Ben-Hur: A Long History

Tags

Ancient Judea, Ancient Rome, Ben Hur, Charleton Heston, Gore Vidal, Jesus of Nazareth, Karl Tunberg, Lew Wallace, Mark Burnett, Messala Severus, Ramon Navarro, Religious Issues, Rodrigo Santoro, Roma Downey, Toby Kebbell, William Wyler

The new Ben-Hur (2016, dir. Timur Bekmambetov) is constantly talked about as a remake of the 1959 version starring Charleton Heston as the title character. But that’s not really true. The reality is that Ben-Hur is a complex enough body of material that it’s almost its own minor genre.

The origins of the film lie more than a century ago, in 1880 when Lew Wallace published his novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s a sprawling novel of more than 500 page that interweaves the lives of Judah Ben-Hur and Jesus. In fact Judah only makes his first appearance in Part 2 (out of 8); Part 1 is devoted entirely to a retelling of Jesus’ birth. So basically, Wallace took the Biblical account of the life of Christ and used it as a background to the life of his hero, with Judah periodically running into Jesus or meeting his followers.

Wallace himself was an interesting character. Trained as a lawyer, he served as a Union general during the American Civil War and served on the military commission that tried the conspirators involved in Lincoln’s assassination. He supported Rutherford B Hayes in one of the most controversial elections in American history, and was rewarded in 1878 after Hayes’ victory by being appointed Governor of New Mexico Territory. It was during his time in that office that he wrote Ben-Hur (having already written a novel and a play). He also found time to arrange for Billy the Kid to testify in exchange for immunity for his crimes. In 1881 he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Lew Wallace

Sales of the novel were slow at first, but within a few years the novel took off, and by 1900 it had becomes the best-selling novel of the 19^th century. It remained at the top of the charts until 1936, when it was knocked off by Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Wallace initially resisted allowing the novel to be turned into a play, out of a concern that no one could properly portray Jesus, but in 1889, he agreed to an adaptation in which Jesus was represented by a beam of light. That production was a run-away success, drawing an audience of religious men and women who had previously been uncomfortable with theater for moral reasons. It became a touring show and only ceased to be performed in 1921. The production used a system of horses running on treadmills with a moving background.

Ben-Hur in Films

Given the story’s intense popularity at the start of the 20^th century, it was a fairly natural choice for movie-makers. In 1907, Sidney Olcott made a 15-minute silent movie that focused entirely on the chariot race, using New Jersey firemen as the charioteers and horses that normally pulled fire wagons. However, Olcott never bothered to get permission from the Wallace estate, triggering a landmark lawsuit that established that film makers were legally obligated to obtain the rights to any previously published work that was still under copyright. If you’re interested in this version, you can watch it on Youtube.

In 1922, Goldwyn Studios secured the rights to Ben-Hur and made an epic silent movie staring Ramon Navarro in the title role. Filmed in Italy, this version told the whole of Ben-Hur’s story, but stripped out most of the material about Jesus and his followers. It was the most expensive silent movie ever made and when it was released late in 1925, it managed to lose money even though it was a blockbuster (in part because the licensing deal gave the Wallace estate 50% of the profits). The film made Navarro one of the leading Hollywood actors. Its version of the chariot race was highly influential, and provided the template for racing scenes in the 1959 version of the film, as well as the 1998 Prince of Egypt animated movie and the pod-racing scene in The Phantom Menace.

The production was extremely troubled; among other catastrophes, May McAvoy, who was playing Esther, dislocated both her wrists; it was rumored that several extras died during the naval battle scene because they couldn’t swim; and the racing scene involved the death of quite a number of horses. The chariot race drew the whole pantheon of Hollywood royalty to watch it, and if you looked closely, you can see  Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, John and Lionel Barrymore, Lilian and Dorothy Gish, Sid Grauman, Samuel Goldwyn, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Fay Wray in the stands. If you’re a fan of cinema history, it’s worth reading about the production.

The film is also quite explicit about its pro-Christian stance. It opens with the Nativity. Jesus cures Judah’s mother and sister of leprosy, while Judah attempts to lead an anti-Roman rebellion in the name of Jesus. It ends with the whole Hur family converting to Christianity. Like the stage play, Jesus is never show full-on, and is sometimes represented by a shaft of light.

In 1959, the story got its most famous cinematic treatment when it was directed by William Wyler, with Charleton Heston playing the lead. Like the 1925 version, it was a huge hit, winning 11 Academy Awards (a feat not equaled until 1997’s Titanic). It is widely considered one of the greatest movies ever made.

But getting the script written was a challenge; it went through 12 different drafts. Karl Tunberg got the script after numerous re-writes and stripped out a good deal of material that had been in the novel, including a substantial chunk of material that follows the fate of the characters after the Crucifixion.

Wyler intensely disliked Tunberg’s dialog, which he felt was too modern, and so he hired Gore Vidal to re-do the dialog. In 1995, Vidal famously claimed that he felt that the dynamic between Judah and Messala only made sense if the two men had once been lovers and that Messala was hoping to get back together with Judah but felt rejected after Judah spurned his advances. According to Vidal, he persuaded Wyler to accept his reading, and told Stephen Boyd, who was playing Messala, to play the scenes that way, but did not tell Heston. When the notoriously conservative Heston learned about Vidal’s claim, he vehemently denied it, but if Vidal’s story is true, Heston wouldn’t have known about it.

Decide for yourself if you believe Vidal’s story.

Regardless of whether Vidal added a homoerotic subtext or not, the film made other changes to the novel. Wallace’s novel is unabashed in its treatment of Christianity being superior to Judaism; the major Jewish characters mostly wind up converting to Christianity after all. Wyler’s version, which was made about a decade after the establishment of the modern state of Israel, was more respectful to Judaism. Jesus’ face is not shown and the actor who played him was not given any lines. Although the ending strongly hints at Ben-Hur’s conversion, it doesn’t make it explicit.

In 2003, Charleton Heston reprised his role in an animated version of the story, produced by his own production company. This version returns to Wallace’ approach to the religious issue. Jesus (voiced by Scott McNeill) is seen and given dialog. Ben-Hur’s sister and mother are both miraculously healed of leprosy, and Messala is miraculously cured of the injured leg he received in the chariot race. Mary Magdalene witnesses Jesus’ resurrection and ascent into Heaven, and the film closes with Judah teaching his children to be Christians.

There was also a 2010 Canadian miniseries of the story, with a cast that included Hugh Bonneville, Alex Kingston, Ray Winstone, and Ben Cross in supporting roles, but I haven’t been able to find enough about it to know how closely it adheres to the original material.

 

The 2016 Ben-Hur

I think it’s important to see the 2016 film in this light. Many people who’ve commented on the film seem unaware of any version other than the 1959 one, and consequently assume that the Heston version represents a sort of baseline from which the 2016 version has deviated. In fact, the Heston version is really the outlier. With the exception of the 1907 silent version, which is just the chariot race, most of the other versions have been explicitly Christian in their sympathies, and it’s the Christian element of the story that really attracted its executive producers, Roma “Touched By an Angel” Downey and Mark Burnett. Downey and Burnett have been nicknamed “Hollywood’s Noisiest Christians” for their unabashed interest in pursuit of the evangelical film market. They produced the History Channel miniseries The Bible, and they have said they viewed the film as “a story of forgiveness with an underlying story of Jesus”.

Downey and Burnett are Christians, in case you were at all unclear

So the film’s decision to cast Rodrigo Santoro as Jesus and to give him several scenes beyond just the Crucifixion is in fact quite true to the source novel. It represents a movement away from Classic Hollywood’s desire to avoid directly showing Jesus on screen, but that’s a convention that no longer has much force.

Given the explicitly Christian background of this version, it’s perhaps surprising that the script isn’t even more Christian than it is. Until the Crucifixion scene, none of Jesus’ dialog comes from the Gospels, and you might be forgiven for not figuring out that this anonymous carpenter is supposed to be Jesus instead of some New Age political thinker. The film even has a clever twist. Dismas (Moises Arias) is an angry anti-Roman zealot whose attempt to assassinate Pontius Pilate causes the ruination of the Hur family, but at the end of the film he’s one of the two criminals crucified with Jesus, the one who declares that Jesus has does nothing to deserve this punishment.

Santoro as Jesus

Unfortunately, the film’s treatment of its Jewish characters is rather awkward. Given the anti-Semitism that was so common in American culture in the late 19^th and early 20^th century it’s not surprising that the novel and the earlier cinematic versions were so explicitly pro-Christian. The 1959 version, as I noted, downplayed that. But in 2016, having literally all the Jewish characters convert feels rather culturally insensitive.

At no point does the film make any real effort to establish what Judaism involved in this period, except that it doesn’t involve the worship of multiple gods. There are a few minor details in the sets; for example, the individual graves in the Jewish cemetery have small stones placed on them in keeping with the modern Jewish custom of doing just that. But that’s about it. None of the Jewish characters ever does anything that seems distinctly Jewish in either a cultural or a religious sense. For example, there are no shots of the Second Temple or depictions of any Jewish religious rituals, no references to Jewish dietary rules, or anything like that. Combined with the conversions at the end of the film, it seems clear that Judah and the rest of the Hur clan aren’t really Jews so much as proto-Christians.

