Word With A Past: Pyrrhic Victory
Pyrrhus (319 to 272 BCE), king of the Greek city-state Epirus, was a second cousin of Alexander the Great. He earned a reputation as a successful general in the political chaos of the successor kingdoms that arose from the ruins of his famous cousin’s empire. A hundred years after Pyrrhus’s death, Hannibal, famous for crossing the Alps with elephants and one of history’s great military commanders, considered Pyrrhus the second greatest general of all time. (Hannibal modestly placed himself at number three.) Pyrrhus’ Memoirs and his books on the art of war were quoted by many authors of the ancient world.
From the perspective of the soldier on the field, Pyrrhus’ reputation was hard earned. He won his battles against Macedonia and Rome at the cost of high casualties. In fact, he is reported to have said “One more such victory against the Romans and we are undone.”
Pyyrhic victory: a victory won at such cost that it might as well be a defeat
History on Display: Vikings
As those of you who hang out here in the Margins know, I’ve had my head down recently working on a big project. No new blog posts! No road trips! No museum visits.! No history just for the fun of it!
As soon as I got a moment to breathe, My Own True Love and I headed to an exhibit at the Field Museum that’s been calling our name for a while: Vikings.
Organized by the Swedish Historical Museum, the exhibit is an answer to every misconception about Viking culture that ever caught the public imagination, beginning with the word Viking, which was not the name of a people but a description of an activity.* As the exhibit makes clear, the Scandinavian region was home to several related cultures over a period of some three hundred years, give or take a decade.** People weren’t Vikings, they went a-viking: which included travel and trade as well as the infamous raids immortalized by Irish monks. Most of the people we think of as Vikings were farmers not raiders.
Here are are some of the exhibit highlights (which may tell you as much about my own history nerd fascinations as the exhibit itself):
- A small Indian bronze of the Buddha was found in a Viking cache, emblematic of the fact that those guys really traveled!
- The only contemporary accounts of the Vikings we have are those written by eighth century Irish monks and an tenth century Islamic traveler named Ibn Fadlan, who ran into a group of Vikings in Russia****–neither unbiased nor familiar with Viking culture from the inside. The first accounts that we have written from the Viking perspective date from around 1220 CE: the works of Icelandic poet Snorri Sturluson. Writing well past the end of the Viking era no matter how loosely it is defined, Snorri is the source of most of what we know about old Norse religion and practices. (More on Snorri in the coming months, I guarantee it.)
This recreation of a Viking boat from the outline of the hardware with which it was made. In my imagination this is how an archaeologist sees things, building a complete image from the smallest remains. (You’ll have to come to the exhibit just to get a better look at the boat, which is far more cool than my limited photographic skills would suggest.)- It came as no surprise that Vikings didn’t wear horned helmets. I was, however, surprised to learn that the first known appearance of the horned helmet appeared in 1876 in the first appearance of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Possibly no other costume designer has influenced the world view of so many. (I would like to point out that though the exhibit regular proclaimed itself a NO HORNS zone, that prohibition did not carry over to the gift shop.)
In short, Vikings is a gorgeous combination of archaeological artifacts (many of them never before seen outside Scandinavia), historical recreation, and interactive museum technology–well worth a visit. The Field Museum is the only US stop for this exhibit, which will run through October 4, 2015. If you’re in Chicago, make time to see it. If you’re interested seriously interested in Vikings, it might be worth a special trip.*****
*Despite its inaccuracy, I’m going to continue using the term, which has become useful shorthand. Feel free to substitute Old Norse etc in your head.
**The canonical start and stop dates are the raid on the monastery at Lindnisfarne in 793CE and the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, at which King Harald of England successfully defended is kingdom against an invasion by Harald Hardrada of Norway.*** In fact, as is often the case, archaeological evidence suggests the periodization is fuzzy at both ends.
***Less than a month before the Battle of Hastings, when another group of Viking descendants invaded England from France.
****Medieval Muslims could give the Vikings a run for their money as far as traveling went.
*****Gina Conkle, I’m looking at you.
The Fall of the Ottomans
Last year I spent a lot of time and virtual ink on books about World War I. When the year came to an end, I had to take a breather. But this one was too good to let pass:
Western histories of the First World War often focus on the trench warfare on the Western front. When they do discuss the campaigns at Gallipoli and Mesopotamia, they generally tell the story from the Western point of view. In The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, historian Eugene Rogan (The Arabs: A History) looks at the war from the often-overlooked perspective of the Ottoman Empire.
Rogan’s story is as complicated as the multi-ethnic empire at its heart. He describes the forces of internal revolution, external wars, lost provinces and lost confidence that led the Ottomans to seek an ally against Russian aggression in the early months of 1914–and how those same forces shaped Ottoman choices throughout the war. He tells the familiar stories of Gallipoli and the Mesopotamian campaign from an unfamiliar vantage point and the less familiar story of Turkey’s fight against Russia on the Caucasian front.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is the recurring question of the relative power of Islam, national identity and ethnicity within the Ottoman world, beginning with Germany’s unfulfilled hope that the Ottoman declaration of war would be seen as an act of jihad, thereby triggering rebellions among Muslim subjects of the British and French empires.* Rogan handles the tricky subjects of jihad, secularism, Arab nationalism, and Turkish paranoia about a possible Armenian fifth column with historical precision and a keen awareness of their implications for the modern world.
* I first came across this idea in John Buchan‘s Greenmantle. Greenmantle is one of my favorite novels, but I always thought the concept was over the top. I was stunned to discover that it was an actual piece of German policy–minus some of Buchan’s wilder flourishes.
The guts of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers