King Arthur: David Franzoni has a Lot to Answer For

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David Franzoni, Freedom!, King Arthur, Medieval Europe, Picts, Roman Britain, Roman Scotland

After three posts that mostly dealt with the general historical background to King Arthur (2004, dir. Antoine Fuqua, screenplay by David Franzoni), it’s time to actually look at the plot, and now I’ll bring my case for indicting David Franzoni for crimes against geography and assault with a pseudohistorical weapon.

The Northern Frontier

The film takes place in northern Britain, along Hadrian’s Wall. Arthur and his men seem to be stationed at one of the forts dotted along Hadrian’s Wall, which marked the legal extent of Roman Britain. Hadrian’s Wall is the most famous example of a Roman limes, a boundary wall used to separate the Romans from people they did not directly rule. There are at least ten of these structures known, including two that run along the Danube, one in Arabia, and one in Libya. Contrary to popular imagination, however, a limes was not really a towering defensive position like the Great Wall of China; the surviving remains of Hadrian’s Wall are actually quite low to the ground and it would not have been hard for a stealthy band of northern Britons to scale it unseen. The purpose of Hadrian’s Wall was more likely to act as a boundary check-point, controlling the movement of goods and peoples across the boundary and to demonstrate to non-Roman peoples the superiority of Roman engineering (and therefore by extension, military) skills. It would have slowed down a formal invasion and allowed Roman soldiers to send an alarm to one of the more heavily fortified forts along the wall, where substantial garrisons were situated.

Hadrian’s Wall. Note how low to the ground the remains are

Substantial scenes take place at one of the forts. The fort is never explicitly identified in the film, but in Lancelot’s closing voice-over, he identifies the final fight there as being the battle of Badon Hill (a point I had overlooked in my previous post about Germanus—my apologies), so I’m going to call this fort Badon, even though that makes absolutely no sense. Placing Badon on Hadrian’s Wall makes about as much sense as saying that the battle of New Orleans took place in New Jersey, since most of the sites that have been proposed for Badon are well to the south. Some people have suggested that the second battle mentioned by Gildas, the battle of Camlann, took place at Camboglanna, one of the forts on Hadrian’s Wall, but I’ve yet to see any serious argument that Badon was on or near the Wall.

Inside the Badon fort

At the start of the film, the antagonists are the indigenous natives of northern Briton. Historically these people have been referred to as the Picts. But the film instead calls them the ‘Woads’, reportedly because during the script read-through, someone suggested ‘Woads’ sounded cooler. Sigh.

We know the Woads are badasses because right at the start of the film they ambush the carriage bringing Bishop Germanus to Badon and get themselves entirely killed (except for one lucky guy that Arthur decides to spare for no clear reason). So let’s think about this. The Woads live north of the Wall, a heavily protected military frontier. Badon is just south of the Wall. Germanus is traveling up to Badon from the south. Do you notice a problem here? How did the Woads get over the Wall to launch an attack so far to the south? This is typical of the film’s approach to geographical issues, which is that they basically don’t matter at all. (Also, fun fact—carriages won’t be invented for another 1000 years, so they may as well have put Germanus in a humvee.  But see Update.)

After he gets to Badon, Germanus tells Arthur that his men have to go up north of the wall and rescue Marius and his son Alecto (who should be Allectus, but we’ve already established in this blog that movies never get Roman names right. Alecto is the name of a Greek goddess), who happens to be the pope’s favorite godson somehow. Marius is an important Roman who just happens to live north of the Wall, a very long way north as it turns out. Again, let’s think about the geography. The Roman Empire is to the south of the Wall, the hated enemy Woads to the north. Why is Marius, an important Roman, living well to the north of the Wall, in enemy territory? If the Woads dislike the Romans so much, why haven’t they massacred the defenseless Marius? Apparently the Wall and its military fortresses were just randomly plopped somewhere on the British landscape with no regard for who lives where, and Marius accidentally wound up on the bad side and some of the Woads wound up on the good side.

 

And Then There’s the Saxons

To complicate things, the villainous Saxons have landed an invasion force three days north of the Wall and are marching south to conquer Britain. Now, historically, the Saxons began their invasion well south of the Wall, pretty much the opposite end of the whole island actually, but failing to make historical sense is pretty much a given for this film, so by this point I had mostly gotten numb to that problem. But this makes absolutely no geographical sense either. If the Saxons are invading by boat, why land themselves such a long ways to the north and then march south to a major fortification which they will have to conquer before they can then march further south to conquer Britain, when ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS LAND THEIR INVASION FORCE SOUTH OF THE WALL?

The entire plot of this film falls apart if the leader of the bad guys (or anyone in the audience) just bothers to look at a goddam map. This is like making a film where Canada decides to invade the United States via Mexico. You see how absurd that is? Canadians are too polite to invade anyone. But David Franzoni won’t let little things like geography or manners stop his plot.

Invading Saxons

The villainous Saxons are led by the even more villainous Saxon leader Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård). We know the Saxons are villainous because they rape women. We know Cerdic is even more villainous because raping woman is too nice for him. He wants his men to kill everyone instead because he doesn’t want them to produce weak children. So he kills his man for being nice enough to rape someone. (Why is it that Hollywood bad guys have to demonstrate their badguyness by killing the bad guys who work for them? Sure, it establishes a hierarchy of badguyness with the main villain at the top, but it seems to me that it would also be a motivation for his men to run away or try to kill him.) Cerdic’s son, Cynric (Til Schweiger) challenges him, and Cerdic once again demonstrates his badguyness by telling Cynric that the next time he challenges his old man, he better have a sword in his hand. Unfortunately, what this really establishes for the audience is that Cynric, who logically ought to be number two on the badguyness hierarchy, is really just a wuss.

Nothing says ‘villainous Saxon’ like furry shoulder pads.

But it does create a situation where the Woads turn out to not be such bad guys at all. They’re actually good guys who just happen to like launching sneak attacks over a heavily fortified frontier to massacre innocent traveling bishops.

The Woads’ lack of genuine badguyness is discovered when Arthur and his men get to Marius’ villa up north. Marius turns out to be an asshole. We know he’s an asshole because he doesn’t want to leave, despite the Saxon army heading his way, and because he’s confiscating all his peasants’ grain and letting them starve. Arthur tells the peasants they’re all free, because Arthur is a good guy and freedom is a good thing. The basic purpose here is to recycle the cliché of the good guy being ordered to rescue someone useless and stupid because that makes the meaningless death of most of the good guys more poignant somehow. The movie’s basically a shitty remake of Escape from New York with Arthur as a more freedom-loving Snake Plissken.

Arthur notices that a couple of Christian priests are bricking up a building, so naturally he insists on forcing his way in, despite the priests claiming this is a holy place. What he discovers instead is that the priests have been torturing Woads there, including a cute moppet whose primary purpose is to remind Arthur of his own unhappy childhood, and Guinevere (Keira Knightley), who eventually turns out to be the daughter of Arthur’s archnemesis the Woad leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane). As usual, this makes no sense. Why are Christian priests torturing people and claiming that the torture chamber is a holy place? Given that the film has already established a contrast between the good British Christianity of Arthur and Pelagius and the bad Roman Christianity of Germanus, making these British Christians horrible people just undermines the dichotomy Franzoni was trying to establish and leaves Arthur as the only Christian who believes anything nice, because freedom and not torturing people are nice.

King Arthur, or SCA event? King Arthur, because if it were an SCA event, the outfits would be more authentic.

The geography, by the way, has gotten worse. Arthur discovers that the Saxons are to the south of them (still north of the Wall, but south of them). They landed three days’ north of the Wall (so apparently Marius’ villa is REALLY far north in Scotland), and have apparently just been hanging out for three days, since Arthur has gotten further north than them without them getting anywhere near the Wall. And because the Saxons are to the south, Arthur is going to have to lead Marius’ people and the rescued Woads over the mountains to the east. The major mountain range in Scotland is the Grampians, which separates the Scottish Highlands from central and southern Scotland. So evidently Marius’ villa is west of Inverness or Loch Ness, and the Saxons, who are coming from the east (having left the region around the mouth of the Rhine river), have sailed northwards around Britain and landed on the western side of Scotland, maybe around Oban or Fort William. They can’t have landed on the east side, because going eastward over the Grampians would still put Arthur’s group north of the Saxons. So apparently Cerdic lands around Fort William, camps out for several days while planning to attack a defenseless villa, marches northeastward up the Great Glen toward the villa despite having the intention of conquering southern Britain, and then discovers that Arthur has gotten Marius out of there. So he then chases Arthur over the Grampians, with the result that Arthur gets south of the Saxons and gets back to Badon before the Saxons do.

It’s not just that the plot would fall apart if the Saxons looked at a map; the plot would fall part if David Franzoni looked at a map. Why the hell is Marius living so far into enemy territory, and why did the Saxons invade western Scotland? Why go north to go south? Because Franzoni isn’t going to let a little thing like geography get in the way of telling a not-very-good story.

