Monthly Archives: August 2017

Books Feminism Women's history

Notes from Tamta’s World: The Life and Encounters of a Medieval Noblewoman from the Middle East to Mongolia, by Antony Eastmond

August 23, 2017 – 7:39 pm

p. 15 Despite its complexity, Tamta’s life can be summarised in one sentence. Of Armenian birth, she was raised at the Georgian court before being married to two Ayyubid rulers, raped and then married by the Shah of the Khwarazmians, captured by the Seljuks, transported by the Mongols, before finally returning to the city of Aklat as its ruler for the last decade of her life.”

p. 22 Even to define her family’s ethnicity is problematic. “… the Armenian-speaking historian Kirakos Gandzaketsi essentially regarded them as Armenian … his idea of what constitutes ‘Armenian’ fluctuates, as elsewhere in his history he notes the family was of Kurdish descent… the Ayyubid family of Saladin into which Tamta was to marry are similarly recorded by Arab historians as being of Kurdish descent, originating from a village near the Armenian city of Dvin … they reinvented themselves as Arabic-speaking rulers. ”

p. 26 Whatever the origins of Tamta and her family, the Mqargdzelis rose to prominence not in Armenia but Georgia. Following their father Sargis, Ivane and his elder brother Zakare found promotion at the Georgian court of Queen Tamar (r. 1184-1210_. Tamar, the only daughter of King Giorgio III, had faced considerable opposition to her elevation to the throne on her father’s death. However, after a decade of rebellion and plot she managed to establish herself as the legitimate, sole ruler. This later enabled her daughter Rusudan, to succeed to the throne after her son, Giorgio IV Lasha, died without legitimate heirs…. Zakare, the elder brother, was appointed by Queen Tamas … commander of her army, and Ivane was made … chamberlain…”

p. 73 Akhlat … is now a small provincial town on the north-west shore of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, its population of just 20,000 dispersed over a wide area … its old buildings were burned down during the Khwarazmian and Mongol sieges of the 1220s and 1230s and what was left was destroyed in two devastating earthquakes in 1246 and 1276…cold and snow are cliches in all of the medieval descriptions of the tosn … its key value lay in its location: it was the meeting place of four different worlds … to the north-east stood the Christian kingdoms of the Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia. It was from here that Ivane drew his army that was to face defeat in 1210 by the walls of Akhlat… the city’s population was largely Christian and Armenian … in the north and west was the plateau of Asian Minor. Although historically a province of the Byzantine Empire, much of the territory had come under the control of Turkish tribes in the course of the 12th century .. still contained a majority Christian population, mostly Greek speaking, but also Armenian and Syriac. To the south lay Syria and the Jazira, a confederation of Arabic city-states, divided among the Ayyubid family of Saladin. Finally to the south-east lay the Persian world of Azerbaihan and Iran. And … from the 1220s Akhlat became a frontier for yet more groups to cross and conquer, the Khwarazmians from Central Asia and then the Mongols.

p. 77 “Under its Sokmenid rulers the fabric of the city had been transformed over the previous 50 years using the income it earned from its position on the trade routes between Anatolia and Iran as well, perhaps, as the spoils it had taken from the Georgians in the 1160s. This had enabled Shahbanu, the wife of the Shah-i Armen Nasir al-Din Sokmen II, to begin an extensive building programme in the city. Like Tamta, she had come to Akhlat as a diplomatic bride to form an alliance with the neighbouring emirate of Erzurum… a campaign had begun to renew and repair all the roads leading to Akhlat; the old wooden bridges were replaced with new stone ones and a series of caravanseais was established along the roads leading to the city…

beseiging the city, Ivane was captured, p. 82 “although al-Awhad was still in command of Akhlat … it seems that he was barely in control: his army was effectively beseiged in the town’s citadel by its population Indeed even al-Awhad’s marriage to Tamta seems to have been organised without his knowledge … it balanced the needs and bargaining strengths of three different groups… although she started off simply as a pawn … she stood to be transformed by the wedding. The act of marriage provided a new and potentially powerful dimension to her identity as the figure that each party in the negotiation needed in order to placate the others. … Tamte’s ability to reduce taxation of monasteries and improve access for pilgrims to Jerusalem show she was able to capitalise on this, and convert her position to one with real power.