And perhaps the expanded Christian elements of the film are part of the reason that it did so poorly at the box office. The story isn’t Christian enough to draw a large evangelical audience, but it’s Christian enough that its tenor feels out of step with what contemporary film-goers are looking for. It’s a bit like Toby Kebbell’s Messala, too Roman to fit in with his Jewish adoptive family and not Roman enough to please the Romans he serves. In the end, both Messala and the film failed to win out.

This post was written with the help of generous donations to my blog. If you like it, please think about sending a few dollars my way.

 

Want to Know More?

The 2016 movie isn’t available on Amazon yet, since it’s still in the theaters, but the 1925 silent version and 1959 Charleton Heston version of Ben Hur are. The 2010 miniseries is also available.

Or think about reading the original novel, which was the best-selling novel of the 19th century. It’s still one of the 20 best-selling novels of all time.

 

Omar Khayyam: Assassins!

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Cornel Wilde, Hasan-i Sabbah, Medieval Islam, Medieval Persia, Michael Rennie, Omar Khayyam, Religious Issues, The Assassins

So about a billion years ago I started to review Omar Khayyam (aka The Lifes, Loves, and Adventures of Omar Khayyam, 1957, dir. William Dieterle), but then I got sidetracked by the awfulness that is Gods of Egypt, as well as by a small mountain of exams. Having finally dug my way through that mountain, I can finish my review of the movie about the Persian poet.

The central plot of the film is inspired by a story that Omar Khayyam made two close friends during his youth, Hasan-i Sabbah and Nizam al-Mulk, and that they promised that whichever one of them was successful, he would promote the other two. (I haven’t been able to track down the origins of the story, so I can’t confirm that it’s historical fact, or that it’s even a medieval story. But all three men are Persians and contemporaries, so it’s certainly possible.) Nizam was appointed vizier by the Turkish sultan Alp Arslan, a post that allowed him to virtually rule the Turkish state for 20 years, and he supposedly offered Omar and Hasan court posts. Omar rejected the offer, but agreed to let Nizam construct an astronomical observatory. Hasan accepted the offer but then had to flee when he tried to arrange the assassination of Nizam. Nizam was eventually assassinated in 1092.

At the start of Omar Khayyam, the film establishes the friendship between Omar (Cornel Wilde), Hasan (Michael Rennie) and Nizam (Sebastian Cabot), who arranges places at court for both of them. The film doesn’t understand that Hasan-i Sabbah’s given name is ‘Hasan’, the ‘i’ being part of the descriptor ‘the bright’ (or literally, ‘the morning’); instead, throughout the film he’s called ‘Hasani’.

Wilde and Cabot as Omar and Nizam

 

Hasan-i Sabbah

Hasan is historically a far more interesting figure than Nizam. Raised in Persia, some time around 1070 he converted from Sunni Islam to the branch of Shia Islam known as Ismailism and swore his loyalty to the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt, whom the Ismailis acknowledged as the Imam.

I don’t have room to explain in detail what the Shiite Islam is, but here’s the short version. Sunni Islam maintained that after Muhammad’s death, the Islamic community should be led by a caliph, a successor to the Prophet’s political and military authority, but not his spiritual authority. This caliph did not have to be a personally moral man, only a leader who could ensure the stability of the state so that Muslims could worship properly. Nor did he have to be related to the Prophet. The minority Shiites, however, argued that the caliph, or as they preferred to call him, the Imam, inherited Muhammad’s spiritual authority as well as his secular authority, and that therefore the office could only pass to one of Muhammad’s descendants by his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali. As the Shiites see it, the Imam was a divinely-inspired moral examplar as well as a political leader.

A medieval image of Hasan

Because they were in the minority, the Shiite view did not win out, and the Sunni understanding of the caliph came to dominate. After the Sunni caliph Yazid I engineered the death in battle of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, Shiism became a religion of protest, rejecting what it saw as the corrupt leadership of the Sunni caliphs in favor of allegiance to the Imam, a politically powerless spiritual leader descended from Hussein.

In 765, the sixth Imam, Jafar as-Sadiq died, and the Shiite community split over who was the seventh Imam. One branch maintained that Jafar’s dead son Ismail was the rightful Imam and that the Imamate should pass through him to his son Muhammad ibn Ismail, while the other branch chose to follow Jafar’s still living younger brother Musa ibn Jafar. These two branches came to be known as Sevener Shia (also Ismailism) and Twelver Shia. Today, most Shiites, such as the Iranians, are Twelver Shiites. But in the 10^th century, a branch of Sevener Shiites took power in Egypt, claiming to be descended from the Muhammad ibn Ismail, establishing the so-called Fatimid Caliphate.

The Fatimids actively worked to promote the Ismaili doctrine as a way to strengthen their rule, and Hassan-I Sabbah becames one of their earliest missionaries. In 1088, he seized control of the fortress of Alamut in Persia and developed it into a base from which he and his followers could operate.

Alamut

Sabbah built a religious order dedicated to advancing the Ismaili cause against its Sunni (and Christian) opponents using a variety of tactics, but the one they are most known for is assassination. In fact, they were commonly referred to as the Assassins, which is where we get the word from. One rank of the Assassins was the Fidayin or ‘sacrifices’, who were operatives willing to die in the course of an assassination. Their standard method was to kill a key political figure in a very public way, thus eliminating an enemy and sowing maximum fear and confusion. Sabbah and his successors to his leadership used the Fidayin very effectively, although they were never able to achieve actual victory.

There are two persistent questions/rumors about the Assassins, and they’re connected. Where did this group get its name and how was Sabbah able to achieve such a high degree of loyalty that his men were willing to undertake what were essentially suicide missions for him? (For those who don’t know, there is an extremely strong prohibition against suicide in Islam, modern suicide bombers not withstanding) The legend is that Sabbah used hashish on them, drugging them into a state of unconsciousness, and then having his men smuggle them into a special garden where they experienced all sorts of pleasures before being drugged again and smuggled out. Sabbah then supposedly told them that he could guarantee their entrance to Paradise if they committed an assassination for him.

Unfortunately, these stories are highly suspect. They seem to derive from later Christian attempts to understand the group’s name as well as anti-Ismaili Muslim authors who wanted to demonstrate the group’s immorality. The stories paint Sabbah in a deeply cynical light and suggest that he held nothing sacred. A commonly-repeated story holds that as he was dying, he said, “Nothing is true; all is permitted.” For a religion with strict laws forbidding things such as alcohol and pork, that’s a shockingly immoral statement, and that’s the point of the story. And there is absolutely no historical evidence that the Assassins used hashish to train their men. In fact, there isn’t much evidence that the Assassins were highly trained, only that they were willing to die in performing their killings.

So where does the name come from? It does derive from hashashin, meaning ‘hashish users’. It was first applied to them by one of the Fatimid caliphs in 1122, but it’s not evidence they used hashish. Rather, it’s an insult, roughly the same as calling someone a ‘crackhead’ today. The term was intended to denigrate Sabbah’s followers as dangerous, violent, and irrational, not as a statement that they actually used drugs. But the meaning of the name has proven an irresistible temptation to people to elaborate on the order’s supposed training techniques. The recent Marco Polo Netflix series used this drug angle in its first season.

The Assassins survived into the 1250s, when they made the mistake of targeting the Mongols. In 1256, the Mongols successfully laid siege to Alamut and captured it, essentially destroying the main force of the group. A splinter branch survived in Syria until the 1270s, when the Egyptian sultan Baibars took control of the group. At that point it seems to have degenerated into simply a group of killers for hire. The group, or at least legends about the group, persisted down into the middle of the 14^th century.

A defaced image of Hasan-i Sabbah

 

The Assassins in Omar Khayyam

The main plot of the film revolves around the Assassins and their nefarious plot to replace the unnamed Shah with his son Ahmud, with the assistance of Ahmud’s traitorous mother Queen Zarada. There’s much talk early in the film about the Assassins, and they assassinate the Shah’s brother Tutush, which establishes how ruthless the Assassins are.

Omar learns from his slave girl that there is a man who left the assassins hiding outside of town. This man tells him that the Assassins are based at Alamut. So Omar goes there on the pretense of making astronomical calculations to correct the calendar for the Shah.

Omar at Alamut with Zarada and Hasani

Rather inexplicably, instead of killing him, this ruthless secret society of assassins just lets Omar stroll into the castle, where the Prior welcomes him, gives him a room, and shows him around the castle, showing him their entire training process. As the film explains, the Assassins train their recruits to be absolutely obedient, showing a room where the men must fill a cistern using a pot with no bottom (in other words, they do the task even though it’s pointless). Then the Assassins systematically teach the men that their faith is meaningless, and then cynically use hashish to trick the men into thinking they’ve been to Paradise. This way the men unhesitatingly obey any command they’re given. The Prior orders one of the men to jump to his death and he does it.

The whole sequence is poorly handled. Why does the Prior let Omar wander around the castle? Why does he give Omar a guided tour of their secret training process, which isn’t going to stay very secret if they treat Alamut as a tourist attraction for every wandering astronomer who passes by? If the Prior has worked his way up through the ranks, why isn’t he a mindless drone like those below him? The whole sequence is so expository, it feels like someone inserted a medieval news reel into the middle of the film.