After Arthur leads the defenseless peasants over the mountains and fights a battle on a frozen river (because it’s winter in Scotland, but not at Badon), Guinevere helps broker an alliance between Arthur and Merlin to fight their common enemy the Saxons. What Merlin gets out of this isn’t clear, because Arthur has a grand total of 5 men under his command, so he’s basically suckering Merlin into giving him a Woadish army when all the Woads have to do is keep out the way of the Saxons as they head south to plunder Roman Britain. The Woads, after all, are brilliant woodsmen whom even Arthur can’t catch. And instead of fighting among the forests of Scotland, which offer perfect cover for the hit-and-run guerilla tactics the Woads are so good at, and instead of using Badon as a strong defensible position that would multiply the power of his greatly outnumbered forces, Arthur decides the smart thing to do is opt for an open field battle next to the Wall. Why does anyone think this man is a skilled military leader? A ten year old with a pile of snowballs and a mound of snow to hide behind demonstrates more tactical sense than Arthur shows through most of this film.

Woadish trebuchets, cuz why not?

And so the film climaxes in the Battle of What’s In Your Wallet, in which hordes of villainous Saxon barbarians charge across a smoke-filled field to fight a few brilliant horsemen who spend most of their time fighting on foot while Woadish archers, including a leather bikini clad Guinevere, fire arrows at them without ever hitting any of the good guys. I suppose in that situation being insanely outnumbered is actually sort of helpful, because the odds of hitting a good guy are small. Oh, and the Woads also have trebuchets, while the Saxons have crossbows. I’ve seen Lego battles with a greater concern for historical accuracy.

You can’t be a Woad without wearing some woad.

Then Arthur wins and Merlin marries him to Guinevere and the happy couple live happily ever after, and the Arthurian legends live happily ever after, and history lives happily ever after. Everyone winds up happy. But not geography. Geography can go fuck itself.

Update: In response to a question from a reader, I did a little more research into Roman transportation. I had been under the impression that while the Romans used a variety two- and four-wheeled wagons, they did not have a covered, four-wheeled person transport with a suspension system–what i would consider a carriage. However, it turns out that an archaeologist working in Bulgaria in the 1960s did uncover the remains of what he reconstructed to be exactly such a vehicle. This is literally the only known example of such a vehicle, but it did exist, and the vehicle used in King Arthur looks not unlike a reconstruction of it in a Cologne museum. So I have to give the film credit for getting that detail basically right, although whether such a vehicle was still in use in the 5th century and on the edge of the Empire is probably debatable.

The Cologne reconstruction

Want to Know More?
No, you don’t. But if you really must, King Arthuris available on Amazon.

Also, think about picking up this: Britain and Ireland Wall Map (tubed) British Isles

Barbarossa: Braveheart in Italy

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Alberta da Giussano, Battle of Legnano, Frederick I Barbarossa, Freedom!, Holy Roman Empire, Lombard League, Medieval Europe, Medieval Germany, Military Stuff, Raz Degan

“Italy. 12^th century AD. Northern Italy is ruled over by a German emperor Frederick I Hohenstaufen, known as ‘Barbarossa’. His dream is to conquer also Central and Southern Italy, thus reviving the ancient empire founded by Charlemagne. But in the North a young man from Milan has formed an army of 900 young men from different cities: the ‘Company of Death’. The young man’s name is Alberto Da Giussano. His dream is to defeat the Emperor and to regain freedom for the Northern lands.”

That’s the prologue text to Barbarossa (aka Sword of War, 2009, dir. Renzo Martinelli), a modest little Italian film about Emperor Frederick I’s conflict with the Lombard League, an alliance of northern Italian city-states seeking to achieve a measure of autonomy within the Holy Roman Empire. That prologue text is also a reasonable summary of most of the film, as it turns out.

The Holy Roman Empire

The film focuses on one of the more confusing elements of medieval political history, the complex relationship between northern Italy and the Holy Roman Empire. To simplify a fairly complex history, on Christmas Day, 800 AD, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the Romans, an action that was seen as reviving the western half of the old Roman Empire. When his grandsons dismembered his empire (usually termed the Carolingian Empire), one grandson got the eastern portion, compromising a large chunk of what is today western Germany. Another grandson got the imperial crown and an awkward strip of land running from the Low Countries to northern and central Italy. But that state broke apart over the next generation or two, with the result that the imperial crown eventually passed to the German portion of the old Empire, and with it a claim to rule northern and central Italy. This conglomeration of Germany and much of Italy eventually came to known as the Holy Roman Empire (whose name was clearly chosen to confuse as many 21^st century college history students as possible, at least to judge from the exams I get).

The Holy Roman Empire

Unfortunately, imperial control of the Italian portions of the Empire was generally a problem. The emperor’s powerful base was always in Germany, and the Alps were a significant obstacle to the effective extension of control over northern Italy. Additionally, northern Italy had a large number of city-states that resented imperial authority and preferred to be as autonomous as possible. A further complication was that much of central Italy was a state ruled by the Pope (termed ‘the Papal States’), and the popes also naturally wanted to be as politically independent as possible. And thanks to the precedent set in 800, the pope had the unchallenged right to perform the imperial coronation that legitimized the emperor’s claim to his title.

The result was a centuries-long simmering conflict in which the Holy Roman Emperors sought to control northern and central Italy as much as possible while the pope and the various city-states of the region wanted to minimize that control. But naturally, some people in these city-states felt their best interests lay in supporting the emperor rather than their fellow citizens. After the mid-11^th century, there was a growing tendency for the pope and the emperor to be political opponents. The result was a long series of wars of varying intensity and a shifting constellation of political factions supporting one side or the other.

In 1158, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) succeeded in forcing the city-state of Milan into submission and convened the Diet of Roncaglia, a meeting of imperial representatives that declared the emperor to have the right to impose taxes and tolls over northern Italy; Barbarossa also begin to replace the podestas, the governing magistrates, of various northern Italian communities. The Milanese refused to accept this ruling and resisted, but Barbarossa defeated the city in 1162 and ordered it completely destroyed and its residents scattered in all directions. The Milanese, however, managed to retain enough communality identity, however, that they were able to reform.

Frederick I Barbarossa

In all of this, one of Barbarossa’s most important allies was Cremona, a hated rival of Milan. But Barbarossa unwittingly alienated the Cremonese by demanding hostages from them. As a result of this, Cremona began to nurture a conspiracy of resistance to the emperor that led to the formation of the Lombard League in 1164, an alliance of various city-states in Lombardy (roughly, northern Italy). The idea behind the League was that the various member states would avoid attacking each other, and to provide military and diplomatic support. In 1167, a re-established Milan joined the League.

The Lombard League

The emergence of the Lombard League was a disaster for Barbarossa, who was no longer able to play off the various member cities against each other, and he was forced to withdraw from Italy, despite having been able to force Pope Alexander III to submit to him. But he returned in 1174, and enjoyed initial success, conquering the smaller towns of Susa and Asti. But then he laid siege of Alessandria but was unable to take it; Milanese forces helped force him to retreat.

Frederick received German reinforcements, including a very large force of knights. Frederick rode to meet them, and then led them back toward Pavia, where his main force was located, but the Milanese intercepted him before the two armies could meet up, and the result was the Battle of Legnano. The Milanese had built a carroccio, a traditional battle-wagon used by many of the Lombard cities. The carroccio carried a standard for the city, as well as an altar, and it acted a focal point and command center for the Milanese troops, most of whom were infantry. In particular, the Milanese employed a unit of infantry with the rather dramatic name of the “Company of Death”. According to Milanese tradition, the company was founded by Alberto da Giussano, a notary and podesta of Milan and included 900 men. Historians are now mostly agreed that da Giussano was probably a fictional figure created by 14^th century Milanese authors, and the Company of Death may have had as few as 300 men.

Frederick succeeded in driving off the Milanese cavalry, but was unable to break the infantry that was formed up around the carroccio. Although high medieval warfare generally favored knights on horseback, infantry armed with pole-arms was always an effective response to cavalry, as long as that infantry was able to stay information. The Milanese, inspired by a desire to avenge the destruction of their city, had reportedly sworn oaths to die fighting Barbarossa and so were determined to stand their ground and not lose their standard. The stalemate was eventually broken when the Milanese cavalry reformed and teamed up with a cavalry force from Brescia. Frederick’s forces were badly defeated; his bodyguards and standard-bearer were killed and for several days it was thought that Barbarossa himself had perished, until he showed up at Pavia.

Legnano was a turning-point for Frederick. Although he was able to build an modest alliance with Pope Alexander, he was no longer in a position to enforce his authority over Lombardy. Finally in 1183, he signed a treaty with the Lombard League that conceded to them the right to elect their own podestas.

A bust of Frederick I

As a result, Legnano holds an important place in Italian history. In the 19^th century, it became a rallying cry for the movement to unify Italy. For much of the 20^th century, there was a Legnano infantry division in the Italian army. The fictional Alberto da Giussano and an allegorical warrior named ‘Legnano’ have both served as symbols of Italian victory over a foreign invader, despite the fact that Barbarossa had a centuries-old claim to be the legitimate ruler of the region and so was not exactly an outsider (although, as a German, he was most definitely a foreigner ethnically).