p. 89 the marriage of Simonis, the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Andronikos II Palaiologos (r. 1282-1328) to Stefan III Milutin, the King of Serbia …in 1299 the Byzantine Emperor was forced to agree to the marriage: Byzantine power was on the wane, and he needed a way to prevent further incursions from Serbia into his territory. Simonis’ dowry was Byzantine lands in the north-west of the empire, which were already in Milutin’s hands: presenting them as a dowry legalised the transfer of ownership and allowed the Emperor to save face… p. 90 Simonis was just five when the marriage was agreed. Milutin was in his forties. This would be his fourth marriage (possibly his fifth) and his sexual appetite was legendary.. Simonis’s age outraged Byzantine society. Andronikos had to plead forgiveness from the Patriarch of Constantinope, wringin his hands like Pilate and claiming that it was a matter beyond his control… Simonis was forced to go to live at her new husband’s court in Serbia, supposedly looked after until she reached puberty. But within three years – when Simonis was at most only eight – she was repeatedly raped by her husband, leaving her unable to have children. Over the years that followed she tried to escape and get back home on more than one occasion; but even when she succeeded … she was forcibly returned by her own brother. Adopting a nun’s habit had proved no defence; her brother simply ripped the clothing off her back and tied her to her horse for the return…. Milutin’s ability to mistreat his bride with impunity clearly symbolised the impotence of the empire”

Tamta married Al-Awhad’s brother Al-Ashraf when the former died … her influence seems to have worked throughout the Ayyubid confederacy. Tamta’s advocacy for pilgrims indicates that she also still retained contacts with the Georgian and Armenian heartlands in which she had grown up.”

p. 216 “The most impressive account of a pilgrimage made during Tamta’s time as wife of al-Ashraf comes away from Jerusalem, at the monastery of Gandzasar, located in the eastern Armenian prvince of AStsakh (now the disputed territroty of Nagorno-Karabagh in Azerbaijan). It concerns a woman named Khorishah, a senior member of the ruling family of the region and a close ally of the Mqargrdzelis.. an inscription set up on the north side of the nave in 1240 by Khorishah’s son … “my mother became a nun and went three times to Jerusalem. There, from the gate of the Holy Resurrection, she took herself to the dwelling of the nuns wearing a hair shirt and, after many years spent in … penitence, she passed into Christ, adorned with the seal of light, and her remains are preserved there.” [travelled between 1216 and her death in 1238 ” “Once in the Holy City she earned her own living my making and selling embroideries. Indeed, this was the one form of employment that was deemed honourable for (noble) women to undertake.”
p. 322 The battle of Garni “the latest invaders, the Khwarazmians, appeared in the Caucasus in 1225 at Garni. This site, in cetral Armenia, possesses the eastern-most building of the Graeco-Roman world. … a peristyle temple probably erected in the 1st century AD… still standing in the 13th century..
..in the shadow that Ivane drew up his forces to face the Khwarazmian army in 1225. .. Jalal al-Din captured Akhlat in April 1230 p. 327 “he entered the palace where he passed the night in the company of the daughter of Ivane”… “rape was a common tactic of war … but it was much rarer to employ it against female members of the elite … rape simultaneously humiliated the Georgians, the Armenians and the Uyyabids .. Tamta’s treatment was subsequently legalised by marriage, giving Tamta her third (and in this case bigamous) husband. The marriage only lasted four months we must assume she stayed behind in Akhlat.”

p. 340 al-AShraf … having restored Tamta to Akhlat her left the city and rode on to Sinjar and then back to Damascus. He was never to return to Akhlat. .. Tamta’s capture by the Mongols in 1236 shows that she cannot have travelled with al-AShraf … in 1232 Akhlat was firmly brough back into the Turkic world of Anatolia, after the 30 year interlufe of Ayyubid rule. .. it was possible for Tamta to shift allegiance without losing power.”

p. 347 “as the crow flies it is more than 4,800 km from Akhlat toi Kakakorum; on the ground, whether travelling on foot or on horseback, it is considerably longer. This was the journey that Tamta made twice, as she travelled to and from the capital of the Great Khan. She was probably away from Akhlat for between five and nine years.”

p. 369 “The decision of the Mongols to return Tamta to Akhlat suggests that they believed she still represented the Ayyubid government in Akhlat, even though no Ayyubid had been in control of the city for more than a decade. However, the fact that Queen Rusudan requested her return indicates that even after her years in capitivity Tamta still possessed a complex, multi-faceted identity which enabled her to retain a value and relevance among the different groups across the region … to the Armenians and others in Akhlat she was still regarded as their ruler, although she now had to meediate between them and her Mongol overlords, rather than the Turkic and Arabic powers that had previously been in power. It was convenient for all sides to believe that Tamta had inherited rule of the city and its surroundings from her husband.

p. 380 The cultural traditions of the Mongol world accorded women much higher status and independent power than they received among the people they conquered to the west. The women who married into the family of Genghis Khan and his relatives possessed considerable rights. Each organised her own ordo (court) Wwith multiple tents, carried on up to 200 carts ,… they had independent wealth, could own property and conduct trade, all of which could be passed on to other women on their deaths; they could command armies and even fight; and they determined the faith and education of their children. [[Culture and Conquest of Mongol Eurasia, TT Allsen.]]