Some of the details of this sequence, such as the man jumping to his death, are drawn from genuine medieval European stories about the Assassins. The purpose of the sequence is to show us that the Assassins are really just cynical, power-hungry men who abuse those who place their trust in them. It strips away all pretense of religion and the film never bothers explaining what the historical Assassins actually believed. There’s no discussion of the Sunni/Shia rift in Islam, and in fact virtually no mention of Islam in the film at all.

Hasani eventually shows up, revealing himself to be the Grand Master. He tries to persuade Omar to join his plan to overthrow the Shah, but Omar refuses and leaves the castle. The movie could have tried to humanize Hasani a little bit by showing him sparing Omar’s life because of their friendship. But instead he just inexplicably allows Omar to leave Alamut to warn the Shah about the plan to ambush his army and kill him.

Hasani being offered food at the Shah’s court

The film concludes with the siege of Alamut. Omar takes advantage of the fact that he saw naphtha in the caverns under Alamut to tunnel into the caverns, light the naphtha on fire and blow up Alamut, Hasani, Zarada, and all the Assassins. It’s about 150 years too early, but it’s a happy ending because after the bad guys all die, the Shah dies too, thus freeing up Sharain to be with Omar.

Overall, Omar Khayyam is a frustrating movie. Someone did enough research to learn a lot about the historical poet. The film tries to shoe-horn in every historical scrap of information about Khayyam and what he was interested in, and it deserves props for knowing about his calendar. And it uses a bunch of his poems, even though it uses the rather free FitzGerald translations; that was the version everyone knew at the time, so it’s forgivable. But the screenwriter couldn’t be bothered to learn anything else about the period or the issues, or even that there was no such thing as the Persian Empire in this period. It can’t be bothered by the fact that its ending is outrageously anachronistic. It can’t be bothered to use actual Persian or Arabic female names, or even spell ‘Ahmed’ correctly. It’s sort of like the screenwriter got halfway through the research process and then said, “Ok, I’ve got enough information about Omar. Ugh, that was a lot of work! Fuck it, I’ll just make the rest up.” Honestly, given when this film was made, I wouldn’t be shocked to learn that’s what happened.

 

Want to Know More?

The standard book on the subject is Bernard Lewis’ The Assassins. It’s short and concise and very readable. But it’s getting old now. Another good, but long-in-the-tooth book on them is The Secret Order of Assassins, by Marshall Hodgson. A more recent book, which focuses more on the legends than the facts, is Farhad Daftary’s The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Ismailis which looks at the development of the myths around the Assassins, both in the Islamic world and Europe.

Day of the Siege: What is it Trying to Say?

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17th Century Europe, Day of the Siege, Early Modern Europe, Enrico Lo Verso, F. Murray Abraham, Islam, Ottoman Empire, Religious Issues, Renzo Martinelli

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 11^th, 2001. Clearly Renzo Martinelli was trying to draw some sort of parallel between the battle of Vienna and the September 11^th attacks. But what is the message?

The basis for the parallel comes from the common misconception that the battle of Vienna happened on September 11^th, 1683. It didn’t. It happened on September 12^th. But if you poke around the Internet, you’ll find a lot of websites dating the battle to the 11^th. 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 17^th 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 11^th, 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 17^th 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 11^th, 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 11^th 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.

Robin Hood: Princes of Thieves: Black Muslims in Medieval England?

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Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Morgan Freeman, Racial Issues, Religious Issues, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves

One of the more unusual elements of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991, dir. Kevin Reynolds) is Azeem (Morgan Freeman), a black Muslim who helps Robin escape from a Muslim prison in Jerusalem. He declares that he owes Robin a life debt (which, by the way, is pretty much an entirely literary concept, without much basis in the real world) and so he returns to England with Robin, whom he insists on calling “Christian”.

Azeem is a new additional to the Robin Hood corpus, with no parallel in the medieval literature or even the earlier Robin Hood films. He seems to have been inspired by the British tv series Robin of Sherwood’s Nasir, a Muslim assassin brought to England as a prisoner who eventually escapes and joins the Merry Men. In RH:PoT’s original script, Freeman’s character was called Nasir until the name was changed to avoid the risk of copyright infringement.

So the character is a very recent addition to the stories of Robin Hood. But he naturally raises the issue of whether people like Azeem were around in medieval England. This is really two separate questions. Were there black people in medieval England and were there Muslims in England?

Freeman as Azeem

 

Black People in Medieval England

There is some modest evidence that there were black people in Roman Britain (and again, as a reminder, race is a modern social construct, not a biological one, so speaking about ‘black people’ and ‘white people’ in the Middle Ages is a bit of a simplification). The Roman military routinely recruited soldiers from one region of the Empire and stationed them in a completely different region. Consequently, some of the Roman soldiers stationed in Britain may have included black men recruited from regions of North Africa that had contact with Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Egypt or Mauritania (Roman Morocco). Men from Mauritania were referred to as ‘Moors’, and an inscription near the Aballava fort on Hadrian’s Wall makes reference to a group of “Aurelian Moors” stationed there in the 3^rd century AD. We also have a reference to an ‘Ethiopian’ at Hadrian’s Wall. Some of these men probably intermarried with local women and had children. A recent study of the teeth of Roman-era bodies from York determined that around 12% of the population of Roman York may have come from Africa, although North Africa was certainly more common than Sub-Saharan Africa. Other studies of Roman-era cemeteries have found that the percentage of Sub-Saharans buried ranged from 11% to 24%, dropping to 6% in the early 5th century. Most of these bodies appear to have been free rather than slave burials. A 2007 DNA study found evidence of a rare DNA marker from Guinea-Bassau in several men with modern Yorkshire surnames, who might therefore be descended from these soldiers. And in the late 2nd/early 3rd century, many high-ranking Roman officials came from North Africa, some of whom held office in Britain; there is some chance that some of these men were of Sub-Saharan descent. It is also likely that some of the slaves brought to Roman Britain were Sub-Saharans. So it is possible that still in the early Middle Ages, there were men and women of Sub-Saharan ancestry, although whether their skin color and facial features would have marked them as ‘black’ by modern standards is another matter.

In the late 7th century, Pope Vitalian sent Hadrian, a monk from somewhere in North Africa, to Britain, where he became the abbot of a monastery in Canterbury. Hadrian is described as being a Berber, and therefore was probably fair-skinned, but little is known about the man’s ancestry, so it is not impossible that he might have been of Sub-Saharan descent. During the Viking Age, Vikings raided the Iberian coastline and may well have raided parts of North Africa, so it is not impossible that they might have taken black people as slaves and brought them back to the British Isles, but at this point this is nothing more than speculation without evidence to support it.

By the 12^th century, when RH:PoT is set, it is unlikely that there were more than a small handful of men and women of African origin or descent in the British Isles. Whereas Italy and the Iberian peninsula had fairly regular contact with North Africa and thus did have modest numbers of black men and women living there, Britain was a fair distance from those parts of Europe. It is certainly possible that a few ‘Moors’ came to Britain, most likely along trade routes from the Iberian peninsula to ports like Bristol. But there were not large enough numbers of them to leave more than very sporadic evidence of their presence behind. For example, in 2013, analysis of a skeleton found in a river in Gloucestershire determined that it belonged to a woman between 18 and 24 who had come from Sub-Saharan Africa some time between 896 and 1025 AD. Who she was and how she got to England is a mystery, but the fact that her body was thrown into a river instead of given a proper burial suggests she may have been low-status, such as a slave. This body is the clearest proof that any person from Sub-Saharan Africa lived in England before the end of the Middle Ages.

Medieval people certainly knew that some people had black skin. St Maurice was pictured as a black man, and Balthasar, one of the Three Wise Men, was often depicted that way as well. A manuscript produced in England around 1241 depicts a black man clinging to a large initial letter. If artists understood that some people had black skin, the most likely possibility is that they had seen such people or knew those who had.

St Maurice, in Magdeburg Cathedral

So it seems likely that there were at least small numbers of black men and women in medieval England. They were probably fairly rare, and most likely to be encountered in the larger cities, having come there probably from the Iberian peninsula for commercial reasons or perhaps as the slave or servant of a wealthy man or woman. But the notion of a black man who traveled from Jerusalem to Nottingham in the 1190s is not impossible, although such a man would certainly have been very unusual.

 

Muslims in Medieval England

Were there Muslims in medieval England? Here the basic answer is no. England was not a religiously pluralistic society. With the exception of the tiny Jewish community (expelled in the 1290s), by the 11^th century everyone in England was expected to be Christian, and would have been baptized into the Christian community a few days after birth. Muslims would have enjoyed no legal protection whatsoever. So it is very unlikely the Muslim merchants from the Iberian peninsula would have come to England to sell their wares. Not impossible, but extremely improbable.

Having said that, however, archaeologists digging in the remains of the Franciscan friary in Ipswich, England, in the 1990s discovered a skeleton of a man born somewhere in North Africa (probably Tunisia, and probably of Berber or Arabic descent) in the period between 1190 and 1300. This means that he was almost certainly born as a Muslim. But he had lived the last decade of life in England, probably at the Franciscan friary. An additional 8 skeletons found on the site also appear to have come from North Africa. Who were these 9 presumably Muslim North Africans and how had they come to live out their last years in a Franciscan friary? One plausible theory is that they were prisoners captured during the 8^th Crusade, which briefly attacked Tunisia. The Franciscans are also known to have attempted missionary work in North Africa in this period, so perhaps these 9 were converts won during one of those missions. Regardless, the fact that they were buried in a Franciscan cemetery strongly points to them having converted from Islam to Christianity. So while there may have been a small number of men and women who were born as Muslims living in England, it is improbable that there were any practicing Muslims, although we cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a Muslim dignitary or merchant having briefly visited the region. So while Azeem as a black man in England is possible (if somewhat unlikely), Azeem as a Muslim is pretty implausible.