 

Barbarossa

Despite the title of the film, Frederick I (Rutger Hauer) is really more of a supporting character in this film. He and his wife Beatrice I (Cécile Cassel) spend much of their time organizing their forces or leading attacks against various cities. His goal, he explains, is to pacify northern Italy and then move on to conquer Sicily so he can re-unite what he calls the “Universal Empire”, presumably the old Roman Empire, even though as ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick could already have claimed to be ruling the Roman state. (Eventually, Frederick married his son and heir Henry to the aunt of King William of Sicily; when William died without sons, Henry inherited Sicily and his son, Frederick II, inherited both states, although the papacy did everything it could to prevent him from unifying the Italian peninsula.)

Rutger Hauer, looking very imperial

Early on, Frederick has a meeting with his distant cousin the visionary nun Hildegarde of Bingen, who tells him “Beware the water, beware the scythe. The scythe means defeat, the water means death.” The question of what this prophecy means hangs over the whole film. The first half turns out to be a prediction of his defeat at Legnano, The second half, as the epilogue text tells us, refers to the fact that decades later, Frederick drowned during the Third Crusade, having made the mistake of trying to swim in his armor when he was in his late 60s.

Instead, most of the film focuses on the story of Alberto da Giussano (Raz Degan), whom the film presents as very much a real historical figure. He’s the son of a smith, rather than being a notary, who comes to hate Barbarossa after the emperor conquers and levels the city in 1162, killing both of Alberto’s unfortunate brothers in the process. But the real villain of the piece is not Barbarossa, who is actually treated quite fairly in the film. Instead, Alberto must contend with Snidely Whiplash Siniscalco Barozzi (F. Murray Abraham), a treacherous Milanese magistrate who thinks that Milan should support Barbarossa and basically serves to embody the opposite of whatever proper moral choice Alberto makes.

Raz Degan as Alberto da Giussano

Barozzi is a fictional character, as far as I can tell, but he can reasonably be seen as a representative of all the Milanese who wanted to accept the emperor as their legitimate overlord. He’s thoroughly demonized, of course, because in action films actual nuance is not acceptable in bad guys; villains must be evil with a capital Eve.

Unfortunately, the film invents two sisters, Eleanora (Kasia Smutniak) and Tessa (Frederica Martinelli). Eleanora, who loves Alberto, is a psychic; she has visions of the future that always come true. Apparently the film has forgotten that it’s supposd to be history and not fantasy, a common problem with movies about the medieval and ancient past. Barozzi is deeply in lust with Tessa, who hates him to the point of eventually becoming a nun to get away from him; unfortunately that works out badly for her, because Barozzi isn’t the kind of villain who will let a little thing like holy orders stop him. And when it doesn’t work out, he decides to burn Eleanora at a witch.

After the destruction of Milan, Alberto becomes a focus on political resistance and the enduring Milanese identity. It is he who essentially persuades the Milanese to rebuild their city. Later, he forges a bunch of iron rings and distributes them to his supporters, who declare themselves the Company of Death, because they’re rather die free than live under Frederick. Then he rallies men from other cities to his cause and persuades them to form the Lombard League to oppose the emperor (remember, Milan wasn’t a founding member of the League.) Everyone gets to shout “freedom!” a lot, because freedom is a lot like moms, apple pie and kittens. Who doesn’t like having some? As the film puts it, “to live one day in total freedom is worth living 100 days in total slavery.” Or did he say 100 years? That would be much more effective rhetorically. The point is that a smidgen of freedom is much better than a bunch of slavery, whatever the exchange rate.

A re-creation of the Milanese carroccio

And then we get to the battle of Legnano, and things get silly. Apparently the actual events, with lots of determined Milanese infantrymen rallying around the carroccio slowly defeating the German cavalry isn’t enough for this film. It needs to be a flashier victory. So Alberto gets this brilliant idea. The infantry can’t kill the knights because the knights are too high up. So to level the playing field, he’s going to put his soldiers in the back of literal wagons and arm them with scythes. That way they’ll be able to slit the throats of the German knights really easily! And of course it works, because….well, I guess because the Milanese are the good guys. Even after the trick is revealed, the German knights just keep riding past the scythe-wagons because apparently their horses only ride in one direction and at one speed, and because none of the knights are smart enough to think that maybe if they attack the unarmored wagon drivers the whole tactic would go straight into a ditch. So the knights just keep riding to the slaughter until the whole thing degenerates into an infantry battle. Alberto catches Barozzi and slits his throat really, really slowly to avenge his dead brothers and loved ones.

Then the epilogue text tells us that Frederick was thought killed and then mysteriously showed up three days later at Pavia. Eleanora totally didn’t get burned as a witch after all because Barozzi’s men didn’t see the clever plot twist coming when they put two dark-haired women in the same cell and then burned one of them with a bag over her head without thinking to ask her name. This serves as an excuse for everyone to shout ‘Freedom!” again, because I guess freedom means never having to cremate your wife. Instead, the film tells us that Alberto and Eleanora lived a long life together and had several children.

 

The Politics of Barbarossa

The film draws heavily from Mel Gibson’s Braveheart at certain points, particularly with its emphasis on people shouting “freedom!”. Alberto is Wallace and Frederick I is Edward I. But Barozzi is also sort of Edward I, because he’s got this evil lust for the virtuous women of the story. Eleanora gets to be Murron, metaphorically coming back from the dead instead of literally, and she gets to be supernatural after all, because all of her visions come true with 100% accuracy. Perhaps the most obvious comparison of  the Battle of Legnano with the Battle of Stirling Bridgeless, both of which are won with a trick that depends on the good guys not revealing the trick too early. So the film includes a scene in which Alberto gets to shout “Hold! Not yet! Now!” which is pretty damn close to Mel Gibson’s line when his men are about to receive a cavalry charge.

Once I saw the parallels with Braveheart, I immediately began noticing that just like the Scottish movie, Barbarossa also has a meta-level dealing with contemporary politics. Braveheart was filmed in the lead-up to the vote over whether to re-establish the Scottish parliament. Barbarossa doesn’t have quite such an obvious political event to connect to, but it strikes me as more than a coincidence that Alberto da Giussano has been taken as the symbol of the Lega Nord (“Northern League”), a major regional party in northern Italy that advocates for the secession of northern Italy from the rest of Italy, and failing that, for greater independence of the northern cities. The film’s focus on the historicity of the fictional da Giussano, its emphasis on the importance of Milan in the founding of the Lombard League (Milan is the headquarters of the Lega Nord) and its championing of freedom! and independence from control outside of Northern Italy all seem to point toward the film having considerable sympathy with the Lega Nord’s political goals.

Milan’s statue of Alberto da Giussano

The film also occasionally dabbles in downright fascist symbolism. The notion of strength through unity is central of da Giussano’s triumph over Barbarossa, both in organizing the Lombard League against him and in keeping his men under tight control at Legnano, but it also happens to be the essential principle of fascism. At one point, as Alberto is trying to persuade people to join the Company of Death, he resorts to having a man try to break a stick, which he does easily, and then try to break a whole bundle of sticks, which he can’t. This bundle of sticks that symbolizes strength through unity is very close to the fasces, the old Roman symbol of strength through unity that Mussolini used as the basis for his theory of fascism (the term directly derives from the fasces).

Barbarossa isn’t a bad film, nor is it a particularly good film. As I said, it’s derivative of Braveheart, which employs many of the same themes more successfully, although it avoids the Scottish film’s rather offensive sexual politics. It’s nice to see a film made about one of the less famous moments in medieval history, and despite its faults, it gets the sequence of events and facts basically correct, apart from its insistence that Alberto da Giussano was a real person who played a critical role in the founding of the Lombard League. The subplots involving Eleanora and Tessa are boring and predictable, as is the film’s insistance that freedom can only be uttered at the top of one’s lungs. And its depiction of Legnano is a truly unfortunate side-trip into Silly Land. But I’ve certainly seen much worse films about the Middle Ages.

Want to Know More?

Barbarossa is available at Amazon under its US title, Sword Of War.

Medieval Italian history can be sort of confusing for the uninitiated because there isn’t a single political narrative, the way there is for, say medieval England. Every major town was its own state, and that makes telling an over-arching historical narrative a bit tricky. I found Edward Burman’s Emperor to Emperor: Italy Before the Renaissance (History and Politics)to be a good place to start when I was traveling in Italy.

If you’re interested in the history of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the classic works on it is Alfred Haverkamp’s Medieval Germany 1056-1273, although obviously it only covers part of the Empire’s history. I don’t actually know any good English-language works on Barbarossa; if anyone wants to suggest one I’ll be glad to take a look at it.

Braveheart: Not Quite What We’d Expect to Hear Before a Battle

Tags

Battle of Falkirk, Braveheart, Braveheart Speech, Freedom!, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Randall Wallace, William Wallace

Mel Gibson’s William Wallace is famous for giving a stirring speech. Before the battle of Stirling Bridge, he gives this somewhat famous speech in which he tells his troops that they are fighting for freedom, although he never explains what freedom means, except that it can’t be taken away.

In reality, we don’t actually know what he said before the battle of Stirling Bridge. Since he wasn’t the main commander, he probably didn’t make any sort of address to the troops as a whole, but he might have said something to his own men. So the speech we get in the film is entirely the product of screenwriter Randall Wallace’ imagination. It’s his idea of what Wallace would have said if he were talking to a bunch of late-20th century Americans watching a movie about medieval Scotland.

