty-four pianos in and around Biarritz needing to be tuned. Brodie wondered what had happened in the ten minutes that he'd been absent to encourage Madame Grosjean to make this impulsive decision. Had she swiftly sacked the man he was replacing? The place had the air of being suddenly vacated. Had she communed with the shade of Norbert Grosjean?\n\nNo matter, he wasn't complaining: he had a job that paid at the rate of a hundred francs a week and, several months later, was thoroughly established. Not for the first time he gave thanks to the universal nature of his profession. Wherever there were pianos he could find work, one way or another.\n\nLika, for her part, made inroads into Biarritz's sizeable Russian population. She had a visiting card made, in Russian and French, advertising her services as Madame L. V. Balfour, teacher of French and of singing. She posted advertisements on the noticeboard of the Russian Orthodox church, in the hallway of the Franco-Russe Club, and in Biarritz's Russian-language weekly newspaper, the _Russkii biulleten' Biarritsa,_ a four-page news-sheet that circulated amongst Biarritz's Russian community during the season. She was almost immediately taken up by one Princess Marie Petrovna Stolypina and offered a job, two hours a day, Monday to Friday, teaching her two children French. This aristocratic connection, in turn, led to other tutoring.\n\nSo, between them, they made a modest living, supplemented by their nights gambling with the martingale system in Biarritz's casino. Their mainstay, and the source of their petit-bourgeois existence, was Brodie's job at Piano-Grosjean. He knew how important he was to Madame Grosjean\u2014every week brought more responsibilities; he was wondering when would be the right moment to ask for an increase in his wages.\n\nHe left the shop, bought a week-old edition of _The Times_ and went upstairs to the Caf\u00e9 Terminus-Olympia's high terrace and found a table by the balustrade with a distant view of the Grande Plage and the H\u00f4tel du Palais on its small promontory. Biarritz was a town of many levels and winding streets that doubled back on themselves. It was easy to forget that high, distant perspectives were often surprisingly on offer. He ordered a Dubonnet, lit a cigarette and opened his newspaper. An anarchist had shot at\u2014and missed\u2014the Prince of Wales in Belgium, the Olympic Games were about to start in Paris, and the Automobile Club of Great Britain had completed a 1,000-mile trial run from London to Edinburgh and back. Sixty-five motors had started and fifty-one were still running by the time they reached Edinburgh. Mr. Rolls's Panhard had reached a speed of 37 mph.\n\nBrodie thought of Edinburgh and Channon's\u2014the life he'd lived once. He called to mind images of Liethen Manor and his family, feeling no nostalgia or melancholy. Something about his new life\u2014his life with Lika\u2014convinced him that he would never return home, never return to Scotland. And then he did feel a moment's sadness: thinking of his brothers and sisters and their circumscribed conditions. Here he was on a terrace of a caf\u00e9 in the south of France looking out at the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean. Escape, flight, freedom\u2014that was the only solution. Perhaps he'd write to them and urge them to leave.\n\nBrodie finished his drink and strolled home, pondering the letter he'd compose. To Callum, he thought, then Callum could pass it round to the others. Perhaps it was what they needed. A jolt, a catalyst\u2014the prospect of new horizons.\n\nWhen he stepped into the apartment Lika was already there\u2014and he knew instantly something was wrong. Her face was set, her chin buckled slightly as she tried to control her emotions.\n\n\"What is it?\" He sat down beside her at the kitchen table and took her hand.\n\nShe pushed a newspaper at him. It was the Russian weekly, the _Russkii biulleten' Biarritsa._ She pointed to an advertisement at the bottom of the first page.\n\n\"I'll translate for you,\" she said, running her finger under the headline. \"Significant Inheritance!\" she said. \"We are seeking the whereabouts of Mademoiselle Lydia V. Blum. She is the recipient of a large inheritance from a benefactor. We will offer a reward of 20,000 roubles to anyone who can inform us of Mlle Blum's whereabouts. Please contact Monsieur M. Kilbarron, 33 boulevard Beaumarchais, Paris III\u00e8me.\" This last address was in Russian and French.\n\n\"Malachi Kilbarron,\" Brodie said. He stood up, feeling sick. He went to the kitchen sink and ran the tap, drinking water from his hand. He turned. \"How did he know we were in Biarritz?\"\n\n\"I don't know. We've been so careful. Maybe he's putting advertisements everywhere. Everywhere where there are Russians.\"\n\nShe stood up and began to walk around the room, clenching her fists and then shaking her fingers, as if they were sore.\n\n\"I knew he'd find us,\" she said harshly. \"I told you. I told you that you should have killed him as well.\"\n\n\"But _how_ did he find us?\" Brodie said, ignoring her last remark. \"In the whole of Europe. How?\"\n\n\"There are agencies. Ex-policemen. They search for missing people. Maybe he hired one.\"\n\n\"It doesn't make sense. We left no trail. You don't need a passport in France. We haven't even registered with the Pr\u00e9fecture\u2014\"\n\n\"It doesn't matter,\" she said, closing her eyes and bracing her back. \"We have to leave. We have to go far away. He's after us, following us. Like a hell-hound. And if he finds us...\" She came over to him and he took her in his arms.\n\n\"He wants to kill us, Brodie,\" she whispered. \"He won't give up.\"\n\n# 3\n\nBrodie looked out of the train window. It was raining and the Borders landscape was drab, drenched and barren-looking as the line crossed a stretch of treeless khaki moorland. Beyond, unhedged, unwalled, sheepless hillsides climbed to meet the enfolding grey-flannel sky. Scotland at its most uncompromising. He felt weak, unmanned somehow, as if a more craven, helpless Brodie Moncur had parasitically occupied his body and spirit. It doesn't matter, Brodie told himself, they're only your family, that's all\u2014people you can leave and forget if you've a mind to.\n\n\"How much further?\" Lika asked. She was eating a sugar bun, the last of three she'd purchased at Waverley station.\n\n\"Half an hour, maybe less. But then we have to get to the village.\"\n\nShe popped the last of the bun in her mouth and licked her fingers free of stickiness. They had been living in Edinburgh for five months now and Brodie could see the physical changes wrought in her\u2014she had put on pounds. The tall rangy girl was growing plump. He didn't mind\u2014she still looked beautiful; in some ways even more voluptuous and alluring in this larger, fleshier incarnation. And he knew why she was eating so much\u2014fear, worry, uncertainty.\n\n\"Are you happy, my darling?\" he asked suddenly, reaching forward to take her hands, now she'd stopped eating.\n\n\"Of course I'm happy. I'm with you.\"\n\n\"You don't mind that I brought you with me, on this trip?\"\n\n\"I wanted to come. I want to meet your family\u2014your father, your sisters and brothers.\"\n\n\"We'll only stay one night\u2014maximum two.\"\n\n\"Stay as long as you like, my love. These are your people and you haven't seen them for years.\"\n\nYes, he thought, and there the problem lay. \"These people\" explained who he was, explained his life. He looked back out of the window at the waterlogged heathland, a few stunted elders bent sideways from the prevailing wind the only variation in a landscape that was almost entirely beige and grey. What was that expression? Yes, the \"pathetic fallacy.\" This grim, bleak view summed up his mood perfectly.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThey had left Biarritz for Edinburgh in September. Brodie handed in his notice to Madame Grosjean, apologizing for his abruptness and inventing some story about his wife's inheritance and how they were going back to Russia. Madame Grosjean's absolute conviction that the world was an unfair and unjust place increased an iota or two. Lika told Princess Stolypina she was returning to Russia also, hoping the word would spread. Brodie experienced retrospective relief that they had adopted the Balfour pseudonym. All this subterfuge was to throw Malachi Kilbarron off the scent should he or his agents ever come to Biarritz and start making enquiries.\n\nThey took the train to Le Havre and caught a ferry to Harwich. From there it was another train journey to Edinburgh. They spent two nights at the North British Hotel at the end of Princes Street before Brodie found some acceptable furnished rooms in the basement of a house in the Dean Village district of town. They registered themselves as Mr. and Mrs. Moncur, dropping Balfour for the return home. Brodie knew too many people in Edinburgh\u2014a nom de plume would only draw attention. It was strange being back in Edinburgh, however. To Brodie it seemed a defeat, somehow\u2014this unwanted return a symbol of how things could so easily go wrong in life; of careless fate, an unknown destiny buffeting you, heedlessly, mocking your own petty plans and fond dreams of a life that you might lead. He tried not to let Lika see what he was feeling as she herself experienced something of a nervous decline. But as the weeks went by, and the new rhythms of their new life established themselves\u2014and the fear of Malachi's pursuit receded\u2014their days became more equable. A kind of cautious happiness returned.\n\nIn Dean Village their basement apartment consisted of a large sitting room with a fireplace, a small kitchen and WC (no bath) and a damp bedroom that gave onto a dark, sunless yard. Small ferns grew in the cracks of the paving stones. They had the services of a housemaid three days a week, a lumpy girl with bad skin but a nice nature called Joyce McGillivray. In the yard there was a coal shed and a privy. C\u00e9sar was let out there to \" _faire pipi_ \" when required but, for some reason, he didn't like being in the yard, growling, bristling, no tail-wag, always scratching at the back door, wanting to return inside. Perhaps a previous lodger's dog had been there before, Brodie wondered, and left his noisome spoor impregnated in the bricks and mortar.\n\nThus settled anonymously\u2014Brodie made no contact with his family or any old friends or acquaintances\u2014they resumed a reduced Scottish version of their Biarritz life, minus the casino. Brodie sought part-time work piano tuning, piano repairing and even piano teaching. He found a job one day a week at a small preparatory school in Corstorphine.\n\nLika joined a choral society\u2014mainly to improve her English\u2014as there seemed little or no demand for French or Russian lessons in Edinburgh. She sang the role of H\u00e9l\u00e8ne in an amateur production of Offenbach's _La Belle H\u00e9l\u00e8ne_ and received a good notice in the _Scotsman_ : \"Mrs. Lydia Moncur was outstanding as H\u00e9l\u00e8ne, demonstrating a lyric gift rare in our native productions of contemporary opera.\" Brodie was busy enough\u2014he could always earn a living\u2014but Lika, he noticed, was often alone at home with C\u00e9sar, bored. For all her efforts she found learning English difficult. When he suggested they talk English at home they managed a stuttering five minutes before they relapsed into French again. She began to cook large meals for them in the evening\u2014stews and pies, compotes and puddings\u2014and she started baking, also\u2014tarts, cakes, biscuits. It seemed to Brodie that, as he crossed the threshold at the end of the working day, the first thing he was required to do was eat.\n\n\"Are you happy, darling?\" he asked her every now and then.\n\n\"Stop asking me if I'm happy!\" she would remonstrate. \"I feel safe. I like it here in Edinburgh. I like being Mrs. Moncur.\"\n\n\"Why won't you marry me, then?\"\n\n\"Why do we need to be married when everyone assumes I'm already married to you?\"\n\n\"It would...It would cement our union. I love you. I want you to be my wife, my legal wife.\"\n\n\"Our union doesn't need cement, Brodie. I don't need a marriage certificate. This little brass ring I wear is perfect.\"\n\nHe gave up raising the matter\u2014they would marry in due course, he assumed, once they were finally decided on where to live and felt safe\u2014and they settled in for an Edinburgh winter. In the New Year Brodie wrote to Callum.\n\n> 15, Danube Street\n> \n> Stockbridge\n> \n> Edinburgh\n> \n> 15 January 1901\n> \n> Dear Callum Moncur,\n> \n> Do you have a brother called Brodie? If so, he would like to inform you that he is now residing in Edinburgh at the above address with his lady wife. He suggests a visit to the family home at some stage in the near future to introduce said wife to his siblings and his horrible father, Malky. Do please communicate if you think this is a good idea\u2014or not.\n> \n> Sincerely yours,\n> \n> Yr affect. bro.,\n> \n> Mr. Moncur (Brodie)\n\n* * *\n\nAt Peebles station Brodie was astonished to see an automobile parked close to the diligences and dog carts that usually acted as local cabs. There was a sign leaning on its rear wheel. \"Ten times faster\u2014same price.\" Brodie and Lika stepped aboard\u2014to boos and catcalls from the other cabbies\u2014and asked to be driven to Liethen Manor. Brodie asked the name of the vehicle and was informed that it was a De Dion-Bouton \"Motorette.\" Brodie sat beside the driver and Lika sat facing them on a small padded bench opposite. The thing was steered by a kind of central column with a brass handle. The driver of the motor was a young man with a strong Glaswegian accent. He wore a reversed tweed cap and goggles and his name was Jamesie, he said. He started the motor by cranking a handle at the rear and jumped aboard. The noise wasn't insufferable and he put the motor in gear and they chugged out of the station yard, picking up speed at they made their way down the high street. They were out of the town within a minute, living up to the brag of his advertisement.\n\n\"I'll gie you my visiting card,\" he shouted. \"Have you a telephone in your house?\"\n\n\"I don't think so,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"If you can avail yourself of a telephone, sir, just make a call to the station. The stationmaster knows me. I can be at your house in an hour or less.\"\n\n\"What language is he speaking?\" Lika asked in French, leaning forward.\n\n\"Are youse foreigners?\" Jamesie asked.\n\n\"Yes,\" Brodie said. \"We are.\"\n\nHe thought his mood couldn't descend any lower but it could, and did, as they were driven into Liethen Manor. He saw that the Howden Inn was closed, its windows boarded up. An old woman in a dirty pinafore shouted and shook her fist at the De Dion as it puttered past. Apart from her the village seemed deserted.\n\nLika was looking around her, fascinated.\n\n\"It reminds me of Russia, this place,\" she said.\n\n\"Really?\"\n\n\"Yes. I feel I could be travelling through a Russian village, so isolated, you know? The mood, the landscape. These small, low houses. The poverty. It's different, of course, but somehow it makes me feel back home.\"\n\nBrodie left it at that, not picking up what she was responding to\u2014or maybe his own familiarity with Liethen Manor made him unaware of its particular, unique nature that was at once apparent to others. Home is somewhere you never really know, Brodie thought gloomily, as the De Dion pulled into the driveway of the manse. Brodie felt that he was returning to some abandoned dwelling, an untenanted arena of some other life that someone else had lived.\n\n\"How many brothers and sisters do you have?\" Lika asked. \"Remind me.\"\n\n\"I've six sisters and two brothers.\"\n\n\"You see, it's very Russian.\"\n\n\"It's very Scottish.\"\n\nThey stepped out of the motor, paid Jamesie and bade him farewell. Brodie looked around, it had been years since he had last stood here and the place looked the same\u2014only the season and the weather were different. The same couldn't be said for him, he realized, thinking about all that had occurred in his life since his last poisonous exchange with Malky, here on this driveway. Perhaps the garden was more unkempt: the lawn was tufty and weedy under the conifers and the monkey-puzzle trees. Yet, now he was here, memories crowded in\u2014it seemed as if he'd been here last week, not over six years ago. You may leave home, but home never leaves you, he thought darkly.\n\nThe front door opened and Doreen stood there, smartly dressed, her hair quite grey. She kissed Brodie and then Lika and they went inside to meet the rest of the family.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie could tell that Lika was very nervous. Who wouldn't be, he thought? They had gathered in the drawing room before dinner and Brodie knew his almost desperate need for a calming cigarette would be shared by Lika. They were all waiting for Malky. Doreen, Ernestine, Aileen, Edith, Alfie, Isabella and Electra. Only Callum and his wife and child were absent. Brodie was very struck by Electra, now almost twenty, pretty, with a round alert face, tall and darker than the others, like him. If she didn't leave the manse soon she'd be lost, Brodie thought, like the three \"Eens,\" old before their time, old maids betrothed to Malky Moncur, domestic potentate. He looked around\u2014there was no sherry or Madeira on offer either, and the butler's pantry was locked.\n\n\"Could I offer anyone a cigarette?\" Brodie asked, casually. \"I've just picked up a new supply of Margarita\u2014you know, my blend.\"\n\nBrodie's entire family was pleased to accept the offer as he passed round his cigarette case, lighting their cigarettes one by one. Lika gave him a heartfelt look of thanks.\n\n\"We're at home,\" Doreen said, fetching and dispersing ashtrays. \"We set the proprieties,\" she added as if responding to some unspoken rebuke.\n\n\"What's wrong with smoking?\" Electra said.\n\n\"Nothing. As long as you don't do it in public.\"\n\n\"Or they'll think you're a hure,\" Alfie said. \"This is an excellent smoke, Brodie.\"\n\n\"Alfie!\" Ernestine snapped, reprovingly.\n\n\"Not every loun smokes,\" Electra said. \"And not every woman who smokes in the street is a loun.\"\n\n\"Can we change the subject, please?\" Doreen said. \"What must Lika be thinking of our conversation?\"\n\n\"I'm not understanding this word,\" Lika said, in her heavily accented English. Her voice sounded unbelievably exotic in this room, Brodie thought, admiringly, like a refreshing breeze on a hot day.\n\n\"Just as well,\" Aileen said. \"We can always count on Alfie to lower the tone.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, we've a letter for you, Brodie,\" Ernestine said. \"It came some weeks ago.\" And she darted out of the room, returning moments later with a small envelope. Brodie tucked it in a pocket.\n\n\"Why isn't Callum here?\" Brodie asked. He and Callum had met briefly for a drink in a pub in Edinburgh two weeks previously to discuss this visit. Callum seemed unwell and said he'd been suffering from influenza. He drank three glasses of hot rum. They agreed he would be present if only to dilute the Malky effect.\n\n\"There's a message. You're invited to dine with him tomorrow night.\"\n\n\"He's become very grand since he married,\" Electra said. \"We're a bit infra dig here at the manse, for Mrs. Moncur.\" Nobody contradicted her, Brodie noticed.\n\nThe tobacco had relaxed them all. Edith and Ernestine started talking to Lika. Alfie wandered over and asked him what Paris was like. Electra joined them.\n\n\"But why did you leave St. Petersburg?\" Electra asked. \"I'd kill someone to go and live in St. Petersburg.\"\n\nBrodie swallowed. Coughed.\n\n\"Professional reasons,\" he said.\n\n\"Callum tells us all your news,\" Alfie said. \"When we see him, that is. We follow you around Europe.\"\n\n\"Take me with you, Brodie,\" Electra said quietly. \"I beg you.\"\n\nThere was a thumping on the ceiling.\n\n\"That'll be Papa,\" Doreen said. \"I'll go and get him. He's ready to come down.\"\n\nBrodie was pleased to see that everyone continued smoking. Brodie crossed the room to stand by Lika. He took her hand behind their backs.\n\nThe door swung open and the Reverend Malcolm Moncur entered the room.\n\nBrodie was shocked. His father was gaunt, half his usual size, walking with two sticks, dewlaps of flesh hanging on either side of his ragged moustache, now mouse-grey. His wasted body made his head seem larger, more gargoyle-like. He looked at his family, gathered in a semicircle facing him, blinking as if surprised, then his watery eyes settled on Brodie.\n\n\"Have you come back home after all these years, you black bastard?\"\n\n\"Very good to see you, Father. May I introduce my wife, Lydia.\"\n\nMalky shuffled over towards them both.\n\n\"You're still as black as the earl of hell's waistcoat.\" He turned to Lika. \"He's no son of mine, madam.\"\n\n\"Everyone calls her Lika.\"\n\n\"Why did you marry this octaroon, my good lady? Was there nobody else in Russia but this swarthy dog?\"\n\n\"That's quite enough, Father,\" Brodie said, stepping in front of Lika.\n\n\"Yes,\" said Doreen, taking Malky's arm. \"You come away into dinner, now.\" She led him into the dining room.\n\n\"Welcome to our happy family, Lika,\" Electra said.\n\nThey all filed into the dining room, following Malky and Doreen.\n\n\"Sorry,\" Brodie whispered to Lika. \"At least I warned you.\"\n\n\"I feel I'm back home,\" she said. \"In a funny way I'm very glad to be here.\" She smiled at him. \"And I feel I know you better now.\"\n\nDoreen had placed Brodie and Lika at the far end of the table, away from Malky. Malky was able to feed himself but Doreen cut up the slices of mutton on his plate and poured the gravy. He muttered to himself as he chewed laboriously and sent Ernestine out for some brandy and water to ease his food down.\n\n\"What happened to him?\" he asked Electra, who was on his left.\n\n\"About two years ago he had a bad fall and he knocked himself out. We found him on the landing upstairs, unconscious.\" She told the rest of the story, quickly. Malky was carried to bed, a doctor called, but before the doctor arrived he came round. \"He said he had tripped and fallen. But we think he had some sort of infarction. He's never been the same since.\"\n\n\"No more sermons.\"\n\n\"No.\" She lowered her voice. \"And I think we're in financial difficulties. But Doreen won't tell us.\"\n\n\"But he made a fortune from those sermons.\"\n\n\"You'll have to ask Doreen. She controls what money there is.\" She leaned closer to him. \"Take me away with you, Brodie. I like Lika\u2014she's very beautiful. I could be your housekeeper, your secretary\u2014all I need is board and lodging.\"\n\n\"I would, like a shot,\" he said. \"But I've my own difficulties\u2014financial and professional. I don't even have a job, everything I do is part-time.\"\n\n\"What are you two darkies whispering about down there?\" Malky bellowed furiously. \"I'll have no whispering in my house!\"\n\nEverybody went silent.\n\n\"We're talking about...\" Brodie hesitated, then improvised. \"Our dead mother. Your late wife.\"\n\nHe knew that would silence him and Malky returned to his mutton, forking a portion into his mouth, eyes focussed on the salt cellar in front of him. Everyone seemed stunned by Brodie's audacity\u2014and its effectiveness. He suddenly felt\u2014and it was not a comfortable feeling\u2014as if the others were beginning to look at him as head of the family, the baton passed on, now Malky's infirmity was so evident. Brodie drank some water, composing himself. Then he asked Ernestine for some brandy and she silently fetched the decanter. Malky watched him make a drink of brandy and water but said nothing. Some small victory had been won here. The conversation levels rose. The brandy decanter was passed around. After pudding\u2014an apple pie\u2014Doreen led Malky away to his bedroom. He did not say goodnight.\n\nLater, lying in bed with Lika, in his old bedroom\u2014a gentle rain falling steadily outside\u2014Brodie thought about the dinner and registered it as one of the strangest and most significant experiences in his life.\n\n\"You don't know what it was like growing up in this house with that man,\" he explained. \"And for me to be here, now, married, with you, lying in this room, in this bed with you. And he can say nothing. It's wonderful for me.\"\n\n\"Remember we're not actually married, Brodie.\"\n\n\"All right, not officially\u2014but in all but name. Even better, in that case.\"\n\n\"He's a very frightened man, your father. I can see it in him, the fear. That's why he attacks you all.\"\n\n\"It's not as simple as that. He needs us but he resents us. So he tries to dominate us, shape our lives, to prove he has power over us.\"\n\n\"But not you.\"\n\n\"No. Not me\u2014and that's why I think he hates me because I never did what he wanted. And now he's just a sick angry old man. He's going to die soon and he knows it. And he knows nobody's frightened of him any more.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen Brodie was dressing the next morning he remembered the letter he'd slipped into his pocket the previous night. He found it and tore it open. It was from Ainsley Channon. He would have sent it to Liethen Manor, knowing the connection with Lady Dalcastle, Brodie realized.\n\n> Channon & Co.\n> \n> 48, George Street\n> \n> Edinburgh\n> \n> 5 January 1901\n> \n> My dear Brodie,\n> \n> Notice has reached me from the piano-tuning world that you are back in Edinburgh. I'm offended that you haven't found the time to drop into the shop and see me. However, all will be forgiven if your good self arrives in the shop in George Street as soon as is feasible for you. We have something important to discuss.\n> \n> Cordially yours,\n> \n> Ainsley Channon\n\nThis made Brodie somewhat apprehensive: \"something important to discuss\"...They had parted in Paris on rueful but unhappy terms\u2014but now the mood was jaunty and unconcerned. Had he really no idea of how wounded Brodie had felt at his unjust dismissal? Or had he simply forgotten?\n\nBrodie, still pondering how best to respond to this invitation, went down to breakfast with Lika. Only Alfie was present and then Isabella arrived. There was a kedgeree served in a chafing dish on the sideboard and, after they'd eaten\u2014there was also tea and rolls, butter and jam\u2014Brodie went through to see Mrs. Daw in the kitchen. She kissed his cheek, tears in her eyes.\n\n\"I never thought to see you again, Brodie. Never, ever,\" she said. \"And here you've gone and married a Russian woman, they tell me.\"\n\n\"She's very lovely. Come and meet her.\"\n\n\"Oh, no, that's not my place. No, no, I wish you all the best, however.\"\n\n\"I told you I'd be back.\"\n\n\"Aye, but for how long? You're not one for staying put, Brodie.\"\n\nBrodie assured her he was back in Edinburgh for a good long while and would be a regular visitor to the manse, and went to rejoin Lika. They put on their hats and coats for the short walk to Dalcastle Hall. Brodie had sent a note on ahead when they'd arrived. Lady Dalcastle was expecting them.\n\n\"Why don't you go yourself?\" Lika suggested. \"I don't mind staying here.\"\n\n\"No. I want the two of you to meet. It's important to me.\"\n\nAs they walked past the lodge through the gates and entered the shadowed drive down through the beech avenue, now bare-branched, that led towards the house the roadway seemed more eroded, puddled and potholed and, as the house itself came into view, Brodie saw more windows were boarded up in the keep. It almost had a derelict air. Some untethered sheep were munching grass on the front lawn.\n\nAt their knock the door was opened by a surly young lad in a green apron who seemed unable to close his mouth. He led them upstairs to the small sitting room and left them to find Lady Dalcastle. Brodie saw the tremulous flame-fidget of a neglected fire and pokered it into more vigorous life and they both sat there in silence, waiting for Lady Dalcastle.\n\n\"Doesn't this seem like Russia to you?\" Lika asked again. \"This old house falling down, this servant boy?\"\n\n\"I don't know,\" he said. \"I can't see it through your eyes. I know it too well.\"\n\nThen Lady Dalcastle came in, clinging to the young lad's arm. She was like a wisp, as if a gust of air could carry her away and fling her against the wall. She was still wearing her bright clothes\u2014an ultramarine silk jacket with a tartan shawl and a dark maroon woollen dress. She clasped Brodie's face between her claw-like hands and stared at him, repeating his name softly.\n\n\"Brodie, Brodie, Brodie Moncur, as I live and breathe. I never thought I'd see you again.\"\n\nShe turned her bright blinking eyes on Lika.\n\n\"And who is this young lady?\"\n\n\"This is my wife, Lady Dalcastle. Lydia\u2014whom we all call Lika. Lika Moncur, _ma femme._ \"\n\nLika gave a little curtsey and smiled as Lady Dalcastle advanced on her, as if she were seeing some kind of ghost.\n\n\" _Enchant\u00e9e, enchant\u00e9e,_ \" Lady Dalcastle spoke to her in her politely accented Scottish-French. \" _C'est un tr\u00e8s grand plaisir._ \" She turned. \"Where's that stupid boy? He's old Broderick's great-nephew. Call for him, Brodie, his name is Lennox.\"\n\nBrodie stepped out into the corridor. Lennox was sitting there on a stool picking at his fingernails. Brodie ordered tea and returned to the room. Lady Dalcastle was talking to Lika about Paris.\n\n\" _J'adore Paris. Mais elle est dangereuse._ \"\n\nTea was brought in on a tray and served, just warm\u2014Lennox had clearly been well trained by his great-uncle. Brodie gave Lady Dalcastle an edited version of his travels.\n\n\"And where did you two get married, my dear?\"\n\n\"Biarritz,\" Brodie interrupted quickly. \"The English consul.\"\n\n\"How romantic!\" Lady Dalcastle clapped her hands in pleasure. And young Lennox appeared.\n\n\"What do you want?\" Lady Dalcastle asked him, crossly.\n\n\"I thought you summoned me, my lady.\"\n\n\"Well, we'll have some cake, seeing you're here.\"\n\n\"There is no cake, my lady.\"\n\n\"Some shortbread biscuits, then.\"\n\n\"I don't think the shortbread biscuits will do, my lady.\"\n\n\"We're not hungry,\" Brodie said. \"We've just breakfasted.\"\n\nThey stayed another twenty minutes, the tepid tea growing cold in their cups. Lady Dalcastle reminisced about her times in Paris with her late husband, Hugo.\n\n\"And that was in the last century,\" she said to Lika. \"I never thought I'd live to say that. Never.\"\n\nAs they were leaving, Lady Dalcastle resting on Brodie's arm\u2014like a straw on his sleeve\u2014she drew him out of the corridor into her study.\n\n\" _J'ai une commission \u00e0 faire,_ \" she explained to Lika.\n\nHer study was lined with empty glass-fronted bookshelves. Here and there were small stuffed animals mounted on plinths\u2014a marmoset, a capercaillie, a red squirrel. Her desk was heaped with mounds of papers. She searched a drawer and took out a book of cheques.\n\n\"I've sold all Hugo's library,\" she said. \"Quite a tidy sum. I couldn't believe how much they paid me for them. I had an antiquarian bookseller up from London\u2014none of those Edinburgh thieves. I've got enough to last me two years, now. If I survive, that is.\" She laughed gaily at this prospect. \"Darling Hugo, finally did me a favour. Silly, worthless man, who'd have thought?\" She sat down and wrote out a cheque for \u00a3100 and handed it to Brodie.\n\n\"You know I can't accept it,\" he said.\n\n\"It's your wedding present,\" she said. \"Cash it fast while there's money in the bank. The creditors are waiting to pounce.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nAlfie had managed to find a man with a neat, sprung gig cart in the village who would take them into Peebles for a shilling and deposit them at Callum's house. Brodie and Lika made their farewells to the sisters. The mood was untypically emotional\u2014tears were shed and wiped away quickly\u2014and when he kissed Electra goodbye she whispered in his ear, \"Send for me, Brodie, I beg you.\" Brodie whispered back that he would try but he could sense her despondency.\n\nHe and Lika were about to climb into the gig when Brodie suddenly asked where his father was.\n\n\"In the garden,\" Doreen said. \"He takes a short walk once a day. Doctor's orders.\" She smiled. \"Don't worry, I'll say your goodbyes for you, he's not in the happiest of moods.\"\n\n\"That's never put me off before,\" Brodie said and, telling Lika to wait a moment, went to find him.\n\nHe wandered round the side of the manse into the darkness of the garden, the evergreen leaves seeming to suck up the meagre winter light. The sagging conifers were heavy with night dew, still dripping. The damp smell of mould and rotting leaves was strong. He saw Malky with his two sticks tottering along a gravel path, muttering to himself. He was wearing an old homburg and a rust-coloured tweed coat that hung nearly to his ankles.\n\n\"Father!\" he called, and crossed the lawn to him, wetting his boots. \"We're away. I've come to say goodbye.\"\n\n\"Away with your Russian whore.\"\n\n\"She's my wife,\" Brodie said. \"And mind your language, if you please.\"\n\n\"She's as much _my_ wife,\" Malky said. \"Do you take me for a damn bloody fool? I can tell. I know lust. I know fornication. I know the reek of the harlot.\"\n\n\"Of course you think you do, speaking as an old fornicator yourself.\"\n\n\"How dare you!\" Malky half-raised his stick as if to strike him and thought better of it. \"You're not welcome in this house any more, you black swine. Take your painted bawd and go to hell.\"\n\nBrodie drew his fist back and, for a split second, was fully prepared to punch his father in the face. Then he stopped himself, and smiled.\n\n\"The leopard never changes its spots,\" he said evenly, though his heartbeat was reverberating in his chest. \"You've lived as a miserable bastard all your life and you'll die one.\"\n\nThen he kicked one of Malky's sticks away and watched him keel over onto the path, slowly.\n\n\"I hope your death won't be too painful,\" Brodie said as Malky swore vilely at him and threw his other stick at him, wildly, sending it clattering off the trunk of a fir. He rolled onto his back struggling vainly to get up. Brodie leaned forward. \"And I'll never see you alive again.\"\n\nBrodie walked away as Malky began to bellow for Doreen. He stored this final image of his father in his memory\u2014supine, raging, impotent\u2014and didn't look back at him.\n\nOn the way into Peebles Brodie told Lika what had happened, word for word, moment by moment.\n\n\"My God,\" she said, nodding, taking it in. \"Just as I keep telling you\u2014it's completely like Russia.\"\n\n> 15, Danube Street\n> \n> Stockbridge\n> \n> Edinburgh\n> \n> 17 March 1901\n> \n> Dear Callum,\n> \n> Please don't take offence at this letter. I am your older brother and your best friend. Everything I write down I would say to you face to face.\n> \n> I can't tell you how much I was looking forward to introducing you to Lika. So, to find you drunk at 2 p.m. was the first unwelcome shock. The second was your appearance. When we met you said you'd been ill\u2014I now know it's dipsomania. It seems you've aged twenty years since I left.\n> \n> I thought your Sheila was delightful and I was sorry that little Randolph had the croup. A pretty child, nonetheless. But think what that child is storing in its memory. To see his father, unwashed, unshaven, unsteady\u2014bumping into chairs, cursing like a dragoon. We grew up with Malcolm Moncur\u2014we know what a domestic monster is and I think that the saddest aspect of our visit to you at Edenbrae was for me to see you following in his noxious footsteps and having the awful premonition of like father, like son.\n> \n> Moreover, how can you talk to Sheila like that in front of strangers? How can you order her around like a kitchen skivvy? And why is your language so persistently foul? Fucking this, shit and shite and fucking that. I know it's the drink talking but that doesn't excuse the stream of profanity we endured. And to address the little serving maid in the way you did was deeply offensive to me and to Lika. Lika thought she was coming to meet my beloved brother, about whom I've told her everything, my soul's companion. Yet you sat there, soused, a cigar burning by your plate, complaining about the food, calling out your cook to upbraid her like some medieval tyrant. It was as well you took yourself off to your bed, carafe in hand. Sheila was sweetness itself, trying to make excuses, apologizing, explaining that you had lost your job at the Writer to the Signet's office and were depressed to be looking for work. She made as good a gloss on your behaviour as was humanly possible. You have a sweet devoted wife, Callum. That is your good fortune\u2014don't destroy it.\n> \n> But if that wasn't enough, Lika, going down to breakfast, finds you on the stairs in your nightshirt, still drunk, practically bare-arsed, bellowing for your chamber pot and cursing the little maid who was bringing it to you in the most revolting terms.\n> \n> You are turning into a drunken bully. Yet we are the sons of a drunken bully. Look what he did to our poor mother, driving her to an early death. Look at the despotism he inflicts on our poor suffering sisters, his daughters. We have always been disgusted with Malky Moncur. I don't want to be disgusted by his son, Callum.\n> \n> By nature you are a funny, generous and affectionate person. Return to that state, to the old Callum\u2014throw this ugly doppelg\u00e4nger out of the door. It's not you, brother, and I was sick at heart to witness it.\n> \n> Well, I've stated my case. My conscience is clear. Read this letter as a love letter, sent by someone who loves you. Write and tell me that you have listened to its message and that the old Callum will live and thrive again.\n> \n> I am your faithful brother,\n> \n> Brodie Moncur\n\n* * *\n\nBrodie and Lika went round the corner to their neighbour, Mrs. Dalmire, who had agreed to look after C\u00e9sar during their short trip to Peebles. Mrs. Dalmire slipped C\u00e9sar's leash and he rushed to Brodie, jumping up so Brodie had to catch him, writhing in his arms as he desperately tried to lick Brodie's face.\n\n\"See, he loves you more than me,\" Lika said, laughing.\n\nFor the first time since he'd left Callum's house Brodie felt his mood improving.\n\n\"I'm so sorry about my family,\" he said as they walked home, C\u00e9sar trotting happily between them.\n\n\"I think that's now more than two hundred times you've apologized since we left Peebles.\"\n\n\"But I'm shocked. So embarrassed. It was so horrible.\"\n\n\"Your sisters are charming. Alfie is a fine young man.\"\n\n\"What's happened, though? Malky unrepentant, revolting. Yes. But Callum?\"\n\n\"It's life, unfortunately,\" Lika said. \"I had an uncle who shot himself. A devoted wife and five children, a good job as a collegiate assessor, second class. He brought ruin and misery down on everyone. Families. I hate to say it but yours is more normal than you think.\"\n\nThey went down the worn stone stairs to their little flat in the basement. Soon a fire was reddening in the grate and there was the smell of soup coming from the kitchen. C\u00e9sar jumped up onto his favourite armchair and rolled onto his back, wanting his stomach scratched.\n\n\"We're home,\" Lika said, carrying in a steaming tureen and setting it on the small dining table. \"Everything is fine now.\"\n\n\"I'm going to go and see Ainsley Channon next week,\" Brodie said, serving them soup. \"I wonder what he wants...\"\n\n# 4\n\nIt was strange being back in the Channon showroom\u2014nothing had really changed. The same dour portraits, the same motionless flock of gleaming pianos in the display area. Brodie had walked past the place a few times since his return to Edinburgh, but always on the far side of George Street, sufficiently distanced from it. It was an important chapter of his life that had ended badly, unjustly. But here he was, back, climbing the stairs behind Ainsley's new secretary (Mrs. Grant had retired). Ainsley himself stood at his office door waiting to greet him, whiskers grey, regrown, beaming, arms spread in welcome.\n\n\"Brodie Moncur. Brodie, Brodie, Brodie. How happy I am to see you!\"\n\nThey shook hands warmly and Ainsley led him in, arm round his shoulders and sat him down, then immediately headed for the ranked decanters to select a suitable whisky to celebrate their reunion. He poured; they clinked glasses.\n\n\"The prodigal returns,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"No! Not at all. I won't hear it. You know the unfortunate circumstances, Brodie\u2014I was very candid with you. No blame apportioned, no bad feelings between us.\"\n\n\"Of course not,\" Brodie said, sipping his whisky, feeling the reassuring hot glow.\n\n\"Which brings me to the matter in hand,\" Ainsley said. \"There have been a few changes.\"\n\nHe explained in more detail. Calder had been \"removed\" from Paris a year ago and was now living in Perth running the small shop that Channon had opened on Mill Street.\n\n\"Your young fellow, Dmitri, is acting manager in Paris. He's doing a fine job but his heart isn't in it, if you know what I mean. And he's not exactly part of the family as you were\u2014are.\" He sighed. \"Calder has...Let's say Calder has now reached his perfect level of competence, running a small shop in a small provincial town. I should never have set him up in Paris. Too many temptations. My mistake\u2014and I paid the price.\" He smiled benignly at Brodie. Brodie didn't know how to respond.\n\n\"So. Brodie.\"\n\n\"So\u2014what, Mr. Channon?\"\n\n\"Would you go back to Paris? But this time as manager.\"\n\nBrodie felt his face go cold\u2014then warm in a blush.\n\n\"Don't say anything!\" Ainsley entreated him. \"Let the idea germinate awhile. Think about it. Take a day or two\u2014take a week. The job's yours. Same salary as Calder had.\" He stood up and replenished their glasses. \"Quite apart from the benefits your presence in Paris would bring to the firm I would, personally, see it as some sort of tardy recompense for the unfortunate nature of your dismissal. It would make me very happy if you were to accept our proposal.\"\n\nBrodie could see, as if in a vision, a Parisian life for him and Lika. Solvent, a very good salary, a nice apartment. He didn't go any further.\n\n\"I'll need twenty-four hours, Mr. Channon. I have to talk it over with my wife.\"\n\n\"A wife? So you're a married man, now, Brodie. Congratulations.\"\n\nAinsley chatted on. Calder's old apartment in the sixteenth arrondissement was also available. And everything Brodie had set in place while he was working there was still functioning well. The tuners he'd trained; the Channon recitals, the tours\u2014they still had Sauter and Nagel on their books. Dmitri handled that side of the business very skilfully.\n\n\"You see these were all your smart ideas, Brodie. That's what we need more of.\"\n\n\"Yes, I think I\u2014\"\n\n\"Talking of your smart ideas\u2014terrible news about John Kilbarron, dying so suddenly like that.\"\n\n\"What? Yes.\"\n\n\"A sudden heart attack, his brother was telling me.\"\n\n\"His brother?\"\n\n\"Yes. What's his name? Malachi\u2014that's right. Malachi Kilbarron. Said John dropped dead like that.\" Ainsley snapped his fingers, dramatically. \"Dead before he hit the floor.\"\n\n\"Have you seen Malachi Kilbarron?\"\n\n\"Saw him last week. Sitting in the very chair you're sitting in.\" Ainsley leaned forward. \"He presented himself very well, all smiles. But he was after money, oh yes. A fishing expedition for money, let's say. He claimed I owed money to his brother.\" Ainsley laughed. \"He realized he had as much chance as a snowball in hell.\" He frowned. \"Weren't you working for John Kilbarron?\"\n\n\"I was\u2014but I'd left his employ. In fact I'd left Russia before he died.\"\n\n\"Well, you never know when the grim reaper will come a-calling.\"\n\nBrodie looked at his hands. They were perfectly still.\n\n\"Did you tell him\u2014Malachi\u2014that you were meeting me?\"\n\n\"He asked after you\u2014most cordially. I told him I'd written to you but at that stage I hadn't had a reply.\"\n\n\"But he knew I was in Edinburgh.\"\n\n\"Yes, I think so. Everything he said seemed to imply that you were in town\u2014somewhere.\"\n\nBrodie stood up, feeling the dull, leaden weight in the chest that disappointment and awful apprehension brings.\n\n\"I'd better be getting along, sir. You'll have your answer in twenty-four hours.\"\n\n\"A positive one, I hope, Brodie, my boy. I'm sure the little lady at home would be drawn to Paris, no? _Merci beaucoup!_ \"\n\nBrodie agreed and said he was just going to pop downstairs to the workshop and say hello to Lachlan Hood. He shook hands with Ainsley, who was issuing more positive views of a move to Paris, but he wasn't really listening. As he descended the staircase he felt a distinct trembling in his legs. Malachi Kilbarron in Edinburgh...How could he have known? How had he been able to follow him first to Biarritz and then Edinburgh? He felt a bolus of nausea in his throat and paused to swallow and regain some calm. He wasn't going to leave by the front entrance as he was sure that Malachi would have paid someone to watch the shop, having given a description of Brodie. Follow him home, would have been the injunction. He might be observed going in but there would be no sign of his departure.\n\nLachlan Hood was obviously pleased to see him but tried to hide it, acting as if Brodie had been absent on a day off rather than for nearly seven years.\n\n\"You're looking well, Brodie. How's life?\"\n\nThey smoked a cigarette for old times' sake and Brodie told him something of his travels.\n\n\"I heard you'd got the chop in Paris,\" Lachlan said. \"Fingers in the till or something.\"\n\n\"I was the scapegoat for fat Calder. All's forgotten and forgiven, anyway. By the by, Lachlan, can I step out the back?\"\n\nLachlan led him through the storeroom at the rear of the shop and out into a cobbled mews lane behind. A fine wind-shifted rain was falling.\n\n\"Bailiffs after you?\" Lachlan said.\n\n\"Something like that. You haven't seen me if anyone asks.\"\n\n\"My lips are sealed, Mr. Moncur.\" Lachlan winked at him and then frowned.\n\n\"You all right, Brodie? You've gone awfully pale.\"\n\nBrodie leaned against the wall and vomited a pint of warm blood onto the damp cobblestones.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nDr. McDaid peered at Brodie through thick-lensed spectacles. His eyes seemed enormous.\n\n\"How many haemorrhages have you had?\" he asked.\n\n\"Three. Three bad ones. There's a bit of blood-spitting sometimes.\"\n\n\"Aye, aye. Yes, yes, yes. Hmmm. Well, there we are, there we go.\"\n\nBrodie shifted away in the bed a bit. Dr. McDaid was sitting too close, making him feel hot.\n\n\"What do you recommend?\"\n\n\"Well, I'd leave Edinburgh as soon as possible. Get out of this country. We're in a Scottish winter. Go somewhere warm.\"\n\nHe seemed to sense Brodie's discomfort at his proximity and stood up, stepping away from the bed. He was a tall thin man in his forties, Brodie estimated, with dark yellow hair glossed back like metal and slicked behind his ears. He was Ainsley Channon's doctor, hence his presence in the Dean Village basement.\n\n\"I can give you medicaments\u2014inhalants, rubs\u2014but it's the cold, the damp, the wet that'll do for you. The 'warm South' is what I'd recommend,\" he said. \"And a touch of the 'blushful Hippocrene' from time to time to improve the mood. Yes, yes. Aye. There we go. How old are you, sir?\"\n\n\"Thirty-one, give or take.\"\n\n\"You'll make forty, I'm pretty sure.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Doctor. How much do I owe you?\"\n\n\"Nothing at all. Ainsley Channon told me to send my bill to him. He's most concerned, naturally. I'll see myself out. Book yourself a ticket to the Mediterranean, Mr. Moncur. I wish I could come with you.\"\n\nHe left the room and Brodie could hear him in the parlour talking to Lika, then the front door closing. He felt not too bad, considering. It was shock more than anything, he reckoned. Malachi-shock. It hadn't been his worst haemorrhage\u2014a blessing of sorts\u2014but he would not become manager of the Paris shop, that was evident. Malachi Kilbarron destroying his future again. He saw that dream disappear, a bright bubble bursting.\n\nLika came in with a steaming cup of hot milk and set it down on the dresser by the bed, leaned forward and kissed him. She took his hand.\n\n\"The doctor said it was not so serious. Lots of rest, he said.\"\n\nBrodie sipped his milk. He had decided not to tell her of Ainsley's offer of the Paris job.\n\n\"There's bad news,\" he said. \"Malachi Kilbarron's in Edinburgh. Looking for me.\"\n\nShe recoiled with such force that the milk slopped in the wide cup in his hand. She covered her face with her hands for a moment, taking this in.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" she said quietly, her back straightening, dropping her hands. \"How did he know we were here?\"\n\n\"I've no idea,\" he said. None at all. First Biarritz and now here...He was at Channon's last week.\"\n\n\"May God protect us.\"\n\n\"He's not the Devil, Lika.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes he is. I know him better than you.\"\n\n\"I just can't think how he can follow us like this. How does he find us?\"\n\n\"What're we going to do?\" she asked in a small hopeless voice.\n\n\"Go away\u2014again. Far from Malachi Kilbarron. Go somewhere hot and warm.\"\n\n# 5\n\nBrodie lit a cigarette and looked up at the dark night sky, star-rich, star-powdered by the Milky Way. It was both warm and cool\u2014perfect Nice weather. The palm trees around him gave their muted wooden rattle as the leaves were stirred and shivered by a breeze coming off the Mediterranean. Lika took the cigarette from his fingers and had a discreet puff.\n\nThey were standing outside the Rosanoff concert hall in Cimiez, home of the Conservatoire Russe des Alpes-Maritimes. It was the interval and many of the audience had stepped outside to enjoy the balmy evening while they waited for the second part of the programme to begin.\n\n\"How do you feel?\" Lika asked.\n\n\"Nervous. I can't help thinking back. That hellish day.\"\n\nThey had listened to Balakirev's _Tamara_ and Glinka's \"Souvenir d'une nuit d'\u00e9t\u00e9 \u00e0 Madrid\" and now, after the interval they were going to hear \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee\" by John Kilbarron, played by the conservatoire's excellent orchestra. Lika was rehearsing _Rusalka_ at the conservatoire and had told him about the concert, having seen it advertised on a poster in the foyer. Brodie knew instantly that he had to hear it just once more in his life. He felt strangely neutral and numb, however, trying to come to terms with what he was about to listen to and his fraught memories of John Kilbarron and what had occurred that morning over two years ago in Yelaginsky Park in St. Petersburg. All the excuses, all George Vere's wise words about self-defence, were valid. But at the same time he knew that his hot rage at Kilbarron's theft had made him decide to sabotage the world premiere concert. It had been his personal act of revenge, a way of settling his scores and Lika's, and one thing had led to another. If only he had walked away, simply resigned himself to the world's injustices. But would Lika have come with him? Of course she would, he told himself. There was no doubt about that. He turned and smiled at her.\n\n\"Why are you smiling at me like that?\" she said. \"I thought you said you were nervous.\"\n\n\"I was just thinking how much I love you.\"\n\n\"Poor silly man!\"\n\nA commissionaire appeared on the steps of the theatre and rang the bell to announce the end of the interval.\n\n\"Are you sure you can do it?\" Lika asked, carefully.\n\n\"Yes, yes. Well, I'll try.\"\n\nThey went inside.\n\nThe piano is in tune, Brodie repeated to himself as the opening bars of Kilbarron's tone poem softly echoed through the concert hall. The piano is in tune\u2014and playing my tune. The music built and then came the key transition\u2014the suspensions, the unresolved tonics, that moment of the surprising chord. The strings, the French horns, the piano\u2014it was highly affecting and, glancing side to side, Brodie saw women dab at their eyes with handkerchiefs; men clench their jawbones and inhale. Of course its reputation had preceded it but listening to \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee\" did actually make you cry. It was working. Lika had sensed it, experienced it first, and Kilbarron had seen his opportunity to make his name and perhaps his fortune.\n\n\"I have to go,\" Brodie whispered to Lika. \"I can't listen to it any more.\"\n\nHe left his seat and sidled out past irritated concertgoers. He strode quickly up the central aisle where a frowning attendant held the door open for him. He heard the soaring orchestra behind him almost as a personal affront.\n\nHe smoked three cigarettes waiting for Lika, trying to clear his head of memories of that morning in Yelaginsky Park. The muzzle of Kilbarron's pistol pressed cold and hard against his skull. And then Kilbarron's moment of horror as he realized what Brodie had just done to him...Self-defence, Vere had said. He was one second away from shooting you like a dog. You're vindicated. Any court in any country in the world. You'd be a dead man. You had no choice...\n\nSecrets, Brodie said to himself, hearing the applause and the cheering from the concert hall. Secrets inside eating at him like his tubercles...He roused himself: Kilbarron's tone poem, his posthumous monument, had ended. Brodie thought with rueful bitterness: Kilbarron's posthumous revenge, also, on the man who had killed him, set to echo down the decades in concert halls the world over.\n\nLika came out. He saw her looking for him and he signalled to her from the edge of the terrace. She kissed him and took his arm.\n\n\"It does make you cry,\" she said. \"Just like the first time I heard you play it.\"\n\n\"Yes. But they're cheering John Kilbarron.\"\n\nThey decided to walk down from Cimiez to the town, drawn by the complicated embroidery of a city's lights shining brightly on its gentle bay below them. Maybe have a bite to eat and then go back to the Pension Deladier where they had the best suite of rooms on the first floor: a drawing room, a bedroom, a dressing room and a bathroom of their own. They had been there ten months now, taking their meandering, precautionary time to arrive in Nice, their old itinerant life re-established, Brodie once more a patient of Dr. Roissansac. His health was restored and they were making their modest living\u2014Brodie tuning and repairing pianos; Lika teaching singing and French to the Russians in town. There were more Russians in Nice than in Biarritz, so she was doing well. In the summer, the off-season, they resumed their martingale system at roulette to make ends meet, gambling in Nice, Beaulieu, Villefranche-sur-Mer and Monte Carlo. There was no need to patronize just one casino here on the C\u00f4te d'Azur. They weren't rich but they led their familiar comfortable life, easily able to afford the Deladier. If they ever needed more money they simply increased their visits to the casinos. They called it the Martingale Benefaction.\n\nIt was easy going, strolling down from the heights of Cimiez, down the winding road towards the city in the warm night, arm in arm. They walked for a while in silence. Both of them thinking back, Brodie supposed, each with their respective memories of John Kilbarron.\n\n\"Lika\u2014I've a question for you. A difficult question.\"\n\n\"You can ask me anything, Brodie. You know that.\"\n\n\"Right...Can you remember that time when you said you wanted to sing 'My Bonny Boy' for the audition?\"\n\n\"Not very well. I think I wanted to sing something in English.\"\n\n\"Exactly. You asked me to come and see you and write down the words and the music...\" He paused. \"Was that your idea or John Kilbarron's?\"\n\n\"My idea. It was an excuse\u2014I wanted to be alone with you. And I knew he was going to be away.\" She kissed his cheek. \"I wanted you, Brodie. So I contrived a way that we could be alone. The song was the perfect pretext. And you didn't suspect a thing, did you?\"\n\n\"No. But you knew how I felt about you.\"\n\n\"I'm afraid it was very obvious.\"\n\n\"So what happened to the manuscript\u2014the music and the lyrics?\"\n\n\"I left them at the audition. Stupidly forgot them. I told you.\"\n\n\"Could John Kilbarron have got hold of them somehow?\"\n\nHe was troubled and she sensed it.\n\n\"What're you trying to say, Brodie?\" She was angered now at his implicit accusation. \"I have to tell you: John Kilbarron didn't need your manuscript to steal your melody. He would have it all stored away after listening to it once. He had that kind of brain. You saw him. He even played it. Analysed it. He had it all then\u2014all of it, in his head.\" She stopped them and looked him in the eye, stern, unabashed. \"He didn't need me to be his accomplice, if that's what you're thinking.\"\n\nBrodie took her in his arms, hugged her and kissed her cheek.\n\n\"I'm sorry, my love. Hearing it tonight has shaken me up, disturbed me. And of course it brought all the bad memories back. That terrible day. Jesus...\"\n\nThey started walking again, Lika taking his arm.\n\n\"There was nothing you could do, my darling. He was set on his course.\"\n\nThey ate in a small brasserie on the rue de France\u2014oysters, a sole with a bottle of wine\u2014and sauntered back to the _pension,_ Brodie calmer now, reassured. They went upstairs to their suite. Brodie came out of the dressing room in his nightshirt to find Lika sitting on the bed, naked. Her hair was down and the solitary light was casting sickle-shaped shadows under her small heavy breasts. She uncrossed her legs.\n\n\"Take that nightshirt off.\"\n\nHe slipped it off and they lay beside each other. He kissed her, kissed her neck, her breasts.\n\n\"You believe me, don't you?\" she said, easing herself round so he could lie on top of her.\n\n\"I'd believe you if you said the earth was flat and the moon was made of cheese.\"\n\n\"What kind of answer is that?\" she said, reaching down for him and guiding him inside her. Sometimes, Brodie thought, wordless, this was the best moment, this simple conjoining of two bodies, this linking, one inside the other, better than _la petite mort._ He looked down at her face, her sleepy-lidded eyes, her little strong chin. She frowned and licked her lips as he eased himself in a little deeper, and lowered his brow to touch hers.\n\n\"Of course I believe you. I believe everything you tell me. I'm your slave.\"\n\nShe laughed at that, hoarse in her throat, delighted.\n\n\"Ah-ha. Good. Well, in that case, slave\u2014fuck me.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nThree weeks later they were breakfasting in the _pension_ 's dining room, smiling at each other, in a benign morning stupor, taking their time. Everybody knew them, all the staff. Madame Deladier had just introduced them to some new guests as \"Monsieur et Madame Moncur, _nos habitu\u00e9s_.\" Sometimes Brodie thought they should rent their own apartment and Lika occasionally returned with offers from some of her Russian clients to look after their houses for the off-season but neither of them thought of Nice as their permanent home\u2014they sensed that would be elsewhere\u2014and Brodie was more and more aware of Lika talking about a return to Russia, to Moscow, where her mother lived. She would suggest buying a small dacha\u2014they could easily get a mortgage\u2014and pictured the simple life they could live there as _dachniki,_ much cheaper than France, she said, moving between Moscow and the country. Brodie said nothing\u2014nodded and smiled. He was uncertain about returning to Russia.\n\nLika went off to her rehearsal at the conservatoire and Brodie, having no tuning appointments until the afternoon, wandered down to the main post office on the place de la Libert\u00e9 in the centre of town to see if any letters had arrived. Callum had started writing to him again\u2014never referring to the letter of admonishment. According to Callum nothing was amiss in his world. He had a new job; Sheila was pregnant again; Malky was now bedridden but still clinging on to life. It was as if Brodie had invented that distressing twenty-four hours at Edenbrae.\n\nAt the Poste Restante window he was handed a small brown paper parcel. He smiled: good old Mr. Hoskings in Edinburgh sending his pound of Margarita blend tobacco, as requested. Timely, as he was running low and now Lika smoked only Margaritas as well. He wandered down to the place Mass\u00e9na, bought some cigarette papers in a _tabac_ and found a pavement table at the Caf\u00e9 Marmot. He still wasn't used to the change in the street noise\u2014the old hubbub of traffic: the rumble of metal-rimmed wheels, the clip-clopping of horses' hooves, the bells of the trams and the omnibuses\u2014but now it was transformed with the admixture of the throaty chugging of automobiles, the warning claxons, more and more. Here in Nice there were more automobiles than in Edinburgh and the streets were growing steadily noisier.\n\nHe ordered a Dubonnet with ice, and unwrapped his parcel, keen to roll a fresh cigarette. There was a rare note included from old Hoskings, he saw\u2014usually it was just a receipt with a \"Paid in full\" stamp. Brodie unfolded the note to see what news there was from Edinburgh.\n\n> Hoskings Ltd\n> \n> 21, West Port\n> \n> Edinburgh\n> \n> 2 March 1902\n> \n> Dear Mr. Moncur,\n> \n> Herewith your latest order and my thanks for the banker's draft. I wish all my customers were as assiduous as your good self when it comes to the matter of \"cash with order\"! Here we are suffering from continuous gales racing down the Firth of Forth\u2014a good two weeks now\u2014you are best placed to be in clement foreign climes in La Belle France. At least the news from South Africa is better. It seems we will win this needless war after all.\n> \n> Do not hesitate to order more Margarita if required. My agent in the United States assures me he has plentiful supplies. However, I doubt you'll be needing any in the immediate future. Your good friend, Mr. Kilbarron, who always asks after you and your whereabouts, tells me he will be sending you his usual package by way of thanks for your introduction. He is a regular and valued customer now and I had the pleasure of meeting him last year when he called into the shop.\n> \n> With my thanks and sincere good wishes,\n> \n> Lamont Hoskings\n\nBrodie sat still, unmoving, unlit cigarette held poised as\u2014like some sort of gaming machine or automaton\u2014the separate realizations settled into their place, _click, click, click,_ like a series of bolts locking into their sockets. He felt a creeping nape-of-the-neck apprehension. Yes, back in Russia, on the first journey to Maloe Nikolskoe, he remembered telling Malachi about Hoskings' shop in Edinburgh, how it was possible to order supplies to be sent abroad, cash with order. Malachi wanted to order some, himself, so taken was he with the taste. What had he said? \"You could smoke these all day long.\" And Brodie had supplied the address.\n\nHe sat there in a stupor, stunned at the unanswerable logic of his argument, realizing what had happened. He had been the hapless, unwitting agent of his own discovery. There was nothing diabolic about it, as Lika feared. It was that simple: that was how Malachi had known he was in Biarritz, and then in Edinburgh. And now he knew he was in Nice...Brodie looked at the date on the letter. It had taken just over three weeks to arrive and Hoskings seemed to imply that Malachi already knew...\n\nBrodie threw some coins on the table and hailed a cab to take him back to the _pension._ When he arrived he saw Lika was back from her rehearsal\u2014no room key on its hook.\n\n\"Oh, Monsieur Moncur,\" the receptionist said. \"Your friend was here again this morning, about two hours ago. I told him monsieur and madame were both out. He said he would come back again.\"\n\n\"Did he say when?\"\n\n\"No. Just another time.\"\n\n\"Did he leave his name?\"\n\n\"No. But he was an Englishman, I think.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Clothilde.\"\n\nBrodie ran upstairs to their suite. Lika was sitting in an armchair embroidering a blouse.\n\n\"What's wrong?\" She could see his panic.\n\n\"Malachi was here. Two hours ago.\"\n\nHe saw the sudden pallor in her face. An instant, pure shock.\n\n\"It's impossible,\" she said, standing slowly. \"Impossible,\" she repeated incredulously. \"Again? How, in God's name?\"\n\n\"I've realized how he tracks us. I'll tell you later. Pack a few things, we just have to leave, get out of here, this _pension._ Then I'll think about what we can do\u2014where we can go. We'll be safe from now on. Now I know how he finds us.\"\n\nLika said nothing, staring at the carpet, still in shock. Then she stood and took a portmanteau from the cupboard.\n\n\"We won't be away long,\" Brodie said. \"We just have to disappear for forty-eight hours while I think of something.\"\n\n# 6\n\nBy the end of the afternoon they were installed in a double room in the H\u00f4tel Royal & Westminster on the avenue F\u00e9lix Faure just off the Promenade du Midi in Menton. An hour by train from Nice; very close to the Italian border. They went for an agitated walk in the _jardin public,_ C\u00e9sar greatly intrigued by his new surroundings, and Brodie explained in further detail about the Margarita revelation.\n\nEverything made sense now, and in a way, he said, it was the best turn of events. They now had it in their power to disappear totally, as far as Malachi Kilbarron was concerned, simply by stopping the despatch of parcels from Edinburgh. Or, even better, sending parcels to Stockholm or Nicosia, Cairo or Cape Town, to lead Malachi astray. He felt more reassured, he said, now the whole of Europe could be their hiding place\u2014anywhere in the world\u2014and they'd never be found again. The initial shock began to recede. Lika, by contrast, seemed still flustered and tearful. They wandered back to the hotel and, once in their room, Lika said she needed to go out to a pharmacy to buy something to \"calm her nerves.\" She left C\u00e9sar with Brodie and went out, returning half an hour later with a paper bag full of pills and sachets. She made herself a drink of a powder in solution and she seemed calmer now.\n\nThey dined in the hotel, speculating about where they could go next. Brodie was in favour of Italy, seeing as they were so close to the frontier\u2014the south of Italy, even Sicily, perhaps. Lika suggested that large cities were the best place to lose yourself: London, New York, Shanghai\u2014somewhere you could live completely anonymously. After their main course\u2014a copious _daube de boeuf_ \u2014she said she felt chilly and Brodie went upstairs to fetch her shawl.\n\n\"We'll be all right, won't we?\" she said when he returned.\n\n\"Of course. Even now\u2014look, he's in Nice, we're in Menton. He has no idea where we are in the world\u2014we're completely safe. And that's how it'll be from now on. I'll send a message to the _pension_ and tell them to pack up our things. Then we decide where to go and our old life starts again.\" He smiled, trying to reassure her\u2014despite her potion she still seemed nervy and insecure. \"But this time he'll never find us.\"\n\nIn bed, later, they lay in each other's arms. Brodie felt unusually tired, yawning constantly, a fact that he put down to the unusual stresses of the day.\n\n\"Have you ever thought,\" Lika said, \"how you'd like to die?\"\n\n\"Lika, please, don't\u2014\"\n\n\"No, seriously. I was thinking about it today. How I'd like to go. Tell me.\"\n\n\"All right. Like this, simultaneously, in your arms.\"\n\n\"No, I mean, do you ever imagine how it would be, that final moment?\"\n\n\"My God, Lika, why do you keep\u2014\"\n\n\"I swatted a fly today with a rolled-up newspaper, while I was waiting to go into rehearsal. _Thwack!_ And I thought: that's how I'd like to go\u2014like a swatted fly.\"\n\n\"Please. Let's not spend time imagining potential deaths before we go to sleep.\"\n\n\"And then you'd make a wonderful, moving speech at my funeral, and break down in tears. And every year on the anniversary of my death you'd come to my grave and lay flowers.\"\n\n\"I'm stopping this conversation now. I'm very tired. Go to sleep. We've a lot to do tomorrow.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie woke, his eyes struck by a thin ray of bright sunshine slicing through a gap in the drawn curtains. He felt ill, his tongue thick and dry. He slipped on his spectacles and looked at his watch. Ten minutes to twelve! It was practically midday. He sat up. No Lika. C\u00e9sar was tied by his lead to the radiator, tail wagging, ready for the day's excitements.\n\nBrodie tried to gather his thoughts, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the sunlit pattern of the rug at his feet, feeling as if he had a terrible hangover. Lika must have gone down to breakfast. He stood up, swayed and sat down. It was if he had been drugged\u2014and now a mild headache was beginning to thump at his temples. Where was Lika for God's sake? C\u00e9sar, frustrated, gave a little yap. Brodie turned to look at him\u2014something was odd. There was a folded piece of paper tucked into his collar. Brodie retrieved it, unfolded it, and saw Lika's handwriting.\n\n> My darling Brodie,\n> \n> I have gone away, gone away with Malachi Kilbarron. It was always me he wanted, not you, and I can't continue this endless flight from him, on and on in terror, ruining your life. So I have gone to him and you are free. I leave you C\u00e9sar as a token of our wonderful times together. This is the only solution my love, believe me. I have known the Kilbarron brothers very well. I know their ties of blood, what bonds they have between them. Malachi would kill you, yes, but only to have me back. Without me, you are free, free to live your life. I will never forget you,\n> \n> Your Lika\n\n# PART V\n\n# Paris\n\n1902\n\n# 1\n\nBrodie sat in the middle of the curved banquette at the far side of the Caf\u00e9 Riche. Through the big plate-glass window he had a perfect view of the large door, with a smaller door contained in it, of the apartment block (number 33) on the boulevard Beaumarchais. It was strange being back in Paris\u2014somehow he had thought he would never see the city again. But such was life: never say something will never happen; nothing stays the same\u2014two of life's many implacable rules. He had a newspaper unfolded in front of him, a notebook and two novels and he ordered regular _petits caf\u00e9s,_ giving as good an impression as he could of a writer in the throes of composition or inspiration. He spent many hours a day in the Riche covertly watching the door to number 33 and the staff were beginning to greet him as a regular, pleased also with the generous tips he left after deciding his day was done and it was time to return to his modest hotel.\n\nSometimes a whole morning and afternoon would go by without his seeing either Lika or Malachi Kilbarron; some days he'd see them on several occasions, either together or singly, emerging from the apartment block. He watched, he made notes: he was waiting for his moment. In his jacket pocket Lika's Derringer was snug\u2014and now loaded with the bullets he'd purchased from Rochefoucauld Chasse-P\u00eache in Biarritz.\n\nIt was nearing lunchtime, so Brodie ordered an anise and water and a plate of lentils with ham. He sat and ate his lunch thinking back to that morning in Menton. He spent a lot of his time in the Riche reflecting. Seeing the two of them together shocked him: Lika and Malachi, Malachi and Lika. Now he had to try to come to terms with thinking of them as a couple, however distasteful that was to him; a couple, moreover, who seemed entirely content together, chatting, smiling, secure in their utter normality of being. Although he was observing them secretly he felt he was looking at two people who were in a world that had never contained Brodie Moncur. How could they be so at ease? How could Lika smile back at Malachi as she climbed into a fiacre? It made no sense in the context of the life that he and Lika had led together for those years\u2014it was as if he'd dreamt their existence, that it was a fond fantasy concocted to console and delude himself.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nWhen he had read Lika's note several times, he drank two pints of water and washed his face and, slowly, the turbid heart-pound of dread started to diminish and his brain began to work. Lika had drugged him somehow\u2014no doubt with some sleeping potion she'd purchased when she went out to the chemist's\u2014and she had probably poured it into his wine when she asked him to go up to their room during dinner to fetch her shawl. Then, while he was still comatose, she left in the morning with her few things, leaving the \"Ne pas d\u00e9ranger\" sign hanging on the outside of their door. Brodie had dressed, paid his bill, and with C\u00e9sar trotting by his side had gone to the station in Menton and caught the first train to Nice.\n\nYes, they told him at the Pension Deladier, Madame Moncur had indeed left some hours ago accompanied by a friend, the Englishman who had called the day before. She had informed them she had to go away for a few days but that Monsieur Moncur would continue to occupy their rooms.\n\nMonsieur Moncur, and the dog C\u00e9sar, did occupy their rooms, and they both went for long walks along the Promenade des Anglais, one of them thinking hard. Brodie was trying to formulate and come to terms with this new appalling situation\u2014Lika Blum and Malachi Kilbarron. He could not fathom it; it remained beyond his wildest cogitations. Yet he began to recall certain statements Lika had made: that Malachi \"checks up\" on her; that Malachi had known her before she knew John Kilbarron. Was there a clue there, he wondered? And what did John feel about Lika's earlier relationship with Malachi, whatever that had been, and how had that impinged on their relationship? What secret history had she kept from him? What hold did Malachi have on her? What time had they shared together? The tormenting questions never ceased. A new focus came to bear on his recent history; new significances revealed, slowly. He brought to mind that day he'd encountered Malachi at Maloe Nikolskoe, out with his gun, asking him if he'd seen Lika, and their walk back to the house. How strange Malachi had been that day, and the odd questions he'd asked. He had thought that Malachi was simply being his brother's keeper but perhaps there were other jealous forces operating in him. And there was that moment in the orchard when Malachi had taken Lika's hand. What level of intimacy did that imply? And, as he thought further, he remembered that night in the hotel in Dubechnia when they'd been discovered\u2014how Malachi had looked at Lika's nakedness and how almost physically sick she had been. What had he said as he'd stared at her breasts? \"Pretty as ever...\" What import did that have, that throwaway remark? It clearly meant, Brodie now assumed as his self-interrogation continued, that he had seen Lika naked before. He began to understand, began to enumerate the multiplying complications. When Brodie and Lika had started their affair she was betraying not only John Kilbarron but his brother...\n\nNow he felt his own growing despair as his deliberations made a dawning sense. But what sort of a person could do that, he asked himself? To move from one man to his brother? And with these questions came a disturbing sadness. What did he really know of Lika Blum? Really understand? And the answer followed: only what she had wanted him to know. It didn't matter how well you thought you knew someone, he realized. You saw what you wanted to see or you saw what that other person wanted you to see. People were opaque; another person was a mystery. Maybe he was as much a mystery to Lika as she was to him...And because he had no real answers, he found, as the days went by, that his mood remained in a strange kind of limbo. He would feel bereft and then, moments later\u2014he felt mystified and angry instead. He didn't weep and wail\u2014because he assumed, logically, this disorder in his life would return to order in due course once the conundrum was solved and Lika came to her senses. His only working explanations were dreadful threats and abiding fear of Malachi and what he might do to her. Or had she always been lying to him?\n\nBut there was no escaping the bitter facts that faced him: Lika had left him to go away with Malachi, that much was certain. But where? St. Petersburg? Dublin?...Something was nagging at him and in due course he remembered. Somewhere Malachi had given an address where he could be contacted. Somewhere...It took him a while of concentrated recall but eventually it came to him. The advertisement in the Russian newspaper in Biarritz.\n\nBrodie and C\u00e9sar changed trains twice before they arrived at Biarritz, where he presented himself at the offices of the _Russkii biulleten' Biarritsa_ and asked if he could see some of their back numbers. There was a scrupulous archive and the date was relatively easy to remember: sometime in the early summer of 1900. The newspaper was a weekly so it took Brodie no time to find the relevant issue and there, on the front page at the bottom, was Malachi's advertisement\u2014in Cyrillic but with the contact address in the original French: 33 boulevard Beaumarchais, Paris III\u00e8me. Brodie was convinced that this was where he would find the couple. He returned to Nice, quietly confident, and settled his affairs there, making up some story about joining Madame Moncur in Paris when she returned from Russia. Madame Deladier was sorry to see him go. Dr. Roissansac advised still warmer climes\u2014Algiers, Palermo, Ajaccio. Brodie caught the train to Paris three weeks to the day after Lika had left him.\n\nAnd his surmise proved to be right. After a fruitless couple of days at the Caf\u00e9 Riche he saw Lika and Malachi emerge from number 33 boulevard Beaumarchais and climb into a cab. Now he had confirmed where they were living, all he had to do was decide when and how the confrontation would occur.\n\nHe scratched his cheek unthinkingly and was startled for a second by the bristles. He sometimes forgot that he had grown a beard. After years of beardlessness he suddenly decided he needed a change of appearance, a disguise of sorts, even if the disguise would only last seconds. He wanted a different Brodie Moncur to appear before Lika and Malachi, whatever he decided to do, when he confronted them and made Lika face the brute facts of her betrayal, never mind the consequences. His beard grew well but was already\u2014alarmingly\u2014flecked with grey. He shaved its edges carefully each morning, shaping it on his cheeks and under his chin. It struck him that growing a beard did not free one from the labour of shaving; his shaving, if anything, was even more finical now he was bearded. Still, when he caught sight of himself in a mirror it gave him pause. He looked so much older, he considered, and more of a force to be reckoned with. All boyishness about him had gone; his beard gave him gravitas, he thought. He saw the older man he might become one day, if he was lucky.\n\nHe ordered yet another _petit caf\u00e9._ His gaze swept the room, idly, and then refocussed on the view through the big window. Malachi Kilbarron was heading out of the apartment block, crossing the avenue and making for the Caf\u00e9 Riche. Brodie stiffened. He slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and his fingers briefly gripped the small curved butt of the Derringer. He rested his head on the palm of his other hand, as if absorbed in his novel, and, through his fingers, watched Malachi come into the bar and give his order. As he waited, Malachi glanced round the caf\u00e9. He looked a bit slimmer, Brodie thought, now he could see him close to\u2014and more prosperous, somehow. He was wearing a dark grey frock coat and one of the new low top hats. He had a pearl stud on the foulard-stock at his throat. He had ordered a cognac and drained it in one go. He paused to light a cheroot, tossed some coins on the zinc bar, sauntered out to hail a passing cab and was soon lost to view.\n\nBrodie sat there, frozen, then began to tremble slightly; he felt his bowels move and clenched his sphincter hard. They had been twenty feet apart. When Malachi had looked round the Caf\u00e9 Riche his gaze would have swept without pause across the bearded man in the corner reading. But for Brodie this encounter was a catalyst: no more watching and waiting\u2014time to act. Seeing Malachi so close, being in the same room, had shaken him, rendered concrete the fact that Lika had left him for this other man. He knew enough, now, of Lika and Malachi's routines\u2014when they usually left the building and when they tended to return. Now was the moment for confrontation and reckoning.\n\nHe walked homewards to the Grand H\u00f4tel des Etrangers in a strange mood. In his room C\u00e9sar welcomed him with his usual manic tail-wagging enthusiasm. C\u00e9sar jumped on the bed and rolled on his back so Brodie could rub his stomach. Later Brodie took him out for a walk and then he had a solitary meal in a small bistro, C\u00e9sar lying silently, content, under the table. He was a good little dog, Brodie thought, and he was glad of his company. C\u00e9sar was his connection to Lika and he knew she had deliberately left him behind for a reason. Was it a message of sorts, he wondered: don't forget me, don't leave me, come and find me? Or was it: my life with you is over\u2014I leave you my dog as a symbol? He found his mood vacillating again between hope and sour resentment. He had decided how to initiate the next day\u2014tomorrow\u2014but he had no idea how it would end.\n\n# 2\n\nBrodie sat in a cab, a fiacre, with the hood up, parked by the side of the boulevard Beaumarchais, forty yards away from the entrance to number 33. Whoever emerged first\u2014Lika or Malachi\u2014would determine his course of action. And, ten minutes later, he saw that it was Lika, wearing a long cape and a small black boater, who stepped out of the door. She waited while the concierge went running to search for a cab. Two minutes later she climbed into a landau.\n\nBrodie tapped his driver on the shoulder.\n\n\"Follow that landau, if you please. Thank you.\"\n\nThe driver flicked his whip and they pulled away into the traffic of the boulevard.\n\n\"Not too close,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"I've done this many times, sir, please don't worry,\" the cabbie said. \"I assume the lady is your wife.\"\n\n\"Yes. Just don't lose her.\"\n\nThey clip-clopped across Paris in the landau's wake, finally heading down the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor\u00e9 past the grand shops and boutiques. At the corner of rue Matignon the landau stopped and Lika stepped down and paid. Brodie told his driver to keep going and, as they went past, he saw her enter a small shop between two larger ones. She opened the door, with her own key.\n\nBrodie paid off his driver and waited five minutes, crossing the street to gain a better view. He saw a curved display window beside a wood and wrought-iron door, and above that a glass sign that read: \"LIKMAL. Magasin de Broderie.\" He crossed the road. He saw in the corner of the sign, in small copperplate, the words: \"Prop. Mme L. V. Kilbarron.\"\n\nThis made him draw up and he felt the physical pain, the muscle-anguish inside, as his gut spasmed reflexively. He didn't delay and pushed open the door, hearing the heavy tinkle of a sprung brass bell on the door frame as he entered. A young woman assistant stood behind a counter. The shop was piled high with bedspreads, quilts, tablecloths, elaborately tasselled cushions, bolts of linen, tulle, chambray, felt and calico. There were glass cabinets full of needles and scissors, piles of hoops and frames of different sizes, great racks of bobbins with multicoloured threads.\n\n\"Can I help you, monsieur?\" the assistant asked. She had an accent\u2014Russian.\n\n\"I'm looking for the proprietor,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"She's busy, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"I'm an old friend\u2014she'll want to see me. Monsieur Moncur.\"\n\nThe assistant left and Brodie heard stairs being climbed and then descended.\n\n\"She will see you upstairs, monsieur.\"\n\nBrodie went up the narrow stairs, they had a steep turn in them, and he paused for a moment outside the door on the landing, hand on the wall for support. He felt a kind of weightlessness, as if he might collapse, boneless. Then a snatching fear of awful rejection. He took in great lungfuls of air and pushed the door open.\n\nShe was sitting behind her small desk, covered with paper, patterns and fashion magazines. There was a ceramic bowl full of freesias in one corner.\n\n\"Hello, Lika.\"\n\n\"I wondered how long it would take you,\" she said, apparently wholly unsurprised to see him. \"Sit down, sit down.\"\n\nBrodie drew a wooden chair up to the desk and sat down, gratefully. He looked around. Lika's new world seemed to have been in existence for years; she appeared entirely at home, as if she'd never left it.\n\n\"I like your beard,\" she said. \"Suddenly you look a bit Russian.\"\n\nShe was very calm\u2014and Brodie strove to match her calm, outwardly, though inwardly he was a mass of competing afflictions: ardent love, bafflement, anger, impotence, yearning, despair. He wanted to kiss her\u2014he wanted the Lika-kiss\u2014and then he wanted to hold her in his arms but now, bizarrely, he felt it would be importunate, a liberty. An importunate act with this woman he knew so intimately...It was astonishing how quickly life could change, how the ground moved beneath you and the landscape you thought you were living in turned out to be entirely different. Like waking up after an earthquake. It was as if their years together had never happened.\n\nHe offered her a Margarita\u2014just to do something while his brain settled. She accepted, he lit it, he lit his own.\n\n\"The Margarita,\" she said, pluming smoke out of the side of her mouth. \"Our downfall.\" She smiled ruefully. \"How is little C\u00e9sar?\"\n\n\"What? He's fine. He seems happy.\"\n\n\"He was always meant to be your dog. He loves you, you know.\"\n\nBrodie wasn't going to let chat about C\u00e9sar deflect him.\n\n\"Why does it say...\" Brodie was glad he was composed enough to mention the words, \"Propri\u00e9taire Madame Kilbarron?\"\n\n\"Because...\" And now he saw emotion overcome her.\n\n\"Because he bought this shop for you? Paid for you to have your own shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honor\u00e9?\"\n\n\"Because he's my husband. I am Madame Kilbarron\u2014Mrs. Kilbarron,\" she added in English.\n\nBrodie stared at her, wondering, wordless.\n\n\"You're _married_ to him?\"\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"So quickly?\"\n\nShe closed her eyes and spoke in a monotone without opening them.\n\n\"I married him when I was eighteen. I've always been married to him.\" Now she opened her eyes. Lash-moist, tear-bright.\n\nBrodie stood up, then he sat down, there was no room to pace about in the tiny packed room.\n\n\"I don't understand.\"\n\n\"I was in a touring opera's chorus. Malachi saw me, met me, thought I had promise. He offered to help, said his brother was a famous musician and could help me also...I was overwhelmed. And then...Then we married.\"\n\n\"But what about John Kilbarron? How did you end up with him?\"\n\n\"Malachi and I were having difficulties. It wasn't easy being together\u2014and he was very dependent on John. I was thinking about leaving him. But John was attracted to me. Very attracted.\"\n\n\"So what?\"\n\n\"John always got what he wanted. And Malachi would have gone to hell for his brother,\" she said simply. \"He appears very confident, Malachi, very sure of himself, but he was always in the shadow of his brother. It was John who achieved everything\u2014the renown, the adulation, the money\u2014and he brought Malachi along in his train. Without John, Malachi was nothing. I think, in fact, he was awestruck and at the same time frightened. It can be a dangerous combination. Malachi would do anything for John, anything.\"\n\n\"Including sharing his wife?\"\n\n\"It wasn't sharing.\"\n\n\"Ah. A kind of loan. You like her? Please try her for size.\"\n\n\"That's unkind, Brodie. It wasn't like that. Malachi stepped back, in a manner of speaking, and John stepped forward.\"\n\n\"Brotherly love.\"\n\n\"I think for Malachi it was also a way of keeping me close...\" She made a face\u2014frowning, hurt. \"Perhaps I shouldn't have done it\u2014but I did. You only saw John at the end but when I met him he was one of the most famous musicians in Europe, in the world. And when a man like that notices you, wants you by his side, it's difficult to resist. Malachi and I had separated, effectively. And John Kilbarron was there. It was very complicated, Brodie. John was a complicated man.\"\n\n\"I know. Too complicated for my simple mind.\"\n\n\"Not everybody thinks in simple, logical ways like you, Brodie.\"\n\n\"It's perverse.\"\n\n\"It's human, I'm afraid to say. We do these things\u2014and sometimes we don't really know why. Some need in us, I suppose. And it happens more often than you think, this kind of thing. How people move from one person to another. How a love can die and another love replace it. Amongst artists. Amongst artistic people.\"\n\n\"I've led a sheltered life, clearly. So our love died and you rediscovered your love for Malachi.\"\n\n\"Our love hasn't died, Brodie. But Malachi would kill you if I stayed with you. I told you: I did this to make you free.\"\n\nHe stubbed out his cigarette, noticing that the ashtray on her desk was full of cigarette ends\u2014she was obviously smoking more than ever.\n\n\"Well. At least now I know why you wouldn't marry me.\"\n\n\"I couldn't marry you. I was married already.\"\n\nThey sat silent for a while.\n\n\"It's all very sad,\" she said. \"I did love Malachi once, in a way, at the beginning. He was different then.\"\n\n\"And the man he's become is now the man for you.\"\n\n\"I don't see that. But I know him better than you do. Knew him better, long ago, let's say.\"\n\n\"But what was wrong with you and me?\"\n\n\"Nothing. It was wonderful. But it couldn't continue. Malachi was always going to come after me and would ruin everything one way or another. I realized that in Nice. I realized we had to stop running. He'll kill you, Brodie. Or he would have. He could bear that I was with John but he couldn't tolerate that I was with you, the man who had killed his brother. It was eating him alive. And that's what I realized in Nice: I had to leave you to make everything stop. That's the only reason. I know him\u2014I know what he would do.\"\n\n\"But we could have escaped.\"\n\n\"No. He would always find us. One day. I did it for you, Brodie. For us. I decided it was best\u2014\"\n\n\"Best to be the proprietor of an embroidery shop in Paris.\"\n\nNow she stood and came over to him. She touched his cheek and made to sit on his knee so he eased his chair back and she sat down, straddling his lap. His arms went loosely around her. He thought he might faint. He found breathing difficult. What was it about this woman?\n\n\"It's so good to see you. To be close to you,\" she said.\n\n\"But why Malachi?\" He groaned. \"I just don't understand.\"\n\n\"Try to imagine me as an eighteen-year-old girl in an opera chorus with dreams of being a great singer. Put yourself in my place\u2014imagine what it was like for me. To be part of John Kilbarron's world made everything possible. But it began to change. And then I met you.\"\n\n\"I still don't understand.\"\n\n\"Look at your love for me. It's blind. You don't see me as I really am. All the many nuances of Lika Blum. The light and the dark. You just see the light. You just see what you want to see. And when I met Malachi I was the same.\"\n\n\"That's just love\u2014not blindness.\"\n\n\"Malachi sees me for what I am\u2014and he still wants me. It's me he wants, not you. If you got in the way he would remove you. It was because of me that he followed us everywhere. Now he has me again you're free.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be free. I can't live without you.\"\n\nThis simple declaration made Brodie want to cry, to bawl like a baby, but he controlled himself, somehow.\n\n\"I worry that he might harm you. Take out his anger at me on you,\" he said.\n\n\"He'll never harm me\u2014now that he has me. Never. I promise you that. You're free now.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be free.\"\n\n\"Yes, you do. This is the only way.\"\n\nShe took his spectacles off and placed them on the desk behind her. Then she gently touched her forehead to his and he knew what was coming. The Lika-kiss. He closed his eyes and she pressed her face against his. Lash to lash, nose against nose, lips to lips, for seconds. The sound of their breathing like a wind in his ears. He counted: eight, nine, ten, eleven...Then he felt the flicker of her tongue and they kissed.\n\nThen she stood up abruptly and he rocked back on his chair. She sat behind her desk again and handed him his spectacles. He put them on.\n\n\"Remember when you said you were my slave?\" She smiled.\n\n\"Yes. I was. I am.\"\n\n\"So you have to obey me...\" She paused. \"Go away, Brodie. You're free. A free man, not a slave any more. I've freed you.\"\n\n\"I don't want to be free, I've told you. I can't live with the thought that I'll never see you again.\"\n\n\"But you _will_ see me again.\" She leaned forward, intently. \"I promise. Write to me, here at the shop, only here, and tell me where you are. I'll never reply but I'll always know where you're living. And one day I'll come to you.\"\n\n\"When?\"\n\n\"I don't know.\" She picked up a skein of yarn from the detritus on her desk and tied it round her fingers as she talked. \"I just have to live out this bit of my life. We're young, Brodie. Let me live out this bit of my life and one day I'll come to your door wherever you are and we'll be together again.\"\n\nBrodie looked up at the ceiling, sensing that weakness invade him again. It was something, he supposed. Something to hold on to.\n\nThere was a knock on the door.\n\n\"Madame, you're needed down here, excuse me,\" the assistant said, remaining outside. It was over.\n\nThey had time for one more feral, furious kiss, a clash of teeth and tongues, causing his spectacles to clatter to the floor.\n\nAnd then she was gone, off down the stairs. Brodie retrieved his glasses and put them on. He waited until his breathing calmed and then walked slowly down to the shop floor to see Lika talking in Russian to a severe-looking woman in black, accompanied by her maid.\n\nLika turned, smiled and raised her hand to him, casually, as if he'd come to repair a broken window.\n\n\" _Mille mercis, monsieur. Au revoir._ \"\n\nBrodie smiled back and said nothing. _Au revoir._ To the re-seeing. Until we see each other again. He heard the heavy tinkle of the sprung brass bell as he closed the door behind him and he thought to himself: every time I hear a bell I'll think of you, Lika. Every time.\n\n# 3\n\nIt took two days of patient waiting in the Caf\u00e9 Riche before Brodie spotted Malachi Kilbarron again. He saw nothing of Lika's comings and goings and, for a while on the second day, began to wonder if there was some rear entrance to the building that they used or if they had both gone away somewhere, but then, after lunch on the second day, at about 3:30 he saw Malachi appear\u2014in overcoat and top hat\u2014and go striding off down the boulevard. Brodie left some francs on his table and darted out after him.\n\nHe followed Malachi carefully\u2014always a good thirty yards or so behind him, always ready to turn his back or veer away\u2014as he walked briskly by the northern side of the place des Vosges and then cut down to the river to the quai de l'H\u00f4tel de Ville. He was setting quite a pace and Brodie's breathing began to labour as he strove to keep up with him.\n\nThen Malachi went into a building on the avenue Victoria and Brodie had a chance to get his breath back. Once Malachi was safely inside, Brodie approached to see many brass plates beside the doors\u2014doctors and lawyers in the main. Some sort of business meeting? Health issues?...An hour and three cigarettes later, Brodie saw Malachi emerge and continue his march westwards, along the quays until he turned up to the rue de Rivoli. There he went into a _salon de th\u00e9_ for some refreshment and Brodie lingered under the arcades, easily keeping out of sight. Half an hour later he sauntered out, at a slower pace, entering the Jardin des Tuileries at the place du Carrousel.\n\nThe late afternoon was shifting into evening and there was a hazy golden light developing in the sky over the city. For a moment the idea struck Brodie that Malachi was going to walk all the way to Lika's shop but it seemed from the way his pace slowed to a meander that he was simply killing some time in the gardens. He bought an ice cream and consumed it; he bought a newspaper and sat on a bench and read it for ten minutes. Then he resumed his perambulations.\n\nThe population of the gardens was thinning as the light dimmed and the air became noticeably chillier. Infants were being ushered or wheeled home by nannies\u2014though he could still hear excited cries and shrieks of children playing somewhere out of sight\u2014kiosks were being closed up; a puppet show's finale entertained an audience of three. Malachi now picked up speed, as if he had remembered an appointment somewhere, taking a side path lined with pleached chestnuts that would take him down to the riverine extremities of the gardens. For a moment the two of them were alone in the gravelled _all\u00e9e_ \u2014thirty paces apart\u2014the sound of their shoes crunching on the sharp pebbly sand almost as if they were marching in time. Malachi now seemed to be making for the Orangerie and Brodie assumed he was going to cross the river at the Pont de la Concorde. This corner of the gardens was quiet and virtually deserted. A man cycled by on a white bicycle; they passed a painter folding up his easel. Malachi paused to light a cigar and Brodie darted behind a chestnut. Malachi tossed his spent match away and set off again, the long perspective of the _all\u00e9e_ stretching in front of him. Now was the time. He quickened his pace and began to gain on Malachi.\n\nWhen he was ten yards or so behind him Brodie reached into the pocket of his overcoat and eased out the Derringer, holding it loosely and half-concealed in his right hand. He felt alive with peril, like something about to explode. He had no intention of shooting Malachi Kilbarron in the back\u2014no, he was going to call his name, and force him to stop, turn and confront his nemesis. Then he would advance on him and shoot him in the chest\u2014both barrels. Simple as that. He didn't need to say anything or insult him\u2014Malachi would know why he was there and what was about to happen. Finis.\n\nBrodie matched his paces exactly with Malachi's\u2014he had no idea what he would do after administering his _coup de gr\u00e2ce._ Perhaps just walk down another path and leave the body there to be discovered. Or turn on his heel and run in the other direction. A running man might look suspicious, however\u2014people would have heard the shots. Best to appear unconcerned. But he couldn't seem to force his mind to function beyond the immediate task he had set himself\u2014something spontaneous would come to him. Then he had the idea that he might go to Lika's shop. Let the hue and cry erupt in the gardens and break the news to Lika that she was free, once and for all. That they were free, once and for all.\n\nHe glanced around\u2014no one in sight\u2014just a distant chestnut vendor pushing his chariot up a side alley, heading away. Two women with black umbrellas up (for some reason) looking at a statue a hundred yards off. Brodie gained a couple of paces more, testing the tension of the triggers with his forefinger. There was Malachi's broad back beneath the gabardine of his coat; there was his creased bull neck beneath the brim of his topper. What should he shout? Malachi! Or\u2014Kilbarron! What would make him stop instantly and turn?\n\nThey passed through a small crossroads in the pathways, with a little lead fountain in the centre plashing water into a stone basin.\n\n\" _Monsieur! Aidez-moi!_ \"\n\nInstinctively, Brodie slowed and glanced round to his right where the shout had come from. A figure was lying on the ground, waving feebly.\n\nMalachi had heard nothing\u2014the patter of water from the fountain intervening\u2014and walked on, his pace unchanged.\n\nBrodie stopped. The man was waving at him, calling for help, plaintively.\n\nBrodie pocketed the Derringer and walked over to him. He was a small man with a soft, untrimmed moustache and a middle parting. Bizarrely, he was wearing two overcoats, the top one with a fur collar, and it was the bulk and weight of the two, plus his obvious grogginess, that was preventing him from clambering to his feet. Brodie helped him up and dusted the gravel off his coat. His hat\u2014a homburg\u2014had rolled some way off and Brodie retrieved that also.\n\n\"Thank you, sir. You're very kind,\" the man said. \"Two girls, bowling hoops with sticks, racing along, made me stumble and fall. And I banged my head.\" He carefully touched his brow where a small egg-shaped lump had formed, the skin stretched but unbroken. \"I think I blacked out for a few seconds. I couldn't move. I thought I'd had a heart attack or something. For a moment I thought I'd died. Yes I did. I was convinced I was dead and this was the afterlife. Exactly like the one I'd left.\"\n\nBrodie could see the man was a little\u2014what was the word?\u2014hysterical. He handed him back his hat.\n\n\"Better go and see your doctor, sir. You may be concussed. I have to rush, excuse me.\"\n\nBrodie ran back to the fountain. He thought he could just make out the figure of Malachi leaving the garden by the gate that led to the place de la Concorde. No following him now...Brodie felt something heave and catch in his chest and for a moment thought he might be on the verge of a haemorrhage but he suddenly calmed.\n\nThe little man in the two overcoats was approaching.\n\n\"I feel I should offer you something, sir, for helping me. A reward. A meal, a drink, some money.\"\n\n\"Absolutely no need,\" Brodie said, watching Malachi disappear from view. \"Happy to be of assistance.\" He tapped his hat brim with a finger.\n\n\"These young girls\u2014running out of the shadows like that. I never saw them. They shouldn't be allowed to run wild with their hoops. It was most disconcerting. They fly by you heedless, shouting, shrieking...\" He pulled on a pair of yellow leather gloves.\n\n\"I did hear children playing,\" Brodie said vaguely. \"Perhaps it was those girls with the hoops.\"\n\n\"Well, if it's only my gratitude you'll accept then be assured my gratitude is copious. Extravagant.\"\n\n\"Thank you,\" Brodie said, shaking the man's proffered, yellow-gloved hand. \"Keep to the side of the pathways if I were you.\"\n\n\"Excellent advice. Are you an Englishman, sir? The accent...\"\n\n\"I'm a Scotsman.\"\n\n\"I've never met a Scotsman. Until this very day. How extraordinary! And how fortuitous that you came to my rescue, a Scotsman. I'll never forget you, kind sir. Immensely grateful.\"\n\nHe pottered off, flicking at bits of grit still sticking to his outer overcoat.\n\nBrodie felt a depression settle on him as he turned and retraced his steps eastwards. He felt a kind of fizzing in his head, then a hot flush overwhelmed him to such an extent that he had to find a bench and sit down.\n\nWhat was happening to him? Was he going insane? Had he really planned to gun down Malachi Kilbarron in the Jardin des Tuileries like some anarchist assassin and just wander away? The flush now gave way to a violent perspiration. His new beard was damp. He took off his hat and ran his fingers through his slick hair. A bead of sweat dropped from the tip of his nose. He was having some kind of fit, he thought. A fit of remorse, of incomprehension, of losing Lika. A mad fit. He had gone mad for an hour or two, he decided. He breathed deeply. Lucky that little fellow in the two overcoats had brought him to his senses.\n\nHe left the garden and crossed the quay to the Pont de Solf\u00e9rino. He walked out to the middle of the bridge and turned to face upstream. He could see the immense curved glass vault of the Grand Palais burning gold as the setting sun turned its thousands of panes ablaze with light. He reached into his pocket, found Lika's little Derringer and, casually, so he didn't draw attention to himself, threw it into the Seine.\n\nHe heard its faint splash as it hit the water and thought: the fit is over. I am calm. Time for my new life to begin. Time to leave Paris forever.\n\n# PART VI\n\n# Geneva\u2014Vienna\u2014Graz\u2014Trieste\n\n1902\u20131905\n\n# 1\n\nIt was the seventeenth letter he had written to Lika since he had left Paris.\n\n> 27, Via San Michele\n> \n> Trieste\n> \n> Austria\u2013Hungary\n> \n> 29 November 1905\n> \n> My darling Lika,\n> \n> I am still in Trieste and, as you can see from the address, I am still in the same place. But I have moved up one floor and I now have a decent-sized room in this gentlemen's lodging house (all bachelors, plus new arrivals, a couple of widowers). I have almost two rooms if you count a bed-space behind a curtain as a room. Two leather armchairs in front of a fire, a table and chair. Pets allowed\u2014C\u00e9sar is in good health. My health, after the near-catastrophe in Graz, seems stable. My job is secure, I'm eating well, I like this city. But my life is incomplete: I think about you every waking hour. I wait for your knock on my door.\n> \n> With my undying love,\n> \n> Brodie\n\n\"I think about you every waking hour.\" It was the constant refrain of his letters. Most sleeping hours, also, he thought. Lika made a regular appearance in his dream life, but so too did the Kilbarron brothers and he consequently slept less well these days. He often felt unnaturally tired and wondered if this was a sign that his tuberculosis was growing more chronic, his lung capacity diminishing as the tubercles continued their secret growth.\n\nHe sealed the envelope, addressed it to the Paris shop, affixed stamps and slipped it in his jacket pocket. He filled C\u00e9sar's bowl with water and set it down on a German newspaper on the floor by the unlit fire. This room was all he really needed, he thought, given his meagre possessions. He had the use of a bathroom and lavatory at the end of the corridor outside. As with all the lodgings he rented the assumption he made was that he'd occupy them for a few weeks, at the most a month or two, but in fact he'd been at this address on the Via San Michele for well over a year, now, since he'd arrived in Trieste in September 1904. And now it was November 1905...The room also had a view of the Castello from its solitary window and he was only a ten-minute walk from his place of work.\n\nHe patted C\u00e9sar goodbye and pulled on his greatcoat, setting his old felt trilby on his head. As he left the building, he paused and looked up and down the street, casually, but searching for anyone lurking, watching. It was a reflex now, something he did automatically, having been followed, one way or another, through the various European cities he had lived and worked in over the past few years. But he saw nothing untoward. Carriages and wagons and a few automobiles\u2014another crisp, sunny autumn day in Trieste, this curious Austro-Hungarian city, full of Italians, nestling at the top of the Adriatic Sea. He was just another foreigner in a city of foreigners\u2014Italians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Slovenes, Greeks and a dozen other nationalities all drawn to this vast port\u2014the Hamburg of the Mediterranean. If there was a perfect city in which to find anonymity\u2014to disappear\u2014then Trieste was ideal.\n\nHe posted his letter in the yellow letter box, adorned with its imperial black double-headed eagle, and strolled on towards Nicolo-Piano where he worked part-time. It was owned by Gabriele Nicolo, a plump energetic man in his fifties, who sold and repaired pianos in a shop on the Via Malcantan behind the Piazza Grande. At the rear of the shop front on Via Malcantan there was a big roofed-in yard where the repair work was done and the pianos stored. In summer you could hear the bands playing in the piazza. Brodie had been working there for eight months now, principally repairing pianos, but he had introduced the idea of a tuning service and it was proving successful. Brodie was training up a young apprentice called Gianluca Geppa\u2014a skinny, studious lad\u2014and was contemplating hiring another, such was the demand.\n\nHe pushed open the rear door to the yard, smelling the wood, the glue and the resin, and realizing that these odours were a constant in his professional life. Amongst all the jobs that had begun and ended in Edinburgh, Paris, Biarritz, Nice, Geneva, Vienna, Graz and now Trieste, these smells had never changed. Same job, same smells\u2014circumstances always unique.\n\nIn the corner of the yard was a small wooden shed with a stove that functioned as a rudimentary office and as a retreat for him, Gianluca and Ottavio the carpenter. Brodie's Italian was about as good as his German so communication was halting and heavily gestural, though broadly efficacious. Gabriele Nicolo spoke some French and wanted to learn English\u2014he had enrolled at the Berlitz school in Trieste\u2014and was happy to have employed an English-speaker as well as an excellent tuner.\n\nBrodie removed his coat and hung up his hat, pulling on a brown overall, and went to look at the faulty pedal on an old upright. He was almost immediately interrupted by Gabriele, who told him he was wanted urgently at the theatre. This was the Teatro Politeama Rossetti where Brodie also worked as an occasional tuner when concerts there required him.\n\n\"Brodie, they say going this afternoon. Any time.\"\n\n\"Go this afternoon.\"\n\n\"Go this afternoon.\"\n\nGabriele asked him to correct every mistake in his English, however petty. Only this way, he reasoned, would he avoid bad habits and improve. He was a heavy-set, bald man, always smoking, always slightly sweaty and harassed. He lit a cigarette off the one he was finishing and asked how Gianluca was progressing.\n\n\"Very well. I sent him out on two jobs yesterday. On his own.\"\n\n\"Be careful, Brodie. He is taking your position soon.\"\n\n\"Will take my position.\"\n\n\"Will take. Will take. Will take.\"\n\nBrodie went back to work and corrected the faulty pedal. Then he started on the rust-damaged dampers in a baby grand, a job that took him up to his lunch break. He wandered over to the Piazza Grande and found a table at a caf\u00e9 where he ate a plate of gnocchi and drank a glass of Prosecco before strolling onto the promenade, where he smoked a cigarette and stared at the ships in the bay, thinking about Lika Blum and how he missed her. Every now and then he would turn full circle and scrutinize the passers-by, the people strolling along the waterside, just in case he saw someone who seemed to be taking a particular interest in him. He was beginning to relax in Trieste; he was beginning to feel secure again after all these months. Maybe Malachi Kilbarron and his detective agencies had finally lost him. The trail had gone well and truly cold.\n\nHe had thought that leaving Paris, and leaving Lika to Malachi, would have been the end of Malachi's obsession with him. Lika had always claimed that _she_ was the object of Malachi's relentless pursuit\u2014not Brodie. But, Brodie wondered, now that Malachi had Lika, his thoughts might be returning to the man who had killed his brother. Maybe Lika was wrong\u2014he wasn't free, as she'd promised: Malachi's resentment, his urge for some blood-for-blood recompense was still in ferment. Because in Geneva and Vienna and Graz\u2014the cities he'd lived in since Paris\u2014he had become aware of Malachi's continued search for him. He had left Graz clandestinely\u2014unobserved, he thought, his next destination a mystery\u2014but he could never truly be sure that it was over, he realized. Never.\n\nHe walked out on the long solid pier that was the Molo San Carlo, taking him some hundred yards out to sea from the city's edge, a favourite promenade for Triestines, enjoying the weak sunshine on his face, hearing the slap and slurry of the waves as they hit the wall, thinking about his peripatetic life over these last three years or so.\n\nIn Geneva, where he'd gone directly after leaving Paris, he'd stayed only a few months. He had used contacts from his old days of the Channon\u2013Kilbarron tour to find jobs at theatres and music halls but having seen the same man watching his hotel for four days in a row he sensed he was being followed. There were many \"detective\" agencies and organizations in Europe and Brodie suspected that Malachi had engaged one to track him down.\n\nSo he moved at once to Vienna, thinking that Austria\u2013Hungary might be a better refuge. They were trying months: his English and French were little use and his German too rudimentary at that stage to gain him employment with German piano makers. He managed some private tuning and played the piano in caf\u00e9s and bars but he was poor and out of sorts in Vienna\u2014he never really settled.\n\nAnd the dissatisfaction increased when he received a letter from Callum saying that a man had called at Edenbrae asking for him and his whereabouts. This man said he worked for Channon\u2014there had been an accountancy error discovered and Brodie was owed a significant amount of back pay\u2014but when Callum telephoned the Edinburgh shop they said they had no knowledge of such a person. Brodie replied saying that the rest of the family should be alerted and no one should tell any stranger anything about him. But the scare was enough to prompt another move.\n\nHe decided to set himself up in Graz, the provincial capital of Styria, a venerable small city, situated 120 miles or so to the south of Vienna. Graz was divided by the river Mur, surrounded by the high mountains of the eastern Alps and dominated by its own castle on a hill, the Schlossberg. It reminded him vaguely of Edinburgh\u2014though the red-tiled roofs of the old town were a far remove from Edinburgh's presiding grey\u2014and he began to feel at home.\n\nHe stayed in Graz for six months as 1903 moved into 1904, employed at a small piano manufacturer called Audritz und Stahl. He lodged in a villa in a suburb south of the city near the racecourse, on Castellfeld Gasse. There was one other lodger\u2014a lecturer in engineering at the Karl-Franz University called Maximilian Scholz. Their landlady was a timid young woman, a spinster, who had inherited the villa when her parents died. Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold must have been in her late thirties, Brodie supposed. She had a perfectly round face and a middle parting of incredible rectitude. She could not meet his eye when she talked to him, always addressing one shoulder or the other, yet it was her habit at night to walk naked about her rooms, curtains undrawn; rooms, moreover, that were directly opposite Brodie's suite. Was she trying to send him a signal, he wondered? Consequently he kept his own curtains permanently drawn, day and night, to C\u00e9sar's irritation, he felt sure, but it removed any voyeuristic temptation.\n\nAfter three months, she managed to ask him if he would join her in her apartments after supper for a round of _Sechsundsechzig._ Brodie said he was unfamiliar with the game. Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold informed him it was very simple, requiring only a deck of cards and two players\u2014she could teach him the rules in five minutes\u2014it might be fun for him to learn a new game, no? Brodie apologized, saying he was very tired, and overheard her inviting Maximilian Scholz instead. For the first time since he had arrived, Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold's curtains were drawn that night.\n\nBrodie began to feel secure in Graz but what made him leave was nothing initially to do with Malachi Kilbarron. In the early summer of 1904 he had another haemorrhage, a really severe one, as bad as his first haemorrhage in Paris. He woke in the night feeling his lungs flooding, almost to the point of drowning, and vomited blood all over his bed before passing out. He was found in the morning by the maid who had come to wake him for breakfast. Her screams could be heard the length of Castellfeld Gasse, reputedly.\n\nHe spent nearly two months in the Hasner Sanatorium on the slopes of the Plabutsch mountain, west of the city, an enforced stay that used up almost all of his savings. His doctor at the sanatorium advised him to go to the coast, to Trieste, where the climate was better, and recommended a colleague there.\n\nWhen Brodie returned to the villa in Castellfeld Gasse to collect his few belongings Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold said that a friend of his had passed by a week previously looking for him. What friend? He was an American friend, Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold recalled. I told him you were ill and in a sanatorium. She assured Brodie that no more information had been passed on but that he had said he would be back, Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold added helpfully. If he calls again, Brodie said, would you kindly tell him I'm going to convalesce in France, in Nice, at the Pension Deladier? He scribbled the address on a sheet of paper. I'll be sure to pass the message on, Fr\u00e4ulein Leopold said. And Brodie caught the train to Trieste.\n\nAnd that seemed to have covered his tracks, he felt. Arriving in Trieste, he had moved hotels three times in a fortnight before he'd found and settled in his lodging house on San Michele. He constantly asked his landlord and everyone he had business with to inform him if anyone\u2014anyone\u2014made enquiries as to his whereabouts. He tried to vary his routines\u2014where he ate, where he wandered\u2014and always kept up a form of regular surveillance, when he was out and about, looking for strangers who reappeared, changing the routes that he took to work and when he returned home. Slowly but surely he came to realize that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, that nobody appeared to be looking for him. He hoped Malachi's agents were haunting the pensions and casinos of the C\u00f4te d'Azur searching for a tall consumptive Scotsman with a little dog. Only Lika knew exactly where he was and that secret was as secure as the grave.\n\nHe stood on the Molo San Carlo, hands in his pockets, staring out over the Adriatic with its silent migration of clouds. This was the view that inspired him, though he knew that if he turned round to look back at the city he would be confronted by the splendid panorama of the littoral. It was only the Adriatic, he was aware, but to him it looked like a boundless ocean, the distance-hazed horizon barely visible, the charge of light from the sea and the sky half-blinding him. He liked to think of his presence here on this jutting stone promontory as a symbol of his journey's end. Thus far and no further...He looked at his pocket watch. He'd better make his way to the theatre and see what they wanted him for.\n\nThe Teatro Politeama Rossetti was a twenty-minute walk away. It was Trieste's largest theatre, easily capable of seating an audience of more than 3,000, and attracted many a virtuoso coming on to Trieste after concerts in Milan, Venice and Vienna. Brodie had made enquiries and offered his services on arrival in the city and was told that he wasn't required. He left his particulars, nonetheless, and a month later was summoned with some urgency. The maestro playing turned out to be Karl-Heinz Nagel, giving a recital of Brahms and Mendelssohn, and a warm reunion ensued. Nagel's enthusiastic encomium had gained him regular employ afterwards. Brodie sensed that, for the manager of the Politeama, his nationality and his fluent French, as much as his expertise, gave the theatre some strange cachet. Look who we have tuning our piano\u2014a Scotsman who speaks French!\n\nBrodie strolled up the Canale Grande and cut across the Via G. Carducci onto the Via Chiozza where the theatre was to be found, its huge facade soon visible. He went to the stage door and on to the manager's office. On his way he passed a poster for the next concert: Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler, he saw. However, there was no sign of the manager\u2014instead his deputy sat at his desk in something of a panic. He was Bojan Kupitur, a Slovene, a lean, tense man who drank too much. Brodie liked Bojan\u2014they were both outsiders in the theatre staffed almost entirely by Italians\u2014but he also recognized his essential incompetence. He could see Bojan was in a state and could smell the liquor on him. Bojan spoke fast but broken French.\n\n\"He is Mozart, oh yes, Sonata in C, and no stupid shit piano ready. _Putain!_ And the maestro is coming in two hours. Brodie, please you fix him for me, Brodie. _Subito!_ _Subito!_ \"\n\nBrodie went down to the basement store and selected the B\u00f6sendorfer that Nagel had used. It was old but the best piano the Politeama possessed. He found some stagehands and they wheeled it into the freight lift and up to the auditorium, settling it in the middle of the stage.\n\nHe opened it up, sat down, found the pitch and played his usual octave sequences. Not too bad. Fifteen minutes' work\u2014Bojan could relax.\n\nBojan was pacing around, darting off from time to time to take a quick swig from whatever he was drinking in the wings.\n\n\"Who's the pianist?\" Brodie asked him. \"I may need to make some final adjustments.\"\n\n\"They don't tell me nothing.\"\n\nBrodie fetched his tools from his locker and went to work. When he had finished he played a few bars of \"My Bonny Boy\" and, of course, thought of Lika. Every waking hour. That day in the Saint-Germain apartment...That song had been the catalyst of all the happiness in his life, he thought. He thought further: and all the unhappiness, also. Perhaps the very first playing of that song could even explain his presence here in Trieste, years later\u2014a man on the run from his past\u2014the causal chain stretched back to that moment, unbroken, when you analysed it closely. He had a sudden idea.\n\n\"It's done, I'm off,\" he said to Bojan. \"You owe me eighty crowns.\"\n\n\"No, Brodie, I beg you. Stay till they come. I give you one hundred crowns.\"\n\nAnother fifteen shillings, Brodie thought. Every little bit helps. They went back to the office and Bojan poured him a glass of schnapps.\n\n\"Why, in the name of Jesus Christ, is Ricardo ill?\" Bojan said, furiously, as if it were a personal slight, some sort of fiendish vendetta. Ricardo was the Politeama's manager. \"Today of all the days. _Putain!_ \" He swore again and topped up his glass.\n\nThey were interrupted by a boy who tapped on the door and said in an awestruck whisper, \"They are here, _signori._ \"\n\nBrodie and Bojan went up to the stage where they saw three men in smart suits looking around the auditorium. Members of the Orchestra Triestini were beginning to settle down in their seats and unpack their instruments and scores in readiness for the rehearsal.\n\nBojan said, \"Look, there's Banzo. I'll talk to him. Stay here.\"\n\nBrodie knew who Marion Banzo was\u2014a local Triestine conductor who often rehearsed the orchestra before the star conductor arrived. In the group of three was a tall portly man with greying hair and, beside him, a tiny, lithe figure, bespectacled, in a pale brown three-piece suit and a bow tie. He was peering out into the gloom of the vast unlit auditorium, impressed. He spotted Brodie standing there and wandered over.\n\n\"It's huge,\" he said in German. \"I had no idea.\" He had wild hair and thin lips. His spectacles were rimless and set so close to his eyes they were almost invisible.\n\n\"Indeed,\" Brodie said. \"We can fit five thousand in here, if we allow standing.\"\n\n\"My God, that's a small town.\"\n\n\"Do you speak French?\" Brodie asked. \"My German isn't so good.\"\n\n\" _Oui, oui._ _Bien s\u00fbr._ So, may I ask you a question? Why is there a piano in the middle of the stage?\"\n\n\"It's for the Mozart. I tuned it myself an hour ago.\"\n\n\"We're performing Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. So we have no need of a piano.\"\n\nBrodie noticed that the man's left leg had a curious pronounced twitch. There was a dull percussive thud of his heel vibrating on the stage's flooring.\n\nBrodie urgently signalled Bojan over.\n\n\"It's a Mozart symphony,\" Brodie said quietly. \"Not a piano concerto.\"\n\n\"Wrong. No. It's Piano Concerto number twenty-one, in C.\"\n\n\"Jupiter Symphony, number forty-one, in C,\" the little man interjected.\n\nBojan swore to himself expressively in Slovene. He took Brodie's elbow and led him away a few paces.\n\n\"It's Ricardo,\" Bojan said, desperately. \"His handwriting\u2014it's impossible. I can't read it. Forty-one, twenty-one, thirty-one\u2014is all the same.\"\n\n\"Please remove the piano,\" the little man said. \"We want to rehearse.\" Then, aside to Brodie: \"I'm sorry to have wasted your time.\"\n\n\"I'll still be paid,\" Brodie said. \"It's some consolation.\"\n\nThe little man was staring at his glasses.\n\n\"You have a line across your lens.\"\n\n\"Two lenses. One on top of the other. The bottom for close work; the top for distance. They're called Franklin spectacles.\"\n\n\"Fascinating. I could use this. Did you get them here in Trieste?\"\n\n\"No. In Edinburgh. Scotland.\"\n\n\"Ah. You're the Scotsman. They told me they had a Scottish piano tuner here.\" He looked again at Brodie's spectacles. \"Are they efficient?\"\n\n\"Excellent. I'd be blind without them.\"\n\n\"Me too...Yes.\" He paused. \"Blind as a worm. Is that what you say in English?\"\n\n\"Blind as a bat.\"\n\n\"A bat. Yes, that makes sense, also.\" He smiled. \"Do you have a cigarette, by any chance?\"\n\nBrodie took out his cigarette case and held it open. The little man took a cigarette and Brodie lit it for him. In the background Bojan was supervising the stagehands removing the redundant piano.\n\n\"Very nice to meet you,\" the little man said. \"Thank you for the cigarette.\" He smiled, gave a brisk bow and wandered over to rejoin Banzo and the other man. Another impresario, Brodie assumed. He went down the stairs to Bojan's office and demanded his hundred crowns. Bojan was drinking and muttering about the shame and that _morceau de merde_ Ricardo who hadn't learned to write his name properly. He opened his cash box and counted out the five twenty-kr\u00f6ne notes.\n\n\"Well, no harm done,\" Brodie said, pocketing them.\n\n\"Oh, no,\" Bojan said, gloomily. \"On the contrary\u2014you wait. It's a disaster for me. The Italians will use it as an excuse to kick me out. They want me out. No Slovenes here.\"\n\nBrodie commiserated and then hurried home to compose his letter. He had decided to write to Dmitri at Channon's showroom in Paris. He told him to go to Lika's shop in the Faubourg Saint-Honor\u00e9 and gave him precise instructions. It had been too long an absence; too long a one-sided correspondence. He needed news of her: he needed to communicate properly. He needed her.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nTwo days later, Brodie sat in the upper tiers of the Politeama listening to Mahler's Fifth Symphony. The response to the first half of the programme\u2014Beethoven's Coriolan Overture and Mozart's Jupiter Symphony\u2014had been very warm, verging on rapturous. At the end of the Fifth, however, the reaction was decidedly cooler. He saw people glancing at each other in puzzlement. There were a few shouts\u2014\"Nonsense!,\" \"Rubbish!\"\u2014that were largely obscured by the general polite applause and the sound of people leaving in haste, as if keen to remove themselves from this modern cacophony.\n\nBrodie had enjoyed the Fifth, particularly the fourth movement, the Adagietto. It reminded him in some way of \"Der Tr\u00e4nensee,\" but he assumed that was mere coincidence. It was almost impossible to imagine in what circumstances Mahler could have heard Kilbarron's tone poem. They were both swimming in the current of the new century's new music, he supposed: the zeitgeist.\n\nHe stepped out of the theatre into the chilly night. It was 1 December and there were stars in the sky above his head\u2014a cloudless frosty night\u2014and his breath condensed in front of him. He turned down a side street looking for an _osterie._ He needed a drink. A cognac, a schnapps, a slivovitz\u2014something warming, at any rate.\n\nHe found a small bar on the Via del Tora, a side street on the way back to the quays. It was busy and smoky, full of people from the theatre, judging by the numbers with programmes in their hands or their pockets. There was a lot of talk about the music. He pushed his way through the crowd to the bar and wedged himself in a corner, ordering his plum brandy and lighting a cigarette. How he missed his Margaritas! He took a sip of his drink and someone jogged his elbow and made him splash brandy on his sleeve.\n\n\" _Mi dispiace molto. Mille scuse!_ \"\n\nThe accent was appalling and came from a brawny young man in a bashed tweed cap and who had a blunt, raw-boned, open, smiling face.\n\n\"No harm done,\" Brodie said in English.\n\n\"No, no. I'll buy you another,\" the young man replied in a strong Irish accent. \"But my brother has all me money.\" He turned and shouted, \"Shem!\" and at this another man joined them, two glasses raised high. He was tall, almost as tall as Brodie, in his twenties, Brodie thought, with thick-lensed spectacles and a strong-jawed, thin-lipped face. He handed over a glass of clear liquid to his brother.\n\n\"Sure, I've gone and knocked this chap's drink clear out of his hand.\"\n\n\"It was just a drop. No bother at all,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"Are you English?\"\n\n\"Scottish.\"\n\n\"What?\"\n\n\"Scottish!\" The noise in the _osterie_ was almost overpowering\u2014they had to shout to make themselves heard. The three of them settled in their corner. The brothers loudly reintroduced themselves, properly. Stan, the younger, and Shem, the older, the one with the spectacles.\n\n\"Have you been to the Teatro?\" Shem asked.\n\n\"Yes.\"\n\n\"What did you think of the Mahler?\"\n\n\"Rather wonderful. I'd need to hear it again. Very modern.\"\n\n\"You're in a small minority as far as I can tell,\" Shem said.\n\n\"I heard this fellow say,\" Stan interposed. \"He said the Mozart was 'too rococo.' And the Mahler was 'beer-garden music.' He liked the Beethoven, though.\"\n\n\"How can you be 'too rococo'? Rococo is too baroque, no?\" Shem looked bemused. \"I thought he said it was 'cynical' music. Cynical music, what in God's name is that?\"\n\n\"I think he said 'cyclical' music,\" Stan said.\n\n\"Cycling music?\" Shem said, not hearing through the din. \"Cynical, cyclical, cycling music. I'd like to hear that, all right.\"\n\nThere was a group of people behind them talking in French. They were being disparaging about the Mahler, also. Brodie translated.\n\n\"This lot describes it as 'insipid dancing music.'\"\n\n\"Well,\" Shem said, \"the composer is always ten years ahead of his audience. If he's any good, that is.\"\n\nBrodie bought them all another round of drinks. He was enjoying speaking English to intelligent people. Shem and Stan accepted the offer of his cigarettes. The _osterie_ was filling up even more\u2014they could hardly hear each other.\n\n\"That's what I like about Trieste,\" Shem shouted. \"Everyone arguing about music and getting drunk.\"\n\nThey had both arrived in the city fairly recently, it transpired, Stan just some weeks previously. They were both teaching English. Earning a navvy's wage, Shem said.\n\nBrodie said he was a piano tuner.\n\n\"Will you tune my old piano?\" Shem asked. \"It's a bit of a wreck.\"\n\n\"Delighted,\" Brodie said. \"I'm not fussy.\" He fished in a pocket for his visiting card with the address of Nicolo-Piano on it. \"I'm there most days\u2014or leave word.\"\n\nShem scrutinized it and handed it to Stan.\n\n\"My business associate will be in touch.\"\n\nA young woman with orange hair and red lips asked if she might be given access to the bar.\n\n\"Now, there's a beauty,\" Shem said, allowing her to squeeze tightly past. \"A lady of the night, if I'm not mistaken. Not a rough edge on her, I can vouch for that.\"\n\n\"I won't tell your wife about your vouching,\" Stan said.\n\n\"You a married man, Brodie?\" Shem asked.\n\n\"I'm engaged. But she's far away\u2014in Paris.\"\n\n\"Ah, Paree...\" Shem sighed. \"I lived in Paris once.\"\n\n\"Is she a Frenchie, then, your girl?\"\n\n\"She's Russian, actually.\"\n\n\"A Russian girl, now that would be something,\" Shem said. \"Have you been to Russia, Brodie?\"\n\n\"Yes,\" Brodie said and told them something of his travels.\n\n\"Where are you from?\"\n\n\"Edinburgh.\"\n\n\"We're both from Dublin. Surprise, surprise.\"\n\nThe mention of their home towns gave them all a moment of reflection.\n\n\"We're a long way from the motherland, that's for sure,\" Shem said. \"Let's get another round in and drink to us exiles. Exiled Celts. Celts in exile. Celxiles.\"\n\n# 2\n\nThe day Brodie received his reply from Dmitri was the day he saw Malachi Kilbarron going into the Teatro Politeama. At least he thought it was Malachi\u2014and his heart thought so too, such was the juddering thud that came with the recognition. A man leaving a motor taxi and walking into a theatre. Stout, bearded like Malachi, smoking a cheroot.\n\nBrodie leaned back against the wall. Don't be a fool, he told himself: how many bearded cigar-smoking men are there in this city? Dozens, hundreds...He waited a few minutes and then went into the foyer and spoke to a commissionaire. A friend of mine just came in\u2014English, with a beard, smoking a cigar. I saw no one like that, sir. Brodie didn't linger and put the delusion\u2014the hallucination\u2014down to his state of nerves. They were a week away from Christmas and bells were tolling in every belfry in the city\u2014and every time he heard a bell toll he thought of Lika, of course. And therefore Malachi, of course. He was haunted by memories\u2014and this was making him see ghosts, spectres, doppelg\u00e4ngers, that's all, he rebuked himself.\n\nAll the same, he counter-rebuked, it _was_ disturbing, and this took him to the central post office up by the main station to see if there was anything for him at the Poste Restante counter and, sure enough, there was\u2014it was Dmitri's reply.\n\n> Channon & Cie\n> \n> Avenue de l'Alma\n> \n> Paris\n> \n> 8 December 1905\n> \n> Mon cher Brodie,\n> \n> I received your letter, thank you. And I send you my good wishes in return. I went immediately to the shop you mentioned in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honor\u00e9 but it was closed. In the window was a sign: \"Fermeture d\u00e9finitive pour cause de d\u00e9c\u00e8s dans la famille.\" I asked in nearby shops and they said it had closed suddenly some weeks before\u2014and they said the shop was for sale. I couldn't get any more information, I'm sorry to say.\n> \n> Please come back to Paris. We miss you. They have made me manager but I'm not very good at my job, I fear. Mr. Channon is very patient and understanding.\n> \n> With my sincere friendship,\n> \n> Dmitri Kuvakin\n\n\" _Pour cause de d\u00e9c\u00e8s dans la famille_...\" A death in the family...He felt utterly confident that it wasn't Lika. Not at all. He knew that if Lika had died something in him would have died also, however far away he was from her. He would have felt something change; he would have felt the world alter in some minuscule but irrefutable way; a Lika-absence registering itself in the atmosphere\u2014a change in air pressure, isobars acknowledging a shift in the nature of existence. Most likely it was her ailing mother, and that would have taken her back to Moscow. He considered further. But\u2014had Lika left Malachi and Malachi had then assumed she was going to join Brodie?...Questions proliferated, hypotheses multiplied. Maybe he had seen Malachi at the theatre after all. Maybe Malachi had found his letters in the shop once it had been closed...But surely Lika wouldn't have been so careless to leave them in a drawer or a cabinet...\n\nHe wandered down to the quayside, and walked out onto the Molo San Carlo and looked out at the restless sea as if an answer might be found there. It was a cold blustery day and the water was choppy, waves dashing against the sides of the quay, sending spray shooting high. A steamship belched smoke as it hove to, heading for the shelter of the harbour's breakwater. Was Malachi Kilbarron in Trieste?...\n\nHallucination or not, he thought, he would take extra precautions. He would change lodgings; he would ask Gabriele Nicolo to fend off any enquiries and feign ignorance; he would avoid the theatre for a good while, pretend he was ill. He walked back to his lodging house in a confusion of emotions. He liked Trieste\u2014where would he go now? And he had to think of his health\u2014he had to go somewhere warm. Crimea? Egypt? Constantinople? Perhaps leaving Europe was the answer. But then, he reflected, a solitary Briton abroad was all the more noticeable.\n\nHe gave his notice at the lodging house, paid the punitive fine of a month's rent and packed his bags. What meagre possessions he had for a man in his mid-thirties, he thought. A bag of tuning tools, a couple of suitcases of clothes and a small dog. C\u00e9sar sensed something was wrong but for him that meant excitement, change\u2014not alarm, not growing apprehension. For the first time he regretted throwing Lika's Derringer into the Seine. Perhaps he should arm himself once more...\n\nHe went down the passageway to the communal bathroom to collect his shaving kit and his soaps and towels. He locked the door and sat on the lavatory for a while making further plans. Tonight he would find a hotel and start looking for new lodgings at the weekend. Or maybe wait until the New Year. One solution might be to live outside Trieste in Grado or Capodistria. There were regular ferries to the city. He could regulate his work easily enough\u2014\n\nHis eye was caught by a spider trapped in the bathtub. A small spider, a fingernail across, trying to climb the smooth enamel of the bath and falling back time after time. He watched it make two dozen vain attempts, admiring its doggedness in the face of such obvious, persistent failure and acknowledging that this was his Robert the Bruce moment. He smiled, thinking: what must it be like for a spider in that alien, eerie landscape? Towering unscaleable walls of white\u2014a world of white, an immense canyon of glossy blankness. A spider nightmare. An insect that could climb up anything suddenly utterly impotent. Brodie glanced to his right. And yet the plug was in its plughole and its chain led upwards to safety and security. If the spider simply moved a few feet down the bath it could climb the chain to freedom effortlessly. He was tempted to help it out but decided it should learn the lesson itself. He stood, eased his shoulders, massaged his biceps and forearms. Time to go to work and warn Gabriele about strangers asking leading questions.\n\n# 3\n\n\"Hello there. Remember me?\"\n\nA young man was standing leaning against the wall by the door of Nicolo-Piano. He was wearing a shiny, worn black suit whose trousers were so short they exposed the tops of his lace-up, unpolished boots.\n\n\"It's Stan, isn't it? The drink-spiller.\"\n\n\"The very same.\"\n\nThey shook hands.\n\n\"My brother wants you to tune his old piano. Fancies himself as a singer, you see. Wants to practise at home, God help us.\"\n\n\"I can do that.\"\n\n\"But there's a budget. Only twenty crowns, I'm afraid.\"\n\n\"It's on the house. For the Celtic Exiles.\"\n\n\"You're a scholar and a gentleman, Mr. Brodie, sir.\"\n\nStan waited while Brodie went into the shop to fetch his tools and explain to Gabriele what he was up to and when he'd be back. Then he and Stan wandered off through side streets in a southerly direction to the apartment where Shem lived with his wife. Except she wasn't really his wife, Stan explained\u2014they hadn't got round to the marriage part of the matrimonial union. Married in all but name, Stan said. Brodie knew what he meant.\n\nThe apartment was in a building in a working-class district of Trieste next door to the language school where both brothers taught. They climbed three flights of stairs to the front door of the flat, passing on the way up a little girl sitting on a stair, naked apart from a ragged blanket around her. Brodie glanced around for a parent or a sibling but saw no one. Stan seemed unperturbed by the encounter and when Shem opened the door to them\u2014still in his pyjamas and dressing gown\u2014Brodie realized that the polite norms of bourgeois behaviour were redundant here.\n\nStan went off to make a cup of tea while Shem led Brodie to the piano. It was a battered upright, monstrously out of tune and most of the ivory had fallen off the keys, leaving the wood exposed.\n\n\"How did you get it up here?\" Brodie asked.\n\n\"It only had to come up one floor,\" Shem said. \"An old chap died and his son sold it to me for twenty crowns and a bottle of moonshine.\"\n\nBrodie played his usual octaves and unisons again. The piano was dead.\n\n\"I can make it sound better, that's for sure. But I won't guarantee it'll stay in tune.\"\n\n\"I bow to your astonishing expertise,\" Shem said as a plump, bosomy young woman with a rosy-cheeked fresh complexion emerged from a back room, carrying a baby.\n\n\"Ah. Here's the missus, and the son and heir,\" Shem said, adding his introduction, \"This is Mr. Brodie...\"\n\n\"Moncur.\"\n\n\"A very decent Scotchman.\"\n\n\"Who's tuning the piano gratis,\" Stan added, coming out of the kitchen with a saucerless cup of tea.\n\n\"Well, good for you, Mr. Brodie Moncur,\" said Mrs. Shem in a strong Dublin accent. \"I'm off to buy some scraps of food for supper. Will you be joining us, perchance?\"\n\n\"I'll be long gone by supper,\" Brodie said.\n\nThen Shem and Stan also excused themselves and Brodie was left alone with the piano. He opened it up and went to work hoping to achieve an approximation of an in-tune piano before they returned. After an hour's work he played \"My Bonny Boy\" and, relatively satisfied, closed the fall on the upright. It was certainly ten times better now, though the decent, proper act would have been to put the poor instrument out of its misery.\n\nThe brothers returned half an hour later and marvelled at the improvement. Shem went into the small kitchen and emerged with a bottle of eau de vie, so he said. Stan found some tumblers and they all toasted the transformed piano. Shem sat down and played and sang a song: \"I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls.\" He had a fine light tenor, Brodie noted.\n\n\"My concert career is now up and running, thanks to you, Brodie,\" he said.\n\nThey talked about opportunities in Trieste, city of music. The brothers liked it better than Dublin, they said, but it was a devil making a living. The eau de vie went round again and Brodie found himself, under its influence, telling them something of his predicament, of how he was being followed by a vindictive, jealous man; how he was thinking of leaving the city, trying to cover up his movements\u2014to escape, disappear, once and for all.\n\n\"The world's your lobster,\" Shem said, enthusiastically. \"Don't go somewhere else in Europe or the Med. No, spread your wings, Brodie\u2014take a leap.\"\n\nFor some reason Brodie thought of the spider in the bath that he'd seen that morning\u2014endlessly trying to scale the same unscaleable wall while safety and freedom lay three feet away. That was the lesson, he reasoned\u2014move away from the standard plan, the obvious route: move laterally.\n\n\"But where?\" Brodie said. \"Timbuktu? Serendip? Vladivostok? Tierra del Fuego?\"\n\n\"Wrong approach,\" Shem said. \"Rely on the aleatory\u2014write that down, Stannie. Yes, Brodie. Hazard the haphazard.\"\n\nHe poured them all another glass of the powerful liquor\u2014as inert as water, it seemed, but with a fiery finish\u2014and slipped away to another room. He returned with a child's globe and a pin.\n\n\"I spin the globe\u2014you pin the pin,\" Shem said.\n\nBrodie accepted the pin and Shem placed the globe on the table in front of him.\n\n\"Close your eyes, Brodie.\"\n\nBrodie did so and heard the globe begin to turn rapidly on its axis making an erratic wooden rattling sound. He stabbed with the pin and let go, opening his eyes. Shem turned the globe towards him and Brodie saw that the pin had stuck in the open sea\u2014in blue ocean somewhere between India and Burma.\n\n\"Can I have another go?\" Brodie said, feeling suddenly intoxicated.\n\n\"No. No, look, you've hit something there. Fetch me my glass, Stan.\"\n\nStan left and returned with a magnifying glass. Shem peered through it.\n\n\"Begod, there's something here, Brodie. You've hit your destiny, son. Square on. There are islands here, as old Archie Pelago would say. Here be islands.\"\n\nHe handed Brodie the magnifying glass and Brodie held it over the pin, moving the glass slightly so he could see where the pinpoint had impacted. Shem was right\u2014he had landed on a small group of islands off the coast of Burma. He removed the pin and held the glass closer so he could read the tiny print.\n\n\"The Andaman and Nicobar Islands,\" he read out. \"Part of the British Empire as well.\"\n\n\"Don't let that put you off,\" Shem said. \"It's a sign.\"\n\nBrodie looked at the two brothers, a strange exhilaration filling him.\n\n\"The Andaman and Nicobar Islands. That's where I'll go. To hell with it.\"\n\nShem and Stan applauded him, delightedly, laughing, and Shem topped his glass up.\n\nThey toasted him. \"Brodie Moncur, adventurer.\"\n\n\"God, I envy you,\" Shem said with feeling. \"Lucky bastard.\"\n\n# PART VII\n\n# The Andaman and Nicobar Islands\n\n1906\n\n# 1\n\nBrodie left Deemer's Hotel and commenced his usual morning round, accompanied by C\u00e9sar on his lead. Dogs were eaten in the Andamans, he had been advised, or were more often stolen to hunt pigs\u2014or to breed with the mongrel dogs that hunted pigs for the natives in the jungle. He didn't want to take any chances with C\u00e9sar, a pure-bred Jack Russell, and a dog of insatiable curiosity, who often darted off pursuing his own individual searches of whatever neighbourhood he might be passing through.\n\nBrodie walked down the hill from the hotel towards the harbour at Port Blair, looking out over the Andaman Sea towards the invisible Malay Peninsula, many dozens of miles distant. He was wearing a white drill suit, a cork helmet and pipe-clayed white shoes\u2014every inch, he thought, the old colonial. Even after three months in the archipelago he still found it strange that he was living here\u2014strange in a dreamlike way\u2014leading a normal life with a white suit to wear, a place to stay and a job to do, being paid. It was another warm and humid day. The temperature was always around eighty degrees, most of the year\u2014occasionally slightly warmer or slightly cooler\u2014and at some stage during the day it would probably rain for a while. Paul Deemer, the eponymous proprietor of the hotel where he stayed, had told him that the lowest temperature ever recorded in the Andamans was sixty-six degrees\u2014a warm summer day by Edinburgh standards. All this heat and warm humidity was good for his lungs, Brodie reminded himself. He had never breathed so freely\u2014perhaps he should have come to the tropics years ago.\n\nHe went to the harbourmaster's office and looked at the shipping manifests\u2014ships that had arrived or docked in transit in Port Blair. He was looking for shipping lines that had a European origin. It was more a matter of intuition than logic as his journey to the Andamans had been very eccentric. First an Austrian-Lloyd steamer from Trieste to Port Said. Very quickly, he found a berth on a P&O coaler to Aden, then, after a week in Aden, he paid for a tiny cabin on an ancient tea clipper heading for Calcutta. He didn't care how he travelled\u2014he felt it was important simply to be moving on. There was another frustrating wait in Calcutta until he secured a place on a ferry full of convicts making the 700-mile crossing to the Andamans. It had taken him nearly two months to make the journey to the place picked out by a pin in Shem's apartment in Trieste. Now he had reached his destination he liked to see what European-registered ships called in at Port Blair\u2014not many, in fact\u2014but every time one arrived it made him more alert.\n\nAfter the harbourmaster he went to the general post office and asked for mail for Miss Arbogast, his employer, and also to see if there was any for him. He was still waiting for his first letter. Nothing from his family and nothing from Lika\u2014no surprise there. But he was still writing to her, addressing letters to the old shop, asking on the envelope that they be forwarded\u2014 _Faire suivre, svp_ \u2014emboldened now by his distance from Europe. He could never know if they actually reached her but the impulse to write was emotional, not intellectual, not logical. He had a strange faith in a posted letter: one way or another, he felt, it would find its recipient, however long it took, thanks to the diligence of the postal services of Europe. The very act of writing made him feel in contact and he wanted to keep living with the idea that her promise could be fulfilled. If he didn't write and tell her where he was, how would she ever find him? How would she ever knock on his door one day? He had a letter to post.\n\n> Poste Restante\n> \n> GPO Port Blair\n> \n> Middle Andaman\n> \n> Andaman Islands\n> \n> Indian Empire\n> \n> 7 June 1906\n> \n> My darling Lika,\n> \n> I am still here and happier now that I have a job working for an American ethnologist called Paget Arbogast. When I answered the advertisement I assumed I was going to be interviewed by a man but in fact Paget Arbogast is a woman, in her early forties\u2014a very strange woman but we seem to get along well. She broke her leg in a fall recently and had need of an assistant, advertised and I responded and was employed. Her research project into the Andaman aborigines will last another two years, she tells me, so I am gainfully employed for as long as I want and as long as she remains here. When the job ends or I grow bored I think I may move on to Australia.\n> \n> I miss you, my darling. I think of you every waking hour. My latest news from Paris is over six months old. I didn't tell you in my last letter but I know your shop has closed. Do you not think it is safe to write to me now? I long to know what has happened. I'm staying in a small clean hotel called Deemer's Hotel. It has a billiard room, a tin shed \"for concerts\" and a garden with enormous shade trees. It even has a telephone! But there are only two numbers that it can connect with\u2014the customs house and the prison governor. However, I am comfortable, my health is better than ever and C\u00e9sar is enjoying his new life in the Orient.\n> \n> I send all my love, as ever.\n> \n> Your Brodie\n\nHe handed his letter to the post-office clerk\u2014a Sikh, judging by his turban\u2014and, leaving, walked up Port Blair's busy, ramshackle main street heading for Miss Arbogast's house. Port Blair was founded as a penal colony and its huge prison still dominated the town\u2014a vast panopticon structure with a central tower and seven radiating, three-storey wings of individual cells, like spokes in a rim-less wheel. He saw the first convict gangs emerging to do their day's unpaid labour. There were over a thousand convicts, men and women, most of them murderers from India and Burma who had been spared execution. Generations of prisoners, having served their sentence, were encouraged to settle and farm, or start businesses and, as more and more villages were established and the forest cleared for agriculture, so the Andaman aborigines and their hunter-gatherer culture came under threat. There were now thousands of \"born locals,\" as the prisoners' children and grandchildren and their descendants were known, steadily colonizing this chain of tiny islands that their forebears had been sent to rot in.\n\nIt was a most curious society, Brodie had come to learn, and a surprisingly peaceful place considering that a significant proportion of its inhabitants were progeny of murderous felons. There were a lot of British and Indian soldiers and police, of course. There was a substantial garrison in barracks on the outskirts of Port Blair and many supervisory British staff running this small far-flung colony. Add all the ancillary business of being a thriving port, with its transitory traffic of adventurers, speculators and ships' crews, it was no surprise that, despite the clutter and the haphazard nature of the buildings, the main street gave every impression of growing prosperity. General merchandise stores and grog-shops, ships' chandlers and lodging houses and, down by the harbour with its long coaling wharf and quays, cranes and warehouses, all the administrative paraphernalia of a busy port.\n\nBrodie trudged up the gentle slope that led to Miss Arbogast's substantial wooden bungalow in its large neat garden. It had a long veranda running the length of its facade and its corrugated-iron roof was painted forest green. Stooping gardeners were cutting the tough grass of the lawn with long thin cutlasses. As Brodie walked up the path to the front door they stopped, stood and gave a little bow and then resumed their back-straining task.\n\nMiss Arbogast deplored the practice of settling released convicts on the land. As she saw it, the Andaman tribes were being corrupted and pressured in every conceivable way. Soon, she said, we would know nothing about these ancient peoples who had been the most isolated on earth over millennia\u2014all their culture, folklore and mythologies would be lost forever. Hence her ethnographical project, funded by her wealthy family and the Smithsonian Institute. She had been living in Port Blair for over two years now, making journeys into the dense forests of the interior, gathering facts and figures for her eventual book.\n\nBrodie knocked on the door and was admitted by Lokima, her Andaman housekeeper. He handed her Miss Arbogast's mail and took a seat in the main room as he waited for Miss Arbogast to arrive. The floor was painted concrete\u2014maroon\u2014and covered with elaborately woven palm-frond mats. The walls were filled with photographs from field trips and ethnographic artefacts\u2014bows and arrows, masks and ceremonial beaded skirts, shelves of wooden pots and, at one end, an entire fishing net stretched over the wall. The wooden sofas and armchairs with their brightly coloured kapok-stuffed cushions were surprisingly comfortable.\n\nSeveral of the photographs featured a bald, lean man with intense staring eyes, usually standing beside Miss Arbogast in the company of naked tribespeople. This was a Francis Bartkowiak, the eminent ethnologist, and the project leader. A year before he had nearly died of amoebic dysentery and, when partially recovered, had been despatched to a hospital in Madras. His health still poor, he had returned to the United States, where he continued to convalesce. Miss Arbogast had taken over the Andaman project and had been running it alone\u2014with the help of her Indian staff\u2014since Bartkowiak's sudden departure. All had been well until her fall and the fractured leg. Brodie, she told him, was the \"godsend, sent by the gods of ethnology\" to save her.\n\nBrodie lit a cigarette and picked up a three-month-old copy of _Harper's Magazine_ and started reading an article about Upton Sinclair's novel called _The Jungle._ He had been employed first as a general dogsbody while Miss Arbogast's broken leg slowly healed but now he was a fully paid-up member of her small ethnographic team. There had been a major problem that she had encountered that he had inadvertently solved. In the Andaman tribes men would often refuse to speak to a woman about certain subjects. Brodie was now invaluable as a transcriber of these male confidences. The \"born local\" translators\u2014most of whom couldn't write\u2014would relay the tribal lore and Brodie would scribble down the details. Miss Arbogast said she didn't know how she had coped without him\u2014vast tracts of Andaman society had been hidden from her because of this gender embargo. Brodie was glad to be of use: for the first time in his life his expertise as a piano tuner was wholly valueless.\n\nMiss Arbogast limped in, leaning on her stick, which she promptly disposed of, seeing him there. She was still in some pain, she complained, worrying that her doctor, Dr. Klein (a German), hadn't set the fractured tibia properly. Brodie repeated his constant advice\u2014rest, rest and more rest\u2014but she wouldn't hear of it: there was vital work to be done. She was a skinny dark-haired woman with the palest blue eyes Brodie had ever seen. They were disconcertingly pale, he thought, and they added to the intensity of a manner that was already fairly intense. She did everything with absolute concentration whether it was buttering toast or climbing mountains, cleaning her teeth or taking photographs of savage tribes. For Miss Arbogast, he realized, life was an entirely controllable entity if only you made sufficient effort. Difficulties, setbacks, confusions and barriers were a sign of some deficiency in yourself; a way could be found to overcome anything if you sought for it with the required vigour. Her broken leg had undermined this adamantine certainty, somewhat. She reluctantly had to admit that _force majeure_ existed, here and there.\n\n\"Brodie, good morning. There you are.\" She shook his hand firmly as she did every day. \"How're things going?\"\n\nHe enjoyed her American accent. She was the first American he had come to know properly, he realized.\n\n\"Everything's aboard. Though I still need to know our final numbers. Of our group.\"\n\n\"Ah, yes. Good point. Colonel Ticknell has offered us four sepoy soldiers, as protection. They'll provide for themselves\u2014food and drink, and so forth\u2014but we'll need another tent for them.\"\n\nBrodie had been charged with organizing and fitting out a two-week expedition to the Nicobar Islands, part of the greater archipelago but eighty miles to the south and separated by a significant sound of water, the Ten Degree Channel. So close, but so different, Miss Arbogast had said. The Andamans were part of the Negrito race; the Nicobars were entirely different, closer to Malays and Burmese. She had to make a comparison to see if further study of the Nicobars would be an essential part of the eventual book.\n\nShe lit a cigarette\u2014she smoked an American brand called Gypsy Queen\u2014and they discussed when they might set off for Great Nicobar, the largest island in the chain. Brodie had chartered an ungainly lumber schooner with a steam engine called the _Lau._ The _Lau_ was an ugly boat with its funnel set aft and two gaff-rigged masts forward. He had hired it from a timber merchant called Deepmal Khan for ten U.S. dollars a day.\n\nHe had told Miss Arbogast that there were two substantial cabins on board but she insisted that they make camp on Great Nicobar. The Nicobar tribes were reputedly both curious and friendly and only by making camp would they attract them and be led to their village settlements.\n\nBrodie agreed with everything, half-listening, watching Miss Arbogast as she limped around her sitting room. She seemed much older than he was\u2014wise, assured and infinitely more capable\u2014but he realized that they were probably separated by only five or six years. She was wearing a khaki drill skirt that came down to her ankles and what looked like a man's shirt, navy blue, with patch breast-pockets and epaulettes. Her hair was tied up in a loose bun. Her face was suntanned from all her hours out in the field\u2014tanned like a peasant, Brodie thought\u2014which made her ice-blue eyes even more striking.\n\n\"How could I have done this without you, Brodie?\"\n\n\"What? Sorry?\"\n\n\"I couldn't mount this trip to Nicobar myself, not in a hundred years.\"\n\n\"I'm sure you could.\"\n\n\"I'm sure I could as well but it would cost me. Don't you get it? They see me coming. 'Rich American Woman'\u2014they try to rob me blind. I should have had someone like you the moment Francis left. Everything would've gone more smoothly.\" She smiled at him. \"Hi-ho. You live and learn. Fiddle-dee-dee.\"\n\n\"Thank you, Miss Arbogast.\"\n\nShe sat down on the armchair beside him and stubbed out her cigarette.\n\n\"I think you should start calling me Page. Don't you? We've known each other long enough.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nBrodie sat beside the interpreter, Ram, on a mat set on the floor of the bachelors' hut, as it was known. Three near-naked young Nicobar men sat opposite, chewing betel nuts and talking freely to Ram, an ex-convict who farmed on Great Nicobar, who had married a native woman, and had learned the language of the tribe. His English was remarkably good, also. He had been a deputy station manager on the Bengal railway, he told Brodie. And then one day he had killed a beggar\u2014beaten him to death with a metal stave\u2014who had refused to leave the station platform after several warnings. Brodie thought it must have been the sheer reasonableness with which Ram recounted this event\u2014wouldn't anyone have bludgeoned such a recalcitrant fool to death in these circumstances?\u2014that had made the court spare the hangman's noose and send him to the Andamans instead.\n\nFrom time to time Ram would hold up his hand for a pause and translate what he had been told into English and Brodie would summarize what he said, scribbling it down as fast as he could, in a ledger. Page had given him a list of specific questions to ask the bachelors. They all seemed to be about the sexual habits of the tribe.\n\n\"They say,\" Ram recounted, unperturbed, \"that usually they do it in the yam-garden at night. For copulation, I mean, when they are young. When they are older they can bring the girl in here.\"\n\nBrodie duly wrote this down and looked at his next question.\n\n\"What is the position for the sexual act?\"\n\nRam engaged in animated conversation and two of the young men happily demonstrated the preferred position, one acting the man, the other the woman.\n\nBrodie wrote down: \"The man kneels and pulls the woman towards him, her legs apart. Holding her legs up with his elbows until penetration is achieved.\"\n\nThere was more chatter.\n\n\"But,\" Ram added, \"in this house, when others are sleeping nearby, they do it like this.\"\n\nThe two men lay on their side facing each other. One man lifted his upper leg and laid it across the other man's upper leg.\n\n\"This way,\" Ram translated, \"they are making less noise. Not disturbing the other men in the hut.\"\n\nBrodie duly jotted this down, made a quick sketch and looked down his list of questions.\n\n\"What about other positions?\"\n\nThere was a lot of ribald laughter\u2014clearly some sort of mockery was taking place.\n\n\"They say...\" Ram coughed and for the first time his disinterested composure left him. \"They say that the white man does not know how to copulate.\"\n\n\"How do they know this?\"\n\n\"Many white men come to sleep with their women.\"\n\n\"What do the white men do that is wrong\u2014that's so amusing?\"\n\nRam asked and more scurrilous laughter ensued. Ram listened intently and translated carefully.\n\n\"They say the white man bears down on the woman too heavily and she cannot respond.\" One of the young men stopped Ram and spoke rapidly. Ram nodded. \"The white man is too quick. Nicobar man takes a long time...\" He listened further. \"It is best to kneeling like this. This way you have good control over...Over the discharge of fluid.\"\n\nBrodie looked at his next question.\n\n\"Do they kiss?\"\n\n\"They suck the lower lip,\" came the eventual answer. \"They will bite each other, also. Neck, shoulder, cheek. The spit is flowing between the mouths.\" Ram pointed. \"They will bite off the eyelashes of the loved one.\"\n\n\"Really?\" Brodie was intrigued.\n\n\"Both men and women will bite off the lashes. It is a sign of great...\" Ram thought of the English words. \"Great emotion.\"\n\nThere was more urgent conversation\u2014the bachelors were clearly enjoying the interrogation. Ram gave his translation serious thought.\n\n\"As there is little contacting between the two bodies,\" Ram said, thoughtfully, \"so, a handsome boy like him can fornicate with an old woman, and an ugly woman, where no love is existing.\"\n\n\"Do they masturbate?\" Brodie asked Page's next question.\n\n\"Only an idiot will masturbate,\" was the blunt reply. \"Or an albino.\"\n\nWhen the session was over and they were about to leave, one of the young men took off the amulet on his wrist and handed it to Brodie, saying a few words. It was woven from a kind of leathery frond and was threaded through some seeds and a tiny cowrie shell. Ram rebuked him but the man persisted and slipped it over Brodie's wrist.\n\n\"He says\u2014and forgive me, please, sahib\u2014that he can see you have had no copulation for a long time. If you wear this charm, copulation will come to you very soon.\"\n\nThat night in Page's tent, lit by two lanterns, he read out the transcriptions to her and she wrote them down in her own heavy leather notebook.\n\n\"This is fascinating,\" she said. \"The women were saying something similar. They seem very sexually...\" She thought and smiled. \"Free. Untroubled. As a society.\"\n\n\"I know what you mean,\" Brodie said, suddenly a bit uncomfortable.\n\n\"The women said that they like the men to 'move on horizontally.' At least that's how it seemed to be translated. I couldn't understand what they were talking about. Now I do\u2014now I know about this squatting, kneeling position the men use. You say they hold the woman's legs up and apart with the crook of their elbows.\"\n\n\"That's what they said.\"\n\nPage offered him a Gypsy Queen. The American blend reminded him of his old Margaritas.\n\n\"The women kept using the same expression: _Kubi-labala-ta._ Literally it means 'a log lying on the ground, moving.'\" She gestured, moving her hand back and forth. \"When the context is fornication it's pretty obvious what they're talking about, wouldn't you say?\"\n\n\"I suppose so.\"\n\n\"And the women bite off the men's eyelashes also\u2014during the sexual act. Fascinating. I don't really understand that one but it's meant to be the height of intimacy.\" She laughed, a throaty deep laugh. \"I don't think that'll catch on back home, somehow.\"\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nEvery day of their short visit to Great Nicobar was occupied with these interrogations. Page with the women of the camp; Brodie with the young men. Page would give him her list of questions and Brodie and Ram would spend hours talking with the young men of the tribe in the bachelors' hut\u2014a simple dwelling with a sloping roof of palm leaves erected on four poles, two long and two short. For some reason they didn't talk to the married couples or the older generation\u2014only young, unmarried men and women\u2014he assumed it must have something to do with the subject of Page's eventual book. However, Page's questions did cover other topics\u2014daily routine, division of labour, domestic tasks, marriage, pregnancy, death rituals, taboos and myths of the spirit world\u2014and steadily they built up a picture of the life of the tribe in all its complexity. Simple hunter-gathering and survival in the forest was overlaid with a complex of morality, rules, strictures, belief patterns that, in their own, way, Brodie thought, rivalled anything that millennia of so-called civilization had brought about. He developed a new respect for primitive _Homo sapiens,_ even though he rather enjoyed the anomalies. The most offensive insult in this Nicobar tribe\u2014one that might on occasion provoke a fight to the death\u2014was the injunction: eat your own shit. Adultery was a capital crime. And personal hygiene was more of a virtue here on Grand Nicobar than it was in Edinburgh. Any foul odour was anathema.\n\nSometimes he would ask Ram to stop and he would take a break and step outside the bachelors' hut to smoke a cigarette. The village consisted of eight of these rudimentary structures, facing inwards and arranged in a rough oval. The centre of the oval contained a communal fire and was reserved for dancing\u2014which, apart from fornication, appeared the sole leisure pursuit. Brodie would look for a patch of shade and light a cigarette and always find himself reflecting on and marvelling at the length and nature of his long journey. From smoking a cigarette outside Channon & Co. in rainy Edinburgh to smoking a cigarette while standing in a Nicobar village, in the stirring leaf-shadows of the palm trees on the other side of the world.\n\nHe always drew a small crowd on these occasions, composed of girls and young women. The Nicobars and the Andamans were tiny, around about five feet tall. Brodie knew that he must seem a giant to them, a freak of nature. The women were naked apart from short skirts of grass fronds, their breasts always uncovered. They stood a discreet couple of yards away, in a semicircle, giggling and pointing at him, talking about him behind their hands, content to look on. He would smile and say \"Hello, ladies, good morning\"\u2014only provoking more giggles and whispered chit-chat. What were they saying about him, he wondered? Another mystery.\n\nAs he thought about the journey he'd made to end up here in this Nicobar village he contemplated his own tribe seen through his new ethnological lens. The despotic patriarch figure, Malky, served by his reluctant sons and daughters, trapped through penury in his privileged dwelling in their cold northern habitat. And, next door, the place of worship with its own rituals, its songs, its incantations, its readings and its own potent symbols\u2014the tortured, naked man dying slowly on a wooden cross. It was good to gain some objectivity on a situation that familiarity had made stale. Your life was turned on its head when you thought about it in this way. If the Nicobars seemed strange and their beliefs outlandish, then so were ours, Brodie thought, seen from another perspective. Those girls had every right to laugh at him.\n\nOn their last day the questions Page gave him were all about death. In the mythology of this tribe\u2014it was slowly revealed to him by Ram's translations\u2014after you died you went to a place called the Island of the Dead. Here life was a replica of life on earth\u2014only happier\u2014and there was no old age. If you had loved many women the only one you would meet again would be the one you had loved most, your true love. This consequence applied to men and women. There would be no unseemly, embarrassing encounters between rival lovers. Brodie found this idea consoling and asked many supplementary questions to be sure he wrote down the details correctly.\n\nIn the evenings after supper he and Page would spend an hour or two collating their transcriptions. The subjects she had chosen all conformed with chapters of the book she was going to write about the Andamans, so she told him. Nicobar life and society\u2014so geographically close\u2014was turning out to be entirely different from that of the Andamans. This trip had been more significant than she had ever thought possible\u2014she was truly grateful to Brodie for all his diligent noting-down. Brodie said he was glad to have been of real help.\n\n\"What's the title of your book?\" he asked.\n\nPage thought. \"I haven't really made up my mind,\" she said. \"Our proposal to the Smithsonian was called _An Ethnographic Study of the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands._ Francis Bartkowiak's idea. A bit dry, don't you think? I always knew we'd need something more arresting.\"\n\n\"You'll think of something.\"\n\n\"I think I know the sort of thing\u2014now we've been here, thanks to the Nicobars. Now we've learned so much more.\"\n\n\"Oh yes?\"\n\n\"Something like\u2014 _Magic, Ritual and Morality in the Andaman Islands._ \"\n\n\"It has a certain ring to it.\"\n\n\"Or\u2014given our recent questions\u2014 _Male and Female Relations in the Andamans._ \"\n\n\"I like that.\"\n\n\"Or\u2014 _The Morality of Sexual Life in the Andamans._ \"\n\n\"Why not?\"\n\n\"Or, quite simply, _The Sexual Life of Andaman Natives._ Given our new focus.\"\n\n\"That should bring hordes of new readers.\"\n\nShe laughed\u2014her throaty, unselfconscious laugh.\n\n\"Or I could just call it _Sexual Life._ Why beat about the bush?\"\n\nBrodie was fully aware what was slowly happening here. A shift had occurred in their relationship. He felt a tightening of his throat as Page's amused blue eyes turned upon him.\n\n\"I suppose there's a risk it might be banned,\" he said. \"The book, I mean, not sexual life. Do you have any more of that bourbon left, by any chance?\"\n\nThey always had a small glass of sour-mash whisky after the evening meal and Brodie had a sudden craving for some liquor.\n\n\"Good idea,\" she said. \"It's in that trunk there.\"\n\nShe pointed to her camp bed, hung with a mosquito net. He crossed the tent and opened the trunk, finding the bottle. Page had set two enamel mugs at their places and was standing waiting for him. Brodie poured them each a dram and they clinked their mugs together.\n\n\"Here's to horizontal movement,\" she said, taking half a pace closer towards him.\n\nBrodie knew that she wanted him to kiss her but instead he smiled at the joke and turned away and strolled over to the open flap of the tent. He could see the lights of the _Lau_ reflected in the dark lagoon beyond the beach. Discreetly he slipped off his fornication amulet and thrust it into his pocket.\n\nHe drained his bourbon and turned. Page hadn't moved.\n\n\"I think I'd better be off to bed,\" he yawned. \"I'm fair wabbit, as we say in Scotland.\"\n\n\"Goodnight, Brodie. See you in the morning.\"\n\n# 2\n\nC\u00e9sar licked his lips, then licked the plate that had contained his chopped chicken until it was entirely clean. Then he jumped onto Brodie's lap and put his front paws on his chest, staring at him intently as if to make sure it was really he and that he had returned. He didn't like Brodie going away and leaving him behind, and when Brodie returned he was given a display of dog affection that was both superfluous and heart-warming. Brodie scratched behind C\u00e9sar's ears and the stumpy apostrophe that was his tail disappeared into a blur of enthusiastic wagging.\n\nHe thought of Lika and wondered what she was doing and where she was. Would she have received his latest letter? And then he thought maybe this was why she had left C\u00e9sar with him\u2014the little dog was a constant memory-catalyst. The C\u00e9sar\u2013Lika, Lika\u2013C\u00e9sar connection a daily reminder. But thinking about her these days brought melancholy in its train. More and more he was beginning to believe that he would never see her again and that to have come halfway around the world just to free himself of Malachi Kilbarron had been foolish, however effective. He was relying on some new occupant of her shop to forward letters on to the previous owner. Too hopeful?...\n\nAn unpleasant realization struck him: what if they were being forwarded to her Paris home? To the apartment on the boulevard Beaumarchais? Malachi would surely open any letter addressed to Lika, particularly if there was a foreign stamp on it. Brodie thought further: maybe he'd been too hasty...Maybe all he was doing was guilelessly providing Malachi with his new location. He should have asked Dmitri to make more enquiries, he realized. Perhaps it might have been more prudent to have written to Lika care of her mother in Moscow...He felt troubled and tipped C\u00e9sar off his lap and reached under his bed for the chamber pot. He raked his throat and spat and saw, amongst the foam of his saliva, pink bubbles and a vermicular thread of glistening bloody mucous. His lungs stirring. From time to time his body seemed to need to remind him\u2014to provide new evidence of the tubercles nestling in his chest, growing, ripening. He knew they were cavities, expanding holes of necrosis filled with dead tissue and pus\u2014like cream cheese, one of his doctors had told him\u2014but he imagined them instead as mouldy rotting plums set in the spongy tissues of his pleural membranes, the branching networks of bronchioles and alveoli.\n\nThere was a knock at the door and C\u00e9sar barked once. For some reason Brodie felt suddenly apprehensive. It was dark outside, late.\n\n\"Who is it?\" he called.\n\n\"It's me, Mr. Moncur. I've a message for you, just delivered.\"\n\nIt was Paul Deemer, the proprietor. Brodie opened the door and was handed an envelope with his name written on it.\n\nHe thanked Deemer, closed the door and ripped it open.\n\n> Wednesday night\n> \n> Dear Brodie,\n> \n> I need to speak to you on a matter of some urgency. Come to my house now, if you will\u2014we can have some supper while we discuss the matter. See you soon.\n> \n> Cordially,\n> \n> Page\n\nBrodie thought: what could she want him for that couldn't wait until morning?\n\n# 3\n\nPage reached forward and brushed back the long lock of hair that had fallen over his face.\n\n\"What happened to your poor ear?\" she asked.\n\n\"Would you believe me if I told you that it was the result of a duel I fought in Russia?\"\n\n\"Certainly not.\"\n\nBrodie leaned back from the ledger. The gesture had caught him by surprise with its intimacy. Page smiled at him, unperturbed.\n\nShe sat opposite him across the narrow table, one elbow hooked over the back of the chair, the attitude causing the cloth of her cream blouse to tighten and flatten her breasts. Wide flat breasts. Brodie thought of all the breasts he'd seen in the Andamans and the Nicobars\u2014dozens and dozens. Hundreds. But innocently revealed, modestly revealed, not a trace of prurience. There was something markedly un-innocent and immodest about Page's pose, he thought, and stood up, stretching as if he were stiff and needed to ease an aching back.\n\n\"Well, it's true. A near miss. Took off my earlobe and a bit more.\"\n\n\"So what happened to the other man\u2014your fellow duellist?\"\n\nBrodie scratched his head and wondered if he should tell her.\n\n\"I killed him.\"\n\nPage laughed. Unconstrained, delighted.\n\n\"Come on! Quit fooling.\"\n\nShe stood up as well and went to refill their glasses with bourbon. Her long hair was down, falling over her back and shoulders, making her look younger, less wiry and shrewd.\n\n\"Tell me you're joking,\" she said, bringing the bottle over. \"You're no killer, Brodie Moncur.\"\n\n\"I'm joking. I had a bad fall from a bicycle.\"\n\n\"That I can believe. Cigarette?\"\n\n\"No thanks.\"\n\nShe poured their drinks into the glasses, the solitary oil lamp on the table thickly lighting one side of her face, like yellow paint. Cadmium. Butter. Honey.\n\nShe closed the ledger and put it on top of the pile of four others. Francis Bartkowiak's ledgers, all the work he had done in the Andamans before falling ill and being sent to India to recover in hospital.\n\n\"Can we do it, do you think?\"\n\n\"I don't see why not. They seem perfectly legible.\"\n\nThis was why she had called him over to her bungalow. She had returned from their trip to find a letter from Bartkowiak asking for the immediate return of the ledgers containing his fieldwork\u2014he had left them in a suitcase in his lodgings. They were to be returned forthwith to him at Yale University, where he had taken up a position in the Department of Philosophy. Brodie couldn't understand why Page was so agitated by the request.\n\n\"He had to leave so quickly,\" she said. \"So he left most of his belongings behind. I have a mass of his stuff, clothes, books and pieces of luggage. I found the suitcase with these ledgers in them.\"\n\n\"So why don't you just send them back?\"\n\n\"He's going to write his own book, don't you see?\" she said, almost angrily. \"He's going to beat me to it.\"\n\n\"But can he?\" Brodie said. \"You've been here twice as long as he was.\"\n\n\"I would say no. But whoever publishes first usually wins in our game. We're a young discipline, ethnography. People are starting to peg out their territory and make their names.\"\n\nPage had suggested that they go through the Bartkowiak ledgers together and copy down anything that seemed relevant to her research as soon as they possibly could. The Andaman project was a joint effort\u2014Francis Bartkowiak couldn't claim sole authorship. They would fillet\u2014her word\u2014his ledgers and send them back to him when they had the information they needed. But it had to be done quickly so he wouldn't be suspicious.\n\n\"Many hands make light work,\" she said. \"Two heads are better than one. The faster we go through his stuff\u2014the sooner we send it back\u2014the less he'll suspect.\"\n\nBrodie said he was at her service. He didn't understand the manoeuvrings of this academic competition but he would do what he could\u2014he was up for the challenge, he said.\n\nHis support made her relax, made her almost exultant, and she poured more bourbon to toast their enterprise. He had looked quickly through the ledgers. Bartkowiak had an easy hand\u2014black ink, copperplate\u2014it wouldn't take the two of them long to see if there was anything in them that would be valuable.\n\n* * *\n\n\u2014\n\nHe began to spend every night at Page's house. They would have supper together and then go through the ledgers, Brodie checking with her for anything that could be valuable to her research. They would wind up the evening with a glass and a smoke on the veranda, looking out over the lights of Port Blair. Brodie left around midnight to return to his room at the hotel. Their regular hours together made their relationship change in subtle ways. In the field, during their days in the Andaman villages where they conducted their interviews, took photographs, made measurements, Page remained formal, issuing instructions, very much the research-project leader. But when night fell and he wandered over to her house to go through the Bartkowiak ledgers a kind of conspiratorial intimacy took over and he sensed the mood between them changing.\n\nDuring their post-ledger moments on the veranda Brodie found himself telling her of his travels, of the journey he had made from rainy Edinburgh to sweltering Port Blair\u2014and the name of Lika Blum inevitably came up, time and again.\n\n\"Why didn't you marry her?\" Page asked.\n\n\"Because I discovered she was already married.\"\n\n\"That can be a problem,\" she said with surprising bitterness.\n\n\"Why aren't you married?\" Brodie asked boldly, bourbon-stimulated.\n\n\"None of your business,\" she said. \"I've not asked you about your amorous past, you may have noticed.\"\n\n\"But I've told you about Lika.\"\n\n\"You told me\u2014I didn't ask.\"\n\n\"All right, I apologize.\"\n\n\"All right, if you really want to know,\" she said, screwing up her face. \"There was a man\u2014an older man\u2014years ago. A long time ago. He was at Princeton. We had a 'liaison.' I didn't know it was doomed.\"\n\n\"Because he was married?\"\n\n\"Something like that.\"\n\n\"What was his name?\"\n\n\"What's that got to do with anything?\"\n\n\"I just like to know these details.\"\n\n\"Emerson.\" She looked away. \"Turned out he was rotten at the core.\"\n\nBrodie stopped asking questions.\n\n\"He was nothing like you,\" she said, turning to him, taking his hand, tenderly. \"In case that's why you were asking.\"\n\n\"I wasn't. Wondering, that is. Just making conversation\u2014asking questions.\"\n\n\"You're much nicer. Sweeter.\"\n\n\"Thank you.\"\n\nShe let go of his hand and picked up her glass and looked at him searchingly over its rim.\n\n\"You're a dark horse, though, Brodie Moncur. Why, I almost believe you could have fought a duel. Was it over the woman? Lika?\"\n\n\"It was over a piece of music, in fact.\"\n\n\"Of course. And the moon is made of cheese.\"\n\nBrodie felt a sharp pang of memory at the phrase, remembering when he had said it before\u2014to Lika.\n\nShe must have seen his expression change. She stood up and walked to the edge of the veranda and, in a businesslike voice, not looking at him, said, \"I was thinking. Why don't you move in here? We could rig up a room for you easily. There are three more bedrooms through that door.\" She pointed. \"It would make everything easier. More convenient. You wouldn't have to be criss-crossing the town day and night.\"\n\n\"What about my dog?\"\n\n\"He's very keen on the idea. I asked him.\"\n\nThey looked at each other candidly. Despite the airy, efficient tone, she was offering herself to him, Brodie knew: offering him the next developing stage in their relationship\u2014employer, to friend, to lover. Suggesting a new arrangement that might lead somewhere, to another more permanent arrangement.\n\n\"I think,\" he said carefully, \"it's probably better if I stay in the hotel. You know how small Port Blair is. Tongues would wag. People would talk behind our backs.\"\n\n\"Who cares? Look what goes on in this town. It's a town full of murderers and criminals.\"\n\nBrodie didn't follow through and Page didn't mention it again. He said goodnight and walked back to Deemer's Hotel thinking about what had been made overt by their last exchange. He knew it was a genuine proposal\u2014Page Arbogast was that sort of person: that was how she dealt with issues in her life. They were to be solved, practically, swiftly, with the least fuss. He thought about it, wondered what marriage to Page Arbogast might mean and saw, that from one perspective, it would solve many problems. He liked her; she intrigued him, was beginning to arouse him, she was clever, laconic and funny. And he knew her family was rich. Her parents were dead and she had one brother, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. The Andaman project had another year or so to run then she would go back to her home in Connecticut and write her book. Brodie could go with her...he stopped himself. What about Lika? How could he even think about being with Page Arbogast when Lika Blum might knock on his door, one of these days? They had made a promise to each other. A promise was a promise.\n\n# 4\n\nBrodie helped Page out of the steam yacht after it was securely berthed by the wharf in front of the customs house. Ram supervised the coolies unloading their equipment and supplies. They had spent a fruitless forty-eight hours looking for settlements of the Jarawas, the Andamans' most elusive and reputedly most aggressive tribe. Colonel Ticknell's sepoys had been called upon and Page had even brought along her own gun\u2014again supplied by the colonel\u2014a revolver, an old .45 Adams Mark III she told him, powerful enough to stop a charging buffalo, she claimed. It had rained both nights when they had camped and he had been badly bitten by mosquitoes that had found a tear in his net. Brodie felt dirty and itchy and, for him, unusually tired. It had been a frustrating and exhausting field trip.\n\nPage let go of his hand.\n\n\"I've got to have a bath,\" she said, adding quietly, \"Have you thought any more about my idea? We can take it very easily. Step by step. One night at a time...\"\n\nBrodie was suddenly tempted, thought\u2014yes, maybe this is the new direction for him, that he should explore it\u2014then he saw Malachi Kilbarron walk out of the customs house and disappear round the corner.\n\n\"Are you all right?\" Page asked, seeing him flinch.\n\n\"I've just seen a ghost,\" he said. \"I'd better get back to Deemer's. I'll come round later.\"\n\nShe was perplexed, he could see. \"It's nothing,\" he said. \"I'll come by later.\" He picked up his bag and walked away.\n\nAt the hotel he asked Paul Deemer if there were any new residents. None, he was told. Anyone asking for me while I was away? No, was the same reply.\n\nHe was moderately reassured. If it was Malachi, then he must have only just arrived, he thought. He washed and shaved, telling himself repeatedly that he could have easily been mistaken. Stout, bearded, European men were hardly rare in the Andamans. There were the garrison officers, the Port Authority officials, the Cellular Gaol administrators, the superintendent's staff, not to mention any number of ships' masters and the crews of passing boats, plus the customs officers and the merchants\u2014so why did he think this man was Malachi?\n\nHe sat down on his chair and hung his head, again feeling an untypical wave of fatigue overwhelm him. All he wanted to do was go to sleep but he knew that if it was indeed Malachi that he had seen then his best opportunity to confront him was now, before he had settled and begun to make enquiries. There were only a few suitable hotels and boarding houses where Europeans would stay in Port Blair. It wouldn't take long to investigate them all and see if he had been hallucinating or not. And if he found Malachi Kilbarron\u2014then Malachi Kilbarron would have to be dealt with, once and for all. He wasn't going to be distracted again.\n\nHe walked over to Page's house. She was waiting, fragrant, bathed, wearing a dark navy dress with red shoes that he hadn't seen before. She was unusually excited, he thought, and then unusually disappointed when, after their supper of pork chops and beans, he had said he felt very tired and worried that he had a fever coming on. She felt his brow, agreed he looked pale, and left to find some sachets of quinine.\n\nIn the two minutes she was absent Brodie darted to her desk and found the Adams revolver. He knew which drawer she kept it in. It was fully loaded. He slipped it in his jacket pocket and slung his jacket over the back of his chair. He said goodnight and apologized again.\n\n\"Are you sure you're all right?\" she said, taking his hand. She had started doing this almost regularly, as if unthinkingly, when they were alone. It was both intimate and unimportant. It perplexed him. \"Shall I call Dr. Klein?\" she asked.\n\n\"I just need ten hours' sleep,\" Brodie said, reassuringly. \"Tramping through dripping jungle isn't what I'm used to.\"\n\n\"Then sleep well. Come tomorrow evening if you feel better. We'll have a day off.\"\n\nBrodie left, his revolver-encumbered jacket heavy over his arm, and headed immediately down to Port Blair's main street. In fact he wasn't feeling well, at all\u2014perhaps he did have a temperature\u2014he could feel the hot flush of fever growing on him. It was strange: he felt weak and yet full of improbable energy all the same. He had a quarry to hunt. He shrugged on his linen jacket, tucked the revolver in his belt, and buttoned his jacket over it. All he had to do was find Malachi Kilbarron\u2014there were a limited number of places where he could be at this time of night.\n\nHe found him in the third hotel he visited. It was called O'Malley's Grand Oriental Hotel and he supposed it was the Irish connotation that had drawn Malachi there. It was a shabby place with a go-down bar, hung with Chinese lanterns, full of prostitutes looking for sailors. There were a few rooms above a so-called chophouse with greasy chequered tablecloths where you could eat oyster pie, fried fish or pork chops\u2014with plenty of watered-down beer and whisky to aid digestion.\n\nMalachi was eating on his own, turned away from the chophouse door, Brodie saw, as he stepped inside. He recognized the same broad back that he had followed in the Jardin des Tuileries. An opportunity missed. He was not going to be distracted tonight.\n\nHe unbuttoned his jacket so he had easy access to his revolver and made his way through the busy tables to where Malachi was enjoying his solitary meal. Brodie stood three feet behind him for a moment\u2014Malachi entirely unaware of his presence as he shovelled some sort of steaming stew into his mouth.\n\n\"Kilbarron,\" Brodie said softly.\n\nNo reaction.\n\n\"Malachi. I need a word with you outside.\"\n\nNothing.\n\nBrodie closed his right hand around the butt of the revolver and, with his left, tapped Malachi on the shoulder.\n\nNow Malachi turned.\n\nExcept it wasn't Malachi. It was a pasty-faced European with a dark beard.\n\n\" _Czymog_ _\u0229_ _w czym_ _\u015b_ _pom\u00f3c?_ \"\n\nPolish, Brodie thought. Something about the accent.\n\n\" _Mes excuses. Entschuldigung._ \"\n\nHe walked out of O'Malley's feeling a surge of unreal relief\u2014exhilaration\u2014mingled with odd shamefacedness. What was wrong with him? Was he going insane? He bounced off a wall, feeling suddenly unsteady and faint, pulse racing then thready. He slid down the wall, falling to his knees. Oh God, he said to himself. Here it comes. Oh God.\n\nA big tubercle in his lung responded to the increase of pressure in his blood and the aneurism on the artery beside it burst and dark blood flowed from his mouth, endlessly.\n\n# 5\n\nBrodie knew he was very ill, as ill as he had ever been in his life. His lungs were on fire and he found breathing laboriously difficult even when propped upright on five pillows in Page's bed. He came in and out of his senses. Dr. Klein had given him some sort of opiate that made him dream awake, it seemed to him, the room wanderingly populated with figures from his life\u2014his brothers and sisters, his father, Malky, Lady Dalcastle, Ainsley Channon, Calder...Then the world would clear and order itself and he knew exactly where he was: here was Page, concerned, loving. Here was Dr. Klein, moustachioed, morose, with his soft clean hands taking his pulse. He would talk to Page, tell her he was feeling a little better and, the next minute, it seemed, John Kilbarron would walk into the room.\n\nIn his moments of lucidity the events of the past few days were explained to him. He had experienced a massive haemorrhage outside O'Malley's Hotel. He had been discovered, unconscious, but someone had recognized him and word was sent to Page. Dr. Klein was summoned and then in the feverish semi-conscious days that followed he had developed pneumonia in his now damaged and depleted lungs. It was the pneumonia that was causing the pain and making his breathing difficult, that was causing the intense fever. The hallucinations were encouraged by the opiates Dr. Klein provided to ease the fiery pain.\n\nBrodie felt as weak as he ever had\u2014almost without energy, concentrating on respiration: breathe in, breathe out. Page sat by his bed, holding his hand.\n\n\"What were you doing there?\" she asked him softly. \"What was happening, Brodie?\"\n\n\"I was looking for a man. A man who had come to kill me.\"\n\nPage smiled at him. He could tell she thought his feverish mind had taken over again.\n\nAnd every time the door was opened C\u00e9sar would sprint in and leap on his bed and lick his hand. Sometimes Brodie would know it was C\u00e9sar, sometimes he would recoil in horror when Malachi Kilbarron was licking his hand.\n\nOne day he felt momentarily better, calmer. The pain in his chest, the molten bands of metal circling his lungs like hoops of a barrel, had eased.\n\nPage asked, \"Why did you take my gun?\"\n\n\"I saw somebody. Somebody who had been chasing me for years, for years.\"\n\n\"Who, for God's sake? Who would come all the way here?\"\n\n\"Malachi would. Malachi Kilbarron.\"\n\n\"Who's Malachi?\"\n\n\"A devil who wants to kill me.\"\n\nShe smiled. He sensed she thought his clarity was going again. A devil, a fiend\u2014a demon called Malachi.\n\n\"Never mind,\" he said. \"In fact I was wrong. Just some Polish sailor.\"\n\nThe next day he felt himself palpably weakening, diminishing, as if there were a tap in his body left running and his vital spirit was flowing out, freely, unchecked, until he barely had the strength to lift his arm from the sheet. He drifted in and out of consciousness. Page's face, Dr. Klein's face\u2014blurred, deforming\u2014registering briefly in the contracting circle that was his vision.\n\nHe had a final moment of clarity. So clear that he thought he might magically be getting better. Then he realized what this moment of clarity signified.\n\nHe saw a shape, like the map of an unknown island, that turned into Lika's face. Then he saw the skein of geese flying low over the Neva river. He saw the deer at Maloe Nikolskoe look up from its grazing and stare at him. He saw Lika come through the door and walk towards him smiling. \"Brodie!\" she called. \"I'm here!\" And he felt tears fill his eyes\u2014an eerie sense of happiness, of other-worldly well-being filled him.\n\nDr. Klein was standing by his bedside. He had injected something into Brodie's arm.\n\n\"Where's Page?\"\n\n\"She's sleeping. It's middle-night.\"\n\n\"Leave her. Don't worry about me, Dr. Klein,\" Brodie said.\n\n\"What is? _Bitte?_ \" Dr. Klein's English was rudimentary.\n\n\"I'll be fine. I'm going to the Island of the Dead.\"\n\n\"Please. I don't understand. _Verstehe nicht._ \"\n\n\" _Ich sterbe,_ \" Brodie explained.\n\n\"Oh, yes. Yes, I'm very sorry to say.\"\n\nDr. Klein stood up and rummaged busily in his bag and Brodie turned to see what he was doing but his spectacles were on the bedside table. He tried to reach for them, ordered his hand to move but it wouldn't. Dimly, blurrily, Brodie was aware of Dr. Klein opening what looked like a bottle of champagne. A golden gleam of foil, its rip then a pause and a dull pop as the cork was removed. Brodie heard a tumbler filled. His fingers were fitted round it and it was guided to his lips.\n\n\"What is it?\"\n\n\"Champagne. It is a German tradition. At the end.\"\n\nBrodie managed a mouthful of warm champagne. The bubbles fizzed around his teeth.\n\nPage came into the room. At least a figure did, a woman. No, it was Lika, come to find him, at last.\n\n\"Thank you very much,\" Brodie said. \"Thank you for everything.\"\n\n# EPILOGUE\n\n> Poste Restante\n> \n> GPO Port Blair\n> \n> Middle Andaman\n> \n> Andaman Islands\n> \n> Indian Empire\n> \n> 2 September 1906\n> \n> My dear Amelia,\n> \n> I will be home in a month or three, I estimate. I'm winding things up, more swiftly than I should, probably, but life in the Andamans isn't the same since poor Brodie Moncur died.\n> \n> The funniest thing was that every morning, when the doors of the house were opened, Brodie's little dog C\u00e9sar went running to the graveyard, about a quarter of a mile away, and sat there by Brodie's grave all day. If I didn't send Lakima to collect him he would have stayed there all night. It was very strange and very affecting.\n> \n> And then, this is extraordinary\u2014last week a young Russian woman arrived. Blonde, attractive, with a servant in tow and many trunks of possessions, so obviously quite rich. She went straight to Deemer's Hotel, asked for Mr. Moncur, was relayed the sad news and was then directed to me. Her name, she said, was Mrs. Lydia Kilbarron. Of course, I realized this was the famous \"Lika.\" I told her what I could of Brodie's life here in Port Blair. Told her as much as I wanted to, I should say\u2014not everything. We walked to the graveyard and found C\u00e9sar sitting there by poor Brodie's grave. The little dog was very happy to see her\u2014he knew her, so it seemed.\n> \n> I left her at the graveside for five minutes or so and then walked her back to the hotel. I could tell she had been weeping\u2014her eyes red, her face quite collapsed\u2014but she had pulled herself together, somehow. She told me that her husband\u2014Mr. Kilbarron\u2014had died suddenly from a fall from a bridge in Paris. An awful accident. He was trying to retrieve her hat that had been blown off by a gust of wind and, in grabbing at it, had lost his footing and fallen from this high bridge. Grieving, she had decided to travel round the world, she said. She knew that her friend, Brodie Moncur, was living here in Port Blair and so had made a detour to visit him. I nodded, kept up the pretence, and said yes, how sad, how interesting, and so forth. She told me she was intending to journey further\u2014to China and Japan and on and on if the mood took her. She asked if she might take C\u00e9sar as a travelling companion and I said yes, of course. I was returning to the United States myself, I informed her, and C\u00e9sar was Brodie's dog, not mine. And so we parted\u2014everything unsaid, though perhaps nothing needed to be said. The lady left with the little dog.\n> \n> I thought I had seen the last of her but the next morning she was back. She gave me some money\u2014hundreds of rupees\u2014and asked for a few lines to be carved on Brodie's headstone\u2014wooden, like all of them here. She copied the lines out and I passed them on to a local carpenter who incised them\u2014very neatly\u2014into the wood. I don't know where these lines came from but they stand as an epigraph to poor Brodie's short life. He was only thirty-six years old and a gentle, lovely soul\u2014or so I say, shedding a selfish tear, who knew him all too briefly.\n> \n> Anyway, Lika, Mrs. Kilbarron, left on her travels with her little dog. I felt very down for a few days after she had gone, I confess. Life is so unfair, so cruel and hard, sometimes. She and I had kept our Brodie Moncur secrets from each other. Two women with so much unspoken. Her visit disturbed me, I have to admit, and made me want to leave here all the more.\n> \n> And so, I'll be home soon, my dear. The great adventure is over and now the hard work begins.\n> \n> With love from your sad, grieving sister,\n> \n> Page\n> \n> PS. By the way, these are the lines she had inscribed on the headstone. Mrs. Kilbarron\u2014Lika\u2014was very insistent and made me promise that they were nicely done. A promise I fulfilled.\n> \n> My bonny man has gone tae sleep,\n> \n> His journey o'er\u2014he's heard the call.\n> \n> Birth tae death is the shortest leap,\n> \n> The grave is waiting for one and all.\n\n# Gratitude and Acknowledgements\n\n# THE MUSICIANS\n\nClive Ackroyd, Patrick Doyle, Chlo\u00e9 van Soeterst\u00e8de, Patrick Neil Doyle, the estate of Ernst Sauter, Aleksandr Markevich.\n\n# THE TERTULIA\n\nProfessor Donald Rayfield, Dr. David T. Evans, Sam M. Goodforth, M\u00e9lisande Sautoy, Dr. Dermot O'Flynn.\n\n# A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nWilliam Boyd is the author of fifteen novels, including _A Good Man in Africa,_ winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; _An Ice-Cream War,_ winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; _Any Human Heart,_ winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel 4 drama; _Restless,_ winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection; the _Sunday Times_ bestseller, _Waiting for Sunrise,_ and _Solo,_ a James Bond novel. William Boyd lives in London and France.\n\n# _What's next on  \nyour reading list?_\n\n[Discover your next  \ngreat read!](http:\/\/links.penguinrandomhouse.com\/type\/prhebooklanding\/isbn\/9780525655275\/display\/1)\n\n* * *\n\nGet personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.\n\nSign up now.\n  1. Cover\n  2. Other Titles\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Copyright\n  5. Contents\n  6. Dedication\n  7. Epigraph\n  8. Prologue\n  9. Part I: Edinburgh\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n  10. Part II: Paris\u2014Geneva\u2014Nice\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n    6. Chapter 6\n    7. Chapter 7\n    8. Chapter 8\n    9. Chapter 9\n    10. Chapter 10\n    11. Chapter 11\n    12. Chapter 12\n    13. Chapter 13\n    14. Chapter 14\n  11. Part III: St. Petersburg\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n    6. Chapter 6\n    7. Chapter 7\n    8. Chapter 8\n    9. Chapter 9\n    10. Chapter 10\n    11. Chapter 11\n  12. Part IV: Biarritz\u2014Edinburgh\u2014Nice\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n    6. Chapter 6\n  13. Part V: Paris\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n  14. Part VI: Geneva\u2014Vienna\u2014Graz\u2014Trieste\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n  15. Part VII: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands\n    1. Chapter 1\n    2. Chapter 2\n    3. Chapter 3\n    4. Chapter 4\n    5. Chapter 5\n  16. Epilogue\n  17. Gratitude and Acknowledgements\n  18. A Note About the Author\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Cover\n  3. Title Page\n  4. Contents\n  5. Start\n\n  1. b\n  2. iii\n  3. iv\n  4. v\n  5. vii\n  6. \n  7. \n  8. \n  9. \n  10. \n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271. \n  272. \n  273. \n  274. \n  275. \n  276. \n  277. \n  278. \n  279. \n  280. \n  281. \n  282. \n  283. \n  284. \n  285. \n  286. \n  287. \n  288. \n  289. \n  290. \n  291. \n  292. \n  293. \n  294. \n  295. \n  296. \n  297. \n  298. \n  299. \n  300. \n  301. \n  302. \n  303. \n  304. \n  305. \n  306. \n  307. \n  308. \n  309. \n  310. \n  311. \n  312. \n  313. \n  314. \n  315. \n  316. \n  317. \n  318. \n  319. \n  320. \n  321. \n  322. \n  323. \n  324. \n  325. \n  326. \n  327. \n  328. \n  329. \n  330. \n  331. \n  332. \n  333. \n  334. \n  335. \n  336. \n  337. \n  338. \n  339. \n  340. \n  341. \n  342. \n  343. \n  344. \n  345. \n  346. \n  347. \n  348. \n  349. \n  350. \n  351. \n  352. \n  353. \n  354. \n  355. \n  356. \n  357. \n  358.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n### Praise for _Investing With Purpose_ :\n\n\"This book has great value for all earlier stage entrepreneurs, and Mark shares his personal growth skills for everyone's benefit.\"\n\n\u2014Lee O'neill,  \nExecutive Director of Urbana-Champaign  \nAngel Network, former President and  \nCEO of Busey Bank\n\n_\"Investing With Purpose_ is an exceptional book! In a highly engaging manner, Mark Aardsma provides practical and proven approaches to investing in the creation of a fulfilling life. This is a book that every entrepreneur should read.\"\n\n\u2014Edgar Papke,  \nLeadership Coach and author,  \n _The Elephant in the Boardroom_\n\n\"I found myself desperately wishing I had read this book when I was 28. And yet now at the age of 58, being challenged that it is not too late to make some significant life changes regarding the resources in my life. Mark has done a masterful job of intertwining life experience and illustrations with principles demonstrating how to identify and make decisions regarding your resources, enabling you to live life to the maximum and positively impact your world.\"\n\n\u2014Dave Clark,  \nChristian Community Development Association,  \nOperations and Program Director\nCAPITALIZE ON THE TIME AND MONEY YOU HAVE TO CREATE THE TOMORROW YOU DESIRE\n\n**INVESTING  \nWith  \nPURPOSE**\n\n><\n\n**_By_**\n\n**Mark Aardsma**\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 by Mark Aardsma\n\nAll rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.\n\nINVESTING WITH PURPOSE\n\nEDITED BY JODI BRANDON\n\nTYPESET BY EILEEN MUNSON\n\nCover design by Rob Johnson\/Toprotype\n\nCover Image by Bruce Rolff\/shutterstock\n\nInterior illustrations by Ian Riley\n\nPrinted in the U.S.A.\n\nTo order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848-0310) to order using VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.\n\nThe Career Press, Inc.\n\n12 Parish Drive\n\nWayne, NJ 07470\n\nwww.careerpress.com\n\n**Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data**\n\nCIP Data Available Upon Request.\n\n### Acknowledgments\n\nTo you: Thank you for aspiring with me to invest well for the greater good.\n\nTo my wife, Jenn: Thank you for supporting the creation of this book with your quiet and active love.\n\nTo my friends Adam, Tim, and Tony: Thank you for batting around ideas and encouraging me in this project.\n\nTo my cousin Feather: Thank you for company and support in the writing sessions.\n\nTo fellow entrepreneur Cameron: Thank you for the music that became the soundtrack to my writing.\n\nTo my mentor Greg: Thank you for your steady belief in my greater potential.\n\nTo my mentor John: Thank you for working really hard on me with me. To my mentor Edgar: Thank you for generously sharing your window on people and business with me.\n\nTo my former employee Phil: Thank you for inspiring the two best business ideas I've had so far, and for your companionship at the beginning of it all.\n\nTo my business managers Collin, Joey, Kim, Lynn, Mario, and Adrienne: Thank you for leading my companies to continued success.\n\nTo my assistant, Venus: Thank you for believing in this work and supporting me in the details.\n\nTo fellow entrepreneur Katie: Thank you for being among the first to show me the broad usefulness of my personal investing notes.\n\nTo entrepreneur and illustrator Ian: Thank you for seeing the value of this project, and for contributing your unique ability to communicate visually.\n\nTo my local editor, Susanna: Thank you for making my writing better, and for lending your personal presence to the process.\n\nTo my literary agent, Maryann: Thank you for your sharp insight, humble confidence, and strong advocacy.\n\nTo the print and audio publishing teams: Thank you for believing in this work and for investing your resources to produce it.\n\nTo my parents: Thank you for investing in me, and for teaching me initiative, resourcefulness, and grit. They have served me well.\n\n### Disclaimer\n\nThis book contains my best attempt to distill what worked and why from my experiences as an entrepreneur and an investor. Your results may vary. The advice in this book is not a substitute for professional tax, legal, or accounting advice.\n\nThroughout this book I address the reader directly, and for simplicity and clarity I give recommendations in the form of imperative sentences. These should not be interpreted as specific instructions for any individual's situation. Portions of this book likely do not apply to your specific circumstances. Please exercise judgment before making investment decisions.\n\n## > Contents <\n\nIntroduction\n\nChapter 1: Reflect Before You Race\n\nChapter 2: Value All Your Resources\n\nChapter 3: Tell Yourself the Truth About Time\n\nChapter 4: Stick With the Folding Tables\n\nChapter 5: Measure and Choose With ROI\n\nChapter 6: Invest in Your Investment Advantages\n\nChapter 7: Build Yourself and Your Network\n\nChapter 8: Manage the Emotions That Trip Investors\n\nChapter 9: Lean Into the Difficult Work\n\nChapter 10: Trust Homework, Not Hunches\n\nChapter 11: Own What You're Building\n\nChapter 12: Keep Rolling the Snowball\n\nChapter 13: Come Out Ahead Trading Your Time\n\nChapter 14: Bet Big on Your Big Advantages\n\nIndex\n\nAbout the Author\n\n##  > Introduction <\n\nWhat will you do with your potential? In this book, I want to invite you to clarify the future you aspire to, and equip you to make your aspirations reality by effectively investing the time and money you have.\n\nYou get to decide what you want. It might be to attain great wealth, to generously improve our world, or both. Maybe you want to build your organization into something much more than it is today. Perhaps lifelong learning and discovery are what you value most, or maybe it's living out your faith. You might aspire to triumph over what scares you, or to forge the fulfilling relationships you long for.\n\nNo matter what you aspire to, how you use the time and money you have will determine whether you make that future reality, or whether it will exist only as an unfulfilled dream.\n\nAt age 24 I was laid off, with just a few thousand dollars in savings. Instead of looking for a new job, I sat down at a makeshift desk in my basement and began to invest my time and money differently. Over the next 10 years I multiplied that savings a thousand-fold into a multi-million-dollar portfolio of businesses and other investments. During that time I also invested in my personal growth, transforming from a timid technician to a confident and capable CEO.\n\nAlong the way I created and refined a document that became my personal guidebook of time-and-money investment principles. When I grasped a new insight, or made a big mistake, I updated that document. When I felt afraid or confused about an investment decision, I reviewed that document to clarify my course.\n\nThis book is that guidebook in expanded form, illustrated with stories from my learning experiences. The investment rules in this book aren't about stock markets or financial wizardry. They are about how to use your resources effectively to get where you want to go. They work just as well today as they did thousands of years ago, before stock markets and even money were invented.\n\nIf you intentionally invest for a long time toward a deliberate future, you'll probably have more resources and more influence than most of the people you walk this earth with. Invest well.\n\nMark Aardsma\n\nmark@aardsma.com\n\n## 1 > Reflect Before You Race\n\nTen years before I wrote this, my employer lost the majority of its funding and I lost my job. I had a wife and two young children. We were partway through major renovations on the 104-year-old farmhouse we lived in, near a tiny town in rural Illinois. I didn't have a college degree, family with money, or an employment backup plan. We had recently spent most of our savings on materials for our home renovations. We had two or three thousand dollars to our name.\n\nI didn't have enough money to invest, but I still got to be an investor. I got to decide how to use the resources I had, including my time.\n\nThe first investment decision I made was to become self-employed. Instead of hitting the streets to look for a new job, I stepped down the wooden stairs to the basement of that old farmhouse. I ducked under a beam at the bottom of the stairs, swept cobwebs away from my face, and looked around. It was creepy. The walls were old cinder block that someone had since sprayed with a green coating to keep water from seeping in. There were still plenty of slimy drip trails on the walls, with green algae that almost matched the coating. And it was cold.\n\nI used one side of the old coal bin for one wall of my new office. A kitchen table from the 1950s became my desk. I moved my computer from upstairs, and connected it to my dial-up Internet modem. I wired a light fixture overhead, plugged in a space heater, and hung plastic drop cloths around three sides of the space to keep the warm air close. Total budget for my new office: $0 up-front and $0 a month.\n\nBelieve me, my first day sitting down at that desk was not filled with feelings of pride and self-assurance. I didn't even tell my friends what I was doing. I didn't want the embarrassment of explaining that it didn't work out.\n\nI knew I wanted to support my family, stay productive, and build interesting things. I knew I was long on time and short on cash. I knew the highest-paying skill I had developed up to that time was computer programming. That day I searched the Internet for postings from small business owners offering to pay for custom software development. I actually did a small project for one of them and earned $59. I'd written software as a job before and made more than $59 in a day, but this was different. For the first time I owned the long-term value of the client relationship\u2014and, much more importantly, I owned the copyright to the software I created. I wasn't just trading my time for cash to pay my bills for another day. I was building long-term value into something I owned. This incredible privilege of owning what I was building came to me courtesy of capitalism, and my willingness to take an emotional risk. That's it. It didn't cost me any money.\n\nI had no idea, nor even a wish, that what I started building would lead to dramatic personal change and multi-million-dollar financial results. I did have just enough clarity about my bigger picture to guide the investment decisions I made that day.\n\n### Bring the Future Into Focus\n\nAt its core, investing is the practice of choosing your present actions intentionally to produce the results you want at a later time.\n\nThis is unnatural. We humans tend to reach for what we want now, and we find it difficult to look ahead to a later time. The present, with all its sensory experience, feels much more real than the future, which can only be imagined. We are not naturally investors. We are wired to prioritize short-term survival, not to maximize long-term results.\n\nSound investment thinking has totally different DNA. It's always looking ahead. It habitually imagines the future while making present decisions. It's always acting like the future is just as real as the present, because it is.\n\nHow are you at looking ahead? Try it with this scene.\n\nA nurse, the smiling one in daisy-printed scrubs, guides your wheelchair down the hall, through the TV lounge, and outside the double doors. It's a warm day, perfect for sitting on the long, shaded, wooden porch.\n\nShe parks you at the far end and leaves you to the quiet afternoon. You're turning 100 tomorrow.\n\nWind chimes and sparrows provide background sounds as you reflect on a century of being alive. You worked hard. You met so many people\u2014most forgotten, some that still make you wince a little, and some whose faces are bright and clear among the crowd.\n\nWhom do you hope will be here tomorrow for your birthday party? You're told there will be a speech by your oldest friend. As you stare out across the lawn, you wonder what she'll say about you. How will she summarize a life of nearly infinite moments, decisions, and words? Accomplishments? Regrets? What do you hope she leaves out?\n\nIf you had a pen and paper handy, you could write some highlights for her. Tell her some things you _don't_ want left out of your story. Maybe you'll just write the entire speech out for her, to make sure the story of your life is told the way you want it to be. Alas, you've nothing to write with, and your story has already unfolded in a million scenes.\n\nYou have the choice to live every day of your life as though you are writing that speech. You get to choose every action you take and every word you speak between now and the end of your life. Think bravely about what you want that speech to say, and live with purpose every day so that speech will be true. Intentionally author your legacy.\n\nAll your time taken together makes up your life. During your life you'll make a lot of choices about what to trade your time and your money for. Authoring your legacy on purpose is intentionally investing your time and money, on a whole-life scale.\n\n### Connect Each Piece to the Bigger Picture\n\nYou have the opportunity to act intentionally on the grand scale of your whole life, and at every smaller scale. With each smaller piece\u2014perhaps a project, a relationship, or a hundred dollars\u2014you can consider the outcome first. Intentionally choose the actions that are most likely to produce the outcome you want for that piece, and for that piece's part in the bigger picture.\n\nPieces come in all types and sizes. Here are some examples. Each list starts with a small piece and progresses through the bigger pieces it is part of.\n\nAnd three more:\n\nHow you stack your own cascades of intentions is a highly individual thing, based on what you value most. You might invest your money to achieve early retirement, whereas your neighbor invests hers to realize a dream of self-employment. You might build a relationship at work to ease your loneliness, while your co-worker builds a relationship at work to seek a promotion. The best decision for each piece is the one that's most likely to line up with what you want for the bigger picture.\n\n\"What you want\" need not suggest selfishness, using people, or anything else that conflicts with your values. Your values and ethics are part of what you want, too. Hurting someone to get what you want isn't what you want if you value respect and generosity. Perhaps you want to live out your faith, give more than you receive, or put others ahead of yourself. If so, acting on purpose for the results you want will not conflict with those things because those things themselves _are_ the results you want. Choose your present actions to bring about those things you truly want. Build what you value most into your bigger picture.\n\nA few years ago I was visiting Ethiopia. I was there to learn about what creates and alleviates poverty. During my visit I was invited to meet with the staff and leadership of a nonprofit school. It was a hot and dusty summer afternoon, and classes had just let out for the day. Our hosts shared little cups of syrupy-sweet, charcoal-roasted espresso with us, and we all sat down to have a conversation. They had asked me to talk with them about planning and strategy.\n\nI felt we needed to have a shared understanding of the school's reason for being before we could have a meaningful conversation about plans and strategy. The bigger picture would give us a light to hold the pieces up to and see where they fit.\n\nWell aware that I was a newcomer and an outsider, I was in no position to share my opinion, or even have one. So I started asking questions. \"What do you do here at the school?\"\n\nMost of the teachers were shy. One brave young woman said the obvious, \"We teach children reading, math, music...?\"\n\n\"What motivates you to get up every day and walk to work in the hot sun to do this?\"\n\n\"We want the students to do well,\" they told me. \"We want them to pass their exams and qualify for high school and college.\" They still seemed nervous about giving the wrong answer.\n\n\"And what motivates you to work hard at helping those students do well? Why?\"\n\nIt was quiet in the room. Nobody answered for a minute. Then the principal of the school, an older man, said quite softly, \"For a better Ethiopia.\" And that was it. I saw a deep love of country on the face of every person there. That was their bigger picture. \"A better Ethiopia\" was the legacy they wanted to leave.\n\nThat set the stage for a wonderful conversation about planning and deciding at the piece level, so the pieces might someday add up to that bigger picture they believed in.\n\nBegin your foundation for sound investing with clear intentionality from the biggest to the smallest scale. It is impossible to define the ideal outcome of any single piece, even a financial investment, apart from the bigger picture of what you want. In order to be consistently intentional, you must connect the pieces into your bigger picture.\n\nWhen I coach an entrepreneur on a business he or she wants to launch, I usually start with questions about the bigger picture: What's your ideal outcome from this business? Do you want to work here for a long time? Do you want to build it and sell it? How does this business fit into what you want your life to be like? The answers to questions like these influence decisions about corporate structure, financing, hiring, marketing\u2014all of it. Every piece connects to the bigger purpose for the business, which connects to the bigger purposes of the entrepreneur's life. Going forward with those purposes disconnected or misaligned is a recipe for misery later on.\n\nThe day before I wrote this section I decided how to invest some money. This cash was sitting in a bank account earning nothing. I could have left it safely there, but I didn't. I didn't need that cash in reserve. I knew I wanted to earn more than zero on it because I always want to use all my resources as productively as I can. Why? One of my big intentions for my life is to leave this world a little better than I found it. Investing my resources productively so they grow helps me fulfill that intention. I had other, more immediate objectives, too. I knew that my plan was to do a business acquisition soon, and I'd need that cash then. My ideal outcome was to invest that money in something that would likely earn a good return and allow me to take that money back out in a few months. I bought a combination of stocks and bonds that fit the criteria that came from using my bigger picture as a guide.\n\n### Wait\u2014the Bigger Picture Is Unclear\n\nMaybe it's hard to describe what you want for a given piece of your life, work, or investments. It's probably harder still to connect it to what you want for each bigger piece above it. Maybe that chain from little piece to big legacy gets foggy somewhere in the middle. When you begin to organize the pieces into a bigger picture you'll find conflicts and contradictions between what you want for each piece. At best, parts of your bigger picture will be unclear and uncertain. That's life without a crystal ball.\n\nIt's not easy to reach clarity and alignment about your bigger picture. Nobody can hand you a personal values statement and life plotline summary. You have to figure them out in a process over time. Improving the clarity of your bigger picture is a lifelong pursuit.\n\nThere are two pitfalls here. One is winging it without taking time to reflect on the bigger picture. This leads to false starts, backtracking, and wasted resources. The other is getting stuck waiting for perfect clarity you'll never get. This leads to stagnation and wasted time. Fortunately, there is middle ground between perfect clarity from here to forever, and wandering aimlessly in confusion.\n\nWe know more than nothing and less than everything about our bigger pictures. Inability to see all the way to the horizon is no reason to fly with your eyes closed. Take time to reflect and bring your bigger picture into view as best you can. You will make far better decisions this way than if you wing it with no map at all, and you'll get far better results than if you sit and wait too long.\n\nMany of the distant foggy parts clear up as you engage, take action, and move forward. With your best rendition of your bigger picture in mind, make the decisions that you deem most likely to lead to the results you want.\n\nEffective investors make intentional decisions while at the same time dealing with uncertainty.\n\n### Watch Out When You've Lost the Bigger Picture\n\nWhen you aren't guided by your vision for the bigger picture, you'll be vulnerable to undesirable influences on your investment decisions.\n\nYou might be tempted to default to the opinions of others. Don't lean on a stock tip, an opinion article, or the advice of someone who may not know what your investment goals are. You need a clear intention for the outcome to check recommendations from others against.\n\nYou might find yourself going along with what others want you to do: your family's vision for your career, the mutual fund your investment advisor wants to sell, or the business decisions that feel safest to the people closest to you. Some people have your best interests at heart, and some don't. Either way, it's a big mistake to default to someone else's game plan because your own vision is foggy. Your job as an investor is to decide. Don't abdicate your role as an investor by letting someone else make your decisions for you.\n\nImitating the crowd is another dangerous default behavior. All the people buying stocks during 1999's bubble couldn't be wrong, could they? Yes. Crowds do irrational things when it comes to investing time and money. If you follow the crowd you'll get average results, at best. You need your own compass that's not swayed by what everyone else is doing.\n\nDoing what feels easy, familiar, or safe is a constant temptation. Your brain is wired with a strong priority to keep you alive. Sometimes the best investment decision, the one that fits your bigger picture, feels risky. Your brain doesn't realize that failed investments aren't life-threatening. Pay attention to your emotions and understand what they are signaling, but don't choose something just because it feels safe. You need a clear plan based on your bigger picture to guide your decisions more purposefully than your emotions alone can.\n\nClarity about what you want also provides motivation and resolve to do scary things, unpopular things, tiring things, boring things. Clear future vision helps you do things that don't feel good or easy or comfortable at the time.\n\n### Think Beyond the Obvious Answers to What You Want\n\nMaybe we don't have to look far to know what we want. This is a book on investment. Don't we all simply want more money? Inside of almost all of us, it's deeper than that. Before we jump into strategy and tactics, here are some thoughts on money as a goal,\n\nFor the first part of my life I was relatively poor, then I had a middle-class income, and in recent years I've experienced an unusual level of wealth. Money is a wonderfully flexible resource. I've found wealth to be useful and worthy of attaining. The flexibility it gives me in what I trade my time for is precious to me. Having wealth also increases my opportunities to keep learning, inventing, and taking risks on new things. And it enables me to pay forward the kindnesses and generosities I've received in ways I couldn't do otherwise.\n\nSome of the people I grew up around view wealthy people with suspicion and judgment. My sense after experiencing a wide range of income levels is that fear and envy, not realistic insight, were the source of those views. I have not found their views to match the reality of my experience.\n\nWealth is a powerful lever. Like a long crowbar, it can be used to do more than the strength of one person could otherwise do. If a wealthy person is authoring a legacy of hurting others, their wealth is a lever that can help them do more of that. If a wealthy person is authoring a legacy of generosity, innovation, or defending the vulnerable, their wealth is a lever that can help them do more of that. Wealth can be used to accomplish an astonishingly wide range of things, from destruction to building, from indulgence to philanthropy, from collecting stuff to enabling relational experiences. I want to make differences that matter while I'm alive. Some differences are hard to make, and I want the most powerful levers I can get.\n\nLike power or beauty, intelligence or strength, wealth can be used to help or to hurt. That doesn't make any of those things bad, it just makes them potent. Use all of them responsibly.\n\nThere's another part to this. Sometimes we use money to keep score of something else. Perhaps the score indicates ability to achieve, or status relative to other people. Every human being wants to feel capable, important, and wanted. Sometimes we think we want money because we want one of those deeper things, and we think money will help us get it. The thing is, we humans are deeply social, and we get the deeper things we need from how people treat us. Having more money doesn't necessarily cause people to treat us the way we'd like.\n\nMoney is useful for many things, but not all. Spending money on things money can't buy is a bad investment.\n\nMy experience has been that the hopes and fears of being me, the joys and heartbreaks of my relationships, the warmth of being loved, the loneliness of being ignored, and the thrills and frustrations of pursuing goals have felt the same all the way through. Being me doesn't feel any better or worse just because I have a lot more money than I used to.\n\nIf you don't like what it feels like to be you, you might be best served by investments in relationships, emotional healing, and personal growth. They'll cost you time and money, but they are quite different pursuits from growing your wealth.\n\nIf you put the advice of this book into practice, you will likely have more money later on than you have now. When you have a lot of money, then what? What do you want to use money _for?_ What do you want to move with that big lever?\n\nThere are many worthy answers to that question. I hope you reflect before you race, and choose well.\n\n### Action Points\n\nThis book began as notes in a document for my personal use. I referred to it to remind myself of my investment principles as I evaluated tough decisions. The table of contents of this book looks a lot like the outline of that original document. Each chapter will end with summary points that expand on the table of contents. You might want to include some of them in your own decision guide.\n\n  Choose your actions intentionally to lead to a future result, all the way through to the legacy you want for your life.\n\n  Define what you want for each piece by connecting it to what you want for the bigger picture.\n\n  Use your best rendition of your bigger picture to guide your decisions, though it will always be imperfect and subject to change.\n\n  Guard against deferring to others or playing it safe when you've lost perspective on your bigger picture.\n\n  If you want to increase your wealth, start with clarity about what you want to use wealth _for,_ and ensure those purposes are things money can help with.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nShare your bigger purposes and see what others are sharing at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook_.\n\n## 2 > Value All Your Resources\n\nI was in India, visiting Kolkata to strengthen ties with my company's textile suppliers there. It was my first experience making that kind of trip. I was wide-eyed and thrilled to be discovering new people and new places so far from home.\n\nI took a car from the airport to my hotel on an undersized, ridiculously crowded road. Bicycles, goats, transport trucks, wooden wagons, and everything in between shared the narrow winding strip of pavement. At first the frequent horn honking seemed uncomfortably rude, until I started to see that it was an essential safety feature. The honking was not chaotic; it was expected communication meant to warn slower travelers on two wheels or two feet that they were about to be passed. I began to understand why driving is a trained profession there, not for the faint of heart.\n\nDuring my visit I spent one day with a local tour guide. He was officially trained in the history and monuments of the city. He wanted to show me the high points and the tourist attractions, what he knew, and what he was proud of. I had a different goal: to continue to learn about poverty around the world. I wanted to see the daily life of real citizens in the city. Because he couldn't resist showing me the high points, I obliged. We went from place to place in our air-conditioned car, learning the history of the city.\n\nAfter a few monument visits and some more persuasive discussion, I prevailed, and we went off the main roads into the alleys and back streets of the city. We saw homeless people sleeping in formerly grand buildings from colonial days. We visited markets with stomach-threatening smells. We stepped into religious places and ceremonies I didn't understand. We saw skilled artisans working with ceramics in small shops down narrow alleys and corridors.\n\nPerhaps my guide was starting to believe that I honestly did want to see the real city. After all that, he took me to a slum. It was a shantytown along and down the banks of an urban ravine. Much to my surprise, pockets of this shantytown looked decidedly _industrial_. There were large square bales of something, sorted by color, and stacked beside the road. I saw piles, tin-roofed sorting areas, and people of all ages doing work. My tour guide explained. The people of this slum are recyclers. They separate materials of value from the trash of the city, and sort, clean, and bale them for sale. That's how they survive.\n\nThis glimpse of a way of life in a slum might make you uneasy. It probably should. It raises a lot of questions worth thinking about, and feeling about.\n\nHere's one thought I took away. I'll never forget the resourcefulness of those people. They used resources we might not even think of as resources to increase their return on investment of time.\n\nThe first time I visited New York City, I took a walk from my hotel near Times Square, all the way down to the financial district in lower Manhattan. I had been intrigued by the workings of financial markets for years, and I had participated in them as a financial investor. I wanted to stand in front of the iconic New York Stock Exchange, the symbolic center of it all. So I did. I stood there and looked at that familiar, pillar-adorned structure, and I felt grateful for access to a system that let me participate, though I had no status, position, or anyone's permission. I wasn't sure what else to do there, so I took a selfie with the Wall St. sign, bought some Greek yogurt from a shop around the corner, and walked back to my hotel.\n\nI'm pretty sure the residents of that slum in Kolkata didn't own any stocks, bonds, or real estate. They certainly weren't using any fancy hedge fund algorithms. I bet they never had a transaction processed at the New York Stock Exchange. They may not have had bank accounts to store money, or even much cash. We might easily conclude that they had no resources to invest, but we'd be wrong. They had resources, and they were making investment decisions with those resources. They had that land in and around the ravine. They had each other. They had other people's trash. They used those resources to increase the return on the investment of their time resource from near zero, to enough to survive.\n\nWhen I talk about investing, I'm referring to something more fundamental than what happens inside the New York Stock Exchange. The Wall Street exchanges, and financial instruments like stocks and bonds, are mechanisms for investing. Investing itself, as a concept, as a _practice_ , is much broader and more basic. Investing existed long before the invention of money. Investing is using resources, of all kinds, to get more of the results you want in the future.\n\nMoney is a human invention to make trading and investing resources easier and more efficient. Thanks to money, if I have extra apples, and want some oranges, I don't have to find someone who has extra oranges and wants apples. Money also transports more easily and stores better than apples and oranges. These features make money a convenient intermediate between one kind of resource and another. We've developed ways to trade money for almost anything, and this is a really useful feature of advanced society. Fundamentally, money is a claim on other people's resources.\n\nMoney is the most flexible resource, but it's not the only resource that matters. The only way to get money in the first place (unless someone gives it to you) is to make effective investment decisions with your other, non-monetary, resources. Time, skills, physical stuff\u2014value all your resources and include them in your intentional investment decisions.\n\n### Take Stock of Your Owned Resources\n\nA resource is anything that's useful to you or someone else. If you get to decide or influence what a useful thing is used _for,_ that thing is part of _your_ resources.\n\nThe most straightforward examples of your resources are things you own. If you own a car, it is part of your resources because you get to decide what it is used for. The cash in your wallet is part of your resources for the same reason.\n\nWe learn about this as toddlers when we try to grab other kids' toys. We call it property rights. Law enforcement in developed countries protects, with force if needed, your exclusive right to decide the use of the resources you own. If someone tries to take the cash from your wallet or the car from your driveway and use it the way they want to, they can be arrested, and forced to repay you. By the same token, the lack of protection for property rights is an enormous obstacle to successful investment in many developing countries.\n\nYou also own some things that wouldn't typically be listed on a credit application or a personal financial statement. You own your body, your mind, and everything you've learned in your life. You own your time, because you get to decide what to use it for. These are all basic human rights protected by things like constitutions, and they are highly useful resources.\n\nThe chart on page 31 shows some more examples of non-financial resources you might own.\n\n(See a longer brainstorm-style list of non-financial, investable resources at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._ You can suggest additions there, too.)\n\n  Conversation skills. |   Hobby gear or supplies.\n\n---|---\n\n  Sales ability. |   Emotional Intelligence.\n\n  Power tools. |   Experience with tragedy.\n\n  Foreign language skills. |   Retirement account.\n\n  Commercial driver's license. |   Works of art.\n\n  Degree or certification. |   Computer.\n\n  Technical skill. |   Spare bedroom.\n\n  Land your house is on. |   Customer list.\n\n  Next year's tax refund. |   Patent or copyright.\n\n  Software application. |   Rental property.\n\n  20\/20 vision. |   Wardrobe of clothes.\n\n  Fashion sense. |   Stock options.\n\n  Industry contacts. |   eBay account.\n\n  Car or truck. |   Work process or system.\n\n  Trustworthy reputation. |   Warehouse space.\n\n### Include Your Vast Shared Resources\n\nAt the time of this writing, I'm working on training for my private pilot's license. When I drive to the airport tomorrow I'll travel over millions of dollars in roads that I don't own, and I get to use. I'll walk through a multi-million-dollar airport terminal that I don't own, and I get to use. I'll drive in my car that was produced with billions of dollars of car-manufacturing equipment that I don't own, and I got to use, indirectly, to get a very nice car for much less than a billion dollars.\n\nI'll taxi the airplane (that I don't own, and get to use) across millions of dollars of concrete taxiways, and take off on a beautiful 1.2 _million_ -square-foot runway, that I don't own, and get to use. A flight instructor whom I don't own (obviously) will use his hundreds of hours of training to assist me. I'll also be assisted by a national system of radar antennas, control towers, security personnel, and air traffic controllers that costs about $16 billion per year to operate. My cost for using it is zero dollars more than if I don't use it. And I can use it as much as I want. I guess in some sense that makes me a $16-billionaire.\n\nShared resources are everywhere. A church's building, a city library, a mentor's insights, Google, Wikipedia\u2014we all have access to countless shared resources.\n\nThose last two shared resources are Internet resources. The Internet is a massive shared resource worthy of special mention. Corporations and governments spent billions of dollars creating the Internet by connecting the world over fiber optic cables. None of us own the Internet, and if you are reading this book, you almost certainly get to use it for very little cost to you. The Internet is a resource that makes things possible that simply wouldn't have worked before, including the businesses I've succeeded with. The Internet makes investments in your learning, communication, marketing, digital product delivery, and almost everything else, more efficient and more accessible than ever before.\n\nFor thousands of years before you and me, other people invested their time and resources in creating technological advancements and the shared resources of advanced civilization. We all get to use them, as a free inheritance from generations past. If you are alive and breathing in this abundant, modern world, you have access to trillions of dollars in shared resources at little or no cost to you. This is not an exaggeration. How will you put those vast resources to use to produce the results you want in the future?\n\nA fashion entrepreneur and friend of a friend used the shared resources of social media to build his rugged clothing brand from nothing. He used the shared resources of many prior textile and apparel technology inventions to inform and enable his manufacturing process. The sewing machine was essential, for example, and cost my friend nothing in invention effort or patent licensing costs. He used the shared resource of UPS to ship his product to a dispersed customer base, something that wouldn't have worked 200 years ago. He used the Internet for all kinds of free information about how to manufacture and market his products. He used the shared resource of word-of-mouth advertising to spread the word, and on and on. The shared resources he tapped into to make his brand a success were vastly greater than the owned resources he invested.\n\nFurthermore, most of what he invested wasn't money. His sense of taste, his energy and insight for marketing, and his time to get it all off the ground were perhaps his biggest investments. If he had included only his bank account when evaluating the resources he could use to start that business, he would have underestimated what he was working with by 99 percent or more.\n\nThe same is true for you. Whether you have a lot of cash on hand, or none at all, you have access to abundant investable resources, vastly greater than at any previous time in the history of humanity.\n\n### Call Out Fear for What it Is\n\nWith so many resources at our disposal, why do we sometimes think and act like we don't have what we need to make investments in our long term? We talk ourselves into doing nothing with the resources we have by telling ourselves we don't have enough yet, or we need different resources before we can start investing in the future we want.\n\nEven if you don't have what you need to build the future you want, you have resources that you can start employing, exchanging, and investing to get the other resources you need.\n\nWe all have enough resources to start building our future today. It's fear, not lack, at work when we dissuade ourselves from taking the reins as active investors of our resources. Fear that we'll run out of survival essentials. Fear that we'll fail in front of family and friends. Fear that we won't get what we want after all, and the heartbreak of trying will be greater than the vague disappointment of lowering our expectations before we even begin. It's fear that says, \"I don't have what I need to do that, so I can't start.\" Honestly, lack of resources has nothing to do with it.\n\nMy friend Will invests in financial markets from his home in Swiss farm country. He also does some work for area goat farmers. These goats have the strength and agility to jump over any fence the farmers could realistically build around their sprawling pastures. Not to worry, though: The farmers have a technique for keeping them in that doesn't require creating real limitations.\n\nWhen the goats are young and full of energy, the farmers keep them in a small pen. These goats promptly commence their best attempts to jump out of the pen. Because the fence around this small pen is high, and the goats are still small, they can't do it. Eventually, they give up. They conclude they don't have what it takes to jump fences. Once they reach that conclusion, they never try again. The farmers can let them out into the big pastures, with much lower fences. When the goats grow big, they never forget that fences are insurmountable. After all, they tried it 1,000 times already. They spend the rest of their lives \"trapped\" by fences they could hop right over.\n\nWe act a lot like those goats. We learn to see ourselves as helpless. We believe we don't have what it takes to pursue what we really want. We keep thinking and acting that way, because it protects us from risk, failure, and disappointment. It also \"protects\" us from taking the actions that will lead to the results we want.\n\nIt takes courage to want what you might not get. It's scary to set your sights on a destination you may never reach. Investing in an uncertain future is risky, and it feels even riskier.\n\nYou have abundant resources. Acknowledge your fears, and decide how to use your resources to build your future. Start with what you have, and build it into more.\n\n### Actively Decide How to Use Your Resources\n\nInvestors are deciders. As an investor, you decide how your resources will be used to produce the results you want in the future. Your resources include your self, your time, everything you own, and the vast shared resources you have access to. With every resource, we choose, consciously or not, how it will be used.\n\nWhen we don't make a conscious and intentional decision about how to use a resource, it doesn't go away, of course, or cease to be used. It may be in storage, or continue to be used the same way it was before. Our time, for example, will be used for something (or nothing) even if we don't consciously and intentionally decide what to do with it. It's much easier and more natural to make passive, default, habitual resource decisions than to make conscious, proactive, intentional decisions.\n\nWhether intentionally or by default, when we choose how to use a resource, we are choosing from the following menu of options.\n\n#### Consume: Trade a Resource for an Experience\n\nWhen you consume a resource, you trade it for an experience, and do not receive another investable resource in return.\n\nWhen I burn natural gas in my furnace to heat my house, the resource is consumed. I trade natural gas for the experience of being warm. I don't receive any resource in return. When I eat food, I trade it for the experience of enjoyable eating, or maybe the experience of staying alive. If I buy new clothes, I trade money for the experience of looking a certain way. If I throw something in the trash, I trade it for the experience of having less clutter around.\n\nIt's not the type of resource used that determines whether a trade is consumption or not. If you receive something investable in return, it's an exchange. If you don't, it's consumption. For a business, an advertising expense intended to be an exchange for new customers can become consumption if no new customers respond. The key question is \"What will I receive in return?\" If you give something investable in trade for nothing investable, it's consumption.\n\nToo much consumption can seriously hurt your long-term future, but consumption isn't always bad. Consumption is a valid and sometimes-necessary resource decision. We'll look further at the tradeoff between consumption and investment in Chapter 4.\n\n#### Exchange: Trade One Resource for Another\n\nYou can trade time at a job for money, and money at the grocery store for food. You can trade cash for stock in a company, and stock in a company for cash. You can trade time practicing for a new set of skills. You can trade time in conversation or a purchased gift for a stronger bond in a relationship. You can sell something online for cash. You can plant a tree for cleaner air. You can give to causes for a better world.\n\nWhen you trade a resource for another resource that's worth more, you grow your resources. This is trading up. In a perfect world, you'd trade up with every trade you make. Reality is uncertain and execution is complex, but the principle is the same.\n\nWe all make countless resource trading decisions every day. Right now you are trading your time reading this book for a benefit you hope to receive. It never stops. The power of choice means you get to make those exchanges intentionally, with your future in mind.\n\n#### Save: Store a Resource for Use at a Later Time\n\nVery often the time when you obtain a resource does not match the best time to put it to use. As investors, we can decide to save and store a resource, for use at a later time.\n\nNone of the tools in my garage are being used at this moment, but their value remains. They are being stored for use at a later time. A building contractor might store leftover materials until another job comes up. A bakery might keep cookies and cakes in a display case until they sell. We store food in refrigerators, money in saving accounts, and product inventory in warehouses. We store information on hard drives and in books. We store knowledge and skills in our brains and bodies. Your trusted reputation is a resource stored in the minds and hearts of other people.\n\nIn central Illinois, where I live, every town has a grain elevator with tall silos for storing grain. We harvest grain once a year, but feed cattle and eat cornflakes year-round. Storage makes that possible and thereby increases the usefulness of the grain harvest.\n\nMost investment activities require first storing up resources, then deploying them into the new investment. Many investments require a sizable chunk of resources up-front, such as buying a business, creating a product, earning a degree, or building a new relationship. You must store up money, skills, and life resources that allow free time, for example, in order to take on those investments.\n\nAn abundant base of stored resources enables you to think and act differently from someone who feels like they barely have enough resources to get by. When you have chosen to save and store resources, you gain confidence, and you open up a lot more options. You can pay in advance if it saves enough to make it worth it. You can make a loan and earn interest instead of paying interest. You can absorb the shock of an unexpected expense without derailing your plans. You can say yes to resource-intensive opportunities when they come along. You'll be searching for those opportunities, because you want to put your stored resources to good use.\n\nStorage retains value while offering us flexibility about when we use a resource. This simple ability to produce or acquire a resource at one time and use it at another time greatly increases our investment options. This is what makes inventions like food preservation (refrigeration, pasteurization, vacuum packing) and money preservation (banks, investment regulations) and property preservation (security systems, insurance) so valuable. \"Use it later\" offers myriad more options than \"use it now.\"\n\n#### Employ: Use a Resource to Accomplish Something Without Using it Up\n\nA hammer greatly reduces the investment of time required to drive a nail into a 2 \u00d7 4. Almost magically, after driving a nail, the hammer gave a valuable return in the form of freed-up time, yet became no less valuable in the process. The laptop I'm using to type this is being neither exchanged nor consumed in the process. A structural engineer's knowledge is neither exchanged nor consumed when he uses it to design a bridge.\n\nInvesting is trading a resource now for something that's worth more later. The hammer, the laptop, and the engineering knowledge cost less to obtain than the value they can provide over their lifetime. Resources like these, which give value without being used up, can be incredibly valuable long-term investments. This is one of the ways investment decisions grow your resources, almost magically turning a little into a lot more.\n\nMany of our shared resources work this way, too. Wikipedia and the local library add value to our endeavors, and lose no value when we use them more. All kinds of tools, equipment, and information resources can be used to create value without losing their value. We have the choice to trade our time and cash for long-term employable resources like these.\n\nMy 13-year-old son earned money last winter shoveling snow for our neighbors. His goal is to purchase a new video game console. The entertainment experience he'll receive from that video game console is consumption. He will not receive an investable resource in return. He uses a shovel to clear those driveways of snow, and earns about $10 for an hour's hard work. The other day I suggested he consider delaying his video game consumption so he could trade some of the cash he is earning for a gas-powered snow blower. This investment in an employable snow blower resource would allow him to earn about $50 an hour instead of the $10 an hour he's making now. The huge increase in productivity would recover his investment in the snow blower within weeks, and provide enough income to purchase 10 video game consoles (or expand his yard care business) this year. As of this writing, he's still thinking about it.\n\n#### Lend: Receive Compensation for Temporary Use of a Resource\n\nWhen you save excess resources and store them, you can usually also lend them at the same time. You can lend extra money to your bank and receive interest as compensation. You can lend an extra house to tenants, and receive rent as compensation. You can lend money to a business by purchasing its stock. (The purchase of stock is both exchanging and lending. You exchange cash for a loan someone else already made.)\n\nWhen a loan (in the broadest sense) is repaid at a fixed amount of money, we usually call it a loan or a bond. When it's repaid in a share of profits, we call it equity or stock. Either way you are giving up the use of your resource for a time, in exchange for compensation.\n\nOf course, you'd expect to receive more back then you originally lent. Renting out your extra resources in one way or another is an important avenue to growing your resources.\n\n#### Borrow: Give Compensation for Temporary Use of a Resource\n\nBorrowing, of course, is the opposite of lending. When you pay for the use of someone else's stored resources, you are the borrower and they are the lender. They will expect to receive more back than you originally borrowed, making this an easy way to shrink your resources\u2014unless you grow what you borrowed a lot before you return it. We'll talk more about debt and leverage in Chapter 12.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Use all your resources, not just financial instruments like stocks and bonds, to produce the results you want later.\n\n  Use both the resources you own and the vast system of shared resources you don't need to own in order to use.\n\n  Confront any fears that hold you back, and get started with the resources you have.\n\n  Actively decide the use of each resource: consume, exchange, save, employ, lend, or borrow.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee a reader-contributed list of non-financial resources you might use to reach your goals, or add to it at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 3 > Tell Yourself the Truth About Time\n\nA few months into my basement software freelancing, things were going just fine. I was earning a nice hourly wage, paying my bills, and saving some money. I wasn't working for an employer, and I was still trading my time for money. I was grateful for this success in generating the income I needed, and at the same time I was starting to feel uneasy. My workdays were full. I couldn't bill any more hours without working nights or weekends. I've never been a workaholic, and I wasn't about to become one to grow my business. Besides, what would happen when my nights and weekends became full? 24\/7 is a hard-stop limit on time. Non-negotiable. I needed a different solution.\n\nAbout that time I took a project to modify an e-commerce Website for a client. The modifications he wanted were small. I think I quoted him $120 to make the changes. He was using a large e-commerce software package to run his Website, and I wasn't familiar with it. As I dug into that software package I found it was undocumented, and complex. I spent an entire day of non-billable time learning how the system worked. It seemed like a pretty bad trade at the time. My effective hourly rate on that project was plummeting rapidly.\n\nThe next day I completed the modifications for the client. There I was with this newly acquired knowledge of the software package, and nothing else to do with it. I felt silly for spending so much time to figure it out. Hoping to redeem myself, I Googled to see if I could find other users of that software who might need work done on it. Within a few clicks I stumbled on an active forum where about 3,000 users of the software interacted. Some of them had the same problem I had just fixed for my client. All of them were looking for help.\n\nIn this I saw a new and different kind of investment opportunity. I began trading less of my time for an hourly wage, and instead traded that time to create software products of lasting value. I created installable modifications in the form of plugins that were useful to many of those 3,000 users. Those software products were resources that I owned, that could be used without being consumed. I was no longer limited by the number of hours in a day. I could sell as many copies as I could find buyers for, and I did.\n\nThose investment decisions I made in my basement grew my resources faster than I ever expected. They still had nothing to do with stocks, bonds, or Wall Street. The resource I created when I studied that software package for a day wasn't visible, tangible, or monetary. Nonetheless, it was a resource I was able to trade for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The hard limit of 24 hours in a day was no longer a limit on what I could earn. I traded what I had, and my resources grew beyond what trading my time for an hourly wage could ever have accomplished.\n\n### Time: A Peculiar and Precious Resource\n\nTime\u2014that is, hours, days, and years being alive\u2014is one of your resources. As an investor of all your resources, you get to make decisions about what you trade your time for. Investment principles apply to time just as well as physical stuff and financial resources. Time is like other resources in that we get to make investment decisions about what we trade it for. You can invest your time toward an intentional future. Time also has some special characteristics as a resource, and these peculiarities make your decisions about how you invest your time extremely important.\n\nTime is special because it's given out to everyone at an equal rate, for free. You may not receive the same amount as another person, but you will receive it at the same pace. You get a fresh installment of 24 hours every day, as long as you are alive. Regardless of wealth, position, location, gender, race, or any other quality, time ticks at the same speed for all. It's like passing go and collecting $200 in Monopoly. You receive it automatically, even if you are at the very beginning of the game and not yet receiving a return from any investments. This means everyone alive always has a valuable resource to make investment decisions with. In life (unlike Monopoly) you can't go resource-bankrupt as long as you are alive. You always have time to trade for something else.\n\nTime is special because it and our bodies are the only things we come into the world owning. Unless you are given a lot of resources early in life, time is the resource you use to prime the pump of investment. It's the resource you trade for most other resources you will own and invest. This means your decisions about how you invest time are hugely impactful, especially early in the process of growing your resources. Life is a grand exercise in starting with time and shared resources, and trading for everything else. The results of your trading might be deep relationships, generous impact, wealth, or all of the above. What you trade for is up to you.\n\nTime is special because it can't be saved or stored. Just like every living person's pace of receiving time is constant and equal, every living person also uses time at the same constant pace that it's received. We use our time as it's given, whether we want to or not, whether or not we consciously decide what to use it for. This is a big limitation. Imagine having to decide every minute what to spend a dollar on, ready or not. Time works like that. We have to spend a minute, every minute, ready or not. Partially mitigating this extreme restriction, time can be traded for other resources that can be saved and stored, thus increasing our flexibility and investment options.\n\nTime is special because it's strictly limited. Our bodies are remarkable in their ability to maintain themselves, heal, and last a long time. Your heart will likely beat more than 2 billion times in your lifetime, in the course of almost a million hours. As humans, we far exceed most other species at this business of living long. Nonetheless, time being alive on earth is a very limited resource. Some people get a lot less than 100 years; nobody gets much more. Many people will receive more dollars in life than they will receive hours. Some people will receive more dollars in life than they will receive heartbeats! From an individual perspective, most other resources are far less limited than time is.\n\nTime is special because, though time can be traded for more of other things, other things cannot be traded for more time. (At least not much more. We might buy medicine that increases our odds of living a full lifespan, for example, but so far nothing extends the human lifespan much beyond 100 years.) Trading time is a one-way thing. Almost all other trades are reversible. Time trades aren't. If you trade an hour for $20 in wages, you can't turn around and trade $20 for an additional hour of lifespan. It is possible to trade resources such as money for the use of other people's time, thus freeing up your own. This is delegation, one of the most powerful trades you can make. Although delegation doesn't increase lifespan, it does open up possibilities for what you can do during your life. We will explore delegation in depth in Chapter 13.\n\nTime is given freely, strictly limited, and un-storable. The hours of our lives can be spent, but more lifetime can't be purchased. These special qualities ought to lend a sense of gravity to our decisions about what we trade our time for.\n\n### A Tale of Two Workers\n\nTwo strong young men each agreed to summer work clearing land of brush and trees. They were tasked with clearing one acre apiece, and would be paid each day based on how much land they cleared. The first worker showed up early on the first day and worked hard. Using the axe, machete, and shovel provided by his employer, he cleared a small portion of his acre. Dirty, sweaty, and tired, he collected his pay for the day's progress. That evening he spent part of his earnings on good food and entertainment. Feeling quite satisfied, he went to bed on time, got some rest, and was back at it clearing land early the next morning. He did the same for two months of weekdays, until the work was complete. His was an admirable and profitable summer. He traded two months of his time for two months' fair wages. He supported himself honorably, enjoyed a pleasant lifestyle, and had some cash left over. Being a responsible planner, he even put some of that leftover cash in a retirement account, to save for a day when he wouldn't be an able-bodied worker anymore.\n\nIn a different part of the county, the second worker began just the same way. He showed up early on the first day and worked hard. Using the tools provided by his employer, he cleared a small portion of his acre. Dirty, sweaty, and equally tired, he collected his pay for the day's progress. That evening he spent his entire day's earnings on a used chain saw and a gallon of gasoline. He ate whatever was in his cupboards at home. Though he worked equally hard, he went to bed with less dinner and less cash in his pocket than the first worker. (It almost seemed unfair.) In effect, he traded a day of his time for a chainsaw and some gasoline.\n\nThe next day, chainsaw in hand, he showed up early and worked hard. He cleared twice as much land as the first day. Dirty, sweaty, and still quite tired, he collected his pay for progress, twice what he earned the day before. That evening, he spent all of his pay to rent a small tractor for one day. After another dinner of whatever was in his cupboards, and another night's sleep, he headed back to work. With the tractor and the chainsaw, he cleared the rest of the acre that day. Dirty, sweaty, and still quite tired, he collected the remaining pay for the entire acre, and returned the tractor. He traded three days of his time for two months' fair wages and a chainsaw. (It almost seemed unfair.) The next morning he inquired into the price of buying a tractor of his own.\n\nAfter a few years of repeating similar investment decisions, our first worker would likely still have a responsible and respectable lifestyle. Our second worker would likely be wealthy and have a lot of free time if he wanted it. They both started with the same resources. This vastly different result flows from the difference in _what they traded their time for_ early on. We all face similar choices.\n\nTiming matters. If our first worker spent a few years trading his time for cash, and then decided to buy a chainsaw and a tractor, he would never catch up to the second worker, who made high-return trades with his investments at the beginning. The earlier you trade your time for resources that increase your return on investment, the better. This is because good time trades increase the return on investment of _all your remaining time_ and they start the process of earning returns on not-your-time resources, like capital, equipment, or employees' time.\n\nTrading your time to learn a marketable skill increases the trading value of your time for the rest of your life. Learning a marketable skill in your last year of life has a much different impact than learning the same skill several decades earlier. Investing financially is also highly time sensitive due to the exponential \"snowball effect\" of compounding. Starting to save and invest money a few years earlier makes a dramatic difference in the total result. Today is a better time to start than tomorrow.\n\nNothing affects our bigger future more dramatically than our time trade decisions. In spite of this, it's not natural to value our time and invest it wisely. Most people I am familiar with make investment choices much more like the first worker than the second worker. They trade their precious, limited time for survival and a lifestyle, and little more. With the right trades, and the right perspective on time, it's possible to achieve survival, a nice lifestyle, and a whole lot more.\n\n### Our Distorted Lens on Time\n\nMultiple aspects of human nature conspire to distort our view of time, and our choices related to time trades.\n\nSensory experience is locked in the present. We are biased to put more weight on what we can see, touch, and otherwise experience than on what we can only imagine. This distorts our view of time. Out of sight tends to be out of mind, and the future is always out of sight. It takes faith, vision, and imagination to treat the future like it's real when we can't see it yet. This biases us to base our time trades on immediate circumstances and desires, to the detriment of our long-term circumstances and desires.\n\nBackward beer that produced a hangover first and happy intoxication the next morning would no doubt be quite unpopular. Wise investment decisions are backward like that, too, and perhaps similarly unpopular.\n\nGreat investors keep the future in sight through their vision and imagination. They aren't overpowered by the sensory experience of the present. Their sense of the future is strong, so strong they can almost taste it. This visionary clarity is a huge investment advantage.\n\nAnother distortion in our view of time comes from the discomfort we feel when we are aware of our mortality. Pretending we will live forever feels better than planning for a real future that includes running out of time. It's unsettling. We don't like unsettling feelings, so we think and act as if they aren't real.\n\nI think we go through life acting like we have more to lose than we really do, because we forget the ending. We are given our minds and bodies and a vast array of other resources to use, temporarily. Nothing we can do will make this arrangement other than temporary. If we remember this, I think we will focus more on using the time well. We'll become more proactive, more risk-taking, and less likely to hunker down in a small life partially comforted by the thin illusion that we can keep it.\n\nPerhaps the most powerful distortion in our lens on time comes from how strongly we are wired to survive. Our biology vigilantly prioritizes survival over all else, and it has a point. If we don't survive, we forfeit all our remaining time. A rabbit running for its life from a predator would not be well served to stop and gather supplies for winter. Survival must be the top priority when survival is threatened. Our long-term plans might be all for naught if we aren't alive to carry them out.\n\nI think our brains take this survival priority too far. They aren't good at telling the difference between bona fide threats to our survival, and scary things that really can't hurt us. They take a \"better safe than sorry\" approach, and panic equally in all risky scenarios. The parts of our brains that control fear and prioritize survival are powerful. They don't understand time, don't do math, and don't do long-term scenario planning. They just keep us alive, today.\n\nIn the safe, wealthy, and abundant societies a lot of us live in, we have time and resources for more than running from predators. Our survival is not at all threatened during our regular daily existence. Our brains haven't quite caught up to that reality.\n\nOur low-level fear brains don't give reliable guidance when it comes to risks and rewards of participating in capitalism, and investment decisions in general. For example, embarrassment and lost money are not actually fatal, but we often act like they will be.\n\nIn response to these signals from our fear-prone brains, we tend to choose things that feel safe now, and let survival take priority over an optimal future. That's probably the best decision-making priority for a rabbit living on a prairie frequented by predators. If you are reading this book, you almost certainly have the luxury of a much more secure existence than that prairie rabbit. In spite of the reality that starvation and being eaten by predators are not significant risks for most of us, we still tend to act like scared rabbits. Our instincts scream \"survive today; let the future take care of it itself.\" It's in our DNA, but as humans in prosperous societies, it's far from the best way to decide how to use our resources.\n\nA Ugandan friend of mine leads a charitable organization that helps farmers in Uganda produce more crops and get them to markets more efficiently. I talked with him from time to time and heard updates on their progress as a new charity. Distribution of superior corn seed and education on farming methods were successful, and the crop was looking good. The amount of corn produced was twice what the same farmers had grown on the same land the season before. We were excited about how these farmers would benefit.\n\nThe time came to harvest the crops, and the harvest was a success. The employees of the organization rented a truck to transport the crops from the remote rural area to markets in the city. This transportation to market was a key link in the chain, allowing much higher sales prices for the crops. The rural farmers did not have the resources to accomplish this transportation to market on their own.\n\nWhen the truck arrived at the farms, they found no crops there to pick up! My friend was dismayed to learn that the farmers had already sold the crops from their big harvest. A local crop trader had offered them half price to buy the crops now, rather than waiting a week or two for the truck to arrive, take the crops to market, sell them, and _then_ pay the farmers. The farmers accepted that offer, and sold the crops for half price, giving up all the benefit they would have gained from the higher yields that season.\n\nWe may dismiss the investment decisions those farmers made as obviously foolish, and in some ways it was. Remember, though, that those farmers have legitimate reason to worry about physical survival more than you probably do. What if the crops never made it to market, or the money from selling them never made it back? What if the crops were stolen before the truck arrived? What if the nonprofit organization couldn't be trusted? Their families might face starvation. Selling for half price, cash in hand right now, ensured their family's survival for another season. Sending those crops to market for full price didn't. Their circumstances, and their mindset, suggested prioritizing short-term survival over maximum long-term results.\n\nWe are hard-wired this way. We may fancy ourselves smarter than those farmers, but the truth is we are subject to the same distortions. We often make decisions that are very much like their choice to sell their crop for half price. Our obsession with survival distorts our view of the future.\n\nWhen we look at time through a distorted lens, we don't take actions that create the future we want. We act based on today, and perhaps tell ourselves that we will get to building the future we want later. In the meantime we miss our most valuable opportunities to make those early time trades and investments that start the compounding process. We trade our time for too little, and we consume what we trade it for too readily. We spend our time on the safe, obvious, expected, and routine, rather than trading it for what we want most in our futures. We don't take enough risk in the present. We wait too long to confront our conflicts, get out of unproductive situations, and make big changes. We think we have time to kick the can down the road. And it costs us way more than half the price of those crops.\n\nWhen we tell ourselves the truth about time, we give ourselves a chance to make very different choices\u2014choices that will lead to the future we want.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Don't unknowingly trade a lifetime for a lifestyle by trading time for money and consuming it all.\n\n  Treat your time like a treasure that's more rare and valuable than abundant resources like money and property.\n\n  Trade your precious, limited time intentionally toward the future you want.\n\n  Trade for resources that increase the productivity of your time, especially early in life.\n\n  Watch out for natural distortions in your view of time, and the bad investment decisions that flow from those distortions.\n\n  Make investment decisions as if the future is just as real as the present, because it is.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee how other readers reacted, and share your thoughts on our precious, limited time at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 4 > Stick With the Folding Tables\n\nAfter a year and a half in my basement, it was time to move my software business to an office. Though it would cost more, it would protect the privacy of my wife and kids, and create a healthy separation between work life and home life.\n\nWe lived in the country, near Piper City, a small town of just 800 people, a grain elevator, and a main street business district that's just one block long. Decades ago those main street buildings housed a bank, a car dealership, a barbershop, a furniture store, and more. Some of the residents and leaders of the town didn't want to admit it, but most of that was long gone and wasn't coming back. Some of the buildings were vacant, some were in use, but none were in their prime.\n\nI called the mayor and asked him if he knew of some office space available to rent. He put me in touch with a couple of building owners, and I worked out a deal with one of them to rent the front half of 15 W. Main St. It was one big room of about 2,500 square feet. It had been a construction office, a small engine repair shop, a pool hall, a dress shop, a furniture store, and probably some other things. Now it was about to become a software office. I and my employee had two 6-foot folding tables, our computers, and our office chairs. We set those up by the front door, and we were moved in. Our setup took up less than one-twelfth of the space we had rented.\n\nTen years later, I own that building, and three others on the same side of Main Street. At my companies, we aren't in the software business anymore, but dozens of employees work there, doing 5,000 percent more business than we were doing when we moved in. A few years ago we converted the second story of 15 W. Main from a dusty attic, untouched for generations, to an additional floor of offices for our growing staff. One of those offices is mine, and in it stands one of those original folding tables. It's still my desk.\n\nThose expansions of our office space were productive investments in future business returns. They weren't risky speculation. We had the sales and earnings growth to prove we'd need the space and make a profit on it.\n\nHaving more office space increased future returns, but upgrading my office furniture wouldn't have. Can I afford new office furniture? Sure. I haven't upgraded from the folding table because that would be consumption, not investment. I see neither emotional nor financial return from upgrading. Those businesses are Internet based. I don't meet clients in that office. I have no visitors whom I need to impress. New office furniture wouldn't do a thing to improve sales or earnings of those businesses, and it wouldn't do a thing to improve my workday experience. I'm serious about evaluating the return on my resource-use decisions. I'm sticking with the folding tables.\n\n### See Consumption and Investment in Contrasting Colors\n\nConsumption is trading resources for anything that doesn't contribute to a future increase in your resources. Consumption may provide an immediate benefit, and that benefit comes at the cost of immediately and permanently reducing your resources.\n\nInvestment is trading part of your resources for something that does contribute to a future increase in your resources. It's trading for something that, over time, is worth more than what it cost you. Something that provides a return.\n\nBoth consumption and investing use resources in the present. They each lead to very different results in the future. To be an effective investor of all your resources, you must not mix consumption and investment into a vague gray of \"spending resources.\" You must see them as polar opposites, like vividly contrasting colors.\n\nConrad and Ivanna are highly fictional characters stranded on a small, otherwise-uninhabited island.\n\nThey each have 24 hours of time per day to use as they choose. Drinkable water and adequate shelter are naturally available. They each need to eat five fish per day to survive for long. They want to use their resources to develop a way to get back to civilization and reunite with their families.\n\nWith immediate survival top of mind, they quickly discover how to catch fish by hand in the shallow water surrounding the island. It's frustrating, it's time-consuming, and it works. The first day they each catch five fish between sunup and sundown. They eat them raw, and retreat exhausted and sunburned to their shelter for the night.\n\nAs the sun rises the next morning, they wade out into the shallows to catch their meals. Again they each catch five fish, eat them raw, and sleep another night.\n\nThe next morning, Ivanna is bothered by the realization they are not getting ahead. They are spending all their time to produce resources and consuming them just to survive. As Conrad wades out to fish, Ivanna decides to use her time differently that day. With stomach growling she climbs up a hill to overlook the island and notes resources at hand. There are bushes, trees, rocks, a stream, sand, birds, and various grassy plants.\n\nShe gathers some thin branches and grassy reeds in a pile on a flat rock at the top of the island. She sits down and begins to braid the grasses into thin ropes. As she works she feels the discomfort of hunger, and sees Conrad on the beach below, eating a fish he just caught. He wades out to try to catch another, and she continues to use her time to braid dozens of long thin ropes.\n\nAs Conrad goes to sleep that night, Ivanna continues working by moonlight. As the sun rises he awakes to find her sleeping, with dozens of fish piled nearby. Amazed at her late-night fishing success, he wakes her to ask the source of this good fortune. He learns, as you have surely guessed, that she has built a fishing net. She can haul in 10 fish with about an hour's work.\n\nShe limited her consumption and _invested_ her time and a few natural resources in something that _increases productivity._\n\nThat day they reach an agreement: Ivanna will rent Conrad her fishing net for a price of five fish per day, all she needs to survive. Conrad will fish one hour per day and catch 10 fish, enough to pay the rental fee and provide for his own survival.\n\nTwo days ago Ivanna had to work her entire day just to eat enough to survive. From now on she doesn't have to spend any time at all on food for survival. Why? Because she limited her consumption, created a surplus of time for a day, and invested it to create something that pays back far more than it cost, day after day, for a long time.\n\nWhat's more, her investment in productivity was not at Conrad's expense. If he was fishing 12 hours a day before, his agreement with Ivanna frees 11 hours of his time per day as well. Investment in productivity is not a zero-sum game.\n\n### Consumption and Investment Compete for the Same Resources\n\nIn their simple scenario, our castaways could use their time resource to get enough food for a day's consumption, or they could invest their time resource in something of lasting value. Whatever time they spent fishing wasn't available to invest, and whatever time they spent building nets wasn't available for fishing.\n\nThe same is true for us in the real world. Real life contains a larger number of opportunities and greater complexity, but the principle is the same. Money spent on rent is no longer available to buy stocks or start a business. Two hours spent enjoying entertainment can't also be spent creating a new product.\n\nYou get to decide how to divide your resources between consumption and investment. Take a vacation, or new equipment for your business? Bigger house payment, or bigger contribution to your retirement account?\n\nHousing and transportation are the biggest consumption expenditures of American households (source: _www.bls.gov\/news.release\/cesan.nr0.htm_ ). The kind of house you live in and the kind of car you drive are likely a big portion of your total consumption. Consume too much of your resources on big items like these, and your investing hands will be tied. Frugality on the little things (skipping Starbucks, or cheaper office supplies) can't overcome the headwinds of over-consuming on the big things (a big mortgage, or undisciplined labor costs).\n\nTrading your time to simply consume more than you need to survive is a very expensive decision, especially early in life and when your resources are few. Most people in developed countries make this decision continuously throughout their lives. If you spend all your working life at a job, and consume (rather than invest) the entire proceeds of that job, you will never start the virtuous cycle of investment. The end result of that approach will be far fewer resources, and even far less opportunity to consume than through the alternate approach of limiting consumption in order to save and invest.\n\n### Limiting Consumption to Increase Investment Leads to Abundance\n\nWhen you choose to limit consumption, as Ivanna did, and direct those resources to investment activity instead, you start a positive spiral of increased productivity and growing resources. Investments pay returns, increasing total resources. If those additional resources are invested, and not consumed, those new investments pay still more returns. This is the positive spiral of compounding. The long-term effect is a dramatic increase in resources.\n\nIvanna's investment allowed much greater consumption in the future than if she had never been willing to be hungry for a little while. This happened quickly in our island story because the productivity gain from the fishing net was a huge 2,400 percent. Dramatic returns like this are possible in the real world too, but often investment returns are much lower. Even with a modest 10-percent gain from investing resources, savers still pull ahead of consumers over time.\n\nConsider a frugal saver who limits her consumption to 70 percent of her total income, and invests the other 30 percent at a 10-percent after-tax annual return. (Stocks and bonds would likely return less than that. If she invested where she had an advantage, such as a certain business, her returns would likely be much more.) For the first 13 years she would consume less than a neighbor with the same income who consumed 100 percent of his income. Looking over the fence at her neighbor's superior lifestyle could make it hard to believe that her decision to consume less and invest more was a wise choice.\n\nShe would have the equivalent of four years' income in savings at 13 years; maybe that would be some consolation.\n\nFor all years following, she would be consuming more than her non-saving neighbor, and still investing 30 percent of her total income each year. Fifty years after beginning this program, she would be able to consume three times what her neighbor was consuming each year, and she'd have _34 years' worth of income_ in savings. He'd have none. By this time the benefits of her early-years choice to limit her consumption would be obvious. If around the time it became obvious, her neighbor started looking over the fence and wondering about his 100-percent-consumption choice, it would be too late for him ever to catch up to his frugal neighbor.\n\nIf our frugal saver limited her consumption to 50 percent of her income, and invested the other 50 percent, her consumption would catch up to her non-saving neighbor in just nine years. See the link at the end of this chapter to download a spreadsheet and experiment with the actual numbers from this example.\n\nOne of the most powerful things you can do for your financial future is consume less in the present, and invest more for the long term. This willingness to limit present consumption in order to produce a large investable surplus makes the difference between a lifetime of treading water, and a future of growing resources.\n\nAt the time of this writing (2015), the average American spends 95 percent of their income on consumption, leaving just 5% for investment (source: _<https:\/\/research.stlouisfed.org\/fred2\/data\/PSAVERT.txt>_ ). If you choose to limit present consumption in order to save and invest a much higher percentage than that, you won't have to move the consumption setting many notches to come out far ahead of your American neighbors.\n\n### Survival Demands a Base Level of Consumption (and Cash)\n\nUnfortunately, reality doesn't let enthusiastic savers take this concept of limiting consumption to the extreme. If you consume nothing, and invest 100 percent of your resources, you'll starve to death. If at any point you don't survive, the rest of your time\u2014your most precious resource\u2014will be forfeited.\n\nYour survival requires air, water, food, shelter, mental health, and maybe some other things. Your first and permanent baseline task is to ensure your resources are sufficient to provide for your survival. Only when you have surplus resources (those resources not needed for your survival) can you decide to invest, or do anything other than survive.\n\nIn the beginning, you'll probably need to trade your time for resources, and consume them in order to survive. This means produce them directly, or work for money to get the water, food, and shelter you need to survive. In developing countries this might be subsistence farming or working for day wages. In developed economies this usually means having a job. A job consumes a great deal of time, and this usage of your most precious resource should not be taken lightly. The key is to limit your consumption and thereby create an investable surplus as soon as possible.\n\nIn business, cash is oxygen. Run out of it, and you'll be dead in short order. A bottle of oxygen won't help if it's an hour late, and extra cash next year won't help a business stay alive either. It's impossible to make decisions for your long term while gasping for air. When survival is in question, survival naturally and necessarily becomes top of mind. The only way to avoid this is to produce more than you consume, and save a surplus. It's much easier to think like an investor when you have extra cash on hand.\n\nThe same is true of personal life. Many households live paycheck to paycheck, and that situation forces decisions that produce short-term gain for long-term pain.\n\nOne of my business buildings sits next to a gas station. I've observed people who visit it multiple times per week, putting $5 of gas into their car at a time. My mind protests the time resource they spend driving there, filling up, paying, and driving off. I bet it amounts to 30 minutes a week for some people. Do that for a decade (as some do) and the total time cost is about 250 hours, equivalent to a month of full-time work. During that decade, I estimate our frequent-filler would also consume about _20 tanks_ of gas on the mile or two back and forth to the gas station. If this person generates enough surplus cash to invest in completely filling the tank just _one time,_ no additional investment will be required ever to enjoy the time and fuel savings of minimizing trips to the gas station.\n\nIf our frequent-filler currently spends $15 per week on gas, then decides to invest in a complete fill, he'll spend perhaps $50 that week on gas. For all weeks for the rest of time, his expense goes back to what it would have been ($15 not counting changes in gas prices).\n\nThis is an extreme example of making decisions to maximize immediate cash flow at the expense of long-term results. This is managing to cash flow instead of to maximum return. It's a vicious cycle. If you are in it, do whatever it takes to generate a surplus that frees you from that cycle. You only have to do it once, for a lifetime of benefit.\n\nWhen we are managing to cash flow instead of long-term results, we do things like habitually pay interest on credit card balances, take lower-paying work because it pays sooner, or repair a worn-out machine repeatedly to avoid the big cash outlay of replacing it. These may not be as obviously shortsighted as frequent trips to the gas station, but the principle and the results are the same.\n\nBecause cash is oxygen, credit cards or other convenient sources of borrowing might seem like a handy way to keep breathing when income and bank accounts run low. The long-term cost of using credit in this way is invisible at first, but soon creates a hole that's expensive and difficult to climb out of. Except in emergencies, live within your means so you have extra cash in the present, and the freedom to do what's best for your long term, even if it reduces your cash up-front.\n\nI do not lack compassion for the survival pressures that frequent-fillers, and their equivalents in others areas of life, are dealing with. I earnestly long to see them make different investment decisions and escape the cycle of managing to cash flow. If they work a couple hours of overtime, or forego enough consumption to create just one tank of surplus, so to speak, they can permanently improve their situation. (So far no gas station patrons have asked my opinion, and I have refrained from leaning out of my office window to offer unsolicited advice.)\n\nFocusing on long-term returns without concern about short-term survival is a luxury that's available to many more people than are currently enjoying it. If you are an able person living in a country with a functioning economy, rule of law, and a few other essentials, you have the choice to consume less than you produce (or produce more than you consume) and create a surplus. Get ahead in this way just once, and you can ensure you won't be distracted from good investment decisions by the need to gasp for air.\n\n### Delaying Consumption Is an Emotional Ability\n\nIn the Stanford marshmallow experiment, researchers placed a marshmallow in front of a child and offered a choice: Eat it now, or wait 15 minutes and get two marshmallows to eat. Children who waited longer for the greater reward, and thus accepted delayed gratification, had better long-term outcomes in life. They were more successful, and even took better care of their health than those children who shortchanged themselves because they couldn't wait to consume the marshmallow.\n\nThe ability to delay gratification to get more of what you want in the long term sits at the core of sound investment thinking. Investment is all about accepting less now in order to have more later. If you consistently choose the path of delayed gratification for greater long-term return, you will do very, very well.\n\nThis isn't easy. It can be truly uncomfortable, even painful, to delay gratification and invest in your future. Dieting and exercise, years of night school, attending psychotherapy, working two jobs, launching a business on a shoestring\u2014these can be difficult short-term pains that lead to really big long-term gains.\n\nIt's natural to feel a pang of loss or deprivation when saying no to consumption, and having to wait for something we want. Tell a small child they can have that delicious candy _after_ dinner, and their frustration and disappointment may bring tears. Effective investors learn just the opposite emotional reaction. They smile like a baby with a lollipop when they get to invest resources for an abundant return in the distant future, and they feel like crying when they are forced to consume resources in the present that could have been invested. I think a rich imagination, a focus on the future, and a bent toward optimism enable investors to bring the emotion of the long-term results into their present decisions.\n\nFundamentally, delayed gratification requires a belief in abundance, and optimism about the future. It rests on a belief that there will be enough, that there will be more, that the consumption we forgo today won't be lost to all time, and that the system works and the returns will come back to us.\n\nFuture-focused investors don't feel deprived when conserving resources to invest; they feel deprived when consumption steals from their investment resource pool. I don't go to bed at night feeling sad that I had to play for the long term instead of binging on consumption that day. I'm genuinely thrilled to get to play the game this way.\n\n### Limiting Consumption Does Not Mean Limiting Spending\n\nKatie is a friend of mine who owns a growing business in the beauty industry. When we talked recently she was deciding whether or not to carry an entire product line from a major makeup manufacturer. She liked the quality, and her knowledge of her business provided a solid basis to believe the product would sell. If it sold well, it would produce a truly stellar return on her investment in initial inventory.\n\nWe worked through the numbers together, and there was no denying they looked good. Trouble was, the manufacturer required a big up-front purchase. The size of the check she'd have to write made her nervous. I think she was wise to consider carefully before spending such a large amount of cash.\n\nWe talked about the difference between spending that amount of money on consumption and spending that amount of money on a stellar investment opportunity like this product line. Stretching to spend a lot of money on a great investment is a good move. Stretching to spend a lot of money on a shopping spree or other consumption is a very bad move. The two are opposites. Katie saw this clearly, and she chose to spend that cash on that big investment. It still felt like a big risk, but her clarity about consumption versus investment allowed her to make an intentional choice rather than an emotional one.\n\nI know a lot of people who grew up in families that valued frugality and taught their kids to limit spending. Many of these families were frugal and responsible consumers of their income, and not active as long-term financial investors. As a result, those children-turned-adults carry an internal compass that warns against spending a lot of money. Unfortunately, that type of internal compass tends to point to \"spend less\" no matter which direction its bearer is facing. A better compass points to maximum return instead.\n\nHere's an extreme example. Imagine a farmer who limits spending on seed in order to save money. As a result he plants only half his acreage in crops. Of course he doesn't end up \"saving money\" at all, because he eliminates half of his farm income that year by limiting his spending. He was limiting _investment_ , not consumption.\n\nOf course no farmer in the real world would be so shortsighted. The business owner that limits spending on a needed expansion, the family that limits spending on retirement investments, and the student that limits spending on learning resources are all making a decision to limit investment. It's not as obvious as the farmer who plants half his crop, but the principle and the results are the same.\n\nFrom time to time I remind the managers who run my businesses that I am eager to spend money\u2014when it's an investment that pays a good return. Because we have limited consumption and created a cash surplus from the beginning, we don't need or want to conserve cash. We want to hunt for investments that pay a good return, then quickly and happily write checks for those investments. Expensive factory equipment that will earn back its value in two years? Yes, please\u2014sign me up.\n\nInvestors see consumption and investment in contrasting colors. They learn to cringe when they write a big check for consumption, and rejoice when they write a big check for investment. They don't operate on a simple rule of \"spend less.\" They stretch to spend less on _consumption_ , and _more_ on investment.\n\n### Be Frugal About the Right Things\n\nBy limiting your consumption and investing more, you'll be directing your resources to where they can grow. When making financial investments, watch out for investing expenses that, ironically, can consume a significant slice of your returns. Perhaps consumptive expenses seem out of place in the world of investment, but I assure you that Wall Street is not populated by charitable organizations. They earn fees and commissions in a number of ways. It's their right to do business in those ways, and it's your right to avoid nearly all of those expenses.\n\nWhen you buy or sell a stock or bond through a financial broker, you'll pay a commission on each transaction. Major online brokers currently charge about $7 to $10 per trade. When investing small amounts of money\u2014say $1,000 at a time\u2014this amounts to about 1 percent of your investment on the buying end, and another 1 percent if you sell the investment soon after. Active traders who frequently buy and sell tend to earn about the same returns as the average investor, before commissions, and a little less after paying those commissions. You can avoid paying much commission at all if you make few transactions, and hold on to your financial investments for a long time. Whether or not that's your strategy, be aware of the commissions you're paying every time you buy or sell.\n\nBe even more wary of paying anyone a fee to manage your investments. In the typical arrangement, the investment manager takes a fee of 1 percent of the value of the investments they are managing for you. They take this fee every year, so they make money whether you did or not. Stock markets have returned about 5 to 10 percent per year on average. If your wealth manager takes a 1-percent fee, they are taking 10 to 20 percent of your gains each year, even though you are taking 100 percent of the risk and providing 100 percent of the capital. Due to the exponential effects of compounding, this can reduce your total investment returns by one-third or more over the course of a lifetime.\n\nTheoretically, they are making investment decisions that produce above-average returns for you, but it's mathematically impossible for them all to be above average. Very few asset managers have a genuine advantage over the rest of the market, though some are lucky for a few years. If they make investment decisions that produce below-average returns for your investments, they still take their 1-percent fee.\n\nAlso be careful about mutual fund fees. Many mutual funds do something like the investment managers we just talked about. They pay a professional manager to manage the fund, and that and other expenses typically add up to 0.5 to 1 percent of the fund's assets every year. Mutual funds provide a valuable service by allowing you to own part of a broad pool of investments, thereby increasing your diversification. However, some funds' fees are much higher than others. It pays to shop around and pay attention to fees, to minimize the costly drag on your total returns.\n\nYou can get almost exactly average returns by investing in index funds that own a little of everything. Some index funds that track the broad stock market charge fees as low as 0.1 percent. Using index finds you'll probably beat most mutual funds, and pay much lower fees.\n\nDo limit your consumption. Don't be stingy with your investment budget. Do be stingy with your investment expenses.\n\n### Beware Sunk Costs\n\nThere's another common fallacy that sometimes comes under the heading of saving money. Though intended to avoid waste, erroneous thinking about sunk costs often leads to poor decisions.\n\nSunk costs are resources already spent, that you won't get back no matter which path forward you choose. Here's an example.\n\nIf you invest four years of time and $100,000 in a college degree in one career, then discover that career pays less and is less enjoyable for you than another career choice, should you switch? Should the fact that you've invested so much in that degree have any bearing on the decision?\n\nIntuitively most of us want to say yes, because it's so disappointing to \"waste\" the investment of four years and $100,000 by switching careers. That $100,000 investment is a sunk cost, and economists look at it this way. If the first career will pay $200,000 less over a lifetime than the second career, then sticking with the first career will cost $200,000 more than dropping it now and switching to the second. The $100,000 expense for completed college cost isn't recovered in either scenario, so it should not influence the decision. Only the difference between the two scenarios, _going forward,_ is relevant.\n\nIn one of my businesses we recently spent more than $2,000 to replace the radiator and the exhaust on a forklift. As soon as those repairs were completed, we discovered that the same forklift also needed an expensive new carburetor. The $2,000 already spent plus the cost of the carburetor replacement added up more than the forklift was worth. Did that mean we should stop spending money on repairs and buy a new forklift? No. The $2,000 was a sunk cost. Whether we completed additional repairs, or junked the forklift, we would not get the $2,000 back. If we had known about the carburetor repair _before_ we repaired the radiator and the exhaust, we would have decided to junk the forklift. Once the $2,000 was spent however, it was no longer relevant to the decision.\n\nThe rational way to evaluate the carburetor decision, ignoring sunk costs, worked as shown in the table on page 68.\n\nThe $2,000 just spent on radiator and exhaust doesn't factor into those calculations, because no matter what we decided to do at that point, it was already gone and not coming back. I'm happy for any chance to spend $1,200 for a $2,500 increase in value, so we replaced the carburetor.\n\n**Item** | **Amount**\n\n---|---\n\nCost of radiator repair (sunk cost): | $2,000\n\nValue of forklift as it is now, with a broken carburetor: | $500\n\nValue of forklift after carburetor replacement: | $3,000\n\nValue increase from carburetor replacement ($3,000-$500): | $2,500\n\nCost of carburetor replacement: | $1,200\n\nGain on carburetor replacement: | $1,300\n\nSay you buy an investment for $10,000, and the value drops to $8,000. If someone offers you $9,000 for that investment, should you sell for $1,000 less than you paid? It's intuitive to resist, not wanting to take a $1,000 loss on the investment. Truth is, when the value dropped from $10,000 to $8,000, you already lost $2,000. That's a sunk cost. When someone offers to buy it for $9,000, they are offering you a chance for a $1,000 gain, and you should probably take it. Like continuing to bet on a bad poker hand because you've already bet a lot, how much you \"have in it\" is irrelevant.\n\nThe same logic applies to years spent at a bad job, or in a bad relationship. Additional years of misery do nothing to redeem the years of misery already incurred. Two wrongs don't make a right. Confront and make change, even when you have a lot invested in the way things are.\n\nAs relational beings, we are prone to get attached, and we are wired to resist accepting losses. Attachment to people is a healthy and essential part of being human. And still, some human relationships are worth ending.\n\nActing like you're married to your investments is a big mistake. You'll make better decisions when you see sunk costs for what they are, and leave them out of your investment decisions. You can't change the past. Choose the option that will produce the best result from this moment forward.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  See vivid contrast between consumption that reduces resources and investment that grows resources over time.\n\n  With optimistic vision and future focus, develop gut-level positive emotion about investing resources, and resistance to future-robbing consumption.\n\n  Do whatever it takes to create a surplus of cash and other resources so you can stop focusing on survival and prioritize long-term returns in your decisions.\n\n  Spend little when the returns will be little. Spend a lot when the returns will be a lot. Limit consumption, but _maximize_ investment.\n\n  Be stingy about incurring trading commissions, asset management fees, and other investing expenses that threaten to skim away a huge slice of your returns over time.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nDownload a spreadsheet and experiment with how savers outpace consumers over time at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook_.\n\n##  5 > Measure and Choose With ROI\n\nFor a few months after moving into that old Main Street building, my single employee and I spent our workdays at our folding table desks by the front door. We continued to create and sell software plugins to the user base I had stumbled upon. Sales were strong, margins were high, and overhead was low. That combination meant profits were high, too.\n\nThough my lifestyle was below middle class, I wasn't about to consume these newfound profits. My wife and I continued to drive 10-year-old cars, and put elbow grease into projects like replacing plaster with drywall in our 100-year-old house. I was quite happy with my lifestyle and didn't feel any urge to change it. I was really happy building my business and enjoying my work. I didn't feel deprived. I did accumulate cash in savings.\n\nThis raised a question: what to do with that savings? To begin, I calculated how much we'd need to set aside each year to cover our retirement. We were in our 20s, so we didn't need to save much per year to cover our future needs. The growth we could expect in our savings over time meant the annual contribution required would be small. We put that amount (a few thousand dollars) into S&P 500 index funds in Roth IRA accounts. This left a lot of savings available to do something else with.\n\nI didn't have any good ideas for what to invest that savings in. I knew I could put it in the general stock market and make a modest return over time. That sounded kind of boring to me, and I wanted to do more with my newfound enjoyment of building my own business. I had conviction I could make higher returns in business than in the stock market.\n\nI wasn't rich at that time, not even close. Because I was limiting my consumption, I didn't need to be rich to have an investable surplus. I already had a \"what to invest extra money in\" problem.\n\nI've never found much sympathy for this challenge from anyone, and you probably won't, either. As my resources have grown and the challenge of investing them well has also gotten bigger, the sympathy seems to get even smaller. Nonetheless, it is a very real challenge for investment-minded people to decide the best thing to do with investable resources. It's not easy to find superior investment opportunities. When you feel _this_ challenge, instead of the challenge to come up with some investable resources, consider it a good sign.\n\nBesides lacking investment ideas, I had another problem: I saw a lot of risk in the software business I had built. All of our customers were users of the same software package. We didn't produce or sell that software. We sold add-ons to it. If that software package was taken off the market, bought by a competitor, or otherwise affected by a big change, we could be out of business very quickly. The narrow niche we served made for easy entry and an obvious path to marketing. It also made our entire business vulnerable to any changes affecting that niche. I didn't like that. I am prone to excessive worry about downside scenarios. Having an employee depending on the stability of the business to pay his mortgage and feed his family added a new sense of weight to my paranoia. I wanted a backup plan, and I didn't have one.\n\nDuring those months of head scratching and software selling, Phil (that first employee) and I decided to setup a recording studio. We both had gone to college for audio-visual production. He graduated, I dropped out, and we both remained interested in audio and video. We figured we'd use all that office space not occupied by our two desks for our studio.\n\nI felt silly spending money to set up a recording studio in a town of 800 people. There would be little to no demand for recording services in our area. If that wasn't problem enough, I knew the recording studio business was facing big challenges from the decreasing cost and increasing quality of home recording. I distinctly remember telling Phil, \"We'll never make any money on this recording studio.\" I was right about that, but it turned out to be a worthwhile project for other reasons.\n\nI didn't see the recording studio as a solution to my need for investment opportunities. I didn't spend much money on it\u2014certainly not the money I was looking to invest. Luckily, by exploring this hobby interest, I stumbled upon a good investment opportunity.\n\nWe wanted to ensure our studio produced recordings with quality sound. That meant we'd need to ensure the acoustics of the room were top-notch. I found acoustical engineering information online, and planned the acoustical treatments for the studio. We'd need wall panels to reduce echo, soundproof coverings for the windows, and a few other things.\n\nA little price shopping quickly revealed that buying those treatments would cost much more than I wanted to pay. I was shocked at how expensive they were. So I decided to build my own. More online research gave me the info I needed to do that, but I found it difficult to source the materials I'd need. At that time, the only way to get those specialty acoustical materials was to find a building contractor who could special order them from the manufacturers. That's what I did. The materials came in inconveniently large bundle quantities, with expensive shipping via truck freight.\n\nAfter the material arrived, I came into the office on a Saturday and built the acoustical treatments for our studio. Sawdust and fabric clippings littered the floor of our software office\u2013turned\u2013recording studio. The acoustical product designs were mine, the costs were low, and I was happy with how the studio looked and sounded.\n\nI had a lot of materials left over. I sat with my legs dangling off a big bale of rockwool batts, and admired my handiwork. It still didn't make sense to me that anything should be so hard to source. We had Google and Amazon for finding and buying things. It should be as easy as a few clicks to get those materials. I couldn't think of anything stopping me from making it that way. In the weeks that followed I started ATS Acoustics, an online store selling specialty acoustical materials with easy shipping via FedEx Ground.\n\nI wasn't about to risk much money on an untested business idea. I used some resources I already had including the suppliers I'd found, my experience in e-commerce Website development, my experience in audio engineering, and the office space we occupied. These resources wouldn't show up on a financial statement or a loan application. I didn't have any credentials or degrees in these skills, but they were what I needed. I had enough to get started. I don't remember spending any money at the beginning except $10 to register the domain name atsacoustics.com. My leftover materials were the inventory we started with.\n\nI was thinking about the likely returns on anything I put at risk during this untested, startup phase. The first return I wanted was a learning outcome, to find out if this business would get traction with customers. I wanted to use the smallest amount of resources that would get that done.\n\nI was really scared. Scared that people would laugh at me if it didn't work out. Scared that I didn't have the skills or the confidence to pull this off. Scared that people wouldn't understand what made me set off in this random new direction. Scared as I was, I went forward.\n\nFortunately that business idea worked out well. People did buy acoustical materials from our online store, and some of them wanted to buy the finished products I'd made, as pictured on our Website. I figured we made them once, so we could make them again. I hired an additional employee to help, and there in the studio and software office, we built acoustic treatments to fill those first few orders.\n\nThe software business was called Aardsma Technology Services\u2014ATS for short. We named the new business ATS Acoustics because we shared the same office and phone lines. When customers called we didn't know if they wanted software or acoustic panels, so we just answered the phone \"ATS. How can I help you?\" every time.\n\nIt was a little ridiculous really. We had to wave frantically to each other to turn off the noisy power tools when the phone was ringing with a customer on the line. Our studio was covered in sawdust and fabric clippings on a daily basis. (As expected, we weren't in demand to record any bands in there.) We used the space, people, skills, and materials we had to test the return on that business before I took much financial risk on it.\n\nIt tested well, and I turned on the spigot. Over the next several years I invested nearly all of my work time and available money into growing that business. As customers placed orders and our accounting showed monthly profits, that gave me plenty of evidence that the risk was lower and the return on investment dramatically higher than what I could get anywhere else. I wasn't about to hold back from investing in a high-return opportunity like that.\n\nATS Acoustics grew little by little into a substantial business. Opportunism and some luck, combined with the resources we had, led to great results. My return on investment so far on ATS Acoustics is a few hundred times greater than what I would likely have received if I had invested my time writing more software and my savings in the stock market.\n\nAt no time during any of that did I have a clear master plan. I was making decisions as I went along, with dreadfully poor ability to predict the future. Luck and happenstance played a role. At the same time, I _was_ thinking about risk and return, and doing my best to make rational investment decisions with my resources.\n\n### Allocate Your Resources Based on Risk and Return\n\nInvestment is trading part of your resources for something that contributes to a future increase in your resources. Something that provides a return. Your resources are always limited. There will always be more investment opportunity than you have resources to invest. This is true of time, money, and every other resource.\n\nNobody has enough money to buy a big chunk of stock in every large company in the world. Nobody has enough time to study every major in college, learn every rewarding hobby, or serve every good cause. Even billionaires and people who live to be more than 100 years old run short of money and time way before they run out of opportunities to use them.\n\nI took my young daughter to a big candy store, and gave her some money to spend on one kind of candy. This place had aisles of licorice and lollipops, chocolates and jelly beans, and much more. She walked through the store, visually scanning hundreds of choices, some mouth-watering favorites, and some she scrunched up her face at and said, \"Blech.\" Though she was only 5 years old, she found a way to sort and prioritize all those options, and pick the one she'd enjoy most. In doing that, she said no to every other candy option, so she could spend her limited money on her top choice.\n\nYour job as an investor is very much like this. You must sort and prioritize your investment opportunities, say no to nearly all of them, and allocate your limited resources to the very best of them. Later on, as returns come in and your resources grow, you head back to the \"candy store\" and repeat the process of choosing the best opportunity from what's available at that time.\n\nFlavor and color preferences might be the qualities my daughter used to sort and prioritize all those investment options. Risk and return are the qualities you'll use to sort and prioritize your investment opportunities. You need a clear understanding of the likely return, and the risk involved, in every investment opportunity you consider. Armed with this information, you can compare one opportunity to another with relative objectivity.\n\n_The Investor's Task_\n\nTake the resources available to you\n\nand invest them where you will get\n\nthe best return available to you.\n\n### Use ROI to Evaluate and Compare Investments\n\nIn order to compare one investment to another, you need an apples-to-apples comparison of the return from each. Return on investment (ROI) is typically stated in percent return per year, and provides that standardized comparison.\n\n(Return per Year \/ Amount Invested) \u00d7 100\n\n= Percent Return on Investment (ROI)\n\nMany investments lend themselves to direct measurement of the return, in specific dollar amounts. For example, if you buy $10,000 of stock in Company A and receive an increase in value of $500 per year:\n\n(500 increase in value \/ 10,000 invested) \u00d7 100 = 5% ROI\n\nIf you buy $10,000 of stock in Company B and receive an increase in value of $1,000 per year:\n\n(1,000 \/ 10,000) \u00d7 100 = 10% ROI\n\nSometimes the return comes in a defined period of time that's not one year. For example, buying $10,000 of inventory that will sell in three months (0.25 years) at a $3,000 profit doesn't conveniently match an even-years time frame. We still express the ROI on that investment on a per-year basis, as an annual return. This allows straightforward comparisons between investments with different amounts of time between initial investment and the payback of returns. Everything is stated in percent return per year.\n\nTotal Return \/ Time in Years = Annualized Return\n\n(Annualized Return \/ Amount Invested) \u00d7 100 = ROI%\n\nOur inventory example:\n\n$3,000 return \/ 0.25 years = $12,000 annualized return\n\n($12,000 \/ $10,000) \u00d7 100 = 120% ROI\n\nSome investments aren't made in dollars. They might be in time, or they might be in something hard to measure in numbers. Nonetheless the same concept of ROI applies. Estimate the value of what you are investing and the value of what you will get back over time.\n\nHere are some examples of evaluating ROI.\n\n#### Choosing a Certificate of Deposit Investment\n\nOne bank offers to pay 3% interest per year on a certificate of deposit (CD), and another bank offers to pay 4% interest per year on the same kind of certificate of deposit. Because the CDs at both banks are FDIC insured, they both involve virtually no risk of loss. It's an easy decision to allocate your money to the 4% CD rather than the 3% CD, because the 4% return is higher.\n\nThis example is easy because the ROI for each CD is guaranteed by the bank, and calculated and stated for us. In many real-life investment decisions, we must estimate returns and calculate the ROI of each option ourselves.\n\n#### Deciding Which Class to Take\n\nResource allocation doesn't always involve money. If your community college is offering free classes on five different topics, at overlapping time slots, you might have a choice to invest your time in one of them, but not more than one. The classes don't pay a financial return, at least not directly. They provide knowledge, skills, and perhaps connections to new relationships.\n\nTo rationally decide which class to allocate your time to, you'll need to evaluate the benefits that each class will return in exchange for the time invested. If some classes require a greater time commitment than others, you'll need to evaluate benefit per hours of time invested, a non-financial form of ROI. The class with the highest benefit per hour would likely be the best investment to allocate your time to.\n\nBenefits like skills and relationships can't be precisely quantified the way many tangible and financial benefits can. We typically can't calculate 2.75-percent improvement in relationship per hour, or 6.3 units of additional skill per class taken. Nonetheless, we can make estimates that allow us to compare non-financial returns.\n\nPerhaps you'd look through the class outlines, and count how many job skill requirements each class would fulfill. If you estimate that an advanced class will cover eight skill requirements with 48 hours invested, and the intro class will cover just four skills, for 32 hours invested, you can make a rational decision. The return on the advanced class is one skill per 6 hours, and on the intro class is 1 skill per 8 hours invested. Even when dollars and financial securities are not involved, you can still make estimates and \"do the math\" to make a rational decision about what offers the best return.\n\n#### Deciding Which Debt to Pay Down First\n\nIf you owe credit card debt charging 20% interest, and a home mortgage charging 4% interest, and you have $1,000 extra dollars this month, which debt should you pay extra on? Paying $1,000 extra on the credit card saves $200 interest per year. Paying $1,000 extra on the home mortgage saves $40 interest per year (probably less due to the home mortgage interest tax deduction). The return on paying down the credit card debt is greater, so that's the rational choice.\n\n#### Leasing vs. Buying\n\nA business owner of mine asked about leasing versus buying some computer servers. He expressed a desire to conserve cash and be careful not to spend too much. I agreed with his conservative instinct and suggested we analyze the lease versus buy decision based on the ROI of each option.\n\nAs I recall, the terms of the lease were three years at $260 a month to lease a server that sells new for $7,000. At the end of the three-year lease, he had the option to buy the equipment for $1,500 and keep it. The three-year lease is, in effect, a way to borrow $7,000 from the server manufacturer. Here's how we broke down the ROI.\n\nTotal lease payments (36 \u00d7 $260) | $9,360\n\n---|---\n\nBuyout at end of lease. | $1,500\n\nTotal cost to acquire 1 server via lease ($9,360 + $1,500) | $10,860\n\nTotal cost to acquire 1 server via up-front purchase. | $7,000\n\nAdditional cost of lease vs. up-front purchase. ($10,860 \u2013 $7,000) | $3,860\n\nAdditional cost of lease per year. ($3,860 \/ 3 years) | $1,287\n\nEffective \"interest rate\" on the $7,000 borrowed. ($1,287 \/ $7,000) | 18%\n\nThat 18% cost means the lease would have a negative 18% ROI. That gave us the number we needed to ask the next question: Did he have access to $7,000 at a cost less than 18% per year? Could he borrow at less than 18% interest per year? Could he sell an investment that's earning less than 18% per year to buy the servers with cash? He had multiple ways to obtain the cash to buy the servers at a cost much lower than 18% per year.\n\nSometimes life and business present more complex scenarios that require additional logical and mathematical steps to properly evaluate the ROI. My goal here isn't to replicate what business textbooks and other resources teach. It's to emphasize that mathematical evaluation of the return on each investment opportunity enables rational decision-making.\n\nEven if math is not your thing, don't miss the concept. Lots of investment opportunities compete for your resources. The opportunities offering the highest return, after accounting for risk, should win the competition. Rationally evaluate the ROI of each investment opportunity. Allocate your resources to the opportunities where you expect the highest return.\n\n### What's the Risk of Loss?\n\nAll investments involve risk and uncertainty, and thus the future return of any investment cannot be known for sure.\n\nYou don't know for sure what Wal-Mart's profits will be next year. You don't know for sure that degree will lead to a high-paying job, those long hours will get you the promotion, or that business you are starting will succeed.\n\nWith all investments, there's a risk you will receive less return than you are expecting. You might lose part of the amount you invested (a negative ROI), or even take a total loss.\n\nSome investments are much riskier than others. You are much less likely to lose money investing in United States Treasury bonds than you are in an untested startup business. Rational investors accept a lower rate of return on lower-risk investments, and require a higher rate of return on higher-risk investments. For example, investors are currently willing to invest in 10-year Treasury bonds for about 2% ROI, and investors typically expect 20% ROI or more when investing in startup companies.\n\nRisk and return are the primary qualities by which you will sort and prioritize your investment opportunities.\n\n### Factor Risk Into Expected Return\n\nThe concept of expected return allows you to compare the returns of investments with different levels of risk. Here's a way to calculate that, in a success-of-failure scenario.\n\n(Probability of Success \u00d7 Return if Success) +\n\n(Probability of Failure \u00d7 Return if Failure) = Expected Return\n\nFor example, an investment in a small pharmaceutical company with one big drug about to break (or fail) might look like this. You might expect a return of 50% if all goes well and the FDA approves the drug and a total loss on the investment if it turns out the drug is unsafe. You estimate the odds of success at 75% and the odds of failure at 25%. You can afford to lose your investment in this obviously risky company. What return can you expect from this investment, taking into account those risks?\n\nWe'll convert percentages to decimals for the math. Here it is:\n\n(0.75 chance of success \u00d7 0.50 return if success) +\n\n(0.25 chance of failure * \u20131.00 return if failure)\n\n= 0.125 or 12.5% expected return\n\nThis math applies to a simple success-or-failure case. It's suitable for most investment decisions I come across in normal life and business. More complex math applies to situations where there are probabilities of partial success, etc. For most of us in practice, the more complex the math required to analyze the decision, the greater odds of making an irrational decision.\n\nMany times you will need to make reasonable estimates of these risk and return values, using your best judgment of the situation. If someone could tell you the precise risk and precise return in advance, investment decisions would all be no-brainers. The in-depth knowledge to assess risk and return better than others is a big part of what makes a good investor.\n\n### Make Sure You Live to Play Another Day\n\nIf the risk is high, and the return is low, it should be a no brainer to pass on such an investment \"opportunity.\"\n\nAdditionally, some investments are too risky to justify making, even when the expected return is high.\n\nFor example, some venture capital investments in startup businesses offer a risk\/return profile something like a 10% chance of a 2,000% return, and a 90% chance of total loss (\u2013100% return). The expected return is 110%.\n\nThat's an excellent return, if you can tolerate the risk. I'd bet a small percentage of my assets on a single investment like that, and I do sometimes. To bet _all_ my assets on a single investment like that would be foolish. Doing so would mean a 10% chance of increasing my assets by 2,000%, and a 90% chance of financial ruin.\n\nPersonally, I never want to make a bet I can't afford to lose. If an investment goes poorly, or completely bust, I always want to have ample resources left to wake up the next day and try again. Sometimes that means passing up an appealing expected return because it would require betting too large a piece of my farm, so to speak.\n\nI've made some big bets on my own businesses, but I've never found it necessary to bet anything I couldn't afford to lose. Occasionally life does present the need to go \"all in\" on a business or investment in an attempt to avoid losing it. Whenever possible, I try to play my cards in a way that doesn't put me in that undesirable scenario.\n\n### All Your Resources Are in the Same Pool\n\nIn Chapter 2 we talked about maximizing returns by looking broadly at all kinds of resources we can invest, not just cash. In addition to that, we make better investment decisions when we view all our resources as one pool, rather than splitting them into separate decision compartments.\n\nConsider this example of an investment mistake. In the morning, a fictional investor named Bob looked at his retirement account, and rationally evaluated which stock or bond to invest in. He compared half a dozen alternatives, and chose the investment with the best return. That was a stock that he estimated he could expect a 7% ROI from. He invested $10,000 in it, and took a break for lunch.\n\nIn the afternoon, Bob paid his bills. He made the minimum payment on a credit card carrying a $5,000 balance at 14% interest, and paid $1,000 extra on a credit card carrying a $5,000 balance at 20% interest.\n\nBob made a rational decision about which stock or bond to invest his retirement money in (the best he could find), and a rational decision about which credit card to pay down (the one charging more interest). But by treating the morning's retirement investment decision as separate from the afternoon's debt paydown decision, he failed to allocate his resources to his best available return. Assuming no withdrawal penalty or tax consequences, his best available return on the $10,000 he invested in retirement that morning was to pay off both the 20% and the 14% debt. That would save a lot more money than the 7% he'd earn from the stock investment.\n\nWhen allocating your available resources, there should only be one master list of opportunities, sorted by return. Creating separate groups of opportunities and choosing within them leads to errors like Bob made.\n\nHere's another example. Say you own two businesses, both with growth potential. You have $10,000 to invest. You determine that your first business will provide a 30% ROI on that $10,000 if you invest it there, and the second business will provide a 15% ROI. Naturally, you'd choose to invest the $10,000 in the first business. Looking at all your resources in one pool goes further than that. If there is additional opportunity to invest in the first business at 30% ROI, do you have any resources earning less than 30% that you can reallocate to the first business? If so, and the risk of loss in the first business is acceptable, it probably makes sense to make that reallocation. If circumstances permit, it might even be rational to sell the second business, and invest the proceeds in the first business.\n\nAlternately, if the first business has all the resources it needs, do you have any resources earning less than 15% that you can reallocate to the second business? Stocks, bonds, savings accounts, or property you could sell?\n\nIt's all one pool. If necessary, reallocate your resources from lower-returning to higher-returning investment opportunities.\n\nIt doesn't make sense to pay 15% interest on a business loan while earning 3% on a CD at the bank. It doesn't make sense to pass up $30\/ hour overtime at work and then spend an hour mowing your own lawn to save $20 (unless you want to pay $10 for an hour of exercise and fresh air).\n\nSometimes there are risk differences between investment opportunities, tax consequences for moving resources from one investment to another, regulatory restrictions like early withdrawal penalties, or other barriers to reallocating assets. For these reasons, it may not be practical to move resources every time a higher return opportunity becomes available. And diversification probably means you won't put all your resources on your single highest-returning investment.\n\nDon't break up your resources into separate compartments unless there are good reasons to do that. Evaluate your investment opportunities all across the board, and when possible, reallocate resources from low-return to high-return opportunities, even if you might normally think of those resources as belonging to two separate parts of your life. Allocate resources _between_ categories, not just _within_ them.\n\n### Count Taxes and Inflation When Comparing Financial Returns\n\nUnlike many investments of time and other resources, investments involving money are usually affected by taxes and inflation. The purpose of financial investment is to grow your resources. Your resources grow by the amount that's left over _after_ taxes and inflation. If you compare returns without adjusting for taxes and inflation, you might make investment mistakes.\n\nFor example, if you have a choice between purchasing an investment in your Roth IRA that yields 6%, or loaning money to your friend's business for 7% interest, you must consider the after-tax returns to make an accurate decision. Investments in a Roth IRA grow tax free, so your 6% return will still be a 6% return after taxes. Interest income on the business loan you made will likely be taxed at ordinary income tax rates, currently up to about 40%. That 40% tax would change your 7% return into a 4.2% after-tax return. All of a sudden putting the money into your Roth IRA doesn't look so bad. It's as if some of the candy in the candy store is subject to sales tax, and some isn't.\n\nSimilarly, say I want to attend a seminar for my training and development, and I have two choices, each costing $1,000. One seminar qualifies as a business expense, and one would be a personal expense. The expense for the business seminar would reduce my business income, and thus reduce my taxes. The personal seminar would cost $1,000 after tax, but the business seminar would cost me only about $600 after the $400 reduction in my income tax bill is accounted for.\n\nThe type and timing of taxes is also impactful. Currently capital gains taxes on investments aren't due until the investments are sold. If you hold them for 50 years, you can delay that tax bill for a very long time, and earn additional returns in the meantime on money that would have gone to taxes. Also, currently in the United States, higher tax rates apply to gains on investments held for less than a year than on those held for a year or more. The rules tend to change. Learn how they affect your investment decisions.\n\nInflation also has an effect. We tend to think of dollars as fixed value things, and that's adequate for everyday life. When investing and receiving dollars over long times spans, we need to account for the change in their value over time. As is the case with all other resources, the value of currency, including dollars, is variable. Central banks try to maintain a positive rate of inflation of about 2 percent per year, which means the value of a dollar\u2014what you can buy with it\u2014typically goes down about 2 percent per year.\n\nInflation changes the value of money over time, and that means it affects the return on investments that pay back in dollars after a period of time. Most financial investments fall into this category, and are affected by inflation.\n\nFor example, if you invest $10,000 in stocks, and 20 years later sell those stocks for $30,000, your total return before inflation was 200%. If during that time inflation averaged 2% per year, it would take about $1.50 at the end of that 20-year period to buy what $1.00 would buy at the beginning. The real return, after inflation, is 200% divided by 1.5, which equals 133%.\n\nInflation works against lenders and most other types of investments, but it works in favor of borrowers. When you borrow money in today's dollars, and pay it back in the future with the future's dollars, inflation means the dollars you paid back with are worth less than the dollars you borrowed. Part of the interest rate you pay when you borrow money goes to cover inflation, which is not a real cost to you, and not a real profit for the lender. The remaining interest is your true cost of borrowing. For example if you borrow money at 4% interest, and inflation is 2% per year, you true cost of borrowing is 2%, not 4%.\n\nThe combined effect of taxes and inflation determine your actual return on investment, and your actual cost of borrowing. Under current rules, home mortgage interest and interest expense within a business are typically tax deductible. If my interest rate is 4%, my marginal tax rate (including state taxes) is 50%, and inflation is 2%, my true cost for borrowing money through my home mortgage is 0 (4% interest \u00d7 50% tax savings = 2% minus 2% inflation = 0%). The 50% tax savings reduces my rate to 2%, and 2% inflation reduces the real rate I'm paying to 0.\n\nJust as inflation reduces the real cost of borrowing, it also reduces the real return on lending. When you receive interest on a bond, or an increase in the dollar value of a stock, your real return, the increase in purchasing power of your resources, is _after_ inflation.\n\nAgain, I won't try to replicate the in-depth study of these topics made in textbooks and online learning resources. Just remember to consider the effects of taxes and inflation on all your investment returns.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Evaluate and understand the ROI you can realistically expect from every investment opportunity.\n\n  Include the risk of loss in your evaluation of ROI, and compare apples to apples based on expected return.\n\n  Avoid risking more than you can afford to lose on a single investment.\n\n  Sort and prioritize your investment opportunities with the highest expected returns at the top of the list.\n\n  See all your resources as part of one large pool, and make one large list of opportunities so you can allocate resources across and between areas of your life and\/or work.\n\n  As much as is practical, allocate your resources to the highest-ROI investments at the top of the list, and say no to all other opportunities.\n\n  Include the effects of taxes and inflation in your evaluation of ROI.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nFind links for further study on analyzing ROI at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 6 > Invest in Your Investment Advantages\n\nOn my first day of self-employment, when I sat down at my computer in that creepy old basement, I had some investment advantages. Though I felt foolish for starting in such a jerry-rigged fashion, and quite uncertain about the future, I had in me more advantages than I knew.\n\nWhen I was 7 years old, my father brought a computer home from a university project. He showed me how to set it up and explained some things about it. Its homemade case looked like a shiny aluminum box. This was before the Internet, before Microsoft Windows, before graphical displays and color monitors. It had the aluminum box, the text-only terminal monitor, and a keyboard. I was fascinated and curious.\n\nThe only programming that computer could understand was assembly language, direct instructions given to the CPU in short abbreviations and hexadecimal codes. So I began to learn how computers worked at the lowest level. There was no manual, no help screen, and no Google. I had whatever my dad told me about it, and whatever I could figure out. I had a lot of time on my hands for figuring out. I learned how CPUs talk to RAM, how registers work, and other technical nuts and bolts. I didn't get very far, but already my advantage was growing. I was developing skill foundations that most other 7-, 8-, and 9-year-old kids didn't have. It wasn't just the computer skills. I was also learning to manage the frustration of not knowing the answer yet, to generate my own creative ideas, and to solve confusing problems without a manual or someone to lead the way.\n\nWhen I was about 10 years old, my dad brought home another computer from work. This was an IBM 8086. It had a 10 MB hard drive that was about the size of a microwave, and Microsoft DOS. My dad also brought me two manuals: one for the computer, and one for Microsoft BASIC, an early computer programming language.\n\nAt the time I had one older and four younger siblings. My dear mother had her hands full and then some. My dad had a career and projects of his own. Partly by choice, partly by necessity, I was a lonely kid with a lot of time to fill. My computer gave me something challenging and intriguing to fill that time with.\n\nOver the next eight years I spent thousands of hours learning how to write code. During that time computers became more common in homes, and improved to include color monitors and the Windows operating system. I outgrew Microsoft BASIC, and learned to code in C and C++. I didn't have much social life, or many healthy relationships, and those were not good things for me. At the same time, I was getting better and better at those computer skills. It wasn't genius that gave me that advantage, it was countless hours of practice, debugging, and repetition. I didn't know it, but I was investing all that time developing what would become one of my biggest investment advantages.\n\nUsing an advantage is the only reliable way to achieve above-average investment returns. I had some advantages, and I'm quite sure you do, too. Like me, you might not be aware of some of your advantages, or readily see how to use them to increase your returns. I want to encourage you to explore in ways that uncover and engage your advantages.\n\nWhen I was 18 and finished with high school, I found a job writing software for a small business. This was another opportunity to expand my skills. It was the height of the dotcom bubble, and my small employer had big dreams of riding that wave. Like most of the dotcoms, it didn't work out. I learned some important things about realistic business models and sound management practices while watching that go painfully awry.\n\nI used the money I saved during that year to start college at Moody Bible Institute. I planned to study radio and television broadcasting. As a new freshman in big-city Chicago, I found a lot to take in. I don't remember much from the first few weeks of college except unlimited cafeteria food, a steady stream of classes and homework, and a lot of pretty girls I didn't have the nerve to talk to.\n\nOnce I settled in a bit, I knew I'd need a job to make ends meet. One day in chapel we heard a presentation about a new software system the students would be required to use. Moody placed great value on students doing volunteer work in the community. This new Web-based system would be our way to report that we had met the requirement each week.\n\nThe system looked homegrown, so I guessed somebody around campus was developing software. I was interested. I still didn't understand the investment advantage I had developed in my thousands of solitary, nerdy hours. I just knew I needed money for school. Maybe I was also looking for something safe and familiar in the strange new world of college life.\n\nThat day, after classes, I found Moody's IT department. The corporate-looking glass doors said \"INFORMATION SYSTEMS\" and had a keypad for security. I had a moment of self-doubt, but it was too late to turn back. The receptionist said, \"Can I help you?\" and I said, \"Yes, um, I'm a student here and a programmer and I'm wondering if you have any jobs for programmers.\" Next thing I knew I was in the VP of information systems' office. I didn't even have time to panic appropriately. He asked me what programming languages I knew. Feeling uncertain and inadequate, I defaulted to the truth: \"I haven't done much, just assembler and BASIC and C and some SQL.\" Luckily for me, that VP was a kind man, and their entire enterprise ran on a C-based mainframe system. He offered me a job that day.\n\nSo after classes every day I went to work writing software for my college. The Internet was becoming a thing, and they wanted me to work on Web-based software that would work together with their mainframe system, what we call cloud computing now. I didn't know anything about Web-based software, so after work I walked to a bookstore in downtown Chicago and bought a book about it. Learning new programming skills from a book was a familiar and comforting path. I think I read most of that book that night in my dorm room.\n\nMy new bosses were wonderful people and healthy leaders. With their warm support I created a Web-based fundraising management system used by their nationwide network of radio stations. I learned more software skills, and more than that I learned about good business management, leadership, and what it's like to know you are believed in.\n\nWhat have your life experiences taught you, that you might put to good use in your activities? We each have unique experiences that lead to unique advantages.\n\nFollowing that project, I was assigned to create an enterprise-wide Web-based budget visibility system that every manager in the Moody organization would use. It was a high priority of the school's president, and got me working with people way above my pay grade. The school's top accounting people answered all my questions about the current accounting system, and accounting in general. I had a lot of questions. I gave them a real-time budget management system. They gave me an education in financial accounting, and a paycheck. We were both thrilled.\n\nA few years later, when I sat down for my first day of creepy basement self-employment, I had no degree in computer science. I had no degree in anything. I didn't have much money, family connections, or a lot of other things. I did carry with me some important advantages. I had deep knowledge of computer programming. I was well familiar with solving problems through my own initiative and creativity. Thanks to my great bosses at Moody I had begun to understand accounting, management, leadership, and business.\n\nMy advantage of advanced computer programming skills enabled me to trade my time for money at a high hourly rate. Even better, I could use those skills plus some business insight to create products and earn much more than an hourly rate. I didn't have much of an advantage at investing in stocks, or doing physical labor, or a bunch of other things. I invested my resources where I did have an advantage: in a software-related business.\n\n### Investment Advantages Increase Your ROI\n\nMaybe you have advantages that are similar to mine, or maybe your learning and circumstances offer a very different set of advantages. What resource or combination of resources do you possess that can increase the ROI on your investment of other resources?\n\nYears of training as a heart surgeon allow that surgeon to earn a higher return on time spent doing heart surgery than she could earn without that training.\n\nA complete kit of wrenches and sockets is an investment advantage that will increase the return on time spent repairing cars.\n\nA strong network of relationships in a community of venture capital investors is a resource that allows an investor to access more and better deals and thereby receive a higher ROI from venture capital investing than he would without those relationships.\n\nKnowledge from thousands of hours spent studying large public companies is an advantage that might allow an investor to make better stock purchasing decisions and thereby receive a higher ROI investing in those companies than he or she would without that deep knowledge.\n\nAccess to an employer-matched and tax-advantaged 401(k) retirement account is an advantage that allows many workers to earn a higher return on their retirement savings than they could without access to that 401(k) plan.\n\nA well-developed personal ability to maintain rational judgment during times of emotional stress is an advantage that might enable superior returns from investment opportunities such as a career in leadership, emergency aid work, or financial investment during troubled economic times.\n\nIn Chapter 4 I argued that your job as an investor is to take your available resources and invest them where you will get the best return. Investing your resources where you have the greatest investment advantages will likely lead to your best returns.\n\nThe heart surgeon is not likely to get her best returns doing carpentry. The auto mechanic is not likely to get his best returns working without his tools. The salaried worker is not likely to get his or her best returns by skipping the employer-matched 401(k) contribution.\n\nOur investment advantages and our best ROI opportunities often go hand in hand. To maximize your investment results, you must know and develop your investment advantages.\n\nWe all have advantages, and we all have resources. We aren't all investing our resources in the opportunities where we have the greatest advantage.\n\n### Competitive Advantages Enable Above-Average ROI\n\nAll investment advantages increase returns, but not all investment advantages lead to above-average returns. Competitive advantages do that. Competitive advantages are investment advantages _over other investors_ in the same type of opportunity.\n\nLearning how to do plumbing might raise a worker's hourly wage, but only doing plumbing _better than most other plumbers_ will allow that worker to earn above-average returns doing plumbing.\n\nLearning how to analyze corporate bonds might raise an investor's returns, but only analyzing corporate bonds _better than most other analysts_ will allow that investor to earn above-average returns investing in bonds.\n\nCompetitive advantages make consistently above-average returns possible.\n\nCompetitive advantages are important in business and financial investment activities in free markets. With free and equal access, investors quickly jump on investments that provide above-average returns. As a result, the above-average opportunity is smoothed away by supply and demand.\n\nFor example, if a publicly traded company shows superior growth and earnings prospects, investors will immediately bid up the price of the company's stock, until the likely return on that investment is in line with the average returns from most other stocks. Information is released to all investors at the same moment, many smart people analyze it, and there's no easy way to have an advantage. Supply and demand bring returns back to the average.\n\nThe same happens in private business. If a particular town is short on donut shops, a donut-loving entrepreneur might see an advantage in starting a donut shop there. For a while, his new shop would likely experience above-average returns as the donut-deprived local population keeps the cash register ringing. Supply, demand, and free markets mean another entrepreneur is likely to hear all those cha-ching sounds and start an additional donut shop across town. This will continue, until opening a new donut shop there no longer promises above-average returns, and the advantage will be gone, not just for the last entrepreneur who opened a shop there, but for the first one, too.\n\nIf one investor has a competitive advantage over most others, he or she can receive consistently above-average returns, even in free and efficient markets. For example, if an investor does deep research to understand and correctly interpret the growth prospects of a publicly traded company before other investors catch on, that investor can get in early and earn above-average returns. This is easier said than done, because predicting the future is risky business, and there's a lot of really smart competition out there doing the same thing. Nonetheless, it is possible to generate a competitive advantage in this way.\n\nIf one donut shop has a secret family recipe for undeniably tastier donuts, they may be able to sustain more cha-ching at the cash register, despite their competitors' best efforts to lure customers away. Because competitors quickly and easily imitate most practices that result in improved business, it's not easy to sustain a competitive advantage. Keeping a secret recipe a secret is easier said than done. When businesses do achieve and sustain competitive advantages, the returns can be lucrative. When they don't, there's no basis to expect an above-average return.\n\nMany people participate in financial or business markets looking for superior returns, but do so without developing or applying a competitive advantage. This is a recipe for disappointment. Markets themselves don't create advantages for you over other participants in those markets. The very fact that they are free markets means you have no unmerited advantage. You gotta earn it.\n\nThough not easy, it is absolutely possible to have an advantage in a free and efficient market. To do so, you must be willing or able to do different things than most other participants in those markets. This in turn, means you must possess combinations of resources that they don't have. These could be skills, relationships, emotional stability, patents, tools, or many other types of resources.\n\nAs investors in open markets, the burden is on us to develop advantages and bring them to the table. If we don't do that, we have no right, or reason, to expect above-average returns.\n\n### Invest Your Resources to Develop Investment Advantages\n\nInvest resources in developing genuine advantages. This will increase the ROI you can earn on your other investments, and dramatically improve your long-term results.\n\nYour investment advantages are likely different than mine. They may include your expertise, your personality, your relationships, and others. Maybe you are worried you don't have any significant investment advantages. Don't despair. It's possible that like me, you have more than you give yourself credit for. And most investment advantages aren't handed out at birth, leaving the unlucky out in the cold.\n\nYou may not have a lot investment advantages, but you certainly have resources that you can trade for them. You can trade your time and money to learn a skill. You can trade your time and employ your relational skills to build genuine relationships that create investment advantages for you and the other party. You can trade your money for tools. You can even trade your time, energy, and money for training and development experiences that change you, as a person, and give you new advantages as a leader, an artist, a financial investor, or a philanthropic world-changer.\n\nInvest your existing resources to gain new resources that give you an investment advantage. Develop investment advantages, on purpose. Like a woodcutter who spends part of his time resource to sharpen his axe, these can be extremely high-ROI investments.\n\nThe next seven chapters of this book will each look at one broadly applicable investment advantage that you can develop and use.\n\n### Watch Out for Advantage Illusions\n\nIronically, what comes to mind most readily when we think of investing\u2014stocks, bonds, commodities, and other things traded on financial markets\u2014are some of the hardest investments to have an advantage in. As a passive investor who buys stock in a company, but does not participate in management, set company strategy, or otherwise personally get involved, most of your personal resources are excluded from providing any benefit. For example, a trustworthy and kind person surely has an advantage over a dishonest and abusive person in many endeavors, but they each will receive the same return on the same stock purchase.\n\nTo achieve superior returns in major financial markets, you must select better securities than most other investors, or you must choose the timing of buying and\/or selling better than most other investors. Neither one is easy to do, because you must compete against a large number of very smart and well-resourced professional traders and investors. There are some ways to beat them, but it's not as easy as it may seem.\n\nA tip about a hot stock is not an advantage. If someone had truly valuable information to tip you off with, it would probably be illegal insider trading to act on it.\n\nNews stories about what a big company is doing, public information on an industry trend, or simple facts about a complex business are not advantages. Seeing a trend everyone else sees is not an advantage. If you don't have significant information other investors don't have, or have a superior way to analyze that information, then the information you have is not an advantage in public financial markets.\n\nIt's virtually impossible to predict the short-term movements of markets. It's extremely unlikely that you can determine when is a good time to get in or get out. For most of us, looking at charts and technical market measures will not bring superior insights to those generated in milliseconds by Wall Street's computers. The investment required to generate an advantage here is far more than a weekend warrior reading financial news or studying charts. Investors who consistently outperform in public markets tend to do things like spend most of their waking hours reading company financial statements and dry annual reports. This is intense work; there's nothing easy about it.\n\nStarting a business doing something you enjoy is not an investment advantage, but it might be a good reason to identify or develop an actual advantage in that business.\n\nAccess to the same foreclosed real estate listings as everyone else is not an advantage, but training on home-inspection techniques and personally examining the properties more thoroughly than other bidders probably would be. Generalize the concept in this example to the arenas you invest in. What can you do to develop an honest-to-goodness advantage?\n\nIt's okay to wade into an area for the purpose of learning and developing an advantage. Just do it with the smallest amount of resource investment that will accomplish your learning goals. Make your experimental investments small ones.\n\nMost of the advantages I can think of take serious time, energy, and sometimes money to develop. In a free and competitive society, there are no easy ways to get ahead. Admitting you don't have all the advantages you wish you had can be disappointing. The good news is there are hard ways to get ahead that work very well. The sooner you focus on areas where you can develop a genuine advantage, the better.\n\n### When Low Returns Are Your Best Opportunity, Accept Low Returns\n\nAn investment advantage increases your return, and a competitive advantage can lead to above-average returns. Sometimes, you won't have a strong enough advantage to get high returns from a given resource, or even any advantage at all to apply to it.\n\nFor example, without specialized skills, most workers won't have an advantage that allows them to earn high wages for their time. In this case the investor's task is still the same: to take the available resources (in this case time) and invest them where they will get the highest available return (perhaps an entry level job).\n\nWithout extensive study and practice of financial investment (maybe even with such study) most of us won't have an advantage that allows us to earn above-average returns on our stock and bond investments. In this case, the best investment for the available resources (money) might be a stock index fund that provides almost exactly average returns. Average returns are much better than putting that money under a mattress and making zero.\n\nIf you don't have a way to get more than the going rate for your rental property, rent it for the going rate. Earn that return while you work on generating an advantage you can apply to your rental house, or sell that house and move those resources to an investment where you do have an advantage.\n\nLow returns still compound to a great deal over time. Don't refuse to make base hits because you only want home runs. Make a sober assessment of your investment advantages, and put your available resources on your best available opportunities. At the same time, build your future by investing in developing skills, experience, connections, personal character, reputation, and other investment advantages.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Take a broad inventory of all your resources and look for ways to combine them to create investment advantages.\n\n  Seek opportunities to invest your resources where you can apply your advantages and receive your best available returns as a result.\n\n  Look for advantages in private opportunities with personal involvement as an alternative to passive investments through major financial markets, where advantages are limited and competition is fierce.\n\n  Rely only on advantages that are based on your willingness or ability to do things most competing investors can't or won't.\n\n  When the best return you can get from a resource is a low or average return, accept that return and invest it, rather than earning zero.\n\n  Invest resources in developing investment advantages that will increase your future returns.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nBrowse and contribute to a big list of investment advantage ideas, take a thought quiz on discovering your investing advantages, and share your thoughts at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 7 > Build Yourself and Your Network\n\nAs my businesses grew, cracks started showing up in me.\n\nI sat on the curb outside my business, watching the ambulance pull away. My heart was still beating fast. We had to call 911 to deal with a medical and\/or psychological emergency in an employee whose life and health were in chaos. It wasn't caused by work, but it sure affected work. That was way more drama than I wanted for one day, or any day. I felt so stupid. That employee was the worst hire I'd ever made, and I knew it. Why didn't I listen to my own better judgment in the interview process? By making bad hires like that I hurt my businesses financially, and I added stress all around me.\n\nOn another day I walked back to my office feeling rattled and defeated. I'd gone into the factory to ask a severely underperforming worker to focus on work and pick up the pace. I brought up the issue timidly, and when he seemed to be getting angry I just walked away. I'd planned to be clear and say, \"I need you to meet these performance standards in order to continue to have at job our company.\" Instead I avoided the confrontation that needed to happen. By failing to confront unacceptable performance, I cost my businesses money every day. Why didn't I stick to my guns?\n\nOn many days, after everyone else had gone home for the day, I'd sit in my office staring at the charts showing upward trends in sales, employee count, product offerings, and profits. Instead of simple satisfaction and gratitude, I felt anxiety that somehow this whole enterprise was going to come crashing down. I didn't feel qualified. My anxiety hurt my quality of life, and because of it, I didn't take the risks that would have maximized the growth of my businesses. Why didn't I have the confidence to take on my competitors, win, and feel good about it?\n\nThere's one answer to all these questions: My character as a person had cracks and gaps. I hadn't developed the core abilities I needed, as a person, to make the decisions and take the actions that would improve my quality of life and my investment returns. I was smart enough, and strategic enough, but my personal, emotional, relational development was a problem.\n\nAt the same time, I had another problem: I didn't have relationships with mentors and peers to reach out to when my own resources and my own character were not enough. I hadn't developed connections to a network of personal and professional supports. I was far too isolated to be healthy and live up to my potential. The solitary computer programmer didn't have what it took to be an effective CEO. I was in trouble.\n\nThese cracks and gaps in me, and my lack of relational network, were disadvantages that hurt my investment returns.\n\nOne Saturday I started reading a book about healthy, connected relationships. The book included stories from a personal development event for business leaders. I was intrigued, and I Googled the event to see if it still existed. It did, and there was one coming up in two weeks on the other side of the country. I went.\n\nI'd never been to anything like this. I'd never even traveled by airline before. At the week-long event I learned about character, emotional intelligence, leadership, and personal growth. We interacted in small groups all week long. We learned about how we came across to the rest of our group, and how we could grow. This week cracked the door open to a whole world of growth and development I'd never known before.\n\nI became a voracious consumer of growth resources. Once a month I flew from Illinois to California for the Leadership Coaching Program. I found a great psychotherapist and went consistently. I hired business coaches and talked to them weekly. I learned about myself, and better ways of leading. Over years, my isolation began to diminish, and the cracks and gaps in my character began to fill in. As a result, my businesses reached new levels of growth and profitability.\n\nThe growth of my businesses would have been stunted if I hadn't worked on myself. The dysfunctions of the leader become the dysfunctions of the organization. I was the bottleneck, and when I grew, the businesses grew. I spent a lot of money and a lot of time on my growth, and I made that money back 100 times over in increased business results.\n\nI invested in myself, and built into me the character to face the demands of the roles I was filling. In addition to improving my quality of life and the quality of my relationships, I grew into a person and a leader that made me one of my own greatest investment advantages. I am still investing heavily in my own growth because I love to grow, and the ROI is off the charts.\n\n### Your Character as a Person Affects Everything Else\n\nAs an investor your job is to decide how resources will be used. Your health and maturity as a person affect every decision you make. Rational judgment during emotional stress, discernment of integrity and motives in others, perseverance during difficulty, the ability to form trusting relationships, and many more abilities flow from personal character. These personal abilities underlie successful investing.\n\nIt's not enough to be smart and strategic. No matter how much you know, a person (you) still has to do it. A person has to maintain judgment and resist clicking the \"sell\" button when markets are shaken. A person has to manage fear and show up at the firing meeting with a difficult employee who needs to go. A person has to manage envy and wait patiently while others overindulge in debt-fueled consumption. A person has to establish connections and build trust with key business partners. Smart people who know better still make a lot of bad investment decisions.\n\nYour personal character, what you are capable of as a person, is a central resource, and a potentially powerful advantage. It's easy to access the same financial news articles as everyone else. It's not easy to react in mature and balanced ways to emotionally provocative economic events. It's easy to contact sources to raise capital for your business. It's not easy to build a trusted, credible connection that wins the deal. When your development as a person enables you to do difficult things others can't or won't, you have an advantage that's hard to imitate.\n\nYou can be your own biggest advantage.\n\n### Invest in Yourself, on Purpose\n\nSignificant personal growth doesn't happen automatically through the routine of daily life and work. Even dramatic life events don't usually change a person's core character. It takes an intentional, active practice of investing in yourself to raise your personal capabilities to new levels.\n\nAs an adult, you are responsible for arranging for your own growth and development. You must be the CEO of your own growth. Nobody is else going to take that role in your life, nor should they.\n\nPersonal growth happens through relationships. Intentionally pursue relationships with people who are for you, personally and professionally, who take a no-judgment approach, and who tell you the truth without sugar-coating. The best relationships for your growth and development are no-shame, no\u2013B.S. zones.\n\nIt usually takes money for therapy sessions, seminar registrations, plane tickets, coaching fees, and similar resources to engage in the personal growth process. It certainly will take a big investment of your time. Growing yourself might be the highest-ROI investment you can make.\n\n### Take Initiative to Engage in Growth\n\nA life coach isn't going to knock on your door and invite you to start working with her to take your career up a notch. The organizers of a workshop focused on just the skills you need probably don't know you're the perfect attendee to market to. Good mentors are typically busy, successful, and in demand. They probably won't come looking for you.\n\nWhen we are very young, we have a right to expect our caregivers to take initiative to ensure we get the growth and development experiences we need. By the time we reach adulthood, that right has fully expired. Healthy development requires us to transition to taking that initiative on our own behalf. Some of us struggle to make this transition, and can let time go by waiting for opportunities and growth resources to come to us. We all need to get out of our passivity, and get active as lifelong leaders of our own growth and development.\n\nHere are some practical ways to do this that have been fruitful for me.\n\n  Reach out to people you admire. Make contact with authors, business leaders, or trailblazers in your areas of interest. Ask for time with people who embody personal and professional characteristics you aspire to. These may be prominent figures, or relatively unnoticed individuals behind the scenes. It takes courage to take the initiative and ask for a connection. In my experience, successful and admirable people are almost always motivated to pay it forward and build into others who are earlier on the path. Many people \"above my pay grade\" have generously shared of themselves with me. Be brave and make the ask. Sometimes this will involve you paying for a coaching or consulting relationship. I've found this works well and is worth it.\n\n  Read. You can learn a great deal from the stories and insights others share in books and articles. Learn about the experiences of others doing what you want to do, or struggling with what holds you back. This is not a substitute for relational growth experiences, but it is a valuable complement.\n\n  Engage with groups of peers. Most industries and interests have affinity groups or cohorts of various kinds that you can join. Support groups exist in most cities focused on addictions, emotional struggles, or difficult life events. Take the initiative to find and explore the resources that fit your need. Evaluate the quality and suitability of those resources for you. \"Together\" is a powerful force. Get around people who value growth, and your growth will benefit.\n\n  Look for conferences, workshops, and similar events that are relevant to your growth goals. Travel a long distance if you need to. Take the initiative and make the investment. In addition to valuable content, attending events also provides opportunity for new relational connections, and focuses your time and attention on the forward motion you want.\n\n  Invest in a few best-friend relationships. Everyone needs an A-team of two to five close friends. If you have some acquaintances that you see potential for a deeper relationship with, take the initiative to invite them to coffee more often. Courageously lead the conversation to what's really important in your life, which probably means risky and vulnerable topics. Most people need this just as much as you do, and will respond positively even though they might not take the initiative. Over months and years of consistent investment, those relationships can grow to provide remarkable mutual benefit.\n\n  Hire a professional. Professional life coaches, business coaches, psychotherapists, personal trainers, and other helpers are accessible even when your network of connections is small. Professional helpers can devote time more consistently to working on your goals than most friends can. And professionals may have greater experience and insight to share than your peers do.\n\n### Evaluate and Develop These Personal Abilities\n\nAs you engage in growth resources, build your awareness of specific personal abilities you want to develop. These abilities are highly relevant to your investing success, and group into a few broad categories. Take a look at yourself in these descriptions. Look for relevant resources and ask for specific help with these from your growth-promoting relationships.\n\n#### The Ability to Connect\n\nThe need for human connection is wired deep into us. When we connect well, we earn the trust of others and learn whom we can trust. Connection requires attuning to emotion in yourself and others, and responding with empathy. Connection depends on relating vulnerably to others, and responding gently to their vulnerability.\n\nI've known many smart, strategic, and driven leaders who benefitted when they improved their ability to connect. They bravely practiced the art of speaking from the heart, not just the head, and speaking vulnerably about their own weakness and failure. They learned to attune and respond to the emotional content, not just the practical content in what others were saying. They learned to connect with and express their own emotion. Their effectiveness and their quality of life improved.\n\nThe ability to connect has a direct bearing on your investment returns. A healthy ability to connect helps to build teams, evaluate partnerships, make sales, and resolve conflict. Any activity that involves interacting with people benefits from this ability.\n\nConnection is essential for another reason. It's how you get what you need. Connection gives you what you need to recover from loss, take on scary challenges, and keep your perspectives realistic and grounded. Your brain comes alive in the context of social connection. Your resilience, courage, creativity, and energy all improve when you are well connected.\n\nThese skills are learned and practiced in relationships, whether one-on-one or in group settings. Spend time in honest relationships with people are who better at this than you are, and you will absorb their skills.\n\n### The Ability to Confront\n\nConnection brings us closer to others. Confrontation gives us the ability to be different from them at the same time. It's based on a strong definition of oneself. Confronting is at the core of enforcing standards, saying no to a sales pitch, making an unpopular leadership decision, or holding an opinion that's contrary to the majority view. Business itself, engaging in a competition for a market, is an act of confrontation.\n\nWe all probably know people who are remarkably clear and defined. They say yes without resentment, and say no clearly and respectfully when they want to. People like that enjoy more peaceful and aligned life experiences, and people around them benefit from their clarity and strength.\n\nWithout this ability you'll be taken advantage of and overpowered by people around you. Most of us are naturally conflict-avoidant, and thus our lives and work can benefit a great deal by strengthening our ability to confront. Grow in this area to be clear about what you want, and say no to what is unacceptable or simply not your best choice.\n\nYour healthiest and most growth-promoting relationships will support your freedom, your strength, and your clear \"no.\" Spend time in those relationships to strengthen this ability. Push outside your comfort zone to practice it. Your investment returns will benefit when you have a strong ability to confront.\n\n#### The Ability to Accept Bad Things\n\nThis is the ability to respond honestly and realistically when faced with negative realities in ourselves, other people, and circumstances around us.\n\nNone of us likes it when bad things happen. An investment loss, a personal failure, a disappointing performance by a team member, or simple bad luck can all bring out an ineffective response in us. We might deny that it's bad, see it as turned all bad, rationalize that it's not our fault, blame and criticize, or insist on perfection.\n\nMaturity in this ability means embracing the truth when things go badly, no matter how uncomfortable or disappointing it may be. Without this ability we hang on to losing investments too long, fail to adjust what's not working, or give up on one imperfect person or investment after another in search of a new \"ideal.\"\n\nLife is a mixed bag, and mature adults accept that and function effectively within that reality. This is something you can work on in your personal growth contexts, if you need to.\n\nInvesting in relationships, in financial markets, in business, or in any other area requires taking the good with the bad. Investors who do that well generate superior returns, financially, in relationships, and in all endeavors.\n\n#### The Ability to Be in Authority and Under Authority\n\nHuman development involves changing from a child, to an adolescent, to an adult. Children know they aren't equals with other adults, and default to a lesser position. Adolescents often push against authority, testing the limits. Adults have the flexibility to take on roles in which they cooperate with authority, and roles in which they are the authority. This ability also relates to the development of specific expertise, and finding one's purpose and calling.\n\nInvestors who take a child position might lack confidence in their own views, be susceptible to manipulation by others, or shrink back from competitive situations.\n\nInvestors who take an adolescent position might have insufficient regard for rules and regulations, or take too much risk in the face on reasonable warnings.\n\nAdults don't automatically submit just because someone wants them to, and they don't automatically rebel just because someone is in charge. Instead of a default reaction, adults make values-based decisions about the most appropriate and effective response in any given situation. They can say, \"I'll follow your lead on this\" when that's appropriate, and they can say, \"I'll take the lead on this\" in situations that call for it.\n\nInvestors need the ability to cooperate with authority, and exercise their own personal authority, to maximize their success.\n\n#### The Ability to Create Endings and Let Go\n\nSometimes it's time for a good thing to end to make way for something better. As humans we are wired to hold on to things, to preserve attachments, and to avoid losses. This tendency is useful in many arenas, but it's too simplistic to guide wise investment decisions.\n\nIf you can't end your attachment to an investment, a business, an employee, a relationship, or a good-but-not-best activity, you'll get stuck.\n\nSometimes big losses early in life, or highly impactful losses at any stage of life amplify our natural tendency to hold on to things. Sometimes we view the world as a place of shortage and scarcity, and we try to hold on to everything out of fear there won't be enough to go around. Working with your growth resources to heal and gain confidence will increase your ability to let go of things and make space for new and better things.\n\nHealthy people and effective investors know how to say hello _and_ goodbye.\n\n#### The Ability to Stand up to Dangerous People\n\nSome people are wise, are responsible, and listen openly to feedback. Some people only learn the hard way. Other people are malicious and willing to intentionally hurt others for their own gain. You need the personal character abilities to respond effectively, and differently, to each of these.\n\nIf you naively assume everyone is wise and responsible, you'll scratch your head wondering why repeating yourself didn't get the message across. Some people aren't malicious, but they are irresponsible, and they need consequences, not more words.\n\nWhen you encounter a truly malicious person, you must see them for what they are, or you'll leave yourself open to serious harm. When someone intends to hurt you on purpose, bring out the cavalry (law enforcement, the court system, whatever it takes) to protect yourself from them.\n\nMy mentor Dr. John Townsend and his partner Dr. Henry Cloud have written many books about personal character qualities, and how they impact personal life and professional performance. I recommend them for further reading.\n\nI've found executive coaches and similar mentoring relationships to be invaluable in the development of my own leadership and personal character. I still have them. I also work with entrepreneurs and other leaders as a business coach. Much of that work focuses, directly or indirectly, on the development of personal character in these and other areas.\n\n### A Trusted Network Is a Precious Resource\n\nEarlier this year I received a phone call from a business owner interesting in selling his company to me. Though I'd never met him, the first thing he said was, \"The president of my bank told me I could trust you.