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Books History Women's history

From How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer by Sarah Bakewell

August 23, 2017 – 7:11 pm

p. 150
Libertinism remained a minority pursuit, but a disproportionately influential one, because out of the libertins would evolve the Enlightenment philosophers of the following century. They gave Montaigne a dangerous yet positive new image, which would stick. They also spawned a less radical breed of salon socialites,: aphorists such as La Bruyere and La Rouchefoucauld whose Maximes gathered together brief, Montaignean observations on human nature:
At times we are as different from ourselves as we are from others.
The surest way to be taken in is to think oneself craftier than other people.
Chance and caprice rule the world.
And, as it happens, one La Rochefoucauld maxim provided a neat comment on Montaigne’s own 17th-century predicament:
We often irritate others when we think we could not possibly do so.

p. 174
According to Giovanni Botero, an Italian political writer living in France in the 1580s, the French countryside of that decade was so rife with thieves and murderers that every house was obliged to keep “watch of the vineyards and orchards: gates, locks, bolts and mastiffs’. Apparently Botero had not visited the Montaigne estate: there the only defender was a person whom Montaigne described as ‘a porter of ancient custom and ceremony, who serves not so much to defend my door as to offer it with more decorum and grace’.
Montaigne lived this way because he was determined to resist intimidation, and did not want to become his own gaoler. But he also believed that, paradoxically, his openness made him safer … Locks made a place look valuable, and there could be no sense of glory in robbing a household where one was welcomed by an elderly doorkeeper. Also, the usual rules of fortification hardly apply in a civil war, ‘your valet may be of the party that you fear’ … far better to win the enemy over by behaving with generosity and honour.
,, once travelling through a forest in a dangerous rural area, he was attacked by 15 to 20 masked men … “I owed my deliverance to my face and the freedom and firmness of my speech’… this was the kind of confrontation that could happen at any time, to any person, and Montaigne often wondered about the best way of dealing with it. Is it wiser to face up squarely to your enemy and challenge him, or should you curry favour by showing submission. Should you throw yourself on the aggressor’s mercy and hope that his sense of humanity will make him spare you? Or if that foolhardy?”

p. 179 “For Montaigne, all humans share an element of their being, and so do all other living things … ‘There is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation’….
We owe other beings the countless small acts of kindness and empathy that Nietzsche would describe as ‘goodwill’ … Montaigne added this remark about his dog: “I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time.” He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.”

p. 291 “Marie le Jars de Gournay, Montaigne’s first great editor and publicist … was a woman of extreme enthusiasm and emotion, all of which she uninhibitedly threw at Montaigne on their first meeting in Paris … her family, minor provincial nobles, lived partly in Paris and partly at the Picardy chateau and estate of Gournay-sur-Aronde, which her father bought in 1568. In adulthood, Marie took her last name from this estate. Such a right was normally reserved for sons, but it was typical of her to ignore this rule … By 1580, Marie was confined to a provincial world … she did what she could to educate herself using the books in the family library. By reading Latin works alongside their French translations, she gave herself the best classical ground she could. The result was a patchy knowledge, unsystematic but deeply motivated.”

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from The Kingdom of Women: Life, Love and Death in China’s Hidden Mountains by Choo Waihong

August 13, 2017 – 12:04 pm

p. 120 The very existence of a woman-centric society in a sea of patriarchy that has inundated the whole world … calls into question the inevitability of human society involving as the male-dominant archetype. The Kingdom of Women has shown that it is possible to have an alternative model … forging a better environment in which a woman can e nurtured and fostered to reach her full potential as a complete, confident person ready to contribute as meaningfully as a man to society … the Mosuo model that puts the female at its centre without downgrading the male to purgatory appears to be a much better option. In a mad moment … I had a vision that I must have been a Mosou woman in a past life. How else could I make sense of the feeling of connectedness I feel in the midst of my Mosuo friends, never again having to fight against covert male chauvunusm in my previous law firms in Singapore or be as aggressive as the next man in an all-male network of lawyers in Los Angeles.”

p. 121. “Gumi … her direct maternal ancestor is Malaxshimi, whose clan is found today in the southern parts of Asia and on the islands of the Pacific as well as in Mongolia, Korea, India and Pakistan.”