So Gibson’s Wallace is famous for a speech the real Wallace didn’t make. As it happens, the real Wallace is famous for a battle speech that he reportedly gave before the battle of Falkirk. An English source, the Flores Historiarum (“The Flowers of History”), has the following to say about Wallace at Falkirk:

“when [Wallace] had collected an army of Scots in the battle of Falkirk against the King of England, and had seen that he could not resist the powerful army of the king, [he] said to the Scots, “Behold I have brought you into a ring, now carol and dance as well as you can,” and so fled himself from the battle, leaving his people to be slain by the sword…”

It’s hard to know how historically accurate this quote is. The author of this portion of the Flores is unknown, but he was almost certainly an English monk at Westminster, writing in the early 14th century. So it’s possible that the source of this quote was someone present at Falkirk, most likely on the English side. But it could also just be derisive gossip among the English. The author is pretty clearly hostile to the Scots; he also refers to Wallace as a “son of Belial” and mentions the various atrocities Wallace committed during his campaign against the English.So our source for this quote is not exactly an impartial commentator. On the other hand, the colloquial comparison of a battle to a party with singing and dancing rings true.

Nevertheless, this quote reputedly by Wallace is quite famous in Britain. It circulates in many forms

“I have brought you to the ring, now dance if you can.”

“I have brought you to the ring, now dance the best you can.”

“I have brought you to the ring, hop if you can.”

“I have brought you to the revel, now see if you can dance.”

“I have brocht ye to the ring, now see gif ye can dance.”

What all of these variations are expressing is the idea, which seems true, that Wallace did not want to fight at Falkirk, but his men insisted on a confrontation with the English.  The quotes capture a sense of weary resignation and Wallace’ awareness that his forces were not strong enough to defeat the English.

It’s pretty obvious why Braveheart leaves out this famous quote. It’s not exactly the sort of rousing speech we would expect to hear a general give his troops. In fact, it’s rather demotivating and raises the possibility that Wallace lost at Falkirk because he wasn’t a very inspiring general. Furthermore, as I said, it clearly expresses the idea that Wallace didn’t want to fight, which is not the way the film wants to depict Wallace. Gibson’s Wallace is eager for battle, makes a suicidal charge at Edward, and has to be dragged off the field, when in reality, Wallace fled the field when his men were clearly losing. That was the smart, tactical choice to make in that situation, but to modern audiences it smacks strongly of cowardice.

So rather than choosing to show audiences the complexity of the situation Wallace was dealing with at Falkirk or show him struggling with an all-too-human sense of despair, the film falls back on a standard Hollywood trope of Heroic Individuality, in which the hero fights to the bitter end, even when doing so is foolish and pointless.

This, to me, is a good example of what I find so frustrating about Hollywood historical films. Randall Wallace and Mel Gibson had a chance to depict the complicated choices and emotions that the real William Wallace was dealing with. They had an opportunity to explore a real man dealing with real problems and trying to make the best of a bad situation. In other words, they had a chance to show this historical figure as a real human being. Instead, they went for a simplistic cliché that offers no nuance and no real life lesson for the audience and simply relies on empty sentiment and a caricature of  masculinity as being about nothing but brute force and raw determination.

On the other hand, I can see why Scottish nationalists prefer Wallace’ made up speech to the one widely attributed to him. It’s definitely the more inspiring speech, and it’s one that certainly can be applied to the modern debate on Scottish independence. Both the Yes and No sides have made Braveheart an issue, with claims that the film’s macho attitude is part of the reason that more Scottish men than women favor independence. Others have disputed these claims. But if there’s any truth behind the claims, I find it unfortunate that some Scots might make a major political choice based on a Hollywood fantasy of a Scottish hero rather than on the actual man.

Braveheart: The Scottish Movie

Tags

Braveheart, Edward I, Falkirk, Freedom!, Hugh Cressingham, Medieval Europe, Medieval Scotland, Mel Gibson, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Robert Bruce, Stirling Bridge, William Wallace

When Mel Gibson released his Braveheart (1995, dir. Mel Gibson), it proved a worldwide hit. It earned five Academy Awards, and became probably the most successful film about the Middle Ages ever made. Almost 20 years after the fact, a very sizable percentage of my students have seen it. It is also one of the most historically-inaccurate films ever made and a film largely reviled by professional medievalists. Like 300, we’re gonna be feasting on this film for multiple posts. So let’s begin, shall we?

The Scottish Wars of Independence

The political circumstances around Wallace’s rebellion are extremely complex, and can only be summarized here. In 1286, the Scottish king Alexander made the mistake of riding his horse down a rocky slope during a storm, breaking his neck in the process. He left no direct heirs other than a young grand-daughter who died 4 years later, which triggered a major political crisis in Scotland. 13 different nobles put forward claims to the Scottish throne. The two leading contenders were John Balliol and Robert Bruce (often incorrectly termed ‘Robert the Bruce’, a corruption of his French name, Robert de Brus).

Because Scotland was heading for a civil war over this issue, the Scottish nobility invited Edward I of England to arbitrate the dispute. Edward demanded that all of the competitors acknowledge him as the overlord of Scotland. Most of them reluctantly accepted this demand, which was not as outrageous as it sounds today, since Edward’s great-grandfather Henry II had enjoyed this position; in Edward’s view, he was simply claiming a right that had slipped over the past two reigns. In 1292, Edward issued a ruling in favor of John Balliol, a ruling accepted by a majority of the Scottish nobility.

A portrait thought to represent Edward I

In the years following, Edward treated Balliol as a vassal rather than an equal, and eventually in 1296, Balliol renounced his homage. Edward responded by invading southern Scotland and defeating the Scots at the battle of Dunbar. Balliol surrendered soon after. Edward deposed him and sent him into captivity, and proceeded to take control of much of Scotland.

The Scots, understandably, disliked this, and bristled at English rule. In 1297, rebellions broke out in numerous parts of Scotland. Andrew de Moray (or Andrew Murray) seized control of Moray in northern Scotland and began conquering northeastern Scotland in the name of Balliol. About the same time, William Wallace rebelled and killed the sheriff of Lanarkshire in southern Scotland. Wallace’ rebellion struggled to catch up to Moray’s lead; it’s important to realize that at this point, Moray was the leader of the movement, not Wallace.

Edward responded by sending troops into Scotland. He also sent his vassal Robert Bruce, but Bruce chose to side with the rebels. On September 11^th, 1297, the English forces, led by John de Warenne and Hugh Cressingham, encountered the joint forces of Moray and Wallace at Stirling Bridge. The Scots took up a position on boggy ground at the north end of the bridge over the River Forth. A sizeable advance force of English infantry and several hundred cavalry under the leadership of Cressingham advanced over the bridge, but then got slowed down by the boggy ground. The Scottish forces seized control of the north end of the bridge and effectively cut the advance force off from the rest of the army. Because of the narrowness of the bridge, the English were unable to get the rest of their army across the river, with the result that the advance force was slaughtered. Warenne chose to retreat, ordering the destruction of the bridge. The unfortunate Cressingham was killed and his body flayed; legend holds that Wallace had a baldrick made out of his skin. Andrew Moray suffered fatal injuries in the battle and died a few weeks later, leaving Wallace as the dominant figure in the war. Wallace invaded northern England and plundered it. After that, he was knighted and appointed Guardian of Scotland.

Modern Stirling. Note the river–it’s going to be important.

Chris Brown, in his William Wallace: The True Story of Braveheart, offers a somewhat different interpretation of the battle based on the idea that the bridge opened out onto a narrow spit of land between two bends in the river. In his view, what the Scots did was simply occupy the neck of the spit, preventing the English from continuing their crossing and forcing the cavalry back into the infantry. In this view, it was not the Scots who prevented the cavalry from retreating, but the English infantry and the narrowness of the bridge.  It’s a plausible scenario. The chief problem is that archaeologists have not yet identified the location of the bridge, which makes a definitive interpretation of the battle difficult. There is also disagreement over whether the English made a second attempt at crossing the bridge or not.

This is essentially Brown’s reconstruction of the battle. Other reconstructions put the bridge at the bend by the word ‘river’

The primary Scottish tactic during the war was the pike schiltrom (sometimes called a ‘hedgehog’). This was a formation in which a large number of men armed with pikes (essentially long spears) positioned in a circular or square formation with men facing outward in all directions. This presents a wall of pikes no matter what direction the schiltrom is approached from, and since horses will not run into an unmoving object, it provided very good defense against the dominant knightly cavalry of the 13^th century. At Stirling Bridge, the Scottish pikemen charged to the bridge and then formed up a schiltrom, thus effectively separating the two halves of the English army. (If you prefer Brown’s reconstruction, they formed their schiltrom at the neck of the spit.)

However, the schiltrom was essentially a static, defensive formation. Once it had formed up, it could not move quickly because it was only effective as long as it maintained its outward-facing orientation; to move, men on one side would have to walk backwards while keeping in formation. Under Brown’s reconstruction, it could have advanced slowly, since it would not have had to defend its rear, but even if it was entirely forward-facing, it would have to maintain its close formation.

The schiltrom was part of the so-called Infantry Revolution of the 14th century; in the decades after Wallace, it was to help drastically reduce the effectiveness of cavalry. But Wallace and his men were at the forefront of this development, before people had really figured out how to best use pikes.

