great empires are not maintained by timidity

♀ queering history since '14  

[qqueenofhades]

Do you have an estimation how much racism or xenophobia Yusuf would have encountered traveling with Nicolo across Europe up to the modern ages? This is a very vague ask, forgive me. I wonder how much the concept of racism has changed over time. I have the vague impression that pre-modern European societies were always more diverse than one might assume nowadays, but I have little factual historic knowledge. I also wonder how much xenophobia Nicolo would have encountered.

And you would be correct! Because the “medieval ages were all lily-white and anyone placing POC in them is Wrong” is yet again, surprise surprise, another total lie that is a product of right-wing reactionary revisionism and not based on actual historical evidence. A couple years ago, I wrote a very lengthy post about historical people of color in Europe, starting from the Roman era and going down to about the 19th century (everything prior to the 20th century, basically). Obviously, it only discussed each example briefly, but there’s definitely more than enough there to debunk any idea that medieval Europe was monochromatically white. Iberia, Sicily, and other “crossroad” kingdoms had the most visibly and long-term settled diverse populations, but major cities such as London were ethnically diverse from their founding (which if you know anything about the Romans, truly, is obvious). There is extensive evidence for Africans and Muslims traveling to, if perhaps not settling in, early medieval Ireland and Britain (though sometimes they did do this, as there is a record of at least one African abbot of an English religious house). I also have this list of readings on the golden age of medieval Africa, including the richest king of all time and the various powerful empires that existed particularly in West Africa.

As noted in the Historical People of Color post, the crusades themselves, despite their obvious violence and bloodshed, were vehicles for cross-cultural exchange, which resulted in both Islamic ideas traveling to the west and western ideas traveling to the Islamic world. Medieval Christians were fascinated by “Saracens” as much as they were frightened by them, and there was a flourishing genre of “Saracen romances,” such as Parzival (one of the most popular romances of German medieval literature,which features the half-Muslim hero Feirefiz) and The King of Tars. These romances obviously display complicated attitudes about race and religion; the Saracen heroes are usually depicted as having to forsake their mistaken beliefs (usually some jumbled combination of paganistic polytheism rather than actual Islam) to complete their moral and emotional journey, and in King of Tars specifically, that results in an actual physical transformation for the Muslim sultan, the Christian princess’ husband, from black-skinned to white-skinned as a symbol of his newly gained virtue. Obviously there is an element of colorism at play; I wouldn’t call it racism because racism as a scientific term and “biological” concept was invented in the 19th century when, yet again, the West was busy concocting “impartial” reasons for its colonialism and “civilization” of supposedly inferior people. In the Saracen romances, however, the Saracen characters are not unsympathetic (if misguided), and the star-crossed lovers trope between Christian princesses and gallant Muslim warriors is played pretty much as you would expect it to go (with the implication that we’re supposed to root for him converting to Christianity so they can be together). As long as religious identity is correct, skin color doesn’t really matter or is at least less important, is viewed as mutable and changeable, and not the only marker of a person’s identity.

So in that sense, Yusuf and Nicolo would not be unfamiliar as characters in their very own star-crossed Saracen romance, and since we’ve already discussed the bonds between knights and how deeply romantic and emotional friendships were often the case even between men who WEREN’T lovers, it’s entirely possible that people would have understood them in that context. It also depends on how much time they spent in medieval Europe (as in DVLA, I have them traveling across the Eastern world for several hundred years after the crusades and not getting back to Europe until the Renaissance, when ideas and attitudes toward race and religion were once more undergoing huge transformation). Obviously, yes, there would be an element of xenophobia throughout history, and England (aha, hello Ancestors of Brexit) has in fact pretty much always been known for hating foreigners. But these weren’t necessarily foreigners of color; white Europeans from France, Italy, the Low Countries, Flanders, Bohemia, etc could all be viewed suspiciously by the English, especially post-Henry VIII and the religious break from Rome. (But this was, again, also the case before that happened, because apparently the English just suck like that.) This plays into the fact that as has been pointed out before, racism in Europe is cultured along very different lines from how it is in America, and takes into account geographical, cultural, religious, and other factors, as well as simply skin color. (Though colorism is usually also unfortunately part of it pretty much everywhere, since the ideal medieval woman was often thought to be blonde and blue-eyed, and fair coloring has always been positively correlated with morality -- just look at “Dark Magic” and “Black Magic” and all those other fantasy tropes of the villain being Dark.)

