One of the standard clichés of royal biopics is the conflict between the monarch’s duties as sovereign and their desires as a private human being. Usually, the monarch yearns for their true love but then has to give that person up for the good of the kingdom. So we get this nice drama in which royal success is founded on royal misery. But occasionally we run into a monarch who goes off-script and chucks royal duty out the window.
Queen Christina of Sweden is one of the most unusual monarchs in history. Her father, Gustavus Adolphus, had made Sweden one of the great powers of Europe through his military leadership during the 30 Years War, but in 1632 he died on the battlefield when she was six, leaving her his heir. She was well-educated and proved to be a remarkably bright girl; by the time she was an adult, she had studied Greek, Latin, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew, as well as philosophy and theology. She took a keen interest in the emerging sciences of the Scientific Revolution, as well as art and history. She corresponded with various artists and scholars. She invited the legal scholar Hugo Grotius to become her librarian but he died before taking up the job. More importantly, she corresponded with the great French philosopher Rene Descartes and invited him to organize a scientific academy, although when they met they did not hit it off and he only saw her few times.
Her biggest challenge, however, is that like Elizabeth I of England, there was enormous pressure on her to marry, and she had a deep distaste for the idea. She disliked feminine things and became known for her unkempt hair. All her life she comported herself in decidedly unfeminine ways; she was a tomboy as a child, insisted on riding astride rather than side-saddle, and enjoyed fencing and bear hunting. She favored men’s shoes. Later in life, she took to wearing a justacorps (the fore-runner of the man’s frock-coat), a cravat, and a man’s wig. At the end of her life, however, she had returned to wearing women’s clothing, including gowns with a scandalously low neckline.
Scholars have struggled to understand Christina’s sense of her own identity. In addition to her mannish habits, her style of dress, and her rejection of marriage, there is some evidence that she was attracted to women. She wrote passionate letters to Ebba Sparre, her lady-in-waiting, but that was a common style of letter-writing at the time; she also once introduced Sparre to the English ambassador as her ‘bed-companion’. But she seems to have disliked most of her other ladies-in-waiting, considering them overly feminine. However, in her late 20s, she socialized so freely with men, including Cardinal Azzolino, that there was much gossip about it, and she wrote passionate letters to him as well. In 1541, one of her subjects accused her of being a ‘jezebel’, which got him executed.
There is no actual evidence that she ever had sex. So historians have variously classified her as heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, asexual, and even intersex. (When she was born, she was so hairy that she was mistaken for a boy for several days.) It’s even been suggested that her refusal to follow social conventions might be evidence for Asperger’s Syndrome.
But Christina is most famous for her decision to abdicate her throne in 1654 when she was 28 years old and to abandon the Lutheranism she was raised in for Catholicism. Her interest in science seems to have led her to question Lutheranism, and long conversations with the Portuguese ambassador, a Jesuit, drew her to Catholicism.
Countess Ebba Sparre
Her decision to abdicate appears to have been the result of a complex set of issues. The constant pressure for her to marry and produce an heir was unpleasant for her. She slowly became more unpopular because of her decision to ennoble more than 300 families, all of whom had to be gifted with property to help them live a suitable lifestyle, and that property had to come from the Crown. Despite being a very hard-working monarch, she was accused of living a life of sport and indulgence. In 1651, she seems to have had a nervous breakdown from the stress of her office. And as queen she had to be a Lutheran. All of this fed into her decision early in 1654 to announce her abdication. She had already named her cousin Karl Gustav as her heir in 1649, so the transition was a relatively easy one.
She was granted a pension as well as revenue from a number of estates. She settled in Rome, although she undertook a number of visits to France, Naples, and Milan, as well as two visits to Sweden after the death of Karl Gustav. She contemplated trying to regain the throne, but was rebuffed because of her religion. She died in Rome in 1689 at the age of 62 and was buried in the grottos beneath St. Peter’s Basilica.
The Girl King
The Girl King (2015, dir. Mika Kaurismäki) follows Christina from her coronation to her abdication and does a reasonably good job of trying to condense the complexities of her story into a 90-minute film. Malin Buska’s Kristina is a strong-willing and highly intelligent woman whose free spirit is slowly choked by the demands of her situation. The film emphasizes her unconventional clothing, showing her frequently dressed in pants and men’s vests, although the historical Christina seems to have only adopted men’s clothing on a regular basis after her abdication. She fences, hunts, and regularly wears a sword.
Malin as Kristina addressing her subjects for the first time
The film is also interested in her intellectual interests. She acquires Grotius’ library after his death, plans to build a 500,000-volume library, and demonstrates her linguistic knowledge several times. The film claims that she became close friends with Descartes and that he helped lay the groundwork for her rejection of Lutheranism. As already noted, Christina and Descartes were not friends, and she didn’t agree with many of his teachings. But the film uses her friendship with Descartes as a short-hand for all the intellectual pursuits that undermined the faith of her childhood.
Any film about Christina has to decide what her sexuality was, and in this film she’s a lesbian. The moment she meets Ebba Sparre (Sarah Gadon), she is smitten by the woman, and as the film goes on she falls more in love with her. She declares Ebba her ‘bed-warmer’ and flirts with her increasingly. When Chancellor Oxenstierna (Michael Nyqvist) gives her several dresses as a way of trying to get her to marry his son Johan (Lucas Bryant), Kristina gives them to Ebba as an excuse to have her undress. Eventually, Ebba reciprocates her love, but just as they consummate their passion, Johan stumbles onto them. Jealous of Ebba, he kidnaps her and pressures her into marrying her long-time fiancé. The film suggests that Ebba’s choice to marry was such a deep betrayal of Kristina that it set in motion the queen’s choice to abdicate. This is going far beyond what the historical evidence will support, but it presents a coherent narrative out of the rather confused and indeterminate evidence of Christina’s complex motives.
Gadon as Ebba
The film certainly oversimplifies. Although it acknowledges a decade passing by, it still manages to compress the events of Christina’s reign into what seems like 18 months; no one in the film ages perceptibly.
And despite its deviations from fact, the film does an impressive job with a lot of little details. For example, the dress that Kristina gives Ebba is identical to one in an actual portrait of Ebba Sparre (compare the two images of Sparre above). Kristina seduces Ebba by showing her the Codex Gigas, the so-called ‘Devil’s Book’, supposedly written by a medieval monk in one night, with the aid of the Devil. The film references Descartes’ interest in the pineal gland and correctly shows foreign ambassadors encouraging Christina’s interest in philosophy as a way to seduce her from Lutheranism (although in this film, it’s the French ambassador, not the Portuguese one). So although the film gets a lot of things wrong, it makes an effort to include a lot of small details that are true.
The film also does a nice job with Christina’s sexuality. Its portrait of a young lesbian fumbling her way toward her first love at a time when lesbianism was taboo is sensitive, not sensational. It presents her desires as natural but still acknowledges that her society cannot accept them, while avoiding exploitation of the subject matter. So if you only see one movie about a lesbian, cross-dressing queen, make it this one.
There don’t seem to be any scholarly works on Christina that are both scholarly and accessible to the general reader. Veronica Buckley’s Christina Queen of Swedenis probably your best bet. Buckley isn’t a scholar, but she’s been praised for a very readable style.
I recently ran across the shortlived Danish tv Heartless (Danish with English subtitles) on Netflix. It was only 8 episodes and I’d read some interesting things about it, so I gave it a try. It’s not a great show, but it has an interesting take on vampirism and part of the show is set in 17th century Denmark, so I figured I’d fire off a quick post about it.
Sebastian (Sebastian Jessen) and Sofie (Julie Zangenberg) are teenage homeless twins living in Copenhagen, dealing with a dark secret. To survive, they need to steal people’s life energy through kisses. If they take too much, the victim bursts into flames and dies. Sebastian is guilt-ridden over this while Sofie shrugs her shoulders and is resigned to her existence. But Sebastian convinces her that they need to find out why they are the way they are, and their investigations eventually reveal that their mother, shortly after dropping them off at an orphanage, went to Ottmannsgaard Academy, an elite private school (the school prides itself on the quality of its fencing instruction) where she evidently vanished. So they manage to enroll and begin seeking clues. Cue all the usual teen drama angst that one expects at that age: social competition, teen romance, existential angst, and vampiric murder.
Sofie getting what she needs
It turns out that Ottmannsgaard has its own dark history, stemming back to Denmark in the 1670s, when the local nobleman, the weak-willed Count Ottman (Lior Cohen) gets his peasant mistress Ane Sørensdatter (Shelly Jacquline Levy) pregnant. His pregnant wife, understandably pissed about her husband’s wandering eye, evidently leans on the local Lutheran minister to accuse Ane of being a witch (like you do). The count tries to get Ane to flee the area, but she refuses because she’s young, in love, and fated to die for the plot to happen, and so instead she gets arrested, tortured, and sentenced to burn at the stake, even though she’s carrying his child.
The execution succeeds, but triggers a curse that follows the children of both the Countess and Ane (who must have been a witch, because her unborn baby somehow survives her mother being burned to death. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is). There’s a twist of sorts here that I won’t give away, although it’s not a huge one (so don’t get your hopes up).
Jessen as Sebastian
Eight episode of that doesn’t give me a whole lot to comment on. But the show at least gets the witchcraft details in the right ballpark. There were no executions of witches in the 1670s, but there was one in the 1680s (the Rugard Trials), in which Jørgen Arenfeldt, a local nobleman, used his authority as the lord of the manor to imprison, try, and execute a half-dozen women as witches. One of the unfortunate women was named Anne Sorensdatter. In doing this, Arenfeldt violated the law by torturing the women and by prosecuting women who lived outside his jurisdiction. The last execution for witchcraft in Denmark happened in 1693.
So the trial and execution of Ane Sørensdatter could actually have happened in loosely the fashion the series depicts. Like the Rugard women, what Ane is subjected to is, I think, supposed to be ducking. As usually happens with this practice, the show misunderstands ducking as a form of torture intended to elicit a confession when in fact it was an effort to obtain objective evidence of witchcraft. But Ane’s ducking is more like just being held underwater rather than being put in a classic ducking stool, so maybe it’s simply supposed to be torture. Torturing witches was illegal in Denmark in this period, but the show doesn’t touch on that, so I think we’re just intended to understand that early modern authorities were gullible sadists and we’ve moved beyond that.