Stirling Bridge hurt Edward’s war effort, but it was hardly a decisive battle. In the long run, it changed very little strategically. In 1298, Edward came north with another army. Initially, Wallace adopted guerrilla tactics, harassing Edward’s forces but not giving battle. Edward contemplated falling back to Edinburgh but then he got word that Wallace was encamped at Falkirk just a few miles away. Wallace seems to have wanted to retreat from the English forces, which substantially outnumbered his troops, but his men, apparently grown overconfident, insisted on fighting. Wallace took up a position between a woods and a small river. Before the battle, Wallace is reported to have told his men, “I have brought you to the (dancing) ring, hop (dance) if you can.” Not exactly an inspiring speech.

Wallace’ infantry were formed into schiltroms, supplemented by a modest force of cavalry and archers. Edward had a significant force of cavalry and a large number of longbowmen, as well as a sizeable force of infantry.

The English cavalry scattered the Scottish archers but could not penetrate the schiltroms. The Scottish cavalry attempted a counter-attack, but were badly outnumbered by the English cavalry and broke and fled. Then Edward brought forward his archers and proceeded to demolish the schiltroms, which were unable to respond effectively to missile fire without losing their formation. Once the Scottish pikemen had been substantially thinned out, the cavalry charged in and finished them off. Wallace fled into the woods. His reputation ruined, he resigned the Guardianship of Scotland.

The second phase of Falkirk, after the Scottish archers and cavalry were dispersed

Over the next several years, Edward gradually got the upper hand in Scotland. Bruce submitted to Edward in 1301. In 1304, after Wallace was defeated again in a minor encounter, most of the Scottish leadership surrendered, although Wallace did not. Finally in 1305, Wallace was captured near Glasgow. He was put on trial, found guilty, and publicly executed; he was hanged, cut down while still alive, emasculated, disemboweled, beheaded, and cut into four pieces. His head was put on a spike at the Tower Bridge, and his limbs were sent to Scotland for display. That brought Wallace’ rebellion to an end, but not the Wars of Independence.

It’s important to realize that there is no evidence that William Wallace was a particularly skilled general. He only ever fought two major battles, and the victory at Stirling Bridge may have been due as much to Moray’s leadership as Wallace’. He was more successful at guerrilla warfare than open-field battles. At best, Stirling Bridge suggests that he was capable of finding a intelligent way to minimize the English advantage, but attacking when the enemy is disorganized and in a bad position does not require particular genius, just the ability to take advantage of an opportunity. He was smart enough to realize that he was unlikely to win at Falkirk, but lacked the leadership skills to get his men to obey him. In the end, Wallace was a failure as a general; his major contribution to Scottish history was in helping start the process of resistance to English rule, not in delivering a major victory.

Braveheart’s Battle of Stirling Bridge

Braveheart offers versions of both Stirling Bridge and Falkirk, but they’re very different from the historical battles. The first battle takes place on a small plain with low hills and a forest behind the English. There is no river or bridge in sight, and the ground is firm, rather than boggy. Wallace (Moray never even appears in the film) arrays his infantry in a simple line. He instructs his small cavalry force to ride off; in reality this is a flanking maneuver, but it’s intended to trick the English into thinking the cavalry has fled. The English command a mixed force of cavalry, archers, and infantry.

I know there’s a river around here somewhere…

The English commander (who I’m going to assume is  Hugh de Cressingham; I’ve watched this movie several times and I’m never clear on this question, but perhaps I’ve just missed something) orders his archers to open fire on the Scottish position, who are taunting them and flashing their genitals at them. The archers inflict a few casualties, but the Scottish miraculously parry most of the arrows with their shields. This is extremely unlikely.

After a second round of Scottish taunting and English arrows failing to achieve very much, Wallace’ cavalry rides off and Cressingham orders a cavalry charge (which is done with a properly dressed line, in contrast to Olivier’s Henry V). The Scots, however, have a trick up their kilts; they have secretly brought pikes with them, which are laid on the ground where the English don’t see them. Thus the cavalry winds up charging not a disorganized mass of general infantry troops but a pike wall that kills their horses and shatters their charge. The Scots massacre the English cavalry, at which point Cressingham panics and orders the infantry to charge in and a formless brawl ensues as both sides charge each other. Then the Scottish cavalry reappears, and the English forces are completely routed; Cressingham is decapitated in battle.

Could a battle like this have happened around 1300? Yes, given a few assumptions. One of the basic rules of medieval warfare is that the side that advances its infantry is at a disadvantage, since the infantry is likely to lose formation (you can see this when the two infantries charge each other at a full run). So the Scots taunt the English in an effort to get them to advance. Instead, Cressingham orders his longbowmen to attack the Scots, who as infantry are going to be particularly vulnerable to archery (they either have to stand their ground and take the hits or advance and risk losing formation). After two flights the English are winning; the Scots are slowly taking casualties and have done no harm to the English. Cressingham’s obvious tactic is to continue exactly what he’s doing because it’s working.

But then we reach the first assumption; for this battle to happen, Cressingham must be a complete idiot and overconfident. When the Scottish cavalry rides off, he foolishly thinks he’s routed them and sends in his cavalry. Had Cressingham been a more prudent general, he would have kept up the missile fire and considered the possibility that the Scots were trying to flank him. The movie present Wallace’ flanking tactic as being extremely clever when in fact it’s actually a pretty basic tactic. Remember, the English have a forest behind them in the movie; they would have chosen that deliberately to prevent a flanking maneuver.

Then we get to the second assumption. The film suggests that it is possible for a pike unit to hide its weapons on the ground until the last minute and therefore trick cavalry into charging it. That’s a huge assumption, and one I’m fairly dubious of. Pikes have to be positioned and braced firmly on the ground using one foot as a sort of backstop so that the pike won’t slide on impact. That’s a complex maneuver, and not one that can quickly done, especially by troops that have never used pikes before (the film shows Wallace dreaming up the pike strategy the night before the battle). And these are cumbersome wooden poles a couple inches around, rather than actual pikes. Also, the film cheats. In all the earlier shots of the Scottish infantry, there are no pikes lying on the ground, but they magically appear just when the Scots are ready to use them. In reality, the English would probably have spotted the pikes on the ground and figured out what the Scots were up to. So the film’s trick is wildly implausible. But if we assume that somehow this trick could be pulled off, what follows is reasonable.

Whoa, dude! Where did these pikes come from?

At this point, Cressingham sends in his infantry. A smarter tactic would have been to stand his ground, resume archery fire, and force the Scots to charge a defensive line under withering arrow fire. Instead, Cressingham panics and orders his infantry to advance. Wallace rather foolishly does the same thing, and the result is a completely chaotic battle in which the Scots have nullified most of the English advantages but have also lost their own unit cohesion. Had Wallace been a skilled commander, he would have stood his ground and let the English infantry charge his pike wall; instead, he gets a lot of his men killed. Perhaps he knows that he barely has control of his army and figures they’ll charge anyway.

So, assuming that Cressingham was an incompetent general and assuming that the trick with the pikes could be pulled off (which it probably couldn’t), this battle could have happened. In contrast to 300’s Thermopylae, this battle makes sense on some level, if you grant a couple of unlikely possibilities. One of Gibson’s concerns is to depict the battle as an extremely chaotic and frightening event, which is a fair assessment of some medieval battles. In this, he is drawing off the same tradition that Kenneth Branagh tapped into a few years earlier in his Henry V.

But Braveheart’s Stirling is certainly not Stirling Bridge, where Wallace and Moray won because they struck the English army at a vulnerable moment and took up a strong position that exploited the narrowness of the bridge and the bogginess of the terrain.

In a previous post, I said that the right question to ask is not “Is this film historically accurate?” but rather “Why is this film being inaccurate about this particular detail?”, and Braveheart illustrates this principle on several occasions. Why did Gibson make up a battle instead of trying to recreate Stirling Bridge the way it happened? On the surface, it seems like an odd decision. The name of the battle is Stirling Bridge, and it’s a fairly well-known event, at least in Scotland, so you’d think that the omission of the bridge would be a problem. And the Scottish tactics at Stirling Bridge were intelligent; the film could have showcased Wallace’ tactical cunning in a more plausible way than it does.

Years ago I saw an interview with someone involved in the film (I don’t think it was Gibson; it may have been the director of photography) who claimed that they couldn’t find an appropriate bridge to use. This is a fairly silly thing to say, since Hollywood routinely builds sets like that all the time.

I think a much more likely reason has to do with how Gibson wanted to present the battle. As I’ve mentioned, in reality, Wallace and Moray won Stirling Bridge because they made good use of the terrain and the bridge. They cut the English forces in two, held off the infantry that had not yet crossed the bridge, and slaughtered the cavalry, which couldn’t maneuver effectively on boggy ground and couldn’t retreat back to the bridge. But that doesn’t fit Gibson’s narrative of Wallace, whom he constantly presents as a plucky, outnumbered underdog who wins his fights through sheer moral force. Showing the bridge would force Gibson to acknowledge that Wallace won because his control of the bridge kept him from being outnumbered; it would undermine the plucky underdog quality Gibson was trying to create. So it seems to me that Gibson’s version of this battle is inaccurate because accuracy at this moment would have violated the point he was trying to make about who Wallace was and who the Scots are as a people. He consciously re-wrote the past to achieve a particular effect.