\" I was struck in that moment by the immense value of a network of trusting relationships. I got access to a deal I never would have known about otherwise, and I had an advantage before we even started talking.\n\nYour relational network connects you to resources that can support your weak points, help solve problems, or assemble a team to tackle a project that's bigger than one person. Your relational network can provide encouragement, a foot in the door with a supplier or partner, or the support of an influential person in government or your industry. And the benefits are mutual. Networking relationships are two-way streets with no losers.\n\nAt the other extreme is isolation. Isolation is deadly. In isolation we are limited to our own resources, and we begin to lose perspective on reality around us. A lone ranger approach is a recipe for disaster.\n\nA valuable relational network is not just a bunch of people who know each other. At its best, it's a bunch of people who _trust_ each other. Trust is the core of intimate relationships. It's the lifeblood of teams performing toward a common goal. It's the heart of making a sale. It opens the door to opportunities of all kinds. Without trust, everything in business and in relationships grinds to a halt.\n\nWhen I visit the drive-through at McDonald's, I hand the cashier my money at the first window, then drive forward and pick up my meal at the second window. If we didn't trust each other, I might demand to see the food before I hand them the money. They could demand the reverse, and a silly standoff would occur. Even something as simple as that drive-through transaction only works because of trust.\n\nYour reputation is the sum of the trust people all across your network place in you. A \"brand\" is another name for the reputation of a business. A trusted reputation is a tremendous asset in all kinds of investment activities. It's _the_ advantage for many prominent figures in business, investing, public speaking, and many other ventures.\n\n### Invest in Your Relationships on Purpose\n\nLike other resources, a valuable and trusting relational network is something you can build. Networks like that are built through engagement and trustworthy behavior.\n\nEngagement is making the choice to reach out, to say hello, to start conversations with people not knowing how they will respond. It's genuine interest in others, without a specific agenda. It's choosing connection over isolation, one interaction at a time.\n\nTrust isn't sustained through presenting the right image, or crafting the right message. Trust is earned from a track record over time. Trust comes from consistent behavior.\n\nWe trust people who listen to us, tell us the truth, and do what they say they will do. We trust people who look out for our best interest even when they have the upper hand. We trust people who admit when they are wrong and do what they can to make it right.\n\nEarn deep and broad trust by consistently doing those things. Like financial savings, trust is built a little at a time over a long time, and it can be blown quickly through bad decisions. Live in a way that makes you widely known as a deeply trustworthy person, and the network you build will be a remarkable and mutually beneficial advantage.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Connect the dots between your personal character and the results you get investing your time and money.\n\n  Invest time and money in resources and experiences to grow yourself and make your personal character abilities a powerful investment advantage.\n\n  Choose engagement over withdrawal and connection over isolation to expand your network and tap into resources much bigger than your own.\n\n  Consistently behave in trustworthy ways to strengthen your relationships and earn the big advantage of a widely trusted reputation.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee a list of reader-contributed ideas for investing in your own growth, and add to it at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 8 > Manage the Emotions That Trip Investors\n\nMy friend Gerry was having a nightmare year. After long-term success as a high-level technical salesperson, he lost his job due to changes in the market. After decades of working hard together to build a marriage and raise children, his wife told him she was leaving. His world was turned upside down. He was feeling heartbreaking pain and intense stress.\n\nAt the same time, he had a lot of decisions to make. Ready or not, he had to decide how to manage current finances, reconstruct a career, care for his children, and navigate the legal issues of a messy divorce. These were critical time-and-money investment decisions that would alter the course of his life and his children's lives, for better or for worse. The pressure was enormous.\n\nHow could he keep the grief, fear, anger, and pressure of that time from overriding his better judgment and pushing him to poor decisions with lasting consequences? It seemed almost too much to ask.\n\nPrior to that time, Gerry had invested thousands of hours in personal-growth contexts, some as a recipient, and some as a leader. His emotional life and his relational networks were healthy. He needed every bit of that to respond to this crisis.\n\nAt the beginning, he paused. He didn't rush out and look for a new job. He didn't rush to do anything. He took a few weeks to breathe and digest what was happening first.\n\nHe paid attention to his emotion, something he is especially good at. When we talked, he would simply acknowledge all the powerful emotions he was feeling, without filtering. I know he had many similar conversations with other friends and supportive people, in which he had the same kind of unfiltered conversations. He didn't even attempt to downplay what he was feeling and the impact on him. He embraced it, and the pain that came with doing that.\n\nBecause his powerful emotions were acknowledged by him and heard by safe people, they didn't overwhelm him, at least not consistently. This allowed him to engage his rational, strategic brain in problem-solving and decision-making. With his whole brain engaged, he had the mental resources to evaluate and respond, instead of simply react.\n\nIn his decisions, he stuck to the wise life principles he had learned and taught, including principles from his strong faith. He'll be honest that he had lapses, and he didn't do everything \"right.\" When I look back, I think he made remarkably healthy and wise decisions through that time. At the time of this writing, he's employed in a good job in his specialty, he's engaged in both the joys and the hard parts of his life, and his kids are doing very well.\n\n### Primitive Emotions Are Powerful Forces\n\nYour brain has primitive parts and rational parts. Both influence your decision-making. As an investor your job is to _decide_ how resources are used. Anything that influences your decision-making can be trouble, or it can be an advantage.\n\nThe primitive parts of our brains drive powerful emotional reactions that get our attention, give us energy, alter our body chemistry, distort our judgment, and more. Cold calculating machines, of course, don't work that way. As humans we can calculate and perform logic, but we are not calculators or computers. Emotions are part of our decision-making environment. We must respond effectively to our emotions to maximize our ability to make sound investment decisions.\n\nEmotional reactions are rapid and compelling. They are ideal for things like urging us to jump out of the way of an oncoming train. Reacting naturally to that emotion could save your life. Reacting naturally to emotion in investment decision-making could cost you a great deal.\n\nI'm convinced that we are much less rationally driven than we'd like to believe. The primitive parts of our brain often take the driver's seat, and our rational brains come up with reasons to justify riding along with what those primitive emotions want. It happens so quickly and so often that we aren't even aware of it most of the time.\n\n### Emotions Spread Through the Flock\n\nWhen I was growing up, my parents kept chickens for fresh eggs. During the night we'd shut them in their coop, but during the day they'd roam the property.\n\nOne day I perched in one of the large trees on our property and looked down on the multi-colored flock of chickens. Brush and branches loosely covered the ground below. The chickens wandered through, picking at the ground for insects. From time to time, one of the chickens would scurry forward and flap a wing, startling another nearby chicken. In a chain reaction the whole flock would take off running, clucking, and flapping in the direction the first one had moved.\n\nFrom my viewpoint, I could see there was no actual threat for them to run from, just a false alarm. From their view, all they had were signals from others in the flock that might indicate danger in the brush. They didn't stop to evaluate; they ran first, and looked around second\u2014not a bad strategy for a group of defenseless birds on a prairie frequented by foxes and other predators. Chickens who stop to make a rational evaluation before running from a predator wouldn't fare well. Of course, they weren't on the prairie, and there were no predators in my backyard, but they stuck with the instinctual strategy that had kept their ancestors in the gene pool.\n\nSometimes we act the same way. We are highly social beings. We constantly monitor the other people in the \"flock\" of human society for cues about our environment and ourselves. Our instincts tell us to read the flock, be scared of what scares them, and rush to snap up our share of what they are eating. Sometimes, like the chickens in my backyard, we act out of instinct in situations in which that instinct does not apply.\n\nFear spreads through the human flock when financial markets falter. Investors copy each other in selling the investments they are afraid of, without stopping to look around and evaluate the threat. The mood swings the other way when the flock appears to be snapping up a hot investment. Enthusiasm spreads and, like those chickens, a bunch of investors set off in the same direction, clucking smart-sounding explanations for their crowd-following behavior.\n\nInvesting is not a split-second game of life-and-death on the prairie. There's time to stop and evaluate what the crowd is doing, before deciding what you will do with your resources. We all have the herd instinct, but effective investors are aware of the emotions they catch from herd contagion, and they respond to them in ways that protect their ability to make rational and principled decisions.\n\n### Respond Effectively to Your Emotions\n\nEffective investors are better than most at keeping their primitive brains and their rational brains online and talking to each other. They learn to be aware of what their emotions are signaling, and at the same time they stay connected to objective reality. They know how to respond to their emotions in healthy ways. They process their emotions, do the math, and evaluate the logic to check and balance how they feel. In a variety of emotional environments, they still base their decisions on their long-term intentions. Sound decision-making in the presence of emotional pressures is a major advantage in all kinds of investment activity.\n\nWhen strong emotions arise, in you or in the flock, follow these steps to preserve your ability to make sound decisions.\n\n1. Pause. Don't do anything in a knee-jerk reaction.\n\n2. Notice and acknowledge your emotion. You can't respond effectively to emotion you ignore or deny. The emotion is real. Pay attention to it.\n\n3. Process your emotion with someone safe. Talk about what it feels like and what you are afraid of. You can do this alone, but doing this interactively with a sane and supportive human being is much better. Give your emotion a chance to be heard and shared. That will lighten your load, get your whole brain back online, and help you regain perspective.\n\n4. Analyze objective information. The primitive parts of our brains don't have time to process detailed information, so they ignore it. Invite your rational brain back to the party and take a look at the available information about what's really happening. Analyze and do the math, like we did in Chapter 5.  \\+ 2 = 4 during both panic and elation.\n\n5. Stick to the rules. Times of high emotion are exactly the wrong times to jettison the rulebook. \"This time it's different\" is rarely true. Use time-tested principles to make your decisions during good times and bad, whether the course of action they require is comfortable or not. Base your decisions on the future you intend, the values you hold, and principles that have stood the test of time.\n\nThese steps are effective in all kinds of circumstances presenting a wide range of emotions. Here's a deeper look at a few of the big ones\u2014emotions that cause trouble when they affect our investment decisions.\n\n### Fear of Loss\n\nWe get spooked. When something we need is threatened, we can lose perspective, and lose our nerve.\n\nThe fear might hit when a relationship you hold dear seems to be turning cold. It might hit when your employer is considering layoffs. Fear of loss would surely arise when a business you've built is showing signs it's time to shut it down and say goodbye to good years and good people. A drop in the price of a stock you bought a lot of last week could activate your fear of loss, even when the fundamental reason you bought it hasn't changed.\n\nFear of loss has a remarkable ability to vaporize our confidence and rationality, prompting us to retreat to a position that feels safer.\n\nIronically, retreat often makes a scary situation worse. Going into a fight, flight, or freeze response doesn't help any of the above situations. Sometimes scary situations are unique opportunities for bold moves, against-the-grain decisions, and taking risk to earn superior returns\u2014not what fear feels like doing at all. Fear is a poor compass for decision-making. It often points away from our best path to the returns we want.\n\nSometimes fear of loss hits when things _are_ going well. As a child, I remember climbing all the way up a tall tree before looking down. All of a sudden the ground looked awfully far away, and the sure-footed confidence I felt while climbing turned to shaky feet feeling for the branches on my way down. Even when we find success, we can fear how far we might fall.\n\nSometimes fear of loss hits us collectively. It spreads like a nervous rustling through the flock during times of economic recession, health epidemic, or political instability. The same thing often happens when financial markets drop. Sometimes we get afraid just because other people are afraid, and our anxiety can be amplified watching reporters talk in urgent tones about the latest dramatic developments.\n\nOn the whole, fear of loss is a useful instinct. It tells us to value and protect the good things we have. It drives us to stay close to our most important relationships, and protect the resources we need to survive. Due to our brain's obsession with survival, our fear instincts can be a bit overactive. To make matters worse, the primitive parts of our brains are particularly poor at distinguishing actual survival threats (the oncoming train) from negative possibilities that aren't life-threatening (public embarrassment, or a drop in market prices).\n\nIn times of fear, we are also prone to catastrophize. This is when we imagine extreme outcomes from something going wrong. It sounds something like \"My boss looks unhappy. I wonder if I'm going to get fired. I won't be able to make rent. I'll be homeless in months, then I'll die alone.\" Or perhaps \"The stock market dropped a lot this week. I wonder if the economy is tanking. I should get out of the markets while I can, before the dollar collapses and we repeat the great depression.\" Silly as it sounds out loud and in the daylight, we all do it. Our brains take a problem and in a split second run all the way ahead to the part where we die penniless and alone. Such moments are not the best times to decide whether or not to hit the sell button on your investments.\n\nThis tendency to catastrophize also serves a useful purpose: It gives us energy and urgency to address problems before it's too late. The young child who wanders from his mother quickly catastrophizes (\"I've lost her forever!\") and in distress let's out a loud wail. This serves to alert his mother while she's still within earshot, and the survival priority is once again well served.\n\nFive hundred feet from the oncoming train is not a good time to start analyzing a time, speed, and distance equation. Sometimes the rational brain needs to step aside and let a reflex reaction address an imminent emergency.\n\nTrouble is, our primitive brains are prone to see imminent emergencies where there aren't any. Very few investment decisions are oncoming trains requiring split-second reactions to ensure the best outcome. If the time it takes to analyze the situation doesn't represent a life-threatening delay, you are probably best served to refrain from making decisions or changes when a sense of panic is rising in you.\n\nAs investors with decision-making responsibility, we can make expensive mistakes in a state of fear. In that state, rational judgment shuts down. We default to avoiding risk, preserving status quo, and expecting the worst. Our survival-obsessed brains don't like to take chances, even chances that are likely to lead to good results.\n\nReacting to a market downturn like it's doomsday is probably not in an investor's best interest. Times of widespread fear present opportunities for superior returns to courageous investors who have an emotional advantage. Good investors have a mature ability to feel fear without being overwhelmed by it. They feel the fear and retain perspective on reality, at the same time.\n\nIn January 2009, overall U.S. stocks were on sale for approximately half of what they sold for 18 months earlier. Was it rational to believe the value of U.S. companies had been slashed in half by the drop in the housing market and the recession that followed? History says no. Fear, not realistic calculations, was at work. Early 2009 turned out to be a great time to buy stocks, just as many investors were selling. As of this writing, the value of U.S. stocks has nearly tripled in the six years since then. When you read this, fear may be back in control, or enthusiasm may be winning the day. I can't predict the moods of the investing public, but I can predict they'll continue to be moody.\n\nFear of loss strikes us in all kinds of situations, not just when public markets get spooked. Fear of losing a relationship drives us to play it safe and avoid the tough conversations that would make that relationship better. Fear of losing a steady paycheck drives us to procrastinate on the business startup that would take our game to the next level. Fear of loss is in all of us. Sometimes fear pushes us to a wise, protective decision. Sometimes it pushes us to absolute foolishness. Fear can't tell the difference, but, using our whole brains and all of our resources, we can.\n\n### Fear of Being Left Out\n\nWe envy. We see other people who appear to be laughing all the way to the bank, and something churns in us. Their career, their results, their relationships seem better than ours, and we feel like we are being left out. Worse than that, we start to feeling like _something is wrong with us._ Deep down we fear they don't just _have_ better than we have\u2014maybe they _are_ better than we are. An anxious urgency drives us to jettison what we have and go for what they have.\n\nDanger! Investment decisions made in this emotional state can be disastrous.\n\nAt the core of envy is the belief that what we have and what we are aren't good. We fall into believing the good stuff is elsewhere out there. This implicit devaluation of our own resources is contrary to everything that makes a good investor.\n\nWhen we look across town at the big new houses some of our neighbors are moving into, we might look back at our own house and see it now stripped of its \"goodness\" in our eyes. This is envy. An envy-driven decision to sell the house, purchase bigger, and move would likely be a very expensive act of consumption. Such a move might be contrary to the intentional future we want. Gripped by envy, we might drop intentionality and act to try to get rid of that awful left-out feeling.\n\nWhen investors looked at rocketing tech stocks in the dotcom bubble of 1999, they may have felt their old-fashioned industrial stocks weren't good anymore. Those plain old stocks sure weren't keeping up with the dotcoms. Gripped by envy, an investor could easily have sold his or her holdings of solid old-fashioned companies, and bought tech stocks at the top of the bubble, the very worst time to buy them. As we all know, the prices of tech stocks crashed soon after\u2014and still have not fully recovered, 15 years later! Those old-fashioned industrial stocks, on the other hand, have outgrown their 1999 prices by 33 percent. With hindsight and the bigger picture in view, nobody feels inclined to envy investors in tech stocks in 1999 anymore.\n\nIf an investor in 1999 had responded effectively to the fear of being left out, he or she could have gone through sound and rational analysis of the value of those tech stocks. Cisco Systems, for example, was one of the most prominent tech stocks at the time. Cisco made the routers that ran corporate networks and the Internet. The Internet was growing rapidly, and many people expected Cisco to grow right along with it.\n\nMost stocks tend to be priced at 10 to 20 times the annual per-share earnings of the company. Near its peak, Cisco stock traded for 130 times estimated annual earnings. For that price to make sense, Cisco would have had to become 10 times as profitable almost overnight. There was no rational basis to believe that would happen. Investors weren't being rational. They were swept along with an enthusiastic crowd they didn't want to be left out of.\n\nThe crash that followed reminds us that sometimes being left out is a good thing. Sticking to sound investment principles, and doing the analysis regardless of emotional state, can remind us what we want to be left out of _before_ we make the investment.\n\n### Fear of Failure\n\nWe fear being wrong, or falling short of a goal we set. We fear the embarrassment and the frustration of failure. This fear is deeply rooted in the human need to see ourselves as competent.\n\nWhen we get into a new business, and it falls flat, our sense of competence is shaken. When we believe an investment is a great opportunity, and subsequently lose our shirt, we feel stupid. When we announce to our friends we are starting something new, and it fails, we feel embarrassed.\n\nIf we react to our fear of failure, we might hurt our investment returns by avoiding risk and procrastinating. Our fear of failure gives us poor guidance about risky opportunities, because it can't tell the difference between embarrassment, the cost of failure, and the cost of a missed opportunity.\n\nConsider a new business opportunity\u2014let's make it a taco truck\u2014that will cost $10,000 to start up and try. If it fails, you'll sell the truck and lose $10,000. If it succeeds, you'll add a few more trucks and make $100,000 a year for at least 10 years, or as long as the taco-selling holds. You figure your business has a 20% chance of success. This is a made-up scenario, but it's not an unrealistic one in my experience.\n\nAnalyzing the ROI on that scenario, you have an 80% chance of losing $10,000 (\u2013$8,000 expected return from the failure scenario) and a 20% chance of making $1,000,000 ($200,000 expected return from the success scenario). Overall expected return on that new business is therefore $192,000. (To keep this example simple I'm ignoring discounts for the present value of future cash flows.)\n\nFear of failure doesn't look at it like that. Fear of failure sees an 80% chance of falling flat and says \"no thanks.\" That's an 80% chance of feeling like an idiot when my friends drive by my customer-forsaken taco truck. Most of us would walk away from an 80% chance of feeling that way. The likely cost of avoiding that feeling of failure is $192,000 in this scenario.\n\nMany times, the cost of failure is much smaller than the reward for success. When we look at the odds of embarrassment instead of the expected ROI, we may pay a huge price for our embarrassment-free experience. What price are you willing to pay to avoid uncomfortable feelings?\n\nThere's another danger in fear of failure. When fear of failure strikes _after_ we've made a decision or committed to an investment, we attempt to \"avoid\" failure by denying it as long as possible.\n\nJim Paul was a successful commodities trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He got attached to a big trade that eventually lost $1.6 million dollars, and cost him his job. In his book, _What I Learned Losing a Million Dollars,_ he talks about the emotional factors that led to those bad decisions. One of them was the psychological resistance we all have to admitting when we are wrong. By denying his mistake as long as he could, he made the mistake much more expensive.\n\nWe all make similar errors. We hang on to an investment, a relationship, an employee, a project, because ending it will mean admitting we were wrong to get into it and we failed to make it work.\n\nThe resolution to fear of failure is not to try harder to avoid mistakes, it's to embrace the flawed reality of being human, and to integrate awareness of your flaws with awareness of your strengths. When you do that, awareness of a flaw isn't destabilizing. It's not even surprising. It's simply an acceptable part of who you are.\n\nIt's hard to take investment risks when failure isn't emotionally acceptable to you. And it's hard to take action to correct a problem when you are busy convincing yourself it doesn't exist. To make sound investment decisions you need a clear view of the good, the bad, and the ugly in your investments, in people around you, and especially in yourself.\n\n### Fear of Personal Rejection\n\nWe want to be liked. We long to be authentically transparent, and receive a response of acceptance from people around us. This fear is rooted in our deep human need for intimacy. We are wired to connect, and rejection hurts.\n\nI was due for a radio interview in a few minutes, but I was still sitting in my car in the station parking lot. I was the day's guest on a business talk show, scheduled to talk about my new venture as a business coach. I'd marketed my companies' products for years, leading to millions in sales. That time I was there at the radio station to market myself, and it felt different. I knew I was way more afraid of this interview than I needed to be.\n\nI wasn't feeling fear of failure. This wasn't about being wrong about going into coaching, or not generating the revenue I expected. This was about whether or not people would respond to me as a person. I was asking people to pay money just to talk to me about their leadership and their businesses. If I got no takers, or worse, someone responded with \"Who do you think you are, anyway?\" I'd feel personally rejected.\n\nI pulled out my cell phone and dialed a good friend. \"I've got this interview in a few minutes and I'm freaking out here.\" He gave me the support I needed, and I did my interview. The fearful part of me was quite surprised when I got all the business coaching clients I wanted within just a few months.\n\nYou can sit behind your computer screen buying stocks and bonds, but your best investment opportunities likely involve you, face-to-face with potential partners, customers, suppliers, or clients. Many activities involve personal selling in one form or another. Investments in relationships, learning new skills from a teacher, or seeking to do good for others' benefit\u2014all involve risk of personal rejection. If you cross everything prone to rejection off your list, you severely limit your opportunities.\n\nLong-term strengthening of your courage to risk rejection comes through the vulnerable and authentic sharing of yourself with people who stay safe and present even when they see your dark side. Instead of putting your best foot forward with everyone, you need some people who see the worst of you, and still accept and admire you. It's a risk to be that vulnerable, and not something to do with untested strangers. Cultivate safe and close relationships in which you can be yourself, good, bad, and ugly. That gives you the internal reserves you need to sustain an occasional disappointing or hurtful response.\n\nThe ability to go forward while feeling fear of personal rejection is a big advantage.\n\n### Fear of Boredom\n\nWe are driven toward excitement, challenge, activity, and reward. These fires burn intensely in ambitious people who read (or write!) books like this one. Patiently taking no action for a long time can be deeply uncomfortable, and it's often the best investment decision.\n\nSuccessful tree farmers understand this well. They don't grow a tree by digging it up every day to check the roots, or try planting it in a new location. They set up the growth process, and they give it time. They prune and fertilize from time to time, but most days they don't change anything; they just let the tree keep growing. Slowly and steadily, a sapling becomes a tall tree.\n\nGood investing, in stocks, bonds, and a lot of real-life things, works the same way. If you've arranged things well, the best investment decision most days is to let everything keep growing right where it is. This isn't easy to do when you're chomping at the bit for some excitement.\n\nCEOs are notorious for doing mergers and acquisitions driven by the thrill of the deal, not by a sound business case. Such deals tend to increase adrenaline and decrease profits.\n\nActive traders in financial markets enjoy the daily thrill of the roller coaster. Watching real-time charts, betting this way, then that, makes it interesting. Patient, long-term investors miss the thrill ride and enjoy higher returns, on average.\n\nRational investing involves evaluating a range of opportunities, saying no to most of them, and allocating your limited resources to the few opportunities from which you will receive the best return. This process requires patience, inherently.\n\nA few days before writing this section I finished evaluating an interesting investment opportunity in a unique air taxi service. After some initial checking, I signed a confidentiality agreement to obtain many pages of information. I had multiple conversations with the CEO and investment bankers on the deal. I read through obscure FAA regulations pertaining to the airline's non-traditional operating model. I imagined feeling pretty cool stepping onto flights as part-owner of the airline. I created spreadsheets to analyze the likely return on investment. And I walked away, because the numbers didn't add up.\n\nI didn't feel a thrill when I said no to that deal and went back to the drawing board to look for another opportunity. My response was a sigh of resigning myself to more research and more analysis before I'd get to do anything exciting.\n\nSuccessful investing requires patience. For some, actively meeting new people might be more fun than turning acquaintances into close friends, but investing in relationships requires a patient commitment. Moving retirement savings from one investment to another feels more active, but patience results in higher returns. Diving into a series of new learning topics might be more exciting, but completing one learning curve might offer greater returns.\n\nIf you are someone who enjoys fast-paced activity, and needs stimulating challenges, go for it. At the same time, make sure you are aware that this drives you. Incorporate those elements into your life. Fast-paced hobbies might be much less expensive than fast-paced investment activity. When you are making a new investment or changing an existing one, ask yourself if you are doing this because you need something to do, or because you have a realistic basis to expect superior returns.\n\nEffective investors have the emotional flexibility to move decisively when moving makes sense, and to sit patiently when it doesn't.\n\n### Engage Your Whole Brain\n\nAs we've seen, the investor who can't engage his rational brain because emotions are taking over has a disadvantage. The reverse is also true: The investor who can't engage his emotional brain because rationality is taking over has a disadvantage, too.\n\nPaintbrushes aren't good at measuring, and tape measures aren't good at spreading paint. Like an investor using emotion to make decisions, the carpenter who uses a paintbrush to measure 2x4s will have poor results. The solution is not to discard the paintbrush, of course; it's to use the right tools for the right tasks.\n\nThe emotionally powerful parts of your brain aren't good at analysis, long-term intentionality, or data-driven decision-making. They are good at some other things that make you better off with them than without them.\n\nEmotions provide a quick signal about what's happening. Like a blinking dashboard light, they are helpful in drawing your attention to a danger, an opportunity, or a need for action. Like the \"check engine\" light in your car, emotions aren't good at telling you specifically what's wrong, let alone how to fix it. When the \"check engine\" light comes on, you need to connect the diagnostic computer to see what's wrong, and have an experienced mechanic apply expertise to recommend a course of action. But without that blinking dashboard light, you wouldn't know you have a problem until expensive engine damage has already occurred.\n\nWhen an emotion sends a quick signal that something needs your attention, don't ignore it. That's like covering the \"check engine\" light with duct tape so it will stop bothering you. At the same time, don't react with an action before you've analyzed the situation. That's like pulling your car into the shop and telling the receptionist, \"My 'check engine' light is on. Let's change the head gasket.\"\n\nEngage your whole brain. Always pay attention to the signals from your emotions, _and_ let the emotion prompt you to connect your diagnostic rational brain to the situation. Use that to understand specifically what's going on, and decide on a course of action. Emotions provide the signal. Analysis and expertise determine how to respond.\n\nEmotions are useful signals, and they have another essential role that rationality simply can't fill.\n\nMy daughters like to weave bracelets and other artistic creations from small colored rubber bands. One of my daughters spent hours one afternoon sorting small rubber bands into an organizer, one color in each square chamber. After she finished, she and I both watched in slow-motion horror as her little brother toddled over, raised the organizer above his head, and shook it. A multicolored rainbow of rubber bands showered all around him. My daughter's afternoon of hard work was lost, with no way to get it back. She burst into a flood of tears.\n\nIn that moment, rationality was not the tool to reach for. My daughter needed my emotion to connect with hers and help her process this unfair and disappointing loss. My emotional empathy gave her what she needed to do that. After a few emotion-focused minutes we moved on to engage our executive brain functions in seeking a solution to the problem. That emotional connection had to happen first.\n\nSituations like this don't just happen in living rooms, they happen in customer service call centers, college classrooms, corporate board-rooms, and investment offices too.\n\nWhen the executive team is scared about a downsizing, and the CEO comes into the boardroom full of rationality, strategy, and smart ideas, the team's collective heart sinks. The CEO just doesn't seem to get what's at stake for them, emotionally. As the strategy discussion continues, their contributions are muted and their brainpower is distracted. In that moment it was not rationality\u2014it was emotion the team needed in order to rise to the occasion and give their best to winning in a tough business competition. The lack of emotional ability in that CEO, not the lack of rational ability, was a disadvantage that would decrease that company's return on investment.\n\nI saw another leader speaking to a group recently. He stopped right in the middle of explaining a difficult reality and said, \"I feel like the room just got heavy. What are you guys feeling right now?\" A few people in the room shared their sense of sadness at the unhappy ending they were facing. That leader got it. He responded with empathy, and the meeting went forward with everyone fully engaged.\n\nThose rational parts of our brains that help so much with decision-making are useless in relational moments like these. We can't connect, relate, or lead effectively without emotion. Emotion connects you to the people you need, and the people you lead.\n\nDon't try to apply paint with a tape measure. Don't try to measure 2\u00d74s with a paintbrush. And don't throw either one out of your tool kit because it's bad at the other functions.\n\nDevelop and engage your whole brain. You'll relate better, you'll make better decisions, and you'll maximize your investment advantage.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Recognize when fear of loss, fear of missing out, fear of failure, fear of rejection, and fear of boredom are active in you.\n\n  When emotions rise, make effective decisions by pausing, acknowledging emotion, processing emotion, analyzing information, and sticking to the rules.\n\n  Use your emotion for what it's good at: signaling what needs attention, and connecting you to the people you need and the people you lead.\n\n  Engage your whole brain\u2014emotional and rational\u2014to respond effectively to what each moment requires, and maximize your investment advantage.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nTake a quiz on your most natural responses to these emotions at _www.aardsma.com\/investbook_.\n\n## 9 > Lean Into the Difficult Work\n\nIt was a cold day in November, and it was raining. I was on the steep roof of my 104-year-old house, crouching on black tarpaper with a nail gun in hand. I was off from work to finish the roofing job before winter. I didn't have a good job or much money at the time, but I knew how to do roofing. I was saving several thousand dollars by installing the new roof myself. I was beginning to think I had taken on too much. I wasn't sure I had it in me to get it done before cold weather hit. That day I dug deep and found the energy to attack that roof. I turned on a beast mode I didn't know I had. I was hurrying, and I took some safety risks I probably shouldn't have. It was a hard day. It was snowing when I put the last few shingles on the ridgeline.\n\nMy wife worked hard on that house, too. She knocked out plaster and removed lath. She restored the century-old woodwork throughout the house one piece at a time. It was a huge, messy job: applying stripper chemicals and sanding every nook and cranny of ornate woodwork. She persisted in that long task, and the results were beautiful.\n\n><\n\nI knew I was about to get screamed at. The guy I had fired the day before was making a beeline for my office door, and he didn't look happy, at all.\n\nIn the seconds it took him to reach my door, I replayed the last few months of his employment. He was a good performer in sales, and gradually his drinking problem had come to my attention. When it became clear his drinking was affecting work, I sat down with him for a heart-to-heart talk. He assured me he knew he had a problem, and he wanted to get help. I encouraged him to take this seriously and consider going into treatment. The next day he asked for six weeks off to go to rehab. Feeling good about how I'd helped him to make the right choice, I gave him the time off.\n\nWhen he returned, things seemed okay for a while, until one day he was caught drinking alcohol at work. I fired him. I no longer felt good about \"helping\" him. I'd been taken for a ride by a dishonest addict, and I knew it. And that brings us to the moment he stormed angrily into my office.\n\nIn a state of intoxication he let me have it about how I'd never believed in him, never gave him a chance, and treated him unfairly. I made it clear I needed him to leave the premises or I'd have the police remove him. He left. It was a hard day. That night I thought about becoming callous, going strictly business, no more Mr. Nice Guy. With a sigh I had to admit that I would never fit a callous way of living and leading. It just wasn't me. I'd be less na\u00efve about addiction, but I'd continue to care and give people the benefit of the doubt. As we started the process to hire his replacement, I knew it wouldn't be the last difficult termination I'd be a part of.\n\n><\n\nA few months into the acoustics business, I realized we had an obstacle to overcome. Large commercial customers like schools and hospitals needed fire-resistant acoustical products to meet building codes. I hadn't designed our products with that in mind. We couldn't sell to those customers unless we altered our product designs and obtained appropriate fire rating test results.\n\nI wasn't about to give up on selling to them, and I didn't want to go back to the drawing board with my product designs. I researched the flammability requirements and what it would take to meet them. For three months I worked nonstop on this challenge. I tested non-toxic fire-retardant chemicals and application processes. I lit test products on fire in the alley behind our building (which attracted the attention of the local fire chief). I bought a welder and learned how to use it. I sketched and built from steel, motors, and other fun stuff a computer-controlled manufacturing machine to ensure consistent quality in our fire-rated products.\n\nDuring that time I could be found in the factory long after everyone else had gone home for the day. I was cutting, welding, wiring, and bolting into the night. I didn't feel bad about it. It was interesting work. I was creating an invention and I couldn't wait to see it run. As I pieced it together at what seemed like a snail's pace, I had my eye on the prize. Run it did, and after some more back-alley fire testing, we sent samples off to an expensive lab for the real tests. I waited nervously for the results, wondering if those three months of long hours would pay off. Had I calculated everything correctly? Would my design work, or would the lab tests prove I really didn't know what I was doing?\n\nMy grin was a mile wide when I got the e-mail showing we'd achieved the highest category of fire rating. Yes! Fire rating was no longer an obstacle for my business, and sales grew.\n\n### Where \"Easy\" Comes From\n\nMy wife and I made a lot of \"easy money\" when we sold the house we'd re-roofed and renovated with our own hands. I made a lot of \"easy money\" when I grew my businesses to a size where hires and fires became a regular part of my job. And I made a lot of \"easy money\" when the fire-resistant product I invented gave my company a big competitive advantage. I'm being sarcastic, of course. The path to success wasn't easy. It was difficult work.\n\nI don't intend by telling these stories to make you feel sorry for me, as if hard work was something unfortunate that happened to me. If anything, envy me for the hard work that made me and my companies better. It wasn't easy. It was good.\n\nThere's a natural sequence in life: When you do the hard things that need to be done, your future gets easier. When you take the easy road now, your future gets harder.\n\nWhen you do the hard thing and limit consumption to save and invest, paying for retirement gets easy. When you take the easy road and enjoy more consumption now, paying for retirement gets hard.\n\nWhen you do the hard thing and confront a problem in an important relationship, the future of that relationship gets easier. When you take the easy road and avoid talking about it, the future of that relationship gets harder.\n\nWhen you do that hard thing to learn and practice a new skill, the future of your career gets easier. When you take the easy road and avoid the difficulty of training and developing yourself, the future of your career gets harder.\n\nWhen you do the hard thing and create a product or service that's genuinely better than the competition, the future of your business gets easier. When you take the easy road and offer the same product at the same price as other businesses, the future of your business gets harder.\n\nThere's potential for confusion here. You might observe a well-funded retiree, a great relationship, a well-paid expert, or a booming business and think they found an easy way that you're missing. It's very likely they didn't find an easy way; they took a hard way that others weren't willing to take, and that made their future easier.\n\nIf you try to jump directly to the easy stages those people are in, it won't work. The easy picking of fruit in the orchard comes from the hard process of planting and tending to the trees over time.\n\nIt only looks easy in the long term. If what you are doing is difficult, it does not necessarily mean you have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Lean into the difficult work.\n\n### Do Difficult Work on Purpose\n\nIn a world where individual freedom and openly competitive markets are the norm, easy ways to success disappear in an instant. If you discover a brilliant idea and begin to find success with it, I assure you a host of competitors will apply considerable time and talent to competing with your success. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it also eliminates much of the advantage for those who went first. Soon it won't be so easy anymore. And of course, discovering a brilliant idea wasn't really easy in the first place.\n\nTo win in a competition, you need an advantage. Willingness to do easy things is not an advantage. Willingness to do difficult work is.\n\nProfessional athletes often have genetic advantages like size or speed, but I don't think you'll find any successful athlete who doesn't lean into the hard work. A linebacker who was given size and strength at birth will be outdone by a linebacker who was given size and strength at birth, _and_ works hard in training and the weight room every day.\n\nThe same is true in business. An entrepreneur with a good idea will be beaten by an entrepreneur with a good idea _and_ tireless execution on that idea. A financial investor with a sharp mind will be beaten by a financial investor with a sharp mind who reads a big stack of financial reports every day.\n\nIn everything you do, if you don't work hard at it, someone who does will beat you. Don't expect to find an advantage that doesn't take work.\n\nIf you want to win big, you need a big advantage. If you want a big advantage, you need to find some really difficult things to do. Looking for easy ways to have an investment advantage is kind of like looking for a fitness advantage at the candy store. Advantages are out there, but the easy store is the wrong place to go shopping for them.\n\nI think some people give up on one difficult project after another, thinking that when they find the winning project, it will be easier than what they've tried so far. I think that's a misunderstanding of the path to winning. Tough going does not indicate you've set off in the wrong direction. Difficulty may mean you're doing something others will have a hard time imitating. That leads to competitive advantage. If your plan is realistic, and the return you expect is worthwhile, stick with it.\n\nLook for difficult things that are worth doing. Advantages are found in doing things others find difficult to do.\n\nWhat difficult things are you willing to do? What kinds of difficulty are tolerable to you that others may not be willing to take on?\n\n### Choose to Do Emotionally Difficult Things\n\nSome projects worth doing require physically difficult work, or long tiring hours of mentally demanding work. I admire people who embrace those kinds of work when they're needed.\n\nThere's another kind of hard work that scares more people than those two: Emotionally difficult work stops a lot of people who are undaunted by a long day of exertion.\n\nA songwriter putting her vulnerable heart into her music is doing emotionally difficult work. A scientist who dares to believe the ground-breaking solution can be found, doesn't know how yet, and still shows up to the lab every day, is doing emotionally difficult work. The leader who takes responsibility and personally promotes a vision for the organization is doing emotionally difficult work.\n\nFear is an invisible filter that screens out many smart and talented people. I imagine a bold red line painted in front of us all, stretching as far to the left and to the right as we can see. This side of the line is crowded, and it feels safer. The other side is sparsely populated. It feels conspicuous and dangerous.\n\nWhen an entrepreneur moves from talking about a new business, to starting that new business, she steps over the red line. The crowd on the safe side gasps and shrinks back a little from the line, and a rumble of envious comments drifts through them. \"Look what she's doing. I couldn't do that. I wonder if she'll make it, or fall flat.\" Sometimes there are naysayers in the crowd, too, yelling their messages across the line at the courageous few. \"Are you sure you know what you're doing over there? It's dangerous, you know. What makes you think you can do what we aren't doing?\"\n\nThe line has no guards, no fence, no barbed wire making it hard to cross. There's no requirement to be smarter, better looking, or wealthier in order to cross it. It's a line, not a fence. The few who cross it often reap big rewards, and see the futures they intended for their lives unfold in exciting ways. Back on the crowded side, people point, envy, analyze, even say it's unfair. But that powerless red line keeps them safely, invisibly, restrained.\n\nThe only requirement to cross the line is a willingness to be uncomfortable. There's no way to remove the fear so you can step into your bigger future feeling comfortable. The only way to get there is to do it afraid. Cross the line of fear that's between you and the work that will lead to the future you want.\n\nPeople who won't cross that line screen themselves out. They exempt themselves from the opportunity to do the work that matters most. They prevent themselves from making changes that will rock the boat. They make sure they won't get the confidence boost that comes from facing their fears.\n\nOn the safe side of the line, there's actually a great deal of risk. Risk of lifelong discontentment in a mediocre job. Risk of your work slowly becoming irrelevant when you could have leapfrogged the industry and led an innovation. Risk of relationships that never reach their potential because you never got really honest with each other. Risk of wasting a world-changing idea by never acting on it, or watching someone else take that idea to the big time.\n\nThe price of choosing short-term comfort can be enormous, and the long-term results of staying on the crowded side of the line can be very uncomfortable.\n\nThe thing is, the one way to change your fear into confidence is to cross the line and live to tell about it. The other thing is, the \"safe\" side of the line actually isn't.\n\n### Everything Gets Difficult in the Middle\n\nThere's another kind of emotionally difficult work. Sometimes, and for some people, the starting is easy, but the finishing is hard. Starting a meaningful project or venture brings feelings of optimism and enthusiasm that wear off somewhere in the middle. Invariably, we encounter unexpected obstacles, and dependencies we didn't think of. Energy falters and doubt rises. Our commitment and our problem-solving abilities are tested.\n\nI learned about this quality when I was an 18-year-old night supervisor at a grocery store. Our job each night was to unload a semi load of groceries, unpack each carton, and stock the shelves. Some nights the truck was full, and my team was short-handed. Faced with this challenge, I noticed my team would divide into two groups. One group was like the guy who sat down on a pallet of canned goods and said, \"It's not gonna happen. We can't get this all done by morning by ourselves.\" On a night with a heavy workload that group would be _less_ productive than on a regular night. I hated that reaction.\n\nThe other group had something in them that responded to the challenge. Their minds and hands got active looking for ways to step up and solve the problem. I loved that reaction. They were my allies on my quest to finish the truck by morning, come hell or high water.\n\nWhen I hire people I look for that quality\u2014that determined perseverance in the face of adversity. In the stories candidates tell, I listen for that kind of grit. Intelligence, technical skill, and people skills are all good things, but this is something different. It's what gets people through when the going gets tough in the middle.\n\nSometimes there's a fine line between a brick wall, and a surmountable difficulty in the middle of a big undertaking. There is such a thing as hitting a brick wall that you cannot push through. Sometimes trying to go forward in that direction will just waste resources. Don't beat your head against it. Dig under. Go around. Get a ladder. Go back and find a different road. Most of the time we give up too soon. Failure is rare. Usually it's not failure, it's giving up before reaching success.\n\nIt's really hard to know what to give up on, and what to persevere on. Only in hindsight can you know for sure what is impossible, and what is merely extremely difficult. Some questions to ask: Does this violate the laws of physics? Does this violate the laws of my country? Has anyone done anything comparable to this before? What, specifically, is the current obstacle, and what ways around it are possible? Can I back up, regroup, and try another path to the outcome I want?\n\nMost of us are prone to give up too soon, not to persevere too long. Find a way forward. Try 14 different ways if you need to. Cultivate perseverance in the face of adversity. It's a kind of emotionally difficult work that can make or break your future. I've never seen an important project that didn't require it. Persevere, and give yourself an advantage.\n\n### How to Find Difficult Work to Do\n\nPerhaps you are motivated and sincerely willing to take on difficulty in pursuit of your goals. Maybe at the same time, you aren't sure what difficult work to take on, or where the opportunities are.\n\nIf so, consider engaging in seeking solutions to one or more real-world problems. Tackle a problem that's holding you back in your work, or that affects other people like you. Face into a difficult problem in you as a person, and engage in a process of growth. Work on a problem that affects society, and that you have a realistic shot at making a difference to. Identify a problem worth solving, and you will find some difficult things to do. Explore possibilities with curiosity.\n\nWhen you are engaged in exploration, you'll stumble on interesting things to do. Don't take a passive stance, waiting for a cause or an idea or a challenge to come to you. Look around, interact with people, notice what could be better in you and in your world. Don't wait to be asked. Select yourself to do something about it.\n\nWhen you do this, you will feel fear. You may fear you can't make a difference, or the difficulties will be too much. You may feel you aren't qualified enough or resourceful enough, or in some other way not enough. You may worry nobody will notice what you're doing, or think it's important. We each have different fears, but we all have them. Sometimes \"I can't find anything to do\" is a mask to cover \"I'm scared.\" We are all scared. Admit it, and go ahead with the difficult work.\n\nThere's no shortage of difficult work to be done. This world is long on difficult challenges and short on people courageous enough to take them on. Easy paths are hard to find, but difficult paths are all over the place. If you're engaging in exploration, and you are willing to attempt scary things, you will find some difficult and worthwhile paths.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Anticipate difficulty as a normal part of worthwhile endeavors.\n\n  Abandon any search for an easy path to success, and instead look for opportunities to do difficult things.\n\n  When the danger is more emotional than consequential, cross the fear line that most others won't.\n\n  If the outcome you seek is achievable and worthwhile, persevere when initial enthusiasm fades and unexpected obstacles arise.\n\n  Gain an advantage by engaging in these kinds of emotionally difficult work.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee other reader's ideas for difficult things worth doing, or contribute yours at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 10 > Trust Homework, Not Hunches\n\nIn the second half of 2014, oil prices made a gradual and remarkable decline from about $105 a barrel to about $45 a barrel. The price of stock in Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, declined steadily with the price of oil. I found it hard to resist that quality company on sale for a bargain price. I felt the price of oil had fallen too far. I admired the company as a sound business. I figured I wouldn't mind owning Exxon Mobil stock long term. I bought a bunch.\n\nOver the next few weeks, the price of oil rose modestly, but my Exxon Mobil stock fell. That left me scratching my head. As I watched the price of oil, the price of stocks overall, and the price of Exxon Mobil stock interact, I began to understand better how multiple factors drive profits at that company. Price movements showed me that the value of Exxon Mobil didn't have a simple relationship to the price of oil. It also responded to interest rates, the value of the U.S. dollar, and especially economic expectations. I also learned more about the supply, demand, and cartel dynamics affecting the price of oil. I realized my knowledge of the oil business and the oil markets was way too shallow to make a call about oil company stock. I'd underestimated the long-term impact of factors driving oil prices down, and I'd made a mistake. I said \"uncle\" and sold my Exxon Mobil stock at a loss.\n\nAs investors, our job is to decide how to use our resources to produce the future results we want. My decision to allocate money to Exxon Mobile stock didn't lead to the future result I wanted. The investment was a mistake\u2014not because I took a loss, but because I violated one of my own investment rules. I invested in something I didn't thoroughly understand.\n\nI always think of Ed when I remember what it means to thoroughly understand something. Ed and I lived on the same dorm floor in college. He was obsessed with aviation. He approached every conversation with energy and enthusiasm, but when the subject was aviation-related, his energy went up another notch. The guy was passionate and knowledgeable.\n\nOne day my girlfriend and I took the Chicago \"L\" train out to O'Hare Airport, just to walk around. It was pre 9\/11, when non-ticketed-passengers could still go through security. As we looked through the concourse windows, I noticed a jet with an unusual angled engine configuration. I hadn't seen that before, and I was curious about it.\n\nA day or two later I ran into Ed in the dorm hallway, and asked him. \"Hey, Ed. I saw this weird jet engine at the airport the other day. I don't know what type of plane it was, but it was angled like this. Do you know why?\"\n\nHis reply blew me away. \"It depends if the aircraft was made _before_ or _after_ May of such-and-such year.\" He went on to explain the history of that engine and its manufacturer, the basis for the design, which aircraft manufacturers used it during what time periods, and why. I had figured he'd know something about it, but this was over the top. I had asked him a random aviation question with no warning, and he was ready with deep and detailed knowledge about it. Something about that level of mastery thrills me, and it reminds of the difference between knowing a few facts or simple storylines and thoroughly understanding something.\n\nThe closer you are to Ed's level of understanding of what you are investing in, the better. When you thoroughly understand an industry, a company, a technology, a culture, or anything else, you have an investment advantage.\n\nI got another reminder of this a few days before I wrote this section. I was at a social gathering with some of my wife's friends. Bill, a quiet, middle-aged man, was among the group. At one point in the conversation he told us a little about his day. Bill is an expert commercial roofing analyst. When an insurance company needs to know why a multi-million-dollar roof failed, or a building owner has a leak nobody can figure out, they call Bill. He's spent most of his life on top of buildings looking at roofs.\n\nThat day he visited a large church building with a pattern of leaks popping up in multiple places. He looked at the stains on the ceiling tiles in various rooms of the building, and then told the owner, \"I'd say your roof membrane is from [manufacturer X], made between 1987 and 1991, and you had a significant hailstorm last summer.\" He hadn't even climbed a ladder and gone on the roof yet! His diagnosis was correct. Like the Sherlock Holmes of roofing, clues that wouldn't mean much to others were all Bill needed to solve the case.\n\nEd thoroughly understands how airplanes work, and Bill thoroughly understands how roofs work. When you thoroughly understand how your investments work, you have an investment advantage.\n\n### Don't Buy Simple Stories\n\nThe human brain is a meaning-making machine. We take bunches of facts and details, and condense them into concise interpretations. These stories help us simplify complex reality and give mentally manageable meaning to jumbles of information. We think and communicate with storylines.\n\nFor example, when financial markets move this way and that, we look for headlines to give meaning to the data. \"Treasuries fell, the dollar fell, and stocks rose because the Federal Reserve said they might wait to raise interest rates.\" Ahh. It all makes sense. The perplexed feeling we had when we saw the day's price charts changes to a pleasant feeling of knowing comprehension.\n\nThe trouble is, the reality of what happened that day is much more complex. Millions of investors made buy and sell decisions for millions of individual reasons. The headline's explanation of the overall result may not even be accurate, but with the story to tame the data, we feel satisfied. Often we feel satisfied by that plausible storyline even though it completely misses the true causes of that day's price movements.\n\nThis ability to simplify observations into stories is a wonderful capability of our brains. It's necessary so we can cope with the complexity of a world filled with virtually infinite events and information. In many cases, our stories serve us well, because they are good enough models of complex reality.\n\nWe might use a simple story like \"Traffic is bad so it's going to take longer to drive downtown.\" That's mentally manageable in a way that analyzing the number of cars on every feeder street is not. The reality of the traffic situation is massively complex. The number of people going to work today, rain or snow on each stretch of road, carpooling trends, accidents, even things like Daylight Savings Time affect the specific details of traffic on a given day. That complexity is simply too much to process, and we don't need to analyze that complexity to decide what time to leave for our theater date. We simplify, and the mental streamlining we receive in exchange for lower precision is worth it. We can round our drive time up a bit, and make the complexities irrelevant to the decision.\n\nOther stories don't serve our decisions well. \"Lawyers make a lot of money. I want to make a lot of money. I want to be a lawyer.\" That's a simple, mentally streamlined story, and there's truth in it. At the same time, the complexities masked by this simple story are also highly relevant to the career-choice decision. Lawyers also spend a lot of money on law school. Some lawyers discover they don't enjoy being lawyers. Some lawyers put in a lot of time as low-paid junior associates before ever making a lot of money. Current trends in the legal profession are toward excess supply, less demand, more automation, and contract outsourcing, putting downward pressure on lawyer's compensation. There's a real chance the aspiring student who sets off to make a lot of money as a lawyer, never actually will. The simple story that our meaning-making brains stamp with \"makes sense\" is an inadequate basis for the decision.\n\nLots of people recognize that a career choice is a complex, multi-factor decision, and wouldn't make such a big time investment decision based on a simple storyline. We are familiar enough with the complexities of a career choice to resist drastic oversimplification. We can protest: \"But wait, it's not that simple. What about this factor?\"\n\nPerhaps we are more susceptible to trusting simple stories when it comes to financial investments in unfamiliar territory. A classic approach to picking stocks started by dividing them into industry segments, picking the strongest industry at the time, then picking the strongest company in that industry to invest in. It's a logical story that makes sense, but it didn't work. The selected companies didn't perform any better than a randomly selected stock would have. The real factors that drive company profits and stock prices are just too complex to accurately simplify into \"strongest industry\" and \"strongest company.\"\n\n\"Traffic is bad\" is good enough to decide what time to leave for the theater, but simple stories like \"more of our electricity will come from wind and solar\" aren't good enough to decide how to invest your money in energy stocks. There are many other factors that influence the future prospects of energy companies, and predicting one trend (not easy in itself) is woefully inadequate to predict investment performance.\n\nWithout in-depth knowledge to check them against, simple stories feel plausible and mentally satisfying, even when they are completely wrong. If you find yourself thinking, \"I don't know a lot about this, but that explanation makes sense to me\" or \"This investment will do well because of one simple factor,\" red flag that thought. That kind of rationale is not a reliable basis for investment decisions of any kind, whether relational, financial, vocational, or otherwise.\n\nThorough understanding, like Ed's knowledge of aviation or Bill's knowledge of roofing, is great insurance against buying simple stories. With that depth of understanding, it's easy to remember that reality is much more complex than a simple storyline. An expert knows what other questions need to be asked and answered to make the right decision.\n\n### Invest in Thorough Understanding\n\nYou can develop thorough understanding by investing time to research, learn, test, and practice.\n\nDig in to learn more. Read articles, books, executive bios, Wikipedia pages, or whatever learning material applies. You'll start to find additional simple storylines that don't agree with the first one you heard. And you'll find additional facets of the situation that are relevant.\n\nDon't be afraid to get practice in an area you are unfamiliar with, for the purpose of learning. Just keep clear that the outcome you are looking for is learning, and the resources you are devoting are a learning cost. Get the learning for the lowest cost that will get the answers you need.\n\nLook for ways to check the storyline in a test or experiment. There's nothing like real-world results to shatter assumptions and raise interesting new questions.\n\nFor example, if you want to learn about trading stock options, practicing by watching actual options respond to price movements is quite instructional. There's no need to wade in with real money, let alone large amounts of real money, to get that instruction. Recognize your limited experience is a disadvantage, and practice trading with a Website that offers \"paper money\" simulated trading. You don't need to risk real money to get the learning outcome you want.\n\nYou might learn, as I did, that options trading is harder than it looks. That lesson is less painful when your losses are in imaginary dollars instead of the real thing. If consistent results over time prove you have a real advantage, _then_ risk resources in search of a financial return.\n\nMany storylines can be illuminated through tests or experiments. If the simple story is \"Consumers will love this because it has a modern design,\" do some test sale on eBay, or read customer reviews to see how consumers actually respond to similar products. If the story is \"This company earns more during construction booms,\" pull some historical financial statements on that company and test your theory against the data. If the story is \"This job candidate will be a great fit because his last job required the same skills,\" set up a working interview where you can see those skills in action.\n\nAs you dig into learning, the satisfying layers of simplicity will peel away, and confusing complexities will become apparent. \"Hmm. Customers like some modern-designed products but not others.\" \"That's strange. The company actually earned less during the last construction boom due to safety problems.\" \"The candidate performed well on the skills, but was late for the working interview and seemed defensive about feedback.\" Not so simple now.\n\nThe confusion that comes from digging into new learning might be an uncomfortable feeling. We can avoid confusion by relying in ignorance on simple, sensible stories. We can also reduce confusion (to a point) by gaining deep understanding of a subject or situation. On the learning curve between ignorance and deep understanding, we have to travel through confusion. This unpleasant mental discord that comes with the learning process is a good sign. It means you are moving closer to understanding the reality of the situation, and it also serves to protect you from the overconfidence that comes from trusting a simple storyline.\n\nYou are more likely to make an investment mistake when you know a few satisfying storylines than when you are engaged in a confusing learning curve. The feeling of confusion is a valuable signal that you need to learn more before deciding. Simple stories, on the other hand, eliminate confusion without adding actual understanding, and believing them is asking for trouble.\n\nResearch and testing will dispel simple stories, and help you see the complexity you must grasp to make an informed decision. Investing the time to thoroughly understanding an opportunity will lead to an investment advantage.\n\n### Embrace Not Knowing\n\nAt one of Berkshire-Hathaway's giant shareholder meetings, I heard an audience member ask Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger what they thought about the new electronic currency BitCoin. As I recall, Munger said, \"I don't have any idea about the value of a BitCoin,\" and Buffett said, \"I don't either. Berkshire won't be investing in BitCoin, I can tell you that. We know what we don't know.\" Next question.\n\nSome investments are so speculative or uncertain, deep understanding of their prospects isn't possible. Other times thorough understanding is possible, but the cost of learning about an opportunity outweighs the potential returns.\n\nIf it doesn't make sense for you to spend the time to go through the learning curve, that's okay. That probably means you shouldn't make a decision about that investment either. Effective investors frequently walk away from opportunities they don't understand.\n\nMost investments will fall into this category for most of us. We have many opportunities to be seduced by simple storylines, and many opportunities to admit what we don't know and stay out of trouble.\n\nAs an investor, you must be able to tell the difference between the illusion of competence from shallow storylines, and a realistic basis for confidence based on deep understanding.\n\nLearn to recognize and be honest with yourself about areas in which you don't have thorough understanding. Reject simple storylines that temptingly offer to bring meaning to that knowledge gap. Just say \"I don't know.\" Dig deeper to learn more, or look for investment opportunities you understand better.\n\n### Understand the Lifeblood of a Business\n\nYou understand _how_ a business is performing by understanding its accounting. You understand _why_ it's performing that way by understanding some other things.\n\nWhat's the economic engine at the core? This is where value gets created. Like the engine in a car, this is where the economic power comes from that drives everything else. In a manufacturing business it's on the assembly line, where the whole product almost magically becomes worth more than the sum of its parts. In an insurance business it might be the ability to accurately price risk, and the financial capacity to take those risks. In a brokerage business the engine at the core might be sales made through trusting relationships. Understanding the core value generator(s) is an essential part of thoroughly understanding a business.\n\nHow do people treat each other there? This is the culture of an organization. Many organizations with smart strategy underperform or fail completely because the employees, customers, or other people involved don't like how they are treated. Is it a competitive culture, a collaborative culture, or a nurturing culture? Does that culture fit the company strategy and the customers' needs?\n\nWhat's the competitive advantage? Do people want what they sell? Do customers have solid reasons to choose this business over another provider? What, if anything, do they do that's hard to imitate?\n\nAll these taken together build a framework for thoroughly understanding a business. This applies to a solo business, a small family business, or a giant corporation. When you can answer these questions in an informed way, you have an advantage in making investment decisions about that business.\n\n### Understand What You Are Involved In\n\nOur most important investments are usually more integral parts of our lives than owning stock in a large and distant corporation. With thorough understanding we'll make better decisions about closer-to-home arenas like our households, our friendships, our jobs or businesses, and our own training and development.\n\nI review financial results from each of my companies a day or two after month end. On a daily basis I look at graphical dashboards of key performance indicators like sales, backlog, capacity utilization, and advertising response. These businesses are my most important financial investments. I keep the information to understand how they are doing close at hand.\n\nMy wife does a great job faithfully accounting for every dollar we spend from our household budget. Each New Year's day we meet to review what we spent in the past year, and decide what to budget for the year ahead. (This holiday activity may give you a glimpse into what a fun-loving person I am.) The accounting my wife does gives us the thorough understanding we need to make informed decisions about our personal consumption. Understanding via accounting enabled sound management of our household finances, which played a key role in our overall investment capability and results.\n\nI've noticed entrepreneurship and a love for accounting sometimes don't coexist in a given individual. If you are investing in your own business, you need to understand the key accounting measures of that business. You don't need to do the accounting yourself, but you better read and understand the numbers that describe the state and performance of the business. Understanding the financial metrics of a close-to-home business is probably even more important than understanding the finances of a public company, in which more accountability and analysis are in place.\n\nFinancial investing without good financial accounting is like painting a portrait in the dark. It might keep you busy for a while, but when the lights come on, it's gonna be ugly.\n\nIt goes without saying that you need to understand the terms of a car loan, employment contract, or life insurance policy before you commit to it. Thorough understanding and wise decisions in such close-to-home financial matters often make a bigger difference than scrutinizing investments you are less personally involved in.\n\nUnderstanding isn't just for financial investments. It applies to investing in relationships with people, whether friends, employees, or a future spouse. Don't rely on first impressions or simple storylines about a person's character. Seek to know people more thoroughly before you trust too much.\n\nUnderstanding applies to investing in your own development, too. Seek to understand your own fears, desires, strengths, and history. Ask people around you for feedback and insight about how you behave and interact.\n\nTake time to learn and understand beneath the surface, and you'll make better decisions.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Maintain a grounded awareness of the limits of your understanding: which investment decisions are in areas you thoroughly understand, and which investment decisions are outside of those limits.\n\n  Approach decisions with extra caution in areas in which you don't have thorough understanding, but you do know enough to be dangerous.\n\n  Don't be lulled into a false sense of understanding by simple, plausible storylines that mask decision-relevant complexities. Dig deeper, or admit you aren't qualified to make investment decisions in that area, and move on.\n\n  Invest in attaining thorough understanding by engaging in learning. Reduce risk and increase ROI on your learning experiences by doing small-scale experiments, not big ones.\n\n  Access and understand financial accounting for your household, and any businesses you invest in. Understand the economic engine at the core, the organizational culture, and the competitive advantage of those businesses too.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee what other readers want to do more homework on, and share your ideas at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 11 > Own What You're Building\n\nEric spent decades honing his skills as a risk management expert. He worked for nationally recognized leaders in the field. He moved up the ladder in his career. He worked on high-profile projects. He even made career moves from one organization to another to keep advancing. Based on his expertise and experience, he currently earns a very nice salary and benefits package. He helps build the systems of the organizations he works for, and he helps protect those organizations from threats. I bet he'll always be able to find a good job until he decides to retire. He'll never lack for food on the table or a good health insurance plan. But he does not own what he's building.\n\nOscar also spent decades working as a risk management professional. He has certifications, experience, and connections in the same field Eric does. For years they followed similar tracks, and earned similar wages. Then Oscar made a change. He invested time and money to build a risk management system of his own. When he was ready, he took a big risk. He left his day job and started his own risk management business. He got meetings with executives at potential client businesses, and pitched his services.\n\nClients signed up, and Oscar installed his system at one site after another. Less than a year after going full time with his business, Oscar was earning about 10 times the money per year that Eric was. Why? It's not because Oscar is smarter, more skilled, or better trained, or has the ability to do things Eric can't. It's because Oscar chose to take the risk to own what he was building, whereas Eric continued to build systems owned by others.\n\nOscar added the advantage of ownership to his investment of time, and the effect on his returns was dramatic.\n\nOwners have profound advantages.\n\n### Owners Get Paid for Taking Risk\n\nOscar invested time and money in his product and his business with no guarantee of success. He risked years of his life and a chunk of his financial future.\n\nOscar also took an emotional risk. He let responsibility for his income and his career fall onto his own shoulders. He had a wife and kids depending on him to make good. He risked failure and disappointment. He risked looking bad in front of his friends and his family.\n\nThere's yet another set of risks Oscar took. If his product malfunctions, and a client experiences losses, he could be liable. The core of his business is taking a portion of his client's risk off of them and onto his business.\n\nA lot of the extra return he's earning now is compensation for risks Oscar took that Eric didn't.\n\nWhether it's real estate, oil wells, farmland, stocks, creative works, or the corner grocery store, people who own those things are taking risks that wage earners aren't taking. Sometimes owners lose big time. Markets go bust. Investors can and sometimes do lose everything they invested.\n\nAs an owner, I've sometimes worked hard an entire month in a business that lost money during that month. None of my employees has ever worked for negative wages in their job.\n\nIn other months I've made more profit than any employer would pay me or my employees for a month's work. Owners take risks that employees don't, and sometimes owners get paid very well for doing that.\n\nSome of the risks owners take are emotional, not financial. Sometimes the price of entry is emotional discomfort, not money. Because many people aren't willing to take those emotional risks, owners can earn superior returns.\n\nThe risks of ownership are often skewed strongly to the upside. Owners can decide to stop investing in what's not working, and continue investing in what is, receiving long-lasting returns on their successful investments.\n\nMany business ventures have risk\/return profiles something like the one shown in the table on page 166.\n\nThe risk profile of ownership differs greatly from the risk profile of employment. We could make a similar table comparing the risk profile of owning apartment buildings to the risk profile of renting apartments, or the risk profiling of directing a not-for-profit to the risk profile of working at one.\n\nMany ventures with potential for huge returns start with a difficult and risky early phase in which returns are negative and the future is uncertain. The payoff for taking on that type of risk profile can be very large.\n\nYou get to make a personal choice about what risk profile you want to take on. If you look at the first few rows of the previous table, you might decide ownership is a raw deal, and employment is much safer. Many people look at real life that way, I think.\n\nLook at the long view, not just the current year or current decade. Look at your personal characteristics and abilities. Consider taking on ownership-type risk profiles to open up big possibilities for your future.\n\nInvestment advantages come from willingness and ability to do things others find difficult. Accepting the risks of ownership is one of those things.\n\n**Event** | **Owner Risk\/Reward** | **Employee Risk\/Reward**\n\n---|---|---\n\nBusiness Begins | Risks a year's wages in capital.  \nTakes responsibility for overall business success\/failure. | Risks no capital.  \nTakes responsibility for specific job duties.\n\nEarly Operation | Loses money each month.  \nPuts in scheduled time for an agreed-upon paycheck.  \nDecides direction. | Makes money each month.  \nPuts in a lot of time for an uncertain future outcome.   \nFollows direction.\n\nIf Early Failure | Loses entire investment.  \nCarries emotional burden of personal failure and finding a new career direction. | Loses job.  \nCarries emotional burden of job seeking.\n\nIf Conflict Between Owner and Employee | Decides outcome.  \nMay terminate employee. | Accepts outcome.  \nMay lose job.\n\nIf Big Business Breakthrough | Receives multi-million dollar increase in net worth. | Potentially receives a modest raise of a few thousand dollars.\n\nSales of Successful Business | Is relieved of ownership responsibility.  \nReceives large cash payment. | Has new bosses assigned, not chosen.  \nMay lose job.\n\n### Owners Are on the Other Side of the Labor Market\n\nEvery market has a supply side, and a demand side. Farmers grow vegetables and supply them to the produce market. Grocery stores and consumers want vegetables, thus providing the demand.\n\nEmployees supply the labor market by trading their time for money. Businesses are on the other side of the labor market; they are part of the demand for labor. Employees sell their time. Businesses buy it.\n\nIt may be to your advantage to be a buyer rather than a seller of time, for a number of reasons.\n\nTime is your scarcest resource. Every hour you trade for money is an hour of your life you can't get back. There are ways to get a lot more money, but there are no ways to get a lot more lifetime. Employees trade away their limited time. Owners can bring in the time of many employees, building something much bigger than they could ever build alone, even in a lifetime.\n\nGlobalization is bringing billions of people into the labor market and probably allowing them to compete with you for your job, even if they live on another continent. And this additional labor is coming online at low prices. This big increase in the supply of labor benefits buyers of labor such as businesses, and hurts employees, the sellers of labor. You might gain an advantage, and do more good, by being an employer who creates a job, than an employee who uses one.\n\nAdditionally, business owners have the flexibility to hire or contract labor from any country that best meets the needs of their business. Employees don't usually have the flexibility to move to whatever country offers the best employment opportunities. Owners have an advantage in the globalizing labor market.\n\nThere's another force affecting the labor market. Not only is supply increasing, but technology is limiting the growth of demand for many kinds of routine labor. The Internet, computers, robotics, and other technology trends are increasingly automating what used to be done by employees. This creates opportunities for skilled technicians who create and maintain high-tech equipment, and removes opportunities for workers who use to do the jobs smart machines have taken over.\n\nThe business owner receives increased returns when new automated equipment welds the product together precisely and cost-effectively. Those employed as welders earn a decreased return when the automation replaces work they used to do.\n\nThere will always be job opportunities for lots of people, but already, developed countries don't have job opportunities for everyone who wants one. If you are willing to be an owner who employs others instead of seeking employment, you can participate in the other side of the labor market, and you might find a big advantage there.\n\n### Owners Participate in Markets for Goods and Services\n\nEmployees participate in the market for the type of work they do. The wage for computer technicians is determined by the supply of computer technicians and the demand for their services. A carpet installer participates in the market for carpet installation labor, and his or her wage is determined by the supply and demand for carpet installation labor.\n\nOwners get to participate in different markets than employees do. An owner of a computer assembly company can employ those computer technicians and participate in the market for assembled computers. An owner of an apartment complex can employ that carpet installer and participate in the market for rental housing.\n\nWhen I shifted from selling my time as a software developer to creating software products that I could sell unlimited digital copies of for no additional cost, I shifted from participating in the market for software development labor, to participating in the market for usable software products. The latter was much more lucrative than the former for me.\n\nSome products and services are worth much more to the market than they cost to build. That was the case with my software products. Owners can earn that difference as a potentially large return. Employees don't usually have that kind of opportunity for outsized returns, because they are competing against many other people with the same sets of skills.\n\nOwners get to participate in markets for goods and services that employees don't. This can be a big advantage in generating higher returns.\n\nIn addition to participating in markets for goods and services, business owners can participate in the market for businesses, by selling their business and\/or buying other businesses. Significant investment returns can come through this avenue.\n\n### Active Owners Tend the Resources They've Invested\n\nIf you are a skilled and conscientious gardener with a bag of apple seeds to invest, you might earn a higher yield of apples investing those seeds in an orchard you tend than in an orchard tended by an unknown gardener of average skill and average motivation.\n\nIf you are good at business, or a certain type of business, you might earn a higher return investing your time and money in a business you tend than in a business tended by an unknown manager of average skill and average motivation.\n\nActive ownership in your investment can take on different forms. You might be the active owner of a business, the active owner of investment real estate, or the active director of a nonprofit organization, for example.\n\nActive owners tend to the management and growth of their own investments. Passive owners leave the tending to others. At the least, active owners pay attention to how the investment is faring and have the control to replace the manager tending to the investment, if results are unsatisfactory.\n\nAt my current level of wealth, if I buy stock in any company in the S&P 500, I won't have the clout to be an active owner of that stock. Instead I'll have a passive role. This keeps my time free, and at the same time prevents me from having any active ownership advantage. I'll get the returns of any other passive investor in that stock, but I won't have the advantages of controlling ownership, or even significant influence as a part-owner.\n\nActive owners typically need a broader range of skillsets than employees do. The active owner of investment real estate needs skills in site selection, deal making, legal matters, hiring contractors, marketing, and managing tenants. The installer that owner employs to replace carpet in the apartments doesn't need that broad range of skills. He or she needs only to be good at one primary job skill.\n\nIf you have the desire and the ability to be an active owner, you may find a significant investment advantage in that role.\n\n### Sometimes Owners Don't Know Their Hourly Rate\n\nWhen you are creating something, like a business, an invention, or a screenplay, you don't know the hourly rate you're working for. It could be negative, it could be higher than any reasonable salary. This is one of the risks owners take.\n\nMonty Widenius didn't know the hourly rate he was working for when he started creating the computer database system MySQL in 1995. I guesstimate he spent at least 25,000 hours coding MySQL before he sold it to Sun 13 years later. That's more than 3,000 work days filled with problem-solving, fatigue, doubts, and no guarantees.\n\nOn top of that, Monty was giving MySQL away as free open-source software the whole time. He saw the long view. He wasn't playing for a paycheck at the end of the week. He lived with the risk that events out of his control might mean the long view never even came true.\n\nIn 2008 he finally knew the hourly rate: His income from the sale was roughly $25 million (source: _<https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Michael_> Widenius_). That's about $1,000 an hour. On top of that, the software he created became a staple of the Internet software world, used by Face-book, Twitter, Google, and many more. His return went beyond dollars to worldwide recognition and impact.\n\nIf he had approached any software company in 1995 and said, \"I'd like you to pay me $1,000 an hour to write database software,\" would any owner have agreed to that deal? No. He had to be his own owner and take a lot of risk to make that deal come true.\n\n### Business Owners Get Investment Opportunities Others Don't\n\nNow that Oscar has his risk management business, he has exclusive access to investment opportunities within that business. When Oscar has $20,000 to invest, he can look within his business for an advertising opportunity, a new hire, or additional software development that will earn a return. It's quite likely he can find opportunities that pay 100% or more ROI. Because Oscar is the owner of his business, he doesn't have to bid or compete against anyone else for those fantastic investment opportunities. Whereas other investors would kill for a 20% ROI in public markets, Oscar can put his own capital to work at 100%+ ROI within his own business.\n\nAt various points in the growth of my acoustics business, we needed more space. To meet those needs I used some of the profits I had earned to buy existing buildings, or buy land and build a new building. I became the landlord for my own business. I got a friendly and reliable tenant (my own businesses) and the businesses got a friendly and reliable landlord (me) who put priority on whatever the businesses needed to grow and succeed.\n\nI earned higher returns than what I could get investing in commercial real estate rented to others. My legal and marketing costs were $0, for example. And my occupancy rate has been 100% the entire time. I'm sure other real estate investors would love to rent real estate to my businesses. They don't get the opportunity. I get first dibs on investing in the real estate my businesses will occupy, because I'm the business owner. Ownership creates opportunities like that.\n\nYou don't have to be an entrepreneur or an active business manager to take advantage of the outsized returns businesses sometimes generate, but it helps. Passive shareholders in a business that has high-return internal investment opportunities also benefit in a similar way. The trouble is, you need to be an owner _before_ the prospects of the business improve. The price of stock in publicly traded companies reflects investor opinions of the future prospects. Unless you have access or information that other investors don't, stock in businesses with a promising future will already be expensive. Knowing which businesses are most likely to see their prospects improve in the near future is a challenging feat.\n\nBusiness owners get to invest at whatever it actually costs to build the business. Outside investors get to invest at a price that reflects the future potential of the business. A restaurateur can own a new restaurant business for the cost of kitchen equipment, inventory, etc. An outside restaurant investor will have to pay a multiple of the expected future profit to buy in. For a restaurant with great prospects, this difference could be large, giving a huge advantage to the owner\/ entrepreneur.\n\nOwnership of a successful business creates investment opportunities that sometimes return dramatically more than publicly available investments do. This may be the best financial investment advantage I know of.\n\n### Ownership Isn't Just for Profit-Making\n\nThe day I wrote this section I visited a number of related not-for-profit organizations, including Lawndale Christian Community Church (LCCC). They are located in the North Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago. The organization's leaders have been working there for 40 years to improve a poor and difficult neighborhood.\n\nThe community of Lawndale has lacked quality housing residents can afford. Slumlords didn't share the values and priorities of the leaders at LCCC. So what did they do? They raised money, bought land, and built houses and apartments. Since then LCCC has developed more than $60 million in real estate in the Lawndale neighborhood. Some of it they rent to local residents. Some of them have sold to local homeowners. They got control over the local housing situation by becoming local housing owners. And this ownership ensures they will keep control into the future, enabling them to implement their values and priorities in the community.\n\nThe community of Lawndale had another problem: The residents wanted local access to affordable healthcare. Once again, LCCC became an owner to solve the problem in a way that fit their mission. Using donations and ultimately large federal grants, they built a medical facility that's now the size of a small hospital. LCCC owns it. They do dental, vision, prenatal care, and so forth, for affordable fees. By owning the medical facility they have a big advantage in working toward the community development future they desire.\n\nWhether your goal is to get rich, improve the neighborhood, or save the rainforest, ownership can give you advantages that help you get there.\n\n### Own Your Work Without Owning a Business\n\nBusiness ownership is a powerful path to financial investment advantage. At the same time, it's not for everyone. It requires broad skills, both technical and interpersonal. It requires a tolerance for risk and an internal drive.\n\nIf you feel business ownership is not for you, you can still benefit from owning your work. You can build and own something that's not a business, like an invention, a work of art, a book, or a physical building.\n\nYou can own productive assets like real estate or farmland without the operational complexities of running a business.\n\nYou can take ownership by forming and leading a group of people to work toward a cause, collaborate on common goals, or share industry best practices. Leaders have ownership benefits that members don't.\n\nYou can invest in developing skills that you own for the rest of your life, so you don't have to \"rent\" those skills by hiring others to do things for you.\n\nYou can become a freelancer, trading your time and skills for money. You'll have more flexibility, take more risk, and likely earn a much higher rate than employees earn doing the same work. I have a friend who observed at the beginning of his IT career that consultants earn far more than employees for the type of work he does, so he became an independent consultant. He's getting the benefits of ownership without running a business, at least not in the sense of managing employees and operations.\n\nDepending on local market conditions, it may be an advantage to own your residence instead of renting it. Owning instead of long-term leasing property, like your car or tools you use, is usually an advantage. Whenever it makes sense, look for opportunities to pay one time and own a productive resource, rather than paying over and over again for the use of something long term.\n\nIf active ownership really isn't for you, you can still own small parts of businesses by buying stock in publicly traded companies. You'll have to compete against lots of other investors to buy that stock, so you probably won't get a great bargain. Still, the returns on owning and accumulating stock will eventually outpace the returns from most day jobs.\n\nThe extra risk and responsibility of owning what your building might be very well worth it.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  If it fits you, consider earning higher returns than the supply and demand market for your skillset offers by investing your time and money to build and own something of long-term value.\n\n  Take on the emotional and\/or financial risks of ownership to open up investment opportunities that are unavailable to those who choose the safety of working under someone else's ownership umbrella.\n\n  If you have the desire and the ability, access superior investment opportunities by owning your own business.\n\n  Even if entrepreneurship isn't for you, look for opportunities to be an owner of your work, passive investments like stocks, and the things you use in your daily life.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nTake a quiz on how entrepreneurship fits you and see a reader-contributed list of ideas for owning what you're building without owning your own business at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 12 > Keep Rolling the Snowball\n\nTwo years into the launch and growth of ATS Acoustics, I was getting restless. That business was past proof-of-concept, and it was generating solid profits. Its future looked bright, and I fully intended to lead it to that future if I could. At the same time my thirst for creative invention and my urge to find high-ROI investment for those profits compelled me to look for an additional business opportunity.\n\nThere were two things I knew I didn't want to do with the profits that were coming in:\n\n1. I didn't want to consume them in an increased lifestyle. Sure, I could have sold the old minivan and bought shiny red sports cars or something. I knew that dumping those profits into my lifestyle would stop the upward momentum of my business investment. That would be like cutting down an orchard of seedling apple trees to get firewood for a fun bonfire. Decades of apple production traded in for a fun party? Never. I wanted those resources to keep growing.\n\n2. I also didn't want to direct those resources into average-returning investments such as the overall market for stocks and bonds. That would be like planting those seedlings in a huge public orchard where competition for space is fierce, and where I couldn't apply my time and talents to creating superior growth.\n\nIf I put those resources in the public markets, they'd grow, but only slowly. I thought I could do better taking my resources and investing them where I had an advantage. I didn't need the big scale of financial markets, because my resources were still small. I needed a high ROI to keep my resources growing.\n\nPhil, the film school graduate and original employee, still worked with me. His job had morphed from installing software modules to selling acoustic panels. (I appreciated his flexibility.) He also had a videography business on the side. One day we chatted at his desk about a large video project he was bidding on. It involved three cameras, a video switcher, and some other gear neither of us owned. He had a quote to rent that gear for 30 days. I thought the quoted price was really high.\n\nThe next morning I said, \"Hey, Phil. If you get that big video job, how about I buy that gear and rent it to you for half of that quote? When you're done with it I'll either rent it to others, or sell it or something.\" That sounded good to him.\n\nWe both waited to see if his bid would win the job. I started to think, \"What _will_ I do with that gear if I buy it?\" I wondered if an online rental store could work. My mind raced ahead to imagine all aspects of the business model: reservations, logistics, shipping, online marketing, and so forth. We could ship nationwide from one central warehouse, using equipment much more efficiently than local rental stores could. I started to think the business could work and I could start it using the gear I'd buy for Phil's big video project.\n\nA few weeks later Phil found out he had lost the bid. Someone else had been awarded the big video job, and he had no need for that gear after all.\n\nYou know when you flip a coin to make a decision, and while the coin is hanging in the air, you suddenly know what you want the outcome to be? When I heard that Phil didn't get the job, it was like that for me. I was disappointed. I wanted to start that rental business. So I did.\n\nI bought one popular, high-end video camera. I began to create the software that would handle online ordering and real-time reservations. I was engrossed in the thrilling task of taking the online rental business from dream to reality. We were still sharing the office and phone lines, so we named this one ATS, too: ATS Rentals.\n\nNewborn ATS Rentals had an awkward problem: We only had one piece of gear in our inventory. If a potential customer came to our Website and saw our inventory of one, they'd wonder what sort of crazy startup this was and never trust us to be their rental provider. On the other hand, if I bought a full range of inventory, and the idea flopped, I'd be out serious money. I don't like to take big risks on untested ideas.\n\nWe solved the problem by listing every piece of audio and video gear Phil and I personally owned. Phil agreed if his personal gear got rented, he'd let me ship it out to the customers, and he'd get a cut of the proceeds. We then had enough categories and items on our Website to look semi-legitimate. We paid for some online search marketing and waited to see if anyone would rent anything.\n\nLuckily the one item ATS Rentals actually owned was the first item that got rented. We got paid, and shipped it out to the customer. For a few days ATS Rentals was sold out. The camera came back. I bought another one, thus doubling our inventory. The business model worked.\n\nNot long after that, I hired a full-time equipment buyer. Seven years later, we haven't stopped buying. ATS Rentals now owns thousands of video cameras, projectors, lenses, and other pieces of audio-visual gear. I've been able to reinvest millions of dollars of profit from ATS Acoustics into ATS Rentals at a high ROI. ATS Rentals was just the investment opportunity I needed to keep those resources growing. Thanks, Phil, for the inspiration.\n\nNow I have a new \"problem\": ATS Acoustics and ATS Rentals are both much bigger businesses than they were seven years ago, and they are both generating solid profits. Because I reinvested my earlier profits, profits grew, creating even more profits that need to be reinvested. If I succeed in the challenge to find new and bigger opportunities to reinvest all that profit, future profits will be even bigger. This is the positive spiral of compounding returns.\n\nI intend to make investment decisions that continue that spiral until I run out of ideas, lose a bunch of money on bad decisions, or run out of lifetime. I'm hoping it's the latter, a very long time from now.\n\nThe returns I want aren't just financial. Entrepreneurship has been good to me. I want as many other people as possible to experience that rewarding thrill ride. I also want people everywhere, from the poorest on up, to value all their resources and invest them in ways that improve their lives and our world. I'm compounding my resources and investing my life for purposes like these.\n\nNot all investment leads to compounding growth. When you assemble the right ingredients, compounding returns grow off the charts.\n\n### Allow Plenty of Time\n\nTime is our most precious resource and an essential ingredient in the compound growth process. Start compounding as early in your life as possible. Most of the returns from compounded investing come in the last few years of the process. Start a few years earlier, and you will dramatically increase your ultimate returns.\n\nConsider the table on page 181, showing the growth of $10,000 over time, based on 10% annual growth.\n\nSome observations:\n\nAfter 65 years of compounding, the original $10,000 has increased roughly 4,904%. That's a lot more than 10% per year times 65 years = 650%. Compound growth is exponential not linear.\n\nIt takes awhile for this process to pick up momentum. The amount earned in year 65 is about as much as the amount earned in the first 40 years combined!\n\nAssuming the investor lives until age 95 (not an unreasonable assumption in our time  _[www.cdc.gov\/nchs\/data\/hus\/hus11.pdf#fig32_ ]) starting to compound that $10,000 at age 29 instead of age 30 will increase the total result by $445,792. If our investor starts at age 20 instead of age 30, the total result will increase by almost $8 million! Time is of the essence.\n\n### Limit Consumption and Reinvest Your Profits\n\nConsuming $100 in year 0, instead of investing it, would reduce the overall return by year 65 by $4,904. Consumption early in the game is very, very expensive later on. Investment early in the game is very, very rewarding later on.\n\nIt's tempting to increase your consumption as your resources start to grow. Too much consumption devastates long-term results.\n\nIf our investor had decided to consume half of each year's investment returns, and invest the other half, the total after 65 years would be just $238,399 instead of $4,903,707. With the numbers in this test case (10% return over 65 years), cutting the reinvestment in half reduced the final result by more than a factor of 20.\n\nConsumption and reinvestment are enemies of each other. Extra consumption, especially early on, will slash the final size of the snowball you're rolling.\n\nIt's almost irresistible to increase consumption as your resources increase. With my growing family and my human nature, I've only partially succeeded in my efforts to keep my consumption from growing. At the very least, ensure your annual consumption is a decreasing _percentage_ of your annual income. Make sure your annual income including investment returns is growing much faster than your consumption is. This will preserve much of your compound growth potential.\n\nIt's not enough to protect your profits from increased consumption. You must also find good opportunities to reinvest those profits. This reinvestment challenge gets bigger every year. In year one our investor only needs to find an opportunity to reinvest $1,464 at 10% return. In year 65 our investor needs an opportunity to reinvest $445,792 at 10% return, a much bigger challenge.\n\nIn year one our investor could do something like upgrade to more efficient household appliances, and probably save 10% of that cost in reduced utility bills for decades to come. It's harder to find an opportunity to deploy $445,792 in household efficiency upgrades. The hunt for high-returning investments gets tougher as the quantity of resources to reinvest gets bigger.\n\n### Don't Get Trapped by Diminishing Returns\n\nAll investment activities run into limits. Every investment will reach a point at which the ROI starts to decrease as the amount of investment increases. Some investments reach that point much sooner than others.\n\nThe ROI on spending five minutes sharpening an ax before a day of woodcutting is enormous. A doubling of productivity might result. Spending an additional five minutes at the beginning of that same day (10 minutes total) sharpening that ax won't quadruple productivity. The increase in productivity might be just a few percent more. As the ax approaches the sharpest it can be, the return on extra sharpening time diminishes to zero. Ax-sharpening is a high-ROI investment with rapidly diminishing returns. It's well worth doing a little of, but it doesn't scale beyond that.\n\nLearning a new skill is similar to ax-sharpening. Taking a class to improve your job skills might be a very high-ROI investment of time and money. Take the same class again, and your return will diminish compared to the first time. Taking a different class related to your job skills will again offer a good ROI, but take enough different classes related to your job and soon the returns will shrink again. As your skills become state of the art for your field, the return on further training diminishes to near zero. You can invest much more time in job skills than you can in ax-sharpening before you run out of worthwhile return. Skills training scales better than ax-sharpening, but it still doesn't scale from 1 to 1 million. Because you'll run out of relevant things to learn, and run out of lifetime to use your skills, a few cumulative decades of skills training is probably about all that makes sense.\n\nScaling a local business also runs into limitations that diminish returns. Todd's commercial lawncare business operates in a city that contains about 1,000 businesses with lawns. At the beginning, Todd only had 10 customers, and his advertising paid off really well. There were 990 potential customers out there to advertise to, and some of them wanted a new lawncare provider. As his business grew to 100 customers, then 500, his advertising became less and less effective. Half of the people who saw his ads were already doing business with him, and most of the other half were happy with their current provider. Advertising that used to generate 100% ROI now generated only 10%. Todd will receive a diminishing return on investing in growing that business in that city.\n\nTo break free of that limitation, Todd could expand to other cities, or even go nationwide. With a few million potential customers in his new nationwide market, Todd could once again earn great returns on his advertising investments. He could probably scale that business big enough to keep him busy growing for decades or perhaps even a lifetime. Eventually though, everything runs into a limit. At a few hundred thousand customers, Todd's lawncare business would once again run into steeply diminishing returns.\n\nWhen you have a little to invest, small opportunities, with high ROI, that also use a lot of your investment advantages make sense. As your resources grow exponentially through compounding reinvestment, you'll need to find investments that can scale bigger without experiencing significantly diminished returns.\n\nIf employment is your path, this might mean changing jobs to invest your career time in a larger company with bigger opportunities. If you are a business owner this might mean expanding your business to other products or services. In financial investing this might mean adding investments to your portfolio that don't offer the same level of superior returns as the opportunities you found when your resources were smaller.\n\nYour available time is a strict limit, and prevents significant compounding growth of anything that requires a lot of your time to keep generating returns. As your resources grow, it's especially important to find investment opportunities that can grow without taking up more of your time.\n\nInvestments in financial markets are the most scalable investments I can think of. These markets are so large that no individual in a lifetime could run out of opportunities to invest in them at acceptably average returns. This huge scale comes at the cost of average returns because most of us don't have advantages that enable us to earn above-average returns in large public markets.\n\nWhen your resources are small, look for creative opportunities to earn higher returns than you can get in those big markets. As your resources grow, expand into opportunities that fit the scale of your resources.\n\n### Continue to Allocate Your Available Resources to Your Best ROI\n\nThe rate of return you earn each year has a dramatic effect on the overall result after an extended period of compounding. Increasing the growth rate of our investors $10,000 from 10% per year to 12% per year more than triples the total earned over a 65-year period. Earning 8% instead of 10% has a similar effect in the opposite direction, reducing the total earned by 70%.\n\nThis dramatic long-term effect is all the more reason to work diligently at allocating your available resources to your investment opportunities from which you expect to receive the highest return.\n\nAs your resources grow, your ROI on a percentage basis will almost certainly shrink. It's not that hard to invest $1,000 in something that turns it into $2,000 in a year, for 100% ROI. Pre-order something in bulk for 50% savings. Upgrade tools or equipment to increase your productivity. Advertise your freelance services. Get a skill certification that leads to a raise. Hire a personal trainer to improve your health and reduce medical costs. Hire a life coach to improve your career path and job performance. It's very difficult to invest $1 billion in something that turns it into $2 billion in a year. Search for high-ROI opportunities in the early years, before the challenge of deploying large amounts of capital sets in. Earning 20% instead of 10% in year three has the same effect on your total results as earning 20% instead of 10% in year 30, but it's a lot easier to do in year three, when the resources you need to deploy are smaller.\n\n### Compound Growth Works for Non-Financial Investments, Too\n\nMary was a director of a small not-for-profit dedicated to animal rescue. She worked hard to promote the organization and raise funds. She spent a lot of time meeting with potential donors and volunteers. She did a good job, but it didn't scale. She could only meet with a handful of people each day. Even if she rushed through meetings and cramped her schedule, there was no way she could double the number of people she was meeting with, let alone grow her organization to 10 or 100 times what it was.\n\nShe could break free of her time limitation and move into a compound growth scenario by reinvesting some of the donor money and volunteer hours to create a staff of PR advocates and fundraisers. If those reinvestments resulted in a net increase in resources for the organization (a positive ROI), Mary could repeat the cycle by increasing the staff further, and receiving even bigger returns.\n\nAlternately, she could get into a compound growth cycle by creating a system in which the average supporter recruits more than one additional supporter, and those new supporters go on to do the same. That's compound growth that isn't limited by Mary's time, or Mary's network of contacts.\n\nAny time you can use the resources you have to generate additional resources that can, in turn, be used to generate even more resources, you can get compound growth.\n\n### Don't Compound Backward\n\nDebt has all the wonderful characteristics of a compounding investment. In most consumer debt, the growth automatically adds to the principal, making it grow even faster. Unfortunately, debt snowballs in the wrong direction.\n\nGoing into debt to fund consumption is a terribly expensive mistake. Borrowing to consume more than you produce is the exact opposite of limiting consumption in order to invest. Investing means having a little less now to have a lot more later. Borrowing to consume means having a lot less later to have a little more now\u2014not a good deal.\n\nIf you are growing consumer debt you are \"negative investing\" and all the power of compounding is working against you. I'm talking about using credit cards or other forms of debt to buy things like food, clothes, or entertainment that don't give a long-term return. Stop the negative spiral of consumer debt as soon as possible. Increase your productivity. Limit your consumption. Paying off high-interest debt may be a better investment than any other opportunity you have. Start there.\n\nIf you want specific guidance on managing personal finances and getting out of debt, access resources like MyMoney.gov or author Dave Ramsey's training materials. The steps to getting debt under control aren't complicated or hard to understand. It comes down to spending less than you earn. Easy to understand, but maybe hard to do.\n\n### Use Debt Selectively and Cautiously\n\nA lot of people get in trouble with debt. In response to this, some financial authors recommend becoming totally debt free. If you want one simple rule about debt, that recommendation will not steer you too far wrong. The costs (missed opportunities) of using too little debt are far smaller than the costs of using too much debt.\n\nAt the same time, debt is useful and helpful in some circumstances. For some endeavors, borrowing money is essential.\n\nSometimes it makes sense to borrow money to own and use an asset that provides a return and has lasting value.\n\nFor example, the owner of a construction business might borrow money to purchase a backhoe. The backhoe has lasting value, and owning it provides a big return in construction productivity and savings versus renting one. The amount of the loan to purchase the backhoe would be less than the value of the backhoe. If the business has an $80,000 loan on a $100,000 backhoe, the business in effect owns 20% of a backhoe. The loan is secured by an asset, and the asset is not consumed faster than the loan is paid off. The productivity increase returned by the backhoe is much greater than the interest cost for the loan. This kind of debt can lead to a positive spiral of increased productivity and increased profits.\n\nA couple of generations ago, a farmer near Mason City, Iowa, invested in a tractor at a time when all the other farmers were still using horses. They all thought he was crazy. The big increase in productivity powered his profits, and he reinvested those profits in buying more farmland. It wasn't long before he was farming more ground than anyone else around. Borrowing money to purchase highly productive assets like that tractor can make very good sense.\n\nSimilarly, a home mortgage is a loan secured by an asset, and the asset is not typically consumed faster than the loan is paid off. It's possible to come out ahead owning a home versus renting one, mortgage interest expense included. Home mortgage debt doesn't snowball in the wrong direction. It spreads out the cost of using your home over the time you use it.\n\nEven if you have extra cash to pay down your mortgage, it may not be your best available return. As of this writing, home mortgage interest rates are, in effect, subsidized by the U.S. government through Federal Reserve bond buying, which makes them a very inexpensive form of debt. If you are generating an after-tax return on invested money greater than the after-tax rate of interest on your home mortgage, it may be rational to keep your mortgage. A return higher than your mortgage interest rate might be hard to find in the stock market, but it should be easy to find in your life, work, and business.\n\nBorrowing at a low interest rate, and investing the borrowed money at a higher rate of return, is leverage. It has its place, and it has its hazards. In personal life and most small businesses, I recommend using it sparingly if at all. Large companies and asset-heavy businesses can and should make strategic use of debt to increase returns on equity. I'm not against leverage, within cautious and reasonable limits. Too much leverage is a lot of fun, until it isn't.\n\nOveruse of debt will hurt you much more than underuse of debt. Use with caution.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  If you haven't already, start investing your resources ASAP to maximize time for compounding growth to work.\n\n  Limit your consumption and reinvest your profits even as investment returns start to roll in. Roll those profits into the snowball of compounding growth.\n\n  Allocate your resources to your best-returning investment opportunities. A slightly higher ROI makes a big difference over many years of compounding.\n\n  When your resources are small, your best-returning investment opportunities may be small opportunities in your personal life and work, not investments in large public markets.\n\n  As your resources grow, expect to expand your search to larger investment opportunities that fit the amount of capital you need to reinvest.\n\n  Look for opportunities for compounding growth of non-financial resources, too.\n\n  Avoid compounding backward by borrowing money to increase consumption.\n\n  Use debt selectively and cautiously to obtain productive assets or prudently leverage investment returns.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nSee how other readers want to \"keep rolling the snowball\" and add your thoughts at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook_.\n\n## 13 > Come Out Ahead Trading Your Time\n\nIn my early 20s I was employed. I traded 40 hours of my time each week for a modest wage. I earned enough at that job to support my family and pay my bills, and I'm grateful for that. Though I didn't know it, I was trading my time for much less than it was worth. I wasn't putting my available time resource on my best available return\u2014not even close. And I wasn't delegating at all. My employer was delegating to me.\n\nThen I started freelancing as a software developer. The clients who hired me to write software paid well. I was still trading my time for money, at a much higher hourly wage. Even at that higher return, I still wasn't putting my available time resource on my best available return.\n\nThen I pivoted from selling my time as a freelancer, to spending my time building salable software products. For the first time I was investing my time in something that could earn a return far larger than any hourly wage. No longer was I the product. I was selling a product that was separate from me. This freed me of a time limitation, and set me up to begin delegating.\n\nI hired a smart and reliable technician to perform software installs. He was not a software developer, so his hourly wage was far lower than what I could earn freelancing. For the first time, I was a _buyer_ of time. I was trading my time for a high value, and buying time at a much lower price. I was coming out ahead on my time trades. I was beginning to break through the limitations of my own time.\n\nThis arrangement was not necessarily at the expense of my employee. If trading his time for that paycheck was his best available return on time, we could both come out ahead. As a high-potential person, he learned a lot on and off the job, and after a few years he became a full-time entrepreneur running his own business. Working for me wasn't his best available return on time for long. Like me, he moved up in the time-trading process.\n\nWhen we started ATS Acoustics, I became a buyer of time on a bigger scale. We hired manufacturing workers and office workers. Soon the total time going into the business was 10, then 20 times what I could put in on my own. I was breaking free of my time limitations in a bigger way. And at the same time those workers were trading their time for a better return than they were earning before they came to work for ATS.\n\nA couple of years later we started ATS Rentals, and the trend continued. I was a buyer of more than 40,000 hours of worker time every year. I was also deploying capital, earning a return on that, too. I spent most of my time leading, building businesses I owned, and investing in my own growth and development. I was earning very high returns on my time. I was coming out much further ahead on my time trades than I had been a few years before.\n\nThen I ran into a problem: Though I had delegated a great deal, and I was earning a high financial return on my time, I had built businesses that weren't equipped to run without my daily presence. Areas like marketing strategy, difficult HR issues, and IT engineering still depended on me. I got stuck inside my own business creations.\n\nIf my vision for my life was simply to get rich, I could have stayed and continued investing my time building those profitable organizations. But there was more I wanted. I wanted to continue creating new things, I wanted more face time with people, and I wanted to pay forward the gifts of leadership development and successful entrepreneurship.\n\nI hadn't prepared those organizations to run without me. Honestly, I didn't have the gut-level optimism to believe they would grow into something much bigger. I don't feel confident those businesses would succeed long enough to need a second generation of leadership. I was focused on overcoming the challenges of that month or year. My vision and my confidence were too small. As a result, I fell behind the curve on preparing for a new level of time trading and delegation.\n\nSo I worked a day job as the leader of my businesses for a few years. During this time my managers continued to grow and develop. In early 2014, I took the leap, stepping away from daily management of those businesses. I put the responsibility in the hands of my managers, increasing their roles as leaders. I didn't know what would happen. I'd never delegated at that level before. I was prepared to make less money if that was the price of having free use of my time.\n\nA year later, overall business results are better than ever. The leaders who replaced me have done an excellent job. I'm receiving more financial return with much less time investment than before. My managers and I are all coming out ahead on this change. The only losers are our business competitors, and I'm okay with that. I should have prepared to step away sooner, because running those businesses was not the best time trade I had available to me.\n\nNow I have freedom to trade my time in pursuit of the life legacy I want to leave. I still spend some time doing things to earn money. I look for opportunities that give me the best available return for my time. And I look for opportunities that return things money can't buy, like impact on people and positive change in our world.\n\nThis story of my time trades (so far) ends very differently than it begins. Effective trades at the beginning led to increased returns, and options for even better time trades. It's a progression that I hope to continue, and I hope you will experience a similar progression.\n\n### Invest in Skills to Increase Returns on Your Time Trades\n\nIf you don't already have significant capital to invest, what you do with your time in the next decade will have a lot more impact on your future than what you do with your financial investments in the next decade.\n\nYou can't make an investment that will increase your lifespan, but you can make investments that increase the value of all your future time. Investing time (and maybe money) in developing skills is an important way to do this.\n\nThe return on skill development is greater when done earlier in life. You can put your new skills to use from the date you acquire them to the date you die. The longer that span is, the greater the payoff will be. We've got it right front-loading education at the beginning of our lives. So don't wait. Today is better than tomorrow when it comes to investing in your skills.\n\nFormal education is one way to develop your skills, but it's hardly the only way, and not the highest-ROI way for many circumstances. Some professions such as medical and legal fields require specific education in order to qualify for a license to practice. If what you want to do requires convincing someone who values credentials to pick you, earning those credentials may be worthwhile. However, if what you want to do depends more on innovation, initiative, leadership, legwork, or the merits of the work itself, you may be better off proceeding to do it than spending years learning about it in a classroom.\n\nI've observed people who want to start something or do some impactful work turn to education instead of starting. The fear of failure or not being good enough, or the simple fear of committing to go forward, finds a nice relief in the expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes unnecessary path of getting education first. As a two-time college dropout, I'll admit I'm biased on this one. You decide what is likely to be most effective for what you want to do.\n\nThough I have my reservations about formal education, I am an unrestrained fan of learning. Learning in some fields is much more fun, effective, and efficient outside of the classroom. The Internet offers free access to more learning resources than you could ever consume. Because the marginal cost of sharing information on the Internet is approximately zero, the economics of free learning work. If you are a self-motivated independent learner, you can get the information and demonstrations you need for new skill development from sites like You-Tube, Khan Academy, and Wikipedia\u2014all for free.\n\n><\n\nCombined with the right information, hands-on learning can be quite efficient and effective for many types of skills. Trial and error, test runs, and small-scale experiments are fantastic learning tools. Learning by doing also has the advantage of generating productive output and\/or earning a wage while learning, in many cases.\n\nI once spent some time between conference sessions with indie musician Hannah Elizabeth Smith. The night before, she had thrilled the crowd with her masterful main stage performance. While we chatted she was messing around on her guitar with skills so impressive and seemingly easy for her, I just had to shake my head and laugh.\n\nIn his book _Outliers_ , Malcolm Gladwell describes the concept of 10,000 hours of practice to master anything, I asked 20-year-old Hannah if she thinks she has 10,000 hours of guitar practice in. After some quick mental math she said, \"I think it's a lot more than that.\"\n\nCalling her gifted would be an insult. She's spent a big fraction of the waking hours _in her life_ practicing guitar. That's earned, not given.\n\nSkill comes from practice. Skill is not handed out to a privileged few at birth. It's developed through investment of time in practice. That means no matter who you are, you can develop skills that raise the value of your time. This is an important way to power the positive spiral of compound investing, even when you have little to no money to invest.\n\nInvestment advantages come from the will or ability to do things others find difficult or impossible. Possessing a high level of skill is one way to get that. You can develop that kind of skill and use it as an investment advantage to earn a higher return on your time.\n\n### Skill is Different From Understanding\n\nIn Chapter 10 I talked about the investment advantage of thorough understanding. Thorough understanding of how something works gives you an advantage in making investment decisions about it. Skill is different. A high level of skill at something gives you an advantage in spending your time actually doing that thing.\n\nI am reminded of this difference every time I practice flying airplanes. I understand the physics pretty well. Lift, inertia, aerodynamics, and engine function all make sense to me. Based on that understanding I can make informed decisions about how an airplane should be flown. This analytical understanding is almost no help with actually flying an airplane myself. A person with understanding knows why the airplane yaws when a crosswind hits. A pilot with skill pushes the right amount of rudder correction at the right time to stabilize the airplane. I'm still practicing that skill.\n\nUnderstanding what technology is required for a startup company to succeed is one thing. Possessing the skill to create that technology in a lab is another. The first enables investment decisions. The second enables trading time for a high return. Both are useful. When you don't have much capital to make investment decisions, deciding to invest your time in increasing your skills might be a very good move.\n\n### Use Your Best Skills; Delegate the Rest\n\nIt's intuitive, of course, that you'll have an advantage working in a career that uses your best skills. If you are trained as a civil engineer, working as a retail cashier, for example, is probably not your best time investment opportunity. Others will be better than you are at cashiering, and you'll be better than they are at engineering. You'll likely seek a career that provides opportunity to put your best skills to use.\n\nFor most of my adult life my best skill was software development. When I started in my basement, long on time and short on cash, it was a no-brainer to invest my time in a business activity that used my software development skills. That's where I had an advantage that allowed me to earn a higher return on my time.\n\nAs I went forward into other businesses, my software skills continued to provide an advantage. I functioned as my own IT department for each of my startups, saving precious capital at early stages. I got into businesses that used a lot of software for logistics and digital marketing, and earned a high return on the time I spent creating that software.\n\nAfter spending 10 years as a CEO, business leadership is now one of my best skills. I continue to look for opportunities to earn a high return on my time by putting my business leadership skills to use.\n\nIn economic terms, the rule is \"Always export your comparative advantage.\" What you trade to others should be the thing you are best at producing, relative to everything else you could produce. Invest your time where you'll get the best return, and delegate the rest to others.\n\nThis applies to more than profit-making. If you are working on a nonprofit cause, it still makes sense for you to spend your time and energy on the parts you are better at compared to others, and let them do the parts they are better at compared to you.\n\nSay it takes you one hour longer to change the oil in your car yourself than to have someone else do it. Say you can get paid $40 per hour using some other specialized skill in a freelance role. $40 per hour is the opportunity cost of your time. And say your local shop can change the oil in your car for $20 in labor. You can \"buy\" that hour of time from the shop for only $20, and \"sell\" it for $40. You come out $20 ahead if you take your car to the oil change store, and $20 _behind_ if you change that oil yourself.\n\nPaying someone to do what you could do yourself may conflict with ingrained values of frugality and self-sufficiency. The thing is, it's not truly frugal to spend $40 of time to save $20 of cash. Make sure you come out ahead on your time trades. _Delegate everything you can delegate for less than the cost of your time_.\n\nIf the current value of your time is $10 per hour instead of $40 per hour, this decision changes. Now you come out $10 ahead if you change the oil yourself, and $10 behind if you take it to the store. This illustrates the power of increasing the value of your time. As you increase the value you can trade your time for, you open up more and more opportunity to delegate _and come out ahead_. This maximizes the use of your most precious resource, your time.\n\n><\n\nA consultant who gets paid $1,000 an hour can and should delegate just about everything, and focus her time on the consulting itself, the part that nobody but she can do. She should have an assistant answering the phone, checking the mail, booking her travel, scheduling her meetings, processing the client contracts, and so on. Economically speaking, she should not be mowing her own lawn, spending more than a few minutes to search for the best deal on a new car, or even spending time driving herself places. Anything that costs (or saves) less than $1,000 per hour of her time should be delegated to someone else. She'd come out $980 behind if she changed her own oil. Frugal with money, in some sense, yes. Good investment, absolutely not.\n\nOften this type of delegation decision requires comparing a non-monetary value to a monetary one. This goes back to knowing what you really want. For example, I could hire a nanny to raise my kids for less than the value of my time, but the non-monetary value of the relationship with my kids is worth more to me than the money I could generate with my time elsewhere. I don't feel the same way about spending time with my car while changing the oil.\n\n### When Passion Doesn't Pay Well\n\nSome people find themselves in a situation where their best marketable skill doesn't align with their passion and what's really important to them. For example, a successful lawyer with high earning potential may find he has no passion for the practice of law. A simple economic perspective says he should use his best skill and delegate the rest. That means to spend a lot of time practicing law, and pay others to do most other things. This is the right prescription if the future he wants is maximum wealth regardless of quality of life.\n\nBack in Chapter 1 we talked about the importance of reflecting before you race. Your \"best return\" is the return that contributes the most to the long-term future you desire. If our lawyer is passionate about justice for victims of human trafficking and wants to leave a legacy of positive impact in that area, he might choose to leave his high-paying corporate law job and go work for a legal justice nonprofit in Africa. The return in terms of dollars would be lower. The return in terms of bringing about the future he wants might be much higher.\n\nIt's a wonderful thing when passion, purpose, and lucrative financial returns all line up around one activity. It's much easier to stay inspired when your activities are in line with your future vision. I feel beyond grateful that entrepreneurship has been that way for me. Sometimes that combination is available all in one package. Sometimes it's not. When your passion and your best economic return lead in different directions, you'll have to answer tough questions about what kind of future you really want.\n\nHow important is economic success to you? What are you willing to give up to get more of what you love? Is the work you're doing to pay the bills helping you move toward what you love, or is it actually holding back?\n\nIf you are doing something you don't really want to do because it pays well, either use that money for what you do truly value, or line up your life with the future you really want by changing what you're doing with your time. If it's hard, but it's your best way to move toward the future you really want, do the hard thing. If it's not moving you toward the future you really want, stop doing it. Line up your actions with your intended future.\n\nAm I suggesting the passionate artist quit her job and go full time doing the street art she loves so much? Probably not, unless a life as a starving artist is the future she really wants. It's quite possible that job she lacks passion for is a key part of making the future she really wants\u2014a future that includes food, shelter, and a way to fund her art. Look realistically at the whole future picture. Don't base your decisions on a fantasy that isn't backed by a workable plan. I'd advise that artist to build a foundation for doing more of what she loves by looking for art-related employment, or building a fan base, for example, and to keep her day job until that foundation is in place.\n\nOn the other hand, sometimes making a big change to engage fully in your passion isn't a fantasy-driven leap, it's a brave and realistic path to the future you really want. A second-generation business owner \"stuck\" in the family business, for example, may have very realistic prospects in another field he is more passionate about, but find it difficult for a number of reasons to make the switch.\n\nTo make the pursuit of your passion work you'll need to possess or develop the abilities and other resources that enable success in that area. You'll also need to outline a realistic plan for doing what you love, paying bills, and maintaining the other parts of life that matter to you.\n\nThe choice to leave your status quo and engage in what you love should be based on realistic projections of the future, as best as you can see. Don't leap based on a fantasy, and don't stay put because of fear.\n\n### How to Delegate Well\n\nIt's in your interest to delegate when others can do tasks at a lower cost than the value of the time it would take you to do those tasks. At the same time, there are hazards in trusting others to do tasks that matter to you. Here are a few thoughts on delegating well.\n\n_Give responsibility to qualified people._ Whether you trust a teenager to mow your lawn, a contractor to build your real estate, an employee to serve customers, or a corporation to manufacture your supplies, it matters whom you select. The more that's at stake, the more due diligence you'll need to invest to ensure the provider you select is competent to perform the way you want them to. Those who lack the required competencies cannot be trusted to deliver, no matter how good their intentions.\n\n_Give responsibility to motivated people._ People respond to incentives, and people respond to their engrained character. Make sure both are pointing toward the behavior you want from the people and providers you select.\n\nIf you want your managers to increase profits, their pay should probably increase when your profits increase. If you want your assembly workers to care about quality, their pay should probably not be based solely on speed. Job security, praise, and opportunity to advance should flow to those who do the work and treat people the way you want them to.\n\nIf you want employees to treat customers with respect and enthusiasm, give that responsibility to people who've had those behaviors engrained in them since they were toddlers. Select people whose internal compass is aligned with the results you want.\n\n_Communicate clear expectations._ Whether you are hiring a person or a company, they need to know what outcomes you expect, what you count as success, and what is not acceptable. It's your job to be clear. Compared to a solo project, it takes extra time and extra communication skills to ensure this clarity. You can read your own mind. Nobody else can.\n\n_Let go, gradually._ Delegation is a process of increasing responsibility and increasing autonomy over time. In most cases it's not a good idea to pick someone, turn them loose, and walk away. Delegation of high-level responsibility is usually a multi-year process. As trust and skills are built, and you've instilled the values and behaviors you want, you can let go more and more. At the same time, don't hang on too much or too long. Nobody likes to be micromanaged. Find an appropriate pace to transition responsibility.\n\n### As Time and Money Investments Pay Off, Reinvest the Extra Time and Money\n\nAs you increase the value of your time, and maximize your return by doing more of what you are best at, and less of what you aren't, your returns will increase. You'll have more time and money available.\n\n\"Reinvest your returns\" applies here, too. Invest that extra time to create long-term value. Develop even more skills. Build your personal character. Deepen your network of relationships. Work overtime. Run a side business. Take on a freelance job. Build something.\n\nOwning your own business can be an especially advantageous way to put your time to optimally productive use. The flexibility to get increased returns by investing increased time and the built-in opportunity to delegate to employees are both fantastic benefits to the owner.\n\nSkill development and higher wage earnings are not sufficient to keep this positive spiral growing beyond the limits of your time. Increasing the value of your time helps increase your returns and generate excess resources, but it doesn't scale beyond 24 hours in a day and about 100 years in a lifetime.\n\nTo break beyond that scale, you'll need to invest part of the proceeds from your time trades in things that can grow without requiring proportionately more time input from you. As we've discussed before, building a business is one way to do that.\n\nThe same concepts can apply to not-for-profit endeavors. Building a movement that incorporates the time of many volunteers and\/or employees enables the returns (measured in impact or positive change) to scale far beyond with the visionary founder could do alone.\n\nLike owning stock, other financial investments also scale without requiring more time inputs. Making a decision about a $10 billion bond purchase doesn't necessarily take more time than making a decision about a $1,000 bond purchase. Capital investments scale in the context of some very, very large markets.\n\n### Trade Your Time Well\n\nIf you desire a bigger future, don't trade all your productive time for money and spend all that money in lifestyle consumption. This is like treading water. You get to stay alive, and that's about it.\n\nYou can intentionally invest your time to increase the value of your time, like learning a new marketable skill. You can intentionally invest your time to build something of long-term value, like a product, a relationship, or a reputation. You can trade your time for the maximum wage available to you, and invest that money on your best available return. You can spend some of that money to delegate lower-paying tasks to others, and put your freed-up time to productive use. You can invest the proceeds of all these constructive activities in opportunities that scale beyond the limitations of your own time.\n\nYou can't buy time and add it to your lifespan, but you can trade money to other people in exchange for their time. This can free up your time, and even more importantly, enable projects that require many times more person-hours of time than you alone could spend on those projects in a lifetime.\n\n_As your productivity and investment returns increase, trading your money for other people's time becomes a much better deal than trading your time for other people's money_.\n\nParadoxically, unless you inherit wealth, the only way you can access this better deal starts by spending your time to get money. Here's the sequence. Be productive with your time. Limit consumption. Invest the extra. Use the extra money that creates to free up your time. Reinvest your time at a higher level of productivity. Repeat.\n\nRepeat that long enough, and your investments will be producing so much return that almost all of your time will be yours to do with as you please. You will no longer have to spend your time to get money, because you won't need the money. You'll invest your time in the future and the legacy you want.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  Invest time and maybe money in developing skills that increase your returns on future time investments.\n\n  Allocate your available time to where you will receive the best available return. Do a lot of what you're best at.\n\n  Define your best return in terms of the long-term future you really want.\n\n  Delegate all kinds of tasks that others can do for less cost to you than the value of the time it would take you to do those tasks.\n\n  Carefully select qualified and motivated people and providers to delegate to, and give responsibility at an appropriate pace, over time.\n\n  As these steps increase the time and money you have available, reinvest those surpluses in even more skill development and even more delegation, to keep the positive spiral going.\n\n  As your resources grow, invest in opportunities that can scale unconstrained by your time limitations.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nTake a quiz on how you currently trade your time and how you might trade it differently at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## 14 > Bet Big on Your Big Advantages\n\nLong before I knew him, my friend and mentor Greg Campbell was a hardworking executive for Sears, Roebuck & Company. In the 1980s he worked his way up in real estate\u2013related management positions within Sears. At the time, Sears was into a lot of businesses beyond retailing. Coldwell Banker Real Estate, Allstate Insurance, and Discover Card, for example, were part of Sears.\n\nAbout 1990, Coldwell Banker was a billion-dollar business that was losing a lot of money. The leadership of Sears asked Greg to take on the role of executive vice president of Coldwell Banker. He accepted, and took on the huge responsibility of running the entire business.\n\nGreg is a disciplined and intentional leader, and that was just what Coldwell Banker needed. In just a few years he led changes in structure and business practices that brought the company from big losses to breaking even. Greg was confident that profitability would soon follow.\n\nThen the top management at Sears came under pressure to get out of the non-retail businesses they were diversified into. Sears decided to put Coldwell Banker up for sale.\n\nGreg had a big advantage in this big opportunity: Not only did he have a front-row seat to the inner workings of Coldwell Banker, and the trend toward profitability, he was at the helm leading that change. He thoroughly understood the change, and he was directing it. That was a big advantage.\n\nGreg saw this big opportunity and this big advantage, and he bet big on it. He cooperated with a group of investors to buy Coldwell Banker from Sears. He became an owner of what he was building. He told me he put \"every dime he had\" into that investment. He didn't diversify. He concentrated, to the extreme.\n\nGreg and the investment group intended to own the business long term and run it as a profitable enterprise. Greg's leadership did result in profitability. Then, unexpectedly, a larger group offered a high price to purchase Coldwell Banker. Greg and the other current owners decided it was just too high a price to pass up, changed their plans, and sold at a big gain. The ROI on that concentrated investment was off the charts.\n\nSince then Greg has been able to focus decades of his time on what matters most to him, including mentoring young leaders like me, and providing significant financial and relational support to not-for-profit causes he believes in.\n\n### Concentrate Your Investment on Your Best Return, if You Can\n\nDiversification is spreading out your resources, and your risk, across multiple investments. Concentration is the opposite: putting a lot of eggs in one basket.\n\nDiversification is a valuable tool for protecting your overall resources from being severely reduced by bad luck or bad decisions related to one investment. The average return from a group of 10 or 30 or 100 separate investments is much more predictable than the return from a single investment.\n\nDiversification is what makes insurance companies work. It's impossible to predict whether or not I will get into a car accident on any given day. But it's easy to predict with reasonable accuracy what percentage of one million car insurance customers will get into an accident on any given day. I figure it's about 0.015%. Additionally, if I wreck 100% of the car I drive on a given day, that's a much more negative event for me than for my insurer to receive claims for accidents on perhaps 0.015% of the cars they insure on a given day. Diversification of risk across a large group makes the results smoother and more predictable.\n\nThis diversification makes sense because\u2014 _and only because_ \u2014the insurance company does not know which drivers will have an accident claim at any given time. When a customer has a claim, the insurance company takes perhaps a 2,000% loss on that year's premium. When a customer does not have a claim, the insurance company receives around a 75% profit on that year's premium. If the insurance company specifically knew who would have an accident and who would not have an accident, they would accept only future-accident-free drivers and make huge profits. Furthermore, they would not need to diversify. Even insuring just one future-accident-free driver would be an acceptable risk and a reasonable guarantee of profitable results.\n\nDiversification actually _reduces_ the insurance company's profits versus the theoretical scenario of knowing the future returns on each driver they insure. Nonetheless, because individual future accidents cannot be specifically predicted, insurance companies have no choice but to diversify the risk across a large group, where they can predict the results in aggregate.\n\nAs investors, we can take some lessons from this.\n\nDiversification is a useful tool when you can't predict the returns of individual investments. The more ability you have to predict which investments will give the best returns, the more it makes sense to concentrate your resources there. This concentration is another way to say the principle we've looked at all throughout this book. Take your available resources and use them on the investment opportunities that will give the best return.\n\nGreg concentrated all of his financial resources to buy part of Coldwell Banker because he had the information to be quite confident that it offered his best available return, by far. What he did took courage, and it involved risk. The story could have ended much differently. But Greg felt that risk was acceptable, and he went all in. With such a big advantage on such a big opportunity, he concentrated. He didn't diversify.\n\nWhen I started my basement software business, I concentrated nearly all my work time on it. It was my best return by far, and the risks of loss were minimal, so it made sense to do that.\n\nWhen I started ATS Acoustics, I concentrated nearly all of my financial net worth in that business. For years after that I continued to reinvest nearly all of my profits into that business. When I started ATS Rentals, I poured a lot of capital into it, too. This kept my resources concentrated in the businesses I owned. I estimate that 95% of all my financial resources were devoted to ATS Acoustics, and later to ATS Rentals, even six to seven years after I started. I was all in on my own companies.\n\nSometimes I got heartburn about this. I knew I was taking very concentrated risk. A lawsuit, a product safety issue, or any number of other calamities I pondered could have brought the thing down. I also knew I had huge advantages in this businesses and a strong likelihood of generating higher ROI than I could reliably find anywhere else.\n\nWe did set aside a little for retirement each quarter. My wife and I were young, so the amount we needed to save for our old age was pretty small. Thank you, compound growth.\n\nOther than that little diversification, I was all in. This wasn't because the businesses were mine, and I wanted to invest in myself. It's because the ROI was high and the risks were small by comparison. If I had diversified my investments at that time, it would have cost me a great deal in missed opportunity.\n\nBet big on your big advantages.\n\n### Diversify When You Need To\n\nDiversification reduces the chance of huge losses, and it also reduces the chance of huge gains. Diversification violates the rule of investing your resources on the best available return. However, when you are unable or unwilling to accept the risk of huge losses, you have no choice but to diversify your investments and accept returns that are closer to average.\n\nDiversification has another downside. Your workload as an investor is increased when you diversify and seek superior returns. Now instead of finding one superior opportunity, you need to find three, or five, or 10. That's harder.\n\nNonetheless, it's rarely smart to bet the farm on one thing, so often we need to do that extra work to keep our risk exposure to acceptable levels. For this reason, don't do something like put your entire net worth on one stock. That's too much trust in a management team you don't know, making decisions you can't override, in a business you can only observe from a distance.\n\nAllocate a lot of resources to your best opportunities, and at the same time ensure that in a downside scenario you'll have enough resources to live to play another day. Greg still had highly marketable executive experience. I had software skills and a little retirement account to fall back on. Neither of us would have gone hungry or homeless if our big bets failed.\n\nFor individuals this might mean keeping an emergency fund of a few months' income in a safe, low-returning savings account. It's not your best return, but it significantly reduces the risk of poor decisions and long-term negative outcomes from unfortunate disruptions like a job loss or an illness. It also means spreading out your resources across multiple investments, even if one of them appears to be better than the others, to reduce the risk of a devastating loss.\n\n### Diversify When You Have No Advantage\n\nIf you have a reliable and time-efficient way to predict returns on individual stocks, it's rational to concentrate your investments on a few of them (perhaps 10 different stock investments). Most investors have no such advantage, meaning their expected return from the stock(s) they pick is the same as the average stock market overall. Diversification offers the same expected return, with much less risk of an unlucky bad result.\n\nBroad stock index funds offer a remarkably cheap and easy way to diversify. It's buying a share of a fund that buys one of everything, so to speak. If you have capital that's not better used elsewhere and you have no advantage at picking stocks, index funds are probably the way to go. This type of no-selection advantage, one-of-everything diversification also brings the significant advantage of requiring no investment of time attempting to pick the winners.\n\nIt also avoids paying someone else an investment management fee to attempt to pick the winners for you. Most investment managers don't have an advantage at picking stocks, either. And most of us have no way to tell the future winning managers from the future average ones. Lacking any advantage here, index funds make sense for most of us.\n\nRemember, though, to look globally at all your resources and all your opportunities. It may be that some skills training, or an employee hire, or starting a business, or spending money to reduce your long-term lifestyle expenses would be a much better investment opportunity for you than a stock index fund.\n\nI view diversified public market investments as useful to me in two scenarios. First, they function well as a low-risk long-term backup fund in case of total disaster in my concentrated endeavors. Second, they provide a readily available last resort when I have resources to invest at a time when I can't find an opportunity where I have an advantage.\n\nMany people who are not involved in business, or dedicated to investment activities of one kind or another, may not have opportunities to invest significant amounts of money where they have an advantage. This makes diversified index funds useful to a large number of people.\n\n### Concentration is Not Just for Financial Investments\n\nIf you are investing time as a volunteer, or investing time building relationships, or investing your skills in a project, it probably makes sense to concentrate more than diversify.\n\nWhen you know which cause, which organization, which relationships will best align with the future you desire, it probably makes sense to concentrate your efforts there. Advocating for 10 good causes is not likely to be as effective as advocating more thoroughly for one or two. If you know the specific place you can make the biggest difference, it will reduce, not increase, your total impact if you spread out your efforts to include work in other places. There's power in laser-like focus over an extended period of time.\n\nThe same is likely true when you are investing money to make a difference, instead of to make more money for yourself. For example, donating to one or a few causes in which you have advantages such as understanding, connections, or relationships is likely to make more difference than diversifying your investment across a large number of organizations.\n\n### Raise Your Eyes\n\nAs we come to the end of this book, I want to ask you to act on what you've read. Sometimes moving from ideas to actions gets really scary, especially when you set out to create a future that deeply matters. Taking action requires courage in the face of fear. It's uncomfortable, and it's worth it.\n\nFor my first 30 years of life I focused most of my energy on getting by. I kept my head down and worked hard on my own challenges. I assumed most people were okay, and I was the only one finding life to be such a difficult journey.\n\nAs a side effect of my struggle, I worked hard to build a lot of things, and I experienced a lot of success. I also reached out for much-needed help, and experienced great relationships with employees, friends, and mentors. Those built into me.\n\nEventually I took a breath and looked around. I raised my eyes to meet the gaze of the people walking by me. I noticed they were struggling, too. As absurd as it seemed at first, I began to realize that I could help\u2014that in various ways I could be generous and have an impact, as others had with me.\n\nAs I engaged with all kinds of people in this world full of humanity, I saw that many people aspire to invest their time and money well. Some people noticed my investment results and wanted to learn about that from me. This book is my response. It's one result of my shift from head down to eyes raised.\n\nI'd like to ask you to do the same. Raise your eyes. Look into the faces of those you share this earth with. See the struggles and the opportunities, and dare to believe that you can make a significant contribution.\n\nThe contributions you make might be wildly different than mine, and that's good. As a human race we face many challenges: political, economic, technological, and human. There is work worth doing. There are people worth serving. We all need each other to step up and start, to use our time and money resources to their fullest potential. That's how new solutions to old problems get discovered and implemented. That's how we keep our countries stable and prosperous, and create opportunities for those who follow behind us. That's how we live up to the full measure of the potential we are given.\n\nIt takes more than a generous heart to make a significant contribution. It takes clarity of vision and intentional action. It takes skillful investment of a broad range of resources. When we live and work with the kind of investment savvy we've talked about in this book, our resources grow and our influence increases.\n\nDevelop your advantages and put them to work making your life and our world better. Lean into the difficult work. Most importantly, start.\n\n### Nothing Happens Until You Start\n\nIt's not enough to have resources, even abundant resources. It's not enough to have advantages, even big ones. Brilliant ideas, bold visions, and masterful plans are worth nothing if you don't act on them. You must take the risk to bet big on your big advantages.\n\nYour fear might be a little uneasy about you dreaming big, because God forbid that gets you excited enough to do something. But starting is risky in a way that dreaming is not. When you start declaring your intentions, making commitments, and taking action, your fear will hit every panic button it's got and stage a full-blown opposition. What you choose to do in that moment will make more difference to your future than maybe anything else.\n\nBack in that creepy, unimpressive basement, on my first day of self-employment, there was a whole lot I didn't have and a whole lot I didn't know. I didn't have any credentials, much money, or many relationships. I didn't know I was taking the first step toward big success and unimagined opportunities. I had no way to know if it would even work out at all. None of that mattered, because I did the most important thing: I started.\n\nYou can start with the resources you have. You can start with the knowledge you have. You have enough vision of the future to take the next step. Don't tell yourself you'll start intentionally creating the future you want after you read more books, get more education, or get a little older. If you choose a safe and inactive detour, your fear will pat you on the shoulder and smile with relief. Action crisis averted. And opportunity lost.\n\nActing on what you know is the hard part, and the part that brings all the rewards for you and the people you impact. Don't miss your opportunities. Take the first action step. Nothing happens until you start.\n\nI hope you intentionally invest your time, money, and all your resources to create the future you really want. That's investing with purpose.\n\nThank you for listening, and for acting. I am grateful.\n\nInvest well, my friend. Don't wait. Go.\n\n### Action Points\n\n  If the level of risk is acceptable to you, concentrate your resources on the investments where you have the biggest advantages.\n\n  Diversify when you need to reduce your risk of a large loss or below-average returns, knowing this will also reduce your chance of a large gain or above-average returns.\n\n  Diversify when you have no advantage at picking the winners, and the cost of diversification is worth the risk-reduction it provides.\n\n  When investing time, and when investing money for non-financial results, use the power of concentration to increase your returns.\n\n  Don't waste time in a holding pattern rationalized by what you don't have. Start with what you have.\n\n### Engage Online\n\nShare how you will start investing differently at _www.aardsma.com\/investingbook._\n\n## > Index <\n\nabilities, developing personal, -112\n\nabove-average returns, competitive advantage and,\n\nabundance, limiting consumption and, -59\n\naccepting\n\nbad things, developing the ability to,\n\nlosses,\n\nactions, choosing intentional,\n\nactive\n\nowners, resources and, -170\n\nownership,\n\nadvantage illusions, watching out for, -101\n\nadvantages,\n\ninvesting in your investment, -102\n\nresources and developing your investment,\n\nallocating\n\navailable resources,\n\nresources based on risk and return, -77\n\nresources to best opportunities,\n\nauthority, the ability to understand, -114\n\navailable resources, allocating,\n\naverage returns,\n\nbest-friend relationships, investing in,\n\nbigger picture,\n\nconnecting each piece to the, -19\n\ndealing with an unclear,\n\nwhen you've lost the, -22\n\nboredom, fear of, -132\n\nborrowing at a low interest rate,\n\nborrowing,\n\nthe real cost of,\n\nbrain,\n\nemotions and your,\n\nengaging your whole, -136\n\nbusiness coach, the importance of hiring a, -111\n\nbusiness owners, advantages of, -172\n\nbusiness, understanding the lifeblood of a, -159\n\nbuying vs. leasing, -80\n\ncertificate of deposit, choosing a,\n\ncharacter, the effect of your, -108\n\nchoosing how to use resources, -35\n\ncommunicating clear expectations,\n\ncompensation for temporary use of a resource, -39\n\ncompetitive advantage, above-average returns and,\n\ncompound growth and non-financial investments, -186\n\nconferences, participating in,\n\nconfront, developing the ability to,\n\nconnect, developing the ability to, -112\n\nconnection, asking to make a,\n\nconsumption and survival, -61\n\nconsumption,\n\ndelaying, -63\n\nlimiting, -59, -64, -182\n\nresources and, -57\n\nsaying no to,\n\nseeing, -56\n\ntoo much, -36\n\ncosts, sunk, -69\n\ncredit, long-term cost of using,\n\ndangerous people, the ability to stand up to,\n\ndebt,\n\nconsumption and, -187\n\ndeciding how to pay off,\n\nhow to use, -188\n\noveruse of,\n\ndefault behavior,\n\ndelayed gratification, -63\n\ndelegate, how to, -202\n\ndelegating, -198\n\ndifficult work, doing the, -144\n\ndiminishing returns, getting trapped by, -185\n\ndiversification, -210\n\ndiversifying\n\nwhen you have no advantage, -213\n\nwhen you need to,\n\nemotional ability of delaying consumption, -63\n\nemotionally difficult things, choosing to do, -146\n\nemotions\n\nand your brain,\n\nthat trip investors, managing the, -136\n\nemotions,\n\npaying attention to your,\n\nresponding effectively to your, -123\n\nthe spreading of, -122\n\nengagement, the importance of,\n\nengaging\n\nin growth, -111\n\nyour whole brain, -136\n\nenvy, the danger of,\n\nethics, considering your own,\n\nexpectations, communicating clear,\n\nexpected return, factoring risk into,\n\nexperience, trading a resource for, -36\n\nfailure, fear of, -130\n\nfear\n\nof being left out, -128\n\nof boredom, -132\n\nof failure, -130\n\nof loss, -126\n\nof personal rejection, -131\n\nfear,\n\ncalling out, -34\n\nlow-level,\n\nthe spreading of,\n\nfinancial returns, taxes and inflation and, -88\n\nflexibility when using resources,\n\nformal education, benefits of a,\n\n401(k), access to a, -96\n\nfree markets, competitive advantage and,\n\nfreelancer, becoming a,\n\nfrugal saving, -59\n\nfrugal, deciding when to be, -66\n\nfuture, considering your, -16\n\nGoogle as a shared resource,\n\ngratification, delayed, -63\n\ngrowth,\n\nnon-financial investments and compound, -186\n\npersonal,\n\ntaking initiative to engage in, -111\n\nhands-on learning, benefits of,\n\nhousing, consumption and,\n\nhuman nature, time and,\n\nillusions, advantage, -101\n\nimitating the crowd, default behavior of,\n\nimmediate benefits, consumption and, -55\n\nimmediate cash flow, making decisions, for, -61\n\nincreasing productivity, investing in,\n\ninflation and taxes, financial returns and, -88\n\ninfluences, undesirable,\n\ninitial investment and payback of returns,\n\ninterest rate, borrowing at a low,\n\nisolation, the limits of,\n\nlabor market, different sides of the, -168\n\nleasing vs. buying, -80\n\nleft out, fear of being, -128\n\nletting go,\n\ngradually, -202\n\nthe importance of,\n\nlife coach, the importance of hiring a, -111\n\nlong-term future, consumption and, -36\n\nlong-term results,\n\nachieving,\n\nimmediate cash flow and, -61\n\nlong-term returns, focusing on,\n\nloss, fear of, -126\n\nlosses, accepting,\n\nlow interest rate, borrowing at a,\n\nlow returns, accepting, -102\n\nlow-level fear brains,\n\nmanagement, paying for investment,\n\nmarket, different sides of the labor, -168\n\nmarkets, short-term movements of,\n\nmaturity, the importance of personal,\n\nmistakes, examples of investment, -85\n\nmoney as a resource, -30\n\nmoney, the motivators of,\n\nmortality, becoming aware of our own,\n\nmotivated people, giving responsibility to,\n\nmutual fund fees,\n\nnatural resources, increasing productivity and,\n\nnetwork, building your, -117\n\nnetworking relationships,\n\nNew York Stock Exchange,\n\nnon-financial investments, compound growth and, -186\n\nnon-financial resources,\n\nobstacles, encountering unexpected,\n\nopportunities, sorting your investment,\n\nowners, market participation of, -169\n\nownership,\n\nactive, -170,\n\nprofit-making and, -173\n\nowning a business, how to own your work with out, -174\n\nowning your work without owning a business, -174\n\npassion, what to do with, -200\n\npayback of returns, initial investment and,\n\npaying for investment management,\n\npeers, engaging with groups of,\n\npersonal\n\nabilities, developing, -112\n\ncharacter, the effect of your, -108\n\ngrowth,\n\nrejection, fear of, -131\n\ntrainer, the importance of hiring a, -111\n\nprimitive emotions, -121\n\nproblems, confronting your,\n\nprofits, reinvesting your, -182\n\npsychotherapist, the importance of hiring a, -111\n\nqualified people, giving responsibility to,\n\nrational judgement, ability to maintain,\n\nreaching out to people you admire,\n\nreading, the importance of,\n\nreflection, benefits of, -25\n\nrejection, fear of personal, -131\n\nrelationships in venture capital, advantages of,\n\nrelationships,\n\ncultivating safe and close,\n\ninvesting in best-friend,\n\ninvesting your, -117\n\nnetworking,\n\nrent, money spent on,\n\nreputation, keeping your trusted,\n\nresource allocation, -79\n\nresource,\n\ncompensation for use of a, -39\n\ntime as a, -43\n\nresources,\n\nallocating, -77\n\nbest opportunities and allocating,\n\nbreaking up your,\n\nconsumption and, -57\n\ndeciding how to use your, -35\n\ninvesting your, -99\n\nnon-financial,\n\nROI and allocating your best,\n\nshared, -33\n\nstoring,\n\ntaking stock of your,\n\ntrading,\n\nvaluing all of your, -39\n\nresults, long-term,\n\nreturns,\n\naccepting low, -102\n\naverage,\n\ndiminishing, -185\n\nincreasing, -196\n\nrisk and return,\n\nallocating resources based on, -77\n\nrisk of loss,\n\nrisk,\n\nowners getting paid for taking, -166\n\nthe importance of, -146\n\nrisky investments,\n\nROI,\n\nallocating resources for your best,\n\ncompetitive advantages and, -98\n\ndecreasing, -183\n\ninvestment advantages and increasing your, -96\n\nmeasuring and choosing with, -89\n\ntaxes and inflation and,\n\nscalable investments, -184\n\nsecurities, selecting better, -100\n\nself-employment, making a decision about, -14\n\nsensory experiences,\n\nshared resources, -33\n\nshort-term movement of markets,\n\nshort-term survival,\n\nsimple stories, trusting, -156\n\nskill, understanding and,\n\nskills,\n\ninvesting in your, -196\n\nlearning new,\n\nsound investing, beginning your foundation for,\n\nspending, limiting, -64\n\nstock, buying or selling,\n\nstoring resources,\n\nsunk costs, -69\n\nsurvival and consumption, -61\n\nsurvival, short-term,\n\nsurviving, our instinct of, -48\n\ntaxes and inflation, financial returns and, -88\n\ntime,\n\nallowing yourself plenty of, -181\n\nreinvesting extra, -203\n\ntelling yourself the truth about, -51\n\ntrading your, -204\n\ntiming, the importance of,\n\ntrading resources,\n\ntransportation, consumption and,\n\ntrust, the importance of,\n\ntrusted network, the importance of a, -116\n\nunderstanding and skill,\n\nunderstanding, investing in thorough, -157\n\nundesirable influences,\n\nvalues, considering your own,\n\nventure capital, network of relationships in,\n\nwealth, the motivation of, -23\n\nWikipedia a shared source,\n\nWikipedia, using,\n\nworkshops, participating in,\n\nyourself, building, -117\n\n## > About the Author <\n\nStarting without wealth, connections, or anyone's permission, Mark Aardsma became the entrepreneur behind multiple successful businesses. Using what he had and building from the ground up, he led two of his companies to the multi-million-dollar level.\n\nOne was featured three years in a row on _Inc._ magazine's list of fastest-growing companies.\n\nMark is an active CEO, a venture investor in early-stage companies, and a patient investor in financial markets. He also does coaching, speaking, and writing intended to encourage his audiences to face their fears and live and work the way they really want to. He lives with his wife and four children in Champaign, Illinois.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n# 30-SECOND\n\n# ANCIENT CHINA\n\n**The 50 most important achievements of a timeless civilization, each explained in half a minute**\n\nEditor\n\n**Yijie Zhuang**\n\nContributors\n\n**Qin Cao**\n\n**Beichen Chen**\n\n**Wengcheong Lam**\n\n**Siran Liu**\n\n**Sai Ma**\n\n**Peng Peng**\n\n**Chao Tang**\n\n**Li Zhang**\n\n**Yijie Zhuang**\n\nIllustrations\n\n**Ivan Hissey**\n\nIn the West, the story of Ancient China is less familiar to us than that of Ancient Egypt or Rome, but it is no less absorbing. This book takes you through the huge achievements of the early civilizations of China, so that you can dazzle your dinner-party guests with your knowledge of its Bronze Age glories.\n\n30 Second Ancient China reveals the secrets of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties, all explained clearly and without the clutter. Each entry is summarized in just 30 seconds \u2013 using nothing more than two pages, 300 words and one picture. Leading scholars present an expert guide to everything from the ancient cities of the Zhou kings and the elaborate oracle-bone rituals to the exquisite bronze vessels that gave the age its name. Add topics dealing with everyday life in Ancient China, and succinct biographies of some intriguing figures and 30-Second Ancient China becomes the perfect introduction to one of the great ancient civilizations.\n\n### CONTENTS\n\nIntroduction\n\n**Land, Architecture & States**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nRivers & Monsoons\n\nOwnership of Land\n\nPopulation\n\nProfile: Zhou Gong\n\nCities\n\nArchitecture\n\nState Management & Bureaucracy\n\n**Great Discoveries**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nErlitou\n\nYinxu\n\nSangxingdui\n\nDayangzhou\n\nProfile: Li Ji\n\nZhouyuan\n\nSuizhou Zeng Marquis Cemetery\n\nYong City & the Qin State Cemetery\n\nMajiayuan\n\n**Bronzes & Rituals**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nCopper Production\n\nPiece-mould Casting\n\nLost Wax Casting\n\nRitual Vessels & their Distribution\n\nProfile: The Shan Family\n\nMatching Sets of Ritual Vessels\n\nMusical Instruments\n\nDecoration & Social Meanings\n\nRitual Reform & Restructuring\n\n**Science & Society**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nFood\n\nAlcohol\n\nPottery Production\n\nTextiles & Clothing\n\nProfile: Bian Que\n\nCoinage\n\nAstronomy & the Calendar\n\nMarriage, Gender & Birth\n\nMedicine\n\n**Afterlife & Beliefs**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nTombs of the Shang Elites\n\nState Cemeteries of the Zhou\n\nCommoner Burials\n\nDivination & Shamanism\n\nProfile: Qin Mu Gong\n\nHuman & Animal Sacrifices\n\nThe Use of Jade\n\n**Writing & Philosophy**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nOracle Bone Inscriptions\n\nBronze Inscriptions\n\nBamboo Slips\n\nProfile: Confucius\n\nStone & Pottery Inscriptions\n\nConfucianism & Early Taoism\n\nWarring State Philosophies\n\nScribes & History\n\n**Warfare, Transportation & Trade**\n\nGLOSSARY\n\nHorses & Chariots\n\nMilitary & Weapons\n\nVows & Pledges\n\nProfile: King Mu\n\nThe Art of War\n\nLong-distance Trade\n\nNomads\n\nNorthern Bronze Complex\n\n**Appendices**\n\nResources\n\nNotes on Contributors\n\nIndex\n\nAcknowledgements\n\n### INTRODUCTION\n\n### Yijie Zhuang\n\nStudents of ancient Chinese history and culture face a number of distinctive questions. Why and how did China, with its huge geographical landmass and multiple nations, remain united for thousands of years? Why is traditional Chinese architecture so different from that in other parts of the world? Why did a borrowed technology, metallurgy, play such a fundamental role in ancient Chinese societies, marking a departure from Western counterparts? Why did the population remain high throughout history? And most importantly, when did the concept of China, culturally and geographically, come into being?\n\nThough fostered during Neolithic times, it was at the beginning of the Bronze Age that many of these characteristics were shaped and developed. Indeed, the Bronze Age, with its long timespan including the Xia, Shang and Zhou periods (c. 4100\u2013221 BCE), saw an acceleration in social complexity; this was closely related to state formation, but also created a network of economic production, state management and ritual activities that were intertwined in a manner which came to define China.\n\nNumerous archaeological discoveries have illuminated aspects of ancient Chinese societies. Yet outside scholarly circles, the general public, particularly in the West, knows very little about these civilizations. Language has been a major barrier, but the trajectory of modern archaeological practice has also been critical in hampering intellectual exchange.\n\nKeeping the same framework that is adopted in other volumes of this series, we have paid particular attention to topics that are sometimes neglected in China and have highlighted those characteristics that are distinctive to ancient China. Each entry is made up of a 30-second history which delves into the subject, further distilled into a 3-second survey, with an additional 3-minute excavation raising a question or an interesting detail which is explored further. Feature spreads in each chapter focus on the lives and careers of some of the most intriguing figures in ancient China. A list of further reading is provided at the end of the book for those who want to pursue particular issues in more depth.\n\n_The unique nature of ancient Chinese society and culture is gradually being uncovered through the examination of archaeological finds such as these ritual figures from Sanxingdui, though much remains to be fully explained._\n\nOur journey begins with the Land, Architecture & States chapter by investigating how the long-lasting agricultural civilization in China was shaped by its unique environment, how archaeologists have tackled the perishable earth-and-wood architecture and how different state-managing strategies were employed during different periods. Complementary information is provided in Great Discoveries, where we choose ten of the most spectacular recent archaeological discoveries, which together represent a panorama of the Xia, Shan and Zhou cultures: cities and urban centres, rich bronze hoards and spectacular state cemeteries.\n\nUtilizing up-to-date research on the development of metallurgy and bronze casting in China, the Bronze & Rituals chapter emphasizes the development of rituals, which played a central role in state management. In Science & Society, we offer some snapshots of daily life in the light of economic and scientific developments in the Bronze Age. As in ancient Egypt, the interment of the dead was a central focus of the living. A hierarchy in mortuary practice was established and gradually enforced more strictly, particularly among the Western Zhou people, and the prestige of the past became the purpose of the present. The constant engagement of Bronze Age people in China with their ancestors will be explored in Afterlife & Beliefs.\n\nThe uniqueness of Chinese writing had significant historical implications, and the early development of a continuous writing tradition is introduced in Writing & Philosophy. This is supplemented by a further exploration of the Warring State philosophies (a Golden Age for ancient Chinese philosophy) and the scribal tradition, another distinctive characteristic of Chinese history. The last chapter deals with Warfare, Transportation & Trade, in light of recent archaeological discoveries and research. As in other early states, war was an important means of obtaining social power. Although answers to some important questions remain cloudy, in this last section we aim to sketch out the expanding, interconnected network of interaction between ancient China and its neighbours in the Bronze Age.\n\nCHRONOLOGY1\n\nXia period c. 2100\u20131600 BCE\n\nShang period \u2013 before Anyang\/Yinxu c. 1600\u20131300 BCE\n\nShang period \u2013 Anyang\/Yinxu 1300\u20131045 BCE\n\nPan Geng\u2013Xiao Yi c. 1300\u20131251 BCE\n\nWu Ding c. 1250\u20131190 BCE\n\nZu Geng\u2013Kang Ding c. 1190\u20131150 BCE\n\nWu Yi\u2013Ding Xin\n\nc. 1150\u20131049\/1046\/1043 BCE2\n\nWestern Zhou period c. 1049\/1046\/1043\u2013771 BC\n\nKing Wu 1049\/1046\/1043\u20131043 BCE\n\nKing Cheng 1042\u20131021 BCE\n\nKing Kang 1020\u2013996 BCE\n\nKing Zhao 995\u2013977 BCE\n\nKing Mu 976\u2013922 BCE\n\nKing Gong 922\u2013900 BCE\n\nKing Yih 899\u2013892 BCE\n\nKing Xiao 891\u2013886 BCE\n\nKing Yi 885\u2013878 BCE\n\nKing Li 877\u2013841 BCE\n\nGong He 841\u2013828 BCE3\n\nKing Xuan 827\u2013782 BCE\n\nKing You 781\u2013771 BCE\n\nEastern Zhou period 770\u2013256 BCE\n\nSpring and Autumn period 770\u2013476 BCE\n\nKing Ping 770\u2013720 BCE\n\nKing Huan 719\u2013697 BCE\n\nKing Zhuang 696\u2013682 BCE\n\nKing Xi 681\u2013677 BCE\n\nKing Hui 676\u2013652 BCE\n\nKing Xiang 651\u2013619 BCE\n\nKing Qing 618\u2013613 BCE\n\nKing Kuang 612\u2013607 BCE\n\nKing Ding 606\u2013586 BCE\n\nKing Jian 585\u2013572 BCE\n\nKing Ling 571\u2013545 BCE\n\nKing Jing 544\u2013520 BCE\n\nKing Jing 519\u2013476 BCE\n\nWarring States period 475\u2013256 BCE\n\nKing Yuan 475\u2013469 BCE\n\nKing Zhending 468\u2013441 BCE\n\nKing Kao 440\u2013426 BCE\n\nKing Wei Lie 425\u2013402 BCE\n\nKing An 401\u2013376 BCE\n\nKing Lie 375\u2013369 BCE\n\nKing Xian 368\u2013321 BCE\n\nKing Shenjing 320\u2013315 BCE\n\nKing Nan 314\u2013256 BCE\n\nQin state 777\u2013221 BCE4\n\nDuke of Xiang 777\u2013766 BCE\n\nDuke of Wen 765\u2013716 BCE\n\nDuke of Ning 715\u2013704 BCE\n\nDuke of Chu 703\u2013698 BCE\n\nDuke of Wu 697\u2013678 BCE\n\nDuke of De 677\u2013676 BCE\n\nDuke of Xuan 675\u2013664 BCE\n\nDuke of Cheng 663\u2013660 BCE\n\nDuke of Mu 659\u2013621 BCE\n\nDuke of Kang 620\u2013609 BCE\n\nDuke of Gong 608\u2013604 BCE\n\nDuke of Huan 603\u2013577 BCE\n\nDuke of Jing 576\u2013537 BCE\n\nDuke of Ai 536\u2013501 BCE\n\nDuke of Hui 500\u2013491 BCE\n\nDuke of Dao 490\u2013477 BCE\n\nDuke of Ligong 476\u2013443 BCE\n\nDuke of Zao 442\u2013429 BCE\n\nDuke of Huai 428\u2013425 BCE\n\nDuke of Ling 424\u2013415 BCE\n\nDuke of Jian 414\u2013400 BCE\n\nDuke of Hui 399\u2013387 BCE\n\nChuzi 386\u2013385 BCE\n\nDuke of Xian 384\u2013362 BCE\n\nDuke of Xiao 361\u2013338 BCE\n\nKing Huiwen 337\u2013311 BCE\n\nKing Wu 310\u2013307 BCE\n\nKing Zhao 306\u2013251 BCE\n\nKing Xiaowen 250 BCE\n\nKing Zhuangxiang 249\u2013247 BCE\n\nKing Zheng 246\u2013221 BCE\n\n**Notes**\n\n1 There are numerous scholarly opinions concerning the chronology of the Xia, Shang and Zhou periods. Here we have adopted the Xia-Shang-and-Zhou periodization project, published in 2000.\n\n2 The exact year when the last King of Shang, Ding Xin, was overthrown remains highly controversial. There are three main suggestions: 1049, 1046 or 1043 BCE.\n\n3 841 BCE is the first point at which Chinese history has an unambiguous chronicle.\n\n4 Qin was one of the many regional states during the Eastern Zhou period when the power of the Zhou royal court was significantly weakened. Its chronicle is partially parallel with that of the Zhou royal court, but the latter disappeared in 256 BCE while the former continued until it united China in 221 BCE under King Zheng, who became the first Emperor under the name Qinshihuangdi.\n\n## LAND, ARCHITECTURE & STATES\n\n### LAND, ARCHITECTURE & STATES\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**alluvium** a loose aggregation of particles of soil, sand, clay or gravel which is alternately eroded and deposited by the actions of a river or other flowing body of water; alluvial soils are often highly fertile and can contain ores of precious metals such as gold and silver.\n\n**cult** the ceremonial practices relating to the worship and service required by a deity or deities. This can involve specific rituals that have to be performed regularly, the erection of buildings to 'house' the deity, votive offerings of objects or goods and the sacrifice of animals or even humans. Participation in cultic practices might be limited to certain sectors of society as a means of establishing hierarchies of status, and control of the cult in the ancient world was frequently a prerequisite of political power.\n\n**feudalism** a system of social organization, prevalent in medieval Europe, which involved the granting of land by a noble landowner or monarch in exchange for military support from the grantee. The person holding the land was known as the lord's vassal, and the relationship was contractually agreed through the swearing of an oath. The system extended downwards in turn to the peasants or serfs, who worked the land on behalf of their lord in return for his protection.\n\n**floodplain** the region adjoining a river that is inundated when the river bursts its banks, for example during periods of heavy rainfall or as a result of snowmelt. Floodplains are characteristically fertile and form rich ecosystems, and the floodplains of rivers such as the Nile, Indus and the Yellow river were the cradles of early civilizations.\n\n**monsoon** a seasonally reversing wind that carries a large amount of moisture inland during the warmer months when the land temperature rises relative to that of the sea. As this air rises the moisture precipitates to generate extended periods of rainfall. During the cooler months the cycle reverses, and a period of drought ensues.\n\n**rammed earth** a building technique whereby walls are built by compacting layers of earth into an externally supported wooden frame.\n\n**Spring and Autumn** period of Chinese history between 771 BCE and 475 BCE, corresponding roughly to the first part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty, when the authority of the Zhou extended over a smaller area than hitherto, and a number of smaller fiefdoms became increasingly independent. The period takes its name from the _Spring and Autumn Annals_ , a chronicle of Lu state during this time which tradition attributes to Confucius.\n\n**tributary system** practice whereby states wishing to trade with China were obliged to recognize Chinese superiority and preeminence in the region, and to send tribute 'missions' to the Chinese court. These involved the performance of particular rituals and the provision of gifts or hostages as a means of acknowledging the superior status of China.\n\n**Warring States** period following on from the Spring and Autumn period, 475 BCE to 221 BCE, roughly corresponding to the second part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. As the Zhou weakened, various smaller states struggled for supremacy, and various alliances and wars took place, culminating in the victory of Qin state and the unification of China under Emperor Qinshihuang in 221 BCE.\n\n### RIVERS & MONSOONS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe history of ancient China was profoundly shaped by its environment, a unique combination of long, sinuous rivers and short-lived but recurrent monsoons. Each summer, the East Asian and Indian summer monsoons brought copious rainfall pouring down into the rivers. But decadal cycles between disastrous floods and extreme droughts caused by abnormal monsoon activities posed a great threat to the society. This changeable water regime was so significant to farmers that, beneficial as the Yellow river has been, it has also been characterized as 'China's tribulation'. To avoid disastrous floods, the Bronze Age peoples often established their permanent settlements along small or medium-sized rivers. Erlitou, the earliest Bronze Age urban centre, was built on the terrace of the ancient Yiluo river, which undergoes active alluvial processes. Part of the site is covered by alluvial deposits or cut by recent river channels. Active alluviation, on the other hand, also promotes the formation of riverine wetlands, which offered the Erlitou people rich natural resources. By the Spring-and-Autumn and Warring States periods, large irrigation canals had been dug in north China to direct river water to farmland. But it is not until the Han period that we see the great migration of farming villages to the floodplains of the lower Yellow river, a process that had mixed results.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAlthough the Egyptian type of floodplain cultivation likely did not happen until the Han period, rivers fed by monsoons played a critical role in the ebb and flow of Bronze Age cultures.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAlthough hard evidence of waterway transportation in the Bronze Age is lacking, the migration and expansion of society in central China undoubtedly benefitted from rivers. Panlong City was a Shang military outpost built right next to the Fuhe river, which connected to the Yangtze river. It is thus very likely that the Shang arrived via the rivers. Some Eastern Zhou bronze vessels have inlaid decorative motifs illustrating scenes of water battles. The boats shown were big enough to accommodate tens or hundreds of people.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nFOOD\n\nMILITARY & WEAPONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nDAYU (GREAT YU)\n\nc. 2200\u20132100 BCE\n\nLegendary founder of the Xia dynasty, a hero of the Xia tribe who tamed the floods.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Fluctuations in the water supply meant the Bronze Age Chinese were at the mercy of floods or drought._**\n\n### OWNERSHIP OF LAND\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nDue to the lack of contemporary written documents, no clear picture can be drawn about land ownership in early Bronze Age China. During the late Shang period, the oracle bone inscriptions unearthed at Yinxu indicate the existence of land that belonged to the Shang king, with labourers being summoned to work on the land. In the Zhou period, every square inch of the land, in theory, belonged to the Zhou king personally. The king gifted parcels of land to the Zhou elites to reward them for service or to ensure their loyalty. However, a regional ruler could also claim ownership of the land in the state that he ruled. Especially during time of war, land could be seized from a conquered state without consultation with its nominal owner. On the other hand, bronze inscriptions of the Western Zhou period indicate that land could be exchanged among elites or used as compensation, though it was not yet considered private property. From the late Western Zhou period onwards, a series of economic reforms, including reforms to land ownership, started to take place. The reforms initiated by Shang Yang in the 4th century BCE were among the most significant of these. However, whether land actually became private property as a result of these reforms is still a matter for debate.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nInscriptions on bronze wares dating to the Western Zhou period have shed light on land ownership of that time.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nA bronze plate with Sanshi inscriptions is one of the most significant textual documents regarding land ownership during the late Western Zhou period. It was unearthed during the reign of Emperor Qianlong (1736\u201395 ce) at Fengxiang, Shaanxi province. The plate has a text of 357 Chinese characters. The inscriptions on it document a land compensation made by Ze state to its neighbouring San state, where the plate was almost certainly cast. The King of Zhou is also mentioned in the inscriptions.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\nBRONZE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nSHANG YANG (LORD SHANG)\n\nc. 390\u2013338 BCE\n\nStatesman in the state of Qin, whose reforms contributed greatly to the phenomenal rise of the Qin state.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nLi Zhang\n\n**_In the Western Zhou dynasty, the Zhou king, in theory, owned every inch of the land._**\n\n### POPULATION\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe earliest record of the population of China was drawn up around the Western Han period (206 BCE\u20138 CE). According to the written record, the number of households at that time amounted to 12,233,062, and the population was 59,594,978. The population before then can only be roughly estimated, based on archaeological excavations at settlements and rare records in historical documents. During the early Bronze Age, the population of the Erlitou site at its peak might have been 18,000\u201330,000. Based on the number and size of settlements, the total population during the early Shang period might have been around 4,000,000 to 4,500,000. The number might have risen to around 7,800,000 during the late Shang period. According to historical documents, a census was conducted during the Western Zhou period. Unfortunately, no record of the population from that time has been preserved. The population grew during the Eastern Zhou period. Based on the number of military personnel, the population during the Warring States period might have reached 20,000,000. However, none of the figures given above can be taken as anything more than an estimate of the population of Bronze Age China.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nDue to the lack of contemporaneous historical documentation, estimates of the Chinese population in the Bronze Age have to be based mainly on archaeological finds and educated guesswork.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nJudging from archaeological discoveries and written records, the ancient city of Linzi was one of the largest and richest cities in China during the Eastern Zhou period, and was famous for being one of the most populous cities of the Warring States. The ancient city of Linzi covered an area of more than 20 sq km (7.5 square miles) in total. From the account of the traveller Su Qin, there were up to 70,000 households in Linzi during the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nLi Zhang\n\n**_A model of Linzi, which was thought by contemporaries to be one of the most populous cities in the Warring States._**\n\n### ZHOU GONG\n\nZhou Gong (Duke of Zhou, c. 1100 BCE) was the brother of the first king of the Western dynasty, King Wu. He assisted his father and brother in launching the war against the Shang dynasty. He also established the political and economic institutions of the Zhou dynasty and fixed new standards for religion, marriage, family, morality and other aspects of society. ' _Zhou_ ' was his title. He was also honoured as ' _Yuan Sheng'_ , the first saint in Chinese history, with his influential philosophy being considered the foundation of Confucianism.\n\nKing Cheng was very young when his father, King Wu, died. His uncle, Zhou Gong, assisted King Cheng as regent. An armed rebellion was staged by two other brothers of King Wu and a son of the last king of the Shang in the east during Zhou Gong's regency. He led an army to suppress the rebellion and subsequently built Chengzhou, another capital city, in order to control the eastern territories. When King Cheng came to adulthood, Zhou Gong handed power back to him and retired to Chengzhou.\n\nZhou Gong was often called 'the king' and issued decrees as a king according to pre-Eastern Han (c. 100 BCE) records. But after the Eastern Han dynasty, some historians claimed that Zhou Gong was just a regent and had never become king. It was considered dishonourable for a high-ranking minister and assistant to a king to claim the throne, according to the moral values of that time. As a model of Confucianism, Zhou Gong should not have overstepped his authority. Some thought that Zhou Gong was forced to hand over power to his nephew and that he went east not to counter the insurgency, but as an exile.\n\nHowever, the archaeological evidence suggests a simpler picture. Inscriptions on late Western Zhou bronzes record that Zhou Gong indeed had great power, but his name was never included in the lineage of Western Zhou kings. Newly discovered bamboo slips state that Zhou Gong went east for three years to suppress a rebellion, which is consistent with the content of poems about him that circulated for 2,000 years.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\n**Zhou Gong, Duke of Zhou was a powerful statesman and brother of King Wu, the founder of the Zhou dynasty. He was influential in consolidating the institutions of the Zhou dynasty.**\n\n### CITIES\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe Bronze Age cities prior to the eastern Zhou were extremely volatile. Often driven by economic needs, control of key natural resources (ore, salt, etc.) and military expansion, these cities were situated in strategically important locations and moved after resources became exhausted. According to Sima Qian's _Records of the Grand Historian_ , the Shang moved their capital at least five times, which is attested by the discovery of two early Shang cities, Zhengzhou and Yanshi. The hoards of valuable bronze vessels discovered at Zhengzhou possibly capture a moment when the Shang elites had to abandon their city under extreme circumstances. The final move to Yinxu in the reign of Pan Geng inaugurated the Shang's golden age. They first built the city on the north bank of the Huan river, but soon moved it to the south bank. Yinxu was a cult centre. Located at its core are ancestral temples, elite tombs and other ritual-related buildings. These were surrounded by bronze foundries, workshops and residential buildings. The Zhou, after their conquest of the Shang, built two capitals: western Zongzhou and eastern Chengzhou. This dual-capital system worked for almost 300 years until the eastern migration of the Zhou royal house. Cities of regional states flourished thereafter, with the focus switching from politics to economic production, opening a new era of urbanization.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAs a result of constant political competition and economic development, the Bronze Age cities of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties experienced dramatic changes in terms of planning and functions throughout the period.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nDrainage became an increasing challenge to the cities. In Qufu City in Lu state in present-day Shandong province, which covered an area of 10 sq km (4 square miles), immense labour was invested in laying drainage pipes (made of stone and bricks) across the city. These pipes survived intensive ploughing in historical times. In Qin Yong City, an ancestral temple was surrounded by a rectangular-shaped stone drainage ditch called 'Sanshui'.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nZHOU GONG\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nSIMA QIAN\n\nc. 145 or 135\u201386 BCE\n\nHan period historian, author of the enduring masterpiece, _Records of the Grand Historian_.\n\nPAN GENG\n\nc. 1300 or 1290\u20131260 BCE\n\nLegendary king of the Shang, best known for having moved the Shang capital to Yinxu.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Cities were located to protect trade routes or natural resources, and often moved to suit changing conditions._**\n\n### ARCHITECTURE\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe use of earth and perishable wood, rather than stone, as the primary building material is a feature distinctive to traditional Chinese architecture. A mature rammed-earth technique was developed to construct the foundations and walls of buildings. This technology relies on enormous labour investment to pile up and compress layers of earth into an externally supported wooden frame. The Shang produced bronze construction parts and used them to connect wooden partitions in palaces. This technique was quickly adopted by the elites in other areas. A hoard discovered at Yong City in Qin state featured numbers of these bronze construction elements. The Zhou began to use hollow bricks and tiles on an impressive scale. The construction of palaces became a means to showcase the taste and status of the residents. Walls made of hollow bricks were carved with beautiful motifs and painted with murals. Roofs were built using eaves tiles and complicated wooden brackets to create an overhanging section to throw rainwater clear of the building. This feature was soon developed for purely aesthetic display, a tradition that can still be seen in the Forbidden City. Floors were made of stones and bricks to guarantee domestic hygiene. Palaces were used by the elites for meetings and as ancestral temples, while commoners lived in primitive subterranean houses.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAn array of new architectural techniques were invented in the Bronze Age, driven by the need of the elites to build colossal, solemn and awe-inspiring buildings.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe largest palace discovered at Erlitou is 10,000 sq m (12,000 square yards) in area, and would have required 1,000 labourers working for 200 consecutive days to build. Some archaeologists think its domestic space was undivided, while others reconstruct it as being composed of 24 rooms aligned in three parallel rows, though 'rooms' might simply mean divided space without any actual walls. Most notable are the sacrificial pits discovered in the courtyard. One has at least three human skeletons forming a circle, all of whom had suffered violent death.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nYONG CITY & THE QIN STATE CEMETERY\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Ancient Chinese buildings were built with a wooden skeleton, and while carved bricks and tiles were used for decorative partition walls, the load-bearing timber frame remained the basis of Chinese architecture for millennia._**\n\n### STATE MANAGEMENT & BUREAUCRACY\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nAs successful as the Shang were, they had only loose control of the different regional powers. Through the establishment of a tributary system, they distributed highly valuable bronze vessels to their allies in different regions and received resources in return. They built military outposts as far afield as the central Yangtze river, but for most of the period they were busy fighting rebellions. The situation did not change much after the Zhou's conquest of the Shang. In fact, the state became even more precarious immediately after the death of King Wu. This crisis provided an opportunity for the strong leadership of Zhou Gong, the brother of King Wu. Besides establishing two capitals to consolidate the regime and crush the rebels, he sent kinsmen and relatives of the royal Ji lineage to strategic locations to create 71 regional states. This system resembled feudalism, but differed from the medieval Europe feudo-vassalic system in that there was no intimate personal relationship between the Zhou king and the regional rulers. A state bureaucracy was also developed: under the Zhou king was the Grand Protector; the Royal Household was in charge of royal affairs, whereas supervisors of land, construction and horses, and scribes took control of state-related business. This highly organized and effective system was mimicked by regional states and set the scene for later Chinese bureaucratic development.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nFrom the tributary system to the feudal system, an effective means of state management was gradually established over time. The development of the Western Zhou state bureaucracy was influential throughout Chinese history.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nLocated in present-day Beijing, Yan was one of the earliest states established by the Zhou. Inscriptions on the Ke lei vessel discovered in an elite tomb here document for the first time the establishment of a regional state (the tomb was probably that of its founder). The inscriptions tell how the king commanded Ke to become the ruler of Yan.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nDAYANGZHOU\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nKING WU\n\nreigned c. 1046\u20131043 BCE\n\nFirst king of the Zhou dynasty of ancient China.\n\nZHOU GONG (DUKE OF ZHOU)\n\nfl. c. 1100 BCE\n\nThe younger brother of King Wu.\n\nKE\n\nc. 10th century BCE\n\nOldest son of Zhou Gong and first ruler of Yan state.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_The distribution of prestige goods in exchange for natural resources was the basis of state control._**\n\n## GREAT DISCOVERIES\n\n### GREAT DISCOVERIES\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**bead-welding** welding is the process of joining two pieces of metal together by heating and softening them. Forge welding was the earliest method, which involves heating the metal and then hammering the separate pieces together. A bead weld uses a filler material between the pieces of metal to create a joint, called a bead.\n\n**bronze** an alloy of copper and either arsenic or tin, which produces a material that is harder and more durable than copper alone. Since ores of tin and copper rarely occur in close geographical proximity, bronze working stimulated trade between different cultures in the ancient world, so that the raw materials could be brought together. Bronze can be cast into various shapes or hammered into flat sheets from ingots.\n\n**Central Plains** region on the lower reaches of the Yellow river, roughly corresponding to modern-day Henan, the southern part of Hebei, the southern part of Shanxi and the western part of Shandong provinces, regarded as the centre of the world in the Chinese Bronze Age.\n\n**dynasty** a line of rulers deriving from the same family or clan. Historians usually divide Chinese history into periods that take their names from the dynasty that was in power during the period under discussion.\n\n**Eurasian steppe** an extensive area of grassland stretching from what is now Ukraine eastwards to Mongolia. During the Bronze Age the steppe supported the grazing herds of nomadic tribespeople, whose mobility was based on their domestication of the horse and probably sheep, goats and cattle. Their horsemanship was a great advantage in military terms, while the mobility of these tribes was significant in disseminating language and culture over a wide area. The Great Wall of China was built in part to protect the Central Plains from attack by the Eurasian nomads.\n\n**inlay** a decorative technique involving the insertion of contrasting materials into depressions in the surface of the object being decorated. Inlays are frequently precious materials such as gold, silver, turquoise or jade.\n\n**lacquer** a hard, shiny decorative material used to give a glossy surface to wooden objects. In China it is derived from the poisonous resin of _Toxicodendron vernicifluum_ , the Chinese lacquer tree, and Chinese lacquerware has been found that dates back to the Neolithic period.\n\n**_lei_** a type of ritual vessel for alcohol.\n\n**loess** sediment formed by the accumulation of wind-borne silt, which can form layers several hundred metres thick.\n\n**mausoleum** a monumental building containing the tomb of one or more people.\n\n**proto-porcelain** an early form of fired and glazed ceramic ware, but without the translucency of true porcelain. Proto-porcelain has been found dating from the Shang dynasty, around 1600 BCE.\n\n**rammed earth** a building technique whereby walls are built by compacting layers of earth into an externally supported wooden frame.\n\n**ramped tomb** a burial chamber which is accessed via one or more ramped causeways; the number of ramps was an indicator of status in the Chinese Bronze Age.\n\n**skew** chamber type of burial chamber in which the entrance passageway or ante-chamber is at an angle to the main chamber.\n\n**slag** by-product of metal smelting, the material that is left after the metal has been extracted from the ore. It has a glassy surface and was used in ancient times to make items of jewellery or glassware.\n\n**turquoise** a blue-green mineral that has been prized as a gemstone for thousands of years and was one of the first gems to be mined. It is often associated with copper deposits.\n\n### ERLITOU\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nAfter a test excavation in 1959 at Erlitou in present-day Henan province, the archaeologist Xu Xusheng was thrilled to discover the ruins of what he believed to be the first Shang capital, Bo, established by King Tang. He did not foresee that this discovery would initiate half a century of excavations and debate on the identity of the founder of the city. It is only recently that most Chinese archaeologists have agreed that Erlitou was most likely established and occupied by the Xia, an idea first proposed by Zou Heng that was vigorously challenged in the 1970s. Of the four occupational phases, the second reached 3 sq km (1.2 square miles). It consists of a rectangular enclosed palace area surrounded by elite tombs, a ceremonial area, a bronze foundry, a turquoise workshop and various functional areas. The whole city was divided by two roads, crisscrossing next to the northeast corner of the palace area. The roads and palaces were the most significant landmark in the city, an unprecedented phenomenon predating the similar design of the Forbidden City by four millennia. Controlling the production and consumption of luxury goods was a vital strategy for the Erlitou elite to consolidate their power. Goods such as bronze plates with turquoise inlay were distributed to areas as far away as northwest China. In return, they received exotic items, such as proto-porcelain from south China.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe idea of 'China' was fostered at Erlitou, a village in central China where successive excavations have revealed one of the largest and earliest urban centres in Chinese history.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nNext to palace No. 3 a rich elite tomb with a wooden coffin was unearthed. It contained bronzes, jade, lacquers, proto-porcelain, white ceramics, numerous other types of objects and, most amazingly, a dragon-shaped turquoise object. The consumption of these luxury goods served to display the occupant's social status, which is further strengthened by the inclusion of this turquoise object with a dragon shape, a unique design appearing only in very few special contexts.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nCITIES\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\nPOTTERY PRODUCTION\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nXUSHENG XU\n\n1888\u20131976\n\nArchaeologist and historian. Organized and directed one of the earliest excavations in China at Doujitai in 1933.\n\nZOU HENG\n\n1927\u20132005\n\nOne of the most prominent Bronze Age archaeologists in China. First person to systematically study pottery discovered at many important Bronze Age sites.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Erlitou is the one of earliest large-scale Bronze Age urban sites to be discovered._**\n\n### YINXU\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe significance of Yinxu was first established when the origin of some ancient oracle bones inscribed with the names of the Shang kings was traced to the site in the early 20th century. This metropolis of the late Shang is located in Anyang, a city in north Henan province, on the banks of the Huan river. The palace area is in the middle of the site to the south of the river. More than 80 large-scale building foundations have been found, encircled by a deep moat connecting to the river. These buildings might have been used for ancestor worship, for hosting political activities by the royal families or as living quarters. Millions of oracle bones have been found on the site, offering a key to the understanding of the divination activities that once took place here. Dozens of other residential areas were scattered around the palace area, with many handicraft workshops among them. Across the Huan river to the north, 13 ramped tombs were found in the royal cemetery along with more than 2,500 sacrificial pits in the eastern section. Most of the sacrifice pits were filled with human skeletons. Although the royal tombs had been badly looted, many fine artefacts were discovered, like the 'Mother Wu' Ding-quadripod, the largest bronze artefact ever discovered from Bronze Age China.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe authenticity of early Chinese documented history was confirmed by the discovery of Yinxu, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, which was one of the earliest excavation sites in the history of Chinese archaeology.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nTwo recently excavated workshops give an insight into craft production in Yinxu. In the Xiaomintun bronze foundry, thousands of pieces of mould debris and slag, together with bronze-casting areas, mould preparing and drying pits, give us an idea of how piece-mould casting worked. Tiesanlu was a huge bone-working workshop. Cattle, pig and deer bones were made into pins, awls and arrowheads. The remains provide us with information about the technology as well as the organization of production.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nCITIES\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nCOMMONER BURIALS\n\nDIVINATION & SHAMANISM\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSai Ma\n\n**_At almost a tonne in weight, the 'Mother Wu' quadripod is the largest Bronze Age artefact discovered in China._**\n\n### SANXINGDUI\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nOver 1,700 bronze, gold and jade artefacts and many ivory tusks were uncovered from two rectangular vertical pits in Guanghan, Sichuan province, in southwestern China in 1986. Following years of subsequent excavations, archaeologists have unveiled a walled city with large building foundations, tombs and pottery kilns. Considered one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century in China, the Sanxingdui site has revealed glimpses of a unique Bronze Age civilization that had lain forgotten for over 3,000 years. The majority of the bronze objects recovered from the two pits remain mysterious in terms of their design and function. Sculpture forms the main category of bronzes and some gigantic masks (one 66 cm [26 in.] tall and 138 cm [54 in.] wide) are obviously too large to wear. Indeed, no parallel for them is known anywhere else in China. Furthermore, the large quantities of jade were mainly in the form of discs and blades of various designs, not the ornaments that are abundant at Yinxu. More surprisingly, most of the objects had been deliberately damaged and burned before being carefully placed layer by layer in the pits. Unfortunately, no written evidence has been found at Sanxingdui and our understanding of the site is rather limited. Viewed in conjunction with the ash and bones of animals in the pits, the objects were possibly ritual sacrificial offerings.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe Sanxingdui site is located thousands of miles away from the Central Plains, the traditional dynastic centre, and its peak is contemporary with the late Shang at Yinxu, c. 1200 BCE.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe village of Sanxingdui, which literally means 'three star mounds', is named after its earthen landscape features, which are the remains of artificial rammed earth walls. This particular construction method suggests Sanxingdui's contact with Erlitou or Zhengzhou, together with some similarities in ceramics and jade blades found there. However, many of the mysteries of Sanxingdui remain to be unlocked.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nYINXU\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_The function of the enormous masks and sculptures discovered in deep pits at Sanxingdui remains a mystery._**\n\n### DAYANGZHOU\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nLocal farmers ploughing their fields in 1989 uncovered this Early Bronze Age (Shang period) tomb, surpassed in richness only by the tomb of the famous Lady Fu Hao at Yinxu. The area where the occupant must have been placed was covered with jade ornaments. He was likely a military leader, as suggested by the 232 bronze weapons unearthed. Some bronze arrowheads, often preserved as complete sets, were still partially covered by lacquer and leather pieces. At the time of his death, this warrior had at hand a huge range of vessels of various types and from diverse sources. These were probably inherited from his ancestors who would have received bronze vessels from the Shang court and other regional powers. He also had more than 700 luxurious jade ornaments and precious jewels. The local contribution to this rich inventory was over 100 items of high-temperature hard ceramics and proto-porcelains. Some were decorated with distinctive geometric motifs of local styles; others had carved symbols on the surface, possibly the name of the potter. How did the occupant become so rich? This region has many copper-mining sites that were in use for thousands of years. The occupant and his group controlled and exported this resource, receiving valuable goods in return. The region's own luxury items, proto-porcelain, appeared in central China as early as the Erlitou period.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nLocated in a strategically important position near the Yangtze river, the occupant of this tomb enjoyed long-term trading relationships with the Shang and other regional powers.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nSituated on the floodplain of the Ganjiang river, a major tributary of the Yangtze river, the survival of the Dayangzhou tomb from erosion is a pure miracle. Because of the sandy deposits into which it was dug, archaeologists could hardly recognize the shape of the chamber. They failed to identify traces of a complete coffin, apart from some pieces of decayed wood and organic materials.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSTATE MANAGEMENT & BUREAUCRACY\n\nYINXU\n\nPOTTERY PRODUCTION\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_The bronze and jade objects in the tomb are testament to the power and status of those who controlled the region's natural resources._**\n\n### LI JI\n\nLi Ji (1896\u20131979), regarded as the 'Father of Chinese Archaeology', is one of the most important anthropologists and archaeologists in 20th-century China. In 1918, as a graduate of the Tsinghua College, he joined the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program to study in the United States, and gained China's first doctorate in anthropology at Harvard University in 1923. After a short stay at Nankai University, Li came back to Tsinghua and joined the newly established Academy of Chinese Learning in 1925. He started his career in archaeology by leading the Xiyincun excavation in 1926, the very first archaeological excavation carried out by Chinese scholars. Xiyincun's success, as well as his dedication to fieldwork, led to Li later becoming director of the Division of Archaeology of the Academia Sinica, and also led him to 'the cause of his life' \u2013 Anyang.\n\nAs the Shang capital before the first millennium BCE, Anyang remained unknown to the world until the late 1920s, when Li and his team excavated the Shang palace, and found archaeological evidence of oracle bones, ritual bronzes, pottery and so on. In 1937, the outbreak of war forced Li to stop the fieldwork, and escort all the archaeological records from one place to another, and eventually to Taiwan in 1948.\n\nAfterwards, as the founder of the Department of Anthropology at the National Taiwan University, and the head of the Institute of History and Philology, Li dedicated the last 30 years of his life to the study of Anyang materials. Using scientific approaches, he standardized terminology, and introduced typology into his archaeological work. He also devoted himself to co-operating with museums, protecting archaeological resources and providing a training ground for new generations of archaeologists.\n\nLi Ji's final book, _Anyang_ , published in 1977, is a portrait of his life of archaeology.\n\n**_Beichen Chen & Chao Tang_**\n\n**Li Ji is considered the 'Father of Chinese Archaeology' and discovered the ancient Shang capital at Anyang. His systematic approach to the study of archaeology has been influential throughout China.**\n\n### ZHOUYUAN\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nIn the hope of exploring the capitals of the Zhou dynasty and guided by ancient texts, the archaeologist Chang-ju Shih investigated Zhouyuan for the first time in the 1940s. Over the following decades, bronze hoards, tombs, building foundations and workshops were discovered, and the site came to be regarded as the pre-dynastic capital from which the Zhou people later conquered the Shang. It is a huge site with a maximum area of 30 sq km (11.5 square miles). Reservoirs and water channels, together with natural gullies and man-made wells, give us a picture of its water supply system. Large building foundations have been found, usually made of rammed earth. These are believed to be either palaces or the ancestral temples of the elites. Thousands of inscribed turtle shell fragments were unearthed in foundations near the modern village of Fengchu. The characters carved on them are so small that they could be regarded as miniatures. Bronze foundries, Jue-earring workshops and bone workshops indicate a high degree of standardization and specialization, demonstrating Zhouyuan's status as an economic centre. However, its role as the pre-dynastic capital has been challenged, mainly because of the lack of prestige remains and goods from the proto-Zhou period. Zhouyuan is certainly important, but its historical position needs further exploration.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nLocated on the south margin of the loess plateau area in northwest China, Zhouyuan, the 'Plain of Zhou', is one of the most important capitals of the proto-Zhou period and a capital-like city of the Western Zhou dynasty.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nIn ancient texts, Zhouyuan was described as fertile land where bitter edible plants like _Viola verecunda_ magically became sweet. Danfu, one of the Zhou ancestors, led his clansmen there, after which the Zhou conquered the Shang. After the establishment of the Zhou dynasty, Zhouyuan was given to Zhou Gong as his fiefdom. Zhouyuan remained prosperous throughout the Western Zhou dynasty, but after the attack of the Quanrong barbarians, the survivors moved to the east and the city quickly collapsed.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nCITIES\n\nARCHITECTURE\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\nDIVINATION & SHAMANISM\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nKING WU\n\nreigned c. 1046\u20131043 BCE\n\nFirst king of the Zhou dynasty.\n\nZHOU GONG (DUKE OF ZHOU)\n\nfl. c. 1100 BCE\n\nThe younger brother of King Wu.\n\nCHANG-JU SHIH\n\n1902\u20132004\n\nArchaeologist and historian. A pioneer of early archaeology.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSai Ma\n\n**_An inscription on this vessel describes a previous Shang family surrendered to Zhou people and settled down at Zhouyuan._**\n\n### SUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nFrom 2011 to 2013, two seasons of excavation at Yejiashan near the present-day city of Suizhou, north Hubei province, revealed the site of a large-scale Western Zhou state cemetery with 147 burials. Over 2,000 grave goods were uncovered, ranging from bronzes and ceramics to lacquer, jade and stoneware, reflecting a wealthy community that flourished here 3,000 years ago. This collection of luxury artefacts derives from multiple disparate sources. Some ideas were borrowed from provincial traditions from hundreds of miles away, such as a flamboyant _lei_ vessel from southwestern China, and the tiger-shaped flanges on a bell from further south. The majority of the bronzes indicated that the ancient Hubei people had adopted a very similar ritual sequence to the Zhou metropolitan areas in the north. Some of them were inscribed with ancient Chinese characters, for example, 'Marquis of Zeng', implying that the owner saw himself as the ruler of a Zhou regional power, the state of Zeng. Although ignored in most of the historical texts known to us, previous discoveries indicated that the Zeng controlled the area from the end of the 9th century to the mid-4th century BCE. By pushing back this timeline another 200 years, the newly excavated Yejiashan makes the Zeng one of the longest-lived regional powers in the whole Zhou period.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAt least two generations of state rulers were buried in the Zeng Marquis cemetery, and one of their tombs is by far the largest found in the archaeology of the Western Zhou.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nLike other ruling classes in the Zhou period, the most powerful occupants at Yejiashan cemetery arranged their tombs on the high visibility mound, surrounded by middlesized and smaller burials. The locations of all the important burials were carefully arranged, starting in the north with the tomb of a possible ruler, and then going south in orderly pairs of later generations. Each one has a possible ruler and his consort(s) side by side.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nSTATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nBeichen Chen\n\n**_The range of goods indicates that this community was widely connected with other Bronze Age regions._**\n\n### YONG CITY & THE QIN STATE CEMETERY\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nFollowing clues from ancient texts, archaeologists had begun to look for the legendary Yong City in the 1930s, and at Fengxiang county in Shaanxi province a site covering 51 sq km (19.5 square miles) was discovered. Within the city is a palace district, workshops, a marketplace and residential areas for commoners. One of the large foundations found near the modern village of Majiazhuang comprises a rectangular wall with one big building located in the middle and two small ones to the south. Its layout is exactly the same as the descriptions from ancient texts of an ancestral shrine. Hundreds of sacrificial pits in the middle yard confirm this assumption. Yong City was so important in the history of the Qin that important ceremonies, like the coronation of Emperor Qinshihuang, were held there even after the capital had been moved elsewhere. Fourteen huge mausoleums were located in the southwest suburb of the city. Triple trenches respectively encircle the mausoleum area, each mausoleum (some include two or more tombs) and some of the tombs. Qin tombs have always been noted for their scale. Of these, Qin Duke Tomb No. 1 is the largest ever to have been excavated in China. It is 300 m (328 yards) long and 24 m (26 yards) deep, with 186 human sacrifices, and is believed to be the tomb of Duke Jing.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nYong City was the capital city of Qin for nearly 300 years from 677 to 383 BCE, which made it the most enduring capital city in the history of Qin state.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe layout of the cemetery could be regarded as a transitional form between the previous 'centralized royal cemetery system' and the subsequent 'independent mausoleum system'. In the Shang and Western Zhou periods, multiple generations of state rulers were buried in the same cemetery, with their own tomb but without an independent mausoleum. However, from the period of Yong City, the independent mausoleum system became much more popular, and later on, in the Qin and Han dynasties, it was fully established.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nCITIES\n\nARCHITECTURE\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nDUKE JING OF QIN\n\nreigned 576\u2013537 BCE\n\nThe 18th ruler of Qin state.\n\nEMPEROR QINSHIHUANG\n\nreigned 246\u2013221 BCE\n\nas king of Qin state\n\nreigned 221\u2013210 BCE\n\nas emperor of Qin dynasty\n\nHe conquered all the other warring states, united China, established the Qin dynasty and became the first emperor in Chinese history.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSai Ma\n\n**_This model shows the tomb of Duke Jing, one of the most significant finds at the ancient Qin capital city._**\n\n### MAJIAYUAN\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nSince the crackdown on tomb robbery at Majiayuan in northwest China in 2006, archaeological work has uncovered more than 20 tombs of the late Warring States period from the total of 59 tombs and sacrificial pits in the cemetery. The structure of the tombs is extremely unusual compared with those found previously in this area. Most of the tombs have a vertical earth-pit with a skew chamber and a stepped tomb tunnel. The steps are usually made up of odd numbers like 9, 7, 5, 3 and 1, which probably represents a social hierarchy. Animal sacrifices were popular, as indicated by the large number of horse, cattle and sheep skulls and forelegs found. Objects unearthed from the tombs show multicultural factors. The tiger-shaped and bighorn sheep-shaped ornaments on the chariots may be influenced by the Eurasian steppe culture, while the widespread use of gold and silver, the appearance of glass and gold bead-welding technology could be related to western cultures, such as the Mediterranean, Pazyryk and Scythian. The cocoon-shaped _Hu_ -jar is a typical Qin cultural object and the spade-shaped foot _Li_ -tripod derives from the indigenous Xirong culture. It is obvious that the Xirong culture played a very important role in cultural exchange between the west and the east.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nMajiayuan is a recently excavated cemetery in Gansu province in northwest China, which is believed to be the cemetery of the so-called Xirong (barbarians in the west) tribe.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAmong the remarkable discoveries at Majiayuan cemetery are the luxurious chariots in the tomb tunnel and the chamber. Most of the chariots are decorated with lacquer and glittering bronze, silver and gold ornaments, usually of hollow geometric and animal motifs. These decorations are found on nearly all parts of the chariots. They are so over-decorated that scholars believe they were meant only for ritual and funeral purposes rather than everyday use.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nDECORATION & SOCIAL MEANINGS\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\nHORSES & CHARIOTS\n\nLONG-DISTANCE TRADE\n\nNOMADS\n\nNORTHERN BRONZE COMPLEX\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSai Ma\n\n**_The artefacts discovered in the tombs at Majiayuan are suggestive of ancient Eurasian steppe cultures and indicate that the owner of the tomb might be one of the so-called 'barbarians in the west'._**\n\n## BRONZES & RITUALS\n\n### BRONZES & RITUALS\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**bronze** an alloy of copper and either arsenic or tin, which produces a material that is harder and more durable than copper alone. Since ores of tin and copper rarely occur together, bronze working stimulated trade between different cultures in the ancient world. Bronze can be cast into various shapes or hammered into flat sheets from ingots.\n\n**Central Plains** region on the lower reaches of the Yellow river, roughly corresponding to modern-day Henan, the southern part of Hebei, the southern part of Shanxi and the western part of Shandong provinces, regarded as the centre of the world in the Chinese Bronze Age.\n\n**inlay** a decorative technique involving the insertion of contrasting materials into depressions in the surface of the object being decorated. Inlays are frequently made with precious materials such as gold, silver, turquoise or jade.\n\n**ocarina** a type of vessel wind instrument, often ovoid and made of ceramic material or bone, with a mouthpiece and holes to vary the pitch of the note.\n\n**radiocarbon dating** method of establishing the age of an organic object by measuring the level of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon, remaining in it. Living organisms exchange carbon with the biosphere, and so have the same level of radiocarbon as the surrounding environment. Once they are dead this exchange ceases, and the radiocarbon starts to decay. Since radiocarbon decays at a known rate, comparing the amount of radiocarbon in an object with the amount in the environment will give an estimate of when the organism died.\n\n**ritual** a sequence of activities usually carried out in a religious context, which may involve specific words or actions, and is usually characterized by invariance, fixed forms and deference to tradition. In the Chinese Bronze Age central control of ritual was a means of maintaining the power and status of elites. The use of bronze vessels of different types characterized ritual in Bronze Age China. The evolution of such ritual vessels over time offers one method of interpreting and periodizing social and cultural changes.\n\n**smelting** the process of extracting a metal from its ore. In ancient times this was achieved by heating the ore with charcoal in a kiln or furnace, the charcoal producing carbon monoxide which acts as a reducing agent, liberating the pure metal from its compound.\n\n**sumptuary laws** set of regulations that control the consumption of especially luxury goods, usually by stipulating that particular foods, clothes or materials could only be used by higher social classes. Sumptuary laws were instituted as a means of establishing and maintaining social hierarchies.\n\n**welding** the process of joining two pieces of metal together by heating and softening them. Forge welding was the earliest method, which involves heating the metal and then hammering the separate pieces together. A bead weld uses a filler material between the pieces of metal to create a joint, called a bead.\n\n### COPPER PRODUCTION\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe Chinese Bronze Age is represented by an enormous number of copper-based objects from a wide range of locations. Although the delicate decoration of these objects has often been remarked upon, little is known about where and how the metal used to manufacture them was produced. The production of metals was a serious issue, since the power of a state was largely legitimated by its control of metal-production centres. Jurisdiction over these metal sources could cause warfare between neighbouring areas, the moving of capital cities and ultimately the prosperity or decline of regional powers. Copper production involves a series of complex activities from mining to smelting, consumes considerable amounts of resources and requires a high level of labour organization. Ancient copper-production sites were usually located close to copper ore deposits and to woodland, in order to avoid the necessity of transporting heavy ores and bulky charcoal. However, it is notable that the Central Plains, the location for the most conspicuous Bronze Age cultures, has no significant copper ore deposits. This implies that the large-scale metal-casting workshops of these cultures had to import metals from other areas. Archaeologists have struggled to identify the copper sources of the cultures for the Central Plains, but still have no conclusive answer.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nCopper production was vital for the ancient Chinese dynasties. The cultures in the Central Plains, although the largest consumers of copper, had no resources to produce it, and the location of their copper source is still a matter for debate.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe most impressive ancient copper-production site was found in Tonglushan, in Hubei province. The excavations revealed mining galleries, ore-dressing facilities, smelting furnaces and huge heaps of slag. Significant disturbance from later mining activities means evidence is hard to date accurately. Radiocarbon dating suggests that the site might have been used in the late Shang dynasty while most of the remains were dated to the Western and Eastern Zhou periods.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\nLONG-DISTANCE TRADE\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_The middle Yangtze river valley has been suggested as a source of the copper ore used in the Central Plains._**\n\n### PIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe most impressive technological innovation in the Chinese Bronze Age was piece-mould casting, which was employed in the large-scale production of bronze ritual vessels, musical instruments, decorative items and other artefacts. This technology characterized three Chinese Bronze Age cultures, the Erlitou, Shang and Zhou, and distinguished them from their northern and northwestern neighbours. In contrast to lost wax casting, a typical mould for piece-mould casting consists of at least three sections assembled around a core. The sectioning enables the mould to copy complex shapes and intricate patterns from a model. The gap between mould and core was filled with liquid bronze to form the artefact. The invention of piece-mould casting in the Central Plains was brought about by the institutional use of ritual vessels in China, which in itself is a cultural practice rarely identified outside of China. This industry culminated in the late Shang to early Western Zhou period when vessels became huge in size and were finely decorated with high-relief patterns. The collapse of centralized power in the late Western Zhou period had a significant impact on this industry. During the subsequent Eastern Zhou period, the sophisticated way of dividing mould sections was simplified and standardized, and cast-on, welding and inlay techniques were widely adopted.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nPiece-mould casting is the hallmark of the Chinese Bronze Age cultures of the Central Plains, and played a significant role in their ritual systems.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe Erlitou culture (1900\u20131500 BCE) has been identified as the first culture to widely adopt piece-mould casting, but some sporadic finds such as the copper 'bell' discovered at the site of Taosi (2600\u20132000 BCE) suggest that the roots of this technology might be in the late Neolithic period. Other issues concerning this technology such as pattern-making techniques and its relationship with lost wax casting attract abundant ongoing academic exchanges.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\nLOST WAX CASTING\n\nRITUAL REFORM & RESTRUCTURING\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_This owl-shaped wine jar shows the capacity of piece-mould casting to reproduce intricate shapes and patterns._**\n\n### LOST WAX CASTING\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nLost wax casting is likely the most controversial technology of the Chinese Bronze Age. Whereas some scholars claim that this technology was fully mastered by Chinese people by the Eastern Zhou period, others hold the opposite opinion, that lost wax casting never appeared in China during the Bronze Age. In contrast to piece-mould casting, lost wax casting is generally accepted as an exotic technology which was mainly used in China to manufacture elaborate decorations on bronze artefacts, rather than for figurines as in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Early evidence of this technology, though still debatable, has mostly been identified in the Chu area and its adjacent regions in central-south China during the middle Eastern Zhou period. In brief, lost wax casting technology involves creating a model of wax and covering it with clay material to form a mould around it. The mould is fired, and the molten wax drains, leaving a gap inside the mould that will be filled by the metal. Compared to the piece-mould method, lost wax casting is much more versatile in shaping any form and enables the craftsman to create considerably more sophisticated decorations on bronze artefacts, such as, for example, the renowned _Zun_ vessel and _Pan_ plate from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng state.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nLost wax casting was employed as a supplementary technology to piece-mould casting during the Chinese Bronze Age to create intricate decorations on bronze artefacts.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe famous _Zun_ vessel and _Pan_ plate found in the tomb of Marquis Yi were decorated with a rim of intricate hollowed intertwined patterns, which was immediately recognized as evidence of lost wax casting. Nevertheless, in 2006 a group of scholars published a paper suggesting that these decorations were manufactured by means of piece-mould casting, and questioned the existence of the lost wax casting technique during the entire Chinese Bronze Age.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_A clay mould used for lost-wax casting, together with the resulting decorated bronze mirror._**\n\n### RITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nBronze ritual vessels were among the most valuable products of the Shang and Western Zhou periods. Normally in the form of alcohol or food containers, ritual vessels appeared at ceremonial banquets (sometimes called sacrifices), in which they were possibly used as offerings to honour gods or family ancestors. Ritual bronzes were usually decorated with attractive motifs, and some of them were inscribed with the name of the vessel's owner and descriptions of their honours or achievements. These early writings were likely intended for gods or ancestors to read, or considering the vessel owners themselves as future ancestors, for their descendants to treasure. Originating in the Central Plains, the use of bronze ritual vessels was widespread in the metropolitan areas of the north Yellow river valley and the south Yangtze river region, covering most of the area between the two river regions and beyond. However, in some remote regions (such as Sanxingdui in Sichuan), although similar bronze vessels were involved in ritual assemblage, it is believed that the local people understood and used such ritual vessels in ways different to those of the central areas, especially the ritual performances that related to ancestor worship.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe use and significance of bronze ritual vessels related to the beliefs of ancient Chinese people and their attitude towards life and the afterlife.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nIn field archaeology, ritual bronzes are normally found in tombs and hoards. The former constitutes the majority, where bronzes were intentionally buried so that the tomb occupant would be able to continue to offer ceremonial banquets to his or her ancestors in the afterlife. Hoards, on the other hand, are more uncommon. The largest finds in Zhouyuan, for instance, are believed to have been hastily buried when the Zhou people had to flee their homeland in the face of invaders from the west.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSANXINGDUI\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nDECORATION & SOCIAL MEANINGS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nBeichen Chen\n\n**_These bronze ritual vessels date from the Western Zhou period, the later vessel on the right shows the change to a more simple geometric palette._**\n\n### THE SHAN FAMILY\n\nOn 19 January 2003, 27 bronze vessels were discovered at Yangjiacun village, Shaanxi province. They belonged to a noble family of the Western Zhou, the Shan. Inscriptions on the vessels describe a family tree from 3,000 years ago. The owner of the bronzes was Lai, who was an administrator of natural resources for King Xuan (827\u2013782 BCE), a position that he had inherited from his ancestors. Lai also served with distinction in the war against the Xianyun, a minority tribe. He was put in charge of the captives from the war. Most of the bronzes were made after this appointment. Lai proudly listed the ranks and achievements of his ancestors on the bronzes.\n\nThe Shan family reared eight generations in the Western Zhou period, and served 12 Zhou kings. The first ancestor named was Shan Gong (Duke Shan). He assisted King Wen and King Wu in their conquest of the Shang dynasty. The second ancestor was Gong Shu, who assisted King Cheng (r. 1042\u20131021 BCE) to govern the regional states. The third ancestor, Xin Shi Zhong, was a minister during King Kang's reign (r. 1020\u2013996 BCE). The fourth ancestor, Hui Zhong Li Fu, participated in the war to suppress the Chu state rebels. The fifth ancestor, Ling Bo, was an officer of King Gong and King Yi (r. 922\u2013892 BCE). The sixth generation was Lai's grandfather, who served King Xiao and King Yi (r. 891\u2013878 BCE). Lai's father, Gong Shu, was the seventh generation, an officer of King Li (r. 877\u2013828 BCE). All these ancestors were virtuous men and were trusted and rewarded by the Zhou kings, serving the Zhou dynasty as officers for generations.\n\nThe Shan family was not the most powerful family of the Western Zhou dynasty, and no record of this family appears in historical texts. However, it is rare to find such a long, clear and complete family lineage inscribed on bronzes. Lai would never have anticipated that the real glory of the Shan family would come 3,000 years after he buried his bronzes.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\n**The Lai Pan inscriptions record the achievements of eight generations of the Shan family who served 12 kings during the Western Zhou dynasty.**\n\n### MATCHING SETS OF RITUAL VESSELS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe institution of matching sets of food vessels ( _ding_ and _gui_ ) was one of the most representative developments introduced by the Ritual Reform around the mid-9th century BCE. Replacing the previous alcohol-focused vessels in various sizes and decorative styles, identical food vessels \u2013 for example, odd numbers of _ding_ tripods in decreasing sizes and even numbers of _gui_ vessels of the same size \u2013 formed the core equipment for sacrifices. The conversion from offering alcohol to offering food changed specific tasks in ritual performance, requiring different procedures executed by different specialists. The presence of vessels of the same shape and decoration shifted the audience's attention from individual vessels to the complete sets, which were of symbolic significance in the vessel owners' social status. According to the 'sumptuary rules' in the texts, the number of matching vessels in a set was supposed to be strictly correlated with the rank of their owner. For example, a king was entitled to nine _ding_ and eight _gui_ , while a minister could have five _ding_ and four _gui_. Field archaeology, however, has rarely established such a one-to-one correlation. It is possible that the greater quantity sets or larger-sized vessels were made for elites with higher social status or a closer relationship to the Zhou authority, but their specific ranks are hard to discern from their vessel sets.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nA move away from individual artefacts to matched sets of bronze vessels characterized the ritual practice of the mid-9th century.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe idea of matching sets was probably inspired by early Western Zhou practice in Shaanxi province. One of the earliest examples, the tomb of a consort of the ruler of Yu state, revealed a simplified set of five _ding_ and four _gui_ , in which the vessels were identical in shape but barely decorated.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\nRITUAL REFORM & RESTRUCTURING\n\nSTATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nBeichen Chen\n\n**_Identical_ ding _vessels in decreasing size form one of the most important components of the matching set._**\n\n### MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nArchaeological discoveries of well-preserved instruments have demonstrated a very long tradition of music making in China. Tonally precise flutes, stone chimes ( _qing_ ), ovoid clay ocarinas ( _xun_ ) and drums had already made their appearance prior to the Bronze Age. During the Chinese Bronze Age, more musical instruments were invented and used. With the advent of bronze casting, the first small metal bells were cast in the first half of the second millennium BCE. Chimed sets of bronze bells in a larger size ( _nao_ ) started to be used by the late Shang elites (c. 1250\u20131050 BCE). During the Zhou dynasty, dual-toned bronze bells in sets became very significant and played an important role in rituals. Bronze bells, together with other musical instruments, provided the musical accompaniment to dances and singing in the ancestral cult. The bronze bells were suspended on wooden racks. Performers used mallets to hit the striking point for the A- or B-tone on the bells. Important evidence for the musical culture of the period was obtained from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, which contained numerous bronze bells. Uniquely, inscriptions recording the tones were cast on the bells, showing that each bell was designed to produce two tones. This discovery fundamentally changed our understanding of music during this period.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nMusic making has a venerable history in China, and the advent of bronze technology allowed more sophisticated chiming instruments to be created.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nOne of the most spectacular discoveries of musical instruments of the Bronze Age was from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng. This tomb, dating to the 5th century BCE, is located at Leigudun, near the city of Suizhou, Hubei province, in central China. Over one hundred musical instruments were unearthed from the tomb including sixty-five bronze bells, thirty-two chime stones, seven large zithers ( _se_ ), three mouth-organs ( _sheng_ ), two panpipes ( _paixiao_ ), two transverse flutes ( _di_ ) and three drums.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nMARQUIS YI OF ZENG\n\ndied c. 433 BCE\n\nRuler of the Zeng state, Warring States period.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nLi Zhang\n\n**_Bronze bells were significant musical instruments during the Bronze Age of China._**\n\n### DECORATION & SOCIAL MEANINGS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nVariations of animal-masks (known in Chinese as _taotie_ ), images of creatures (including both imaginary and realistic animals) and geometric motifs formed the repertoire of the ancient decorating system on Chinese bronzes. Despite time and regional differences, the principal ways of combining them were remarkably stable: the eye-based animal-mask (sometimes with winding horns and shrinking body) occupies the visual centre of the vessel, surrounded by one or more layers of subordinate patterns, such as dragons, birds and repeated geometric patterns. Before being overwhelmingly replaced in the 9th century BCE, such _taotie_ and animal images had been valued by the Shang and Western Zhou ruling class for over five centuries. They are normally interpreted in terms of animal\/ancestor worship, especially for religious or ceremonial occasions. Through them, ancient people believed they would have the power to communicate with their ancestors or gods. Hence, certain motifs were likely to be given symbolic meanings. For example, _taotie_ could represent 'power' or 'protection'; dragons could stand for 'death'; and cicadas could mean 'rebirth'. Although the original significance of these bronze decorations has been lost in history, the mystery of their meaning paradoxically renders the visual impact of this decoration more compelling for us.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe decorative schemes of Chinese bronzes reflected the belief systems of those who commissioned these vessels.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nLike inscriptions, in field archaeology decoration is another 'age indicator'. Based on traditional mould-casting techniques, the animal-mask developed from a plain and undecorated design to incorporate dense intricate patterns, until the 9th century BCE when it was suddenly replaced by bands of geometric patterns. From the 6th century onwards, new casting technologies such as 'pattern-block' and 'lost wax' allowed the adoption of more complicated designs of bronze decoration.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\nLOST WAX CASTING\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\nRITUAL REFORM & RESTRUCTURING\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nBeichen Chen\n\n**_As one of the most popular motifs on bronzes, animal masks had occupied the visual centre of bronze vessels for centuries._**\n\n### RITUAL REFORM & RESTRUCTURING\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe late Western Zhou faced a series of crises. Some of these originated from within the state, as a consequence of the expanding bureaucracy and increasing conflict among the aristocrats for land and economic resources. This necessitated a top-down reform of ritual, located at the centre of aristocratic life and involving the use of bronze vessels. Motifs and the decoration of ritual vessels changed from animal shapes and high-relief patterns to an abstract and geometric palette. Wine vessels such as jue almost disappeared from the bronze sets, and the more important role subsequently played by food vessels is evident. Several new types were added to the list of prestigious ritual vessels, but these were simple and humble forms derived from ceramic kitchen vessels. The rationale behind this reform was clear: to reduce the complexity of ritual vessels, to introduce more everyday life elements and to restrict the elites through the imposition of strict sumptuary rules. What remains puzzling is why this reform is not mentioned in any written accounts of the history of the Western Zhou, except for some inscriptions mentioning the court's ban on alcohol consumption. One explanation is that it may have been secondary to a much more comprehensive reorganization of elite society, so that it penetrated so deeply into society that even historians with sharp eyes failed to notice it.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThrough a series of reforms in bronze production that played a central role in the state, the late Western Zhou court managed to re-establish ritual and social order.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe prominent Chinese bronze specialist, Jessica Rawson, was the first scholar to spot these changes and 'study them as indicators of a major historical phenomenon'. Focusing on the amazing discovery of the famous Zhuangbai No.1 bronze hoard, in which bronzes with distinctive period styles were preserved, she and other scholars were able to reconstruct a complete chronology of these bronzes, with the help of inscriptions, and pin down when these dramatic changes occurred.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nZHOUYUAN\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\nTHE SHAN FAMILY\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nJESSICA RAWSON\n\n1943\u2013\n\nProminent art historian, curator and academic administrator, specializing in Chinese art and archaeology.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Intricately decorated wine vessels were replaced by artefacts based on simple food containers._**\n\n## SCIENCE & SOCIETY\n\n### SCIENCE & SOCIETY\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**Bian-stone therapy** the treatment of especially neck and back pain by the application of sharpened or heated stones to the affected areas. This is one of the oldest medical therapies in human history, and involves scraping and sometimes piercing the skin, a precursor to acupuncture. It is based on the idea that there is a flow of energy through the body via channels called meridians, and that this flow can become blocked or unbalanced, leading to pain and illness.\n\n**commodity coinage** a system of currency that uses objects that are perceived to have value in themselves, as opposed to representative currency which stands as a token for something else. Historically, commodity money has included such items as salt, peppercorns, gold, tobacco, cowrie shells, stones and beads.\n\n**concubine** a woman who has a long-term sexual relationship with a man without being married to him. In Bronze Age China concubines were usually inferior in status to wives, but their children could become heirs, and a chief function of concubinage was to increase the probability that a man would produce a male heir.\n\n**conjunction** in astronomy, the apparent close approach of two celestial bodies as viewed from the earth. Such conjunctions could be interpreted in the ancient world as having significance for human affairs on earth, and their recording in documents offers a means of dating particular events.\n\n**firing** method of strengthening, hardening and fixing the shape of a ceramic object by the application of high temperatures.\n\n**horn cupping** the application of hollow cups to the skin as a form of medical therapy. The first cups were made of horn, although cups could also be made of bamboo or ceramics. The cup was heated to warm the air inside it and then placed on the skin. As the air cooled after it was placed on the body, the change in air pressure inside the cup would draw the skin and the subcutaneous muscle beneath it upwards.\n\n**kaolin** a soft, earthy, usually white clay mineral, the main component in the manufacture of porcelain. It takes its name from a village called Kao-Ling near the city of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province, which has been a centre of porcelain manufacture for over 2,000 years.\n\n**proto-porcelain** an early form of fired and glazed ceramic ware, but without the translucency of true porcelain. Proto-porcelain has been found dating from the Shang dynasty, around 1600 BCE.\n\n**silk** textile created from the fibrous cocoons of the mulberry silkworm, _Bombyx mori_. Silk fabrics were developed in China perhaps as early as 5000 BCE, and it became one of the most important trade goods in the ancient world. Silk was a luxury fabric that was originally reserved for the Chinese elites.\n\n### FOOD\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nFive grains \u2013 foxtail millet, common millet, rice, wheat and soya bean \u2013 were the staple food of the people living in Bronze Age China. Foxtail millet and common millet were dominant in the north, while rice played a central role in the diet of people in the south. Cooking in the Bronze Age mainly involved the boiling and steaming of grains, though evidence of noodles and cakes has also been found in the marginal areas. While different types of livestock and poultry were raised, pork, along with beef, mutton and chicken, were the main sources of meat in this period. Roasting, boiling and steaming were employed in cooking meat. The Bronze Age Chinese also consumed various vegetables, such as garlic, chives and celery. Wild resources acquired through hunting, gathering and fishing offered a supplementary source of nutrition. The emergence of various types of food triggered the development of specialized cooking, serving and drinking vessels, both ceramic and bronze. Additionally, chopsticks, spoons, knives and forks also appeared as essential utensils in this period. Icehouses identified at several palace sites might have been used to preserve food for the elites; the common people, however, would store their food in cellars or big jars.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAgriculture and animal raising supplied food for people in the Bronze Age, and the prototype of Chinese cuisine had already emerged.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAncient foodstuffs are occasionally preserved in some specific context, thus expanding our knowledge of the Bronze Age diet. In a Warring States tomb in Shaanxi province, the remains of soup were found in a bronze tripod, and a bone in it was identified to be from a dog. Another interesting discovery came from the Subeixi cemetery in Xinjiang, where noodles and cakes were discovered and the analysis revealed that they were made of common millet.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nALCOHOL\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_The ancient Chinese diet was based on the cultivation of grains, though they also raised animals for meat._**\n\n### ALCOHOL\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe Bronze Age witnessed the development of alcohol-making in China. Alcohol in this period can be divided into two main categories, _li_ and _jiu_. _Li_ was brewed using sprouted grain, while _jiu_ used distiller's yeast. The two types of alcohol were consumed at different occasions and events. _Li_ was mainly used in sacrificial practices as an offering to the gods and ancestors, while _jiu_ was for daily drinking. The most significant evidence for the highly developed alcohol-making system in this period is the complex assemblages of bronze wine containers and drinking vessels. In Shang elite tombs, the most important burial goods were sets of these wine vessels, such as _zun_ , _jue_ and _gu_ , which outnumbered even the food containers. The main ingredient for alcohol was grain, specifically rice, and the highly developed drinking culture of this period probably indicates a large agricultural surplus (although it might also be the case that production was monopolized by the minority elites). Excessive drinking could be blamed for the collapse of the early kingdoms. The last kings of the Xia and Shang dynasties were both accused of constructing massive wine pools, large enough to sail boats on. The early kings of the Zhou dynasty restricted the consumption of alcohol, though it was still widely used in ritual ceremonies and feasts.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAlcohol-making was highly developed in the Bronze Age of China and played a significant role in both ritual practice and the daily life of ancient people.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nIn an early Western Zhou cemetery excavated in 2013 at the site of Shigushan in Shaanxi province, a bronze _you_ vessel still containing alcohol was found in an elite tomb. This is currently the earliest material evidence of alcohol in China. Many other bronze wine vessels, such as _zun_ , _hu_ , _zhi_ and _jin_ were found in the same tomb and might have been used as a set with the _you_ for wine drinking.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_Alcohol was of central importance to ritual, as evidenced by the variety of drinking vessels found in elite tombs._**\n\n### POTTERY PRODUCTION\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nAlthough ceramics were no longer the major focus of craft production in the Bronze Age, pottery manufacture did not cease. The production of ceramics and bronzes were closely tied together, and continuous innovations were beneficial to both industries. With their mastery of high-temperature firing, the Late Neolithic people in China had realized that some minerals could be turned into a fluid glaze to coat the surface of ceramics. This glazing technology was more widely used in the Bronze Age to produce so-called proto-porcelain to satisfy the elites' new obsession with objects with lustrous surfaces. The Bronze Age people in south and southeast China were excellent makers of this proto-porcelain. With their great technological achievements in bronze casting, the Shang were capable of transforming ordinary clay into stunning pieces. They found out that a certain type of kaolin is perfect for producing white ceramics on which beautiful decorations could be displayed. In Lady Fu Hao's tomb, a huge number of white ceramics were placed, along with numerous bronze items and stone and jade objects. These ceramics and some of the stone artefacts mimicked the forms of the bronzes. For the Bronze Age elites, the forms and shapes of different kinds of objects could be freely and fluidly transformed from one to another.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nClosely related to bronze casting, pottery production continued to flourish during the Bronze Age.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nA breakthrough in research on proto-porcelain came about with the discovery of the Yue state elite tombs in Hongshan, Jiangsu province. Each tomb contains hundreds, if not thousands of objects, the majority of which are proto-porcelain in the same shapes as bronze ritual vessels and musical instruments. Some of the earliest glass was also discovered. With its shining surfaces and beautiful decoration, this glazed proto-porcelain represents the highest level of ceramic production of this period.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nERLITOU\n\nYINXU\n\nPIECE-MOULD CASTING\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nFU HAO\n\ndied c. 1200 BCE\n\nPosthumous title of Mu Xin, the consort of King Wu Ding, famous for being a female military general. Her tomb was excavated in 1976, generating the largest number of burial objects of any Bronze Age elite tomb.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Ancient Chinese ceramics ranged from simple domestic vessels to lustrous glazed proto-porcelain._**\n\n### TEXTILES & CLOTHING\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nBecause of their organic nature, ancient textiles rarely survive. Most of the examples we have come from sealed tomb contexts and from textile impressions identified from corrosion imprints on bronze objects in tombs. The most significant aspect of the Chinese textile industry was the invention of silk, the use of which reached its artistic zenith in the Eastern Zhou period (771\u2013221 BCE). Tomb 1 of the Chu state at Mashan (4th century BCE) in Hubei province yielded the best-known archaeological finds of silk textiles. The deceased was fully dressed before being wrapped in 13 layers of beautifully decorated garments and coverlets. Their sheer textures and brilliant colours provide material evidence about the development of Chinese textile manufacture \u2013 silk-weaving structures and pattern techniques, birds and dragons as major decorative motifs, and embroidered ornamentation. The most common articles of clothing were robes of different lengths. Disparity in clothing materials was a mark of social status, as silk was exclusive to the elites, in contrast to the hemp clothing worn by others. During the Zhou dynasty, systems of colour and design on outfits were gradually developed to distinguish different social classes, and this was adopted by later dynasties.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe complicated procedures, vast resources and immense labour and time required to produce textiles, especially silk, made them a fundamental element of a privileged lifestyle in ancient China.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe unique Chu tomb structures contributed significantly to the miraculous preservation of silk textiles. In a typical Chu burial, wooden coffins were covered by layers of charcoal and thick white clay, and buried deep underground. These painstaking efforts to insulate the tomb guaranteed a stable temperature and humidity in the chambers, and effectively sealed the tomb from penetration by oxygen and bacteria, thus aiding the preservation of organic materials.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nDECORATION & SOCIAL MEANINGS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_The ancient Chinese were skilled in the production of textiles, most especially silk, and their designs developed into a sophisticated indicator of social hierarchies._**\n\n### BIAN QUE\n\nBian Que was the medical officer of the legendary Emperor Huang, though his dates are a matter of dispute. The first doctor mentioned in historical texts, he was adept at surgery, gynaecology and paediatrics, but particularly at pulse taking and acupuncture. Bian Que emphasized the importance of communication with and observation of patients, as these were an efficient means of accurate diagnosis in an age without scientific equipment. It was said that he could judge the condition of a patient from his very first glance. He once paid a visit to Qi Huan Gong (Duke Huan of Qi state, died 643 BCE) and told him that he was slightly ill and should be treated quickly. Qi Huan Gong did not listen. Bian Que visited him every couple of days subsequently and warned him that his disease had gradually progressed from skin, to blood, to gastrointestinal tract. On his last visit, Bian Que said it was too late for Qi Huan Gong to be cured. Sure enough, Qi Huan Gong died shortly afterwards.\n\nAnother time Bian Que was on his way to the capital of Guo state when he heard that the prince of Guo had died suddenly. He asked about the prince's symptoms and suggested that it was just shock rather than death. The prince's attendants checked his body according to Bian Que's advice and found that the prince was still breathing and his body warm. Afterwards, they invited Bian Que to the palace to save the prince's life.\n\nHowever, according to historical records, Guo state was defunct hundreds of years before the reign of Qi Huan Gong, so Bian Que could not have attended both the prince of Guo and Duke Huan. A solution to this puzzle was suggested in 2013, when a batch of bamboo slips were discovered in a Han dynasty tomb in Sichuan province. Most of the slips were medical books, including one entitled _Medical Theory of Bi Xi_. Experts think that 'Bi Xi' was the ancient pronunciation of 'Bian Que'. Thus, these books might be the classics written by the 'Bian Que School' of the Eastern Zhou period. They had been using the title 'Bian Que' for several hundred years, and so the Bian Que who saved the life of the Guo prince might be a different person from the one who saw Qi Huan Gong in 643 BCE.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\n**One of the earliest recorded Chinese physicians, according to legend Bian Que was a gifted diagnostician and his skills ranged from acupuncture to surgery.**\n\n### COINAGE\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nMost transactions in the Early Bronze Age of China were performed using commodities as currency. The emergence of a true monetary system had to wait until the Eastern Zhou period. By then, the states of central-north China employed three main types of bronze coinage, which still bore the shape of primitive commodity currencies. They were the spade-shaped _Bu_ coin, the knife-shaped _Dao_ coin and rounded coins with a round or square hole in the middle. In south China, the coinage system was quite different, possibly indicating a different trajectory of cultural development. The area of ancient Chu, while also using _Bu_ coins, operated largely with _Yi Bi_ coins, which were usually perforated, shell-shaped and had pronounced inscriptions on the front surface. The shape might have been derived from the ancient tradition of using shells and shell-shaped bronze as currency. Precious metal coinage, such as the gold stamped plaque, also appeared during this period, though it played a relatively minor role compared to the bronze coinages. When the first emperor, Qin Shinghuandi, finally united the country in 221 BCE, he adopted the round coin called _Ban Liang_ as the currency of his empire. This became the prototype for almost all Chinese bronze coins in later periods.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe early metallic coinages of ancient China appeared first in the Eastern Zhou period, imitating the forms of common daily artefacts and commodities.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nDespite the large quantities of Eastern Zhou coins that have been excavated, the widespread exchange of these coins between different areas makes it difficult to determine in which state they were produced. Hence the identification of coin-casting foundries becomes very significant. The casting foundries in Luoyang, the Eastern Zhou capital city, for instance, revealed a special type of mould for casting socketed spade-shaped Bu coins, suggesting that this coinage might have been issued by the Eastern Zhou kings.\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nEMPEROR QINSHIHUANG\n\n260\u2013210 BCE\n\nThe first emperor of China.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_The earliest Chinese coins retained the shapes of recognizable objects such as knives and rings._**\n\n### ASTRONOMY & THE CALENDAR\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe Shang calendar was derived from observations of the movements of the sun and moon, which were noted and charted. Solar and lunar eclipses were also observed, and oracle bone divination records include predictions of such events, which were believed to signify good or bad fortune. The most famous example of this was related to the Zhou's conquest of the Shang in the 11th century BCE. The observation of the conjunction of the first visible planets was taken as a propitious sign for the Zhou's forthcoming military campaign. The recording of this astronomical phenomenon gave important evidence for the modern reconstruction of the chronology of the Bronze Age. The Shang calendar was made up of 60-day cycles. Each day had a name that combined two different number sequences, called the 10 heavenly stems and the 12 earthly branches. A month followed the movement of the moon, which is either 29 or 30 days, and a year consisted of 12 lunar months, with an extra month added every three years to bring the calendar back into step with the solar year. The calendar was closely associated with the reigning power. On an oracle bone inscription, a year was commonly recorded as, for example, 'the king's fifth year'. This tradition was followed by chroniclers throughout the royal dynasties. The lunar calendar is still used in China for agricultural work and traditional festivals.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAstronomy and the calendar were closely linked to significant aspects of Bronze Age societies, in particular warfare, ritual offerings and sacrifices, and agriculture.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe popularity and prominence of astronomy in the Bronze Age has been attested by archaeological discoveries in the 20th century. One example is the decoration on a lacquer box lid from an elite tomb, that of Marquis Yi of Zeng in Suixian, Hubei province. A depiction of the Northern Dipper is surrounded by the inscribed names of the complete sequence of the 28 stellar lodges.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\nDIVINATION & SHAMANISM\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nMARQUIS YI OF ZENG\n\ndied c. 433 BCE\n\nRuler of the Zeng state, Warring States period.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_The ancient Chinese related astronomical observations to earthly events such as harvests and battles._**\n\n### MARRIAGE, GENDER & CHILDREN\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nOur earliest information about marriage in ancient China comes from inscriptions on oracle bones, although the documentation is limited to social elites. From the way that women are named in these inscriptions, it has been deduced that monogamy was the custom during the early Shang period, while polygamy became the dominant practice during the later Shang. During the middle Western Zhou period monogamy again became the norm, though it was customary for a husband to have several concubines. Marriage between couples with the same family name was forbidden from this period. Marriages began to be recorded through inscriptions on bronze vessels, which show that feudal princes used marriage to cement alliances. However, the core function of marriage in the Bronze Age was to continue the family line via sons, and the increased number of consorts after the early Shang period was probably to ensure the birth of male offspring. Women appear in documents with their surnames only after marriage, and before marriage they are rarely recorded and never named, implying that their roles in society were largely bound up with their husbands. The consorts of the Shang kings frequently participated in ritual ceremonies and warfare, but in the Zhou period women withdrew from any kind of social activity and were largely constrained by ethical codes.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nMarriage, gender and children were closely associated in the Chinese Bronze Age. A woman gained her social role via marriage while the core function of marriage was to produce male offspring to continue the family line.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAlthough most women had quite restricted roles in Zhou society, exceptions did exist. When a high-born woman married a powerful lord, she could be influential. For instance, the sister of King Xiang of Zhou married Duke Xiang of Song state, and became the stepmother and stepgrandmother of two later dukes. She seized power in the Song court for long periods, and even plotted the murder of her stepgrandson, Duke Zhao, to allow another stepgrandson and her secret lover, _Bao_ , to become Duke Wen.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_The inscription on this bronze vessel from the Western Zhou period records the alliance made between the states of Deng and Ying, which was solemnized by the marriage for which the vessel formed part of the dowry._**\n\n### MEDICINE\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe ancient medicine of China, which stemmed from prehistoric witchcraft, developed significantly during the Bronze Age. By the Shang period, more than 30 diseases relating to different parts of the body had been recorded in the oracle bone inscriptions. Healers could not only diagnose various illnesses based on different symptoms, they could also predict the trends of illnesses by monitoring the disease's progress and employ corresponding therapeutic methods. Besides herbal medicines, Bian-stone therapy (the precursor of acupuncture) and simple surgery had also been developed. Nonetheless, most healing activities in Shang society still had a quasi-magical nature, and the first medical professionals did not emerge until the late Western Zhou period. The Eastern Zhou period witnessed a major development in diagnostic techniques and methods of treatment. Various herbs began to be used in compounds to enhance their healing effects. Other methods such as massage, baths, acupuncture and horn cupping were also employed in medical treatment. More fundamentally, a theoretical system interweaving practical medical knowledge and traditional philosophies was established, which laid the foundation for traditional Chinese medicine as we know it today. Famous doctors of the period, such as Bian Que, were recorded in historical documents along with classical prescriptions.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nTraditional Chinese medicine was initiated in the Shang and Western Zhou periods, and was fully developed in the Eastern Zhou period.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe earliest confirmed evidence of medical instruments and herbal medicine was found at the site of Taixi in Gaocheng, Hebei province. Among the burial goods of a tomb dated to the Shang period, a Bian-stone was found in a lacquered box. In the remains of a house on the same site, various seeds were found in different ceramic jars, some of which might have been used to treat diarrhoea.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nBIAN QUE\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_Traditional Chinese herbal medicine as we know it has its roots in the Bronze Age's philosophical systems._**\n\n## AFTERLIFE & BELIEFS\n\n### AFTERLIFE & BELIEFS\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**chamber** in a Chinese Bronze Age tomb, an outer coffin of timber or sometimes brick, within which might be an inner coffin of timber.\n\n**demographics** the quantifiable statistics of a given population, such as age range, gender balance, ethnicity, social status, etc.\n\n**Neolithic** the Neolithic period in China dates from c. 8500\u20133000 BCE, though these dates remain a matter of debate. The earliest Neolithic culture so far discovered in China is the Nanzhuangtou in present-day Hebei province. The Neolithic period saw the beginnings of crop cultivation and animal domestication and the use of polished stone tools.\n\n**jade** this is the name for two types of metamorphic rock, nephrite and jadeite; nephrite was the stone used for various decorative purposes in Bronze Age China. Nephrite can be a creamy-white or various shades of green, and nephrite deposits in China were mined as early as 6000 BCE.\n\n**pyromancy** the art of divination using fire.\n\n**ritual** a sequence of activities usually carried out in a religious context, which may involve specific words or actions, and is usually characterized by invariance, fixed forms and deference to tradition. In the Chinese Bronze Age central control of ritual was a means of maintaining the power and status of elites. The use of bronze vessels of different types characterized ritual in Bronze Age China. The evolution of such ritual vessels over time offers one method of interpreting and periodizing social and cultural changes.\n\n**shaft-pit tomb** type of tomb consisting of an underground pit dug into the earth, with a lining of timber or sometimes brick forming a burial chamber. Access would be via steps or a ramp, and a mound would be raised above the chamber.\n\n**shaman** person believed to be able to access and influence the spirit world, often by means of rituals or the attainment of trancelike states. Shamans are often credited with powers of healing or divination.\n\n**sumptuary laws** set of regulations that control the consumption of especially luxury goods, usually by stipulating that particular foods, or clothes or materials could only be used by higher social classes. Sumptuary laws were instituted as a means of establishing and maintaining social hierarchies.\n\n**vassal state** a state that is subordinate to another. During the Zhou dynasty there were a number of states that recognized the authority of the Zhou court and supplied military assistance when requested. Some were little more than fortified towns, but others controlled significant amounts of territory and enjoyed a degree of autonomy.\n\n**waist-pit** a sacrificial pit beneath a coffin in which sacrificial animals were usually found.\n\n### TOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe tombs of late Shang elites discovered at Yinxu (Anyang) can be classified into three categories: Shang royal burials, high-status tombs and medium or low-rank elite tombs in cemeteries distributed throughout the capital. During the 1930s, the excavations at the Xibeigang cemetery uncovered a total of 14 tombs with ramps, alongside over 800 sacrificial pits. As the number of ramps associated with a tomb is viewed as an indicator of status, the eight 4-ramp burials in the cemetery \u2013 which are unparalleled in terms of their size, the number of human or animal sacrifices interred inside the chambers and the number of sacrificial pits associated with them \u2013 are usually attributed to the Shang kings. Unfortunately, most of these royal tombs have been extensively looted over the years. The tomb of Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding, was the first undisturbed high-rank burial to be discovered at Anyang. Her tomb included more than 1,600 kg (1.75 tons) of bronzes, over 700 pieces of jade and other prestige goods made of exotic materials, such as ivory cups and marble and turquoise objects. Lower-rank elite tombs were also found in various parts of Yinxu. Spatially, the cemeteries are often subdivided into different clusters that show consistency in terms of burial goods and emblems on bronzes, and these were possibly occupied by different lineages.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nElite tombs of the late Shang offer valuable evidence regarding mortuary systems, elite craft industries and, in particular, social organization.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nLate Shang elite tombs have also been widely found outside of Anyang. These tombs usually exhibit certain indigenous funeral practices, while including Yinxu-style mortuary goods. The occupants of these tombs might have been regional allies or agents of the Shang state taking charge of resources or tribute transportation. In other words, the late Shang appeared to rely on religion or ideology to maintain their large political and trade network.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nHUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\nTHE USE OF JADE\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nFU HAO\n\ndied c. 1200 BCE\n\nThe consort of King Wu Ding, famous for being a military general. Her tomb was excavated in 1976, generating the largest number of burial objects of any Bronze Age elite tomb.\n\nWU DING\n\nreigned c. 1250\u20131192 BCE\n\nA king of the Shang dynasty\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_The tomb of Lady Fu Hao yielded a magnificent array of prestige objects from the Bronze Age. The image at right shows a reconstruction of the tomb._**\n\n### STATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nTo control its vast territory, the Western Zhou established significant numbers of vassal states in the Central Plains and parts of the Yangtze valley. The majority of these states were ruled by Zhou kin branches. Since the 1980s, archaeological work has identified at least ten Zhou vassal states (e.g. Jin and Yan) and about a dozen non-Zhou vassal states through the excavation of their cemeteries. The discoveries are significant for an understanding of two aspects of Western Zhou politics. First, they help clarify how social rank was structured. In each cemetery, lords and their lineages were usually buried in a cluster separate from the commoners; the layout of the Jin Marquis cemetery is the best example of this. These elite members were buried with sets of bronze vessels, musical instruments, chariots, jade ornaments, etc., to demonstrate their power over sacrificial ritual and administration. Second, aspects of the materials used illustrate the organization of the political network. For instance, bronzes from the state cemeteries show a high degree of similarity to their counterparts from the capital area, the Wei river valley. However, daily-used ceramics in regional centres are different from the assemblages in the capital area. Thus the sovereignty of the Zhou over their vassal states was achieved primarily through transporting elite culture from the core to the peripheries.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe state cemeteries of the Western Zhou provide tangible evidence of how the dynasty laid the foundations of the early Chinese empire.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nNon-Zhou vassal states fall into three categories: the political alliances of the Zhou court in the capital area (evidenced by the Yu state cemetery in Baoji, Shaanxi); descendants of the Shang family (e.g. the Changzikou tomb in Luyi, Henan); and societies living on the periphery of the Western Zhou polity (e.g. the Peng state cemetery in Jiangxiang, Shanxi). The cemeteries of these states usually present distinctive practices such as waist-pits, human or animal sacrifices, and the burial of exotic bronzes, elements that are often absent from cemeteries belonging to Zhou elites.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nCOMMONER BURIALS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_Funerary objects help explain how elite culture was transmitted from the dynastic centre to the vassal regions._**\n\n### COMMONER BURIALS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nDuring the Shang and Zhou periods commoners were buried in cemeteries at many locations in the capital area or in urban centres, together with lower-rank elites. These burials are usually shaft-pit tombs and include simple pottery assemblages, but without wooden chambers, jade amulets or bronze objects such as weapons. Commoner cemeteries of the Bronze Age were usually subdivided into several sectors, and in each sector tombs were concentrated and separated from other burial plots. The orientation, body position and type of burial goods in each sector show a relatively high similarity, indicating that the burials belonged to the same lineage or kin-group. It is notable that, throughout the entire Bronze Age, infants were buried separately in residential areas or near houses, and not with adults in the cemeteries. These burials usually do not include any burial goods or even wooden coffins. Furthermore, unlike the high elites, there is no solid evidence that the practice of joint burials of husbands and wives in separate pits was adopted among commoners until the very end of the Bronze Age. This indicates that the layout and arrangement of commoner cemeteries may have focused more on reinforcing the preoccupation with lineage relationships instead of the smaller individual family units.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAlthough commoner burials do not yield any remarkable burial goods, they can give important clues in understanding the horizontal social structure (i.e., kinship relations) as well as the vertical hierarchy or social ranking.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe best evidence for documenting the demographics of commoner social groups comes from the Shangma cemetery, which includes more than 1,387 tombs and was the first cemetery to be excavated almost completely. According to Lothar von Falkenhausen's work, during the middle Spring- and-Autumn period the community had a population of between 380 and 750 people \u2013 who may have belonged to the same kin-based lineage including both elites or leaders and common members.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nSUIZHOU ZENG MARQUIS CEMETERY\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nSTATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_Commoners were buried with simple objects, but had the same desire to enter the afterlife properly equipped._**\n\n### DIVINATION & SHAMANISM\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nDivination was one important means by which the late Shang kings established their rule and authority. The practice of pyromantic divination using scapulars began as early as the Neolithic period in East Asia, but the systematic preparation of bones or turtle shells by trimming, polishing, drilling and chiselling a series of oval and circular holes to obtain a regular shape of cracks was a significant invention of the late Shang, probably associated with King Wu Ding. The elaboration of divination processes may have provided a means of monopolizing and restricting the knowledge of ritual to the Shang kings and a small group of diviners. A heated metal stick was used to burn holes and make cracks on prepared bones, and the king was then responsible for interpreting the meaning of the cracks, which would address a wide range of questions from the result of a military campaign to agricultural harvests. Thereafter the question addressed, the prognostication and in some cases the verification of the result would be carved into the bone or turtle shell. Divination was a defining feature of Shang politics, and the Shang kings are often referred to as 'shamans' in scholarly work, because they were able to communicate with the ancestral dead with the help of animals and a series of religious ceremonies.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nDuring the Late Shang period, divination became a state-sponsored ritual controlled exclusively by the kings and a small group of diviners who were trained in literacy and the relevant ritual procedures.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe logic behind the divination process in the late Shang period lies in the fact the Shang kings were the only channels of communication with the ancestral spirits. These could intercede with the highest deity, Ti, to provide favourable consequences like a fruitful harvest or assistance in warfare, once they had received the proper number of sacrificial offerings provided by the correct type of rituals on the right day.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nWU DING\n\nreigned c. 1250\u20131192 BCE\n\nA king of the Shang dynasty\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_Patterned ox bones and turtle shells were the most commonly used objects for pyromantic divination._**\n\n### QIN MU GONG\n\nComposed nearly 2,500 years ago, the poem opposite describes the tragic deaths of three noble brothers of Qin state, who were human sacrifices of their monarch, Qin Mu Gong (Duke Mu of Qin state, r. 659\u2013621 BCE). The territory of Qin had been very close to the Western Zhou capital, but this territory was no longer prosperous after the chaotic decline of the Western Zhou dynasty. Qin and its people, surrounded by the Xirong and other ethnic minorities, were considered barbarians by the states to the east of the Yellow river after the eastern migration of the Zhou royal court.\n\nHowever, Qin Mu Gong conquered several minority tribes during his reign and expanded his western territory, which made Qin state the overlord of the west land. As a man with charisma, Qin Mu Gong treasured talented people. He brought back Bailixi, a slave of Chu, at a cost of five pieces of sheepskin, and made him prime minister. Despite opposition from his ministers, he trusted General Meng Ming Shi, who had twice been defeated by the Jin. With his support, Meng eventually defeated the powerful Jin army.\n\nAnother dramatic story showed his character: a thoroughbred horse escaped from his paddock and was killed and eaten by some peasants. The protector of the horses arrested 300 peasants and sentenced them to death. Hearing of this event, Qin Mu Gong said: 'Men of high character should cherish lives more than property. I have heard that eating good horsemeat without drinking is harmful to the health, so reward the peasants with good wine and free them.' Later, when fighting against the Jin, Qin Mu Gong was injured and trapped in an impasse. The 300 peasants he had spared risked their lives to rescue him.\n\nAfter Qin Mu Gong's death, over 170 people were buried alive with him. Many of them were noble ministers. This event destroyed the elite of Qin state, and led to continuous instability throughout the Spring-and-Autumn period.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\nThey flit about, the yellow birds,\n\nAnd rest upon the jujubes find.\n\nWho buried were in duke Muh's grave,\n\nAlive to awful death consigned?\n\n'Mong brothers three, who met that fate,\n\nTwas sad the first, Yen-seih, to see.\n\nHe stood alone; a hundred men\n\nCould show no other such as he.\n\nWhen to the yawning grave he came,\n\nTerror unnerved and shook his frame.\n\nWhy thus destroy our noblest men,\n\nTo thee we cry, O azure heaven!\n\nTo save Yen-seih from death, we would\n\nA hundred lives have freely given.\n\nJames Legge, _The Book of Ancient Poetry_ ,\n\nLondon: Tr\u00fcbner & Co., 1876, (see here)\n\n**Duke Mu of Qin (Qin Mu Gong) was a charismatic leader who succeeded in expanding the territory of the Qin state. This depiction shows him wearing a later style of dress.**\n\n### HUMAN & ANIMAL SACRIFICES\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nHuman and animal sacrifices were a significant component of various rituals throughout the Chinese Bronze Age. Sacrificial pits containing human and animal remains were already widespread during the Longshan period, known as the transitional period before the Bronze Age. The practice of sacrificing humans and animals as offerings in a wide range of contexts \u2013 including burials, storage pits and palace foundations \u2013 witnessed a dramatic increase during the Erlitou and early Shang periods, and reached its peak in the late Shang period. The most illustrative example is the Xibeigang royal cemetery, where at least 30,000 human victims were sacrificed in rituals. After the founding of the Western Zhou dynasty, the practice of human sacrificial offerings was gradually abandoned, but the role of animal sacrifices in rituals remained important. For instance, animal sacrifices served as a critical element of funeral rituals performed at the cemeteries of the Jin marquises at Tianma-Qucun and Yangshe, Shaanxi, both during and after the time of burial. In addition, rows of sacrificial pits containing the remains of sheep\/goats, cattle and humans have been found in the central courtyard of the Majiazhuang palace in Fengxiang, Shaanxi, which is considered to be an ancestral temple of the rulers of the Qin state during the Eastern Zhou.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nSacrificial ritual served as the foundation for elite authority and played a crucial role in the construction of political leadership.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAs sacrificial rituals were performed on a grand scale, the late Shang diviners developed a wide vocabulary for the ways of killing sacrifices, like beheading, splitting into halves, chopping, burning and burying, as demonstrated by this inscription: 'Making-cracks on _jimao day_ , Que divined: \"In performing the exorcism for Lady Hao to Father Yi, [we] cleave a sheep and a pig and pledge ten penned sheep.\"' ( _Heji_ 271f)\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nSTATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_These skeletal remains from an early Shang period sacrificial pit at Zhengzhou indicate the scale of the practice of human and animal sacrifices._**\n\n### THE USE OF JADE\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe tradition of using jade (nephrite) for ornaments and its associated craft technology has deep historical roots that can be traced back to the late Neolithic cultures. Starting from the Early Bronze Age, this practice became more ritualized and integrated into the state-controlled ceremonies. At the Erlitou site, for instance, jade knives, axes, _ge_ halberds, _gui_ ceremonial blades and turquoise inlaid objects were buried in richly equipped tombs with bronze ritual vessels and ornaments. This indicates that jade objects were highly valued in mortuary ceremonies and represented the concept that, in the afterlife, the dead would require everything they had used when alive. The large amount of jade found in the tomb of Lady Fu Hao offers an important profile of the use of this material in the Shang period: not only has the craftsmanship achieved a high level, but the repertoire has also expanded to include objects like bi discs, rings, bracelets and animal figurines that had not been found in previous elite tombs. Jade was no less significant in the Western Zhou period. The Zhou elites also developed new tastes, preferring geometric and interweaving patterns of motifs; using jade for face-covers to protect the spirits of their ancestors; and combining beads, tubes and plaques to make complex pendant ornaments as a token of grave occupants' high status.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nJade was not only an exotic commodity related to long-distance trade but also an indispensable part of the regalia in various rituals and ceremonies during the Bronze Age.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAntique-style jade objects were frequently found in elite tombs. For instance, the jade collection in the Fu Hao tomb includes items from Neolithic cultures such as the Shijiahe, Liangzhu and Hongshan. Similarly, jade objects dating back to the late Shang or even the Neolithic were found in the marquis tombs of the Jin, Guo and Rui states, indicating that jade objects would have been passed down as heirlooms in elite families.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nSTATE CEMETERIES OF THE ZHOU\n\nLONG-DISTANCE TRADE\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nFU HAO\n\ndied c. 1200 BCE\n\nThe consort of King Wu Ding, famous for being a military general. Her tomb was excavated in 1976, generating the largest number of burial objects of any Bronze Age elite tomb.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_Jade was used to create complex decorative objects, some of which were kept by families for many generations._**\n\n## WRITING & PHILOSOPHY\n\n### WRITING & PHILOSOPHY\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**Agriculturalism** an agrarian social and political philosophy based on a form of utopian communalism. The Agriculturalists believed that human beings were in essence farmers, that the ideal ruler worked in the fields alongside his subjects and that society should be based on an egalitarian self-sufficiency. Agriculturalism was suppressed by the Qin dynasty and few of its texts are extant.\n\n**epistemology** the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge \u2013 what knowledge is, how it can be acquired and what its relation is to concepts such as truth and belief.\n\n**ethics** the branch of philosophy concerned with identifying, justifying and systematizing codes of right and wrong behaviour.\n\n**glyphs** in writing, a mark (for example a letter or a symbol) that has meaning in some system of language, such that in association with other glyphs it can express ideas or concepts.\n\n**Mohism** school of philosophy that developed around the time of Confucianism, which was characterized by a rather austere and utilitarian view of human life, with an emphasis on order and parsimony and a rejection of music and art. Mohists were scientifically minded and technologically skilled, which allowed them to hold significant social and political power, but their ethical positions were largely absorbed by Confucianism, and their political influence waned after China was unified.\n\n**Naturalism** school of philosophy that explained the universe in terms of the complementary concepts of yin (dark, cold, female, negative) and yang (light, warm, male, positive) and the Five Elements (earth, fire, water, wood, metal). Zou Yan (305\u2013240 BCE) is considered to have been the founder of this school, whose teachings were absorbed by Taoism.\n\n**paleography** the study of ancient and historical writing in terms of its development, the processes used to create it and its deciphering and dating.\n\n**proto-porcelain** an early form of fired and glazed ceramic ware, but without the translucency of true porcelain. Proto-porcelain has been found dating from the Shang dynasty, around 1600 BCE.\n\n**Warring States period** period following on from the Spring-and-Autumn period, 475 BCE to 221 BCE, roughly corresponding to the second part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. As the Zhou weakened, various smaller states struggled for supremacy, and various alliances and wars took place, culminating in the victory of Qin state and the unification of China under Emperor Qinshihuang in 221 BCE.\n\n### ORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe significance of inscribed oracle bones was first established in 1899 by Wang Yirong, who recognized that the marks on the bones resembled Chinese characters. The oracle bones examined by Wang were connected with the Yinxu site of the late Shang dynasty. Although these form the bulk of the earliest preserved Chinese written corpus, the script cannot be the actual first writing, since the maturity of the script and its capacity to record complex ideas indicates that the writing system itself is much older. Oracle bones were mainly used for royal divinations. Hollows carved into one side of the bone or shell were scorched by the diviner to cause a pattern of cracks on the other side, from which the oracle would be read in response to the king's question. The inscription, mainly for royal display, was carved after the ritual was complete. Although covering a wide range of social, political, military and economic topics, the inscriptions cannot be relied upon as historically accurate since they were primarily used for ritual purposes. Oracle bones were not exclusive to the Shang kings, since inscribed divination bones have also been associated with Shang non-royals, contemporary neighbours from Zhengzhou in the south and Daxinzhuang in the east, as well as with Zhou people in the Wei river valley both before and after their conquest of the Shang.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAlthough the use of bone divination may date back to the Neolithic period (c. 6500\u20135500 BCE), the practice of carving inscriptions on bones or shells seems to have begun in the reign of Wu Ding, c. 1200 BCE.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nMost of the bone and shell inscriptions known to us bear only a few characters. A lengthier text concerns the pregnancy of Lady Fu Hao, the wife of Wu Ding. It reads: 'Crack- making on the day _jiashen_ , Que divines: \"Will Lady Hao's childbearing be lucky?\" The king predicts: \"If the child is born on a _ding_ day, it will be lucky; if on a _geng_ day, greatly favourable.\" Three weeks and one day later, on the day _jiayin_ , the child was born. Not lucky. It was a girl.' _Jiayin_ was neither a _ding_ nor a _geng_ day, so the king was right.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nYINXU\n\nBRONZE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nWANG YIRONG\n\n1845\u20131900\n\nPresident of the Imperial University, was an expert on traditional studies of metal and stone inscriptions, and the first to collect oracle bones.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nPeng Peng\n\n**_Wang Yirong recognized that the marks on bone fragments resembled inscriptions found on stone and metal._**\n\n### BRONZE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe earliest bronze inscriptions are preserved on Shang vessels dating to the reign of Wu Ding around 1200 BCE. Most of these consist of an emblem or an ancestor dedication, and have fluent curving strokes consistent with contemporary brush writing. During the last two Shang reigns (c. 11th century BCE), a few examples begin to include narrative texts in which the vessel-maker informs his deceased ancestor of a reward he has received. These could be viewed as prototypes of similar Western Zhou bronze texts. Compared with the late Shang examples, Western Zhou inscriptions are remarkably lengthy and varied in content, covering a vast range of topics such as official appointments, military merits, marriages and economic activities. However, because of the religious context of ancestor worship, bronze texts have to be used cautiously as historical evidence. In the Eastern Zhou period, following the decline of the Zhou royal house and great social transformations, certain terms (e.g., _tianzi_ , 'Son of Heaven', a reference to the Zhou king) and formulaic expressions (e.g., the dedicatory statements to ancestors) gradually vanished. Artistically derived script reached its peak with the creation of the _niao chong shu_ ('bird\u2013worm script'), and inscriptions moved from the interior to the exterior of the vessel, implying a transfer of audience from the deceased to the living.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nBronze inscriptions on ritual bronzes (mostly vessels and bells) relate chiefly to ancestor worship.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAs the archaeologist Lothar von Falkenhausen suggests, the bulk of Western Zhou long inscriptions comprise three parts: an initial 'announcement of merit', a central 'statement of dedication' and a final 'statement of purpose'. Of these, the dedicatory statement to the deceased ancestor, _X zuo bao zun yi_ ('X made this precious, venerable sacrificial vessel'), is the most significant part. Clearly the main concern of the Western Zhou inscriptions was ancestor worship.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nYINXU\n\nRITUAL VESSELS & THEIR DISTRIBUTION\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nSCRIBES & HISTORY\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nPeng Peng\n\n**_As an example of ancestor worship, this lid of a bronze_ you _vessel (top) bears the inscription: 'Earl of Hei made this precious, venerable sacrificial vessel'._**\n\n### BAMBOO SLIPS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nBamboo slips were one of the most important media for literacy in Bronze Age China. They were made from narrow processed strips of bamboo, and each slip carried a column of text that was written using brush and ink. The texts were usually written on only one side of the slips, although examples with text on both sides of the slip have been discovered. Different numbers of slips would be bound together with thread in a sequence, the number of slips depending on the length of the text. From the evidence of oracle bone inscriptions from the late Shang, bamboo slips might have already been in use by then. However, because bamboo is perishable, no bamboo slips from the late Shang period have yet been discovered. The earliest surviving bamboo slips from archaeological contexts date to the Warring States period. Ancient bamboo slips from tombs were discovered as early as the Jin dynasty. In around 280 CE, tons of bamboo slips were looted from the tomb of a Wei state king, who had lived in the Warring States period. The majority of bamboo slips dating to the Warring States period have been excavated from Chu tombs in today's Hubei, Hunan and southern Henan province. The particular soil conditions there allow the preservation of bamboo slips over millennia. Over the past several decades, a number of sensational discoveries of bamboo slips have been made.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nTexts written on bamboo slips provide significant evidence for the palaeography, history and literature of early China, and their discovery has enriched our knowledge of Bronze Age China tremendously.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nOne of the most spectacular finds of bamboo slips was unearthed at Guodian, Hubei province, in 1993. This Chu tomb dates to the middle phase of the Warring States period, and the Guodian bamboo slips would have been made before the time of the burial. There were 804 strips in total, 726 of which carried inscriptions. More than 13,000 characters were written on them, all of which were in the Chu writing style.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nCONFUCIANISM & EARLY TAOISM\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nLi Zhang\n\n**_Texts written on bamboo slips were one of the most significant forms of documentation in early China._**\n\n### CONFUCIUS\n\nA descendant of the Shang nobility, Confucius was born in 551 BCE. He was a junior officer of Lu state, and became prime minister of Lu in 499. In 497 Confucius was forced to leave the state because of conflict with the Lu elites. He began a grand tour of many states with his students. Confucius elaborated his political ideas to the monarchs of more than ten states. None accepted his ideas, and those who did not agree with him had him expelled or even tried to murder him. Several times Confucius was on the point of starvation and was derided as a 'homeless cur'. He returned to Lu state after a 14-year absence, and spent the rest of his life editing the texts known as the Five Classics, until his death in 479 BCE.\n\nConfucius advocated 'Ren' (benevolence) and 'Li' (courtesy). He called for monarchs to cherish their people and to follow moral standards in their dealings with their families and with their states. He believed that one's character should come from education and the social environment. He broke the aristocratic monopoly on education and established schools in the countryside. It is said that Confucius had taught over 3,000 students, the best of whom gained high achievements in politics, the military, literature, music and even commerce.\n\nConfucianism was just one of the various schools of thought in Confucius' lifetime. Only 400 years after his death, Emperor Wu (r. 141\u201387 BCE) of the Han dynasty elevated Confucianism as the state orthodoxy. Confucius was ennobled as a duke, and schools were set up by Emperor Wu all over the country. Emperor Taizong (r. 626\u201349 CE) of the Tang dynasty made him a king and the mentor of all. The Confucian classics became required reading for intellectuals and the most important source for the imperial examinations. Confucius' thoughts on politics, philosophy and education have had a profound influence in China and around the world ever since. His offspring lived in Qufu, the ancient capital of Lu state, and inherited the title 'Duke Yansheng' (bloodline of the sage) for generations, receiving great respect and courtesy from the Chinese emperors.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\n**One of the most influential figures in Chinese Bronze Age history, Confucius' legacy endures to this day. His teachings on politics, philosophy and education continue to inspire students all around the world.**\n\n### STONE & POTTERY INSCRIPTIONS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nUnlike the ancient Near East, inscriptions on pottery or stones were comparatively rare during most of the Chinese Bronze Age. Unearthed stone inscriptions of this period are mainly from the Yinxu site, and date to the late Shang period. These were incised or written on stone or jade artefacts, most of which were discovered in Shang elite tombs. They are identical to those carved on oracle bones of the same period. The majority of the inscriptions specify the names of Shang elites; some record activities associated with the stone or jade artefact that the inscriptions were incised on. The longest of them consists of 12 characters, which were carved on a stone _gui_ vessel. Incidental marks on pottery from the Bronze Age have been found, the majority of which consist of single glyphs. The most significant discovery of pottery inscriptions beyond the Central Plains was from the site at Wucheng in Zhangshu, Jiangxi, located to the south of the Xiao river. Wucheng was a regional centre through the Shang period. More than 120 pottery inscriptions have been unearthed here so far. Pottery inscriptions are more frequently found from the Warring States period, most of which are stamped on ceramics. The majority are names of people, places or dates of pottery manufacture, the discoveries of which shed light on the politics and economy of that period.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nStone inscriptions were relatively rare during the Bronze Age of China, all the discoveries of which were on small stone artefacts.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nProduction of metal and proto-porcelain was significant at Wucheng. Inscriptions have been found incised on ceramics and on stone moulds for metal production. Although most of these consist of single or double glyphs, one comprises 12 characters. These were carved around the shoulder of a proto-porcelain jar. Many of the Wucheng inscriptions resemble those found at Yinxu.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nLi Zhang\n\n**_There was a surge of inscriptions on pottery during the Warring States period, which provides invaluable information for us to probe into the history of that period._**\n\n### CONFUCIANISM & EARLY TAOISM\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe generic term 'Confucianism' refers to the philosophy of three thinkers, Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi. All emphasized the cultivation of virtues such as benevolence ( _ren_ ) in order to achieve the 'Way', or a better life, but they suggested slightly different approaches. For Confucius, the 'Way' relies on benevolence, which has to be cultivated through the practice of various 'rituals'. Mencius conceptualized benevolence and righteousness as 'beginnings' that human beings inherently possess. What we need to do is to 'fill them out' in order to become fully virtuous. Xunzi seems to be more in line with Confucius in the sense that benevolence has to be achieved by correcting one's unethical predispositions and by following rituals. Since humans have 'standards of righteousness' they can form a society, which is a key component in Xunzi's idea of the 'Way'. The concept of the 'Way' is also a cornerstone in the canon of early Taoism, but it was conceptualized from a dramatically different perspective. According to Laozi, the traditional founder of Taoism, the 'Way' is somewhere in our mind, and has little to do with practical ethics. To follow the 'Way' is to remain constant and avoid chasing ever-shifting desires. Zhuangzi, another thinker linked to Taoism, suggested the 'Way' is the cultivation of complete harmony with the natural world, but is not related to specific virtues.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe philosophical trends of Confucianism and Taoism not only help in understanding their contemporary material culture but also provide a key to the polities of the following Han period.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nBecause of their epistemological differences regarding the 'Way', these thinkers hold different political stances. According to Confucius and Xunzi, governors should vigorously try to align themselves through rituals. But for the Taoists, governors should limit their political or economic impact upon the people. Like the operations of nature, governors should simply 'reduce the size of the state and liberate the population' and be minimally involved in administrative affairs.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nBAMBOO SLIPS\n\nCONFUCIUS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nCONFUCIUS\n\nc. 551\u2013479 BCE\n\nTeacher and philosopher.\n\nMENCIUS\n\nc. 390-305 BCE\n\nConfucian philosopher.\n\nXUNZI\n\nc. 312\u2013230 BCE\n\nConfucian philosopher.\n\nLAOZI\n\nc. 5th or 4th century BCE\n\nFounder of Taoism.\n\nZHUANGZI\n\nc. 365 BCE, and lived until after 300 BCE\n\nTaoist philosopher.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_Laozi (top), Confucius (right) and Mencius (bottom), three key ancient philosophers._**\n\n### WARRING STATE PHILOSOPHIES\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nKnown as the era of the 'hundred schools of thought and philosophy', the Warring States period witnessed a flowering of intellectual and cultural scholarship, and the emergence of major schools of Chinese philosophical thought: Confucianism, Mohism, Taoism and Legalism. There were also other branches of philosophy, such as Agriculturalism and Naturalism, which later faded away. The intellectual and cultural development of this period was not a coincidence, but a continuation of developments in language, literature and political thought and practice that stretched back hundreds of years. In the context of a turbulent period of conflict, kings of different states competed with each other to gain dominance, and advice from intellectuals was keenly sought after. Hence, in order to gain patronage from their kings, political and moral issues became of the utmost concern to philosophers as they sought to give advice on state affairs. For instance, one key aspect of Legalism teaching is the use of law by rulers in government. Shang Yang, a key figure of the Legalism school, persuaded the king of Qin state to adopt certain legal practices. A series of reforms were instituted, which laid the foundation for the ultimate victory of the Qin Empire over all the other states.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nMajor Chinese philosophies were formed during the Warring States period, and some of these schools of thought have had a long-lasting impact on Chinese culture.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nMost of the philosophical writings of the period do not survive and some of the texts we have today were compiled over many centuries. However, archaeological discoveries have yielded works that had been lost in the intervening two thousand years. In 1993, 804 bamboo slips were found in a Chu tomb at Guodian, Hubei province, dating to the middle of the Warring States period. Of the 16 pieces of writing identified, 13 were completely unknown to modern scholars.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nBAMBOO SLIPS\n\nCONFUCIANISM & EARLY TAOISM\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nSHANG YANG\n\n4th century BCE\n\nPolitician, credited as the founder of Legalism and author of _The Book of Lord Shang_.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_Inscribed bamboo slips found in tombs reveal philosophical writings that were long lost._**\n\n### SCRIBES & HISTORY\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nWhen the diviners at Yinxu made predictions and inscribed characters on to oracle bones, they were producing historical records; and by participating in divination, they were at the very centre of the Shang political domain. The powers of writing and the scribal tradition were strengthened during the Zhou period when bronze vessels became the principal bearer of written records (a tradition the Shang never adopted except for the occasional casting of their clan symbols). This practice boomed during the middle Western Zhou when the texts became much longer. They record royal or aristocratic family lineages, with common endings such as 'for ten thousand years sons' sons and grandsons' grandsons eternally treasure and use in offering'. These formalized texts must have followed models written on perishable materials such as bamboo and kept in the state archive. The scribes who kept these archives had an increasingly central role. They were important assistants to the king for events such as appointment ceremonies, feasts or legal disputes. During the political turmoil of the Eastern Zhou, they took the moral high ground, judging the behaviour of the elites with sometimes fatal consequences. There was no lack of stories about brave scribes sacrificing themselves for truth, so that the seeds of a tradition of independent historical authenticity were germinated.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nNumerous historians, public and private, have produced texts throughout Chinese history. The origin of this long-lasting tradition can be traced back to the late Shang period and matured during the Eastern Zhou period.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe first Chinese chronicle is _Zuo Zhuan_ , believed to have been written by the Lu state scribe Qiuming Zuo at the end of the Spring-and-Autumn period. However, modern scholars think that it was actually written later by various hands during the Warring States period. It follows the chronology of 12 dukes of Lu state, covering the years 722\u2013468 BCE, though major historical events from elsewhere are also recorded. Its succinct style led many scholars to expend tremendous efforts to elucidate it and offer their own interpretations.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\nBRONZE INSCRIPTIONS\n\nBAMBOO SLIPS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nQIUMING ZUO\n\nfl.5th century BCE\n\nLu state scribe and author of the first Chinese chronicle, _Zuo Zhuan_.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Qiuming Zuo is credited as author of the first known Chinese chronicle, and thus a founder of the scribal tradition._**\n\n## WARFARE, TRANSPORTATION & TRADE\n\n### WARFARE, TRANSPORTATION & TRADE\n\n### GLOSSARY\n\n**bloomery** the earliest method of smelting iron. A bloomery is a pit or a chimney with an air supply in which iron ore is heated with charcoal. Carbon monoxide produced by the incomplete burning of the charcoal reacts with the ore in a reduction process that releases small particles of metal, which fall to the bottom of the furnace to produce a spongy mass called a bloom. This can then be worked with a hammer.\n\n**bronze** an alloy of copper and either arsenic or tin, which produces a material that is harder and more durable than copper alone. Since ores of tin and copper rarely occur together, bronze working stimulated trade between different cultures in the ancient world. Bronze can be cast into various shapes or hammered into flat sheets from ingots.\n\n**Eurasian steppe** an extensive area of grassland stretching from what is now Ukraine eastwards to Mongolia. During the Bronze Age the steppe supported the grazing herds of nomadic tribespeople, whose mobility was based on their domestication of the horse and probably sheep, goats and cattle. Their horsemanship was a great advantage in military terms, while the mobility of these tribes was significant in disseminating language and culture over a wide area. The Great Wall of China was built in part to protect the Central Plains from attack by the Eurasian nomads.\n\n**jade** this is the name for two types of metamorphic rock, nephrite and jadeite; nephrite was the stone used for various decorative purposes in Bronze Age China. Nephrite can be a creamy-white or various shades of green, and nephrite deposits in China were mined as early as 6000 BCE.\n\n**metallurgy** the science and technology of metals, including the methods of extracting metals from ores, the process of alloying, and the investigation of the composition and properties of different metals.\n\n**Silk Road** a series of trading routes that connected East and West from about 200 BCE, named after the trade in Chinese silk carried out along its length, although the route also transmitted other trade goods as well as being a conduit for social, political, philosophical and cultural interchange.\n\n**vassal state** a state that is subordinate to another. During the Zhou dynasty there were a number of states that recognized the authority of the Zhou court and supplied military assistance when requested. Some were little more than fortified towns, but others controlled significant amounts of territory and enjoyed a degree of autonomy.\n\n**Warring States period** period following on from the Spring-and-Autumn period, 475 BCE to 221 BCE, roughly corresponding to the second part of the Eastern Zhou dynasty. As the Zhou weakened, various smaller states struggled for supremacy, and various alliances and wars took place, culminating in the victory of Qin state and the unification of China under Emperor Qinshihuang in 221 BCE.\n\n### HORSES & CHARIOTS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nFrom 1200 BCE, horses and chariots quickly became established at Yinxu. The majority of about 60 Shang horse and chariot pits discovered so far have been uncovered here. Raising horses and using chariots in hunting and fighting were of central importance for the Shang elites, and thus it was essential that these accompanied them into the afterlife. A group usually consisting of two horses and one chariot decorated with beautiful bronze fittings would be placed at the entrance to a Shang elite tomb. Horses gained a high place in the Shang linguistic hierarchy. In oracle bone inscriptions, the quantification of horses used counting words, the same as those used for humans, while other animals did not merit such distinction. The Zhou, whose ancestors probably learned the skills of horse raising and chariot driving from the tribes in the north, used horses and chariots on an impressive scale. This followed the breaking of the monopoly over the horse and chariot begun by the Shang elites, as more and more aristocrats competed for power and social status. In one sacrificial pit belonging to the tomb of a Qi state ruler, probably Jing Gong, more than 600 horses were buried, a number that the Shang kings would not have even dreamed of. Jing Gong did not have a large number of chariots, however, possibly for fear of exceeding what was merited by his status.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nIntroduced from central Asia, chariots and domesticated horses followed a different trajectory in terms of the development of power and social hierarchy in Bronze Age China from that experienced elsewhere.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nA chariot pit containing six horses and one well-preserved chariot with magnificent decorations was discovered in the centre of Luoyang City in 2002. Archaeologists were thrilled to think they had found a chariot belonging to a Zhou king. If true, as was testified by numerous historical texts, then it was possibly a final attempt by the Zhou king to maintain his ever-declining economic and political power. Soon the rule breakers from the Qin and Chu states openly used this six-horse and one-chariot pit in elite tombs.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nYINXU\n\nMILITARY & WEAPONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nJING GONG\n\n547\u2013490 BCE\n\nRuler of Qi state and a major power player during the Spring-and-Autumn period.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Bronze harness pieces from a chariot team; chariots were elite status symbols from the Shang period onwards._**\n\n### MILITARY & WEAPONS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nWarfare and violence were commonplace in Bronze Age China, and military power was essential to the political authority of the Xia, Shang and Zhou dynasties. Military campaigns featured frequently in inscriptions on oracle bones and bronzes, and armies consisting of several thousand soldiers were levied against hostile polities. The Western Zhou maintained a regular force composed of 'Six Armies of the West' and 'Eight Armies of the East.' The most common type of military force was probably infantry. Chariots were introduced by the late Shang and gained significance in both rituals and warfare. The emergence of the bronze industry contributed fundamentally to weapon production. Specialized weapons emerged, such as _ge_ (dagger-axes), _mao_ (spears) and _jian_ (swords). Weapons were also made of jade, and most of these have been discovered in elite tombs. This symbolic representation of actual weapons in precious materials suggests the primacy of warfare and weapons. Military leadership and achievement were celebrated, as evidenced from the large numbers of weapons placed in tombs. One of the best-known military leaders was Fu Hao, a consort of King Wu Ding, who led numerous campaigns. Over 100 bronze and jade weapons were uncovered in her tomb, some of them bearing her personal name and featuring intricate designs.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nMilitary proficiency was crucial for the maintenance of power and authority. Armies and weapons progressively became more specialized during the Chinese Bronze Age.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nShang oracle bone inscriptions note that military expeditions were often led by kings and elites. Certain types of weapons, such as _yue_ (battle axes), have only been found in high-status tombs, together with large numbers of other weapons and ritual vessels. It is probable that they represented an individual's military power and served as symbols of leadership. Military ability, therefore, was closely linked to identity, status and power.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nTOMBS OF THE SHANG ELITES\n\nTHE USE OF JADE\n\nHORSES & CHARIOTS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHIES\n\nWU DING\n\nreigned c. 1250\u20131190 BCE\n\nKing of the Shang dynasty at Anyang.\n\nFU HAO\n\ndied c. 1200 BCE\n\nRoyal consort of Wu Ding and a military leader.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_The introduction of bronze technology permitted the mass manufacturing and development of bronze weapons._**\n\n### VOWS & PLEDGES\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nEven the seemingly consolidated Western Zhou regime faced constant attacks from neighbouring powers. Although he had large standing armies at his disposal, the Zhou king often had to seek help from the regional rulers. An agreement between the state and regional or private armies was established by a special event, often ending with the taking of a pledge by the participants. Bronze vessels were produced to mark such treaties. The Zhou king would not always protect the regional states, however; worse, he sometimes launched attacks on them. The regional rulers did not have the legal right to abandon their king. They could overthrow him but that would require the sanction of all the other regional rulers. Often all they could do was condemn the king as immoral, as manifested by bronze inscriptions. After the eastern migration of the Zhou court following their defeat by the Quanrong (nomads) and their allies, a period dominated by battles between the Zhou and the nomads and among the regional rulers, military alliances were essential for the consolidation of any state. At an extraordinary site in the Jin state capital, more than 5,000 fragments of jade and stone items were found in a number of pits, with characters written in red or black, alongside animal skeletons. These records dealt with the making of covenants, exchanging hostages and cursing enemies, indicating how frequently the Jin state was involved in conflicts.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nAt a time when warfare was the norm, vows and pledges were central activities in elite circles to expand and consolidate their territories.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nWhen the rebel forces gathered outside Yinxu, their leader, King Wu, made this pledge before his army: 'Ah! ye hereditary rulers of my friendly states; ye managers of affairs, the ministers of instruction, of war, and of public works; the many officers subordinate to them; the master of my bodyguards; the captains of thousands, and captains of hundreds; and ye, O men of Yong, Shu, Qiang, Mao, Wei, Lu, Peng and Pu; lift up your lances, join your shields, raise your spears; I have a speech to make.' (translated by James Legge from _The Book of Documents_ , Chapter 30, _Mu shi_ )\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nYINXU\n\nMILITARY & WEAPONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nKING WU\n\ndied c. 1040 BCE\n\nSon of King Wen, conquered the Shang with his joint army of different regional military groups.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nYijie Zhuang\n\n**_Many records of alliances have been found, indicating the importance of allies in this turbulent era._**\n\n### KING MU\n\nKing Mu is undoubtedly the most legendary monarch in Chinese history. Living c. 1000 BCE, he was said to have claimed the throne at the age of 50 and to have died 55 years later. Most scholars question the authenticity of the historical record, as to live for 105 years would be highly unlikely in that era.\n\nHowever, King Mu is legendary not for his age, but for his epic journeys. According to historical texts written between 800 and 200 BCE, King Mu led the imperial troops to fight against the western tribes and met the Queen Mother of the West (the goddess of eternal life in ancient Chinese myth). This meeting was recorded in a novel called _The Legend of King Mu_ , the earliest novel known in China. The discovery of the novel was itself dramatic. In 281 CE, an ancient tomb in Ji county, Henan province was robbed. The robbers found many bamboo slips. Some of them were used for lighting, while the rest were left outside the tomb and were subsequently brought back to the capital for collating and interpretation. _The Legend of King Mu_ was among those books identified, most of which dated to the Warring States period (475\u2013221 BCE).\n\nThe book says that King Mu had a carriage drawn by eight horses. After travelling 90,000 li (1 li = c. 500 metres) westwards, King Mu reached 'The Kingdom of the Queen Mother of the West' and held a banquet with her. This account has provoked the curiosity and imagination of readers on questions such as the route of King Mu's journey and where he met the Queen Mother of the West. Some scholars believe that he went across the southern edge of the Tarim basin, through the Pamirs, Iran and over the Caucasus mountains, and arrived in Eastern Europe. 'The Kingdom of the Queen Mother of the West' was located on the peak of Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus to the northwest of Teheran. Others think that he went to a country in central Asia from the southern Tianshan mountains. A third view holds that he set off from the Hexi corridor to Turpan, then went across the northern Tianshan mountains and reached the Yili valley.\n\n**_Chao Tang & Yijie Zhuang_**\n\n**A painting showing King Mu of Zhou being entertained by a woman playing the guzheng. This depiction is from a period later than the Bronze Age.**\n\n### THE ART OF WAR\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe most famous Chinese military treatise, _The Art of War_ , is attributed to Sun Zi (or Sun Tzu), an army commander of the Wu state. In the formation of a world made up of a number of rival states, the practice of war became more specialized. This period witnessed the compilation of many texts that considered a new subject \u2013 warfare and its relation to states. Drawing on contemporary combat examples, _The Art of War_ is divided into 13 themed chapters, covering the key stages of waging a war, from preparation to manoeuvring and attacking. Many chapters are devoted to the arts of strategy and manipulation. For instance, the final chapter, 'Using Spies', emphasizes the importance of knowing an enemy's circumstances. Five types of spies \u2013 'local', 'internal', 'converted', 'doomed' and 'surviving' \u2013 should be drawn upon to obtain accurate information. One of the most famous quotations from _The Art of War_ is 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles'. _The Art of War_ was highly regarded by later Chinese dynasties. From the 1960s, its wisdom was applied in business contexts by the Japanese, and its influence has reached beyond its original military scope.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\n_The Art of War_ is considered to be one of the classic treatises on military strategy and tactics.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nOver the centuries, many scholars have debated the content of _The Art of War_ and its attribution to Sun Zi. In 1972 inscribed bamboo slips with the text of _The Art of War_ were unearthed in a Western Han tomb at the foot of Yinque Mountain, Linyi, Shandong province, dating back to the 2nd century BCE. This archaeological discovery confirmed the authenticity of the 13-chapter treatise.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nBAMBOO SLIPS\n\nMILITARY & WEAPONS\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nSUN ZI\n\nc. mid 6th\u2013mid 5th century BCE\n\nGeneral of the Wu state and author of _The Art of War_.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nQin Cao\n\n**_Sun Zi, author of_ The Art of War**, **_one of the most influential military treatises of any period in human history._**\n\n### LONG-DISTANCE TRADE\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe capital cities of Bronze Age dynasties usually served as craft-production centres which made not only everyday goods for commoners such as ceramics and bone tools, but also prestige items such as bronzes and jade artefacts that were restricted to elites or royals. The natural resources required for manufacturing high-status objects, as well as certain necessities like salt and stone, were not immediately available in the heartland of these dynasties. For this reason the grand expansions of the Erlitou and early Shang cultures are often considered a strategy to establish outposts so as to monitor the transport of resources. The best-known example is Panlongcheng, an early Shang colony in present-day Huanpi, Hubei province, which safeguarded the transport to the north of copper and tin produced from ores in the Yangtze river valley. Even though the late Shang did not follow this strategy in setting up widespread outposts, long-distance exchange continued to thrive. For example, turtle shells and cowry shells excavated at Yinxu may have been transported there from the far south, for example the Yangtze river valley or the coastal area. Scientific analysis of jade objects from the Fu Hao tomb also confirmed that considerable numbers of them are Xinjiang nephrite, indicating the existence of a trade network that linked the late Shang core with communities in the west.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe manufacture of elite goods using exotic resources and the redistribution of these items was a cornerstone of the Bronze Age political system.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nLong before the Silk Road was opened up, long-distance exchange between East and West Asia had already taken place and introduced not only exotic goods but also significant technologies \u2013 horses, chariots and metallurgy (both bronze and bloomery iron) \u2013 into China through the Hexi corridor before or during the Bronze Age. These exchanges had transformative social impacts that eventually became the defining features of Bronze Age China.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nTHE USE OF JADE\n\nORACLE BONE INSCRIPTIONS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nWengcheong Lam\n\n**_The discovery of jade and bronze artefacts far from the sources of the raw materials required for their production is evidence of the huge distances over which goods were traded in ancient China._**\n\n### NOMADS\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe most common mode of subsistence for the Bronze Age nomads in northern China was hunter-gathering and pasturage, though they did settle occasionally and turn to agriculture. Scholars believe that the reason they moved southwards was the harsh environment caused by climatic changes and the consequent lack of food. In the oracle bone records, the Shang referred to the people around them as 'fang', some of these might have been nomads. A clearer picture of them emerges from the Western Zhou period. The invasion of the Western Zhou capital by the Quanrong (barbarians named _Quan_ ) was probably the most significant meeting of the two sides. The Zhou were defeated and forced to move their capital to the east. The Great Wall of China was also initiated, to some extent, by the necessity of repelling the nomads. Nevertheless, communication between the nomads and the agricultural communities extended beyond warfare. 'Wearing Hu dress and shooting from a horse' is an account of Wu Ling, the king of Zhao state during the Warring States period, who ordered his soldiers to learn from the nomads and to substitute short and close-fitting clothing for their flowing garments, in order to increase their combat effectiveness. The nomadic tribes also made great contributions to various areas of knowledge, such as the use of horses and chariots, metallurgy and the interchange of many kinds of plants and animals.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nOn the vast steppes in the north of China were communities that moved around foraging for food, some of which headed south and made contact with the settled agricultural communities.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nAs a result of their particular environment and way of life, material remains of nomads are quite different from those of agricultural settlements. They usually lived in caves or tents, so dwelling foundations are relatively few. Ceramics are not suitable for a mobile lifestyle, so these are rarely found. Bronze tools and weapons, and gold and silver jewellery are, however, comparatively common. Animal sacrifices have also been found in tombs and animal motifs are common decorations on artefacts.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nRIVERS & MONSOONS\n\nHORSES & CHARIOTS\n\nLONG-DISTANCE TRADE\n\nNORTHERN BRONZE COMPLEX\n\n#### 3-SECOND BIOGRAPHY\n\nWU LING\n\nReigned 325\u2013299 BCE\n\nKing of Zhao state during the Warring States period.\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSai Ma\n\n**_Animals were common subjects for gold and bronze artefacts made by the nomadic tribes of the Eurasian steppe._**\n\n### NORTHERN BRONZE COMPLEX\n\n### the 30-second history\n\nThe 'northern zone' is the term used to refer to the region north of the Great Wall, where the landscape is dominated by semi-arid grassland. Because of its location, this area was a connecting route as well as cultural intermediary between the Central Plains and the Eastern Eurasian Steppe from the Neolithic period. From the late Neolithic period, this area is known for the widespread use of metal objects. Because of the generally early date of these metal finds and the region's dynamic relationship with the surrounding cultures, it is believed that early metallurgy techniques were transmitted from the Eurasian Steppe to the Central Plains via this region. However, although many cultural features were shared between the peoples of the Central Plains and those living in this region, their strategies in metallurgy were in stark contrast. Communities in the northern zone used bronze to manufacture tools and personal decorations, whereas in the Central Plains bronze was mainly used for ritual items; in the Central Plains, casting employed sophisticated piece-moulding, in contrast with the simple bi-valve moulds used in the northern zone; arsenical copper and precious metals were seldom used in the Central Plains, but were widely used in the northern zone. These distinctions indicate that this area was culturally independent from the Central Plains during most of the Bronze Age.\n\n#### 3-SECOND SURVEY\n\nThe northern zone lies in a critical position between the Eurasian Steppe and the Central Plains of China, acting as mediator of cultural interaction between these two regions. Metallurgy was probably introduced to the Central Plains from this region.\n\n#### 3-MINUTE EXCAVATION\n\nThe Lower Xiajiadian culture in the Liao river valley is one of the most important Bronze Age cultures in the northern zone. It is broadly dated between the late third millennium and the late second millennium BCE. Its society was probably based on kinship, and members of rich families boast large collections of tomb artefacts, especially bronze ornaments. The most impressive cemetery revealed 60 metal objects, 52 of which were found in the tombs of wealthy families.\n\n#### RELATED HISTORIES\n\nHORSES & CHARIOTS\n\nNOMADS\n\n#### 30-SECOND TEXT\n\nSiran Liu\n\n**_Tools and items of jewellery were characteristic of the metalwork of the northern tribes._**\n\n## APPENDICES\n\n### RESOURCES\n\n#### BOOKS\n\n_Ancient Sichuan: Treasures from a Lost Civilization_  \nEdited by Robert Bagley  \n(Seattle Art Museum, 2001)\n\n_Anyang_  \nLi Chi  \n(University of Washington Press, 1977)\n\n_The Archaeology of China: From the Late Paleolithic to the Early Bronze Age_  \nLi Liu and Xingcan Chen  \n(Cambridge University Press, 2012)\n\n_The Archaeology of Warfare: Prehistories of Raiding and Conquest_  \nElizabeth Arkush and Mark Allen.  \n(University Press of Florida, 2006)\n\n_Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China_  \nKwang-chih Chang  \n(Harvard University Press, 1983)\n\n_The Beginning of the Use of Metals and Alloys_  \nEdited by R. Maddin  \n(MIT Press, 1988)\n\n_Bureaucracy and the State in Early China_  \nFeng Li  \n(Cambridge University Press, 2013)\n\n_The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC_  \nEdited by Michael Loewe and  \nEdward L. Shaughnessy,  \n(Cambridge University Press, 1999)\n\n_Chinese Silks_  \nDieter Kuhn, James C. W. Watt, and Juanjuan Chen  \n(Yale University Press, 2012)\n\n_Chinese Society in the Age of Confucius (1000\u2013250 BC): The Archaeological Evidence_  \nLothar von Falkenhausen  \n(Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, 2006)\n\n_Early China: A Social and Cultural History_  \nFeng Li  \n(Cambridge University Press, 2013)\n\n_The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process._  \nEdited by Stephen Houston  \n(Cambridge University Press, 2008)\n\n_Landscape and Power in Early China: The Crisis and the Fall of the Western Zhou 1045\u2013771 BC_  \nFeng Li  \n(Cambridge University Press, 1996)\n\n_New Perspectives on China's Past: Chinese Archaeology in the Twentieth Century._  \nEdited by Xiaoneng Yang  \n(Yale University Press with the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 2004)\n\n_The Problem of Meaning in Early Chinese Ritual Bronzes_  \nEdited by R. Whitfield  \n(Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1993)\n\n_Ritual Vessels of Bronze Age China_  \nMax Loehr  \n(The Asia Society, 1968)\n\n_Science and Civilisation in China Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology; Part XIII: Mining_  \nP. J. Golas  \n(Cambridge University Press, 1999)\n\n_Shang Ritual Bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections_  \nRobert Bagley  \n(Harvard University Press, 1987)\n\n_Sources of Shang History: The Oracle-bone Inscriptions of Bronze Age China_  \nDavid Keightley  \n(University of California Press, 1978)\n\n_Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels_  \nEdward L. Shaughnessy  \n(University of California Press, 1991)\n\n_Suspended Music: Chime-Bells in the Culture of Bronze Age China_  \nLothar von Falkenhausen  \n(University of California Press, 1993)\n\n_Western Zhou Ritual Bronzes from the Arthur M. Sackler Collections_  \nJessica Rawson  \n(Arthur M. Sackler Foundation, 1990)\n\n_Writing & Literacy in Early China_  \nEdited by Feng Li and David Branner  \n(University of Washington Press, 2011)\n\n### NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS\n\n**EDITOR**\n\n**Yijie Zhuang** is Lecturer in Chinese Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. He graduated from Peking University and obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include geoarchaeology \u2014 long-term land use, history and landscape changes from the Neolithic to early Imperial periods in China.\n\n**CONTRIBUTORS**\n\n**Qin Cao** is a PhD student at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford. She is the holder of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (ahrc) Collaborative Doctoral Award in association with the British Museum. Her research explores the multiple roles of weapons and their significance in Shang (c.1600\u20131050 BCE) and Western Zhou (c.1050\u2013771 BCE) societies.\n\n**Beichen Chen** is a DPhil candidate at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. His current academic interest lies in the study of China's bronze ritual vessels from the second to the first millennium BCE, including the development of casting technology, and the change of ritual performance. He is also working on China's ancient trade and exchange, especially through waterway communications.\n\n**Wengcheong Lam** is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University. His research areas include the iron technology, food system and the economic structure of the Bronze Age and Early China.\n\n**Siran Liu** is a PhD student at the University College London, Institute of Archaeology. His main research interest is in reconstructing ancient metal production technologies; scrutinizing the technological choices of craftsmen under various social-economic and environmental settings; and understanding the cultural-environmental reasons underlying the technological diversification and innovation in the ancient world. He is fascinated by the inter-disciplinary nature of this research and especially enjoys a methodology combining fieldwork, lab-based scientific analysis and experimental reconstruction.\n\n**Sai Ma** is an assistant professor at School of Ethnology and Sociology, Minzu University of China. Her interests lie in Chinese archaeology, especially the Bronze Age. She participated in archaeological surveys and excavations in many provinces in China. Her research focuses on social complexity, specialized production, mortuary analysis and hierarchy. Her related interests are ethnoarchaeology, modern mortuary rites and archaeobotany.\n\n**Peng Peng** is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. He has extensive experience in archaeology. He participated in excavations at Marsal (Lorraine, France), and spent nearly half a year working at the salt-producing Shuangwangcheng site in Shandong Province, China. He also took part in the Chengdu Plain Archaeological Survey Project organized by Washington University, Harvard University and Peking University. He has given presentations and published articles on a variety of topics, including Chinese bronzes, salt archaeology, origins of agriculture, archaeological methodology and Chinese local beliefs. He is also interested in ancient civilizations besides China, especially ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica and the Andean World. His current academic interest lies in the study of Chinese ancient bronzes, and comparative study of the first civilizations and writing systems.\n\n**Chao Tang** majored in both History and Chinese Literature for her BA, and continued her study at Peking University for her MA in Chinese Bronze Age archaeology. She has worked at the First Historical Archives of China for several years. Her research interests include the text analysis of ancient geographic literature and how this can inform historic records and archaeological data in the study of ancient society.\n\n**Li Zhang** is Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Zhengzhou University. Her research focuses on the emergence and transformation of complex societies during the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age of China, as well as the landscape of China's participation in the Eurasian network during the Bronze Age.\n\n### INDEX\n\nTHE PAGE NUMBERS IN THE INDEX CORRESPOND TO THE PRINT EDITION OF THE BOOK. PLEASE USE YOUR EBOOK READER'S SEARCH FACILITY TO FIND A SPECIFIC ENTRY.\n\n**A**\n\nAgriculturalism 114, 128\n\nalcohol 64, 70, 78\u201379\n\nalluvium\/alluviation 12, 14\n\nanimal-masks 68\n\nAnyang 41, 98\n\narchitecture 24\u201325\n\n_Art of War, The_ 144\u201345\n\nastronomy 88\u201389\n\n**B**\n\nbamboo slips 21, 85, 120\u201321, 128, 143, 144\n\nbead-welding 30, 48, 53\n\nbells 56, 66, 118\n\nBian Que 84\u201385, 92\n\nBian-stone therapy 74, 92\n\nbirth 90, 116\n\nbloomery 134\n\nbronze 14, 22, 30, 52, 134, 140\n\nbead-welding 30, 48, 53\n\ncasting 34, 56\u201359, 68\n\nconstruction parts 24\n\ndecoration 68\u201369\n\ninscriptions 16, 21, 44, 90, 118\u201319, 130, 140\n\nNorthern bronze complex 150\u201351\n\nsmelting 31, 53\n\ntrade 30, 32\n\nweapons 138\n\nbureaucracy 26\u201327\n\nburials _see_ cemeteries; tombs\n\n**C**\n\ncalendar 88\u201389\n\ncemeteries\n\ncommoner burials 102\u20133\n\nmausoleums 31, 46, 108\n\nstate cemeteries 44, 46\u201347, 100\u2013101\n\nSuizhou Zeng Marquis cemetery 44\u201345\n\n_see also_ tombs\n\nCentral Plain 30, 52, 54, 60, 150\n\nceramics _see_ pottery\n\nchamber 96\n\nChang-ju Shih 42\n\nchariot pits 136\n\nchariots 48, 136\u201337, 138\n\nchildren 90\u201391\n\nchronology 9\n\ncities 18, 22\u201323\n\ncapital cities 46, 54, 146\n\nclothing 82\u201383, 148\n\ncoinage 86\u201387\n\ncommodity currency 74, 86\n\nconcubines 74, 90\n\nConfucianism 21, 114, 123, 126\u201327, 128\n\nConfucius 13, 122\u201323\n\nconjunctions 74\n\ncopper production 54\u201355\n\ncult 12\n\n_see also_ ritual\n\n**D**\n\nDayangzhou 38\u201339\n\ndemographics 96, 102\n\ndivination 34, 96, 104\u20135, 108, 130\n\n_see also_ oracle bone inscriptions\n\ndrainage 22\n\ndynasty 30\n\n**E**\n\nEastern Zhou period 9, 13, 54, 56, 58, 108\n\ncities 18, 22\n\ncoinage 86\n\ninscriptions 118, 130\n\nmedicine 92\n\nsilk 82\n\nwater battles 14\n\nepistemology 114, 126\n\nErlitou 14, 18, 24, 32\u201333, 36, 38, 56, 108, 110, 146\n\nethics 114, 126\n\nEurasian steppe 30, 48, 134, 150\n\n**F**\n\nFalkenhausen, Lothar von 102, 118\n\nfeudalism 12, 26\n\nfiring 74, 80\n\nfloodplains 12, 14, 38\n\nfood 76\u201377\n\nForbidden City 24, 32\n\nforge welding 30\n\nFu Hao, Lady 38, 80, 98, 108, 110, 116, 138, 146\n\n**G**\n\ngender 90\u201391\n\nglyphs 114, 124\n\ngrains 76, 78\n\nGreat Wall of China 30, 134, 148, 150\n\n**H**\n\nhorn cupping 75\n\nhorses 30, 136\u201337\n\n**I**\n\ninlay 30, 32, 52\n\ninscriptions 26, 42\n\nbamboo slips 21, 85, 120\u201321, 128, 143, 144\n\nbronze vessels 16, 21, 44, 90, 118\u201319, 130, 140\n\nglyphs 114, 124\n\noracle bones 34, 41, 88, 90, 104, 116\u201317, 120, 130, 136, 138, 148\n\nscribes 26, 130\u201331\n\nstone pottery 124\u201325\n\n**J**\n\njade 36, 38, 44, 96, 110\u201311, 124, 134, 138, 140, 146\n\n**K**\n\nkaolin 75, 80\n\n**L**\n\nlacquer 31, 38, 44\n\nland ownership 16\u201317\n\nLaozi 126\n\nLegalism 128\n\n_lei_ vessels 26, 31, 44\n\nLi Ji 40\u201341\n\nLinzi 18\n\nloess 31, 42\n\nlost wax casting 56, 58\u201359, 68\n\n**M**\n\nMajiayuan 48\u201349\n\nmarriage 90\u201391\n\nmausoleums 31, 46, 108\n\nmedicine 85, 92\u201393\n\nMencius 126\n\nmetallurgy 135, 146, 148, 150\n\nmilitary 138\u201339, 140, 144\n\nMohism 114, 128\n\nmonsoons 13, 14\u201315\n\n'Mother Wu' quadripod 34, 35\n\nMu, King 142\u201343\n\nmusical instruments 52, 66\u201367, 80\n\n**N**\n\nNaturalism 115, 128\n\nNeolithic period 56, 96, 104, 110, 150\n\nnomads 30, 134, 140, 148\u201349\n\nNorthern bronze complex 150\u201351\n\n**O**\n\nocarinas 52, 66\n\noracle bone inscriptions 34, 41, 88, 90, 104, 116\u201317, 120, 130, 136, 138, 148\n\n**P**\n\npaleography 115, 120\n\nPan Geng, King 22\n\npiece-mould casting 34, 56\u201357, 58\n\npledges 140\u201341\n\npolygamy 90\n\npopulation 18\u201319\n\npottery\n\nceramics 36, 38, 44, 80, 148\n\nfiring 74, 80\n\nproduction 80\u201381\n\nstone pottery inscriptions 124\u201325\n\nproto-porcelain 31, 32, 38, 75, 80, 115, 124\n\npyromancy 96\n\n**Q**\n\nQi Huan Gong 85\n\nQin Mu Gong 106\u20137\n\nQin state 9, 13, 24, 48, 108, 114, 115, 128, 136\n\ncemetery 46\u201347\n\nQuanrong 42, 140, 148\n\n**R**\n\nradiocarbon dating 52, 54\n\nramped tombs 31, 34, 98\n\n_Records of the Grand Historian_ 22\n\nritual 48, 53, 96, 104, 126\n\ncult 12\n\nreform & restructuring 64, 70\u201371\n\n_see also_ sacrifice\n\nritual vessels 60\u201361, 70, 96\n\nmatching sets 64\u201365\n\nrivers 14\u201315\n\n**S**\n\nsacrifice 34, 48, 98, 100, 108\u20139, 148\n\nsacrificial pits 24, 34, 36, 46, 97, 98, 100, 108, 136\n\nSanxingdui 7, 36\u201337, 60\n\nscribes 26, 130\u201331\n\nshaft-pit tombs 97, 102\n\nshamanism 104\u20135\n\nshamans 97, 104\n\nShan family 62\u201363\n\nShang period 6, 9, 14, 18, 26, 34, 38, 54, 56, 66, 68\n\nalcohol 78\n\narchitecture 24\n\ncalendar 88\n\nchariots 136, 138\n\ncities 22\n\ndivination 104, 108, 116\n\nelite tombs 98\u201399, 136, 138\n\ninscriptions 118, 120, 124, 130\n\nmarriage 90\n\nmedicine 92\n\npottery 80\n\nstate cemeteries 46\n\ntrade 146\n\nwomen 90\n\nShang Yang 16, 128\n\nsilk 75, 82\n\nSilk Road 135\n\nSima Qian 22\n\nskew chamber 31, 48\n\nslag 31, 34\n\nsmelting 31, 53\n\nSpring-and-Autumn period 13, 14, 102, 130\n\n_Spring and Autumn Annals_ 13\n\nstate management 26\u201327\n\nstone pottery inscriptions 124\u201325\n\nSu Qin 18\n\nSuizhou Zeng Marquis cemetery 44\u201345\n\nsumptuary laws 53, 64, 97\n\nSun Zi (Sun Tzu) 144\n\n**T**\n\nTaoism 115, 126\u201327, 128\n\ntextiles 82\u201383\n\nsilk 75, 82\n\ntombs 32, 38, 44\n\nburial goods 32, 60, 78, 80, 92, 98, 100, 102, 110\n\nchamber 96\n\nChu tombs 82, 120, 128\n\nDayangzhou 38\u201339\n\njade objects 110\n\nMajiayuan site 48\u201349\n\nQin tombs 46\n\nramped tombs 31, 34, 98\n\nshaft-pit tombs 97, 102\n\nShang elite 98\u201399, 136, 138\n\nskew chamber 31, 48\n\n_see also_ cemeteries\n\ntrade 30, 32, 146\u201347\n\ntributary system 13, 16\n\nturquoise 31, 32\n\n**V**\n\nvassal states 97, 100, 135\n\nvows 140\u201341\n\n**W**\n\nwarfare 138, 140, 144, 148\n\nWarring States period 9, 13, 14, 48, 115, 135\n\nbamboo slips 120\n\nfood 76\n\nphilosophies 128\u201329\n\npopulation 18\n\n'Way', the 126\n\nweapons 138\u201339\n\nwelding 30, 48, 53\n\nWestern Zhou period 8, 9, 18, 21, 42, 54, 56, 64, 68, 70, 108\n\nalcohol 78\n\nbureaucracy 26\n\ninscriptions 118, 130\n\njade 110\n\nland ownership 16\n\nmarriage 90\n\nmedicine 92\n\nmilitary power 138, 140\n\nnomads 148\n\nShan family 63\n\nstate cemeteries 48, 100\n\nvassal states 100\n\nvows & pledges 140\n\nwine vessels 70, 78\n\nwomen, status of 90\n\nWu Ding, King 98, 104, 116, 138\n\nWu, King 21, 26, 140\n\nWu Ling, King 148\n\n**X**\n\nXia period 6, 9, 22, 32, 78, 138\n\nXu Xusheng 32\n\nXunzi 126\n\n**Y**\n\nYi, Marquis 58, 66, 88\n\nYinxu 22, 34\u201335, 36, 98, 116, 124, 130, 136, 140, 146\n\nYong City 22, 24, 46\u201347\n\n**Z**\n\nZhengzhou 22, 36, 116\n\nZhou dynasty 66, 88\n\nalcohol 78\n\ncities 22\n\nclothing 82\n\nmilitary power 138\n\nstate cemeteries 44\u201345, 100\u2013101\n\nvassal states 97, 135\n\nwomen 90\n\n_see also_ Eastern Zhou period; Western Zhou period\n\nZhou Gong 20\u201321, 26, 42\n\nZhouyuan 42\u201343, 60\n\nZhuangbai No.1 bronze hoard 70\n\nZhuangzi 126\n\nZou Heng 32\n\n### ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS\n\nPICTURE CREDITS  \nThe publisher would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their kind permission to reproduce the images in this book. Every effort has been made to acknowledge the pictures; however, we apologize if there are any unintentional omissions.\n\nAlamy: \/\u00a9 Lebrecht Music and Arts Photo Library .\n\n**Qin Cao:**  centre right,  (all background images).\n\n**Beichen Chen:**  bottom left & right,  top right, bottom right & background image,  (all photos).\n\n**Clipart:**  top right,  bottom left,  (hand images),  bottom right,  bottom,  bottom,  right,  top left,  bottom.\n\n**Corbis:** \/\u00a9 Lowell Georgia:  left.\n\n**Ivan Hissey:** ,  left & right, ,  centre & bottom, ,  left,  bottom left,  top.\n\n**Sai Ma:**  bottom background.\n\n**Shutterstock, Inc.\/www.shutterstock.com:**  bottom right; \/Alan49:  background image; \/AridOcean:  top left, top; \/Atelier_A:  bottom; \/fotoarek:  bottom right; \/ArtWell:  top; \/Marilyn Barbone:  top; \/Alena Brozova:  top; \/changsgallery:  top; \/Chotewang:  left; \/Nikolay Dimitrov-ecobo:  background;\n\n\/Fribus Ekaterina:  bottom; \/fotohunter:  top right; \/Lalith Herath:  background, left; \/Jiang Hongyan:  top right; \/Pavel Ilyukhin:  bottom; \/Junrong: ; \/Jun Kawaguchi:  centre,  background; \/Kletr:  bottom; \/kongsky:  bottom; \/Philip Lange: ; \/ L.F:  background; \/Tim Masters:  bottom right; \/michal812:  bottom; \/Jun Mu:  top right, centre & bottom right; \/Neftali:  bottom; \/Bill Perry: , ; \/TTstudio:  background; \/Kirill Smirnov:  top right; \/Successo images:  background; \/Subbotina Anna:  left; \/sunxuejun:  background; \/EmiliaUngur:  top right; \/Ye Choh Wah:  background; \/Yangchao:  left.\n\n**Chao Tang:**  top left,  top far left,  bottom left & right.\n\n**Thinkstock:**  left.\n\n**Gary Lee Todd, PhD:**  (all photos),  top right (both photos),  (all photos),  bottom,  bottom,  top right,  (all photos),  centre,  (all photos),  centre and bottom,  bottom left, ,  (all photos),  bottom,  centre & bottom right,  top right, centre & bottom,  left & far right,  (all photos),  top,  bottom,  (all photos),  (all photos),  (all photos),  top left & right,  (all except top far left),  (all photos),  (all photos),  top & background,  top & bottom centre,  top,  (all photos),  bottom,  (all photos),  top left and right,  bottom left to right.\n\n**Wikipedia:** 663highland:  main image; \/Fanghong:  top left,  right; \/Ismoon:  bottom; \/Kanguole:  top right,  background; \/Kenpeiu:  right; \/Mountain: 8, ,  t-op; Mlogic:  main image; \/Rolfmueller:  main image; \/Sharkman:  right &  left.\nFirst published in Great Britain in 2015 by\n\n**Ivy Press**\n\n210 High Street, Lewes,\n\nEast Sussex BN7 2NS, U.K.\n\nwww.ivypress.co.uk\n\nCopyright \u00a9 The Ivy Press Limited 2015\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder.\n\nBritish Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data\n\nA CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.\n\nPrint ISBN: 978-1-78240-270-1\n\nEPUB ISBN: 978-1-78240-296-1\n\nMOBI ISBN: 978-1-78240-297-8\n\nPDF ISBN: 978-1-78240-298-5\n\nThis book was conceived, designed and produced by **Ivy Press**\n\n210 High Street, Lewes,\n\nEast Sussex BN7 2NS, U.K.\n\nwww.ivypress.co.uk\n\nCreative Director **Peter Bridgewater**\n\nPublisher **Susan Kelly**\n\nEditorial Director **Tom Kitch**\n\nArt Director **Michael Whitehead**\n\nSenior Project Editor **Caroline Earle**\n\nCommissioning Editor **Sophie Collins**\n\nDesigner **Ginny Zeal**\n\nIllustrator **Ivan Hissey**\n\nPicture Researcher **Sharon Dortenzio**\n\nGlossaries Text **Andrew Kirk**\n\nCover image: Shutterstock \/ Fotokon\n\nTypeset in Section\n\nColour origination by Ivy Press Reprographics\n\nDistributed worldwide (except North America) by Thames & Hudson Ltd., 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX, United Kingdom\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":" \n**_PRAISE FOR_**\n\n**TWA 800**\n\n\"Jack Cashill has researched, organized, and documented all aspects of this intrigue in an outstanding and readable style. He has provided the needed resolution to finally end the TWA 800 conspiracy. It is\u2014by far\u2014the most thorough, insightful, and believable accounting of that tragedy.\"\n\n**\u2014VERNON GROSE,** former NTSB board member and CNN commentator on TWA 800\n\n\"In this extraordinary book, Jack Cashill\u2014America's greatest investigative reporter\u2014provides new and overwhelming evidence that the official explanation [of TWA 800] from the Clintons couldn't possibly be true, and that something is very, very wrong at both the FBI and the CIA.\"\n\n**\u2014HERBERT E. MEYER,** former National Intelligence Council vice chairman\n\n\"Jack Cashill has done it again. He is one of the great investigative journalists in America, at a time that it has become a lost art. In his new book, _TWA 800: The Crash, the Cover-Up and the Conspiracy_ , he walks us through one of the most important and revealing stories of the last twenty years.... He also presents new evidence and fresh perspectives, linking the cover-up to today's presidential race.\"\n\n**\u2014ROGER ARONOFF,** editor of Accuracy in Media and producer of the award-winning documentary _TWA 800: The Search for the Truth_\n\n\"Jack Cashill has worked tirelessly for almost twenty years to bring the truth of what really happened to TWA Flight 800 to the public, and most of all, to the families who lost loved ones on that flight. Because I lost my son, Yon Rojany, that fateful night of July 17, 1996\u2014and never believed the government line about a spark in the center fuel tank\u2014I am forever indebted to Jack. This book is a compelling read laying out the facts of what really happened. It is a book you won't be able to put down. Thank you, Jack!\"\n\n**\u2014LISA MICHELSON,** family member of TWA 800 victim\n\n\"A transparent fraud exposed! In 2003 Jack and I wrote _First Strike_ , an account of the TWA Flight 800 shoot-down, exposing evidence uncovered as of 2003. Now, in 2016, Cashill tells a compelling story based on evidence uncovered over the last nineteen plus years. It is a book that should be a runaway best seller\u2014but will not. Dominant eastern media, led by the _New York Times_ , has far too much to lose, as do the National Security State and important political players from 1996.\"\n\n**\u2014JAMES SANDERS,** author of _The Downing of TWA Flight 800_\n\n\"Outstanding! Co-counsel Mark Lane and I had the honor of bringing Jim and Liz Sanders' civil rights lawsuit against eight government officials who participated in the cover-up. Later, I had the pleasure of prosecuting Ray Lahr's FOIA lawsuit. Astonishingly, to keep the truth of the missile strike from the American people, the government concealed all the physical evidence, and the eyewitness accounts, with the cooperation of the media. In _TWA 800_ , Jack Cashill proves it, succinctly.\"\n\n**\u2014JOHN CLARKE,** attorney\n\nCopyright \u00a9 2016 by Jack Cashill\n\nAll rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, website, or broadcast.\n\nRegnery History\u2122 is a trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation; Regnery\u00ae is a registered trademark of Salem Communications Holding Corporation\n\nFirst e-book edition 2016: ISBN 978-1-62157-546-7\n\nOriginally published in hardcover, 2016\n\nThe Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:\n\nNames: Cashill, Jack.\n\nTitle: TWA 800: the crash, the cover-up, and the conspiracy \/ Jack Cashill.\n\nDescription: Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2016.\n\nIdentifiers: LCCN 2016004757\n\nSubjects: LCSH: TWA Flight 800 Crash, 1996. | Aircraft accidents--New York (State)--Long Island Region. | Aircraft accidents--North Atlantic Ocean. | Aircraft accidents--Investigation--United States. | Conspiracies. | BISAC: HISTORY \/ United States \/ 20th Century. | TRANSPORTATION \/ Aviation \/ History.\n\nClassification: LCC TL553.525.N7 C37 2016 | DDC 363.12\/465--dc23\n\nLC record available at <http:\/\/lccn.loc.gov\/2016004757>\n\nPublished in the United States by\n\nRegnery History\n\nAn imprint of Regnery Publishing\n\nA Division of Salem Media Group\n\n300 New Jersey Ave NW\n\nWashington, DC 20001\n\nwww.RegneryHistory.com\n\nManufactured in the United States of America\n\n10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1\n\nBooks are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. For information on discounts and terms, please visit our website: www.Regnery.com.\n\nDistributed to the trade by\n\nPerseus Distribution\n\n250 West 57th Street\n\nNew York, NY 10107\n_To James and Elizabeth Sanders_\n**CONTENTS**\n\n**ONE** THE BREACH\n\n**TWO** CONSPIRACY THEORIST\n\n**THREE** THE BEST PEOPLE\n\n**FOUR** THE VIDEO\n\n**FIVE** THE MAN ON THE BRIDGE\n\n**SIX** INTELLIGENCE MEDAL OF MERIT\n\n**SEVEN** THE GOOD BUREAUCRAT\n\n**EIGHT** RESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM\n\n**NINE** SEPTEMBER 11\n\n**TEN** FIT TO PRINT\n\n**ELEVEN** BLACK HOLE\n\n**TWELVE** DOG DAYS\n\n**THIRTEEN** LOST AT SEA\n\n**FOURTEEN** MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON\n\n**FIFTEEN** THE FIXERS\n\n**SIXTEEN** ENGINE TROUBLE\n\n**SEVENTEEN** BENGHAZI MOMENT\n\n**EIGHTEEN** PROCRUSTES\n\n**NINETEEN** THE SMOKING GUN\n\nNOTES\n\nINDEX\n\nAt 8:19 p.m. on July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport bound for Paris. At 8:31 p.m. the plane was destroyed ten miles off the popular South Shore of Long Island. The FBI would interview more than 250 people who saw an object streaking toward the plane.\nChapter: ONE\n\nTHE BREACH\n\n_But you also had systemically a wall that was in place between the criminal side and the intelligence side. What's in a criminal case doesn't cross over that line. Ironclad regulations, so that even people in the criminal division and the intelligence divisions of the FBI couldn't talk to each other, let alone talk to us or us talk to them_.\n\n_\u2014Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, before the 9\/11 Commission, March 24, 2004_\n\n**\"J** ack Cashill?\"\n\nI took the call in my Kansas City office on my landline. I still had one. It was the spring of 2009.\n\n\"You got 'im.\"\n\n\"This is witness number seventy-three. Do you know who I am?\"\n\nI did indeed. She was arguably the single most important eyewitness to the destruction of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island thirteen years earlier. During those years her identity eluded the many independent researchers into the crash, myself included. As she told me, physicist Tom Stalcup, among the more dedicated of those researchers, had recently tracked her down. Before that contact, she had no idea how crucial was her testimony. Once she learned, she wanted to learn more and called me, since I had co-authored a book on TWA 800 with James Sanders called _First Strike_.\n\n\"Do you remember what I told the FBI?\" she asked.\n\n\"I certainly do.\" I could almost recite it. \"Upside down Nike swoosh, correct?\"\n\n\"That's me.\"\n\nOn July 17, 1996, Sandy\u2014not her real name\u2014was visiting friends on Long Island. They were relatives of her fianc\u00e9 who was working in New York City. That evening Sandy and her two friends drove to a beach near the Moriches Inlet on the South Shore of Long Island. Just a few minutes after sunset, the FBI would report, \"She observed an aircraft climbing in the sky, traveling from her right to her left.\" This would have been from the west, JFK airport in New York City, towards the east, eventually Paris, the original destination of the ill-fated 747 with 230 souls on board.\n\nThe sun was setting behind her. \"While keeping her eyes on the aircraft,\" the FBI report continued, \"she observed a 'red streak' moving up from the ground toward the aircraft at an approximately 45 degree angle. The 'red streak' was leaving a light gray colored smoke trail. The 'red streak' went passed [sic] the right side and above the aircraft before arcing back toward the aircraft's right wing.\"\n\nAccording to the FBI, Sandy described the arc's shape \"as resembling an upside down NIKE swoosh logo.\" The smoke trail, light gray in color, widened as it approached the aircraft. Agent Lee Butler interviewed Sandy at her North Carolina home three days after the disaster and wrote down Sandy's account on a \"302,\" the standard FBI report form. \"She never took her eyes off the aircraft during this time,\" the 302 continued. \"At the instant the smoke trail ended at the aircraft's right wing, she heard a loud sharp noise which sounded like a firecracker had just exploded at her feet. She then observed a fire at the aircraft followed by one or two secondary explosions which had a deeper sound. She then observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back. She then observed burning pieces of debris falling from the aircraft.\"\n\nWeeks before the FBI and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) were able to piece together the break-up sequence of the aircraft, Sandy had nailed it. She was the perfect eyewitness. She worked in the travel industry. She had a long-standing interest in aviation. She tracked the plane and the \"flare\" as separate objects. She read no more into the explosion than what she could observe. At the Moriches Inlet, she was as close to the actual site of the explosion as any other witness, less than ten miles away. And she was not grandstanding. Just the opposite. Her friends and her fianc\u00e9 were dead set against her cooperating with the FBI. The following day agent Mary Doran called and asked Sandy to talk to her friends. Doran wanted their accounts as well. Sandy balked. As she told Doran, her friends were \"really upset\" she had given their names to the FBI. \"They did not want to have any involvement whatsoever with the FBI,\" she added. Sandy's fianc\u00e9 sided with his relatives, so much so that she feared he would break off the engagement if the FBI contacted them.\n\nSandy would marry her fianc\u00e9. At the time she called me, he was being treated for cancer in a hospital about an hour up the road from my Kansas City office. Had her husband been healthy, she would not have dared to follow up. He wanted her to have nothing to do with the case, but now there was a story she felt the need to share.\n\nIt involved her second interview. As reported on an FBI 302, agents Steven Bongardt and Theodore Otto visited Sandy at her North Carolina home on April 29, 1997, and produced a report more detailed than Agent Butler's from July 1996. Sandy covered much of the same territory, but her account was not as precise as it had been during the first interview nine months earlier. In that earlier interview, she claimed the object hit the right wing. This time \"she could not recall which of the wings\" was struck. Nor did she repeat her claim that the object came \"up from the ground.\" In this second account, she only claimed to have seen the object in mid-flight.\n\nUnlike Agent Butler, Bongardt and Otto asked her what kind of object she had observed. \"She replied that she believed she witnessed a missile,\" the agents reported, \"which had been fired from a boat which was located somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean.\" By this time the idea that a missile struck TWA 800 had been shuttled off to the netherworld of the conspiracy theorist. A month earlier, the CIA and the FBI concurred that a sighting like hers was an optical illusion. The agents did not include the \"missile\" detail to make Sandy look astute. They included it to make her look flighty. They also suggested a reason why her initial account might be unreliable. Although denying she was \"inebriated\" at the time of the crash, Sandy did admit that \"she had consumed two (2) 'Long Island Ice Tea' cocktails\" earlier that evening. This admission rendered her initial account suspect.\n\nAt the time, the FBI did not make audio recordings of interviews. A secretary simply took the handwritten 302s and typed them up. Sandy had only recently read the two separate 302s. She was still fuming when I talked to her. She had real problems with that second one.\n\n\"I don't even know what a 'Long Island Ice Tea' is,\" she told me.\n\n\"Could it have been another drink?\" I asked.\n\n\"No,\" she told me. \"I don't drink, not at all. And there's something else you don't know, something stranger.\"\n\n\"Tell me.\"\n\n\"There was no second interview. They made it all up.\"\n\n\"There's something you may not know.\" I added. \"You're not the only witness they did that to.\"\n\nAs Sandy was learning, she was one of more than 700 witnesses to the crash or its aftermath that the FBI interviewed. The fact that her two friends refused to be interviewed suggests that there were many more who saw the incident but refused to cooperate. By the National Transportation Safety Board's count she was one of 258 eyewitnesses who saw a rising streak of light and one of fifty-six who traced that light to the ground or the horizon. She had no idea there were so many. Few people did. Of the fifty-six, the _New York Times_ , which more or less owned the story, interviewed exactly none after the first two days of the investigation and those in the first two days only cursorily.\n\nWhile Sandy and her friends were enjoying the summer evening at the Moriches Inlet, Bill and Hillary Clinton were working the rope line at the Women's Leadership Forum of the Democratic National Committee. At 8:35 p.m., four minutes after TWA 800 was blown out of the sky, a motorcade whisked the Clintons to the White House. They arrived at 8:45 p.m. and made their way to the family residence. Soon after they arrived, Clinton's chief of staff Leon Panetta called the president with the grim news out of Long Island.\n\nBy 9 p.m. the White House was abuzz with talk of the disaster. In his bestselling 2004 memoir, _Against All Enemies_ , Richard Clarke provided the most detailed account of that evening. At the time, Clarke served as chairman of the Coordinating Security Group (CSG) on terrorism. Within thirty minutes of the plane's crash, wrote Clarke, he had called a meeting of the CSG in the White House Situation Room. This involved the FBI, the CIA, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the departments of State and Defense, the Pentagon, and the Coast Guard. \"The investigation [looked] at almost every possibility including a state actor,\" said Panetta. From the beginning, no one considered this an ordinary plane crash.\n\nFor reasons unknown but easily imagined, the president chose not to join Clarke and the other anxious officials in the Situation Room, located in the White House's basement. Instead, as Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert \"Buzz\" Patterson confirmed, the Clintons spent the evening on the second floor in the family residence. Patterson believes there was another person with the Clintons, Sandy Berger, the deputy national security advisor. At the time, Patterson carried the nuclear football for the president, which kept him in close proximity. That night, he too was in the White House, but he was not involved in any relevant discussions.\n\nThat same night, Captain Ray Ott and his crew on a Navy surveillance plane, the P-3 Orion, were flying almost directly above the 747 when it exploded. After circling for a half hour and shooting video of the debris field, the plane quit the scene and headed south two hundred miles on a routine sub-hunting exercise. No entity in the military arsenal was as capable of hunting down any suspected terrorists as the P-3, but Ott had orders to do otherwise.\n\nFor the next six hours the Clintons gathered information and evaluated possible responses. The response Clarke dreaded most went by the cryptic name, the \"Eisenhower option.\" According to Clarke, Clinton argued for a \"massive attack\" against Iran if American interests were to be attacked again as they had been in June when terrorists blew up the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen American servicemen. \"Clearly,\" Panetta would later tell CNN, \"if we had determined that this was a foreign act or a terrorist [sic] similar to what had happened to 9\/11 that President Clinton would not have hesitated to take action.