p. “I became curious to find out where Zhaxi’s ancestors [a particularly prominent, popular, six-foot man] came from … his genes revealed that he was descended from the paternal clan ancestor of Sigurd, the dragon-slayer of Norse mythology. Here was a he-man from Lugu Lake who could trace his ancestry to the Vikings of Norway .. it might suggest why Zhaxi and his Musou brothers look so different from the Chinese and other ethnic minority groups in this part of the world.”

p. 147 “An axia pair may decide to go on meeting on a regular basis that progresses over time into a stable relationship, and this is when their affair is more open, with the ‘walking’ man not hiding his presence in front of the woman’s family … the male axia comes and goes openly, though still only at night “

p. 149 “the ‘nuclear’ family is a separate unit consisting of the grandmother and her children and all her matrilineal descendants’”

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Books History Politics

Notes from Britain’s Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Sims

August 13, 2017 – 11:54 am

p. 4 “England acquired her French empire by dynastic happenstance, and her kings expanded it for reasons of ambition, but its retention soon acquired a strategic rationale. In the pre-modern age, sail was the fastest form of travel, making northern France and Flanders much closer to London than to northern England. The Channel was not a barrier but a conduit across the ‘Narrow Sea’. … Proximity was good for trade, but bad for security. There was no way the infant navy could be sure of intercepting an invasion force once it had embarked. … Whoever had access to the sea in the Middle Ages – and for long after – could cross if they had the shops to do so. This meant that England would either have to attack an enemy fleet before it left harbour, as she did with great success at Bruges in 1213 and Sluys in 1340 or, better still, to control the far shores to prevent embarkation in the first place. Channel posts such as Dover and Calais were thus understood as strategically interdependent, both as bastions against Europe and as sally ports into the continent.”
p.52-55 “The British elite knew about Europe, and knew more as the 18th century progressed. A considerable number had fought there during the war of Grand Alliance against Louis XIV, and were to do so again in the 1740s and 1750s. Some of them studied there, including William Pitt the Elder, who spent time at the University of Utrecht. Many more went on the Grand Tour. British statesmen frequently accompanied the king to Hanover … in the parliamentary sphere, … embarrassing gaffe or manifest geographical ignorance were rare, at least before 1760. … Two of the most prominent experts of the time, Luke Schaub and Francois Saint-Saphorin, were foreign born and routinely reported to London in French from their diplomatic posts….the world 18th-century British statesman inhabited – certainly before 1760 – was still a firmly Eurocentric one… of course, there were tose who attacked the British strategic consensus on Europe and espoused a naval and insular destiny in its stead … exploded with renewed force in the 1730s in a popular and parliamentary clamour for a maritime war against Spain… former secretary of state and arch-Tory Bolingbroke in his trace The Idea of A Patriot King, 1738 …”Great Britain is an island’. She should avoid continental wars and devote ‘a continual attention to improve her natural, that is her maritime strength… like other amphibious animals, we must come occasionally on shore: but the water is more properly our element, and in it, like them, as we find our greatest security, so we exert our greatest force’… All the same, the prevailing elite sense was that Britain was an integral part of Europe … partly a question of economic interest, as trade with Europe far exceeded that with any other part of the world. In November 1755, the Lord Chancellor the Earl of Hardwicke observed that ‘No man of sense or integrity will say that you can quite separate yourselves from the continent.” .. the Earl of Sunderland [1716] the “old Tory notion that England can subsist by itself whaever becomes of the rest of Europe was “justly exploded ever since the revolution [of 1688].”

p. 57 “Britain had not merely a calling to maintain the balance, it also had a clear interest in doing so. It was only the European balance that stoof between Britain and the threat of ‘universal monarchy’, which would not only destroy British commerce but would bring in its train the return of the Stuarts and the subversion of the Revolution Settlement of 1688.
p. 67 Central to the culture of intervention … was a realization that British power was limited and that British interests could be achieved only in cooperation with other states. There was a resulting reliance on diplomacy and European alliances, often backed up with Britain’s formidable fiscal power in the shape of subsidies. It was for this reason that the former arch-universalist William Pitt announced in late 1759 that he had “unlearned his juvenile errors, and thought no longer that England could do it all by herself”.

p. 105 The primacy of Europe in British stategy throughout most of the Napoleonic period was to be demonstrated again and again. Whever the opportunity presented itself, Britain engaged the French on land: in 1799 in Holland; in north Germany in 1805-6; in Walcharen in 1809; in the Peninsula after 1808; and, of course, in the Low Countries in 1815…Only two major operations were mounted against colonial targets: those to the Cape of Good Hope in 1805 and South America in 1806-7; the latter, it should be added, was simply an opportunistic exploitation of an unauthorized initiative by Sir Home Popham which ended in tears…. London saw colonial possession as pawns with which to re-establish the European balance of power. For example, the Cape of Good Hope was, temporarily, restored to the Dutch in 1802”.

p. 134 (1880s) “the Maquis of Salisbury … was in fact deeply critical of the ‘sterile’ and ‘dangerous’ policy of isolation. Salisbury was entirely clear that Britain’s destny la on the continent. ‘We are part of the community of Europe,’ Salisbury remarked,’ ‘and we must do our duty as such.’

