LUCY PICK BOOKS

Amy Kelly’s engaging and evocative biography of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings says about Eleanor’s participation in the Second Crusade, citing Michaud’s History of the Crusades as her source:

With the queen came “many other ladies of quality,” Sybille , Countess of Flanders, whose half brother was King of Jerusalem, Mamille of Roucy, Florine of Bourgogne, Torqueri of Bouillon, Faydide of Toulouse, and scores of others whom the chroniclers could not afford the parchment to enumerate.

Do a google search for a few of those names. Go ahead, I’ll wait. You’ll find that scores of other writers, both in published non-fiction and fiction, as well as web-based sources have taken those words as gospel truth and have published that list of names almost word for word — Allison Weir, Norman Cantor, Antonia Fraser, etc.
Problem. Not one name on that list actually accompanied Eleanor to the Holy Land — and as it happens, Michaud mentions none of them. Let’s take a look at them one by one:

• Sybille of Anjou, countess of Flanders: She did eventually make it to the Holy Land, travelling with her husband on his third pilgrimage there, at which point she refused to return home and spent the rest of her days as a nun in the convent of Bethany. But during the Second Crusade she stayed in Flanders to run the county, leaving her husband to go to Jerusalem alone.
• Mamille of Roucy: Died around 1122.  The Second Crusade began in 1147
• Florine of Bourgogne: There is a Florine of Bourgogne who was married to Prince Sweyn of Denmark and apparently they both went on the First Crusade where both of them died in 1097.  One source suggests she remarried and died in the Holy Land in 1102.
• Faydide of Toulouse:  She, at first, seemed the most promising because her husband, Alfonso Jordan of Toulouse did go on the Second Crusade.  But it seems Faydide died long enough before the crusade that Alfonso was able to marry and then separate from Ermengard of Narbonne before he left for the east.
• Torqueri of Bouillon:  Not only can I find no evidence of anyone of this name, “Torqueri” does not even seem to be a woman’s name.  Or a man’s name.

So, frankly, shame on all these authors for simply accepting Kelly’s words as fact, especially the ones who claim to be writing non-fiction. But the lie has been repeated so many times, it has become a commonplace. Faced with that, what does the historical novelist do? Work the myth into the story — or change it?

Santiago — Saint James — can be found in several different guises. There’s James at the Transfiguration; my favourite, James as a medieval pilgrim; and this version I found in Barcelona on what was probably a church belonging to the military Order of Santiago, Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-slayer.

James as a bloodthirsty slayer of Muslims, very medieval and crusade-y, no? Well, no, or at least, not as much as you might expect. While the ideas behind this image come from the time when Christians and Musims fought for contro of the peninsula, most of the actual images showing James on a horse, trampling a beleaguered Moor actually date from a time after 1492, the date when the Muslims lost control of Granada, their final stronghold in the peninsula. This one is dated 1580.

I guess it is easier to imagine yourself as a valiant slayer of infidels once they have already been soundly vanquished.

A recent article describes genetic studies of Spanish men that show a high percentage of them bear traces of Sephardic Jewish and North African ancestry:

Sephardic Jews leave genetic legacy in Spain

From the 15th century on, Spain’s Jews were mostly expelled or forced to convert, but today some 20 percent of Spanish men tested have Sephardic Jewish ancestry, and 11 percent can be traced to North Africa, a study has found.

“These values are surprisingly high,” the researchers wrote in their report, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

They checked the Y chromosome, a stretch of DNA carried only by men and passed down with little change from father to son. Mutations in this gene can be used to trace ancestry, and some have been clearly linked to Sephardic Jewish and northern African populations.

“The genetic composition of the current population is the legacy of our diverse cultural and religious past,” one of the report’s authors, Francesc Calafell, from the evolutionary biology faculty at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, said on Friday.