 

Braveheart’s Falkirk

After Stirling, Wallace lays siege to York, which never happened, and captures it. He executes Edward’s unnamed nephew and sends his head to Edward. Edward’s daughter-in-law, Isabella meets Wallace and warns him that Edward plans to invade, so Wallace is able to prepare for the forthcoming battle.

In Gibson’s version of the battle of Falkirk, the battle again takes place on a small plain surrounded by hills and forest. There is no Westquarter Burn. The Scots prepare the ground by pouring pitch on the ground.

Both sides line up their troops in a line. There is no sign of the Scottish schiltroms. Edward disdainfully decides not to use his archers, and instead orders his Irish mercenaries (of whom there were none at the actual Falkirk) to advance, with the stated purpose of getting them killed to soften up the Scots. The mercenaries, however, switch sides because of Wallace’ cleverness in getting the Irish to support him. Then he orders his archers to use fire arrows to light the pitch on fire after the English have advanced their forces. The English cavalry breaks, and the two infantries collide (again, ignoring the rule to never advance your infantry if you can avoid it). Wallace again seems to be winning.

The Scots charging at Falkirk

However, the Scottish cavalry refuses to engage, and Edward explains that he has bribed its leaders. The film presents this as a villainous trick, ignoring the fact that Wallace has just done the same thing. Apparently it’s ok when Wallace lures the mercenaries to his side, but it’s evil when Edward does it with the cavalry. Edward callously orders his archers to open fire even though it will mean killing lots of English soldiers. This spells Wallace’ defeat. Wounded (he pretty clearly has an arrow in his lung, which would have killed him fairly soon after the battle), he charges Edward’s position, but is intercepted by Robert Bruce, who helps him get to safety.

So, as with Stirling Bridge, Gibson’s Falkirk is entirely wrong. There are no schiltroms. Gibson’s Wallace uses fire where the real one didn’t. Gibson’s Wallace advances his troops when the real one didn’t. Gibson’s Wallace schemes to get the Irish to switch sides and his Edward does the same to the Scots, when in reality neither of them did anything of the sort. The historical flight of the Scottish cavalry becomes conscious treachery. Instead of fleeing in defeat, Gibson’s Wallace fights against all odds until he cannot fight any longer and must be taken off the field against his will.

It’s easy to see why Gibson’s depiction of Falkirk is inaccurate. The historical Wallace was not a tactical genius; he favored guerrilla tactics; his victory at Stirling Bridge probably owed as much to Moray’s skill as a commander as to his. Reluctant to fight but forced to by his troops, he adopted a static position that was bound to lose the battle because of the English archers, and when he lost, he did the smart thing and ran away.

But once again that runs directly counter to Gibson’s preferred vision of William Wallace. Gibson’s Wallace is a clever commander who makes effective use of stratagems and loses only because he is betrayed by a corrupt nobility who are willing to be the English king’s lackeys. This betrayal is heightened by the rank immorality of the cinematic Edward, who is arrogant, treacherous, and willing to sacrifice his own troops for no good reason (and that’s all just in this scene). The Scots had victory within their grasp, and lose it because they lacked moral resolve, not because the English were better at warfare.

In a future post, I’ll talk about how these battles fit into the wider message of the film. Here, it’s enough to say that there is a sharp disjunction between the historical battles and the blatantly moralistic battles that Gibson presents. There is no reason he could not have shown the battles as they actually happened, except that it didn’t fit his purpose to do so.

Want to Know More?

Although it pains me to admit it, Braveheartis readily available on Amazon.

There are a couple books on William Wallace, but the only one I’ve seen that is worth anything is William Wallace: The Man and the Mythby Chris Brown. Although I’m not sure that Brown is a scholar, the book is well-researched and does a good job laying out what we actually know about Wallace, which is less than a lot of people seem to think. The best work on Edward I is Michael Prestwich’s Edward I (The English Monarchs Series). If you feel you need some context for Wallace’ rebellion, take a look at Michael Brown’s The Wars of Scotland, 1214-1371 (New Edinburgh History of Scotland).

Osprey Books publishes a lot of carefully researched and beautifully illustrated works on specific military campaigns and weapon systems, and their book on Stirling Bridge and Falkirk 1297-98: William Wallace’s rebellion (Campaign)does a good job of surveying Wallace’s military career.

300: This is Sparta! (Funny, it looks a lot like modern America)

Tags

300, Ancient Greece, David Wenham, Dilios, Freedom!, Gerard Butler, Gorgo, Lena Headey, Leonidas, Movies I Hate, Spartans

In a previous post, I discussed the problem of how 300 (2007, dir. Zack Snyder) depicts the battle of Thermopylae. But the battle isn’t the only problem with the film. We also need to talk about the film’s depiction of Spartan society. (You didn’t think that the only problems with this film were in the battle scenes, did you?)

Spartan society was famously austere by Greek standards. In the middle of the Archaic Period, c. 750 BC or so, Spartan society chose to focus itself on warfare to the exclusion of most of the other things that Greeks typically did, such as farming and craft work. Whereas most Greek soldiers were essentially part-time warriors like the American National Guard, Spartan soldiers were full-time professionals. Everything in Spartan society was subjugated to the goal of producing great soldiers.

Spartan boys were raised in a matter that modern Americans would find shockingly harsh, if not downright cruel. Plutarch tells us that Spartan officials examined new-born infants to determine if they were health enough to be raised. Babies that did not meet the state’s standards were thrown off a cliff.

The movie mostly ignores this; although an early scene does seem to show such an examination, the film does not explain the significance of the scene.  When Leonidas (Gerard Butler) encounters the horribly-deformed Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan), he treats Ephialtes with dignity and compassion, and tries to let him down easy, offering him work tending the wounded. The historical Leonidas would almost certainly not have done that. Spartans considered the physically deformed unworthy of survival. This is a society that entertained itself by making their subject helot neighbors get drunk and dance and then laugh and throw things at them for not dancing well; they were hardly champions of the notion that all life has dignity. But disdain for the handicapped does not play well in modern society, and so despite hinting at the actual way Spartans treated such people, the movie instead projects modern values back onto the Spartans to keep our sympathies.

At seven, Spartan boys were taken from their family’s household and were thereafter raised in communal barracks with other boys of their age group; they would not live in private again until they were 30; even married men were expected to live in the barracks rather than with their wives. Various practices were designed to produce boys who were tough, disinterested in luxury, ambitious, and clever. They were beaten for minor infractions. They were allowed only minimal clothing and had to sleep on piles of river-rushes. They were not provided with sufficient food, so that they would become skilled at hunting and stealing food, but were beaten if they were caught with food they had not been given, so they would learn to be clever. Boys were encouraged to fight each other, and part of their coming of age ritual involved being beaten so brutally at the altar of Artemis that some of them died. Exactly how accurate these details are is unsure, since Plutarch was writing centuries after the decline of Classical Sparta, but he is one of our primary sources for life in ancient Sparta.

300 certainly depicts this aspect of Spartan society. Young Leonidas is trained to fight starting at 5, and is forced to fight a wolf in the middle of a snow-storm (which, of course, Greece is known for) while wearing only a loin-cloth. We see him being beaten while tied to a post. The general austerity of Sparta is also depicted. When the villainous Theron (Dominic West) is killed by Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey), his corruption is proven to the Gerousia (the Spartan council) when the gold coins that Xerxes has bribed him with fall out of his tunic. Spartans famously scorned gold currency as corrupting, and instead used iron cooking-spits, so this detail rings true, even if Theron is an invented character.

What this quote fails to understand is that in the Greek underworld, there was no dining, food, or pleasure.

But the film takes this austerity to absurd levels by showing the Spartan soldiers consistently wearing nothing but sandals, a jockstrap, a cloak, and occasionally a helmet. This certainly allows for immense amounts of eye-candy (and I’m all in favor of generous servings of beefcake in film), but this is both silly as domestic clothing and downright absurd as battle gear. Like other hoplites, Spartans wore a full panoply of armor, which typically included shin greaves, a breast-plate, and helmet, as well as spear and sword. This was extremely heavy; modern experiments have tended to produce a panoply that weighs about 70 pounds. Men fighting under the hot Mediterranean sun would probably have been exhausted after about half an hour. During the Classical period, the Greeks slowly lightened the panoply, discarding the greaves and finding ways to lighten the breast-plate and helmet, but this was in the period after Thermopylae. So the armor that we see Leonidas and the other Spartans wearing simply cannot be justified. I suppose it bears echoes of the nudity we see in much of the male statuary from ancient Greek, but if that was the point, why are the men wearing jockstraps? Probably because male genitals are still largely taboo in America cinema, or perhaps because it would create too much homoeroticism for the fan-boy audience to be comfortable with.

Spartan government was three-sided. They had two royal families, each of which provided one king at a time. Leonidas came from the Agiad dynasty, and is correctly depicted essentially as a general rather than a political leader, but his co-king Archidamus I, of the Eurypontid dynasty, makes no appearance in the film. The Gerousia, the Spartan council, is shown as apparently running Sparta, when in reality it was more of a legislative steering committee and law court. The actual running of Sparta was in the hands of the ephors, officials elected by a popular assembly. In 300, however, the ephors are not the leaders of Sparta but rather hideously deformed or diseased “priests of the old gods” who stymie Leonidas in his efforts to get Sparta to declare war.