The so-called Ipswich Man

Want to Know More?

Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves [Double Sided]is available on Amazon.

There isn’t a whole lot of scholarship on black people in medieval England, but there is an excellent Tumblr devoted to People of Color in European Art History that demonstrates that some medieval artists definitely knew that black people existed.

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film Vs Fact

Tags

Ancient Egypt, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues

My previous post compared Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott) with the Biblical account of the Exodus. This post is going to look at the historicity of the Exodus. This is a big topic and one that bumps into the challenge of separating belief from verifiable historical evidence. As a Christian, I can believe in the Bible as a matter of faith, but as a historian, I have to look at the actual evidence. And I am a long ways from being a specialist in ancient Egyptian history or Biblical archaeology or any of the other specific fields required to really speak authoritatively on this problem.

As I mentioned in my last post, the essential problem with comparing the Biblical narrative with historical fact is that scholars have not found any Egyptian documents that fit with the Biblical text. One of the biggest challenges is simply pinning down when the Exodus is supposed to have happened.

 

Who was the Pharaoh of the Exodus?

(Warning: I’m going to gloss over some very complicated issues of chronology in this post, chief of which is that the regnal dates for Egyptian pharaohs are less fixed than they seem; most of the regnal dates I’m going to cite can actually vary by nearly a half-century, for reasons too complex to tackle here, unless people really want me to get into the messy details. I’ll do my best to explain the core issues but understand there’s more going on here that I’m leaving out for brevity’s sake.)

Throughout Exodus, the ruler of Egypt is simply identified as ‘Pharaoh’ with no additional reference to which pharaoh we’re talking about. Given that Egypt was ruled by pharaohs for close to 3,000 years, that means there are a lot of candidates to look at. Modern scholars have offered arguments for most of the pharaohs from Dedumose I (d.c. 1582 BC) to Setnakhte (d.c.1186 BC). Scholars have generally agreed that the New Kingdom period, including the 18^th, 19^th, and 20^th dynasties and running from around c.1550 to c.1069 BC is the right period. (Just for reference, the famous Akhenaten was an 18^th dynasty pharaoh ruling from about 1353-1336 BC, and his even more famous son Tutankhamun died around 1323 BC. The 18^th dynasty died out about 1292 BC and was succeeded by the 19^th dynasty.)

1 Kings 6:1 says that the Exodus happened 480 years before the construction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem (which happened some time around 970 BC, give or take a decade), which would put the Exodus happening around the 1440s, 1446 to be precise, if you assume that various Biblical details are exactly correct. 1446 falls during the reign of the 18th dynasty Pharaoh Thutmose III (step-son of the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut). But during this period, Canaan was part of the Egyptian empire, and an Exodus from Egyptian territory into Egyptian territory makes little sense. And Thutmose’ reign was one of the cultural and military high points of the New Kingdom, which doesn’t exactly fit with the story of military disaster told in Exodus

Many historians consider that 480 number symbolic, because the same figure of 480 years is said to separate the construction of Solomon’s Temple and the Second Temple. (Also, the anonymous author  of 1 Kings doesn’t give us any clue how he calculated that figure of 480 years, and he’s not likely to have had a lot of written records to work from.) ‘480 years’ may well be a way of saying 12 generations of 40 years each. If Jewish authors used 40 years to stand for a single generation (note that Moses is said to have lived for 120 years, with his life falling into neat 40 year chunks), then perhaps that 480 figure is a different way of saying 250 years (much closer to an actual human generation), which would give the Exodus a date around 1210 or so. That date falls late in the reign of Ramesses II (who reigned 1279 to 1213 BC, one of the longest reigns in human history) or slightly after, during the reign of his son Merneptah (r. 1213-1203 BC). Consequently, most historians who accept the Exodus as a fact have argued that Ramesses is the pharaoh of the Exodus.

Statue of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel

Another small point in Ramesses’ favor is his son Merneptah became pharaoh because all of his older brothers had already died, which fits into the story of all the Egyptian’s first-born sons dying.

Additional support for the idea that Ramesses II is the Pharaoh of the Exodus comes from Exodus 1:11, “So [the Egyptians] put slave masters over [the Hebrews] to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and [Pi-]Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh.” Pithom (or Per-Atum, the “House of Atum”) has never been definitively identified, but Pi-Ramesses (or Per-Ramesses, the “House of Ramesses”) has been fairly definitively identified since the 1960s as a city built in the Nile Delta, on the easternmost branch of the Nile. Ramesses II built it as a new capital, since the location was much closer to the Canaanite territories of the Egyptian Empire, as well as a good spot from which to stop an invasion of Egypt by the Hittites (since such an invasion would have to go through the northern Sinai peninsula. (The previous capital was Avaris, also on the same branch of the Nile. The film inaccurately depicts Ramesses as ruling from Memphis, much further to the south, slightly below the point where the Nile splits into different branches at the Delta.)

Pi-Ramesses is not far from Tanis and Avaris

So the Biblical claim that the Hebrews built Pi-Ramesses fits with what we know of Ramesses II’s building work. His father Seti possessed a summer palace there, and Ramesses was born in the area, so it is more accurate to picture an existing complex being developed into a large city (ultimately housing about 300,000 people). But Exodus says that the city was built as a ‘store city’. Scholars have debated what a ‘store city’ is, but since Pi-Ramesses was apparently intended as a new capital, the text seems to be wrong, unless Ramesses built the city and then decided it could serve as a capital. Or perhaps it was only Pi-thom that was intended to serve as a store city. So if we are going to find evidence of the Exodus outside the Bible, it appears that the mid- to late-13^th century BC is the period to look in. A few scholars have argued that the Biblical ‘Ramesses’ is not a reference to Pi-Ramesses, but that view does not seem to command much acceptance.

Pi-Ramesses today

(Incidentally, this reference to the Hebrews building store cities in Egypt is what lies underneath Ben Carson’s infamous claim that the Pyramids were built for grain storage. He’s conflating the Biblical claim of store cities with the popular misconception that the Pyramids were built with slave labor.)

Some professional and amateur scholars make arguments for other pharaohs. Ahmose I, the founder of the 18th dynasty, who ruled c.1539-c.1514) is sometimes pointed to because of the so-called ‘Tempest Stela‘, which describes a period of darkness and severe storms. But his reign seems way too early for the Exodus. Another popular candidate is Amenhotep II (r.1427-1401), son of Thutmose III. The argument here is that there were actually two Amenhotep IIs. The first died four years into his reign and his successor took the same name to disguise the humiliating death of his predecessor. As a theory, it’s a big stretch with only a small amount of evidence to support it (which I don’t want to get into). And it’s worth pointing out that Pi-Ramesses was built centuries after their rule.

There’s also the question of whether the Pharaoh of the Exodus died along with his army. Exodus does not explicitly claim this, but many assume that the pharaoh must have been with his army when it was destroyed by the sea. Since Exodus 2 says that the pharaoh at whose court Moses was raised died before Moses saw the Burning Bush, scholars have looked for a pharaoh who had a very long reign followed by a pharaoh who had a short reign (assuming that pharaoh died during the Exodus). None of the candidates fit that pattern exactly, which is why the two Amenhotep IIs theory is appealing. But for my money, the fact that Exodus insists that Pi-Ramesses was built during the reign of Pharaoh makes Ramesses II or his son Merneptah the best candidate. He comes closer than any of the others.

 

Evidence

Unfortunately, after more than a century of searching for evidence, archaeologists and Egyptologists have yet to find any clear proof for the events described in Exodus. Exodus 12: 37-38 says that at the time of the Exodus, the Hebrews numbered around 600,000, not counting women and children. Factoring in women and children, the text is claiming that a population of close to 2 million people emigrated from Egypt (probably larger, since the figure of 2 million is assuming one woman and child per man). In the 13^th century, Egypt is estimated to have had somewhere between 3 and 3.5 million inhabitants, so if we read the numbers as literal in a modern sense, Exodus is claiming that literally half the population of Egypt were Hebrews, a figure that seems impossibly large. Even if we assume that modern scholars have severely underestimated the total population of Egypt, the numbers seem implausible (among other details, Exodus 1 claims that these 2 million Hebrews were served by just 2 midwives). Given the Biblical tendency to use numbers symbolically (or at least non-literally), it is likely that this figure of 600,000 men should be understood that way. (Indeed, the statistic 603,350, which is given in the book of Numbers, translates in Hebrew numerology to “the children of Israel, every individual.”) Otherwise, it is hard to see how the loss of half its population would not have triggered a complete collapse of Egyptian civilization, something for which there is no evidence.

A large emigration (even if not 2 million people) would plausibly have left archaeological evidence (600,000 people camping out at Mt. Sinai, for example, would probably leave refuse in the form of animal bones, broken pots, and broken tools), but archaeologists have yet to find evidence for any such camps.