\" So charged was the atmosphere following TWA 800's destruction that Clarke called this moment in history, \"The Almost War, 1996.\"\n\nThis was exactly the kind of crisis the president feared most. He had even given it a generic name, \"Greg Norman.\" Clinton and golfer Greg Norman were buddies. A few months earlier, in April 1996, Norman took a six-stroke lead into the final round of the Masters and blew it. Clinton worried that his campaign might suffer a similar fate. He told press aide Mike McCurry, \"That's going to be the new _theme_ for the campaign, that we're not going to allow ourselves to be Greg Normanized.\" He and Hillary had spent the last sixteen months scrambling out of the crater left by the disastrous 1994 mid-term elections. Now with a lead in the polls seemingly as solid as Norman's at the Masters, Clinton would leave nothing to chance. \"We could have a major crisis go bad on us,\" he worried. \"Greg Norman,\" he reminded his staff over and over. \"Greg Norman.\"\n\nBy 3 a.m. the Clintons had settled on a strategy, one even bolder than it might have seemed to those not in the know. At that fabled hour\u2014the one Hillary would mythologize in her run against Barack Obama\u2014Bill called Berger's boss, National Security Advisor Tony Lake, with the following message: \"Dust off the contingency plans.\" For the time being, the president, in private at least, would blame terrorists for the attack, Iran the chief suspect among them.\n\nThe apolitical Lake may not have known any more than this. Only a handful of people did. Evidence strongly suggests that a trusted source in the U.S. Navy received orders to secure the plane's black boxes and to silence his colleagues. The Department of Justice got the word to have the FBI take the investigation over from the National Transportation Safety Board, the NTSB. Although arguably illegal, this move was made publicly. Less public but even more suspect was the intervention of the CIA. Very quietly, as a treasure trove of recently unearthed CIA documents confirm, the CIA was allowed to breach the storied \"wall\" that prevented the nation's intelligence arm from collaborating with its prosecutorial arm. The agency involved itself on day one of the investigation and ultimately seized control. Ironically, the same Justice Department official who authorized the wall in 1995 was one of the select few chosen to oversee its violation.\n\nAlthough the phrase has been much abused, there is none better than \"cover-up\" to describe what followed. Like many initiatives the Clinton White House choreographed, this one was highly improvisational. Before it was through, the TWA 800 investigation would make several sharp course corrections. To be sure, the great majority of those working the investigation had little or no idea it was being misdirected. Some who did harbor suspicions bravely resisted the misdirection, but they had almost nowhere to turn with their protests. Had there been a vigilant media to hear these individuals, or even a mature Internet to share their objections, the truth would have surfaced. To make sure it did not, the CIA, the FBI, and the White House largely avoided the subject of aviation terror for the next five years. As the nation learned in the aftermath of 9\/11, the \"wall\" that was breached all too easily to protect the secrets of TWA 800 held much too firmly when it came to the secrets of our enemies.\nChapter: TWO\n\nCONSPIRACY THEORIST\n\n**I** never intended to become a conspiracy theorist. In the fall of 2000, when I first dipped my toe into the murky headwaters of the TWA 800 intrigue, I thought myself something of a skeptic, the Socratic nitpicker who rained on the paranoid parades of others. At the time, I was working as an independent writer and producer, mostly in advertising. A variety of new technologies had allowed me to quit the agency world ten years earlier. By the year 2000 I was also doing a fair amount of writing unrelated to advertising. I contributed the odd piece to the _Washington Post_ , the _Wall Street Journal_ , _Fortune_ , and the _Weekly Standard_. Locally, I wrote occasionally for the _Kansas City Star_ and regularly for the regional business magazine, _Ingram_ ' _s_. That year too I had my first and only novel published, a moderately successful, dystopian political fantasy called _2006: The Chautauqua Rising_. In writing the novel I discovered how useful the Internet could be. Over time I came to appreciate it much more than did the FBI or the _New York Times_. For the curious citizen, the Internet was an equalizer.\n\nI anticipated none of this on that September evening when I headed off to a local country club to hear a presentation by James Sanders. A veteran cop turned investigative reporter, Sanders had authored the 1997 book, _The Downing of TWA Flight 800_ , and paid a high price for doing so. As he explained, fifty-three TWA employees were on board that doomed aircraft, most of them deadheading back to Paris. His wife, Elizabeth Sanders, had served as a trainer for TWA flight attendants. She knew many of those who had died on the plane, attendants and pilots both, and attended more memorial services than she had ever hoped to.\n\nAt one of those services she encountered a friend named Terry Stacey, a 747 pilot and manager. Stacey had been working at the investigation site in Calverton on Long Island and harbored deep suspicions about the direction of the investigation. Knowing that James Sanders was an investigative reporter with a couple books to his credit, Stacey asked Elizabeth to introduce them. Her role in what followed would not go much deeper, but for the authorities that was deep enough.\n\nElizabeth's life began to unravel in March 1997 when California's Riverside _Press_ - _Enterprise_ published a front-page article headlined, \"New Data Show Missile May Have Nailed TWA 800.\" The story described in some detail Sanders's inquiry into the TWA 800 investigation over the preceding five months. A still unknown individual working at Calverton had removed a pinch of seatback material from the plane and sent it to Sanders by Federal Express for testing. That person was Stacey. For the FBI this was a problem much greater than a pinch of foam rubber might suggest. If that pinch had escaped the hangar, who knew what else had?\n\nOnce the story broke in the _Press_ - _Enterprise_ , the Clinton Justice Department (DOJ) had little choice but to hunt down the conspirators. The Sanderses were not hard to find. Two DOJ prosecutors told them if they did not reveal their source within the investigation, both would become grand jury targets themselves. Lest she be forced to give up Stacey, Elizabeth went into hiding for the next eight months in an Oregon trailer park. That exile almost cost Elizabeth her sanity. James refused to cooperate.\n\nThe FBI honchos pursued the removal of the TWA 800 evidence with more passion than they pursued the evidence itself. Soon enough, agents soon found their way to Stacey, arresting him and the Sanderses. \"Conspiracy theorist and wife charged with theft of parts from airplane,\" the FBI announced much too proudly on the New York office's website. Despite Sanders's two previous books, the DOJ decided that was not enough output to merit standing as a \"journalist.\" Denied that standing, the Sanderses were tried as thieves, Elizabeth the Bonnie to James's Clyde. To save his considerable pension, Stacey pled guilty to a misdemeanor. The Sanderses went to trial in a Long Island federal court and were convicted of conspiracy to steal airplane parts.\n\nThis was the story James told to a large crowd at the country club. Not until I recalled that Kansas City was the ancestral home of TWA did the size and intensity of the audience make sense to me. The company had shifted its hub to St. Louis some years back, but its overhaul base remained in Kansas City, as did many of its retired employees. Almost to a person, the TWA people in the room appeared to endorse Sanders's argument that TWA 800 had, in fact, been shot down. This surprised me. At the time, I thought this theory among the more improbable then in circulation. Admittedly, though, I had paid little attention to the investigation. I could not recall, for instance, where I was when I first heard about the plane's demise.\n\nBeing on the board of the group that invited the Sanderses, I went to dinner with them afterwards at an Italian restaurant on Kansas City's Country Club Plaza. We sat at a long table, and I found myself at the end of it seated next to Elizabeth. We had a chance to talk. As she related, when she and James first met, he was a police officer and accident investigator in Orange County, California, and she a Polynesian dance instructor. Of Filipino descent, she looked the part. She was sweet, soft-spoken, and agelessly pretty.\n\nLooking for a more substantial job, Elizabeth signed on with TWA, first as a flight attendant and then as a senior trainer. Losing her job pained Elizabeth more than being arrested or convicted. She loved her work and thought of her colleagues as family. This, I gleaned, was not an unusual sentiment among TWA employees. By evening's end, I had begun to reassess Sanders's missile theory. I figured if agents of the government were willing to arrest someone like Elizabeth Sanders for conspiracy, they might, in fact, have had something to hide. Hoping to probe a little deeper, I asked the Sanderses if they could meet me the next morning for breakfast, and they agreed.\n\nLater that night I went online to research TWA Flight 800\u2014and quickly sobered up. The debate had apparently been settled. Three years earlier, in November 1997, the FBI essentially closed its criminal investigation into the disaster. At a press conference that day, the FBI declared emphatically, \"No evidence has been found that would indicate that a criminal act was the cause of the tragedy of Flight 800.\" For its part, the NTSB wrapped up its investigation in August 2000, a month before the Sanderses' appearance in Kansas City. At the final NTSB hearing, Bernard Loeb, the agency's director of the Office of Aviation Safety, said confidently, \"The physical evidence indicated indisputably that a missile did not strike the airplane.\" Neither the FBI nor the NTSB was sure exactly what electrical source sparked an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank (also known as a \"center wing tank\"), but each agency vigorously rejected the idea that a bomb or missile might have been responsible. Words like \"no evidence\" and \"indisputably\" left little room for argument.\n\nKnowing how hard the media rode \"conspiracy theorists,\" I had no interest in becoming one. At the time, it was hard for me to imagine that the FBI and the NTSB would have colluded to conceal the true cause of so public an event in so visible a place. Journalists, I could see, were equally dismissive of so unlikely an intrigue. At least three years earlier, the mainstream media had written off as cranks and kooks anyone who challenged the official explanation. So, for the most part, had the conservative media. The fear of being called a conspiracy theorist paralyzed the respectable right. Although not one to worry about respectability, agenda-setting radio host Rush Limbaugh had another issue. Jim Kallstrom, the head of the FBI investigation, was a friend. \"I don't know of anybody with more honesty or integrity,\" said Limbaugh of Kallstrom. If anyone of consequence on the right or left felt otherwise about TWA 800, that person was keeping quiet about it.\n\nMy idea was to do a video documentary, one that would make a case this complex at least reasonably comprehensible. At breakfast that next morning, I shared my idea and my reservations with the Sanderses. They liked the idea and understood my skepticism. To address it, they invited me to their home in Florida to review the data they had collected. Before heading south, I explored the literature on this particular disaster. There was a ton of it, much of it technical and some of it impenetrable. I could see why the complexity of any given plane crash could intimidate journalists. With so much information to absorb, the temptation was to trust the experts and yield to their authority. In the four years following TWA 800's destruction, the media had done just that.\n\nBy this time, two mainstream books had been written on TWA Flight 800. In 1999, Random House published Pat Milton's _In the Blink of an Eye_. Three years earlier, Milton led the Associated Press's coverage of the disaster. According to Milton, the book \"resulted from the willingness of the FBI to open itself up to a journalist.\" Kallstrom trusted her, and she rewarded his trust with something like adulation. The _New York Times_ reviewer commended Milton for avoiding \"the pitfalls of conspiracy mongering,\" high praise from the _Times_. HarperCollins followed in early 2000 with a book from CNN's Christine Negroni called _Deadly Departure_. The book's subtitle pretty well summed up Negroni's thesis: \"Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again.\" Not surprisingly, Negroni left CNN soon after the book came out to work for a high-end personal injury law firm that specialized in suing airlines and aircraft manufacturers.\n\nI read these books before going to Florida. They almost made me rethink my trip. At the time, I had little up-close insight into the way the national media worked. I had to assume that two reporters with great contacts working for top-flight media outlets had a pretty good grasp on the facts. Each apparently knew enough to have a book accepted by a major publisher, and a book is not a solitary adventure. A successful one requires a collaboration of sorts among author, agent, publisher, editor, attorneys, and reviewers. All parties seemed to line up behind both books, especially _Deadly Departure_ , a _New York Times_ \"Notable Book of the Year.\" Sanders, by contrast, was an off-brand reporter and convicted felon living in a low-end Florida apartment complex hard by a smelly canal from which alligators occasionally emerged to eat neighborhood dogs. I owed him a visit, but I expected little.\n\nI underestimated the Sanderses. During our few days together, James impressed me with his relentless, good-spirited energy. In his mid-fifties when we met, he called to mind the cops I grew up around back in Newark, New Jersey\u2014my father, my uncle, several of my cousins. He saw the world as it was and did not flinch from its occasional injustice. As I came to appreciate, he was as much a bulldog as his nemesis Kallstrom. They shared a first name, were of roughly the same age, the same medium height, the same stocky build, the same cop pugnacity. The difference was that Kallstrom, head of the FBI's New York City office, controlled all the levers of power, and Sanders controlled none, not even his ability to come and go. He still needed permission from his probation officer to travel. This power disparity fazed Sanders not at all. The truth emboldened him, just as he believed it enfeebled Kallstrom.\n\nThree intense days with James and Elizabeth in March 2001 left me convinced they had a much better handle on the facts of the case than did Milton, Negroni, or the _New York Times_ newsroom. Two things persuaded me. One was the willingness of the Sanderses to confront the evidence and follow where it led. They hid nothing. They fudged nothing. They offered no improbable rationales. Kallstrom, I came to see, could not do the same.\n\nThe Sanderses' integrity was just the half of it. For all their good intentions, I would not have embarked on this excellent adventure had they not shown me one particular swath of evidence: the eyewitness testimony. I could scarcely believe there was so much of it, and that it was so consistent and so credible. As something of a news junkie, I had to scold myself for being so unknowing. There was an untold story here, a big one. After three days and a contemplative flight home, I started imaging how I would look in a tin-foil hat.\nChapter: THREE\n\nTHE BEST PEOPLE\n\n**I** n the early 1990s, my producing partner Michael Wunsch and I decided to canoe down an industrial river in the midst of Kansas City and record our adventure. We funded the subsequent documentary ourselves. KCPT, the regional PBS station, picked it up, and the airing of _Blue River Blues_ attracted the attention of a local foundation as we hoped it might. The foundation commissioned us to create a history of Kansas City and transformed us in the process from commercial video makers to documentarians.\n\nBy the decade's end, I had produced at least half a dozen additional long form videos, several for KCPT, a few for cable networks, a couple for ourselves, each with a different funding formula. After meeting with the Sanderses, I convinced Wunsch that their story had enough merit to risk my time and his studio overhead on an hour-long documentary. My goal was to make the video as simple and straightforward as possible. In a story as visual as this one, a video could have an impact print could not.\n\nFortunately, the networks and their affiliates had lost their monopoly on video imagery. The technology that broke the network stranglehold was not the Internet, but the underestimated videocassette recorder. The VCR allowed producers to create products that went straight to consumers unfiltered by the networks' anxious lawyers and activist suits. Our plan was to recuperate our costs through direct sales of our video to the individual consumer. We had no illusions that a network would want in.\n\nA little na\u00efve at the time, I found it hard to believe that broadcasters would leave so powerfully visual a story on the table for shoestring producers like us to take up. But leave it they did. On the up side, we had an open field. On the down side, the networks had produced few visuals for us to use in constructing the documentary. Although CNN named the TWA 800 tragedy the number one domestic news story of 1996\u2014Clinton's reelection was number two\u2014the various TV stations shot very little footage beyond the wreckage recovery. Much more helpful was Accuracy in Media, a D.C.-based watchdog group founded by the tireless Reed Irvine in 1969 and still managed by him more than thirty years later. Irvine and his associates tracked down eyewitnesses, recruited technical experts, videotaped conferences, and routinely dug up stuff the major media tried to bury.\n\nThanks to the various sunshine laws, the U.S. government proved surprisingly helpful. Once the NTSB wrapped up its case in August 2000, we had access to a mother lode of data, much of it visual. This included an animation of the crash created by the CIA, NTSB animations, hours and hours of video from the NTSB hearing, all seven hundred or so of the FBI witness interviews, scores of eyewitness drawings, and a vast library of charts and photos and technical data.\n\nIn a totalitarian country, authorities can suppress information at will. In America, the media have to collaborate in that suppression. During the Clinton era, the White House did a superb job convincing the media to do just that. This was not a new phenomenon. More than fifty years earlier, former communist Whittaker Chambers discovered how seamlessly self-censorship worked. At the time, Chambers was a reluctant witness to the treason of his former friend and comrade, Alger Hiss. A highly respected Harvard Law grad, Hiss had insinuated himself into the upper reaches of the State Department. Despite the enormity of the evidence against him, establishment worthies refused to believe this popular Democrat was a Soviet agent. \"It was, not invariably, but in general, the 'best people' who were for Alger Hiss and who were prepared to go to any length to protect and defend him,\" wrote Chambers in his 1952 masterwork, _Witness_. \"It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.\"\n\nSo it was with TWA Flight 800. Minds snapped shut early on in spite of the evidence. The fact that TWA 800 went down during the reelection campaign of a popular Democrat contributed mightily to the ensuing psychosis. This was less a media conspiracy than a collective pathology, as unwitting as it was unhealthy. The \"best people\" of the late 1990s could no more acknowledge their susceptibility to groupthink than the \"best people\" of the late 1940s could theirs. So locked were they into their delusions they mocked those who did not share them.\n\nThey directed much of their mockery at Internet users. Still in its embryonic state in July 1996\u2014the _New York Times_ went online that same year\u2014the Internet challenged the traditional arbiters of information in ways as unwelcome as they were unprecedented. Most critically, the Internet reduced the information imbalance between \"the best people\" and what Chambers called \"the great body of the nation.\" He referred here to those ordinary Americans who, unlike their betters, kept their minds open, \"waiting for the returns to come in.\" Thanks to the Internet, those everyday citizens had much quicker and more complete access to the \"returns\" than they ever had before.\n\nThe \"best people,\" with the _New York Times_ in the lead, pushed back hard. On November 24, 1996, for instance, just four months after the crash and a year before the FBI closed its investigation, the _Times_ ran an all-too-typical article headlined \"Pierre, Is That a Masonic Flag on the Moon?\" In the first sentence reporter George Johnson singled out the ostensible target, the Internet with its \"throbbing, fevered brain.\" Johnson directed his contempt, however, at those ordinary Americans whose Internet use threatened the _Times_ ' hegemony on the news. \"Electrified by the Internet,\" Johnson complained, \"suspicions about the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800 were almost instantly transmuted into convictions that it was the result of friendly fire.\"\n\nOn the tenth anniversary of the crash in 2006, CNN's Jeffery Reid nicely captured the anti-Internet bias still prevalent in America's newsrooms. Reid explained how ten years earlier a \"slew of sinister conspiracy theories\" diverted investigators' attention from the accepted cause of the disaster, a center fuel tank explosion, \"most likely\" caused by a spark in its vapor-filled center tank. \"So prevalent were these theories,\" Reid added, \"that the term 'Pierre Salinger Syndrome'\u2014the belief that everything on the Internet is true\u2014entered the lexicon.\"\n\nIn the real world, no one suffered from Pierre Salinger syndrome, least of all Pierre Salinger. As press secretary to President John F. Kennedy, Salinger helped create and sustain the Camelot mythology in which he himself\u2014a quotable, cigar-chomping citizen of the world\u2014played an integral part. Salinger was nothing if not connected. He stood just feet from Robert Kennedy when the senator was shot. He served briefly as a U.S. Senator from California. And in the years that followed, he made a nice career for himself as a journalist and international public relations executive. In 1996, his name still opened doors on both sides of the Atlantic, but he overestimated his clout.\n\nAbout a month after the TWA 800 disaster, retired United Airline pilot and accident investigator Dick Russell received a phone call from Jim Holtsclaw, a friend of his who served as a deputy regional director for the Air Transport Association (ATA). Although Holtsclaw worked out of Los Angeles, he had been in Washington for a regular monthly ATA meeting soon after the TWA 800 disaster. In Washington, a friend alerted Holtsclaw that the air traffic controllers in New York sensed something amiss. The friend put Holtsclaw in touch with one of them. \"I'll send the radar tape,\" the controller told him. \"You decide what you are seeing.\"\n\nHoltsclaw knew something about radar. He graduated from the U.S. Air Force Air Traffic Control School and the FAA Air Traffic School, served as LAX Control Tower manager and ATC manager with American Airlines before moving on to the Air Transport Association. As he would later testify under oath, he had received a copy of the radar tape recorded at the New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON). It showed, in Holtsclaw's words, \"a primary target at the speed of approximately 1200 knots converging with TWA 800, during the climb out phase of TWA 800.\"\n\n\"Target\" was controller-speak for \"unknown object.\" That first night a missile strike seemed the obvious cause of the plane's demise. MSNBC, on the air for just two days, had secured an amateur video showing an object approaching the plane. Russell saw the video several times before it was pulled. Although the government and the media would scramble to change the storyline, CNN was still reporting on July 19 that \"radar records reviewed by military officials showed a mystery blip in the vicinity of the TWA flight path.\"\n\nThose officials had reason to be concerned. CNN's Negroni provided the most detailed account of this radar data in her book _Deadly Departure_. This account has added value in that it represents what attorneys call an \"admission against interest.\" Negroni's primary source was Ron Schleede, then a deputy director of aviation safety at the NTSB. On the morning after the crash, July 18, an FAA official showed him a radar plot that got his complete attention. \"Holy Christ, it looks bad,\" he said at the time. He told Negroni, \"It showed this track that suggested something fast made a turn and took the airplane.\" This was the same track that alarmed Holtsclaw and the air traffic controller who tipped him off. That same morning, said Schleede, \"The FAA was working with people at the top secret level. They were in a crisis room with intelligence people and everybody else.\"\n\nDuring their phone conversation, Russell wrote down what Holtsclaw had to tell him verbatim. Russell had no trouble believing it. He had been suspicious since Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon first announced the crash. Russell had been around long enough to know that civilian plane crashes were not the natural bailiwick of the Defense Department. Russell e-mailed Holtsclaw's highly specific message to eleven confidantes who shared his interest in air safety. The gist of the e-mail was that \"TWA Flight 800 was shot down by a U.S. Navy guided missile ship which was in area W-105.\" Wrote Russell, \"It has been a cover-up from the word go.\" Although recipients had vowed to keep the information among them, one of them posted the information on the Internet, and it somehow found its way through French intelligence and on to Pierre Salinger.\n\nAt the time, Salinger was working in Paris where the interest in TWA 800 remained high. Thirty-six French citizens died in the crash. Salinger called Russell about the rumors and visited him in Florida soon afterwards. In addition to the information Russell and his colleagues had been sharing, Salinger had with him several government dispatches that reinforced the theory that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down the 747. As to Salinger's motives, Russell believes that he seriously disliked the Clintons. He remained a loyal enough Democrat, however, to sit on his information until it lost its political punch. He broke his silence at an aviation conference in the French resort city of Cannes two days after the November 4 presidential election. There, Salinger told the assembled executives that he had \"very important details that show the plane was brought down by a U.S. Navy missile.\" He added the obvious: \"If the news came out that an American naval ship shot down that plane it would be something that would make the public very very unhappy and could have an effect on the election.\"\n\nAmerican authorities did not care what role Salinger had played in Camelot. They were quick to swat him out of the Kennedy pantheon. The FBI, the White House, the Navy all took a shot. Salinger was unready for the assault. The documents he had were sketchy, and his knowledge base was shallow. The media found the subject irresistible. In the month of November 1996 alone, the _New York Times_ ran four articles with headlines that mocked Salinger. George Johnson was particularly merciless. \"It was all linked to Whitewater,\" Johnson wrote, \"unless the missile was meant for a visiting U.F.O.?\" Johnson's reference to \"Whitewater\" was not uncommon. He made slighting allusions as well to Waco, Ruby Ridge, Arkansas state troopers, Vincent Foster, and other sources of amusement in Clinton-era newsrooms. What Johnson was attempting to do, and he was hardly unique in so doing, was to paint TWA 800 as one wacky anti-Clinton conspiracy out of many. What he did not do\u2014no one at the _Times_ did after the first two days\u2014was speak to any of the 258 FBI witnesses to a likely missile strike.\n\nAt the time, I must confess to having enjoyed the attacks on Salinger. It was not that I trusted the Clintons. I did not, but like many Americans, I trusted the U.S. Navy or certainly wanted to. Salinger's accusations seemed not just wrongheaded. To me, they seemed borderline treasonous.\nChapter: FOUR\n\nTHE VIDEO\n\n**W** e called our documentary _Silenced_. It opened with a relevant quote from Thomas Jefferson: \"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.\" The problem we faced, the problem Whittaker Chambers faced, was a problem even our founders faced. This was a problem rooted deep in human nature: the temptation to _not_ know, to remain ignorant even in the face of evil\u2014especially in the face of evil. As I was learning, the magnitude of the TWA 800 deception helped protect it. Skeptical as I was of the administration's good intentions, even I had a hard time believing that its minions could execute such spectacular legerdemain. Skepticism made sense. We made _Silenced_ to help overcome it. An honest recounting of known facts might not stir the best people from their slumber, but it just might rouse the \"great body of the nation\" to ask questions.\n\nHere is what we knew for sure in the spring of 2001 and shared in _Silenced_. At 8:19 p.m., on a pleasantly cool evening, TWA Flight 800 left JFK Airport in New York with 230 people on board bound for Paris. The 747 headed east in fair skies along the affluent south coast of Long Island. Twelve minutes into this so-far uneventful flight, witnesses along the coast began to notice inexplicable phenomena in the sky. Mike Wire, working on a Westhampton bridge, watched as a flaming streak of light rose up from behind a beach house and zigzagged south-southeast away from shore. Senior Navy NCO Dwight Brumley saw another streak from his window seat thousands of feet above TWA 800 on US Air Flight 217. This second streak rose up towards his plane before leveling off and heading north towards Long Island on a course perpendicular to TWA 800's. Engineer Paul Angelides tracked the southbound streak from his Westhampton deck and then watched in awe as the northbound streak rose off the horizon.\n\nAt 8:31 p.m., Wire, Brumley, Angelides and hundreds of others, perhaps thousands, watched helplessly as TWA 800 exploded in mid-air. Air National Guard pilot Major Fritz Meyer had little doubt what caused the plane to explode. \"It was definitely a rocket motor,\" he said. \"What I saw explode was definitely ordnance. I have enough experience. I saw one, two, three, four explosions before the fireball.\" No one was in a better position to see. Meyer was in a helicopter over the Long Island shore facing southbound.\n\n\"The plane broke jaggedly in the sky,\" said witness Lisa Perry. \"The nose is continuing to go forward; the left wing is gliding off in its own direction, drifting in an arc gracefully down; the right wing and passenger window are doing the same in their direction out to the right; and the tail with its fireball leaps up and then promptly falls into the water below.\"\n\nIn the course of _Silenced_ , we told in brief the story of James and Elizabeth Sanders. We delved into the radar data, the physical evidence, the debris field, the rocket residue, the flight data recorder, the cockpit voice recorder, the characteristics of Jet A fuel, and other technical information. Without question, the most compelling part of the video was the eyewitness testimony. No network had ever interviewed Mike Wire, Lisa Perry, Paul Angelides, Dwight Brumley, or Major Fritz Meyer. Ten years after the disaster, CNN's Internet-basher Jeffrey Reid did not even know they existed. Those who watched _Silenced_ were finally able to compare the credibility of the witnesses to that of the government officials tasked with discrediting them. To the dispassionate observer, it was no contest. The witnesses knew what they saw. Despite all the incentives not to, they continued to plead their case and go public with their dissent. We paid no one for his or her testimony.\n\nTo make its \"no physical evidence\" alibi stick, the administration somehow had to trivialize the witness testimony. Recently discovered CIA memos show the CIA got the assignment immediately after the crash. The agency's quiet work behind the scenes culminated in the public premiere of an animated video in November 1997. The FBI showed the video during a news conference announcing the suspension of its criminal probe. Although the networks would never air the video again, we got hold of a copy and included relevant sections of it in _Silenced_.\n\n\"The following program was produced by the Central Intelligence Agency.\" So began the narration of what has come to be called the zoom climb video. The narrator explained that there were three major theories as to what destroyed TWA 800: bomb, missile, or mechanical failure. What concerned investigators, however, were reports \"from dozens of eyewitnesses\" who had allegedly seen objects in the sky before the explosion. \"Was it a missile?\" asked the narrator. \"Did foreign terrorists destroy the aircraft?\" Of course not. \"What the witnesses saw,\" the narrator reassured the media, \"was a Boeing 747 in various stages of crippled flight.\" After some thoroughly confusing misdirection about sound analysis, the narrator weighed in with his money quote, underlined on screen in case someone might miss the point, \"The Eyewitnesses Did Not See a Missile.\"\n\nAs to what the witnesses did see, the CIA and other agencies involved could never get their stories quite straight. This was evident on the very day of the video's premiere and would become problematic as the investigation ground on. The narrator talked of \"a trailing cascade of flames\" falling to the horizon, and the video showed as much. The FBI claimed this was the image that confused the witnesses. \"What some people thought was a missile hitting the plane was actually burning, leaking fuel from the jet after the front part had already broken off,\" reported CNN, paraphrasing the FBI.\n\nThe CIA narrator, however, said something quite different. \"Just after the aircraft exploded,\" he insisted, \"it pitched up abruptly and climbed several thousand feet from its last recorded altitude of about 13,800 feet to a maximum altitude of about 17,000 feet.\" The animation showed the plane doing just that. As the narrator explained, when the nose of the plane broke off, the sudden loss of mass caused the plane to turn up and climb. This rocketing, noseless 747 was what witnesses \"repeatedly described as an ascending white light resembling a flare or firework.\"\n\nAs we noted in _Silenced_ , the CIA explanation mystified not only the eyewitnesses, but also the aviation experts. Among those we interviewed on camera was Dick Russell's friend and mentor, Ray Lahr. A retired United Airlines pilot, Lahr enlisted in the U.S. Navy right out of high school in 1943. He was still in training when the war ended, but he elected to get his commission and remain in the reserves. In 1953, he began his career as a pilot with United Airlines and remained with the company until his retirement in 1985. While still with United, he pursued advanced studies at UCLA in gravity, a field that Lahr describes as \"the love of my life.\" In addition, he worked with the Airline Pilots Association (ALPA) as an accident investigator. Given his background, no one in America was better positioned to critique the CIA zoom climb than Lahr.\n\nLahr is an American original. He has since become a good friend. At the time of our interview he was seventy-five years old. With his close-cropped dark hair and compact, athletic build, he looked twenty years younger. He still does. \"All the pilots that I've spoken to think it's ridiculous,\" Lahr said of the zoom climb. He argued that when the nose left the aircraft, the center of gravity moved \"aft,\" to the rear of the plane. \"The tail section fell backward,\" witness Lisa Perry told the FBI. Lahr described the phenomenon as \"putting two people on one side of teeter totter.\" He added, \"The plane would not have any opportunity to climb.\" It would be so out of balance, he argued, that it \"would immediately stall and fall out of the sky.\"\n\nThe most formidable of the zoom climb's critics to appear in _Silenced_ was Bill Donaldson. As a twenty-five-year Navy carrier pilot, Donaldson flew more than seventy strike missions over North Vietnam and Laos. Retired at the time of TWA 800's destruction, Donaldson wrote a letter to the _Wall Street Journal_ critical of the investigation in 1997. That letter led to the formation of a high-level group of TWA 800 dissenters known as the Associated Retired Aviation Professionals, which he headed.\n\nIn high school, Donaldson had been an all-state football player, and in his mid-fifties, he still looked the part. When he spoke, people listened. The fact that he had investigated a dozen aviation accidents during his tenure with the Navy added to his natural air of authority. Tragically, while we were putting together our video, Donaldson was suffering from a fatal brain tumor. He died at fifty-six, just weeks before 9\/11. Although I had never met Donaldson, I spoke with him about the crash and watched clips of his public presentations that we included in _Silenced_. \"Once it goes beyond twenty degrees nose up,\" said Donaldson of the aircraft in one dramatic show-and-tell, \"it can't fly anymore because these wings are no longer into the wind. They can't produce lift.\" There was, in fact, a certain force that caused the plane to fall out of sky, Donaldson deadpanned. \"It's called gravity.\"\nChapter: FIVE\n\nTHE MAN ON THE BRIDGE\n\n**T** he CIA analysts never interviewed Mike Wire, the fellow who saw the incident from a bridge in Westhampton. One would think they might have, given that they built their animation around his perspective. We interviewed Wire, and we did so on the bridge in question. This no-nonsense, six-foot, seven-inch millwright told us and showed us what he told the FBI five years earlier. In _Silenced_ , we created our own animation of what he had actually seen.\n\nOn that fateful evening, Wire was working late with several engineers and electricians to open a new bridge on Beach Lane. It now spans the Quantuck Canal that separates the mainland from the pricey spit of a beach beyond. Wire's job put him in the windowless switchgear room at the base of the bridge. Needing a breather, he surfaced at about 8:30 and leaned out casually over the rail with his eye on the dunes and beach houses beyond. From this vantage point, he saw\u2014and felt\u2014events unfold.\n\nSoon after the event, Wire returned to his Richboro, Pennsylvania, home. Alerted to what Wire had seen by a co-worker, FBI agent Daniel Kilcullen called Wire on July 23. The brief conversation convinced Kilcullen that Wire deserved an interview. On July 29, agent Andrew Lash showed up _chez_ Wire, and Wire told his story. At the time, he had no idea that hundreds of others had seen what he had seen. After his interview, Wire returned to work and gave the incident little thought. He did not pay much attention to the news accounts until November 18, 1997, the day the FBI wrapped up its investigation. After seeing an abbreviated version of the CIA video on the news, he presumed it to be \"some temporary scheme to pacify the public.\" He did not learn of his starring role in the complete video until AIM's Reed Irvine found him in the spring of 2000. An Army vet, Wire was about to get a fresh look at the way the government worked.\n\nWire was an \"excellent eyewitness,\" claimed the narrator of the CIA video. He watched a white light travel upwards. \"It zigzagged\" as it rose. And at the apex of its travel, it \"arched over and disappeared.\" In the video, while the narrator was saying these words, the viewer was watching a flaming TWA 800 zoom up and arch over. \"So the white light the eyewitness described,\" concluded the narrator, \"probably was the aircraft briefly ascending and arching over after it exploded, rather than a missile attacking the aircraft.\"\n\nBy the time we interviewed Wire in the spring of 2001, we had access to some eye-opening documents. One was Wire's original FBI 302 from July 29, 1996. In it, FBI agent Lash reported faithfully, if a bit sloppily, what Wire told him.\n\nWire saw a white light that was traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40 degree angle. Wire described the white light as a light that sparkled and thought it was some type of fireworks. Wire stated that the white light \"zigzagged\" as it traveled upwards, and at the apex of its travel the white light \"arched over\" and disappeared from Wire's view. . . . Wire stated the white light traveled outwards from the beach in a south-southeasterly direction.\n\nSeconds after the light disappeared, Wire reported seeing \"an orange light that appeared to be a fireball.\" The fireball fell from the sky at approximately a thirty-degree angle and \"left a fire trail burning behind it.\" Only \"after\" the fireball descended behind the houses on the beach, did Wire hear the first of four explosions. The first was the loudest, and it shook the bridge sufficiently that the other workers came running out of the switchgear room to see what was going on.\n\nOne highly useful document clarifies how Wire found himself center stage in this drama. I refer here to the word-for-word transcript of a meeting between the NTSB's witness group and the CIA analysts responsible for the video. To read the document is to understand the thoroughly corrupting role the CIA played in the investigation. The meeting took place in the fifth floor boardroom of the NTSB offices in Washington. Representing the CIA were the unnamed deputy director of the Office of Transnational Issues (OTI) and the two analysts who did the work on the video, also unnamed. \"Analyst 1\" was almost assuredly Randolph Tauss, a senior weapons analyst in the Directorate of Intelligence who would later take credit for his efforts on the case. At the table for the NTSB were managers Bernard Loeb and David Mayer as well as five industry members of the NTSB witness group.\n\nThe two members of that group who offered any real challenge to the CIA were J. Dennis Rodrigues, an air safety accident investigator for Boeing, and Bob Young, director of Flight Safety for TWA. One of the objections I have heard as to why there could not have been a cover-up goes something like this: \"Are you telling me that the hundreds of people who worked on this investigation conspired to corrupt it?\" No, that is not the way conspiracies unfold. After the crash, thousands of workers made a great, good faith effort to redeem the bodies, retrieve the wreckage, and search for answers. Few of those, however, were allowed to see beyond their immediate assignments. And fewer still had access to the big picture. On April 30, 1999, Rodrigues and Young got a glimpse of that picture. With no support from their superiors\u2014Mayer, in fact, had been quietly working with the CIA\u2014they pursued the truth in an environment rich with intimidation. To date their efforts have come to naught, but they did succeed in exposing a major plot twist in the CIA's knowing rewrite of aviation history.\n\nThe NTSB made the report public in April 2000, a year after the meeting and four months before the final NTSB hearing in August. There was a Pulitzer waiting for the journalist who read it, dissected it, and pursued it. As far as I can tell, no one seems to have bothered. In my experience, and more on this later, journalists rarely explore material if they fear\u2014or their superiors fear\u2014the implications of their research. For ideological reasons, that fear factor seems to intensify in presidential election years. For all the power of the Internet, independent investigators cannot get agency honchos to answer their phone calls. To this day, only the major media have this power. Indeed, were it not for the _Washington Post_ , the word \"Watergate\" would have little meaning beyond D.C.'s real estate community.\n\nThis gathering was held in April 1999. Incredibly, it had taken the NTSB a year and a half to set up a meeting with the CIA analysts who were doing a job that its own staffers should have been doing from day one of the investigation. It was decided early in the two-hour meeting to allow the NTSB reps to set the agenda. Analyst 1 answered almost all of their questions. As the analyst explained, the FBI originally provided the CIA with thirty or forty witness summaries, ostensibly to help determine whether there was any evidence of terrorism. Over the next ten months, the FBI provided the CIA with more than two hundred additional 302s.\n\nTo say the least, the 302s lacked precision. The FBI agents had little, if any, aviation experience. And unless accompanied by representatives from Suffolk County or the Defense Intelligence Agency, they had no instruments with which to gauge position. The CIA analysts had no relevant experience either. Nor did they interview any of the eyewitnesses. Working with about one-third of the 302s, the analysts somehow concluded that the witnesses had deceived themselves into thinking they saw something that they hadn't. They came to this conclusion, said Analyst 1, \"late on December 30, 1996.\" As shall be seen, these analysts used gratuitously specific details for a reason.\n\nThe NTSB's Young had questions. \"CIA Analyst #1, we've had access to 755 witness statements versus your 244.\" The analyst could only answer, \"Right.\" He offered no explanation. More troubling than this disparity was the fact the NTSB witness group did not get to see the eyewitness summaries until more than two years after the CIA had. \"We only read these in the last few months,\" said Rodrigues, \"long after the video came out.\"\n\nYoung and Rodrigues sensed that the die had been cast. Although legally charged with responsibility for domestic airline crashes, the NTSB had yielded its authority to the FBI, and the FBI passed it on to the CIA. Their superiors allowed this to happen. The meeting that they and their more responsible colleagues had been demanding for months, if not years, was something of a dumb show. Still, they persisted. \"The video shows, or the video in effect says,\" asked Rodrigues skeptically, \"that what the eyewitnesses saw was the crippled airplane, after the nose comes off, climbing.\" Said Analyst 1 in response, \"That is something that a few eyewitnesses saw. The guy on the bridge saw that.\" Rodrigues sighed in frustration, \"If it's only one or two of them, it's not representative of all of them.\" Seemingly cornered, Analyst 1 improvised a response, \"Let me say something else about this eyewitness [Wire] because I think this is interesting\":\n\nHe was an important eyewitness to us. _And we asked the FBI to talk to him again_ , _and they did_. In his original description, he thought he had seen a firework and that perhaps that firework had originated on the beach behind the house. We went to that location and realized that if he was only seeing the airplane, that he would not see a light appear from behind the rooftop of that house. The light would actually appear in the sky. It's high enough in the sky that that would have to happen.\n\nWhen he was reinterviewed, he said that is indeed what happened. The light did appear in the sky. Now, when the FBI told us that, we got even more comfortable with our theory. He also described, he was asked to describe how high in the sky above the house he thought that light appeared, and he said it was as if\u2014if you imagine a flag pole on top of the house it would be as if it were on the top or the tip of the flag pole. [Emphasis added.]\n\nIf nothing else, one has to admire the CIA analysts' nerve. They built their animation around Wire's perspective in Westhampton, but in building it they took total liberty with his original testimony. In his July 1996 FBI 302, Wire reported a \"40 degree\" climb. In the CIA, animation, however, the noseless TWA 800 climbs at a seventy-degree angle or more. Wire spoke of an object zigzagging \"outward from the beach.\" The animation shows an object ascending briefly in a two-dimensional plane far from shore. Of most importance, Wire claimed that the object ascended \"skyward from the ground.\" The CIA analysts could not live with this. In their animation, the object first appears about twenty degrees above the horizon almost exactly where TWA 800 would have been when blown out of the sky. If nervy, the analysts were often careless. In the animation, the narrator echoes Wire's claim that the object \"zigzagged\" as it rose even while the object on screen ascends without hint of a wiggle.\n\nThe astute reader may know where this is heading. As with Witness 73, there was no second interview. The FBI talked to Wire on July 29, 1996, and never talked to him again. Analyst 1, who artfully adlibbed his way through the two-hour meeting, may well have concocted this interview on the fly. With Witness 73 at least there was a second 302 in the NTSB docket. For Wire there was none. The NTSB sustained this charade in its final August 2000 report. The report specifically referenced the July 29, 1996, in-person interview, and then spoke of how Wire changed his story in \"subsequent interviews,\" plural, with no date or agency attached to any of them.\n\nIn the years since, I have gotten to know Mike and his wife Joan well. He is a stalwart guy and a great patriot. He worked extensively in lower Manhattan on wreckage removal after the World Trade Center attack and suffered severe health problems as a result. He accepted that risk as part of his responsibility. But he couldn't accept the passivity of the media in the face of so transparent a fraud.\n\nThe man-on-the-bridge ruse was not the only one Young and Rodrigues exposed during their much-delayed interview with the CIA analysts. They had issues with sound as well as sight, particularly Wire's claim that a sound wave shook this seventy-ton bridge eleven miles from TWA 800. \"The problem I'm having a little bit,\" Rodrigues asked the analysts, \"is that the center tank explosion is categorized as a low order explosion.\" Unwilling to defend the notion that a low-order explosion at that distance\u2014or any distance\u2014could have shaken the bridge, Analyst 1 argued instead that an explosion of a missile warhead was \"not nearly loud enough to do that sort of thing.\"\n\nAlthough Young and Rodrigues were willing to challenge the CIA analysts, they seemed unwilling to offer the obvious alternative thesis, namely that a missile or missiles had generated a sonic boom. In late January 2016, for instance, residents up and down the coasts of Long Island and New Jersey reported what they thought was an earthquake only to be told that \"Naval aircraft testing over the Atlantic Ocean\" had caused a series of sonic booms. If there were missiles involved in the 2016 test, authorities were mum. Young was not prepared to talk about missiles either. He offered defensively, \"I don't see how we can get a center tank to make that sound.\" When no one picked up this train of thought, Young's superiors, Loeb and Mayer, allowed the conversation to drift away.\n\nA third issue involved Eastwind Airlines pilot, David McClaine. On the night in question, McClaine was flying from Boston to Trenton, New Jersey. He had just descended to 16,000 feet when he watched TWA 800 explode right in front of him. Later that night, when he returned home to the Charlotte area, he wrote a report of what he had seen and submitted it to Eastwind Airlines. The next day, July 18, a female FBI agent interviewed him at his home for about an hour. Another agent called him at home later that evening and confirmed the details of the interview. \"I don't think they had any aviation experience,\" McClaine would later tell the NTSB. Much later.\n\nNTSB witness group members did not interview McClaine until March 25, 1999, nearly three years after the disaster and a month before their interview with the CIA. This was shocking, appalling really. Until that time, NTSB group members had not seen the incident report McClaine submitted to his employer late on July 17, had not seen the FBI 302 on McClaine, and were unaware that he had already given several media interviews explaining what he had seen. In October 1997, David Hendrix, who helped break the Sanderses' story for the Riverside _Press_ - _Enterprise_ , reported in some detail what McClaine had witnessed a month before the CIA premiered its notorious video. Had official Washington been aware of McClaine's testimony before the premiere of the video, the FBI might have hesitated to show it.\n\nIn this instance, as in so many others, it is hard to tell where incompetence left off, and intrigue began. Again, only Young and Rodrigues tried to straighten out the record. McClaine obliged them. As always, he was open and forthcoming. While descending into Trenton, he had his eye on TWA 800 for some five minutes. \"Boy, did he have a pair of landing lights,\" he told his interrogators. It was their brightness that attracted his attention. He saw no missile approach the plane, but as he explained, \"The fuselage and the wing could have blocked that out.\" Besides, he occasionally looked at his instrument panel and away from TWA 800. When the Eastwind plane reached 16,000 feet, McClaine flipped on his landing lights to alert the TWA 800 captain to his proximity. Just at that moment, the 747 exploded right in his face. \"It all ended right there,\" said McClaine. \"And everything went down.\"\n\n\"Was there any flaming object that climbed to your altitude, 16 [thousand feet] or more?\" asked Rodrigues. \"Not that I could see,\" answered McClaine. \"You didn't see any structure or anything else zoom up 1,000, 1,500, 3,000 feet?\" asked Young. \"No,\" said McClaine unequivocally. When asked about the CIA video, McClaine volunteered, \"I didn't see [TWA 800] pitch up, no. Everything ended right there at the explosion, as far as I'm concerned.\" With the wings and nose blown off, he could not imagine the aircraft \"pushing against the wind\" and zooming upwards. \"I didn't see that happen.\" Young knew it could not have happened. Said he, \"We'd be cutting new trails in aerodynamics if we could do that.\" No one in the room dissented. Even before their interview a month later with the CIA analysts, the NTSB witness group members all knew their zoom climb scenario was a crock.\n\nDuring that April 1999 CIA interview, Young recounted the interview with McClaine in some detail. \"If [TWA 800] had ascended,\" said Young, \"certainly he would have been concerned because it would have ascended right through his altitude.\" In his response, Analyst 1 unthinkingly referred to the CIA's \"analysis of the 302 information.\" He and his partner had read McClaine's 302 before they made the video. They knew what he had seen. Analyst 1 tried to squirm out of this logical black hole, but Young kept coming back to it.\n\n\"He never saw any ascension,\" said Young. Analyst 1 stalled for time. \"It was my understanding, based on the 302 information we had,\" he bluffed, \"that the pilot never reported seeing the plane. He only saw a light.\" At this point, the newly appointed head of NTSB witness group, David Mayer, intervened to protect the CIA thesis. Unknown to the other members of the witness group, the crafty Mayer had been \"working closely\" with the lead CIA analyst for the previous sixteen months. CIA head George Tenet admitted as much to the NTSB's Jim Hall in a March 1999 letter.\n\nThere was much going on that investigators working with the NTSB did not know about, and the CIA preferred to keep it that way. In that same letter to Hall, Tenet expressed his wish \"that the briefing will be in a closed session, that no transcript will be made of CIA's presentation and that appropriate safeguards will be made to protect any extraneous CIA and FBI interests.\" Before the NTSB closed its case and even after, Mayer would go to great lengths to protect \"CIA and FBI interests.\" In this kind of environment, national interests did not stand a chance.\n\nInexplicably, in 2008, the CIA's Randolph Tauss went public with an authorized explanation for the agency's involvement. According to Tauss, the FBI immediately requested CIA assistance given \"the possibility that international terrorists may have been involved.\" Tauss claimed the agency responded to the FBI's request for help less than twenty-four hours after the plane's destruction and cited Executive Order 12333 as justification. A clause in that order authorizes the CIA to \"conduct counterintelligence activities outside the United States and, without assuming or performing any internal security functions, conduct counterintelligence activities within the United States in coordination with the FBI.\" When President Ronald Reagan signed this order in 1981, he likely did not think \"counterintelligence\" would include the making of cartoons to discredit citizen testimony.\n\nThere is something fishy about all of this. In the FBI's case-closing press conference from November 1997, Kallstrom said the FBI \"looked throughout the government\" to find the experts best able to answer the question, \"What did the eyewitnesses see?\" Kallstrom appears to have echoed a talking point on this subject prepared for him by the CIA immediately before this press conference. The relevant CIA memo reads as follows, \"The FBI requested CIA technical assistance in analyzing more than 200 eyewitness reports to determine what those eyewitnesses saw.\"\n\nIn fact, however, the people with the \"best expertise\" were on the ground in Long Island helping the FBI interview eyewitnesses in the first weeks of the investigation. These were the representatives from the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC) in Alabama, a subset of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Missiles were their business. Counterintelligence was the CIA's. The shift in the CIA's mission from hunting \"international terrorists\" to providing \"technical assistance\" on witness observations took place fully off camera. The fact that the FBI fed the CIA the witness statements so slowly and incompletely suggests the agency's help was not welcome. Once empowered, however, the CIA analysts bullied the MSIC reps and the FBI into accepting the CIA's counterfeit thesis. \"We found the talent we were looking for in the CIA,\" said Kallstrom in closing the criminal investigation. By that time, he was too compromised to say otherwise.\n\nWitness 649, Joseph Delgado, was one of many witnesses to provide the FBI with a detailed drawing. He saw the missile rise from behind a tree line and make \"a dramatic correction\" to strike TWA 800. The missile trajectory he saw closely resembled one captured on video five days earlier during an apparent missile test. _Federal Bureau of Investigation_\nChapter: SIX\n\nINTELLIGENCE MEDAL OF MERIT\n\n**Q** uietly, after the media lost interest in TWA 800, the CIA awarded Randolph Tauss its Intelligence Medal of Merit, an award given \"for performance of especially meritorious service or for achievement conspicuously above normal duties.\" In a perverse way, Tauss deserved it. More through chutzpah than hard evidence, he and his colleagues managed to convince all relevant parties that nearly three hundred good citizens\u2014pilots, surfers, fishermen, boaters, National Guard officers\u2014could not tell up from down.\n\nTo communicate the depth of the CIA's deception, I have condensed the 302s of the most observant of the witnesses. The FBI gathered this information in the first few weeks of the investigation and shared many of the best 302s with the CIA. The Suffolk County Police, the MSIC reps, and the FBI re-interviewed several of these people. The nearly seven hundred other witnesses did not see something different from what these people saw. They saw something less, usually just a final spectacular explosion and\/or the descent of the wreckage into the sea. I beg the reader's patience if this exercise seems a bit repetitive. It is important to understand just how much solid, consistent testimony the authorities chose to distort or ignore.\n\nFive days after TWA 800's destruction, Witness 82 told two Suffolk County PD detectives that she was sitting at Smith's Point Beach when she \"saw a flare shoot from the water\" and fly upwards in a \"concave arc.\" As the woman reported, the flare had a pink flame that turned orange as it ascended and was followed by a \"thin black smoke trail.\" She watched the object for about five seconds before \"it turned into a large ball of orange fire.\" She did not see the fireball fall to the surface or \"hear any sound.\"\n\nWitness 88 was fishing with friends in Moriches Inlet facing south out over the ocean. Before he saw anything, he heard an explosion. He then saw to the southeast what looked like a \"firework ascending.\" The object left \"a wispy white smoke trail.\" At the peak of its ascent, the object, now flaming red at its tip, arced from the east to the west. He then saw an airplane come into the field of view. The bright red object \"ran into the airplane and upon doing so both exploded into a huge plume of flame.\" He believed the object hit the plane near the cockpit area. The plume of flame separated into two and \"spiraled to the ground.\" He heard no further sounds. Witness 88 shared this information with the New York State Police ten days after the crash. No one else appears to have interviewed him, but the report was included in the FBI docket.\n\nWitness 129 was fishing with a friend off a jetty in the Moriches Inlet, when he saw to his southeast a \"flare rising upwards.\" He followed it for about five seconds as it lifted from his eye level and curved southeast and slightly downward. He then saw a small flash, followed by a large explosion. A huge fireball then fell to the oceans in two pieces. Five to ten seconds after the wreckage hit the water, he heard \"a thunder or rumbling.\" Two FBI agents interviewed Witness 129 on July 19, 1996. Later that day, they interviewed him again, this time accompanied by a MSIC analyst.\n\nWitness 144, Ann DeCaro by name, was walking around the track at Mastic Beach High School with a friend when she noticed a plane, traveling west to east, the direction TWA 800 was heading. She then \"saw an object to the right with a bright orange glow with a white streak behind it.\" She described the streak as \"taking off like a rocket.\" After losing sight of it for a moment, she saw a bright orange fireball, which broke into two pieces and \"fell straight down.\" She told the FBI she heard no sound nor felt any thunder and was one of the few witnesses to insist she saw a \"missile.\"\n\nAt Bayshore, Long Island, Witness 145 was looking out the window of a friend's house when she \"saw a plane and noticed an object spiraling towards the plane.\" She described the object as having \"a glow at the end of it and a grey\/white smoke trail.\" She watched \"the object hit the plane\" but was not sure where. She did, however, \"hear a loud noise\" just as the object hit the plane. The plane then split in two and dropped to the water. A few seconds later, she told the FBI, \"she heard another explosion.\" A week later, the Suffolk County Police took GPS readings of her sighting.\n\nWitness 159 was leaving a restaurant in Quogue when \"two claps of thunder\" drew his attention. Looking to his southwest, he \"observed an orange\/white glow diminishing in size as it moved away from him.\" He described it as \"rising skyward.\" At top of its trajectory, he saw a whitish glow, heard \"more thunder\" and saw an orange ball of flames drop toward the ocean. The Suffolk County Police re-interviewed him.\n\nWitness 166, a veteran of the Polish Army with missile experience, was at a park in Lindenhurst with his wife when he \"noticed something ascending . . . like white, yellow fire, trailed by black smoke.\" He heard a \"shhh\" sound. The object arched slightly at top. He then observed an explosion. Said the FBI agent, \"After hearing news of the crash, he concluded he had seen a missile.\"\n\nWitness 174, a retired naval officer, was looking out the window of his beachfront home in Rowayton, when he \"saw a skyrocket type object streak up into the night sky from behind Sheffield Island.\" A few seconds later, \"after the skyrocket contrail disappeared,\" he saw \"a large orange fireball.\" Although the two FBI agents interviewing Witness 174 neglected to ask about sound, they did ask \"whether he may have actually seen something going down instead of up.\" Four weeks after the crash, the agents had likely gotten the hint to discourage missile talk. The naval officer did not oblige them. He \"insisted that his skyrocket went up.\"\n\nWitness 221 was sitting on the beach in Fire Island with his wife watching the surf come in. He saw a commercial jet fly by, surely TWA 800, and then \"saw a streak of light travel up from the water into the sky. [He] described the streak of light as though it was like a rocket or shooting star only going upward.\" He then heard a \"low rumbling sound\" and saw a flash of light but was not sure whether sound or light came first.\n\nWitness 233 was looking out the open window of her parked car at Patchogue Bay when she \"noticed a flare off into the distance, rising off into the air.\" She described it as \"moving steadily straight up\" and as being \"reddish orange with a short reddish-orange smoke trail.\" Like many of the other witnesses, she saw something \"brightly pulse.\" Two seconds later, \"she observed a large object seemingly stopping its forward momentum while igniting into a fireball.\" The fireball broke into two pieces and floated downward. As the FBI agent duly noted, this witness \"could not recall hearing any sound related to the incident.\"\n\nWitness 241, while walking around the track at Westhampton High School, \"observed a bright white light arching into the sky.\" At its apex, she observed \"that the light appeared to fizzle out, then moments later, a huge explosion occurred.\" The FBI agent reported that she \"did not hear any sound or explosion.\"\n\nWitness 243 was crabbing with about twenty other people on the dock at Forge River Marina in Mastic when a young boy alerted him and the others to what appeared to be \"a flare flying up into the air.\" Two days after the crash Witness 243 told the FBI, \"The flying object was relatively slow in flying up and took four or five seconds before hitting the airplane. The smoke, which trailed this object, was whitish in color and the band of smoke was narrow.\" The resulting explosion \"made no noise.\"\n\nWitness 260 and a friend were fishing at the Moriches Inlet when he saw an apparent flare rise into the sky south-southeast of his position. The witness told an FBI agent he \"watched the flare move upward in the sky to a point where the flare seemed to lose energy and arc and begin to descend.\" The witness then \"observed a fireball somewhat above where he saw the last flare.\" The agent recorded no information about sound.\n\nWitness 275 was walking to her car in East Quogue. She looked up and \"observed an orange colored 'arc' moving upward from behind the trees southwest of her home.\" The arc continued to travel upward and \"ended in a large explosion.\" Once again, the FBI agent made no reference to sound.\n\nWitness 280, sitting in his jeep with the top down in Riverhead, \"saw a red dot traveling from west to east, parallel to the horizon.\" Three or four seconds later he saw a \"bright orange explosion.\" He told the FBI, \"It was like the red object pushed whatever it hit forward, causing it to explode, and dive downward.\" The witness added that he \"never heard any sounds.\"\n\nWitness 282, a master sergeant with the New York Air National Guard, had just parachuted into his base at Gabreski Airport as part of an exercise. He was on the ground, looking south, \"when he saw what looked like a flare at about 2500 to 3,000 feet traveling from west to east. The object was orange with a pink center. It also had a very faint grayish white plume.\" The flare then \"erupted into a fireball and the fireball fell straight down and broke into two.\" Although the witness was interviewed by an NYPD detective and an FBI agent, neither appeared to inquire about sound.\n\nWitness 305 was looking out a restaurant window in Sayville when she saw a \"thin stream of orange flame, but no smoke, which traveled for about three seconds . . . until it disappeared over the horizon.\" To her, it looked like a \"firework\" that came \"straight up out of the water.\" This was immediately followed by \"a huge explosion.\" The witness told the FBI agent she \"did not hear a sound.\"\n\nWitness 324 was standing on the outside deck of the Westhampton Yacht Squadron when someone yelled, \"Look!\" He turned and \"observed a red flare arching in the sky and descending downward. As it descended downward, \"he heard a 'thump' and then there was a sudden burst of flames.\" This large body of flames split in two and descended.\n\nWitness 326 was driving westward along the Sunrise Highway when he \"saw a red glowing object ascending from the tree tops.\" The object arced from the west to the east and suddenly \"burst into a larger red glowing ball.\" He told the FBI agents he \"did not hear any sounds at all.\"\n\nWitness 332, an air traffic controller at Gabreski Airport, \"saw a flash of light\" that he initially thought was a flare or fireworks. He told the FBI, \"He heard no noise.\" He then saw a fireball that \"fell straight down\" in three pieces.\n\nWitness 358 was fishing off a boat in Moriches Inlet with friends when he saw a \"flare like object for eight to ten seconds at which time it turned into a bright yellowish orange glow.\" This glow then turned into a wide flame that fell towards the ocean in two pieces. The FBI agents do not appear to have inquired about sound.\n\nWitness 364, who had once served as the Marine Corps crew chief of a helicopter squadron, was sitting on the dock of the Bellport Yacht Club with a female friend. Looking to the southeast, he \"noticed an object rising vertically.\" It had a red glow and \"rose from the east to the west on a steep angle.\" The object took about thirty seconds to reach its zenith, then arced downwards for ten seconds, and sped off on a flat, horizontal course for about fifteen seconds. Just as he told his friend to look, the witness saw a small red explosion, followed by a \"tremendous\" bright white second explosion, which evolved into an orange-yellow ball that fell in two pieces to the sea. \"He realized he had seen two different things,\" reported the FBI, \"namely the rising 'object,' and the subsequent explosions.\" After learning of TWA 800's destruction, \"He came to the personal conclusion that what he had seen was a missile hitting the airplane.\" If this witness heard anything, the FBI did not report it. During the interview, the Suffolk County PD used GPS to plot the object's trajectory.\n\nWitnesses 385 and 386, a couple with their young children, were boating in the Moriches Inlet. They told the FBI that a bright orange-red glow \"seemed like it came off the horizon and rose slowly, weaving as it continued upward.\" It traveled diagonally at a seventy-degree angle going in a westerly direction and left a white smoke trail in its wake. It then disappeared, and a \"large oval ball of fire\" appeared just above where the object was last sighted. The two heard no sound as they watched as \"the ball of fire came straight down,\" breaking eventually into two pieces.\n\nWitnesses 394 and 395, another couple, were standing on a platform behind Westhampton when they \"saw a red dot in the sky.\" The fellow saw \"stream of white or grey smoke prior to seeing red dot.\" It looked like a flare and was moving from west to east. It soon exploded and \"came down like a curtain of flame.\" The female witness told the FBI they heard the sound of four explosions in rapid succession beginning about ten seconds after they saw the first one.\n\nThe FBI interviewed Witnesses 409 and 607, a man and wife, in July 1997. It was his second FBI interview, her first. Two agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) also interviewed the couple three days after the crash. The ATF interview and the first FBI interview in January 1997 dealt mostly with what the husband and his son saw at the crash site to which they repaired by boat after the explosion. The second FBI interview covered what they saw before the explosion. At the time, the couple and their son were standing on a dock at Great Gun Beach on what they described as a \"clear, chilly night.\" They were looking out on to the water when the wife said, \"Watch this, we're going to see fireworks.\" Her husband then \"saw a light greyish streak\/line ascending into the sky over the ocean.\" It was southeast of their location and moving from east to west. The streak disappeared, and he saw a \"bright white light\" in the sky where the streak had ended. A second explosion followed, bright orange in color. The flaming debris broke into two pieces and fell to the sea. The couple \"never heard an explosion.\"\n\nIn July 1996, Witness 484 told the FBI she was sitting on a neighbor's dock in Shirley when she saw \"a streak rising into the sky at an angle curving a little to the west.\" She then saw an explosion that sounded like a \"loud firework.\" In July 1997, this witness gave a more detailed account to the FBI. The ascending object reminded her of \"a lighted match head, blue and orange in color . . . brighter at its head and faded toward its tail.\" She watched it for roughly ten seconds \"traveling in an arc from her lower right to her upper left.\" The object disappeared for a moment, and soon after she witnessed a large explosion, the mass of which separated into two flaming pieces that fell to the sea. In this interview she claimed to have heard no sounds emanating from the event. As was the norm with these second interviews, the FBI questioned her about her eyesight and her drinking and concluded, \"She was not under the influence of any substance on July 17, 1996.\" As was the norm as well, the FBI relied on the witness's gesticulations with her arms and thumbs to plot the object's trajectory.\n\nWitness 491 was fishing with some buddies off a dock in Center Moriches when he \"observed a red light moving up into the air.\" It was moving in an \"irregular type arc\" in a southeasterly direction. He followed this \"red flare\" for an estimated thirty seconds and felt it \"was trying to follow something.\" The flare then suddenly \"turned into a huge ball of flame and fell in two pieces.\" Interviewed in July 1996 by the FBI and a New York State Police investigator, the witness made no comment about sound.\n\nWitness 496, while standing on the dock in East Moriches, saw what appeared to be a flare ascending in the sky. In July 1996, she told the FBI the object was already in mid-air when she saw it. The flare had an orange tail and traveled from south to southwest. About ten seconds after she first saw the object she observed an explosion. She first realized \"a plane had exploded when she saw the plane break into two pieces as it fell straight to the ground.\" Two days after the first interview she returned to the site and helped the Suffolk County Police plot the course of what she had seen. A year later, in July 1997, the FBI interviewed Witness 496 once again. Her story did not change but for one caveat. She allegedly told the agents, \"At no time while she was witnessing the event did she identify the object as an aircraft.\" The first 302 reported otherwise. The witness also addressed the issue of sound, which did not come up in the first interview. As she told the agents, she reportedly heard a \"loud boom\" five seconds after the falling plane wreckage descended below the tree line.\n\nWitness 497 got double tapped by the FBI as well. In July 1996, he told the FBI he was sitting in his car facing south at Moriches Bay when he saw \"a red flare begin its ascent above the horizon line.\" It flew \"straight up\" for three seconds or so and terminated in a \"bright white explosion.\" He heard a \"boom,\" and after watching the flaming wreckage fall to the sea, he heard four more booms. In June 1997, the FBI interviewed him once more. This time he admitted having a couple of beers. The agents reported an additional and unlikely caveat, namely that his sight was fixed on the horizon, and he was confident the object did not originate at the water line.\n\nWitness 536 was on Ponquogue Beach with a friend and her children when she saw a \"huge flare that came up from the water.\" There was \"grey smoke and white smoke\" behind the flare and a \"bright orange glow\" at the leading edge of the smoke. After the explosion, she heard a \"deep, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom sound\" that shook the ground. In a second FBI interview in July 1997, she reiterated her story, but the agents added, in what may have been a misprint, that at the time of the incident the witness \"was under the influence of alcohol or drugs.\"\n\nWitness 550, working on a charter boat off Fire Island, was interviewed by the FBI and ATF on July 19, 1996, and by the FBI, MSIC, and Suffolk County Police Department a day later. The witness \"saw a plane coming from west to east and then what looked like a 'smaller' plane coming from the northeast on a dead course heading towards the nose of the larger plane.\" He heard a \"crackling sound\" when the two planes \"crunched up,\" then a \"poof\" followed by a \"whooshing sound.\" As he saw it, \"The larger plane blew up and became a big fireball which then broke into four pieces.\"\n\nWitness 558 was on fire duty for the Air National Guard at Gabreski Airport. As he told the FBI five days after the crash, \"He noticed a red flare or roman candle ascending [above] the tree line,\" gaining altitude and bearing in a southeasterly direction. He watched the flare ascend for as long as thirty seconds, lost it for a split second, and then observed \"a large fireball erupt in the sky\" before becoming \"a ball of fire which separated into two equally sized balls dropping from the sky with no audible sound.\" The FBI interviewed him again a day later, and his story remained the same.\n\nWitness 560 was still another of those citizens who enjoyed a second visit from the FBI. In her first interview in July 1996, she told the two agents she was sitting in her car overlooking Northwest Bay in East Hampton when she noticed a fine white line extending upwards in the sky in a north-northwesterly direction. As the trail extended upwards and began to arc, the trail began to dissipate. The thin line then turned \"bright white\" and then became \"a bright red\/orange ball of fire\" that cascaded down towards the sea. She heard no relevant sounds. In her second FBI interview in June 1997, the agents had her relating a more confusing tale. It concluded with the claim that \"she did not see anything traveling in an upward direction.\"\n\nThe FBI interviewed Witness 570 a second time as well. In July 1996, he told the agent he had been swimming at water hole in Speonk when \"he observed a reddish\/orange flare ascending in the sky.\" The apparent flare \"was followed by a white vapor trail.\" He then observed an explosion in the sky from which \"two large balls of fire\" fell to the earth. In June 1997, he repeated his story to the agents in more detail. Although largely consistent with his first interview, the agents made a point of the fact that the flare-like object \"made a sharp turn downward as if it were dropping out of the sky.\" The witness also noted \"a deep sound like thunder\" after the wreckage fell from the sky.\n\nWitness 640 was standing in the surf at Smith Point Park when \"his eye caught a jet plane, off to his left, and moving eastward.\" At the same time, the witness saw \"off to his right, a 'green flash' rising up, and going toward the plane.\" The flash was far out in the ocean and moving east as was the plane. A week after the crash, he took the FBI to the spot and showed them where he had seen what he had seen. He did not, however, track the object to the point of collision or hear anything.\n\nIn the first few weeks of the investigation, the FBI still seemed intent on gathering information about what appeared to be a missile attack. Agents were instructed to ask witnesses questions about the \"missile launch point,\" \"the color of the smoke trail,\" and \"the impact point\"\u2014at least these were some of the questions forwarded to the Florida agents interviewing Witness 32, Dwight Brumley. They never did ask Brumley these questions, but that had likely more to do with incompetence than ill intention.\n\nOn July 21, 1996, two FBI agents along with representatives from the New York State Police, the Coast Guard, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Suffolk County Police escorted Witness 648 a mile or so out into the ocean south of the Moriches Inlet. Their goal was to get perspective on what the witness and his two fishing buddies had seen four days earlier. According to the FBI, the witness kept continuously in his sights \"a faint yellow star-type object\" that moved in an east to west direction\u2014the opposite direction TWA 800 was flying\u2014before \"it banked and turned downward toward the water.\" Its glow grew more intense, producing a mushroom of white smoke and \"a rushing roar-type sound.\" At that instant, the witness \"observed a plane which separated into two flaming parts,\" one the fuselage, the other a wing, and both crashed into the water. Sufficiently alarmed, he called a \"May Day\" into the Coast Guard.\n\nOf all the witnesses, none provided the FBI with a more precise illustration of what he had seen than Witness 649. In _Silenced_ , we animated his illustration to show the sequence of events from his perspective. Although we did not know his name at the time, Joseph Delgado, a public school administrator in Suffolk County, has since gone public. The CIA's Tauss described the \"most useful reports\" as those that \"referenced identifiable landmarks.\" Delgado did just that, starting with his initial phone interview a day after the disaster.\n\n\"His point of reference on the Mill Road tree line was a telephone pole next to the yellow fire hydrant,\" the FBI reported. The reader would do well to keep this reference in mind. It will come in to play soon enough. The following day, July 19, two FBI agents visited Delgado at his home with his wife present. As he told the agents, he had just finished exercising on the track at Westhampton High School and was walking to his vehicle when he observed \"an object ascending from behind the trees.\" He described the bright white light object as \"elongated.\" More specifically, it had a reddish pink aura around it and a grey tail. It ascended vertically, moving in a \"squiggly\" pattern, and arced off to the right in a southwesterly direction.\n\nHad he not been tracking \"object number one,\" Delgado would not likely have seen \"object number two,\" which \"glittered\" with the reflection of the sun. That first object, said Delgado, \"appeared like it was going to slightly miss object number two unless it made a dramatic correction.\" This, it apparently did. Although he failed to see the actual contact, he saw a \"white puff,\" out of which emerged two objects \"that arched upward from the initial impact trailing smoke.\" These then turned into large rectangular balls of fire that descended at an angle down past the tree line. Delgado heard nothing, but he was sufficiently concerned to drive to the beach where he thought the collision might have taken place. According to the FBI report, when Delgado heard later about the destruction of TWA 800, \"He realized he had observed the entire occurrence.\" Unlike most witnesses, Delgado brought the agents to the site, and they noted again that the \"point of reference was a telephone pole next to a yellow fire hydrant located on Mill Road.\"\n\nThe authorities took Delgado's account seriously. The next day, July 20, three FBI agents, three investigators from the Suffolk County Marine Bureau (SCMB), a Suffolk County police officer, and two MSIC analysts visited the site. There, the SCMB personnel, using a GPS 45 Personal Navigator and a hand-bearing magnetic compass, tracked the paths of objects one and two. Delgado's was one of eleven witness reports that the SCMB plotted in the first two weeks after the incident. Although talk of missiles had been discouraged from day one, investigators, even those not fully in the loop, had to know that a missile or missiles had destroyed TWA 800. Indeed, they were tasked with asking questions such as, \"What did it look [like] when it impacted the aircraft? Small, single burst of fire\/sparks or multiple bursts?\"\n\nThe authorities were not through with Delgado. On May 8, 1997, two agents from the FBI and a representative from the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, interviewed Delgado at his Long island school. According to FBI notes, the China Lake rep was introduced to Delgado simply as \"a member of the Department of Defense.\" Delgado repeated his account without any seeming change other than the addition of a second \"puff\" after the collision and the use of the word \"firebox\" to describe what fell from the sky. He told his interrogators he was confident he had seen a missile strike but having heard nothing in the ten months since the incident to confirm his suspicions, he was beginning to doubt himself.\n\nThe FBI agents ran a little game on Delgado. They showed him a drawing of the incident produced by Tauss's office in the CIA and, lest he be intimidated, told him another witness had drawn it. Delgado knew what he saw, and this was not it. He told the agents the drawing was \"missing the entire first part\"\u2014that is, the ascent of the missile\u2014and he made appropriate modifications. This interview took place six weeks after the CIA's Deputy Director of Intelligence had sent the following memorandum to the FBI's Kallstrom:\n\nOur analysis demonstrates that the eyewitness sightings of greatest concern to us\u2014the ones originally interpreted to be of a possible missile attack\u2014took place after the first of several explosions aboard the aircraft . . . combined with the total absence of physical evidence of a missile attack, [this] leads CIA analysts to conclude that no such attack occurred.\n\nIn his 2008 report, Tauss described how the CIA came to this conclusion. He larded the report with enough techno-gobbledygook to mesmerize the media into inaction, but the \"crucial\" element at the heart of his analysis was \"the fact that the explosion was extraordinarily loud.\" Tauss's report left the distinct impression that sound was more important than sight. One problem, he conceded, was that the sightings were \"remarkably detailed\" and \"surprisingly consistent.\" This much was true. Another problem, one that he evaded, was the wild inconsistency in the sounds witnesses reported hearing, if they heard any sounds at all.\n\nStill, as Tauss noted, \"a few eyewitness reports proved particularly useful.\" Among the \"most valuable\" was a fellow in a beachfront condominium. According to Tauss, even though he saw nothing before the plane exploded, \"His report of loud sounds just after the fireballs hit the water made it possible to calculate the elapsed time from when the plane first exploded to when it hit the water.\" He was referring here to Witness 83. According to his FBI 302, this witness told the agents that five to ten seconds after the plane's wreckage met the horizon, he \"heard an extremely loud explosion that shook his house.\" Knowing where the plane was when it exploded and where Witness 83 was located, Tauss was able \"to calculate how long it took sound to travel from the explosion to the observer (49 seconds).\" Incredibly, Tauss used this forty-nine second differential as the basis of his \"sound-propagation analysis\" to establish that \"eyewitnesses who appeared to have seen a missile 'streak up' and cause the plane to explode could not have seen such an occurrence.\"\n\nI say \"incredibly\" because the \"man in the condominium\" was Paul Angelides, the forensic engineer who appeared in _Silenced_. As he tried to do with Delgado's drawing, Tauss edited out of Angelides's account what he witnessed before the explosion. According to his FBI 302, Angelides had seen a \"red flare\" followed by \"a thin white smoke trail.\" He tracked this object for three or four seconds before the plane exploded. According to Tauss, however, Angelides's \"observations began well after Flight 800 first exploded.\" Truth, as they say, is the first casualty of war. Tauss had no such excuse. This was peacetime. The shameless CIA analyst followed his passage on Angelides with a sentence that begins, \"Another excellent eyewitness on the land . . .\" That witness was Mike Wire, the man on the bridge.\n\nNot even knowing the role he played in the creation of the CIA zoom climb video, Angelides was appalled when he first viewed it. \"That bore no resemblance whatsoever to what I saw,\" he told us. In fact, he was so disgusted he called the FBI and insisted they come back and talk to him. His request was ignored. Wire was none too pleased either. Said he of the zoom climb video, \"When I saw the scenario I thought it was strange because it was nothing like what I observed.\" The plainspoken Meyer may have summarized the CIA scenario best: \"It was totally ludicrous.\"\n\nTauss singled out a third _Silenced_ witness for analysis. This was Witness 32, Dwight Brumley, the senior Navy NCO, who was a passenger on board US Air Flight 217. After watching a small plane fly underneath 217, Brumley, according to the FBI, \"observed a light which appeared to be a 'flare' and looked like the shooting of an unexploded firework into the air.\" The object was moving from right to left. US Air 217 was heading northeast to Providence. \"Right to left\" from Brumley's perspective meant roughly parallel to the path of 217 but on a slightly more northerly course. This was more or less perpendicular to the path of TWA 800. The flare-like object appeared to peak and head downward. Just then, Brumley saw a small explosion, followed by a large one, which turned into a \"fireball\" that fell from the sky. He estimated that this incident took place three thousand to four thousand feet below US Air 217.\n\nThis version of events did not work for Tauss. In his report, he claimed that Brumley's flare-like object first appeared just where TWA 800 was when it exploded. More troubling, he claimed the object was heading not north but east, the same direction in which TWA 800 was traveling. This lie enabled Tauss to claim that Brumley's flare \"almost certainly was Flight 800 just after it exploded, not a missile.\" The CIA video showed this sequence as Tauss described it. Brumley was not amused. \"The flight sequence shows TWA 800 in crippled flight crossing my field of view from left to right and ahead of US Air 217,\" he swore in an affidavit. \"This is not correct. At no time did I see a burning TWA 800 crossing my field of view. If anyone claims I did they are very much mistaken.\"\n\nWhat Brumley found surprising\u2014disturbing really\u2014was that no one from the CIA or the NTSB talked to him before contorting his testimony to fit the CIA scenario. A twenty-five-year Navy vet, Brumley had trained in electronic warfare and participated in various missile-firing exercises. Given his knowledge base and his perspective on the disaster, he thought he might warrant more than a forty-five-minute interview by two FBI agents who knew little about aviation. \"One of the biggest questions I have,\" said Brumley after the investigation closed, \"is why I was never contacted 'officially' by somebody with aviation experience.\" The only people who did talk to him after the initial interview were independent researchers like Commander Donaldson.\n\nLike so many other witnesses, Brumley heard no sound. Indeed, only those who had not read the witness summaries\u2014or who were complicit in the CIA's disinformation campaign\u2014could have taken the notion of \"sound propagation analysis\" seriously. In seven of the forty witness accounts summarized previously, the interviewing agents did not even bother to ask about what the witnesses heard. In another nineteen, the witnesses heard nothing at all. In only fourteen of the forty summaries did a witness admit to hearing a sound, and in only three of those did the witness report hearing, more or less, what Angelides heard. A few reported hearing a sound as the objects collided. Witness 550 described a \"crackling sound\" when the two objects \"crunched up.\" He then heard a \"poof\" followed by a \"whooshing sound.\" Several heard what Mike Wire had heard, as Witness 536 described it: an earth shaking \"deep, boom-boom-boom-boom-boom sound.\" Almost assuredly, an object breaking the sound barrier caused a sonic boom, but Tauss never entertained the possibility.\n\nThe CIA's elevation of these random aural accounts over the highly consistent visual ones had nothing to do with science and everything to do with politics. In fact, thirty-nine of these forty witnesses saw a red or orange or pink flare-like object ascending. Sixteen of the forty specified that the object was trailed by a white or grey smoke trail. Many described it as arcing or curving. Several observed the object heading westward, in the opposite direction TWA 800 was flying. A few saw the 747 before the object collided with it. Yes, virtually every one of these acknowledged seeing the \"trailing cascade of flames\" highlighted in the CIA video, but all of them, save perhaps one, saw it as a fully separate event, and all of those saw the crippled plane heading only downwards.\n\nDespite its consistency, this testimony moved Tauss not at all. In the face of all evidence to the contrary, he insisted, \"The plane had exploded before [the witness] observations began.\" This was nuts. Delgado, Wire and more than fifty others saw the object as soon as it emerged above the horizon or the tree line or house line in front of them and tracked it for any number of seconds before the initial explosion. In his 2008 report, Tauss did even not try to explain away the testimony of Witness 73, the travel agent who called me years later at my office. He couldn't. She was looking at TWA 800 as the object approached it and \"never took her eyes off the aircraft during this time.\" Her initial FBI report continued: \"At the instant the smoke trail ended at the aircraft's right wing, she heard a loud sharp noise which sounded like a firecracker had just exploded at her feet. She then observed a fire at the aircraft followed by one or two secondary explosions which had a deeper sound. She then observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back. She then observed burning pieces of debris falling from the aircraft.\"\n\nGiven the specificity of her testimony, it was no wonder Tauss and\/or his accomplices in the FBI turned her into a drunk. What they lacked in integrity, they compensated for in audacity. They blew off Witness 73 and every other witness as well. \"What [the witnesses] were seeing,\" Tauss insisted, \"was a trail of burning fuel coming from the aircraft.\" This was not, however, what the eyewitnesses were alleged to have seen in the 1997 CIA zoom climb video. The reader may recall the narrator's claim that \"just after the aircraft exploded it pitched up abruptly and climbed several thousand feet from its last recorded altitude of about 13,800 feet to a maximum altitude of about 17,000 feet\" and his subsequent assertion that \"the eyewitnesses almost certainly saw only the burning aircraft without realizing it.\" In the 2008 CIA report, there was no mention whatsoever of this hypothesis. It vanished without explanation or apology.\n\nBy the time we were ready to launch _Silenced_ in the summer of 2001, I knew most of this. I knew enough certainly to trust James Sanders more than the mainstream media. Although we chose not to discuss politics in _Silenced_ or the source of the missiles fired, I had strong suspicions about both. I still had much to learn. That would come in time.\nChapter: SEVEN\n\nTHE GOOD BUREAUCRAT\n\n**T** he editor of _Silenced_ , Kelly Creech, hoped the project would be a learning experience for me. We had worked together on any number of videos before and shared thoughts on any number of subjects. One was the Kennedy assassination. A serious student of the event, Creech bought more or less into the Oliver Stone version of a government sanctioned turkey shoot. I dissented strongly enough that Creech offered to fly me to Dallas and walk me through Dealey Plaza. I argued then, and would argue now, that conspiracies of execution are not in our national character. The widely accepted rule of law among us and the generally cautious nature of the American civil servant weigh against that possibility.\n\nConspiracies of concealment are another matter altogether. It was not hard to imagine the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover or the CIA's John McCone shuffling the paperwork to avoid blame for Lee Harvey Oswald's unsupervised presence along JFK's parade route. In a similar vein, one did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe Richard Nixon would conspire with his subordinates to conceal a screwy, ill-advised break-in of the Democratic National Headquarters, especially in an election year. In these cases, the ambition of government employees made them all the more susceptible to pressure from above. \"I was affected by how easily I said yes, sir,\" contrite Nixon aide Alex Butterfield told reporter Bob Woodward years later. \"I had seen myself and heard myself get caught up in and be anxious and ready to facilitate an abusive government.\" Access to power can be that seductive.\n\nThe CIA's role in the TWA 800 affair made sense to me. Its agents were in the business of deception. They got medals for it. I suspect that if they were asked to deceive the American people for reasons of the highest national security\u2014to avoid war, say, or to protect a secret weapons system\u2014they would have willingly obliged. Contrary to what its critics might think, the FBI is not in the business of lying. For those few in the know, the task could not have come easily. As shall be seen, at least one agent resisted.\n\nJim Kallstrom's assignment, I am convinced, scarred him for life, his bluster notwithstanding. Through some combination of carrots and sticks\u2014and more on these later\u2014the White House swayed him to its cause several weeks into the investigation. After all, the FBI did report to the Department of Justice, and, short of resigning, Kallstrom had little choice but to be a good soldier. As a young Marine platoon commander, he had served in Vietnam and fought in the grueling battle of Khe Sanh. He knew how to follow orders.\n\nMuch harder to understand was the complicity of the career professionals at the NTSB. Although founded in 1967, the agency was made fully independent in 1974. Its role was to investigate all major civilian transportation accidents in the United States and to do so without political pressure. For the first twenty-five years of its existence it did just that. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 changed the equation. In his first appointment to the NTSB Board, the relentlessly political Clinton replaced a pilot\/aeronautical engineer\/aviation lawyer with a good-old-boy Al Gore crony from Tennessee, Jim Hall. Unkindly but accurately, a _Washington Post_ columnist described Hall as \"a politically connected white male Democrat whose only transportation experience apparently is a driver's license.\" Less than a year after his appointment, Clinton appointed the feckless Hall chairman. \"I wouldn't trust Jim Hall as far as I could throw him,\" Reaganera NTSB board member Vernon Grose told me. \"He was locked up with Al Gore. I have no use for his integrity.\"\n\nAs he often did\u2014at the Department of Justice most relevantly\u2014Clinton put his go-to guy in the less scrutinized second spot. That would be Robert Francis, a tall, balding patrician from Massachusetts. \"Bob Francis,\" Pat Milton reported, \"felt responsible only to the person who had appointed him: the president of the United States.\" Francis had passed the previous nine years running the Paris office of the FAA. There, he had insinuated himself into the good graces of international courtesan and Democratic Party power broker, Pamela Churchill Harriman, Clinton's ambassador to France. In 1995, Harriman helped secure the NTSB gig for Francis. Francis would prove to be the ideal _commissaire politique_. Clinton needed one. This was the most desperate stretch of his career. Virtually every move he and Hillary made in 1995 and 1996 was political, and few moves proved as salutary as the appointment of Francis. Although board members were expected to rotate through accident assignments, vice-chairman Francis somehow managed to catch two in a row: the May 1996 ValuJet crash in Florida, from which he had just returned, and now TWA Flight 800.\n\nWhen the Department of Justice attorneys moved to take over the investigation, Francis was on the scene to let them. This move flirted with illegality. By law, the FBI could only seize control if DOJ attorneys declared the crash a crime scene, but this they did not do and never would. According to Title 49, section 1131(a)(2) of the U.S. Code, an NTSB investigation \"has priority over any investigation by another department, agency or instrumentality of the United States Government.\" If the FBI were to run a parallel investigation, the NTSB was to authorize and oversee it. The opposite happened.\n\n\"There was something rotten in Denmark, just on the timing,\" said Grose. \"The law is very clear,\" he told me. \"The invitation is exclusively limited to when criminal action is suspected. And NTSB decides that distinction\u2014not the FBI.\" In his experience, the NTSB enlisted the FBI's help if they thought there was a crime involved. He cited the October 1999 case of EgyptAir Flight 990, which crashed sixty miles south of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, killing all 217 people on board. In that instance, the NTSB called in the FBI nearly two weeks after the crash when the recovered CVR pointed to a crime. The NTSB did not follow this protocol in the TWA 800 case. \"The night of the crash,\" added Grose, who provided expert commentary for CNN into the early morning hours, \"the FBI was already in charge.\" From his perspective, to understand what happened to the investigation there is no more important problem to solve than who authorized the FBI takeover.\n\nHall and Francis yielded readily to the FBI takeover of the investigation. This was understandable. They were political people. They had their marching orders. If President Clinton lost in November, they would be out of work. A brief pep talk about national security would likely salve whatever conscience they brought to the job. Harder to understand were the motives of NTSB witness group head, Dr. David Mayer and his boss, Dr. Bernard Loeb, the head of the NTSB's Office of Aviation Safety. Nine years previously, Loeb had brought Mayer on board as a statistics and database specialist, and he had worked his way up to safety study manager by the time of the hearing.\n\nUnlike the industry members of the NTSB witness group, Mayer was a federal employee. That said, he was not a political appointee. He had nothing obvious to gain from subverting the truth. And yet he participated in the sham 2000 NTSB hearing with overt enthusiasm. Fussy and officious, he seemed to me the good bureaucrat, one whose motives would have been clear to all good bureaucrats throughout history, if no one else.\n\nThanks to the video recording of the August 2000 hearings, we were able to give Mayer a featured on-camera role in _Silenced_. As the presenter for the witness section, Mayer came on in relief to save the game the CIA had run on the American people. If he succeeded, no witness account would ever be taken seriously. This was not an easy assignment, but Mayer was clearly the man for the job. He told the board that the FBI had begun interviewing witnesses on the evening of the accident and, within a week, had contacted more than five hundred of them. This was true enough. \"During this time,\" he continued, \"safety board investigators reviewed the many witness accounts the FBI was documenting.\" This half-truth cloaked an insulting reality.\n\nTwo days after the crash, the NTSB's Bruce Magladry formed a witness group that included accident investigators from TWA, ALPA, and the FAA. On that same day, the FBI informed Magladry that no outside investigator could have any access to witness information. Two days later, Assistant United States Attorney Valerie Caproni told Magladry he could review FBI witness statements only if \"no notes [be] taken and no copies made.\" A day later, he was told he could not even take notes during an interview and could only interview a witness in the presence of an FBI agent. Two days later, he gave up and slumped back to Washington. It was hard to blame him. The restrictions rendered his task frivolous. That was not, however, how Kallstrom remembered it. \"I cannot recall telling the NTSB not to interview anybody,\" he told Megyn Kelly of Fox News in June 2013. \"They could interview whoever the hell they wanted to.\" After years of fending off accusations, Kallstrom lied even when he did not have to.\n\nNot until April 1998 did the NTSB receive the witness summaries from the FBI. The actual review began months later, now with Mayer as head of the witness group. Like the CIA's Tauss, Mayer made the case that reviewing these summaries was a \"painstaking\" task that took many months. In reality, a literate adult could read them all in an afternoon. Most are no more than a paragraph or two long.\n\nMayer endeavored to tell the board members what the witnesses, a quarter of whom were less than eleven miles away, actually observed. Some of what he said was true: only a few saw TWA 800 before it blew up; fewer still saw the nose section fall to the sea as it was not on fire; many saw what appeared to be a fireball breaking into pieces as it fell to the sea. Mayer claimed, however, that no one saw the initial explosion, which was not true. He insisted that the flaming fuselage, which looked like \"a small light or streak,\" confused witnesses into thinking they saw a missile. This was egregiously false.\n\nMayer had some explaining to do, and he knew it. By the witness group's own count, 258 witnesses reported seeing a streak of light. There was, he conceded, \"a remarkable consistency\" among them. Of those 258 witnesses, fifty-six, by Mayer's count, put his casuistry to the test. These were the witnesses like Mike Wire and Joseph Delgado, who saw the object ascend straight up from the horizon. As to why these witness accounts \"didn't seem to fit,\" Mayer offered two explanations, one more specious than the other. His best shot was to blame the FBI. Mayer admitted the agents did not record the interviews. They simply took notes, many of which were \"incomplete\" or \"vaguely worded.\" As a result, \"The documents may not always say what the witness said.\" This was true to a degree, especially in the second round of interviews in 1997. At that stage in the investigation, the agents were trying to dilute the strength of the testimony, even if it meant making a teetotaler a drinker.\n\nMayer's second rationale was more insulting than the first. This time the culprit was \"memory error.\" Mayer cited the work of a hitherto obscure psychologist, Ira Hyman of Western Washington University, to the effect that people \"combine knowledge from various sources with their own personal experience to create memory.\" Hyman's expertise was in recovered childhood memories. These fifty-six adult witnesses were telling authorities what they had seen a day or two earlier. Most gave their testimony unaware that others were giving comparable testimony. When re-interviewed, they stuck to their original stories, even after the media had ridiculed the missile theory and individuals such as Pierre Salinger who proposed it.\n\nTo make his point, Mayer walked the board through an utterly specious rendering of what Mike Wire saw from the bridge and Dwight Brumley saw from his US Air flight overhead. In each case, he either manufactured or contorted details to confirm his own \"small light or streak\" theory. Mayer then showed the results of a missile visibility test, one undertaken not to determine if a missile struck TWA 800\u2014\"We've known for a long time it wasn't\"\u2014but to show what witnesses at those distances might have seen. Not since the prosecutors dared O. J. Simpson to try on the gloves has a bit of show and tell gone so badly. Although positioned as far as sixteen miles from the launch site, \"all of the observers,\" the NTSB acknowledged, \"easily detected\" the shoulder-fired missiles used in the test.\n\nThe video of this test was priceless. We included it in _Silenced_ and compared the missile in the test to what Wire and Delgado had seen. It was a near perfect match. \"The rocket motor of the missile would be visible and it would look like a light ascending rapidly for about eight seconds,\" said Mayer. Wire used the word \"zigzag\" to describe the motion of the ascending object. Delgado used \"squiggly.\" The missile in the video confirmed their observations. It squiggled and zigzagged. Both witnesses and many others noted that the missile seemed to disappear at the peak of its ascent. Unwittingly, Mayer explained why: \"Then the motor would burn out and the light would disappear for as much as seven seconds.\" The missile used in the test was of the shoulder launch variety. A larger missile would have been more visible still.\n\nIn one of his less comprehendible moments, Mayer testified that in a \"hypothetical missile attack\" a witness would first have seen one streak of light, the hypothetical missile. Then he would have seen a second streak of light, the \"airplane in crippled flight.\" This made no sense to anyone paying attention. Mayer was suggesting that a fuel tank explosion had already crippled the plane _before_ the \"hypothetical\" missile struck. Mayer explained that since no witness saw both an ascending streak of light followed by Mayer's imagined \"crippled flight\" streak of light, they must have seen only the flaming fuselage of a crippled flight, never mind that several of the best eyewitnesses saw the missile heading in the opposite direction as TWA 800, and many more saw it ascend from the horizon. The NTSB produced its own video to show what a swooping, flaming, gently climbing plane might have looked like.\n\n\"They got smart when the CIA got laughed out of town by aviators,\" observed Commander Donaldson. \"The NTSB figured they'd get away with half of it. So they said it climbed 1,700 feet. It didn't.\" As with the CIA video, the NTSB plane streaked smoothly without the zigzags so many witnesses described. Mayer did not attempt to explain the discrepancy. There was a good deal more he chose not to explore, including the possibility that more than one missile hit the aircraft almost simultaneously and appeared, at least, to stop the 747 in its tracks.\n\nSeveral witnesses testified to this perception. One fellow, Witness 551, who was sitting behind Dwight Brumley on US Air 217, said that TWA 800 came to a virtual halt \"like a bus running into a stone wall.\" Witness 233 \"observed a large object seemingly stopping its forward momentum while igniting into a fireball.\" Witness 150, Lisa Perry, who appeared in _Silenced_ , gave very specific testimony along these lines. As the FBI reported, Perry tracked a cylindrical object moving at a high speed when she then \"noticed a large commercial airliner which appeared to be traveling at the same altitude. The object headed toward the side of the plane. She saw a puff of smoke, and then the plane simply seemed to 'just stop.'\" Fissures developed throughout the plane, and it broke like a toy. \"It was a 747, she knew, because it had a bump on the top.\" Her 302 continued, \"The front was carried forward and arced down with its momentum. The right wing seemed to stay with the front of the plane. . . . A portion of the left wing began to fall separately down, yet forward with momentum. The tail section fell backward. There was 'blackness' in the rear. All of the pieces seemed to fall 'gracefully' down and widening, leaving a cloud in the sky.\" It would take weeks of investigation before the NTSB realized how accurate was the description Perry gave within days of the crash.\n\nTo be sure, Mayer made no reference to Perry's testimony or that of Witness 73, who described the destruction of the aircraft in similar terms. He did, however, make a passing reference to Captain Christian Baur, the Air National Guard helicopter co-pilot flying with Major Fritz Meyer. In his FBI interview on July 20, 1996, Baur reported seeing a flare-like object moving from left to right, towards JFK. He saw enough of it to ask the flight engineer, \"Is that a pyro?\" Baur then saw a succession of explosions followed by a \"huge fireball.\" As he told the FBI, he first \"thought two things had flown into each other.\" Baur expanded on what he had seen during his interview with the NTSB in January 1997. \"There was an object that came from the left,\" said Baur. \"And it appeared to be like\u2014like, a white-hot. Like a pyrotechnic.\" Once it collided, or appeared to, with TWA Flight 800, said Baur, \"It was almost as if the plane dropped in its tracks. It didn't keep going.\"\n\nFor Mayer, there were two major problems with this testimony. One was Baur's contention, shared by many of the better observers, that TWA 800 seemed to halt in the sky when struck. The second was that the object Baur saw was moving from east to west. TWA 800 was moving west to east. The streak Baur witnessed could not have been the flaming fuselage of Mayer's imagination. Mayer solved this problem by discounting Baur's testimony as something of a memory trick. Apparently, in his initial debriefing right after the incident, Baur did not talk of seeing a streak. Mayer seized on this. He spoke of Baur's later testimony to the FBI and NTSB as \"an example of details being added over time.\" On night one, however, Baur had more pressing concerns, like dodging bodies as they fell from the sky and locating them for retrieval.\n\nHad Mayer paid serious attention to what Baur and Meyer said he might have solved the mystery of the plane's demise. Interviewed by the NTSB witness group the same day as Baur, Meyer told his interrogators that he saw a streak moving in a gentle arc from right to left, the _same_ direction as TWA 800. He then saw a series of hard explosions \"as opposed to soft explosion like gasoline or something.\" Only then did he see the fireball, which he described as \"definitely petroleum.\" The two pilots were not confused. They saw two different objects, one heading in a westerly direction, one east, each exploding at or near TWA 800 and blowing it climactically out of the sky\u2014no zoom climb, no gentle looping climb, no survivors.\n\nWhen Mayer finished his presentation, the folksy board chairman Jim Hall asked Mayer a series of questions. Although Hall's probe seemed genuine, Mayer's answers were likely rehearsed in advance, and many of them were untrue. \"Were your activities restricted in any way?\" Hall asked. \"No, sir,\" said Mayer. \"There were no restrictions placed on us.\" This statement makes euphemism impossible: it was pure lie. No other word suffices. The DOJ shut the NTSB witness group out of the interview process on day two of the investigation. The FBI did not even allow its members to review the 302s until well after the CIA ruled out a missile strike. For Hall, these illegal actions were minor housekeeping details. \"I want to acknowledge that normal board procedures were not followed in this investigation,\" he said, \"and we are addressing that because that, unfortunately, has added to a lot of the misconception that has been generated around this.\"\n\nHall then asked other pertinent questions: \"If you could show that the airplane did not climb after the nose departed, will that change your analysis?\" Mayer replied, \"Our analysis is not actually dependent on that.\" Lest he pull the curtain all the way back on the CIA's puppet show, Mayer claimed to \"believe\" the plane did ascend. Believe? That was not the only blow the NTSB quietly dealt to the CIA's theorizing. Mayer made no mention of the \"sound propagation analysis\" that inspired the CIA recreation. Hall addressed this as well. \"Is sound a factor in this analysis you showed us?\" he asked. \"Again, we certainly gave sound a great deal of consideration,\" Mayer answered, \"but our analysis is not based on sound so, no, sir, it's not.\"\n\nWithout calling attention to the fact, Mayer and Hall had fully subverted the FBI\/CIA analysis. Sound was irrelevant. The zoom climb was a fantasy. The witness statements were impressively consistent and might have driven the investigation if the DOJ and FBI had not illegally prevented the NTSB witness group from seeing them. The observers in the missile test all saw pretty much what the witnesses had. \"Is your analysis of the witness accounts dependent on the CIA work?\" Hall asked lamely. It was not, said Mayer: \"We were aware of their work but our work is not a derivative of theirs.\" Of course Mayer was aware. He had been working with the CIA. This I learned only recently, and it helps explain Mayer's performance. The access to power can turn a career bureaucrat's head all too easily.\n\nEven if the other board members were serious about their responsibility, they would have been hard pressed to do the right thing. The NTSB witness group had been handed a rough hewn but well accepted fraud. Once appointed to head that group, Mayer smoothed out its rough spots, surely on orders from above, but let the fraud stand. To expose it might well have caused a constitutional crisis. The nation had just survived the impeachment of its president. Who, at this stage of the TWA 800 saga, would have investigated whom? Better to congratulate Mayer for what board member George Black called his \"excellent literature review and report\" and move on.\n\nBefore letting Mayer go, Hall had one more public relations problem to solve. Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media helped organize the \"TWA 800 Eyewitness Alliance.\" A week before the hearings, its members took out a full-page ad in the _Washington Times_ boldly headlined, \"We Saw TWA Flight 800 Shot Down by Missiles And We Won't Be Silenced Any Longer.\" The ad featured the testimony of seven witnesses including Mike Wire, Dwight Brumley, Paul Angelides, Major Fritz Meyer, and Joseph Delgado. It was not easy to ignore.\n\n\"What do you think about those accounts?\" Hall asked Mayer. At this juncture, Tom Stalcup could control himself no longer. The young physicist startled the audience in the Baltimore hearing room by yelling out, \"Ask the eyewitnesses!\" As Stalcup explained to us when interviewed for _Silenced_ , there was no precedent for shutting the witnesses down like this. In place of their testimony, the NTSB satisfied itself with letting one its own officials sum up FBI reports he had already discounted as \"incomplete\" or \"vaguely worded.\" Mayer himself had spoken to none of the witnesses. An outraged Stalcup would go on to fight this battle for the next fifteen years, but he would not prevail that afternoon. Hall very civilly threatened to have Stalcup removed if he said anything else.\n\nMayer had a copy of the _Washington Times_ ad with him and breezed through the first five witness accounts with brief, specious counter claims not worth repeating. The sixth witness, William Gallagher, had earlier talked to the media about his frustration with the investigation. \"I saw something hit the right side of the plane,\" the plainspoken New Jersey fisherman told the Riverside _Press_ - _Enterprise_ in October 1997. \"My honest opinion, my gut feeling, is that we have the most brilliant people in the world and the best technology, [and] if they've been on scene for a year and they've not come up with something, as a critical thinker I have to ask, could they be covering up something?\" This was a question Mayer chose not to answer. He skipped Gallagher altogether.\n\nJoseph Delgado, the seventh of the witnesses, gave Mayer the most trouble. As Mayer acknowledged, \"Witness 649 described events that certainly do sound like a missile attacking the airplane.\" He noted too that Delgado was one of the eleven witnesses who were part of the Suffolk County Marine Bureau's line-of-sight study, chosen in no small part \"because he provided some fixed reference points.\" The reader may recall that both in his phone interview and in his on-site interview at the running track, Delgado specified a \"telephone pole next to the yellow fire hydrant.\"\n\nTo discredit Delgado, Mayer reached deep into his bag of propaganda tricks and pulled out a convincingly specific detail. \"The yellow line that's been drawn shows his line of sight between those two flagpoles,\" said Mayer of Delgado while showing a supporting graphic. He argued that Delgado was looking in the wrong direction to see Flight 800 \"when it would have been struck by a hypothetical missile.\" In making _Silenced_ , we went to a location Mayer never visited, Delgado's school track. We showed why Delgado never mentioned a flagpole, let alone two. There was none. What Delgado showed the investigators were a fire hydrant and a telephone pole. Those were his reference points. Never did he imply that all the action was contained within them.\n\nGiven the work Mayer put into this presentation, it is hard to believe this reference was a mistake. If it were, he made exactly the same mistake that the CIA analysts did in discussing the apocryphal second FBI interview with Mike Wire. According to Analyst 1, Wire recanted his earlier statement that he first saw the object as it ascended from below the rooftop. In this second interview, Wire now claimed he first saw the object \"high in the sky.\" How high? Analyst 1 had the answer: \"[Wire] said it was as if\u2014if you imagine a flag pole on top of the house. It would be as if it were on the top or the tip of the flag pole.\" The flag pole gambit apparently worked. Both times. Who, after all, would disbelieve a detail that specific?\n\nThe media should have helped the citizenry see through the smoke. They didn't. As I heard from several reporters who covered this story, the _New York Times_ owned this story. The FBI channeled virtually all new information through the _Times_ , and the _Times_ reported that information very close to uncritically. After the final FBI press conference in November 1997, for instance, the paper's opinion page editors congratulated the FBI for its \"admirable thoroughness and openness\" in an op-ed insultingly titled \"Conspiracy Inoculation.\" They were able to reach this hapless conclusion for one reason above all others: after the first day or two of the investigation, the _Times_ did not interview a single one of the 258 \"streak of light\" witnesses.\n\nIf the media had paid attention to the investigation, they would have known by the time of the final NTSB hearing that they had been played. During the previous four years, government agencies had proposed at least four distinct scenarios to explain witness testimony. None of them made sense, but all went unchallenged.\n\nThe first was the bomb scenario sold successfully to the _Times_ through August 1996. In fact, as early as July 19, the _Times_ was reporting, \"Some investigators think the most likely explanation was a terrorist or criminal bombing, a scenario apt to strike deep fear in the public.\"\n\nAs to scenario two, the zoom climb, the CIA fixed upon this curiosity almost magically on December 30, 1996. Based on their fabled \"sound propagation analysis,\" agency analysts concluded that after a spontaneous fuel tank explosion blew off the cockpit, the flaming, noseless fuselage streaked straight up more than three thousand feet. To reach this conclusion, of course, the CIA had to ignore the fact that no witness reported seeing the plane ascend, not a single one. Said Eastwind pilot David McClaine, TWA 800 \"seemed to fall straight down.\"\n\nAn alternate possibility implicit in the CIA analysis was the cascading flame scenario. At the time of the November 1997 video premiere and FBI press conference, CNN paraphrased unnamed FBI officials to the effect that \"what some witnesses thought was a missile hitting the plane was actually burning, leaking fuel from the jet after its front part had already broken off.\" By 2008, the CIA had adopted this theory as well. \"What [the witnesses] were seeing,\" analyst Tauss insisted, \"was a trail of burning fuel coming from the aircraft.\"\n\nThe fourth possibility is the one that Mayer proposed at the NTSB hearing. In this scenario, the center fuel tank exploded spontaneously but unseen. When the flames spread to the wings, the flaming fuselage, ascending gradually about 1500 feet, looked like \"a small light or streak.\"\n\nThen there is the fifth possibility, the one that Joseph Delgado, Mike Wire, William Gallagher, and scores of other savvy and responsible witnesses described in remarkably consistent detail. I refer here to the \"events\" that, in Mayer's words, \"certainly do sound like a missile attacking the airplane.\" These events include the ascending flare-like objects, the smoke trail, the zigzag, the arc, the momentary disappearance, and multiple subsequent \"bright white\" explosions, followed by a fuel-fed fireball. Every one of the best witnesses saw a glowing object ascend and then saw the flaming plane descend. Their descriptions of the falling plane are as vivid and accurate as their descriptions of the ascending object. They did not confuse the two.\n\n\"It was important for us to determine if the witness accounts were generally consistent with the physical evidence,\" said Mayer at the final NTSB hearing. As should be clear, these accounts were not consistent at all with the physical evidence the NTSB presented. By the time we had completed _Silenced_ in early summer 2001, I had every reason to trust the witnesses and none to trust the government. Officials who were willing to change witness testimony\u2014or in some cases invent it\u2014would have few qualms about editing tape, misreading data, misplacing parts, rearranging the debris field, or, if push came to shove, pulling out a hammer and bending the metal.\nChapter: EIGHT\n\nRESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM\n\n**O** n June 6, 2001, we staged a pre-screening of _Silenced_ for a tough audience, the Kansas City \"hangar\" of a semi-secret organization known as the \"Quiet Birdmen.\" At the time the QBs were meeting at the Kansas City Club, a posh gentleman's retreat in downtown Kansas City. There were close to a hundred people in attendance, the great majority of them retired airline, military, and freight pilots with a heavy TWA representation. I was a little apprehensive. Every one in the audience knew more about aviation than I did. They sat in silence through the hour-long presentation. The video concluded with our own animation, as seen from the perspective of the man on the bridge, of a two-missile strike on the doomed aircraft. We did not speculate as to the type of missile fired or the perpetrator of the attack. We focused instead on the witnesses and the corruption of their testimony.\n\nI did not know quite what to expect in the way of response, but when the lights came up, one gentleman rose angrily from his seat and shouted, \"Follow the money!\" He was a retired TWA pilot. Like many of his colleagues, he had been heavily invested in the company. He believed, as many of them did, that TWA management swallowed the government line to curry favor. At the time of this screening, the airline was in bankruptcy. It would cease to exist altogether within six months. If anyone in the room doubted that missiles had destroyed TWA 800, he kept his opinions to himself. Offered instead were corroborating details, particularly from angry TWA pilots, about the money trail and the inexplicable Pentagon visits of then TWA CEO Jeff Erickson. Said one TWA pilot: \"90 percent of us believe there was a government cover-up.\" Many traced the airline's demise to that fateful night in July 1996.\n\nOnce we started distributing the video, the response we got from people within Boeing was equally encouraging. One engineer who had spent countless hours analyzing the aircraft's destruction on the company's Cray Supercomputers e-mailed me the following: \"I brought [ _Silenced_ ] to work today and showed it during lunch to eight of my fellow Boeing workers. The room was deathly quiet the entire time. . . . My impression then was a missile strike, and it is even more so today.\"\n\nEncouraged by the reception, I sent a copy to Claudia Anderson, the managing editor of the _Weekly Standard_ , a publication I considered then and now to be the nation's smartest conservative journal. For the past few years I had been writing the occasional piece for the publication and had met Anderson during a recent visit. Not hearing back from her, I called to see if she had had a chance to watch _Silenced_. She claimed she tried but fell asleep while watching it. Taken aback, I suggested she watch it all the way through, this being the greatest untold story of our time, one with major political implications. She doubted she would.\n\nI sensed correctly that my relationship with the _Weekly Standard_ was over. Those who believe that the conservative media would jump at a story potentially damaging to the Clintons have no experience with conservative media. In Washington, at least, I had crossed the line from responsible journalist to conspiracy theorist. Peter Goelz certainly thought so. I knew Goelz from Kansas City, though not well. In a county without much in the way of Republican opposition, I did some political media for local Democrats, including future senator Claire McCaskill in her successful run for Jackson County prosecutor. Goelz worked as a Democratic consultant and lobbyist, and so our paths crossed once or twice.\n\nLocally, Goelz was best known for his lobbying work with the \"gaming\" interests that were buying their way into Missouri. They nosed their way into the state with the pitch that the gambling would be limited to actual, floating, old-timey riverboats. In practice, the \"boats\" proved no more capable of floating than the Pentagon, but this was apparently \"transportation\" expertise enough to snag Goelz the spokesman's job on Jim Hall's staff at the NTSB. Being a political supporter of the ambitious Hall probably did not hurt either.\n\nSpokesman for Jim Hall was not the job for which loyalist Goelz had been pining. His connections were strong enough that Clinton had tagged him in 1994 to head the National Indian Gaming Commission, a job rich with perks and possibilities. According to the _Washington Post_ , however, nearly all the participating tribes were \"furious\" that the White House was ramming Goelz down their throats. So too was Democratic senator Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs, who had been promised an open application process. Their collective disgust forced the White House to rethink its plans, and so Goelz ended up on Hall's NTSB staff.\n\nIn May 2001, I wrote an article in support of _Silenced_ for _Ingram_ ' _s_ , the business magazine that I served as executive editor. Goelz did not like it. In a dismissive letter to the editor in the next month's edition, he wrote, \"In the end there were no missiles, no bombs, no mystery fleet, no fleeing ships, no terrorists, no U.S. Navy involvement. It was just a tired old 747 with an empty, explosive center wing tank.\"\n\nIn October 1998, Goelz singled out ABC News correspondent Lisa Stark and producer Tina Babarovic as being \"very responsible about reporting the complexities\" of the TWA 800 crash investigation. He likely made this point not so much to praise ABC News as to intimidate ABC Entertainment. The network had recently commissioned filmmaker Oliver Stone to produce a one-hour prime-time special that would explore alternative TWA 800 scenarios. It never came to pass. According to the _New York Times_ , the network dropped plans after \"several ABC journalists\" complained that viewers might confuse the Stone project with the news, and the news people knew for a fact that the missile theories were \"groundless.\" In reporting on this conflict for the _Times_ , Lawrie Mifflin elaborated that various theories about bombs and missiles had been \"widely discredited.\" Goelz emphatically agreed, calling all such theories \"[a]bsolutely, completely groundless.\" At this time, the NTSB witness group had yet to read the eyewitness summaries, let alone come to any conclusions.\n\nIf nothing else, Goelz was skilled in turning one branch of the media against another. In August 1999, Kelly O'Meara, a reporter with _Insight_ magazine, asked Goelz for an interview. She had quietly received some new radar data from an NTSB source and wanted Goelz's take on it. Fortunately, she recorded the interview. Within an hour of its conclusion, Goelz called the _Washington Post_ 's Howard Kurtz to make a preemptive strike on O'Meara. Less than two days later, in an article thick with sarcasm, Kurtz quoted Goelz as saying, \"She really believes that the United States Navy shot this thing down and there was a fleet of warships.\" As her audiotape proved, O'Meara said or implied no such thing, but that is the way Goelz rolled, and the media rolled with him. Said former NTSB board member Vernon Grose of Goelz, \"No other NTSB Managing Director has ever given interviews or delivered opinions about accidents.\"\n\nMy turn was coming up. On July 16, 2001, I got a call from a producer at CNN asking if I would be willing to talk about TWA Flight 800 on air the following day, July 17, the fifth anniversary of the crash. Of course, I would. I would be beamed in remotely to the _The Point_ , a show hosted then by Greta Van Susteren. There was nothing tentative about the arrangement. The producer might or might not select someone to go on with me as counterpoint, she told me, but barring a confession from wayward congressman Gary Condit, then too much in the news, the show would go on. That night I organized my thoughts as though I were to be the only guest.\n\nThe next morning the producer called back. Jim Hall had agreed to go on with me. Our dual appearance was billed on the CNN website and was promoted on conservative websites as well. The producer also directed me to the studio in Kansas City where the interview would be shot. It was KCPT, the local PBS station. I was pleased. The station had aired a half dozen of my documentaries.\n\nAfter making the arrangements, I headed out to a local public swimming pool where I idled away my lunch hour. It seemed like just another summer day until that light bulb went off over my head. \"Good God!\" I thought. In six hours, I would have the chance to blow open the most successful cover-up in American peacetime history on CNN, the most respected of all cable news channels. I expected the deck to be stacked at least a little. A few years earlier the Truman Library in nearby Independence had asked me to debate the then retired Illinois Senator Paul Simon on Harry Truman's Fair Deal. The format went like this: Simon got twenty minutes. I got twenty minutes. Simon got twenty more minutes. Anticipating something similar, I concentrated on honing one killer question.\n\nWhat I came up with was this: \"By the NTSB's own count, fifty-six eyewitnesses saw an object rise up off the horizon, ascend, zigzag, arc over, and explode at or near the aircraft.\" I would continue, \"The CIA\u2014and what was the CIA doing on this case anyhow?\u2014tried to tell us that the crippled plane rocketed upwards three thousand feet, confusing the witnesses. Aviators ridiculed this explanation. The NTSB disowned it. So my question to you, Mr. Hall, is what did the eyewitnesses see?\" Hall, I imagined, would fumble out some kind of half-assed explanation. Then I would respond, \"With all due respect, Mr. Hall, but the CIA had so little to go on that they manufactured\u2014created out of whole cloth\u2014an interview with their key witness, and I would be happy to show you the proof.\" At this point, the ref slaps the mat. Takedown! \"Mr. Hall,\" I would say in conclusion, \"I think you owe the American people an apology.\"\n\nOf course, we would never get to this point. As soon as I formulated these questions, I knew the interview would never take place. Hall was much too slow, much too vulnerable. Unlike the president who appointed him chairman, Hall was not \"an unusually good liar.\" Nor was he fast on his feet. Someone, I was certain, would get to him or to CNN and call this whole thing off. I just waited for the call to come. I did not have to wait long. Three hours before the show was to air, a chagrined young producer called to tell me my CNN debut was not to be. She did not hide her disgust. Jim Hall refused to appear on the show with me. And if I were to appear alone, as I had been scheduled to do just the previous day, then that would not be \"responsible journalism.\"\n\nAn hour later, I e-mailed Kristina Borjesson, a former CBS producer who was canned for trying to break out the TWA 800 story four years earlier. \"The producer and Greta Van Susteren are furious. Not their fault. This came from the top,\" I wrote. \"The standards for responsible journalism seem to have changed overnight.\" A serious reporter, Borjesson called CNN to confirm the facts in my e-mail. After much searching, she found a source willing to speak anonymously.\n\n\"We had no idea we were going to run into this problem,\" the source told Borjesson. This CNN staffer went on to say that neither Hall nor Goelz would appear on this show with me so the decision was made to put Hall on alone. \"If it is not responsible journalism for Cashill to go on alone, why is it responsible journalism for Hall to go on alone?\" asked Borjesson. The answer was that Hall was a \"legitimate news guest.\" Then the source said about me, \"Lots of people warned us about this guy.\"\n\nThat evening I watched _The Point_ to see what responsible journalism looked like. Van Susteren began with a pointless canard. \"At first,\" she said, \"people suspected a bomb went off on the plane.\" No, at first people suspected a missile and with good reason. She then talked about the \"painstaking search\" that led authorities to conclude that an electrical spark \"probably\" ignited vapors in the jet's empty fuel tank. Those vapors, she claimed, had been caused by the heat of the air conditioning units located under the tank. Much was made throughout the investigation about the plane sitting out on a hot tarmac, but these planes routinely sat out on tarmacs in places like Cairo and Phoenix. Plus, as one witness told the FBI, \"It was a clear, chilly night.\" Van Susteren concluded her introduction musing about the \"conspiracy theorists\" that insisted the plane was shot down.\n\nIn her defense, Van Susteren almost assuredly did not write this opening. It would not surprise me if NTSB staffers had a hand in its creation. The \"painstaking\" trope smells of David Mayer, as does the all-purpose \"conspiracy theorist.\" After the introduction, however, Van Susteren asked Hall a question that had the potential to derail him.\n\n\"Jim,\" she asked, \"can you say with 100 percent certainty that the people who think that this flight was shot down, that they were wrong?\" Hall tried to kill the clock with innocuous blather. \"Well, Greta,\" he began, \"I think the first thing that I need to say this evening is, we all need to remember first the 230 individuals who lost their lives in that tragedy.\" Throughout the investigation, Hall, Kallstrom and others held the grief of family members in ready reserve to ward off tough questions.\n\nHall prattled on for a minute or two before Van Susteren stopped him. \"Does that mean, Jim,\" she asked, \"that you are 100 percent certain that the conspiracists, who some say saw a white light traveling sky ward, zigzagging, disappearing, and then an orange ball of fire\u2014can you say with 100 percent certainty that they're wrong?\" Other than the irksome use of \"conspiracists,\" this was a good question. An attorney, Hall knew enough to shade his answer. \"Greta,\" he said, \"in my mind, with 100 percent certainty, our investigators, based on the facts that we developed, they are wrong. They are incorrect.\" In his mind at least, Hall had dodged the bullet. It was not even hard.\n\nCNN did not get off quite so easily. The Internet journal _WorldNetDaily_ ran a five-part series to support the release of _Silenced_. Its editors also heavily promoted my appearance on CNN. As Accuracy in Media reported, \"The cancellation angered a lot of people.\" Many of them communicated their disgust to the network. As a salve, CNN brass rescheduled me for August 2 but cancelled that one too. \"We just didn't want to rush into something like we were rushing into it,\" said CNN executive producer Bruce Perlmutter in Yogi Berra\u2013speak. In my place, CNN lined up Jim McKenna, a government-friendly aviation reporter but eventually dumped him for a news-less Gary Condit update. As would soon enough become clear, my lessons in responsible journalism were just beginning.\nChapter: NINE\n\nSEPTEMBER 11\n\n**\"Y** ou've got to hear what I was just told,\" said the caller. The time was late summer 2001. The fellow on the other end of the line was Steve Rosenbaum, the founder and then executive producer of an innovative, New York\u2013based production company, Broadcast News Networks (BNN). Rosenbaum was working to help us find a cable network home for _Silenced_ , but up to this point he was agnostic on its thesis.\n\n\"You got my attention,\" I said.\n\nAs Rosenbaum explained, he was sitting on the rooftop deck of his New York City offices, interviewing a potential new hire for a job as BNN technical director, when a plane passed overhead. The plane got Rosenbaum talking about _Silenced_ and TWA Flight 800.\n\n\"You know,\" said the job candidate, \"I saw the video.\"\n\n\"You saw _Silenced_?\" asked a surprised Rosenbaum.\n\n\"No,\" said the candidate, \"I saw the actual video, the video of the missile.\" The fellow had been working late at MSNBC the evening of July 17, 1996. The network was airing an amateur video of the missile strike in regular rotation until \"three men in suits\" came to the fellow's editing suite. They demanded every copy of the video that the network had and cautioned that there could be serious consequences for this fellow and his colleagues should they choose to talk about the video, let alone air it again.\n\nAlthough I had not seen the video, I had heard a good deal about it, including a rumored bidding war for its purchase. Over time, at least a hundred people have sworn to me they saw it. No one was quite sure which station aired it, but MSNBC seemed a likely suspect. The network debuted on July 15, 1996, two days before the crash. That its execs would go all in to obtain the video made good marketing sense.\n\nIn early 2009, I received my most precise confirmation as to its contents, this from a 747 pilot named Thomas Young. In early August 1996, Young explained, he was laid up in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Hong Kong for ten days with a back injury. His employer, Polar Air Cargo, flew his wife Barbara out to join him. They had little else to do but watch TV. Here, according to Young, is what they saw on the local news, both on an English language channel and a Chinese channel, over and over again:\n\nThe videotape began with people milling about on a deck facing a body of water. In the background, a streak of light can be seen leaving a point below the edge of the deck, accelerating as it climbed; it passed behind what appeared to me to be a thin cloud layer and continued upward out of the frame, from right to left. As the streak of light disappeared beyond the edge of the frame, after a slight pause, there is a generalized, dim flash on the upper left side of the screen, followed by a brighter and more pronounced flash.\n\nYoung had a distinct perspective on what he was seeing. For six years in the 1980s he had worked at Boeing, much of that time in its Space and Strategic Missile Systems Division. There he had reviewed scores of videotapes of missile launches, covering a wide range of missile types. Given the TV reception in his Hong Kong hospital, Young could not identify the type of missile that took out TWA 800, but he was confident he was looking at a missile. \"If this was a Navy missile,\" Barbara recalled her husband saying at the time, \"there goes Clinton's re-election.\" Apparently, the FBI had not yet made its way to Hong Kong. This description, of course, tracks precisely what the best eyewitnesses saw. When Young returned to the United States, he was \"absolutely shocked not to see the video on the air.\" He asked his fellow pilots if they had seen it and was shocked again that they had not. Young's testimony has added value in that he had little to gain by telling me this, and even less in lending his name to the account.\n\nIn the summer of 2001, Rosenbaum had asked us to extend our sixty-minute documentary to ninety minutes to make it more marketable. We all agreed that an interview with Rosenbaum's job candidate would be a useful and newsworthy addition. The fact that Rosenbaum decided to hire the fellow made him all the more accessible, but it did not make him any less fearful. He flat out refused to speak on the record or even off it, at least to me. I have only Rosenbaum's word for what the fellow experienced, but Rosenbaum had no reason to exaggerate.\n\nIf nothing else, this refusal gave us more time to devote to the family members of those who died in the crash. For _Silenced_ , we interviewed Marge Krukar, a former TWA flight attendant whose brother Andrew Krukar was among the victims. In Paris, Andrew had planned to meet up with his sweetheart who was to come on a later flight. There he would surprise her with an engagement ring\u2014one shattered dream out of many. Marge's testimony was as powerful as Andrew's story. She had vowed to find out who was responsible for her brother's death and, to this point, the authorities only stood in the way.\n\nDon Nibert was no more satisfied with the investigation than Marge Krukar. Like too many other residents of Montoursville, a pleasant little town in central Pennsylvania, he lost a child on that flight. Alone among the townspeople, he would openly challenge the official explanation. I agreed to meet Nibert at 2 p.m. on August 30, 2001, at the Montoursville Cemetery where his daughter Cheryl, her fifteen fellow French Club members, and their five chaperones were buried. I contracted with a video crew out of Scranton to meet us there as well. I was staying in western New York at the time and drove down. The day was dreary, the sky close and ominous, the worst kind of light for shooting a video. As I found my way to Montoursville and approached the cemetery, however, the clouds parted just a little, and the sun struggled through. There was something mystical about the light\u2014something mystical about the whole experience, for that matter.\n\nTall and taciturn, Nibert did not seem like a fellow given to fabulation. He had a story to tell, and was not afraid to tell it. After showing me the grave of Cheryl and her schoolmates, he told me the story of that tragic evening. In its early hours, he was picking berries in his small commercial orchard, completing a job Cheryl had been intent on finishing before he shooed her away. Just as the sun was setting, he heard a voice behind him in the Ohio valley accent he had grown up hearing and heeding. The voice was his mother's. He did not doubt its source for a moment. \"Don, Cheryl is okay,\" said the voice. \"She is with me. You even sent her with raspberry stains on her hands.\" His mother had been dead for years.\n\nA professor of agriculture at a nearby college, Nibert has the mind of a scientist. Still, he did not discount what he had heard. He and his wife Donna finished their work in the orchard and went back to the house. There the phone rang. It was the mother of one Cheryl's classmates. She was frightened. A plane had crashed off Long Island. Did Don know the flight number of the kids' plane? Nibert did not have to know the number. He knew the plane was theirs. At that awful moment, the long, nightmarish saga began\u2014the desperate phone calls, the trip to JFK, the meeting with authorities, the identification of the body, the grief, the numbness, the despair, and, for Nibert, the mendacity. \"I trusted the government before we went through this,\" he said. \"I do not trust them now.\" The lies would make him an activist.\n\nAfter the meeting at the cemetery, Nibert and I drove by the high school Cheryl attended. He had something he wanted to show me. In a small park next to the school stood a statue of a tall bronze angel, its head bowed, encircled by twenty-one young maple trees, one for each victim. Nibert explained that three days after the crash, during a memorial service, a cloud in the shape of an angel hovered over the town. Almost to a person, the parents took it as a sign their children were in good hands. Today, an angel in front of a public high school might be considered something of a provocation. I asked Nibert whether he was concerned that the ACLU might sue to have it removed. \"Let 'em try,\" he said drily. Clint Eastwood could not have said it more convincingly. When we returned to his home, Nibert showed me a photo of that cloud, and my own skepticism melted. The resemblance was uncanny.\n\nTwelve days later, before we had a chance to edit the footage from Montoursville, the world turned upside down: it was September 11, 2001. Despite the horrifying events of the day, the Kansas City parish to which I belonged chose to go ahead with its annual dinner. Our young French priest reasoned that people would all the more feel the need to connect with those they knew and cared for, and no one disagreed. Not until I arrived, however, did I learn that the scheduled speaker's plane had been forced down in Indianapolis. The priest asked me to speak in his stead. \"You know something about airplanes,\" he said. \"Father,\" I replied, \"I'm not sure this should be about airplanes.\" In fact, I was pretty sure it shouldn't be, but until about five minutes before my time to speak, I wasn't sure what to speak about. Then it hit me. I would talk about the Angel of Montoursville. It was a natural topic.\n\nGiven the national mood, we decided to shelve _Silenced_ for a while. BNN agreed. We did, however, glean some useful insights on the day of September 11 itself. One came from George Stephanopolous, the Clinton advisor turned ABC News correspondent. On the afternoon of that endless day, Stephanopolous was speaking to ABC News anchor Peter Jennings about President George Bush's relocation to the situation room at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Likely to show he deserved his generous salary, Stephanopolous served up some inside info about a second, more secure White House Situation Room about which few people knew. There, he told Jennings, the various military chiefs could teleconference with the president and other officials. \"In my time at the White House,\" confided Stephanopolous, \"it was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon.\" To the degree this remark garnered attention, it was for Stephanopolous's use of the word \"bombing.\" If \"bombing\" was a slip of the tongue, his assertion about the Situation Room was surely not. This was newsworthy. The Pentagon does not involve itself in civilian plane crashes, certainly not in the United States. Nor, for that matter, does the White House. This had never happened before.\n\nJim Kallstrom had his own moment of revelation as well. While speaking with Dan Rather on CBS News about the events of the day, he blurted out in no particular context, \"We need to stop the hypocrisy.\" He then quickly added, \"not that hypocrisy got us to this day.\" Kallstrom knew more than he was prepared to say. Hypocrisy did help get America to that day. By convincing America that a mechanical failure destroyed TWA 800, Kallstrom and his superiors relegated talk about aviation terror to the overnight radio shows, if there. The failure to take the problem seriously left America more vulnerable than it needed to be. Kallstrom was the public face of this deception, and for just that one honest moment on September 11, he rebelled against the role he had felt compelled to play.\n\nIn the days following September 11, several commentators alluded to the destruction of TWA 800, but only one did so twice, and that was John Kerry, then a senator from Massachusetts. Senator Kerry first mentioned TWA 800 on September 11 itself. \"We have always known this could happen,\" Kerry told Larry King. By \"we\" he meant the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. By \"this\" he meant the use of planes as flying bombs. \"I can remember after the bombings of the embassies, after TWA 800, we went through this flurry of activity, talking about it, but not really doing hard work of responding.\"\n\nI knew of at least one person who called Kerry's office for clarification about his inclusion of TWA 800. A Kerry staffer told her she must have misunderstood. There was no misunderstanding Kerry's second mention. I saw it as it happened. Kerry was a guest on _Hardball with Chris Matthews_ , then on CNBC. \"We've had the _Achille Lauro_ , the Munich Olympics, the pipe bomb at the Olympics in Atlanta, the TWA 800, the bombing of embassies, and it's not going to disappear overnight,\" Kerry told Matthews, again adding \"TWA 800\" to a list of terrorist actions.\n\nIn between Kerry's first mention of TWA 800 and the second, one major newspaper broke the story of how former vice president Al Gore undermined an air safety commission he himself chaired. According to Kerry's hometown newspaper _Boston Globe_ , Gore sold out the commission, formed after the TWA 800 disaster, for campaign cash. Reporters Walter Robinson and Glen Johnson knew an Achilles heel when they saw one. The collapse of Gore's commission struck them as \"the clearest recent public example of the success that airlines have long had in defeating calls for more oversight.\" I speculated at the time that Kerry's follow-up on Chris Matthews's show was fortuitous. He was playing _hardball_. Gore stood in the way of his run for the White House, and he wanted him out. I may have been right. After Gore's surprise announcement he would not be a candidate in 2004, he endorsed Howard Dean over Kerry.\n\nI was not the only one who caught the many references to TWA Flight 800 by the various commentators. So too did retired TWA Captain Albert Mundo. Mundo knew something about TWA 800. He served as flight engineer on the plane's trip in from Athens earlier on the day of its demise and inspected it before its final flight. On September 25, 2001, he sent a letter to Greta Van Susteren. He pointed out the various terrorist references by Kerry and others and lamented the cancellation of my scheduled appearance on CNN two months prior. \"Had the real cause of the destruction of TWA 800 been made public,\" he wrote, \"then there surely would have been a heightened awareness of the terrorist threat to this nation.\"\n\nBestselling novelist Nelson DeMille noticed as well. He was on Long Island the night of July 17, 1996. News reports of the plane's destruction spooked him. He had put his college-age daughter on that same plane three nights earlier. Two years later, his research on a new novel dealing with Mideast terrorism, _The Lion_ ' _s Game_ , put him in touch with several FBI agents and members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). During one interview he casually mentioned TWA 800, and the agent answered brusquely, \"What does that have to do with Mideast terrorism?\" When DeMille mentioned the possibility of a missile strike, the agent shot back that it was a center fuel tank explosion and concluded, \"That's all I'm going to say about that.\"\n\nThe agent's tone intrigued DeMille. He kept asking the question of other involved parties and kept getting the same cryptic answers. One New York cop he interviewed worked the case through the JTTF. Not being a federal agent, he felt freer to talk. He had interviewed two dozen witnesses and convinced DeMille those witnesses had seen _something_. After September 11, at the suggestion of the NYPD\/JTTF officer, DeMille got hold of the FBI witness summaries, the 302s, and he came to much the same conclusion that I did upon reading them at the Sanderses' home in Florida.\n\nBefore beginning a novel on TWA 800, DeMille conferred with retired TWA international captain, Jack Clary. \"I don't know what it was,\" said Clary as to the cause of the crash, \"but I know what it wasn't. It wasn't a short-circuit spark in the center fuel tank.\" As Clary asked rhetorically, and this more than five years after the crash, \"Do you see the FAA requiring any remedial action on the center fuel tank of the 747s?\" The answer was no, not even on Air Force One. There had never been a comparable explosion before and has not been one since. Thomas Young, in fact, had told me that his Boeing colleagues thought the spark in the fuel tank theory \"laughable.\"\n\nSoon after, DeMille ran into a neighbor at a Long Island restaurant. In passing, the man asked what he was working on. DeMille said he was thinking about writing a novel based on TWA 800. \"We saw that,\" said the fellow. \"We were on our boat that night.\" DeMille arranged to interview the couple and their children. On the night in question, this family and another were out boating. \"Look, a skyrocket,\" said one of the kids. And then everyone on the boat, four adults and five children, \"watched as a streak of light rose off the water and headed into the sky.\" DeMille knew these people and trusted them. They had nothing to gain by embellishing. They convinced him there was a story to be told. The subsequent novel, _Night Fall_ , opens on July 17, 1996, and culminates on September 11, 2001. Not to give too much away, but the story begins with a steamy encounter on the beach that the couple decides to videotape. DeMille knew a real video was out there, and the plot of his novel revolves around it. Although the real video was confiscated, the hunt for it would continue. More on this later.\nChapter: TEN\n\nFIT TO PRINT\n\n**\"C** ashill, you are either stupid, delusional or complicit,\" wrote one correspondent. \"Hey bozo,\" wrote another, \"what are you going to do with that little bit of money you are being paid to spew that elementary, zombie riddled, falsity?\" No, the NTSB's Peter Goelz was not calling me out for being a conspiracy theorist. Just the opposite. The readers of a piece I had written about September 11 were calling me out for _not_ being enough of a conspiracy theorist. One summed up my failings nicely. \"You are no better than the rest of the hacks out there with something to sell,\" he wrote. \"Only you are willing to excuse the murder of thousands of citizens by our own government to do it.\"\n\nIn the offending piece, I suggested a media version of Gresham's law: bad conspiracies drive out the good. In the wake of September 11, a variety of wildly speculative inside job theories threatened to trivialize the most consequential real conspiracy of our time. This was the environment in which James Sanders and I were writing in 2002, having signed a book contract early that year. A former accident investigator, Sanders was the nuts and bolts guy. I was more interested in the logic, the why. None of the 9\/11 conspiracy theories passed the \"why\" test. For a theory to make sense, all the pieces must fall in place, not just some, and there has to be a compelling logic as to why they would. The challenge in discerning the logic of the TWA 800 misdirection was that the logic kept shifting. A walk through the first two months of the _New York Times_ ' reporting on the investigation sheds useful, if imperfect, light on that shift.\n\nAfter the downing of TWA 800, the _Times_ reporters swarmed Long Island, producing as many as a half dozen articles a day. Little of that reporting went beyond what they were told by the FBI. If nothing else, the _Times_ ' dependence on the FBI provided clearer focus on the pressures Kallstrom and his colleagues faced and some insight into why they responded the way they did. The pressure was coming from several different sources: the White House, largely through the Justice Department; Clinton's go-to guy at the NTSB, Robert Francis; and, most curiously, the CIA.\n\nThe _Times_ ' first full article on July 18 leads with the fact that the FBI had taken over jurisdiction of the investigation. The reason for the takeover was that \"witnesses reported an explosion, raising the possibility that a bomb went off on the jetliner.\" On day one, \"federal law enforcement authorities\" were leading the _Times_ away from a missile. In fact, the word \"missile\" does not appear in the article, and each of the eyewitnesses interviewed saw the plane only after it exploded. That the _Times_ failed to mention the widely bruited speculation about a missile suggests that its reporters were asked not to. The article concluded, however, with a federal official saying, \"It doesn't look good,\" meaning, the reporter conceded, \"a terrorist act.\" A day later, July 19, the _Times_ published the president's remarks on the crash. \"We do not know what caused this tragedy,\" said Clinton. \"I want to say that again: We do not know as of this moment what caused this tragedy.\" To drive home a lie, Clinton had the habit of repeating an assertion as if repetition signaled sincerity. He did this most memorably in January 1998. \"I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again,\" the president told the nation. \"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.\" We know he was lying in January 1998. The evidence strongly suggests he was lying in July 1996 as well.\n\nIn a separate article on July 19, the _Times_ ' David Johnston introduced the possibility of a missile strike. \"In public,\" Johnston wrote, investigators were talking about an \"accident,\" but \"in private\" they hinted at a \"terrorist's missile.\" The _Times_ ' account was straightforward. Eyewitnesses \"had described a bright light, like a flash, moving toward the plane just before the initial explosion, and that the flash had been followed by a huge blast\u2014a chain of events consistent with a missile impact and the blast produced by an aircraft heavily laden with fuel.\" There it was. This was the most honest description of the plane's demise that the _Times_ would publish. Of note, this same article reported that air traffic controllers \"had picked up a mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane just before the explosion.\"\n\nBased on his language, Johnston's sources seemed to be local. Later that same day, a separate article by Matthew Purdy showed \"federal\" law enforcement officials struggling to regain control of the narrative. They claimed to have looked at radar records and were \"giving less credence\" to the missile theory in no small part because TWA 800 was flying too high for most shoulder-fired missiles to reach. This was true, but there was no mention of the kind of missiles that did have range enough to destroy a 747 at more than 13,000 feet. Curiously, the _Times_ quoted both Major Fritz Meyer and Paul Angelides, the last two witnesses to a likely missile strike the _Times_ would cite. Both would press their case in the years to come, but the _Times_ had no interest in hearing what they or other eyewitnesses had to say. On July 20, the _Times_ ran a notice asking people who saw \"events in the sky\" to call an FBI hotline. The FBI, however, would not share the results of these calls with the NTSB for nearly three years and never with the _New York Times_.\n\nRecently published CIA documents show that the White House had recruited the agency within a day of the crash, not to hunt for international terrorists but to suppress missile speculation. In a July 20 internal memo obtained by a Ray Lahr FOIA request, a CIA analyst reported \"no evidence of a missile\" in the radar data. That same memo argued that the aircraft was beyond the range of virtually all shoulder-fired missiles. In no memo was there any mention of a possible naval misfire even though one memo acknowledged the Navy was \"reportedly conducting an exercise in the area.\" The analyst mentioned the exercise only because he was interested in seeing if any of the ships had raw radar video recordings to share.\n\nSure enough, by July 21, \"experts\" were telling the _Times_ that the radar blip was actually \"an electronic phantom image.\" They insisted too that TWA 800 was flying beyond the range of even the \"most sophisticated shoulder-launched missiles.\" It was not hard for the authorities to make the radar mean whatever they wanted. A CIA analyst would admit in an internal memo that the FAA did not \"store or record\" the original radar video data. The only imagery available was \"post-detection,\" meaning copies or representations. Jim Holtsclaw had the advantage of talking to controllers who witnessed the event in real time. These experts also told David Johnston that no one either saw or heard a missile launch, a claim they could not begin to substantiate.\n\nOn July 24, the _Times_ ' Matthew Purdy reported that investigators had yet to find proof of an explosion. Speaking to reporters, President Clinton claimed to have learned nothing new about \"the cause of the _accident_ \" (italics added). On July 26, the paper of record published the president's remarks on his and Hillary's meeting with the families of the victims. \"We do not yet know what caused Flight 800 to crash, whether it was mechanical failure or sabotage,\" he insisted. \"But we will find out.\"\n\nBy July 26, investigators had established the false dialectic that would hold for the next two months. The cockpit voice recorder captured only a brief sound before it stopped recording. This, reported Matthew Wald, \"added strong support to the theory that a bomb destroyed the plane.\" That much conceded, \"aviation experts,\" surely the NTSB, could \"not exclude mechanical failure.\" There was no mention of a missile. This same dialectic played out a day later. The NTSB's Francis insisted that mechanical malfunction still could not be ruled out but his comments shriveled under a headline that read, \"Backing a Bomb Theory: Devices Stopped in Unison.\"\n\nThe bomb scenario enabled Clinton to appear presidential. On July 26, _Times_ editors praised his decision to install bomb detection systems in advance of any NTSB findings. On July 28, _Times_ readers learned that \"within days\" the weight of the evidence would \"prompt the Government to announce that the cause was sabotage, and that the case is being taken over by the F.B.I.\" The word \"sabotage\" implied \"bomb,\" but investigators had every reason to believe the culprit was a missile. In a July 30 internal memo, headlined \"Hold the Press,\" a CIA analyst warned of an impending FBI report on a likely missile strike. After interviewing 144 witnesses, the FBI was convinced there was a \"high probability that the incident was caused by a MANPAD,\" meaning a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. According to the reporting agents, all three of whom had aviation experience, the evidence was \"overwhelming.\" The witnesses were \"excellent\" and their testimony \"too consistent\" for the cause to be anything other than a missile.\n\nThe unnamed CIA analyst boasted of how he discouraged the FBI from pursuing this angle. \"I reported to [the FBI agent] the majority if not all our concerns, issues and problems with the determination that the incident was most-likely caused by a MANPAD.\" Said the analyst of his FBI counterpart, \"He had little to refute our concerns.\" At this point, even internally, all missile talk revolved around terrorism. The FBI agents appeared to be sincere in their beliefs; the CIA analysts not so much. In any case, the FBI never did go public with this report even though it had \"only minor corrections left to make,\" and the future performance of the CIA suggests it played a role in assuring the same.\n\nOn August 2, 1996, two weeks after the crash, President Clinton shared his thoughts on TWA 800 with Taylor Branch. About once a month over the course of his presidency, Clinton allowed the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning historian to interview him. The understanding between the two was that these conversations could not be published before 2010, time enough, one presumes, to give Hillary her shot at the presidency. When published, _The Clinton Tapes_ offered little in the way of the new or useful. Even in private, Clinton could not stop spinning, but on August 2, 1996, Taylor caught up with Clinton before the spin had become dogma. At the time, it appears that the Clinton White House was still finessing the TWA 800 narrative. \"Unless some telltale chemical survived the brine,\" Clinton told Branch, \"[the investigators] must try to reassemble the plane to determine the cause.\" Clinton also told Branch that the FBI was \"rechecking\" its interviews with \"some fifteen ground witnesses who saw a bright streak in the sky near the plane.\" If corroborated, Branch added, this \"could suggest a missile rather than a bomb.\" By August 2, of course, the FBI had interviewed more than 500 witnesses, at least 144 of whom were considered \"excellent.\" Clinton had to know this. He knew enough certainly to tell Branch that a Stinger fired from land was out of the question, but not a surface-to-air missile fired from the sea.\n\nPerhaps as a form of dress rehearsal, Clinton floated the Eisenhower option by Tower. \"They want war,\" Branch quoted Clinton as saying of Iran. Never one to take his eye off the prize, Clinton was convinced that, given his investment in the Mideast peace process, fundamentalists in Iran and elsewhere wanted war to \"undermine [his] chances for reelection.\" After the Khobar Towers bombing in June 1996, the president's first instinct was to have advisor Dick Morris run a quick poll. Morris found that Americans approved of his handling of the terrorist attack 73 to 20 percent. \"SAUDI BOMBING\u2014recovered from Friday and looking great,\" Morris wrote in his notes. Only 18 percent held Clinton responsible. If Morris polled about Clinton's handling of TWA 800, he has never discussed it publicly.\n\nGiven how little information was available to the public or even to Clinton's cabinet, the Iran angle seemed to make sense. In their 1998 book _TWA 800_ : _Accident or Incident_ , Kevin Ready and Cap Parlier made a plausible, if speculative, case that a surface-to-air missile fired from an Iranian ship destroyed the airliner. They traced the Iranian motivation to the U.S. Navy's accidental shoot down of Iranian Airbus 655 in July 1988. Both Ready and Parlier have serious credentials, Ready having served as a military intelligence officer and Arabic linguist and Parlier as a U.S. Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. _No Survivors_ , a 2013 CNN special report, made the case that the White House did indeed think terrorists attacked TWA 800, with Iran the leading suspect. \"I think our first thought,\" said national security advisor Anthony Lake, \"was that, when we got this news, that if it was terrorism, we wanted to especially look for an Iranian connection.\"\n\nSubsequent events suggest, however, that Clinton was hedging his bets with history. He knew more than he was telling Branch or even his aides, but on August 2, 1996, he had yet to fix on an end game. If the FBI found Clinton's \"telltale\" chemicals, its agents could argue for a bomb and declare the crash a crime. In the interim, the FBI and CIA would continue to marginalize the witnesses. Both agencies had been doing that from day one. With the witness testimony suppressed, the investigators could \"reassemble the plane\" as Clinton suggested to Branch, and the tedious reconstruction of the massive 747 would take the investigation past the November election. The missile talk would remain strictly private. Greg Norman. Greg Norman.\n\nThe White House could live with a bomb scenario. For the first two weeks of August, the bomb theory dominated the _Times_ reporting. Relentlessly political, Clinton attempted to exploit public anxiety about terrorism. In an article with the none too subtle headline, \"Seizing the Crime Issue, Clinton Blurs Party Lines,\" the _Times_ told its readers that the tough talking president \"scrapped his party's traditional approach to crime and criminal justice.\" In its stead, he recommended a series of punitive measures that \"threatened the Republicans' lock on law and order.\"\n\nOn August 14, four weeks to the day after the crash, the _Times_ offered the first detailed account of the plane's break-up sequence. The most salient revelation was that the center fuel tank caught fire as many as twenty-four seconds after the initial blast. This meant that the \"only good explanations remaining\" were either a bomb or missile. Reporter Don Van Natta described the destruction of the plane in much the same way the best eyewitnesses had weeks earlier. \"The blast's force decapitated the plane, severing the cockpit and first-class cabin, which then fell into the Atlantic Ocean,\" he wrote. Witness 73, for instance, \"observed the front of the aircraft separate from the back.\" Witness 150, Lisa Perry, told of how the plane broke apart like a toy: \"The front was carried forward and arced down with its momentum.\" In no subsequent report by the FBI, NTSB, or CIA did any witness get credit for such an observation. To admit the witnesses reported the break-up sequence accurately would be to concede they knew what caused the plane to break up.\n\nIn their later embrace of the CIA zoom climb scenario, _Times_ editors ignored Van Natta's accurate description of a plane going nowhere but down. \"The rest of the plane flew on, descending rapidly,\" he wrote, \"and as it did thousands of gallons of jet fuel spilled out of the wings and the center fuel tank between them. At 8,000 feet, about 24 seconds after the initial blast, the fuel caught fire, engulfing the remainder of the jetliner into a giant fireball.\"\n\nOn August 17, in an article prophetically titled \"To T.W.A. Crash Investigators, Not All Witnesses Are Equal,\" Andrew Revkin introduced _Times_ readers to Witness 136, Michael Russell. On July 19, Russell told the FBI he was working on a survey vessel a mile off shore when \"a white flash in the sky caught his eye.\" Within seconds of that flash, Russell \"observed a burst of fire forming a huge fireball.\" According to Revkin, who identified Russell by name, \"His sober, understated story was one of only a few that investigators have judged credible.\" As reported, there were \"fewer than a dozen\" accounts believable enough to aid the investigation. Of course, the FBI knew there were many, many more.\n\nThe FBI judged Russell's story credible because it fit with the Bureau's already skewed plot line. This was not Russell's fault. His observations were honest and accurate. He caught the \"white flash\" out of the corner of his eye. He did not happen to see the ascending object that caused it. That said, the white flash suggested a high explosive, meaning one that detonates at a high rate of speed, as in a bomb or a missile. The subsequent fireball, more yellow in color, he correctly identified as \"a substance of extreme flammability being suddenly ignited.\" An engineer, Russell knew the difference. Russell's account, Revkin reported, \"bolstered the idea that a bomb, and not an exploding fuel tank, triggered the disintegration of the airplane.\" More to the point, his account \"substantially weakened support for the idea that a missile downed the plane.\" That was the article's money quote, and the reason readers were allowed to hear from Michael Russell.\n\nThe investigators who introduced Russell to the _Times_ imagined a level of happy collaboration among the agencies that had defied reality. As they assured the _Times_ , \"teams of Federal agents and safety board officials\" were carefully interviewing witnesses, reading their body language, and culling out \"the pleasers.\" This was nonsense. In reality, the FBI agents were imprecise and inconsistent. They had shut out safety board officials altogether and prevented witnesses from reading and correcting the 302s.\n\nAmateurism was only part of the problem. The Clinton White House was improvising a strategy to make missile talk go away and exploiting FBI weaknesses to make it happen. In this highly compartmentalized investigation, the great majority of those working it had no suspicion there was a strategy in place other than seeking the truth. Kallstrom knew, but he could not have known what conclusion he would be allowed to reach. As late as six weeks after the crash, I seriously doubt if Clinton knew what would be the final explanation for the crash. What the insiders did know, however, was that there could be no missile strike\u2014a bomb maybe, but no missile\u2014at least until November.\n\nOn Thursday, August 22, the investigation took an unexpected turn. Reporter Dan Barry noted that Kallstrom was \"conspicuously absent\" from the podium he shared with the NTSB's Robert Francis during the routine press briefings. Francis told reporters not to read too much into Kallstrom's absence as Kallstrom had other responsibilities to attend to. Taking Francis's cue, Barry failed to follow up. He should have. For the first time, Kallstrom had been called to meet with government officials in Washington.\n\nFrom a political perspective, the meeting came a day or two too late. \"Three senior officials\" had already provided the _Times_ enough information to generate an above the fold, front-page headline on Friday, August 23, reading, \"Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800.\" If Van Natta, the author of the article, called one of the president's people for confirmation, that call may have triggered the August 22 meeting. According to Pierre Salinger, August 22 was also the specific date Dick Russell composed his nervy e-mail, and that may have factored in as well. Kallstrom blamed the DOJ attorneys for informing the _Times_ about the residue finds, but this accusation was not credible on any level. DOJ officials did not have the knowledge to generate a story of this magnitude. More to the point, just days before the Democratic National Convention, the attorneys at the deeply politicized DOJ did not have the motive.\n\nThe Van Natta article could scarcely have been more definitive. Investigators had found \"scientific evidence\" of an explosive device, specifically traces of PETN, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a component found in bombs and missiles. As Van Natta reported, the FBI had announced as early as July 29 that \"one positive result\" was enough to declare the plane's destruction a criminal act, a condition repeated often over the next few weeks. This was not the first article in which the _Times_ reported evidence of explosives. On August 9, Van Natta noted that ATF agents had detected traces of explosives on some pieces of wreckage, but \"later tests at the F.B.I. turned out negative.\" On August 14, Van Natta reported that in ten field tests on the scene in Long Island, chemists had detected \"residue consistent with an explosive,\" but in each case further tests at the FBI lab in Washington were \"not conclusive.\" On August 24, Dan Barry reported that five days after the crash, investigators on Long Island had found a trace of PETN on a piece of the right wing, but \"more sophisticated\" tests at the FBI lab failed to replicate the result.\n\nAt first glance, this may seem as if the FBI was just being thorough, but in fact the EGIS Explosives Detection System at the Calverton investigation site was as at least as sophisticated as any device the FBI had in its lab. In his book on criminal forensics, Dr. Harold Trimm called EGIS \"the ultimate in speed, accuracy, and sensitivity\u2014without compromise.\" EGIS developer David Fine described the technology as \"extremely sensitive\" and noted that false positives were \"very rare if ever.\"\n\nA further complication was that the FBI lab was then subject to what the _Times_ described as a \"long-running internal inquiry\" by the Inspector General of the DOJ. This inquiry cautioned FBI brass \"to wait for incontrovertible evidence before saying publicly what most of them acknowledge privately: that Flight 800 was deliberately downed by an explosive device.\" When Kallstrom finally did go public with his evidence\u2014he sat on it for two weeks\u2014he likely felt safe because the explosive residue had been found in the plane's interior. This revelation kept the investigation on the \"bomb\" track. Still, the White House could not have been pleased with the timing.\n\nDespite Clinton's lead over Republican Bob Dole in the polls, presidential advisor Dick Morris reminded the president that he had \"a soft underbelly.\" Too many voters did not trust this former draft-dodger in his role as commander in chief. As Morris well knew, a missile attack against America, by friend or foe, would have exposed that vulnerability. A bomb scenario was more manageable but still problematic.\n\nFor whatever reason, the _Times_ reporters and editors failed to comment on the political backdrop against which this drama was playing out. The other above-the-fold headline on August 23 read as follows, \"Clinton Signs Bill Cutting Welfare; States in New Roll.\" The president was dramatically tacking to the center, as he had been doing on the terrorism issue. The signing of this bill three days before the start of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago was hardly a coincidence. There, Clinton hoped to sell the party's peace and prosperity message. Front page headlines about explosive devices destroying an American airliner, by a bomb or especially by a missile, would remind America of what Clinton was not\u2014namely, a trustworthy wartime leader.\n\nBack from Washington on the day the article appeared, Friday, August 23, an apparently chastened Kallstrom reversed direction. According to _Times_ reporter Jim Barry, Kallstrom staged a \"hastily announced\" news conference. Investigators, said Kallstrom, lacked \"the critical mass of information\" necessary to declare the crash a criminal act. \"The three theories are on the board,\" he added. \"When we confirm one of them, we'll take the other two off.\" When asked the provenance of the PETN if not a bomb or a missile, Kallstrom alluded vaguely to \"some other means.\" Barry followed this comment with an unusually critical observation, \"But on Thursday night, a senior law enforcement official laughed out loud at the suggestion of this possibility.\"\n\nAlthough there is no published record of any Washington meeting, Kallstrom returned to Calverton a changed man. Based on his subsequent performance, he seemed to have no more urgent task than to negate the _Times_ reporting on explosive residues. Front-page headlines like \"Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800\" were not easily explained away, and it fell to Kallstrom to do the explaining.\n\nWithout noting the significance of the date, Christine Negroni traced the effort to find an alternate explanation to the very day the \"Prime Evidence\" headline appeared, August 23. For the FAA, this meant a worldwide search to determine whether local police had ever used explosives in dog-training exercises on the plane that would come to be designated TWA 800. This would be no simple task. The FAA had never systematized these records. For its part, the FBI ceased to look for eyewitnesses. Agents would do no more interviews for the next two months, and only a handful after that, almost inevitably for the wrong reasons. The investigators working through the NTSB continued to do their work in good faith, but in a highly compartmentalized investigation most knew little more about the mischief afoot than did the public. That too would soon change, and people who noted the mischief would suffer for it.\nChapter: ELEVEN\n\nBLACK HOLE\n\n**O** n August 22, 1996, the day Jim Kallstrom was called back to Washington, the White House blunted the forward momentum of the investigation (just as surely as missiles had TWA 800's five weeks earlier). Those five weeks had to have been a tumultuous stretch in the life of President Clinton. A U.S. airliner had been blown out of the sky two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, and the White House was making plans to retaliate. Richard Clarke called this crisis \"the almost war,\" and he was not exaggerating. As late as two weeks after the incident, Clinton was telling historian Taylor Branch that we were on the verge of attacking Iran.\n\nGiven the gravity of the situation, one would have expected Clinton and his advisors to feature this saga in their respective memoirs, especially since all this chaos and uncertainty unfolded in the heat of a presidential campaign. Yet save for Clarke, they did not, not at all. So suffocating was the shroud of silence that cloaked the TWA 800 investigation that the individuals most deeply involved all but refused to talk about it. As a case in point, in his 957-page 2004 memoir, _My Life_ , Bill Clinton spent one paragraph on TWA 800 and that a thoroughly dishonest one. \"At the time everyone assumed\u2014wrongly as it turned out\u2014that this was a terrorist act,\" Clinton wrote. \"There was even speculation that the plane had been downed by a rocket fired from a boat in Long Island Sound.\"\n\nNo, the fifty-six certified NTSB witnesses who claimed to see an object ascend from the horizon all traced its provenance to the Atlantic Ocean, south of Long Island. The Sound is north of Long Island. \"While I cautioned against jumping to conclusions,\" continued the former president, \"it was clear that we had to do more to strengthen aviation safety.\" He then added a second paragraph bragging about the intrusive and irrelevant measures he and Vice President Al Gore took\u2014or promised to take\u2014to avoid future bombings. That was it.\n\nA week after the crash, Bill and Hillary spent three heart-wrenching hours meeting with the victims' families. Clarke described the president \"praying with them, hugging them, taking pictures with them.\" He spoke of how \"Mrs. Clinton\" retreated alone to a makeshift chapel, there to pray \"on her knees.\" For someone who liked to boast of her empathy with ordinary people, Hillary could have made literary hay with a scene this poignant. She did not. In her 528-page memoir, _Living History_ , Hillary spent just one-third of a sentence on TWA 800, which, for her, was merely one out of several \"tragic events\" that summer.\n\nIn his memoir, _My FBI_ : _Bringing Down The Mafia_ , _Investigating Bill Clinton_ , _and Fighting the War on Terror_ , former FBI director Louis Freeh mentioned the crash in passing as a footnote to the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudia Arabia: \"Three weeks later, on July 17, TWA flight 800 exploded off Long Island minutes after taking off from John F. Kennedy International Airport. No one knew what brought it down: mechanical failure, a bomb, a ground-to-air missile all seemed possible in the early stages.\" No investigation during Freeh's tenure generated more news coverage or demanded as much FBI attention, and yet Freeh begrudged it only two sentences, neither of which answered the question as to what did bring the plane down.\n\nIn his memoir _Off With Their Heads_ , presidential advisor Dick Morris teased his audience but did not deliver. He cited TWA 800 as one of \"three attacks\" in the \"terror summer of 1996.\" Wrote Morris, \"Americans demanded action. But all they got from Clinton were speeches.\" He did not shy from speaking in detail of the other two \"attacks\"\u2014Khobar Towers and the Olympic Park bombing\u2014but about TWA 800 he had nothing to say beyond its listing with the other two. On July 15, 2003, I got the Morris treatment firsthand when he and I were phone-in guests on Paul Schiffer's Cleveland radio show. Three times I asked Morris to elaborate on his TWA 800 remarks. Three times he responded as though he had not even heard my question.\n\nAlthough he was inadvertently open about TWA 800 with ABC's Peter Jennings on 9\/11, George Stephanopolous did not spare the incident a single word in his 1999 memoir _All Too Human_. In June 2013, Stephanopolous sat mutely during a three-minute discussion of TWA 800 by two of his ABC colleagues on his own show, _Good Morning America_. Again, he said not a word.\n\nIn the aftermath of the plane's destruction, George Tenet served as acting director of Central Intelligence. The new CIA documents show him to have been involved in the investigation from very nearly the beginning. Indeed, he signed off on the CIA's ultimate explanation months before the FBI shared that explanation with the public. Yet he too failed to even mention the disaster in his 2007 memoir _At the Center of the Storm_. Clinton's chief-of-staff Leon Panetta called the president with the news of the plane's downing. \"The concern at that moment was that this might very well be a terrorist act,\" Panetta would tell CNN. The concern was apparently not memorable enough to earn even the slightest mention in Panetta's 2014 memoir, _Worthy Fights_.\n\nTWA 800 and the ensuing investigation would seem perfect fodder for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee's \"Special Report\" for that period of time explored the terrorist bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks before the TWA 800 disaster and a variety of other intelligence-related stories in the news. The report, however, was fully silent on the subject of TWA 800. This was all the more troubling given the CIA's own acknowledgement that \"the DI [Directorate of Intelligence] became involved in the 'missile theory' the day after the crash occurred.\" Equally curious is that on the same day the report was issued\u2014February 28, 1997\u2014CIA analysts presented a comprehensive PowerPoint titled, \"A Witness by Witness Account: A Review of the TWA 800 Witness Reports,\" to an unspecified internal audience.\n\nTim Weiner covered TWA 800 for the _New York Times_. In his 2008 bestseller, _Legacy of Ashes_ : _The History of the CIA_ , he had the opportunity to make amends for the paper's failure to smoke out CIA mischief during the course of the investigation. To no one's great surprise, he chose not to even mention TWA 800. Sicilian mobsters could learn a thing or two about _omerta_ from the _Times_ newsroom.\n\nAs the lone White House chronicler of the TWA 800 aftermath, Richard Clarke buttressed the administration case just when the 9\/11 Commission might have been tempted to scrutinize it. Unfortunately, little of what he wrote was true. \"The FAA,\" he reported, \"was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft.\" In fact, if the FAA had no explanation, its people would have likely contacted the NTSB. Clarke was summoned precisely because the FAA did have an explanation: the radar data showing an unknown object approaching TWA 800 just before it blew up. It was the radar data, not the eyewitness reports, that prompted Clarke's meeting. As to the \"17,000 feet\" reference, Clarke incorporated the CIA's zoom climb altitude into this 1996 story long before the CIA imagined it and repeated the altitude in his 2004 book long after the NTSB disowned it.\n\nRoughly four weeks after the crash, the late FBI terrorist expert John O'Neill reportedly told Clarke that the witness interviews \"were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger.\" Since O'Neill died at the World Trade Center on September 11, Clarke could put whatever words in O'Neill's mouth he chose to. For the record, no witness ever mentioned a \"Stinger.\" As early as July 22, CIA analysts and FBI agents had concluded that a missile \"would have to come from a boat under the flight path\" and would most likely have been \"an IR SAM,\" meaning an Iranian surface-to-air missile. O'Neill was correct, however, in telling Clarke the FBI was convinced a missile had taken down the plane. This bears repeating. Within two weeks of the disaster, FBI agents had interviewed 144 \"excellent\" eyewitnesses and found the evidence for a missile strike \"overwhelming.\" Clarke used his book to help scrub this information from the record. In the days following the crash, he wrote, \"No intelligence surfaced that helped advance the investigation.\"\n\nClarke cited the small, shoulder-fired Stinger missile as a way of discrediting all terrorist or missile-related theories. The CIA memos showed its analysts taking the same tack with the FBI. \"[TWA 800] was at 15,000 feet,\" Clarke reportedly told O'Neill. \"No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high.\" Confident no one in the media would challenge his numbers, Clarke did not bother to get the altitude of TWA 800 right or even consistently wrong. The actual altitude at the time of TWA's destruction was 13,760 feet.\n\nAlthough Clarke would pass himself off as a man above politics, the Clintons had seduced him if by no other means than granting him an access to power that George W. Bush never did. Clarke openly relished his role as a Clinton insider. A week after the crash, the president was telling Clarke and others that he was convinced terrorists had downed the plane and at that point, Clarke may not have known enough to disbelieve him. Soon, however, Clarke would become an active agent of disinformation. Based on his own timeline, he assumed this role a \"few weeks later,\" or roughly a month after the crash. As Clarke related in his book, he visited the investigation site at a \"giant hangar in Beth Page, Long Island\" where the plane was being \"rebuilt.\" Although he did not reveal why he was at the hangar or who sent him, Clarke did see fit to report on a remarkably convenient exchange he had with a random, unnamed technician:\n\n\"So this is where the bomb exploded?\" I asked. \"Where on the plane was it?\"\n\n\"The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb,\" he added. \"See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside.\"\n\n\"What's below row 23?\" I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I thought it was.\n\n\"The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit . . .\" He indicated an explosion with his hands.\n\nThe technician went on to tell Clarke that those \"old 747s\" had an \"electrical pump inside the center line fuel tank,\" and he cited the pump as the likely source of ignition. In truth, the whole story rings false. The giant hangar was in Calverton, forty-five miles east of Beth Page, and the decision to rebuild the plane was not made until the second week of November, at least two months after this serendipitous meeting. These \"old\" 747s could idle for hours on runways in Phoenix or Cairo without overheating, let alone on a cool summer evening in New York. The plane's fuel pumps were suspect until finally recovered and found blameless. The NTSB admittedly never did find an ignition source.\n\nWhy Clarke chose to tell so strange a story is bewildering. Something of a glory hound, he may have wanted to claim credit for showing the White House the way out of this monstrous political mess. He elaborated, in fact, that he returned to Washington that same day and shared his fuel tank theory with Panetta and National Security Advisor Tony Lake, even to the point of diagramming the interior of the 747. Neither Panetta nor Lake has confirmed this account, but then again they, like everyone but Clarke, have kept their accounts to the bare minimum. \"Does the NTSB agree with you?\" Lake reportedly asked Clarke. \"Not yet.\" He added the telling comment, \"We were all cautiously encouraged.\" The word \"encouraged\" gives away more than Clarke intended. A fuel tank explosion brings no one back to life, but it would spare the president a Greg Norman moment.\n\n\"Unfortunately,\" Clarke concluded, \"the public debate over the incident was clouded by conspiracy theory.\" Speaking of conspiracies, Clarke failed to sort through the conflicting details of the one the CIA had orchestrated. Although he accepted TWA's 800 apocryphal ascent to 17,000 feet, he claimed that what the witnesses saw was not the zoom climb but \"a column of jet fuel from the initial explosion and rupture, falling and then catching fire.\" If he never quite got his story straight, it was because he did not have to. The media held the Clinton White House to a different standard than they did that of his successor, George W. Bush. When Clarke's book came out in March 2004, he got a ton of exposure, including sixty minutes on _60 Minutes_. No one asked him about his preposterous take on TWA 800. This was an election year after all. He was telling the media that Bush had done \"a terrible job on the war against terrorism,\" and that was all they needed to hear.\nChapter: TWELVE\n\nDOG DAYS\n\n**A** s the Long Island summer slogged into its dog days, the news from the investigation slowed as well. The immediate problem for Jim Kallstrom was that he sold the bomb theory too well. The victims' families believed it. So did the media. In the days after his return from Washington in late August, he seemed to be playing for time\u2014to what end was not quite clear. Despite earlier promises, he refused to declare the crash a criminal act.\n\nOn August 31, the _Times_ ' Don Van Natta complicated matters for the White House. He reported that investigators had found \"additional traces of explosive residue\" on the interior of the aircraft near where the right wing met the fuselage. Earlier, investigators had found explosive traces on the exterior where the right wing met the fuselage. \"This is the spot believed to be the focal point of the explosion that destroyed the plane,\" Van Natta reported. For the record, Witness 73 had also identified \"the aircraft's right wing\" as the initial point of contact. So too had fisherman William Gallagher. This residue was RDX. RDX and PETN are the prime ingredients of Semtex, a plastic explosive that can be molded into any shape and slipped easily past an X-ray machine. For this reason, Semtex had become, wrote Van Natta, a \"favorite of terrorist bombers.\" Publicly at least, the FBI and the NTSB continued to insist that until they found telltale \"physical evidence\" they could not designate the explosion a criminal act. Still, noted Van Natta, they offered no alternative explanation as to how these chemicals got on the plane.\n\nIt was about this time that the dynamics of the investigation appeared to change. Few people noticed the difference, but one who did was senior NTSB accident investigator Hank Hughes. Hughes had been on the go-team that arrived immediately after the crash and worked on-site for months thereafter. At Calverton, Hughes led the team that reconstructed the interior of the aircraft. It was not until May 1999 that he and other NTSB and ATF officials were able to take their concerns public. The setting was a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing chaired by Republican Senator Charles Grassley. Those testifying complained that the FBI, although allegedly running a \"parallel investigation,\" bullied its working partners from day one. FBI agents let the others see only what they wanted them to see, and sometimes they restricted them from seeing anything at all. Kallstrom was nonplussed. In his typically brusque fashion, he dismissed the hearing as a \"kangaroo court of malcontents.\"\n\nAs the hearing revealed, the NTSB was predisposed to deconstruct _accidents_. Its officials resented the FBI and failed to understand why its agents leaned towards a crime. \"It was not whether someone was going to find evidence of a bomb,\" said NTSB metallurgist Frank Zakar, \"it's a matter of when.\" To Zakar and others, if a bomb at least seemed plausible, a missile did not. \"Possibly the FBI had knowledge of something we were not aware of that could possibly have led them to believe it was a missile damage,\" said Zakar naively. This was nearly three years after the incident. That Zakar still did not know about the radar data or the witness testimony is striking. This lack of knowledge, when coupled with a resentment of the FBI, led the NTSB rank-and-file to push for a mechanical explanation without much in the way of prompting.\n\nHughes, however, was seeing something more sinister. The FBI's failure to respect the evidence and honor the chain of custody frustrated him, but it was the \"disappearance of parts from the hangar\" that truly alarmed him. Whole seats were missing, and other evidence was disturbed. At one point, he set up an overnight video surveillance that recorded two FBI agents in the hangar without authorization at 3 a.m. On another occasion, he saw an FBI agent trying to flatten out a piece of metal with a hammer. Indeed, if one visual image captured the spirit of the investigation, this was it.\n\n\"You don't alter evidence,\" Hughes told Grassley. He had no idea what the agent's intentions were, and he had no authority to stop him. When Hughes reported problems, he was ignored. As he would come to recognize, an FBI with this much control could literally hammer the metal to make an external explosion look like an internal one. Metaphorically, it could hammer the evidence to fit almost any outcome it desired.\n\nHughes started noticing this phenomenon about two months into the investigation. He was not alone. Jim Speer, representing ALPA, the Airline Pilot's Association, watched the FBI skew the investigation and shared his misgivings in _Silenced_. With twenty-five years of experience as an Air Force fighter pilot and additional experience with TWA, Speer brought a rich experiential knowledge into his work. None of this impressed the FBI. Speer had to be inventive to learn much of anything. On one occasion, he identified a suspicious-looking part from the right wing and brought it to the FBI's field lab at Calverton. He was convinced a high explosive had damaged it but dared not say as much. Instead, he told the FBI testers that he had done some chemical testing in college and was curious to see how the EGIS technology worked. When they agreed to show him, he grabbed the suspect part and passed it off as one of the million parts\u2014literally\u2014retrieved from the ocean floor.\n\n\"I asked them to swab it and test that in their demonstration, which they did, and the part tested positive for nitrates,\" said Speer. This threw the testers into a panic. One of them picked up the phone, made a call, and in \"nanoseconds\" three agents in suits came running in. The agents huddled with the testers before informing Speer the machine had frequent false positives. They ran the tests several times without letting Speer watch. When finished, the lead agent turned to Speer and said, \"All the rest of the tests were negative; we will declare the overall test negative and the first one you saw, we'll call it a false positive.\"\n\nTWA's Bob Young, who worked with the NTSB on the investigation, witnessed this incident. As he noted, and Speer confirmed, the FBI sent this part to Washington for further testing. It never came back. This was a common phenomenon. In his otherwise innocuous testimony before Grassley's subcommittee, Donald Kerr, the FBI Lab director, casually boasted that FBI Lab examiners sent \"116 pieces of debris\" to the FBI lab in Washington for further testing. This was 116 more pieces than Kallstrom would admit to sending.\n\nFBI Director Louis Freeh had appointed Kerr, an outsider, to clean up the lab in the wake of a major scandal that rocked the FBI while the TWA 800 investigation was in full swing. Dr. Frederic Whitehurst, who blew the whistle on that scandal, failed to understand why any part from Calverton should have been sent to the D.C. lab. For one, he believed that the EGIS technology was \"very specific and very sensitive.\" For another, he argued that in delivery the part ran the risk of contamination. That these parts tested positive for explosive residue after weeks of immersion suggests that a high explosive blast outside the aircraft was more than the proverbial figment of a conspiracy theorist's imagination.\n\nThe boldest among the malcontents was Terry Stacey, the TWA senior manager who worked on the investigation through the NTSB. Stacey knew the aircraft well. He had flown the 747 in from Paris the day before its tragic end. Originally assigned to the NTSB witness group, he did not protest when the FBI neutered it. He was a team player by nature. Elizabeth Sanders described him as \"a straight arrow, go-by-the-rules kind of guy.\" A couple months into the investigation, he too noticed a subtle shift in FBI behavior. Always secretive, the agents now seemed intent on concealing potential evidence of a missile attack. In October 1996, James Sanders flew up from Virginia to meet with Stacey at Newark Airport. \"What he told me over those first hours,\" said Sanders, \"was one thing\u2014'I know there's a cover-up in progress.'\"\n\nSanders pored over the data Stacey provided in subsequent meetings. What the two concluded was that an initial blast outside the right wing appeared to leave a reddish-orange residue trail across two rows of nearby seats. In late August 1996, the FBI had the residue tested but refused to share the results with Stacey and others working with the NTSB. In September 1996, the residue trail was much discussed at Calverton. Stacey had planned on scraping off some of the residue, but when it refused to yield, he cut out a few square inches of material and FedExed it to Sanders. Sanders had the material tested at an independent lab on the West Coast, and its elements were found to be consistent with elements present in the exhaust residue of a solid-fuel missile.\n\nAfter Sanders went public with his findings in March 1997, the FBI counter-claimed that the material was simply glue. If this were so, the FBI brass would not have needed to classify the results under national security, but they did. If this were so, they could have simply informed Stacey it was glue before he sacrificed his career to get at the truth, but they did not. If this were so, they would not have felt compelled to arrest Stacey and the Sanderses, but apparently they did.\n\nOne did not have to be a conspiracy theorist to distrust the FBI. Gene York, an experienced 747 pilot who worked the investigation through the NTSB on behalf of the ALPA, does not believe a missile brought down the plane. He concedes he is among the minority of pilots who feels that way, but having helped reconstruct the plane, he is firm in his beliefs. A former Marine like Kallstrom, York had little use for the FBI honcho's bullyboy style. \"He couldn't put a sentence together without a four-letter word,\" York told me. He described Kallstrom at work as \"a bull in a china shop.\" York had real problems with the way the FBI agents ran the show. \"They would pick up things that looked like a crime and go hide it,\" he said. When he protested, they retaliated by trying to get him thrown off the investigation. They even threatened to bring him up on charges of mishandling government equipment. He believes they tapped his phone as well. The whole experience left York disillusioned. \"Don't ever ask me to trust the government,\" he said. \"These guys do what they want to do and we are just hanging on for the ride.\"\n\nOn September 19, 1996, the government went public with its change in direction. The news this time came out of NTSB headquarters in Washington, not out of Calverton. Putting it in play was Gore family retainer and NTSB chair, Jim Hall. \"Convinced that none of the physical evidence recovered from T.W.A. Flight 800 proves that a bomb brought down the plane,\" Matthew Wald led in his _Times_ article, the NTSB was now planning tests \"to show that the explosion could have been caused by a mechanical failure alone.\"\n\nWald cautioned that not everyone had signed on to this shift. Boeing did not think a fuel tank explosion capable of doing that kind of damage. Without passion, Kallstrom insisted the FBI would continue its parallel investigation. And Wald reminded his audience why many thought a mechanical failure unlikely, including the explosive residue, the lack of any emergency transmissions, and the dramatic fracturing of the plane. Unmentioned in the article was any reference whatsoever to eyewitnesses, at least a few of whom described the break-up sequence in detail before the NTSB confirmed the same. Forgotten too were the two military helicopter pilots who watched objects strike TWA 800 from opposite directions. As for the \"mysterious radar blip that appeared to move rapidly toward the plane,\" the authorities had been incrementally erasing that from the record for more than a month. In sum, Wald made eight references to a bomb in the article and only one to a missile and that briefly in the negative.\n\nIn her account from this same period, Pat Milton likewise deleted talk of missiles from the record. Given her access to Kallstrom, she was able to recreate a conversation between him and trusted deputy Tom Pickard. The two were apparently confused because a trace of RDX was found on a curtain in the rear of the plane as well as in the area near the right wing. \"How about multiple bombs?\" Kallstrom reportedly mused. \"Multiple bombs?\" said Pickard. \"But how do you detonate multiple bombs on a single plane?\" If Milton is to be believed, both seem to have forgotten that three of their more capable agents had interviewed 144 \"excellent\" witnesses less than two months prior and found the evidence for a missile strike \"overwhelming.\"\n\nThe balance between bomb and mechanical failure lasted exactly one day before the weight swung fully the way of \"mechanical.\" On Friday, September 20, the FBI released a statement claiming the TWA 800 aircraft had \"previously been used in a law enforcement training exercise for bomb-detection dogs.\" On September 21, the _Times_ ' Matthew Purdy filled in the details. Reportedly, on June 10, 1996, the St. Louis police used the TWA 800 plane to train a bomb-sniffing dog. The trainer placed explosives throughout the plane and encouraged the dog to find them. One law enforcement official told Purdy the explosives were kept in tightly wrapped packages but conceded that \"testing can leave traces behind.\"\n\nThe following day, September 22, the _Times_ published what would prove to be the investigation's obituary. \"Can you imagine what a defense lawyer would do to us?\" one investigator told Van Natta. \"This pretty much knocks out the traces, unless we get something much more concrete.\" By \"concrete\" he meant physical evidence of a blast, like the explosive residue that had been blasted into the corner of a baggage container in the bombing of Pan-Am 103 in 1998. But that piece was only ten inches long.\n\nFrom the beginning Kallstrom argued that the critical piece of evidence was most likely \"a small piece of metal.\" With the weather worsening, and that evidence likely deep under water, the search had become what Van Natta called \"a race against the calendar.\" Van Natta was right, but not in the way he intended. For the White House, the search had always been a race against the calendar\u2014a race, that is, to November. If the officials under its sway could keep the public pacified and the airways open until then, they would win the race. The investigation was proving less stressful than the Clintons might have imagined. If the media believed the outcome hinged on a small piece of metal, how hard could it be to lose that piece or never find it?\n\nIn looking back at the case, I am struck by the sincerity of so many hundreds of hard-working investigators, and I am forced to wonder whether I have read too much into the inconsistencies. Then I come face to face with some appalling act of deception, and I file my doubts away. The CIA zoom climb animation comes to mind. So too does David Mayer's creepy, CIA-influenced performance at the 2000 NTSB hearing. And the fabrication of witness statements would unsettle the media in the better class of banana republics. The dog-training story, however, came first and hit the serious investigators, said one, like \"a punch in the gut.\" All the work he and others had done finding explosive residue was undone\u2014in this case by a training exercise that never took place.\n\nTo sell the dog story took any number of lies. It also required victims. One for sure was the St. Louis police officer that did the training, Herman Burnett. A second may well have been Ohio Congressman James Traficant who exposed the training for the fraud it was. So willing were reporters to believe Kallstrom\u2014or to protect the Clintons pre-election\u2014that they failed to confirm a story that could not withstand the least bit of scrutiny. Taking its lead from the FAA, the FBI had agent Jim Van Rhein interview Burnett on September 21, 1996. The alert reader may recall that the FBI put out its press release on this exercise the day before that interview, September 20. The _Times_ published a comprehensive dog-training article on September 21. Incredibly, the FBI and the _Times_ broke this story nationwide before a reporter or even an agent spoke to Burnett.\n\nSix years after the incident I asked a police officer friend to persuade Burnett to talk to me, and Burnett obliged. As Burnett told me, I was the first person in the media to call him. Burnett had a story to tell. In fact, the FBI had no proof he had ever done a training exercise on the plane that would become TWA 800. In a September 1997 letter to Rep. Traficant, Kallstrom asserted, \"The [airport] manager on duty, whose name the patrolman could not recall, told him that a wide body was available at gate 50.\" The FBI did observe that Burnett \"made no notations regarding the tail number of the aircraft, as it was not his policy to do so.\" Nor was it Burnett's policy to note the gate number, but that detail was left out of the record. What Burnett did list on the form were specific start and stop times and the notation \"wide body.\" That was all the information anyone had to go on.\n\nThe lack of documentation should have nipped the story in the bud. To repeat, no known record put Burnett and his dog at gate 50 or on the Flight 800 plane. The FBI claim that Burnett remembered the gate number after three months was unbelievable on its face. Yes, a 747 bearing TWA #17119, the number for the Flight 800 plane, was parked at gate 50 that day. According to the FBI, the plane was there \"from shortly before 700 hours [7 AM] until approximately 1230 hours [12:30 PM] on that date.\" No one disputes this. The FBI also acknowledged that Burnett \"began the placement of the explosives at 10:45 AM.\" No one disputes this either, but these time details undercut the whole FBI construct.\n\nOn that June day, as usual, Burnett placed the training aids throughout the passenger cabin in a \"zigzag\" pattern. He let the explosives sit for a while, as FAA regulations dictate, and then returned to his car to retrieve Carlo, his dog. \"At 11:45 AM,\" again according to the FBI, \"the patrolman began the exercise by bringing the dog into the aircraft. The exercise lasted 15 minutes, and the dog located all the explosives.\" Carlo's mission accomplished, Burnett led him out of the plane and back to the car. Burnett then returned to the plane to retrieve the scattered training aids. He placed each aid on the galley counter and carted them all back out. Burnett estimated this activity to have taken fifteen minutes. Based on the FBI's own timetable, Burnett could not have left the plane earlier than 12:15 p.m. Yes, the Flight 800 plane was at gate 50 until 12:30 as the FBI indicated.\n\nThere was a reason the plane left the gate. As clearly documented in several places including Captain Vance Weir's \"Pilot Activity Sheet,\" Weir and his passengers took off for Honolulu in that very same 747 at 12:35 p.m. Burnett did not leave the plane until 12:15 p.m. at the earliest and saw no one. To clean the plane, stock it, check out the mechanics, and board several hundred passengers would have taken more than the fifteen-minute window of opportunity offered in the FBI's own timetable. Much more.\n\nEven if the FBI had been unaware of TWA regulations that mandated an hour on-board preparation time for the crew, its agents would have known just from experience that a Hawaii-bound 747 would have been busily stocking up and loading passengers long before the plane took off. Burnett, however, was alleged to be exercising his dog in a \"sterile\" environment and seeing no one. As it happened, another 747, a veritable clone, was parked at gate 51. This second plane\u2014bound for JFK International as TWA Flight 844\u2014would not leave the gate until 2:00 p.m. This later departure would have allowed Burnett and Carlo plenty of time to execute the training undisturbed. In its response to Traficant, the FBI failed to acknowledge this second plane. \"You know for sure the dog was on the plane?\" Rep. Traficant asked Kallstrom at a congressional hearing in July of 1997. \"We have a report that documents the training,\" dodged Kallstrom.\n\nHow, one must ask, could so flagrant a deception unfold with so many people looking on? The answer seems fairly obvious. Immediately after Kallstrom was called to Washington on August 22, federal officials began searching the nation, and probably the world, to find an airport at which a dog exercise had taken place on a day when the Flight 800 plane was parked there. Almost all of those involved in this search performed it in good faith, but not everyone. At the end of the search, some few people\u2014Kallstrom was surely one\u2014made an executive decision not to scruple over the details. The pressure to justify the investigation's shift in direction forced their hand. They may have been reluctant collaborators, but their collaboration killed the investigation.\n\nAs was obvious from the beginning, too, Burnett did not put his training aids anywhere near where the explosive residue had been found. He told the FBI he made five separate placements of explosive devices within the plane in a zigzag pattern. These included smokeless powder, water gel, detonator cord, and ammonia dynamite. All of these were placed outside the area of damage on the right side of the plane, rows 17\u201327, in which the explosive residue had been found. And none of these aids combined PETN and RDX, the elements of Semtex that the FBI had reported finding in late August.\n\nVan Natta reported this discrepancy in his September 22 article on the subject. \"Records show the packages were not placed in the same place where the traces were located,\" Van Natta wrote, citing \"several\" unnamed investigators as his source. These investigators also pointed out that an explosive trace had been found on the right wing, a location clearly beyond Carlo's skill set. CNN's Negroni used named sources to make the same point. \"Where the bureau got hits on the wreckage,\" said FAA bomb technician, Calvin Walbert, \"there was no explosive training aids anywhere near that.\" Said Irish Flynn, FAA associate administrator, \"It's a question of where those traces came from. The dog doesn't answer the questions.\"\n\nTo defend the FBI's conclusions, Kallstrom would dishonor his good name and damage Burnett's. At the July 1997 hearing, Rep. Traficant prodded Kallstrom, \"Isn't it a fact that where the dog was to have visited, that it is not the part of the plane where the precursors of Semtex were found?\" Said Kallstrom, growing defensive and defiant, \"That's not true.\" He added in agonizingly dishonest detail, \"It is very important where the packages were put, Congressman. And the test packages that we looked at, that were in very bad condition, that were unfortunately dripping those chemicals, were placed exactly above the location of the airplane where we found chemicals on the floor.\" In fact, Kallstrom elaborated, \"An incredible amount of this chemical leaking out of these packages fell into that spot.\" The \"tightly wrapped packages\" of September 1996 were dripping chemicals less than a year later exactly where Kallstrom needed them to be dripped. This was a multi-tiered _lie_. No euphemism can paper over what Kallstrom said and did.\n\nIn her 1999 book, Milton changed any number of details to make the story work. She had Burnett loading the plane with \"enough plastic explosives to blow the airport sky-high.\" She referred here specifically to \"five pounds of SEMTEX, or C-4.\" In his 1997 letter to Traficant, however, Kallstrom specified a \"1.4 block of C-4.\" With all due respect to Ms. Milton, SEMTEX and C-4 are not the same. Unlike SEMTEX, C-4 does _not_ contain PETN, and it was the discovery of PETN traces that first prompted the \"bomb\" stories in the _Times_. Besides, Kallstrom admitted in 1997 that Burnett placed the C-4 in a seatback pouch outside the suspected area.\n\nIn cleaning up Kallstrom's account after the fact, Milton put the finishing touches on Burnett's reputation. \"Yeah, I could have spilled more than a little,\" Burnett reportedly told the FBI. \"The packages were old and cracked and we hadn't used them in a while, so more than usual might have come out.\" Milton referred to the incident as the \"dog fiasco\" and concluded her account with Kallstrom and his colleagues laughing at \"Carlo\" jokes. Officer Burnett, an African American, did not find the incident funny. \"I am pissed off to this day,\" he told me. \"I never lost any. I never spilled any. There was never any powder laying loose.\" As to his alleged confession of the same, he said, \"I just hate that they twisted my words. I know what I did, and how I did it.\" As should be clear by now, his were not the only words that were twisted in this investigation.\n\nThree weeks after the dog-training story broke, and four weeks before the election, President Clinton signed an aviation bill into law that included a range of cumbersome programs designed to prevent passengers from bringing bombs onto commercial airplanes. \"It will improve the security of air travel,\" said Clinton. \"It will carry forward our fight against terrorism.\" In attendance at the White House signing were several people who lost loved ones on TWA Flight 800, unwitting props in Clinton's effort to \"showcase himself as a can-do steward tackling the nation's problems.\" Nowhere in the _Times_ article just cited was the word \"missile\" even mentioned. That possibility had largely been relegated to the realm of the grassy-knollers. With more than a little help from the media, Clinton managed to turn a national security disaster of major proportions into a pre-election photo-op. Sixteen years later, Hillary Clinton would attempt to do much the same with Benghazi.\n\nThe Navy P-3 was hovering a mile or so above TWA 800 when the plane exploded. That was the command position the P-3 routinely assumed during a Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) missile test, illustrations of which were publicly available in 1996.\nChapter: THIRTEEN\n\nLOST AT SEA\n\n**A** lthough fully confident that TWA 800 was shot down\u2014I would not have embarked on this adventure were I not\u2014I was not certain about who pulled the trigger. In _Silenced_ , Sanders and I remained agnostic on the subject. For _First Strike_ , which was published in 2003, we knew we would have to offer specifics, even if speculatively. From the beginning, Sanders believed the U.S. Navy had tragically misfired and said so in his 1997 book, _The Downing of TWA Flight 800_. For my part\u2014and here is where what scientists call \"confirmation bias\" sneaks into the process\u2014I did not want to believe that was true.\n\nIn _First Strike_ , as the name of the book suggests, we arrived at a plausible speculation, namely that the Navy took out TWA 800 in the process of destroying a small terrorist plane filled with explosives. This theory is not at all fanciful, and Sanders still believes it possible. Several eyewitnesses talked about a small plane. Witness 550, for instance, reported seeing \"a plane coming from west to east and then what looked like a 'smaller' plane coming from the northeast on a dead course heading towards the nose of the larger plane.\" He heard a \"crackling sound\" when the two planes \"crunched up.\" In addition to witness testimony, we heard from at least two military sources that the flying bomb scenario was indeed the case. Even the CIA speculated early on that a \"small airplane\" might have intercepted TWA 800.\n\nA few months after the book was published, I was a guest on Barbara Simpson's San Francisco radio show. One call from a local banker intrigued me enough that I had the producer take the caller's name and number off-air. I followed up later that day. A Navy veteran, the fellow struck me as entirely credible. As he told the story, one of his banking customers was a TWA executive. Having served as a radar man during several missile-firing exercises on the Pacific missile firing range, the banker was curious about TWA 800 and asked the exec what he knew. Citing the TWA CEO as his source, the exec told him the U.S. Navy shot down the 747 by accident. This the banker had heard before, and he remained unconvinced. One added detail, however, caused the banker to reevaluate the possibility of a shoot down, specifically the exec's suggestion that the U.S. Navy was not running a test but was actually trying to take out a small terrorist plane when its missiles inadvertently destroyed TWA 800.\n\nIn his 2003 book, _Dereliction of Duty_ , retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert \"Buzz\" Patterson related an incident that makes this theory sound at least plausible. As mentioned previously, Patterson carried the \"nuclear football\" for the president. One morning in \"late-summer\" 1996, Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update to the National Security Council when he \"keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons.\" The plot went under the rubric \"Operation Bojinka,\" Bojinka being the Serbo-Croatian word for \"loud bang.\"\n\nThe mastermind of the plot was Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef. Yousef was on trial in New York for his role in Bojinka on the day TWA 800 went down. Although the plot's best-known feature was a scheme to blow up eleven American airliners over the Pacific, a secondary feature had Yousef and\/or his cohorts chartering a plane, loading it with explosives, and crashing it into an American target. In moving these documents between offices, Patterson saw the president's hand-annotated response to Bojinka. \"I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community,\" Patterson wrote, \"and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.\" Knowledge about the use of planes as bombs would emerge as a contentious issue during the 9\/11 Commission hearings in 2004. As early as the summer of 1996 Clinton and his staff were aware of the threat. It is altogether likely that Clinton's review of these documents was related to TWA 800's destruction, if only to establish an alibi.\n\nAll this being said, I do not believe that Yousef had anything concrete to do with the demise of TWA 800. Nor have I seen sufficient evidence in the thirteen years since _First Strike_ was published to believe a terrorist plane threatened TWA 800. If Yousef played any role it was to heighten anxiety, already keen three weeks after the terror bombing of the USAF's Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia. Two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, the Clinton administration reportedly had the U.S. Navy on the highest state of alert since the Cuban Missile crisis. In this hair-trigger environment, accidents could happen.\n\nAccidents had happened before in such an environment. On Sunday morning, July 3, 1988, at the tail end of the Iran-Iraq War, an Aegis cruiser, the USS _Vincennes_ , fired two Standard Missiles at a commercial Iranian Airbus, IR 655. IR 655 had reached 13,500 feet, a final altitude almost identical to TWA 800's, when Captain Will Rogers III gave the order to fire. Rogers and his crew had mistaken the ascending passenger jet with 290 people on board for a descending Iranian F-14, a fighter plane.\n\nFour years after the incident, in July 1992, _Newsweek_ teamed up with ABC News's _Nightline_ to produce an exhaustive expos\u00e9 on the incident and its subsequent cover-up. _Newsweek_ 's John Barry and Roger Charles reported that the $400 million Aegis system was capable of tracking every aircraft within three hundred miles and shooting them down. The weakness of the system was its complexity, especially when managed by people with little experience in high-pressure situations. \"Some experts,\" observed the reporters, \"question whether even the best-trained crew could handle, under stress, the torrent of data that Aegis would pour on them.\"\n\nIn retrospect, Rogers and his crew could have used more training. Working under a time crunch in the ship's windowless combat information center (CIC), they made a series of oversights and misinterpretations that quickly turned tragic. With IR 655 just eleven miles away, Rogers switched the firing key to \"free\" the ship's SM-2 antiaircraft missiles. Given the green light to fire, a nervous young lieutenant pressed the wrong keys on his console twenty-three times before a veteran petty officer leaned over and pressed the right ones. Thirty seconds later, the first missile blew a chunk of the left wing off the airliner with an engine pod still attached, and the rest of the plane quickly plunged into the sea. The job done, Rogers gave the order to steam south out of Iranian waters.\n\nWithin twelve hours, Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called a press conference at the Pentagon to announce that, yes, the Navy had accidentally shot down a commercial airliner. That was about all the truth Crowe was inclined to offer. Relying on the information Rogers provided, Crowe stuck to the story that the Iranian plane was descending, picking up speed, flying outside the commercial air corridor, and refusing to identify itself. As their colleagues would do after the TWA 800 disaster, the naval officers closed ranks and kept other investigating bodies at bay. By July 14, 1988, when Vice President George H. W. Bush reported on the incident to the United Nations, Crowe knew that Rogers's initial report was false in almost every detail but chose not to share that information with Bush. \"The U.S. Navy did what all navies do after terrible blunders at sea,\" _Newsweek_ reported. \"It told lies and handed out medals.\"\n\n_Newsweek_ ran this lengthy cover story while Bush was running for reelection. It did his campaign no good. Following the article's publication, Les Aspin, Democratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, held public hearings on the _Vincennes_ incident in July 1992 and grilled a defiant Crowe. \"The accusations of a cover-up are preposterous and unfounded,\" Crowe told the House committee. After the hearing, Aspin vowed that there would be further hearings on the subject. There were not. On September 19, 1992, two months after testifying before Aspin, the politically savvy Crowe made an unlikely pilgrimage to Little Rock, Arkansas.\n\nThis was a crucial visit. The great majority of military officers, active and retired, loathed the draft-dodging Clinton. With the candidate beaming by his side, Crowe dismissed Clinton's draft record as \"a divisive and peripheral issue\" and threw his considerable weight behind Clinton's bid for the presidency. A month later, Crowe wrote a _New York Times_ op-ed defending his position. He conceded that Ronald Reagan, who first appointed Crowe chairman, did an excellent job handling the Soviet Union. He admitted too that George H. W. Bush, who extended Crowe's chairmanship, did great work in defeating Saddam Hussein. That said, Crowe argued unconvincingly, \"America needs new leadership, which will imaginatively and boldly address the problems facing our citizens and threatening our prosperity.\" Upon being elected, Clinton appointed Aspin secretary of defense, and the probe into the _Vincennes_ quietly died. Helping it stay dead was the newly appointed chairman of the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, none other than Crowe. When TWA 800 blew up, the retired admiral was serving as the ambassador to the United Kingdom.\n\nBarring a deathbed confession, the exact details of what the U.S. Navy did on the night of July 17, 1996, may never be known. What the media learned from the _Vincennes_ incident, however, was that the mismanagement of the U.S. Navy's prized Aegis system could and did result in the accidental destruction of a commercial airliner. They learned too that the Navy was capable of deceiving the citizenry about a misfire of this magnitude. What they chose not to learn, however, was that Bill Clinton was capable of exploiting vulnerable naval officers to improve his political chances.\n\nIn the election year of 1996, the media chose to forget the little they did learn from the _Vincennes_ incident. Most conspicuously, the _New York Times_ failed to voice the least suspicion about the role of the U.S. Navy in TWA 800's demise. On September 17, two months to the day after the crash, Andrew Revkin wrote an article on Internet-based conspiracy theories, one of which suggested that a Navy Aegis guided missile cruiser \"let loose a practice shot that went awry.\" The Pentagon denied any involvement, and Kallstrom assured the _Times_ ' readers that the probability of a Navy misfire was \"as close to zero as you can get.\" This was the most probing penetration of the naval involvement the _Times_ would deliver. It was as if the _Vincennes_ incident and its subsequent cover-up had never taken place. Had the _Times_ reporters persisted, they would likely have encountered what _Newsweek_ did in pursuing the _Vincennes_ story\u2014\"months of stonewalling by senior naval officers\"\u2014but there was no indication they bothered.\n\nAlthough Revkin did not name a source for the Internet-based theory, he was likely referring to the Holtsclaw-Russell communication. Russell recalls sending his provocative e-mail about a month after the crash. Interestingly, Pierre Salinger cited August 22 as the specific date of the e-mail. This was the same day Kallstrom was summoned to Washington for that game-changing session with the DOJ. According to the Russell e-mail, on the night of July 17 a Navy P-3 participated in a missile firing practice in W-105, a warning area off the southeast coast of Long Island. For the record, the P-3 is a long-range, antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft with advanced submarine detection and avionics equipment. It can help provide a fleet commander oversight of an engagement at sea and relay information among the various ships in a battle group. As it happens, the presence of an Iranian P-3 near IR 655 heightened the suspicions of Rogers and his crew on the _Vincennes_.\n\nThe AP's Pat Milton provided the only serious window into Kallstrom's knowledge base at this time, especially in regards to the U.S. Navy. Writing two years after the incident, Milton explored the P-3 issue in some detail. In her retelling, FBI agents interviewed the crewmembers the day after the crash and satisfied themselves with the crew's explanation that the P-3's proximity to the exploding TWA 800\u2014less than a mile away\u2014was a \"harmless coincidence.\" Wanting more assurance, Kallstrom sent agents back to interview the crew again on the following day. This time Captain Ray Ott resisted the interrogation. \"Are you saying I'm lying?\" he told the agents. \"Are you questioning my patriotism here?\" Ott refused to share details of his flight and told the agents the mission was classified.\n\nAn irritated Kallstrom contacted the chief of the Atlantic fleet, Admiral Bud Flanagan, and asked him to intervene. \"They've given you all the information relevant to your search, sir,\" Flanagan reportedly told Kallstrom. \"Anything else is outside what you need to know.\" According to Milton, Kallstrom then leaned on his old Marine Corps colleague, General Charles Krulak, to get at the truth, and Krulak shared Kallstrom's concern with his fellow Joint Chiefs. The verdict: \"Friendly fire did not play a role in the downing.\" Still, Kallstrom persisted, and the Navy obliged by allowing his agents to interview the P-3 crew a third time. To this point in the investigation, there is no reason to doubt Kallstrom's sincerity.\n\nSome time before the third interview, the FBI learned that the P-3's transponder, the homing device that enables air traffic control to track the plane, was off during the flight. Holtsclaw knew this before Kallstrom did. He told Russell the P-3 was \"a non-beacon target (transponder OFF) flying southwest in the controlled airspace almost over TWA 800.\" In his third interview with the FBI, Ott explained that the plane's transponder was \"faulty\" and only worked \"intermittently.\" In their interview with the NTSB in March 1997, P-3 crew members insisted the transponder \"failed after takeoff\" and was soon replaced through the normal Navy supply channels.\n\nAccording to Milton, after the explosion the P-3 circled back to the crash site with the crew offering to help. The plane then returned to its original practice mission, dropping sonobuoys to track the USS _Trepang_ , a submarine. At a November 1996 press conference, Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen, who managed the Navy's end of the investigation, claimed the P-3 was conducting the training exercise with the _Trepang_ eighty miles south of the crash site, a figure Milton would repeat. In March 1997, however, the P-3 crew told the NTSB much the same story about the training exercise but added that the sonobuoys were all dropped \"a minimum of 200 miles south\" of the crash site.\n\nThe authorities staged the aforementioned November 1996 press conference to refute Pierre Salinger's claim of an accidental shoot-down. In no previous article had the _Times_ so much as mentioned the P-3. Its readers still did not know what Russell's colleagues knew, namely, that the P-3 was flying almost immediately above TWA 800 with its transponder off. This, as shall be seen, was a critical detail. Kristensen chose not to mention it at the press conference. A savvy reporter might have asked one devastating question: if Washington were on veritable war footing immediately after TWA 800's destruction, and a terrorist missile attack was suspected, why did the P-3 continue on a routine sub-hunting exercise 80 miles (or 200 miles) to the south? After all, no naval asset was more capable of finding the culprit. Two answers suggest themselves. One is that the P-3 crew, knowing the Navy's culpability, heeded orders to vacate the area. The second, and much less likely, is that the crew remained ignorant of a potential terrorist threat.\n\nReporters had good cause not to ask tough questions. Kristina Borjesson, then a CBS producer, attended this press conference. She watched in shock as Kallstrom exploded at a fellow who asked how the U.S. Navy could be involved in the investigation when it was a possible suspect. \"Remove him,\" Kallstrom shouted. Two men promptly grabbed the reporter by the arms and dragged him out of the room. Wrote Borjesson, \"Right then and there, the rest of us had been put on notice to be on our best behavior.\"\n\nA veteran freelance cameraman who worked the TWA 800 case every day for months confirmed Borjesson's account. \"I watched some astounding things I never saw before, nor saw since,\" said the fellow who asked that I not reveal his name. \"It all unfolded before me\u2014firsthand: official stories changing, Pat Milton cozying up with the FBI, tapes confiscated, threats to boycott TV networks if those shows persisted with the missile theory, press thrown out of press conferences for simply asking a question.\"\n\nWhen Russell's e-mail surfaced, the authorities sensed they had a problem on their hands. Russell knew about the naval training exercise. He knew about the P-3. He knew that the P-3's transponder was off. And he knew about the radar data. The readers of the _New York Times_ knew none of this. That the e-mail apparently surfaced on August 22 might have been a coincidence, but the investigation overflowed with coincidences, like the one that put the P-3 with its allegedly broken transponder right above TWA 800 as it exploded. Another coincidence, of course, was that the radar data just happened to mimic a missile arcing over and intersecting TWA 800 in the second before its identifier vanished from the screen.\n\nKallstrom was in way over his head. He and his agents knew nothing about radar data or P-3s or submarines or guided missile cruisers. Although the FBI's November 1997 summary listed all the Navy assets its agents reportedly checked out, those agents depended fully on the Navy for that information. If the crew of the P-3 felt free to blow them off, the skippers of the cruisers and subs surely felt the same. Navy higher-ups had to know the president had their back, and Kallstrom had to have figured that out. In November 1996, with all options still in play, he insisted there was no Navy involvement in TWA 800's destruction. \"We have looked at this thoroughly,\" he blustered, \"and we have absolutely not one shred of evidence that it happened or it could have happened.\" In truth, he did not have a clue.\n\nIn addition to the P-3, three submarines and at least one cruiser were in the mix that night. Kallstrom claimed early on that no naval asset was \"in a position to be involved,\" but the FBI was never sure where those assets were. The information Milton got from the FBI put one of those subs, the USS _Trepang_ , 80 miles south of Long Island. (The P-3 crew, as mentioned, said the _Trepang_ was 200 miles away.) Milton put a second sub, the USS _Wyoming_ , 150 miles south. A tugboat captain spotted a third sub about fifty miles away off the Long Island coast about midnight on July 17. Milton identified that sub as the _Albuquerque_.\n\nAs to the cruiser, Rear Admiral Edward K. Kristensen claimed at the November 1996 conference held to discredit Salinger that the USS _Normandy_ was the \"nearest ship\" to the crash site about 185 miles southwest. By this time, however, Kallstrom had to know Kristensen was being deceptive. According to Milton, shortly after the crash Kallstrom learned of a \"gray warship\" that two flight attendants spotted off the Long Island coast an hour before the crash steaming south. FBI witness Lisa Perry and her friend Alice Rowe likely saw the same ship about two hours before the crash near the coast of Fire Island and heading east. \"The ship was so big and close,\" said the women, \"that you couldn't capture the entire profile in one glance.\" They described it as battleship gray with a large globe and impressive gunnery. \"It was quite obviously a military fighting ship.\" Other witnesses had seen this ship as well. Kallstrom was not at all pleased to learn how badly he had been played. He reportedly called Admiral Flanagan's office in a huff. Only then was he told there had, in fact, been a Navy ship in the area\u2014a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, the USS _Normandy_.\n\nIf Kallstrom ever did learn the location of the _Normandy_ at the moment of TWA 800's destruction, he did not share that information with Pat Milton. According to Milton, the FBI verified \"the precise location\" of the ship as \"181 miles southwest of the crash site, at latitude 37 degrees, 32.8 minutes north, longitude 74 degrees, 0.92 minutes west, off the Manasquan inlet in New Jersey.\" Milton passed these numbers along without doing her homework. The coordinates do place the USS _Normandy_ at a site roughly 181 miles from TWA 800's debris field but nowhere near the Manasquan inlet. If the coordinates were accurate, the _Normandy_ was off the coast of Delaware-Maryland-Virginia, at least 150 miles south of Manasquan. The ship that witnesses had seen just hours before the crash might have made it to Manasquan by 8:31 p.m., but given the timeline, the ship could not have made it to Virginia. Whatever ship the witnesses did see the FBI apparently failed to inspect. No surface vessel other than the _Normandy_ was listed in the FBI's final summary.\n\nChances are the _Normandy_ was where Kristensen said\u2014180 or so miles southwest of the crash site. The coordinates given to Milton put the ship off the coast of Wallops Island, home of NASA's Wallops Flight Facility and site of a rocket testing range. That is where the ship was positioned when retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and then active TWA 747 captain Allen Strasser had the opportunity to witness a missile test in March 1995, sixteen months before the fatal shoot down. As Strasser told me, he was a guest aboard the ship.\n\nAbout five to ten miles away from the _Normandy_ that day was a second ship. On the night in question, slightly after midnight, a target missile was launched from Wallops Island. The second ship then launched an intercept missile. Strasser stood on the starboard wing bridge of the _Normandy_ and watched the missile ascend. After the launch, Strasser returned to the ship's combat information center where fewer than ten people monitored its computer systems, reprogrammed to put all of their computing power into the intercept shot. The purpose of the test, said Strasser, was to help upgrade the U.S. Navy standard arm missile from a ship-to-air, antiaircraft missile to a ship-to-air, anti-missile missile. The test that night proved fruitful, the first success after two previous failures. Prophetically perhaps, the successful intercept took place high over the ocean just south of Long Island.\n\nAccording to Strasser, on the night TWA 800 went down, an American Airline captain reported seeing a missile ascend from Wallops Island. Strasser argues that if a Navy ship fired the fatal shot, the crew may not have known the missile had a booster rocket capable of propelling it farther and higher than a typical standard arm missile. The missile would have been loaded in a vertical launch system, which was not visible to the crew. This may help answer the question of why no sailor has come forward, publicly at least, to report the incident.\n\nChanneling the FBI, Milton wrote of the _Normandy_ , \"The agents told [Kallstrom] that the ship had been 181 miles south of the crash site when Flight 800 exploded, and not in the position to hit the plane with any of its armaments.\" This information is misleading. In the test that Strasser observed, the _Normandy_ programmed and monitored the missile. It did not fire any missiles itself. \"I believe the loss of TWA 800 was by a missile,\" Strasser told me, \"and there is a 75\u201385 percent chance it was our own missile.\" Strasser and I had this communication in 2008. Over the years I have heard from any number of people in and around the incident. Most do not want their names repeated. Strasser was an exception. \"Feel free to use the information as is,\" he said. \"It is all true. The initial three people who let this out of the bag were arrested by the FBI to scare them into submission.\" A one-time top gun, Strasser was not easily intimidated.\n\nIn its final press release, the FBI boasted that its agents had done an \"accounting of all armaments capable of reaching Flight 800.\" Despite their efforts, they had little idea of what those armaments were. Few people did. One of my correspondents suggested why. He cautioned that his information was limited, but his insights have merit nonetheless. \"Mack\" (not his real name) was a crewmember on the USS _Albuquerque_. Several days before TWA 800 was destroyed, Mack was involved in loading what he was told were \"experimental missiles\" aboard the sub. \"This was not your normal load out,\" he said. The sub was heading for the testing area off the coast of New Jersey and south of Long Island. Mack did not go on that cruise. When the TWA 800 news first broke and talk of missiles was still in the air, his wife asked, \"Do you think it was a terrorist?\" Said Mack, \"God, I hope so. My boat was out there.\" If a terrorist did not down the plane, he feared the Navy might have.\n\nThis fear was widespread. It accounted, at least in part, for media reluctance to pursue this angle and the insider reluctance to share information. Still, some facts were too obvious to ignore. In its final report the NTSB conceded that FAA radar picked up four unidentified vessels within six miles of the TWA 800 explosion. Three of the six were leaving the scene at between twelve and twenty knots \"consistent with the speed of a boat.\" A submarine goes under the rubric \"boat.\" The fact that all three of these radar tracks disappeared right after TWA 800 crashed raised the question of whether these boats were submarines.\n\nKallstrom never said otherwise. The final FBI summary located the three subs in question\u2014the USS _Wyoming_ , the USS _Albuquerque_ , and the USS _Trepang_ \u2014in the \"immediate vicinity of the crash site.\" In a recorded September 1998 phone interview AIM's Reed Irvine asked Kallstrom about the unidentified vessels within six miles of that site. Said Kallstrom, \"I spoke about those publicly. They were Navy vessels that were on classified maneuvers.\" No, Kallstrom had never spoken publicly about classified maneuvers. He was having a hard time keeping his story straight.\n\nRadar picked up a fourth vessel radar within six miles of the crash site, and this one the authorities never managed to explain away. The ship was spotted twenty minutes before the explosion heading southwest. At the time TWA blew up, it was less than three miles away. Instead of heading back to the site to look for survivors, its captain committed a nautical sin of the highest order. He fled the scene at a speed the FBI estimated at between twenty-five and thirty-five knots. That captain has never been held to account. \"Despite extensive efforts,\" the FBI's Lewis Schiliro told a House subcommittee, \"the FBI has been unable to identify this vessel.\" Schiliro added the meaningless disclaimer, \"Based on our investigative efforts, we are confident it was not a military vessel.\" The FBI identified the other vessels in the area and conducted interviews as appropriate, claimed Schiliro, but he declined to name the other vessels for fear of compromising the investigation.\n\nAccording to Schiliro, the fleeing ship was \"believed to be at least 25\u201330 feet in length.\" This was pure guesswork, if not outright disinformation. A Navy cruiser measures in the hundreds of feet. A routine radar scan cannot gauge length, but it is much more likely to pick up a Navy cruiser than an ordinary pleasure boat. Whatever the nature of the ship, whether Navy or pleasure or terrorist, the people on board would have had a better perspective on the incident than just about any witness. Admittedly, FBI agents never talked to them. Nor did the FBI explain how it was able to identify every other vessel in the area except the most conspicuous one.\n\nOn subjects nautical, the FBI had little choice but to take the Navy's word. From day one, however, naval officers were sparing with the truth. The directive to be evasive had to come from on high. How high one can only conjecture, but the White House would be a reasonable guess. Were the shoot-down the result of a secret test gone awry, a president could easily have invoked \"national security\" as the rationale for concealing the truth from the American people. Only a few high ranking officers would have needed to know the details, but it is hard to believe they would or could have misdirected the investigation of their own accord.\n\nFor the first week after the crash the documentation of its cause lay buried, presumably on the ocean bottom. Investigators believed, with good cause, that when they retrieved the so-called \"black boxes\" they would discover the truth. These durable fluorescent orange containers protected the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR) respectively. Between them, the CVR and FDR had the potential to spell out precisely what had gone wrong.\n\nInvestigators knew how skilled the U.S. Navy was in retrieving these boxes and expected quick results. In February 1996, the Navy used a remote-control submersible vehicle to recover the CVR and FDR from Birgenair Flight 301, a Turkish charter plane that crashed off the coast of the Dominican Republic. The devices had sunk with the wreckage to a depth of 7200 feet. The FDR revealed in explicit detail the mechanical flaws that caused Birgenair 301 to crash, and the CVR recorded the pilots' desperate attempt to cope with the impending disaster. As in most crashes caused by mechanical failure, the cockpit drama lasted for several excruciating minutes. In this case, it began with one pilot saying, \"There is something wrong, there are some problems,\" and it ended three minutes later with the other pilot crying out, \"Oh, what's happening?\" The FDR data proved just as revealing. Between them, the two devices told in inarguable detail the story of Birgenair 301's undoing.\n\nOn the night of the TWA 800 crash, would-be rescue boats had picked up the distinctive \"ping\" from the black boxes' underwater locator beacon. The next morning, July 18, two NTSB investigators set out to find the boxes. This should not have been hard. The sea was smooth. The sky was crystal clear. The searchers used the latest in sounding devices. And the aircraft wreckage lay only 120 feet beneath the surface. Birgenair 301 had settled _sixty_ times deeper. Wrote CNN's Negroni, \"The men left the inlet that afternoon optimistic they'd soon have what they were after.\" They found nothing, heard nothing.\n\nThe _New York Times_ expressed little curiosity about the delay, but the Long Island\u2013based _Newsday_ sensed something amiss. On July 22, the paper ran an article titled, \"Divers Wait as Devices Scan Ocean.\" According to _Newsday_ , Navy divers still had not gone into the water. They had been relying instead on various remote devices that had yet to find the elusive boxes. \"They should be down there diving,\" a captain of a nearby diving boat operation told _Newsday_. \"[Federal officials] said it was too rough out there, but my boat had 27 divers in the water on Saturday [July 20].\"\n\nNavy Captain Chip McCord told _Newsday_ that those remote devices were a \"quicker and better\" way to locate the boxes, but in the first four days the Navy found nothing. _Newsday_ paraphrased McCord as explaining, \"Signals from the black boxes have not been heard because the devices are broken, destroyed or covered with sand or other material.\" Whether intentionally or not, McCord was misleading the reporters. On July 24, two Navy divers finally went in. I have seen the underwater video of the Eureka moment, a moment Negroni described accurately enough. No sooner was the first diver lowered to the ocean floor, she wrote, than he saw \"an orange box with FLIGHT RECORDER stenciled on its side.\" Seconds later, the other diver \"came into view. In his arms he carried another orange box.\" Said diver Kevin Gelhafen, \"Recovering the boxes was merely picking them up, setting them in the basket, and tying them down.\" Like Milton, Negroni expressed no wonder at the ease with which the divers found the boxes.\n\nWith the boxes successfully recovered, President Clinton's \"on again\/off again\" trip to New York was on again. Arriving at JFK the morning after their retrieval, Clinton spun their recovery to his best political advantage. \"Just last night the divers who were braving the waters of the Atlantic to search for answers recovered both flight data recorders,\" boasted the president at a press conference afterwards. \"Our experts are analyzing their contents at this very moment. This is major step toward unraveling the mystery of Flight 800.\" As to what that mystery might be, Clinton laid out two possibilities, \"mechanical failure or sabotage.\" The word \"sabotage\" implied a bomb, not a missile.\n\nA major part of that \"mystery\" was the length of time it took to find the boxes. No sand or other material covered the CVR and FDR\u2014not that any such covering would have muffled their distinctive ping. Nor were the beacons broken. In its first formal report from November 1997, the NTSB addressed the condition of the two boxes. Although banged up and even ripped open, the boxes protected the recording devices, both of which were in good working order. The NTSB also examined the underwater locator beacon on the CVR, the \"pinger,\" and it \"operated normally when tested.\" This report failed to mention the condition of the FDR beacon, but there is every reason to believe that it worked as well.\n\nStranger still, when the NTSB agents examined the recordings, they found no useful information at all. The last words out of the cockpit were \"power set,\" a casual acknowledgement of an air traffic control order to continue ascending. This was said nearly a minute before the tape ended. The FDR ended at the exact same time as the CVR, also revealing nothing of consequence. According to former NTSB Board member Vernon Grose, this complete lack of information was unusual to the point of extraordinary. As Sanders and I discussed in some detail in _First Strike_ , there is every reason to believe the boxes were recovered immediately after the crash, edited, and put back in place. I will not go into detail here because the evidence remains inconclusive.\n\nSome facts, however, speak for themselves. Most notable is the inexplicable failure of the CVR and FDR to reveal any crash-related information whatsoever. Another is a CIA intra-agency memo from early in the investigation in which an analyst expressed surprise that the recorders would go silent. \"To get the electrical power to shut down,\" wrote the anonymous analyst, \"[a missile] would need to 'miss' the engines, and instead hit the electrical compartment by mistake.\" There was no evidence this happened. Finally, there is Executive Order 13039. Although the president preferred to work through his fixers, on March 11, 1997, Clinton quietly signed this order effectively removing all federal whistle-blower protection from anyone, civilian or military, associated with U.S. Navy \"special warfare\" operations. This would include any Navy divers charged with moving the black boxes.\n\nThe date of the executive order is worth considering. On the following day, March 12, the _New York Times_ reported that government officials had \"unleashed a pre-emptive strike\" to neutralize an upcoming 57-page article in the _Paris Match_. That article explored in depth the Navy's role in the destruction of TWA 800. The _Times_ also noted that on the day before, March 11, the same day as Clinton's executive order, the Riverside _Press-Enterprise_ broke the story of James Sanders's residue test. Having cause to fear the collapse of the cover-up, Clinton for the first time left his fingerprints on the investigation. The media failed to notice.\n\nMuch more alert than the media, Montoursville's Don Nibert had deep suspicions about the black boxes. The technically inclined Nibert used his status as a bereaved family member to get information. As he would tell CNN, he asked for a copy of the flight data recorder tape to have it analyzed independently, and the NTSB obliged him. Nibert delivered the tape to audio expert Glenn Schulze. For the thirty years prior Schulze had worked as an independent consultant with high profile clients like the U.S. Navy and the Applied Research labs at the University of Texas. Schulze concluded there were at least two seconds purposely deleted from that tape. Nibert believed they were removed to conceal \"an outside explosion next to the airplane.\" When CNN asked NTSB Board member John Goglia for clarification, he responded unhelpfully, \"We talked about there being an event of something that the data was missing and it's unexplainable, it's just missing.\"\n\nNibert's proposed scenario, if accurate, would not have shocked Jim Speer. Representing the representing the Airline Pilot's Association, Speer recalled watching a video of the ocean floor early in the investigation and noticing that the tape had been jacked with. \"Look at the gaps in the time clock here,\" Speer told his FBI chaperone. \"There is no reason for gaps to occur unless the tape has been edited. I want to see the unedited version.\" Said the agent, \"No.\" End of conversation.\n\nWith the black boxes saying nothing, and the media saying not much more, the Navy was off the hook. More importantly, so was the president. Missiles, friend or foe, had been edited out of the equation as surely as the troubling shots of the ocean floor in Speer's video and the revealing last few seconds of data from the black boxes. For the White House, things were looking up.\nChapter: FOURTEEN\n\nMR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON\n\n**I** n late November 2002, I was strolling the concrete banks of Brush Creek, a channelized waterway that runs through the heart of Kansas City. As usual, I walked Huck Finn\u2013style along the edge. With _First Strike_ about to be released, scads of people had told me to \"watch my back.\" What they should have told me was to \"watch my step.\" Lost in thought, I stepped off into space and immediately knew I was going in the water. As in the cartoons, it took about a half hour to get there. On the way, I had time to contemplate the absurdity of what could happen were I to drown in the smelly, semi-toxic Brush Creek. Who would ever believe I just fell in? A whole conspiracy industry could grow up around my literal liquidation. I hit the water almost laughing.\n\nThe laughing stopped, however, when I realized I could not get out. I was wearing sweats, now about as heavy as I was, and boots. The walkway was about a foot and a half above the water. I could not quite pull myself out or throw my foot up over the edge. The harder I tried, the wearier I got. Few people in our overly antiseptic metropolis walk the creek even in the best of weather. In late November, no one does. But then\u2014 _mirabile dictu!_ \u2014a hefty, heaven-sent fellow came ambling down the walkway. \"Hey, Mac,\" I said to my new guardian angel, \"could you lend me a hand?\" Again as in the cartoons, he did a comic double take. My guess is that he had not seen too many swimmers in this waterway, especially in November. He cheerfully obliged and spared the conspiracy mills a story even the _New York Times_ might have felt compelled to investigate.\n\nUpon the book's publication three months later, our young publicist Bob Keyser and I descended on the nation's capital. Our goal was to find someone higher up the media chain to take an interest in the information Sanders and I had gathered. Thanks to the Internet, we had much more information at our disposal than the _Times_ newsroom had a year after the crash, but we lacked the institutional clout to prod authorities to return our phone calls. That is not to say we didn't try. We simply did not succeed. I had no illusion that we could break open this story ourselves.\n\nAs I had yet to acquire a reputation as a \"loose cannon\"\u2014that would come in time\u2014a few media people of note proved willing to talk with us. We began with AIM's Reed Irvine, who had been helpful throughout. He knew what doors to knock on and what numbers to call and graciously shared those numbers with us. One door led to Don Phillips, an aviation reporter who covered the TWA 800 affair for the _Washington Post_. We met with him in the _Post_ 's lobby. Although he told us little that was new or useful, Phillips did not disguise his contempt for a process that relegated him and every other reporter not with the _New York Times_ to a lower media caste. By funneling its inside information to the _Times_ , the FBI made the Grey Lady a co-dependent, and she obliged, wittingly or not, by enabling the White House's disinformation campaign.\n\nI never did meet the one person I thought could move the TWA 800 saga into the mainstream, but in deference to Irvine, that fellow did take my calls. In addition to being the most effective reporter of his generation, Bob Woodward was a U.S. Navy vet. He served for five years as a lieutenant after graduating from Yale in 1965. During those years, by his own account, he sometimes acted as a courier between the White House and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, then the chief of naval operations. Moorer, long since retired, publicly supported the work Irvine was doing to reopen the TWA 800 investigation. In January 1998, at an AIM-sponsored press conference, he and Commander Donaldson made the case that a surface-to-air missile brought down the aircraft. Despite Moorer's credentials and Donaldson's expertise, the media blew them off. During Clinton's second term, reporters showed little interest in knowing any more than they had to about the workings of the administration.\n\nWoodward was not nearly as dismissive. He let me make my case almost without comment. Not above a little flattery, I assured him he was the only reporter capable of breaking this open, which was very close to the truth. I added, a bit presumptuously, that TWA 800 would make a nicely symmetrical capstone thirty years after Watergate. Woodward reminded me that the war in Iraq was just about ready to kick off. He suspected it would grab the media's attention in a way a seven-year-old story could not. That I could not deny. In any case, Woodward remained polite throughout our two or three phone conversations and asked me to send a book to his home address, which he provided. I have not heard from him since. If he left anything unspoken, it was a general sense of apprehension, the kind that, if voiced, might have translated, \"Don't you know what you are getting yourself into?\"\n\nI did get to meet one mainstream reporter in Washington with a reputation for uncovering things presidential: Michael Isikoff, then with _Newsweek_. Isikoff became very nearly a household word early in 1998 when Matt Drudge broke an Isikoff story that _Newsweek_ had spiked, namely that President Clinton had been dallying with intern Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office. Sex was the one scandalous slice of Clinton's life that defied the media's best efforts to suppress it.\n\nWith Isikoff in _Newsweek_ 's cramped Washington office was a colleague who covered the TWA 800 story for the magazine, Mark Hosenball. In fact, no reporter endorsed the CIA zoom climb hoax more enthusiastically than did Hosenball. His article on the subject began with a _pro forma_ dig at \"conspiracy theories\" and went nowhere positive from there. Indeed, without intending to, Hosenball revealed how painfully little America's major newsrooms knew about TWA 800 even in November 1997, sixteen months after the crash. Worse, what he did know he got from the CIA. Its analysts had convinced him that \"infrared images captured by spy satellites\" showed what really happened during the plane's last forty-nine seconds.\n\nThis revelation may have come as news to Kallstrom. The FBI's comprehensive summary issued just a week before Hosenball's article did not once mention the word \"satellite.\" The NTSB's final report made only vague mention of \"infrared sensor information from a U.S. satellite\" and that in reference to the CIA video. In his 2008 report, the CIA's Randolph Tauss claimed a satellite detected a \"heat plume associated with the crash\" but said it was not \"crucial\" to the analysis. In her book, CNN's Christine Negroni made no mention of satellites, and AP's Pat Milton made only fleeting references. The _New York Times_ avoided the subject altogether. Yet here was Hosenball saying that the CIA had \"spy satellites designed to monitor unfriendly foreign countries pointed at the Eastern Seaboard.\" This at least sounded plausible. Two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics, and three weeks after the terror bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the military was on an extremely high state of alert.\n\nFamily member Don Nibert heard about the satellites as well and wanted to know more. \"I learned that they had three satellites that would have coverage of the site near the 8:30 time period,\" Nibert observed wryly. \"All failed.\" Nibert asked John Clark, an aviation safety deputy with the NTSB, what were the odds all three would cease working at the same time. Clark responded that this information was considered classified.\n\nThis was bunk. If the satellites showed what Hosenball claimed, federal officials would not have needed the CIA's trumped up zoom climb video. Surely too the FBI and NTSB would have used the data to buttress their shaky, inconclusive summaries. In a letter to then congressman John Kasich two months after the press conference, the CIA quietly buried the subject: \"No satellite imagery of the disaster exists.\" This translates, \"No satellite imagery exists that would help us make our case.\"\n\nHosenball fell hard for the CIA video. Under his byline, _Newsweek_ ran a fully affirmative, nine-frame, full-color recreation captioned with the unlikely boast, \"CIA Photos.\" For Hosenball, the video provided a necessary rebuttal to \"speculation about a mystery missile.\" As he told the story, \"some\" of the \"244\" FBI witnesses claimed to have seen a streak of light arcing across the sky. In reality, that \"some\" was 258, and the \"244\" was 736. But who was counting? Not Hosenball. He had information enough to assure his readers that what the witnesses really saw was the fuselage of the burning, climbing plane rocketing upwards some three-thousand-plus feet.\n\nIndeed, had Hosenball been on the CIA payroll he could not have done more to legitimize the agency's crude rewrite of history. Among the major media only Robert Hager of NBC rivaled Hosenball in the uncritical affirmation of government talking points. In fact, the CIA cited Hager in an in-house newsletter as an example of how well the media received the zoom climb animation. \"The work was riveting,\" the newsletter quoted Hager as saying. Hager too marveled at the satellite data and congratulated the CIA on its \"fascinating, highly informed\" presentation. In the years to come, authorities could rely on Hager to pass off TWA 800 agitprop as news.\n\nOur goal in meeting with Isikoff and Hosenball was not to make enemies but to make converts. Unfortunately, we had no success. Hosenball resisted fiercely. He countered my objections to the CIA animation with the claim that Boeing executives had assured him the 747 fuel tank was a veritable time bomb. I had a hard time believing any executive anywhere would say something that incriminating, but Boeing did have reason not to make enemies at the White House. When the crash occurred, Boeing was in the middle of negotiations to buy McDonnell Douglas, its only real competitor in the American commercial airliner market. The airlines closed the deal in December 1996 with a $13 billion price tag, pending government approval.\n\nAmong others, consumer advocate Ralph Nader denounced the proposed merger, arguing that it would give Boeing a near monopoly on the industry as well as \"dramatic political power.\" Despite Nader's impassioned plea, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved the merger on July 1, 1997. This was a mighty subjective decision. Just the day before, the head of the FTC was reportedly \"delighted\" when a federal judge blocked a proposed merger between Office Depot and Staples. The _New York Times_ dryly noted that the decision was \"controversial\" in antitrust circles given that the merged entity would \"would control only 6 percent to 8 percent of the overall office products market.\"\n\nIn November 1997, with the merger concluded, Boeing execs seemed confident enough to distance the company from the CIA zoom climb animation. \"Boeing was not involved in the production of the video shown today, nor have we had the opportunity to obtain a copy or fully understand the data used to create it,\" said a company press release posted immediately after the video's airing. \"The video's explanation of the eyewitness observations can be best assessed by the eyewitnesses themselves.\" The release concluded with an odd disclaimer, \"Since the beginning of the investigation, Boeing has never subscribed to any one theory.\"\n\nIsikoff did not patronize us the way Hosenball had. He just did not express much interest. He asked me which three pages of the book he should read. \"Given that this is the great untold story of our time,\" I responded, \"how about a chapter?\" I suggested chapter fourteen, our summary chapter. As I explained, there is a binary quality to any such investigation: gate open or shut, explosive device or mechanical failure, internal explosion or external explosion. To transform an external explosion into a mechanical failure someone had to alter or suppress every known variable.\n\nAs I explained to Isikoff, in chapter fourteen of our book we reviewed all the relevant variables\u2014the physical evidence, the eyewitness testimony, the debris field, the medical forensics, the explosive residue, the residue trail, the Navy information, the radar data, the FDR, the CVR, the satellite data, and more\u2014and showed how the authorities lost, stole, concealed, erased, deleted, denied, or simply ignored every variable that did not fit the preferred outcome. Where need be, I continued, they even manufactured new evidence\u2014the zoom climb, the imaginary flagpoles, bogus interviews, counterfeit dog training. Losing patience, Isikoff looked at me skeptically and repeated, \"Which three pages?\"\n\nMr. Smith, welcome to Washington.\nChapter: FIFTEEN\n\nTHE FIXERS\n\n**\"T** hey were careless people,\" wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, \"they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together and let other people clean up the mess they had made.\" Fitzgerald, of course, was writing here about his fictional characters Tom and Daisy Buchanan in _The Great Gatsby_. The Buchanans, however, had nothing on the Clintons. Throughout their political careers, Bill and Hillary made one unseemly mess after another and in every case let other people clean up.\n\nThe clean-up people rarely got the top jobs. Those required Senate confirmation. They got the number two spots or, in Webster Hubbell's case at the Department of Justice, the number three spot. Unfortunately, Hubbell had messes of his own and no one to clean up after him. A year into his tenure as associate attorney general, the Clintons' old Arkansas pal was forced out for sundry corruptions back at his and Hillary's law firm in Little Rock. For the Clintons this was just as well. The ungainly Hubbell would not have been up to the TWA 800 mess\u2014the Clinton's most complex and consequential, Monica included. This clean up had to be managed through at least three agencies: the NTSB, the CIA, and the FBI, as well the Departments of Defense and Justice.\n\nIn that it controlled the FBI, the DOJ had the most demanding job. Making it tougher still was the disarray within the department. From the moment Hillary Clinton staked out Justice as her personal fiefdom, the department had been in chaos. Nanny issues sidelined the first two attorney general candidates as well as the first would-be deputy AG. Insisting that a woman\u2014any woman\u2014head the department, Hillary finally settled on the feckless Miami prosecutor Janet Reno. For the next eight years the Clintons would have to work around her. Needing someone to work through, they finally found a fixer worthy of the number two position, a little known DC litigator named Jamie Gorelick. With Gorelick's appointment as deputy attorney general in February 1994, Hillary had three women occupying the most powerful posts in federal law enforcement, criminal division head Jo Ann Harris being the third.\n\nGorelick proved to be a much more capable and subtle problem solver than the blundering Hubbell. In June 1996, a little more than a month before the TWA 800 crash, _Newsweek_ 's Mark Hosenball\u2014yes, that Mark Hosenball\u2014took note of Gorelick's insider role. In a rare glimpse at the political workings of the feminized DOJ, Hosenball observed that Gorelick had set up \"a campaign-like 'war room'\" to combat alleged smears from the Bob Dole campaign. Wrote Hosenball without a hint of disapproval, \"In a campaign year, Justice can't afford to be totally blind.\"\n\nIn that stormy campaign year, Justice was very nearly omniscient. A month after the Hosenball revelation, still in war room mode, Gorelick directed the FBI to take over the TWA 800 investigation. Heading up Justice's operation on the ground in Long Island was United States Attorney Valerie Caproni. As attorneys and officers of the court, Gorelick and Caproni knew the FBI was the subordinate agency. They knew too the NTSB could not legally be restricted in its pursuit of information. They simply ignored the law. The FBI reported to Justice. The NTSB did not.\n\nWhile Reno contented herself with \"policy issues,\" Gorelick ran the department. The media acknowledged as much, but they missed Gorelick's crucial role in the TWA 800 investigation. In her book _Deadly Departure_ , CNN's Christine Negroni never once mentioned her. The _New York Times_ made only one reference to Gorelick in regards to TWA 800. That came on July 20, three days post-crash. Identified as a member of an \"interagency task force,\" Gorelick told the _Times_ that investigators were still entertaining \"multiple possibilities\" as to the cause of the crash. That was it. Of note, at the time of the interview, she was traveling to the Atlanta Olympic games \"with the presidential party.\" In a lapse of taste given the mess in Long Island, the _Times_ headlined this article, \"Clinton Tells U.S. Athletes, 'I Want You to Mop Up'.\"\n\nOnly with the release of Pat Milton's book three years after the crash did Gorelick's name surface in any meaningful way. Milton identified Gorelick as the most serious player at the August 22, 1996, meeting in the attorney general's office, the meeting that reversed the momentum of the investigation. Presuming Kallstrom told Milton about Gorelick's presence at that meeting, he did not share her apparent message, namely that investigators had to find some explanation other than a bomb, let alone a missile. Although undocumented, the rough outlines of the strategy shift would not be hard to interpret.\n\nWhat followed in the next several weeks was the most ambitious and successful cover-up in American peacetime history. At its quiet center was Gorelick. With the help of a complicit media, she and her cronies transformed a transparent missile strike into a mechanical failure of unknown origin. Given her role, the months after the crash had to have been emotionally harrowing. She did not know whether she would wake up one morning to find _Washington Post_ reporters at her door eager to make her their John Mitchell or H. R. Haldeman. Perhaps such anxiety may have inspired her to leave the DOJ in January 1997. If so, the media missed the story. In an article on her departure, the _New York Times_ failed to explain why the \"hard-driving, efficient\" deputy was stepping down or what she intended to do next. Nor did the paper mention her role in the TWA 800 investigation.\n\nThere was nothing routine about Gorelick's next career move. In May 1997, the Clintons found a way to reward their trusted deputy for her steely performance. To the best of my knowledge, not one reporter even questioned why a middling bureaucrat with no financial or housing experience would be handed the vice-chairmanship of Fannie Mae, a sinecure the _Washington Monthly_ aptly called \"the equivalent of winning the lottery.\" Had the reporters inquired, they might have learned that Clinton had appointed five reliable hacks total to the Fannie Mae Board, including the chief of staff and deputy campaign manager from his 1992 campaign, a former White House aide, a major DNC fundraiser and Lincoln bedroom guest, and a GOP real estate mogul who endorsed Clinton in 1992. The _Washington Monthly_ summarized a board appointment as \"a nice way for a president to say 'thank you' to a political ally.\" One does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect that Clinton had something to do with Gorelick's appointment. Gorelick would make $877,573 in that first half-year alone.\n\nAnother understated player in the TWA 800 drama was George Tenet. A party loyalist, Tenet hopscotched from one congressional staff position to another before wending his way to the deputy directorship at Central Intelligence. On July 17, 1996, he was serving in that position under John Deutch. A respected intellectual, Deutch brought much to the office, but, unlike Tenet, he did not bring the one quality the Clintons most valued: blind fealty. In September 1996 Deutch confirmed White House suspicions by testifying to Congress that Saddam Hussein was stronger than he had been after the 1991 Gulf War. Reported the _Times_ ' Tim Weiner, \"The White House was furious at Deutch for speaking the truth in public.\" Clinton dismissed him two months later.\n\nThe memos the CIA released in response to various FOIA requests reveal the CIA's complete engagement in the investigation by the day after the crash. In that all names are redacted, I cannot tell whether Tenet sent or received any of these memos. He was sufficiently involved, however, to lend his imprimatur to agency disinformation by March 1997. That month Tenet sent FBI director Louis Freeh a letter assuring him that \"what these eyewitnesses saw was the crippled aircraft after the first explosion had already taken place.\" This was eight months before the FBI shared the counterfeit CIA thesis with the public. For all the FBI's bluster and the NTSB's statutory authority, the CIA gave the impression of being the agency in charge.\n\nTo secure a meeting with the analysts responsible for the zoom climb video, for instance, the NTSB's Jim Hall had to send a humble pie letter to Tenet explaining how NTSB group members would \"appreciate learning more about the CIA's evaluation of witness statements.\" Hall sent this letter two years after Tenet informed Freeh as to what the witnesses were alleged to have seen. In March 1997 the White House rewarded Tenet for his faithful service by naming him director of central intelligence. Opined the _New York Times_ , more accurately than its editors knew, \"The rise of Mr. Tenet is proof of the rewards of being a loyal and obedient servant to one's boss, be he a senator, a spymaster or the President of the United States.\"\n\nFor all their power within the administration, neither Tenet nor Gorelick could have undone the TWA 800 investigation without Kallstrom's support. In the way of compensation, Gorelick had one precious carrot to dangle: the freedom of Kallstrom's good friend and FBI colleague, R. Lindley DeVecchio. For thirty years, until his arrest in 1992, a Brooklyn hit man named Greg Scarpa worked as a \"top echelon confidential informant\" for the FBI. DeVecchio managed that relationship for many of those years. In return for the intelligence Scarpa provided on New York's La Cosa Nostra families, the FBI protected Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, and kept him out of prison.\n\nDuring the years he was under FBI protection, however, Scarpa murdered as many as fifty people. Ultimately, three of DeVecchio's fellow agents accused him of losing his moral balance and, at the very least, providing Scarpa with the kind of FBI intelligence that allowed him to target his enemies. This was a serious charge and not without parallels elsewhere. A similar relationship with mobster Whitey Bulger in Boston would earn FBI agent John Connolly a forty-year sentence for murder.\n\nAccording to the _New York Times_ , the Clinton Justice Department began its investigation of DeVecchio in 1994 based on the testimony of his FBI colleagues. In April of 1996, with DeVecchio still in FBI limbo, Kallstrom had his attorney send a memo to FBI director Louis Freeh warning that the DOJ investigation of DeVecchio threatened future prosecutions and \"casts a cloud\" over the New York Office. In July 1996, the DeVecchio case was still active when Freeh assigned Kallstrom to head up the TWA Flight 800 investigation.\n\nOn August 22 of that year Gorelick summoned Kallstrom to Washington. In early September 1996, the Justice Department abruptly closed its thirty-one month long investigation and informed DeVecchio that a prosecution was not warranted. By mid-September 1996, Kallstrom had ended all serious talk of a missile and pushed through the administration's \"mechanical failure\" narrative. In October, DeVecchio resigned with full pension. Of course, the DOJ's abrupt clearance of DeVecchio in 1996, like Gorelick's Fannie Mae bonanza and Tenet's directorship, may all have been happy coincidences, but the coincidences in the TWA 800 investigation make hash out of the laws of probability.\n\nIn any case, the State of New York was not as forgiving as the Department of Justice. In 2006, its prosecutors indicted DeVecchio for his alleged role in abetting the Scarpa murders. At the time of his indictment, Kallstrom came defiantly to his friend's defense. \"Lin DeVecchio is not guilty and did not partake in what he's being charged with. It's as simple as that,\" said Kallstrom, still speaking in absolutes. Then serving as senior counterterrorism advisor to New York governor George Pataki, Kallstrom apparently saw no conflict in publicly raising money for a man whom New York State had indicted for murder. Although the case against DeVecchio eventually fell apart, the evidence was strong enough for the State of New York to risk alienating the FBI by bringing it to trial.\n\nKallstrom left the FBI in December 1997 immediately after the close of the TWA 800 case. Like many of his peers, Louis Freeh included, he took an executive position with the MBNA Bank before assuming New York State's top security post in response to 9\/11. Today, he serves as a regular contributor to Fox News on the subject of terror. The NTSB's Peter Goelz did pretty well too. He proved to be a good enough soldier during the early rough going of the TWA 800 investigation that Jim Hall named him managing director of the NTSB on December 4, 1997, a week before Kallstrom resigned. On the next day, December 5, the FBI arrested James and Elizabeth Sanders. The NTSB's David Mayer would have to wait a little longer for his ship to sail in, but in July 2009, he was named managing director of the NTSB. The CIA's Randolph Tauss meanwhile got his medal. Washington takes care of its own.\n\nIf Gorelick's sweet Fannie Mae deal passed under the media radar, Webster Hubbell's did not. In the same spring Gorelick was plotting her career options, Hubbell was fending off any number of government interrogators. They were hoping to learn why Hubbell's \"clients\" paid him more than $400,000 in the months after he stepped down from Justice to face criminal charges. The most generous of those clients, the Riady family of Indonesia, had been bailing Clinton out since his Whitewater days in Arkansas. According to the _Times_ , the Riadys had their hand in a $2 billion American-Chinese project whose White House endorsement international bagman Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had the dishonor of trumpeting. He did so, said the _Times_ , while \"on a groundbreaking trade mission to Beijing.\"\n\nThis groundbreaking mission to China took place two months after the Riadys put Mr. Hubbell on their payroll. Without saying so explicitly, the _Times_ strongly implied that the disgraced White House fixer was paid to keep quiet during his eighteen months in prison. The headline said as much, \"Payment to an Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project.\" The Whitewater independent counsel, the Justice Department, and Congress were all investigating Clinton fundraising but were getting nothing out of Hubbell.\n\n\"I'm not going to talk about my clients,\" he told the _Times_ , as if he could have provided any useful service to anyone other than his continued silence. The president claimed to have learned about the payoff only by reading about it in the newspapers. \"The charge is serious; we need to get to the bottom of it,\" said Clinton with enough of a straight face to keep the _Times_ from branding this scandal a \"scandal\" and running with it the way its editors would have had Clinton been a Republican.\n\nAs Hubbell's case suggested, a fixer's obligation to the Clintons did not end when he or she left their employ. In January 2004, the _Times_ reported matter-of-factly that Jamie Gorelick was resigning from Fannie Mae \"to spend more time on the national commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to pursue other interests.\" What the _Times_ did not report is that during her five-plus years with that self-serving enterprise, Gorelick self-served herself to the queenly sum of $26,466,834 in salary, bonuses, performance pay, and stock options.\n\nGorelick was either the most self-sacrificing of American patriots or an anxious fixer with a mess to clean up. As one of only five Democrats on that commission and the only one to give up a $5-million-a-year gig to secure a seat, the latter option seems most likely. Gorelick hinted at what that mess might be when she told the _Times_ that the commission's work focused \"on the period of 1998 forward.\" She said this to deflect criticism that she would be investigating her own responsibility for the 9\/11 attacks, but her timing suggested a deeper truth.\n\nIf the Clintons asked Gorelick to give up her extravagant Fannie Mae salary, they asked even more of their ultimate fixer, Sandy Berger. Like _Pulp Fiction_ 's Winston Wolf, Berger's job was to \"solve problems.\" Berger and the president went way back. They worked together on the McGovern campaign in 1972, and twenty years later Berger urged Clinton to run for president when others friends shied away. In his first term, Clinton rewarded this trade lawyer and lobbyist with the deputy national security advisor job, not because of Berger's foreign policy experience, which was slight, but because of his political instincts, which were keen.\n\nIn his second term, Clinton appointed Berger national security advisor. Unlike virtually all of his predecessors\u2014General Colin Powell, Rear Admiral John Poindexter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger\u2014Berger had no serious foreign policy expertise. What he did have was the president's confidence. Clinton had entrusted the then deputy with some highly sensitive assignments, and Berger delivered. That Berger reportedly remained in the family quarters with the Clintons during the first night of the TWA 800 saga testified to the trust between the two men. So too did his designation as Clinton's point man on China. On the controversial trade missions abroad, it was Berger who pulled the strings that made Ron Brown dance.\n\nIn April 2002, the former president called in his chits. He designated Berger as his representative to review intelligence documents in advance of the various hearings on 9\/11. As a 2007 report by the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform specified, Berger did not ask for this assignment, not at all. According to the archivists, Berger \"indicated some disgust with the burden and responsibility of conducting the document review.\" The Clintons, however, had a hold on Berger. To appease them, he risked everything\u2014his reputation, his livelihood, his very freedom. According to the House report, Berger made four trips to the National Archives. His stated reason for the visits was to prepare for his upcoming testimony before the Graham-Goss congressional committee and the 9\/11 Commission. The first of his visits was in May 2002, the last in October 2003. He clearly left his mark. \"The full extent of Berger's document removal,\" said the House report, \"is not known and never can be known.\"\n\nIn the absence of substantive reporting by the major media, please allow me an informed speculation as to why Berger risked his all. On his first visit, according to Archives staff, \"Berger was especially interested in White House terrorism advisor Richard Clarke's personal office files.\" According to the Committee, \"Had Berger seen 'a smoking gun' or other documents he did not want brought to an investigatory panel's attention, he could have removed it on this visit.\" If there were a \"smoking gun,\" it might well have involved the idea of using planes as bombs.\n\nUnderstandably, the 9\/11 Commission was concerned about who knew what when in regards to the use of planes as bombs. Before the Atlanta Olympics, in fact, Clarke had warned security planners about the possibility of someone like Ramzi Yousef hijacking a 747 and flying it into Olympic Stadium. Two days before the start of those Olympics, on July 17, Saddam's National Liberation Day, with the U.S. Navy on an extremely high state of alert, TWA Flight 800 blew up inexplicably off the coast of Long Island. The fact that the president was reviewing Bojinka plans soon after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 made the versions of those plans with his hand written notes on them all the more critical. If found and revealed, those plans, at the very least, would have shown the president's interest in the possible use of planes as bombs five years before September 11.\n\nBerger's task, I believe, was to make sure all references to Bojinka, planes-as-bombs, and\/or TWA Flight 800 were rooted from the Archives, especially any documents with hand-written notes that led back to co-conspirators Berger, Clarke, Tenet, Gorelick, or Clinton. For what other reason would Berger have risked so much?\n\nPaul Brachfeld, the inspector general of the National Archives, threw a major wrench into the Clintons' scheme. Unlike so many career bureaucrats, Brachfeld spoke out forcefully about the criminal activity he was witnessing, namely Berger's theft and destruction of sensitive government documents. Unfortunately, he met resistance from other career bureaucrats less committed to the national interest than he was. On January 14, 2004, the day Berger first testified privately before the 9\/11 Commission, Brachfeld met with DOJ attorney Howard Sklamberg. Concerned that Berger had obstructed the 9\/11 Commission's work, Brachfeld wanted assurance that the commission knew of Berger's crime and the potential ramifications of it. He did not get it. On March 22, 2004, two days before Berger's public testimony, senior attorneys John Dion and Bruce Swartz informed Brachfeld the DOJ was _not_ going to notify the commission of the Berger investigation before his appearance.\n\nDOJ's failure to notify the commission set up one of the most bizarre days in the annals of American history\u2014Wednesday, March 24, 2004. Testifying together before the commission were George Tenet, Richard Clarke, and Sandy Berger. Evaluating their testimony was Jamie Gorelick, one of only ten commissioners. Berger had already been apprehended stealing and destroying documents that the commission was expected to review. The commission members, at least the Republicans, did not know this. This much was evident in Chairman Thomas Kean's initial exchange with Berger.\n\n\"We are pleased to welcome before the commission a witness who can offer us considerable insight into questions of national policy coordination, Mr. Samuel Berger, who served as President Clinton's national security advisor,\" said Kean. To those in the know what Kean asked next must have sounded like a punch line: \"Mr. Berger, we would like to ask you to raise your right hand. Do you swear or affirm to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?\" Even more perversely amusing were Gorelick's final words to Berger, \"Thank you very much for your testimony and your service to the country.\"\n\nThe Republicans on the commission questioned Berger and Clarke about President Clinton's inaction after the bombing of the USS _Cole_ and other terrorist attacks. In a dazzling display of political moxie, both men cited the false TWA 800 narrative to make their inaction seem virtuous. \"We thought TWA 800 was terrorism,\" said Berger. \"It was not terrorism. People actually\u2014dozens of people saw the missile strike TWA 800 as it went up over Long Island.\" At this point, Commissioner John Lehman interjected, \"Yes, but you just told us. . . .\" Berger snapped back, \"Preliminary judgments, I have come to learn, are not the same as judgments.\"\n\nClarke elaborated on this theme in his defense of Berger. \"He pointed out that in the days and weeks after the TWA 800 crash, we assumed it was a terrorist attack,\" said Clarke confidently. \"There were eyewitnesses of what appeared to be a missile attack. But after exhaustive investigations that went on for years, in the case of the NTSB and the FBI, a determination was made that it was not a terrorist attack.\" With Berger having purged the files and with Gorelick monitoring the commission, Clarke had every reason to feel confident.\n\nClarke came to the hearing well prepped. In this critical election year, several major media partisans had collaborated to turn this hitherto obscure bureaucrat into a celebrity swift boater. His soon-to-be-bestseller _Against All Enemies_ had been published two days prior. He appeared on _60 Minutes_ the Sunday before the hearing and on _Meet the Press_ the following Sunday. At every turn, he played the selfless public servant who, unlike President Bush, was man enough to apologize for failing to prevent 9\/11. In testifying before Gorelick and her fellow commissioners, Clarke asked that intelligence analysts \"be forgiven for not thinking about [aviation terror] given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it.\"\n\nOf course, to think about aviation terror would have kept TWA 800 in the conversation. As the memoirs of the various participants suggest, no one wanted it there. Although Clarke talked about the crash in 2004, he helped kill the investigation in 1996. Berger and Gorelick signed on to make sure it stayed dead. Unfortunately, the Clintons and their cronies did so good a job burying the truth that no one passed information about potential aviation terror on to the next administration. This became apparent with the very first question posed to Bush national security advisor Condoleezza Rice in her appearance before the commission on April 8, 2004. Asked Kean, \"Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?\" Rice had not.\n\nTenet avoided the subject of TWA 800 at the hearing, but he caused problems for Gorelick on another front. In explaining intelligence failures before 9\/11, he first addressed the \"wall that was in place between the criminal side and the intelligence side.\" Tenet made that barrier sound impenetrable. \"What's in a criminal case doesn't cross over that line. Ironclad regulations,\" he insisted. \"So that even people in the Criminal Division and the Intelligence Divisions of the FBI couldn't talk to each other, let alone talk to us or us talk to them.\"\n\nThis testimony flummoxed those of us researching TWA 800. Kallstrom and his colleagues certainly used the \"wall\" to protect the FBI's criminal investigation from the NTSB, but they welcomed, or at least accepted, the involvement of the CIA from day one on. In the ensuing months, they fed the CIA analysts a steady stream of information about a presumed crime against American citizens on American territory. This cooperation, in which Tenet himself was involved, showed the wall to be more vulnerable to presidential politics than to any pressing issue of national security.\n\nIn her response to Tenet, Gorelick acknowledged the wall and claimed to have used \"brute force\" in her attempt to penetrate it, but she took no responsibility for its creation. The task of assigning credit was left to Attorney General John Ashcroft. In fact, he was the first witness to call attention to the inherent conflict in Gorelick's double agency. \"The single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall,\" Ashcroft testified before the commission on April 13, 2004. He was referring here to the same memo that Tenet had, one issued in 1995, which provided instructions on the \"separation of certain foreign counterintelligence and criminal investigations.\" These instructions, as Tenet noted, disallowed FBI agents from communicating with intelligence gatherers at the CIA and elsewhere. \"Full disclosure,\" Ashcroft continued, \"compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission.\"\n\nThat author, of course, was Gorelick. \"We predicted Democrats would use the 9\/11 Commission for partisan purposes, and that much of the press would oblige,\" thundered a _Wall Street Journal_ editorial. \"But color us astonished that barely anyone appreciates the significance of the bombshell Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped on the hearings Tuesday.\" For all their passion, the _Journal_ editors themselves failed to see the significance of the Ashcroft revelation. The Clintons and their allies had handed an inexperienced functionary a $5 million a year job. She then gave that job up to join the 9\/11 Commission despite a work history that, when exposed, would embarrass the Democrats. Having kicked TWA 800 down Clinton's ample memory hole, the _Journal_ and all other media overlooked one outstanding fact: under Gorelick's watchful gaze the CIA and FBI collaborated splendidly on the zoom climb video. In so doing, they proved there was nothing \"ironclad\" about those regulations. By 2004, this collaboration was a matter of record.\n\nWhile the commission hearing moved on, its best story lines suppressed or ignored, the National Archives' Brachfeld kept prodding Justice. On April 6, 2004, two weeks after Berger's appearance before the 9\/11 Commission, he called DOJ's Inspector General Glenn Fine and again expressed his concern that the commissioners remained unaware of Berger's theft. Fine organized a meeting for April 9. Brachfeld reported to those gathered, \"Berger knowingly removed documents and therefore, may have purposely impeded the 9\/11 investigation.\" Some of those documents, Brachfeld added, might have been \"original.\"\n\nFor all of his efforts, Brachfeld was unable to persuade Justice to inform the 9\/11 Commission of Berger's actions. The commissioners remained in the dark until July 19, 2004, three days before the 9\/11 Commission released its final report, too late for any significant amendment. They might not have known even then had there not been a leak from somewhere in the Bush administration. At the time this story broke in July 2004, Berger was serving as a campaign advisor to Senator John Kerry. \"Last year, when I was in the archives reviewing documents, I made an honest mistake,\" he told reporters. His attorney Lanny Breuer called the removal of these documents an \"accident\" and shifted the blame to the Bush White House for using the revelation as a campaign ploy. A year later, when Berger pled guilty, the _Times_ wrote off the theft and the surrounding hoopla as \"a brief stir\" in the campaign season.\n\nIn truth, there was nothing honest or accidental about what Berger had done. Among his more flagrantly criminal acts, Berger swiped some highly classified documents, and then, during a break, stashed them under a trailer at a construction site. He retrieved them at the end of the day and admittedly used scissors to cut the documents into little pieces before throwing them away. These repeated thefts should have caused a whole lot more than a brief stir. \"His motives in taking the documents remain something of a mystery,\" reported the _Times_ after Berger pled guilty. How different history would have been had the _Washington Post_ contented itself with writing, \"The motives of the Watergate burglars remain something of a mystery.\"\n\nFinally, on Friday, April 1, 2005, the Bush Department of Justice announced its plea deal with Berger, an embarrassingly lenient one at that\u2014a $10,000 fine and the loss of his top-level security clearance for three years. That was it. Berger repeatedly stole and destroyed classified documents, lied about it to authorities, and received a much lighter punishment than James Sanders had for receiving and testing a purloined pinch of foam rubber. In September 2005, a federal judge upped the ante on Berger's treachery but not by enough to hurt. Judge Deborah Robinson raised the fine to $50,000\u2014chump change for the wealthy attorney\u2014added two years of probation, and threw in one hundred hours of community service. Robinson said she took into account Berger's \"otherwise exemplary record\" and \"sincere expression of remorse\" in her sentence. Berger was remorseful only about getting caught. \"I let considerations of personal convenience override clear rules of handling classified material,\" he lied on the very day of his sentencing. There was nothing convenient about shredding documents and nothing exemplary about the reasons he had to do so.\n\nAs I watched these events unfold, I presumed the Bush DOJ went soft on Berger to honor some unwritten pact among presidents to protect their predecessors' national security secrets. On closer inspection, however, it seems that the Bush White House lacked control of its own Justice Department. For the record, Dion, Swartz, Sklamberg, and Fine were all holdovers from the Clinton administration. As far as I could tell, Fine, Swartz, and Sklamberg have only contributed to Democratic candidates in federal races and Dion has no record of federal contributions. During the course of the investigation, Alberto Gonzales, a Republican Janet Reno, replaced the much shrewder John Ashcroft as attorney general. For whatever reason, Gonzales consented to the absurdly lenient plea agreement offered to Berger. In the final analysis, the decision to protect Berger may have had more to do with saving the Clinton legacy than with protecting national interests.\n\nLess than a year later, Berger was back in the news. The global strategy firm over which he presided, Stonebridge International, added a new member to its advisory board. That member just happened to be the vice-chair of the 9\/11 Commission, Lee Hamilton, a former congressman. The _chutzpah_ of this appointment still astonishes. Berger had thoroughly sabotaged the work of the 9\/11 Commission and then had the nerve to appoint the highest-ranking Democrat on that commission to the five-member advisory board of his private firm. Again, the media chose not to notice. The media failed to notice as well when Berger helped plot the political assassination of the one man in Washington most willing to expose his and the Clintons' criminal mischief, Rep. Curt Weldon, a ten-term Republican from Pennsylvania. In the process, the unrepentant Berger would help turn Congress over to the Democrats.\n\nIn March 2006, Berger held a fundraiser for the designated hit man, Joe Sestak, a former vice admiral forced into retirement for what the U.S. Navy charitably called \"poor command climate.\" This would-be congressman had not lived in Weldon's suburban Philadelphia district for thirty years before being tabbed to run against Weldon. Berger lent more than his money and support. He volunteered Stonebridge's Director of Communications to serve as Sestak's campaign spokesperson. Before the campaign was through, Berger and his allies would bring in the big guns, none bigger than Bill Clinton and none more lethal than the FBI.\n\nUnaware of the plot against Weldon, I stumbled into the middle of it. Mike Wire, the TWA 800 witness on the bridge, had wrangled an appointment with Weldon and asked if I wanted to come along. Wire lived in suburban Philadelphia, and I happened to be down the New Jersey shore that week. So he and I and his wife Joan drove down together. We did not expect much. If Weldon were like other authorities we had tried to contact, he would have listened politely for a few minutes and promised to have some staffer look into it.\n\nGiven Weldon's interests, I had expected to meet a much harder guy. The year before our visit Regnery Publishing had published Weldon's _Countdown to Terror_ : _The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America_ \u2014 _and How the CIA Has Ignored It_ , a book whose very title made serious enemies in the intelligence establishment. Weldon had also shed light on Able Danger, the Army intelligence unit that had targeted 9\/11 conspirators months before the attack only to be thwarted by various bureaucracies.\n\nThe Weldon we met, however, was a congenial, grandfatherly fellow who took more pride in his service as a volunteer fireman than he did in fighting the CIA. He had served a couple of terms as a small town mayor and seemed no more regal than that. Nor did the session go as we had anticipated. Not at all. Weldon ushered us into his office at 11 a.m., and he and Russ Caso, his chief intelligence aide, kept us there for more than two hours. In fact, I was the one who broke up the meeting as I had to be back in New Jersey for an extended family gathering.\n\nWire told a compelling story. His straightforward, no-nonsense account has made a believer out of many a skeptic. I supported his account by showing other witness testimony from _Silenced_ and explaining the motivation and the logic of the conspirators. Weldon did not need much convincing. He had been investigating the dark side of the Clinton security apparatus for years, including Berger's woefully under-punished destruction of government documents.\n\nWeldon was well aware of the forces massing against him. And he thought he knew why. He had made it his business to find out what Berger had been seeking in the National Archives and how he had gotten off so lightly. In fact, when we left Weldon, he was on his way to review the Berger evidence. He was the one man in Washington willing and able to put all the pieces together of a scandal that, if pursued, could shake the DC firmament. The very fact that Berger was overseeing a campaign against the man most likely to expose him had the potential to move the political Richter at least a few notches.\n\nThe Clintons and their cronies invested a good deal of energy in neutralizing Weldon. During an unusually testy Chris Wallace interview with President Clinton on Fox News in late September 2006, the nation saw just how much energy. \"A three-star admiral,\" Clinton announced out of nowhere, \"who was on my National Security Council staff, who also fought terror, by the way, is running for the seat of Curt Weldon in Pennsylvania.\" He did not even mention Sestak. In fact, he mentioned only two Republicans in the interview: Curt Weldon and President George Bush. A week or so later, Clinton visited Weldon's district to stir up the base.\n\nPopular ten-term congressmen don't go down easily. With three weeks remaining before the election, despite the outsized efforts of the Sestak campaign, Weldon retained a seven-point lead in the polls. Weldon's enemies, however, had a nasty little ace up their sleeves. Dealing it was Greg Gordon of the Democrat-friendly McClatchy Newspapers' Washington Bureau. Two anonymous sources had allegedly told Gordon that Weldon had \"traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter.\" Two days later, on October 15, the _New York Times_ , in a surprisingly lengthy article on the race, confirmed that law enforcement officials \"were investigating [Weldon's] role in securing lobbying contracts for his daughter's international public relations firm.\"\n\nAlleging a need to act quickly because of the leak, the FBI raided the homes of Weldon's daughter and a friend on Monday morning, October 16. Within hours, Democrat protesters were waving \"Caught Red-Handed\" signs outside Weldon's district office in Upper Darby. The story received a great deal of unreflective attention from a media desperate for a Democrat win. My attempt to educate reporters at the McClatchy papers and the local _Delco Times_ fell on willfully deaf ears. The narrative had already been established, and the media saw no need to rework it. On election night, Sestak and his pals had cause to celebrate. He won his district with 56 percent of the vote, and the Democrats retook Congress.\n\nIt took a good long while for the local media to wise up. \"It was assumed by some at the time that the Justice Department wouldn't have taken the extraordinary steps to conduct such raids if it didn't have substantial evidence of wrongdoing on the part of its targets,\" editorialized the _Daily Times_ , a suburban Philadelphia paper. \"And yet, more than three-and-a-half years later, none of those people have been charged with anything.\" One other casualty was Weldon's aide Russ Caso. Howard Sklamberg, the lead U.S. Attorney in the Weldon case, charged Caso with failing to file the proper disclosure forms on a job held by his wife. Caso pled guilty and accepted two years of probation, which was two more years than Sklamberg, a Democrat, recommended for Sandy Berger when he prosecuted that case.\n\nWeldon was not the first congressman to involve himself with TWA Flight 800. That honor belonged to James Traficant, a maverick Democrat from Ohio. A member of the House Subcommittee on Aviation, Traficant had been a \"strong supporter\" of Commander William Donaldson's independent investigation into the TWA 800 disaster. Then, said Donaldson, Traficant had a \"sudden and severe change of heart.\" It coincided precisely with a federal plea deal by Traficant's senior political advisor in 1998. \"After Mr. O'Nesti's guilty plea,\" observed Donaldson in a press release, \"Mr. Traficant avoided all contact with Commander Donaldson and proactively attacked the Donaldson investigation.\" This is not to say that Traficant was innocent of the charges that would eventually land him in a prison for seven years, but he came to see, as did Weldon, that justice in Washington is a notoriously subjective affair.\nChapter: SIXTEEN\n\nENGINE TROUBLE\n\n**A** s the years passed, two realities forced their way into the conversations among TWA 800 researchers. One was the futility of attempting to determine, without a high level insider as guide, _exactly_ what happened on the night of July 17, 1996\u2014who fired what from where and why. The second was the vanity of expecting that guide to come forward on his own. Few people knew the dynamics of the shoot-down, and with each passing year, the incentives for them to volunteer what they knew diminished.\n\nAs I was coming to see, something as mundane as a pension could go a long way in assuring a lifetime of silence. Jim Kallstrom acknowledged as much himself. In criticizing the investigators who testified in the 2013 documentary _TWA Flight 800_ , he groused, \"They could have been real men and been whistleblowers back then.\" He attributed their hesitance to \"their government pensions.\" Kallstrom overlooked a few other disincentives, such as Clinton's Executive Order 13039, the removal of several investigators from the Calverton hangar for challenging the FBI, the public humiliation of Pierre Salinger, and the arrest of Terry Stacey and the Sanderses. More problematic still was the failure of the media to offer whistleblowers a safe harbor.\n\nDespite the many reasons not to speak out, from time to time I would hear from lower-level servicemen who claimed to know something. As I was writing this book, in fact, one \"Sailor\" e-mailed me the following:\n\nWe were using commercial aircrafts as simulation! We were doing this because there was to be absolutely no live missiles! But when Commander Cookaa heard that there was a real missile launched, he got on WISKEY [sic] secured channel and started conversing about the live fire! Commander Cook was in charge of the exercise! USS CARR was the Warfare Commander for the exercise! You double-check that because after the deployment he was sent to Warfare College to teach. My leading petty officer, as he was sitting in the Captain's chair in CIC [combat information center], made it so clear that I say nothing of what I saw or heard because the government could ruin me with my social security number and even kill me. And his words were, \"so with that being said, pull the RD390 tapes, close all positional log books, including the bridges, tape them and leave them on the DRT table!\" They took a few things to a place called the shred room where we destroy documents using salt water and a shredder! When we ran, we ran to Bermuda where we were not allowed to leave the ship, no phone calls, e-mails secured, and nothing was to be discussed! Everyone that was involved was told in CIC, \"This didn't happen!\"\n\nName changed.\n\nI did some checking. The USS _Carr_ was, in fact, a guided missile frigate. The RD-390 is a multi-channel tape recorder. The named skipper took command five days before the TWA 800 incident. The previous year the ship underwent extensive combat system upgrades which led to \"two highly successful dual missile firing exercises\" in early 1996. The ship's official history is oddly silent on where the ship operated between April 1996 and November 1996 when it headed for the Mediterranean. Then too, the USS _Carr_ fit the description of the ship Lisa Perry and other witnesses had seen earlier on the evening of July 17: a large (453 feet) military fighting ship, battleship gray, a big globe, lots of equipment, ID number on the front. Of note, the skipper did go on to teach at the U.S. Army War College, not unlike the _Vincennes_ captain, Will Rogers, who instructed his fellow officers in San Diego before retiring.\n\nIn December 2015, at my prompting, \"Sailor\" contacted Commander Cook through Facebook. After an exchange of pleasantries, Sailor introduced the subject indirectly by sending Cook a link to an Internet article that blamed the destruction of TWA 800 on a military missile. \"I am sorry Capt. [Cook] for the direct, but it troubles me! Please forgive me.\" Replied Cook in the kind of semi-literate shorthand common on Facebook, \"No problem. We were no where [sic] around Ny. And the missles [sic] we fire were in the Puerto Rico Opera area.\" Sailor prodded gently about the possibility of another Navy vessel being involved, and Cook responded, \"The Navy proved there no units around and no one fires a missles [sic] without strict area clearance. Rest assured can not be hidden or allowed.\"\n\nNot wanting to accuse an individual based on an unverifiable source, no matter how well the source's account held up, I have altered the commander's name. Independent researchers have the freedom to pursue stories over time, but we do not have clout. Clout comes with having a major newsroom as back up\u2014the greater the misdeed, the greater the need for it. In its absence, people like this commander feel no pressure to share much of anything.\n\nShort of a confession from one of the participants in the TWA 800 cover-up, my colleagues and I have had to rely on circumstantial evidence, the more visual the better. The holy grail of this pursuit has been the amateur video of the missile, the one around which Nelson DeMille constructed the plot of his bestseller, _Nightfall_. MSNBC probably aired it briefly that first night, and foreign stations showed it after that, but the FBI appears to have seized all available copies.\n\nVideos about the event have proved helpful if for no other reason than that they keep the story alive. Some of these add information. Others unintentionally show the bankruptcy of the government position. In 2005, Pierre-Emmanuel Luneau-Daurignac produced a helpful documentary on TWA Flight 800 for a major French network. In April of that year I went to Paris to meet with Luneau-Daurignac and several other journalists whose interest in the story remained keen. Retired United Airlines captain Ray Lahr was to join us.\n\nIn the early morning hours of April 19, Lahr left his Malibu home for a trip to Los Angeles International Airport, and beyond that to Charles De Gaulle. He arrived sleepless on the morning of April 20. Michel Breistroff met him at the airport in his Jaguar. Some ten years prior, then still in his early fifties, Breistroff retired to better follow the career of his son, also named Michel, who starred on the Harvard hockey team and on the French national team. He loved the boy dearly and was devastated when young Michel died aboard TWA 800. Breistroff has been on a mission ever since.\n\nMichel and Ray met me at my hotel. On the surface, Breistroff has everything going for him\u2014looks, wealth, style. That said, the loss of his beloved son has robbed much of the joy from his life. For his part, Ray Lahr, then a few months shy of his eightieth birthday, was a work of nature. With the death of Commander Donaldson nearly five years earlier, he had emerged as the leader of the ongoing dissident investigation into the demise of TWA Flight 800. His good-natured persistence helped pull the various factions together in their collective effort to keep the case alive. Tireless at eighty, Ray and I would walk for hours around Paris later that day.\n\nAt lunchtime, we journeyed to the aptly named Cafe des Delices in Paris's sixth arrondissement. There, we met with the French journalists and Luneau-Daurignac. Breistroff, in fact, had appeared in studio on camera after the showing of Luneau-Daurignac's documentary. He seemed neither optimistic, nor pessimistic, merely determined. As helpful as the journalists were, it struck me that if anyone were able to force this case open it would be the family members like Breistroff. On the first anniversary of the crash, he confronted Kallstrom at a ceremony on Long Island. Breistroff impressed Pat Milton as well. She spent three pages of her book on the confrontation. \"All that matters to me is knowing the truth,\" Breistroff reportedly told Kallstrom. \"My life is over. I sit in a chair at night and go to bed at two a.m. When I get up in the morning, it is not daylight for me, but only darkness again. I want to trust you, but there are people higher than you that may be pulling strings.\"\n\n\"Michel,\" Kallstrom replied, \"there is no way in hell that if a Navy missile or any other missile shot this plane down it could ever be hidden from me.\" By this time, Kallstrom was deeply in denial. The Navy had deceived him left and right. He had sanctioned the fraudulent dog training exercise. With his blessing, the FBI and the CIA were far along in the creation of the zoom climb video and the manufacture of the witness interviews needed to pull it off. Kallstrom's seeming sincerity may have swayed Milton, but it did not move Breistroff. To this day, he is confident he was right: people higher than Kallstrom were pulling strings.\n\nBreistroff is not the only family member who has refused to accept the government's unholy spin. Another parent I have gotten to know along the way is Lisa Michelson, the mother of then nineteen-year-old Yon Rojany. On the afternoon of July 17, 1996, Yon arrived at JFK Airport with a ticket for Rome. Basketball coach Larry Brown had seen Yon play in California and encouraged him to try out for the Italian Basketball League. Yon took his advice. When TWA cancelled Flight 841 to Rome, its agents secured him a seat on Flight 800 before Yon had a chance to call his mom. It didn't matter. As soon as Michelson heard of the Flight 800 crash and saw the images of its burning debris, she intuited that Yon had been on board. She called TWA desperately throughout the night and did not learn of Yon's fate for sure until her niece was able to check the passenger manifest in Paris nearly two days after the plane went down. All that Michelson remembers upon hearing the news is falling to the ground and crying. In the months that followed she called the NTSB almost daily. \"They did their best to assure me that it was mechanical failure,\" Lisa told me in 2003. \"I am not able to explain to you specifically why I didn't believe them, but I didn't. Too many things I was told just didn't make sense.\"\n\nA month before the Paris meeting, Lisa, Ray, and I met in a Santa Monica restaurant with a serious Hollywood player interested in producing a movie about TWA 800. Several other producers had approached Sanders and me over the years. In every case, as in this one, someone higher up in the money chain said no. Among those who contacted us were representatives of controversial director Oliver Stone whose would-be TWA 800 project for ABC in 1998 had come to naught. Our dealings with Stone went nowhere as well.\n\nFamily members do not get discouraged that easily. Michelson credits her son Eric\u2014and now her grandchildren\u2014with keeping her going through the ordeal. It is not easy for her to talk about the disaster even today. When asked what it is that she hopes to get by keeping the investigation alive, Michelson answers concisely, \"the truth.\" She adds, \"The truth is so easy, so simple. To lie is difficult.\" This is the same answer that Breistroff gives. The same answer that Don Nibert, father of Cheryl from Montoursville, gives. The same answer that Marge Krukar, brother of Andrew, gives. Whenever I think of sloughing off this case, I think of them. I think of them too when I read anew Kallstrom's gripe that people like Lahr, Sanders, and myself have \"increased the pain already inflicted on the victims' families.\"\n\nSaid Kallstrom to Breistroff about anyone who might have ordered a cover-up, \"I would like nothing better than to expose them. No matter who the cowards were, I would stand up and tell the whole world about it.\" Within months, Kallstrom would close the FBI case, sell the CIA's duplicitous video to a credulous media, and block all eyewitness testimony at the NTSB hearing that followed. The man apparently has a sterner constitution than the rest of us. On the tenth anniversary of the crash in July 2006, Michelson got in Kallstrom's face at the memorial service on Long Island. \"I can't believe you're still sticking to this story,\" she said to him. \"How can you lie to people's faces?\" He dropped his head and said nothing.\n\nThe evening of the tenth anniversary, CNN aired its own documentary on the crash called _No Survivors_ : _Why TWA 800 Could Happen Again_. One detail stood out in this otherwise orthodox rehashing of the government position: the treatment of the notorious zoom climb. In CNN's recreation, a noseless aircraft flew not straight up but straight ahead, trending downward. \"Only twelve minutes after take off,\" the CNN narrator claimed, \"the center fuel tank blast rips away the bottom of the plane. The cockpit and nose section plunge into the sea. For another half minute or so, the decapitated plane flies on. Then, it loses momentum and begins its deadly drop toward the ocean below.\"\n\nIncredibly, the zoom climb had _fully_ disappeared. Lahr had spent the previous three years battling the CIA and the NTSB to secure the calculations used to determine the crippled plane's vertical climb, and now CNN, with the NTSB's blessing, was telling Lahr there was no zoom climb in the first place. Without it, CNN had to imagine some other optical illusion powerful enough to confuse the witnesses into thinking down was up. \"Investigators believe the red lights seen by eyewitnesses could have been an intense fire immediately after the fuel tank erupted,\" the narrator continued, now beginning to embarrass the network with sheer disinformation.\n\nAmong the many nuggets buried in the CIA document cache was one that astonished even the cynics among us: the CIA analysts knew there was no zoom climb and had known this as early as March 1999. In a memo from March 24 of that year an unnamed analyst more or less owned up to the con. The \"maximum CIA calculated altitude in the final study was about 14,500 feet,\" he conceded. He added that the noseless plane's maximum angle of attack was \"about 35 degrees,\" not the seventy or so degrees shown in the video. \"This high angle suggests the likelihood that engine compressor stall would occur.\" From the beginning this is what aviation professionals said would happen when the nose was severed; the remainder of the plane would pitch up, stall, and fall. This was what the best witnesses reported seeing. The CIA acknowledged this more than a year before the NTSB's final hearing but apparently did not share the news with the NTSB and certainly did not inform the media.\n\nTwo months after the debut of CNN's _No Survivors_ , Lahr and his Washington-based attorney John Clarke received some judicial good news. In fact, the _National Law Journal_ deemed the news unusual enough to capsulize the story on its front page as, \"A rare win in fight for TWA crash records.\" The story related how federal judge Howard Matz found Lahr's evidence \"sufficient to permit Plaintiff to proceed based on his claim that the government acted improperly in its investigation of Flight 800 or at least performed in a grossly negligent fashion.\" Arguing that the \"public interest\" was at stake in Lahr's pursuit of the truth, Matz allowed him access to seven of the twelve CIA documents he had requested.\n\nIn August 2007, a Lahr FOIA suit resulted in an unexpected harvest. A document the FBI sent to him and Clarke detailed a communication that took place six days after the crash. It read as follows: \"On Tuesday, July 23, 1996, a representative from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) advised [the FBI] that after a visual analysis of both the videotape as well as a number of still photographs taken from various portions of the tape, the phenomenon captured by [name redacted] appeared to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a MANPAD [Man-portable air-defense] missile.\"\n\nThe video discussed in the FBI document was shot on July 12, 1996, five days _before_ the crash. This was not news. Lahr had received a heavily redacted document earlier that told the story of how a fellow and his friend on Long Island were attempting to videotape the sunrise when they saw and recorded \"a grey trail of smoke ascending from the horizon at an angle of approximately 75 [degrees].\" So compelling was the sight that the fellow made a comment to his friend, heard on the tape, \"They must be testing a rocket.\" Pat Milton discussed the video in her book.\n\nWhat Milton did not discuss and what the redacted memo did not show was the DIA's involvement. This unredacted version revealed that the FBI took the video seriously enough to bring in the DIA for further analysis, and the DIA found the video image to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a missile. For the record, the DIA is a Department of Defense combat support agency and a serious player in the United States intelligence community. An important component of the DIA is the Missile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC), an Alabama-based operation charged with gathering intelligence on enemy surface-to-air missiles and short-range ballistic missiles. During a Senate inquiry in May 1999, the FBI's number two man on the investigation, Lewis Schiliro, conceded that MSIC analysts had arrived on the scene in Long Island just two days after the July 17, 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 and interviewed eyewitnesses along with the FBI.\n\nIn September 2007, a month after Lahr received his unexpected surprise in the mail, I got a surprise of my own. A producer at Fox News had a video he thought I should see. I stopped by when I was in New York and picked it up. Wary of being involved at all, the producer would not tell me how he obtained it. Ideally, Fox News would have covered the story that this video generated, but there were forces at work at Fox, just as there were at ABC, that kept the network from exploring the TWA 800 story in any meaningful way.\n\nI did not know exactly what those forces were, but I saw them at work just two months prior. Another Fox staffer enlisted me to be a guest on a segment she was producing for _Hannity's America_. At her request I sent a copy of _Silenced_. As I was doing research in California at time on another book project, she arranged to do a remote interview with me in a San Francisco studio. The interview lasted twenty minutes, and she gave the impression she actually watched _Silenced_ and took it seriously. Her questions were intelligent. Unfortunately, the produced segment was not. The give-away came quickly. My on-screen identifier was \"conspiracy theorist,\" never a good sign.\n\nStanding in for the FBI was Pat Milton. In a fair fight, I would have KO'ed Milton in the first round, but I never got a shot. The producer crunched my twenty minutes of interview time down to twenty seconds of TV time. In those twenty seconds, I tried to summarize the eyewitnesses accounts, but it was not time enough to dissuade Sean Hannity from presenting the rehashed misinformation the producer put on the teleprompter. A year after CNN fully flattened out the CIA zoom climb, Fox News resurrected it in all its Orwellian subtlety. Ill-served by his producer, Hannity stated matter-of-factly that what the eyewitnesses actually saw was \"really just the aftermath of the explosion,\" and that was that.\n\nIf my producer friend gave me this new infrared video to atone for his network's timidity, he succeeded. The video had been shot immediately after the crash from the U.S. Navy P-3 Orion. There was no mistaking the perspective as the camera occasionally tilted down past the plane's propellers to the smoldering wreckage below. Apparently, a copy had surfaced years earlier as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request. At the time, it did not cause much of a stir. The video simply showed the main debris field, and there was nothing controversial about it. The video more or less confirmed the wreckage pattern as later diagramed. The NTSB witness group, which the FBI thwarted at every opportunity, may well have seen the same edited version. In its 1997 Factual Report, the witness group acknowledged receipt of the video but claimed it \"provided no additional information pertinent to the investigation.\" No future NTSB or FBI report mentioned the video.\n\nThe unedited video I received showed something the earlier video obviously had not. Although the videographer focused on the main debris field, he did not stay with it. Five different times he panned the camera off to the northwest, perhaps a mile or two, and there he fixed on a fully separate burning object, one capable of sending great plumes of smoke into the sky. In no subsequent government report was there any mention, let alone clarification, of what that object might have been. A single engine on a 747 of this vintage had a lot of fuel to burn. By weight, it was about twenty times larger than the engine of your average automobile.\n\nWhen I first told James Sanders of the video, I said the smoking wreckage was northeast of the major debris field. \"Hmmm,\" Sanders responded, \"I thought it would have been northwest.\" He was right. I misspoke. I meant to say northwest, back towards JFK. Sanders was on to something. He was convinced a missile warhead explosion, likely external to the plane, blasted the No. 3 engine off the right wing. This was where the explosive traces were found both on the wing and in the adjoining section of fuselage. We now had a literal smoking gun. (For those who might wish to see the video, it is available online at WND.com embedded in the article, \"Stunning New Video of 800 Crash Site\" from October 15, 2007.)\n\nIf this were an engine, as it certainly appeared to be, the NTSB had refused to acknowledge the same. The NTSB had divided the wreckage into three zones depending on where the various pieces fell. In the red zone, the one closest to JFK, were the seats and overhead bins from rows seventeen through nineteen where the plane first ruptured. These were the same rows on which the mysterious reddish-orange residue was found. In that same zone too were the bodies of the people who had been in those seats, many of them mutilated by the force of the explosion but not burned. In the yellow zone was the forward section of the plane, including the cockpit, first class, and business sections. This part was severed by the blast and plunged relatively intact into the sea.\n\nThe final NTSB report from August 2000 put all four engines in the so-called green zone, the swath of the debris field _farthest_ from JFK. This was the zone that included the headless two-thirds of the fuselage that sputtered on for some distance before erupting in the fireball that almost all the witnesses observed. According to the NTSB, the green zone wreckage included both wings, the main landing gear, the tail section, the bulk of the center fuel tank, and \"all four engines.\"\n\nThe P-3 video, however, showed what appeared to be a smoking engine a mile or more northwest of this zone. Sanders had good reason to suspect it was the No. 3 engine. Early in his investigation, he had secured a copy of a local CBS news broadcast in which the announcer said, \"On Monday, the fourth and final engine was located along with small pieces of wreckage found nearest Kennedy Airport, pieces that fell from the plane first.\" TWA's Terry Stacey had shared with Sanders an early map of the debris field, and that placed only three engines in the green zone\u20141, 2, and 4. The calculated movement of items between zones alarmed Stacey early on, but retagging engines went well beyond tidying up the data. Then too there was the testimony of Witness 648, a fisherman, who was closer to the crash site than any other. He watched as \"the right wing separated from the fuselage.\" As his FBI 302 documents, \"He did not see any engine pods on it.\"\n\nThis wayward engine proved problematic for the NTSB from the beginning. The _Times_ matter-of-factly reported fact that the fourth engine was not recovered until August 15, four weeks after the crash and nine days after local CBS news reported it found. Less important than the timing of the find was the location. The local report placed it \"nearest Kennedy Airport\" as the P-3 video suggested. The _Times_ failed to acknowledge anything unusual about the engine's location or its condition. \"Some turbine blades were missing,\" rationalized the _Times_ , \"but the damage may have been caused by the impact.\"\n\nThe following day the NTSB's Robert Francis assured the public there was \"nothing really extraordinary\" about any of the engines, the last of which had been taken apart in \"an unusually quick\" process. The fact that some unnamed \"officials\" had claimed that the \"No. 3 engine\" showed \"foreign object damage\" was not to be taken seriously. That alleged foreign object, Francis insisted, was \"part of the engine itself.\" The _Times_ reporting, however, left unclear whether the last engine found was, in fact, the No. 3 engine. Sanders believes it was. He is convinced that the location of the engine was so damaging to the developing government case for a spontaneous fuel tank explosion that the FBI and\/or NTSB had to corrupt the debris field charts by eventually placing the recovered engine in the same zone as the others. He submitted a FOIA request to review the salvage documents from this period, a request the FBI has not yet fulfilled.\n\nIn addition to Stacey, several other investigators at Calverton complained about the retagging of parts. The most outspoken was the NTSB's Hank Hughes. Chief among the accused was the NTSB's ubiquitous David Mayer. \"During the investigation, I personally witnessed Dr. Mayer changing wreckage recovery tags on interior wreckage components without proper authority,\" said Hughes in a sworn affidavit. \"Mayer's changes falsified the factual record of the actual physical locations from which those components were recovered.\" When Hughes asked Mayer why he was retagging items, he reportedly answered, \"I didn't want to confuse the Chairman,\" meaning NTSB chairman Jim Hall.\n\nMayer was not the only one monkeying with the evidence. In one of the several meetings held to undo Mayer's mess, investigators working through the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) learned that Paul Harkins, the Navy's supervisor of salvage, tagged more than one hundred pieces of wreckage without authorization or documentation. The actions of Mayer and Harkins, together with \"the FBI's altering, tainting and removing evidence,\" said Hughes, \"acted to undermine the investigation.\"\n\nWorse, the NTSB brass kept the other parties to the investigation in the dark about the way Mayer had rigged the tag database. In fact, they were reluctant to discuss anything controversial. When he started voicing his dissent prior to the NTSB hearing in August 2000, the IAMAW's Rocky Miller learned that silence was the approved policy. \"If you believe in corporate memory,\" the NTSB's investigator in charge, Al Dickinson, told him, \"you won't ask any questions or speak at the public hearing.\"\n\nThe video of smoking wreckage observed from the P-3 should have been enough to reopen the investigation. If nothing else, the NTSB needed to explain why its officials had failed to even mention the source of that smoke plume in any of their public hearings. To prod them into action, I met with one of the _New York Times_ reporters who covered the crash and gave him a copy of the video. That he was willing to meet with me testified to his open-mindedness, but nothing came of the meeting. If Fox News was not willing to touch this story, I had no reason to believe the _Times_ would, and my suspicions were, as usual, confirmed.\n\nThe mid-air break-up of Iranian Airbus 655 had the potential to explain the location of the stray TWA 800 engine. As it happened, some crewmen on the bridge of the USS _Montgomery_ near the _Vincennes_ watched as a Navy standard missile destroyed this aircraft. There was nothing theoretical about their observations. They saw the first missile explode at or near the left wing of the plane and watched in awe as a section of the wing \"with an engine pod still attached\" fell to the sea. Although the Navy did not have the opportunity to assess IR 655's debris field in any detail, this engine would have fallen into the zone closest to the airliner's point of departure, much the way the smoking TWA 800 engine appeared to. Not surprisingly, the NTSB and FBI made no reference in any of their reports to the _Vincennes_ incident. By journeying to Little Rock in 1992, Admiral Crowe helped assure that the saga of the IR 655 would never be fully told. Jamie Gorelick and Sandy Berger had a harder task. They had to assure that the true story of TWA 800 would never be told at all.\n\na Name changed.\nChapter: SEVENTEEN\n\nBENGHAZI MOMENT\n\n**I** n early December 1997, two weeks after closing its investigation, the FBI sent a letter to NTSB chairman James Hall telling him its conditions for the upcoming public hearing on TWA Flight 800, the first to be held by the NTSB. Incredibly, these included: \"no public discussion or publication of the interviews conducted with witnesses to the crash, no presentation of the video simulation of the crash created for the F.B.I. by the Central Intelligence Agency, and no reference to the search for residue of explosives on the wreckage.\" Although these exclusions essentially negated any real value the hearings might have had, the _New York Times_ reported them deep in an article on a potential Boeing redesign as matter-of-factly as they reported the hearing's date and location.\n\nIf the media took no notice of the FBI's power play, Tom Stalcup did. Then working on his Ph.D. in physics at Florida State, Stalcup intuited what was going on. The CIA video troubled him when he watched it two weeks prior, but now the authorities were removing from the discussion any evidence that might challenge that video and the thesis it represented. Working through their fixers, the Clintons reminded the media that only the paranoid would question official orthodoxy. Officials working the TWA 800 case would call Stalcup a conspiracy theorist and worse, but from that first NTSB hearing on, they faced no more relentless a critic than this young physicist.\n\nI first met Stalcup in the spring of 2001. On his own dime, he came to Kansas City to lend his testimony to our documentary _Silenced_. Tall and reserved with a shock of dark hair, Stalcup observed the TWA 800 misdirection through a scientist's eyes. Given the data and his own knowledge base, the CIA video struck him as an affront to the laws of physics, and he was fully capable of explaining why. Although he would go on to launch his own IT company, Stalcup never gave up on TWA 800. More than fifteen years after the crash, he collaborated with former CBS producer Kristina Borjesson on a documentary so compelling even the _New York Times_ had to concede it was _not_ \"crackpot conspiracy theory stuff.\"\n\nCalled simply _TWA Flight 800_ and ably directed by Borjesson, the documentary circulated around Washington before its Epix network premiere on July 17, 2013, the seventeenth anniversary of the crash. Most impressively, Stalcup and Borjesson persuaded a half-dozen highly credible whistleblowers from within the investigation to tell their stories on camera. These included (all affiliations circa 1996) the NTSB's Hank Hughes, Bob Young from TWA, ALPA investigator Jim Speer, Suffolk County chief medical examiner Charles Wetli, U.S. Army forensic pathologist Colonel Dennis Shanahan, and Rocky Miller, investigation coordinator for the IAMAW. The producers supplemented the whistle-blower testimony with that of numerous family members, witnesses, and experts like Ray Lahr, former NTSB Board member Vernon Grose, EGIS developer David Fine, FBI bomb analyst Bob Heckman, and FBI lab whistleblower Frederic Whitehurst. Many of these people came together to form a group Stalcup called the \"TWA 800 project.\"\n\nStalcup and Borjesson walked viewers through the complete spectrum of evidence. As they made clear, _all_ evidence\u2014witness accounts, explosive residue, splatter patterns, radar data, debris field maps\u2014pointed to a missile attack on the aircraft. Ever the physicist, Stalcup described the radar data as the crash's \"smoking gun.\" He referred here not to the air traffic controller data suggesting a missile strike but a ballistics analysis of the radar immediately post-crash. Stalcup argued that the radar evidence showed the debris exiting the side of a plane at a high velocity, Mach 4 or greater. The NTSB, however, contended that a low-velocity, forward-moving, fuel-air explosion in the fuel wing tank caused the plane to blow apart. If true, this would have been a first. Since the introduction of Jet-A fuel in 1965, no commercial aircraft had ever spontaneously exploded.\n\nThe documentary made a more dramatic impact when it discussed the effects of a high-speed explosion on the passengers. Indeed, the producers could have made a second, more gruesome documentary using the evidence gathered by the two pathologists, Wetli and Shanahan. As they and Hughes testified, the force of the blast shattered bodies and sent bone shards flying through the cabin. At least one shard pierced the fuselage like an arrowhead. The image of this was chilling. A low-velocity, fuel-air explosion would have burned the passengers in their seats, but it would not have mutilated them. Said Hughes, \"The damage to the seats and the injury to the passengers was random which in my mind indicate a high ordinance detonation not a low speed explosion like a center fuel tank blowing up.\" When asked where the explosion originated, Hughes answered without hesitation, \"external to the aircraft.\" The strength of the documentary was the human element, especially the testimony of the whistleblowers. They were too numerous and too knowledgeable to ignore. The eyewitnesses added to the video's emotional power.\n\nIn addition to those featured in _Silenced_ , Stalcup spoke with several who had not previously gone public, including Greek pilot Vassilis Bakounis, who was interviewed in Cyprus. A veteran Olympic Airlines pilot, Bakounis was in the U.S. in 1996 working on his commercial pilot's license. On the night of July 17 he was flying along the south shore of Long Island at about two thousand feet when he saw \"a light coming out of the sea.\" It caught Bakounis's attention. \"I followed that light for many seconds before it makes, kind of veers to the right,\" said Bakounis using his hands to illustrate the turn. The gesture, in fact, looked like an upside down Nike swoosh. \"Then I see an explosion,\" Bakounis continued, \"then its flame was falling down like an umbrella of flames.\" Bakounis elaborated that the streak of light started \"very, very low\" and then \"climbed past his altitude.\" The FBI ignored Bakounis. This was not easy to do. Several witnesses reported seeing his plane. He gave an interview to a Greek publication five weeks after the crash. Independent researchers, including one that the FBI was monitoring, translated the interview and put it on their web sites. No matter. The CIA disregarded Bakounis's testimony as well.\n\nStalcup and Borjesson did a much better job than the CIA or NTSB in aligning witness testimony with the location of TWA 800 at the time of its destruction. Their animation of the disaster tracked three missiles, each exploding in close proximity to the doomed airliner. Politically savvy, the producers avoided saying who fired those missiles or why the authorities undermined the investigation. The informed viewer, however, had to suspect the one navy capable of a missile strike this sophisticated and so close to shore.\n\nIn June 2013, a month before the scheduled airing of the video on the crash's seventeenth anniversary, Stalcup and his colleagues petitioned the NTSB to reopen the investigation. They had some high level supporters. One was Vernon Grose. Over the years, Grose had been CNN's go-to guy on aviation safety. He had done more than 170 media interviews on TWA 800 alone. \"I am convinced by the evidence that a missile\u2014not the center wing tank explosion\u2014brought it down,\" said Grose. \"It's time to take a fresh look at all the evidence, much of which was withheld by the FBI.\"\n\nGiven the quality of the documentary, the guardians of the TWA 800 orthodoxy knew they had a problem on hand and sent their fixers out to resolve it. These included Peter Goelz and Jim Kallstrom. Soon after the petition was filed both veteran spinmeisters appeared on national TV to reassert the official narrative. Predictably, the pair dismissed their critics in the crudest of absolutes. When CNN's Jake Tapper asked Goelz about Stalcup's argument, Goelz answered, \"There is no evidence whatsoever that supports his theory.\" The next day on Fox News, Kallstrom told Bill Hemmer that the documentary's thesis was \"preposterous, pure fiction.\" Casual viewers had no reason to disbelieve either of them.\n\nThe very nearly identical riffs by Goelz and Kallstrom strongly suggest one unseen hand prodding them both. When Tapper raised the issue of the eyewitness testimony, Goelz said, \"Almost all of the witnesses say this: 'I heard a sound. I looked up and then I saw a streak of light or firework and an explosion.'\" When Hemmer asked about the witnesses, Kallstrom also claimed, \"The vast majority of those people looked up when they heard the bang.\" Kallstrom added, \"The plane had already exploded, and [the witnesses] were seeing the plane falling apart.\" Goelz spun the same yarn. According to him, the witnesses saw only \"the last six seconds\" of the forty-plus second break-up of the aircraft. \"No witness saw the first event forty seconds prior to that,\" he insisted.\n\nWere I to chart a TWA 800 hierarchy of lies, this orchestrated bunkum would rank near the top. As mentioned earlier, the FBI did not even bother to ask seven of the forty best witnesses about sound. Another nineteen told the FBI they heard nothing at all. In only fourteen of the forty summaries did a witness admit to hearing a sound, and in only three of those did that person report hearing a sound before looking up. In fact, these forty witnesses saw all or most of the entire sequence. That sequence began, as Bakounis affirmed, with \"a light coming out of the sea\" and ended nearly a minute later with the shattered plane \"falling down like an umbrella of flames.\"\n\nMore curious still, before July 2013 the FBI had not endorsed the CIA's bogus sound propagation analysis, nor had the NTSB. The FBI's final summary made no reference to sound. At the final NTSB hearing in August 2000, David Mayer all but rejected the CIA thesis, telling chairman Jim Hall, \"Our [witness] analysis is not based on sound.\" It seems likely that Goelz and Kallstrom resorted to this argument for the same reason the CIA had: it sounded scientific. With it, they could intimidate their interrogators. Kallstrom, in fact, made a caustic remark about the \"basic physics\" of the crash in setting up his thesis. Try as they might, Tapper or Hemmer were in no position to contradict such authoritative sources, certainly not in the three to five minutes a typical TV segment runs.\n\nTwo days after Kallstrom's appearance, I was beamed in from a Kansas City TV studio to talk about the documentary on CNN's _New Day_ with Alison Kosik. For balance, CNN enlisted Jim Polk, a \"Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist\" who had contributed to CNN's 2006 special report on TWA 800. Kosik set up this segment by claiming with much more confidence than the NTSB ever had that \"a spark from faulty wiring\" caused the plane's center fuel tank to explode. To reinforce the point, she played an interview from the 2006 report with Eastwind pilot David McClaine. \"I didn't see any missile at all,\" said McClaine who had seen the crash from above. In a feint at fairness, Polk told Kosik in studio, \"There was a helicopter pilot who says he did see a missile before the explosion.\" And that was it for the witnesses.\n\n\"Jack,\" asked Kosik, \"what do you think happened if it wasn't an internal explosion like [McClaine and his co-pilot] saw?\" I might have answered that one of the great scandals of the investigation was that it took nearly three years for the NTSB to interview McClaine and that when its investigators finally did, McClaine demolished the CIA's zoom climb theory. McClaine also told the NTSB he was not necessarily in position to see a missile: \"The fuselage and the wing could have blocked that out.\"\n\nTime being precious, I took another tack. \"Well, unlike what Jim says, there were two hundred seventy eyewitnesses to a missile strike,\" I said, relying here on the FBI count. \"Ninety-six of them, this is FBI eyewitnesses, saw it from the horizon ascend all the way up to the plane.\" Using hand gestures to make my point, I continued, \"They all described it the same way: that it was a red tip, a plume trail after it, gray, and then it gets near the plane and it arcs over, zigzags, hits the plane, blows up.\" I then explained how the FBI recruited the CIA to create the zoom climb animation that discredited the eyewitnesses. \"When the CNN did its animation ten years later\u2014ten years after the crash, they eliminated that zoom climb altogether,\" I said. \"So I ask Jim [Polk] this, why did you eliminate the zoom climb if the CIA\u2014and what was the CIA doing involved in this in the first place?\u2014if the CIA used that to expressly discredit the eyewitnesses?\"\n\nThis was not a question Polk wanted to hear. \"I would agree with you the CIA animation is controversial,\" said Polk with an eye on the 2013 understatement-of-the-year award. \"We did not make [TWA 800] climb in our animation because, frankly, the transponder disappeared on the radar at the time of the explosion. So there's no altitude readout on the rest of the flight and so there's no supporting evidence for the CIA's animation.\"\n\nNo supporting evidence for the CIA's animation? As Polk must have suspected, _all_ evidence\u2014starting with McClaine's testimony\u2014showed the zoom climb to be an intentional fraud. As mentioned earlier, even the CIA conceded privately that the 747 could not climb a few hundred feet let alone a few thousand. \"It all ended right there,\" said McClaine of the blast. \"And everything went down.\" Polk had access to McClaine's NTSB testimony but since it did not fit into the approved storyline he simply ignored it. He should not have. The eyewitnesses saw something ascend for as many as thirty seconds. If that something was not a flaming TWA 800, it was surely a missile. Polk and CNN had done enough research to tell the great, untold story of our time, but they apparently lacked the courage to tell it.\n\nAfter the commercial break, Kosik asked me with a hint of condescension, \"if there was an external blast, who shot [TWA 800] down, why would anybody shoot it down, and why would there be this cover up?\" Not perfectly sure who shot the plane down, and having only a minute or so to speak, I focused on a subject I knew well. \"Let me address the cover-up,\" I answered. \"Five weeks after the crash, the _New York Times_ had this headline above the fold right: Prime Evidence that Explosive Device Found in or Destroyed TWA Flight 800. That's a paraphrase, but it's close.\" The actual headline was this: \"Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800.\" This article ran on August 23, 1996. According to the _Times_ , only the FBI's uncertainty about whether the device was a bomb or a missile kept Kallstrom from declaring TWA 800's destruction a crime.\n\n\"Above the fold left,\" I continued, \"was 'Clinton Signs Welfare Reform Bill on Eve of Democratic National Convention.' One of those headlines had to go.\" I pantomimed dropping the right headline from the screen. \"This was Bill Clinton's Benghazi moment,\" I added. \"They [the Clintons] just wanted to kick this can down the road until after November so it would not affect the outcome of the election.\"\n\nThe answer was that simple and that obvious. In June 2013 everyone who followed the news knew what I meant by \"Benghazi moment.\" Bill and Hillary Clinton had no more noble a goal in July 1996 than Hillary and Barack Obama had in September 2012 when they lied about Benghazi. In each case, that goal was to get beyond the November elections by whatever means necessary.\n\nLike Obama, the Clintons would not have shared their motives with anyone beyond their most intimate circle, Sandy Berger, say, and maybe Jamie Gorelick and Robert Francis. Political people like Tenet, Panetta, Goelz, and Clarke were savvy enough not to ask too many questions. As to the military officers involved, their Christmas came in July 1996 with an unexpected CYA authorization from the White House. They did not need to know any more than that. More difficult to explain were the actions of Kallstrom, Mayer, Hall, Loeb, Dickinson, and a few other non-political people who obstructed the investigation but had nothing obvious to gain by doing so. Stalcup leaned particularly hard on Mayer whom he fairly accused of \"corruption, malfeasance, and possible illegal activity.\"\n\nHere, I speculate, but the message these actors received, the one that Gorelick would have first articulated at the August 1996 meeting with Kallstrom in Washington, might have gone something like this: \"An enemy aircraft attacked TWA 800. As of now, we don't know which enemy. We may never know. The Navy attempted to shoot down the aircraft but failed. If we alert the American people, they will demand retaliation, and that may lead us into a war we don't want and don't need. They will also hesitate to fly, and that could cripple the economy. For reasons of national security, we need your help to put this incident to bed.\" At the 9\/11 hearings, Berger and Clarke elevated the White House's near paralysis to a virtue.\n\nOn September 11, 2012, I doubt if Hillary shared the TWA 800 playbook with Obama, but she followed the script, and he followed her lead. Their political futures, at least at this moment, tracked together. That endless night Obama avoided the White House Situation Room much as the Clintons had on the night of July 17, 1996. Where exactly Obama holed up has never been revealed, but spokesman Jay Carney did acknowledge he was in touch with Hillary: \"He spoke with the secretary of state at approximately 10 p.m.,\" said Carney. \"He called her to get an update on the situation.\"\n\nAbout that same time Hillary released a statement blaming \"inflammatory material posted on the Internet\" for the attack on the Benghazi consulate. She was referring specifically to the absurd trailer for the would-be film, _The Innocence of Muslims_. Said the secretary piously, she who gave a standing ovation to _The Book of Mormon_ on Broadway, \"The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation.\" Hillary was not confused. She was lying. Shortly after the sending the press release, she informed the president of Egypt. \"We know that the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.\" Later that night, in an e-mail to daughter Chelsea, she pinned the attack on an \"Al Qaeda-like group.\" Her fingerprints were all over the blame-the-video strategy, however, and Obama made sure the media knew it.\n\nThat strategy almost came undone five weeks later at a CNN presidential debate famously \"moderated\" by Candy Crowley. At the pivotal moment in this town hall style debate, Crowley bypassed the audience and asked Obama a question of her own. Obama looked much too well prepared for it. Walking confidently towards Crowley as she asked, \"Does the buck stop with the secretary of state?\" Obama had his answer ready. \"Secretary Clinton has done an extraordinary job, but she works for me,\" he said. \"I'm the president, and I'm always responsible.\"\n\nObama vigorously defended not only his administration's response to the Benghazi crisis but also his own comments in the Rose Garden the day after the attack. \"I told the American people and the world that we were going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror, and I also said we are going to hunt down those who committed this crime,\" said the president.\n\nThis was more than Romney could endure. He knew well that Obama had endorsed Hillary's video fraud in his Rose Garden speech. \"While the United States rejects efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others,\" said Obama, \"we must all unequivocally oppose the kind of senseless violence that took the lives of these public servants.\" Like Hillary, he strongly implied that four Americans were killed in a spontaneous outburst devoid of strategy and provoked by the offending video. There was no other way to have interpreted this comment.\n\n\"You said in the Rose Garden the day after the attack it was an act of terror? It was not a spontaneous demonstration, is that what you are saying,\" Romney pressed Obama, telling Crowley he just wanted to get Obama's response on record. After a moment's hesitation, Obama shouted out, \"Get the transcript,\" and the camera panned to Crowley waving a piece of paper. \"He did in fact, sir, call . . .\" said Crowley hesitantly to Romney, \"so let me call it an act of terror.\" Obama jumped back in, \"Can you say that a little louder, Candy.\" She obliged, \"He did call it an act of terror.\" So saying, Crowley and CNN preserved the political future of both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.\n\nI hesitate to equate what CNN did to me with what the network did to Romney, but the impulse, I suspect, was much the same. Someone at CNN apparently did not like my Benghazi remark. When CNN released the transcript of the show the next day, it jumped from Polk's final comment to Kosik awkwardly saying, \"Well, the good thing is\u2014I have to cut you guys off. But the good thing is that there's a documentary about this.\" I promptly wrote an article for _American Thinker_ titled \"CNN Edits Out Comparison of TWA 800 and Benghazi.\" CNN apparently caught just enough flak to reinsert the missing section. This allowed me to write a follow-up article titled, \"What CNN Cut Out of TWA 800 Interview.\"\n\nOn at least one occasion CNN got the TWA 800 story right, even if by accident. Kudos of sorts goes to CNN host Anderson Cooper. On July 17, 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over the Ukraine by a surface-to-air-missile, likely by pro-Russian insurgents and almost assuredly by accident. In discussing the tragedy that evening, Cooper referred back to \"July 17, 1996, when TWA Flight 800 was _shot down_ off the coast of Long Island in New York [emphasis added].\" Cooper had TWA 800 on the brain. He served as host of a CNN special report on the subject, _Witnessed: The Crash of TWA Flight 800_ , that would air two days later. Bizarrely, CNN's _Witnessed_ split the difference between the CIA's 3,500-foot zoom climb and the perfectly flat trajectory of CNN's _No Survivors_ , the 2006 report Jim Polk and I discussed a year earlier. On air, former NTSB Board member John Goglia claimed that TWA 800 \"rose and continue[d] to fly for a few thousand feet more ending up in the 16,000 foot range.\" In the _Witnessed_ animation, borrowed from the NTSB, the viewer saw Flight 800 ascend for about 2000 feet in great sweeping loops, then nose over and fall more or less straight down.\n\nTo further confuse its viewers, _Witnessed_ featured Eastwind pilot Captain David McClaine returning to make the case he had been making from day one. At the moment of the explosion, \"[TWA 800] went down, not up,\" said McClaine. \"The wings fell right off the airplane right away. So how is it going to climb, or what if it had no wings?\" Never did CNN try to reconcile the CIA's 3500-foot zoom climb with the NTSB's 2000-foot corkscrew or with the flat trajectory of its own creation, let alone with McClaine's eyewitness account.\n\nAlthough Cooper had told the truth about TWA 800, media watchers knew it had to have been a slip, Freudian or otherwise. To no one's surprise, he confessed his apparent error before the show ended. \"I just want to correct something I said regarding the plane crash, earlier I said that today was the anniversary of flight TWA 800, crashing off the coast of Long Island in 1996,\" Cooper regretted. \"I believe I said that it was shot down. Obviously the government said it was a center fuel tank explosion. Although some people indicated they saw a rocket, there was no evidence of that. It was ruled to be a center fuel tank explosion. So I apologize for misspeaking about that anniversary.\" No evidence? At least not at CNN.\nChapter: EIGHTEEN\n\nPROCRUSTES\n\n**T** om Stalcup was not easily put off. Recognizing this, the authorities continued to chip away at his credibility with all the means at their disposal. One was the carcass of TWA 800, then and now on display at the NTSB Training Center in Virginia. Nothing said, \"no stone unturned\" quite like a painfully reconstructed aircraft. On July 2, 2013, the NTSB staged a media briefing with the plane as prop. Despite her stellar media credentials and her obvious interest in the crash, the NTSB would not allow Kristina Borjesson to attend. In fact, no members of the TWA 800 Project team were invited, not even the relatives of the victims. The only family members invited were those the NTSB could count on to stick to the script. And stick they did. In its account of the briefing, Reuters gave one of those selected family members the final word, \"I was convinced by the NTSB findings when the report came out,\" he said. \"Hearing talk of a movie coming out and reigniting conspiracy theories that we as family members heard about years ago is opening up old wounds.\"\n\nStalcup did not give up easily. Two weeks after the briefing, he sent NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman a formal request asking her to correct the misinformation presented at the July 2 briefing as well as the spin from Jim Kallstrom and Peter Goelz. In September of that year Stalcup sent another letter to Hersman detailing David Mayer's perfidy. In that same communication he sent three separate animations showing the discrepancy between the FAA radar evidence and the imagined debris trajectory plotted by the NTSB. In January 2014, Stalcup, Hughes, Young, and eyewitness Joseph Delgado journeyed to the NTSB's Washington offices. The brass sent a few flak catchers down to meet them. No one assigned to review the TWA 800 Project's petition attended the meeting. Later that month, Stalcup sent a follow-up letter summarizing the meeting. He dropped in one little nugget culled from his FOIA requests: an acknowledgement by former CIA Director George Tenet that Mayer \"worked closely\" with the lead CIA analyst responsible for the zoom climb animation.\n\nStalcup persisted, and the NTSB continued to stonewall. He requested a presentation by the TWA 800 Project team before the full NTSB Board, which proposal the NTSB general counsel soon rejected. That same month, March 2014, more than twenty family members asked the NTSB to reconsider. Three months later, in June 2014, the board formally denied the family members' request. Once that request was denied, Stalcup and Hughes wrote what they called an \"open letter of protest\" to the board's general counsel. Attaching an affidavit from Hughes, they hammered home the conflict of interest implicit in having Mayer's subordinates review a petition accusing Mayer of \"malfeasance.\"\n\nOn July 2, 2014, a week after Stalcup's open letter, the NTSB coldly rejected his team's request for a re-opening of the investigation. \"None of the physical evidence supports the theory that the streak of light observed by some witnesses was a missile,\" read the one-page release. \"The NTSB determined that an explosion of the center wing fuel tank was the probable cause of the accident.\" The NTSB case was even weaker than the word \"probable\" suggests. Its experts spent four years desperately trying to find the cause of the explosion other than the obvious, and the best its expert could conclude was that \"the source of the ignition for the explosion could not be determined with certainty.\" An expert on wiring, former NTSB board member Vernon Grose insisted: \"There could not be an [internal] ignition source.\" If there were, he added, the authorities would have grounded 747s\u2014starting with Air Force One\u2014and demanded changes. They did not. In contrast to the NTSB TWA 800 investigation, the Dutch Safety Board took only a year to conclude definitively that the \"detonation of a warhead\" above the left hand side of MH 17's cockpit destroyed the plane.\n\n\"Probable,\" however, was win enough to inspire Peter Goelz's Twitter equivalent of an end zone dance. \"For those involved,\" he tweeted, \"#TWA800 was a tragedy of infinite pain. Shame on the conspiracists who made it a topic of self aggrandizement and gain.\" The TWA 800 Project tweeted back, \"Sir, please explain this 'gain.' The filmmakers lost a huge amount of money making this film.\" Goelz's line of attack was a common one. Over the years, scores of critics have insisted I was into TWA 800 \"only for the money.\" Let me assure past and future critics that if money were my motivator I would have stayed in advertising.\n\nAmong the new findings Stalcup shared with the NTSB\u2014or at least tried to\u2014was a score of FBI witness statements that had somehow been omitted from the official record. He had managed to secure these through FOIA requests. The NTSB conceded the evidence was new but insisted these 302s did not differ substantially from the other seven hundred or so already in the official record. This was more or less correct. Stalcup, however, dug up additional witness information of much more consequence. Attorney John Clarke requested the same information from the CIA and posted it on Ray Lahr's website in September 2015. These memos show in unseemly detail how the CIA sausage-makers cooked up the zoom climb animation. No one who reads them can doubt for a second how fully and deliberately the CIA and its enablers sabotaged the investigation.\n\nOn February 28, 1997, CIA analysts presented a comprehensive PowerPoint titled, \"A Witness by Witness Account: A Review of the TWA 800 Witness Reports.\" The audience was unspecified, but it likely included need-to-know representatives from the CIA, the FBI, and MSIC. Each slide showed the CIA interpretation of a single witness summary. Surprisingly, most of the very best ones were there: the man on the bridge, Mike Wire; school administrator Joseph Delgado; helicopter pilots Fritz Meyer and Christian Baur; UA 217 passenger Dwight Brumley; and even Witness 73. Ignorance offered no possible excuse for what these analysts had done. They took the accounts of the most observant witnesses, siphoned out all conflicting details, and presented the residue as fact.\n\nIn constructing their presentation, the analysts so simplified and homogenized witness observations they made it difficult to align the CIA summaries with the FBI 302s. The CIA also assigned the witnesses numbers different than the ones the FBI assigned, and that did not help much either. In several cases, however, the detail was specific enough to compare the two. Among the newly found 302s, now unredacted, was that of Charles Le Brun, an assistant fire chief for the Air National Guard (CIA 152). On the evening of July 17, he was heading south by boat in Moneybogue Bay when he saw a flare-like object ascend. Given his location, the FBI reported, \"Le Brun knew it originated from the ocean.\" The object ascended vertically for about fifteen seconds, then burst into a yellow flash slightly larger than the light of the flare. This yellow flash remained illuminated and descended. It then burst into a huge fireball \"about twenty times the size of the yellow flash\" and fell toward the sea.\n\nIn their summary, the CIA analysts acknowledged the fifteen-second ascent \"straight up in the sky\" and the fireball twenty times the size of the original flash, but they failed to mention the object's climb \"from the ocean.\" Given Le Brun's credentials and his location, as well as the fact that he saw one object go up and another come down, the analysts could not dismiss his testimony with a glib, \"observations limited to end event\" as they did with others. Instead, they discounted his testimony because the ascending object \"was not white as most observations,\" a pointless caveat in that they discounted all the rising \"white\" lights as well.\n\nThe CIA analysts so liked Mike Wire they designated him witness \"1.\" As stated earlier, they had to fabricate a second interview with Wire to make his testimony work, but once they did, whether Wire knew it or not, he was their guy. The object Wire saw was moving from west to east, as was TWA 800. This gave the analysts enough wiggle room to conclude that Wire's observations were \"consistent with aircraft trajectory.\" In sum, he only saw a crippled TWA 800. More useful still, Wire heard the sound of the blasts at the appropriate time. Of course, the analysts could not explain how a low energy fuel-air explosion could shake a bridge ten miles away, but that was one of the many anomalies they chose to overlook.\n\nFBI Witness 364 (CIA 47) served up another anomaly. This former Marine helicopter crew chief saw an object ascend vertically. He watched for thirty seconds as the object \"rose from the east to the west on a steep angle.\" Concluded the analysts, \"Observations consistent with aircraft hypothesis _except for east to west motion_ \" (italics in original). That was a big \"except.\" This witness saw these objects moving towards each other. In fact, he told the FBI he thought he had seen \"a missile hitting the airplane.\" The analysts simply ignored the collision. Kallstrom ignored the witness's reference to a missile. \"No one ever said a missile,\" he told a congressional committee in July 1997, \"none of the witnesses.\" In fact, several had.\n\nThe analysts worked even harder to make the testimony of FBI Witness 550 (CIA 7) fit their narrative. Out fishing that evening, the witness saw what \"looked like a smaller plane coming from the northeast on a dead course heading towards the nose of the larger plane.\" The two objects then \"crunched up\" before the larger plane blew up and \"became a big fireball which then broke into four pieces.\" The CIA analysts concluded with startling dishonesty that the witness heard a \"series of sounds when two planes _passed_ each other\" (italics added). They then disqualified the witness account because the \"sound doesn't work.\" In a just world, transforming \"crunched up\" into \"passed each other\" would be crime enough to earn an orange jump suit.\n\nWitness 73 (CIA 39), she of the upside down Nike swoosh, saw events so clearly the CIA felt compelled to turn her into a drunk. Three days after the crash, she told the FBI that she saw \"the front of the aircraft separate from the back.\" The mapping of the debris field had long since confirmed her observations. This was no secret. The analysts knew how solid was her account. They conceded she saw \"two objects,\" or at least claimed to, and that \"the red object hit the aircraft.\" The best disqualifier they could summon was that the red object did \"not follow realistic missile trajectory.\" That was it. Two months after this presentation, someone saw to it that Witness 73 had a new 302 in her file.\n\nAnother act of overt fraud involved FBI Witness 32 (CIA 106), Dwight Brumley, a U.S. Navy master chief. At the climactic moment, Brumley was looking out a right side window on US Air 217, a plane heading northeast thousands of feet above TWA 800's path. As recorded on his original 302, Brumley told the FBI he saw a flare like-object moving from \"right to left,\" very nearly perpendicular to the path of TWA 800. According to the CIA analyst, however, Brumley \"observed flare ascending which moved _left to right_ \" (italics added). This supposed flare, the analyst concluded, \"matches aircraft trajectory.\" In other words, what Brumley saw was TWA 800 in crippled flight. He was said to have admitted as much \"in a second interview.\"\n\nAs was the case with Witness 73 and the man on the bridge, Brumley's second interview was created out of whole cloth. Careless or reckless or both, authorities left Brumley's original 302 filed in the NTSB docket and manufactured a new one with the original date for his CIA file. It was only after the CIA file surfaced that the fraud became obvious. As was true with Witness 73 and Mike Wire, no one spoke to Brumley after the first week of the investigation. \"There was never a second interview with me by either the FBI, the CIA or any other government official,\" Brumley firmly told Tom Stalcup in a recorded interview. \"I always maintained that the object moved from my right to left, and I never said otherwise.\"\n\nThe analysts had more trouble still with Delgado, FBI Witness 649 (CIA 47). He too saw two separate objects, but his ascending object was moving in a southwesterly direction, not towards the east, as was TWA 800. This object made a \"dramatic correction\" at the last moment and exploded in a \"white puff\" next to the aircraft. The plane then devolved into a ball of fire and fell behind the tree line. The CIA's deconstruction of Delgado's account hurts the brain. The analysts concluded that the ascending object was actually TWA 800 after a second explosion. The fact that this object was going in the wrong direction did not overly trouble the analysts. Nor did Delgado's highly specific drawing of two objects with distinct trajectories. With a bravado born of impunity they concluded Delgado \"did not observe _two objects_ around the _initial_ event\" (italics theirs). Like the mythical Greek highwayman Procrustes, who stretched or chopped captives to fit a certain height, the CIA analysts had a one-sized scenario and stretched or slashed the truth to make the witness accounts fit. If anyone objected there was always a Peter Goelz or a Jim Kallstrom ready to shout \"conspiracy theorist.\"\n\nAs a quick reminder, Goelz, Jim Hall's man at the NTSB, claimed on national TV the witnesses saw only \"the last six seconds\" of the forty-plus second break-up of the aircraft. \"No witness saw the first event forty seconds prior to that,\" he insisted. Of course, they did. One of the witnesses just cited saw an ascent of fifteen seconds. Another saw an ascent of thirty seconds. All saw a descending object for another twenty or thirty seconds. As late as February 1997, the CIA analysts were accepting the duration of these sightings. Goelz's \"last six seconds\" claim has no known provenance.\n\nThe CIA presentation did not convince everyone, at least not the representatives from the DIA's Missile and Space Intelligence Center then working with the FBI. In an undated document, likely soon after this February 1997 presentation, the MSIC reps submitted their concerns in writing to the CIA. For one, the reps could \"not agree with the CIA conclusion that no witness saw the initial event.\" They insisted that several witnesses could not \"be lightly disregarded\" and might possibly \"have seen something other than the aircraft.\" They noted too that several of these witnesses saw an object moving in the opposite direction of TWA 800 prior to the explosions. The testimony of these witnesses could \"not be explained as seeing any portion of the aircraft trajectory proposed by the CIA or other sources,\" said the reps firmly.\n\nWhat the CIA analysts lacked in integrity they made up for in nerve. Their exchanges with MSIC and other agencies leave the impression that the White House had the agency's back, and everyone knew it. Among equals, these exchanges would have provoked warfare. They were that insulting. Yes, more than 90 percent saw something other than the zoom climb, said the CIA analysts, but what they saw was likely \"a fuel related event in the final seconds of the aircraft's descent toward the water.\" As to the imagined objects heading west toward TWA 800, those sightings too were \"likely related to fuel burning.\" MSIC seemed to sense the power disparity and yielded without much fight. All that the reps could say in return was, \"Continue re-interviewing the witnesses.\"\n\nDespite institutional pressure to yield, one unnamed FBI agent refused to accept the CIA narrative. For simplicity's sake, let us call him Special Agent Lewis Erskine. Erskine was part of the FBI's two-man missile team. According to an internal CIA memo from April 29, 1997, Erskine's FBI partner was \"completely convinced\" by the CIA analysis. If true, this suggests he had been gotten to. Erskine, however, had \"concerns.\" That was something of an understatement. In April 1997, he sent the CIA a blistering critique of its zoom climb scenario and demanded answers to more than a dozen salient questions. He wanted to know why the analysts failed to account for the eight witnesses who saw an object \"hit the aircraft\" or the numerous witnesses who saw the object move from east to west, the opposite direction of TWA 800. In all, Erskine cited some thirty \"problem witnesses\" whose accounts did not square with the \"agency scenario.\" With some precision, he also challenged the aerodynamics of the CIA's zoom climb.\n\nThe CIA analyst, likely Randolph Tauss, responded with his usual obfuscations, but he made one surprising concession, namely that he had no physical proof a zoom climb after the initial \"pitch up\" of the aircraft. No one denied the plane might have appeared to pitch up after the nose was blown off. Ray Lahr described the phenomenon as \"putting two people on one side of a teeter totter.\" As witness Lisa Perry saw it, \"The tail section fell backward.\" For Joseph Delgado, the plane \"arched upward.\" But not a single witness saw the 747 ascend after this initial convulsion. The CIA analyst did not contest this point. \"Whatever happens after these first few seconds,\" he responded to Erskine, \"is not understood by the CIA and would require extensive modeling of the aircraft beyond the CIA capabilities.\" A point that bears repeating is that two years later, in a March 1999 memo, a CIA analyst would privately concede that the \"maximum calculated altitude\" for TWA 800 post-explosion was 14,500 feet. Publicly, the agency said nothing to correct the record. All this said, the FBI went ahead and showed the CIA's zoom climb video to the nation seven months after the CIA conceded to Erskine that it had no supportive data.\n\nThe reader will recall that in November 1997 Kallstrom claimed he \"looked throughout the government\" to find the people best able to analyze \"all the known data about Flight 800 in conjunction with the eyewitness reports.\" He allegedly found those people at the CIA, but on this point the chief analyst demurred. That assignment, he admitted, was \"beyond the CIA capabilities.\"\n\nErskine raised one more concern unvoiced in any other official document\u2014the \"possible 'missile self destruct\/proximity' theory.\" He chided the analyst for claiming that the apparent lack of physical evidence disproved the missile theory. He reminded the analyst that a missile blast triggered by a proximity fuse \"would likely leave little or no evidence of a hit on the aircraft.