Ok, I get that action films traditionally don’t provide nuanced depictions of ancient political systems, and some simplification of what was a complex system is understandable, but turning the city’s elected government officials into creepy priests suffering from terminal acne is just weird.

Spartan Women

Spartan women occupied a place of considerable prominence in Spartan society. Because men did not live at home, even after marriage, until they were 30, Spartan households wear largely run by the wives and mothers, who possessed considerably greater legal rights than other Greek women did, and were allowed to own and control their own property. Whereas most Greek women were expected to remain at home, Spartan women seem to have been considerably more visible. Because they had so much influence over property and households, they apparently exercised some degree of political influence within Sparta, a truly remarkable arrangement in a Greek world that generally saw public society as the province of men. They were expected to be physically active and engage in vigorous dancing and calisthenics so that they would bear healthy children.

But you wouldn’t know any of that from the film. Leonidas’ queen, Gorgo (Lena Headey), is the only woman in the whole film with an actual speaking role, and the impression the film gives is of an essentially male-dominated and male-populated society, when in reality, Sparta was the least male-dominated of all Greek communities. The near-complete marginalization of women is not so much a reflection of historical Sparta as it is a reflection of modern male-dominated action film conventions, in which women exist primarily to be love interests or kidnap victims in need of rescue. The film does, I suppose, deserve some props for giving Gorgo something to do that doesn’t involve being rescued, but her entire story arc is one of failure; her scenes could be deleted entirely without having a dramatic impact on the overall plot of the film.

Lena Headey as Gorgo

And Gorgo’s story-line contains one of the most egregious inaccuracies in the film. After the Spartans depart, Gorgo works unsuccessfully to persuade the Gerousia to send reinforcements to Leonidas. The villainous Theron coerces her into having sex with him as the price of his agreement to support her efforts. However, when the Gerousia meets, Theron seeks to discredit her by accusing her of adultery. In the actual Sparta, this would have been absurd. Spartan society required women to give birth to as many children as possible, so as to maintain the number of Spartan soldiers. Xenophon tells us that Spartan men routinely shared wives under a variety of circumstances, such as when an older man shared his wife with a younger man, for the purposes of keeping the wife pregnant. Men away from Sparta for a prolonged period were expected to arrange a lover for their wives. In other words, far from being shamed for committing adultery, Gorgo would have been expected to take a lover while Leonidas was out of town.

Sparta and Homosexuality

The movie also omits another element of Spartan society, named the important role that homosexuality played in it. Spartan boys were, like other Greek boys, expected to form homosexual relationships with older men, and Xenophon says that Spartan soldiers took male lovers, although they disliked the practice of some communities, such as Thebes, who structured their elite military around pairs of lovers. For Greeks, encouraging sexual relationships between soldiers meant that they would fight harder to impress and protect their lovers.

But Zack Snyder probably figured that featuring a band of macho beefcake warriors groping each other during breaks in the fighting would not play so well to the fan-boys and teenagers his film was aimed at, so instead he overlooks that and offers instead mostly chaste and presumably heterosexual men. Leonidas is clearly straight; he gets some gentle pillow-talk with Gorgo and thinks of her body when he contemplates submitting to Xerxes (who clearly got his freak on a long time ago and never looked back). He also derides the Athenians as ‘boy-lovers’, conveniently forgetting that most of his soldiers would have fallen into that same category.

Dilios and Aristodemus

Another way that the film substantially betrays the Spartan spirit is in its treatment of Dilios (David Wenham), who loses an eye fighting and is sent back to Sparta before the final battle. He is the only survivor (of a battle famous precisely for its lack of survivors) and the narrator of the film. In the film’s terms, his dismissal from the army enables him to convey Leonidas’ love to Gorgo and, a year later, to lead an enormous army of Greeks to victory over the Persians at the battle of Plataea.

But this ignores the fact that Spartan society considered leaving a battle or surviving in defeat a sign of total cowardice and moral worthlessness. The poetry of Tyrtaeus of Sparta dwells at length on the importance of dying in battle, going so far as to describe it as “beautiful” (such, at least, is one way to translate the Greek agathos); a man who flees battle will suffer social humiliation and poverty and be forgotten after death. Plutarch reports famous anecdotes in which Spartan mothers reject sons who survive battles in which Sparta is defeated; in several cases the mothers go so far as to kill cowardly sons. According to him, Spartan mothers tell their departing sons to return with their shields (that is, victorious) or on them (that is, being carried on the shield as a stretcher); returning without the shield is a sign that the man threw away his shield so he could flee faster.

Instead of being given command so as to avenge the Spartan dead, Dilios would have been ridiculed, and his own mother would have tried to kill him. And the movie knows about this; Gorgo tells Leonidas to return with his shield or on it. So once again, the movie makes a show of saying one thing and then doing something very different when following the rules would disrupt the story.

In fact, Dilios was a real person. His actual name was Aristodemus, and he and another man, Eurytus, suffered eye problems at Thermopylae (Herodotus calls it a disease of the eye, but perhaps he means a wound). Leonidas ordered them to return home, but Eurytus refused and fought even though blind. Aristodemus, however, obeyed Leonidas; as a result, Herodotus tells us he was branded a coward, and men refused to speak to him or give him a light for his fire. A third Spartan, Pantites, also survived because he had been sent somewhere as a messenger and failed to get back to Thermopylae in time. He hanged himself.

However, these details don’t fit with modern notions of how soldiers behave. Perhaps humiliating a wounded veteran is too much like what happened to some Vietnam veterans. So the movie simply ignores this element of Spartan society.

The cinematic Spartans are fighting for “freedom”, and the Spartans are consistently presented as making free choices to fight, in contrast to the Persian soldiers, who in some scenes are shown being forced to fight. So the movie offers a contrast between the freedom-loving Spartans and the essentially enslaved Persians. This may well have been how contemporary Greeks viewed the conflict, so on that level, the film may have gotten something right.

But the film grossly oversimplifies this dichotomy by ignoring other major features of Spartan society. Like all Greeks, the Spartans owned slaves, and thought nothing wrong with it. Also, uniquely among Greeks, the Spartans had also virtually enslaved their immediate neighbors, forcibly reducing them to the level of helots (roughly, serfs). Every Spartan citizen (such as all the Spartan warriors in the film) was assigned the labor of a set number of helots, who were expected to do things like farm work so that the Spartans could devote themselves full-time to military matters. So while the Spartans might have been fighting for some notion of freedom, it wasn’t freedom in the sense of equality of choice, so much as it was freedom of Spartan citizens to own slaves and control helots. And once again, we can see the film rightly recognizing that modern audiences would be uncomfortable with such details and instead substituting ideas that are more in line with what their audience is likely to think appropriate.

(Also, and here I confess I’m going out on a limb, I don’t think Sparta had a bottomless pit in the center of town into which they could conveniently throw people. But perhaps I’m wrong about that.)

So instead of giving us an accurate historical treatment, the film chooses to project modern values back onto the past, asserting that past peoples are just like us, only they look better in jockstraps.

Want to Know More?

300is available in multiple formats on Amazon.

Paul Cartledge is arguably the world’s foremost authority on Sparta, and has written a number of important works on it. His Sparta and Lakonia: A Regional History 1300-362 BCis probably the best look at Spartan history (down to the late Classical period) generally available. It combines archaeological evidence with the sparse literary sources.

The best work on Spartan women is Sarah Pomeroy’s aptly-named Spartan Women, which examines everything the sources can tell us about Sparta’s treatment of women and families, which was vastly different from women elsewhere in ancient Greece.

Correction: In a previous version of this post, I mis-spelled Lena Headey’s last name. I regret the error.

300: The First Movie Named after the Number of Historical Errors in It

Tags

300, Ancient Greece, Freedom!, Gerard Butler, Leonidas, Military Stuff, Movies I Hate, Spartans, Thermopylae

My goal with this blog is to explore the relationship between film and history, to look at film the way a historian does and not the way a member of the general audience or a fan does. In doing so, I hope to illuminate some of the concerns historians have about the way that cinema, one of the most important art forms of our society produces, treats the human past. Whenever I get into a discussion about a historical film with someone, perhaps one of my students, a friend, or a casual acquaintance, usually the first question I get asked is “is the film historically accurate?” I have a lot of thoughts about the issue of historically accurate films, but I’ll leave most of them for another day. Instead, since this is the first question I’m usually asked, I’m going to start this blog by picking a film and just asking, does the film get the basic facts right?

The film I’m going to tackle is 300 (2006, dir. Zack Snyder). First off, let me say that I hated this film with a passion. I thought it was badly written, badly directed, badly acted, and just generally badly done. I loathed the voice-over narration with a passion and kept waiting for the narrator to get killed, only to be deeply disappointed to learn that he was the only one of the 300 to survive. But just because I hate this movie doesn’t mean there might not be some merit in it. And yes, before you ask, I do know that the movie is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel. But my purpose is to evaluate the movie as history, not as an adaption of a literary work.  While the movie owes a great deal to its source material, it must rise or fall on its own merits. And m. any of those who have seen the movie have not read the graphic novel. Because of this, they will tend to assume that the movie is based directed on the historical event.