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Books Environmental politics Politics

Notes from The Shock of the Anthropocene by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

August 8, 2017 – 11:11 pm

Page 69 “Exaggerating a little, we could say that history for the anthropocenologists comes down in the end to the set of exponential graphs. The specificity of historical reasoning, the effort to construct an explanatory account, is eclipsed in favour of a descriptive and quantitative view. But it’s the concordant upward curves are indeed chronological indexes, they are explanatory at the secondary level. Environmental statistics simply measure the results of the historical phenomena that are the prime movers of the crisis. The less undifferentiated and more explanatory history of the Anthropocene that we propose in this book seeks to shift the focus of the study from the environments affected and the biogeochemical cycles disturbed on to the actors, institutions and decisions that have produced these effects.”

Page 73 “The grand narrative of the Anthropocene is thus the story of an awakening. There was a long moment of unawareness, from 1750 to the late 20th century, followed by a sudden arousal. … We can include in this binary narrative the overly simple thesis according to which modernity has established a great separation between nature and society, a separation that allegedly prevented us from becoming aware of ecological issues, and that was only challenged quite recently. As if the thinkers of antiquity have not already established distribution between nature and culture, whether to promote it or question its value and limitations; as if modernity, ever since the Renaissance, is not also constructed around knowledge that emphasized the belonging of human beings to the enveloping order of nature…. The problem with all of the grand narratives of awakening, revelation or arousal of consciousness is that they are historically wrong. The period 1770 and 1830 was marked on the contrary by a very acute awareness of the interactions between nature and society. Deforestation, for example, was conceived as the rupture of an organic link between woodland, human society and the global environment, and the use of coal was promoted as a way to restore forests. … An organicist scientific thought conceived the earth as a living things right to the mid 19th century. … By proposing in 1821 that ‘ it is therefore the planet as a whole that is compromised [ by deforestation and other environmental damages], and not just certain regions’ Charles Fourier reflected on a large number of scientific writings and warnings of his time.”

Page 101 “In Great Britain between 1800 and 2000 the price of light (measured in lumens) fell by a factor of 3000, but consumption increased 40000 times. According to goods and their price elasticity, the rebound effect varies, but on the whole, energy efficiency has been more than out balanced by economic growth.”

Page 103 “The crisis of the 1930s offers some interesting cases: Carbon emissions in the United States fell from 520 to 340 million tonnes, and in France from 66 to 55 million. In the latter case, this reduction was not just bound up with the recession, but also with the differential evolution of prices; that of coal rose by 40% during the crisis, while the general price index stagnating. It was also in the 1930s that wood fuel experienced a peak, before a definitive decline after the Second World War.”

page 105 Gaslighting which appeared in London in the 1810s was extraordinarily inefficient. “It consisted in distilling coal – using more coal to heat this – in order to produce a gas designed to light housing or streets. … A third of the coal was burnt to produce gas, a third of this gas escaped in pipes that massively leaked, and at the end of the day the lie to each day was very poor…. The transition from oil lamps to gas lighting, that is, from an organic and locally applied energy to a fossil energy distribution over a network, while massively increasing energy consumption, above all increased the losses.”

“The ‘ energy consumed per capita’ traced by historians actually corresponds to national production of energy divided by population. It includes example with the energy spent on waging wars, running the navy and controlling the empire, as well as the energy dissipated in inefficient technological systems. What we lack is a history of energy services, which would show the energy actually used by different classes of consumers.”

Page 107 “The ecologists David and Marcia Pimentel, for example, showed that the transition from a traditional agriculture to an intensive and mechanised one led to a fall in energy yield: More calories (basically derived from oil) had to be used in order to produce each calorie of food. In the case of maize, the shift was from a ratio of 10 calories produced for each calorie invested to a ratio of only three to one. The generalisation of this type of analysis, that is, a general history of thermodynamic (in)efficiency (taking up Ivan Illich’s thesis of counter-productivity) would undoubtedly lead to a far more ambiguous account than that conveyed by energy history and its ascendant curves of energy, health and efficiency.”

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