It’s nice to see a show in which historical research (albeit conducted at the high school level) is actually an important component of the series. Throughout the show, Sebastian is constantly seeking clues to the past, speaking with his history teacher, asking to write his term paper on witchcraft trials, reading old books, and so on. So in a way, the show offers a nice example of the way a historical researcher chases events through the evidence to unravel the mysteries of the past. It’s rather convenient that at key moments he runs into people who just happen to have saved boxes of old stuff for more than a decade and those boxes always have a clue he needs, but hey, it’s a teen drama so I think we can forgive that wild coincidence.
Sofie’s character is handled particularly nicely. As the show goes on, she develops an attraction to the headmaster’s daughter Emilie (Julie Christiansen) who gradually reciprocates her feelings. When the headmaster discovers this, he’s uncomfortable with the relationship, not because of the lesbianism but because he’s suspicious of Sofie’s motives and nature. There’s a very nice scene in which he tells Emilie that he doesn’t care that she might be attracted to women, but that he doesn’t want her involved with Sofie. The show’s treatment of two young lesbians is really refreshing because their lesbianism isn’t in any way the problem in the relationship.
Sofie and Emilie
Heartless is not a great show, either in its treatment of its historical themes or the quality of its teen drama. It nearly got cancelled after 5 episodes, and the network apparently decided to film three more episodes simply as a way to give the story a conclusion. It’s filled with lots of wordless brooding of the kind Scandinavians are so good at depicting but which can get sort of tedious for American viewers. But it captures some of the complexities of teenage sexuality and identity quite well, in which the problems of vampiric existence become an interesting metaphor for the transition to adulthood, and the show doesn’t try to stretch out its central mystery further than the story can support. So if you’re in the mood for a novel approach to vampirism or just want to see lots of Scandinavian teens yearning for what they can’t have, give it a look.
I can’t offer you anything on witchcraft in Denmark, but if you want to know more about witch trials and related matters, a good introduction to the Early Modern Witch Hunts is Joseph Klaits’ Servants of Satan.
When Quills (2000, dir. Philip Kaufman, based on the play of the same name by Doug Wright) came out, it was received quite well by critics, who praised Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the Marquis de Sade, and it earned Rush his second Academy Award nomination. But it wasn’t so popular with historians, who pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. In particular, Neil Schaeffer, author of The Marquis de Sade: A Life, published a scathing critique of the film as being both inaccurate and simplistic in its depiction of the notorious pornographer. So the movie, like De Sade himself, was quite controversial. Sounds like fun!
De Sade’s Life
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a minor French noble born in the mid-18th century and the poster boy for everything wrong with the 18th century aristocracy. By the time he was 23, he had begun sexually assaulting prostitutes and employees of both sexes egregiously enough that the police began paying serious attention to him, no small accomplishment at a time when the aristocracy enjoyed substantial legal prerogatives. When he was 28, he hired a woman to be his housekeeper, but then tied her up, and repeatedly tortured her with knives and hot wax. Four years later, in 1772, he and his man-servant were convicted of sodomy and poisoning and fled to Italy to avoid a death sentence.
During all this, his mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, essentially an extra-judicial order of imprisonment. In 1777, he was lured back to Paris and arrested under the lettre and imprisoned, although he managed to get the death sentence overturned.
The Marquis de Sade
By 1789, when the French Revolution was brewing, he was being incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison, and nearly triggered the Storming of the Bastille two weeks early when he shouted out a window that the prisoners were being murdered. Just days before the Storming liberated the inmates of the Bastille, de Sade was transferred to the Charenton asylum. But a year later, he was released when the National Assembly invalidated all lettres de cachet. At this point his long-suffering wife divorced him.
He managed to get himself elected to the National Convention and spent several years as a politician before getting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bad side and being arrested. But before he could be executed, Robespierre fell from power and he was released.
He had already begun producing the pornographic works he is famous for during his first imprisonment. In 1801, Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author of the anonymous paired pornographic novels, Justine and Juliette, and eventually the works were traced to de Sade and he was arrested and imprisoned once again. In 1803, his family arranged for him to be declared insane, and he was sent back to the Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1814.
The director of Charenton was the Abbé de Coulmier, a Catholic priest known for his liberal attitudes toward the inmates in his charge. Coulmier rejected many of the harsh treatments that were popular at the time, such as the physical restraint of patients and the practice of dunking patients head-first in water. Instead, Coulmier favored therapies such as self-expression, diets, and purges. In particular, he believed that allowing patients to express themselves in writing, theater, and music was helpful.
Because of this, Coulmier allowed de Sade to stage popular French plays, using the inmates as actors, for the viewing pleasure of the Parisian public. But in 1809, police orders required de Sade to be put in solitary confinement and forbidden to write. This confinement turns out to have been not so solitary after all, because in 1810, he began a relationship with Madeleine LeClerc, the 14-year-old daughter of an employee at Charenton. He died in his sleep 4 years later.
The chapel at Charenten
De Sade’s Writings
Although de Sade is today mostly remembered as a pornographer and as the man who gave his name to ‘sadism’, he was more complex than that. Not all of his work was obscene; he wrote both political treatises and conventional plays, and he deserves to be ranked as a figure of the Enlightenment. And even his pornographic work is highly intellectual. His paired novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or The Rewards of Vice tell the stories of two sisters raised in a convent. But whereas Justine strives to remain virtuous, Juliette comes to believe that morality, virtue, and religion are meaningless. Justine experiences a series of personal disasters, including becoming the unwilling sex-slave of a group of monks. Every good deed she does results in a further sexual assault, humiliation, or other catastrophe, and finally she is struck by lightning and dies, after which her corpse is sexually assaulted. But Juliette willingly engages in the most perverse behaviors possible, indulging in orgies and repeatedly murdering people. Her various accomplices commit rape, murder, incest, and cannibalism. She is ultimately rewarded with an audience with the pope, and the novel ends with another long orgy.
Despite the repulsive content, de Sade has a point to make. Several in fact. Like many 18th century intellectuals, he rejects conventional religion, and aggressively satirizes it; the clergy in his stories are often the most debauched characters. Given that the clergy enjoyed legal prerogatives as extensive as the nobility’s at this time, including immunity from taxation and most law courts and a strangle-hold on public religious life and education, de Sade’s attacks are remarkably bold and in favor of the separation of Church and State. Some have seen de Sade as challenging God to prove His existence by punishing de Sade’s blasphemies.
These two novels demonstrate the idea that virtue and vice are not neatly rewarded and condemned in real life, and the novels represent an effort to build an essentially atheistic moral paradigm celebrating the pursuit of pleasure as the only meaning in life. Nature consistently triumphs over the forces of civilization and restraint. (At least, that’s all assuming you read them seriously, and not as satire, as some scholars do.)
And de Sade’s slow corruption of Juliette, who gradually moves from simple sexual pleasures to full-blown sexual sadism of the most extreme sort, can be read as a challenge to the reader. How far are you willing to take your sexual fantasies? Will you at some point put the book down because you feel it is no longer titillating but rather disgusting, or will you allow the novel to corrupt you as it corrupts Juliette? These books may be deeply disturbing, but they’re also far more thought-provoking than most modern porn.
Nor was de Sade the only author in this period to intermingle pornography with philosophical musings. As the great intellectual historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, philosophical pornography was an extremely popular (if illegal) genre in 18th century France. Quite a few authors used obscene stories as a way to attack the French clergy and the French political system. De Sade’s novels are the most extreme, but he’s by no means the only author of the day to tell stories of priests fornicating in the confessional and monks debauching nuns during the Eucharist. He’s just the one we still remember.
So What Does Quills Make of All This?
The movie opens in 1794 with de Sade apparently writing a story about a woman who is guillotined during the French Revolution and then jumps to ‘years later’ with de Sade in the Charenton asylum. Instead of being sent there for having written Justine, he has written the novel and had it smuggled out of prison by Madeleine (Kate Winslet). Napoleon orders a stop to his publishing, and dispatches Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to Charenton to force Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) to crack down on de Sade’s privileges. Whereas Coulmier is gentle and believes in art therapy, Royer-Collard is old school and favors water-boarding patients. He also has a child bride Simone (Amelia Warner), whom he rather sadistically has sex with on their wedding night.
Geoffrey Rush as de Sade
Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard is a real person. In 1806, he was appointed chief physician at Charenton, where he became convinced that de Sade was sane and ought to be in a conventional prison. But his function here is to be the catalyst for everything going wrong at the asylum. Prior to his arrival, de Sade and Coulmier are friends, with de Sade seeking to express his disturbed thoughts on paper.
But Royer-Collard’s attempts to restrain de Sade trigger a contest of wills between the two men, with Coulmier caught in the middle. Royer-Collard’s harsh treatment of his young wife becomes gossip that reaches de Sade’s ears, so de Sade stages a play that is a thinly-veiled sex farce of the marriage. Simone, who sees the first part of the play, becomes interested in de Sade’s writings and secretly tracks down a copy of Justine. Corrupted by it, she runs off with a young architect, played by Stephen Moyer.
Furious at this, Royer-Collard leans on Coulmier, forcing him to gradually restrict de Sade’s privileges. When he takes away de Sade’s writing implements, de Sade figures out how to write with red wine on his bed sheets. When the bed is taken away, he writes in blood on his own clothes. Coulmier states the whole point of the film when he says to de Sade, “The more I forbid, the more you’re provoked.” De Sade points out that Coulmier finds it arousing to have so much power over him.
Joaquin Phoenix as Coulmier
Finally, naked and with nothing in his cell, he arranges to dictate a story to Madeleine through a chain of inmates, like an obscene game of Telephone. But one of the aroused inmates intentionally lights a fire, and in the confusion, another inmate rapes and murders Madeleine. Coulmier, who has fallen deeply in lust with the woman thanks to de Sade’s corrosive influence, apparently has sex with her corpse, and then has de Sade’s tongue cut out after water-boarding him. Chained in a cell, de Sade continues writing, using his own feces as ink. He dies in Coulmier’s arms, rejecting the crucifix the priest offers him.
The movie ends with Coulmier now imprisoned in de Sade’s old room, begging a visitor for paper and quill so he can write. He finally understands de Sade’s compulsion to write.
Hopefully from this summary, it should be clear that the film starts off somewhat shaky on the facts, since de Sade didn’t write Justine in prison, because that’s what he was imprisoned for. But it rattles along in the right general historical direction until, in the last hour, the train jumps the track and goes veering off into Crazyland at full speed, bearing its passengers to a world of hurt none of them bought a ticket for.