\" In his response, the CIA analyst referred only to the damage a \"portable SAM\" would have caused. Refusing to even consider the possibility of a naval misfire, he implied that since a shoulder-fired missile could not have wreaked such catastrophic damage, a mechanical failure must have.\n\nIn his conclusion, Erskine hit the CIA hard. He recommended that \"the Agency withdraw its conclusions\" until it could meet several conditions, any one of which would unravel the CIA scenario. These included the integration of radar data, the validation of key witnesses, and the reconciliation of the thirty \"problem witnesses\" with the zoom climb scenario. The CIA analyst did not seem overly worried. He knew that Tenet and Kallstrom had already signed off on his analysis. \"CIA will continue to look at problematic witnesses,\" he responded, \"but we believe we have adequately explained all of them within the agency scenario.\" The analyst got to work quickly. The very day he sent this memo, April 29, 1997, Witness 73's new 302 magically appeared in her file.\n\nAt Kallstrom's direction, the FBI did proceed to re-interview witnesses. At the congressional hearing in July 1997, he claimed that his agents interviewed \"most of [the witnesses] more than once.\" That was just one lie out of many that day, but the FBI did record about thirty additional interviews with witnesses. Of course, some of these interviews were provably apocryphal. That did not stop Kallstrom from testifying in July 1997 that the second interviews, when combined with the CIA's \"sophisticated analysis,\" would soon provide a \"clear understanding of these critical eyewitness observations.\"\n\nOn reading statements such as this, I find myself feeling sorry for Kallstrom. He helped construct a case he knew to be fraudulent, and he had to sense just how fragile the construction was. If it collapsed, the CIA analysts could run and hide. The NTSB bureaucrats could plead ignorance. The Clintons could seek executive privilege, and he alone would have to answer to the victims' mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. Nothing the courts might throw at him would wound that deeply.\n\nFive days before TWA 800's demise, an amateur videographer captured an apparent missile test in progress off the coast of Long Island. Although not visible in this still, the video also captured burning debris falling from the sky. _Federal Bureau of Investigation_\nChapter: NINETEEN\n\nTHE SMOKING GUN\n\n**N** o one ever expected _the_ video to show up, least of all in a batch of miscellaneous FBI documents secured through a FOIA request. I refer here to the video of the missile strike that MSNBC reportedly aired on the night of July 17, 1996, the one around which Nelson DeMille wrote his novel, _Night Fall_. But then one day, nineteen years after James Sanders began his lonely quest for the truth, a Las Vegas postman delivered a video to his house that had all the appearances of being \"the\" video.\n\nThe video came with no explanation as to what it was. A skeptic by nature, Sanders watched it through and could not believe what he was seeing. The light seemed right. The place seemed right. The Long Island accent of the videographer seemed right. There was a new moon hovering over the Atlantic Ocean, and yes, when Sanders checked, there was a new moon on the night of July 17. And as to what was happening out at sea, there was no denying that seemed right too. For Sanders, this video had the potential not only to vindicate his efforts, but also to erase the criminal stain on his and Elizabeth's records. Sanders made copies and sent one to me. By this time, I was well into the research on this book, which was good. Had I not been, I might have failed to understand what I was seeing.\n\nAfter days of waiting, a neatly packaged jump drive arrived at my office. I inserted the drive in my Mac, opened up the document, and hoped that my computer would be able to show the video. Everything worked. The view seemed to be from a deck not far from the ocean. That was good. My best correspondent on this subject, the 747 pilot who watched the video over and over in a Hong Kong Hospital bed, said it was shot from a deck, but he also said there was a party going on. There was no party here. It was just a guy and his buddy trying to master what seemed to be a new video camera.\n\nThen, sure enough, a smoke trail emerged from the horizon zigzagging its way up at about a seventy-five degree angle in an east to west direction. \"It must be a rocket or something going up,\" said the one fellow matter-of-factly. \"Uh, oh,\" I said to myself. This may not be what we hoped it was. I remembered the document that Ray Lahr had received years earlier about the existence of a video shot at dawn on July 12, 1996, by a fellow on Long Island trying to capture the sunrise. According to that document, he reportedly said, \"They must be testing a rocket.\" That quote was much too close to what the fellow actually said on the video to be a coincidence. The light was deceptive. I could not tell whether it was dusk or dawn. So I found a helpful web site called \"Moon Page.\" I loaded in the date, the time, and the time zone. I then compared the morning moon on July 12 to the evening moon on July 17. No question. Yes, each moon was new, but the July 12 moon was waning exactly as was the moon in the video. The July 17 moon was waxing.\n\nBefore calling Sanders with the news, I looked carefully at the video and the assembled stills. Yes, he would be disappointed, but this video had powerful evidentiary value of its own. It was amateurish but clearly genuine. All the agencies were aware of it. As mentioned earlier, the Defense Intelligence Agency had advised the FBI on July 23, 1996, that the imagery captured on the video \"appeared to be consistent with the exhaust plume from a MANPAD.\" The video, however, showed much more than an exhaust plume going up. It showed something coming down. As Sanders and I now understood, by July 23, just six days after the crash, the authorities were already pulling their punches.\n\nIn fact, the CIA started talking down the possibility of a missile strike of any sort within days of the crash, if not hours. In a July 20 memo, an analyst reported \"no evidence of a missile\" in the radar data. That same memo argued that the aircraft was beyond the range of virtually all shoulder-fired missiles. In no memo was there any mention of a possible naval misfire even though one memo acknowledged the Navy was reportedly \"conducting an exercise in the area.\" The analyst mentioned this only because he was interested in seeing if any of the ships had raw radar video recordings to share.\n\nAs noted earlier, a July 30 CIA memo warned that the FBI was preparing a report pointing to a missile strike. After interviewing 144 witnesses, \"mainly professionals,\" the FBI agents involved were convinced a shoulder-fired missile destroyed TWA 800. That same CIA memo held another surprise. After TWA 800 went down, the FBI received reports from four other witnesses claiming to have seen \"a similar surface-to-air something\" launched on July 7. \"If true,\" said the CIA analyst, \"the FBI would now have witnesses reporting seeing something race towards the sky on the 7th, 12th and 17th.\" Assuming these sightings to be genuine, the analyst reviewed the various reasons as to why a terrorist with a shoulder-fired missile might have wanted to shoot off a missile on three separate occasions, each five days apart. There was no talk of the Navy.\n\nAs with virtually all evidence that threatened the government scenario, the authorities eventually discounted the July 12 video. An internal memo from October 21, 1996, spoke of how the CIA came to this conclusion. According to the analyst, officials from still another intelligence agency, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), \"believed, at least initially,\" that the ascending plume in the July 12 video \"might be a MANPAD smoke trail.\" Upon further review, however, they concluded, \"The trail appears to have most likely been a contrail from a very far away aircraft.\"\n\nThe deception was that easy\u2014at least until someone either carelessly or craftily sent Sanders the July 12 video. To be sure, the camera work on this video makes analysis difficult. The action appears to be farther out to sea than was TWA 800's, and the cameraman, unaware of what he was seeing, continued to readjust the lens and scan the horizon. That said, the video's irregular, ascending smoke trail does not resemble any aircraft contrail I have ever seen. It is too thick, dark, and irregular. In fact, it almost perfectly matches the direction and angle of attack of the smoke trail that Joseph Delgado sketched for investigators.\n\nThe video shows a secondary action, however, that betrays the deceit at the heart of the NIMA analysis: very near the point where the smoke trail ends, flaming debris falls out of the sky. In none of the CIA memos was the falling debris mentioned. This added detail renders the idea of a terrorist missile even more preposterous. The ascending object\u2014or another one unseen\u2014appears to have hit something and destroyed it. The target object might have been a drone, a test missile, or possibly even a terrorist plane packed with explosives as envisioned in the Bojinka plot. On close examination, the smoke trail left by the falling debris seems to intersect the vestiges of the ascending trail. This makes sense. The target object continued east as it fell. The Delgado drawing captured this same phenomenon with TWA 800. If there was a climatic explosion on July 12, the cameraman missed it, but, then again, the target of this apparent missile would not have had a fuel tank nearly as large as that of a 747.\n\nOn July 17, 1996, a Long Island woman by the name of Linda Kabot shed some unwitting light on the possible nature of the target. That evening Kabot was taking photographs at a fundraising party for her boss, Vincent Cannuscio, the Republican Town Supervisor of Southampton. The event was held outdoors, at Docker's, an East Quogue restaurant with a deck that overlooks Shinnecock Bay. Kabot was facing north with her back to the ocean a few blocks away when she snapped one photo with the potential to rewrite history. At the time, however, she did not notice anything unusual.\n\nA few days later, Kabot picked up the developed photos. In one, she saw what the _New York Times_ described as a \"long cylindrical object high in the sky,\" its left end tilted downward, its right end \"brightly lighted.\" Good citizen that she was, Kabot called the FBI. At this stage, just days after the disaster, the FBI was still serious about seeking the truth. Agents interviewed her and other guests at the event, took the negatives, but left Kabot with the original. The _Times_ did not use the word \"drone\" in its August 26 coverage of the Kabot photo, but a drone was likely what Kabot captured on film. The ever-incurious _Times_ never mentioned Kabot or the photo again.\n\nWitness 150, Lisa Perry, had likely seen the same object. In an interview on July 23, 1996, she told the FBI she saw an \"unusual object traveling at high speed north to south.\" She described it as \"cylindrical, tubular, and bullet shaped\" with no wings, no vapor trail, and a slight upward trajectory. She followed the object for several seconds when she saw it approach a \"large commercial airliner\" traveling at roughly the same altitude. Although she saw no collision, she described the break-up of the aircraft with impressive accuracy.\n\nThe media ignored Perry's testimony and allowed the Kabot photo to fade from memory. On November 18, 1997, however, the FBI resurrected the photo in its closing summary of the case. For analysis the FBI had turned the photo over to an entity it called the \"CIA National Imagery and Mapping Administration (NIMA).\" Upon reading this I did a double take. Nowhere in my research on NIMA did I get the impression NIMA was affiliated with the CIA. This was the same bunch that insisted the smoke trail in the July 12 video was an airplane contrail. Here, they were advising the FBI that the object in the photo was \"not a missile\" and \"not a drone.\"\n\nThe reason drones were ruled out smacked of tautology: \"No drone exercises conducted near Long Island July 17, 1996.\" Nearly a year before this press conference, the stubborn NTSB witness group had requested to see the Kabot photo and the FBI's analysis of the same. In its Factual Report from October 1997, the Witness Group noted that the requested material \"has not been received.\" No matter. In its case-closing press conference, the FBI assured America the Kabot photo was one of many things that were not what they appeared to be:\n\n\u2022 The apparent drone in the Kabot photo was determined to be \"an aircraft\" of indeterminate type.\n\n\u2022 The apparent missile trail on a July 17 photo taken by a woman named Heidi Kreiger was determined to be \"debris on the film surface.\"\n\n\u2022 The apparent missile on Dick Russell's radar tape was determined to be \"a ghost of Jet Express 18 which was at a different location.\"\n\n\u2022 The apparent missile residue on the seat cushions, the testing of which led to the indictment of the Sanderses, was determined to be glue, a \"chlorinated polymeric material, commonly used as contact adhesive.\"\n\n\u2022 The apparent PETN and RDX found inside and outside the fuselage were determined to be the sloppy after effects of a \"canine explosives training aboard the victim aircraft.\"\n\n\u2022 The witness observations, once thought \"overwhelming\" proof of a missile strike, were determined to be a collective optical illusion thanks to the \"brilliant and professional\" work of the CIA.\n\n\u2022 \"The vast majority\" of the witness observations were determined to be \"consistent\" with the CIA analysis, although admittedly there remained \"a few\" that could \"not be fully explained.\"\n\nThese were just the anomalies that the FBI breezily explained away in its final summary. There were, of course, many more.\n\n\u2022 The FBI determined that there was no strategic retagging of airplane parts, including engine No. 3, given that \"the logged recovery location of all debris from the wings and the cabin structure was verified.\"\n\n\u2022 The summary made no mention of the serious charges brought against David Mayer and others for changing tags.\n\n\u2022 The summary made no mention of the P-3 video.\n\n\u2022 As to the reported \"foreign object damage\" to engine No. 3, the FBI summary added no new information.\n\n\u2022 \"The [cockpit voice recorder] review disclosed no evidence of a criminal act,\" no evidence of anything for that matter. Ditto the flight data recorder. Said the NTSB's John Goglia earlier, \"The data was missing and it's unexplainable, it's just missing.\" The FBI was as silent as the CVR on this issue.\n\n\u2022 The \"infrared sensor information from a U.S. satellite\" that allegedly helped the CIA establish the zoom climb scenario went unmentioned.\n\n\u2022 Unmentioned was the large mystery ship fleeing the scene at up to thirty-five knots, the one suspicious vessel the FBI inexplicably failed to identify.\n\n\u2022 Unmentioned was the sound propagation analysis around which the CIA based its analysis. In fact, the word \"sound\" does not appear in the FBI summary.\n\n\u2022 Unmentioned were the \"116 pieces of debris\" FBI lab director Donald Kerr said were sent to the FBI lab in Washington for further testing.\n\n\u2022 The FBI claimed \"there were no missile firing [sic] for two years prior to July 17, 1996, in the Whiskey 105-106-107 areas,\" which meant the July 12 video could not have shown an ascending missile, nor could the July 7 witnesses have seen one.\n\n\u2022 Finally, there was no mention of the July 12 video. To acknowledge this video would have been to concede the very real possibility that there had been a \"missile firing\" just five days prior to the destruction of TWA 800.\n\nThere was one other bit of evidence that the FBI chose not to discuss. This was the fax Long Island resident Dede Muma received from an employee at San Diego's Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical in May 1997. The employee, Eric Hittinger, had intended to send the fax to his superior on assignment at Calverton but transposed the last two numbers. As fate would have it, the fax went to Muma. She in turn forwarded it to the _Southampton Press_. The _Press_ ran the illustration shown in the fax through the highly authoritative Jane's Information Services, and Jane's determined the object pictured to be a Teledyne Ryan BQM-34 Firebee I, a target drone about 23 feet long capable of flying more than 700 miles an hour.\n\nAlthough the FBI would not talk to the _Press_ , Hittinger did. He said the FBI had contacted Teledyne Ryan to identify pieces of wreckage that looked like parts of a drone. He faxed the illustration to help his superior on the scene at Calverton make the identification. When the _Press_ caught up with Hittinger in July 1997, he assured the reporter the part in question did not belong to a Firebee and that \"it was all put to bed some time ago.\" Accuracy in Media's Reed Irvine talked to the Teledyne employee on the scene, Walt Hamilton. According to Irvine, Hamilton said the part did, in fact, look like a Teledyne Ryan product. He requested the drawings to make sure it wasn't. \"If it wasn't from a Firebee,\" wrote Irvine, \"it must have been from another drone, evidence the FBI hid and the NTSB has destroyed.\"\n\nAuthorities had an incentive to discount the Kabot photo and the Muma fax. In its summary the FBI acknowledged that three submarines\u2014the USS _Normandy_ , the USS _Trepang_ , and the USS _Albuquerque_ \u2014were in the \"immediate vicinity of the crash site.\" So too, said the FBI, were an Aegis cruiser and a U.S. Navy P-3 Orion. The P-3, in fact, just happened to be flying about seven thousand feet above TWA 800 when the plane was blown out of the sky. Were there a drone or target missile in the mix, the U.S. Navy would have had all the \"combatants\" needed for a Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) missile test.\n\nIn 1996, the Navy was in the process of introducing this enormously complex system. The CEC was created to integrate the information coming from each of the combatant's sensors\u2014range, bearing, elevation, Doppler updates etc.\u2014and feed the integrated picture back to the individual combatants. In the CEC live-fire tests, which began as early as 1994 in Puerto Rico, drones played the role of \"unknown assumed enemy.\" The P-3's role was to relay data among the various units involved.\n\nIn July 1996, this information was not classified. If curious, the FBI\u2014or the media\u2014could have reviewed a comprehensive article in the November 1995 _John Hopkins APL Technical Digest_ titled simply, \"The Cooperative Engagement Capability.\" One color illustration captured an actual test off the Virginia coast in 1994 when the various ships in the USS _Dwight D. Eisenhower_ battlegroup successfully cued and tracked a tactical ballistic missile. In the middle of the illustration, relaying information among the vessels, was the P-3.\n\nThe P-3 should have given the game away. The authorities could explain away the hundreds of missile sightings on July 17, the radar track of a missile, the photo of a drone, the photo of a smoke trail, the missile sightings on July 12 and July 17, even the location of ships and submarines. There was no denying, however, that right in the middle of the mix, exactly where one would expect to find a surveillance aircraft in a missile test, was the P-3. Its transponder \"broken,\" the plane was flying within a mile or so of what was said to be the first spontaneous mid-air explosion in the era of Jet-A fuel. This was either most freakish coincidence in the history of aviation or the proverbial \"smoking gun.\" If the media needed to confirm their suspicions, they should have asked the Navy brass why the P-3 was sent on a meaningless sub-hunting exercise hundreds of mile away while the terrorists who allegedly shot down TWA 800 were still at large. Finally, the media might have asked Jim Kallstrom how FBI investigators overlooked so obvious a lead.\n\nI do not presume to know the exact details of what happened the night of July 17, 1996, but the evidence for a missile test gone awry overwhelms the dispassionate observer. With Ramzi Yousef on trial in New York, with serious people worried about the threat to attack America with flying bombs, with the Atlanta Olympics just two days away, with Saddam Hussein celebrating Iraq's Independence Day, it made sense for the Navy to test its cooperative engagement capabilities in the Atlantic, arguably even in the crowded air space around New York. The probable tests on July 7 and July 12 caused no stir. It seems likely that the Navy increased the degree of difficulty on July 17, perhaps in response to a genuine threat. If the participants had merely cued and tracked as they did in the earlier test off the Virginia coast, two hundred thirty people would not have died that night. As was true with the _Vincennes_ in 1988, something went wrong.\n\nBased on available evidence, it appears that at least two missiles detonated near TWA 800 in quick order, one at the No. 3 engine on the right side, and the second and fatal blast, according to the IAMAW, at \"the lower left side of the aircraft.\" If there were a drone in the mix, it seems to have been destroyed.\n\nSeveral very good witnesses named the right wing as the site of one explosion, including Witness 73 and fisherman William Gallagher who \"saw something hit the right side of the plane.\" As the _New York Times_ reported, investigators found traces of PETN on the right wing within five days of the crash and confirmed traces of PETN inside the fuselage near the right wing. ALPA's Jim Speer had a section of the right wing tested for nitrates, and when it tested positive the FBI shut the test down. The No. 3 engine appeared to have been the first object blown off the aircraft.\n\nThe IAMAW, the most forthright participant in the NTSB investigation, spoke openly of the left side blast. Although restrained in its language, the union's final report had the ring of truth about it: \"A high pressure event breached the fuselage and the fuselage unzipped due to the event. The explosion [of the center fuel tank] was a result of this event.\" In layman's terms, a blast\u2014\"outside of the aircraft in close proximity to the aircraft\"\u2014ripped open the center fuel tank and caused the fuel to vaporize and explode.\n\nYes, the center fuel tank did blow up. The IAMAW confirmed as much. No one ever said otherwise. The IAMAW, however, did not shy from rejecting the official NTSB position on the fuel tank's role in the plane's destruction: \"We have not been a party to any evidence, wreckage or tests that could conclude that the [center fuel tank] explosion was and is the primary contributor to this accident.\" As of August 14, 1996, the _New York Times_ was reporting much the same, specifically that \"the center fuel tank caught fire as many as 24 seconds after the initial blast that split apart the plane.\"\n\nFor its part, the NTSB could offer no evidence to rebut the IAMAW case for an external blast save for an absence of \"physical evidence.\" In the light of what is now known about the corruption of the investigation, this argument carries no weight. The one honest member of the FBI missile team noted that a missile triggered by a proximity fuse \"would likely leave little or no evidence of a hit on the aircraft.\" Then too, as the NTSB conceded in its final report, \"Some areas of fuselage skin and [center fuel tank] are missing.\" Why doubt that officials who distorted witness observations, rearranged the debris field, and reinterpreted _all_ data and visual imagery to fit their preferred scenario would have qualms about making physical evidence go \"missing.\" According to the NTSB's Hank Hughes, who openly protested the \"disappearance of parts from the hangar,\" this evidence did not go missing by accident.\n\nAccidents can happen. This was a huge one, a tragic one. But the larger wrong, the moral wrong, the uncorrected wrong began _after_ the plane's destruction. The Navy could not have\u2014and would not have\u2014concealed its responsibility unless authorized to do so. Nor would the FBI and CIA have intervened on their own initiative. These authorizations could only have come from the White House. This was the rare White House in American history, perhaps the only one, reckless enough to have authorized a cover-up this bold.\n\nMuch about the government's performance in the TWA 800 investigation surprises, but none of it shocks. Governments inevitably fail the people. Our founders knew this. They constructed a constitution that accounted for the weaknesses of human nature. As a corrective, they passed the First Amendment. \"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived,\" wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1799, \"but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.\" Two centuries later, Jefferson's trust in the press was thoroughly betrayed.\n\nIn his review of Stalcup and Borjesson's _TWA Flight 800_ , the _Times_ ' Neil Genzlinger wondered whether there was a government agency with the credibility to reopen the investigation, especially given how \"poorly\" the agencies in question came off in the documentary. In an unwitting bit of institutional self-criticism, Genzlinger concluded, \"It's hard to imagine any entity that would command the authority that could put the Flight 800 case to rest.\" The readers of that article\u2014or this book\u2014have to ask, \"How about the _New York Times_?\"\nNOTES\n\nONE: THE BREACH\n\n. Transcript, 9\/11 Commission Hearing, CNN, March 24, 2004, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/0403\/24\/nfcnn.01.html>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix B.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In_ - _flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747_ - _131_ , _N93119_ , _near East Moriches_ , _New York, July 17_ , _1996_ (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 232, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1LqLGsX>.\n\n. Hillary Rodham Clinton's White House Schedules, _New York Times_ , March 20, 2008, <http:\/\/projects.nytimes.com\/clinton-schedules>.\n\n. Transcript, _Witnessed_ : _The Crash of TWA Flight 800_ , CNN, July 19, 2014, <http:\/\/transcripts.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/1407\/19\/csr.01.html>.\n\n. Richard Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 121.\n\n. Phone interview with Robert Patterson, July 15, 2004 (est.) and follow-up in person interview, Newport Beach, California, October 15, 2006.\n\n. NTSB docket materials, Exhibit 4A, appendix M.\n\n. Transcript, _Witnessed_.\n\n. Robert Woodward, _The Choice_ : _How Clinton Won_ (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 421.\n\n. Ibid., 367.\n\n. Evan Thomas et al., _Back from the Dead: How Clinton Survived the Republican Revolution_ (New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997), 79.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 7.\n\nTWO: CONSPIRACY THEORIST\n\n. Loren Fleckenstein, \"New Data Show Missile May Have Nailed TWA 800,\" _Press-Enterprise_ , March 10, 1997.\n\n. FBI press release, December 5, 1997.\n\n. FBI New York Office Press Release, November 18, 1997, <http:\/\/www.lchr.org\/a\/11\/j\/fbitwa.htm>.\n\n. NTSB Hearing, August 22, 2000, <https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Portal:TWA_Flight_800_investigation\/Day1>.\n\n. Transcript, \"Jim Kallstrom's Take on the Plane,\" March 20, 2014, <http:\/\/www.rushlimbaugh.com\/daily\/2014\/03\/20\/jim_kallstrom_s_take_on_the_plane>.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 353.\n\n. William Langewiesche, \"Dead End Story,\" _New York Times_ , September 26, 1999, <https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/books\/99\/09\/26\/reviews\/990926.26langewt.html>.\n\nTHREE: THE BEST PEOPLE\n\n. \"Top 10 Stories of 1996,\" CNN.com, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/EVENTS\/1996\/year.in.review\/>.\n\n. Whittaker Chambers, _Witness_ (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2014), 793.\n\n. George Johnson, \"Pierre, Is That A Masonic Flag on the Moon?\" _New York Times_ , November 24, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/11\/24\/weekinreview\/pierre-is-that-a-masonic-flag-on-the-moon.html>.\n\n. Jeffrey Reid, \"'Pierre Salinger Syndrome' and the TWA 800 Conspiracies,\" CNN.com, July 17, 2006, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2006\/US\/07\/12\/twa.conspiracy\/>.\n\n. Phone interviews with Dick Russell, the most recent and detailed on July 25, 2015.\n\n. Phone interview with Jim Holtsclaw, July 28, 2015.\n\n. Affidavit, James Allan Holtsclaw, October 25, 2002, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/lahr\/affidavits\/j-james-holtsclaw.pdf>.\n\n. \"What Happened to TWA Flight 800,\" CNN.com, July 19, 2015, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9607\/19\/twa.investigation\/index.html?_s=PM:US>.\n\n. Christine Negroni, _Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 138\u201339.\n\n. Affidavit of Richard Russell, January 2, 2003, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/lahr\/affidavits\/m-richard-russell.pdf>.\n\n. The e-mail was published by CNN.com in August 1996, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9611\/08\/twa.update\/email.html>.\n\n. Jocelyn Noveck, \"Pierre Salinger's TWA Flight 800 Missile News Conference,\" Associated Press, November 8, 1996, <http:\/\/www.welfarestate.com\/twa800\/pierre.htm>.\n\nFOUR: THE VIDEO\n\n. Thomas Jefferson letter to Charles Yancey, 1816, <http:\/\/famguardian.org\/Subjects\/Politics\/thomasjefferson\/jeff1350.htm>.\n\n. Unless specified otherwise, all the quotes that follow can be found in Jack Cashill and James Sanders, _Silenced_ , 2001.\n\n. FBI New York Office Press Release, \"FBI: No criminal evidence behind TWA 800 crash,\" November 18, 1997, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9711\/18\/twa.fbi.presser\/>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix B.\n\nFIVE: THE MAN ON THE BRIDGE\n\n. Jack Cashill and James Sanders, _Silenced_ (2001).\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix FF.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119, near East Moriches, New York, July 17, 1996_ (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 236, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1LqLGsX>.\n\n. \"Navy Aircraft Testing May Have Caused Earthquake-Like Sonic Boom Felt from New Jersey to Long Island,\" NBC New York, January 27, 2016, <http:\/\/www.nbcnewyork.com\/news\/local\/Earthquake-Sonic-Boom-Shaking-New-Jersey-New-York-Connecticut-Long-Island-Tri-State-Shaking-NY-CT-NJ-366886661.html>.\n\n. NTSB docket materials, Exhibit 4A, appendix Z.\n\n. David Hendrix, \"Witnesses Boost Missile Theory,\" _Press-Enterprise_ , October 20, 1997, cached at <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/AUDIO.html>.\n\n. Letter from George Tenet to Jim Hall, March 15, 1999, cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 76\u2013100.\n\n. Randolph M. Tauss, \"The Crash of TWA Flight 800,\" <https:\/\/www.cia.gov\/offices-of-cia\/public-affairs\/entertainment-industry-liaison\/twaflight.pdf>.\n\n. Executive Order 12333\u2014United States intelligence activities, Federal Register, December 4, 1981, <http:\/\/www.archives.gov\/federal-register\/codification\/executive-order\/12333.html>.\n\n. FBI New York Office Press Release, November 18, 1997.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 51\u201375.\n\nSIX: INTELLIGENCE MEDAL OF MERIT\n\n. Randolph M. Tauss, \"The Crash of TWA Flight 800,\" <https:\/\/www.cia.gov\/offices-of-cia\/public-affairs\/entertainment-industry-liaison\/twaflight.pdf>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix B.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix C.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix D.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix E.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix F.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix G.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid., appendix H.\n\n. Ibid., appendix B.\n\n. Ibid., appendix H.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Tauss, \"The Crash of TWA Flight 800.\"\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. NTSB docket materials, Exhibit 4A, appendix B.\n\n. \"Affidavit of Mr. Dwight Brumley,\" TWA800.com, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/lahr\/affidavits\/p-dwight-brumley.pdf>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nSEVEN: THE GOOD BUREAUCRAT\n\n. Bob Woodward, _The Last of the President's Men_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), e-book, chapter 22.\n\n. Al Kamen, \"Route to NTSB Runs Through Tennessee,\" _Washington Post_ , May 28, 1993, cached at High Beam Research, <http:\/\/www.highbeam.com\/doc\/1P2-948549.html>.\n\n. Phone interview with Vernon Grose, October 23, 2015.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 131.\n\n. Christine Negroni, _Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 85.\n\n. Phone interview with Vernon Grose, October 23, 2105 and follow-up e-mail exchange on November 9, 2015.\n\n. TWA Flight 800 Investigation\/Day 2\u20133, Wikisource, <https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/Portal:TWA_Flight_800_investigation\/Day2-3>.\n\n. NTSB Witness Group Factual Report, Docket No. SA-516, Exhibit No. 4A, October 16, 1997, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/4a\/exhibit4a.html>.\n\n. Megyn Kelly Reports, Fox News, June 19, 2013, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Qg0vN1j_Q0A>.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119, near East Moriches, New York_ , July 17, 1996 (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 255, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1LqLGsX>.\n\n. As shown in _Silenced_.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix G.\n\n. Ibid., appendix D.\n\n. Ibid., appendix C. All Perry material can be found here.\n\n. Ibid., appendix H.\n\n. Ibid., appendix N.\n\n. Ibid., appendix O.\n\n. _The Washington Times_ , Tuesday, August 15, 2000, cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/images\/times-8-15-00.gif>.\n\n. David Hendrix, \"Witnesses Boost Missile Theory,\" _Press-Enterprise_ , October 20, 1997, cached at <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/AUDIO.html>\n\n. NTSB docket materials, Exhibit 4A, appendix FF.\n\n. \"Conspiracy Inoculation,\" _New York Times_ , November 19, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/11\/19\/opinion\/conspiracy-inoculation.html>.\n\n. \"After the Crash,\" _New York Times_ , July 19, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/19\/opinion\/after-the-crash.html>.\n\n. \"FBI: No criminal evidence behind TWA 800 crash,\" CNN.com, November 18, 1997, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9711\/18\/twa.fbi.presser\/>.\n\n. Randolph M. Tauss, \"The Crash of TWA Flight 800,\" <https:\/\/www.cia.gov\/offices-of-cia\/public-affairs\/entertainment-industry-liaison\/twaflight.pdf>.\n\nEIGHT: RESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM\n\n. E-mail to author, circa June 20, 2001.\n\n. Al Kamen, \"Bombshell from Lawrence Livermore,\" _Washington Post_ , March 28, 1994, <http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/pb\/archive\/politics\/1994\/03\/28\/bombshell-from-lawrence-livermore\/bbec0be8-84a0-47b8-a725-e6013e1c4024\/?resType=accessibility>.\n\n. Lawrie Mifflin, \"Media Talk; ABC News at Odds With Parent Network,\" _New York Times_ , October 26, 1998, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1998\/10\/26\/business\/media-talk-abc-news-at-odds-with-parent-network.html>.\n\n. Kristina Borjesson, _Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press_ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 323.\n\n. E-mail to the author, November 9, 2015.\n\n. Borjesson, _Into the Buzzsaw_ , 325.\n\n. Transcript, CNN The Point with Greta Van Susteren, July 17, 2001, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/0107\/17\/tpt.00.html>.\n\n. Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid, \"Advice to CNN, Part II,\" Accuracy in Media, August 17, 2001, <http:\/\/www.aim.org\/media-monitor\/advice-to-cnn-part-ii\/>.\n\n. Reed Irvine, \"CNN Has Two Black Eyes,\" Accuracy in Media, August 3, 2001, <http:\/\/www.aim.org\/publications\/weekly_column\/2001\/08\/03.html>.\n\nNINE: SEPTEMBER 11\n\n. For more detail, see Jack Cashill, \"What Does Leon Panetta Know About TWA 800,\" January 8, 2009, WND.com, <http:\/\/www.cashill.com\/twa800\/what_does_leon_panetta.htm>.\n\n. Phone interview with Thomas Young, November 11, 2015.\n\n. Reed Irvine, \"The 'Bombing' of TWA 800,\" Accuracy in Media, September 19, 2001, <http:\/\/www.aim.org\/aim-column\/the-bombing-of-twa-800\/>.\n\n. Transcript, CBS News Special Report, September 11, 2001, cached at <http:\/\/pastebin.ca\/raw\/1965515>.\n\n. Transcript, \"Larry King Live,\" September 11, 2001, cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/news\/kerry-9-11-01.htm>.\n\n. CNBC News Transcripts, _Hardball with Chris Matthews_ , September 24, 2001, cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/news\/kerry-transcript-9-24-01.htm>.\n\n. Walter Robinson and Glen Johnson, \"Airlines Fought Security Changes,\" _Boston Globe_ , September 20, 2001, cached at <http:\/\/www.webguild.com\/sentinel\/airlines_fought.htm>.\n\n. Letter cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/news\/mundo-9-25-01.htm>.\n\n. Phone interview with Thomas Young, November 11, 2015.\n\n. Nelson DeMille, _Night Fall_ (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2004). The incidents that DeMille relates are condensed from the book's foreword.\n\nTEN: FIT TO PRINT\n\n. N. R. Kleinfield, \"The Crash of Flight 800,\" _New York Times_ , July 18, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/18\/nyregion\/crash-flight-800-overview-twa-jetliner-leaving-new-york-for-paris-crashes.html>.\n\n. \"Explosion Aboard T.W.A. Flight 800,\" _New York Times_ , July 19, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/19\/nyregion\/explosion-aboard-twa-flight-800-remarks-by-clinton-about-the-crash-of-flight-800.html>.\n\n. President Bill Clinton, January 26, 1998, video cached at Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia, http:\/\/www.bing.com\/videos\/search?q=i+did+not+have+sexual+relations+with+that+woman%2c+miss+lewinsky.+%E2%80%9D&view=detail&mid=146486F89583EEE7CD33146486F89583EEE7CD33&FORM=VIRE7.\n\n. David Johnston, \"Explosion Aboard T.W.A. Flight 800: The Theories,\" _New York Times_ , July 19, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/19\/nyregion\/explosion-aboard-twa-flight-800-theories-multitude-ideas-but-little-evidence.html>.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"Investigators Suspect Explosive Device as Likeliest Cause for Crash of Flight 800,\" _New York Times_ , July 19, 1996, <http:\/\/partners.nytimes.com\/library\/national\/960719explosion-aboard-t.html>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. David Johnston, \"The Crash of Flight 800: The Possibilities,\" _New York Times_ , July 21, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/21\/nyregion\/crash-flight-800-possibilities-tips-leads-theories-are-flooding.html>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"No Evidence of Explosive So Far in Crash Inquiry,\" _New York Times_ , July 24, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/24\/nyregion\/no-evidence-of-explosive-so-far-in-crash-inquiry.html>.\n\n. \"The Fate of Flight 800; The President's Remarks at Kennedy to the Families of the Crash Victims,\" _New York Times_ , July 26, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/26\/nyregion\/fate-flight-800-president-s-remarks-kennedy-families-crash-victims.html>.\n\n. Matthew Wald, \"The Fate of Flight 800: The Data,\" _New York Times_ , July 26, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/26\/nyregion\/fate-flight-800-data-record-quick-destruction-briefest-sound-then-silence.html>.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"The Fate of Flight 800: The Flight Data,\" _New York Times_ , July 27, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/27\/nyregion\/fate-flight-800-flight-data-backing-bomb-theory-devices-stopped-unison.html>.\n\n. \"Mr. Clinton Moves on Air Security,\" _New York Times_ , July 26, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/26\/opinion\/mr-clinton-moves-on-air-security.html>.\n\n. Joe Sexton, \"The Fate of Flight 800: The Investigation,\" _New York Times_ , July 28, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/28\/nyregion\/fate-flight-800-investigation-while-cause-crash-sought-parallel-criminal-inquiry.html>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Taylor Branch, _The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History in the White House_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 371.\n\n. Ibid., 372.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Byron York, \"The Facts About Clinton and Terrorism,\" _National Review_ , September 11, 2006, <http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/218683\/facts-about-clinton-and-terrorism-byron-york>.\n\n. Kevin Ready and Cap Parlier, _TWA 800_ : _Accident or Incident_ (Prescott, AZ: Saint Gaudens Press, 1998).\n\n. Transcript, \"TWA Flight 800: No Survivors,\" CNN.com, June 31, 2013, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/1306\/21\/acd.02.html>.\n\n. Branch, _The Clinton Tapes_ , 371.\n\n. David Johnston and Tim Weiner, \"Seizing the Crime Issue, Clinton Blurs Party Lines,\" _New York Times_ , August 1, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/01\/us\/seizing-the-crime-issue-clinton-blurs-party-lines.html>.\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"Fuel Tank's Condition Makes Malfunction Seem Less Likely,\" _New York Times_ , August 14, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/14\/nyregion\/fuel-tank-s-condition-makes-malfunction-seem-less-likely.html>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix C.\n\n. Dan Barry, \"F.B.I. Says 2 Labs Found Traces Of Explosive on T.W.A. Jetliner,\" _New York Times_ , August 24, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/24\/nyregion\/fbi-says-2-labs-found-traces-of-explosive-on-twa-jetliner.html>.\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of TWA 800,\" _New York Times_ , August 23, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/23\/nyregion\/prime-evidence-found-that-device-exploded-in-cabin-of-flight-800.html>.\n\n. Jocelyn Noveck, \"Pierre Salinger Claims Navy Missile Shot Down TWA Flight 800,\" Associated Press, November 8, 1996, cached at <http:\/\/www.welfarestate.com\/twa800\/pierre.htm>.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 227.\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"Small Pieces of T.W.A. Jet's Wreckage Intrigue Investigators,\" _New York Times_ , August 9, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/09\/nyregion\/small-pieces-of-twa-jet-s-wreckage-intrigue-investigators.html>.\n\n. Barry, \"F.B.I. Says 2 Labs Found Traces Of Explosive on T.W.A. Jetliner.\"\n\n. Harold Trimm, _Forensics the Easy Way_ (Hauppauge, NY: Barron's Educational Series, 2005), 151.\n\n. Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson, _TWA Flight 800_ (TWA 800 Project, LLC, 2013).\n\n. David Johnston, \"At F.B.I. Lab, A Scientific Mission and a Challenge of Its Methods, _New York Times_ , August 3, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/03\/nyregion\/at-fbi-lab-a-scientific-mission-and-a-challenge-of-its-methods.html>.\n\n. Dick Morris, _Behind the Oval Office: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties_ (New York: Random House, 1997), 33.\n\n. Francis X. Clines, \"Clinton Signs Bill Cutting Welfare; States in New Role,\" _New York Times_ , August 23, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/23\/us\/clinton-signs-bill-cutting-welfare-states-in-new-role.html>.\n\n. Barry, \"F.B.I. Says 2 Labs Found Traces Of Explosive on T.W.A. Jetliner.\"\n\n. Christine Negroni, _Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 185.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nELEVEN: BLACK HOLE\n\n. Bill Clinton, _My Life_ (New York: Random House, 2004), 334.\n\n. Richard Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 123\u201324.\n\n. Hillary Clinton, _Living History_ (New York: Scribner, 2003), 363.\n\n. Louis Freeh, _My FBI: Bringing Down The Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror_ (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), 291.\n\n. Dick Morris, _Off with Their Heads: Traitors, Crooks, and Obstructionists in American Politics, Media, and Business_ (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 106.\n\n. Good Morning America, June 19, 2013, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2wPZGZXmIEk>.\n\n. Transcript, \"TWA Flight 800: No Survivors,\" CNN.com, June 31, 2013, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/1306\/21\/acd.02.html>.\n\n. Special Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate, January 4, 1995 to October 3, 1996, published January 22, 1997, <http:\/\/www.intelligence.senate.gov\/publications\/committee-activities-special-report-select-committee-intelligence-january-4-1995>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 51\u201375.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 1\u201310.\n\n. Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ , 121.\n\n. Ibid., 122.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ , 122.\n\n. Ibid., 124.\n\n. Ibid., 125.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 282.\n\n. Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ , 126.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Clarke's Take on Terror,\" _60 Minutes_ , CBS, March 19, 2004, <http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/clarkes-take-on-terror\/>.\n\nTWELVE: DOG DAYS\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"More Traces of Explosive in Flight 800,\" _New York Times_ , August 31, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/31\/nyregion\/more-traces-of-explosive-in-flight-800.html>.\n\n. \"TWA Flight 800 Crash Investigation,\" C-SPAN, May 10, 1999, <http:\/\/www.c-span.org\/video\/?123165-1\/twa-flight-800-crash-investigation>.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 262.\n\n. As interviewed for _Silenced_.\n\n. Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson, _TWA Flight 800_ (TWA 800 Project, LLC, 2013).\n\n. \"TWA Flight 800 Crash Investigation,\" C-SPAN, May 10, 1999.\n\n. Stalcup and Borjesson, _TWA Flight 800_.\n\n. As interviewed for _Silenced_.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Phone interview with Gene York, June 8, 2015.\n\n. Matthew Wald, \"New Focus on Malfunctions In Inquiry on T.W.A. Crash,\" _New York Times_ , September 19, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/09\/19\/nyregion\/new-focus-on-malfunctions-in-inquiry-on-twa-crash.html>.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 229.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"Bomb Security Test On Jet May Explain Trace of Explosives,\" _New York Times_ , September 21, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/09\/21\/nyregion\/bomb-security-test-on-jet-may-explain-trace-of-explosives.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"Setback in T.W.A. Crash Inquiry Adds Urgency to the Search for Evidence of a Bomb,\" _New York Times_ , September 22, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/09\/22\/nyregion\/setback-in-twa-crash-inquiry-addsurgency-to-the-search-for-evidence-of-a-bomb.html?pagewanted=all>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 231.\n\n. Letter to Rep. James Traficant from Jim Kallstrom in response to Traficant's questions, September 5, 1997, <http:\/\/www.apfn.org\/thewinds\/flight800.pdf>.\n\n. The gate assignment from June 10, 1996 is listed as Appendix VII in Peter Lance: _Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI\u2014and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 567.\n\n. This was reported by Dave Hendrix of the Riverside _Press-Enterprise_ and published as a chapter, \"St. Louis Canine Scheme,\" in James Sanders' book, _Altered Evidence_ (Philadelphia, PA: Offset Paperbacks, 1999). Tom Shoemaker and Kay Pennington also did original research on the story as reported in the December 1988 and January 1999 _TWA Case Files Newsletter_.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Transcript, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Aviation, July 10, 1997, <http:\/\/commdocs.house.gov\/committees\/Trans\/hpw105-33.000\/hpw105-33_0f.htm>.\n\n. Christine Negroni, _Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 185.\n\n. Ibid., 186.\n\n. Transcript, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Aviation.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 231\u201332.\n\n. Phone interview with Herman Burnett, August 2001.\n\n. Todd Purdum, \"Clinton Signs a Wide-Ranging Measure on Airport Security,\" _New York Times_ , October 10, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/10\/10\/us\/clinton-signs-a-wide-ranging-measure-on-airport-security.html>.\n\nTHIRTEEN: LOST AT SEA\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Robert Patterson, _Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security_ (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 139.\n\n. FBI NO\/FORN memo 1995, Appendix XI, in Peter Lance: _Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI\u2014and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 576.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 6.\n\n. John Barry and Roger Charles, \"Sea of Lies,\" _Newsweek_ , July 12, 1992, <http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/sea-lies-200118>.\n\n. Michael Gordon, \"Cover-Up Denied in Downing Of Iranian Passenger Jet in '88,\" _New York Times_ , July 22, 1992, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1992\/07\/22\/world\/cover-up-denied-in-downing-of-iranian-passenger-jet-in-88.html>.\n\n. David Evans, \"Crowe Endorsement Of Clinton Raises More Than Eyebrows,\" _Chicago Tribune_ , September 25, 1992, <http:\/\/articles.chicagotribune.com\/1992-09-25\/news\/9203270346_1_crowe-iranianterritorial-waters-clinton-campaign>.\n\n. William Crowe, \"Clinton's Vietnam Era Compatriots at Oxford; Divisive and Peripheral,\" _New York Times_ , October 13, 1992, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1992\/10\/13\/opinion\/l-clinton-s-vietnam-era-compatriots-at-oxford-divisive-and-peripheral-350092.html>.\n\n. Andrew Revkin, \"Conspiracy Theories Rife On Demise of Flight 800,\" _New York Times_ , September 17, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/09\/17\/nyregion\/conspiracy-theories-rife-on-demise-of-flight-800.html>.\n\n. Jocelyn Noveck, \"Pierre Salinger's TWA Flight 800 Missile News Conference,\" Associated Press, November 8, 1996, <http:\/\/www.welfarestate.com\/twa800\/pierre.htm>.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 89.\n\n. Ibid., 91.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix M.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 153.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"Despite Many Denials, T.W.A. Missile Rumor Is Back,\" _New York Times_ , November 9, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/11\/09\/nyregion\/despite-many-denials-twa-missile-rumor-is-back.html>.\n\n. NTSB docket materials, Exhibit 4A, appendix M.\n\n. Kristina Borjesson, _Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press_ (New York: Prometheus Books, 2004), 291.\n\n. E-mail exchange and follow-up interview, November 15, 2010.\n\n. Noveck, \"Pierre Salinger's TWA Flight 800 Missile News Conference.\"\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 150\u201352.\n\n. Purdy, \"Despite Many Denials, T.W.A. Missile Rumor Is Back.\"\n\n. Letter from Alice Rowe and Lisa Perry to Cmdr. Donaldson, October 17, 1998, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/pages\/perry.htm>.\n\n. FBI New York Office Press Release, \"FBI: No criminal evidence behind TWA 800 crash,\" November 18, 1997, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/US\/9711\/18\/twa.fbi.presser\/>.\n\n. E-mail communications with Allen Strasser, August 2008, for more detail see Jack Cashill, \"Pilot Sheds New Light on TWA 800 Scandal,\" August 7, 2008, WND.com, <http:\/\/www.cashill.com\/twa800\/pilot_sheds.htm>.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 186.\n\n. E-mail communications, June 2013, for more detail see Jack Cashill, \"Did Navy Sub Missile Hit TWA 800?\" WND.com, June 21, 2013, <http:\/\/www.wnd.com\/2013\/06\/did-navy-sub-missile-hit-twa-800\/>.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119, near East Moriches, New York_ , _July 17, 1996_ (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 88\u201389, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1LqLGsX>.\n\n. Reed Irvine, \"Navy Vessels on Classified Maneuvers,\" AIM Report, September 1999, <http:\/\/www.aim.org\/publications\/aim_report\/1999\/09a.htm>.\n\n. Letter from Lewis Schiliro to Rep. James Traficant, July 27, 1997, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/letters\/fbi.htm>.\n\n. \"Erroneous Airspeed Indications Cited in Boeing 757 Control Loss,\" _Accident Prevention_ , October 1999, <http:\/\/flightsafety.org\/ap\/ap_oct99.pdf>.\n\n. Christine Negroni, _Deadly Departure: Why the Experts Failed to Prevent the TWA Flight 800 Disaster and How It Could Happen Again_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 93.\n\n. Jerry Markon et al., \"Divers Wait as Devices Scan Ocean,\" _Newsday_ , July 22, 1996, cached at <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/PING\/ping.html>.\n\n. Negroni, _Deadly Departure_ , 117.\n\n. Ibid., 170.\n\n. \"The Fate of Flight 800: The President's Remarks at Kennedy to the Families of the Crash Victims,\" _New York Times_ , July 26, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/26\/nyregion\/fate-flight-800-president-s-remarks-kennedy-families-crash-victims.html>.\n\n. Group Chairman's Factual Report of Investigation Cockpit Voice Recorder, October 20, 1997, Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/www.twa800.com\/ntsb\/8-15-00\/docket\/Ex_12A.pdf>.\n\n. CVR transcript TWA Flight 800, Aviation Safety Network, <http:\/\/aviation-safety.net\/investigation\/cvr\/transcripts\/cvr_tw800.php>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. \"Executive Order 13039\u2014Exclusion of the Naval Special Warfare Development Group From the Federal Labor-Management Relations Program,\" March 11, 1997, The American Presidency Project, <http:\/\/www.presidency.ucsb.edu\/ws\/?pid=53855>.\n\n. Matthew Purdy, \"Missile Theory Rebutted in T.W.A. Flight 800 Crash,\" _New York Times_ , March 12, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/03\/12\/nyregion\/missile-theory-rebutted-in-twa-flight-800-crash.html>.\n\n. Transcript, _Witnessed_.\n\n. As interviewed for _Silenced_.\n\nFOURTEEN: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON\n\n. Bob Woodward, \"How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat,'\" _Washington Post_ , June 20, 2005, <https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/politics\/how-mark-felt-became-deep-throat\/2012\/06\/04\/gJQAlpARIV_story.html>.\n\n. Robert Davey, \"High-Ranking Military Officers, Independent Investigators, Pilots, and Eyewitnesses Believe a Missile Destroyed TWA Flight 800,\" _Village Voice_ , July 21, 1998, <http:\/\/www.villagevoice.com\/news\/high-ranking-military-officers-independent-investigators-pilots-and-eyewitnesses-believe-a-missle-destroyed-twa-flight-800-6424009>.\n\n. Mark Hosenball, \"Re-Creating Flight 800's Final Seconds,\" _Newsweek_ , November 30, 1997, <http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/re-creating-flight-800s-final-seconds-170906>.\n\n. Videotaped interview with Don Nibert, August 30, 2001.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 51\u201375.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Brian Knowlton, \"Boeing to Buy McDonnell Douglas,\" _New York Times_ , December 16, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/12\/16\/news\/16iht-merge.t_0.html>.\n\n. Ralph Nader, Letter on Boeing McDonnell Douglas Merger, December 23, 1996, <http:\/\/www.cptech.org\/at\/boeing\/dec231996.html>.\n\n. John Broder, \"Office Depot And Staples Merger Halted,\" _New York Times_ , July 1, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/07\/01\/business\/office-depot-and-staples-merger-halted.html>.\n\n. Boeing press release, November 18, 1997, now cached at <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/CIAVIDEO\/boeing.html>.\n\nFIFTEEN: THE FIXERS\n\n. Mark Hosenball, \"Desperately Seeking the Next Willie Horton,\" _Newsweek_ , June 2, 1996, <http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/desperately-seeking-next-willie-horton-178768>.\n\n. Jerry Gray, \"Politics: The Democrats; Clinton Tells U.S. Athletes, 'I Want You to Mop Up',\" _New York Times_ , July 20, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/07\/20\/us\/politics-the-democrat-clinton-tells-us-athletes-i-want-you-to-mop-up.html>.\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 226.\n\n. David Johnston, \"No. 2 Official at Justice Dept. Leaving After 3 Years There,\" _New York Times_ , January 15, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/01\/15\/us\/no-2-official-at-justice-dept-leaving-after-3-years-there.html>.\n\n. Michelle Cottle, \"Nice work if you can get it: how Fannie Mae became Washington's biggest power player,\" _Washington Monthly_ , June 1, 1998, <http:\/\/www.thefreelibrary.com\/Nice+work+if+you+can+get+it:+how+Fannie+Mae+became+Washington's...-a020789484>.\n\n. Tim Weiner, \"Nominations Have Made C.I.A. Chief Odd Man Out,\" _New York Times_ , December 6, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/12\/06\/us\/nominations-have-made-cia-chief-odd-man-out.html>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Ibid., records 51\u201375.\n\n. Tim Weiner, \"For 'the Ultimate Staff Guy,' a Time to Reap the Rewards of Being Loyal,\" _New York Times_ , March 20, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/03\/20\/us\/for-the-ultimate-staff-guy-a-time-to-reap-the-rewards-of-being-loyal.html>.\n\n. Selwyn Raab, \"F.B.I. Agent Won't Testify At Mafia Figure's Hearing,\" _New York Times_ , May 18, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/05\/18\/nyregion\/fbi-agent-won-t-testify-at-mafia-figure-s-hearing.html>.\n\n. Letter from Kallstrom's office to Louis Freeh, April 10, 1996, Appendix V in Peter Lance, _Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI\u2014and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him_ (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 553.\n\n. Dennis Fitzgerald, _Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy, and Procedure_ (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2007), 230.\n\n. Michael Brick, \"Agent Accused in Mob Murders Seeks Immunity,\" _New York Daily News_ , April 11, 2006, <http:\/\/z14.invisionfree.com\/GangstersInc\/ar\/t754.htm>.\n\n. \"Goelz Named to Top Administrative Post at NTSB,\" NTSB Press Release, December 4, 1997, <http:\/\/www.ntsb.gov\/news\/press-releases\/Pages\/Goelz_Named_to_Top_Administrative_Post_at_NTSB;_Finch_to_Head_Government_Public_and_Family_Affairs_Office.aspx>.\n\n. Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton, \"Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project,\" _New York Times_ , March 6, 1997, <https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/books\/97\/12\/14\/home\/030697hubbell.html>.\n\n. Jeff Gerth and Stephen Labaton, \"Payment to an Ex-Clinton Aide Is Linked to Big Chinese Project,\" _New York Times_ , March 6, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/03\/06\/us\/payment-to-an-ex-clinton-aide-is-linked-to-big-chinese-project.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Fannie Mae Head to Quit,\" _New York Times_ , January 11, 2003, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2003\/01\/11\/business\/fannie-mae-head-to-quit.html>.\n\n. Chris Neefus, \"Former Clinton Official Paid $26 Million by Fannie Mae Before Taxpayer Bailout Now on Obama Shortlist to Run FBI,\" cnsnews.com, <http:\/\/www.cnsnews.com\/news\/article\/former-clinton-official-paid-26-million-fannie-mae-taxpayer-bailout-now-obama-shortlist>.\n\n. David Rosenbaum, \"For Members of Panel, Past Work Becomes an Issue in the Present,\" _New York Times_ , April 14, 2004, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/04\/14\/us\/threats-responses-commissioners-for-members-panel-past-work-becomes-issue.html>.\n\n. \"Sandy Berger's Theft of Classified Documents: Unanswered Questions,\" Staff Report, U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, <https:\/\/fas.org\/irp\/congress\/2007_rpt\/berger.pdf>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Richard Clarke, _Against All Enemies_ (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 106.\n\n. \"Transcript: Wednesday's 9\/11 Commission Hearings,\" March 24, 2004, _Washington Post_ , <http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/articles\/A20349-2004Mar24.html>.\n\n. \"Text of Condoleezza Rice statement,\" _USA Today_ , April 8, 2004, <http:\/\/usatoday30.usatoday.com\/news\/washington\/2004-04-08-rice-transcript_x.htm>.\n\n. Rosenbaum, \"For Members of Panel, Past Work Becomes an Issue in the Present.\"\n\n. Memo from Jamie Gorelick to Louis Freeh and others, April 14, 2005, <http:\/\/www.justice.gov\/sites\/default\/files\/ag\/legacy\/2004\/04\/14\/1995_gorelick_memo.pdf>.\n\n. \"Gorelick's Wall,\" _Wall Street Journal_ , April 15, 2004, <http:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/SB108198447949083135>.\n\n. Eric Lichtblau, \"A Kerry Adviser Leaves the Race Over Documents,\" _New York Times_ , July 21, 2014, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/07\/21\/us\/a-kerry-adviser-leaves-the-race-over-documents.html>.\n\n. Eric Lichtblau, \"Clinton Aide Pleads Guilty to Taking Secret Papers,\" _New York Times_ , April 2, 2005, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2005\/04\/02\/politics\/clinton-aide-pleads-guilty-to-taking-secret-papers.html?_r=0>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Carol Loennig, \"Berger is Fined for Smuggling Classified Papers,\" _Washington Post_ , September 9, 2005, <http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2005\/09\/08\/AR2005090801711.html>.\n\n. \"Campaign Finance in American Politics,\" <http:\/\/www.campaignmoney.com\/>.\n\n. William Bender, \"Weldon blasts Sestak's ties with fired CIA senior analyst,\" _Delco Times_ , April 23, 2006, <http:\/\/alt.politics.bush.narkive.com\/RiRbW1Pp\/weldon-blasts-sestak-s-ties-with-fired-cia-senior-analyst>.\n\n. Weldon Congressional Campaign press release, \"Sestak's Secretary works for Sandy Berger,\" May 10, 2006, <http:\/\/www.abledangerblog.com\/2006\/05\/sestaks-press-secretary-works-for.html>.\n\n. Transcript, William Jefferson Clinton on FOX News Sunday, September 24, 2006, <http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/story\/2006\/09\/26\/transcript-william-jefferson-clinton-on-fox-news-sunday.html>.\n\n. Greg Gordon, \"Congressman in tight race for re-election comes under federal investigation,\" McClatchy Newspapers, October 13, 2006, <http:\/\/www.mcclatchydc.com\/incoming\/article24458383.html>.\n\n. Kate Zernike, \"In Pennsylvania, Questions About War Erode a Traditional Republican Advantage,\" _New York Times_ , October 15, 2006, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2006\/10\/15\/us\/politics\/15weldon.html?_r=0>.\n\n. Brian Naylor, \"FBI Investigates Pennsylvania Republican Weldon,\" NPR, October 20, 2006, <http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=6352043>.\n\n. \"It's time feds bring Weldon matter to close,\" _Delco Times_ , August 4, 2009, <http:\/\/www.delcotimes.com\/general-news\/20090804\/editorial-its-time-feds-bring-weldon-matter-to-close>.\n\n. Christopher Matthews, \"Sklamberg Leaves D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office for FDA,\" Main Justice, May 20, 2010, <http:\/\/www.mainjustice.com\/2010\/05\/20\/sklamberg-leaves-d-c-u-s-attorneys-office-for-the-fda\/>.\n\n. Press Release, \"Donaldson Exposes Traficant's Duplicity on TWA Flight 800,\" May 24, 1999, cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/news\/prtraficant.htm>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nSIXTEEN: ENGINE TROUBLE\n\n. Megyn Kelly Reports, Fox News, June 19, 2013, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Qg0vN1j_Q0A>.\n\n. USS _Carr_ , <http:\/\/navysite.de\/ffg\/FFG52.HTM#co>.\n\n. Conversation captured in an e-mail exchange, December 9, 2015.\n\n. Michael Rivero, \"Was TWA 800 Shot Down By a Military Missile?\" <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/twa.php#axzz3yZczrqdK>\n\n. Patricia Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ : _The FBI Investigation of TWA Flight 800_ (New York: Random House, 1999), 329\u201331.\n\n. \"TWA Flight 800: A Mother's Letter,\" June 19, 2003, WND.com, <http:\/\/www.wnd.com\/2003\/06\/19368\/>.\n\n. Phone interview with Lisa Michelson, June 28, 2015.\n\n. Milton, _In the Blink of an Eye_ , 331.\n\n. Transcript, \"TWA Flight 800: No Survivors,\" CNN.com, June 31, 2013, <http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/1306\/21\/acd.02.html>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 76\u2013101.\n\n. _National Law Journal_ , September 18, 2006, cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, <http:\/\/raylahr.entryhost.com\/9-18-06-National-Law-Journal.pdf>.\n\n. See \"Twa Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb,\" <http:\/\/raylahr.entryhost.com>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, \"TWA Flight 800 Crash Investigation,\" C-SPAN, May 10, 1999, <http:\/\/www.c-span.org\/video\/?123165-1\/twa-flight-800-crash-investigation>.\n\n. _Hannity's America_ , Fox News, July 29, 1997.\n\n. NTSB Witness Group Factual Report, October 16, 1997, cached at Associated Retired Aviation Professionals: The Flight 800 Investigation, <http:\/\/twa800.com\/4a\/exhibit4a.html>.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800 Boeing 747-131, N93119, near East Moriches, New York, July 17, 1996_ (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 74.\n\n. CBS News 2, August 5, 1996.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix H.\n\n. Matthew Wald, \"Nothing 'Extraordinary' Is Found in 747's Engines,\" _New York Times_ , August 17, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/17\/nyregion\/nothing-extraordinary-is-found-in-747-s-engines.html>.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Affidavit of Henry Hughes, cached at The TWA 800 Project, <https:\/\/twa800project.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/affidavit-of-hank-hughes.pdf>.\n\n. \"Analysis and Recommendations Regarding T.W.A. Flight 800,\" submitted by R. T. Miller, <https:\/\/twa800.sites.usa.gov\/files\/twa800\/DCA96MA070\/50470.pdf>.\n\n. Affidavit of Henry Hughes.\n\n. As interviewed in Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson, _TWA Flight 800_ (TWA 800 Project, LLC, 2013).\n\n. John Barry and Roger Charles, \"Sea of Lies,\" _Newsweek_ , July 12, 1992, <http:\/\/www.newsweek.com\/sea-lies-200118>.\n\nSEVENTEEN: BENGHAZI MOMENT\n\n. Matthew Wald, \"Boeing Says Vapor Threat Requires a Tank Redesign,\" _New York Times_ , December 10, 1997, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1997\/12\/10\/nyregion\/boeing-says-vapor-threat-requires-a-tank-redesign.html>.\n\n. Neil Genzlinger, \"Leaving No Survivors but Many Questions,\" _New York Times_ , July 16, 2013, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/07\/17\/arts\/television\/twa-flight-800-examines-a-1996-tragedy.html?_r=0>.\n\n. As interviewed in Tom Stalcup and Kristina Borjesson, _TWA Flight 800_ (TWA 800 Project, LLC, 2013).\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. \"Risk Management Expert Calls for New Investigation into Cause of TWA Flight 800 Crash,\" PRweb, July 8, 2013, <http:\/\/www.prweb.com\/releases\/2013\/7\/prweb10903410.htm>.\n\n. \"The Situation Room,\" CNN, June 20, 2013, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Pd95PkWbkn8>.\n\n. \"Former FBI investigator defends probe into TWA 800 crash,\" Fox News, June 20, 2013, <http:\/\/video.foxnews.com\/v\/2494702166001\/former-fbi-investigator-defends-probe-into-twa-800-crash\/?#sp=show-clips>.\n\n. Transcript, CNN Newsroom, June 22, 2013, <http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/TRANSCRIPTS\/1306\/22\/cnr.02.html>.\n\n. Fred Lucas, \"WH: Obama Called Hillary on Night of Benghazi Attack\u2014More Than Six Hours After It Started,\" cnsnews.com, February 20, 2013, <http:\/\/cnsnews.com\/news\/article\/wh-obama-called-hillary-night-benghazi-attack-more-six-hours-after-it-started>.\n\n. Donovan Slack, \"Hillary Clinton condemns Benghazi attack,\" _Politico_ , September 12, 2012, <http:\/\/www.politico.com\/blogs\/politico44\/2012\/09\/hillary-clinton-condemns-benghazi-attack-135265>.\n\n. Brendan Bordelon, \"Benghazi Committee Bombshell: Clinton Knew 'Attack Had Nothing to Do with the Film,'\" _National Review_ , October 22, 2015, <http:\/\/www.nationalreview.com\/article\/425933\/benghazi-committee-emails-hillary-clinton-lied-video-excuse>.\n\n. \"Second Presidential Debate: Libya,\" CBS News, October 16, 2012, <http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/videos\/second-presidential-debate-libya\/>.\n\n. \"President Obama Speaks on the Attack on Benghazi,\" whitehouse.gov, September 12, 2102, <https:\/\/www.whitehouse.gov\/photos-and-video\/video\/2012\/09\/12\/president-obama-speaks-attack-benghazi>.\n\n. Jack Cashill, \"CNN Edits Out Comparison of TWA 800 and Benghazi,\" _American Thinker_ , June 26, 2013, <http:\/\/www.americanthinker.com\/articles\/2013\/06\/cnn_edits_out_comparison_of_twa_800_and_benghazi.html>.\n\n. Jack Cashill, \"What CNN Cut Out of TWA 800 Interview,\" _American Thinker_ , June 27, 2013, <http:\/\/www.cashill.com\/twa800\/what_cnn_cut_out.htm>.\n\n. Andrew Kramer and Dan Bilefsky, \"Malaysia Airlines Crash Investigators May Have Found Missile Clues in Ukraine,\" _New York Times_ , August 11, 2015, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/08\/12\/world\/europe\/malaysia-airlines-crash-mh17-ukraine-missile.html?_r=0>.\n\n. \"Malaysia Flight Crashes With 295 On Board,\" CNN Breaking News, July 17, 2014, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UFLb49pPSe4>.\n\n. Transcript, _Witnessed_.\n\n. \"Malaysia Flight Crashes With 295 On Board,\" CNN Breaking News, July 17, 2014, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BUqbteKLkzg>.\n\nEIGHTEEN: PROCRUSTES\n\n. Susan Cornwell, \"Safety investigators stand by cause of TWA Flight 800 Crash,\" Reuters, July 2, 2013, <http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/2013\/07\/03\/us-usa-flight-probe-idUSBRE96201120130703>.\n\n. Letter to David Tochen, June 26, 2014, The TWA 800 Project, <https:\/\/twa800project.files.wordpress.com\/2014\/06\/stalcup-hughes-to-tochen-final.pdf>. This letter documents the Project's history of petitioning the NTSB.\n\n. \"NTSB Stands By Investigation of 1996 Crash of TWA Flight 800,\" NTSB, <http:\/\/twa800.sites.usa.gov\/>.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 800_ , xvi.\n\n. Phone interview with Vernon Grose, October 23, 2015.\n\n. \"MH17 Crash,\" Dutch Safety Board, October 2015, <http:\/\/cdn.onderzoeksraad.nl\/documents\/report-mh17-crash-en.pdf>.\n\n. \"NTSB Refuses to Reopen TWA Flight 800 Crash Probe,\" NBC News, July 2, 2014, <http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/news\/us-news\/ntsb-refuses-reopen-twa-flight-800-crash-probe-n147051>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 1\u201310.\n\n. Ibid. All other CIA interpretations of the FBI 302s can be found at this location.\n\n. Transcript, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Aviation, July 10, 1997.\n\n. Document cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com\/ \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" Court Ordered releases, CIA: May 13, 2008.\n\n. Brumley interview as seen in Tom Stalcup's Rebuttal of CIA Video About TWA Flight 800, <https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=IyluFVxqBlo>.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Document cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com\/\"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" Court Ordered releases, CIA: May 13, 2008, 8\u201313.\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 76\u2013101.\n\n. FBI New York Office Press Release, November 18, 1997, <http:\/\/www.lchr.org\/a\/11\/j\/fbitwa.htm>.\n\n. Transcript, Hearing before the Subcommittee on Aviation, July 10, 1997.\n\n. Ibid.\n\nNINETEEN: THE SMOKING GUN\n\n. CIA documents cached at TWA Flight 800: The Impossible Zoom Climb, raylahr.entryhost.com, \"CIA records released to Tom Stalcup,\" records 26\u201350.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Ibid.\n\n. Dan Barry, \"Is That a Missile? Snapshot on Night of Air Crash Turns Hot,\" _New York Times_ , August 26, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/26\/nyregion\/is-that-a-missile-snapshot-on-night-of-air-crash-turns-hot.html>.\n\n. TWA Flight 800, NTSB docket materials, DCA-96-MA070, August 2000, Exhibit 4A, appendix C.\n\n. NTSB Witness Group Factual Report, October 16, 1997.\n\n. Michael Pitcher, \"Fax Gives Glimpse of Crash Investigation,\" _Southampton Press_ , July 24, 1997, <http:\/\/archive.southamptonpress.com\/shpress\/1997-3\/97072408.htm>.\n\n. Reed Irvine, \"NTSB Destroys Incriminating Evidence,\" Accuracy In Media, December 14, 2001, <http:\/\/www.aim.org\/publications\/weekly_column\/2001\/12\/14.html>.\n\n. \"The Cooperative Engagement Capability,\" _John Hopkins APL Technical Digest_ , November 1995. The illustration of the P-3 is on page 3of the _Digest_. <http:\/\/www.jhuapl.edu\/techdigest\/td\/td1604\/APLteam.pdf>.\n\n. David Hendrix, \"Witnesses Boost Missile Theory,\" _Press-Enterprise_ , October 20, 1997, cached at <http:\/\/whatreallyhappened.com\/RANCHO\/CRASH\/TWA\/AUDIO.html>.\n\n. International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, \"Analysis and Recommendations Regarding T.W.A. Flight 800,\" <https:\/\/twa800.sites.usa.gov\/files\/twa800\/DCA96MA070\/50470.pdf>. See also twa800.com\/iamaw\/iamaw_submission.pdf.\n\n. Don Van Natta, \"Fuel Tank's Condition Makes Malfunction Seem Less Likely,\" _New York Times_ , August 14, 1996, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1996\/08\/14\/nyregion\/fuel-tank-s-condition-makes-malfunction-seem-less-likely.html>.\n\n. NTSB Aircraft Accident Report, _In-flight breakup over the Atlantic Ocean, Trans World Airlines Flight 8Boeing 747-131, N93119, near East Moriches, New York, July 17, 1996_ (Washington, DC: Diane Publishing, 2000), 273, <http:\/\/bit.ly\/1LqLGsX>.\n\n. Thomas Jefferson to Archibald Stuart, 1799, <http:\/\/famguardian.org\/Subjects\/Politics\/thomasjefferson\/jeff1600.htm>.\n\n. Neil Genzlinger, \"Leaving No Survivors but Many Questions,\" _New York Times_ , July 16, 2013, <http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2013\/07\/17\/arts\/television\/twa-flight-800-examines-a-1996-tragedy.html?_r=0>.\nINDEX\n\nA\n\nABC, , , ,\n\nABC Entertainment,\n\nABC News, 77\u201378, ,\n\nAble Danger,\n\nAccuracy in Media (AIM), , , , , , 146\u201347,\n\n_Achille Lauro_ ,\n\nAegis system. _See_ U.S. Navy: Aegis system\n\n_Against All Enemies_ (Clarke), ,\n\nAir Force One, ,\n\nAirline Pilots Association (ALPA), , , , , ,\n\nAir National Guard, , , , ,\n\nair traffic controllers, , , ,\n\nAir Transport Association (ATA), 20\u201321\n\n_All Too Human_ (Stephanopolous),\n\n\"Almost War, 1996, The,\" ,\n\nAmerican Airlines,\n\nAmerican Thinker,\n\n\"Analyst 1,\" 33\u201337, ,\n\nAnderson, Claudia,\n\nAngelides, Paul, 26\u201327, , , ,\n\nAngel of Montoursville, the,\n\nApplied Research labs at University of Texas,\n\nAshcroft, John, ,\n\nAspin, Les,\n\nAssociated Press,\n\nAssociated Retired Aviation Professionals,\n\nAtlanta, Olympic games at, , , , , , ,\n\n_At the Center of the Storm_ (Tenet),\n\naviation terror, , ,\n\nB\n\nBabarovic, Tina,\n\nBacon, Ken,\n\nBakounis, Vassilis, 189\u201391\n\nBarry, Dan, 101\u20132\n\nBarry, Jim, 103\u20134\n\nBarry, John,\n\nBaur, Christian, 68\u201369,\n\nBayshore, Long Island,\n\nBellport Yacht Club,\n\nBenghazi terrorist attacks, , 195\u201397\n\nBerger, Sandy, , 194\u201395\n\nwith the Clintons on night of TWA 800 incident, 5\u20137\n\ntheft and destruction of documents from National Archives, 160\u201370\n\nBirgenair Flight 301,\n\nBlack, George,\n\nblack boxes. _See_ TWA 800\n\nBlue River Blues,\n\nBoeing, , , , , , , 149\u201350,\n\npurchase of McDonnell Douglas,\n\nbomb scenario, , , , ,\n\nBongardt, Steven,\n\n_Book of Mormon, The_ ,\n\nBorjesson, Kristina, , , 188\u201390, ,\n\n_Boston Globe_ ,\n\nBrachfeld, Paul, , 165\u201366\n\nBranch, Taylor, 97\u201399,\n\nBreistroff, Michel, 176\u201378\n\nBreuer, Lanny,\n\nBroadcast News Networks (BNN), , ,\n\nBrown, Larry,\n\nBrumley, Dwight (a.k.a. Witness 32), 26\u201327, , 57\u201358, , , ,\n\nBrown, Ron, ,\n\nBrush Creek,\n\nBrzezinski, Zbigniew,\n\nBulger, Whitey,\n\nBureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), , , ,\n\nBurnett, Herman, 120\u201324\n\nBush, George H. W., 130\u201331\n\nBush, George W., , , , , , ,\n\nBush Department of Justice,\n\nButler, Lee, 2\u20133\n\nButterfield, Alex,\n\nC\n\nCalverton (investigation site), , , , , 114\u201316, , , ,\n\nCannuscio, Vincent,\n\nCaproni, Valerie, , 154\u201355\n\nCarlo (dog), 121\u201324\n\nCarney, Jay,\n\ncascading flame scenario, , ,\n\nCashill, Jack\n\ncontact with Bob Woodward,\n\ne-mail from \"Sailor\"\n\ninterview with Kosik, 192\u201393,\n\ninvited and then uninvited from _The Point_ , 78\u201380\n\nvisit to the Sanderses' home,\n\nCaso, Russ, 169\u201370\n\nCBS, , ,\n\nCBS News, , 183\u201384\n\nChambers, Whittaker, ,\n\nCharles, Roger,\n\nChina Lake, CA,\n\nCIA (Central Intelligence Agency), , , , , 27\u201328, 31\u201340, , , 55\u201359, 61\u201362, 64\u201365, , , 72\u201373, , , 96\u201397, 99\u2013100, 107\u20139, , , , , 147\u201350, 154\u201356, , 164\u201365, , 177\u201382, , 190\u201392, , 200\u20138, 213\u201317,\n\nanalysts adjusting witness testimonies to fit theories, 201\u20138\n\nanimation of the TWA 800 crash, , 147\u201351, , 200\u20131\n\nintervention in investigation,\n\nrole in TWA 800 cover-up, 62\u201374\n\nzoom climb scenario, 27\u201329, , 56\u201357, , 69\u201370, , ,\n\nClark, John, ,\n\nClarke, John, , , 162\u201363, ,\n\nClarke, Richard, , , , 161\u201362\n\naccount of visiting investigation site, 109\u201311\n\nClary, Jack,\n\nClinton, Bill\n\nattempt to sell peace and prosperity message, 103\u20134\n\nand avoiding a \"Greg Norman\" crisis, 6\u20137, ,\n\nFox News interview, 169\u201371\n\nreelection of, 18\u201319\n\nresponse to TWA 800 crash, 5\u20137, , ,\n\nand welfare bill, ,\n\nClinton, Hillary\n\nand the Department of Justice,\n\nresponse to Benghazi attacks, , 194\u201397\n\n_Clinton Tapes, The_ (Branch),\n\nCNBC,\n\nCNN, , , , 20\u201321, 27\u201328, , , 78\u201382, , , , , , , , , 179\u201380, , 190\u201393, 195\u201398\n\ncockpit voice recorder (CVR), , , , ,\n\nCondit, Gary, ,\n\nConnolly, John,\n\nconspiracy theorists, conspiracists, , 11\u201312, , , , , 116\u201317, , , ,\n\nCooper, Anderson, 197\u201398\n\nCooperative Engagement Capability missile test (CEC), ,\n\nCoordinating Security Group (CSG),\n\n_Countdown to Terror_ (Weldon),\n\nCray Supercomputers,\n\nCreech, Kelly,\n\nCrowe, William, 130\u201331,\n\nCrowley, Candy, 195\u201396\n\nCuban Missile crisis,\n\nCyprus,\n\nD\n\n_Daily Times_ ,\n\n_Deadly Departure_ (Negroni), 13\u201314, ,\n\nDealey Plaza,\n\nDean, Howard,\n\nDeCaro, Ann (a.k.a. Witness 144),\n\nDefense Department, , , , ,\n\nDefense Intelligence Agency (DIA), , , 180\u201381, ,\n\nDelgado, Joseph (a.k.a. Witness 649), , 53\u201356, , 66\u201367, 71\u201372, , , , , ,\n\nuse of telephone pole as reference point,\n\nDeMille, Nelson, 90\u201391,\n\nDemocratic National Committee (DNC),\n\nDemocratic National Headquarters,\n\nDemocratic Party,\n\nDepartment of Defense. _See_ Defense Department\n\nDepartment of Justice (DOJ), , 10\u201311, 62\u201363, , 102\u20133, , 153\u201355, , , , . _See also_ Justice Department\n\nDepartment of State. _See_ State Department.\n\nDeputy Director of Intelligence,\n\n_Dereliction of Duty_ (Patterson),\n\nDeutch, John,\n\nDeVecchio, R. Lindley, 157\u201358\n\nDickinson, Al, ,\n\nDion, John, ,\n\nDole, Bob, ,\n\nDominican Republic,\n\nDonaldson, William \"Bill,\" , , , , ,\n\nDoran, Mary,\n\n_Downing of TWA Flight 800, The_ (Sanders), ,\n\nDrudge, Matt,\n\nDutch Safety Board,\n\nE\n\nEast Moriches,\n\nEast Quoque,\n\nEastwind Airlines, 37\u201338, , ,\n\nEGIS Explosives Detection System, 102\u20133, 115\u201316,\n\nEgyptAir Flight 990,\n\n\"Eisenhower option,\" ,\n\nErickson, Jeff,\n\nErskine, Lewis, 206\u20137\n\nExecutive Order 12333,\n\nExecutive Order 13039, ,\n\nF\n\nFAA Air Traffic School,\n\nFannie Mae, , 158\u201360\n\nFederal Aviation Administration (FAA), , , , , , , , , 120\u201321, , ,\n\nFederal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 2\u20137, 10\u201312, , , , 22\u201323, 27\u201329, 31\u201332, 34\u201340, 42\u201359, 61\u201366, 68-73, , , , 94\u201395, 97\u2013104, 106\u20139, , 118\u201324, 132\u201339, , , 148\u201349, , 157\u201359, , , , , , 176\u201378, 180\u201382, 184\u201388, 190\u201394, 201\u20138, , , 215\u201321\n\nCriminal Division, ,\n\nFBI 302s,\n\nIntelligence Divisions,\n\ninvolvement in NTSB investigation, , , 114\u201317,\n\ntakeover of investigation from the NTSB, 63\u201365\n\nFederal Trade Commission (FTC),\n\nFine, David, ,\n\nFine, Glenn,\n\nFire Island, , ,\n\nFirst Amendment, the,\n\n_First Strike_ (Sanders and Cashill), , , , ,\n\nFitzgerald, F. Scott,\n\nFlanagan, Bud,\n\nflight data recorder (FDR), , 140\u201341, ,\n\nFlynn, Irish,\n\nFOIA requests (Freedom of Information Act), , 200\u20131\n\nForeign Intelligence Advisory Board,\n\nForge River Marina,\n\n_Fortune_ ,\n\nFox News, , , , 181\u201382, ,\n\nFrancis, Robert, , , , , ,\n\nappointment to NTSB,\n\nFreeh, Louis, 106\u20137, , 157\u201358\n\nG\n\nGabreski Airport, 47\u201348,\n\nGallagher, William, , , ,\n\nGelhafen, Kevin,\n\nGenzlinger, Neil,\n\nGoelz, Peter, 76\u201378, , , , 190\u201392, , 200\u20131,\n\nGoglia, John, , ,\n\nGonzales, Alberto,\n\n_Good Morning America_ ,\n\nGordon, Greg,\n\nGore, Al, , , ,\n\nGorelick, Jamie, 154\u201360, 162\u201365, ,\n\nGrassley, Charles, 114\u201316\n\n_Great Gatsby, The_ (Fitzgerald),\n\nGreat Gun Beach,\n\nGrose, Vernon, 63\u201364, , , , ,\n\nGulf War (1991),\n\nH\n\nHager, Robert,\n\nHaldeman, H. R.,\n\nHall, Jim, , , , 70\u201371, , , , , , , 191\u201392, ,\n\nappointment to NTSB Board,\n\ninterview on _The Point_ , 79\u201381\n\nHamilton, Walt,\n\nHannity, Sean,\n\n_Hannity's America_ ,\n\n_Hardball with Chris Matthews_ ,\n\nHarkins, Paul,\n\nHarperCollins,\n\nHarriman, Pamela Churchill,\n\nHarris, Jo Ann,\n\nHeckman, Bob,\n\nHemmer, Bill, 191\u201392\n\nHendrix, David,\n\nHersman, Deborah,\n\nHiss, Alger,\n\nHittinger, Eric,\n\nHoltsclaw, Jim, 20\u201322, , 132\u201333\n\nHoover, J. Edgar,\n\nHosenball, Mark, 147\u201350,\n\nHouse Armed Services Committee,\n\nHubbell, Webster, 153\u201354, 159\u201360\n\nHughes, Hank, 114\u201315, 184\u201385, 188\u201389, ,\n\nHussein, Saddam, , ,\n\nHyman, Ira,\n\nI\n\nIndonesia,\n\n_Ingram's_ , ,\n\n_Innocence of Muslims, The_ ,\n\nInouye, Daniel,\n\nIntelligence Medal of Merit,\n\nInternational Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW),\n\nInternet, the, , , 18\u201320, , , , , , , ,\n\n_In the Blink of an Eye_ (Milton),\n\nIran, , , , , 129\u201330, ,\n\nIranian Airbus 655, ,\n\nIrvine, Reed, , , , , 146\u201347,\n\nIsikoff, Michael, , 149\u201351\n\nJ\n\nJane's Information Services (\"Jane's,\"),\n\nJefferson, Thomas, ,\n\nJennings, Peter, 87\u201388,\n\nJet A fuel, , ,\n\nJFK Airport, , ,\n\n_John Hopkins APL Technical Digest_ ,\n\nJohnson, George, ,\n\nJohnson, Glen,\n\nJohnston, David, 95\u201396\n\nJoint Chiefs of Staff,\n\nJoint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF),\n\nJustice Department, , 10\u201311, , , , 102\u20133, , 154\u201355, 158\u201359, , , , . _See also_ Department of Justice\n\nK\n\nKabot, Linda,\n\nKallstrom, Jim, 13\u201314, 40\u201341, , , , , , , 103\u20135, 113\u201314, 116\u201320, 123\u201324, 132\u201339, , , 157\u201359, , 173\u201374, 177\u201378, 190\u201392, , , , , 207\u20138,\n\nsummoned to meeting in Washington, 101\u20132, ,\n\nKansas City, , , 11\u201312, , , , , , ,\n\nKansas City Club,\n\n_Kansas City Star_ ,\n\nKasich, John,\n\nKCPT (local PBS station), ,\n\nKean, Thomas, 163\u201364\n\nKelly, Megyn,\n\nKennedy, John F., ,\n\nassassination of,\n\nKennedy, Robert,\n\nKerr, Donald, ,\n\nKerry, John, 88\u201389,\n\nKeyser, Bob,\n\nKhobar Towers bombing, ,\n\nKilcullen, Daniel,\n\nKing, Larry,\n\nKissinger, Henry,\n\nKosik, Allison, 192\u201393,\n\nKristensen, Edward K., 133\u201336\n\nKrukar, Andrew, ,\n\nKrukar, Marge, ,\n\nKrulak, Charles,\n\nKurtz, Howard,\n\nL\n\nLa Cosa Nostra families,\n\nLahr, Ray, 28\u201329, , , 178\u201381, , , ,\n\nLake, Tony, , ,\n\nLash, Andrew,\n\nLe Brun, Charles,\n\n_Legacy of Ashes_ (Weiner),\n\nLehman, John,\n\nLewinsky, Monica, , , , ,\n\nLimbaugh, Rush, 12\u201313\n\n_Lion's Game, The_ (DeMille),\n\nLittle Rock, AR, , ,\n\n_Living History_ (Clinton),\n\nLoeb, Bernard, , , , ,\n\nLong Island, x, 1\u20132, , 10\u201311, , , , , , , , , , , , , 135\u201338, , 154\u201355, 162\u201363, , 179\u201381, , 197\u201398, 210\u201312, 214\u201315,\n\nLong Island Ice Tea,\n\nLong Island Sound,\n\nLos Angeles, CA, ,\n\nLuneau-Daurignac, Pierre-Emmanuel, 176\u201377\n\nM\n\nMagladry, Bruce,\n\nMalaysia Airlines Flight ,\n\nManasquan inlet,\n\nMANPAD (man-portable air-defense missile), , , 213\u201314\n\nMastic Beach High School,\n\nMatz, Howard,\n\nMayer, David, 33\u201334, , , 64\u201372, , , , , 184\u201385, , , ,\n\n\"memory error\" explanation, ,\n\nreference to a flagpole, ,\n\nMBNA Bank,\n\nMcCaskill, Claire,\n\nMcClaine, David, 37\u201339, , 192\u201393,\n\nMcClatchy Newspapers,\n\nMcCone, John,\n\nMcCord, Chip,\n\nMcCurry, Mike,\n\nMcDonnell Douglas,\n\nMcKenna, Jim,\n\nmedia, the, , 12\u201313, 18\u201319, 21\u201322, , , 37\u201338, , , , , , , 76\u201378, , , , , 119\u201320, , 131\u201332, , 143\u201344, 146\u201347, , , , , , , 167\u201368, , , , , 187\u201388, , , , , ,\n\n_Meet the Press_ ,\n\nMeyer, Fritz, 26\u201327, , 68\u201369, , ,\n\nMichelson, Lisa, 177\u201378\n\nMifflin, Lawrie,\n\nMiller, Rocky, ,\n\nMilton, Patricia, 13\u201314, , 118\u201319, 123\u201324, 132\u201337, , , , , 180\u201381\n\nMissile and Space Intelligence Center (MSIC), , , , , , , , 205\u20136\n\nmissiles\n\nantiaircraft missiles, ,\n\nMANPAD, , , 213\u201314\n\nNavy missiles, , , , ,\n\nstandard arm missile,\n\nStinger missiles, , 108\u20139\n\nvideo footage of, 180\u201381\n\nMitchell, John,\n\nMontoursville, 85\u201387, ,\n\nMoorer, Thomas H.,\n\nMoriches Inlet, the, 2\u20134, , 47\u201351,\n\nMorris, Dick, , ,\n\nMSNBC, , , ,\n\nMuma, Dede,\n\nMundo, Albert,\n\nMunich Olympics,\n\n_My FBI_ (Freeh),\n\n_My Life_ (Clinton),\n\nN\n\nNader, Ralph,\n\nNantucket Island,\n\nNASA,\n\nNational Archives, the, 161\u201362, ,\n\nNational Guard, . _See also_ Air National Guard\n\nNational Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), 213\u201315\n\nNational Indian Gaming Commission,\n\n_National Law Journal_ ,\n\nNational Liberation Day,\n\nNational Security Council, ,\n\nNaval Air Warfare Center,\n\nNBC,\n\nNegroni, Christine, 13\u201314, , , , 140\u201341, ,\n\n_New Day_ ,\n\n_Newsday_ ,\n\n_Newsweek_ , 129\u201330, , , ,\n\nNew York City, , , , , , , , , , , 157\u201358, ,\n\nNew York State, , , , , , ,\n\nNew York State Police, , ,\n\nNew York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON),\n\n_New York Times_ , , , 13\u201314, 19\u201320, , , , 94\u201397, 99\u2013104, , , 118\u201320, 123\u201324, 131\u201332, 134\u201335, , , , , , 155\u201360, , , 184\u201385, 187\u201388, 193\u201394, , 220\u201322\n\nNibert, Cheryl, 86\u201387,\n\nNibert, Don, 85\u201387, , ,\n\n_Night Fall_ (DeMille),\n\n_Nightline_ ,\n\nNixon, Richard,\n\nNorman, Greg, , ,\n\n_No Survivors_ (CNN documentary), , 179\u201380,\n\nNTSB (National Transportation Safety Board)\n\nanimations,\n\nfinal report, , ,\n\nhearing, , , , , 73\u201374, , , , , ,\n\nNTSB Board, , 142\u201343, , ,\n\nNTSB Training Center,\n\nNTSB witness group, , , 38\u201339, 64\u201366, 69\u201371, , , , 215\u201316\n\nNYPD, ,\n\nO\n\nObama, Barack, , 194\u201396\n\nresponse to Benghazi attacks,\n\nOffice Depot,\n\nOffice of Aviation Safety, ,\n\nOffice of Transnational Issues (OTI),\n\nOffutt Air Force Base,\n\n_Off With Their Heads_ (Morris),\n\nOklahoma City bombing,\n\nOlympic Airlines,\n\nOlympic Park bombing,\n\nO'Meara, Kelly,\n\nO'Neill, John, 108\u20139\n\n\"Operation Bojinka,\" 128\u201329, ,\n\nOswald, Lee Harvey,\n\nOtt, Ray, ,\n\nOtto, Theodore,\n\nOval Office, the,\n\nP\n\nPan-Am ,\n\nPanetta, Leon, 5\u20136, , ,\n\nParis, x, , , , , , , , 176\u201378\n\n_Paris Match_ ,\n\nParlier, Cap, 98\u201399\n\nPataki, George,\n\nPatchogue Bay,\n\nPatterson, Robert \"Buzz,\" , 128\u201329\n\nPentagon, the, , , 76\u201377, , ,\n\nPerlmutter, Bruce,\n\nPerry, Lisa (Witness 150), 26\u201327, , , , , , ,\n\nPETN, traces on TWA 800 debris, , , , 122\u201323, ,\n\nPhillips, Don,\n\nPickard, Tom,\n\nPoindexter, John,\n\n_Point, The_ , ,\n\nPolar Air Cargo,\n\nPolk, Jim, 192\u201393, 196\u201397\n\nPonquogue Beach,\n\nPowell, Colin,\n\n_Press-Enterprise_ of Riverside, CA, , , ,\n\nProcrustes,\n\nP-3 Orion, , , 132\u201335, 182\u201385, 218\u201319\n\nnew footage of the crash site from, 182\u201385,\n\n_Pulp Fiction_ ,\n\nPurdy, Matthew, 95\u201396,\n\nQ\n\nQuantuck Canal, 31\u201332\n\n\"Quiet Birdmen,\" the,\n\nR\n\nradar, , , , 95\u201396, , , , , , 138\u201339, , , , , , , , ,\n\nRandom House,\n\nRather, Dan,\n\nRDX, traces on TWA 800 debris, , , ,\n\nReady, Kevin, 98\u201399\n\nReagan, Ronald, , ,\n\nRegnery Publishing,\n\nReid, Jeffrey, ,\n\nReno, Janet, 154\u201355,\n\nReuters,\n\nRevkin, Andrew, 100\u20131,\n\nRhein, Jim Van,\n\nRiady family,\n\nRice, Condoleezza,\n\nRobinson, Deborah,\n\nRobinson, Walter,\n\nRodrigues, J. Dennis, 33\u201335, 37\u201338\n\nRogers, Will, 129\u201330, ,\n\nRojany, Yon,\n\nRomney, Mitt,\n\nRosenbaum, Steve, ,\n\nRowe, Alice,\n\nRussell, Dick, 20\u201322, , 132\u201335\n\nRussell, Michael (a.k.a. Witness ), 100\u20132\n\nS\n\nSalinger, Pierre, , 22\u201323, , , , 134\u201335,\n\nSanders, Elizabeth, 10\u201314, , , , , 116\u201317, , ,\n\nSanders, James, , 10\u201314, , , , , , , , , 142\u201343, , , , , , 182\u201384, 211\u201314,\n\nSaudi Arabia, , , ,\n\nScarpa, Greg, 157\u201358\n\nSchiffer, Paul,\n\nSchiliro, Lewis, ,\n\nSchleede, Ron,\n\nSchulze, Glenn,\n\nSCMB,\n\nSemtex, , 122\u201323\n\nSenate Select Committee on Indian Affairs,\n\nSenate Select Committee on Intelligence, ,\n\nSenate Select Committee on Intelligence \"Special Report,\"\n\nSeptember 11, 2001 (terrorist attacks), 6\u20137, , 87\u201388, 90\u201391, 93\u201394, 107\u20139, , 159\u201362, 164\u201366,\n\n9\/11 Commission, , , , 161\u201362, 165\u201367,\n\nSestak, Joe, 168\u201370\n\nShanahan, Dennis, 188\u201389\n\n_Silenced_ , 25\u201329, , , 56\u201357, 59\u201361, , 67\u201372, 74\u201377, , , , , , , , , 188\u201389\n\nSimon, Paul,\n\nSimpson, Barbara,\n\nSimpson, O. J.,\n\nSklamberg, Howard, , ,\n\nsonic boom, ,\n\nsound propagation analysis, , , , , ,\n\nSouthampton Press, 214\u201318\n\nSpace and Strategic Missile Systems Division, 84\u201385\n\nSpeer, Jim, 115\u201316, 143\u201344, ,\n\nStacey, Terry, 10\u201311, 116\u201317, , , 183\u201384\n\nStalcup, Tom, , , 187\u201391, , 199\u2013201, ,\n\nStaples,\n\nStark, Lisa,\n\nState Department,\n\nStephanopolous, George, 87\u201388,\n\nStinger missile. _See_ missiles: Stinger missiles\n\nSt. Louis, , 119\u201320\n\nStone, Oliver, , ,\n\nStrasser, Allen, 137\u201338\n\nSuffolk County Marine Bureau (SCMB),\n\nSuffolk County Police Department, 43\u201345, 49\u201351, , ,\n\nsunshine laws,\n\nSwartz, Bruce, ,\n\nT\n\nTapper, Jake, 191\u201392\n\nTauss, Randolph, , , , , 55\u201359, , , , ,\n\nawarded Intelligence Medal of Merit, ,\n\nTeledyne Ryan BQM-34 Firebee (a.k.a. Firebee),\n\nTenet, George, , , , 156\u201358, , 164\u201365, , ,\n\nTraficant, James, , 122\u201323, 170\u201371\n\nTruman, Harry,\n\nTWA (Trans World Airlines), 10\u201312, , , 75\u201376, , , 115\u201316, , 121\u201322, , ,\n\nTWA 800\n\nblack boxes of, , 140\u201344\n\ncabin of, , , , , , ,\n\ncenter fuel tank explosion, , , , , 73\u201374, , , , , 100\u20131, 110\u201311, , , , 183\u201384, 189\u201390, , , , , 220\u201321\n\ncrash site, , 133\u201334, 136\u201339, 183\u201384,\n\ndog-training exercises purportedly conducted on, , 113\u201324, ,\n\nengines of, , , , , 182\u201384, , ,\n\nexplosive residue on, 103\u20134, , , 118\u201320, , , . _See also_ PETN _and_ RDX\n\nfuselage of, , , 66\u201367, , 73\u201374, , , 183\u201384, , , , 220\u201321\n\nnoseless aircraft, , , ,\n\nradar data of the crash, , , , 95\u201396, , , , , , 138\u201339, , , , , , , , ,\n\nsatellite imagery of the disaster, 148\u201349, ,\n\nsupposed zoom climb. _See_ zoom climb\n\nweather on the night of the crash, ,\n\nwreckage zones, 183\u201384,\n\n_TWA 800: Accident or Incident_ (Ready and Parlier),\n\nTWA 800 Eyewitness Alliance,\n\nTWA 800 Project, , 199\u2013201\n\nTWA Flight 844,\n\n_TWA Flight 800_ (documentary), , ,\n\nTwitter,\n\nU\n\nUCLA,\n\nUkraine,\n\nUnited Airlines, , ,\n\nUnited Nations,\n\nUS Air Flight , , , , ,\n\nU.S. Air Force, , , , , , , ,\n\nU.S. Air Force Air Traffic Control School,\n\nU.S. Coast Guard, the, , ,\n\nU.S. Marine Corps, , , , , ,\n\nU.S. Navy, 5\u20136, 22\u201323, , 28\u201329, 57\u201358, 77\u201378, , , , 126\u201344, , , , , , , , 185\u201386, , , , , 218\u201321\n\nAegis system, 129\u201332,\n\nUSS _Albuquerque_ , , ,\n\nUSS _Carr_ , 174\u201375\n\nUSS _Cole_ ,\n\nUSS _Dwight D. Eisenhower_ ,\n\nUSS _Montgomery_ ,\n\nUSS _Normandy_ , 136\u201337,\n\nUSS _Trepang_ , 133\u201335, ,\n\nUSS _Vincennes_ , , 131\u201332, , 185\u201386,\n\nUSS _Wyoming_ , ,\n\nV\n\nVan Natta, Don, , , 113\u201314, ,\n\nVan Susteren, Greta, , 80\u201381,\n\nVCR (videocassette recorder),\n\nvideo of missile test, 180\u201382, 210\u201315, 217\u201318\n\nvideo of TWA 800, , 25\u201329, 83\u201385, ,\n\nMSNBC likely airing, , , ,\n\nvideo of TWA 800 debris field from P-3, 182\u201385,\n\nW\n\nWalbert, Calvin,\n\nWald, Matthew, ,\n\nWallace, Chris,\n\nWallops Flight Facility, 136\u201337\n\n_Wall Street Journal_ , , ,\n\nWashington, D.C., 20\u201321, , , , , 101\u20135, , , , , , , , , , 158\u201359, 168\u201371, , , , ,\n\n_Washington Monthly_ ,\n\n_Washington Post_ , , , , 77\u201378, , ,\n\n_Washington Times_ ,\n\nWatergate scandal, , ,\n\n_Weekly Standard_ , ,\n\nWeiner, Tim, ,\n\nWeir, Vance,\n\nWeldon, Curt, 168\u201371\n\nWestern Washington University,\n\nWesthampton High School, ,\n\nWetli, Charles, 188\u201389\n\nWhite House, the, 4\u20135, , , , , , 88\u201389, , , 98\u201399, , , , , 110\u201311, , , , , , 146\u201347, , 156\u201357, , , 166\u201367, 194\u201395, ,\n\nWhite House Situation Room, , ,\n\nWhitehurst, Frederic, ,\n\nWhitewater scandal, ,\n\nWire, Mike (a.k.a. \"the man on the bridge\"), 26\u201327, 31\u201341\n\nalteration of testimony to include reference to flagpole,\n\nmade-up second interview,\n\n_Witness_ (Chambers),\n\n\"Witness by Witness Account, A\" (CIA PowerPoint), ,\n\n_Witnessed_ (CNN special report),\n\nWitness 150 (Lisa Perry), , ,\n\nWitness 144 (Ann DeCaro),\n\nWitness 136 (Michael Russell),\n\nWitness 73 (\"Sandy\"), , , , , , , , ,\n\nWitness 649 (Joseph Delgado), , , ,\n\nWitness 32 (Dwight Brumley), ,\n\nwitness testimony summaries, 43\u201360\n\nWomen's Leadership Forum of the Democratic National Committee,\n\nWoodward, Bob, ,\n\nWorldNetDaily,\n\nWND.com,\n\nWorld Trade Center,\n\n_Worthy Fights_ (Panetta),\n\nWunsch, Michael,\n\nY\n\nYork, Gene, 117\u201318\n\nYoung, Bob, 33\u201335, 37\u201339, , ,\n\nYoung, Thomas, 84\u201385,\n\nYousef, Ramzi, 128\u201329, ,\n\nZ\n\nZakar, Frank,\n\nzoom climb, 27\u201329, , 56\u201357, , 69\u201370, , , , , , 147\u201351, , , , , , 192\u201393, , 200\u20131, 206\u20138, \nTable of Contents\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Title Page\n  3. Copyright\n  4. Dedication\n  5. CONTENTS\n  6. ONE: THE BREACH\n  7. TWO: CONSPIRACY THEORIST\n  8. THREE: THE BEST PEOPLE\n  9. FOUR: THE VIDEO\n  10. FIVE: THE MAN ON THE BRIDGE\n  11. SIX: INTELLIGENCE MEDAL OF MERIT\n  12. SEVEN: THE GOOD BUREAUCRAT\n  13. EIGHT: RESPONSIBLE JOURNALISM\n  14. NINE: SEPTEMBER 11\n  15. TEN: FIT TO PRINT\n  16. ELEVEN: BLACK HOLE\n  17. TWELVE: DOG DAYS\n  18. THIRTEEN: LOST AT SEA\n  19. FOURTEEN: MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON\n  20. FIFTEEN: THE FIXERS\n  21. SIXTEEN: ENGINE TROUBLE\n  22. SEVENTEEN: BENGHAZI MOMENT\n  23. EIGHTEEN: PROCRUSTES\n  24. NINETEEN: THE SMOKING GUN\n  25. NOTES\n  26. INDEX\n\n# Guide\n\n  1. Cover\n  2. Contents\n  3. Title Page\n\n  1. i\n  2. ii\n  3. iii\n  4. iv\n  5. v\n  6. vi\n  7. vii\n  8. viii\n  9. ix\n  10. x\n  11. \n  12. \n  13. \n  14. \n  15. \n  16. \n  17. \n  18. \n  19. \n  20. \n  21. \n  22. \n  23. \n  24. \n  25. \n  26. \n  27. \n  28. \n  29. \n  30. \n  31. \n  32. \n  33. \n  34. \n  35. \n  36. \n  37. \n  38. \n  39. \n  40. \n  41. \n  42. \n  43. \n  44. \n  45. \n  46. \n  47. \n  48. \n  49. \n  50. \n  51. \n  52. \n  53. \n  54. \n  55. \n  56. \n  57. \n  58. \n  59. \n  60. \n  61. \n  62. \n  63. \n  64. \n  65. \n  66. \n  67. \n  68. \n  69. \n  70. \n  71. \n  72. \n  73. \n  74. \n  75. \n  76. \n  77. \n  78. \n  79. \n  80. \n  81. \n  82. \n  83. \n  84. \n  85. \n  86. \n  87. \n  88. \n  89. \n  90. \n  91. \n  92. \n  93. \n  94. \n  95. \n  96. \n  97. \n  98. \n  99. \n  100. \n  101. \n  102. \n  103. \n  104. \n  105. \n  106. \n  107. \n  108. \n  109. \n  110. \n  111. \n  112. \n  113. \n  114. \n  115. \n  116. \n  117. \n  118. \n  119. \n  120. \n  121. \n  122. \n  123. \n  124. \n  125. \n  126. \n  127. \n  128. \n  129. \n  130. \n  131. \n  132. \n  133. \n  134. \n  135. \n  136. \n  137. \n  138. \n  139. \n  140. \n  141. \n  142. \n  143. \n  144. \n  145. \n  146. \n  147. \n  148. \n  149. \n  150. \n  151. \n  152. \n  153. \n  154. \n  155. \n  156. \n  157. \n  158. \n  159. \n  160. \n  161. \n  162. \n  163. \n  164. \n  165. \n  166. \n  167. \n  168. \n  169. \n  170. \n  171. \n  172. \n  173. \n  174. \n  175. \n  176. \n  177. \n  178. \n  179. \n  180. \n  181. \n  182. \n  183. \n  184. \n  185. \n  186. \n  187. \n  188. \n  189. \n  190. \n  191. \n  192. \n  193. \n  194. \n  195. \n  196. \n  197. \n  198. \n  199. \n  200. \n  201. \n  202. \n  203. \n  204. \n  205. \n  206. \n  207. \n  208. \n  209. \n  210. \n  211. \n  212. \n  213. \n  214. \n  215. \n  216. \n  217. \n  218. \n  219. \n  220. \n  221. \n  222. \n  223. \n  224. \n  225. \n  226. \n  227. \n  228. \n  229. \n  230. \n  231. \n  232. \n  233. \n  234. \n  235. \n  236. \n  237. \n  238. \n  239. \n  240. \n  241. \n  242. \n  243. \n  244. \n  245. \n  246. \n  247. \n  248. \n  249. \n  250. \n  251. \n  252. \n  253. \n  254. \n  255. \n  256. \n  257. \n  258. \n  259. \n  260. \n  261. \n  262. \n  263. \n  264. \n  265. \n  266. \n  267. \n  268. \n  269. \n  270. \n  271.\n\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}
+{"text":"\n\n## NORMAN DAVIES\n\n### Vanished Kingdoms\n\nThe History of Half-Forgotten Europe\n\nPENGUIN BOOKS\n\n## Contents\n\n_List of Illustrations_\n\n_List of Figures_\n\n_List of Maps_\n\nIntroduction\n\n1. Tolosa: Sojourn of the Visigoths (AD 418\u2013507)\n\n2. Alt Clud: Kingdom of the Rock (Fifth to Twelfth Centuries)\n\n3. Burgundia: Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms ( _c_. 411\u20131795)\n\n4. Aragon: A Mediterranean Empire (1137\u20131714)\n\n5. Litva: A Grand Duchy with Kings (1253\u20131795)\n\n6. Byzantion: The Star-lit Golden Bough (330\u20131453)\n\n7. Borussia: Watery Land of the Prusai (1230\u20131945)\n\n8. Sabaudia: The House that Humbert Built (1033\u20131946)\n\n9. Galicia: Kingdom of the Naked and Starving (1773\u20131918)\n\n10. Etruria: French Snake in the Tuscan Grass (1801\u20131814)\n\n11. Rosenau: The Loved and Unwanted Legacy (1826\u20131918)\n\n12. Tsernagora: Kingdom of the Black Mountain (1910\u20131918)\n\n13. Rusyn: The Republic of One Day (15 March 1939)\n\n14. \u00c9ire: The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown's Retreat since 1916\n\n15. CCCP: The Ultimate Vanishing Act (1924\u20131991)\n\nIllustrations\n\nHow States Die\n\n_Notes_\n\n_Acknowledgements_\nPENGUIN BOOKS  \nVANISHED KINGDOMS\n\n'An original and stimulating masterpiece... an outstanding example of historical writing at its very best' Roger Morgan, _The Times Higher Education_\n\n'This extraordinary book... reflects the broad interests and humane vision of a scholar of prodigious learning, who believes in history as the key to a better way of thinking and living' Christopher Clark, _The Times Literary Supplement_\n\n'A wonderful book... There is much that lingers in the mind when this book is put down' Donald Rayfi eld, _Literary Review_\n\n'All across Europe ghosts will bless him for telling their long-forgotten stories' _Economist_\n\n'A challenging perspective on Europe's past, but also an original way of writing history... In this brilliant, beautifully written book, Davies recovers those scattered vestiges of dead kingdoms... _Vanished Kingdoms_ is a book about memory and loss' Ben Wilson, _Daily Telegraph_\n\n'The continent's story is turned upside down in this dazzling history... brilliant... a lovely eye for detail' Dominic Sandbrook, _Sunday Times_\n\n'Always evocative... delightfully packed with surprises to startle even the most jaded reader or traveller' Stephen Howe, _Independent_ , Books of the Year\n\n'An exuberant literary success... written with passion and vivacity... history par excellence' Ronald Hutton, _The Times_\n\n## ABOUT THE AUTHOR\n\nNorman Davies, born in Bolton, Lancashire, is the author of the number one bestseller _Europe: A History_ (1996), _Rising '44:_ _the Battle for Warsaw_ (2003), _God's Playground: A History of Poland_ (1981), _The Isles_ (1999) __ and _Europe at War_ (2006). His books have been translated worldwide into a score of languages, including Chinese, Japanese and Russian. A graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, and the University of Sussex, he worked as a schoolmaster at St Paul's School before spending a quarter of a century at SSEES, University of London, while also holding visiting posts at Columbia, McGill, Stanford, Harvard, Hokkaido, CASS Beijing, ANU Canberra, CNRS Paris, Adelaide and Cambridge. From 1997\u20132004 he was Supernumerary Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford; he is now Professor at the Jagiellonian University at Krak\u00f3w, an Honorary Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford and a life member of Clare Hall and Peterhouse, Cambridge.\n\nThe recipient of numerous honorary degrees and honorary citizenships, Norman Davies was awarded the Grand Cross of Poland's Order of Merit in 1999 and, in Britain in 2001, the CMG; he is a fellow of the British Academy, and lives in Oxford and Krak\u00f3w. After completing _Vanished Kingdoms_ in 2011, he embarked on a round-the-world lecture tour that took in, among other stops, Abu Dhabi, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Melbourne, Tasmania, New Zealand, Tahiti, California and Texas. He is now preparing a volume of essays and travel sketches.\n_I'r anghofiedig_\n\n_For those whom historians tend to forget_\n\n## List of Illustrations\n\n##### CHAPTER FRONTISPIECES\n\nRoad sign near Vouill\u00e9 (Norman Davies)\n\nDumbarton Rock (Purestock\/Getty Images)\n\nHammershus Castle, Bornholm (Christoph M\u00fcller)\n\nPalace at Perpignan (Norman Davies)\n\nBelarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (AP Photo\/Belta, Nikolai Petrov)\n\nBosphorus Bridge (Spectrum Colour Library\/HIP\/TopFoto)\n\nKaliningrad (STRINGER\/AFP\/Getty Images)\n\nRepublic Day Parade, Rome (AP Photo\/Pier Paolo Cito)\n\nHalych (Roman Zacharij)\n\nDuomo in Florence (Roger Antrobus\/Getty Images)\n\nSchloss Rosenau in Coburg. Chalk lithograph, _c_. 1860, by Hans A.Williard (1832\u20131867) (akg-images)\n\nThe road to Cetinje, Montenegro, 1901 (copyright \u00a9 ullsteinbild\/TopFoto)\n\n_The Prisoner of Zenda_ , 1952 (akg-images\/album)\n\nIrish Free State postage stamp (Royal Philatelic Society, London)\n\nDemonstration in Tallinn, Estonia, 1989 (AP Photo\/Pekka Elomaa)\n\n##### PLATES\n\n 1. The Burial of Alaric. Woodcut, _c_. 1855, after a drawing by Eduard Bendemann (1811\u20131899) (akg-images)\n\n 2. Clovis defeats Alaric III. Chalk lithograph by Nikolai D. Dmitrijeff Orenburgsky (1838\u20131898) after a painting by Friedrich T\u00fcshaus (1832\u20131885), 1875 (akg-images)\n\n 3. The Book of Aneirin (National Library of Wales, Cardiff)\n\n 4. The Arms of the City of Glasgow (Public Domain)\n\n 5. Statue of William Wallace in Aberdeen, Scotland (Public Domain)\n\n 6. The Rhinegold. Oil painting, 1859, by Peter von Cornelius (ullstein bild\/AKG Pressebild)\n\n 7. Dagobert Solidus (Public Domain)\n\n 8. King Gontran of Bourgogne designates his nephew Childebert II as his successor, miniature from the 'Chronicles of France', printed by A. Verard, Paris, 1493 (hand-coloured print), French School, fifteenth century (Biblioteca Nazionale, Turin, Italy\/Index\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n 9. Frederick I Barbarossa and his sons King Henry VI and Duke Frederick VI. Medieval illumination from the Chronic of the Guelphs, 1179\u20131191 (Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek Fulda, Germany)\n\n. The Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, and his son Charles. From the Chronicles of Hainault. Rogier van der Weyden miniature, 1477 (Royal Library, Brussels)\n\n. Charles the Bold (1433\u201377), duke of Burgundy (1467\u201377), from the Rules and Ordinances of the Order of the Golden Fleece (vellum) (British Library, London, UK\/copyright \u00a9 British Library Board. All Rights Reserved\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Mary of Burgundy (1457\u20131482), oil on wood, attributed to Michael Pacher, 1490 (original in a private collection)\n\n. Aljaferia Palace, Zaragoza (akg\/Bildarchiv Monheim)\n\n. Naples waterfront (detail). Painting, 1465, by Francesco Pagano. Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy. (akg-images\/ Erich Lessing)\n\n. Petronila of Aragon and Count Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, oil on canvas 1634 (Prado Museum)\n\n. Ferdinand the Catholic, king of Aragon, of Sicily, and of Castile-Leon, 1452\u20131516. Painting, contemporary copy after late-fifteenth-century painting by Michael Sittow (1469\u20131525). (akg-images\/Erich Lessing)\n\n. Isabella I, Queen of Castile, and Leon, 1451\u20131504. Painting, _c_. 1500, after Juan de Flandes, oil on wood (akg-images\/Erich Lessing)\n\n. _The Battle of El Puig_ from the St George Altarpiece (copyright \u00a9 Victoria & Albert Museum, London)\n\n. 'The Ladder of John Klimakos', icon, twelfth century, paint and gold leaf on panel (Monastery of Saint Catherine, Mount Sinai, Egypt\/Ancient Art and Architecture Collection Ltd\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Siege of Constantinople, 1453 (original in the Bibliotheque National, Paris)\n\n. Trakai Castle, Lithuania (akg-images\/Volker Kreidler)\n\n. Mir Castle, Belarus (Alex Zalenko)\n\n. Barbara Radziwill (1520\u201351) _c_. 1553\u201356 (oil on copper), studio of Lucas Cranach the Younger (1515\u201386) (copyright \u00a9 Czartoryski Museum, Cracow, Poland\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Lithuanian Statutes (National Library, Warsaw)\n\n. 'The Polish Plumb Cake', _c_. 1772 (engraving), John Lodge, (fl. 1782\u2013d. 1796) (private collection\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Portrait of Stanislas II Augustus, king of Poland (pastel on paper mounted on canvas), after Marcello Bacciarelli (1731\u20131818) (copyright \u00a9 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, UK\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Summer afternoon in a 'Stetl' in Galicia. _c_. 1900 (ullstein bild\/ Imagno)\n\n. A Hutsul man with horse, Poland (copyright \u00a9 RIA Novosti\/ TopFoto)\n\n. G\u00f3rale men, Poland (Tatrza\u0144skiego Parku Narodowego, Poland, with thanks to Mr Zbigniew \u0141adygin)\n\n. Lw\u00f3w scene, _c_. 1900 (Public Domain)\n\n. Emperor Joseph II wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece. Oil on canvas, Georg Weickert, eighteenth century (ullstein bild\/Imagno)\n\n. Franz Joseph (1830\u20131916), Austrian emperor (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n. Curonian Spit, East Prussia, wandering dune and lagoon, 1934 (copyright \u00a9 ullstein bild\/TopFoto)\n\n. Marienburg, West Prussia. Castle of the Teutonic Order, from the northwest, _c_. 1930 (akg-images\/Paul W. John)\n\n. Detail from _The Battle of Grunwald_ by Jan Matejko, oil on canvas, 1878 (National Museum in Warsaw)\n\n. Tannenberg Memorial in 1934, on the occasion of the transfer of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg's remains to the crypt. (ullstein bild\/Imagno)\n\n. _The Prussian Homage_ by Jan Matejko, oil on canvas, 1882 (Wawel Museum, Krak\u00f3w)\n\n. Albrecht I von Hohenzollern, duke of Prussia, painting, 1522 (akg-images)\n\n. Frederick I, King of Prussia (1701\u201313), colour print, 1890, after a watercolour by Woldemar Friedrich (akg images)\n\n. Frederick William (1620\u20131688), the 'Great Elector', after an engraving of 1683 by Antoine Masson (TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. Hautecombe monastery on the western shore of Lake Bourget, lithograph ( _c_. 1860?) by A. Cuvillier (akg-images)\n\n. _Bonneville, Savoy with Mont Blanc_ , by J. M. W. Turner (1775\u20131851) (private collection\/photograph copyright \u00a9 Christie's Images\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. The citizens of Chamb\u00e9ry vote for annexation, summer 1860 (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n. Victor Emmanuel II of Savoy, king of Italy (copyright \u00a9 2006 Alinari\/TopFoto)\n\n. Fiftieth anniversary of the annexation of Savoy to France, illustration, _Le Petit Journal_ , 18 September 1910 (colour lithograph) (private collection\/Giraudon\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Activists in Piazza del Quirinale before the referendum of 2 June 1946 (copyright \u00a9 2006 Alinari\/TopFoto)\n\n. Marie Luise of Bourbon with her children. painting, 1807, by Wilhelm Titel (1784\u20131862) (akg-images\/Rabatti\/Domingie)\n\n. Silver florin of the Kingdom of Etruria (private collection)\n\n. Elisa Baciocchi, grand duchess of Tuscany, and her court, by Pietro Benvenuti, oil on canvas, 1813 (copyright \u00a9 RMN\/Chateau de Versailles)\n\n. San Miniato in Val d'Arno, Tuscany, Italy (Bruno Morandi\/Robert Harding\/Getty)\n\n. Napoleon in exile on Elba before his return to France. Aquatint, _c_. 1830, with later colouring (akg-images)\n\n. Victoria and Albert at the time of their wedding, 1840 (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n. Royal group photograph, Coburg, April 1894 (The Royal Collection, copyright \u00a9 2011 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II)\n\n. Duke Karl Eduard of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, 1916 (bpk\/ Langhammer)\n\n. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip on their wedding day, 20 November 1947 (copyright \u00a9 2003 Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. Funeral procession of George V (copyright \u00a9 2005 Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. Hitler entering Prague, 17 March 1939 (copyright \u00a9 1999 Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. Huszt, 1939 (Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. Black and Tans in Dublin, 1920 (Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. 'The Treaty Makers' (sepia photograph), English photographer (Private Collection\/The Stapleton Collection\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Women under guard in Dublin, 1921 (copyright \u00a9 Underwood & Underwood\/Corbis)\n\n. De Valera taking the salute at an IRA parade (Topham Picturepoint\/TopFoto.co.uk)\n\n. King George V and Queen Mary during a visit to Ireland, July 1911 (photograph by Topical Press Agency\/Hulton Archive\/Getty Images)\n\n. Participants of the Imperial Conference 1926 seated with King George V (Library and Archives Canada)\n\n. Queen Elizabeth II makes a speech watched by Irish _taoiseach_ Enda Kenny and President Mary McAleese during a State dinner in Dublin Castle, 18 May 2011 in Dublin (photograph by Irish Governmen\/Pool\/Getty Images)\n\n, , , , . Irish postage stamps (images courtesy of the Royal Philatelic Society; with thanks to Dr Alan Huggins)\n\n. King Nikola of Montenegro with his family, undated (Mary Evans Picture Library)\n\n. King Nikola of Montenegro, _c_. 1910 (ullstein bild)\n\n. King Nikola in exile, France, 1921 (copyright \u00a9 The Granger Collection)\n\n. Montenegrin postage stamps (author's collection)\n\n. Montenegrin postage stamps (British Library, Philatelic Collections: Supplementary Collection \u2013 Montenegro)\n\n. _Kalevipoeg Carrying the Boards_ , 1914 (pastel on paper), by OskarKallis (1892\u20131917) (copyright \u00a9 Art Museum of Estonia, Tallinn, Estonia\/The Bridgeman Art Library)\n\n. Bronze Soldier monument in the Tallinn military cemetery (akg-images\/RIA Nowosti)\n\n. Linda Monument in front of the Long Herman tower in Tallinn (copyright \u00a9 RIA Novosti\/TopFoto)\n\n. Red Army soldiers occupying Tallinn, June 1940 (private collection)\n\n. Volunteers of the Latvian Legion parade in Talinn, 1943 (SV-Bilderdienst)\n\n. The Baltic Way Protest, August 1989 (ullstein bild\/Nowosti)\n\n. Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, 1991 (copyright \u00a9 RIA Novosti\/TopFoto)\n\n## List of Figures\n\n 1. Carolingians and Bosonids\n\n 2. The Burgundian succession\n\n 3. Early rulers of Aragon: the House of Ramiro\n\n 4. The House of Trast\u00e1mara\n\n 5. The Jagiellons\n\n 6. The early Radziwi\u0142\u0142s\n\n 7. Hohenzollerns and Jagiellons\n\n 8. The later Hohenzollerns, 1701\u20131918\n\n 9. Counts of Savoy\n\n. I Buonaparti: the Bonapartes\n\n. Bourbon \u2013 Borb\u00f3n \u2013 Borbone (the Bourbons)\n\n. The Hanovers and the Wettins\n\n. The British Saxe-Coburgs and Gothas\n\n. Petrovi\u0107 and Karadjordjevi\u0107\n\n## List of Maps\n\n 1 Kingdom of Tolosa, fifth\u2013sixth centuries\n\n 2 Firth of Clyde\n\n 3 Northern Britannia, _c_. AD 410\n\n 4 The 'Old North', sixth\u2013seventh centuries\n\n 5 The Viking invasions\n\n 6 Northern Britain, ninth\u2013tenth centuries\n\n 7 Bornholm\n\n 8 The first Burgundian Kingdom (411\u2013437)\n\n 9 The second Burgundian Kingdom (451\u2013532\/4)\n\n Burgundy within the Frankish realms, mid-sixth century\n\n The legacy of central Lotharingia\n\n The Duchy of Burgundy, eleventh century\n\n The Kingdom of Provence, _c_. 900\n\n The Three Burgundies, _c_. AD 1000\n\n The imperial Kingdom of Arles from 1032\n\n The modern linguistic region Arpitania\n\n The disintegration of imperial Burgundy\n\n The Duchy and County of Burgundy in the fourteenth century\n\n The States of Burgundy, fourteenth\u2013fifteenth centuries\n\n The Imperial Circles of the Holy Roman Empire\n\n Pyrenees\n\n Marches of Charlemagne's Empire, ninth century\n\n The cradle of the Kingdom of Aragon, 1035\u20131137\n\n The Iberian peninsula in 1137\n\n The heartlands of the Crown of Aragon\n\n Aragonese Empire\n\n The two medieval Sicilies\n\n The Kingdom of Mallorca\n\n The union of Castile and Aragon, 1479\n\n Belarus\n\n The 'Land of the Headwaters'\n\n The Principalities of Polatsk, _c_. twelfth century\n\n The Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Mindaugus (mid-thirteenth century)\n\n The Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the other Jagiellonian lands, _c_. 1500\n\n The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1572\n\n The Grand Duchy of Lithuania, 1572\u20131795\n\n The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania, 1772\u20131795\n\n Western _gubernias_ of the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century\n\n Istanbul and the Bosporus\n\n Contraction of the Byzantine Empire\n\n Kaliningrad _oblast_\n\n Borussia \u2013 land of the Moravia\n\n The Teutonic State, 1410\n\n Royal and Ducal Prussia after 1466\n\n Brandenburg-Prussia in 1648\n\n The growth of the Hohenzollern Kingdom, 1701\u20131795\n\n The Kingdom of Prussia, 1807\u20131918\n\n The Eastern frontline, 1944\u20131945\n\n Rome\n\n Savoy and Piedmont\n\n The Kingdom of Sardinia, _c_. 1750\n\n Italy, 1859\u20131861\n\n Northern Italy, spring 1860\n\n West Ukraine\n\n The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, _c_. 1900\n\n Galicia in Austria-Hungary, _c_. 1914\n\n Florence\n\n The Kingdom of Etruria, 1801\u20131807\n\n Napoleonic Italy, 1810\n\n Free State of Th\u00fcringia and Northern Bavaria\n\n Saxon mini-states, _c_. 1900\n\n Montenegro, 2011\n\n The tribes of Montenegro, _c_. 1900\n\n Montenegro and neighbours, 1911\n\n Yugoslavia after 1945\n\n Modern Zakarpattia (Carpatho-Ukraine)\n\n Czechoslovak Republic, 1920\u20131938\n\n The Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, 1939\n\n Ireland, 2011\n\n Northern Ireland in the late twentieth century\n\n Estonia\n\n The Baltic States between the wars\n\n Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 1945\u20131991\n\n Russia's western 'near abroad' after 1991\n\n## Introduction\n\nAll my life, I have been intrigued by the gap between appearances and reality. Things are never quite as they seem. I was born a subject of the British Empire, and as a child, read in my _Children's Encyclopaedia_ that 'our empire' was one 'on which the sun never set'. I saw that there was more red on the map than any other colour, and was delighted. Before long, I was watching in disbelief as the imperial sunset blazed across the post-war skies amidst seas of blood and mayhem. Reality, as later revealed, belied outward appearances of unlimited power and permanence.\n\nIn my encyclopedia I also read that Mount Everest, at 29,002 feet, was the highest peak in the world and was named after the surveyor general of British India, Col. Sir George Everest. I naturally fell for the unwritten assumption, as I was supposed to, that the pinnacle of the earth was British; and I was duly impressed. It all looked very straightforward. By the time I received my copy of the Coronation Edition of Sir John Hunt's _The Ascent of Everest_ as a Christmas present in 1953, of course, India had left the Empire. But I have since learned that Mount Everest had never belonged either to India or to the Empire. Since the King of Nepal did not grant Everest's men permission to enter his country, the mountain had been measured from a very great distance; 29,002 feet was not in consequence its correct height; the mountain's English name was adopted as an act of self-aggrandisement, and its most authentic names are Sagarmatha (in Nepali) and Chomolangma (in Tibetan). Knowledge, I have been forced to admit, is no less fluid than the circumstances in which it is obtained.\n\nAs a boy, I was taken on several occasions to Welsh-speaking Wales. Being endowed with a very Welsh name, I immediately felt at home and gained a lasting affinity with the country. On visiting friends in a hill village near Bethesda, also Davieses, I met with people who did not normally speak English, and was given a present of my first English\u2013Welsh dictionary, T. Gwynn Jones's _Geiriadur_ ; it made me a lifelong collector of foreign languages, though not alas a master of Welsh. Seeing the English castles at Conwy, Harlech and Beaumaris (usually and wrongly called 'Welsh castles'), I sympathized more with the conquered than with the conquerors, and on reading somewhere that the Welsh name for 'England', _Lloegr_ , meant 'the Lost Land', I fell for the fancy, imagining what a huge sense of loss and forgetting the name expresses. A learned colleague has since told me that my imagination had outrun the etymology. Yet as someone brought up in English surroundings, I never cease to be amazed that everywhere which we now call 'England' was once not English at all. This amazement underlies much of what is written in _Vanished Kingdoms_. Dover, after all, or the Avon, are pure Welsh names.\n\nAs a teenager, singing badly on the back row of the school choir, I was particularly attracted to a piece by Charles Villiers Stanford. For some reason, the stoical words and languorous melody of 'They told me Heraclitus' struck a congenial chord. So I went home and looked him up in my copy of Blakeney's _Smaller Classical Dictionary_ and found he was the 'weeping Greek philosopher' from the sixth century BC. It was Heraclitus who said that 'everything is in flux' and 'You can never cross the same river twice'. He was the pioneer of the idea of transience, and he features early in my schoolboy notebook of quotations:\n\n> They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead.\n> \n> They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.\n> \n> I wept as I remembered how often you and I\n> \n> Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.\n> \n> And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,\n> \n> A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest,\n> \n> Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,\n> \n> For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.\n\nHeraclitus and his nightingales are not far beneath the surface of my work either.\n\nAs a school-leaver, I followed the advice of my history master to spend the summer vacation reading Edward Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , together with his _Autobiography_. Gibbon's subject was, in his own words, 'the greatest perhaps and most awful scene in the history of mankind'. I have never read anything to surpass it. Its magnificent narrative demonstrates that the lifespan even of the mightiest states is finite.\n\nYears later, as a professional historian, I plunged into the history of Central and Eastern Europe. My first assignment as a lecturer at the University of London was to prepare a course of ninety lectures on Polish history. The centrepiece of the course was devoted to the Commonwealth or _Rzeczpospolita_ of Poland-Lithuania, which at its conception in 1569 was the largest state in Europe (or at least the master of our continent's largest tract of inhabited lands). Nonetheless, in little more than two decades at the end of the eighteenth century, the Polish-Lithuanian state was destroyed so comprehensively that few people today have even heard of it. And it was not the only casualty. The Republic of Venice was laid low in the same era, as was the Holy Roman Empire.\n\nThroughout most of my academic career, the Soviet Union was the biggest beast in my field of study, and one of the world's two superpowers. It possessed the largest territory in the world, a vast arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons and an unparalleled array of security services. None of its guns or policemen could save it. One day in 1991 it disappeared from the map of the globe, and it has never been seen since.\n\nNot surprisingly, therefore, when I came to write the history of _The Isles_ , I began to wonder if the days of the state in which I was born and live, the United Kingdom, might also be numbered. I decided that they were. My strict, Nonconformist upbringing had taught me to look askance at the trappings of power. My head still rings with the glorious, measured cadences of 'St Clement':\n\n> So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,\n> \n> Like earth's proud empires, pass away;\n> \n> Thy kingdom stands, and grows for ever,\n> \n> Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.\n\nTo her very great credit, Queen Victoria, Empress of India, asked for this hymn to be sung at her Diamond Jubilee.\n\nHistorians and their publishers spend inordinate time and energy retailing the history of everything that they take to be powerful, prominent and impressive. They flood the bookshops, and their readers' minds, with tales of great powers, of great achievements, of great men and women, of victories, heroes and wars \u2013 especially the wars which 'we' are supposed to have won \u2013 and of the great evils which we opposed. In 2010, 380 books on the Third Reich were published in Great Britain alone. If not 'Might is Right', their motto could well be 'Nothing Succeeds Like Success'.\n\nHistorians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist, writing hundreds and thousands of books on British history, French history, German history, Russian history, American history, Chinese history, Indian history, Brazilian history or whatever. Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards. As soon as great powers arise, whether the United States in the twentieth century or China in the twenty-first, the call goes out for offerings on American History or Chinese History, and siren voices sing that today's important countries are also those whose past is most deserving of examination, that a more comprehensive spectrum of historical knowledge can be safely ignored. In this jungle of information about the past, the big beasts invariably win out. Smaller or weaker countries have difficulty in making their voices heard, and dead kingdoms have almost no advocates at all.\n\nOur mental maps are thus inevitably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and by accepted wisdom. If we continue to neglect other areas of the past, the blank spaces in our minds are reinforced, and we pile more and more knowledge into those compartments of which we are already aware. Partial knowledge becomes ever more partial, and ignorance becomes self-perpetuating.\n\nMatters are not improved by the trend towards ultra-specialization among professionals. The tsunami of information in today's Internet-dominated world is overwhelming; the number of journals to be read and of new sources to be consulted is multiplying geometrically, and many young historians feel compelled to restrict their efforts to tiny periods of time and minute patches of territory. They are drawn into discussing their work in arcane, academic jargon addressed to ever dwindling coteries of their like-minded peers, and the defensive cry goes up on every hand: 'That is not my period.' In consequence, since academic debate \u2013 indeed knowledge itself \u2013 progresses through newcomers challenging the methods and conclusions of their predecessors, the difficulties for historians of all ages in breaking out into unexplored territory, or of attempting to paint large-scale, inclusive panoramas, are rapidly increasing. With few exceptions \u2013 some of them of great value \u2013 the professionals stick to the well-worn ruts.\n\nIn this regard, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the great names of my youth had spotted the trend long since. My own tutor at Oxford, A. J. P. Taylor, roamed widely and fearlessly over many aspects of British and European history, setting us all a good example. But I did not realize until recently that Taylor's great rival, Hugh Trevor-Roper, had posed the problem in characteristically elegant fashion:\n\n> Today most professional historians 'specialise'. They choose a period, sometimes a very brief period, and within that period they strive, in desperate competition with ever-expanding evidence, to know all the facts. Thus armed, they can comfortably shoot down any amateurs who blunder... into their heavily fortified field... Theirs is a static world. They have a self-contained economy, a Maginot Line and large reserves... but they have no philosophy. For historical philosophy is incompatible with such narrow frontiers. It must apply to humanity in any period. To test it, a historian must dare to travel abroad, even in hostile country; to express it he must be ready to write essays on subjects on which he may be ill-equipped to write books.\n\nI wish I had read that earlier. Although Taylor apparently admired Trevor-Roper's _Essays_ , he did not recommend them to his students.\n\nThe above observations may be worth considering further, if only because mainstream history-making persists in its addiction to great powers, to narratives about the roots of the present and to ultra-specialized topics. The resultant image of life in the past is necessarily deficient. In reality, life is far more complex; it consists of failures, near misses and brave tries as well as triumphs and successes. Mediocrity, ungrasped opportunities and false starts, though unsensational _,_ are commonplace. The panorama of the past is indeed studded with greatness, but it is filled in the main with lesser powers, lesser people, lesser lives and lesser emotions. Most importantly, students of history need to be constantly reminded of the transience of power, for transience is one of the fundamental characteristics both of the human condition and of the political order. Sooner or later, all things come to an end. Sooner or later, the centre cannot hold. All states and nations, however great, bloom for a season and are replaced.\n\n_Vanished Kingdoms_ has been conceived with such sober but not particularly pessimistic truths in mind. Several of the case studies deal with states 'that once were great'. Some deal with realms that did not aspire to greatness. Others describe entities that never had a chance. All come from Europe, and all form a part of that strange jumble of crooked timbers which we call 'European History'.\n\n'Vanished Kingdoms' is a phrase, like 'Lost Worlds', which summons up many images. It recalls intrepid explorers trekking over the heights of the Himalayas or through the depths of the Amazonian jungle; or archaeologists, digging down through long-lost layers in the sites of Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt. The myth of Atlantis is never far away. Readers of the Old Testament are especially familiar with the concept. There were seven biblical kingdoms, we are told, between ancient Egypt and the Euphrates, and dedicated Old Testament scholars have laboured long and hard to establish a framework of dates and sites. Not much can be said with certainty about Ziklag, Edom, Zoboh, Moab, Gilead, Philistia and Geshur. Most information about them consists of fleeting allusions, such as: 'But Absalom fled, and went to Talmai, the son of Ammihud, king of Geshur. And David mourned for his son every day.' Today, after millennia of change and conflict, two of the would-be successor states to those seven kingdoms have been locked for decades in near impasse. One of them, despite overwhelming military power, has not been able to impose true peace; the other, already near-strangled, may never see the light of day.\n\nOf course, human nature dictates that everyone is lulled into thinking that disasters only happen to others. Imperial nations, and ex-imperial nations, are particularly reluctant to recognize how quickly reality moves on. Having lived a charmed life in the mid-twentieth century, and having held out against the odds in our 'Finest Hour', the British risk falling into a state of self-delusion which tells them that their condition is still as fine, that their institutions are above compare, that their country is somehow eternal. The English in particular are blissfully unaware that the disintegration of the United Kingdom began in 1922, and will probably continue; they are less aware of complex identities than are the Welsh, the Scots or the Irish. Hence, if the end does come, it will come as a surprise. Those who seriously believe 'There'll always be an England' are whistling in the dark. And yet it was one of England's most enduring poets, writing his 'Elegy' in the tranquil shade of the churchyard at Stoke Poges, who summed up the certainty facing states and individuals alike. Thomas Gray had the measure of our essential vanity:\n\n> The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,\n> \n> And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,\n> \n> Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:\n> \n> The paths of glory lead but to the grave.\n\nSooner or later the final blow always falls. Since the defeat of the Greater German Reich in 1945, obituaries have been written for several European states. They include the German Democratic Republic (1990), the Soviet Union (1991), Czechoslovakia (1992) and the Federation of Yugoslavia (2006). There will undoubtedly be more. The difficult question is, who will be next? Judging by its current dysfunctionality, Belgium could become Europe's next Great Auk, or perhaps Italy. It is impossible to say. And no one can forecast with any certainty whether the latest infant to join Europe's family of nations, the Republic of Kosovo, will sink or swim. But anyone imagining that the law of transience does not apply to them is living in _Nephelokokkygia_ (a word coined by Aristophanes to make his audience stop and think).\n\nModern education may have something to answer for here. In the days, not too distant, when all educated Europeans were brought up on a mixture of the Christian Gospels and the ancient classics, everyone was all too familiar with the idea of mortality, for states as well as individuals. Though Christian precepts were widely disregarded, they did teach of a kingdom 'not of this world'. The classics, propagating supposedly universal values, were the product of a revered but dead civilization. The 'Glory that was Greece' and the 'Grandeur that was Rome' had evaporated thousands of years before; they suffered the fate of Carthage and Tyre, but were still alive in people's minds.\n\nSomehow my own education at school and university must have slipped through before the rot set in. At Bolton School I learned Latin, started Greek, and took my turn at the daily Bible readings in the Great Hall; my history and geography teachers, Bill Brown and Harold Porter, both encouraged their sixth form pupils to read books in foreign languages. During my year in France, at Grenoble, I sat in the library ploughing my way through much of Michelet and Lavisse in the hope that something would rub off. At Magdalen College, K. B. McFarlane, A. J. P. Taylor and John Stoye, a matchless trio of tutors, awaited me. In my very first tutorial, McFarlane told me, in a voice as gentle as his cats, 'not to believe everything that you read in books'; Taylor was to tell me later to forget a doctorate and write a book myself, because 'D.Phils are for second-raters'; his politics were puzzling, his pose to his pupils avuncular, his lecturing magnificent and his prose style delicious. Stoye, who was researching the Siege of Vienna at the time, helped push my horizons to the East. As a postgraduate at Sussex, I studied Russian, only to be cured of all pan-Slav illusions by a long spell in Poland. At the Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, I found myself in the care of senior historians, like Henryk Batowski and Jozef Gierowski, whose careers were devoted to limiting the inroads of a totalitarian regime, and who as a result had a passionate belief in the existence of historical truth. Back in Oxford at St Antony's, I sat at the feet of giants such as William Deakin, Max Hayward and Ronald Hingley, who rolled history, politics, literature and hair-raising wartime escapades into one; my supervisor was the late Harry Willetts, Polonist, Russicist and translator of Solzhenitsyn; his speciality seminars took place in the kitchen of his house on Church Walk, where one heard at first hand from his Polish wife, Halina, what deportation to Stalinist Siberia really involved. When I finally found an academic post at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies in London, I stepped into the shadow of Hugh Seton-Watson, a polyglot of immense learning, who never forgot throughout the Cold War that Europe consisted of two halves. Hugh wrote a review of my first book, anonymously as the practice of the _TLS_ then was, confessing to it some ten years later. All of us at SSEES were struggling to convey the realities of closed societies to audiences living in an open one; we were all tending slender intellectual flames that were in danger of blowing out. And that was an education in itself.\n\nToday the barbarians have broken into the garden. Most schoolchildren have never met with Homer or Virgil; some receive no religious instruction of any sort; and the teaching of modern languages has almost ground to a halt. History itself has to fight for a reduced place in the curriculum alongside apparently more important subjects such as Economics, or IT, or Sociology or Media Studies. Materialism and consumerism are rife. Young people have to learn in a cocoon filled with false optimism. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they grow up with very little sense of the pitiless passage of time.\n\nThe task of the historian, therefore, goes beyond the duty of tending the generalized memory. When a few events in the past are remembered pervasively, to the exclusion of equally deserving subjects, there is a need for determined explorers to stray from the beaten track and to recover some of the less fashionable memory sites. It is akin to the work of the ecologists and environmentalists who care for endangered species, and of those who, by studying the fate of the dodo and the dinosaur, build up a true picture both of our planet's condition and of its prospects. The present exploration of a selection of extinct realms has been pursued with a similar sense of curiosity. The historian who sets out on the trail of The 'Kingdom of the Rock' or The 'Republic of One Day' shares the excitement of people who track down the lairs of the snow leopard or the Siberian tiger. 'I saw pale kings,' the poet recalls, 'and princes too. \/ Pale warriors, death-pale were they all...'\n\nThe theme of mankind's hubris, of course, is not new. It is older than the Greeks who invented the word, and who, in the period of their greatness, discovered the statues of the Egyptian pharaohs already half-buried in the desert sands.\n\n> 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:\n> \n> Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'\n> \n> Nothing beside remains. Round the decay\n> \n> Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare\n> \n> The lone and level sands stretch far away.\n\nFrom the day of this book's conception I have concentrated on two priorities: to highlight the contrast between times present and times past, and to explore the workings of historical memory. These priorities suggested that each of the studies should have a three-part structure. Part I of every chapter therefore paints a sketch of some European location as it appears today. Part II then tells the narrative of a 'vanished kingdom' that once inhabited the same location. Part III examines the extent to which the vanished kingdom has either been remembered or forgotten; usually it is poorly remembered or half-forgotten, or completely derelict.\n\nI have also been at pains to present vanished kingdoms drawn from as many of the main periods and regions of European history as space would allow. Tolosa, for example, comes from Western Europe, Litva and Galicia from the East. Alt Clud and \u00c9ire are based in the British Isles, Borussia in the Baltic, Tsernagora in the Balkans, and Aragon in Iberia and the Mediterranean. The chapter covering the 'Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms' of Burgundia tells a medieval story that straddles modern France and Germany; Sabaudia deals mainly with the early modern period while linking France, Switzerland and Italy; and Rosenau and CCCP are confined to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.\n\nIt goes without saying that the subject of vanished kingdoms cannot be exhausted by the limited collection of examples presented here. The 'history of half-forgotten Europe' is far more extensive than any partial selection can cover. Many earlier candidates have had to be dropped, if only for reasons of space. One such study, 'Kerno', examines King Mark's kingdom in post-Roman Cornwall, and is decorated by reflections on the theme of cultural genocide and excerpts from the work of the Cornish poet Norman Davies. Another study, 'De Grote Appel: A Short-Lived Dutch Colony', sets out the history of New Amsterdam before it was transformed into New York. A third, 'Carnaro: The Regency of the First _duce_ ', tells the extraordinary story of Gabriele d'Annunzio's takeover in Fiume in 1919 and concludes with his exquisite poem, ' _La pioggia nel pineto'_ , 'Rain in the Pinewood'.\n\nIn these endeavours, I have inevitably relied heavily on the work of others. No historian can have a thorough knowledge of all parts and periods of European history, and all good generalists feast heartily on the dishes served up by their specialist confr\u00e8res. Anyone setting out into unfamiliar territory needs to be armed with maps and guides and the accounts of those who went before. In the early stages of research, I gained enormously from the advice of specialist colleagues such as the late Rees Davies on the Old North, David Abulafia on Aragon, or Micha\u0142 Giedroy\u0107 on Lithuania, and almost every chapter has benefited greatly from expert studies and scholarly consultations. In short, every single section of my little cathedral has been built from the bricks, stones and drawings of someone else.\n\nI have always loved Plato's metaphor of the 'ship of state'. The idea of a great vessel, with its helmsman, crew and complement of passengers, ploughing its way across the oceans of time, is irresistible. So, too, are the many poems which celebrate it:\n\n> _O navis, referent in mare te novi_\n> \n> _fluctus! O quid agis? Fortiter occupa_\n> \n> _portum! Nonne vides ut_\n> \n> _nudum remigio latus..._ 18\n\nOr again:\n\n> Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!\n> \n> Sail on, O Union, strong and great!\n> \n> Humanity with all its fears,\n> \n> With all the hopes of future years,\n> \n> Is hanging breathless on thy fate\n\nThese lines from Longfellow were written out by President Roosevelt in his own hand, and sent to Winston Churchill on 20 January 1941. They were accompanied by a note which said, 'I think this verse applies to your people as it does to us.'\n\nThe same thoughts come to mind when brains are racked about kingdoms that have vanished. For ships of state do not sail on for ever. They sometimes ride the storms, and sometimes founder. On occasion they limp into port to be refitted; on other occasions, damaged beyond repair, they are broken up; or they sink, slipping beneath the surface to a hidden resting place among the barnacles and the fishes.\n\nIn this connection, another string of images presents itself, in which the historian becomes a beachcomber and treasure-seeker, a collector of flotsam and jetsam, a raiser of wrecks, a diver of the deep, scouring the seabed to recover what was lost. This book certainly sits comfortably in the category of historical salvage. It garners the traces of ships of state that sank, and it invites the reader, if only on the page, to watch with delight as the stricken galleons straighten their fallen masts, draw up their anchors, fill their sails and reset their course across the ocean swell.\n\nNorman Davies\n\n_Peterhouse and St Antony's  \nApril 2011_\n\n## 1\n\n## Tolosa\n\n_Sojourn of the Visigoths ( AD 418\u2013507)_\n\n##### I\n\nVouill\u00e9, formerly Vouill\u00e9-la-Bataille, is a small country _bourg_ of some three thousand souls in the French D\u00e9partement de la Vienne, and _chef-lieu_ of a rural commune in the region of Poitou-Charente. It lies close to the Route Nationale 149, the old Roman road that runs from Poitiers to Nantes, and it is traversed by a pleasant stream, the Auzance, as it meanders towards the Atlantic. It boasts two churches, two schools, a tiny central square entered through an arch, a large _terrain de p\u00e9tanques_ , some fine riverside gardens, a town hall, a couple of restaurants, a modest stadium, a tall water tower, a listed chateau-hotel, Le P\u00e9rigny, a Saturday market, and no special celebrity. It is also the presumed site of an early sixth-century battle. A memorial plaque, erected by the local history society in 2007 on the 1,500th anniversary, is so well hidden that the _Office de tourisme_ in the square cannot always say exactly where it is.\n\nIn one of those delectable adjectival flourishes which the French language adores, the inhabitants of Vouill\u00e9 rejoice in the name of Vouglaisiens or Vouglaisiennes; they call the surrounding district, popular with ramblers, the Pays Vouglaisien. Not surprisingly, they take great pride in their _patrimoine_ , the legacy of their forebears. A statement made in 1972 by the president of the local Syndicat d'Initiative can be found both on the municipal website and on a simple monument erected at the Carrefour de Clovis. ' _L'histoire de la France_ ', it says with no noticeable modesty, ' _commen\u00e7a donc a Vouill\u00e9'_ ('The history of France began at Vouill\u00e9').\n\n##### II\n\nOn 24 August 410 Alaric the Visigoth achieved the ultimate goal of the many barbarian chiefs who invaded the crumbling Roman Empire of the West. At the third attempt, he sacked Rome:\n\n> Having surrounded the city and once more reduced the inhabitants to the verge of starvation, he effected an entry at night through the Salarian Gate... This time, the king was in no humour to spare the capital of the world. The sack lasted for two or three days. Some respect was shown for churches... [but] the palace of Sallust... was burned down; and excavations on the Aventine [Hill], then a fashionable aristocratic quarter, have revealed many traces of the fires which destroyed the plundered houses. A rich booty and numerous captives, including the Emperor's sister, Galla Placidia, were taken.\n> \n> On the third day, Alaric led his triumphant host forth... and marched southward... His object was to cross over to Africa, probably for the purpose of establishing his people in that rich country... But his days were numbered. He died at Consentia [Cosenza] before the end of the year.\n\nAlaric's name meant 'the Ruler of All'.\n\nAlaric's people, known as the Visigoths \u2013 in German, the _Westgoten_ \u2013 had been the first of the Germanic hordes to break into the Roman Empire. Originating in the distant Baltic region but long settled in the abandoned province of Dacia (in modern Romania), they were semi-itinerant agriculturalists who typically stayed for long periods in one fertile vicinity before moving on to the next. They were also converts to the Arian branch of Christianity.* Displaced from their earlier districts of residence, they were seeking a new place to rest. But they never made it to Africa. Instead, being stranded in southern Italy after the sack of Rome, they bargained their way to a new accommodation with the Romans. Their success inspired their Gothic kinsfolk whom they had left far behind in Eastern Europe. Within three generations, their cousins, the Ostro- or 'Eastern' Goths, would follow them on the road to Italy.\n\nThe Visigoths were not a tribe, in the usual sense of the word; and there is some doubt whether their name can be etymologically connected with 'the West'. They had been brought together from a variety of ethnic components during Alaric's wanderings, and they only acquired the 'Western' epithet after becoming separated from the main Gothic concentration.\n\nAlaric's exploits broke the spell that held back many of his barbarian counterparts. As a Byzantine commentator had noted, the Empire was not protected by 'rivers, lagoons or parapets, but by fear' \u2013 fear being 'an obstacle that no man has surmounted once he is convinced that he is inferior'. Thanks to Alaric, the barbarians lost their sense of inferiority.\n\nThe spectacular rites of Alaric's funeral caused comment among the ancients, and have inspired much speculation among modern historians and anthropologists:\n\n> The ferocious character of the barbarians was displayed in the funeral of a hero whose valour... they celebrated with mournful applause... they forcibly diverted the course of the Busentinus, a small river that washes the walls of Consentia. The royal sepulchre, adorned with the splendid spoils and trophies of Rome, was constructed in the vacant bed; the waters were then restored to their natural channel; and the secret spot where the remains of Alaric had been deposited was for ever concealed by the inhuman massacre of the prisoners who had been employed to execute the work.\n\nDespite his sensational reputation, however, 'the Ruler of All' achieved none of his long-term objectives. He was the eternal wanderer, who constantly switched his allegiance. In turn he had been Rome's ally, Rome's enemy, Rome's destroyer, a legitimate emperor's protector and a usurper's partner.\n\nIn Alaric's time, the Western Empire was inundated by barbarian hordes moving across the Empire's frontiers in many directions. Britannia was succumbing to Picts from the north, to Scots from Hibernia and to Germanic raiders besieging 'the Saxon shore' to the south-east. Roman Gaul had been transfixed by 'the horde of hordes' that crossed the frozen Rhine in the winter of 406\/7. War-bands of Vandals, Alans and Suevi were ransacking Gallia Aquitania in the south and spilling over the mountains into Iberia. Further hordes, including the Huns, were lining up to take the Visigoths' route through the Danubian provinces.\n\nAlaric's successor as leader of the Visigoths, therefore, struck a deal with imperial Rome. Ataulf \u2013 the 'Noble Wolf' \u2013 agreed to leave Italy and to chase his fellow barbarians from Gaul and Spain. His one condition was that he could return to the status of an imperial _foederatus_ or 'ally', which Alaric had once enjoyed. As reported by a contemporary, the historian Paulus Orosius, Ataulf's 'Declaration' makes interesting reading:\n\n> I once aspired [he said]... to obliterate the name of Rome; to erect on its ruins the dominion of the Goths; and to acquire, like Augustus, the immortal fame of the founder of a new empire. By repeated experiments [however,] I was gradually convinced that laws are essentially necessary... and that the fierce untractable humour of the Goths was incapable of bearing the salutary yoke of... civil government... it is now my sincere wish that the gratitude of future ages should acknowledge the merit of a stranger, who employed the sword of the Goths, not to subvert, but to restore and maintain, the prosperity of the Roman empire.\n\nThe decade following Alaric's death was filled with violent conflict not only between the Visigoths and their rivals but also among the leading Visigothic families. Ataulf marched his people from Italy to southern Gaul and Spain, where they attacked the Vandals, Suevi and Alans. At the same time, a simmering feud between Alaric's own dynasty and the rival Amalfings was reignited. Ataulf, who had married the captive Galla Placidia, was murdered in his palace at Barcelona in 415, together with their children. So, too, was his immediate successor, Sidericus, 'the king of five days'. The man who then emerged as leader, a brave warrior and an astute diplomat called Vallia, is sometimes identified as Alaric's bastard son. It was Vallia who negotiated the key treaty whereby the Visigoths reconfirmed their status as imperial allies and received a permanent home in Roman Aquitania.\n\nThe 'Kingdom of Tolosa', therefore, started its life as a dependent but autonomous imperial sub-state. It occupied one of the three parts into which Gaul had traditionally been divided, and it was ruled by its tribal chiefs operating under the standard rules of imperial _hospitalitas_. By decree of the Emperor Honorius, the Visigoths took possession of their new capital of Palladia Tolosa (the modern Toulouse) in 418. After Vallia, they were to be ruled for the rest of the century by five kings: Theodoric I, Thorismund, Theodoric II, Euric and Alaric II. Theodoric I and Alaric II would both be killed in battle. Thorismund and Theodoric II were both murdered. Euric, the younger brother of both Thorismund and of the second Theodoric, brought the kingdom to the peak of its wealth and power.\n\nThe Visigoths took over Aquitania after a long period of disquiet, apparently without provoking serious opposition. The Gallo-Roman nobility, which had once joined a rebel Gallic Empire, were not noted for their docility. Yet the new overlords were zealous imitators of Roman ideals, and the smack of strong government went unopposed. The Visigothic kings were given to taking hostages and to punishing disloyal subjects, but they did not indulge in gratuitous violence. Numerous Romans entered their service, notably the military general Nepotanius, the admiral Namatius of Saintes, and Victorius, the _dux super septem civitates_ , or 'commander of Septimania'. The Visigoths did not legislate separately for the Gallo-Romans, suggesting a willingness to assimilate; a new system of land tenure did not involve significant confiscations; and in religious matters, the Arian practices of the Visigothic clergy proceeded in parallel to the well-established network of Roman bishoprics and rural churches. The fact that the General Church Council of Agde could take place in Visigothic territory in 506 suggests that the non-Arians had no special fear for their safety.\n\nThe Roman city of Tolosa, built on the plain beneath an ancient Celtic hill fort, had been given the epithet Palladia by the Emperor Domitian in honour of the goddess Pallas Athena, patroness of the arts. Surrounded by walls of Augustan vintage, it was fully furnished with aqueducts, theatres, baths and an elaborate sewage system, and it served the strategic Via Aquitania, which ran across southern Gaul from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. From the fourth century onwards, it was an active centre of imperial Christianity and the seat of a bishop. St Saturnin, one of the first apostles of Gaul, had been martyred in Tolosa in _c._ 257, dragged through the streets by a wild bull. The basilica where his relics were guarded was the main focus of Nicene worship. The chief church of the Arians was at Nostra Domina Daurata, founded in the mid-fifth century on the site of a former temple to Apollo.\n\nAquitania, in fact, had a long tradition of energetic theological debate. St Hilarius of Poitiers ( _c_. 300\u2013368) was renowned as the _Malleus Arianorum_ , an early 'Hammer of the Arians'. St Experius (d. 410), bishop of Tolosa, is remembered as the recipient of a letter from Pope Innocent I that fixed the canon of Holy Scripture. The priest Vigilantius ( _fl_. _c_. 400), in contrast, was regarded as a bold dissident who condemned the superstitious cult of saints and relics. St Prosper of Aquitania ( _c_. 390\u2013455) was a historian, a disciple of St Augustine and the first continuator of Jerome's Universal Chronicle; and St Rusticus of Narbonne (d. 461), a champion of what would later emerge as 'Catholicism', battled against both the new Nestorian heresy * and the older Arianism of his Visigoth masters.\n\nOnce Visigothic rule was established, the kingdom expanded dramatically. Acquisitions were made in almost every decade of the fifth century. The conquest of Narbo Martius (Narbonne) in 436 provided direct access to the Mediterranean. The whole of Septimania followed later by gift of the imperial authorities. In the aftermath of the mid-century irruption of the Huns, the Visigoths roamed far to the north, well beyond the Loire, and in 470 they surged into central Gaul, incorporating both Civitas Turanorum (Tours) and Arvernis (Clermont). After that, they took possession of Arelate (Arles) and Massilia (Marseille), and, during a systematic campaign of conquest in Iberia, reached the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar). From 474, a Roman in the Visigothic service, Vincentius, ruled as the king's deputy in Iberia with the title of _dux hispaniarum_. By the turn of the century, they controlled the largest of all the states in the post-Roman West, and looked set to become the principal winner among the Empire's barbarian predators.\n\nTheodoric I, or Theodorid (r. 419\u201351), was blessed with numerous sons and daughters, and used them to found an elaborate network of dynastic alliances. But he is best remembered both by contemporary chroniclers and by later historians for his valiant part in the repulse of Attila's Huns. He perished as a faithful ally of the imperial general, Flavius Aetius, leading his warriors in June 451 into the bloody fray of the Catalaunian Fields* which preserved Gaul from the most terrible horsemen of the steppes. He was succeeded in turn by three of his sons.\n\nAccording to Gibbon, Thorismund (r. 451\u20133) had played the key role in the victory where his father perished, holding his forces in reserve on the nearby heights until he swept down and drove the Huns from the field. The victory brought him little reward. He was murdered by his brother Theodoric before his power could be consolidated, reputedly for threatening to break with the Roman alliance.\n\nTheodoric II (r. 453\u201366), has enlivened the historical record partly through the colourful name of his wife, Queen Pedauco \u2013 meaning 'Goose Foot' \u2013 and partly through a rare eyewitness description of him by the Latin writer Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius (432\u201388) was bishop of Arvernis, and hence a subject of the Visigoths. One of his surviving letters answered a request from a friend to describe the king in detail:\n\n> Well, he is a man worth knowing... He is well set up, in height above the average man, but below the giant. His head is round, with curled hair retreating... His nervous neck is free from disfiguring knots. The eyebrows are bushy and arched; when the lids droop, the lashes reach almost half-way down the cheeks. The upper ears are buried under overlying locks, after the fashion of his race. The nose is finely aquiline; the lips are thin and not [unduly] enlarged... Every day the hair springing from his nostrils is cut back;... and his barber is assiduous in eradicating the rich growth on the lower part of the face. Chin, throat, and neck are full, but not fat, and all of fair complexion... they often flush, but from modesty, and not from anger. His shoulders are smooth, the upper- and forearms strong and hard; hands broad, breast prominent; waist receding. The spine dividing the broad expanse of back does not project, and you can see the spring of the ribs; the sides swell with salient muscle, the well-girt flanks are full of vigour. His thighs are like hard horn; the knee-joints firm and masculine; the knees themselves the comeliest and least wrinkled in the world. A full ankle supports the leg, and the foot is small to bear such mighty limbs.\n> \n>... Before daybreak he goes with a very small suite to attend the service of his priests. He prays with assiduity, but... one may suspect more of habit than conviction in his piety. Administrative duties... take up the rest of the morning. Armed nobles stand about the royal seat; the mass of guards in their garb of skins are... kept at the threshold... [F]oreign envoys are introduced. The king hears them out, and says little;... but accelerates matters ripe for dispatch. The second hour arrives; he rises from the throne to inspect his treasure-chamber or stable.\n\nThe bishop, clearly an admirer, warms to the task:\n\n> If the chase is the order of the day, he joins it, but never carries his bow at his side, considering this derogatory to royal state. When a bird or beast is marked for him... he puts his hand behind his back and takes the bow from a page with the string all hanging loose... He will ask you beforehand what you would like him to transfix; you choose, and he hits. If there is a miss... your vision will mostly be at fault, and not the archer's skill.\n> \n> On ordinary days, his table resembles that of a private person. The board does not groan beneath a mass of dull and unpolished silver set on by panting servitors; the weight lies rather in the conversation than in the plate; there is either sensible talk or none. The hangings and draperies... are sometimes of purple silk, sometimes only of linen; art, not costliness, commends the fare... Toasts are few... In short, you will find the elegance of Greece, the good cheer of Gaul, Italian nimbleness... and everywhere the discipline of a king's house... The siesta after dinner is... sometimes intermitted. When inclined for the board-game, he is quick to gather up the dice, examines them with care, shakes the box with expert hand, throws rapidly, humorously apostrophizes them, and patiently waits the issue. Silent at a good throw, he makes merry over a bad [one]... always the philosopher... Sometimes, though this is rare, supper is enlivened by sallies of mimes, but no guest is ever exposed to the wound of a biting tongue. Withal there is no noise of hydraulic organ, or choir with its conductor intoning a set piece; you will hear no players of lyre or flute, no master of the music, no girls with cithara or tabor; the king cares for no strains but those which no less charm the mind with virtue than the ear with melody. When he rises to withdraw, the treasury watch begins its vigil; armed sentries stand on guard during the first hours of slumber... I must stay my pen; you asked for nothing more than one or two facts... and my own aim was to write a letter, not a history. Farewell.\n\nTheodoric II's reign came to grief through the vagaries of imperial politics. In 455, the newly appointed Roman commander in Gaul, Eparchius Avitus, visited Tolosa. News arrived during his visit that Rome had been sacked for a second time, by the Vandals; and Theodoric seized the opportunity to proclaim Avitus emperor. He then conducted the first of the Visigoths' incursions into Iberia, justifying his conquests as the recovery of imperial land. His claims did not convince the next emperor, Majorian, described by Gibbon as 'a great and heroic character', who briefly reasserted imperial authority in Gaul with energy.\n\nTheodoric's younger brother, Euric (or Evaric or Erwig, r. 466\u201384), seized power in the midst of military conflicts involving not only Visigoths and imperial forces but also a number of Visigothic factions. He killed his brother, defeated a rampaging Celtic warlord, Riothamus, recrossed the Pyrenees and settled a body of Ostrogothic mercenaries from Roman service in his lands. Lawgiver as well as warrior chief, he turned out to be the most rounded personality of his House. Though familiar with Latin, he usually spoke to foreign envoys in Gothic through an interpreter. The Arian services of his royal chapel were also conducted in Gothic. He extended his realms right across Iberia. The _Codex Euricianus_ of 471 was the first attempt in the post-Roman world to commit a summary of customary Germanic laws to writing. It was a sign of political maturity. In 476, Euric persuaded the penultimate emperor of the West, Julius Nepos, to relinquish even nominal Roman suzerainty over the Visigoths' lands. Before he died, the Roman Empire in the West had collapsed completely. The Kingdom of Tolosa was left orphaned and sovereign.\n\nMeticulous scholarship has tracked the progression of Visigothic kingship in the fifth century. In the first stage, the tendency was to emulate all forms of Roman legal practice and Latin titles. In the middle stage, the _Reges Gothorum_ saw themselves as something better than mere _foederati_. In the last stage, as successors to the Empire, they thought themselves as good as any emperor. Over the same decades, the upper stratum of Visigothic society, the _optimates_ , gradually lost their influence. Germanic tradition had stressed the equality of all warriors. Post-Roman monarchy stressed hierarchy and regal dignity.\n\nThanks to the Frankish chronicler Gregory of Tours (534\u201394), Euric has been stained with the label of a persecutor of Catholics. The insinuation is unjust. A few dissaffected clerics like Bishop Quinctianus of Civitas Rutenorum (Rodez) were driven into exile. But nothing occurred to match the savage persecutions perpetrated by the Arian Vandals in North Africa.\n\nShortly after the deaths both of Euric and of Romulus Augustulus, the last of the Western emperors, Flavius Teodoricus, alias Theodoric the Ostrogoth, accepted Byzantine instructions to march on Italy and to restore imperial fortunes. He crossed the Alps with a huge army in 488, scattered the defenders of the post-Roman order, and killed its leader, Odoacer, with his own bare hands, after a three-year siege of Ravenna. Calling on the aid of his Visigoth cousins, he overran the Italian peninsula from end to end and assumed the title of 'vice-emperor'. Bolstered by the military and cultural power of Byzantium, and by great maritime potential, his Ostrogothic kingdom based at Ravenna soon threatened to overshadow its neighbours and rivals. In addition to the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa, it bordered the (second) Kingdom of the Burgundians recently established in the valley of the Rh\u00f4ne (see pp. 94\u2013).\n\nEuric's son, Alaric II, who succeeded as a boy in 484, was the eighth of the royal line. He spent much energy mollifying neighbours and subjects alike. His greatest achievement lay in the preparation of the famous _Breviarum Alarici_ , a highly refined compilation of Roman law. This work, which interpreted laws as well as summarizing them, was approved by a committee of nobles and clerics before being promulgated in 506. It would become a standard text throughout post-Roman Gaul until the eleventh century. Furthermore, Alaric courted the Ostrogoths. He married Theodoric's daughter, and with her produced an infant son, bringing the prospect of a vast and combined pan-Gothic federation into view.\n\nAlaric's nemesis, however, arrived in the shape of Clovis, king of the Germanic Franks, who from the 480s had begun to extend his realm into Gaul from the Rhineland and who was already busy undermining the Burgundians. Clovis was a neophyte Catholic with limitless ambitions, and the ruler most likely to feel threatened by a union of the Goths. In 497 he had joined with the Bretons to mount an attack along the western coast of Aquitaine, where the port of Burdigala (Bordeaux) was briefly occupied. Sometime after that, he won a crushing victory over his eastern neighbours, the Alemanni, and felt free to pay more attention to the south. Alaric's instinct was to avoid confrontation. He had once handed back a Frankish fugitive, Syagrius, who had dared to challenge Clovis. Gregory of Tours reports how the Visigoth insisted on going to Ambaciensis (Amboise), where he engaged Clovis in face-to-face conversation on an island of the River Loire:\n\n> _Igitur Alaricus rex Gothorum cum viderit, Chlodovechum regem gentes assiduae debellare, legatus ad eum dirigit, dicens:_ ' _Si frater meus vellit, insederat animo, ut nos Deo propitio pariter videremus.'_...\n> \n> When Alaric King of the Goths saw the constant conquests which Clovis was making, he sent delegates to him, saying: 'If my brother so agrees, I propose that we hold a conversation together, under God's auspices.' And when Clovis did not reply, Alaric went to meet him regardless, and they talked and ate and drank, and left each other in peace.\n\nAs it turned out, Clovis could not be assuaged so easily. Recently allied both to the Burgundians, by marriage, and to the Byzantine emperor, who granted him the title of imperial consul, he aimed to steal a march on his rivals. A joint campaign against the Visigothic realm was agreed. The Byzantines were to patrol the southern coast. The Franks were to march from the north. An offer of parley from Theodoric the Ostrogoth was spurned. It was the spring of 507, and a 'flaming meteor' was lighting up the night sky:\n\n> _Igitur Chlodovechus rex ait suis:_ ' _Valde molestum fero, quod hi Arriani partem teneant Galliarum..._\n> \n> King Clovis, therefore, addressed his warriors: 'It pains me that these Arians are holding such a large part of the Gauls. Let us march with God's aid, and reduce them to our power...' So the army moved off [from Tours] in the direction of Poitiers... Reaching the River Vigenna [Vienne], which was swollen by rain, the Franks did not know how to cross until a huge hind appeared and showed them how the river could be forded... Pitching his tent on a hill near Poitiers, the king saw smoke rising from the Church of St Hilaire, and took it as a sign that he was to triumph over the heretics.\n\nThe scene for the fateful battle was set:\n\n> So Clovis came to grips with Alaric, King of the Goths, in the plain of Vouill\u00e9 [ _in campo Vogladense_ ], three leagues from the city. As was their custom, the Goths feigned flight. But Clovis killed Alaric with his own hand, himself escaping [an ambush] thanks to the strength of his breastplate and the speed of his horse.\n\nThe outcome, therefore, was undisputable (and the Vouglaisiens have proof positive of their name's derivation). The power of the Visigoths in Gaul was broken in a few hours. And the Franks pressed on. Some of them rode over the central mountains to garner lands as far as the Burgundian frontier. Clovis made for Burdigala, where he wintered before sacking Tolosa the following spring. A remnant of Alaric's forces made a stand at Narbonne, but most of them withdrew to the line of the Pyrenees. The Gallic heartland of their kingdom was abandoned. Henceforth, the Visigoths would rule in Iberia alone, preserving their ascendancy there until the arrival of the Moors two centuries later.\n\nExplanations of the Frankish victory differ widely. The victors' version conveyed by Gregory of Tours stressed the hand of a Catholic God who had aided his Catholic warriors. Even Edward Gibbon stressed the role of religion, imaginatively casting the Gallo-Roman nobility in the role of a Catholic fifth column. His arguments are now contested. He is on safer ground when he writes of the fickle fortunes of war. 'Such is the empire of Fortune (if we may still disguise our ignorance under that popular name)', wrote Gibbon loftily, 'that it is almost equally difficult to foresee the events of war, or to explain their various consequences.'\n\nFor a decade or more, Theodoric the Ostrogoth continued to pursue his pan-Gothic dreams. He was the designated guardian of his grandson, Alaric II's young heir, Amalric, and the nominal overlord of a supposedly nascent 'empire' stretching from the Alps to the Atlantic. Yet the pillars of his own power were crumbling. He could not maintain order in Italy, let alone challenge the Franks in Gaul or assist the Visigoths in Spain. The moment was ripe for the Roman emperors in Constantinople to launch yet another strategic offensive. Shortly after Theodoric died in 526, the Emperor Justinian prepared to lead his legions to the West in person. For the rest of the sixth century, as Alaric's descendants consolidated their hold on Iberia, imperial troops remained in Italy, while the successors of Clovis the Frank put their shoulder to the long task of transforming Gallia into Francia, and Francia into France.\n\n##### III\n\nThough the Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa lasted for eighty-nine years over a wide area, the physical evidence for its existence is minimal. Archaeological excavations have yielded almost nothing. Although one gold _solidus_ of Alaric II has survived, most coins from Visigothic Tolosa carry imperial inscriptions. Several hundred marble sarcophagi from the period bear no marks of identification. Almost everything that is known comes from fragmentary written sources. Even the site of the battle with Clovis is not entirely certain. One group of antiquarians equates Gregory's _campus Vogladensis_ with Vouill\u00e9, another group insists on locating it at the nearby village of Voulon. There is almost no mention of the Visigoths in the widespread 'Heritage' activities of Toulouse and Aquitaine. Only recently has a comprehensive bibliography been compiled to help scholars piece the jigsaw together.\n\nThe church of Nostra Domina Daurata \u2013 Notre-Dame de la Daurade \u2013 whose origins were connected with the Visigoths, was totally demolished in 1761 to make way for the construction of Toulouse's riverside quays. It had housed the shrine of a Black Madonna. The original icon was stolen in the fifteenth century, and its first replacement was burned by revolutionaries in 1799. Prints survive of an early medieval octagonal chapel lined with marble columns and golden mosaics. The present-day basilica, like the cathedral of St Saturnin, is entirely modern.\n\nFortunately, the maps and the museums are not totally bare. A cluster of place names featuring the suffix _-ens_ , as in Douzens, Pezens and Sauzens, all in the D\u00e9partement de l'Aude, is judged to betray Visigothic origins. The village of Dieupentale (Tarn-et-Garonne) possesses the only name of exclusively Visigothic provenance: _diup_ meaning 'deep', and _dal_ , 'valley'. Certain modest types of bronzes, eagle brooches and glassware are classed in the same way, thanks to similarities with finds in Rome's former Danubian provinces. And on the road between Narbonne and Carcassonne one passes the imposing whale-back Montagne d'Alaric. Local sources explain its name by reference to fortifications dating to the reign of Ataulf, and to a persistent myth concerning the last king of Tolosa's last resting place. The mountain shelters the ruins of a medieval priory, St Pierre d'Alaric and, on its northern slopes, a registered wine region which produces vintage wines within the scope of AOC Corbi\u00e8res.\n\nNowadays, some of the strongest hints of a Visigothic past in southern France emanate unexpectedly from wild legends, from historical fiction, and in particular from one small village deep in the Pyrenean foothills. Rennes-le-Ch\u00e2teau is a walled, hilltop hamlet in the Pays de Raz\u00e8s, containing perhaps twenty houses, a church and a medieval castle. It commands enchanting views over the Val des Couleurs, and stands beneath the 'Holy Mountain' of Bugarach, starting point of Jules Verne's _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_. Identified as the ancient city of Rhedae, it gained a reputation in the nineteenth century for having been the impregnable stronghold of the Visigoths after their expulsion from none-too-distant Tolosa. The stone pillars of the parish church were said to be of Visigothic origin, and fabulous rumours of buried treasure proliferated.\n\nIn 1885, the parish was taken over by an extraordinary, not to say notorious vicar, Father B\u00e9renger Sauni\u00e8re (1852\u20131917). Together with his neighbour and colleague, the Abb\u00e9 Boudet of nearby Rennes-les-Bains, author of a bizarre volume on ancient Celtic languages, Father Sauni\u00e8re dabbled both in history and in the occult. When renovating his church, he claimed to have discovered three parchments hidden inside a Visigothic pillar and covered in coded messages. Soon afterwards, he showed signs of ostentatious and unexplained wealth; the splendid villa and fake medieval folly which he built are still in place. When he was dying, his deathbed confession so shocked his confessor that the vicar was denied the last rites. His favourite motto, reportedly, was a quotation from Balzac: ' _Il y a deux histoires: l_ ' _histoire officielle, menteuse, et l_ ' _histoire secr\u00e8te, o\u00f9 sont les v\u00e9ritables causes des \u00e9v\u00e9nements_ ' ('There are two sorts of history: lying official history and secret history, where the true causes of events can be found').\n\nTo be fair, the Visigoths form only one of many elements in the fantastical pot-pourri of stories that have circulated since Father Sauni\u00e8re's death. They have been resurrected in the company of Cathars, Templars, Rosicrucians, the shadowy Priory of Sion, and the Holy Grail itself. Dan Brown's _The Da Vinci Code_ is but one of a dozen books that feed off the mysterious tales. According to taste, the secret Treasure of Rhedae is variously described as the 'Jewels of the Visigoths' carried off from Rome or from Tolosa, or the 'Hoard of Jerusalem', brought by the Visigoths from Byzantium. The link with the so-called 'bloodline of Christ' hangs on yet more far-fetched suppositions, namely that St Mary Magdalene travelled to southern Gaul and that her descendants married into local Visigothic families.\n\nNonetheless, despite the efforts of the Vouglaisiens and the Rennains \u2013 not to be confused with the Rennois of Rennes-les-Bains \u2013 the modern French nation has never really warmed to the Visigoths. Their trail is far stronger in Spain than in the country where their statehood began. This is only to be expected. After the retreat from Aquitania, the Visigoths established themselves as the dominant element in Iberia. Their second realm, the Kingdom of Toledo, lasted twice as long as the Kingdom of Tolosa, and has penetrated deeply into modern Spanish consciousness. The Visigothic kings, including the monarchs of Tolosa, are honoured by statues in Madrid,* but not in Toulouse.\n\nSome imaginative method needs to be devised, therefore, for reclaiming the lost Visigothic culture of the Aquitanian era. It might be possible, for example, to work backwards from the known realia of Visigothic Spain. After all, the religious and artistic practices which the Visigoths would have taken with them from Aquitania were dominant in parts of Iberia until the late sixth century; the Gothic speech, which Sidonius heard in Tolosa, held its own in Toledo until the seventh century; and the Visigoths' political culture as first defined by Euric continued to evolve until the eighth century. Of course, great care is needed. Not everything that bears the Visigothic label, like Visigothic Chant or Visigothic Script, derives from the Visigoths. And the Iberian cultural soil into which Visigothic customs were transplanted, though similarly Romanized, was not identical to that of Gallia Aquitania.\n\nEven so, there are several leads to work on. In ecclesiastical architecture, the exquisite simplicity of the Visigothic church of San Pedro de la Nava at Zamora could well have had parallels in post-Roman Gaul. Its surviving horseshoe arches and tunnel vaulting were clearly inspired by something that went before it. The symbolism and style of Visigothic sacred art has Byzantine roots and would also have passed through Tolosa. The influence of Gothic language on the indigenous population, though limited, would have been much the same on both sides of the Pyrenees. Words such as _suppa_ (soup) or _bank_ (bench) belong to the long list of Germanisms adopted by the neo-Latin idioms. And, since prayers learned in childhood are the ones remembered longest, we can plausibly assume that the Gothic form of the Lord's Prayer, as recited at every stage of the Visigoths' journey from the Danube to the Douro, was also recited devoutly at Nostra Domina Daurata:\n\nAtta unsar \u00feu in himinam | Our Father, Thou in Heaven  \n---|---  \nweihnai namo \u00feein | Holy be Thy name.  \nqimai \u00feiudinassus \u00feeins | Thy kingdom come  \nwair\u00feai wilja \u00feeins | Thy will be done,  \nswe in himina jah ana air\u00feai. | As in Heaven so on earth.  \nHlaif unsarana \u00feana sinteinan gif uns himma daga | Give us this day our daily loaf  \njah aflet uns \u00featei skulans sijaima | And forgive us who are in debt  \nswaswe jah weis afletam \u00feaim skulam unsaraim | As we also forgive our debtors.  \njah ni briggais uns in fraistubnjai | Bring us not into temptation  \nak lausei uns af \u00feamma ubilin | But free us from the evil one.  \nUnte \u00feeina ist \u00feiudangardi jah mahts | For thine is the kingdom and might  \njah wul\u00feus in aiwins. | And glory in eternity.\n\nThe fate of the Kingdom of Tolosa naturally prompts reflections about 'alternative history'. What would have happened if Clovis had been defeated, and the Visigoths had won? It was quite possible for them to have done so. The alternative _was_ a possibility, and it opens up vistas of an unrealized future. On the eve of the Battle of Vouill\u00e9, the Franks controlled perhaps one-third of post-Roman Gaul. The Visigoths, Arian Christians, were becoming overlords of Iberia as well as southern Gaul, and were linked to the Ostrogoths in Italy. The bishop of Rome enjoyed no special position among the five patriarchs of Christendom, and by far the larger part of Europe remained pagan. Had Alaric II fought off Clovis, it is entirely realistic to envisage Western Europe dominated by a pan-Gothic hegemony, while a diminished Roman Church retreated before the double advance of Arianism and Byzantine Orthodoxy. In which case, France may never have come into being, or may have developed somewhere else or in a different way. The future power of the papacy, which the Franks were destined to promote, may not have come about. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is perfectly predictable.\n\nYet the endless alternative scenarios, which exist at every stage of history, do not warrant too much attention. The past is not a board game that can be played and replayed at will. What happened happened. What didn't, didn't. Clovis the Frank _did_ kill Alaric the Visigoth. The Franks drove out the Visigoths, and not vice versa. It is not unreasonable to maintain, therefore, that 'The history of France began at Vouill\u00e9'.\n\nThe story of the 'post-Roman twilight' is complicated enough as it is. Historians have to take account of the sheer diversity of the 'barbarians', and hence of the richly polycultural and multi-ethnic flavour of their intermingling with settled populations. Numerous unexpected twists and turns occurred in their interactions. Above all, the timescale was enormous. The gap between the collapse of the Western Empire in 476 and the emergence of recognizable modern states like France or England spans five hundred years at least. The post-Roman twilight lasted twice as long as the Western Empire itself.\n\nIn this respect, the example of the Visigoths serves as a case study for 'Barbarian Europe' as a whole. Their sojourn in Aquitania was but one stop on a very long road. Like their cousins, the Ostrogoths and the Lombards, and their sometime neighbours the Burgundians, they belonged to an ethnic and linguistic sub-group which has totally died out. Their customs and speech were not close to Frankish, which was the progenitor of modern Dutch and Flemish and which provided the catalyst for transforming Gallo-Roman Latin into Old French. It is unlikely that Alaric II could have conversed with Clovis at Amboise without resorting either to Latin or to an interpreter. What is more, the Visigoths encountered many other 'barbarians' on the road, no doubt 'contaminating' their language, their culture and their gene pool in the process. Among them, the Vandals were East Germanic, the Suevi or 'Swabians' were Central Germanic, the Huns were Turkic, and the Alans were Iranic (like the modern Ossetians).\n\nPopular memory-making plays many tricks. One of them may be called 'the foreshortening of time'. Peering back into the past, contemporary Europeans see modern history in the foreground, medieval history in the middle distance, and the post-Roman twilight as a faint strip along the far horizon. Figures like Alaric or Clovis remain distant, faceless specks, unless plucked from their historical setting, magnified, dressed up and lionized for reasons of latter-day politics or national pride. Clovis I, king of the Franks, the victor of Vouill\u00e9, is commemorated by a magnificent tomb in the Parisian abbey of St Denis. Alaric II, whom Clovis killed, had ruled over a larger realm than that of the Franks. Yet he has no known grave, no modern monument.\n\nHistorical memory spurns even-handedness. The Visigoths must have known it. In their wisdom, they had buried their leaders in a traditional way which honoured the dead but which left no trace. The sepulchre of Alaric I, 'the Ruler of All', was washed into the sands of the sea long before his successors founded the Kingdom of Tolosa. No one but an occasional German Romantic cares to recall the moment:\n\n> _N\u00e4chtlich am Busento lispeln_\n> \n> _Bei Cosenza dumpfe Lieder._\n> \n> _Aus den Wassern schallt es Antwort_\n> \n> _Und in Wirbeln klingt es wieder_.\n\n('Mournful songs whisper in the night \/ near Cosenza, along Busento's banks. \/ The waters murmur their answer, \/ and the whirlpools resound with singing.')\n\n## 2\n\n## Alt Clud\n\nKingdom of the Rock (Fifth to Twelfth Centuries)\n\n##### I\n\nDumbarton Rock is not one of Britain's premier historical sites. It does not figure in Britain's top fifty places to visit. It is not classed in the same league as Stonehenge or Hampton Court, or its more famous Scottish neighbours, Stirling and Edinburgh. If people know it at all, they rate it as little more than a striking local landmark.\n\nYet modest Dumbarton is one of those special places that have the power to conjure up the stark contrast between what is and what once was. The past is not only a foreign country that we half knew existed; it is hiding another concealed country behind it, and behind that one, another, and another \u2013 like a set of Russian _matryoshki_ , in which larger dolls conceal smaller. Certainly, the surface is not a reliable guide to what lies underneath. In this case, the surface exhibits a country which we know as Scotland. Another country called England lies beyond the Borders. But Dumbarton beckons us to a world that flourished before England or Scotland had been invented.\n\nGeologically, Dumbarton Rock is just a volcanic plug, the residual core of a prehistoric volcano whose outer cone has been washed away by erosion over aeons. Ever since the last Ice Age, it has protruded through the floodplain on the north bank of the Firth of Clyde at the point where the River Leven flows down from the Highlands. Strategically, it has had immense importance. For centuries it dominated the traffic on the Firth, guarding the gateway to the country's heartland. It deterred the invaders and intruders who sought to sail upriver from the Irish Sea, and it sheltered all those who awaited a fair wind or an ebb tide to take them downstream to the ocean. To the south, on the opposite bank, lie Paisley, Greenock and Gourock, the first of which is the site of a magnificent medieval abbey. To the east sprawls industrial Clydebank, and beyond that the great city of Glasgow. The Kilpatrick Hills and the 'Bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond' rise to the north. To the west, as the Firth broadens out into an imposing estuary, islands great and small come into view, Bute, Arran and Ailsa Craig, and in the far haze the desolate Mull of Kintyre. Nothing, one might believe, could be more Scottish.\n\nThe position of Dumbarton Rock can be best appreciated from the air as one lands at Glasgow Airport. The main flight path brings planes in from the north, over the green and bracken-coloured braes towards the point on the Clyde where the narrow stream ends and the Firth begins. Looking from the right-hand window of the plane, one passes close to the modern Clyde suspension bridge, and enjoys a grandstand view of the shimmering waters beyond. The view is particularly dramatic on a fine summer's evening. The red glow of the sunset outlines the distant lochs and islands. The broad expanse of the Firth shines silver, and the twin peaks of the Rock stand out against the light like a pair of Egyptian pyramids.\n\nThe Firth of Clyde is tidal. Like all the inlets and estuaries on Britain's western coasts, it is subjected to four tides in every twenty-six hours \u2013 two flood tides and two ebb tides, whose perpetual motions have not stopped since the ocean first invaded this part of Europe. An Iron Age fort once stood atop the Rock; over the millennia, sentinels have watched the processions of coracles, boats and battleships that have sailed in on the rising tide or sailed out on the ebb. In late Roman times, they would have warned of the approach of the Hibernian pirates, whom the Romans called _Scotti_.* In the ninth century they would have gasped in awe at the fearsome fleets of Viking longships. In more recent times, they would have seen the troopships and merchantmen that formed the sinews of the British Empire, and the stately Cunard liners steaming out to the Atlantic.\n\nNot surprisingly, the town under the shadow of the Rock lived for much of its career from ship-building. The shipyard at Dumbarton was itself too small to accommodate the great ocean liners that were built at nearby Clydebank; instead, it specialized in the smaller steamships and paddleboats that have plied their trade on the Clyde for the last 200 years. Indeed, steaming 'doon the watter' from Glasgow has long been one of the most characteristic activities of the area. Europe's very first commercial steamship service started up here in 1812, when the _Comet_ sailed from Glasgow to Greenock. In the following decades the service was extended not only to every harbour on the Firth, but to ports as far as Oban and Stornoway. The red, white and black-tipped funnels of the steamers, mailboats and ferries of David MacBrayne's company later established a ubiquitous presence that attracted millions of trippers and travellers. The successor company of Caledonian-MacBrayne, or 'Cal-Mac', still forms an essential element of the local scene. The saying persists: 'The Earth is the Lord's and all that therein is, but the Highlands and Islands belong to MacBrayne.'\n\nIndustrial development also spread up the Vale of Leven along the five riverside miles separating Dumbarton from Balloch on Loch Lomond. Dye-works, print shops and foundries were concentrated in the factories of Alexandria, Jamestown and Bonhill. Workers from the Vale of Leven were known in Dumbarton as 'jeelies', because they ate their jeelies or 'jam sandwiches' in the yard while the locals went home for lunch.\n\nThere is no better way of finding one's historical and geographical bearings than by taking a steamer trip across the Firth. Even a short crossing from Wemyss Bay to Rothesay on the Isle of Bute, or from Ardrossan to Brodick on Arran, proves immensely stimulating, for in little more than half an hour it takes passengers across Scotland's most important divide, between the Lowlands and the Highlands. Wemyss Bay, in Ayrshire, 30 miles west of Glasgow, belongs to the Lallans* homeland of Robbie Burns. Rothesay and the Isle of Bute belong to the Gaeltacht \u2013 the land of the clans, the tartans and the Gaelic tongue. The journey should be undertaken on one of the 'bracing' days for which the Firth is famous. A stiff breeze chops the water, blowing spray off the tips of the waves. The sturdy ferryboat bucks and rolls confidently amid the raucous cries of the seagulls and the pungent smell of seaweed. Charcoal-grey clouds scud overhead, moving too fast to drop their charge of rain; patches of blue sky release narrow torrents of sunlight that play here and there on the seawater and on the luminous green of the opposite shore. The white bow waves dance with the white sails of the yachts as they speed along. Holding fast to the rail, cheeks chafed and lungs filled to overflowing, one watches transfixed at the display of colour and movement. A rainbow glistens over the Kyles of Bute. Then a sudden calm descends as the ferry enters the lee of the harbour, and one steps ashore, duly braced, in a different country.\n\nThis is the landscape for ever associated with the name of the Harry Lauder (1870\u20131950), one of the most famous entertainers of the early twentieth century, and reputedly the first star singer to sell a million records. Lauder sang popular sentimental songs in a broad Scots brogue, shattering all class barriers by his unique mixture of stoicism and tenderness. Numbers like 'I love a lassie, a bonnie Hielan' lassie' or 'Keep right on to the end of the road' brought him a fortune from which he built his mansion at Laudervale near Dunoon. His many tours to the United States would invariably start with a steamer trip up the Firth from Dunoon to the Princes Pier in Greenock.\n\n> Roamin' in the gloamin' on the bonnie banks of Clyde,\n> \n> Roamin' in the gloamin' wi' ma lassie by ma side.\n> \n> When the sun has gone to rest, that's the time that I like best.\n> \n> O it's lovely to be roamin' in the gloamin'.\n\nA visit to Dumbarton Castle tells some of the older stories. It features in all the local guidebooks and websites:\n\n> Dumbarton Rock stands above the River Leven where it merges with the Clyde and is the town's most famous ancient building. The castle, which stands 240 feet up on the Rock... forms a prominent landmark on the Clyde. The Rock... has been fortified since prehistoric times. The castle was a royal fortress long before the town became a Royal Burgh; its ownership [passed] from Scottish to English and back again. Prominent during the Wars of Independence, it was used to imprison Wallace for a short time after his capture. It was from here, too, that Mary, Queen of Scots, was conveyed to France for safety. She was trying to reach Dumbarton Castle when she suffered her final defeat at Langside.\n\nWilliam Wallace, the 'Braveheart', and Mary Stuart are two names from Scottish history that are almost universally recognized.\n\nOn closer inspection, the twin peaks of the Rock's summit are divided by a deep chasm: at 240 feet, 'White Tower Crag' is slightly higher than the 'Beak'. The oldest surviving structure is a fourteenth-century stone arch, whence a stairway of 308 steps leads up to the top. At the bottom, the eighteenth-century Governor's House contains a small museum. Here, one learns from the pleasant young guide that the early English historian Bede wrote about a fortified city called 'Alcluith', the 'rock of the Clyde'; also that, together with Castle Dundonald in Ayrshire, Dumbarton was once the chief royal stronghold of the Kingdom of Strathclyde. 'We were invaded in 870 by the Vikings,' the guide informs us. On being asked who 'we' are, she says with a smile, 'I'm a local girl, I'm a Pict.'\n\nThe view from White Tower Crag rewards its climbers. The modern town lies immediately below, criss-crossed by ant-like people. Central Glasgow, half a dozen miles away, is veiled in mist. But the moisture-laden air to the west increases the visibility like a magnifying glass. The Firth presents itself as a giant outstretched hand, with its fingers pointing into Gareloch and Loch Long on the right, Holy Loch in the centre, and the hills of Arran and Argyll on the horizon. In the distance to the north rise the blue-grey peaks of Ben Lomond and Ben Oss. Across the river lie the pine-clad slopes of Glennifer Braes in Renfrewshire and the Hill of Stake; and in the left foreground the airport runways.\n\nHoly Loch is a name that frequently made the headlines in the 1960s and 1970s. It is the smallest of the sea-lochs on the Firth, only two or three miles long, but it makes a perfect, sheltered harbour. For more than thirty years it was the site of a United States Navy submarine base, and the scene of concomitant demonstrations by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Officially and euphemistically labelled as Refit Site One, the base housed the SUBRON-14 submarine fleet charged with patrolling the Atlantic. There was a floating dock, a large tender ship, a flotilla of tugs and barges, and up to ten Polaris\/Poseidon Class Ballistic Missile submarines. As the underwater behemoths slipped from their dock and rode into the Firth, the captain's periscope would have caught sight of the Rock some 20 miles upstream. These days the harbour is back with the Royal Navy, though one wonders for how long. The devolved government of Scotland is controlled by the Scottish Nationalist Party. If they ever win their proposed referendum for full independence, one of their first steps would be to demand the closure of the base.\n\nDumbarton today is struggling to survive in the post-industrial age. The heyday of its ship-building came to an end in the 1960s and it has not yet found an adequate replacement. The dockside has been concreted over to form a car park, and supermarkets fill the space once used by giant warehouses. In some guidebooks to Scotland, the town is not even mentioned. Industrial decline hit the Vale of Leven earlier. Many factories there were closed down before 1939. Persistent unemployment bred radical politics, and the epithet of 'Little Moscow' was coined to match that of adjacent 'Red Clydeside'. In the 1950s the run-down district was used to locate several of Glasgow's largest projects of overspill housing. Forty and fifty years on, the massive, dilapidated estates such as the Mill of Haldane in East Balloch were the scene of equally massive campaigns of attempted urban renewal.\n\nYet a positive development began when one of Scotland's leading whisky distillers moved into Dumbarton to employ the laid-off dockers. 'George Ballantine's Finest' is one of the most popular and best-known brands of blended whisky in the world. Every bottle bears the proud assignations: 'Scotch Whisky, Fully Matured, Finest Quality', 'George Ballantyne & Sons, Founded in 1827 in Scotland' and 'By Appointment to the Late Queen Victoria and the Late King Edward VII'. According to the country of its destination it also carries a marker saying, 'Finest Skotsk\u00e1 Whisky', or 'Whisky Szkocka 40%obj.' or 'Finest Sk\u00f3t Whisky... Sz\u00e1rmazasi Orsz\u00e1g: Nagy Britannia (Skocia)'. At the bottom, the label reads 'Bottled in Scotland', 'Product of Scotland' and 'Allied Distillers Limited, Dumbarton G82 2SS'. In whatever language, there can be no doubt: this is Scottish Scotch from Scotland.\n\nIn the early twenty-first century Dumbarton is indeed in Scotland, and Scotland is part of the United Kingdom. But it was not always so, and it may not always be so in the future. One needs only stand atop the Rock and count the centuries. A hundred years ago, Clydeside was the lifeline of an imperial conurbation which served the Empire's manufacturing enterprises. Two hundred years ago, it was the centre of a region of the United Kingdom, often known as 'North Britain', whose Scottishness was fading, but whose Britishness was rising. Three hundred years ago it had just crossed the threshold of an unprecedented constitutional union with England. Four hundred years ago it was ruled by a king who had recently migrated to London, but who remained Scotland's sovereign. Five hundred years ago, before the Battle of Flodden, it was part of a country which regarded itself as England's equal. A thousand years ago, under King Macbeth and others, it belonged to a realm where Gaelic was still the dominant language. One thousand five hundred years ago it belonged to the 'Old North'.\n\nDumbarton is an English name, the Anglicized form of a Gaelic predecessor, _Dun Breteann_ , meaning 'Fort of the Britons'. This, in turn, provides the clue to the people who lived on the Clyde long before the Anglophones and the Gaels arrived. Oddly enough, when the modern County Council was formed in 1889, the older spelling of the name was revived to give 'Dunbartonshire' a tinge of authenticity. (The county was abolished in 1975, since when it has been joined to the wider Strathclyde Region.)\n\nNonetheless, the form of the name most frequently associated with the Rock has gone round the world, carried in the memories of Scots emigrants. There is a Dumbarton in Western Australia, a second in Queensland, a third in New Zealand and a fourth in New Brunswick, Canada. In the United States, the Dumbartons are legion: in Maryland, in Virginia, in South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Wisconsin... One finds Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC; Dumbarton Village in Houston, Texas; a Dumbarton Bridge across San Francisco Bay; a Dumbarton Church in Georgetown, DC; a Dumbarton School in Baltimore; and a Dumbarton College in Illinois. In the American Civil War, the US Navy once captured a Confederate vessel called _Dumbarton_ ; and the Royal Navy has a fishery protection ship called HMS _Dumbarton Castle_. One finds a Dunbarton in New Hampshire.\n\nHow many Dumbartonians, one wonders, know how it all started? For them at least it may be important to know that Dumbarton was not always a minor satellite of a modern metropolis. Supported by the fertile farmlands of the adjoining _Levanach_ \u2013 the Vale of Leven, the original homeland of Clan Lennox \u2013 it was the centre of a powerful realm, the capital of an extensive state. Indeed, it was the seat of kings.\n\n##### II\n\nFew historians these days talk of the 'Dark Ages'. Knowing that the phrase was coined in the 1330s by the early Renaissance poet Petrarch, they feel that the implied contrast between the 'Light' of the ancient world and the alleged 'intellectual Gloom' of what followed is unjust. In British history, the 'Dark Ages' is rarely employed except for the two or three centuries which started with the retreat of the Roman legions and which are notoriously short of sources. This is exactly the period that embraces the 'Kingdom of the Rock'.\n\nObscurity, therefore, is the period's hallmark. Coherent narratives can only be established with great difficulty, and historical investigations are a speculators' paradise. Substantiated facts form tiny islets of sure knowledge in a vast sea of blank spots and confusion. Scarce sources are often written in eccentric languages, studied only by ultra-specialists. All judgements would benefit from being classified as undisputed (very few), deductive, analogous or tentative (most).\n\nThere is also a deep-seated problem of biased advocacy. The early history of the Isles* saw a tussle for survival between the Ancient Britons, the Irish Gaels, the Scots, the Picts and a collection of immigrant Germanic 'Anglo-Saxons'. In modern times some of these parties have had enthusiastic fans. The English, who are now a dominant majority, have often taken the triumph of their forebears for granted, at least in popular history. They admire the imperialist Romans, and identify with the Anglo-Saxons, but despise the Celts. They venerate Bede, who was a Germanic Northumbrian and whom they call Venerable, and neglect his competitors. They dislike the Celtic sources, which they cannot read, routinely dismissing them as fanciful or unreliable. The Scots, whose ancestors ultimately triumphed in Scotland, can be equally self-centred. Nowadays, there are few people around to champion the cause of the 'Old North'.\n\nThis term \u2013 which the Welsh call _Yr Hen Ogledd \u2013_ requires an explanation. The Ancient Britons, dozens of territorial tribes who had dominated the whole of Great Britain on the eve of the Roman conquest and gave the island its name, were gradually displaced or absorbed in post-Roman times, and their former dominance in all parts of the island has largely been forgotten. Their most visible descendants, known in English as the 'Welsh', that is, the 'aliens', now inhabit only one corner of their former homeland, in a remnant that the incoming English called 'Wales', the 'Alien Land'.* Time was when things were different. After the passing of Roman Britannia and the influx of 'Anglo-Saxons', the Britons held out longest in three main regions. In one of them, modern Wales, they survived. In the other two, modern Cornwall and the 'Old North', they did not. Yet their presence there was very real, and lasted for centuries. The 'Kingdom of the Rock' was the longest-lived fragment of the Ancient Britons' stronghold in northern Britain, the region that in due course would become Scotland.\n\nPerhaps one should start, therefore, with an undisputed fact. The kingdom _did_ exist. Its story is reflected in archaeological and linguistic evidence, in the chronicles of its neighbours, in king-lists and in references from poetry and legend; it existed for six or seven hundred years. Its original name and its exact boundaries are not known. But we do know with absolute certainty that it was there. Between the dusk of Roman Britannia and the dawn of England and Scotland, several Celtic kingdoms operated in northern Britain. The 'Kingdom of the Rock' was the last of them to succumb.\n\nThe Celts of the Isles were divided in Roman times \u2013 as they still are \u2013 into two distinctive linguistic groups. On the Green Isle, _\u00c9ire_ , the Gaelic or Goidelic Celts spoke a tongue categorized by linguists as 'Q-Celtic'. Their word for 'son' was _mac_. On the larger Isle of _Prydain_ (Great Britain), the British Celts spoke Brythonic or 'P-Celtic'. Their word for 'son' was _map_. To the uninitiated, the Goidelic and the Brythonic branches of Celtic look and sound dissimilar, but a good teacher can quickly elucidate the processes whereby common roots were transformed by successive sound changes. The characteristic word order of verb\u2013 subject\u2013object remained unaltered, and morphological shifts often followed parallel patterns. Both Goidelic and Brythonic Celts adopted new systems of syllabic accentuation, for example; but while Goidelic chose to place the accent on the first syllable of a word, Brythonic went for stress on the penultimate syllable. Both language groups softened the consonants between vowels. Goidelic changed _t_ to _th_ , Brythonic to _d_ , thus changing _ciatus_ (battle) into _cath_ (Irish) and _cad_ (Welsh). The initial _w_ -sound was replaced by _f_ in Goidelic and _gw_ in Brythonic, giving _fir_ for 'true' in Irish and _gwir_ in Welsh. English ears are not accustomed to these sounds. But since Goidelic\/Gaelic and Brythonic 'Old Welsh' would in time compete to be heard on the Rock, their reverberations, however imperfectly understood, form an essential part of the background.\n\nDuring the four centuries of Roman rule, the Romano-Britons living in the imperial province of Britannia were markedly less Latinized than their Celtic kinsfolk in Gaul or Iberia. Some of them would have been bilingual, speaking Latin for official purposes and Brythonic among themselves; others less so. When the Western Empire collapsed, they did not advance to a neo-Latin idiom parallel to French or Spanish. Instead, they largely reverted to a monolingual Brythonic, until meeting new linguistic challenges posed by Germanic invaders from the Continent, by Gaelic 'Scots' from Ireland, and later by Norse-speaking Vikings.\n\nIn modern times, everyone has become accustomed to thinking of Great Britain in terms of England, Scotland and Wales. But this modern map must be put out of mind if one wishes to understand the island's previous make-up. In the era when Britannia was collapsing, there was no England, since the Anglo-Saxon ancestors of the English were still arriving; there was no Scotland, since the Scots had not even started to arrive; and there was no clearly defined Wales. The former Romano-Britons and their P-Celtic speech were spread over most if not all of _Prydain_ , and as the ethno-linguistic jigsaw changed, 'Wales' could be found in every pocket where Britons persisted.\n\nOne can observe several degrees of the persistence of Romanization in post-Roman Britain. The cities and surrounding hinterlands within the former province of Britannia remained highly Romanized. The upland tribes, including those living beyond Hadrian's Wall, had been at best partially Romanized. The 'Picts' of the further North were virtually untouched.\n\nAn important division among the post-Roman Britons resulted from the Anglo-Saxon invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries. As the 'Anglo-Saxons' pushed westwards into the Midlands, they drove a wedge between the Britons on either side of them. After the Battle of Chester in 616, Angles moving coast to coast consolidated a belt of territory from the Humber to the Mersey in the powerful state of Mercia. From then on (though contact was maintained along the western sea-lanes), the Britons of the North were cut off from the larger concentrations of their kinsfolk elsewhere. A distinction grew up between the Welsh of 'Wales', and the North Welsh, whose beleagured British community was obliged to wage a prolonged rearguard action.\n\nDespite its shadowy outlines, however, the 'Old North' cannot be regarded as a mere footnote to the grand pageant of British history. It contained at least seven known kingdoms, whose deeds were no less derring than those of their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. It left a large body of place names and a corpus of literature \u2013 known in Welsh as _Hengerdd_ or the 'Old Verse' \u2013 which makes _Beowulf_ look like an upstart latecomer.\n\nThe language of the Old North is usually classified in the category of Cumbric, a sub-group of P-Celtic Brythonic, and related, therefore, to Welsh, Cornish and Breton. A major problem exists for historians, of course, in that Cumbric was rarely written down and can only be reconstructed by linguists from meagre scraps of information. One such scrap is the name of Cumbria ('Land of the Welsh') itself, which once extended over a far wider area than today. Another scrap comes from the counting systems of Cumbrian shepherds. It is well attested that people faced by the decline of their native language are particularly reluctant to abandon two things: the numbers, whereby they learned to count, and the prayers through which they addressed their God. An amazing instance of this phenomenon can be found in some of the upland communities of the Borders which nowadays straddle northern England and southern Scotland. Anglicization triumphed in those parts centuries ago either in the form of northern English or of Lowland Scots, but shepherds there continue to count their sheep using the numerals of their Brythonic forebears. The correspondences are unmistakeable, and they were reflected in inscriptions still visible until recently on the old sheepmarket at Cockermouth. They are the very last echoes of the Old North.\n\nTable 1. Counting in northern English, Lowland Scots and modern Welsh\n\nChristianity was more firmly established in late Roman Britain than is often supposed. St Alban was put to death for his faith at Verulamium in _c_. 304, and the Emperor Theodosius I did not give Christianity an official monopoly until 380. It would have had little time to penetrate into all levels of society before the departure of the legions. Yet for most of the fourth century, the Edict of Milan in 313 had granted religious toleration to Christians, and Christian practices spread patchily. In the subsequent era, knowledge of Latin and adherence to the Roman religion were the twin marks of the _Romanitas_ that civilized Britons savoured in the face of heathen invaders.\n\nIt was the Romans who came to use the term _Picti_ for the tribes who had clung to the old ways \u2013 to tattooing, to principled illiteracy and to native religion \u2013 and both the Irish and the Britons were accustomed to treat the Picts as a race apart. The Irish Gaels called them _Cruithne_ , which may be what they had once called all the inhabitants of Britain. The Welsh term _Cymry_ , usually translated as 'companions' or 'compatriots', which was coming into use in late Roman times, was a form of self-identification both for Britons of the west (modern Wales) and for the 'Men of the Old North', but not, apparently, for the Picts. It possessed definite overtones of _cives Romani_.\n\nThough the Roman legions had marched north beyond their province of Britannia on several occasions, they never conquered the whole of the island and they only occupied the land between the Hadrianic and the Antonine Walls, the _Intervallum_ , for less than thirty years in the mid-second century. Nonetheless they stayed long enough to forge close ties with the more co-operative tribes and to gather basic information from them about northern Britain. The second-century geographer Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria, had met soldiers and sailors returning from Britain, and he drew a map containing many names of rivers, towns, islands and tribes. In the far north, beyond the Antonine Wall, he noted the _Caledonii_. In the area between the walls, he recorded four tribes \u2013 the _Damnonii_ , the _Novantae_ , the _Selgovae_ and the _Votadini_. In Damnonia, he recorded six _oppida_ or 'towns': Alauna, Colanica, Coria, Lindon, Victoria and Vindogara (Colanica can also be found in another source known as the Ravenna Cosmography). Lindon, the _Llyn Dun_ or 'Lake Fort', has been tentatively identified with Balloch on Loch Lomond. But Alauna is less uncertain. It means the 'headland' or 'spur', and nicely matches the locality of the Rock.\n\nThe Roman names for British tribes were mainly Latin translations of Celtic originals, which English scholars rarely translate. But an attempt can be made. The _Caledonii_ were possibly the 'Hard People', _Selgovae_ were the 'Hunters' and the _Novantae_ the 'Vigorous People'. The _Votadini_ (mistranscribed by Ptolemy as _Otadini_ ) were the 'subjects or followers of Fothad'. The _Damnonii_ were in some way connected to the Celtic word for 'deep'; 'the People of the Sea' is the most probable. It fits well with their location, and explains why other coastal tribes in Britain and Ireland, like the _Dumnonii_ of the future Devon, had similar names. At all events, Damnonia was the earliest known statelet to be based on or near the Rock. Its maritime activities are hardly to be doubted: a later Irish source mentions an unidentified battleground in Ireland where Beinnie Britt killed Art, son of Conn. Beinnie was a 'Briton' from across the water. The Damnonians evidently possessed the capacity for transporting fighting men by sea.\n\nThe Rock stood only a couple of miles from the western end of the Antonine Wall on the River _Clota_ , at the point where the Roman fleet would have been stationed to control the pirates of the northern sea and to facilitate the transfer of Gaulish auxiliaries helping to construct the Antonine Wall. Their presence is attested by an inscription on an altar erected at a fort on the wall only a few miles from _Brittanodunum_ (Dunglass). 'CAMPES TRIBUSET BRITANI QP SETIUS IUSTUS PREF. COH IIII GAL VS LLM' (To the eternal field deities of Britain, Quintus Pisentius Justus, Prefect of the 4th Cohort of Gallic auxiliaries dedicated his willingly executed vow). The date was equivalent to AD 142. Within a couple of decades, the legions had retreated. Their plans to return never materialized. But the Emperor Caracalla (r. 209\u201317) established a system of forward cavalry patrols (called _areani_ ) north of Hadrian's Wall, and it is conceivable that the _Clota_ continued to offer facilities to the Roman western fleet.\n\nIn the middle of the fourth century, the northern defences of Britannia were completely overrun by what the Romans called a great _confederatio barbarica_. It is not known whether Damnonia joined in. But for two years, from 367 to 369, the government of the whole Britannic province collapsed. Marauders and deserters devastated the countryside, capturing the chief military officer and killing the commander of the fortified 'Saxon Shore' on the province's eastern and southern coasts. Order was restored by a veteran soldier, Count Theodosius, who re-garrisoned Hadrian's Wall and introduced a series of dependent buffer states both in the west and the north. In the late fourth century, a Spanish general called Magnus Maximus established himself in the west, and subsequently as 'Macsen Wledig' became the legendary founder of several Welsh dynasties. At that same time, a personage by the name of Paternus or Padarn Pesrut (Paternus of the Red Cloak) emerged as ruler of the Votadini. His red cloak signified high Roman rank; large numbers of Roman coins dated between 369 and 410 have been found on the site of his putative capital at _Marchidun_ (the modern Roxburgh Castle). In 405, an entry in one of the books of Irish Annals mentions a battle fought at _strath Cluatha_ , 'the Battle of the Clyde valley'. This is most likely the moment when the shadowy post-Roman states of the north were coming into existence. The buffer fiefdoms that Theodosius had put into place were turning into ready-made native 'kingdoms'.\n\nOf course, the term 'king', as used both in the sources and by historians, is something of a vanity title. These rulers were not crowned monarchs, but leaders of war-bands that enforced their will and collected tribute. Their fluctuating fortunes were defined by the number of settlements from which tribute could be extracted.\n\nAfter the Roman troops withdrew from _Britannia_ , in 410 or perhaps a little later, the _Intervallum_ hosted five or possibly six or seven native kingdoms. Some are better documented than the others. 'Galwyddel' (Galloway) occupied the lands of the _Novantae_. 'Rheged', centred on Caer Ligualid (the former _Luguvalium_ and modern Carlisle), straddled both sides of Hadrian's Wall. It possessed a complete late-Roman capital, including a wall, a bishop, an aqueduct and a municipal fountain that was still working 250 years later. At some point in the fifth century it was ruled by Coel Hen, the original 'Old King Cole', who spent much time campaigning in _Aeron \u2013_ the future Ayrshire \u2013 and whose name provides the starting point of the Welsh genealogical list known as 'The Descent of the Men of the North' ( _Bonedd Gwyr y Gogledd_ ). On the east coast, 'Manau' (Clackmannan) and 'Lleddiniawn' (Lothian) lined opposite shores of the Firth of Forth. They may or may not have formed separate realms, but are together regarded as the homeland of the 'Guotadin', the real Celtic name for the _Votadini_. This 'Land of Gododdin' (to use a more modern form of the name) may well have been subject to Coel Hen before breaking free. Like Rheged, it came under Christian influence at an early date. The cemetery of its capital, Dun Eidyn, contained numerous Christian graves. Neighbouring 'Bryneich' occupied the coastal strip south of Gododdin and on either side of Hadrian's Wall. Relatively speaking, the 'Kingdom of the Rock' stayed in the shadows.\n\nFifth-century events in the _Intervallum_ are illuminated to some extent by the activities of three men who attracted outside attention: Cunedda, Patrick and Ninian. Cunedda ap Edern, the 'Good Leader', was a warrior from Gododdin who _c_. 425 led a military expedition to distant Gwynedd in North Wales to eject an unwelcome colony of Irish settlers. Succeeding in his mission, he passed into history as one of the early Welsh heroes, and progenitor of Gwynedd's ruling house. His expedition, as recorded in a later historical work produced in the court of one of his successors, the _Historia Brittonum_ , could have been inspired by a feeling of solidarity among the _Cymry_.\n\nCunedda's story shows the degree to which the meagre historical sources raise as many questions as they solve. Interpretation of the king-lists continues to be as intricate as it is enigmatic. The earliest compilations for this period are to be found among the British Library's collection of manuscripts known as the Harleian Genealogies, which date from an era long after the lives of the monarchs mentioned. They mainly derive from Wales, not from North Britain, and may be seen as attempts by the medieval Welsh to preserve the memory of their lost northern kindred. They rarely contain reliable dates, and are full of recurring names and eccentric spellings that cannot be pinned with certainty onto particular individuals. Researchers have to resort to generation-counting, to detailed comparisons of sources and to endless guessing. They also have to make allowance, in place of primogeniture, for the practice of tanistry, that is, the naming of a successor who was not necessarily the ruler's son. One is reminded of the task of early Egyptologists who pieced together the reigns and the dynasties of the pharaohs.\n\nPatrick is the best documented and most studied figure of the age. He was clearly a Briton of the north who was seized by Irish pirates as a boy and sold into slavery, who escaped and studied in Gaul, and who returned to lead a mission for the conversion of Ireland. Unfortunately, the dates and locations of the British sections of his biography are hotly disputed. His birthplace, described in his writings as a _villula_ or 'small estate' near a _vicus Bannevem Taberniae_ , has been 'convincingly' located to a village 15 miles inland from Caer Ligualid (Carlisle). An alternative location in a village that bears Patrick's name, barely a stone's throw from the Rock, is frequently overlooked, as is a local story about the boy 'Succat', who was seized by pirates when fishing by the _Clota_. The fact remains, however, that one of Patrick's two surviving letters is addressed to the _milites Corotici_ , whom he reprimands for allying themselves with the Picts and for warring and looting in a manner unbecoming for Romans and Christians:\n\n> I Patrick, a sinner, very badly educated, declare myself to be a bishop in Ireland... I live among barbarian tribes as an exile and refugee for the love of God... I have written and set down with my own hand these words to be solemnly given, carried and sent to the soldiers of Coroticus. I do not say 'To my fellow citizens'... but 'To the fellow citizens of the devils', because of their wicked behaviour.\n> \n> The day after the newly baptized, still bearing the chrism, still in their white dress... had been ruthlessly massacred and slaughtered, I sent a letter by a holy presbyter along with other clergy. They were laughed at.\n> \n> Here your sheep were savaged... by gangsters at the behest of Coroticus. One who betrays Christians into the hands of Scots and Picts is far from the love of God. Voracious wolves have swallowed up the flock of the Lord in Ireland which had been growing nicely through hard work...\n> \n> It is the custom of the Roman Gauls who are Christians to send to the Franks... and to ransom baptized people who have been captured. You, on the contrary, murder them, and sell them to an outlandish people who know not God. You are virtually handing the members of Christ to a brothel...\n> \n> So I mourn for you, my dearest... But again I rejoice, for those baptized believers have departed this world for Paradise... The good will feast in confidence with Christ. They shall judge nations and rule over wicked kings for ever and ever. Amen.\n\nBy general consent, this Coroticus is to be equated with Ceredig Gueldig, otherwise Ceretic Guletic, the earliest-known ruler of 'The Rock'. What would have been more natural then for Patrick, having become a bishop, to address the prince of his native country? But for their misdeeds, he would have addressed the soldiers of Coroticus as 'My fellow citizens'. _Civis_ , 'citizen', was the highest form of compliment among former Romano-Britons. At all events, to be absolutely clear, St Patrick, like St David, was a Welshman.\n\nSo, too, was St Ninian, who, according to Bede, was sent from Carlisle to convert the southern Picts. Unfortunately, there is no indication of a date (although the fifth century is generally preferred), and there is no clue to the precise meaning of 'southern Picts'. If the phrase refers to _Novantae_ and _Selgovae_ , Ninian might have been responsible for the founding of the Christian community at _Candida Casa_ (now Whithorn) in Galloway, where the Latinus Stone dates from _c_. 450. If it meant the Caledonians of Fortriu, he would have had to pass through the lands of 'The Rock' to reach them.\n\nBoth the geography and the chronology of the links between the two substantiated northern kings of the fifth century, Coel Hen and Ceredig Gueldig (Coroticus), are uncertain. One possibility is that Coel Hen initially ruled over territory stretching from the Clyde to _Eboracum_ (York). However, after Coel Hen was drowned _c._ 420 in a bog at Tarbolton in Aeron, it is not too far-fetched to assume that the 'Kingdom of the Rock' had detached itself from Rheged, much as Gododdin might have done. In this scenario, Ceredig becomes a successor and possibly a descendant of Coel Hen, as well as the founder of the dynasty of 'The Rock'. Ceredig's supposed successors \u2013 Erbin, Cinuit, Gereint, Tutagual and Caw \u2013 are nothing but names.\n\nThe historicity of Ceredig Gueldig is based on congruent references in the Harleian Genealogies, and is strengthened by further mention of him in the Annals of Ulster (in the context of St Patrick's adventures), as _Coirtech regem Aloo_. 'Aloo', which occurs on several occasions, is evidently a shortened form of Alauna. The early medieval _Annales Cambriae_ (Welsh Annals), which were compiled at St David's, call him 'Ceretig Guletic map Cynlop' (Ceredig the Wealthy, son of Cynloyp). Though shadowy, he has the distinction of being more readily identifiable than his far more famous contemporary \u2013 King Arthur.\n\nUp to this point, the story of 'The Rock' can be told exclusively within the compass of the post-Roman British tribes. But in the sixth century changes occurred that were to transform the scene radically. First, the Germanic Angles, the furthest outliers of the Anglo-Saxons, who were busy taking over southern Britannia, established a foothold on the coast of Gododdin and Bryneich. Second, Gaelic Scots from Dalriada in Ulster established a similar foothold on the north-western coast, close to, but slightly above the Rock. Henceforth, the future of the _Intervallum_ would hang on the outcome of a four-sided contest between the native Britons and Picts, and the newcomer Angles and Scots. Three hundred years later, a fifth party, the Vikings, would act as a vital catalyst in the final phase of the contest.\n\nAccording to Bede, 'Ida began his reign in 547.' According to the Welsh monk who lived after Bede and composed the _Historia Brittonum_ in faraway Gwynedd, Ida 'added Din Guauroy to Berneich'. Ida the Flamebearer was an Angle from somewhere further south. Berneich or Bryneich was the original British\/Celtic name of the kingdom which he and his successors would now rule and Anglicize and which is generally known in its Latin form of _Bernicia_. Din Guauroy was the British name for the magnificent and near-impregnable coastal castle at Bamburgh.\n\nTo begin with, Ida's Angles formed a small and isolated outpost. Unlike other Anglo-Saxons, they mixed readily with the native British, creating 'the only recognisably Germano-Celtic cultural and political fusion in Britain'. Their long-term strategy, dictated by their advantageous coastal position, was to link up with their kinsmen in the Kingdom of _Deur_ or Deira to the south, forming a united Anglian realm in Northumbria (that is, 'North of the Humber'). At the same time, they could chip away at the surrounding British kingdoms of Rheged and Gododdin.\n\nThe Gaelic Scots on the west coast developed their activities in similar fashion. The theory that they arrived from Ireland in one mass migration is now discredited: there may well have been 'Scottish' (meaning Irish) settlements on both sides of the North Channel from much earlier times. Yet the important political fact concerns the extension of a Gaelic Kingdom of Dalriada from Ulster to the British shore of what would henceforth be known as 'Argyll' or the 'Eastern Gaels', where Aedan macGabrain began his reign in 574. The facts of the reign are known through the presence of St Columba ( _c_. 521\u201397), who had recently planted a Christian community on the island of Iona and whose biographer, Adamnan, provides a well informed and detailed source. The strategic concerns of the Gaels of Argyll are not hard to divine. On the one hand, they would have aimed to consolidate the link between Argyll and Ulster, in particular by developing their sea power. On the other, if they were not to be pushed back into the sea, they would have been tempted to expand their territory at the expense of neighbouring kingdoms \u2013 notably of the inland Picts and of the Britons of 'The Rock'.\n\nSuch is the context for one of the many strands in the unending riddle of King Arthur. The riddle is not going to be solved in a couple of pages. The literature on the subject is vast, and its conclusions are totally contradictory. Suffice it to say that there were two distinct King Arthurs, one an elusive but historical figure from the sixth century, the other a legendary medieval hero whose exploits were spun by the bards and myth-makers of a much later age. In all of this, one notes a marked tendency for Arthur-hunters from England to assume that he lived and fought in England, and for Arthur-hunters from the Borders to prove that he came from _Marchidun_ , alias Roxburgh. Arthur-hunters from Glasgow place him firmly in Drumchapel, and Arthur-hunters from the Clan MacArthur display a bravado worthy of the late General Douglas MacArthur. Yet Bede and Gildas are both silent on the matter, while the _Historia Brittonum_ names thirteen battle sites of a 'famous _dux bellorum_ ' which defy identification. The historical Arthur was certainly British, since he was made famous by resisting the incursions of the Britons' enemies. After that one is looking for toponymic needles in a semi-historic haystack. Nonetheless, one is bound to be impressed by the recent surge of advocacy in favour of Arthur being a hero of northern as opposed to southern Britain. Everyone can understand the confusion between _Damnonia_ and _Dumnonia_ , or the misattribution by the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth of Welsh legends deriving from the 'Old North'. Beyond that, one can only say that the Rock of Dumbarton is hardly less plausible than the rock of Tintagel. The Rock of the Clyde was known to antiquaries as the _Castrum Arturi_ ; and both an Arthur's Stone and a King's Ridge are still to be found in the vicinity.\n\nLocal historians have few qualms. In his _Glasgow and Strathclyde,_ James Knight waxes particularly eloquent:\n\n> Careful research seems to show that when we trace the Arthurian legends back to their origins we arrive at a real historical person... the head of a British federation in Strathclyde in the century after Ninian. His enemies were the heathen Scots on the west, the Picts on the north, and the Angles on the east... As the result of a victory at Bowden Hill (West Lothian) in 516 he divided the conquered territories among three brothers, Urien [of Rheged], Arawn... and Llew or Loth, King of the Picts... Loth was the father of Thenaw... the mother of Kentigern or Mungo, the real founder of Glasgow and its patron saint... In 537, a fresh pagan combination was formed under Modred, Arthur's nephew, and at Camelon near Falkirk, a great battle was fought in which both leaders fell, and which overwhelmed Christianity in Scotland for a whole generation.\n\nWhatever we might think of this, here enters St Mungo, aka Kentigern, the 'Chief Lord'. One of the most popular saints of medieval Britain, he lived through most of the sixth century, and died _c._ 613, 'a very old man'. If the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ is right in putting his birth in 518, he could have reached the age of ninety-five. Historians would be on stronger ground if his _Life_ , written by a twelfth-century monk, were not a conventional hagiography that jumbles up facts, tall tales and dubious reports of miracle-working.\n\nThe saint was said to have been born on the beach at Culross in Fife. His mother, Tenew, queen of Lleddiniawn, had been cast adrift in a coracle, punished by her husband for adultery. She was somehow rescued by St Servanus, who, despite living a century later, saw the child and dubbed him in Old Welsh _Mwn gu_ , 'Dear One'. Educated by the monks at Culross, Mungo made his way either to Rheged or to 'The Rock'. In one account, he is said to have walked to the Clyde, taking the body of an old man on a cart pulled by two untamed bulls and heading for the Christian cemetery at Molendinar beside the Rock, where he acquired the non-existent title of 'bishop of North Britain'.\n\nThe central years of Mungo's career were passed in Gwynedd, whither he went at the invitation of St Dewi or David, the patron of Wales and pioneer of Welsh monasticism. With David's assistance, he founded a church at Llanelwy, where the holy Asaph served as deacon; Llanelwy is now St Asaph in Flintshire. Around 580 Mungo was summoned back to Clydeside by Roderick or Rhydderch Hael, a monarch of 'The Rock' in the fifth or the sixth generation of Ceredig's dynasty. At Rhydderch's request he founded a church at Glas-gau, the 'Blue-Green Meadow', died at a ripe old age and was buried in the crypt. His tomb duly became a site of pilgrimage.\n\nMungo's miracles, cemented by centuries of later tradition, are best remembered by a jingle: 'Here's the bird that never flew, here's the tree that never grew. Here's the bell that never rang. Here's the fish that never swam.' The four symbols of bird, tree, bell and fish appear on modern Glasgow's coat of arms. The bird stands for the pet sparrow of St Servanus that Mungo restored to life. The tree represents a dead branch which Mungo endowed with the capacity to burst into flame. The bell was supposedly brought back from Mungo's journey to Rome. And the fish is a salmon, immortalized by the legend of 'The Salmon and the Ring':\n\n> Once upon a time, King Rhydderch's queen, Languoreth, took a secret lover, a young soldier. As a token of her love, she foolishly gave the soldier a ring that had earlier been presented to her by her husband. When the king saw the ring on the soldier's finger, he gave him wine and disarmed him. Seizing the ring he flung it into the waters of the Clyde. He condemned the soldier to death. And he flung the queen into a dungeon.\n> \n> In her desperation, the queen turned to Saint Mungo for advice. The saint promptly sent his man to catch the fish in the river. The man returned with a salmon which, when cut open, contained the missing ring. The king's wrath was assuaged. The soldier was reprieved. The queen was forgiven.\n\nIn some accounts Rhydderch and Languoreth are described as the 'monarchs of Cadzow', a locality to the south of Glasgow which later became the site of a royal castle and in modern times the seat of the dukes of Hamilton. Mungo also appears in some of the Arthurian legends, where textual analysts have noted similarities between the legend of 'The Salmon and the Ring' and the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere.\n\nIt is beyond doubt, however, that the greatest power in Mungo's time was wielded by Urien, king of Rheged. Urien's Latin name was _Urbigenus_ or 'city-born', and it implies a conscious degree of _Romanitas_. He ruled over a domain that stretched from the southern outskirts of Glasgau to the environs of _Mancunium_ , where an outpost called Reged-ham (the present Rochdale) attests his sway. The royal seat lay at Dun Rheged (Dunragit) in Galloway; the chief city was Caer Ligualid (Carlisle); the main corridor of communication the Ituna or Solway, which led to the open sea and to Ireland. Urien earned the Old Welsh epithet of _Y Eochydd_ , 'Lord of the Rip-Tide', suggesting that Rheged, like 'The Rock' and Dalriada, was a significant naval power.\n\nIn the late sixth century, the Britons of the North recognized the growing threat from the Angles, and Urien mounted a grand coalition against them. His allies included Rhydderch Hael of 'The Rock', Guallauc from Lennox, Morgant of south Gododdin, Aedan macGabrain of Argyll and King Fiachna of Ulster. In 590 they set out to wipe Bernicia off the map. The Irish somehow stormed the heights of Bamburgh; and the remnants of the garrison took refuge on Medcaut, the 'Island of Tides', the Angles' name for Lindisfarne. Urien laid siege. He was on the point of total victory, when through the jealousy of Morgant, he was assassinated. The unity of the Britons was lost, and the ambitions of Rheged ended.\n\nAs in the preceding period, the king-lists of 'The Rock' from the sixth century, such as the _Bonedd Gwyr y Gogledd_ , 'The Descent of the Men of the North', contain one definite name and a clutch of doubtful ones. Just as Ceredig (Coroticus) is given veracity by links with St Patrick, Rhydderch Hael is bolstered by his links to St Columba. Adamnan recalled that St Columba had visited the court of 'The Rock' and he makes Rhydderch the subject of one of the saint's prophecies:\n\n> This same king being on friendly terms with the holy man, sent him on one occasion a secret message... as he was anxious to know whether he would be killed by his enemies or not. But when [the messenger] was being closely [questioned] by the saint regarding the king, his kingdom and people... the saint replied, 'He shall never be delivered into the hands of his enemies; he will die at home on his own pillow.' And the prophecy of the saint regarding King Roderc was fully accomplished; for, according to his word, he died quietly in his own house.\n\nRhydderch Hael features in the _Bonedd Gwyr y Gogledd_ , and in order to coincide with St Columba his regnal dates are conventionally fixed as _c_. 580\u2013618. Adamnan describes him as _filius Tothail_ , which puts Rhydderch's father, Tutagual, in the regnal time bracket of 560\u201380. But all further identifications are hopelessly problematic. Historians are left struggling once again in the red mist in regard to Rhydderch's successors. Dumnagual Hen, Clinoch and Cinbellin are names without dates or faces. No less than five princes called Dumnagual are referred to. One of them, who apparently had three sons, could conceivably have been the father of Gildas the chronicler.\n\nIn the seventh century the Old North was shaken both by religious disputes and by shattering military battles. Interpretations inevitably vary, but all commentators agree that Catraeth, Whitby and Nechtansmere mark milestones of lasting significance.\n\nThe Battle of Catraeth occurred in _c_. 600 as a by-product of continued animosity between Britons and Angles. The conflict was exacerbated by the apprehensions of the Celtic Church, which would have heard of the Roman mission recently introduced into southern Britain by St Augustine of Canterbury. It came to a head within ten years of Urien's assassination, and arose from a similar set of circumstances. This time it was Yrfai, son of Wulfsten, lord of north Gododdin, who assembled the coalition. He invited three hundred warriors to Dun Eidyn, feasted them for months on end, and then set out to do battle. Princes from Pictland and Gwynedd joined him. So, too, did Cynon, son of Clydno Eidyn, Lord of 'The Rock', whose name suggests kinship with Yrfai. The coalition deployed an elite cavalry force, and rode far to the south, beyond Bernicia, beyond Hadrian's Wall, into the eastern lands of Rheged. They called themselves _Y Bedydd \u2013_ 'The Baptized' \u2013 and claimed to be defending the old faith against the Anglian _Gynt_ or 'Gentiles'. Their exploits were recorded in the greatest of the early Old Welsh epics. The opening sentence of the only surviving manuscript, known as _The Book of Aneirin_ , announces the names of the poem and of its author:\n\n> _Hwn yw e gododdin, aneirin ae cant._ 40\n> \n> (This is the Gododdin, Aneirin sang it.)\n\nThere follows a long collection of eulogies for the fallen warriors. One of them was called Madauc or Madawg:\n\n> _Ni forth\u00efnt ueiri mol\u00fct n\u00efuet,_\n> \n> _ractria riall\u00fc trin orthoret,_\n> \n> _teb\u00efh\u00efc tan teryd dru\u00ef c\u00efnne\u00fcet._\n> \n> _D\u00efu Maurth guisgassant e\u00fc cein d\u00fchet_\n> \n> _Diu Merchyr b\u00fc guero e\u00fc c\u00eftunet..._\n> \n> The chief men maintained the praise of rightful privilege\n> \n> like a bright fire that has been well kindled.\n> \n> On Tuesday they put on their dark covering.\n> \n> On Wednesday their common purpose was bitter.\n> \n> On Thursday envoys were pledged.\n> \n> On Friday corpses were counted.\n> \n> On Saturday their joint action was swift.\n> \n> On Sunday, their red blades were redistributed.\n> \n> On Monday, a stream of blood as high as the thigh was seen.\n> \n> A Gododdin man tells that when they came back\n> \n> before Madawg's tent after the exhaustion of battle\n> \n> but one in a hundred would return.\n\nAs many observers have noted, the warrior ethos, the poetic hyperbole and the tangible cult of death and slaughter has a timeless quality. These are Celts fighting Angles, but without too much variation they could well be the host of Agamemnon at Troy. The Lord of 'The Rock' was in the van:\n\n> _Moch arereith \u00ef \u2013 immetin_\n> \n> _pan \u2013 cr\u00efssiassan c\u00efnt\u00e4r\u00e4nn i-mbodin..._\n> \n> He rose early in the morning\n> \n> When centurions hasten in the mustering of the army,\n> \n> Moving from one advanced position to another.\n> \n> At the front of a hundred men he was the first to kill.\n> \n> As great was his craving for corpses\n> \n> As for drinking mead or wine.\n> \n> It was with utter hatred\n> \n> That the Lord of Dumbarton, the laughing warrior,\n> \n> Would kill the enemy.\n\nYet this time the laughing was cut short. The advance guard of the Anglian host had pulled back, and drawn their adversaries into the line of march of a second Anglian force moving up from Deira. They collided at Catraeth (the modern Catterick). The slaughter was shocking even for a society that lived from warfare, and the North British army was annihilated: only one of the three hundred chiefs returned. Yrfai and Cynon and most of their companions were slain:\n\n> _E tri bet yg Kewin Kelvi..._\n> \n> The three graves on the ridge of Celvi,\n> \n> Inspiration has declared them to me:\n> \n> [They are] the grave of Cynon of the rugged brows,\n> \n> The grave of Cynfael and the grave of Cynfeli.\n\nThe road was open for the Angles to resume their inexorable progress.\n\nThe political consequences of Catraeth were worked out in the following decades. The Angles of Bernicia streamed north and overran Gododdin, so that by 631 Dun Eidyn had become Edinburgh ( _burgh_ meaning 'fort' was simply a calque of the Celtic _dun_ ). They also returned to the onslaught on Rheged which had been halted by Urien. In an earlier confrontation, the men of Deira had inflicted a Catraeth-like defeat on the Luguvalians at Aderydd (now Arthuret near Longtown in Cumbria), and had reputedly forced the bard of the city, Myrddin (Merlin), to seek refuge in the 'Forest of Cellydon' (which sounds awfully like Caledonia). Now the redoubled strength of the Angles could move into Rheged with destructive vengeance, bringing with them permanent colonists. Urien's line disappears from the record. The last king of Rheged, the exiled Llywarch Hen, is received into the Welsh court of Powys, and Rheged itself fades away. In short, the presence of the Angles in the north is fixed from coast to coast; Bernicia's expansion is revitalized; and the British people of 'The Rock' are further isolated from their countrymen.\n\nThe religious conflict came to a head in the 660s. The issues were often those of rite or theology, like the calculation of Easter, but at their heart was a raw struggle for power. The north had been evangelized by Celtic missionaries; by St Ninian, by St Columba, by Rhun, son of Urien and bishop of Luguvalium, who claimed to have baptized Edwin of Northumbria, and by the Irishman St Aidan, who established the See of Lindisfarne _c._ 635. Yet the Roman mission, firmly allied to the expansion of Anglo-Saxon power, was unyielding. In 664 Oswy of Northumbria, far stronger than his predecessors, convened the Synod of Whitby. Despite his personal links to Celtic Christianity he ruled in favour of the Roman party, and appointed St Wilfrid as bishop of Northumbria. Henceforth, Anglian government marched hand in hand with the Roman faith. Within five years, Wilfrid was claiming to be 'bishop of Pictland'. 'It turned out that, in addition to Latin, God spoke English, not Gaelic.'\n\nIt also turned out that Wilfrid had been overly optimistic. Nechtansmere, the Anglian name for a location that the Britons variously called _Llyn Garan_ , the 'Heron's Pool', or _Dunnicken_ , the 'Fort of Nechtan', lies well to the north of the Firth of Forth, near Forfar in modern Angus. Bede mentions it in connection with the onset of Northumbria's decline, for it was at Nechtansmere that at around three o'clock on the Saturday afternoon of 20 May 685, the army of Ecgfrith, son of Oswy, king of Northumbria, was routed by the combined forces of Pictland and 'The Rock' under a warrior with the magnificent name of Bridei map Bili. Ecgfrith and his entire royal bodyguard were cut down. 'Rashly leading his army to ravage the province of the Picts,' wrote Bede, 'and much against the advice of the Blessed Cuthbert, [Ecgfrith] was drawn into the straits of inaccessible mountains, and slain with the greatest part of his forces.' The Angles were never seen in those parts again.\n\nUnusually for the 'Dark Ages', Bridei's victory left a lasting artistic monument in the so-called Aberlemno Stone. It stands in the kirkyard only six miles from the battle site, and carries the only clear battle narrative to be seen on any of the Pictish symbol-stones:\n\n> [The narrative] reads like a comic strip in a newspaper, with four scenes arranged in sequence from top to bottom. In the first, a mounted figure who may represent Bridei chases another mounted warrior. In his haste to escape the latter has thrown away his shield and sword. This man may be Ecgfrith... turning and fleeing at the moment when he realised that an ambush had been sprung. What identifies the escaping warrior as a Northumbrian is his helmet. During excavations at the Coppergate in York a very similar design, rounded with a long nose-guard was discovered.\n\nThe second scene shows Ecgfrith, or a mounted Northumbrian figure, wearing the same sort of helmet, attacking a group of Pictish infantrymen. The sculptor clearly understood military tactics because he was careful to arrange the men into the proper battle formation of three ranks. At the front stands a warrior with a sword and a round, curved shield with prominent boss. When the opposing cavalry charged he had to withstand the shock of impact. To support him another man stands immediately behind holding a long spear which projected well beyond the front rank. To the rear of the two warriors engaging the enemy, a third spearman stood in reserve. Along an extended battle line, an array of bristling spear points was designed to deter a charge, forcing cavalry horses to shy or to reel away. In a third scene, carved at the foot of the stone, the Bridei and Ecgfrith figures face each other on horseback. Ecgfrith appears to be on the point of throwing his spear while Bridei readies himself to parry it. And in a final act, tucked into the bottom right-hand corner, Ecgfrith lies dead on the battlefield. A raven, a carrion-feeder symbolizing defeat, pecks at his neck.\n\nThe Aberlemno Stone is a Pictish national manifesto. Carved a century after the great victory, its message was both simple and powerful: Pictland is different. And in 685 that 'singular identity had been preserved by force of arms'.\n\nThere is no reason to query the continuity of the monarchy of 'The Rock' throughout the seventh century, but all its king-names are dubious, and several overlaps can be observed with the rulers of Pictland. Rhydderch Hael does not appear to have had sons. The succession passed to Nwython (Neithon, Nechtan), who is conceivably the same person as Nechtan, king of Pictish Fortriu (d. _c_. 621), after whom Nechtansmere could have been named. Nwython was father to Beli (or Bili I) and grandfather both to Ywain (Owen, Owain) and to Brude (Bridei). Owen of 'The Rock' was the victor of the Battle of Strathcarron in 642, when the king of Dalriada was killed, while his brother or half-brother, Bridei map Bili, who ruled in Fortriu, was the victor of Nechtansmere. References to another run of dubious names crop up from time to time in the Annals of Ulster, showing that in their rivalry with Dalriada, the monarchs of 'The Rock' did not hesitate to take the fight across the sea to Ireland.\n\nThe consequences of Nechtansmere were never reversed. The battle had come at the end of a phase when fortunes on the Anglian-Pictish frontier had swung back and forth and the intervening territory had changed hands several times. But after Nechtansmere, both the Picts and the Britons of 'The Rock' stood their ground. The Angles put down roots to the south of the Firth of Forth, and did not venture beyond their stronghold at Stirling. They colonized Galloway and the former _Aeron_ (Ayrshire) in the south-west, but they did not move on the Clyde. Within their area of settlement, they introduced their particular brand of Old English that, mixed with local idioms, led to the emergence of a language called 'Lallans' or Lowland Scots. Henceforth, to the north and west of the Angles, the Gaelic Scots, the Picts and the Britons were drawn into a new, three-sided ethnic contest. Reduced to its simplest, the contest saw the Scots gaining the upper hand over the Picts, before the Picto-Scots overwhelmed the Britons. This was to take perhaps 250 years.\n\nThe eighth century and the first part of the ninth are the darkest of all. The historical record of the long decades between Nechtansmere and the irruption of the Vikings is threadbare. Despite occasional shafts of light, no continuous narrative can be constructed. As the Northumbrian Angles dug in to the south of them, and the warring Scots and Picts gradually fused together to the north, the Britons on the Clyde turned in on themselves. There are no famous monarchs; no resounding battles; no memory-cementing poems, no extant chronicles. The sources offer no clues on the subject of naval power. No expeditions by sea are recorded. No information is forthcoming on the size of armed patrols that may or may not have been maintained on the Firth of Clyde to monitor shipping and to protect the kingdom's tax-gatherers. Nothing has survived except occasional remarks among descriptions of the doings of others. Of the various peoples involved in the creation of Scotland, 'it is the Britons about whom least is known, and about whom least has been written'.\n\nFor much of this time, the territorial extent of the realms of 'The Rock' can only be conjectured. Following the fall of Rheged and Gododdin, the kingdom's neighbours did not change. To the west and north-west, most of the isles and promontories were controlled by the Dalriadan Scots. The extraordinary _Senchus_ or 'Register' of Dalriada \u2013 a sort of primitive Domesday Book \u2013 shows that Kintyre was one of its most important regions. It also implies that the tribute-collectors of 'The Rock' would not have ventured further afield than Bute and Arran. The main concern would have been to safeguard the seaways of the Firth. To the north, the _Clach nam Breatan_ or 'British Stone', which can still be seen in Glen Falloch above the head of Loch Lomond, marked the traditional dividing line with the Picts. Beyond lay the fertile valley of Strathearn and the Pictish province of Fortriu. To the east and the south, the lands of 'The Rock' adjoined Northumbrian territory. They occupied the tributary valleys and surrounding ridges of the Clyde Basin, but not much more. One major border post would probably have been in the vicinity of modern Kelvinhead, another in the vicinity of modern Beattock. Internal communications were compact, whether by river or by sea. There was land for arable farming and livestock, and forest. The ring of upland hills facilitated a sheltered climate and sound defence lines.\n\nYet the kingdom's overall resources fell behind those of neighbouring states. Northumbria was at least twice as large. The merger of the Picts and the Scots was to produce another large entity. As time passed, 'The Rock' found it ever harder to compete. All the indications are that Dalriada possessed significant naval capacity. One may infer that the lords of 'The Rock' would have sought to make similar provisions, but were unable to do so.\n\nAt the time of Nechtansmere, Pictland had still been pagan, and the map of Christianity in the north did not settle quickly. For a time, the Northumbrian Angles competed with the Dalriadan Scots to convert the Picts. The halting of their own territorial expansion did not stop their religious ambitions. The first two incumbents of a Northumbrian bishopric at Whithorn were Penthelm, 'Leader of the Picts', and Pentwine, 'Friend of the Picts'. Whithorn was not adjacent to Pictland, but some sort of Christian mission accompanied the bishopric. In that same era, Nechtan, king of the Picts (r. 706\u201324) expelled the Ionan monks and appealed to Bede's boss, the abbot of Jarrow, for advice on how to establish a church on the Roman model. In later times, he would be credited with the wholesale conversion of Pictland. In reality, he was probably just standardizing the Roman rite. His successor, Oengus I (r. 729\u201361), went a step further by importing the relics of St Andrew from Byzantium and building a shrine for them on the furthermost eastern shore. The people of 'The Rock', holding to the tradition of St Mungo, would not have been directly affected.\n\nThe year 731 marks the date of the most unambiguous of all references to the 'Kingdom of the Rock'. In his _Ecclesiastical History of the English People_ , Bede, who died only four years later, mentions the Firth of Clyde ' _ubi est civitas Brettonum munitissima usque hodie quae vocatur Alcluith_ ', 'where there is a city of the Britons highly fortified to the present day and called Alcluith'. Elsewhere he names ' _urbem Alcluith, quod lingua eorum significavit Petram Cluit; est enim iuxta fluvium nominis illius_ ', 'the city of Alcluith, which in their language means Rock of the Clyde, because it lies next to the river of that name'. He also notes that the western end of the Antonine Wall is found nearby. Bede lived at Jarrow, less than 200 miles distant. The fact that he says Alcluith is fortified 'up to the present time' is ample proof that the Rock was inhabited and actively defended.\n\nTwenty years later, another short but categoric reference appears in the Welsh _Brut y Tywysogion_ , the 'Chronicle of the Princes':\n\n> _DCCL. Deg mlyned a deugeint a seith cant oed oet Crist pan vu y vr\u00f3ydyr r\u00f3g y Brytanyeit ar Picteit yg g\u00f3eith Maesyda\u00f3c, ac llada\u00f3d y Brytanyeit Talargan brenhin y Picteit. Ac yna y bu uar\u00f3 Te\u00f3d\u00f3r map Beli_.\n> \n> Seven hundred and fifty was the year of Christ when the battle between the Britons and the Picts took place, [that is,] the action of Maesydog, and the Britons killed Talargan, King of the Picts. And then Tewdwr, son of Beli, died.\n\nThe cryptic information is important because it tallies with other snippets of both Welsh and Irish provenance. Teudebur map Beli, son of Beli II of 'The Rock', figures in the Harleian Genealogies as a contemporary of Oengus macFerguson of Pictland, whose brother Talorgen was killed at Maesyda\u00f3c\/Mygedawc \u2013 a location identified with the modern Mugdock halfway between Dumbarton and Stirling. The Irish Annals of Tigernach put the death of 'Taudar mac Bili, ri Alo Cluaide' at 752.\n\nThe death of King Teudebur\/Taudar initiated a period of dynastic strife in which headlines of 'Catastrophe on the Rock' could have appeared at several points. The contested throne was secured by the late king's son, Dynfwal map Teudebur, but almost immediately his kingdom was invaded by a joint army of Picts and Angles, who turned up like vultures at the feast. On 1 August 756 King Dynfwal surrendered 'The Rock' jointly to Onuist, king of the Picts, and Eadberht, king of Northumbria; the terms of submission are not known. But ten days later, as Eadberht marched home, he and his army were suddenly wiped out 'between _Ouania_ and _Niwanbrig_ '. The only possible perpetrator was Onuist, whom one of Bede's continuators, without charging him with the crime directly, characterizes as 'a tyrannical butcher'. The _Ouania_ or River Avon, a Welsh name, would have been the one in West Lothian, and _Niwanbrig_ or 'Newbridge', which is an Anglian name, would have been somewhere beyond the Northumbrian border. The Picto-Northumbrian alliance had collapsed, and the 'Kingdom of the Rock' gained a respite.\n\nA more persistent threat, however, came from the continuing fusion of the Picts and the Gaelic Scots in a process undoubtedly helped by the final stage of Pictland's Christianization. Three parallel operations were in play. In the cultural sphere, the Gaelic-speaking Scots, long since converted to Christianity, provided the literate clergy who drove the conversion forward. They would have had little difficulty in persuading their Pictish converts to adopt their language as well as their religious beliefs. (Their success may be compared to that of the Anglo-Saxon clergy, who in a somewhat later period simultaneously converted and Anglicized the pagan Danes of the Danelaw.) At the same time, in the geographical sphere, the Gaels were migrating eastwards, physically mingling with the Picts and forming a solid belt of Scottish settlement from Argyll to Fife. By the time that the first known list of Pictland's provinces was drawn up, two of them had Gaelic names. _Atholl_ , which means 'New Ireland', lies to the east of the mountainous watershed; _Gobharaidh_ or 'Gowrie' lies north of the Tay round modern Perth. In the political sphere, ever closer relations were established between the Dalriadan and Pictish ruling houses, until the distinction between them grew blurred. Since Edinburgh would long remain in Northumbrian hands, the capital of the emerging kingdom was to be located at Dunkeld. The sacred coronation stone would be housed at the nearby abbey of Scone. From the standpoint of the North Britons, a new and more dangerous rival was emerging from the combination of two old enemies.\n\nThe manoeuvrings whereby Gaelic dynasts from Dalriada merged with their counterparts in Pictland cannot be reconstructed with precision. One Pictish king, Oengus I macFerguson, is known to have originated in Argyll. Another, Oengus II (r. 820\u201334), briefly created a joint kingdom from sea to sea a hundred years later. But a disputed succession then spawned civil war; and a decade passed before the Gaelic contender, Cinaed mac Alpin, better known as Kenneth macAlpin (810\u201358), secured the throne as 'king of the Picts'. In later times, macAlpin was to be widely credited with creating the first united 'Kingdom of Scotland', yet the attribution may be premature. Under his son, Constantine I (r. 863\u201377, the founder of Dunkeld), Argyll and Pictland were still being governed as separate entities, and it could be that the union was only completed permanently by Constantine II (r. 900\u2013943). The kingdom's Gaelic name of 'Alba' was not recorded in macAlpin's time; the name of 'Scotland' was not used except by outsiders.\n\nAt some point during the Picto-Gaelic fusion, St Andrew was adopted as patron of the Alban kingdom. According to legend, the relics of the saint were donated to a King Oengus; the monastery of Cennrigmonoid (the core of the modern St Andrews), which became the focus of the saint's cult, dates from the mid-eighth century. The Alban flag was designed from the blue and white saltire of St Andrew.\n\nThe union was cemented above all by the Viking invasions. Sea-raiders from Scandinavia roared onto the scene at the end of the eighth century. Pouring down the coasts, they destroyed Lindisfarne in 793 and Iona in 795, then conquered the Isle of Man and settled in Ireland, Sutherland, Orkney and Shetland. That first attack on Lindisfarne caused repercussions similar to those which followed the arrival of Ida the Flamebearer 250 years earlier. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle trembled:\n\n> AD 793. This year came dreadful forewarnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were great sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament. These tremendous tokens were followed soon after by famine, and on the sixth day before the Ides of January... by the harrowing inroads of heathen men, who made lamentable havoc in the Church of God on Holy Island, by rapine and slaughter.\n\nThe Vikings, like the Scots and Angles before them, intended to stay.\n\nThe north-west of Britain was especially vulnerable. By the 830s Viking intruders were making Dalriadan Argyll unsafe for habitation, devastating coastal settlements and raiding deep into the interior. In 839 a Viking host marched into the Pictish heartland of Fortriu, and killed the two sons of Oengus II. They did not settle, but they created the vital opening for Kenneth macAlpin, then ruler of Argyll, to launch his bid for the throne.\n\nVikings were to cause even worse havoc in the neighbouring 'Kingdom of the Rock'. Commentators write that 'The Rock' in that era 'seems to have remained subject to foreign control', or 'the kingdom seems to have been eclipsed'. But the circumstances are nowhere clarified. The 'controllers' could have been Vikings or Picts, or 'Scots' from Dalriada, or possibly a combination of various outsiders. One solitary happening is attributed to _c_. 849: 'The Britons burned Dunblane.' Dunblane lay in Pictland, near Stirling. One possibility among several suggests that the Britons of 'The Rock' were already chafing against the growing power of a Picto-Gaelic union that would only grow stronger in the following decades.\n\nBy the late 860s the Vikings were threatening to overwhelm the whole of the Isles. They had created a major base in Dublin whence they were swarming all over Ireland and the western coasts of Britain. They held London, East Anglia and Humberside in what became the Danelaw. Wessex alone among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms was mounting effective resistance. King Alfred of Wessex (r. 871\u201399) was lucky to escape their clutches. Further north, by moving up the Mersey, the Solway and the Humber, the Scandinavian raiders had created a Norse community in the Lake District of the former Rheged and a Viking Kingdom of York. They had completely absorbed the far north of Britain, which they called their 'Southland' (Sutherland). The earlier balance of power was in ruins, and the future lay open to bidders. If the Vikings prevailed, Britain would be turned in its entirety into another Norse realm like Denmark or Norway. If Wessex in the south or Alba in the north could rally, some new modus vivendi might be found.\n\nAll surviving contemporary sources agree that 'The Rock' was destroyed by Vikings in 870 or 871. The exact date can vary by a year or two, due to the hazards of retrospective year-counting. But chroniclers in Ulster, in St Davids and in three versions of the Welsh Annals all use the same name for the target, Alt Clud (the British form); and they all use verbs that imply complete destruction:\n\n> 869\\.... the battle of Cryn Onen [Ash Hill] took place.\n> \n> 870. Eight hundred and seventy was the year of Christ, and Caer Alclut was demolished by the Pagans.\n> \n> _Deg mlyned athrugeint ac wythgant oed Krist, AC Y TORRET KAER ALCLUT Y GAN Y PAGANYEIT_\n> \n> (St Carodog of Llancarvan, _Brut y Tywysogion_\n> \n> (Chronicle of the Princes))\n> \n> 869 _an Cat Brin Onnen_\n> \n> 870 _an Arx Alt Clut a gentilibus fracta est_\n> \n> 871 _an Guoccaun mersus est, rex Cereticiaun_.\n> \n> (Nennius and the Welsh Annals)\n> \n> 870 _an Cat Brionnen annus. Cant Wrenonnen_ (Ashdown)\n> \n> 871 _an Arx Alclut a Gentilibus fracta est. Alclut fracta est_\n> \n> 872 _an Guoccaun mersus est Gugan, rex Cereticiaun rex Ceredigean mersus est_\n> \n> (Welsh Annals)\n> \n> _Obsesio Ailech Cluathe a Nordmannis, i.e. Amlaiph et Imhar ii regis Nordmannorum obsederunt arcem illam et destruxerunt in fine_ 4 _mensium arcem et predaverunt_.\n> \n> The siege of Ailech Cluathe by the Northmen, that is by Olaf and Ivar, two kings of the Northmen besieged the citadel, and at the end of four months destroyed and plundered it.\n> \n> (Annals of Ulster)\n\nBy piecing together these scattered bits of information, narratives of reasonable plausibility can be constructed:\n\n> It was in the year 870 that the Norse king of Dublin, Olaf the White... decided on an expedition to plunder the kingdom of the Britons in Strathclyde. He set off with a large fleet from Dublin and, sailing up the Firth of Clyde, laid siege to Alclut. He was joined by another Viking ruler, Ivar Beinlaus (the 'Cripple' or 'one-legged'), who came north from York, which he had seized in 867. The garrison of Alclut held out for four months. But at length it was compelled to surrender, as the well on the Rock had dried up... The citadel was destroyed and the kingdom of the Britons lay prostrate before the invaders, who remained in Strathclyde over the winter, [before] sailing back to Dublin with a fleet of two hundred ships laden with slaves and booty. The king of Strathclyde was killed shortly afterwards and the kingdom passed for a time under the control of neighbouring kings.\n\nThe Viking fleet sailed away with its loot, heading no doubt for the Dublin slave market, though the presence of Viking-style 'hogsback' tombstones in the nearby Govan district indicates that a body of Vikings could have stayed behind. But local survivors also remained; and the humbled monarchy of 'The Rock' was not eliminated. The exact fate of King Arthgal is hard to discover. One modern authority assumes that he was taken prisoner to Dublin. Most accept the chronicler's statement that 'Arthgal, king of the Britons, was slain in 872 by counsel of Constantine, son of Kenneth [macAlpin]'. It is certain that the British king's son, Rhun map Arthgal, had married, or was about to marry, the sister of King Constantine I. The neatest solution, though it is uncertain, would show Constantine setting up Rhun during his father's absence and then persuading or paying the Dublin Vikings to kill Arthgal and to prevent his return. One way or the other, it is clear that the Scots established their supremacy over the 'Kingdom of the Rock' in the early 870s, with Constantine I ruling as over-king and Rhun as sub-king.\n\nAs the Welsh _Brut y Tywysogion_ put it, 'the men of Strathclyde who refused to unite with the English had to depart their country and go to Gwynedd'. It is likely that the Welsh chronicler was using 'English' as the English used the word 'Welsh' \u2013 to mean 'foreigners'. Yet the episode shows what really went on in the 'Dark Ages' when one native society was overrun by another. Some of the defeated population were sold into slavery. Some, probably most, stayed on to work the land and in time to integrate with the victors. But the ruling elite had to be replaced. If they were lucky, they would be given the choice of submitting to the victor's rule or of being expelled. If not, they would be killed. This explains how language and culture change in areas where the basic human gene pool remains the same. The example of post-Roman Britannia turning into Anglo-Saxon England is a prime case; the Britons of the north turning into Gaelic Strathclyders is another.\n\nThe departing elders of 'The Rock', who had chosen to reunite with their British kith and kin rather than with the incoming Gaels, could only have reached distant Gwynedd by sea. Their ships would have sailed on the tide, leaving the Rock behind, gliding past Bute and Arran (which they would have called something else), edging round the coast of _Aeron_ , and out past the 'rip-tide' of the Ituna. They would have carried their bards and their scribes, who were to pass on the knowledge of the _Gwyr y Gogledd_ to their Welsh hosts. As they must have known, hundreds, indeed thousands of years of history were being cut adrift with them. One cannot say for certain when this journey took place, but by 890, the exiles had appeared in the Welsh Annals, and are reported helping the king of Gwynedd to repel the 'Saxons'.\n\nFrom 870\/871, therefore, the remaining Britons of 'The Rock' were closely subject to the rising Kingdom of 'Alba'. Formal feudal overlordship, which was slowly spreading round Europe at the time, was not yet introduced, but the shift in power was manifest. The monarchs of 'The Rock' henceforth acted in concert with their Alban superiors. The administrative centre was moved across the river from Alt Clud to Govan; and the name of Cumbria came increasingly into use for the sub-kingdom as a whole. Control over 'The Rock' and its tributary lands would have assisted sons and grandsons of Kenneth macAlpin to strengthen their inheritance.\n\nIt was the Alban monarchs and their fellow Gaels who introduced the name of Strath Cluaith or 'Strathclyde', by which Alt Clud would be best known in later times. They had good reason to treat the people of 'The Rock' with some indulgence; from their point of view, the rulers of Strathclyde were but a junior branch of their own family through the maternal line. Eochaid map Rhun ( _fl._ 878\u20139) even appears to have made a bid for the senior, Alban throne on the strength of being Kenneth macAlpin's grandson. One source calls him 'the first Briton to rule over Gael'. He was dispossessed by the shadowy Giric MacRath, or 'Son of Fortune', who held Britons, Norse and English in his house as slaves. Yet the rift between the senior and the junior branches of the ruling family did not lead to a lasting feud. In any case, the imminent and unforeseen collapse of Viking power beyond Hadrian's Wall was to draw the Strathclyders and the Scots into yet another set of power struggles in which they would need to stand together.\n\nIn the tenth century, a resurgent Wessex came to the fore in southern Britain. Within twenty years of King Alfred's death in 899 it was showing signs not only of reducing the Danes and Vikings to submission but also of creating a united 'Kingdom of all-Britain'. Athelstan (r. 924\u201339), Alfred's grandson, succeeded to the Kingdom of Mercia as well as to Wessex, and in 927 he launched a lightning northern campaign, destroying the Viking Kingdom of York, overrunning Northumbria as far as the Forth, and obliging Constantine II, king of Scots, to sue for peace. A meeting of five kings at Eamont Bridge in Cumbria acknowledged Athelstan's overlordship. Apart from Athelstan and Constantine, the participants included the king of 'West Wales', the 'king of Bamburgh' and Ywain map Dynfwal of Strathclyde, otherwise 'Owen of Cumbria'. The act of homage to Athelstan signalled more than the advance of Anglo-Saxon power from the Tyne to the Forth; it marked the first step in a long campaign by the English kings to claim hegemony over their northern neighbours.\n\nNonetheless, the humbling of Viking York and Northumbria allowed the Strathclyders to move into part of the resultant vacuum, and to recover many of the historic territories of the 'Old North'. In subsequent decades, they reached southwards into the former lands of Rheged and deep into the Pennines. Acting as a sub-state of 'Alba', they pushed the frontier with England back beyond the zone where the Borders would eventually settle. A boundary stone on the summit of Stainmore, variously known as Rere Cross, Rear Cross or Rey Cross \u2013 halfway between Penrith and Barnard Castle \u2013 probably marks the limit of Alban and Strathclyde rule. A cluster of Cumbrian parish churches dedicated to St Mungo\/Kentigern, notably at Dearham near Cockermouth, attests to persistent Clydeside influences. In this era, the customs and language of the Brythonic elements of the population, not least the Cumbric sheep-counters, would have been strengthened, though the established dominance of the Anglian and Norse elements was not displaced. The great majority of Lake District place names, for example, like Bassenthwaite, Langdale or Scafell, are self-evidently Norse in origin, while only a minority, like Derwent, 'Oak Valley', or Helvellyn, 'Yellow Moor', are Brythonic. Dunmail Raise on the road between Keswick and Grasmere, where in future times a cairn would mark the boundary between Cumberland and Westmorland, was named after one of the three sub-kings of Strathclyde of that name. In the early tenth century, the Dunmail cairn could have been a southern counterpart to Rere Cross on Stainmore.\n\nRespite, however, was short. In 937, one of the most crucial, but frequently neglected battles in the history of the Isles was fought at _Brunanburh_ , an unspecified location somewhere on Merseyside. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle breaks into verse for this entry. The poem, known as _The Battle of Brunanburh_ , was translated by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:\n\n> Athelstan King,\n> \n> Lord among Earls,\n> \n> Bracelet-bestower and\n> \n> Baron of Barons,\n> \n> He with his brother\n> \n> Edmund Atheling,\n> \n> Gaining a lifelong\n> \n> Glory in battle,\n> \n> Slew with the sword-edge\n> \n> There by Brunanburh,\n> \n> Brake the shield-wall,\n> \n> Hew'd the lindenwood,\n> \n> Hack'd the battleshield...\n\nAt Brunanburh, Athelstan of Wessex, titular 'King of All-Britain' faced a coalition of Welsh, Scots and Norse kings who were evidently alarmed by the surge of southern English power and who had brought their troops into Athelstan's territory. The king of Strathclyde, probably Ywain map Dynfwal, was among them. This was the point at which, if the fortunes of battle had favoured them, the non-English forces could have clipped the wings of Wessex. England was no more inevitable than Scotland was, and different turns could have been taken at every step of the way. As it was, Athelstan triumphed, and the anti-English coalition was broken. The Anglo-Saxon chronicler (again translated by Tennyson) proclaimed an ultimate victory over the 'Welsh':\n\n> Never had huger\n> \n> Slaughter of heroes\n> \n> Slain by the sword-edge \u2013\n> \n> Such as old writers\n> \n> Have writ of in histories \u2013\n> \n> Hapt in this isle, since\n> \n> Up from the East hither\n> \n> Saxon and Angle from\n> \n> Over the broad billow\n> \n> Broke into Britain with\n> \n> Haughty war-workers who\n> \n> Harried the Welshman, when\n> \n> Earls that were lured by the\n> \n> Hunger of glory gat\n> \n> Hold of the land.\n\nThe consequences of Brunanburh \u2013 what the English were to call the 'Great Battle' \u2013 were not immediately apparent. Indeed, Athelstan's early death inspired a temporary recovery of his enemies, and his heirs were required to fight hard to confirm his conquests. In 944\u20135, for example, Athelstan's half-brother and successor, Edmund the Elder, invaded the extended Kingdom of Strathclyde, defeated its sub-king, Dynfwal III \u2013 whom the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls 'Dunmail' \u2013 and, as part of a general settlement, insisted that Strathclyde be formally subordinated to Alba. The Alban Scots were being told to keep a tighter rein on their dependants. The sovereign life of the former 'Kingdom of the Rock' was reaching its term.\n\nA solitary sentence in the Welsh _Brut y Tywysogion_ is worthy of note. After listing the death of Bishop Emerys of St Davids in 944, it records, entirely without comment: ' _Ystrat Clut adiffeith\u00f3yt y gan y Saeson_ ' ('Ystrat Clut was devastated by the Saxons'). This must have been at least the fourth time that 'The Rock' had been devastated, and the perpetrators can only have been the troops or allies of Edmund the Elder. But it was the first occasion that the Welsh dropped the traditional Brythonic name of Alt Clud, replacing it by Ystrad Clut, or 'Vale of Clyde' \u2013 a simple calque of the Gaelic name. The Brythonic\/Cumbric character of the kingdom was slipping; Gaelicized Alban 'Strathclyde' was emerging, and the Welsh were aware of it. The Britons of the Old North were not even mentioned.\n\nIn the next generation, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports, six _reguli_ or 'subject kings' were required to row the barge of Edmund's successor, Edgar, along the River Dee in a ritual, Viking-style act of subordination, elsewhere called the 'Submission of Chester'. One of the later Dynfwals participated as a rower, thereby giving him a certain standing. The symbolism would not have been lost on contemporaries. Strathclyde had benefited from a temporary geographical expansion, and its political status, though diminished, was not inconsiderable. The age of independence was past. But the former Alt Clud was not yet an integral province of Alba. The descendants of Ceredig kept their separate identity, and by using old British names they clearly remained conscious of their ancestry, but their separate activities were limited. When they went to war, they and their men invariably fought alongside their Alban superiors.\n\nIn the eleventh century the Britishness of Strathclyde continued to fade, even though it benefited to some extent from the new preoccupations that took centre stage both in England and in Alba. All parts of the Isles were shaken by the terminal convulsions of the Viking Age. In England, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy was overthrown by Cnut Sweynsson the Great (r. 1018\u201335), who briefly raised the prospect of an Anglo-Scandinavian empire. In 1066 two separate hostile expeditions landed in England. The first, led by Harald Sigurdsson 'Hardrada', sailed from Norway to the mouth of the Tyne in September and was destroyed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. The second, led by Duke William of Normandy, the grandson of Frenchified Vikings, crossed the Channel in October and after the Battle of Hastings seized the English throne. In the years after 1066, when England was turned into a Norman colony, much of the Conqueror's time was spent in the 'Harrying of the North', in subduing Northumbria and invading Scotland. The Anglo-Scottish settlement in the Treaty of Abernethy (1072) included an act of homage which further strengthened the English argument that Scotland was by now a legal fief of England.\n\nNorthern Britain in this era was assuming the shape and character which would be recognizable throughout the Middle Ages. Though Orkney and Shetland, Sutherland and the Western Isles remained in Norse hands, the great bulk of territory was united under one ruler. Furthermore, the kings of Alba progressively adopted the title of _rex Scottorum_ or 'king of the Scots', thereby cementing the concept of 'Scotland'; their conquest of northern Northumbria, which followed the capture of Edinburgh in 1020, engendered a further shift in self-identity. The absorption of the Lallans-speaking Lowlands, whose aristocracy now possessed strong English and Norman connections, challenged the previous dominance of the Gaeltacht.\n\nNonetheless, the House of macAlpin continued to control the monarchy of Alba\/Scotland for most of the century. In 1031 Malcolm I and his associates submitted to Cnut when he came north for the purpose, and no conflict ensued. The one interval in the macAlpins' hold on the throne began in 1040, when Donnchad I (Duncan) was killed by MacBethad mac Findlaich (r. 1040\u201357), lord of Moray, known to contemporaries as the _Ri Deircc_ or 'Red King' and to readers of Shakespeare as Macbeth. Almost all historians of the period insist that Shakespeare's play makes for great drama but for poor history. No contemporary account describes him as a tyrant. He ruled right up to the eve of the Norman Conquest, and gave shelter to exiles from England. He was the last king of Alba to preside over a Gaelic-speaking court. He was killed by the forces of Malcolm III Canmore (r. 1058\u201393), son of the murdered Donnchad.\n\nSuch was the setting for the final span of Strathclyde's political history. The kingdom stretched deep into the zone contested between Scotland and England, and its affairs inevitably became entangled with Anglo-Scottish rivalry. At one time, it was assumed that Eogan II, otherwise known as Owain the Blind (d. 1018), was the last of his line. His presence at the Battle of Carham in 1016 or 1018 near Durham between the Scots and English is well attested. But his death there is not. In fact, the sub-monarchs of Strathclyde and their state still had decades in front of them. There are strong indications that Donnchad had ruled over Strathclyde as a royal appanage before acceding to the Alban throne; and there is little doubt that the English targeted Strathclyde during the last years of Macbeth's reign. In 1054 Siward, the mighty earl of Northumbria, who had come to Britain in Cnut's time, led a large fleet and a huge army northwards, provoking a bloody field of slaughter at the unlocated Battle of the Seven Sleepers. Macbeth was put to flight, and Siward's son killed. More to the point, according to an English chronicler, Siward 'made Mael Coluim, prince of the Cumbrians, a king'. In the Scottish tradition, this prince has usually been identified as Macbeth's enemy, Malcolm Canmore; but it seems more likely that he was a Cumbrian\/Strathclyder of the same name who was reinstated by Siward in the land of his forebears. If this was the case, eleventh-century Strathclyde was oscillating between alternating phases of Scottish and English suzerainty.\n\nOne thing is certain: the Gaelic pressures on the Britishness of Strathclyde and on the Cumbrian language were augmented by parallel pressures from England. The steady Gaelicization which had been proceeding since the Viking destruction of 'The Rock' in 870\/871, was now competing with Anglicization. The linguistic shifts have not been well documented, but would have proceeded at different speeds in different districts and in different milieux. From Rhun map Arthgal (who had a Gaelic wife) onwards, the sub-kings of Strathclyde would probably have been bilingual, with the Gaelic steadily pushing the Brythonic into the background. Thanks to the English invasion of 1054, they would have been turning increasingly to Lallans after the mid-century, just as Macbeth's court was. The sub-kings' Brythonic subjects would have accepted linguistic change less rapidly. The first of them to succumb would probably have lived in the northerly districts adjacent to Argyll, where the influx of Gaelic would have been strongest, or in the few tiny urban and ecclesiastical centres, like Glasgow. Since Church appointments were influenced by ruling circles, and education was controlled by the Church, the small educated class would have followed the fashions of the court. The farmers and pastoralists of the countryside would have been much more resistant. Centuries could have passed before the old idioms finally gave way.\n\nIn the twelfth century the passing of the dominance of the Brythonic tongue did not bring about any instant demise of the Strathclyders' sense of identity. Strathclyde would long remember its origins, and its people would long be marked by distinctive customs, by distinctive laws and no doubt by a distinctive accent. There can be little doubt, for example, that Brythonic identity endured into the era when Scotland's Highland clans were forming. Several clan names are manifestly Brythonic in origin, and a number of clan genealogies boast Brythonic ancestry. The clearest example is that of Clan Galbraith, whose Gaelic name means 'Foreign Briton' and whose ancestral fortress was built on the island of Inchgalbraith in Loch Lomond. The Galbraiths trace their origins to Gilchrist Breatnach, 'Gilchrist the Briton', who married a daughter of the earl of Lennox in the late twelfth century. Their emblem, a boar's head, is the same as that of the late kings of Strathclyde. The Colquhouns of Luss, the Kincaids, the MacArthurs and the Clan Lennox all have similar connections with the territory where Gaels and Britons once overlapped.\n\nIn 1113 David, the son of Malcolm Canmore and St Margaret (1045\u201393), who had strong English connections, was given the title of 'prince of the Cumbrians'. The honour may have signified little more than a royal courtesy (like that of princes of Wales at the medieval English court) but it can also be taken as an indication that Strathclyde was still a discrete administrative unit, and that the kings of Scotland recognized its particularity. It was during David's years as Cumbrian prince that he built his hunting castle at Cadzow (now Hamilton), and when the first of Glasgow's permanent line of bishops was appointed the medieval bishops of Glasgow would habitually refer to their diocese as 'Cumbria' Twenty years later, after ascending the Scottish throne, King David brought Norman barons into Strathclyde , as part of the 'Davidian Revolution' and, as his late mother would have approved, adding one more layer of political and linguistic culture. Ever since the fall of 'The Rock' in 870\/871, Govan and its stone-built old church had served as Strathclyde's cultural and government centre. It had been the seat of the royal residence, and it was the site of large-scale production of Celtic crosses. But it now ceded prominence to Glasgow, where David I patronized the cult of St Mungo.\n\nNot far from Glasgow, the islands in the Firth of Clyde might plausibly be thought the most resistant strongholds of Brythonic culture. It would appear, however, that Gaelic had taken over and that Irish poets of the period were already talking of the Firth as part of their own world. In the famous _Acallam na Sen\u00f3rach_ or 'Old Men's Colloquy', a twelfth-century Gaelic poet imagined a meeting between St Patrick, the Briton who had converted Ireland, and Ca\u00edlte, a disciple of 'Fingal', the most illustrious of Ireland's legendary heroes. The meeting is entirely unhistorical; St Patrick belongs to post-Roman Britain, while Fingal is placed at a variety of points right up to the Viking Age. The latest of the Fingal legends finds him defending Glencoe against a Norse host that had sailed into Loch Leven, which would make him a contemporary to the Viking attack on Alt Clud. At all events, the two men are imagined to have exchanged views on a wide range of topics. In one sequence, St Patrick asks Ca\u00edlte whether the hunting grounds are better on the Irish or the Scottish shore. The answer names an island within view of White Tower Crag:\n\n> Arran blessed with stags, encircled by the sea,\n> \n> Island that fed hosts, where black spears turn crimson.\n> \n> Carefree deer on its peaks, branches of tender berries,\n> \n> Streams of icy water, dark oaks decked with mast,\n> \n> Greyhounds here and beagles, blackberries, fruit of sloe,\n> \n> Trees thick with blackthorns, deer spread about the oaks,\n> \n> Rocks with purple lichen, meadows rich with grass,\n> \n> A fine fortress of crags, the leaping of fawns and trout,\n> \n> Gentle meadows and plump swine, gardens pleasant beyond belief,\n> \n> Nuts on the bough of hazel, and longships sailing by.\n> \n> Lovely in fair weather, trout beneath its banks,\n> \n> Gulls scream from the cliffs, Arran ever lovely.\n\nWhen these enchanting evocations were composed, Alauna, Aloo, Alt Clud and the Cumbrian 'Kingdom of Strathclyde' were all dissolving into history.\n\n'The Rock' itself drops out of sight. _Dun Breteann_ , the 'Fort of the Britons', completely disappears from the historical record between 944 and the late Middle Ages. Archaeological evidence suggests that it was never totally abandoned, but it became, at best, a backwater. The active life of Strathclyde had moved elsewhere. Other ports serviced the river traffic. Ships sailed past without mooring. The city of Glasgow burgeoned further upstream; and across the river the Barony of Renfrew served as the base of a great Norman family, the fitzAlan-Stewarts, for whom a royal future beckoned.\n\nSome estimates extend the terminal phase of the Cumbric language into the thirteenth century, that is, into the age of William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Scotland's struggle for independence. Thanks to his exploits in the wars against England, Wallace rose to be Scotland's national hero. Yet his origins are extremely obscure, and historians have long contested the details of his birth and parentage. It is readily acknowledged that Wallace's reputation is 'legend-encrusted' and that 'his early life is a mystery'. Nonetheless, one faction clings to his birthdate in 1272 and to his birth in the village of Elderslie near Paisley, where an imposing monument now stands. Another faction favours Kilmarnock's Riccarton Castle in Ayrshire.\n\nOne of the few hard facts in the story is that the surname of Wallace \u2013 _Uallas_ in Gaelic \u2013 means 'Welshman' or 'Briton'. Like the English name for Wales, it is a variant on the standard Germanic label for foreigner, and it was used by English-speakers both in the Welsh Marches and in Cumbrian districts further north. As a result, there were lots of medieval Wallaces, not only in English counties like Shropshire but also in parts of southern Scotland. At one time, the hero's surname was explained by the ingenious notion that his forebears migrated from Shropshire in the retinue of the fitzAlans. But the supposition is entirely unsupported by evidence. It was the doyen of Scottish surname scholars, George Fraser Black, who first gave currency to the idea that William Wallace's paternal family were Strathclyde Britons.\n\nThe geographical context is important. Wallace's traditional birthplace at Elderslie, now close to Glasgow Airport's southern runway, lies literally within sight of the Rock, and prior to the arrival of the fitzAlans in the 1130s, lay in the centre of the former British heartland. In any case, all the localities linked with the hero's early life, whether Elderslie, Riccarton or Lanark (where he killed the English sheriff in 1297), are in the same post-Brythonic vicinity. Since Gaelic had supplanted Cumbric there, they add credibility to the report that Wallace was known to his Gaelic-speaking comrades as _Uilleam Breatnach_ , or 'William the Briton'. This does not prove that Wallace himself was a Cumbric-speaker. But it does hint at the slight possibility that the 'Braveheart' may have had a similar connection to Scottishness that St Patrick had to Irishness.\n\nSimilar questions surround the origins of the most powerful of the Highland clans, the Campbells. Their oldest known possessions were concentrated in the district of Cowal, immediately adjacent to the Kyles of Bute; and their subsequent heartland round Loch Awe and upper Loch Fyne lies within walking distance of Loch Lomond. Their Gaelic name of MacCailinmor derives from a famous thirteenth-century warrior, 'Colin Campbell the Great', but the MacArthurs of Strachur provide a parallel line of descent. Their sobriquet of Campbell comes from the Gaelic _caim beil_ or 'twisted mouth', and is usually interpreted as 'a person whose speech is unintelligible'. In other words, they were not Gaelic-speaking Scots. 'Clan Campbell', writes the latest historian of the clans, 'probably originated among the Old Welsh kindreds of the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde.'\n\nOne would like to think, therefore, that somewhere in the shadow of the Rock the old ways lingered on. Perhaps, in some modest tavern or fisherman's cabin, the old-timers might have chatted in the old Cumbric-Brythonic tongue, singing the old songs, and telling the old tales about Ceredig and St Patrick, about Mungo and the Salmon, about the great battles of Catraeth, Nechtansmere and the Seven Sleepers. They would have wondered about the fate of the kinsfolk who had sailed away into exile, never to return. And they would have taught their children to count on their fingers: _yinty, tinty, tetheri, metheri, bamf_...\n\n##### III\n\nThe history of Scotland, like the history of England, has passed through several distinct phases, in which the cultural and linguistic shifts have been no less far-reaching than the political ones. One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if 'Scottishness' or 'Englishness' were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations \u2013 like the United States of America or Australia \u2013 from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.\n\nDuring the lifetime of the 'Kingdom of the Rock', the British population of the 'Old North' was repeatedly subjected to external cultural impulses. In the Roman period Latin was the challenger, together with the classical and later the Christian culture to which Latin gave access. In the 'Dark Ages' a double assault was mounted by the combination of Gaelic spreading from the north and west, and various forms of English moving in from the south. Pagan Norse culture made an impact during the Viking Age, just as Norman French did in the period following the Conquest. In the end, after a protracted struggle for survival, the Brythonic\/Cumbrian language sank beneath the waves, and the 'Strathclyders' were transformed into a particular species of Scotsmen.\n\nIn medieval Scotland, the Gaelic Scots, who had founded the united kingdom in the ninth century and had given it their name, were steadily elbowed out. Their ascendancy lasted for only 200 years or so, replaced by new, non-Gaelic power groups based in the southern Lowlands. They themselves were increasingly hemmed in, pushed back to their retreats in the Highlands and Islands. Having enjoyed their hour of glory by absorbing the Picts and the Britons, they were left facing the same prospect of slow annihilation that had once faced their rivals in Pictdom and the Old North. For a time, after Scotland reasserted its independence from England in the fourteenth century, a certain internal balance was maintained, but seen in the longer perspective the long rearguard action had already begun.\n\nIn the early modern era, however, the position of the Gaeltacht began to slip again. Large sections of north-eastern Scotland were being Anglicized. The Lowlanders turned Protestant while many of the Highlanders, whose clans still lived from their age-old practices of seasonal raiding and cattle-rustling, remained Catholic. Most seriously, in 1603 a Stuart king acceded to the throne of England. This gave the Scottish Lowlanders and Protestants an external power-link that the Gaels could never match. Shortly afterwards, a plantation of militant Scots Protestants was established in Ulster, cutting the Gaels off from their Irish kinsfolk. Later that century Oliver Cromwell demonstrated with fire and sword that the three kingdoms in the Isles could no longer be regarded as equals. In 1707 a Protestant Hanoverian monarchy, subservient to a distant Parliament at Westminster, was imposed. From then on, from the Gaelic viewpoint, the last stand was only a matter of time.\n\nThe deep sense of injustice, and of gathering gloom, which beset the Gaels as they watched the failure of their Risings in 1715 and 1745 and the suppression of their way of life, must have echoed the feelings of the Britons of the Old North almost a thousand years before. Their warriors were no less brave. Their language was no less poetic. Their history was no less ancient. Yet they were succumbing to the bigger battalions and to political necessity. In the prelude to the decisive Battle of Culloden in 1746, the Gaelic clansmen recited their genealogies under cannonfire to give them purpose for the fight on the rain-soaked moor. The Britons at Catraeth or Nechtansmere might well have done the same. For the ill-fated Celts were imbued with a suitable spirit of fatalism. Things occurred because they had to. Nature was red in tooth and claw. Animals killed animals. Men fought men. Species became extinct, but life went on. Death was part of living.\n\nThe difference between the fate of Gaeldom and that of the Old North lies in a series of reprieves from which the Gaels have benefited. After 1746, when the Highlanders were forbidden to carry arms, to wear their tartans or to speak their native language, tens of thousands were shipped off to Canada during the Clearances, and many of the glens were left with nothing more than sheep and desolation. In popular usage, 'Scotland' became near unmentionable and was replaced by 'North Britain'. After the Napoleonic Wars, however, a conscious effort was made to reintegrate the Gaelic heritage into mainstream Scottish life. When George IV visited Edinburgh in 1822, Walter Scott, whose novels had immortally romanticized Scottish history, staged a great show, where kilts and tartans could be worn again. In a symbolic gesture of reconciliation, Queen Victoria established her summer residence at Balmoral, enhancing the Highlands' romantic image. Ever since then, Scotland's identity has fed on a fascinating symbiosis between the Lowland heritage of Robbie Burns and the Highland heritage of Rob Roy MacGregor. In the twentieth century, when Gaelic was dying its second death, it received eleventh-hour resuscitation by injections of educational support, Gaelic television and radio channels, and the status of an official language.\n\nStrathclyde's modern destiny has been deeply influenced by the Highland\u2013Lowland divide. The Firth of Clyde formed a key sector of the frontline for centuries, like the Antonine Wall before it. Yet during the Industrial Revolution the Gaels came back in force. Together with the Irish from across the sea, they poured into Victorian Clydeside, to work the mines and to build the ships. They came, not as conquering heroes, but as penniless migrants and hungry job-seekers, begging for employment in a foreign land. They, too, had to assimilate, but they gave Glasgow a large dose of its inimitable modern flavour. They made Glasgow Celtic the equal of Glasgow Rangers. They ensured that the home of Harry Lauder and St Mungo is as different from Edinburgh as _Dun Breteann_ would once have been from Bernician Dunedin.\n\nEven so, the long-term prospects for the Gaelic world are precarious. Both in Ireland and in Scotland it still stands only one step from annihilation. One is reminded of the remarkable work of the Highland clergyman James Macpherson (1736\u201396), whose passion for the Gaels pulled off one of the great triumphs of literary fakery. His collection of poems, first published as _Ossian_ , purported to be translations of works by an ancient Gaelic bard, fortuitously discovered in a dusty dungeon. They were nothing of the sort, the product, rather, of Macpherson's own fertile imagination. But they fooled most of the eminent literati of the day. They convinced Goethe, won over Scott and enchanted Napoleon. And they show that Macpherson was well aware of the precedent of 'The Rock':\n\n> I have seen the walls of Balaclutha\n> \n> But they were desolate...\n> \n> And the voice of the people is heard no more.\n> \n> The thistle shook its lonely heard;\n> \n> The moss whistled in the wind.\n\n## 3\n\n## Burgundia\n\n_Five, Six or Seven Kingdoms (c. 411\u20131795)_\n\n##### I\n\nBornholm, 'the Pearl of the Baltic', is a small, lonely, Danish island in the middle of the sea. It lies 100 miles east of central Denmark, and halfway between Sweden and Poland. Its area measures about 700 square miles \u2013 similar to that of the Isle of Man or of Malta, and its population, which is slowly declining, stands at the latest official count at 42,050 (2009). Administratively, since 2007 it has been tacked onto Denmark's Capital Region, and it lives from fishing, farming and mining, and in the summer from tourism. Traditional exports include granite, clinker and herrings.\n\nOne usually reaches Bornholm by ferry, three and a half hours from German Sassnitz, six from Copenhagen, six and a half from \u015awinouj\u015bcie in Poland, and two by hydrofoil from Ystad in Sweden. One can also fly to the airport at R\u00f8nne, either by SAS Scandinavian or by the local carriers, Cimber Air and until April 2010 'Wings of Bornholm'.\n\nThe island's landscape is pleasantly varied. The interior presents a mixture of lush pastures and dark forests. Some of the beaches are low and sandy, others lined with steep, volcanic cliffs. Many, like the favourite Dueodde Strand, are covered in superfine, bright white sand. There are a number of small towns, such as R\u00f8nne, Nex\u00f8, Allinge, Gudhjem and Svaneke. The highest point reaches 1,082 feet. But Bornholm's most glorious feature arrives with the long summer days, which give twenty hours of bright skies, warm sun and Baltic breeze. The mild, sunny climate encourages gardens and orchards, and in sheltered spots an exotic display of flowering bushes and fig trees.\n\nBornholmers speak a language, _Bornholmsk_ , that differs both from standard Danish and Swedish; its grammatical features such as triple genders are similar to those in Norwegian or Icelandic and its phonetic patterns similar to south-Swedish Scanian. An organization called _BevarBornholmsk_ is devoted to the language's preservation, and several successful folk groups perform the island's music and songs. Danes from Copenhagen can sometimes be seen consulting a Danish-Bornholmsk dictionary. In medical circles, the name of Bornholm is linked incongruously to a viral infection called _epidemic pleurodynia_ , otherwise known as the 'Devil's Grip', the 'Grasp of the Phantom' or, more prosaically, Bornholm disease. The malady was first described in 1933.\n\nNonetheless, tourist publicity eulogizes this 'paradise for simple souls', where all manner of open-air pursuits flourish. The brochures talk of the _\u00d8sters_ \u00f8 _ens Perle_ ('Pearl of the Baltic'), _Solopgangens Land_ ('Sunrise Land'), _maleriske fiskelejer_ ('quaint fishing hamlet'), _Pelle Erobreren_ ( _Pelle the Conqueror_ \u2013 the title of a popular novel) and, of course, _Velkommen til Bornholm_. Biking, golfing, fishing, beach-walking, kite-flying, wind-surfing and a visit to one of the nature parks are all strongly recommended. There is a Birds of Prey Show and a Butterfly Park, and, in the long June days, festivals for rock-climbers and for the enthusiasts of the modern sport of ultra-running. Every year, the harbour at Tejn hosts the Bornholm Trolling Master competition, which involves sea-fishing in speedboats. Since bathing or sunbathing in the nude is legal throughout Denmark, Bornholm offers infinite opportunites for naturists. The area west of the lighthouse on Dueodde Strand is an old-established location. Bornholm also advertises itself as the 'Bright Green Island'. Thirty per cent of the island's energy is already generated by wind turbines in a project which aims to replace all petrol-driven cars with electric vehicles by 2011.\n\nHoliday-makers are encouraged to explore Bornholm's historical legacy, or at least parts of it. Topics not widely advertised include the lengthy refusal of the Red Army to leave after the Liberation of 1945, and the elaborate radio intercept stations which were installed by NATO during the Cold War. The main emphasis nowadays is on the enigmatic 'round churches', which the Knights Templar built in the late medieval period, and on the local patriots who fought for the island's freedom from the Swedes in the mid-seventeenth century. Many visitors make for the spectacular cliff-top ruins of Hammershus Castle, the largest fortified building in northern Europe, which was built by a Danish king, Valdemar the Victorious, early in the thirteenth century and commands stunning views over the water to Sweden. An annual jousting tournament is held there, yet the view alone is sufficient reason to visit. On a fine summer's morning, the shimmering light that hovers over the waves below the battlements produces magical moments. Time and space can merge; the imagination races. Viewed from the cliff top of 'today', the cliff foot becomes 'yesterday', the advancing lines of sea horses the centuries of history, and the far shore, barely visible, the Age of the _V\u00f6lkerwanderung_.\n\nInvestigations into Bornholm's earliest history are no less rewarding. Local archaeologists have established that the sequence of prehistoric graves came to a sudden end, strongly suggesting that the inhabitants had either been wiped out by a natural disaster, like the plague, or had departed en masse. Here, the Old Norse form of the island's name, _Burgundarholm_ , is relevant. Alfred the Great, composing his translation of Orosius in the Viking Age, called it _Burgenda Land_.\n\nOf course, when searching for origins, there is no need to assign one homeland to one people. Primitive tribes were mobile; they were all to some degree migrants or nomads. Even those who practised agriculture would stop for a season somewhere, and then move on. Their season might last for a couple of summers, a couple of generations, or even a couple of centuries. It came to an end when arable land was exhausted, when the climate changed, or when the next warlike tribe arrived to replace them. All in all, therefore, the traditional identification of Bornholm with the prehistoric wanderings of the Burgundians is entirely credible: by no means proven, but more than a mere possibility. Nor does it imply that Bornholm was the Burgundians' only significant stop, or that other peoples did not stop there also. But the Burgundians must have been present for long enough and in sufficient numbers for early geographers to make a lasting connection.\n\nIt would be idle to suppose, however, that the average visitor worries about such matters. Only historical enthusiasts follow every turn in the fortunes of an island tossed around between successive Baltic powers. The Danes, when they think about the past, have their own priorities. They dream about Viking exploits; and they remember the time, not too long ago, when the far shore beyond Bornholm, now in Sweden, belonged to Denmark. Part of the action of the much celebrated Norse _Jomsvikingesaga_ , which chronicles the wars of Vikings and Slavs, takes place on the island. Known history, the guidebook declares, began when Bornholm was the property of the medieval bishops of Lund. In modern times, the island was captured by Denmark in 1523, placed in pawn to the city of L\u00fcbeck, recovered by the Danes, occupied by the Swedes until 1648, visited by Peter the Great of Russia in 1716, seized by the Germans in 1940\u201345, and liberated by the Red Army. Aware, perhaps, of fragments of this story, the carefree tourists paddle in the seawater or take off their clothes, ride their bikes, fly their kites and sail their boats.\n\nIn December 2010, hit by the severest of the snowstorms that paralysed much of northern Europe, Bornholm was declared a disaster area. The Danish Metereological Institute measured a minimum snowfall of 55 inches (140 centimetres) across the island, though some parts were blocked by drifts up to 20 feet (6 metres). After a week of vainly trying to dig themselves out, the inhabitants called for help. They had to rely on military vehicles to deliver supplies, and to dump mountains of snow into the sea. Apart from the news that this was the coldest December since records were first kept in 1874, they had no time whatsoever to think about history.\n\n##### II\n\nFew subjects in European history have created more havoc than that summarized by the phrase 'all the Burgundies'. Conflicting information is supplied by almost every historical or reference work one cares to consult. As long ago as 1862, James Bryce, Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, was sufficiently worried to include a special note 'On the Burgundies' in his pioneering study of the Holy Roman Empire. 'It would be hard to mention any geographical name', he wrote, 'which... has caused, and continues to cause, more confusion... '\n\nBryce was a man of indefatigable stamina. He was a Glaswegian, an Alpinist, a Gladstonian liberal, an ambassador to the United States, and a meticulous fact-checker. (He once climbed Mount Ararat to check where Noah's Ark had rested.) His once famous 'Note A' lists the ten entities which, by his calculation, had borne the name of Burgundy 'at different times and in different districts':\n\nI. | The _Regnum Burgundionum_ (Kingdom of the Burgundians), AD 406\u2013534.  \n---|---  \nII. | The _Regnum Burgundiae_ (Kingdom of Burgundy), under the Merovingians.  \nIII. | The _Regnum Provinciae seu Burgundiae_ (Kingdom of Provence or of Burgundy), founded 877, 'less accurately called Cis-Jurane Burgundy'.  \nIV. | The _Regnum Iurense, or Burgundia Transiurensis_ (Kingdom of the Jura, or of 'Trans-Jurane Burgundy'), founded in 888.  \nV. | The _Regnum Burgundiae_ , or _Regnum Arelatense_ (Kingdom of Burgundy or of Arles), formed in 937 by the union of III and IV.  \nVI. | _Burgundia Minor_ (the Lesser Duchy, _Klein Burgund_ ).  \nVII. | The Free County or Palatinate of Burgundy (Franche-Comt\u00e9, Freigrafschaft).  \nVIII. | The _Landgrafschaft_ or Landgravate of Burgundy, part of VI.  \nIX. | The Imperial Circle of Burgundy, _Kreis Burgund_ , established 1548.  \nX. | The Duchy of Burgundy (Bourgogne), which was 'always a fief of the Crown of France'.\n\nThe complexities are self-evident; one need not delve into Bryce's Note too deeply before doubts arise. Yet it is one of the few attempts to see the Burgundian problem as a whole. It naturally invites further exploration.\n\nThe Kingdom of the Burgundians (No. I on Bryce's list) was a short-lived affair. It was set up by a tribal chief or warleader, Gundahar, on the west bank of the middle Rhine in the first decade of the fifth century. He and his father Gibica had brought their people over the river into the Roman Empire, probably during the great barbarian irruption in the winter of 406\u20137, and then helped elevate a local usurper, Jovinus, who was proclaimed 'anti-emperor' at Moguntiacum (Mainz); Jovinus in his turn pronounced the Burgundians to be imperial 'allies'. In Rome's opinion, the whole arrangement was deeply irregular.\n\nWhere exactly the Burgundian horde had come from is the subject of much learned speculation. Their presence in the late fourth century on the River Main (immediately to the east of the Roman _limes_ ) is documented in Roman sources, as are their wars with the Alemanni. A memorial inscription in Augusta Treverorum (Trier), attests to the Roman service of one Hanulfus, a member of the Burgundian royal family. Earlier stages of the Burgundian itinerary are less certain. One hypothesis proposes a four-stage trek, the first part of which would have taken them from Scandinavia to the lower Vistula by the first century AD. The second stage sees them moving to the Oder, the third to the middle Elbe by the third century, and the fourth to the Main.\n\nThe Burgundians spoke a Germanic language similar to that of the Goths, who also hailed from Scandinavia. Like the Goths, they had adopted the Arian form of Christianity, and may well have been familiar with the Gothic Bible (as translated by Wulfila, a converted Goth from northern Bulgaria). Furthermore, through interaction with various non-Germanic tribes, they had acquired the Hunnic practice of female head-binding, which was applied to girls during infancy and elongated their skulls for life. This has had the unintended consequence of making their graves instantly recognizable to archaeologists.\n\nGundahar's kingdom was centred on the old Celtic capital of Borbetomagus (Worms), stretching south to Noviomagus (Speyer) and Argentoratum (Strasbourg). The newcomers, initially some 80,000 strong, were settled among a well-established Gallo-Roman population. They are mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon poem _Widsith_ , in a brief recitation of fifth-century rulers. Widsith, the 'Far Traveller', was bold enough to claim that he had visited Gundahar's kingdom in person:\n\nMid \u00deyringum ic waes  \n... ond mid Burgendum | I was with the Thuringians  \n... and with the Burgundians.  \n---|---  \n\u00deaer ic beag ge\u00feah. | There, they gave me a ring.  \nMe \u00feaer Gu\u00f0ohere forgeaf | There Gunthere gave me  \nGlaedlicne ma\u00fe\u00feum | A shining treasure  \nSonges to leane. | To pay for my songs.  \nNaes \u00feaet saene cyning! | He was no bad king.\n\nGundahar's position, however, was shaky from the start. As soon as the Roman authorities regained their composure, they determined to expunge him. In 436 the Roman general Flavius Aetius, servant of the Emperor Valentinian III, called in Attila's Huns, and used them to do the bloody work. Reputedly, 20,000 Burgundians perished.\n\nThe massacre of the Burgundians passed into the annals of North European myth. Echoes of it found a place in many of the Norse sagas; and it lay at the heart of the tales of the _Nibelungen_ , or as the Norsemen called them, the _Niflungar_ , the descendants of Nefi and owners of a fabulous Burgundian treasure. Gundahar reappears as Gunnar; and Gunnar's sister Gudrun gives rise to a famous lineage after her marriage to Atli (Attila). The Eddaic poem the _Atlakvida_ , or 'Lay of Atli', contains many events and names characteristic of the fifth and sixth centuries, including Gunnar and Gudrun. In the German tradition, by contrast, the mythical realm of _Niflheim_ (Mist-Home) is inhabited by warring giants and dwarfs. Nybling is the original guardian of the hoard; Gundahar becomes G\u00fcnter; Gudrun Kriemhild; and Kriemhild weds Siegfried, meaning 'Peace of Victory', son of Siegmund and Sieglind. In these later myths and sagas the Burgundians are frequently described, anachronistically, as Franks. The late-medieval _Nibelungenlied_ is driven by a mix of fact and fantasy, though the basic historical underlay is rarely disputed by modern scholars:\n\n> _Uns ist in alten maeren wunders vil geseit_\n> \n> _von helden lobebaeren, von gr\u00f4zer arebeit,_\n> \n> _von freuden, h\u00f4chgez\u00eeten, von weinen und von klagen,_\n> \n> _von k\u00fcener recken str\u00eeten..._\n\n('We're told of wonders in the ancient tales, \/ of praise-worthy heroes, of great ordeals, \/ of joy and feasting, of weeping and wailing \/ and of the clash of bold warriors...')\n\nFollowing the massacre at Borbetomagus, the trail of the Burgundians briefly goes cold, but it soon resurfaces in accounts of the battles between Aetius and the Huns. There is a strong probability that one group of Burgundian warriors had been captured and conscripted by the Huns, while others under the new king, Gundioc (r. 437\u201374), were taken into Roman service. Burgundians in consequence fought on both sides in the great Battle of the Catalaunian Fields in June 451 (see p. 21, above), between the Roman general Aetius and the Huns, where according to Gibbon 'the whole fate of western civilisation hung in the balance'. After his victory, Aetius made Gundioc the grant of a kingdom in the province of Sabaudia (an old form of the modern Savoy: see Chapter 8). This time, the Burgundians were settling in the Empire with official approval, though a mass of survivors from Borbetomagus could have fled south spontaneously, and the imperial grant might merely have confirmed a fait accompli. Sabaudia does not figure on Bryce's list, and one has to wonder why he did not choose to count the realms of Gundahar and Gundioc as separate kingdoms. They eminently match his definition of a geographical or political name applied 'at different times to different districts'. Gundahar's parameters were 'early fifth century, Lower Rhine'; those of Gundioc 'mid-fifth century, Upper Rh\u00f4ne and Sa\u00f4ne'. There was no overlap. One meets modern descriptions of Gundioc's realm classed either as the 'second federate kingdom' or as 'the last independent Burgundian kingdom'.\n\nThe frontiers of the Burgundians' second kingdom expanded rapidly. The initial centre was Genava (Geneva) on Lake Lemanus, where they filled a space recently created by the displacement of the Helvetii tribe. Soon afterwards, they turned their attention onto the district at the confluence of the Rivers Arus (Sa\u00f4ne) and Rhodanus (Rh\u00f4ne) in the heart of Gaul. Within a decade, they had entered Lugdunum (Lyon), Divio (Dijon), Vesontio (Besan\u00e7on), Augustodunum (Autun), Andemantunnum (Langres) and Colonia Julia Vienna (Vienne). Frontier fortresses at Avenio (Avignon) near the Rh\u00f4ne delta and at Eburodunum (Embrun) in the mountains protected a highly compact territorial unit with first-rate communications.\n\nThe little that is known about the Burgundians at the time of their arrival comes from a Gallo-Roman writer, who saw them enter his native Lugdunum. Sidonius Apollinaris would have been about twenty years old in 452 when he met them. He makes references in his correspondence to 'hairy giants', 'who are all seven feet tall', and who 'gabble in an incomprehensible tongue'. Even less is known about the Burgundian language. A handful of words have survived in the text of legal codes (see below), and the recorded names of Burgundian rulers have decipherable meanings. Gundobad means 'bold in battle', Godomar is 'celebrated in battle'. A few modern place names can be traced to a personal name combined with the Scandinavian suffix - _ingos_. The village of Vufflens in the Vaud, for example, has been explained as 'Vaffel's Place'. It is not much to go on.\n\nIn the century which separated the fall of the first kingdom from the fall of the second, five kings are recorded, all from Gibica's ancient line:\n\n> Gundioc\/Gunderic (r. 437\u201374)\n> \n> Chilperic I (r. 474\u201380)\n> \n> Gundobad (r. 480\u2013516)\n> \n> Sigismund (r. 516\u201323)\n> \n> Gundimar\/Godomar (r. 523\u201334)\n\nThe foundations of a Burgundian royal palace dating from _c_. 500, including a hall and a Christian chapel, have been identified within the Roman site at Geneva, and the historicity of King Godomar is affirmed by a tombstone in the old abbey cemetery of Offranges, near Evian:\n\n> IN HOC TUMOLO REQUIESCAT BONAE MEMORIAE EBROVACCUS QUI VIXIT ANNS XIII ET MENSIS IIII ET TRANSIT X KL SEPTEMBRIS MAVURTIO VIRO CLR CONSS SUB UNC CONSS BRANDOBRIGI REDIMITIONEM A DNMO GUDOMARO REGE ACCEPERUNT.\n\nThe first part of the inscription is clear. A boy, Ebrovaccus, aged thirteen years and four months, who 'lies in this mound', died during the consulship of Mavortius. The second part has inspired many guesses. 'Godomar being King', a Celtic-sounding tribe, the Brandobriges, were redeemed or ransomed. The earliest Burgundian coins were minted under imperial licence at Ravenna in the early sixth century, showing Gundobad's monogram and the head of the Roman (Byzantine) emperor. They nicely illustrate the status of a _rex_ as a recognized imperial deputy.\n\nThe Burgundian kings made the most of dynastic marriages. Gundioc married his sister to Ricimer (405\u201372), sometime assistant to Flavius Aetius and de facto arbiter of the dying Empire. In the next generation, Chilperic's daughter Clothilda (474\u2013545) was married to Clovis, king of the Franks, a dozen years before he defeated the Visigoths at Vouill\u00e9 (see pp. \u2013, above). As St Clothilda, she is celebrated for persuading her powerful husband to adopt Catholic Christianity, and is buried in the church of St Genevi\u00e8ve in Paris.\n\nClothilda's uncle, Gundobad, who prided himself in the title of Roman patrician, only gained full control of his inheritance after thirty years of family strife, which saw the Burgundian kingdom partitioned and ruled simultaneously from three centres, Lugdunum, Julia Vienna and Genava. This civil war weakened the nascent state at a juncture when it might otherwise have mounted a more active challenge to both Franks and Visigoths. Gundobad owed his Roman career to his kinsman Ricimer, and he had the brief distinction of elevating an emperor, Glycerius, to the throne at Ravenna. But much of his subsequent life was spent battling his own relatives, and he kept the Franks at a distance by paying them tribute. His brother Godesigel, accompanied by Clothilda's mother, Caretana, held out in Genava until the turn of the century. After that, he stopped the Frankish tribute, and concentrated on Church organization and law-making. Two law codes are attributed to him, the _Lex Romana Burgundionum_ and the _Lex Gundobada_.\n\nThe Burgundian Code (or codes), which survives in thirteen extant manuscripts, is typical of the period when the Germanic peoples were adopting Christianity, entering literacy and codifying law. Unlike the _Codex Euricianus_ (see above, p. 23), it is to be regarded as supplementary to existing Roman law, consisting of a collection of customary laws ( _mores_ ) for the Burgundians and a number of statutes ( _leges_ ) intended for the ex-Roman citizens living among them. The standard modern edition of the Burgundian Code presents 105 'constitutions', plus 4 additional enactments. Mainly promulgated at Lugdunum by Gundobad, and revised under Sigismund, they cover a huge range of subjects, starting with Gifts, Murders and the Emancipation of Slaves and finishing with Vineyards, Asses and Oxen taken in Pledge. For almost all offences, they set a price for restitution, and a separate sum for a fine or punishment:\n\n> XII Of Stealing Girls\n> \n> If anyone shall steal a girl, let him be compelled to pay the price set for such a girl ninefold, and let him pay a fine to the amount of twelve _solidi_.\n> \n> If a girl who has been seized returns uncorrupted to her parents, let the abductor compound six times the _wergeld_ of the girl; moreover, let the fine be set at twelve _solidi_.\n> \n> If indeed, the girl seeks the man of her own will and comes to his house, and he has intercourse with her, let him pay her marriage price threefold; if moreover, she returns uncorrupted to her home, let her return with all blame removed from him.\n\nOne constitution lays down elaborate rules for the setting of wolf-traps with drawn bowstrings, _tensuras_ (XLVI). Others provide measures for 'Jews who Presume to Raise their Hands against a Christian' (CII), or double the tariff for theft or trespass in vineyards at night (CIII). Fixing the tariff was a major concern:\n\n  * A dog killed, 1 _solidus_\n  * A stolen pig, sheep, goat or beehive, 3 _solidi_\n  * A woman raped, 12 _solidi_\n  * A woman whose hair is cut off without cause, 12 _solidi_\n  * A murdered slave, 30 _solidi_\n  * A murdered carpenter, 40 _solidi_\n  * A murdered blacksmith, 50 _solidi_\n  * A murdered silversmith, 100 _solidi_\n  * A murdered goldsmith, 200 _solidi_\n\n(Women's hair would be cut off in order to enable them to fight as warriors.) Except for an occasional Burgundian phrase, such as _wergeld_ or _wittimon_ , the Code was written in Latin. A number of counts appended their seals to it as witnesses, thereby leaving a rare list of Burgundian personal names:\n\n> Abcar\n> \n> Unnan\n> \n> Sunia\n> \n> Wadahamer\n> \n> Aveliemer\n> \n> Viliemer\n> \n> Hildegern\n> \n> Gundemund\n> \n> Avenahar\n> \n> Sigisvuld\n> \n> Widemer\n> \n> Walest\n> \n> Aunemund\n> \n> Hildeulf\n> \n> Gundeful\n> \n> Silvan\n> \n> Vulfia\n> \n> Coniaric\n> \n> Usgild\n> \n> Effo...\n\nSigismund, son of Gundobad, a convert and a saint of the Catholic Church, is often credited with the wholesale conversion of his people. Together with his royal brothers, he campaigned none too successfully against the Franks, but was better at suppressing the Arian enclaves which had survived during the kingdom's partition. He is reputed to have strangled his infant son to exclude him from the succession, and, abducted by the Franks, he ended his life at the bottom of a well at Coulmiers, near Orl\u00e9ans. He was declared a martyr, and his cult spread to many parts of Europe. Among his lasting achievements were a long correspondence ( _c._ 494\u2013523) with his chief adviser, Archbishop (later Saint) Avitus of Vienne,  and the foundation of the abbey at Agaunum (now St Maurice-en-Valais), a site of the _laus perennis_ or 'unceasing praise' of God.\n\nThe 'Catholic' ascendancy in Burgundy was systematized in 517 at the Council of Epaon (possibly Albon in the modern Dauphin\u00e9), where Avitus, whose letters constitute a very rare contemporary source, laid down guidelines for social and ecclesiastical practice. The rules whereby Arians could be reconciled to the Church were relaxed. Rules governing monasteries and convents were tightened, as were those relating to marriage and consanguinity. This last measure so enraged King Sigismund that he withdrew from communion with the Church, threatening to revert to Arianism. He relented when the bishop of Valence helped cure him when he was ill.\n\nThe suppression of the (second) Kingdom of the Burgundians came about as a result of the Frankish victory in the seemingly endless Franko-Burgundian wars in the first decades of the sixth century. The key role played in those wars by Clothilda, Clovis's Burgundian widow (Clovis died in 511), was traditionally attributed to her support for Catholicism, but it was equally marked by her political engagement on behalf of her sons in their feud with her Burgundian kinsmen. The kingdom came under attack from the Franks, both from the north and, in the wake of their victory over the Visigoths at Vouill\u00e9, from the west. In 532 or 534, Gundimar, trapped between them, was proscribed, pursued and executed, and his birthright annexed.\n\nThe period during which the former Burgundian kingdom was subjected to Frankish overlordship lasted more than three hundred years, long enough for the original distinction between Franks and Burgundians to be blurred and for the Franco-Burgundian overlords to merge into the culture and society of the former Gallo-Roman population. Two dynasties were descended from the offspring of Clovis and Clothilda. The Merovingians, who ruled to 751, traced their bloodline to Merewig or Merov\u00e9e, the grandfather of Clovis, and wore their hair long as a sign of royal status. The Carolingians, who ruled from 751 to 987, rose to prominence as 'mayors of the palace' of the Merovingian court at Jovis Villa (Jupille) on the River Meuse, and were descended from the famous warrior Charles Martel. Their mightiest son was Charles the Great, or Charlemagne (r. 768\u2013814), whose dominions stretched from the Spanish March to Saxony and who raised himself to the dignity of emperor.\n\nThose same centuries saw fundamental linguistic changes. In the days of Clovis and Gundobad, the old Frankish and Scando-Burgundian tongues had still been spoken alongside the late Latin of the Gallo-Romans. By Charlemagne's time, all these vernaculars had been replaced by a range of new idioms in the general category of _Francien_ or 'Old French'. Frankish only survived in the Low Countries as the ancestor of Dutch and Flemish. Latin survived in stylized form as the language of the Church and as a written medium. Burgundian was totally submerged. The numerous variants of Old French are usually divided into two groups \u2013 the _langue d'o\u00efl_ and the _langue d'oc_. The former was characterized by the use of _hoc ille_ for 'yes', hence the modern _oui_ , and the latter by an unvarnished _hoc,_ and in general by a closer adherence to its Latin roots. The line dividing the _o\u00efl_ and the _oc_ ran right through the former Burgundian sphere, and is still very visible on today's linguistic map.\n\nWithin the Frankish realms, a territorial unit known as Burgundia always existed. Many of the Merovingians styled themselves kings of ' _Francia et Burgundia_ ' or of ' _Neustria et Burgundia_ '. (Neustria was the early medieval name for the north-western region round Paris.) In the late sixth century, one of the grandsons of Clovis and Clothilda, Guntram (r. 561\u201392), established a distinct _Regnum Burgundiae_ , which functioned for a century and a half until it was reabsorbed by Charles Martel. This shadowy principality figures as No. II on Bryce's list, though it would be better described as the 'third kingdom'. Presumably on the grounds that it was not a fully sovereign state, its existence has often been ignored. Yet both of the preceding Burgundian kingdoms had similarly been subject to overlords.\n\nGuntram or Guntramnus is an interesting figure, not just because he was declared a saint, but also because his armies fought as far afield as Brittany and Septimania in south-western Francia. For a time, as 'king of Orl\u00e9ans', he even shared dominion over Paris. He was the exact contemporary of the chronicler-bishop Gregory of Tours, who carefully recorded the progress of his reign, largely a non-stop series of wars, dynastic quarrels, murders, intrigues and acts of treachery. Guntram's marital affairs were as complex as his military campaigns:\n\n> The good king Guntram first took a concubine Veneranda, a slave belonging to one of his people, by whom he had a son Gundobad. Later he married Marcatrude, daughter of Magnar, and sent his son Gundobad to Orl\u00e9ans. But when she too had a son, Marcatrude became jealous, they say... and poisoned [Gundobad's] drink. Upon his death, by God's judgement... she incurred the hatred of the king, and was dismissed by him. Next he took Austerchild, also named Bobilla. He had by her two sons, of whom the older was called Clothar and the younger Chlodomer.\n\nAt one point, Gregory of Tours stops his narrative to present a sketch of Divio (Dijon), which was to have a special place in Burgundian history. He had just been talking about Gregorius, bishop of Langres:\n\n> [Divio], where [Bishop Gregorius] was so active... is a stronghold with very solid walls, built in the midst of a plain, a very pleasant place, the lands rich and fruitful, so that... a great wealth of produce arrives in due season. On the south it has a river... very rich in fish, and from the north comes another little stream, which runs... under a bridge... flowing around the whole fortified place... and turning the mills before the gate with wonderful speed. The four gates face the four regions of the universe, and thirty-three towers adorn the Wall [which] is thirty feet high and fifteen feet thick... On the west are hills, very fertile and full of vineyards, which produce such a noble Falernian that [the inhabitants] disdain the wine of Ascalon. The ancients say this place was built by the emperor Aurelian.\n\nDespite this air of plenty, if Gregory is to be believed, Guntram spent his final years fasting, praying and weeping. His capital lay at Cabillo (Chalon-sur-Sa\u00f4ne), where he was buried in the church of St Marcellus. He was declared a saint by the spontaneous acclamation of his subjects, and became the patron of repentant murderers.\n\nA corrective to what are sometimes thought Gregory's excessively pro-Frankish leanings comes from Marius d'Avenches (532\u201396), bishop of Lausanne (later St Marius Aventicensis), famed both for piety and scholarship. Protector of the poor, he was said to have ploughed his own land; as a scholar, he restarted the work of St Prosper of Aquitania, extending Prosper's Universal Chronicle to 581. The premier cleric of the age, however, was probably St Caesarius of Arles (d. 542), a formidable preacher, theologian and prelate. Born at Cabillo, he studied at Lerinum, and presided for nearly forty years as primate of Gaul. The Irish missionary St Columbanus ( _c_. 540\u2013615) would also have arrived in Guntram's time. He lived partly as a guest at the Burgundian court and partly as a hermit in the Vosges.\n\nAt its height in 587, Guntram's _Regnum Burgundiae_ briefly commanded the greater part of Gaul, including Bordeaux, Rennes and Paris, as well as the former Burgundy of Gundobad. It was too extended for its own good, and invited the depredations of its neighbours. Guntram's sword-swinging successors performed numerous contorted exchanges of thrones and territory. Several rulers' names are recorded by the chroniclers as kings of Burgundy, of Neustria and Burgundy, or of 'all the Franks'; as well as Guntram they include Childebert II (r. 592\u20135), Theuderic II (r. 595\u2013613), Sigebert (r. 613), Clotaire II (r. 613\u201329), Dagobert (r. 629\u201339), Clovis II (r. 639\u201355) and Clotaire III (r. 655\u201373).\n\nSome phases of Merovingian history are irredeemably opaque, but the chronicler variously known as Fredegar, Fredegarius or the Pseudo-Fredegarius (d. _c_. 660) throws a shaft of light on the third quarter of the seventh century. He lived in a monastery, possibly at Chalon or Luxeuil, and started by trying to 'improve' a number of existing chronicles. But for eighteen years from 624 he compiled a detailed and reflective commentary on contemporary events which amply illustrates how the cult of the blood-feud was alive and well at all social levels of Franco-Burgundian society. A quotation from Attila is more than apt: ' _Quid viro forti suavius quam vindicta manu querere?_ ' ('What could be more delightful for a strong man than to pursue a vendetta?') Fredegar mentions an incident involving the emperor of Byzantium that nicely illustrates the cheapness of human life. After two Burgundian envoys had been killed in a brawl in Byzantine-ruled Carthage, the Emperor Maurice offered restitution in the form of twelve men, 'to do with as you will'. Fredegar's particular bugbear, not to say the object of his vilification, was the Visigoth princess Brunechildis, who came to the Burgundian court from Hispania and allegedly filled it with violence and hatred: ' _Tanta mala et effusione sanguinum a Brunechildis consilium in Francia factae sunt._ '\n\nFredegar's narrative closes with the story of Flaochad, _genere Franco_ (an ethnic Frank) and mayor of the palace, who sought revenge against a Burgundian patrician called Willebad. The two faced up with their followers outside the walls of Augustodunum:\n\n> Berthar, a Transjuran Frank... was the first to attack Willebad. And the Burgundian Manaulf, gnashing his teeth with fury... came forward with his men to fight. Berthar had once been a friend of his, and now said, 'Come under my shield and I will protect you...', and he lifted his shield to afford cover. But [Manaulf ] struck at his chest with his lance... When Chaubedo, Berthar's son, saw his father in danger, he threw Manaulf to the ground, transfixed him with his spear, and slew all who had wounded his father. And thus, by God's help, the good boy saved Berthar from death. Those dukes who had preferred not to set their men upon Willebad now pillaged his tents... The non-fighters took a quantity of gold and silver and horses and other objects.\n\nAs one leading scholar puts it, 'The marvel of early medieval society is not war, but peace.'\n\nBy Fredegar's time, the Merovingian monarchs were being reduced to mere ciphers in the hands of those mayors and counts of the royal palaces. What is more, the political centre of gravity was passing to Frankish Austrasia (eastern Francia). Dagobert, who ruled over Neustria (the 'new western land'), was to become the butt of a lovely French nursery rhyme: ' _Le Bon Roi Dagobert \/ A mis sa culotte \u00e0 l'envers'_ ('Good King Dagobert \/ put on his trousers inside out'). He also established Paris as the main capital. A crucial battle at Tertry in Picardy in 687 ensured Burgundy's subordination to Austrasia.\n\nIn the early eighth century, a movement for Burgundian separatism, started by the battling Bishop Savaric of Auxerre, provoked the very outcome which it had sought to avoid. Charles Martel (688\u2013741), founder not only of the Carolingian dynasty but also, in large part, of the Carolingian Empire, descended on Burgundy to bring it to heel. Arriving as victor of the epoch-making battle at Tours against the Saracens in 732, he proceeded to expel them equally from their footholds in Provence and Languedoc. The storming of Saracen-held Arles in 736 was one of the high points of his campaign:\n\n> After assembling forces at Saragossa the Muslims had entered Frankish territory in 735, crossed the River Rh\u00f4ne and captured and looted Arles. From there they struck into the heart of Provence, ending with the capture of Avignon... Islamic forces [raided] Lyon, Burgundy, and Piedmont. Again Charles Martel came to the rescue, reconquering most of the lost territories in two campaigns in 736 and 739... [He] put an end to any serious Muslim expedition across the Pyrenees [forever].\n\nHe also put an end to hopes that the _Regnum Burgundiae_ might rise again at any point soon.\n\nIn the century following Charles Martel, the Frankish Empire flourished, faltered and fell. Charlemagne spent much of his time either in the north, in Aachen, or fighting on the peripheries of his lands against Moors, Slavs and Avars, and had little direct involvement with his Burgundian domains. Yet in 773 he assembled a great army in Burgundian Geneva for his Lombard War. Emboldened by favourable messages from the Roman pope, his forces marched over the Alps in two huge columns, one crossing the pass of the Mont Cenis, the other the Great St Bernard. Having reduced Pavia, the capital of the Lombards, by a long siege, he climbed the steps of St Peter's in Rome on his knees as a penitent. Later, he created the first Papal State.\n\nIn the tradition of his ancestors, Charlemagne planned to divide his empire between his sons. In the event, since only one son survived him, the empire stayed intact until it was divided in 843 between three of his grandsons. The Treaty of Verdun created divisions that would persist through much of European history. One grandson took West Francia, which was to develop into the Kingdom of France. Another took East Francia, which formed the springboard for a nascent Germany. The eldest grandson took a long strip of territory in the centre, together with the imperial title. Lothar's 'Middle Kingdom' was equally composed from three informal sections. One piece of territory in the north stretched from the North Sea to Metz, where the name of Lotharingia (Lorraine) would live on. The second section, in the centre, was an extended 'Burgundia', including Provence. The third was a long swathe running south through Italy as far as Rome. As an integrated unit, Lothar's realm proved to be a brief contrivance, yet its constituent parts long evaded permanent absorption either into France or into Germany. Burgundia was one of the most resistant.\n\nAnyone grappling with the Carolingian legacy needs to keep the number 'three' to the fore; threefold partitions were performed three times over. Most students grasp that each of Charlemagne's grandsons received a one-third share, and it is not hard to remember that Lothar's 'Middle Kingdom' consisted of three sections. It is the third step, however, which is often forgotten. Within fifty years of the Treaty of Verdun, the former _Regnum Burgundiae_ , now forming the middle section of the Middle Kingdom, was itself divided into three. (The mnemonic for the exercise is '3\u00d73\u00d73'.) This last tripartite division took place in three stages \u2013 in 843, 879 and 888 (contemporaneous with Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon England) \u2013 and it produced three new entities: the Duchy of Burgundy in the north-west, the Kingdom of Lower Burgundy in the south, and the Kingdom of Upper Burgundy in the north-east.\n\nThe initial carving up of Charlemagne's empire in 843, therefore, was but one step in a much longer process. Although Lothar took the greater part of the sometime Burgundian kingdom, including Lyon, about one-eighth of it was awarded to West Francia. This strategically important award, consisting of the upper valley of the River Sa\u00f4ne, including Guntram's centre at Chalon, was one of the few clauses of the Treaty of Verdun to prove permanent, and gave its new rulers a bridgehead on the southern slopes of the continental divide. Henceforth West Frankish forces, and later the armies of France, enjoyed a secure point of entry to the road to Italy.\n\nAt Verdun, West Francia's acquisition was originally given the traditional name of _Regnum Burgundiae_ , but the designation proved a dead letter and for a time the area was not awarded any special status. A permanent solution was only found in the 880s, when West Francia adopted a comprehensive administrative structure made up of duchies and counties. Seven 'primitive peers' were created, each with the rank of _dux_ or duke (governor), and each heading a string of dependent counts. The Duchy of Burgundy took its place alongside Aquitaine, Brittany, Gascony, Normandy, Flanders and Champagne. It represented Bryce's Burgundy No. X, although in chronological order it was the fourth.\n\nPredictably, the duchy's affairs did not run entirely smoothly. The central figure in a long series of contorted conflicts was Richard the Justiciar ( _c_. 850\u2013921), a brother of the West Frankish queen, Richildis, wife of Charles the Bald. Richard, whose family base was Autun, travelled to Rome during Charles's imperial campaign, and was eventually rewarded with the governorship of (West Frankish) Burgundy with the title first of _marchio_ (marquis, that is, border lord) and then of duke. His deathbed confession became famous: 'I die a brigand, but have saved the lives of honest men.'\n\nFrom 1004, the kings of France took direct control of the duchy from the heirs of the Justiciar. Sometimes the duchy was granted in fief, sometimes held by the king in person. Until 1361, the list of dukes contained twelve names, starting with Robert le Vieux (d. 1076) and finishing with Philippe de Rouvres (r. 1346\u201361). The list of subordinate vassals included the counts of Chalon, of the Charolais, of M\u00e2con, Autun, Nevers, Avallon, Tonerre, Senlis, Auxerre, Sens, Troyes, Auxonne, Montb\u00e9liard and Bar; each of their houses would forge a long, colourful story of its own. With some delay, the duchy's administrative centre settled at Dijon, which lies on a south-flowing tributary of the Sa\u00f4ne, appropriately called the Bourgogne, and conveniently located for easy access over the Plateau de Langres into Champagne, or upstream to the headwaters of the Seine and the road to Paris.\n\nThe duchy was already the home of venerable monastic foundations, but some new names were now added. The house of Cluny, which followed the Rule of St Benedict, is often seen as the motherhouse of Western monasticism, and was founded in 910; it was the _alma mater_ of three or four popes. The abbey of Tournus, another tenth-century foundation, sheltered the relics of the martyred St Philibert. The abbey of C\u00eeteaux, mother of the Cistercian Order, was founded in 1098. St Bernard (1090\u20131153), Church reformer and founder of the Knights Templar, arrived there as a young man, and on 31 March 1146 preached the Second Crusade from the hall of the abbey of V\u00e9zelay. The abbey of Pontigny on the River Yonne dates from St Bernard's time.\n\nThe monks of these Burgundian monasteries are widely credited with the revival of the neglected art of viticulture. They were not the original pioneers, since the donation of a vineyard to the Church was recorded in the time of King Guntram. But they themselves, at the communion service, were wine consumers; and on the slopes of the C\u00f4te d'Or or of the 'C\u00f4tes de Beaune' they patiently developed vineyards of unsurpassed quality, inventing both the production methods and the time-honoured vocabulary of the _cru_ , the _terroir_ and the _clos_. Burgundy reds are grown from the _pinot noir_ grape; most that now head the list of Grands Cru, such as the Domaine de la Roman\u00e9e-Conti near Vosne, once the property of the abbey of Saint-Vivant, or Aloxe-Corton, which was launched by the cathedral chapter of Autun, or Chambertin, founded by the abbey de B\u00e8ze, started as medieval ecclesiastical enterprises. The white wines of Chablis were invented by the monks of Pontigny. The Clos de Vougeot, first planted by the monks of C\u00eeteaux, knew just one proprietor from 1115 to the French Revolution.\n\n_Chanter le vin_ \u2013 'celebrating wine in song' \u2013 has formed part of the duchy's heritage ever since. Many of France's timeless drinking songs, like ' _Chevalier de la Table Ronde',_ or _'Boire un petit coup'_ , derive from Burgundy, and they celebrate a culture of good wine, good food, good company and above all good cheer:\n\n> _Le Duc de Bordeaux ne boit qu' du Bourgogne_ ,\n> \n> _mais l' Duc de Bourgogne, lui, ne boit que de l'eau,_\n> \n> _ils ont aussit\u00f4t \u00e9chang\u00e9 sans vergogne_\n> \n> _un verr' de Bourgogne contr' le port de Bordeaux_.\n\n'The Duke of Bordeaux drinks only Bourgogne, \/ but the Duke of Bourgogne he drinks water alone, \/ so neither felt shame when they sought to exchange \/ a glass of Bourgogne for the port of Bordeaux.')\n\nMeanwhile, to the east of the nascent duchy, the main part of the former Burgundian kingdom had lapsed into chaos. Lothar I's death in 855 was followed by repeated splinterings, reunifications and re-splinterings. One short-lived territorial reorganization, however, left a lasting mark. Under Lothar II (r. 835\u201369), the southern and south-western districts, including Lyon and Vienne, were added to a new _Regnum Provinciae_ , which thereby acquired the label of 'Lower Burgundy'. In consequence, the more northerly and north-eastern districts took on the name of 'Upper Burgundy'. The frontiers soon changed, but the names stuck.\n\nThe Kingdom of Provence, created in 879, otherwise known as the Kingdom of Lower Burgundy \u2013 _le Royaume de Basse-Bourgogne_ \u2013 lasted with one short break for only fifty-four years. Its territory combined the Rh\u00f4ne valley from Lyon to Arles, together with the original Roman province up to the foothills of the maritime Alps. Its cultural make-up was half-Burgundian and half-Proven\u00e7al, thereby assisting a new form of speech called Franco-Proven\u00e7al. Its main administrative centre was Arelate (Arles). It was the fifth Burgundian state and the fourth kingdom (No. III according to Bryce).\n\nThe early years of this kingdom were closely tied to the career of Count Boso (r. 879\u201387), who rose to power in the same way as his younger brother, Richard the Justiciar, through his links with the Frankish king and would-be emperor, Charles the Bald. His first post was as count of Lyon, but during Charles's Italian campaign of 875\u20137 he received the high office of _missus dominicus_ (envoy or ambassador), and gained close ties with the papacy. Pope John VIII adopted him as his son, and Boso accompanied him on his journey to West Francia in 878. In the next year, however, when West Francia lost its second king in eighteen months through unexpected illnesses, Boso decided to cut loose. Returning to Provence, where he had probably already held office, he persuaded the local bishops and nobles to organize the Synod of Mantaille and to elevate him to the rank of a sovereign monarch through a 'free election'. He used the formula ' _Dei Gratia id quod sum_ ' ('By God's Grace, this is what I am'). Boso's temerity was challenged, but the experiment survived. After he died in 887 and was buried at Vienne, his heirs, the 'Bosonids', spawned three influential lineages. Two relatives ruled Provence after him: his son, Louis the Blind (r. 887\u2013928), who was also king of Italy and nominal emperor, and his son-in-law, Hugh of Arles (r. 928\u201333).\n\nCount Boso's realm commanded the rich river trade of the Rh\u00f4ne valley, and the main points of entry and exit between the continental interior and the Mediterranean. Its ancient cities brimmed with civilization and commerce. True, the coasts were regularly ravaged by Saracen corsairs; many prime sites on the Riviera had been infested with pirates and the sea trade to Italy was unsafe. 'Robber barons' and castle lords controlled many of the mountain valleys. Even so, any ambitious ruler like Boso would have known that he had acquired a highly promising piece of real estate. The Christian Church provided a thread of continuity and stability. Each of the main cities had its ancient bishopric, and monasticism was solidly established. The island abbey of Lerinum (L\u00e9rins), founded _c._ 410 by St Honortus, had produced many clerics who served throughout southern Gaul. Much diminished, it was now subordinated to Cluny.\n\nParallel developments were occurring in Upper Burgundy. There, the initiative was taken by another Frankish adventurer, Rudolf of Auxerre (859\u2013912). He and his associates, who were all connected by marriage to the Bavarian Guelphs, gave notice of rising German interest. None of the assorted overlords of central Lotharingia were strong, and opportunity beckoned. Hence, having failed in a plan to seize Alsace, Rudolf withdrew to St Maurice (-en-Valais), which was the base of his personal lands, and conspired with leading nobles and clergymen over a different manoeuvre. In 888 an assembly was convened at St Maurice to elect him 'king of Burgundy', following the precedent set in Provence by the Synod of Mantaille. Rudolf consolidated his holdings by abandoning his claim on Alsace in return for East Francian recognition of his own sovereignty. He also made a number of prudent marriage alliances. His sister married Richard the Justiciar. One daughter married Louis the Blind and another married Boso II, count of Arles and subsequently margrave of Tuscany. The Burgundians were sticking together.\n\nBy the end of the ninth century, therefore, three separate Burgundies had appeared. One, the duchy, lay within the West Frankish orbit. The other two, the kingdoms of Upper and of Lower Burgundy, were freshly independent. The limits of Rudolf's dominion were described in the terminology of the day as lying between ' _Iurum et Alpes Penninas... apud Sanctum Mauritium_ '. For this reason, the kingdom was sometimes labelled 'Trans-Juran Burgundy' to distinguish it from the duchy in 'Cis-Juran Burgundy', but these ancient labels are confusing. In reality, Rudolf's territory covered both flanks of the Jura and stretched right across the modern Swiss cantons of Valais, Vaud, Neufch\u00e2tel and Geneva, together with Savoy and northern Dauphin\u00e9. The administrative centre was St Maurice. Here was the fifth of the Burgundian kingdoms, No. IV on Bryce's list.\n\n'Upper Burgundy' is hard to imagine without shedding the modern concepts of 'France', 'Germany' and 'Switzerland'. One has to remind oneself constantly that the modern states of Europe had not been invented, and that the communities which preceded them were no more artificial than very many of the states of European history. The 'Upper Burgundians' practised linguistic solidarity, never spreading beyond the bounds of their old tribal foes, the German-speaking Alemanni. They were characterized by the obstinacy of highlanders, instinctively distrustful of outsiders, and they shared the memories and myths of a common past that were already half a millennium old. In the opinion of some, they were able to preserve the free spirit of old Burgundy more effectively than was possible in the French-ruled duchy or in districts more subject to external influences. As a Swiss historian has put it, ' _C'est ainsi que nacquit une improbable patrie entre un marteau et une \u00e9clume_ ' ('It was thus, between a hammer and an anvil, that an improbable homeland was born'). The clear implication is that Switzerland grew from its Burgundian roots.\n\nFew specialists would demur from the view, however, that tenth-century Upper Burgundy was located in 'one of the most obscure periods of mediaeval history'.* Rudolf II (d. 937), the only son of the kingdom's founder, put his birthright at risk by intervening in the dangerous stakes of north Italian politics. Crowned king of the Lombards in 923, he commuted for a time between St Maurice and Pavia. The Italian nobles duly turned against him, inviting Hugh of Arles, regent of Lower Burgundy, to replace him. In 933 Rudolf and Hugh then worked out an ingenious solution. Rudolf agreed to recognize Hugh's claims in Italy, while Hugh proposed Rudolf as monarch of a joint kingdom of the Upper and Lower Burgundies. Rudolf's daughter married Hugh's son, and four years later the happy couple came into possession of their merged realms. This cardinal event, however, is surrounded with potential confusion as the kings of Upper Burgundy are variously referred to as Rudolf, Rudolphus, Ralf or Raoul. It is also odd (except for people wedded to English practice) to see that their regnal numbering continues without a break after the creation of a new kingdom. For dynastic reasons, the first Rudolph to reign over the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies is generally counted as Rudolf II, which implies that he had merely benefited from a takeover of the south, not from the creation of a new realm.\n\nThe main source of confusion, though, derives from complacency about the political context of the treaty of 933. All the Burgundy-based commentaries present it as a simple bargain between two rulers. Yet developments in northern Italy were always followed closely in Germany, where the comings and goings of Rudolph and Hugh could not fail to arouse the suspicions of the Saxon Ottonian dynasty. When the two Burgundian rulers formed a close political and matrimonial alliance, their imperial German neighbours could not leave them undisturbed:\n\n> Against the threat involved in this alliance [Emperor] Otto I's reaction was immediate. Intervening as the protector of Rudolf's fifteen year old son, Conrad, Otto invaded Burgundy, 'received king and kingdom into his possession', and thus countered the threat of a union of Italy and the Burgundian lands... Although it was not until 1034 that Burgundy was finally united with Germany, German control was assured from 938.\n\nThe German factor provided the key element in the Burgundian amalgamation. The Rudolphine dynasty was allowed to carry on, and the merger of the two Burgundian kingdoms went ahead. Yet the emperor always held the whip hand. Whenever the time was right, he or his successors could overturn the arrangement and reorder Burgundian affairs to their own advantage.\n\nIn the tenth century the future shape of Europe was slowly becoming visible. In the West, the long _Reconquista_ against the Muslims was starting to turn Iberia into a peninsula of Christian states. The first ever kings of all-England mounted the throne (see p. 72, above) Under Hugues Capet (r. 987\u201396) and his successors, West Francia was slowly being rebranded as France;*and the three Ottonian rulers of Saxony were launching the state which in due course would become the Holy Roman Empire. As memories of the Franks faded, the old names like West Francia or Neustria, and East Francia or Austrasia, disappeared in favour of France and Germany. In Italy, the Roman pope had gained political as well as a spiritual authority. In the East, as Byzantine power and Orthodox influence receded, new states emerged. After the arrival of the Magyars in 895, centuries of deep barbarian penetration into Europe finally drew to a close. Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Rus', like France, England and Germany, were new polities. Despite its many transformations, Burgundy was already very old.\n\nDespite the arbitrary manner of its creation, the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies, otherwise known from its capital as the 'Kingdom of Arles' \u2013 ' _Le Royaume des Deux Bourgognes_ ', or in German ' _Das K\u00f6nigreich Arelat_ ' \u2013 was far from being an artificial entity. It formed a natural geographical unit, made from the Rh\u00f4ne valley and all its tributaries from the glaciers to the sea. It was firmly based on historic Burgundia, and possessed a common post-Latin culture. In the north, via the ancient pathway of the 'Burgundian Gate' (now the Belfort Gap), it enjoyed a convenient link with the Rhineland; and in the south, via the ports of Arles and Marseille, it was in close touch with both Italy and Iberia. Geopolitically, it lay somewhat in the lee of the tempests that were about to embroil neighbouring states. The wind blew fair for a prosperous historical voyage. This was the sixth Burgundian kingdom, James Bryce's No. V.\n\nDuring the first century of its existence, the kingdom avoided the dynastic crises which blighted many similar states. The two successors of Rudolf II, Conrad (r. 937\u201393) and Rudolf III (r. 993\u20131032), both lived very long lives. Conradus Pacificus ('Konrad der Friedfertiger') earned a sobriquet which in the medieval context, when kings were by definition warlords, was mildly pejorative and possibly unjust. The modern translation is usually 'the Peaceful', but it may better be rendered, if not as 'the Gutless', then at least as 'the Unwarlike'. Not that Conrad shunned war completely. In 954 his kingdom was invaded simultaneously by a Magyar raiding party and by Saracens. He sent envoys to the Magyars inviting them to repel the Saracens, and other envoys to the Saracens imploring them to fight the Magyars. He then sat back, and waited until his two enemies were cutting each other to pieces, before ordering the Burgundian host to clear the field. In the following decade he led expeditions against the Saracen settlements in Provence. So he may best be characterized as a king familiar with guile as well as gore. Surviving on the throne for fifty-six years was no mean feat in itself.\n\nConrad's realm is well attested both by coinage and by ecclesiastical charters. A bronze denier bearing the inscription CONRADUS around a central cross, was minted in Lugdunum. The abbey of Montmajour at Frigolet near Avignon was founded by him in 960, and, before 993, the abbey of Darentasia (Tarentaise in Savoy), whose modern name of Mo\u00fbtiers is just a corrupted form of _monasterium._ In politics, despite Conrad's marriage to a princess from West Francia, the reign was most clearly marked by the hostility of the Hugonids, who were minded to renege on the agreement of 933, and by continuing German tutelage. Conrad had been a ward at the imperial court, and his sister Adelheid (r. 931\u20139) became Otto the Great's second empress. A generous benefactress, she was raised to sainthood as St Adelaide. She also played a key role as dowager-regent during the minority of her son. Conrad's later years unfolded in the shadow of the coming Millennium, when the end of the world was forecast. 'The tenth century was the iron age of the world; things had gone to the worst, and now was to be the judgment and completion.' Plagues and famine foretold the cataclysm that never happened. Some scholars present a different impression. 'The gay smiling climate of the South... called forth the earliest fruits of chivalry and its attendant song,' wrote one gushing nineteenth-century enthusiast. 'During the greater part of the 10th century, while Northern France was a prey to intestine commotions, Provence and the non-French parts of historic Burgundy enjoyed repose under the mild rule of Conrad the Pacific.'\n\nConrad's son, Rudolf III, was equally dependent on German support. When the nobility rebelled, he was saved by a German force sent on the orders of the Dowager Adelheid, for the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies lacked any semblance of strong central government. The king at Arles was far removed from most of the inland regions that he hoped to control. Counts, bishops and cities asserted their sway over their localities. At the same time, decentralization had its advantages. The body politic could not be killed by a simple blow to the centre; it could only be dismantled slowly, piece by piece. Such was the fate of the 'Arelate'. It held together in ramshackle fashion long after some of its most vital members had fallen off.\n\nTo do it justice, therefore, historians would have to tell all the histories of all the petty rulers and statelets which took root alongside regal authority. In Upper Burgundy, for example, the bishop of Geneva took control of not only the city but much of the adjoining lake area too. In consequence, the _Comes_ , or secular count of the Genevois, set himself up in neighbouring Eneci (Annecy), where a line of twenty-one counts ruled from the tenth century to the end of the fourteenth. Similar things happened in Lyon. The bishops of Lyon, who claimed to be primates of Gaul, had been elevated to the rank of archbishop in Frankish times and were already in firm control of the city when the Kingdom of Arles appeared. As a result, the count of the Lyonnais moved out to the neighbouring district of Forez, where, from the stronghold of Montbrison, he could orchestrate an endless duel with the archbishops.\n\nIn the northern reaches of Upper Burgundy, the 'counts-palatine of Burgundy' enjoyed special privileges in return for holding the frontier zone against the Germans of Alsace and Swabia. Their stronghold stood at Vesontio (Besan\u00e7on), where Otte-Guillaume\/Otto-Wilhelm of Burgundy (986\u20131026) founded a line of thirty-six counts that survived to the seventeenth century. In the Viennois, the counts of Albon founded a base from which Guigues d'Albon (d. 1030) created a small empire stretching all the way to the Mont Cenis. One of his descendants was to adopt a dolphin as his heraldic emblem. His successors became known as _delfini_ and their domain as the Delfinat or Dauphin\u00e9.\n\nIn Lower Burgundy, a string of near-independent counties came into existence in the Rh\u00f4ne valley, in the Valentinois, at Orange and in the Comtat Venaissin. But the greatest power was garnered by the heirs of Count Boso. Of the three lines of Bosonids, one came to an end with Hugh of Arles (see above); a second spawned the 'counts of Provence' based at Ais (Aix-en-Provence); the third founded the mountainous County of Fourcalquier. The ascendancy of the counts of Provence in the southern parts of the kingdom was near complete but for the rumbustious lords of Baou (Les Baux), whose impregnable fortress and indomitable will defied all comers.\n\nThanks to the splintering of power, the Arelate declined, and Arles sank into a capital city in name only. No coronations were held there between the tenth and the twelfth century. The magnificent Roman amphitheatre was turned into a castle, and a miserable clutch of dwellings was built for safety inside the arena. The regal church of St Trophime stood outside, waiting for better times. In such conditions, Rudolf III struggled on under ever-growing restrictions. The chroniclers gave him the label of ' _der Faule_ ' or ' _le Fain\u00e9ant_ ' and 'the Pious', which together make for a 'holy loafer'. He was particularly disturbed by the depredations of the counts-palatine from the north, against whom he called in Heinrich (Henry) II, king of the Germans. Heinrich's price \u2013 like that of Duke William of Normandy in this same era \u2013 was to extract a promise to appoint him sole heir apparent. Rudolf was childless, and the succession was likely to be claimed by his cousin, Odo II of Champagne, one of the most terrifying warriors of a terrifying age. In the event, Heinrich (r. 1014\u201324) died before Rudolf did. But the promise was not forgotten.\n\nThe matter came to a head in 1032. As expected, Rudolf died without issue. As expected, the throne of the Two Burgundies was immediately disputed both by Odo of Champagne and by Heinrich's son, the Emperor Conrad II. The emperor won, because Odo's claim was denounced by his feudal superior, the king of France. So a measure of international recognition was granted as the 'realm of Two Burgundies' passed painlessly into the possession of the German emperors. It would stay there, in theory at least, until the very last fragment fell to the French over six centuries later.\n\nThe Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as it came to be called, was not a simple organism. In its later stages, it was said to contain as many princely states as there were days in the year. But after 1032, its basic threefold structure consisted of the Kingdom of Germany ( _Regnum Teutonicum_ ), the Kingdom of Italy ( _Regnum Italiae_ ) and the Kingdom of Burgundy ( _Regnum Burgundiae_ ), that is the 'Kingdom of Arles' as renamed after incorporation, and commonly known in German as the _K\u00f6nigreich von Burgund_. Now, therefore, only two Burgundies were functioning: the dependent duchy within France and the dependent kingdom within the Empire. Should the latter be counted as a new entity or not? Bryce thought not, and treats it as a simple continuation of the Kingdom of Arles. Yet the contrary arguments are persuasive. The political context had changed radically, and the territorial base would change, too. Within a century of 1032, imperial Burgundy would experience further transformations. It is counted here as the seventh kingdom.\n\nFor the next three hundred years \u2013 a huge span of time \u2013 the imperial kingdom continued to operate as best it could. With the sole exception of Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1152\u201390), the distant emperors rarely took a close interest from their various residences in Germany. The essence of the kingdom's politics lay with the localities \u2013 in the ongoing feuds of the counts and the cities, on the fate of obscure battles, on the plotting of dynasts. Even so, few would have predicted that France's modest duchy might one day grow more powerful than the Empire's enormous kingdom.\n\nThe linguistic patterns which developed within the imperial kingdom are instructive. Despite German overlordship, the German language made few inroads. The main vernacular remained a Franco-Proven\u00e7al idiom, the ancestor of modern Arpitan, which one can hear to this day in the streets of Lyon and in parts of western Switzerland and Savoy. To anyone with a historical ear, Arpitan carries the echoes of bygone Burgundy.\n\nThe mechanism whereby imperial counts were promoted to dukedoms by the emperor seems to have been entirely haphazard. Everything depended on the power, prestige and good fortune of particular vassals at particular moments. Yet one new duchy, closely entwined with the noble German House of Z\u00e4hringen, holds a special place in the story. The castle of Z\u00e4hringen now lies in ruins on a hillside overlooking the town of Freiburg-im-Breisgau, but in the eleventh and twelfth centuries it was the seat of an ambitious clan of local counts, who had already won and lost two duchies, and who were now heading for the ducal ranks for a third time. The Z\u00e4hringer had proved themselves efficient managers of their estates; they had exploited their legal rights over Church lands in the Black Forest, and, after founding the municipality of Freiburg, pioneered a system of consolidated local administration. They were demonstrating in miniature what the emperor longed to introduce on a larger scale. Too many Burgundian nobles had forgotten their oaths of fealty. In 1127, therefore, the emperor appointed Conrad von Z\u00e4hringen _Rector_ or 'governor' of the Kingdom of Burgundy, rewarding him further with the lands of a newly invented Duchy of _Burgundia Minor_ or 'Lesser Burgundy'. The Z\u00e4hringen rectors were effectively brought in to restore discipline.\n\nThe Duchy of _Burgundia Minor_ , known in German as _Klein Burgund_ , covered a sizeable area to the east of the Jura, coinciding quite closely with the limits of modern Francophone Switzerland. It is No. VI on Bryce's list. It contained a smaller unit within it classed as a _Landgrafschaft_ or 'Landgravate', which also received the appellation of 'Burgundy' and which is No. VIII on Bryce's list. This unit consisted of the district on either side of the River Aar between Thun and Solothurn. It may or may not have reached as far as the Habichtsburg or Habsburg, the 'Hawk's Castle', which overlooks the River Aar below Solothurn, and which was to be the original seat of Central Europe's most powerful dynasty. Habsburg tradition insists that the protoplast of the family was called Guntram.\n\nAs rectors and dukes, the Z\u00e4hringer exercised overlordship over a large variety of nobles, counts and bishops, and over an archipelago of islands of loyal towns in the midst of a wayward countryside. They showed great energy establishing a network of incorporated towns, including Fribourg, Burgdorf, Murten (Morat), Rheinfelden and Thun. Their most active representative, Count Berthold V ( _fl._ 1180\u20131218), built the castle of Thun, and in 1191, reportedly after killing a bear, founded the city of Berne. When he died heirless, the duchy lapsed. The experiment was not repeated.\n\nAlready in the mid-twelfth century Frederick Barbarossa was well aware of the need to shore up imperial power. He was crowned king of Germany at Aachen in 1152, king of Italy at Pavia in 1154, Holy Roman Emperor in 1155 and, after considerable delay, king of Burgundy at Arles in 1173. Each of these steps was preceded by years of politicking and campaigning. In the process he made common cause with the Roman papacy, thereby giving new life to the doctrine of 'the Two Swords', whereby emperor and pope were supposed to be the dual agents, secular and ecclesiastical, of divine rule. Barbarossa's keen interest in Burgundy was kindled by his second marriage, to Beatrice, heiress of the count-palatine. Thanks to this union, he took the county under his direct rule, embroiled himself in the kingdom's quarrels, and here at least achieved nothing decisive. He died on his way to the Second Crusade without ever seeing the Holy Land.\n\nBy pitting emperors against popes, the long-running 'Investiture Contest' inevitably weakened each of the supreme authorities of the medieval world. It began in the tenth century, when the Ottonian emperors first promoted their claim to control the election of popes, and it continued in fits and starts before fizzling out in the thirteenth. It centred in general round an inconclusive dispute as to whether pope or emperor was entitled to exercise jurisdiction over the other, and in particular round their rights and procedures for making appointments. It added an extra dimension to a bitter civil war in Germany, that came to an end in theory at the Concordat of Worms of 1122. But it rumbled on elsewhere, not least in England under King John. Its significance may have been exaggerated by historians, who neglect other sources of tension; but in all parts of the Empire, it helped create an impasse where neither the emperor nor the pope would cede to the other's claims of supremacy, and it accelerated the fragmentation of power:\n\n> The period of the Investiture Contest saw the establishment... of new territorial units, and these units were the nuclei from which were created the principalities of late mediaeval Germany... Many generations were to pass before... the princes established full territorial control, but already at the beginning of the twelfth century the great aristocratic families were mounting the path which led to territorial sovereignty; and it was the Investiture Contest with its revolutionary social changes which gave them the opportunity to assert and consolidate these powers.\n\nThe imperial Kingdom of Burgundy was especially susceptible to this weakening of authority. One must ask why, after the interlude of the Z\u00e4hringen duchy, the emperors were so reluctant to intervene and stop the rot. The best answers are geographical, political and strategic. First, thanks to imperial Burgundy's mountainous terrain, all military operations there were fraught with uncertainty. Secondly, automatic priority was given to the Kingdom of Germany. The death of every emperor was invariably followed by a campaign in which the leading candidates competed to succeed him and be crowned as king of the Germans, before proceeding towards coronation as emperor. Thirdly, having secured Germany, every monarch had to choose between attending to Italy or to Burgundy. Almost without exception, they gave precedence to Italy. Rome, the seat of the papacy, exercised a magic attraction. Papal approval carried enormous weight, and every would-be German emperor dreamed of walking in the steps of Charlemagne. So the Kingdom of Burgundy was routinely neglected. One German emperor even left Germany as well as Burgundy to fend for itself. Frederick II (r. 1220\u201350), half-Italian, preferred to set up his court in his mother's base in Sicily.\n\nInexorably, therefore, the Kingdom of Burgundy was subject to a long series of secessions. Chips flew off the block at regular intervals. The original collection of territories steadily shrank. Provence went first, then the Comtat Venaissin, Lyon and the Dauphin\u00e9. The Empire frequently retained moribund claims or residual rights, but the overall effect was unmistakeable. The kingdom crumbled in slow motion. The earliest moves towards separation were taken by prelates, who in several instances assumed the status of 'prince-bishops'. Their courage was born of the emperors' need for ecclesiastical support. The bishops of Sion (in the Valais) and of Geneva broke free at a very early stage, and others simply followed.\n\nThe strongest statement of the Church's position on investiture was made in Burgundy in 1157. At the Diet of Besanz (Besan\u00e7on), the papal legate ventured the opinion that the Empire was nothing more than a papal _beneficium_ : that is, a voluntary gift remaining at the pope's disposal. As one historian remarked, he took the risk that one of the imperial dukes might put a battleaxe through his skull, for he was throwing doubt on to the unquestioned acceptance of the emperor's authority. He certainly put ideas into the heads of both the archbishop of Besanz and the local count.\n\nThe County-Palatine of Burgundy \u2013 so called because of its location on the kingdom's northern border \u2013 was a crucial territory. Count Rainald or Renaud III (d. 1148) had already tried and failed to build his own small empire. Having inherited the County of M\u00e2con within the adjoining French Duchy of Burgundy, he declared himself to be a _Freigraf_ or _franc comte_ within the Empire. The imperial authorities showed no sympathy, confiscating most of Rainald's lands as punishment. Yet it was Rainald's daughter whom the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa married, and the memory of Rainald's 'Free County' remained. In 1178, the archbishop of Besanz, a grandson of Rainald III, negotiated his way to turning his episcopal see into a _Reichsstadt_ or 'imperial city', free from the feudal dues of the County-Palatine. It was a telling precedent. A couple of decades later, the bishop of Basle went one step further by creating a 'prince-bishopric', and ruling not only over his episcopal see, but also over nearby lands once confiscated from Rainald III.\n\nLarge parts of the future Switzerland were also carved out of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy. Sometime early in the thirteenth century, a peasant migration occurred from the lands of the bishop of Sion in the Valais eastward to the Grisons. The migrants took bridge-building techniques with them, opened up the Schollenen Gorge to travellers and provided access to the valuable trade route over the St Gotthard pass into Italy. In August 1291 the men of Uri, Schweiz and Unterwalden, who operated tolls on the pass, swore an oath to resist outside interference. They had performed the founding act of the Swiss Confederation.\n\nProvence, by contrast, drifted apart from Burgundy through a succession of marriages. In 1127, in stage one, the last Bosonid heiress had ceded her rights to a husband from Barcelona, thereby putting practical control of the territory beyond the Empire's reach. In 1246, the last Catalan heiress of Provence brought the same dowry to an Angevin husband, thereby launching a line of counts who were vassals of the king of France (see p. 174).\n\nAnd so the erosion continued. In the first quarter of the thirteenth century, the French conquered Languedoc in the course of the Albigensian Crusade, bringing them up to the right bank of the Rh\u00f4ne. Under St Louis, king of France (r. 1226\u201370), they long planned an outpost on the Mediterranean coast at Aigues-Mortes, aiming to build a crusading port and to consolidate their hold on the lower Rh\u00f4ne valley. In 1229 agents of the king of France succeeded in ousting the bishop of Vivarium (Viviers) to create a French foothold in the Vivarais at the foot of the C\u00e9vennes. The Comtat Venaissin on the opposite bank, which took its name from the small town of Venasque, was bequeathed by an heirless owner as a gift to the papacy in 1274. The enclave of Avignon, within the comtat, was sold to an exiled pope in 1348. The nearby county of Aurausion (Orange) enjoyed the status of an autonomous principality under the counts of Baux, notorious for their feuding with the counts of Provence during the 'Baussenque Wars'. The legacy of the counts eventually passed to the French House of Chalon.\n\nLugdunum \u2013 Lyon \u2013 the chief city of the Rh\u00f4ne valley, was growing all the time into a commercial city of the first rank. Its annual fairs, thronged by Italian merchants, provided a point of exchange between the commerce of northern and southern Europe. Yet increasingly it became an object of great strategic interest to France. Thirteenth-century Lyon was, above all, an archiepiscopal city of unusual importance. Church councils were held there. One, in 1245, excommunicated the Emperor Frederick II. Another in 1274 was attended by 500 bishops. Popes presided in person; and in 1305 Pope Clement V was crowned there. It was probably no accident that the archbishop of Lyon, Bernard de Got, was the new pope's brother.\n\nThe papal bull deposing and excommunicating Frederick II did not mince words:\n\n> Innocent, bishop, servant of the servants of God... The secular prince who has been the special cause of so much discord... has committed four sins of the greatest gravity... [including] perjury... the arrest of our legates... [holding] sees, abbeys and other churches vacant... [and] sacrilege. Furthermore he has deservedly become suspect of heresy... We therefore denounce the said prince, and mark him out as an outcast who has made himself unworthy of the empire... Let those whose task it is... freely choose a successor... Given at Lyons on 17 July in the 3rd year of our pontificate.\n\nSuch a document could never have been produced if the emperor had exercised even limited influence over what was still, in theory, an imperial city.\n\nThe Second Council of Lyon (1274) was convened to end the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. It only succeeded in confirming and defining a key item of Catholic theology, the _filioque_ ,* which has barred the way to reconciliation ever since. (Lyon was also the place where a long-running heretical movement was thought to have begun. Peter Valdo had preached dangerously irregular, proto-Protestant views, and was banished. But his movement persisted. Valdensian communities took to the mountains of Savoy, and would defy the authorities in the best Burgundian manner for centuries (see p. 408).\n\nLyon, however, was riven with internal power struggles, and therefore fell easy prey to French intrigues. The archbishop was permanently at odds both with the counts of the Lyonnais-Forez, and with the city's rich patricians. When the French won over first the count and then the patricians, the archbishop was defenceless. French troops marched in without resistance in 1311. The archbishop retained his title of 'primate of the Gauls', but power passed to a city-commune run by elected consuls subject to French approval.\n\nThe Dauphin\u00e9, equally coveted by France, controlled the road to Italy over the Mont Cenis. But the counts of Albon\/Vienne, who held Grenoble and the approaches to the pass, hung on until 1349, when they sold out to the king of France in a private cash deal. Henceforth, the territory would serve as a dignity for the French king's son and heir, the 'dauphin' (whether or not it still technically formed part of the Holy Roman Empire is an open question).\n\nBy this stage, the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy was looking distinctly ragged. The parts that abutted Germany, like Basle and Berne, were still under the emperor's eye. But all those abutting France were being sucked beyond his reach. The emperors admitted as much. Though none of them formally renounced their claims to the kingdom, none after Conrad IV in 1264 bothered to publicize their royal Burgundian title.\n\nPolitical fragmentation was obviously gaining pace, yet such a simple term hardly describes the complicated processes at work. For as the traditional units crumbled new agglomerations were growing up, often in disregard for existing state boundaries. Marriages, dowries, conquests and bequests resulted in a constant stream of mergers, de-mergers and new upstart fortunes. The typical Burgundian count was no longer the ruler of one straightforward fief dependent on one overlord. More often he was head of a complex clutch of lands, titles and claims, assembled over the generations by the combined efforts of his family's knights, wives, children and lawyers.\n\nExamining the counts-palatine of Burgundy, for example, one sees that the original inheritance had repeatedly passed from one political sphere to another, and by marriage from one family to another: in 1156 to the German family of Hohenstaufen; in 1208 to the Bavarian House of Andechs; and in 1315 to the royal House of France. At each stage the beneficiary added his wife's titles and possessions to his own, sometimes acknowledging the former overlord, sometimes not. For the expert courtly genealogists and their clients, a significant moment loomed in 1330 when Jeanne III de France, consort of the duke of royal French Burgundy, inherited a claim to the imperial County-Palatine of Burgundy from her mother. The royal duchy and the imperial county were tantalizingly close to a permanent union. In the midst of the labyrinth of Burgundian successions (see below), Margaret, countess-palatine of Burgundy (1310\u201382), daughter of the French king, sought to accelerate the prospective merger. In 1366, with no particular justification, she started to promote the term of 'France-Comt\u00e9' _(sic)_ , dropping the traditional name of 'County of Burgundy' from her charters. (She was undoubtedly playing on the precedent of Rainald III, the self-styled _franc comte_.) The established formula of 'Franche-Comt\u00e9' only emerged definitively after Margaret's death. It is kingdom No. VII on Bryce's list.\n\nThe mid-fourteenth century was a time of maximum distress across Europe. The Black Death struck in 1348, though it was by no means the last irruption of the bubonic plague. France was about to descend into the bear pit of the Hundred Years War with England, and the Holy Roman Empire was in uproar over the Golden Bull of 1356 and the introduction of a consolidated imperial constitution and electoral procedures. Thanks to the papal schism, there was one pope in Rome, and another in Avignon. Those few parts of the Kingdom of Burgundy which had not been lost were often disputed among neighbours. To cap it all, mind-boggling crises of succession erupted simultaneously in the Kingdom of France, in the Duchy of Burgundy and in the County-Palatine. At this point, faint-hearted readers are advised to take a break.\n\nStudying the Burgundian succession of the 1360s, one can easily develop ' _Palis-Rondon_ ' \u2013 as the Japanese call a squint. Three of the main players were Jean II de Valois, king of France, and two of his sons: Charles de Navarre and Philippe le Hardi. One explanation runs as follows:\n\n> Charles II of Navarre was a grandson and heir to Margaret of Burgundy, eldest daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. John II of France was a son and heir to Joan of Burgundy, second daughter of Duke Robert II of Burgundy. John was first cousin of Philip's father i.e. a cousin once removed, whereas Charles was the son of a first cousin of Philip's father i.e. a second cousin himself. Charles's mother Joan had died already in 1349. John's practical position was helped by his being the stepfather of the young duke having been married to the widowed Joan of Auvergne...\n\nThis, one suspects, is _not_ the way to explain it \u2013 even if it's correct.\n\nAnother way is to leave the finer points of the genealogical tangle to the specialists, and to probe the nomenclature and the politics. It would help if it were clarified at the outset that three separate women all used the same style of 'Margaret of Burgundy'; and that three individual men were all called 'Philippe de Valois'. One of them, otherwise known as Philippe de Rouvres (1347\u201361), thoughtlessly started the crisis in 1361 by dying prematurely during a recurrence of the plague and in an unconsummated marriage. Had he lived, he might painlessly have fused his own claims to the duchy and those of his wife to the county-palatine. Instead, all his titles were deemed to have reverted to rival claimants. What is more, the French king, Jean le Bon, decided to ignore the principle of primogeniture and, again for purely political reasons, to earmark the Duchy of Burgundy for his fourth son.\n\nThe bold actions of this fourth son, Philippe de Valois, le Hardi (Philip the Bold), who had won his spurs as a teenager at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 against England's Black Prince, provide the key to all subsequent developments. Despite his modest ranking in the French line of succession, he managed to dominate the long-running Council of Regents that ran France for decades after his father's death in 1364. Also, by marrying the widow of Philippe de Rouvres, Marguerite de Dampierre, heiress to Flanders (where she was known as Marghareta van Male), he rescued a bevy of claims and titles that had earlier been dispersed. Among them was the vital claim to the County-Palatine of Burgundy, which finally reverted to Marguerite in 1384 after the death of her father. The result was a newly reunited Burgundian polity, centred on the union of duchy and county, which came together in the last two decades of Philippe le Hardi's long life. It does not figure separately on Bryce's list, but arose from a combination of Nos. X and VII.\n\nTo no one's surprise, the emergence of the duchy-county, which could only have been realized through the simultaneous weakness of France and Germany, caused severe friction. In France, it provoked a fierce and protracted civil war between two court factions, the 'Burgundians' and the 'Armagnacs', whose intrigues quickly became entangled with the politics of the Hundred Years War. The former favoured good relations both with the successors of Philippe le Hardi and with Burgundy's English allies. The latter, the French patriots, deplored the activities of their breakaway duchy and its treacherous alliance with the hereditary English enemy. From 1418 to 1436, forces from Burgundy participated in the English occupation of Paris. The imperial Germans, hopelessly divided by their own quarrels, were in no state to intervene until the Habsburg era began in the 1430s. Everyone, except perhaps the clerks of the imperial chancery, forgot that the Kingdom of Burgundy had not officially expired. In the interval, the duke-counts enjoyed a free run.\n\nThe astonishing new creation which flourished from the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth century is generally and inaccurately called the 'Duchy of Burgundy', or sometimes just 'Valois Burgundy'; it was ruled by a line of French dukes, who briefly threw off the tutelage of Paris in order to create a brilliant, wealthy and cultured civilization of their own. Yet the dominant French perspective is not necessarily the best one, and the historical term of the 'States of Burgundy' is definitely to be preferred: so, too, for its rulers is the double title of 'duke-counts'. The success of the enterprise derived from the fact that the French duchy and the imperial county, having been fused at the head in a personal union, were merged into a new entity that was neither French nor German. Philippe le Hardi's family was only half-French; it was equally half-Flemish, and since Philippe's Flemish wife, Marguerite de Dampierre, had been born a subject of the emperor, at least partially imperial. Furthermore, behind the extraordinary small empire which the duke-counts assembled, from Boulogne to the Black Forest, lay the romantic idea that they were reassembling the long-lost realm of Lotharingia.\n\nOnly four duke-counts of the States of Burgundy reigned in more than a century: Philippe le Hardi\/Filips de Stoute (r. 1364\u20131404), Jean sans Peur\/Jan zonder Vrees (r. 1404\u201319), Philippe le Bon\/Filips de Goede (r. 1419\u201367) and Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire\/Karel de Stoute (r. 1467\u201377). Dutch and Flemish historians have their own nomenclature, of course. When they talk of rulers who were simultaneously duke ( _hertog_ ) and count ( _graaf_ ), they are thinking of Burgundian outsiders who were also counts of Flanders and Artois. The full list of the Burgundian States, however, cannot be limited to two Burgundies, Flanders and Artois. Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire, for instance, held fifteen titles: count of Artois, duke of Limburg, duke of Brabant, duke of Lothier, duke of Burgundy, duke of Luxembourg, count-palatine of Burgundy, margrave of Namur, count of Charolais, count of Zeeland, count of Flanders, count of Zutphen, duke of Guelders, count of Hainault and count of Holland.\n\nNone of the duke-counts were kings. Coronations lay in the gift of the pope, and no pope would have braved the wrath of both the king of France and the German emperor in order to elevate a king of Burgundy. But in the brilliance of their courts, the wealth of their cities and the opulence of their patronage, the Burgundians outshone almost all the crowned heads of their day, and were kings in all but name.\n\nThe territorial base of the new political complex differed substantially from that of all previous Burgundies. Although anchored in the duchy and the county, the greater part of the agglomeration lay in the coastal region far to the north, and did _not_ include most of historic Burgundy. The personal inheritance of Marguerite de Dampierre, born at Bruges, was considerably larger and wealthier than her husband's. It stretched all the way from the ex-French counties of Vermandois and Ponthieu to the ex-imperial counties of Holland and Gelderland, and comprised all the great cities of the Low Countries: Amiens, Arras, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and Amsterdam. Several gaps in the patchwork \u2013 at Utrecht, Cambrai, Li\u00e8ge and Luxeuil \u2013 were filled by dependent bishoprics. One of the fragments of imperial Burgundy that the German emperors hung on to was the county of Neuch\u00e2tel (now a canton in north-western Switzerland). This was made possible because the Emperor Rudolf I took Neuch\u00e2tel into his personal possession before handing it in fief to one of his supporters. Its proximity to Germany ensured the emperors' continuing care and attention, and it evaded the clutches both of the Valois duke-counts and of the Swiss Confederation all the way to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. From 1707 to 1806, it belonged, eccentrically, to Prussia.\n\nThe fifteenth century saw the heyday of medieval cities. They flourished most ostentatiously in two centres, northern Italy and the Low Countries \u2013 that is, in the States of Burgundy \u2013 and were the true habitat of the Renaissance. Art and learning went hand in hand with commerce:\n\n> Bruges, at this time the most international mercantile town in north-west Europe, was undoubtedly [Burgundy's] beating heart. Hundreds of foreigners had their residence there... At least twelve 'nations' of foreign merchants enjoyed... legal protection... Forty or fifty Hansa merchants resided in the city throughout the year. The northern Italians... were even more numerous. There were also... Catalans, Castilians, Portuguese, Basques, Scots, and English.\n> \n> Bruges was the centre of a complex network... During the six-week-long Whitsun fair... all the foreigners left Bruges... for Antwerp. There they controlled the trade in expensive textiles such as linen and velvet, and... in goods from overseas like spices, wine, oil, tropical fruits, sugar, and furs... Thus, we can imagine Bruges at the top of a pyramid, with... Antwerp in the second place and Ghent and Ypres, regional mercantile centres.\n> \n> From the thirteenth century on, Italian firms had extended credit to rulers in the Low Countries... Duke Philip the Bold had close connections with Dino Rapondi, a banker from Lucca... Dino settled in Flanders and lent large sums of money to the duke and to the towns... With a bill of exchange for sixty thousand francs, payable in Venice, and a large loan, Dino provided the ransom for John the Fearless when he was captured by the Turks... in 1396.\n\nThe court of the duke-counts was itinerant. Its home base lay in the 'Palais des Ducs' in Dijon, where it wintered, but it would move off every spring for its annual progress; regular destinations included the old comtal residences at Hesdin in Artois and Mechelen near Antwerp. Contemporaries always commented on its splendour and ostentation. 'Burgundian' has become a byword for lavish dress, conspicuous consumption and making merry. The processions and pageants and the 'entries' of the duke-counts and their guests were consciously undertaken as political spectacles. The Burgundian court felt itself the equal of all its neighbours, bar none:\n\n> The king of France... took the road to Troyes, in Champagne... He was accompanied by his uncles the duke of Bourbon, the duke of Touraine... and many other knights... [when] he arrived at Dijon... he was received with every respect and affection by the duchess of Burgundy, and all who had come thither to do him honour. Grand entertainments were given on the occasion, and the king remained eight days at Dijon.\n\nBurgundy's ruling circles cultivated the art and the ethos of chivalry with unparalleled passion. The Order of the Golden Fleece, modelled on England's Order of the Garter, was instituted in 1430. Its rituals and ceremonies outshone all others. Its badge was mounted on a jewelled collar bearing the incongruous motto: ' _Pretium Laborum Non Vile'_ ('Not a Bad Reward for Working'). The choice of a non-Christian theme for the Order was an outward sign of interest in the ancient world. The same can be said of the manuscripts and the literary works, such as the _\u00c9pop\u00e9e troyenne_ or 'Trojan Epic', which graced their libraries. William Caxton, the pioneer of English printing, published a _Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye_ in 1473, based on the Burgundian original.\n\nThe Flemish School of painting, a centrepiece of the Northern Renaissance, was launched under Burgundian patronage. Painters such as Robert Campin ( _c_. 1378\u20131444), Jan van Eyck ( _c_. 1390\u20131441), who worked both for the count of Holland and for Philip the Bold, Roger van der Weyden ( _c_. 1400\u20131464) and Hans Memling ( _c_. 1430\u201394), a German who settled in Bruges, pioneered the secularization of European art. They moved with confidence into new genres, including portraits, still life, everyday scenes and landscape. Outstanding sculptors, too, were patronized. Claus Sluter ( _fl_. 1380\u20131405), a Dutchman, became the court sculptor at Dijon. His best-known surviving work is the _Well of Moses_ , fashioned for the ducal mausoleum at the monastery of Champol. Tapestries, too, were a Burgundian speciality. The costly technique of weaving gold thread into coloured designs was invented in Arras. In the fifteenth century, the _tapissiers_ could produce huge, wallhung panels depicting battles, historical scenes, ancient legends and intricate landscapes.\n\nMusic blossomed alongside the visual arts. The Burgundian School started life in the ducal chapel in Dijon, where 'the Burgundian Spirit in Song' could already be heard by the century's turn. But it expanded both geographically and stylistically. Guillaume Dufay ( _c_. 1397\u20131470), a Brabanter, may have been the most famous European composer of the day. The later Franco-Flemish School produced a bevy of talent centred on the genius of Joskin van de Velde ( _c_.1450\u20131520), better known as Josquin des Prez, who brought polyphony to its peak.\n\nRenaissance literature covered many fields from poetry to philosophy. Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466\u20131536), the greatest humanist of his age, was a Burgundian. Both French and Dutch developed alongside Latin, and the intermingling of the vernaculars has been called 'a dialogue of two cultures'. Burgundy also provided the setting for one of the most stirring works of twentieth-century scholarship, Johan Huizinga's _Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen_ (1919), known throughout the world as _TheWaning of the Middle Ages_. Huizinga (1872\u20131945), a professor at Leiden and a pioneer of cultural history, used detailed analysis of the rituals, art forms and spectacles at the Burgundian court to formulate his theory about the rough and vividly emotional character of late medieval life, contesting the prevailing view that it was an age full of Renaissance grace, aestheticism and enlightened debate:\n\n> When the world was half a thousand years younger, all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us. Every event, every deed was defined in given and expressive forms; death by virtue of the sacraments, basked in the radiance of the divine mystery. But even the lesser events \u2013 a journey, a visit, a piece of work, were accompanied by a multitude of blessings, ceremonies, sayings and conventions.\n\nHuizinga's views were hugely influential, even though they provoked hostility among some Dutch colleagues, and bewilderment in his Belgian friend Henri Pirenne.\n\nFor all their extraordinary cultural patronage, politics was the prime _m\u00e9tier_ of the duke-counts. Burgundy distinguished itself both in projects to lay the foundations of an integrated state and in the brilliance of its diplomacy. Although force could be used to suppress rebellious subjects, local particularities were respected; and it was the practice to rule by established procedure and consent. In a typical decree of 13 December 1385, Ghent felt both its lord's heavy hand and his magnanimity:\n\n> Philip of France, duke of Burgundy, earl of Flanders and Artois, palatine of Burgundy... to all, greeting: be it known... our well-beloved subjects... of our good town of Ghent, having humbly supplicated us, to have mercy, that [We] have pardoned and forgiven all misdemeanours and offences... and have fully confirmed all the said customs, privileges, and franchises, provided they place themselves wholly under obedience [to us].\n\nThe duke-counts, like the English monarchs, drew on their impossibly tangled genealogy to support their claim that they were the true kings of France, and Philip the Bold in particular was preoccupied with French affairs. When he died in 1404, his position both as a prince of the Valois blood and as an independent ruler was secure. Yet he did not neglect his 'States of Burgundy'. He was a connoisseur of fine wine, and issued detailed decrees on matters such as the banishment of the inferior gamay grape or the sacrifice of quality to quantity through excessive use of manure. Small towns like Pommard, Nuits St George and Beaune grew up in his time as centres for the _n\u00e9gociants,_ the middlemen of the wine trade. One of his properties at the Ch\u00e2teau de Santenay on the slopes of the C\u00f4te d'Or still produces wines that bear his name. He was also the principal constructor of the Palais de Ducs at Dijon.\n\nPhilip's son, Jean sans Peur \u2013 John the Fearless \u2013 who had fought against the Turks as a young knight in the Crusade of Nicopolis, consolidated Burgundy's power and independence. Endlessly embroiled with his French relatives, he was murdered by the entourage of the dauphin in September 1419 on the bridge at Montereau near Paris in an encounter which he had expected to be a diplomatic parley. John's son, Philippe le Bon \u2013 Philip the Good \u2013 was known in his youth as the count of Charolais, and brought 'the States' to a high degree of prestige and prosperity. He expanded them by the purchase of Namur and Luxembourg, by the conquest of Holland, Zealand and Frisia in the so-called Cold Wars, and by the inheritance of Brabant, Limburg and Antwerp. He liked to style himself, immodestly, as the 'grand duke of the West'.\n\nPhilip the Good's funeral is often cited as the grandest of Burgundian spectacles. It was lavishly staged in Bruges in 1467 and was recorded in great detail by the court chronicler, Chastellain. Hundreds of mourners, dressed in black, were fitted out at official expense with cloaks reflecting their rank. The church of St Donation was filled with so many candles that the stained glass had to be broken to release the heat. Twenty thousand spectators watched the torchlight procession:\n\n> The remains of Duke Philip... were placed in a closed leaden coffin weighing more than 240 pounds. A cloth of gold measuring thirty-two ells and lined with black satin covered the coffin. Twelve Archers of the Guard carried [it], [while] the pall of gold cloth... was held by sixteen grand barons... A canopy of golden cloth mounted on four large spikes was a borne aloft by four Burgundian noblemen: the counts of Joigny, Bouquan, and Blancquehain, and the seigneur de Chastelguion. Directly behind... walking alone was Meriadez, the Master of the Horse... [and] the principal director of the funeral. [He] carried the ducal sword of his late master in its richly ornate sheath, pointed down towards the ground.\n\nDuring the entombment, the sword was passed to the late duke's son and heir, Charles, in a gesture borrowed from French regal ceremony. It signified the continuity of princely power \u2013 but it also gave notice of Charles's intention of living by the sword.\n\nCharles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire has variously been classed, according to translation, as 'the Bold', 'the Rash' and 'the Terrible'. He was the son of a Portuguese princess, and through successive marriages, brother-in-law to the kings both of France and of England. His warlike disposition had erupted before his father's death, when in 1466, he ordered the slaughter of every man, woman and child in the rebellious town of Dinant. His main mistake was to assume that he could offend all his neighbours simultaneously, and in the complicated Burgundian wars of the 1470s, his enemies eventually united against him. He soon found himself pressed in the west by Louis XI of France, 'the Universal Spider', and in the east by the Lorrainers, the Imperialists and the Swiss.\n\nSwitzerland, which by now had absorbed large parts of the old 'Upper Burgundy', proved to be the nemesis of the 'Burgundian States'. In three successive battles, Charles was successively humiliated, outmanoeuvred and obliterated. At Grandson in the Vaud (2 March 1476), where he had slaughtered the local garrison, he abandoned a vast booty, including his solid silver bath. At the lake of Morat (Murten) in the canton of Berne (22 June 1476), his army was routed, and many of his troops drowned. Finally, at the winter siege of Nancy (5 January 1477), he met his death. The chronicler Philippe de Commynes recorded what he had heard:\n\n> The duke's... few troops, in bad shape, were immediately... either killed or [put to] flight... The Duke of Burgundy perished on the field... The manner of it was recounted to me by [prisoners] who saw him hurled to the ground... He was set upon by a crowd of soldiers, who killed him and despoiled his body without recognizing him. This battle was fought on... the eve of Epiphany. [Two days later], the duke's naked corpse, frozen into the ice of a pond, was identified: the head had been split to the chin by a Swiss halberd, the body many times pierced by Swiss pikes.\n\nCommynes, who had once served Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire, was harsh in his judgement. 'Half of Europe', he commented, 'would not have satisfied him.'\n\nThe 'Booty of Burgundy' is a phrase most usually applied to the vast pile of treasure which was captured by the Swiss at Grandson and which has been appearing on the European art market ever since, but it could equally be applied to the fate of the 'States of Burgundy' as a whole. Within a few years, the possessions of the duke-counts had been dispersed. The duchy, swiftly occupied by French forces, reverted to France. The County-Palatine, the 'Franche-Comt\u00e9', with some delay, reverted to the Empire. The link between the duchy and the Low Countries was severed.\n\nThe late duke-count's nineteen-year-old daughter, Mary of Burgundy (1457\u201382), was now wooed by more suitors than the years of her life. Since her duchy had been seized by the French, she fell back on her subjects in the Low Countries. Yet they, too, were simmering with resentment. They stopped her from choosing a husband until she granted them a 'Great Privilege' abolishing all her father's recent impositions. Mary was then free to make her choice, which fell on Maximilian von Habsburg, son of the Holy Roman Emperor. The marriage was consecrated at Ghent on 19 August in the year that had started with the Battle of Nancy. It was one of the great matrimonial milestones of European history. Within five years, Mary was dead, killed by a fall from her horse, yet in the brief interval, she had given birth to three children who would ensure the political legacy of her marriage. Her widowed husband succeeded to the Empire; her son Philip IV was to marry the queen of Aragon and Castile, and her grandson, Charles of Ghent, _Kezer_ Karel, better known as the Emperor Charles V, was to scoop the largest portfolio of titles and dominions ever bequeathed to a European monarch.\n\nFrom the geographical standpoint, the principal result of the settlement of 1477 must be found in the permanent separation of the duchy from the rest of the 'Burgundian Inheritance'. The duchy returned to the Kingdom of France, where as 'Bourgogne' it became one of the provinces of the _ancien r\u00e9gime_. The rest passed to the Habsburgs, who complicated matters by adopting the title of 'duke of Burgundy' without inheriting the duchy. In this way, the hereditary title of dukes of Burgundy, which all Habsburg emperors used from 1477 to 1795, was associated with a very different territory from that underlying the title of 'kings of Burgundy' which earlier emperors had once used.\n\nThe County-Palatine followed a somewhat variant course. In 1477 it was seized by France, but only sixteen years later was restored to the Empire by the Treaty of Senlis as the price of peace and added to the Habsburgs' 'Burgundian Inheritance'. Its status was confirmed in 1512, at the time that the titular Duke Charles II (not yet the Emperor Charles V) was still considering the creation of a new administrative unit, the _Burgundischer Reichskreis_ or 'Imperial Burgundian Circle'. There were a dozen such circles within the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The Burgundian Circle, formalized in 1548, is No. IX on Bryce's list.\n\nNonetheless, since the Peace of Senlis did not hold, chronic war between France and the Empire became one of the most persistent fixtures of modern European history. In the process, the territory of the 'Burgundian Circle' was gradually whittled down, exactly as the former Kingdom of Burgundy had been. In 1512, the Circle comprised twenty distinct territorial units. Over the years, it shrank and shrivelled. In 1555 a large part was transferred to the rule of Madrid as the Spanish Netherlands, but within twenty-five years half of these Spanish-ruled provinces broke free to launch themselves as the Dutch Republic. By the time the residue was returned by Spain to Austria in 1715, only eight of the original twenty units survived as the 'Austrian Netherlands'. (The Duchy of Lorraine, incidentally, where Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire had died, was not incorporated into the Imperial Circle. It remained technically independent, and its last duke, _le bon roi_ Stanislas (r. 1735\u201366), was an unemployed Polish monarch, whose daughter happened to be the queen of France.)\n\nThe trajectory of the County-Palatine of Burgundy, the 'Franche-Comt\u00e9', was also somewhat eccentric. Most of it was handed over to Spanish rule in 1555 with the rest of the Circle. Yet the county's capital, Besanz\/Besan\u00e7on, remained a _Reichsstadt_ within the Empire until 1651. Only then was it restored, for just one generation, as the capital of 'El Contado Franco', before being ceded to France with the rest of the county at the Treaty of Nijmegen of 1678, thus breaking the Empire's final link with its former Kingdom of Burgundy.\n\nThe provinces of Bourgogne and of Franche-Comt\u00e9 stood side by side within the Kingdom of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution. The former, administered from Dijon, was officially inhabited by _bourguignons_ and _bourguignonnes_ ; the latter, administered from Besan\u00e7on, by _comtois_ and _comtoises_. In 1791 both were abolished, and each was replaced by republican _d\u00e9partements_ with names of no historical significance. Everything associated with the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ was despised. The French were deliberately cut off from their provincial identities and taught to forget the Kingdom of France, let alone the many kingdoms of Burgundy.\n\nThe modern French state is famed for the centralized character of its administration. Over the last 200 years many things have changed. The revolutionary Republic was replaced by the Empire: the Empire by a restored kingdom, by a Second Republic, by a Second Empire, and by the Third, Fourth and Fifth Republics. For much of this time, one thing has not changed: Paris has proposed, and the rest of France has disposed.\n\nIn the second half of the twentieth century, however, practice was modified. A measure of decentralization was introduced in 1956 for the limited purposes of state-planning and in 1982 for the establishment of regional councils. Since then, France has been divided into twenty-two regions, which are broadly comparable in size and shape to the thirty-four pre-revolutionary provinces. One region is called Bourgogne. Its immediate neighbour is called Franche-Comt\u00e9. However, France's regions do not operate in the same way as the devolved countries of the United Kingdom, or the cantons of Switzerland. The powers of France's central government have not been curbed, only mildly clipped; and the appeal to historical formations has been very limited. The post-war bureaucrats who invented the regions do not appear to remember anything further back than the _ancien r\u00e9gime_. They ignored the Burgundian associations of Franche-Comt\u00e9, and awarded the Burgundian name exclusively to the former duchy. There is no recognition that the region which they designated as 'Rh\u00f4ne-Alpes' is sitting on as strong a Burgundian claim as anywhere else.\n\nNonetheless, historical memory is remarkably persistent. It may be inaccurate, confused and distorted, but it doesn't disappear easily. One hundred and eleven years passed between the abolition of Merovingian Burgundy and the founding of the Carolingian duchy; 162 years passed between the abolition of the royal French province of 'Bourgogne' and its revival as a region. Clearly, these spans are not long enough for the collective psyche to forget completely. In modern times, memories of fifteenth-century 'Burgundy' appear to have eclipsed all others, perhaps as a result of its artistic splendour. Yet one must never say 'never'. The day may yet dawn when the citizens of Geneva, Basle, Grenoble, Arles, Lyon, Dijon and Besan\u00e7on will unfurl their banner and sing their anthem: 'Burgundia has not perished yet, so long as we still live!' And they might invite a representative or a delegation from Bornholm to join in the celebrations.\n\nBryce's Note A 'On the Burgundies' contained ten items, and it mentioned a possible eleventh. It did not concern itself with the provinces of the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ , and for obvious reasons could not have included the present-day regions. Even so, Bryce's tally of ten or eleven 'Burgundies' is manifestly too short. According to definitions, there have been five, six or seven kingdoms, two duchies, one or two provinces, one county-palatine, one landgravate, one 'United States', one Imperial Circle, and at least one region. This brings the aggregate to a minimum of thirteen and a maximum of sixteen. At the beginning of the twenty-first century a running total of fifteen Burgundies is absolutely defensible. One is reminded of the Latin motto of Philip the Good, ' _Non Aliud_ ' \u2013 best translated as 'Enough, but not too much'.\n\nBy way of recapitulation, therefore, it may be appropriate to present a summary of Note A (Revised):\n\n1. 410\u201336 | The first Burgundian kingdom of Gundahar (Bryce's I).  \n---|---  \n2. 451\u2013534 | The second Burgundian kingdom, founded by Gundioc.  \n3. _c_. 590\u2013734 | The third (Frankish) kingdom of Burgundy (Bryce's II).  \n4. 843\u20131384 | The French Duchy of Burgundy (Bryce's X).  \n5. 879\u2013933 | The Kingdom of Lower Burgundy (Bryce's III).  \n6. 888\u2013933 | The Kingdom of Upper Burgundy (Bryce's IV).  \n7. 933\u20131032 | The united Kingdom of the Two Burgundies (Arelate) (Bryce's V).  \n8. _c_. 1000\u20131678 | The County-Palatine of Burgundy (Franche-Comt\u00e9) (Bryce's VII).  \n9. 1032\u2013? | The imperial Kingdom of Burgundy.  \n10. 1127\u20131218 | The imperial Duchy of Lesser Burgundy (Bryce's VI).  \n11. 1127+ | The imperial Landgravate of Burgundy (Bryce's VIII).  \n12. 1384\u20131477 | The united 'States of Burgundy'.  \n13. 1477\u20131791 | The French province of Burgundy (Bourgogne).  \n14. 1548\u20131795 | The Imperial Burgundian Circle (Bryce's IX).  \n15. 1982+ | The contemporary French region of Bourgogne.\n\n##### III\n\nMost people looking for information these days reach for their computer and the Internet. They bring up a search engine like Webcrawler, Yahoo, Google or Baidu, type in a keyword, click once, and are instantaneously rewarded with uncountable numbers of 'hits'. Traditionalists believe that new technology often produces poor results.\n\nIn the case of 'Burgundy', one click on Google (in February 2009) brought up 23,900,000 entries. The list was augmented by an option to have the keyword or keywords defined. One click on the 'Definition' offered by 'answers.com' yielded the following:\n\n> Burgundy A historical region and former province of Eastern France. The area was first organised into a kingdom by the Burgundii, a Germanic people, in the 5th century. At the height of its later power in the 14th and 15th centuries, [it] controlled vast territories in present-day Netherlands, Belgium and north-eastern France. It was incorporated into the French crown lands by Louis XI in 1477.\n\nNo one wants to be needlessly pedantic, but seekers after precision should be warned: every single sentence of the above definition contains false or misleading assertions. The first area once organized into a kingdom by the Burgundii, for example, is not in eastern France.\n\nHowever, one should not judge the authors of 'answers.com' too harshly. If fifteen Burgundies is taken as a full score, they manage three out of fifteen, or 20 per cent, which if one explores further, by no means puts them at the bottom of the class. What is more, their faulty information derives from verifiable sources. _The Britannica Concise Encyclopedia_ , cited by 'answers.com', defines Burgundy as 'historical and governmental region, France'. The _Columbia Encyclopedia_ goes for 'historic region, E. France'. An entry from the online Wikipedia goes for 'a region historically situated in modern-day France and Switzerland... and in the 4th century assigned by the Romans to... the Burgundians, who settled there in their own kingdom'.\n\nThe discrepancies in these definitions are easily spotted. But it is distressing to see that their common characteristic lies in their immobility: they are all trying to tie the concept of Burgundy to a single locality. None grasps the key feature, namely that Burgundy was a movable feast.\n\nThe Google list on 'Burgundy' is presented in two forms. The full list, containing over 23 million entries, is impractically long. The shortened list contains 535 entries ranked by the frequency of their consultation. Here, the common characteristics are a persistent focus on the present, and again a rigid determination to locate Burgundy exclusively in France.\n\nA new search can be conducted using two key words: 'Burgundy' plus 'History'. The resultant crop of websites looks promising. They include 'History of Burgundy', 'Burgundy \u2013 History', 'The Burgundians', and many more. On examination, however, the drawbacks become obvious. The text of 'The Burgundians' stops abruptly after the second kingdom, because its remit stops in the sixth century (score 2 : 15). The home page of the 'History of Burgundy' offers four sub-sections, the third of which is headed 'The Glorious Age... 1364\u20131477'. The purpose is to sell 'the Glorious Duchy' and nothing else. 'Burgundy \u2013 History' reveals shameless prejudices. 'From the 10th century onward,' it opines, 'Burgundy meant a duchy belonging to the royal family of the Capetians.' If that were to be believed, the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy never even existed (score 1: 15).\n\nAnd so one could continue, using different keywords and different linguistic preferences. The same stunted concepts recur time and time again. A French site located via 'Bourgogne' distinguishes the early Kingdom of _Bourgondie_ (the Burgundians) from 'the later [Frankish] Kingdom of _Bourgogne_ ', and is exceptional for mentioning the Kingdom of the Two Burgundies (score 4 : 15).\n\nStudents are frequently warned against pulling information off the Internet. Wikipedia, the self-authored, online encyclopedia, is especially suspect. 'How can anything be verified?' one hears. 'People can write whatever comes into their head.' Such fears are clearly not baseless. Yet they are widely accompanied by the assumption that the old-fashioned printed works of reference, 'the recognized authorities', are _ipso facto_ more reliable. The test of this comes, therefore, when Internet sites are compared to some of the more traditional, academic products.\n\nBurgundy, for certain, is a complex word. It carries a mass of diverse connotations. In English, for example, it has two main meanings: a place and a product. According to the _Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_ , the place is defined as '1. a Kingdom, and later a duchy of the Western Empire, subsequently giving its name to a province of France'. The product is '2. ellipt. wine made in Burgundy'. Of course, one cannot expect the English to be particularly knowledgeable on continental matters, and it is not a complete surprise if the _SOED_ 's entry contains flaws. What is surprising is that a mistake in word order muddies the issue unnecessarily. If the entry had read: 'Burgundy: 1. a Kingdom of the western Roman Empire, and later a duchy...', it would have been accurate, though incomplete. As it stands, it is both inaccurate and incomplete. And as for the wine, connoisseurs would be appalled by the implication that any old plonk from the region would qualify for the 'Appellation d'Origine Contr\u00f4l\u00e9e', the 'Registered Name of Origin' (score 1 : 15).\n\nThe full OED repeats the above definitions, while adding others:\n\n  * 'shade of red of the colour of Burgundy wine'\n  * 'sort of head-dress for women = BOURGOIGNE (obsolete)'\n  * 'Burgundy hay: applied by British writers to the Lucerne plant, _Medicago sativa_ , but in French originally to Sainfoin, _Onobrychis sativa_ (the two were formerly confused)'\n  * 'Burgundy mixture, a preparation of soda and copper sulphate used for spraying potato-tops'\n\nUnder 'Burgundian', after 'belonging to Burgundy' (adj.) and 'an inhabitant of Burgundy' (subst.), the OED opts eccentrically for 'one of the Teutonic nations of the Burgunds...' and '2. (in form of _Burgonian_ ) A kind of ship... built in the Burgundian dominions, which in the 15th c. included the Netherlands'. The 'Teutonic nation of Burgunds' is conceptually mangled, but at least the geography is not Francocentric.\n\n_Webster's American Dictionary_ is minimalist. It offers 'a region in France'; 'a blended red wine produced elsewhere (as California)'; and 'a reddish purple color'. This suggests, eccentrically, that Californian burgundy is the real thing, while burgundy from Burgundy may not be.\n\nGiven the prevailing pro-French bias, one expects the French to be better informed. _Littr\u00e9_ is one of the older dictionaries: ' _BOURGOGNE, s.m vin de Bourgogne, E de Burgundi, nom d'un peuple germain; s.f nom vulgaire du sainfoin_.' The definitions are sparse: a wine, a state, a people and a sort of hay, as in the OED. But there follow the headdress, the province and, unusually, 'a breakaway fragment of pack-ice': ' _nom donn\u00e9 par les marins aux morceaux de glace d\u00e9tach\u00e9e de la banquise_ '. No one else has spotted the ice-floes.\n\n_Robert_ comes next, and again the haul is disappointing. Burgundy, as in _Littr\u00e9_ , is nothing more than a province (score 1 : 15). And, despite the list of grand crus, there is no sign of the AOC.\n\nSo one turns to Imbs, and his _Tr\u00e9sor de la langue fran\u00e7aise_ ('Treasury of the French Language'). This is no more fruitful. Burgundy is still a mere province (score 1 : 15). But separate words are given for the Burgundians of old ( _Burgondes_ ) and the Burgundians of today ( _Bourguignons_ ). Nonetheless, one must conclude: dictionary definitions are very inadequate, particularly on historical matters.\n\nEncyclopedias form a large category. _The New Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (1974) can draw on the phenomenal _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (11th edition, 1911). It doesn't disappoint. After describing the ancient Burgundians as 'Scandinavian', it gives a brief account of six kingdoms of Burgundy plus the county, plus a duchy, plus the 'states of Burgundy', plus the province. The seventh kingdom is at least implied. The only items missing are the Imperial Circle, a duchy, a landgravate, and the province (score 11 : 15).\n\nThe _Nouveau Petit Larousse_ , a household name in France, starts with an unsatisfactory definition: Burgundy, 'a region in the east of France which is more of a historical than a geographical unity'. But the account that follows covers six kingdoms, plus the county, duchy, 'states of Burgundy' and province (score 10 : 15). Still no Imperial Circle. It concludes: 'Burgundy found itself joined for a long time with Germany. The Kings of France ate into it bit by bit over the centuries.' This is tremendous news: _Larousse_ is not Francocentric.\n\nThe international aspect of the problem is crucial. The Burgundian question defies national frontiers. Ideally, one would draw on reference works not just from France, but from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Each source would naturally be strong on some points and weaker on others.\n\nA German _Brockhaus_ happens to be to hand. The entry is suitably long and detailed. It distinguishes well between the Burgundy of the present, which is defined as 'a Region made up of four French departments', and five Burgundies of the past: the Koenigreich der Burgunder, from 443, the Burgundia of the Franks, from 534, the Koenigreich Burgund (Arelat), the Herzogtum Burgund, that is, the duchy, and the Freigrafschaft Burgund (Franche-Comt\u00e9). In explaining the genesis of the Arelat, _Brockhaus_ also mentions Boso's 'Kingdom of Lower Burgundy' (score 7 : 15). Surprisingly, no Imperial Circle.\n\nSeeking impartiality, one turns to a country with no direct links to Burgundy. An old copy of the _Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna_ _PWN_ is also to hand. It transpires that the Poles still use the Latin form, _Burgundia_. The _EP_ describes it as a 'historical land ( _kraina historyczna_ )in eastern France', and 'an important region for wine production'. But the long, solid, historical summary contains few deficiencies. One meets 'the 5th Century Kingdom of the Germanic Burgundians'; the kingdoms of Upper Burgundy, of Lower Burgundy, and of Arles; and from 1032 'a kingdom within the structure of Germany'. Five out of a possible seven is good. 'The name of Burgundy', it continues, 'was only preserved... in the Free County (Franche-Comt\u00e9) which had belonged to Germany until 1382.' This statement is inaccurate, but the general narrative stays on course. 'The Duchy's period of greatness was launched by the rule of Filip \u015amia\u0142y [Philip the Bold],' it says. And it does not stop, as many accounts do, with the last of the Valois duke-counts: 'After the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, his sole heiress, Marie, married the Archduke of Austria Maximilian; and a new partition of B. resulted. France recovered the Duchy of B. plus Picardy. The Habsburgs took the Netherlands plus Franche-Comt\u00e9, which eventually returned to France in 1678'. (Score 9 : 15.) Still no Imperial Circle.\n\nFor people without French, German or Polish, the highest hopes have to be reserved for a recently published _Gazetteer of the World_ , produced by a prestigious American institution. It specializes in the descriptions of geographical places and historical territories: 'Burgundy (BUHR-ghun-dee), Fr. Bourgogne (BOORGON-yuh), historic region and former province of E central and E France. The name applies to 2 successive anc. kingdoms and to a duchy, all embracing a territory larger than the 17th\u201318th cent. prov. After 1790, it was divided into depts. Present-day, it forms one of France's new administrative regions'. So far, not too bad (score 5 : 15). Before long, however, the anachronisms creep in: 'Conquered by Caesar in his Gallic Wars, it was later settled (5th cent. A.D.) by Burgundians, a Germanic tribe, who established the First Kingdom of Burgundy.' Times and places are wrongly associated, and convoluted misconceptions proliferate:\n\n> Partitioned during the Merovingian and Carolingian era, it was reunited (933) in the Second Kingdom comprising Cisjurane Burgundy (already known as Provence) in the S and Transjurane Burgundy (N). Soon a smaller duchy of Burgundy was created by Emperor Charles II and absorbed (1034) into the Holy Roman Empire. The duchy entered its golden age under Philip the Good and came to include most of the present Neth., Belgium, and N and E France.\n\nThe word 'soon' shows the editors trying to climb desperately from the mire. The chronology is topsy-turvy, the nomenclature scrambled, and the absorption of the duchy into the Holy Roman Empire imaginary. Fortunately, a partial recovery is staged in the final section:\n\n> During 15th cent. Burgundy was... an artistic center outshining the rest of the continent. The wars of ambitious Charles the Bold, however, proved ruinous... His daughter, Mary of Burgundy, by marrying Emperor Maximilian I, brought most of the expanded Burgundy (but not the Fr. duchy) to the house of Hapsburg. The duchy was seized by Louis XI who made it into a Fr. Prov... Burgundy now lies astride the main Paris-Lyon-Marseilles RR and auto routes.\n\n(Score: hard to calculate.)\n\nSo what is the information-seeker to do? Taken together, the 'recognized authorities' are really no less imperfect than any others. The Internet, like any other library, contains works of varying value. Like all sources, it has to be used with critical vigilance, but it is not markedly inferior. Analytical studies have shown that Wikipedia, for all its faults, can sometimes match the most prestigious academic brands. It has the virtue of being constantly corrected and updated.\n\nThe search, in fact, need never end. The indefatigable may wish to go on and explore the multi-authored composite historical works, often recommended for reference purposes. Unfortunately, the relevant chapter in the composite _New Cambridge Medieval History_ does not open too promisingly. 'The region known as Burgundy', it begins, 'has had some of the most elastic borders of any region of France.' Once again, Burgundy is conceived in its limited French form. Medievalists, above all, should take more care.\n\nOther searchers may try their luck with the romantically titled works of yesteryear. _The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy_ , for example, which hovers between fact and fiction, opens with a flourish. 'On such a night as this,' the first sentence whispers conspiratorially, 'Charles of Burgundy rode to his death. He lost an empire, monsieur, because he dare not rescue a beautiful woman.' A few pages later, it gets worse: 'The kingdom lives because its motley kings, tatterdemalion warriors, guitar-playing swashbucklers, and mace-wielding choristers have refused to remain in their moldy tombs.' Then, on page 8, one meets a sentence for which all can be forgiven. 'The ancient Burgundy was, and is, something quite apart from the France that enveloped it \u2013 a sort of Atlantis engulfed beneath seas upon seas of new people.' The author possessed the priceless gift of imaginative sympathy which so many more prestigious compilations lack. And he produced another great line. 'Moonlight', he wrote, 'is the great restorer of vanished kingdoms.'\n\n## 4\n\n## Aragon\n\nA Mediterranean Empire (1137\u20131714)\n\n##### I\n\nPerpignan is the _chef-lieu_ of France's most southerly department, the Pyr\u00e9n\u00e9es-Orientales (d\u00e9p. 64), one of five such departments within the Region of Languedoc-Roussillon. As the _corbeau_ flies, it is situated 510 miles south-south-west of Paris, close to the Franco-Spanish frontier. In former times it was the provincial capital of historic Roussillon, which today borders the Spanish districts of Lleida and Gerona and the Principality of Andorra. The C\u00f4te Vermeille, the 'Scarlet Coast', lies immediately adjacent on the Golfe du Lion, 12 miles to the south, and beyond it the Costa Brava. The best way to get there is by TGV Express; fast, luxurious trains leave the Gare de Lyon four times a day for Avignon, and thence along the plain of Languedoc via Montpellier, B\u00e9ziers and Narbonne. The journey takes 4 hours 45 minutes. Passengers arriving in the daytime are usually greeted by the strong southern sun, which bathes the city on average for 300 days each year.\n\nAlternatively, one can fly to the regional airport of Perpignan-Rivesaltes, which hosts flights from domestic and international destinations including Paris-Orly, London-Stansted, Charleroi and Southampton. On entering the terminal building, the first poster one sees reads:\n\nVISITEZ LE CH\u00c2TEAU DES ROIS PLACE-FORTE D'UN ROYAUME EPH\u00c9M\u00c8RE\n\n('Visit the Castle of the Kings, Fortress of an Ephemeral Kingdom'). Few visitors could be expected to know beforehand what the 'Ephemeral Kingdom' refers to.\n\nThe old city lies on the southern bank of the River T\u00eat, which is lined by the Boulevard de la France Libre. An inner ring road is formed by the boulevards Foch, Wilson, Briand and Poincar\u00e9 which surround the imposing medieval citadel. A tangle of narrow streets filled with caf\u00e9s and restaurants tumbles down towards the river, and is dominated by three squares: place de la Loge, place Verdun and the place Arago (Fran\u00e7ois Arago (1786\u20131853) was a renowned scientific pioneer of local descent). The railway station is located at the end of the avenue G\u00e9n\u00e9ral de Gaulle.\n\nNonetheless, as the tourist websites emphasize, Perpignan has unmistakable foreign flavours. 'A good part of Perpignan's population is of Spanish origin,' one reads, 'refugees from the Civil War and their descendants. The southern influence is further augmented by a substantial admixture of North Africans, both Arabs and white French settlers repatriated after Algerian independence in 1962.' 'While there are few monuments to visit,' the website continues, 'Perpignan is an enjoyable city with a lively street life. Its heyday was in the 13th and 14th centuries.' The most recommended sights include the medieval Loge de Mer, the cath\u00e9drale Saint-Jean, the Palais de la D\u00e9putation (once the parliament of Roussillon) and, of course, the citadel.\n\nNowadays, Perpignan's Catalan connections are widely publicized and actively promoted. The Castilet Gate is home to a Catalan folk museum called 'Casa Pairal'. The _Office de tourisme_ promotes the festivals of La Sanch at Easter, of Sant Jordi in April, when sweethearts exchange gifts, and the Festa Major at the summer solstice, which celebrates 'the spirit of Perpignan la catalane'. It invites public participation in the Catalan national dance, the _sardana_ , flies the Catalan flag alongside the French tricolour, and revels in the city's sobriquet of _La Fidelissima_ , once awarded to the city for resisting a French king. In short, it takes pride in _Perpigna_ being ' _la capitale de la Catalogne fran\u00e7aise_ '. These perspectives, not recognized before the 1980s, 'have greatly enhanced our heritage'.\n\nPerpignan's local rugby club, the _Union Sportive des Arlequins Perpignanais,_ or ' _USA Perpignan_ ' for short, plays in the Catalan colours of 'blood red and gold'. Founded in 1902, it is based at the Stade Aim\u00e9 Giral, and in 2008\u20139 won the French champions' title.\n\nAs always in France, a concise academic history is on sale. A volume entitled _Histoire du Roussillon_ , written by a _ma\u00eetre de conf\u00e9rences_ at the University of Toulouse, starts with an eloquent invocation of the geographical setting: 'Roussillon, however, is not just the mountain range brusquely surging from the sea... It is also the coastland of the great \"Middle Sea\", with all its burden of history... Roussillon owes both its intensity and the explosion of its destiny to the sea's presence.' The story of the province unfolds from ancient times to the contemporary epoch. The birth of Perpignan comes about a third of the way through:\n\n> Originally just a simple Roman villa, it was chosen by certain counts of Roussillon, who established their residence there at the end of the ninth century, thereby supplanting the functions of the adjacent ruined city of Ruscino. The consecration of the parish church of St John the Baptist on 16 March 1025, next to the hall of the count, marks the earliest manifestation of a new political and administrative centre.\n\nThe physical chessboard on which political life developed here after the collapse of the Roman Empire evidently saw a mass of tiny lordships struggling to exist, trapped between the rising power of the Moorish emirs in Iberia and that of the Frankish kings in the former Gaul. Every other mountaintop sprouted a fortified tower or castle, attesting to a state of affairs in which every larger district had its count and every valley its viscount. As the feudal lords battled to subordinate their neighbours, some lordships thrived and expanded, while others shrivelled. Gradually, as the lesser fry were swallowed up, a few powerful dynasts came to dominate. One of these was Inigo Aristra, the Basque warlord who drove out the Carolingians from the western Pyrenees in the early ninth century, not long after Charlemagne's campaign against the Moors. A second, in the eleventh century, was Sancho El Mayor, originally 'King of Pamplona'.\n\nThe narrative grows infernally complicated following the disintegration of the Frankish Empire and of its outlier beyond the eastern Pyrenees, the _Marca Hispanica_ or 'Spanish March'. The historical record lists a procession of kings, princes and counts, all with unlikely names. Who exactly was Suniaire I, not to mention the long line of Guillaberts, Gausfreds and Guinards? Can Count Raymond Berenguer II (r. 1076\u201382) really be a different person from Berenguer Raymond II (r. 1076\u201397)? And are the Raymonds (or Raimunds) different from the Ram\u00f3ns?\n\nSeeking answers to these puzzles, one climbs the cobbled streets to Perpignan's citadel. There, another surprise awaits in the form of an imposing, fortress-like structure called 'Le Palais des rois'. It is not what one expects from a palace, and looks for all the world like a desert fort from _Beau Geste_ , plucked from the sands of the Sahara. Its garden is adorned with palm trees, and its interior displays an extraordinary mixture of ecclesiastical Gothic arches and exotic Moorish courtyards. Cultural and historical compasses spin out of control. Who were these kings, and where was their kingdom?\n\nIn the summer of 2010 Perpignan hosted the twenty-third annual 'Estivales', a popular festival of music, dance, theatre, circus and cinema. For three weeks in July, hundreds of entertainers presented scores of performances, and tens of thousands of enthusiasts flocked to enjoy them. Large-scale open-air shows took place on the Campo Santo, a purpose-built arena constructed beside the medieval church of St Jean le Vieux; more intimate events were staged in the Cloister of the Minimes. In 2010 the main theme of Mediterranean culture was given an extra African accent. The programmes were headed by the Dunas flamenco group from Seville; the Nederland Dans Theatre, Salif Keita from Mali, Victoria Chaplin's Invisible Circus, the Africa Umoja Ensemble from South Africa, and singers such as Vanessa Paradis and Alain Souchon. Yet many would say that the best of Perpignan was to be discovered on the festival's fringe by the carefree crowds sipping wine under the stars, munching tapas, applauding the street artists, listening in the park to a gypsy guitarist or an impromptu jazz band, or dreamily dancing till dawn to the scent of hibiscus.\n\nThe Pyrenees, which form a mountain range of spectacular proportions and whose dark outline stood out against the night sky of the festival, provide the permanent backdrop to Perpignan. They run for some 200 miles from sea to sea, from the picturesque painters' villages of Collioure and Banyuls on the C\u00f4te Vermeille to the elegant resorts of Biarritz and Bayonne on the Atlantic shore. In between lie a tangle of craggy ranges, deep verdant valleys, fantastic gorges, elevated plateaux, steep passes, lonely scree fields and deserts, powerful snow-driven rivers, crystal-clear lakes, flower-strewn pastures and, high above the 10,000-foot line, a world of glaciers, snowfields and rugged rock summits. The tallest peaks \u2013 the Pic de Aneto (11,168 feet), the Maladeta (10,853 feet) and the Monte Perdido (11,007 feet), to use their Spanish names \u2013 all lie in the central section. For more than 350 years, this massive natural barrier has separated France from Spain. With one small exception, in the Vall d'Aran, the Franco-Spanish frontier winds its way along the full length of the Pyrenean ridge.\n\nIn terms of historic provinces \u2013 which were replaced during the French Revolution by the _d\u00e9partements_ \u2013 the _montant nord_ or 'northerly slope' of the Pyrenees was occupied towards its Mediterranean end by Cerdagne as well as by Roussillon, both of which go back to the days of the _Marca Hispanica_. On the southern slopes, if one starts from the Costa Brava, the line of the March parallel to the ridge takes one today through upper Catalonia, past the Principality of Andorra, and back into the north-western corner of Catalonia. Historically, one is passing through a series of ancient counties from Perelada on the coast to Pallars in the heart of the mountains.\n\nIn some stretches, the French side of the Pyrenees is less accessible than the Spanish side. The inland valley of the Ari\u00e8ge, for example, which runs north from Andorra, was kept apart politically from Cerdagne and Roussillon by a near-impassable tract. As a result, the counts of Foix, who once dominated the Ari\u00e8ge, were drawn westwards into B\u00e9arn and Navarre. The eastern Pyrenees, in contrast, though containing some mighty summits, have always invited human movement and migration, rarely acting as the cultural and linguistic wall which political planners in Paris or Madrid might have preferred. The area of Catalan speech, for instance, straddles the Pyrenean ridge just as Basque does in the far west.\n\nRoussillon (Rossell\u00f3 in Catalan) combines a short length of coastline with a long stretch of the Pyrenean ridge. Its 1,500 square miles are dominated by one huge mountain and two transverse rivers. Le Mont Canigou or 'Canigo' (9,137 feet), where Catalans light their traditional Midsummer Eve bonfires, is visible across the sea from the vicinity of distant Marseille. The Rivers T\u00eat and Tech, which water the Roussillon plain, rise in the upland districts of Conflent and Vallespir respectively, once counties in their own right. The region is famed for its _vin doux naturel_ from the C\u00f4te Vermeille, for its ancient Romanesque abbeys such as St Michel de Cuxa or St Martin de Canigou, and for some of 'the most beautiful villages in France' \u2013 Castelnou among them, together with Evol, Mosset, Vinca and St Laurent de Cerdans. From the thirteenth century onwards, Roussillon's northernmost border, from the plateau of Caspir to the medieval fortress of Salses, formed a defence line against the growing power of France. It faces the formidable 'five sons of Carcassonne', the French castles of Aguilar, Qu\u00e9ribus, Peyrepertuse, Puilaurens and Termes along the Languedoc frontier. Salses was built to plug the gap between the seaside lagoons and the inland heights.\n\nRoussillon's folklore differs markedly from that of other French regions. The _sardana_ is pure Catalan; men and women hold hands in a ring, and circle back and forth to measured patterns in 6\/8 rhythm. The typical band is the _coble_ ; nine or ten wind-players blow _tenora_ and _tible_ (high and low oboes), _flabiol_ (flute), and the goatskin _bodega_ (bagpipes), usually accompanied by drum and double bass. An international folk festival is held every August at Am\u00e9lie-les-Bains (Els Banys d'Arles).\n\nUnlike Roussillon, Cerdagne (Cerdanya in Catalan, Cerda\u00f1a in Spanish) is entirely landlocked, and is nowadays split into French and Spanish halves. It grew strong through its relative inaccessibility, and rich from an ancient trans-Pyrenean trade route. Its historic capital and county seat stood at Ll\u00edvia. The counts of Cerdagne-Conflent, who reached their apogee during the eleventh century, founded the abbeys both of St Michel de Cuxa and of Montserrat, before bequeathing their inheritance to their descendants, the counts of Barcelona. Their legacy stayed intact until the seventeenth century. During the negotiations held at Ll\u00edvia in 1659, when Cerdagne was divided, the French commissioners demanded 130 communes in northern Cerdagne; the Spanish commissioners argued that Ll\u00edvia was not a commune, but a city. Ll\u00edvia has remained a Spanish enclave inside French territory ever since. A visit there is instructive. At the start of the local 'Historical Trail', Ll\u00edvia is proclaimed to be the 'cradle of the Catalan State'.\n\nAt some 12,300 square miles, modern Catalonia or _Catalunya_ is much larger than either Roussillon or Cerdagne. It is triangular in shape, and is divided into forty-one _comarques_ or 'rural districts'. The top side of the triangle follows the Pyrenean frontier. The coastal side runs down at a right angle along the Costa Brava, past Barcelona and the Costa Dorada, and as far as the province of Valencia. The inland side of the triangle links the southernmost point on the coast with Catalonia's westernmost point in the mountains. Since 1978, after painful experiences under General Franco, the province has enjoyed autonomy within Spain, and has successfully reinstated the official status of the Catalan language.\n\nThe section of the eastern Pyrenees where upper Catalonia abuts the old French County of Foix reveals some of the region's geographical, historical and linguistic complexities. The Catalan district of Pallars nestles in the vicinity of three diverse neighbours. To its west lies a clutch of Spanish-speaking districts, starting with Sobrarbe and Ribagorza. To its north lies the Vall d'Aran, which can only be approached by vehicles through the Vielha tunnel and which, though located on the French side of the ridge, still belongs to Spain. The people of the Vall d'Aran speak a unique language that mixes Basque and neo-Latin elements ( _aran_ means 'valley' in Basque). To the east lies the Principality of Andorra, one of Europe's oldest states.\n\nAndorra occupies a tiny mountain retreat wedged between France and Spain. For 700 years from 1278, its government was jointly supervised by the comte de Foix (or later by the pr\u00e9fet of the Ari\u00e8ge) and by the bishop of Seu d'Urgell. Since 1993, however, it has joined Monaco, Liechtenstein and San Marino as one of Europe's sovereign mini-states. The Andorrans, like the inhabitants of the ' _Franja d'Arag\u00f3n_ ' \u2013 a strip of territory immediately adjacent to Pillars \u2013 speak Catalan, but their national anthem is bilingual. Few countries can boast a national song more redolent of history:\n\n_El Gran Carlemany, mon Pare,_ | _Le grand Charlemagne, mon p\u00e8re,_  \n---|---  \n_dels arabs em deslliura,_ | _des arabes me d\u00e9livra,_  \n_i del cel vida em dona_ | _et du ciel me donna la vie_  \n_Meritxell, la Gran Mare._ | _Meritxell, notre m\u00e8re._  \n_Princesa nasqui i Pubilla,_ | _Je suis n\u00e9e princesse h\u00e9riti\u00e8re_  \n_entre dues nacions neutral_ | _neutre entre deux nations._  \n_sols resto l'\u00fanica filla_ | _Seule, je reste l'unique fille_  \n_de l'imperi Carlemany._ | _de l'empire de Charlemagne,_  \n_creient i lliure_ | _croyante et libre_  \n_onze segles_ | _depuis onze si\u00e8cles,_  \n_creient i lliure vull ser_ | _pour toujours je veux l'\u00eatre_  \n_siguin els furs mos tutors_ | _que les Fueros soient mes tuteurs_  \n_i mos pr\u00ednceps defensors._ | _et les princes mes protecteurs _\n\n('My father, the great Charlemagne, \/ saved me from the Arabs, \/ and Meritxell, my great mother, \/ gave me life from Heaven. \/ I was born a princess, an heiress \/ neutral between two nations. \/ I remain alone, the one and only daughter \/ of Charlemagne's empire. \/Faithful and free \/for eleven centuries, \/ I wish to be so for ever, \/ may the customary laws be my tutors \/ and the princes my protectors.') The Andorrans still sing of Charlemagne for their country started life under his rule and was never incorporated by the great powers which succeeded him.\n\nNowhere can one understand the lie of the land better than standing on the high Franco-Spanish frontier south of Perpignan. The strong afternoon sun shines in one's face. The sea glistens on the horizon to the left, the last outcrop of the French coast merging into the Costa Brava. On the right, the line of the mountain ridge leads off towards Andorra and the central Pyrenees. Roussillon and Cerdagne are at one's back, and beyond them Languedoc. In front, the steep hills of Catalonia stretch out as far as the eye can see. Catalonia's chief port and city, Barcelona, is just out of sight, but it can be reached by car in little more than an hour by following the Autoroute\/Autopista E-15, which snakes over the foothills below.\n\nThanks to the present dominance of centralized national states, it is easy to think of this Pyrenean region as peripheral, both to France and to Spain \u2013 far from Paris and far from Madrid. Rambling round the Pyrenean ridge, however, prompts doubts. Landscape, itself the product of aeons of change, evokes thoughts about the changeability of everything else. Not so very long ago, France was nowhere in sight in these parts, and Spain did not even exist. Perpignan was once a capital city. So, too, were Barcelona and Zaragoza. Then, people on both sides of the eastern Pyrenees became subjects of one king, members and beneficiaries of a political community whose furthest bounds stretched far beyond the shining horizon.\n\n##### II\n\nThe origins of the kingdom can be traced to a mountain stream \u2013 the Aragon* \u2013 that flows down from the high pastures of the central Pyrenees into the broad valley of the Ebro. The river gave its name to the landlocked district, now known as the _Alto Arag\u00f3n_ , or 'High Aragon', whence it springs. The landscape that it traverses consists mainly of a desert plain covered by thin, chalky, salt-ridden soil. In most seasons it is characterized by dry watercourses and ash-coloured shrublands. The summers are scorchingly hot, the winters cold and snowbound. Yet the mountains which ring the plain carry oak, pine and beech forests, and the high pastures form a fine habitat for merino sheep. The Pyrenean ridge, dominated in this section by the peaks of the Aneto and the Perdido, creates a formidable barrier. A few oases of greenery nestle in the steep, upland valleys, but the only area suitable for large-scale agriculture spreads out below the mountains among the wheat fields, orchards and vineyards that line the Ebro. One of the oldest trans-Pyrenean trade routes runs across the pass of the Port de Canfranc from Zaragoza to B\u00e9arn.\n\nHere, towards the end of the first millennium, Christian lords ruling the north-eastern perimeter of Iberia started to fight back against the Muslim Moors, who had ruled over most of the peninsula since crossing from North Africa some two centuries earlier. That gaggle of Christian lordships, large and small, had been created when Frankish power spilled over the Pyrenees to confront Islam as it advanced. Charlemagne's campaign of 778 against the Moors was recorded in the opening lines of the Old French epic poem, the _Chanson de Roland_ :\n\n> _Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes,_\n> \n> _Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne._\n> \n> _Tresqu'en la mer cunquist la tere altaigne,_\n> \n> _N'i ad castel ki devant lui remaigne,_\n> \n> _Mur ne citet n'i est rem\u00e9s a fraindre,_\n> \n> _Fors Sarraguce, ki est en une muntaigne._\n> \n> _Li reis Marsilie la tient, ki Deu nen aimet,_\n> \n> _Mahumet sert e Apollin recleimet:_\n> \n> _Nes poet guarder que mals ne l'i ateignet._\n> \n> Charles the King, our great Emperor,\n> \n> Advanced that year in full array into Spain.\n> \n> He conquered the high lands as far as the sea,\n> \n> No castle which stood before him,\n> \n> Nor any fortified wall was unbroken,\n> \n> Except for Zaragoza, which lies in a mountain range.\n> \n> [Zaragoza] was held by a King, Marsilie, whom God did not love.\n> \n> He served Mahomet, and worshipped Apollo:\n> \n> Poets record only the ills which he performed.\n\nCharlemagne's retreat from Zaragoza culminated in the heroic fight at the Pass of Roncevalles, where Roland and Oliver were immortalized.\n\nCharlemagne's response to the threat from Muslim Iberia was to organize four militarized buffer zones: the March of Gascony, the March of Toulouse (to which Andorra was attached), the March of Gothia along the Mediterranean coast from Narbonne to N\u00eemes, and the _Marca Hispanica_ from the central to the eastern Pyrenees. This fourth March consisted of no fewer than sixteen counties, each controlled by a military commissioner or _comitatus._ The first to be formed, in 760, was Roussillon; the last, in 801, Barcelona. Others on the March's eastern flank included Pallars, Urgell, Conflent, Vallespir, Cerdagne, Besal\u00fa, Perelada, Ausona, Girona and Emp\u00faries. The population of these counties contained a strong admixture of Visigoths (see Chapter 1), and it is from the mingling of Frankish, Iberian and Gothic cultures that Catalonia was to assume its inimitable language and character.\n\nIn the period which followed, the overextended Franks pulled back; the power of the Moors also began to ebb and the Christian lords of the Pyrenees asserted their freedom. One of the more important lordships in the former _Marca Hispanica_ centred on the County of Barcelona, which lost all semblance of subordination to the Frankish Empire once the Carolingians gave way to the Capetians. Another was the domain of Sancho El Mayor of Navarre (d. 1035), known as 'the Great', who ruled extensive lands on either side of the Pyrenees. His capital at Pamplona lay in the heart of the Basque country, which had never submitted to foreign domination. It was flanked on the west by Christian Castile and Le\u00f3n, and to the east by the mountainous counties of Aragon, Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, all of which he came to control. For a time, he even extracted recognition of his suzerainty from the count of Barcelona, Berenguer Ram\u00f3n I El Corbat, 'the Crooked' (r. 1022\u201335).*\n\nSancho El Mayor was blessed with five sons, and he conceived a plan to perpetuate his family's fortunes. Taking the title of 'King of all the Spains' for himself, he designed a future whereby his Christian 'empire' would be supported by an array of tributary sub-kings. He set up his eldest legitimate son as king of Navarre; gave Castile and Le\u00f3n to his second son; and in his will, bequeathed Sobrarbe and Ribagorza to his two youngest sons. Sancho's bastard son, Ramiro, was passed over in the will, but was left undisturbed as the _baiulus_ or 'steward' of Aragon.\n\nNeedless to say, Sancho's happy scheme did not long survive its author. The four royal sons were soon embroiled in wars against their brothers. In 1050, at the Council of Coyanza, Ferdinand reaffirmed the model charter passed in Le\u00f3n thirty years before which now provided the guidelines for all the Christian states of Iberia, including the principle of hereditary kingship. After that, he gave priority to the nascent _Reconquista,_ the reconquest of the peninsula from the Moors, through which he forged a reputation that made him 'emperor of Spain'. The Christian warriors of his generation were destined to reach the gates of Seville and Toledo before being driven back. Ramiro exploited his brothers' preoccupations. Barely five years passed after their father's death before he seized Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, joined them to Aragon, and was proclaimed king. The three adjacent territories united by Ramiro formed the cradle of his kingdom's later expansion.\n\nFor the first hundred years, the House of Ramiro ruled Aragon in undisputed succession. It produced four kings, who, following a civil war among their western neighbours, came to reign in Navarre as well as in Aragon. Initially, there was no substantial Aragonese town to act as an administrative or ecclesiastical centre. Ramiro's subjects' pastoral needs were served by itinerant priests, and by the remote Benedictine monastery of San Pedro de Siresa. The city of Chaca or Jaca, previously the base for a Carolingian county, was adopted in 1063 as the seat of the first Aragonese bishopric. The larger and older city of Huesca \u2013 Roman Osca, and in the eleventh century the Moorish fortress of _Wasquah_ \u2013 was not conquered until forty years later. Ramiro, now King Sancho Ram\u00edrez, built the castle of Monte Aragon beside it to facilitate his attacks, and was killed by a stray arrow when reconnoitring the city's walls. The final assault was led by the late king's successor, Pedro I, Ramiro's eldest grandson, who was buried there after making it his principal residence. Regular disputes occurred with the counts of Toulouse over control of the mountain passes, but the overarching danger lay in the incessant fighting between Christians and Muslims to the south.\n\nFrom the outset, therefore, the infant Kingdom of Aragon did not possess the best chances of independent long-term survival. It was squeezed between the stronger kingdoms of Castile and Navarre, the powerful Muslim emirate of Zaragoza, and, beyond Ribagorza, the eastern flank of the former March dominated by the counts of Barcelona. In those days, warlords devoured their neighbours or were devoured themselves. Ramiro and his successors could certainly benefit from their mountain retreat, but their dilemma was stark: if they tried to expand, they risked the vengeance of their rivals; if they stayed inactive, they could stagnate and attract the vultures. Their insecurity is mirrored in their repeated attempts to join forces with their neighbours, first with Navarre, then with Castile and eventually with Barcelona.\n\nThe initial historical and cultural connections of Aragon were very specific. Starting as the homeland of the pre-Roman Celtiberian tribe of the _Ilergertes,_ it had never belonged to the Basque country, and had never been subject either to substantial Moorish settlement or to the heavier Frankish influences evident in Catalonia. In the continuum of the peninsula's linguistic idioms, its native speech was distinct. Aragon, above all, was small and poor. It could not raise large armies, as Castile could, and, though its society was largely free of feudal impositions, it did not possess Catalonia's commercial potential or its easy contacts with the outside world. Hence, it could only satisfy its growing circle of clients and partners by granting them wide measures of autonomy. In opposition to the traditions of Castile, 'Aragonism' favoured respect for local laws and shunned centralized authority.\n\nThe little land of Sobrarbe \u2013 one of the three constituent parts of the first Kingdom of Aragon \u2013 holds a special place in the evolution of its political traditions. According to a legend which was accepted as historical fact for centuries, the rulers were required to swear an oath embodying a formal contract with their subjects. 'We who are worth as much as you,' they were told, 'take you as our king provided that you preserve our laws.' They were also obliged to confirm the appointment of an elected justiciar, who was the guardian of those laws. Modern research has shown the 'Oath of Sobrarbe' to be an invention of much later times; even so, many commentators take it to reflect the essence of an ancient tradition.\n\nAragon's role in the _Reconquista_ was considerable. A treacherous game of shifting alliances developed, whereby Aragon would combine with Castile to press the Moors, or with the Moors to restrain the Castilians. Gratuitous violence was rife. In 1064 the first campaigning season of King Sancho Ram\u00edrez's reign had opened with a spectacular international expedition against the Muslim-held town of Barbastro. Blessed by the pope, the Aragonese and Catalan assault force was swollen by an army of knights from Aquitaine, Burgundy and Calabria; a siege was mounted; and the defenders were massacred. Word spread that 50,000 souls had perished. But victory was brief. The crusaders pulled out, laden with loot, slaves and women, leaving only a small garrison behind. In the following year, therefore, Barbastro was retaken by a Muslim relief column from Lleida, and the Christian garrison suffered the same fate as its predecessors.\n\nThe first Siege of Barbastro provides the setting for a rare insight into realities of life on the Christian\u2013Muslim frontier; it was provided by a Moorish writer, Ibn Bassam, who was familiar in turn with the account of a Jew sent into the city to ransom prominent citizens:\n\n> When the French crusaders captured Barbastro... in 1064, each of the principal knights received a house with all that it contained, women, children and furniture... [The Jew] found the crusader in Moorish dress seated on a divan and surrounded by Moslem waiting girls; he... had married the daughter of the former owner and hoped that she would give him descendants. 'Her Moslem ancestors did the same with our women when they possessed themselves of this country. Now we do likewise...' He then turned to the girl and said in broken Arabic: 'Take your lute and sing some songs for this gentleman.' The Jew adds: 'I was pleased to see the Count show such enthusiasm as if he understood the words, though he continued drinking.'\n\nThe cultural consequences of such encounters cannot have been trivial. It may be no accident that one of the leaders of the 'Crusade of Barbastro' was Guillaume VIII, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitou, father of the first of the troubadours.\n\nSuch was the world of Rodrigo D\u00edaz ( _c._ 1040\u201399), a Castilian knight from Vivar, who gained his early title of 'El Campeador', 'the Champion', when he slew a Navarran general in single combat. In the 1070s he was sent to collect tribute from Seville. Yet he was accused of diverting part of the king's treasure for himself, and was banished. From then on, he became a freebooter, a mercenary who sold the services of his company's lances to the highest bidder. He maintained close relations with Pedro I of Aragon, to whose son and heir he gave his daughter in marriage. But his principal employer was Moktadir, the Arab emir of Zaragoza, and it was from the Muslims that he gained the epithet of 'El Cid', 'the War Lord'. All the northern states bore the brunt of his depredations. His final exploit was to besiege Valencia at the head of an infidel army.\n\nThe Cid of romance and legend, Spain's most eminent literary hero, emerged over the centuries as a knight of perfect virtue, showing little resemblance to the real Rodrigo D\u00edaz. The first stories, written in dog Latin, began to circulate soon after his death, while the epic _Poema del Cid_ dates from the late twelfth century:\n\n> _De los sos ojos tan fuertemientre llorando,_\n> \n> _Tornava la cabe\u00e7a e estr\u00e1valos catando..._\n> \n> _All\u00ed piensan de aguijar, all\u00ed sueltan las rriendas._\n> \n> _A l'exida de Bivar ovieron la corneja diestra..._\n> \n> _'i\u00c1lbricia, \u00c1lbar F\u00e1\u00f1ez, ca echados somos de tierra?'_...\n> \n> Tears streamed from his eyes, as he turned his head and stood looking at them... They all thought of leaving, slackened their reins. At the gate of Vivar, a crow flew on the right-hand side... 'Good Cheer, \u00c1lva F\u00e1\u00f1ez, for we are banished from this land.\n> \n> Ruy D\u00edaz entered Burgos with his company of sixty knights. Men and women came out to see him pass, while the burghers and their wives stood at their windows, sorrowfully weeping. With one accord they all said, 'What a good vassal. If only he had a good lord!'\n\nIn the wake of a raid on Aragon, D\u00edaz once strayed further east into the domains of Raimund or Ram\u00f3n Berenguer I, count of Barcelona. As usual, he plundered the countryside, and extorted tribute:\n\n> Rumours reached the ears of the Count of Barcelona that Cid Ruy D\u00edaz was harrying the countryside; and the Count was highly incensed... The Count was a hasty and foolish man and spoke without due reflection: 'The Cid, Rodrigo of Vivar, has done me great wrongs... Now he is ravaging the lands under my protection. I never... showed enmity towards him, but since he seeks me out, I shall demand redress.'\n> \n> Great numbers of Moors and Christians... went in search of the mighty Ruy D\u00edaz of Vivar. They journeyed three days and two nights and came up with the Cid in the pine wood of T\u00e9var. The Cid, Don Rodrigo, carrying large quantities of booty, descended from the mountains to a valley, where he received the message of Count Ram\u00f3n... [He] sent back word, saying: 'Tell the Count not to take offence. I am carrying off nothing of his...' The Count replied: 'Not so! He shall pay for past and present injuries here and now.'\n> \n> 'Knights,' (said the Cid) 'make ready quickly to take up arms. Count Ram\u00f3n has... a vast host of Moors and Christians and is determined to fight... Tighten your saddle-girths and put on your armour. Ram\u00f3n Berenguer will see the kind of man he has found today in the pine wood of T\u00e9var...'\n> \n> All were... clad in armour and mounted on their horses. They watched... the Franks* rode down the hill... [Then] the Cid, fortunate in battle, ordered the attack. His men were delighted to obey and they used their pennoned lances to good effect, striking some and overturning others. The Cid won the battle and took Count Ram\u00f3n prisoner.\n> \n> A great feast was prepared... but Count Ram\u00f3n showed no relish for it. They brought the dishes and placed them in front of him, but he... scorned all they offered. 'I shall not eat a mouthful,' he said, 'for all the wealth of Spain. I had rather die outright since such badly shod fellows have defeated me in battle.'\n> \n> To that the Cid replied in these words: 'Eat this bread, Count, and drink this wine. If you do as I say you will go free. If not, you will never see Christendom again.\n\nEl Cid kept his word, and the booty. The count kept his life, and returned home to lick his wounds. As he must have realized, the future would not be decided solely by the struggle against the Moors but equally by the rivalries of Barcelona, Castile, Navarre and Aragon.\n\nIf Castile took El Cid to its heart, Aragon formally adopted St George as its patron, three centuries before the kings of England did the same. The royal standard of Aragon showed the red cross of St George on a white field, sometimes with the head of a black, crowned Moor in each of the four quarters. The cult of St George the Martyr, a fourth-century Armenian, was popular among crusaders, and was linked to Aragon's desire to become a papal protectorate. Urban II, the pope of the First Crusade, duly accepted Aragon into 'The Liberty of the Roman Church' in 1089, as he did for Barcelona a year later.\n\nAnother milestone was reached in 1118. Thanks to the wars of El Cid, the emirate of Zaragoza grew weak, and Aragonese forces were emboldened to seize it. Henceforth they commanded the central valley of the Ebro. Under Alfonso I El Batallador, Zaragoza became the seat of Aragon's government, its cathedral the seat of an archbishop and the site of royal coronations and its streets the setting for elegant aristocratic palaces. The Moorish host was incorporated into the kingdom's army and the emirs' magnificent Aljaferia Castle became the residence of Christian kings. Aragon was ceasing to be a remote backwater. Most importantly, its claim to royal status, confirmed by the pope, was now generally recognized.\n\nPrior to the death of Alfonso I in 1134, the kingdom entered a period of dynastic panic, whose felicitous outcome could hardly have been foreseen. Alfonso, though hugely victorious as a warrior, was hugely inept as a dynast and politician. His nephew's early death, by which he himself came to the throne, failed to impress upon him the necessity of producing an heir, and his belated marriage to Urraca of Le\u00f3n, Regent of Castile, brought none of the expected benefits. In his later years, he separated from his wife, lost his grip on Castile and remained childless. Furthermore, his brother was a celibate priest, an ex-monk who was now the bishop of Barbastro. In his will, Alfonso prepared to bequeath his realms in equal parts to three crusading orders, thereby offending all other interested parties. The nobles of Navarre promptly broke away, and severed the link with Aragon for good. The Aragonese nobility were also spurred into action, persuading the king's brother to abandon his vows and take a wife. Hence, when the monarch lay dying, the ex-monk was already committed to matrimony; a royal child would be born, and Aragon would receive a prize heiress. The short reign of Ramiro II El Monaco was deliberately designed as a temporary measure and did not avoid turbulence, but it served its purpose. As soon as he could, the dutiful king abdicated in favour of his infant daughter and returned to his monastic cell. A regency council then set about its task of finding a suitable replacement for the broken partnership with Navarre, and a suitable bridegroom for the heiress. Providentially, the neighbouring county of Barcelona had another child heir on its hands.\n\nIn 1137, therefore, the one-year-old Petronilla of Aragon \u2013 _Peyronella_ in Aragonese, and _Peronela_ in Catalan \u2013 was betrothed in Zaragoza to twenty-four-year-old Ram\u00f3n Berenguer IV of Barcelona. The girl remained queen, while her husband adopted the style of 'prince of Aragon'. A further treaty stipulated that Aragon and Barcelona would keep their separate institutions, customs and titles, and that in the event of a premature death both states would pass to the survivor of the betrothed pair. This last precaution proved unnecessary. After fourteen years of waiting, the queen and the prince-count were formally married, and their marriage produced five children. For practical purposes, the husband ruled both in Aragon and in Barcelona, while successfully disentangling himself from involvements in Castile, where his sister, Berenguela, was now 'empress'. Ram\u00f3n and Petronilla's eldest son, also Ram\u00f3n Berenguer, was appointed their joint heir. After being widowed in 1162, Petronilla renounced all her rights in favour of her son. After a quarter of a century's delay the betrothal of 1137 finally bore its full fruit; the wedding of two persons had resulted in the marriage of two states.\n\nFor his part, Ram\u00f3n Berenguer dropped his Catalan name on ascending the throne, and in remembrance of El Batallador assumed the title of 'Alfonso II of Aragon and I of Barcelona'. Henceforth, a long line of monarchs would inherit the dual titles of 'kings of Aragon' and 'counts of Barcelona in Catalunya'. Monarchists, and historians paying deference to monarchy, call them 'king-counts'; Catalans and Catalanophiles call them 'count-kings'.\n\nThe union of kingdom and county had far-reaching consequences, creating an extended territorial base that combined a secure mountain stronghold with a maritime coastline of huge naval and commercial potential. It stood fair to be as wealthy as it was invincible. At the same time, like the newly emergent Portugal, Aragon-Barcelona presented a significant counterweight to Castile. It was no accident that the eldest daughter of Prince Ram\u00f3n and Queen Petronilla was to be given in marriage to Sancho the Populator (r. 1185\u20131211), the second king of Portugal. Nonetheless, the kingdom and the county remained in some respects uncomfortable bedfellows. Each preserved its own laws, its own _Cortes_ or parliament and its own language. The Aragonese language was not too dissimilar from Castilian; Catalan was more akin to Occitan, the language of Languedoc. Barcelona, founded by Hannibal's brother in the third century BC and liberated from the Moors by Charlemagne, was far more venerable than Zaragoza. The House of Berenguer, which was the successor to a line of twenty-four counts in Barcelona since the early ninth century, was undoubtedly senior to that of Ramiro. And its territorial possessions were markedly more extensive. Ever since the time of the first Count Bera (r. 801\u201320), son of Charlemagne's retainer William of Toulouse, those holdings had waxed and waned over the generations. But, anchored on the easternmost counties of the former _Marca Hispanica,_ and especially on the maritime districts of Empord\u00e0 (Ampuri\u00e9s), Ausona, Girona and Barcelona, they formed a solid block of land straddling both flanks of the Pyrenees. In short, the Catalan part of the joint realm was older, larger and wealthier. Pessimists might have forecast that the two parts would never completely gel; optimists hoped each would complement the other. Both proved correct.\n\nThis 'complex monarchy' appeared on the European scene at much the same time as the troubadours and their cult of 'courtly love'. Aragon-Catalonia lay in the heart of the countries, including Aquitaine, Languedoc and Provence, where the troubadours flourished. Ram\u00f3n Vidal de Besal\u00fa ( _c_. 1196\u20131252), a subject of the king-count, is credited with the first work of literary criticism in a Romance language, the _Razos de trobar_. (His advocacy of the Occitan idiom of Limoges prompted Dante Alighieri to write _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ and to advocate the merits of Tuscan in Italy.) Guillaume de Poitiers (1071\u20131126), Pon\u00e7 de la Gu\u00e0rdia ( _fl_. 1154\u201388) and Huguet de Mataplana (1173\u20131213) preceded Ram\u00f3n Vidal; Arnaut Catalan ( _fl_. 1219\u201353), Amanieu de Sescars, known as _il dieu d'amor_ ( _fl_. 1275\u201395), Jofre de Foix\u00e0 (d. 1300) and others came later. Jofre was a Franciscan friar from Empord\u00e0, sent by his Order to Sicily. His tract, _Vers e regles de trobar_ , by giving examples of the works of other songsters, became a standard compendium:\n\n> _Canczon audi q'es bella 'n tresca,_\n> \n> _Que fo de razon espanescai;_\n> \n> _Non fo de paraulla grezesca_\n> \n> _Ni de lengua serrazinesca._\n> \n>...\n> \n> _Tota Basconn' et Aragons_\n> \n> _E l'encontrada delz Gascons_\n> \n> _Sabon quals es aquist canczons_.\n\n('I heard a song which is beautiful in its theme, \/ and which was in Hispanic style, \/ neither Greek in its speech \/ nor Saracen \/... All the Basques and the Aragonese \/ have heard it from the Gascons: \/ they know what these songs are like.') 'The art of the troubadours is the starting point of modern European literature,' wrote a British medievalist many years ago. 'And if we wish to find this mysterious element which is the quintessence of the medieval spirit, we cannot do better than to follow the example of the Romantics and look for it in the age and the country of the Troubadours.'\n\nDuring the early _Reconquista_ , the military functions of castle lords were paramount, and favoured the growth of a powerful landed aristocracy supported by the toil of an enserfed peasantry. A score of these _rics homens_ assembled small private states, establishing themselves first as counts and eventually as dukes. They included the Montcadas, the Coloma of Queralt, and the counts of Cardona, Urgell, Emp\u00faries and Pallars-Sobira. Their fortunes were to peak in the fourteenth century. The origins of the Montcada clan illustrate this development. Montcada or Moncada is a small castle\/village, seven miles inland from Barcelona, close to the abbey of St Cugat des Valles. In the early twelfth century its heiress married an obscure knight called Guillem Ram\u00f3n (1090\u20131173), who rose to be 'Great Seneschal' at the comtal court. Boosted by the gift of Tortosa-Lleida in the southern district of 'New Catalonia', their offspring thrived. In the next generation, they held some twenty to thirty castles and manors, some around Tortosa, some in the diocese of Vic, and others in the district of Girona. One of them, by marrying the heiress to B\u00e9arn, founded a trans-Pyrenean branch. From then on, their future was assured. All these great families lived off the toil of the unfree, and the serfs of Aragon-Barcelona, many of them Moors, kept company with slaves. Barcelona, Valencia and later Palma all held regular slave markets. Their wares, often Moorish prisoners, were sold on either to noble and merchant households or to foreign traders.\n\nGovernmental forms were advanced for their day. Their consultative and delegatory tendencies can be traced back to the eleventh century assemblies of _pau i treva \u2013_ 'Sanctuary and Truce' \u2013 attended by the nobility; the first Catalan legal code, the _Usatges de Barcelona_ (1068), was based on the decisions of those assemblies. Many authors, however, consider the joint meeting of Catalan and Aragonese nobles, convened by the king-count at Lleida in 1216, to have been the true starting point of a long parliamentary tradition. From then on, parliaments were held in all parts of the Crown lands. In Aragon, the _Cortes_ held at Huesca in 1247 led to the formation of the _Fuero d'Aragon_ , the 'Codex of Huesca'. In Catalonia, the assembly held at Barcelona in 1283 established three 'constitutions', or fundamental laws, one making annual sessions of the assembly obligatory. These _Corts catalanes_ consisted of three arms or _bra\u00e7os_ representing the Church, the nobility and the citizens of royal towns. Their main function was legislative. With the king-count's consent, they could pass laws of their own making ( _capitols de cort_ ), on condition that they in turn approved laws initiated by him. In due course they acted as a model for overseas territories.\n\nThanks to their far-reaching powers under these arrangements, the nobility acquired a strong sense of solidarity, and of equality with their rulers. For a time between 1287 and 1348 they even cultivated a theory of the right of armed resistance to oppressive monarchs. As Pedro IV later remarked, 'It is as hard as to divide the nobles of Aragon as it is to unite the nobles of Castile.'\n\nEven before the Union, the counts of Barcelona had begun to project their power beyond Iberia. The first step was taken with the acquisition of Provence; the second, only five years later, through the bequest of Cerdanya (Cerdagne) and Besal\u00fa.\n\nFrom 1032 Provence had been a margravate of the Holy Roman Empire in the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy (see p. 119). Early in the twelfth century a marriage was arranged with papal assistance between Ram\u00f3n Berenguer I, count of Barcelona, and Douce de Provence, heiress to the margravate. In this way, in 1112 Provence passed under the rule of Barcelona for 134 years. When the male line failed in 1246, the marriage of B\u00e9atrice de Provence to Charles d'Anjou propelled it into the French orbit of the Angevins. This was to be one of several bones of Angevin\u2013Aragonese contention.\n\nThe marriage of 1112, celebrated in Arles on 3 February, exemplifies the complex ramifications of medieval matrimonial politics. The bride, Douce or Dul\u00e7e, an only child, had inherited Provence from her mother. But she had also inherited the lands of her late father, Gilbert de G\u00e9vaudan, viscount of Millau. This meant that her Catalan husband took possession of both G\u00e9vaudan (in the wilds of what is now the _d\u00e9partement_ of Loz\u00e8re) and Millau (where the impressive viaduct now stands on Autoroute 9). The bishop of Mende, dismayed, invited the king of France to keep the Catalans out. His initiative enabled the French to stake their very first claim to a piece of Languedoc. Eventually, Aragon sold both G\u00e9vaudan and Millau to the French in 1225. But that was not the end of it. Gilbert de G\u00e9vaudan had also possessed the title to a district on the borders of the Auvergne and Rouergue, known in French as _Le Carlat_ and in Catalan as _Carlades_ (now in the _d\u00e9partement_ of Cantal). So Gilbert's Catalan son-in-law collected the Carlat as well, passing it on to his heirs and successors. In 1167 the Carlat was handed in fief to the counts of Rodez, who paid their feudal dues either to Barcelona or to Perpignan for 360 years.\n\nAnd so the saga went on. One of the two children of Ram\u00f3n Berenguer I and Douce de Provence was a girl known after her father as Berenguela de Barcelona (1116\u201349). She, like her mother, grew up to become a hot property, and in 1128 was married off to Alfonso VII, king of Castile. Hence, the progenitors of the royal houses both of Castile and of Aragon-Catalonia were all direct descendants of Douce de Provence.\n\nCerdanya, in contrast, passed to Barcelona through death as opposed to marriage, after a long independent career. Its central feature is a high plateau on which the only modest town, Puigcerda, would be built. In the era of post-Carolingian fragmentation, the seat of its counts was at Ripoll, south of the Pyrenean ridge, and, like neighbouring Urgell and Rossell\u00f3, it shook off the overlordship not only of the Franks but also of all its local rivals. Its most famous count, Guifr\u00e9 El Pil\u00f3s (Wilfred the Hairy, d. 897), sought the protection of the papacy, and had the distinction of founding the bloodline from which the House of Berenguer in Barcelona traced its origins. The later counts of Cerdanya absorbed the adjacent district of Besal\u00fa, but in the early twelfth century they ran out of heirs, and in 1117 the last of them willed his inheritance to his relatives in Barcelona. From then on, for 542 years Cerdanya and Besal\u00fa furnished the central section of the natural ramparts of northern Catalonia.\n\nPrior to the Union, the flag of the County of Barcelona had consisted of four red horizontal stripes on a gold field. After the Union, this same flag often served for the whole state. The royal standard, in contrast, displayed a crowned shield quartered with the arms both of Aragon and of Catalonia. The usual regal style read ' _Dei Gratia Rex Aragonensis, Comes Barchinonensis et Marchio Provinciae_ ' ('By God's Grace, king of Aragon, count of Barcelona and marquis of Provence'). A name for the combined realm did not at first exist. But, from the mid-thirteenth century onwards, the _Corona aragonensis_ , the 'Crown of Aragon', appeared with increasing frequency, and there is every reason for modern historians to use it.\n\nRuling dynasties provided the threads of ownership and political control which help explain the intricate territorial jigsaw of medieval Europe. They lived by the generally accepted principles of property, inheritance and war, by feudal concepts of jurisdiction based on landownership, and by a political order run by an elaborate hierarchy of lords and vassals. They acquired their lands and titles by marriages, by legacies and bequests, by purchases, by conquest and, occasionally, by donations. They lost them by deaths in the family, by adverse legal judgments, by sale or by military defeat. They defended them with their retinues of knights, with the blessings of a deferential clergy and with whole benches of lawyers.\n\nAs suggested elsewhere, the dynastic agglomerations of the medieval period may best be understood by analogy to the international corporations of later times. In a sense, the kingdom-county was a political business, and 'Aragon' was a famous brand. The business relied for protection on its military arm, but its main assets lay in land and in the money raised from fees and taxes. Each constituent territory enjoyed a large measure of self-government, where the nobles formed a local executive class running the subsidiary firms. The _Corts_ , or assemblies, which the nobles dominated, formed the boards of the subsidiaries. By convention, it was the dynasty which supplied the top managerial elite \u2013 the CEOs \u2013 who were enhanced by regal status and who could move, as circumstance demanded, from firm to firm, from country to country. One should not forget that the Aragon-Barcelona 'Company' came into being in the first place through the fortuitous merger of 1137.\n\nContiguity is an issue. The County of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Valencia, which were joined to Aragon in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries respectively, came to be seen as constituent elements of the Crown's heartland, the main parts of the 'inner empire', which may be distinguished from the 'outer empire' overseas. Yet historians face a very real problem in categorizing Aragon's far-flung lands. In recent times, they have frequently talked of the 'Aragonese Empire' or the 'Aragon-Catalonian Empire'. Scholastic arguments which crankily complain that the Aragonese example did not resemble the ancient Roman Empire or the modern British Empire are not helpful. These unhistorical terms do serve a purpose. For, though the Crown of Aragon was dynastic in origin and decentralized in nature, it formed more than a mere ragbag of accidental possessions. It constituted a long-lasting political community with a common allegiance, common traditions, common cultural proclivities and strong economic ties. How one classifies it is of secondary importance. In the opinion of a scholar whose main focus lies in the Golden Age of all-Spain, it was 'one of the most imposing states of medieval Europe'.\n\nThe heirs and successors of Alfonso II and I descended in the male line for ten generations. To complicate matters, they all boasted an Aragonese-Spanish name in addition to their Catalan name, and were separately numbered according to the Aragonese and Catalan styles. Their sobriquets were written in dual Aragonese and Catalan forms:\n\n1137\u201362 | Petronilla of Aragon and Ram\u00f3n Berenguer IV El Sant  \n---|---  \n1162\u201396 | Alfonso II El Casto\/Alfons I El Trubador  \n1196\u20131213 | Pedro II El Cat\u00f3lico\/Pere I El Catolic  \n1213\u201376 | Jaime I El Conquistador\/Jaume I El Conquerridor  \n1276\u201385 | Pedro III El Grande\/Pere II El Gran  \n1285\u201391 | Alfonso III El Franco\/Alfons II El Liberal  \n1291\u20131327 | Jaime II El Justo\/Jaume II El Just  \n1327\u201336 | Alfonso IV El Benigno\/Alfons III El Benigne  \n1336\u201387 | Pedro IV El Ceremonioso\/Pere III El Ceremonioso  \n1387\u201396 | Juan I El Cazador\/Juan I El Cacador (the Hunter)  \n1396\u20131410 | Martin I El Humano\/Marti I L'Human  \n1410\u201312 | Interregnum.\n\nThroughout this very long time, the royal domain never ceased to expand. Indeed, there was no period between the twelfth and the late fifteenth centuries when Aragon's 'empire' was not either swallowing new lands or busy digesting them. In the decades following the Union, several pieces of valuable real estate were obtained. While waiting to marry Queen Petronilla, Ram\u00f3n Berenguer El Sant battled the Moors incessantly and in 1148 took control both of Tortosa in the south and of Lleida (L\u00e9rida) in the north-west. Rossell\u00f3 fell into the hands of his son and Montpellier into the lap of his grandson.\n\nRossell\u00f3 held onto its independence for fifty years longer than Cerdanya. But it was taken over in 1172 in exactly the same way. It occupied an area of great strategic importance, commanding not only the easiest passage of the Pyrenees along the old Via Augusta, but also the transverse trade route between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. It possessed a valuable port at Colliure (Collioure), and an important line of fortified castles including Perpinya (Perpignan), facing Languedoc. Three ancient _comarcas_ or 'districts' functioned: El Conflent centred on Prada (Prades) in the valley of the T\u00eat; Vallespir in the valley of the Tech; and, in the upper valley of the Aude, the subalpine district of Capcir.\n\nRossell\u00f3's five centuries in the principality of Catalonia were characterized by its role as the north-eastern bulwark of the Aragonese-Catalan heartland. It repeatedly held the line against France. During the Albigensian Crusade against the heretical Cathar sect of the early thirteenth century, which brought the French into Languedoc, it stood firm against the awesome might of Carcassonne. It also provided the usual entry point of French armies into Iberia. On one notorious occasion, it was betrayed by an abbot who personally told the French king how to penetrate the defences:\n\n> Four monks, who were from Toulouse and were in a monastery near Argeles, went to the King of France, and one of them was the abbot. And he said to the King of France: 'Lord, I and these other monks are natives of your country and your natural subjects. If it is your pleasure, we shall show you where you can pass. Let one of your _rics homens_ go at once with a thousand armed horse, and with many men afoot... to make roads. And, in advance of them, some thousand foot-soldiers could go... so that those who are making the roads need not desist from their work. And thus assuredly, Lord, you and all your followers will be able to pass over.' And the King of France said: 'Abbot, how do you know this?' 'Lord,' said he, 'because our men and our monks go to that place every day to get wood and lime. And this place, Lord, is called the Pass of Manzana. If you enquire of the count of Foix, who knows this country well, you will find it is so.' Said the King of France: 'We fully trust you; and tonight, We shall do all that is necessary...'\n\nThis was not the first and certainly not the last time that French forces were seen in Catalonia. But they rarely prospered. On this occasion, returning to France, the French king died at Perpinya.\n\nMontpellier, a close neighbour of N\u00eemes and Arles, lay on the far side of the plain of Languedoc, 80 miles beyond Rossell\u00f3. It was the only major city of Languedoc-Septimania which had no Roman origins, but grew round a fortified hill whence the inhabitants sheltered from Saracen raids. It developed as a dynamic commercial centre due to the proximity of the Rh\u00f4ne valley and the frontier of the Holy Roman Empire; and in this respect it was not surpassed until the rise of late-medieval Marseille. Its famed schools of law and medicine were well established by the mid-twelfth century, and its reputation was boosted by the tolerance shown to Muslims, Jews and Cathars.\n\nMontpellier's link with the Crown of Aragon was created in 1204 by the marriage of King Pedro II to the local heiress, Dame Marie de Montpellier. The city with its large taxable wealth made up the bride's dowry. Its place in Aragonese history, however, was cemented for being the birthplace of Marie's son, Jaime El Conquistador, 'the Conqueror'. In 1208, his mother was staying in her hometown when her pregnancy was announced:\n\n> And the notables of Montpellier disposed that [no one] should leave the palace, neither the Queen, nor they nor their wives, nor the damsels present, until nine months should be accomplished... And so all together, they remained with the Lady Queen very joyously. And their joy was greater still when they saw that it had pleased God... that the Queen grew bigger. And at the end of nine months, according to nature, she gave birth to a beautiful and fine son, who was born for the good of Christians, and more particularly for the good of his peoples... And with great rejoicing and satisfaction they baptised him in the church of Our Lady Saint Mary of the Tables in Montpellier, and they gave him, by the grace of God, the name of En Jaime, and he reigned many years and obtained great victories and gave great increase to the Catholic Faith and to all his vassals and subjects.\n> \n> And the said Infante En Jaime grew more in one year than others do in two. And it was not long before the good king, his father, died, and he was crowned King of Aragon and count of Barcelona and Urgell and Lord of Montpellier.\n\nThe administration of Montpellier was not a simple matter. Prior to 1204, the predecessors of Dame Marie had shared the city's jurisdiction with the bishops of Maguelonne. But when the bishops sold their share of the city to the king of France, the Aragonese officials had to work in tandem with French officials, and separate court systems, one Aragonese and the other French, operated in parallel.\n\nBeing thus free from direct royal control and hence from restrictive legislation, Montpellier could grow rapidly. Its population at the turn of the century numbered _c_. 40,000; it possessed a thriving silk industry and it was an entrep\u00f4t between seaborne and inland trade, especially of spices, attracting a vibrant financial community. Many of the pioneering techniques of credit and banking migrated from Italy to Montpellier in its Aragonese period.\n\nMontpellier's effective independence also made it a frequent destination for fugitives. Runaway serfs, debtors, criminals evading justice and suspected heretics all sought asylum in the city's religious houses. An inquiry into these matters ordered by the king of France in 1338 has left us a rich collection of records. The municipal courts were far from lenient; banishment and execution were common sentences. On one occasion, four foreigners who were forced to confess to assaulting a doctor of law and to leaving him for dead, were promptly executed for murder before their victim recovered.\n\nMontpellier contained a large Jewish community too, which was deeply involved in medicine, in money-lending and in controversy. Their medical and financial activities benefited all their fellow citizens; the controversies were largely theological, and were directed at fellow Jews. The correspondence between Abba Mari of Montpellier and Rabbi Ibn Adret of Barcelona reveals a concerted attack on the authority of the great Castilian scholar, Maimonides, by the prominent Talmudist Solomon of Montpellier and his circle.\n\nThe presence of the Roman Church in Iberia stretched back to the days of the Roman Empire. Two martyrs to Roman persecution, St Vincent of Saragossa and St Vincent the Deacon, had both been born in Osca (Huesca). Though their veneration grew, the Church suffered deep setbacks in the centuries of Muslim dominance. The _Reconquista_ gave Iberian Catholicism both its intense spirituality and its militancy. The two archdioceses of the kingdom-county \u2013 Zaragoza for Aragon and Tarragona for Catalonia \u2013 had been wrested from Muslim control in the twelfth century. Many of the churches, like the cathedral at Huesca, were established within the walls of 'purified' mosques.\n\nA seminal role had been played by St Olegarius (Oleguer Bonestry, _c_. 1060\u20131137), archbishop of Tarragona, who presided over the Church Council of Barcelona in 1127, negotiated the marriage of his count to Queen Petronilla, and then consolidated ecclesiastical structures in the dioceses of Lleida, Girona, Urgell, Vic, Tortosa and Solsona. The later transfer of the bishopric of Valencia to Tarragona gave lasting offence to the Castilian archbishop of Toledo, who claimed supremacy in all reconquered lands.\n\nAragon-Catalonia was affected indirectly by the Church's war against the Cathar heresy in neighbouring Languedoc. The conflict inspired the creation in 1232 of a Committee of Inquisition; and it helped the rise of militarized, crusading orders, and of organizations such as the Order for the Redemption of Christian Captives. Nonetheless, many of the kingdom-county's leading clerics laid emphasis on the non-military aspects of the faith. St Raymond de Pe\u00f1afort ( _c_. 1175\u20131275), born at Vilafranca, apart from being confessor to Jaime I, was the foremost canon lawyer of the age. St Arnau de Gurb, bishop of Barcelona from 1252 to 1284, promoted dialogue with Jews and Muslims; there was no serious bloodletting from religious causes until the pogrom against Jews in Valencia in 1391. In later periods, the Church of Aragon-Catalonia produced numerous prominent prelates. One was Cardinal Berenguer de Anglesola (d. 1408), papal legate and sometime bishop of Huesca. Another was Cardinal Joan de Casanova OP (1387\u20131436), Dominican bishop of Elne. Born in Barcelona and buried in Florence, he was a royal confessor, and patron of the _Psalter and Book of Hours of King Alfons_ o.\n\nAs in all medieval kingdoms, the coronation of the monarch was an act of supreme significance, cementing the partnership of Church and State. The ceremonies, traditionally held in the cathedral at Zaragoza, gave spectators proof positive of the monarchy's divine calling:\n\n> It is the truth that, at vesper-time on Good Friday [1328], the Lord King [Alfonso El Benigno] sent to tell everyone that on Easter Eve all should quit the mourning they were wearing for, the Lord King, his father, and that every man should trim his beard and begin the feast...\n> \n> And so, on Saturday morning, at the time of the Alleluia and as the bells were ringing, every man was apparelled as the Lord King had commanded...\n> \n> And when the bells were ringing madly, the Lord King issued from the Aljaferia to go to the Church of San Salvador... First of all came, on horseback [a procession of knights carrying ceremonial swords] and after the sword of the Lord King came two carriages of the Lord King with two [lighted] wax tapers; in each wax taper there were over ten quintals of wax...\n> \n> And behind the two wax candles, came the Lord King, riding on his horse, with the most beautiful harness ever made by the hands of masters, and the sword was carried before him.\n\nThe vigil proceeded all through the night, accompanied by two holy masses:\n\n> And when it was finished, the Lord King kissed the cross of the sword and girded it on himself, and then, drew it from the scabbard and brandished it three times. And the first time, he defied all the enemies of the Holy Catholic faith; and the second time, he engaged to defend orphans, wards and widows; and the third time, he promised to maintain justice all his life... And the Lord Archbishop anointed him with chrism on the shoulder and on the right arm...\n> \n> And... the Lord King himself took the crown from the altar and placed it on his own head... And... the said Lords Archbishops and Bishops and Abbots and Priors and the Lords Infantes with them, cried in a loud voice: _Te Deum laudamus_. And as they were singing, the Lord King took the golden sceptre in his right hand and put it in his left and then took the orb in his right...\n> \n> And when... the Gospel had been sung, the Lord King again, with a low obeisance offered himself and his sacred crown to God, and knelt down very humbly. And... he went to seat himself before the altar of San Salvador, on the royal throne, and he sent for all the nobles... and dubbed them knights.\n\nFamously, Christianity and Islam coexisted in several parts of the Crown of Aragon. 'Nowhere was contact between the two cultures closer than on the Gulf of Lyons,' wrote Christopher Dawson; the County of Barcelona in particular 'was a kind of bridge between the two worlds'. Yet the patterns were not uniform. In the lands newly occupied by the _Reconquista_ , the Moors still dominated numerically. In most towns and cities of Aragon and Catalonia, they lived in closed wards, where, nonetheless, linguistic assimilation accelerated. In the countryside, they were often left to the supervision of the Knights Templar. The Jews, too, lived apart, as their own Talmudic rules required, but played a fruitful role in intellectual, medical and commercial life. Questions of tolerance and oppression, however, are almost impossible to quantify. A well-known study of the _convivencia_ of Moors and Christians in fourteenth-century Aragon reports that the well-organized _mud\u00e9jar_ communities experienced good times and bad, and concludes: 'the general situation of Muslims, whether desirable or undesirable', was _not_ due to 'the justice or injustice of the Christian authorities'.\n\nSimilar conclusions can be applied to the Jewish community. Prior to the end of the fifteenth century, apart from in Poland-Lithuania, the kingdom-county and its subject lands were one of the few parts of Europe where Jews flourished. They were particularly prominent in the reign of Jaime the Conqueror. Benveniste de Porta ( _fl_. 1250\u201370), the king's banker, advanced loans on the security of royal taxes, and, with the Crown finances in debt to the tune of over 100,000 _sous_ , became the royal tax-farmer. Moses ben Nahman Gerondi (known as Nahmanides, 1194\u20131270), was a famous Catalan rabbi and philosopher from Girona. He starred in disputations both among Jews and between Jews and Christians. In the 1230s he acted as a conciliator in the conflict between Solomon of Montpellier and Maimonides, and in 1263 he took part in the heated Disputation of Barcelona with the convert, Paul the Christian. He had a lasting influence through his commentary on the Torah, which offered alternative interpretations of controversial biblical passages. Exiled through the machinations of his Dominican opponents, he founded a synagogue in Jerusalem that still survives.\n\nPilgrims were omnipresent among medieval travellers. There was plenty to see. The foremost pilgrimage took thousands to the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, in the hills behind Barcelona, where one could see the miraculous _Verge negra_ \u2013 the Black Madonna, _La Morenta_ , the Patroness of Catalonia. The abbey of Ripoll near Girona was famous for the tomb of Count Wilfred the Hairy, for its library and for its community of learned monks, who studied Arabic manuscripts, transmitted ancient knowledge to posterity, and compiled the chronicles of the counts of Barcelona. The Cistercian abbey of Poblet, in the district of Tarragona, was enthusiastically patronized by the king-counts. Its royal pantheon, surmounted by a magnificent Gothic octagon, sheltered the tombs of almost all the monarchs.\n\nAll the cities of Aragon and Catalonia boasted grand cathedral churches, while the countryside was dotted with colossal castles that proclaimed the victorious pride of the _reconquistadores_. In the heyday of castle-building, Aragon and Catalonia had manned the ramparts of Christendom; and the moving Moorish frontier had called for line after line of castles as it went forward. Some of the fortresses, like Loarre in Huesca or the mighty Aljaferia in Zaragoza, were royal foundations. Others, like Cardona, or Peratallada or the Alca\u00f1iz in Teruel, were constructed by noble warlords. All served to underline the medieval truism that the Faith went hand in hand with the sword. The Crown of Aragon was also graced by seven universities: Montpellier, Perpignan, Barcelona, Valencia, Catania and later Palermo and Naples.\n\nMany pilgrims passed through Aragon or Catalonia on their way to Santiago di Compostela and the shrine of St James; one of the stops on the 'seashell road' was at the monastery of San Juan de la Pe\u00f1a near Jaca. Built in the eleventh century under an overhanging rock at the bottom of a gorge, the monastery was home to the chronicler-monks of Aragon and housed Aragon's first royal pantheon. Its tombs would certainly have challenged their visitors' knowledge of history, as they still do. One inscription reads: 'HIC REQUIESCIT FAMULUS DEI GARCIAS XIMENEZ PRIMUS REX ARAGONUM, QUI AMPLIAVIT ECCLESIAM SANCTI IOHANIS IBIQUE VITA DEFUNCTUS SEPELITUR.' It refers to a 'first king of Aragon', probably the semi-legendary Garci Ximenez, who ruled in Sobrarbe in the eighth century under the supremacy of Navarre long before Ramiro's time. Another inscription is less obscure: 'HIC REQUIESCIT EXIMINA, MULIER RODERICI CID' ('Here lies Eximina, the wife of Rodriguez, El Cid').\n\nJaime I was the king whose long reign permitted him both to extend and to consolidate a still-vulnerable polity. Born, as we have seen, in Montpellier during the Albigensian Crusade, he seems to have spent time at the court of Simon de Montfort, the crusaders' commander. His reign started badly, though, thanks to an ill-starred scheme to merge the kingdom-county with the Kingdom of Navarre, and it was some years before royal authority could be firmly asserted. But then, in the late 1220s, Jaime sidelined domestic problems by adventuring overseas. In 1229 he invaded the Moorish-controlled Balearic Islands, declaring himself 'king of Mallorca'. Three years later, he entered the old stomping ground of El Cid in Valencia. After two decades of campaigning to secure the new conglomeration, he signed the Treaty of Corbeil with the king of France in 1258, gaining mutual recognition of the frontiers and of all sovereign titles.\n\nIn later life, Jaime was to compose the famous Catalan _Llibre dels Fets_ or 'Book of Deeds', an autobiographical chronicle about his life and times. The manuscript, now in the national library of Barcelona, is written in a vernacular similar to Occitan. He made generous provision for his ten legitimate children, and for numerous illegitimate ones. His testament, drawn up in 1262, envisaged the division of his realms between his two eldest sons. One of them was to inherit Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. The other, with the title of 'king of Mallorca', was to inherit the Balearics, Rossell\u00f3, Cerdanya and Montpellier.\n\nJaime I's realms presented a kaleidoscope of languages, religions and cultures. The religious spectrum stretched from ultra-fervent Catholicism to Judaism and Islam. The urban culture of the great cities was worlds apart from the life of Pyrenean pastoral communities, and nothing impressed so strongly as the dynamism of medieval Barcelona. The old city, overlooking the port, was dominated by the cathedral or _seu_ of Santa Eulalia and by the densely inhabited public quarter, the Barri G\u00f3tic. On one side stood the ancient but none-too-imposing _Palau Reial_ , the residence of the counts, and on the other side, the _Call_ or 'Jewish Quarter'. A tangle of narrow streets, where the _Ramblas_ was yet to be built, ran down to the waterfront, or rather to a sandy beach. In the time of Jaime I, the city, though already a bustling metropolis, lacked many of its later adornments. At the northern end, the _Lonja_ , seat of the Consulado del Mar and resort of foreign merchants, occupied a temporary building. At the southern end, the _Drassanes_ or Royal Dockyard, a spectacle of ant-like activity, was in the early stages of its expansion. The imposing palaces of the _Generalitat_ and of the _Ajuntament_ , where municipal assemblies would be held, were a dream of the future. Behind the docks, the church of Santa Maria del Pi served the city guilds, while the Hospital de la Santa Creu housed a medical complex. Around them, to landward, ran the unbroken line of the city walls. In front of them, a mass of merchant ships and military galleys rode at anchor, or rested on the open beach.\n\nAnyone who saw Barcelona would have understood that increasing naval power underpinned the increasing wealth and strength of the state. The _Drassanes_ in Barcelona's port was but the visible base of an expanding network. The policy of constructing a permanent royal fleet is attributed to the Conqueror's father, Pedro II, who dreamed of a _regne dins el mar_ , 'a kingdom in the sea'. But it demanded long-term commitment, and huge resources in money, men and materials. The chosen weapon was the seagoing galley powered by a combination of sail and oar, the latest variant on ancient Greek biremes and triremes. When the oars kicked in, these galleys could show a devastating turn of speed. The largest of them were driven by 100 or even 150 oars, each oar manned by two or three rowers. Each carried a bow-mounted battering ram, an arsenal of catapults for attack, and a strong company of crossbowmen for self-defence.\n\nSea battles were a regular occurrence. One in particular stuck in the memory of a popular chronicler:\n\n> And when the galleys of En Conrado Lansa saw the ten galleys coming, they left the place. And the Saracens, who saw them shouted in their Saracen language 'Aur, Aur': and they came [on] with great vigour. And the galleys of En Conrado Lansa formed in a circle, and all four collected together and held council. And En Conrado Lansa said to them: 'You, my Lords, know that the favour of God is with the Lord King of Aragon and you know how many victories he has had over Saracens... Therefore I pray you all that you remember the power of God and of Our Lady Saint Mary, and the Holy Catholic Faith, and the honour of the Lord King and of the city of Valencia and of all the Kingdom; and that, roped together as we are, we attack resolutely, and that, on this day, we do so much that we be spoken of forever.'\n> \n> And all began to shout: 'Let us attack them! Let us attack them! They will all be ours!'... And with that he ordered trumpets and [drums] to be sounded, and with great shouts they began a vehement attack. And the four galleys, most beautifully, and without any clamour, went to the attack in the midst of the ten galleys and there the battle was most grievous and it lasted from the morning until the hour of vespers, and no one dared to eat or drink.\n> \n> But Our Lord the true God and His blessed Mother, from Whom come all favours, and the good luck of the Lord King of Aragon, gave the victory to our men, in such manner that all the galleys were defeated and the men killed or taken... [And so,] with great honour and triumph, they returned to Valencia with the galleys which they brought there, and with many Saracen captives who had hidden below deck, of whom they had much profit.\n\nIn the chronicler's eyes, it was evidently a sin for Saracens to hold Christian slaves, but not for Christians to enslave Saracens.\n\nThe Balearic Islands \u2013 in Roman times, the _Gymnesiae_ \u2013 have been described as 'a strategic imperative' for Aragon. Lying some 100 miles off the coast of Catalonia, they commanded the coastal trade, the approaches to the Strait of Gibraltar, and the crossing to North Africa. They provided both the stepping stones for small-scale shipping and the grand harbours which could act as naval bases. Yet they had remained in Moorish hands long after the union of Catalonia and Aragon. To Catalan sailors, this infidel stronghold must have felt like a thorn in Christian flesh. In the mind of King Jaime, it presented the most urgent of challenges.\n\nThe conquest by Jaime I, which began in 1229, absorbed formidable logistical resources. The initial attack on Mallorca (the 'Greater Island') was led by a fleet of galleys towing armoured troop-transports, whose bows opened \u2013 like those of landing-craft on the Normandy beaches \u2013 to release waves of advancing infantry. The king himself wrote a description of the operations in the _Llibre dels Fets_ :\n\n> One portion of the fleet was deployed at Cambrils, but the larger part, in which we found ourselves, was in the port of Salon and on the beach, and the remainder at Tarragona... We had 25 capital ships, 18 tarides, 12 galleys, and 100 buzas and galliots...\n> \n> Bovet's ship, in which Guillem de Montcada sailed, was to act as a guide, and had to carry a lantern as a light whilst Carro's ship had the rearguard... I was in the galley of Montpellier towards the rear.\n> \n> We set sail on Wednesday morning from Salon, with a land breeze... It was a wonderful sight... The whole sea appeared white with sails.\n> \n> The hour of vespers came. And near the first watch, we overtook the ship of Guillem of Montcada... and we climbed up the lantern and hailed them... The crew responded that it was the King's ship, and that we were welcome one hundred thousand times... And sailing by night and at the front of the fleet, we did not lower sail or change course, but let the galley run as fast as it could... There was a beautiful moon and breeze from the south-west, and we said that we could go to Pollen\u00e7a...\n\nHaving ignored the bad weather forecast, and surviving a squall, during which he prayed to the Virgin Mary, the king landed safely. The troops disembarked without opposition. They then saw that they were not alone:\n\n> The Saracens were ranged before them with some five thousand footmen and two hundred horsemen. And Ram\u00f3n de Montcada came and said that he would go to survey them, [adding] 'Let no one come with me.' And when he got near them, he called, [saying] 'Let us attack, for they are nothing!' And [Montcada] was the first to attack. And when the Christians came up to the Moors, at four lances' length at most, the Moors turned tail and fled. But they were pursued with such speed that more than one thousand, five hundred Saracens died, as there was no desire to take prisoners. This done, our men returned to the seashore.\n\nThus was the voyage to Mallorca and the first engagement completed. That evening, the bishop of Barcelona delivered a sermon: 'Barons... take heed. Those who die in this task will do so in the name of Our Lord and will receive paradise, where they will have everlasting glory. And those who live will have honour and renown for all their lives and a good end in their deaths...'\n\nThe main city of Madina was then besieged, and on its capitulation, the Almohad rulers submitted on condition that the population be spared. Madina's harbour, renamed Ciutat de Mallorca (now Palma), could henceforth act as partner for Barcelona and deny all the adjacent waters to hostile shipping.\n\nMenorca (the 'Lesser Island') was captured in 1231 by guile. Huge fires were built on the cliffs of Cap de Formentor on Mallorca, to create the illusion of a massive armed camp. The Menorcans surrendered without a fight, buying their survival as a vassal Islamic state with the promise of annual tribute. The twin islands of Evissa (now Ibiza) and Formentera were captured in 1235 by a private crusade of the archbishop of Tarragona. According to local legend, the ruling sheikh's brother quarrelled with him over a woman in the harem, and told the besieging Catalans of a secret tunnel. The Arab mosques were torn down and replaced by Catholic churches.\n\nValencia, an ancient port and Roman settlement and the centre of the Moorish _tarifa_ of Balansiya, now formed the focus of the king's attention. Its conquest started slightly later than that of the Balearics, and the ongoing land battles were not completed until 1304. Aragonese forces were employed almost constantly for three generations in simultaneous campaigns in the Balearics and on the Valencian coast.\n\nThe conquest of Valencia has traditionally been seen as Aragon's contribution to the religious crusade against the Moors. Yet other motives can also be identified. By fighting the Moors, the Aragonese were also rebuffing the Castilians, who had lodged an earlier stake in the area. Furthermore, by winning new royal lands King Jaime was able to strengthen the Crown against the nobles. His careful management of colonization allowed him to create new estates and new sources of revenue from which the nobles could be excluded.\n\nThe campaign advanced in spasms. Much of the fighting was defensive. In the first phase, 1232\u20133, Aragon captured the districts of Morella, Burriana and Pe\u00f1iscola. In 1237\u20138 Jaime I entered the 'city of El Cid' and formally created the Kingdom of Valencia. In the third phase, in 1243\u20135, the Aragonese drove on into districts claimed by the Castilians, and a line of demarcation had to be established. The onset of the fourth and final phase was delayed to 1296, and lasted for eight years. The Arbitration of Torrellas (1304), as later amended, assigned Alicante to Valencia and Murcia to Castile.\n\nThe colonization of the Kingdom of Valencia, as reflected in subsequent linguistic patterns, followed twin routes. The king brought large groups of Catalan settlers into the coastal strip, thereby deciding that the future Valencian language would be a dialect of Catalan. Noble adventurers, on the other hand, set up private holdings in the inland districts, bringing settlers in from Aragon. Their descendants still employ a form of speech that is close to Aragonese.\n\nTwo issues loomed large. One was the fate of the Muslim Moors, the other the form of government. The Christian population of Valencia formed a distinct minority for many years to come, but the defeated Muslims were badly needed to work the land of the new territories. There could be no question of a general expulsion. Instead, Islam was tolerated subject to the political loyalty of local leaders. In this way, the _mud\u00e9jars_ of Valencia came to represent a solid Muslim enclave within Christian Iberia.\n\nThe government of the Kingdom of Valencia was modelled neither on Aragon nor on Catalonia. Kingship was permanently invested in the Crown of Aragon, but the _Furs de Valencia_ or 'Charters of Valencia' were produced through a lengthy process of bargaining between the Crown and the local (Christian) community. In these negotiations, occupying much of the fourteenth century, the municipality of the city of Valencia played a prominent role. Once the _Furs_ were established, Valencia's power and wealth forged ahead. The wool trade supported extensive textile manufactories and underpinned the overseas commerce which made the city a worthy partner (and competitor) to Barcelona. The elegant _Lonja de la Seda_ or 'Silk Exchange', which still stands, attests to the port's far-flung contacts, and the _Taula de canvis_ ('table of exchange') acted both as a bank and a stock exchange.\n\nOne of the side effects of the conquest of Valencia was to strengthen Aragon's hold on the inland province of Teruel that lies on the direct line between Zaragoza and Valencia. The intervening terrain is exceptionally hostile. The colonists' trail was blocked by range after range of stony mountains \u2013 including the wonderfully named Sierras Universales. The winters are notably inclement. Even today, the roads are few and far between. The remoteness of Teruel had made it a favoured place of refuge for Iberian Jews.\n\nThe fame of medieval Teruel, however, is for ever associated with a tale of star-struck lovers, Diego and Isabela, who lived there in the thirteenth century. Their tomb still stands in the parish church (no matter that Boccaccio reports an almost identical tale from Florence). The Marcillas and the Segaras of Teruel resembled the Montagues and Capulets of Verona. The Seguras were wealthy; the Marcillas impoverished. So, when Diego Marcilla asked for Isabela Segura's hand in marriage, her stern father told him that he had five years \u2013 and not a day longer! \u2013 to go away and make his fortune.\n\nFive years passed, and Diego hadn't returned. On the day after the deadline, Isabela was ordered to wed an elderly knight. During the wedding feast, a commotion was heard. Diego had arrived, laden with riches and longing for his lady. He had counted the five years from the day of his departure, not, like the Seguras, from the day of his dismissal. That night, Diego crept into Isabela's bridal suite and begged for a kiss. ' _Besame_ ,' he pleaded, ' _que me muero_ ' ('Kiss me, for I'm dying'). Isabela, remembering her vows, turned away, and Diego fell dead at her feet. So the wedding was followed by a funeral. Isabela bent over Diego's bier, kissed him tenderly on the lips, and fell dead herself. The _amantes de Teruel_ , separated in life, were united in death.\n\nIn that same era, the heir apparent of the kingdom-county \u2013 the future Pedro III El Grande \u2013 married the heiress of Sicily, Constanza di Hohenstaufen. The fourteen-year-old bride, who arrived in Barcelona in 1262 with a fleet of galleys, laden with jewels and surrounded by an extravagant retinue, was to introduce the royal court to unaccustomed levels of opulence. The king's table, for example, abandoned its previous austerity, which had dictated a standard diet of mutton, with fish on Fridays. Detailed pantry receipts have survived to show that the royal household's culinary repertoire rapidly improved. Beef, goats' meat, poultry and salt pork with cabbage were served on ordinary days, not just at banquets, and roast pigeon figured so frequently it may have been the princess's favourite. Milk, butter, white sugar, spices, onions, spinach and other vegetables became items of daily expenditure, while large quantities of nuts and fresh fruit were consumed at breakfast. Extraordinarily intricate rules were laid down to allocate particular cuts of a carcass to particular grades of cook in lieu of salary. Soap appears on the shopping lists, indicating a dramatic step change in washing habits.\n\nMeanwhile, fifty years of royal warfare brought the nobility into a strong bargaining position. The traditional warrior caste fought the king's battles without demur, and was richly rewarded by grants of land and honours. Yet in the last years of Jaime I's reign, they increased their demands. They formed a 'Union of Liberties', calling for a charter of their rights and privileges, a definition of the powers of the justiciar, a guarantee of the rule of law, and a promise of annual parliaments. Jaime I's successor conceded their demands, issuing a General Privilege (1283), which successive kings were obliged to reconfirm. The document is rightly known as Aragon's 'Magna Carta'.\n\nThe growing territorial base of the kingdom-county supplied the flow of manpower and taxes which facilitated further overseas conquests. Once the Balearic Islands had been pacified, the galleys could be sent on longer expeditions. In the two decades after 1282, they descended on Sicily, on the isles of Malta and Gozo, and even on Greece.\n\nSicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. Because of its triangular shape, it had been known since Greek times as 'Trinacria', and it had lived through wave after wave of colonizations, Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Norman. It is dominated on the eastern side by the volcanic hulk of Mount Etna, and for the rest by rolling hills interspersed with fields of vines and olives. The easternmost port of Messina is separated by a narrow strait from southern Italy, while the westernmost port, Marsala, is equidistant to within 100 miles from Sardinia and Tunisia. In the early thirteenth century, the chief city, Palermo, had furnished the camels and the harems of the exotic and itinerant court of the Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215\u201350), the so-called _Stupor Mundi_. Thanks to the rivalry between the German houses of Guelph and Ghibelline, however, the Emperor Frederick was drawn into a feud with the (pro-Guelph) Papal States, and he and his sons, Conrad and Manfred, were excommunicated. In 1266 the Hohenstaufens' Kingdom of Sicily, consisting of southern Italy as well as the island itself, was awarded by papal decree to the papal favourite, Charles d'Anjou.\n\nAragon's link to Sicily came about as an unforeseen consequence of popular discontent with Angevin rule. In 1282 the citizens of Palermo turned on the Angevin-French garrison, and massacred them in a nocturnal outrage that came to be known as the 'Sicilian Vespers'. In the ensuing struggle, a group of former Hohenstaufen supporters appealed for aid to Aragon, offering the throne to Pedro III, the husband of Manfred's daughter, Constanza. The appeal signalled confidence in Aragon's newfound military and naval standing; the offer was a result for which the Aragonese court had long been angling.\n\nThe War of the Sicilian Vespers, which lasted no less than twenty years, pitted the king of France against anyone and everyone. The fighting was concentrated on a series of naval campaigns in which the Aragonese galley-fleet successfully denied the Angevins a safe passage for their troops. Supreme command of operations fell to Jaime II El Justo (1267\u20131327), Pedro III's son, who assumed the royal claim to Sicily on his father's death in 1285. The architect of success was, without doubt, Admiral Ruggiero di Lauria ( _c_. 1245\u20131305), a Calabrian sailor in the Aragonese service who fought six major sea battles against preponderant enemy odds and repeatedly prevailed through a mixture of daring, guile and superior seamanship.\n\nThe final outcome, in 1302, saw a compromise in which the Angevins kept their lands on the _Continente_ , while the Aragonese kept the island. In order to confuse posterity, the reduced Angevin realm, centred on Naples, continued to be called the Kingdom of Sicily. The new Aragonese realm, based on Sicily, was initially called the Kingdom of Trinacria. Charmingly, in reference to the _faro_ or 'lighthouse', which stood on the island shore of the Straits of Messina. the Angevin realm now became known in Sicilian parlance as ' _La Sicilia di qua del faro_ ' or 'Sicily beyond the lighthouse'. The Aragonese realm was ' _La Sicilia di qui del faro_ ' or 'Sicily on this side of the lighthouse'. To compound the confusion, the Calabrians adopted the opposite perspective. For them, the tip of their country stood at the lighthouse at Reggio, and for them Sicily became ' _di qua del faro_ '.\n\nThe coronation of Jaime El Justo of Aragon-Catalonia, which took place in Palermo on 2 February 1286, long before the war was won, was more than a sacred and symbolic ceremony: it was the occasion when the new king could win over his new subjects.\n\n> Summoning, therefore, the prelates, barons and syndics of the cities and townships throughout the island, [the notables of the kingdom] assembled in parliament in Palermo... Thither James repaired, with the Queen and the Infant Don Frederic, and was crowned in the name of God and of the Virgin, by the Bishop of Cefal\u00f9, the Archimandrite of Messina and many other Sicilian prelates, as well as the Bishops of Squillaci and Nicastro.\n> \n> During the subsequent days of festivity... James at his own cost conferred the honour of knighthood on four hundred Sicilian nobles: distributed many favours; and granted many fiefs which had lapsed to the exchequer on the expulsion of the French barons, both to do honour to this joyful occasion and to increase the number of his supporters...\n> \n>  \n> \n> For the same reason, during the sitting of parliament on the 5th of February, he promulgated the constitutions and immunities, as they were then called, incorporated with the laws of the Kingdom of Sicily under the head of the acts of King James, and written in the language of concession...\n\nFor Dante Alighieri, writing in the early fourteenth century, the Sicilian Vespers and its consequences were contemporary events that he incorporated into the _Divina Commedia_. On the shores of Purgatory, for example, Dante meets the shade of Manfred, son of the Emperor Frederick II, who like his father had died excommunicate. Manfred explains that 'despite the Church's curse', repentance had given him the hope of salvation; and he begs Dante, if restored to the land of the living, to tell his 'lovely daughter' of the good news:\n\n> _ond'io ti priego che, quando tu riedi,_\n> \n> _vadi a mia bella figlia, genitrice_\n> \n> _de l'onor di Cicilia e d'Aragona,_\n> \n> _e dichi 'l vero a lei, s'altro si dice._\n\n('I pray, when you return to the world, \/ that you go to my lovely daughter, mother \/ of kings in Sicily and Aragon \/ and tell her the truth, lest she's heard something different.') As well as being the wife of Pedro III of Aragon, Manfred's daughter Constanza (still alive in 1300 as Queen Mother) was mother both of Jaime II of Aragon and of Frederico II of Sicily.\n\nIn a valley 'where nature was a painter', Dante meets the shades of negligent princes, who squandered their birthright. The setting is idyllic. The riot of flowers \u2013 ' _Oro e argento fine, cocco e biacca, indaco legno lucido sereno, fresco smeraldo_ ' \u2013 is mixed with a choir of souls intoning the ' _Salve Regina_ '. But the lesson is severe. The shades of Pedro III and Charles d'Anjou, rivals for the Sicilian throne, sing in harmony. Others receive the poet's lash. The _Nasetto_ , 'the Snubnose', who 'fled and dishonoured the Lily', is Philippe III of France, who had died in Perpignan at the end of his campaign in Catalonia.\n\nNot surprisingly, the original Aragonese candidate for the thone of Sicily was long dead by the time that peace came. Pedro III's third son, Frederico, was eventually confirmed as the long-term holder of the throne. He gave rise to a new Sicilian line of the House of Aragon, ruling in parallel to their relatives in Barcelona and Majorca for more than a hundred years.\n\nThe islands of Malta and Gozo passed under the Crown of Aragon in 1282, since they formed an integral part of the Kingdom of Sicily. Owing to the long wars between the Aragonese and the Angevins, however, the Maltese nobility gained a large measure of autonomy that lasted until the link with Aragon was severed centuries later. The royal government exercised control through a long series of viceroy\/governors. The Arab elite was not expelled; their Muslim faith, Moorish architecture and Arabic language waned very slowly; indeed, modern Maltese is in many respects a derivative of medieval Arabic. The chief city, Mdina, retained its Arabic name while turning into a stronghold of the feudal nobility.\n\nThe link with Greece also originated as an offshoot of the Crown's intervention in Sicily. At the end of the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the Aragonese army in Sicily could no longer be paid. So, with the king's approval, a powerful 'Catalan Company' was assembled and sent in 1302 as mercenaries to the Emperor of Byzantium, who was already feeling the threat from the Ottoman advance. The company's leader was an adventurer from Rossell\u00f3, Ruggier Desflors (Roger Deslaur or Roger de Flor). A Catalan soldier, who recorded their deeds for posterity, wrote that they had gone to 'Romania':\n\n> The Emperor, in the presence of all, made Frey Roger sit down before him and gave him the baton and the cap and the banner and the seal of the Empire, and invested him with the robes belonging to the office and made him Caesar of the Empire. And a Caesar is an officer who sits in a chair near that of the Emperor, only half a palm lower, and he can do as much as the Emperor in the Empire. He can bestow gifts in perpetuity and can dispose of the treasure, impose tribute, and he can apply the question and hang and quarter... And again, he signs himself 'Caesar of Our Empire' and the Emperor writes to him 'Caesar of Thy Empire'. What shall I tell you? There is no difference between the Emperor and the Caesar, except that... the Emperor wears a scarlet cap and all his robes are scarlet, and the Caesar wears a blue cap and his robes are blue with a narrow gold border...\n\nFor several years the company, under Byzantine command, fought the Turks in Anatolia and gained a reputation for rapine and pillage. When its indiscipline outweighed its usefulness, it was rounded up by another regiment of Byzantine mercenaries and massacred. The survivors faced annihilation and, gathering an assortment of Balkan hirelings, deserters and desperadoes, set out on the trail of the 'Catalan Revenge'. In the process, they took possession of Athens: 'Once under Catalan control, Athens was transformed into a Catalan mini-state. Its nominal dependency on the Duchy of Achaia was renounced. Catalan was declared the official language; Catalan law replaced Byzantine law; and Catalan officials resided in the Parthenon, lords of all they surveyed.' The Duchy of Neopatria (Neopatras) in central Greece was ruled in tandem with the Athenian duchy from 1319 to 1390, and outlived Aragonese rule in Athens by a decade.\n\nAragon's elevated standing in that era can be gauged from the fact that the Angevins, having lost Sicily during the War of the Sicilian Vespers, went to great lengths to recover it by diplomatic and financial means. In 1311 Robert of Naples wrote to his Aragonese counterpart in Palermo offering to exchange the 'Kingdom of Trinacria' for the Angevin 'Kingdom of Albania' at Durazzo, together with Angevin rights in the Duchy of Achaia. He was rebuffed, but in subsequent years the offer was repeatedly increased until, in addition to Albania and Achaia, it included Sardinia, Corsica, all the former Templar possessions in southern Italy, one half of Sicily and 100,000 ounces of gold. The Aragonese were not tempted. The project lapsed.\n\nThe rapid expansion of the kingdom-county and the multiplication of its dependencies inevitably generated tensions. The problems that arose can hardly be attributed to 'imperial overstretch', as might have occurred in a more centralized system. Rather, they must be seen as the product of centrifugal forces that pulled the dependencies away from the heartland. Cadet branches of the ruling house snubbed their seniors, autonomous regimes adopted wayward policies and a widening gulf opened up between the centre and the peripheries.\n\nJaime the Conqueror had already identified the dangers when devising a scheme to divide the Crown lands into two co-equal parts. He had hoped that his two sons would co-operate in the interests of dynastic harmony, but his chosen solution produced the opposite effect. Shortly after his death in 1276, fratricidal conflict broke out between the Kingdom of Aragon and the Kingdom of Mallorca which festered for over fifty years. The Conqueror could not have foreseen two key factors, the unplanned acquisition of Sicily and the explosive growth of Mallorcan commerce, which combined to ruin the balance between the various parts of his legacy. Aragonese rule in Sicily prompted an endless feud with the Angevins, and to cap it all, large parts of the state's heartland were overrun by armed leagues of rebellious nobles. When the Black Death struck, many said that God was punishing His people justly.\n\nThe 'Kingdom of the Greater Island' came into being in 1276 following the execution of the Conqueror's testament and the partition of his possessions. Pedro, the elder son, received the dynasty's ancestral territories to the south and west of the Pyrenees, while Jaime, the younger son, received the offshore islands, the smaller provinces to the north of the mountains, and a couple of outlying possessions. The ceremonial centre of Jaime's kingdom lay on Mallorca; his mainland castle was built in Perpinya. The coat of arms of the kingdom betrayed its origins. The four vertical red stripes on a golden background \u2013 _Or, four billets gules_ \u2013 the emblem of Catalonia, were superimposed by a broad, diagonal, sea-blue band \u2013 a _bend azure_. At the same time, an adjustment was made to the internal frontier between Aragon and the County of Barcelona. The border had traditionally followed the River Cinca; it was now moved eastwards to the Segre, thereby creating the _Franja,_ a border strip within Aragon where most of the villages spoke (and speak) Catalan.\n\nPedro III, however, rejected the spirit of his father's plan and refused to accept his younger brother as an equal. Within three years, he sent his army to surround the walls of Perpinya, demanding that Jaime submit in an act of homage. It was the rule, he declared, that no king should be subject to the wishes of another. Jaime, trapped, decided to comply. Yet, notwithstanding the Treaty of Perpinya of 1279, the dispute rumbled on. Pedro's lawyers maintained that the terms of treaty, and the subsequent act of homage, had changed the Kingdom of the Greater Island into a fief of Aragon. Jaime's lawyers maintained that their father's will remained the definitive document.\n\nIn 1285 the legal arguments turned into open warfare. The king of France mounted an expedition into Catalonia, aiming to block Aragonese ambitions in Sicily. His plans backfired sensationally. Aragon rallied. The French were pushed back. And, since King Jaime was assumed to have been in collaboration with the invaders, the whole of his kingdom, including the Balearics, was taken over by Pedro's forces and effectively suspended. Papal intervention eventually assured the kingdom's restoration, but the vulnerability of the junior branch was fully exposed.\n\nDuring the Aragonese occupation, Menorca was subjected to a vicious act of retribution. In 1287, aiming no doubt to refill their coffers, the Aragonese crushed the local emirate of Menorca, and rounded up the entire Muslim population; 40,000 souls were shipped off to the slave markets of North Africa. This cruel act, which had no parallel either in Mallorca or Valencia, was a milestone in the grim history of European slavery. The island was resettled by Catalan colonists, and the magnificent port of Mahon was added to the growing chain of Aragonese bases.\n\nThe royal feud raged on, but despite the politics and the battles of these years, the infant kingdom's economy flourished. Agricultural methods were improved, a textile industry was launched, and ship-building developed to the point where the keels of an independent galley-fleet could be laid. Castles and palaces were built, notably the circular Bellver Castle on Mallorca, and the Palace of the Kings at Perpinya. Above all, commerce boomed. Mallorca became the entrep\u00f4t for the seaborne trade between Europe and North Africa. It was the place where the small coastal boats transferred their cargoes to larger seagoing vessels. It was equally the entry point for rare commodities \u2013 oriental spices, gold and 'porcelain' shells. New routes were exploited with Sicily and Sardinia, and even (since Jaime III had been brought up in his mother's home of Achaia) with Greece and with Mamluk Egypt. Expeditions explored ocean routes to the Canaries and to north-west Europe and independent Mallorcan consulates were set up in the Berber states of North Africa. Genoese merchants were welcomed, creating the _Lonja dels generesos_ in Palma, and Mallorcans muscling in on the Atlantic trade appeared in London and Bruges. The records of Francesco Datini, 'the Merchant of Prato', reveal that he was importing Iberian wool to Italy, not from the Spanish mainland but from the islands. Naval facilities were expanded for the Aragonese fleet.\n\nAs part of their strategy to maximize income from trade in their own ships, the kings of the Greater Island sought to close their ports to Barcelonan and Valencian vessels. In 1301, for example, they tried to step up the anchorage tax on Catalan ships entering Collioure, signalling their intention of treating them as foreigners. The scheme failed and was replaced by an attempt to make Barcelona pay a flat annual fee of 60,000 silver pounds. That ploy failed, too, when Barcelona argued that a similar sum should be paid to Aragon as a feudal fee for approval of the king's marriage. The cat was playing with the mouse. In due course, the Mallorcans minted their own coinage in Rossell\u00f3, and in 1342 they even launched an independent expedition to explore the Canaries. In the eyes of their Aragonese cousins, they were building an empire within the Empire.\n\nIn Balearic society, the balance between Christians, Muslims and Jews was different than elsewhere. A few free Muslims remained in Mallorca, though the majority were enserfed. The Jews, in contrast, prospered mightily. They belonged to the same cultural network as their co-religionists in Barcelona, Perpinya and Montpellier; they enjoyed the right of _alyama_ or self-government; and they participated energetically in the commercial boom. The _Call_ or 'ghetto' in Ciutat de Mallorca was a prosperous quarter surrounding a single prominent synagogue. Apart from the solitary pogrom in 1391, generalized persecution would not set in until the fifteenth century.\n\nThe kingdom's best-known subject by far was Ram\u00f3n Llull (1232\u20131315). Philosopher, novelist, linguist and reconciler of religions, he was born in Mallorca soon after the conquest, served as a page in Jaime the Conqueror's court, studied at the University of Montpellier, and later rose to serve as seneschal of the 'Greater Island' in Perpinya. His first book, _Le Llibre de la cavalleria_ , dealt with the principles of chivalry. A moment of religious ecstasy followed. The rest of his life was spent trying to harmonize the three great monotheist religions. Llull knew Arabic as well as he knew Latin, and had been trained in the work of Muslim and Jewish philosophers. He laboured for many years at the Franciscan monastery at Miramar on Mount Randa, before setting out on long tours to meet popes and princes, journeying as far afield as Georgia and Egypt and teaching in many foreign universities. At the Council of Vienne in 1311, he witnessed the nominal acceptance of his cherished proposal for the teaching of oriental languages. He undertook repeated missions to Muslim North Africa, where he engaged in learned disputations with the _ulemas_ (religious scholars), and where his remarkable life reached its term.\n\nLlull's works were frowned on by the Church, but never lacked admirers. His _Ars major_ and _Ars generalis_ contain a mass of speculative philosophy. His _Blaquerna_ is sometimes cited as the world's first novel. His poetry, in _El Desconort_ or _Lo Cant de Ramon_ , is beautifully simple. He even invented a sort of cybernetic machine that claimed to unravel the mysteries of universal knowledge. Llull has rightly been called 'a great European'.\n\nSardinia first came into Aragon's sights during the suspension of the Kingdom of the Greater Island, when Pope Boniface VIII, seeing Aragon as a useful ally against the troublesome Republic of Genoa, tried to transfer both Sardinia and Corsica to Barcelona.\n\nMedieval Sardinia was divided into four _Giudicati_ or 'Judgeships', Gallura in the north, Cagliari in the south, Logudoro in the north-west and Arborea on the west coast. The ruling judges were military as well as judicial officials, who passed much of their time contesting control of the castles of the island's mountainous interior. By the turn of the fourteenth century, Gallura and Cagliari were in the pockets of the Pisans, and Logudoro of the Genoese; Arborea was the only Judgeship to remain fully independent.\n\nAragon's claim was revived by the Infante Alfonso of the Trinacrian line. His expedition, having sailed from Mallorca, landed in the spring of 1323:\n\n> And the Lord Infante En Alfonso had fine weather and assembled all the fleet at the island of San Pietro. And they went to Palmas dels Sols and there all the chivalry and the almugavars landed. And, immediately, the Judge of Arborea came there with all his power, to receive him as lord, and a great number of Sardinians... [from] the city of Sassari surrendered to him. And there they made an agreement, by the Judge's advice, that the Lord Infante should go and besiege Iglesias...\n> \n> The Lord Infante, besieging Iglesias, attacked it every day with catapults. But [he] and all his host had so much sickness, that the greater part of his followers died... and he, himself, was very ill. Assuredly he would have been in great danger of dying, if it had not been for the great care of my Lady the Infanta...\n> \n> However ill the Lord Infante was, for no physician would he leave the siege. Many times with the fever upon him he would put on his armour and order an attack. By his good endeavour... he reduced the town to such a state that it surrendered. So all the host entered... and garrisoned the fort well. And then he came to Cagliari, and built a castle... opposite Cagliari and gave it the name of Bonaire.\n\nOn 24 April 1326 the foundation of the Kingdom of Sardinia was proclaimed. Arborea alone offered coherent resistance.\n\nAragonese rule in Sardinia was not entirely even-handed. The _Coeterum_ statute of 1324 abolished Pisan law, introducing legislation that favoured the newcomers. All public offices were reserved for Catalans, Mallorcans and Aragonese. As from 1328, a trumpet was sounded at nightfall from the battlements of Cagliari, warning all Sardinians to leave. A parliament opened, similar to the _Corts_ in Barcelona. The three estates of feudal lords, clergy and royal officers met in separate chambers, and exercised an advisory role. In 1354, the port of Alghero was settled by Catalans, and their descendants speak Catalan to the present day.\n\nThe life and reign of Pedro IV (1319\u201387) form the centrepiece to the whole Aragonese fourteenth century. The son of Alfonso IV and of Teresa d'Enten\u00e7a, heiress of Urgell, he succeeded in 1336, inheriting a domain that stretched right across the Mediterranean from Valencia to Athens. He was known as El Ceremonioso from the rigid etiquette of his court, and also as El Punyalet, 'the Poignard', after furiously cutting up both a proposed charter of noble liberties and his own finger. His life was filled with warfare: against his relatives, against his nobles, and against his neighbour and namesake, Pedro the Cruel of Castile. Prior to 1348, he prevailed against an armed insurrection of nobles, survived the plague which killed his queen, Leonora of Portugal (the Black Death split his reign into two clear halves), and suppressed the Kingdom of Mallorca. Many of the events of the reign were voluminously recorded in the chronicle which he personally commissioned.\n\nThe two branches of Jaime the Conqueror's family repeatedly intermarried in the first half of the fourteenth century in the hope of reaching reconciliation, but it never worked. The final suppression of the Kingdom of Mallorca came about through a culmination of complaints. The commercial policy of the Mallorcans irked Barcelona. Their continuing links to France, through Montpellier, aroused suspicions. And the last straw was delivered by news of intrigues with the Genoese. Pedro decided to act. In 1343 troops carried by the Catalan fleet invaded the Balearics. In 1344 an Aragonese army stormed Perpinya. The Mallorcan court was driven into exile. In 1349 the last, desperate Mallorcan ruler, Jaime III, sold Montpellier to raise funds, then staked all on an expedition to recover Mallorca. His gamble failed. He was killed on the field of Llucmajor in southern Mallorca, and his 'Ephemeral Kingdom' died with him. Though the legal claims of the Mallorcan line were kept in circulation for the lifetime of Jaime III's immediate heirs, his son the nominal Jaime IV lived in Naples as the consort of the notorious Queen Joanna I (see below, p. 211).\n\nPedro's decisive action completed a process of monarchical consolidation. To prevent the fragmentation of the Crown, it had been decided in his father's time that 'whoever rules in Aragon rules in Catalonia and Valencia as well'. The king now reincorporated the lands of the 'Greater Island' also.\n\nBoth in its origins and in its outcome, the noble revolt of the (second) 'Union of Liberties', which came to a head in 1347, reflected deep unrest that was no less social than political. The royal justiciar had ruled that 'a lord can maltreat his vassal whenever there is just cause', and the nobility's control over their serfs, who had no recourse beyond the mercy of their oppressor, had become near absolute. Such court records as remain of complaints against lordly malpractices are expressed in the 'tormented voices' of a virtually invisible underclass. In best Aragonese fashion, the Union's leaders also added the legal right of rebellion against the king to their usual litany of petitions and demands. The rebels' sense of omnipotence was increased by the support of the king's half-brothers, who feared for the loss of their top positions in the royal line of succession.\n\nYet the Union had picked an agile and obstinate opponent, and one who possessed ready allies, especially in Catalonia. Initially, the rebels made deep inroads into Valencia and Aragon, but they grew disunited when unexpected concessions were made. While they hesitated, the king turned to the prosperous merchant class of Barcelona, which supplied him with money and professional soldiers. The rebellion collapsed in a sea of blood at the Battle of Epila near Zaragoza in July 1348. After his victory, the king rescinded the Privilege of Union of 1287 together with all other charters making reference to the nobles' right of rebellion. At the same time, he took an oath to respect his subjects' traditional liberties, while strengthening the powers of the justiciar, whose constitutional pre-eminence dates from this time. He reached a sensible compromise, resisting the temptation to introduce a royal despotism.\n\nIn the midst of these preoccupations, the Black Death struck like the Hand of God. The king was still struggling to restore order after the Union of Liberties:\n\n> The great plague began in the city of Valencia in the month of May in the year of Our Lord 1348... By the middle of June over 300 persons died each day. We decided to leave the city and go to Aragon...\n> \n> As soon as We arrived in Teruel We heard that the Prince En Ferrando was in Saragossa with many [others], discussing the affairs of the Union... All that was discussed tended to Our great disgrace. But [after] some days in Teruel, the great plague began there [too], and We had to leave. And We made Our way to (Saragossa) via Tarazona, where the noble En Lop de Luna was, with an Aragonese armed company, waiting for the troops [which] the king of Castile was to send for Our assistance...\n> \n> Then We directed Our way to Our Aljaferia... We sentenced thirteen persons to death, with confiscation of their goods, as they had committed the crime of l\u00e8se majest\u00e9. Those condemned were hanged, some at the Gate of Toledo and some in other places...\n> \n> The _jurats_ [magistrates] of the city [then] begged Us that We should be pleased to discuss the state of the kingdom. Having talked with Our council, we at once agreed to hold _Cortes generals_ in the city... The first thing that We [did] was that all the acts made by the Union were judicially condemned; and, in the main building of the monastery of the Preachers, where the _Cortes_ were celebrated, _all_ the documents and legal processes made by the Union were burnt... so that nothing of its acts should remain...\n> \n> We went to the Church of Sent Salvador and, standing in the pulpit... We spoke to the people. Our discourse was, in sum, that We considered Ourselves prejudiced and injured by the Union, but that, remembering the mercy [which] the bygone kings of Aragon had been accustomed to show to their subjects, We pardoned them... This was done in the month of August.\n> \n> During the [continuing] discussions, the great plague began [again]... and increased daily... The _Cortes_ being in agreement, We prorogued them [to] the city of Teruel... And then the _Cortes_ graciously accorded Us a _morabati_ or _monedatge_ [tax], which We had collected in all parts of the kingdom.\n> \n> We left the city of Saragossa with the queen, Our wife, who was ill. Many days had passed since the illness started but she was better... [So] We went to Ex\u00e9rica. And the illness of the queen increased so much that in a few days she passed from this life in Ex\u00e9rica. As soon as she was buried and We had dined, We mounted and went to Segorbe where the plague had come to an end.\n\nThe king was obviously too busy to tarry or to mourn. It is notable that the _Cortes_ waited until the end of the session before 'graciously' granting the king his taxes, which were payable in a seven-year cycle. (In Castile, as in England, the king demanded his taxes _before_ agreeing to hear representations.) In the opinion of one leading scholar, this practice explains why the royal power in such a rich country suffered from financial weakness.\n\nIn the second half of his reign, Pedro IV's troubles were religious as well as financial; he fell into a lengthy feud with the inquisitor-general and head of the Dominican Order in Aragon, Nicolau Eymerich (1320\u201399), author of _Directorium Inquisitorium_ (1376), an authoritative handbook for defining and combating witchcraft, which was defined as a form of heresy. The inquisitor was a zealot who refined the use of torture and persecuted both the Jews of Aragon and the followers of Ramon Llull. He was twice banished to Avignon, and twice returned.\n\nA century after its birth, the Aragonese navy was the third biggest in the western Mediterranean, after those of Genoa and the Moorish emirates of North Africa. Its galleys were half as big again as in the thirteenth century, carrying an average complement of 223 rowers and crewmen; its shipyards at Barcelona, Valencia and Palma, drawing on the oak woods of Montseny, were virtually self-sufficient except for oars. Its increased capacity made it possible for a fleet to extend the standard four-month tour of summer duty to twelve or even eighteen months. A fleet of twenty-eight galleys, for example, which put to sea in 1341 under Admiral Pere de Moncada (grandson of Ruggiero di Lauria), wintered on station, only returning to Barcelona the next year.\n\nThe main threat at that time came from the North African Moors. The Christian navies, commanded by Admiral Boccanegra of Genoa, joined forces to isolate Muslim Granada from the Marinid rulers of Morocco and to keep the Strait of Gibraltar open. The Castilians in particular suffered great losses, and were obliged to hire fifteen replacement galleys from Genoa at 800 gold florins per month. For logistical reasons, however, the Aragonese were unable to fight for long without allies, since their plans to assemble a fleet of forty heavy and twenty light galleys were not realized. The prospect that Genoa might ally itself with the Moors proved especially worrying. Aragon remained a major naval force until the utility of galleys declined through the introduction of gunpowder in the late fifteenth century.\n\nAragon's overseas territories suffered not only from the Black Death but also from the social ills that had wracked the heartland. The most distinguished historian of Sicily, for example, has written of the rise of a 'New Feudalism'. The barons rampaged with impunity; the serfs toiled without relief; the towns withered; and the monarchy was helpless. In 1377, Pedro IV of Aragon invaded Sicily in order to bring it under direct control.\n\nConditions in Sardinia, where Aragon waged three wars against Arborea, were no healthier. Arborea received support from Genoa, but not enough to produce a clear victory. Remarkably, despite the upheaval, one of the most talented women of the Middle Ages, Eleonora d'Arborea (1347\u20131404), was able to flourish both in government and in science. Wife of a Genoese, and mother of successive Sardinian judges, she defended her birthright with spirit both against Aragon and against local republicans. She was an unlikely pioneer of ornithology and bird-protection \u2013 the _falco eleonora_ is named in her honour \u2013 and she is remembered as the author of a famous law code, the _Carta de Logu_ , which remained in force from 1395 to 1861.\n\nThe death of Pedro IV in 1387 marked the culmination of a century-long period of evolution in the institutions of the Crown of Aragon. The monarchy, the administration and the political culture of the state had all been forced to respond to the growing 'empire', and all had been systematically transformed. The 'Arago-Catalan Court', as one historian calls it, provided the key to 'the rise of administrative kingship'. The Royal Chancery, the 'King's Memory', kept copies of all laws and letters, leaving a vast store of documentary treasures in Barcelona's _Arxiu de la Corona d'Arago_. Its paper-based technology can be traced to Jaime the Conqueror's capture of Europe's first Muslim-owned paper factory at Xativa in Valencia. The Royal Treasury, the 'King's Purse', kept detailed, daily records of all financial transactions. And the Royal Household, the 'King's Body', revealed 'a discreet society' of royal relatives, specialized bureaucrats and highly trained servants, who ran the state. One scholar's conclusion, which seems to regret the polity's ultimate demise, is unnecessarily pessimistic:\n\n> The question might be asked... whether an examination of the changes within the administrative system [of the Crown of Aragon] might not be an exercise in futility. After all, [the system] left few lasting traces... But its ultimate lack of success does not affect its value... We have witnessed the truth that modernisation, no matter how visionary, is not enough to guarantee the survival of the state.\n\nIn the 1350s Pedro IV had lined up against Castile in the so-called 'War of the Two Peters', whose causes have long since been forgotten. By the late fourteenth century, Iberia was moving towards a series of dynastic disasters which would culminate simultaneously. The ruling houses of Trast\u00e1mara in Castile and of Barcelona in the kingdom-county were already intermarried, yet by the turn of the century each was eyeing up the other's uncertain prospects, as a long minority in Castile combined with a paralysing interregnum in Aragon to create a knot of problems of mind-bending complexity. The resulting convulsions continued for decades until the two houses finally united for good in the epoch-making marriage of 1469.\n\nIn Castile, the crisis began in 1406 with the premature death of King Henry III El Doliente, 'the Sufferer', whose son and heir was barely one year old. The ensuing regency was presided over by two co-regents: Henry's widow, Catherine of Lancaster, and his younger brother, Fernando d'Antequera, who had earned the sobriquet thanks to his victory over the Moors in Andalusia. The arrangement involved Aragon because Fernando and his late brother were both sons of Eleanor of Aragon, daughter of Pedro IV and Eleanour of Sicily.\n\nIn Aragon, at exactly the same time, a parallel crisis was precipitated by the death of the royal heir apparent, who had been ruling in Sicily. The king himself, Martin I El Humano, 'the Humane' \u2013 the last royal descendant of Count Wilfred the Hairy \u2013 lived on for a further four years, but the ruling house had run out of male issue. In 1410, when the king followed his son to an early grave, there was no obvious successor. No fewer than six candidates vied for the throne. They placed their claims before the assembled representatives of Aragon, Barcelona and Valencia, but no decision was reached. Then, a commission of nine notables sought to find a resolution, and an eventual winner emerged at the so-called Compromise of Caspe. The commissioners' choice was momentous, not to say adventurous, for it fell on none other than Fernando d'Antequera, infante and regent of Castile \u2013 a man who spoke no Catalan, and whose personal estates lay in southern Spain. Yet the winner proved his mettle, defeating his most recalcitrant rival, the count of Urgell, in battle at Montearagon near Huesca, and quickly restoring stability. For an interval, the affairs of both kingdoms were entrusted to the same person.\n\nFernando I, king of Aragon (r. 1412\u201316), known in Barcelona as 'Ferran d'Antequera', was a prudent administrator and forceful politician. His most important achievement was to press successfully for the deposition of the Aragonese antipope, Benedict XIII, thereby ending the Great Schism of the Western Church. Most importantly, he was blessed with an ample supply of sons. The two older ones, Alfonso and Juan, would succeed him in turn. His regal style, as recorded in a document of 1413, reads: ' _Ferdinandus, Dei Gratia Rex Aragonum, Sicilie, Valencie, Maioricarum, Sardiniae et Corsice, Comes Barchinone, Dux Athenarum et Neopatriae, ac etiam Comes Rossilonis et Ceritaniae_ ' ('Fernando, by the Grace of God king of Aragon, Sicily, Valencia, Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica, count of Barcelona, duke of Athens and Neopatria, and also count of Roussillon and Cerdagne'). Needless to say, several of the titles were redundant.\n\nAt this juncture, a clear head is necessary to disentangle the multiple coincidences of names. Fernando's nephew, the boy-king of Castile, and Fernando's second son shared the same Christian name, and both were destined to rule their respective kingdoms for long periods under the same designation of Juan II. Juan II of Castile (r. 1406\u201354) is generally regarded as feeble-minded. His cousin, Juan II of Aragon (r. 1458\u201379), was intemperate. To cap it all, in order to perpetuate the intimate relations of the courts of Toledo and Barcelona, the sister of Juan II of Castile was married off to Alfonso of Aragon, while the sister of Juan II of Aragon married Juan II of Castile. Both of these brides were called Maria; they were first cousins, and each of them married a first cousin. After their marriages, Princess Maria of Castile became Queen Maria of Aragon, and Maria of Aragon became Maria of Castile. The phrase 'keeping it within the family' gains new significance.\n\nThe Crown of Aragon escaped from this tangled web of consanguinity by an agreement of mutual convenience between Fernando I's two sons. Soon after their father died in 1416, Alfonso, his successor, decided to sail away and to concentrate his career on Aragon's overseas territories and would shortly turn his attentions to Naples. Juan, the younger brother, was left at home as lieutenant-general and effective ruler of the kingdom-county. If one adds the thirty-seven years of Juan's lieutenant-generalcy to the twenty-one years of his reign in his own right, one finds that he ruled longer than any other Aragonese monarch.\n\nJuan II's long rule, however, was not particularly felicitous. He embroiled his subjects in a wearying saga of spats, wars and feuds that render his sobriquet of 'the Great' a mystery. Having married a Navarran princess, he spent fifty years as the effective ruler of the Kingdom of Navarre _iure uxoris_ , but neglecting his other duties. In the 1450s, he was totally absorbed by a Navarrese civil war and by a vicious vendetta against his elder son, whom he had appointed viceroy in Barcelona. In the 1460s, he faced a ten-year Catalan revolt, and in the 1470s pursued an ill-judged war against Louis XI of France.\n\nThe one favourable element in his reign lay in the continuation of close ties between Aragon and Castile. The two branches of the Trast\u00e1mara clan co-operated discreetly to keep the family fortunes afloat, and together, they weighed down on the dwindling power of the Moors in Granada. The culmination of their plans was achieved on 19 October 1469 at Valladolid, where Fernando, the younger son of Juan II of Aragon, was joined in wedlock to Isabella, the only daughter of Juan II of Castile. They are known to posterity as 'Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs' (see below). The two principal kingdoms of Iberia were moving ever closer.\n\nDuring the long, strife-filled decades of the fifteenth century, the ramshackle structures of the Crown of Aragon were undoubtedly weakened, further; the heartland increasingly lost a firm hold on its overseas dependencies. Alfonso V (r. 1416\u201358), king of Sicily by hereditary right and, from 1421, the designated heir to the Kingdom of Naples, emerged as one of the most resplendent princes of the early Renaissance. Surrounded by an inimitable mixture of artists, soldiers of fortune, men of letters, architects and ambitious Aragonese courtiers, he spent his time fighting, feuding, feasting and forging his reputation as 'the Magnanimous'. During his reign Corsica was captured, and Naples conquered.\n\nIn theory, Corsica had formed part of the Aragonese Kingdom of Sardinia from the days of Pope Boniface. In practice, encouraged by Genoa, it had rejected Aragon's advances for more than a century. Alfonso V of Aragon personally led the expedition which conquered Corsica in 1420. Reducing the fortress of Bonifacio by siege, he briefly established a regime headed by a local viceroy. In 1453, however, unable to defend his acquisition, he handed it back to the Genoese in return for a loan from the Banco di San Giorgio. Surprisingly, the brief Aragonese presence was sufficient to introduce the symbol of the 'Moor's Head' which later emerged as Corsica's national emblem.\n\nThe Kingdom of Naples \u2013 that is, the part of the original Kingdom of Sicily that had stayed in Angevin hands after 1282 \u2013 was the largest and most populous state in medieval Italy, occupying the whole of the southern half of the peninsula from the frontier of the Romagna to the heel of 'the boot'. Its territory consisted of six modern regions \u2013 Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata and Calabria \u2013 and coincided very closely with what Romans and northern Italians call _il Mezzogiorno_ , the Midi, or 'the land of the noonday sun'. Because the Angevins were papal clients, it was also a traditional protectorate of the papacy.\n\nFor 150 years after the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the Angevin monarchs had held on to their Neapolitan inheritance. Their readiness to fight their own Angevin relatives was only exceeded by their determination to exclude their Aragonese rivals. There were two episodes of acute crisis. Both featured heirless queens \u2013 Joanna I (r. 1343\u201382) and Joanna II (r. 1414\u201335) \u2013 and both possessed a specifically Aragonese angle.\n\nJoanna I imported four husbands, including Jaime IV, pretender to the throne of Mallorca, but none of them brought stability. Joanna II reigned over a kingdom rent by violence and scandal. Her first husband, a Habsburg, left her, and the second soon fled in fear of his life. The queen was then free to have herself crowned as sole monarch and to rule in league with successive lovers. The one that lasted longest, Giovanni Caracciolo, known as 'Sergianni', was the wealthiest of her subjects and an inveterate intriguer. Before being stabbed to death, he was a virtual dictator.\n\nLike her earlier namesake, however, Joanna II was dogged not simply by the lack of a child and of scruples, but also by a congenital inability to stick with a decision. She designated in turn no fewer than four men as her official heir. In 1420, when the pope gave his support to an Angevin to be her successor at Naples, the queen promptly turned to Alfonso V of Aragon as counter-heir. Alfonso invaded, captured Sergianni, and was besieging the royal palace of Castel Capuano when the queen again changed her mind, repudiated him, and reverted to the pope's original candidate. _La regin' \u00e8 mobile_. Later, Joanna chose another Angevin, Ren\u00e9 d'Anjou, count of Provence, to take his place.\n\nIn the two ensuing wars of the Neapolitan succession, 1420\u201324 and 1435\u201343, the fighting spread far and wide. In 1424 Alfonso's imminent victory in Naples was interrupted when he was summoned back to Barcelona to handle a crisis with Castile, sacking Marseille on his roundabout route home. In the second war, Alfonso was defeated at sea by the Genoese, taken prisoner, handed over to the Sforza family of Milan, and eventually ransomed. In the middle phase, when Ren\u00e9 d'Anjou was installed in Naples, Alfonso set up a strong naval base at Gaeta, but was repeatedly rebuffed on land. In the final phase, he successfully picked off all of the kingdom's peripheral regions, reconciled himself to the papacy, and, by making decisive use of his formidable artillery train, slowly surrounded his prize. In June 1442 Ren\u00e9 fled, and Alfonso finally entered Naples in style. He cherished it above all his other possessions. He ruled over both kingdoms of Sicily, thereby creating in personal union an early emanation of the joint _Regnum utriusque Siciliae_ , the 'Kingdom of the Two Sicilies'. For the next sixty years, Naples was tightly held in the hands either of Alfonso or of his sons.\n\nNaples in its Aragonese period ranked high in both size and opulence among Europe's port cities. Its history went back to ancient Greek times, and it served as the outlet for a region in which Greek-speaking communities survived into modern times. Its hinterland consists of the productive plain of Campagna; and its approach from the sea, with the cone of Mount Vesuvius in view, is spectacular. 'See Naples and die' is a phrase attributed to Goethe, but it is a sentiment that fits Alfonso the Magnanimous perfectly. Many of the urban landmarks were of great antiquity, but that did not prevent the incoming Aragonese from altering or embellishing them. The Greek-built fortress of Castel d'Ovo, for example, which guards the old harbour, had been strongly fortified by the Normans. The Aragonese pulled down the tall Norman towers. The cathedral of San Gennaro, patron of the city, stands on the site of a temple of Apollo; the Aragonese lavishly decorated some of the chapels. The pine-wooded promontory of Pizzofalcone (whence the breath-taking panorama across the bay to Vesuvius) had hosted the villas of the rich and powerful for nearly 2,000 years. The Aragonese simply joined the queue.\n\nMany of the most prominent buildings dated from Angevin times. The university had been founded in the thirteenth century. The castle of St Elmo, the _Belforte_ , had overlooked the city from an anterior ridge since 1343. The monastery of San Domenico Maggiore, which contains the cell of Thomas Aquinas, was completely restored in 1445. The imposing Castel Nuovo, constructed during the War of the Sicilian Vespers, protected the harbour. A triumphal arch in white marble was placed incongruously between the two round towers of the fa\u00e7ade by the Aragonese, and dedicated to Alfonso the Magnanimous.\n\nThe city's prominence in the late fifteenth century owed much to the final phase of commericial growth prior to the long recession caused by Ottoman expansion. Naples joined Palermo, Malta, Valencia, Barcelona, Palma, Corsica and Sardinia in a naval and mercantile network which dominated the western Mediterranean.\n\nAlfonso's coat of arms and regal style well illustrate the complexities of his position. An inscription on his triumphal arch read: 'ALFONSO REX HISPANUS SICULUS ITALICUS PIUS CLEMENS INVICTUS'. He was claiming, extravagantly, to be the 'king of Spain, Sicily and Italy'. It displays the simple arms of Aragon surmounted by a cannon and two griffins. More usually, his arms appear as Aragon quartered with Naples, in which the Neapolitan element, reflecting the city's past, contains the emblems of Hungary, Anjou and Jerusalem. In one of the last documents of his reign, dating from March 1458, his full regal style exceeded even his father's: _'Nos Alfonsus D.G. Rex Aragonum, Siciliae Citra et Ultra Farum, Valentiae, Hierusalem, Hungariae, Maioricarum, Sardiniae et Corsicae, Comes Barchinone, Dux Athenarum et Neopatriae ac etium Comes Rossilionus et Ceritaniae_ ' ('We Alfonso, by God's Grace king of Aragon, of Sicily both before and beyond the lighthouse, of Valencia, Jerusalem, Hungary, Mallorca, Sardinia and Corsica, count of Barcelona, duke of Athens and Neopatria, and also count of Roussillon and Cerdagne').\n\nAlfonso's role as patron of the arts is the subject of differing opinions. 'No man of his day', wrote a later British consul at Barcelona, 'had a larger share of the quality called by the Italians \" _virt\u00f9_ \".' He set his courtiers an example by carrying the works of Livy and Caesar on his campaigns, and by halting his army in respect for Virgil's birthplace. He was said to have been cured from illness by listening to Latin poetry, and the sycophants likened him to Seneca or to Trajan (both of whom were Iberian). On entering Naples, he set to work to turn it into a fitting rival for Florence or Venice. His sculptured portrait, attributed to Mino da Fiesole, hangs in the Louvre. Overall, however, the achievements of Naples' _Quattrocentro Aragonese_ were relatively modest, especially under Alfonso's successors. According to Giorgio Vasari, 'the Neapolitan nobles value a horse more than a painter'.\n\nAlfonso's role as power broker was undeniably significant. Though Aragon had been an international player for two centuries, it rose in Alfonso's time to the first rank. An equal partner in the Iberian conglomerate, it also controlled a large slice of the Italian peninsula, and could exert great influence on the papacy. Possession of all the major islands of the western and central Mediterranean gave it an unrivalled hold on trade and shipping. Indeed, after Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, it was forced to take the lead in challenging Ottoman power. Alfonso was the chief patron of Skanderbeg, the Albanian warlord battling the Turks in the Balkans, and he even contacted distant Coptic Ethiopia with a view to forming an anti-Muslim alliance.\n\nIn the opinion of Britain's leading historian of the medieval Mediterranean, Alfonso was a man of 'imperial vision' whose reign 'marks the high point of Aragonese influence', both 'within Spain and within the Mediterranean'. Indeed, some of his plans which did not materialize were at least as significant as those which did. In 1448, for example, he captured the statelet of Piombino, including the island of Elba, aiming thereby to exercise greater control over Genoese shipping lanes, but he had also carved out a stepping stone into nearby Tuscany. If Alfonso had replaced the Medici in Florence at the height of the Renaissance, his name would be in every history book. As it was, all the other powers in Italy united against him and he was forced to desist. Even so, the scale of his ambition is clear. To a degree rarely admitted, he was the role model for his nephew, Fernando El Cat\u00f3lico, who is conventionally given the sole credit for widening Aragon's horizons.\n\nOn Alfonso's death in 1458, Naples did not pass, like Sicily and the rest of the Crown of Aragon, to Alfonso's brother Juan II. In the first instance, it was bequeathed to Alfonso's bastard son, Fernando I, known as Don Ferrante (r. 1458\u201394). It then passed successively to Don Ferrante's son Alfonso II and grandson Fernando or Ferdinand II, and then to Don Ferrante's second son Frederico. After a brief French interlude it finally fell in 1504, like the other Crown lands, to the 'Catholic Monarchs'.\n\nBy far the longest of these Neapolitan reigns was that of the much underrated Don Ferrante, who presided over the kingdom for nearly forty years. Like his father, he possessed an inimitable mixture of courage, artistic gifts and Machiavellian ruthlessness. He also possessed a wife, Isabella of Taranto, whose dowry brought in a treasure chest of feudal claims and titles. As a result, he styled himself 'king of Jerusalem' as well as king of Naples, asserting authority over vengeful Angevins, rebellious barons and Turkish intruders alike. Don Ferrante's record bore stains and setbacks, not least the loss of Otranto to the Turks in 1480. Yet his survival during the international wars of the 1490s was proof of remarkable resilience.\n\nNothing better illustrates the international prominence of Aragon at this time than the extraordinary careers which turned an obscure Aragonese family into a household name. Borja is a small town in the province of Zaragoza, and a merchant family of that provenance was long established in Valencia. A law professor from the University of Lleida, Alfons de Borja (1378\u20131458), made a brilliant reputation for himself in Aragon's diplomatic service, and, thanks to his success in reconciling his master with the pope at the Council of Basle (1431\u20139), received a cardinal's hat. In Rome, as Cardinal 'di Borgia', he replicated the same success within the Church hierarchy, and was eventually elected pontiff as Pope Callistus III in 1455. Legend holds that he excommunicated the comet, later known as Halley's, which blazed through the skies in 1456. He quashed the judgment against Joan of Arc, and he filled Rome with Aragonese officials: his death in 1458, in the same month as Alfonso V's, sparked a riot against the hated 'Catalans'.\n\nThe upward mobility of the Borgias, however, did not stop with his death. Pope Callistus had raised two of his Valencian nephews to the cardinalcy, thereby creating a powerful Borgia faction, notorious for its corruption and nepotism. One of these, Roderic Llan\u00e7ol de Borja (1431\u20131503), gained a grip on Church administration under five popes, and fathered a bevy of bastards whose interests and marriages he promoted with undivided zeal. In 1492, at a conclave swamped in gold ducats, he secured the throne of St Peter for himself, and as Alexander VI headed the papacy during its most unholy era. His pontificate was marked by the French wars in Italy, by the rise and fall of Savonarola in Florence, by zealous exploitation of the international indulgence scam (which triggered Luther's Reformation), and, in 1493, by the Bull of Donation which divided the New World between Spain and Portugal. Of his children, Giovanni, duke of Gandia, was assassinated; the much maligned Lucrezia was the source of lurid tales; and Cesare Borgia was said to be the model for Machiavelli's _Prince_.\n\nIn the conventional view, the unified Kingdom of Spain was born at the end of the fifteenth century through the personal union of Ferdinand and Isabella. Thanks to that union, the ascendant Castilians are said to have exerted a dominant position over their declining Aragonese partners. This reductive interpretation ignores both the incremental steps whereby union was achieved and the very complex relationship between Castile and Aragon over many decades. From an Aragonese perspective, though the Castilians took over Aragon in 1412, the Aragonese establishment gained ascendancy over Castile in the last quarter of the century.\n\nAt the dynastic level, three distinct steps can be observed. In Step One, following the installation of Fernando d'Antequera in Aragon in 1412, two branches of the Castilian House of Trast\u00e1mara ruled Castile and Aragon in parallel. In Step Two, which lasted for a quarter of a century after the marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469 and the subsequent accession of each of the spouses to their respective kingdoms, Castile and Aragon were ruled in tandem by co-monarchs forming a single political team. In Step Three, which began with Isabella's death in 1504, the widowed Ferdinand added the regency of Castile to his existing duties as the hereditary king of Aragon. (He was able to do so because the only surviving child of the Catholic Monarchs, their daughter Juana, had been judged insane, and incarcerated.) From that point on, he and his successors reigned over the two kingdoms in full personal union. But was Fernando El Cat\u00f3lico\/Ferran El Catolic Aragonese or Castilian? The answer is that he was both. He was a prince of Aragon of Castilian descent, who reigned for thirty-seven years in Aragon and for forty-six years in Aragon and Castile jointly.\n\nThe prospects of the young couple had improved only gradually after their marriage in 1469. They were both distressed by the many pains of their parents' generation, and they set their minds on the benefits of unification both in political and in religious affairs. They had signed a prenuptial arrangement promising exact equality, their motto being ' _Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Ysabel E Fernando_ ' (Isabella and Ferdinand, it's all the same). Their device, drawn from their initials, was the Y(oke) and the F(asces) \u2013 the ancient rods of authority. Following the death of Isabella's half-brother in 1474, they became joint monarchs of Castile, but not without their being denounced as usurpers. After the death of Ferdinand's father in 1479, they added Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Sicily and Naples to their portfolio.\n\nBut for ten years, from 1462 to 1472, the kingdom-county was wracked by civil war in which King Juan II battled against three successive pretenders: Enrique of Castile, El Impotente, Pedro V, constable of Portugal, and Ren\u00e9 d'Anjou, count of Provence. Apart from being the hereditary count of Provence Ren\u00e9 d'Anjou (1409\u201380) was duke of Lorraine, titular king of Jerusalem and the chief rival of the Aragonese in Naples. For twenty years, after being ousted from Naples by Alfonso V, he was a redundant royal looking for better employment. Fortune finally smiled on him in the 1460s. The nobles of Catalonia had expelled Juan II from the country, quickly followed by two hopeful 'anti-kings'. Ren\u00e9 was the third anti-king to be invited to take the throne. In practice, his 'reign' was a non-starter, and after sending his son to Barcelona to test the political climate, he sensibly stayed away. He retired to Aix-en-Provence where he devoted himself to the arts and to good works. He is known in Proven\u00e7al and French history as 'Le Bon Roi Ren\u00e9'. Memorial fountains have been erected to his name both in Aix and in Naples, but not in Barcelona. His tomb stands in the cathedral of Angers, the cradle of Angevin destiny.\n\nThe troubles of the 1460s, often labelled the 'Catalan Crisis', have sometimes given rise to generalizations about 'the unexpected eclipse of the Crown of Aragon', about 'a society in retreat', and about Castile and Aragon being 'unequal partners'. These judgements tell only one side of the story. There certainly was a period of vicious internal strife, and Barcelona in particular experienced steep economic decline. But Castile was in uproar no less than Catalonia, and, within the Aragonese orbit, the decline of Barcelona was more than offset by the 'golden age' of Valencia and by the splendour of Naples. Commercial patterns seem to have adapted well to a fluid political environment. Catalan and Valencian merchants swarmed into Naples, and Aragonese traders protected by the Catalan Company retained an emporium as far away as the island of Aegina in Greece. The kingdom-county as a whole was by no means moribund. The leading specialist of the subject concludes, 'It was the sixteenth and not the fifteenth century that saw the decline of the Crown of Aragon.'\n\nAragon's grip on its 'empire' started to slip after the turn of the century. Conditions in Italy had been transformed by the entry of French troops into Naples in 1495. Yet a papal coalition against the French and two royal deaths opened the way for Fernando El Cat\u00f3lico's intervention. Based at the time in Sicily, his first thought was to partition the Neapolitan kingdom as a means of halting the French. But the victory of his general, Gonzalo de C\u00f3rdoba, on the Garigliano (1502), rendered concessions unnecessary, and Naples then followed Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Sicily and Sardinia into united Spanish rule.\n\nIt was the Aragonese pope, Alexander VI, who dubbed Ferdinand and Isabella _Los Reyes Cat\u00f3licos_. The epithet was well deserved. In 1474, they had subjected their joint kingdoms to the _Santa Hermandad_ , or Holy Brotherhood, a system of extra-judicial political and religious police. In 1482 they launched the all-Spanish Inquisition under the Dominican Tom\u00e1s de Torquemada (1420\u201398). In 1492, after the fall of Granada, they expelled many Jews and Moors who refused to convert to Catholicism. Spain's religious zeal stood at the opposite end of the scale to that of the Vatican. Nonetheless, the apparently wholesale expulsions of non-Christians were not unqualified. The policy aimed above all to separate converts from the unconverted, and many _conversos_ continued to flourish. Having resisted conversion, many Muslim communities even stayed in place for a century and more. Luis de Sant\u00e1ngel, a Jewish _converso_ who had bankrolled Christopher Columbus, hired the Genoese ships which carried the expellees from the ports of Valencia and Catalonia. The great majority of them sailed to Naples, where they were welcomed by Don Ferrante and settled down in the Mezzogiorno, still under Aragonese rule.\n\nThe early years of Ferdinand and Isabella's joint reign were marked by the last Iberian crusade against the Emirate of Granada, and by the expedition of Christopher Columbus 'to the Indies'. Both were completed in 1492\u20133. Yet there was no move towards closer union. Indeed, the Castilians jealously guarded their monopoly on contacts with the Americas. The most important development in the kingdom-county was the establishment of a Council of Aragon to co-ordinate the affairs of the Aragonese 'empire'. The Crowns of Aragon and Castile were kept strictly apart. (One may compare Aragon's position to that of Scotland after the union of the Crowns with England in 1603; the monarch had left for greater things, but the 'auld kingdom' remained intact.)\n\nFerdinand, as king of Aragon, was also responsible for launching Aragonese historiography. The _Cr\u00f3nica de Arag\u00f3n_ (1499) of Gualberto Fabricio de Vagad was commissioned by him; Lucio Marineo S\u00edculo's _De Aragoniae Regibus et eorum rebus gestis libri V_ (1509) provided a multi-volume tour of Aragon's past, real and imaginary, from the legendary eighth-century monarchs of Sobrarbe to the death of Alfonso V in 1458.\n\nFrom 1494, Ferdinand was hard pressed to defend his dynasty. Carefully laid plans were going awry. Three of the royal couple's five children, including the crown prince, predeceased their mother. So, too, did their eldest grandson and heir. The fourth child, Juana la Loca, was mentally disturbed; and the fifth, Catalina, headed to disaster in England as 'Catharine of Aragon'. An ingenious solution was found by recognizing Juana's Habsburg husband, Philip the Fair of Burgundy, as heir apparent to the Castilian throne. But in September 1506 he died as well. In an ironical twist of fate, a few months before Isabella's death in November 1504, she and Ferdinand had been chosen to be joint emperors of the (defunct) Byzantine Empire.\n\nYet the worst anxieties were misplaced. The torrent of premature deaths did not carry off everyone. Despite Juana's mental illness, two of her sons, grandsons of _Los Reyes Cat\u00f3licos_ , Carlos\/Charles and Fernando\/Ferdinand, grew to manhood. Both faced dazzling futures at the head of the Habsburg world. On the death of Philip the Fair, Habsburg Burgundy had passed to Carlos\/Charles, his eldest son, who in 1516 also succeeded his grandfather in Castile and Aragon. Three years later he was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V and became known to history as the 'emperor of the World'.\n\nSome people find the intricacies of dynastic politics tedious. To the medieval mind, they held prime importance. All the key decisions of Charles V's reign were underlain by the sheer unwieldiness of his inheritance. The first, in 1521, was to appoint his brother Ferdinand as acting emperor in Vienna; the second, in 1555, was to divide the Habsburg lands permanently and to limit the rule of his son Philip to the Spanish territories. But possession of large parts of the Americas gave the Castilian element greater weight in the conglomerate than all the other lands put together. In 1516, when welcoming their presumptive co-king, the _Cortes_ of Castile made sure that Aragon was formally excluded from the Americas. This selfish disposition was never rescinded.\n\nIn succession to Charles V, who abdicated in 1556, four kings from the House of Habsburg mounted the throne:\n\n> Felipe II (Philip II), the Prudent (1556\u201398)\n> \n> Felipe III (Philip III), the Pious (1598\u20131621)\n> \n> Felipe IV (Philip IV), the Great (1621\u201365)\n> \n> Carlos II (Charles II), the Bewitched (1665\u20131700)\n\nAragon made trouble for all of them. Philip II was the first in history to use the title of 'king of Spain'.\n\nOld divisions persisted. Castile and Aragon were still in personal but not constitutional union when their king was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Yet the election did not make them a dependency of the Empire: they remained, like Hungary, in the category of the emperor's non-imperial territories.\n\nAfter 1555, however, Aragon's predicament changed once again. Indeed, as the Kingdom of Spain took flight, many historians talk as if Aragon's story had finished. Such was not the case. The kingdom-county lived on: it kept its separate laws and institutions, its languages and traditions, and its cultural and commercial connections with its former 'empire'. And it repeatedly rebelled against Castilian presumptions.\n\nOf Aragon's Italian possessions only Sardinia and Sicily stayed under direct Aragonese control. Malta and Gozo were donated to the Knights of St John in 1530. Sardinia, 'the pearl of the Tyrrhenian Sea', escaped Spain's close attention except as a naval base from which the Iberian wool trade could be protected. Sicily stayed cut off from the rest of Italy. Indeed, for a long time to come, Sicilians probably had more in common with Catalans and Aragonese than with Piedmontese, Lombardi or Tuscans.\n\nMalta, too, despite the severance of its direct link, continued to exhibit strong Aragonese influences. From start to finish, Aragon made a prominent contribution to the Hospitallers, whose religious ethos, seafaring prowess and crusading traditions struck a common chord. The Aragonese formed one of the eight _langues_ or 'nations' into which the knights were organized; the Auberge d'Aragon stands to this day as one of the grand edifices of Valletta; and eight out of twenty-eight Grand Masters of the Order in the Maltese period came from Aragon; the escutcheon of Juan de Homedes (r. 1536\u201353) is carved into the keystone arch of the city gate of Mdina. Most curiously, the centrepiece hanging above the altar in the chapel of the Langue d'Aragon in Valetta, a painting by Mattia Preti, shows a mounted St George slaying the Devil on the background of a medieval battle. The picture was long assumed to portray a battle-scene from the Holy Land. Recent conservation work, however, has revealed that it portrays the victory of El Puig, inflicted on the Moors in 1234 in the region south of Valencia. In other words, Preti had been commissioned to illustrate an episode in the foundation myth not of the Hospitallers, but of the Crown of Aragon.\n\nThe separate identity of the Crown of Aragon was long preserved within Spain. Despite the dominance of Castile and the stream of centralizing measures flowing from the new capital in Madrid, Aragonese particularism continued to make itself felt right up to the early eighteenth century. Though the _Cortes_ could only be convened by the king, the nobles maintained control over the _Diputaci\u00f3n_ , a representative body for preparing petitions, and the chief legal officer, the justiciar, could not be removed on the king's order. The _Fueros_ , the corpus of Aragon's traditional laws and customs, was considered sacrosanct, and internal customs posts enforced the protective tariffs of Aragon-Catalonia's commerce. Under Philip II and his successors, the lands and people of the Crown remained proud and formally distinct until the day of its extinction.\n\nReligion provided a source of regular trouble. The Spanish kings were eager to enforce religious uniformity, and remained dutiful supporters of the Holy Inquisition, which Ferdinand and Isabella had founded. For practical purposes, however, the Inquisition could not enforce its rulings in Aragon. The nobility was temperamentally indisposed to help; and many dissidents and suspects were able to evade investigation. At least one-third of the population of Valencia were _moriscos_ , Moorish converts, whose conversion to Catholicism was barely skin-deep. In the eyes of Madrid, where central power now resided, the failure of the Inquisition to make headway against them was proof of Aragon's unreliability.\n\nIn 1582 royal troops were sent to Valencia without local agreement, and in 1589 the same thing happened in Ribagor\u00e7a. But Philip II's displeasure with the Crown of Aragon came to a head through the obstinacy of a royal secretary of Catalan origin called Antonio Perez. Perez, facing a dubious charge of murder, fled prison in Madrid and on reaching Aragonese territory promptly appealed to the protection of the _Fueros_. In particular, he claimed the right of a legal procedure, the _firma de manifestaci\u00f3n._ The justiciar, Juan de Luna, ruled that Perez could not be extradited to Madrid. The viceroy was killed during violent demonstrations in Barcelona, and the king's patience snapped. An army of 12,000 men marched into Aragon. Perez was smuggled across the frontier into B\u00e9arn. The justiciar and twenty-one other officials were executed. The king then hypocritically reconfirmed the _Fueros_ , and a sullen Aragon returned to the _status quo ante_.\n\nThe subsequent experience of the Crown lands within the Spanish state was characterized by a long, uneasy truce punctuated by three more violent episodes. The first insurrection, known to Castilians as the 'Catalan Revolt' (1640\u201352) and to the Catalans either as the _Corpus de Sang_ (because it broke out on the day of Corpus Christi) or as _La Guerra dels Segadors_ , the 'War of the Reapers' (because the first person killed by the soldiery was an innocent reaper), was provoked by a prolonged period of oppressive taxation and by the forcible billeting of troops in the countryside. Local disturbances drew in a French army, which occupied northern Catalonia for years, and the resultant conflict cost Spain an enormous haemorrhage of blood and treasure over two decades. It was terminated by the Treaty of the Pyrenees (1659), when Rossell\u00f3 and east Cerdanya were ceded to France as the price of peace.\n\nThe second insurrection, between 1687 and 1697, was named the 'Revolt of the _Barretinas'_ after the high-crowned berets worn by Catalan peasants. The complaints were much as before, but this time did not involve the towns and cities. Tensions rose after a peasant mob demolished the small port of Mataro, and three members of the _Diputaci\u00f3n_ were arrested in Barcelona for daring to lodge a protest against official reactions. French agents toured the villages, a rural militia was raised, military support arrived from Roussillon, and in the culminating phase Barcelona was ineffectively surrounded. Years of local raids and vicious reprisals preceded an inconclusive stalemate.\n\nThe third insurrection, between 1700 and 1713, erupted in the context of the Franco-Spanish War over the Spanish Succession. Aragon, Valencia and Catalonia all declared in favour of the Austrian contender, 'Don Carlos' von Habsburg, and organized a self-governing federation. In their own eyes, they had taken to arms in defence of their ancient liberties. In the eyes of Madrid and of Versailles, they had mounted an intolerable defiance of monarchical rule. French and Spanish armies combined to reduce the rebels to obedience. Valencia was reconquered in 1707, and Aragon in 1708. Barcelona held out through two terrible sieges until September 1714.\n\nBy then, further resistance was pointless, and compromise was impossible. The Treaty of Utrecht signalling the general European peace had already been signed. 'Don Carlos' had left for Vienna. The French candidate, Philippe de Bourbon, was already installed in Madrid as King Felipe V, and his officials were busy preparing the _Nueva Planta_ or 'New Order', whereby uniform Castilian laws and practices would be introduced throughout Spain. The Catalan separatists were totally isolated and capitulation was unavoidable. The French marshal-duke of Berwick marched in to install a military government. The pillars of the Crown's autonomy, the _Diputaci\u00f3n_ and the _Generalitat_ of Catalonia, together with the mint and the university, were closed down; the system of provincial tariffs was abolished. Leaders of the 'rebellion' were executed or exiled, and a Spanish captain-general took command. The Catalan language was banned. Henceforth Castilian customs, Castilian speech and Castilian rule were to enjoy a monopoly. The name of Aragon remained as a little more than a Spanish administrative unit. The dying embers of the Crown of Aragon were extinguished for ever.\n\n##### III\n\nThe 'Crown of Aragon' has not fared well on the fields of remembrance. Ultimately a loser in the competition with Castile, and a mere ghost in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when most foundational historical works were compiled, it is a frequent absentee in the resultant narratives. It tends to be presented as 'a historical region of Spain', not, like its sometime counterpart, Portugal, as a sovereign state. As often as not, its legacy is treated with indifference, if not with hostility, and it is left as a codicil to the main Castilian story. Most Spaniards today have lost all sense of the Crown of Aragon's separate and extraordinary past.\n\nThe attitudes of those who might seemingly have the strongest interest in the subject give the greatest cause for reflection. For today's Aragonese and Catalans do not share a common outlook; the historic marriage of their two countries has dissolved into mental divorce. The Aragonese \u2013 inhabitants of the 'Autonomous Spanish Community' of Aragon \u2013 do not dance the _Joca Aragonese_ in order to stress the historic link with Catalonia: quite the opposite. And for many Catalans, the very name of Aragon sticks in the throat. In place of the 'kingdom-county', monuments and textbooks in Catalonia refer to the 'medieval Catalan state', or to the 'Catalan Empire' or sometimes to some unidentified 'kingdom'. The concept of a multinational 'Crown of Aragon' is distinctly out of fashion. In academic circles, it is often replaced by the dubious neologism of the 'Catalan-Aragonese Federation'. Modern politics, in fact, plagues almost all attempts to recall the Crown of Aragon with accuracy and affection. The dual kingdom-county, with its long chain of dependencies, lived and died long before the age of modern nationalism; and its ethos was ill matched to modern enthusiasms. Its memory has not been espoused by Spanish nationalism, by Catalan nationalism, nor even by provincial Aragonese particularism.\n\nMemories of the former Crown of Aragon have in effect been carefully compartmentalized. People remember only what they want to remember. They suffer from a lack of benevolent but impartial concern; and quarrels can be easily provoked. In the 1980s, for example, when the province of Aragon was seeking a new flag for the post-Franco era, it adopted a design based on the medieval standard of the Crown of Aragon, where the Cross of St George is joined by the 'four carmine bars on a field of gold'. In Zaragoza, the design no doubt felt perfectly innocent and appropriate. In Barcelona, it caused outrage. Protests and pamphlets proliferated. For, as every good Catalan knows, the 'carmine and gold' belongs exclusively to the national flag of Catalonia, the _Senyera_ , that was awarded to Wilfred the Hairy more than a thousand years ago. As the legend goes, the hirsute warrior was lying wounded on the battlefield. The Emperor Louis dipped his fingers in the count's own gore and drew four bloody stripes on the coverlet's cloth-of-gold. Aragon, at the time, had yet to be born\n\nRegional anthems aimed at restoring the identity of long neglected communities form another feature of post-Franco Spain. One might have expected a strong historical flavour, yet the lyrics adopted in provinces once belonging to the Crown of Aragon show little interest in the realities of the past. They may well be conditioned by animosities and inhibitions generated during the Civil War of 1936\u20139, and still not healed. As a result, they tend to reinforce the prevailing amnesia. In Catalonia, for example, ' _Els Segadors_ ', 'The Reapers', has been raised from a popular song to an official hymn. Composed in the nineteenth century to recall the insurrection of 1640, it breathes defiance against foreign domination, but has nothing to say about Catalonia's former Aragonese partner:\n\n> _Catalunya triomfant_\n> \n> _Tornar\u00e0 a ser rica i plena,_\n> \n> _Endarrera aquesta gent_\n> \n> _Tan ufana i tan superba_.\n> \n> _Bon cop de fal\u00e7!_\n> \n> _Bon cop de fal\u00e7_ ,\n> \n> _Defensors de la terra!_\n> \n> _Bon cop de fal\u00e7!_\n\n('Triumphant Catalonia \/ will return to wealth and plenty, \/ and will drive out those people \/ so mean and arrogant. \/ A good sickle's blow! \/ A good sickle's blow, \/ oh defenders of the land! \/ A good sickle's blow!') One suspects that the Aragonese are now subsumed among 'those mean and arrogant' people.\n\nIn the Autonomous Community of Aragon, the official _Himno_ combines an old melody with modern words, praising 'the flowers of our fields', 'the snowy peaks of our mountains', and the hopes and dreams for a future of freedom and justice. Yet its highly poetic lines contain not a single historical echo of the Crown of Aragon's ancient past:\n\n> _Luz de Arag\u00f3n, torre al viento, campana de soledad!_\n> \n> _Que tu af\u00e1n propague, r\u00edo sin frontera, tu raz\u00f3n, tu verdad!_\n> \n> _Vencedor de tanto olvido, memoria de eternidad,_\n> \n> _Pueblo del tama\u00f1o de hombres y mujeres, i Arag\u00f3n, vivir\u00e1s!_\n\n('Light of Aragon, Tower in the Wind, Bell of Solitude! \/ Your confidence will spread, a river without bounds: so, too, your reason, your truth! \/ Victor over so much oblivion, memory of eternity, \/ a people of so many men and women, Aragon, you will live!')\n\nIn Valencia, they still sing a _Himno_ which has not changed since the regional Valencian Exhibition of 1909. Many consider the words to be redundant, but a recording made in 2008 by Pl\u00e1cido Domingo in both Castilian and Valencian has restored the anthem's fortunes:\n\n> _Per ofrenar noves gl\u00f2ries a Espanya,_\n> \n> _Tots a una veu, germans, vingau._\n> \n> _Ja en el taller i en el camp remoregen_\n> \n> _C\u00e0ntics d'amor, himnes de pau!_\n> \n> _Nostra Senyera!_\n> \n> _Gl\u00f3ria a la P\u00e1tria! Visca Valencia!_\n> \n> _Visca! Visca! Visca!_\n\n('To offer up new glories to Spain \/ all with one voice, brothers, gather around. \/ In the workshops and in the fields \/ songs of love already resound, and hymns of peace. \/ Our Lady! Glory to the Fatherland, Long live Valencia! Viva! Viva! Viva!')\n\nAnd in Mallorca, the authorities have adopted a charming but incongrous song about a spider:\n\n> _La Balanguera misteriosa,_\n> \n> _Com una aranya d'art subtil,_\n> \n> _Buida que buida sa filiosa,_\n> \n> _De nostra vida treu el fil._\n> \n> _Com una parca b\u00e9 cavilla,_\n> \n> _Tixint la tela per dem\u00e0._\n> \n> _La balanguera fila, fila,_\n> \n> _La balanguera filer\u00e0._\n\n('The mysterious Balanguera, \/ like a subtle and artistic spider, \/ empties and empties her distaff, \/ and draws out the thread of our lives. \/ Like fate she ponders well, \/ weaving the cloth for tomorrow. \/ The Balanguera spins and spins, \/ the Balanguera will always spin.')\n\nThe musical landscape in Perpignan is necessarily rather different. The French Region of Languedoc-Roussillon has so far resisted the temptation of commissioning an official anthem. But several songs circulate as rousing examples of local patriotism. At _USA Perpignan_ , they roar out the lines of ' _L'Estaca_ ', 'The Stake'.* In the bars and in the backstreets of the festivals, the _Montanyes Regalades_ or the _Montanyes de Canigou_ float gently on the evening air. But the crowds predominantly speak French, and it is the French words of ' _Le Hymne \u00e0 la Catalogne_ ' that constitute the most frequent refrain:\n\n> _Perpignan, Perpignan,_\n> \n> _Chante, chante les catalanes._\n> \n> _Perpignan, Perpignan,_\n> \n> _Danse, danse la Sardane!_\n\n('Perpignan, Perpignan, \/ sing, sing to the Catalan girls. \/ Perpignan, Perpignan, \/ dance, dance the _sardane_!')\n\nSometimes, it seems, history can best be invoked by dispassionate outsiders. Concluding his description of the Crown of Aragon, a foreign scholar strikes a note of serene resignation: 'The old stones are quiet now. They tell... of fighting and protecting and exploiting: of rural toil and herding: of praying and endowing: of trading and talking, and of links and aspirations across sunny seas.'\n\n## 5\n\n## Litva\n\n_A Grand Duchy with Kings (1253\u20131795)_\n\n##### I\n\nBelarus does not attract visitors. There are so few of them that the country fails to feature in the published International Tourism Rankings. One might be tempted to think that there is little to see, nothing of interest and no history worth mentioning. Yet Belarus, which for most of the twentieth century was known to the outside world as Byelorussia, is not boring; nor is it tiny or geographically remote. Its area of 81,000 square miles is similar to that of Scotland, Kansas or Minnesota, and prior to 1991 put it in sixth position among the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union. Its population, 10.4 million in 2007, is similar to that of Belgium, Portugal or Greece, Michigan or Pennsylvania: it is only one-third the size of its southern neighbour, Ukraine, but larger than the three Baltic States put together. Since 2004 it has been bordered by three states of the European Union, which in large part are separated by Belarus from its giant eastern neighbour, Russia. The capital Miensk, or Minsk, lies on Europe's main east\u2013west railway line between Paris, Berlin and Moscow, or can be reached by direct flights from London Heathrow in around three hours.\n\nLow-lying and landlocked \u2013 surrounded by Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Ukraine and Russia \u2013 Belarus has many rivers but no mountains. Its highest point at Dzyarzhynska Hara or 'Dzherzhynsky Hill' reaches a mere 1,132 feet (346 metres). Its main physical axis runs from south-west to north-east across the great European plain and along a section of the continental divide. All the rivers above the divide, the Nyoman (Nieman) and Dvina and their tributaries, flow to the Baltic; all rivers below the divide, like the Pripyat\u2032 and Berezina, flow south towards the Dniepr and the Black Sea.\n\nThe country's problems, patently severe, can best be summarized by four 'I's \u2013 Infrastructure, Image, Irradiation and, above all, _Istoriia_. As a showpiece of the infrastructure, the Belarusian tourist industry can recommend no hotels in the higher international categories, no scenic routes served by modern roads and service stations, and no holiday resorts. Furthermore, despite some stunning tracts of primeval forest, this cannot be described as unspoiled territory.\n\nOn the surface at least, the capital Minsk is peculiarly uninteresting. It was virtually levelled in 1944 during a frontline German\u2013Soviet battle, which caused horrendous loss of life, and the ruins were then repopulated by rootless migrants, mainly Russians. Its Soviet-style urban design emphasizes extra-large boulevards with little traffic, grandiose public buildings for officialdom, and shoddy, decaying tower blocks for the populace.\n\nThe overall image of Belarus, in fact, is catastrophic. It scores lower than all other European countries in almost all fields. In the most recent (but somewhat out-of-date) Quality of Life Index available (2005), where Ireland came top and Zimbabwe bottom, Belarus occupied the 100th place out of 111. In the Corruption Percentage Index (CPI, 2007), it was 150th out of 179, and in _The Economist_ 's Democracy Index (2007), it is the only entirely European country still classified as 'Not Free'. Three-quarters of its Soviet-planned economy remains in state hands. Its population, which steadily rose in the post-war decades, is now declining. It is ruled by the pseudo-democratic dictatorship of Alexander Grigoryevich Lukashenko, which analysts place in the none too savoury company of other ex-Soviet regimes in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. The official languages are Russian and Belarusian, but the latter operates at a severe disadvantage. Lukashenko, like the rest of the ex-Soviet elite, normally speaks only Russian in public. Confusion reigns over the question whether his name should not be written and spoken in the Belarusian form of 'Alyaksandr Lukashenka'.\n\nBelarusian publicity makes no secret of the fact that the country has been blighted by the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl in April 1986. Indeed, great efforts have been made to inform the world about the damage and the costs. Chernobyl's deadly, Soviet-era reactor lies just over the border in Ukraine, but 75 per cent of the radioactive fallout drifted north, and it was Belarusian villages, Belarusian agriculture and Belarusian children which bore the brunt. The by-products of the 1986 explosion will remain active for hundreds of thousands of years. Half a century at least must pass before all fish, fungi and forest berries will be fit for human consumption. The closure of the offending reactor is nowhere in sight.\n\nThe misfortunes of Belarus, however, did not begin in 1986, but recurred with painful monotony throughout the last century. The Byelorussian National Republic (BNR) of 1918, which emerged from the collapse of the Tsarist Russian Empire, was crushed by the Bolsheviks. In the 1930s up to 60 per cent of the native intelligentsia was killed in Stalin's Purges; the mass-murder site in the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk between 1937 and 1941 has still to be properly investigated. In 1941\u20135, during the German occupation and the accompanying Holocaust, one-quarter of the entire population perished. Post-war ethnic cleansing caused the exodus of similar numbers. Soviet reconstruction was slow, and Marshall Aid was excluded. Quite apart from the terrible human costs, these multiple tragedies have resulted in many Belarusians having a weak sense of their national identity.\n\nSo 'Lukashenkism' can only be rated as the country's most recent blight; it is the product of what political scientists might call 'failed transition'. The politico-socio-economic system of the USSR collapsed in the 1990s, and was not replaced by a viable alternative; Lukashenko (b. 1954) rocketed to power by filling the vacuum. In 1991 he had been a man of purely local consequence, an ex-officer of the Soviet border guard and director of a _sovkhoz_ or 'state collective farm', but not a prominent member of the ruling Communist Party. He came to notice as the only deputy of the Byelorussian SSR's last assembly to vote against the abolition of the Soviet Union, and gained his foothold on power by heading a corruption commission, which promptly discredited the country's first post-Soviet leaders. Within three years, he was president.\n\nIn four terms of office \u2013 in 1994\u20132001, 2001\u20136, 2006\u201310 and from 2010 to the present \u2013 Lukashenko has calmly created a legal dictatorship, achieving his goals through a dubious referendum, a purpose-built constitution, and a hand-picked legislature. A police state operates, the 'president's men' enforcing obedience at all levels. The opposition is harassed. The media are shackled. Foreign protests are ignored. Western governments are courted for investment, but not for advice. In short, the president-dictator does as he likes. Fifty new 'universities' are busy training the cadres that will project Lukashenkism into the future, while several parts of the University of Minsk can only function in exile. Careless talk characterizes the president as 'a would-be Putin with no missiles and no oil'; it is not a good comparison, and it underestimates his tenacity. His henchmen call him ' _Batka_ ', the 'Daddy of the Nation'. Their slogan proclaims: _Batka_ Is, _Batka_ Was and ' _Batka_ Will Be.' 'My position and the state will never allow me to become a dictator,' he says of himself, 'but an authoritarian ruling style is my characteristic.'\n\nImmediately after 1991, Belarus was taken to be a straightforward, Russian-controlled puppet state. It was (and apparently still is) the capital of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), which was formed to replace the Soviet Union and to preserve Russian supremacy in a less inflexible form. In 1996, at least in theory, Belarus entered economic union with Russia, aiming to produce a customs union and a common currency within twelve years. In 2002 it even began talks on a Russian proposal for constitutional union. But none of these schemes came to fruition. Instead, they have been supplanted by a series of ever intensifying rows about 'unpaid debts', oil prices and gas supplies, and in general about Lukashenko's disinclination to dance to the Kremlin's tune. Relations deteriorated to the point of being at best ambiguous. Then in a sudden reversal, the 'Last Dictator' travelled to Moscow in 2010, in advance of a looming election, mending his fences and announcing that the oil-price dispute had been settled.\n\nThe European Union was no happier with Belarus than Russia was. Lukashenko has proved resistant to all overtures for meaningful dialogue, always insisting that he will not accept 'the imposition of alien values from outside'. Protracted discussions preceded the reluctant acceptance of Belarus as a member of the EU's Eastern Partnership, inaugurated in May 2009. The Partnership complements the Union for the Mediterranean, which deals with the EU's neighbours in North Africa and the Middle East; it aims to promote good governance, energy security, environmental protection and co-operation on common issues of trade, travel and migration.\n\nThe presidential election of December 2010, therefore, took place amid considerable uncertainty. In the run-up to the elections, President Dmitri Medvedyev of Russia fired off a broadside, accusing Lukashenko of repeatedly breaking his promises; among other supposed offences, he had failed to recognize the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and had granted asylum to the ousted Kirghiz president, Bakiryev. In an article entitled 'Batka Stoops To Blackmail', _Russia Today_ lamented an incident in which Russia's threat to cut off oil to Belarus had apparently been countered by a Belarusian threat to cut off electricity to Kaliningrad. Outside observers concluded that Russia was losing patience. Then, early in 2011, came the Wikileaks scandal. No less than 1,878 of the leaked cables related to Belarus; in a cluster dating back to 2005 American diplomats characterized Belarus as 'the last outpost of tyranny' and 'a virtual mafioso state'. But Batka had little to fear. In the polls of 19 December, he had been officially declared to have received 79.7 per cent of the votes. Opposition candidates, who had been allowed to stand, were beaten up afterwards by the police. Demonstration were followed by arrests. Diplomats from neighbouring countries reckoned that Lukashenko had probably lost, but he continued on his way unruffled. In an appearance on the state STV television channel, he surprised his audience by breaking into fluent Belarusian, introducing his elderly mother and courting popularity.\n\nIn recent years, the thesis that dictatorships are vulnerable to the growth of new communications and technologies has gathered widespread support. The Green Revolution in Iran in 2009, the ousting of Ben Bella from Tunisia in 2010, and the revolt against President Mubarak in Egypt in 2011 have all been held up as instances where a repressed opposition mobilized itself by cellphones, Facebook and Twitter. A future-technology specialist argues the opposite case. According to Evgeny Morozov, all dictatorships control access to the Internet and possess active cyber-departments to protect their interests. The democratic character of the Net, he says, is a delusion. Morozov is Belarusian.\n\nEven so, the Internet offers a wealth of information about Belarus that was not available when the state came into being. Readily accessible websites list a host of attractions for hardy souls who are considering a visit, and they give a flavour of what awaits. A government-sponsored site follows six headings: Jewish History, Castles and Churches, World War II, Nature, Agro- and Eco-Tourism, and 'Healthcare Tourism'. The Jewish link informs readers that Marc Chagall, Irving Berlin and Kirk Douglas all came from Belarus, but does not suggest any places to see in connection with them. The 'World War II' link recommends the Soviet-era Belarusian National War Memorial at Khatyn ( _sic_ ), and the Soviet memory site at the fortress at Brest. The 'Nature' link mentions only one of the country's six national parks, and advises people hoping to explore the Belavezha Forest to approach it via Poland. 'Do not expect a five-star service anywhere,' it warns, but 'you can swim in any lake or river without lifeguard whistling at you'. Under 'Agro-Tourism', visitors are urged to watch the harvesting of extremely unlikely local foods 'such as coconuts, pineapple, or sugar-cane'. Under 'Healthcare', one learns that 'Dentistry is lately on the rise in Belarus'. But only one spa is named, at the salt caverns of Salihorsk. Most recently, winter skiing has been introduced. The National Ski Centre is at Logoisk, which has a partner at Silich Mountain. Each resort possesses one hotel.\n\n'The medieval martial castle' of Mir, some 60 miles to the south-west of Minsk, turns out to be 'the main architectural symbol' of the country. It is also the seat of the national school of architectural conservation, and it well repays the journey. A splendidly illustrated English-language guidebook awaits, showing the castle in all seasons. In 2000, one learns, the castle complex was included in the UNESCO Register of World Heritage Sites.\n\nThe position of the castle on a low mound and surrounded by a lake enhances the illusion of fabulously colossal proportions, as it looms over the water and the lush meadows. Its brick-and-stone battlements were constructed round a broad, interior courtyard, but the most prominent aspect is provided by tall octagonal towers that rise at the four corners, and by the central, fortified entrance gate approached over a bridge. It is the colours, however, that make the most immediate impression. The three-storey palace wing is plastered white, with red brick sills and ribbing; the entrance gate and two of the corner towers are faced with red brick interspersed with white panes and false windows, the roofs tiled in a brighter shade of orange-red that stands out magnificently against the blue sky of the summer's day or, in winter, against the deep snowdrifts. In autumn, the leaves of the park change colour to match the battlements. Sunsets at Mir are a photographer's dream.\n\nAs presented by the guidebook, however, the account of the castle's historical development needs some unscrambling. The settlement was first noted in chronicles in AD 1395, 'in connection with the unsuccessful campaign to Novogrudok of the crusaders'. For 'crusaders' read 'Teutonic Knights'. 'The Grand Lithuanian Duke Sigismund... granted Mir to his courtier, Simeon Gedygoldovich' in 1434. So the Lithuanians ruled here. Construction of the present edifice started in the early sixteenth century. Since then, this monument to 'Gothic-Renaissance architecture' 'has remained in original form'. One might expect either Gothic or Renaissance, but generally not both.\n\nThe guidebook also stresses the multi-ethnic and multi-religious character of the local community. Jews were engaged in commerce. Tartars dealt with leather-dressing. 'Belarusians' were engaged in craftsmanship. Gypsies traditionally bred horses. (The grand duke even made Jan Marcinkiewicz 'king of the gypsies'.) The market square once sheltered 'Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches, a Mosque, and a _Yeshiva_ with Synagogue'. The church of 'Saint Trinity' (its walls painted in a warm shade of magnolia: the onion-domes in bright blue) became 'the Uniate Church of Basilian Monastery in 1705' and later 'an Orthodox church again', though no explanation is offered. The market square is now called '17 September Square', 17 September 1939 being the date when the Soviet Union entered the Second World War.\n\nThe guidebook states how 'the towers of Mir have withstood the rushes of the conquerors with honour', but it does not identify the on-rushing conquerors by name (it could have listed the Prussians, the Poles, the Russians, the French of Napoleon, the Germans and others). The most recent private owners, from 1891 to 1939, are named as the 'Dukes Sviatopolk of Mir'. Their family mausoleum, built in 1904 by 'a well-known architect from St Petersburg', still stands in the park.\n\nOne of the historic monuments not usually mentioned on the websites for foreigners is the manor of Dzyarzhynovo, formerly Oziemb\u0142\u00f3w, in the Minsk region. Renovated in 2004 and opened by Lukashenko in person, this 'Historico-Cultural Centre' \u2013 a modest, timber-built, three-storey house on the edge of a forest \u2013 was the birthplace of Feliks Dzier\u017cy\u0144ski, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, author of Lenin's 'Red Terror', and one of the most fearsome figures in East European history. Its renovation at the start of the twenty-first century says much about Lukashenko's views and tastes.\n\nVisitors may be surprised to learn that the Lithuanian frontier is close to all these places in western Belarus. Indeed, given a free run at the customs post, a trip to Vilnius, Lithuania's capital (which the Belarusians call Vil\u2032nya), can easily be undertaken in a day. The trip is highly recommended, if only because the culture shock is tremendous. Many Westerners were led to believe that all the countries of the Soviet bloc were grey and uniform Russian clones. Today, one sees a different reality. Lithuania is Catholic; Belarus is either Orthodox or non-religious. Lithuanians speak a Baltic language; Belarusians a Slavic tongue, somewhere between Polish and Russian. Lithuanian is written in the Latin alphabet, Belarusian in Cyrillic. Above all, Lithuania is a member of the European Union, and the material gulf between the neighbours is widening rapidly.\n\nThe mental gulf between the two countries is already next to unbridgeable. Twenty years ago, both Lithuania and Belarus formed part of the Soviet Union; each of them today looks at their past from diametrically different perspectives. Shortly after crossing the Lithuanian border, a red flag by the side of the road marks the entrance to the Isgyvenimo Drama, an attraction billed as 'Europe's Strangest Theme Park'. A turning into the forest leads to a vast underground bunker built in the 1980s to house Soviet-Lithuanian television in case of nuclear war:\n\n> Soviet anthems blare out from a creaking old radio, the few striplights that are working flicker maddeningly, and damp swarms over the walls like triffids... 'Forget your past! Forget your history! A colossal bullfrog of a guard in an olive-green uniform is spitting at us in Russian, while a huge Alsatian strains at the leash'... 'Welcome to the Soviet Union,' snarls the guard. 'Here you are nobody'...\n> \n> We are given mouldy overcoats that are so damp that they are almost liquid, and a cup of Soviet coffee with no coffee in it... The bullfrog gives us our orders; we will answer only in the negative or the affirmative: dissent will be punished with beatings and solitary confinement; and we will forget all thoughts other than the glory of the socialist paradise in which we now live. We stand to attention for the hoisting of the red flag, then down we go into the freezing cold. For three hours, we are humiliated, interrogated, forced to sign false confessions, shown propaganda, and taught to prepare for an attack by the imperialist pigs.\n> \n> Having failed to answer correctly in Russian, I get [the answer] repeated in broken, angry English. The interrogating KGB officer pushes me against a filing cabinet, and prods me in the chest, hard. 'You are English? English spy! English spy!'\n\nThe aim is to make people feel what the Soviet Union was really like. 'Someone always faints,' the director explains; 'it's very easy to break people's will.' In neighbouring Belarus, where memories of the Soviet Union are still respected, this sort of exhibition is unthinkable.\n\nMost visitors will need assistance to find their way round this geographical and historical maze. Assistance is again to hand on the Internet:\n\n> Who are the Belarusians, anyway? What is this strange country \u2013 Belarus \u2013 which appeared on the map a few years ago, [and which] used to be called Belorussia, Byelorussia or even White Russia?\n> \n> Most people in the West don't even know that Belarus exists, that it has a language of its own and that it has its own history and culture. It is much more convenient to call everything between Brest and Vladivostok 'Russia'.\n> \n> One of the great misfortunes of the Belarusians is indeed the fact that their country's name sounds like 'Russia'... Ukraine, for example (which is... similar in culture and language), is in a somewhat better position. Most people probably now realise that Ukraine is an independent state and nation.\n> \n> Unfortunately, Belarus is still not taken seriously... Many people believe that the Belarusians never had a state of their own... Few people know about the existence of the Grand Duchy... the medieval Belarusian state... the heyday of the Belarusian nation.\n> \n> Belarusian history is not an easy subject to study... One comes across several different versions which contradict each other \u2013 the Russian version, the Polish version, the Lithuanian version, the Soviet version and finally the Belarusian version. Belarus is a country [whose] history has been rewritten and falsified so many times that it is difficult to tell who can be believed... Now, after the collapse of the Russia-dominated Soviet Union, it is finally possible to publish the Belarusian version and a number of books have appeared which deal with the contentious issues... Unfortunately they are all in Belarusian and have not been translated...\n\nIn which case, a brief _tour d'horizon_ may not be out of place. This country possesses hidden histories that rarely escape into the outside world.\n\n##### II\n\nOne of the few things that can be said for certain about Europe's pre-historic peoples is that they all came from somewhere else. Northern Europe, in particular, had to be completely repopulated after the last Ice Age, 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. Repopulation could only be effected by migrants. None of Europe's modern nations are genuinely native.\n\nThis injunction must surely be true even of the Baltic peoples \u2013 the Lithuanians, Latvians, ancient Prussians and others \u2013 who arrived in the northern parts of the European peninsula long before the historical record. By general scholarly consent, the Lithuanian language represents the oldest European branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. The presence of the Balts definitely preceded the advent both of the Finnic peoples, whose ancestors drifted out of Eurasia some 2,000 years ago, and of the Slavs, who followed in the wake of the Germanics at various times during the first millennium AD.\n\nUnderstanding of the processes of prehistoric settlement has latterly been considerably refined. In the nineteenth century prehistoric migration was conceived in brutal, pseudo-Darwinian terms. In the conflicts between migrant tribes and the sedentary population, the winners took all, and the losers were driven out or obliterated. Such was the conventional picture that was painted, for example, about post-Roman Britain after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.\n\nNowadays, the consensus has shifted. Migrations took place, of course, but they did not necessarily involve wholesale expulsions or mass slaughter; more usually, they caused a high degree of ethnic mixing and cultural assimilation between the incomers and their predecessors. Now that DNA can be tested, it has been discovered that the overwhelming majority of people in England are biologically descended from the pre-Anglo-Saxon and even pre-Celtic populations. One has to conclude that most of the indigenous inhabitants survived the migrations, while changing their language and culture, possibly many times.\n\nSimilar issues arise in relation to the land which, to maintain an impartial air and to avoid anachronistic modernisms, may be called by the convenience label of 'MDL' (see below). The initial ethnolinguistic mix was made up of Balts, Slavs, Finnics and Germanics. All were pale-skinned, northern Europeans. All except the Finnics spoke languages of Indo-European origin. The territory was bounded in the north-west by the Baltic Sea, in the south by the vast marshland drained by the Pripyat\u2032 \u2013 the Pripet Marshes \u2013 in the west by the Vistula basin and in the east by the watershed of the upper Volga.\n\nIn ancient times, indeed until quite recently, rivers bore an importance which is often forgotten. The carriage of people and goods was far easier by water than overland, especially in spring and summer. So human settlements tended to develop on the banks of navigable rivers, and at points where access could be gained from one river system to another. The MDL was well supplied by several such interfluvial routes. The Nieman and the Dvina rivers flowed into the Baltic. The Dniepr network flowed to the Black Sea, the Volga network to the Caspian. The area where these networks converged was especially attractive for prehistoric travellers and traders.\n\nThe formation of the future state, however, needs to be considered in a slightly wider context, partly because the ethnic mix varied from district to district, and partly because three distinct habitats can be identified. The Baltic coastland was the first. It was exposed to the raids of the Vikings from the ninth to the twelfth century, and later to the seaborne inroads of Danes, Germans and Swedes. The second habitat, lying immediately behind the coast, had been formed by the last great ice cap, and contained a dense jumble of rocky, morainic ridges covered with lakes and dense forests. It was peculiarly impenetrable, and sections of it became the natural fortress of undiluted Baltic settlement. The third habitat, further inland, can be described as the 'Land of the Headwaters'. It was accessible, especially by river; it possessed attractive agricultural potential; and it became the natural meeting-place of Balts, Finnics, Germanics and Slavs. This was to be the MDL's heartland.\n\nEach of the ethnolinguistic groupings consisted of numerous tribes, and the names by which they were known have generated enormous controversies. In the case of the Baltic group, for example, conventional modern nomenclature places 'Prussians' in the south-west, 'Lithuanians' in the middle and 'Latvians' in the north-east. Yet the Prussian label became attached to the Baltic Prussians' Germanized successors. The origins of the Lithuanian label is disputed by their Slavic neighbours, and the Latvian label did not emerge until the modern age. The Finnic group impinged only marginally. The Slavic group, in contrast \u2013 or at least the East Slav group \u2013 did adopt a generic name: _Rus_ \u2032. Unfortunately, debates about the roots of Rus\u2032-Ruthenia-Rossiya-Russia have filled miles of shelving, and nomenclatural cacophony flourishes.\n\nChronology is vital. At the start of the second millennium, one is dealing with an age when Moscow had not even been founded, and when a Moscow-led 'Russian state' lay very far ahead. Baltic tribes inhabited much of the coastland, all of the Lakeland, and large parts of the 'Land of the Headwaters'. For the time being, the forest zone to the east, which was to become Muscovy's base, was inhabited by Finnic tribes, which called it _Siisdai_. The East Slavs were slowly expanding from an area further south, colonizing the valley of the great river which the ancient Greeks had called the Boristhenes, the Byzantines the Danapris, and the Slavs the Dniepr. They were to form the largest body of inhabitants in the region, having been left behind when their West Slavic kinsfolk moved off towards the Vistula and Elbe, perhaps in the fifth or sixth century AD, and the 'Yugo' or South Slavs began their trek towards a distant destination in post-Roman Illyria. Throughout most of the first millennium all these groups were pagan.\n\nSometime before the end of the millenium, however, Scandinavian adventurers, known as Vikings in the West and as Varangians in the East, succeeded in establishing a regular trade route between the Baltic and Black Seas, using the 'Land of the Headwaters' as the critical point of passage. Their favourite porterage, over which Viking longships could be hauled for 15\u201320 miles, lay between the sources of the Dvina and the Dniepr. What is more, they built a number of forts to protect their landings and staging-posts; the forts attracted Slavic settlers, and the settlers submitted to the rule of Scandinavian overlords. They called their network of forts the _Gard_ \u2013 _grad\/grod\/gorod_ being the Slavic word for town or fort. In the south, beyond the Dniepr rapids, a wide area along the Black Sea coast was held by the khanate of the Khazars, a Turkic people whose lands stretched as far as the Caspian; the Varangians would have had to pay tribute to the Khazars to reach open water and to trade with Byzantium.\n\nSuch were the circumstances in which the East Slavs adopted the name of _Rus_ \u2032. The derivation of the term is obscure, although it is often related to a word for 'ruddy' or 'red-haired', as the Varangian overlords could well have been. _Rus_ \u2032, at all events, became the name of the country. _Ruski_ was the country's Slavonic language, and _Rusin_ (m.) and _Rusinka_ (f.) were names for the inhabitants. Byzantine Greeks translated _Rus_ \u2032 as _Rossiya_ ; _Rusin_ was the derivative for the Latin terms of _Ruthenus_ and _Ruthenia_.\n\nThe oldest of the Varangian settlements, Holmgard, was founded _c_. 860 by a chieftain called Hroerekh on the shore of Lake Ilmen, close to the Gulf of Finland. The most northerly of the forts, Alaborg, lay on Lake Ladoga; the most easterly at Murom near the Volga, and the most southerly at Sambat on the Danapris, close to the existing Slavic settlement of Kiyiv (Kiev). The most westerly fort, which appears in the Scandinavian sagas as Palteskja and entered the historical record in 862, lay on the upper reaches of the Dvina. The Slavs, quite naturally, used their own vocabulary and name systems. They knew Hroerekh as Rurik, Holmgard as Novgorod, that is, 'new fort', and Palteskja as Polatsk. Their nomenclature has obliterated all Norse forms.\n\nIn that same era, other important population shifts were taking place. Slavic tribes, notably the _Kryvichi_ and the _Dragovichi_ , migrated from the south, mingling with Balts in the fertile 'Land of the Headwaters'. Their arrival was accompanied by agricultural advances and by linguistic changes. Some linguists hold that a Balto-Slavic language was created; others content themselves with the occurrence of a complex interaction of Baltic and Slavic idioms. But none would contest the fact that the Balto-Slavic collision created the characteristic phonological and lexical features which gave a distinct identity to the emerging 'headwaters variant' of _ruski_.\n\nHere, one must note the contentious issue of the name of 'Litva'. According to scholars of the Baltic persuasion, _Litva_ was always and _ab origine_ the generic label used by the Baltic tribes living in their Lakeland fastness. In its modern spelling, written as _Lietuva_ , it is the modern Lithuanian name for Lithuania _._ According to scholars of the Belarusian persuasion, however, _Litva_ was originally the homeland of a Slavic tribe, and had no connection with the Balts until the Balts moved south, absorbed the Slavic tribe and purloined its name. The tribe in question lived in a district in the upper reaches of the River Nieman, where another fort, a 'Little Novgorod' was built. In the absence of credible information, one cannot say whether this fort began as a Varangian, a Baltic or a Ruthenian foundation. Its Slavic name appears in a variety of forms including Navahrudak, Novogrodok and Nowogr\u00f3dek.\n\nStatehood reached the region before Christianity did. Three principalities emerged from the Varango\u2013Slavic\u2013Baltic encounters and each was connected with the same Rurikid dynasty. One was at Novgorod, where Rurik died in _c._ 879. A second was at Kiev, which was conquered by Rurik's son, Oleg. The third was at Polatsk on the River Dvina. All of them figure in the oldest of the East Slav chronicles, the _Povest_ \u2032 _Vremennych lat_ ('The Story of the Years of Time'). Centuries later, when the East Slavs became differentiated into separate nationalities, their foundation stories were to be fiercely contested. But at the risk of oversimplification, Kiyiv\/Kiev was the main centre of the southern part of East Slavdom, in a region that would later be called Ukraine; this Kievan Rus\u2032 long exercised hegemony over the others. Novgorod, where a splendid mercantile republic was to develop, belonged to the north-eastern part of East Slavdom, that is, to 'Great Rus\u2032. And Polatsk in the north-west planted the political seed which, with the important involvement of the Balts, would grow into the 'MDL'.\n\nTwo words of warning need to be issued. One concerns the East Slavs, and the other, the Balts. In the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries, when Kievan Rus\u2032 was at its apogee, the area to the north-east of Kiev, the so-called _Zalesskaya Zemlya_ , the 'Land beyond the Forest', had still not been absorbed. In so far as the upper valleys of the Ugra, Oka and Moskva rivers were inhabited, they were dominated by a block of Finnic settlement that for a lengthy period separated Kievan Rus\u2032 from places such as Suzdal, Yaroslavl and Rostov. Early Rus\u2032was a world without Moscow, and, more importantly, without the self-centred theories of history which the Muscovites would later invent and impose.\n\nThe presence of Baltic tribes living west of Polatsk is well attested both from archaeology and from passing reference in their neighbours' chronicles. Yet as Slavic migration undermined their monopoly on the 'Land of the Headwaters', they retreated into their lakes and forests, shunning subsequent developments. They customarily divided their homeland into the _Zemaitis_ or 'Lowland' on the coast, and the _Auk\u0161tota_ or 'Upland' of the interior. The tribes of the former, known in Latin as _Samogitia_ , bordered the Prussians, and the frontier zone with the Poles. They long maintained a separate identity, and one tribe, the _Sudovians_ (in Polish, the _Ja\u0107wings_ ), showed signs of creating their own statelet. The Upland, in contrast, remained aloof. It was destined to stand out as Europe's last pagan stronghold.\n\nThe earliest arrival of Christianity in the region occurred in the late tenth century, and bore consequences far beyond the realm of religious practice. In its first phase, it transformed the Slavic communities, but not the others. The Balts were untouched; Scandinavia still bowed to the Old Norse Gods. The Khazar khanate, predominantly Muslim, was ruled by an elite that eccentrically adopted Judaism.\n\nKievan Rus\u2032 had long been in contact with Byzantium, and it was the Greek Orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire that gradually infiltrated the East Slavs. A century earlier, the Byzantine missionaries, Saints Cyril and Methodius, had developed both an alphabet and a composite language, known respectively as Cyrillic and as Old Church Slavonic, to facilitate the conversion of the Slavs. Their efforts had borne early fruit among the Bulgars, a Slavicized Turkic people living on the Black Sea coast close to Constantinople.\n\nNonetheless, religious conversion was nowhere a simple matter, and the Rurikid ruling houses of Rus\u2032 were not easily detached from their Varangian roots. The Kievan Prince Ingvar, whom the Slavs called Ihor or Igor, had a Christian wife, the sainted Olga (Helga). He built a fleet of ships that terrorized all parts of the Black Sea; after twice besieging Constantinople, he entered into formal diplomatic relations with the Empire, but consistently rejected his wife's pleas to accept her religion. His death in 945 was described by a Byzantine chronicler. He had attempted unwisely to exact tribute twice in the same month from one of his subject tribes. The tribesmen captured him, bent two birch trees double, and tied his legs to the tips of the trees; then they let them spring back to their full height.\n\nIt is impossible to say how exactly the Rurikids viewed their Varangian ancestry, or whether they cultivated their Norse gods in order to distance themselves from their Slav subjects. Over time, their 'Norseness' would have been diluted. Svyatoslav, son of Ingvar and Olga, seems to have been the first of the line whose Slav name does not also appear in a Norse form in any source.\n\nIngvar's grandson, Valdemar\/Volodimir (r. 980\u20131015), was born illegitimate, and therefore had marginal chances of scooping the dynastic jackpot. Yet he surmounted all obstacles. Raised at the feet of his Christian grandmother, the Regent Olga, he was sent from Kiev to rule over Novgorod, and in the war of succession that followed his father's death in 972, he seems to have called on his Scandinavian kinsmen, notably Haakon Sigurdsson of Norway. First, he invaded Polatsk, killed its ruler, Rogvolod, and carried off Rogvolod's daughter, Rogneda. Then, victorious over his brothers, he re-entered Kiev, settled down as ruler of a reunited Rus\u2032, and took Rogneda as his bride. His name in the Old Church Slavonic of the chronicles was Vladimir \u2013 meaning 'World-Ruler'.\n\nThe most portentous event of Vladimir's reign occurred in 988. Having sent out envoys to observe all the religions of the day, the 'World-Ruler' rejected Latin Catholicism, Islam and Judaism, and decided to introduce Christianity into his land in its Byzantine form. The envoys who had attended the Mass in St Sophia's cathedral in Constantinople had reported: 'We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth.' Christian missions were then sent to the different parts of Rus\u2032. An Orthodox _eparch_ , or metropolitan bishop, was installed in Polatsk in 992.\n\nIn the next generation, the Rurikid dynasty splintered again. Prince Izyaslav (d. 1001), son of Vladimir and Rogneda, returned to his mother's home of Polatsk to re-establish the ruling line of so-called _Rogvolodichi_. Kiev and Novgorod passed to his brother, Yaroslav the Wise, between whom and the rest of Vladimir's brood a complicated fratricidal feud broke out. As a result, Polatsk was able to break away to become an independent political entity. Novgorod did the same slightly later. In due course, Rus\u2032 was divided into seven or eight separate principalities.\n\nBetween the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, the Principality of Polatsk under the descendants of Rurik governed the 'Land of the Headwaters' in north-west Rus\u2032 without serious interference. It was subdivided into five dependent 'lands' \u2013 Polatsk (Polotsk), Smalensk (Smolensk), Tura\u045e (Turov), on the Pripyat\u2032, Cherniga\u045e (Chernigov), which bordered Kiev, and Navahrudak (Novogrudok), which bordered Auk\u0161tota. At some point, it lost control of Smalensk, whose ruler emerged as an independent prince. Like all the nascent principalities of medieval Europe, it spent much time warring. There were campaigns to the east against Pskov and Novgorod, conflicts to the south with Kiev, and constant skirmishes with the Balts to the north-west. In this context, the chroniclers begin to record the presence of a people described as 'Lituvins'. The first mention occurs in the German Quedlinburg Chronicle in an entry for 1009. Modern Lithuanians regard this date as their entry into history.\n\nIn those same centuries, further headway was made in the grounding of the Orthodox Church. St Efrosinia of Polatsk ( _c_. 1120\u201373) was an abbess, bibliophile and church-builder; her bejewelled cross, plundered during the Second World War, was long regarded as the supreme treasure of local art. She died on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and her church of St Saviour still stands. Her contemporary, St Kiryl of Tura\u045e ( _c_. 1130\u201382) was a monk, a bishop, a famous preacher and the author of prayers that are still in use. Smalensk was home to an icon of great antiquity traditionally attributed to St Luke.\n\nOne may assume that people in Polatsk would have heard of the founding of _Moskva_ (Moscow), which occurred in 1147 some 300 miles away. Yet they would have had little reason to regard it as a major event in their lives. Moscow was just one of several cities newly founded by Yuri Dolgorukiy, prince of Vladimir-Suzdal, whose writ did not run in the Land of the Headwaters. The political loyalty of the citizens of Polatsk was quite separate from that to which the infant Moscow belonged. Their ecclesiastical obedience was to the metropolitan of Kiev, who in turn owed allegiance to the patriarch of Constantinople. At that stage of their history, the different parts of Rus\u2032 were set on centrifugal courses.\n\nIn the thirteenth century two external dangers appeared whose impact was to be lasting. The first was the Teutonic Knights, a German crusading order that had assumed the mission of converting the Baltic pagans. The second, the Mongol Horde of Genghis Khan, galloped out of Central Asia into the heart of Europe. The principalities of Rus\u2032 were caught between the two.\n\nGerman crusaders landed on the Baltic coast at the very start of the century. Their fort at Riga, founded in 1204, served as the base for their northern province of Livonia, the _Terra Marianna_ ('Land of the Virgin Mary'). Their southern province of Prussia, founded in 1230, became the base for operations driving eastwards towards Samogitia and Auk\u0161tota (see pp. 339ff.). Before long, the Knights controlled access to the sea via the estuaries of the Nieman and the Dvina, and the leaders of Polatsk, Novgorod and Vladimir felt sufficiently threatened to take common action. Prince Alexander Nevsky (1220\u201363) of Novgorod had already made his name battling the Swedes on the River Neva; in 1242 he and his allies won a still more spectacular victory over the Teutonic Knights on the ice of Lake Peipus. He is regarded nowadays as Russia's most popular hero.\n\nThe Mongol Horde attacked when Alexander Nevsky was heavily embroiled in the north. Tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of nomadic horsemen rode out of the steppe into the ill-defended borders of eastern Rus\u2032. Moscow was totally destroyed in 1238, less than a century after its foundation. Kiev suffered the same fate in 1240. The Horde stormed on through Poland, razing Krak\u00f3w, and cutting down the assembled knights of Silesia. Tribute was exacted by the Mongol khan from all parts of Rus\u2032 that his riders could reach, and Alexander Nevsky was obliged to submit to the Horde for confirmation of his titles.\n\nThe twin threats from north and south produced a predictable reaction from the lands caught in the middle. The Baltic tribes of Samogitia and Auk\u0161tota, under pressure from the Teutonic Knights, found common cause with the Orthodox Christian princes of Polatsk. At this distance, it is impossible to tell whether the Baltic party simply attacked their weakened Ruthenian neighbours and annexed their land, or whether something closer to a voluntary merger was engineered. The well-established Principality of Polatsk need not have been razed and destroyed in the manner of Moscow and Kiev. It is more likely that the constituent districts of the principality submitted successively to Baltic overlords, until a point was reached at which the new overlords gained a controlling interest.\n\nHowever it came about, the key figure henceforth is best identified as the 'High King' Mindaugas (1203\u201363), otherwise Mindoug or Mendog, who was crowned in 1253 with the German-derived title of _konung_. He could not have attained this position without the benefit of a preceding period of state-building. Recent scholars have emphasized that the Baltic tribes had been organizing military formations, tax collection and manorial enterprises for at least a century. One of them proposes 1183 as the date when the new Baltic state was launched. Another suggests that Mindaugas, though originally a pagan warrior, had fought as a mercenary in the land of Navahrudak, had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and had then used Navahrudak as a power-base for further expansion. His religious elasticity was notorious. At another time, he was baptized into the Catholic faith, and later abandoned it. Yet he was certainly strong enough to attack Novgorod in the early 1240s, and, following his repulse, to pick off Polatsk, Vitebsk and Minsk in turn. His coronation must have been the culmination of a series of political and military triumphs. As a sign of his enhanced dignity, his entourage gave him the same status of 'grand duke' or 'grand prince' that Alexander Nevsky had recently negotiated for himself from the Mongols, and they called his new state the Grand Duchy of Litva. In the practice of the Ruthenian scribes, the name was usually shortened to VKL: 'V' for _Vielkie_ or 'Grand', 'K' for _Knyaztva_ or 'Duchy' and 'L' for _Litvy_. In the practice of Latin scribes, VKL was transcribed as MDL, and Litva was translated as 'Lithuania': _Magnus Ducatus Lithuaniae_.\n\nThe name Belarus \u2013 or some earlier form of it \u2013 also came into currency in this same era. Its literal meaning of 'White Ruthenia' is not in doubt, but its derivation has been the subject of endless speculation. Most plausibly, 'white' had the connotation of a free territory, and 'black' that of territory that was occupied, or tribute-paying. It certainly fits the circumstances. White Ruthenia was the only part of Rus\u2032 to stay free of the Mongol yoke. The name of _Czarnorus_ \u2032 or 'Black Ruthenia', which became attached to the Land of Navahrudak, might conceivably be explained in the same way, since it was probably the first part of the Principality of Polatsk to be occupied by the Balts.\n\nThe territory of the grand duchy in this earliest emanation was roughly equivalent to a combination of present-day Lithuania and present-day Belarus, and the creation of the new state dealt a heavy blow to the idea of a united Rus\u2032. White Ruthenia parted company from eastern Rus\u2032 for many centuries, developing along different lines and acquiring a separate identity. Its imminent reunion for a long spell with Kievan\/Ukrainian Ruthenia would give the Belarusians and Ukrainians much in common, and would project the expanded concept of 'Litva' far beyond its modest Baltic origins. At the same time, in the late thirteenth century, that new state was entering a cultural and political sphere which was quite foreign to Mongol-controlled Moscow.\n\nOnce the grand duchy had been established, its particular characteristics would probably have caused less surprise to its subjects than to outsiders. A caste of pagan warriors held sway over a predominantly Christian population that had adopted its Orthodox ties nearly three centuries earlier. Vestal virgins tended the sacred flame in oak groves, while Christian preachers strove alongside them to inculcate a totally different religion and culture. Christianization had been in progress in Europe for more than 1,000 years; as it proceeded, all public manifestations of paganism were generally suppressed. But circumstances in the MDL did not conform to a simple pattern. The arrival of Orthodox Christianity had indeed led to the suppression of the Norse and Slavic variants of paganism. Nevertheless, resistance was protracted; the Balts of the region were not yet affected; and memories of former beliefs must surely have lingered on. Such memories would have functioned in a setting where the paganism of the late Varangian elite probably differed little from the dying Slavic paganism of the populace at large. Pagan practices often went underground or morphed into pseudo-Christian rituals, and the supposedly Christianized people of early White Ruthenia may have passed through several generations during which the continuing pagan religion of their Baltic neighbours would not have looked particularly strange or offensive. Hence, when a Baltic warrior caste stepped into the Varangians' shoes, there was no violent reaction.\n\nThe Ruthenians' acceptance of Baltic overlordship would have been strengthened by the growing opportunities for territorial expansion and military adventure. At the time of the coronation of Mindaugas, the Mongol Horde ruled supreme at all points to the south. In the following decades, however, Mongol power declined; the 'Golden Horde' settled far away on the lower Volga; and Ruthenian princes were tempted to stray, their temerity varying in proportion to their distance from the Mongols' revenge. The Muscovites, for instance, did not make their decisive bid for freedom until the 1380s. But the princes of southern Ruthenia, in Ukraine, grew restless a century earlier, when the fading of Mongol control created a vacuum into which the warriors of the grand duchy charged with alacrity. Under Grand Duke Gediminas (r. 1316\u201341), they reached Kiev for the first time, ruling it for several decades in conjunction with the Tartars. In addition, a broad band of territory was annexed stretching from Podolia and Volhynian Lutsk on the Polish border to Chernigov and Bryansk on the confines of Muscovy. Brest on the River Bug was captured, together with the district of Polesie beyond the Bug.\n\nGediminas is generally taken to have been the founder of the grand duchy's capital, although it may well have been built on the site of the unidentified Voruta, the principal residence of Mindaugas. According to legend, he had been hunting on the borders of Baltic and Ruthenian settlement and had a dream in which he saw an iron wolf howling on the top of a hill; a shaman told him to erect a castle on a nearby bluff overlooking three rivers. The wooden castle was soon surrounded by houses and streets running down to the River Vilnya. Its earliest mention in the historical record dates from 1323, soon before the grand duke invited foreign traders and craftsmen to live there. Municipal rights on the model of Magdeburg were granted six decades later. For the grand duchy's original Baltic elite, the city's name was _Vilnius_ : for the Ruthenians, _Vil\u2032nya_ , like the river: for the Poles, who would soon arrive in force, _Wilno._ 45\n\nUnder Grand Duke Algierdas (r. 1345\u201377), the tempo quickened. Algierdas, one of Gediminas's seven sons, was a pagan warrior chief par excellence, who appears to have maintained internal peace by dividing his dominions with his brother, Kestutis. He battled the Teutonic crusaders and the Tartar hordes with equal enthusiasm, and twice besieged Moscow. Although held posthumously to have been a champion of Orthodoxy, his marriage to an Orthodox princess, Maria of Vitebsk, had no special significance. In 1349 the lands of 'Red Ruthenia' \u2013 so-called because they centred on the 'Red Town' of Chervien \u2013 were divided with Poland. And in 1362, at the Battle of the Blue Water near the Black Sea coast, the supremacy of the Mongol-Tartar Horde was broken for good. The consequences were immense. The grand dukes of Litva took over Kiev permanently, absorbing the southern expanses of Ukraine and putting themselves in a position to influence the metropolitan of Kiev, the highest authority of the Orthodox Church in East Slavdom. In the course of a century of raiding, of castle-building and of rewarding their followers with handsome lands, they came to govern a state that was larger than either France or the Holy Roman Empire, and was going to grow still further.\n\nThe city of Kiyiv\/Kiev was the most ancient and most venerable in the whole of Slavdom. Legend attributes its foundation to the year AD 485, when the valiant Kie and his brothers set up their homes on three adjacent hills beside the Dniepr. In that remote era the various Slavic peoples were as yet undifferentiated. Thanks to modern politics, however, the city of Kiev is more usually associated in people's minds with 'ancient Russia' than with medieval Lithuania; indeed, it is frequently billed as 'Russia's birthplace'. So a word of clarification may be in order. When the grand duchy overran it in 1362, the city was a shadow of its former self; its population had greatly declined, and the metropolitan himself was living elsewhere. The cathedral church of St Sophia founded by Yaroslav the Wise, together with its 'indestructible wall', which depicted the Virgin Oranta in golden mosaics, was still intact. But recovery from the Mongols' ravages had been slow, and the city's political importance was minimal. Nonetheless, the so-called 'Lithuanian occupation', which was to last for more than 200 years, was no fleeting episode; and it was undertaken by a successor state to Kievan Rus\u2032 whose rule was perfectly acceptable to most contemporaries. One cannot judge medieval events by the teleological standards of a Russia that had yet to be created.\n\nMuscovy also stood to reap its rewards from the Mongols' retreat. Following the example of Algierdas, the ruler of Moscow, Dmitri 'Donskoy', was expanding his frontiers towards the Don, and preparing to form a coalition of eastern princes that would throw off the 'Mongol yoke' for ever. In this way, Moscow and the grand duchy became rivals to inherit the legacy of a divided Rus\u2032.\n\nDespite the waning of the Mongolian threat, however, the grand duchy knew little respite, for the Teutonic Knights were still on the march. Having subdued Prussia and Livonia, the Knights were entering a long period of hostility and intermittent conflict with Poland; their greedy crusading eyes also descended on the defiant paganism of the Lithuanians. The strategic grounds for a rapprochement between the grand duchy and Poland grew ever more apparent.\n\nUnlike most monarchs of the age, the grand dukes of Litva, not being Christians, naturally exhibited no special preference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and they married their daughters to Catholic or to Orthodox princes as convenience dictated. Yet a view has persisted that Grand Duke Gediminas in particular had been grooming his court and country for conversion to Roman Catholicism; it is supported by the phraseology of a letter which Gediminas wrote to the pope in 1322 and which contains an expression of his readiness ' _fidem catholicam recipere_ ' _._ A recent study, however, concludes that the grand duke's intentions were strictly limited. The letter was sent in a tricky international phase when he was fighting fiercely against the Catholic Teutonic Order and, at the same time, seeking assistance from Catholic Poland. Gediminas was assuring the pope that he was not anti-Catholic, and that, as a gesture of goodwill, he would admit Dominican and Franciscan missions; but he was not considering wholesale conversion. Indeed, he may well have hoped that the Vatican might abolish the Teutonic Order in the way that it had abolished the Knights Templar. Gediminas did not hesitate to execute Catholic priests judged to have insulted the pagan religion, and his own funeral in 1342 displayed all the features of traditional ritual. The grand duke's body was placed on an open pyre. His favourite servant and his favourite horse were cast into the flames to accompany their master, and a group of German slaves, bound and gagged, were heaped on top for good measure. Algierdas, too, departed this life like his father, with no hint of Christian sensitivities.\n\nReligious life in Litva, therefore, was far from straightforward. On the surface, there appeared to be a high degree of tolerance. Muslim Tartar communities were welcomed. So, too, were Jewish Karaites from Crimea, and special provisions were made for Catholic knights to marry the daughters of the grand duke's pagan entourage. Under the surface, however, there were ugly tensions. In 1347, when Vilnius was still a pagan capital, three Christian Ruthenian brothers \u2013 Anthony, John and Eustaphy \u2013 were put to death for some minor insubordination. These three 'Vilna Martyrs' were duly revered by the Orthodox faithful, and their relics preserved in the Trinity church.\n\nWhen Grand Duke Jogaila (r. 1377\u20131434) mounted the throne still a bachelor, he knew that any marriage he might make would be overshadowed by strategic considerations. He had no special love for the Poles, worshippers of 'the German God' and a target for his raiding parties. His first inclination was to explore the possibility of marrying a princess from Moscow. Yet in 1382 a prime opportunity occurred. Louis of Anjou, king of Poland and Hungary, died suddenly without male issue; Louis's younger daughter Jadwiga (or Hedwig) was designated by the magnates of Poland as the prospective successor and _rex_ :\n\n> In 1385, as soon as Jadwiga arrived in Cracow, the Lithuanian matchmakers made their first approaches. A conjugal and a political union were proposed. It was a decisive moment in the life of two nations... The Polish barons, too, had their reasons. After thirteen years of Angevin rule, they were not now disposed to submit to the first man, who by marrying Jadwiga, could impose himself on them. [Further] having rejected Louis's elder daughter, Maria, on the grounds that she was [betrothed] to Sigismund of Brandenburg, they could hardly accept Jadwiga's present fianc\u00e9, Wilhelm von Habsburg, Prince of Austria... The Lithuanian connection was much more interesting. Jadwiga could be told to do her duty. Maidenly and ecclesiastical reticence could be overcome.\n> \n> On 14 August 1385, therefore, at Kreva (Krewo) in White Ruthenia, an agreement was signed, in which the Polish barons persuaded Jogaila to concede a number of very advantageous undertakings. In return for the hand of Jadwiga, the Lithuanian prince was ready to accept Christian baptism, to convert his pagan subjects to Roman Catholicism, to release all Polish prisoners and slaves, to co-ordinate operations against the Teutonic Knights, and to associate the Grand Duchy of Lithuania with the Kingdom of Poland in a permanent union. On this basis, in February 1386 a great assembly of Polish barons and nobility at Lublin elected Jogaila, whom they knew as 'Jagie\u0142\u0142o', as their king.\n\nThe grand duchy was embarking on a Polish\u2013Lithuanian orientation that would accompany it for as long as it lasted. 'For four long generations spanning 186 years, Jogaila and his heirs [would drive] the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Litva in harness, like a coach-and-pair. They presided over an era when the Lithuanian and Ruthenian elite [would be] polonized, and the Poles [would accede] to the problems of the east.' For much of that time it appeared that the Jagiellons were building one of Europe's strongest monarchies.\n\nThe consequences of the Union of Kreva were felt more immediately in the grand duchy than in the Kingdom of Poland. The pagan religion of the Lithuanian elite was prohibited. The sacred groves were felled. The pagan priests and vestal virgins were banished, and mass Christian baptisms were enacted in the River Vilnya on the orders of the now Catholic monarch. Henceforth, Roman Catholicism became the official religion of court circles in Vilnius, and increasingly of the more ambitious nobles. Adopted by a substantial minority of the grand duchy's population, it existed in uneasy cohabitation with the Byzantine Orthodoxy of the majority. At the same time, traditional political culture was undermined. In theory, the grand duke lost none of his autocratic powers; in practice, he was obliged to grant wide privileges to influential subjects, who quickly learned the habits of their more rebellious Polish counterparts.\n\nThe minting of coinage, however, has traditionally been one of the marks of sovereignty, and the grand duchy was no exception. Until recently, it was thought that the first coins could be dated to the early fourteenth century, but analysis of a major hoard discovered in the grounds of the lower castle at Vilnius has confirmed that the first minting took place under Jogaila in 1387. The triangular silver alloy _kapros_ , which at first sight appear to be more primitive and older, actually date from the fifteenth century. Henceforth, the coinage regularly bore the emblem of the grand duchy \u2013 the mounted rider known as the _vytis_ or _pahonia_ \u2013 which has continued in use to the present day.\n\nJogaila's cousin Vytautas (1350\u20131430) caused constant trouble in the grand duchy for decades. Already disaffected before the Union with Poland, he was imprisoned in the castle of Kreva, during negotiations there with the Poles, won the sympathy of many _boyars_ , that is, of senior members of the grand ducal entourage,* escaped and took refuge with the Teutonic Knights; he may even have toyed with the idea of an alliance with Muscovy. But he was lured back to obedience by Jogaila, signed the Union of Kreva, accepted baptism and actively supported the Christianization campaign. Shortly afterwards, however, he fell out with Jogaila yet again, this time over the grant of the Duchy of Trakai to someone else. He fled once more to Prussia, and remained the focus of dissent throughout the 1390s. Only defeat by the Tartars tamed his opposition, and thanks to the Vil\u2032nya-Radom Act of 1401 (see below) he was able to emerge as Jogaila's partner and near-equal, running the grand duchy while Jogaila ran the kingdom. In 1408, he recovered Smalensk at the third attempt before loyally leading the grand duchy's army into battle alongside the Poles. Nonetheless, he jealously guarded Lithuania's separate status for a further thirty years, gaining the epithet of 'Vytautas the Great' and becoming an international figure. He received the obeisance of Tartar khans and Russian princes, exacted rich tribute from Novgorod, and conducted diplomatic relations with both the pope and the German emperor. At the time of his death in 1430, news spread that he had been planning to have himself crowned as 'king of Lithuania'.\n\nThe death of Vytautas led first to civil war and then to reconciliation under the main branch of the Jagiellonian dynasty. The civil war lasted throughout the 1430s as Jogaila's brother battled with a brother of Vytautas, while the Teutonic Knights did their best to meddle. At one point, it was announced that the grand duchy had been annexed by Poland. Yet Jogaila's passing defused tensions. One of his young sons, W\u0142adys\u0142aw III (r. 1434\u201344), took the throne of Poland under the guidance of the great Cardinal Ole\u015bnicki, who dominated the royal court, while Jogaila's younger son, Kazimierz Jagiello\u0144czyk (1427\u201392), was brought up to rule the grand duchy. In the end, weary of bloodshed, the _boyars_ of Litva acclaimed the thirteen-year-old Jagiello\u0144czyk grand duke in 1440 without seeking Polish approval. Their choice proved judicious. The young prince grew into one of the great father-figures of medieval Europe. He added the throne of Poland to his position in the grand duchy after his crusader-brother was killed by the Turks at Varna in 1444, and, by marrying a Habsburg, was able to place his numerous sons and daughters in positions of influence far and wide. Apart from rescuing the Polish-Lithuanian Union, he oversaw the rise of Jagiellons to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary. Indeed, for a time in the late fifteenth century, the prospects of the Jagiellonian dynasty looked considerably stronger than those of their Habsburg relatives.\n\nNotwithstanding stresses and strains, therefore, the dual state proved more resilient than many had feared. It adjusted to successive crises, its constitutional structures evolving accordingly:\n\n> The [Act] of Kreva was abrogated by Jadwiga's death [in 1400], but the political arguments which inspired it remained operative throughout the Jagiellonian era. On every occasion that difficulties arose, the Polish-Lithuanian Union was renewed on terms of ever increasing intimacy...\n> \n> The first stage [had been] effected in 1401. As Jogaila and Jadwiga were childless, it was necessary to design the machinery of a future succession. Meeting in their separate camps at Radom and Vilna the Polish and Lithuanian barons agreed that nothing should be decided in future without mutual consultation. In the so called 'Vilna-Radom Act', Jogaila's cousin Vitautas (Witold) was to rule Lithuania for life... If Jogaila were to die without natural heirs, the future of his two realms was to be determined by common assent.\n> \n> The second stage was effected in an agreement signed at Horod\u0142o in Volhynia on 2 October 1413. Here, in effect, the Polish lords and Lithuanian boyars formed themselves into a joint estate. Among the many provisions it was agreed that matters of concern touching both countries should be settled in joint assemblies of the nobility, and that the Polish lords should participate in the electoral confirmation of the Lithuanian Grand Duke...\n> \n> Most remarkable, however, was the spirit in which the agreements were reached... The Polish nobility were obtaining a permanent stake in the internal affairs of their partners: the Lithuanians were receiving a guarantee of the separate identity of their state. Cynics would say that in such circumstances it is easy to be noble-minded. Even so... the words of the Preamble to the Act of Horod\u0142o are worth noting: ' _Whoever is unsupported by the mystery of Love_ ', it began, ' _shall not achieve the Grace of salvation... For by Love, laws are made, kingdoms governed, cities ordered, and the state of the commonweal is brought to its proper goal. Whoever shall cast Love aside, shall lose everything_.' In later times, when a weakened Polish-Lithuanian state became... the prey of stronger enemies, these words served... as a reminder of the Union's high founding principles.\n> \n> Thus the Polish and Lithuanian nobility looked forward to the future with confidence. To all intents and purposes, they became one, political nation. Henceforth, to be 'Polish' was to be a citizen of the Polish-Lithuanian state.\n\nOne persistent nuisance to the security of the united polity continued to be posed by the Teutonic Knights. Despite the fact that the crusaders' original _raison d'\u00eatre_ had vanished with the conversion of Lithuania, they doggedly defended their power and sought to extend the Order's lands. Most descriptions of the wars between the Teutonic Order and Poland-Lithuania view them as a simple clash between Prussian and Polish interests. Conventional interpretations of the great battle at Grunwald in 1410, at which the Order was decisively defeated (see pp. 346\u2013), provide a good example. Yet the grand duchy's priorities necessarily diverged from the kingdom's. The 'Great War' with the Knights (1409\u201322) certainly brought Poland and Lithuania closer, but in matters of foreign policy and military preparedness, the grand duchy had to reckon with other issues relating to Livonia, Muscovy and Crimea which affected the Poles only tangentially.\n\nAfter 1418 Livonia evolved into an unusual confederation of mini-states, less than half of which was occupied by the Livonian province of the Teutonic Order. It was joined in the greater part by the four self-governing bishoprics of Riga, Courland, \u00d6sel and Dorpat. A Livonian Diet regularly convened at Walk ( a town which today is divided between Valka in Latvia and Valga in Estonia), and was dominated by a Germanized nobility. The fragmented character of the confederation reduced its capacity for offence. Nonetheless, it was the nearest foreign state to Vilnius, and it had to be watched at all times.\n\nMuscovy aroused fears that were by no means confined to its growing military strength. Having extracted the lands of the eastern Rus\u2032 from the Mongol yoke, it grew in power and prestige, and by gaining control of the Republic of Novgorod by stages, it became the equal of the grand duchy in terms of inhabited territory and population. Its culminating assault arrived in 1478, when large numbers of Novgorod's citizens were massacred. Yet the source of Moscow's unparalleled pretensions lay far over the horizon in ideas born in Byzantium. In 1453, when the Ottoman Turks finally captured Constantinople, they put the Byzantine Empire out of its terminal agony; but they also planted the seed of a megalomaniac idea in Muscovite minds. Byzantium, the 'Second Rome' was dead. Long live Moscow, therefore, the 'Third Rome'! Ivan III (r. 1440\u20131505), known as 'the Great', was the first Muscovite prince to take the idea seriously, to adopt the Byzantine two-headed eagle as his emblem, and thereby to spread the notion that he was the only true successor of the Roman Caesars, the 'tsars'. The prospects from the religious perspective were particularly threatening. The patriarch of Constantinople, to whom all Orthodox Slavs had hitherto owed allegiance, had now fallen into infidel hands. According to Moscow's logic, his authority passed automatically to the metropolitan of Moscow, who would eventually be raised to the self-appointed rank of patriarch. All Orthodox Slavs, not least in Ukraine and White Ruthenia, quaked.\n\nThe Khanate of Crimea was another menacing newcomer. The remnants of the original Mongol Horde had dispersed; but an important fragment of it, which had taken over the Crimean peninsula and converted to Islam, revived former fears. These Crimean Tartars enjoyed a near-impregnable base, and they grew rich from Black Sea trade and piracy and from inland raids; they also benefited from the protection of the Ottoman sultan. In 1399, on the River Vorskla near Ukrainian Poltava, they routed a grand ducal army under Vytautas, effectively terminating his political plans, and in the fifteenth century their raiding parties began to penetrate deep both into Muscovy and the grand duchy. These activities on the 'Wild Steppes' of the grand duchy's southern expanses gave rise to the formation of self-defence communities of 'Cossacks' on the lower Dniepr ( _Kozak_ is a Turkish word meaning 'adventurer' or 'freebooter'). Here was Europe's ultimate borderland. Its Slavonic name, _Ukraina_ , meant 'On the Edge': a counterpart to the American 'Frontier'. Cossacks and Tartars were Europe's 'cowboys and Indians'. Centuries would pass before they were tamed.\n\nKiev in particular remained exposed to Tartar attacks. One such assault in 1416 preceded a siege that was successfully resisted; another in 1483 led to the city's sacking. The return of the metropolitans to residence there proves that ancient traditions were still alive. So, too, does the magnificent Kievan Psalter (1397), containing more than 300 spectacular miniatures. The growth of municipal pride is evidenced by the introduction of Magdeburg Law (the most widespread set of municipal rights used for the incorporation of cities in Eastern Europe), by the construction of a wooden _Ratusha_ , or 'town hall', that lasted until modern times, and by the adoption in 1471 of the city's emblem, the Archangel Michael. Merchants continued to be drawn to fairs where the river trade met the steppe trails. But Kiev trailed behind Vil\u2032nya.\n\nThe grand duchy was to reach its farthest limits when the Crimean khans ceded sections of the Black Sea coast in the mid-fifteenth century in return for military assistance. The territory, largely uninhabited, was known as _Dykra_ , the 'Wasteland'. It contained a couple of fortified ports, Kara Kerman (later Ochakiv) and Hacibey (later Odessa), and apart from some nomadic tribes, nothing much else. The grand duchy could neither defend it nor develop it, and eventually abandoned it to the Ottomans.\n\nOver the decades, the Jagiellons and their entourage, who left Vilnius in 1386 and took up residence in the Royal Castle at Krak\u00f3w, became thoroughly Polonized. Jogaila and his two sons were bilingual, as was Jogaila's grandson, Alexander Jagiello\u0144czyk, who ruled in the grand duchy before ruling Poland as well. But by the sixteenth century, the royal and grand-ducal courts were almost exclusively Polish-speaking. Back home in Vilnius-Vil\u2032nya, the dominant administrative language was Slavonic _ruski_ , not Baltic Lithuanian.\n\nSimilar adjustments occurred among the grand duchy's nobility. Prior to the Union of Horod\u0142o, power had rested firmly in the hands of a ruler whose subjects owed him absolute fealty. Under Vytautas, however, a policy of enfeoffment was instigated, that is, of investing nobles with fiefs and creating a class of feudal vassals. The ruler increasingly exercised power indirectly through loyal courtiers and servants who were rewarded with huge grants of land in each of the main localities. In due course, as the distant grand dukes grew less and less inclined to interfere, a small number of powerful families put down roots and turned themselves into hereditary lords. Some of them were destined to become the largest landowners in the whole of Europe. With few exceptions, these fortunes were created by individuals of either Lithuanian or Ruthenian descent, such as Gostautas (Gasztold) or Ostrozki (Ostrogski), but their descendants functioned effortlessly in the highest circles of all the Jagiellonian realms. By the sixteenth century, a score of magnates controlled 30 per cent of the grand duchy's land, leaving the remaining 70 per cent in the hands of some 19,000 minor _boyars_ , of the Church, or of the grand duke's domain. A military register (see Table 2) drawn from 1528 clearly displays the magnatial preponderance. These names would reverberate throughout the grand duchy's history.\n\nTable 2. Military Register (1528)\n\nFamily | Knights due for service | Number of villages  \n---|---|---  \nKesgaillos ( Kezgajllo) | 768 | 12,288  \nRadvilaos (Radziwi\u0142\u0142) | 760 | 12,160  \nGostautas (Gasztold) | 466 | 7,456  \nOlelko (Olelko, prince) | 433 | 6,928  \nOstrozki (Ostrogski, prince) | 426 | 6,816  \n\u2014\u2014 (Ostrzykowicz) | 338 | 5,408  \nHleb (Hlebowicz) | 279 | 4,464  \n\u2014\u2014 (Zabrzezi\u0144ski) | 258 | 4,128  \nThe bishop of Vilnius | 236 | 3,776  \n\u2014\u2014 (Kiszka) | 224 | 3,548  \nChodko (Chodkiewicz) | 201 | 3,216  \n\u2014\u2014 (Sanguszko, prince) | 170 | 2,720  \n\u2014\u2014 (Illnicz) | 160 | 2,560  \nSapiegos (Sapieha) | 153 | 2,448  \n\u2014\u2014 (Holsza\u0144ski, prince) | 122 | 1,952  \n\u2014\u2014 (Pac) |  97 | 1,552\n\nNone of the magnates of Litva faced a more star-studded future than the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s, yet their origins were obscure, and their rise to prominence occurred late and quickly. The legend that they were descended from the last pagan archpriest of Vilnius is a fabrication. The first of the clan was Krystyn O\u015bcik, the castellan of Vil\u2032nya from 1417 until 1442, whose son's first name became the family's surname. Long life, lavish dowries, numerous offspring, high office and territorial appetite did the rest. The clan was firmly ensconced by the time the Jagiellonian era came to an end. From then on, their record of office in the grand duchy was unrelenting: 7 hetmans or 'Supreme Commanders', 8 chancellors, 5 marshals, 13 palatines of Vil\u2032nya, 6 palatines of Troki, 2 bishops, 1 cardinal and a total of 40 senators. Their motto read: ' _B\u00f3g Nam Radzi'_ \u2013 'God Advises Us'.\n\nThe assembling of the largest estate lands in the grand duchy took about a century. Krystyn O\u015bcik had no great fortune, but his great-grandsons accumulated _c._ 14,000 homesteads with a serf population of _c_. 90,000. There were three branches: the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s of Rajgr\u00f3d and Goni\u0105dz on the Polish frontier, who died out in 1542, the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s of Nie\u015bwie\u017c and O\u0142yka in the south, and the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s of Birze close to Livonia. They obtained properties by serving the grand dukes, who rewarded them well, and by marrying wealthy wives. But they also purchased land, broke new ground in the wilderness, and took in estates as security against loans. Their key property of Nie\u015bwie\u017c arrived in their portfolio with Jan I's third wife in 1523. Mir was received in grant. O\u0142yka, on the other hand, which lay beyond the Pripyat\u2032 in Volhynia, was discarded, and eventually became the seat of the Czartoryskis. Yet, by the 1550s, when Miko\u0142aj 'the Black' and Miko\u0142aj 'the Red' were the favourite ministers of the king and grand duke Sigismund-August, and Miko\u0142aj the Red's sister, Barbara, was queen, they had outrun all competitors. The permanence of their fortunes was to be sealed in 1586. In return for supplying the Crown with an annual quota of troops, the Radziwi\u0142\u0142 estates were raised to the status of an _Ordynacja_ (entail), which could never be legally dispersed.\n\nTheir palace at Nie\u015bwie\u017c lies in the rolling country near the source of the Nieman, halfway between Minsk and Pinsk. It was one of the three Radziwi\u0142\u0142 estates entailed in 1586, and was developed by Jan I's son, Miko\u0142aj Krzysztof 'Sierotka' (1549\u20131616), 'the Orphan'. Completed in 1599, it was graced by Bernadoni's Baroque Corpus Christi church to mark the family's return to Catholicism at various times during the Counter-Reformation. Its five wings boasted 106 main rooms, an entrance gate, a clock tower, a parade ground and park. It was later extended by Prince Micha\u0142 Kazimierz 'Rybe\u0144ko' (1702\u201362), the ninth _ordinatus_ , whose wife Franciszka Wi\u015bniowiecka was a playwright, who demanded and received her own theatre. Though robbed and sacked in various wars, the fabric was never destroyed, and it has survived, like the castle of Mir, to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.\n\nEach of the key castles of the magnatial estates grew into a small-scale capital, overshadowing the modest incorporated towns. The growth of the magnates was also accompanied by an influx of Jews, who were attracted both by the commercial possibilities and by the demand for literate administrators. In this, the grand duchy followed in the footsteps of Poland, which since the mid-fourteenth century had been Europe's main safe haven for persecuted Jewry. The stereotypical image of rural towns throughout the grand duchy presents a picture of a Polish or Polonized landowner, a small middle class of strong Jewish complexion, and a surrounding peasant mass of illiterate serfs, Lithuanians or Ruthenians.\n\nGiven the increased influence of the magnates, the governments of Jagiellonian Litva took the form of a partnership between the grand duke or his deputies and the Lords' Council. (As yet, there was nothing equivalent to the Polish _Sejm_ or parliament that first assembled in the late fifteenth century.) The grand dukes never formally surrendered their absolute powers, but since they were frequently absent in Poland, the Council was able to assume far-reaching responsibilities. At the regional level, the Polish model was followed. The grand duke's representative, the _wojewoda_ or 'palatine', exercised supreme political and military authority in each of the palatinates except in the far south beyond Kiev, where Tartars and Cossacks roamed at will. 'Ukraina' only felt the rod of government intermittently from the rewards and punishments meted out by royal\/grand-ducal expeditions.\n\nThe great offices of state were reserved for a narrow circle of magnates. The same surnames recur. The _hetman wielki_ or 'great hetman' commanded the military forces of the grand duchy, and was expected to lead them in person; he supervised a network of castellans charged with defending the grand-ducal castles and organizing regional defence. The _kanclerz_ or 'chancellor' headed the civilian administration, based in Vil\u2032nya, and was assisted by the palatines and district _starostas_ , whose function had originally been military but was gradually transformed into that of regional and local executives.\n\nAttempts to modernize the administration of the grand duchy were hampered by the absence of a uniform legal code, but this deficiency was remedied in 1522 by a commission convened on the grand duke's orders. The 'First Lithuanian Statute' was implemented seven years later. It consisted of 282 articles in 13 chapters, many of them drawn from the ancient code of Kievan Rus\u2032, the _Russkaya Pravda_. It was handwritten in the _ruski_ language of White Ruthenia, and has survived in several copies. The first article states that 'all citizens of the grand duchy of Lithuania shall be judged by the same court regardless of their rank and title'. Chapter 3 summarizes the privileges of the nobility, chapter 4, family law, and chapters 11,  and , criminal law. Many extravagant claims have been made about the Lithuanian Statutes, suggesting, for instance, that they were the only comprehensive legal codex between Justinian and Napoleon. If this is an exaggeration, the achievement was certainly real.\n\nIn matters of religion, the grand duchy of the early sixteenth century was characterized by great diversity. Since Ukraine as well as White Ruthenia formed part of the state, Orthodox Christians formed a heavy majority of the population. They adhered to the traditional Slavonic liturgy of Kievan Rus\u2032, not to the Muscovite 'Russian Orthodoxy' that was enforced beyond the eastern border. They had little direct contact with their distant patriarch and the clergy was left largely to its own devices, the Ostrogski princes acting as their secular 'guardian'. Their holiest shrines in the north were at Trokiele near Lida and at Zhirovice near Hrodna, where a wonder-working statuette of the Virgin was revered; and in the south at the monastery of Lavra Pecherskaya in Kiev, founded by St Theodosius in the eleventh century. Several proposals to create a separate patriarchate for the grand duchy were never realized.\n\nRoman Catholicism, introduced into Baltic Lithuania by Jogaila in the 1380s as the second Christian denomination in the grand duchy, was strengthened by the Polonization of the nobility; the bishop of Vil\u2032nya became a powerful figure. St Casimir Jagiellon, son and brother of kings and grand dukes, died at Hrodna in 1484. Canonized in 1522, he was declared patron saint of Lithuania. Nevertheless, the Calvinist Reformation made surprising headway in the grand duchy, especially among the magnates. Miko\u0142aj 'the Red' Radziwi\u0142\u0142, grand hetman and chancellor, was a convert, and protector of a Protestant community at Birze. The Holy Bible, translated into Polish for the first time ever, was published at Brest in 1562. (The first accessible Lithuanian equivalent of the Brest Bible did not appear until 1735 when published in Prussian K\u00f6nigsberg; a translation into Lithuanian undertaken in Oxford during Cromwell's Protectorate had little popular impact.)\n\nJudaism was also present throughout the grand duchy, and Jewish numbers increased steadily due to migration from Poland. Quaint wooden synagogues were a feature of many small towns. A community of _karaim_ or 'Karaites', originally from Crimea, had been settled in Troki since the time of Vytautas. The Karaites do not accept the validity of the Talmud, and are regarded by the proponents of rabbinical Judaism as heretics. They, like the Protestant Christians, put strong emphasis on the written word, and were drawn into the printing trade, thereby contributing to the general growth of education and literacy.\n\nVil\u2032nya-Vilnius in the early sixteenth century was a city of many traders, many languages and many religions. The grand duchy's capital since the fourteenth century, it was unrivalled in size and influence after the loss of Smalensk, and had been walled against possible Tartar attack. In 1522, the year that the walls were finished, it welcomed the grand duchy's first print shop. Its owner was the humanist and bibliophile Francysk Skaryna ( _c_. 1485\u20131540), who gained the reputation of being the founding father of Belarusian letters. The royal and grand-ducal palace stood on the site of a pagan temple destroyed only 150 years before. The Ruthenians congregated on the eastern side around the Gate of Dawn and their Orthodox church; the Jews dominated the western quarter, and its 'German Street'. The Poles and the Catholics were in a distinct minority until the court moved there in 1543.\n\nKiyiv\/Kiev struggled to compete. In a charter of 29 March 1514, the king and grand duke, Sigismund the Elder, reconfirmed the municipality's right to be governed by the Magdeburg Law, which had evidently lapsed:\n\n> The mayor [ _voit_ ] and townspeople of Kiev have petitioned us and informed us that our brother, His Grace... Alexander of glorious memory... had granted them in his benevolence the German or Magdeburg law .... so that in the future the townspeople would be governed in accordance with all the articles of that law. Taking into consideration their services, therefore, and the losses they suffer from our enemies in the borderland [the Tatars], and desiring that this town of ours should increase in population and prosperity, we have done as they petitioned .... And they shall observe this law in every respect, just as our town of Vil\u2032no observes it; and by this our charter we confirm eternally and inviolably for all time to come... all those rights and exemptions which we have granted.\n\nThe most acute concern of the grand duchy, however, lay with the rise of Muscovy under Ivan 'the Great'. The ideology of the 'Third Rome' no doubt seemed far-fetched to many non-Muscovites, since it was saying, in effect, that the grand duchy had no legitimacy. It underpinned the dubious proposition that Moscow possessed a divine, imperial mission to unite all of ancient Rus\u2032 under its rule, thereby justifying the policy of the 'Gathering of the Lands'. According to this ideology, the majority of the grand duchy's inhabitants, being Orthodox Slavs and descendants of Kievan Rus\u2032, should now defect. The message received little or no support among White Ruthenians and Ukrainians, who valued their political separation and their religious liberty, but from Moscow's viewpoint it provided a constant and convenient _casus belli_. Alexander Jagiello\u0144czyk, son of Casimir the Great, was married to Ivan's daughter, Helena, but when he approached his father-in-law to discuss improved relations, he was told that there could be no discussions until the whole of the 'tsar's birthright' had been returned. Helena wrote to her father: 'Everyone here thought that I would bring all good things, love, friendship, eternal peace and co-operation: instead, there came war, conflict, the ruin of towns, the shedding of Christian blood, the widowing of wives, the orphaning of children, slavery, despair, weeping and groans.'\n\nIvan III began the campaign to recover the lands of Rus\u2032 in 1485. It would proceed, with intervals, for three centuries, but it opened with five Muscovite wars against the grand duchy in fifty years. Vyazma was the first grand-ducal fortress to be lost, in 1494; but the most critical battle of the near incessant fighting was contested near the city of Orsha on 8 September 1514. The Muscovites had just captured Smalensk by siege with a huge array of men and machines, carrying off the city's holy icon and immediately laying the foundations of the largest of all their kremlins. They were moving deeper into the grand duchy when confronted by a much smaller force under Hetman Konstanty Ostrogski. They attacked at dawn, enjoying a 3 : 1 advantage and confident of success. Assault and counter-assault followed, until the massed Muscovite spearhead was drawn into a trap. The Lithuanian lines parted suddenly to reveal banks of concealed artillery. Cannon mowed down the advancing infantry. Polish cavalry swept in from the wings, and, as reported with considerable exaggeration, 30,000 Muscovite dead were left on the field; all 300 of their guns were captured. Returning to Vil\u2032nya in triumph, Ostrogski celebrated the victory by building two Orthodox churches: of the Trinity and of St Nicholas. Yet repeated attempts to recover the lost lands met only modest success. When a longer interval in hostilities was called in 1537, the Muscovites were still holding on to broad expanses of the borders including Polatsk, Smalensk, Chernigov and Seversk; Homel alone was retained.\n\nMilitary problems demanded constant attention. Until the middle of the fifteenth century, the old feudal levy performed well. Poland alone put 18,000 knights into the field and the grand duchy was not far behind. Fortresses and cities were protected by dirt-and-stone walls to meet the challenge of siege artillery. In later decades, however, difficulties arose. The old type of army was no longer suited to the open warfare of the south against the Crimean Tartars. Knights could hardly arrive on the scene of distant action before the season's campaign was ending. Casual finances, which had to be spent before the land tax was collected, no longer sufficed. The _lev\u00e9e-en-masse_ had to be supplemented. In the 1490s a limited move in this direction was taken when an _obrona potoczna_ or 'current defence force' of some 2,000 men was created to defend Red Ruthenia from Tartar raids. In 1526 it received an established financial grant. The trouble was that the system needed extending. Without a permanent standing army, each campaign required an extraordinary financial grant, and the numbers of men who could be fielded were constantly declining, forcing commanders to rely on the resourcefulness and (variable) quality of their troops.\n\nIn this regard, Crown Hetman Jan Tarnowski (1488\u20131561), was an outstanding figure. Though not a subject of the grand duchy, he played an important role in its affairs. Like his contemporary in the west, the Chevalier de Bayard, 'the knight without fear of reproach', he was a small man with an immense reputation. It was Tarnowski who modified the Hussite concept of the _tabor_ or 'military train' for use in the east, and turned it into the vehicle of repeated victory against overwhelming odds. The stores of his entire army were carried in huge six-horse wagons, which could stay on the move over vast distances or which could be chained together and formed up into a square to make an instant fortress anywhere in the wilderness. A Polish-Lithuanian _tabor_ besieged by twenty or thirty thousand Tartars must have closely resembled the overland wagon trains of American pioneers attacked by the Sioux or the Cherokee. Tarnowski also developed the headquarters services of a modern army: horse-artillery, field hospitals, the corps of _Szancknechte_ (sappers), the _Probantmajster_ 's logistical department, the 'Hetman's Articles' or code of discipline, courts martial and the corps of army chaplains. His experiences were summarized in a book of theory, _Consilium Rationis Bellicae_ ('An Outline of Military Method'), published in 1558. His watchword was 'Know your adversary'; and he preached the doctrine of military flexibility.\n\nSigismund-August (1520\u201372) was to be the last of the Jagiellonian king-grand dukes, and his personal tragedy was somehow symptomatic of a hereditary system that was nearing its end. Subjected as a boy in Krak\u00f3w to a hasty and irregular coronation, where the customary procedures were not observed, he was made painfully aware of the dynasty's anxieties; the Jagiellons were losing their thrones in Hungary and Bohemia. Yet as the son of Sigismund the Elder and of Queen Bona Sforza, he grew up in the midst of Poland's 'Golden Age', surrounded by Italian-inspired art, architecture and literature; he matured to be a true Renaissance man, noted for his patronage of the humanities, his religious toleration, his interest in administrative reforms and his passion for maritime affairs. He was given control of the grand duchy when still a teenager, and Vil\u2032nya was the scene of his happiest moments.\n\nThe young Jagiellon met Barbara Radziwi\u0142\u0142 in Vil\u2032nya when he was a twenty-four-year-old widower and she the twenty-four-year-old widow of the grand duchy's richest man, Stanis\u0142aw Gaszto\u0142d. Their romance was sweetened by the opposition of many courtiers and by their secret marriage in the palace chapel in 1547. But Barbara was sick and childless. She was not crowned as queen and grand duchess, and soon died from malignant cancer. Her husband was heartbroken. The dynasty was entering a cul-de-sac.\n\nThe rest of Sigismund-August's reign proceeded in the shadow of the broken dream. The king-grand duke's miserable third marriage, to a Habsburg archduchess, highlighted the contrast between the stricken Jagiellons and the meteoric rise of their Habsburg relatives. (This was the age of Emperor Charles V, so different from the prospects of fifty years earlier.) What is more, the pressures for political integration, which grew in the 1550s, were not generally welcomed. The brooding monarch had not been keen on it in his early years, and confessed that he was likely to die before the future of his two states had been properly resolved.\n\nA favourable turn in foreign affairs, however, occurred in 1561. Gotard Kettler (1517\u201387), grand master of the Knights of the Sword in Livonia,* was troubled by the vulnerability of the federation to which he belonged, fearing the depredations of Danes, Swedes and Muscovites. He was also swept along by the full flood the Protestant Reformation, which was sapping the foundations of the state. Appealing to Sigismund-August for help, he decided on the same course of action which had been followed a generation earlier by the grand master of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia (see below, p. 351): he disbanded his Order; converted to Lutheranism; and turned Livonia into a secular state. After a brief, multi-sided war, the grand duchy annexed southern Livonia, and Kettler became duke of Courland, which he held from Lithuania in fief. Sigismund-August, already the overlord of Prussia in his capacity as king of Poland, now became, in his capacity as grand duke, overlord of Courland-Livonia as well.\n\nIn 1566 the Second Lithuanian Statute was published, a revised and expanded version of the First. It now consisted of 14 chapters and 367 articles, written in the same _ruski_ language that was declared the sole medium of court hearings. (One senses a vested interest of entrenched Ruthenian lawyers, who held a virtual monopoly.) Innovations included confirmation of the equality of Catholic and Orthodox Christians before the law, the extension of Lithuanian justice to the south-western province of Volhynia, and the introduction of new noble privileges in line with Poland, where the king's powers were already formally limited. The Polish statute of _Nihil Novi_ (1505), for example, had established the parliamentary principle of _Nic o nas bez nas_ , roughly 'Nothing about us without us'; it was very similar to the idea of 'no taxation without representation', which some readers may imagine to have been invented elsewhere. The traditional governance of the grand duchy had tended towards the autocratic end of the spectrum. The legislation of 1566 formed part of a move in the opposite direction of limited monarchy.\n\nThroughout Sigismund-August's reign, no stable peace was achieved with Muscovy. The fifth Muscovite War had ended in 1537 with a truce, not a treaty. The grand duchy had been strengthened by a second victory at Orsha in 1564 during the Livonian crisis, and by gaining direct access to the sea at Mittau and Riga; but Moscow had also gained its first ever foothold on the Baltic at Narva. Further hostilities were awaited.\n\nBy the mid-1560s, the most pressing concern by far was the imminent extinction of the Jagiellonian dynasty. Sigismund-August was convinced that his death would bring chaos if the grand duchy were not integrated with Poland. The _Sejm_ , which assembled in Lublin three days before Christmas in 1568, had been convoked for the express purpose of forging a constitutional union between kingdom and grand duchy. Sigismund-August was in a hurry. This was the fourth such meeting in five years, and was attended by both Lithuanian and Polish representatives; the arguments were well rehearsed. The common danger from Muscovy, the exposure of the south-eastern provinces to the Tartars, the convergence of political cultures and the inadequacy of existing military and financial practices all pointed to the necessity of fundamental change. But there was added urgency. The king's third marriage had failed definitively. Divorce was impossible. A legitimate heir could not be born. The Jagiellons were sure to die out.\n\nThe king-grand duke, tired and sick, roused himself for the last great effort of his life. He alone could break the barriers to reform. In the last decade, he had tried many devices to unify mechanisms in the two parts of his realm. In 1559 he had instituted a _Sejm_ for the grand duchy, and in 1564 provincial _sejmiki_ or regional assemblies of nobles on the Polish model. At the same time he surrendered all of his prerogatives which limited the nobility's property rights, and extended full legal privileges to Orthodox gentry. He knew, of course, that habits do not change overnight. He knew that the Lithuanian representatives were fearful of Poland's greater numbers, and had been selected by the magnates under threat of punishment. He watched at Lublin how the three leading Lithuanians \u2013 Miko\u0142aj 'the Red' Radziwi\u0142\u0142, Jan Chodkiewicz and Ostafi Wo\u0142owicz \u2013 simply ordered the rest of their delegation to keep silent. After one month of formalities, and a further month of crossed purposes, the king summoned Radziwi\u0142\u0142 and Chodkiewicz to appear in person and explain themselves. When they fled in the night he reacted angrily. Over the following days three provinces of the grand duchy \u2013 Podlasie, Volhynia and Kiev \u2013 were incorporated into the kingdom by royal decree _._ Two Podlasian officers, on refusing to swear allegiance to the Polish Crown, were promptly stripped of their posts. The implication was clear: if the Lithuanian lords refused to behave like Polish noblemen and debate the issue openly, the king would turn on them with all the fury of former Lithuanian autocrats.\n\nIn April the leading lords of the Ukraine* \u2013 Ostrogski, Czartoryski, Sanguszko and Wi\u015bniowiecki \u2013 took their places in the Senate (the upper chamber of the _Sejm_ ). On 17 June 1569 Chodkiewicz himself reappeared, and, in the name of his peers, tearfully implored the king 'not to hand them over to the Polish Crown by hereditary will, to the slavery and shame of their children'. Sigismund-August replied, also in tears: 'God dwells where Love is, for such is his Divine Will. I am not leading Your Lordships to any forced submission. We must all submit to God, and not to earthly rulers.' It was the moment of decision. Chodkiewicz accepted the terms of the proposed Union. The Senate rose to its feet and roared its thanks. Poland and Lithuania were to be joined together, 'freemen with free, equals with equal'. There was to be one _Rzeczpospolita_ , one 'Republic or Commonwealth'; one indivisible body-politic; one king, elected not born; one currency, and one _Sejm_ , whose deputies were to form the state's most powerful institution. The Lithuanians were to keep their own law, their own administration, their own army, and the titles of their princely families.\n\nThe king-grand duke laboured incessantly on the details for hours on end, day after day. 'These are great matters,' he said, 'which are to last for centuries; they require long deliberation and good counsel.' Finally, on 1 July 1569, the Act of Union was sealed. Standing hat in hand, and surrounded by the clergy, Sigismund-August received the oaths of loyalty from each of the signatories. Then, he led the entire assembly to the church of St Stanis\u0142aw, knelt before the altar and sang the _Te Deum_ in a strong voice.\n\nIn Muscovy, Ivan IV, angered by news of the Union of Lublin, hastened to one of the crimes which earned him the name of 'Terrible'. Novgorod, like the new Poland-Lithuania, despised Moscow's autocratic tradition. Forged letters were produced to show that the archbishop and governor of Novgorod were guilty of treasonable contacts with Sigismund-August. The tsar administered punishment in person. The inhabitants of Novgorod were systematically seized and killed in batches of 500 or 1,000 every day. In five weeks, Russia's most civilized city was depopulated and reduced to a smouldering heap. Ivan returned to Moscow to prepare the cauldrons of boiling oil and the meat hooks which were to chastise some hundreds of Muscovites suspected of sympathizing with Novgorod. What future for the 'Republic of goodwill' with such a neighbour?\n\nSigismund-August's last years were tinged with remorse. His constant appeals for love and harmony were bred by the fear that love and harmony were in short supply. In 1569 the _Sejm_ insisted on debating his marital affairs and rose on 12 September without attending to his requests. The provisions for drafting electoral procedure, for creating a central treasury and for preparing judicial reforms were postponed. 'You see that I am a servant of Death,' he had told them, 'no less than Your Lordships. If you do not pay heed, then my work and Yours will be turned to nought.' They paid little attention.\n\nSigismund-August relapsed into despair and insomnia. He locked himself into his castle at Knyszyn near the Lithuanian border and refused to receive his senators. He died on 7 July 1572, surrounded by a motley company of quacks, astrologers and witches, in a room hung in black in memory of Barbara Radziwi\u0142\u0142. His last will repeated his beautiful lifelong wishes which were so unlikely to come true:\n\n> By this our last testament, We give and bequeath to our two realms, to the Polish Crown and to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, that love, harmony, and unity... which our forebears cemented for eternity by strong agreements, mutually confirmed... And to whomsoever of the two nations shall hold firmly to the Union... We bequeath Our blessing, that the Lord God in his favour shall grant them honour and power [and] fame both at home and abroad... But whosoever shall profess ingratitude and follow the paths of separation, may they quake before God's wrath, who in the words of the prophet, hates and curses them who sow dissension between brother and brother...\n\nThe last of the Jagiellons was buried on Wawel Hill in Krak\u00f3w. The private person of the king-grand duke was dead; his public person rode in effigy to the burial. The royal standard was broken asunder and, with the royal jewels, cast into the grave. This same act symbolized the transfiguration of the Kingdom of Poland and of the grand duchy. The late king had ruled as the hereditary monarch of two separate principalities. He was leaving them united in one elective republic.\n\nWithin the dual _Rzeczpospolita_ , the grand duchy found itself both diminished and strengthened. By losing the southern steppelands in Ukraine (see p. 262), it was reduced to less than half its former size, and with the Ukrainian lands added to the kingdom, its relative size vis-\u00e0-vis Poland fell to perhaps 1 : 1.5. It had returned to the traditional Lithuanian-White Ruthenian base of the distant days of Mindaugas. Observers of the _Rzeczpospolita_ would wonder whether, if Ukraine had been set up as a third pillar of the state instead of passing under Polish rule, the resultant triple structure might not have been more balanced. As it was, the grand duchy played a junior role in the Polish-Lithuanian partnership. Yet it possessed a guarantee of internal inviolability, and its representatives could participate in full in both the common _Sejm_ and the royal elections. The so-called Noble Democracy gave the great Lithuanian lords inordinate influence.\n\nThe administrative units and regional jurisdictions of the _Rzeczpospolita_ were finally defined in 1581. The grand duchy possessed its own supreme judicial tribunal, which circulated between sessions in three centres: nine palatinates, plus the Duchy of Samogitia, and Livonia. The palatinates were Vilna, Troki, Brest, Minsk, Vitebsk, Mtislav, Polatsk, Seversk and Smalensk, the latter being no more than a residual entity. Each of them was divided into _poviats_ or 'districts', and each held its own _sejmik_ or 'regional assembly of nobles', sending delegates to the central Diet in Warsaw with precise instructions. The Duchy of Samogitia functioned as a palatinate except that it was divided into twenty-eight 'tracts' instead of districts. Livonia would be handed to Sweden in 1621; Seversk in 1634 and the remnant of Smalensk in 1667 to Muscovy. The rest remained intact to 1773, or in some cases to 1795.\n\nOne of the characteristics of the commonwealth's nobility was their distaste for titles: in theory, they were all equal, whether aristocrat or lowly squire. Hence, unlike the rest of Europe, there were no native counts, earls or dukes. Nonetheless, one of the ways in which the king had overcome the doubts of the Lithuanian magnates in 1569 was by allowing most of them to keep their princely titles. (The offer was not available to the kingdom's greatest lords, like the Zamoyski or the Potocki.) Two categories existed. The old Ruthenian title of _Knyaz_ was reserved for descendants of the Rurikid, Gediminid and Rogvolodichi ruling houses. The Latin titles of _princeps_ and _dux_ had usually been awarded either by the pope or by the Holy Roman Emperor. Both, after 1569, passed into Polish as _ksi_ \u0105 _ze_ , 'prince'. The Ruthenian princely families included the clans of Giedroy\u0107, Puzyna, Sanguszko, Sapieha and Czartoryski. The imperial and papal princes were headed by the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s, who had been granted the honour twice. Henceforth, almost all of these names were the _magnati magnatorum_ \u2013 the 'greatest of the great'.\n\nWithin the _Rzeczpospolita_ 's dual framework, the leaders of the grand duchy were eager to maximize their freedom of action. To this end, state laws were reviewed, and in 1588 a third version of the grand duchy's law code was published. This Third Lithuanian Statute had been in preparation since the Union of Lublin. The committee which prepared the drafts was drawn from a cross-section of nationalities and religions, and seems to have intended a collation of Polish and Lithuanian laws. But the moving spirit of the exercise was Prince Lev Sapieha (1557\u20131633), Lithuanian chancellor from 1581; and the end product was clearly designed to preserve the grand duchy's special interests. Its fourteen chapters were approved by Sigismund Vasa in the first year of his reign, confirmed by the joint _Sejm_ and printed in Vil\u2032nya in 1588. Its third chapter, which states that no lands would be ceded to anyone, defiantly introduces the corporate concept of the grand duchy's nature. The relevant passage brims with defiance:\n\n> RA\u0179DZE\u0141 TRECI: _'Ab \u0161lachieckich volna\u015bciach i pa\u0161yre\u0144ni Vialikaha Kniastva Lito\u016dskaha.' My, Haspadar, abiacajem, taksama, i \u015b\u0107viard\u017eajem toje za Siabie j na\u0161\u010diadka\u016d Na\u0161ych... My, nia budziem nikomu nijakim \u010dynam bajara\u016d, \u015blachtu dy ichnayja majontki, ab\u0161ary i ziemli addava\u0107..._\n> \n> CHAPTER THREE: 'On the Freedoms of the nobility and the development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.' We, the _Haspadar_ , the Ruler, by custom and by confirmation, for Ourselves and Our heirs, and by the Oath that We took with all the assemblies of all the lands of the Grand Duchy... Art. 5. We declare for all time, and undertake to preserve, that We like our forebears... will never hand over to anyone, by any act, the property, territories and lands of the _boyars_ and nobles.\n\nReligion posed the greatest challenge. The _Rzeczpospolita_ took shape in the year of the St Bartholomew's Eve massacre, when 20,000 Protestants were murdered in Paris. Much of Europe was ablaze with wars of religion. In Warsaw, the nobles of the newborn commonwealth, exceptionally, formed a solemn league to avoid violence through religious differences. And so it proved. Although the Counter-Reformation was to recover much lost ground from the Protestants, in the commonwealth it could only do so by peaceful means. In Lithuania, a chain of Jesuit colleges established at Vil\u2032nya, Polatsk, Dorpat, Orsha and Vitebsk was particularly successful in revitalizing Catholicism, and conflict between Catholics and Orthodox was rare. The threat was mainly external. Muscovy persisted in its efforts to draw the Ruthenians away from Byzantine Orthodoxy and to persuade them to recognize the authority of the patriarch of Moscow. After decades of such harassment, the majority of Slav Orthodox bishops summoned a Church Council at Brest in 1596 and formed a new Greek Catholic Church, which was to preserve the Slavonic liturgy while adopting papal supremacy. Henceforth, the Orthodox community in the grand duchy was to be divided, as in Ukraine, between 'Uniates' and 'Disuniates'. The Uniates were in communion with Rome; the disuniates continued to recognize the patriarch of Constantinople. Even so, simple Orthodox believers were sometimes reluctant to accept the Greek Catholics. St Jozephat Kuntsevich (1580\u20131623), Uniate archbishop of Polatsk, was murdered in Vitebsk by an angry mob and cast into the Dvina. The Ukrainian Cossacks, who often rampaged into the _Rzeczpospolita_ , were also fierce defenders of the old Orthodoxy. The Orthodox martyr St Athanasius of Brest (d. 1648) appears to have been murdered by Catholics in retaliation for the Cossacks' misdeeds.\n\nTo most Europeans in that Age of Monarchy, a royal election sounded like a contradiction in terms. But in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as in the Holy Roman Empire, it was a fundamental constitutional procedure for centuries. All nobles were entitled to participate, providing an electorate of 5 to 6 per cent of the population. They were required to attend armed and mounted, and between 30,000 and 40,000 would gather on the Wola Field near Warsaw, staying there until a unanimous decision was obtained. Some of the magnates, like the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s, would bring along a regiment or two, and a battery of artillery, to help win over the opposition. They were choosing a man who would automatically become grand duke as well as king of Poland.\n\nThe first election, in 1573, passed off quietly, but it produced a dud from France. Henry de Valois fled to Paris three months after his coronation, having succeeded to the French throne. The second election in 1576 was a procedural shambles, provoking civil war. But it eventually produced a brilliant warrior and statesman from Transylvania \u2013 Stefan Batory \u2013 who brought the rebellious elements to heel, and devoted much energy to the grand duchy's foreign policy. The third election, in 1587, initiated a series of kings from the Polish-Swedish Vasa dynasty:\n\n> Henryk Walezy (Henri de Valois) (r. 1573\u20134)\n> \n> Stefan (Stephen) Batory (Istvan Bathory) (r. 1576\u201386)\n> \n> Zygmunt III Waza (Sigismund III Vasa) (r. 1587\u20131632)\n> \n> W\u0142adys\u0142aw IV Waza (Ladislas IV Vasa) (r. 1632\u201348)\n> \n> Jan Kazimierz Waza (John Casimir Vasa) (r. 1648\u201368)\n\nBy custom, the Catholic primate of Poland presided over the state during the interregnum between the death of a king-grand duke and a successor's coronation.\n\nBatory's war against Moscow in 1579\u201382 aimed to recoup the grand duchy's losses and to put an end to the constant wrangling over Livonia. The Muscovites had taken advantage of Batory's other preoccupations, principally in suppressing the revolt of Danzig, and had overrun almost all of Livonia; a response was called for. Most of the fighting took place along the eastern border, where the Russian city of Pskov was besieged by a huge force, which built a wooden city outside the walls to survive the winter. The Russian chronicler saw it as a trial of strength between two opposing religious faiths:\n\n> The siege of Pskov began in the year 7089,* in the month of August and the 18th day, on the feast of the holy martyrs Frol and Laurel. The Lithuanian people started to cross the river and to appear before the city with their regiments... The king himself came before Pskov. In that same month of August on the 26th day, on the feast of the holy martyrs Adrian and Natalya, this man, the Lithuanian king, drew close... like a wild boar from the wilderness.\n\nThe purpose of the operation was to cut off Moscow's line of communication with Livonia. The tsar wrote to the pope, complaining that Batory was 'a Turkish employee'. The pope responded by sending a Jesuit legate, Possevini, to see if there was any chance of compromise. But the siege continued, even though cavalrymen were frozen dead in their saddles. The Poles and Lithuanians, having put their strategic garrotte into place, were not going to relent until the tsar conceded. His position secure, the 'much-proud Lithuanian King Stephan' left the 'evil-hearted and greatly-proud chancellor-Pole', Jan Zamoyski, in command. Negotiations began in the presence of Possevini. At the Peace of Yam Zapolski (January 1582), Moscow abandoned the whole of Livonia, and returned Polatsk to Batory. The besiegers hung on at Pskov until the tsar's commissioners handed over the keys to all the Livonian castles:\n\n> And so, by the great and ineffable grace of the Holy Trinity, of our helpers... from the whole family of Christ... by the intercessions of the great miracle-workers... by defenders of the God-preserved city of Pskov, by the leaders in Christ... of the whole Russian land... by the prayers of the true-believing and God-loving Grand Duchess Olga... and of all the saints; by the Lord the tsar, the true-believing grand duke, Ivan Vasil\u2032evich, beloved of Christ, who holds all Russia in his patrimony; indeed, by all God's wonders, the city of God with all its people was saved from the Lithuanian king...\n> \n> Then, on the fourth day of February, the Polish hetman and lord chancellor moved off with all his array to the Lithuanian land. In the city of Pskov, the gates were opened. And I, having completed this story in all its fullness, have brought it to its end.\n\nThus did the Muscovites record a severe defeat. They would not regain another viable opening onto the Baltic, a 'window on the West', for 120 years.\n\nThe Vasa period started on a note of continuity because the successful candidate of 1587, the Swedish Prince Sigismund Vasa (Zygmunt Waza), was the son of a Jagiellonian mother. But the Swedish connection proved deeply conflictual. As leader of the defeated pro-Catholic party in the Swedish civil war, Sigismund lost control of his native country and fell into long-running hostility with his victorious Protestant relatives, not least over control of Livonia. Once again, the grand duchy was exposed. What is more, the outbreak in 1606 of a noble revolt in Poland, the Zebrzydowski Confederation, demonstrated that it was perfectly legal to take up arms against the king if strict rules were observed. A baleful precedent was set for the Lithuanian magnates. In 1621, the Swedish Vasas took over Livonia by force of arms, leaving the _Rzeczpospolita_ only the province of Letgalia at Dunabourg, on the grand duchy's northern border.\n\nThe reign of W\u0142adys\u0142aw IV brought a period of political calm, economic prosperity and social peace. The _Rzeczpospolita_ even managed to avoid involvement in the protracted violence of the Thirty Years War in neighbouring Germany. In reality, however, deep-seated problems were accumulating.\n\nOne of the prominent social and cultural features of Poland-Lithuania in the early seventeenth century was a phenomenon that has been dubbed the 'noble\u2013Jewish alliance'. In the grand duchy, as in the Ukrainian palatinates now separated from it, the wealth and influence of the landed magnates increased. And a literate class of Jewish managers, lawyers and administrators was imported from Poland to run the estates and to colonize the small towns. The Jews had often faced discrimination in the urban centres, especially from the guilds. But in the east of the state, which was less urbanized, they met fewer barriers. In Vilnius, they established a very strong community where Yiddish culture was cherished and eminent scholars of the Torah welcomed.\n\nThe grand duchy also provided refuge for radical religious thinkers. A group of Polish anti-Trinitarians settled at Troki, where they analysed biblical texts alongside members of the Jewish Karaites. The _Hizzuq Emunah_ ('Fortress of Faith') of Isaac ben Abraham of Troki (1525\u201386), though not translated into Latin until 1681, was regarded by the _philosophes_ of the Enlightenment as one of the founts of their thought. 'Even the most determined freethinkers', wrote Voltaire, 'have proposed virtually nothing that cannot be found in _Le Rampart de la Foi du Rabbin Isaac_.' The Karaites of Troki would have appreciated the compliment but not the reference to one of their leading intellectuals as a rabbi.\n\nIn those same decades, royal patronage was a chosen instrument of the Counter-Reformation no less than education. The Polish Vasas were Catholic devotees by definition \u2013 having lost their throne in Sweden for the Faith \u2013 and the preferences of the court affected the ecclesiastical alignment of the nobles. Father Piotr Skarga SJ (1536\u20131612), sometime rector of the Jesuit Academy at Vil\u2032nya, confessor to the king-grand duke and the Catholic Church's most eloquent ideologue, foresaw a day of reckoning for the sinful republic. Another Jesuit, St Andrew Bobola (1591\u20131657), who worked as a rural missionary first in Polatsk and later in Pi\u0144sk, was to be martyred in the Cossack wars.\n\nDisaster struck in 1648. A Cossack rebellion in Ukraine headed by Bogdan Chmielnicki sent Cossack armies flooding westwards into Poland, and provoked a chain of further invasions. In 1654 the Muscovites joined in after reaching an understanding with the Cossacks. This development provoked Swedish armies to march both into northern Poland and into the grand duchy, where Vil\u2032nya was occupied. The treasonable surrender of the Lithuanian grand hetman, Janusz Radziwi\u0142\u0142, who was contemplating a permanent union with Sweden, created shock waves of despair. In 1655 one Russian army entered Ukraine, and another invaded the grand duchy, recapturing Vil\u2032nya from the Swedes and perpetrating a horrific pogrom. In 1655\u20136 the king-grand duke, Jan Kazimierz, fled to his wife's possessions in Habsburg-ruled Silesia. These terrible years became known as the _Potop_ , the 'Flood'.\n\nDuring the Cossack wars, the government of the _Rzeczpospolita_ was plagued by a form of constitutional abuse that would become notorious. In a system where the nobles were both law-makers and law-enforcers, it made good sense for the _Sejm_ to work on the principle of unanimity; deputies had habitually held up proceedings until particular points of a bill were clarified or dropped; this _liberum veto_ or 'right of veto' had served its purpose for years. Yet in 1652 a Lithuanian deputy called Sici\u0144ski, acting on the orders of his Radziwi\u0142\u0142 patron, exercised the veto in the final minutes of an overextended parliamentary session, immediately before the state budget was to be approved. In a finely calculated act of legislative vandalism, he then left the chamber without justifying his protest, and rode out into the night. The veto was judged valid, and the entire legislation of the session remained unratified. Much to the amusement of some of the grand duchy's magnates, one imagines, an aristocratic troublemaker had demonstrated how the state could be held to ransom.\n\nIn 1656 and 1657 the _Rzeczpospolita_ staged a remarkable revival. The king-grand duke returned. New troops were raised, and Catholic sentiment was aroused by appeals to fight the heretical, Protestant invaders. The Virgin Mary was proclaimed Queen of Poland. The Swedes were expelled from both the kingdom and the grand duchy, and the Muscovites pushed back. Polish-Lithuanian troops even attacked enemy positions on the Danish islands, which the Swedes had reached by marching across the ice. At Hadziacz in 1658 Cossack elders signed an agreement which appeared to end their alliance with Moscow and to initiate a tripartite _Rzeczpospolita_. At the Treaty of Oliwa in 1660 a general settlement of the First Northern War* was concluded, though Livonia and Ducal Prussia had to be abandoned. But then, exactly when Polish-Lithuanian forces were taking the offensive against the Muscovites, another crippling noble rebel confederation shattered the common resolve. Kiev and the eastern Ukraine were lost for ever; and in 1668, after six years of fraternal fighting, Jan Kazimierz, the last Vasa monarch, abdicated. During his reign, 25 per cent of the _Rzeczpospolita_ 's population died of fire and sword, hunger and plague.\n\nThe reign of Jan Sobieski (1673\u201396) is most often viewed, especially by outsiders unfamiliar with internal affairs, as the last grand flourish of Polish-Lithuanian power and glory. Certainly, as a fearless warrior and war leader, who had made his name as crown hetman during the Swedish wars, he put on a grand show. By breaking the Ottoman Siege of Vienna in 1683, he secured his place as one of Europe's greatest heroes. Yet Sobieski's foreign wars, financed by foreign subsidies, masked deep internal weaknesses. One of his most intractable problems persisted in the grand duchy, where the vendettas of the magnates ran completely out of control. While the king-grand duke battled the Turks on the Danube, the Sapieha faction battled the Pac faction in the grand duchy, and all semblance of co-ordinated government broke down. In itself, the breakdown was not terminally destructive \u2013 the _Rzeczpospolita_ had recovered from similar episodes before \u2013 but the timing was fatal. The grand duchy was paralysed at a juncture when Swedish\u2013Muscovite rivalry was coming to a head in the adjoining lands; any major war between Sweden's Baltic Empire and Muscovy was bound to see the grand duchy trampled between the two.\n\nIn 1696, on Sobieski's death, the official language of the grand duchy's administration was changed from _ruski_ to Polish. The change marked the point where the ruling nobility had become so Polonized that the grand duchy's principal native language was no longer readily intelligible to the upper classes and to the bureaucracy. The Chancellery scribes had to make another adjustment. What for centuries had been either VKL or MDL now became WXL: 'W' for _Wielkie_ , 'X' for _Ksi\u0119stwo_ and 'L' for _Litewskie_ ; and Vil\u2032nya, for official purposes, became Wilno. It was highly ironic; the Polishness of the grand duchy's elite was intensifying at the very time when Russian influences among them stood on the brink of marked expansion.\n\nThe era of the Saxon kings that followed Sobieski is traditionally seen as the nadir of the _Rzeczpospolita_ 's fortunes, although some historians have sought to rehabilitate it. August II the Strong (r. 1697\u20131733), elector of Saxony, and his son, August III (r. 1733\u201363), accepted the Polish-Lithuanian throne in order to outflank their German neighbours and rivals in Brandenburg-Prussia. They only achieved their goal by pocketing Russian gold, by bribing electors with fake coins, by promising to convert to Catholicism, and afterwards by signing up to a permanent alliance with the tsar. In the ensuing decades, they used their new acquisition as a milch cow and dragged it into endless wars, quarrels and occupations, from which, whatever their wishes, they were impotent to escape. Formally, they held the triple title of 'elector, king and grand duke'.\n\nThe Great Northern War (1700\u201321) essentially pitted Russia against Sweden, although other powers were also involved. Peter the Great, the aspirant emperor of Russia, and Charles XII, king of Sweden, were the principal combatants. The former, a physical giant, was 'a typical fanatic, who never questioned the correctness of his ideas'; the latter, sexually ambiguous, was eulogized by Voltaire as 'a king without weaknesses'. August the Strong, however, was deeply enmeshed in the political intrigues from the start, and much of the fighting was conducted in Poland and Lithuania. His entry into the war as Peter's ally sucked Charles XII's army into the _Rzeczpospolita_ , and the Swedes' long march to destruction at Poltava in 1709 brought a trail of devastation throughout the grand duchy. The Polish-Lithuanian nobility were divided into pro-Russian and pro-Swedish factions: a Swedish placeman, Stanis\u0142aw Leszczy\u0144ski (later duke of Lorraine) contrived to sit on the throne between 1704 and 1709; and the subsequent arrival of the Russian army virtually turned the _Rzeczpospolita_ into a Russian protectorate. In 1717, when Russian mediators did nothing to calm interfactional animosities, the noble deputies were driven into passing laws in silence, at a cowed _Sejm_ that assembled under the menace of Russian guns, effectively depriving the state of the means of its own defence. Military spending was drastically curtailed. State taxation could only support a standing army limited to 18,000 men, at a time when the Prussians could field 200,000 and the Russians 500,000. The grand duchy's military establishment was now smaller than the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s' private army.\n\nUnder August III, the central organs of the _Rzeczpospolita_ ceased to function. The elector-king-grand duke resided in Dresden, and ruled through viceroys. Attempts to convene the _Sejm_ , and hence to raise taxes, were repeatedly blocked by use of the _liberum veto_. For thirty years, the _sejmiki_ , the regional noble assemblies, provided the sole source of co-ordinated administration. The magnates grew stronger than ever. They cultivated an outlook called 'Sarmatism', proclaiming \u2013 ostrich-like \u2013 that 'Polish freedom' was incomparably wonderful. Both the Prussians in northern Poland and the Russians in the grand duchy billeted their troops on the countryside for free, by charging the cost of their upkeep to the local population. Europe of the Enlightenment looked on, and complacently equated 'Poland' with 'anarchy'.\n\nNothing better illustrates the political decadence of the Saxon era than the workings of the so-called 'Familia'. A group of magnates headed by the Czartoryskis and Poniatowskis took advantage of the political vacuum, seeking to replace the authority of the absent monarch with their own. They came together in the 1730s, when a royal election was in prospect, and were active until the 1760s, when one of their number was the successful candidate in the next. Proposing a single centralized state, the abolition of the _liberum veto_ , and a modernized financial system, they aroused the opposition of the Potocki faction in the kingdom and of the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s in the grand duchy. Among the Familia's most active members among the older generation was General Stanis\u0142aw Poniatowski (1676\u20131762), sometime adjutant to Charles XII and treasurer of the grand duchy, and in the younger generation, Prince Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski (1734\u20131823), probably the most enlightened reformer of the age. Their flamboyant aristocratic lifestyles contrasted blatantly with that of the countless serfs who maintained it. One sees parallels with progressive elements among the French nobility of the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ , and with the more enlightened slave-owners, who, a continent away, were preparing the American Revolution.\n\nIt would be unwise, however, to generalize too drastically about the peasantry. It is true that the society of the grand duchy was marked for centuries by serfdom, and the misery of the serfs could be dire. In 1743\u20134, in the _starostvo_ (county) of Krychev in eastern White Ruthenia, a local war was fought between the Radziwi\u0142\u0142 regiments and an 'army' of rebellious serfs. Petitions to the lords, known as _supliki_ , begging for easement, were sometimes granted, sometimes ignored. Yet islands of hope could flourish amid the sea of poverty. Although about 30 per cent of the population was controlled by the magnatial estates, about 70 per cent was not. A class of free peasants held their own in the eastern palatinates, paying rent and prospering from the production of flax and timber. In the southern palatinates, flight to 'Cossackdom' or to estates in Ukraine, where colonists received favourable terms, was always an option for disaffected peasants.\n\nMoreover, the later eighteenth century saw a considerable increase in the overall size of the economy, in agricultural improvements, and even in manufacturing. Efforts to rationalize river transport were crowned in 1785 by the opening of canal systems linking both the Nieman and the Dniepr and, via the Royal Canal, the Pripyat\u2032 and the Bug. The grand duchy was well placed to export corn, timber and potash. The improvers aimed to direct trade both to the Vistula and to the Black Sea, in addition to the traditional exit via Riga. The great estates were equipped with flour mills, lumber machines and breweries. The first textile factory in the grand duchy began working in 1752 at Nie\u015bwie\u017c, and the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s thereafter constructed twenty-three further industrial works, producing everything from glass to paper, bricks to gunpowder.\n\nStanis\u0142aw-August Poniatowski (r. 1764\u201395), the last king-grand duke of Poland-Lithuania, was the Familia's candidate for the throne and a former lover of the Russian empress, Catherine the Great. As a young diplomat employed in St Peterburg by both the British and the Saxon embassies, he had made a huge impression on the German-born future empress, who selected him for protracted romantic services. A decade later, he easily won her support in the royal election. As monarch, however, he saw his task as one of urgent reform, reanimating the vital organs of the moribund state, modernizing society, promoting culture and relaxing the stranglehold of the pro-Russian magnates elevated by his Saxon predecessors. The empress wished to maintain the status quo from which Russia greatly benefited. The two of them were on a collision course. Every time the beleaguered monarch showed signs of pulling his country from the quagmire, his patroness pushed it back in.\n\nThe three decades of Stanis\u0142aw-August's reign witnessed a dramatic spectacle rarely seen in European history. One of the largest states in Europe fought for its life, while the wisecrackers of the Enlightenment, led by Voltaire, mocked its impotence. Stanis\u0142aw-August and his circle desperately sought to restore the _Rzeczpospolita_ to health and viability, while the so-called 'Enlightened Despots'* sought not only to obstruct him, but to exploit their victim's vulnerability and to dismantle the repairs. A maritime metaphor might be appropriate. The captain and crew strive valiantly to keep their stricken vessel afloat, while pirates moored alongside help themselves to the ship's timbers chunk by chunk. The captain is then declared (by the pirates) to have been a poor seaman, and his ship a wreck that was not worth saving. The drama usually appears in the history books as the 'Partitions of Poland', but this, of course, is a misnomer. The state being dismantled was not 'Poland', but the dual 'Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania'. Moreover, the catastrophe was less catastrophic in the long run for Poland than for the grand duchy. Though the kingdom was dismembered like the grand duchy, large parts of Poland were destined to be salvaged. The wreck of the grand duchy would sink for ever.\n\nThe First Partition, in 1773, was enacted as punishment for a decade of successful progress. It was conceived by Frederick II of Prussia, approved by Catherine the Great and then foisted on a supposedly reluctant empress of Austria, Maria Theresa. As the Prussian king explained: 'She wept as she took, and the more she wept the more she took.' Since the _Rzeczpospolita_ was essentially defenceless, the international bandits were able to carve out large slices of territory for themselves, and then to persuade the victim to cede their plunder by formal treaty. The Prussians took a slice out of northern Poland. The Austrians were given a bigger slice in the south. The Russians annexed roughly one-quarter of the grand duchy, including the palatinates of Polatsk, Vitebsk and Mtislav. A chorus of Russian spokesmen and apologists explained that the noble empress was merely repossessing her own property.\n\nThe following decades nonetheless saw the heyday of the Polish Enlightenment. The leading spirits of the movement, inspired by the king-grand duke himself and resigned to the futility of political activities, made great strides in education, agriculture, administration, history and the arts. Modern schools were opened, the latest farming methods introduced, a national history project launched, civil servants were trained, and writers and painters sponsored. The magnates played their part, some of them voluntarily emancipating their serfs. The banishment of the Jesuit Order in 1773 threatened to devastate schooling, but the National Education Commission that was tasked with addressing the crisis set up a far-flung school system, which functioned far into the nineteenth century. It would train several generations in the language, culture and heritage of the _Rzeczpospolita_. 'If there are still people in two hundred years time who think of themselves as Poles,' declared Stanis\u0142aw-August, 'my work will not have been in vain.' The Commission's first director was Jakub Massalski (1727\u201394), bishop of Vil\u2032nya. The _Korpus Kadet\u00f3w_ , founded to train an administrative elite, was pioneered by Prince Micha\u0142 Kazimierz 'Rybe\u0144ko' Radziwi\u0142\u0142; while his son, Prince Karol Stanis\u0142aw, 'Panie Kochanku' (1734\u201390), though a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary, raised his palace at Nie\u015bwie\u017c into a major centre of theatre, music and opera.\n\nThe Second Partition was preceded by an intense period of political reform embodied in the Great _Sejm_ of 1788\u201392. It was a race against time between the reformers, who sought to regain the _Rzeczpospolita_ 's independence, and the pro-Russian opposition, hampered by Russia's preoccupation with an Ottoman war. If the Turks continued to pin the Russians down, the Polish-Lithuanian reformers might find the space to attain their goals. If not, a Russian expedition would march. At first, the reforms prospered: taxes were voted. A professional standing army was financed and put into training, and the core offices of a modern administration were established. Finally, on 3 May 1791, on the initiative of the king-grand duke, a fine written constitution was passed, the first in Europe and second in the world only to that of the United States of America.\n\nBy this time, however, and tragically for the reformers, the international climate had fundamentally shifted. The outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 had convinced Europe's absolute rulers that moderate constitutionalists and flaming Jacobins were indistinguishable. The Polish-Lithuanian experiment was doomed. A Russo-Turkish truce cleared the ground, and in St Petersburg the empress collected a group of hand-picked Russophiles, all subjects of the _Rzeczpospolita_ , who raised the flag of rebellion on the south-eastern frontier at Targowica. Then the Russian army marched in their support.\n\nThe Russo-Polish war of 1791\u20132 was not a foregone conclusion. The forces of the _Rzeczpospolita_ , though outnumbered, slowed the progress of the advancing Russian columns. At two battles in Ukraine, at Ziele\u0144ce and Dubienka, General Ko\u015bciuszko proved to be a commander of unusual talent. But then the king-grand duke lost his nerve and capitulated, the constitution was declared invalid, and the traitorous victors were invited by their Russian paymasters to plunder and to persecute. Those treacherous 'Targovicians' included General Szymon Kossakowski, the grand duchy's grand hetman, and his brother Josef Kossakowski, bishop of Livonia.\n\nGeneral Tadeusz Ko\u015bciuszko (Tadevish Kastiushka, 1746\u20131817) was a professional soldier, the son of Polonized gentry from the Brest region of White Ruthenia. Educated in Warsaw and Paris, he had spent 1776\u201383 in the service of the infant United States, where he is remembered as a friend of Thomas Jefferson and a founder of the West Point military academy. His views on freedom and democracy were strengthened by his American experience. He was about to become the chief hero of the _Rzeczpospolita_ 's demise.\n\nThe details of the Second Partition were worked out in protracted negotiations. By a Russo-Prussian treaty of 23 January 1793, the Prussians were to take Danzig and the Russians were to absorb most of the grand duchy's palatinates except for Vil\u2032nya, Brest and Samogitia. This time the Austrians were left out. By a second treaty, signed at Hrodna on 25 September by representatives of Prussia and of the _Sejm_ of Poland-Lithuania, the king-grand duke was obliged to accept the emasculation of his regal powers. The treaties were implemented later in the year.\n\nFor two years, what was left of the _Rzeczpospolita_ \u2013 a clutch of territories in central Poland and the rump of the grand duchy, including Warsaw, Lublin, Pozna\u0144, Krak\u00f3w and Vil\u2032nya \u2013 fought desperately to survive. Ko\u015bciuszko raised his standard in March 1794, swearing the oath to king and country in the Great Square of Krak\u00f3w. In one battle, at Rac\u0142awice, the Russians were routed. In Vil\u2032nya, a soldier of Jacobin leanings, Jakub Jasi\u0144ski, expelled the Russian garrison. But at the Battle of Maciejowice, Ko\u015bciuszko fell wounded from his horse; according to legend, his last words before capture were ' _Finis Poloniae_ '. In Warsaw, a true Jacobin-style rising broke out, and a number of clerics and nobles were strung up by the mob. Finally, as the Russian General Suvorov entered the capital, the whole population of the suburb of Praga were massacred. Suvorov's laconic message to the empress read: 'Hurrah. Praga. Suvorov.' Her reply read, 'Bravo Fieldmarshal, Catherine.' After that, the Third Partition, an act of liquidation, could be imposed without any pretence of negotiation.\n\nDuring those two final years, the territory of the grand duchy was systematically overrun and pillaged. The Russians retook Vil\u2032nya, and formally abolished the ancient state of which it was the capital. All nobles who had taken up arms lost their lands, and all the traditional civil and military offices were closed. Lithuania and Poland had been joined, for better and for worse, for 409 years. They were now extinguished together, and the link was severed.\n\nThe exact moment at which a body-politic dies is sometimes hard to determine. In legal terms, it could be defined by an act of abdication unaccompanied by an act of succession, or by the withdrawal of international recognition. In the kingdom-grand duchy, it arrived for practical purposes on the day when the last of the offices of state stopped functioning: 25 November 1795, symbolically St Catherine's Day. By then, Warsaw had been handed over to the Prussians, who expelled all remaining foreign diplomats. The Austrians were organizing Galicia. The Russians were digesting the grand duchy whole.\n\nOne last scene was enacted. After the formal abdication of Stanis\u0142aw-August on the morning of 25 November, he was escorted from Warsaw under guard, and condemned without trial to lifetime captivity in Russia. He was, as it were, acting out the fate of his ex-subjects. After crossing the border and stopping in Hrodna in 'Black Ruthenia', the military column attending his carriage wound its way through the wintry landscape from one end of the grand duchy to the other. His captors would have been told that they were crossing 'western Russia'. Such was the formula that would henceforth be taught to the world at large. But Stanis\u0142aw-August knew otherwise. He and his memories were bound for St Petersburg on a journey of no return.\n\n##### III\n\nThe legacy left by the demise of a state is markedly more complex than that which follows the death of an individual. There is, to begin with, a large physical residue of land, cities, government buildings and other assorted assets that have to be reallocated by the new owners. There is a considerable collection of legal and financial issues \u2013 claims, titles, debts and outstanding cases \u2013 that must somehow be resolved. As likely as not, there is also a huge cultural deposit, the accumulated literature, music, art, legends, history, languages, laws and customs that live on even when their authors do not. Most importantly, there is a community of people, thousands or millions strong, the former citizens, subjects and servants of the defunct state, who will now be pressed to change their identities, their attitudes and their allegiances. Finally, there are, or there ought to be, the state archives: the collections of official files and government records, which attest to the functioning of the late body-politic, and which enable historians to trace its progress and to preserve its memory. In the case of the grand duchy, all these elements can be identified, and more besides.\n\nAfter 1793 the lands and peoples which had for centuries formed part of the grand duchy passed in their entirety to the Russian Empire. They were supplied not only with a new administration, a new ruling class, a new official language and a new Russian-based educational system, but also with a new history. They were declared, quite falsely, to have been reunited with the ancient Russian homeland, from which, supposedly, they had once been torn away. The Empress Catherine celebrated her acquisitions in true Spartan manner by striking a notorious medal which read: 'That which was torn away, I have recovered.' Wilno\/Vil\u2032nya, no longer a state capital, became the provincial city of Vilna. Hence, when Napoleon arrived on the Nieman only a dozen years later, the world was told he was about to invade 'Russia'.\n\nEveryone interested in international affairs knows that shorthand forms are widely used in place of cumbersome state titles. People say 'America' instead of 'the United States of America', ignoring the protests of the Canadians. They still say 'England' instead of 'the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland', though 'the UK' is increasingly common. And throughout the twentieth century, they have invariably said 'Russia' when referring to 'the Empire of all the Russias', 'the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics', or, since 1992, 'the Russian Federation'. This practice is bearable so long as its users understand what the short forms are replacing. There is a very real danger, however, that by hearing nothing but the short forms endlessly repeated, the unwary public may be misled. For it is all too easy \u2013 and completely erroneous \u2013 to believe that the UK is equivalent to 'the land of the English' or to assume that 'Russia' is inhabited exclusively by Russians.\n\nThe issue is particularly relevant to the fallout from the suppression of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. The peoples of the former grand duchy disappeared from view in the late eighteenth century and, with a brief exception during the Russian Revolution, only resurfaced in the late twentieth. Suddenly in 1989\u201391, the world woke up to the news that the western regions of the Soviet Union had not really been Russian at all. New nation-states, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine appeared as if from nowhere, and precious few commentators were able to explain where they came from.\n\nAfter the Russian Empire's annexation of the grand duchy, all the historic administrative structures were replaced by centralized _gubernias_ or 'governorships', which took their orders from the tsarist government in St Petersburg. The six _gubernias_ of Vilna, Kovno (including Courland), Grodno, Minsk, Mogilev and Vitebsk were grouped together in a north-western _Kray_ or 'Land' ruled by a governor-general. The entire nomenclature was changed. Russian names took the place of Polish names, and map-makers round the world came to terms with 'Western Russia' or 'the North-western Gubernias'. The old names of 'Lithuania' and 'Belarus' were banished. 'White Ruthenia' was presented as 'White Russia', and an international treaty was signed to suppress the name of Poland for ever.\n\nIn this first Russian period, the administrative rearrangements included the creation of the so-called Pale of Jewish Settlement in 1791. The Jewish Pale was a clearly defined region \u2013 essentially the lands of Russian-occupied Poland-Lithuania \u2013 within which all Jews were now required to reside. Henceforth, no Jew could legally reside elsewhere in the Russian Empire without special permission; and no Jew could reside in one of the closed cities, like Kiev, within the Pale. The boundaries of the Pale were to vary, but the legal restrictions remained in place until 1917. As a result, the former grand duchy, together with Austrian Galicia, and the Kingdom of Poland as resurrected by the Congress of Vienna, became the parts of Europe where the percentage of Jews within the general population was highest.\n\nThe existing laws were too extensive and too firmly established to be replaced wholesale or overnight. Russian decrees were introduced gradually, and sections of the old Lithuanian Statutes remained in force for decades. Yet one area where radical change was introduced quickly pertained to the status of the nobility. In Poland-Lithuania, the nobles had formed an independent legal estate. They had elected the monarch, governed the localities, convened regional assemblies and enjoyed the rights to own land and to bear arms. Such 'Golden Freedoms' were unthinkable in the tsarist autocracy, so early in the 1790s the privileges of the grand duchy's nobility were arbitrarily rescinded. The only families permitted to apply for noble status were those who could produce documents to prove it. Since no such documentation had been produced systematically in Poland-Lithuania, over 80 per cent of the existing nobility were cast into a legal limbo, uncertain about their title to their estates and land and their qualifications for public office.\n\nIn 1806 the armies of Napoleon's French Empire advanced eastwards, to establish the French-controlled Duchy of Warsaw. Hopes rose high that Napoleon would liberate the population of the whole region from both social and political oppression. In the event he did neither, although he did raise huge numbers of Polish troops for the French service. The peace negotiations held in 1807, between Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I on a raft moored in the Nieman, proved only temporary.\n\nMuch of the fighting of the 1812 campaign, which Napoleon called his 'Second Polish War', was contested on lands which until recently had formed part of the grand duchy. The _Grande Arm\u00e9e_ crossed the Nieman at Kovno, and reached Vilna on Sunday, 28 June. 'Our entry into the city was triumphal,' wrote one of Napoleon's Polish officers.\n\n> The streets... were full of people; all the windows were garnished with ladies who displayed the wildest enthusiasm... The Polish patriots of Vilna held a solemn [service] in the cathedral, followed by a ceremonial act of reunification of Lithuania and Poland... 'Everyone, in the manor and the village, felt that they were going into battle in the Polish cause,' wrote [a landowner]... In Grodno, the French forces were met by a procession with [icons], candles, incense and choirs. In Minsk... a _Te Deum_ was held to thank God for the liberation. Resplendent in his full dress uniform, General Grouchy personally handed around the plate at Mass, but at the other end of town his cuirassiers were breaking into shops and warehouses... As soon as they saw how the French behaved, [the country folk] took themselves and their livestock off to the forests... 'The Frenchman came to remove our fetters,' the peasants quipped, 'but he took our boots too.'\n\nWith some delay, the French moved off towards Moscow. The Battle of Borodino was fought on the first section of historic Russian territory that they entered. Moscow burned. Napoleon's retreat, which began in December, proceeded over the same ground. The icy crossing of the River Berezina, an exploit that became legendary, brought the _Grande Arm\u00e9e_ back into the former grand duchy. The Cossacks harassed the frozen French columns as they shuffled through the snow towards a mirage of safety. Long before the spring came, it was clear that all hope for the restoration of the commonwealth was lost.\n\nAt the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the victories of the tsar's armies were reflected in political arrangements that would last until the First World War. A Russian-run Kingdom of Poland, of which the tsar was king, was established, but the former grand duchy in its entirety returned to being part of the Russian Empire. For the next three or four generations, Poles, Lithuanians, Ruthenians and Jews were subject to an unrelenting campaign to turn them into model subjects of the tsar.\n\nBefore the Partitions, every elected Polish-Lithuanian monarch had borne the dual titles of 'king of Poland' and 'grand duke of Lithuania'. After 1795, when the titles became vacant, they were snapped up by the tsars. Yet they were still kept strictly separate. As from 1815, all the Romanovs adopted the three-part style of 'emperor and autocrat of all the Russias', 'tsar (or sometimes king) of Poland' and 'grand duke of Finland, etc. etc.' Lithuania did not appear in the short title, being subsumed according to tsarist ideology in the category of 'all the Russias'.\n\nIn time, as the nineteenth century progressed, a proportion of the wealthier and more influential landowners of the former grand duchy were able to have their nobility confirmed by the Office of Heralds in St Petersburg. Not surprisingly the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s were among those who adjusted well. But the tsarist authorities made political loyalty an iron condition of any such confirmation and refusals were common. So, too, were confiscations. A large number of estates, and all the most important offices, were taken over by incoming Russian officials, adventurers and carpetbaggers. At the head of them were figures like General Alexander Rimsky-Korsakov (1753\u20131840), who lived in the extravagant Tuskulanai manor near Vilnius, or Count Mikhail Muravyov (1796\u20131866), later known as Muravyov-Vilensky, who held a series of high government positions, and who was instrumental in suppressing local resistance. 'What Russian guns can't accomplish', Muravyov once said, 'will be accomplished by Russian schools.'\n\nIn Muravyov's time, serfdom was the burning social issue. It had been avoided during the Napoleonic Wars, and shelved during the ultra-conservative post-war era, but it arose again under Alexander II, the so-called 'Tsar Liberator' (r. 1855\u201381). Together with those in other parts of the Tsarist Empire, the serfs of the former grand duchy, an absolute majority of the population, were released from their feudal bonds in 1861, but not from the grinding poverty of backward rural life. Yet emancipation brought hope. It meant that the former serfs could move away to seek work, that they could learn new crafts and skills, and open businesses; and that they could educate their children. Reality moved slowly; aspirations rose fast.\n\nEducation, therefore, became a battleground of competing interests. Tsarist officialdom saw an opportunity for far-reaching Russification, which involved not only the teaching of the Great Russian (Muscovite) language but also reverence for the tsar and the promotion of Russian Orthodoxy. For the population at large, the problem was how to give their children a schooling without handing them over unconditionally to the ambitions of the Russian state. Both the Poles and the Jews possessed their own school systems, and, from the 1840s, the Catholic bishops of Wilno (Vilnius) successfully sponsored primary classes for Lithuanian-speaking children. The harshest battles centred on the fate of White Ruthenians, whose language was treated as a Russian dialect and whose conversion to Russian Orthodoxy was taken for granted.\n\nThe overall effectiveness of Russification is hard to measure. The currency of Russian certainly increased, and a proportion of the people became functionally bilingual. One of the few groups to be more thoroughly Russified belonged to a sector of the Jewish community who adopted Russian in place of their native Yiddish. These people were known as _Litvaks_ , literally 'Jews of the grand duchy'; their linguistic choice marked their desire of escaping from traditional Jewish society. They naturally made up most of the first wave of Jews who decided to emigrate.\n\nReligion remained a bone of contention. Some groups and individuals were willing to bear the civil penalties which their religious allegiance entailed. Yet there was no move to close down either Roman Catholic churches or Jewish synagogues. Tsarist animosity focused on the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Uniates, who were treated as traitors to the nation. In 1839 and again in 1876 decrees were issued to ban Greek Catholicism outright and to force its adherents into Russian Orthodoxy. In order to practise their religion, many Uniates fled to Austrian-ruled Galicia.\n\nNonetheless, despite the tensions, the human mass of the former grand duchy stayed largely _in situ_. For the first two or three generations, prevalent attitudes were characterized by mainly passive resistance to Russian rule, although it sporadically turned active. For two or three generations after that, the former grand duchy was deeply affected by the rise of a variety of new political and national movements. Until 1864, the sense of disillusionment was heightened by the bitter consequences of three successive failed risings \u2013 in 1812, 1830\u201331 and 1863\u20134. On each occasion, patriots from the former kingdom fought and died alongside volunteers from the former grand duchy, hoping that the late _Rzeczpospolita_ could somehow be revived. On the contrary, the risings were crushed; repressions multiplied; tsarist rule was strengthened.\n\nThe former grand duchy supplied many of the insurrectionary leaders. Romuald Traugutt (1826\u201364), head of a clandestine national government declared in Warsaw during the January Rising of 1863\u20134, was the son of a gentry family from the Brest palatinate. Jakub Gieysztor (1827\u201397), a Polish nobleman who had freed his Lithuanian serfs, believed that the rising was premature, but joined all the same. Antanas Mackievi\u010dius (1828\u201363), later seen as a Lithuanian nationalist, nonetheless fought for the restoration of the multinational grand duchy. Zygmunt Sierakowski (1826\u201364) led bands of rural guerrillas in Samogitia. Kastu\u015b Kalino\u016dski (1838\u201364), now counted among the pioneers of Belarusian identity, addressed social distress as well as national issues. All fought in vain. Traugutt and his associates were executed in front of Warsaw's Russian citadel. Sierakowski and Kalino\u016dski were executed in Vilnius. Their dreams of the grand duchy's revival died with them.\n\nIn this era of insurrections, the poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798\u20131855), born and raised in Novogrudok \u2013 the town in 'Black Ruthenia' where the very name of _Litva_ was said to have been born \u2013 penned the most eloquent and lasting lament for the late grand duchy. His epic poem _Pan Tadeusz_ (1834) has the subtitle 'The Last Raid in Lithuania', and describes the life of a rural community at the time of Napoleon's invasion in 1812. In matchless language, it evokes both the colourful traditions of the past, and the dreams for liberation. Mickiewicz wrote in Polish, and the opening lines of _Pan Tadeusz_ have become the most famous lines in the language:\n\n> _O Litwo! Ojczyzno moja, Ty jeste\u015b jako zdrowie._\n> \n> _Ile Ci\u0119 ceni\u0107 trzeba, ten tylko si\u0119 dowie,_\n> \n> _Kto Ci\u0119 straci\u0142. Dzi\u015b pi\u0119kno\u015b\u0107 Tw\u0105 w ca\u0142ej ozdobie_\n> \n> _Widz\u0119 i opisuj\u0119, bo t\u0119skni\u0119 po Tobie._\n\n('O Litva! My homeland, you are like health. \/ How to gauge your worth, only he can know \/ who has lost you. Today I see your full beauty \/ and describe it, because I long for you.') Irony of ironies, Poland's national bard did not come from Poland. It is as if William Shakespeare had lived in Dublin. But such is his stature that Lithuanians, too, take 'Adomas Mickievi\u010dius' to be their own; and Belarusians consider 'Mitskieyvitch' to be theirs:\n\n_T\u0117vyne Lietuva, mielesn\u0117 u\u017e sveikat\u0105!_ | _\u041bim\u0432a! T\u044b, \u044f\u043a \u0437\u2202apo\u045ee \u045e \u043dac, ma\u044f A\u0439\u0447\u044c\u0131\u043da!..._  \n---|---  \n_Kaip reik tave branginti, vien tik tas pamato,_ | _IIImo \u0432apma m\u044c\u0131, a\u0446\u0437\u043di\u0446\u044c mo\u0439 \u043da\u043be\u0436\u043d\u044bm \u0447\u044b\u043dam,_  \n_Kas jau tav\u0119s neteko. N\u016bn tave vaizduoju_ | _Xmo \u0446\u044f\u0431e \u045empa\u0446i\u045e. Boc\u044c \u043apacy m\u0432\u0430\u044e \u0436\u044b\u0432y\u044e_  \n_A\u0161, ilgesy gro\u017eiu sajaudintas tavuoju._ | _\u0417\u043do\u045e \u0431a\u0447y i anic\u0432a\u044e, \u0431o c\u043apo\u0437\u044c cymy\u044e._\n\nAll the millions of people who still read this poetry, translate it, learn it by heart, or teach and study it in school as part of the official curriculum, are perpetuating the grand duchy's heritage.\n\nOpposition to tsarist rule after 1864 was channelled in new directions. The anarchists, for example, believed in direct action. The _Narodna Vol\u2032ya_ ('National Will') organization, attracted recruits from all over the Russian Empire. But the man who threw the bomb that killed Tsar Alexander II in 1881 was a d\u00e9class\u00e9 nobleman from the district of Bobruisk, Ignacy Hryniewiecki (1856\u201381). The socialists long remained undistinguished from the anarchists, and until the end of the century were largely undifferentiated between the democratic and undemocratic tendencies. J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski (1867\u20131935), who hailed from a minor landowning family from the Vilna district, became a leading light in the illegal Polish Socialist Party (PPS), having spent five years in exile in Siberia. He was to emerge in 1918 as the first head of state of a reborn Poland. Yet he always stayed true to the multinational traditions of the grand duchy, contesting nationalism in all its forms and longing for close co-operation between Poles, Jews, Lithuanians and Belarusians. The _Bund_ , or Jewish Labour League, came into being in Minsk in 1897. (Ironically enough, Pi\u0142sudski's ethnic, social and geographical origins were almost identical to those both of Ignacy Hryniewiecki and of Feliks Dzier\u017cy\u0144ski (1877\u20131926).\n\nIn late nineteenth-century Europe, nationality issues rose to the top of the agenda almost everywhere. Any number of national movements took to the field in opposition to the central authorities, aiming in the first instance to capture cultural affairs \u2013 to promote a national language, to publicize national literature and to formulate a national history. Then they moved on to demand political autonomy, and, as the final stage, the creation of a national state.\n\nIn this context, the lands of the former grand duchy offered abundant, politically fertile ground. The brutal tsarist regime invited resistance, and social structures were crumbling due to the proscription of the nobility and the liberation of the serfs. The result was fierce competition, not only between tsarist officialdom and its opponents, but equally between nationalist and socialist groupings and between rival national movements. A spectrum of separate national dreams arose that could not be satisfied without conflict.\n\nThe Russians had developed a state-backed nationalism of their own that was projected from Moscow and St Petersburg into the imperial provinces. It viewed the Poles, dominant in the former ruling class of the _Rzeczpospolita_ , as the prime enemy. The Lithuanians (though Roman Catholic) and the Jews were seen as prospective allies against the Poles, while the Ruthenians were classed as Russians. In the past 'Polishness' had been associated both with the landowning nobility and with Roman Catholicism, but these associations gradually broke down. Increasingly it was linked to all Polish-speakers, irrespective of social, economic or religious status. A large group of d\u00e9class\u00e9 Polish nobles strove to keep up appearances. A Polish bourgeoisie held the fort in Wilno, as they called it, and a sizeable Polish sector of the peasantry was concentrated in the surrounding district. All tended to show solidarity with their compatriots in the former kingdom.\n\nThe Ruthenians, almost entirely enserfed until 1861, possessed little awareness of nationality. If asked about their national affiliation, they were famous for replying that they were _tutejsi_ or 'locals'. Nonetheless, they were deeply offended by the forcible introduction of Russian Orthodoxy, and grew more receptive to the activists who were collecting and publishing Belarusian folklore and codifying the Belarusian language for educational purposes. Contrary to some predictions, they never sought to join their fellow Ruthenians in Ukraine. Instead, some of them sought to imitate Polish culture. Jan Czeczot (1796\u20131847), who was Polish, is often regarded as the pioneer of Belarusian identity. Vincent Dunin-Marcinkiewicz (1807\u201384) initiated the Belarusian literary tradition by translating _Pan Tadeusz_.\n\nThe Lithuanian national movement started from similarly humble beginnings. Church-based Lithuanian primary schools had long functioned, but a sixty-year struggle with the Russian authorities had to be fought before permission was given for Lithuanian to be written in the Latin alphabet. By the early twentieth century, however, the first generation of Lithuanian-educated Lithuanians was coming to the fore. They were passionate about language and literature, about separating their own ethnic history from that of their neighbours and about gaining recognition.\n\nIn 1800 the Jewish community of the former grand duchy had been defined exclusively by religion. By 1900, after exposure to an unprecedented demographic explosion, to pogroms and to a series of modernizing movements, it had emerged as a recognized nationality. The _Haskalah_ or 'Jewish Enlightenment', which urged Jews to assimilate into public life while preserving their religious practices in private, operated throughout the century. Yet the spread of the Hasidic movement, demanding new forms of strict religious observance, worked in the opposite direction. One of its prominent sects, the _Lubavicher_ , gained many devotees in the southern districts.\n\nZionism, in contrast, grew out of Jewish secular culture and the Hebrew Revival, that is, the campaign to adapt the Hebrew language to everyday purposes. The Second Zionist Congress, held at Minsk in 1902, revealed the existence of a fully fledged Jewish nationalist movement. Its main goals were to sharpen Jewish identity against other nationalities, to encourage emigration to Palestine and, like nationalists the world over, to complain of discrimination and persecution (quite justifiably, in this case, after the passing of the discriminatory May Laws of 1882). It inevitably collided with the _Bund_ , which sought to reconcile Jews with their neighbours and to build a better world for all.\n\nBy 1914, therefore, the political scene was fragmented in the extreme. Visions of the future were irreconcilably diverse:\n\n> [T]he old capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was a desired political capital to Lithuanians, Belarusians, and Poles... a spiritual capital to the Jews... and an ancient Russian city to the officials who exercised power. Most of the city's schools taught in Russian, most of its churches were Roman Catholic, more than a third of its inhabitants were Jews... The city was... 'Vilnius' in Lithuanian, 'Wilno' in Polish, 'Vil\u2032nia' in Belarusian, 'Vil\u2032na' in Russian and 'Vilne' in Yiddish...\n> \n> Vilnius was for Lithuanian activists the capital of the Grand Duchy, built by Grand Duke Gediminas at the dawn of Lithuania's glory. Increasingly, they saw the medieval Grand Duchy as the antecedent of an independent Lithuanian state...\n> \n> Belarusian national activists, too, harkened back to the Grand Duchy, regarded themselves as its heirs, and claimed Vil\u2032nia as their capital. Unlike [the Lithuanians]... they favored a revived Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth... The Belarusian idea began to compete seriously with the imperial idea [of ] 'West Russia.' In Vil\u2032nia city, Belarusian speakers far outnumbered Lithuanian speakers. In the Vil\u2032nia province... [they] were more than half the population. The first important Belarusian periodical, _Nasha Niva_ (Our Soil), appeared in 1906.\n> \n> Under Russian imperial rule, a special sort of Polish culture consolidated its hold on... the Wilno region ( _Wile\u0144szczyzna_ ). Despite a series of [discriminatory] laws... Poles still owned most of the land, [and] were probably the city's plurality... Assimilation to Polish language was regarded not so much as joining a distinct national [group] as joining respectable society... Aware of their families' roots... and often bilingual or trilingual themselves, [such Poles] regarded the Grand Duchy as the most beautiful part of the Polish inheritance... In the early twentieth century, their political views were given a federalist structure by patriotic socialists such as J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski...\n> \n> The Jews, who represented 40 percent of the city's population and perhaps three quarters of its traders... had inhabited the 'Jerusalem of Lithuania' in large numbers for four hundred years. The 'Lithuania' in question was the old Grand Duchy, which had included cities such as Minsk (by this time about 51 percent Jewish), Homel (55 percent), Pinsk (74 percent), and Vitebsk (51 percent). The Vitebsk of this era is best known from the paintings of its native son, Marc Chagall (1887\u20131985).\n\nThanks to international convulsions beyond their control, all the national movements that had taken root in the former grand duchy were about to be overwhelmed by outside interests. During the First World War (1914\u201318), the area saw fierce fighting between German and Russian armies on the Eastern Front; and after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and Civil War it was subjected to a series of political experiments. In March 1918 at Brest (which the Poles call Brze\u015b\u0107 Litewski and the Germans Brest-Litowsk), Leon Trotsky signed away a large swathe of the dead Tsarist Empire, including most of the former grand duchy, where the experiments mushroomed. The stunted Republic of Lithuania, founded with German support in 1917 in Kaunas (Kovno), could not realize its claims on Vilnius; and the resultant Polish-Lithuanian feud ever the city obstructed all attempts at post-war co-operation. The Byelorussian National Republic, created by local activists in Minsk, lasted for little more than a fortnight. The Communist-run Lithuanian-Byelorussian Republic which succeeded it, the 'Lit-Byel', created in conjunction with the Bolsheviks, endured barely a year. In 1919\u201320 the Polish army of J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski established a brief interval of dominance in the region. After its victory in the Polish\u2013Soviet War of 1919\u201320, Poland held onto 'Middle Lithuania' and partitioned Byelorussia with the Soviets. The official name of Vilna reverted back to Wilno.\n\nIn the inter-war period, the Lithuanian Republic lost its democracy to the regime of Antanas Smetona (1874\u20131944), while partitioned Byelorussia lost all prospect of self-government. Western Byelorussia, under Polish rule, remained a backward region, but its difficulties bore no comparison to the horrors taking place beyond the Soviet frontier. Under Lenin's auspices, the Byelorussian SSR \u2013 in eastern Belarus \u2013 was granted use of the Byelorussian language and a nominally autonomous administration in Minsk. In reality, it was run from Moscow through the iron dictatorship of the Soviet Communist Party. The Uniate Church, which had resurfaced during the German occupation of the war years, was eradicated even more viciously than in tsarist times. Under Stalin, the young Byelorussian intelligentsia, educated in the 1920s, was almost annihilated; the leaders of the Byelorussian national movement were shot. Any independent peasants were destroyed during the collectivization campaign. The Jewish community was deeply split between the secular, pro-Soviet element organized by the all-powerful _Yevsektsiya_ or Jewish section of the Communist Party and the traditional, religious and non-Communist majority. Many decades later, the Kuropaty Forest near Minsk would reveal the secret mass graves of hundreds of thousands of unidentified victims of Stalin's 'Great Terror'.\n\nIn the Second World War the former grand duchy lay in the eye of the storm from beginning to end, being subjected to an ordeal unparalleled in the whole of European history. Both Western Byelorussia and Lithuania were awarded by the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact to the Soviet sphere of influence. A joint Nazi\u2013Soviet victory parade was staged in Brest in September 1939, and Lithuania was overrun by Stalin's Red Army in June 1940. The first Soviet occupation was marked by mass executions, deportations and repressions. German occupation followed when 'Operation Barbarossa' crashed over the frontier in June 1941; it spurned all the many opportunities that arose to present the Nazi regime as a liberator. A quick glance at the wartime map reveals that (with the exception of Leningrad\/St Petersburg) the weight of devastation and Nazi oppression were not inflicted on Russia but on the non-Russian republics. (The German military _Reichskommissariat Ostland_ coincided in large measure with the post-1569 grand duchy.) The year 1941 also signalled the onset of the Nazis' two largest crimes: the genocidal Holocaust against Jews and the liquidation of Soviet prisoners by starvation. The scene of these crimes largely coincided with the horrors of unbelievably ferocious anti-partisan warfare. In 1944 the victorious and vengeful Red Army smashed its way west regardless of the human cost. The retreating Germans created 'scorched-earth' zones and last-ditch 'fortresses' to be defended to the death. In one single campaign, Operation Bagration, which drove the front to the River Vistula, Marshal Rokossowski reoccupied the whole of Byelorussia and destroyed more than fifty German divisions. In the process, Minsk and several other cities were completely razed, with enormous loss of civilian life. Then the world's record-breaking murder machine, Stalin's NKVD, appeared to filter, arrest, shoot, torture, deport and terrorize the survivors.