I thought it was fascinating, and useful data for medieval historians who are trying to weigh the evidence of numbers of Jews who were converted to Christianity and remained in Spain, and those who left. The high numbers of those with Jewish ancestry are especially significant given the usually low estimates of the population of Jews in medieval Spain. Another report suggested that the number of those with Jewish descent were relatively fewer in Catalunya, indicating perhaps the “success” of the pogroms against them in the fourteenth century.

I am of Sephardic descent through my great grandmother. Her last name was Bondy which means “Bon dia” in Catalan (”Good day” or “Yom tov” in Hebrew). My understanding is that all the Bondys in Bohemia were descended from one Sephardic Jew who moved to Prague in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. By chance, I am going to be spending a month at the university where they did this study in January — maybe I’ll have a chance to talk to the researchers!

Just got back last night after ten days at the cottage in the Eastern Townships with a side trip involving a night in Montreal and a weekend in Quebec City. Much good food was eaten and conviviality shared, but what struck me was the potential for good historical fiction about this whole area.

There is an old and noble tradition of historical writing about French Canada during the ancien regime and the British colonies to the south, including the war of Independence — I’m thinking of authors like Thomas Costain, Thomas Raddall, and Kenneth Roberts. But when I say old, I mean old. Surely we are due for some reinterpretations. I thought of my friend with Renaissance and Early modern interests as I strolled the streets of old Quebec, still intact within its original walls, and couldn’t help feeling that this town in its restored beauty might provide as strong a sense of how the French lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as any in France.

The photo at left is from Old Montreal, and it shows the “sailor’s church,” Notre Dame de Bon Secours (immortalized by Leonard Cohen as “Our Lady of the Harbour”) with the silvered dome of the Marche de Bonsecours in the background.

I’m trying to write a scene about a tournament and it’s a bit of a stretch for me.  That was an understatement.  I tend to skim battle and fight scenes in books, and glaze over in the movie theatre, and now I find myself having to come up with something more interesting than “He hit him with his sword and then the other guy struck back and then…”

So while I’m procrastinating, I will offer you this interesting factoid I just learned.  Did you know that our word “tournament” comes from the fact that, after the two jousting knight had made their initial charges towards each other on horseback, they had to quickly turn around, the “tournament,” to face each other and charge again?  Imagine the challenge of halting the momentum of a galloping horse, heavy with armor-laden rider, and turning the animal in the opposite direction.  The one who could do this with the most speed and skill had a definite advantage.

A colleague of mine, Catherine Brekus, once said that writing history like putting together a puzzle, only half the pieces and the box lid with the picture on it are missing. I like that analogy, and I want to push it a little further. Unlike most puzzles, the pieces of the historical puzzle, the evidence, do not fit together in only one way. The same set of pieces will be put together in different ways by different historians, because depending on our own politics, interest, background, and questions we will see different patterns on each of the pieces, alone and in series. The puzzles we make will change as generations of historians come up with new questions and approaches. There are wrong ways to put the pieces together, jamming a tab into a slot where it doesn’t fit, but also multiple right ways. Of these right ways, some will give you a better, fuller picture of the whole.

Just make sure you find the piece that disappeared under the chesterfield.

Spotted today in Publisher’s Marketplace:

Research associate to Doris Kearns Goodwin for Team of Rivals Nora Titone’s THE TRAGEDY OF EDWIN AND JOHN WILKES BOOTH, a close examination of the Booth brothers’ lifelong rivalry, revealing surprising new insights into the motives of Lincoln’s assassin, with a foreword by Goodwin, to Martin Beiser at Free Press, in a significant deal, for publication in April 2010, by Katharine Cluverius at ICM (world).

I read the proposal for this book and, believe me, you’re in for a treat. Nora has a thoroughly gripping story that brings John Wilkes to life and introduces a new character to the drama, his older brother, the famous actor, Edwin Booth. We’re going to have to rethink everything we ever thought we knew about John Wilkes Booth and the reasons why Lincoln was assasinated.