De Sade is somewhere between a full-blown lunatic with a sexual fixation and a martyr for the cause of free speech. The film can’t quite decide what’s really motivating him. On the one hand, his erotic writing appears to be a symptom of some mental illness; he is literally incapable of not writing, despite the increasing misery it’s causing him. And by the end of the film, he’s infected both Coulmier and arguably Madeleine with his madness.
Coulmier, about to do the literal nasty with Madeleine’s corpse
But on the other hand, he’s engaging in a willful defiance of Royer-Collard’s efforts to silence him. The two men fall into a chess match; each action by Royer-Collard to stop de Sade from writing elicits a response from de Sade in which he seeks to demonstrate the doctor’s ultimate impotence to control him. It is Royer-Collard’s efforts to still de Sade’s pen that triggers the next round of outrageous writing, and the marquis’ writings that trigger the next crack-down.
De Sade’s ideas corrupt everyone around him, driving them to lust, in the case of Coulmier, Simone, and the architect, or madness, in the case of the inmates who participate in his telephone game of dictation. Madeleine craves more stories from de Sade and is ultimately killed by the process of dictation, as is de Sade himself. The only character not corrupted by de Sade is Royer-Collard, who is already more of a sadist than de Sade. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea if your martyr for freedom of the press is a man whose writings literally corrupt and destroy those who read them.
Michael Caine as Royer-Collard
From a historical standpoint, the problem with Quills is that it too readily accepts the idea of de Sade as a charming madman and barely entertains the possibility that perhaps de Sade was actually trying to actually say something. And it soft-pedals the more literally sadistic elements of his writings. From the snippets of his stories that we hear, de Sade likes to talk about penises and vaginas a lot, and he readily mocks Christianity, but there’s only faint hints that he was also writing about rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other disturbing things.
So for me at least, Quills doesn’t really work. It fails to grapple effectively with what the historical de Sade was trying to say, and it fails to offer a coherent message about who this man was and why he wrote such outrageous things. In a way, watching the movie feels a bit like reading Justine; instead of sympathizing with any of the characters or being turned on by its decadence, I just wanted to take a shower and put the whole experience behind me.
The full title of Day of the Siege: September Eleven, 1683(aka September Eleven, 1683, 2012, dir. Renzo Martinelli) immediately makes one think of September 11th, 2001. Clearly Renzo Martinelli was trying to draw some sort of parallel between the battle of Vienna and the September 11th attacks. But what is the message?
The basis for the parallel comes from the common misconception that the battle of Vienna happened on September 11th, 1683. It didn’t. It happened on September 12th. But if you poke around the Internet, you’ll find a lot of websites dating the battle to the 11th. So was Martinelli simply misinformed, or was he willfully overlooking the issue of dating to make a point?
Within the Film
Martinelli opens the film with a quote from the esteemed French medieval historian Marc Bloch. “Misunderstanding of the present grows fatally from the ignorance of the past.” So Martinelli is quite clearly including the quote to make the audience aware that we’re supposed to learn a lesson, and that ignoring the Battle of Vienna would be a mistake. There is no connection whatsoever between Bloch’s specific subject matter (he was a social historian who focused on medieval France) and the 17th century or Islamic history. But Bloch was part of the French resistance during World War II. He was captured and executed shortly after D-Day in 1944. Is Martinelli trying to make a parallel between the Nazis who executed Bloch and the Turks? As we’ll see, I suspect the answer is yes.
Any casual viewer of the film will, I think, come to the conclusion that Marco d’Aviano (F. Murray Abraham) and Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) are the main characters; the film spends roughly equal time on both characters, although it digs into d’Aviano somewhat more deeply. But apparently, Martinelli did not see Mustafa as one of the main characters. Immediately after the Bloch quote, Martinelli gives us a prologue text. “On September 11th, 1683, Islam was at the peak of it’s [sic] expansion in the West. Three hundred thousand Islamic troopers under the command of Kara Mustafa, were besieging the city they called “the Golden Apple”; Vienna. The aim of Kara Mustafa was to lead his army on to Rome, and transform the Basilica of Saint Peter into a Mosque. If all of this never came about, it’s due to an Italian monk, Marco Da Aviano and a Polish King, Jan Sobieski. This is their story.”
Mustafa, looking very Turkish
Aside from the spelling and punctuation errors, which are presumably an issue of translation from the Italian, this prologue is very odd, because it claims that the film tells Jan Sobieski’s (Jerzy Skolimowski) story, which it doesn’t Sobieski is a supporting character who appears relatively late in the film and get no character development whatsoever, apart from his struggle to get his troops up a hill, and he get much less screen time than Mustafa.
So despite Mustafa being one of the protagonists, Martinelli discourages the audience focusing on him as a main character and instead directs attention toward Sobieski. So the film is pretty much explicitly telling us to sympathize with the Western Catholic position rather than the Turkish Muslim position. Whatever Martinelli’s message is, it’s intended for the West, not Muslims.
Note the absence of Mustafa in favor of two supporting Western characters
Religion understandably plays a major role in the film. Several of the characters debate or discuss the contrast between Christianity and Islam. D’Aviano debates the issue with Abu’l, Abu’l twice makes statements to his deaf-mute wife about the issue, and d’Aviano and Mustafa debate the issue during a parley. D’Aviano asserts that Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God; that’s a controversial assertion today, but in terms of 17th century Catholic theology, it’s an accurate representation of what d’Aviano would have thought. In his debate with Mustafa, he insists that “The true god has no use for submission. He wants all men to be free, to worship him freely.” It’s nice to see a film actually define the freedom its characters are striving for (in this case the freedom to worship or not), but it’s a comparison that positions Islam as a religion of slavery. Again that might be a view that the historical d’Avaino would have agreed with, but it was Martinelli’s decision to include the line in the film.
Abu’l’s statements to his wife fit with d’Aviano’s statement. When he decides to leave Italy and his wife to support the Turkish campaign, he tells her that the difference between Christianity and Islam is that Christians put their hearts ahead of their faith, while Muslims do the opposite. Later, when he risks himself to rescue his wife from a stockade of captive women, he tells her, “At times, faith alone is not enough, even for us Muslims.” So at that point he appears to be repudiating the notion that Muslims put faith first. But then at the end of the film, for no clear reason, he disguises himself as Mustafa and charges the Hussars, who cut him down with gunfire. Since the film gives him no reason to be personally loyal to Mustafa, the viewer is left to assume that he is doing it for religious reasons. Thus, his actions deny the growth he has shown his wife and affirm that Muslims cannot change or grow on any issue involving their faith. Martinelli clearly views Islam as a sort of totalitarian religion, glossing over the way that Leopold I historically worked to suppress Protestantism in Hungary. Apparently, when Catholics are religiously intolerant, it’s not worth talking about.
The film opens with d’Aviano giving a sermon to a group of peasants about trusting God to grant them the strength to defend their homes. He also insists that he cannot work miracles, contrary to his reputation. A blind member of the audience promptly gets a miracle that cures his blindness. Later in the film, d’Aviano heals one of Leopold I’s daughters of what looks to be highly advanced breast cancer. So d’Aviano is a humble miracle-worker. In contrast, Mustafa is given a portent that the invasion will go badly, but he arrogantly misunderstands it and is rewarded with defeat and his own execution. So the film seems to be suggesting that God is on the West’s side, granting d’Aviano and those who trust him miracles. I don’t think there’s any doubt here that Martinelli is pro-Catholic.
D’Aviano, looking very friarish
Martinelli’s Statements
Martinelli has offered some guidance to his intentions in various statements made to the press. (All translations made with the help of Google Translate, since I do not read either Italian or Rumanian. Thus it is possible that I may have missed some nuance to his statements.) Well before the film was made, he said, “The origin of the deep anger which the West is forced to confront today was born September 11th, 1683.”
When a Romanian journalist asked him if he expected the Vatican to support the film, he responded, “No…In recent speeches, [Pope Benedict] said to open our hearts to Islam and I’m not sure that would be the best thing we can do with these guys….Today [the Church] preaches tolerance, and my film is politically incorrect. There is a priest who says ‘there is a time for prayer and another for war.’ If you do not fight now, Europe will be lost.”
From these quotes, it seems that Martinelli believes that the Islamic world is angry at the West because of Mustafa’s failure to conquer Europe, and that this anger is the root for the September 11th attacks in 2001. He seems to feel that religious tolerance of Muslims is a bad idea, because if the West trusts Muslims, they will have an easier time launching another attack.
Renzo Martinelli
When d’Aviano parleys with Mustafa, Mustafa tells him that even if the Turks are defeated, such a loss would only be “trimming the Prophet’s beard,” in other words, a momentary defeat that the Turks will recover from.
So the lesson that Martinelli wants his viewers to learn is evidently that the West has forgotten what happened at Vienna in 1683. In 1683, the West stood united against Islam and stopped an unprovoked invasion. But the West forgot to remain vigilant, and the result was the catastrophe of 9-11. He is urging us to once again be on our guard, to reject religious tolerance as too dangerous, and to remember that Muslims cannot change their ways and therefore can never be trusted.
I applaud Martinelli for seeking to use a historical film to get his audience to think about issues he is concerned with. Far too often, historical conflicts are just an excuse for another over-the-top action film. But Martinelli’s Islamophobia, which comes out in some of his interviews, is appalling, and his attempts to get attention for his film by explicitly linking it to 9-11 is downright offensive. He overlooks the fact that after the end of the Great Turkish War in 1699, Western powers embarked on a 200 year long project to dismember the Ottoman Empire, slowly taking territory from it in one trumped up war after another. The break-up of the Ottoman state and the arrogance with which Western powers, especially Britain and France, redrew the map of the Middle East after World War I plays a major role in the turbulence in the region today and certainly contributes to the hostility many Muslims feel toward the West. By omitting the three centuries between 1683 and 2001, Martinelli is offering a simplistic and historically vacuous argument about what caused the 9-11 attacks.
Given that the film is wrong-headed, offensive, not particularly good, and painfully low-budget in places, the best thing to do with Day of the Siege is let it fall into the obscurity it deserves.
Day of the Siege: September Eleven, 1683 (aka September Eleven, 1683, 2012, dir. Renzo Martinelli) is a joint Italian-Polish film about the Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. It’s notable chiefly for not being especially good or bad, and tackling an important but poorly-known historical event. It reminded me a lot of eggplant; after I was done, I thought, “I could have had something else.” So let’s (reluctantly) dig in.
The Battle of Vienna
The Ottoman Empire conquered the last remnants of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 and by the early 16th century the attention of the Ottoman Sultans had turned to expanding up into the Balkans. In 1529, the forces of Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna, but was unable to take the city, and heavy snowfall turned the Ottoman withdrawal into a serious disaster. This failure brought an end to Ottoman expansion into Europe for 150 years.