\n\nA land so afflicted could never be the same again. The Lithuanians had been severely depleted by Soviet actions in 1940\u201341 and 1944\u20135. The Poles were decimated, partly by the early Soviet deportations, partly by the German occupation, and partly by the post-war 'repatriation campaign'. The Jews, murdered by the Nazi SS during the Holocaust, had been virtually exterminated. The Byelorussians suffered from all sides. By 1945 human losses in Byelorussia were estimated at 25 per cent of the population. No other part of Europe \u2013 not Poland, not the Baltic States, not Ukraine and not Russia \u2013 had sustained such mind-numbing levels of slaughter.\n\nFor forty-six years after the war, Lithuania and Byelorussia sweated out a further spell within the Soviet Union, where the question of their reintegration was not even considered. Not only were they behind the Iron Curtain in the post-war period; they were corralled behind the extra grille that separated them from other countries of the Soviet bloc. The watchword was reconstruction. But they were poorly treated compared to more favoured republics. Politically and economically, they were held in the stranglehold of Communist Party control and of centralized command planning. Socially, they had been artificially homogenized, and they could exploit a tiny margin of autonomy only culturally and linguistically. In the Lithuanian SSR, the Lithuanian language was retained as the principal medium of education and administration, and a Lithuanian Communist elite took pains to keep the influx of Russians at bay. By the late twentieth century over 80 per cent of the citizenry remained Lithuanian by speech and nationality. As the Soviet Union began to crumble, Lithuania became a viable candidate for separation. Early in 1991 it was the first of the Soviet republics to demand independence.\n\nThe Byelorussian SSR was less coherent in its ethnic composition and far more confused in its objectives. It had never recovered fully from its wartime devastation. The inflow of ethnic Russians was not stemmed, especially into top positions, and Russophile sentiment came in with them. The great mass of people were indigent, collectivized state serfs, whose knowledge of their own history and culture was minimal. Religion was sorely curtailed. The native Uniates were not reinstated and the Roman Catholic churches stayed shut, as they had since 1917. The Byelorussian language, written exclusively in Cyrillic, was rarely a vehicle for subversive thoughts. And the border with Poland remained closely guarded.\n\nNonetheless, when the moment of Soviet collapse arrived, the Byelorussian Communist Party did not falter. It acted as host to a secret meeting held in the tsar's former hunting lodge at Viskuli in the Belovezh Forest on 9 December 1991, when the representatives of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine declared the USSR to be extinct. The world's largest state expired painlessly. It met a much easier death than that suffered by the grand duchy almost two centuries earlier.\n\nArchives are, in a sense, the dust and ashes of a dead polity. They contain the records of monarchs who reigned, of institutions that functioned and of lives that were lived. Like boxes of family papers in the attic, they are an indispensable aid to accurate memory and to trustworthy history.\n\nThe condition of archives, therefore, gives a good indication of the strength of memory and the reliability of the history books. If archives are well ordered, one may conclude that the legacy of past times is respected. If not, it is likely that memory and history have been neglected. One of the first decisions of ill-willed regimes is to order the destruction or sequestration of their predecessors' archives. In the case of the grand duchy, large parts of the archives have totally disappeared.\n\nThe _Metryka Litevska_ or 'Lithuanian Register' is the commonest collective name for the original indexes\/archival inventories of the grand duchy's central chancery. Since it no longer exists in one place, it is difficult to estimate its size. But, at a minimum, it was made up of a thousand huge, leather-bound ledgers, and it contained six main divisions: Books of Inscriptions (i.e. summaries of laws and decrees), Books of 'Public Affairs' (records of the Chancellor's Office), _Sigillata_ (copies of documents issued under the grand-ducal seal), Court Books, Land Survey Books, and Legation Books relating to foreign affairs. The time-span stretches from the very early thirteenth century to the very late eighteenth century. The principal languages employed are _ruski_ (Old Belarusian), Latin and Polish.\n\nLocating and reconstructing the _Metryka Litevska_ has demanded a fascinating saga of academic sleuthing that could only be undertaken with modern technology. It was long delayed, partly because the most interested parties had no access, and partly because Russian and Soviet archivists were following their own agenda. Nowadays, one can state with some confidence that the dispersal of the grand duchy's records took place in nine or ten stages:\n\n  * In 1572, following Union with Poland, the main body of documents (though not the registers) was taken by the last chancellor of the pre-Union grand duchy, Miko\u0142aj 'the Red' Radziwi\u0142\u0142, and was housed in the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s' palace at Nie\u015bwie\u017c. According to the Radziwi\u0142\u0142s, the priceless papers had been consigned to them for safe-keeping; according to others they were stolen.\n  * From 1572 to 1740 the archives of the post-Union period, together with the older registers, were kept in the Chancery in Vilnius. Most papers relating to foreign policy were filed in the _Metryka Koronna_. The _Metryka Litevska_ received numerous files relating to Muscovy and the Tartars.\n  * During the Swedish invasion of 1655\u20136, large quantities of documents and inventories were plundered and taken to Stockholm. Part of the loot was returned by the Treaty of Oliwa (1660), but an important group of registers remained in Sweden.\n  * In 1740 the grand-ducal Chancery and its records were moved to Warsaw; sometime later a joint Polish-Lithuanian archival administration was established. After 1777, since the majority of clerks could no longer read Cyrillic, Polish summaries were added to the contents of each ledger. A start was made on a huge project aiming to produce a full copy of the entire archive and to transcribe all the _ruski_ texts into the Latin alphabet.\n  * In 1795 the contents of Warsaw's archives and libraries, together with the surviving registers, were seized by the Russian army, and transported to St Petersburg, where they were duly joined by the archives from Nie\u015bwie\u017c.\n  * In the course of the nineteenth century Russian imperial archivists broke up the Polish-Lithuanian records to suit their own administrative purposes. Anything relating to Ukraine, for example, was sent to Kiev.\n  * In 1887 an incomplete and inaccurate catalogue of the _Metryka Litevska_ was compiled and published in St Petersburg.\n  * In 1921 the Treaty of Riga between Poland and the Soviet republics made provision for the restoration of all archives carried off from Warsaw in 1795. The provision was largely observed in the breach.\n  * In 1939, the Polish Archive Service removed as many records as possible from central Warsaw, but large parts of the pre-war collections were destroyed during the war by fires, bombing and German looting.\n\nOne obvious conclusion is that Vilnius and Minsk are probably not necessarily the best places to locate the basic sources for study of the grand duchy.\n\nThe task of piecing together the archival jigsaw was first undertaken by Polish scholars in the 1920s and 1930s, but the work was far from complete when overtaken by redoubled wartime disasters. Post-war conditions, which gave absolute priority to the sensitivities of the Soviet Union, were not conducive to impartial research.\n\nSo with much delay the star role eventually fell to a heroic American scholar from Harvard University, whose findings began to appear in the 1980s. Her original concern was to summarize the holdings of the Soviet state archives in general, since their guardians treated catalogues as state secrets. But she came to realize that many records originating from the grand duchy, though broken up and widely scattered, had survived under misleading headings and identification numbers. She also realized that the registers in Stockholm, to which she had unrestricted access, were invaluable. They helped her to trace papers which were housed in various parts of Poland or the Soviet Union and whose existence would otherwise have been impossible to pinpoint. The net result was an unrivalled degree of understanding of the grand duchy's archival legacy.\n\nSince then, primary research has been greatly facilitated, and scholars of many nationalities toil to make up the backlog of two centuries. Enormous gaps and problems remain, yet it is a great consolation to know that all was not lost. Even for the amateur historian with no special expertise, it is extraordinarily exciting to open one of the inventories, and to gaze on the raw material of the grand duchy's history with one's own eyes.\n\nOne important relic, however, was never in the archives. The body of the last king-grand duke, buried appropriately in the church of St Catherine in St Petersburg in February 1798, rested untroubled in its tomb for 140 years. Then, in 1938, by agreement of the Soviet and Polish authorities who were tasked with fulfilling the restitution clauses of the Treaty of Riga, the sarcophagus was broken open and the coffin dispatched to Poland. However, since pre-war Poland's official view of Stanis\u0142aw-August was not positive, the government opposed the plan of reburial in the royal crypt at Wawel Castle in Krak\u00f3w, and the coffin was transported instead to the chapel at Volchin (Wo\u0142czyn) near Brest, to Stanis\u0142aw-August's birthplace in the former grand duchy. During the war and in the post-war Soviet period, Volchin was totally devastated and the derelict chapel used as the fertilizer store of a Soviet collective farm. So the pulverized human remains 'brought home' to St John's cathedral in Warsaw in 1995 were not in reality homeward bound; nor, with any certainty, were they the remains of Stanis\u0142aw-August.\n\nIn the fields of art, architecture and social history, another single-handed labour of love was undertaken by an archivist and librarian who passed the second half of his life in Silesia. In the 1930s the late Roman Aftanazy had been a keen cyclist and photographer, touring the eastern borders of Poland's Second Republic with a camera and notebook, and starting a collection of annotated pictures of castles and country houses. After the war, when many of the historic buildings had been destroyed, he realized that his collection, though incomplete, was unique. And he spent the next forty years compiling a detailed photographic and descriptive record of every single landed estate in Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. He contacted all the surviving former owners or their neighbours, persuading them to submit every available photograph, plan, inventory or family history. His daring operation in Communist times was completely illegal, but its results were sensational. In 1986 he published the first volumes (out of a total of twenty-two) of a work which lists and describes in detail more than 1,500 residences. Part I, consisting of four volumes, deals with the former grand duchy, and is organized by the palatinates that existed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are 148 substantial entries, from Abele to \u017byrmuny, for the Palatinate of Vilnia alone. This is no mere catalogue. It is a comprehensive compendium, giving full accounts of almost every landed family and their estates, together with their homes, their galleries, their gardens, their furniture, their genealogies, their legends and their fortunes. It is an intellectual rescue operation of a lost world on a grand scale.\n\nThe volume on the residences of the Palatinate of Brest contains a description of the birthplace of the last king-grand duke:\n\n> The Volchin estate lay to the north-west of Brest, close to the junction of the Bug and Pulva rivers. In the mid-16th century it had belonged to the Soltan family, and in 1586 Jaros\u0142aw So\u0142tan, Starosta of Ostryn built an Orthodox church there. In 1639, the first wooden Catholic church was erected by the next owner, Alexander Gosiewski, Vojevoda of Smolensk... Between 1708 and 1720 [during the Great Northern War] the property passed by sale or inheritance to the Sapiehas, the Flemings, the Czartoryskis, and the Poniatowskis...\n> \n> Stanis\u0142aw Poniatowski proved to be an excellent manager. While enlarging the palace initiated by the Sapiehas, he re-modelled a score of farms, built seven water mills, reduced the obligations of his serfs, bred a herd of pedigree cattle, and constructed a fleet of ships for carrying grain [by river] to Danzig. In 1733, he opened the octagonal chapel in which his son, the future king, was christened.\n> \n> Nonetheless, the estate was sold in 1744 to Poniatowski's son-in-law, Micha\u0142 Czartoryski, the Lithuanian chancellor, who completed the palace in mid-century, adding stone-built wings to the central section built of spruce logs. As well as the 92 main rooms, there was a library, a theatre, an orangerie, a frescoed altana, and a home park of 60 _morgs_. The furniture and tapestries were French, and the paintings mainly Italian. Portraits of Charles XII, of August II and III, and of Stanis\u0142aw Poniatowski himself held pride of place... Since Volchin was relatively close to the capital, Warsaw, it was the scene of numerous balls, garden parties, theatrical performances and boat races.\n> \n> [Thanks to the First Partition, however,] the Czartoryskis moved their main residence in 1775 to Pu\u0142awy [near Lublin], and Volchin was neglected. [After the Third Partition of 1795, it found itself in the Russian Empire, and was abandoned.] It was eventually sold in 1838 to settle the family's debts, and in the mid-nineteenth century the [ruined] palace was demolished.\n> \n> After that, only the chapel survived, having been converted by the tsarist authorities for the purposes of Orthodox worship. The chapel register, which contained the record of King Stanis\u0142aw-August's baptism, was preserved in a nearby Catholic parish. Restoration of the chapel, which accompanied its reconversion to a Catholic sanctuary, was completed in time for the arrival of the king's coffin from Leningrad in 1938.\n\nEven diligently reconstructed records and material remains, however, do not tell the whole story. Some people, by religious analogy, might believe that the grand duchy had a soul or spirit as well as a mortal body. For the grand duchy continues to generate all manner of intangibles \u2013 myths, legends, stories and literary echoes \u2013 that many observers notice, and some try to analyse.\n\nOne of the best known poetical statements about life in the twentieth century proposes that the modern world was built on 'a heap of broken images'. And one of the very first of many enigmatic fragments scattered through T. S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ refers to Lithuania. 'Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch,' says an unidentified female voice. ('I'm no sort of Russian woman: I come from Lithuania, pure German.') The words are so deliberately obscure and enigmatic they come close to nonsense, and they inevitably invite speculation. They might refer, as the poet's widow has proposed, to a real woman encountered in Paris. Alternatively, they could well be a sly and deliberately distorted reference to a character in H. G. Wells's _New Machiavelli_ (1911), who was not a Lithuanian but a Lett from Courland. 'The line is not a direct quote,' says the latest of literary detectives, 'but a transposition made... to hear all the voices as one voice, all the women as one woman.' The historian refrains from joining in. The important point is that echoes of something called 'Lithuania', but very different from modern Lithuania, continued to circulate long after its death, and that, as the poet was aware, Russia was something else. The grand duchy is one of the countless 'broken images' which contribute to our imperfect understanding of European civilization.\n\n## 6\n\n## Byzantion\n\nThe Star-lit Golden Bough (330\u20131453)\n\n##### I\n\nIstanbul is the fourth largest city in Europe, and the largest in Turkey. It straddles the waters of the magnificent Bosporus, its ancient suburbs lying on the European shore and the newer eastern suburbs on the Asian side. Founded as _Byzantion_ in the seventh century BC by Greek colonists from Megara, it changed its name to Constantinople in AD 330, when it became the capital of the Roman Empire, and to Istanbul in 1453, when it became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Since it commands the only passage for shipping between the Mediterranean and Black Seas, its strategic and commercial importance is unsurpassed. Its historical monuments include, from the Greek period, the Serpentine Column, which has stood in the centre of the hippodrome for nearly 2000 years; from the Roman period, the cathedral of St Sophia, the Aqueduct of Valens and the matchless Theodosian Walls; and from the Ottoman period, the sultan's Topkapi Palace and the Suleymaniye Mosque. The Golden Horn, the natural harbour which first attracted Greeks, Romans and Turks alike, is the heart of the city. It provides Europe's closest view of Asia. The posters say ' _Ho\u015f kar\u015filamak t\u00fcrkiye_ ' ('Welcome to Turkey').\n\nAnyone wishing to look deeper into the life of Istanbul will probably be told to turn to the novels of Orhan Pamuk, and in particular to his _Istanbul: Memories and the City_. In the citation for his Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, the Swedish Academy wrote: 'In the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city, [Pamuk] has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures':\n\n> A lovely spring breeze was wafting through the balcony's grand doors, carrying the scent of linden trees. The lights of the city shone on the Golden Horn below. Even the slums and shanty-towns of Kasimpasa looked beautiful. I thought how happy I was, even feeling as if this was a prelude to yet greater happiness. The gravity of what had transpired with Fusun confused me, but I told myself that everyone has his secrets, fears, and moments of worry. No one could guess how many of these elegant guests felt similarly uneasy or carried secret, spiritual wounds.\n\nPamuk certainly writes of Istanbul's pains and of his own inner life with emotional precision. Of himself, he says: 'I am the living dead'; and of his hometown: 'Istanbul is no longer a city of consequence... It is an insular little place sinking in its own ruins.' In this introspective mode, his writing has depth, and his interest in varied social milieux and competing intellectual traditions gives it breadth, too.\n\nYet in some respects, Pamuk's vision is surprisingly blinkered. Readers will search in vain for many of the symbols and references which might be conjured up by such a rich history. His much-vaunted exploration of 'a vast cultural history' turns out to be entirely Turkocentric. 'The East' of his experience means the flotsam of the late Ottoman Empire. 'The West' stands for Atat\u00fcrk's secular, Europeanized, national republic and its foreign sources of inspiration. The past, it seems, goes no further back than the world of his parents and grandparents. Pamuk's gloomy artistry is the work of a modern _Istanbullu_ with marked historical myopia: a writer blind to all but the most recent remains of what went before.\n\nThroughout 2010, together with the Ruhr region in Germany and P\u00e9cs in Hungary, Istanbul served as one of the three chosen European Capitals of Culture. Having created the 'Istanbul 2010 ECOC Agency', it participated with energy and elan under the slogan of ' _Avrupa K\u00fclt\u00fcr Ba\u015fkenti_ '. Hundreds of events took place spanning the visual arts, music, film, literature, theatre, traditional arts, urban culture, education, cultural heritage, museums, tourism and sports. The year-long festival opened on 10 January with a rally in the Golden Horn Congress Centre attended by the president of Turkey, Abdullah G\u00fcl, and the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan. 'I salute everyone: from Emperor Constantine to Sultan Mehmet the Conqueror,' Mr Erdo\u011fan said, 'from Sultan Suleyman all the way to Mustafa Kemal Atat\u00fcrk, who have since its foundation ornamented Istanbul like an embroidery.' Proceedings ended twelve months later at a closing ceremony addressed by State Minister Egemen Ba\u011fi\u015f. 'The world has re-discovered Istanbul with this project,' the minister said boldly; 'Istanbul is [not just] a European city; it is the city which shaped European Culture.'\n\n##### II\n\nByzantium \u2013 whose English name was taken from the Latin, not the Greek \u2013 is a piece of historical reality; despite its changing appellations, it has had a continuous and evolving existence since the day of its foundation. The 'Byzantine Empire', in contrast, is no more than an intellectual construct, an abstraction, some might say, that never really existed. Promoted by the _philosophes_ of the Enlightenment \u2013 the Byzantines themselves continued to call their territories the 'Roman Empire' \u2013 it is a label of convenience invented long after the state in question had disappeared, a substitute for another artificial name \u2013 the 'Greek Empire' \u2013 which some historians (including Gibbon) preferred. Its inventors disliked theocratic states in principle, and could not stomach the idea of a Roman Empire that was not ruled by Rome.\n\nThe translation of the Roman Empire from a state whose centre of gravity lay in Italy to one based further east took place very gradually. Its division into Western and Eastern sub-states, each with its own emperor, was introduced by Diocletian in AD 285; the choice of Byzantium as the new capital was made by Constantine I in 330; the Western Empire collapsed in 476; and the definitive loss of Italy occurred in stages between the initial invasion of the Lombards in 567 and their much delayed entry into Rome in 772. This was the latest point, 440 years after the founding of Constantinople, when the Empire can be said to have shed its former western provinces for good, and when, looking at its history in retrospect, westerners felt it had ceased to be 'theirs'. Yet another thousand years would pass before the Enlightenment concocted a new designation for this political entity with which the 'West' no longer identified.\n\nThe Roman Empire was never in fact primarily western, nor purely Roman. The Romans had conquered Greece and the Greek-speaking Hellenic world (including Byzantion) in their republican days, long before they intervened in more distant places like Gaul, Germany or Britain; and the intermingling of Greek and Roman traditions played a fundamental role in all subsequent developments. Shortly after the death of the first _Augustus_ , Octavius Caesar (r. 726\u2013767 AUC: 27 BC\u2013AD 14), the wealthiest and most populous imperial province was in Hellenized Egypt. Christianity, the future imperial religion, came out of the East in the same era, and four out of the five Church patriarchs would reside there. When the forty-ninth emperor, Diocletian, divided the Empire into two halves, he himself chose to be _Augustus_ of the East; and when the fifty-sixth decided to move the capital from the Tiber to the Bosporus, he did so in response to a well-established political, commercial and cultural shift.\n\nFrom then on, the Roman Empire grew ever more oriental, both in geography and civilization. As from 380, under the sixty-sixth emperor, Theodosius I (r. 379\u201395) Christianity gained a religious monopoly, soon causing 'Caesaro-papism' to become the norm. The _basileus_ (emperor) ruled both as _autocrator_ and as _pontifex maximus_ ; Church and State were inseparable. In the fifth century, the provinces of Britannia, Gallia, Germania and (northern) Africa were overrun by 'barbarian' hordes; in the sixth, despite a brief resurgence under the eighty-eighth emperor, Justinian (r. 527\u201365), Hispania and Italia began to peel away. The Empire was being reduced to what in modern terms might be called the Balkans and the Levant. In the seventh century, as the Lombards bit off most of Italy, the first attacks were launched by the rising power of Islam, with whose adherents the imperials would fight to the death for more than 800 years. In the eleventh century the Great Schism cut the Empire off from the Latin Church of the West, creating the lasting division between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. All the while, despite their use of the Greek language, the Empire's rulers and subjects continued to think of themselves as Romans and to call their homeland either _Romania_ or _Pragmata Romaion_ , the 'Land of the Romans'. This was the offence for which Westerners in general, and the _philosophes_ in particular, could not forgive them.\n\nTo all who have been seduced by the concept of 'Western Civilization', therefore, the Byzantine Empire appears as the antithesis \u2013 the butt, the scapegoat, the pariah, the undesirable 'other'. Although it formed part of a story that lasted longer than any other kingdom or empire in Europe's past, and contains in its record a full panoply of all the virtues, vices and banalities that the centuries can muster, it has been subjected in modern times to a campaign of denigration of unparalleled virulence and duration. The fashion, if not initiated by Voltaire, was certainly inflated and disseminated by him. ' _Byzance_ ', wrote the Sage of Ferney in 1751, was 'a story of obscure brigands', and 'a disgrace to the human mind'.\n\nMontesquieu wrote an early work on the decadence of the late Roman Empire, for which he invented the adjective 'byzantine' in its modern sense. His chief contribution to political thought lay in his definition of 'the separation of powers'; and since Byzantium knew no such separation, he was necessarily hostile. 'Henceforth', he wrote after dropping the Roman name, 'the Greek Empire is nothing more than a tissue of revolts, seditions and perfidies... Revolutions created more revolutions, so that the effect became the cause.' The flail was then taken up by Georg Hegel, founder of the modern philosophy of history. 'Byzantium', Hegel opined, 'exhibits a millennial series of uninterrupted crimes, weakness, baseness, and want of principle: a repulsive and hence an uninteresting picture.' Such was the Enlightenment's prevailing wisdom. Did the Empire of Augustus know no crimes?\n\nYet predictably no one matched the great Edward Gibbon in the eloquence of his disdain. Thanks to Gibbon, the whole of Byzantine history came to be conceived as the inexorable progress of Decline, varied only by the welcome moment of its Fall. Gibbon's notorious chapter 48, which traces the reigns of the Byzantine emperors from Heraclius (no. 93, r. 610\u201341) to Alexius V (no. 151, r. 1204), overflows with the relish of his wilful prejudice. The Greek empire, Gibbon wrote in his chapter 48, saw the triumph of barbarism and superstition; '[its fate] has been compared to that of the Rhine, which loses itself in the sands before its waters can mingle with the ocean'. Or again:\n\n> [T]he subjects of the Byzantine Empire, who assume and dishonour the names both of Greeks and Romans, present a dead uniformity of abject vices, which are neither softened by the weakness of humanity nor animated by the vigour of memorable crimes... on the throne, in the camp, in the schools, we search, perhaps with fruitless diligence, the names and characters that may deserve to be rescued from oblivion.\n\nThe negativity is relentless:\n\n> Of a space of eight hundred years, the four first centuries are overspread with a cloud interrupted by some faint and broken rays of historic light... The four last centuries are exempt from the reproach of penury: and with the Comnenian family the historic muse of Constantinople again revives, but her apparel is gaudy, her motions are without elegance or grace. A succession of priests, or courtiers, treads in each other's footsteps in the same path of servitude and superstition: their views are narrow, their judgment is feeble or corrupt: and we close the volume of copious barrenness, still ignorant of the causes of events, the characters of the actors, and the manners of the times.\n\nThe Gibbonian lash spares none of the sixty rulers mentioned in that long chapter. On the subject of the Empress Irene, for example, the last of the Isaurian dynasty (no. 110, r. 797\u2013802), who had blinded her son (and about whom Voltaire wrote a play), his outrage assumes cosmic proportions:\n\n> The most bigoted orthodoxy has justly execrated the unnatural mother, who may not easily be paralleled in the history of crimes. To her bloody deed superstition has attributed a subsequent darkness of seventeen days, during which many vessels in mid-day were driven from their course, as if the sun, a globe of fire so vast and so remote, could sympathise with the atoms of a revolving planet. On earth, the crime of Irene was left five years unpunished; her reign was crowned with external splendour; and if she could silence the voice of conscience, she neither heard nor regarded the reproaches of mankind. The Roman world bowed to the government of a female; and as she moved through the streets of Constantinople the reins of four milk-white steeds were held by as many patricians, who marched on foot before [her] golden chariot... But these patricians were for the most part eunuchs; and their black ingratitude justified, on this occasion, the popular hatred and contempt.\n\nIn other cases, mockery was the chosen weapon:\n\n> The name of Leo the Sixth has been dignified with the title of _philosopher_ ; and the union of the prince and the sage... would indeed constitute the perfection of human nature. But the claims of Leo are far short of this ideal excellence. Did he reduce his passions and appetites under the dominion of reason? His life was spent in the pomp of the palace, in the society of his wives and concubines; and even the clemency which he showed, and the peace which he strove to preserve, must be imputed to the softness and indolence of his character. Did he subdue his prejudices, and those of his subjects? His mind was tinged with the most puerile superstition; the influence of the clergy and the errors of the people were consecrated by his laws; and the oracles of Leo, which reveal in prophetic style, the fates of the empire, are founded on the arts of astrology and divination. If we still inquire the reason of his sage appellation, it can only be replied, that [he] was less ignorant than the greater part of his contemporaries in church and state.\n\nGibbon had run into a crisis in the writing of _The Decline and Fall_. After forty-seven chapters he had only reached the end of the sixth century, and he had nearly nine more centuries to cover. He desperately needed to change the pace, and chapter 48 was his vehicle for doing so. Rhetorically, it was magnificent; but as even his admirers admit, 'historically, it was the weakest section'.\n\nThe onslaught of the Enlightenment all but obliterated the earlier school of Byzantine scholarship which had been started in Italy by academic refugees from Constantinople in the mid-fifteenth century; and the rehabilitation of the Byzantine Empire as a worthy subject of study has occupied the best part of the last 200 years. The first steps towards greater discrimination were taken in Germany, by Winckelmann and others. In Britain, the art historian John Ruskin (1819\u20131900) made a powerful case for the originality of Byzantine art, especially in _The Stones of Venice_ (1851\u20133); and the work of his older contemporary George Finlay (1799\u20131875) re-created a historical continuum which links the revered world of ancient Greece both with Byzantium and with the newly independent Greek kingdom of his own day. As Finlay demonstrated, the Empire died twice: once at the hands of Western crusaders, who seized Constantinople between 1204 (the perverted Fourth Crusade) and 1261, and the second time at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1453. In its terminal phase, the Empire shrivelled in almost botanical style, having repeatedly flowered and borne its fruit. Eventually, reduced to the confines of the single city, it was ready, like the last living twig on an ancient stump, to perish.\n\nIn the twentieth century, three scholarly names stand out. J. B. Bury (1861\u20131927), an Irishman, is often credited with the revival of Byzantine studies in Britain. Editor both of Gibbon and of the _Cambridge Ancient History_ , he held chairs at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Cambridge. A brilliant Hellenist, he wrote extensively on Classical Greek, Roman and Byzantine subjects. Professor Sir Steven Runciman (1903\u20132000), an eccentric gentleman scholar, claimed to have been Bury's 'first and only student' at Cambridge. He was conversant with an astonishing array of languages, including, reputedly, Greek, Latin, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Russian and Bulgarian, and in the title of an influential early work he bravely linked 'Byzantine' with 'Civilisation'. In his _History of the Crusades_ (3 vols., 1951\u20134), he constantly battled the self-centred prejudices of the 'West', preferring to believe that the Easterners were guardians of Europe's culture and refinement, and Westerners the barbarians. 'There never was a greater crime against humanity', he wrote, 'than the Fourth Crusade.' Professor Sir Dimitri Obolensky (1918\u20132001), a Russian-born Oxonian, displayed similar inclinations. His work was notable for revealing that the Byzantine Commonwealth had been a multinational community of faith, and that its legacy was still alive among the Eastern Slavs.\n\nOnce Byzantine Studies were established in the academic world, the next task was to raise awareness among the public at large. In this regard, Judith Herrin, a professor from King's College, London, relates the sort of incident that turns other historians green with envy:\n\n> One afternoon... two workmen knocked on my door in [London University]. They were doing repairs... and had often passed my door with its notice: 'Professor of Byzantine History'. Together, they decided to stop by and ask me 'What _is_ Byzantine history?' They thought that it had something to do with Turkey. And so I found myself trying to explain briefly what Byzantine history is to two serious builders in hard hats and heavy boots... They thanked me warmly, said how curious it was, this Byzantium, and asked why didn't I write about it for them?\n\nThose two builders were in the same position as 99 per cent of the population, including 98 per cent of educated Westerners.\n\nAnother distinguished Byzantinist, meanwhile, had been applying herself to some of the basic questions. 'For most historians,' Professor Averil Cameron begins, 'Byzantium is an absence.' Her answer to 'What was Byzantium?' sounds very straightforward: 'Byzantium is the modern name given to the state and society ruled almost continuously from Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the dedication of the city by the Emperor Constantine in AD 330 until its sack by the Ottomans under the young Mehmed ('The Conqueror') in 1453.'  'But Byzantium is hard to grasp,' she continues, 'and \"the Byzantines\" even more so.' Her perception that Byzantine history began in AD 330 is not shared by everyone. Many scholars put the transition from Roman to Byzantine significantly later, either with Justinian or with Heraclius or even with Leo III (r. 717\u201341). It is common practice nowadays to use the framework of five Byzantine dynasties: the Heraclian (610\u2013717), the Isaurian (717\u2013867), the Macedonian (867\u20131081), the Comnenian (1081\u20131258) and the Palaeologan (1258\u20131453).\n\nIn answer to 'Who were the Byzantines?' Professor Cameron is intent on dispelling misconceptions:\n\n> The Byzantines were not a 'people' in any ethnic sense. If we consider only Anatolia, the population had been thoroughly mixed for many centuries. Nor did an education in classicising Greek, which was normal for Christians and pagans alike when Constantinople was founded, and which continued to be the badge of culture in Byzantium, carry any ethnic implications. In this sense, advancement in Byzantium was open to anyone who was able to obtain the education in the first place.\n\nUnder 'Attitudes to Byzantium', Cameron quotes a well-known academic reference work with dismay. 'The term \"Byzantine\", its editors pronounce, 'is a) something extremely complicated, b) inflexible, or c) carried on by underhand means.' Non-expert reactions are little better:\n\n> In the western public consciousness mention of Byzantium attracts two main responses: either it is still thought of as irrelevant or backward, the precursor of the Ottoman Empire and somehow implicated in the political and religious problems of the contemporary Balkans, or else it seems in some mysterious way powerfully attractive, associated as it is with icons and spirituality or with the revival of religion in post-Communist Europe. Each of these responses reveals the persistence of deep-seated stereotypes, and neither does justice to Byzantium or the Byzantines as they actually existed.\n\nProgress, in other words, is slow.\n\nIn 2008\u20139, the Royal Academy in London staged an epoch-making exhibition in collaboration with the Benaki Museum in Athens, and entitled simply _Byzantium_. It contained 350 objects, many of stunning beauty. The magnificent catalogue was assembled by 100 contributors. Reviewers, as if rediscovering a forgotten truth, wrote of 'the intensity of sacred art'. The president of the Academy enthused about the 'huge crowds', which surged past half a million. The biggest wonder was that nothing like it had been staged before.\n\nThe book Professor Herrin promised to the builders appeared shortly before the exhibition, after five years' preparation. In her introduction to what she calls 'a different history of Byzantium', Herrin talks appetizingly of 'an image of opaque duplicity', and of 'a mystery' associated with this 'lost world'. In her conclusions, she appeals for Byzantium to be 'saved from its negative stereotype'. The chapter headings include items such as 'The Largest City in Christendom', 'The Ravenna Mosaics', 'The Bulwark against Islam', 'Icons', 'Greek Fire', 'Eunuchs' and 'Basil II, the Bulgar-slayer'. In addition to scenes from Constantinople, the illustrations show Mount Athos and Mount Sinai, Cappadocia, the Fourth Armenia, Moscow, Sicily, Greece, Venice and Muslim C\u00f3rdoba. This may not be what the average reader expects. Least expected of all was the headline of one of the book's enthusiastic reviews: 'Brilliant, Beautiful and Byzantine'. These were not adjectives that would have naturally been associated with the subject fifty years earlier.\n\nFortunately, awareness of Byzantium is not quite so limited in other parts of Europe. Educated Russians, for example, conscious of the Orthodox tradition, are very aware of their debt. 'We have taken over the best parts of our national culture from Tsargrad,' a Professor Granovsky once exclaimed, using the old Russian name for Constantinople. Even in Catholic countries, where people are generally less sympathetic, the response is unlikely to be a blank stare. In April 1962 a young historian from Oxford was travelling across Poland with a group of British students, almost all of them totally devoid of any knowledge of the country's history. As their train approached Warsaw, the tall outline of a huge, ugly building appeared on the horizon. Unbeknown to the student-traveller it was the much-hated Palace of Culture which Joseph Stalin had donated to the Polish capital a dozen years earlier. Braving the language barrier, a gentleman in the compartment pointed through the window to explain what the building was. He tried in Polish; he tried in German; he tried in Russian; all to no avail. But then he found the one word that conveyed his meaning. ' _Byzancjum_ ,' he cried with a broad Eureka grin. ' _To jest Byzancjum_ ' ('This is Byzantium').\n\nEvery scrap of knowledge leads inexorably to the day when the real, the historic Byzantium ceased to exist. 'The one thing we think we know is that the Byzantines were doomed.' When Constantinople was founded, the Roman Empire had stretched from the Atlantic to the bounds of Persia, from Hadrian's Wall to the Sahara. Together with China and the Gupta Empire in India, it was one of the largest political states in the world, and it is all too easy to imagine that its subsequent career followed a steady, monotonous, uninterrupted downwards slide. Yet Doomsday _did_ occur in the spring of 1453. The Ottoman Turks had been camping on the Asian shore of the Bosporus for over a century. The Roman Empire, once covering the whole of the 'known world', had shrunk to the bounds of the Theodosian Walls:\n\n> The impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night... On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour...\n> \n> But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam...\n> \n> The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries:\n>\n>> 'The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly... but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement... Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it... each wave making way without panic for its successor...'\n\n> Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The [166th] Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared.\n> \n> Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque:\n>\n>> 'The _muezzin_ ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the _ezan_ or public invitation... The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the _namaz_ of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine... A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. \"The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch song on the towers of Afrasiab.\" '\n\nOne thousand, one hundred and twenty-three years had passed since the refounding of the city by the Emperor Constantine: 2,211 years since the Megarans had laid the first stone.\n\n##### III\n\nDescribing or summarizing Europe's greatest 'vanished kingdom' is almost too much to contemplate. Like European history in general, the story is too long, too rich and too complex; and if Orhan Pamuk is typical of his compatriots, it is virtually forgotten among the Byzantines' most immediate successors. Despite their hard-won achievements, professional historians struggle with the enormity of their task. Summary evocations are perhaps best left to poets, especially to one who was once the pupil of J. B. Bury:\n\n> The unpurged images of day recede;\n> \n> The Emperor's drunken soldiery are abed;\n> \n> Night resonance recedes, night-walkers' song\n> \n> After great cathedral gong;\n> \n> A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains\n> \n> All that man is,\n> \n> All mere complexities,\n> \n> The fury and the mire of human veins.\n> \n> Before me floats an image, man or shade,\n> \n> Shade more than man, more image than a shade;\n> \n> For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth\n> \n> May unwind the winding path;\n> \n> A mouth that has no moisture and no breath\n> \n> Breathless mouths may summon;\n> \n> I hail the superhuman;\n> \n> I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.\n> \n> Miracle, bird or golden handiwork,\n> \n> More miracle than bird or handiwork,\n> \n> Planted on the star-lit golden bough,\n> \n> Can like the cocks of Hades crow,\n> \n> Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud\n> \n> In glory of changeless metal\n> \n> Common bird or petal\n> \n> And all complexities of mire or blood.\n> \n> At midnight on the Emperor's pavement flit\n> \n> Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,\n> \n> Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,\n> \n> Where blood-begotten spirits come\n> \n> And all complexities of fury leave,\n> \n> Dying into a dance,\n> \n> An agony of trance,\n> \n> An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve.\n> \n> Astraddle on the dolphin's mire and blood,\n> \n> Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood,\n> \n> The golden smithies of the Emperor!\n> \n> Marbles of the dancing floor\n> \n> Break bitter furies of complexity,\n> \n> Those images that yet\n> \n> Fresh images beget,\n> \n> That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.\n\n## 7\n\n## Borussia\n\nWatery Land of the Prusai (1230\u20131945)\n\n##### I\n\nKaliningrad is the most westerly city of the Russian Federation. Capital of the surrounding autonomous _oblast_ or 'administrative district', it was named in Soviet times after one of Stalin's many disreputable henchmen, Mikhail Kalinin (1875\u20131946), sometime president of the USSR. It lies on the Pregolya river, 30 miles from the Baltic coast and the ex-Soviet naval base of Baltiysk. The city centre, which straddles a number of islands, was extensively damaged during the Second World War, and the ruins of its historic buildings were long left uncleared by the controlling Soviet military. Now, restored to civilian rule, Kaliningrad possesses the full infrastructure of a modern, developing city: an international airport, a direct rail link to Moscow, a business park, an industrial zone and a university. Its ex-Soviet population of 430,000 consists almost entirely of Russian-speakers drawn from all the former Soviet republics.\n\nThanks to wartime devastation, grandiose plans were drawn up in 1945 to design 'a Russian and socialist city' worthy of 'our Soviet Man, victor and creator... of a new, progressive culture'. The chief architect, Dmitri Navalikhan, assumed that building would start from a tabula rasa, that is, on a site from which all traces of the past had been erased; the style was to be a 'New Brutalism'. In practice, nothing so ambitious proved possible. Navalikhan's plans still lie in the Moscow archives, the object of art historians' curiosity. When rebuilding did start, attempts were made to demonstrate that Kaliningrad was an ancient Russian city returning to its roots. The first statue to be erected, in 1946, was to the eighteenth-century soldier Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov, whose father had briefly served as governor of the city during the Seven Years War. Only then was the main street, the _Leninskiy Prospekt_ , laid out from the railway station to the city centre, and lined with statues of Lenin, Stalin, Kalinin, Kutuzov and Pushkin.\n\nKaliningrad's present, anomalous situation is the result of the simultaneous collapse of both the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union itself. Having been assigned after the Second World War to the Russian SFSR,* the Kaliningrad _oblast_ served as the linchpin of Soviet strategic defences in the Baltic region. But in 1990\u201391, when adjoining parts of Poland and Lithuania left the Soviet bloc, it suddenly found itself cut off from the rest of Russia, and the demise of the USSR rendered the concept of a Soviet military zone redundant. Surrounded by foreign countries, the stranded Russian enclave, with a total population close to 1 million, became a sad anachronism.\n\nThe full history of Kaliningrad's unenviable fate in the 1990s has still to be written, but there can be no doubt that it was characterized by a large measure of neglect and an almost total lack of financial investment. Submarines of the ex-Soviet fleet rusted at their moorings; ex-Soviet soldiers and their dependants lost all means of providing for themselves; environmental pollution mushroomed. The ensuing vacuum was filled by social, economic and political pathologies of all sorts. Crime syndicates flourished. A scheme was afoot to declare independence from Moscow. In 1998, to retake control, Moscow declared a state of emergency.\n\nAt the very end of the century, concerted efforts were made to rescue the failed city by the rehabilitation both of its physical infrastructure and its social fabric. Modern buildings were constructed, eyesores were cleared, roads mended and trees planted. Drug gangs were rounded up, protection rings closed down, and foreign smuggling stifled. The aim was to turn Kaliningrad into the hub of a Special Economic Zone, a 'Baltic Hong Kong' attracting new enterprises, casinos and tourist hotels. The European Union, eager to contain the danger on its borders, offered far-reaching advice and co-operation.\n\nIn the course of Vladimir Putin's two presidential terms, from 2000 to 2008, Russia, though patently only pseudo-democratic, made considerable progress towards greater stability and prosperity, and Kaliningrad's downward slide was halted. New industry arrived, notably in the form of a television assembly plant that now supplies one in three television sets throughout Russia, and a BMW car factory, whose products go mainly to Germany. Hotels, a casino and tourist agencies have been established, and an Agreement of Special Association signed with the European Union. City-twinning partnerships have been created, not only with fellow Baltic ports like Kiel, Gdynia or Klaipeda, but also with Norfolk (Virginia) and Mexico City. High-powered delegations visited, including European Commissioner Chris Patten and German Chancellor Gerhard Schr\u00f6der. Conferences were held, an EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee was formed, and in December 2006 a casino law aimed to confine gambling to a special zone within the Special Zone. Most importantly, travel and transport arrangements were eased so that people and goods could move freely to the rest of Russia. It did no harm that the president's wife, Russia's first lady, Lyudmila Putina, had been born and raised in Kaliningrad. And though formally only prime minister after 2008, Putin clearly remains master of the Kremlin.\n\nVIP visitors are customarily taken to inspect drilling rigs, new business enterprises and the Kaliningrad _duma_ or 'parliament'. A Working Group of the EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee in October 2006, for example, was shown round the LUKOIL D6 offshore rig, the Georgenburg Studfarm, the Taranova Brewery, and the Lesobalt wood-processing factory. Overall, the European visitors were impressed both by recent economic recovery and by the colossal gulf still to be bridged. Economic growth in 2001\u20135 was reported at 25 per cent, 6 per cent per annum, but 25 per cent of zero is still zero. All thoughtful visitors are dumbfounded by the crime figures, and by living standards that one scholar has put at sixty-five times lower than the EU average.\n\nAll but the most partial observers would agree that the potential of the 'Baltic Hong Kong' has yet to be realized. Over-enthusiastic proponents of 'Transition' assumed that free markets and Western-style democracies would develop of their own accord. In fact, the Soviet legacy is proving stubborn. One reason lies in the very low starting point: once a city has gained the reputation of 'cesspit of cesspits', the tarnished image does not improve overnight. Negative statistics, which may or may not be out of date, continue to circulate. Kaliningrad has (or had) a murder rate 20\u201330 per cent higher than the Russian average. Kaliningrad is (or was) the scene of Europe's highest rates of HIV infection, tuberculosis and diphtheria. Kaliningrad is still reputed to support Europe's most persistent network of white slave trafficking. And though the Kaliningrad _oblast_ regenerates, the adjacent districts in Poland and Lithuania, now inside the European Union, regenerate much faster.\n\nTwo factors inhibit Kaliningrad's would-be renaissance. One derives from the nature of the Putin regime itself. If crime, corruption and a hidden local hierarchy lie at the heart of the problem, the centralized authoritarian system is unlikely to cure it; the Special Economic Zone may well prove to be more of a money-spinning outpost of Kremlin Corp than a motor of local well-being. One of the most successful, government-backed enterprises, the Baltic Tobacco Factory (BTF), turns out to be specially designed for smuggling cigarettes into Germany. It mass-produces the ex-Chinese Jin Ling brand in packets that are suspiciously similar to those of Camel cigarettes, except that a goat has replaced the camel.\n\nFurther inhibitions stem from the pathological proportions of the Russian military presence. Since the Soviet army's withdrawal from East Germany, the Kaliningrad _oblast_ harbours the largest concentration of military equipment, personnel and installations in the whole of Europe, and the cash-strapped ex-Soviet military is widely suspected of playing godfather to the notorious crime syndicates. What is more, militarization may actually increase. In the summer of 2007, when Russia's foreign minister first hinted at relocating nuclear missiles to Kaliningrad in response to US proposals for a Central European 'Missile Shield', none but the generals rejoiced. Headlines about 'a return to the strategic frontline' do not encourage investors and developers.*\n\nPresident Putin's governor in Kaliningrad, Georgiy Boos, was appointed in September 2005 to preside over celebrations of the city's 750th anniversary. A pretext was found in the slender thread of continuity since 1255, and the festivities were attended by presidents Putin and Chirac of France, and Germany's Chancellor Schr\u00f6der. Governor Boos stressed the necessity for dialogue on all fronts, especially with Germany and the EU, and acted as the genial host to numerous delegations.\n\nVisitors to the enclave, therefore, have many interesting things to look out for. They usually arrive either at Khrabrovo Airport, which serves international destinations such as Copenhagen, Warsaw and Prague, or at the Bagrationovsk border crossing with Poland. Europeans accustomed to border-free journeys can relive their past experiences of visa controls, police questions and customs examinations. Rumours of an unavoidable thirty-six-hour wait are exaggerated.\n\nLandmarks of the Soviet era are much in evidence. The _Dom Sovietov_ , or 'House of Soviets', a high-rise pile from the 1960s, occupies the site of the former Royal Castle. The _Rossiya_ cinema is an architectural exhibit of some distinction. The _Ploshad Pobiedy_ or 'Victory Square' is named after Stalin's triumph in the 'Great Patriotic War', and a triumphal arch reminds visitors to the Baltic Stadium of the same event. The City Hall or 'White House' vies in its oversized proportions with the gleaming new Russian Orthodox cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Deliberately or accidentally, the statue of Lenin \u2013 a brutal proponent of atheism, but still apparently revered \u2013 stands right in front of the cathedral.\n\nShopping is not Kaliningrad's forte. A Benetton shop has opened in place of an abandoned Italian restaurant. Another store, clearly a champion of endurance, sports a sign 'Founded in 1932'. But generally speaking, there is nothing to make the experience of consumption here anything but the most mundane.\n\nAmong the restored historical monuments, pride of place must go to the medieval cathedral. Built over fifty years in the fourteenth century, it was destroyed in 1944 in as many minutes by RAF bombs. One can view three of the city's fortified gates, now adapted for motor traffic, the former opera house, now a museum, the city zoo, and, allegedly, the wartime headquarters of the Nazi Gestapo. Visitors with a sense of the past, however, may have difficulty in locating the remnants of pre-Soviet times:\n\n> Occasionally, signs of another, older order poked through the wreckage of the new. In one place, a concrete pavement came to an abrupt end revealing a well-laid cobblestone road lying just beneath its surface; somewhere else, an old building leaned sideways in an empty lot, surrounded by nothing. It was possible, almost, to see how the streets of the old town \u2013 once narrow and twisted and lined with the tall houses of the merchants \u2013 had disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety... had vanished behind spectacular monotony...\n> \n> Yet the city seemed unconscious of its history. After an hour of searching, map in hand, I found the only monument to the Soviet destruction of [the city]: a tiny underground museum hidden away in a war bunker. Most of its displays contained battle dioramas, and a series of diagrams plotted the Red Army's advance... The final room contained before-and-after photographs. Brick homes and churches before: identical concrete blocks after. Mediaeval churches before: empty lots after.\n> \n> Outside, I tried to walk through the old heart of the city, but the street plan made no sense. The centre of the town seemed jagged, unfinished: it was as if someone had thrown down the mismatched boulevards and drab buildings on top of the older landmarks by accident, and then gave up the whole project for lost when he saw the hideous result.\n\nOnly two of the city's famous inhabitants have left a discernible spoor. One, Leonhard Euler (1707\u201383) was a celebrated mathematician who went off to St Petersburg. Before leaving he set his fellow citizens the impossible task of finding a route round the city's islands in such a way that returned them to their starting point after crossing each of its then seven bridges not more than once. The puzzle cannot be tackled in its original form, since only five bridges have survived. Even so, 'Euler's Path' is a pleasant tourist trail which takes one round the Old City's islands.\n\nUnlike his colleague and critic, J. G. Hamann (1730\u201388), Immanuel Kant (1724\u20131804) never set foot outside his home town. His lectures are reputed to have been attended by Russian officers during the Seven Years War. His tomb is still marked in the restored cathedral, and a moving souvenir lurks in an easily missed corner of the former castle precinct, where a small inscribed bilingual plaque bears a quotation from Kant's _Critique of Practical Reason_. 'There are two things', it reads, 'which the more I think of them, the more they inspire awe: the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within.' A small posy of flowers is usually left on the lintel of this plaque.\n\nMany visitors drop into the former Kaliningrad State Pedagogical Institute, which since 2005 has been upgraded to full university status as the Russian State University 'Immanuel Kant', or 'ISKUR'. The institution claims to be successor to the sixteenth-century Albertina College, and is unusually keen to establish international connections. As of March 2008, it was claiming forty-four partner universities, including four in Lithuania, ten in Poland, fourteen in Germany, and Europe's oldest university at Bologna.\n\nYet the intellectual horizons of Kaliningrad's educated citizens can be very limited, especially in regard to history. A brilliant American historian of the region, then a young journalist, was looking in the early 1990s for assistance from the editor of a newspaper previously called _Komsomolskaya Pravda_ ; she found out how little her Russian colleague could tell her:\n\n> She had been born in Siberia, and spent her childhood at an army base in the Kurile Islands. Her parents had escaped the cold and poverty of Asiatic Russia by joining the army [and] moving west...\n> \n> The editor had lived in Kaliningrad for most of her life, but in school she had not learned that Kaliningrad had ever been a German city. History began with the Russian Revolution, and the next important event was the Great Patriotic War. After the war, her teachers told her, Stalin liberated Kaliningrad from Nazi occupation, but no-one ever said anything about the city prior to this event. Now she knew more. She had seen photographs of the cathedral, and she was very proud of Kant: she thought that Kaliningrad should be renamed Kantgrad. Already, she said, her generation considered itself 'different' from Russian Russians. They were Baltic Russians, a new nationality...\n> \n> Yet her knowledge of the city's past was shallow. She spoke of Kant with the same veneration that Russians reserve for their canon of cultural heroes \u2013 Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky \u2013 yet she had not read any of Kant's books: 'I don't think they are published in Russian'... Her interest in Germany was an interest in German tourism, German commerce, not an interest in the German past. Her plans for 'her city' were plans that would bring in German money.\n\nA worthwhile diversion is to explore the Kutuzovsky suburb, the only pre-war district to have survived intact and where ancient pre-war trams were still running in the 1990s. It is free of the otherwise ubiquitous _khrushchyoba_ , the Khrushchev-era housing blocks, and is filled instead with once elegant villas, each now divided into seven or eight apartments. Nowadays, the Kutuzovsky is also punctuated with the vulgar, fenced-off residences of the super-rich. Outside Kaliningrad, visitors can enjoy a curious mixture of verdant countryside (where brooding lakes and forests alternate with agricultural settlements) and small towns caught in a time warp. With few exceptions, these tattered places have preserved their grandiloquent Soviet names: Sovyetsk Gvardejsk ('Red Guard-town'), Slavsk ('Gloryville'), Krasno-Znamensk ('Red Banner'), Pravdinsk (after _pravda_ , 'the truth') and Pionerskii (after the Communist Youth Organization). No one tells you that Sovyetsk was formerly Tilsit, where Tsar Alexander I met Napoleon on a raft on the Nieman in 1807. Tourists can visit the naval base at Baltiysk if armed with a _propusk_ or 'pass'. The giant sand-dunes of the Curonian Spit are a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. The more adventurous can plunge into the forests to discover the romantic ruins of Teutonic castles at Balga, Polessk (Labiau) and Saalau (Kamenskoe). The _Kaliningradtsy_ console themselves with the none-too-gallant saying, as one moves away from Poland, that 'the cows get prettier \u2013 unlike the women'.\n\nOn the coast, beyond Baltiysk, lie a couple of half-empty seaside resorts: Svetlogorsk and Zelenogradsky. The strangely dilapidated town of Yantarny is said to be the source of 80 per cent of the world's amber, and hence of the smuggling trade. Hardy souls who venture out of Kaliningrad to savour these places, however, must be prepared for a lesson in Communist-era planning:\n\n> I made my way up the filthy staircase and down the dark hall. Opening the door, I beheld a remarkable sight. It was not just that the hotel room was badly designed. It was as if someone had purposefully set out to create a room where... nothing worked at all.\n> \n> Every item in the bathroom was poorly constructed, as if stray bits of old junk had been reassembled there... The sink had no drainpipe, so water leaked straight onto the floor. The toilet flushed not with a handle, but with a bit of twisted wire. The shower head was so low that any normal adult would have to kneel to wet his head. An inoperable ventilator, unconnected to any source of electricity, hung from the wall.\n> \n> In the bedroom, the walls were covered in unmatching tiles. Half of the room was muddy blue, and the other half hospital green. No-one had made the tiles reach the ceiling, so several inches of unadorned cement lined the top of the walls. The beds lacked sheets and pillows. A small but vigorous cockroach was crawling across the floor.\n> \n> Someone had ordered the construction of this hotel. Someone else had built it. Someone had placed the mismatching tiles on the walls, someone had installed the ill-fitting sink... someone had failed to make the beds. Many decisions had been made, but no-one had been responsible for the hotel room... It was just a place, created to fill the plan of a distant bureaucrat who would never see it and would never care.\n\nThe region's best asset is its climate. Apart from faraway Murmansk, this is Russia's only section of northern coastline that is ice-free throughout the year. Twenty years ago, the USSR had six Baltic naval bases. Today's Russia has only two: Kronstadt near St Petersburg and Baltiysk.\n\nSo far, Kaliningrad and its beleaguered enclave have failed to change their name. The city of Kalinin, in central Russia, has reverted to the ancient name of Tver, and the broad Kalininskaya Boulevard in central Moscow is the 'Tverskaya' again. The citizens of Leningrad voted overwhelmingly in 1991 to recover the city's original identity of St Petersburg. So there is no shortage of precedents, but no consensus has emerged in the enclave about a new name. The front-runners in the 1990s were 'Kantograd' and 'Korolovsk'. At present, the Russian slang-name of 'Kyonig' is said to have the edge. But cultural sensibilities are still heavily Sovietized, and rallies are still held to mark the Bolshevik Revolution.\n\nAs the second post-Soviet decade reached its end, the city held its breath to see if the stand-off over nuclear missiles could be defused. In 2008 hopes were sinking. The government of Poland had agreed in principle to admit the American 'Shield'; and Russia's new president, Dmitri Medvedyev, threatened to install short-range Iskander missiles in the enclave. Then in 2009 tensions relaxed. The incoming Obama administration in the United States curtailed the chances of the 'Shield' being built, and the Iskanders were sent back. The signing of a new Russo-American START Treaty on 26 January 2011 promised a period of calm.\n\nNonetheless, the Kalingrad enclave remains a place of tangible unease. Some still blame external threats. 'Russia is like a wolf,' one Kaliningrader has said enigmatically, 'a wolf that has been trapped by hunters.' So far no one has caught sight of the hunters; others underline internal shortcomings. On 2 February 2010 tens if not hundreds of thousands of protesters gathered in central Kaliningrad to demand the removal not only of Governor Boos but also of Vladimir Putin. The placards targeted Putin's _YedRo_ or 'United Russia' Party; ' _Partiya YedRo_ ' _,_ the jingle read, ' _pomoinoye vyedro_ ' ('United Russia [is] a bucket of filth'). The Kremlin ordered a high-level inquiry, but fresh demonstrations broke out exactly six months later. This time Governor Boos was immediately fired, and replaced by the local YedRo Secretary, Nikolay Tsukanov. Suddenly the air was thick again with ambitious plans. Visions of the Baltic Hong Kong resurfaced as the federal government proposed yet another 'new economic status' for the enclave. Governor Tsukanov proposed his home town of Gusev as a centre of expansion parallel to Kaliningrad. The Regional Development Agency announced multi-billion-rouble grants to accelerate stalled projects for a new seaport and a nuclear power station. Even the outlook for gay tourism was explored. Then, as if to go back to basics, a Russo-German scheme was unveiled at Zeleniogorsk to prepare an Open Air Museum of the Ancient Prussians.\n\n##### II\n\nOne thousand, two thousand years ago, the land that lies on the southern shore of Europe's second inland sea was virtually _terra incognita_. If it was known beyond its own shores at all, it was as the 'Amber Coast', the source of the shimmering translucent gold-brown stones which were highly prized for jewellery in the ancient world. The native tribes who lived in the dark forests of the Baltic coastland had few contacts with outsiders. They lived from fishing, hunting and raiding their neighbours. They called themselves _Prusai_ , or _Pruzzi_ \u2013 a name that has been traced to an Indo-European root connected with water. Since they would have identified themselves above all with their natural surroundings, there is some basis for thinking of them as the 'Water Tribes' or the 'Lakeland Folk', or possibly, through the striking configuration of their coastline, as the 'People of the Lagoons'.\n\nThe _Prusai_ thrived untouched by civilization until the thirteenth century AD. They were pagan, illiterate, pre-agricultural and, in the eyes of their neighbours, primitive predators. All the great events of early European history passed them by. Hoards of Roman coins, deriving no doubt from the amber trade, indicate that they must have been aware of the wider world, yet the Roman Empire rose and declined without altering their way of life. The invading Asiatic nomads rode across the open plains to the south, and the westward passage of Germanic, and later of Slavic tribes, did not penetrate their homeland. The empire of Charlemagne and his successors never reached them; nor did the religion of the Nazarenes, which gradually overtook the north European mainland in the tenth century and Scandinavia in the twelfth.\n\nApart from occasional and ambiguous references by early geographers, the first event to bring the _Prusai_ into the historical record occurred in 997. In that year the Czech Prince Vojtech of Prague, a missionary bishop, took ship in the Vistula delta intending to convert them. Instead, he was murdered by his prospective flock. A search party ransomed his body, and brought it back as a holy relic to the newly founded Polish cathedral of Gniezno. Vojtech was better known by his baptismal name of Adalbert, and as St Adalbert of Prussia he was destined to become the heavenly patron of the land which had rejected him.\n\nThe _Prusai_ formed the westernmost grouping within a larger collection of Baltic peoples, including the Lithuanians and Latvians and who spoke related languages and followed similarly traditional ways of life. The names of their constituent tribes were recorded in Latin forms by the Catholic monks who first accumulated knowledge of the region. Already in the ninth century, the so-called Bavarian Geographer* had recorded the Latin name of _Borussia \u2013_ that is, the land of the _Prusai_ \u2013 from which all modern variants of the country's name are derived: _Prussia_ (Latin and English), _Preussen_ (German), _Prusse_ (French) and _Prusy_ (Polish). Five hundred years later, when the conquest of Borussia by Christian knights was in progress, the priest Peter Dusberger compiled a much fuller list of tribes. Among the Balto-Prussian ethnic group, he noted the Varmians, the Pomesanians, the Natangians, the Sambians, the Skalovians, the Nadruvians, the Bartians, the Sudovians and the Galindians. Each of them possessed their own territory within the expanse lying between the Vistula and Nemanus (Nieman) rivers. The first six on the list were settled on the coast, the others in the interior. There may have been others.\n\nThe geography of _Borussia_ added greatly to its isolation. The coastal strip was bordered by a string of maritime lagoons, which had formed behind long sandy spits and which obstructed easy access to the rivers. The interior consisted largely of the vast lines of morainic stones which marked the stages of retreat of the last northern ice cap. The result was a tangle of fantastically shaped lakes interspersed by winding chains of pine-covered heights. There were no straightforward routes or trails, no safe refuges for intruders. Most of the ground was unsuitable for growing crops. The temptation to mount cattle-raids into the open country beyond the lakes, and to seize the produce of foreign barns, was great.\n\nBy the thirteenth century, however, the _Prusai_ were effectively surrounded on all sides. The area to the west beyond the Vistula had been settled by Western Slavs, notably by the Kashubs, who formed part of the Duchy of Pomerania. To the south lay the Polish Duchy of Mazovia, centred on Warsaw, which during 'the era of fragmentation', was enjoying a state of semi-independence. To the east, beyond the Nieman, other Baltic groupings were embarking on adventures of their own that would lead to the states of Livonia and of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.\n\nThe principal motor of change in East Central Europe in that era was the arrival of the Mongol Horde. Streaming out of the Asian steppes, the Mongols destroyed Moscow in 1238, before wreaking death and pillage through what is now southern Poland and Hungary. The resultant insecurity encouraged two developments. One was the establishment of crusading orders to strengthen Christendom's eastern borders. The other was the mobilization of German colonists to repopulate the devastated districts.\n\nIn its previous phase, Germanic colonization did not affect _Borussia_. After 1180, when the Slavonic duke of Pomerania, Boguslav III, had sworn fealty to the Holy Roman Empire, settlers from the latter crossed the River Oder and edged along the Pomeranian coast. After 1204, when one of the military orders, the Knights of the Sword (see p. 270n.), established a base at Riga in Livonia and when the Danes built their fort at Tallinn in Estonia, the Northern Crusades* were underway. But the _Prusai_ , sandwiched between the advancing colonists on one side and the warring crusaders on the other, remained unscathed.\n\nSuch was the situation in the 1220s, when Conrad, duke of Mazovia, lost patience with the perpetual raiding of the _Prusai_. Earlier attempts to subdue them with the help a minor Polish crusading order, the Knights of Dobrzyn, had failed, so in exchange for a grant in fief of the district of Che\u0142mno (Kulmerland) the duke called in an outfit of far greater capacity, inviting the Knights of the Teutonic Order to use their fief as a base for containing the _Prusai_. From what was said later, it seems Conrad envisaged nothing more than a local and limited operation. He would certainly not have anticipated that his guests would soon grow far more powerful than himself.\n\nThe 'Order of the Brothers of the Teutonic House of the Virgin Mary in Jerusalem' had been founded in the previous century as one of several military organizations spawned by the crusader states of _Outremer_ in the Holy Land devoted to converting 'infidels'. It thrived through control of the port of Acre, but after the Saracen reconquest of Jerusalem in 1187 its knights increasingly gained a living as mercenaries in Greece, in Spain and then in Hungary. Yet its essential ethos and ambitions remained intact. The Teutonic Knights were looking for projects that would sustain a way of life devoted to fighting infidels but free from Europe's feudal hierarchies.\n\nThe key figure in their schemes was Hermann von Salza ( _c_. 1179\u20131239), who ruled the Order for thirty years as grand master, and who possessed connections both at the imperial court and at the Lateran Palace. This was the time when the emperor, Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (r. 1215\u201350), held sway in Sicily, and when his wars with the Papal States led to his excommunication (see p. 192). Von Salza, whose career began as a knight in the Hohenstaufen entourage, acted as mediator in their disputes, and his familiarity with successive popes gave him a position which he exploited to great advantage. In essence, he contrived to place the Knights under direct papal patronage, and thereby to secure immunity from unconditional loyalty to the various secular rulers in whose lands they operated. The strategy failed in Hungary, whence the Order was expelled in 1225. In Mazovia, it worked to perfection.\n\nApart from anything else, Grand Master von Salza was an expert in legal trickery. Each stage of his scheming was supported by fine-sounding documents which gave the Order important rights without corresponding obligations. In 1226, the emperor's Golden Bull of Rimini stated that the duke of Mazovia should equip the Order to fight the pagans, and that the conquered territory should be _Reichsfrei_ , that is, beyond imperial jurisdiction. In 1230 the Treaty of Kruszwica, supposedly signed both by the Order and by the duke but leaving no later documentary trace, stated that Kulmerland was to be held by the Order in fief from Mazovia. In 1234, the self-contradictory Golden Bull of Rieti of Pope Gregory IX confirmed these arrangements, while also subjecting the Order exclusively to papal authority. Thus, having secured their foothold, the Knights felt that they possessed legal immunity. Any protests by the duke of Mazovia could be ignored. The emperor and the pope were far away, and the throne of Poland was vacant.\n\nWithin a short time, the Teutonic Order created a socio-military machine that could sustain unbroken campaigns of conquest and that turned the frontline in _Borussia_ into the scene of non-stop operations. Both the Order of Dobrzyn and the Order of the Sword were absorbed into it, providing a pool of knights to support a regular army. Recruits appeared from all over Christendom, attracted by the adventure of combat and the lust for land. Peasant colonists, mainly Germans and Flemings, were imported on favourable terms to work the land and to ease the manpower problem. Towns were built, marshes drained, trails cut through the wilderness and trade routes opened up. The amber monopoly was appropriated, taxes collected, troops raised, trained and paid, and the war against the infidels incessantly pursued. The killing, burning and deportation of the native _Prusai_ was pursued in the name of the Faith, and the 'Black Knights', who wore a white cloak emblazoned with the black cross, assumed the divine mantle. They and their dependants spoke German, and it was among them that the name of _Preussen_ gained currency.\n\nThe political organization of the _Ordensstaat_ , as it came to be known \u2013 the State of the Teutonic Order \u2013 was built up in the course of the conquest. To begin with, its headquarters remained in Acre, but then moved to Venice; it did not come to _Borussia_ until 1309. The grand masters were chosen by the Brother-Knights through an electoral committee. Once confirmed by the pope, they served both as commander-in-chief and as chief executive, appointing the subordinate _Landmeisters_ , the provincial governors, and _Komturs_ , the district commanders. Altogether, during the 327 years of the Order's existence in its medieval form, thirty-five grand masters held office for an average of nine years each. The first of von Salza's successors was Conrad of Thuringia (1239\u201340), and the last Albrecht von Hohenzollern (1510\u201325). The longest serving grand master was Winrich von Kniprode, from 1351 to 1382.\n\nThe conquest of _Borussia_ proceeded over six decades, and was formally completed in 1283. Unfortunately, since the _Prusai_ left no records, the story has only been told from the Order's perspective. The chief source is the four-volume _Chronicon Terrae Prussiae_ , composed by Peter Dusberger half a century later, probably in K\u00f6nigsberg. Peter saw the Order's work as a sacred mission, and his Brother-Knights who died in battle assured of a place in Heaven. The pagans, he acknowledged, were also to be admired for their unwavering devotion to their misguided beliefs. Many Christians, he laments, could learn from their example.\n\nThere can be no doubt that these Northern Crusades were contested with great ferocity on both sides. It was said that captured knights were roasted alive inside their armour. The _Prusai_ , if they resisted conversion _,_ could expect no better. All forms of violence and cruelty were justified. Captives were routinely tortured, settlements systematically razed, and survivors of both sexes were forced into slavery, from which baptism was the only exit. Their huts and homes were cleared to make way for incoming colonists. Large numbers were deported to reservations; others fled to neighbouring Lithuania. Thus did 'Western Civilization' advance.\n\nThe _Livonian Rhymed Chronicle_ ,* written in the late thirteenth century, described the initial offensive:\n\n> Being on a peninsula, the land is almost surrounded by the wild seas... No army had ever invaded there, and on the [seaward] side no one can fight against it because a wild stream, wide and deep, flows along it... A narrow strip extends towards [Lithuania] and there the Christians came with their stately army. The Christians rejoiced. They found the great forest of the Samites there... [made] of trees so large that they served as a bulwark... The Christians... vowed not to rest till it had been cut in two... Then, when they had... slashed through the forest, the army advanced directly into the land. The Samites learned that they were visited by guests who wished to do them harm.\n\nOn that occasion, the crusaders had fallen into a trap. Deep in the wilderness, they were ambushed and annihilated.\n\nAs the crusaders progressed, they planted many fortified towns and castles in the wilderness. Elbing, Thorn, Allenstein and Marienwerder were all Teutonic foundations. K\u00f6nigsberg ('King's Mountain') was founded in 1255 on a site sacred to the _Prusai_ called _Tvangste_. It was named in honour of King Ottakar II of Bohemia, who had participated in the fighting personally. But nothing rivalled the size and grandeur of the Marienburg, the 'Fortress of the Virgin', erected from 1274 on the banks of the River Nogat. Four times larger than the royal castle of the English kings at Windsor, it was almost certainly the biggest medieval castle in Europe, and could be approached from the sea. Its vast walls, soaring towers and bristling battlements exude a sense of triumph and permanence. When completed in the early fourteenth century, it became the seat of the Order. By then, the land of the _Prusai_ had been subdued, and the new country of _Preussen_ established.\n\nThe advance of the Teutonic Order naturally went hand in hand with the power of the Roman Catholic Church which had blessed its activities. The first, missionary, bishop of _Borussia_ , Christian of Oliva (d. 1245), was a Cistercian monk with Polish connections who had worked with the Order of Dobrzyn. But the Teutonic Knights preferred the Dominicans, and in the 1330s, when Bishop Christian was being held for ransom by the _Prusai_ , they made fresh arrangements. A papal legate arrived to mediate, and in 1243 he divided the country into four dioceses: Che\u0142mno, Pomesania, Varmia and Sambia. He placed the new church province under the archbishop of Riga.\n\nKulmerland had formed the northern border of the Polish Duchy of Mazovia, and contained the towns of Kulm (Che\u0142mno), Thorn (Toru\u0144), Graudenz (Grudzi\u0105dz) and P\u0142ock. The castle at Dobrzyn had belonged to the eponymous knightly order. Once the lakeland area to the north was cleared of its native inhabitants, it was settled by Polish colonists from Mazovia known as Mazurs, thereby receiving its name of Mazury (Mazuria\/Masuren). According to later folklore, Pomesania enshrined the name of Pomeso, son of a legendary king, Vudevuto. It occupied the maritime district to the east of the Vistula. Its principal town Elbing (Elbl\u0105g) replaced the former port of the _Prusai_ at Truso. Varmia or Emeland was the homeland of a Baltic tribe descended from a legendary chieftain, Varmo. It became the seat of a powerful line of bishops, prince-bishops and, eventually, archbishops. The first of the bishops never assumed office, but the second and third, Anselm von Meisser and Heinrich Fleming, ruled the see until the turn of the fourteenth century. Their cathedral was built at Frauenburg (Frombork), which in 1310 became the first Prussian city to be incorporated, as was common in the Baltic according to the Law of L\u00fcbeck. In due course, Frauenburg would become the home of its cathedral's canon-astronomer, Nicholas Copernicus. Sambia or Samland remained beyond the control of the Teutonic Order until the 1250s. It consisted largely of the maritime peninsula which separates the two principal coastal lagoons \u2013 subsequently known as the _Frisches Haff_ and the _Kurisches Haff_. The city of K\u00f6nigsberg was surrounded by countryside in which the native Old Prussian language persisted long after being suppressed elsewhere.\n\nThe most easterly parts of _Borussia_ were not conquered until the early 1280s. The key moment came with the fall of the island fortress within the 'Salmon Lake' of E\u0142k. German settlers renamed the fortress 'Lyck', and the Poles '\u0141\u0119g'. But the salmon motif was not forgotten. Nearly 700 years later, when another population transfer took place, the Old Prussian name of E\u0142k was restored and a salmon reappeared in the town's coat of arms.\n\nDespite the neglect with which the heritage of the _Prusai_ was once treated, enough remnants of their language, Prusiskan, have survived for it to be reconstructed by modern scholars. It is classified as 'Old Prussian' to distinguish it from various Germanic dialects, such as Low Prussian, which developed in the province subsequently. It is one of the oldest known forms of Indo-European, and is closest to modern Latvian.\n\nOld Prussian was written down in the Latin alphabet from the thirteenth century onwards. The so-called Basel Epigram, which was probably inscribed in the margin of another manuscript by an educated Prussian sent to study in Prague, reads: ' _Kayle rekyse, thoneaw labonache theywelyse. Eg koyte, poyte, nykoyte, penega doyte._ ' This has been rendered as: 'Hello, sir! You are no longer a kind uncle, if you want to drink yourself but don't give a penny to others.' The so-called Elbing Vocabulary, dating from _c_. 1400, records 802 words in their German and Old Prussian versions, and a fifteenth-century fragment records the first line of the paternoster: ' _Towe N\u00fcsze kas esse andangens\u00fcn swyntins_.' By far the fullest texts are to be found in three catechisms printed in K\u00f6nigsberg in 1545\u201361 in the hope of converting the last surviving _Prusai_ to Protestantism.\n\nThe Germanization of the conquered province, therefore, was a very long process. Though the Knights and the majority of colonists were German-speaking, the official language of the Church and of administration was Latin. What is more, once the Old Prussian population was baptized, the campaign to eradicate their culture waned. Many Old Prussian place names and river names (Tawe, Tawelle, Tawelninken) and even personal names survived, as did small rural pockets of native speakers. As things worked out, the _Ordensstaat_ disappeared before the Old Prussian language did.\n\nNo sooner had the _Ordensstaat_ been established than it ran into open conflict with its neighbouring Polish duchies. The Knights had never shown much respect for their neighbours, and for most of the thirteenth century, when the fragmented Kingdom of Poland was unable to stand up for itself, they probably imagined that they could exploit their military advantage unopposed. In the long run, however, they were awakening a powerful rival who would eventually bring them low. The Poles always felt cheated by the way that their Teutonic 'guests' had 'abused their hospitality'; but so long as the Order confined itself to battling the pagans they were not unduly concerned. Yet the Order's threat to the lower Vistula valley commanding Poland's access to the sea could not be ignored. The Polish\u2013Teutonic contest over this crucial territory would last for nearly 200 years.\n\nEver since the Goths had moved away from the lower Vistula in the early part of the first millennium AD, the area had been systematically settled by Slavic tribes. Together with the port of Gda\u0144sk, the area had formed part of the Polish realm for centuries, and was the funnel through which Poland's contacts with the sea had to pass. It was now coming under double pressure \u2013 from the creeping growth of Brandenburg along the coast to the west, and from the Teutonic State to the east.\n\nBrandenburg, it should be stressed, had no earlier connection with Prussia. Based on an infertile and unpromising piece of territory beyond the River Oder, in the Empire's _Nordmark_ or 'North March', it was originally inhabited by Slavs, who knew it as Brennibor. It was not yet an electorate of the Empire, and was still to fall into the grasp of the Hohenzollern family. It was ruled by the House of Ascania, heirs of Albert the Bear ( _c_. 1100\u201370), first margrave of Brandenburg and the founder of Berlin. A century after Margrave Albert's death, the Brandenburgers had crossed the Oder and were entrenched on its eastern bank in their so-called _Neumark_ or 'New March'. Two hundred miles and more of Poland and of Polish-controlled Pomerania separated them from the nearest holdings of the Teutonic Order.\n\nThe Poles were either too divided, or too slow, to avert the danger. Their capital lay far over the horizon in Krak\u00f3w, and their rulers had grown careless of northern interests. In the decade starting in 1300 the Polish throne fell temporarily to the Bohemian Premyslid dynasty, which also ruled Hungary, and which cared nothing for Baltic affairs. The key moment arrived in 1308\u20139, when a party of magnates in eastern Pomerania, seeing the distractions of their nominal Polish overlords, transferred their allegiance to the Brandenburgers. Then, in a repetition of Conrad duke of Mazovia's fatal blunder eighty years before, a pro-Polish party in Pomerania called on the Teutonic Knights to help them retain Gda\u0144sk. The Knights rode in, and kept Gda\u0144sk for themselves. According to one report, to ease the introduction of submissive German colonists, they massacred the entire population of the city. Within a short time they had annexed the entire lower Vistula, and the Polish court was left appealing in vain to a papal tribunal. The Knights had turned from fighting pagans to fighting fellow Catholics.\n\nIn the fourteenth century the territorial possessions of the _Ordensstaat_ reached their maximum extent. Courland and Livonia had been merged. The last native rebellions had been suppressed, the rural economy thrived, and several cities \u2013 Danzig (Gda\u0144sk), Marienburg, Elbing and K\u00f6nigsberg \u2013 joined the international trading network of the Hanseatic League. Fine churches were built, like the Marienkirche in Danzig or the cathedral at Frauenburg; monasteries were planted in the countryside; church schools trained an educated class. Crusading continued beyond Prussia, settling down into a routine of seasonal campaigns in Lithuania, where many a foreign knight won his spurs. The Knights had created a disciplined, purposeful and prosperous medieval state, and the fame of _Preussen_ spread far and wide. Chaucer's Knight from the _Canterbury Tales_ had been there:\n\n> A knight ther was and that a worthy man\n> \n> That fro the tyme that he first bigan\n> \n> To ryden out, he loved chivalrye\n> \n> Trouthe and honour, fredom and curtesie.\n> \n>...\n> \n> At Alisaundre he was, when it was wonne;\n> \n> Ful oft tyme he hadde the bord bigonne\n> \n> Aboven all naciouns in Pruce:\n> \n> In Lettow hadde he reysed and in Ruce.\n\nSo, too, in his youth, had the English king, Henry IV.\n\nThe Order's wars with Poland are too extensive, and perhaps too tedious, to recount in detail. There were endless skirmishes and numerous lengthy conflicts. As time wore on, however, the Poles gradually strengthened their position. In 1320 the Kingdom of Poland was reunited. In 1333\u201370, under Casimir the Great, it rationalized its holdings by incorporating Red Ruthenia and voluntarily ceding Silesia to the Holy Roman Empire. In 1385, at the Union of Kreva, it established a personal union with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, thereby creating the largest state on the European map (see pp. 254\u2013 above). The threat posed by the Teutonic Order lay at the root of the Poland-Lithuania Union. Henceforth, the Jagiellonian dynasty consciously set out to dig the Order's grave.\n\nThe Battle of Grunwald, which was fought on open ground near the town of Allenstein (Olsztyn) on 15 July 1410, saw the Teutonic Knights humbled. In later times, it would be presented as a decisive clash of arms between 'Teuton' and 'Slav'. In reality, its significance was regional, not racial, but it certainly marked the watershed of the Order's military power. The victor, W\u0142adys\u0142aw Jagie\u0142\u0142o, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, captured the Teutonic camp, where he found a score of wagons loaded with iron shackles prepared for the intended prisoners, now turned victors. Resplendent in silver armour on the crest of a hillock, he received the standard of the bishop of Prussian Pomerania, and sent it to Krak\u00f3w as a trophy. With it he dispatched a letter to his queen:\n\n> Most serene, excellent Princess, dearest Spouse! On Tuesday, the Feast of the Apostles, the grand master with all his power drew close, and demanded that battle be joined... After we had watched each other for a time, the grand master sent two swords over to us with this message: 'Know you, King and Witold, that this very hour we shall do battle with you. For this, we send you these swords for your assistance.'... At which, with the troops standing in full order, we advanced to the fray without delay. Among the numberless dead, we ourselves had few losses... We cut down the Master, and the Marshal, SCHWARTSBURG, and many of the _Komturs_ , forcing many others to flee... The pursuit continued for two miles. Many were drowned in the lakes and rivers, and many killed, so that very few escaped.\n\nBefore Grunwald, the Knights could think of themselves as all but invincible. After Grunwald, they were thrown onto the defensive.\n\nThe battle may equally be seen as a confrontation between two opposing strains of Christianity. The Teutonic Knights belonged to the brutal, supremacist crusading tradition of Western Europe, built on the assumption that infidels and 'other-believers' were for extirpating. The Jagiellons, in contrast, whose realms contained a great plurality of religious belief, deplored both the crusading tradition and the theory of papal supremacy behind which the Knights concealed their rapacity. On the eve of Grunwald, the Polish contingents intoned their 'Hymn to the Virgin', the _Bogurodzica_ , thereby underlining their conviction that the Knights' own cult of the Virgin Mary was false. They were joined in the fray by ranks of Orthodox Ruthenians and by Muslim Tartar cavalry. This was the era which witnessed the beginnings of the conciliar movement, which sought to subordinate the papacy to the decisions of Church Councils. One of the members of the Polish-Lithuanian delegation to the Council of Constance, Paulus Vladimiri (Pawe\u0142 W\u0142odkowic, _c_. 1385\u20131435), rector of the Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, led the intellectual assault on the Teutonic Order's pretensions. His _Tractatus de potestate papae et imperatoris respectu infidelium_ , a 'Treatise on the power of the pope and the emperor with regard to non-believers', did not immediately win universal support. But it sowed the first seeds of serious doubt concerning the validity of the Order's mission.\n\nThe first cracks in the _Ordensstaat_ 's fabric appeared in the mid-fifteenth century. To bolster their flagging military machine, the Knights mercilessly raised taxes to the point at which their commercial cities sought to escape. The Prussian League, first formed with like-minded municipalities in 1440 by the city fathers of Danzig, appealed to the Polish king for protection. An act of incorporation issued by King Casimir Jagiello\u0144czyk in 1456 provided the immediate cause of the third, thirteen-year Polish-Teutonic War. The outcome, following another Polish victory, was exactly what the Order had sought to prevent. The Treaty of Thorn (1466) divided the _Ordensstaat_ into two. The western part, henceforth known as Royal Prussia, and which included Danzig, was returned to the Kingdom of Poland after a gap of 157 years. The eastern part, centred on K\u00f6nigsberg, remained in Teutonic hands as a Polish fief. The Order lost more than half of its human and economic resources. K\u00f6nigsberg became its fourth capital.\n\nThe division of the _Ordensstaat_ in 1466 created distinctions that lasted until the Second World War. Despite a complicated political history, and repeated changes of nomenclature, the western section (Royal Prussia\/Polish Prussia \/ _Westpreussen_ , and, in large part, and using Nazi terminology, the 'Polish Corridor') was never again fully merged with the eastern section (East Prussia\/Ducal Prussia\/Prussian Prussia\/ _Ostpreussen_ ). In the eyes of those who admire the _Ordensstaat_ and regret its misfortunes, the Treaty of Thorn has been described as the start of the 'partitions of Prussia'.\n\nThe history of Royal Prussia, which fell into the Polish orbit, is little known to those who approach the Prussian story from an exclusively German perspective. (The subject was actively suppressed by bans and book-burnings when the Hohenzollerns eventually took over.) Yet for 300 years this 'Other Prussia' flourished, not only as a separate institutional entity, but as the source of a separate political ideology and culture, based on concepts of freedom and liberty. Though the population was ethically mixed, Polish and German \u2013 with a strong German predominance in the cities \u2013 the corporate identity and fierce local patriotism of Royal Prussia digressed markedly from the values with which the name of 'Prussia' is usually associated.\n\nRoyal Prussia's territory consisted of the valley of the lower Vistula from the river's 'elbow' near Thorn to the Baltic coast, plus the protruding province of Varmia. Its three major centres were Danzig (Gda\u0144sk), Elbing (Elbl\u0105g) and Thorn (Toru\u0144), together with a constellation of lesser towns. These prosperous urban communities provided the motor both for commercial dynamism and for startlingly original cultural developments.\n\nThe government of Royal Prussia was based on the municipal liberties granted to the towns, and on the provincial Diet, which provided a forum for a politically active nobility. Following the statute of _Nihil Novi_ (see p. 271, above), courts and provincial assemblies developed in the wider Kingdom of Poland too. When the constitutional Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was created in 1569, Royal Prussia was formally incorporated. From then until the First Partition of Poland of 1773, it was divided into the palatinates of Pomerania (Danzig), Kulm and Marienburg, and the autonomous diocese of Varmia. Deputies were sent to the central Diet in Warsaw and to royal elections, while _sejmiki_ or district noble assemblies functioned in each palatinate.\n\nThe high degree of self-government enjoyed by Royal Prussia's burghers and nobles fostered a high degree of originality in the realms of history-writing and myth-making. Simon Grunau's _Preussische Chronik_ , produced in fifteenth-century Elbing, was fundamentally hostile to the record of the Teutonic Knights. The scholar Erasmus Stella (d. 1521) explored the origins of Prussia, presenting the ancient _Prusai_ as a 'people born to freedom', and publicizing the legend of 'Mother Borussia' and her many sons. In due course, both the Gothic Myth and the Sarmatian Myth* were adapted to reinforce the idea that 'the Prussians will not suffer a lord amongst them'. The Sarmatian strand in this ideology invented a common oriental origin for Prussians, Poles and Lithuanians, so that the authors' contemporary attachment to the right of resistance could be shown to have ancient roots. It was an effective barrier to absolutist ideas coming from the West, and a fertile seed-bed for the 'Royal Prussian Enlightenment' centred in the eighteenth century around the figure of Gottfried Lengnich (1689\u20131774).\n\nAll in all, Royal Prussia generated a strong sense of 'pre-modern identity' that stands apart from ethnic nationalism, but was firmly grounded in the experience of a long-lasting political community. This identity, which saw Poland as protector and its easterly neighbour, the growing Hohenzollern state, as a menace, inspired heart-warming loyalty in successive wars, and exercised a significant influence on oppositional circles in adjacent K\u00f6nigsberg. It would persist until the eventual arrival of the army and officialdom of Frederick II of Prussia in 1773, after which it was suppressed by force.\n\nIn the fifty or sixty years following the Treaty of Thorn, the Teutonic Knights gradually lost their _raison d'\u00eatre_. They had no more pagans to convert, and the twin stars of their ideological firmament, the Empire and the papacy, were both in disgraceful disarray. Their former subjects in Royal Prussia had won impressive liberties, and were now surging ahead in prosperity. After losing their edge in the latest armed conflicts with Poland, many of the Knights in Teutonic Prussia could have seen little hope in a future of endlessly lost battles. Their state was ripe for a revolution that none saw coming.\n\nThe Knights had a further problem. The Treaty of Thorn required their grand masters to pay homage to the Polish king. The act of homage was normal feudal practice, and since the Order's lands lay outside the Empire, it was not an issue on which the Empire could intervene. Even so, it grated. Later German commentaries would invariably call it 'humiliating'. Each subsequent homage strengthened the feeling among the Knights that arrangements had to change, and after 1493 the Knights tried to withdraw their Polish allegiance. Moreover, two grand masters enjoyed strong political connections in Germany. Friedrich von Sachsen (r. 1497\u20131510) was a prince of Saxony. His successor, Albrecht von Hohenzollern (r. 1510\u201325), was a scion of the dynasty that had taken over the imperial Electorate of Brandenburg.\n\nIt was in 1517 that Martin Luther (probably) nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg. Even he could not have guessed that the Teutonic Knights, long famed for their militant Catholicism, would prove to be one of his most receptive audiences. Within a couple of years, however, Grand Master von Hohenzollern had been won over to the need for radical measures to reform the Church. After consultations with Martin Luther in person, he determined to transform the Catholic _Ordensstaat_ into a confessional state devoted to what would soon be called Protestantism. This meant that the grand master would have to resign from his office and assume a secular title, that the Order would have to be disbanded or dismissed, and that individual Knights would have to choose between joining the new state or leaving. Most crucially, approval would have to be obtained from Poland-Lithuania. If it was not, the chances were that the Order's part of Prussia would simply be annexed, or that the Knights would be sent by their feudal superior on military service against his enemies elsewhere (Poland-Lithuania was sorely troubled at the time by marauding Tartar hordes: see p. 260).\n\nSuch was the genesis of the solution that was duly put into effect in 1525. The grand master resigned. The Order, together with any Knights who so chose, retired to its northern province of Courland-Livonia (see p. 270), and the rest swore allegiance to the new Lutheran faith. Then, by prior agreement, Albrecht von Hohenzollern travelled to Krak\u00f3w to proclaim his fealty to the king of Poland, and to receive Prussia in fief. According to the Treaty of Krak\u00f3w, the ex-grand master became a duke, and his possessions a duchy.\n\nThe act of Prussian homage, which was staged in public on 10 April 1525 in Krak\u00f3w's great market square, did not belong to the historic scenes which the Hohenzollerns would later care to publicize, but it formed an essential element in the make-up of sixteenth-century Europe. As depicted by the Romantic painter Jan Matejko, it would become a favourite prop to Polish national pride. In the painting, Sigismund- August, King Sigismund I, sits grandly on his throne. Albrecht von Hohenzollern, bareheaded and dressed in full armour, kneels before him, holding the Prussian standard of the black eagle. A Prussian knight touches the hem of the standard in a gesture which was later said to have rendered the homage invalid. The series of ducal acts of homage to Poland was to continue with every change of duke or king: 1569, 1578, 1611, 1621, 1633, 1641... Europe would forget, but time was when the king of Poland was boss and the Hohenzollern was an underling.\n\nThe second stage of Duke Albrecht's investment took place in K\u00f6nigsberg, where he arrived on 9 May 1525, seeking the formal approbation of the Prussian Estates:\n\n> The whole city welcomed [the duke] with the ringing of bells and the firing of cannon. The Confirmation Diet, assembled on 25 May, was attended by three Polish commissioners \u2013 the _wojewoda_ of Marienburg, the Chamberlain of Pomerania, and the _starosta_ of Bratian... The viceroy, Jerzy Polentz, feared opposition... Albrecht personally justified the need for the Treaty with Poland, blaming all previous misfortunes on the bad conduct of the Order.\n> \n> On the 28th, Georg Kunheim stated the willingness of the Estates to accept the authority of the duke and of the royal commissioners... Only the City Council of K\u00f6nigsberg demurred, but it was won over by the efforts of Friedrich Heydeck. That same day, the Estates paid homage to the duke in front of the Castle steps; and on the 29th and 30th, they passed resolutions to give Albrecht a significant financial grant of 82,000 guilders...\n> \n> On the 31st, during the last session, a nobleman calling himself 'the Old Pilgrim' cut out the [black] cross from the cloak of one of the Knights, Caspar Blumanau. With this gesture, the Teutonic Order ceased to exist in Prussia.\n\nMuch scholarly comment about the events of 1525 is coloured by knowledge of subsequent developments. It assumes that Poland was bound to weaken, and that the Hohenzollerns were destined for greatness. No one at the time possessed such knowledge. The king of Poland was by far the stronger player. He had weighed the plan to create the duchy against an alternative of sending the Order to Ukraine to crusade against the Tartars. He would have been advised that the Order had lost much of its military potential, and chose the option of transforming the remnant of the _Ordensstaat_ in the hope of creating a powerful and lasting Polish-Prussian unit. Success or failure depended on the evolution of Catholic\u2013Protestant relations, on the uncertain fortunes of the Hohenzollerns and, above all, on the shifting balance of power. If the Kingdom of Poland were to remain dominant, the Duchy of Prussia would remain dependent. If Poland faltered, the duchy might try to cut loose.\n\nHistorical judgements on the Teutonic State differ widely. Heinrich von Treitschke, court historian at Berlin in the late nineteenth century, idolized it:\n\n> What thrills us... in the history of the _Ordensland_... is the profound doctrine of the supreme value of the state and of civic subordination to the purposes of the state, which the Teutonic Knights proclaimed [so] clearly... The full harshness of the Germans favoured the position of the Order amidst the heedless frivolity of the Slavs. Thus Prussia earns the name of the new Germany.\n\nPolish historians, whose views receive less publicity, find less to enthuse them. Treitschke's ethnic comparisons, though typical for his age, presaged much worse to come. An exiled German historian who took refuge in Britain during the Second World War sought to balance the extremes by talking economics. 'All in all,' he wrote, 'the image of the Teutonic Order as the agent of extermination is a clich\u00e9 no longer tenable... The most lasting legacy of [their] state... was its economic system based on large-scale agricultural production.' To impartial ears, this opinion may sound like a faint-hearted attempt to avoid troublesome issues.\n\nFor the century following 1525, the Duchy of Prussia, the successor to the Teutonic _Ordensstaat_ , remained a dependent fief of the Kingdom of Poland; it maintained its status in 1569 when, by the Union of Lublin, the kingdom joined the Grand Duchy of Lithuania to form the _Rzeczpospolita_ or Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania (see p. 272). It was undoubtedly one of the jewels in the Polish Crown during Poland's 'Golden Age' and, as such, is well known to students of Polish history. Yet in the annals of the Hohenzollerns it is often skipped over by those eager to reach the age of the 'Great Elector' and of Frederick the Great. In the later age of nationalism, Germans were disinclined to remember how Germany's premier dynasty played a subservient role to the Jagiellons and their successors.\n\nIt is entirely anachronistic, however, to regard Albrecht of Hohenzollern, duke of Prussia, as a defiant Germanic champion. To be exact, he was the son of Jagiellons on his maternal side, and hence half-Polish; and he kept in close contact with his Polish relatives: King Sigismund I was his uncle and Sigismund II August his cousin. Furthermore, since Albrecht's conversion to Lutheranism had resulted in his excommunication by the papacy and banishment from the Empire, he naturally relied all the more on Poland as the duchy's chief guarantor. When Prussian Lutheranism was rent by an internal schism involving the duke's prot\u00e9g\u00e9, Andreas Osiander, for example, it was Sigismund-August who acted as mediator. The Polish king, who had to cope with Protestants among his own nobles, was no champion of the Counter-Reformation. He was to say that he wanted 'no windows into men's souls'; his tolerant attitude to religious differences certainly helped the first Lutheran state to take root.\n\nSixteenth-century K\u00f6nigsberg, known in Polish as Kr\u00f3lewiec, blossomed into the capital city of this small state. It was the site both of an independent Protestant university \u2013 the Albertina (from 1544) \u2013 and of the ducal mint, which issued some fine coins bearing the inscription 'JUSTUS EX FIDE VIVIT', 'The Just Man Lives By Faith'. It was also the seat of the Prussian Estates, an assembly which acted as a brake on the duke's arbitrary tendencies, and enjoyed the right of appeal to the Polish overlord. Like the burghers of neighbouring Danzig, many of the Prussian nobles greatly appreciated the liberties which the Polish connection afforded them.\n\nDuke Albrecht's reign in Prussia lasted more than forty years. It was severely disturbed in the 1520s by the Peasants War, which the duke suppressed with ferocity and which confirmed the continued existence of serfdom. From 1530, the duchy was drawn into the Wars of the Schmalkaldic League, fought against the German emperor to confirm the right of the Protestant states to self-determination, and ended by acceptance of the principle _cuius regio, eius religio_ \u2013 the religion of a state's ruler was the religion which was to prevail there. In the 1550s the duchy was disturbed by a storm in court politics provoked by the intrigues of a Croatian adventurer, Paul Skali\u0107, and the duke participated somewhat fitfully in the campaign against Emperor Charles V. Yet his ambitions turned increasingly to his own dynastic matters. Since he was one of eight brothers, the duke had a superabundance of relatives. Thanks to his newfound Protestantism, the previously celibate grand master had been able to marry; and his marriage to Dorothea of Denmark produced another large brood of children. According to a proclamation of 1561, in addition to his Prussian dukedom, he claimed to be margrave of Brandenburg and of Stettin in Pomerania, duke of the Kashubians and Wends, burgrave of Nuremberg, and count of R\u00fcgen.\n\nNonetheless, during the duke's lifetime, religion raised a near-insurmountable barrier to any thoughts of uniting the two main Hohenzollern lines. The duke's cousins, the Hohenzollern margrave-electors* of Brandenburg, were staunch Roman Catholics. Joachim I Nestor (r. 1491\u20131535) forced his sons, on pain of disinheritance, to swear eternal loyalty to the Catholic faith. Nevertheless, Joachim II Hector (r. 1535\u201371), though married to Jadwiga Jagiellonka, daughter of the Polish king, gradually embraced the growing Protestant faction in Berlin, and formally proclaimed Lutheranism as Brandenburg's religion in 1555.\n\nThroughout the sixteenth century, in fact, Prussia's connections with Poland stayed stronger than those with the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. Royal or West Prussia, joined to the Kingdom of Poland, was largely inhabited by Poles. Ducal or East Prussia, though mainly Lutheran and German-speaking, was a Polish fief and dependent on Poland's goodwill.\n\nThe gradual rapprochement between the Hohenzollerns of K\u00f6nigsberg and the Hohenzollerns of Berlin did not start until after Duke Albrecht's death. The principal cause lay in the protracted bouts of mental illness which afflicted the duke's son and heir, Albrecht Friedrich (r. 1568\u20131618) throughout another very long reign. According to custom, a fief could be revoked in cases of heirlessness or incapacity, and the family was forced to take precautions. First, the Berlin Hohenzollerns persuaded the Polish king to sell them the legal rights to the duchy's reversion. This meant that, if Albrecht Friedrich were to be incapacitated permanently, the Brandenburgers were entitled to act as if they were his legal heirs. Secondly, they appointed a Berliner as regent (effectively viceroy) in Prussia. Thirdly, in 1594, they married the duke's daughter, Anna, to the margrave-elector's son, Johann Sigismund (1572\u20131619). By that time, the Jagiellons had died out; the elective monarchy of Poland-Lithuania had been dragged by a Vasa king into the civil wars of Sweden, and its close supervision of Prussian affairs was slipping.\n\nFrom the viewpoint of Hohenzollern dynastic planners, everything fell into place in 1618, though not without complications. Duke Albrecht Friedrich finally died on the eve of the Thirty Years War, and was succeeded without contest by his son-in-law, Johann Sigismund, thereby creating a personal union between Prussia and Brandenburg. But barely a year later Johann Sigismund died unexpectedly, and his twenty-four-year-old son, Georg Wilhelm (r. 1619\u201340), was not able to assume his legacy so smoothly. This time the court lawyers in Warsaw took a close interest, and insisted that procedures be followed. Margrave-Elector Georg Wilhelm was kept waiting two years before claiming his right of succession to the duchy.\n\nThe merger of the Hohenzollerns' twin states can be viewed from different perspectives. From Berlin, no doubt \u2013 especially in later times \u2013 it was seen as a magnanimous gesture by the senior branch to graciously open the family firm to their country cousins. From K\u00f6nigsberg, in contrast, it looked more like a voluntary decision taken between equal partners. In the first phase of the Thirty Years War, both Brandenburg and the Empire to which it belonged were deeply traumatized. Prussia, in contrast, was enjoying an enviable position on the Baltic as the natural 'halfway house' between the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, on which it was constitutionally dependent, and the nearby Swedish Empire, which shared its Protestant and commercial interests. The decisive trials of strength still lay in the future. It was to stand aloof from the wars in Germany, and would be neutral in the Polish-Swedish conflict, when Gustavus Adolphus blazed his trail of glory and destruction across the Continent. At that time, Poland-Lithuania, unlike the Empire, was avoiding religious embroilments. Anyone peering into the future would have had grounds to suppose that Prussia's destiny in the Polish-Swedish Vasa orbit was no less stable than Brandenburg's precarious position in a divided and warring Germany.\n\nThe admission of the Brandenburgers into Prussia was not just a simple decision between monarchs. The king of Poland was not an absolute ruler, and in order to implement the agreement with Berlin over the fusion of the two Hohenzollern possessions, he was obliged to obtain the assent both of the commonwealth's Diet and of the Prussian Estates. The procedures were cumbersome, and the negotiations tortuous. What might have looked to the court at Berlin as a foregone conclusion proved in Warsaw and K\u00f6nigsberg to be a protracted political cliffhanger.\n\nThe key session of the Estates of Ducal Prussia lasted from 11 March to 16 July 1621 in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of Sigismund III Vasa. It opened with a protest from the court in Berlin, which regarded the confirmation procedures in general, and the presence of the king of Poland's commissioners in particular, as unwanted interference in the duchy's internal affairs. Georg Wilhelm had imagined that he could be invested first and discuss conditions later, but the opposite applied. The king's commissioners, led by the royal secretary, Stefan Zadowski, faced the Estates with four demands before he agreed to continue: an increase in the subsidy for the Turkish War, the building of a second Catholic Church in K\u00f6nigsberg, the appointment of a royal naval inspector at Pillau and the fortification of the port of Pillau against Swedish attack. A walk-out by the pro-Brandenburg faction had little effect, since they proved to be in a minority. So the session resumed with an agreement to discuss the list of _gravamina_ or local 'complaints' alongside the king's demands. Another wrangle concerned appointments to vacant offices. The would-be duke was informed in writing that he had no right to make appointments until he had performed the act of homage. In response, Berlin refused to recognize the speaker of the Diet, a royal candidate, and objected to the custom whereby the duchy's officials swore dual oaths of allegiance both to the king and to the duke.\n\nThe Brandenburg party eventually gained the upper hand, possibly by bribery; the royal commissioners suddenly announced the imminent handover of the duchy's administration at the end of May. After that, the king concentrated on winning Georg Wilhelm's co-operation in his dynastic feud with the Swedish Vasas. He never managed to insist on the reinstatement of the speaker, who had been physically ejected from K\u00f6nigsberg by guardsmen from Brandenburg. The game closed with the would-be duke's candidature approved. Georg Wilhelm was received in Warsaw, where he was obliged to swear on oath that his sister's marriage to Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had been arranged without his knowledge. The act of homage was performed on 23 October. The dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia was finally under way.\n\nFrom 1621 to 1657 the Duchy of Prussia was ruled from Berlin but as a distinctly separate element of the doubly dependent, dual state of Brandenburg-Prussia. Its continuing feudal link to Poland required some residual obligations, but in practice it meant little more than an understanding not to oppose the overlord's interests in foreign policy. The reign of Margrave-Duke-Elector Georg Wilhelm was overshadowed by the Thirty Years War, from which he sought to stay aloof. In this he was successful with respect to Prussia, but unsuccessful with respect to Brandenburg. In 1631 he was drawn into the campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus. His tiny army was unable to compete and large parts of his ancestral lands were ravaged. He retired exhausted to K\u00f6nigsberg six years later, and was succeeded by his only son, Friedrich Wilhelm (r. 1640\u201388), known to Berlin-biased history as 'The Great Elector', _Der Grosser Kurfurst_.\n\nThe constitutional position of the Great Elector is worth elucidating. Later German history would always present him as a prince of the German Empire with subsidiary interests in the distant outpost of Prussia. The key to his policies, however, lay in the fact that he was bound by two loyalties, not one. As elector of Brandenburg, he was a dependant of the Habsburg-run Empire. But as duke of Prussia he was a dependant, and a formal vassal, of the Kingdom of Poland. Especially in the early years of his reign, it was far from clear which of the two allegiances would be the more important. He later became a past master of playing off one against the other, but prior to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, when the Thirty Years War finally ended, Poland attracted much of his loyalty. The court of Ladislas IV Vasa in Warsaw, where religious tolerance prevailed, could be reached in a day from K\u00f6nigsberg, at least on a winter sleigh ride, and the young Hohenzollern loved to go there. He spoke bad Polish fluently, and as a 'prince of Poland' was eager to participate in all the gatherings, rites and ceremonies. His own act of homage was performed on 6 October 1641 in the courtyard of Warsaw's royal castle. This outlook would not be modified until the following decades, when Poland would be overtaken by calamities every bit as horrendous as those visited earlier on Germany.\n\nThe lessons which the young margrave-duke-elector learned from his father's unhappy experiences were threefold. First, since he had forsaken Lutheranism for the Calvinism of his mother and his uncle Frederick, elector palatine, the 'winter king' of Bohemia, he cannot have failed to realize that Poland's religious pluralism brought many benefits. Secondly, seeing Poland's vulnerability despite its size, he decided that a large standing army was a sine qua non for self-protection. Thirdly, he calculated that the fiscal and commercial policies of smaller states would have to be unusually efficient if they were to support a viable military establishment. In short, he was encouraged to adopt the inimitable mixture of toleration, militarism and mercantilism for which the Hohenzollern state would become famous. In this, the margrave-duke-elector's chief adviser was to be J. F. von Blumenthal (1609\u201357), sometime chief military commissar of the Empire, diplomat, administrator and financier.\n\nThe establishment of Brandenburg-Prussia encouraged the consolidation of a social class whose fortunes would for ever be tied to the image of the Hohenzollern state. Landowning and military service had gone hand in hand throughout European history; but conditions to the east of the Elbe in the seventeenth century fostered a very special breed of noble families, whose rise has been extravagantly described as 'the most important factor in German History'. The _Junkers_ * benefited both from the availability of large expanses of uncultivated land, which enabled them to build up unusually extensive estates, typically of 5,000\u20137,000 acres, and from a dynamic state machine eager to employ them. As a result, they would acquire a near-monopoly on higher posts in the Hohenzollerns' army and bureaucracy; and they cultivated a corporate ideology and ethos which has been defined as 'the opposite of everything bourgeois'. Combining land improvement with soldiering, the typical Junker was a patriarchal _Hausvater_ , a stickler for discipline, a political loyalist, a social conservative, an agrarian capitalist, a cultural philistine, a devotee of his honour, duty and masculinity, and the self-appointed master of his home locality. He had more in common with his brothers and neighbours, the Polish _szlachta_ , than with counterparts in France or England. Several of the largest Junker families, like the Donhoffs of Friedrichstein, had close relatives, like the Denhoffs of Parnava, who lived and served in Poland and Lithuania. But one should take care not to run ahead too fast. 'In early modern times,' writes a specialist, 'the Junkers were interested above all in farming; their military inclinations date from the eighteenth century.'\n\nIn 1648 the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania was struck by an explosion of chaos similar to that which had hit Germany in 1618. It was brought low in the first instance by a long-running and destructive rebellion of the Ukrainian Cossacks. But then the Muscovite armies invaded, followed in close order by those of Charles X of Sweden, who launched simultaneous attacks from both north and west. These were the years of the Swedish 'Flood', the _Potop_. Pillage, rapine, plague and hunger ensued. A quarter of the population died. The royal government virtually collapsed. The king, Jan Kasimierz Vasa, fled his kingdom (see p. 281). In the midst of the anarchy, the duke of Prussia attempted to stay neutral. But in 1656, when another Swedish army landed in Danzig, Brandenburg-Prussia could either join the invader or risk being invaded. Moreover, the Swedish campaign was dressed up as a Protestant crusade, to which the Protestant Prussians were expected to adhere. Also, since Charles X Vasa was posing as the rightful king of Poland, he could reward the Hohenzollern duke by releasing him from his feudal dues. Friedrich Wilhelm made his choice, and in late July the Prussians entered Warsaw in triumph with the Swedes. Charles X then declared that the Duchy of Prussia was sovereign and independent.\n\nThe next year, however, saw the beginnings of a strong Polish revival. At the Treaty of Wehlau (September 1657) the margrave-duke-elector agreed to abandon the Swedes, but only if the Polish negotiators matched the Swedes by conceding Prussia's sovereign status. Poland could not refuse. And the concession was incorporated into the Treaty of Oliwa (1660) that ended the _Potop_.\n\nIn later times, the Treaty of Wehlau and its consequences have caused considerable controversy. German historians have usually seen it as an inevitable step in Prussia's rise to power. Polish historians have often seen it as a shameless act of blackmail, carried out by a grasping Prussian who had treacherously deserted his duty. All agree that it was an important milestone, and few could deny that the feudal contract was broken. As a vassal of Poland, the margrave-duke-elector definitely had an obligation of loyalty; equally, as the feudal liege, the Polish king had an obligation to protect his vassal. Both sides had broken their bond. It is also beyond dispute that the Treaty of Wehlau was never constitutionally ratified by the _Sejm_ of the Commonwealth, and that many clauses remained a dead letter. One, for example, granted Poland-Lithuania the right of reversion to the Duchy of Prussia, much as the Hohenzollerns had obtained in the previous century. Another, which granted Brandenburg-Prussia the income of Lauenburg and B\u00fctow, was made conditional on Berlin supplying 1,500 infantrymen and 500 cavalrymen for the commonwealth's campaigns against Muscovy. By a similar arrangement, the elector was to enjoy the city of Elbing's income until the commonwealth refunded the costs of his operations against the Swedes. Neither side observed these near-impossible commitments, thereby storing up a mass of unresolved disputes for the future.\n\nFrom 1657 to 1701 the Duchy of Prussia was thus an independent state attached by personal union to the dependent, imperial state of Brandenburg. It was already a monarchy in substance, if not in name, and though its ruler did not change his titles, he had definitely improved his status. The margrave-duke-elector of Brandenburg-Prussia, like the Stuart kings of England-Scotland-Ireland in the same period, was moving from the third class to the second class of European rulers.\n\nThis was the age of Louis XIV, when the absolutist model of government in France was widely praised, and the Hohenzollern elector was one of many who was attracted to it. In Brandenburg, Blumenthal proposed that nobles committed to military service be relieved of taxation in return for surrendering their rights to assemble in the Estates. Eventually, in 1678, he would succeed in founding and financing a substantial standing army. His master was moving along an authoritarian, if not a strictly absolutist, road.\n\nHuge resentment built up in the duchy. The governor, whose first act had been to hang two of K\u00f6nigsberg's burghers accused of collaboration with the Swedes, was seen to violate the guarantee of self-government which the Prussian Estates had received; they protested in fury. The imperial envoy to Poland, Franz von Lisola, expressed his surprise:\n\n> [A] strong aversion to the Elector [prevails] in the whole Duchy of Prussia, not just among the Catholics but also among the Lutherans and the common folk... They all plan rebellion as soon as possible, mainly because of religion, [but also] because the Elector aims... to subject Prussia to the arbitrary power of his ministers from Brandenburg and to abolish all privileges. The Elector joined the Swedish party without the consent of the estates, thereby provoking the revenge and the hatred of the Poles against them.\n\nThe elector's own chancellor, Otto von Schwerin, shared the opinion. 'Your Electoral Highness would not believe to what extent the Polish crown is dear to their hearts,' he reported in 1661, 'and how they all seek their good in this connection.' A decade later he wrote, 'As long as one generation lives who remembers Polish rule, there will be a source of resistance in Prussia.'\n\nThe reasons for constitutional conflict between Brandenburg and Prussia ran deep. The two states drew on different traditions concerning the relationship between ruler and ruled:\n\n> While pro-Hohenzollern theorists proclaimed the duty of the ruled to believe and trust in the good intentions of the ruler _legibus solutus_ , some among the Ducal Prussian estates, including the burghers of K\u00f6nigsberg, defended the principle of fundamental laws restricting the power of central government. [It was] the outsider from Berlin who diminished their liberties, while the Polish crown, with whom they had formed 'one body', was their natural home. The belief that they were dealing with a foreign ruler provoked a refusal to finance the Elector's other domains and provinces in the Empire, which had no connection with Prussia but through the dynasty: 'Shall the last drop of blood be wrung from the Prussian nobility, although they have nothing to do with the Holy Roman Empire?'\n> \n> What separated the Elector and his advisors from the Prussian opposition was a fundamental difference in the understanding of human nature, the function of government, and... the common good.\n\nHohenzollern military policy was soon tested. Sweden, though it had its wings clipped in 1660, still possessed a fine army and a first-rate navy, and the Swedes were unhappy with their rivals' diplomatic intrigues. In 1675 they launched a lightning attack on Berlin from Stettin. The local defences were overrun, and the margrave-duke-elector was obliged to march his Prussian army 155 miles in ten days to rescue Brandenburg. At Fehrbellin, the Prussians gained a famous victory, and showed that a new power had entered the European stage. The date of 28 June remained a national holiday in Berlin until 1918, and the 'Fehrbelliner March' supplied one of the finest tunes in the European military repertoire. The victor was raised in popular parlance to the ranks of 'the Great'.\n\nThree years later, the Swedes tried another manoeuvre. This time, the margrave-duke-elector had to deploy his troops by sleigh, in the depths of winter, capturing Stralsund and the island of R\u00fcgen. He showed that his new standing army \u2013 already 40,000 professional men strong \u2013 was as mobile as it was muscular. Even so, one is not entitled to imagine that Brandenburg-Prussia had already overtaken Poland-Lithuania in every respect. The Great Elector's last years coincided with the career of Poland's greatest warrior king, Jan Sobieski.\n\nPoland-Lithuania was apparently recovering well from the catastrophes of preceding reigns, and Sobieski's pet project was the reconquest of Prussia. He swore 'to reduce the Hohenzollerns to the Polish obedience': that is, to reverse the Treaty of Wehlau, which in Polish eyes had been signed under duress. But in 1672 the Ottoman Turks invaded the province of Podolia, and Sobieski's attention was diverted to the south. By the mid-1670s, the Ottomans were overrunning Hungary, and by the early 1680s were heading for Austria. In the end, Sobieski found glory in 1683 at the Siege of Vienna (see p. 282), only to be endlessly bogged down thereafter in his Danubian campaigns. He never brought Prussia to heel: the Great Elector died in 1688, unpunished, head of a state that was fast developing into one of the wonders of the Continent.\n\nThe next margrave-duke-elector, Friedrich or Frederick III (r. 1688\u20131713), did not at first seem particularly adventurous. His inheritance was put in jeopardy in 1697 when his neighbour and chief rival in Germany, the elector of Saxony, was unexpectedly crowned king of Poland in succession to Sobieski. Brandenburg-Prussia was now all but surrounded by a Saxon-Polish-Lithuanian combination that enjoyed a marked preponderance of territory and resources. The Saxon elector-king, August II the Strong, whose amorous adventures have gained him a place in the _Guinness Book of Records_ , was intent on competing in the military as well as the erotic lists. The dangers rose dramatically in 1700, when Charles XII of Sweden set out to rekindle the northern wars and August set out to oppose him. As in 1656, Brandenburg-Prussia threw in its lot with the Swedes.\n\nSuch was the setting for one of the most astonishing events of self-promotion in modern history. No one could have guessed what the outcome might be of the two vastly complicated European wars then beginning, nor how Hohenzollern Brandenburg-Prussia would emerge from them. The War of the Spanish Succession had thirteen years to run. The Great Northern War was to last for twenty-one years. In the politics of the north, no one could have foretold whether Charles of Sweden, Peter of Russia or even August of Saxony-Poland-Lithuania would prevail. Yet the margrave-duke-elector, as the proud owner of a fine army, knew he was going to be courted by all sides, and would be able to exact a price for his support. He wanted to bring recognition to his father's achievements, to draw level with his Saxon rival (who had already been crowned in Krak\u00f3w), and to ensure that his representatives would be sitting at the top table when fighting gave way to diplomacy. To this end, he determined to raise his international status to that of a crowned king.\n\nThere was more to royal titles than met the eye. They were symbols of legitimacy, and were fiercely guarded. Negotiations between the Hohenzollern and the Holy Roman Emperor, the ageing Leopold I, were pursued by Charles Ancillon, son of the leader of the Huguenot community in Berlin. The emperor was a stickler for protocol. He was, or had been, the holder of the only royal titles permitted in the Empire: 'king of the Germans', 'king of the Romans' and 'king of Bohemia'. On the other hand, Ancillon noticed that the formation of a new grand alliance against Louis XIV was causing anxiety; the emperor's advisers were inclined to make concessions. So he argued that his master, as duke of Prussia, already enjoyed the rights of an independent sovereign and, most importantly, that the status of Brandenburg would not be affected. If the elector of Saxony could be crowned outside the Empire, why couldn't the Hohenzollern? The deal was struck. In exchange for an alliance against France and a contingent of 8,000 grenadiers, the margrave-duke-elector was to be granted a coronation.\n\nOne crucial detail remained, namely the wording of the royal title. The margrave-duke-elector could not become 'king of Brandenburg', because Brandenburg was part of the Empire. Nor could he become 'king of Prussia', because the western half of Prussia belonged to Poland, over which his Swedish allies also claimed suzerainty. (In 1704, when Charles XII invaded Poland, one of the first things he did was to declare himself Polish king.) So what could the prospective realm be called? The title had somehow to be based on Frederick's duchy. The solution was found with 'the Kingdom _in_ Prussia'.*\n\nFrederick's coronation took place in K\u00f6nigsberg, the city where he had been born in the year of the Treaty of Wehlau. It required a colossal logistical operation: 1,800 carts and carriages pulled by 30,000 horses dragged 200 courtiers and their paraphernalia from Berlin over 400 miles of unpaved roads. For a substantial part of the journey the travellers were crossing Polish territory. The expedition took exactly four weeks \u2013 with Christmas celebrated on the way:\n\n> By January 18, 1701 everything was ready \u2013 trumpeters, drummers, bells. The King-to-be created a scenario for his own coronation. The people of Koenigsberg saluted Friedrich and his wife Sophie Charlotte as their King and Queen. Friedrich put the crown onto his own head and after that let the [specially created] bishops bless him... [so that] the kingship [be] considered as God-given. Thus Friedrich III became Friedrich I King in Prussia...\n> \n> After the self-coronation, he called for his wife in order to crown her a Queen. She came in a gorgeous golden dress all shining with diamonds, with a wonderful pearl bouquet fastened onto the dress, and wearing the purple mantle with crowns and eagles similar to her husband's. She [knelt] before the King, and he put the crown onto her head. Sophie Charlotte, being a... highly intellectual woman, perceived the event as a farce...\n> \n> Not seeing... the Queen's sufferings, the King continued his performance. The servants brought the best piece of roasted ox and two rummers of wine for the royal couple. The feast began. Gold and silver coins to the sum of 6000 thalers were scattered among the crowd. The first day of celebration finished with fireworks and illuminations. The whole celebration continued till spring and finished in Berlin. Afterward it occurred that the event had cost the King... six million thalers\n\nFrederick's annual income was 4 million thalers. Prussia's pretentiousness became something of a joke. Stories, true and false, were retailed around Europe:\n\n> Frederick imitated the rigid etiquette of the Spanish court in his little kingdom, surrounded his palace with Swiss guards, and indulged his taste for pomp and magnificence... [His ministers] drew funds from the unfortunate people in various and novel ways. Taxes on wigs, dresses, and hogs' bristles were imposed; and it is scarcely necessary to say that the extortionate [chief ] minister took good care to fill his own pockets... He even had recourse to alchemy to procure gold; and one alchemist [called]... the Conte de Ruggiero, was put to death (... for deceiving the King)... being hanged on a gilded gallows, in a toga made of gilt paper.\n\nThe coronation did not increase the territory of Brandenburg-Prussia by one square inch, but its rulers could now regard themselves as kings and be so regarded by others. They had broken the unseen barrier which, in an age of faith, divided the company of the Lord's Anointed from mere chief executives. In the new century, their kingdom and its fortunes would advance from strength to strength.\n\nAs from 1701, therefore, the meaning of 'Prussia' shifted once again. It ceased to be a geographical term, and, in a brilliant act of political branding, was turned into a dynastic one. At the start of Frederick III's reign, it had referred exclusively to the eastern segment of Brandenburg-Prussia. After the coronation (when he adopted the style of Frederick I), it was applied to all parts of the king's realms, and the change required a deliberate mental adjustment. Every person who let the word 'elector' pass their lips paid a one-thaler fine into the charity box. Henceforth, every single place on which the Hohenzollerns laid their hands was officially designated as 'Prussian' \u2013 any number of distant localities from Poznan to Neuch\u00e2tel to M\u00f6nchengladbach were destined to be called 'Prussian'. Strange to say, Berlin became Prussian. Still more strangely, Brandenburg became Prussian. Duke Albrecht would never have believed it.\n\nOne of the very first and most famous products of the new kingdom was discovered by mistake. In 1704 a couple of Berlin paint-makers were trying to mix a red pigment. The potash which they used was contaminated, so, instead of red, they precipitated a beautifully stable, synthetic and light-fast blue. Its chemical name is ferric hexacyanoferrate. They called it Prussian Blue, 'PB' for short. Had their discovery occurred only four or five years earlier, it probably would have been called Brandenburg Blue.\n\nAll stories, like all good essays, have a beginning, a middle and an end. The Prussian story is no exception \u2013 the only difficulty is to specify its start point, mid-point and end point. If the exercise is confined to recorded history, the total span, from the Golden Bull of Rimini in 1226 to Law No. 46 of 1947, measures 721 years. This would put the mathematical mid-point at 1586, in the era when Prussia's association with Brandenburg was just breaking into bud. If on the other hand one counts the span less mechanically in round centuries, the central period is occupied by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the early period by the thirteenth century to the fifteenth and the terminal period by the eighteenth century to the twentieth. By this reckoning, the coronation of 1701 marks the start point of Prussia's final flourish.\n\nIt is not hard to see therefore that the 'Rise of Prussia', traditionally dated from 1640, as generally conceived is a manifest misnomer. It would be better described as the 'Rise of Hohenzollern Prussia', or perhaps of the 'Fifth Prussia'. Indeed, the conventional 'Rise of Prussia' owes its very existence to a group of nineteenth-century historians, known as the 'Borussian School', who were working for the Hohenzollern court. Scholars such as J. G. Droysen (1808\u201340), Heinrich von Sybel (1817\u201395) and, above all, Heinrich von Treitschke (1834\u201396), were partisans of the Hohenzollerns' historic mission, of Prussian Protestantism as opposed to Austrian Catholicism, of the 'Prussian Spirit' and of the _Kleindeutsch_ solution of the German Question in their own day. They lionized the Teutonic Knights, but shunned those parts of the story that tied Prussia neither to Germany nor to the Hohenzollerns. They cemented the notion that Prussia and Germany were one and the same thing. Among foreign scholars, their views have won a near-monopoly. 'When we speak of Germany we think of Prussia,' wrote two distinguished British authors from the same era, 'and when we speak of Prussia we are thinking of Germany.'\n\nThe Berlin-centred and rarely questioned 'Borussian approach' has benefited greatly from the disappearance of all Prussia's rivals which had once figured prominently, but which from a later standpoint can appear insignificant. Several powerful countries disappeared not only from the forefront of international politics but also from the front pages of historiography. Sweden's power was demolished by Peter the Great. Saxony lost much ground after its separation from Polish-Lithuania in 1763. Poland-Lithuania collapsed catastrophically during the Partitions of 1773\u201393, when it was physically swallowed by its neighbours (see pp. 285\u2013). The Holy Roman Empire was destroyed in 1806 during the Napoleonic Wars. Its demise left Prussia vying with Austria for supremacy in the German world, and with the Russian Empire for dominance in the East.\n\nYet in 1701, when Frederick I proclaimed the 'Kingdom in Prussia', the map of Europe looked very different from that of a later age. The Grand Duchy of Moscow had already taken to calling itself _Rossiya_ or 'Russia', and its recent seizure of Ukraine from Poland had given it territorial weight in Europe to match its vast, empty holdings beyond the Urals. But the Russian Empire did not formally exist. In 1703, in an act of bravado parallel to that of Frederick I's, Grand Duke Peter Romanov laid the foundations of his imperial city-to-be on Swedish land at the mouth of the River Neva, and called it _Sankt Petersburg_. Russia, like Prussia, was gambling on the outcome of the Great Northern War. Henceforth, the competition between these two gamblers introduced a new factor into European history, matching in their rivalry for control of the East the older, Franco-Imperial competition for supremacy in the West.\n\nAt the time, neither Frederick nor Peter could be classed as premiership players. The Hohenzollerns were preoccupied with Brandenburg's neighbour, Saxony. The Romanovs were preoccupied with Sweden, whose provinces on the southern Baltic shore promised a future 'window on the West'. As yet, the Hohenzollerns could not dare to challenge their German masters, the Habsburg emperors, and the Romanovs, though masters of the limitless wastes of Siberia, had so far failed to establish a permanent outlet either to the Baltic or to the Black Sea. To the west, they faced Poland-Lithuania, whose internal maladies were masked by Sobieski's military reputation; in the south, they were hemmed in by the lands of the Ottoman sultan.\n\nGiven these constraints, the modern Prussian story centres on the ways and means whereby a peripheral, partly dependent and initially third-class outfit contrived in the space of five or six generations to become Europe's leading power. The transformation is surrounded by the aura of a near-miracle. The main stages can be summarized under five headings: (1) the international recognition of Prussia's royal status by the Treaty of Nystadt in 1721; (2) the phenomenal military feats of Frederick II the Great (r. 1740\u201386), whose acquisition of 'Royal Prussia' inspired him to change his title to 'King _of_ Prussia'; (3) the astonishing revival of the kingdom and the Prussian army after their defeat and near-extinction during the Napoleonic Wars; (4) Prussia's colossal territorial gains at the Congress of Vienna (1815), which laid the foundations of its subsequent industrial pre-eminence; and (5) the three textbook wars of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who in less than a decade turned Prussia into Europe's supreme military power. The zenith of Prussia's success arrived after victory in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, when, in the great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Prussian king was declared emperor of Germany.\n\nThe most precarious moment in the whole saga occurred in January 1762 towards the end of the Seven Years War. K\u00f6nigsberg, captured by Russian forces four years earlier, was administered by military governors and for practical purposes had been annexed to the Russian Empire. After the storming of the fortress of Kolberg in Pomerania, Berlin was put under siege, and was on the point of capitulating. Frederick II, whose army had lost half its troops, was said to be on the point of suicide. But suddenly the Russian empress died; her nephew Peter III succeeded, and as a declared Prussophile, called off the offensive; Frederick was offered an honourable exit from the war. He called his lucky escape the 'Miracle of the House of Brandenburg'. Prussia survived, recovered and went on to outperform the aspirations of even her most fervent admirers.\n\nInfuriatingly for Berlin, many Europeans reacted to Prussia's success with a mixture of fear and ill-disguised jealousy. Some turned to satire and caricature: a Victorian schoolbook from England, which presented a 'brief sketch of the growth of Prussian power', speaks for the whole genre:\n\n> By her insatiable ambition, guided by consummate skill and complete disregard of what is lawful and right, she [Prussia] has succeeded within the last century of robbing Austria, Poland, Saxony, Denmark, Hanover and France of provinces belonging to their respective empires. And thus, for a season, [she has] succeeded in making herself the head boy of Dame Europa's School.\n\nHow, one wonders, can the head boy be a 'she'? The gender confusion may be symptomatic. 'Prussian militarism', which all the other powers were trying to emulate, would soon be denounced as a fundamental cause of Europe's miseries.\n\nHerein lie the roots of another historiographic phenomenon. Having been made the centrepiece of a dubious moral parable about Good and Evil in modern times, German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has reached unequalled prominence in the academic syllabus, commanding by far the largest number of theses, textbooks, courses and researchers. Especially in Anglo-American opinion, whose English-language media rule the globalized roost, former complaints about 'Prussian militarism' have merged with the horror of Nazism, the culmination of all past evil. Adolf Hitler (who was not a Prussian), the author of the Holocaust and warlord of the Axis, has been presented not only as an ogre to obliterate all other ogres, but also as the inevitable product of long-term German trends. Hitler, as one gadfly historian put it, was no more of an accident than 'when a river flows into the sea'. Other tyrants, other victims, other tragedies, have been pushed aside or emotionally defused. Among them is the tragedy of Prussia itself.\n\nThis 'Allied Scheme' has the further effect of endowing Russia with a relatively benign image. Since the Empire of the tsars, and later the Soviet Union, fought stoutly as allies of the West in two world wars, 'Russia' is not judged by the same standards by which Prussia and Germany are judged. People talk of Prussian militarism but not of Russian militarism; of the 'German jackboot' but not of the Russian or the Soviet jackboot (even though goose-stepping was introduced into Russia by Prussian military advisers). Russian imperialism and expansionism, though far more extensive than anything in the German record, are somehow taken to be normal. German ideas of _Lebensraum_ , 'living space', which long predated Hitler, are uniquely aggressive and obnoxious. Russia's development, especially in its Soviet form, which under Lenin and Stalin followed a course filled with human misery and mass murder, has sometimes been described as a noble experiment that lost its way. Until very recently, German development has been widely described in terms of its _Sonderweg_ , a sinister 'Special Path' that was leading in the wrong direction from the start. Communist crimes are rarely measured by the same criteria as Nazi crimes, and, despite a plethora of historical truth-telling in recent decades, Russia is still perceived, on balance, as having been a force for good. Young scholars who challenge the German-centred consensus can still sometimes expect a roasting.\n\nA better balance between East and West is called for. Thanks to Prussia's location on Germany's eastern flank, Russia always loomed large on the Prussian mental map. Once Poland-Lithuania was removed from the reckoning, Prussia and Russia gained a common frontier, and fear of Russia nourished many Prussian attitudes. By the same token, thanks to repeated bloody campaigns, it was the Prussian element within Germany that Russians learned to hate. These tendencies need to be recognized, and correctives applied. Western strands in German history must not be forgotten. But Russo-Prussian relations must feature with due prominence in the long, last act of the tale which leads eventually to Prussia's annihilation.\n\nSuch is the context within which one of the most formidable of recent history books needs to be examined. Few writers can ever have received such an extravagant shower of plaudits as the author of _Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia_. To almost universal acclaim, Christopher Clark, a Cambridge don of Australian provenance, has written a text whose intellectual content is as cogent as its style is lucid. The reviews bristle with flattering adjectives: 'riveting', 'illuminating', 'profoundly satisfying', 'enthralling', 'authoritative', 'shrewd' and 'judicious'. Clark rejects the jaded accusations against the Hohenzollern state, offering in their place a portrait of a polity that was progressive, cosmopolitan and enlightened. His tour de force is all the more welcome because it undermines the framework of prejudice into which German history has so often been forced.\n\nNonetheless, at least one half sentence in Clark's text must be called into question. It is not insignificant, since it makes up the first clause of the first sentence on the first of 688 pages. The words read: 'In the beginning, there was only Brandenburg', and they are conditioned by a further phrase, 'the heartland of the future state of Prussia'. One has to wonder. It is hard to see why the eastern part of the equation is ignored. A better opening might have read: 'Once upon a time, there was a place called Brandenburg, and another called Prussia.' It might have prepared the reader better for the long exposition which follows, and which shows how Brandenburg and Prussia came together. In fact, _Iron Kingdom_ does not start at the beginning either of Prussia or of Brandenburg or indeed of the kingdom. It picks up the thread in the year 1600, more than halfway through Prussian history, and more than a century before the kingdom's launch. And one cannot help noticing the book's final sentence. 'In the end', it states, 'there was only Brandenburg.' It is an elegant flourish to bring the argument full circle, but it also reveals the author's secret. He has adopted the standpoint of a latterday liberal Berliner; he has not been relating the history of 'all the Prussias'. Despite the very original interpretation, the focus, like that of the Borussian School, is firmly placed on the Hohenzollerns' creation: its origins, its prime and its sorry end. Once this is understood, all further quibbles can be forgotten. The remaining 99.99 per cent of _Iron Kingdom_ can be read with great benefit. It deals in depth with the 250-year period that the present sketch is regrettably obliged to skimp.\n\nIn the nineteenth century Hohenzollern Prussia bore little resemblance to the kingdom of Frederick I, still less to the Prussia of Duke Albrecht. Its possessions stretched from Aachen to Tilsit, from the Danish frontier to Switzerland. It had many heartlands: the twin industrial heartlands of the Ruhr and of Silesia, the state heartland in Brandenburg and the historical heartland in a province that had now become 'East Prussia'. It was Europe's leading industrial power, and its huge military-industrial complex explains the basis of its leading role in the German Empire.\n\nRussia, meanwhile, having acquired the largest slice of Poland-Lithuania and most of the Ottoman Empire's Black Sea lands, had become Prussia's immediate neighbour. It was by far the largest state in the world, possessing a larger population than all the German states together, untold natural riches and gargantuan ambitions. Once France had been humbled in 1871, it was self-evident that the Empire of the tsars was the only continental power that might one day challenge Prussian-controlled Germany.\n\nAs these circumstances became apparent, Prussia adopted a policy of studied non-confrontation. For decades on end, Berlin avoided all hints of wishing to extend Prussia's eastern frontier. During the Crimean War it stayed aloof from Britain and France's quarrel with Russia; each of Bismarck's short wars \u2013 in 1864, 1866 and 1870\u201371 \u2013 were conducted exclusively in Western or Central Europe. In his testament, the first modern German emperor, Wilhelm I, proffered the crucial advice to his son, 'never to provoke those Russian barbarians'. His restraint postponed, but did not dispel, the conflict which many considered inevitable.\n\nPrussia's westward expansion could not but dilute the multinational character of Prussian society. In 1800, when Prussia had held Warsaw,* the Slav element in its population reached a peak of about 40 per cent. Thereafter it gradually declined, and receptiveness to German nationalism rose accordingly. 'Old Prussia' had been staunchly monarchist, stressing duty to the state, not the nation. Loyalty was its only yardstick for judging Germans, Poles and Danes alike. The Hohenzollerns looked askance at German unification until the very last moment. When the German Empire was declared in 1871, Poles still formed 10 per cent of the population, and had a huge cohort in Berlin. Their Germanized offspring sprinkled the provinces and the football teams with Polish surnames. Similarly, as Berlin grew mightily, the significance of the original, the historic, the 'real Prussia' shrank accordingly. K\u00f6nigsberg remained a substantial provincial town and the coronation city. No expense was spared to equip it with impressive modern fortifications. But compared to Berlin it was a backwater:\n\n> KOENIGSBERG (Polish _Kr\u00f3lewiec_ ), a town of Germany, capital of the province of East Prussia and a fortress of the first rank... Pop. (1905), 219,862... It consists of three parts: the Altstadt (old town), to the west, L\u00f6benicht to the east, and the island Kneiphof, together with numerous suburbs...\n> \n> Among the more interesting buildings are the _Schloss_ , a long rectangle begun in 1255... and the cathedral, begun in 1333, adjoining which is the tomb of Kant. The _Schloss_ was originally the residence of the Grand Masters of the Teutonic Order and later of the dukes of Prussia. Behind is the parade-ground, with the statues of Albert I and [many others]... To the east is the _Schlossteich_ , a long narrow ornamental lake... The north-west side of the parade-ground is occupied by the new university buildings, completed in 1865, the finest architectural features of the town. The university (Collegium Albertinum) was founded in 1544 by Albert duke of Prussia, as a 'purely Lutheran' place of learning. It is chiefly distinguished for its mathematical and philosophical studies, and possesses a famous observatory...\n> \n> Koenigsberg is a naval and military fortress of the first order. The fortifications were only completed in 1905... The works consist of an inner wall... and of twelve detached forts... on [either] bank of the Pregel. Between them lie two great forts, that of Friedrichsburg on an island, and the Kaserne Kronprinz on the east of the town... The protected position of its harbour has made Koenigsberg one of [Germany's] most important commercial cities. A new channel has recently been [opened to] Pillau, 29 miles distant on the outer side of the Frische Haff...\n> \n> The Altstadt grew up around the castle built... on the advice of Ottaker II. King of Bohemia... Its first site was near the fishing village of Steindamm, but after destruction by the Prussians in 1263 it was rebuilt in its present position... In 1340 [the city] entered the Hanseatic League...\n> \n> Koenigsberg suffered severely during the war of liberation... The opening of a railway system [later] gave a new impetus to its commerce, making it the principal outlet for Russian grain, seeds, flax and hemp. It has now regular steam communication with Memel, Stettin, Kiel, Amsterdam and Hull.\n\nDespite the initial hint, few people reading this entry would have guessed which part of the city's history had been quietly omitted.\n\nA day on which at least some of K\u00f6nigsberg's past glories returned was 18 October 1861. King Wilhelm I (r. 1861\u201388) arrived with his new chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, to initiate what became Prussia's most glorious decade. The painter Adolf Menzel attended the coronation to make sketches, and four years later, after completing 152 portraits of the participants, he produced a vast documentary canvas, overwhelming in its detailed realism. Unfortunately, Menzel's conceit of showing the king and future emperor swinging his ceremonial sword in a gesture worthy of Grand Master von Salza was not thought appropriate. The picture was duly consigned to a bedroom in the Sanssouci Palace at Potsdam.\n\nThe standard text on nineteenth-century Prussian military attitudes was composed by General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849\u20131930), a Baltic German, a cavalryman, a military writer and a pupil of Treitschke. Born in St Petersburg, he may conceivably have absorbed something from the country of his birth, though his main claim to fame was to have been the first German soldier to ride through the Arc de Triomphe in Paris at the head of the victory parade in 1871. His _Germany and the Next War_ (1912) was copiously quoted by Allied apologists eager to justify their anti-German animosity. From Treitschke's _Politics_ (1897) it borrowed 'The end-all and be-all of a State is power, and he who is not man enough to look this truth in the face should not meddle with politics'. And 'God will always see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race'. Bernhardi's own epigrammatic contributions include: 'War is a biological necessity'; 'The maintenance of peace can never be the main goal of policy'; 'War is the greatest factor in the furtherance of culture and power'; 'The State is a law unto itself. Weak nations do not have the same right to live as powerful and vigorous nations'; and 'Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible'.\n\nBernhardi's detractors did not always notice that his rant was framed as an attack on the treatise on 'Perpetual Peace' by Immanuel Kant, who was rather more Prussian than he was; Bernhardi's admirers, who could be found everywhere Europe, did not enquire too closely why warmongering was right in one country but wrong in others. Patriotism and partisanship framed most people's views on the cause of the First World War; they have started to fade only lately. 'It was the British government', writes a prominent British historian, 'which ultimately decided to turn the continental war into a world war.'\n\nNonetheless, it would be unwise to distance Prussian-led Germany very far from the heart of debates on the road to war. German unification had been achieved in 1871 through Prussia's crushing military victory over France, and the next four decades were overshadowed by the near-universal conviction that military preparedness was the key to the successful pursuit of international relations. No one was more convinced than Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and the last king of Prussia (r. 1888\u20131918), and no country was better equipped than the homeland of Alfred Krupp, the world's largest industrial firm, for making elaborate preparations. When Wilhelm set his 'New Course' and dismissed Bismarck in his reign's second year, France was already engaged with Russia in building a military counterweight and the British Empire was soon fearing for its naval supremacy. Rightly or wrongly, he was widely regarded as the embodiment of Prussian values:\n\n> He believed in force and 'the survival of the fittest' in domestic as well as foreign politics. [He] did not lack intelligence but he did lack stability, disguising his deep insecurities by swagger and tough talk... He was not so much concerned with gaining specific objectives, as had been the case with Bismarck, as with asserting his will. This trait in the ruler of the most important Continental power was one of the main causes of the prevailing uneasiness in Europe at the turn-of-the-century.\n\nAccording to an unattributed but shrewd assessment, the Kaiser, 'if not the father of the Great War, was its godfather'.\n\nBy 1914, Europe's two strongest military powers, Russia and Prussian-led Germany, were poised on the verge of a trial of strength, before which neither would flinch. Indeed, both Berlin and St Petersburg were convinced that the coming clash had better be fought sooner than later. Russia was aligned with France and Britain. Germany stood alongside Austria and Italy at the head of the so-called Central Powers. The 'Great War' exploded very nearly 100 years after Waterloo had ended the last Continent-wide conflagration. All sides blamed their opponents for the conflict. Western analysts, who denounced 'the Kaiser's War', pointed to Germany's 'Schlieffen Plan', the tactics of which determined that Germany should strike first before being struck a double blow. Though his original plan was modified, the dead General Schlieffen was roundly denigrated as a treacherous Prussian warmonger. Germany's fears of encirclement were given little credence.\n\nRussia's equally ambiguous actions attracted less criticism in the West. Yet in the chain reaction that led from the assassination at Sarajevo to the outbreak of war, Russia's unconditional support for Serbia matched Germany's 'blank cheque' to Austria, and it was Russia's provocative mobilization that finally pushed Germany over the edge. The speed of the Russian army's double-pronged attack on the Eastern Front showed how the tsarist military command, like its German counterpart, had been planning a pre-emptive blow. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his entourage were undoubtedly paranoiac, but their readiness to resort to war did not exceed that of the Russians.\n\nWestern commentators have not generally wanted to hear how their Russian allies hoped to harm Germany, but war aims published by the Russian foreign office in September 1914 reveal their intentions. They foresaw ( _a_ ) the total liquidation of East Prussia; ( _b_ ) the re-creation of a Russian-run Kingdom of Poland; and ( _c_ ) the establishment of a new Russo-German frontier on the Rivers Oder and Western Neisse (exactly as eventually happened in 1945). From Germany's viewpoint, they were deeply threatening. They do not absolve the German leadership, but they certainly show that Prussia's militarism was not unique. Of course, Russia's plans were quickly forgotten. The attack on East Prussia was efficiently repulsed; the Russian 'steamroller' repeatedly stalled and after 1915 German forces carried all before them on the Eastern Front. Even so, the Prussians who dominated Germany's military circles had received a nasty shock, a shock which goes a long way to explaining their punitive terms imposed on Soviet Russia at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918). The chief German negotiator at Brest-Litovsk, General Max Hoffmann (1869\u20131927), had been Field Marshal Hindenburg's chief-of-staff in East Prussia four years earlier. It was Hoffmann who suggested changing the name of the victory of 1914 to the 'Battle of Tannenberg',* thereby claiming revenge for the defeat of the Teutonic Knights at nearby Grunwald 500 years before.\n\nAny narrative which stresses the Russian dimension in the First World War automatically invites protests about neglect of the French dimension. Surely, one hears, the Russo-German contest in the East must be discussed in conjunction with the centuries-old Franco-German saga in the West. This is true. Yet a contradistinction between the French and Russian factors is not entirely valid. Unlike in 1871, the French had forged a close military partnership with Russia, ensuring that in 1914 Germany faced a concerted challenge on two fronts. As seen from Berlin, the hostile double-headed Franco-Russian hydra was a monster which no one else had to face. What is more, the hydra's Russian head was judged more dangerous than the French one. Schlieffen and his colleagues reckoned that France had to be dealt with first, because Russia, with far more territory and far more troops, could not be neutralized so readily.\n\nBerlin, moreover, was still looking at the military landscape through Prussian spectacles. The Kaiser and his Junker-dominated staff had good reason to worry about the proximity of the Russian frontline. At its nearest point, Russian troops were deployed within 60 miles of K\u00f6nigsberg, and in the border province of Grenzmark Posen, less than 200 miles from Berlin. The French frontier was much more distant. If the campaigns were to go badly, the French might retake Alsace and Lorraine, or invade the Rhineland. The Russians would capture the Empire's capital.\n\nFor all these reasons, the outcome of the First World War was deeply bewildering. By late 1918, the German army had gained a complete victory on the Eastern Front, had eliminated its most dangerous enemy and had dictated the terms of peace. Its stalwart performance on the Western Front, against an array of powerful allies, had not faltered for more than four years; and it was brought to an end without experiencing anything that might have been described as a rout. Yet the German Empire collapsed. Revolution erupted in Berlin; the Kaiser was forced to abdicate; the Hohenzollerns were banished; the invincible 'Iron Kingdom', around which Germany's imperial personality had been forged, was demolished; and the victorious Allies, representatives of the 'Western civilization' with which most Germans identified, chose to act vindictively and to punish Germany for all the war's disasters and bloodshed. The resultant bewilderment opened the door to a variety of political hucksters and fanatics whose very existence was previously unknown.\n\nStrategic thinking with strong nationalist and racial overtones was very much in fashion in those days, not only in Germany. Already before the war, strident publicists and learned professors from various countries had raised the so-called 'Jewish Question' or the 'Thousand-Year Struggle between Teuton and Slav'; the success of Bolshevik revolutionaries, who made no secret of their international aspirations, greatly heightened existing tensions. As the Armistice silenced the guns on the Western Front, the prospects of a lasting peace in the East were receding fast. The Bolsheviks were promising to export their Revolution to the heart of 'capitalist Europe'. If and when they decided to put their promises into practice, the eastern provinces of Germany would find themselves in the first line of attack. Western Europeans were breathing a sigh of relief, but the nations of Eastern Europe were bracing themselves for further conflict. As subsequent history proved, the stay of execution lasted for just thirty years. In late August 1914 the Cossacks of Russia's General Rennenkampf had ridden up to the outer walls of K\u00f6nigsberg. Given the historical inclinations of Russian 'imperial tourism', there was every possibility that in one guise or another they would be back.\n\nThe abolition of the Kingdom of Prussia in November 1918 is often mistaken for the end of the Prussian story. In reality, it marked the end of Hohenzollern rule, but not of the Prussian state. Yet another variant on Prussian statehood, a _Freistaat Preussen_ or 'Free State of Prussia' lived on, first as a self-governing component of the post-war 'Weimar Republic' and then, from 1933, of the Third Reich \u2013 though by then the self-government was only nominal.\n\nNonetheless, the outcome of the First World War left little more than an uneasy truce in many parts of Europe. The settlement of Versailles, bypassing the Bolsheviks, failed to address the problems of the East. The reborn Polish Republic, invaded by the Red Army in 1920, was forced to defend its independence unaided, interrupting Lenin's revolutionary march on Berlin in the process. Both the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia were treated as pariahs by the Western Powers. Millions of Europeans were left either fearful or resentful, and the possibility of a renewed conflagration was always present. Even though the Central Powers had won a comprehensive victory on the Eastern Front, the people of Prussia suffered the heaviest territorial losses and bore a disproportionate share of the opprobrium. It was no accident that the myth of the 'stab in the back'* was launched by Hindenburg and General Ludendorff.\n\nAfter the abolition of the Prusso-German monarchy, the _Freistaat Preussen_ , though substantially reduced by cessions to Poland, remained the largest territory in Germany. Its government was dominated by Social Democrats. A single SPD politician, Otto Braun, served as Prussian prime minister from 1920 to 1932.\n\nPrussia's brief era of democracy was overthrown by the arbitrary actions of Germany's central government. In 1932 the German chancellor, von Papen, suspended Braun's administration in the so-called _Preussenschlag_ or 'Prussian coup', citing 'electoral turbulence'. His dubious decision facilitated the introduction of one-party rule by the Nazis, who appointed Hermann G\u00f6ring as the Prussian premier only one year later. G\u00f6ring gloated over 'the marriage of old Prussia with young Germany'.\n\nTraditional Prussian society, still led by the landed Junker class, did not provide a natural hunting-ground for the Nazis. Prussia's cities, including Berlin, leaned decidedly to the Left. Very few Nazi leaders were born in East Prussia. Even so, some Nazi ideas did resonate strongly. Protests against the _'Diktat_ of Versailles', for example, made more sense in Danzig or in K\u00f6nigsberg than in Hamburg or Munich. Claims about the German master race could also appeal to people who had long cultivated the ethos of hardy pioneers, and the concept of _Lebensraum_ was associated exclusively with the East. The idea that Germany's natural 'living space' was there for the taking did not seem particularly outlandish after the German army's recent victory in those parts. In East Prussia, above all, still shaken by the Russian invasion of 1914, proposals for the eastward extension of German settlement could be seen as a necessary defensive measure.\n\nVoting trends in Weimar Prussia followed no simple pattern. While the provincial _Landtag_ had a socialist majority, the city of K\u00f6nigsberg itself was run by a right-wing nationalist, Carl Goerdeler (1884\u20131945), _B\u00fcrgermeister_ from 1920 to 1930. In the two elections of 1932, the Nazis made significant advances, but failed to win an outright victory. In the last democratic contest in K\u00f6nigsberg, the Nazis received 62,888 votes from 173,154 cast (36.3 per cent); the left-wing vote of 75,564 was divided almost equally between socialists and Communists.\n\nInter-war Prussia did not share a frontier with the Soviet Union, but many of Prussia's discontents were shared by the Bolsheviks. Both sides hated the Versailles settlement, and despised the new, Western-backed national states. The Bolsheviks were free of Nazi-style racism, but they shared an appetite for mass killing by category and assumed that ideological conflict would lead to military conflict. They knew that their attempt in 1920 to export Communist Revolution with bayonets had failed miserably. So when Stalin launched his Five Year Plans, he famously predicted that, if the breakneck programme did not succeed within a decade, 'we will be annihilated'. He was counting on war.\n\nThe Second World War in Europe, therefore, must be conceived above all as a fight to the death between two totalitarian monsters. The Greater Reich and the Soviet Union were the largest combatant powers by far. Both aimed to recoup losses incurred since 1914. And their titanic, savage struggle on the Eastern Front accounted for perhaps three-quarters of the fighting and casualties. The future of East Prussia hung in the balance throughout. Each stage of the war, therefore, has to be defined by the changing relations between Germany and the Soviet Union. During the currency of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact in 1939\u201341 East Prussia was protected by its location in the German sphere of influence. After the start of 'Operation Barbarossa' on 22 June 1941, when Hitler assaulted his erstwhile partner, it was left far behind the area of operations. Within a couple of years, when the tide changed, its prospects quickly grew precarious.\n\nThe outcome of the war was decided by the unexpected survival of the Red Army, and by the series of colossal, almost unimaginably expensive victories that began with Stalingrad and Kursk. From mid-1943 onwards, Stalin's triumphant forces smashed their way westwards, until they won the shattering Battle for Berlin in April 1945 without even calling on Western assistance. The final layout of Europe on VE Day saw perhaps one-quarter of the Continent neutral, one-quarter under Western control, and one-half under Soviet control. Though the Third Reich was totally destroyed, the principal victor was not 'Freedom, Justice and Democracy'. It was a second totalitarian regime, which had killed millions, which ran the world's largest network of concentration camps, and which had triumphed by exacting unparalleled human sacrifices. This second evil monster would keep the free world busy for the next forty-five years. The Prussia of the Teutonic Knights, of Duke Albrecht and of Immanuel Kant, lay entirely at its mercy.\n\nThe sentence hanging over Prussia could not be executed by one blow. The first phase began in the late summer of 1944. When Soviet troops approached, the decisive move appeared imminent. A Red Army sortie into the frontier village of Nemmersdorf left a trail of atrocities behind it. But Stalin had given priority to the conquest of the Balkans, and his northern armies halted on the Nieman and the middle Vistula.\n\nAdolf Hitler's main military command post was located at the Wolfsschanze or 'Wolf's Lair' near Rastenburg in East Prussia from June 1941 to November 1944. The unsuccessful bomb plot against him took place there on 20 July 1944, yet the headquarters was not relocated for a further four months. In that time, the central Soviet spearhead forces stayed encamped before Warsaw; three Soviet 'fronts' in Lithuania surrounded East Prussia's northern border, while the Red Army's attack columns were surging through Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. The Western Allies were still crawling up Italy, and pushing stolidly on through France. Their one contribution to the reduction of East Prussia occurred when the RAF twice raided K\u00f6nigsberg.\n\nIn the records of RAF Bomber Command, the K\u00f6nigsberg operation is justified by the target being 'an important supply port for the Eastern Front' and is described as 'one of the most successful of the war'. For 'successful' read 'devastating'. Two consecutive raids were necessary before the desired effect was achieved. On the night of 26\/7 August, 74 Avro Lancasters of 5 Group flew in: 4 were lost, and little damage was inflicted. So on the night of 29\/30 August, 189 Lancasters were sent, dropping 480 tons of incendiaries, and losing 15 of their number. Their controllers noted 'significant fighter activity'. The fires burned for three days. The inner suburbs of Altstadt, L\u00f6benicht and Kneiphof, which had no port facilities, were obliterated. In the local record, 25,000 people were killed.\n\nThe firestorm of August 1944 figures prominently in explanations of the disappearance of the famous Prussian treasure, the _Bernsteinzimmer_ or 'Amber Room' presented to Peter the Great during the Great Northern War. Fifty-five amber panels decorated with gold leaf and crystal mirrors and weighing six tons adorned the Imperial Palace at Tsarskoye Selo near St Petersburg from 1716 to 1941. During the Siege of Leningrad, they were 'reclaimed' by German troops, reassembled in K\u00f6nigsberg, and put on public display in the Royal Castle. Since 1944, their whereabouts have been unknown.\n\nBy January 1945 the Soviet conquest of East Prussia had been awaited for many months, and the Red Army rapidly overran the whole province except for K\u00f6nigsberg. The purpose of the operation, which began on 13 January, was to engage the large German Army Group Centre and to prevent it from assisting other German defence lines. Marshal Zhukov's principal offensive, which set off from the vicinity of Warsaw, was pointed directly at Berlin; and Marshal Rokossovsky was tasked with ensuring that no German units from East Prussia could interfere. This objective was achieved, though progress was slow, and heroic efforts by German defenders managed to reopen the supply road from K\u00f6nigsberg to Pillau.\n\nThe most obvious, immediate consequence, however, was to sow panic among East Prussia's civilian population, and to trigger the terrible _Flucht aus dem Osten_ or 'Flight from the East'. The winter was unusually harsh. Deep snow covered the ground. All the rivers and canals were frozen hard, and the _Frisches Haff_ , the 'Freshwater Lagoon', had turned into a vast slab of solid ice. The Gauleiter of the province, Erich Koch, resisted the orderly evacuation of the population until it was too late, condemning disobedient civilians to be shot. So when he finally relented on 20 January, he started a stampede. Germans living north of K\u00f6nigsberg had no chance of escape. Those living further south had ten days before the roads to Elbing and Danzig were cut. Tens of thousands of people set off in carts, on bicycles, horse or foot, hoping to reach safety.\n\nTo begin with, the K\u00f6nigsbergers were only half-trapped. Once the railway to Allenstein was cut, the best way out was to cross the ice to Pillau. Hundreds and thousands attempted the crossing every day for several weeks. Many dropped from cold and exhaustion. Many were strafed by Soviet fighters, or fell into holes in the ice. But many struggled on to Pillau to wait for help.\n\nFortunately for them, the _Kriegsmarine_ had prepared plans for a large-scale humanitarian rescue. Admiral D\u00f6nitz gave orders on 21 January for 'Operation Hannibal' to begin. A thousand merchant ships and naval vessels operated a non-stop service between Pillau, Danzig and Stettin, running the gauntlet of Soviet bombers and submarines. They suffered horrendous losses, including the sinking of the _Wilhelm Gustloff_ , the greatest maritime disaster in world history, when 10,000 may have died. But they also saved very many lives.\n\nThe final battle for K\u00f6nigsberg \u2013 what the Russians now call the _Shturm Kenigsberga_ , the 'Storming of K\u00f6nigsberg' \u2013 was mounted in the first week of April under General Chernyakovsky. The attackers faced four concentric defensive lines, twenty modernized forts, and five full divisions of the 3rd Panzer Army. Calls for surrender were ignored. Chernyakovsky moved to the assault, deploying four armies, massed artillery at a density of 250 guns per half-mile, and a fleet of warplanes. Shelling pulverized the outermost defences. Day 1 of the ground assault brought the attackers to the second line in the south. Day 2 was marked by fierce resistance and by Hitler's repeated refusal of permission to capitulate. On Day 3, in better weather, the Soviet air force wreaked havoc in the city centre. Day 4 dawned with the defences hopelessly fragmented, and finished with the forbidden capitulation. An estimated 80 per cent of Prussia's one-time capital lay in ruins. The surviving defenders were marched off, and the remaining civilians subjected to a reign of murder, rape and pillage. 'The robbers' lair of German imperialism', _Pravda_ announced in Moscow, 'has been liquidated.'\n\nA German, who had been working during the siege as a doctor, took a walk to see for himself:\n\n> Slowly, systematically, Soviet soldiers were blowing holes in the streets, wrecking churches, burning houses, raping women. The scale of the destruction is difficult to imagine. The idea was not simply to defeat K\u00f6nigsberg, but to destroy its history...\n> \n> Up the K\u00f6nigstrasse, over the Rossgartenmarkt and beyond, wound an enormous coil of incoming troops, in which we now became engulfed. I pinched my thigh hard to convince myself that all of this was no dream... 'K\u00f6nigsberg in 1945,' I told myself repeatedly...\n> \n> Just about here was where our dentist used to live. He worked up there \u2013 in the air. Perhaps in those days... he may have looked down at the peaceful street below... Now, between flaming ruins, a wildly yelling throng, without beginning or end, was pushing its way along the same street.\n\nThe confusion is indicative of the conditions that reigned amid the post-war ruins of K\u00f6nigsberg. There are many mysteries. What happened, for example, to the German civilians who were still alive at the war's end? Of East Prussia's population of 2.2 million, an estimated 300,000 were killed during the fighting; 193,000 were still trapped in the city before the final assault, but only 50,000 were sent to Germany in 1949, having been used for forced labour. The figures do not add up. The deficit appears to total 100,000 at the very least.*\n\nA K\u00f6nigsberger, having fled the city, joined a group of refugees in an empty village:\n\n> In the farmyard further down the road stood a cart, to which four naked women were nailed through their hands in a cruciform position... In the dwellings we found a total of seventy-two women, including children, and one old man, all dead, all murdered in a bestial manner, except only for a few who had bullet holes in their necks. Some babies had their heads bashed in... All the women, as well as the girls... had been raped.\n\nFive decades later, a visiting historian who saw the place with her own eyes, made a considered judgement:\n\n> [K\u00d6nigsberg was] one of the few places where Stalin succeeded completely in what he set out to do. He exterminated the East Prussians as thoroughly as the Teutonic Knights once exterminated the Prus, taking a few years instead of a century. He filled the city with outsiders. He destroyed the churches and the houses and the trees. He put concrete blocks in their place. He obliterated the past. 'If I were dropped in this town by parachute and asked where I was,' wrote [Marion von D\u00d6nhoff ] who spent her childhood near K\u00d6nigsberg and returned long after the war, 'I would answer: perhaps Irkutsk.'\n\nThe formal termination of Prussia's existence was delayed for a while more. Here, historians must distinguish between the province of East Prussia and the state of Prussia. The province was liquidated by the Potsdam Conference; the state was not. Despite Allied assertions to the contrary, the Potsdam Conference, which lasted from 17 July to 2 August 1945, possessed no legal standing. It was a makeshift arrangement between the victorious Allied leaders, who met to discuss the management of a defeated Germany and, pending an intended peace conference, to make interim judgements on urgent matters. A Council of Foreign Ministers prepared the peace conference's agenda, but the conference never met, so the decisions taken at Potsdam, unlike those embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, did not receive the endorsement of an international treaty. In relation to K\u00f6nigsberg and East Prussia, they were extremely vague and tentative:\n\n> The Conference examined a proposal by the Soviet Government to the effect that pending the final determination of... the peace settlement, the section of the [USSR's] western frontier adjacent to the Baltic Sea should pass from a point on the eastern shore of the Bay of Danzig to the east, north of Braunsberg-Goldap, to the meeting point of the frontiers of Lithuania, the Polish Republic and East Prussia. The Conference has agreed in principle... concerning the ultimate transfer to the Soviet Union of the City of K\u00f6nigsberg and the area adjacent to it as described above subject to expert examination...\n> \n> The President of the United States and the British Prime Minister have declared that they will support the proposal of the Conference at the forthcoming peace settlement.\n\nNothing was spelled out in the Potsdam Agreement about the division of East Prussia. Though the new Soviet frontier was to pass 'north of Braunsberg-Goldap', the Allied negotiators did not indicate that the area to the south of the line was to be handed to Poland. This not-so-trivial matter was left to a private understanding between the Soviet Union and its Polish Communist clients, and to a separate, Polish-Soviet Treaty signed on 16 August 1945. Only then did the map emerge that held good for the rest of the century.\n\nFor the time being, the Allied Control Authority, which was running occupied Germany, put the Prussian question aside. The Council of the Four Powers \u2013 the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France \u2013 which administered the four zones of occupation plus Berlin, were overburdened by pressing issues of emergency welfare, reconstruction, economic re-priming, and de-Nazification. They only remembered Prussia when they began to prepare a new, comprehensive network of German administrative units.\n\nPrussia presented an unforeseen problem. The _Freistaat Preussen_ had been overthrown illegally in 1932\u20133, and could now be regarded as a victim of Nazi aggression. Its long-serving prime minister Otto Braun had returned from Swiss exile. Like his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Willi Brandt, he was an acknowledged anti-Nazi, and was back in Berlin lobbying strongly for the restoration of the state from whose helm he had been abruptly removed a dozen years earlier. The fact was, of course, that Prussia's former provinces had already been broken up, and the would-be state had no territory left to administer. In any case, the Soviets were implacably opposed. Their thinking was reflected in the Allied Control Authority's Law No. 46 of 25 February 1947. Not only was the State of Prussia peremptorily abolished; it was characterized as 'a bearer of militarism and reaction'.\n\nLaw No. 46 merely put the final nail in Prussia's empty coffin. The body of Prussia, the living substance, the community of human beings that had stayed intact until January 1945, had already been dispersed. By 1947 there was virtually nothing left. Prussia suffered the fate of Carthage: ' _ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant_ ', 'they create a desert, and they call it peace'.\n\n##### III\n\nSince the fall of the Iron Curtain, the memory site* par excellence of all things Prussian has been established in Berlin. After a break of forty-five years, reunited Berlin returned to its position at the head of a united Germany, and is booming, not least as a cultural centre. Despite the passage of time, however, Berliners cannot help being reminded that they are reclaiming a historically polluted space, which served not too long ago as capital both of the Third Reich and of the German Democratic Republic. So anything which diverts attention from the 'bad old days' is welcome, and deliberately cultivated memories of Prussia constitute an effective antidote to the otherwise unsavoury odours of the _Hitlerzeit_ , the _Mauer_ and the _Volksrepublik_. Sighs of relief are everywhere audible, thanking the stars that many aspects of the city's Prussian connection can be celebrated with pride and enthusiasm. Even so, observers puzzle over the exact causes:\n\n> It is more than a 'yearning for Prussia', more than a passing nostalgic whim which prevents the ghost of Prussia from being laid to rest... ; it is more than a mere escapist tendency or wish to flee into the past. This new sensitivity towards Prussia more likely expresses growing dissatisfaction with the shallowness of the present, a desire to see it more deeply rooted in the soil of history. Far from indicating a 'flight from Federal Republican reality', it suggests an attempt to safeguard the reality in its entirety, no matter how dubious its constituent elements might be.\n\nIn the early twenty-first century, therefore, nostalgia about parts of the past mingles with optimism about the future. Berliners and tourists alike ogle the cranes and skyscrapers of the Potsdamer Platz that is rising from the ruins left during the Cold War. They admire the restored Reichstag, which still retains its dedication 'DEM DEUTSCHEN VOLKE', 'To the German Nation', but whose heavy stone dome has been replaced by a light and airy glass one by the British architect Norman Foster. They gaze at the restored Brandenburg Gate, past which the Berlin Wall ran until recently, or at the re-gilded _Siegess\u00e4ule_ , the 'Victory Column', which commemorates the Franco-Prussian War. The mindless triumphalism of former times has gone, but there is no reluctance to recall Prussia's days of non-military glory. The royal palaces at Potsdam and Charlottenburg are popular destinations; a decision was taken in 2010 to ignore financial prudence and to rebuild the Hohenzollerns' _Stadtschloss_ or 'City-centre Palace', that was demolished by the GDR. With every day that passes, _Preussentum_ , the 'Prussian Spirit', is taking on friendlier connotations.\n\nNowhere can this wind of historical change be felt more keenly than on Museum Island, in the middle of the River Spree. The _Altes Museum_ was founded there in 1830, and joined by the _Neues Museum_ in 1859, the _Alte Nationalgalerie_ in 1876, the _Bode Museum_ in 1904, and finally the _Pergamon Museum_ in 1930. Enthusiasts call it 'Prussia's Most Beautiful Jewel':\n\n> Museum island is a product of what was surely the happiest and most prestigious [of decades], around 1820\u201330... The philosopher, Hegel, regarded that Prussian heyday as evidence that the 'world spirit' thrives at a certain time, in a certain place, and with particular fervour...\n> \n> When you first step onto this island you cannot believe your eyes \u2013 right in the middle of the city you are surrounded on two sides by water and by five examples of monumental architecture. Sitting on a summer's evening on the grass in front of the Altes Museum, on which the words 'ALL ART IS AND WAS CONTEMPORARY' [stand out] in neon lettering, you see the old reconciled with the new. You hear the bells of Berlin cathedral behind you, watch the glowing red sunset... and for a few moments are transported back to the Prussian Arcadia. The fact that the lawns and the flower-beds... are still known by the wonderful name of _Lustgarten_ (literally, Garden of Pleasure) says a lot about the often underestimated sensual delights of supposedly ossified Prussianism.\n\nSome dictionary definitions of 'Prussianism' still hold to outdated views. _Merriam-Webster_ , for example, defines it as: 'the despotic militarism and harsh discipline of the Prussian ruling class'. It will clearly have to be modified.\n\nOther exhibitions in Berlin display a similarly strong Prussian accent. The German Historical Museum (DHM) does not possess a separate Prussian section; but the Hohenzollern state takes second place there only to the Holy Roman Empire. The Prussia Exhibition of 1981 in West Berlin \u2013 _Preussen Versuch einer Bilanz_ , 'Prussia: an Attempted Balance Sheet' \u2013 attracted enormous attention, not least because East Germany at the time was assuming shades of Prussian Blue. In 2001 Berlin and Brandenburg joined forces to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the Prussian Kingdom's foundation; and more than a hundred exhibitions were staged. A show on _Prussia's Women_ , for example, examined the neglected half of the Prussian story. Others explored 'Prussia's Sense of Art', 'Prussia: a European Story' and 'Prussian Science and Technology'. A more recent exhibition of _Power and Friendship_ put on by the German foreign office about the relations between Prussia and Russia in the years 1800\u20131917 demonstrates what can achieved by discreet, diplomatic selectivity.\n\nFor selectivity, whether of location or date or theme, is the key to understanding all appeals to history, and one should not pretend that it is risk-free. From the historian's standpoint, Berlin's current Prussomania is harmless, but only as long as it does not assume monopolistic proportions. Two dangers come to mind. One is that Prussia's multinational history be seen exclusively from the German perspective. The other is that Brandenburg's image becomes so fused with Prussia's that the two are thought inseparable. This would be an injustice. After all, Prussia's origins lie far beyond Berlin, just as Berlin's own origins lay outside the Hohenzollern and Prussian parameters. When the Hohenzollerns moved to Brandenburg in the early fifteenth century, Prussia was already a well-established state. When the Prussian label was first attached to Brandenburg in 1701, the Hohenzollerns had been sovereign rulers for only forty-four years. Before that, Brandenburg's non-Prussian and initially non-German storyline tells of the early margraves, of the electorate, of the _Nordmark_ , of Albert the Bear, and of the Slavic land of Brennibor.\n\nIn short, those who are inspired to reflect on the past in the beguiling environment of Berlin's _Lustgarten_ should not allow their thoughts to be constrained by their immediate surroundings. They should certainly read and learn about the Hohenzollerns' 'Iron Kingdom'; but they should also read something about other Prussian worlds that have vanished even more comprehensively. On this subject, the popular poet Agnes Miegel (1879\u20131964), a K\u00f6nigsberger, skilfully invokes the anguish of her compatriots:\n\n_O kalt weht der Wind \u00fcber leeres Land,_ | Oh cold blows the wind o'er the empty land,  \n---|---  \n_O leichter weht Asche als Staub und sand!_ | Ashes waft lighter than dust and sand.  \n_Und die Nessel w\u00e4chst hoch an geborstner Wand_ | And nettles grow high on the broken wall,  \n_Aber h\u00f6her die Distel am Acker rand!_ | Higher yet is the thistle on the acre's edge.  \n_Es war ein Land \u2013 wir liebten dies Land \u2013_ | There once was a land which we dearly loved;  \n_Aber Grauen sank dr\u00fcber wie D\u00fcnensand_ | Horrors engulfed it like sand-dunes.  \n_Verweht wie im Bruch des Elches Spur_ | As the spoor of the elk is dissolved in the bog,  \n_Ist die F\u00e4hrte von Mensch und Kreatur \u2013_ | So, too, is the passage of man and beast.  \n_Sie erstarrten in Schnee, sie vergl\u00fchten im Brand_ | They froze in the snow, or burned in  \n_Sie verdarben elend in Feindes-land,_ | Or perished in misery on hostile ground.  \n_Sie liegen tief auf der Ostsee Grund,_ | Deep they lie on the East Sea's bed,  \n_Flut w\u00e4scht ihr Gebein in Bucht und Sund_ | The tides wash their bones round bays and straits,  \n_Sie schlafen in J\u00fctlands sandigem Schoss \u2013_ | They sleep in Jutland's sandy lap \u2013  \n_Und wir Letzten treiben heimat-los,_ | And we, the last of them, wander homeless,  \n_Tang nach dem Sturm, Herbstlaub im Wind \u2013_ | Like storm-tossed seaweed, or wind-blown leaves.  \n_Vater, Du weisst, wie einsam wir sind!_ | Father, You alone know Your children's desolation.\n\nBerliners in particular might keep constantly in mind that the Iron Kingdom was only one of several Prussias. In the not too distant future, they will be able to visit the exhibition and documentation centre of the proposed Centre for Flight and Expulsion, approved by the Bundestag in March 2008 amidst great controversy. The Centre is the brainchild of the League of German Expellees (BdV) and its doughty chairperson, Erika Steinbach, who is determined to add a story of German wartime suffering to the more familiar narrative of German guilt. Among the two million members of her League, there is a strong contingent of East Prussians and K\u00f6nigsbergers, whose perspective does not chime with that of the typical Berliner or casual visitor. For they and their descendants, like assorted Poles from the former Royal Prussia or Russians from Kaliningrad, are likely to show little inclination for nostalgic Prussian fashions. They will know that in the long centuries before Friedrich Wilhelm's coronation in K\u00f6nigsberg, the land where Kaliningrad now stands was ruled by grand masters of the Teutonic Order, by dukes of Prussia, by duke-electors and by kings of Poland. They may even have heard of _Tvangste_ and of the shadowy, anonymous, 'People of the Lagoons'.\n\nAll the nations that ever lived have left their footsteps in the sand. The traces fade with every tide, the echoes grow faint, the images are fractured, the human material is atomized and recycled. But if we know where to look, there is always a remnant, a remainder, an irreducible residue.\n\nIn this case, the residue is quite large. The last of the Prussias is not long dead. There are living people who remember it. There are men and women who were born Prussian and who, in part at least, have retained their Prussian identity. They have been scattered to the ends of the earth, but some still belong to the associations of exiles and expellees, who talk of the old times, and who write books about the _Unvergessene Heimat_ , the 'Unforgettable Homeland'. There are even those who dream of Prussia's resurrection. Yet these are all relicts from just the latest Prussian generation. They are descendants not only of German forebears but also of several earlier incarnations of Prussia. Somewhere among them roam the genes of the _Prusai_.\n\n## 8\n\n## Sabaudia\n\nThe House that Humbert Built (1033\u20131946)\n\n##### I\n\nRome, 2 June. Italy's Day of the Republic, the _Festa della Repubblica_ , is celebrated on the same date every year. The president comes down from the Quirinale Palace, lays a crown of laurels on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier and gives the signal for a grand military parade. RAI news, the Italian news agency, issues the usual bulletin: 'The celebrations of the anniversary of the Republic were initiated today by the President... Escorted by the cuirassiers of the guard of the Corps of Carabinieri, he laid the Crown on the Altar of the Fatherland, and sent the parade on its way from the Imperial Forum...' Italian commentators liken their republican _Festa_ to Bastille Day in France or to Independence Day in the United States. A similar event will be staged on 4 November, _la Giornata dell'Unit\u00e0_ , to mark Italy's annual Armed Forces Day.\n\nIn 2010 Giorgio Napolitano (b. 1925), Italy's eleventh president, had reached the fifth year of his seven-year term. Trained as a lawyer, he used to be an activist of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), until it was dissolved in 1992; he then served as a member of the European Parliament. His nicknames include _Il Principe Rosso_ , 'The Red Prince', and _Il Re Umberto_ , 'King Umberto'. His personal contribution to the national day was to invite the public into the house and gardens of the Quirinale. He has been characterized as Italy's 'enduring president', a pillar of stability in an unstable country.\n\nThe tomb of Italy's Unknown Soldier, the _Milite Ignoto_ , stands beside the Altar of the Fatherland at the centrepoint of the monumental complex on the Piazza Venezia \u2013 the _Vittoriano_. It dates from 1911, and is surrounded by an array of patriotic symbols \u2013 including the columns of Winged Victory, the four-horse chariot, the _Quadrighe_ , and the Fountain of the Two Seas. On the steps of the altar, the president of state is awaited by the presidents of the Senate, of the chamber of deputies, of the constitutional court and of the council of ministers. After laying the crown of laurels, he reviews the guard of honour, presents a short address, then leaves the square with the minister of defence and the chief of the defence staff.\n\nThe military parade presents a stunning show made up from all branches of the Italian armed forces and police. The crowds applaud, listening to the bands of the _Esercito_ (army), the _Marina Militare_ (navy), the _Aeronautica_ (air force), the _Arma dei Carabinieri_ , the _Polizia di Stato_ (state police), and other formations. The traditional _Corsa degli Bersaglieri_ raises a special cheer: the 'Sharpshooters Regiment' (including its musicians) does not march past the stands, but runs. The soldiers step out most willingly to the strains of the ' _Canzone del Piave_ ', the 'Song of the Piave', a popular melody from the First World War (and between 1943\u20136 the national anthem). Warplanes scream overhead, releasing jetstreams of green, white and red. (In 2008 heavy rain was falling, and no planes flew.)\n\nThe symbols of the Italian Republic are displayed everywhere. The national flag, the green-white-red tricolour, dates from the Cispadane Republic of 1797. The Republic's emblem consists of a five-pointed red star surmounting the toothed wheel of labour, encircled by garlands of oak and olive. It rests on the gold letters of 'REPUBBLICA ITALIANA' on a red field. The national anthem, ' _Il Canto degli Italiani_ ', is popularly known after its author as 'Mameli's Hymn'. Composed in Genoa in 1847, it was always sung by republicans in defiance of their monarchist rivals:\n\n> _Fratelli d'Italia!_\n> \n> _L'Italia s'\u00e8 desta;_\n> \n> _Dell'elmo di Scipio_\n> \n> _S'\u00e8 cinta la testa._\n> \n> _Dov'\u00e8 la Vittoria?_\n> \n> _Le porga la chioma,_\n> \n> _Ch\u00e9 schiava di Roma;_\n> \n> _Iddio la cre\u00f2._\n> \n> _Stringiamci a coorte_\n> \n> _Siam pronti alla morte_\n> \n> _L'Italia chiam\u00f2._\n\n('Brothers of Italy! \/ Our land has awoken. \/ Her head is ringed \/ by Scipio's Helmet. \/ Where's our Victory? \/ The roll-call summons you, \/ once the slave of Rome. \/ God has created Her. \/ Let's line up in our cohorts, \/ we're ready for death. \/ Italy has called.')\n\nThe foul weather of 2008 matched a tense political situation. The leaders of the _Lega Nord_ , the 'Northern League', Italy's most bumptious party, were boycotting the parades; they do not believe in the permanence of the present political order. When pressed by a reporter, the president issued a stark warning: ' _Basta ribellioni contro lo stato_ ', 'Enough rebellions against the state!' Before the parade finished, an incident occurred on the Fori Imperiali. The president's open-topped limousine had already passed. When Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's car appeared, a girl ran forward calling ' _Presidente, presidente, una foto..._ ' (In Italian usage, as president of the council of ministers, the premier enjoys the same form of address as the president of the Republic.) The cavalcade halted. The crowd started chanting: 'Silvio! Silvio!' Berlusconi obliged. Leaping out of his car, he strolled the full length of the Fori surrounded by his admirers. A voice in the crush shouted ' _Silvio santo subito_ '* in mock blasphemy; ' _Ci prover\u00f2_ ,' he promised, 'I'll show you; I'll solve all the problems.' The press reported widely on the 'Berlusconi show' and the _bagno di follia_ , 'the forty minutes of delirium'. The Day of the Republic, ran the headline, 'has been turned into the _Festa di Silvio_ '.\n\nThe annual _Festa della Repubblica_ is staged to remember one of the closest-run political events in Italy's history. On 2 June 1946 Italians were asked to vote in an 'institutional referendum' to decide whether their country should remain a kingdom or become a republic. The result was announced next day. The monarchy received 10,719,284 valid votes \u2013 46 per cent; the republic 12,717,923 \u2013 a victorious 54 per cent. The country was geographically divided. The north supported the republic; the poor, less populous Mezzogiorno favoured the monarchy. Ravenna voted 91.2 per cent for the republic; Messina 85.4 per cent for the king.\n\nThe last king of Italy, Umberto II (1904\u201383) was forty-two years old when, from his point of view, the referendum was lost. Having mounted the throne a month earlier as a result of his father's abdication, he had reigned for only thirty-three days, and thereby earned the unkind sobriquet of _Il re di maggio_ , 'The king of May'. In the three preceding years he had served with some acumen as 'royal lieutenant', putting his compromised father into the background and easing the country's transition from Mussolini's Fascism. In this respect, his role was not dissimilar to that of his Spanish relative, Juan Carlos, during the aftermath of Franco.\n\nPost-war Italy, however, was less forgiving than post-Franco Spain. Italy's royals had worked with Mussolini over two decades, and the wounds of dictatorship, defeat, foreign occupation and civil war were still festering. The anti-clerical and anti-monarchist Left, urged on by the Communists, was rampant. Umberto's father had been slow to adapt. By clinging to his throne for as long as he did, he had lessened the chances of the monarchy's survival.\n\nThe consequences of the referendum were swift and stark. The constituent assembly resolved that the monarchy was abolished, that the monarchy's symbols were illegal, that the royal family's property was to be confiscated and that the king and his close male relatives were to be banished. The king's home, the Quirinale Palace, was to be handed to an acting head of state, Alcide de Gasperi. The royal standard, with its eagle and four crowns, was to be hauled down, and the shield of the House of Savoy was to be torn from the central section of the national tricolour. The anthem of the ' _Marcia Reale_ ', the 'Royal March', already suspended, was to be permanently silenced. All the signs and symbols associated with the Italian state since its birth in 1861 were to disappear. The kingdom was ordered to dissolve; the date was set for 18 June.\n\nThe king hesitated for over a week, ceasing only when riots in Naples were suppressed by bloody violence and civil war loomed. He formally put an end to his brief reign on 12 June 1946, setting aside the royal insignia, consigning the royal jewels to the Banca d'Italia and signing away his birthright. The next day he drove to Ciampino Airport, whence he flew into exile f0r life. His first port of call was his elderly father, who had left after the abdication a month earlier and had taken up residence in Egyptian Alexandria under the name of the count of Pollenzo. At the invitation of King Farouk, his Belgian-born queen, Marie-Jos\u00e9, and their four children would shortly arrive to join him. As his plane soared out over the Tyrrhenian Sea, the last Umberto and his kingdom vanished over the horizon. He took with him the legacy of the first Umberto, nearly a thousand years old.\n\n##### II\n\nHumbertus or Hupertus I ( _c_. 980\u20131047), otherwise Humbert of the Whitehand, was the first count of Sabaudia. Since he lived at a time when all written sources were in Latin, the vernacular versions of his name and his county can only be guessed. But later records refer to him either as ' _Humbert aux Mains Blanches_ ' (in French) or as ' _Umberto Biancamano_ ' (in Italian), and to his county either as _Savoie_ or _Savoia_. His possessions in the upper reaches of the Two Burgundies (see pp. 115 ff) stretched from the shores of Lake Leman to the Alpine fastnesses round Mont Blanc. He and his court would have spoken an old form of Franco-Proven\u00e7al, a predecessor of the language now known as _Savoyard_. He was a direct progenitor of the king of Italy who was dethroned by the referendum of June 1946.\n\nLike all self-respecting medieval rulers, Humbertus boasted a very long genealogical tree. Copied uncritically on numerous modern websites, it starts in AD 390 with a Roman senator called Ferreolus. Verifiable accuracy is never a characteristic of such productions. Any such claims made on behalf of Humbertus by his descendants were certainly not taken up by a historically minded Victorian travel-writer who visited the region at a time when it was achieving international fame and who confined himself to its medieval connections:\n\n> Next day I reached St Jean de Maurienne. We seem to know nothing of [its] early history except that it was governed by bishops before... Humbert of the White Hands... obtained his investiture from the Emperor Conrad the Salic, towards the commencement of the eleventh century. The Christian world had just recovered from the abject fears of the year 1000... and its princes had [returned to] fighting and murdering one another...\n> \n> The Bishops of Savoy... [had] declared themselves independent... Humbert, who... had raised himself by his personal merit to be a Marquis, or Lieutenant of the Emperor... fought the Bishop, defeated him, razed his city to the ground; and thus caused himself to be named Sovereign Count of that wild district.\n\nThe intrepid author of these words, Bayle St John, walked the length and breadth of that 'wild district' in 1856, when it was fast becoming one of Europe's most unstable trouble spots. He was a well-read Francophile, fascinated by political developments in the region, and it would have been out of character if he had not been familiar with a learned history of Savoy recently published in Annecy. Its author, like St John, gave no credence to any rumours of Humbert's exotic ancestry, but provided more details of the county's rise to prominence:\n\n> In 1033, the Emperor Conrad the Salic was absent in Hungary, and Eudes, Count of Champagne, benefited from his absence to take possession of Cisjuran Burgundy... The Emperor then returned... and marched against the rebels. One of his lieutenants, meanwhile, a descendant of Boso... laid siege to [the episcopal town of ] St Jean de Maurienne, leaving the Emperor to deal with Geneva. The siege was long: the sorties numerous and bloody: the Bishop sought every means to free himself... In the end, taken by storm and razed, the town of St Jean was left completely deserted... The lieutenant of whom we have spoken, was called Humbert, commander of the March of Maurienne. Conrad created a sovereign county for him \u2013 _comes in agro Savojense_.\n\nHenceforth, the counts of Sabaudia were both subjects of the Holy Roman Empire and for practical purposes lords of all they surveyed. They flourished by the usual medieval strategies of exploiting their vassals, fighting their neighbours, expanding their territories and marrying well. Since their immediate neighbours to the west, the counts of Vienne, were increasingly drawn into the growing French sphere, they themselves concentrated their efforts on control of the Alpine passes, and on links with the eastern (Italian) side of the Alps in the _Piemonte_ , the 'Foot of the Mountains'. As a result, the heartland of Sabaudia soon consisted of a clutch of 'provinces' which surrounded the meeting point of the modern frontiers of France, Switzerland and Italy: namely, Savoy proper (its _chef-lieu_ Chamb\u00e9ry), the Genevois (Annecy), the Chablais (Thonon), Faucigny (Bonneville), the Tarentaise (Mo\u00fbtiers), the Maurienne (St Jean) and the Val d'Aosta (Courmayeur). The administrative centre was moved from St Jean to Camberiaco (Chamb\u00e9ry) in 1232, but the counts' favourite residences were at Avigliana (Viana, Veillane) near Susa, and later at Aiguebelle (Acqua, Aigue) in the Maurienne. Their prize assets, however, were the mountain trails leading across the high ridge of the western Alps, namely the Great St Bernard, the Little St Bernard, the Mont Cenis and, further south, the Col de Maddalena (Largenti\u00e8res). The counts adopted the sobriquet of _gardien des cols_ , 'guardian of the Alpine passes'.\n\nThe list of the early Sabaudian counts is filled with colourful characters. Otto\/Oddon I (r. 1051\u201360), by marrying Adalina da Susa, carried the family's fortunes into Piedmont. Amadeus III (r. 1103\u201348) died in Rhodes during the Second Crusade. Pierre II (r. 1263\u20138), known as 'the little Charlemagne', was a warrior who greatly expanded his territories. Amadeus VI (r. 1343\u201383), the Green Count, died of the plague at the end of a long military career. His son, Amadeus VII (r. 1383\u201391), the Red Count, died from poison, but not before gaining control of the _Paese Nizzardo_ (Pays de Nice) to the south. Almost all of them were buried beside the Lac du Bourget in the crypt of the Abbey of Hautecombe, whose chantries would not be silenced until the arrival of French revolutionary troops in 1796.\n\nThe rise of the medieval counts is known in some considerable detail thanks to a French chronicle compiled in the early fifteenth century by Jean d'Orville, also known by his surname of 'Cabaret'. The text, which exists in thirty copies but which has only been recently translated from Latin into French, is full of adventures, curiosities and, as might be expected, obsequious flattery. Much space is devoted to the conquests of the ninth count, Pierre II, who led his knights over the Great St Bernard pass in 1263 to confront the duke of Z\u00e4hringen. Having captured the castle of Chillon on Lake Leman by surprise attack, Count Pierre took the duke prisoner, and set out to conquer the whole of the Pays de Vaud:\n\n> The Count rode first to Moudon, where he seized the lower town. Fearing the projectiles of his _engins_ , the defenders of the Great Tower and of the upper town surrendered... He then made for Romont, where the inhabitants refused to capitulate. But the Savoyards hurled such a huge number of stones that the walls crumbled. Having made his entry, he ordered the construction of a small castle at Morat, between the lakes... The capture of Yverdon was much more difficult. The defenders were well supplied with artillery, which caused heavy losses in his army... So the Count ordered his prisoners to be brought from Chillon, and demanded of the Duke that all the barons and knights of the Vaud be permitted to pay him homage. If the Duke refused, he would be put to death... The Duke saw that no other solution was possible... The Vaudois paid homage to the Count... And the Duke returned freely to his duchy in Germany.\n\nAt the time, the Pays de Vaud formed part of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy; Switzerland had not been invented. The Kingdom of France, which watched the expansion of Savoy with suspicion, was still confined to the west of the Rh\u00f4ne. Thanks to a common rivalry with France, however, Sabaudia developed a special relationship with England and in 1236, Count Pierre II travelled to London with his niece Eleanor of Provence, for her marriage to King Henry III. Known in England as the earl of Richmond, the count became one of the king's favourites and leader of an influential court faction. In 1246 Henry III granted the Savoyards a manor on the banks of the Thames, halfway between the City of London and Westminster. This Savoy Manor gave rise to a thriving district, graced in due course by the Savoy Palace, the Savoy Chapel and the Savoy Hotel.\n\nCount Amadeus VIII (r. 1391\u20131440) is celebrated on many scores. On coming of age, he formulated the statutes of his dynasty's premier order of chivalry, the Order of the Collar, modelled (like the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece) on England's Order of the Garter. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the Order was repeatedly to change its name, but never to drop its enigmatic motto of ' _FERT_ '.* In 1416, the count moved up a rank in the medieval hierarchy by obtaining the title of 'duke' from the emperor, together with formal recognition of his independence. Shortly afterwards, he took possession of Torino (Turin), henceforth the richest item in his portfolio. He and his heirs would doggedly exploit their position as lords of the joint state of Piedmont-Savoy, ruling over lands stretching from the environs of Lyon to the source of the Rh\u00f4ne near Andermatt, and from the Lake of Neuch\u00e2tel to the Tyrrhenian Sea.\n\nNonetheless, it could be said that the greatest achievement of Amadeus VIII, now Duke Amadeus, was to be elected pope, or at least anti-pope. After the deaths of his wife and eldest son, he had retired to the Ch\u00e2teau de Ripaille on the shores of Lake Leman, where he was living as the master of an order of knights-hermit. Fame of his saintliness spread, and in 1439 he found that an irregular conclave of cardinals, appointed by the Church Council of Basle, had raised him to the throne of St Peter. Taking the papal name of Felix V, he failed to exert his authority and resigned a decade later, accepting a cardinal's hat in consolation. His position as duke, meantime, had been assumed by his second son, Louis (r. 1440\u201365), who raised the family's status still higher by gaining possession of the wonder-working Shroud of Turin.\n\nFrom the time of the duke-pope, the succession to the ducal title passed smoothly by hereditary right through fourteen generations. (The only serious difficulty arose in 1496 when the direct line became extinct; it was solved by the accession of Philippe de Bresse, lord of Bugey, the late duke's great-uncle.) None of the dukes was more resplendent or more successful than Emanuele-Filiberto (r. 1553\u201380), who made Turin his permanent capital in 1563 and who greatly strengthened Italian influence throughout his dominions. Nonetheless, the devastation caused by the Franco-Imperial Habsburg wars of the sixteenth century was colossal \u2013 at the start of his reign the whole of the duchy had been occupied by the French. The Venetian ambassador to Turin reported desperate conditions:\n\n> Uncultivated, no citizens in the cities, neither man nor beast in the fields, all the land forest-clad and wild: one sees no houses for most of them are burnt, and of nearly all the castles, only the walls are visible; and of the inhabitants once so numerous, some have died of the plague or of hunger, some by the sword, and some have fled elsewhere, preferring to beg their bread abroad.\n\nThe delicacy of the duke's predicament can be judged by the fact that he served as an imperial general while married to the sister of the French king. His fortunes were restored by his victory at the head of Spanish forces at Saint-Quentin in August 1557; the full restitution of his lands following the Peace of Cateau-Cambr\u00e9sis (1559) permitted him to dispense with income granted by the duchy's Estates and to rule as an absolute monarch. By skilful diplomacy, he persuaded the French to vacate the fortress of Pinerolo, the Spaniards to leave Asti, and, at the cost of abandoning the Vaud, the Bernese to restore Gex, the Chablais and the Genevois. A form of Italian now became the main language of administration and education, and the ruling house identified ever more strongly with its Italian name of _Casa Savoia_.\n\nIn the early seventeenth century a Francophile and Francophone reaction grew in strength in the duchy's Savoyard districts. The _Acad\u00e9mie Florimontane_ , founded at Annecy in 1606, served as an inspiration for the Acad\u00e9mie Fran\u00e7aise founded in Paris twenty-nine years later by Cardinal Richelieu, and served as a counterbalance to official, Italianate influence. Conflicts between Catholics and Protestants also arose. St Francis de Sales (1567\u20131622), born in the Ch\u00e2teau de Thorens near Annecy, made his saintly name by calming religious passions. Originally a pupil of the Jesuits, he studied in both Paris and Padua before returning to Annecy and devoting himself to 'the devout life'. His sermons were spellbinding, his books beautifully written and his peaceable methods of evangelism inspired numerous Catholic Orders, including the Sisters of the Visitation of Holy Mary, the Missionaries of St Francis and the Salesians of Don Bosco. In due course he became bishop of Geneva, although based in Annecy because the city of Geneva remained in Calvinist hands. He was named patron of the deaf on account of his invention of a sign language.\n\nDespite de Sales' example, religion continued to be the source of major conflict. A non-Catholic Christian community, the _Valdenses_ or Vaudois, that long antedated the Protestant Reformation, had taken deep root in the Alpine valleys. In the sixteenth century the Valdenses joined forces with the Calvinists, and probably represented a majority of Christian believers in the duchy's Alpine districts. The Counter-Reformation authorities were determined to eradicate them. In 1535 they had been extirpated in French-ruled Provence, and long awaited a similar fate in Switzerland. It was eventually inflicted upon them by Duke Carlo Emanuele II in 1655. The duke's army took up positions, and drove its victims to the heads of the valleys, then, at 4 a.m. on 24 April, proceeded to a general massacre. It was a bloodbath such as Europe had not seen since the massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve eighty years before. Protestant Europe was outraged. Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the British Isles, threatened to intervene; Cromwell's Latin secretary, John Milton, composed a sonnet, 'On the late Massacher in _Piemont_ ':\n\n> Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints, whose bones\n> \n> Lie scatter'd on the Alpine mountains cold,\n> \n> Ev'n them who kept thy truth so pure of old\n> \n> When all our Fathers worship't Stocks and Stones,\n> \n> Forget not: in thy book record their groanes\n> \n> Who were thy Sheep in their antient Fold\n> \n> Slayn by the bloody _Piemontese_ that roll'd\n> \n> Mother with infant down the Rocks. Their moans\n> \n> The Vales redoubl'd to the Hills, and they\n> \n> To Heav'n. Their martyr'd blood and ashes sow\n> \n> O're all th' _Italian_ fields where still doth sway\n> \n> The triple Tyrant: that from there may grow\n> \n> A hunder'd-fold, who having learnt their way\n> \n> Early may fly the _Babylonian_ wo.\n\nAstonishingly, no general amnesty was granted to the Vaudois until 1848.\n\nNothing seemed to bring any serious interruption to the onward march of the _Casa Savoia_. From 1630 the dukes had assumed the additional title of 'princes of Carignano', a lowly Piedmontese village, and henceforth as self-styled 'prince-dukes' were buried in a purpose-built mausoleum within the cathedral complex in Turin. The widowed queen-regent, Marie-Christine de France (d. 1663), ' _Madama Reale_ ', was a dominant figure in the mid-seventeenth century. It was for her that the ducal palace in Turin was misleadingly named the 'Palazzo Reale'. The domed San Sidone chapel (1694) was constructed to provide a suitable setting for the Shroud. The dynasty's sense of self-importance was plain to see.\n\nMadama Reale's son, Carlo Emanuele II (r. 1638\u201375), extirpator of the Vaudois, also set his heart on strengthening access to the Mediterranean seaboard. Thwarted in a war with Genoa, he chose instead to develop the port of Nizza\/Nice, to which he built a transalpine road over the Col de Tende. The three different parts of the duchy \u2013 Savoy, 'New Provence' (Nice) and Piedmont \u2013 were heading towards economic as well as political integration. Their borders had stabilized, and when Switzerland gained international recognition at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the House of Savoy resigned all thoughts of recovering any parts of the new state that it had once possessed. Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663\u20131736), the greatest military commander of the early eighteenth century, was one of Carlo Emanuele's grandsons.\n\nIt was Prince-Duke Vittorio Amadeo II\/Victor Amadeus II (r. 1675\u20131730) who finally secured a royal throne, by manoeuvring astutely during the War of the Spanish Succession. At the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), he was among the beneficiaries, being rewarded with the ex-Spanish Kingdom of Sicily \u2013 hardly the most convenient of acquisitions, but newly anointed monarchs cannot afford to look a _cavallo di presente_ in the mouth. The obvious policy was to accept the gift graciously, to bask in the title of 'king of Sicily' and to bide one's time.\n\nAn excellent opportunity arrived only five years later. The _Casa Savoia_ was not alone in its dissatisfaction with its gains from Utrecht, and during the territorial redistribution that took place during preparations for the Treaty of The Hague (1720), it proved possible to do business with the Austrians, specifically to swap Sicily for Sardinia. The arrangement was still not ideal, but it made the dynasty's territorial agglomeration slightly more cohesive, while preserving the monarch's all-important royal status. For the next eighty years, as 'kings of Sardinia', the heirs of Vittorio Amadeo II could enjoy the uninterrupted fruits of their second kingdom in the curious configuration of Piedmont-Savoy-Nice and Sardinia.\n\nMore stable conditions in the eighteenth century raised the House of Savoy to its apogee. Apart from the strange attempt of Vittorio Amadeo II to reclaim his throne after abdicating and retiring to Chamb\u00e9ry with his mistress, there were no dynastic crises; there were no destructive wars, and there was plenty of room for improvement and steady enrichment. Carlo Emanuele III (r. 1730\u201373) proved himself an able administrator and diplomat, confining his involvement in the Wars of the Polish and Austrian Successions to limited and lucrative campaigns. His son, Vittorio Amadeo III (r. 1773\u201396) was religiously devout, politically conservative and temperamentally generous, being a great benefactor and a popular 'Father of his People'. Their kingdom could not be counted among Europe's greatest powers, but it was sturdily independent and frequently courted as an ally. A British strategist, surveying the state of the Continent in 1761, rated it highly:\n\n> The Dominions of His Sardinian Majesty, considered as Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont, have always been regarded as the Key of Italy... and in latter times this Prince has been justly looked upon as the natural Master of the Ballance in Italy... Because of its being His interest to affect Peace rather than War, Reason and Experience dictate that he will never want Allies... for the Preservation of His Territories.\n\nThe resources at the king's disposal impressed the foreign observer:\n\n> The island of Sardinia, next to Sicily, is the largest in the Mediterranean... The people are rough and unpolished, but live in a kind of barbarous Plenty, which, affording them much Meat and little Labour, they look on their Island as a Paradise from which they are drawn with Reluctancy... The Dutchy of Savoy is a large but far from fruitful Country; however, the Inhabitants are a hardy and laborious People, and by their Industry subsist tolerably well. The Principality of Piedmont is very large and the best part of it very fertile and well-cultivated, much less exposed than Savoy... very strong by Nature and well fortified by Art. _Turin,_ which is the royal residence, is a very large and beautiful city standing by the River Po and admirably well fortified. The County of Nice is less fruitful but of great importance as it is the only [continental] Part... which lies upon the Sea... The districts acquired from the Dutchy of Milan have augmented both the Power and the Revenue of his Sardinian Majesty, so he is justly esteemed one of the most considerable Potentates...\n> \n> The Commerce of these Countries was scarce worthy of Notice, but by degrees Things have been very much changed. The Staple Commodity of Piedmont is a kind of Silk indispensably necessary in many Manufactures... The Navigation of the Po enables the inhabitants of Turin to carry on considerable Trade to Venice... Besides all these, His Sardinian Majesty has gradually and silently possessed himself of all the Passages whereby the Inland Trade is carried on between France and Italy, and having it in his Power to lay what Duties he thinks proper, derives thence an additional Revenue, keeping the neighbouring States in a kind of Dependence...\n> \n> Even as Things stand now, it is apparent that the Territories of this Monarch are very populous, and the People of _Savoy_ and of the Vallies are naturally martial, so that under these last two reigns a very considerable Army of regular Troops has been kept up, and the King can never be at a loss to bring forty or fifty Thousand Men into the Field when Occasion require it... Besides this, the Fortresses of Piedmont are in so good order that his Sardinian Majesty can always make a Stand until supported by the Autrians... Upon these Principles, therefore, we may safely lay it down that... he is one of the great powers of Italy.\"\n\nThe rosy tone of this account may be explained in part by its author's wish to encourage an alliance between Great Britain and the House of Savoy. But it was by no means eccentric in seeing that 'Sardinia', like its northern counterpart 'Prussia', was currently moving up the international league table. Progress continued for another generation until Vittorio Amadeo III put everything at risk by declaring war on revolutionary France.\n\nEver since France's Italian wars of the late fifteenth century, French troops on their way down the Italian peninsula had repeatedly marched through Savoy and Piedmont, sometimes staying for decades at a time. But Napoleon's 'Army of Italy', which crossed the Alps in 1796, brought a new dimension to the practice. The troops of the revolutionary French Republic were intent on sweeping away all the _anciens r\u00e9gimes_ which they encountered, and they spared the Roman Catholic Church no mercy. The abbey of Hautecombe, for example, was sacked, and turned into a tile factory. Savoy was annexed to the French Republic as the D\u00e9partement du Mont-Blanc, without a fight; Piedmont was turned into a French military district; a D\u00e9partement des Alpes-Maritimes was formed round Nice; and the 'king of Sardinia' with his son and heir were driven out of their mainland dominions and forced to live in exile in the Sardinian rump of their kingdom. All these drastic arrangements proved temporary.\n\nThe general restoration of Europe's monarchies that followed Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo was confirmed by the Congress of Vienna (1815), and the exiled king of Sardinia was not forgotten. He recovered his lost lands, returned to Turin, and promptly attempted the restoration of the _status quo ante_. Yet post-Napoleonic Europe was very different from pre-revolutionary Europe. Many of the ideas spawned and exported by the French Revolution continued to circulate, posing a near-ubiquitous challenge to the natural conservatism of the restored monarchs. The ideas of 'the nation', endowed with a life of its own, and of the inborn right of its inhabitants to liberty, equality and social fraternity, were particularly strong, beginning to undermine the post-Napoleonic order as soon as it was established. Three parts of Europe where 'the nation' felt most excluded from politics were specially susceptible; and popular demands grew for the creation of nation-states on the French model. Poland, which had been carved up by three neighbouring empires (see pp. 285\u2013), was to strive in vain throughout the nineteenth century to win back its independence; but Germany and Italy were to succeed where Poland failed. Germany was divided by the intense rivalry of Protestant Prussia and Catholic Austria; advocates of the German national movement, the _Vorm\u00e4rz_ ('pre-March'), could at first see no easy way to do so. Italy's divisions were still more marked. The north was dominated by the Austrian Empire, which held onto both Venice and Milan; the centre was run by a gaggle of reactionary monarchs, including the Roman pontiff in his Papal States; and the south remained in the grip of the Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In face of the restored hereditary rulers, the advocates of the Italian national movement, the Risorgimento or 'Resurgence', did not possess a common strategy.\n\nFor Italian nationalism encompassed several competing interests. One wing placed the emphasis on cultural objectives, notably on education, the promotion of a single, standardized Italian language, and the promotion of national consciousness. The central figure in this was the Milanese writer, Alessandro Manzoni (1785\u20131873), author of the first novel written in standard Italian, _I promessi sposi_ ( _The Betrothed_ , 1827). Another wing was dedicated to political radicalism. Here the central role was played by the secret and revolutionary Society of the Charcoal burners, the _Carbonari_ , whose activities were formally banned; one of its members, a Sicilian soldier called Guglielmo Pepe (1783\u20131855), launched the first of many abortive risings in Calabria in 1820. There was even a tradition of support for the Risorgimento by ruling monarchs; Napoleon's stepson and viceroy in Italy, Eug\u00e8ne de Beauharnais, had set the example, which was followed by the emperor's brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, when King of Naples (see p. 523, below). It seemed to create the perceived need for a political patron of established authority, who could curb the hotheads while giving heart to the moderates and negotiating with the powers.\n\nThe things that all Italian nationalists shared were dismay at the failure of early constitutional projects, opposition to the political role of the papacy, and resentment against the 'foreign presence' of Austria in Lombardy, Venice and the Trentino. They operated in all parts of Italy, though less successfully in some states than in others, and from early on saw Piedmont as fertile ground. In March 1823 a nationalist insurrection was organized in the town of Alessandria by a professional officer of the Sardinian army, Count Santorre de Santarosa (1783\u20131825), who was hoping to unite Italy under the House of Savoy by waging war on the Austrians. He persuaded the regent of Piedmont to issue a short-lived Constitution before the absent king returned and ordered the insurrectionaries to be crushed. Despite its failure, Santarosa's enterprise showed that Piedmont was already moving in a different political direction from Savoy.\n\nThe seeds of nationalism had been sown in Savoy during the years of occupation by armies of the revolutionary Republic and Empire. After 1815, voices were again raised for the removal of the 'foreign kings' and the reinstatement of a French administration, and steps were taken to forge a separate Franco-Savoyard identity. This was done in part by cultivating the idea that the modern, French-speaking inhabitants of Savoy were the direct descendants of a Celtic tribe, the Allobroges, who had lived in the region in Roman times. A key figure in this movement was Joseph Dessaix (1817\u201370), a writer, sometime political prisoner and admirer of the Risorgimento. He was the author both of a popular historical encyclopedia and of the definitive Savoyard song, ' _Le Chant des Allobroges_ ':\n\n> _Je te salue, \u00f4 terre hospitali\u00e8re,_\n> \n> _O\u00f9 le malheur trouva protection_\n> \n> _D'un peuple libre arborant la banni\u00e8re._\n> \n> _Je vins f\u00eater la Constitution._\n> \n> _Allobroges vaillants! Dans vos vertes campagnes_\n> \n> _Accordez-moi toujours asile et s\u00fbret\u00e9;_\n> \n> _Car j'aime \u00e0 respirer l'air pur de vos montagnes._\n> \n> _Je suis la Libert\u00e9! La Libert\u00e9!_\n\n('I greet you, hospitable land, \/ where misfortune found protection \/ from a free people displaying their banner. \/ I came to celebrate the constitution. \/\/ Valiant Allobroges! In your green countryside \/ grant me always refuge and security; \/ for I love to breathe the pure air of your mountains. \/ I am Liberty! Liberty!') This song was not sung in Piedmont.\n\nYet nationalism, whether French or Italian, did not enjoy a monopoly on the political spectrum. Conservatism was also strong, and a long struggle between monarchists and republicans was only just beginning. Many people simply clung to the status quo, fearing a return to the turbulence of Napoleonic times. In both Piedmont and Savoy, a middle way appealed, combining the maintenance of the monarchy with a programme of gradual constitutional reform. In the peculiar arrangements of what officialdom now called _I Stati Sardi_ , 'the Sardinian States', many Savoyards and Piemontesi felt that they could find common cause. Growing currency was given to the concept of 'the Subalpine Kingdom' \u2013 _il Regno Subalpino_ , _le Royaume Subalpin_.\n\nThe 'king of Sardinia' who returned from exile in 1815 was the fifth of his line to bear the royal title, and the fifth of eight 'Sardinian' monarchs in all. Vittorio Emanuele I (r. 1802\u201321) was the second son of the late Vittorio Amadeo III and had briefly been preceded during their exile by his elder brother, Carlo Emanuele IV (r. 1796\u20131802). During his stay in Cagliari, he formed the Corps of Carabinieri, which remains a colourful feature of Italian life to this day. After the Congress of Vienna handed him the lands of the former Genoese Republic, he founded the Sardinian navy, which was henceforth based in the port of Genoa.\n\nCarlo il Felice\/Charles le Heureux\/F\u00e9lix (r. 1821\u201331) was the younger brother of his two predecessors. He was particularly proud of the Bourbon heritage of his mother, Maria Antonia, an infanta of Spain, and a zealous defender the royal prerogative. After the suppression of Santarosa's rising, he was known to his subjects not as _Il Felice_ , but as _Il Feroce_ , 'The Ferocious'.\n\nHis successor, Carlo Alberto (r. 1831\u201349), was less ferocious but not easily swayed by radical demands. He introduced a bureaucratic, paternalistic administration dubbed _Il Buon Governo_ or 'Good Rule', and in 1834 ordered the suppression of the next attempted insurrection, in Turin, for which the young Giuseppe Mazzini (see below) was handed a death sentence. Carlo Alberto also took special pains to reassert the dynasty's standing by restoring its monuments. He renovated the family mausoleum at Hautecombe and relaunched it as the prime symbol of the family's continuity. The revolutionary wreckage at the abbey was removed, a grandiose Gothic church was erected on the ruins, and the ducal tombs were lovingly reconsecrated. A steamship service was introduced to take visitors back and forth to Aix-les-Bains, and in 1849 Carlo Alberto himself was buried there among his ancestors. The record of his self-proclaimed _Buon Governo_ was not entirely negative. A memorial column erected in his honour still stands beside the Pont d'Arve at Bonneville.\n\nBefore his death, Carlo Alberto had succumbed to the Continent-wide clamour of 1848 to issue liberal constitutions, in his case _lo Statuto Albertino_. The remarkable thing was not that the _Statuto_ was introduced, but that it was never rescinded. While reserving all executive decisions to the king, including declarations of war and peace, it guaranteed freedom of speech and assembly and made provision for a two-chamber parliament, made up of an appointed Senate and a chamber of elected deputies. The king equally ensured the survival of the Valdenses. After centuries of persecution he granted them toleration, decorating the one-legged British missionary, John Beckwith, who had taken up their cause. Henceforth their main centre would be located near Ivrea in Piedmont, at La Torre on the eastern slopes of the Gran Paradiso.\n\nPiedmont-Savoy did not witness any of the more extreme manifestations of the 'Springtime of Nations'. Public meetings in Chamb\u00e9ry and Turin did not disintegrate into the sort of riots and revolutions that were witnessed in Paris, Milan or Rome. Nonetheless, the old king's proclamation of the _Statuto_ had far-reaching consequences, and his refusal to heed the resurgent conservatives or to limit the constitution kept the ferment of 1848 bubbling throughout the following decade. It opened the way in Savoy for pro-French republicans to agitate in favour of reunion with France; and, on the other side of the Monte Viso, for activists of the Risorgimento to press for the adoption of Piedmont as the springboard of Italian unification. Neither the Francophiles in Savoy nor the Italophiles in Piedmont enjoyed a monopoly. Yet the resultant stresses grew ever more visible. Savoy and Piedmont were being pulled in opposite directions. This was what Bayle St John had set out to observe.\n\nUnfortunately, Vittorio Emanuele II (r. 1849\u201361 and 1861\u201378) was temperamentally indisposed to plotting a firm course between the competing whirlpools. In his youth he had dallied in _Carbonaro_ circles, and was familiar with the aims of the radicals, though he sympathized more with those of the moderates. On the other hand, as a crowned king, he was loath to join the hue and cry against other divinely appointed monarchs. It was not his choice that the reactionary stand of other Italian rulers, including the pope, should have pushed him into the role of the Risorgimento's chief patron, yet neither could he bring himself to shun the conceited motto of ' _VERDI_ ' \u2013 'Vittorio Emanuele Re d'Italia'. As part of a dubious claim to have shown bravery in battle, he also adopted the sobriquet of _Il Re Galantuomo_ , 'the Hero King'. In reality, he was one of the world's ditherers. The British foreign minister, the earl of Clarendon, was less than generous: 'There is universal agreement that Vittorio Emanuele is an imbecile. He tells lies to everyone. At this rate, he will end up losing his crown and ruining Italy.' In foreign affairs the king relied on the advice of his foreign minister, the devious Count Cavour (see below). 'I have discovered the perfect means of deceiving diplomats,' Cavour once said; 'I tell them the truth and they never believe me.'\n\nThe political condition of Savoy at this juncture was extremely fragile. The Sardinian Restoration had been accompanied by an influx of Italian-speaking bureaucrats and by a resurgence of 'the noble-clerical reaction', and pro-French sentiment had been growing ever since: large numbers of Savoyards had emigrated to Lyon and Paris, and the republicans among them instinctively sought rapprochement with a French republic. On the other hand, as carefully reported by Bayle St John, the pro-French party received a series of hard blows in the 1850s. The opening of the 'subalpine parliament' in Turin, attended by deputies from every part of the state, won over many sceptics. The invasion of Chamb\u00e9ry in 1848 by a republican rabble from Lyon calling themselves the 'Voraces' infuriated the citizenry, and the violence in Paris surrounding Napoleon III's _coup d'\u00e9tat_ in 1851, widely reported in Chamb\u00e9ry, tarnished France's image. From then on, there was no French republic for Savoyard republicans to join.\n\nChamb\u00e9ry in the 1850s was a small provincial town still harbouring memories of its past glory. It was increasingly overshadowed both by the nearby spa of Aix-les-Bains, with its boisterous casino, and, across the frontier, by the French city of Grenoble, which was more than twice its size. Bayle St John liked it:\n\n> Chamb\u00e9ry is the capital of the province of Savoy; and, it has... a far more complete and metropolitan character than might have been expected. There is no trace of the village about it... evidently a place accustomed to be the seat of government [and] somewhat annoyed to be so no longer... Everything seems to be arranged for making the city a comfortable winter-quarter... During the summer everyone who can afford it disperses... up the lower slopes of the mountains which are dotted with villas...\n> \n> However, the streets and... the Place Saint L\u00e9ger, where the band played each evening, were sufficiently well-thronged... The aristocracy of the place being away, the middle classes tried to lord it... I wished to change some English sovereigns. The money-changer had gone to Paris. This is confirmation of a truth... that the English... all go to Switzerland, or only make a dash into northern Savoy to visit Mont Blanc...\n> \n> The fountain of De Boigne, with its four half-elephants stuck together is one of the ugliest things I have ever seen... M. de Boigne... earned a colossal fortune in India... He built the long street through the centre of town, adorned like the Rue de Rivoli [in Paris], with porticos...\n> \n> Then there is the old castle \u2013 so many times rebuilt that only a scrap is really old... Underneath the terrace of the castle... not far from the place where Mme. de Warens once [held]... her extraordinary interviews with Jean Jacques [Rousseau], extends a botanical garden.\n\nTravellers usually reached Chamb\u00e9ry from France by crossing the frontier station on the River Guiers at le Pont de Beauvoisin, some 15 miles west of the city. St John reported a succession of peculiarly pedantic and intrusive customs examinations conducted by teams of French and 'Sardinian' inspectors. In local parlance, 'beyond the Guiers' meant 'in France', and 'this side of the Guiers' meant 'in Savoy'. On leaving the city, travellers could go either north to Geneva and the Swiss frontier, south towards the border with Dauphin\u00e9, or east on the road to Italy. Fifteen miles from Chamb\u00e9ry, the eastbound road divides. The left fork takes one to Albertville, Mo\u00fbtiers, Bourg St Maurice and via the Little St Bernard pass to the Val d'Aosta. The right fork, which Bayle St John preferred, leads to St Jean de Maurienne, the Mont Cenis and, through the Val di Susa, to Turin.\n\nThe capital of Piedmont lies 138 very precipitous miles from the capital of Savoy. On reaching it, having crossed the Mont Cenis on foot, Bayle St John did not conceal his distaste:\n\n> Turin has been suddenly swelled out to suit the convenience of a new royalty... [It] disappoints the stranger, not because it is uglier or meaner than he expects, but because of its audacious air of pretension... Every street, every square manifestly asserts its right to be admired, and fails at first because the mind puts itself into a hostile attitude. Instead of noticing the real beauties, we notice at once the tedious provoking uniformity...\n> \n> Numbers of the houses and palaces are built of brick in a dirty London hue... The Carignan Palace, where the Chamber of Deputies sits, is a huge ugly pile... The palace of the king upon the Piazza Castello is nothing to look at, but its apartments are superbly laid out and decorated... The Palazzo Madama is an old brick house... To make it uglier than it would otherwise be, they have built an observatory on the top...\n> \n> The court is as elaborate as the court of an empire, with all the same accumulation of useless offices and degrading titles, which are ludicrous... in so small a kingdom. If every soldier is a general, every man has two confessors.\n\nAs a Victorian liberal and an Anglican Protestant, the itinerant Englishman was perhaps predisposed against 'the Sardinian monarchy' and its hallmark Catholicism. Yet an inventory of the royal palaces in Turin and its surroundings listed twenty-two major buildings; the charge of overblown pretentiousness was well targeted, and the fact that he had to walk over the central section of the route between Chamb\u00e9ry and Turin, in a year when the railway between Chamb\u00e9ry and Paris was on the verge of completion, revealed the relative attractions of the two sides of the Alps. Even eighty years earlier, observers including both Voltaire and Gibbon had reacted exactly as St John did. They felt that the extravagant Sardinian monarchy was living it up at the expense of its impoverished Alpine subjects. 'In every gilded moulding', wrote Gibbon during a visit to the royal palace in Turin in 1764, 'I see a Savoyard village dying of hunger, cold and poverty.'\n\nThe catalogue of the royal titles, almost one hundred long, was no less extensive than that of the royal palaces:\n\n> Victor Emmanuel II, by the Grace of God, King of Sardinia, Cyprus, Jerusalem, Armenia, Duke of Savoy, count of Maurienne, Marquis (of the Holy Roman Empire) in Italy; prince of Piedmont, Carignano, Oneglia, Poirino, Trino; Prince and Perpetual vicar of the Holy Roman Empire... prince bailiff of the Duchy of Aosta, Prince of Chieri, Dronero, Crescentino... Duke of Genoa, Montferrat, Aosta... Chablais, Genevois, Piacenza, Marquis of Saluzzo (Saluces), Ivrea, Susa... Ginevra, Nizza, Tenda, Romont, Asti... Novara, Tortona, Bobbio, Soissons... Baron of Vaud e del Faucigni, Lord of Vercelli, Pinerolo, Lomellina... Overlord of Monaco, Roccabruna and 11\/12th of Menton, Noble patrician of Venice, patrician of Ferrara.\n\nSoon yet another title would be added.\n\nIt was well known that the Emperor Napoleon III looked with favour on the Italian Risorgimento, but many observers in the late 1850s wondered whether sympathy would ever be translated into action. It _was_ , but only after some extraordinary skulduggery. In January 1858, a group of Italian revolutionaries unsuccessfully bombed the emperor's carriage on its way to the Paris Op\u00e9ra; disillusioned by his prevarications, they were convinced that he was blocking all hopes for change in Italy. The chief conspirator, Felice Orsini, soon captured by the police, was a disciple of Mazzini _._ Before he was guillotined, he apparently penned two death-cell letters, which were duly published in the press. 'Unless Italy is free,' they said, 'the peace of Europe will be no more than a delusion.' Much, much later it was discovered that the letters' author was not Orsini but an imperial aide. Napoleon III spent many hours in the following weeks poring over Italian maps; he had decided to prevaricate no further.\n\nAt this stage, three men were driving the 'Italian Question' forward. All three were subjects of the House of Savoy; and all contested Metternich's cynical saying that 'Italy is merely a geographical expression'. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805\u201371), founder of the 'Young Italy' movement and the theorist of Italian republicanism, had never reconciled himself to the Congress of Vienna which had handed his native Genoa to the Piedmontese. In 1858 he was still under sentence of death in Turin for fomenting failed insurrections; and, as one of the leaders of the ill-fated Roman Republic of 1848\u20139, was still operating from exile in London. Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807\u201382), a Nizzardo sea-captain and once Mazzini's partner, already had a rich revolutionary career behind him, both in Italy and in South America. In 1858, having recently established his home on the island of Caprera off Sardinia, and with his hopes for support from the House of Savoy reviving, he was preparing to be elected to the subalpine parliament as the member for Nice. Camillo Benso, Count Cavour (1810\u201361), an aristocratic liberal with Piemontese, French and Savoyard connections, had been prime minister of the Sardinian kingdom for six years. He had already steered the House of Savoy through the Crimean crisis. He was less interested in patronizing the Risorgimento than in furthering his royal master's fortunes, and he regarded the activities of Mazzini and Garibaldi as an infernal nuisance.\n\nIn the early summer of the same year, an obscure emissary from Paris arrived in Turin unannounced. He told Count Cavour that Napoleon III wished to see him privately, preferably during the emperor's annual visit to the spa at Plombi\u00e8res-les-Bains in the Vosges. Cavour hardly needed to be briefed. He knew about the turn in French policy through the wife of the crown prince of Savoy, Napoleon III's daughter; and he was receiving information from his own cousin, Virginia Oldini, countess of Castiglione, whom he had deliberately inserted into the imperial court in Paris to add her to the emperor's lengthy list of mistresses.* Cavour thereon ordered a false passport, and travelled to the Vosges incognito and by a roundabout route. His secret meeting with Napoleon at Plombi\u00e8res on 21 July 1858 was conducted in a semi-conspiratorial setting, although his presence was leaked to the French press. What exactly happened can only be reconstructed from a report composed by Cavour; none of the emperor's ministers were involved and many details remain vague. But it is clear Cavour learned that the French were itching to attack Austria, and were willing to do so in partnership with Sardinia. He did not learn the emperor's final aims, however, and he was taken aback by the harsh terms proposed. In essence, the emperor offered to send his army to liberate northern Italy from Austria, but only if the counties of Savoy and Nice were ceded to France in return. Cavour swallowed his pride and, in principle, accepted. He was risking the loss of perhaps a third of his sovereign's possessions in the uncertain hope of winning something more extensive.\n\nOver the next two years Italian politics evolved rapidly, and all the while the agreement of Plombi\u00e8res was kept conveniently secret. In June 1859 the French army marched 'to free Italy' from its oppressors \u2013 the Austrian imperialists, the pope and other 'reactionary' rulers. At Magenta and Solferino it won decisive but particularly bloody victories against the Austrians. (The terrible suffering of the soldiery at Solferino prompted the creation of the Red Cross.) The Sardinian army, assisted by Garibaldi's volunteers, the _Cacciatori d'Italia_ , had played a supporting role. The Austrians, despairing, agreed to withdraw from Lombardy. As they left Milan, the 'Sardinians' marched in. The House of Savoy was preparing to form its third kingdom, just as Cavour had planned.\n\nYet several things did _not_ go to plan. Shortly after Solferino, Napoleon III made a separate peace with Austria at Villafranca di Verona, failing to consult Cavour and sorely displeasing his Italian clients. He was said to be traumatized by the appalling battlefield bloodshed, and appeared to be abandoning the scheme for an expanded Sardinian kingdom in favour of a French-protected Italian confederation. Cavour resigned in disgust, and for six months the path towards a mutually agreed solution became severely fogbound.\n\nIn the second half of 1859 developments in north-central Italy came to the fore. Having lost the protection of their Austrian allies, the dukes of Parma and Modena and the grand duke of Tuscany were all overthrown by local revolutions. In Florence, Grand Duke Leopold II, who had rescinded Tuscany's constitution in the way that Vittorio Emanuele had not done, was forced to abdicate. Papal administrators were driven out of the Romagna, the northernmost section of the Papal States. All the liberated territories then joined forces in a pro-Sardinian grouping called the United Provinces of Central Italy. They elected one Sardinian governor, only to find that Vittorio Emanuele insisted on appointing a different one. Confusion reigned. Napoleon III in particular had lost his way.\n\nAt this juncture, Cavour realized that an opportunity for diplomatic action had reopened. Returning to office in January 1860, he determined to mend fences with the French and to resuscitate the Plombi\u00e8res agreement. Essentially, if Paris were prepared to approve a series of plebiscites in the United Provinces of Central Italy with a view to their incorporation by Sardinia, Turin would agree to hold parallel plebiscites in Nice and Savoy with a view to their cession to France. These terms were drawn up and signed in Turin at the Franco-Sardinian Treaty of 24 March 1860.\n\nThe difference between a referendum and a plebiscite is a fine one. Both pertain to collective decisions made by the direct vote of all qualified adults. The referendum, which derives from Swiss practice, involves an issue that is provisionally determined in advance, but that is then 'referred' for a final decision by the whole electorate. This would have suited the circumstances envisaged by the Treaty of Turin, but 'plebiscite' was the term that the treaty used.\n\nPlebiscites were common in nineteenth-century Europe, especially in France. The _scitum plebis_ or 'people's choice' had its roots in ancient Rome and was revived during the French Revolution, when popular support was sought for successive constitutions. Louis-Napoleon's _coup d'\u00e9tat_ was approved by plebiscite in 1851, as was the restoration of the French Empire in 1852. The plebiscites in Nice and Savoy were to form part of a series starting in Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Romagna. Plebiscites are often criticized for being open to manipulation. The wording, the timing, the local circumstances and the degree of impartial supervision can all affect the outcome. In 1860 in Nice and Savoy, none of the basic safeguards were in place. The plebiscites were staged for the purpose of obtaining a preconceived result; Napoleon III aimed to keep procedures under close French control; the press was subjected to censorship; and the 'Sardinian' government obligingly resigned all responsibility.\n\nThe inhabitants of Savoy were told nothing of what was being prepared until some astonishing posters, dated 10 March 1860, were put up in all the main localities. In Chamb\u00e9ry, Governor Orso Serra announced the referendum and appealed for calm: 'HABITANTS DE LA PROVINCE DE CHAMB\u00c9RY. _Envoy\u00e9 ici par le Gouvernement du Roi_...,' he began. 'Sent here by the king's government in order to strengthen the ancient ties which unite the populations of the monarchy, I could not foresee the events which... are rendering the accomplishment of my mission very difficult.' He then blamed 'the events' on a _sourde agitation \u2013_ literally on 'deaf' or 'thoughtless trouble-making' \u2013 and gave the distinct impression that the government had been forced to organize the referendum against its better judgement. His summary of the king's attitude was, at best, curious:\n\n> You will be called on to choose between this ancient monarchy of Savoy, to which you are united by the affection of centuries and by limitless devotion, and the Nation, which has so many claims to your sympathy... However keen would be the regret experienced in the king's heart if the provinces which were the glorious cradle of the monarchy were to decide to separate... he would not refuse to recognise the validity of the peaceful and orderly manifestation [of your will].\n\nThe terms of the Turin Treaty were then published and 'Sardinian' troops were ordered to withdraw from the plebiscite areas. On 1 April 1860 Vittorio Emanuele formally released his Savoyard and Ni\u00e7ois subjects from their oath of allegiance. The voters could hardly have failed to guess that the monarchy intended to abandon them.\n\nThey also knew that the French emperor believed the outcome to be a foregone conclusion. He had ignored a petition sent to him from northern Savoy asking for wider consultations, and on 21 March his words to a delegation of well-known Savoyard Francophiles were made public. 'I am able without failing in any international duty to testify to you my sympathy, ' he told them. 'It is neither by conquest nor by insurrection that Savoy and Nice will be united to France, but by her legitimate sovereign supported by popular consent.'\n\nIn the brief period when debate was permitted, the plebiscite organizers did not reinstate suspended newspapers, such as the _Courrier des Alpes_ , which had been demanding that all options be openly discussed. In theory, the options in Savoy were fivefold. The first was for the status quo to be maintained. The second would see Savoy become an independent state. The third would see Savoy joined to Switzerland. The fourth would allow districts with pro-Swiss, pro-'Sardinian' or pro-French sentiments to decide for themselves. The fifth was that the whole of Savoy would be taken by France. In the event, only one question was put: ' _La Savoie, veut-elle \u00eatre r\u00e9unie \u00e0 la France?_ ' ('Does Savoy want to be reunited with France?') The word 'reunite' was in itself obviously provocative. The voters were only able to choose between ' _Oui_ ' and ' _Non_ '.\n\nIn the spring of 1860 the Italian peninsula found itself in almost total turmoil. As yet, no Kingdom of Italy existed. The future of the United Provinces of Central Italy hung in the balance; and, though nationalist ferment was spreading to Sicily, Garibaldi and his 'Thousand' were still waiting to sail into the fray there. The autocratic King 'Bomba' \u2013 Ferdinand II \u2013 was still entrenched in Naples, as was the pope in Rome. Despite much criticism, Austria was holding on both to Venice and to the surrounding _Terraferma_. To hold a plebiscite amid such uncertainty was tantamount to offering a choice, not between France and Italy, but between France and chaos.\n\nThe plebiscite planners were especially worried about pro-Swiss sentiment. Switzerland, unlike France or Italy, was both stable and democratic. The Swiss cantons adjacent to Savoy, having the same Burgundian origins, were French-speaking, and the northern Savoyard districts of Chablais and Faucigny were known to possess a clear, pro-Swiss majority. So the planners added an extra 'box' headed ' _oui et Zone_ ' to the voting paper. This gave voters who accepted annexation to France the extra possibility of supporting a 'Free Trade Zone' in the northern districts. There was no extra box marked ' _Non et Zone_ ', and no opportunity to opt for incorporation into Switzerland. Women (as usual) were excluded.\n\nApril 1860 provided the occasion for popular poetry. One of the less gruesome verses was written by a M. Turbil, the inspector of elementary schools in Savoy, who expressed appreciation of the 'Sardinian' past along with fervent expectation of the French future:\n\n> _Nous l'aimions cependant l'antique dynastie_\n> \n> _Dont nos superbes monts couvrirent le berceau,_\n> \n> _Et le Roi-Chevalier qu'acclame L'Italie,_\n> \n> _Et notre vieille croix, et notre vieux drapeau!_\n> \n> _Aujourd'hui le Pi\u00e9mont, trouvant pour sa couronne_\n> \n> _Un plus riche fleuron, d\u00e9serte nos firmas..._\n> \n> _O mon charmant pays! Volontiers on pardonne_\n> \n> _Quand la France nous tends les bras!_\n\n('We loved the ancient dynasty \/ whose cradle is surrounded by our sublime peaks, \/ and the knightly king, whom Italy now acclaims, \/ and our old Cross and our old flag. \/ But today, finding a richer emblem for its Crown, \/ Piedmont is deserting our frosty land... \/ Oh, my charming country! One freely forgives \/ when we are offered France's embrace.')\n\nThe plebiscite in Savoy did not take place until voting in Central Italy and in Nice had been completed. Parma, Modena, Tuscany and Romagna, which all voted on 22 March, showed strong majorities for incorporation into Piedmont, thereby creating a setting where the traditional Franco-Italian balance in the _Stati Sardi_ had already been overturned. The County of Nice voted on 15\/16 April in an event marked by a low turnout and a high rate of abstentions. Nonetheless, the French were able to claim that 25,743 Ni\u00e7ois had voted ' _Oui_ ' and only 100 ' _Non_ '. Presented as a 99.23 per cent victory for France, the result gave the impression of an unstoppable trend. Garibaldi, for one, was furious at the cession of his native town. He voiced his outrage loudly in the subalpine parliament, before returning home to Caprera.\n\nVoting in Savoy was organized collectively, inhibiting dissent. It started on Sunday, 22 April. Parishioners were led to the voting booths by stewards. Cards marked ' _Oui_ ' were distributed for men to stick on their hats. An engraving from Chamb\u00e9ry shows voters lined up by profession in front of the Grenette (today the Mus\u00e9e des Beaux-Arts). Doctors and lawyers wore their academic robes. The band of the National Guard was playing cheerful music. French flags waved on all sides. The first group of voters, the customs officers, were brought in at 7 a.m. At nine o'clock it was the turn of the archbishop and his chapter; at 9.30, the farmers from the suburbs. Secret balloting was not practised. Scrutiny of the votes proceeded on the 23rd and the 24th, and the final count for the whole of Savoy was proclaimed on 29 April: Registered voters: 135,449. Votes cast: 130,839. Favourable: 130,523. Against: 235. ' _Oui et Zone_ ': 47,000. Abstentions: _c_. 600. Spoiled papers: 71. Majority: 99.76 per cent.\n\nIn Chamb\u00e9ry itself, the majority of pro-French votes was declared to be only 99.39 per cent. 'There were no winners and losers today', an imperial proclamation commented. 'In the midst of such imposing unanimity, the old hatreds have disappeared.' Within a week, Garibaldi sailed with his 'Thousand' from Genoa, heading for the conquest of Sicily, and Savoy faded from the forefront of Europe's attention.\n\nRatification of the plebiscite was scheduled for 29 May in the subalpine parliament in Turin, and for early June in the French Senate. The session in Turin proved tumultuous. Only three of the eighteen Savoyard deputies bothered to attend, and Cavour was shouted down. But he had little to fear. The results were safely ratified. French troops held a grand parade in Chamb\u00e9ry in front of the Fontaine des \u00c9l\u00e9phants.\n\nTwo matters remained: the transfer of powers, and the division of the armed forces. The former was staged in the castle at Chamb\u00e9ry on 14 June 1860. The French emperor's representative, Senator Laity, arrived to take possession of the territory from the Sardinian commissioner, M. Bianchi. The two men drove to the castle in one carriage. The documents of transfer were signed in the antechamber of the Grand Salon. M. Bianchi then left by the back door, as Senator Laity proceeded to announce that annexation was complete. The archbishop made a short speech: 'For eight centuries,' he said, 'the clergy of Savoy always maintained a sense of loyalty and of perfect submission to the royal family to whom Providence had assigned our destiny... Subject now to a new sovereign, we shall grant him the same respect, obedience and loyalty.' The senator responded gracefully. At 12.15 p.m. the French flag was raised, and cannon roared out a salute. At the time of the plebiscite, 6,350 Savoyards were serving in the Sardinian army; 6,033 had voted ' _Oui_ ' and 282 ' _Non_ '. The officers were now given a free choice either of staying in the Sardinian service, or of resigning their commissions. Most of them stayed. But the 'Brigade de Savoie' was disbanded:\n\n> When Victor Emmanuel presided [in Turin] over the last parade of the Brigade of Savoy, before sending the soldiers home over the Alps, which had now become a state frontier, it is said that the troops and the sovereign were both deeply moved... The ancient alliance between the Savoyard soldiers and the House of Savoy was coming to an end amid the ritual and fanfares of a military review; and eight centuries of history were reaching their term. One of the oldest and most stable monarchies in Europe was dying... There was much... to impress every man of honour, even the most passionate democrat.\n\nWhen it was all over, the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eug\u00e9nie paid their first official visit to Savoy between 27 August and 5 September. The celebrations were extravagant. The streets were hung with bunting and with loyal placards. Parades, receptions, balls, banquets, concerts and theatre visits followed in dizzy succession, and the emperor graciously ate a meal of _chamois aux \u00e9pinards_. The empress graciously waved to every shout of the crowd. A memorable gas-lit tableau was erected on the station platform at Chamb\u00e9ry showing an imperial eagle, with a wing-span of 30 feet, clutching in its talons a board bearing the figure 141,893 \u2013 supposedly the total tally of votes cast for France.\n\nNo one knew what the results of the plebiscite might have been if all options had been offered. Britain and Switzerland protested in vain. France and 'Sardinia' insisted that they had fulfilled their obligations, and that the result had been lawfully ratified; a Free Trade Zone was in place along France's new border with Switzerland. The king and Count Cavour had more pressing matters to worry about. The _fait_ was _accompli_. Yet the divorce between Savoy and Piedmont can only be seen as a historic rupture. It ended a union that had been in place since 1416, and it rode roughshod over a number of democratic choices. It also separated the ruling house from its ancestral land, cutting them adrift like a boat without moorings, a flimsy vessel tossed like a bottle onto the stormy seas of Italian politics.\n\nThe Kingdom of Italy did not materialize until the year following the transfer of Nice and Savoy. Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, and subsequently to Naples, proved a decisive catalyst, and for several weeks in the late summer of 1860, the prospect loomed that the 'Sardinian' monarchists would be sidelined. However, neither Cavour nor Napoleon III was prepared to contemplate failure. On 11 September, the Sardinian army marched south to take control of all the Papal States and to keep Garibaldi's republicans out of Rome. The race was on. 'If we do not reach the Volturno before Garibaldi reaches La Cattolica,' Cavour said, 'the monarchy is lost, and Italy will remain in the prison-house of the revolution.'\n\nGaribaldi lost the race. Marching up from the south, he never reached Rome and had to settle for a triumphal entry into Naples in the company of Vittorio Emanuele II. Then, having been refused the Neapolitan viceroyalty for life, he retired in pique. The king of Sardinia was left in command of virtually the whole country. The last major obstacle had fallen. The House of Savoy was indeed entering its third kingdom.\n\nArrangements were finalized in the winter of 1860\/61. An all-Italian parliament was summoned to Turin and voted decisively for the creation of a national Kingdom of Italy, of which Vittorio Emanuele was to be the first monarch. The proclamation was made in February 1861 and the coronation staged on 17 March. Count Cavour officially became Italian prime minister, but he was also mortally exhausted, and died of a stroke within months. His last words, as reported, were 'Italy is made. All is safe.' Napoleon III was aghast at the news. 'The driver has fallen from the box,' he remarked, 'we must see if the horses will bolt.'\n\nAfter four years, the kingdom's capital was moved from Turin to Florence. In 1866, following the Austro-Prussian War, Venice was incorporated into Italy. Finally in 1870, Rome fell; and the Papal States were abolished. The pope lost all temporal power. Vittorio Emanuele took up residence in the former papal palace on the Quirinale. When he died in 1878, victorious and revered, the foundation stone of the _Vittoriano_ was laid in his honour.\n\nDuring the next sixty-eight years three monarchs reigned in Italy: Vittorio Emanuele II's son Umberto I (r. 1878\u20131900), Vittorio Emanuele III (r. 1900\u201346) and Umberto II (r. 1946). None of their reigns was terminated by natural causes. Umberto I, who had fought at Solferino, had been christened with the name of the dynasty's founder, and changed his regnal number from IV to I. By contemporary standards, he was not the most oppressive of monarchs, and was dubbed _Il Buono_. Nonetheless he did little to calm a wave of violent bread riots that broke out in the late 1890s, and he made himself unpopular by rewarding the general, Bava-Beccaria, who had violently suppressed rioters in Milan. Like his maternal Habsburg relatives, he became the target for nihilist assassins. In July 1900, at Monza, he was shot dead.\n\nThe House of Savoy entered the twentieth century, therefore, visibly chastened. In conservative eyes, the assassination of 1900 simply added to the continuing humiliation of a Catholic nation evident in the fate of a 'captive papacy'. Monarchs relying solely on Divine Right were evidently unsafe. In any event, the elaborate bronze and marble complex of seventeen sculptures of princes of the House of Savoy from Umberto Biancamano on, executed in 1903 by Canale and displayed in the Valentino Garden in Turin, was to be the last of its kind. The First World War was a time of intense ordeals for Italy as for many countries, and it proved fatal for several ancient monarchies. If the Habsburgs, the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs could be toppled, the _Casa Savoia_ had to watch its step.\n\nFortunately, the new king, Vittorio Emanuele III, had sworn loyalty to the constitution without demur, and was widely judged to be a man of 'energy and a lofty sense of duty'. Italian Fascism was not his creation, and his policy of trying to tame it rather than confront it cannot be attributed to cowardice. It all happened by a process of creep and fudge. Nonetheless, as the true nature of Europe's first Fascist regime was revealed in the 1920s, the monarchy undoubtedly complied with some of its excesses. And in one important symbolic respect, by accepting a panoply of phoney titles, it lent its name to the regime's aggressions. Vittorio Emanuele III did not object when offered the crown of the 'emperor of Abyssinia' or the 'king of Albania'. One of his relatives basked in the title of 'Zvitomir II, king of Croatia'.\n\nNevertheless, throughout the war years, the monarchy acted as a force for stability and continuity. Many of Italy's elite regiments, like the _Cavalleggeri Savoia_ or the _Granatieri di Savoia_ \u2013 named after the House not the Duchy of Savoy \u2013 prided themselves on traditions going back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century. ' _Avanti Savoia_ ' remained the standard battle cry of Italian troops, and high-quality equipment such as the Savoia Marchetti SM 79 bomber benefited from the royal brand. In August 1942, while fighting the Red Army on the River Don at Izbushensky, 600 dragoons of the Prince of Aosta Celere Division achieved a signal victory against overwhelming odds. As they trotted, cantered and then galloped into 'the last major cavalry charge of European history', they whirled their sabres and roared out their cries of ' _Carica!_ ' ('Charge!') and ' _Savoia!_ '\n\nWhether or not the dynasty could be forgiven was the issue posed by the referendum of 1946. For the first time in Italy's history, women were permitted to participate in the voting. The opinion of a leading British historian betrays no regrets about the people's choice: 'Like the [English] in 1688 and the French in 1789, the Italians had thus carried out their own constitutional revolution... The oldest surviving dynasty in Europe had run its course. After eighty-five years, during which it presided over national unification and enjoyed many triumphs as well as failures, the end came in tragedy and anticlimax'. But once again the wording of the referendum may be pertinent. At the time it was first discussed, Vittorio Emanuele III had already ceded his official duties to his son; and it would have been perfectly possible for the referendum to have posed the question whether or not the king should officially abdicate. In that case, the nation could have passed its verdict on one man's record, while leaving the monarchy intact. Yet the referendum's authors, heavily influenced by ex-Partisans and Communists, were determined that the vote should be aimed directly at the institution of monarchy. As a result, the king's conduct and the suitability of his son were overshadowed by weightier considerations. The question posed was 'republic' or 'king'. The House of Savoy was presented as being out of its depth in an age of populist politics and democratic manipulation. Just as it had discarded the Duchy of Savoy through a plebiscite, it now lost the Kingdom of Italy through a referendum. The long story, which began nearly ten centuries before with one Umberto, ended with another. And the vision of Mazzini and Garibaldi finally triumphed over that of Cavour.\n\n##### III\n\nIn the view of monarchical purists no throne ever falls vacant. There is always an heir apparent, always a successor, always a claimant (even if some see the claim as that of a false pretender). 'The king is dead', they say. 'Long live the king!'\n\nEx-King Umberto II, therefore, was not really an ex-king in the eyes of his most fervent subjects and followers. He was simply an unfortunate monarch in temporary exile \u2013 exactly as his great-great-grandfather Carlo Alberto had been, or his maternal grandfather, King Nikola of Montenegro (see Chapter 12). After leaving Italy, and arranging his father's funeral in 1947, he and his family settled in Switzerland. The royal couple's marriage, however, had never been happy; and exile permitted them to separate. The ex-queen, Marie-Jos\u00e9, who was a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by birth, stayed in Geneva with her children, and later moved to Mexico. Umberto took up residence in the Villa Italia at Cascais in Portugal, whence, as 'Europe's Grandfather', he could sally forth to royal weddings or jubilees at the invitation of the dwindling company of reigning monarchs. According to gossip, he was bisexual \u2013 a personal trait which might explain the Vatican's strange silence during the referendum of 1946. He died in 1983 and was laid to rest at Hautecombe, where Marie-Jos\u00e9 would join him twenty years later. His last act, irksome to many of his relatives, was to bequeath the Shroud of Turin in his will to the Roman Catholic Church.\n\nUmberto's death led automatically to the elevation of his only son and heir to Italy's virtual throne. Vittorio Emanuele IV, prince of Naples (b. 1937), had shot and killed a man in Corsica and had spent a dozen years proving his innocence in the French courts. (He had fired a rifle in anger at night-time intruders on his yacht, and hit a sleeping tourist on an adjacent boat.) He was also pressing the Italian government to lift the ban on his return to Italy, entering a plea to the European Court of Human Rights. His wish was finally granted in 2002 on condition that he formally renounce all claims. This done, he proceeded to sue the Republic both for compensation, and for restitution, among other things, of the Quirinale Palace. In 2006 he was briefly imprisoned on charges of benefiting from the profits of prostitution at his casino at Campione on Lake Como.\n\nIn the eyes of true monarchist circles, however, more serious offences had been committed. After quarrelling with his father and marrying a commoner without royal permission, Vittorio Emanuele had long feared that he might be dispossessed, and so claimed that Umberto II had forfeited the crown by agreeing to the referendum of 1946. Though the father was still alive at the time, the son proclaimed himself 'king'. At this, his angry relatives mounted a counter-claim. By negotiating with the government of the Italian Republic, they argued, Vittorio Emanuele had implicitly acknowledged the Republic's legitimacy, and had _ipso facto_ committed treason against himself. A substitute claimant was found in his cousin Amadeo, 'duke of Aosta' (b. 1943), who during Mussolini's occupation of Yugoslavia had been the infant 'king of Croatia'.\n\nThe two well-funded camps were well capable of pursuing long campaigns of litigious attrition. One of them drew income from the Campione casino, from arms dealing and from a hedge fund registered in Geneva. The other supported itself from the wine trade and from the appellation of _Vini Savoia-Aosta_. In May 2004 both claimants were invited to a royal wedding in Madrid. There, in full view of the cameras, the elder titular king landed two punches on the nose of the younger one. Their battles continued inconclusively in the courts. In January 2010 a court in Arezzo ordered the duke of Aosta to drop the name of Savoia, and to confine himself, like his wines, to the Savoia-Aosta label; another court in Piacenza dismissed the charges of criminal corruption levelled at Vittorio Emanuele. But no ruling was made on the contested headship of the House. Increasingly, it seemed that the issue would eventually be settled by the age-old competition between longevity and fertility; the most likely winner in the long term was yet another Umberto (b. 2009), the duke of Aosta's grandson. To keep the rumour mill turning, Vittorio Emanuele has been caught on video boasting how he duped the French courts over the murder of which he had once been acquitted. Neither murder nor manslaughter is a bar to the succession, but the prince's outburst that preceded the killing cannot have endeared him to his subjects. ' _Voi, italiani di merda_ ', he was reported to have shouted, 'You Italian sh\u2013ts, I'll kill the lot of you'.\n\nThe land from which the _Casa Savoia_ took its name has now belonged to France for more than a century and a half. The _d\u00e9partements_ of Savoie ( _chef-lieu_ Chamb\u00e9ry) and of Haute-Savoie ( _chef-lieu_ Annecy) form part of the Rh\u00f4ne-Alpes region. They are endowed with huge areas of exceptional natural beauty, including (western) Europe's highest mountain, Mont-Blanc (15,771 feet), France's first National Park in the Vanoise, and scores of world-famous ski-resorts \u2013 Chamonix, Meg\u00e8ve, Val d'Is\u00e8re, Les Arcs, Meribel, Tignes and Flaine, among others. They also encompass an officially denominated wine-growing region, which stretches from Cr\u00e9py overlooking Lake Geneva to the flank of the Massif des Bauges south of Chamb\u00e9ry. The AOC _Vin de Savoie_ , much neglected in Paris, includes fine white, red and ros\u00e9 wines, the most renowned among its twenty-two registered _crus_ being the aromatic, golden Chignin-Bergeron, the dry Apremont made on the slopes of Mont Granier from white Jacqu\u00e8re grapes, the deep-red Mondeuse d'Arbin, and the Roussette de Savoie cru Marestel, which comes from the village of Jongieux, perched on a plateau high above the abbey of Hautecombe. These are among the modern successors to the _Vitis Allobrogica_ , recorded in ancient times by both Pliny and Plutarch.\n\nPopular guides to the history of Savoy, however, rarely enter into the historical nuances:\n\n  * Early 11th century, 'Humbert aux Blanches Mains', Count of Maurienne... receives the title of Count of Savoy. His dynasty became 'Guardians of the Passes'.\n  * 1419, Savoy is united with Piedmont.\n  * 1860, April. Savoyard Plebiscite. A crushing majority of 'Yes' votes hands Savoy to France.\n\n> The Savoyards, weary of government by Piedmont... turned to France. In 1858, at the interview of Plombi\u00e8res, Napoleon III and Cavour decided that, in exchange for French help in the struggle against the Austrian occupation, Italy would cede Savoy and Nice to France if the population concerned consented. This led to the Plebiscite of April 1860. By a vote of 130,533 for 'Yes' against 235 for 'No', the Savoyards expressed their desire to become French.\n\nThis assumes, among other things, that an Italian state existed at the time of the plebiscite.\n\nAn official website explains the plebiscite in terms of discontent with some poorly identified kings:\n\n> The kings of Savoy began to spend increasing amounts of time in their Italian territories and the Savoyards, who had always spoken French, found it difficult [after 1815] to accept the return of the Piedmontese administration... In 1858, during the Plombi\u00e8res talks between Napoleon III and Cavour, minister of the King of Piemonte and Sardinia, France promised to provide military aid against Austria on the condition that Nice and Savoy would be returned to France. King Vittorio-Emmanuele II, whose ambition was the unification of Italy, accepted the deal.\n\nThe modern visitor to Chamb\u00e9ry is treated to all the sights that pleased Bayle St John more than 150 years ago, and more besides. The castle, adorned with a classical fa\u00e7ade, is nowadays the Pr\u00e9fecture, but the cathedral, the rue de Boigne, the place St L\u00e9ger and the Fontaine des \u00c9l\u00e9phants are much as they were. The Mus\u00e9e Savoisien, lodged in a former Franciscan convent, contains an extensive collection of religious art, much of it brought from Hautecombe. St John, who devoted a whole chapter to Mme de Warens and Rousseau, would be delighted to learn that Les Charmettes has been preserved and restored: 'The memory of the philosopher inhabits the rooms... which are decorated in the late 18th century style... The house opens onto a terraced garden in a wooded valley... closed on the horizon by the Dent du Nivolet. It's here that the visitor will best recover the charm of this \"sojourn of happiness and innocence\".'\n\nIn Bayle St John's time, alpinism was in its infancy, and skiing had not been invented. The very first ski-station in Savoie, at Meg\u00e8ve, was opened in 1921. Nowadays, such places support the region's biggest business. Most visitors rush past everything else to reach the slopes, or in the summer to power their speedboats across the green-blue waters of the Lac du Bourget and the Lac d'Annecy. But several fine historical sites survive. The ferries still sail to the abbey of Hautecombe, now in the care of an ecumenical order. The Ch\u00e2teau de Thorens, 12 miles up the mountain from Annecy, exudes the atmosphere of pre-plebiscite Savoy. And in Cavour's former study it displays the table on which the treaty of annexation was signed.\n\nThe pilgrim route to St Jean-de-Maurienne, where it all began, leads for 40 miles up the valley of the Arc beneath the towering peaks of the Vanoise. On approaching St Jean, one passes the ruined ramparts of the Ch\u00e2teau de Charbonni\u00e8res, the earliest known seat of the counts of Maurienne. Immediately before the town, a round tower, La Tour du Ch\u00e2tel, marks the place where Count Humbertus I expired in 1047. In the town square, the eleventh-century cathedral is signalled in the guidebook for its coloured medieval frescoes, its pre-Romanesque crypt, its cloister and garden, and for the side chapel of St Th\u00e8cle, which houses a most holy relic: the three fingers of St John the Baptist, brought from Alexandria in early Christian times, which give the town its name. The cathedral is a strange building. Its ancient interior and leaning tower are masked by an incongruous, three-arched neo-classical fa\u00e7ade erected in the reign of Carlo Emanuele III. But in the shade of the front portico, the destination of all historical pilgrims awaits. The tomb of Humbert aux Mains Blanches shows a warrior reclining on his sarcophagus under a pointed Gothic arch. It is covered by an iron grille bearing the signs and symbols of his house: the Cross of Savoy, the double Savoyan love-knot, and the _fert_ motto. It was built in 1826 by King Carlo il Felice, at the time when he was restoring Hautecombe and when he hoped that Savoy and Piedmont would stay together for ever.\n\nNone of which prepares the visitor for the news that chronic criticism of the Annexation of 1860 has rumbled on ever since. A dissident minority has always existed in Savoie, and if anything is now gaining strength. Only ten years after the Annexation, the French Second Empire of Napoleon III collapsed and was replaced by the Third Republic. The occasion was used by Savoyard republicans to voice their opinion that the plebiscite had been rigged. At Bonneville in Faucigny, a local committee resolved that the vote 'did not represent the will of the people'. Paris reacted by sending 10,000 extra troops to Savoy.\n\nAfter the First World War, the French government's actions were challenged in the International Court of Justice, and the Free Trade Zone was summarily abolished. As part of the proceedings, the full text of the secret Franco-Sardinian agreement was made public. It transpired that France had given guarantees about the demilitarization of Savoy which were subsequently ignored.\n\nDuring the Second World War Savoie was invaded first by Italian and then by German forces. In 1944 the French Resistance suffered a bloody defeat at the Plateau de Gli\u00e8res, the Savoyard counterpart to the fortress of Vercors in Dauphin\u00e9. Pro-French sentiment revived. In 1960 festivities marking the centenary of the plebiscite were held without opposition. After 1965, however, a movement for regional autonomy (MRS) began, part of a broader surge of sentiment in France against over-centralization. It did not succeed either in turning Savoie into an official region or in joining Savoie to Dauphin\u00e9.\n\nWith some delay, therefore, the _Ligue Savoisienne_ was founded in 1994 with an openly separatist agenda. Its performance in local elections \u2013 6 per cent of the vote in Haute-Savoie, and 5 per cent in Savoie \u2013 was modest, but its adherents have since entered into competition with a restructured regionalist movement. With the aid of the Internet, they are conducting a lively 'identity campaign' to raise awareness of the distinctness of the Savoyard language and to clarify the contested issues of modern history. They argue, for instance, that the Franco-Sardinian Treaty of Turin of 24 March 1860 has lapsed through non-observance; that the subsequent plebiscite was a travesty; and that the democratic will of the Savoyard nation has never been tested. In 1998, having made a declaration of independence that everyone else ignored, they published a Constitutional Project for the Federation of Savoy.\n\nPreparations in Savoie for the 150th anniversary of the Annexation in 2010 were understandably somewhat muted. The state archive in Chamb\u00e9ry staged an exhibition of posters from 1860; and the official website was adorned by a collection of impartial historical dossiers on _la p\u00e9riode sarde_ , 'the Sardinian Period'. Neither Chamb\u00e9ry nor Annecy thought fit to mount a Franco-Italian festival to match that organized in 2008 by the town of Plombi\u00e8res-les-Bains. The Savoyard separatists had roundly condemned that festival, denouncing 'the celebration of a conspiracy which united a dictator and his accomplice in fomenting conquests and massacres'.\n\nThe one thing missing was any trace of curiosity, let alone regret, concerning the fate of the _Casa Savoia_. The mixed feelings described by Bayle St John in the days of the 'subalpine kingdom' have completely evaporated. According to today's Savoyards, the _Casa Savoia_ turned their backs on their homeland, and their homeland has forgotten the _Savoia_. Whatever their origins, the ex-kings of Italy are seen as irrelevant foreigners; they belong to a well-known category of Savoyard migrants \u2013 local lads who left home to make their fortune, but who lost touch with their roots. As the sorrowful Savoyard proverb puts it: ' _Toujours ma ch\u00e8vre monte, et mon fils descend_ ',* 'My goat always goes up the mountain, and my son is always going down.'\n\nPreparations for celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Italian Unification in 2011 were concentrated very naturally in Turin, although many events were held elsewhere.\u2020 Turin's festival, entitled ' _Esperianza Italia_ 150', was poised to present hundreds of concerts, operas, exhibitions, plays and parades. The royal palaces had been renovated, and the ex-royal hunting lodge, the _Reggia di Venaria Reale_ , was fitted out as the venue for an extravagant artistic display.\n\nYet an embarrassing background of political turmoil could not be wholly concealed. The prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, a vulgar billionaire, a media baron, is the longest serving leader of a major European country, and a serial offender against good taste and responsible conduct. Having survived decades of accusations of corruption, he was finally stripped of his legal immunity, and faced four trials for tax fraud, bribery and sordid sex offences. Italian women were staging demonstrations against him in all the major cities. When his government proposed to introduce 17 March as an extra national holiday to mark the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, his coalition partners walked out. His public standing, which only three years previously had produced the ' _Festa da Silvio_ ', was sinking to the level of the _Casa Savoia_. To say that the international reputation of a wonderful country was being tarnished by its political elite was an understatement.\n\nHistorians increasingly believed that Italy's malaise had deeper causes. Dysfunctional politics are perhaps the outward symptom of more fundamental flaws. The Unification of Italy, once held up as a glorious achievement, was proving at best a partial success. The manner of its execution, as an instrument of the ambitions of the _Casa Savoia_ , never engendered a sense of solidarity between Italy's diverse regions, and even when the _Savoia_ left, centrifugal forces remained strong:\n\n> Geography and the vicissitudes of history made certain countries... more important than the sum of their parts might have indicated. In Italy the opposite was true. The parts are so stupendous that [some of them] would rival every other country in the world in the quality of its art or the civilization of its past. But the parts have never added up to a coherent whole. United Italy never became the nation its founders had hoped for because its making had been flawed both in conception and in execution... 'a sin against history and geography'. It was thus predestined to be a disappointment... [The Italians] have created much of the world's greatest art, architecture and music... Yet the millennia of their past and the vulnerability of their placement have made it impossible for them to create a successful nation-state.\n\nThe president of the Republic, who had often railed bitterly against his countrymen's quarrels, must have been holding his head in despair. Giorgio Napolitano could only have reflected on the absence of fundamental consensus throughout his long career. He would certainly have remembered the day of the referendum in June 1946, when he and his Communist comrades in Naples had tried to celebrate the republic's victory. They hung out their Red Flag alongside a national tricolour from which the coat of arms of the _Savoia_ had been ripped out. Their headquarters was promptly stormed by a baying mob of monarchists, who had won an overwhelming majority in the city. Disunity threatened then, and has continued to do so ever since.\n\n## 9\n\n## Galicia\n\n_Kingdom of the Naked and Starving (1773\u20131918)_\n\n##### I\n\nThe road to Halich is very wide, extremely bumpy and almost empty. It runs across rolling open countryside for 60 miles south from L\u2032viv, the chief city of western Ukraine. Every now and again one passes through a roadside village with its goose-pond, its old wooden houses and flower gardens, and its rebuilt, onion-domed church. Though the fact is nowhere advertised, one is travelling over part of the 'continental divide', the watershed between the Baltic and the Black Sea. To the west and north-west, all waters flow into the basin of the Vistula. To the east and south, they flow either into the Dniepr or the Dniester. Our road, via Rohatyn, is heading for the Dniester.\n\nOur driver, Pan Volodymyr, belongs to the middle-aged generation that learned to drive during the Soviet era. Indeed, one could talk of a Red Army driving style \u2013 utterly fearless and completely regardless of human life. Pan Volodymyr seems to care nothing either about his own skin or about passenger welfare. His main technique is to charge at full speed down the middle of the road, wheels straddling the centre line. In this way, he avoids the steep camber and the deepest of the potholes that multiply on the tarmac's outer edges, but the main purpose, one suspects, is to be lord of the road. He careers along, oblivious to the bucking motion, the constant jumps and jolts, and the non-stop judder of an over-stressed chassis. He constantly takes left-turning corners blind, then fights with the shaking steering wheel as the vehicle yaws back over the hump into the dangerous pothole zone. He spurns his seat belt, except for a short stretch where the police are known to lurk; and he clearly has no use for the handbrake, which lies buried under a pile of bottles and magazines. Worst of all, when he sees another car approaching, he refuses either to slow down or to move over. Instead, he clings to a position within inches of the centre line, daring the oncomer to give way, and only veering outwards at the very last second. He is equally contemptuous of combine harvesters, of massive swaying timber-trucks, and of drivers from the same school of driving as himself. When asked if he could possibly keep his speed below 75 mph, he presses on regardless in sullen silence.\n\nIn Rohatyn, we circle the square looking for a place to stop. An oversize statue of the beautiful Roxolana stands in the centre. This daughter of a local Orthodox priest was seized as _yasir_ or 'human booty' during a Tartar raid in the early sixteenth century, sold in the slave market of Istanbul and raised to be the consort of the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent: a local girl lost but not forgotten. The date of birth that appears on her statue is questionable, but her story is authentic. Renamed Hurrem, 'the Smiling One', she bore the sultan six children; her son Selim succeeded to the Ottoman throne; and the resplendent Baths of Roxolana (1556) are still one of Istanbul's prominent tourist attractions.\n\nThe traffic on the road to Halich says much about contemporary Ukraine. Pan Volodymyr, who is reputed to be a bishop's chauffeur, an aristo of his profession, drives a gleaming Renault Espace, which keeps company with similarly up-to-date Toyotas and Skodas and an occasional BMW, but most of the vehicles are twenty or thirty years older. In L\u2032viv, we had ridden in a colossal Volga taxi, which thundered over the cobbles at perhaps 10 mph and was easily overtaken by a student jogger.\n\nHere, in the countryside, one sees why the road has to be 10 yards wide. Soviet designs, especially of trucks, combined gargantuanism with pre-war technology. Many such monsters are still crawling around like decrepit dinosaurs, indeed one of them is edging painfully up a steep slope and being imperceptibly overtaken by a dilapidated ex-German charabanc belching heavy black smoke. As Pan Volodymyr roars up behind, blasting his horn and aiming for the narrow gap between them, another huge truck comes into view at the top of the hill, broken down and stranded on the verge, which our cavalcade has somehow to pass. The roadway is wide enough for three vehicles, but not for four. I close my eyes in prayer.\n\nOrdinary Ukrainians do not have such problems. They usually walk, or ride between the villages on creaking bicycles; they drive a horse and cart, a _fura_ , or they stand for hours at forlorn crossroads in the shade of derelict bus shelters, waiting for the lift that may or may not come. They push sacks of potatoes on handcarts, or pull wooden beams on improvised trailers, or, with no shop in sight for miles, they trudge homewards with bulging shopping bags. They try to flag us down, or to sell us a jar of forest berries, but Pan Volodymyr careers on. Episcopal drivers stop for no man.\n\nLike the roads, the Ukrainian countryside is only partly de-Sovietized. The collective farms which once turned the peasants into state serfs have been disbanded, but they have not been replaced by a viable system of private farming. 'The young people are leaving for the cities in droves,' one of our companions says sadly, 'or are working abroad.' One sees the results. An old woman, bent double, holds a single cow on a rope in the pasture. The ex-Soviet dairy stands abandoned nearby. A ragged lad watches a herd of grazing goats. A grandfather dangles his grandchild on the porch of their cabin. The plots and strips and orchards adjacent to the village are tilled and tended, full of fruit and vegetables, but the great open fields, untouched for years, have gone to seed, turned into oceans of bracken and meadow-wort. 'No one knows who owns what,' we are told; 'they are waiting for legislation.' One thinks: for legislation, like the bus which may or may not come.\n\nThe town of Burshtyn is announced miles away by a soaring yellow cloud that rises into the summer sky. It is a prime relic of Soviet times, a whole community dependent on one colossal coal-burning power station in the heart of a rural region. The coal comes from the Donbass (the Donetsk Basin), almost 1,000 miles away. Three red-and-white chimneys, extraordinarily tall and covered in soot, belch out their pungent filth perhaps 900 feet above the ground. Acres of rusting gantries line the streets. The wrecks of abandoned boilers, trucks and railway equipment litter the townscape; a thick layer of ubiquitous grey powder stifles the weeds that grow between the sleepers and the rails that no longer lead anywhere. The installation is too vital to discard and too costly to replace, so it continues to produce and to pollute.\n\nHalich comes into view over the brow of a hill not far beyond Burshtyn. A medieval miracle takes the place of a modern monstrosity. Our companion points to a Romanesque hilltop tower on the right. 'That's the twelfth-century church of St Pantaleimon,' she announces, 'recently restored.' A roadside sign says '\u0413A\u041b\u0418\u0427'. The Cyrillic letter \u0413, which in Russian is pronounced 'G' as in 'Gal', is pronounced 'H' in Ukrainian, as in 'Hal'. The sunlit valley of the Dniester, already a sizeable stream, glistens ahead. A couple of bridges, one old and one new, cross the river in the direction of a huddle of roofs surrounded by tall trees. Beyond rises a steep, wooded scarp surmounted by red-brick fortifications.\n\nWe drive into town, crossing the new concrete bridge over the Dniester, and passing a _fura_ with a tethered foal trotting behind. The square is spacious, dusty, windblown and almost deserted. A large cobbled expanse rings an ill-defined central area where a tall statue stands amid a clump of much taller trees. The pines and planes have somehow been grafted and pollarded to produce a high panoply of leaf cover supported by bare trunks. A tiny goose-pond shimmers alongside. This is not just a country town, but a town with a patch of countryside right in the middle of it.\n\nA small gaggle of men are sitting or squatting in the shade, waiting for something to happen. A couple of them struggle to their feet to watch us arrive. A Renault Espace with plates from L\u2032viv provides them with the event of the morning. We rumble over the cobbles round three sides of the square until we reach a shady parking space near the local reception committee. Two dilapidated vehicles nearby look more abandoned than parked. Nothing moves. We climb out to take our bearings.\n\nHalich does not look the least bit historic. It appears to have been hit by a cyclone, most probably the Second World War, and then by a Five Year Plan that ran for only two or three. At one time, the square must have been lined with shops and houses on all four sides. Only one line of older buildings remains, on the northern side. It backs onto the Dniester, and contains the 'Pharmacy', a bookshop and a store selling glassware. The other three sides are largely open to the elements. Even on this summer's day, the wind blows a cloud of dust through the trees. The western side is half-filled by a Soviet-era pavilion from the 1960s or 1970s covered with wooden scaffolding. It is being prepared either for reconstruction or for demolition, but no workers are in sight. The eastern side is defaced by an incongruously modern furniture store, not yet completed, and by a gaping open space through which the corrugated-iron or green-painted roofs of the cabins of the locals can be glimpsed. The southern side, under the lea of the wooded scarp, displays a small wooden-built, onion-domed church, an overgrown paddock confined by a fence, and a crumbling Soviet cinema.\n\nCuriosity encourages a stroll through the trees to the statue. It turns out to be as grandiose as its surroundings are shabby. A monumental bronze horseman, sword in hand, rears above a white marble plinth. The inscription reads 'KOPO\u041b\u042c \u0414AH\u0418\u041bO XA\u041b\u0418\u0426K\u0418\u0418', ' _Korol' Danylo Halitsky_ '. Pan Volodymyr announces that _Korol_ ' means ' _K\u00f6nig_ ' \u2013 'King'. It's both a surprise and a puzzle. So, too, is the date: '1998', less than ten years before our visit. One of our party wonders how a poverty-stricken community can afford an inordinately lavish historical symbol. Someone else adds that another monument must have stood here until quite recently: most probably a statue of Lenin. At all events, we are seeing signs of what we came for. This is where the name of Galicia began.\n\nLunchtime. The Restaurant 'Mirage' is open. One notes a delicious sense of irony. Food in Soviet times was often a mirage; now one can buy it. The fare is modest but appetizing: red beetroot soup, a thick slice of roast pork and a tomato salad. All the wooden houses on the street have their own little gardens and apple trees. The supply of fruit and vegetables is plentiful.\n\nAfter lunch, we wander back across the square to the wooden church spotted earlier. Outside is a tablet dated 1929 that we try to decipher. It is a memorial to a group of twenty-one locals, 'WHO SUFFERED FOR THE RUSSIAN NAME IN THE TALERHOF CAMP UNDER THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN YOKE'. This is tricky. The inscription obviously relates to the First World War, when Halich would have been occupied by the Russian army before being recaptured by the 'Royal and Imperials', and its Russophile flavour explains why it survived the Soviet era. Talerhof sounds Austrian. But why had the victims suffered 'for the Russian name'? Perhaps they were people whom the Austrians had regarded as collaborators. Someone had wanted to remember them, and some official had allowed them to do so; 1929 could have been the year of their return, or more likely of its tenth anniversary.\n\nInside the church, an elderly woman is sweeping the floor; a still older man rises from his seat and offers to show us round. Pan Roman speaks Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and German. He was born in 1925, he says, after his Ukrainian father married his Polish mother. He stands beside a nineteenth-century iconostasis adorned with folk-style icons, and tells us his story, which, like the ill-lit church, is filled with confusing details. When he talks of the German army, it is not clear whether he is referring to the First or the Second World War. Between the wars, he had 'finished seven classes', meaning that his schooling ended when he was thirteen or fourteen. He does not say so, but the school, like his mother, must have been Polish. He leaves us in no doubt about the defining moment of his life. In 1946 he and his mother were deported to Siberia, where they were 'thrown out of the train' and 'buried in snow'. He does not explain how a young man of conscript age could have survived the war, or when they returned from Siberia.\n\nWe decide to walk up the hill to explore the castle. When we reach it, we find that the impressive red-brick construction is modern. As Pan Roman had told us, the original was levelled by Red Army artillery in the summer of 1944 after the Wehrmacht had set up a defensive position there. There are no medieval ruins to be seen, and there is nothing to say whose castle it once was. The view across the valley to the distant church of St Pantaleimon is ravishing.\n\nReturning to the square and the bookshop, we purchase a small guidebook to try to solve some of the basic questions. We are apparently in the so-called New Town, founded in the fourteenth century, while the ancient 'Princely City' lies several miles away on the top of a plateau. A picture from before the First World War shows that the square had indeed been enclosed and lined with houses, and that its extended oblong had stretched from the foot of the castle scarp to the line of riverside houses that still survive. The iron footbridge across the river was already _in situ_ , built by the Austrians to take passengers from the square to the railway station. In those days, trains would have gone up and down the Dniester line from Stryj to Stanislavov, Chernovtsy, and eventually to Moldavian Kishinev.\n\nThe town's links with the south are emphasized by the fact that for centuries it was one of the chief refuges of the Jewish Karaite sect, which originated in Crimea (see p. 266). The Karaites, who spoke Tartar as their everyday speech, survived in Halich until sometime after the arrival of the Nazis in 1941. Their _kenasa_ or 'temple' was blown up by the Soviets in 1985. Their memory survives in the name of 'Karaitsky Street'.\n\nThe guidebook presents us with an elaborate chronology, starting in AD 290 with the earliest mention of Halich in a work by Jordanes and ending in 2001 when Halich joined the Association of West Ukrainian Towns. In between, sixty or seventy entries recount a wide selection of events:\n\n981 | Volodymyr the Great annexes Halich to Kievan Rus\u2032.  \n---|---  \n1156\u20137 | The Halich bishopric is founded.  \n1189 | Hungarian King Bela II occupies Halich.  \n1199 | Halychyna and Volhynia united in a single principality.  \n1241 | The (Mongol) host of Batu Khan captures Halich.  \n1253 | Danylo Halitsky crowned in Drohobych.  \n1349 | Polish King Kazimierz III captures Halich.  \n1367 | Halich is granted the Magdeburg Law.  \n1772 | Halich passes to Austrian rule.  \n1886 | Construction of the L\u2032viv to Chernovtsy railway line.  \n1915 | Occupation by the Russian army.  \n1918 | Halich becomes part of the West Ukrainian People's Republic.  \n1919\u201339 | Halich is under Polish rule.  \n1939\u201391 | Halich is under the Soviets.  \n24 August 1991 | Halich joins independent Ukraine.\n\nNothing of significance, apparently, happened for 400 years before 1772 or in the three years of German occupation 1941\u20134.\n\nThe tone of the guidebook outdoes the photos in Technicolor:\n\n> It was on the banks of the age-old Dniester... that the princely town of Halich \u2013 a powerhouse of Ukrainian statehood \u2013 was destined to appear. It was here that the Ukrainian spirit was nurtured, tempered in vilest battles... moulded by the will-power of lion-hearted and wise princes, covered with the glory of victorious Halich regiments, rinsed with tears, and braced with thousands of Halichians slaughtered in massacres... under the foreign yoke. [They are] brought back to life in chronicles, gospels and songs... in cathedrals, churches and whatnot.\n\nThe author is at pains to stress that under presidential decrees of 11 October 1994, ancient Halich was granted the status of a 'National Preserve', also that the same decrees saw 'the beginning of the process of the restoration of historical justice'. Ancient Halich and its Ruthenian inhabitants are strongly connected to the task of reconstructing contemporary Ukraine's identity.\n\nTo reach the _Knyazhi Horod_ or 'Princely City', one has to drive five or six miles out of Halich and up a long hill to the village of Krylos. Pan Volodymyr sets off enthusiastically. He draws up on a steep slope in front of the rural museum, searches desperately for the handbrake, and announces that from here on we have to walk. In the museum, skipping through displays of prehistoric pots and modern folk culture, we learn that the exact location of the Princely City was not found until the second half of the twentieth century and that a huge archaeological project is still in progress. A gang of student volunteers armed with spades, sieves and cameras walks past, proving the point. These modern Ukrainians think of the medieval Ruthenians as their ethnic ancestors.\n\nThe _Knyazhi Horod_ occupies _c_. 120 acres of land which exploits the natural defensive features of a wedge-shaped mountain. It is contained in a double ring of ramparts, one lining the outer circle that runs inland from the high bluffs overlooking the Dniester, the other surrounding the inner fortress on Krylos Hill. The oldest point is the tenth-century burial mound of a prince, possibly the founder of Halich, who was interred with his weapons and the remains of his burned ship. The largest complex of foundations belongs to the twelfth-century cathedral of the Assumption. The most significant item is probably the Prince's Well, the only safe source of water for the garrison and inhabitants, who must have numbered several thousand. The site was large enough to include grazing pasture for livestock, orchards and market gardens. Its military decline coincided with the fall of the Ruthenian principality of Halich in the mid-fourteenth century, when a Polish royal stronghold was built nearby. Its use continued, however, as a local religious centre, first by the Orthodox Church, and from the end of the sixteenth century by Greek Catholics. The Palace of the Greek Catholic metropolitans stood here. The church of the Assumption began to rise alongside the ruins of the preceding cathedral in 1584, the work of a local _boyar_ Shumliansky family, but was razed to the ground by a Tartar raid in 1676 and never properly restored. In Soviet times, the buildings were used as a museum. Like their tsarist predecessors, who ruled here briefly in 1914\u201315, the Soviets did not tolerate the Greek Catholic Church, and were fiercely hostile to any remnants of independent Ruthenian or Ukrainian history. Only now is the ancient legacy of Halich being put back together, piece by piece.\n\nThe name of Danylo Romanovych Halitsky (r. 1245\u201364), prince and conceivably 'king' of Halich, is well known to all Ukrainians as the founder of L\u2032viv. He is said to have received his crown from an emissary of Pope Innocent IV, the most politically powerful pontiff of the Middle Ages and the sworn enemy of German emperors. Three years after his coronation, Halitsky laid the foundations of the new capital, which he named after his infant son Liv \u2013 Leo, 'the Lion'. His own emblem was a raven, which figures prominently on his coat of arms and on all subsequent heraldic compositions derived from it. Our return journey, therefore, with 'Volodymyr the Great' raring for the chase, led from the Raven's Perch to the Lion's Den.\n\nTo travellers in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Halich is just a small, Ukrainian town of no special interest except to archaeologists and enthusiasts of medieval history. Yet throughout the nineteenth century it was a hallowed spot of unusual distinction, indeed it was the place which gave a sense of historical purpose and identity to one of Central Europe's most famous kingdoms.\n\n##### II\n\nThe Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was created in 1773 from the acquisitions of the Austrian Empire during the First Partition of Poland, and was destroyed in October 1918 at the end of the First World War. Throughout its existence of 145 years, it was designated as a _Kronland_ , one of the Empire's 'Crownlands', and the kingdom's crown was vested from start to finish in the imperial monarchs of the House of Habsburg. In all, there were seven of them:\n\n> Maria Theresa (r. 1740\u201380)\n> \n> Joseph II (r. 1780\u201390)\n> \n> Leopold II (r. 1790\u201392)\n> \n> Francis II (r. 1792\u20131835)\n> \n> Ferdinand I (r. 1835\u201348)\n> \n> Franz-Joseph (r. 1848\u20131916)\n> \n> Charles (r. 1916\u201318)\n\nThe kingdom's name was invented by Maria Theresa's advisers in Vienna in accordance with a complicated historical conceit. Many centuries earlier \u2013 before their annexation by medieval Poland \u2013 the districts of Halicz (Galicia) and Volodymyr (Lodomeria) had briefly belonged to the kings of Hungary, who had thereon assumed the title of 'dukes of Galicia and Lodomeria'. Four hundred years later, since the empress was also queen of Hungary, her advisers decided to revive the ancient ducal title, upgrade it to royal status, and apply it to a much wider area.\n\nThe kingdom's territory was increased and diminished on various occasions, but was never inconsiderable. The core area established in 1773 covered _c_. 30,000 square miles, similar in size to Scotland or Bavaria, and consisted of two distinct parts. Western Galicia coincided in large measure with the historic Polish province of Ma\u0142opolska (Lesser Poland), whose roots went back to the eleventh century, occupying a broad tract of land between the upper valley of the Vistula and the Carpathian ridge. Eastern Galicia, beyond the River San, largely coincided with the former palatinate of Ruthenia, a province which had been annexed by Poland in the fourteenth century. Its chief city \u2013 L\u2032viv \u2013 which the Austrians renamed Lemberg, became the kingdom's seat of government.\n\nThe kingdom's population, which was to grow dramatically during the nineteenth century, numbered some 3 million in 1773. It was mainly composed of three ethnic groups, each associated with a different religion. The Polish-speaking Poles were predominantly Roman Catholic. The Ruthenians, who spoke _ruski_ , a form of old Ukrainian, were predominantly Greek Catholic Uniates (see p. 277). The Jews, if not assimilated into Polish society, mainly spoke Yiddish, and were divided between the adherents of Orthodox Judaism and of Chassidism (see below, p. 463). The population was overwhelmingly rural. With the exception of Lemberg itself, the towns were small; the villages were numerous. In western Galicia, Poles and Jews lived cheek by jowl. In eastern Galicia, Polish nobles lived in their country houses, while Ruthenian peasants tilled the soil, and Jews formed a strong majority in their _shtetln_ or 'little towns'.\n\nThe kingdom's history can be divided into three periods. During its first twenty years Galicia was deeply influenced by the enlightened reforms of Joseph II. In the next twenty, which were dominated by the Napoleonic Wars, it experienced successive bouts of political instability and territorial transformation. Only after 1815 did it settle down to the more stable but less optimistic existence which persisted until the end. One mid-century change, however, was important. In 1846 Poland's ancient capital, Krak\u00f3w, which the 1815 Congress of Vienna had turned into a city-republic, lost its sovereign status and was merged with Galicia. From then on Krak\u00f3w and Lemberg were rival centres.\n\nThe kingdom's character escapes easy categorization. It was determined by its artificial creation, by its geopolitical location and by its legendary poverty. Far from Vienna but close to the Empire's most vulnerable frontiers, life in Galicia was full of pains and problems. Its citizens were never in full control of their destiny, developing a strong sense of fatalism combined with a famous brand of humour. At some point, some Galician wag made play on the kingdom's name. Since _go\u0142y_ means 'naked' and _g\u0142\u00f3d_ means 'hunger', it didn't take much to adapt the kingdom's name to 'Golicia and Glodomeria' \u2013 'Kingdom of the Naked and Starving'.\n\nThe reforms of Joseph II, an enlightened despot par excellence, were radical but mainly short-lived. A serious attempt was made, for example, to improve the lot of the illiterate, rural serfs. Taxes were imposed on landowners and numerous monasteries were dissolved to provide the income for a state-backed scheme of primary education. Yet the emperor's centralizing policies underestimated both provincial particularities and the force of conservative opposition. At the end of his ten-year reign, in the shadow of the French Revolution, he was forced to rescind much of his reform programme. The dissolution of monasteries did, however, have lasting effects. The social influence of the Roman Catholic Church was diminished, and former monastic lands were frequently used to attract German colonists and to settle them as free farmers. In several districts, compact German communities came to form a substantial minority.\n\nGalicia's fate during the French revolutionary wars was closely bound up with that of its Austrian masters. The Habsburgs, relatives of Marie-Antoinette, were viewed in Paris as the lords of reaction, and for twenty years after 1793 France and Austria were almost continually at war. Although the revolutionary armies never set foot in Galicia, they inspired the creation of the neighbouring Duchy of Warsaw, with which conflict was unavoidable. Throughout those two decades large numbers of Galician men were conscripted into the Austrian army, and the province was obliged to pay its tribute in blood and taxes.\n\nSuch was the setting for the romantic and tragic story of the three Polish Legions, which cut a dashing figure on many a battlefield. About 30,000 Galician soldiers, who had been taken to Italy by the Austrians, volunteered in 1797 to change sides and to fight for Napoleon. Their commander, General Jan Henryk D\u0105browski (1755\u20131818), found favour with his men by pressing Napoleon to overthrow the Partitions of Poland (see pp. 285\u2013). In the event, the Legions were employed everywhere except on the road to Poland, and deep disillusionment set in. Their last, desperate mission was to Haiti, where many of them changed sides for a second time to fight against French colonialism. Nonetheless, the 'Song of the Legions', set to the tune of a lively mazurka, long outlived the original singers:\n\n> _Jeszcze Polska nie zgin\u0119\u0142a, p\u00f3ki my \u017cyjemy,_\n> \n> _Co nam obca przemoc wzi\u0119\u0142a, szabl\u0105 odbierzemy!_\n> \n> _Marsz, marsz, D\u0105browski, z ziemi w\u0142oskiej do Polski,_\n> \n> _Pod Twoim przewodem, z\u0142\u0105czym si\u0119 z narodem._\n\n('Poland has not perished yet so long as we still live. \/ That which foreign force has seized we'll with sabres drawn retrieve! \/ March, march, D\u0105browski, to Poland from the Italian land. \/ So let us join our nation, under Thy command'.) Nearly a century would pass before these words could be freely sung in Galicia.\n\nHaving missed out on the Second Partition of Poland in 1793, the Austrian authorities participated in the Third two years later, accepting a large tract of land north of the Vistula containing both Krak\u00f3w and Lublin. They renamed it 'New Galicia'. Their acquisition provided one of the causes of the brief war of 1809 with the Napoleonic Duchy of Warsaw, but the expanded territorial arrangements did not survive the Napoleonic Wars; at the Congress of Vienna, New Galicia disappeared from the map. Krak\u00f3w was elevated to be a small independent republic; Lublin was given to Russia.\n\nPrince Metternich, the Austrian chancellor from 1815 to 1846, famously remarked that 'Asia begins at the Landstrasse', a street in Vienna's eastern suburbs. The Viennese were apt to regard anywhere and everywhere to the east of their magnificent city as backward and exotic, and they played a prominent role in launching the stereotype of 'Eastern Europe' as a reservoir of underdevelopment and inferiority. Travellers to Galicia habitually wrote of dirty inns, bad roads and savage peasants. After 1846, however, the _Kaiser-Ferdinands-Nordbahn_ linked Vienna with Lemberg. The railway provided a convenient means whereby Austrians could discover Galicia, and Galicians the rest of the Empire. The author of one well-known travelogue called it _Aus Halbasien_ : 'Half-way to Asia'. 'Anyone taking that line will die of boredom,' he wrote, 'if not of hunger.'\n\nAs the crow flies, Lemberg is some 340 miles north-east of Vienna, but the rail journey was considerably longer. The first stage crossed the provinces of Moravia and Austrian Silesia; the Galician frontier was reached either at O\u015bwi\u0119cim (Auschwitz) or at Bielsko (Bielitz). Beyond Bielsko lay the lands of the medieval Duchy of O\u015bwi\u0119cim and Zator. A short ride to the south lay the Habsburg castle of \u017bywiec (Saybusch), seat of an imperial archduke and from 1856 home to an imperial brewery. To the left, one skirted the fertile valley of the Vistula; to the right the rolling Beskid Hills. At K\u0119ty stood the chapel of the Saint-Professor Johannes Cantius (1390\u20131473), patron of academic study. At Wadowice, the Austrians were to build a large barracks, and the garrison town would become the birthplace of a pope. At Kalwaria La\u0144ckoro\u0144a one passed a hilltop Franciscan monastery, scene of a popular annual pilgrimage. In the early days the train did not cross the river into Krak\u00f3w but stayed on the south bank at Franz-Jozef Stadt (Podg\u00f3rze). From 1815 to 1846, the Vistula formed the frontier between the Austrian Empire and the Republic of Krak\u00f3w.\n\nFurther east, as Galicia widened out, the railway left the Vistula and made for the San. Wieliczka and Bochnia possessed ancient salt mines, once the source of great wealth. Tarn\u00f3w and Rzesz\u00f3w were bishoprics. Travellers pausing for refreshment might have noticed that peasants coming from the villages in the wooded hill country to the south of the line were no longer speaking Polish. They were Ruthenian Lemkos \u2013 one of several distinct ethnic communities. Przemy\u015bl (Peremyshl) on the River San commanded Galicia's central crossroads, the dividing line between west and east. It was the site of the kingdom's largest fortress, of two cathedrals, Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic, and of several synagogues.\n\nDespite its historic origins in a Ruthenian principality, Lemberg had become an island of Polishness. As time passed, it also attracted a substantial Jewish community and an influential body of Austrian bureaucrats, many of them Germans from Bohemia. It was Galicia's principal centre of urban life and of refined culture, and it developed a unique personality (see below). In due course, the railway was extended beyond Lemberg, in the first instance to join Galicia with the neighbouring province of Bukovina. Later on, it linked the Austrian Empire with the Russian port of Odessa. Galicia's eastern frontier was passed at \u015aniaty\u0144. In that district, locals still called the northern bank of the Dniester the 'Polish side', and the southern bank the 'Turkish side'.\n\nThe landscape of Galicia was (and still is) extremely picturesque. The rivers flowing down from the snowbound Carpathian ridge are filled with broad, deep and powerful streams feeding numerous lakes and waterfalls, and range after range of hills are piled up against the ridge, creating row after row of valleys, great and small. The woods and forests were varied and extensive. The hilltops were often crowned with dense pinewoods, while high stands of beech stretched out below the rocky summits of the main ridge. The valley floors and broad plains were filled with farmland. Agriculture was traditional, not to say primitive. The peasants lived in wooden cabins, spun yarn for their own clothes, and tilled the fields by hand in timeless routine. They donned their colourful costumes on Sundays or for religious festivals, or to ride to the markets that were run by Jews. It was a land which tourists would increasingly seek to visit, and which peasants would increasingly want to leave.\n\nGalicia's mountain districts presented remarkable variety, both in their inhabitants and their scenery; they were to prove attractive for hikers, ethnographers, painters, poets and photographers, especially from Germany and Austria. _Podhale_ , the 'Land of the _G\u00f3rale_ ' or 'Polish Highlanders', snuggled among the subalpine peaks of the Tatra Mountains to the south of Krak\u00f3w. It was famed for its wood-carving, its white felt clothing and its inimitably raucous music. Further east, the _Lemkivshchyna_ or 'Land of the Lemkos' occupied both sides of the Carpathian ridge among the tree-clad Lower Beskid hills. The Greek Catholic Lemkos spoke a Ruthenian dialect quite different from the speech of the _G\u00f3rale_ , and were famed for their choral singing. Beyond the San round Sambor lay the _Boykivshchyna_ , the 'Land of the Boykos', another Ruthene group which included a substantial minority of Orthodox. Boyko villages were marked out by their unusual triple-domed, beehive churches. The _Hutsulshchyna_ or 'Land of the Hutsuls' backed onto the mountainous frontier with Hungary to the south-east of Lemberg. The Hutsuls specialized in metalwork and horse-breeding, lived in widely scattered hamlets, and were said to be riddled with syphilis. All these districts boasted wild scenery, severe winters, remote pastoral homesteads, archaic dialects, vivid costumes and treasured folklore.\n\nGalician society was formally feudal until the mid-nineteenth century, and remained traditional and pre-modern until the end of its existence. Most of the landed estates, where serfdom remained in force until 1848, belonged to a score of powerful Polish magnates. The free peasantry was largely confined to pastoral communities in the southern highlands. The middle classes were undeveloped, the commercial and professional sectors often being in Jewish hands. Religious practices were strong. Churches and synagogues usually provided the most substantial buildings.\n\nA small number of the grandest Galician landowners could boast some of the largest fortunes in Europe. Each of them governed scores of scattered districts from their _klucz_ or 'home estate' \u2013 the Branickis at Sucha, the Czartoryskis at Sieniawa, the Potockis at \u0141ancut and Ryman\u00f3w, the Sapiehas at Krasiczyn, the Dzieduszyckis at Jezupol and the Lubomirskis at Czerwonogr\u00f3d. These families attended court in Vienna and assumed Austrian titles. Their extravagant lifestyle, filled with balls, banquets, foreign tours and international gatherings, was vulnerable to the vagaries of fortune. Though they prospered as a class, individual families rose and fell like football clubs in a premiership league table.\n\nThe peasantry, in contrast, were as indigent as their masters were affluent. Men, women and children toiled in the fields from dawn to dusk. They had a few basic implements, an ox-team or possibly a horse, but before the twentieth century little or no machinery. Until 1848 the men were obliged to work for several days a week on the lord's demesne, leaving their wives and offspring to cultivate the family plot. They attempted to survive outside the money economy, suspicious of the Jews who ran it, fearful of debt, and only going to market to sell a pig or to buy a fork or a foal. Like the aristocrats, they watched their family fortunes rise and fall in response to the vicissitudes of health, weather, fertility and the birth of sons, but the tenor of their communal life was remarkably constant. Peasant speech, peasant customs and peasant dancing were all peculiar to their particular social estate. Even after the abolition of serfdom, partly thanks to illiteracy and the scarcity of alternative employment, the peasantry stayed firmly tied to the land. Polish and Ruthenian peasants in Galicia had much more in common with each other than with the rest of society.\n\nDebates over serfdom multiplied after the Congress of Vienna, but the issue did not come to a head in Galicia until 1846, when disastrous floods coincided with a political upheaval in the Republic of Krak\u00f3w. Some Austrian officials, it seems, actively encouraged serfs to rebel against their masters in order to nip the Cracovian conspiracy in the bud. A peasant called Jakub Szela from the village of Smarzowy near Tarn\u00f3w assembled a gang of men intent on violence against the local nobility. When the authorities failed to intervene, bands of rebel serfs toured the countryside, beating, burning and butchering noblemen and their families. Bounties were paid for severed noble heads. At least 1,500 murders were perpetrated, and none was punished. When the military finally moved in, Szela was exiled to Bukovina, and the emperor was eventually forced to sign the decree of abolition. This _Rabacja_ or 'Peasant Rising' of 1846 (otherwise known as the 'Galician Slaughter') sent ripples of horror round Europe. Everyone who had thought that the social order was God-given and immutable was obliged to think again.\n\nThe abolition of serfdom brought only partial relief for the peasants. The strong conservative lobby in Vienna was able to insist that the state compensation payable to the landowners for the loss of their serfs be financed from long-term mortgage payments imposed on the ex-serfs. The supposed beneficiaries of abolition were indeed freed from bondage and were theoretically free to leave their villages, yet they were not given anywhere to go, and, if they stayed on to work the land which they still regarded as 'theirs', they moved at a stroke from serfdom to deeply indebted tenancies, typically condemned to pay off their mortgage over thirty or forty years. To make things worse, all sorts of traditional practices, such as the right to graze cattle on common land or to collect firewood in the forest, were thrown into dispute, where the advantage belonged to the landowner and his lawyers. Serfdom had provided security of tenure in exchange for bondage. Now, both bondage and security had ended.\n\nNonetheless, over the decades, new horizons opened up for the former serfs, who were forced to take responsibility for their own destiny. They could buy and sell their produce more effectively, and exploit crafts for monetary gain. They looked forward to educating their children, and began to campaign for village schools. With some delay, they took to various new forms of collective activity, organizing both economic co-operatives and political parties.\n\nAll the textbooks state that in the second half of the nineteenth century Galicia's economy remained seriously retarded. Certainly it did not possess the dynamism either of its neighbour, Prussian-ruled Silesia, or of Austrian-ruled Bohemia. Yet it did not stand still either. After 1848 a wider railway network was built; export businesses increased, especially of timber, paper, sugar and tobacco; and several mechanized industries were launched.\n\nOil, however, supplied the only resource to promise industrial development of more than provincial importance. Discovered in the 1850s in the district of Borys\u0142aw-Drohobycz, it grew explosively into a wild oil-rush area of near-unregulated drilling and exploration. Foreign investment, mainly French and German, poured in. Borys\u0142aw and nearby Tustanowice saw hundreds of oil shafts spring up in the muddy fields alongside the district's only paved road, and 100 trains a day left the state refinery at Drohobycz. In 1908 the Galician oilfield claimed to be the third largest in the world after those of Texas and Persia.\n\nEven so, the deep-seated problems of Galicia's rural economy deteriorated. After devastating floods in the early 1880s, rural poverty reached catastrophic proportions. Famine stalked both the villages and the Jewish _shtetln_ that lived from the peasants' trade. A study published in 1887, which historians now consider exaggerated, purported to show that Galicia had become Europe's poorest province. Paradoxically, the population had more than doubled in less than a century, while agricultural productivity lagged far behind. Galicia appeared to be falling victim to the Malthusian nightmare which most of Europe had avoided. Overpopulation underlay all other socio-economic ills. Food production had fallen well below rates in neighbouring countries in every crop except potatoes. The birth rate soared to 44\/1,000 per annum. The death rate was dropping. The total population was heading for 9 million. Galicia could no longer feed its sons and daughters.\n\nMass migration was the result. Migrant workers no longer returned home after a seasonal spell in Germany or in Western Europe, but went further and further afield. The coal mines of Ostrava or of Upper Silesia were a frequent destination, but once the railways were built, it was a relatively simple matter to take a train to Bremen or Hamburg and to sail for America. The station at O\u015bwie\u0119cim provided the main point of departure. Special barracks were built to house the crowds of paupers who thronged the platforms, and fourth-class wagons were laid on to transport them to the north German ports. The exodus gathered momentum in the last decades before 1914. The annual outflow was counted in hundreds of thousands, and the total ran into millions. Most of them would never see Galicia again. The Poles usually headed for the new industrial towns of the American Midwest like Chicago, Detroit or Cleveland, Ohio. The Ruthenians preferred the prairie provinces of Canada. The Jews made for Vienna, and then for New York.\n\nThough many emigrants would not have known how to read and write, some did; and the letters sent back home constitute an eloquent source of information on their experiences. The pains of emigration also form the subject of Galicia's best-loved popular song:\n\n> _G\u00f3ralu, czy ci nie \u017cal_\n> \n> _Odchodzi\u0107 od stron ojczystych_ ,\n> \n> _\u015bwierkowych las\u00f3w i hal_\n> \n> _I tych potok\u00f3w srebrzystych?_\n> \n> _G\u00f3ralu, czy ci nie \u017cal?_\n> \n> _G\u00f3ralu, wracaj do hal!_\n\n('Oh, Gooral, are you not weeping \/ to walk from your own native land, \/ from the pine trees, mountains and pastures, \/ from the silver torrent's bright strand \/ Oh, Gooral, are you not weeping? \/ Oh, Gooral, come back to home!') In the nature of things, Galicia's cities were untypical. The urban population never exceeded 20 per cent of the country. Yet its importance should not be underestimated: the cities were the focal point of administrative, commercial and cultural activities that kept the kingdom functioning. Lemberg, though a Polish city in the eyes of its Polish majority, strongly exuded the flavours of the multinational Habsburg Empire. Its Jewish community, increasingly assimilated, represented perhaps a third of its population, while the other minorities \u2013 Ruthenian, German, Czech and Armenian \u2013 created a variegated ethnic patchwork.\n\nA large number of imposing public buildings in the grandiose Viennese style sprang up round the older, historic centre. The university, refounded in 1817, the renowned _Politechnika_ (1877) and the building of the Galician _Sejm_ or Diet were all examples of modern neo-Gothic design. The three cathedrals \u2013 Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic and Armenian \u2013 set the tone of religious plurality, and the erection of a full range of theatres, opera house, art galleries and museums attested to the city's cultural vitality. The late nineteenth century saw the arrival of railway stations, municipal waterworks, tramways, parks, prisons and sports clubs. Lemberg was famed for its lively caf\u00e9 life. Numerous monuments and institutions dedicated to King John (Jan) Sobieski, the 'Saviour of Vienna' (see p. 282), the district's most illustrious son, were entirely appropriate.\n\nFor the first 100 years, the Austrian authorities in Lemberg pursued a policy of steady linguistic Germanization. But from 1870, the introduction of municipal autonomy led to re-Polonization. Streets, like Sapieha Boulevard, the main thoroughfare, were given Polish names. A statue to Poland's national bard, Adam Mickiewicz (who never visited), was placed in the Mariacki Square. And the amazing Panorama Rac\u0142awicka, a theatrical battle-scene presented 'in the round', was opened on the centenary of Ko\u015bciuszko's famous victory over the Russians at Rac\u0142awice in 1794 (see p. 289). The city's motto, ' _Semper Fidelis_ ', which had distinct Roman Catholic overtones, was now taken to refer unambiguously to the memory of Poland's tragic past.\n\nBy the late nineteenth century Lemberg had found its way into the leading European tourist guides:\n\n> LEMBERG \u2013 Population, c 160,000 Hotels. Hot.George, R from 3K, B.90h; Imperial, Grand, Metropole, de L'Europe, de France. Restaurants. At the hotels, also Stadtmuller, Krakowska Str; Rail Restaurant at the chief station. Cafes. Theatre Caf\u00e9, Ferdinands Platz; Vienna Caf\u00e9, Heilige-Geist Platz. Electric Tramway from the chief station to the Wa\u0142y Hetmanskie, and thence to the Kilinski Park and to the Cemetery of \u0141yczak\u00f3w. Horse cars also traverse the town. British Vice-Consul: Prof. R. Zaliecki...\n\nUnlike Lemberg, nineteenth-century Krak\u00f3w was struggling to recover from a long period of decay. When Galicia was first formed, grass had been growing through the cobbles of its magnificent medieval square, the _Rynek_. More recently, the successive collapse of New Galicia, of the Duchy of Warsaw and of the Republic of Krak\u00f3w all dashed the city's hopes of regaining its former status. Krak\u00f3w was smaller than Lemberg, and returned to Galicia in 1846 as a distinctly poor and battered relation. To disarm the city, the medieval walls were razed and replaced by a municipal garden, the _Planty_ , encircling the central area.\n\nNonetheless, in the last quarter of the century Krak\u00f3w's ancient splendour started to revive. The Jagiellonian University, re-Polonized and rehoused, became a powerhouse of modern Polish culture. Art, science and learning flourished as never before. And Krak\u00f3w's Polishness, radiating from the most Polish part of Galicia, heralded further changes to come:\n\n> _Gdy chcesz wiedzie\u0107, co to chowa_\n> \n> _Nasza przesz\u0142o\u015b\u0107 w swoj\u00e9m \u0142onie_ ,\n> \n> _Jako stara s\u0142awa p\u0142onie:_\n> \n> _To jed\u017a bracie do Krakowa._\n\n('If you want to see what here is bred \/ our heritage in its very womb \/ like an ancient flame that catches fire: \/ ride, brothers! Go to Krakow!')\n\nGalicia's linguistic kaleidoscope exuded both charm and complications. The main secular tongues of German, Polish, Ruthenian and Yiddish were accompanied by the sacred languages of Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Old Armenian and Hebrew.\n\nIn Galicia's early days, German was less developed as a governmental and literary medium than Polish. (It was only starting to develop in those roles in Prussia.) As a result, the Habsburg bureaucrats of Lemberg cultivated a highly stilted and artificial style of their own. Galician Polish, too, was relatively archaic. The nobles held forth in forms filled with third-person titles, rhetorical flourishes and elaborate courtesies. The peasants used the second-person form, and were given to rural idioms, popular proverbs and down-to-earth vocabulary. Ruthenian, that is, Galician _ruski_ , which would be classified nowadays as Old West Ukrainian, was the language of illiterate serfs and their descendants, and of the Greek Catholic clergy who served them; it shared many of the characteristics of White Ruthenian _ruski_ in the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania (see p. 243). Its vocabulary had been subjected to a tidal wave of Polonisms, and its orthography long wavered between the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabets. In the mountain districts, it fragmented into numerous local dialects.\n\nHistorically, the native language of Galicia's Jews was Yiddish; they prayed and studied in Hebrew. As the nineteenth century wore on, however, the trend towards assimilation in secular matters led to the widespread adoption either of German or, especially in Krak\u00f3w, of Polish. Jews in the country towns also needed to understand the language of the surrounding peasantry. Trilingualism or quadrilingualism was not uncommon.\n\nThe depth of the cultural gulf which separated town from country, and class from class, can be gleaned from the exceptional memoirs of Jan S\u0142omka, that is, 'Jack Straw' (1848\u20131929), who was born in a village near D\u0119bica in western Galicia in the last year of serfdom. As an illiterate farmboy, he writes, he had no conception of being Polish. The peasants of his district called themselves 'Mazury', having migrated from further north in Mazovia many generations earlier. The label of 'Pole' was reserved for nobles. Only when he learned to read and write in his twenties did he realize that he belonged to the same Polish nation as Prince Sapieha or Adam Mickiewicz.\n\nGalicia's linguistic diversity was nicely demonstrated in the singing of the imperial anthem, which was adopted in 1795 with words by Lorenz Leopold Haschka and melody by Joseph Haydn:\n\n> _Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser,_\n> \n> _Unsern guten Kaiser Franz,_\n> \n> _Hoch als Herrscher, hoch als Weiser,_\n> \n> _Steht er in des Ruhmes Glanz..._ 27\n\n(The music was to be adopted later by the German Empire, and sung to ' _Deutschland, Deutschland \u00fcber alles_ '.) After 1848, however, the practice spread whereby the anthem could be sung by each of the emperor's subjects in their own language. In Galicia, the Polish version competed mainly with Ruthenian:\n\n_Bo\u017ce wspieraj, Bo\u017ce ochro\u0144_ | _Bozhe, budy pokrovytel\u00b4_  \n---|---  \n_Nam Cesarza i nasz kraj_ , | _Cisariuh, Ieho kraiam!_  \n_Tarcz\u0105 wiary rz\u0105dy os\u0142o\u0144_ | _Kripkyj viroiu pravyte\u0142\u00b4_  \n_Pa\u0144stwu Jego si\u0142\u0119 daj_. | _Mudro nai provodyt\u0142 nam!_\n\n('God assist and God protect \/ our Emperor and our land! \/ Guard his rule with the shield of faith \/ and hold his state in Thy hand! _'_ ) The text was also available in Yiddish and Hebrew, and if necessary in Friulian.\n\nBy the turn of the century, each of the Empire's nationalities was singing their own national anthem alongside, or even in place of the imperial one. The Poles of Galicia did not favour D\u0105browski's ' _Mazurek_ ' or the ' _Warszawianka_ ' that were popular across the Russian frontier. Instead, they preferred the lugubrious choral hymn composed by Kornel Ujejski in shock from the Galician _Rabacja_ :\n\n> _Z dymem po\u017car\u00f3w, z kurzem krwi bratniej_\n> \n> _Do Ciebie, Panie, bije ten g\u0142os..._\n> \n> Through fiery smoke, through brothers' blood and ashes,\n> \n> To Thee, O Lord, our fearful prayers ring out\n> \n> In terrible lamentation, like the Last Shout.\n> \n> Our hair grows grey from these entreaties.\n> \n> Our songs are filled with sorrow's invocation.\n> \n> Our brows are pierced by crowns of rooted thorn.\n> \n> Our outstretched hands are raised in supplication,\n> \n> Like monuments to Thy wrath, eternally forlorn.\n\nThe Ruthenians, for their part, adopted a song that was first printed in Lemberg in 1863. Appropriately composed by a lyricist from Kiev and a musical cleric from Peremyshl, it embodied the spiritual link between the Ukrainian national movement in the Russian Empire and the Ruthenians of Galicia, and was destined to become the national anthem of Ukraine. Its first line parodied the first line of D\u0105browski's ' _Mazurek_ ': 'Poland has not perished yet'. The pro-Ukrainian Ruthenians sang ' _Shche ne vmerla Ukraina_ ', 'So far Ukraine has not perished'.\n\nThe Zionist anthem ' _Hatikvah_ ', though rarely heard in conservative Galicia, was predictably composed by a Galician Jew.\n\nGalicia's religious culture was traditional, compartmentalized and very demanding. It was designed for people who craved guidance and solace in hard, uncertain lives and who rarely questioned either the strict observances or the unbending authority of their religious leaders. Piety both in public and in private marked a way of life accepted by Christians and Jews alike.\n\nThe main branches of the Catholic faith, Roman and Greek, operated throughout the kingdom. The Roman Catholic Church was closely associated both with the Habsburg establishment and with the Polish community. In western Galicia it provided the religion of all classes: in the east, of the gentry.\n\nThe Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church, in contrast, served a Ruthenian community that was only slowly emerging from serfdom and from cultural isolation. It had retained the liturgy of its Byzantine roots, while adhering to the principle of papal supremacy. Being viewed with intense hostility by the Russian Orthodox Church across the eastern frontier, it blended well with Austria's anti-Russian political stance. Its most outstanding hierarch was Andrei Sheptytskyi (Andrzej Szeptycki, 1865\u20131944), metropolitan of Lemberg-Halich, who was cousin to a Roman Catholic general and nephew to the dramatist Alexander Fredro. Scion of a leading landed family and a graduate of the Jagiellonian University, he chose a Ruthenian and Uniate identity of his own free will, and became the true shepherd of his flock, both politically and spiritually. In the Second World War he was one of the few churchmen to dare to denounce Nazi crimes from the pulpit.\n\nThe Russian Orthodox Church, despite (or perhaps because of) its dogged attempts to recruit Slav Christians, was not well viewed in Galicia. The so-called 'Russophiles' in the central Carpathian area were the only substantial group to embrace it. The old-established Armenian Church served a community of merchants and exiles who had fled Ottoman rule, and whose adherents were thoroughly Polonized in everyday life. But their cathedral in Lemberg preserved the rites and language of Christianity's oldest denomination.\n\nThe Protestants of Galicia were fish in the wrong sort of water. They were either German Lutherans, who had settled in a number of rural colonies, or Polish Evangelicals, who had spilled over the border from Austrian Silesia (where the Catholics were Czech and the Protestants Polish). They were strong in Lemberg, in Stanis\u0142aw\u00f3w and in Bia\u0142a.\n\nAs defined by religious practice, the Jews formed over 10 per cent of Galicia's population and were often an absolute majority in particular localities. Yet traditional Orthodox Judaism was strongly challenged by the rise of the Hassidic sects, who had started to proliferate in the late eighteenth century. The Hassids, or Chassids, meaning the 'Pious', rejected the rabbis and their teaching of the Talmud. They observed their own strict rules of dress and diet, and lived in separate communes, each headed by its _zaddik_ or 'guru'. Their emphasis lay on the mystical aspects of religion, on the practice of Cabbala and on their rapturous singing and dancing. They were especially resistant to assimilation and modernity, and increasingly set the tone for the _Galizianer_ , the stereotypical 'Galician Jew'. The Karaites, who also shunned Judaic Orthodoxy, were another minority within the minority.\n\nMonasteries had long been a feature of the Galician landscape, and they suited the kingdom's conservative ethos. Many of the dissolutions enacted by Joseph II, therefore, were reversed; many ancient foundations, Roman Catholic and Uniate, continued to flourish. Here and there \u2013 in the Benedictine ruins of Tyniec near Krak\u00f3w, or of the former Basilian cloister at Trembowla \u2013 there were reminders of hostile secular forces. But they were exceptions. The approaches to Krak\u00f3w continued to be dominated by the towers of the Camaldulensian monastery at Bielany, and by the imposing battlements of the Salvator convent.\n\nAll denominations made public displays of their piety. Galician life was punctuated by a great variety of saints' days, processions and pilgrimages. The Cracovian Feast of St Stanis\u0142aw was celebrated in May with great pomp, while the Corpus Christi parade in June attracted still greater crowds. The annual pilgrimage in August to the Franciscan cloister at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska in west Galicia was attended by tens of thousands of peasants who dressed up in their finest clothes to camp out in the vicinity for days. (It was a central event in the peasants' marriage market.)\n\nThe Jews, too, had their pilgrimages. At Passover in the spring or at Yom Kippur in the autumn visitors would congregate round prominent synagogues or at the homes of 'miracle-working' _zaddiks_. Belz and Husiatyn were two of many favourite destinations.\n\nAmong the Catholics, the cult of the Virgin Mary was widely practised. Many Polish pilgrims headed across the frontier to Cz\u0119stochowa, to the shrine of the Black Madonna, who had long been revered as 'Queen of Poland'. Attempts by the Austrian authorities to declare her 'Queen of Galicia and Lodomeria' did not meet with much success.\n\nGalicia's secular culture has to be divided into two parts: the folk culture of the peasant majority, which was rooted in immemorial customs; and the more intellectual activities of educated circles, which were the product of growing European interchanges in science and the arts.\n\nDespite the age of its roots, Galician folk-culture cannot be regarded as static. After the abolition of serfdom, the speech, the costumes, the music, the legends, the songs and dances and the everyday practices of various regions all became badges of pride for the newly liberated rural class, and were standardized and formalized in new ways. They also attracted the attention of early ethnographers. Franti\u0161ek \u0158eho\u0159 (1857\u201399) was a Czech who was taken in his boyhood to a farm near Lemberg, and who spent a lifetime recording Ruthenian folklore. Semyon Ansky (1863\u20131920) was a Jewish socialist who made a now classic study of Galician Jewry during the First World War. Stanis\u0142aw Vincenz (1888\u20131971) was a Pole born in Hutsul country who was to spend most of his life in exile. His famous analysis of Hutsul culture, _Na Wysokiej Po\u0142oninie_ , 'On the High Pasture', was not published until the world of his youth had been destroyed.\n\nEducation, of course, was the key to social advancement. But, despite many improvements, it remained the preserve of relatively few beneficiaries. Generally speaking, Jews who learned to read and write as a religious duty were better served than Christians, and enjoyed a distinct headstart on the route into the professions, commerce and the arts. In the early nineteenth century the provision of primary schools, largely by the Churches, was woefully inadequate. After the reign of Joseph II the Austrian state was interested in little other than the training of its German-speaking bureaucracy. From the 1860s onwards, however, important changes were made. First, though elementary education was never compulsory, the number of schools multiplied greatly. Secondly, both the secondary schools and the universities were largely taken over by Polish educators. By 1914 Galicia possessed sixty-one Polish _gymnasia_ or grammar schools, but only six Ruthenian ones. The Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, the University of Lemberg and the Lemberg _Politechnika_ were all Polish institutions.\n\nFor obvious reasons, historians rose to special prominence. Everyone wanted to know how the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had been destroyed, and why Galicia had been created. The Sta\u0144czyk Group of historians in Krak\u00f3w \u2013 so named after a mordant royal jester \u2013 held that the Polish nation had no one to blame for its misfortunes but itself. Count-Professor Stanis\u0142aw Tarnowski (1837\u20131917) was a central figure in the group. Alexander Br\u00fcckner (1856\u20131939), professor of Slavic History and Philology at Berlin, was also, despite his name, a Galician Pole. Professor Szymon Azkenazy (1866\u20131935), a specialist in diplomatic history, contested the Sta\u0144czyks' 'pessimism'. It was entirely fitting that one of the last governors of Galicia, Professor Micha\u0142 Bobrzy\u0144ski (1849\u20131935), was a popular Cracovian medievalist.\n\nYet no one was more influential in the long run than Mikhail Hrushevsky (1866\u20131934), the founding father of Ukrainian history. Though employed in St Petersburg, Hrushevsky could only publish freely in Lemberg, and his _Traditional Scheme of Russian History_ (1904) demolished the widespread Russocentric myth that Moscow and its successors had been the sole legitimate heirs of Kievan Rus\u00b4. Meir Ba\u0142aban (1877\u20131942), a graduate of Lemberg, wrote a series of groundbreaking works on the Jews of Krak\u00f3w, Lemberg and Lublin, thereby earning the reputation as the pioneer of modern Polish-Jewish history.\n\nLiterature, too, blossomed in Galicia, partly because many foreign writers chose to live there. Thanks to the rise of national languages, Polish, Ruthenian and Jewish letters flourished in parallel. Among Galicia's native sons, the poet Wincenty Pol (1807\u201372), offspring of an Austrian family in New Galicia, took brilliantly to the local Polish idiom. Count Alexander Fredro (1793\u20131876), whose estate lay at Suroch\u00f3w near Jaros\u0142aw, is best characterized as the father of Galician comedy. Kazimierz Tetmayer (1865\u20131940) was the principal promoter of the 'Tatra Legend' and of associated regional culture, and the patron of Zakopane as a literary centre. Elements of the legend included a romantic cult of the high mountains, tales of freedom-loving heroes (especially of Janosik, the 'Robin Hood' of the Tatras), and a movement for stylized regional architecture and design.\n\nAn eclectic group of artists and writers calling themselves _M\u0142oda Polska_ , 'Young Poland', made their name around the turn of the century. By far the most significant figure among them was the Cracovian Stanis\u0142aw Wyspia\u0144ski (1869\u20131907) \u2013 poet, dramatist, painter, architect, designer and professor of Fine Arts. His play _Wesele_ (1901), 'The Wedding Feast', bristling both with historical references and contemporary issues, is a dramatic masterpiece. _Wesele_ was inspired by a real event \u2013 the marriage in the village of Bronowice near Krak\u00f3w of a young university lecturer and a peasant girl. The Cracovian snobs no doubt viewed the event as a social _m\u00e9salliance_. But Wyspia\u0144ski saw it as an allegory of reconciliation leading to national unity. In the play's final scene, a little girl is brought forward and asked to put her hand on her heart: 'Something is throbbing,' she says.\n\n> \u2014 'And do you know what it is?'\n> \n> \u2014 'It's my heart.'\n> \n> \u2014 'Yes, and that's what Poland is!'\n\nWyspia\u0144ski would be counted among the highest pantheon of Polish writers.\n\nAmong the many exiles who moved to Galicia, Jan Kasprowicz (1860\u20131926) won perhaps the greatest reputation. The child of illiterate parents, he had fled Prussia, but so educated himself that he translated Dante, Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky into Polish. He worked for thirty years in Lemberg, before retiring to his _Harenda_ at Poronin near Zakopane.\n\nThe Ruthenian literary movement, which started virtually from scratch in the 1830s, had a multitude of obstacles to overcome. The _Rusalka Dnistrovaia_ , the very first joint publication of three writers calling themselves the 'Ruthenian Triad', was composed in Lemberg in 1837, but for fear of the state censorship was published in Budapest; it was not until 1848 that activists were successful in asserting the right of Ruthenian\/Ukrainian to be officially regarded as a distinct language. Henceforth, the 'Ukrainian Awakening' would proceed in parallel in Austrian Galicia and in Russian-ruled Ukraine. Its most important member, Ivan Franko (1856\u20131916), enjoyed little esteem during his lifetime. He was the orphaned son of a blacksmith from a village near Drohobych, an active non-Marxist socialist, a powerful prose writer, and an academic. After his death, he came to be seen alongside the poet Taras Shevchenko as one of the fathers of modern Ukrainian literature; the university from which he was expelled would later be given his name. In Galician times he made a major contribution to the cultural advance of his national community by translating the classics of European literature, including works by Dante, Shakespeare, Byron, Hugo and Goethe.\n\nVasyl Stefanyk (1871\u20131936) was an accomplished writer of Ruthenian short stories. Born in Pokutia, East Galicia, he studied medicine in Krak\u00f3w and became acquainted with members of the _M\u0142oda Polska_ group. His chosen theme was the travails of emigration. One of the stories, ' _Kaminnyi Khrest_ ', 'The Stone Cross' (1900), was turned into an early film; a monument to its real-life hero, who died in Canada in 1911, was raised in Hilliard, Alberta.\n\nGalicians often used German as a literary medium, either because they had gone off to study in Austria or because they sought to address a wider European public. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836\u201395) fitted both criteria. He was the son of the police director of Lemberg, and was not a native German-speaker. But on returning from studies in Graz he made his name in the 1860s as a writer of short stories inspired by Polish, Jewish and Ruthenian folklore. His trademark work, however, _Venus in Pelz_ ('Venus in Furs', 1869), explored his sexual proclivities, and gave rise to the psychiatric term 'masochism'.\n\nJewish writers plied their craft in German, Polish, Yiddish or Hebrew according to circumstance. The leading literary critic Wilhelm Feldman (1866\u20131919), for example, born in Zbara\u017c, educated in Berlin and resident in Krak\u00f3w, mainly chose Polish. Mordechai Gebirtig (1877\u20131942), poet and song-writer, is celebrated as Krak\u00f3w's 'Last Yiddish Bard'. His song, ' _S' Brent_ ', 'Our little town is burning', has become a Jewish standard. His 'Farewell to Krak\u00f3w' can be taken as a lament for the lost world of Galician Jewry:\n\n> _Blayb gezunt mir, Kroke!_\n> \n> _Blayb zhe mir gezunt_.\n> \n> _S'vart di fur geshpant shayn fur mayn hoyz_\n> \n> _S'traybt der wild soyne_ ,\n> \n> _Vi m'traybt a hunt_ ,\n> \n> _Mit akhzoriyes mikh fun dir aroys_.\n\n('Farewell for me, my Krak\u00f3w! \/ Farewell, my country. \/ The harnessed cart is waiting outside. \/ The wild enemy \/ is driving me out like a dog \/ to destinies unknown.')\n\nSooner or later, all attempts to describe Galicia's qualities and characteristics reach the subject of humour. Galicians tended to be both sardonic \u2013 since they had little faith in their ability to change anything \u2013 and, as a way of softening the blow, addicted to jokes. A famous story, told by Galicians about the Galician Front in 1914, says it all. A German officer reports: 'The situation is serious, but not hopeless.' An Austrian officer retorts: 'No, it's hopeless, but not serious.'\n\nMany of the jokes centred on the long-lived Emperor Franz-Joseph. In the winter of 1851, when he visited the Jagiellonian University, the professors were told that they must stand when the emperor was standing, and sit when the emperor was seated. Outside the venerated _Collegium Maius_ , the emperor slipped on the icy cobblestones and fell flat on his face. All the professors immediately flung themselves headlong onto the ice. On another occasion, the emperor lost his way when hunting in the mountains, taking refuge after nightfall in a remote tavern. The emperor knocks on the bolted door. 'Who's there?' the innkeeper calls. 'We are,' comes the reply. 'And who, for God's sake, are _We_?' 'We, by God's Grace,' the visitor recites, 'are His Royal and Imperial Majesty, the Apostolic King of Jerusalem, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, Dalmatia, Croatia, Slovenia, Galicia and Lodomeria...' 'In that case,' the innkeeper relents, 'come in, but by God's grace, will We please wipe Our boots.'\n\nTrue to his ascetic lifestyle, whereby he wore the same old army jacket for decades, Franz-Joseph was said to allow himself only one mistress. Anna Nakowska, wife of a Galician railway official, claimed to have made numerous discreet visits to the Hofburg in the 1870s. She reportedly benefited from discounted railway fares, and her husband from regular promotions. But she was not alone, being superseded in the emperor's affections by his long-term companion, the actress Katharina Schratt. In 1880, during the emperor's second visit to Galicia, the station at Bochnia was decorated with a banner bearing the imperial motto, ' _Viribus Unitis_ '. The workmen responsible did not notice that the banner was hanging directly over the station conveniences. The combined message read: 'Strength in Union: Ladies and Gentlemen'.\n\nIn 1915 an Austrian officer of Polish descent was overheard deriding his emperor as a ' _stary pierdola_ '. In the ensuing court martial, three professors of the Jagiellonian University solemnly testified that the offending expression could indeed be construed as 'Old Fart'. On the other hand, they asserted, it was also an archaic form of endearment meaning 'Fine elderly gentleman'. About the same time, a Russian revolutionary was stopped on the frontier. A police officer asks him: 'For what purpose do you intend to visit Galicia?' 'My purpose is to support the international struggle of the Working Class against Capitalism!' 'In that case,' says the officer, 'since no one here does much work, and we don't have any money, please come in.'\n\nJokes and gossip are excellent subjects for dividing historians. The purists say, correctly, that they cannot be verified. The realists maintain, with equal correctness, that they provide vital insights into the tenor of everyday life.\n\nFor the first century of its existence, Galicia's government was entirely centralized. The emperor and his ministers in Vienna ruled through governors resident in Lemberg. Politics, such as it was, consisted of delivering petitions to the governor, or, for influential aristocrats, of seeking the emperor's ear at court. From 1772 to 1848, every single name on the list of governors or 'governors-general' \u2013 eighteen in total, from Graf Anton von Pergen to Freiherr Wilhelm von Hammerstein \u2013 was an Austrian German.\n\nIn 1848, during the 'Springtime of Nations', Galicia played a minor part in the Europe-wide disturbances, and Galician delegates attended the Slav Congress in Prague. The Congress assisted in the recognition of Ukrainian identity despite Russian protests, while discovering that the Poles and pan-Slavism do not mix. Little could be achieved beyond the talking. Imperial forces were on hand to bombard first Lemberg and then Krak\u00f3w into obedience. Nonetheless, the consequences were far-reaching. A lively Galician delegation had lobbied the emperor in Vienna for the abolition of serfdom, and at home a rash of political organizations formed to channel the growing demands for representation. A strong body of the emperor's Galician advisers were convinced that constitutional reform was unavoidable. Among them was Count Agenor Go\u0142uchowski, a native Galician who went on to serve several terms as governor from the 1850s to the 1870s.\n\nTwo new organizations with lasting influence were both Ruthenian in orientation. The Supreme Ruthenian Council ( _Holovna Ruska Rada_ , HRR) set out not just to gain influence with the Austrian government, but also to prevent the Poles from gaining a monopoly on language and educational issues. It rapidly mobilized a network of local councils, which were to be the foundation of the future Ruthenian\/Ukrainian movement. The Ruthenian Congress ( _Ruskyi Sobor_ ), in contrast, was set up by conservative landowners in order to counter the HRR's more radical aspirations. Between them, these two organizations would ensure that the Galician Poles would not henceforth have everything their own way.\n\nAfter the 'Springtime of Nations', Polish leaders headed by Go\u0142uchowski pressed for provincial autonomy in the name of political restraint. They were effectively telling Vienna that if put in charge, they would keep the lid on radicalism. At the same time, a group calling themselves the 'Podolians' followed the example of Prince Lev Sapieha and emphasized charitable works and social relief. Perhaps as a result, compared to the situation in Russian-ruled Poland, Polish national sentiment in Galicia was relatively subdued. In 1863\u20134, when the January Rising was raging over the border (see pp. 295\u2013, active support for the insurrectionaries was limited.\n\nGalicia was finally granted autonomy in 1871 following the transformation of the Empire into the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy four years earlier. Galicia was to enjoy less self-government than Hungary but more than other imperial provinces. There was to be a _Sejm_ with three chambers; a separate Ministry of Galician Affairs in Vienna; and the governors were given the title of _namiestnik_ or 'viceroy'. Polish was to be the principal language of administration and education. Conservative landowners were left in a dominant position, and the more assertive Poles began to think of the kingdom as the 'Piedmont' of a reunited Poland, that it might mirror Piedmont's role in Italy's Risorgimento. Ruthenians and Jews felt increasingly excluded. Between 1871 and 1915, every viceroy, every minister of Galician affairs and every marshal of the Galician Diet, was Polish. The Galician Diet, also dominated by Poles, was notorious for long-winded speech-making and for lack of effective action. The Polish expression of ' _austriackie gadanie_ ', literally 'Austrian babbling', possesses similar connotations to English phrases such as 'hot air' or 'prattle'.\n\nNonetheless, social and political conditions in Galicia were conducive to nationalist ideas gaining most ground among the Ruthenians. One group, the 'Old Ruthenians', gathered in the parish halls of Uniate churches. A second, the Kachkovskyi Society, named after its founder, was suspected of Russophile tendencies. A third, the _Narodovtsy_ or 'Populists', gradually won the support of a clear majority. Backed by the educational Prosvita Society, they made a telling symbolic step when they established their headquarters in the Lubomirsky Palace, formerly the governor's residence. They too thought of Galicia as being like Piedmont \u2013 but of a future Ukrainian state.\n\nBy 1907, democratic institutions had been introduced throughout the Empire. Male suffrage, which had already functioned for several years, was replaced by universal suffrage for elections to the imperial _Reichsrat_ in Vienna, where Galician deputies took their places alongside Germans, Czechs, Slovenes, Bukovinians and many others. Nationalists of many hues mingled alongside conservatives, socialists and the first Zionists. In 1908 Galicia sent the largest of all delegations, some on horseback, others on foot, and all in brilliant costumes, to the emperor's diamond jubilee celebrations.\n\nYet in that same year, the viceroy of Galicia was murdered in Lemberg by a Ukrainian extremist. The assassination made it to the front page of the _New York Times_ :\n\n> STUDENT MURDERS GOVERNOR OF GALICIA\n> \n> Count Andreas Potocki Victim of Bitter Enmity between Ruthenians and Poles\n> \n> SHOT WHILE GIVING AN AUDIENCE\n> \n> Poles crying for vengeance \u2013 Great Excitement at Lemberg\n\nFive years later, on the eve of the First World War, another political bombshell exploded. Austrian counter-intelligence agents checking suspicious parcels of money in Vienna's main post office, uncovered a traitorous liaison between the former chief of their military intelligence service and the Russian government. Colonel Alfred Redl (1864\u20131913), born in Lemberg, part Jewish and part Ukrainian, had been a brilliant officer. But he was also homosexual, and vulnerable to blackmail. Over a decade, he is thought to have supplied the Russians with the Austro-Hungarian masterplan for war against Serbia and details of all the main fortifications in Galicia. When he shot himself in disgrace, the emperor was said to be most upset by the bad example of an officer dying in mortal sin.\n\nBy the turn of the century, therefore, several social and political chasms were opening up in Galicia. The aristocrats had been joined in the wealthiest sector of society by a small but very affluent bourgeois class, frequently Jewish, while the Polish Socialist Party (PPS) was mobilizing support among a small but militant working class, especially in the oilfield. A sturdy Polish Peasant Movement (PSL), markedly anti-clerical and undeferential, was courting a large constituency. Poor Jews and still poorer peasants were emigrating in droves. Above all, rival nationalist movements were eyeing each other with deepening suspicion. Galicia had little to offer to those demanding 'Poland for the Poles', 'Ukraine for Ukrainians' or 'Zion for the Jews'.\n\nNowhere could these divisions be seen more clearly than in Krynica, a small spa town nestling in the hills 60 miles south-east of Krak\u00f3w. Mineral springs had been discovered there and a fine Renaissance-style pump-house had been built in the 1890s beneath the pine-clad slopes. Railway lines connected Krynica-Muszyna both with Krak\u00f3w and with Budapest. Rich clients, many Jewish and many from Russia and Hungary, came to take the waters, to relax in the mudbaths, to stroll along the elegant Parade and to enjoy the luxurious hotels, villas and restaurants. Elegant Polish ladies showed off the latest Parisian fashions. At the same time, a half-hidden slum of Jewish paupers huddled behind the town hall, and ragged peasants from the surrounding Ruthenian villages drifted into town to seek work as servants or chambermaids, or sometimes to beg. One of them, a deaf-mute Lemko washerwoman, gave birth in 1895 to one of Galicia's most remarkable sons. Epifanyi Drovnyak, like his mother, suffered from a speech impediment, and spent much of his life begging on the Parade. Yet as 'Nikifor' he eventually won recognition as a unique, 'naive' (or stylistically 'primitive') painter. Just as his contemporary L. S. Lowry painted Lancashire cotton mills and matchstick people, Nikifor loved to draw Galician train stations and their passengers.\n\nA couple of hours on the slow local train to the north of Krynica brought one to Bobowa \u2013 an archetypal Jewish _shtetl_ in the middle of verdant Polish countryside. In 1889 the village had burned down. The original inhabitants moved out, and the followers of a Chassid _zaddik_ , Salomon ben Natan Halberstam, moved in. A new _yeshivah_ or Talmudic academy was founded. The old wooden synagogue was rebuilt in stone, and on feast days thousands of Chassidic pilgrims would arrive from far and wide. The owners of the town were the counts D\u0142ugoszowski, refugees from Russian-ruled Poland. In the years before 1914, the son of the family, Boles\u0142aw Wieniawa-D\u0142ugoszowski, was studying in Paris. But he returned home in time to fight with Pi\u0142sudski's Polish Legions during the First World War. His relations with the Jews exemplify the way in which, at their best, different Galician religions and ethnic communities could live beside each other before 1914. Photographs have survived of him in officer's uniform entertaining Salomon Halberstam's son \u2013 the silver-haired, bemedalled general with the smiling, bearded, fur-hatted Chassid.\n\nWhen war broke out in August 1914, everyone knew that Galicia's fate was precarious. It was strategically exposed, and fighting between the Austrian and Russian armies immediately took place on Galician soil. Fear of the 'Russian steamroller' was great: if the tsar's armies were victorious, Galicia would be annexed to Russia. If the Central Powers held firm, almost everyone assumed that Galicia would remain a Habsburg Crownland indefinitely.\n\nMost Galician men who enrolled for military service served in the Imperial and Royal Army. The casualty rate among them was high. A much smaller number, perhaps 30,000, found their way either into J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski's newly formed Polish Legions or into their Ukrainian equivalent, the United Sich Riflemen. Both of these formations grew out of scouting, sporting or paramilitary groups that had come into being in the previous decade. Pi\u0142sudski's men, who belonged to the anti-nationalist branch of Polish patriotic opinion, upholding the country's multi-religious and multi-cultural traditions, contained a strong contingent of Jews. And, like D\u0105browski's men a century earlier, they were fired up by the call to fight for the restoration of Polish independence. They actually started the fighting on the Galician Front on 6 August, when they crossed the Russian frontier near Krak\u00f3w in an act of deliberate bravura. But they soon retreated, and took their place on the frontline alongside all the other formations of the Central Powers. After three years of hard fighting, they were pulled out of the line in preparation for transfer to the Western Front. Having refused to take an oath of allegiance to the German Kaiser, however, they were disbanded. Pi\u0142sudski was imprisoned, his officers interned, and the rank and file redistributed among other units. As a result, they played no further part either in the war or in Galicia's future.\n\nThe Austrian authorities were equally keen to mobilize Ruthenian manpower. A Ukrainian army corps assembled round the Sich Riflemen by drawing on recruits from eastern Galicia. Their ultimate political aims were not clarified, but their eagerness to fight Russia was shared by their Polish counterparts and satisfied Vienna. Since they stayed in the field, they were able to influence events at the war's end.\n\nAt first, Galicia's prospects had looked grim. The Russian steamroller rolled, driven by huge numerical superiority. Lemberg was occupied, and the fortress at Przemy\u015bl was subjected to a five-month siege. The Austrians pulled back. By early December 1914 Cossack patrols were raiding the outskirts of Krak\u00f3w. (One of them was captured at Bierzan\u00f3w, now within the city limits.) But then the line held. In a Christmas counter-offensive, the Austrians recovered almost half the lost ground, retaking most of west Galicia.\n\nIn 1915 the initiative passed to the Central Powers. Having knocked out one of the two Russian army groups in East Prussia, and having established a trench-line deep inside France, the German command felt free to reinforce its hard-pressed Austrian allies. A massive combined operation pushed off in July from the district of Gorlice (adjacent to Krynica) and all resistance was swamped for a couple of hundred miles. The Germans swung north to capture Warsaw. The Austrians reached Lublin, recovering both Przemy\u015bl and Lemberg. The German and Austrian emperors met to agree on the re-creation of a subservient Polish kingdom in Warsaw and Lublin. Galicia breathed again.\n\nThe next year was one of renewed alarms, heightened by the death of Franz-Joseph. General Brusilov launched a fresh Russian offensive. Lemberg changed hands once again, and Przemy\u015bl was subjected to a second siege. This time, however, the Russians drove south over the Carpathians into Hungary. They eventually ran out of steam, and their positions in the winter of 1916\u201317 were not dissimilar to those of two winters previously. War-torn Galicia was holding on. It provided the setting for one of the most celebrated fictional treatments of life on the Eastern Front in _The Adventures of the Good Soldier \u0160vejk_. \u0160vejk's Czech creator, Jaroslav Ha\u0161ek, served in Galicia.\n\nIt was not long before the crash of the cannon was joined by the rumblings of revolution. In the course of 1917 the Russian army fell apart. Mutinous soldiers shot their officers and refused to fight, appealing to the rank and file of their German and Austrian enemies to follow suit. In March the 'February Revolution' overthrew the tsar. In November the Bolsheviks' 'October Revolution' overthrew Russia's provisional government. In consequence, though the fighting raged on in Western Europe, peace was clearly coming to the East. The armies of the Central Powers surged forward, occupying the Baltic provinces, Lithuania, Byelorussia and Ukraine. Both Lithuania and Ukraine declared their independence from Russia, and Lenin, the desperate Bolshevik leader, was forced to sue for peace. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918 was signed at the dictate of Berlin and Vienna. Soviet Russia was forced to resign from huge swathes of territory, and Galicia was reconfirmed as a Habsburg possession.\n\nThe main civilian concerns were now for epidemic diseases and for refugees. Typhoid broke out, followed by the worldwide epidemic of Spanish influenza. Well over a million Galician civilians had been displaced, their sufferings inspiring appeals for international aid.\n\nThe impact of the Bolshevik Revolution on Galicia is difficult to gauge. It may have encouraged the new Emperor Charles to seek a separate peace. Some soldiers, infected by the revolutionary bacillus, threatened to mutiny; most simply demanded to go home. Many of them, while marching off, turned against their imperial rulers less in the name of international revolution than in that of national liberation. Czech and Slovak regiments demanded a Czech-Slovak state; Croats and Slovenes aspired to a new Yugoslavia; Poles talked about a Polish Republic; and Ukrainians about a free Ukraine.\n\nThe ferment came to a head in October 1918. The Central Powers were now falling back in disarray on the Western Front, and the emperors in Berlin and Vienna were facing calls for abdication. In Galicia, the troops of the Royal and Imperial Army, together with Austrian officialdom, were melting away. Officers threw away the keys of their fortresses. Appeals to Vienna went unanswered, and in any case Vienna seemed to be issuing no orders. Krak\u00f3w was left in the hands of the local garrison. Lemberg was handed over to a division of Ukrainian Riflemen. In west Galicia, a Polish Liquidation Committee declared itself guardian of all ex-imperial assets. In east Galicia, a 'West Ukrainian Socialist Republic' was surfacing in parallel to an Austro-German Republic in Vienna. On 11 November the Emperor Charles declared that he was withdrawing from government, and absolved all officials from their oath of office. Unlike the German Kaiser, he did not abdicate but withdrew to his country house at Eckertsau to await developments. After four months, he left for Switzerland, and the Empire just petered out. Ironically, since the emperor had also been king of Galicia and Lodomeria, the helpless kingdom petered out with it. After months of huge confusion, it was joined to the reborn Polish Republic, whose head of state, freshly released from his German prison, was J\u00f3zef Pi\u0142sudski.\n\nGalicia's afterlife lasted at the most for one generation. The kingdom itself was never restored, but the multinational community which it had fostered lived on under a succession of political regimes and was not definitively broken up until the Second World War. In 1918\u201321, the partition of Galicia led to violent conflicts. The Poles of Lemberg rebelled against the West Ukrainian Republic within a week, drove the Ukrainian troops out by their own efforts, and then, calling on military assistance from central Poland, freed the whole of Galicia from Ukrainian control. They then embarked on a political campaign to ensure that all of the former Galicia be awarded to the Polish Republic. At the same time, the territory became embroiled in a wider war between Poland and the Soviet Republics. In spring a 1920 it provided the base for Pi\u0142sudski's march on Kiev in the company of his allied Ukrainian armies. That summer, it was the scene of a Bolshevik invasion, headed by the fearsome _Konarmiya_ of 'Red Cossacks'. In the autumn, following Poland's decisive victory over the Red Army at Warsaw, it returned in its entirety to Polish rule.\n\nIn the 1920s and 1930s, reunited and forming a composite part of inter-war Poland, the former Galicia enjoyed a brief period of respite. West Galicia, centred on Krak\u00f3w, returned to its historical name of Ma\u0142opolska. East Galicia\/West Ukraine, centred on Lemberg (now Lw\u00f3w), was given the unhistorical name of 'Eastern Little Poland'. As in late Austrian times, the Poles held the reins of power. Administration and education were strongly Polonized, and for the first time illiteracy was largely abolished. In several easterly districts, substantial numbers of Polish settlers, usually war veterans from 1920, were given grants of land to strengthen the border areas. Loyalty was maintained by a relatively benign regime, by a strong military presence, and by fear of the neighbouring Soviet republics, where political, social and economic conditions were infinitely more oppressive. Refugees reaching the former Galicia from Lenin's 'Red Terror', from Stalin's forced collectivization or from the Ukrainian Famine of 1932\u20133 left little doubt in people's minds about the horrors of the 'Soviet paradise'.