The Historical Battle of Thermopylae Let’s start with a brief recap of the known facts about the battle of Thermopylae. In 480, during the 3^rd Persian War, the Persians under the direction of King Xerxes invaded Greece. To avoid a repeat of earlier Persian mistakes in the 1^st and 2^nd Persian Wars, Xerxes sent an army overland through Thrace and Macedon into Thessaly, while sending a fleet to follow along the coastline. Xerxes’ army may have numbered between 300,00 and 500,000 soldiers (although many modern historians put the number rather lower), and given the poor farmland of much of Greece, the fleet played a vital role of carrying provisions for the army.

At Thermopylae, a force of 5-7,000 men drawn from various Greek communities encountered Xerxes’ army. Under the leadership of the Spartan king Leonidas, who reportedly had heard a prophecy that either he would die or Sparta would be conquered, the Greeks took up a position between the shore of the Gulf of Malia and a high cliff, a spot known as Thermopylae, “the Hot Gates”, due to some hot springs in the area.

Classical Greeks fought in a formation known as a phalanx, in which the soldiers were, by the standards of the day, heavily armored. In particular each man carried a large heavy shield that covered the left half of his body and the right half of the man to his left. This necessitated a very tight formation, because if the men allowed any space between themselves, they would find the right half of their body vulnerable. These hoplite warriors were armed with a long spear that gave them considerable reach.  While extremely effective, the hoplite phalanx was vulnerable to attack from behind, because it could not quickly re-orient itself. (But see Update.)

In contrast, the Persian troops typically used lighter shields and shorter spears. Because of the mis-match between the Greek and Persian troops, the Persians were unable to make serious headway and suffered significant casualties, because the geographical factors effectively neutralized the enormous Persian advantage of numbers.

For the first two days, the Greeks effectively held off the Spartans, but on the second day, the Persians received a report from a local man named Ephialtes that there was a mountain path around the cliffs. Ephialtes was reportedly motivated by a desire for a reward, although in subsequent years, his name became synonymous with traitors. With Ephialtes’ assistance, Persian forces made their way around Thermopylae on the third day, overcoming the Phocian troops who guarded that route.

Leonidas received advance warning of this and ordered the non-Spartan troops with withdraw. He seems to have decided that the Spartans would act as a rearguard to allow the other troops time to retreat in safety. However, not all the Greek troops chose to depart. At the end, Leonidas’ forces numbered about 300 Spartan elite troops, between 7-900 other Spartan troops, 400 Thebans, and 400 Thespians. In the battle that followed, Leonidas was killed by arrows, and the Greek troops defended his body, eventually withdrawing to a nearby hill. The Theban troops chose to surrender, while the rest of the Greeks were slaughtered, because now they were being attacked from both sides.

Xerxes’ march down into Greece continued. Athens was sacked, but the Athenian admiral Themistocles was able to lure the Persian navy into an ambush and destroyed much of it. Having lost the ability to resupply his troops, and fearing that the Greeks would blockade the Hellespont and thereby trap his army, Xerxes chose to retreat back toward Thrace. Much of his army died on the way, due to starvation and illness, and the next year, a coalition of Greek forces defeated the last of the Persian army at the battle of Plataea, and a Greek naval force destroyed the remnants of Xerxes’ navy, thus ending Persian efforts to conquer Greece.

Thermopylae in 300 Ok, if you’ve stayed with me so far (I know, historical explanations can get a little long-winded, but the background is necessary to explain what the movie gets wrong), then you may have noticed that the summary I’ve just offered doesn’t really match with the movie on a few points, like the fact that the Spartans weren’t the only Greeks fighting at Thermopylae. Presumably depicting close to 2,000 Greeks defying the Persians is less dramatic than 300 Spartans doing so. (And it would render the movie title a little inappropriate.) But in some ways that’s a small sin (unless you’re a Theban or a Thespian, I suppose); it allows the action to focus on the Spartans who are the center of the story without distracting the viewer with little things like all the other people who contributed to the battle. And the movie does have a line acknowledging the Phocian defeat and a brief scene with the other Greeks leaving, although it treats them more as cowards than as engaging in a strategic withdrawal.

I can overlook the exclusive focus on the Spartans during the fight scenes. What I can’t overlook is the fact that the movie’s depiction of warfare doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Part way through the film, Leonidas (Gerard Butler) encounters Ephialtes (who in a bit of creative liberty is a horribly deformed Spartan). Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) wants to fight with his brother Spartans, but Leonidas explains to him that his deformities mean that he cannot fight in a phalanx; he cannot hold his shield up the way hoplite warfare requires. “We fight as a single, impenetrable unit; that is the source of our strength.” So the movie emphasizes the historical fact of the hoplite system as the basis of the warfare it will supposedly show us. This is a crucial scene, because Leonidas’ rejection of Ephialtes provides the motive for Ephialtes to show the Persians the way around Thermopylae. However, when the movie actually gets to the fighting, something different happens.

The first fight begins with something resembling a hoplite phalanx, but partway through, the Spartans abandon their phalanx formation and begin to fight as individuals with what appear to be yards of space between the individual soldiers. They briefly reform into a phalanx to push some Persian soldiers off a cliff, but after that, it’s essentially solo fights for the rest of the film. In other words, having told us that hoplite warfare is critical what the Spartans do, the film almost immediately abandons hoplite warfare for a series of showy solo fights, because apparently that’s more macho than having unit cohesion. And Lord knows fan-boys like pretending they’re macho.

Also, as a side note, ignoring the phalanx means that Leonidas has been a complete dick to Ephialtes. He’s lied to the man about how Spartans fight for no apparent reason. Serves him right that Ephialtes betrays him. Having a glaring contradiction at the heart of the movie is bad enough, but it’s actually much worse than it looks. Remember that the reason the Spartans couldn’t hold off the Persians when they attacked from the rear is that a phalanx can’t defend its rear because it can’t re-orient itself quickly. So once the Persians got behind the Spartan position, the historical Leonidas realized that the cause was lost.

But these cinematic Spartans don’t need to fight in a phalanx because they’re super-warriors who are essentially immune to harm. So there’s no logical reason why they can’t just keep fighting when they get encircled. But once the Persians encircle them, apparently Xerxes finds the Magic Spartan Off Switch and the Spartans just become incapable of resisting any longer, considerately abandoning all pretense at tactics so the Persians can decapitate them. Instead of valiantly fighting to delay the Persians, Leonidas intentionally gets his men slaughtered for nothing more than a literal long-shot chance at killing Xerxes. He’s not a great leader; he’s an idiot who gets his men killed for nothing.

Also, the hoplite weapon system relied on spears as the primary weapon. Swords were generally resorted to only after spears broke. Spartans were, however, well-known for using swords as the battle wore on. In the movie however, the Spartans mostly fight with their swords, which I suppose makes more sense if they’re fighting out of formation, but it’s still essentially wrong. The film’s fight choreographers chose to base their depiction of the Spartan fighting style on eskrima, a Filipino martial arts style, which might look cool on-screen, but is utterly inappropriate historically.

I can forgive a lot of small historical errors, but being internally inconsistent is another things completely. A movie that can’t make sense on its own terms and follow its own rules is a bad movie. Having departed significantly from the historical facts of the battle, 300 resorts to making up its own battle, and in the process produces a battle that looks cool but is completely incoherent and irrational, even by its own rules. This isn’t the historical battle of Thermopylae; it’s an incoherent fantasy fight cloaked in a thin veneer of historical detail.

Update 5/5/14

Last week, I had a chance to hear part of a lecture by a scholar who knows a great deal more about classical Greek warfare than I do. According to him, there is evidence that a hoplite phalanx could reverse its facing fairly quickly. It was a difficult maneuver to pull off, since it required the rear ranks of the phalanx to essentially march through the forward ranks and turn about. The Spartans were the only Greeks who were particularly adept at it, because it required more practice than most city-states gave their citizen armies. However, at Thermopylae, this still wouldn’t have helped very much, since the Persians were able to attack from both sides of the phalanx, which could not easily have fought facing in both directions.

He also dropped a few other interesting tidbits. Evidently, there is debate about whether phalanxes fought with their spears over-handed or underhanded. Greek art, such as painting on pottery, is fairly consistent about showing hoplites using spears overhanded, but experiments with reconstructing hoplite warfare have tended to suggest that fighting underhanded, with the spear about hip level, makes more sense ergonomically. If that’s true, then the question becomes why the paintings are all wrong. There is also a discussion of whether hoplites may occasionally have fought with more space between them; it makes it easier to drag those who have fallen back to safety and makes it easier to use a sword after the spears are broken.

Want to Learn More?

300is available in multiple formats through Amazon.

Our best source for the Persian Wars is Herodotus’ The Histories, Revised (Penguin Classics).There’s also a version, Herodotus: The Persian War (Translations from Greek and Roman Authors), that’s only the sections about the Persian Wars with scholarly explanations added.

Philip Souza’s book on the The Greek and Persian Wars 499-386 BCis a good introduction to the subject.