In the middle of the 18th century, the reign of Sultan Mehmet IV (1642-93) marked a significant turning point in Ottoman fortunes. He surrendered a great deal of his political power to his Grand Viziers, inaugurating a gradual decline in the power of the sultan. Initially, the Grand Vizier Köprülü Mehmed proved a successful military leader, defeating Venice, re-affirming Ottoman power over Transylvania after a brief war with Austria, and waging a successful campaign against Poland.
But a later Grand Vizier, Kara Mustafa, proved less effective in the office. In 1681, Hungarian Protestants rebelled against the Austrian Emperor Leopold I’s efforts to impose Catholicism throughout Hungary, and Mustafa decided to support the rebellion in the hopes of being able to break Hungary away from Austria and eventually absorb it into the Ottoman state. He was able to persuade Mehmed IV’s Divan (essentially, the Ottoman Cabinet) to authorize military action, and in August of 1682, the Ottomans declared war on Austria.
Kara Mustafa
But the timing of this declaration of war was remarkably bad. It was impossible to get Ottoman troops into Austrian territory before the onset of winter, and the result was that Leopold had the entire winter to prepare for war. He concluded alliances with Venice and Poland and was able to call upon some of the major nobles of the Holy Roman Empire to provide troops.
Emperor Leopold I
In Spring of 1683, Mustafa marched about 150,000 troops into Austria, accompanied by a force of 40,000 Crimean Tatars. Leopold retreated to Passau, leaving a garrison of 15,000 in Vienna under Count Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg. When the Ottoman forces arrived at Pechtoldsdorf south of Vienna, Mustafa persuaded the town to peacefully surrender, but then massacred the population. This action persuaded von Starhemberg that he had to hold Vienna at all costs, because any surrender would result in another massacre.
Note how close to Ottoman territory Vienna is
The siege began on July 17th, and the Turks succeeded in completely cutting off Vienna, so that the food supply quickly became a problem. But the Austrians had nearly three times as much artillery as the Turks, making it hard for the Turks to launch an effective attack on the city. The Turks attempted to sap the walls, but the Austrians detected the Turkish mines and were able to intercept and destroy them. Von Starhemberg was severely wounded, but was able to maintain effective control of his forces, ordering that any soldier found asleep should be shot.
Then a joint German-Polish army of 80,000 troops arrived. There had been considerable quarrelling about how the troops would be paid and who would lead them, but eventually it was agreed that King Jan Sobieski of Poland would be the lead general.
Jan III Sobieski
Aware of the arriving relief army, Mustafa ordered an assault of the city very early on September 12th (while it was still dark, actually). But the Imperial forces intervened, forcing a land battle. After half a day of fighting, Sobieski achieved a notable tactical success. Noticing that the Turks had not fortified one side of their position because of the presence of the Kahlenberg mountain, Sobieski managed to get 18,000 cavalry and a number of cannons up the opposite side of the Kahlenberg. In the mid-afternoon he led what has been called the largest cavalry charge in European history down the forested side of the Kahlenberg and into the exhausted Ottoman ranks, which promptly fled. Overall, between the siege and the battle, the Turks lost at least 30,000 men and an enormous amount of loot. Completely disgraced, the unfortunate Kara Mustafa was strangled in Belgrade on the sultan’s orders late in the same year.
The failure of the siege of Vienna was only the start of the Great Turkish War, which lasted down to 1699 and resulted in the significant loss of Turkish territory in what is now Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This marked the beginning of the contraction of the Ottoman state in Europe, a process that would slowly continue for the next century, pick up steam in the 19th century, and culminate in the break-up of the Empire after World War I.
Polish Winged Hussars at the Battle of Vienna
The Day of the Siege
The film tells the story of the battle of Vienna by focusing on two main characters, Kara Mustafa (Enrico Lo Verso) and the Capuchin friar Marco d’Aviano (F. Murray Abraham). Mustafa’s story revolves around a recurrent dream that his wife/concubine has that Mustafa will be killed with a hail of arrows. He consults a blind holy man who tells him that there is some truth in the dream and that while much blood will be shed, Mustafa’s blood will not. Are you noticing the subtle hint that his arrogance will get him strangled?
Lo Verso as Mustafa
But the film is more interested in d’Aviano, who is a real historical figure. He was a fairly ordinary friar until 1676, when he apparently healed a nun who had been bedridden for more than a decade. As a result of his he acquired the reputation of a miracle-worker, and people began to seek him out for his blessing. Among those who sought his help was Leopold I, whose wife had been unable to conceive a male heir. D’Aviano became Leopold’s spiritual counselor and remained in close contact with him for the rest of D’Aviano’s life. Leopold was by nature a somewhat indecisive man, and d’Aviano’s more forceful personality helped Leopold make many decisions.
The film shows d’Aviano realizing in 1682 that the Turks are planning to attack. Historically, this is probably because d’Aviano learned of the Turkish declaration of war, which was made in August of 1682. But in the film, the Turks don’t declare war until March of 1683, which has the effect of making d’Aviano a prophet. He goes to Vienna and tries unsuccessfully to persuade Leopold (Piotry Adamczyk) that the Turks are planning to invade, but Leopold refuses to believe him and then basically wets himself when he gets the declaration of war. D’aviano winds up at Vienna and helps rally resistance to the Turks.
Abraham as d’Aviano
The film also exaggerates the military imbalance to make the Turks more threatening. Mustafa commands 300,000 troops, not 150,000, and appears to have way more artillery than the Austrians do. When Mustafa sets up his camp, the Tatar commander warns him that they could be attacked from the Kahlenberg, but Mustafa scornfully refuses to seriously consider the possibility. The Turks successfully sap the walls of Vienna in at least one spot, which doesn’t seem to have happened.
Apart from these deviations, the film basically gets the story right. It focuses at some length on the political complexities of the Imperial side, with the argument turning on German reluctance to allow the Polish Sobieski (Jerzy Skolomowski) to command the troops. Sobieski resolves the dispute by threatening to leave if he is not allowed to command and by declaring his intention to lead his cavalry over the Kahlenberg. Clearly, the screenwriter really liked this whole Kahlenberg issue and wants to make sure that the viewer understands that Mustafa was arrogant and Sobieski was a brilliant commander.
The charge of the Winged Hussars down the Kahlenberg
But the film is weakened by a variety of problems. It invents the detail that when they were both young men, Mustafa met d’Aviano in Venice and saved his life, in exchange for which d’Aviano gave Mustafa a wolf’s tooth as a good luck charm. Do you get the irony of Mustafa saving d’Aviano and then d’Aviano successfully opposing Mustafa so that Mustafa is defeated and gets executed? Do you? Cuz it’s really cool and ironical and stuff, so the film is going to make sure you get it.
And then to add to this, the film invents a Turk, Abu’l (Yorgo Voyagis), whose name is gibberish Arabic, meaning ‘Father of the’. (Abu is a common element of Arab (not Turkish) names, given to a man after his first son is born.) But Abu’l has no children in the film, just a deaf-mute wife who is able to understand people when THEY TALK REALLY LOUD TO HER. No joke. Abu’l lives in Italy for some reason, and d’Aviano saves him from an Italian mob after the declaration of war. But then Abu’l decides he has to leave his wife and go join the Turkish army where Mustafa decides to trust him. As a result, there are repeated dramatic scenes when Abu’l runs into d’Aviano, and then his deaf-mute wife, then d’Aviano again, and then disguises himself as Mustafa and gets himself shot repeatedly by the Austrians, thus fulfilling Mrs. Mustafa’s dream, because foreshadowing and irony and all that.
For me, though, the biggest problem with the film comes with its production values. Normally, I don’t factor in production values when I’m deciding what I think about a movie. Cheap production values do not invalidate a good story (see lots of original Star Trek and Doctor Who episodes). But the producers here clearly decided that their sets couldn’t quite stand up to close scrutiny, so they used very cheap CGI to overlay many scenes with falling snow, billowing smoke and dust, and other atmospheric effects. Not only does this call attention to the cheapness of the production, but it actually makes many scenes hard to see and renders watching them a headache.
Another flaw with the script is that Abu’l is the only character to undergo any appreciable character development, and he’s mostly just a jerk with no clear motivation most of the time, so rescuing his wife from a Turkish rape-stockade looks like growth. D’Aviano, despite being the main character, never really learns anything, and while Mustafa gets an appropriate comeuppance for his arrogance, he never seems to reflect on his mistakes.
The death of Kara Mustafa
Overall, it’s nice that the film wanted to tell the story of what is arguably one of the great turning point battles in Western history. The film gets the job done adequately from that standpoint. But as a movie, the only real drama for the viewer is who’s going to win the battle of Vienna, and the film constantly nudges the viewer in the ribs and says “look at this! Mustafa’s gonna lose cuz he’s arrogant and misunderstands the prophecy!”, which ruins the only suspense the film can generate.
So I don’t recommend this movie because meh. But at least it’s not Dragon Knight.
A very significant portion of Queen Margot(1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles, based on Alexandre Dumas’ 1845 novel La Reine Margot) deals with Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez). In the film la Mole is a Huguenot soldier who has come to Paris to seek service under the Huguenot commanders gathered in Paris for the wedding of Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) to Margot (Isabella Adjani). Unfortunately, he gets caught up in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when Coconnas (Claudio Amendola) tries to kill him. In his desperate flight, la Mole staggers into Margot’s chambers, who prevents Coconnas from killing him. Later that same night, la Mole runs into Coconnas outside and the two men fight until they are both unconscious.
Instead of being buried with the rest of the dead, the two men are rescued by the executioner, who nurses them both back to health. La Mole has fallen in love with Margot and wants to see her again. He learns that Coconnas has access to Margot’s handmaid Henriette (in fact, they seem to be lovers) and when he meets Coconnas again, he discovers that the man has had a change of heart and now repents of the murders he committed that night. So with the aid of Henriette, la Mole becomes Margot’s lover and tries to find a way to help her escape the royal court. Navarre knows of their affair and gradually learns to tolerate it, since he doesn’t love Margot anyway.
Unfortunately, for la Mole, when Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi) hatches a plan to murder Navarre with a poisoned book, the book that gets used coincidentally turns out to be one that la Mole inherited from his father and sold to a bookdealer. It has la Mole’s name written in it. So when Catherine discovers to her horror that she’s poisoned her own son Charles IX, she blames the poisoning on la Mole, who by this time is known to be Margot’s lover. As a result, la Mole and Coconnas are apprehended and executed shortly after Charles’ death. Margot, acting on a comment la Mole once made to her, claims his head and has it preserved as a memento of their love.
Vincent Perez as la Mole
La Mole’s story is a grand example of the sort of story 19th century audiences had a taste for: doomed romance, dramatic changes of heart, narrow escapes, the struggle for redemption, and macabre details like preserved heads. But does it have any basis in fact?
The Real La Mole
While not entirely fiction, Dumas’s doomed lover is a far cry for the historical la Mole. Joseph Boniface de la Mole was a French nobleman, who does seem to have been part of the Huguenot faction at court. He was indeed rumored to have been Marguerite of Valois’ lover early in her marriage to Navarre. So that part is basically true.
But Marguerite didn’t rescue him from death during the Massacre. It was another man, the fortunate Huguenot M. de Teian, who benefitted from Marguerite’s somewhat unintentional intervention. Here is Marguerite’s description of what happened:
“As soon as I beheld it was broad day, I apprehended all the danger my sister had spoken of was over; and being inclined to sleep, I bade my nurse make the door fast, and I applied myself to take some repose. In about an hour I was awakened by a violent noise at the door, made with both hands and feet, and a voice calling out, “Navarre! Navarre!” My nurse, supposing the King my husband to be at the door, hastened to open it, when a gentleman, named M. de Teian, ran in, and threw himself immediately upon my bed. He had received a wound in his arm from a sword, and another by a pike, and was then pursued by four archers, who followed him into the bedchamber. Perceiving these last, I jumped out of bed, and the poor gentleman after me, holding me fast by the waist. I did not then know him; neither was I sure that he came to do me no harm, or whether the archers were in pursuit of him or me. In this situation I screamed aloud, and he cried out likewise, for our fright was mutual. At length, by God’s providence, M. de Nangay, captain of the guard, came into the bed-chamber, and, seeing me thus surrounded, though he could not help pitying me, he was scarcely able to refrain from laughter. However, he reprimanded the archers very severely for their indiscretion, and drove them out of the chamber. At my request he granted the poor gentleman his life, and I had him put to bed in my closet, caused his wounds to be dressed, and did not suffer him to quit my apartment until he was perfectly cured.”
If you’re interested, you can read her recollection of the Massacre (including this incident) here, under Letter V. You’ll find that it differs substantially from the film’s depiction of the slaughter.
But La Mole’s historical importance is completely unrelated to his relationship with Marguerite. What he’s actually remembered for is an attempt to assassinate Charles IX. He was a friend of François of Alençon, Margot and Charles’ youngest brother. In the film, Alençon is a secondary character; he participates in the Massacre, it’s hinted that he would like to see his brother dead, and in one scene he humiliates Margot and helps force her to confess her adultery.
François d’Alençon
In reality, before the Massacre, Alençon aligned himself with the Huguenot faction, which included Navarre and Admiral Coligny. When there was a proposal to marry his brother Henry of Anjou to Elizabeth I, Alençon acted as the French negotiator perhaps because he was seen as a Protestant sympathizer. When the Massacre happened, la Mole and another Huguenot nobleman, Annibal de Coconnas, were arrested and thrown in prison but survived, apparently due to their relationship with Alençon.
As Charles began his final decline, Alençon was implicated in a plot to assassinate Charles by means of a wax doll stabbed with pins. The doll was found in la Mole’s possession, and after being tortured, la Mole and Coconnas were both beheaded. Whether they had genuinely attempted to kill the king or were simply convenient scapegoats for Charles’ medical problems is unclear. Charles, however, was still alive when they were executed and only died later on, so Dumas has reversed the order of the events here. Margeurite mentions all of this in her memoirs (see the previous link, in Letter VII), and offers no suggestion that she had any feelings for la Mole at all, although it’s unlikely she would have admitted to the affair in such a document. There was indeed a rumor that Marguerite had his head preserved.
So what Dumas has done is taken two separate men, la Mole and de Teian, and conflated them. He’s built the post-Massacre portion of his story around la Mole’s eventual execution and has greatly changed Coconnas to turn him into a redeemed villain rather than a man who avoided one political plot only to fall victim to a second one. The historical la Mole was not an outsider at court but rather a well-known courtier.
But if you’re a long-time reader of this blog, it won’t come as a surprise that the facts and the story you saw were quite different things, will it?
My previous post on Queen Margot(1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles) dealt with the film’s treatment of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris in 1572. That event and its lead-up takes about a third of the film; the remainer of the film focuses on the fall-out from that event in the lives of Margaret of Valois, the titular Margot, who is by virtue of marriage now queen of Navarre (Isabelle Adjani), her imperiled husband Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil), her lover Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez), and the barely stable King Charles IX (John-Hugues Anglade).
The film opens in 1572, a few days before the Massacre. It closes shortly after Charles’ death and the accession of his brother Henry of Anjou in 1574, so roughly two years pass, although the film gives us few markers for the passage of time except for the death of the king. In between these two solidly historical events, the film essentially descends into romantic political fantasy, as far as I can tell.
The massacre of the Huguenots was a huge blow to the Protestant community in France, which lost tens of thousands of adherents and their leaders to slaughter, flight from France, and fear-driven conversion to Catholicism. The film, however, has only a nominal interest in this issue; it is interested in the Massacre primarily because of the dramatic tensions it creates for its main characters. The ensuing political intrigues revolve not around the Huguenot response to so much death, but rather on the complex web of emotions spawned by the crisis. In the film, Navarre converts to Catholicism the day after the Massacre, because he is essentially held hostage at court and needs to find a way to escape. In reality, he promised to convert, but did not actually undergo a formal confirmation at a Catholic; like Elizabeth Tudor during the reign of her Catholic sister Mary I, he used the period of religious instruction to play for time.
Henry of Navarre
In the film, his conversion opens the door to a growing friendship between Navarre and Charles. Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi), Charles’ mother, quickly realizes that Navarre is beginning to step into the void Coligny’s death has left for Charles; she orchestrated the failed assassination of the Admiral in order to retain her hold on political power, and now that hold is in danger once again. So she immediately plots to murder Henry. At the same time, Navarre is trying to find a way to escape from the court, while la Mole plots to find a way to rescue Margot. But neither can escape without the other; to do so would leave the other in terrible danger and Navarre feels he owes Margot his life, so he is reluctant to abandon her even though he knows she is in love with la Mole. So the tension in the later portions of the film grows from the question of whether the Catholic assassins will manage to kill Navarre before he and Margot can both get away from Paris.
Marguerite of Valois, about the time of her marriage
In true 19th century literary fashion, the court is aswirl with plots, poisons, and adultery. Catherine first tries to murder Henry by giving a tube of poisoned lipstick to his mistress, and when that fails, she arranges to lace a book with arsenic. Rumors of political assassination by poison were incredibly common in ancient, medieval and early modern writings, and virtually any political figure who died unexpectedly was rumored to have been poisoned.
But as a historian, I tend to be very suspicious of any claim that a historical figure died from poison. Prior to the 19th century, the poor state of medical knowledge meant that many potentially fatal medical conditions could go undiagnosed and untreated for years. People could have fatal heart attacks, strokes, aneurysms, and the like with no noticable warning signs. The lack of modern hygiene techniques and the poor state of food preservation meant that food poisoning and other food-borne illnesses were probably far more common than people realized. As a result, there were numerous ways that apparently healthy people might suddenly fall ill and die without being poisoned, and many of those deaths could easily be mistaken for poisoning. That’s not to say that poisoning did not happen, only that we ought to be extremely cautious about attributing unexpected death to poison.
In the film, after the Massacre, there are essentially three key incidents: the attempt to murder Henry with poisoned lipstick, the hunting accident where Henry saves Charles’ life at the cost of giving up a chance to escape the kingdom, and the attempt to poison Henry with an arsenic-laced book.
The first incident revolves around Henry’s mistress, Charlotte de Sauve (Asia Argento), who is given a tube of poisoned lipstick and told that it contains a powerful aphrodisiac. Margot, suspecting a plot, stops Henry from kissing Charlotte, who unfortunately dies a horrible death. Charlotte was in fact Henry’s mistress, but she did not die in 1573 or 74; she remained his mistress until 1579, long after he had left the French court, and she only died in 1617, seven years after he had died. She was, in fact, one of Catherine de Medici’s informants, so if Catherine had wanted to poison Henry, she could just have given Charlotte something to slip into his drink. So the poisoned lipstick and Charlotte’s untimely death are entirely Dumas’ invention.
Charlotte de Sauve
Similarly, as far as I can tell, the hunting accident in which Henry saves Charles from a wild boar also appears to be complete fiction. Charles did enjoy hunting, however, and by the end of his life he and Henry appear to have become good friends (or at least Charles thought they were good friends). In the film, right after the accident, Charles takes Henry to meet his secret mistress, who seems to be a common servant, and infant son. Charles did in fact have a mistress on whom he fathered an illegitimate son, but she seems to have been known at court, and after his death, she received a pension and her son was raised well and allowed to inherit some of Catherine de Medici’s property and a noble title.
What Killed Charles IX?
The third major incident involves Catherine’s attempt to poison Henry using a book on hunting that has been impregnated with arsenic. The pages are stuck together and to unstuck them, the reader must lick his finger and loosen the page; as a result, as the reader works his way through the book, he will inevitably consume a lot of arsenic. Unfortunately, before Henry sees the book, Charles finds it and reads it. so Catherine unintentionally poisons her own son. In the film, Charles lingers for a remarkably long time, constantly exuding a bloody sweat that makes for a ghastly cinematic image, especially because he and Margot wear a lot of white clothes during this part of the film precisely so Charles can bleed on them.
Charles getting blood all over his nice white clothes
The reality of Charles’ death is rather different. Bloody sweat is a real condition, known as hematohidrosis or hematidrosis, but it’s extremely rare and its causes are unknown. It’s not generally fatal, except in newborns. So it’s wildly unlikely that Charles could have died from such a condition, even if there was clear evidence that he had it. But there isn’t any solid evidence that bloody sweat was a symptom of his death.
We have two narratives of Charles’ death, which you can read here. In the first, Charles spends a long time silent and then sends for Henry of Navarre, with whom he has a substantial conversation. Then he dies some time later. In the second, he experiences pain and sweats a great deal, groans, and has a conversation with his nurse during which he cries a lot. Then he apparently dies. The two narratives are not completely compatible, since the first makes no mention of the conversation with his nurse and the second makes no mention of his conversation with Navarre, but it is not impossible that they could both be true; usually scholars read the second account as happening earlier in the evening than the first account. But neither makes any mention of bloody sweat or indeed blood at all, although in the second narrative Charles laments the shedding of Huguenot blood.
The idea that he died of a bloody sweat is probably a Huguenot story meant to convey divine justice; the monarch who shed so much blood died oozing his own blood as a manifestation of his guilt. There is a long tradition in Western historical writing of monarchs who did awful things supposedly dying in horrible ways. These stories nearly always revolve around the idea that the ruler’s moral corruption somehow becomes physically manifest at the end of his life. For example, William I of England (often called William the Bastard) was badly injured during siege in which his troops burned a church; his horse shifted and threw him against the pommel of his saddle. He died not long thereafter, but according to a monastic chronicle, when his body was placed into his sarcophagus, it burst open and produced such an awful stench that the funeral service had to be hurriedly finished so everyone could flee the smell. While it is not completely impossible that William might have ruptured an internal organ and died of a severe infection that would produce a terrible odor, it’s just as likely that the chronicler in question is trying to demonstrate William’s moral decay with a story about literal rot and stench.
Charles IX
Additionally, Charles’ symptoms do not match those of arsenic poisoning. The classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning include headaches, confusion, diarrhea, sleepiness, convulsions, discoloration of the fingernails, vomiting, bloody urine, hair loss, and stomach pains. Bloody sweat is not one of the symptoms. In the film, Charles experiences several abdominal pain, and possibly confusion (a general issue for him) and hair loss (his hair looks quite thin at the end), but none of the messier and less glamorous symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, or bloody urine.
In reality, most historians attribute his death to pulmonary tuberculosis, the symptoms of which include severe coughing, coughing up blood or bloody mucus, chest pain, weight loss, fatigue, fever, night sweats and chills, and loss of appetite. It’s clear he was producing blood; shortly before his death he had a violent hemorrhage and after his death, one Catholic bishop claimed that the amount of blood he produced was a sign he was a saint. But he seems to have been coughing it up, rather than sweating it. His other symptoms included bursts of manic energy, general weakness and fatigue, heavy sweating, severe weight loss (the English ambassador described him as being “no more than skin and bone”) and pain. Additionally, his brother Henry III also died of a form of tuberculosis, so his family may have been particularly susceptible to it for some reason. Tuberculosis is not a slam dunk diagnosis, but it certainly fits the symptoms more closely than arsenic poisoning.
Alexandre Dumas
But Dumas is at least drawing off of 16th century claims that Charles had died of bloody sweat, and his plot uses this story to good effect, dramatizing his moral complicity in the massacre and working in the irony that Catherine, who is trying to murder Henry to maintain her position with her son, instead murders her son and enables Henry to escape the court. It may not be good history, but it’s certainly a good story.
If you’re inclined to learn more about Henry of Navarre’s rather eventful life, the only thing readily available is Desmond Seward’s The First Bourbon: Henry IV of France & Navarre. Seward is a popular historian rather than a scholar, but his work is highly readable.
One of the most infamous events in all of French history is the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, during which French Catholics, with apparent royal backing, slaughtered thousands of Huguenots (French Protestants) in the streets of Paris. That horrible event is at the center of Alexandre Dumas’ novel La Reine Margot (published in 1845), which was adapted for the screen as Queen Margot (1994, dir. Patrice Chéreau, French with English subtitles).
The Massacre as It Happened
When the French king Henry II died in 1559, he left behind four minor sons and a widow, Catherine de Medici, who acted as regent. It was Catherine’s tragedy to watch three of her sons become king and die without heirs. Francis II died at age 16 after reigning only one year, and was succeeded by Charles IX, his ten year brother, who reigned for 14 years but died without a legitimate son in 1574. He was succeeded by his brother, the probably homosexual Henry of Anjou, who ruled as Henry III until his death in 1589, likewise dying without heirs.
Charles has often been depicted as a weak king, but that may be unfair. He took direct control of the kingdom when he was 13, but looked to his mother for guidance his entire reign, which makes sense given that by the end of it, he was still only 24.
Charles IX
And Charles was ruling during a period of extreme political tensions. France was torn by the Protestant Reformations, divided into hard-core Catholics and Huguenots, who were followers of Jean Calvin. The Catholics were led by the House of Guise, while the Huguenots were led by the House of Bourbon. In between was a faction known as the Politiques, who were Catholics and Protestants who wanted to find a way for the two rival faiths to co-exist peacefully. Members of both factions sat on the Royal Council, and Charles and his mother had to find a way to navigate the competing demands of these two groups. As Catholics, they naturally sympathized with the House of Guise, but they did not want to make the Guises politically dominant by relying on them too much, and so Charles entrusted a good deal of power to Gaspard de Coligny, the Admiral of France and leader of the Huguenots. And to keep Coligny from growing too powerful, Charles and Catherine relied heavily on Henry of Anjou, Charles’ younger brother, as a counterbalance.
Catherine de Medici
Sadly, Charles’ reign was marred by a series of civil wars, conspiracies, and political assassinations. Coligny took over as Huguenot leader after the murder of Louis, Prince of Condé, while Duke Henry of Guise loathed Coligny for orchestrating the murder of his father. Catherine was rumored to have poisoned Jeanne of Navarre, mother of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre, with a pair of poisoned gloves. Both Francis II and Charles IX had been the target of Huguenot kidnapping plots, and at one point, the Guises had orchestrated a slaughter of Huguenots during a worship service. Coligny narrowly survived an assassination plot.
When the Third War of Religion was brought to an end with the Treaty of Saint-Germain, which Charles and Catherine seem to have arranged in good faith, it made sense to try to bring the two warring factions together with a marriage. The proposal was to marry the Huguenot leader Henry of Navarre to Charles’ sister Marguerite. The Treaty granted Huguenots freedom of conscience and the right to worship everywhere across France, so a mixed-religion marriage would act as a reasonable symbol of that treaty. So on April 18, 1572, with large numbers of Huguenots visiting the Catholic stronghold of Paris, Henry and Marguerite were married.
Henry of Navarre
Unfortunately the marriage was ill-conceived. Charles and Catherine were trying to walk a tight-rope between angry Catholics and suspicious Huguenots. There were enormous amounts of bad blood and mistrust on both sides. (Imagine trying to end World War II by marrying one of FDR’s daughters to Adolf Hitler. That’s how much Catholics and Huguenots disliked each other.) Catholics were appalled that Charles would re-admit Coligny to the Royal Council when the Admiral had just been fighting him a few weeks before. European society had not yet developed the notion that Protestants and Catholics could live together; both sides insisted that the other side was wrong, was going to Hell, and did not deserve political or civil rights because they were religiously in error. Additionally, many Huguenots had begun to reject the idea of monarchy entirely and had called for the overthrow of the monarchy or at least the ruling family. On the other side, the Catholic bishop Simon Vigor had been calling for the deaths of Huguenots from Paris pulpits for some time. So the Parisian population was deeply unhappy to suddenly be hosting literally thousands of Huguenots in their midst for the wedding.
Henry and Marguerite
And then, four days later, someone shot Coligny, seriously wounding him. The identity of the assassin is known, but historians have never been able to definitively prove who was behind the assassination attempt. Many have speculated that Catherine was afraid that Coligny’s rising influence over her son would mean the end of her political power, but the most likely suspect was the Guises; the assassin was a client of the Guises and had taken his shot from the window of a house owned by them; Charles certainly thought they were the guilty party. Coligny survived the attempt on his life, but it ratcheted up the tensions in the city enormously.
Admiral Coligny
Two nights later, the municipal government of Paris was ordered to shut the gates of the city and arm the citizenry, and in the early hours of St. Bartholemew’s Day, the bells of Saint-Germain rang out. The palace guard of the Louvre forced the visiting Huguenot nobles to leave the palace. Henry of Guise forced his way into Coligny’s house with a band of men, dragged him from his bed, killed him, and threw his corpse out the window. That was the trigger for an orgy of violence that lasted three days. Although the target of the violence seems to have initially been the Huguenot nobility, the general population of the city soon turned their wrath on their commoner Huguenot neighbors, slaughtering men, women, and children. The bodies were thrown in the Seine.
Francois Dubois’ depiction of the Massacre; note Coligny’s body hanging out a window in the background
Marguerite reportedly saved Navarre and a cousin of his by sheltering them in her bedroom and refusing to allow anyone in. Afterwards, he feigned willingness to convert to Catholicism until he was able to get away from Paris, at which point he renounced the notion of a conversion. (Decades later he would actually convert in order to inherit the French crown. Paris, he is reported to have said, “is worth a mass.”)
As the violence spread the following day, Charles frantically tried to stop the killing, to no avail. He sent letters out across the kingdom in an effort to stop the violence from spreading, but as word of the killing spread, at least a dozen French cities experienced their own massacres.
Exactly how many died in the massacre is unknown. Estimates range from 2,000 to 70,000, but the figures generally used today put the deaths in Paris in the 2-3,000 range and nationally in the 7-10,000 range.
The massacre was a profound blow to the Huguenots. They had lost many of their most prominent leaders in the slaughter, and tens of thousands of them had converted to Catholicism out of fear. Many fled the country entirely. Protestant countries were appalled at the carnage, and the Massacre became a rallying cry for opposition to Catholicism across the Protestant world. Pope Gregory XIII was so overjoyed that he ordered a special mass of thanksgiving, sent Charles a golden rose, and issued a commemorative medal. He also commissioned a trio of murals that are still in the Vatican today.
Giorgio Vasari’s depiction of the Massacre; note Coligny’s body falling out a window
Who Ordered the Massacre?
While it’s easy to guess the basic reason the Massacre happened, there’s been a good deal of argument over who ordered it. Well into the 19th century, blame for the Massacre was usually placed on the shoulders of Catherine. She was widely viewed as a domineering schemer who completely controlled her weak-willed son. The wedding was sometimes viewed as a plot to lure the Huguenots into Paris so that they could be slaughtered. In this view, Catherine was vicious, power-hungry, and ruthlessly determined to impose Catholicism. According to a letter attributed to Henry of Anjou, when Catherine finally forced Charles to accept the killing of the Huguenot leadership, he said that if they were going to kill the leaders, it was necessary to kill all the Huguenots, so that he would not have to listen to them accusing him of the crime.