Nor do Egyptian texts make any reference to either the Hebrews as a slave people, to the 10 plagues, or to the destruction of an Egyptian army in the sea. The closest scholars have found to a reference to the Hebrews in Egypt are references to a people called the Habiru or Apiru, mentioned in various sources between about 1800 BC and 1100 BC, who live in the Fertile Crescent and Canaan. These people are various described as nomads, rebels, raiders, laborers, slaves, and thieves. But the term seems to be a catch-all term for people in that region, and not a specific ethnic or cultural group, and the similarity of ‘Habiru’ to ‘Hebrew’ appears to be accidental rather than linguistic. And remember, this group is supposed to be half the population of Egypt. If the Hebrews were such a large segment of the population, why is there no clear mention of them?

The Ipuwer Papyrus, a New Kingdom copy of a text composed sometime between the late Old Kingdom and the Second Intermediate Period (so, between roughly 1850 BC and 1600 BC) describes a period of anarchy in which society has turned upside down: the laborers are not working, the poor have become rich, the nobles are distressed, death and blood are everywhere, barbarians have invaded Egypt, and cats and dogs have generally started living together, just like Bill Murray once said. In other words, the text is a description of a society in which nothing is working properly and it seems like the end of the world. Some details are evocative of the Exodus story: there is pestilence in the land, the river is blood, the servants are rebelling and not working and they have taken the riches of the nobles, grain is destroyed and the cattle moan, the land is without light, and everyone is lamenting. But the text also includes a lot of details that don’t fit the Biblical narrative (a barbarian invasion, children are having their brains dashed out, widespread warfare and violence, crocodiles are killing people, the nobles are being beaten and forced to labor, the poor are living in mansions, the king has been overthrown by a mob, and so on. So while some people have tried to use the Ipuwer Papyrus as evidence for the Exodus, this requires that they ignore all the parts of the text that don’t fit the story, and it also requires the Exodus to have happened hundreds of years earlier than any scenario the Tanakh/Old Testament envisions.

The Ipuwer Papyrus

There are a few bits of indirect evidence in support of the Biblical narrative. A monument erected by Merneptah, Ramesses II’s successor contains the word ‘Israel’ in a context that suggests a group of migratory people, which does fit the Biblical narrative for what happened to the Hebrews after they left Egypt. The Egyptian form of ‘Yahweh’ occurs in a temple built by Ramesses II. Some of the Hebrew names in Exodus seem to reflect Egyptian linguistic influence, including ‘Moses’. But overall, the evidence is not convincing unless one is already convinced.

One argument is made that Egyptian sources may not mention the facts connected to the Exodus because Egyptians didn’t like commemorating royal failures. That’s certainly true. Ramesses II, to take a very relevant example, depicted himself as the victor of the battle of Kadesh when Hittite sources make it very clear the battle was a draw. Occasionally the Egyptians posthumously tried to obliterate the evidence of unpopular pharaohs; Thutmose III had the name of his predecessor Hatshepsut chiseled off of monuments. So Egyptians were more than willing to rewrite their own past by glossing over events and people that did not fit with their ideology. So it is possible that Ramesses II might have ordered the suppression of evidence of the 10 plagues and the Exodus, which would have made him look very weak, and not the living god he claimed to be.

Ramesses II at Kadesh

But there are three flaws with this argument. First, despite Egyptian efforts to rose-color the past, scholars have found considerable evidence of the things they tried to obliterate; Hatshepsut’s reign is fairly well documented. Papyrus documents often contain references to things the pharaohs clearly wanted kept secret (like the political trial of a wife of Ramesses III who was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate him, or the destruction of royal mummies by tomb-robbers). So it’s unlikely that Ramesses would have been able to completely eliminate evidence of these events. Second, the fact that we can see a reason why evidence was suppressed doesn’t prove the event happened and was covered up. At best, it only means that it is possible that such a thing could have happened. Absence of evidence is not evidence. Third, even if all mentions of the Exodus itself were scrubbed, why aren’t there mentions of the Hebrews in Egyptian documents and monuments from before the Exodus?  Purging centuries of records would almost certainly have been beyond the capacity of ancient Egyptian government.

So because the actual evidence for the Exodus is so scanty and unpersuasive, most archaeologists and Egyptologists have argued that specifically searching for evidence of the Exodus is pointless. The resources for archaeology is scant enough that they are better spent on projects more likely to bear important fruit. More skeptical scholars argue that the lack of evidence means that the Exodus is best regarded as a story invented centuries after the fact to explain where the Hebrews came from.

However…

To my mind, there’s a major problem with arguing that the story of the Exodus was invented to provide an origin for the Hebrews. Most cultures, when they are inventing their origins, like to provide a noble and heroic ancestry for themselves. Consider all the people who wanted to be descended from those noble and tragic Trojans: the Romans, the medieval Britons, the Merovingians, and the Norse, among others. People invent ancestors who are gods and towering heroes.

But the Hebrew origin story is quite different. In the Exodus story, they acknowledge being helpless slaves, entirely oppressed and unable to save themselves until Yahweh sends Moses. Moses is timid and unwilling, a lousy speaker who needs help just delivering his message. When he does liberate the Hebrews, they respond by constantly doubting and challenging him; they repeatedly fail to trust Yahweh despite the miracles they see, and have to be punished more than once. Moses periodically loses his temper and disobeys Yahweh and winds up being punished for it. Pretty much everyone in this story looks bad at least once. And why make their great liberator the foster-son of the hated Egyptian ruler?

So the Exodus story doesn’t fit with the sorts of stories people invent for themselves. If the Exodus were simple a made-up story, we’d expect the Hebrews to be far more noble and consistent than they are. We’d expect Moses to be more of a paragon of virtue. To my mind, the constant moral failings revealed in the story make it surprisingly plausible, despite the lack of evidence and the hard-to-accept miracles. The core of the story simply looks real to me in a way that, for example, Vergil’s Aeneid doesn’t. Does that mean that the Exodus must have happened? No. But for me at least, it’s a peg I can hang some faith on.

Want to Know More? 

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!

Exodus: Gods and Kings: Film vs Narrative

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Ancient Egypt, Ben Kingsley, Christian Bale, Exodus, Exodus: Gods and Kings, Joel Edgerton, Moses, Ramesses II, Religious Issues, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver

How do you a historical analysis of a movie based on a sacred text that scholars have not been able to find much factual corroboration for? It’s not possible to compare the Biblical story of the Exodus to historical records from Egypt, because Egyptian records make no clear reference to the event, and the Exodus narrative doesn’t identify the pharaoh involved, making it hard to know when the events are supposed to have taken place. So how do I review Exodus: Gods and Kings (2014, dir. Ridley Scott)?

The film tells the story of Moses (Christian Bale) and Pharaoh Ramesses II (Joel Edgerton) as they fight over whether or not Ramesses will free the enslaved Hebrews. We get all the major beats of the Exodus narrative, including the burning bush, the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea. But the film takes substantial liberties with the narrative. Scott decided to take the approach that all of the miraculous events could have had modern scientific explanations, and so he left the question open as to what was actually happening in Egypt.

I guess the place to start my analysis is to see where the film follows the Biblical narrative and where it doesn’t.

 

Moses Gets His Start

The film basically follows the Biblical birth-narrative for Moses (described in back-story rather than shown), that when the Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew boys killed because the Hebrews were multiplying too quickly, Moses’ mother put him in a basket and floated him down the Nile, so that he was found by Pharaoh’s daughter. Bithiah. As a result he’s raised in the royal household and rises to become a general, a detail not in the original text. We get to see Moses and Ramesses fighting the Hittites and Moses saving Ramesses’ life in battle.

This allows the film to develop the relationship between Moses, Ramesses, and Seti I (John Turturro), Ramesses’ father, who quietly regrets that he cannot make Moses his successor, because he can see that Moses is a better leader than Ramesses. Ramesses slowly comes to resent his foster brother. None of this is in the book of Exodus; the ruler is simply called Pharaoh, and there is nothing to suggest that the Pharaoh whom Moses confronts is not the same Pharaoh who ordered the deaths of the Hebrew boys.

Edgerton and Bale as Ramesses and Moses

So the whole “Moses and Pharaoh are foster brothers” element of the film is made up; in doing this, Scott is probably drawing off of Cecil B DeMille’s Ten Commandments. Since DeMille’s 1956 version was a partial remake of his 1923 silent film of the same name, I suspect that the idea to make Moses and Pharaoh brothers ultimately goes back to Jeanie MacPherson, the screenwriter who penned the silent version’s script. The three films certainly have a lot of parallels beyond the ‘foster brothers’ angle: the emphasis on enormous sets, villainous Egyptians whipping Hebrews, white people playing all the principle roles, and many others. But I’ll confess to not having researched the history of Moses fiction, so perhaps I’m off-base there.

The Biblical narrative does not explain how Moses rediscovers his birth family, but in the film Moses meets Nun (Ben Kingsley), who tells him of his Hebrew parentage. He initially conceals the fact, but the villainous Egyptian Hegep (Ben Mendelsohn) tells Ramesses, who threatens to cut off the arm of Miriam (Tara Fitzgerald), a palace slave who is also Moses’ sister and the one who brought the baby to Bithiah’s attention in the first place. So Moses admits the truth, at which point Queen Tuya (Sigourney Weaver, given pretty much nothing to do except dislike Moses), Ramesses’ mother, persuades the pharaoh to exile Moses and send assassins after him. This is a deviation from the original text, in which Moses flees after killing an Egyptian (a detail that does happen in the film, but is not the reason why Pharaoh wants him dead).