\n\nThe problems encountered by Galicia's non-Polish minorities, which were to be a favourite topic of Communist propaganda in the decades that followed, have often been exaggerated. The Jews did encounter a certain measure of discrimination, especially during the Polish\u2013Soviet War. But stories of widespread pogroms, though oft repeated, were dismissed by successive international inquiries. The notorious 'Lemberger Pogrom' of November 1918 turned out to be a military massacre in which three-quarters of the victims were Christian. The Ruthenians\/Ukrainians, too, encountered painful episodes. Rural poverty continued to afflict the villages of so-called 'Polska B', that is, the poorer, eastern part of inter-war Poland. Though the constitution guaranteed the equality of all citizens, Ukrainian language and culture were never put on an equal footing with Polish. In 1931 a rural strike was countered by brutal pacifications from the Polish military; in 1934 the murder by Ukrainian terrorists of the Galician-born minister of the interior, Bronis\u0142aw Pieracki, provoked harsh repressions. Even so, none of these ordeals bore any resemblance either to the atrocities in progress across the Soviet border or to the catastrophes that were about to strike.\n\nEx-Galicians who became prominent after 1918 were legion. They included Wincenty Witos, peasant politician and premier; Stefan Banach, mathematician; Karel Sobelsohn, 'Radek', Bolshevik; Leopold Weiss (Muhammad Asad), Muslim convert; Micha\u0142 Bobrzy\u0144ski, historian; Martin Buber, philosopher; Joseph Retinger, a 'Father of Europe'; Omelian Pritsak, Harvard orientalist; Joseph Roth, Austrian writer; Bruno Schulz, Polish writer and artist; S. Y. Agnon, Israeli novelist; W\u0142adys\u0142aw Sikorski, general and politician; Archduke Albrecht von Habsburg, Polish officer; Rudolf Weigl, microbiologist; Ludwig von Mises, economist; Stepan Bandera, Ukrainian nationalist; and Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi-hunter.\n\nSpace permits only one of these diverse figures to be described. The highly eccentric career of Leopold Weiss (1900\u201392) was prompted by circumstances that were fairly common among educated Galicians. Weiss was born in Lemberg to a family of liberal Jewish professionals, who took religious tolerance for granted. His father, the son and grandson of rabbis, had broken with tradition to become a lawyer; and, though the young Leopold's parents gave him a standard Talmudic education, they took great care not to press religious views on him. The result, he said, was a feeling that they lacked any real conviction. Hence, when he arrived in Palestine in the 1920s he parted company with his Zionist colleagues from Galicia, made friends with Arabs, converted to Islam, and took the name of Muhammad Asad. He was the author of _The Message of the Qur'an_ (1964), one of the best-known introductions to Islamic teaching for foreigners. After living for a time in Saudi Arabia and befriending King Saud, he married a Saudi wife, and moved to British India, eventually serving as Pakistan's first ambassador to the United Nations. In 1939 he was arrested by the British as an enemy alien. His parents, who had stayed in Lemberg, perished in the Holocaust.\n\nIn 1939\u201345 the former Galicia belonged to the slice of Europe which suffered greater human losses than anywhere in previous European history. The Polish Republic was destroyed in four weeks in September 1939 by the collusion of Hitler's Wehrmacht with Stalin's Red Army. By the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact of 28 September, the land and people of the defunct Republic were divided between German and Soviet zones of occupation. The southernmost stretch of the dividing line ran along the River San (along the old border between west and east Galicia). Then the killings and deportations began. In the German zone, Krak\u00f3w, renamed Krakau, was made the capital of the SS-ruled General Government; O\u015bwi\u0119cim, renamed Auschwitz, saw the installation of the Nazis' largest concentration camp. In the Soviet zone, Lemberg (now Lvov) became the headquarters of a brutal Communist regime enforcing Stalinist norms. Up to a million people \u2013 Poles, Ukrainians and Jews \u2013 were condemned either to the Soviet concentration camps of the Gulag, or to exile in the depths of Siberia or of Central Asia.\n\nIn the middle years of the war, 1941\u20134, following Hitler's reneging on the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact and 'Operation Barbarossa', the area of German occupation was extended far to the east. East Galicia, now _Distrikt Galizien_ , was added to the General Government, and Nazi policies for reconstructing the racial composition of their _Lebensraum_ swung into action. Virtually all Galician Jews were murdered, either shot in cold blood or transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz or Sobibor. Slightly later, part of the Ukrainian underground launched a programme of ethnic cleansing in which hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered. The Waffen-SS raised only one division of Ukrainian volunteers in the former Galicia, the XIV Waffen-SS _Galizien_ , exclusively for military duties against the Soviet Union; two or three Waffen-SS divisions were typically raised in each of many other occupied countries, such as Belgium, the Netherlands and Hungary. On the other side, scores of Ukrainian divisions fought in the Red Army. The clandestine Ukrainian Insurrectionary Army (UPA) duly launched a desperate campaign to defend its homeland simultaneously against both Hitler and Stalin. They, their dependants and their sympathizers were annihilated.\n\nIn 1944\u20135 the Red Army returned with a vengeance. The Stalinist authorities were determined to uphold the frontier-line agreed with the Nazis in 1939, and hence to perpetuate the division of the former Galicia. What is more, they ruled that the remaining Polish population was to be concentrated to the west of the line, and Ukrainians to the east. Vast tides of fugitive humanity flowed back and forth. Recalcitrants were driven out of their homes. The Poles of east Galicia\/eastern Ma\u0142opolska\/ _Distrikt Galizien_ , now labelled 'repatriants', were packed onto trains and dispatched from Soviet territory. Almost the entire surviving Polish population of Lemberg was sent to Wroc\u0142aw\/Breslau, the capital of Silesia, where it replaced the expelled German citizenry. This was social engineering on an unprecedented scale.\n\nThe districts adjoining the new Polish\u2013Soviet frontier were hit particularly hard. One example must suffice. Ustrzyki Dolne lay on the bank of the River San. Its multinational Galician make-up had stayed intact till 1939. A Jewish majority predominated in the town, though there were also some Poles and a few Ruthenians. One of its prominent Jewish citizens, Moses Fr\u00e4nkel, had been a long-serving mayor. In the surrounding mountainous countryside, a Ruthenian Lemko peasantry lived alongside an old German rural colony. None of these groups survived the war. The Poles of Ustrzyki were deported en masse by the Soviets in 1939, almost all of them dying from maltreatment or the Siberian cold. The Germans, by Nazi-Soviet agreement, were forcibly sent to the so-called ' _Warthegau_ ' to replace expelled natives.* In 1942 the Jews of Ustrzyki were rounded up by the Wehrmacht, marched to a temporary transit station, and then sent to the extermination camp at Sobib\u00f3r. This only left the Ruthenian Lemkos, who were rounded up and dispersed by the Communist authorities in 1946\u20137 in an act of ethnic cleansing called 'Operation Vistula', launched on the pretext of rooting out the remnants of the wartime Ukrainian underground. By that time, Ustrzyki was a ghost town, emptied of all its pre-war inhabitants. The mountain villages were deserted, the houses had been torched and razed, the orchards had turned wild; the fields, untended, were overgrown. All that remained were a few ruined churches and synagogues, and the vandalized tombstones of the cemeteries. The former east Galicia, forcibly Ukrainianized, now formed part of the Ukrainian SSR. The former west Galicia, artificially Polonized, belonged to the Polish People's Republic. The new Soviet\u2013 Polish frontier reduced contacts to a minimum. The Ustrzyki district was finally restored to Poland by the Soviet Union in 1951.\n\nThe Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria had died in 1918. Thirty years later, the community of ex-Galicians had effectively been broken up and dispersed. Their multinational homeland had been completely ground to pieces. In the end, ex-Galician society fell victim to the two great totalitarian monsters of the twentieth century. But clearly it also harboured elements within its own make-up that could be driven to ugly, murderous violence. Some of its Ruthenians\/Ukrainians had voluntarily joined the Nazi service, and some in the wartime countryside had engaged in Nazi-style crimes against Poles. Some of its Poles and Jews had joined Stalin's cause, and became complicit in Soviet crimes, especially in 1939\u201341. Seventy years after the event, revelations are emerging only now about shameful crimes perpetrated by Polish peasants against fugitive Jews. Observers will be tempted to ask whether the Galicians, if left to their own devices, might not have descended to the sort of intercommunal atrocities that broke out, for example, in Yugoslavia. The question is unhistorical, and the answer can never be known \u2013 though it can be easily asked by people whose country has never been occupied or subjected to the sort of apocalypse which struck the former Galicia.\n\n##### III\n\nMuseums are an established feature of contemporary cultural, social and intellectual life. They are the conscious product of attempts to keep in touch with the past, and sometimes to reconstruct it systematically. Traditionally, they have displayed a strong material emphasis \u2013 on the collection, preservation, analysis and display of historical objects \u2013 and a tendency, perhaps inevitable, to reflect the priorities of their paymasters. Few museums set out to be completely impartial or inclusive, and none succeed in being so.\n\nModern museums have grown from a very long tradition that goes back to ancient Greece. The _Mouseion_ or 'Seat of the Muses' at Alexandria, which housed the famous Library, was the prototype of many later institutions. During the Renaissance a _cabinet de curiosit\u00e9s_ or _Rarit\u00e4tenkammer_ became essential for self-respecting rulers and aristocrats. The collections of Cosimo I de' Medici in Florence and Rudolf II in Prague were unsurpassed. Claims to be Europe's oldest public museum are disputed between the Grimani Collection in Venice (1523), the Ole Worm Collection in Copenhagen (1654) and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (1677). Europe's leading state museums include the Vatican's Capitoline Museum (1734), the British Museum in London (1759), the Prado in Madrid (1784), the Louvre in Paris (1793) and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam (1800). The theory and practice behind museums used to be called museography, but nowadays museology, or museum studies, is more common. Not everyone, though, is impressed. 'A museum', said Pablo Picasso, 'is just a collection of lies.'\n\nThe Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria flourished in an era when state and national museums were becoming a fixture of every major European capital. The complex of Royal Museums in Berlin (see pp. 390\u2013) was particularly imposing. Not to be outdone, Emperor Franz-Joseph opened two grand museums on adjacent sites in Vienna in 1891 to form his own _Museumviertel_ or 'Museum Quarter'. One, the _Kunsthistorisches Museum_ , was devoted to art history; the other, the _Naturhistorisches_ , to natural science. The older Germanic National Museum at Nuremberg, which was launched in 1853 by patrons linked to the movement for German unification, had a consciously national and non-dynastic purpose. So too did the magnificent Sz\u00e9pm\u0171v\u00e9szeti Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (1906). These were the benchmarks to which all Central European museum creators aspired.\n\nGalicia possessed its own more modest array of museums. In Lemberg, the oldest, the Ossolineum, was founded in 1817 by (and named after) a local landowner and literary patron. Its origins and contents were later described in a popular guidebook:\n\n> At Ossoli\u0144ski Street 2, in an extensive park, stands the Ossolineum (The National Ossoli\u0144ski Institute). It consists of two parts: the Library founded by Count Jozef Maksymilian Ossoli\u0144ski... and the Museum initiated in 1823 by a grant from Prince Henryk Lubomirski. The collections are located in a former Carmelite Convent, which was once... a military cookhouse. [Before] 1869... they were subjected to all sorts of governmental interference. The Library consists of 142,000 books, 5,000 manuscripts, 5,300 autographs and 1,700 documents. The Lubomirski Museum... [that merged] in 1870 with the rest of the collections... has since grown enormously.\n\nIn addition to books and documents, the collection contained historical paintings, costumes, coins, flags, armour and assorted militaria. The Dzieduszycki Museum, founded in 1855, was devoted primarily to ornithology and ethnography. Its prize exhibit was a prehistoric hairy rhinoceros unearthed near Stanis\u0142aw\u00f3w. A small Ruthenian exhibition was a distinctly poor relation.\n\nThe twin stars of Krak\u00f3w's museums were the Czartoryski and the _Narodowe_ or 'National'. Set up within a year of each other in 1878\u20139, the former originated in a private aristocratic collection. The latter was launched by a municipal committee determined to display the grandiose canvases of the Polish National School.\n\nPrincess Izabella Czartoryska (1746\u20131835) n\u00e9e Fleming was as rich as she was patriotic as she was debauched. At a juncture when one of her sons was the leading minister of the tsar, she set out to collect everything and anything that would help preserve the memory of the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and much else besides. Her estate at Pu\u0142awy near Lublin had just been incorporated into 'New Galicia', and she created two collections there, one in the Temple of the Sibyl (1801) and the other in the Galician House (1803). Within a few years, however, Pu\u0142awy found itself again under Russian control. Exhibitions of Polish patriotism were not tolerated, and the remnants of the plundered contents were transferred, after many peripatations, to Krak\u00f3w, where in the late nineteenth century visitors could admire them in peace. By then, the husband rather than the wife was being given the credit:\n\n> _The Museum of the Princes Czartoryski_ represents first-class scientific and artistic value... Its origins go back to the end of the XVIII Century, when General Adam Czartoryski... began to collect souvenirs of the past in Pu\u0142awy... After the catastrophe of [the November Rising] in 1831, [important sections] were lost. But others survived in Paris [and elsewhere]... Only _c._ 1880 were they reassembled by Prince W\u0142adys\u0142aw Czartoryski in Krak\u00f3w, in the former Piarist Monastery... The pearls of the collection are a Marble Venus from Naples, the Etruscan Ware, Egyptian antiquities, 12th Century enameled Limoges crosses, 7000 pieces of armour, 4000 coins and medals, 500 paintings and miniatures, 20,000 prints and drawings... and the grand standard of the Russian Tsar captured [in 1610] by [Hetman] \u017b\u00f3\u0142kiewski.\n\nThese Galician museums stayed intact until the Second World War. But in 1939\u201345, state-backed looting was only one of many disasters to befall them. The Czartoryski Museum eventually recovered its Leonardo, _Lady with an Ermine_ , but not its Raphael, _Portrait of a Young Man_. The Ossolineum lost its D\u00fcrers, presumably to Nazi looters, before the institution was broken up by Soviet decree. One half was to remain in L\u2032viv to form part of a purely Ukrainian complex. The other half, including the original manuscript of Mickiewicz's _Pan Tadeusz_ , was to be shipped to Wroc\u0142aw in Silesia, where, following post-war frontier changes, the Polish collection was to be resurrected.\n\nIn the Soviet-run world, however, no museum managers would have dared to celebrate the Galician heritage as such. Their focus lay instead on Communist class themes or on exclusively national stories. Soviet Ukraine cultivated a uniquely hostile vision of the former Galicia. All ills were attributed to Polish class oppression; the oppressors were Poles, and all the oppressed were Ukrainians. Galicia's multinational panorama was equally unwelcome to officials of the post-war Polish People's Republic. Poland's historic link with the eastern part of the kingdom, and with L\u2032viv, was a taboo subject, where numerous blank spots were kept deliberately blank. At the same time, Communist cultural policy recognized the importance of museums as instruments of educational and social control, which ensured they were completely subordinated to ideology and to current political goals.\n\nBy the time the Soviet bloc disintegrated in 1989\u201391, Galicia had been seventy years in the grave. Both the museologists and the public at large had grown accustomed to a highly selective view of the past. Henceforth the Marxist approach was condemned, but nationalist assumptions persisted. Financial resources and new ideas were in short supply. Change came slowly.\n\nGiven that Ukrainian L\u2032viv had spent 145 years as the capital of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, one might expect that the city's museums would devote substantial space to the 'Austrian Period'. Visitors soon discover that the expectation is misplaced. Contemporary L\u2032viv betrays little interest either in Galicia as a whole or in the former realities of 'Lemberg'. Two decades after the fall of Communism, no prominent exhibition in seven main museums addresses Habsburg times. In the L\u2032viv Historical Museum on the central _Rynok_ there is an exhibition on the ancient world, another on the medieval world and a third on 'Literary L\u2032viv in the early 20th Century'. A special department concentrates on everyday life in bygone 'Halichyna'; and there are galleries displaying paintings, jewellery, porcelain, military orders and armour. A permanent exhibition celebrates 'The Struggle of the Ukrainian People for National Independence', but treats Austrian Galicia as just one of successive foreign occupations \u2013 in which 'the people' are assumed to be exclusively Ukrainian. One meets no awareness that 'Halichyna' and 'Galicia' are not quite the same thing.\n\nIn Krak\u00f3w, sometime chief city of western Galicia, one can encounter the same lack of interest. The focus here is Polish as opposed to Ukrainian, but the prevailing myopia is remarkably similar. The Muzeum Narodowe in Krak\u00f3w, housed in the medieval Cloth Hall and splendidly renovated, cultivates the national strand of memory and little else \u2013 just like its counterpart in L\u2032viv. In the main displays and in the principal buildings, the emphasis is on the nineteenth-century school of Polish art; the star exhibits are the colossal canvases, often on historical subjects, by painters such as Matejko, Che\u0142mo\u0144ski or Malczewski. As one enters, one still sees the inscription which announces that this is a shrine to the culture of the Polish nation. A certain indulgence towards late Austrian times when the Polish element had gained the upper hand can be sensed. Even so, the strength of the chosen perspective is striking. It was reinforced during the decades of the People's Republic when officialdom was bent on promoting a sense of national identity among a distressed, displaced and often disaffected population.\n\nA visit to the Czartoryski Museum prompts different thoughts. Paintings and antiquities apart, the exhibits include a remarkable _cabinet de curiosit\u00e9s_. The original intention, one suspects, was to simply impress the multitude, though today's viewers may find themselves wondering whether the identifications of the objects are true or false:\n\n  * The harp of Marie Leszczy\u0144ska, queen of France (1703\u201368).\n  * The violin of her father, Stanis\u0142aw Leszczy\u0144ski, king of Poland.\n  * The silver hat badge of King Stefan Batory (r. 1576\u201386).\n  * The knife and fork of Queen Barbara Radziwi\u0142\u0142 (d. 1551).\n  * Jan Sobieski's camp bed from the Siege of Vienna (1683).\n  * Voltaire's quill.\n  * Rousseau's briefcase.\n  * The Marshal's tipstaff from the Diet of 3 May 1791.\n  * Ko\u015bciuszko's standard (1794).\n\nThe most dramatic exhibit of all, proudly displayed behind plate glass, is a half-gnawed, rock-solid, bright green chunk of mouldy bread. It was allegedly cast aside by the none-too-hungry Napoleon on the morning when he re-crossed the Berezina in December 1812, then picked up and preserved by his hungry but loyal soldiers. Like all holy relics, genuine or fake, it has immense powers of imaginatory stimulation. Above it, there hangs the inscription that once hung over the entrance to the Temple of the Sibyl in Pu\u0142awy. It reads 'PRZESZ\u0141O\u015a\u0106 PRZYSZ\u0141O\u015aCI', 'The Past in the Service of the Future'.\n\nWhose past and whose future? one wonders. Two hundred years ago, the 'Past' for the Czartoryskis was that of the late Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the 'Future' was the happy time when the Commonwealth was going to be restored. The collection was established before the Congress of Vienna dashed all hopes of a restoration, so its conceptual basis has stood still for two centuries. It is no place to learn about Galicia. The museum's planned reorganization, which may return part of the holdings to Pu\u0142awy, clearly offers opportunities for reflection.\n\nMost museologists would recognize here the clutch of problems that centre on the near-universal idea of the 'excluded past'. They struggle to find ways of reintroducing topics that for one reason or another have been neglected or actively suppressed. In the United States, for example, the Native American heritage and the history of slavery long suffered from official denial, and it is only recently that the omissions have been rectified. In Australia, it was the appalling history of the near-extermination of the Aborigines. In Russia, despite the efforts of the Memorial Association, the crimes of the Soviet regime largely escape attention; there is certainly no museum recording the history of its victims. In most countries, including Britain, the histories of women, of children, of the poor, have not been expounded with enthusiasm. In Poland and Ukraine, the successor states to Galicia, a great deal remains to be done if Galicia's memory is not to fall into oblivion.\n\nA step in the right direction was taken in 1995 when a new _Muzeum Galicja_ opened in the Kazimierz district of Krak\u00f3w. It has won many plaudits for its innovatory methods of recovering 'The Traces of Memory'. Its basic collection has been assembled round photographs by the late Chris Schwarz, who travelled far and wide to record 'what could still be recorded of a lost civilisation'. Yet, as its English name indicates, the Galicia Jewish Museum was conceived as a tribute to Jewish life in the former Galicia, not to Galician life as a whole. There are five sections:\n\n  * Jewish Life in Ruins.\n  * Jewish Culture as it once was.\n  * Sites of Massacre and Destruction.\n  * How the Past is being remembered.\n  * People Making Memory.\n\nIn 2008, three additional exhibitions were on view: 'Fighting with Dignity: Jewish Resistance in Krak\u00f3w, 1939\u201345', 'March '68 in the Krak\u00f3w Press', and 'Polish Heroes: those who rescued Jews'. _Muzeum Galicja_ is an admirable antidote both to the effects of the Holocaust and to the lamentable tendency to bypass the age-old Jewish presence, yet it too presents something short of the full story. The fact remains that the sum total of current memory-making leaves much to be desired. The rich, multi-layered legacy of Galicia stays in the shadows. The kingdom 'as it really was' remains at best half-forgotten or half-remembered.\n\nOne ray of hope in this regard may well be found beyond the territory of the former Galicia, in Silesia. Contacts between the Ossolineum Institute, relocated to Wroc\u0142aw in 1946, and its sister institution in L\u2032viv, were all but eliminated. After 1991, however, it reorganized itself as a private foundation, and secured legal ownership of its most important possessions, and now has an explicit mission to bridge the gap between Poland and Ukraine. Rehoused in the former German Gymnasium of St Matthias, and magnificently refurbished, it operates in an environment where international reconciliation is an everyday issue, and where knowledge of Polish-German issues may assist in the handling of Polish-Ukrainian issues. Since German Breslau, like Austrian Galicia, possessed a strong Jewish presence, it may help to reintegrate Jewish memory, too. The Stefanyk Library in L\u2032viv, less accustomed to the new opportunities and more strapped for cash, adapted more slowly, but practical co-operation and a measure of trust are being re-established. New vistas are opening up in the new era of digitization and of exhibition-sharing. In the twenty-first century this L\u2032viv\u2013Wroc\u0142aw axis offers one of the best prospects for resuscitating Galician heritage.\n\nAnother positive development of a completely different type is located in the town of Nowy S\u0105cz, not far from Krynica, where an open-air ethnographic museum admirably illustrates the difficulties of adapting to a new political environment and of recovering comprehensive memories. The exhibits consist mainly of rural buildings, transported from their original sites and carefully reassembled. The most interesting aspect, though, is that in Galician times the surrounding district straddled the divide between predominantly Polish and predominantly Ukrainian settlement; the adjoining township of Stary S\u0105cz was home to a vibrant Jewish community.\n\nWhen the museum was first conceived in the 1960s, the cultural authorities of the Polish People's Republic were eager to promote a strange mixture of Marxist historical materialism and old-fashioned 'Blood and Soil' nationalism. It was judged essential to pretend that the territory of the Republic coincided exactly with Poland's immemorial 'historic lands'. Talk of 'ethnic minorities' was suppressed; all museums were subject to rigorous state censorship; and any deviation risked punishment. It was not possible, for example, to let it be known that the area south-east of Nowy S\u0105cz had been inhabited until recently by people of Ruthenian\/Ukrainian descent. And any hint of the ethnic cleansing undertaken by the Communist regime during 'Operation Vistula' would have been construed as a criminal offence.\n\nIn the museum's early days, therefore, nothing was said directly about Poles, Ukrainians or Jews. Instead, the exhibition space was divided into four sectors, each devoted to one of four 'ethnographic groups' \u2013 _Pog\u00f3rzanie_ (Hill People), _G\u00f3rale_ (Highlanders) _Lemkos_ and _Lachy_. Each of the groups, it was explained, enjoyed their own dress, customs, dialects and socio-economic organization. The use of the term _Lachy_ is particularly curious. It is the standard Ukrainian word for Poles, and it was presumably chosen to avoid explaining that the neighbouring Lemkos were a branch of the Ukrainians. In all probability it referred to the Polish peasants of the mid-Galician plain, who practised arable farming as opposed to the pastoral economy of the hill and mountain groups.\n\nTo be fair, the museum's initial _raison d'\u00eatre_ was to provide a record of traditional rural life, which was fast disappearing under the pressures of industrialization. Care was taken, in good Marxist style, to distinguish between the primitive cabins of landless labourers and the more substantial dwellings of richer owners. Even so, there were glaring omissions. There was no church, no manor house, and not a single reminder of the Jewish presence.\n\nSince 1989 the contents of the museum have evolved in several directions. First, the updated guidebook now speaks of three 'ethnic minorities' \u2013 Germans, Jews and Roma \u2013 alongside the four 'ethnographic groups', and exhibits have been added relating to each of them. Secondly, a number of rural churches and chapels have been introduced. There are fine examples of wooden sacral architecture, Roman Catholic, Uniate, Orthodox and Lutheran, but as yet no sign of a synagogue. Thirdly, with assistance from European Union funds, a separate area has been set aside to reconstruct a typical _miasteczko galicyjskie_ or 'Galician townlet'. As of 2009, when building works were still incomplete, the Yiddish word of _shtetl_ was not being used, but it would be very surprising if the overall Jewish accent were not considerably strengthened. For the time being, visitors are greeted with a photographic exhibition of Jewish sites and cemeteries in Galicia, and also with a klezmer concert and an introduction to Jewish cooking.\n\nA stroll round the museum takes two or three hours, or more if the richly furnished interiors are properly inspected. Over sixty buildings offer great variety, from a poor peasant's cabin from Lipnica Wielka ( _c_. 1850), to an early nineteenth-century linseed oil-mill from S\u0142opnice; from a thatched cottage of a country labourer from Podegrod (1846), to a wooden Greek Catholic church of St Demetrius from Czarne (1786); from a Roma complex of two dwellings and a forge from Czarna, to an early eighteenth-century manor house from Rdzawa near Bochnia. For all its dilemmas, this collection of Galician rural architecture and folklore is more typical of the former Galicia, and is more inclusive, than are the art galleries and highbrow museums. Yet it can never be complete. The 'real', the authentic, the 'total Galicia' remains tantalizingly out of reach.\n\nThe present challenge facing local historians and museologists would have been well understood by Galicians. In the wake of the latest political shift in 1989, the bearers of the Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish heritages are confronted, like their ancestors, by the need to find paths towards compromise and cohabitation. They have somehow to shelve their selfish interests, and to seek out themes of common concern. It is to be hoped that something can be achieved before the centenary of Galicia's demise in 2018. A touch of Galician humour would help. So, too, would the old Habsburg motto: ' _Viribus Unitis_ '.\n\n## 10\n\n## Etruria\n\nFrench Snake in the Tuscan Grass (1801\u20131814)\n\n##### I\n\nFlorence \u2013 Firenze \u2013 the chief city of Tuscany and cradle of the Renaissance \u2013 is the Mecca of all art-seekers. They come in their millions from all over the world, gazing at the buildings, the paintings and the sculpture, walking the streets that were walked by Dante, Fra Angelico and Michelangelo, breathing the air inhaled by Giotto, by Leonardo and by Galileo. I myself was one of them, taken at a tender age to see the great masterpieces, and shortly afterwards to the gates of Paradise Lost at nearby Vall'Ombrosa, where John Milton imagined Satan's legions as 'Angel Forms'\n\n> who lay intrans't,\n> \n> Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks\n> \n> In _Vallombrosa_ , where th' _Etrurian_ shades\n> \n> High overarch't imbowr;\n\nMilton was consciously writing in the epic tradition of Homer, Virgil and Dante. James Joyce, another literary pilgrim to Italy, described _Paradise Lost_ as 'a Puritan transcript of the Divine Comedy'.\n\nLike all medieval cities, Florence has an ancient heart that covers just a couple of square miles. The only good way to see it is on foot. A stroll from the Ponte Vecchio, the 'Old Bridge', across the River Arno to the central Piazza della Signoria takes only a few minutes, and one can walk round the line of the medieval walls in a morning or an afternoon. On arriving in Florence, therefore, one is faced by a mass of adverts and agencies which offer the services of private guides and of guided tours. A typical enterprise offers six alternative tours: 'Introduction to Florence', 'The Golden Age', 'The Medici Dynasty', 'Life in Medieval Florence', 'Unusual Florence' and 'Florence for Children'. The last of these options, it is promised, can be enjoyed no less by accompanying adults. The attractions include 'climbing the Duomo tower', 'visiting a castle', 'how children lived', 'trying on period clothing' and 'watching artists at work.'\n\nMost guidebooks recommend a one- or two-day tour in the company of an interpreter, followed by a lifetime of individual exploration. After all, one is entering a city that claims to possess one-fifth of all the world's 'Old Masters':\n\n> _Day 1_\n> \n> The Accademia Gallery, starring Michelangelo's _David._\n> \n> The Monastery of San Marco: Fra Angelico murals.\n> \n> The Medici Chapels.\n> \n> The Cathedral Baptistery and Ghiberti's Bronze Doors.\n> \n> Giotto's Tower.\n> \n> Dinner near the Piazza della Signoria.\n> \n> _Day_ 2\n> \n> The Bargello Museum.\n> \n> The Duomo Museum, including Donatello.\n> \n> The Church of Santa Maria Novella, Masaccio.\n> \n> The Uffizi Galleries: reserve a month in advance.\n> \n> Dinner in the Oltrarno district.\n\nWhy do they say Oltrarno in Florence, but Trastevere in Rome?*\n\nThe literary cognoscenti choose the Dante Trail. Dante Alighieri (1265\u20131321) not only pioneered vernacular literature in Europe, he preceded all the other geniuses that Florence produced, and set the Renaissance in motion. The trail always begins at the Sasso di Dante, 'Dante's Stone', from which the poet is said to have watched the laying of the cathedral's foundations in 1296. Next, inside the cathedral, one gazes at Domenico di Michelino's astonishing depiction of _Dante and his Poem_ (1465), which portrays the garlanded and red-robed poet holding up a copy of his _Divine Comedy._ On the right of the picture rise the walls and turrets of Florence, with the Duomo behind; on the left, the pit of Hell, the mountain of Purgatory and the heaven of Paradise.\n\nFrom the cathedral, the guide leads his party along the trail to the houses of the Portinari family. Dante's Beatrice, the idealized woman who leads the poet from _Purgatorio_ to _Paradiso_ , was a Portinari who died young. The group passes thence in a couple of minutes to Dante's own home, La Casa di Dante. Nearby stands the Palazzo del Bargello, a glowering structure that was once the seat of the _podest\u00e0_ or 'governor'. It was here, in 1301, that Dante's banishment from Florence was proclaimed; a sentence that flowed from some obscure factional feud, it was a cruel prelude to a lifetime's exile and to the endless moods of simmering anger and gnawing nostalgia that drove his pen through a hundred cantos. Outside the church of Santa Croce, one sees Pezzi's over-life-size statue of Dante (1865) and inside, Ricci's cenotaph to the Altissimo Poet\u00e0 (1829). Santa Croce contains the tombs of Michelangelo and of Galileo, but not, of course, of Dante. Florence's greatest son was not allowed home even to die.\n\nPassing along the Via dei Neri, the 'Street of the Blacks', one is reminded of the rival factions whose feuds ruined Florentine politics. The Guelphs drove out the Ghibellines, before the victorious Guelphs themselves split into Blacks and Whites. Dante had belonged to the Whites, who lost out. At the former Palazzo dei Priori, one can still see the rooms where Dante participated in municipal meetings before his banishment.\n\nIn Dante's time, the great open space of the Signoria was filled by the palaces of the powerful Uberti clan. Earlier in the thirteenth century the Uberti had championed the pro-imperial Ghibelline party. After the triumph of their anti-imperial Guelph enemies, their palaces were razed, leaving a void that can be seen and felt to this day.\n\nBeside the Ponte Vecchio, the Tower of the Amidei is associated with the murder in 1215 of a young nobleman, Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who had spurned a daughter of one of the oldest Florentine families, the Amidei. The murder is alluded to in Dante's _Paradiso_ , and was said to have sparked the original feud between Guelphs and Ghibellines. The nearby church of Santa Trinit\u00e0 used to house Cimabue's _Madonna_ ( _c._ 1280), which would have been known to Dante but which now hangs in the Uffizi. In Santa Maria Maggiore lies the tomb of Brunetto Latini, the Florentine philosopher to whom Dante was intellectually indebted. Despite placing him in the _Inferno_ in the Ring of the Sodomites, Dante says to him: ' _m'insegnavate come l'uom s'etterna_ ', 'you taught me how man makes himself eternal'. The tour ends at the church of Santa Maria Novella, where one admires the frescoes of the Strozzi chapel painted by Filippino Lippi, and the great crucifix painted by Giotto, Cimabue's pupil and Dante's contemporary.\n\nThe poet, torn between admiration of his native city and disgust at its vices, railed bitterly in the _Inferno_ against the ingratitude of his compatriots, who appeared to forget him:\n\n> _Godi, Fiorenza, poi che se' s\u00ec grande,_\n> \n> _che per mare e per terra batti l'ali,_\n> \n> _e per lo 'nferno tuo nome si spande!_\n> \n> Rejoice, O Florence, you are so great\n> \n> That your wings beat over land and sea,\n> \n> And your name resounds through Hell\n\nOr again:\n\n> Florence mine, you might well be content...\n> \n> You are rich, you're at peace, and you're wise...\n> \n> [Yet], if you recall your past, and think clearly,\n> \n> You will see yourself like a woman fallen sick\n> \n> Who cannot find repose on the softest down,\n> \n> Twisting, turning and seeking to ease her pain.\n\nDante called her Fiorenza \u2013 half-way between the Latin Florentia and the modern Firenze \u2013 but he need not have worried about his reputation in his native city. As we can see in a second set of frescoes in Santa Maria Novella, painted by Nardo di Cenio in the 1350s, Dante became a celebrity within a generation of his death.\n\nNiccol\u00f2 Machiavelli (1469\u20131527) is another towering genius whose presence in Florence can sometimes be overshadowed by his contemporaries. His tomb in Santa Croce bears the inscription 'TANTO NOMINI NULLUM PAR ELOGIUM': 'No praise is sufficient for so great a man.' Machiavelli was a man after Dante's own heart: mordant, searingly honest, frequently funny, sardonic, and breathtaking in every other line he wrote. They would have got on famously. Machiavelli was an accomplished historian. His _History of Florence_ (1520\u201325) is sometimes regarded as the pioneering work of modern European history; yet he is best known for his scintillating political commentary, _Il Principe_ , _The Prince_. His no-nonsense advice to ruling princes made him famous. 'A prince must learn _not_ to be always good,' he wrote, 'but to be good or not as needs require.' In the future, several of the world's greatest statesmen were to keep a copy of Machiavelli in their pocket or at their bedside.\n\nSuch is the force of the Renaissance, however, that many visitors to Florence fail to realize that the city's history cannot fairly be confined to one brilliant age. The city's website lists thirteen main periods:\n\n> Foundation of the Roman colony, Florentia (59 BC).\n> \n> Byzantine and Lombard periods.\n> \n> The Carolingians.\n> \n> Florence of the Communes.\n> \n> 13th Century: Guelphs and Ghibellines.\n> \n> From the 14th Century to the Renaissance.\n> \n> The Renaissance.\n> \n> Great names of the 16th Century.\n> \n> Decline of the Medici to 1737.\n> \n> The Lorraine Period.\n> \n> Risorgimento.\n> \n> Florence as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.\n> \n> Florence of the Novecento (20th Century).\n\nTwo or three more periods may safely be added, especially if Florence's surroundings are included. One of them, prior to Florentia's founding, was that of the Etruscans, when present-day Tuscany lay at the centre of Italy's most prominent prehistoric civilization. Another, in our own day, sees Florence at the heart of a huge influx of migrants and foreigners, who come to savour the 'simple life' that has been drowned elsewhere by modern living. The world of Dante and Machiavelli forms a suitable backdrop to a countryside where medieval villages and ancient farmhouses snuggle among the olive groves, and where the rich bask in the sun, sip Chianti, lament the modern rat race, and idealize vigorously:\n\n> For dinner tonight, we've stopped at the _rosticceria_ and picked up some divine _gnocchi_ made from semolina flour. I've made a salad. Ed brings out the Ambrae from Montepulciano and holds it up to the light. _Ambrae_... must be Latin, possibly for amber. I take a sip \u2013 maybe it _is_ ambiance, the way dew on lilacs and oak leaves might taste. _Wine is light, held together by water._ I wish I'd said that, but Galileo did.\n> \n> From the yard above the road, I see the cypresses graph a rise and fall against a sky blown clean of clouds by this afternoon's wind. Stars are shooting over the valley, stars that fell even before the Etruscans watched from this hillside... Five, six, stars streak across the sky. I hold out my hand to catch one.\n\nThis is not a backward-looking city, however. Its president (that is, mayor), elected in February 2009, is a young, dynamic, centre-left politician, who is tipped to leap to the forefront of Italy's national politics. Matteo Renzi (b. 1975) is demanding a clean-out of Berlusconi's Augean Stables. His views are condensed in a book entitled _Fuori!_ ('Out!'). 'I get nauseous thinking about Italy's political class,' he says; 'it has done nothing in thirty years, and spends its time arguing on chat shows.'\n\nFlorence guards its secrets well. Those who know the city best are aware of things that never cross the path of the average tourist. The British colony in Florence, for example, goes back to medieval times. It did not originate with the stream of temporary visitors, like John Milton in 1638, who came here on the Grand Tour but then returned home, though it obviously did much to enliven the stay of such artistic tourists. It has been graced, among others, by such notables as George Nassau, 3rd Earl Cowper and Reichsf\u00fcrst of the Holy Roman Empire (1739\u201389); Lord Henry Somerset (1849\u20131932), songwriter, sometime comptroller of Queen Victoria's household and former husband of Lady Isabella Somers-Cocks; Una, Lady Troubridge (1887\u20131963), sculptress and sometime wife of an admiral; the inter-war group of English ladies known as _I Scorpioni_ ('The Scorpions'), who featured in Franco Zeffirelli's film _Tea with Mussolini_ (1999); and most recently Sir Harold Acton (1904\u201394), author of the inimitable _Memoirs of an Aesthete_ (1948). A parallel list of literary names would include Radclyffe Hall (1880\u20131943), author of _The Well of Loneliness_ (1928); Violet Paget (Vernon Lee, 1856\u20131935), novelist and inventor of the concept of 'empathy'; Violet Keppel-Trefusis (1894\u20131972), daughter of King Edward VII's mistress; and the extraordinary double-bodied poet Michael Field (Katherine Bradley, 1846\u20131914 and Edith Cooper, 1862\u20131913), affectionately known as 'the Mikes'. All of these exiles (and many more) can be described as art-lovers, bohemians and connoisseurs, and many were aristocrats, real or imagined. Yet they did not advertise the most important cause of their exile. All, or nearly all, were fugitives from the British law, and many were devoted to personal relationships that in Dante's time \u2013 as in the case of Brunetto Latini \u2013 would have alerted the so-called 'Office of the Night'. Habitual pretence was part of the game. Harold Acton threatened to sue on hearing that he might be 'outed' by a biographer and, while claiming to be merely observing 'certain men in Florence', coined the immortal phrase, 'the queerer, the dearer'.\n\nAnother secret pertains to a further period of Florentine history, which followed the 'Lorraine Period' and preceded the Risorgimento, but which the city's website fails to mention. For reasons not entirely clear, few guidebooks even mention its leading figure, the ghost that stalks the Florentine feast. He was a great man with Florentine roots, who transformed Europe and was said always to carry a copy of _Il Principe_ on his person.\n\n##### II\n\nNapoleon Bonaparte, as he became, was not a Frenchman. Born in Ajaccio in 1769, he was a Corsican, and his native language was _corsicano_ , an Italian dialect similar to Genoese. Admittedly, he was a French subject from birth, having entered this world just a year after France bought Corsica from the city of Genoa; but he did not start to learn French until he was ten, nor Frenchify his name until the age of twenty-six. Less well known is the fact that the Buonaparti were a family of Florentine descent. The main branch had been lords of Fucecchio between Florence and Pisa in Dante's time, and a lesser branch left Tuscany for Corsica in the sixteenth century. Except for a flying visit in 1784, when he needed to obtain a certificate of noble origin in order to start officers' training in the French army, Napoleon did not see Italy until his late twenties. When he finally arrived for a longer stay, on what might now be thought of as a business trip, one of the first things he did was to visit Florence and look up his long-lost relatives.\n\nLike many Corsicans, Nabuleone Buonaparte possessed a potent sense of family solidarity. His parents and their seven other children were to play a central part in his life. His father, Carlo-Maria Buonaparte (1746\u201385) died young, aged thirty-nine; his mother, Maria-Letizia Ramolino (1750\u20131836), lived fifty years a widow. Except for Giuseppe (Joseph, 1768\u20131844), all of Nabuleone's siblings were born after him. His three younger brothers were Luciano (Lucien, 1775\u20131840), Luigi (Louis, 1779\u20131846) and Girolamo (J\u00e9r\u00f4me, 1784\u20131860); his three sisters were Maria-Anna (1777\u20131820), Maria-Paolina (1780\u20131825) and Carolina-Maria (1782\u20131839). They collectively milked the connection with their celebrated brother for all they were worth.\n\nIt was the Italian campaign of 1796 \u2013 Year V according to the revolutionary calendar \u2013 that brought the young General Bonaparte to the notice of the whole Continent, and vaulted him into the upper reaches of French politics and international affairs. He set out in the spring of that year to carry the war to the Austrian Empire, which had been a thorn in the flesh of the French Republic for the previous three years; and he ended the campaigning season having conquered great swathes of Austrian territory in Italy. He had been sent out from France as a servant of the collective leadership of the revolutionary Directory, and returned as the arbiter of its decisions. Surrounded by a crowd of imperial provinces, Italian duchies, Papal States and city-republics, he became the destroyer of crowns, a maker of kingdoms.\n\nThe sheer speed and brilliance of that first Italian campaign created the emotional shock which drove forward the subsequent torrent of political changes. The twenty-six-year-old took command of the Army of Italy immediately after marrying Jos\u00e9phine de Beauharnais on 9 March, scattering the Austrians at Millesimo on 13 April and the Piedmontese at Mondovi on the 22nd. Within three weeks he had crushed the main Austrian force at Lodi, and on 15 May entered Milan. The Kingdom of Sardinia made peace, France annexed Nice and Savoy, and the puppet Lombardic Republic was launched. Fighting resumed in the late summer, ending with yet another victory for Bonaparte over the Austrians at the Battle of Arcola (15\u201317 November). By that time, the Cispadane Republic was already in business at Bologna.*\n\nGeneral Bonaparte visited Florence during the summer interval between the two rounds of campaigning. On 29 June he arrived at the little town of San Miniato in the Val d'Arno,\u2020 and met the Abb\u00e9 Filippo Buonaparte, who was described as his _zio_ or 'uncle'. They talked of changing family fortunes, and visited the family tombs in the church of San Francesco. San Miniato is often publicized as Italy's 'capital of truffles', of which Napoleon was inordinately fond. 'Triumphant on the battlefield,' writes one connoisseur, 'Napoleon also ate truffles for strength in his tussles between the covers with the fiery Josephine.' The Tartuffians do not record whether it was before or after his visit to San Miniato that he gained an appetite for the reputed aphrodisiac. Yet the encounter with his ancestors would undoubtedly have strengthened Bonaparte's feeling that he and his siblings might be destined for greater things in Italy.\n\nBonaparte had driven to San Miniato from the coast at Livorno, which French troops had entered a couple of days earlier on the pretext of the French flag being insulted there. Livorno was the chief port of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, with which France was not officially at war, but everyone knew that Tuscan troops had been sent to bolster the Austrians and that Tuscany's neutrality was observed in the breach:\n\n> On the 27th of June the French entered [Livorno], and a few hours previous to their arrival, every English ship in the mole, twenty-three in number, sailed for Corsica, conveying a considerable quantity of merchandize, two hundred and forty oxen, and most of the families belonging to the English factory; for our minister at Florence, Hon.W. F. Wyndham, and our consul at Livorno [ John Udney, Esq.] who had both been indefatigable in procuring good intelligence, knew of the scheme long before its execution.\n\nLivorno would not cease to be a source of trouble.\n\nOn 1 July, the general paid a visit to Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Tuscany at the Pitti Palace in Florence. The grand-ducal residence, one of Florence's most historic buildings, lacked nothing for such important occasions, its external surroundings in the Boboli Gardens being no less splendid than the grand interior:\n\n> The Palazzo Pitti was begun after the design of Filippo di Ser Brunellesco, the most celebrated architect of the fifteenth century, and finished by Ammannati. In the courtyard is the basso-rilievo of a mule, who constantly drew the sledge which contained the materials employed in the building; and over [it] is a statue of Hercules, and near it a group like that called Ajax Telamon, of a soldier going to inter his dead comrade. The ceilings of this palace painted in _tempera_ by Pietro de Cortona and his scholars, represent the patriotic action of the Medici family, under emblems taken from heathen mythology...\n> \n> The Royal Apartments are splendidly adorned with gilding, beautiful tables of Florentine mosaic-work, superb silver statues, and some of the most celebrated pictues in the world, namely by Salvator Rosa, Rubens, Fra Bartolomeo, Titian, Carlo Dolci, Raphael!!!, Andrea del Sarto, Vandyck!!!, Buonarotti!!!, and Rembrandt!!!...\n> \n> The _Giardino di Boboli_ is very large, and contains several pieces of sculpture, the most remarkable of which are the fountain of the great walk decorated with a colossal Neptune standing on a granite bason, by Giovanni di Bologna... [It] is open to the public.\n\nThe Pitti would soon see many new faces, and many of its art treasures would disappear to Paris.\n\nThe grand duke was a prominent member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, the ruling house of Austria, against whom Bonaparte had been fighting. His late father, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, had been grand duke of Tuscany before him; the present emperor, Francis II, was his elder brother. His grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa, had been the dynasty's matriarch for forty years, and it was her husband, Francis of Lorraine, who had gained possession of Tuscany after the death of the last of the Medici. In the young Corsican's eyes, these people were quintessential aristos, international parasites of the sort that the French Revolution was intent on driving out.\n\nGrand Duke Ferdinando was obviously unable to refuse the general's proposed visit and received him politely. Yet the meeting was necessarily fraught: the grand duke was nephew to the late French queen, Marie-Antoinette, whose head had rolled under the guillotine only three years earlier. A near-contemporary account confirms the dinner guest's insolent mood:\n\n> Bonaparte... resolved, that the brother of the emperor should pay for his presumed inclinations. For the present, the Florentine museum and the grand duke's treasury were spared; but [Livorno], the seaport of Tuscany and the great feeder of its wealth, was seized without ceremony. The grand duke, in place of resenting these injuries, was obliged to receive Bonaparte with all the appearance of cordiality, and the spoiler repaid his courtesy by telling him, rubbing his hands with glee, during the princely entertainment provided for him, 'I have just received letters from Milan; the citadel has fallen; \u2013 your brother no longer has a foot of land in Lombardy.' 'It is a sad case,' said Napoleon himself, long afterward, 'when the dwarf comes into the embrace of the giant, he is like enough to be suffocated; but it is in the giant's nature to squeeze hard.'\n\nIn effect, the upstart general was putting his host on notice: Florence could go the same way as Milan. More to the point \u2013 there was no need to spell it out \u2013 Ferdinando's head could end up in the same sort of bloody basket as that of his aunt.\n\nA different account of the event suggests that the grand duke played his part very skilfully:\n\n> Bonaparte came to Florence accompanied by Berthier [his chief of staff ] and part of his _\u00e9tat-major_ , but no privates except those who commonly attended his person, and these mounted guard at the Pitti Palace, while the Tuscan troops attended the French general who was invited to dine with the Grand Duke. The entrance of the French was orderly, but... not one Tuscan subject welcomed them with 'Viva la Repubblica!'\n> \n> The Grand Duke, however, received Bonaparte with affability, untinctured by fear; making him magnificent presents, and doing the honours of a splendid table with apparent ease and cheerfulness; and though during dinner a French courier arrived to announce that the citadel of Milan had surrendered, the Grand Duke was so master of himself as to betray no concern: but conversed with his guest respecting the Bonaparte family, which is of Tuscan origin, and at the general's instance conferred upon his uncle the order of S. Stefano.\n> \n> In the evening the Duke accompanied Bonaparte to the theatre, where the audience received their prince with uncommon plaudits. \u2013 'You seem to reign in the hearts of your subjects, sir', said the general; 'but have you always such full houses as this?' 'Usually a great deal fuller,' replied the Duke.\n\nSoon after leaving Florence, Bonaparte was told that the Royal Navy had seized the island of Elba. Activity at sea was one of the few things that the British could do to impede French progress. Elba, though adminstered from Naples as part of the _Stato dei Presidii_ , otherwise known as the 'Tuscan ports', lay within historic Tuscany; and its loss would have prompted the grand strategist to contemplate further conquests as a means of protecting his fragile gains. For the British, Tuscany held no great strategic interest. Its main claim to fame at the time lay in the Etruscan-style pottery that was all the rage among Britain's wealthy classes. Josiah Wedgwood, who had died the year before, had called his ceramics factory in Staffordshire's Black Country 'Etruria'.\n\nBonaparte returned to Paris in November, leaving the French army in Italy to the command of General Charles Leclerc (1772\u20131802). But he was soon forced to retrace his steps, and had to spend a second year campaigning in Italy before a firmer peace with Austria could be signed at Campo Formio in October 1797. In the process, the French army wrested the Romagna from the Papal States, marched into Tyrol, and sent off an expedition to capture the Ionian Islands. A new crop of French-sponsored republics sprouted in its wake \u2013 the Ligurian at Genoa, the Lemanic at Geneva, then the Helvetian in Switzerland and the Roman in the realms of the pope. The Cisalpine Republic engorged itself by swallowing the Cispadane.\n\nA powerful backlash followed this avalanche of change, and in 1798\u20139 French forces in Italy struggled to contain it. Bonaparte, who sailed romantically to Egypt in May 1798, could not intervene in person. The exiled pope, Pius VI, implacable after being stripped of his temporal powers, inspired resistance. Britain marshalled a second anti-French coalition. The Russians sent a powerful army into Italy under Field Marshal Suvorov, and a fleet under Admiral Gorchakov to join the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. The king of Naples, seizing the opportunity provided by Bonaparte's absence in Egypt, recaptured Rome, only to flee as soon as the French counter-attacked, sailing in haste from Naples aboard Nelson's flagship. Pending Bonaparte's return to Europe, all arrangements necessarily seemed temporary.\n\nItalian affairs were vastly complicated by the far-reaching tentacles of the House of Bourbon. The late Louis XVI of France had been a Bourbon; the king of Spain was a Bourbon; the king of Naples was a Bourbon; and so, too, was the duke of Parma, whose possessions almost touched Tuscany in the north. The duke tried to secure his position by paying the French a million _livres_ and sending twenty-five of his best paintings to the Louvre, hoping to turn himself into a key pawn on the political chessboard. It was of the Bourbons that France's foreign minister, Talleyrand, was much later to say: 'They have learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.'\n\nFrench diplomacy at this point was juggling with half a dozen issues, most of which had a Tuscan aspect. Negotiations with Spain, which eventually led to the secret treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1800), aimed to facilitate the purchase by France of Spain's American province of Louisiana; Tuscany was being dangled in front of the Spanish Bourbons as an inducement to accept the deal. Negotiations with Naples were conducted in Florence, where the Neapolitan Bourbons were being offered the restoration of their kingdom on condition that their ports remained closed to Britain's Royal Navy. Negotiations with Portugal sought likewise to exclude the British. Negotiations with Britain itself at Amiens were leading at snail's pace towards a formal treaty that would not be signed until March 1802; the British were characteristically most concerned about the freedom of maritime trade. Negotiations with the papacy assumed that revolutionary, anti-religious fanaticism was running its course; the proposed Concordat would restore Catholicism to France but not the Papal States to the papacy.\n\nTuscany, which depended on overseas trade and was the immediate neighbour of the Papal States, could not be indifferent either to commercial negotiations or to the Franco-papal conflict. The French army's occupation of Rome in February 1798 caused passions to rise, and the grand duke's decision to welcome the fugitive pope raised tensions. The grand duke was acutely aware of French suspicions, so when he gave shelter in 1798\u20139 not only to the pope but also to a varied company of 'reactionary' exiles, including the king of Sardinia, he cannot have been totally surprised by the consequences. Pius VI, frail and eighty-one years old, was accommodated throughout the winter in the _Forestiera_ or 'Forest Lodge' of the Carthusian Certosa di Galluzzo near Florence, a favourite destination for day trippers from the city:\n\n> The monastery is built on a circular hill; the building is extremely irregular... [But] there are few subjects in Tuscany which a painter would rather study. The great square within the monastery is surrounded by a colonnade supporting the roof.\n> \n> Each hermit has two or three small rooms to himself and a little plot of ground. Some were employed in reading; some cultivated their gardens, while others would mope in gloomy melancholy... they seldom spoke, silence being a virtue of the Order of St Bruno... One of their favourite amusements after meals was to feed some two hundred cats, which came mewing and squalling beneath the windows from the woods below.\n\nBut the Directory in Paris feared a rescue, so on 28 March 1799 the pope was plucked from his Florentine asylum and transported across the Alps under duress. He died in captivity at Valence after reigning twenty-four years. His death was a black omen for his erstwhile Tuscan hosts.\n\nWorse was to follow. In the summer of 1799 Florence was the scene of violent commotions. A republican faction took control of the municipality and invited a small French force into the city. An _Albero della Libert\u00e0_ , a 'Tree of Liberty', was raised in the Piazza della Signoria, the revolutionary calendar was imposed, together with heavy taxes, and the militants forced the grand duke and many clerics to depart. A violent counter-revolution then broke out in nearby Arezzo. Fomented by the new pope, Pius VII (r. 1800\u20131823), who had been elected in an emergency conclave in Venice, bloodthirsty peasant bands roamed the countryside to cries of ' _Viva Maria!_ ' before storming into Florence and slaughtering any Frenchman too slow to escape. The grand duke's supporters restored order with the help of Austrian troops. They won but a short stay of execution.\n\nThe turbulence in Tuscany coincided with still more gruesome horrors in the south. French difficulties in southern Italy had multiplied in proportion to the extreme violence sanctioned by the royalist Neapolitan opposition. The king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, was a son of the former Spanish king, Charles III; his wife, the Archduchess Maria Carolina, was the daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa and sister of Marie-Antoinette, the executed wife of Louis XVI. After the declaration of the Neapolitan Parthenopean Republic in 1799, they had retired with their court to Palermo in Sicily, whence a ferocious campaign of resistance was organized. The peasant _lazzaroni_ \u2013 counterparts of the Spanish _guerrillas_ \u2013 fought the French with great courage and cruelty, while a 'Christian Army of the Holy Faith', the _Sanfedisti_ , advanced from Calabria under the none-too-Christian Cardinal Ruffo. Fire, plunder and massacre spread far and wide; the cardinal's irregulars were supported both by a squadron of the Russian navy and by Admiral Horatio Nelson, who was rewarded with the title of duke of Bront\u00eb. The return of the royal couple to Naples in December 1800 was attended by mass executions and punitive trials.\n\nIn 1800, having effectively appointed himself first consul in France, Bonaparte returned to Italy with a vengeance. Crossing the Great St Bernard for a second time, he descended onto the plain of Lombardy and blew his enemies away like chaff. At Marengo in June, he defeated the Austrians so thoroughly that the rest of the peninsula lay at his feet. The Second Coalition was dead; the French resurgence was unstoppable. Negotiations began at Lun\u00e9ville for a comprehensive European settlement that was finally signed the following February. France gained the left bank of the Rhine. Six French-run republics, four of them in Italy, received international recognition; Tuscany was to be disposed of as the first consul thought fit. In October 1800 General Joachim Murat (1767\u20131815), Napoleon's aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, led a large French force into Tuscany which occupied the whole region, broke into Florence, sacked churches and perpetrated atrocities. Murat, a cavalryman dubbed the 'First Horseman of Europe', placed himself at the head of a provisional Tuscan government. He was accompanied by his eighteen-year-old wife of several months, the former Carolina Buonaparte, the first consul's youngest sister. She was one of three Buonaparte sisters who would enliven the Florentine scene.\n\nSuch was the state of affairs that prevailed while the diplomatic settlement over Tuscany was being concluded. The full terms were revealed in the final Franco-Spanish Treaty of Aranjuez (21 March 1801) and in the Franco-Neapolitan Treaty of Florence signed by Murat on 28 March 1801. Grand Duke Ferdinando's Tuscan possessions were to be confiscated and pass to his neighbours, the Bourbons of Parma, who were to be given royal status and the title of 'kings of Etruria'. Ferdinando was to be compensated from lands seized by the secularization of the archbishopric of Salzburg. The Bourbons of Naples, who had ruled over the _Stato dei Presidii_ since the 1730s, were required to cede their possession and to withdraw its garrisons. The _Stato dei Presidii_ would then be amalgamated with the territory of the dissolved Grand Duchy of Tuscany to create the Kingdom of Etruria, so reuniting historic Tuscany with much of the adjacent coastline.\n\nDespite their elevation to nominal royalty, the Bourbons of Parma cannot have been particularly delighted by this turn of events; their home base in Parma was to be annexed directly to France as the D\u00e9partement de Taro (it was contiguous on its western border with Piedmont, which had already been incorporated). What is more, the duke of Parma was to be passed over in Etruria in favour of his son, Lodovico di Borbone, otherwise known as Louis de Bourbon, who was married to a Spanish cousin and was presumably judged more malleable. The new king's father, who had paid so heavily to sweeten the French, declined in health and shortly died, no doubt rueing his investment.\n\nThe Kingdom of Etruria was the first of Napoleon's monarchical experiments. All the earlier states and statelets thrown up by the French Revolution, from Batavia to Helvetia, had been republics modelled on the French Republic itself. But by 1801, as first consul for life, Napoleon was free to indulge his own autocratic tendencies. His new attitude was bound up with the growing reaction against republicanism both in France and in Italy, which encouraged him to seek common cause with moderate (and especially with dependent) monarchists. He would continue on this path until in four years he was crowned emperor of the French, and in five, king of Italy.\n\nBy public proclamation, Etruria was declared to be a sovereign kingdom, and as such it would receive foreign ambassadors; in reality, it was a client state which paid tribute to France \u2013 partly to maintain the French garrison and partly to swell Napoleon's general war chest. Because of the Bourbon connection, it is sometimes described as belonging to the Spanish dominions, but this is nominally correct at best. It owed everything to its French sponsors. It had been invented by the French, and could be dismantled by the French. As soon as its existence became inconvenient, it would be wiped out at the stroke of a Parisian pen.\n\nEtruria's king, Lodovico I (or Louis Ier d'\u00c9trurie, 1773\u20131803), was barely twenty-eight years old when handed his kingdom without warning. By royalist standards, his pedigree was impeccable. His father's family, the Bourbons of Parma, were close relatives of Spain's ruling house, who called him _El Ni\u00f1o_ , 'The Child'. His mother's family, the Habsburg-Lorrainers, linked him both to Austria and to the previous rulers of Tuscany. His nineteen-year-old wife, Maria-Luisa di Borbone, was an infanta of Spain. A famous group portrait, _The Family of Charles_ IV, was painted by Goya in 1800\u20131801. It shows Lodovico and Maria-Luisa holding their baby son and standing in a place of honour immediately behind the Spanish monarch. Whether or not the half-Spanish client of an increasingly autocratic French dictator could gain control over his manufactured Italian realm was open to question.\n\nThere was no time for a coronation. On hearing of their good fortune, the king and queen rushed from Spain to Paris in May 1801 to undergo a civilian induction, and no doubt to be given advice and instructions. Napoleon organized two military parades in their honour in front of the Tuileries. The royal couple sat in Napoleon's box at the Op\u00e9ra during a performance of Gluck's _Iphig\u00e9nie en Aulide_. Commemorative medals were struck, and complimentary verses composed:\n\n> _La Toscane autrefois nous donna M\u00e9dicis,_\n> \n> _Aujourd'hui la vertu va r\u00e9gner dans Florence_.\n\n('Tuscany in former times gave us the Medicis, \/ today in Florence Virtue is going to reign.') The appearance of a young Bourbon couple so soon after the end of the revolutionary wars could not fail to intrigue Parisians, not least because they were only thinly disguised as the 'count and countess of Livorno'. They became the talk of the town, and the subject of gossip in the first consul's entourage, which knew very well that this was 'Don Louis I of Etruria' and 'Maria-Luisa, infanta of Spain'. They made a mixed impression, as the emperor's chief valet recalled:\n\n> The King of Etruria was not fond of work, and... did not please the First Consul, who could not endure idleness. I heard him one day severely score his royal prot\u00e9g\u00e9 (in his absence of course). 'Here is a prince,' he said, 'who... passes his time cackling to old women, to whom... he complains in a whisper of owing his elevation to the chief of this cursed French Republic...' 'It is asserted,' remarked [an officer of the household to Bonaparte], 'that you wished to disgust the French people with Kings by showing them such a specimen, as the Spartans disgusted their children with drunkenness by exhibiting to them a drunken slave.' 'Not so, my dear sir,' replied the First Consul, 'I have no desire to disgust them with royalty, but the sojourn of the King of Etruria will annoy a number of good people, who work incessantly to create a feeling favourable to the Bourbons.'\n\nMaria-Luisa had some success in creating that favourable feeling:\n\n> The Queen of Etruria was, in the opinion of the First Consul, more sagacious and prudent than her husband... [She] dressed herself in the morning for the whole day, and walked in the garden, her head adorned with flowers or a diadem, and wearing a dress, the train of which swept up the sand of the walk: often also carrying in her arms one of her children... ; by night the toilet of her Majesty was somewhat disarranged. She was far from pretty, and her manners were not suited to her rank. But, which fully atoned for all of this, she was good-tempered, much loved by those in her service, and scrupulous in fulfilling the duties of wife and mother. In consequence, the First Consul, who made a great point of domestic virtue, professed for her the highest esteem.\n\nA concert and extravagant farewell party were organized for the visitors at the Ch\u00e2teau de Neuilly by Talleyrand. The chateau and park were illuminated with coloured lights, and one end of the hall was filled by a tableau of the Piazza della Signoria replete with fountains and 'Tuscans singing couplets in honour of their sovereigns'. There was a grand ball hosted by the first consul's sister Paolina, and the evening closed with a display of rockets, fireworks and 'Bengal Fire'. Then the happy couple set off and travelled by stages to Florence. When they entered their capital on 2 August, they were greeted by representatives of the municipality; a new royal flag was flying, and a royal medal had been struck in celebration. The streets were thronged with curious people, and General Murat was waiting with his staff and a detachment of cavalry to escort them into their residence in the Pitti Palace.\n\nThe Kingdom of Etruria's territory of _c._ 7,700 square miles formed a rough rectangle, bounded in the west by the sea, and in the north, east and south by high mountains. Northern Tuscany was separated from the basin of the Po by the Apennines, which at Monte Cimone rose above 6,000 feet. Travellers coming from the north, from Bologna, faced a wild tract of country:\n\n> Two miles before and after Scarico l'Asino, where the Italian customs house stands, the mountains become so black and barren that you discover nothing but naked crags and crumbled rocks... Farther on, Nature assumes a more cheerful face, the heights and bottoms being clad with spreading forests of chestnuts... Groves of fig-trees succeed them, and these are relieved by extensive plantations of olives, which in Etruria seem to have displaced every other fruit.\n\nFlorence, the kingdom's capital, was circled by a ring of ancient Tuscan towns \u2013 Prato, Arezzo, Cortona, Siena and San Gimignano \u2013 and was linked by the lower valley of the Arno to Pisa and the sea. Southern Tuscany round Pitigliano adjoined the frontier of the Papal States (which had been resuscitated in 1800) and the coastal strip extended southwards for some 90 miles as far as the peninsula of Monte Argentario. Etruria's main outlet to the sea, Livorno, had been developed by the Medici as a free port, and had attracted an unusually cosmopolitan population. There were colonies of Greeks and Turks, a large Jewish community and, as the Protestant cemetery attests, a prosperous group of English merchants, who called it 'Leghorn'. It had been relieved from the French occupation of 1796, but in 1798\u20139 it had been forced to supply ships and men for the Egyptian campaign. Suspicions of its pro-British sympathies persisted. The kingdom's other ports, formerly part of the _Stato dei Presidii_ , included Piombino, Talamone and Orbetello.\n\nEtruria was not poor. The Tuscan countryside was productive as always, and the cities maintained strong ties with international commerce; hence the continuing British interest. Foreign visitors were pleasantly surprised by the relatively low cost of living: 'This city is not calculated to drain the traveller's pocket... Bread and wine are still cheaper than in Rome; and a pot of excellent coffee with cream and cakes cost only five _grazie._ This coin, worth about a penny, appears to have taken its name from the Austrian _kreutzer..._ It is singular that the Austrian ducats are all over Italy...' Indeed, multiple currencies operated. The Florentine system, which was similar to the \u00a3, _s_., _d_. of England, was different from the Pisan. One Tuscan pound or _lira_ was equivalent to 20 _soldi_ , and 1 _soldo_ to 12 _denari_. Intermediate coins called _paoli_ and _quatrini_ also circulated. Austrian gold ducats and Maria Theresa silver _thalers_ were highly valued.\n\nAn Englishwoman living in Tuscany at the time has left some vivid descriptions of the condition of the people and the country. In addition to the grand duchy's artistic heritage, she writes enthusiastically about the vitality of urban life, the vigour of the peasantry and the enlightened nature of the prevailing laws. In Florence, for example, she was excited by the ceremonies surrounding the Feast of St John, the city's patron, which took place every June. There were chariot-races, exhibitions of _pallone_ , a game said to be the ancestor of baseball, and elaborate processions:\n\n> On the morning of the festa of S. Giovanni homage is paid by all the Tuscan cities to their prince; and this ceremony passes in the Piazza del Granduca; the throne of the sovereign being erected under the Loggia, which is hung with a fine tapestry, as is the royal box. The balconies and scaffoldings for the people are likewise handsomely decorated. No sooner has the prince ascended the throne (which is surrounded by the household and the great officers of state) than the procession commences with men on horseback dressed in ancient habits... ; then come gentlemen [from] the neighbourhood of Pisa, then come immense wooden towers representing the several cities of Tuscany... ; but when the citizens of Siena arrive, they are summoned to stop and their leader makes an oration expressing sorrow for the revolt some hundred years ago and promising they will always be loyal in future... After the Sanesi come the citizens of Florence followed by the little Tuscan army, which pays the military compliments to its sovereign and closes the procession.\n\nThe English resident found the Florentines very hospitable, 'fond of learning, the arts and sciences', and 'generally speaking, good-humoured, warm-hearted and friendly'. The greatest impression, however, was made by the peasants of the countryside:\n\n> The Tuscan peasantry, considered collectively, are pure in their morals and pastoral in their lives; and the peculiar comeliness of both sexes is very striking, especially in the environs of Florence... The men are tall, robust, finely proportioned, and endowed with that self-possession, which at once excites respect... The women are of a middle stature, and were it not for bad stays, would be well made. They have large, languishing black eyes accompanied by that expressive brow which constitutes the most captivating part of an Italian countenance. Their manners are uncommonly graceful, and instead of curtseying, they gently bow their bodies and kiss the hand of a superior... The upper class of farmers usually possess a horse, a waggon or two, and a pair of large, dove-coloured oxen, whose beauty is as remarkable as their masters... Shoes and stockings are deemed superfluous even by the women, who carry them in baskets on their heads until they reach town... The phraseology of Florentine peasants is wonderfully elegant, indeed their Italian is said to be the purest now spoken; but the most remarkable quality in these people is their industry: for during the hottest weather they toil all day without sleep... yet they live almost entirely upon bread, fruit, pulse, and the common wine of the country. Though their diet is light and their bodily exertions are almost perpetual, they commonly attain old age.\n\nIn the two preceding decades, Tuscany had benefited greatly from the progressive social policies of the Habsburg grand dukes, who were paragons of the 'enlightened despotism' then in fashion. The contrast with England could not have been greater:\n\n> According to the law of the late Emperor Leopold, no one can be imprisoned for debt, though creditors have power to seize the property of their debtors; and no offence is punishable with death, though murderers are condemned to perpetual labour as galley-slaves; and to these and many other wise regulations are attributable the almost total exemption from robbery and murder which this country enjoys and the increase to its population... I have never heard of house-breaking, nor of more than one highway-robbery (and that committed by an Irishman) during my long residence...\n\nModern historians confirm this positive picture. 'Tuscany, insignificant in terms of _Realpolitik_ ,' writes one British expert on the era, 'was renowned throughout the civilised world... not only through its unique cultural heritage, but because of its enactment of some of the most enlightened principles of the Enlightenment.' The incoming Etrurian management would be hard pressed to match its predecessor.\n\nThe formation of a royal government, however, was severely constrained by the king's French supervisors; all of Lodovico I's appointments had to be made in consultation with the resident French ambassador and his legation. General Henri-Jacques Clarke (1765\u20131818), seconded to Florence from other duties in Italy, did not shrink from giving vociferous opinions. The king and the ambassador decided to retain the council of state and its subordinate ministries that had operated under the previous grand-ducal regime, but the French were adamant that no persons of the 'Austrian persuasion' could continue to hold senior office. The choice of chief minister fell on Count Odoardo Salvatico. The king and council established their own direct link with France by appointing Count Averardo Serristori as their ambassador to the first consul; in practice, to Talleyrand. A papal nuncio, Mgr Caleppi, was present, though his traditional influence was much reduced. On 29 August 1801 the king addressed his subjects in his first _motu proprio_ or 'decree', which enjoined them to put the past into 'perpetual oblivion' and to heal their divisions. Over him hovered the shadow of 6,000 French troops, one-third of them men from the Polish Legions.\n\nThe outlines of local politics were clear to see. Small groups of Jacobin sympathizers and Freemasons existed in the cities, and tended to look to the French for radical measures. Conservative, anti-revolutionary circles were more numerous, especially in the countryside, often enjoying the support of the clergy. The middle ground was held by the so-called 'Patriotic Party', attached to Tuscany's enlightened heritage and aiming to steer between the extremes; the University of Pisa was said to be its powerhouse. The prospects for moderation, however, were favourable. The violent events of 'il '99' had discredited doctrinaire positions, and the kingdom started life in the year of the Concordat, whereby the first consul was reconciled to the Roman Church. Italy appeared to be stabilizing. The French were making peace with Austria and with Britain, extricating themselves from their disastrous Egyptian expedition and evacuating Naples.\n\nWithin Napoleonic Italy, Etruria was surrounded by a patchwork of petty principalities, all dependent on France but each with a different regime. To the north, administered from Milan, lay the enlarged Cisalpine Republic. To the east and south, ruled from Rome, lay the restored but still occupied Papal States. To the north-west, lay the Ligurian Republic of Genoa and the Republic of Lucca.* Further north, Piedmont had been declared a French military district. In each of these places, as in Etruria, French-inspired republicans were vying with papal-backed 'reactionaries'. Etruria found itself in a category in which local rulers possessed some leeway in internal affairs while deferring to France in external affairs.\n\nThe arrival of the royal couple in their residence, as described in the queen's memoir, was less than auspicious. Their predecessor, the Grand Duke Ferdinando, had stripped the Pitti Palace of everything he could carry off, and the queen complained that she had to organize a whip-round of local sympathizers to provide some basic furniture and cooking utensils. As an infanta of Spain, accustomed to dining off gold and silver plate, she was reduced for the first time in her life to eating off porcelain. Worse, she suffered the first of two miscarriages.\n\nNonetheless, as she recalled, modest progress was made:\n\n> My husband's first object was to try to get rid of the French troops which occupied Tuscany and which pressed very heavily on the people; but under a variety of pretences, his demands... were constantly refused... All that we could obtain was that Murat's troops should quit the capital as soon as a noble guard would be formed; but they neither quitted Leghorn nor Pisa nor the other parts of the state.\n\nIn 1802, however, Napoleon's restless spirit destroyed hopes for an extended period of calm. The Cisalpine Republic, now renamed the 'Italian Republic', became the focus of his attention. Its constitution required the election of a president, so a _consultation_ was convened at Lyon to consider the candidates and a suitable hint from Talleyrand persuaded the delegates to elect Napoleon himself. Later that year, French troops reoccupied Switzerland. The terms of the treaties of Lun\u00e9ville and Amiens were flouted everywhere. Napoleon defiantly declared, 'It is recognized by Europe that Holland and Italy, as well as Switzerland, are at France's disposal.'\n\nEtruria saw little of its royal couple. Both of them were frequently indisposed, and the queen took to attending functions alone. Then in September they sailed for Spain to attend a family wedding. The queen gave birth to a premature baby girl aboard ship near Barcelona; the king was so ill from epilepsy that they missed the wedding. They did not return till the end of the year.\n\nBy 1803, Napoleon was again preparing for war. To this end, he crudely extracted subsidies from his satraps, disregarded their nominal neutrality and threatened the non-compliant with punishment. He was especially rapacious in his support for the state-sponsored looting of art. Visitors to the Uffizi found that the gallery's most famous exhibit was missing:\n\n> The Venus of the Medici is here no more; she was torn from the pedestal by the French and sent to the depot of spoils in Paris. Her place is now vacant; she stood in the beautiful octagonal hall among the choicest forms of antiquity... You miss her with a peculiarly painful sensation. Florence during two centuries was her assigned abode; every traveller sought her here... and now she is gone.\n\nSuccessive events sent ripples of foreboding through the little Etrurian court. One was Napoleon's cynical resale of Louisiana to the United States for 60 million francs, less than three years after the deal of which the creation of Etruria had formed part. The first consul's greed seemed boundless. Shortly afterwards, in May 1803, Etruria was cast into mourning by the sudden and unexpected death of its young king, who died from an epileptic fit when barely thirty years old. His body was carried back to Spain and buried in the Pantheon of the Infantes in the Escorial.\n\nNothing was more shocking for the royalists, however, than the kidnapping and execution of the duc d'Enghien, the last of the French Bourbons and a symbol of the royalist cause throughout Europe. The dashing duke was an \u00e9migr\u00e9 who had taken up arms against the French Republic. In March 1804 a military snatch squad crossed the Rhine, raided the duke's residence in Germany, and carried their captive back to France for trial. Napoleon refused all pleas for mercy, and ordered that the duke be executed in the palace ditch at Vincennes. His judicial murder attracted the comment by France's chief of police, later attributed to Talleyrand: ' _C'\u00e9tait pire qu'un crime; c'\u00e9tait une faute_ ' ('It was worse than a crime; it was a mistake'). After that, no Bourbon or royalist could feel safe, and Napoleon's reputation plummeted.\n\nLodovico I was automatically succeeded in Etruria by his infant son, Carlo-Luigi (Charles-Louis), aged four. Executive powers were placed in the hands of the late king's widow and the child's mother, herself only twenty years old, who took the title of queen-regent. A 10-lira silver coin, minted at this time, announced the new reign. The inscription reads: 'CAROLUS LUDOVICUS DEI GRATIA REX ETRURIAE ET MARIA ALOYSIA REGINA RECTRIX'.\n\nFor four years, as Etruria's boy monarch grew up, the kingdom was administered by the queen-regent with the guidance of her ministers. Following Salvatico's dismissal, two men came to the fore. One was Count Fossombroni, a prudent and experienced servant of the previous regime, who still had a long career in front of him, and the other Jean-Gabriel Eynard (1775\u20131863), an enterprising Franco-Swiss businessman. Eynard came to Florence in 1803 from Genoa, where he had made a fortune supplying the French army with blue denim cloth, 'Bleu de G\u00eanes', and is said to be the inventor of 'blue jeans'. He used his money to buy the sole subscription to an Etrurian government bond, which gave him a built-in interest in the kingdom's welfare. Working in partnership with the queen-regent, he reorganized the tax system, created taxable manufactures, such as tobacco and porcelain companies, and closely monitored military procurement, travelling to Paris in person to ensure that the promised subsidies were paid. Some measure of his success may be seen in the queen-regent's announcement of an extraordinary levy of 20,000 troops. In total, the Kingdom of Etruria raised no fewer than twenty-six regiments, including the Reggimento Real Toscano, the Compagnia Dragoni d'Etruria, the Pompatori Militari di Firenze and the Corpore Reale dei Cacciatori della Citt\u00e0 di Firenze.\n\nThe queen-regent spent lavishly on educational projects too, founding a Higher School for Science, and a Museum of Natural History; she once threw a party in the Loggia dei Lonzi where 200 poor children were entertained before being told to take the cutlery and crockery home. (Perhaps it was the despised porcelain.) Slowly, she regained her optimism:\n\n> When I assumed the reins of government, my sole idea was to promote the happiness of my subjects... An epidemic fever had recently broken out at Leghorn, and a great number had fallen victims to it. The French troops continued to occupy the country, without the least necessity... and occasioned exorbitant expenses. I saw myself reduced to increasing the taxes. At last, however, I succeeded in obtaining a Spanish general to be sent with some troops of that nation in place of the French... I then enjoyed perfect tranquillity.\n\nShe also derived much satisfaction from her children:\n\n> The King, my son, was everything I could wish; good, docile, and already gave indications of a noble character. He made great progress in his studies; his health was strong, and every day saw an increase in the tender affection which his subjects bore to him. My only ambition was to be able some day to show him the deplorable state in which I had found the kingdom, and that in which I expected to deliver it into his hands.\n\nPrincess Marie-Louise-Charlotte, three years younger than her brother, had recovered well from the adverse circumstances of her birth.\n\nIn December 1803 the queen-regent entertained a surprise visitor to the Pitti in the person of Paolina, Napoleon's second sister. The two women had met two years earlier at Neuilly. Both had since been widowed; both understood the fragility of their respective positions. In the space of a few months, Paolina had buried her first husband, General Leclerc, who had died campaigning in San Domingo, and had entered a second marriage with a Roman aristocrat, Camillo Borghese, prince of Salmona, to whose estates she was now travelling. She sincerely liked the queen-regent, asked for a portrait and a lock of her hair for keepsakes, and begged to keep in touch. On receiving the keepsakes, she thanked 'ma ch\u00e8re Louise' warmly in her none-too-grammatical French: 'Adieu, ma Louise, adieu! Je vous aime et ce n'est pas pour dire... Si vous d\u00e9sires me sentir heureuse, aimes moi toujours: je suis pour la vie vostre Paulette [ _sic_ ].' The letter was signed, 'Borghese, n\u00e9e Bonaparte'. Since the queen-regent's French was not much better, the two wrote henceforth in Italian.\n\nPrincess Paolina's visit must have been all the more intriguing for the Florentines, because she and her siblings were attracting ever more sensational headlines. The first consul's genius for self-promotion was now extending to the promotion of his four brothers and three sisters, all of whom were showered with offices, titles, marriage partners and publicity. He employed the neo-classical sculptor Antonio Canova, for example, to glorify the Buonaparte brood in marble nudes. In 1804 he commissioned a topless, reclining figure of _Paulina Borghese as Venus Victrix_ , and a vulgar imitation of Michelangelo's _David_ entitled _Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker._ The former caused a minor sensation; the latter was so embarrassing that its originator refused to put it on public display.* Nepotism came naturally in such a climate. A fresh French ambassador arrived in Florence, the Marquis Fran\u00e7ois de Beauharnais (1753\u20131823), the brother of Jos\u00e9phine's first husband.\n\nIn December 1804 the 'first consul for life' invited the pope to Paris to officiate in Notre-Dame at his coronation as the 'emperor of the French'. As part of the proceedings, he awarded all of his siblings the title of _altesse imp\u00e9riale_ or 'imperial highness', while naming his brothers Giuseppe (Joseph) and Luigi (Louis) as his official heirs. At the climatic moment in the service, he took the imperial crown out of the pope's hands and, spurning divine assistance, placed it on his own head. Six months later, having waved his wand to turn the Italian Republic into the Kingdom of Italy, he organized a second coronation for himself in Milan. He then set up his favourite sister 'Elisa', Signora Bacciochi, first as princess of Piombino and then as duchess of Lucca.\n\nElisa was the family nickname for Maria-Anna Buonaparte, the fourth surviving child of Napoleon's parents, who had been close to Napoleon since their time together in pre-revolutionary Paris. She was well educated, having attended the Maison Royale de Saint-Louis at St Cyr, and socially ambitious, having run a literary salon with her other brother, Luciano. Above all, she was quite capable of standing up for herself. She was the dominant partner in a long-lasting if unequal marriage to a bumbling Corsican officer, Pasquale Bacciochi Levoy, who had also changed his first name \u2013 in his case from Pasquale to Felice\/F\u00e9lix \u2013 and who after their wedding in 1797 commanded the citadel at Ajaccio. Many thought that it was Elisa's idea to turn Italy into a political playground for the Buonaparti, and to put her in charge of the first experiment. In the next year, the district of Massa and Carrara, which contained Europe's most valuable marble quarries, was specially detached from her brother's Kingdom of Italy for their benefit. F\u00e9lix was promoted to the rank of g\u00e9n\u00e9ral de division.\n\nElisa threw herself into her task with zest. She created an Academy of Fine Arts in Lucca, founded the Banque Elisienne, reformed the clergy and promulgated new legal codes. She was assiduous in financing her extravagances through the confiscation of Church property. Her methods could not fail to be compared to those of the queen-regent in Etruria; the Palazzo Lucchese and the Palazzo Pitti were in open competition. Yet the two women behaved to each other with propriety. Letters and gifts were exchanged. Maria-Luisa sent a pair of pure bred horses to Lucca; Elisa responded by sending a consignment of fine Parisian dress materials in return.\n\nIn Florence, it was easy to feel that the Bonaparte tribe were getting uncomfortably close. It was no secret that they were looking for suitable lands and titles for themselves in Italy, rather than elsewhere. When Napoleon was overheard saying 'Luciano would restore the glory of the Medici', strong rumours spread that the emperor's second brother, who was performing well in Paris as the minister of the interior, had been earmarked to take over Etruria. In the event, Luciano (Lucien), who was a convinced republican, had to be content with the title of prince of Canino; Luigi was made king of Holland, Girolamo king of Westphalia, Paolina duchess of Guastalla, and Eug\u00e8ne de Beauharnais, Napoleon's stepson, viceroy of Italy. The emperor was losing the patience to work with foreign royals.\n\nIn the years 1805\u20137 Napoleon was preoccupied with the affairs of northern Europe. His great victories of Austerlitz, Jena, Auerstadt and Friedland destroyed the Holy Roman Empire, reduced Prussia to ruins, drew the French into Poland and threatened Russia. Problems in Spain and Portugal also demanded his attention. In Italy, left to its own devices, crushing taxation and merciless recruiting were provoking popular resistance. Pope Pius VII was unreconciled to the French regime. Rome spawned a rebellion. Southern Italy was in uproar and the French hold on Naples tenuous. When cities like Genoa caused trouble, the instinctive reaction was to incorporate them into France. Napoleon grew especially impatient with the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, and, as he saw it, with the king's ingratitude. Both Giuseppe Bonaparte and Joachim Murat were still waiting for thrones. When he discovered that the Neapolitans had been conspiring yet again with the British, he abruptly announced: 'The Bourbon dynasty has ceased to reign.' Giuseppe arrived in Naples in February 1806 to replace them.\n\nIn that same year, Napoleon systematized his attempts to stifle Britain's trade with the Continent. His Berlin Decrees (November 1806) forbade the import of British goods, thereby initiating the 'Continental System'; his Milan Decree (December 1807) ordered the confiscation of any vessel that had called at a British port. The System held firm in France and Germany, but was widely circumvented in the Mediterranean and came at a high political cost. None of the French-occupied countries liked being told what they could or could not buy. The Kingdom of Etruria, which as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany had been suspected by the French of 'Austrophilism', now gained the reputation of being 'Anglophile'. Livorno was seen as the port where the Continental System leaked most.\n\nNapoleon's growing problems in Spain were compounded by yet another showdown with the ruling Bourbons. Charles IV and Maria-Luisa, parents of the Etrurian queen-regent, had reigned since 1788. The king was rated 'despotic, sluggish and stupid', a former wrestler who spent his time hunting; the queen, 'coarse, passionate and narrow-minded', acted as their political manager. Together, they were the most reactionary couple still seated on a European throne. Through the 1790s, they had been unswerving opponents of the French Revolution, and during the negotiations at San Ildefonso they had fought hard to uphold Bourbon interests. In the following years, however, they sought an accommodation with France. Their one-time chief minister, Godoy, duke of Alcudia, who contrived to be both the king's favourite and the queen's lover, was restored to power by the first consul, and set out to satisfy French demands. Spain undertook to pay France a monthly tribute of 6 million francs and to prevent Portugal from breaking the continental blockade. Neither obligation was fulfilled. Godoy was deeply unpopular, and the heir apparent, Ferdinand, led an abortive plot against him.\n\nIn 1806\u20137 the crisis in Iberia slipped out of control, until in November 1807 General Junot was ordered to march through Spain with a French army and to punish the Portuguese. He only succeeded in provoking a general Spanish collapse amid what became the Peninsular War. In March 1808 the Spanish king abdicated and took refuge in France at Bayonne. Napoleon toyed for a while with his son, Ferdinand (in royalist eyes Ferdinand VII), before luring him to join his father in France. There he was arrested, and, like the rest of the Spanish royals, pensioned off. Ex-King Charles and ex-Queen Maria-Luisa were packed off to Rome, while ex-King Ferdinand was imprisoned for six years at Talleyrand's castle of Valen\u00e7ay. Napoleon coolly sent his brother Giuseppe to Madrid to take the prisoners' throne, and Murat replaced Giuseppe on the throne in Naples.\n\nThese degrading events can only have been followed in the Pitti Palace with dismay. The queen-regent of Etruria was the daughter of the abdicated Charles IV, the sister of the imprisoned Ferdinand VII, and grand-niece of the deposed king of Naples. By the autumn of 1807, increasingly isolated, she was the last of the Bourbons in power. The marquis de Beauharnais was posted to Spain and replaced by a less congenial ambassador to Etruria, Count Hector d'Aubusson de la Feuillade, the Empress Jos\u00e9phine's chamberlain; the queen-regent suspected the newcomer of intriguing with the Princess-Duchess Elisa. Long before the final scene, she must have trembled at the way the drama was unfolding.\n\nIn Paris, too, doubts must have been raised about the Kingdom of Etruria's future. Though more docile than the Kingdom of Naples, it had failed to become a bastion of French influence and had turned instead into the last Bourbon outpost. Florence was again serving as a haven for anti-French refugees, and Etruria's ports were acting as ready loopholes for British goods. Although one British historian states confidently that the queen-regent of Etruria 'was abruptly removed for failing to enforce the Continental blockade', the explanation is insufficient; very little time had elapsed to assess whether the 'Continental System' was working or not. It seems more likely that Napoleon had made up his mind during his dealings with the Bourbons in Bayonne, and was simply waiting for a convenient moment to act.\n\nThe causes of Etruria's demise, therefore, must be sought in a wider context; the breaching of the ban on British trade was important, but so too were the perception of Etruria's deepening disaffection and Napoleon's escalating dispute with the papacy. Pius VII and his chief minister, Consalvi, had tried repeatedly to find a modus vivendi with France. But in 1806 he had declined to grant a divorce to the emperor's youngest brother, Girolamo, who had rashly married an American woman called Betsy Patterson; and in 1807, reacting to Napoleon's insistence on the removal of Consalvi, he refused to give public support to the Continental System. The Papal States and their neighbour, Etruria, together looked set to become a theatre for anti-French activities in Italy, and the emperor baulked. As part of the settlement with the Spanish Bourbons, a legal but little publicized decree signed by the emperor late in 1807 at Fontainebleau announced the abolition of the Kingdom of Etruria. The following February a column of troops was despatched to reoccupy Rome. The pope protested. The emperor joined the four remaining Papal States to his Kingdom of Italy. The pope thereon excommunicated the emperor, and the emperor gave orders for the arrest and deportation of the pope.\n\nThe queen-regent of Etruria would later claim that she had been taken by total surprise:\n\n> On the 23rd November 1807, while I was at one of my country residences [at Castello], the French Minister, D'Aubusson la Feuillade, came to inform me that Spain had ceded my kingdom to France;... and that the French troops ordered to take charge of my dominions had arrived. I immediately despatched a courier to the King [of Spain], my father, to ask for an explanation... The answer which I received... was that I must hasten my departure, as the country no longer belonged to me, and that I must find consolation in the bosom of my family... At the moment of our departure the French published a proclamation in which they released our subjects from their oath of fidelity... In this manner, at the worst season of the year, I took leave of a country where my heart has remained ever since.\n\nIn contemplating the dissolution of Etruria, French bureaucrats would certainly have weighed the advantages and disadvantages of two solutions. On the one hand they would have pondered the replacement of the Bourbon-Parmas by an alternative client ruler. On the other, they would have discussed the benefits of annexing the kingdom to the French Empire. In the event, they decided to do both. The kingdom's territory was divided into three, and added to the Empire as the _d\u00e9partements_ of the Arno, Mediterran\u00e9e and Ombrone. Shortly afterwards, the Princess-Duchess Elisa was given the additional resuscitated title of grand duchess of Tuscany. Maria-Luisa di Borbone, ex-queen-regent of Etruria, vacated the Pitti Palace with her children on 10 December 1807. As she left, the kingdom expired, after an existence of less than seven years.\n\nFor the next eighteen months the territorial and administrative reorganization of the former kingdom was accompanied by widespread civil disobedience and in the countryside by the rise of banditry. Pending the arrival of their new grand duchess, who had fallen seriously ill, the three new imperial _d\u00e9partements_ were subordinated to a military general-government, which also oversaw the island of Elba. Civil prefects were appointed: Jean-Antoine, baron Fauchet for the Arno at Florence, Ange Gandolfo for the Ombrone at Siena, and Guillaume Capelle for La Mediterran\u00e9e at Livorno; each of the _d\u00e9partements_ was divided into sub-prefectures on the French model (Elba was transferred from Lucca to La Mediterran\u00e9e in 1811 as the Arrondissement of Portoferraio). All these territories were put under the supreme command of a _Giunta_ or 'Joint Command' headed by the governor-general, Jacques-Fran\u00e7ois de Menou (1750\u20131810).\n\nMenou was one of most colourful characters of revolutionary France; he has also been characterized as 'probably the hardest man in Napoleonic Europe'. As the baron de Boussay, he had been a noble deputy to the Estates-General of 1789. Later, he made his name as the Republic's enforcer in the horrific war of the Vend\u00e9e, and rose to be general in chief of the Army of the Interior. Surviving a treason trial, he accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, where he converted to Islam and, after the assassination of General Kl\u00e9ber, accepted the overall command of the expeditionary force. In line with his newfound faith, he changed his first name to Abdullah, and named his infant son Suleyman after Kl\u00e9ber's assassin. Forced to capitulate by the defeat at Aboukir, Menou returned to France, served on the _Tribunat_ and then moved to Turin as administrator-general of militarized Piedmont. There, for his private devotions, he built himself a golden-domed mosque beside the Chapel Royal.\n\n'When Menou went to Florence, he left his wife behind, took up with the lead dancer at the Milan opera, staged stunning equestrian shows for the public, and threw lavish parties in the beautiful Pitti Palace.' Yet the emperor had sent Menou to Tuscany to restore discipline and to combat the anticipated reaction to the introduction of universal male conscription \u2013 one of the necessary consequences of being incorporated into the Empire. In 1808 he oversaw the formation of several new Tuscan regiments, among them the 29th Division of _Veliti_ , the famous 'V\u00e9lites de Florence', a quick-marching infantry unit that distinguished itself all over Europe. The Tuscans, however, had repeatedly shown their displeasure at heavy French taxation, requisitioning and military recruitment, and conscription meant a further tightening of the screw. Men placed on the military register were likely to abscond, to take to the woods and to live from brigandage; if forced into uniform, they were likely to desert and to take their arms with them. As a veteran of some of the toughest fighting of the last twenty years, Menou believed their insubordination could only be countered by terrorizing the population that gave the bandits and deserters sustenance. His chosen technique was to organize 'flying columns' that took recalcitrant villages by surprise, destroyed farmsteads, seized hostages and meted out summary executions. The hallmark tool of his trade was the mobile guillotine. His name is listed on the Arc de Triomphe.\n\nMenou's right-hand man in Tuscany was General \u00c9tienne Radet (1762\u20131825), a comrade-in-arms since the pacification of the Vend\u00e9e. Radet was by now inspector-general of the Gendarmerie, his task to expand the service into the Empire's new _d\u00e9partements_ ; he supervised the creation of the 29e L\u00e9gion de Gendarmerie de Florence, who were both trained soldiers and an arm of the judicial police. The 29e L\u00e9gion sought to be ubiquitous, being formed into units of six, which occupied posts for surveillance and control in every suburb, every valley and every district. They lived in the heart of bandit country, directly confronting the brigands, smugglers and deserters. They were largely made up of French veterans, since the proposal to mix Frenchmen with locals proved impractical. Two successive conscriptions in 1808 and 1809 kept them very busy.\n\nIn the summer of 1809, Radet received the most important order of his life: on the emperor's direct authority, he was told to take 1,000 men to Rome and to kidnap the pope. On the night of 5 July they scaled the walls of the Quirinal Palace, where Radet raced round the darkened corridors until he burst into the pontiff's private rooms. ' _Saint-P\u00e8re_ ,' he began, 'Holy Father, I come in the name of my sovereign, the emperor of the French, to tell you that you must renounce the temporal domains of the Church.' ' _Je ne le puis_ ,' Pius VI is said to have replied, ' _je ne le dois pas, je ne le veux pas_ ' ('I can't do it, I oughtn't to do it and I don't want to do it'). So the raiding party bundled their prisoner into a carriage; Radet locked the door, and climbed on top beside the coachman. Before dawn, they were racing along the northern road out of Rome.\n\nDespite the political tensions and the social unrest, Princess-Duchess-Grand Duchess Elisa Bacciochi thrived. Separated from her husband, she applied herself to the administration and adornment of her extended realms, showing signs of her brother's flare and energy. Her pet project was the complete refurbishment of the Pitti Palace and Boboli Gardens, which she raised to the condition which has distinguished them ever since, and where she prepared a lavish apartment for Napoleon's use on the return visit which he promised to make. She also placed herself at the heart of Florentine artistic life. A painting commissioned from Pietro Benvenuti, now at Versailles, may be regarded as her manifesto: entitled _Elisa Bonaparte entour\u00e9e d'artistes \u00e0 Florence_ , it shows Elisa wearing a tiara and a dazzling white Empire dress looking down from an elevated throne onto an adoring company of equally resplendent courtiers, soldiers, painters, sculptors and craftsmen. In the foreground, wearing a cocked hat, Antonio Canova is presenting the grand duchess with his latest marble bust, _Elisa en Polymnie_.\n\nLate in July 1809, soon after the grand duchess was installed, the Florentines hardly noticed an incident that was hidden from public view. After a prolonged and nightmare journey from Rome, during which the captive pontiff suffered acute gastric attacks and General Radet was injured when their carriage overturned, Pius VII was brought in the night to the Certosa di Galluzzo, the self-same monastic house at which his late predecessor had resided ten years before. One of his attendants later published an account of their experiences:\n\n> Our approach to this holy spot was known before hand by that worthy sister of Buonaparte, the soi-disante Grand-Duchess of Tuscany, who had the insidious and malignant courtesy to send a message to the Holy Father... to ask whether there was anything he wanted... To so unexpected and artful a message, the Pope only answered with his customary heroism: 'I do not know this lady of whom you speak, and I have no need of her services for anything.'\n\nIn the morning, since the grand duchess had no intention of taking him in, the captive's involuntary journey restarted. He was taken over the Alps to Brian\u00e7on and thence, after a change of orders, to indefinite house arrest at Savona on the Riviera.\n\nMeanwhile, the fortunes of the ex-queen-regent were equally sliding from bad to worse. After her expulsion from Florence, she had travelled to Milan for a meeting with Napoleon. He promised her compensation in the dual form of the Principality of Northern Lusitania in Portugal (which he did not control) and marriage to his brother Luciano (who was already married). Unsurprisingly, she rejected both propositions. From Milan, she travelled to her family home at Aranjuez in Spain, which she reached in the wake of her father's abdication. She eventually caught up with her parents and brother on their way into exile: 'I knew nothing of what had been going on, and almost the first words which my father addressed to me on my arrival were: \"You must know, my daughter, that our family has for ever ceased to reign.\" I thought I should have died at the intelligence... I took leave of my parents and retired to my chamber more dead than alive.'\n\nYet her ordeal deepened. She plotted to escape with her children to England, but was trapped by the French police, summarily tried, deported to Rome and incarcerated:\n\n> I remained two years and a half in this monastery, and a whole year without seeing a soul, without speaking to a creature, and without being allowed to write or to receive news, even of my son... Exactly a month after my entry into the convent, M. Janet, intendant of the treasury, paid me a visit and took from me the jewels I had brought with me... Once a month only, General Miollis brought my parents and son to see me, but I was not allowed to kiss the dear child more than once.\n\nAs the ex-queen-regent languished in detention, the French masters of her son's former kingdom were losing the will to stamp their mark on a reluctant population. General Menou left in 1809; General Radet did not return; and the drive to build imperial institutions and to enforce the imperial law gradually lost momentum. 'Quiet reigned in Tuscany,' writes one historian of the years 1809\u201313, 'but it was the quiet of exhaustion and fear.' Despair set in when many of the recruits and conscripts failed to come home. Food prices soared, bread riots erupted and hunger stalked the countryside. The news from Russia in 1812 was bad, and from the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in 1813 catastrophic. The Empire was crumbling; its servants lost heart, and the bandits grew bold. Faced by a powerful brigand called Bonaccio, the increasingly impotent prefect of the Arno proposed that he and his band of deserters be offered an amnesty if only they would volunteer to be transported to Spain. In Florence, the prefect only had one depleted Croat regiment at his disposal. Yet his superiors in Paris overruled him. 'All wrongdoers must be captured,' they wrote indignantly, 'or driven beyond the borders of the empire.' By that time, no one in Florence knew where the borders were.\n\nThe final act of Tuscany's _anni francesi_ , the sad 'French Years', was delivered in the spring of 1814 by a man who had once been present at their launch. Marshal Murat, as he now was, the 'king of Naples', had abandoned Napoleon after Leipzig and changed sides; the Austrians put him in charge of a mixed army of imperial regulars and captured Italians. At their head, he traversed half of Italy, heading for Rome and Naples, and liberating towns and cities from his French compatriots. As his men entered Florence on 23 February, Princess-Grand Duchess Elisa fled, the administration dissolved, the residue of the garrison surrendered and negotiations started almost immediately for the restoration of Grand Duke Ferdinando.\n\nEx-Queen-Regent Maria-Luisa was already free, liberated on 14 January 1814 when Neapolitan troops drove the French from Rome. Reunited with her royal parents, she took up residence in the Quirinale Palace, where she was among the dignitaries who welcomed Pope Pius VII in May following his release. During the weeks of waiting, she was writing her memoir in the hope that it would help her to reach England. It ends with a defiant declaration:\n\n> Such is the calamitous history briefly told, which I could spin out into volumes... I have been the unhappy victim of the blackest treachery, the football of a tyrant who made sport of our lives and properties... I trust that England, the asylum of unfortunate princes, will not refuse to take under her protection an unhappy widow and mother, with two children... all three without any support; although we have undisputable rights as sovereigns to the states of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla as well as Etruria...\n\nAt that very time, Napoleon was himself being forced to abdicate. For many months since Leipzig, he had conducted a fighting retreat from Germany. But every victory was pyrrhic; every week his armies dwindled, and every day his supporters grew wearier. Despite dazzling manoeuvres in north-eastern France, he proved incapable of defending Paris. Finally, he bowed to the demand of his generals, and on 11 April 1814 signed an act of unconditional abdication. Though he never revisited Florence as he had promised, he did return to the former Kingdom of Etruria, and in the most unforeseen of circumstances. In return for his agreeing to abdicate, the tsar of Russia insisted that he be given the island of Elba as his private, sovereign domain, and he landed there on 4 May, disembarking from the appropriately named British warship the _Undaunted_. He was allowed to keep 500 officers in his retinue, and 1,100 soldiers for his guard; his house at Portoferraio was dubbed the imperial palace. Prior to his arrival, the populace were said to have burned him in effigy, protesting at the heavy taxes and military conscription still in force; but when they saw him in person, they took him to their hearts, hoping that he could better their lot. They led him in procession to the harbour church, sang a _Te Deum_ and presented their petitions.\n\nDuring the 297 days that Napoleon spent on Elba, he conducted himself with exemplary energy and initiative, setting a shining example for all sovereigns of small states and accomplishing considerably more in those ten months than the Bourbon-Parmas had done in Etruria in six years. He was following in the footsteps of the island's Renaissance ruler, Cosimo I de' Medici, who had founded the town of Cosmopolis (now Portoferraio) in 1548. He designed a flag, issued a constitution, built roads, repaired the harbour, organized plantations and irrigation schemes, reviewed his troops, opened a hospital, reorganized the iron mines and the granite quarry, introduced running water and drainage, and grandly restored three of the island's villas. He was helped, of course, by a generous Allied pension. Despite the close attentions of his mother, 'Madame M\u00e8re', he even managed to smuggle in his favourite mistress, Maria Walewska, for a two-day tryst. (His wife, daughter of the Austrian emperor, and his son were in Vienna.) Much of the time, though, was passed in playing the game of spies and counter-spies, in duping his British guards wherever possible, and in seeking information about the growing crisis in France. His entourage of generals, Bertrand, Drouot and Cambronne, was probably more anxious than he.\n\nOn arrival on Elba, Napoleon had declared ' _Ce sera l'\u00eele des repos_ ' ('This will be the Isle of Relaxations'). He had been on the move, more or less non-stop, for twenty years. He had fought sixty major battles, criss-crossed the Continent from Madrid to Moscow, and had seen millions of men die. The break was welcome, but his health faltered. He put on weight and suffered from urine retention. He lavished attention on his residences, building an Egyptian room at the Palazzo Mulini and an ornamental garden at the Villa San Martino. In high summer he was particularly fond of the hermitage of La Madonna del Monte, whence he strolled around the hills and looked out over the sea to his native Corsica. His favourite viewpoint lay atop a rocky perch still known as the _Sedia de Napoleone_ , 'Napoleon's Seat'.\n\nAccording to the leading nineteenth-century historian of the consulate and Empire, the exiled ex-emperor displayed fine qualities of character:\n\n> His life was quiet and fulfilled, for it is in the nature of superior minds to know how to submit to the severities of fate, especially when deserved... His mother, tough and imperious, but very conscientious... enjoyed a place of honour... And Princess Pauline Borghese pushed friendship for her brother to the point of passion... She was the centre of a small company of people on the island, who... treated Napoleon] as their sovereign. He showed himself to be gentle, well-mannered, serene and attentive. When his monarchical duties were done, he spent his time with Bertrand and Drouot, walking, or riding round the island, or sailing a canoe... He cherished the idea of writing a history of his reign, discussing the more controversial aspects of his career with great frankness. He often returned to the subject of the failed Peace of Prague[*\u2013 the only mistake to which he readily admitted... He read the newspapers with a remarkable intellectual penetration, that helped him to find the truth among the thousand assertions of the journalists... According to him, the march of the French Revolution had only been halted for a moment... Further conflicts between [the supporters of ] the _ancien r\u00e9gime_ and of the Revolution were to be expected; and they would provide the opening for him to reappear on the scene.\n\nPlans for _L'Envol de L'Aigle_ , 'The Eagle's Flight', were veiled in secrecy. The Bonapartists in France had certainly not lost hope; and the return of thousands of French prisoners from Germany, Russia and Spain was feeding a large pool of trained but unemployed veterans. The freshly restored Bourbon king of France, Louis XVIII, was showing no talent, and had broken an undertaking to pay the ex-emperor a subsidy of 2 million francs. The Allied Powers had dropped their guard. Napoleon's chief jailer, Sir Neil Campbell, instead of watching his charge, was in the habit of sailing over to Livorno for entertainment.\n\nA plot, therefore, could be hatched. Whether Napoleon was the instigator or the willing accomplice is immaterial. His troops trained for a journey. A sloop appeared off the coast during the night of 25\/26 February 1815. In the morning, the escape route was open:\n\n> Napoleon allowed the soldiers to continue their duties until midday, when they were given some soup. They were then assembled in the harbour with their arms and baggage... Although no one said that they were about to sail for France, they never doubted it, and broke into transports of indescribable joy! They were immensely excited by the prospect of... seeing France again, and of entering once more on the path of power and glory. And they filled the bay of Porto Ferraio with shouts of _Vive l'Empereur!_ 63\n\nAt the last moment, the 'king of Elba' stepped into a rowing boat to be ferried to the sloop and to seek his destiny once more. Landing near Antibes on the French Riviera, he set out on the road for Grenoble and Paris. Somewhere before Grasse, he passed the carriage of the prince of Monaco. 'Where are you going?' he enquired. ' _Chez moi_ ,' the prince replied. ' _Moi aussi_ ,' said Napoleon.\n\nThe Battle of Waterloo followed in June. The British army under the duke of Wellington was drawn up to the south of Brussels. The Prussians under Field Marshal Bl\u00fccher were approaching from the east. Napoleon was confident of victory. His fellow exiles from Elba were with him. But finally the fortunes of war turned against them, and Napoleon quitted the field defeated. General Cambronne, gravely wounded, was lying in a pool of his own blood when called on to surrender by a British officer. According to the official version, he replied, ' _La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas_ ' ('The Guard dies, but doesn't surrender'). Rumour spread, however, that ' _le Mot de Cambronne_ ' was not _meurt_ , but a different five-letter m-word. A hundred years later, French encyclopedias were still refusing to quote him exactly. 'A mistake may be admitted after one day,' it has been said; 'if delayed, the truth will emerge after one century.' Bertrand would survive to accompany his master on the second exile. Drouot lived on, and was made famous by his great oration when Napoleon's remains were interred in Les Invalides in 1840.\n\nThe subsequent fate of the main players in the drama of 'Etruria' can be shortly told. The Emperor Napoleon, of course, was shipped off to St Helena, whence he did not escape. By decree of the Congress of Vienna, his empress, Marie-Louise of Austria (1791\u20131847) \u2013 of whom he had said unkindly ' _Je marie un ventre_ ' ('I am marrying a belly') \u2013 was given the former Bourbon Duchy of Parma for life. Her son, the consumptive _Aiglon_ or 'Eaglet' (1811\u201332), was raised and educated in Vienna, where he used the title of duke of Reichstadt; in the view of the Bonapartist purists, he was the Emperor Napoleon II. After his death the Napoleonic succession passed to the _Aiglon'_ s uncles, first to Giuseppe and in 1844 to Luigi. Countess Maria Walewska, whom Napoleon last saw briefly on Elba, returned to Poland, divorced her husband and was remarried to one of Napoleon's marshals, Count Philippe Antoine D'Ornano (1784\u20131863), another Corsican. Maintained by an estate near Naples, she died in 1817 leaving three sons from three different fathers, and some highly controversial memoirs. The handsome son born from her liaison with Napoleon, Alexander Florian Colonna-Walewski (1810\u201368), fled from service in the Russian army, emigrated to France, served in the Foreign Legion and rose under Napoleon III to be senator, duke and minister of foreign affairs. He married the daughter of Princess Poniatowski in Florence in 1846, resolutely insisting to the last that he was the son of his mother's first husband.\n\nThe Grand Duchy of Tuscany, including Florence and Elba, was restored in 1815 to Ferdinando III of Habsburg-Lorraine, who returned to the Pitti Palace after an absence of fifteen years and found it in much better condition than when he had left it. He and his descendants reigned in Florence until 1859\u201360, when the French came back and the second Kingdom of Italy was formed (see Chapter 8). The former grand duchess of Tuscany, Elisa Buonaparte-Bacciochi, pregnant and still only thirty-eight, was arrested in March 1814 and spent some months in detention in Austria; she took up residence near Trieste, where she died prematurely from a contagious disease, predeceasing her imperial brother. Her husband, F\u00e9lix Bacciochi, survived her by twenty-one years, but was buried alongside her in the Basilica of St Petronius in Bologna. Her daughter, Elisa Napoleone Bacciochi Levoy (1806\u201369), sometime princess of Piombino, became the duchess of Camerata by marriage, and her eldest brother, Giuseppe, sailed away to make a new life in the United States. Her ex-royal brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, who changed sides for a second time in 1815, ended up being executed by the post-war Neapolitan authorities. Fearless to the last, he put himself in command of the firing squad that killed him. ' _Soldats, faites votre devoir_ ,' he ordered; 'Soldiers, do your duty. Aim straight at the heart, and spare the face. Fire!'\n\nThe _dramatis persona_ of the story who recovered against the greatest odds was the ex-queen and ex-queen-regent of Etruria, Maria-Luisa. Resisting multiple misfortunes, she secured a future both for her children and for herself. The Congress of Vienna rewarded her with the Duchy of Lucca, where she replaced the deposed Bacciochi, and where a memorial now stands in the palace that was grandly restored under her guidance. She developed the port of Viareggio, and founded seventeen monasteries. Sadly, she lost the affection of her son, Charles-Louis\/Carlo-Luigi (1799\u20131884), once the boy-king of Etruria and known after 1815 as the 'prince of Lucca', who claimed to have been ruined by her 'physically, morally and financially'. Despite strenuous efforts, she failed to find a new spouse for herself, but arranged her son's marriage to a princess of Savoy, and that of her daughter, Marie-Louise-Charlotte (1802\u201357), to a prince of Saxony. She died of cancer in Rome in 1824, and her body was taken to the Escorial for burial beside her late husband. She is not short of biographers. Twenty-three years later, her thankless son succeeded to the Duchy of Parma after Napoleon's ex-empress, and lived to a ripe old age.\n\nOf the people who had worked with her in Florence, Count Fossombroni resumed his earlier career as chief adviser to Grand Duke Ferdinando. Jean-Gabriel Eynard stayed on after 1807 to work for Grand Duchess Elisa. He then settled in Geneva, and became a pioneer of daguerreotype photography and one of Europe's leading philhellenes; he was a co-founder of the Bank of Greece. General Clarke rose to be Napoleon's minister for war; the Marquis de Beauharnais headed several Napoleonic embassies. General Menou died in service on leaving Florence. General Radet was made a baron of the Empire for his exploits in Italy, only to be court-martialled during the Restoration and to serve a four-year sentence of imprisonment.\n\nAfter Napoleon's death, the surviving Buonaparti felt much more comfortable in Italy than anywhere else. 'Madame M\u00e8re' went from Elba to Rome with her daughter, Paolina Borghese, whom she outlived, and died at an advanced age in 1836, never having learned a word of French. Her personality was described by an English art collector, who met her in 1817, when he called to examine her brother's pictures:\n\n> The mother of Napoleon... resides with her brother, Cardinal Fesch, in the Palazzo Falcone. She was even said to have become a devotee... She affects none of the reserve of Lucien in certain matters, but speaks with tears in her eyes about the ex-emperor, displays the feeling of a mother in her language, and laments that he has not written since being on St Helena, fondly cherishing the hope that the English government would finally set him at liberty... Madame has evidently been a very fine woman; she still looks well with the aid of her toilette, and her manners are ever dignified. She appears a queen, and refutes those notions, so easily accredited in Britain, [about] the vulgar manners of the Bonaparte family.\n\nThe same art collector also records seeing 'Papa Chiaromonti', Pius VII, General Radet's former prisoner:\n\n> We have often met his Holiness taking his favourite walk near the Coliseum. His morning dress is a scarlet mantle, a scarlet hat with a very broad brim edged with gold, and scarlet stockings and shoes. When he is met by the Romans, they invariably fall on their knees, and he gives them his blessing. The British stand and take off their hats, and their bows are graciously returned... His Holiness's carriage, which is a plain, crazy-looking machine drawn by six horses with riders in purple livery, always follows him.\n\nPaolina, in contrast to her mother, became extravagant in her later years, insisting, it was said, on being carried to her bath by African slaves. Luciano, prince of Canino, the ex-Jacobin, also chose Rome, devoted himself to Etruscan archaeology and died in Viterbo in 1840. His son, Charles-Lucien Bonaparte (1803\u201357) became a zoologist and ornithologist of international fame, and compiled the first major survey of Italy's natural fauna.\n\nCamillo Borghese, the Roman prince, chose Florence over Rome. Long separated from Paolina, he spent seventeen peaceful years living by the Arno with his mistress and dabbling in Bonapartist plots. For a brief period, when Paolina was mortally sick, Pope Leo XII persuaded him to take in his dying wife. He never left Florence, and both he and Paolina were laid to rest in the Borghese Chapel at the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore. Carolina Buonaparte-Murat, the ex-queen of Naples, was the subject of scandalous rumours during the Congress of Vienna about her alleged dalliance with Prince Metternich. It is more certain that Talleyrand said of her, 'she has Cromwell's head on the shoulders of a pretty woman.' ('Cromwell's head' presumably meant ruthless brains.) She moved to Florence in 1830 with her second husband, Francis Macdonald, residing in the Palazzo di Annalena on the Via Romana. A cenotaph in her memory stands by the Murat family tomb in the P\u00e8re Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Giuseppe, the eldest brother and sometime king of Naples and of Spain, sailed back from the United States to settle in Florence too, and died there in 1844. Girolamo Bonaparte, the youngest brother and erstwhile king of Westphalia, lived in Florence with his third wife until 1853 before moving to Paris as a 'prince imperial' under the Second Empire. Luigi, the ex-king of Holland, who was expelled from his much-loved kingdom by Napoleon and dispossessed by the Restoration, formally renounced French citizenship and spent the second half of his life abroad. But he, too, found his way to Tuscany and died in Livorno. Ironically, it was Luigi's son, Charles Louis-Napoleon (1803\u201373), who finally inherited the Bonapartist mantle, climbed the political ladder and emerged as the Emperor Napoleon III. Except for his aunt Carolina, who had once sought brief asylum in Ajaccio when Murat was on the run, no single member of the Buonaparte clan ever returned to Corsica.\n\nNabuleone, Giuseppe and Girolamo were buried in the Parisian Invalides. They were joined in 1940 by the _Aiglon_ , whose remains were sent to Paris from Austria with the compliments of Adolf Hitler. In some people's eyes, as veterans of the French service, they rightly belong there. Yet they and their kin were all, in essence, outsiders \u2013 as the French might say unkindly, _des intrus_ , or as their mother would have said, _intrusi_.\n\n##### III\n\nSo who cares to remember the Kingdom of Etruria? Not the Italians, for whom it occurred during a period of national humiliation. It barely gets a mention in the Museo Napoleonico in Rome. Not the French either, for whom it was a far-away, dead-end episode; nor the Spaniards, for whom the Napoleonic era is both painful and embarrassing. And certainly not the Florentines, who have so many more uplifting things to remember. The answer, therefore, is 'not many'. Historians who study Italy in the early nineteenth century do so to 'the almost total exclusion of the direct and indirect impact of the French Revolution'. One interested party (one imagines) is the Bourbon family, which has survived intermittently on the throne of Spain and whose followers maintain a thriving genealogical industry. Apart from them, there is only the occasional Bonapartist pilgrim, and the faithful readers of nonconformist historians. Elba is for ever associated with Napoleon. Florence is not.\n\nYet a 'Napoleonic Tour' of Florence and Tuscany might prove a worthy addition to those already operating. Day 1 could start at the Piazza della Signoria, to see if anyone among the admirers of Michelangelo's _David_ has heard of the _Albero della Libert\u00e0_ or of _Napoleon as Mars the Peacemaker_. An extended stop at the Pitti Palace, where Napoleon met the grand duke of Tuscany, could concentrate on the contrasting management styles of the queen-regent of Etruria and of Grand Duchess Elisa Bacciochi. A short trip out to the beautiful Certosa di Galluzzo, where two popes were held prisoner, would serve as a reminder of the ingrained coercion of Napoleonic regimes. In the evening, there is time to drive down the Val d'Arno to the ruined castle at Fuccechio and the church at San Miniato, whose hillside perches face each other across the valley. San Miniato del Tedesco, to give its full name, once an imperial residence on the pilgrim route to Rome, where Napoleon met the Abb\u00e9 Filippo Buonaparte, is a good place to stay overnight. The Torrione Tower was the scene of the suicide of Pier della Vigna, secretary to Emperor Frederick II, as recounted in Dante's _Inferno_ ; the Palazzo Buonaparte still stands in the town square and a copy of Napoleon's death mask is on display nearby. The best time to visit is mid-November, when one can combine historical explorations with the _Mostra Mercato Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco_ ('National Commercial Fair of the White Truffle'). Truffle-based recipes can be sampled at the _Ristorante Accademia degli Affidati_ on the Piazza Napoleone.\n\nDay 2 starts with a gentle downhill trip to Lucca, where the palace is stocked not only with more memories of Elisa and Maria-Luisa but with many art treasures. In the afternoon, one sails across the strait on the ferry from Piombino to Portoferraio on Elba, admires the Villa San Martino and finishes with the steep climb above Marciana to a well-deserved rest at La Madonna del Monte. Sunset over the sea, as viewed from the _Sedia de Napoleone_ , provides the finest of settings for thoughts on the fickleness of fortune both for individuals and for kingdoms.\n\nOn this issue, both Dante and Machiavelli have much to say. Machiavelli regards Fortune as the creator of opportunities, which some men exploit to their advantage and others neglect at their cost. The important thing is for a ruler to be flexible, adaptable and enterprising. 'It is better to be bold than timid and cautious,' he wrote, 'because Fortune is a woman, and the man who wants to control her must treat her roughly.'\n\nDante, like most of his educated contemporaries, was heir to the classical tradition where the Goddess Fortuna dispenses good luck and bad luck by turns. As a reader of Boethius, he was familiar with the image of Fortuna's Wheel, whose four axes were marked with the words _regno_ ('I reign'), _regnavi_ ('I have reigned'), _sum sine regno_ ('I am without a kingdom') and _regnabo_ ('I shall reign'). In the _Inferno_ , he put his views into the mouth of his guide Virgil, whose exposition nevertheless assumes unexpected Christian overtones. Dante held that what unbelievers might call Chance is really the work of Divine Providence, whose dispensations govern the Wheel of Fortune no less than the motions of the universe. Lady Fortuna is praiseworthy, therefore, and men are foolish to 'crucify her' simply because the causes of her actions are not fully understood:\n\n> _per ch'una gente impera e l'altra langue_\n> \n> _seguendo lo giudicio di costei_\n> \n> _che \u00e8 occulto, com'in erba l'angue_.\n\n('For one nation rules and another languishes \/ according to her hidden judgement, \/ hidden like a snake in the grass.')\n\n## 11\n\n## Rosenau\n\n_The Loved and Unwanted Legacy (1826\u20131918_ )\n\n##### I\n\nCoburg, sometimes spelled Koburg, is a tidy country town close to the dead centre of the German Federal Republic. It sits astride one of the streams that flow down from the Th\u00fcringian forest into the circle of Upper Franconia in northern Bavaria. It makes its living from woodworking and furniture-making, and is home to some 42,000 inhabitants. Its historical monuments include the medieval hilltop fortress, the _Veste Coburg_ , and the ostentatious former ducal palace, the _Schloss Ehrenburg_. Bayreuth, the city of Wagner, lies some 40 miles distant.\n\nThe town of Gotha, some two hours' drive to the north, lies at the foot of the opposite slopes in the Free State of Th\u00fcringia, whose dense forests have given it the label of the 'green heart of Germany'. It is a local administrative centre and, with 46,000 inhabitants, is slightly larger than Coburg; its name, meaning 'Waters of the Goths', appears as _Gotaha_ in a document of Charlemagne's era. Its principal modern attraction is the Friedenstein, a former ducal palace and 'pearl of the early Baroque'. Eisenach, overlooked by the Wartburg castle where Martin Luther took refuge, lies only 16 miles to the west, and Erfurt, the _Land_ capital, a similar short distance to the east.\n\nIn the course of their long history, the towns of Coburg and Gotha and their dependent districts were sometimes ruled separately and sometimes together. Their part of Germany was famous for its teeming mass of small states, all of which had once claimed to be equal members of the Holy Roman Empire; Coburg and Gotha, on the borders of Saxony and Bavaria, usually fell within the Saxon political orbit. In the early nineteenth century, however, the two statelets were joined together in a territorial reorganization agreed among descendants of the kings of Saxony; and for the nine decades up to 1918, a sovereign duchy functioned there under a single line of ruling dukes. In that era, the principal ducal seat lay neither in Coburg nor in Gotha, but at _Schloss Rosenau_ , near Rodenthal. The united duchy was broken up after the First World War, when the citizens of Coburg voted to join Bavaria. After the Second World War, from 1949 to 1990, Coburg found itself in West Germany, while Gotha belonged to the Communist-ruled German Democratic Republic.\n\nNowadays, Rosenau Castle is owned by the Bavarian government. Originally founded in the fourteenth century as the hunting lodge of a rich merchant, the castle was bought by a duke of Saxe-Gotha in 1721 and remained in the possession of his descendants for two hundred years. It was twice allowed to fall into rack and ruin, once during the Napoleonic Wars and again after the Second World War. Having ceased to be a private property in 1918, it was taken over during the Third Reich by the National Socialists' Women's Service and then by the Luftwaffe. After the war, when General Eisenhower's headquarters was located for a time at Gotha, it was used by the US army. By the 1970s, it became a derelict 'national monument'.\n\nThe more recent restoration of Rosenau by Bavaria's _Schl\u00f6sser- und G\u00e4rtenverwaltung_ , the 'Castle and Garden Administration', was started in 1990, and completed by the turn of the century. The aim was to bring the house and park back to the prime condition which they had enjoyed in the 1840s. 'The palace, basically a medieval structure, had been rebuilt from 1808 to 1817 in the neo-Gothic style,' explains the English website of the 'Bavarian Palace Department':\n\n> Particular highlights are the Marble Hall with its three aisles, and the residential apartments with their colourful wall decoration and original Biedermeier furniture from Vienna. Among the structures that have survived in the landscaped park with its 'Swan Lake' and 'Prince's Pond' are the orangery, the tea-house (today the park restaurant), the Jousting Column (sundial), and parts of the hermitage.\n\nOnce the restoration was in progress, Rosenau attracted interest from connoisseurs of art and architecture the world over. British magazines sent experts out to report: 'Today, after years of neglect, Rosenau has become once more the perfect Biedermeier dream of a little Gothic castle. Its small but pretty interiors full of stained glass, brightly colored painted and papered walls, and elaborately decorated ceilings are all now exquisitely restored to their former glory after a decade of patient work.' Guided tours are provided every hour on the hour. Visitors are impressed by the fact that Rosenau has been rescued from ruin twice over. Art and architecture, however, do not explain everything. Fascination with 'the perfect Biedermeier dream' far exceeds the intrinsic merit of Rosenau's romantic views or its fine Marble Hall. Much of the excitement derives from its connections with a world-famous man and wife who loved each other deeply and who both loved Rosenau. In 2011, the 150th anniversary of the husband's death provided the pretext for a series of exhibitions, concerts and readings, not only at Rosenau but also at the Callenberg and Ehrenburg palaces. The festivities were modestly billed 'Coburg Commemorates One of its Famous Inhabitants'.\n\n##### II\n\nFranz Albrecht Karl August Immanuel (1819\u201361) was not a king. But he was definitely royal, both by birth and later by marriage. He was the second son of Ernst III, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and of Louise, princess of the neighbouring Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, and as such a scion of the senior, Ernestine branch of the Wettins, the royal House of Saxony.* As he grew up, his relatives long pondered the possibility of exploiting their links with leading foreign monarchies.\n\nThe prince was born and raised at Rosenau. The day following his birth, his paternal grandmother, the dowager duchess of Coburg-Saalfeld, wrote to her married daughter in England:\n\n> _Rosenau, August 27, 1819_\n> \n> [Louischen] was yesterday morning safely and quickly delivered of a little boy. Siebold, the _accoucheuse_ , had only been called at three, and at six the little one gave his first cry in this world, and looked about like a little squirrel with a pair of large black eyes. At a quarter to 7 I heard the tramp of a horse. It was a groom, who brought the joyful news. I was off directly, as you may imagine, and found the little mother slightly exhausted, but _gaie et dispos_. She sends you and Edward [the duke of Kent] a thousand kind messages...\n\n'The little boy is to be christened tomorrow', his grandmother continued. 'The Emperor of Austria, the old Duke of Saxe-Teschen, the Duke of Gotha, Mensdorff, and I are to be sponsors.' Baptism into the Lutheran Protestant faith was performed by an archbishop in Rosenau's Marble Hall. Since the Austrian emperor was Catholic, he was appointed 'sponsor' rather than godfather; it was in his honour that the infant's first given name was Franz. But for everyday purposes, his parents intended to call him Albrecht after the duke of Saxe-Teschen.\n\nAfter the duke of Gotha's death, when Albrecht was six, the two families of Coburg and Gotha decided to merge their duchies in a personal union. The result from 1826 was a united Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha \u2013 in German, _Das Herzogtum Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha_ \u2013 whose two parts were separated by a substantial band of territory belonging to the Kingdom of Saxony. Albrecht's father changed his title, becoming Duke Ernst I; and his elder brother, also Ernst, became the heir apparent. The new duchy's attractive bicolour standard, the _Landesflagge_ , displayed two horizontal halves: the upper half in apple green, the lower half in white.\n\nRosenau during Albrecht's boyhood was basking in the glory of its first renovation. A local almanac noted the stark contrast with its condition only a few years earlier: 'The busy court ladies enjoy views of beautiful nature, where not so long ago pigeons and swallows, owls and bats nested... When the present re-shaping of the castle began it was just the dirty and uncomfortable dwelling of boorish tenants; the fine Marble Hall was a dust-tip and wood-store.' The Duchess Louise was particularly pleased with her own quarters: 'I live on the second floor... I have a little living room, where if there are not too many visitors we generally drink our tea. The wallpaper is gold with dark blue vine leaves... My sitting-room... is grey, dark blue and gold.'\n\nA more extensive description can be found in the volume compiled long afterwards by Albrecht's widow:\n\n> Distant about four miles from Coburg, it is charmingly placed on a knoll that rises abruptly... from a range of wooded hills which divide the lovely valley of the Itz from the broad and undulating plain... The knoll on which the house stands... falls precipitously on the east side to the Itz, and by a very steep descent on the other three sides to the plain...\n> \n> The top forms a small plateau, on the southern edge of which stands the house, a solid oblong building... with high gable-ends. The entrance is in a round tower on the west side of the house, to which the approach ascends through a thick grove of young spruce firs... A broad winding staircase in the tower leads upwards to the principal rooms on the first floor, and downwards to the Marble Hall, or dining-room...\n> \n> A small terrace-garden at the north end... commands a lovely view of the Itz, beyond which... the country is broken up into a succession of wooded hills and picturesque valleys, with... smiling, tidy villages standing in the middle of rich meadows and orchards, the hills gradually rising up to the highest points of the Th\u00fcringerwald...\n> \n> The Marble Hall... opens on a small gravelled space, bounded by a neatly trimmed hedge of roses, and communicating... by a long and irregular flight of stone steps, with the walk along the banks of the [river] below. Standing on this space in the early morning... or in the afternoon... it is difficult to imagine anything more bright or enjoyable.\n> \n> Prominent amongst the trees which grow and thrive at the Rosenau is the Abele poplar, of which there are many very good specimens here... This accounts at once for this tree having always been a favourite one with the Prince, for surely no man was ever endowed with a stronger feeling of love for all the recollections and associations of his youth, and of his native place.\n\nAlbrecht would tell his wife that his childhood at Rosenau had been 'paradise'. He and his older brother had been handed over at an early age to the care of a tutor called Christopher Florsch\u00fctz, who attended the boys night and day, being responsible for all aspects of their upbringing:\n\n> The children soon discovered that Florsch\u00fctz's stern exterior hid a heart of gold. Although only twenty-five, he had already been... tutor to the two youngest sons of duke [Ernst]'s eldest sister, Alexander and Arthur Mensdorff. Many of duke [Ernst]'s old-fashioned friends deplored the choice of a man of known liberal principles... (later on, some of them even blamed Florsch\u00fctz for letting them attend lectures in philosophy at Bonn, on the ground that such studies might lead to anarchy!) Mathematics and Latin formed the basis of Florsch\u00fctz's teaching... together with wide reading of modern literature in German, French and English. Florsch\u00fctz spoke English well, so that [his younger pupil] was familiar with it from the age of four...\n> \n> Florsch\u00fctz... was a born teacher who [imparted] a love of learning for its own sake, and there is no doubt that [Albrecht]'s passionate interest in science was a direct result of having physics and chemistry presented to him in an interesting way as a boy... Above all, Florsch\u00fctz taught them to go to the root of everything, to accept nothing at second hand, to use their eyes and to look about them for beauty in nature, art, literature and humanity.\n\nBy speaking English with Florsch\u00fctz, Albrecht would have learned for the first time to think of himself sometimes as Albert, and of his brother as Ernest; it was an important transition. He would have known from an early age that his paternal aunt, Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, his father's widowed sister, was now duchess of Kent and living in London with her three children. Having cousins in London, he would have seen the point of giving English an equal place in his studies with the more usual French. His diligence, aged fourteen, may be gauged from a timetable that he prepared for himself in 1833 (see p. 548).\n\nThe paradise, however, had its dark side. Albert's immediate family could not give him the warmth and encouragement on which children thrive. His father, the duke, was a shameless syphilitic rake, said to organize orgies in one of his other residences at Callenberg. He had brought a mistress from France, Mme Panam, whose insufferable son used the self-styled name of 'prince de Coburg', and whose memoirs, published in 1823, brought shame on all concerned. Albert's mother, the Duchess Louise, disgusted by her husband's debauchery, chose a formal separation, even though this most cruelly forced her to abandon her children. When she was leaving, a large crowd of well-wishers gathered at Rosenau to see her off. Her sons, confined in the nursery with whooping cough, could not join them. In due course, she divorced and remarried, but died young, of cancer. She was replaced at Rosenau by the duke's cousin and second wife, Antoinette-Marie of W\u00fcrttemberg, who failed to establish a warm relationship with her stepsons. Worse still, though they rarely quarrelled openly, Albert did not really find a soulmate in the elder brother, who shared his fate for more than twenty years:\n\n> These brothers, born in 1818 and 1819, were so dissimilar in character and appearance that there were mischievous rumours that the younger one was illegitimate... Almost from the day of his birth Albert's beauty was remarked upon. 'Lovely as a little angel,' his mother recorded in his infancy. His eyes, like his mother's, were deep blue and his curly hair was at first fair.\n> \n> Albert's brother Ernest 'was as unattractive as Prince Albert was attractive. His complexion,' ran [one] harsh description, 'was sallow with liver spots, his eyes were bloodshot, and his lower teeth, like those of a bulldog, protruded far above his upper ones.' He was 'a mighty hunter of wine, women and song'. Even from their infancy, it was plainly evident that the elder son took after his father... while Albert strongly resembled his mother...\n> \n> [Another relative] found it puzzling that [Prince Albert] turned out to have so fine a character 'with such a father and such a brother, both equally unprincipled'. When Albert was still only four, his mother suddenly disappeared from his life for ever... it was typical of the boy, and later of the man, that he never uttered a bitter comment on this occurrence, and always thought of his mother with great tenderness.\n\nTable 3. Albert's timetable\n\nThe 'mischievous rumours' were generated by speculation that his mother may have indulged in a secret liaison before his birth, possibly with an army lieutenant or with a Jewish chamberlain at Coburg. Closer examination of the circumstances leads to the unproven hypothesis that the child's biological father could have been Prince Leopold, the future king of the Belgians and the most likely source of allegations designed to cover his own tracks.\n\nAlbert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and Victoria of Kent were introduced to each other in May 1836 by their hopeful relatives. He was still sixteen; she had just passed her seventeenth birthday. 'Uncle Leopold', who by now was King Leopold, was brother both to Albert's father and to Victoria's mother; and it was he who arranged for his two Saxon nephews to travel to London to meet their cousin, already the heiress to the British throne. The scheme worked to perfection. Victoria wrote to her uncle thanking him for 'the prospect of great happiness... in the person of dear Albert'. There was no question at this stage of an engagement. The old king, William IV, disapproved. But the emotional bond, at least on the girl's side, was sealed.\n\nVictoria's family, the Hanoverians, were no less German than Albert's, having consistently imported brides from Germany for all their heirs apparent, and they were even more painfully dysfunctional. Victoria, who had been conceived in Saxony and born in England,* was surrounded by German women in her infancy and only began English lessons from the age of five. She never knew her father, the duke of Kent, who died young; indeed, cruel gossip hinted that she, too, was not her father's biological child. Three of her four surviving paternal uncles, including the king, were estranged from their wives; bastard cousins proliferated; sexual and hereditary diseases, especially porphyria, were rampant; premature deaths were commonplace. Victoria had only become heir apparent in 1830 because all three of her father's older brothers died without legitimate issue. Her mother, the duchess of Kent, never gained a proper grasp of English; she had two older, German-speaking children from a previous marriage, and lived in London with a lover thinly disguised as her household comptroller;\u2020 she was jealous and overprotective of her latest offspring, preventing Victoria making friends and subjecting her to a repressive daily regime. Fearful of the illicit liaisons with which the royal court was riddled, she even forced her adolescent daughter to sleep with her in the same room. The lonely teenager, locked up in Kensington Palace for longer than she could remember, sought solace with her spaniel, Dash, and with her beloved governess, Louise Lehzen, a Coburger.\n\nVictoria, in short, had much in common with her handsome Saxon cousin; and she determined to resist all alternative suitors. William IV died a year after his visit and she was crowned queen in 1838. Albert was invited back the following year. He meanwhile had been patiently studying at the University of Bonn, staying with Uncle Leopold in Brussels and undertaking a 'Grand Tour' of Italy. He arrived in Windsor on 15 October 1839, and the queen proposed marriage on the morning of the fourth day of his return. Her journal overflowed with superlatives:\n\n> Oh _!_ to _feel_ I was, and am loved by such an _Angel_ as Albert was _too great a delight to describe!_ He is _perfection;_ perfection in every way \u2013 in beauty \u2013 in everything! I told him I was quite unworthy of him and kissed his dear hand \u2013 he said he would be very happy _'das Leben mit dir zu zubringen_ ' and was so kind... it was the happiest, brightest moment of my life, which made up for all I had suffered and endured. Oh! _how_ I adore and love him, I cannot say!\n\nAlbert's account of the betrothal is contained in a letter which he wrote shortly afterwards to his grandmother, the dowager duchess of Gotha; it was to be translated into English for the authorized description of his early years compiled under Victoria's supervision:\n\n> _Liebe Grossmama..._\n> \n> The Queen sent for me alone to her room... and declared to me in a genuine outburst of love and affection ( _in einem wahren Ergusse von Herzlichkeit und Liebe_ ) that I had gained her whole heart ( _ich habe ihr ganzes Herz gewonnen_ ) and would make her intensely happy ( _\u00fcbergl\u00fccklich_ ) if I would make her the sacrifice of sharing my life with her ( _wenn ich das Opfer bringen wolle, mit ihr mein Leben zu theilen_ )...; the only thing that troubled her was that she did not think herself worthy of me ( _das sie meiner nicht werth ware_ )...\n\nBoth the queen and the prince were native German-speakers; it would have been strange, when pledging their troth, if they had turned to some other language. Certainly, German was the idiom that they would use for personal and domestic purposes for the rest of their life together.\n\nPrince Albert's journey to England in anticipation of their wedding occupied two freezing weeks early in 1840. He started on 28 January from his grandmother's house in Gotha:\n\n> The streets were densely crowded, every window was crammed with heads, every house-top covered with people waving handkerchiefs, and vying with each other in demonstrations of affection... The carriages stopped in passing the Dowager Duchess's, and Prince Albert got out with his father and brother to bid her a last adieu...\n> \n> Having passed in a long procession through the town... the Princes took a final leave at the Last Shilling, and got into one of the Queen's travelling-carriages. The Duke, attended by Colonel Grey, went another German mile to the frontier, where an arch of green fir-trees had been erected, and a number of young girls dressed in white, with roses and garlands, and a band of musicians and singers... were assembled to bid a final 'Godspeed', as he left his native land behind him.\n> \n> The travelling-carriages, with the fourgons, were eight in number... The Duke and Princes were attended, in addition to the three English gentlemen (Lord Torrington, Colonel Grey, and Mr. Seymour), by Counts Alvensleben, Kolowrath, Gruben, and P\u00f6llnitz...\n> \n> A little before nine [a.m.], the party left Cassel to go seventeen German miles to Arnsberg, where they only arrived as the clock was striking ten in the evening. The following night was passed at Deutz...\n> \n> The Rhine... had to be crossed the next morning in boats, a tedious and a cold operation, made more disagreeable by the heavy rain... The party left Cologne about half past nine, dined at Aix-la-Chapelle about three, and arrived at Li\u00e8ge, where they slept, about ten. At Aix-la-Chapelle the Prince heard the news of the rejection of the proposed grant of \u00a350,000... It led him to fear that the people of England were not pleased with the marriage...\n> \n> Before leaving Li\u00e8ge, the Duke received all the authorities, civil and military, who were severally introduced... At ten, the whole party was conveyed, in one large omnibus, to the railroad terminus at Ans, where a special train had been provided, by which they were taken in four hours to Brussels...\n> \n> On Wednesday the 5th February, at half past seven, the journey to England was resumed, by rail as far as Ostend, and thence posting along the coast by Dunkirk and Gravelines to Calais... At half past eleven the two Princes arrived at Calais, where, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, they found all the officers of the garrison waiting at the hotel to receive them... Lord Clarence Paget, who had been sent in the _Firebrand_ to escort the Prince over, also met the party at the hotel...\n> \n> [Early on] Thursday the 6th February, the weather was beautiful, with a light air from the N.W. Unfortunately the tide was too low to admit of sailing before half past eleven; and in the meantime the day changed. A strong breeze freshened up from the S.E., and increased almost to a gale. The _Firebrand_ not being able to get out so soon, the whole party had embarked in the _Ariel_ , one of the Dover packets... But the passage was long (five hours and a half); and the deck of the little steamer was a scene of almost universal misery and seasickness. The Duke had gone below, and on either side of the cabin staircase lay the two Princes, in an almost helpless state. The sea got heavier as the vessel approached the land, and it was by no common effort... that Prince Albert, who had continued to suffer up to the last moment, got up as it entered between the piers to bow to the people by which they were crowded.\n\nThe inhospitable mood of the English Channel could easily have been taken as a bad omen. But as soon as they docked the Prince's spirits rose rapidly:\n\n> Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm which greeted the Prince when he set his foot on shore as the affianced husband of our Queen... The night was spent at Dover, at the York Hotel, and after a very poor attempt by most of the party at dinner, everyone was glad to get to bed.\n> \n> It had been arranged that the Prince should not arrive at Buckingham Palace till Saturday. A short journey was therefore made the next day to Canterbury... The Royal party arrived accompanied by an escort of the 11th Hussars, and having received an address from the city authorities, the Prince, with his brother, attended the service of the Cathedral at three. In the evening the city was illuminated, and a vast crowd assembled before the hotel, cheering for the Prince, who answered their call by appearing, to their great delight, on the balcony.\n> \n> From Canterbury the Prince sent on his valet with his favourite greyhound, E\u00f4s, and the Queen speaks in her journal of the pleasure which the sight of 'dear Egs' gave her...\n> \n> On Saturday morning, the 8th, after receiving an address from the Dean and Chapter, the Prince left at ten for London, meeting with the same enthusiastic reception along the whole line of route to Buckingham Palace. Here the party arrived at half past four o'clock, and were received at the hall-door by the Queen and the Duchess of Kent, attended by the whole household. At five o'clock the Lord Chancellor administrated the oaths of naturalisation to the Prince, and the day ended by a great dinner, attended by the officers of State, Lord Melbourne, etc., the Queen recording in her journal, in warm terms, the great joy she felt at seeing the Prince again...\n> \n> But amidst... all the rejoicings and festivities... the grandmother left behind at Gotha... was not forgotten... And the Prince himself, on the morning of his wedding-day, sent her these few touching lines:\n> \n> 'Dear Grandmama, In less than three hours I shall stand before the altar with my dear bride! In these solemn moments I must once more ask for your blessing, which I am well assured I shall receive, and which will be my safeguard and my future joy! I must end. God help me!\n> \n> Ever your faithful Grandson.\n> \n> _London, Feb_. 10, 1840.'\n\nThe royal wedding took place in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace. It gave the bridegroom the title of His Royal Highness, the House of Lords having refused to make him a peer of the realm, and the Commons awarding him only a reduced grant from the Civil List. The prime minister, Lord Melbourne, parried the queen's request for the elevation of her husband to 'king-consort'; seventeen years would pass before the lesser title of 'prince consort' would be granted. Albert feigned indifference. 'It would almost be a step downwards,' he wrote. 'As a Duke of Saxony I feel myself much higher than a Duke of York or Kent.' His consolation was that by marrying Victoria he had given his own name of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to the British royal family. He had also the gratification of hearing his bride promise 'to obey him and serve him'. Five months earlier, the queen's advisers had insisted that he would _not_ be allowed to propose marriage during their engagement but that the proposal must be made by her. Yet now, when it came to the wedding, they did not interfere with the traditional service. Albert was required 'to love, comfort, honour and keep' his wedded wife, but Victoria was further required to proffer both obedience and service to her wedded husband. This was no mean concession. And he had entered the Chapel Royal surrounded by the knighthood, chivalry, pomp and insignia of his homeland:\n\n> THE BRIDEGROOM\n> \n> HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, FIELD-MARSHAL PRINCE ALBERT, K.G.\n> \n> Wearing the Collar of the Order of the Garter\n> \n> Supported by their Serene Highnesses, the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha\n> \n> And the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha,\n> \n> Each attended by the Officers of their Suite, namely\n> \n> Count Kolowrath, Baron Alvensleben and Baron de Lowenfels.\n\nHis father, the duke, wore the dark-green uniform with red piping of his duchy's army, thigh-length military boots and the Grand Cross of the highest ducal order. His brother, Prince Ernst, wore a light-blue cavalry uniform, adorned by the Star of Coburg-Gotha and the Collar of the Garter, and carried an officer's helmet. They had entered their carriages amid the sound of trumpets and 'all the honours paid to the Queen herself'; and they left the Palace escorted by a squadron of Life Guards.\n\nSome historians do not accept the conventional picture of an ecstatic, well-matched couple, each content in their complementary roles. They suggest that Albert in particular was unhappy in his subordinate position, presuming that the emotional rigours of his childhood had made him a dissembler. He was never so deeply in love as the besotted Victoria, they say; he plotted his life's course as he played chess, move by move, and callously exploited his wife's numerous pregnancies in order to strengthen his hold over her. He was a voracious, obsessive hunter, killing animals en masse for pleasure, and a harsh father to his sons. In the political sphere he did far more than hold the blotter while his wife signed the state papers: he maintained a clandestine correspondence with his kinsmen in Germany, especially in Prussia, using Rothschilds Bank as a conduit for letters. He refused to stay out of controversies, and appeared in the public gallery of the House of Lords, for example, to air his views on the Corn Laws.\n\nNonetheless, Albert's ascent to the highest level of royal and aristocratic society cannot have failed to arouse some sense of satisfaction, not least because his native duchy was home to the most prestigious of publications on these matters. The _Almanach de Gotha_ was Europe's most authoritative genealogical guide for nearly 200 years. First issued in 1763, it listed names in three sections: I. Sovereign Houses, II. German Nobility, and III. Selected Nobility of other European countries; each annual edition recorded all relevant births, deaths, marriages and titles. Throughout the nineteenth century, in order to preserve their status, all aristocrats were obliged to marry persons of equivalent rank. The _Almanach_ , therefore, had the last word on who was permitted to marry whom. It is absolutely certain that there would have been a copy on the shelves at Coburg and Rosenau.\n\nDue to their deference to their local dukes, the _Almanach_ 's editors customarily listed the House of Saxony in pole position among the sovereigns. The Emperor Napoleon had once taken offence at this practice, but in the 1820s, when Albert's name first appeared, the Ernestine (Lutheran) branch of Saxony again led the field; and Albert's mother appeared in the same subsection as Victoria's mother. In accordance with the traditional linguistic practices of the German aristocracy, the information was presented in French:\n\n> G\u00c9N\u00c9ALOGIE DES SOUVERAINS DE L'EUROPE\n> \n> ET DES MEMBRES VIVANTS DES LEURS FAMILLES\n> \n> SAXE\n> \n> BRANCHE ERNESTINE (Luth.)\n> \n> SAXE-GOTHA\n> \n> Duc Fr\u00e9d\u00e9rick IV, n\u00e9 le 23 Nov 1774, succ. \u00e0 son fr\u00e8re le Duc Auguste, 17 Mai 1822...\n> \n> SAXE-MEININGEN...\n> \n> SAXE-HILDBOURGHAUSEN...\n> \n> SAXE-SAALFELD-COBURG\n> \n> 1) Duc Ernest, n. 2 Janv. 1784, succ. \u00e0 son p\u00e8re le Duc Fran\u00e7ois, le 9 Dec 1806, mar 31 Juill 1817 \u00e0 la D. Louise, F. d'Auguste, Duc de Saxe-Gotha, n. 21 D\u00e9c 1800\n> \n> Fils\n> \n> 2) D. Ernest Auguste Charles Jean L\u00e9opold Alexandre Edouard, Pr.H\u00e9r\u00e9d. n.21 Juin 1818\n> \n> D. Albert Fran\u00e7ois Auguste Charles Emmanuel, n. 26 Ao\u00fbt 1819\n> \n> Fr\u00e8res et S\u0153urs...\n> \n> 5) D. Marie Louise Victoire, n. 17 Ao\u00fbt 1786. v. Grande-Bretagne [Londres]...\n> \n> Great Britain is listed twenty-one pages further on:\n> \n> GRANDE BRETAGNE (Engl. Anglic.)\n> \n> Roi Georges IV, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Auguste, n\u00e9 12 Ao\u00fbt 1762... succ. \u00e0 son p\u00e8re le Roi Georges III 29 Janv. 1820...\n> \n> Fr\u00e8res et S\u0153urs\n> \n> 4) Venue du Fr\u00e8re le Pr. Eduard, Duc de Kent (quatri\u00e8me Fils du Roi Georges III), Pr. Marie Louise Victoire, n\u00e9 17 Ao\u00fbt 1786, F. de Fran\u00e7ois Duc de Saxe-Cobourg...\n> \n> Enfant\n> \n> Pr. Alexandrine Victoire, n. 24 Mai 1819.\n\nFour years after Albert married Victoria, the old duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Albert's father, died, and the ducal title passed to Albert's elder brother, Ernest II (r. 1844\u201393). Since his brother had fathered no children (and did not seem about to do so), Albert assumed the position of heir apparent, and Albert's sons moved up in the duchy's line of succession. Nothing changed in this regard for the rest of the consort's life.\n\nVictoria's diaries for 1845 gush with enthusiasm during the young couple's first visit to Germany. They travelled to Coburg, and then to Rosenau: 'I cannot say how much affected I felt in entering this dear old place and with difficulty I resisted crying; the beautifully ornamented town, all with wreaths and flowers, the numbers of good and affectionate people, the many recollections all connected with this place, all was so affecting.' Victoria's delight was unbounded as she toured her husband's birthplace; he showed her the nursery, the table on which he would stand to be dressed as a small boy, and the cuts in the wallpaper left from his fencing fights with his brother.\n\nAlbert, in contrast, was troubled. On the journey from Cologne on the Prussian royal train, they had been treated to the sight of 4,000 Prussian soldiers lining the banks of the Rhine as they passed, firing thunderous volleys. During a brief reception in the Augustusburg Palace at Br\u00fchl, the king of Prussia had delivered an overblown speech on the theme of 'Waterloo-Victory-Victoria'. And not everything at Coburg was to Albert's liking:\n\n> Since he had particularly asked that there should be no fuss, Albert was annoyed that Ernest received them... with a guard of honour and his little army on parade. Because it was bound to be an emotional experience to take Victoria to the Rosenau, he arranged for them to be alone when he showed her his old bedroom under the roof... In the Veste [Coburg's fortress] he took her to see the Cranachs, the new Ernst-Albrecht Museum, the chapel with Luther's pulpit and the marvellous view from the terrace. Everything was as it had always been, except that he now had a wife by his side.\n> \n> Yet he himself had changed... He was amazed that he had never noticed that the peasants lived in hovels, that their wives worked in the fields even in the last stages of pregnancy, and that there were no schools to speak of. It was a shock to find the great contrast between Coburg and Gotha... There was much more evidence of culture in his maternal grandfather's palace than in all his father's houses put together... Albert had not realised how many of his interests were inherited from [his maternal great-grandfather]... and how much his four years in England had done to develop them.\n\nThe ten years that followed brought the royal pair their longest period of calm and fulfilment. Victoria was a self-assured monarch, surrounded by a fast-growing family. Albert was devoted to his work as chairman of the committee preparing the Great Exhibition, and he adored his daughters, particularly the eldest, 'Vickie', who grew up to be his favourite companion. In the census return completed on 30 March 1851 the royal family are recorded as living in Buckingham Palace with only a few servants. 'Her Majesty Alexandrina Victoria' is listed first; her 'Relationship to Head of Household' was 'Wife', her 'Condition' 'Mar[ried]', her age thirty-one, and her 'Rank, Profession or Occupation' 'The Queen'. 'HRH Francis Albert Augustus Charles Emmanuel', also thirty-one and married, was described as 'Head' of the household, and 'Duke of Saxony, Prince of Coburg and Gotha'. He apparently had no British 'Rank, Profession or Occupation'. One suspects that it was Albert who answered the census official's questions.\n\nQueen and consort would see Rosenau together only one more time, although Victoria would go there alone on five further occasions. During their visit in the summer of 1860, she waxed particularly eloquent. 'If I weren't the person whom I am,' she said, 'my home would be here,' adding cautiously, 'though it would be my second home.' Albert broke down in tears. 'I shall never see my birthplace again,' he exclaimed prophetically. Within the year he was dead, struck down at the age of forty-two, officially by typhoid.\n\nContrary to the legend of a perfect marriage, there is reason to suppose that Albert's shockingly early death could indeed have been hastened by the unseen stresses of mounting matrimonial discord. After the birth in 1857 of their ninth child, Princess Beatrice, the queen's doctors ruled that her life would be endangered by further pregnancy, and the couple were forced to make separate sleeping arrangements. She grew irritable, and occasionally hysterical; he became depressed, withdrawn and exhausted by overwork. In that same year he was deeply pained by the fact that his title of prince consort had to be granted through the queen's personal intervention because no one else in authority had cared to take the initiative. The queen did not support him in his ill-concealed feud with Lord Palmerston. Albert felt unloved, and ashamed by the realization that his eldest son, the future Edward VII, was turning, like his own father and brother, into a brazen lecher. He was already weak and drained, therefore, when he set out in the cold, damp November weather of 1861 to visit the prince of Wales in Cambridge and to administer a paternal reprimand. He took Edward for a long walk and caught cold. Returning to Windsor with a high fever, he suffered complications and never recovered.\n\nIf this version of events is accepted, Queen Victoria's descent into lifetime mourning was caused as much by guilt as by grief; her determination to perpetuate Albert's memory in a worldwide array of monuments and memorials was certainly inconsistent with his wishes. She also felt compelled persistently to revisit the scene of their lost bliss in Germany. In the summer of 1863 the black-robed widow stayed with Albert's aunt at Coburg, where she received the emperor of Austria, Franz-Joseph. Her ministers in London fretted at her absence. 'Your Majesty,' advised Benjamin Disraeli, 'you cannot rule the Empire from Coburg.'\n\nBy the mid-nineteenth century, the name of Saxe-Coburg had assumed continental proportions. Most of Albert and Victoria's nine children were married into Europe's most prestigious ruling families. They and their progeny were to occupy the thrones not only of the British Empire but also of Germany, Russia, Norway, Spain, Romania and Bulgaria. Uncle Leopold's line of Saxe-Coburgs held its own in Belgium for five generations, and extended its tentacles as far as Mexico; the Saxe-Coburg-Koharys were prominent in Hungary, and gave rise to the Coburg-Braganzas who ruled Portugal until 1910. The Palais Coburg in Vienna, built between 1840 and 1845 for General Ferdinand Sachsen-Coburg-Kohary, was one of the architectural treasures of the Habsburg capital; and Saxe-Coburg soup, made from Albert's favourite Brussels sprouts, was a worthy counterpart to the Brown Windsor soup on which the British Empire was said to have been built.\n\nAlbert's homeland did not enjoy the formal status of a kingdom, but it was a hereditary monarchy, and was accepted as a constituent member of the German Empire from 1871 to 1918. Like its neighbours, Saxe-Altenberg, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (where Goethe had served as chancellor), it was tiny, but clearly attractive:\n\n> SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA (Ger. _Sachsen-Koburg-Gotha_ ), a sovereign duchy of Germany, in Thuringia... consisting of the two formerly separate duchies of Coburg and Gotha, and of eight small scattered enclaves... The total area is 764 sq. m., of which about 224 are in Coburg and 540 in Gotha. The duchy of Coburg is bounded by Bavaria, and by Saxe-Meiningen, which separates it from Gotha... The duchy of Coburg is an undulating and fertile district, reaching its highest point in the Senichsh\u00f6he (1716 ft.) near Mirsdorf. Its streams, the chief of which are the Itz, Biberach, Steinach and Rodach, all find their way into the Main. The duchy of Gotha, more than twice the size of Coburg, stretches from the borders of Prussia... to the Thuringian Forest, the highest summits of which (Der grosse Beerberg, 3225 ft. and Schneekopf, 3179 ft.) rise within its borders. The more level district on the north is spoken of as the 'open country' ( _das Land_ ) in contrast to the wooded hills of the 'forest' ( _der Wald_ ).\n\nDuke Ernst II was active in Germany's court politics and in the German national movement, for whose benefit he was known for hosting prestigious shooting rallies. But his management of his own duchy was far from ideal, and there can be no doubt that its affairs exercised the hearts and minds of both Albert and Victoria throughout their marriage. Little, however, was done, and it was a great misfortune that Albert had been dead for more than thirty years before matters came to a head. By that time, the sons of Albert and Victoria had hearts and minds of their own, and the duchy had become a fully constitutional state. Coburg had possessed a constitution since 1821; Gotha followed suit during the 'Springtime of Nations' that swept Central Europe in 1848\u20139. Throughout those early years the two territories had been joined to their ruler in personal union; but from 1852 they were legally united under him, like the several parts of Britain's United Kingdom:\n\n> _Constitution and Administration_. \u2013 Saxe-Coburg-Gotha is a limited hereditary monarchy, its constitution resting on a law of 1852, modified in 1874. For its own immediate affairs each duchy has a separate diet, but in more important and general matters a common diet... meeting at Coburg and Gotha alternately, exercises authority. The members are elected for four years. The Coburg diet consists of eleven members and the Gotha diet of nineteen. The franchise is extended to all male taxpayers of twenty-five years of age and upwards... The united duchy is represented in the imperial Bundesrat by one member and in the Reichstag by two members... By treaty with Prussia the troops of the duchy are incorporated with the Prussian army. The budget is voted... for four years, a distinction being made between domain revenue and state revenue. The receipts... on behalf of Coburg were estimated for 1909\u20131910 at about \u00a3100,000 and those for Gotha at about \u00a3200,000, while the common state expenditure amounted to about the same sum. The civil list of the reigning duke is fixed at \u00a315,000 a year, in addition to half the proceeds of the Gotha domains, and half the net revenue of the Coburg domains... The duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha [also] enjoys a very large private fortune, amassed chiefly by Ernest I., who sold the principality of Lichtenberg, which the Congress of Vienna had bestowed upon him in recognition of his services to Prussia.\n\nOver the decades the name of Gotha came to be associated with three very different spheres of life: engineering, left-wing politics and aeronautics. All three derived from one source. The _Goth\u00e4r Waggonfabrik_ started producing rolling stock in the 1840s; it rapidly attracted a large industrial workforce that became one of the breeding grounds of German socialism. The German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was founded in the town in 1854, and its 'Gotha Programme' of 1875 became a central subject of debate within the movement. Karl Marx's _Critique of the Gotha Programme_ introduced the world to concepts such as the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and 'proletarian internationalism', propagating the famous principle of 'From all according to ability, to all according to need'. Its tardy publication in 1891, eight years after its author's death, prepared the theoretical ground for the transition from Marxism to Marxism-Leninism. By that time, the _Waggonfabrik_ was one of the Empire's leading producers of electric trams. After the turn of the century, it would diversify still further when it moved into airplane construction. The Gotha Ursinus G-1 biplane was to become the mainstay of the imperial strategic bomber fleet.\n\nDuke Ernest II of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha died in 1893. He had been Victoria's brother-in-law for more than fifty years and was great-uncle to Kaiser Wilhelm:\n\n> It appears the end was paralysis of the larynx caused by the state of the brain... which in its turn was the result of the terrible fast life he had led in Berlin from the time he was seventeen; put into the 1st Prussian Corps, the fastest of all the regiments, with a thoroughly bad man to look after him. He simply had no chance whatever, and humanly speaking his life has just been drained away. How strange Royalties are, their children seem to lack the ordinary care bestowed on our own humblest middle class.\n\nThe duke's death was greatly mourned in Berlin; he had been the first person to congratulate the Kaiser on his accession. He was buried in the Moritzkirche in Coburg.\n\nThe succession passed automatically to the late duke's Germano-British nephews. The snag was that none of them really wanted it. Victoria and Albert's eldest son, Edward, renounced his claim, having better things to do as prince of Wales. Their second son, Alfred, duke of Edinburgh (b. 1844), who had pursued a successful career in the Royal Navy and sailed the world, accepted it reluctantly. He was probably motivated by the interests of his only son, Prince Alfred ('Alfie'), the wayward offspring of an unhappy marriage to a Russian princess. Having sworn allegiance to the duchy's constitution, Duke Alfred (r. 1893\u20131900) settled in at Rosenau, busying himself with his music-making and his ceramics collection, bringing order to the duchy's finances, and slowly overcoming the locals' resistance to a 'foreigner'. He was rewarded the following year by his mother's last visit and by one of the most inclusive gatherings of European royalty ever staged. In addition to the Queen-Empress Victoria, he acted as host to Kaiser Wilhelm II, to the future Tsar Nicholas II and to the future British kings Edward VII and George V. His reign was also enlivened by the presence in Coburg of Johann Strauss II, the 'Waltz King', who had left Vienna following his third marriage to a Protestant. Strauss's opera _The Gypsy Baron_ (1885) and his famous ' _Kaiser-Waltzer_ ' ('Emperor Waltz', 1889) were both composed in Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.\n\nDeaths in the ruling family then struck a double blow. In 1899 the heir apparent, Prince 'Alfie', who was both syphilitic and haemophiliac, shot himself during his parents' silver wedding celebrations, despairing both at his medical condition and at the implications of his secret marriage to a commoner. Barely a year later, Duke Alfred died at Rosenau of throat cancer, exactly as his uncle had done. News of his death made world headlines:\n\n> DUKE OF SAXE-COBURG DEAD\n> \n> Expired Suddenly at Rosenau Castle on Monday\n> \n> QUEEN VICTORIA'S SECOND SON\n> \n> was afflicted with cancer, but did not know of his malady\n\nA few weeks earlier, the next step in the saga of succession had been settled in the most unsatisfactory manner imaginable: by hunting for the least unwilling candidate. Victoria and Albert's third son, Arthur, duke of Connaught, already a general in the British army, was not going to endanger his chance of receiving a field marshal's baton, and Connaught's own son, Prince Arthur (b. 1883), a schoolboy at Eton College, was apparently terrified of the inheritance. Victoria and Albert's fourth son, Leopold, duke of Albany (1853\u201384), another haemophiliac, was already dead, struck down by a botched injection following a fall at Cannes. So the royal courtiers' search moved with awful inevitability to another Eton schoolboy: Leopold's helpless and posthumous son, Queen Victoria's youngest grandson, Prince Charles Edward (b. 1884). Rumours surfaced that the elder prince, Arthur, had given his younger cousin, Charles Edward, a good public-school thrashing in order to deflect the hand of fate. The ultimate decision would have been taken by Queen Victoria herself.\n\nThe Diet of the duchy made a rare show of dissatisfaction. As reported in the _New York Times_ , which could take liberties unthinkable in London, the atmosphere had turned sour:\n\n> The Diet of the Duchy as well as the people at large is protesting most energetically against this intention of the British Royal Family, and declare that they will not allow these British princes to shake the dice for the ducal crown of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. The Diet has proclaimed its right to say the directing word about the succession to the throne.\n\nThe protesters were presumably told to mind their own business.\n\nThus began the sad public career of Prince Charles Edward (Carl-Eduard), the last duke of Albany and the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In theory, like his uncles and cousins, he could have tried to renounce the claim. In practice, he was trapped. Despite having a German mother, the former Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, he was exceptional in the family for speaking no German; it had been assumed that he would have to earn his living in England. He knew of no one to whom he might have passed the burden of his succession, and had no means of gauging how poisoned the chalice would prove to be. His mother told him, or so his descendants would say, that to acquiesce in his fate was the most dutiful way of honouring his dead father's memory.\n\nAt first, the prospects did not seem too bad. Carl-Eduard was allowed to finish his English education, and to begin with he reigned in name only under joint regents. He would have known that his predecessor, Duke Alfred, an accomplished musician, had won his subjects' confidence and that in seven years' occupancy of the throne had managed to flit happily between Rosenau and his London residence at Clarence House.\n\n> Joint regent for the boy-Duke, with his mother, was... Prince Hohenlohe. But it was the Kaiser himself who superintended his education, and 'Charlie' and his sister Alice spent many holidays with the imperial family... There was, occasionally, some embarrassment about the young people's divided loyalties, but they solved it in their own way: during the Boer War the Crown Prince [of Prussia] bet Alice a diamond brooch against a diamond pin that the Boers would win \u2013 he duly paid up when the British were victorious. A few years later... the new Coburgs' link with the imperial family was tightened, when Duke Charlie married [the Empress's niece] and the couple divided their time between Coburg and Berlin... Princess Alice, on the other hand, had reforged the link with Britain by marrying Prince Alexander of Teck... whose sister Mary had married Prince George, the future George V. Alexander largely had been educated in Britain and was an officer in the British army.\n\nDuke Carl-Eduard's accession to Saxe-Coburg-Gotha at the age of twenty-one took place in July 1905. His entry into his duchy was attended by much ceremony, and much unguarded comment. He was received at the railway station at Gotha with full military honours, before proceeding to the Friedenstein Palace, where his mother was waiting. He swore the constitutional oath in the throne room of the palace, watched by representatives of the Kaiser and King Edward VII, by ministers of the duchy's government, and by an array of officials and their ladies. Some of the press reports, while sympathizing with the new duke, did not mince words about the manner of his succession:\n\n> UNWILLING PRINCE IS NOW A GERMAN DUKE\n> \n> Charles Edward of Saxe-Coburg Attains his Majority\n> \n> HIS HEAD WAS NOT PUNCHED\n> \n> Cousin to whom the Dukedom was also offered\n> \n> Threatened to Whip Him if he refused it\n\nOne small source of satisfaction arose from Carl-Eduard's right to a magnificent, newly designed personal standard, the _Herzogstandarte_ , neatly combining his British and Saxon connections. The design showed the royal banner-of-arms of Saxony \u2013 a field of ten black and gold horizontal stripes \u2013 surmounted by a diagonal _Rautenkranz_ or 'crancelin', and a heraldic canton. The crancelin, running from upper left to bottom right, took the form of a crenellated garland in deep green. The heraldic canton placed in the top-left corner was made up from the quartered arms of a royal British prince 'defaced' by a white 'label' bearing red hearts and red crosses.\n\nVery soon the first international storm clouds appeared on the horizon. The 'Dreadnought race' was driving a wedge between Britain and Germany, and the young duke's chief patron and cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm, was proving particularly bullish. The Kaiser had already nominated the duke's bride, Princess Victoria Adelaide of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl\u00fccksburg \u2013 a relative both of Britain's Queen Alexandra and of Prince Andrew of Greece (father of the yet-unborn Prince Philip) \u2013 and he now ordered his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 to attend an officer school of the Prussian army. This assignment must have been especially uncomfortable. Carl-Eduard had been taking German lessons, but, as a lifelong sufferer from rheumatoid arthritis, he had no military ability or inclination. Fortunately, his marriage was a happy one. He married his bride at Gl\u00fccksburg in Holstein \u2013 in the 'Lucky Castle'. His wife and five children provided a source of solace in a life that was to grow increasingly bleak.\n\nThe First World War saw the duke raised to the rank of general, yet abruptly removed from his nominal command. Though he volunteered to fight on the Eastern Front, he saw no active service. No doubt to mask this embarrassment, a medal was struck in 1916 to celebrate his non-existent military record. The Diet of his duchy revived the issue of the succession, voting that 'all foreigners' and 'persons who have waged war on the German Empire' should be excluded; at the same time, in Britain, he was struck off the list of Knights of the Garter. In July 1917, nearly three years into the war, his British relatives abandoned the German family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha by an Order in Council, and were magically transformed into 'Windsors'. His sister Alice and her husband, the duke of Teck, were reinvented as the countess and earl of Athlone, but he was not offered the same option. Still worse, since he was judged to have 'adhered to His Majesty's enemies', Britain's Titles Deprivation Act (1917) empowered the Privy Council to investigate his alleged treason and to decide on the punishment.\n\nThe Titles Deprivation Act was peculiarly vindictive with regard to those members of the British royal family for whom, like Duke Carl-Eduard, much more was at stake than a mere name change. It was one thing to legislate for British royals at home, quite another to lay down the law for 'all descendants of Queen Victoria':\n\n> We, of our Royal Will and Authority [proclaimed George V], do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor... And We do hereby further declare that We for Ourselves and... for all other descendants of Our... Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms, relinquish and enjoin the discontinuance of the use of the degrees, styles, dignities, titles and honours of Dukes and Duchesses of Saxony and Princes and Princesses of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and all other German degrees, styles, dignities, titles, honours and appellations.\n\nThe Privy Council's verdict was delivered in January 1919. Together with three other 'enemy peers', Carl-Eduard was to lose the dukedom of Albany, the earldom of Clarence, the barony of Arklow and the style of Royal Highness. His standards were removed from St George's Chapel, Windsor. In short, he was turned into a pariah.*\n\nMeanwhile, as the German Empire folded, all the hereditary rulers in Germany were forced to abdicate. Carl-Eduard renounced his dukedom on 14 November 1918, five days after the announcement of the Kaiser's own abdication. Then, as the Weimar Republic stuttered into life, the German populace took revenge on its aristocracy. The Workers' and Soldiers' Council of Gotha invaded the ex-duke's castle at Rosenau, abolished his duchy and confiscated his lands. He was now a private citizen, a condemned man in his homeland, an outcast in his adopted country and a lodger in his own home. He had done nothing except to behave well and do what he was told. The humiliation was acute.\n\nIt is not true, however, that the ex-duke was penniless. With some delay, he received a compensation settlement from the state, and possessed other sources of income that enabled him to sustain a comfortable family life. His mother, the dowager-duchess of Albany, came to visit him and his family for vacations, delighting in her grandchildren. They were all spending a family holiday together at Hinterreis in the Austrian Tyrol when she died there suddenly in September 1922.\n\nInter-war Germany was a hotbed of radical politics and a cauldron of economic distress. Industrial production faltered, unemployment soared and the currency collapsed. The nation lost its established leaders, the middle classes lost their savings and large sections of the public lost all hope. The vacuum was filled by wild radicals from both the Right and the Left. Fascist and Communist Party gangs battled each other in the streets.\n\nOn 14 October 1922 a little-known group of right-wing thugs from Munich decided to target the town of Coburg, which they knew to be, like Gotha, a nest of their left-wing opponents. Their leader, a former corporal called Adolf Hitler, announced that he was going to stage a 'German Day' in Coburg, and hired a train for the purpose. He arrived with a brass band and 800 flag-waving supporters (practically the whole National Socialist Party at the time), who promptly brawled with policemen attempting to maintain order. When a crowd of locals tried to bar the way, a general fracas ensued. Stones were thrown, insults hurled and bones broken. The Nazis then pressed on to the town centre, where Hitler held a rally, announcing that Coburg had been cleansed of 'Red tyranny'. Back at the train station, the railwaymen refused to release the Nazis' train. Hitler responded by threatening to kidnap every 'Red' in sight and to take them hostage to Munich. His bluster and brutality won the day. Seven years later, Coburg was the first city in Germany to give the Nazis an absolute majority of votes in a municipal election. In 1932 Hitler issued one of the most prized Nazi Party decorations, the 'Coburg Badge', showing a wreathed swastika. The inscription reads: 'MIT HITLER IN COBURG, 1922\u201332'.\n\nIt is not possible to say whether ex-Duke Carl-Eduard watched Hitler at work on the 'German Day' in Coburg; if not, he would certainly have heard first-hand reports. He was an example of those who cared little for the Nazis' radical ideology, but who shared their outrage at Germany's shabby post-war treatment; he would have approved of their hostility to the Communists, who had destroyed his duchy. At first he was associated with one of the more conservative groupings, the Harzburg Front, which sought to unify the German right-wing opposition, and which made a tactical alliance with the Nazis in the early 1930s. In 1932, however, when right-wing politics were in some disarray, he was persuaded to join the SA, the Nazi Brownshirts, and rose quickly to the high rank of _Obergruppenf\u00fchrer_. He may have been influenced by his wife's brother-in-law, ex-Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, who had joined the Nazi Party before him.\n\nAfter Hitler's election to power in 1933, the ex-duke was singled out as an instrument for cultivating the British establishment and was made president of the Anglo-German Friendship Society. In this capacity he kept in close touch with the British ambassadors in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps and Sir Nevile Henderson, and attended the funeral in London of his cousin George V in January 1936. Limping along far behind the late king's coffin as the official German emissary, he was completely ignored by his British relatives. A solitary figure, he shuffled along painfully, shoulders stooped and feet splayed, struggling to keep pace with the procession. Incongruously, he wore a green, German-style trenchcoat bereft of insignia and a stormtrooper's iron helmet. His influence, such as it was, came to an end less than a year later with the abdication of his cousin's son, Edward VIII, of whom the Nazis had entertained high hopes.\n\nWhatever the ex-duke's exact opinions, there is no doubt that he and his distinguished lineage were exploited by the Nazis, even though they may have seen him more as a victim of 'the Reds' than as an enthusiast for 'the Browns'. In 1932, for example, when Carl-Eduard's daughter Sibylla was married in Coburg to Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, Hitler sent a personal telegram of congratulations. In the evening, during a torchlight procession by the local branch of the Nazi Party, the revellers marched round the statue of Prince Albert that stood in the town square. Carl-Eduard also contrived to hold on to some of his aristocratic privileges, continuing to award medals and decorations to his 'House Order' of Saxe-Coburg Gotha. As a wartime aviation ace, Hermann G\u00f6ring was awarded the Order's Commander's Cross.\n\nDuring the Second World War the ailing Herr von Saxe-Coburg lived with his family in seclusion. Though he kept his honorary presidency of the German Red Cross, on whose behalf he visited the United States and Japan in 1940, henceforth he played little active part in public life. One of his sons was killed on the Eastern Front; two others served in the armed forces. Allegedly, he received another telegram in April 1945 from the F\u00fchrer, urging him to avoid the invading Americans. By then, most of his remaining property had been seized by the Soviet army, which also smashed the presses of the _Almanach de Gotha_ and carried off their priceless archives. The husband of his much-loved sister, Princess Alice, was now the governor-general of Canada, yet none of the ex-duke's connections would save him. He was arrested in 1946 by the American Military Administration of Bavaria and hauled before a de-Nazification court. The prosecution argued that he could not possibly have been unaware of Nazi atrocities. He denied the accusation and pleaded not guilty, but was given a crushing fine, and further detained. By early 1947, sick and undernourished, he was succumbing to the rigours of a prison camp. 'Crippled by arthritis, the old man stumbled painfully round a rubbish dump, scrabbling in the rotting refuse until he found an old tin can. Starving, he pulled up grass to add to the thin soup which his American captors allowed him.' That same year, his sister Princess Alice and her husband the earl of Athlone travelled to Germany and successfully effected his release.\n\nIronically, the Americans then assigned the ex-duke and ex-duchess a servant's lodging in the stables of _Schloss Callenberg_ , the scene of his great-grandfather's orgies. According to his granddaughter, 'he thought it was wonderful'. He had contracted cancer, and had lost the sight of an eye. But he lived long enough to buy a ticket to a public cinema at Gotha in June 1953, and to watch the coronation of Elizabeth II in Technicolor. 'That must have been the worst moment' \u2013 the young British queen was his nephew's daughter, and he was the second most senior living member of her father's family. He died in 1954 aged sixty-nine. His eldest son and heir, Johann Leopold, had renounced all rights of inheritance. Carl-Eduard's only consolation was that he died in a bed that had been brought from his birthplace at Claremont House, Esher, in Surrey. It was, he said, 'his little bit of England'.\n\n##### III\n\nWhen the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was founded in 1826, European monarchy was at its peak. All the leading powers \u2013 France, Britain, Prussia, Austria and Russia \u2013 were monarchies; and every time that a new state was formed, like Greece in 1828 or Belgium in 1831, new monarchs were selected and installed. Republicanism appeared discredited. The revolutionary Corsican general who terrified Europe for twenty years had abandoned his original principles by crowning himself emperor of the French and king of Italy in the middle of his career. After France's defeat, the victorious monarchs thanked God for His blessings, and forgot why the Revolution had happened.\n\nBy 1919, when the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was abolished, monarchy was in serious decline. The Romanovs had been toppled and savagely murdered; the Hohenzollerns and the Habsburgs had been forced out; France had reached its Third Republic. Both Austria and Germany were in the process of adopting republican regimes. Among the states formed by the post-war settlement, republics outnumbered monarchies by four to one. The minority of monarchs who had not lost their thrones, in countries like Britain or Italy, feared for their future.\n\nEuropean monarchy was deeply bound up with the mystical registers of Christian religion. The example of the United States was not yet strong enough for Europeans to accept that republican ideals were compatible with a religious society. Kings and emperors were not just crowned; they were anointed with holy oil and installed amid oaths, prayers, anthems, divine invocations and clouds of incense. In 1914 they had all received the Almighty's blessing for prosecuting war against each other and for sending millions of their subjects to the slaughter. Monarchists did not notice the discrepancy, doing their utmost to convince the world that monarchy was God-given and virtuous, that republicanism was godless and morally deficient.\n\nYet the systemic vindictiveness with which the last duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was treated by his own kind, suggests that there is little to choose in terms of morality between royalty and republicans. When dynastic interest or national pride are at stake, the Sermon on the Mount counts for little, and common human decency is set aside. Generally speaking, British attitudes have followed suit. Whenever Carl-Eduard's name crops up in the British press, all the old epithets about the 'traitor peer' resurface, and new ones are added: 'a scandalous life', one of 'Hitler's most fervent supporters', 'a top Nazi official' and 'a convicted Nazi'.\n\nAfter Carl-Eduard's death, his offspring were divided over what to do. Some of them retreated into private life; his daughter Sibylla became mother to the king of Sweden. His widow, the ex-Duchess Victoria Adelaide, lived on until 1970. But his fifth child, Friedrich Josias (1918\u201398) decided to revive his late father's claims, and it is Friedrich Josias's son, Andreas von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (b. 1943), who now heads the line descended from the duke of Albany. The outcome of a short-lived wartime marriage, the self-styled 'Prince Andreas' is the grandson of Albert and Victoria's grandson. The heir apparent, 'Prince Hubertus', was married to Kelly Rodestvedt in Coburg on 23 May 2009.\n\nUsing a variety of strategies, other members of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan fared better than the luckless Carl-Eduard. One branch, for example, had been raised in 1878 to the throne of Bulgaria. Their last representative, the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon (b. 1937), started his reign in 1943 aged six, only to be driven out after a couple of years by the Soviet-backed Communists, who shot his uncle, the regent, and abolished the monarchy. He lived in Spain, graduated from a US army cadet school and prospered in business. Then, when the Communist regime in Bulgaria collapsed, he reinvented himself, formed a democratic political party and in 2001\u20135 served as Bulgaria's prime minister under the unlikely name of 'Sakskoburggotski'.\n\nFurther branches of the family strove to survive by disguising their identity. The Saxe-Coburg-Gothas of Belgium, for example, simply stopped using their family name in the correct belief that it would soon be forgotten. Their British relations, in contrast, embarked on an elaborate strategy of concealment, marshalling a mixture of legal ploys, image-management and historical propaganda. They repeatedly changed their family name by proclamation or by Acts of Parliament, successfully masking the fact that the Windsor-Mountbatten wedding of 1947 would otherwise have seen a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha marrying a Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl\u00fccksburg. The bride's father, as seen above, had changed his surname before she was born, and changed his first name from Albert or 'Bertie' to George on ascending the throne; the bridegroom had assumed an Anglicized form of his mother's name. A future queen, of course, could not stay as 'Mrs Mountbatten' for long, so after her marriage her surname was changed back to 'Windsor' (despite her husband's displeasure) and in 1960, for the benefit of the children, it was modified again to 'Mountbatten-Windsor'. Through all of this, the royals honed their upper-class English accents, threw themselves into patriotic and charitable activities, spoke no German in public, deflected awkward questions, avoided their German relatives and, in a sustained campaign of genealogical legerdemain, massaged their family tree beyond recognition. Most of their subjects do not know that Lady Diana Spencer (1961\u201397) was the very first person of primarily English descent who ever came near the British throne in the whole of its 300-year history. They had to wait until the twenty-first century before Camilla Parker-Bowles, by a civil marriage, and Kate Middleton, in a grand church wedding, were allowed to follow her example.\n\nPretence, therefore, is an essential part of the royal performance; some might call it adaptability. Albert and Victoria would have understood perfectly, both having embarrassing relatives to dispel. They would also have known (since the operation started in their own times) that royal genealogists can achieve wonderful results through imaginative misrepresentation; vulgar forgery is unnecessary. By the skilful use of Englished forms, by an emphasis on titles as opposed to surnames, and above all by the selective filtration of unwanted bloodlines, dedicated family-tree-surgeons have transformed the dominant flavour of their product. No doubt with the best patriotic motives in mind, they have persuaded the unsuspecting public that British royalty's closest ancestral ties are with English and Scottish monarchs all the way back to William the Conqueror and beyond. In the process, they have sidelined the royal family's far closer ties with the Hanovers, the Tecks, the Brandenburg-Ansbachs, the Brunswick-Wolfenb\u00fcttels, the W\u00fcrttembergers and the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl\u00fccksburgs. If only the truth were known, the degree of consanguinity between the 'Mountbatten-Windsors' and the Normans, Plantagenets, Tudors and Stuarts is almost astronomically remote.\n\nAnyone wishing to reconstruct the basic kinship group of the British queen and her consort only needs to list the parents and grandparents of their respective forebears. In addition to the Bowes-Lyons, the Cavendish-Bentincks, the Smiths (of Blendon Hall), the Burnabies and the Romanovs, they will soon discover their most intimate connections to be with the Anhalt-Zerbsts, the Altenbergs, the Barby-M\u00fchlingens, the Battenbergs, the Braunschweig-L\u00fcnebergs, the Castell-Castells, the Castell-Reinlingens, the Dohna-Schlobittens, the Erbach-Ehrbachs, the Erbach-Sch\u00f6nbergs, the Ebersdorfs, the Hesses, the Hesse-Darmstadts, the Hesse-Kassels, the Hesse-Philippstals, the Hohenzollerns, the Holstein-Gottorps, the J\u00fclich-Kleve-Bergs, the Kiz-Rheides, the Lehndorffs, the Leiningen-Dagsburgs, the Lippes, the Mecklenburg-Strelitzes, the Nassau-Usingens, the Nassau-Weilbergs, the Neubergs, the Oettingen-Oettingens, the Pfalz-Zimmerns, the Reuss von Ebersdorfs, the Saxe-Altenbergs, the Saxe-Coburg-Saalfelds, the Saxe-Eisenachs, the Saxe-Gothas, the Saxe-Hildeburghausens, the Saxe-Lauenbergs, the Saxe-Weimars, the Saxe-Weissenfels, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, the von Schliebens, the Sch\u00f6nburg-Glauchaus, the Schwarzburg-Rudolfstadts, the Schwarzburg-Sonderhausens, the Solms-Laubachs, the Solms-Sonnenwalde und Pouches, the Stolberg-Gederns, the Waldecks, the Waldeck-Eisenbergs, the Wettins and three times over with the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas.\n\nNone of which, one hastens to add, implies that Germans make undesirable relatives; international match-making cannot be reduced to any such crude formula. What it does show, thanks in no small part to Albert and Victoria, is that British public opinion adopted markedly pro-German sympathies for much of the nineteenth century, but, thanks to two world wars, decidedly Germanophobe antipathies for most of the twentieth. To navigate a path of survival through the minefield of these shifting prejudices, Britain's royal family decided to pretend that it was something it wasn't, and isn't. The late Princess Diana was thus perhaps more right than she knew when she regretted 'having married into a German family'. Prince Albert, of course, never had such regrets.\n\n## 12\n\n## Tsernagora\n\nKingdom of the Black Mountain (1910\u20131918)\n\n##### I\n\nMontenegro is the 192nd member of the United Nations, received into membership on 28 June 2006. It is one of only three states to have been so inducted in the twenty-first century, the others being the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 2000 and Switzerland in 2002. To make matters suitably confusing, Montenegro had formed part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 1992 and 2002, until the Federation changed its name to 'Serbia and Montenegro'. It can at least take comfort from being one important step ahead of its neighbour, the self-styled Republic of Kosovo, which declared its independence on 17 February 2008, but which has not gained full international recognition.\n\nThe establishment of state sovereignty is a complex business. For practical purposes, a political entity may gain its independence by its own efforts, but to enjoy sovereign status in international law it needs to be recognized as such by others. Similarly, a recognized state may cease to function _de facto_ , but its disappearance does not become an established fact _de jure_ until accepted internationally. In the twenty-first century, the international body that usually confirms a candidate state's full sovereignty by admitting it to membership, or crosses it off the list, is the United Nations. UN procedures require that membership is granted or withdrawn by a decision of the General Assembly acting on the advice of the Security Council. Montenegro, however, has made it. Today, together with five other post-Yugoslav republics, it looks forward to a brighter future than at any time in the last generation.\n\nMontenegro has a population of 620,000 living in a territory of 5,332 square miles. As in neighbouring Bosnia and Albania, the population has traditionally been divided along religious lines, although proportions differ. According to the last census (2003), three-quarters are Orthodox Christians. The remainder are either Roman Catholics, living mainly on the coast, or Muslims. All speak a dialect of the same language, which is variously designated as Serbian, Serb-Croat or Montenegrin, and is written in Montenegro in modified forms either of the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabet.\n\nAfter the dismemberment of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and the consequent humbling of Serbia, Montenegro is no longer overshadowed by its overweening Serbian neighbour. Democratization of a sort is afoot, and a market economy is taking root. A fully fledged diplomatic service has been established. There are Montenegrin embassies to the UN in New York, to the EU in Brussels, to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Vienna, to all the other post-Yugoslav republics, to the Holy See and to a dozen major capitals on all continents, including the United Kingdom and the United States.\n\nTourism is professionally promoted. Montenegro can be reached by road, rail, sea and air. Frontier crossings are open with Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Albania, Serbia and, most recently, with Kosovo (which Montenegro recognized in October 2008). The bus-line _Autosaobracaj_ links Croatian Dubrovnik with Herceg-Novi. A railway link runs from Podgorica to Bar, a regular ferry sails to Bar from Bari in Italy, and two international airports function at Podgorica and Tivat. Flights to the majority of European capitals are assured by two national carriers: Montenegro Airlines and Adria Airways. The well-established Croatian airport at Dubrovnik lies only 20 miles from the border. It is no longer true that Montenegro is remote or inaccessible.\n\nThe tourist brochures and websites gush with superlatives about the 'Pearl of the Adriatic':\n\n> The sea, the lakes, the canyons, the mountains enable everyone to decide on the best way to enjoy quality vacation. In one day, a traveller can have a coffee on one of the numerous beaches of the Budva Riviera, eat lunch with the song of the birds on the Skardar Lake, and dine beside the fireplace on the slopes of the Durmitor mountain...\n> \n> Turbulent history... has left behind an invaluable treasure in numerous historic monuments throughout this proud country. The blue sea with endless beaches, restless waters of the clear rivers and beautiful mountain massifs, mixed with the spirits of the old times, have given Montenegro everything one needs for an unforgettable vacation.\n> \n> Montenegro is an ecological state... A large number of sunny days in the summer months and a large quantity of snow in the winter, determine the two most developed forms of tourism... In recent times, following global trends, Montenegro is developing extreme sports that the tourists can enjoy as well.\n\nRafting down the Tara Riva in the Durmitor National Park is strongly recommended.\n\nMontenegro's two inland capitals, Podgorica and Cetinje, compete for visitors, but the main destinations for holidaymakers lie on the coast, where they are regaled with stunning natural beauty and historical charm. Ulcinj has 'the longest sandy beach on the Adriatic'. Kotor is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Petrova\u0107 hosts Roman and Venetian remains. The island-hotel of Sveti Stefan, joined to the mainland by a causeway, boasts a long list of famous guests from Sophia Loren and Princess Margaret to Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Yuri Gagarin, Alberto Moravia, Sidney Poitier, the president of Outer Margolia and Willy Brandt (which says something of its vintage); it has recently re-opened after renovation, its monastic-style rooms blended with modern luxury and costing from \u00a3770 per night upwards. The port of Bar contains both the Turkish fortress of Haj Nehaj and the Castle of King Nikola.\n\nPodgorica is the country's largest town, with 135,000 inhabitants, and is the present-day capital. It stands near the site of a prehistoric Illyrian settlement, and developed during the Middle Ages as a commercial centre. Razed to the ground during the Second World War, its most dynamic period of growth occurred during post-war industrialization, when it was renamed Titograd. Cetinje is barely one-tenth the size of Podgorica but it is the country's historical and religious centre. Founded in the fifteenth century at the foot of the imposing Mount Lov\u0107en, it provided a secure refuge against Ottoman power spreading from the interior and Venetian power dominating the coast. Its long record of resistance earned it the nickname of the 'Serbian Sparta'. Its principal monuments include the Cetinje Monastery, the Lokanda Hotel and the Biljarda House (1838), formerly the Royal Palace, which contains the ultimate symbol of nineteenth-century Europeanization, a billiard room. The plentiful iron railings in Cetinje were cast from captured Ottoman cannon.\n\nNot everything in Montenegro, however, is quite as transparent as the crystal waters of the Adriatic. The economy conceals some very murky sectors; the citizens continue to be torn by a fundamental identity problem, and the political system is decidedly Putinesque.\n\nOne of the strongest arguments for Montenegro's withdrawal from Yugoslavia was to protect the economy from rampant hyperinflation, which in 1994 reached a world record level of 3.13 million per cent per month. In 1999, therefore, the dinar was dropped in favour of the Deutschmark, and in 2002 the Deutschmark was replaced by the euro. Montenegro, in the view of informed commentators, was already preparing to separate. Even so, the economy has struggled to recover. It is buoyed up by endemic smuggling, by widespread money-laundering and by dubious foreign investors, especially Russians, who have found a safe haven for their activities. On the international Corruption Chart Index, Montenegro occupies 85th position out of 179 countries listed.\n\nThe core of the identity problem lies in the issue of whether or not Montenegrins are really Serbs. In the census of 2003, only 270,000 or 43 per cent declared themselves to be ethnic Montenegrins; 200,000 or 32 per cent preferred self-designation as Serbs. Several surveys were undertaken, and the percentages fluctuated wildly according to the questions asked \u2013 in the view of an \u00e9migr\u00e9 website, Montenegrins constitute 62 per cent of the population, and Serbs only 9 per cent. The distinction rests less on religious practice and more on attitudes towards the Serbian state and to the highly politicized Serbian Orthodox Church, which insists that all its adherents are Serbs whether they like it or not. In 1993, when the first referendum on independence was held in a setting dominated by the Serbia of Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107, and by his campaign to maintain Yugoslav unity by force, the vote unsurprisingly produced a pro-Serbian majority. But it also provoked the appearance of a breakaway Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which rejects the automatic association of its members with Serb identity, and which was restored after an interval of seventy-five years. This showed that strong resentments persisted against Serbian domination, and not only in the political sphere. In 2006, when a second referendum was held after Milo\u0161evi\u0107 had been deposed, a pro-independence majority was returned by the modest margin of 55.5 per cent for and 44.5 per cent against.\n\nThroughout this period, Montenegro's political scene was dominated by one party and by one man. The party, the Democratic Socialist Party of Montenegro (DSPM), was a reconstructed continuation of the Montenegrin branch of Tito's old League of Yugoslav Communists. The man was Milo Djukanovi\u0107 (b. 1962), the party leader and a prime example of an ex-Communist who knew how to adapt to the post-Communist era. Djukanovi\u0107 is a former basketball player, with the tall stature of a natural leader, the face of a film star and the eloquence of a practised populist. He first came to prominence as a close associate of Milo\u0161evi\u0107, who helped him to apply Serbia's 'anti-bureaucratic revolution' and to remove the party's Old Guard. He then elbowed his colleagues aside, and in 1991 entered office at the age of twenty-nine in the first of his six terms as prime minister. Except for a four-year break in 1998\u20132002, when he served as president, his premiership continued until December 2010. He parted company with Milo\u0161evi\u0107 in the mid-1990s over the Dayton Accords, which he considered too conciliatory, and was slowly converted to the movement for independence round the turn of the century. He stepped down as premier at the end of the decade, being replaced by his deputy, Igor Luk\u0161i\u0107, but retained the key post of Chairman of the DSPM. He is said to be concentrating on Montenegro's bid to join the European Union; still only forty-nine, he has by no means bowed out of politics.\n\nThe power of the Montenegrin political elite is said to rest on a seamless alliance between the ruling Party and members of the former Yugoslav security services; their wealth is certainly connected to a number of family-controlled banks and businesses, such as Capital Invest, Primary Invest and Select Investment. The international reputation of Djukanovi\u0107 stood high, especially with American representatives, during the Bosnian and Kosovo crises, but passed temporarily under a cloud when Italian police laid charges laid against him over alleged links with the Mafia and the Camorra; the charges have since been dropped. Djukanovi\u0107 has been described as 'the kind of Marxist who keeps a picture of Margaret Thatcher on his desk' and as 'the Smartest Man in the Balkans'.\n\nLike all EU candidates, Montenegro faced a long process of verifications and negotiations. Formal application was made in 2008, and candidate status granted in December 2010. When negotiations opened in the following New Year, an assessment of Montenegro's chances of meeting the criteria for the thirty-five chapters of the Union's _acquis communautaire_ was issued by the EU team in Brussels. Reading very much like an old-fashioned school report, their statement listed the current position regarding each chapter under one of five categories: 1. 'No major difficulties expected', 2. 'Further effort needed', 3. 'Considerable effort needed', 4. 'Nothing to adopt', and 5. 'Totally incompatible with the acquis'. It placed eight subjects starting with 'Taxation' into the first category; thirteen starting with 'Labour Mobility' into the second; eighteen starting with 'Free Movement of Goods' into the third; two including 'Institutions' into the fourth; and only one, 'Environment', into the fifth. Why exactly policy to the environment should be judged 'totally incompatible' in Montenegro, which has declared itself 'an ecological state', would now have to be investigated. It may have something to do with the plan for multiple dams on the Moraca river. An overall Action Plan was proposed and accepted on 23 February 2011. All applicants must pass through this mill, and a final result cannot be expected for some years. For the time being, the world watches and waits, pondering the well-known television advertisement broadcast alongside 'Incredible India' and 'Malaysia Truly Asia' \u2013 'Montenegro \u2013 Experience the Wild Beauty'.\n\n##### II\n\nThe Lyc\u00e9e Louis-le-Grand is one of France's most prestigious boys' schools. Once a Jesuit college, it changed its name when it received the royal patronage of Louis XIV, but still stands on the rue St Jacques in the heart of Paris, in the _Quartier Latin_ , surrounded by the hallowed halls of the Sorbonne and the Coll\u00e8ge de France. Its graduates, named ' _magnoludoviciens_ ', are envied for their success in gaining competitive entry to the elite ' _grandes \u00e9coles_ '. They include some of the best-known names of French culture and politics, from Moli\u00e8re and Voltaire to presidents Pompidou, Giscard d'Estaing and Chirac. They also include a number of sons of distinguished foreign families who have been sent to Paris to be subjected to an educational experience of international renown.\n\nOne of the latter, Nikola Mirkov Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 (1841\u20131921) studied at Louis-le-Grand in the second part of the 1850s. He was a Balkan prince from a country which most of his classmates could hardly have marked on the map, heir to a near-legendary line of hereditary and celibate prince-bishops or _vladikas_ , who traditionally passed their sovereign titles to their nephews. He had been raised in the Serbian Orthodox Church, schooled both in the martial arts and in poetry, and was not well suited to his academic hothouse. He undoubtedly regarded himself as a Serb, and belonged to a dynasty that openly spoke of the restoration of the 'tsardom of Stefan Du\u0161an', destroyed by the Ottoman Turks nearly 500 years earlier. Like all his compatriots, he had been brought up to believe that the Ottoman victory over the Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 was the greatest catastrophe in world history. Now he was living in an age when the Ottoman Empire was the 'Sick Man of Europe'. Serbia, Greece and Romania had already broken free of its grip. Hopes were rising that others would soon follow.\n\nIn 1860, when his country's call came, Prince Nikola was just nineteen years old. His uncle, Danilo I, had been assassinated. There was no time to finish his baccalaureate. The ex-schoolboy hurried to Marseille, took ship and sailed home to become the crowned head of a state whose future was as uncertain as its past was obscure.\n\n_Crna Gora_ , as its inhabitants call it, the 'land of the Black Mountain', lay inland from the Adriatic coast, squeezed between Bosnia and Albania. It took its name from the dark, pine-clad massif of Mount Lov\u0107en (5,653 feet), which rises to the west of Cetinje; when the country first made the headlines during Prince Nikola's long reign, Victorian newspapers often transliterated the Cyrillic form of the name as 'Tsernagora'. Today, it best known to the outside world by the old Venetian name of Montenegro. Its total area is smaller than that of Wales or of Connecticut. The fertile landscape of the northern district contrasts sharply with the sterile, calcinated mountains of the centre and south, known as the _Brda_ or 'Highlands'. At the prince's accession, landlocked Montenegro was separated from the Adriatic by a long coastal strip known to locals as _Primore_ and to others as _Albania veneziana_.\n\nIn the distant past, the Principality-Bishopric of Montenegro had been ruled by non-hereditary clerics; Prince Nicola's family established the right of hereditary succession in 1696, and Nicola was the seventh of the Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 line. His uncle and immediate predecessor, however, had secularized the state, separating it from the Orthodox Church in 1852 and changing the ruler's title from 'prince-bishop' to 'prince'. This meant that Nicola's duties were entirely non-ecclesiastical, and that the headship of the Church was no longer joined to the headship of the principality.\n\nMontenegrin society was organized round a traditional system of tribes or clans, which had led the struggle against Ottoman domination from the sixteenth century onwards. The clans were contemptuous of all outside government, and resistant to taxation. They also cultivated the inimitable Montenegrin code of chivalry, summarized by the slogan ' _\u010dojstvo i Juna\u0161tvo'_ \u2013 'Humanity and Bravery' \u2013 that characterized the ideals of a warrior people. Vendettas and feuding were an integral part of their way of life.\n\nThe distinction between tribes and clans is simple in theory, but less easy to make in practice. In essence, the clans were patrilineal kinship groups similar to those in Scotland, each claiming descent from a historical or legendary ancestor. Petrovi\u0107, for example, meaning 'Son of Peter', was Prince Nikola's clan name; some of the larger clans were divided into sub-clans, which used separate names. Men and women from the same clan were forbidden to marry. The tribes, in contrast, were larger groupings made up of all the clans inhabiting a particular territorial district. Each of them held regular gatherings or _zbori_ in traditionally designated villages, where matters of common interest were discussed and tribal chiefs were elected. The Njegu\u0161i tribe, for example, to which the Petrovi\u0107i clan belonged, took its name from the village where it held its tribal meetings. In districts inhabited by a single clan, the tribe and the clan became indistinguishable. In Prince Nikola's lifetime, some thirty tribes were active in Old Montenegro or in the adjacent Highlands and Coastland.\n\nOnce the tribes had liberated the most remote mountain districts from the Ottomans in the sixteenth century, a proto-national movement began to form round the authority of the Orthodox metropolitan of Cetinje. This movement, partly religious and partly political, gave rise to the independent principality of the _vladikas_. Such at least is the romantic version of history that became popular in Prince Nikola's day. Later historians have grown increasingly cautious about declarations of the country's 'age-old freedom'. They now paint a picture in which the principality did indeed enjoy a large measure of self-government but only in close association with the Ottomans. As elsewhere in the Balkans, the Sublime Porte was willing to arrange special rules for taxation and military service, but not to resign its claim to overlordship.\n\nMontenegro's status in 1860, therefore, can best be described as disputed. In the eyes of the outside world, it was still an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. But since it had enjoyed self-rule under its prince-bishops for nearly two centuries, increasing numbers of its people tended to think of it as an independent, sovereign state. In the age of the Risorgimento, which was blossoming just across the Adriatic, they were not alone in harbouring nationalist ideas. On the other hand, thanks to the Orthodox connection, the Russian Empire began to act as if Montenegro were some sort of informal protectorate. Prince Nikola's main aim during his reign was to gain full international recognition for the independence from both these behemoths which he and many of his subjects took to be their birthright.\n\nNikola's fervent sense of a national mission was fostered by the romantic literature of the day, and in particular by the writings of the last of the ecclesiastical _vladikas_ , Petar II Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 (r. 1830\u201351), a man whom he would have known before departing for Paris. Prince-Bishop Petar's _Gorski Vijenac_ , 'The Mountain Wreath', is counted a jewel of Serbian poetry and by some as a major engine in what has been called the 'slavic myth-making factory'; it was certainly a work of great popularity that helped cement nineteenth-century Serbian identity. Published in 1847, it runs on through 2,819 epic verses, celebrating the people's struggle for freedom and describing the cultural interplay of the Montenegrin tribes with Ottoman Muslims and decadent Venetians. It centres on a period in the early eighteenth century, when significant numbers of Montenegrins had converted to Islam and the survival of Christian Slavs was perceived to be in danger. Petar was rousing his countrymen to fight for their traditions or to see them perish:\n\n>... After the storm the sky grows clearer;\n> \n> The soul grows serene after sorrow's pain;\n> \n> The song waxes joyous after tears have been shed.\n> \n> Oh that mine eyes could be opened to watch\n> \n> As our homeland regains all that which was lost,\n> \n> As Tsar Lazar's crown shines bright in my face\n> \n> And Milos returns to his Serbian kin.\n> \n> Then would my soul be truly content,\n> \n> Like a peaceful morn at the height of Spring\n> \n> When the winds of the sea and the darkest clouds\n> \n> Sleep calm o'er the heaving waves...\n> \n> Let the struggle continue without respite,\n> \n> Let it bring what men thought never could be.\n> \n> Let Hell and the Devil devour us all.\n> \n> Flowers will grow and bedeck our graves,\n> \n> For the sake of those who are still to come...\n\nIn recent times, Petar's poetry has been judged incendiary, accused of inciting conflict between Christian and Muslim; in its day, it gave heart to a weak Christian community that felt oppressed by a powerful Ottoman and Muslim establishment.\n\nAt all events, the Montenegrins faced a formidable task. In the late nineteenth century they were surrounded on all sides by stronger neighbours. In 1862, when the prince's father, Prince Mirko, took an army into neighbouring Herzegovina to help some fellow Christian rebels, the incursion ended in defeat and a punitive peace. Bosnia and Herzegovina were ruled by Austria after 1878, but both the Sand\u017eak of Novi Pazar* and Albania (to which the coastal _Primore_ belonged) remained integral parts of the Ottoman Empire. The strategic environment was taut.\n\nFor fifteen years, therefore, awaiting more favourable international circumstances, Prince Nikola applied his mind to domestic reforms in the spirit of Petar II, who had been devoted not only to poetry but also to constitutionalism and to popular education; regarded as the father of his people, he had been buried on the very summit of Mount Lov\u0107en. Prince Nikola drove his reforms forward. He surrendered some of his prerogatives to the Senate, initiated a programme of general primary education and, with notable assistance from Russia (which he was quite willing to accept), restructured and re-equipped the army.\n\nMuch effort was put into public relations, and a number of foreign tours were staged. In 1867 Nikola returned to Paris to meet Napoleon III, and the following year he toured St Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna. As a champion of Orthodoxy he was well favoured by the Romanovs, who sent military missions and supplies to Cetinje and who strengthened their own dynasty with an influx of Montenegrin brides.\n\nBy 1876, Nikola felt strong enough to declare war on the Ottomans, and in conjunction with Serbia to wage what amounted to a war of independence. Like his father, he personally led his troops into battle. Initial fortunes were meagre, but when the Russian army opened up a front on the Black Sea, the Ottomans were forced to withdraw their troops to defend Bulgaria, and the Montenegrins were free to conquer their seaboard. They were praised by the British prime minister, William Gladstone, who called them 'a bunch of heroes... whose braveries surpass those of the ancient Hellenes at Thermopylae and Marathon'. They were rewarded at the Congress of Berlin, convened in 1878 to terminate the Russo-Turkish War, with a declaration by the Great Powers of Montenegro's sovereign status. Its frontiers were extended, and Prince Nikola announced that the Battle of Kosovo had been revenged. The date of the Berlin Declaration \u2013 13 July \u2013 was adopted as Montenegro's National Day.\n\nGladstone's concern for Montenegro derived from his long-standing crusade in defence of the Ottoman Empire's Slav and Christian subjects, and was a natural sequel to his denunciation of the 'Bulgarian Horrors'. In 1877 he wrote a learned but highly romantic article about Montenegrin history, stressing its centuries-old record of resistance and the 'honourable sentiment of gratitude' owed by Western nations. 'Among the Serbian lands', he wrote of the fifteenth century, 'was the flourishing Principality of Zeta':\n\n> It took its name from the stream which flows southward... toward the Lake of Scutari. It comprised the territory now known as Montenegro, or Tsernagora, together with the seaward frontier... and the rich and fair plains encircling the irregular outline of the inhospitable mountain. Land after land had given way; but Zeta ever stood firm. At last, in 1478, Scutari was taken on the South, and in 1483... Herzegovina on the north submitted to the Ottomans. Ivan Tchernoievitch, the Montenegrin hero of the day, applied to the Venetians for the aid he had often given, and was refused. Thereupon he, and his people with him, quitted the sunny tracts in which they had basked for some seven hundred years, and sought, on the rocks and amidst the precipices, surety for the two gifts most precious to mankind \u2013 their faith and their freedom. To them, as to the Pomaks of Bulgaria and the Bosnian Begs, it was open to purchase by conformity a debasing peace. Before them, as before others, lay the _trinoda necessitas_ : the alternatives of death, slavery or the Koran. They were not to die, for they had work to do. To the Koran or slavery, they preferred a life of cold, want, hardship and perpetual peril. Such is their Magna Charta; and without reproach to others, it is, as far as I know, the noblest in the world.\n> \n> Then and there, [they] voted unanimously their fundamental law, that, in time of war against the Turk, no son of Tsernagora would quit the field without the order of his chief: that a runaway would be forever disgraced and banished; that he should be dressed in woman's clothes... and that the women striking him with their distaffs should hunt the coward away from the sanctuary of freedom. And now for four centuries wanting only seven years they have maintained the covenant of that awful day, through an unbroken series of trials and exploits, to which it is hard to find a parallel in the annals of Europe, perhaps even of mankind.\n\nGladstone was especially impressed by the fact that, when fleeing to the interior mountains in 1484, only seven years after Caxton had produced England's first book, the Montenegrins had carried a printing-press with them. More critically, he noted two uncivilized practices: the public display of severed Turkish heads, and the mutilation of prisoners. The former was dismissed, since the British government had done the same to Jacobite rebels not long previously, but the latter found no excuse.\n\nNot to be outdone, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Gladstone's exact contemporary, penned a sonnet:\n\n> They rose to where their sovran eagle sails,\n> \n> They kept their faith, their freedom, on the height,\n> \n> Chaste, frugal, savage, arm'd by day and night\n> \n> Against the Turk; whose inroad nowhere scales\n> \n> Their headlong passes...\n> \n> O smallest among peoples! rough rock-throne\n> \n> Of Freedom! warriors beating back the swarm\n> \n> Of Turkish Islam for five hundred years,\n> \n> Great Tsernogora! never since thine own\n> \n> Black ridges drew the cloud and brake the storm\n> \n> Has breathed a race of mightier mountaineers.\n\nOwing to the publicity generated by his tours, the prince of Montenegro could only grow in political stature. In 1891 he visited the Ottoman sultan, who implicitly, though not formally, relinquished all rights over his former province. In 1896, he attended the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II in St Petersburg, and on his way home won the ultimate accolade of taking afternoon tea with Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. In line with other progressive monarchs, he was preparing a constitution, launched a national currency, the _perper_ , and promoted the idea of a national Church.\n\nIn June 1903 Montenegro's royal court was deeply shaken by a crisis in neighbouring Serbia. The king of Serbia, Aleksandar I Obrenovi\u0107, had caused great offence among his subjects by arbitrary acts such as suspending the constitution for half an hour in order to dismiss some unwanted senators, and in the teeth of fierce criticism had recently married a commoner, Queen Draga. A dispute then arose over the naming of an heir apparent. King Aleksandar wanted to elevate Queen Draga's brother, against whom the twenty-four-year-old Prince Mirko of Montenegro, Prince Nikola's second son, who was married to an Obrenovi\u0107, was put forward as a counter-candidate. Senior members of the Serbian military were so incensed that they plotted a royal assassination, and in Belgrade on 11 July Aleksandar and Draga were shot, mutilated and disembowelled. The assassins then rejected Prince Mirko, choosing the exiled Serbian Prince Petar Karadjordjevi\u0107 in his stead. King Petar I, as he became (r. 1903\u201321), had lived in Cetinje during his exile and had married Nikola's eldest daughter, Zorka; he was a mild and liberal man, who had translated John Stuart Mill into Serbian. Even so, fear and suspicion entered into relations between the courts of Cetinje and Belgrade.\n\nIn February 1904 the Russo-Japanese conflict broke out in the Far East, and Prince Nikola felt obliged to declare war on Japan in support of the tsar; several hundred Montenegrins travelled to Manchuria to join the ranks. Among them was the prince's godson, Dr Anto Gvozdenovi\u0107 (1853\u20131935), who rose to be a general in the Russian, and later the French, armies. After the fighting ceased, no steps were taken to end the state of war between Montenegro and Japan.\n\nAlso in 1904, the traditional system of tribes and clans was reorganized. Four _nahija_ \u2013 'provinces' or 'captaincies' \u2013 were created, the tribes were redistributed within them, and every province received its state-appointed elder. Prince Nikola was smoothing the ground for the introduction of more modern state structures.\n\nIn 1905, Montenegro became a constitutional monarchy following the adoption of an elaborate constitution of 222 articles, modelled in large part on its Serbian equivalent. A British Foreign Office Handbook would use Serbian terminology to describe the arrangements:\n\n> The Prince continued to represent the State in all its foreign relations; primogeniture in the male line was declared to be the law of succession; the Senate was preserved; the country was divided into departments ( _oblasti_ ), districts ( _capitanie_ ) and communes ( _opshtine_ ); a free press and free compulsory elementary education, a Council of State of six, and a Court of Accounts of six members formed part of the Charter. A National Assembly of sixty-two deputies (the _Narodna Skupshtina_ ), partly elected by universal suffrage and partly composed of ex officio nominees of the Prince, was to meet annually on 31 October... Deputies must be 30 years of age and pay 15 kronen in taxes annually.\n\nThe first general election was held in November of the same year. There were no established political parties; deputies mainly represented local or tribal interests; and the National Assembly's recommendation required the approval of the prince.\n\nAfter 1907, however, two embryonic parties did arise. One, the _Naradna Stranka_ or 'People's Party' (NS), was organized by and Italian-educated engineer, Andrija Radovi\u0107 (1872\u20131947), who aimed to introduce a more modern and democratic system. The other, the 'True People's Party' (PNS) or 'Rightists', was organized by Prince Nikola himself, who resented the challenge to his prerogatives. Radovi\u0107 survived for barely a year as prime minister, and briefly found himself in prison. Yet in 1913 his People's Party won a landslide victory and he retuned to favour. Prospects for constititional evolution were improving.\n\nIn 1910 Montenegro celebrated its prince's golden jubilee. The court of St Petersburg raised him to the honorary rank of field marshal and, as befitted the occasion, the National Assembly petitioned him to assume the title of 'king', which he graciously accepted. The representatives of the Great Powers applauded and Montenegro took its place among the kingdoms of Europe on Proclamation Day, 28 August 1910 (15 August Old Style).*\n\nIn a parallel step, a decree gave effect to the decision to declare the Orthodox Church in Montenegro autocephalous, that is, independent of patriarchal jurisdiction. Previously the Church had operated under the nominal jurisdiction of the patriarch of Constantinople, as did its counterpart in Serbia. But the decree now asserted that Montenegro had never accepted the abolition of the Serbian patriarchate by the Ottomans in 1766, and hence that the Montenegrin Church was the only true successor of the tradition of St Sava, the founder of Serbian Orthodoxy. This was no trivial matter. The Orthodox clergy traditionally acted as guardians not only of religious practice but also of national identity. The Montenegrins now appeared to be claiming that their form of adherence to Serbian traditions was more correct than that practised in Serbia. This was asking for trouble.\n\nAn official photograph of the royal family on Proclamation Day records the Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 clan at the height of their success. The gentlemen are decked out in a variety of exotic military uniforms; the ladies in regulation ankle-length, white silk dresses and cartwheel hats. King Nikola sits in national costume in the centre alongside the matronly Queen Milena, a landowner's daughter who had married him when she was only thirteen. They are surrounded by their seven surviving daughters, their three sons, one grandson and a collection of spouses. Their eldest son-in-law, Petar I of Serbia, is missing, but three others, including King Vittorio Emanuele III of Italy, are present. Crown Prince Danilo (1871\u20131939), their fifth child, stands in the middle of the back row; their twenty-one-year-old grandson, Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, reclines in the foreground.\n\nIn the summer of 1911 an American reporter, who was seeking a scoop on the current Albanian crisis but had heard of King Nikola's love for poetry and plays, obtained an interview at the 'Biljarda House' by announcing that he was a New York literary critic. Fighting had flared on the nearby frontier, but 'Nikita' was not going to miss an opportunity to discuss literature. 'There is no vanity so deep', the reporter remarked, 'as that of authorship':\n\n> The King soon joined me \u2013 a fine, old, sturdy gentleman turned seventy, with rugged features, a coarse mouth, and a good forehead. A heavy moustache lent picturesqueness to a massive face, lit up by shrewd and rather kindly eyes... Nikita seemed oblivious of his Ministers... He plunged into literature, [speaking] in faultless French \u2013 the French of a professor... He touched on Lamartine, and eulogised Chateaubriand. From poetry we passed on to drama.\n> \n> 'Yes,' said the King, 'I have written plays myself. The best known, produced in the Royal Theatre here, is a drama called the \"Empress of the Balkans\". The heroine was suggested by my wife.'\n> \n> I knew nothing of the 'Empress', but it seemed courteous to inquire if the King would not like to have the work performed in France or England or America. The question seemed to change Nikita instantly from the ruler of a brave and restless land into an author... He gave me a copy of his play in Montenegrin (which resembles Serb or Russian). He also favoured me with his autographed photograph.\n> \n> Being now in high good spirits, he obliged me quite spontaneously with his opinion on the impending crisis. To my distress, I found that he had resolved to avoid war, for the time, and to drop the Albanian cause.\n\nThe Balkan Wars \u2013 wars of liberation from the Ottoman Empire, complicated by conflicts between the liberated for the spoils \u2013 erupted the very next year notwithstanding, and Montenegro found itself in a cauldron of swirling conflicts in which stronger parties always held the initiative. King Nikola plunged into the fray alongside Serbia. He still had his lyrical foreign admirers:\n\n> He speaks as straight as his rifle's shot,\n> \n> As straight as a thrusting blade,\n> \n> Waiting the deed that shall trouble the truce\n> \n> His savage guns have made...\n> \n> Stern old King of the stark black hills,\n> \n> Where the fierce lean eagles breed,\n> \n> Your speech rings true as your good sword rings \u2013\n> \n> And you are a king indeed\n\nThe First Balkan War of 1912, in which several states participated against the Ottomans and Montenegro fired the first shot, ended the age-old dominance of the Ottoman Empire. The Second Balkan War of 1913, in which 10,000 Montenegrin troops were sent to the Bulgarian Front, ended with Montenegro winning a common border with Serbia. But it also led to disputes with the Great Powers. King Nikola had captured the Albanian port of Shkoder (Scutari) in defiance of Western advice, only pulling out after vociferous Austrian protests. Vienna viewed Montenegro as a Russian surrogate.\n\nAs if on cue, as soon as peace was declared, King Nikola's play, _Balkanska Carica,_ was published in London in an English translation. A signed portrait of the author faced the title page:\n\n> THE EMPRESS OF THE BALKANS: A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS BY NICHOLAS I PETROVITCH-NIEGOSH, KING OF MONTENEGRO\n> \n> Adapted from the Servian...\n> \n> London\n> \n> (Eveleigh Nash)\n> \n> 1913\n\nThe text was preceded by a detailed 'Description of the Characters', one or two quite recognizable:\n\n> PRINCE EEVAN, the Ruler of Montenegro, age 70 \u2013 a majestic old man, a warrior and a stern ruler, but kind-hearted.\n> \n> PRINCE GEORGE, the Heir-Apparent, age 26 \u2013 young and strong, very polite and kind, and of a quiet disposition.\n> \n> PRINCE STANKO, the second son, age 24 \u2013 strong and very ambitious: vigorous, fearless and brave, but of changeable moods, easy to persuade.\n> \n> VOIVODA DEHAN, age 65 \u2013 old, but bears his age well, being full of life: a great hero and warrior, yet not vain.\n> \n> VOIVIDA PERUN, Prince Eevan's guest, age 60.\n> \n> DANITZA, Perun's daughter, aged 20 \u2013 a firm character and very patriotic: in love with Stanko: full of pluck, very resolute, and of pleasant manners.\n> \n> IBRAHIM AGA, Envoy of the Sultan, aged 50 \u2013 slight and medium height, dark yellowish complexion, and cunning looking, full of compliments and a very deceitful character.\n\nThe time of the action is given as 'the end of the Fifteenth Century'. The American, who had brought the original text to London, thought that the royal drama lacked 'imaginative charm'. 'It did not make me very anxious to adapt the play for Broadway,' he wrote. 'It had been written in fair verse, under the influence of Schiller, [but] had no \"punch\"... It might have proved the germ of a good musical comedy.' Unfortunately, musical comedy was the image which Europeans as well as Americans continued to have of Montenegro:\n\n> There was a whiff of the Middle Ages about King Nicholas: his insistence on leading his troops into battle, his dispensing of justice under an ancient tree, and the magnificent medals he awarded himself and his friends... His capital, Cetinje, was merely a large village, the Bank of Montenegro a small cottage, and the Grand Hotel a boarding-house... [The king's] new palace was more like a German pension, with the royal children doing their homework in folk costume... and the King sitting on the front steps waiting for visitors. Franz Leh\u00e1r used Montenegro as the model for _The Merry Widow_.\n\nLeh\u00e1r's operetta, first performed in Vienna in December 1905, was a popular sensation in the years before the Great War; between 1907 and 1910 it received nearly 800 performances in London alone. In the libretto, the scene of action is barely disguised as the Principality of 'Pontevedro', and its capital as Letigne. The Pontevedran ambassador is Baron Zeta, his first secretary \u2013 Count Danilo, and his assistant \u2013 Njegus. 'Vilya's Song' is presented as an 'old Pontevedran melody':\n\n> _Vilja, O Vilja! Du Waldm\u00e4gdelein,_\n> \n> _Fass' mich und lass' mich_\n> \n> _Dein Trautliebster sein._\n\n('Vilya, O Vilya, you forest maiden, \/ take me and let me \/ be your own truest love.') If Europeans thought about Montenegro at all before the war, most of them would have done so in terms of Leh\u00e1r's happy romp.\n\nMontenegro's story is well illustrated on its early postage stamps. The first issue of the Montenegrin post office, from 1874, was inscribed exclusively in Cyrillic and shows the head of Prince Nikola. A commemorative issue in 1893 marked the 400th anniversary of Montenegro's oldest surviving printed book, and another in 1896 the 200th anniversary of the hereditary state of the _vladikas_. In 1910 a coronation issue appeared, and was followed by a set of definitive designs which showed the king sporting traditional regal headdress and which proved to be the country's last.\n\nIn August 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo took place within thirty miles of the Montenegrin frontier, and fighting was started by the Austrian attack on Serbia. The Montenegrins rushed to bolster Serbian resistance, declaring war against Austria, only to find themselves caught up in a long and bitter conflict. They also hoped, as the Serbs did, to obtain hefty slices of the Adriatic coast and of northern Albania; indeed they were formally promised important acquisitions, including Dubrovnik, during negotiations preceding the Treaty of London (1915) which brought Italy into the war on the Allied side. But the outcome of the fighting was less favourable. In 1916\u201317 the Serbian army was forced to retreat, conducting a long march over the mountains into Albania, and eventually taking refuge on the island of Corfu. As the Austrians surged forward, Montenegro was cast into intense distress. At the Battle of Mojkovac in January 1916, the Montenegrin army made great sacrifices to enable their Serbian allies to escape, but their own country fell into enemy hands, and King Nikola was persuaded to go into exile in France. He left his kingdom to a plight that was as ambiguous as it was perilous. After complicated negotiations, he reached an agreement with Vienna whereby the royal administration and the authority of the clans would be left in place under the overall control of an Austrian commander. These negotiations in their turn provoked not only the unintended capitulation of the Montenegrin army but also a bitter split within the Montenegrin government-in-exile. Andrija Radovi\u0107, who had served a further spell as prime minister, parted company with the king permanently. The exiled monarch was rapidly losing control of his destiny.\n\nIn the remaining years of the war, as Austrian power faded, political ferment accelerated. One part of Montenegrin opinion was drawn to the 'Yugoslav Idea', the scheme whereby all the southern Slavs \u2013 Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes and Macedonians \u2013 would join together to form a common state. Another part gave more attention to the 'Pan-Serbian Idea', which proposed that the existing Kingdom of Serbia should be expanded to draw in all ethnic Serbs, including those living in Bosnia, Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia. Crucially, though the concept of a united Yugoslavia and that of a 'Greater Serbia' each had their enthusiasts, they were not necessarily incompatible. Such, indeed, was the view of Andrija Radovi\u0107. Henceforth, Monternegro's best-connected politician contacted Serbia's exiled government and made common cause with them.\n\nThe wider diplomatic framework was also changing shape. In 1914 Montenegro's interests had been protected by Russia, and by Russia's ally, France. After the Treaty of London, however, Italy entered the equation and King Nikola shared Italian aspirations for territorial reconstruction in the Adriatic region, as did Radovi\u0107. Then in 1917 the Bolshevik Revolution knocked Russia off the chessboard; the French duly drew closer to Serbia; and Italian plans for the Adriatic lost Western support. The Americans, in particular, were opposed to the Treaty of London, which they saw as a wicked example of the old secret diplomacy. King Nikola was losing his international friends.\n\nAccording to one witness, 'the Austrian occupation was not a brutal one'; at least in its first phase. 'Not a child was killed, not a woman violated.' Yet matters soon deteriorated. The Montenegrin army's capitulation spread dismay, and the exiled government gave contradictory explanations. For example, it issued a declaration stating that the agreement with the Austrians had only been made to gain time; that the King was urging resistance, and that nobody had the right to negotiate an armistice, let alone make peace. As a result, many of the king's loyal subjects were unclear as to whether they should co-operate with the occupying forces or not. The Austrians ordered the internment of all adult males as a precaution. This sparked acts of defiance, which in turn provoked reprisals. Austrian soldiers were shot, and the offenders were hanged. Worst of all, the clans broke ranks. Montenegrins started to skirmish with Montenegrins. As the international conflict drew to a close, civil war was looming.\n\nThanks to the Austrian occupation and King Nikola's exile, Montenegro played little part in the rapidly moving but ill co-0rdinated plans to create a united state of Yugoslavia. The principal protagonist in this venture was a Dalmatian Croat, Ante Trumbi\u0107 (1864\u20131938), sometime mayor of Split, further up the Adriatic coast from Kotor. Trumbi\u0107's Yugoslav Committee had been launched in London, working closely with the scholar R. W. Seton-Watson and his journal _New Europe_ ; but in 1917\u201318 it was engaged in its key task of finding suitable Serb partners in order to outflank the alternative project of a Greater Serbia. On 17 July 1917, in conjunction with the slippery Serb politician Nikola Pa\u0161i\u0107 (1845\u20131926), sometime mayor of Belgrade, Trumbi\u0107 signed the Corfu Declaration, which envisaged a future Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The Declaration named the House of Karadjordjevi\u0107 as the future ruling dynasty, and it made no mention of Montenegro. This was ominous. And Pa\u0161i\u0107 proved himself to be thoroughly unreliable. Seton-Watson said of him: 'The old man changes his mind every few hours, and cannot be trusted for five minutes with his word of honour or anything else.' Pa\u0161i\u0107 was soon indicating that the Corfu Declaration had been a passing dalliance, and as late as July 1918 appeared to be paying attention exclusively to pan-Serbian aspirations. 'Serbia', he told Trumbi\u0107 opaquely, 'internationally represents our nation of three names.'\n\nFollowing the Corfu Declaration, Radovi\u0107 surfaced in Switzerland, where he established the Central Montenegrin Committee of National Reunification. The extent of his support cannot be gauged, but one should note that the nation which he aimed to reunite was not Montenegro; it was the nation of all Serbs wherever they lived. For practical purposes, he was campaigning against Montenegro's restoration.\n\nInside Montenegro, therefore, confusion reigned. Contact with the exiled king had virtually been lost. There was no Montenegrin radio service, the telephones were controlled by the Austrians, and the illiterate majority of the population could not make sense of the few foreign newspapers that crept past the censors. The Yugoslav project was left in the hands of distant outsiders. There can be little doubt that the Montenegrins, like most Europeans, were expecting change. They knew that King Nikola's chief patron, the Russian tsar, had been overthrown, and that parts of his Empire, like Ukraine, had broken away. But for the most part they were waiting patiently for the king to return and for the international situation to stabilize.\n\nThe last fortnight of the war caused the greatest confusion of all. On 28 October 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed, the Emperor Charles withdrew from government, and the Austrian occupation forces pulled out from Montenegro. In all the great cities of the dying Empire \u2013 in Vienna and Budapest, in Zagreb, Ljubljana, Prague, Lemberg and Sarajevo \u2013 national committees sprang up to demand the formation of new states. Then, on 4 November, revolution broke out in Berlin. The Kaiser abdicated, German forces on the Western Front retreated, and the Central Powers, which had appeared invincible only six months earlier, cracked. The Western Allies, 'who were not expecting victory when it came', emerged triumphant. They dictated the terms of the Armistice of 11 November, and announced that a general Peace Conference would convene in Paris on 31 January. Montenegrins were not the only ones to wonder what the fast-moving events would bring.\n\nAt the very end of the Great War, in the interval between the Armistice and the start of the Peace Conference, Montenegro was hit by the cruellest of blows. The war had apparently been won. The country was freeing itself from the Central Powers. As a member of the victorious Allies, it was looking forward to receiving its due rewards. Yet a completely different scenario arose. A hastily convened meeting of a 'Grand National Assembly' calling itself the _Skup\u0161tina_ voted in favour of union with the nascent Yugoslav kingdom. Executive decisions passed immediately to Belgrade. King Nikola lost his throne. His kingdom, a Serbian Sparta only eight years old, was put out on the mountainside like a Spartan child, and left to die in its infancy. It was the only Allied state to disappear from the map.\n\nThe sequence of events whereby Montenegro lost its statehood deserves closer examination. After all, the standard procedure for an occupied Allied country would have seen the state and its territory restored as soon as victory was assured. Belgium, for example, which had been occupied by Germany between 1914 and 1918, was fully restored to the king of the Belgians and his government at the end of hostilities. Albert I made his triumphal re-entry into Brussels on 22 November 1918, two days before the 'Grand National Assembly' of Montenegro convened. Allied declarations had consistently bracketed Montenegro with Belgium and Serbia as countries whose restoration was guaranteed. What in 1918 made Montenegro different?\n\nThe collapse of Austria-Hungary in October 1918 left a vacuum in the territories which the Royal and Imperial Army had occupied. In Montenegro, no provision was made for an orderly transfer of power. The Montenegrin army had no time to reconstitute itself. After the capitulation of January 1916, some of its units had handed in their arms to the Austrians and disbanded; others had left the country and were serving under Serbian command. All the Balkan allies were subordinated in theory to the French General Franchet d'Esp\u00e9rey in distant Salonika; the western part of the Balkan theatre had been entrusted to his deputy, General Venel. Yet little direct control could be exercised and few military resources could be spared for the Montenegrin backwater. The coastal region was assigned to the French or to British and Italian units brought in by sea. The mountainous interior was assigned to the Serbian army, the only substantial ground force in the region, while the eastern border districts were infiltrated by Serbian 'irregulars'. In short, in the weeks both before and after the Armistice, no coherent Montenegrin formation was on hand to defend Montenegro's interests.\n\nThe standing of the Montenegrin monarchy was definitely diminished. King Nikola's wartime actions had provoked a wave of criticism. Some denounced him for treating with the enemy, others for deserting his country or betraying the Serbs, and a few for 'behaving like a despot' or for living well off Allied subsidies. He had quarrelled with some of the politicians, and calls for his abdication had emanated from his own entourage. Yet there had been no concerted campaign in the country to remove him, still less to abolish the institution of monarchy; a deal with the king's Serbian relatives was still on the cards. A measure of qualified sympathy for the king can be found in an unexpected source. Milovan Djilas (1911\u201395), later one of Tito's comrades and prisoners, and himself a Montenegrin, remembered the episode from his childhood. 'There had actually been no betrayal,' he wrote. 'What could [the king] have done?... [He] did not betray the Serbs. If he betrayed anything \u2013 and he did \u2013 it was the Montenegrin Army and the Montenegrin state.'\n\nAs for relations between the House of Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 and the House of Karadjordjevi\u0107, little was known in public. The kings of Montenegro and Serbia were both old men; both were looking to the younger generation; both had been forced into exile, Nikola in Antibes, Petar in Corfu; and both hoped for co-ordinated policy. Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, Nikola's grandson, was a key figure; he was already the acting Serbian regent, and was obviously ambitious. In London in 1915, he had been the first person ever to talk about 'our Yugoslav people' \u2013 though such sentiments did not necessarily indicate ill will to his grandfather. A highly impractical scheme floated by Radovi\u0107 foresaw the Montenegrin and Serbian dynasties reigning over Yugoslavia jointly, with a Petrovi\u0107 and a Karadjordjevi\u0107 taking turns to mount the throne. Nobody took the idea seriously.\n\nMontenegro's isolation was increased by tensions in neighbouring Albania, which was the subject of acute international disagreements. The Serbian army had laid waste to large parts of northern Albania in late 1918, devastating over 150 villages in the Drin valley. The depredations were encouraged by the French, who wanted post-war Serbia to be strong and were hatching a plot to partition Albania. In order to undermine a fragile government in Tirana, an insurrection was then fomented among the Catholic Mirdita clan, which was to declare its mountainous retreat to be an independent republic. Far away in Paris, a French-dominated committee announced that Albania was to be partitioned (according to the provisions of the Treaty of London), while the United States recognized Albanian independence and received an Albanian ambassador to Washington. This complicated dispute distracted attention from developments elsewhere.\n\nInside Montenegro, two opposing political camps were forming but with no established forum in which to compete. The pan-Serbian camp inspired by Radovi\u0107 was pressing both for unification with Serbia and for the creation of a Yugoslav state under Belgrade's leadership. It assumed that Montenegro's pre-war constitution had lapsed, and sought to achieve its end by imposing its own unilateral procedures: a classic case of self-styled democrats impatient of democratic methods. The rival royalist camp aimed to restore the Kingdom of Montenegro first and to address the Yugoslav issue later. Its sympathizers, though badly organized, probably represented majority opinion; they certainly reflected the stated intentions of the Allied Powers.\n\nIt is worth quoting Clause 11 of President Wilson's Fourteen Points of April 1917, which had gained the adherence of both Britain and France, and which was widely seen to embody the guidelines of Allied policy. 'Romania, Serbia and Montenegro should be evacuated,' it read, 'occupied territory restored, Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea, and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel.' Further: 'International guarantees should be entered upon for the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states.' From this, it is clear that the Allied leaders intended to restore the statehood of all their Balkan allies and to secure it by treaty.\n\nIn the circumstances of November 1918, however, there was no question of 'friendly counsel' or a level political playing field. The Serbian army, which had marched into the void left by the Austrians, gave its backing to the pan-Serbian group in Montenegro, which immediately set up a so-called National Council, together with a Provisional Executive Committee to organize elections to a 'Grand National Assembly'. The plan was masterminded by Radovi\u0107. The country's political class as a whole were given no chance to compete on equal terms. The king and government were still abroad; they commanded no independent troops and few officials; and the effective influence of their supporters outside Cetinje was minimal. From his French exile, King Nikola issued a decree on 12 November, the day after the Armistice, for convening the Montenegrin parliament or _Skup\u0161tina_ ; but his loyal subjects had no way of implementing it.\n\nSo far, no fundamental disagreement had arisen over the joint Yugoslav project. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and Montenegrins had all felt the weight of Austrian rule or occupation, and all saw the benefits of future co-operation. A Yugoslav state suited the purposes of the Western Allies, who saw it as a desirable replacement for Austrian influence, and the smaller nations were enthusiastic. King Nikola himself had expressed his willingness to join. He was thinking, no doubt, of a federal Yugoslav state modelled on the German Empire, in which several reigning monarchs had retained their separate crowns. Here was an issue on which 'friendly counsel' was certainly needed.\n\nMontenegrins, therefore, had many worries. It was not clear how Montenegro's territory was to be fully restored, or how the Yugoslav project might be realized. Disagreements were always in the air; pessimists might have despaired. Yet it was a great relief to hear that the Armistice had been declared, and a comfort that Montenegro was accepted as one of the victorious allies. In such circumstances, small nations are naturally inclined to put their faith in the benevolence of the Great Powers; Montenegro, it appeared, was not in so sorry a pass as Hungary or Bulgaria, which had backed the wrong side.\n\nThe Serbs, in contrast, would have spotted several major obstacles from the start. Time, for them, was of the essence. If they were to realize their dream of a state in which Serbia would play the same dominant role as Prussia played in Germany, they had to act quickly. In particular, they had to forestall their principal partners and rivals, the Croats, who were still extricating themselves from the old Austro-Hungarian institutional structures. The outcome of the Peace Conference and its deliberations was uncertain. The Serbian delegation would be in a far stronger position if preliminary arrangements to Serbia's liking were put in place in advance.\n\nThe Serbs were equally concerned about the future of their monarchy. One might have expected the monarchists of Serbia and Montenegro to act in harmony, if only to keep the republicans at bay. After all, King Petar I of Serbia was King Nikola's son-in-law, had lived in Cetinje and shared a very similar background. He, too, had been educated in France; he was a graduate of the military academy at Saint-Cyr, and had served (as 'Pierre Kara') as a French officer during the Franco-Prussian War. The two monarchs were of the same age and of the same outlook and had a very great deal in common. But there lay the problem. There were generals and courtiers in Belgrade who regarded the House of Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 as a dangerous challenger. They had brought King Petar to the throne in 1903 through a murderous military _coup d'\u00e9tat_ , and were fearful of something similar happening again. Moreover, their king was sick, and had ceded his prerogatives to his Montenegrin-born son. In the race for the throne of Yugoslavia \u2013 there were no kings in Slovenia or Croatia \u2013 the Montenegrin dynasty was the Serbians' only serious competitor.\n\nIn addition, Serbia was a landlocked country. There were four possible directions in which her promised 'access to the sea' could be projected: over Croatian territory to the north-west, over Albanian territory to the south-west, over Greek territory to the south, or directly over Montenegro. Greece and Croatia were strong enough to resist. Albania was in turmoil. Montenegro offered the easiest target.\n\nAt the turn of October 1918 the stalled Yugoslav project had suddenly come to life. Another National Committee appeared in Croatian Zagreb on 29 October, announcing the creation without warning of a 'State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs'. Its president, Dr Anton Koro\u0161ec, was a Slovene who had been active in the imperial _Reichsrat_ in Vienna, and its vice-presidents were a Croat and a Serb from Croatia. Its putative territory was made up exclusively of lands from the dying Habsburg Empire \u2013 the Serbs in its title referring to inhabitants of Bosnia and Hercegovina, not of Serbia or Montenegro. Nonetheless its appearance opened up opportunities which the exiled government of Serbia could not ignore. Nikola Pa\u0161i\u0107 immediately saw the chance of building a 'Greater Serbia' within a still larger Yugoslavia, and he sought a swift encounter with the politicians from Zagreb. Koro\u0161ec was equally eager to do business with Pa\u0161i\u0107, because conflict was looming with Italy over the Adriatic littoral from Trieste to Dubrovnik. (In a last act of Austro-Hungarian desperation, Koro\u0161ec had been handed control of the entire Royal and Imperial Fleet.)\n\nThe resultant Conference of Geneva was attended by Pa\u0161i\u0107, Koro\u0161ec and Trumbi\u0107, representatives respectively of the government of Serbia, the National Council from Zagreb and the Yugoslav Committee, but with no authorized representative from Montenegro. On 6 November, after four hectic days, it reached an agreement whereby the newly announced State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs would be merged with the Kingdom of Serbia. An expanded National Council was recognized as the provisional government of the merged states, while parallel ministries would function in Zagreb and Belgrade. The name of the new entity, subtly modified, was to be the 'Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes'.\n\nSerbia, therefore, had the strongest of motives for eliminating Montenegro without delay, and the chance of exploiting a golden opening presented itself before the war had formally ended. The chosen course of action, adopted with lightning speed, was to bring all Serbs into the Yugoslav fold on Belgrade's terms. It was applied to ex-Austrian Bosnia and Hercegovina and to the ex-Hungarian Vojvodina as well as to Montenegro. In all cases, the organizers achieved their goals with the tacit assistance of the Serbian army. In Montenegro's case, they selected Podgorica, not the royal capital of Cetinje, as the meeting-place for the 'Grand National Assembly', and quickly distributed white and green voting cards: white for the pro-Serbian Yugoslav option; green for advocates of the restoration of the Kingdom of Montenegro. The timetable was draconian, and the sleight of hand brazen. The few foreign observers who learned of the elections were blissfully unaware that the 'Grand National Assembly' was something quite different from the constitutional _Skup\u0161tina_ , whose convocation the king had decreed.\n\nTwo short weeks, starting on 10 November, were allotted for the election campaign, which was marked and marred by a tide of anti-Petrovi\u0107 smears and insinuations. Brochures and press articles fanned hostile rumours. The absent King Nikola's dealings with the Habsburgs were described as selfish and unpatriotic: he was said to have amassed a huge personal fortune in (unspecified) British banks. Rallies were limited to seven days only (and in Cetinje to three days). The Serbian army was ordered to arrest all 'agitators', and to prevent the return of Montenegrin exiles. A council of compliant bishops announced the reunion of the Montenegrin and Serbian Orthodox Churches.\n\nIn this stage-managed scenario, the result of the 'plebiscite' was entirely predictable: 168 delegates were chosen with a crushing majority for the pro-Serbian Whites, the _byela\u0161i_ , and the resulting 'Grand National Assembly' met on 24 November. During the Assembly's second session two days later a 'Decision Document' stated first that 'the Serbian people of Montenegro share one blood, language, religion and tradition with the people of Serbia', and secondly, that the unification of Montenegro with Serbia offers 'the only possible salvation for our people'. No debate was permitted.\n\nFour resolutions were then passed:\n\n  1. to dethrone King Nikola I Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 and his dynasty\n  2. to unify Montenegro and Serbia into one state under the [Serbian] Karadjordjevi\u0107 dynasty, and thus unified... to join the common mother country... of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes\n  3. to select an Executive Committee of five persons to manage all activities until unification is complete: [and]\n  4. to inform the former King, his Government, the Allied Powers, and all non-aligned states about this decision.\n\nOut of 168 delegates, 160 assented. 'With Serbian troops in occupation,' writes one disinterested historian, 'a national assembly, apparently made up only of those with the correct views, voted hastily to depose their king and to unite with Serbia.'\n\nContemporary descriptions of the Podgorica Assembly do not reflect well on its participants:\n\n> They smoked, talked, shouted as in a caf\u00e9; the resolutions were declared to have been carried by unanimity. Anyone who attempted to object was howled down. Objections were raised that some members present, even those from Cetinje itself, were not the persons elected. But no hearing could be obtained. Some Albanians had been sent forcibly to represent the county of Pec, but they protested in vain that they had no wish to take part in the proceedings. All this was under the shadow of the bayonet.\n\nProtests made no difference, and once the vote had been recorded, the Assembly's participants were surplus to requirements. On 1 December a Serb-appointed Montenegrin Council invited the Serbian regent, Prince Aleksandar, to assume power, and Montenegro was annexed to Serbia by royal decree; Aleksandar had already assumed the additional post of regent of the Yugoslav kingdom. On 4 December, in Belgrade, the invalid Petar I was proclaimed king of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, making his last public appearance. His new style made no mention of Montenegro. The Serbian Yugoslav authorities severed relations with King Nikola, assuring the Allied Powers that the demise of his kingdom had come about through his subjects' democratic choice.\n\nThe backlash was not slow in coming. The royalist Greens or _zelenasi_ appealed to General Venel to annul the Podgorica resolutions and to support free elections. Fighting broke out in Cetinje on Christmas Eve, 24 December. The royalists, already classed as 'rebels', suffered dead and wounded. During a brief visit to Cetinje, General Venel called for a ceasefire, ordering the rebels (but not the Serbian army) to lay down their arms. In essence, Montenegro had been pacified before the Peace Conference in Paris had even started work.\n\nKing Nikola and his ministers still had the use of their embassy in Paris, in addition to the royal residence in Antibes and their offices in Neuilly-sur-Seine and Bordeaux, where a Montenegrin military camp was located. They approached all and sundry with pleas that Montenegro's independence be respected; the king was personally assured by Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and President Poincar\u00e9 that they all understood his position. He publicly appealed to his subjects to renounce violence. But no practical assistance was forthcoming. The king's letters to the Allied leaders usually went unanswered, or, if answered, were degraded by high-flown but evasive replies. On 24 November 1918, the day of the king's deposition, Poincar\u00e9 wrote: 'Your Majesty may rest assured that the Government of the [French] Republic... will lend itself to no attempt which would aim to force the will of the people of Montenegro and to deny their legitimate aspirations.' President Wilson only replied after two months' delay: 'A good opportunity will soon be offered to the Montenegrin people', he opined, 'to express themselves freely upon the political form of their future Government.'\n\nThe Greens launched a more determined rising on the day of the Orthodox Christmas, 7 January 1919. Their temerity quickly ignited a civil war, which divided the traditional tribes. The Serbian army carried out fierce reprisals, provoking counter-reprisals. Both sides perpetrated atrocities; the house of Andrija Radovi\u0107 in Martinici was torched by marauders, his mother kidnapped and his father shot. But the Greens were no match for Serbian fire-power. 'Their houses were burned down. They were pillaged and beaten. The women had cats sewn into their skirts, and the cats were beaten with rods. The soldiers mounted astride the backs of old men and forced them to carry them across streams. They attacked girls. Property and honour and the past: all this was trampled on.' Montenegrin soldiers were required to swear a new oath of allegiance to King Petar I. Those who refused were arrested. Serbian jails filled up with Montenegrin inmates.\n\nThe Peace Conference proved a disaster for Montenegro. In the absence of Russia owing to the Bolshevik Revolution, King Nikola's kingdom found itself friendless. The seat reserved for the country's delegate remained empty. The explanation offered by the Supreme Council on 13 January 1919 stated that 'the seat could not be allocated until the political situation in the country had clarified'. The Yugoslav delegation, in contrast, headed by Trumbi\u0107 and Pa\u0161i\u0107, took their seats without difficulty. They were accompanied by Andrija Radovi\u0107, the head of their Montenegrin Section, and were able to feed their views to the conference almost unopposed. Their publicity materials, including a book by Radovi\u0107, were widely translated and widely distributed, greatly outnumbering the pro-Montenegrin offerings. King Nikola's representative, General Gvozdenovi\u0107, was only invited to address the Supreme Council on one occasion, on 6 March, but to no effect. In May the Conference extended formal recognition to the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, of which Montenegro, willy-nilly, now formed part. Thereafter the Serbian government had nothing to do but to protect its gains; King Nikola would be hammering on a door that was already shut.\n\nDespite continuing international concern, the whole of 1919 passed without any meaningful discussion about Montenegro. The British government sent out a prominent diplomat, the earl de Salis, to make enquiries on the spot. An Irish landowner and a count of the Holy Roman Empire, Sir John De Salis-Soglio (1864\u20131939) had held several posts in the Balkans, including that of British envoy at Cetinje in 1911\u201316; he deposited his report in the Foreign Office in September, but the foreign minister, Lord Curzon, told Parliament that its publication was impossible. Questions were tabled both in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords, to no avail. Rumours spread that De Salis had disappeared, that he had been rescued by a British warship, or that his life was in danger. A parliamentary review prepared by Major Temperley* duly informed the House of Commons that nothing improper had occurred. Yet the feeling grew that the British government knew far more that it was prepared to concede.\n\nOnce the main sessions of the Peace Conference were over, Britain's Foreign Office published all the handbooks which it had earlier prepared for the use of its officials and diplomats. No. 20 in the series was devoted to Montenegro. Its eighty-two pages contained copious information on history, geography and social and economic conditions, but only a few lines on developments since 1913:\n\n> Especially since the two Serb states have been coterminous, contact with Serbia has led the Montenegrins to make comparisons not to the advantage of their own country; and a movement for the abdication of King Nikola so as to unite the two countries under the Karageorgevich dynasty was publicly started by the ex-Premier M. A. Radovich in 1917. The conference of Jugo-Slav delegates held at Geneva in 1918 discussed the relation of Montenegro to the new Jugo-Slav state; and a specially summoned Skupshtina deposed the king and declared for incorporation... This decision, however, has been challenged on constitutional grounds.\n\nThis summary could easily have been written in Belgrade. The failure to distinguish between the 'Grand National Assembly' and the constitutional _Skup\u0161tina_ , which never convened, was fundamentally misleading.\n\nIn 1920\u201321 Britain, France and the United States proceeded one by one to withdraw their representatives from the Montenegrin government-in-exile. They had decided that the king's ministers had lost their ability to influence developments, and, since fresh elections were being held throughout Serbia, accepted the view that the people of Montenegro were participating in a democratic system. They were deeply at odds by now with the Italian government, which was voicing its displeasure over the Adriatic settlement, and which saw itself alongside Montenegro as a fellow victim of Allied callousness. It was left to the American press, and to a lesser extent to the Italians, to tell the world some basic and long overdue details. Early in April 1920 the _New York Times_ published a sensational article entitled 'Serbs Arrest De Salis':\n\n> Paris, April 2. The Count de Salis, formerly British Minister to Montenegro and a special envoy to the Vatican... has been arrested and imprisoned by the Serbians while executing a mission of investigation into Montenegro for his Government. This information is contained in a declaration made to King Nicholas, who is now in Paris, by the Montenegran Foreign Minister... The declaration alleges that the [count's] Report was to the effect that the Serbian Army 'which overran Montenegro after the armistice terrorized the population', [and that] the reign of terror continues.\n> \n> In conclusion, the complaint is made that 'Europe knows what is happening to Montenegro, but remains indifferent' and that President Wilson, 'the great champion of small nations, persistently turns a deaf ear'.\n\nPrime Minister Bonomi of Italy told his parliament at this time: 'The Montenegrin question has _not_ been discussed by the powers, and the state of affairs created by Serbia has never received international sanction.' The queen of Montenegro asked for a meeting with Lloyd George when he visited Cannes. The request was refused. The powers were giving their former ally the cold shoulder. The contents of the De Salis report were not disclosed, though historians now know how damning it was. Among other things, Montenegro was 'under occupation by a strong Serbian force', Montenegrin officials had been replaced by Serbians, elections to the Podgorica Assembly had been illegal, the prisons were full and the present regime was hated.\n\nMeanwhile, the Serbian army began an annual series of expeditions into the mountains to round up the 'rebels'. Barbarous acts multiplied. Villages were torched. Bounties of 100,000 dinars were placed on the heads of fugitives. Locals were beaten or bribed to turn informer, and prisoners faced torture and execution. The Belgrade press showed no restraint in publishing the grisly photographs. A Canadian staff officer, resident in the Balkans, gave testimony: 'I know the case of a certain Bulatovich called \"the Colonel\" found in the hands of the Serbs. This unfortunate man was three times hung... At the last moment, the rope was cut so that he would not die immediately... Afterwards, they broke his arms and legs. Finally, still living, they removed his skin, like that of a beast.' Reports from Montenegro recorded 6,000 houses burned, and many more pillaged. Damage caused by the Serbian army exceeded that of the Austrian occupation, and was estimated at 723 million francs. More than 5,000 Montenegrin civilians were languishing in Serbian internment camps. Another Canadian, who had been running a war hospital at Dulcigno (Ulcinj), wrote to the British government in July 1920 saying that his charity could no longer do its work. 'The Serbs have done every dirty trick they could think of,' he wrote. 'There are not many Montenegrins, and in another year there will be none left.' To cap it all, the Serbian government passed a law for 'The Protection of the State', permitting its security forces to use whatever means they pleased.\n\nOwing to continued protests, the British government called for still more inquiries. In mid-1920 further reports were commissioned from Major Temperley, and from Ronald Bryce, a professional diplomat, who were sent out to observe the elections. Neither discovered serious irregularities. Bryce concluded ( _a_ ) that fresh elections had taken place satisfactorily, and ( _b_ ) that the people of Montenegro were in favour of a 'Jugo-Slav State'. Temperley concurred. What they failed to report was that the Serbian government had vetted all the electoral candidates, and that membership of the 'Jugo-Slav State' was not at issue. It was one thing to favour the formation of Yugoslavia; it was something quite different to be tricked and shackled into joining Yugoslavia with no opportunity to negotiate the terms. For its part, the government of Montenegro in exile appealed to the Supreme Allied Council for the creation of a commission of inquiry.\n\nBy this time, despairing of their alliance with Britain and France, King Nikola and his ministers placed their last hope in the good faith of the United States; General Gvozdenovi\u0107 was dispatched as the royal ambassador to Washington. In January 1921, therefore, when the US administration followed the British and French lead in withdrawing recognition from Montenegro's representatives, the reaction was understandably bitter. J. S. Plamenatz, premier and foreign minister of the royal Montenegrin government, signed a strong, not to say intemperate diplomatic protest. He reminded the Americans of 'the annexation of Allied Montenegro by force and bloodshed' and of President Wilson's assurances about the Montenegrin people's 'right to self-determination':\n\n> Taking into consideration all the foregoing facts, the royal Government of Montenegro cannot believe that the government of the United States \u2013 the most civilized country in the world \u2013 would contemplate an act [leading to] the breaking off of diplomatic relations with Montenegro. Such an action would not only aid the criminal intentions of Belgrade, but would ignore all the principles of international morality and justice; the United States would be guilty of not respecting its given word and not respecting the sovereignty of Montenegro.\n\nKing Nikola of Montenegro died on 1 March 1921 at Antibes aged eighty, and was buried at San Remo. A terminal act of submission appeared to have been played out on the 21 October following, when Queen Milena, the king's widow, dissolved the Montenegrin government-in-exile and released the ministers from their oath of allegiance, so detaching herself from the only focus round which the royalist cause might have coalesced. Her decision was reported in the _New York Times_ under the headline of 'Exit Montenegro':\n\n> News has reached Rome that the Montenegrin Government has ceased to exist... Queen Milena has recognised the inopportuneness of giving the name of Government to a body of ministers who no longer have any power... The handful of soldiers remaining... have agreed to disband... The act of Queen Milena... marks the passing of one of the most interesting little states of Europe, and removes from the Supreme Council and the League of Nations one of their most afflicting burdens... It is unlikely that agitation for an independent Montenegro will be continued.\n\nBy that time, the former kingdom was losing its very name. After incorporation into a newly centralized Serbia, Serbian officials increasingly referred to it as the _Banovina Zetska_ , the 'Region of the Zeta', a formula officially adopted in 1929; the Montenegrin constitution, together with the authority of the tribes and clans, had been swept away.\n\nThe House of Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 was brought low by Nikola's death. The heir apparent, Prince Danilo, had renounced his rights in favour of his cousin, King Aleksandar. His brother, Prince Mirko, had predeceased their father; the next in line, Prince Mirko's son Mihailo, was a boy of thirteen. There was no hope of a quick recovery. In due course Mihailo, who had been at school at Eastbourne in England, accepted the role of pretender, and General Gvozdenovi\u0107 was appointed regent.\n\nA 'League of Montenegrin Emigrants' thereupon published a brochure entitled _Le Plus Grand Crime de la Guerre Mondiale_ , 'The Greatest Crime of the World War'. Its subtitle read: _La Tentative d'escamoter un \u00e9tat alli\u00e9_ , 'The Attempt to Cause an Allied State to Vanish'. The book consisted of page after page of quotations from Allied statesmen:\n\n> 'Great Britain will continue to pursue the war energetically until Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro are restored.' Herbert Asquith, 10 January 1916.\n> \n> 'The restoration of Belgium, Serbia and Montenegro.' David Lloyd George, in response to a question from the German delegation to the Peace Conference concerning the conditions of peace, 16 April 1919.\n> \n> 'The question of Montenegro will not be discussed at Pallanza [during Yugoslav-Italian negotiations] but at a later date by all the Powers.' Bonar Law, British Conservative Party leader, 11 May 1920.\n> \n> 'Montenegro's only fault is to have participated in the war and to have believed the promises of her allies.' C. Treves, Italian socialist.\n> \n> 'Germany's crime against Belgium is not so great as that committed by Serbia... against Montenegro. The first of those crimes has been repaired; the second still enjoys the support of the Powers.' Hugo Mowinckel, Norwegian minister, August 1920.\n\nThe final curtain, however, had not yet fully descended. Between April and May 1922 the delegates of thirty-four countries convened at the Genoa Conference to discuss the post-war reconstruction of Eastern Europe. The conference was heading for fruitless deadlock, but one of the items on its agenda related to the work of the Inter-Allied Reparations Commission, and discussion revealed that Montenegro's share of reparations had never been paid. Absurd though the argument sounded, the Commission had retained the $2 million collected and due to Montenegro because 'it apparently doesn't know to whom to pay it'. The occasion provided a pretext for further protests on Montenegro's behalf. Gabriele d'Annunzio, the firebrand Italian nationalist and 'the first duce', made an impassioned speech; and a Dr Chotch, still described as Montenegro's foreign minister, presented a formal appeal to each of the delegations:\n\n> With its note of 1 November 1920 to the Supreme Allied Council and the League of Nations, the Government of Montenegro... asked for the appointment of an international commission of investigation... [into] the crimes and offences committed... against the Montenegrin people. Unfortunately, this cry of despair... did not find the response which we hoped its justice would inspire.\n> \n> The Montenegrin people and Government firmly believe that the exalted assembly of the representatives of the nations gathered at Genoa will not ignore the martyrdom of the Montenegrin people and the unheard-of barbarity of which they are the victims.\n> \n> Consequently, in the name of the Montenegrin Government, I have the honor to pray the International Conference to deign to inaugurate a commission of investigation charged with verification of the [said] crimes and offences...\n\n'Montenegro's Plea' was accompanied by piles of documents detailing Serbian atrocities. It received no known reply, and no investigation ever materialized. The _New York Times_ , which had pursued the story with determination, spoke the last word, publishing a long article on 16 April 1922 and recounting the events of the last four years; the headline read 'Annihilation of a Nation'.\n\nMontenegro's friends in the outside world were now few and far between. One of them, an Englishman who had once been tutor to King Nikola's sons, wrote a searing denunciation in 1924, which excoriates the Allied Powers no less than Serbia. It opens with a scene from the heart of London:\n\n> On the walls of the top of the grand staircase in the Foreign Office in Whitehall a number of decorative panels have been painted in honour of our Allies in the Great War. The centre panel, entitled 'BRITANNIA PACIFICATRIX', depicts all the Allies and includes Montenegro as a separate state. Britannia is represented welcoming her loyal comrades in arms; some \u2013 France, Italy, America and Japan \u2013 are glorious figures; others, who suffered more bitterly \u2013 Belgium, Roumania, Serbia, Montenegro \u2013 are mournful with bleeding wounds. The official description of the panel contains the following words: 'Serbia is clasping Montenegro in her arms.'\n\nFor the next eighty-seven years, the former subjects of the Kingdom of Montenegro lived their lives as citizens of Yugoslavia. In the inter-war period, they were integrated into Serbia within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. During the Second World War they endured harsh occupations, first by the Italian Fascists and then by the German Nazis. In post-war, Communist-run Yugoslavia, their land was reconstituted by Tito as one of the country's six federal republics.\n\nKing Nikola's legacy was not insignificant. For one thing, he left a dozen sons and daughters who, through numerous strategic marriages, played a significant role in Balkan and Orthodox politics, and he was remembered as the 'father-in-law of Europe'. (His daughter Yelena, as Queen Elena of Italy during Mussolini's regime, had some influence in an Axis attempt to restore a Montenegrin state.) For another, he left a considerable poetic and literary oeuvre that now forms part of the standard Serbo-Croat repertoire. Most ironically, perhaps, he had done much through his earlier writings and pronouncements to strengthen the cause of pan-Serbian nationalism, fanning the flames of romantic exclusivity without knowing what the flames might consume. His own career was ruined by the cause which he had once encouraged.\n\nOnce Tito's Communist regime had passed, King Nikola's memory could again be honoured. In 1989 his body and that of Queen Milena (who had died at Cap d'Antibes only two years after her husband) were brought home from San Remo and reinterred in the Cupiro Chapel at Cetinje. The former royal palace reopened as a royal museum. Shortly after, the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, which Nikola had sponsored, was re-established. In 1997, the elderly Archbishop Mikhailo of Cetinje, who had worked in exile as Queen Elena of Italy's archivist, assumed the position of the metropolitan of Montenegro, thereby challenging the hierarchy of the Serbian Orthodox Church. His rival was Archbishop Amfilohije, metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral, who made headlines by denouncing Prime Minister Djukanovi\u0107 as the 'Pagan King'. Archbishop Mikhailo gained the allegiance of perhaps 30 per cent of the faithful.\n\nDuring the terrible Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Montenegro stood by Serbian-led Yugoslavia for longer than any other republic. No less than a third of the officers of the Yugoslav army were Montenegrins, as were large numbers of officials and Party leaders in Yugoslavia's central administration. Montenegrin forces participated in the attacks on Croatian Dubrovnik and on the Muslim-inhabited areas of Bosnia. Both Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 and \u017deljko Ra\u017enatovi\u0107, the paramilitary leader known as 'Arkan', were Serbs of Montenegrin descent. So, too, is Radovan Karadzi\u010d, the former leader of the Bosnian Serbs.\n\nYet from 1997 onwards the Montenegrin Communist Party, which had stayed in charge throughout the wars, split into pro- and anti-Milo\u0161evi\u0107 factions, and the stronger anti faction gradually distanced itself from Belgrade. In its brief, last emanation, the Yugoslav Federation took a dual form, within which Serbia and Montenegro were assigned an equal voice in foreign and defence policy, adopting the sort of arrangement which King Nikola and his ministers might once have accepted.\n\nMontenegro's disaffection with Serbia grew markedly in 1999 during 'Operation Noble Anvil', NATO's bombing campaign launched to protect neighbouring Kosovo, then a province of Serbia (with a largely Albanian population) which, as we saw at the outset, declared its independence in 2008. Kosovan refugees poured over the frontier; NATO planners targeted Montenegrin ports and communications; and collateral casualties were caused when bombs fell on peaceful villages. Montenegro was paying heavily for a Serbian connection of rapidly decreasing benefit.\n\nOnce Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 had been overthrown in Serbia in October 2000, the Montenegrin leadership talked openly of its aspirations for an agreed divorce. Preparations took time, but on 22 May 2006, after nearly ninety years' delay, the crucial referendum was held. The motion for independence narrowly gained the required majority of votes, despite EU monitors having raised the threshold from 50 to 55 per cent; the winning margin of 0.5 per cent was more respectable than it seemed. Montenegro joined the United Nations and the Council of Europe. The sovereign state which had vanished in 1918 was restored.\n\nIn the period preceding the referendum, the government of Prime Minister Djukanovi\u0107 systematically promoted all the symbols of Montenegro's separate identity. In addition to supporting the Montenegrin Orthodox Church, it renamed the country's official language. The school curriculum replaced Serbian language classes with 'native language classes', and the University's Department of Serbian Language and Literature became the 'Department of Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian and Croat Studies'. In 2004 a new state anthem was introduced in reaction to Serbia's reintroduction of the old royal anthem of the House of Karadjordjevi\u0107. Since then Montenegrins sing ' _Oj svijetla majska zoro_ ', 'Oh, bright dawn of May', which recalls the conquest of Kosovo.\n\nFinally, on 12 December 2005 the prime minister unveiled a long-awaited statue in a spacious park of Podgorica. 'Montenegro', Djukanovi\u0107 said, 'was, is and should be a friend of all nations, especially of the South Slavs. But never again [will she become] someone's friend to her own detriment.' An opposition spokesman dismissed the event as 'a dictator's act of personal promotion'. Yet it was welcomed by Prince Nikola II Petrovi\u0107 (b. 1941), an architect resident in Paris and son of the late Prince Mihailo. The statue showed King Nikola mounted, but wearing the same national dress as he had worn on Proclamation Day in 1910.\n\n##### III\n\nThe theory and practice of state sovereignty is a complex subject. Few would deny that the destruction of a recognized state through foreign interference is illegal. One may draw a parallel with the death of individuals. If a man or a woman dies from age or sickness, the event may be regretted, but it cannot be morally denounced. Yet if the loss of life is due to the action or inaction of others, it is automatically classed as a crime \u2013 manslaughter or murder or involuntary homicide.\n\nWith respect to sovereign states, the wider context is crucial. Few politicians or international lawyers would oppose the idea that a supranational order exists, and that the conduct of sovereign states is subject to collective rules and sanctions. Such, after all, are the foundations of international law. The failure in Montenegro's case, therefore, was not confined to the fact of the state's demise through foreign fraud and violence: it was equally a failure of what would now be called the 'international community'. Montenegro had been a member of the wartime entente, and her legal personality was still intact as the war ended. Whether or not it was formally terminated by the decisions of the Paris Peace Conference is open to debate. For reasons that are hard to pinpoint, Montenegro's fate completely escaped the international agenda.\n\nKing Nikola's kingdom sank before the legal framework of state sovereignty was strengthened by the Estrada Doctrine of 1930 and the Montevideo Convention of 1933, which expounded the principles of sovereign equality and of non-intervention. It certainly met Montevideo's four criteria of sovereignty: namely, a permanent population, a defined territory, a recognized government, and the capacity to conduct foreign relations. But in 1918\u201321, when the Allied Powers and then the League of Nations had to deal with numerous cases of disputed sovereignty, none of these principles had been formally established. The \u00c5land Isles, for example, objected to automatic incorporation into Finland, which had recently declared its independence. The \u00c5landers were 90 per cent Swedish-speaking, and claimed the right to remain in Sweden. The Swedish government sponsored their claim, and the League of Nations convened its very first commission of inquiry. In 1921, to the surprise of many, the commission's recommendation was to leave the islands under Finnish jurisdiction, but with a firm guarantee of their autonomy. This judgment has held good ever since.\n\nIn Albania, another dispute was not settled so peaceably. The Serbian army launched a further advance in an attempt to pre-empt the outcome, but its offensive helped the Allied Powers to resolve their differences in precisely the opposite way to the Serbs' intentions. In November 1921, by a decree of the Allied Conference of Ambassadors, Albanian independence was recognized and, with minor changes, the frontiers of 1913 were reconfirmed.\n\nThe question arises, therefore, why Montenegro could not have benefited from similar arbitration. Both the Peace Conference and the League of Nations were aware of the problem, yet failed to act. The League's excuse may well have been a technical one: once incorporated into Serbia, the Montenegrins became a minority, and the League had a rule that claims by minorities had to be sponsored by the claimants' 'mother country'. Sweden sponsored the \u00c5landers, but Serbia was obviously not going to sponsor a Montenegrin complaint against Serbia.\n\nOne can only think that the Supreme Council at the Peace Conference was gripped by the fatal 'friendly ally syndrome'. Montenegro was shunned for the same reason that the Irish Republic or Corsica was shunned. Allied leaders were quick to champion the victims of the defeated enemy, but they had neither the will nor the courage to investigate injustices caused by their own major partners. At one point, for example, President Wilson agreed to meet a Corsican delegation, not realizing that Corsica formed part of metropolitan France. When reprimanded by Clemenceau, he cancelled the appointment, telling his secretary: 'I cannot interfere with the internal affairs of a friendly ally.' Lloyd George pounced. 'I hope your Excellency will apply the same rule to Ireland,' he said, 'which I need not remind you is still a part of Great Britain... After all, are we not your ally?' 'Associate,' the President responded sourly, 'not ally.'\n\nAssessments of Montenegro's unification with Serbia have varied greatly over the decades. Inter-war Serbian scholars regarded it as an entirely natural event. Yugoslav scholars of the Tito era, strongly influenced by Communist ideology, showed no sympathy for a dead monarchy. Now that an independent Montenegro has re-emerged, however, a new historical consensus appears to be emerging with it. A textbook published in Podgorica in 2006 and a scholarly monograph both present interpretations that coincide in large measure with the once lonely voice of the author of _Martyred Nation_.\n\nOne is tempted to enquire whether any other European states have been treated as shabbily as Montenegro was, especially by an ally or by self-styled benefactors. Austria's _Anschluss_ with Germany in 1938, as engineered by Adolf Hitler, is an obvious candidate, and Stalin's takeover of the three Baltic states in 1940 is another. Yet the fate of Poland in 1944\u20135 must surely top the list. Poland was a comparatively large country, a combatant Allied state, and a formal ally of the Western Powers. Nonetheless, the formula which could be dubbed the 'Montenegrin Gambit' worked like a dream for Poland's post-war oppressors. In stage one, the Soviet Union's Red Army overruns Poland in the closing campaign of the war against Germany; one Allied country is said to be liberating another. In stage two, in the shadow of Red Army bayonets, a bogus committee is formed to undermine the reputation of the exiled government in London, and to demand a common political front with the USSR. Their programme is presented as the product of honest differences within Polish democratic opinion. In stage three, a pre-printed manifesto is suddenly produced, and in the name of the people a self-appointed gang of Soviet stooges usurp the prerogatives of the legal but absent government. In stage four, the Communist security forces classify all political opponents as 'bandits', and calmly pulverize the independence movement. The Western leaders thereon submit to the 'friendly ally syndrome' in the manner of the Foreign Office panels, as 'Russia clasped Poland in her arms'.\n\nSurprising parallels can be observed during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. The militaristic, centralizing Serbia that swallowed Montenegro in 1918 seems to have been reborn in the militaristic, centralizing Serbia of Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107. Once again, shameless intrigues in neighbours' affairs, the deployment of military force, and murderous reprisals against 'rebels' became the order of the day. Once again, most Western leaders stood aloof in impotent embarrassment. Yugoslavia fell apart amid a worse wave of thuggery and chicanery than that attending her birth. Fortunately, after years of bloodshed and hand-wringing, the Western Powers eventually overcame their inhibitions. Peace-keeping forces were sent to Bosnia and to Kosovo and the warring parties were brought to the negotiating table at Dayton, Ohio. The Serb-led Yugoslav army was restrained, Yugoslavia was selectively bombed by NATO, and Milo\u0161evi\u0107 eventually faced charges of war crimes before an international tribunal.\n\nOne wonders what King Nikola might have made of it all, had he or his successors had ever returned to pot the ivories in the Biljarda House or to bask on the sun-baked battlements of Bar. Nikola had belonged to a generation for whom 'Serb' and 'Montenegrin' were almost inter-changeable terms, and for whom the enemy was almost invariably an outsider \u2013 usually a Turk or an Austrian. Familiar with tribal feuds, he could hardly have imagined the scale of the fratricidal slaughter that was perpetrated by Yugoslavs against Yugoslavs in 1918\u201321, in 1941\u20135 and again in 1991\u20135. Moreover, Nikola was overthrown not by republicans but by fellow monarchists, and his memory was reinstated by an ex-Communist. So he might have concluded that neither monarchy nor republicanism, which gained an incontestable lead in Yugoslavia during the Second World War, were necessarily virtuous. The only true guide to human behaviour, perhaps, is the ancient Montenegrin code of 'Humanity and Bravery'. In this spirit, Montenegrins of all persuasions can still enjoy the rousing song, which King Nikola himself composed:\n\n> _O\u043da\u043co, '\u043da\u043co, 'hamo... \u0417a \u0431p\u0414a o\u043da_\n> \n> _Mu\u043bo\u0448e\u0432, \u043aa\u0416y, npe\u0431u\u0432a \u0433po\u0431!_\n> \n> _O\u043da\u043co no\u043aoj \u2202o\u0431uhy \u2202y\u0448u_\n> \n> _\u041aa\u2202 Cp\u0431u\u043d \u0432u\u0448e \u043de \u0431y\u2202e po\u0431._\n> \n> _Onamo, 'namo... za brda ona_\n> \n> _Milo\u0161ev, ka\u017eu, prebiva grob!_\n> \n> _Onamo pokoj dobi\u0107u du\u0161i_\n> \n> _Kad Srbin vi\u0161e ne bude rob._\n> \n> There, over there... beyond the hills,\n> \n> Milo\u0161, they say, is laid in his grave!\n> \n> There my soul will obtain rest\n> \n> When the Serb will no more be a slave.\n\nAs Lord Curzon apparently failed to recognize, it is the Montenegrin counterpart to 'Rule, Britannia'.\n\n## 13\n\n## Rusyn\n\n_The Republic of One Day (15 March 1939)_\n\n##### I\n\n'Ruthenia' sounds vaguely similar to 'Ruritania': or rather, it sounds suspiciously like a whimsical cross between Ruritania and Slovenia. It is, of course, a real place, as opposed to the fictional kingdom invented by the Victorian novelist Anthony Hope for _The Prisoner of Zenda_. Ruritania never vanished, because it never existed. Ruthenia, in contrast, like Slovenia, belonged in Hope's day to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in official Hungarian terminology was called _K\u00e1rp\u00e1talya_. After the First World War, it was joined to Czechoslovakia as _Podkarpatsko_ or 'Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia'; and after the Second, to the Soviet Union. It now forms the Zakarpattia region of the Ukrainian Republic. Nowadays, the preferred name for the region in English is 'Carpatho-Ukraine'. Its largest town and the most westerly in Ukraine, Uzhgorod, lies very close to the frontier of Slovakia and hence of the European Union. One can get there from Western Europe by driving due east from the Czech Republic or by taking a cheap flight to Uzhgorod from Prague, Warsaw or Kiev.\n\nThe dominant ethnic group in Carpatho-Ukraine call themselves _Rusyns_ or 'Ruthenians'; under Hungarian rule before 1918, they were often referred to as _Ukro-Rusyns_ or 'Ruthenians of Hungary'. They are a small branch of a much larger East Slavic grouping that includes the Belarusians and Ukrainians, both of whom at one time called themselves by the same name (see Chapters 5 and ), but from whom the Carpatho-Rusyns would think themselves distinct. Prior to 1945, their homeland on the sunny southern slopes of the central Carpathian Mountains was never incorporated into the same state as Belarus or Ukraine, and the different historical environment inevitably fostered different customs and characteristics. The landscape below the subalpine peaks is dominated by tree-clad hills, deep valleys and broad rivers, by flower-filled summer meadows, and by a climate that encourages fruit-growing and wine-production. Apart from Uzhgorod and Mukachevo, the towns are few and insignificant. The typical village is no more than a cluster of farm buildings watched over by a carved wooden church. Overpopulation and rural poverty, however, forced many to flee abroad. Robert Maxwell (1923\u201391), the British press magnate, was born J\u00e1n Ludv\u00edk Hoch at Solotvyno near Tyachiv on the Romanian frontier; popularly known as 'the bouncing Czech', he was a Czechoslovak citizen at birth but not ethnically Czech. Adolph Zukor (1873\u20131976), the founder of Paramount Pictures, was born in a Rusyn village just across the frontier with Slovakia, as were the parents of American artist Andrij Warhola (Andy Warhol, 1928\u201387).\n\nNot everyone will see the point of visiting Zakarpattia. It does not top the bill of Ukraine's tourist destinations, just as Ukraine does not top Europe's. Yet the point is not trivial. It is not just about gazing on Uzhgorod's ancient castle, or strolling carefree across the footbridge over the River Uzh, or sampling the local Pancake Festival, Zarkapattia's answer to Mardi Gras. For some, it may involve seeking the traces of the venerable Jewish _yeshivah_ , which once flourished at Khust. But for most, it is mainly concerned with proving that this little part of the world exists.\n\n##### II\n\nIn the early twentieth century the Rusyns of Carpatho-Ukraine possessed a strong sense of national consciousness, reinforced by an active \u00e9migr\u00e9 community in the United States. Their identity was closely bound up with the Greek Catholic Church, which had been established in the Kingdom of Hungary since the Union of Uzhgorod of 1646. But the Church's influence was fractured by the presence of Russophile and Orthodox elements, and later, in the 1920s, by that of Communists. Their political aspirations were constantly thwarted by the indifference of the Great Powers and by the presence among them of Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian, German and Jewish minorities.\n\nCarpatho-Ukraine's two decades in the inter-war Republic of Czechoslovakia were not happy. The government in Prague constantly postponed action on its undertaking to give a wide measure of autonomy to _Podkarpatsko_ , as demanded by the Treaty of St Germain (1919), which had formally abolished the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The population of 814,000 (1938), of whom about 15 per cent were Jews, suffered the lowest living standards in the country. Politics were stifled by the wrangles of pro-Hungarian, pro-German and pro-Soviet groupings. During the Munich Conference of September 1938, when substantial slices of Bohemia were repackaged as the 'Sudetenland' and ceded to Nazi Germany, the impotence of the central government caused dismay; and matters deteriorated further in November when German arbitrators at the so-called Vienna Awards forced both Slovak and Ruthenian delegates to cede territory to Hungary. _Podkarpatsko_ lost a broad swathe of land that included both Uzhgorod and Mukachevo.\n\nNonetheless, on 22 November 1938 Prague granted the much-delayed autonomy to Slovakia and Ruthenia in a desperate attempt to hold the state together. An executive Regional Council was established at Khust (Huszt), headed by the Revd Avgustyn Voloshyn (1874\u20131945), a Greek Catholic clergyman and former professor of mathematics, who had chaired the committee that had recommended Ruthenia's entry into Czechoslovakia twenty years before. A regional assembly was planned. A nationalistic paramilitary formation, the Sich Guard, received official recognition.\n\nThese arrangements, however, only created deeper tensions. The Slovaks, in particular, felt dangerously exposed to further Hungarian encroachments, and prepared to seek independent status under German protection. The Rusyns formed the helpless last link at the end of the chain. Slovak independence would cut them off from Prague completely. They had little enthusiasm to attach themselves to Poland; Polish\u2013Ukrainian relations were not the best. And, though some sympathy existed for the theoretical concept of a Greater Ukraine, they had no wish in practice to join Stalin's blood-soaked Soviet Union. To stand any chance of survival, Carpatho-Ruthenia's only sensible course of action would be to declare independence itself.\n\nThe match was struck at 5.00 a.m. on 15 March 1939, when the German army marched into the rump of Czechoslovakia, occupied Prague and proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia to be a 'Protectorate' of the Reich. Hitler cited prevailing civil unrest (created by the Nazis) as a threat to German security. Father Tiso, the Slovak leader, was already declaring Slovakia's secession, forewarned thanks to a recent meeting with the F\u00fchrer. The Rusyn leaders, whom no one had consulted and who were totally isolated, decided they had no alternative but to follow the Slovaks' lead.\n\nThe Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine, therefore, was proclaimed that same day. Its government was to be led by the Revd Voloshyn as president, and by Julian Revay as prime minister. Its constitution stated that a democratically elected Diet was to enjoy supreme control; that the state language was to be Ukrainian; that the flag was to consist of two blue and yellow horizontal bands; and that the new measures were to be implemented immediately. The words of the national anthem, ' _Shche ne vmerla Ukraina_ ', 'Ukraine has not perished yet', borrowed from Poland's, were aptly defiant. Since Uzhgorod was already occupied by Hungary, Khust was to be the state capital.\n\nEthnic violence instantly spilled over into Carpatho-Ukraine from Slovakia. The Sich Guard became embroiled both with stranded Czechoslovak army garrisons and with Slovak and Hungarian irregulars on the frontiers. Three-sided skirmishes were in progress when unexpected news arrived in the afternoon. The Hungarian army, having condemned the civil unrest, had crossed the border from the south.\n\nThanks to the close proximity of Hungary and Romania, Khust had been attracting an unusual crowd of foreigners. A substantial German delegation had arrived, and had persuaded German peasants from some of the nearby villages to come into town and wave their swastika flags. There was an elderly American missionary, Mrs McCormick and her husband, and a Polish photographer. There were at least two Britons. One of the Britons, Commander Wedgwood-Benn MP, spoke none of the local languages and left, but not before he was overheard (as reported by the other Englishman) telling someone in Latin, ' _Adolfus Hitler bonus vir!_ '*\n\nMichael Winch, a travel-writer, claimed to be there conducting research. He was expecting the Sich Guards to come to blows with the police and army. He was able to present an eyewitness account of events from his hotel window, which is worth quoting at length:\n\n> In twenty-four hours we lived in three different states. We woke up in the Czechoslovak Republic. By the evening Carpatho-Ukraine was a free land. Next day the Hungarians came in...\n> \n> At quarter-past six [in the] morning, Tuesday, [15 March] I was woken up by banging in the courtyard. At first, I had thought they were beating carpets... Jumping up, I looked out of the window... and dived straight under my bed. In the archway to the back street a boy was standing with a smoking revolver in his hand. Rifles were banging off, and from the other side came the rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun.\n> \n> Then I realized that the Czech gendarmes and military were at last making the long-planned attack on the Sitch... Two tanks arrived and it seemed likely that gendarmes would soon come bursting up the stairs...\n> \n> Suddenly there was an appalling noise of splintering glass, and a shower of bullets came whizzing through the windows... We were all lying flat on our stomachs on the cold cement floor, but the porter crept along and gingerly opened the door. All eyes were transfixed as the opening gradually widened. Across the threshold two legs were lying immobile. I thought their owner was dead. Then... a man came crawling out of the room, followed by two others. They were Slovak lorry drivers...\n> \n> About half an hour later a messenger arrived from [Father-President] Voloshyn and ordered the Sitch to surrender. He said that the Hungarians had taken advantage of internal dissension to renew their claims... and all were to combine together to keep them out...\n> \n> The square... was still absolutely deserted. All the heavy iron shutters were down... The only living things in sight were a horse, standing in an unattended cab... and a soldier looking very comic as he crouched behind the petrol pump and covered a nearby window with his rifle... In the hotel everyone's nerves were getting strained. The little waiter took refuge in drink. 'The Czechs are pig-dogs, the Poles are pig-dogs,' I heard him shouting... The restaurant was a shambles; no furniture, the mirrors shattered, the curtains torn down, the walls pitted by bullets, dirt and paper everywhere...\n> \n> Life at once returned to normal. In a few minutes I saw a peasant from Apeza, with a bundle of carpets over his shoulder, hawking along the street, and a Jew setting off with a chicken under his arm to be killed by the ritual slaughterer. The outside of the hotel [was] all pitted and blackened... The Sitch barracks had had every single window blown out...\n> \n> Czech rule was shortlived. At one o'clock it was announced over the wireless that Slovakia had proclaimed its independence. This inevitably meant the end of the Czechoslovak State, and the future of Carpatho-Ukraine was in the balance... In the afternoon, a Council of Ministers decided that it would follow Slovakia's example. So the slaughter of forty people in the morning had been to no purpose...\n> \n> At about six-thirty, in falling snow, we all collected outside the Government building to hear the Proclamation of Independence. There were [some] seven hundred persons present... Father Voloshyn, the Prime Minister, Gren-Zedonsky, a patriotic writer, and other representative persons spoke from the balcony. A new Ministry was announced... No one demonstrated, no one sang, no one even raised a patriotic shout for the new Republic. Even after the speeches there was little enthusiasm. Gendarmes... guarded the doors, and Czech soldiers... preparing for evacuation, continually ploughed their way through the crowd... The people seemed drugged by bewilderment.\n> \n> No mention had been made in the speeches of German protection. Voloshyn was still full of hope, but so far a telegram which had been sent to Hitler at midnight on Monday-Tuesday, asking that Carpatho-Ukraine should be accepted as a full German Protectorate, had not been answered... We went to bed in a free Ukraine.\n\nThe next day, 16 March, dawned with the Republic still intact:\n\n> On our last morning in Chust, we were woken by the Sitch marching down the street and singing patriotic songs. They had been released from gaol, had been re-armed and were to take over the defence and policing of the country. The Czechs... were in full retreat. Boxes were being carried downstairs, furniture, bicycles and people were being piled on to lorries. A small boy was waiting for transport with a huge white pig held by a rope round its hind leg.\n> \n> The Ukrainians were at last a free people. Every house was flying a yellow and blue flag. Blue and yellow were in every buttonhole, on every horse, on every caf\u00e9 table. The Jews, in terror, were even painting bands of blue and yellow round their shop windows. The first meeting of the Diet, so long postponed, was to take place that very afternoon. Apart from the Government, we seemed to be the only people in town who knew that the Hungarians were advancing. But where were the German aeroplanes?...\n> \n> With the country's future decided both the McCormicks and ourselves felt that there was no reason for stopping longer.\n\nSo the Anglo-Americans decided on evacuation:\n\n> But what route should we leave by?... We piled fifteen pieces of luggage into my ten-pound car, while the McCormicks, C and five more pieces of luggage were squeezed into a taxi, whose driver we had bribed heavily...\n> \n> When we left [Khust] at mid-day all the gendarmes had disappeared. The streets were being policed by the Sitch and by German colonists [wearing] swastikas... We felt as if we were leaving helpless children to be slaughtered.\n> \n> At Sevlus, some fifteen miles west of Chust, we found a very different scene. Not a single flag; and all the shops were shut. I suggested that it might be as well to inquire from the local commander [about] conditions on the frontier. We went into... the headquarters of the frontier guard. We... eventually found [the commandant] across the road. The remnants of the Czech Army were to evacuate the town in ten minutes, he said, and the Hungarians were only three kilometres away.\n> \n> 'I suppose we can go through all right?' asked Mrs McCormick.\n> \n> 'You can of course do whatever you like,' he said, 'but listen!'\n> \n> From down the road came the steady rat-tat-tat of a machine-gun.\n> \n> 'We shall have to go back,' I said.\n> \n> 'Oh no, it will be quite all right,' said Mrs McCormick, 'we're Americans, no one will shoot at us.'...\n> \n> We hurried back, ran our cars into the [Polish] Consulate's garden and were given coffee and liqueurs... while the battle went on outside. There was a good deal of noise, but... no one seemed to get killed. From the verandah we heard the command 'Forward, boys!' and saw the first Hungarians, the 'irregulars', with rifles slung over their shoulders on pieces of string, come clambering over the fence...\n> \n> Then came the Hungarian Army. Most of them were old warriors, some with falling moustaches, and they drove in aged cars most of which had been [requisitioned]... The local population, the majority of which is Hungarian, gave them a hastily improvised welcome. As many Hungarian flags [had been] hidden away... as there had been Ukrainian flags in Chust...\n> \n> As soon as the troops had passed, a lawyer in the house opposite darted out and put a Hungarian name-plate on his door. It was the fifth time he had changed it in the last twenty years, he said.\n> \n> After the [Hungarian] Colonel had come and drunk sherry with the [polish] Consul we proceeded on our way. We were in Ukrainian registered cars \u2013 but no one stopped, or even questioned us.\n\nHungarian forces pushed steadily forward, dispersing all opposition and arresting both Czechoslovak and Carpatho-Ukrainian officials. During the afternoon, Budapest radio announced that _K\u00e1rp\u00e1talya_ had been reunited with the motherland after twenty-one years' separation. Hitler had secretly authorized the action. By the evening, it was all over. The Hungarians captured Khust. Most of the Rusyn leaders escaped into Romania. The Sich fought on in the mountains. Hundreds were killed outright, while more than 1,000 reached Bratislava, only later to find their way into German camps. On 17 March Hungarian soldiers occupied the Polish frontier and completed their short campaign. They were met by Polish units, who helped them deal with captured Sich Guards. Prisoners suspected of coming from the Polish side were taken into Poland. The others were taken by their captors to the banks of the Tisa river, and (reportedly) massacred. The Hungarians then crossed into Slovakia to secure the frontier zone there.\n\nThese events, though they involved military action, a substantial death toll, the invasion of a member state of the League of Nations, and the suppression of a democratic government, might well qualify as a prelude to the Second World War. Alas, they very rarely find mention.\n\nCarpatho-Ruthenia survived much of the war under Hungarian rule in relative quiet. But in 1944 the long-delayed arrival of the Nazis paved the way for the Holocaust's last major operation and the extermination of the entire Jewish population. The arrival of the Red Army in turn spelled disaster for the Hungarians, many of whom were deported to the Gulag. A Czechoslovak delegation which hoped that the Soviets would relinquish control made a brief appearance, but swiftly departed. The Revd. Voloshyn, who had passed the war teaching quietly in Prague, was taken to Moscow and shot.\n\nFifty years of Soviet silence followed. In 1991 Zakarpattia resurfaced as a district of independent Ukraine, in 2002 the Revd Voloshyn was officially declared a Hero of Ukraine. In October 2008 an Orthodox priest from Uzhgorod, Abbot Dmitri Sidor, assembled a group of Russophiles, all conveniently armed with Russian passports (exactly as their counterparts in South Ossetia), and publicly announced the restoration of the Republic of Carpatho-Ruthenia. Once again, the world paid no attention whatsoever.\n\n##### III\n\nIn the eyes of most Westerners, nothing could be more 'Ruritanian' than the story of Carpatho-Ukraine's one-day republic. All the necessary ingredients are present: a diminutive East European country; a squabbling mix of obscure ethnic groups; a mass of near-unpronounceable names in unfamiliar languages; a brew of 'fanatical nationalisms'; and a tragi-comic outcome for which the Ruritanians alone need be blamed.\n\nThese attitudes about Eastern Europe have surfaced many times in the thinking of Western intellectuals. They are part of a widespread, but often unspoken assumption about Western superiority. They are implicit in several of the influential theories of economic history, such as those of Immanuel Wallerstein or Robert Brenner, and explicit in works of political science by Hans Kohn, Ernest Gellner and John Plamenatz. In one of his choicer passages, Plamenatz contrasts the healthy 'civic nationalism' of Western countries with the supposedly unhealthy nationalism of their Eastern counterparts. Western nationalism, Plamenatz maintains, was 'culturally well equipped'. 'They had languages adapted... to progressive civilisation. They had universities and schools... importing the skills prized by that civilisation. They had... philosophers, scientists, artists and poets... of world reputation. They had medical, legal and other professions... with high standards.' In other words, their inherently liberal attitudes were supposedly born from superior education and culture.\n\nFrom this one might deduce that Eastern Europe had no modern languages, no schools or universities (like Prague or Krak\u00f3w), no scientists (like Copernicus) or poets (like Pushkin), and, despite the lawyer of Sevlus who dashed out to change his name-plate, no professionals. 'What I call eastern nationalism has flourished among the Slavs as well as in Asia and Africa... and Latin America,' Plamenatz explains. 'I could not call it non-European, and have thought it best to call it eastern because it first appeared to the east of Western Europe.' In other words, the inherently illiberal attitudes of Eastern Europe were supposedly derived from inferior culture. It may not be completely irrelevant that Plamenatz, though an Oxford don, was born in Cetinje in Montenegro, the son of King Nikola's prime minister-in-exile (see Chapter 12). A similar air of deprecation pervades the ethnic slurs and jokes purveyed by the science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who would habitually translate them into a Ruritanian context, not mentioning any real countries by name. A well-known conflict-resolution game, 'Equatorial Cyberspace', uses a highly nationalist country called Ruritania as the base model for its conflicts.\n\nThe critical dimension in these false scenarios can be found in an ingrained leniency towards the conduct of the Great Powers and of Western countries in general. Any group of Ruritanians can be made to look ridiculous if one omits to make the necessary comparisons. In the case of the break-up of Czechoslovakia, for instance, it is not irrelevant to ask how the crisis started. Is the wild nationalism of the East Europeans to be condemned, and the measured civic nationalism of Adolf Hitler (who stirred up the conflict to begin with, and incited others to follow his example) to be praised? In the wider context of Ukrainian politics, are the minor iniquities of minor parties to be highlighted while the colossal mass murders in Soviet Ukraine are passed over in silence?\n\nQuestions of the same sort can be asked about international diplomacy. It is easy enough to point out blameworthy faults among assorted Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ruthenians. Yet all these most interested parties were excluded from the Munich Conference, as were the Soviets. The prime responsibility, therefore, lay with those who arrogated the decisions to themselves \u2013 notably with Adolf Hitler, the host, and with Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister and principal guest. Here is the context within which some telling comparisons can be made. Can one seriously suggest that the brands of nationalism favoured by Hitler or Mussolini should be characterized as civic or liberal? Will anyone dare to say that Julian Revay and the Revd Voloshyn were selfish, parochial and short-sighted politicians, unlike the generous, broad-minded and far-seeing statesman from Downing Street? All judgements about the luckless Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine should start from the fact that the Rusyn leadership was desperately trying to cope with the fall-out of policies which were none of their making.\n\nFortunately, the 'Ruritanian syndrome' is now a well-recognized phenomenon in intellectual discourse and is the subject of numerous studies and analyses. Terms such as the 'imperialism of the imagination' or 'narrative colonization' are coined by scholars exploring Europe's mental maps and 'orientalist discourses of otherness'. 'Balkanization' is a stereotype with little more validity than Erewhon, Eothen or 'Dracula-Land'; and it is harmless so long as it is kept in the realm of jokes or operetta. Nonetheless, 'it is [still] possible for... advanced exponents of European multicultural ideals', writes one indignant scholar, 'to write about Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians with the sort of generalised, open condescension which would appall if applied to Somalis or the people of Zaire'. _Nota bene_ : the Carpatho-Rusyns don't even make it onto the list of the slighted.\n\n## 14\n\n## \u00c9ire\n\n_The Unconscionable Tempo of the Crown's Retreat since 1916_\n\n##### I\n\nBy all accounts, Prince Albert's visit to Dublin was a huge success. As befitted a state occasion, he was greeted by a 21-gun salute. He planted an Irish oak, sported a green tie embroidered with shamrocks and drew a large crowd as he strolled along Kildare Street on his way to tea at the Shelbourne Hotel. After visiting a local school, he took leave of the children with the Gaelic words: _go raibh mile maith agat_ , meaning 'Thank you a thousand times'. 'Prince Albert', gushed the _Irish Times_ (founded 1859), 'brought a touch of class and ceremony to Dublin.' Some readers might have blinked and reread the headline. For this was April 2011; it was the Irish Republic; and the visitor was the son of the film star Grace Kelly, Prince Albert II of Monaco. Observers of Ireland beware: it is full of unexpected echoes of the past.\n\nUntil very recently, Ireland was widely esteemed as a fortress of democratic republicanism, and a model of self-made prosperity; it is the republican David, who slung his shot at the British imperial Goliath, and escaped. Ireland is now a sovereign member both of the United Nations and of the European Union. The republican image is strong. Its head of state, the _uachtar\u00e1n_ or 'president' of the Republic, is elected directly for a term of seven years, renewable once; the present incumbent is Mary McAleese, a former professor of law born in the Ardoyne district of Belfast. The bi-cameral parliament, the _Oireachtas_ , consists of a Senate of 60 members, and the lower house or _D\u00e1il_ , whose 166 members are elected under a system of proportional representation and single transferable votes. The _taoiseach_ or 'prime minister' is appointed by the president after nomination by the parliament. The Republic's capital is Baile Atha Cliath (Dublin), its official languages Irish Gaelic and English. Its coat of arms displays a golden harp on a deep blue field, its flag is a green-white-and-orange tricolour. And its national anthem is the ' _Amhr\u00e1n na bhFiann_ ' or 'Soldier's Song', invariably sung in Gaelic:\n\n> _Sinne Fianna F\u00e1il_\n> \n> _Ata f\u00e1 gheall ag Eirinn,_\n> \n> _Buidhean dar sluagh tar ruinn do rainig_\n> \n> _Chughainn..._ 3\n\nThe official use of Gaelic, which is no longer the language of everyday speech, is an essential part of the state ethos; the Irish don't understand much of it, but the English can't get a word.\n\nVisitors to Dublin see evidence of Ireland's democratic and republican traditions on every hand. The castle, founded by King John and once the seat of English colonial power, is nowadays used for presidential receptions and inaugurations. Leinster House, once the palace of the Fitzgerald dukes of Leinster, is the home of the D\u00e1il. The Bank of Ireland building, which faces Trinity College, once housed the parliament of the pre-1800 kingdom. The city's main street is named after Daniel O'Connell (1775\u20131847), 'the Liberator', who fought for Catholic Emancipation. It shelters the old General Post Office, where the Irish Republic was first proclaimed in 1916, and, at its northern end, a Garden of Remembrance dedicated to 'all who gave their lives in the cause of Irish Freedom'. The Mansion House, the home of the lord mayor, where the Republic was proclaimed for the second time in 1919, is situated close to St Stephen's Green across the river on Dawson Street. The Green saw fierce fighting during the Easter Rising, and entered people's hearts because both sides stopped firing to let the ducks in the pond be fed. It now shelters a monument to Ireland's most revered female revolutionary, Countess Constance Markiewicz (1868\u20131927), who fought there as a soldier. The bronze bust sits atop a stone pedestal inscribed: 'CONSTANCE MARKIEVICZ, MAJOR IRISH CITIZEN ARMY, 1916'.\n\nThe Republic's territory, some 27,450 square miles, is divided into twenty-six counties (since 1999, the Republic does not lay formal claim to the six counties of British-ruled Northern Ireland). Its area is smaller than both England and Scotland, but almost four times larger than Wales. The island forms a rough rectangle, the western coast constituting Europe's most westerly rampart against the Atlantic Ocean.\n\nThe Republic's population, which stands at 4.442 million (2008) is considerably lower than the highest historical levels. In 1800 Ireland was home to some 8 million inhabitants, not far behind England's then total of _c_. 10 million, a ratio of 1 : 1.25. Largely as the result of famine, emigration and the absence of Irish modernization and industrialization, the ratio had fallen by 1900 to 1 : 12.\n\nIreland's political system survived great turbuluence before it gained stability. Two main political parties trace their roots to the 1920s. _Fianna F\u00e1il_ or 'Soldiers of Destiny', once the party of \u00c9amon de Valera, the 'Father of the Republic', has often dominated, forming the government for sixty of the state's eighty years and most recently from 1997 to February 2011. The rival _Fine Gael_ or 'Clan of the Gaels', otherwise the United Ireland Party, which also boasts republican roots, has usually headed the opposition. Its father-figure is De Valera's rival, Michael Collins. Three other parties are represented _._ The Labour Party has a similar profile to its namesake in Britain; the environmentalist Green Party, founded in 1981, entered government with Fianna F\u00e1il in 2007; and _Sinn F\u00e9in_ , the oldest of Irish republican groupings, is looking to rebuild after decades of marginality.\n\nThe Irish Republic experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Thanks to investment in education and modern technology, and to membership of the European Union, remarkable advances took place from the 1960s onwards; Ireland's GDP per capita rose decade by decade until at the beginning of the twenty-first century it overtook that of the United Kingdom. For a time, Irish citizens enjoyed the top ranking in the Worldwide Quality of Life Index. Not until the global recession of 2008\u20139 did the 'Celtic Tiger' (so named in 1994) stumble, and with it the political elite's reputation. Out of Prince Albert's hearing, the talk in Dublin was of ineffectual leadership, and of 'a culture of clientilism, cronyism and corruption'.\n\nThe official Irish version of Irish history is built round a three-part scheme of periodization. Two or three millennia of the 'Era of Ancient Celtic Freedom', stretching from prehistory to the twelfth century AD, are followed by the 'Era of Foreign Domination' (1171\u20131916) and then by the 'Era of National Liberation', which is still in progress. (Liberation is judged incomplete because the Republic's territory does not yet encompass the whole of the island of Ireland.) Present-day academics might reject the scheme as politically driven and 'archaic' in comparison to their own advanced researches; but academic histories do not have the last word in any country.\n\nIreland's Era of Ancient Celtic Freedom is by any standards one of the marvels of European history. The Gaelic-speaking nation, secure in its seagirt fortress, was ruled by bards and tribal chieftains, among whom a long succession of _ard r\u00ed_ or 'high kings' exercised supreme authority. The Irish king lists, compiled by medieval monks, contain some 200 names, the earliest of which, like Slaine (1934\u20131933 BC) or Bres (1897\u20131890 BC), are clearly mythical; the precise-looking dates are the product of pure guesswork. The latest names such as Muirchertach Mac-Lochlain (d. AD 1166) or Ruaidre Ua Chobar (d. 1186) were unable to exert anything more than nominal authority. The high point is often taken to have been reached by Brian B\u00f3raimhe, Brian Boru (r. 1002\u201314), who is described in the medieval _Book of Armagh_ as _Imperator Scottorum_ or 'emperor of the Irish'. He battled the Vikings, briefly established hegemony over all the island, and died at the Battle of Clontarf, the 'Bull's Meadow', near Dublin. Mael Sechneill mac Domnaill, king of Meath (r. 980\u20131002, 1014\u201322), known as Malachi Mor, was deposed by Brian Boru, but regained the high kingship after Clontarf.\n\nThe Era of Foreign Domination, which lasted more than 700 years, is conventionally divided into three sub-periods. The first, under the heading of the 'Lordship of Ireland (1171\u20131541)', saw the kings of England ruling as overlords but not annexing the country. The second, under the heading of the 'Kingdom of Ireland (1541\u20131801)', was launched by Henry VIII's Crown of Ireland Act and terminated by the the Napoleonic Wars; it saw the English monarchs (and from 1707 British monarchs) reigning in parallel over realms joined by personal union. The third sub-period, under the heading of 'British Ireland (from 1801)' saw 'John Bull's Other Island' integrated into the expanded United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Presuming that British rule in Ireland can be recognized as legitimate \u2013 which purists do not accept \u2013 republican teaching holds that it ended in the years 1916\u201318; in the eyes of unreconciled unionists, it has never ended.\n\nOfficial accounts sometimes circumnavigate a number of episodes which the majority of Irish people would prefer not to have happened. One of these, the Plantation of Ulster, saw a Protestant colony, mainly of Scottish Presbyterians, established in northern Ireland in the early seventeenth century (exactly the same era in which the Pilgrim Fathers established similar colonies in North America). Other regrettable episodes deriving from religious conflicts include the reconquest of Ireland by Oliver Cromwell in 1649\u201352 and the victory of Protestant forces under William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689. Nonetheless, the Irish show few signs of forgetting the suffering of their forebears; memories remain alive of Cromwellian atrocities such as the Siege of Drogheda or of the discriminatory, anti-Catholic Penal Laws enforced after 1691.\n\nThe last decades of the Kingdom of Ireland, however, are usually viewed with favour. In the era of the American War of Independence, an Irish Patriot Party came to the fore, demanding the repeal of the Penal Laws, seeking to share English traditions of liberty, and aiming to establish a degree of constitutional autonomy. Their leader was Henry Grattan (1746\u20131820), a member of the Anglo-Irish Protestant elite, who worked for the emancipation of the Catholic majority. 'Patriots of Ireland,' declared George Washington in 1788, 'your cause is identical with mine.' In 1782 Grattan persuaded the British government to grant self-government to the Irish parliament in Dublin \u2013 henceforth 'Grattan's Parliament' \u2013 and to sever many mechanisms of British control save for the Crown and the Crown's representative, the viceroy. His policy, which imitators called 'Home Rule', was summed up by the slogan: 'The [Irish] Channel Forbids Union, the Ocean Forbids Separation'. It came to grief thanks to fears in London generated by the French Revolution and by the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798. But it was long remembered as an experiment ahead of its time.\n\nThe nineteenth century, therefore, is often regarded by the Irish as a time when foreign oppression returned with a vengeance. The first phase of life in the United Kingdom was dominated by O'Connell's campaign for freedom of religion and the rights of the Roman Catholic Church; the second phase by a great national awakening of the sort which occurred in many European countries. The roots of the movement lay in the realization in the decades after the Great Famine of 1846\u20139 that the lifeblood of traditional Irish culture had been haemorrhaging for generations and that only a concerted effort could prevent the country being turned into a 'West Britain' as advocated by British officialdom. The result was an explosion of interest in national history, Gaelic language, Celtic myths, Irish literature and folk music. Its heroes were not rebels or soldiers, but poets like Brian Merriman (1749\u20131805), scholars like James Hardiman (1782\u20131855) or Samuel Ferguson (1810\u201355), and writers like William Carleton (1794\u20131869). Their work came to fruition in the Gaelic Revival at the century's end.\n\nNo activity was more typical of this movement than the collection, distribution and writing of popular songs. And no member of it was more influential than the great poet song-writer Thomas Moore (1779\u20131852), friend of Byron and Shelley, and author of 'The Minstrel Boy', 'The Meeting of the Waters', 'The Last Rose of Summer' and many others. Fired by Moore's example, a veritable torrent of lyrics and melodies poured forth. Almost all of the songs which were to feature in Ireland's twentieth-century history had been composed before the First World War. They included 'A Nation Once Again' (1854), 'The Wearing of the Green' (1864), 'God Save Ireland' (1867), 'The Soldier's Song' (1907), 'Danny Boy' (1913) and Thomas Moore's 'Let Erin Remember':\n\n> Let Erin remember the days of old\n> \n> 'Ere her faithless sons betrayed her,\n> \n> When Malachi wore the collar of gold\n> \n> Which he won from the proud invader:\n> \n> When her kings, with standard of green unfurl'd,\n> \n> Led the Red-branch knights into danger,\n> \n> 'Ere the emerald gem of the western world\n> \n> Was set in the crown of the stranger.\n\nTone-deaf historians may dismiss these songs and their lyrics as 'doggerel'; if so, they may be ignoring a valid point of entry to the mood and spirit of some important historical moments. Irish intellectuals have also tended to be dismissive; they could be envious of Tom Moore's enduring popularity. As all would have agreed, however, 'the stranger' was the king of England.\n\nMonarchy has featured in the Irish story, therefore, in a variety of periods and in a number of guises. The native high kings of ancient Ireland were a historical reality of which the modern Irish are inordinately proud. The medieval lords of Ireland were for practical purposes English kings by another name; the Kingdom of Ireland, which Henry VIII bequeathed to his heirs and successors in perpetuity, was an evolving polity, parts of whose heritage persist to the present. The British monarchs of the nineteenth century reigned over a sorrowing Ireland plagued by the death and departure of millions. Queen Victoria visited Dublin four times between 1864 and 1900, Edward VII and George V just once each, in 1904 and 1911 respectively. On these occasions, the desire of the inhabitants to please their guests without compromising their principles could prove hilarious. When Edward VII visited the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, he found the buildings bedecked not with red, white and blue but with the royal horse-racing colours; when he drove into the south-western village of Tully in his fleet of open-topped Panhards and Cadillacs, he was greeted by a group of pony riders holding up a banner: 'FRIEND OF OUR POPE'.\n\nAs the nineteenth century drew on, the main thrust of Irish politics was directed to the struggle for Home Rule, that is for autonomous self-government under the British Crown. Its minimum goal was to restore institutions similar to those of the pre-Union kingdom. The period is for ever associated with the name of Charles Stewart Parnell (1846\u201391), who commanded the political scene for only a short period but with immense panache. The son of an Anglo-Irish-American Protestant family, he turned the Irish Parliamentary Party into a major political force, and concentrated all his efforts on gaining influence with the British establishment. He took advantage of the uproar in the Irish countryside during the Land War, when tenants battled landowners (like the notorious Captain Boycott), and he won over many voters who might otherwise have espoused radicalism. While campaigning for the restoration of the pre-Union Irish parliament, he kept his ultimate objectives deliberately obscure. 'No man has the right', he once declared, 'to say to his country: \"Thus Far, and No Further\".' He made a huge impression on Britain's Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, not least when Parnell's party held the balance of power at Westminster after the election of 1885. Gladstone duly performed a volte-face and adopted the principle of Home Rule. But Parnell's sudden and early death, aged forty-five, robbed Ireland of its 'uncrowned king'; the Home Rule Bill lost its most powerful motor; and a series of Conservative governments after Gladstone played the Irish Question out of court.\n\nParnell's democratic strategy overshadowed all other Irish political trends. A revolutionary, republican movement certainly existed; the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), known as the Fenians, had been founded in 1858 by people with strong Irish-American connections. They had organized an abortive rising in 1867 and a number of sporadic acts of violence continued to be perpetrated. But by the century's end, their tiny, clandestine membership was judged marginal to the mainstream.\n\nDuring Parnell's lifetime, Irish society was revitalized by the Roman Catholic Church, which achieved a position of unprecedented authority. No longer the patron of a dispossessed and starving nation served by a downtrodden clergy, it came into its own as a major force in education, social care and nation-building. Its four archdioceses and its thousand parishes became the focus of activities and enterprises. They were supported by a wide variety of religious orders and lay organizations such as the Ancient Order of Hibernians (originally founded in the sixteenth century) or the Knights of Columbanus (1915). The Irish Church was deeply conservative in temper; it preserved and promoted many traditional customs such as the worship of relics, the veneration of saints and adoration of the Virgin Mary; its idea of progress was to adopt Vatican-sponsored cults like that of the Immaculate Conception or the Sacred Heart of Jesus. When in 1879 the Mother of God was judged to have appeared in person at Knock in County Galway, the Church's special mission to the Irish people was confirmed.\n\nPredictably, Ireland's ancient Christian tradition was enriched by her equally strong musical inclinations; the encounter has borne much fruit, not least in hymnology. Yet the best known of Irish hymns was slow to take its final form. The Gaelic words of ' _Rop t\u00fa mo Baile_ ' are attributed to a sixth-century monk, D\u00e1llan Forgaill; the folk melody ' _Slane'_ is named after a battle of the same era. The two were not put together until Mary Byrne translated the Gaelic into English in 1905, Eleanor Hull versified it in 1912, and the verse joined the tune in a hymnary of 1927. The English version has become a worldwide favourite among hymn-singers, and has been translated back into modern Gaelic many times:\n\nBe Thou my vision, O lord of my heart, | _B\u00ed Thusa 'mo sh\u00faile a R\u00ed mh\u00f3r na nd\u00fail_  \n---|---  \nNaught be all else to me, save that Thou art; | _L\u00edon thusa mo bheatha mo ch\u00e9adfa\u00ed 's mo stuaim_  \nThou my best thought by day or by night, | _B\u00ed thusa i m'aigne gach o\u00edche 's gach l\u00e1_  \nWaking or sleeping, Thy presence my light. | _Im chodladh no im dh\u00faiseacht, l\u00edon m\u00e9 le do ghr\u00e1._  \nBe Thou my wisdom, Thou my true word, | _B\u00ed Thusa 'mo threor\u00fa i mbriathar 's imbeart_  \nI ever with Thee and Thou with me,Lord | _Fan thusa go deo liom is coinnigh m\u00e9 ceart_  \nThou my great Father, I Thy true son, | _Glac c\u00faram mar Athair, is \u00e9ist le mo ghu\u00ed_  \nThou in me dwelling, and I with Thee, one. | _Is tabhair domsa \u00e1it c\u00f3na\u00ed istigh i do chro\u00ed_\n\nIn all, four Home Rule bills were introduced into the Westminster Parliament \u2013 in 1886, 1892, 1912 and 1920. The third one was critical because the Irish Party held the balance at Westminster. Facing ferocious opposition from the Ulster Unionists, it started its passage through Parliament in April 1912 under the sponsorship of Herbert Asquith's Liberal government, cleared the House of Lords after three rejections, received royal assent, and entered into British law as the Government of Ireland Act on 18 September 1914. The widespread impression was that a suitable compromise had been found, that Parnell's dream had been realized. The suspension of the Act due to the outbreak of the Great War did not cause the expected uproar; and wartime preoccupations defused the looming confrontation between the armed Ulster Volunteers in Belfast and their counterparts in Dublin, the Irish Volunteers. Hundreds of thousands of Irishmen served in the British forces in 1914\u201318, some 50,000 of them sacrificing their lives.\n\nGiven what was to happen within a matter of months, therefore, it is pertinent to ask about Irish attitudes to the Crown. Curiously, information on this subject is not readily forthcoming. The essay on 'Ireland in the Twentieth Century' on the Irish government's official website makes no single mention of monarchy whatsoever. More surprisingly, the distinguished Irish historian most closely associated with this period has little to say either. Roy Foster's chapter entitled 'The New Nationalism', covering the years between Parnell's death and the First World War in his now standard account, contains no single sentence about republicanism; and it makes only two passing references to the IRB in the context of its rivalry with the Gaelic League. The important issues according to him were cultural nationalism, the Gaelic language, the Land Question, the socialist movement, opposition to the Boer War, Anglophobia and anti-Protestant sentiment, but not, apparently, the monarchy. This must surely be an omission. For kings and queens, royal titles and the 'Crown' figured in political debates at the time, and have never ceased to do so.\n\nPolitics, however, cannot explain everything. The years of the struggle over Home Rule were equally the years when both Britain and America were swept by a popular craze for Irish songs. The star turn was the tenor John McCormack (1884\u20131945), an opera singer who took to the concert platform. His signature song was 'The Wearing of the Green', whose words referred to the United Irishmen of 1798:\n\n> Oh Paddy dear, and did ye hear the news that's going round\n> \n> The shamrock is by law forbid to grow on Irish land.\n> \n> No more Saint Patrick's Day we'll keep: his colour can't be seen\n> \n> For there's a cruel law agin' the Wearing of the Green.\n\nAnd no number rivalled the success of a song that exuded pure contentment:\n\n> When Irish eyes are smiling sure 'tis like a morn in spring;\n> \n> With a lilt of Irish laughter you can hear the angels sing.\n> \n> When Irish hearts are happy all the world is bright and gay,\n> \n> And when Irish eyes are smiling sure they'd steal your heart away.\n\nNor were the smiles confined to the native Irish. Parts of Ireland in that era were the preserve of the British elite, the playground of the highest servants of the Crown; some of them would look back on those halcyon pre-war days as the happiest in their lives. One of the most evocative of memoirs was written by a future British prime minister:\n\n> My father had gone to Ireland as secretary to his father [who had been] appointed Lord-Lieutenant by Mr Disraeli... We lived in a house called 'The Little Lodge', about a stone's throw from the Viceregal [residence]. Here I spent nearly three years of childhood... I remember my grandfather, the Viceroy, unveiling the Lord Gough statue in 1878. A great black crowd, scarlet soldiers on horseback... the old Duke, the formidable grandpapa, talking loudly to the crowd. I recall even a phrase he used: 'and with a withering volley he shattered the enemy line.' I quite understood... that a 'volley' meant what the black-coated soldiers used to do with loud bangs so often in the Phoenix Park where I was taken for my morning walks...\n> \n> In one of these years we paid a visit to Emo Park, the seat of Lord Portarlington, who was explained to me as a sort of uncle... The central point in my memory is a tall white stone tower... [which] had been blown up by Oliver Cromwell. I understood definitely that he had blown up all sorts of things and was therefore a very great man.\n> \n> My nurse, Mrs Everest, was nervous about the Fenians. I gathered these were wicked people... On one occasion when I was out riding on my donkey, we thought we saw a long dark procession of Fenians approaching. I am sure now it [was] the Rifle Brigade... But we were all very much alarmed, particularly the donkey, who expressed his anxiety by kicking. I was thrown off and had concussion of the brain. This was my first introduction to Irish politics!\n> \n> It was at 'The Little Lodge' I was first menaced with Education. The approach of a sinister figure described as 'the Governess' was announced... Mrs Everest produced a book called _Reading without Tears._ It certainly did not justify its title in my case... [When] the Governess was due to arrive, I did what so many oppressed peoples have done in similar circumstances: I took to the woods. I hid in the extensive shrubberies... which surrounded 'The Little Lodge'...\n> \n> My mother took no part in these impositions... My picture of her in Ireland is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses... [She] always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power... She shone for me like the Evening Star.\n\nAnyone who spends a few carefree hours in Phoenix Park today will still find many of the attractions that so delighted the young Winston Churchill over a hundred years ago. The ancient herd of fallow deer still grazes on the park's verdant grassland; the wide open spaces where Lord and Lady Randolph spurred their chargers still welcome riders. The Furry Glen, the People's Garden and the Dublin Zoo are in place, as are the ruins of the Magazine Fort (1611) and the Testimonial Monument (1864) to the celebrated Dubliner, the duke of Wellington, who was (probably) born at 24 Upper Merrion Street.\n\nOther landmarks have either changed or disappeared. The Viceregal Lodge is now the _\u00c1ras an Uacht\u00e1rain_ , the official residence of the Irish president. The Little Lodge is called Ratra House, in memory of the Republic's first president, Douglas Hyde, who died there; and its shrubberies still bloom. They even tell visitors about the ghost of a little boy who wanders the park in search of his grandfather. The Deerfield Residence, once the home of Ireland's chief secretary, now houses the US ambassador, and medieval Ashdown Castle, newly renovated, the visitors' centre. There one can buy refreshments, souvenirs and guidebooks. One learns, for example, that the park's name has nothing to do with phoenixes, but is a corruption of the Gaelic name, _fionn uisce_ , meaning 'clear water'. One can also read about the Phoenix Park murders of 6 May 1882, when two leading British officials were knifed to death by a Fenian group calling themselves the 'Irish National Invincibles'. One of the victims, Lord Frederick Cavendish, was the chief secretary; the other, Thomas Henry Burke (1829\u201382), was the permanent secretary, the top civil servant of the day. Burke was a Catholic from Galway, but seen by his assailants as a 'castle rat'. Three years earlier, he met his young neighbour, Winston Churchill, and gave him the present of a toy drum. The death and the drum are both recalled in _My Early Life_. The statues to Lord Carlisle and to Field Marshal Gough \u2013 the latter unveiled by 'the formidable grandpapa' \u2013 stood in the park until the 1920s, but have since vanished.\n\nThe purging of British statues in Dublin went to considerable lengths, but was never completed. In addition to Carlisle and Gough, the nationalists expunged Admiral Nelson from O'Connell Street, King William III from College Green, and Queen Victoria herself from Merrion Square. But interesting exceptions were made. One statue, which once held pride of place in front of Leinster House, was moved to the side of the D\u00e1il, to Leinster Lawn, and is still there in the company of assorted republicans and nationalists. Queen Victoria repeatedly begged for it to be erected, as it was in 1908, seven years after her death, to the memory of Albert \u2013 not of Monaco, but of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Since that time, Ireland has been a central player in a historical process that may be described without too much hyperbole or sense of anticipation as the break-up of the United Kingdom. The process, whose seeds were barely perceptible in the early twentieth century, was to surface fifteen years after Queen Victoria's death and continued to develop for the rest of the century amid the alternating pulsations of centrifugal and centripetal forces. In the early twenty-first century it reached a significant new stage after the introduction of devolution, but was still some distance, even in Ireland, from its ultimate vanishing point.\n\n##### II\n\nIf Ireland's contemporary history begins anywhere, it is with the Easter Rising of 24 April 1916. In a move calculated to exploit Britain's wartime preoccupations, a few hundred Irish patriot-rebels stormed the General Post Office in Dublin, raised republican flags and pronounced the advent of the Irish Republic:\n\n> POBLACHT NA h\u00c9IREANN\n> \n> THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT\n> \n> OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC\n> \n> TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND\n> \n> Irishmen and Irishwomen. In the name of God and of the dead generations, from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to the flag and strikes for her freedom.\n\nFighting with British forces lasted for seven days. The surviving insurgents were rounded up, and their leaders tried for treason; ninety were condemned to death. Fifteen of them, including the seven signatories of the Republic's Proclamation \u2013 Clarke, MacDiarmid, MacDonagh, Ceannt, Pearse, Connolly and Plunkett \u2013 were executed. The British response was harsh, perhaps because plans for German involvement had been uncovered; the insurgents would not have risked a military operation without hopes of heavyweight foreign assistance. As it was, the executions were creating martyrs. \u00c9amon de Valera, commander of the Irish Volunteers' Third Brigade, was lucky to be reprieved (see below). A republican song from the days immediately after the Rising exudes undiluted bitterness:\n\n> Take away the blood-stained bandage from off an Irish brow;\n> \n> We fought and bled for Ireland and will not shirk it now.\n> \n> We held on in her struggle, in answer to her call\n> \n> And because we sought to free her \/ we are placed against a wall.\n\nIn those same years, the strong Irish presence in the British army was underlined by the most famous of all the Great War's marching songs. A battalion of the Connaught Rangers was heard singing it as they marched out of Calais for the Front. Recorded by John McCormack, it quickly became a runaway hit:\n\n> It's a long way to Tipperary\n> \n> It's a long way to go.\n> \n> It's a long way to Tipperary\n> \n> To the sweetest girl I know.\n> \n> Good-bye, Piccadilly,\n> \n> Farewell Leicester Square,\n> \n> It's a long, long way to Tipperary\n> \n> But my heart's right there.\n\nThe unhurried beat is perfect for swinging along in unison. The melody is compelling. And the bittersweet words are anything but warlike. Tipperary is now known to untold millions round the world who would not otherwise know where it is.\n\nAs Britain concentrated all her resources and attention on the war effort, attitudes in Ireland fermented. The insurgents' political organization, Sinn F\u00e9in, meaning 'Ours Alone', and its secret military wing, the IRB, attracted far more sympathizers after the Rising than before it. It claimed that the British were reneging on Home Rule, not merely postponing it, that the British government was beholden to the Unionist lobby, and that Irish patriots would have to fight for their rights. In October 1917, Sinn F\u00e9in's convention openly advocated 'international recognition of Ireland as an independent Irish Republic'. De Valera, amnestied, became the party's chairman.\n\nThe Unionists, for their part, were dedicated to the integrity of the United Kingdom and regarded Sinn F\u00e9in and their like as a bunch of mutineers. Men like Sir Edward Carson \u2013 a Protestant barrister from Dublin, who had brought down Oscar Wilde \u2013 or Churchill's friend F. E. Smith, later earl of Birkenhead, saw British law as the sole fount of legitimacy. They waved their Union Jacks, and revered the Ulster Volunteers who had been slaughtered on the Western Front. With few exceptions, they were also supporters of the Protestant Ascendancy. Both the Anglo-Irish landowning class and the Presbyterians of Ulster were embattled Protestant minorities in a largely Catholic land.\n\nThe songs to which the Unionists marched drew on a rich and ancient repertoire. 'King Billy', that is, William III of Orange (d. 1694), invariably figures as the chief hero, and the pope as the chief villain:\n\n> Sons, whose sires with William bled\n> \n> Offspring of the mighty dead\n> \n> When the Popish tyrants fled\n> \n> And this fair land left free.\n> \n> Yield not now to Popish guile\n> \n> Trust them least when most they smile\n> \n> Sun the crafty fowler's toil.\n> \n> And keep your liberty\n\nThe sectarian fervour gripping 'loyalists' and 'Unionists' had barely changed since the seventeenth century.\n\nIn 1917\u201318 the British government organized a multi-party convention which debated the implementation of Home Rule inconclusively. Then, early in 1918, it sought to bring Ireland into line with Great Britain by introducing military conscription. Objectively, the policy appeared even-handed, and in fact was never applied. But in the fragile Irish context it provided the pebble that set off a landslide, refanning passions that might otherwise have died down. Almost everyone united against it \u2013 the Church, the unions, the Parnellite Irish Parliamentary Party and the local councils. Prime Minister David Lloyd George thereupon made the fatal mistake of threatening to withhold Home Rule 'until the condition of Ireland makes it possible'.\n\nA new chapter opened as the Great War closed. At the general election of December 1918, Lloyd George was whipping up support for 'squeezing Germany till the pips squeak'. But in Ireland, demands for total independence had risen to the top of the agenda, and pushed out other concerns. Of 105 Irish MPs elected, 73 belonged to Sinn F\u00e9in. They promptly turned their backs on Westminster, and on 21 January 1919 those of them who were not in British prisons assembled in the Round Room of Dublin's Mansion House as a separate D\u00e1il or parliament. The Papal Count George Plunkett (1851\u20131948), father of three condemned sons, and Eoin (John) MacNeill (1867\u20131945), military commander and medieval historian, kept order. The Assembly voted to sever links with Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland was proclaimed for a second time, in Gaelic, as if the United Kingdom did not exist. \u00c9amon de Valera was appointed the chief executive, and the Republic's armed force, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), was formed from a variety of amalgamated units, including the IRB. Instructions were drawn up for ambassadors to be sent to the Peace Conference in Paris, and an 'Address to the Free Nations of the World' was framed. The session was finished within an hour and a half.\n\nThe British press watched in disbelief. British journalists, like many participants, were not well attuned to the proceedings:\n\n> Twenty-eight Sinn F\u00e9in members of parliament were here... But there must have been at least two thousand others in an improvised Strangers' Gallery. Many other thousands waited outside, but a strong body of the Sinn F\u00e9in Volunteers kept an effective and sometimes a rather stupid guard.\n> \n> It would have offended against the national spirit, of course, to carry on the debates of the National Assembly in the language of the Sassenach, and the result was a self-denying ordinance which kept some members quite silent and even reduced others to mere French.\n> \n> It was a very quiet and rather stilted National Assembly. Probably nine-tenths of those there did not know what it was saying, and when the instructed raised a cheer, the Speaker broke into English to tell them that the rules of parliament did not allow it. The Mansion House, which gives it hospitality to all comers, had provided a few seats for the benches, and, roped off from [the rest the room] these made the House.\n\nIn 1919\u201320 a massive campaign of civil disobedience brought the British administration in Ireland to its knees. Taxes went unpaid, government offices were boycotted, dockers refused to handle British army supplies, orders from London went unheeded. But formal recognition proved more elusive. The British government was not willing to recognize a state within the state; and it persuaded foreign countries to follow suit. Representatives of the Irish Republic who travelled to the Peace Conference in Paris were not admitted. Lenin, who accepted a loan from Ireland for Soviet Russia, was the sole foreign leader to acknowledge the Irish Republic's existence.\n\nThe first hostile act against British forces occurred on 21 January 1919, when a couple of lone marksmen killed some officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Tipperary. The British government reacted with restraint, merely designating a Special Military Zone in the south-west. Similarly, the D\u00e1il made no haste to declare war. The majority of IRA leaders favoured guerrilla-style tactics like those of the South African Boers, whom they greatly admired, and a minority led by Arthur Griffith favoured passive resistance. Even so, violence spread. IRA raids provoked RIC reprisals. Hundreds of policemen were shot, and scores of country houses belonging to Anglo-Irish landowners were torched. By the summer, an undeclared armed conflict variously called the 'Anglo-Irish War' or the 'War of Irish Independence' was well and truly ignited.\n\nIn 1920, the British government lost patience. Reluctant to deploy the regular British army, which was in the throes of demobilization, it raised two notorious auxiliary formations to bring the rebels to heel. One of them, the RIC Reserve Force, universally known from the colour of their uniforms as the 'Black and Tans', were recruited from hardened war veterans, paid 10 shillings per day, and exempted from normal military discipline. The other, the Auxiliary Division of the RIC, known as the 'Auxies', were drawn exclusively from ex-British army officers. Together, they burned, plundered and murdered their way round Ireland. Regular courts were suspended, and subsidies halted to non-loyalist districts. In the autumn Westminster introduced new legislation. The Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (1920) provided for martial law, internment and death sentences without trial. In December the Government of Ireland Act (1920), passed under Unionist pressure, attempted to limit the contagion by dividing the island into two parts \u2013 Southern Ireland, made up of twenty-six counties, and Northern Ireland, containing the remaining six. Each was to have its own assembly. Contrary to intentions, the partition proved permanent.\n\nThe initial years of military struggle against the British brought the IRA to the peak of its popularity. Lacking comparable firepower, its leaders avoided open battle with professional British troops, and were duly denounced as terrorists. But by keeping up their attacks and staying in the field, they created an impasse in which the British began to review their policies. The misdeeds of the 'Black and Tans' strengthened the Irish cause with every day that passed:\n\n> They burned their way through Munster,\n> \n> Then laid Leinster on the rack.\n> \n> Thro' Connacht and thro' Ulster\n> \n> Marched the men in brown and black.\n> \n> They shot down wives and children\n> \n> In their own heroic way, but\n> \n> The Black and Tans like lightning ran\n> \n> From the Rifles of the IRA\n\nOver the winter of 1920\u201321, bloodshed intensified. The worst episodes occurred in Belfast, where 'loyalist' mobs attacked Catholic enclaves indiscriminately. The creation of paramilitary 'B-specials' to support the Ulster Constabulary was opposed by the Catholic hierarchy, but few Protestant leaders publicly reprimanded loyalist violence.\n\nThree men co-operated in the construction of a truce. General Smuts, the South African champion of the Boers, suggested to King George V that he make a 'speech for conciliation in Ireland'. The idea was taken up by Lloyd George, who persuaded a reluctant Cabinet to comply. The king's speech, delivered in Belfast on 22 June 1921, called on all Irishmen 'to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, to forgive and forget, and to join in making for the land they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill'. The words were judged to match the public mood. A truce came into effect on 11 July 1921. The forces of the Crown and their militant opponents appeared to have fought each other to a standstill.\n\nAt this point, \u00c9amon de Valera (1882\u20131975) reached the first pinnacle in a long career characterized by successive peaks and troughs. Born in the United States, the son of an Irish mother and a reputedly Cuban father, he had grown up in Ireland with his maternal relatives, had learned Gaelic and qualified as a teacher. Known as 'the Long Fellow' because of his height, he was a principled republican among comrades holding a variety of constitutional views. He had been saved from execution after the Easter Rising by his American citizenship, and was pushed into prominence by being a rare survivor of the original leadership. In 1917\u201319 he rose from the position of Sinn F\u00e9in's chairman, to that of president of the _D\u00e1il \u00c9ireann_ , and of _pr\u00edomh aire_ or 'prime minister' _._ 37\n\nFor the whole of 1920, however, the _pr\u00edomh aire_ had absented himself, disappearing from Dublin to raise funds in the United States. In consequence, he lost ground to his deputies, notably to Michael Collins, 'the Big Fellow', sometime head of the IRB and another survivor of the Rising, and to Arthur Griffith, one of the original founders of Sinn F\u00e9in. Griffith, a surprising voice of moderation, had long advocated a 'two kingdom solution', such as had pertained prior to 1801, publicizing the idea of a dual, Anglo-Irish monarchy similar to that of Austria-Hungary. Among these leaders, there was no common blueprint regarding the nature of the future state.\n\nThree days after the truce, \u00c9amon de Valera went to Downing Street to sound out Lloyd George, and a priceless scene ensued. De Valera was used to thinking of Ireland's oppressors as 'the English'. He had not counted on his British adversary being both a Celt and a native Welsh-speaker. He read out his declaration in stilted Gaelic, then handed Lloyd George an English translation. The 'Welsh Wizard' played along with him. 'So what's the Gaelic name for your state?' he enquired. ' _Saorst\u00e1t_ ' ('Free State') came the reply. 'I see,' said Lloyd George. 'I didn't hear the Gaelic word for \"Republic\" in your speech.' He then launched into a lengthy discussion in Welsh with his personal secretary, T. J. Jones. De Valera, flustered, couldn't follow. Eventually, reverting to English, Lloyd George delivered the knock-out blow. 'We Celts don't have a word for a Republic,' he announced, 'because we've never had one.' If this account reflects even part of the truth, De Valera already knew that one of his key demands \u2013 the recognition of the Irish Republic \u2013 was unlikely to be met. Nonetheless, on returning to Dublin, he persuaded the D\u00e1il to proclaim him president of the Republic. He was throwing down the gauntlet not only to the British but also to many Irish colleagues.\n\nWork began soon after on an Anglo-Irish Treaty. Its main aims were to design a new political order for Southern Ireland, and to define the border with Ulster, which was to have the right to secede. The Irish delegation at the negotiations was led by Arthur Griffith, assisted by Michael Collins and others, who installed themselves at 44 Hans Crescent in Kensington. Its secretary was the English novelist and Hibernophile, Erskine Childers. The negotiators wrestled in London, while killings in Ireland persisted; they only reached a conclusion after the British threatened to restart a full-scale war. Ratification had to be undertaken in triplicate \u2013 by the D\u00e1il, by the British-backed House of Commons of Southern Ireland and by the British Parliament in Westminster. All was completed in January 1922. The king had reason to be satisfied. After a civil war (as he would have seen it) a wayward realm had returned to the fold, and had made its peace with the home country.\n\nThe details, however, were crucial. As determined by the treaty, the Irish Free State was to take the form of a constitutional monarchy, not a republic. It was to resemble the existing dominions, such as Canada or Australia, thereby achieving more than the pre-war Home Rule Act, which had only promised self-government within the United Kingdom; but the king was to remain head of state \u2013 albeit of a different state \u2013 and was to be represented in Dublin by a governor-general. The legislative D\u00e1il, elected by universal suffrage, was to name its candidate for prime minister for the governor-general's approval. The national anthem, as previously, was to be 'God Save the King'. These arrangements were the fruit of a reluctant compromise between the British hard line, which upheld the rights of the Crown, and the initial Irish demands, which had hoped to preserve their Republic. They were set to take effect on 6 December.\n\nReactions to the treaty were threefold. First, the Unionists in Northern Ireland hastened to exercise their opt-out. At the province's first general election in May 1921, they had won a 66 percent majority. A second vote was staged with certain outcome. Sir James Craig MP, sometime organizer of the Ulster Volunteers, took the night ferry from Belfast carrying a loyal petition to the king. The whole operation was completed within a month, and six of the nine historic counties of Ulster adopted the position from which they have never since wavered. Secondly, the Irish Free State applied for membership of the League of Nations. Thirdly, the politicians in Dublin who appeared to have achieved a large part of their objectives fell into deadly dispute.\n\nThe Anglo-Irish Treaty passed in the D\u00e1il by only sixty-four votes to fifty-seven; the treaty's opponents, who lost out, flatly refused to accept the result. De Valera resigned, and started making provocative speeches about 'Irishmen wading through Irish blood'. Michael Collins, who had prosecuted the war against the British but who had also signed the treaty, was denounced as a renegade. In order to prove his patriotic credentials, he launched an abortive attack on Ulster, in the first of the so-called 'Border Wars', before entering into armed conflict with his 'irreconcilable' Irish adversaries. Nineteen twenty-two, therefore, was a year of civil war. The 'Free Staters' and their army were pitted against the rump of the IRA, and were subjected to the same guerrilla-style attacks that the British had endured earlier. Before the treaty entered into force, Collins was killed in an ambush. He claimed to have won 'the freedom to win freedom', and he was eventually proved right. Arthur Griffith, too, died that year, from a heart attack. But the pro-treaty forces prevailed, and the Free State took flight as envisioned. George V was the king; Tim Healy (1855\u20131931), a lawyer and former Westminster MP, was the first governor-general, and W. T. Cosgrave (1880\u20131965), once sentenced to death, the first _taoiseach_. As one of the Free State leaders put it: 'We were probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries ever.'