Henry of Anjou, the future Henry III
Early modern historians tended to take a very negative view of women exercising political power. While Queen Elizabeth I of England (a younger contemporary of Catherine) was able to win the admiration of scholars, they were more likely to point to women as unacceptably ambitious and ruthless, the way Catherine was, or as overly sexual and swayed by bad men, as Mary of Scotland was. The notion that female rulers were simply trying to govern while having to overcome obstacles arising from their gender was rarely considered. Instead, their failings were viewed as evidence the women ought not to be involved in politics.
However, that letter of Anjou’s was proven to be a fake in the mid-19th century, and since the collapse of the ‘Evil Catherine’ scenario, alternative views have been put forward. Charles has been accused of orchestrating the killing out of fear that the Huguenots were planning to overthrow him after the attack on Coligny. In favor of this claim is the fact that when Charles sought to end the killing, he issued a decree that said he had taken action to prevent a Protestant plot.
Robert Knecht has argued that the failed attempt on Coligny’s life threw the royal court into a panic. Charles and his council concluded that a Fourth War of Religion was inevitable and decided that the best option was to kill all the Huguenot leaders right away in an attempt to avert the war by killing those who would be leading it. There were 4,000 Huguenots soldiers sleeping outside the city, so if violence broke out, the Huguenots might be able to seize control of Paris. Again, that fits with the royal decree Charles issued. But it doesn’t explain why Catherine initially denounced the killings.
However, a recent theory put forward by Thierry Wanegffelen offers a more complex explanation of the events, especially when combined with Knecht’s views. As Wanegffelen sees it, Catherine and Charles opposed taking any action against the Huguenots after the attempt on Coligny’s life. However, Anjou saw this as an opportunity to advance his power and made an arrangement with Henry of Guise to orchestrate the killings of the Huguenot leadership. Wanegffelen points out that during the slaughter, Anjou’s men claimed to be acting under his authority, not the king’s. Catherine initially denounced the killings, but then realized that she was in danger of ruining Anjou, whose support she needed against Guise. So then Charles took credit for the killings as a way to cover up his brother’s role in it. However, after things had settled down somewhat, Catherine worried that Henry was becoming too powerful and found various ways to get him out of Paris.
Duke Henry I of Guise
This explains the start of the Massacre, but does not explain why it grew so large and resisted Charles’ efforts to stop it. To explain that, we have to turn to the religious tensions and the systematic efforts to demonize the Huguenots made by men like Bishop Vigor. It has also been suggested that there may have been an economic dimension to the killing; the Huguenots tended to be somewhat wealthier craftsmen than the average resident of the city.
The Massacre in the Film
The film opens with the wedding of Henry of Navarre (Daniel Auteuil) and Margot, as she’s called in the film (Isabelle Adjani); Margot is so reluctant to marry a Huguenot that when she is asked during the ritual if she marries him, she hesitates so long that Charles gives her a violent shove.
Isabelle Adjani as the reluctant bride Margot
The wedding celebrations that follow play like a very tension-packed episode of Reign, with lots of flirting between young men and women and open discussion of the various affairs the nobles are having. Margot’s lover is Henry of Guise (Miguel Bosé), and she vastly prefers him over her new Protestant husband, so much so that she tells Navarre not to come to her room on her wedding night. When Navarre show up anyway, he tells her that he needs her as his ally, because he knows he is among enemies. She reluctantly agrees that she will not be his enemy, but she will not sleep with him. Instead, she and her handmaiden, Duchess Henriette of Nevers (Dominique Blanc) sneak out into the streets of Paris to find a lover for her. She finds Leyrac de la Mole (Vincent Perez), a Huguenot who bumps uglies with her in an alleyway.
Given that the novel was written in the 19th century, it is not surprising that it adopts a fairly old-fashioned view of who caused the Massacre. Catherine de Medici (Virna Lisi, with a wonderfully high plucked forehead) is a veritable gorgon, totally dominating her weak son Charles IX (Jean-Hughes Anglade), who is played as virtually insane in his emotional instability. (Given how fiercely he chews scenery when he’s onscreen, it’s a wonder there weren’t holes in the walls.) Catherine has a vaguely incestuous relationship with Henry of Anjou (Pascal Greggory), which is unlikely, given Henry’s strong penchant for young men. Both Charles and Anjou are styled with long, stringy hair (totally wrong for the fashions of the day) and sickly pallors, as if to suggest that Catherine has infected her sons with her malice. Henry of Guise at one point accuses Margot of having had sex with one of her brothers.
Lisi and Greggory as Catherine and Henry of Anjou
Perhaps it plays better in Dumas’ book, but in the film, Catherine’s schemes are malevolent but somewhat ill-formed. Rather than having an overarching plan, she lurches from evil scheme to evil scheme as if she’s making it up moment by moment. She insists that she wants peace with the Huguenots, but she also wants Coligny (Jean-Claude Brialy) dead because she realizes that Charles is coming to see Coligny as a father figure and that means she will lose power. So she is behind the assassination attempt against him, having apparently not stopped to consider the impact killing Coligny would have on prospects for peace.
When it becomes clear that Coligny has survived and the Huguenots are on the verge of rioting, Catherine and Anjou browbeat Charles into authorizing the massacre, forgetting that peace was the original goal. Charles remarks that if they are going to kill the leaders, they must kill them all, so that he will not have to listen to their accusations; the suggestion is that he fears he will hear voices.
Anglade’s pathetic Charles
So Guise, acting as much out of sexual rivalry with Navarre as anything else, goes out to find men willing to do the dirty work. One of the villains he recruits is Coconnas (Claudio Amendola). When the bells finally ring, Guise, Anjou and Coconnas run rampant.
The Massacre sequence is a tour de force of panic, chaos, and violence. Whereas in reality, the Louvre was not the site of the killing, in the film, the killing starts there and spirals outward. Huguenots are lined up against the walls and bayoneted, women have their throats slit, and young nobles are dragged to their doom begging for mercy. Confusion reigns as the bewildered Margot runs through the halls, trying to understand what’s happening. It’s a shockingly effective sequence; I first saw this film 20 years ago, and the massacre sequence has always stayed with me.
Here’s the first part of it. Warning: it’s quite bloody.
Then the killing spreads to the streets and soon corpses are lying everywhere. Coconnas seems to revel in the chance to slaughter Huguenots, and Henriette seems almost psychotically amused by the spectacle. Guise bursts into Coligny’s room and throws him from the window still alive (another inaccuracy, because Coligny’s killing seems to have started the violence).
The results of the massacre
Coconnas bursts into la Mole’s bedroom, but la Mole wounds him and flees through a window across the rooftop. As he searches for a safe haven amidst the violence, Coconnas doggedly pursues him, wounding him twice. Eventually, by wild coincidence, la Mole staggers into Margot’s chambers. Recognizing him, she intervenes when Coconnas tries to enter, telling him that at Judgment Day he will be asked to account for his murders and telling him that he will have to kill her to get to his target. Later, however, la Mole staggers back into the street, where he and Coconnas slowly bludgeon each other into unconsciousness and are mistaken for corpses to be carted off.
Margot learns that Navarre has been taken to the king’s chamber, where she finds him a captive, being browbeaten until he agrees to convert, which he does the next day. Again, this distorts the facts, since Margot is said to have protected him (not la Mole) and Navarre did not actually make a public conversion but only promised to.
Auteuil as Henry of Navarre
Overall, the film’s depiction draws heavily on 19th century notions of the event both in terms of who is behind it, what their motives were, and who was doing the killing. Modern historical explanations have tended to emphasize the complexity of the politics over the personalities of the Catherine and her sons and have found sociological explanations for why the Massacre grew so out of control. There’s no sense that the general population of Paris were complicit in the killings, or that the violence lasted for three days. The killings seem over by sunrise.
This fits with 19th century notions of history as being primarily driven by Great Men and Bad Women. If historical events are dictated by individuals in positions of power, then it stands to reason that personal motives such as lust for power, insanity, and sibling resentments are primary historical forces. Thanks in no small part to the historical theories of Karl Marx and his followers, historians now tend to accord a much larger role to the widespread sentiments of the general population and are somewhat less inclined to view personality as the basic explanation for everything. But, as I noted, the source material for the film is 19th century, and bringing the film more in line with contemporary historical analysis would probably have changed Dumas’s plot too much.
The film also tends to demonize the Catholics. Although it makes clear that the Huguenots are just as intransigent as their opponents, the film makes no mention of their more ruthless actions, apart from the killing of Guise’ father. Nor does it show any interest in the theological issues of the day; it is enough to say that the Catholics hate the Huguenots and are willing to slaughter them. In fairness though, it’s probably hard to offer an even-handed treatment of the slaughter of thousands of innocent people.
In the next post, I’ll explore the rest of the film.
In my first post on Amadeus (1984, dir. Milos Forman), I explored the basic problem with the film, namely that the claim that Antonio Salieri had poisoned Wolfgang Mozart doesn’t really hold up. The great composer’s symptoms don’t bear much resemblance to the symptoms of poison, and it’s hard to see why Salieri would have wanted to poison Mozart; Salieri’s career was at its pinnacle in 1791, while Mozart was struggling and enjoying only sporadic success with his operas. So does this mean we just need to write the film off as poor history?
No. I think there’s another way to think about the film, that it represents not historical fact, but rather Salieri’s fantasies and inner demons. Screenwriter Peter Shaffer depicts Salieri as being driven by envy of Mozart’s superior talent as a composer. But in the 1780s, few people saw Mozart as the musical genius he is today remembered for being. He failed to win an appointment to any high musical office, and wasn’t even able to get himself appointed as a royal tutor. Some of his operas were successful by the standards of the day, but others rather less so. He wasn’t quite as penniless as the film suggests, but he was constantly forced to borrow money from people. He was undoubtedly a musical innovator, but that may have made many important people shy away from patronizing him. Instead, he was seen more as a former child prodigy, someone whose work was interesting, but perhaps not fully mature. It’s only in retrospect that we can see how important and innovative Mozart truly was.
Furthermore, Salieri was highly acclaimed. He produced more than 35 operas, many (though not all) of which were quite popular. His operas were also quite influential on other musicians in part because of his various innovations, and he was a sought-after teacher; among his most important pupils were Beethoven, Liszt, and Schubert. His appointment of Royal Kapellmeister demonstrates that he was considered one of the great composers of Europe and it’s a measure of his influence at Joseph II’s court. He was also financially successful. Objectively, there’s no reason that Salieri would feel inferior to Mozart.