Then we get Moses’ meeting with the shepherdess Zipporah (Maria Valverde) and her father Jethro, which happens the way it does in the Biblical text. They get married with suspiciously modern-sounding wedding vows, have a son, and debate whether to raise him religiously or not. Zipporah wants Gershom to be able to decide for himself what he believes when he reaches adulthood, while Moses wants to raise him to believe in himself. This whole sequence is laughably modern in the way it thinks about issues of marriage, family, and religion, and is in some ways the real low point of the film.

Moses and Zipporah swearing to ‘trust whatever they do not yet know’ of each other. The scene with the Unity Candle got cut

 

Are You There, God? It’s Me, Moses

Then Moses wanders up Mt Horeb looking for some lost goats. He gets caught in a landslide during a storm and is knocked out, and when he wakes up he’s trapped in mud. He sees a burning bush and has a conversation with a young boy, identified in the credits as Malak (the Hebrew word for ‘angel’ and ‘messenger’). While the choice to use this mysterious boy as Yahweh’s mouthpiece in the film attracted a lot of attention, I actually don’t find the idea problematic. Throughout the Biblical narrative God and Moses talk a good deal, but the text rarely explains what that looked like. Scott made the reasonable choice that it needed to be depicted visually rather than just using a booming voice from nowhere. And, as Christian Bale said in an interview, “I’m always interested in asking other people’s opinions on it. How would you have represented God, if you were in Ridley’s position? It can be very easy to pick apart someone’s choice for a depiction of God. But if you are put in Ridley’s shoes, it’s an immensely difficult thing. How on earth do you do that?” That’s a pretty fair point. Scott had to make a choice about how to show that, and his choice was inevitably going to bother some people.

Malak (Isaac Andrews)

 

So for the rest of the film, when Moses talks with God, he has a conversation with Malak. Malak is a bit like Harvey the Pooka; only Moses can see him, which raises the question of whether Malak is all in his head. That’s Bale’s interpretation. “I think [Moses] was likely schizophrenic and was one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life.”

A bigger issue than Malak’s appearance is his personality. As divine messengers go, he’s very angry, and wants to take revenge on the Egyptians for what they’ve done to His people. As the film goes on, Moses becomes more and more appalled at what is happening to the Egyptians, whom he naturally cares for, and he argues with Malak several times. The notion of arguing with God is a very Jewish notion, and does have at least a bit of support in the text, since Moses is initially very resistant to acting as God’s messenger and keeps trying to offer excuses for why he’s not the best man for the job. But the Biblical Moses slowly becomes more certain over time, and directs his anger not at God but at the Hebrews when they become disobedient. But the film does do a nice job of exploring the uncertainty of a prophet, a common theme in the Tanakh/Old Testament.

 

Back to Egypt

Moses heads back to Egypt and meets his brother Aaron (Andrew Tarbet). In the original text, Aaron is an important figure who accompanies Moses on repeated visits to Pharaoh’s court and performs the famous staff-into-snake miracle. In the film, Aaron is pretty much an afterthought, with virtually no dialog or function. As a matter of fact, I kept thinking Joshua was Aaron, because Joshua keeps sneaking off to watch Moses talk to empty air (since no one else can see Malak) and Aaron basically just disappears into the background.

In the Biblical narrative, Moses and Aaron’s visits to Pharaoh alternate with the various plagues, as Pharaoh remains unmoved by what is happening. Scott’s film pares down the meetings, perhaps because the repetition doesn’t make for compelling cinema, At one point, a visit from Moses is replaced by Moses writing a text on a horse’s side and sending it to the court, a really bizarre choice that isn’t explained and just seems silly.

Pharaoh’s response to Moses’ first visit is the famous ‘bricks without straw’ edict, but in the film Ramesses issues that order long after the plagues begin. Instead, when Pharaoh refuses to release the Hebrews, Moses trains them in guerilla tactics and they start blowing stuff up and attacking ships with fire arrows, because you can’t skip the Shit Blows Up and the Fire Arrows at Night scenes in films like this.

I’m a bit conflicted about this. A charitable reading of this is that the film is trying to highlight the ineffectiveness of violence compared to God’s power. But given that the film doesn’t want to definitively say that Yahweh exists, I think it’s more likely to just be an attempt to bring some macho violence to a film that doesn’t really get to have much of that.

Moses teaching the Hebrews how to do archery

Malak shows up and tells Moses he’s taking way too long to liberate the Hebrews, and that it’s time to get Biblical on Ramesses’s ass. The Ten Plagues all occur, in almost the right order (the death of the livestock and the boils are switched). But Scott favors a naturalistic explanation for the plagues. The Nile turns to blood when large crocodiles slaughter a bunch of fishermen (ignoring the Biblical detail that even water than was kept in buckets and jars was affected), and the blood kills the fish and forces the frogs out of the water. Without the frogs in the river, lice and flies proliferate, giving many people boils. Then a disease strikes the livestock, which die bleeding for the mouth. Then a massive hailstorm strikes, followed by a swarm of locusts that eat all the crops in the field. Because Ramesses is by this point just being an asshole, he refuses to release any food from the royal granaries, which provokes a food riot, which Ramesses crushes with his soldiers.

Then darkness sets in, and Ramesses declares that if one more bad thing happens, so help him God, he’s gonna kill all the Hebrew babies just cuz. But apparently this gives Yahweh an idea…

Malak tells Moses that he wants to humiliate Ramesses and gives him the rules for the Passover, which Moses teaches to the Israelites. A shadow sweeps across the land and all the Egyptian boys die. This is the only one of the plagues that the film makes no real attempt to naturalize.

What is nice about the plagues sequence is that it does a very good job of dramatizing just how appalling the Biblical plagues are in the text; at different moments, they’re frightening, disgusting, dangerous, and tragic, and the made-up detail about the food riot highlights the undercurrent of the Biblical narrative, which is that the plagues are destroying Egypt’s economy, ruining all the sources of food and driving the people to desperation and panic. Naturalistic explanations or not, Scott’s film drives home for those who believe the Biblical narrative just how horrible it would have been to live through.

The Plague of Locusts

 

The Parting of the Sea

When Moses first leaves Egypt, he crosses the sea at what the film identifies as the Tiran Straits, which the film apparently thinks separates Egypt from the Sinai peninsula. In reality, the Tiran Straits separate the southern end of the Sinai peninsula from Arabia and the Gulf of Aqaba from the Red Sea. The Straits are depicted as shallow enough to walk across, when in reality its shallowest channel is 240 ft deep. So the geography is way off. Moses tries to lead the Israelites to the Tiran Straits, but decides that because Pharaoh will easily be able to follow them with his chariots, so instead he takes a mountain pass, gets lost, and runs into the Red Sea. So apparently Moses is as bad at map-reading as Ridley Scott is.

Egypt is to the left of the Sinai peninsula

Frustrated, Moses takes a nap, and when he wakes up, the water has inexplicably receded. Scott says that his treatment of this event is based on a tsumani caused by an earthquake that happened around 3000 BC off the Italian coast. I’m a bit skeptical about this claim, since there aren’t records about Italy reaching back that far, and I’m not sure how archaeology could document the temporary recession of water like that, but let’s put that aside. The film ignores the Biblical details about the pillar of smoke and fire that separated the Hebrews and the Egyptians or the powerful wind that split the water in two. Moses hurriedly leads his people across and Ramesses foolishly leads his men into the sea. Then tornadoes and a huge tidal wave sweep in and destroy the army and Ramesses barely gets out alive.

The Red Sea, starting to un-part

A little later, Moses carves the 10 Commandments at Malak’s instruction and rides off to Canaan.

Although the film deviates from the narrative in a variety of ways (the reason Moses has to leave Egypt, the guerilla war against Egypt, omitting most of the meetings between Moses and Pharaoh), these are comparatively small alterations to the text that can mostly be understood as simplifying the structure of the narrative and trying to add more ‘action’ to the film (which is to say, violence). It’s hard to have a blockbuster film without at least one major battle and a Shit Blows Up scene.

The biggest deviation from the text comes in the desire to pare out or naturalize the various miracles. The idea of using science to explain away Biblical miracles emerged in the 18^th century as a way of demonstrating the superiority of the Scientific Revolution over the ignorance and superstition of the past. I’ve never found it a particularly useful way to understand Biblical miracles because it relies on the assumption that ancient people were so steeped in ignorance and superstition that they were incapable of exercising even the smallest bit of rational thought, curiosity, or skepticism. It assumes that people who lived far more intimately with nature than we do today were unable to actually observe nature. It also ignores the whole question of why ancient people interpreted a scientific phenomenon in a particular way, so it doesn’t actually explain very much. And Biblical miracle stories often emphasize that the observable facts don’t fit with naturalistic explanations. The whole point of saying in Exodus 7:19 that even water in jars and buckets will turn to blood is to demonstrate that natural explanations couldn’t explain it. For the first several miracles, Pharaoh’s wise men are able to duplicate the miracles, but after the third plague they admit they can’t reproduce the effects. The text is fairly plain; these events defy natural explanation. Accept the story as a miracle or discount it and explore why a culture would tell stories about miracles that didn’t happen, but trying to naturalize the miracles is just condescending to our ancestors.