\n\nThe central cause of the civil war had lain in the decision to sacrifice the Republic. The tragedy was all the greater since 'feeling in the country at large was far more decisively in favour of the Treaty than in the committed republican atmosphere of the D\u00e1il'. In this regard, Roy Foster has written reprovingly of 'the obsession with \"the Crown\". The fact is that two opposing groups were obsessed with the Crown: the Irish ultra-republicans and the British establishment. Constitutionally, the Anglo-Irish settlement introduced a system that was halfway between the abandoned Home Rule project and full sovereignty. What it most nearly resembled was the separate but dependent 'Kingdom of Ireland', abolished in 1801 to make way for the Union.\n\nIn the final phase of the civil war, which continued into the late spring of 1923, exasperated Free State ministers adopted ruthless measures to fight violence with violence. Once masters of their own legislation, they introduced an Emergency Powers Act which sanctioned summary executions. Before the fighting petered out, the forces of the Free State had killed more IRA men than the British ever did. Erskine Childers was among the victims. De Valera, having denounced the treaty and praised the 'Legion of the Rearguard', was arrested and interned.\n\nNot surprisingly, most of the songs generated by the Irish Civil War emanated from the defeated republicans. The Free Staters, though they won, had little to crow about. 'The Drumboe Martyrs' laments one batch of executed victims, while the satirical 'Irish Free State', 'which ran up the red-white-and-blue', accurately reflects republican bitterness. Yet nothing offended republicans more than the Free State's adoption of the green-white-and-gold tricolour of the late Republic:\n\n> Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors,\n> \n> It's the flag we republicans claim.\n> \n> It can never belong to Free Staters,\n> \n> For you've brought on it nothing but shame.\n> \n> Why not leave it to those who are willing\n> \n> To uphold it in war and in peace,\n> \n> To the men who intend to do killing\n> \n> Until England's tyrannies cease?\n> \n> You have murdered our brave Liam and Rory,\n> \n> You have murdered young Richard and Joe.\n> \n> Your hands with their blood is still gory,\n> \n> Fulfilling the work of the foe.\n\nTaken together, the Anglo-Irish War, the Anglo-Irish treaty and the Irish Civil War changed the face of southern Ireland. After 1919, large numbers of Anglo-Irish landowners, the backbone of British rule, left their estates and never returned. After 1922, the treaty made provision for the orderly exodus or retirement of British officials, whom the Free State compensated. The survivors of fratricidal slaughter were left in a state of deep trauma that took decades to heal.\n\nIn March 1924, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford died in Cambridge, where he had been Professor of Music for almost forty years. He was a musician of the highest standing both as conductor and composer; his contribution to church choral music in particular passed into the standard repertoire. But the professor had equally produced a lengthy series of collections of Irish folk songs and of Irish-inspired compositions. For he was an Irishman, born in Dublin, who never cut his roots. His works included a comic opera, _Shamus O'Brien,_ six orchestral _Irish Rhapsodies_ , _Irish Fantasies_ and _Six Irish Sketches_ for violin, _Intermezzo on the Londonderry_ Air for organ, a _Limmerich ohne Woerte_ under the pseudonym of Karel Drofnatski, and three song cycles for voice and piano: _A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster_ , _Six Songs from the Glens of Antrim_ and _An Irish Idyll_ :\n\n> In summer time I foot the turf\n> \n> And lay the sods to dry;\n> \n> South wind and lark's song\n> \n> And the sun far up in the sky.\n> \n> I pile them on the turf stack\n> \n> Against the time of snow;\n> \n> Black frost, a gale from the north.\n> \n> Who minds what winds may blow?\n> \n> Now winter's here, make up the fire,\n> \n> And let you bolt the door.\n> \n> A wind across the mountains,\n> \n> And a draught across the floor.\n> \n>...\n> \n> I see myself a barefoot child,\n> \n> I see myself a lad,\n> \n> When the gold upon the gorse bush\n> \n> Was all the gold I had.\n> \n> I do be having some fine old dreams\n> \n> Of days were long ago,\n> \n> When the wind keens, the night falls\n> \n> And the embers glow.\n\nStanford was witness in his generation to the deep interpenetration of English and Irish life.\n\nThe Irish Free State could not have experienced a worse start, and acute problems pressed on many fronts. The coffers, for example, were virtually empty, and confusion reigned over the nature of the Free State's monarchy. Some sources list George V and his two sons, Edward VIII and George VI, as 'kings of Ireland'. In the light of subsequent Commonwealth practice, this looks logical. But contemporary documents contain no such title. In reality, the exact relationship between the Free State and its monarch had been left curiously (and perhaps deliberately) ambivalent. Article 4 of the treaty laid down an oath of allegiance to be taken by all members of the D\u00e1il, binding them 'to be faithful to HM King George V... in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain... and her membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations'.\n\nThe so-called National Anthem also caused trouble. 'God Save the King' is a royal anthem, not a national one, and nowhere does it mention the country whose monarch God is asked to save. More seriously, the words were still the same as in Britain. In consequence, they stuck in many an Irish throat. Though the Free State bands would dutifully play the melody on official occasions, it was often met either with stony silence or with counter-chants. Gaelic-speakers usually sang 'The Soldier's Song'. Others preferred a favourite from the American Civil War, sung to the rousing tune of 'Tramp, Tramp, Tramp \u2013 the Boys are Marching':\n\n> 'God Save Ireland,' said the heroes,\n> \n> 'God Save Ireland,' said they all.\n> \n> Whether on the scaffold high\n> \n> Or the battlefield we die,\n> \n> Oh, what matter when for Erin dear we fall.\n\nFrom its inception the Free State was closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church, which, thanks to the exodus of Anglo-Irish Protestants, garnered the loyalties of 93 per cent of the population. The Church, having supported Parnell and the Home Rule Bill, had formally condemned the IRA's violence, and after the civil war it was the only institution with the resources to assist an impoverished government in the fields of education, healthcare and social reform. The majority of schools were run by Catholic orders, which insisted on Catholic instruction in the classroom. In 1924 divorce was banned and the sale of contraceptives made illegal; abortion was unavailable. After 1930, most Irish hospitals were funded by a sweepstake whose tickets were routinely distributed by priests and nuns, and the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 was treated as a state event. Suggestions have been made that the loss of royal ritual made people more susceptible to the charms of religious ritual. The authoritarian ethos of the Irish Church could not be easily contested. For practical purposes, the ecclesiastical Index of banned books functioned as a system of state censorship. Ulster Protestants had always held that 'Home Rule means Rome Rule', and the Free State's early years did little to discredit the equation.\n\nNonetheless, during the rest of the 1920s, the two parts of Ireland settled down to an uneasy truce in which open conflict was avoided. In the North, which was more industrialized, competition for work in a sluggish post-war economy led to increasing and blatant discrimination against Catholics in key enterprises such as the Belfast shipyards. A government plan to introduce non-sectarian education was blocked by opposition from Protestants and Catholics alike. In the South, where over half the population still worked the land, the government put its mind to maximizing agricultural commerce, especially with Britain, and to relieving social poverty. Gaelic education represented another priority, which addressed the demands of cultural nationalism. 'The prosecution of the Irish language became the necessary benchmark of an independent ethos.' At the same time, care was taken to strengthen democratic stability round the D\u00e1il, the Free State army and the unarmed police, the _Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na_. When \u00c9amon de Valera re-emerged from detention to found Fianna F\u00e1il in 1926, promising to promote republicanism through the Free State's institutions, he caused the Sinn F\u00e9in movement to splinter yet again. From then on, republicans still bent on armed struggle were reduced to a very small rump.\n\nNo privileged status was offered to the Roman Catholic Church, despite its long-standing ties to Irish nationalism. Some Catholic politicians harboured anti-clerical tendencies, just as many Catholic priests had shunned the IRA. In any case, the British guardians of the treaty, conditioned by the Protestant Ascendancy, were unwilling to envisage a theocratic state on Britain's doorstep. So Free State leaders had to be cautious. _Taoiseach_ Cosgrave expressed his country's undying allegiance to the papacy, but the more extreme advocates of Catholic control were disappointed. Deep-seated tensions between Church and State in Ireland did not surface for over half a century.\n\nWith some delay, the British government responded to the division of Ireland by passing the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act (1927). Ever since his pre-war coronation, George V had used the formula of 'king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of the Dominions, and of other realms beyond the seas'. Now the initial part of his title was changed to 'king of Great Britain, Ireland, the Dominions, and...'. The replacement of the first 'and' by a comma pointed unambiguously to Ireland being accepted as a separate realm. In consequence, the king was advised to accept the nomination of the next governor-general from the Irish government, not from the British. At the Imperial Conference of 1926, when the structures of the British Commonwealth were first mooted, the Irish Free State was listed among its constituent dominions, alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Cosgrave participated without apparent demur.\n\nThe 1930s witnessed a republican revival. Membership of the Commonwealth did not give the Free State any marked benefits; and, as the Great Depression deepened, socio-economic ills in Ireland mounted. After five years' preparation, De Valera's Fianna F\u00e1il, drawing on pro-republican sympathies that had gone underground since the civil war, won the election of 1932, and formed a radical government. For its party anthem, it had adopted the melody and bilingual lyrics that had been sung before the General Post Office in 1916. The original words of _'Amhr\u00e1n na bhFiann_ ' were in English:\n\n> Sons of the Gael! Men of the Pale!\n> \n> The long-watched day is breaking;\n> \n> The serried ranks of Innisfail\n> \n> Shall set the tyrant quaking.\n> \n> Our campfires now are burning low;\n> \n> See in the east a silvery glow,\n> \n> Out yonder waits the Saxon foe,\n> \n> So chant a soldier's song.\n\nDe Valera assumed office shortly after the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had retracted Britain's right to legislate for the dominions. As a result, he was able to use legalistic 'salami tactics' to slice up the Free State's constitution bit by bit. First to go was its reference to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Then, in successive amendments, he abolished or limited the Senate, the governor-generalship and appeals to the Privy Council. Short of declaring war, the British were helpless. The second governor-general, James McNeill (1928\u201332), grew so irritated that he resigned early; and the third, Donald Buckley (1932\u20136), was simply told by De Valera to keep a low profile, effectively neutered by a hint about suspending the Irish government's payment of the lease on his luxurious residence. When he welcomed the French ambassador he performed the only official function in the whole of his tenure.\n\nThe prime opportunity for more extensive change came about through a crisis in the British monarchy. The old king, George V, died in January 1936, breaking the thread of continuity with pre-Rising times. He was succeeded by the playboy Edward VIII, whose association with an American divorcee scandalized Catholic Ireland, no less than Britain. Preparations for a secular coronation broke the sacred spell that monarchists had long cultivated. De Valera seized the opportunity to abolish the oath of allegiance in Ireland, and, through the External Relations Act (1936), to deny Britain control over foreign affairs. He also wrote directly to the new king, giving notice that his government intended to replace the Free State's constitution. Paralysed by the abdication crisis, the British government barely noticed what was happening.\n\nIn December 1936 a curious monarchical moment occurred. Edward VIII abdicated on the 10th, the decision being immediately confirmed by the Westminster Parliament. But the D\u00e1il in Dublin was unable to follow suit until the 12th. This meant that for one whole day \u2013 11 December 1936 \u2013 the duke of Windsor retained his status as king in Ireland (if not as 'king _of_ Ireland') without being the United Kingdom's sovereign.\n\nSuch was the prelude to De Valera's boldest step. In 1937 he introduced a bill to the D\u00e1il proposing that the constitution of 1922 be repealed. The Free State was to disappear, and a draft _Bunreacht na h\u00c9ireann_ or 'Constitution of Ireland' was put forward to replace it. The Gaelic version of the Preamble and fifty articles was to be regarded as definitive; the state's official name was to be changed to _\u00c9ire_. The governor-general was to be replaced by the _uachtar\u00e1n_ or 'president', and the will of the people was to be supreme. The draft was accepted by popular plebiscite on 1 July 1937.\n\nThe British government in London did not yet accept the change explicitly. But it was recognized implicitly by the monarchy when George VI was crowned in May 1937 as 'king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland'. However, since \u00c9ire had not withdrawn from the Commonwealth, and since the king's claim to reign over 'the dominions' was not altered, Britain and Ireland both acknowledged some residual and purely theoretical role for the Crown.\n\nThe _Bunreacht_ generated many hostile misunderstandings. The Preamble, for example, was worded, 'In the name of the most Holy Trinity... to Whom all actions of men and states must be referred.' This gave rise to wild accusations that the text as a whole discriminated against non-Roman Catholics. In reality, religious freedom together with the rights of all Christian faiths and of the Jewish community were guaranteed; and a reference to 'the special position of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church', though deliberately deferential in tone, made no provision for practical action. The first president of \u00c9ire, Douglas Hyde (1860\u20131949), founder of the Gaelic League, who was famous for lecturing forty years before 'On the Necessity of De-anglicising the Irish People', was a Protestant. De Valera resisted persistent demands to give Roman Catholicism the status of a state-backed religion, and on issues such as divorce or the role of women simply followed the social teaching of his day.\n\nArticle 2 of the _Bunreacht_ reasserted the concept of a national territory covering the whole island of Ireland, as in the Act of 1542. This provoked howls of protest in Belfast, which claimed that Northern Ireland's existence was denied. Yet Article 3 specifically stated that \u00c9ire would not govern anywhere beyond the twenty-six counties. Widest of the mark was the accusation that the _Bunreacht_ of 1937 had created an Irish 'Republic'. Acutely conscious of the painful sensitivities of the 1920s, De Valera needed no instruction on this point. Neither 'the Republic' in English, nor any Gaelic equivalent, found a mention. He had long since learned the virtue of constructive obfuscation.\n\nIn this same period, De Valera was extremely active in the League of Nations. His speech in 1936 on 'The Failure of the League' underlined the selfishness of the Great Powers and their disregard for small nations. It helped him to the League's presidency, and strengthened his hand in dealings with Britain. In 1938 \u00c9ire succeeded in terminating an Anglo-Irish trade war, and in regaining the three 'Treaty Ports' of Spike Island, Berehaven and Lough Swilly which the Royal Navy had occupied since 1922. It was edging its way towards full sovereignty.\n\nDuring the Second World War, Ireland immediately declared an 'Emergency' accompanied by strict neutrality. The Emergency was explained by the need to restrain the IRA, which had traditional pro-German sympathies and which perpetrated several anti-government bombings. (Evidence would emerge long afterwards of De Valera's complicity with British Intelligence on this issue.) The policy of neutrality was genuine, seeking to avoid commitment either to Britain or to Germany. De Valera's temerity caused immense anger in London, where the British government had assumed that all the dominions would automatically take Britain's side. British attitudes were still largely configured in imperial mode, and, since Irish harbours were sorely needed for the campaign against German U-boats, a real danger arose that British forces would reoccupy them. Churchill first tried to tempt De Valera by dangling the prospect before him of a reunited Ireland. When this failed, he swallowed his fury. He knew how much trouble the 'Irish Question' had caused only twenty years earlier. In any case, Britain's resources were hopelessly overstretched. But \u00c9ire did not tempt fate by cosying up to the Third Reich. Indeed, as the Nazi star waned, intelligence was shared with the British. Nonetheless, De Valera's defiant, not to say gratuitous gesture in April 1945, when he visited the German embassy in Dublin to present his condolences on Adolf Hitler's death, exceeded the normal demands of protocol. Despite his American roots, he made no parallel gesture on the death of President Roosevelt.\n\nAfter the war, Ireland could have expected British retribution. Yet Clement Attlee's Labour government was less bullish than Churchill's Conservatives might have been, and amid a torrent of post-war crises Ireland did not figure high on Britain's priorities. The decision in 1947 to abandon India, and the collapse of the Empire, deflated Britain's imperial pretentions for good.\n\nBy 1948, therefore, having after some delay repealed Emergency powers, John Costello's interparty coalition, which had taken over from De Valera , felt confident enough to initiate the final break with Britain, and the British government felt sufficiently contrite to bow to the inevitable. On 18 April the Republic of Ireland Act was introduced to the D\u00e1il. In five brief clauses, it renamed the state, cancelled the External Relations Act (1936), gave executive authority to the president, formally withdrew from the Commonwealth, and established the date of its completion exactly one year later. De Valera, the republican, though out of office, had finally triumphed after thirty-three years of struggle. Asked what his greatest mistake had been, he confessed: 'to have opposed the Treaty'. Foster calls him an 'old political shaman'. He would serve two presidential terms under the new dispensation.\n\nIn the meantime, the rules of the British Commonwealth were amended so that republics were not automatically excluded. Ireland did not seek to benefit. Then Attlee's government moved the Ireland Act (1949), which both recognized the Republic and confirmed Northern Ireland's separate status. The British were at pains not to disturb the huge number of Irish people who were living and working in Britain.\n\nNonetheless, the clumsy wording of the Ireland Act sowed the seeds of future conflict. One clause stated, bizarrely, that 'Ireland shall not be regarded as a foreign country for the purpose of any law'. Another stated that the status quo in Northern Ireland could not be changed without the express consent of the Stormont parliament, effectively handing the Unionists a built-in veto on all reforms. This created the impression that the British government was retracting with the left hand what had just been granted by the right, and, in the eyes of many, provided the rallying point round which the near-defunct IRA could rise again. Henceforth, the clandestine IRA reverted to the fundamentalist brand of republicanism that condemned it to be treated as a pariah both in the South and the North.\n\nThe clause also lay at the root of a long-running wrangle between Britain and \u00c9ire's head of state. According to the _Bunreacht_ of 1937, the head of state's official title in English was 'president of \u00c9ire'. But British officialdom refused to use it, and invitations were politely turned down for decades. When the Commonwealth Conference determined in 1953 to regulate its affairs at the start of a new reign, therefore, Ireland was no longer a member. Queen Elizabeth II became 'queen of Canada' and 'queen of Australia' but not 'queen of Ireland'. Though Irish people had played a prominent part in creating the human substance of Empire and Commonwealth, their representatives did not participate in the post-imperial club. Instead, they poured their enthusiasm into the Marian Year of 1954, an ultra-Catholic occasion that jarred with prevailing attitudes in Britain.\n\nIn 1962 an embarrassing legal anomaly was discovered. As part of a legislative spring-cleaning exercise, it was found at Westminster that the original Crown of Ireland Act (1542) was still on the statute books. It had been left untouched in 1801 when the Kingdom of Ireland had supposedly been abolished; and again in 1921\u20132, when the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom. Henry VIII's Act laid down, among other things, that all the Tudor monarch's heirs and successors were to be 'kings of Ireland' in perpetuity. For the legal purists, the implications were astonishing. Elizabeth II did indeed belong to the heirs and successors of Henry VIII. So by right of inheritance if not by coronation, she was still queen of Ireland. The Act was promptly repealed.\n\nAlso in 1962, the latest of the IRA's long-running 'border campaigns' came to an end. Notwithstanding appearances, pockets of the diehard IRA had lived on, and for six years they had pursued a series of typical hit-and-run actions on the border of Northern Ireland. One incident, the inglorious raid on the Brookeburgh barracks of the RUC in County Fermanagh on New Year's Day 1957, left two young men dead and produced one of the most poignant of modern Irish ballads. Written by Dominic Behan, brother of the playwright Brendan, 'The Patriot Game' pours scorn on the Irish Republic and on British forces alike:\n\n> Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,\n> \n> For the love of one's country is a terrible thing.\n> \n> It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,\n> \n> And it makes us part of the patriot game.\n> \n> This Ireland of ours has too long been half free.\n> \n> Six counties lie under John Bull's tyranny.\n> \n> But still De Valera is greatly to blame\n> \n> For shirking his part in the patriot game.\n> \n> And now as I lie here, my body in holes\n> \n> I think of those traitors who bargained in souls\n> \n> And I wish that my rifle had given the same\n> \n> To those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.\n\nIt was recorded by Liam Clancy and in the United States by Bob Dylan, who said of Clancy: 'the best ballad singer I've ever heard'.\n\nNonetheless, despite such setbacks, relations between the Irish and British governments had been slowly but steadily improving. Both had sought to join the European Economic Community, and both had been fended off by General de Gaulle. It was a welcome milestone, therefore, when the Republic of Ireland joined in 1972 with the United Kingdom and Denmark as entrants to the EEC. It was a day when Irish eyes were indeed smiling.\n\nUnfortunately, the same half-century in Northern Ireland was marked by rigid ossification. The Unionist-Loyalist majority in the six counties, having gained control in 1920, strained every sinew to maintain its dominance; in time their intransigence led to a violent backlash from the excluded minority. Ironically, at the very time when Britain and Ireland were entering into neighbourly partnership, the Unionist and Nationalist communities of Northern Ireland were entering into a thirty-year intercommunal bloodbath.\n\nThe regime which prevailed in Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1972 was based on an anachronistic mixture of sectarian prejudice, pseudo-democratic manipulation and social oppression. Arguably, in a segregated society, it was also responsible for the defensive, introverted and sometimes extremist attitudes that grew up on the opposite side of the sectarian divide. The province's parliament, which met at Stormont Castle, had a built-in Protestant-Unionist majority that was maintained by gerrymandering in marginal constituencies. The province's long-serving prime ministers, notably Viscount Craigavon (formerly Sir James Craig), 1922\u201340, and Lord Brookeburgh, 1943\u201363, were paragons of immobility. The province's twelve Westminster MPs, a bulwark of the Conservative and Unionist Party, allied with the British Tories in all the most reactionary causes of the day, and the Province's police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, recruited almost exclusively from Protestants, routinely turned a blind eye to all misdemeanours except those committed by Catholics. The province's oldest and most influential organization, the Orange Order, was devoted to the defence of the Protestant Ascendancy, and its own parades in the annual marching season in July used the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne as the pretext for celebrating anti-Catholic triumphalism. Thousands of marching columns, bedecked in bowler hats, pinstripe suits and umbrellas flaunted their Orange sashes and Union Jacks, deliberately passing through Catholic districts in order to cow the natives. The whole tenor of official life was conducted in the aggressive-defensive mode initiated before the First World War. 'Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right' was a common cry. Marching, drilling, flag-waving, loyalty to 'the Crown', and shouts of 'We will never surrender' set the dominant tone. The minority community \u2013 Catholic, Irish Nationalist, Republican, and roughly 40 per cent of the population \u2013 were simply expected to knuckle under. While attitudes both in Britain and in southern Ireland evolved, attitudes in Ulster froze.\n\nOne element of the Ulster mind-set stressed the ancient link with Scotland. Scottish Presbyterians, though numerically dominant, had long played second fiddle to the Unionist establishment, which tended to have English landowning and (Anglican) Church of Ireland connections. (The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) of the Revd Ian Paisley would eventually get the upper hand over the official Unionists.) Especially when supporting Glasgow Rangers football club, the Ulstermen sang of 'The Hands across the Water' \u2013 the common Scottish bond:\n\n> And it's hands across the water\n> \n> Reaching out for you and me,\n> \n> For King, for Ulster, for Scotland\n> \n> Helping keep our people free!\n> \n> Let the cry be 'No Surrender'\n> \n> Let no one doubt our Loyalty\n> \n> Reaching out to the Red Hand of Ulster,\n> \n> Is the hand across the sea.\n\nThe immediate origins of Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' can be traced to the late 1960s. A republican celebration in Belfast of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising \u2013 to match the concurrent festival in Dublin \u2013 provoked a public declaration from the newly formed paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) that all IRA supporters would be killed. The first murders began. Two years later, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), modelled on its counterpart in the United States, started mass demonstrations calling for an end to discrimination against Catholics in housing, employment, healthcare and political representation. The demonstrators were brutally assaulted both by Protestant mobs and by the RUC. Their first rally, on 27 April 1968, was to protest against a ban on republican Easter parades.\n\nIn August 1969 the 'Battle of the Bogside' in Derry (or Londonderry as it was more generally known in the north) saw a more menacing outbreak of rioting. It also saw the emergence of the Provisional IRA, the 'Provos', an armed paramilitary splinter group, which promised to take on the UVF using its own methods. The Northern Ireland prime minister of the time, Sir Terence O'Neill, milder and less confrontational than his predecessors, had once caused a scandal by visiting a Catholic school, and showed sympathy for the besieged minority. He called in the British army to protect them. The decision proved fatal. Instead of holding the ring, the army took sides, identifying loyalists as allies and 'Provos' as the enemy. In January 1972, on 'Bloody Sunday', soldiers of the Parachute Regiment gunned down thirteen unarmed Catholic demonstrators. Further rioting ensued. The British government blamed the government of Northern Ireland. The parliament at Stormont was suspended. The province looked forward to three decades of military law and of 'Direct Rule' from London.\n\nBritain's good intentions of ruling impartially soon lapsed. The Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973, which proposed power-sharing between the two communities, was aborted by a paralysing wave of loyalist strikes. No effective action was taken against them. Thereafter, the British authorities merely sought to contain the violence. The army, military intelligence and MI5 worked closely with the RUC. The Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), a new security force, was largely Protestant in its make-up, and was infiltrated by the UVF. The Provos and other clandestine republican formations were classed as criminals and terrorists, whereas, despite their similarly brutal conduct, the UVF and Ulster Defence Association (UDA) were not. The policy of internment without trial in the purpose-built Maze Prison at Long Kesh was directed overwhelmingly at Catholic suspects, provoking hunger strikes and a further downward turn in the spiral of violence. Nothing was done to rein in loyalist marches, and well-meaning reconciliation groups, including churchmen from both sides and the 'Peace People' who received the Nobel Prize for their efforts, were sidelined.\n\nIntercommunal atrocities proliferated, with a constant stream of murders, reprisals, bombings, shootings, house-burnings, beatings, knee-cappings, disappearances, collective punishments, as well as the harshest of words. Belfast was divided into fearful armed camps, each sheltering behind barbed wire, high walls and bricked-off streets. There were parts of town where Catholics or Protestants could not tread for fear of their lives; and in the countryside, there were districts such as South Armagh where British soldiers walked at their peril. The British media made great play at specific outrages such as the assassinations of Airey Neave MP in 1979 and of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, in the same year; far less attention was paid to the unceasing bloodletting of lesser human beings in Belfast. Frustrations on the nationalist side of the barricades reached boiling point. A hunger strike began in the Maze Prison when an IRA activist, Bobby Sands, elected to Westminster during his sentence, starved himself to death. Recruitment for the Provos soared.\n\nThe Northern Ireland 'Troubles' produced a new wave of republican minstrelsy. Ballads and protest songs proliferated, and recordings went round the world. 'My Little Armalite' celebrated the favourite weapon of the Provos, and 'Fighting Men of Crossmaglen' the struggle in South Armagh. 'The Men behind the Wire' highlighted the endless ordeal of the internees:\n\n> Armoured cars and tanks and guns\n> \n> Came to take away our sons\n> \n> But every man will stand behind\n> \n> The Men behind the Wire.\n> \n> Not for them a judge or jury\n> \n> Or indeed a crime at all.\n> \n> Being Irish makes them guilty,\n> \n> So we're guilty one and all.\n> \n> Round the world the truth will echo\n> \n> Cromwell's men are here again.\n> \n> England's name again is sullied\n> \n> In the eyes of honest men.\n\nFresh calls came from the Republic to end the 'Occupation'. The language could be less than polite:\n\n> Go home, British soldiers, go on home!\n> \n> Have you got no f\u2014ing homes of your own?\n> \n> For eight hundred years, we've fought you without fears\n> \n> And we'll fight you for eight hundred more.\n> \n> If you stay, British solders, if you stay\n> \n> You'll never ever beat the IRA.\n> \n> So f\u2014 your Union Jack, we want our country back.\n> \n> We want to see old Ireland free once more.\n\nYet gentler tones were heard among the truculence. One of the most popular recordings of the era derived from the revival of an ancient Irish air by the 'Blind Harper', with modern words added:\n\n> Just give me your hand\n> \n> Is ' _tabhair dom do lamh_ '.\n> \n> Just give me your hand\n> \n> And I will walk with you.\n> \n> For the world it is ours,\n> \n> All the sea and the land.\n> \n> To destroy or command,\n> \n> If you give me your hand.\n\nIn the 1970s and 1980s, the singing and the weeping continued, with no sign of resolution.\n\nIn those same decades the grip of the Roman Catholic Church on life in the Republic finally began to slip. The hierarchy opposed a state scheme for free public secondary schools, presumably because it would compete with the Church's own; censorship and the constitutional ban on divorce were only removed in 1966. Changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council, notably to the celebration of Holy Mass in Latin, helped undermine a priesthood accustomed to the idea of an eternal status quo. But reform was driven above all by demands for women's rights. The Health (Family Planning) Act of 1979, which permitted the sale of contraceptives on prescription, was a landmark, though it also demonstrated the Church's powers of obstruction. A Church-backed 'Pro-Life' campaign battled its 'Pro-Choice' adversaries on abortion, routinely issuing injunctions against actual and would-be offenders. These petty skirmishes concealed a volcano ready to erupt. In 1984\u20135 the first of an endless flow of sex scandals broke surface. The seminarians of Maynooth College publicly accused their reverend head of predatory homosexual habits; in County Offaly an unmarried fifteen-year-old schoolgirl died horribly giving birth alone on a beach; and in County Clare, a local priest was found battered to death in suspicious circumstances. Step by step, the press gained courage, official denials lost credibility and the truth seeped out. Throughout the twentieth century, and contrary to their own teaching, all levels of the Catholic clergy had been involved in all manner of sexual abuses, from secret concubinage and fathering of children, to rape, molestation, beatings and exploitation of minors. The _Garda S\u00edoch\u00e1na_ had been complicit in the hierarchy's cover-up. The standing of the Church slumped; the Church's link to the state weakened, and the country's image was sullied.\n\nIn retrospect, one could see that the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979, when more than a third of the Republic's population flocked to greet him in Phoenix Park, had marked the high point of traditional Irish attitudes and practices. Ninety per cent of the population were still attending Mass at least once a week. In the subsequent decades numerous incremental changes took place which some observers believe have added up to a social revolution, notably in the fields of public and private morality, the position of women, the relations of Church and State, of declining deference to authority and of increased understanding of the North. 'The first two decades of the 20th century brought Ireland independence,' wrote an Oxford historian, 'but the final two brought a social revolution whose consequences were probably even more far reaching.'\n\nIn the 1990s, headlines from Ireland placed these moral upheavals in the Republic alongside a political impasse in the North and signs of a historic economic reversal. The Republic's presidential election of 1990 was won by Mary Robinson, an activist of the Pro-Choice movement; after one term she departed to become UN Commissioner for Human Rights and to be replaced by another woman of similar profile, Mary McAleese. In 1992, the appalling 'X-Case', in which the attorney-general of the Republic had taken steps to prosecute a teenage victim of rape, provoked a national referendum on the right to information on abortion; the Church's defeat on this relatively minor issue punctured its dictatorial pretensions for good.\n\nIn the North, a beleaguered IRA had redirected its bombing campaign onto the British mainland. The Brighton Bombing of 1984 nearly killed the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. Frightful atrocities occurred at Canary Wharf in London and in Manchester. But a parallel policy of the 'bullet and the ballot-box' was then adopted. While the Provos persisted \u2013 as they saw it \u2013 in matching violence with violence, their political wing, Sinn F\u00e9in, sought to reap the benefits of open politics. The architect of the policy was Gerry Adams (Gear\u00f3id MacAdhaimh, b. 1948), the grandson and great-grandson of Fenians, an activist of NICRA, an ex-internee, a survivor of assassins, allegedly an ex-IRA commander, and the president of Sinn F\u00e9in since 1983. To avoid prosecution, Adams claimed disingenuously that his party was totally independent of the Provo terrorists. Yet his strategy bore fruit. Mainstream nationalists found their way into public discussions, floating the possibility of a settlement. In the crucial Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993, Prime Minister John Major joined the Republic's _taoiseach_ in affirming that the Northern Ireland Question should be solved exclusively by Irish people from North and South. The British government was distancing itself from the fighting. The first of a string of ceasefires followed. They happened to the accompaniment of an unprecedented boom in the Republic's economy; never before in living memory had Dublin been far more prosperous than Belfast.\n\nIn the later 1990s sporadic violence recurred. But as the death toll passed the 3,500 mark, killing fatigue set in on all sides. Senator George Mitchell, the US president's emissary, breathed life into preliminary talks. The war of words did not abate. The loudest mouth in Northern Ireland characterized the pope as 'the Anti-Christ', called Gerry Adams 'the devil's dinner partner', President McAleese 'dishonest' and the queen 'a parrot'. But prospects of peace were improving.\n\nThe Belfast Agreement of April 1998 \u2013 otherwise known as the Good Friday Agreement \u2013 was clearly a very important if ambiguous achievement. To some, it was only 'a Sunningdale for slow learners', for others a masterly model for all long-running 'peace processes'. It was signed by Prime Minister Tony Blair for the United Kingdom, by _Taoiseach_ Bertie Ahern for the Republic, and by all the Northern Ireland parties except the Democratic Unionists. Put to referendums in both the North and the Republic, it won approval by 71 per cent and by 84 per cent respectively. Of its eighteen provisions, a key clause bound all signatories to the pursuit of their objectives 'by peaceful and democratic means'. Groups and individuals were henceforth free to work for a reunited Ireland or for the preservation of the United Kingdom, but not with guns or bombs. There were three additional strands: one devoted to internal arrangements in Northern Ireland, a second to contacts between Northern Ireland and the Republic and a third to the British Isles and Ireland as a whole. In the view of Britain's Northern Ireland Office, 'the political and peace processes... have brought huge benefits and change'.\n\nThe most immediate response, however, was horrific. On 15 August 1998, four months before the Agreement came into force, a car bomb exploded without warning in Omagh, killing 29 people and maiming 300. A dissident group calling itself the 'Real IRA' was publicizing its dissent. In that same year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to the leaders of Northern Ireland's two moderate parties. David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party and John Hume of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP) had shunned the violent elements within their respective Unionist and Nationalist communities, and were judged to be makers of peace.\n\nOn Armistice Day 1998 President McAleese joined Queen Elizabeth II in a symbolic act of reconciliation at the Messines Ridge near Ypres in Belgium. Messines was the site of a battle in June 1917 where 20,000 Irish soldiers \u2013 Protestants from the 6th Ulster Division and Catholics from the 16th Irish Division \u2013 had shed their blood side by side in the British service. Now, after eighty years' silence, the two women stood facing the sunset, and paid their respects to the fallen. After the ceremony, they inaugurated the Island of Ireland Peace Tower.\n\nNonetheless, years passed before some of the Agreement's main provisions bore fruit. The creation of a governmental Executive from all parties elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly was made possible by Sinn F\u00e9in's willingness to suspend its ideological objections and to work _pro tempore_ within an institution that was ultimately responsible to the British Crown. The first attempt, under David Trimble as first minister, broke down over slow progress in disarming the paramilitaries. The setback was remedied by the St Andrews Agreement of 2006, and the Executive finally got down to business the next May. Votes were moving from the moderate centre towards the two extremes, but not to the detriment of co-operation. The redoubtable Ian Paisley of the DUP, now more restrained in his public pronouncements, and Martin McGuinness of Sinn F\u00e9in, once sworn enemies, became first minister and deputy first minister respectively.\n\nOther elements had moved faster. By the Good Friday Agreement, the Republic dropped its constitutional claim to the six counties. The North-South Ministerial Council, and the potentially important British-Irish 'Council of the Isles', started work. British army bases were closed. Reform of the police system was initiated, and commissions on human rights, equal opportunities and parades went into business.\n\nAs with every previous step, the Good Friday Agreement brought about a new round of singing. One of the themes hailed hopes of reconciliation:\n\n> In the battered streets of Belfast,\n> \n> Can't you hear the people cry?\n> \n> For justice long denied them\n> \n> And their crying fills the sky.\n> \n> But the winds of change are singing\n> \n> Bringing hope from dark despair.\n> \n> There's a day of justice dawning.\n> \n> You can feel it in the air.\n> \n> There's a time laid out for laughing,\n> \n> And a time laid out to weep\n> \n> There's a time laid out for sowing\n> \n> And a time laid out to reap\n> \n> There's a time to love your brother\n> \n> And a time for hate to cease,\n> \n> If you sow the seeds of justice\n> \n> Then you'll reap the fruits of peace.\n\nSimultaneously, with no ulterior motives in mind, the BBC World Service held a competition to find the world's most popular song. The winner could hardly have been predicted. Beating India's national hymn ' _Vande Mataram_ ', it was a very old song from Ireland:\n\n> When boyhood's fire was in my blood\n> \n> I read of ancient freemen,\n> \n> For Greece and Rome who bravely stood\n> \n> Three hundred men and three men.\n> \n> And then I prayed I yet might see\n> \n> Our fetters rent in twain,\n> \n> And Ireland long a province, be\n> \n> A Nation Once Again.\n> \n> (refrain) A Nation Once Again,\n> \n> A Nation Once Again,\n> \n> And Ireland long a province, be\n> \n> A Nation Once Again.\n\nOne suspects that the e-mail voting skills of Irish expatriates in 2002 were still superior to those of the average Indian.\n\nIn the decade when Northern Ireland was tending its wounds, the Republic was stoking the fires of a different sort of catastrophe. The economic boom went to Irish heads. People told 'We are richer than the Germans', felt that they could spend money like water. Property developers launched grandiose projects; consumers piled up mountains of debt, splashing out on luxurious homes, foreign holidays and expensive cars; and irresponsible bankers handed out excessive credit without a thought for tomorrow. Politicians acted as if the party would never stop. 'The boom is getting boomier,' chortled Bertie Ahern, in 2006. 'We behaved like a pauper who had won the lottery,' said someone else. The behaviour seemed all the more reprehensible since it coincided with the inquiries and reports that comprehensively exposed the shortcomings of the Catholic Church. Eventually a leading Irish commentator, foreseeing disaster, described his country as 'A Ship of Fools'.\n\nDamien Dempsey was the songster who set the national mood to music:\n\n> Greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy\n> \n> So greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy, greedy\n> \n> Now they say the Celtic Tiger in my home town\n> \n> Brings jewels and crowns, picks you up off the ground\n> \n> But the Celtic Tiger does two things\n> \n> It brings you good luck or it eats you for its supper.\n> \n> It's the tale of the two cities on the shamrock shore.\n> \n> Please Sir can I have some more,\n> \n> Cos if you are poor you'll be eaten for sure.\n> \n> And that's how I know the poor have more taste than the rich\n> \n> And that's how I know the poor have more taste than the rich.\n> \n> Hear the Tiger roar \u2013 I want more\n> \n> Hear the Tiger roar, I want more, more, more.\n\nThe Republic's distress coincided with the North's convalescence. No one could pretend, of course, that the 'Irish Question' had reached its terminus. Pockets of tension remained in Ulster. Various minorities still felt embattled. The Orangemen were still marching, and protesters still attempting to block their way. Dissident IRA-men were still planning their 'spectaculars', and exploding bombs. Mind-sets changed slowly. Yet a return to large-scale bloodshed was unlikely, and a distinct shift in attitudes to Ireland's painful history could be observed. 'Where previously our history has been characterized by a plundering of the past to separate and differentiate us,' said the Irish president in a London lecture, 'our future now holds the optimistic possibility that... we will re-visit the past more comfortably and find... elements of kinship long neglected, of connections deliberately over-looked.' 'Today we salute Ulster's honoured and unageing dead,' declared Northern Ireland's incoming first minister, '... Protestant and Roman Catholic... Unionist and Nationalist, male and female, children and adults, all innocent victims of the terrible conflict.' 'The reality is, that it's now 2009,' wrote the president of Sinn F\u00e9in in his _Leargas_ blogspot, 'not 1969 or 1920 or for that matter 1690. And we're all living in an Ireland governed democratically by all-Ireland institutions, and by powersharing mechanisms in the six counties.' In January 2010 a marathon negotiating session involving both British and Irish prime ministers broke the latest deadlock in Northern Ireland, enabling the Executive to resume business.\n\nThe British government itself was experiencing a change of heart. The Saville Inquiry into the events of 'Bloody Sunday' reported in June 2010, firmly rejecting the whitewash of the earlier Widgery Report and condemning killings by the British army as 'unjustified and unjustifiable'. It destroyed the notion that the 'Provos' could be blamed for everything. The new prime minister, David Cameron, made an unreserved apology in the House of Commons, and the chairman of the official Unionists (the Ulster Unionist Party, UUP), once the bedrock of British control in Ulster, resigned: in 2010 the UUP vote had slumped from 46 per cent in 1974 to 15 per cent. The first minister of the province, Peter Robinson of the DUP, was embroiled in a damaging scandal. Times were changing. The city of Derry\/Londonderry, where the initial killings had taken place in 1972, was chosen as the UK's 'City of Culture'.\n\nThe Republic, meanwhile, was sinking deeper into the mire. Though the financial bubble had burst in 2008 in line with the global recession, the most serious consequences did not surface immediately. The Fianna F\u00e1il government took over the debts of two failing banks, the Anglo-Irish and the Ulster, and pretended that the problem was solved. In the spring of 2010, when Greece was forced to accept a Eurozone bail-out, ministers in Dublin were still mocking suggestions that Ireland might have to follow suit. But self-criticism crept into public debate. 'We're very narcissistic,' one woman lamented; 'we believed our boom was better than anyone else's.' And moral reflections returned. 'People lost interest in the other world,' commented the abbot of Glenstal, 'while they were so successful in this one.' The government denied all until reality caught up with them in November. Inspectors from the EU Commission and the IMF flew in to examine Ireland's books. Their investigations led to an 85-billion-euro rescue package that would tie the Republic into austerity, tax rises and social pain for decades to come. The Celtic Tiger, if not dead, was floored. The Republic found itself in intensive care; a land of smiles became a land of woe, and its image as a brave pioneer evaporated.\n\nPolitical meltdown followed swiftly on economic meltdown. The _taoiseach_ , Brian Cowen, announced his imminent departure, his government's reputation in shreds. In a mere five years, Ireland's position in the Quality of Life Index had dived from 5th in the world to 41st, sixteen places behind the United Kingdom. Inward immigration had stopped, and outward emigration had restarted at the rate of 1,000 per week. Unemployment was soaring. Popular anger reached fever pitch. A general election brought forward to 25 February 2011 voted massively for change. Fianna F\u00e1il was battered by the voters, its representation in the D\u00e1il falling from 70 to 16. Its coalition partner, the Green Party, was annihilated. Fine Gael triumphed, increasing its seats from 51 to 68; its leader, Enda Kenny, hastened to form a cabinet. The Labour Party almost doubled its representation, from 20 to 35, and Sinn F\u00e9in's tiny support was more than tripled, from 4 seats to 13. Gerry Adams, who had resigned from his unoccupied seat at Westminster, topped the contest in County Louth, in the nearest part of the country to Belfast; he had declared his ambition of becoming the Republic's president within five years. Sinn F\u00e9in's decline had been arrested, but the 'fortress of democratic republicanism', which it had once founded, looked distinctly sick. \u00c9amon de Valera 'was spinning in his grave'.\n\nJames Joyce's novel _Ulysses_ (1922) was completed in the year that the Irish Free State was proclaimed. One of the characters says, 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' Despite the passage of nearly a century, the sentiment still strikes chords. The British nightmare is perpetuated by the Irish Question still hanging like a millstone round London's neck; the Republic's nightmare is fed by shame that so many accomplishments have repeatedly been squandered, and the nightmare of principled republicans by their inability to win majority backing. In Northern Ireland, the most recent nightmare has ended, but people have woken up to an apparent stalemate.\n\nHence, as the centenary of the Easter Rising rose over the horizon, the main participants in the chain of conflicts \u2013 the British, the Irish, the Unionists and the republicans \u2013 had all been duly chastened; everyone's pride had been humbled in turn. The long retreat of British rule in Ireland had slowed to an imperceptible crawl. The British queen, who still reigned over six Irish counties, accepted an invitation to visit Dublin for the first formal royal visit there since her grandfather's in 1911. Unionists were holding on to their corner of the island, but only by sharing power. Nationalists and republicans, in whose eyes the country was only three-quarters free, were marking time, believing it to be on their side. Monarchy in Ireland had still not vanished. It had reached a moment reminiscent of a king of Ireland's famous last words; lying on his deathbed in 1685, Charles II, who was equally king of England and king of Scotland, apologized for being 'an unconscionable time a-dying'.\n\n##### III\n\nThat the United Kingdom will collapse is a foregone conclusion. Sooner or later, all states _do_ collapse, and ramshackle, asymmetric dynastic amalgamations are more vulnerable than cohesive nation-states. Only the 'how' and the 'when' are mysteries of the future.\n\nAn exhaustive study of the many pillars on which British power and prestige were built \u2013 ranging from the monarchy, the Royal Navy and the Empire to the Protestant Ascendancy, the Industrial Revolution, Parliament and Sterling \u2013 indicated that all without exception were in decline; some were already defunct, others seriously diminished or debilitated; it suggests that the last act may come sooner rather than later. Nothing implies that the end will necessarily be violent; some political organisms dissolve quietly. All it means is that present structures will one day disappear, and be replaced by something else.\n\nThe contending forces of centralization and decentralization have ebbed and flowed in modern British history like the tides of the sea. The Home Rule Bill for Ireland (1912) was matched by a Scottish Home Rule Bill (1914); both suffered the same fate, because the Great War demanded the tightening of ties to the imperial government in London. Lloyd George, one of Britain's wartime prime ministers, had started his career calling for Welsh Home Rule and working for an organization, _Cymru Fydd_ or 'Young Wales', that also faded. But the Armistice was followed in the inter-war period by the opposite tendency. Ireland's secession from the United Kingdom was accompanied by the founding in 1920 of the Scottish National League, the forerunner of the Scottish National Party (SNP), and in 1925 of _Plaid Cymru_ in Wales; as we have seen, Home Rule for Northern Ireland began to operate in 1921.\n\nThe Second World War reinvigorated the centre, only to be followed once again by a centrifugal surge. Ireland's exit from the Commonwealth in 1949 formed part of the general retreat from Empire; the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969 coincided with a phase when the SNP and Plaid Cymru had been winning their first seats in Westminster, where they joined the Ulster Unionists in a spectrum of regional parties. As half a century earlier, when Constance Markiewicz had been elected the first British woman MP, Sinn F\u00e9in refused to take the oath to the Crown or to occupy the seats it had won. Yet the tide was already on the turn when the British government ceded referendums on devolution in Scotland and Wales in 1979, and defeat of the devolutionists preceded twenty years of respite.\n\nThe demands from the 'UK's regions' inexorably built up again in the 1990s, and immediately after their general election victory in 1997 the 'Scotto-Brits' of New Labour introduced a devolved parliament and government in Edinburgh for Scotland, a devolved Assembly and Executive in Cardiff for Wales, and proposals for similar devolved arrangements in Northern Ireland. They had come together under the late John Smith, MP for North Lanarkshire and leader of the Labour Party 1992\u20134, in circumstances making them acutely conscious of the electoral threat to the Scottish Labour Party from the SNP; they understood far better that any English politicians that the interplay of Westminster politics with that of the new 'regional centres' was becoming a key feature of the overall system. Under Tony Blair in 1997\u20132007 and Gordon Brown in 2007\u201310, they stayed loyal to their devolutionary principles, but took no steps either to apply them to the regions within England or to create a devolved English legislature. Their hesitations have left the political architecture of the United Kingdom in the early twenty-first century inherently unbalanced. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland cannot develop any sense of equality with their over-mighty English partner; and the English have little incentive to address the inbuilt instability. The kingdom is not well prepared for the next turn of the tide; resentments grow, and solidarity is sapped.\n\nThe introduction of self-government undoubtedly deflates centrifugal pressures, and wins time for re-consolidation. But the history of other empires that decided to decentralize \u2013 like Austria-Hungary after 1867 \u2013 proves equally that life in autonomous provinces provides a school for separatists, who see their autonomy as a step towards national independence. (Before 1916, as we saw, Arthur Griffith had been pressing for an Austro-Hungarian solution in Ireland.) The British case is interesting because the united state has always contained within itself three consciously non-English nations, whose tectonic plates have long been drifting away from London's central control. There may be a devolutionary lull, but it will not last for ever. The events of 1998 are still too close to see if devolution \u2013 which has a secondary meaning of 'degeneration' \u2013 is going to hold up for another generation or not. Time is always the hardest dimension to judge.\n\nIreland played the key role in the first stage of the United Kingdom's disintegration in 1919\u201322, and it will no doubt play its part in the stages still to come. It split off in less than ideal circumstances when British imperial confidence was still strong; it took dominion status within the Commonwealth as a stepping stone towards the final shore; and it weathered many adverse forecasts. Yet it held its own, and in due course reached its intended destination. The little boy from the Little Lodge lived to see it pass most of the stops on the way: from Republic to Free State, from Free State back to Republic, and from Commonwealth member to aspirant candidate of the European Economic Community. 'We have always found the Irish a bit odd,' Churchill once remarked, no doubt with a grin. 'They refuse to be English.' Ireland's present financial plight is bad \u2013 worse, it is said, than the United Kingdom's \u2013 but is unlikely to be terminal given the prop supplied by the Eurozone. Assuming that it recovers, the Republic will again be minded to assist any who contemplate following its lead. For the time being, a significant new factor lies in the rise of the Nationalists in the North and their growing impact on the Republic. In the British general election of 2010, the combined vote of the Unionist parties (DUP plus UUP) fell below that of the combined anti-Unionists (Sinn F\u00e9in plus SDLP). Gerry Adams was preparing to present himself not only as the democratic majority leader in the North but also as the only true champion of republicanism in the island as a whole.\n\nHowever, just as the construction of the British state and nation took place by stages over many years, its deconstruction can only be expected to proceed in like manner \u2013 in an extended process involving successive lurches, lulls and landslips. It will also depend on the continued health and strength of the European Union. Would-be separatists in Britain are encouraged by the existence of a European home, where they can take refuge. Yet in the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, the Community is less open to newcomers than previously, and it is far from certain that the EU can continue to drift in its present unwieldy and ineffectual form. The immediate future may be determined by a race between the United Kingdom and the EU over which beats the other to a major crisis.\n\nThe fate of the monarchy will inevitably form another element in the drama. The United Kingdom has been a monarchical state from the start, and the weakening or termination of the monarchy must necessarily have far-reaching consequences. Most analysts, however, do not look beyond the hoary arguments between constitutional monarchy and republicanism. More recently, the monarchists appeared to have the upper hand, maintaining that the modern monarchy, far from being democracy's enemy, adds stability and legitimacy to the democratic institutions, with which it co-operates. One prominent pundit wrote a book _On Royalty_ only to find that he was losing faith in his initial republican sympathies. Criticism is widespread about individual royals, as it is about primogeniture and the exclusion of Catholics, but not about the basic issue of the monarchy's existence. British republicanism remains weak. A campaign group called 'Republic' was founded in 1983, and is frequently asked politely for comments. Its activities have been facilitated by a ruling of the law lords which determined in 2003 that the moribund Treason (Felony) Act could not be invoked against peaceful advocacy of a republic. The realms of possibility do not exclude the chance that the heirs and successors of Elizabeth II might just fall by the wayside without warning; no one who remembers the abdication crisis of 1936 would bet on the monarchy failing to serve up a surprise. But the joyous wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton in April 2011 seemed to be pointing in the opposite direction, as were the opinion polls. All indications suggested that nothing radical would happen during Elizabeth II's lifetime, and her longevity looked assured.\n\nYet polls are poor long-term predictors, and in any case the future of the monarchy and the potential break-up of the British state are two very different things. If by some stroke of fortune, the republicans were to prevail, they would rebuild the machinery of government and change the states's name, perhaps to the 'United British Republic'; but the elementary facts of the state's territory, population and make-up would remain intact. Not so if the United Kingdom were to disintegrate, and spawn a series of new sovereign entities from its constituent parts. In the latter case, the monarch of the day would pushed into a choice between retiring gracefully or soldiering on in reduced circumstances. It is perfectly possible to imagine a small group of stoical, diehard royals clinging to the throne, stiffening their upper lips, and watching with noble resignation as their kingdom crumbled around them. That the captain goes down with his ship is an honourable British tradition.\n\nNonetheless, the monarchy's fate is of secondary significance, if not largely irrelevant to the more profound issue of the state's survival; the United Kingdom will still be facing dissolution whether a king or queen continues to reign or not. Permutations in the most likely sequence of future political landslips are numerous, offering a variety of alternative scenarios. Scotland, almost certainly, will make the first move, although it is not yet ready to do so. The SNP has held the reins of government in Edinburgh from 2009 and openly favours separation; its electoral triumph in May 2011 increased its standing but its further success is dependent on numerous unknowns. Even if it manages to organize a referendum on Scottish independence, it is very unlikely to succeed at the first attempt. It was given a huge boost by the hostile stance of Mrs Thatcher's right-wing regime in the 1980s, and a similar effect could be forecast if Westminster were to revert to a Thatcherite position. As matters stand, they were complicated in 2010 by the formation of a British coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, who were less abrasive than a straight Tory administration might have been. The Liberal Democrats, in particular, had still to prove whether they could salvage a support-base in Scotland. If they fail, the British government will be dependent for the first time ever on almost exclusively English representation.\n\nEven so, the long-term trends are clear enough. English resentment against the 'peripheries' is sure to balloon in times of austerity, boosting support for specifically English-orientated organizations like the Campaign for an English Parliament or, on the right-wing fringe, the English Defence League; this resentment as much as Scottish nationalism will be decisive in driving the Scots from the Union. What exactly will trigger the breach can only be imagined, but the ongoing problems of the euro conjure up some menacing perspectives. If the bail-out of Ireland in 2010, which cost 85 billion euros, were to be followed by a more costly emergency in a much larger country like Spain or Italy, one can well postulate that the British government would refuse to contribute; and in the ensuing fracas, it would reasonable to expect that a body of English Eurosceptics would seize the opportunity to demand Britain's withdrawal from the EU. Such a demand could be the match that fires the keg. The Europhile Scots, the Europhile Welsh and the Europhile Irish would be enraged. If the SNP were to stage its referendum at a juncture when voting for Scottish independence was posed in terms of leaving the United Kingdom but staying in the EU, the SNP's chances of winning would be greatly enhanced. If they won, the Act of Union would be revoked; Scotland would take its place alongside Ireland as a sovereign member of the EU, and the United Kingdom as we know it would disappear. Other Scottish escape routes can be plotted.\n\nWhen Scotland departs, a crestfallen England \u2013 frustrated, diminished and shorn of its great-power pretensions \u2013 will be left in the company of two far smaller dependencies. Resultant discomforts will grow sharply. Autonomous Wales will compete with autonomous Northern Ireland to make the next move. Timescales are hard to estimate, but in ten or twenty years' time, political evolution may have progressed further in Ulster than is Wales. Throughout the twentieth century Ulster Unionists could afford to be intransigent, because they possessed a local, democratic majority; in the twenty-first century they will be squeezed by the growing demographic advantage of the Catholic and nationalist community. How will they react? The Protestant heirs of Edward Carson and Ian Paisley are never going to be dragged willingly into the bosom of the Irish Republic, but they will have to compromise; and since they have long viewed Scotland as their ancestral home, they may well seek a rescue through some form of partnership 'across the water', jumping before they are pushed. Difficult adjustments would be necessary on all sides; the Irish counties may have to be repartitioned, and sectarian sensitivities calmed. European mediators may play a part. But a generation that has grown up in peace will strain every sinew to avoid a return to the Troubles. And once the Anglo-Scottish union has been broken, the environment for Belfast, Dublin and Edinburgh to seek a common destiny will be much improved.\n\nThat would leave Wales standing alone with England. Nothing could be more conducive to a sharpening of Welsh political instincts, to demands in Cardiff for further devolution and to a comprehensive rapprochement between 'Welsh Wales' and South Wales. The English would be losing heart; the Red Dragon's departure would only be a matter of time. The Welsh, who once were the original Britons, would end up being the last of the Britons.\n\nIf by any chance the monarchy were to keep functioning, it would be obliged to readapt its titles to each successive shift. When Scotland leaves the United Kingdom, 'Great Britain' will be dropped from the royal title, which will change perhaps to the neologism of 'kings (or queens) of England, Wales and Northern Ireland'. When Northern Ireland leaves, the title could revert to that of 'kings (or queens) of England and Wales', as under Henry VIII in 1536. If a monarch were still in post when Wales leaves, he or she will be back to being 'king (or queen) of England'. This is a title which many misguided English subjects believe to have been current all along. It would not apply, of course, if an English Republic had been declared in the meantime, or if at some point the House of Windsor had morphed into the House of Balmoral and had mounted the Scottish throne.\n\nAs ever, when a political community dissolves, the residue will include a collection of songs, and of emotions which the songs embody. The key emotion will be nostalgia, that is, a wistful sentiment inspired by loss, the pain of being separated from one's home. Nothing is more powerfully nostalgic than the words and haunting melody of Ireland's most deservedly famous song:\n\n> Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling\n> \n> From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.\n> \n> The summer's gone, and all the roses falling.\n> \n> 'Tis you, 'tis you must go, and I must bide.\n> \n> But come ye back, when summer's in the meadow,\n> \n> Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow.\n> \n> 'Tis I'll be there, in sunshine or in shadow.\n> \n> Oh, Danny boy, oh Danny boy, I love you so\n\nSaturated with 'Celtic melancholy', these words were written, surprisingly and appropriately, by an Englishman. The melody, the incomparable 'Londonderry Air', is classed as Irish Traditional.\n\n## 15\n\n## CCCP\n\n_The Ultimate Vanishing Act (1924\u20131991)_\n\n##### I\n\nEstonia reaches the world headlines only sporadically. It did so in 1994, when a sea-going ferry sank in the night in the Gulf of Finland with the loss of nearly a thousand lives, and it did so again in April 2007. On the latter occasion, the Estonian government had ordered the removal of a war memorial from the centre of the capital to a suburban cemetery. The result was violent rioting, followed by a strange episode that some commentators called 'the world's third cyber war', organized, or so it appeared, by or from the country's largest neighbour.* A very tiny flea had somehow enraged a very big bear.\n\nEstonia joined the European Union in 2004. One of ten new member states, it was one of three entrants which, until recently, had formed part of the Soviet Union. Its accession substantially extended the EU's frontier with Russia that had first come into being to the north of St Petersburg, Russia's second city, as a result of Finland's accession in 1995.\n\nEstonia, 17,370 square miles in area, is twentieth in size of the EU's present member states, larger than Denmark but smaller than Slovakia. In terms of population, with 1.3 million inhabitants, it ranks twenty-fourth, between Cyprus and Slovenia. Its culture and history are nearest to those of its northern neighbour, Finland, from which it is separated by an arm of the Baltic Sea. Its name for itself, as seen on its postage stamps, is _Eesti_ , which derives from a Scandinavian label given to the peoples of the eastern Baltic, and which even appears in Tacitus.\n\nThe Estonian language belongs to the Finno-Ugrian group; apart from Finnish, it has no major close linguistic relatives in Europe (its other geographical neighbours \u2013 Swedish, Latvian and Russian \u2013 are Indo-European). It owes its origin to a prehistoric migration from western Siberia, where other Ugric peoples still survive. Its sound system is characterized by an unusual triple gradation of phoneme length \u2013 short, long and overlong. Its morphology, like that of Turkish or Hungarian, is 'agglutinative', meaning that simple verbal units are often 'glued together' to form lengthy compounds; its orthography has been adapted since the seventeenth century to the Latin alphabet. It has three main dialects \u2013 one connected with Tallinn; another with Tartu; and a third called _Kirderannikumurre_ based on the north-east coastland. The final amalgam is almost totally incomprehensible to the outside world. The opening sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Estonian reads ' _K\u00f5ik inimesed s\u00fcnnivad vabadena ja v\u00f5rdsetena omav\u00e4\u00e4rikuselt ja \u00f5igustelt_' ('All people are born free and equal in their dignity and rights').\n\nTallinn, the capital, is a Baltic port city of some 400,000 people. Its name is usually explained by the phrase ' _Taani-linna_ ', meaning 'Danish castle', which reflects the fact that it was long dominated by foreign seafarers, while the Estonians lived primarily in the interior. (For much of its long history, it was best known by its German, Swedish, Russian and Danish name of Reval.) There are three distinct quarters. The _Toompea_ or _Domberg_ , 'Cathedral Hill', was formed round the original medieval fortress built in 1219; the Lower City crowds round the port area; and the outer suburbs developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries when rural Estonians moved in to work in the city's expanding industries. The ethnic breakdown of the citizens (2007) indicates 54.9 per cent Estonians, and 42 per cent Slavs, mainly Russian. These figures are very different from those of the period immediately before 1940, when few Russians but many Germans were present.\n\nTravel to Estonia is easy, either by air to Tallinn, by ferry from Helsinki, or by rail from Riga or St Petersburg. The country has become something of a Mecca for the adventurous traveller who wants to explore unfamiliar places that until recently were completely out of bounds. The tourist brochures recommend a combination of sightseeing in Tallinn and Tartu and of communing with nature in the many forests, lakes and islands. The Toompea castle, the Toomkirik church and the medieval ramparts top the sightseeing list in Tallinn. The summer Estonian Song Festival is a big draw to Tartu, which is also a university town. The Lahemaa National Park lies only 30 miles east of Tallinn along the coast. Bear, moose, boar and wolves roam the woods. Fishing for northern pike or eel, or bird-watching along the expansive shore of Lake Peipus, offer unusual experiences. Beach-walking at Pirita or P\u00e4rnu can be exhilarating.\n\nThe walk up Cathedral Hill in Tallinn reveals many layers of history. Once the northernmost member of the Hanseatic League, the city passed through phases of rule by Denmark, the Teutonic Order, Sweden and, from 1721, the Russian Empire. The sixty-six towers of the heavily fortified walls indicate how successive governors valued their prize. The slender spire of St Olav's, once the tallest in Europe, belongs to the late medieval period before the arrival of Lutheranism. Yet it is striking that the prime location at the top of the hill continues to be dominated by the Russian Orthodox church of St Alexander Nevsky, which overshadows the Lutheran cathedral and which was completed in the last years of tsarist rule. A plan in 1924 to demolish this exuberant symbol of foreign power was not carried out by Estonia's first independent government; in the 1990s, following Estonia's second independence, it has been meticulously restored.\n\nAs an ex-Soviet state, Estonia naturally takes pride in its multi-party parliamentary democracy introduced after the constitutional referendum of 1992, and in its free-market economy. The present prime minister, Andrus Ansip (b. 1956), head of the Reform Party and a former mayor of Tartu, has run a coalition government since 2005. The president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves (b. 1953), born in Sweden and educated in the United States, a former foreign minister, was elected in 2006. The Bertelsmann Transformation Index places Estonia first out of fifteen 'post-Soviet states' in its final, weighted average for all-round political, economic and social performance.\n\nControversies arise, as in any democracy. In March 2010 several newspapers printed blank pages in protest against a government bill requiring journalists to disclose their sources of information in certain well-defined areas. _Pravda_ in Moscow regarded the bill as outrageous and Estonian democracy 'a profanation'. 'The level of democracy there is similar to that of ancient Athens,' _Pravda_ 's correspondent commented; 'it's democracy for the privileged.' This view may be compared with that of the Press Freedom Global Rankings (2009). Estonia with a status of 'Free' comes 6th out of 175, higher than both the United Kingdom and the United States; Russia with a status of 'Not Free' comes 153rd.\n\nSurprisingly perhaps, the aspect of life in Estonia which many choose to praise is not democracy, sightseeing or communing with nature, but the electronic revolution. Tallinn, the home of Kazaa and Skype, is publicized as the 'super-connected capital' and the 'champion of the digital age':\n\n> Estonia has broken free from its Eastern bloc shackles to emerge anew as European champion of the digital age... In Tallinn free internet access is taken for granted and the acceptance of digital ID cards has opened up a world of mobile phone-enabled e-commerce. Not only do Estonians buy lottery tickets, annual travel passes, and beer at a concert via SMS, they also carry out the majority of their banking transactions electronically...\n> \n> Practising what they preach, the country's leaders have also embraced wireless technology; documents are reviewed from internet terminals and laptops provided in parliament. Laws are filed electronically... The public can access draft laws and minutes from parliamentary debates online... Estonia became the first nation to allow electronic voting for parliamentary elections in 2007...\n> \n> It's little wonder, then, that the world's most talented young IT professionals have flocked to Estonia's capital to establish e-businesses. It's quite a transformation... 'Back in 1991, Estonia wanted to be the best in something, and it seized the opportunity with IT.'\n\nIn January 2009 Tallinn was named as one of the world's top seven 'Intelligent Communities'.\n\nNevertheless, visitors to Estonia will soon encounter the strong attachment to folk culture, and to the feeling that land and people are one. A nation which lived for centuries on the edge of civilization and which had no name for itself other than _maarahvas_ , meaning 'locals', has been deeply impressed by the age-old struggle for survival and identity. Before the nineteenth century, there was little written literature, and, exactly as in Finland, the movement of national awakening was launched by writers who collected oral legends and transposed them into modern imitations of what they imagined to be ancient poetry. In Finland, the task was undertaken by Elias L\u00f6nnrot (1802\u201384), author of the world-famous _Kalevala_ , and in Estonia by his exact contemporary, Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald (1803\u201382), author of the _Kalevipoeg_ or _Kalevide_ (1853), the 'Son of Kalev'. Both men were country physicians, and neither, despite their German names, was German. Kreutzwald's parents had been serfs. He himself had been a village schoolteacher before qualifying in medicine. He only took up the challenge of reconstructing the tales of Kalev and Linda after his colleague, Dr Faehlmann, the original pioneer, died young.\n\nKreuzwald's _Kalevipoeg_ is universally regarded in Estonia as the national epic. It recounts the adventures of the giant Soini in 19,000 verses arranged in twenty cantos, which to outsiders (except perhaps Finns) are written in pure gobbledegook:\n\n> _S\u00f5ua, laulik, lausa suuga,_\n> \n> _S\u00f5ua laululaevakesta,_\n> \n> _Pajataja paadikesta \u2013_\n> \n> _S\u00f5ua neid senna kaldale,_\n> \n> _Kuhu kotkad kuldas\u00f5nu,_\n> \n> _Kaarnad h\u00f5bekuulutusi,_\n> \n> _Luiked vaskseid luaastusi_\n> \n> _Vanast ajast varistanud,_\n> \n> _Muiste p\u00e4ivist pillutanud..._ 10\n\nAccording to tradition, Kalev and his spouse Linda were regarded as the protoplasts of the modern nation; and their story is told to every Estonian child:\n\n> Kalev foretold the glory and greatness of [their] last son to Linda, indicating [Soini], still unborn, as his heir, and shortly after fell dangerously sick.\n> \n> Then Linda took her brooch, and spun it round on a thread, while she sent forth the Alder-Beetle... to beseech the aid of the Moon. But the Moon only gazed on him sorrowfully...\n> \n> Again Linda spun the brooch and sent forth the beetle... as far as the Gold Mountain, till he encountered the Evening Star, but he also refused him to answer.\n> \n> Next time, the beetle took a different route, over wide heaths and thick fir-woods till he met... the rising sun. [And], on a fourth journey, [he] encountered the Wind-Magician, the old Soothsayer from Suomi, the great Necromancer himself. But they replied with one voice that... what the moonlight had blanched... could never bloom again. And before the beetle returned from his fruitless journey, the mighty Kalev had expired.\n> \n> Linda sat weeping by his bedside without food or drink for seven days and seven nights, and then began to prepare [him] for burial. First she bathed him with her tears, then with salt water from the sea, rain water from the clouds, and lastly water from the spring. Then she smoothed his hair with her fingers, and brushed it with a silver brush, and combed it with a golden comb... She drew on him a silken shirt, a satin shroud, and a robe confined with a silver girdle. She dug his grave herself, thirty ells beneath the sod, and grass and flowers soon sprang from it.\n>\n>> From the grave the grasses sprouted,\n>> \n>> And the herbage from the hillock;\n>> \n>> From the dead man dewy grasses,\n>> \n>> From his cheeks grew ruddy flowers,\n>> \n>> From his eyes there sprang the harebells,\n>> \n>> Golden flowerets from the eyelids...\n> \n> Linda mourned Kalev for three months and more... \/ She heaped a cairn of stones over his tomb, \/ which formed the hill where \/ the Cathedral of [Tallinn] now stands... The Upper Lake, on Tallinn's inland side, was said to be formed from Linda's tears.\n\nIf the folk legends of the Baltic region occupy the most distant part of Estonia's timeline, the most recent period is taken up with the Soviet years of 1940\u201391. Many foreign observers will find much to admire in current efforts to cope with the Soviet legacy. The Russian Federation, a fellow post-Soviet state, is 358 times Estonia's size, and to keep an even keel in the turbulent wake of the giant neighbour demands great skill and nerve.\n\nThe strategy of the Estonian government is based on membership of two international organizations, the European Union and NATO, which provide a measure of political, economic and military security that Estonia on its own could not dream of. Many people in the West are not always aware that Russia still upholds the concept of the 'near-abroad', that is, an extraterritorial sphere of influence in which Moscow feels entitled to interfere.\n\nThe Museum of Occupations, opened in 2003, is the product of an information policy that is calmly undermining the shibboleths of the Soviet era. The name says it all. Estonia in the Second World War suffered invasions both by the Nazis and by the Soviets, and large numbers of citizens were killed by each set of invaders. It is a vital service to historical truth, therefore, that the word 'occupation', with all the terrible things it implies, be employed in its plural form. To the Soviet mind-set, as to the present-day Kremlin, this simple rectification of the historical record is anathema. In Soviet usage, as in that of many Britons and Americans, the negative word 'occupation' is applied exclusively to the misdeeds of the Nazis, while all actions of the anti-fascist alliance are referred to as 'liberation'.\n\nRectifying the history books is equally necessary. In 1998 the Estonian president convened an International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, which has produced a huge volume of 1,337 pages chronicling the basic facts of the wartime experience. The book's cover shows a Nazi swastika and a Soviet Red Star both dripping blood. Difficult issues, such as the reasons why different groups of Estonians fought either on the German or on the Soviet side, are confronted. In the realm of film, an Estonian-Canadian has produced an award-winning documentary entitled _Gulag_ 113 (2005), the name of a Soviet concentration camp near Kotlas in the Arctic, based on personal testimonies.\n\nThe 'War of Symbols' has its roots in the baleful legacy of Soviet fictions which modern Estonia constantly seeks to counter. After the Red Army's triumph in 1944\u20135, like all other 'liberated countries', Estonia was covered by a rash of grandiose monuments hailing Soviet achievements. One of the largest is the _Monument Sovietskiy_ at Paldiski, where a Soviet submarine base once functioned. Another, the _Maarjam\u00e4e_ Memorial by the seaside at Pirata, is a concrete and iron complex surrounding a tall obelisk. An extra spire was added in 1960 to mark Russian soldiers killed in 1918. A third, known as the _Pronkss\u00f6dur_ , or _Bronze Soldier_ , stood in the centre of Tallinn until 2007.\n\nIt needs to be borne in mind that while the Soviet authorities expended considerable money and energy restoring monuments with Soviet or Russian connections, including the Palace of Catherine the Great at Kadriorg, they forcibly suppressed all memory sites associated with Estonia's own independent history. As a result, the Soviet memorials, which were viewed by Russians as symbols of pride, were viewed by Estonians as symbols of oppression. What is more, having no places to pay respect to their own dead, Estonians were forced to improvise. The pre-war Linda Monument, for example, which depicts the legendary heroine mourning Kalev, took on new connotations during the Cold War. Standing on a street in the Lower City, it became the unofficial site for remembrance of the post-war Stalinist terror. People leaving flowers there risked arrest. Nowadays, a modern plaque reads: 'TO REMEMBER THE PEOPLE WHO WERE TAKEN AWAY'.\n\nIn the continuing climate of recrimination, the decision of the Estonian government to relocate the _Bronze Soldier_ is variously judged either highly offensive or perfectly reasonable. By Soviet standards, the memorial was a modest one. A six-foot-tall statue, modelled on the figure of a pre-war Olympic wrestler, stood in a thoughtful pose, with bowed head, in front of a simple wall of dolomite stone. The problem lay in its prime location and in the inscription: 'TO THE LIBERATORS OF TALLINN', which the great majority of citizens felt inappropriate. So in April 2007 it was relocated to the war cemetery, to join the Soviet war graves. It was not destroyed or blown up, as some reports insisted, or defaced or banished out of sight. Yet the resultant outburst was immediate and violent. Thousands of ethnic Russians marched on downtown Tallinn, waving Russian flags and shouting anti-Estonian slogans. Rioting raged for two days. Shops were looted and windows smashed; 300 disturbers of the peace were detained.\n\nNot content with the strength of this reaction, Vladimir Putin, president of the Russian Federation, used the occasion of the annual Red Square parade on 9 May to fuel the fire: 'Those who are trying today to desecrate memorials to war heroes are insulting their own people and sowing enmity and new distrust,' he told thousands of veterans and soldiers. Kremlin sources accused Estonia of 'blasphemy' and of 'indulging neo-fascists'. Members of a Kremlin-backed youth movement barricaded the Estonian embassy in Moscow.\n\nSuch was the context of the mysterious 'cyber war'. The basic facts are not in dispute. The websites of Estonian government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks and businesses were disabled by tens of thousands of simultaneous electronic 'hits'. Their servers were swamped, and a domino-style sequence of Distributed Denial of Service (DDS) was triggered: in other words, paralysis. The attacks came in three waves: one starting on 27 April, just after the relocation of the _Bronze Soldier_ ; a second on 9 May, after Putin's speech; the third a week later. They were on a scale that could only be achieved by mobilizing a worldwide network of up to a million co-ordinated computers which had either been hijacked or rented through the so-called 'botnet' system. Fortunately, as a member of the EU and NATO, Estonia could draw on international assistance, and, with the help of the Asymmetric Threats Contingency Alliance (ATCA), was successful in ending the emergency.\n\nThe outstanding question is who was responsible. In talking to the Russian authorities, EU and NATO officials were careful to avoid direct accusations, and Kremlin officials were quick to deny them, suggesting instead that sophisticated Estonian computer specialists had masterminded a cyber offensive against their own government. Many things are possible, but some possibilities are more probable than others, and there are certain similarities between these and other mysterious events such as the murder in London of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko in November 2006 by radioactive polonium 210. Very few countries, companies or individuals possess the resources to launch sting operations at $200 million a shot. The cyber offensive against Estonia does not fit into the same category as other known episodes, such as Moonlight Maze (1999), when unidentified hackers penetrated the Pentagon, or Titan Rain (2003), which apparently came out of China, both of which are classed as simple info-gathering, 'phishing' exercises. According to one expert, the sole purpose of repeatedly using a vast stream of ten Mbit\/s for ten hours, as occurred in Estonia, is to cripple the victim's infrastructure.\n\nInternational law was not very helpful. As things stood in 2007, an attack on a member state's communications centre by bombs or missiles would automatically have invoked Article V of the NATO Treaty as an act of war, but an anonymous 'botnet' attack fell into a grey area. It may just be a coincidence that during the attack on Estonia attack the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 'the first line of defence against cyber-terrorism', happened to be holding a conference in Seattle. It may be irrelevant that some attackers could be traced to Internet addresses in Moscow. And it may be true, as one Finnish expert commented, that 'the Kremlin could inflict much more serious cyber-damage if it chose to'. Yet someone, somewhere, was going to extraordinary lengths to send a message.\n\nThe Estonian government's determination to press ahead and join the Eurozone as planned on 1 January 2011 can only be seen in the light of the cyber-experience. Sceptical commentators said that it had bought 'the last ticket to the _Titanic_ '. The previous year, 2010, had witnessed a major sovereign debt crisis in which the future of the euro was repeatedly called into question. Two countries in the zone, Greece and Ireland, had been forced to accept painful bail-outs, and several others were thought to be teetering on the same brink. It was not a moment of confidence in the euro, yet Estonia did not falter. It had recovered from the global recession, returning to GDP growth at +2.4 per cent after 12 months of headlong fall in 2009 of -13.9 per cent. On New Year's Day, therefore, it became the seventeenth member of the Eurozone; the _kroon_ ceased to circulate, being exchanged for euros at the rate of 1E = 15.6466 _krooni. '_ Estonia is too small', said the finance minister, 'to allow itself the luxury of full independence.' The flea, it seemed, was seeking safety in numbers against the unwelcome attentions of the bear.\n\n##### II\n\nMany myths and misunderstandings persist about Soviet history. As often as not, textbooks state quite inaccurately that the Soviet Union was founded in 1917 by the Bolshevik Revolution. They imply that Lenin's party had been the principal revolutionary force in the Russian Empire and overthrew the tsar, and that the Soviet Union was just a further stage in the seamless continuum of Russia and the Russians. The so-called 'Russian Civil War' is usually presented as a domestic affair, fought out between Russian 'Whites' and Russian 'Reds'. In more recent times, the Russian Federation of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin is frequently presented not as one of the fifteen post-Soviet states, but rather as the product of a mere change of government, as just the latest variant on the unchanging Russian theme. Some may be surprised to learn, therefore, that the Soviet Union was created on 1 January 1924 and dissolved on 31 December 1991.\n\nIn formal terms, the Tsarist Empire of 'all the Russias', which reached its end in February 1917, had been created by Peter the Great in 1721. But Peter's empire prolonged and expanded the political and territorial complex that had been assembled earlier by the grand dukes or 'tsars' of Muscovy. 'The gathering of the lands', a long process whereby Moscow aimed to take control of all the East Slavs, had been proclaimed in the fifteenth century. Expansion across the Urals into Siberia and Central Asia, the largest demographic vacuum on the globe, was launched at the end of the sixteenth century; the conquest of lands in the west and north-west possessed by Sweden and Poland began in the mid-seventeenth. The pace of expansion was relentless. Between 1683 and 1914 it averaged 53 square miles per day, and may be characterized as a case of _bulimia politica_. Despite some regurgitations, the result by the early twentieth century was an imperial domain of unparalleled dimensions in which ethnic Russians represented barely half of the population.\n\nIf the Russians constituted the largest of the seventy or so nationalities in the Tsarist Empire, the Estonians were one of the smallest. Like the Finns, they had spent most of modern history within the political sphere of Sweden. Much of their homeland lay within the historic Swedish province of Ingria, or in Livonia; the Russian connection did not impinge until the Russo-Polish and Russo-Swedish wars of relatively recent times. Russia's imperial capital, St Petersburg, was founded in 1703 in a Swedish-Estonian-Finnish district without the slightest reference either to international law or to the local inhabitants. Russia's possession of Estonia was confirmed by the Treaty of Nystadt (1721) at the close of the Great Northern War.\n\nAfter the emancipation of their serfs under Alexander I \u2013 earlier than in Russia as a whole \u2013 Estonians rapidly acquired a strong sense of their national identity. As Protestants, they were devoted to education in their own language, and resisted the imposition of Russian. Yet demands for an independent Estonian state only found expression at the turn of the twentieth century, and with very meagre chances of realization. In order to succeed, a very diminutive David would somehow have to challenge a super-colossal Goliath.\n\nTo compound these problems, Estonian society had its own internal divisions. The Estonian-speaking majority were mainly rural peasants. The administration was controlled by Russians, while commercial and landowning interests were largely in the hands of Baltic Germans and of a small Jewish community. The main port, Reval (Tallinn), was especially lacking in Estonian flavour. The whole country was garrisoned by a large Russian army.\n\nThe condition of the Estonians in the early twentieth century was conveyed to the world by the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ in bilious tones:\n\n> The Esths, Ehsts, or Esthonians, who call themselves Tallopoeg and Maamees, are known to the Russians as Chukhni or Chukhontsi, to the Letts as Iggauni, and to the Finns as Virolaiset. They belong to the Finnish family, and consequently to the Ural-Altaic division of the human race. Altogether they number close upon one million, and are thus distributed: 365,959 in Esthonia (in 1897), 518,594 in Livonia, 64,116 in the government of St. Petersburg, 25,458 in that of Pskov, and 12,855 [elsewhere]. As a race they exhibit manifest evidences of their Ural-Altaic or Mongolic descent in their short stature, absence of beard, oblique eyes, broad face, low forehead and small mouth. In addition, they are an under-sized, ill-thriven people, with long arms and thin, short legs. They cling tenaciously to their native language, which is closely allied to the Finnish... Since 1873 the cultivation of their mother tongue has been sedulously promoted by an Esthonian Literary Society ( _Eesti Korjameeste Selts_ ), which publishes _Toimetused_ , or 'Instructions' on all sorts of subjects. They have a decided love of poetry, and exhibit great facility in improvising verses and poems on all occasions, and they sing, everywhere, from morning to night...\n\nOne can easily imagine a Victorian empire-builder describing the Welsh or the Irish in similarly dismissive style. Astonishingly, the author goes on to express the opinion that Estonia's lot had improved through Russification:\n\n> Since 1878, however, a vast change for the better has been effected in their economic position... The determining feature of their recent history has been the attempt made by the Russian government (since 1881) and the Orthodox Greek Church (since 1883) to russify and convert the inhabitants of the province... by enforcing the use of Russian in the schools and by harsh and repressive measures aimed at their native language.\n\nIn all probability, these words reflect the views of a Russian contributor, Prince Piotr Kropotkin.\n\nThe encyclopedia's account of Estonia's capital puts a heavy accent on its Russian and German connections:\n\n> REVAL, or REVEL (Russ. _Revel_ , formerly _Kolyva\u00f1_ ; Esthonian, _Tallina_ and _Tannilin_ ), a fortified seaport town of Russia... situated on... the gulf of Finland, 230 m. W. of St. Petersburg by rail. Pop by nail. (1900) 66,292, of whom half were Esthonians and 30% Germans. The city consists of two parts \u2013 the Domberg or Dom, which occupies a hill, and the lower town on the beach. The Dom contains the castle (first built in the 13th century...), where the provincial administration has its seat, and an [Orthodox] cathedral (1894\u20131900) with five gilded domes... The church of St. Nicholas, built in 1317, contains many antiquities... and old German paintings. The Dom church contains... the graves of the circumnavigator Baron A. J. von Krusenstern (1770\u20131846), of the Swedish soldiers Pontus de la Gardie (d. 1585) and Carl Horn (d. 1601), and of the Bohemian Protestant leader Count Matthias von Thurn (1580\u20131640)...\n> \n> The oldest church is the Esthonian, built in 1219. The public institutions include a good provincial museum of antiquities; an imperial palace, Katharinenthal, built by Peter the Great in 1719; and very valuable archives, preserved in the town hall (14th century). The pleasant situation of the town attracts thousands of people for seabathing. It is the seat of a branch board of the Russian admiralty and of the administration of the Baltic lighthouses. Its port... freezes nearly every winter.\n\nThe break-up of the Tsarist Empire began during the First World War, two years before the Russian revolutions of 1917. In the summer of 1915, German forces broke through Russian lines on the Eastern Front, and occupied large swathes of imperial territory, from Poland and Lithuania in the north to Ukraine in the south. Russian counter-offensives failed, arousing much anger. In February 1917 the tsar was overthrown and imprisoned by his own courtiers, and his autocratic regime replaced by constitutionalists who formed a provisional government. But in November 1917* the provisional government, headed by the socialist Alexander Kerensky, was overthrown by Lenin's Bolsheviks, a smaller but more ruthless socialist faction, in what was effectively a _coup d'\u00e9tat_. Constitutional socialists were replaced by totalitarian socialists (and to add extra irony, Kerensky's father had once been Lenin's headmaster). In their origins, the Bolsheviks had been part of the clandestine Russian Social Democratic Party, but after seizing power they broke with all their former comrades, like the Mensheviks, and treated them with the same absolute disdain that characterized their dealings with all opponents.* In March 1918, at Brest-Litovsk, they were forced to make peace with Germany, and to abandon most of the territory which the Germans had occupied since the outbreak of war. (see p. 378 above).\n\nAs self-proclaimed internationalists, Lenin and his circle were not especially interested in frontiers and territory. They believed that all such matters would be sorted out amicably once the international revolution had destroyed all existing regimes and had joined up with fraternal proletarians in foreign countries. Two events, however, intervened. The first was the outbreak of the Russian Civil War, in which the infant power of the Bolshevik 'Reds' was contested by a variety of adversaries, usually called 'Whites' but made up of conservatives, non-Bolshevik leftists and non-Russian nationalists. The second was the revolt of the many non-Russian nationalities, all of whom chose to break free and to form their own national republics. In 1918\u201319, therefore, the Bolsheviks' area of control, which is best called Soviet Russia, covered only a fraction of the former Tsarist Empire.\u2020 The tasks of the Red Army were threefold: to secure the Russian heartland; to reconquer the breakaway national republics; and to march into Central Europe to provoke the prophesied international revolution.\n\nThe Bolsheviks' bid to engineer revolution throughout Europe by force was launched in 1920, but failed miserably. Lenin on this occasion was the enthusiast, and Leon Trotsky, as commissar for war, despite his reputation, the sceptic. The Red Army marched westwards in May, naming its destination as Berlin or even Paris. They didn't get past Warsaw. They were badly beaten in August by the army of the Polish Republic \u2013 one of the breakaway national states, which had no desire to return to Russian rule, Red or White. From then on, the Bolshevik leaders had to think more seriously about organizing and centralizing power in the lands that they actually controlled.\n\nThe overall performance of the Red Army in those years was very erratic. Finland, the Baltic States and Poland were not brought under Soviet control. But Byelorussia, Ukraine and the vast expanses of Siberia, southern Russia and the Far East were reconquered. So, too, was the Caucasus. Many parts of Central Asia were still being contested in the mid-1920s.\n\nIn 1922, however, Lenin suffered a series of strokes and Joseph Stalin emerged as general secretary of the ruling Bolshevik Party. He rejected Lenin's internationalist priorities, and launched the policy of 'Socialism in One Country'. His purpose was to postpone foreign adventures while building up political, economic and military power. Such was the context for the formation of a Soviet Union. The Bolshevik Party had no intention of relinquishing its dictatorial hold on power, but its doctrine of the 'Party-State' permitted the organization of a number of nominally autonomous but dependent republics; answering to the central Party dictatorship, these republics were also to be joined in federal union. The plans were passed by the Supreme Soviet in December 1923 and put into effect on the first day of the following year. The name of the new federal state was to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR in short: in transliterated Russian, ' _Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Republik'_ , or _SSSR_. The acronym written in Cyrillic was 'CCCP'.\n\nMoscow thereupon became the dual capital both of the Soviet Union and of Soviet Russia. The All-Union government and the subsidiary government of the RSFSR were separate bodies, staffed by different officials. Even so, political power continued to be concentrated, as always, not in Soviet state structures but in the parallel organs of the dictatorial Bolshevik Party, which oversaw the work of all other institutions. In 1925, the Bolsheviks changed their name once more to 'All-union Communist Party' ( _Vsesoyuznaya Komunistichestkaya Partiya_ , or VKP). The VKP's general secretary, Joseph Stalin, the supreme dictator, saw no need to appoint himself to subordinate positions such as president or prime minister of the USSR. The inner sanctum of power was located in Stalin's office in the VKP's headquarters in the Kremlin.\n\nThe events that unfolded in Estonia during those same years combined to bring about a result that few would have thought possible, namely, the declaration of Estonia's independence. During the First World War the German army had in 1915\u201316 swept into the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire in, fatally weakening tsarist power in ways that the local population could never have achieved on its own. The Germans encouraged the national aspirations of non-Russian peoples, and in some places such as Lithuania and Ukraine, they actively supported moves to create sovereign republics. They occupied Reval and Dorpat (Tartu), but stopped short of Petrograd (as St Petersburg had recently been renamed).\n\nIn March 1917 the Russian provisional government proclaimed its intention of continuing the war against Germany and of reuniting the Russian Empire. To counter this policy, the Bolsheviks called for peace, and for the recognition of the national rights of all subject peoples. Estonia, on the doorstep of revolutionary Petrograd, was inevitably excited by the passions of the day. The Baltic Germans were at best unsure. During the civil war which followed, Estonia was the scene of several multi-sided conflicts. It provided the base for one of the 'White' armies attacking Bolshevik Petrograd. At the same time, it witnessed a complicated civil war of its own, in which Bolshevik sympathizers, Estonian national patriots and the German _Baltikum_ army struggled to gain supremacy.\n\nSeen from the Estonian perspective, the key events in that turbulent period were the granting of autonomy to Estonia in March 1917, following a mammoth demonstration in Petrograd, and the peace treaty with Soviet Russia in February 1920. Kerensky, the head of the provisional government, was a liberal and favoured self-government of the non-Russian provinces, which he wanted to keep loyal for the continuing war effort. So on 30 March 1917 a decree was passed consolidating all Estonian-inhabited districts into one province, and authorizing the formation of an administrative executive and a parliament, the _Maap\u00e4ev_.\n\nIn the summer of 1917, however, the provisional government in Petrograd started to lose control. The Bolsheviks were undermining stability in the country and the Germans were advancing up the Baltic coast. At this juncture, an Estonian radical, Jaan T\u00f5nisson, proposed the creation of a Northern Union of all the Baltic countries, including Finland. The goal, as yet out of reach, was independent statehood. 'We can't stand by while our fate is left to the mercy of others,' he declared. 'It's now, or never.'\n\nWhen the Bolshevik coup occurred in November 1917, therefore, an Estonian independence movement was already in existence; and on the following 24 February, the country's future National Day, a declaration of independence was promulgated in Tallinn. It had little prospect of general acceptance: it was opposed by local Communists, who among other things had set up a Soviet mini-republic on the island of Naissaar off Tallinn; all was soon overturned by the extension northwards of the area of German occupation, the _Ober Ost_. The Germans were not welcomed with any enthusiasm, but their presence at least blocked a possible Bolshevik takeover; the Estonian Committee of National Salvation, which had issued the declaration, was forced underground and its emissary to Finland captured by the Germans and shot. Recognition by the Western Allies did not materialize until May. At this stage, however, the Bolsheviks' stance towards breakaway republics was still ambiguous; in some places, notably in Ukraine and the Caucasus, they were crushing the separatists by force, but in the Baltic region they refrained from outright denunciations of national movements. On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, when the Germans laid down their arms, the National Committee resurfaced in Tallinn and reconfirmed their earlier pronouncements.\n\nIn Estonian eyes, the War of Independence began at that point. Lenin did not recognize Estonia's freedom; Red Guards overran many districts, and briefly seized Tallinn. The 'Red Terror' was unleashed in support both of social revolution and of Russian control. Many atrocities were perpetrated, and for a time it appeared that the 'Reds' would prevail. Yet Estonian defences held. A small Estonian army, under General Johan Laidoner, used armoured trains to disrupt Bolshevik communications. Britain's Royal Navy landed supplies, and Finnish volunteers crossed the Gulf of Finland. No clear verdict had been achieved when a new enemy appeared in the form of German volunteers, the _Baltikum Landwehr,_ marching out of Latvia. Three-sided hostilities persisted until the end of 1919.\n\nBy that time, Trotsky's main Red Army was winning the Russian Civil War, and a major attack on Estonia was daily awaited. Yet Lenin's inner circle had other ideas. They had always argued that a proletarian revolution in Russia must necessarily link up with a wider revolution in the major capitalist countries, so now, having secured Russia and set their minds on a strategic offensive through Poland to Germany, they abandoned secondary operations such as the conquest of Estonia. The attack on Narva with 160,000 men had brought no results. It was opportune to sue for peace, and a truce was arranged before Soviet Russian and Estonian negotiators assembled at Tartu.\n\nThe Tartu Treaty between Estonia and Soviet Russia was signed on 2 February 1920:\n\n> Russia recognised Estonia's independence, 'giving up of free will and for ever all the sovereign rights that Russia had over the Estonian people and country.' Soviet Russia paid Estonia 15 million gold roubles from the tsarist gold reserves. Under the peace treaty Estonia agreed to disarm the White Russian army on its territory, for which [the] Whites later bitterly reproached [her]. Larger countries were also not enthusiastic... According to the western countries Estonia should have fought Russia until the fall of communism and the restoration of the White government, after which it should have peacefully reunited with Russia. It is understandable that Estonia was not interested in such a future...\n\nThe dissonance between the interests of small nations and the ideas of Westerners, who pursued stability at anyone's cost but their own, was manifest.\n\nEstonia's independence, therefore, was achieved almost exclusively by Estonian efforts. It had little to do with the Western Powers or their Versailles settlement. What is more, it came about well before the creation of the Soviet Union and the stabilization of Soviet affairs by Joseph Stalin. 'Today Estonia commands its future for the first time,' declared the chief Estonian representative at Tartu, Jaan Poska. But he added: 'The threat has not yet passed.'\n\nUnder Stalin's direction, the USSR was transformed in less than two decades from a backward, largely peasant country into a modern power of considerable industrial and military potential. Stalin was driven partly by Communist ideology and partly by memories of the humiliating defeat of the Great War. When he launched his accelerated programme of Five Year Plans and collectivized agriculture in 1929, he said: 'If we don't transform this country in ten years, our enemies will destroy us.'\n\nThis socio-economic transformation, however, was achieved through the most appalling cruelty, violence, terror and mass murder. The USSR built the world's first major concentration camp system: the Gulag. Millions died during forced collectivization and during the artificial famine produced in Ukraine. The Communist Party itself was subjected to violent purges and disgraceful show trials, and in the 'Great Terror' of 1937\u20139 vast numbers of ordinary men and women were simply shot at random to create the ultimate totalitarian climate where no one felt safe. The Soviet economy, which many foreign observers imagined to be a fascinating experiment, was made to work by suppressing all normal human incentives and spontaneous initiatives: 'Stalin built this Brobdingnagian economy on the bones of kulaks and prisoners... It was not designed to generate the stream of information necessary for self-regulation, but to respond to orders from the regime. It was an economy planned for total control. But control in the absence of terror cannot be total.' Westerners, distracted by the rise of fascism, were notoriously slow to recognize the true nature of the USSR. Anyone living in the countries bordering the USSR was likely to be better informed.\n\nThroughout the inter-war period, the Estonian Republic made rapid progress towards the creation of a modern state and society. The Bolshevik model did not appeal. A democratic republican constitution was passed on 15 June 1920. All the national institutions \u2013 civil service, education, justice, welfare and armed forces \u2013 had to be organized from scratch, and the Estonian language itself had to be adapted. All this, not surprisingly, caused considerable difficulties, not least since the Estonians were used to being governed either in Russian or in German.\n\nAfter joining the League of Nations in 1920 as a founder member, Estonia gained universal recognition. It played a full part in international trade, in various pan-European cultural projects, and in numerous international bodies from the Red Cross to the International Postal Union. In foreign policy, the Estonian government was naturally drawn to the company of Western democracies, which had championed the cause of national self-determination. As in the parallel case of Finland, considerable tact and restraint had to be exercised so as not to arouse the ire of the giant neighbour.\n\nYet there were limits to what could be achieved. Communist agitation persisted, despite the Tartu Treaty, and in 1924 Estonia survived a brazen attempt to overthrow it:\n\n> With Comintern's support, the leaders of the putsch received training and equipment in the Soviet Union from where they were then secretly taken to Estonia. The Soviet embassy in Estonia participated actively in the preparations. Military forces were massed on the Estonian borders, and the Red Navy's Baltic Fleet set out to sea. Soviet journalists started a fierce campaign of anti-Estonia propaganda. On December 1, 1924 several hundred insurgents attacked the more important strategic points and military units in Tallinn. Their goal was to take power in the capital for a couple of hours and then send a request for help to the 'friendly' Red Army...\n> \n> However, events did not evolve as planned. At Tondi military school, at the War Ministry, and in many other places the attack was resisted. Attempts to get workers to join the uprising also failed. Fighting groups, some of them spontaneously formed, began to take back sites held by communist attack groups. In this way the unit formed by General P\u00f5dder won back the Central Telegraph before a victory call could be sent to the Red Navy waiting for the raid. Within six hours the coup attempt had been put down... Some of those captured were executed. Over 20 people died on the Republic's side, civilians among them.\n\nMoscow's intentions had been fully revealed; tensions did not subside until the Soviet Union joined the League of Nations in 1935, after which Moscow adopted the less abrasive concept of an international 'Popular Front' and made a show of co-operating with foreign partners against fascism. It seemed that the ground was being prepared for a programme of collective security, which Estonia could join.\n\nNonetheless, the attempt to introduce Estonia to Western-style democracy also ran into trouble. A multi-party parliamentary system functioned in the 1920s, but the largest single political group, the Estonian Peasant Party, was inevitably the advocate of sectional interests. The propertied and landed classes, mainly German, who had the upper hand under tsarist rule, felt threatened; and a small pro-Bolshevik minority was raring to denounce the 'bourgeois' state. The financial crisis of 1929\u201330 caused the collapse of Estonia's main bank, and was followed by severe unemployment. In the political sphere, the populist VAPSI movement (which began as an association of army veterans) gained support, demanding authoritarian government. In 1933 the currency, the _kroon_ , had to be devalued; and in the ensuing rumpus, Jaan T\u00f5nisson, now head of state, declared a state of emergency. His desperation opened the door to more unrest, a national referendum, a new constitution and the emergence of an authoritarian regime dominated by the Peasant Party of Konstantin P\u00e4ts:\n\n> As the new constitution came into force, the first step was the election of a president. Four candidates [competed]: August Rei, P\u00e4ts, [General] Laidoner, and Vapsi leader A. Larka. In reality only the latter two stood a chance... P\u00e4ts, fulfilling the duties of the head of state, decided not to wait for the election results. He made an agreement with Laidoner and on March 12, 1934 they carried out a coup... giving Laidoner extraordinary authority to guarantee the security of the state. Vapsi organisations were closed and their leaders arrested. Elections were postponed...\n> \n> The coup was at first welcomed by a lot of Estonians, but it soon became clear that P\u00e4ts... planned to govern Estonia on the basis of the authoritarian constitution of the Vapses... On October 2, 1934 P\u00e4ts dissolved the parliament, which had been demanding a restoration of democracy, and did not recall it. The silent era, as it became known, started, during which the government curtailed many civil rights... On March 5, 1935 the activity of political parties was suspended, the only one that remained being the Fatherland Union ( _Isamaaliit_ )... Silencing the opposition enabled the government to carry out centralised reforms...\n\nThe Estonian dictatorship of 1935\u201340 had certainly digressed from the democratic path, but it was not in the same horrific league as that of the totalitarians. One of the last peacetime acts of President P\u00e4ts was to give amnesty to all political prisoners.\n\nThere can be no doubt that the Soviet Union was the largest combatant state in the Second World War in Europe, and that it ended the war as the principal victorious power. In the first phase of the war, during the currency of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact, the USSR was the Third Reich's partner, and behaved accordingly. The Red Army participated in the annihilation of Poland, invaded Finland in the Winter War of 1939\u201340 and forcibly annexed the Baltic States, Moldova and Bukovina. In the spring and summer of 1940, the Germans rapidly overran Belgium and northern France in an astonishing blitzkrieg, but throughout the war operations on the Western Front were of little interest and no benefit to Estonia.\n\nIn the second phase, which started in June 1941 with 'Operation Barbarossa', the Soviet Union sustained a massive attack by its erstwhile German partner. Few experts gave the Red Army much chance of survival. But it fought on against the odds, manoeuvring in the vast spaces of the Eastern Front, evacuating industry and sacrificing colossal numbers of men. The German invaders were repulsed at Moscow, stopped in their tracks at besieged Leningrad and soundly beaten at Stalingrad.\n\nIn the third and conclusive phase, which began with the destruction of Germany's largest Panzer tank force at Kursk in July 1943, the Red Army relentlessly drove the Wehrmacht back. US aid via Lend-Lease came on stream, and the pre-war Soviet frontier was reached a year later. The Soviets moved so much faster than the Western Allies that the whole of Eastern Europe was overrun before Berlin was stormed without Western help. By May 1945, Stalin's victory was complete. At Yalta and Potsdam, he was able to drive a very hard bargain with the Americans, who were still fighting the Japanese. Despite unprecedented losses, which may have reached 27 million, the USSR had emerged as one of the world's two superpowers.\n\nDuring the Second World War, Estonia found itself in a zone of Europe that was occupied in turn both by the Stalinist Soviets and by the Nazi Germans. The resultant miseries were multiplied by the fact that it lay close to the German\u2013Soviet frontline for three whole years.\n\nIn 1939, the secret protocols of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact consigned Estonia to the Soviet sphere of influence, where Stalin could act with impunity. Estonians watched helplessly as the Red Army assaulted their Finnish neighbour, and then in June 1940 as it invaded the three Baltic states. In Soviet parlance, this operation was labelled 'liberation', though it involved mass repressions, deportations and massacres. By agreement with the Nazis, Estonia's German community was expelled en masse to German-occupied Poland. That first Soviet occupation of Estonia in 1940\u201341 was to last for only one year, but it was organized in a manner that smacked of careful planning. It was preceded by a harsh diplomatic campaign, and was facilitated by the expulsion of the Estonian Germans. It was achieved by blackmail and threats, and, technically, by a Council of State that voted obediently for incorporation into the USSR.\n\nThe shameless arrogance of Soviet conduct, however, can only be believed if described in detail. Stalin's manipulation of force and fraud was superlative. The opening gambit was to surround Estonia's frontiers with Red Army divisions and to demand, in the name of security, that Soviet military bases be built on Estonian territory. Next, after the Red Army had moved in, it transpired that the Soviet troops had been accompanied by thousands of slave labourers brought in by the NKVD to build the bases. The operation was overseen in person by the notorious Andrei Zhdanov, a member both of Stalin's Politburo and of the Supreme Soviet. In the third stage, Zhdanov delivered the master stroke. The men from the Soviet labour battalions were marched under guard into central Tallinn to lead a 'public demonstration' against the Estonian government and to call for an end to 'bourgeois power'. Appropriate revolutionary placards were distributed for the benefit of the foreign press. Order was maintained by a self-appointed 'People's Self-defence' organization; the Estonian police were warned to stay away. The Estonian tricolour was hauled down from the mast on Toompea hill and replaced by the 'Hammer and Sickle'. The parliament buildings and the president's palace at Kadriorg were taken over, together with the offices of press and radio. Two days later, on 21 June, Zhdanov instructed President P\u00e4ts whom to appoint as prime minister and whom to dismiss. A month of purges followed. All Estonian institutions, including the civil service and the political parties, were stripped of unsuitable personnel. In the general election of 14\u201315 July, the 'Union of Working People' claimed a 92.9 per cent victory. The way was open for the declaration of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic beneath the portraits of Lenin and Stalin and the gunbarrels of Soviet tanks.\n\nEstonian reactions were recorded by a British diplomat from Moscow. 'The feelings of the Estonian people at present', he noted, 'are a mixture of apathetic resignation to their fate, forlorn hope for an ultimate delivery by Great Britain or Germany, fear of the OGPU [secret police], contempt for their conquerors, and bitter regret that they did not, like the Finns, make a bid for freedom.'\n\nOnce incorporation was effected, all existing state institutions were dissolved. The police force was reorganized, and the Estonian army disbanded. All professional associations were banned. The press was censored, and independent journalists dismissed. Sovietization proceeded apace in the economy, in education and in the judicial system. These changes were accompanied by violent repressions. Arrests and interrogations were commonplace. Some cases were tried in court; most were not. Executions were perpetrated in NKVD prisons and in the forests. Mass deportations began, especially of professional people who might rally opposition. The conscription of Estonian men into the Red Army was followed by the evacuation of factories and factory workers to the 'rear areas' deep in Russia.\n\nIn the course of several weeks, a fully fledged Soviet system of government was installed and running. The Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic officially came into being on 6 August 1940, but all power was vested in the centralized Communist Party of the Soviet Union and its local appointees. An Estonian Supreme Soviet took the place of the _Maap\u00e4ev_ , and a hand-picked Council of People's Commissars under Johannes Lauristin headed the executive. All local government bodies were Sovietized. There was, however, some resistance: although the Red Army's Winter War against Finland had finished before the Soviet occupation of Estonia began, Finnish sympathies were strongly pro-Estonian, and, with clandestine Finnish help, bands of 'Forest Brothers' conducted a partisan summer war against the occupiers.\n\nIn June 1941, following Hitler's dramatic renegation of the Nazi\u2013 Soviet Pact, the German Wehrmacht arrived, and turned Estonia into the base area for the long-running Siege of Leningrad. People suspected of collaboration with the recent Soviet regime were rounded up. Those Estonians who welcomed the German occupation, however, mainly did so from relief at seeing the back of Stalin's henchmen. As in other countries occupied by the Third Reich, the Waffen SS established an Estonian Legion for recruits willing to sign on for service on the Eastern Front.\n\nThe dilemmas faced by Estonia and other East European countries during the German occupation are rarely understood by Westerners, who have been led to believe that only one 'Evil Force' had to be confronted. In reality, the Germans wielded ruthless power and resistance was near-impossible. There were also sound patriotic reasons for joining the 'war against Bolshevism', particularly after a measure of self-government was introduced, extremely welcome after the preceding 'Great Terror'. In the second half of 1941, therefore, a joyful interlude arrived when the symbols of Soviet oppression were torn down. A series of investigations uncovered the sites of Soviet massacres and executions. Estonia, like Finland, was needed by Germany for the war against the USSR. Hope rose among Estonians that a bearable modus vivendi would be found.\n\nNonetheless, the true nature of the Nazi regime quickly became evident. The Gestapo and Security Police (SD) proved themselves the equals of the NKVD. A concentration camp was opened in Tartu, and a new wave of arrests and executions took place. The extermination of Estonia's small community of about 1,000 Jews was perpetrated in January 1942, followed by the creation of extermination centres for imported Czech and German Jews. Soviet prisoners of war were killed in still larger numbers.\n\nDuring the three years when the German\u2013Soviet front lay close to Estonia's north-eastern border, Estonian soldiers served both in German-sponsored and in Soviet-sponsored formations. Before the German invasion, the Red Army had trained Estonian officers, formed Estonian regiments set up an Estonian branch of the Political-Military Department. Two Soviet divisions, the 180th and 182nd, were largely Estonian in composition, as were the 8th and 22nd Territorial Rifle Corps. They were pulled back as the Wehrmacht advanced. A few senior Estonian officers, such as Major-General Jaan Kruus, passed into Soviet service, though every single one of them who was not killed at the front, including Kruus, was eventually murdered by the NKVD. General Laidoner, the pre-war commander-in-chief, was held in the Gulag until his death in 1953.\n\nOn the German side, Estonian recruits were taken into the _Omakaitse_ ('Home Guard'), into Estonian security groups within the Wehrmacht, into so-called Defence Battalions, into Border Defence Regiments and into the Estonian SS-Legion. None of these formations was necessarily sinister in character, and, in theory at least, all were assigned to purely military duties. In February 1944 general conscription was imposed on all males of military age.\n\nLike all other SS-Legions in other German-occupied countries, the Estonian Legionnaires were composed mainly of volunteers. After training, they were transferred either to the Waffen-SS 20th Grenadier Division or to one of the SS-Ostland reserve battalions, where their senior officers were German. They saw combat service in various sectors of the Eastern Front, suffering heavy casualties. Their toughest engagement, in February 1943, was in the Narva sector. The survivors were withdrawn for retraining in Germany, and then saw action in Silesia, where their commander, SS- _Standartenf\u00fchrer_ Franz Augsberger, was killed in battle.\n\nIn the summer of 1944 the pendulum of war swung again. The Siege of Leningrad was lifted, the Red Army returned and the German Army Group North pulled out successfully into Latvia in 'Operation Aster'. The Estonian population was left to cope with the aftermath. The NKVD set to work again with a vengeance, and another wave of Estonians was consigned to the Gulag or to mass graves. The second Soviet 'liberation' rendered the topic of Estonian independence impossible to mention. This time, the Soviets let it be known that they intended to stay for ever.\n\nNonetheless, in the brief interval between the German retreat and the Soviets' return, a small group of Estonian politicians attempted to organize an independent government in Tallinn. J\u00fcri Uluots (1890\u20131945), who had been both the last pre-war prime minister and chairman of a German-sponsored National Committee, issued a declaration of Estonian neutrality. On 18 September 1944, acting in his capacity as the sole legal representative of the pre-war republic still at liberty, he appointed a government headed by a lawyer, Otto Tief. The blue-black-and-white flag flew on the Pikk Hermann tower for two days. A party of German marines, sent from evacuation duties in the port to crush the 'mutiny', was repulsed. But on the 22nd, Soviet tanks drove in, and the flag was hauled down. The government fled to Pogari, whence they hoped to escape to Finland. Scattered resistance briefly slowed the Red Army down. Tief and most of his ministers were arrested and sent to the Gulag. Uluots and a small company reached Stockholm, where an Estonian government-in-exile was formed. Their principled action was doomed to failure, but, like the contemporaneous Warsaw Rising, had enormous symbolic resonance.\n\nThe reimposition of Soviet rule in 1944\u20135 sparked a repeat performance of all the horrors and ordeals of 1940\u201341. A Communist government, handpicked in Moscow, arrived on the coat-tails of the Red Army. Its most prominent figure, Johannes Vares Barbarus (d. 1946), a doctor and poet, had briefly served in similar circumstances in 1940. The Estonian Communist Party was reinstated, intent on wreaking revenge on its compatriots. Estonian territory east of Narva and much of the Petseri eastern district were arbitrarily annexed by the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), the largest of the Soviet republics.\n\nOn 2\u20133 July 1945 a military court of the Supreme Soviet held a show trial to condemn the ministers of the last Estonian government. Uluots was condemned _in absentia_ (and died \u2013 unusually \u2013 of natural causes). His minister of defence, Jaan Maide, was shot. Others were imprisoned. The Great Terror raged once again. In 1944\u201353, _c_. 30,000 Estonians were consigned to prison camps. Tens of thousands more were arrested, interrogated, tortured, raped, 'disappeared' or executed. The largest single deportation, involving 76,000 individuals from all three Baltic States, was carried out in March 1949. Their destination was eastern Siberia. The re-deportation of children who had been taken to Siberia in 1941 and who had somehow found their way home was peculiarly sadistic. Soviet citizens repatriated from Germany and returning prisoners of war could expect no mercy. Low-level armed resistance continued for years.\n\nOne small footnote raises a wry smile. One of Otto Tief's ministers, Arnold Susi, who fell into the clutches of the NKVD in 1944, made friends in the Gulag with Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both men were eventually released; it was at Susi's country home in Estonia that Solzhenitsyn would later hole up in secret to write _The Gulag Archipelago_ , the book which would do so much to undermine belief in the Soviet system. The pre-war Estonian president, Konstantin P\u00e4ts, like General Laidoner, was not so lucky. He spent sixteen years in a Soviet camp before dying there in 1956. The exiled Estonian government, sheltered in Stockholm, carried the baton of legality from 1940 to 1992.\n\nIn the eyes of the Western Powers, the Soviet annexation of Estonia in 1940 had been judged illegal; no retraction was ever issued to change the official opinion. The 4221st Estonian Guard Company, formed by the US army from selected prisoners of war in 1946, saw duty at the Nuremberg War Tribunal, wearing American uniforms. Yet nothing practical was done to challenge Estonia's captivity.\n\nFor forty years after the war, the Soviet Union strove to compete with the United States in all fields, and to prove the vaunted superiority of its system. In 1952 it introduced a model, but totally bogus and irrelevant constitution, and changed the ruling party's name to the 'Communist Party of the Soviet Union', KPSS or, in English, CPSU. Despite such window dressing, it remained not just a 'one-party state' but a complicated amalgamation of union and autonomous republics, shackled at every level by the parallel structures of the Party dictatorship. Throughout the Cold War it held its own. Not only was it the largest country in the world territorially; it possessed the world's most numerous nuclear arsenal, and a vast array of naval, air, ground and rocket forces. For a time after the launch of the Sputnik spaceship in 1957 it seemed to be gaining an edge in science and technology too. It looked completely invincible.\n\nAfter Stalin's death in 1953, the crimes of the early Soviet era were selectively denounced, and a limited 'thaw' under the leadership of Nikita Khrushchev removed the worst excesses. Yet the essence of latter-day Soviet Communism was immobility. There was no serious modification of Marxism-Leninism, no retreat from a command economy, no lowering of the censorship and no real margin of freedom. In the 1970s, under Leonid Brezhnev, a permanent state of international impasse was reached under the name of 'd\u00e9tente'. Neither the United States nor the USSR was winning the arms race. The Soviets' former pupil, Communist China, was brought to the fore in the international arena in 1972 by an American diplomatic manoeuvre following the Sino-Soviet split. In the 1980s the Soviet leadership grew more rigid in response to the challenge from US President Ronald Reagan, who spoke openly of the 'evil empire'. Poland's Solidarity movement was crushed, as previous acts of defiance in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had been. The Soviet bloc appeared to be gripped in the same vice that had gripped the Soviet Union for three generations.\n\nThroughout the post-war era the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic (ESSR) was the smallest of the Soviet Union's fifteen republics. Its territory was essentially the same as that of pre-war Estonia, but its population was somewhat different. The Jews (exterminated) and Germans (expelled or killed) had gone, and their absence was more than made up by a massive influx of Russian settlers. Estonia was governed by the standard dual Party-State system imposed on all the Soviet republics. State institutions were largely run by locals, especially by Estonian nationals born elsewhere in the USSR. The Estonian branch of the Soviet Communist Party was also largely in Estonian hands but it was directly subordinated to Moscow, which charged it with keeping all state organs in line. In reality, therefore, the country was locked into a Russian-run collective dictatorship. Elections were held for councils and assemblies. But since all candidates were appointed by Party-run electoral commissioners, voters were given no meaningful choice.\n\nThe history of the Estonian Communist Party, especially in the last phase of Stalinism from 1945 to 1953, makes for sorry reading. One chairman, Barbarus, committed suicide little more than a year after his appointment. A successor, Nikolai Karotamm, was purged in 1950, charged with 'bourgeois nationalism'. A third, Johannes K\u00e4bin, emerged as the Party's strongman for twenty years. Yet personalities held only secondary importance. All factions in the Party competed to win Moscow's approval, and all were ultimately dependent on the presence of the Red Army and the KGB, the Soviet Security Service.\n\nStalinist repression was followed by the post-Stalinist 'thaw' and then by the long era of Brezhnevian stagnation. During the 'thaw', K\u00e4bin's close links with Khrushchev bore fruit in the shape of reduced food requisitions and improved economic conditions. Under Brezhnev, however, Russification gathered pace once again. K\u00e4bin was succeeded by a Russified Estonian, Karl Vaino, who had been born in Tomsk and could not speak his mother-tongue fluently. The official policy of bilingualism did not apply to Russians, laying the seeds of a later conflict. Bureaucratic centralization had the effect that 'the recipes of all cakes baked in Estonia were drawn up in Moscow'.\n\nInformation in the West about Soviet-era Estonia in this period was peculiarly inadequate. An encyclopedia of Russia published in London in 1961, for example, was not so much factually inaccurate as incapable of distinguishing the wood from the trees:\n\n> Estonia (Estonian Eesti or Eestimaa), Union Republic of the U.S.S.R, bordering on the Gulf of Finland, Latvia, the Baltic Sea and Lake Chudskoye in the east; it is mainly lowland plain, partially forested, with many lakes and marshes and a soft, almost maritime climate; Area 17,800 sq. m.; population (1959) 1,197,000 (56 per cent urban), mostly Estonians (73 per cent), also Russians (22 per cent), before the war also Germans. There are oil-shale extraction and processing, electrical engineering, textile, wood-processing and food (bacon and butter) industries; dairy farming and pig raising are carried on, and grain, potatoes, vegetables and flax cultivated. Principal towns: Tallinn (capital), Tartu, P\u00e4rnu, Narva, Kohtla-J\u00e4rve... During the period of Estonian independence (1919\u201340) the country's industry declined, being cut off from the Russian market, but agriculture flourished with the export of butter and bacon to Britain and Germany. At first independent Estonia was a democratic republic, but in 1934 a dictatorship was established under President P\u00e4ts... though a kind of representative assembly with limited powers was introduced. A Communist uprising in Tallinn was suppressed in 1924.\n\nThis entry could easily have been written by the propaganda department of the Soviet embassy. It concentrates on economic issues, avoids controversial historical matters, says nothing of the Second World War, and gives the impression that the pre-war Estonian Republic (but not Stalin's Soviet Union) deserved the label of a dictatorship. It omits the important fact that both Britain and the United States regarded Estonia's incorporation into the USSR as illegal.\n\nIndeed, each of the assertions in the extract above needs a gloss. The influx of Russians, for example, was not just a happenstance, but part of a systematic policy aimed at strengthening Moscow's influence and weakening Estonian identity. The city of Narva illustrates the point. Completely destroyed during the war, it was placed out of bounds to Estonians after 1945. The large-scale presence of the Soviet military had the same effect. Several Estonian garrison towns, like Paldiski, were closed to civilians for decades.\n\nIn the socio-economic sphere, it is true that Soviet planning promoted industrialization and urbanization, yet one can hardly refer to the subject without discussing the harsh, exploitative methods and their baleful consequences. The unrestrained exploitation of Estonia's oil-shale beds for the benefit of Leningrad, for example, has ruined the town of Kohtla-J\u00e4rve, which is now overshadowed by towering slag heaps. The nearby town of Ailamae was blessed with a Soviet nuclear processing plant, and has been left with a hopelessly polluted man-made lake that was used as a dump for dangerous waste. In Tallinn, the suburb of Lasnam\u00e4e, once touted as a workers' paradise, is stranded as a museum for the maltreatment of the proletariat.\n\nCulturally, the Soviet authorities sponsored purposeful activities, some of which were undoubtedly beneficial. State education ensured almost universal literacy, and Estonian remained the main language of instruction in most schools. In literature, despite official promotion of the great Russian classics, some local writers were able to flourish. The sentimental and uncontroversial Oskar Luts (1887\u20131953), author of _Kevade_ ( _The Spring_ , 1913) had started to publish in tsarist times and remained popular. The historical novelist Jaan Kroos (1920\u20132007) established himself as a 'State Artist of the ESSR' after his return from the Gulag; his favourite theme, which pitted Estonian peasants against Baltic German barons, suited Soviet political interests but could also be read as a surreptitious metaphor for the contemporary scene. The arts were encouraged, especially film, music, dance and opera, and imposing state-sponsored venues were provided. The bass-baritone Georg Ots (1920\u201375), one of the Soviet Union's most thunderous opera-singers, contrived to include Estonian songs and productions in his repertoire.\n\nBut the overall balance-sheet is not easily assessed. Russification intensified in the 1970s as the Estonian proportion of the population shrank; religious observance was decimated; the Estonian Lutheran Church and the Russian Orthodox Church were sorely harassed, and ubiquitous state censorship enforced whatever it regarded as the Soviet norm. The cultural environment, therefore, could be stifling, and leading figures, like the conductor Neeme J\u00e4rvi (b. 1937), fled abroad; taking his wife and family to Sweden in 1980, he settled for many years in Gothenburg. He was soon followed by his contemporary, Arvo P\u00e4rt, the modern minimalist composer, who chose Vienna. Emigration, which was illegal, was often the only option for creative people, who wanted to further their careers unhindered.\n\nEstonia would be a good place, in fact, to study the consequences of the Soviet Union's deeply ambiguous cultural policies in detail. Soviet cultural planners aimed to achieve the impossible: to encourage national and linguistic diversity and at the same time to mould people in the image of their ideal _Homo sovieticus_ , 'national in form, but socialist in content'. What they meant was that Estonians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Uzbeks and all the others would be allowed to speak their national languages but not to express any independent ideas; and they failed to publicize the ultimate goal, which was a generalized Communist-inspired culture plus Russification. This was the approach to all branches of cultural activity: a superficial variety was tolerated, but only as part of a far-reaching conformity. The author of the strategy, Joseph Stalin, who was not a native Russian, made no bones about the ultimate purpose, which was 'the fusion [of cultures] into one General Culture, socialist in both form and content and expressed in one general language'. Russian, the language of the imperial capital, was the only possible candidate for promotion as the universal lingua franca. In practice, it was taught rigorously in all Estonian schools of the ESSR as a compulsory second language, though of course no serious effort was made to teach Estonian to Russians, even those living in Estonia.\n\nLooking back on Soviet cultural policy, which had such a critical impact on Estonian national identity, some Estonians may conclude that it was an improvement on the openly Russificatory, pre-Revolution schemes. Most, however, will have their doubts, and will probably realize how lucky Estonia was to have been exposed to Soviet social engineering for only two or three generations. There was no support for genuine bilingualism, and all the non-linguistic aspects of culture were subordinated to foreign priorities. One need look no further than the Kreutzwald State Library of the ESSR (now the National Library) in Tallinn. Housed in a gigantic concrete bunker-building never completed in Soviet times, its first priority after 1945 was to expand its Russian collection; and throughout its existence, large numbers of Estonian, pre-Soviet or foreign books were held under lock and key in a special section of prohibita closed to ordinary readers.\n\nGiven the vigilance of the KGB, no opposition movement could expect to operate in Soviet Estonia for long. But games of cat and mouse were played incessantly, and relays of groups and individuals constantly gave new life to dissident impulses. The armed opposition of 'Forest Brothers' stayed at large until the mid-1950s, supported by agents of Western intelligence; and a small number of 'lone rangers' until the 1970s. Various forms of civilian protest surfaced from time to time. In 1946 a group of schoolgirls blew up a Soviet war memorial in Tallinn. After 1975, the Helsinki Agreement, which encouraged so-called 'legal opposition', and the so-called Baltic Appeal of 1979, which demanded publication of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact's protocols, made world headlines; in 1980 youth riots were reported. Reprisals were severe, but nonconformism never dried up.\n\nThroughout those long decades, it was illegal to wave the Estonian colours of blue, white and black; it was illegal to sing the pre-war national anthem; and it was treasonable to talk in public about independence. Above all, it was unwise to dream.\n\nWhen the young, dynamic and affable Mikhail Gorbachev stepped onto the world scene in March 1985 as the new general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, no one thought that the Soviet Union's funeral was approaching. Gorbachev came to save the USSR, not to bury it. Western politicians, and the Western public, were enchanted by him. His determination to end the Cold War naturally played well, while the slogans of _glasnost_ (often taken, wrongly, to mean 'openness') and _perestroika_ ('reconstruction') were universally applauded. Few outsiders could understand why Gorbachev was so heartily distrusted among many of his own people.\n\nIn retrospect, one can see that Gorbachev was poorly suited to act as the Soviet Union's saviour, partly because he was poorly informed, notably about the history and make-up of the mammoth state which he dismantled by mistake. He failed to realize that the USSR had been assembled from a collection of captured nationalities held together by coercion. As soon as the coercion was removed, almost all the non-Russian republics prepared to leave, exactly as they had in 1918. In only a few cases did the Russian-dominated elites of Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan hesitate. When Gorbachev let it be known that East Germany could not count on the Soviet army to intervene, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, all the Communist leaders of the satellite states (except Ceau\u0282escu in Romania) saw the game was up, the Soviet bloc disintegrated and the Berlin Wall collapsed. Similarly in August 1991, when Gorbachev attempted to relax the terms of the Union Treaty (which defined the role of the USSR's constituent republics), his own colleagues launched an abortive coup against him. His political credit was exhausted. Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic), led a movement to recognize the independence of the fifteen Soviet republics, and in effect to terminate the Soviet story.\n\nWhen Gorbachev first appeared, no one in Estonia, or in the other Soviet republics, had been thinking about national independence. The new general secretary had not been shaped by the Stalinist era, but all the talk concerned the reform of the Soviet system, not its replacement. In any case Gorbachev was slow to show his hand. When he did, his main concerns centred on foreign policy, not on the internal structures of the Soviet State. In 1987, the eightieth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution were staged with all the usual Soviet bombast, and everyone assumed that similar anniversaries would continue into the foreseeable future. Even when _glasnost_ and _perestroika_ got under way, they were presented as the twin pillars of a controlled experiment, aiming for a degree of welcome relaxation, not for radical change.\n\nYet Estonians by then could receive Finnish television, so they knew that their Finnish cousins across the water enjoyed a far higher standard of living, and much greater freedoms. But they were not inclined to raise their hopes. Twice in the twentieth century they had escaped from the Soviet grasp, only to be twice recaptured. In the early 1980s they had watched the Solidarity episode in Poland intensely, and had seen the movement crushed.\n\nNineteen eighty-seven was the year when Soviet-watchers noticed that Moscow's grip on the Soviet republics was slipping. When a local war broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the remote enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, Gorbachev took no active steps to stifle it. Communist leaders in each of the republics, including Estonia, realized that their room for manoeuvre was widening. _Glasnost_ , too, was getting out of hand. Contrary to Western belief, the Russian word means 'publicity', and was initially used by Gorbachev to encourage Party activists to stand up for his policies against hostile criticism. Yet once unleashed the slogan soon spread into areas of previously taboo subjects. In Estonia, it gave rise to uninhibited historical discussions and to an unparalleled tide of national reawakening.\n\nThe first buds of the coming 'Baltic spring' had appeared in October 1986 with the foundation of the harmless-sounding Estonian Heritage Society. This was soon followed by public protests, apparently unconnected, against phosphorite mining. But history and ecology were joining hands. What they had in common was a determination to resist Moscow's dictatorial habits.\n\nMass demonstrations began in 1987. They were entirely peaceful, but unauthorized. One, on 23 August, was held in the Hirvepark in Tallinn to mark the anniversary of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact \u2013 hitherto an unmentionable event. Another, in October, gathered in V\u00f5ru to remember the War of Independence. This was the first occasion for forty-seven years when the Estonian flag flew freely in public. A third meeting, in February 1988, was called to mark the Tartu Treaty of 1920 and faced police with dogs and riot shields. From then on the ferment gathered pace in the guise of the 'Singing Revolution'. Ever-greater crowds would assemble spontaneously to sing forbidden patriotic songs and to wave flags. Emotions rose inexorably. Finally, on 11 September 1988 at the Tallinn Song Festival, the leader of the Heritage Society demanded the restoration of Estonia's independence.\n\nDefiance of Soviet authority was now out in the open. Gorbachev's reaction was to replace the ruling Party's first secretary in Estonia, while promoting constitutional reform and the creation of a National (Soviet) Delegates Congress. His position weakened, however, when people across the USSR sensed that he was unwilling to sanction the use of force. As a result, the Supreme Council of the ESSR decided of its own accord on 16 November 1988 to issue a declaration of Estonian sovereignty. Soviet laws were only to be regarded as valid when ratified in Tallinn. Moscow protested, but no one was disciplined. The outside world was still largely oblivious to the implications.\n\nIn 1989 Estonian politics followed two paths. One group, headed by Estonian Communists, participated in Gorbachev's Moscow-centred reform movement. The other, based in Tallinn, pressed for autonomy and, increasingly, for independence. The climate was changing rapidly. In June the world outcry against the Tiananmen Square massacre in China lessened the chances of Soviet hardliners regaining control, and the triumph of the Solidarity movement in the partial elections in Poland showed that the monolith was cracking. On 23 August 1989, 2 million people linked hands in the 'Baltic Chain', which stretched all the way across the Baltic States from Tallinn to Vilnius in Lithuania. It showed that Estonians were not isolated. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November, regarded in the West as a world-historical event, did not make the same impact on Soviet citizens, who had still to break the bars of their cage.\n\nIn 1990 and 1991 the Estonian national movement adopted the strategy of pursuing its own programme while ignoring whatever Moscow did. In February 1990 elections to a Congress of Estonia turned into a de facto referendum on national statehood. The Congress then announced 'a period of transition awaiting developments'. Pro-Moscow elements staged impotent counter-demonstrations. Violent events occurred in Lithuania and Latvia, where in January 1991 Soviet special forces attempted and failed to suppress the 'separatists'. Gorbachev's one and only resort to force produced, from his viewpoint, far too little and was much too late. Even so, an Estonian referendum on 3 March produced a 77 per cent majority in favour of independence. The three Baltic republics then seceded, regardless of the consequences. On 17 September 1991 the flags of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were flown at the UN building in New York. They had been recognized by Iceland, by the UN and by Yeltsin's Russia even while the USSR was theoretically still intact. Estonia soared into free flight as the Soviet Union slumped onto its deathbed. On 31 December 1991 'Lenin's only child' finally succumbed.\n\n##### III\n\nThe Soviet Union was a major player on the world stage for most of the twentieth century. From the day of its creation to the day of its dissolution it was bigger than any other territorial entity on the globe, and its sheer size gave it enormous geopolitical significance. But it made still greater impact for both ideological and military reasons. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the 'world's first socialist state', it delivered the single most serious challenge to a reigning international order dominated by the Western Powers. Thanks to its stunning victory in the Second World War, it passed four decades as one of only two world superpowers, vying with the United States for influence, and (prior to the Sino-Soviet split) commanding a bloc of states containing almost one-third of mankind.\n\nAccording to their own propaganda, Soviet leaders had discovered the secrets of the 'scientific system of the future'; they were looking forward to a continuing existence where defeats and disasters would be unknown. Their utopian ideology produced a scenario which described the road to the end of the world. They would resist all attempts to divert their mission until a perfect, classless and 'Communist' society was achieved. Foreign states would gradually be won over. When a critical mass of progressive nations had joined the Soviet camp, the remaining fortresses of reaction would surrender, and all conflict would cease. States would then become redundant. Frontiers, governments and armies would wither away, and mankind would prosper for ever in a condition of bliss, as promised by the socialist prophets. 'Day by day, hour by hour,' every schoolchild was taught, 'the Soviet people are building the radiant edifice of Communism with joy and pride.' As many observers have remarked, Soviet Communism was less of a political creed, and more like a pseudo-religion; it rested on belief, not on experience or knowledge.\n\nMany factors contributed to the Soviet Union's downfall. They include defeat in Afghanistan, an unsustainable arms race, financial bankruptcy, laggardly technology, sclerotic political structures, a discredited ideology, a generation gap between rulers and ruled, and much else besides; discussion of them fills any number of weighty tomes, but none in itself gives a sufficient explanation. The essence lies deeper, and is not complicated. The Soviet system was built on extreme force and extreme fraud. Practically everything that Lenin and the Leninists did was accompanied by killing; practically everything they said was based on half-baked theories, a total lack of integrity and huge, barefaced lies \u2013 what the Russians would call _naglaya lozh\u2032_. The Soviet economy had been assembled over decades by eliminating all market mechanisms, by suppressing the flow of economic information and by terrorizing the population into subservience. When a general secretary finally came along who was no longer prepared to perpetuate the fantasies and the coercion, all the circuits fused, and total paralysis rapidly ensued. Gorbachev, the well-intentioned reformer, was as shocked by this as anyone. His predicament was likened in Russia to an apocryphal story about an old man who flushed his toilet at the exact moment of the Tashkent earthquake. 'If I'd known what was going to happen,' the old man exclaimed as he climbed from the rubble, 'I would never have pulled the chain.'\n\nThis gulf between the idealized scenario and the reality may well explain why Soviet leaders behaved like frightened rabbits, mesmerized by the headlights of history, as the juggernaut of unexpected events was about to run them over. Gorbachev and his comrades, trained from childhood in the Soviet fictions, simply could not respond appropriately; they tried to grapple with accumulating problems, but found them insoluble. No one could have guessed at the magnitude of their incompetence or self-deception. No one could have predicted that the Soviet Union, which possessed the most elaborate security apparatus ever assembled, would prove incapable of self-defence, or would have expired without a spirited rearguard action. The August coup of 1991, mounted by Gorbachev's closest colleagues, proved a total fiasco; it discredited Gorbachev as well as those who had arrested him, and it triggered the very collapse that its authors had wanted to avoid. One can only conclude that the dinosaur was already brain-dead before it died from the political equivalent of a paralytic stroke.\n\nThe departure of the Soviet Union left a political void in large expanses of Eurasia, and an accompanying vacuum in the international arena. Fifteen dependent Soviet republics were transformed into fifteen independent states, the largest of them the giant Russian Federation, the smallest tiny Estonia. The other thirteen ranged from Estonia's Baltic neighbours Latvia and Lithuania to Uzbekistan, Kirghizstan and Turkmenistan in Central Asia. Some of them joined the so-called Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a supposedly voluntary association of Russian-led ex-Soviet republics. Others, including Estonia, declined, and within a short time were heading eagerly towards membership both of NATO and of the European Union.\n\nThe vacuum in international politics took at least a decade to fill. Some American analysts, preoccupied for the whole of their adult lives by rivalry with the Soviet Union, assumed that US-led capitalist democracy would henceforth have no more major competitors, that they had reached the 'End of History'. Others concluded that the twenty-first century would be the 'American Century'. All of this was questionable. It was just as possible to argue, as one prescient historian did in 1988, that American power had passed its peak, that the US lead had been squandered by a neo-conservative administration, or that the new century heralded the rise of new powers like China, India and Brazil. The geopolitics of the world were changing from 'bipolar' to polygonal.\n\nAt all events, the reconfigured map of the globe threw up a number of unforeseen patterns. The European Union, for example, which had been formalized by the Maastricht Treaty on the same day in December 1991 on which the leaders of Russia, Byelorussia and Ukraine put the Soviet Union out of its misery, expanded exponentially into the post-Soviet void. By 2007 it had a membership of twenty-seven states with more than 500 million inhabitants; ten of the twenty-seven, including Estonia, had only recently escaped from Communist tyranny. In terms both of GDP and of population, it far outstripped anything that the former Soviet Union could boast.\n\nAt the same time, since the ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia were found to be rich in oil, they were drawn into a new version of the Great Game. The United States now vied with Russia over the control of new oil reserves, the politics of the Middle East gained a new northern flank and the future of countries like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan became the object of intensified international concern.\n\nEstonia's restoration in the midst of the turbulence was especially remarkable, and by no means preordained. Estonian leaders had set a skilful course around the obstacles blocking their progress, but the odds for success were not favourable. They possessed guile and popular support, but no serious instruments of power. One forgets just how hostile and touchy official Soviet opinion was; it had been looking forward to the demise of the separate personalities of the USSR's constituent republics and to their assimilation into 'universal Soviet Man'. According to another apocryphal story, a visiting Oxford academic had ventured to say in the 1980s that he rather liked Estonia. 'In that case,' his host had retorted, 'you must obviously be anti-Soviet.' And yet the daunting chasm of transition was safely crossed. As one prime minister reported with satisfaction, Estonia had performed a miracle that was psychological no less than political and economic.\n\nA pertinent remark in this context was voiced by Vladimir Putin, the second president of the Russian Federation. In 2005, looking back, he said that 'the collapse of the Soviet Union had been the greatest geo-political catastrophe of the century'. He was referring in particular to the fate of ethnic Russians stranded outside Russia's borders. But he had been a career officer of the KGB, which, despite its ruthless reputation, had signally failed in its prime duty of protecting the Soviet state. His regret was tinged by pangs of corporate guilt.\n\nPutin's sense of humiliation was shared by millions of Russians for whom the loss of superpower status had been accompanied by the loss of a large part of their colonial empire. His determination to recover lost prestige, by fighting the Chechen war or by appearing to 'stand up to the Americans', was more important to them than his half-measures in establishing a 'managed democracy'. These attitudes, macho and defiant, underpinned his undoubted popularity. One must presume that Putin shared with his compatriots a strong sense of bafflement about how the great calamity had actually happened. There had been no time to reflect. The Soviet Union had been there one day, and had gone the next. Contrary to the wishes of its supporters, and the efforts of its guardians, it had performed world history's ultimate vanishing act.\n\n1. The funeral of Alaric the Visigoth, 'Ruler of All',AD 410, in the bed of the Busento, Calabria.\n\n2. 'The history of France began at Vouill\u00e9.' AD 507: Clovis the Frank slays Alaric III, King of the Visigoths.\n\n3. _Y Gododdin_ : a page from the medieval Book of Aneirin, the seventh-century Old Welsh epic preserved in a thirteenth-century manuscript.\n\n4. Bird, Tree, Fish and Ring: symbols from the legend of St Mungo (sixth century), portrayed in Glasgow's coat-of-arms.\n\n5. William Wallace (1272\u20131305) \u2013 known to filmgoers as Braveheart and to his Gaelic contemporaries as Uilleam Breatnach, 'William the Briton'.\n\n6. Rheingold: an episode from the legends of the _Nibelungen_ , medieval tales based on echoes of the first Kingdom of the Burgundians (fifth century).\n\n7. A rare coin showing the head of the Merovingian King Dagobert ( _c_. 603\u201339), 'who pulled on his trousers inside out'.\n\n8. Guntram or Gontran of Burgundy ( _c_. 525\u201392), the 'Battle Crow', king and saint.\n\n9. Frederick Barbarossa (r. 1162\u201390): German emperor, king of Italy and king of Burgundy, crowned at Arles in 1172.\n\n10. Philip the Good and Charles the Bold: duke-counts of the fifteenth-century States of Burgundy.\n\n11. Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire, a.k.a. Karel de Stoute (r. 1467\u201377): duke of Burgundy, count of Flanders, margrave of Namur, etc., etc.\n\n12. Duchess-Countess-Margravine Mary of Burgundy (1457\u201382), heiress.\n\n13. The Aljaferia Fortress: constructed in the tenth century in Iberian-Islamic style for the Muslim emirs of Zaragoza, captured in 1118 by Alfonso El Battalador, king of Aragon.\n\n14. The Catalan galley fleet anchored off Naples (fifteenth-century miniature).\n\n15. Queen Petronilla of Aragon and Count R\u00e1mon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, whose marriage in 1137 joined Aragon to Barcelona for nearly 600 years.\n\n16. and 17. _Los Reyes Cat\u00f3licos_ : Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, _c_. 1491.\n\n18. Mattia Preti, _The Battle of El Puig_ ; Langue d'Aragon Chapel, Valletta. The battle, fought in 1238 near Valencia between Catalans and Moors, was a milestone in the _Reconquista_.\n\n19. 'The Ladder to Heaven': seventh-century Byzantine icon by St John Climacus. Images of the ascetic life and of spiritual perfection underline the theocratic nature of Byzantine civilization.\n\n20. The Siege of Constantinople, 1453 (fifteenth-century French miniature). The Ottoman Turks deliver the _coup de gr\u00e2ce_ to the Roman Empire.\n\n21. Trakai Castle, Lithuania: a fourteenth-century fortress, built by the uncle of Grand Duke Jogaila, who united Lithuania with Poland in 1385.\n\n22. _Mirsky Zamak_ , the Castle of Mir, Belarus: completed in the late sixteenth century by Prince Miko\u0142aj Krzysztof Radziwi\u0142\u0142.\n\n23. Barbara Radziwi\u0142\u0142 (1520\u201351), the tragic wife of Sigismund-August: queen of Poland and grand duchess of Lithuania for six months.\n\n24. Title page of the Third Lithuanian Statute, 1588.\n\n25. 'The Polish Plum Cake', 1773: cartoon satirizing the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania.\n\n26. Stanis\u0142aw-August Poniatowski (r. 1764\u201395): born at Volchin in White Ruthenia, died in St Petersburg, 'repatriated' 1938.\n\n27. _Stetl Juden_ , orthodox Jews, from one of Galicia's many Jewish towns.\n\n28. Hutsul man and horse from eastern Galicia.\n\n29. Polish G\u00f3rale, or 'Highlanders', from the Tatra mountains.\n\n30. Lw\u00f3w\u2013L\u00b4 viv\u2013Lemberg, capital city of Habsburg Galicia.\n\n31. Joseph II (r. 1780\u201390), emperor and first king of Galicia and Lodomeria.\n\n32. Franz-Josef (r. 1848\u20131916), emperor and last king of Galicia and Lodomeria.\n\n33. The Vistula Lagoon (the _Kalingradskiy Zaliv_ , formerly the _Frisches Haff_ ): the Baltic coast in the watery homeland of the _Prusai_.\n\n34. Malbork, Poland: formerly the Marienburg, headquarters of the Teutonic Knights and the world's largest brick castle.\n\n35. The Battle of Grunwald (in the German tradition, Tannenberg), 15 July 1410, as depicted by Jan Matejko (1878): the Death of Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen.\n\n36. The Tannenberg Memorial, 1927\u201345, marking the German victory of September 1914 and the 'Teutons' Revenge' for Grunwald.\n\n37. _The Prussian Homage_ , Krakow, 1525, as depicted by Matejko. Albrecht von Hohenzollern kneels before Sigismund I, king of Poland\n\n38. Albrecht von Hohenzollern (1490\u20131568), last grand master of the Teutonic Order and first duke of Prussia.\n\n39. Frederick I (r. 1688\u20131713), first king in Prussia, K\u00f6nigsberg, 1701.\n\n40. Frederick William I (1620\u201388), the 'Great Elector' of Brandenburg and last duke of Prussia.\n\n41. The Abbey of Hautecombe, Lac du Bourget, Savoy: site of the mausoleum of the _Casa Savoia_.\n\n42. _Mont Blanc_ , painted by J. M. W. Turner in 1837, when Western Europe's highest peak formed part of the Sardinian 'Sub-alpine Kingdom'.\n\n43. April 1860: voters line up in Chamb\u00e9ry for the Plebiscite on the future of Savoy.\n\n44. Vittorio Emanuele II (r. 1849\u201378), king of Sardinia and, from 1861, of Italy.\n\n45. 1910: the fiftieth anniversary of Savoy's 'reunion' with France.\n\n46. Referendum of 1946: Italian monarchists support 'Umberto II, the Monarchy and the Soldier King'.\n\n47. Maria-Luisa di Borbone (1782\u20131824) as Queen Regent of Etruria, _c_. 1804, with her son, King Carlo Lodovico II, and her daughter, Maria Luisa Carlota.\n\n48. A 10-lira silver florin of the Kingdom of Etruria (1803), showing the infant king with his mother and, on the reverse, the kingdom's coat-of-arms.\n\n49. _Elisa Bonaparte entour\u00e9e d'artistes \u00e0 Florence_ (1809) by Pietro Benvenuti. Antonio Canova presents a marble bust to Napoleon's eldest sister who was the duchess of Lucca, grand duchess of Tuscany and princess of Piombino.\n\n50. San Miniato in Val d'Arno: sometime home of the Buonaparti and of superb white truffles.\n\n51. Napoleon's First Exile, Elba, 1814: behind him Generals Bertrand, Drouot and Cambronne, who may or may not have said 'La Garde meurt'.\n\n52. Royal Wedding, 1840, at the Chapel Royal, St James's Palace: Victoria, who had proposed to Albert, nonetheless promised 'to serve and obey' him.\n\n53. Queen Victoria and family, Coburg, 21 April 1894: Kaiser Wilhelm II, the Queen, Dowager Empress 'Vickie' of Germany ( _front row seated L to R_ ); also, the Queen's surviving sons, in uniform \u2013 Edward ( _middle, L_ ), Alfred, ( _back, R_ ) and Arthur ( _second row, R_ ); the future Tsar, Nicholas II with fianc\u00e9e, Alix of Hesse ( _second row_ ); 3 Russian grand dukes, 3 Battenbergs, 10 Saxe-Coburg and Gothas, and 13 princesses; Prince 'Alfie' of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, d. 1899 ( _standing extreme L_ ).\n\n54. Prince Charles Edward (1884\u20131953): Victoria and Albert's youngest grandson, the last duke of Albany and the last duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.\n\n55. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip: but for the name-changing, their wedding in 1947 would have seen a Saxe-Coburg and Gotha marrying a Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gl\u00fccksburg.\n\n56. The funeral of King George V, January 1936. The late king's cousin, Charles Edward, brings up the rear of the procession wearing a steel German helmet.\n\n57. Adolf Hitler enters Prague, 15 March 1939.\n\n58. Khust: capital for one day of the Republic of Carpatho-Ukraine.\n\n59. The 'Black and Tans': Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, 1920, during the Anglo-Irish War.\n\n60. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed by Michael Collins, December 1921.\n\n61. Irish women singing hymns and political songs under guard in Dublin, 1921.\n\n62. Eamon de Valera takes the salute at an IRA parade, 1922, during the Irish Civil War.\n\n63. King George V and Queen Mary, monarchs of Great Britain and Ireland, ride through Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), July 1911.\n\n64. The Imperial Conference, London, 1926. George V and his prime ministers; W. T. Cosgrave of the Irish Free State ( _back row, right_ ).\n\n65. Queen Elizabeth II, Queen of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, speaking three words of Gaelic in Dublin Castle, watched closely by the Irish Republic\ud810\udcfes _taoiseach_ , Enda Kenny, and President Mary McAleese: May 2011, one century after her grandfather's visit.\n\nIRISH POSTAL HISTORY\n\n66. British stamps of 1912 bearing the head of King George V, overprinted in Gaelic. (a) 'Provisional Government of Ireland 1922' during the currency of the Republic, and (b) 'Irish Free State 1922' after the Anglo-Irish Treaty came into force.\n\n67. Irish Free State, First Series, 1922, 1d Red. Although George V remained king, the design omits both the king's head and the new state's name, showing instead a map of all Ireland and the unofficial name of \u00c9ire.\n\n68. Latin was admissible, but not English. (a) The International Eucharistic Congress, 1932, and (b) The Holy Year of 1933\u20134: 'In the Cross is Salvation'.\n\n69. Postage stamps in the service of republican history \u2013 (a) 2p, mauve, 1937. 'The constitution of Ireland', which officially introduced the name of \u00c9ire \u2013 Hibernia turns the pages of history; (b) 2\u00bdp black, 1941. twenty-fifth anniversary of the Easter Rising: a volunteer before Dublin's General Post Office.\n\n70. The centenary of the late President's birth, 1982: 26p commemorative issue, 'Eamon de Valera, 1882\u20131975'.\n\n71. The Montenegrin Royal Family, Proclamation Day, 1910: in the foreground, reclining, is King Nikola's grandson, Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia, subsequently the first king of Yugoslavia.\n\n72. Nikola I Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161 (1841\u20131921): the first and only king of Montenegro \u2013 soldier, author, law-giver and exile.\n\n73. King Nikola in exile: Antibes, France, _c_. 1921. Montenegro, after annexation by Serbia, was the only Allied country to lose its independence after the First World War.\n\nMONTENEGRIN POSTAL HISTORY\n\n74. 3 novi\u0107 red, from the country's first issue in 1874\n\n1 novi\u0107 blue and brown from the 200th anniversary series, 1896.\n\n75. Stamps celebrating the fiftieth year of Nikola's reign and the Proclamation of the Kingdom, 1910. ( _left_ ) 1 para black, Nikola _magnoludovicien_ ; ( _centre_ ) 2 para purple, King Nikola and Queen Milena; ( _right_ ) 5 para green, the King on horseback.\n\n76. _Kalevipoeg_ , 'The Son of Kalevi': Estonia's foundation myth.\n\n77. The _Pronkss\u00f6dur_ or 'Bronze Soldier': a Soviet war memorial, whose removal to a war cemetery in Tallinn caused the cyber war of 2007.\n\n78. The pre-war Linda Monument: used in Soviet times as an unofficial memorial site for Estonians killed or deported by Stalin.\n\n79. Red Army cavalry enters Tallinn. The forces of the Soviet Union occupied Estonia twice, in 1940\u201341 and for a second time between 1945 and 1991.\n\n80. A Latvian battalion of the Waffen SS marches through Tallinn. The forces of the Third Reich occupied Estonia from July 1941 to September 1944.\n\n81. The Baltic Chain, 23 August 1989, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi\u2013Soviet Pact: two million protesters link hands over the 350 miles from Estonia to Latvia and Lithuania.\n\n82. Moscow, August 1991: Mikhail Gorbachev, secretary general of the Soviet Communist Party and president of the USSR, is publicly berated by Boris Yeltsin, president of the RSFSR (Soviet Russia). Fifteen Soviet republics, including Russia, were starting out on their road to sovereign independence, and the Soviet Union was about to vanish.\n\n## How States Die\n\nThe strange death of the Soviet Union \u2013 which played no small part in the trains of thought behind the present studies \u2013 suggests that a typology of 'vanished kingdoms' is worth attempting. Bodies politic clearly expire for a variety of reasons, and it is perhaps important to ask whether their disappearances follow discernible patterns. Historians are not comfortable with the idea of random causation, and some sort of analysis, however tentative, is desirable.\n\nPolitical pathologies can be observed in endless guises. But the theme here is neither 'revolution' nor 'regime-change' nor 'system-failure'. Revolution and regime-change refer to events where the social order or the government is overthrown, but where the territory and population of the state remain intact. 'System-failure' is concerned with political organisms which lose the capacity to function effectively, but do not necessarily collapse completely; they may be compared to a motor car that has broken down but has not yet been scrapped. This brief enquiry is limited to the more drastic phenomenon of states that cease to exist.\n\nPolitical philosophers, whose known ruminations began in ancient Greece, have been thinking about statehood for millennia, though state demise has seldom been at the forefront of their preoccupations. By describing the state as a 'creation of nature', and man as a 'political animal', Aristotle can be read as implying, among other things, that states, like other natural life forms, might be subject to cycles of birth and death. Thomas Hobbes, though mainly interested in the foundation and perpetuation of states, was more explicit about their demise. In _Leviathan_ , he expounded on the 'internall diseases' that tend to 'the dissolution of the Commonwealth'. The ultimate factor is war: 'When in a warre (forraign, or intestine,) the enemies get a final Victory; so as... there is no farther protection of Subjects in their loyalty; then is the Commonwealth DISSOLVED.' At the last, 'Nothing can be immortall, which mortals make.' Rousseau in his _Social Contract_ reached the same conclusion. 'If Sparta and Rome perished,' he asked rhetorically, 'what state can hope to last for ever?' 'The body politic, no less then the body of a man, begins to die as soon as it is born, and bears within itself the causes of its own destruction... the best constitution will come to an end.'\n\nChristian theologians and biblical scholars, whose traditions are almost as long as those of the philosophers, have constantly been exercised by the rise and fall of states, though less by related questions of causation; they have usually been satisfied by explanations based on divine providence or the Wrath of God. The Fall of Babylon of 539 BC, which was a major historical event in the Old Testament, is presented in the Book of Revelation as a metaphor for the end of the existing world order and the advent of Christ-ruled 'New Jerusalem'. Every good Christian had heard the story of Belshazzar's Feast, where the prophet Daniel deciphered the writing on the wall: 'MENE, MENE, TEKEL UPHARSIN... God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it;... thou art weighed in the balances and found wanting'; and few would be unaware of the words of the angel from heaven who 'cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit.'St Augustine of Hippo (354\u2013430), the senior Father of the Church, expounded these matters in his _City of God_ ; all human history, he writes, consists of a confrontation between the _civitas hominis_ , the World of Man, and the _civitas Dei_ , the divine World of the Spirit. The passing of the former is a necessary prelude to the triumph of the latter. St Thomas Aquinas OP ( _c._ 1225\u201374), Christian theologian par excellence, dominated Catholic thought into modern times. In his _Summa Theologica,_ he consigned political questions like the birth and dissolution of states to the realm of universal or natural law, disentangling them from divine law and opening them up to the general, non-theological, discussions, in which all could participate. The Protestant reformers developed their own schools of politico-theological scholarship. In England, Thomas Cromwell, in his preamble to the Henrician Act of Supremacy, was at pains to deny the link between royal authority and traditional Catholic teaching, inventing a new scheme of English history to match. In Germany, Martin Luther's doctrine of the Two Kingdoms was a new take on St Augustine's old theme of the City of God.\n\nIn the nineteenth century, anarchists like Proudhon or Bakunin, believing all government to be pernicious, were the first to postulate that 'the destruction of the state' was actually admissible. The Marxists talked in similar vein, though with different goals in mind. Marx himself denied that he aimed at 'the complete destruction of the state'; the 'withering of the state' which Engels described was only to occur at a late stage when the sources of class conflict had been eliminated. But Lenin in his _State and Revolution_ (1917) called openly for the 'destruction of the bourgeois state', as a prelude to the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariat'.\n\nIn the twentieth century international lawyers have explored the subject in their own right and with their own methods. The defining term which they chose for it in English was the 'extinction of states'. One of the most recent contributors to the debate argues that in a world where _terra nullius_ ('no one's land') no longer exists, the extinction of pre-existing states is a precondition for the creation of new ones.\n\nPolitical scientists entered the field relatively recently. All too often their hallmark has been prolix argumentation leading to blindingly obvious conclusions. So it is reassuring to see that the English term on which they appear to have settled, 'State Death', is uncharacteristically concise. Their approach, which depends heavily on factorial modelling and on comparison of case studies, is closely allied to analyses of territorial disputes and of conflicts preceding the outbreak of wars. Yet their arguments would carry greater weight if they did not rely so much on data originating in the simplistic Correlates of War Project (COW). To every historian's despair, COW takes 1816 as the arbitrary start point of history, uses patently invalid definitions of state sovereignty and apparently (in studies written in the twenty-first century) does not yet include the USSR among its obituaries. It is a hopeful sign that a call has been made to revise the COW data.\n\nIn the last decade, a further sub-field of study has appeared under the heading of 'Failed States'. The term is clearly a misnomer, since the bodies concerned, though infirm, have still not reached the international graveyard. They should probably be called 'Failing States', and are said to be 'in danger of disintegration'. As from 2005, an annual Index of sixty such invalids has been published, supported by quantitative measurements of their distress and dividing them into 'critical', 'in danger' and 'borderline'. Somalia, Chad and Sudan topped the Index for 2010. Europe was represented by Georgia (no. 37), Azerbaijan (no. 55), Moldova (no. 58) and Bosnia and Hercegovina (no. 60).\n\nVocabulary is important, and terminological proliferation is indicative of a sorry pass where modern scholars betray little ability of harmonize their practices with neighbouring disciplines. If the 'dissolution of the state' was good enough for Hobbes and Locke (and for the French philosophers as well), one wonders why it should be dismissed by lesser mortals. As it is, on top of 'dissolution', one is now forced to worry about 'destruction', 'withering', 'extinction', 'expiration', 'death', 'failure', 'disintegration' and no doubt many more. One is reminded of the parrot which was 'demised', 'passed on', 'expired', 'stiff', 'deceased', 'bereft of life' 'off the twig', 'gone to join the bleedin' choir invisible' \u2013 'in fact, an ex-parrot'. Likewise, the focus here is on the past tense and on the ex-state. In this connection, the term 'extinct states' has again been gaining currency; a popular website lists no fewer than 207 extinct states in Europe's past, a definite underestimate.\n\nAt one time, it was only thought necessary to consider two categories of dissolution, one caused by external force and the other by internal malfunction: in Hobbesian language, 'forraign warre' was contrasted with 'internall diseases'. John Locke took a similar line in his _Two Treatises on Civil Government._ Having discussed how 'the inroad of foreign force' was 'the usual and almost the only way whereby [a commonwealth] is dissolved', he goes on to say: 'Besides this overturning from without, governments are dissolved from within,' and then explains the circumstances in which this takes place.\n\nThe international lawyers also preferred a dual scheme, distinguishing the voluntary from the involuntary. 'Voluntary extinction' was exemplified in the British Isles, where 'the Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland were extinguished as states' in order to create the United Kingdom. 'Involuntary extinction' is illustrated by 'Poland, destroyed in 1795'.\n\nNowadays, most scholars would agree that external, internal, voluntary and involuntary factors are all observable, and that dual schemes no longer suffice. Among the case studies in this book, at least five mechanisms appear to be at work: implosion, conquest, merger, liquidation and 'infant mortality'.\n\nThe Soviet Union is often said to have 'imploded'. The metaphor may well be taken from the realm of astronomy where stars and other heavenly bodies, often large and apparently solid, are known to collapse in on themselves and atomize. It suggests that outside pressures may be present, but the essential event pertains to a catastrophic malfunction at the centre; a vacuum is created, the constituent parts disengage, and the whole is destroyed. Some such catastrophe occurred in Moscow in the autumn of 1991. The Soviet political system had been constructed round the centralized dictatorship of the Communist Party and the command economy. Hence, as soon as Gorbachev lost the ability or the will to command, all the Party-State structures ground to a halt. Fifteen orphaned republics were pushed into taking the terminal step beyond mere 'system-failure'. Implosion, therefore, must be counted as a form of death by natural causes.\n\nScholarly attempts to explain the demise of the USSR follow as many lines of argument as there are specialists to pursue them. Sovietologists frequently point to economic failings. Some also stress the ideological black hole created by Gorbachev's decision to end the Cold War, which deprived the 'first socialist state' of its _raison d'\u00eatre,_ and others the revolt of the nationalities, which led to the fateful scheme to reform the Union Treaty and to the abortive coup of August 1991. Each of these has merit. But deeper questions centre on the puzzle of why the elaborate machinery of the Party-State proved incapable of responding. Here, one enters the unfathomable realm of the unintended consequences of _glasnost_ and _perestroika_.\n\nThe Federation of Yugoslavia, which fell apart in stages between 1991 and 2006, displayed many similar features to those in the USSR. Power leached away from Belgrade, as it did from Moscow, as each of the federation's republics ignored instructions from the centre. In Yugoslavia, however, the central institutions of the state rallied; and a long rearguard action was mounted from the Serbian-controlled centre to rein in the separatist inclinations of its neighbours. In time, however, Serbia's brutal campaign to rescue the federation by military means reinforced the centrifugal forces already in motion. The more Milo\u0161evi\u0107 raged, the more surely the constituent republics were alienated, including, in the end, Serbia's most faithful partner, Montenegro. Here one wonders whether 'explosion' might not be a more appropriate description.\n\nThe Austro-Hungarian Empire, which collapsed in 1918, would seem to be another example of implosion. In that case, external pressures were more in evidence thanks to the military operations of the First World War. Yet the Empire survived the fighting intact, only to fall victim to the catastrophic failure of imperial authority at the war's end. After peace had been signed on the Eastern Front in March 1918, the imperial heartland was no longer under threat from a major 'inroad of force'. The conflict on the Italian Front, though intense, was essentially a regional affair. But in the following months the Habsburgs and their officials lost the ability to command. By October, the emperor's writ no longer ran; and the Empire's various provinces were making their own arrangements. Galicia, for example, did not rebel. It was deserted by an impotent Vienna besieged by Austro-German republicans. Then, lacking all guidance, it disintegrated amid the general chaos.\n\nAs Locke observed, the 'inroad of foreign force' supplies the most usual cause of state death. The Kingdom of Tolosa, the States of Burgundy, the Byzantine Empire, the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, and Prussia (as an element of the Third Reich) were all destroyed by conquest. Yet conquerors do not always proceed to destroy their defeated adversaries; both the Byzantine and the Polish examples suggest that the health and strength of a conquered country plays a part, alongside the conqueror's intentions, in the loser's fate. By 1453, for example, the once-mighty Byzantine Empire had shrunk to the dimensions of a tiny city-state, before being picked off by the final siege. Before 1795, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had endured a century of encroachments, debilitating malfunctions and internal haemorrhages before it faced the wars of the Partitions. The question posed, therefore, is whether the weakness of the state or the malevolence of its enemies was primarily responsible for its decease. Here, the moment of truth only arrives when the conquered state lies prostrate at the conqueror's mercy, and the decision is taken to reprieve or to destroy. The sages of the Enlightenment mocked the commonwealth's impotence. The patient was undoubtedly sick, but that sickness, in itself, was not decisive. The key lies in the knowledge that the commonwealth's neighbours were planning to kill their victim and to seize his assets. The Partitions of Poland-Lithuania can rightly be likened to a sustained campaign of bullying and assault which ended with the murder of a battered invalid. 'Poland-Lithuania was the victim of political vivisection \u2013 by mutilation, amputation, and in the end by total dismemberment: and the only excuse given was that the patient had not been feeling well.' In coroner's language, the outcome would be described as 'death by unnatural causes'.\n\nConquest, in other words, is not necessarily the prelude to annihilation, although it often may be. Cato might cry ' _Delenda est Carthago_ ', 'Carthage must be destroyed', but the advice does not have to be heeded. In the case of Prussia \u2013 which, though merged into Germany, still existed in 1945 \u2013 the Allied Powers waited almost two years before delivering the _coup de gr\u00e2ce_. In other instances, countries can be conquered, occupied, absorbed and at some later date revived. Rousseau was well aware of this possibility when asked to analyse Poland-Lithuania's predicament in 1769. 'You are likely to be swallowed whole,' he predicted correctly, 'hence you must take care to ensure that you are not digested.' The experience of the Baltic States in the twentieth century fits the same pattern. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were invaded by the Soviet Union in June 1940, occupied and annexed. But they were not fully digested. Fifty years later, like the biblical Jonah, they re-emerged from the belly of the whale, gasping but intact.\n\nGeopolitical factors obviously play a role. Some states, like eighteenth-century Sweden or nineteenth-century Spain, can decline and degrade to the point where they become sitting ducks for would-be aggressors. They survive because no one takes the trouble to finish them off. States occupying more sensitive locations have no such luck. The leading scholar in 'State Death' theory places special emphasis on this mechanism.\n\nMany political organisms start life through the amalgamation of pre-existing units; the degree of integration achieved by such amalgams differs widely. Dynastic states are particularly susceptible to the collector's syndrome. The Kingdom-County of Aragon was one such example; the fifth Kingdom of Burgundy another; and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland a third. By the same token, if the process is reversed, the likelihood of a collection breaking up into its original units can be high. Such operations are probably best described in the corporate language of merger and de-merger.\n\nThe 'Kingdom of Sardinia', 1718\u20131861, must be rated a dynastic amalgam par excellence. Its four main constituent elements \u2013 Savoy, Piedmont, Nice and Sardinia \u2013 had been assembled by the _Casa Savoia_ much as multinational corporations now assemble a portfolio of brands and companies. After the Napoleonic Wars, the parts had little in common except the common subjection to the ruling house. In the 1860s, therefore, as the Risorgimento reached its height, the dynasty took a conscious decision to offload the Savoyard and Nizzardo parts of its portfolio to clear the ground for a new corporation, to be called the 'Kingdom of Italy'. The Sardinian brand was sacrificed together with Savoy because they were incompatible with the dynasty's new business plan.\n\nPolitical dynasties, however, employ a variety of strategies, among which the marriage of heirs and heiresses is arguably the most important. Furthermore, since patriarchal cultures can normally insist that a wife's assets be automatically subsumed into those of her husband, the realms of a sovereign heiress would usually lose their separate identity on marriage, as they did in the cases of Jadwiga of Poland in 1385 or of Mary of Burgundy in 1477. In practice, a great deal depended on the conditions agreed during pre-nuptial negotiations or succession contracts, and all sorts of variant settlements have resulted. British readers will be most familiar with the differences between the settlement for a personal union of 'England and Wales' and Scotland in 1603 after the death of Elizabeth I, and those for the constitutional union of England and Scotland in 1707 and of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801.\n\nThe case of the Crown of Aragon is particularly interesting in this regard. The dual state first came into being in 1137 due to a marriage contract sealed on behalf of the heiress of Aragon and the heir to the County of Barcelona. Formally, Aragon and Catalonia were still distinct entities more than three centuries later in 1469 when the prospective King-Count Ferdinand of Aragon married the Infanta Isabella, heiress to Castille. So, too, was their Kingdom of Valencia. These three heartland units, while being incorporated into the Spanish realms, remained juridically and administratively distinct for nearly 250 years after that second landmark marriage; the Crown of Aragon did not finally fade away until the aftermath of the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By that time, Spain was struggling with the tangled succession of the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties \u2013 neither of which had been heard of in the distant days of Queen Petronilla and Count Ram\u00f3n Berenguer.\n\nLiquidation is a concept well understood in company law; and there is no good reason why it should not be applied by analogy to the particular circumstances in which a state entity or 'political company' is deliberately suppressed. The clearest example that comes to mind is when the leaders of the two parts of Czechoslovakia reached agreement on their 'velvet divorce' by consent in 1993. Since then, both the Czech Republic and the Republic of Slovakia have taken their places as sovereign states and good neighbours within the European Union.\n\nOf course, the trickiest question is to determine which liquidations are genuinely consensual and which are not. Many of them are not. In November 1918 the handpicked 'Grand National Assembly' which enabled Serbia to seize and liquidate the Kingdom of Montenegro by outwardly democratic means may be regarded a classic example of gangster-led political theatre. The Allied Powers, alas, were not very nimble or astute at spotting the rogues; they certainly let the Montenegrin question slip past the Paris Peace Conference, perhaps because they had no means of constraining wayward allies like Serbia. At least one British statesman, a future Nobel Peace Prize winner and serving in the founding commission of the League of Nations, seems to have seen what was happening; Lord Robert Cecil (1864\u20131958) summed up the Serbian delegates of the Peace Conference as 'a band of dishonest and murderous intriguers', and he was not taken in, as many were in that era, by the posturing of the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, six months before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Cecil had the misfortune to tell the council of the League: 'There has scarcely ever been a period in the history of the world when war was less likely than at present.' Even perspicacious statesmen have their moments of credulity.\n\nIn 1940, the Soviet takeover of the Baltic States was also accompanied by a combination of military invasions, phoney 'referendums' and international perplexity. Handpicked delegates were assembled. Portraits of Stalin were paraded. The public was terrorized. Critics were harassed or physically removed. The result was known in advance, and the world was told that the victimized countries had joyfully petitioned Moscow for admission to the USSR. In the process, the 'bourgeois republics' were liquidated. 'Suicide by coercion' might also fit.\n\nIrish republicans would maintain that their Republic had been liquidated in like manner by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. In their view, the treaty was invalid because the Irish delegates had been browbeaten into submission by the British threat of full-scale war, and they were not mistaken in their belief that browbeating had been applied. The Free Staters and their friends, in contrast, argued that the content of the treaty was not so drastic, and that the charge of 'liquidating the Republic' hid a more complicated reality. The facts are on their side. Though the name and form of the 'Republic' were indeed surrendered under pressure, the substance of a separate, self-governing Irish state was upheld. Despite everything, the treaty did not re-incorporate Ireland into the United Kingdom, and it provided the foundations on which the Irish Republic was subsequently constructed.\n\nThere remains a category which, for want of something more precise, may be described as the political counterpart of infant mortality. In order to survive, newborn states need to possess a set of viable internal organs, including a functioning executive, a defence force, a revenue system and a diplomatic service. If they possess none of these things, they lack the means to sustain an autonomous existence, and they perish before they can breathe and flourish. The 'Republic of One Day' in Carpatho-Ukraine illustrates the point nicely. Since its executive body did nothing other than to declare its independence, it may be said to have been stillborn.\n\nOther young states succumb after a brief struggle. No state is as vulnerable as in the very early days of its existence, and the vultures begin to hover as soon as the infant takes its first breath. Many such infants falter because they are incapable of independent sustenance if the parent's life support is withdrawn. All the Napoleonic creations, such as the Kingdom of Etruria, belong to this category. Others collapse because the political, military or economic environment is too hostile. Several can be found in the brief outline of Soviet history sketched in Chapter 15. One such state would be Kerensky's would-be constitutional and republican Russia, which had overthrown the tsar's government in February 1917 but whose provisional government was snuffed out by the Bolsheviks after only eight months. Another might be the Byelorussian National Republic of 1918 or the Ukrainian National Republic in the same era. A third would be the homeland of the Soviet Union's founder, the Republic of Georgia, which held out for three years in its first incarnation from 1918 to 1921, and which is again gasping for air nearly ninety years later in the hostile environment of Russia's 'near abroad'.\n\nSuccessful statehood, in fact, is a rare blessing. It requires health and vigour, good fortune, benevolent neighbours and a sense of purpose to aid growth and to reach maturity. All the best-known polities in history have passed through this test of infancy, and many have lived to a grand old age. Those which failed the test have perished without making their mark. In the chronicles of bodies politic, as in the human condition in general, this has been the way of the world since time immemorial.\n\nFrom the time of the ancient Greeks, and no doubt longer, the death of a monarch entailed a grand funeral, an oration, a burial or a burning pyre, an epitaph on the tomb and an obituary. Alaric's committal to the Busento was but a specific variant to normal practice. The Anglo-Saxons and Vikings often buried their chieftain in his ship, to mark the end of his rule and the start of a new voyage either to Valhalla or to Heaven:\n\n> Scyld was still a strong man when his time came\n> \n> And he passed over into Our Lord's keeping.\n> \n> His warrior band did what he bade them\n> \n> When he laid down the law among the Danes.\n> \n> They shouldered him out to the sea's flood,\n> \n> the chief they revered who had ruled them.\n> \n> A ring-necked prow rode in the harbour,\n> \n> clad with ice, its cables tightening.\n> \n> They stretched their beloved lord in the boat,\n> \n> laid out amidships by the mast,\n> \n> the great ring-giver... The treasure was massed\n> \n> on top of him: it would travel far\n> \n> on out into the sway of the ocean...\n> \n> And they set a gold standard up\n> \n> high above his head and let him drift\n> \n> to wind and tide, bewailing him\n> \n> and mourning their loss. No man can tell,\n> \n> no wise man in the hall or weathered veteran\n> \n> knows for certain who salvaged that load.\n\nGenerally speaking, the death of a ship of state was not so f\u00eated, though the occasional fine obituary has been penned. William Wordsworth mourned the passing of a state far older than the Kingdom of Etruria, but another of those which were snuffed out by a Napoleonic whim:\n\n> Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee;\n> \n> And was the safeguard of the West: the worth\n> \n> Of Venice did not fall beneath her birth,\n> \n> Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.\n> \n> She was a maiden City, bright and free;\n> \n> No guile seduced, no force could violate;\n> \n> And, when she took unto herself a Mate,\n> \n> She must espouse the everlasting Sea.\n> \n> And what if she had seen those glories fade,\n> \n> Those titles vanish, and that strength decay;\n> \n> Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid\n> \n> When her long life hath reached its final day:\n> \n> Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade\n> \n> Of that which once was great is passed away.\n\n## Notes\n\n##### INTRODUCTION\n\n1. John Hunt, _The Ascent of Everest_ (London, 1953); R. Mantovani, _Everest: The History of the Himalayan Giant_ (Shrewsbury, 1997); J. R. Smith, _Everest: The Man and the Mountain_ (Caithness, 1999). 2. T. Gwynn Jones, _Geiriadur: Cymraeg\u2013Saesneg a Saesneg\u2013Cymraeg_ (Cardiff, 1953). 3. William Johnson Cory (1823\u201392), after Callimachus (third century BC). 4. Edward Gibbon, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , Everyman edn., 6 vols. (London, 1910); _The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon_ (London, 1910). 5. Norman Davies, _The Isles: A History_ (London, 1999). 6. 'The Day Thou gavest Lord is ended' (1870), words by John Ellerton, melody of 'St Clement' by Clement Scholefield. 7. 'Nazi Gold: Publishing the Third Reich', BBC Radio 4, 17 March 2011. 8. A. J. P. Taylor, _The Struggle for Mastery in Europe_ (Oxford, 1954); _English History, 1914\u201345_ (Oxford, 1965); _The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809\u20131918_ (London, 1948); _Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman_ (London, 1955); _The Course of German History_ (London, 1945); _The Origins of the Second World War_ (London, 1961); etc. 9. H. Trevor-Roper, _Historical Essays_ (London, 1957), foreword, quoted by Adam Sisman, _Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography_ (London, 2010), p. 293. 10. Ibid., pp. 168, 294. 11. See R. B. Cunninghame Graham, _A Vanished Arcadia: Some Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607\u20131767_ (London, 1901); B. L. Putnam Weale, _The Vanished Empire_ (London, 1920), on China; Mabel Cabot, _Vanished Kingdoms: A Woman Explorer in Tibet, China, and Mongolia, 1921\u201325_ (New York, 2003); or Oriental Institute Museum, Chicago, _Vanished Kingdoms of the Nile: The Rediscovery of Nubia. An Exhibition_ (Chicago, 1995). 12. Murry Hope, _Atlantis: Myth or Reality?_ (London, 1991); R. Vidal-Naquet, _The Atlantis Story: A Short History of Plato's Myth_ (Exeter, 2007). 13. www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org\/jsource\/archaeology\/bethsaida.htm. See also P. R. Davies, _In Search of Ancient Israel_ (Sheffield, 1992). 14. 2 Samuel 13: 37. 15. Thomas Gray, 'Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard' (1751). 16. John Keats, 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci' (1819). 17. Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'Ozymandias' (1818). Rameses II, pharaoh of the XIXth dynasty, was known to the Greeks as Ozymandias. His statue, 'the Younger Memnon', which inspired Shelley, is in the British Museum. 18. Horace, _Odes_ , book I, ode 14, lines 1\u20134. 19. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'The Building of the Ship' 1849. 20. W. S. Churchill, _The Second World War_ , vol. 3: _The Grand Alliance_ (London, 1950), p. 24.\n\n##### CHAPTER 1. TOLOSA\n\nBibliographical Note. Until recently, the Visigoths have not been treated favourably by historians. The decline of the Roman Empire in the West was conventionally viewed from the imperial perspective and through Latin sources. And the transitional fifth century did not get much coverage. The _New Cambridge Medieval History_ , vol. 1 (Cambridge, 2005), for example, does not address the period before AD 500. Two relevant collections of academic studies are available in English: P. Heather (ed.), _The Visigoths from the Migration Period to the Seventh Century: An Ethnographic Perspective_ (Woodbridge, 1999), and A. Ferreiro (ed.), _The Visigoths: Studies in Culture and Society_ (Leiden, 1999). A synthesis of the subject has recently been published in German: Gerd Kampers, _Geschichte der Westgoten_ (Paderborn, 2008). A chapter on 'The First Gothic Successor State' is well hidden in Peter Heather's _The Goths_ (Oxford, 1996), pp. 181\u2013215.\n\n##### I\n\n1. See www.lescommunes.com\/communie-vouille-86294.html (2009). See also 15 _e Centenaire de la Bataille de Vouill\u00e9, 507\u20132007_ , foreword by S\u00e9gol\u00e9ne Royal (Poitiers, 2007), p. 29. 2. www.507vouillelabataille.com (2008).\n\n##### II\n\n3. After J. B. Bury, _The History of the Later Roman Empire, 395\u2013800_ (London, 1889), vol. 1, ch. 6. 4. See H. Wolfram, _History of the Goths_ (Berkeley, 1998); P. Heather, 'The Fourth Century Goths', in P. Heather and J. Matthews, _The Goths in the 4th Century_ (London, 1991), pp. 51\u201394. 5. Themistius, _Orations_ , quoted by Heather, and Matthews, _The Goths in the 4th Century_ , p. 47. 6. Edward Gibbon, _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , Everyman edn., 6 vols. (London, 1911), ch. 31. 7. Marcel Brion, _Alaric the Goth_ (London, 1932). 8. Paulus Orosius (d. 418), _Historia Adversos Paganos_ , quoted Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_ , ch. 31. 9. See R. Mathisen and H. Sivan, 'Forging a New Identity: The Kingdom of Toulouse and the Frontiers of Visigothic Aquitaine, 418\u2013507', in Ferreiro, _The Visigoths_ , pp. 1\u201362. 10. Septimania, 'the province of the Seven Cities' on the Mediterranean coast, was made up of the modern districts of B\u00e9ziers, Elne, Agde, Narbonne, Lod\u00e8ve, Maguelonne and N\u00eemes. 11. See Mathisen and Sivan, 'Forging a New Identity'. 12. St Jerome (342\u2013420), translator of the Latin Vulgate Bible. His Chronicle built on the earlier work of St Eusebius and became the basic source on the history of the early Christian Church. See also L. Valentin, _St Prosper d'Aquitaine_ (Paris, 1900). 13. E. A. Thompson, _The Huns_ (Oxford, 1999); Christopher Kelly, _Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire_ (London, 2008). 14. Sidonius Apollinaris, _Letters_ , trans. O. M. Dalton (Oxford, 1915). 15. K. Zeumer (ed.), _Leges Visigothorum Antiquiores_ (Hanover, 1894). 16. Pablo C. Diaz, 'Toulouse: The Shadow of the Roman Empire', in Heather, _The Visigoths_ , pp. 330 ff. 17. See Ian Wood, in Kathleen Mitchell and Ian Wood (eds.), _The World of Gregory of Tours_ (Leiden, 2002). 18. T. Hodgkin, _Theodoric the Goth: The Barbarian Champion of Civilization_ (London, 1923). 19. See J. Gaudemet, 'Br\u00e9viaire d'Alaric', in Jean Leclant (ed.), _Dictionnaire de ll'antiquit\u00e9_ (Paris, 2005). 20. See Edward James, _The Franks_ (Oxford, 1998). 21. Gregory of Tours, _Historia Francorum_ , 2.35; Latin text at www.thelatinlibrary.com\/gregorytours\/gregorytours2.shtml; a translation is available at www.fordham.edu\/halsall\/basis\/gregory-hist.html. 22. Ibid., 2.37. 23. Ian Wood, in Rosamund McKitterick and Roland Quinault (eds.), _Gibbon and Empire_ (Cambridge, 1997). 24. Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_ , ch. 38. 25. See John Moorehead, _Justinian_ (London, 1994). 26. See B. Young, 'The Missing Archaeology of the Visigoths', in _The Battle of Vouill\u00e9: Symposium Commemorating the 1500th Anniversary_ , University of Indiana at Urbana Champaign, 12 April 2007; <http:\/\/theheroicage.blogspot.com\/2007_04_01_archive.html>.\n\n##### III\n\n27. 'La Bataille de Voulon', <http:\/\/voulon.fr\/histoire_42.htm> (2010). 28. www.jacobins.mairie-toulouse.fr\/patrhist\/edifices\/menu\/listeed_.htm (2010); www.visite.org\/aquitaine\/fr\/patrimoine.php (2010). 29. A. Ferreiro, _The Visigoths in Gaul and Spain,_ ad _418\u2013711: A Bibliography_ (Leiden, 1998). 30. 'Cl\u00f4itres et monast\u00e8res disparus de Toulouse', <http:\/\/pedagogie.ac-toulouse.fr\/culture\/religieux\/clodaurade.htm> (2010). 31. www.corbieresweb.com\/montagne-d-alaric (2010). 32. Henry Lincoln, _The Holy Place: Decoding the Mystery of Rennes-le-Ch\u00e2teau_ (Moreton-in-Marsh, 2005); www.rennes-le-chateau-archive.com\/ (2010). 33. Henri Boudet, _La Vraie Langue celtique et le cromlech de Rennes-les-Bains_ (Carcassonne, 1886; N\u00eemes, 1999). 34. <http:\/\/redpill.dailygrail.com\/wiki\/rennes_le_chateau> (2010); <http:\/\/dreamscape.com\/morgana\/metis.htm> (2010); www.magie-arcadie.be\/rennes-le-chateau.htm (2010). 35. G\u00e9rard de S\u00e8de, _L'Or de Rennes, ou La vie insolite de B\u00e9renger Sauni\u00e8re_ (Paris, 1967); Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln, _The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail_ (London, 1982, 2005); R. Andrews and P. Schellenberger, _The Tomb of God_ (London, 1996); Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, _The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ_ (London, 1997, 2007); Christian Doumergue, _Rennes-le-Ch\u00e2teau, le grand h\u00e9ritage_ (N\u00eemes, 1997); Dan Brown, _The Da Vinci Code: A Novel_ (London, 2003). 36. See Joseph O'Callaghan, _A History of Mediaeval Spain_ (Ithaca, NY, 1975), ch. 1, 'The Visigothic Kingdom'; Harold Livermore, _Twilight of the Goths: The Rise and Fall of the Kingdom of Toledo, 575\u2013711_ (Bristol, 2006). 37. D. A. Pharies, _A Brief History of theSpanish Language_ (Chicago, 2007). 38. <http:\/\/rickmk.com\/rmk\/pray\/got-our.html> (2010). 39. V. Kouznetsov, _Les Alains: cavaliers des steppes, seigneurs du Caucase_ (Paris, 1997). 40. August von Platen (1796\u20131835), 'Das Grab in Busento' (1820).\n\n##### CHAPTER 2. ALT CLUD\n\nBibliographical Note. There is no dedicated monograph in English on this subject, and only a handful of scattered academic articles such as Alan Macquarrie, 'The Kings of Strathclyde', in A. Grant and K. Stringer (eds.), _Mediaeval Scotland: Crown, Lordship and Community_ (Edinburgh, 1993), pp. 1\u201320, or, for the later period, Davitt Broun, 'The Welsh Identity of the Kingdom of Strathclyde, 900\u20131100', _Innes Review_ , 55 (2004), pp. 111\u201380. Growing piles of information, of variable reliablility, are available on a rising tide of internet sites, including www.templum.freeserve.co.uk\/history\/strathclyde\/localkings.htm and <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/list_of_kings_of_strathclyde>. The background is beautifully presented by Alistair Moffat, _Before Scotland: The Story of Scotland before History_ (London, 2005), especially ch. 7, 'The Last of the British'.\n\n##### I\n\n1. A panoramic view of the Rock can be seen at www.flickr.com\/photos\/ccgd\/5512793\/. Also _Dumbarton Rock_ , photo by John Crae; www.clydesite.co.uk\/articles\/upperriver.asp. 2. R. Jeffrey and I. Watson, _Doon the Watter: A Century of Holidays on the Clyde_ , 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1999). 3. Iain McCrorie, _The Royal Road to the Isles_ (Glasgow, 2001); F. M. Walker, _Song of the Clyde_ : _A History of Clyde Shipbuilding_ (Edinburgh, 2001); see also www.shipsofcalmac.co.uk\/history_timeline.asp. 4. www.traditionalmusic.co.uk\/folk-song-lyrics\/roamin_in_the_gloamin_.htm; see also Gordon Irving, _Great Scot: The Life Story of Sir Harry Lauder_ (London, 1968). 5. Quoted in www.turningwood.fsnet.co.uk\/dumbarton.html (2004); www.undiscovered-scotland.co.uk\/dumbarton\/dumbartoncastle (2008); see also Iain MacIvor, _Dumbarton Castle_ (Edinburgh, 2003). 6. See Brian Lavery, 'The British Government and the American Polaris Base on the Clyde', _Journal of Martime Research_ (Sep. 2001). 7. www.whiskymag.com\/whisky\/brand\/ballantine_s (2004); www.ballantines.com. 8. Incorporated 1765, see www.dunbartonnh.org.\n\n##### II\n\n9. T. Mommsen, 'Petrarch's Conception of the Dark Ages', _Speculum_ , 17\/2 (1942), pp. 226\u201342. 10. K. H. Schmidt, 'Insular Celtic: P and Q Celtic', in M. J. Ball and J. Fife (eds.), _The Celtic Languages_ (London, 1993); Paul Russell, _An Introduction to the Celtic Languages_ (London, 1995). 11. W. F. Skene, _The Four AncientBooks of Wales_, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1868). 12. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Cumbric_language> (2008). Most recently, and after the completion of the present essay, a Cumbric Revival Community has been launched on the Internet at www.cumbricrevival.com. 13. See Peter Brown, _The Rise of Western Christendom_ (Oxford, 2003). 14. Elizabeth Sutherland, _In Search of the Picts: A Celtic Dark Age Nation_ (London, 1994). 15. Possibly confused with another Alauna, south of Hadrian's Wall, usually located at modern Maryport (Cumbria). See also I. A. Richmond, 'Ancient Geographical Sources for Britain North of the Cheviot', in his _Roman and Native in North Britain_ (Edinburgh, 1958); G. W. S. Barrow, 'The Tribes of North Britain Revisited', _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_ , 119 (1989), pp. 161\u20133. 16. In July 2008, the Antonine Wall was adopted by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site. See www.antonineway.com. 17. See Michael Jones, _The End of Roman Britain_ (Ithaca, NY, 1996). 18. Peniarth MS 45, National Library of Wales: translated online at <http:\/\/www.maryjones.us\/ctexts\/bonedd.html> (2010). 19. 'Yr Hen Ogledd', in John Koch (ed.), _Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclo-pedia_ (Oxford, 2006). 20. C. T. Greenhead, quoted in Moffat, _Before Scotland_ , p. 305. 21. Old Kilpatrick, West Dunbartonshire, which is situated on the Clyde at the western end of the Antonine Wall. See www.rcag.org.uk\/parishes_st.patricks_oldkilpatrick.htm. 22. Macquarrie, 'The Kings of Strathclyde', p. 4, and A. Boyle, 'The Birthplace of St. Patrick', _Scottish Historical Review_ , 60 (1981). Boyle's identification of Fintry near Old Kilpatrick with the _Ventre_ of Miurchu's _Vita sancti Patricii_ (seventh century) and with W. J. Watson's _Venn tref_ or 'White House' is rejected, somewhat unconvincingly, on the grounds that Kilpatrick is supposedly a Gaelic name of much later vintage; W. J. Watson, _The History of Celtic Place-names of Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 1993). See J. B. Bury, _The Life of St Patrick and his Place in History_ (London, 1905). 23. St Patrick, 'Letter to Coroticus', in R. P. C. Hanson, _The Life and Writings of the Historical Saint Patrick_ (New York, 1983), pp. 58\u201373. 24. Daphne Brooke, _The Search for St Ninian_ (Whithorn, 1993). 25. Leslie Alcock, 'A Multi-Disciplinary Chronology for Alt Clut, Castle Rock, Dumbarton', _Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland_ (1975\u20136), p. 105. 26. See Kathleen Hughes, 'The Welsh Latin Chronicles: _Annales Cambriae_ and Related Texts', in Hughes, _Celtic Britain in the Early Middle Ages: Studies in Scottish and Welsh Sources_ (Woodbridge, 1980), pp. 67\u201385. 27. Nennius, _Historia Brittonum_ ('A History of the Britons'), ed. D. Dumville (Cambridge, 1985). 28. Moffat, _Before Scotland,_ p. 320. 29. Adamnan, _Life of St Columba_ , ed. W. Reeves (Lampeter, 1988); Adamnan of Iona, _Life of St Columba_ , trans. R. Sharpe (London, 1995). 30. <http:\/\/www.clanarthur.com> (2008); http:\/\/www.scottishweb.net\/...clans-clanmacarthur\/ (2010). 31. At Strathblane. In _Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms_ (London, 1999), Alistair Moffat argues for King Arthur's base to have been located at Roxburgh Castle in the Borders. 32. John Bruce, _History of the Parish of West or Old Kilpatrick and of the Church and Certain Lands in the Parish of East or New Kilpatrick_ (Glasgow, 1893); Joseph Irving, _History of Dumbartonshire_ (Dumbarton, 1860). 33. James Knight, _Glasgow and Strathclyde_ (London, 1930). The references to Bruce, Irving, Knight and others are at www.templum.freeserve.co.uk\/history\/strathclyde\/arthur.htm. 34. The Life is by Jocelyn of Furness. See John Glass, _The Mission of St Mungo_ (Twickenham, 2007). 35. 'The University of Glasgow Story' at www.universitystory.gla.ac.uk\/coat-of-arms\/. 36. See www.catholicireland.net\/church-a-bible\/church\/january-saints\/1226-14-st-kentigern-or-mungo. Many versions of the legend exist. 37. Adamnan, _Life of St Columba_ , ch. 8. See also 'Rhydderch Hael', www.celtnet.org.uk\/gods_rh\/rhydderch.htm. 38. See M. Lapidge and D. Dumville, _Gildas: New Approaches_ (Woodbridge, 1984). 39. A. Marette-Crosby, _The Foundations of Christian England: Augustine of Canterbury and his Impact_ (York, 1997). 40. J. T. Koch (ed.), _The Gododdin of Aneirin: Text and Context from Dark-Age North Britain_ (Cardiff, 1997), p. 52. 41. Ibid., pp. 10\u201311. 42. Ibid., pp. 12\u201313. 43. From 'The Stanzas of the Graves', in _The Black Book of Carmarthen_ , <http:\/\/www.celtic-twilight.com\/camelot\/poetry\/yrhengerdd\/englynion_y_beddau.htm>. (2008). 44. Moffat, _Before Scotland_ , p. 326. 45. Bede, _Ecclesiastical History_ , book 4, ch. 26. 46. James Fraser, _The Pictish Conquest: The Battle of Dunnichen 685 and the Birth of Scotland_ (Stroud, 2006). 47. Moffat, _Before Scotland_ , pp. 328\u20139. 48. See W. D. Simpson, _The Early Christian Monuments at Aberlemno, Angus_ (Edinburgh, 1969). 49. P. C. Bartrum (trans.), _Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts_ (Cardiff, 1966): also online at <http:\/\/kmatthews.org.uk\/history\/harleian_genealogies\/5.html>. 50. 'Pittin the mither tongue online', www.scots-online.org (2010). 51. Macquarrie, 'The Kings of Strathclyde', p. 1. 52. See John Bannerman, _Studies in the History of Dalriada_ (Edinburgh, 1974). 53. N. A. M. Rodger, _The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660\u20131649_ (London, 1997), p. 5. 54. From Bede, book 1, chs. 1, 12, quoted in Alcock, 'A Multi-Disciplinary Chronology for Alt Clut', pp. 104\u20135. 55. _Brut y Tywysogion_ ('Chronicle of the Princes'), ed. Revd John Williams ab Ithel (London, 1860), pp. 6\u20137. 56. Otherwise Teudibar map Beli, see www.earlybritishkingdoms.com\/lists\/strathclyde.html. 57. N. Aitchison, _Scotland's Stone of Destiny: Myth, History and Nationhood_ (Stroud, 2000). 58. Macquarrie, 'The Kings of Strathclyde', pp. 12, 18. 59. _Brut y Tywysogion_ , pp. 14\u201315; _Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals_ , ed. J. Morris (London, 1980), pp. 48, 89; _The Annales Cambriae: Texts A\u2013C in Parallel_ , ed. D. Dumville (Cambridge, 2002); _The Annals of Ulster_ , quoted by Alcock, 'A Multi-Disciplinary Chronology for Alt Clut', p. 106. 60. Text reconstructed by author. 61. A. A. M. Duncan, _Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom_ (Edinburgh, 1995), p. 90. 62. Macquarrie, 'The Kings of Strathclyde', p. 12. 63. Ibid., pp. 12\u201313. 64. See John Davies, _A History of Wales_ (London, 1993), pp. 62 ff. 65. Norman Davies, _The Isles: A History_ (London, 1999), pp. 216\u201317. 66. _Brut y Tywysogion_ , pp. 20\u201321. 67. See Broun, 'The Welsh Identity of the Kingdom of Strathclyde'. 68. See e.g. Nicholas Aitchison, _Macbeth: Man and Myth_ (Stroud, 1999). 69. _The Chronicle of John of Worcester_ , ed. R. Darlington and P. McGurk (Oxford, 1998). 70. A. A. M. Duncan, _Kingship of the Scots, 842\u20131292_ (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 37\u201341. 71. Cynthia Nevile, _Native Lordship in Mediaeval Scotland: The Earldoms of Strathearn and Lennox, 1140\u20131365_ (Portland and Dublin, 2005). 72. Michael, bishop of Glasgow. According to English sources, two earlier bishops of Glasgow were appointed by the archbishops of York. Bishop Magsuen ( _fl_. 1055\u201360) may well have owed his see to the conquest of Earl Siward. 73. A. Dooley and H. Roe, _Tales of the Elders of Ireland_ (Oxford, 1998), p. 13. 74. F. Mort, _Renfrewshire_ (Cambridge, 1912). 75. A. A. M. Duncan, 'William, Son of Alan Wallace: The Documents', in J. Cowan (ed.), _The Wallace Book_ (Edinburgh, 2007), pp. 42\u201363. 76. Fiona Watson, 'Sir William Wallace: What We Do \u2013 and Don't Know', in Cowan, _The Wallace Book_ , p. 27. 77. J. C. Borland, _William Wallace: His Birthplace and Family Connections_ (Kilmarnock, 1999). 78. James A. Mackay, _William Wallace: Brave Heart_ (Edinburgh, 1996). 79. George Fraser Black, _The Surnames of Scotland: Their Origin, Meaning and History_ (New York, 1946). 80. See also M. Stead and A. Young, _In the Steps of William Wallace_ (London, 2002). 81. Alistair Moffat, _The Highland Clans_ (London, 2010), p. 151.\n\n##### III\n\n82. See G. W. S. Barrow, _Kingship and Unity: Scotland 1000\u20131306_ (London, 1981) 83. John Prebble, _Culloden_ (London, 1973); J. Sadler, _Culloden: The Last Charge of the Highland Clans_ (Stroud, 2006). 84. John Prebble, _The Highland Clearances_ (London, 1963). 85. Wilson McLeod, _Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland_ (Edinburgh, 2006). 86. R. Renwick and J. Lindsay, _The History of Glasgow_ , 3 vols. (Glasgow, 1934). 87. James Macpherson, _The Poems of Ossian and Related Works_ (Edinburgh, 1896).\n\n##### CHAPTER 3. BURGUNDIA\n\nBibliographical Note. The overwhelming mass of general works on Burgundy are written from the French perspective, and the great majority of them concentrate heavily on the history of the late medieval duchy. See, for example, Henri Drouot, _Histoire de Bourgogne_ (Paris, 1927), or Jean Richard, _Histoire de Bourgogne_ (Paris, 1957). There is no standard study of the imperial Kingdom of Burgundy in English, and no broad survey of Burgundian history as a whole.\n\n##### I\n\n1. See www.brk.dk; also <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/bornholm> (2007). 2. See www.cimber.com (2010), www.airliners.net\/aviation-forums\/general_aviation\/4474449 (2010). 3. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki.bornholmsk_dialect> (2011); J. D. Prince, 'The Danish Dialect of Bornholm', _Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,_ 63\/2 (1924), pp. 190\u2013207. 4. 'Bornholmsk Folkemusik', <http:\/\/www.myspace.com\/habbadam> (2010). 5. J. H. Hopkins, 'Bornholm Disease', _British Medical Journal_ , 1\/4664 (May 1950). 6. Martin Anderson Nexo, _Pelle Eroberen_ (1910), translated as _Pelle the Conqueror_ (London, 1916) and turned into a film directed by Bille August in 1987. 7. <http:\/\/www.iau.org.tw>. 8. 'Trolling Master Bornholm Allinge', http:\/\/www.eventful.com\/events\/trolling-master...\/ (2001). 9. Danish Naturists Federation, <http:\/\/www.strandguide.dk> (2010). 10. 'Bright Green Island', <http:\/\/www.brk.dk\/bornholm\/site=aspx?p=45> (2010). 11. Erling Haagense, _The Templars' Secret Island_ (Moreton-in-Marsh, 2000). 12. R.Guichard, _Essai sur l'histoire du peuple Burgonde de Bornholm_ (Paris, 1965); I. Wood, 'Ethnicity and the Ethnogenesis of the Burgundians', in H. Wolfram and W. Pohl (eds.), _Typen der Ethnogenese unter besonderer Ber\u00fccksichtigung der Bayern_ (Vienna, 1990). 13. See Knud Jespersen, _A History of Denmark_ (Basingstoke, 2004). 14. 'Danish Island Calls for Help', 28 December 2010, www.swedishwire.com\/nordic\/7860 (2010).\n\n##### II\n\n15. James Bryce, _The Holy Roman Empire_ (London, 1901), p. 434. 16. Ibid. 17. Odet Perrin, _Les Burgondes_ (Neuch\u00e2tel, 1968). 18. Guichard, _Essai_. 19. G. W. S. Friedrichsen, _The Gothic Version of the Epistles_ (London, 1939); Charles A. Anderson Scott, _Ulfilas: Apostle of the Goths_ (Cambridge, 1885). 20. From _Widsith_ , ed. K. Malone (London, 1936). 21. Perrin, _Les Burgondes_ , pp. 270\u201373. 22. Translation by author. 23. Edward Peters, 'Introduction', to Katherine Drew, _The Burgundian Code: Book of Constitutions or Law of Gundobad_ (Philadelphia, 1963), pp. 1\u20132. 24. C. E. Stevens, _Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age_ (Oxford, 1933). 25. J. Favrod, _Les Burgondes: un royaume oubli\u00e9 au c\u0153ur de l'Europe_ (Lausanne, 2002), pp. 32 ff. 26. Ibid., p. 235. 27. Perrin, _Les Burgondes_ , p. 537. 28. See P. Grierson and M. Blackburn, _Medieval European Coinage_ (Cambridge, 1986), vol. 1, pp. 75 ff. 29. 'St Clothilda', _Catholic Encyclopedia_ (New York, 1907). 30. 'The Burgundian Civil War', _Burgundians in the Mist_ , <http:\/\/www.theburgundian.blogspot.com\/2010\/06\/burgundian-civil-war.html> (2010). 31. Drew, _The Burgundian Code_ , contains the text of the code in translation. 32. Ibid., p. 31. 33. Ibid., p. 84. 34. Ibid., p. 86. 35. Ibid., p. 17. 36. F. Paxton, 'Power and the Power to Heal: The Cult of St Sigismund of Burgundy', _Early Modern Europe_ , 2 (1993), pp. 95\u2013110. 37. D. Shanzer and I. Wood, _Avitus of Vienne: Letters and Selected Prose_ (Liverpool, 2002). 38. P. Bouffard, _Saint-Maurice d'Agaune_ (Geneva, 1974). 39. J. von Pflugk-Harttung, _A History of All Nations from the Earliest of Times_ (Philadelphia, 1905), p. 399. 40. See Guy Raynaud de Lage, _Introduction \u00e0 l'ancien fran\u00e7ais_ (Paris, 1975); P. Porteau, 'Langue d'oc et langue d'o\u00efl', in his _Deux \u00e9tudes dans l'histoire de la langue_ (Paris, 1962). 41. Gregory of Tours, _Historia Francorum_ , 4.25. See Medieval Online Sourcebook, www.fordham.edu\/halsall\/basis\/gregory-hist.html. 42. Ibid., 3.19. 43. J. Favrod (trans.), _La Chronique de Marius d'Avenches_ (Lausanne, 1991). 44. W. E. Klingshirn, _Caesarius of Arles: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul_ (Cambridge, 1994). 45. F. MacManus, _St Columban_ (New York, 1963); Katherine Lack, _The Eagleand the Dove: The Spirituality of the Celtic Saint Columbanus_ (London, 2000). 46. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, 'The Bloodfeud of the Franks', in his _The Long-Haired Kings and Other Studies in Frankish History_ (London, 1962). 47. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, 'Fredegar and the History of France', ibid., p. 87. 48. Ibid., p. 92. 49. Ibid., p. 147. 50. L. Theis, _Dagobert: un roi pour un peuple_ (Paris, 1952). 51. Antonio Santosuosso, _Barbarians, Marauders and Infidels: The Ways of Medieval Warfare_ (Boulder, Colo., 2004). 52. Alessandro Barbero, _Charlemagne: Father of a Continent_ (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 28\u201333. 53. Jean Richard, _Les Ducs de Bourgogne et la formation du duch\u00e9_ (Paris, 1954). 54. Lucy Smith, _The Early History of the Abbey of Cluny_ (London, 1930); Edwin Mullins, _In Search of Cluny: God's Lost Empire_ (Oxford, 2004). 55. Gillian Evans, _Bernard of Clairvaux_ (Oxford, 2000). 56. 'A Thousand Years of Monastic Winegrowing', www.bourgogne-wines.com. 57. 'Le Duc de Bordeaux', <http:\/\/wn.com\/un_deux_rab> (2010). 58. R. Poupardin, _Boson et le royaume de Provence_ (Ch\u00e2lons-sur-Sa\u00f4ne, 1899). 59. Mireille Labrousse, _St Honorat: fondateur de L\u00e9rins et \u00c9v\u00eaque d'Arles_ (B\u00e9grolles, 1995). 60. Favrod, _La Chronique de Marius d'Avenches_ , p. 122. 61. R. Lane Poole, _Burgundian Notes: The Union of the Two Kingdoms of Burgundy_ (Oxford, 1913). 62. Geoffrey Barraclough, _The Origins of Modern Germany_ (London, 1947), pp. 50\u201351. 63. _Alpes du Nord_ , Michelin, Guide Vert (Paris, 2007), pp. 338\u20139. 64. R. W. Dixon, _The Close of the Tenth Century of the Christian Era_ , Arnold Prize Essay (Oxford, 1858), p. 2. 65. E. Taylor (ed.), _Lays of the Minnesingers or German Troubadours of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries_ (London, 1825), pp. 15\u201316. 66. D. Stich, _Parlons francoproven\u00e7al: une langue m\u00e9connue_ (Paris, 1998); www.arpitania.com. 67. R. Lane Poole, _Burgundian Notes: The Supposed Origin of Burgundia Minor_ (Oxford, 1915). 68. See Adam Wandruszka, _The House of Habsburg: Six Hundred Years of a European Dynasty_ (London, 1994). 69. 'Zaehringen', _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 70. Peter Munz, _Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics_ (London, 1969). 71. K. Leyser, 'The Crisis of Medieval Germany', in his _Communications and Power in Medieval Europe_ , vol. 2 (London, 1994). 72. Barraclough, _Origins of Modern Germany_ , p. 146. 73. David Abulafia, _Frederick_ II _: A Medieval Emperor_ (London, 1988). 74. See J. Boichard, _Histoire de la Franche-Comt\u00e9_ (Toulouse, 1978). 75. See Rudolf Massini, _Des Bistums Basel zur Zeit des Investiturstreites_ (Basle, 1946). 76. Reginald Abbot, _The Rise of the Swiss Confederation_ (Oxford, 1861). 77. M. Aurel _et al_., _La Provence au Moyen-\u00c2ge_ (Aix-en-Provence, 2005). 78. A. Latreille, _L'Histoire de Lyon et du Lyonnais_ (Toulouse, 1975). 79. J. Charay, _Petite histoire politique et administrative du Vivarais_ (Lyon, 1959). 80. F. Benoit, _La Provence et le Comtat Venaissin_ (Paris, 1949); B. Guillemain, _La Cour pontificale d'Avignon_ (Paris, 1962). 81. Fran\u00e7oise Gasparri, _La Principaut\u00e9 d'Orange au Moyen \u00c2g_ e (Paris, 1985). 82. Council of Lyon, 1245. See www.piar.hu\/councils\/ecum13.htm#bullofex-communication; full text at www.intratext.com\/ixt\/eng0066\/. 83. W. L. Wakefield, _Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100\u20131250_ (London, 1974); A. Monaster, _History of the Vaudois Church_ (London, 1848). 84. See Joseph Strayer, _The Reignof Philip the Fair_ (Princeton, 1980). 85. B. Bligny, _L'Histoire du Dauphin\u00e9_ (Toulouse, 1973). 86. See www.identitecomtoise.net\/histoire, a website on the language and history of Franche-Comt\u00e9. 87. From 'Philip I of Burgundy', <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/philip_1%2c_duke_of_burgundy> (August 2007). 88. Richard Vaughan, _Philip the Bold: The Formation of the Burgundian State_ (London, 1979). 89. Richard Vaughan, _Valois Burgundy_ (London, 1975). 90. J. Billioud, _Les \u00c9tats de Bourgogne aux XIVe et XVe si\u00e8cles_ (Dijon, 1922). 91. J. Calmette, _The Golden Age of Burgundy_ (London, 2001). 92. G. Attinger, _L'Histoire du Pays de Neuch\u00e2tel_ (Neuch\u00e2tel, 1979). 93. W. Blockmans and W. Prevenier, _The Promised Lands: The Low Countries under Burgundian Rule, 1369\u20131530_ (Philadelphia, 1999), pp. 164\u20135. 94. Jean Froissart, _The Chronicles of England, France and Spain etc._ (London, 1906), p. 464. 95. J.-M. Cauchies (ed.), _A la cour de Bourgogne: le Duc, son entourage, son train_ (Turnhout, 1998). 96. Myriam Cheyns-Cond\u00e9, 'L'\u00c9pop\u00e9e troyenne dans la \"Librairie\" ducale bourguignonne', in Cauchies, _A la cour de Bourgogne_. See also N. F. Blake, _William Caxton and English Literary Culture_ (London, 1992). 97. H. Liebaers, _Flemish Art from the Beginning till Now_ (Antwerp, 1985); Dirk De Vos, _The Flemish Primitives_ (Amsterdam, 2002). 98. K. Morand, _Claus Sluter: Artist at the Court of Burgundy_ (London, 1991). 99. J. Lestocquoy, _Deux si\u00e8cles de l'histoire de la tapisserie_ (Arras, 1978). 100. 'Un tres doulx regard: the blossoming of the Burgundian spirit in song, 1390\u20131440', www.asteriamusica.com\/programs.html (2007). 101. D. Fallows, _Dufay_ (New York, 1998); W. H. Kemp, _Burgundian Court Song_ (Oxford, 1990); H. M. Brown, _Josquin and the Fifteenth-Century Chanson_ (Oxford, 1985). 102. L. E. Halkin, _Erasmus: A Critical Biography_ (Oxford, 1993). 103. J. Huizinga, _The Waning of the Middle Ages_ (London, 1924), p. 1. 104. See 'Johan Huizinga', at www.kirjasto.sci.fi\/huizin.htm (2008). 105. From Froissart, _Chronicles_. 106. <http:\/\/www.chateau-de-santenay.com> (2010). 107. 'Le Palais des Ducs de Bourgogne', <http:\/\/dijon.free.fr\/visite\/palais1.htm> (2010). 108. Richard Vaughan, _John the Fearless: The Growth of Burgundian Power_ (London, 1966). 109. Richard Vaughan, _Philip the Good: The Apogee of Burgundy_ (Woodbridge, 2002). 110. Edward Tabri, 'The Funeral of Duke Philip the Good', _Essays in History_ , 33 (1990\u201391). 111. Richard Vaughan, _Charles the Bold: The Last Duke of Burgundy_ (Woodbridge, 2002); Henri Dubois, _Charles le T\u00e9m\u00e9raire_ (Paris, 2004). 112. Philippe de Commynes, _The Universal Spider: The Life of Louis XI of France_ , trans. and ed. Paul Kendall (London, 1973), p. 212. 113. Ibid., p. 213. 114. Ibid., pp. 198 ff. See also Mus\u00e9e Historique de Berne, _Le Butin des guerres de Bourgogne et \u0153uvres d'art de la cour de Bourgogne_ , catalogue raisonn\u00e9e (Berne, 1969). 115. Luc Hommel, _Marie de Bourgogne ou le grand h\u00e9ritage_ (Brussels, 1945); G. Dumont, _Marie de Bourgogne_ (Paris, 1982). 116. Martyn Rady, _The Emperor Charles V_ (London, 1988). 117. See <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/reichskreis>. 118. See Pieter Geyl, _The Revolt of the Netherlands_ (London, 1988). 119. Jean Schneider, _L'Histoire de la Lorraine_ (Paris, 1961). 120. Francisco El\u00edas de Tejada y Sp\u00ednola, _El Franco-condado hisp\u00e1nico_ (Seville, 1975); Fran\u00e7ois Pernot, _La Franche-Comt\u00e9 espagnol_ e (Besan\u00e7on, 2003). 121. See <http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/anciennes_provinces_de_france> (2008). 122. <http:\/\/regionsdefrance.wikispaces.com\/> (2008). 123. www.rhonealpes.fr\/ (2008). 124. Apparently a transposition of the French motto ' _Autre n'auray_ ', also used by the dukes; see R. Prosser, _The Order of the Golden Fleece_ (Iowa City, 1981), p. 5.\n\n##### III\n\n125. 'Burgundy',www.answers.com (2009). 126. 'Burgundy (region)', <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/burgundy_(region)> (2008). Some of the problems are sorted out at <http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/bourgogne_(homonymie)>. 127. www.burgundynet\/history-burgundy.html. 128. _Shorter Oxford English Dictionary_ (Oxford, 2000), vol. 1, p. 253. 129. _Oxford English Dictionary_ , compact edn. (Oxford, 1971), vol. 1, p. 1187. 130. Dictionaries listed above include: www.meriam-webster.com. \u00c9mile Littr\u00e9 (Paris, 1956); Paul Robert (Paris, 1966); Paul lmbs (Paris, 1975); _New Encylopaedia Britannica_ , macropedia, vol. 3, p. 497; and _Nouveau petit Larousse_ (Paris, 1969). 131. _Brockhaus: die Encyclop\u00e4die_ (Leipzig, 1996), vol. 4, pp. 196\u20138. 132. _Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN_ (Warsaw, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 379\u201380. 133. Saul Cohen (ed.), _The Columbia Gazetteer of the World_ (New York, 1998), vol. 1, pp. 470\u201371. 134. Andrew Dalby, _The World and Wikipedia: How We Are Editing Reality_ (Draycott, 2009). 135. To be fair, the chapter closes with 'the history of the various Burgundian regions was far from simple'; _New Cambridge Medieval History_ (Cambridge, 1999), vol. 3, pp. 328, 345. 136. Robert J. Casey, _The Lost Kingdom of Burgundy_ (London, 1924), pp. 3, 6, 8.\n\n##### CHAPTER 4. ARAGON\n\nBibliographical Note. Library catalogues contain more entries on the writer Louis Aragon than on the Crown of Aragon. Apart from Thomas Bisson's _The Medieval Crown of Aragon: A Short History_ (Oxford, 1986), there is no satisfactory work in English on the overall subject. Henry Chaytor's _History of Aragon and Catalonia_ (London, 1933), which is now available online, starts with 'the grand-sons of Noah' and is far too densely detailed for comfort. Numerous documentary sources have been collected and translated, such as the _Llibre dels Fets_ of James the Conqueror (see note 51 below) or _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ (see note 37). And it is not difficult to find excellent monographs or academic articles on particular aspects and episodes. But the inclusive approach is signally lacking, especially in work inspired by national Catalan or regional Aragonese perspectives. Readers seeking introductory matter need to explore books on the Iberian peninsula as a whole, such as Jocelyn Hillgarth's _The Spanish Kingdoms, 1250\u20131516_ (Oxford, 1976) or Stanley Payne's 'The Rise of Arag\u00f3n-Catalonia', in his _A History of Spain and Portugal_ , 2 vols. (Madison, 1973), vol. 1, ch. 5.\n\n##### I\n\n1. www.perpignan.cci.fr\/2-13674-accueil.php (2007). 2. 'Office de Tourisme de la Ville de Perpignan', www.mairie-perpignan.fr (2007). 3. <http:\/\/france-for-visitors.com\/pyrenees\/roussillon\/perpignan.html> (2007). 4. <http:\/\/www.usap.com> (2010). 5. Marcel Durliat, _L'Histoire du Roussillon_ (Paris, 1962), pp. 6, 40. 6. <http:\/\/www.estivales.com> (2010). 7. <http:\/\/www.villagesdefrance.free.fr> (2010). 8. Horace Chauvet, _Folklore du Roussillon_ (Perpignan, 1943). 9. Festival of Am\u00e9lie-les-Bains: <http:\/\/www.kadmusarts\/festivals\/932.htm> (2010). 10. Alicia Marcet i Juncosa, _Abr\u00e9g\u00e9 d'histoire des terres catalanes du nord_ , traduction du catalan (Canet, 1994). 11. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/el_gran_carlemany> (2010). See also A. Degage and A. Duro i Arajol, _L'Andorre_ (Paris, 1998).\n\n##### II\n\n12. _The Song of Roland_ , trans. Glyn Burgess (London, 1990), lines 1\u20139. 13. Barton Sholod, 'The Formation of a Spanish March', in his _Charlemagne in Spain: The Cultural Legacy of Roncesvalles_ (Geneva, 1966), pp. 44 ff. 14. Ralph Giesey, _If Not, Not: The Oath of the Aragonese and the Legendary Laws of Sobrarbe_ (Princeton, 1968). 15. A. Ferreiro, 'The Siege of Barbastro, 1064\u20135: A Reassessment', _Journal of Medieval History_ , 9\/2 (1983), pp. 129\u201344. 16. Ibn Bassam, quoted by Christopher Dawson, 'The Origins of the Romantic Tradition', in his _Mediaeval Religion and Other Essays_ (London, 1934), p. 146. 17. Gerald Bond (ed. and trans.), _The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitiers, and IX Duke of Aquitaine_ (New York, 1982). 18. Richard Fletcher, _The Quest for El Cid_ (Oxford, 1991); David Nicolle, _El Cid and the Reconquista_ (London, 1988); Ram\u00f3n Pidal, _The Cid and his Spain_ (London, 1924). 19. _The Poem of the Cid: A New Critical Edition_ , ed. Ian Michael, trans. Rita Hamilton and Janet Perry (Manchester, 1975), ll. 1 ff. 20. Ibid., ll. 955\u201361 ff. See T. Montgomery, 'The Cid and the Count of Barcelona', _Hispanic Review_ , 30\/1 (1962), pp. 1\u201311. 21. R. W. Southern, _The Making of the Middle Ages_ (London, 1953), p. 129. 22. George Beech, _The Brief Eminence and Doomed Fall of Islamic Saragossa_ (Zaragoza, 2008). See <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/taifa_of_zaragoza> (2008). 23. J. Bouti\u00e8re and A. H. Schutz (eds.), _Biographies des troubadours_ (Paris, 1964). 24. From the Proven\u00e7al poem _Sainte Foy_ , quoted by Chaytor, _History of Aragon and Catalonia_ , ch. 4. See also H. J. Chaytor, _The Proven\u00e7al Chanson de Geste_ (London, 1946). 25. Dawson, _Mediaeval Religion and Other Essays_ , pp. 125, 128. 26. John Shideler, _A Medieval Catalan Noble Family: The Montcadas, 1000\u20131230_ (Berkeley, 1983). 27. Attributed to Ferdinand the Catholic. On Aragonese constitutional matters, see J. M. Mas i Solench, _Les Corts a la Corona Catalono-Aragonesa_ (Barcelona, 1995); Xavier Gil, 'Parliamentary Life in the Crown of Aragon', _Journal of Early Modern History_ , 6\/4 (2002), pp. 362\u201395. 28. Georges de Manteyer, _La Provence, du premier au douzi\u00e8me si\u00e8cle_ (Paris, 1908). 29. E. Le Roy Ladurie, _L'Histoire du Languedoc_ (Paris, 1962). 30. Bernard Reilly, _TheKingdom of Le\u00f3n-Castilla under King Alfonso VII_ (Philadelphia, 1998). 31. Southern, _The Making of the Middle Ages_ , pp. 122\u20137; 'The Family of the Counts of Barcelona', Genealogical Table, ibid., p. 125. Count Wilfred is buried at his foundation, Santa Maria di Ripoll. 32. Peter Sahlins, _Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees_ (Berkeley, 1989). 33. Norman Davies, _Europe: A History_ (Oxford, 1996), pp. 427\u20138. 34. Jocelyn Hillgarth, 'The Problem of a Catalan Mediterranean Empire', _English Historical Review_ , 90 (1975), pp. 3 ff. 35. J. H. Elliott, _The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598\u20131640_ (Cambridge, 1963), p. 3. See also his 'A Europe of Composite Monarchies', _Past and Present_ , 137\/1 (1992), pp. 48 ff. 36. http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/lista_de_reis_d'aragon (Catalan). In the present study, the Aragonese style will be followed, but the Catalan form is equally correct. 37. Pass of Manzana, from _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , trans. from the Catalan by Lady Goodenough (London, 1921). 38. Philippe III le Hardi, during the 'Aragonese Crusade'. See Ivan Gobry, _Philippe III, fils de Saint Louis_ (Paris, 2004). 39. _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , vol. 1, pp. 16\u201317. 40. K. L. Reyerson, 'Flight from Prosecution: The Search for Religious Asylum in Mediaeval Montpellier', _French Historical Studies_ , 17\/3 (1992), pp. 602\u201326. 41. See Y. Baer, _A History of the Jews in Christian Spain_ , 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1961). 42. Francesca Espa\u00f1ol, 'El salterio y libro de horas de Alfonso el Magn\u00e1nimo y el cardenal Joan de Casanova 28962 (British Library, Add. 28962)', _Locus Amoenus_ , 6 (2002\u20133). 43. Coronation of Alfonso El Benigno, 1328, from, _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , vol. 2, pp. 722\u20138. 44. Dawson, _Mediaeval Religion and Other Essays_ , p. 135. 45. John Boswell, _The Royal Treasure: Muslim Communities under the Crown of Aragon_ (New Haven, 1977). 46. _Gesta Comitum Barcinonensiam_ , ed. L. Barrau Dihigo and J. Mass\u00d3 i Torrents. (Barcelona, 1925). 47. Ana Isabel Lape\u00f1a Pa\u00fal, _Selecci\u00f3n de documentos del monasterio de San Juan de la Pe\u00f1a, 1195\u20131410_ (Zaragoza, 1995), p. 388. 48. Felipe Fern\u00e1ndez-Armesto, _Barcelona: A Thousand Years of the City's Past_ (London, 1991). 49. Susan Rose, 'Christians, Muslims and Crusaders: Naval Warfare in the Mediterranean at the Time of the Crusades', in her _Medieval Naval Warfare_ (London, 2002), ch. III. 50. _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , vol. 1, pp. 50\u201352; J. A. Robson, 'The Catalan Fleet and Moorish Sea-power (1337\u20131344)', _English Historical Review_ , 74 (1959), pp. 386\u2013408. 51. _The Book of Deeds of James I of Aragon: A Translation of the Medieval Catalan_ Llibre dels Fets, Crusade Texts in Translation, 10, trans. Damian Smith and Helena Buffery (Aldershot, 2003), pp. 78\u201381. 52. Ibid., p. 84. 53. Ibid., p. 86. 54. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/valencian> (2007); see also <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/kingdom_of_valencia> (2008). 55. R. I. Burns, 'Muslims in the Thirteenth-Century Realms of Aragon', in J. Powell (ed.), _Muslims under Latin Rule, 1100\u20131300_ (Princeton, 1990). 56. _Spain_ , Dorling Kindersley series (London, 2000), pp. 240\u201343. 57. J. L. Sotoca Garc\u00eda, _Los amantes de Teruel: la tradici\u00f3n y la historia_ (Zaragoza, 1979). 58. Marta VanLandingham, 'The Domestic Influence of the Queen', in her _Transforming the State: King, Court and Political Culture in the Realms of Aragon (1213\u20131387)_ (Leiden, 2002), pp. 187\u201394. 59. See Chaytor, _History of Aragon and Catalonia_ , ch. 8. 60. Denis Mack Smith, _MediaevalSicily_ (London, 1968); Clifford Backman, _The Decline and Fall of Medieval Sicily: Politics, Religion and Economy in the Reign of Frederick III, 1296\u20131337_ (Cambridge, 1995). 61. Steven Runciman, _The Sicilian Vespers_ (Cambridge, 1958). 62. Lawrence Mott, _Sea Power in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Catalan-Aragonese Fleet in the War of the Sicilian Vespers_ (Gainesville, Fla., 2003). 63. 'Roger of Loria', _Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia_ , www.education.yahoo (2011). 64. Michele Amari, _History of the War of the Sicilian Vespers_ (London, 1850), vol. 2, pp. 231\u20133. 65. Dante Alighieri, _Purgatorio_ , canto III, ll. 114\u201317 (translation by author). 66. Ibid., canto VII, ll. 70\u2013129. 67. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/category:kings_of_sicily> (2008). 68. See Neil Wilson, _Malta_ (London, 2000). 69. _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , vol. 2, pp. 507\u20139. 70. K. M. Setton, _The Catalan Domination of Athens, 1311\u201388_ (London, 1975). 71. Ibid. 72. David Abulafia, 'The Aragonese Kingdom of Albania: An Angevin Project of 1311\u201316', in B. Arbel (ed.), _Intercultural Contacts in the Medieval Mediterranean_ (London, 1996), pp. 1\u201313. 73. See Paul Kennedy, _The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers_ (London, 1988). 74. Burns, 'Muslims', pp. 67 ff. 75. David Abulafia, _A Medieval Emporium: The Catalan Kingdom of Majorca_ (Cambridge, 1994). 76. Ibid. 77. A. L. Isaacs, _The Jews of Majorca_ (London, 1936). 78. E. A. Peers, _Ramon Lull: A Biography_ (London, 1929). 79. _The Chronicle of Muntaner_ , vol. 2, p. 661. 80. Pere III of Catalonia (Pedro IV of Aragon), _Chronicle_ , trans. Mary Hillgarth (Toronto, 1980). 81. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/james_iii_of_majorca> (2008). 82. T. N. Bisson, _Tormented Voices: Power, Crisis and Humanity in Rural Catalonia, 1140\u20131200_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). 83. In his will, Pedro IV had appointed his daughter and only child, Constanza, as his successor. His temerity in this matter was seen by many nobles as a direct threat to their own, more normal practice of male primogeniture. 84. www.1902encyclopedia.com\/s\/spa\/spain-24htm (2010). 85. Pere III (Pedro IV), _Chronicle_ , pp. 431\u20139. 86. J. N. Hillgarth, 'The Royal Accounts of the Crown of Aragon', in her _Spain and the Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages_ (Aldershot, 2003), study III, p. 15. 87. Josep Brugada i Guti\u00e9rrez-Rav\u00e9, _Nicolau Eimeric (1320\u20131399) i la pol\u00e8mica inquisitorial_ (Barcelona, 1998). 88. Mack Smith, _Mediaeval Sicily_ , ch. VII, 'The New Feudalism'. 89. Bianca Pitzorno, _Vita di Eleonora d'Arborea: principessa medioevale di Sardegna_ (Brescia, 1984). 90. Eleonora d'Arborea, _Carta de Logu_ (Sassari, 2002, facsimile of the 1805 edn.). 91. VanLandingham, _Transforming the State_ , 'Introduction'. 92. Ferran Soldevila, _Hist\u00f2ria de Catalunya_ (Barcelona, 1962). 93. Norman Davies, 'Xativa', in _Europe: A History_ , p. 350. 94. VanLandingham, _Transforming the State_ , p. 195. 95. Pedro de Luna, Benedict XIII, antipope, 1394\u20131423. Ironically, Benedict had supported Ferdinand's candidacy for the Aragonese throne; J. N. D. Kelly, _The Oxford Dictionary of Popes_ (Oxford, 1986), pp. 232\u20134. 96. 'Titles of European Hereditary Monarchs', Doc. 149, Dec. 1413, www.geo-cities.com\/eurprin\/aragon.html (2009). 97. Alan Ryder, _Alfonso the Magnanimous: King of Aragon, Naples and Sicily_ (Oxford, 1990). 98. Paul Arrighi, _Histoire de la Corse_ (Paris, 1966); M.-A. Ceccaldi, _Histoire de la Corse, 1464\u20131560_ (Ajaccio, 2006). 99. 'Titles of European Hereditary Monarchs', Aragon, Doc. 1, March 1458, www.geocities.com\/eurprin\/aragon.html (2009). 100. Quoted by George Hersey, _Alfonso_ II _and the Artistic Renewal of Naples_ (New Haven, 1969). 101. Harry Hodgkinson, _Scanderbeg_ (London, 2004); O. G. S. Crawford (ed.), _Ethiopian Itineraries, c_. 1400\u20131524 (Cambridge, 1958), pp. 12ff. 102. David Abulafia, 'The Crown of Aragon in the Fifteenth Century', unpaginated draft article to appear in the catalogue of the 'Crown of Aragon' Exhibition, Philadelphia Museum of Art (planned for 2010 but postponed). With permission. 103. 'Callistus III', in Kelly, _The Oxford Dictionary of Popes_ , pp. 179\u201380. 104. Marion Johnson, _The Borgias_ (London, 2001). 105. Felipe Fern\u00e1ndez-Armesto, _Ferdinand and Isabella_ (London, 1975); J.-H. Mariejol, _The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella_ (New Brunswick, NJ, 1961). 106. Marie-Louyse Des Garets, _Le Roi Re_ n\u00e9 (Paris, 1980). 107. John Elliott, _Imperial Spain_ (London, 1963), pp. 24, 30\u201331. 108. P. Vilar, 'Le D\u00e9clin catalan du bas Moyen \u00c2ge', _Estudios de Historia Moderna_ , 6 (1956\u20139), pp. 1\u201368. 109. Abulafia, 'The Crown of Aragon'. 110. Jozef P\u00e9rez, 'The Inquisition in the Kingdom of Aragon', in his _The Spanish Inquisition: A History_ (New Haven, 2005), pp. 30\u201333; Henry Kamen, _The Spanish Inquisition_ (London, 1965). 111. Abulafia, 'The Crown of Aragon'. 112. Felipe Fern\u00e1ndez-Armesto _1492: The year our World Began_ (London, 2010). 113. Mariejol, _The Spain of Ferdinand and Isabella_ , _passim_. 114. Published as Marineo Lucio, _Cr\u00f3nica d'Arag\u00f3n_ (Barcelona, 1974). 115. Henry Kamen, _Spain's Road to Empire: The Making of a World Power, 1492\u20131763_ (London, 2003). 116. Geoffrey Parker, _Philip II_ (London, 1979). 117. See Ernle Bradford, _The Great Siege of Malta: 1565_ (London, 1969). 118. V. Titone, _La societ\u00e0 siciliana sotto gli spagnoli_ (Palermo, 1978). 119. 'Battle of le Puig', _Malta Times_ , 5 January 2007, 'Expert Concludes Mattia Preti Painting Depicts Famous 13th Century Battle.' 120. M. Mignet, _Antonio Perez and Philip II_ (London, 1846). 121. Elliott, _The Revolt of the Catalans_. 122. See Henry Kamen, _Spain in the Later Seventeenth Century_ (London, 1983). 123. Henry Kamen, _The War of the Spanish Succession in Spain, 1700\u201315_ (London, 1969); David Francis, _The First Peninsular War, 1702\u201313_ (London, 1975). 124. Henry Kamen, _Philip V of Spain: The King who Reigned Twice_ (New Haven, 2001).\n\n##### III\n\n125. www.spain-flag.eu\/region-spain-flags\/aragon.htm (2008). 126. Armand de Fluvi\u00e0 i Escorsa, _Els quatre pals: l'escut dels comtes de Barcelona_ (Barcelona, 1994). 127. See J. Llobera, _The Role of Historical Memory in (Ethno)Nation-Building_ (London, 1996). 128. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/els_segadors> (2011). 129. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/himno_de_aragon> (2011). 130. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/himno_de_la_comunidad_valenciana> (2011). 131. 'The Anthem of Majorca', http:\/\/www.consellmallorca.net\/?&id_parent=272&id_section=1855&id_son=749& (2011). 132. 'Hymne \u00e1 la Catalogne', http:www.oasisdesartistes.com\/modules\/newbbex\/viewtopic.php? (2011). 133. Bisson, _Medieval Crown_ , pp. 189\u201390.\n\n##### CHAPTER 5. LITVA\n\nBibliographical Note. The historiography of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania is extremely fragmented, and preliminary introductions in English are hard to find. A start could be made with Jerzy Lukowski, _Liberty's Folly: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Eighteenth Century, 1697\u20131795_ (London, 1991), Daniel Stone, _The Polish-Lithuanian State, 1386\u20131795_ (Seattle, 2001) or even with Norman Davies, _God's Playground: A History of Poland_ , 2 vols.(Oxford, 1981), vol. 1, which provides the background to the long period of union with Poland between 1385 and 1795. More serious researchers will need to have half a dozen languages at their fingertips, and must be prepared to wrestle with conflicting Lithuanian, Belarusian, Polish and Russian perspectives. See Stephen Rowell, _A History of Lithuania_ (Vilnius, 2002), Nicholas Vakar, _Belorussia: The Making of a Nation_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1956) and John Fennell, _The Crisis of Medieval Russia, 1200\u20131304_ (London, 1983). A multinational survey of the Grand Duchy's history is eagerly awaited from the pen of Professor Robert Frost of Aberdeen University.\n\n##### I\n\n1. CIA, World Factbook, www.cia.gov\/library\/publications\/the-world-factbook\/geos\/bo\/html (2008); www.alternativeairlines.com\/belavia. 2. The website for 'International Tourist Rankings' names fifty countries. The Corruption Perception Index is produced by Transparency International. The 'Quality of Life Index' and the 'Democracy Index' are both produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, London, www.eiu.com. 3. BBC News online, Stephen Mulvey, 'Profile: Europe's Last Dictator?',10 September 2001; see also <http:\/\/president.gov.by\/en>. 4. Piers Paul Read, _Ablaze: The Story of Chernobyl_ (London, 1993); Alex Kirby, 'Analysis: The Chernobyl Legacy', BBC News online, 5 June 2000; John Vidal, 'Hell on Earth', _Guardian_ , 26 April 2006; USA Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 'Fact Sheet on the Accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant', www.nrc.gov\/reading-rm\/doc-collections\/fact-sheets\/fschernobyl.html (2008). 5. <http:\/\/www.massviolence.org\/kurapaty-1937-1941-nkvd-mass-killings> (2010). 6. Ivan Lubachko, _Belorussia under Soviet Rule_ (Lexington, Ky., 1973); Keith Sword (ed.), _The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939\u201341_. (Basingstoke, 1991); David Marples, _Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe_ (Basingstoke, 1996). 7. European Humanities University, Vilnius, <http:\/\/en.ehu.lt\/about> (2008). 8. 'Alexander Lukashenko: Dictator with a Difference', _Daily Telegraph_ , 25 Sept. 2008; BBC News online, 'Observers Deplore Belarus Vote', 24 April 2004. 9. For an eccentrically apologetic assessment, see Stewart Parker, _The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus_ (Minsk, 2007). 10. Helena Golani, 'Two Decades of the Russian Federation's Foreign Policy in the CIS: The Cases of Belarus and Ukraine', Hebrew University, 2011: <http:\/\/www.ef.huki.ac.il\/publications\/yakovlev%20golani.pdf> (2011). 11. 'Eastern Partnership', European Union External Action: <http:\/\/eeas.europa.eu\/eastern\/index-en.htm> (2011). 12. <http:\/\/charter97.org\/en\/news\/2011\/5\/22\/38809\/?1> (2011). 13. 'Wikileaks, Belarus and Israel Shamir', <http:\/\/www.indexoncensorship.org\/,,,wikileaks-belarus-and-israel-shamir> (2011). 14. David Stern, 'Europe's Last Dictator Goes to the Polls', BBC News online, 17 December 2010. 15. 'As Belarus Votes, World Settles for Lukashenko as the Devil it Knows', Radio Free Europe, 31 Jan. 2011. 16. Evgeny Morozov, _The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World_ (London, 2011); see also Timothy Garton Ash, _Guardian_ , 19 Jan. 2011. 17. The Soviet era memorial was designed to divert attention from the none-too-distant site of the NKVD's massacre at Katyn: www.belarus-misc.org\/history\/chatyn.htm (2008). 18. Captured from the Poles in September 1939, the old fortress of Brest (Brest-Litovsk) was the scene of a heroic stand by the Red Army at the start of Operation Barbarossa. See 'Brest Hero Fortress', www.absoluteastronomy.com\/topics\/brest_fortress (2007). 19. The Virtual Belarus Guide, www.belarusguide.com\/travel1 (2007). 20. http:\/www.belarus.by\/en\/travel\/adventure-sports (2011). 21. www.belintourist.by\/travel (2007). 22. Sergei Mel'nik, _M\u0418P \u2013 MIR_ (Minsk, 2007), p. 18; see also <http:\/\/whc.unesco.org\/en\/lis> (2009). 23. Mel'nik, _MIR_ , pp. 2\u20135. 24. Ibid., p. 5. 25. Ibid., _passim_. 26. <http:\/\/www.radzima.org\/eng\/locality\/dzyarzhynava.html> (2011). 27. www.soviet.bunker.com (2011). 28. Dan Hancox, 'Back in the USSR', _Guardian_ , 2 May 2011. 29. www.belarusguide.com\/as\/history\/vklintro.html (2007).\n\n##### II\n\n30. Marija Gimbutas, _The Balts_ (London, 1963); Alfred Senn, _The Lithuanian Language: A Characterization_ (Chicago, Ill., 1942). 31. Bryan Sykes, _Blood of the Isles: Exploring the Roots of our Tribal History_ (London, 2006); idem, _One World \u2013 Many Genes_ (Cedar City, Ut., 2003). 32. On Slavic prehistory, see Marija Gimbutas, _The Slavs_ (London, 1971). I am indebted to Micha\u0142 Giedroy\u0107 of Oxford for guidance in crossing this minefield, and for his unpublished notes on 'Belarus: The Missing Link' (2007). 33. Reginald De Bray, 'Byelorussian', in his _Guide to the Slavonic Languages_ (London, 1961), pp. 129\u201392; also 'The Belarusian Language', <http:\/\/languages.miensk.com\/lang_eu_as_af\/indoeuropean\/belarusian.htm> (2007). 34. The outlines of the controversy over 'Litva' can be followed on the Internet in the conflicting information supplied by Lithuanian and Belarusian sites. Compare 'Lithuanian History, A Brief Chronology', www.balticsworldwide.com\/tourist\/lithuania\/history.htm, and 'History of Belarus in Dates', <http:\/\/xz5.org>, or 'The Origins of the Grand Duchy of Litva (Lithuania)', www.belarusguide.com\/as\/history\/jermal1.html. The rudiments of the problem, but not a solution, can be observed in W. Ostrowski, _The Ancient Names and Early Cartography of Byelorussia_ (London, 1971). 35. D. Ostrowski (ed.), _The Povest\u2032 vremennykh let: An Interlinear Collation and Paradosis_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2003). 36. Arthur Koestler, _The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar Empire and its Heritage_ (London, 1976). 37. See Richard Fletcher, _The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity_ (Berkeley, 1999). 38. As per _The History of Leo the Deacon_ , ed. A.-M. Talbot and D. F. Sullivan (Washington, 2005). 39. _Die Annales Quedlinburgenses_ , ed. Martina Giese (Hanover, 2004), entry for AD 1009. The Lithuanian millennium was celebrated in July 2009; www.kulturkompasset.com\/2009\/06\/lithuanian_millenium_celebration_in-vilnius. 40. 'St Euphrosyne of Polotsk', www.belarus\/by\/...\/famous_belarusians (2007). 41. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/cyril_of_turaw> (2007); A. Mel\u2032nika\u016d, _Kiryl, episkap Tura\u016dski_ (Minsk, 1997). The cathedral of St Kiril of Turau of the Belarusian Autocephalous Orthodox Church is located at 401, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11217. 42. 'Smolensk Icon Mother of God', <http:\/\/www.icon.lt\/list\/smolensk.htm> (2011). 43. M. Isoaho, _The Image of Aleksandr Nevskiy in Medieval Russia: Warrior and Saint_ (Leiden, 2006). 44. Micha\u0142 Giedroy\u0107, _The Rulers of Thirteenth-Century Lithuania_ (Oxford, 1994). 45. S. \u017bukas, _Vilnius: The City and History_ (Vilnius, 2001); J. Harasowska, _Wilno_ (Glasgow, 1944). 46. See Stephen Christopher Rowell, _Lithuania Ascending: A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295\u20131345_ (Cambridge, 1994). 47. Saints' Day, 14 April, www.missionstclare.com\/english\/people\/apr14.htm (2009). 48. Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 1, pp. 116\u201317. 49. Ibid. 50. 'Pocket Book of Lithuanian Coins, 1386\u20131938', www.freshwap.net\/forums\/e-book-tutorials\/247084-a.html (2009); <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/pahonia> (2009). 51. G. Micku-naite., _Making a Great Ruler: Grand Duke Vytautas of Lithuania_ (Budapest, 2006). 52. Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 1, pp. 119\u201321. 53. Livonian confederation, <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/livonian_confederation> (2007). 54. M. Stremoukoff, 'Moscow the Third Rome: Sources of the Doctrine', _Speculum_ (Jan. 1953), pp. 84\u2013101, repr. in M. Cherniavsky (ed.), _The Structure of Russian History: Interpretative Essays_ (New York, 1970). 55. Alan Fisher, _The Crimean Tartars_ (Stanford, Calif., 1978). 56. 'Zaporizhian Cossacks', in Volodymyr Kubijovy\u010d (ed.), _Encyclopedia of Ukraine_ (Toronto, 1970). 57. http:\/\/www.svgatayarus.ru\/pda\/data\/...267_kiev_psalter\/index.php?lang (2011). 58. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia\/wiki\/dykra> (2009). 59. From J. Ochma\u0144ski, _Historia Litwy_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1979), p. 106. 60. S. Mackiewicz, _Dom Radziwi \u00f3w_ (Warsaw, 1990); see also 'Radziwill Family', <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/radziwi%c5%82%c5%82_family> (2008). 61. Miros\u0142awa Malczewska, _Latyfundium Radzwi\u0142\u0142\u00f3w w_ XV _do po\u0142owy_ XVI _wieku_ (Warsaw, 1985); _World News_ , <http:\/\/wn.com\/niasvizh_castle> (2010). 62. Karl von Loewe (ed.), _The Lithuanian Statute of_ 1529 (Leiden, 1976). 63. Feast Day, 4 March; see 'St. Casimir', in _Catholic Encyclopedia_ (New York, 1907). 64. _Biblia \u015bwi\u0119ta: to jest Ksi\u0119gi Starego i Nowego Zakonu_ (Brest, 1563; facsimile, Paderborn, 2001); S. B. Chyli\u0144ski, _An Account of the Translation of the Bible into the Lithuanian Tongue_ (Oxford, 1659). 65. See 'Lithuania', _Encyclopedia Judaica_ (Jerusalem, 1971), vol. 11; 'Belorussia', ibid., vol. 4. 66. Meira Polliack, _Karaite Judaism: A Guide_ (Leiden, 2004). 67. 'Francis Skaryna', <http:\/\/www.belarusguide.com\/culture\/people\/skaryna.html> (2010). 68. George Vernadsky _et al_. (eds.), _A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917_ , 3 vols. (New Haven, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 109\u201310. 69. Ochma\u0144ski, _Historia Litwy_ , p. 117. 70. See 'Battle of Orsha', www.kismeta.com\/digrasse\/orsha.htm (2008). In September 2005 four citizens of Belarus were heavily fined for celebrating the 491st anniversary. 71. W. Dworzaczek, _Hetman Jan Tarnowski_ (Warsaw, 1985). 72. See Robert I. Frost, _The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558\u20131721_ (Harlow, 2000). 73. See M. Koialovich, _Dnevnik liublinskogo seima_ 1569 _goda_ (St Petersburg, 1869). 74. H. E. Dembkowski, _The Union of Lublin: Polish Federalism in the Golden Age_ (Boulder, Colo., 1982). 75. Anna Sucheni-Grabowska, _Zygmunt August: kr\u00f3l polski i wielki ksi\u0105\u017c\u0119 litewski_ (Warsaw, 1996). 76. Quoted in Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 1, p. 155. 77. Sucheni-Grabowska, _Zygmunt August_. 78. www.geocities.com\/paris\/chateau\/7855\/kasic\/statut\/artykul_3.htm. 79. On the origins of the Greek Catholic Church, and the Council of Brest, see Oskar Halecki, _From Florence to Brest, 1439\u20131596_ (New York, 1968). 80. Siege of Pskov, V. I. Malyshev (ed.), _Pov'est' o prikhozhenii Stefana Batoriya na grad Pskov_ (Moscow and Leningrad, 1952), pp. 55 ff. 81. Ibid., p. 98. 82. 'Vilna', in _Encyclopedia Judaica_ , vol. 16, pp. 138 ff. 83. The anti-Trinitarian movement in Poland-Lithuania was founded by Fausto Sozzini (1539\u20131604), whose followers were variously known as Arians, Socinians, Racovians and Polish Brethren. See P. Hewett, _Racovia: An Early Liberal Religious Community_ (Providence, RI, 2004). 84. Isaac of Troki, _Hizuk Emunah, or Faith Strengthened_ (New York, 1970). 85. Voltaire, _M\u00e9langes_ , vol. 3 (Paris, 1961), p. 334. 86. Janusz Tazbir, _Piotr Skarga: szermierz kontrreformacji_ (Warsaw, 1978). 87. 'St Andrew Bobola', in _Catholic Encyclopedia_. 88. See J. Gierowski and A. Kami\u0144ski, 'The Eclipse of Poland', in _New Cambridge Modern History_ , vol. 6 (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 681\u2013715, trans. Norman Davies. 89. Margus Laidre, 'On Personalities', in his _The Great Northern War and Estonia_ (Tallinn, 2010), pp. 218\u201336. 90. Marceli Kosman, _Historia Bia\u0142orusi_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1979), pp. 172\u201383. 91. On Stanis\u0142aw-August, see Adam Zamoyski, _The Last King of Poland_ (London, 1992). 92. Jerzy Lukowski, _The Partitions of Poland_ (London, 1999). 93. Andrzej Ciechanowski, _Nie\u015bwie\u017c : mi\u0119dzynarodowy o\u015brodek kultury na Bia\u0142orusi_ (Warsaw, 1994), pp. 21\u20138. See also Richard Butterwick (ed.), _Peripheries of the Enlightenment_ (Oxford, 2008). Naturally, Lithuanian commentators talk of the 'Lithuanian Enlightenment'. See 'Age of Enlightenment in Lithuania', http:\/\/lietuva1000.lt\/lietuvos-istorija\/...\/svietimo-epocha-lietuvoje\/fulltext (2009). 94. M. Hillar, 'The Polish Constitution of May 3, 1791: Myth and Reality', _Polish Review,_ 37\/2 (1992), pp. 185\u2013207. 95. M. Haiman, _Ko\u015bciuszko: Leader and Exile_ (New York, 1977). 96. R. H. Lord, _The Second Partition of Poland: A Study in Diplomatic History_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1915). 97. R. H. Lord, 'The Third Partition of Poland', _Slavonic Review_ , 9 (1925).\n\n##### III\n\n98. Catherine's Medal, 1793; R. Bideleux and I. Jeffries, _A History of Eastern Europe: Crisis and Change_ (London, 1998), p. 164. According to Sparta's founding myth, the Sons of Heracles recovered their ancestral lands which the Mycenaeans had taken from them, and then turned the Mycenaeans into helots. 99. Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 1, p. 542. 100. Adam Zamoyski, _1812_ : _Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow_ (London, 2004), pp. 161\u20133. 101. N. Riazanovsky, _A History of Russia_ (New York, 1963). 102. G. Dynner, _Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society_ (New York, 2006). 103. Timothy Snyder, _The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569\u20131999_ (New Haven, 2003), pp. 53\u20136. 104. Edvardas Tuskenis (ed.), _Lithuania in European Politics: The Years of the First Republic, 1918\u201340_ (New York, 1999). 105. _Byelorussia's Independence Day, March_ 25, 1918 _: Documents, Facts, Proclamations, Statements and Comments_ (New York, 1958). 106. See Norman Davies, 'The Genesis of the Polish-Soviet War, 1919\u201320', _European History Quarterly_ , 5\/1 (1975), pp. 47\u201367. 107. See Norman Davies, _White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919\u20131920_ (London, 1972). 108. <http:\/\/www.massviolence.org\/kurapaty-1937-1941-nkvd-mass-killings> (2010). 109. Timothy Snyder, _Bloodlands_ (New Haven, 2010). 110. D. J. Smith, _The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania_ (London, 2002). 111. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, _The Lithuanian Metryka in Moscow and Warsaw: Reconstructing the Archives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1984). 112. Zamoyski, _The Last King of Poland._ 113. Roman Aftanazy, _Dzieje rezydencji na dawnych kresach Rzeczypospolitej,_ 2nd edn., 11 vols. (Wroc\u0142aw, 1991\u20137). 114. Ibid., vol. 3. 115. H. A. Mason, 'The Lithuanian Whore in _The Waste Land_ ', _Cambridge Quarterly_ , 18 (1989), pp. 63\u201372.\n\n##### CHAPTER 6. BYZANTION\n\nBibliographical Note. It is invidious to make suggestions for reading in a field that is headed by Edward Gibbon. In addition to sampling Gibbon, whose prejudices need to be recognized, my own recommendations would be, for sheer _joie de vivre_ , Steven Runciman, _Byzantine Civilisation_ (London, 1933), plus two recent books: Judith Herrin, _Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire_ (London, 2007), and Averil Cameron, _The Byzantines_ (Oxford, 2006). Exciting introductions are also provided by Cyril Mango, _Byzantium: The Empire of the New Rome_ (London, 1988), and John Julius Norwich, _A Short History of Byzantium_ (London, 1998)\n\n##### I\n\n1. www.istanbulcityguide.com (2008); _Time Out Istanbul_ (London, 2004). 2. Orhan Pamuk, _The Museum of Innocence_ (London, 2009), p. 33. 3. Pamuk, _Istanbul: Memories and the City_ , quoted by Christopher Bellaigue, 'A Walker in the City', _New York Times_ , 5 June 2005. 4. Erdo\u011fan, 17 January 2010, Anadolu Agency, <http:\/\/www.highbeam.com\/doc\/IGI-216976898.html> (2010). 5. Egemen Ba\u011fi\u015f, 23 February 2010, <http:\/\/abgs.gov.tr\/index.php?p=4567641=2> (2010).\n\n##### II\n\n6. Norman Davies, 'Western Civilisation versus European History', in his _Europe East and West_ (London, 2006), pp. 46\u201360. 7. Voltaire, from _Microm\u00e9gas, Avec une histoire des croisades_ (1752). 8. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, _Consid\u00e9rations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur d\u00e9cadence_ (1734), ch. 21. 9. Georg Hegel, _The Philosophy of History_ (New York, 2007), p. 338. 10. Edward Gibbon, _The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_ , Everyman edn., 6 vols. (London, 1911), ch. 48. 11. Runciman, _Byzantine Civilisation._ 12. George Finlay, _Greece under the Romans_ (Edinburgh, 1844), _History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires_ (Edinburgh, 1853), _The Hellenic Kingdom and the Greek Nation_ (London, 1836). 13. J. B. Bury, _A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great_ (London, 1900), _The Hellenistic Age_ (Cambridge, 1923), _A History of the Roman Empire from its Foundation to Marcus Aurelius_ (London, 1893), _A History of the Later Roman Empire,_ 395\u2013 800 (London, 1889), _A History of the Eastern Roman Empire, 802\u2013867_ (London, 1912). 14. Runciman, _Byzantine Civilisation._ 15. Anthony Bryer, 'Sir Steven Runciman: The Owl, the Spider and the Historian', _History Today_ (May 2001); for collected obituaries, see <http:\/\/homepage.mac.com\/paulstephenson\/madison\/byzantium\/notes\/runcimanobit.html>. 16. See Michael Angold, 'The Road to 1204', _Journal of Medieval History_ , 25\/3 (1999), pp. 257\u201378. 17. Dimitri Obolensky, _The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe, 500\u20131453_ (London, 1971); _The Byzantine Inheritance of Eastern Europe_ (London, 1982); _Byzantium and the Slavs_ (Crestwood, 1994); _Russia's Byzantine Inheritance_ (Oxford, 1950). 18. See the journal _Byzantine and Greek Studies_ (1975\u2013 ). 19. Herrin, _Byzantium_ , p. xiii. 20. Cameron, _The Byzantines_ , p. viii; Averil Cameron, _The Uses and Abuses of Byzantium: An Essay_ (London, 1992). 21. Cameron, _The Byzantines_ , p. 1. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., p. 8. 24. J. Pearsall (ed.), _Oxford English Reference Dictionary_ (Oxford, 1996); see Cameron, _The Byzantines,_ p. 3 _._ 25. Ibid. 26. R. Cormack and M. Vassilaki, _Byzantium 330\u20131450_ , Royal Academy of Arts (London, 2008). 27. <http:\/\/static.royalacademy.org.uk\/files\/ra-annual-report-2009-653.pdf> (2011). 28. G. W. Bowersock, 'Brilliant, Beautiful and Byzantine', _New York Review of Books_ (25 Sept. 2008). 29. Unlocated. See Priscilla Roosevelt, _Apostle of Russian Liberalism_ (Newtonville, Mass., 1986). 30. Norman Davies, personal recollection from April 1962. 31. Cameron, _The Byzantines_ , p. 4. 32. Norman Davies, _Europe: A History_ (Oxford, 1996), pp. 448\u201350, with extracts from Gibbon, _Decline and Fall_ , ch. 68.\n\n##### III\n\n33. William Butler Yeats, 'Byzantium _'_ (1930).\n\n##### CHAPTER 7. BORUSSIA\n\nBibliographical Note. Any survey of Prussian history is contingent on what is understood by the term 'Prussia'. The principal focus among Germans and Germanists has always been on the possessions of the Hohenzollern dynasty and on their kingdom founded in 1701. The most up-to-date and rightly praised work on this hugely documented subject is Christopher Clark, _Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600\u20131947_ (London, 2006) _._ Readers seeking information in English about pre-Hohenzollern Prussia, or non-German Prussia, face a more difficult task. The best introduction in English would be Karin Friedrich, _The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569\u20131772_ (Cambridge, 2000).\n\n##### I\n\n1. <http:\/\/russia.rin.ru\/guides_e\/2780.html> (2008). 2. Bert Hoppe, 'Traces of a Virtual History in a Real City', National Centre for Contemporary Art, <http:\/\/www.art-guide.ncca-kaliningrad.ru> (2010). 3. A. Torello, 'Kaliningrad, Adrift in Europe', _SAIS Review_ , 25\/1 (2005), pp. 139\u201341. 4. Special Economic Zone, www.kaliningrad-rda.org\/en\/kgd\/sez.php (2008). 5. Camiel Eurlings (ed.), _Report: Kaliningrad Region_ , Working Group of the EU-Russia Parliamentary Co-operation Committee, 9\u201311 October 2005. European Parliament, PE.358.347. 6. Grant Heard, 'The Baltic Kaliningrad', <http:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/baltic\/papers\/kaliningrad.html> (2008). Massive protests were staged in Kaliningrad in February 2010 against continuing economic hardships. 7. Angus Roxburgh, 'Why the Russian Cesspit is No Hong Kong', _Sunday Herald_ (18 Feb. 2001), <http:\/\/findarticles.com\/p\/articles\/mi_qn4156\/is_20010218\/ai_n13957352> (2008). 8. Beyond Transition, online newsletter, 'Kaliningrad: Uncertain Future of Russia's Baltic Enclave', www.worldbank.org\/html\/prddr\/trans\/...pgs41-42.htm (2008). 9. M. Sobczyk, 'Illicit Cigarettes Flood into EU from the East', Emerging Europe, _Wall Street Journal_ (22 Feb. 2011). 10. Roskosmos, www.federalspace.ru\/main\/php?lang=en (2008). 11. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.\/wiki\/georgi_boos> (2008). 12. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/kaliningrad> (2008). 13. www.lonelyplanet.com\/russia\/western...russia\/kaliningrad\/472292 (2008). 14. Anne Applebaum, _Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe_ (New York, 1994), pp. 22\u20133. 15. Euler's Seven Bridges, <http:\/\/mathforum.org\/isaac\/problems\/bridges1.htm> (2008); <http:\/\/people.engr.ncsu.edu\/mfms\/sevenbridges\/> (2008). 16. Allen Buchler, 'Kaliningrad Revisited' (2004), www.electric-review.com\/archives\/000010.html (2008). 17. Immanuel Kant State University of Russia, <http:\/\/intdep.albertina.ru\/index4.html> (2008). 18. Applebaum, _Between East andWest_, p. 27. 19. Kaliningrad region, <http:\/\/myazcomputerguy.com\/everbrite\/page6d.html> (2008). 20. In Svetlogorsk: Applebaum, _Between East and West_ , pp. 30\u201331. 21. 'US, Poland, Reach Deal on Anti-Missile Defense Shield', _Huffington Post_ (14 Aug. 2008), www.huffingtonpost.com\/2008\/08\/14\/html (2008); Luke Harding, 'Living on the Frontline of the New Cold War', _Guardian_ (8 Nov. 2008). 22. Buchler, 'Kaliningrad Revisited'. 23. Luke Harding, 'Kremlin Shocked as Kaliningrad Stages Huge Anti-government Demonstration, _Guardian_ (2 Feb. 2010). 24. <http:\/\/www.bruecke-osteuropa.de\/kaliningrad\/rda-kaliningrad.ppt> (2011). 25. See www.lagomar.de\/index.php?id=58 (2011).\n\n##### II\n\n26. Henryk \u0141owmia\u0144ski, _The Ancient Prussians_ (Toru\u0144, 1936). 27. See J. Mortimer Wheeler, _Rome Beyond the Imperial Frontiers_ (London, 1955). 28. D. Attwater, _Penguin Dictionary of Saints_ (London, 1976), p. 30; Gerard Labuda (ed.), _\u015awi\u0119ty Wojciech w polskiej tradycji historiograficznej_ (Warsaw, 1998). 29. Eric Christiansen, _The Northern Crusades: The Baltic and the Catholic Frontier, 1100\u20131525_ (London, 1997). 30. Henryk Samsonowicz, _Konrad Mazowiecki_ (Warsaw, 2008); Karol G\u00f3rski, _Zakon Krzy\u017cacki a powstanie pa\u0144stwa pruskiego_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1977). 31. William Urban, _The Teutonic Knights: A Military History_ (London, 2003); Udo Arnold (ed.), _Contributions to the History of the Teutonic Order_ (Marburg, 1986). 32. Peter of Duisberg, _Chronicon Terrae Prussiae_ (Jena, 1679). 33. _Livonian Rhymed Chronicle_ , trans. Jerry Smith (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), quoted by Christiansen, _The Northern Crusades_ ; see also William Urban, _The Prussian Crusade_ (Langham, Md., 1977). 34. A. Chodzy\u0144ski, _Malbork Castle_ (Warsaw, 1982); Karol G\u00f3rski, _Dzieje Malborka_ (Gdynia, 1960). 35. Fred Hoyle, _Copernicus: His Life and Work_ (London, 1973); Maria Bogucka, _Copernicus: The Country and Times_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1973). 36. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/e%c5%82k> (2008). 37. <http:\/\/donelaitis.vdu.lt\/prussian\/index.htm> (2008). 38. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/old_prussian> (2008). 39. Marian Biskup, _Zakon Krzy\u017cacki a Polska w \u015bredniowieczu_ (Toru\u0144 , 1987). 40. E. Schmidt, _Die Mark Brandenburg unter den Askaniern, 1134\u20131320_ (Cologne, 1973). 41. Geoffrey Chaucer, _The Canterbury Tales_ , 'The Prologue', ll. 43\u20136, 51\u20134. 42. R. Kyngeston, _Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry, Earl of Derby (afterwards King Henry IV)_ (London, 1894). 43. Stanis\u0142aus F. Be\u0142ch, _The Contribution of Poland to the Development of the Doctrine of International Law: Paulus Vladimiri, decretorum doktor, 1409\u20131432_ (London, 1964). 44. www.absoluteastronomy.com\/topics\/partition(politics)) (2008). 45. Friedrich, _The Other Prussia_. 46. Ibid., ch. 9, 'Myths Old and New: The Royal Prussian Enlightenment.' 47. Jan Matejko, _Hold Pruski_ , 'The Prussian Tribute' (1882): <http:\/\/entertainment.webshots.com\/photo\/1419644023074695728kkcxmn> (2008). 48. Janusz Ma\u0142\u0142ek, _Dwie cz\u0119\u015bci Prus: studia z dziej\u00f3w Prus Ksi\u0105\u017c\u0119cych i Prus Kr\u00f3lewskich w_ XVI _i_ XVII _wieku_ (Olsztyn, 1987), pp. 37\u20138. 49. Treitschke, quoted Friedrich, _The Other Prussia_ , introduction. 50. M. Biskup (ed.), _The Teutonic State of Prussia in Polish Historiography_ (Marburg, 1982). 51. F. L. Carsten, _The Origins of Prussia_ (Oxford, 1954). 52. See Benedikt Stuchtey, 'Imperialism and Frontier in British and German Historical Writing around 1900', in B. Stuchtey and P. Wende (eds.), _British and German Historiography, 1750\u20131950_ (New York, 2000). 53. W. Hubatsch, _Albrecht of Brandenburg-Ansbach: Teutonic Grand Master and Duke of Prussia_ (Heidelberg, 1967). 54. See H. W. Koch, _A History of Prussia_ (New York, 1978). 55. Barbara Janiszewska-Mincer and Franciszek Mincer, 'The Diet of 1621', in their _Rzeczpospolita Polska a Prusy Ksi\u0105\u017c\u0119ce w latach 1598\u20131621: Sprawa Sukcesji Brandenburskiej_ (Warsaw, 1988), pp. 245ff. 56. As from the Swedish civil war of the 1590s, the Polish Vasas claimed to be the legitimate kings of Sweden and the Swedish Vasas claimed to be the legitimate kings of Poland-Lithuania. 57. Derek McKay, _The Great Elector_ (Harlow, 2001). 58. A. J. P. Taylor, _The Course of German History_ (London, 1945), p. 28. 59. Max Weber, 'National Character and the Junkers', in his _Essays on Sociology_ (London, 1998); see also C. Torp, _Max Weber and the Prussian Junker_ (T\u00fcbingen, 1998). 60. Piers Paul Read, _The Junkers_ (London, 1968); F. L. Carsten, _A History of the Prussian Junkers_ (Aldershot, 1989). 61. Ibid., p. vii. 62. Norman Davies, 'Vasa \u2013 the Swedish Connection', in his _God's Playground: A History of Poland_ (Oxford, 1981), vol.1, pp. 433\u2013669. 63. Qu0ted in Friedrich, _The Other Prussia_ , p. 152. 64. Qu0ted ibid., p. 154. 65. Ibid., pp. 154\u20135. 66. R. Herion, 'Fehrbelliner Reitermarsch', www.amisforte.nl\/fehrbelliner.htm (2008). 67. <http:\/\/www.germanculture.com\/ua\/library\/weekly\/aa011801a.htm>. 68. M. A. D.  _sic_ ], _The History of Prussia_ (London, 1869), pp. 10\u201311. [69. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/prussian_blue> (2008). 70. Rudolf von Thadden, 'Prussia: When Was It?', in his _Prussia: The History of a Lost State_ (Cambridge, 1987). 71. G. P. Gooch, 'The Prussian School', in his _History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century_ (London, 1913); R. Southward, _Droysen and the Prussian School of History_ (Lexington, Ky., 1995). 72. J. A. R. Marriott and Sir Charles Grant Robertson, _The Evolution of Prussia: The Making of an Empire_ (Oxford, 1915), p. 11. 73. A. J. P. Taylor, _Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman_ (London, 1955); David Hargreaves, _Bismarck and German Unification_ (Basingstoke, 1991). 74. An Old Westminster King's Scholar, _The Growth of Prussia from AD 1271 to AD 1871_ (London, 1871), p. 30. 75. Taylor, _Course of German History_ , p. 7; <http:\/\/gotterdammerung.org\/books\/reviews\/c\/course-of-german-history.html> (2010). 76. G. Hosking and R. Service (eds.), _Re-interpreting Russia_ (Basingstoke, 1998); Robert Service, _Stalin: A Biography_ (London, 2004); Richard Pipes, _Three 'Whys' of the Russian Revolution_ (London, 1998); Robert Conquest, _The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History_ (London, 2005). 77. See Richard Evans on Timothy Snyder, _London Review of Books_ (4 Nov. 2010). 78. Clark, _Iron Kingdom_ , p. 1. 79. Norman Davies, 'Preussen \u2013 the Prussian Partition, 1772\u20131918', in his _God's Playground_ , vol. 2, pp. 112\u201338; see also E. Martuszewski, _Polscy i nie polscy Prusacy_ (Olsztyn, 1974). 80. 'Koenigsberg', in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 81. Adolf Menzel, _Coronation of Wilhelm I in Koenigsberg in the Year 1861_ (1865): <http:\/\/germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org\/print_document.cfm?document_id=304> (2008). 82. Friedrich von Bernhardi, _Germany and the Next War_ , trans. Allen H. Powles (London, 1912). 83. Niall Ferguson, _The Pity of War_ (London, 1998), p. 461. 84. W. L. Langer _et al., Western Civilization_ (Chicago, 1968), p. 528. 85. Sergei Dobrorolski, 'On the Mobilisation of the Russian Army, 1914', in his _Voienniy Sbornik_ (1922), trans. www.vlib.us\/wwi\/resources\/archives\/texts\/t040831b.html (2008). 86. K. Rosen-Zawadzki, 'Karta buduszczej Jewropy' ('Map of the future Europe'), _Studia z dziej\u00f3w_ ZSRR _i Europy \u015arodkowej_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1972), vol. 8, pp. 141\u20135, with map. 87. Holger Herwig, 'Tannenberg: Reality and Myth' and 'The Use and Abuse of History and the Great War', in Jay Winter _et al_. (eds.), _The Great War and the Twentieth Century_ (New Haven, 2000). 88. Norman Davies, _White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919\u201320_ (London, 1972). 89. Dietrich Orlow, _Weimar Prussia, 1918\u201325: The Unlikely Rock of Democracy_ (Pittsburgh, 1995); idem, _Weimar Prussia, 1925\u201333: The Illusion of Strength_ (Pittsburgh, 1991). 90. Michael Behrent, 'Weimar Koenigsberg', from 'Research for the Max & Gilbert film _Koenigsberg is Dead_ (2004)': www.do4d.de\/k\/ii_nation.html (2008). 91. Ibid. 92. Service, _Stalin_ , p. 273. 93. Norman Davies, _Europe at War, 1939\u20131945: No Simple Victory_ (London, 2006). 94. RAF Bomber Command, campaign diary, August 1944, www.raf.mod.uk\/bombercommand\/aug44.html (2008). 95. 95. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/amber_room> (2008). see also Catherine Scott-Clark, _The Amber Room: The Untold Story of the Greatest Hoax of the Twentieth Century_ (London, 2004). 96. A.-M. De Zayas, _A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of East European Germans, 1944\u201350_ (Basingstoke, 2006); Christopher Duffy, _Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany_ (London, 1991). 97. C. Dobson _et al_., _The Cruellest Night: Germany's Dunkirk and the Sinking of the_ Wilhelm Gustloff (London, 1979). In 2002 a monument was raised in Kaliningrad to Alexander Marinesko, the captain of the Soviet submarine which sank the _Gustloff_. See photo: www.flikr.com\/photos\/sludgeulper\/3273776945\/ (2008). 98. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/battle_of_k%c3%b6nigsberg>; see also Isabel Glenny, _The Fall of Hitler's Fortress City: The Battle for Koenigsberg, 1945_ (London, 2007); Antony Beevor, _Berlin: The Downfall, 1945_ (London, 2002). 99. Graf Hans von Lehndorff, quoted by Applebaum, _Between East and West_ , pp. 18\u201319. 100. David Shukman, 'On the Trail of the Amber Room', BBC News, 1 August 1998: <http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk.\/1\/hi\/world\/europe\/143364.stm> (2008). 101. Karl Potrek, quoted by Applebaum, _Between East and West_ , p. 19. 102. Applebaum, _Between East and West_ , pp. 25\u20136. Marion D\u00f6nhoff, _Before the Storm: Memories of my Youth in Old Prussia_ (New York, 1990). 103. 'Agreements of the Berlin (Potsdam) Conference, 17 July\u20132 August 1945', www.pbs.org\/wgbh\/amex\/truman\/psources\/ps_potsdam.html (2008). 104. Polish\u2013Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-operation, 21 April 1945; see Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 2, pp. 558\u20139. 105. 'Abolition of the State of Prussia', US State Department, _Germany, 1945\u201347: The Story in Documents_ (Washington, 1950), p. 151.\n\n##### III\n\n106. Thadden, _Prussia: The History of a Lost State,_ p. 125. 107. Florian Illies, 'Prussia's Most Beautiful Jewel', _dot De Magazin-Deutschland_ (13 Nov. 2009). 108. Merriam-Webster online, www.yourdictionary.com (2009). 109. Ausstellungskatalog, _Preussen versuch einer Bilanz_ (1981): www.hdg.de\/lemo\/objekte\/pikt\/...katalogpreussen\/index.htm (2008). 110. 'Prussia 2001', www.germanculture.com.u\/library\/weekly\/aa0111801a.htm (2008). 111. www.preussen-2001.de\/en\/programm\/landesausstellung.html (2008). 112. _Power and Friendship: Berlin\u2013St Petersburg,_ 1800 _\u2013_ 1917 _: Rediscovering an Era of European History_ , www.spsg.de\/macht_und_feundschaft_pressetext\/eng.pdf (2008). 113. Agnes Miegel, from 'Es war ein Land', <http:\/\/www.alt-rehse.de\/heimat-preussen.htm> (2011), trans. Norman Davies. 114. Bernd L\u00e4ngin, _Unvergessene Heimat Ostpreussen: St_ \u00e4 _dte, Landschaften, und Menschen auf alten Fotos_ (Dusseldorf, 1995).\n\n##### CHAPTER 8. SABAUDIA\n\nBibliographical Note. Since it cannot be fitted tidily into French, Swiss or Italian history, Savoy is frequently overlooked. No standard survey has been published in English, either of the land of Savoy or of the House of Savoy. Indeed, British library catalogues give more space to religious matters in seventeenth-century Savoy than to all other Savoyard topics. Of course, specific studies have been addressed to particular people, periods or episodes. But an introduction to the historical identity of Savoy remains extremely elusive. French historians, such as Henri M\u00e9nabr\u00e9a, _Histoire de Savoie_ (Paris, 1933, 1960), find great difficulty in transcending the concept of Savoy merely as a province of France. Interest in the _Casa Savoia_ is largely, if not exclusively, Italian. Jacques Lovie, _Savoie_ (Grenoble, 1973) is much quoted; and a recent study by Robert Colonna d'Istria, _Histoire de la Savoie_ (Paris, 2002) brings an open-minded approach to the subject. A polemical study by Jean Pignon, _Savoie fran\u00e7aise: histoire d'un pays annexe_ (St Gingolphe, 1996), illustrates the convictions of the separatist minority.\n\n##### I\n\n1. RAI bulletin, 3 June 2008: www.televideo.rai.it\/televideo\/pub\/popupultimanotizia.jsp?id=393939. 2. 'Napolitano alla Festa del 2 giugno', www.repubblica.it\/2008\/06\/sezioni\/politica\/due-giugno-2008 (2008). 3. P. Kammerer, 'Italy's Enduring President', _Le Monde diplomatique_ (English edn.) (1 Aug. 2008). 4. www.quirinale.it\/simboli\/emblema\/emblema-aa.htm (2008). 5. 'L'inno nazionale', www.radiomarconi.com\/marconi\/mameli1.html (2010). 6. 'E la festa della Repubblica diventa la festa di Silvio', www.repubblica.it\/2008\/06\/sezioni\/politica\/due-guigno-2008\/ (2008). 7. <http:\/\/ena.lu\/referendum-constitution-italy-1946-020703683.html> (2010). 8. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/umberto_ii_of_italy> (2008).\n\n##### II\n\n9. Bayle St John, _The Subalpine Kingdom: or, Experiences and Studies in Savoy, Piedmont and Genoa_ , 2 vols. (London, 1856), vol. 1, pp. 141\u20133. 10. Claude Genoux, _Histoire de Savoie_ (Annecy, 1852), p. 68. 11. 11. E. Cox, _The Green Count of Savoy_ (Princeton, 1967). 12. Jean d'Orville 'Cabaret', _La Chronique de Savoie_ (Les Marches, 1995), 'Comment le comte Pierre devint seigneur du Pays de Vaud', pp. 108\u20139. 13. Robert Somerville, _The Savoy: Manor, Hospital, Chapel_ (London, 1960); Compton Mackenzie, _The Savoy of London_ (London, 1953). 14. J. N. D. Kelly, _The Oxford Dictionary of Popes_ (Oxford, 1986), pp. 243\u20134. 15. A. S. Barnes, _The Holy Shroud of Turin_ (London, 1934); H. E. Gove, _Relic, Icon or Hoax? Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud_ (Bristol, 1996); R. Hoare, _The Turin Shroud is Genuine: The Irrefutable Evidence_ (London, 1994). 16. Quoted by E. Ricotti (1861) in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 17. Margaret Trouncer, _The Gentleman Saint: Francis de Sales and his Times_ (London, 1973). 18. J.-P. Fouchy, _Et Nice devient le port de Savoie_ (Cannes, 2008). 19. Nicholas Henderson, _Prince Eugen of Savoy_ (London, 1964). 20. C. Storrs, _War, Diplomacy and the Rise of Savoy, 1690\u20131720_ (Cambridge, 1999). 21. John Campbell, _The Present State of Europe_ , 6th edn. (London, 1761), p. 380. 22. Ibid., pp. 398\u2013402. 23. J. Dessaix, _La Savoie historique et pittoresque,_ 2 vols. (Annecy, 1854). 24. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/chant_des_allobroges> (2008). One of several stanzas that are often omitted refers to Poland's struggle for freedom: _'Rel\u00e8ve-toi ma Pologne h\u00e9ro\u00efque \/ Car pour t'aider je m'avance \u00e0 grands pas, \/ Secoue enfin ton sommeil l\u00e9thargique \/ Et je le veux, et je le veux, tu ne p\u00e9riras pas!'_ ('Arise, my heroic Poland, \/ for I'm striding to your aid. \/ Shake off your lethargic sleep \/ I wish it, wish it: you will not die!'). Quoted by Liliana Batko-Sonik, 'Stan wojenny w Ma\u0142opolsce: relacje i dokumenty' (Krak\u00f3w, n.d.), p. 19. 25. C\u00e9sar Vidal, _Charles Albert et le risorgimento italien_ (Paris, 1932). 26. C. Jemolo _et al_., _Lo Statuto Albertino_ (Florence, 1946). 27. 'John Beckwith', _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. 28. Quoted at www.search.com\/reference\/victor_emmanuel_ii_of_italy (2008). 29. Denis Mack Smith, _Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the Risorgimento_ (London, 1971); idem, _Cavour_ (London, 1985); Maurice Pal\u00e9ologue, _Cavour_ (London, 1927, 1970). 30. www.quotesdaddy.com (2010). 31. Sylvain Milbach, _L'\u00c9veil politique de la Savoie: conflits ordinaires et rivalit\u00e9s nouvelles, 1848\u20131853_ (Rennes, 2008). 32. Justin Godart, _A Lyon, en 1848: les Voraces_ (Paris, 1948). 33. St John, _The Subalpine Kingdom_ , vol. 1, pp. 19\u201320, 72\u20134. 34. Ibid., pp. 156\u201364. 35. Edward Gibbon, _Gibbon's Journey from Geneva to Rome..._ , ed. G. A. Bonnard (London, 1961), p. 18, quoted by H. Trevor-Roper, _History and Enlightenment_ (London, 2010), p. 10. 36. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/house_of_savoy>(2008). 37. Orsini Letters, in Pal\u00e9ologue, _Cavour_ , ch. IV, pp. 105\u201346. 38. C. Bayly (ed.), _Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism_ (Oxford, 2008). 39. Donn Byrne, _Garibaldi: The Man and the Myth_ (Oxford, 1998). 40. Denis Mack Smith, _Cavour and Garibaldi: A Study in Political Conflict_ (Cambridge, 1985). 41. Claude Dufresne, _La Comtesse de Castiglione_ (Paris, 2002); Giuseppe Borghetti, _L'Ambasciatrice de Cavour_ (Rome, 1933); P. Apraxine and X. Demange, _La Comtesse Divine: Photographs of the Countess of Castiglione_ (New Haven, 2001). 42. Pal\u00e9ologue, _Cavour_ , ch. V, pp. 149\u201371. 43. Franco-Sardinian Treaty, 1860: <http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/traite_de_turin_1860> (2008). 44. 'Annonce d'un referendum et appel au calme', 10 March 1860: www.savoie.fr\/archives73\/expo-affiches-1860\/index.html (2010). 45. Napoleon III, 21 March 1860: <http:\/\/newspapers.nla.gov.au\/ndp\/del\/article\/1206057>. 46. Lovie, _Savoie_ , pp. 38\u201341. 47. Ibid., p. 37. 48. M\u00e9nabr\u00e9a, _Histoire de Savoie_ , pp. 231\u20132. 49. Lovie, _Savoie_ , p. 41. 50. Ibid., pp. 43\u20135. 51. M\u00e9nabr\u00e9a, _Histoire de Savoie_ , p. 347. 52. Lovie, _Savoie_ , p. 48. 53. _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. 54. www.quotesdaddy.com. 55. www.biographicon.com\/view\/5roil (2010). 56. Cecil Headlam, in _Harmsworth Universal Encyclopedia_ (London, 1925). 57. Denis Mack Smith, _Italy and its Monarchs_ (New Haven, 1969), p. 342.\n\n##### III\n\n58. Robert Katz, _The Fall of the House of Savoy_ : _A Study in the Relevance of the Commonplace or the Vulgarity of History_ (London, 1971). 59. See: www.regalis.com\/reg\/savgen, also <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/...htm>, Category: 'Pretenders to the Italian Throne'. 60. www.crocerealedisavoia.it\/index.htm (2010). 61. 'Right Royal Punch-up', _Guardian_ (29 May 2004); see also <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/vittorio_emanuele,_prince_of_naples> (2010). 62. 'Prince admits killings on video', _Sunday Times_ , 27 Feb. 2011; Birgit Hamer, _Delitto senza Castigo: la vera storia di Vittorio Emanuele_ (Civitavecchio, 2011). 63. <http:\/\/www.vin-de-savoie.fr>. 64. _Alpes du Nord_ , Michelin Guide Vert (Paris, 2007), p. 30. 65. www.tourisme.savoiehautesavoie.com (2008). 66. _Alpes du Nord_ , p. 88. 67. Communaut\u00e9 du Chemin Neuf, _L'Abbaye de Hautecombe_ (Lyon, n.d.). 68. www.chateauthorens.fr (2008). 69. Maison de la Maurienne, _Guide Patrimoine_ (St Jean, n.d.), pp. 7\u20138; also www.maurienne-tourisme.com (2010). 70. M\u00e9nabr\u00e9a, _Histoire de Savoie_ , p. 674. 71. Colonna d'Istria, _Histoire de la Savoie_ , pp. 243\u20134. 72. Projet de Constitution de la Federation Savoisienne, <http:\/\/notre.savoie.free.fr\/infos\/inf052.htm> (2008). 73. www.sabaudia.org\/v2\/dossiers\/dos-histoire.php (2010). 74. '150\u00e8me Anniversaire de l'Entrevue de Plombi\u00e8res', www.categorynet.com\/communiques-de-presse\/histoire (2008). 75. Open letter to the president of the Rh\u00f4ne-Alpes region, Arpita News, 27 June 2008, <http:\/\/blog.regionleman.com\/2008\/06\/07> (2008). 76. David Gilmour, _The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples_ (London, 2011), p. 399. 77. Kammerer, 'Italy's Enduring President'.\n\n##### CHAPTER 9. GALICIA\n\nBibliographical Note. Library systems which fail to distinguish between 'Galicia' as a province of Spain and 'Galicia' as a province of the Austrian Empire can cause needless confusion. So, too, do entries which insist on placing historic entities into modern categories, such as 'Galicia (Ukraine)' or 'Galicia (Poland and Ukraine)'. The sole overview of the subject in English, Paul Magocsi's _Galicia: A Historical Survey and Bibliographical Guide_ (Toronto, 1983) is written very deliberately from a Ukrainian standpoint, while Polish, Jewish and Austrian imperial perspectives are equally important. Readers are best advised to start with the relevant chapters in one of the general introductions to the Habsburg monarchy \u2013 such as that by Henry Wickham Steed (1913), by A. J. P. Taylor (1948, 1990), or by Robert Kann (1977) \u2013 and then to move on to studies of the different ethnic communities. In addition to Magocsi, it is possible to explore Galicia's Polish connections in the chapter 'Galicia' in Norman Davies, _God's Playground: A History of Poland_ (Oxford, 1981), vol. 2, and Galicia's Jewish heritage in Jonathan Webber, _Rediscovering Traces of Memory_ (Bloomington, Ind., 2009).\n\n##### I\n\n1. Journey undertaken in May 2006. 2. Yury Lukomsky and Mariya Kostik, _Putyvnik-Halych_ (L'viv, 2003). 3. 'Korotka istorichna kronika Halicha', ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 1.\n\n##### II\n\n5. Stanislaw Grodziski, _W Kr\u00f3lestwie Galicji i Lodomerii_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1976); see also Henryk Wereszycki, _Niewygas\u0142a przeszto\u015b\u0107_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1987); H.-C. Maner, _Galizien: eine Grenzregion im Kalk\u00fcl der Donaumonarchie im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert_ (Munich, 2007). 6. T. C. W. Blanning, _Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism_ (London, 1994); S. K. Padover, _The Revolutionary Emperor: Joseph II of Austria_ (London, 1967). 7. _Galizien_ , Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas (Berlin, 1999). 8. W. J. Podg\u00f3rski, _Pie\u015b\u0144 Ojczyzny pe\u0142na: Mazurek D\u0105browskiego w dziejowych rolach_ (Warsaw, 1994). 9. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/west_galicia> (2008). 10. Karl Emil Franzos, _Aus Halbasien: Culturbilder aus Galizien_ (1876), quoted by Marcin Pollack, _Nach Galizien_ , trans. as _Po Galicji_ (Wo\u0142owiec, 2007), p. 12. 11. M. Or\u0142owicz, _Ilustrowany Przewodnik po Galicji, Bukowinie, Spiszu, Orawie, i \u015al\u0105sku Cieszy\u0144skim_ (Lw\u00f3w, 1919, repr. Krosno, 2004). 12. J. Czajkowski (ed.), _\u0141emkowie w historii i kulturze Karpat_ (Rzesz\u00f3w, 1992). 13. <http:\/\/www.wrota.podkarpackie.pl\/en\/culture\/minority\/ethnic\/boykos> (2011). 14. F. A. Ossendowski, _Huculszczyzna: Gorgany i Czarnohora_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1990). 15. Daniel Beauvois, _Tr\u00f3jk\u0105t ukrai\u0144ski: szlachta, carat i lud..., 1793\u20131914_ (Lublin, 2005), brilliant but bilious, contains many references to Galicia; see also his 'Szlachta w Galicji Wschodniej', _Studia Historyczne_ , 34\/2 (1991). 16. M. Sliwa (ed.), _Rok_ 1846 _w Galicyji_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1997); see also Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 2, pp. 147\u20138. 17. Stefan Kieniewicz, _The Emancipation of the Polish Peasantry_ (Chicago, 1969). 18. S. Unger, _The Galician Petroleum Industry_ (London, 1907); Norman Davies, 'Brytyjski kapitalism a nafta galicyjska', _Studia Historyczne_ , 13 (1970), pp. 283\u20139; Alison Frank, _Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). 19. S. Szczepa\u0144ski, _N\u0119dza galicyjska w cyfrach_ (Lw\u00f3w, 1888), quoted by Davies, _God's Playground_ , vol. 2, p. 146. 20. Dorota Prasza\u0142owicz _et al_., _Mechanizmy zamorskich migracji \u0142a\u0144cuchowych w XIX wieku_ (Krak\u00f3w, 2004). 21. W. Thomas and F. Znaniecki, _The Polish Peasant in Europe and America_ (Boston, 1998). 22. www.vbvm.org\/polish\/song.html (2008). 23. John Czaplicka (ed.), _Lviv: A City in the Crosscurrents of History_ (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); S. Wasilewski, _Lw\u00f3w_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1990); P. F\u00e4ssler _et al_., _Lemberg, Lw\u00f3w, Lviv \u2013 eine Stadt im Schnittpunkt europ\u00e4ischer Kulturen_ (Cologne, 1995). 24. From K. Baedeker, _Austria-Hungary_ (London, 1905). 25. From Wincenty Pol, 'Pie\u015b\u0144 o ziemi nasz\u00e9j' (1843), 'A Song of Our Land'. 26. Jan Slomka, _From Serfdom to Self-Government: The Memoirs of a Polish Village Mayor (_ 1842\u20131927 _)_ (London, 1941). 27. 'Austria-Hungary, Die Kaiserhymne', <http:\/\/david.national-anthems.net\/ath.htm> (2008). 28. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/translations_of_gott_erhalte_franz_den_kaiser> (2008). 29. Kornel Ujejski, from _Skargi Jeremiego_ (Paris, 1947), trans. Norman Davies. 30. Naphtali Herz Imber (1855\u20131909). See J. Kabakoff, _Master of Hope: Selected Writings of N. H. Imber_ (New York, 1985). 31. A. Krawczuk, _Christian and Social Ethics in Ukraine: The Legacy of Andrei Sheptytskij_ (Edmonton, 1997). 32. A. V. Wendland, _Die Russophilen im Galizien_ (Vienna, 2001). 33. K. Stopka, _Ormianie w Polsce dawnej i dzisiejszej_ (Krak\u00f3w, 2000). 34. Mikhail Kizilov, _The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethno-religious Minority, 1772\u20131945_ (Oxford, 2009). 35. P. Palys, 'The Road to Galicia: Franti\u0161ek Rehor and Everyday Life in Galicia in the Second Half of the 19th Century', _Studia Historyczne_ , 50\/1 (2007). 36. S. Ansky, _The Enemy at his Pleasure: A Journey through the Jewish Pale of Settlement during World War One_ (New York, 2002). 37. Stanis\u0142aw Vincenz, _On the High Uplands: Sagas, Songs, Tales and Legends of the Carpathians_ (London, 1955). 38. Marcin Kr\u00f3l, _Sta\u0144czycy: antologia my\u015bli spo\u0142ecznej i politycznej konserwatyst_ \u00f3 _w krakowskich_ (Warsaw, 1982). 39. W. Berbelicki, _Aleksander Br\u00fcckner_ (Warsaw, 1989); M. Katz (ed.), _Aleksander Br\u00fcckner: ein polnischer Slavist in Berlin_ (Wiesbaden, 1991). 40. J. Dutkiewicz, _Szymon Askenazy i jego szko\u0142a_ (Warsaw, 1958). 41. Mikhailo Hrushevsky, _The Traditional Scheme of Russian History_ (Winnipeg, 1958). 42. Isaac Biderman, _Mayer Balaban, Historian of Polish Jewry_ (New York, 1976). 43. J. Rosnowska, _Dzieje Poety: o Wincentym Polu_ (Warsaw, 1963). 44. B. Lasocka, _Aleksander Fredro: drogi \u017cycia_ (Warsaw, 2001). 45. K. Przerwa-Tetmajer, _Poezje wybrane_ , ed. J. Krzy\u017canowski (Wroc\u0142aw, 1968); K. Przerwa-Tetmajer, _Tales of the Tatras_ (New York, 1943). 46. Kazimierz Wyka, _M\u0142oda Polska_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1987); S. Pigo\u0144, _\u015apiewak wielko\u015bci narodu_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1957), on Wyspia\u0144ski. 47. From S. Wyspia\u0144ski, _Wesele (_ 1901 _): The Wedding_ , trans. Gerald Karpolka (Ann Arbor, 2001). 48. J. J. Lipski, _Tw\u00f3rczo\u015b\u0107 Jana Kasprowicza_ (Warsaw, 1975). 49. _Rusalka dniestrovaia: ruthenische Volks-Lieder_ (Budim, 1837) 50. J. Kozik, _The Ukrainian National Movement in Galicia, 1815\u201349_ (Edmonton, 1986); 'Ivan Franko', in _Encyclopedia of Ukraine_ (Toronto, 1970). 51. El\u017cbieta Wi\u015bniewska, _Wasyl Stefanyk w obliczu M\u0142odej Polski_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1986). 52. James Cleugh, _The First Masochist: A Biography of Leopold Sacher-Masoch_ (London, 1967). 53. Wilhelm Feldman, _Dzieje polskiej my\u015bli politycznej_ (Warsaw, 1991). 54. From Mordechai Gebirtig, _Mayne Mider_ (New York, 1948); G. Schneider (ed.), _Mordechai Gebirtig: His Poetic and Musical Legacy_ (London, 2000). 55. See Leszek Mazan, _Zdarzenia z \u017cycia naszego monarchy_ (Krak\u00f3w, 2003). 56. On 1848, L. B. Namier, _The Revolution of the Intellectuals_ (Oxford, 1992). Namier, formerly Bernstein-Niemirowski, was himself a Galician; see Julia Namier, _Lewis Namier_ (Oxford, 1971). 57. Paul Magocsi, _The Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism: Galicia as Ukraine's Piedmont_ (Toronto, 2002). 58. _New York Times_ (13 April 1908). 59. Robert Asprey, _The Panther's Feast_ (London, 1959); see also Janusz Pieka\u0142kiewicz, _World History of Espionage_ (Washington, 1998). 60. M. Kilowska-Lysiak, 'Nikifor', in Visual Arts Profiles, www.culture.pl\/en\/culture\/artykuly\/os_nikifor_krynicki (2008). 61. 'Bober (Hasidic Dynasty)', <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/bobov.html> (2008). 62. W. Milewska _et al_., _Legiony Polskie, 1914\u201318_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1998); Waclaw J\u0119drzejewicz, _Joseph Pi\u0142sudski: A Life for Poland_ (New York, 1982). 63. They are not to be confused with the Ukrainian Legion raised by the Waffen-SS in the Second World War. They were to form the basic military force of the West Ukrainian Republic in 1918\u201319. See Stepan Ripetsky, _Ukrainske sichove striletstvo_ (New York, 1956). 64. Mark Von Hagen, _War in a European Borderland: Occupations and Occupation Plans in Galicia and Ukraine_ (Seattle, 2007); see also Norman Stone, _The Eastern Front, 1914\u201317_ (London, 1988). 65. Jaroslav Ha\u0161ek, _The Good Soldier Svejk and his Fortunes during the Great War_ , trans. Cecil Parrott (London, 1998); Cecil Parrott, _The Bad Bohemian: The Life of Jaroslav Ha\u0161ek, Creator of the Good Soldier Svejk_ (London, 1978). 66. J. W. Wheeler Bennett, _The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Germany's Eastern Policy_ (London, 1940). 67. Mikhailo Hutsuliak, _Pershyi Listopad 1918 roku na zakhidnikh zemlyakh Ukrainy_ (Kiev, 1993); Artur Leinwand, _Obrona Lwowa: 1\u201322 listopada 1918r_ (Warsaw, 1991); Oleksa Kuz'ma, _Lystopadovi dni_ 1918 _r_ (L'viv, 2003); Maciej Koz\u0142owski, _Mi\u0119dzy Sanem a Zbruczem: walki o Lw\u00f3w i Galicj\u0119 Wschodni\u0105, 1918\u201319_ (Krak\u00f3w, 1991). 68. Norman Davies, _White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War, 1919\u20131920_ (London, 1972); Micha\u0142 Klimecki, _Galicja Wschodnia_ 1920 (Warsaw, 2000); idem, _Galicyjska Socjalistyczna Republika Rad_ (Toru\u0144, 2006); Michael Palij, _The Ukrainian-Polish Defensive Alliance, 1919\u201320_ (Edmonton, 1995). 69. See Norman Davies, 'Great Britain and the Polish Jews, 1918\u201320', _Journal of Contemporary History_ , 8 (1973), pp. 119\u201342. 70. A. Zakrzewski, _Wincenty Witos: ch\u0142opski polityk i m\u0105\u017c stanu_ (Warsaw, 1977). 71. P. Kaluza, _A Life of Stefan Banach_ (Boston, 1976). 72. W. \u0141erner, _The Last Internationalist_ (Stanford, Calif., 1979). 73. Muhammad Asad, _Islam at the Crossroads_ (New York, 1934), _The Road to Mecca_ (New York, 1954; London, 1996), _The Principles of State and Government in Islam_ (Berkeley, 1961), etc. 74. W. \u0141azuga, _Micha\u0142 Bobrzy\u0144ski: my\u015bl historyczna a dzia\u0142alno\u015b\u0107polityczna_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1982). 75. M. Friedman, _Encounter on the Narrow Ridge: A Life of Martin Buber_ (New York, 2003). 76. Jan Pomian, _Joseph Retinger: Memoirs of an Eminence Grise_ (London, 1972); G. Witkowski, _Ojcowie Europy_ (Warsaw, 2001). 77. F. E. Sysyn, _Adelphotes: A Tribute to Omeljan Pritsak_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 78. W. von Sternburg, _Joseph Roth_ (Cologne, 2009). 79. J. Jarz\u0119bski, _Szulz_ (Wroc\u0142aw, 1999). 80. B. Hochman, _The Fiction of S. Y. Agnon_ (Ithaca, NY, 1970). 81. Keith Sword (ed.), _Sikorski, Soldier and Statesman_ (London, 1990). 82. Timothy Snyder, _Red Prince: The Fall of a Dynasty_ (London, 2008). 83. W. W. Szybalski, _The Genius of Rudolf Stefan Weigl, a Lvovian Microbe Hunter_ (Madison, 1957). 84. Javier Aranzadi, _Liberalism against Liberalism: The Works of Ludwig von Mises_ (London, 2006). 85. K. Anders, _Murder to Order_ (London, 1965). 86. T. Segey, _Simon Wiesenthal_ (London, 2010). 87. Asad, _The Road to Mecca._ 88. Keith Sword, _The Soviet Takeover of the Polish Eastern Provinces, 1939\u201341_ (Basingstoke, 1991). 89. 'Galicia Memorial Sites', www.chgs.umn.edu\/museum\/memorials\/galiciapoland (2011). 90. T. Piotrowski, _Polish-Ukrainian Relations during World War Two: Ethnic Cleansing in Volhynia and Galicia_ (Toronto, 1995). 91. M. O. Logusz, _Galicia Division: The_ 14th _Waffen_ SS _Grenadier Division Galizien_ (Philadelphia, 1997). 92. V. Humeniuk and L. Luciuk, _Their Just War: Images of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army_ (Toronto, 2007). 93. Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, _Microcosm: Portrait of a Central European City_ (London, 1999). 94. Information on Ustrzyki Dolne provided by the late Professor Eugeniusz Waniek of Krak\u00f3w, 2009. 95. <http:\/\/www.dpcamps.org\/operationvistula.html> (2011). 96. <http:\/\/borsuczyna.pl\/en\/bieszczady> (2011). 97. J. Grabowski, _Judenjagd: polowanie na \u017byd\u00f3w,_ 1942 _\u2013_ 45 _. Studium dziej\u00f3w pewnego powiatu_ (Warsaw, 2011).\n\n##### III\n\n98. Neil MacGregor, _A History of the World in_ 100 _Objects_ (London, 2010), 'Introduction'. 99. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, _Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge_ (London, 1992). 100. <http:\/\/www.brainyquote.com\/quotes\/authors\/p\/picasso_2html> (2001). 101. _M. Or\u0142owicz, Ilustrowany Przewodnik po Galicji_ , pp. 68\u201370. 102. Ibid., p. 62. 103. Ibid., pp. 297\u20139. 104. <http:\/\/www.lvivbest.com\/en\/museums> (2011). 105. Muzeum Narodowe, Krak\u00f3w, www.muzeum.krakow.pl (2011). 106. Fundacja KsiKsi\u0105\u017c\u0105t Czartoryskich, www.muzeum-czartoryskich.krakow.pl (2011). 107. Ibid. 108. P. Stone and R. Mackenzie, _The Excluded Past: Archaeology in Education_ (London, 1990). 109. National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, <http:\/\/www.nmai.si.edu\/subpage.cfm?subpage=visitor> (2011). 110. Muzeum Galicja, Krak\u00f3w, www.galicjajewishmuseum.org (2011). 111. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/ossolineum> (2011). 112. 'V. Stefanyk National Lviv Academic Library', <http:\/\/www.nas.gov.ua\/en\/structure\/dhpl\/lsl\/pages\/default.aspx> (2011). 113. Magdalena Kroch, _A Guide to the S\u0105cz Ethnographic Park_ (Nowy S\u0105cz, 2003). 114. Joanna Holda, _S\u0105cz Ethnographic Park: Supplement to the Guide, 2003_ (Nowy S\u0105cz, 2006) 115. www.muzeum.sacz.pl\/47.17.wiecej_o_sadeckim_parku_etnograficznym.htm.\n\n##### CHAPTER 10. ETRURIA\n\nBibliographical Note. There is no monograph in English devoted to the Kingdom of Etruria. Interested readers will need to burrow both into works dealing with Italy as a whole, such as C. Duggan, _The Force of Destiny: A History of Italy since_ 1796 (London, 2008) or into accounts of Napoleon's Italian campaigns. There is one standard item in Italian, Giovanni Drei, _Il Regno d'Etruria_ (Modena, 1935), and two recent studies: Romano Coppini, _Il gran-ducato di Toscana dagli 'anni francesi' all'Unit\u00e0_ (Torino, 1993), and Edgardo Donati, _La Toscana nell'impero napoleonico_ (Florence, 2008).\n\n##### I\n\n1. John Milton, _Paradise Lost_ (1664), book I, ll. 301\u2013304. 2. James Joyce, quoted by R. J. Schork, in _American Notes and Queries_ , 4 (1991), p. 1. 3. Florentia Agency, www.florentina.org\/florentia_walking-tours\/pdf (2008). 4. www.ricksteves.com\/plan\/destinations\/italy\/florence3.htm (2008). 5. Dante Alighieri, _Inferno_ , canto XV, l. 85. 6. 'The Florence of Dante', www.aboutflorence.com\/itineries-florence\/dante.html. 7. Dante, _Inferno_ , canto XXVI, ll. 1\u20133. 8. Dante, _Purgatorio_ , canto VI, ll. 127, 137, 148\u201351. 9. J. R. Hale, _Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy_ (London, 1961); Quentin Skinner, _Machiavelli: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford, 2000); Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli, _The Prince_ , ed. Q. Skinner (Cambridge, 1988). 10. www.aboutflorence.com\/history (2008). 11. Frances Mayes, _Bella Tuscany: The Sweet Life in Italy_ (London, 1999); Beth Elon, _Tasting Tuscany_ (London, 2006); see also Kinta Beevor's exquisite _A Tuscan Childhood_ (London, 1993). 12. Mayes, _Bella Tuscany_ , pp. 56, 364. 13. Tom Kington, 'Italy's Rising Star Vows to Banish Berlusconi Sleaze', _Observer_ (20 Feb. 2011). 14. Philippe Jullian, _Violet Trefusis: A Biography_ (London, 1976). 15. David Leavitt, _Florence: A Delicate Case_ (London, 2002), p. 87. See also: Oreste del Buono _et al_., _Gli Anglo-Fiorentini: una storia d'amore_ (Florence, 1987).\n\n##### II\n\n16. A. H. Hilliard, _Napoleon's Brothers_ (Stroud, 2007); Margery Weiner, _The Parvenu Princesses: Elisa, Pauline and Caroline Bonaparte_ (London, 1964). 17. David Chandler, _The Campaigns of Napoleon_ (London, 1966). 18. E. Luard and J. Heseltine, _Truffles_ (London, 2006), p. 37. 19. Andrea Corsini, _Il Bonaparte a Firenze_ (Florence, 1961). 20. Marianna Starke, _Letters from Italy_ (London, 1815), vol. 1, pp. 71\u20132. 21. Ibid., pp. 203\u201312. 22. J. G. Lockhart, _The History of Napoleon Bonaparte_ (London, 1830), vol. 1, p. 41. 23. 'Bonaparte chez le Duc de Toscane, 1796', lithographe, Paris, _c_. 1830. Kunstantiquariat Poligraphicum, www.poligraphicum.de\/napoleon.html (2008). 24. Starke, _Letters from Italy_ , vol. 1, pp. 74\u20135. 25. John Bergamini, _The Spanish Bourbons: History of a Tenacious Dynasty_ (London, 1974). 26. H. W. Williams, _Travels in Italy, Greece and the Ionian Islands_ (Edinburgh, 1820), vol. 1, pp. 176\u20137. 27. R. Duppa, _A Brief Account of the Subversion of the Papal Government,_ 1798 (London, 1807). 28. F. C. Schneid, _Napoleon's Conquest of Europe: The War of the Third Coalition_ (Westport, Conn., 2005), p. 220. 29. Constant Louis Wairy], _The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte_ (London, 1895), vol. 2, ch. VII. [30. Ibid. 31. www.cgb.fr\/monnaies\/vso\/v31\/gb\/monnaiesgbcbf6.htm (2007). 32. Teodor Uklanski, _Travels in Upper Italy, Tuscany, and the Ecclesiastical States... in 1808\u20139_ (London, 1816), pp. 38\u20139. 33. 'Royaume d'\u00c9trurie', http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/royaume_d'etrurie (2007). 34. Uklanski, _Travels_ , p. 94. 35. Starke, _Letters from Italy_ , vol. 1, pp. 243\u20135. 36. Ibid., pp. 249\u201353. 37. Ibid., pp. 258\u20139. 38. Stuart Woolf, 'Introduction' to Ivan Tognarini, _La Toscana nell'et\u00e0 rivoluzionaria e napoleonica_ (Naples, 1985), p. 15. 39. Giovanni Drei, _Regno d'Etruria (_ 1801 _\u2013_ 1807 _)_ (Modena, 1935), p. 46. 40. Stuart Woolf, 'Rationalisation and Social Conservatism, 1800\u201314', in his _A History of Italy,_ 1700 _\u2013_ 1860 _: The Social Constraints of Political Change_ (London, 1979), pp. 188 ff. 41. _The Memoirs of the Queen of Etruria, written by herself (an addition to the memoirs of the Baron de Kolli)_ (London, 1823), pp. 309\u201310. 42. Uklanski, _Travels_ , p. 67. 43. 'Royaume d'\u00c9trurie'. 44. _Memoirs_ , pp. 313\u201314. 45. Ibid., p. 314. 46. Ibid., p. 137. 47. Douglas Hilt, _Godoy and the Spanish Monarchs_ (London, 1987). 48. Woolf, 'Rationalisation', p. 206. 49. Margaret O'Dwyer, _The Papacy in the Age of Napoleon and of the Restoration: Pius VII, 1800\u201323_ (Langham, Md., 1985). 50. _Memoirs_ , pp. 315\u201316. 51. Michael Broers, _Napoleon's Other War: Bandits, Rebels and their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions_ (Witney, 2010), p. 90. 52. Ibid., p. 91. 53. Ibid. 54. Philippe Bordes, 'Les Peintres Fabre et Benvenuti \u00e0 la cour d'Elisa Bonaparte', in P. Rosenberg (ed.), _Florence et la France: rapports sous la R\u00e9volution et l'Empire_ (Paris, 1979), pp. 187\u2013207. 55. _Narrative of the Seizure and Removal of Pope Pius_ VII _on_ 6 _July_ 1809 _..._ , trans. from the Italian (London, 1814), pp. 106\u20137. 56. _Memoirs_ , p. 318. 57. Ibid., pp. 335\u20136. 58. Roman Coppini, _Il gran-ducato di Toscana_ , p. 187. 59. Broers, _Napoleon's Other War_ , p. 92. 60. _Memoirs_ , pp. 339\u201340. 61. Robert Christophe, _Napoleon on Elba_ (London, 1964); Guy Godlewski, _Napol\u00e9on \u00e0 l'\u00eele d'Elbe_ (Paris, 2003). 62. Adolphe Thiers, _Histoire du Consulat et de l'Empire_ (Paris, 1861), vol. 19, pp. 51\u20133. 63. Ibid. 64. Norman Mackenzie, _The Escape from Elba: The Fall and Flight of Napoleon, 1814\u201315_ (Oxford, 1982); Alan Schom, _One Hundred Days_ (London, 1993). 65. 'Mot de Cambronne', in _Dictionnaire encyclop\u00e9dique Quillet_ (Paris, 1935). 66. Compare Dom Pierre, 'La V\u00e9rit\u00e9 sur le Mot de Cambronne', based on the testimony of a French eyewitness, <http:\/\/napoleon1er.perso.neuf.fr\/mot_de_cambronne.html> (2009), with John White, 'Cambronne's words' based on British testimony and discussed at www.napoleon-series.org\/research\/miscellaneous\/c_cambronne.html(2010). In all probability Cambronne uttered both of the 'm-words' but prior to his capture. 67. J. T. Tussaud, _The Chosen Four_ (London, 1938). 68. G. Ambert, _Le G\u00e9n\u00e9ral Drouot_ (Tours, 1896). 69. Antoine D'Ornano, _Maria Walewska, l'\u00e9pouse polonaise de Napol\u00e9on_ (Paris, 1937); C. Sutherland, _Napoleon's Great Love_ (London, 1979); Marian Brandys, _K\u0142opoty z pani\u0105 Walewsk\u0105_ (Warsaw, 1969); Fran\u00e7oise de Bernardy, _Alexandre Walewski: le fils polonais de Napol\u00e9on_ (Paris, 1976); C. Hibbert, _Napoleon's Women_ (New York, 2002). 70. Owen Connolly, _The Gentle Bonaparte: A Biography of Joseph, Napoleon's Eldest Brother_ (New York, 1968). 71. Marcel Dupont, _Murat: cavalier, mar\u00e9chal, prince et roi_ (Paris, 1980). 72. W. R. Villa-Urrutia, _La Reina de Etruria, do\u00f1a Maria Luisa de Borb\u00f3n_ (Madrid, 1923); Sixte, Prince of Bourbon-Parma, _La Reine d'\u00c9trurie_ (Paris, 1928). See also <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/maria_louisa_of_spain.duchess_of_lucca> (2008). 73. Alain Decaux, _Napoleon's Mother_ (London, 1962). 74. Williams, _Travels_ , vol. 2, pp. 4\u20135. 75. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 453. 76. Len Ortzen, _Imperial Venus_ (London, 1974). 77. A Pietromarchi, _Lucien Bonaparte: prince romain_ (Paris, 1985). 78. P. T. Stroud, _The Emperor of Nature: Charles-Lucien Bonaparte and his World_ (Philadelphia, 2000). 79. Joan Bear, _Carolina Murat: A Biography_ (London, 1972). 80. Owen Connolly, _The Gentle Bonaparte: A Biography of Napoleon's Elder Brother_ (New York, 1968). 81. F. M. Kircheisen, _Jovial King: Napoleon's Youngest Brother_ (London, 1932). 82. <http:\/\/www.biography.com\/articles\/louis-bonaparte-9218602>. 83. F. S. Bresler, _Napoleon III: A Life_ (London, 1999). 84. Hubert Cole, _The Betrayers: Joachim and Caroline Murat_ (London, 1972).\n\n##### III\n\n85. C. Pietrangeli, _Il Museo Napoleonico_ (Rome, 1950). 86. Woolf, 'Rationalisation'. 87. Charles Petrie, _The Spanish Royal House_ (London, 1958); J. H. Shennan, _The Bourbons: History of a Dynasty_ (London, 2007). See also www.casareal.es\/casareal and www.borbonparma.org. 88. Dante, _Inferno_ , canto XIII, ll. 58\u201360. 89. D. Facaros and M. Pauls, _Tuscany, Umbria & the Marches_, Cadogan guides (London, 1990), pp. 212\u201313; <http:\/\/www.san-miniato.com> (2010). 90. <http:\/\/jobili.com\/festival\/white_truffle_festival_in_san_miniato_12438> (2011). 91. <http:\/\/www.ristorantedegliaffidati.it> (2011). 92. Machiavelli, _The Prince_ , ch. 25. 93. Dante, _Inferno_ , canto VII, ll. 82\u20134.\n\n##### CHAPTER 11. ROSENAU\n\nBibliographical Note. There is no single monograph in English which covers the whole of this chapter's subject. The ancestry and life of Albert, the prince consort, have generated a huge literature. Leading biographies include Theodore Martin, _The Life of_ HRH _the Prince Consort_ , 5 vols. (London, 1875\u201380); Daphne Bennett, _King without a Crown_ (London, 1977); David Duff, _Albert and Victoria_ (London, 1977); Robert Rhodes James, _Albert, Prince Consort_ (London, 1983); and Stanley Weintraub, _Albert: Uncrowned King_ (London, 1998). The history of the British royal family after Albert's death has also attracted much attention. Relevant works include Sidney Lee, _Queen Victoria: A Biography_ (London, 1902); John Van der Kiste and Bee Jordaan, _Dearest Affie: Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh_ (Stroud, 1984); Lance Salway, _Queen Victoria's Grandchildren_ (London, 1991), and E. J. Feuchtwanger, _Albert and Victoria: The Rise and Fall of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha_ (London, 2006). Interest in the royal family's German duchy, however, falls off sharply during the First World War. There is no account of the duchy's final years, and no biography of the last duke. Studies of the politics and administration history of the duchy are only available in German.\n\n##### I\n\n1. www.coburg-tourist.com (2008). 2. <http:\/\/english.gotha.de> (2008). 3. See entry 'Rosenau' in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 4. www.schloesser.bayern.de\/englisch\/palace\/objects\/co-rosen.htm (2008). 5. Stephen Calloway, in _Antiques_ (8 Jan. 1994). 6. www.sgvcoburg.de. 7. 'Bayern Tourismus', <http:\/\/www.bavaria.by\/en\/in-2011-coburg-commemorates-one-of-its-famous-inhabitants.html> (2011).\n\n##### II\n\n8. Charles Young, _The Early Years of the Prince Consort_ , compiled for and annotated by Queen Victoria (London, 1867), pp. 22\u20133. 9. Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (Germany), civil and state flag: www.crwflags.com\/fotw\/flags\/de-sg%5ed.html#1897. 10. _Coburgischen Taschenbuch,_ 1821, quoted by Calloway in _Antiques_. 11. Calloway, ibid. 12. _The Early Years_ , pp. 85\u20138. The description is annotated by Queen Victoria: 'The peaceful beauty of the scene is, perhaps, still more striking by moonlight.' 13. Bennett, _King without a Crown_ , p. 18. 14. Pauline Adelaide Panam, _Memoirs of a Young Greek Lady, Madame Pauline Adelaide Alexandre Panam... versus the reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg_ (London, 1823). 15. See Elizabeth Scheeben, _Ernst_ II _: Herzog von Saxe-Coburg und Gotha_ (Frankfurt, 1987). 16. Bennett, _King without a Crown_ , p. 18. 17. Baron von Mayern; story discounted by Feuchtwanger, _Albert and Victoria_ , p. 30. 18. Richard Sotnick, _The Coburg Conspiracy: Royal Plots and Manoeuvres_ (London, 2010) 19. On Victoria's disputed ancestry, see D. M. and W. Potts, _Queen Victoria's Gene_ (Stroud, 1995). 20. Notably the FitzClarences; see Roger Fulford, _Royal Dukes: The Father and Uncles of Queen Victoria_ (London, 2000). 21. John C. G. R\u00f6hl, Martin Warren and David Hunt, _Purple Secret: Genes_ , _Madness and the Royal Houses of Europe_ (London, 1998). 22. Quoted by Feuchtwanger, _Albert and Victoria_ , p. 39. 23. Young, _The Early Years of the Prince Consort_ , pp. 239\u201341, 422\u20133 24. Ibid., pp. 197\u2013205. 25. Ibid., p. 453. 26. Ibid., p. 447. 27. See UKTV History, _Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha_ (2010), a documentary film by Griffin Nary, parts 1\u20133, including interviews with Stanley Weintraub, Theo Arnson and Monica Charlot. 28. _Almanach de Gotha_ , 60th edn. (Gotha, 1823), pp. 1\u20133. 29. Ibid., pp. 20\u201321. 30. Bennett, _King without a Crown_ , p. 133. 31. 'Queen Victoria's Census Return' (1851), www.nationalarchives.gov.uk\/museum\/item.asp?item-id=35 (2011). 32. _Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha,_ film, parts 4\u20136. 33. 'Saxe-Coburg-Gotha' in _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ 34. Ibid. 35. Karl Marx, _Critique of the Gotha Programme_ (1875). 36. <http:\/\/encyclopedia.farlex.com\/gotha+bomber> (2008). During the Second World War a prototype 'Gotha jet fighter' was developed, first as the Ho-IX, then as the Go229: see www.aviastar.org\/air\/german\/horten_ho-9.php (2008). 37. Dulcie M. Ashdown, _Victoria and the Coburgs_ (London, 1981), p. 174. 38. Van der Kiste and Jordaan, _Dearest Affie_. 39. _New York Times_ (1 Aug. 1900). 40. Ibid. (8 June 1899). 41. Charlotte Zeepvat, _Prince Leopold: The Untold Story of Queen Victoria's Youngest Son_ (Stroud, 1998). 42. Ashdown, _Victoria and the Coburgs_ , p. 178. 43. _New York Times_ (20 July 1905). 44. Quoted by Ashdown, _Victoria and the Coburgs_ , p. 186. 45. Robin Lumsden, _Medals and Awards of the Third Reich_ (Shrewsbury, 2001). 46. Ashdown, _Victoria and the Coburgs_ , pp. 191\u20132. 47. Theo Aronson, _Princess Alice: Countess of Athlone_ (London, 1998). 48. Michael Thornton, 'The Nazi Relative that the Royals Disowned', _Mail on Sunday\/_ Mail Online (1 Dec. 2007). 49. Victoria Huntington-Whitely, in the Channel 4 documentary _Hitler's Favourite Royal_ , 2 June 2008. 50. Ibid.\n\n##### III\n\n51. <http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/prince-andreas-of-saxe-coburg\/136732246347101?sk=wrki> (2011). 52. Royal News of 2009, I, www.angelfire.com\/realm\/gotha\/news\/2009_1.htm (2010). 53. www.fact-archive.com\/encylopedia\/simeo_ii_of_bulgaria (2008); see also John D. Bell, _Bulgaria in Transition_ (Westview, conn., 1998). 54. 'The Belgian Royal Family', <http:\/\/www.monarchie.be\/en> (2011). 55. Mountbatten-Windsors, see Ben Pimlott, _The Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth_ II (London, 1996). 56. E. Tauerschmidt, _Prince Albert's Ancestry_ (London, 1840). 57. Dulcie M. Ashdown, _The Royal Line of Succession: The British Monarchy from Egbert AD802 to Queen Elizabeth II_ (Andover, 1992). 58. To her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius; see Sally Bedell Smith, _Diana_ : _The Life of a Troubled Princess_ (London, 2007).\n\n##### Chapter 12. Tsernagora\n\nBibliographical Note. Surprisingly enough, the history of Montenegro has been well served by English-language historians, although the short-lived Montenegrin Kingdom is inevitably treated as a passing episode. The most up-to-date works are: Elizabeth Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain: A History of Montenegro_ (London, 2007), and Kenneth Morrison, _Montenegro: A Modern History_ (London, 2009). It is well worth dipping into some of the older books to sample the period flavour. See, for example, R. Wyon and G. Prance, _Land of the Black Mountain_ (London, 1903), or Mary Edith Durham, _Through the Lands of the Serb_ (London, 1904). H. W. V. Temperley's chapter 'Montenegro and her Share in Serbian National Development', in his _History of Serbia_ (London, 1917), gives a distinctly pro-Serb slant, while the Handbook No. 19, _Montenegro_ , issued by the Historical Section of the British Foreign Office in 1919, is informative both about the country's past and about the attitudes of the Great Powers. A monograph by Srdja Pavlovic, _Balkan Anschluss: The Annexation of Montenegro and the Creation of the South Slav State_ (West Lafayette, Ind., 2008) was not available when the present study was being prepared.\n\n##### I\n\n1. <http:\/\/un.org\/members\/list.shtml> (2008). 2. http:\/\/montenegro.embassyhomepage.com (2008). 3. www.visit-montenegro.com\/tourism-mcc.htm (2008). 4. <http:\/\/www.summitpost.org\/durmitor\/152176> (2011). 5. Claire Wrathall, 'A Star Reborn', _Financial Times_ (4\u20135 June 2011); <http:\/\/www.amanresorts.com>. 6. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/podgorica> (2008). 7. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org.wiki\/cetinje> (2008). 8. BBC News, 14 November 2002; Steve Hanke, 'Inflation Nation', _Wall Street Journal_ (24 May 2006). 9. <http:\/\/media.transparency.org\/news_room\/in_focus\/2008\/cpi2008> (2008); Russia weighed in at 147th, and Belarus at 151st. Denmark is top, Somalia bottom. 10. 'Controversy over Montenegrin ethnic identity', <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/montenegrins>. 11. 'Montenegro's Referendum', www.crisisgroup.org\/home\/index.cfm?=4144 (2006). 12. Radio Free Europe, 17 October 2008. 13. www.earthconservation.net\/dam-effect-on-environment.html (2011). 14. <http:\/\/www.eupolitics.einnews.com\/news\/eu-enlargement-montenegro> (2011). 15. As seen on CNN and on the BBC World Service.\n\n##### II\n\n16. _La Dictionnaire encyclop\u00e9dique Quillet_ (Paris, 1935). 17. www.montenegro.org\/kirigniki.html (2008). This source is a website of the Montenegrin Association of America. 18. Wyon and Prance, _Land of the Black Mountain_. 19. Christopher Boehm, _Blood Revenge: The Enactment and Management of Conflict in Montenegro and Other Tribal Societies_ (Philadelphia, 1987). 20. See Germaine Tillon, _My Cousin, my Husband: Clans and Clanship in Mediterranean Societies_ (London, 2007). 21. E. D. Goy, _The Sabre and the Song_ (Belgrade, 1995). 22. See Branislav Djurdjev, _Turska vlast u Crnoj Goriu_ XVI _i_ XVII _veku_ (Sarajevo, 1953). 23. Adapted by Norman Davies from _The Mountain Wreath_ , by Petar Petrovi\u0107-Njego\u0161, trans. Vasa D. Mihailovich (Belgrade, 1997). 24. S. Pavlovi\u0107, 'The Mountain Wreath: Poetry or a Blueprint for the Final Solution?', _spacesofidentity.net_ , 1\/3 (Oct. 2001). 25. George Brodrick _et al._ , 'Montenegro and its Borderlands: A Discussion', _Geographical Journal_ , 4\/5 (1894), pp. 405\u20137. 26. As quoted in 'Montenegro: A Commentary', _Ambassadors' Review_ (Fall 2008). 27. W. E. Gladstone, _Montenegro or Tsernagora: A Sketch_ (London, 1913), pp. 4\u20135; repr. from _Nineteenth Century_ (May 1877). 28. Ibid., p. 18. 29. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'Montenegro' (1877), from _Ballads and Other Poems_ (1880). 30. _Montenegro_ , FCO Handbook No. 19, p. 36. 31. 'Montenegro', in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 32. C. Mylonos, _Serbian Orthodox Fundamentals_ (Budapest, 2003). 33. 'The Family of King Nikola Petrovic-Njegos', www.njegos.org\/petrovics\/family.htm (2010). 34. Charles Henry Meltzer, 'Nicholas of Montenegro, King and Dramatist', _New York Times_ (11 Nov. 1917). 35. Don Marquis, 'Nicholas of Montenegro' (1912). 36. See Richard Hall, _The Balkan Wars,_ 1912 _\u2013_ 13 _: Prelude to the First World War_ (London, 2000); also Brian Pearce (ed.), _The Balkan Wars: The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky_ (London, 1980). 37. Nicholas I Petrovitch-Niegosh, _The Empress of the Balkans_ , trans. W. M. Petrovitch and D. J. Volnay (London, 1913). 38. Meltzer, 'Nicholas of Montenegro'. His article, which was prompted by the announcement of King Nicola's exile, contained reminiscences of events some six years earlier. 39. Margaret MacMillan, _Peacemakers_ (London, 2001), p. 129. 40. 'Vilya's Song' for _Die lustige Witwe_ ('The Merry Widow'), music by Franz Leh\u00e1r, libretto by Victor Leon and Leo Stein; see J. Kenrick, 'The History of a Hit' (2004), www.musicals101.com\/widowhist\/htm. 41. Montenegro postal history: Kingdom of Montenegro from 1874, Austrian occupation, 1917\u201318, Italian occupation, 1941\u20133, German occupation, 1943\u20134, _Scott Standard Postage Stamp Catalogue_ (New York, 1984), vol. 3, pp. 890\u201392. 42. See Jan Gordon, _Two Vagabonds in Serbia and Montenegro,_ 1915 (London, 1939). 43. Milovan Djilas, _Montenegro_ (London, 1964), p. 107. 44. Corfu Declaration (1917), www.firstworldwar.org\/source\/greaterserbia_corfudeclaration.htm (2010). 45. Hugh Seton-Watson (ed.), _R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs: Correspondence 1906\u201341_ , 2 vols. (London, 1976), vol. 1, p. 359. 46. MacMillan, _Peacemakers_ , p. 27. 47. Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain_ , pp. 218 ff. 48. Andrija Radovi\u0107 to R. W. Seton-Watson, _R. W. Seton-Watson and the Yugoslavs_ , vol. 1, p. 304. 49. Djilas, _Montenegro_ , pp. 108\u20139. 50. Hugh Seton-Watson, _The Making of a New Europe: R. W. Seton-Watson and the Last Years of Austria-Hungary_ (London, 1981), p. 157. 51. Wilson's Fourteen Points, quoted by Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain_ , p. 330. 52. \u0160erbo Rastoder, 'Twentieth Century Montenegro', in his _The History of Montenegro from Ancient Tim_ es (Podgorica, 2006), pp. 159 ff. 53. Ivo Banac, _The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origin, History, Politics_ (Ithaca, NY, 1984), especially part II, 'Great Serbia and Great Yugoslavia', pp. 141\u2013214. 54. Rastoder, 'Twentieth Century Montenegro', p. 160. 55. MacMillan, _Peacemakers_ , p. 126. 56. Quoted by Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain_ , p. 320. 57. Rastoder, 'Twentieth Century Montenegro', p. 162. 58. Quoted in Alex Devine, _The Martyred Nation: A Plea for Montenegro_ (London, 1924), p. 13. 59. Ibid. 60. Milovan Djilas, _Land Without Justice_ (New York, 1958), quoted by Roberts, _Realm of the BlackMountain_, p. 326. 61. J. Ciubranovitch (ed.), _Le Plus Grand Crime de L'histoire_ (Rome, 1928), p. 10. 62. A. Radovi\u0107, _Le Monten\u00e9gro: son pass\u00e9 et son avenir_ (Paris, 1918); Janko Spasojevic, _Le Roi Nicholas et l'Union du Montenegro avec la Serbie_ (Geneva, 1918); Alex Devine, _Montenegro in History, Politics and War_ (London, 1918); Yovan Plamenatz, _Le Mont\u00e9negro devant La Conf\u00e9rence de la paix_ (Paris, 1919). 63. On Montenegro at the Peace Conference, see Dejan Djoki\u0107, _Nikola Pasi\u0107 and Ante Trumbi\u0107: the Kingdom of Croats, Serbs and Slovenes_ (London, 2010) (the Peace Conferences of 1919\u201323 and their aftermath), and Whitney Warren, _Montenegro: The Crime of the Peace Conference_ (New York, 1922); also Ivo Lederer, _Yugoslavia at the Peace Conference_ (New Haven, 1963). 64. Report by earl de Salis on Montenegro, 21 August 1919, PRO (London) FO 608\/46: referenced by Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain_. Text published in R. L. Jarman (ed.), _Yugoslavia Political Diaries, 1918\u201365_ (Cambridge, 1997), vol. 1. 65. Temperley Report, 12 October 1919, in Jarman, _Yugoslavia Political Diaries_ , vol. 1. 66. See J. D. Fair, _Harold Temperley: A Scholar and Romantic in the Public Realm_ (London, 1992). 67. _Montenegro_ , FCO Handbook No. 19, p. 38. 68. _New York Times_ (4 April 1920). 69. Devine, _Martyred Nation_ , p. 34. 70. Report by earl de Salis, in Jarman, _Yugoslavia Political Diaries_ , vol. 1. 71. Col. Burham, quoted by Devine, _Martyred Nation_ , pp. 19\u201320. 72. Enclosure in George Grahame (Paris) to Earl Curzon, 19 August 1920. National Archives, LG\/F\/57\/2\/\/4. 73. Bryce Report, 12 December 1920, in Jarman, _Yugoslavia Political Diaries_ , vol. 1. 74. Published in the _New York Times_ in 1922. 75. _New York Times_ (22 Oct. 1921). 76. Ciubranovitch, _Le Plus Grand Crime_. 77. _Ibid._ 78. 'Montenegro's Plea as Made at Genoa', _New York Times_ (4 June 1922). 79. Walter Littlefield, 'Annihilation of a Nation: Montenegrins' Effort to Prevent Annexation of their Country to Serbia', _New York Times_ (16 April 1922). 80. Devine, _Martyred Nation_ , p. 1. 81. 'Serbian Bishop Condemns Supporters of the Montenegrin Church', BBC \u2013 IMR, 7 January 2006. 82. www.moc-cpc.org\/index_e.htm (2010). 83. See T. Judah, _The Serbs: History, Myth and the Destruction of Yugoslavia_ (New Haven, 1997). 84. Lenard Cohen, _Serpent in the Bosom: The Rise and Fall of Slobodan Milo\u0161ev\u00edc_ (Boulder, Colo., 2001). 85. Nick Hawton, _The Quest for Radovan Karad\u017ei\u0107_ (London, 2009). 86. 'Serbia accepts Montenegro Result', BBC News, 23 May 2006, news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/world\/Europe\/5009242.stm (2011). 87. Florian Bieber (ed.), _Montenegro in Transition: Problems of Identity and Statehood_ (Baden-Baden, 2003). 88. <http:\/\/www.montenegro.org\/language.html> (2011). 89. <http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gptpjmdtofk> (2011). 90. 'PM Unveils Monument to Last Montenegrin King, Vows to Renew Independence', BBC \u2013 IMR, 20 December 2005.\n\n##### III\n\n91. <http:\/\/njegos.org\/past\/petrovics\/family.htm> (2008); see also Olga Opfell, _Royalty Who Wait_ (Jefferson, NC, 2001). 92. See www.cfr.org\/publication\/15897\/montevideo_convention.html (2008). 93. James Barros, _The \u00c5land Islands Question_ (New Haven, 1968). 94. Miranda Vickers, _The Albanians: A Modern History_ (London, 1999). 95. E. J. Dillon, _The Inside Story of the Peace Conference_ (London, 1919), p. 98. 96. Roberts, _Realm of the Black Mountain_ ; Rastoder, 'Twentieth Century Montenegro'; Devine, _Martyred Nation_. 97. Pavlovic, _Balkan Anschluss_ , not consulted. 98. See Andres K\u00fcng, _A Dream of Freedom_ (Cardiff, 1981). 99. See Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, _The Rape of Poland_ (London, 1948). 100. Laura Silber, Alan Little and A. Ciri\u0107, _The Death of Yugoslavia_ (London, 1995); Misha Glenny, _The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War_ (London, 1996); Mark Almond, _Europe's Backyard War_ (London, 1994). 101. Human Rights Watch, _Weighing the Evidence: Lessons from the Slobodan Milosevic Trial_ (New York, 2006). 102. http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/onamo_'namo! (2008).\n\n##### CHAPTER 13. RUSYN\n\nBibliographical Note. Thanks to the work of American and Canadian Ukrainians, the history of Carpatho-Ruthenia is reasonably accessible in English. The principal scholar in the field is Paul Robert Magocsi, whose titles include _The Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia_ (Vienna, 1983), _Carpatho-Rusyn Studies: A Bibliography_ (New York, 1988), and _Our People: Carpatho-Rusyns and their Descendants in North America_ (Toronto, 1994). The region also attracted a number of Western travellers with a taste for the exotic, notably Henry Baerlein, _In Czechoslovakia's Hinterland_ (London, 1938).\n\n##### I\n\n1. Anthony Hope, _The Prisoner of Zenda_ (London, 1894).\n\n##### II\n\n2. Paul Magocsi, 'National Assimilation: The Case of the Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia', _East Central Europe_ , 11\/2 (1975), pp. 101\u201331. 3. Michael Winch, _Republic for a Day: An Eye-witness Account of the Carpatho-Ukraine Incident_ (London, 1939), pp. 275 ff. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. www.ucrdc.org\/hi-augustyn-voloshyn.html. 7. Yuri Snegirev, 'A New Republic is Close to Appearing in Transcarpathia', _Izvestiya_ (14 Nov. 2008), trans. at www.robertamsterdam.com\/2008\/11\/when_in_ruthenia.htm.\n\n##### III\n\n8. Immanuel Wallerstein, _Modern World Systems: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy_ (New York, 1974). 9. Hans Kohn, _The Idea of Nationalism: A Study of its Origin and Background_ (New York, 1944). 10. Ernest Gellner, _Nations and Nationalism_ (Oxford, 1983). 11. John Plamenatz, _Man and Society: A Critical Examination of Some Important Social and Political Theories_ (London, 1963). 12. Ibid., quoted by Norman Davies, _Europe East and West_ (London, 2006), pp. 29\u201332. 13. Ibid. 14. Vesna Goldsworthy, _Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination_ (London, 1998), p. xi. See also Norman Davies, 'Fair Comparisons and False Contrasts', in his _Europe East and West_ , pp. 22\u201345.\n\n##### Chapter 14. \u00c9ire\n\nBibliographical Note. Despite an enormous literature, Ireland's twentieth-century history is not particularly accessible. Many authors are manifestly partisan, and others assume exacting levels of knowledge that their readers may not possess. General surveys of the subject have been published by Mary Collins (London, 1970), Edward Norman (London, 1971), J. J. Lee (Cambridge, 1989), Tony Gray (London, 1996), Alvin Jackson (Oxford, 1999), Richard Killeen (Dublin, 2003) and Tim Pat Coogan (London, 2004). Roy Foster, who brings strong cultural insights into his political analysis, is the acknowledged authority. Senia Pa\u0161eta, _Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction_ (Oxford, 2003) provides a good entry point. _The Oxford Companion to Irish History_ , ed. S. J. Connolly (Oxford 1998), offers a mine of reliable information. Recordings of all the songs in this chapter can be found on the website of www.youtube.com.\n\n##### I\n\n1. _Irish Times_ (4 April 2011). 2. Ray MacManais, _The Road from Ardoyne: The Making of a President_ (Dingle, 2004). 3. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/amhran_na_bhfiann> (2008). 4. www.visitdublin.com\/seeanddo\/historicsites\/dublin.aspx (2008). 5. www.fiannafail.ie (2010). 6. www.finegael.org (2010). 7. 'Worldwide Quality of Life Index, 2005', www.economist.com\/media\/pdf\/quality_of_life.pdf (2008). Interestingly, a rival index produced by the Irish-based organization International Living.com placed France in first place, and Ireland in 57th; www.il-ireland.com\/qofl2008\/ (2009). 8. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/list_of_high_kings_of_ireland> (2009). 9. M. Mahoney, _Brian Boru: Ireland's Greatest King_ (Stroud, 2002). 10. See Cecelia Holland, _The Kings in Winter_ (New York, 1968) and Morgan Llywelyn, _Lion of Ireland_ (New York, 1980), historical novels; also www.doyle.com.au\/battleclontarf.htm. 11. Philip Robinson, _The Ulster Plantation: British Settlement in an Irish Landscape_ , 1600\u20131607 (Belfast, 2005); Cyril Falls, _The Birth of Ulster_ (London, 1996). 12. R. Dunlop (ed.), _Ireland under the Commonwealth_ (Manchester, 1913). 13. P. B. Ellis, _The Boyne Water_ (London, 1976). 14. M. Wall, _The Penal Laws_ , 1691\u20131760 (Dundalk, 1961). 15. 'Let Erin Remember', Thomas Moore, _Poetical Works_ (Edinburgh, n.d), pp. 440\u201341. 16. As recounted by Mary Kenny, _The Crown and theShamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy_ (Dublin, 2009). 17. Roy Foster, _Charles Stuart Parnell: The Man and his Family_ (Hassocks, 1979); Paul Bew, _Parnell_ (Dublin, 1991). 18. R. V. Comerford, _The Fenians in Context_ , 1858\u201382 (Dublin, 1998). 19. D. O'Corrain and T. O'Riordan, _Ireland,_ 1815 _\u2013_ 70 _: Emancipation, Famine, and Religion_ (Dublin, 2011). 20. Diarmaid Ferriter, 'Ireland in the Twentieth Century', www.gov.ie\/en\/essays\/twentieth.html (2009). 21. Roy Foster, 'The \"New\" Nationalism', in his _Modern Ireland_ , 1600\u20131972 (London, 1988), pp. 450, 454. 22. www.ireland-information.com\/irishmusic\/thewearingofthegreen.shtml (2010). 23. 'When Irish Eyes Are Smiling', from _The Isle O' Dreams_ (1912) by Chauncey Olcott, www.contemplator.com\/ireland\/irisheye.html (2009). 24. W. S. Churchill, _My Early Life_ (London, 1930). 25. Michael O'Riain, 'Queen Victoria and her Reign at Leinster House', _Dublin Historical Record_ , 1 (1999), pp. 75\u201386.\n\n##### II\n\n26. Full text in Foster, _Modern Ireland_ , pp. 596\u20137. 27. Brian Barton and Richard Foy, _The Easter Rising_ (Stroud, 1999). 28. www.triskelle.eu\/lyrics\/bloodstainedbandage.php?index (2009). 29. www.firstworldwar.com\/audio\/itsalongwaytotipperary.htm (2009). 30. Foster, _Modern Ireland_ , p. 489. 31. www.loyalist.lyrics.co.uk\/index-s.html (2009). 32. Foster, _Modern Ireland_ , p. 489. 33. Ibid., p. 490. 34. 'Sinn Fein's 'Declaration of Independence', _Manchester Guardian_ (22 Jan. 1922). 35. 'The Rifles of the IRA', <http:\/\/ingeb.org\/songs\/inninet.htm> (2009). 36. C. L. Mowat, _Britain between the Wars_ (London, 1968), pp. 84\u20135. 37. See Ronan Fanning, 'De Valera', in _Dictionary of Irish Biography_ (Cambridge, 2009). 38. Tim Pat Coogan, _Michael Collins: A Biography_ (London, 1990). 39. R. Davis, _Arthur Griffith_ (Dundalk, 1976). 40. See Arthur Griffith, _The Resurrection of Hungary: A Parallel for Ireland_ (Dublin, 1904). 41. Calton Younger, _A State of Disunion_ (London, 1972). 42. See Thomas Jones, _Diary with Letters_ (London, 1954). 43. See Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford), _Peace by Ordeal_ (London, 1962). 44. Kevin O'Higgins, quoted in J. Cannon (ed.), _The Oxford Companion to British History_ (Oxford, 1997), p. 515. 45. Foster, _Modern Ireland_ , p. 509. 46. Ibid., p. 506. 47. Tom Cox, _The Damned Englishman: A Study of Erskine Childers_ (Hicksville, NY, 1975). 48. See Tim Pat Coogan, _De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow_ (London, 1993). 49. 'Take it down from the Mast', www.free-lyrics\/thedubliners\/274859.html. 50. Jeremy Dibble, _Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician_ (Oxford, 2002); C. V. Stanford, _Pages from an Unwritten Diary_ (London, 1914). 51. 'A Fire of Turf', op. 139, nr. 1 (1913), words by Winifred Letts, from _An Irish Idyll_. 52. e.g. George VI, 'the last King of Ireland', www.answers.com\/topic\/king-george-vi (2009). 53. Text of the Anglo-Irish Treaty 1921: National Archives of Ireland, _Documents on Irish Foreign Policy_ , vol. 1: 1919\u201321 (Dublin, 1998), also online. 54. 'God Save Ireland', www.celtic-lyrics.com>forum>lyrics. 55. By Mary Kenny, in _The Crown and the Shamrock_. See also N. Browne, _Church and State in Modern Ireland_ (Belfast, 1991). 56. Foster, _Modern Ireland_ , p. 518. 57. Enda Macdonagh, 'Church\u2013State Relations in Independent Ireland', in James Mackey (ed.), _Religion and Politics in Ireland_ (Dublin, 2003). 58. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/monarchy_of_ireland> (2009). 59. www.iol.ie\/~dluby\/anthem.html (2009). 60. Brendan Sexton, _Ireland and the Crown,_ 1922\u201336: _The Governor-Generalship of the Irish Free State_ (Dublin, 1989). 61. ' _Bunreacht na h\u00c9ireann_ ', www.constitution.ie\/constitution-of-ireland\/default.asp (2009). 62. J. E. and G. W. Donleavy, _Douglas Hyde: A Maker of Modern Ireland_ (Oxford, 1991). 63. Coogan, _De Valera_. 64. Ian Wood, _Ireland during the Second World War_ (London, 2002); E. O'Halpin (ed.), MI5 _and Ireland_ , 1939\u201345 (Dublin, 2003); Brian Girvin, _The Emergency: Neutral Ireland_ (London, 2006); Clair Wills, _That Neutral Island: A Cultural History of Ireland during the Second World War_ (London, 2007). 65. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/republic_of_ireland_act_1948> (2009), with text. 66. Foster, _Modern Ireland_. 67. 'Ireland Act, 1949, c41, 12 and 13 Geo 6', full text at <http:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/wiki\/ireland_act_1949> (2009). 68. 'Crown of Ireland Act, 1542, c. 1 33 Hen. 8', full text at www.opsi.gov.uk\/revisedstatutes\/acts\/aip\/1542\/caip_15420001_en_1 (2009). This Act, including the clause on 'High Treason', still applies in Northern Ireland. 69. www.thebards.net\/music\/lyrics\/patriot_game.shtml (2010). 70. Paul Bew _et al._ , _Northern Ireland,_ 1921 _\u2013_ 2001 _: Political Forces and Social Classes_ (London, 1995). 71. www.loyalistlyrics.co.uk\/index-h.html (2009). 72. Mary E. Daly and Margeret O'Callaghan (eds.), 1916 _in_ 1996: _Commemorating the Easter Rising_ (Dublin, 2007). 73. Patrick Bishop and Eamonn Mallie, _The Provisional_ IRA (London, 1987). 74. Eamonn McCann, _Bloody Sunday in Derry_ (Dingle, 1998); idem, _The Bloody Sunday Enquiry_ (London, 2006). 75. Conflict Archive on the Internet (CAIN) Webservice, 'The Sunningdale Agreement': <http:\/\/cain.ulst.ac.uk\/events\/sunningdale\/agreement.htm> (2009). 76. Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, Nobel Prize Winners, 1976: www.peacepeople.com\/pphistory.htm (2009). 77. Paul Routledge, _The Elusive Life and Violent Death of Airey Neave_ (London, 2003). 78. Philip Ziegler, _Mountbatten: The Official Biography_ (London, 2001). 79. J. M. Feehan, _Bobby Sands and the Tragedy of Modern Ireland_ (Sag Harbor, NY, 1985). 80. 'The Men behind the Wire', composed by Paddy McGuigan of the Barleycorn group, who was himself interned as a reward for writing the song. See <http:\/\/unitedireland.tripod.com\/id110.htm> (2009). 81. 'Go home, British soldiers' (1972), composed by Tommy Skelly of the South Dublin Union. See R. Daly and D. Warfield, _Celtic and Ireland in Song and Stor_ y (Glasgow, 1990), pp. 38, 150\u201355. 82. From _The Wolfe Tones Song Book_ , vol. 2 (1990). 83. Pa\u0161eta, _Modern Ireland: A Very Short Introduction_ , p. 146. 84. <http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=j61grao2x9g> (2011). 85. Ed Moloney, _The Secret History of the_ IRA (London, 2002). 86. Ian Paisley, MP, www.allgreatquotes.com\/ian_paisley_quotes.shtml (2010). 87. Kevin Bean, _The New Politics of Sinn Fein_ (Liverpool, 2007). 88. www.nio-gov.uk\/the agreement\/political background_8_august_2004 (2009). 89. BBC News, 16 August 1998, <http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/h\/events\/northern_ireland\/latest_events\/152156.stm> (2009). 90. Dean Godson, _Himself Alone: David Trimbleand the Ordeal of Unionism_ (London, 2005); Frank Millar, _David Trimble: The Price of Peace_ (Dublin, 2008); George Drower, _John Hume: Man of Peace_ (London, 1996); Paul Routledge, _John Hume: A Biography_ (London, 1998). 91. Steve Bruce, _God Save Ulster: The Religion and Politics of Paisleyism_ (Oxford, 1986); _idem, Paisley: Religion and Politics in Northern Ireland_ (Oxford, 2007). 92. L. Clarke and M. Johnston, _Martin McGuinness: From Guns to Government_ (Edinburgh, 2003); see also Gerry Adams, _Hope and History: Making Peace in Ireland_ (Dingle, 2003). 93. Officially the British-Irish Council first convened in 1999; see <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/british%e2%80%93irish_council>. 94. 'A Day of Justice Dawning' or 'The Winds are Singing Freedom', by Terry Makem, <http:\/\/merryploughboys.com\/cd-lyrics\/3_01twasf.html> (2009). 95. 'A Nation Once Again', composed by Thomas Osborne Davis (1814\u201345), <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/a_nation_once_again> (2009); see also <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/worldservice\/us\/features\/topten> (2009), with audio recording by the Wolfe Tones. 96. Fintan O'Toole, _Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Killed the Celtic Tiger_ (London, 2009). 97. Damien Dempsey, 'Celtic Tiger', <http:\/\/www.justsomelyrics.com\/1511874> (2011). 98. Michael Cox _et al._ , _A Farewell to Arms: Beyond the Good Friday Agreement_ , 2nd edn. (Manchester, 2006). 99. Mary MacAleese, 'Changing History', Longford Lecture, 23 November 2007, quoted Margaret Macmillan, _The Uses and Abuses of History_ (London, 2009), p. 72. 100. Ian Paisley, 8 May 2007, www.allgreatquotes.com. 101. Gerry Adams, 4 December 2009, <http:\/\/www.leargas.blogspot.com\/2009\/12\/lesson-of-history.html> (2010). 102. 'No MPs and no Empey', _Guardian_ (10 Aug. 2010). 103. <http:\/\/noplaceinthesun.com\/page15.htm> (2011). 104. Quoted in 'After the Race', _The Economist_ (19 Feb. 2011). 105. Peter Topping, 'Ireland's 2010 Deficit Largest in the EU', _Inside Ireland_ (27 June 2011). 106. <http:\/\/fairocracy.com\/general_election_results_2011\/irish_general_election_full_results.html> (28 Feb. 2011). 107. Diarmaid Ferriter, 'The People's Act of Revenge', _Guardian_ (24 Feb. 2011). 108. http:\/\/www.fco.gov.uk\/en\/about-us\/whatwe...\/state-visit-ireland-2011 (2011). 109. <http:\/\/www.englishmonarchs.co.uk\/stuart-3.htm> (2011).\n\n##### III\n\n110. Norman Davies, _The Isles: A History_ (London, 1996), pp. 697\u20131017. 111. Tam Dalyell, _Devolution: The End of Britain?_ (London, 1977). 112. Vernon Bogdanor, _Devolution in the United Kingdom_ (Oxford, 1999). 113. _Shorter Oxford English Dictionary._ 114. Timothy Garton Ash, 'Wake up Europe', _Guardian_ (June 2010); David Marquand, _The End of Europe_ (London, 2011). 115. See Vernon Bogdanor, _The Monarchy and the Constitution_ (Oxford, 1995). 116. Jeremy Paxman, _On Royalty_ (London, 2006). 117. See www.republic.org.uk. 118. An ICM poll for the BBC in 2009 found 76 per cent in favour of the monarchy continuing after the reign of Elizabeth II, with 18 per cent against and 6 per cent undecided; news.bbc.co.uk\/1\/hi\/7967142.st (2011). See also <http:\/\/www.officialroyalwedding2010.org> (2011). 119. <http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news-scotland-13305522> (2011). 120. Martin Kettle, 'Scotland will tell...', _Guardian_ (9 April 2011). 121. See <http:\/\/www.cep.org.uk> (2011). 122. See <http:\/\/www.englishdefenceleague.org> (2011). 123. 'Danny Boy', words (1910) by F. E. Weatherly, published 1913. Davies, _The Isles_ , app. 62, pp. 1010\u201311. 124. Frederick Weatherly (1848\u20131929), composer of 'The Holy City', 'Roses of Picardy', 'Yesteryear', 'Beauty's Eyes', etc. See 'Danny Boy \u2013 the Mystery Solved', <http:\/\/www.standingstones.com\/dannyboy.html> (2009).\n\n##### Chapter 15. Cccp\n\nBibliographical Note. No subject has been more blighted than Soviet history by political passions and by special pleading. The best overview is that of Geoffrey Hosking, _History of the Soviet Union_ (London, 1985); Bertrand Russell's _Theory and Practice of Bolshevism_ (London, 1919), written by a former sympathizer whose eyes were opened, remains a valuable antidote to the thousands of Westerners who took Soviet propaganda at face value. The authors to avoid include Sidney Webb, E. H. Carr and Jerry Hough. Even among sceptical commentators, however, a strong tendency remains to equate the Soviet Union with Russia, and readers need to make a conscious effort to supplement their general reading with an outline knowledge of the fifteen Soviet republics. The most convenient introduction to the history of Estonia is by Mati Laur, _A History of Estonia_ (Tallinn, 2004).\n\n##### I\n\n1. Statistics from _Whitaker's Almanack_ 2007 (London, 2006); see also, _Country Report: Estonia_ , Economist Intelligence Unit (London, 1998). 2. <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/estonian_language> (2008); ibid., \/estonian_vocabulary; Mare Kitsnik and Leelo Kingisepp, _Teach Yourself Estonian_ (London, 2008). 3. 'Tallinn: An Introduction', www.balticsww.com\/tourist\/estonia\/sights.htm (2008). 4. Neil Taylor, _Estonia: The Bradt Travel Guide_ (Chalfont, 2005); Robin Gauldie, _Estonia_ (Peterborough, 2006); http:\/visitestonia.com\/index.php (2008). 5. Bertelsmann Transformation Index, www.nationmaster.com\/country\/en-estonia\/dem-democracy (2010). 6. Sergei Balsamov, 'Profane Estonian Democracy and Blank Newspaper Pages', _Pravda_ , www.english.pravda.ru\/world\/ussr\/19-03-2010\/112645-democracy-0 (2010). 7. Reporters Without Borders, www.rsf.org\/only_peace_protects_freedoms-in.htm (2010). 8. _Easyjet_ , in-flight magazine (April 2008), p. 98. 9. www.intelligentcommunity.org\/client-uploads.\/icf-il-2009 (2009). 10. Fr. R. Kreutzwald, _Kalevipoeg_ , canto I, ll. 1\u20138, after the critical edition of 1961, www.kalevipoeg.info\/texteestoniencadres.html (2008). 11. 'Death of Kaleb', www.sacred-texts.com\/neu\/hoe\/hoe1-07\/htm (2008). 12. Museum of Occupations of Estonia, www.okupatsioon.ee\/english (2008). A similarly imaginative museum can be visited in Riga: www.occupationmuseum.lv. 13. Estonian International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes against Humanity, _Estonia,_ 1940\u20131945 (Tallinn, 2006). 14. Eduard Kolga; <http:\/\/nationalalliance.org\/gulag\/5gulag.htm> (2007). 15. K. Brueggemann and A. Kasekamp, 'The Politics of History and the \"War of Monuments\" ', _Estonia: Nationalities Papers_ , 36\/3 (3 July 2008), pp. 425\u201348. 16. Monument controversy, <http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/bronze_soldier_of_tallinn> (2008). 17. Gary Peach, 'Estonia Removes Disputed Soviet War Memorial', _International Herald Tribune_ (27 April 2007). 18. Adrian Blomfield, 'Putin Criticises Estonia over War Memorial', _Daily Telegraph_ (12 May 2007). 19. Ian Traynor, 'Russia Accused of Unleashing Cyberwar to Disable Estonia', _Guardian_ (17 May 2007); 'A Cyber-riot', _The Economist_ (10 May 2007). 20. www.security-gurus.de\/papers\/cyberwarfare.pdf (2010). 21. www.ncsa.illinois.edu (2010). 22. 'Estonia Joins Euro as Currency Expands into former Soviet Bloc', <http:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/2010-12-31.html> (2011).\n\n##### II\n\n23. Richard Pipes, _The Formation of the Soviet Union_ (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). 24. Geoffrey Hosking, _Russia: People and Empire_ , 1552\u20131917 (London, 1997). 25. 'Estonia', in _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ , 11th edn. (1911). 26. 'Reval', ibid. 27. Evan Mawdsley, _The Russian Civil War_ (Edinburgh, 2000). 28. Robert Service, 'The Polish Corridor', in _Stalin: A Biography_ (London, 2004), pp. 175\u201385. 29. See Norman Davies, _White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War_ , 1919\u20131920 (London, 1972); and Adam Zamoyski, _Warsaw_ 1920 (London, 2008). 30. N. Bukharin, _Building up Socialism_ (London, 1925); Service, _Stalin_. 31. Georg von Rauch, _The Baltic States: The Years of Independence_ (London, 1974), pp. 24\u201339. 32. Ibid., p. 31. 33. Estonia's Declaration of Independence, 1918, www.president.ee (2010). 34. 'The German Occupation, 1917\u201318', in Rauch, _Baltic States_ , pp. 39\u201349. 35. 'War of Independence', ibid., pp. 49\u201370. See also www.allempires.com\/article\/index.php?q=estonian_liberation_war (2008). 36. Mart Laar, _Estonia's Way_ (Tallinn, 2006), p. 126. 37. See M. W. Graham, _The Diplomatic Recognition of the Border States_ (Berkeley, 1939). 38. Anne Applebaum, _Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps_ (London, 2003). 39. Stefan Oleskiw, _Agony of a Nation_ (London, 1983); Robert Conquest, _The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivisation and the Terror-Famine_ (London, 2002); L. Luciuk (ed.), _Holodomor: Reflections on the Great Famine in Soviet Ukraine_ , 1932\u201333 (Kingston, Ont., 2008). 40. Scott Shane, _Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union_ (Chicago, 1994), p. 90. 41. Robert Conquest, _The Great Terror: A Reassessment_ (Oxford, 2008); idem, _Stalin: Breaker of Nations_ (London, 1998); idem, _The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History_ (London, 2005). 42. Laar, _Estonia's Way_ , p. 130. 43. Ibid., pp. 135\u20136. 44. See Norman Davies, _Europe at War,_ 1939 _\u2013_ 1945 _: No Simple Victory_ (London, 2006). 45. Steve Zaloga, _Poland_ 1939 _: The Birth of Blitzkrieg_ (Oxford, 2002). 46. William Trotter, _The Winter War: The Russo-Finnish War of_ 1939\u201340 (London, 2002). 47. Rodric Braithwaite, _Moscow_ 1941 _: A City and its People at War_ (London, 2006). 48. Harrison Salisbury, _The Siege of Leningrad_ (London, 1969). 49. Antony Beevor, _Stalingrad_ (London, 1999). 50. Janusz Piekalkiewicz, _Operation Citadel: Kursk and Orel. The Greatest Tank Battle of the Second World War_ (Novato, Calif., 1987). 51. Antony Beevor, _Berlin: The Downfall_ , 1945 (London, 2002). 52. See Richard Overy, _Russia's War_ (London, 1999). 53. Jan Lewandowski, _Estonia_ (Warsaw, 2001), pp. 137\u201345. 54. J. W. Russell, quoted by David Kirby, 'Incorporation', in G. Smith (ed.), _The Baltic States_ (London, 1996), p. 80. 55. 'Soviet Occupation, 1940\u201341', in _Estonia,_ 1940\u20131945, pp. 1\u2013410; Meelis Maripuu, 'The Deportations of 1940\u201341', ibid.; see also Imbi Paju, _Memories Denied_ (Helsinki, 2006). 56. 'German Occupation, 1941\u201344', in _Estonia_ , 1940\u20131945, pp. 521\u2013766; Riho Vastrik, 'The Tartu Concentration Camp', Meelis Maripuu, 'The Execution of Estonian Jews', 'The Annihilation of Czech and German Jews', 'Soviet Prisoners of War in Estonia', ibid. 57. Indrik Paavle, 'Fate of the Estonian Elite', in _Estonia,_ 1940\u20131945, pp. 391\u2013410. 58. T. Hiio and P. Kaasik, 'Estonian Units in the Waffen SS', in _Estonia,_ 1940\u20131945, pp. 927\u201368; P. Kaasik, 'The 8th Estonian Rifle Corps in North-Western Russia', ibid., pp. 909\u201326. 59. Lauri Malksoo, 'The Government of Otto Tief', in _Estonia_ , 1940\u20131945, pp. 1107\u201312. 60. 'Phase III, The Soviet Occupation of Estonia from 1944', www.historycommission.ee\/temp\/pdf\/conclusions_en_1944.pdf (2008); see also M. Laar, _War in the Woods: Estonia's Struggle for Survival_ , 1944\u201356 (Ann Arbor, 1992). 61. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, _Invisible Allies_ (New York, 1997), pp. 46\u201364. 62. _Estonia_ , 1940\u20131945, p. 1031. 63. Robert Litwak, _D\u00e9tente: American Foreign Policy,_ 1969\u201376 (Cambridge, 1986). 64. Margaret MacMillan, _Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World_ (New York, 2006). 65. Leonard Shapiro, _The Government and Politics of the Soviet Union_ (London, 1970); Martin Malia, _The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia,_ 1917\u201391 (New York, 1994); Alec Nove, _Stalinism and After_ (Boston, 1989). 66. T. Parming and E. Jaervesoo, _Case Study of a Soviet Republic: The Estonian_ SSR (Boulder, Colo., 1978). 67. S. Utechin, _Concise Encyclopaedia of Russia_ (London, 1961), pp. 172\u20133. 68. Maxim Waldstein, 'Russifying Estonia? Iurii Lotman and the Politics of Language and Culture in Soviet Estonia', _Kritika_ , 8\/3 (2007), pp. 561\u201396. 69. Paul Hillier, _Arvo P\u00e4rt_ (Oxford, 1997); Eesti Musika, _Estonian Music Guide_ (Tallinn, 2004). 70. Marina Frolova-Walker, 'Nationalist in Form, Socialist in Content: Musical Nation-building in the Soviet Republics', _Journal of the American Musical Society_ , 51\/2 (1998), pp. 331\u201371. 71. Quoted in Stalin, _Marxism and the National and Colonial Question_ (n.p., 1934). 72. <http:\/\/www.nlib.ee\/html\/inglise\/rr\/hist.html> (2011). 73. The Appeal was signed by prominent names in all three Baltic States. See 'Estonia Today: The Molotov\u2013Ribbentrop Pact and its Consequences', <http:\/\/web-static.vm.ee\/static\/failid\/493\/mrp.pdf>. 74. Stephen White, _Gorbachev and After_ (Cambridge, 1993). 75. 'Glasnost', in _Oxford Russian\u2013English Dictionary_ (Oxford, 1972). 76. Estonian national awakening: Clare Thomson, _The Singing Revolution_ (London, 1992); Henri Voigt, _'Estonia \u2013 the Singing Revolution': Between Utopia and Disillusionment_ (Oxford, 2005), pp. 20\u201335. 77. Meldra Usenko, _Akcija Baltijas Cels,_ 1989 _\u2013 The Baltic Way_ (Riga, n.d.), illustrated. 78. 'Estonia \u2013 Independence Reclaimed', <http:\/\/countrystudies.us\/estonia\/5.htm> (2008).\n\n##### III\n\n79. Yuri Meltsev reviewing Shane, _Dismantling Utopia,_ in _Independent Review_ , 1 (1996). 80. See Emilio Gentile, _Politics as Religion_ (Oxford, 2006). 81. Archie Brown, _The Gorbachev Factor_ (Oxford, 1997); idem, _Seven Years that Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective_ (Oxford, 2007). 82. Leonid Batkin, as quoted by Shane, _Dismantling Utopia_ , p. 5. 83. Edward Lucas, _The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Threatens Both Russia and the West_ (London, 2007). 84. Francis Fukuyama, 'The End of History?' _National Interest_ , 16 (1989). 85. Paul Kennedy, in _The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers_ (London, 1988). 86. Michael Cox, US _Foreign Policy after the Cold War: Superpower without a Mission_ (London, 1995); Bill Emmott, _Rivals: The Power Struggle between China, India and Japan_ (London, 2008); Martin Jacques, _When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World_ (London, 2009); Lauren Phillips, _International Politics in_ 2030 _: The Transformative Power of Large Developing Countries_ (Bonn, 2008). 87. Lutz Kleveman, _The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia_ (London, 2004). 88. Mart Laar, 'The Estonian Economic Miracle', Backgrounder 2060, _The Heritage Foundation_ (7 August 2007); www.heritage.org\/isses\/worldwidefreedom\/bg2060.cfm. 89. Andrew Osborn, 'Putin: Collapse of the Century', _Independent_ (26 April 2005). 90. Lilia Shevtsova, _Putin's Russia_ (Washington, 2005). 91. Anna Politovskaya, _Putin's Russia: Life in a Failing Democracy_ (London, 2004); Anders Aslund, _Putin's Decline and America's Response_ (Washington, 2005); Bertil Nygren, _The Rebuilding of Greater Russia_ (London, 2008).\n\n##### HOW STATES DIE\n\n1. Aristotle, _Politics_ , book I, parts 1\u20132. 2. Thomas Hobbes, _Leviathan_ (1651), part II, ch. xxix 'Of those things that weaken or tend to the Dissolution of a Commonwealth'. 3. J.-J. Rousseau, _Social Contract_ (1762), book III, ch. 11, 'The Death of the Body Politic', trans. Maurice Cranston (London, 1968). 4. Daniel 5: 25\u20137. 5. Revelation 18: 2. 6. Augustine, _City of God_ , trans. J. Healey (London, 1931). 7. T. Gilby, _The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas_ (Chicago, 1958); E. L. Fortin, 'Thomas Aquinas as a Political Thinker', _Perspectives of Political Science_ , 26\/2 (1997), p. 92. 8. Edwin Jones, _The English Nation: The Great Myth_ (Stroud, 2003). 9. W. Cargill Thompson, _The Political Thought of Martin Luther_ (Totowa, NJ, 1984). 10. See James Joll, _The Anarchists_ (London, 1965). 11. Karl Marx, in his _Critique of the Gotha Programme_ (1875); Friedrich Engels, in the _Anti-D\u00fchring_ (1878), as expounded by Lenin, 'On the Withering of the State and Violent Revolution', in his _State and Revolution_ (1917), ch. 2. 12. Lenin, 'On the Eve of Revolution', in his _State and Revolution_ , ch. 2: www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1917\/staterev\/ch02.htm (2009). 13. John Westlake, 'On the Extinction of States', in his _International Law_ , Part 1 (Cambridge, 1904), pp. 63\u20138. 14. James Crawford, _The Creation of States in International Law_ , 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2006). 15. Tanisha Fazal, _State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation and Annexation_ (Princeton, 2007). 16. 'COW, Project History', www.correlatesofwar.org\/cowhistory.htm (2009). 17. Fazal, _State Death_ , pp. 243\u201358. 18. 'Index of Failed States, 2009', from the journal _Foreign Policy_ www.foreignpolicy.com\/articles\/2009\/06\/22\/2009_failed_states_index_interactive_map_and_rankings (2010). 19. _Monty Python's Flying Circus_ , 'Dead Parrot Sketch', www.mtholyoke.edu\/~ebarnes\/python\/dead-parrot.htm (2009). 20. www.en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/list_of_extinct_states (2011). 21. John Locke, 'Of the Dissolution of Government', _Two Treatises on Civil Government_ (1690; London, 1960), ch. XIX, pp. 252\u20133. 22. Westlake, 'On the Extinction of States', p. 64. 23. Ibid., p. 66. 24. See Saul Bernard Cohen, 'Implosion of the Soviet State', in his _Geopolitics of the World System_ (Langham, Md., 2003), pp. 198 ff.; Robert Miller, 'The Implosion of a Superpower' (1992), <http:\/\/history.eserver.org\/gloss\/ussr-in-1991.txt> (2010). 25. 'The Collapse of Communism: A Re-examination', British Academy Symposium, 15\u201316 October 2009. 26. Laura Silber and Allan Little, _The Death of Yugoslavia_ (London, 1995). 27. Mark Cornwall (ed.), _The Last Years of Austria-Hungary_ (Exeter, 2002); Oszkar Jaszi, _The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy_ (Chicago, 1966). 28. Norman Davies, _God's Playground: A History of Poland_ (Oxford, 1981), vol. 1, p. 551. 29. J.-J. Rousseau, _Consid\u00e9rations sur le Gouvernement de la Pologne et sa r\u00e9forme projet\u00e9e_ (London, 1782). 30. Fazal, _State Death_. 31. Ji\u0159i Prehe, 'The Split of Czechoslovakia: A Defeat or a Victory?', www.prehe.cz\/prednasky\/2004 (2009). 32. Lord Robert Cecil, quoted by Harry Hanak, 'The Government, the Foreign Office and Austro-Hungary, 1914\u201318', _Slavonic and East European Review_ , 47\/108 (1969). 33. David Marshall Lang, _A Modern History of Georgia_ (London, 1962); A. K. Niedermaier (ed.), _Countdown to War in Georgia_ (Minneapolis, 2008). 34. _Beowulf_ , prologue, ll. 26\u201352, trans. Seamus Heaney as 'The Ship of Death', from _The Haw Lantern_ (London, 1987). 35. William Wordsworth, 'On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic' (1802).\n\n## Acknowledgements\n\nResearch on this book began in April 2006, when I set off with my wife Maria for the Firth of Clyde on the first of successive expeditions to explore the site of a vanished kingdom. For the next five years we shared the ardours and pleasures of an enterprise in which I was the pen-pusher cum designer and she the undisputed _chef des id\u00e9es_ and manager of life-support systems. Once again, Roger Moorhouse provided sterling assistance as picture-researcher, map-drawer and adviser in matters German. Katarzyna Pisarska has served throughout as my virtual PA, skimming over all obstacles whether in Harvard, Uzbekistan or Nepal. I acknowledge my debt to several institutions, including the Fundacja Nauki Polski and Carta Blanca S.A. in Warsaw, the Jagiellonian University in Krak\u00f3w, Clare Hall and Peterhouse, Cambridge, and St Antony's College, Oxford; and I wish to express my special gratitude to numerous individual contributors. Almost every chapter has been read and improved by consultants of the highest calibre, whose comments calmed doubts and fears while leaving ultimate responsibility with the author. The long list of names is headed by that of my late friend and colleague Rees Davies, who was in at the start and who was followed by Jorg Hensgen, Peter Heather, James Campbell, Conrad Leyser, David Abulafia, Robert Frost, Robert Evans, Philip Mansel, Noel Malcolm, Roy Foster, Geoffrey Hosking, Margus Laidre and Chris Clark, who proved particularly generous. Additional advice was kindly supplied by Alexandra Loewe, Alba and Andrea Skidmore, and Thomas Charles-Edwards. The digitalized text was beautifully produced from a large manuscript by Gosia Figwer, Malgorzata Ciszewska and the late Miranda Long, ably supplemented by Heather and Sebastian Godwin and Hazel Dunn. Professional editorial work was undertaken by David Milner, Charlotte Ridings and Elizabeth Stratford. The project was launched by Will Sulkin, who gave valuable early support, but came to fruition through the combined efforts of my irreplaceable agent, David Godwin, and of my literary adviser, fellow Boltonian and publishing director of Allen Lane, the indefatigable Stuart Proffitt.\nALLEN LANE\n\nPublished by the Penguin Group\n\nPenguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\n\nPenguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA\n\nPenguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3   \n(a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)\n\nPenguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)\n\nPenguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia   \n(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)\n\nPenguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi \u2013 110 017, India\n\nPenguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand   \n(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)\n\nPenguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, 2196, South Africa\n\nPenguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England\n\nwww.penguin.com\n\nFirst published 2011\n\nCopyright \u00a9 Norman Davies, 2011\n\nThe moral right of the author has been asserted\n\nAll rights reserved.\n\n978-0-14-196048-7\n* Arius of Alexandria (d. 336), the principal heresiarch of the fourth century, was condemned by the Church Council of Nicaea for denying the full divinity of Christ and hence the prevailing view on the nature of the Trinity. After Nicaea, his teaching was banned by the imperial authorities.\n\n* Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople in 428\u201331, the principal heresiarch of the fifth century, was condemned by the Council of Ephesus for holding that Christ's nature was equally human and divine.\n\n* An unconfirmed site usually located in the vicinity of Ch\u00e2lons-en-Champagne.\n\n* Next to the Royal Palace in the Plaze de Oriente.\n* The Romans gave this name to a branch of the Gaelic-speaking people of north-eastern Ireland who raided Britannia in the late fourth century and who later settled on both sides of the North Channel. The application of the 'Scots' label, however, expanded dramatically. Originally pertaining to the Gaels from Ireland who moved to Argyll, it was later used to refer to the ninth-century kingdom created by the fusion of Gaels and Picts, and eventually to all subjects of the Kingdom of Scotland irrespective of their linguistic or ethnic origin.\n\n* Lallans is the local name for the language of 'Lowland Scots' as spoken in the southern part of Scotland.\n\n* 'The Isles' became British by monarchical criteria in 1603 and constitutionally in 1801. They ceased to be British in 1949.\n\n* The Old Germanic _walchaz_ , 'foreign' or 'alien', is similarly reflected in the Dutch _waalsch_ , meaning 'Walloon'.\n* The author of that assessment, R. Lane Poole, sometime editor of the _English Historical Review_ and Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, wrestled manfully with the problem. His _Notes on Burgundy_ , written before the First World War, could easily be dismissed as dry-asdust delvings. Yet they brim with suppressed excitement as he compares ambiguous references in little-known charters and chronicles, or admires the precision with which Flodoard of Reims distinguishes between three people, all with the same name. Two of his studies embark on investigative detective work, trying to establish the identities of men whose full names have not been recorded. One study deals with 'a duke near the Alps', who reportedly married a daughter of the English king, Edward the Elder (r. 899\u2013924); the other deals with a Burgundian known only as Hugo Cisalpinus. Was it Hugh the Black, or Hugh the White, or possibly Hugh, nephew of Hugh of Italy? Neither pursuit is successful. The pleasure lies in the chase.\n\n* In the preceding period, the name of France had rarely been used except for the small region in the Seine valley now known as the \u00cele de France. It was as duc de France in this limited sense that Hugues Capet first rose to prominence. When, on becoming king, he applied the name to the whole of his far larger kingdom, he was giving expression to the political claim that he and his subjects were the only true heirs to the Frankish tradition of Charlemagne and Clovis. His success may be gauged from the fact that the German name of _Frankreich_ , 'Land of the Franks', became attached to the western part of Charlemagne's former empire, but not to the eastern part, which was now being subsumed into the concept of _Deutschland_. The shift in nomenclature was no doubt facilitated by the indifference of the Ottonian emperors, who as Saxons did not take offence at the loss of the Frankish label in the east.\n\n* The _filioque_ (literally 'and the Son') is the central element in the theological doctrine of the Double Procession of the Holy Spirit. Ever since the ninth century the Western Church has held to the view that the Holy Spirit proceeds 'from the Father and the Son'. The Eastern Church, in contrast, believes in a single fount of the divine Godhead, and in consequence holds to the formula that the Holy Spirit proceeds 'from the Father and _through_ the Son'. This fine distinction caused no end of difficulties for many hundreds of years.\n* The name 'Aragon', like nearby 'Aran', is usually linked etymologically to the Basque word for 'valley'. In modern Basque it is 'Aragoa'. The territory from which the river springs was variously known in the earliest times either as Aragon after the river or as Jaca after its only sizeable settlement. In the same way, the adjacent territory to the west was variously known either as Navarra after the Basque word for 'plain' or as Pamplona after its only city. The clear implication is that Basques once lived far beyond their modern limits.\n\n* The House of Barcelona adopted the custom of alternating the names of the counts in each generation in order to distinguish fathers from sons. Hence the son and heir of Berenguer Ram\u00f3n I became Ram\u00f3n Berenguer I (r. 1035\u201376). When the latter's countess gave birth _c_. 1053 to twin sons, therefore, the problem was solved by calling the elder twin Ram\u00f3n Berenguer and the younger one Berenguer Ram\u00f3n. In due course when the twins succeeded their father, Ram\u00f3n Berenguer II ruled in uneasy tandem with his brother, Berenguer Ram\u00f3n II El Fratricida. The sole rule of the surviving twin came about through the death of his brother in a suspicious hunting accident, very similar to that of their contemporary, William Rufus of England.\n\n* The Catalans, because of their former subjection to Frankish overlordship, were still identified here as Franks.\n\n* ' _L'Estaca_ ' is a liberation song from the Franco era, composed in 1968 by the Catalan singer, Llu\u00eds Llach. It became popular in many countries, not least in Poland, where an adaptation by Jacek Kaczmarski \u2013 ' _Mury_ ', 'The Walls' \u2013 caught on as the unofficial anthem of the Solidarity movement; anti-Fascist sentiments inspired anti-Communist lyrics. The key stanza reads: 'Wyrwij mury \u017ceby krat, \/ Zerwij kajdany, polam bat. \/ A mury run\u0105, run\u0105, run\u0105 \/ i pogrzebi\u0105 stary \u015bwiat' ('Tear down the bars of the cage, \/ Snap the chains, and break the lash. \/ The walls will crumble, crumble, crumble \/ And hasten the old world's crash').\n* _Boyar_ meaning 'warrior' is a term that can be found in Kievan Rus\u2032, in the grand duchy and later in Muscovy. It refers to a military elite who over time also formed the circle of the prince's senior political advisers.\n\n* The Livonian Knights of the Sword were a crusading order founded in Riga in 1202 and merged with the Teutonic Knights in 1236, thereby forming the Livonian province of the Teutonic State.\n\n* _Ukraina_ , very roughly the territory between Kiev and the Black Sea coast, was Europe's equivalent of the later American frontier. It was dominated by wide open steppes, and, except for the river valleys of the Don, the Dniepr and the Dniester, it was not permanently settled until early modern times under Polish rule.\n\n* Until 1699 the Russian calendar calculated the years since the date of the Creation of the World, and placed New Year's Day on 1 September. After 1699 the Julian not the Gregorian Calendar was adopted.\n\n* Given the Polish\u2013Swedish conflict of 1621\u201335 during the continental campaigns of Gustavus Adolphus, Polish usage prefers to call the conflict of 1654\u201360 the 'Second Northern War'. Robert Frost ( _The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in North-eastern Europe, 1558\u20131621_ (Harlow, 2000)) concurs.\n\n* Notably Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia, whose rational approach to state-building was lavishly praised by apologists living at a safe distance from their habitual depredations and warmongering.\n* Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the predecessor of the present-day Russian Federation and prior to 1992 the largest of fifteen constituent Republics of the Soviet Union.\n\n* It is not true that Kaliningrad houses the mission control centre of the Russian Space Agency (ROSKOSMOS). Numerous misleading comments on this subject derive from the fact that prior to 1996 the small town of Korolev near Moscow, which does house the centre, also used the name of Kaliningrad.\n\n* An anonymous author, the Geographus Bavarus, probably a monk of Reichenau; his work entitled _Descriptio civitatum et regionum ad septentrionalem plagam Danubii_ was not discovered until 1772, in Munich in the Bavarian State Library.\n\n* So-called by historians to distinguish them from the Crusades in the Holy Land, in Languedoc or in Iberia.\n\n* The _Livlandische Reimchronik_ , composed in Low German by anonymous authors and intended to be read aloud to the Knights during their mealtimes, covers the years 1180\u20131290.\n\n* The Gothic Myth among Germans and the Sarmatian Myth among Poles propagated the idea that the modern descendants of ancient Goths and Sarmatians inherited their forebears' inborn love of freedom.\n\n* Together with the kings of Bohemia, the counts palatine of the Rhine and the dukes of Saxony, the margraves of Brandenburg served as one of the Holy Roman Empire's four secular and hereditary electors, participating in imperial elections and enjoying the prestigious title of _Kurfurst_ or 'Prince-Elector'.\n\n* _Junker_ , literally _Jung Herr_ or 'Young Lord' and originally a colloquial phrase, came to denote a whole social class. Its members often had roots in Germany's medieval aristocracy, the _Uradel_ , but in early modern times, as the 'Ostelbien nobility', they were concentrated in Brandenburg-Prussia, whence they later migrated into all the Hohenzollern provinces. Their surnames were usually preceded by _von_ or _zu_.\n\n* _Das K\u00f6nigreich in Preussen_ as distinct from _Das K\u00f6nigreich Preussen_ from 1772.\n\n* From 1795 to 1806, following the Third Partition of Poland.\n\n* Hindenburg's attack on 29 August 1914 centred on the 2th Russian Army, which was surrounded near the village of Frogenau. Tannenberg, nearly 20 miles away, did not feature until a report was written that evening.\n\n* The _Dolchstosslegende_ , traced to a conversation between General Ludendorff and Sir Neil Malcolm in 1919, gained wide currency by claiming that the German military had been betrayed by politicians.\n\n* The Soviet assault of April 1945 is the second event which features in the Amber Room mystery. A recent study claims that the treasure was destroyed on 9\u201311 April by high explosives and fire, but this assumes that no attempt had been made to crate the treasure up or remove it to safety in the previous five months, and that six tons of amber could evaporate in heat without leaving even microscopic chemical traces. So the hunt continues. One theory holds that the Amber Room sank with the _Wilhelm Gustloff_ ; a second that it was buried with Nazi gold in a Saxon mine; a third that it lies beneath a Lithuanian lagoon; and a fourth that it forms part of the undeclared loot in Moscow's Trophy Archive. The word on the street in Kaliningrad is that it was drowned in the concrete foundations of the _Dom Sovietov_.\n\n* Thanks to the work of the French scholar Pierre Nora, in _Les Lieux de m\u00e9moire_ (1984\u201392), 'memory site' now forms part of the established vocabulary of studies on collective memory. It refers to places, objects and buildings that are deliberately selected and promoted over others to preserve the memory of people or events.\n* _Santo subito_ , meaning 'an instant saint', was the cry raised on the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005, when many of his admirers were demanding beatification without delay.\n\n* The Order, now known as the Order of the Most Holy Annunciation, still exists. Its motto is variously taken to stand either for the Latin word _fert_ , 'he bore', as in 'Christ bore our sins', or for a hidden message such as FORTITUDE EIUS RHODUM TULIT, which would refer to the conquest of Rhodes by Amadeus III, or FOEDERE ET RELIGIONE TENEMUR, 'We are held together by the constitution and by religion'.\n\n* Oldini, ' _la comtesse divine_ ', often reckoned one of the great beauties of the age, fascinated Parisian high society, lived luxuriously in a grand _H\u00f4tel_ on the place Vend\u00f4me and became one of the stars of early photography.\n\n* Alternatively, ' _Toujours, ma ch\u00e8vre monte et ma femme descend_.'\n\n\u2020 A fine evening of ' _Melodie e poesie_ ' was staged in the Italian embassy in London, featuring Neapolitan songs and readings from Dante and Petrarch, and among the guests, Fabio Capello, the football coach, and Antonio Carluccio, the master chef. By a happy coincidence, Capello was born on 18 June 1946, the birthday of the Italian Republic.\n* The _Warthegau_ , i.e. the District of the River Warthe, was the Nazi name for Great Poland.\n* Florence's district of Oltrarno, literally 'on the other side of the Arno', is the counterpart of Trastevere, 'on the other side of the Tiber', in Rome.\n\n* Like the names of the French Republic's _d\u00e9partements_ , all the names of republics created in Italy were based on geographical features. 'Lombardic' refers to the Plain of Lombardy; 'Cispadane' means 'On this side of the River Po'; 'Cisalpine' means 'On this side of the Alps'.\n\n\u2020 Not to be confused with San Miniato del Monte, which directly overlooks the city.\n\n* They inspired the opening sentence of Tolstoy's _War and Peace_ (1869): ' \" _Eh bien, mon prince_ , so Genoa and Lucca are now no more than private estates of the Bonaparte family.\" '\n\n* Bought for a song by the Duke of Wellington in 1815, it is now housed in Apsley House, London.\n\n* More usually, the Congress of Prague, June\u2013August 1813, when Napoleon had the opportunity of making peace with Russia and Prussia during an extended truce. After he rejected the terms offered, Austria joined the coalition against him, and he was forced into the unsuccessful campaign that led to his defeat at the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig.\n* _Saxe_ is the French name for Saxony, as opposed to _Sachsen_ in German. Since the German aristocracy had the habit of speaking French, however, they often wrote their titles in the French form, and it was the French form that passed into English usage. _'Saxe Coburg_ ' stands for 'Coburg Saxony' and ' _Saxe Gotha_ ' for 'Gotha Saxony'.\n\n* By a curious coincidence, the same midwife, Frau Siebold, had attended Victoria's birth at Kensington Palace three months before officiating at Albert's birth at Rosenau. The Kents' wedding had taken place at the bride's home in the Ehrenburg Palace at Coburg in May 1818. Shortly after, the duchess of Kent announced her pregnancy and promptly left for England to ensure that her child would be British-born, taking Frau Siebold with her.\n\n\u2020 Sir John Conroy.\n\n* The three other 'discontinued peers' were the crown prince of Hanover (the duke of Cumberland), the duke of Brunswick and Viscount Taafe.\n* A district of Bosnia. The Ottoman _sandjak_ was a second-level administrative unit, less than a province.\n\n* Like other Orthodox countries, Montenegro adhered to the old Julian Calendar, which was thirteen days behind the Gregorian Calendar used by Western countries. Dates were usually expressed in both New Style and Old Style.\n\n* H. W. V. Temperley (1879\u20131939) was a historian, Fellow of Peterhouse and later Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. In 1919, having fought at Gallipoli and published his _History of Serbia_ , he was working for the War Office in military intelligence.\n* Most unlikely; Commander William Wedgwood-Benn, Viscount Stansgate (1877\u20131960), was a long-serving Liberal and then Labour MP, who served in the RAF in both world wars.\n* The first cyber war was fought in 1998 between NATO and Serbia, the second in 2006 by Israel and Hisbollah.\n\n* Owing to tsarist Russia's use of the Julian Calendar, the 'October Revolution' actually took place on 7 November 1917 (New Style). To bring Russia into line with the rest of Europe, a Bolshevik decree abolished the Julian Calendar one month later; 17 December 1917 (Old Style) was inmediately followed the next day by 1 January 1918 (New Style).\n\n* The Bolsheviks described themselves by the formula of Russian Social Democratic Workers Party (Bolsheviks), usually reduced to RSDRP(b). Like most of the contorted acronyms of the revolutionary period, this name was repeatedly altered.\n\n\u2020 The official name was the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). Many Westerners, who grew accustomed to the name of Soviet Russia in this initial period, continued to apply it inappropriately after 1924 to the wider Soviet Union, of which the RSFSR was only one part.\n","meta":{"redpajama_set_name":"RedPajamaBook"}}