Unless Salieri simply struggled with feelings of inferiority in later life. The last two decades of his life, unfortunately, saw his compositions gradually fall out of popularity; by the time he died, there were fewer and fewer productions of his operas being staged. In some ways, the tragedy of Salieri’s life was that he outlived the popularity of his day, because tastes were beginning to shift to Mozart’s style. Mozart’s early and mysterious death proved to be a boost to his career; there was far more interest in his music after his death than before it. By the last few years of his life, Salieri may well have felt that Mozart had eclipsed him.
Shaffer captures this nicely right at the opening of Amadeus. The priest (Richard Frank) who visits Salieri in the asylum has some musical training, so Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) plays two of his compositions, which the priest fails to recognize. Then he plays one of Mozart’s, and the priest recognizes it quickly. To a man used to success and popular acclaim, we can imagine that such a situation would have been quite painful.
Abraham as the elderly Salieri
So I’d like to propose that what we see in the film is not meant to be historical at all (in fact Shaffer has said as much). Rather, I see the film as representing Salieri’s fantasy of the past, profoundly colored by his growing sense of personal failure. Salieri is clearly not a reliable narrator (and remember, the whole film is a flashback narrated by Salieri). He depicts Mozart (Tom Hulce) as being far more vulgar and ill-mannered than he actually was. He sees Mozart as mocking him, and upstaging him when Mozart first meets him. Despite this, he also depicts Mozart as liking and trusting him, and turning to him repeatedly for assistance and guidance. It is hard to reconcile these two ideas unless we assume that Salieri is simply not viewing Mozart rationally.
Hulce as the buffoonish Mozart
Similarly, Salieri rewrites his own sexual history. The real Salieri was married, but the cinematic Salieri is unmarried and dedicated to chastity until he abandons it after he grows angry with God. When Constanze Mozart (Elizabeth Berridge) approaches Salieri asking for help for her husband, Salieri tells her to return later that day because he will only help her if she has sex with him. The demand clearly upsets her, but when she returns that evening, he depicts Frau Mozart as being eager to have sex with him; she seems comfortable with the idea, and undresses without being told to, even to the point of baring her breasts. At that point, he humiliates her by summoning a servant and telling him to escort her out. But apparently she never tells Mozart about this incident, since he continues to trust Salieri. Salieri’s version of this event plays more as a male fantasy than as reality. So I propose that this sequence is really a representation of what the elderly Salieri wished had happened, rather than something he did, an expression of an unconsummated desire for Constanze that troubled him.
Likewise his claims of murdering Mozart are erratic. At the start of the film he claims to have killed the great composer, and partway through, he suggests that he struggled to find a way to do the deed. But at the end of the film, he admits to nothing worse than thwarting Mozart’s career and waging psychological warfare against the man. So he denies what he has claimed he has done. Again, I think his claim of murder represents something Salieri wishes he had done, not something we are intended to think he actually did.
Salieri claims that he disguised himself as the Black Messenger, using a costume that Leopold Mozart once wore. But as I related last time, that story is false as well, since the man dressed in grey, not black, and did not wear a mask. But the story of the Grey Messenger was well-known by Salieri’s last years, so Salieri could easily have co-opted it to make himself the man who helped hasten Mozart’s demise.
Salieri in the Black Messenger costume
And, of course, we must remember that Salieri is in an asylum after attempting to cut his throat with a razor. And at the end of the film, he declares himself the “patron saint of mediocrity”, Clearly, this man has serious issues. Viewing him as an unreliable narrator who weaves a literally fantastic story for us makes a good deal of sense.
From battlesthat makeno sense and nobles acting like contemporary millennials to medieval clergymen and witch hunters who just make up the rules as they go and falsehoods that besmirch a real man’s reputation, regular readers of this blog will know that I often call out screenwriters and directors for some of the wild nonsense they make up when they could just tell the actual story. On the surface, you might think that Amadeus (1984, dir. Milos Forman) deserves that treatment for its seemingly bizarre claim that Antonio Salieri anonymously commissioned Mozart’s Requiem Mass as part of a plot to murder him and steal the credit for his work. It seems so implausible that it has to have been invented by Peter Shaffer, the playwright whose play formed the basis for the script.
And yet, it’s almost true.
The Curious History of Mozart’s Requiem Mass
In 1791, Mozart was offered a commission to compose a Requiem Mass; he was paid half up front with the rest being promised on delivery of the finished work. The commission was done through intermediaries so that the commissioner could remain anonymous, but the man who commissioned it was Count Franz von Walzegg, a somewhat eccentric German aristocrat. Walsegg was an amateur musician and very enthusiastic about music; he maintained a group of musicians who performed for him and his friends twice a week. In addition to getting copies of new works of music as they came out, he also liked to anonymously commission works for composers and then pass them off at these private performances as his own work, often hand-copying the scores to add to the verisimilitude of the deception. He liked to challenge his friends to guess who had composed the work they had just heard; his friends, knowing the truth, would play along and be ‘amazed’ when Walsegg finally told them the work was his.
Count von Walsegg
When Walsegg’s wife died in her late 20s, the count, himself only 28, decided to commission a Requiem from Mozart. There is some uncertainty about exactly who Walsegg sent to meet with Mozart; Walsegg told his attorney to arrange it, but the attorney probably sent one of his clerks. Mozart referred to his visitor as the Grey Messenger, because the man was dressed all in grey. It’s not clear whether Mozart understood that Walsegg was the ultimate commissioner or not; he may genuinely not have known whom the work was going to, or he may have simply played along with the ruse to humor his patron. Walsegg’s odd habit was apparently well-known in Viennese circles, so Mozart could certainly have guessed the man’s identity if he thought about it very much.
Mozart promised the Requiem would be completed in 3 months, but it was delayed twice, once by a trip to Prague and then after his return by the premiere of The Magic Flute. The Grey Messenger visited Mozart several times during this period, but Mozart was able to win an extension of an extra month. It was during this final month that Mozart began contemplating his own death and claiming he had been poisoned, at least if we are to believe his widow Constanze’s story about the Requiem. She claimed that he had begun to think that he was actually writing it for himself; as a result, she took the manuscript away from him for a few weeks, until his spirits lifted. This left him rather pressed for time, but then on November 20th, he fell ill. He continued working on the Requiem as long as he was able, but died before he could finish it.
Constanze was eager to see the work completed, because she was in tight financial straits. She permitted a public performance of the unfinished work just two weeks after her husband’s death. Then she arranged for one of Mozart’s close friends, Jacob Eybler, to finish it, but he returned the manuscript to her after only completing one section and adding 8 bars to another, possibly because he felt inadequate for the task. So she passed the manuscript to Franz Süssmayr, who was Mozart’s pupil and assistant but whom Mozart had considerable disdain for. Süssmayr, however, had been with Mozart on his last night, and so might have had known something of Mozart’s intentions for the incomplete portions of the work; he, Constanze, and her sister Sophie all later claimed that this was the case, and the completed work is far superior to anything else Süssmayr produced, so there is good reason for believing these claims. It was Süssmayr who completed the Requiem, although some scholars have detected the hand of other composers in sections of it.
Franz Süssmayr
At this point, Constanze demonstrated that she knew how to play the hand she had been dealt. She gave Walsegg a copy of the finished work (complete with a forged signature), claiming that it was entirely her husband’s work, and got her payment. Exactly how this exchange took place is unknown–did the Grey Messenger contact her, or did she by this point know that Walsegg was the commissioner and contact him? She insisted later that she had no knowledge of the commissioner’s identity, but she is not an entirely reliable witness and clearly lied about various aspects of the manuscript’s history at different points. Regardless of whether she knew of Walsegg’s involvement at this point, she was contacted by the Prussian ambassador, who offered to buy the work for King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia. So she sold it to the Prussians for a very large sum of money, and then turned around and sold it to two other nobles, thus substantially easing her financial problems.
On January 2, 1793, the completed Requiem received its first public performance, in Vienna. It was clearly understood to be Mozart’s work; it was organized as a benefit for Frau Mozart. Antonio Salieri attended the rehearsals, and many of Mozart’s friends celebrated the performance. In December of that same year, Walsegg conducted a performance of the Requiem, claiming it was his, and he repeated this the following February, the anniversary of his wife’s death. But by this point, it was becoming known that the work was actually Mozart’s. To save himself from embarrassment, Walsegg falsely claimed that he had been a student of Mozart and had sent the work to Mozart for approval. He claimed that after Mozart died, Constanze had mistaken the work for one of her husband’s.
In 1799, as Constanze explored the possibility of publishing the Requiem with Mozart’s other works, she revealed to the potential publisher that Süssmayr had completed the work; this was the first public acknowledgement that Mozart was not the sole author. When Walsegg learned of the impending publication, he sent his attorney to confront Frau Mozart, pointing out that she had promised him the only copy of the manuscript and that legally it belonged to him. She lied and told him that the publication was happening from copies of the Requiem that she had no control over, and at that point Walsegg accepted the inevitable and abandoned all pretense of having written the work.
The web of secrecy, half-truths and lies that surrounded the Requiem’s composition and early performances allowed for the emergence of a set of myths around the work. A biography of Mozart issued in 1798 claimed that Mozart had been entirely unaware of the identity of the commissioner, that he fainted numerous times during the composition process, and that he had had forebodings of his own death during the process, among other stories. The same year, Constanze claimed that he had been working on the composition the day he died, that the Grey Messenger had arrived shortly after her husband’s death and claimed the manuscript, and that she never learned the identity of the commissioner. The details about the mysterious Grey Messenger and Mozart’s supposed foreknowledge of his death providing the materials for a wonderful ghost story that helped stir interest in the work.
By this point, rumors were already circulating blaming Salieri for Mozart’s death, although no one seems to have taken them very seriously. But the first person to connect Salieri to the mysterious Grey Messenger was Alexander Pushkin, in his 1831 story “Mozart and Salieri”, which Peter Shaffer subsequently adapted into Amadeus. What Pushkin and Shaffer did was simplify the story of the Requiem’s composition and build it into a more dramatically satisfying narrative by substituting the malevolent Salieri for the vain Walsegg and turning the Grey Messenger into the more ominous Black Messenger.
Obviously, involving Salieri in the story of the Requiem is a substantial deviation from the facts. But the fact that the Requiem Mass was anonymously commissioned by someone who wished to pass it off as his own work is true. It’s a good example of the cliché that historical fact is often more interesting than historical fiction, and one that I wish more screenwriters would try to follow.
Want to Know More
The complex history of the Requiem is related in detail here.
Robert Gutman’s biography Mozart: A Cultural Biographyseeks to place Mozart in a wider context and is widely regarded as the definitive biography of the composer.
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There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, 
A simple introduction to the Massacre is 
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