Sucks to be Egyptian

Scott was clearly trying to avoid having to replicate DeMIlle’s Ten Commandments, and you can’t blame him. While that film also makes alterations to the text, it plays the miracles pretty much as written, so if Scott had followed the same strategy, all he would have gotten was a bigger remake of a Hollywood classic, and critics would probably have complained that he wasn’t bringing anything fresh to the film. Like it or not The Ten Commandments works quite well, as long as you accept the 50s film conventions and Heston’s acting style. There’s no point in remaking a successful film (although these days Hollywood doesn’t understand that), so I think Scott made the right choice to take the film in a very different direction. Its portrait of a deeply uncertain and conflicted Moses who argues with a very certain and angry Yahweh is an interesting one, one that highlights elements of the original text that don’t normally get a lot of attention. I’m not sure the film really succeeds, but it’s a valiant effort to breathe new life into a familiar story.

Next time, I’ll take a poke at the historical issues around the Exodus narrative.

 

Update: When I wrote this post, I forgot about a reference in Exodus 2 about the pharaoh who raised Moses dying before Moses saw the Burning Bush. So the Moses and Pharaoh are foster brother” thing is actually readily derivable from Exodus itself, although it is not pointed out in the text.

“Want to Know More?

Exodus: Gods and Kings is available on Amazon. If you want to read the story, check out the Bible!

The Physician: Muslims and Jews and Christians! Oh My!

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Medieval Persia, Movies I Hate, Noah Gordon, Religious Issues, The Physician, Tom Payne

Fortunately, I was wrong about feeling an aneurism coming on after the first 20 minutes of The Physician (2013, dir. Philip Stölzl, based on the 1986 novel of the same name by Noah Gordon). A little calming bed rest and I’m ready to take on more of the film, which mercifully is less stroke-inducing than the first part, perhaps because I’m a specialist in medieval England and not in medieval Persia, where the rest of the film is set. But that’s not to say that it’s actually a good movie.

Robert Cole (Tom Payne), the anachronistically-named English protagonist with the magical ability to know if people he touches are going to die, decides that he wants to study medicine with the greatest doctor in the world, so he consults a map of the known world, about 400 years before any such thing existed. Then he sets out for Isfahan, Persia, sometime around 1022.

But he’s been warned that Christians aren’t allowed in Muslim lands. Sigh. Taken as a general statement, this is total bullshit. There was a thriving network of Christian communities across the Islamic world down into the early 21^st century, when the Iraq War released forces that devastated Christian communities in Iraq, forcing them to flee.

Unlike Christianity, Islam has fairly precise rules intended to guarantee Jews and Christians a measure of legal toleration as long as they do not challenge Islamic dominance. The basic rules were established by a document known as the Pact of Umar, traditionally ascribed to the second caliph, Umar ibn Khattab (who died in 644), but probably belonging to a slightly later period. According to the Pact, conquered Jewish and Christian communities could receive the status of dhimmis, or ‘protected persons’, provided that they paid a special tax, the jizya, accepted their inferior status, and obeyed a variety of rules that restricted their religious practices in different ways; for example, they could not build new churches, conduct religious rituals in public, and could not try to prevent conversion to Islam or pursue converts from Islam. If they accepted these rules, the dhimmis were permitted to worship according to their religious practices, were generally judged according to their own law, and could do things that were forbidden to Muslims, such as eating pork or drinking alcohol.

These rules are highly problematic in some ways, and are a far cry from 21^st century Western notions of religious toleration, but they allowed a substantial measure of peace and prosperity to Jews and Christians most of the time, and were far superior to the options that Muslims and Jews found in most Christian territories. They did not completely prevent conflict between different religious groups; anti-Jewish and anti-Christian violence or legislation periodically occurred. But dhimmi status was a part of sharia law, and therefore was not subject to the whims of individual rulers most of the time, because medieval Muslim society did not accord individual rulers much control over the legal system.

Tom Payne as Rob Cole aka Jesse ben Benjamin

So the movie’s claims that Muslim society did not tolerate Christians at all is, taken broadly, completely false. Noah Gordon is probably just talking (or writing) out his ass.

However, the early 11^th century did see a considerable decree of tensions between Christians and Muslims within the Shi’ite Fatimid Empire, which included Egypt and Palestine. For example, in 1009, the Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim (who died in 1021) ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He instituted force conversions of Jews and Christians, which is contrary to general Islamic law. His actions were, strictly speaking, a violation of sharia, but Al-Hakim is often considered to have been insane, and the Fatimid caliphs enjoyed greater control over sharia in their territories than other rulers did.

Isfahan is about in the center of the green Abbasid zone on this map

Al-Hakim died in 1021 (unless you’re a Druze and you believe he went into occultation, a state of mystical hiding in which he continues to abide to this day), and the persecution of Christians and Jews came to an end, but since the film is vague about exactly when Rob is making his journey, perhaps he got to Egypt a bit earlier. Or perhaps Rob got out of date information and just didn’t bother to double-check it when he reached Cairo. But al-Hakim’s persecution of Christians did not apply to Persia, which was on the other side of Iraq from the Fatimid state, so the film is still basically wrong on this issue. Rob might have had to pretend to be a Jew while he was passing through Egypt, but once he reached Iraq he would have been able to admit to being a Christian again. I suppose we could say that by the time he gets to Persia he’s been depending on the support of other Jews, so that he continues his deception because he doesn’t want to offend his hosts, but I think that’s stretching things a bit too far.

Because he can’t be an open Christian, Rob decides to disguise himself as a Jew. He adopts the name Jesse ben Benjamin and (wince) circumcises himself. In for a penny, in for a pound I suppose. Exactly why he does this isn’t entirely clear. It’s not like the Jews he meets are going to make him drop trou while they shake his hand, so he could probably get by just by keeping his pants on, which is generally a polite thing to do around strangers.

Once he gets to Isfahan he settles in with a Jewish family there, and at one point fakes his way through a Hebrew table blessing, despite knowing neither Hebrew nor anything about Jewish rituals. At least, there’s no sign he knows Hebrew. Everyone in the film just speaks English, with no indication of what language it’s substituting for. He also miraculously learns to read Arabic at some point, despite not being literate at all earlier in the film when he’s shown an Arabic book. It’s not clear how long Rob spends in Isfahan, so I perhaps we should assume that he just learns to read during his medical studies, but unlike in some films, there’s no training montage to suggest it, and the idea that he mastered Arabic in a year or two is pretty implausible.

But the film does deserve points for exploring, at least in a half-assed way, the way that Jews lived in medieval Persia. The Jews of Isfahan live in a distinct quarter, have their own synagogue, and seem to be allowed to follow their own laws. They engage in commerce and education right alongside the Muslims of the city. We see a Hebrew worship service, and when the synagogue is set on fire, the camera focuses on the burning of the Torah scroll, treating it as the serious loss it would be. The film touches on the fact that Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol but the Jews are permitted to do so.

The Molla Neissan Synagogue in modern Isfahan

Part of the film’s climax involves a Muslim riot that targets the Jewish quarter. The cause of this riot is rather muddled and cliché-ridden, and I’ll tackle it in my next post, but taken on its own, it’s reasonable example of how fraught with peril the situation of the dhimmi communities could be when religious tensions were inflamed. When they realize the rioters are coming for them, the Jews barricade the entrance to their quarter and defend it until they are overwhelmed, at which point they retreat to their synagogue and barricade themselves into that structure, also unsuccessfully. When the Muslims break in, they light the synagogue on fire and trap the terrified Jewish survivors in the mikvah, the synagogue’s ritual bath. Fortunately, our hero rather improbably manages to save the day.

Overall, the complexity of the religious situation is probably the best thing about the film. Very rarely do big-budget films explore the three-sided religious dynamics of the Muslim world, and even if this film does so rather imperfectly, it’s still interesting. It doesn’t make me hate the movie any less for its godawful opening scenes though.

Want to Know More?

The Physicianis available on Amazon. Noah Gordon’s The Physician (The Cole Trilogy)is available too.

Queen Margot: Poisoned Lipstick and Bloody Sweat

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16th century France, Alexandre Dumas, Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Daniel Auteuil, Early Modern Europe, Henry of Navarre, Isabella Adjani, John-Hugues Anglade, Margaret of Valois, Medical Stuff, Movies I Love, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Religious Issues, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, Virna Lisi

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 19^th 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 19^th 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 16^th 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.

Want to Know More?

Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

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.

Queen Margot: Like Reign But with More Corpses

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16th century France, Alexnadre Dumas, Catherine de Medici, Charles IX, Daniel Auteuil, Early Modern Europe, Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, Interesting Women, Isabelle Adjani, Marguerite of Valois, Movies I Love, Paris, Patrice Chéreau, Queen Margot, Religious Issues, St Bartholomew's Day Massacre, The Protestant Reformations, Virna Lisi

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 one of 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 19^th 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-19^th 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 19^th 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 aren’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 19^th 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 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 19^th 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 19^th 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.

 

Want to Know More?

Queen Margot (English Subtitled)is available on Amazon. The novel is available in English there as well, as Queen Margot; Or, Marguerite de Valois – With Nine Illustrations.There’s also a historical biography of Margot and her mother Catherine, The Rival Queens: Catherine de’ Medici, Her Daughter Marguerite de Valois, and the Betrayal that Ignited a Kingdom, although Nancy Goldstone is not a professional historian.

One good scholarly introduction to 16th century France is Frederic Baumgartner’s France in the Sixteenth Century.A simple introduction to the Massacre is The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford Cultural Editions Series).

Salem: The Tensions Beneath the Accusations

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Paul Boyer, Religious Issues, Salem, Salem Witch Trials, Stephen Nissenbaum, Witchcraft

When I first started discussing Salem, I looked at the way the series misunderstood Salem as a place. I’ve also mentioned how Salem omits one of the key figures in the Witch Panic, Rev. Samuel Parris. After a lot of intervening posts, it’s time to tackle why those omissions are such a big deal.

A House Divided

I’ve already explained that Salem was actually two communities, the larger, more prosperous Salem Town and the smaller, more agricultural Salem Village. Salem Town had reluctantly allowed Salem Village to have its own church (or ‘meeting place’), reluctantly because the church and its minister were supported by taxes, so a new church meant that Salem Town would be losing tax revenue from Salem Village. The Town had only done this because the Massachusetts Legislature had authorized the new church. So this new church was a focus on considerable tension with the wider Salem community.

And, in fact, the question of who was to serve as the minister of Salem Village’s new church was extremely contentious. In 1673, Rev. James Bayley was appointed minister, but left 7 years later, amid accusations that he wasn’t praying enough and that church members had not been allowed to participate in his selection. He was replaced with Rev. George Burroughs, who was ousted in 1683 and ultimately wound up moving to the Maine frontier. Burroughs was succeeded by Rev. Deodat Lawson. He stayed for four very turbulent years before departing in 1688. His successor was Rev. Samuel Parris, who was eventually forced out in 1696 because members of the church who opposed him were refusing to pay the taxes for his salary. The constant disputes are not entirely understood, but it is clear that Salem Village was split into two factions, those who supported Bayley and Burroughs and those who supported Lawson and Parris, which each side opposing and complaining about the other.

Samuel Parris

In 1974, historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum published a very important work, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft. In it, they worked to untangle the religious politics of Salem in the 1680s and 90s, and what they found is that during the Witch Trials those Villagers who supported Lawson and Parris tended to be bringing accusations of witchcraft against those who supported Bayley and Burroughs. Indeed, Rev. Burroughs was himself accused of being the leader of the witches, initially by Abigail Williams and then later by Mary Walcott, Susannah Sheldon, and Mercy Lewis. He was forcibly brought back from the Maine frontier to stand trial, and was eventually found guilty and executed that August. But the supporters of Bayley and Burroughs were not bringing accusations against the supporters of Lawson and Parris. This suggests that there was something distinct about the former group that was leading them to fear witchcraft.

Boyer and Nissenbaum mapped out the residences of those involved, and found that a majority of the accusers came from the western half of the Village, which was the more rural side, while a majority of those accused, as well as those who spoke in defense of them at the trials, lived on the eastern half of the Village, closer to Salem Town. Furthermore, the accusers mostly tended to be farmers by occupation, whereas large numbers of the accused witches were tradesmen and craftsmen, including a carpenter, a shoe-maker, a miller, and a sawmill operator. Several of them, such as Bridget Bishop, ran taverns. In other words, the accused tended to be somewhat better off economically, enjoy more social and commercial contacts with Salem Town, and engage in occupations directly tied to the growing commercial world of Boston and Salem Town, while the accused tended to struggling members of a more traditional rural economy. Puritans in particular considered taverns highly suspect places where immoral activity went on.

Boyer and Nissenbaum’s map. A for ‘accuser’, D for defender of an accused witch, W in a circle for an accused witch

Since that pattern tended to also manifest in the question of who supported which ministers, Boyer and Nissenbaum suggested that Salem Village was a community divided between those who were suspicious of the economic transformation taking place in late 17^th century Massachusetts and those who had found it a source of economic opportunities. The ‘traditionalists’ had been uncomfortable with Bayley and Burroughs and succeeded in forcing them out and installing first Lawson and then Parris because they suspected the first two ministers because they seemed insufficiently traditional in some way, perhaps because their supporters were too ready to embrace economic change.

The Problem of the Quakers

Another thing that troubled the Puritans of Salem Village was that they and their ancestors had come to New England to get away from what they considered the ungodly society of England. Not only was England wealthy, it was home to numerous different brands of Christianity. The Puritans were strict Congregationalists who felt that the Anglicans were too moderate and willing to compromise on religious matters. They also loathed the much more religiously liberal Quakers, who maintained that every person possessed an inner divine light, which to the Puritans seemed dangerously close to saying that God was in all people and might therefore speak through anyone. The Quakers had earned their derisive nickname by a tendency of some members to ‘quake’ when they felt the Holy Spirit within them. Such religious shaking looked rather like the seizures that those afflicted by witchcraft sometimes experienced.

The oldest Quaker Meeting House in the US, in Flushing, NY

As a result, the Massachusetts Colony had initially been extremely hostile to Quakers, arresting them, ordering them whipped, and in the 1650s and 60s, hanging them. The Puritans were determined to keep out what they saw as the diabolical Quakers. But when Massachusetts received a new charter from James II in the mid-1680s, it granted religious toleration to all Protestants, meaning that Quakers now enjoyed legal protection and could not be violently forced out of the community. By 1692, the largest community of Quakers in Essex County was located in Salem Town, and Quaker communities had sprung up in neighboring communities as well. Accused witches frequently had Quaker connections, but were not generally Quakers themselves. For example, Rebecca Nurse had taken in an orphaned Quaker child, while Elizabeth Proctor had numerous Quaker relatives. And, as one historian has demonstrated, Quakers tended to live in the eastern half of Salem Village.

So if we pull all of this together, what we see is that Salem Village had a significant faction of traditionalist Puritans who saw themselves struggling economically as farmers; increasing settlement meant that the farmers had fewer opportunities to expand their farms. Even if the stormy weather of 1692 didn’t cause ergotism, it may well have caused poor harvests and similar problems. These traditionalists saw themselves losing their social position to people whose occupations and economic activities seemed religiously suspect. They were seeing rising numbers of Quakers appearing in the colony, and could no longer keep them out or express their distaste for Quakers through legal persecution. They saw these religious and economic changes as signs they were losing ‘their’ Salem to the forces of Satan, and because the two sides of Salem Village were geographically and socially quite distinct, they had fewer chances to interact and see their opponents as human beings. They had won a few victories over the issue of which minister would lead them, but their preferred candidates were being contested by their opponents. And then, in 1692, a group of teenage girls began to experience strange symptoms and claimed that some of the non-traditionalists were witches. Seen in that context, the Witch Panic makes a lot more sense.

To appreciate the anxiety the Quakers caused, one only has to think about the considerable anxiety that the spread of Islamic immigrants has caused in some sections of contemporary American society. Like Salem, modern America is experiencing a growth of religious pluralism and some traditionalists are extremely uncomfortable with that development. Some traditionalists call directly for the restriction of religious rights to Christians, but others express their anxiety a bit more indirectly through worries about ‘terrorism’. While there are certainly many differences between witches and terrorists (not least of which is that terrorists actually exist), they are both easily demonizable figures who cannot be compromised with because of the danger they are seen to pose.

The Salem Witch Trials are a fascinating set of events. They have engaged the attention of many serious scholars and enthusiastic amateurs for generations, and hopefully these posts have given you a sense of why they are so compelling and worthy of study. The work of scholars like Walter Stephens, Carol Karlsen, Paul Boyer, and Stephen Nissenbaum have reveled a truly complex set of social, economic, religious, and cultural forces (and I’ve only scratched the surface of the issues).

And yet, WGN’s Salem ignores most of this in favor of an entirely fabricated, historically inaccurate, lurid tale of actual witches plotting evil and working actual magic. The show runner and writers have taken a rich, fascinating story and replaced it with juvenile pabulum. In a few places they’ve gotten bits right; there’s a passing line in one episode about how the Puritans are losing control of the town and are afraid, but that’s a throwaway line that goes nowhere. And while they’ve managed to replicate part of what’s going on with the teenage girls of Salem, I think that was basically blind luck.

I entirely understand that in order to succeed, a television show has to be interesting and engaging to its audience. It has to give them a reason to turn in week after week. But the actual Salem Witch Trials are interesting and engaging. The unembellished facts have held people’s attention for 3 centuries now and show no signs of becoming boring. Instead of throwing out the facts and making a new story out of whole cloth, Salem could have woven its lurid intrigues around the real characters and events. They didn’t have to lead Mercy Lewis through town in bondage gear to make her seizures and accusations shocking.

The past is a fascinating place. It would be nice of American television actually went there occasionally.

Want to Know More?

SALEM SEASON 1is available through Amazon.

When I was a first semester freshman, I took a course in American History before the Civil War. It was my first college history course, and one of the textbooks was After the Fact: The Art of Historical Detection. Its various chapters are dedicated to introducing various interesting historical issues to college students, and its second chapter, on Salem, introduced me to the work of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum. That chapter is probably what I remember most clearly from that class (apart from everyone humming the Preamble to the Constitution when we had to write it on an exam). If you’re looking for an easy introduction to historical methods and American history, this is an excellent book.

Or you could buy Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.