So basically, Yusuf and Nicolo would probably have been equally mistrusted in, say, 16th-century England (such as when they go there in the attempt to rescue Andy and Quynh in DVLA). They’re sodomites, for a start (this is right about when male homosexuality starts to enter the books as a capital crime), and Nicolo is Italian and therefore deeply suspicious as a possible papal agent. Yusuf might have actually made out better in that case, because Elizabethan England had fairly friendly diplomatic relations with the Ottoman and Persian empires (this is written about in the Historical People of Color post) and there was even an idea of Protestant England and Muslim North Africa allying together to attack their mutual enemy, Catholic Spain. Othello is obviously a product of this cultural context, with its dashing but doomed and tragic Moorish captain (see once again: the character himself is not unsympathetic, and is misled by the evil Iago). So many Elizabethan Englishmen settled in Muslim societies that there were attempted royal incentives to lure them back, and Yusuf would probably have been an exotic curiosity more than an existential danger. (As noted, they would almost certainly hate Nicolo more.)

In places such as Constantinople, where I had them live for a while in chapter 4, Nicolo would also be the more obviously mistrusted party. In a Greek Orthodox city that had substantial and long-term populations of Muslims and Jews, a Latin Catholic would be more the Enemy, because... well, sometimes we hate the people who are almost like us more than we hate the people who are obviously very different and therefore cannot be compared. Emperor Alexios Komnenos of Byzantium helped launch the First Crusade, at least in part in hopes of getting formerly Byzantine lands back from the Turks, but very quickly realized that he couldn’t control the crusaders and things went sour long before the trauma of 1204 and the sack of Constantinople; relations between Latin and Greek Christians had been at the brink of outright hostility for most of the crusades. The Byzantine emperors were used to diplomacy and negotiation and trade agreements with their counterparts in the Islamic world, all of which was viewed as “consorting with the enemy” by the West. Besides, the Great Schism in 1054 had already broken the Western and Eastern churches apart after centuries of bitter theological disputes (these arguments may look like the most mind-bogglingly boring and tiny and insignificant details ever, but the battle over defining heresy and orthodoxy RAGED almost from the founding of Christianity in the first century). So yes, if they were in the Slavic lands, in Eastern and Southern Europe, in Constantinople, in anywhere that adhered to the Orthodox rite, the locals would be used to Yusuf, but HATE Nicolo.

So yes. As ever, the reception that they would have encountered is complicated, and it would not be immediately analogous to modern racism and Islamophobia. It would also be intensely mediated by their cultural, chronological, and geographic location, where sometimes Nicolo would (paradoxically) be MORE mistrusted by other white Christian Europeans. Not to say that Yusuf wouldn’t have encountered prejudice too, because he would, but not quite in the same ways as he would now, or that we would expect.

Thanks for the question!

[liviadeservedbetter]

This is an excellent answer: however, I feel that there is a need to clarify some points it raises about Byzantium and its relationship with the Western Christian world. This is not the first time I’ve run into an assesment similar to OP’s in this fandom, and while it might be common, it is not correct.

Constantinople had ‘substantial and long-term populations of Muslims and Jews’: but we cannot, in any way, characterise it as Greek Orthodox city before the late 13th century. ‘Greek Christianity’ only developed a sharply delineated view of itself after 1204, as we will see shortly. Constantinople was an imperial capital which defined itself not in relation to modern concepts of religion or nationhood, but rather to the empire it possessed: it was not necessarily territorial, but defined by common concepts of law, administration and rulership. Constantinople was the beating hearts of the networks that bound up its imperium: foreigners came along with trade and with information, and although the Byzantines could be very xenophobic and snobby about them, they were not in any way unusual. Muslims and Jews had their quarters in Constantinople in the 11th and 12th century: but so did the Westerners. Venetians, since they had a special relationship as a polity with the empire, were the first: they were followed by the Pisans, Amalfitans and Genovese in the 12th century. (Note that the Byzantine merchants did not like it, because the foreigners received special trading privileges: and we will shortly see how much of a problem that turned out to be.)

This is also exemplified by the example of the First Crusade. Throughout the 10th century - and well into the 12th - Byzantines came to rely heavily on foreign mercenaries instead of the thematic armies that previously formed their main millitary force. Peter Frankopan argues that it was something of a vogue for Western knights to serve in Constantinople in the period that preceded the First Crusade: in fact, he makes the point that Alexios I Komnenos directed his letters precisely to those families that previously had some of their family members sojourn in Constantinople. There was also a number of pilgrims and monks that passed - or stayed in - Constantinople: indeed, it is the very reason why Alexios even conceived of the idea that it might be a good idea to urge the pope to support his recruitment effort (which turned into the First Crusade: no one in Byzantium expected that). Note that the main crusader army cooperated with the Byzantines during the siege of Nicea and expected Alexios to come relieve them at Antioch: the fact that this did not happen and that Bohemond of Sicily seized this opportunity to claim the city as his own was extremely unfortunate, and it skews our sources on both sides to just pile on blame on the other.

But the fact that the Byzantines did not get along well with the Christian polities that arose in the Middle East did not mean that these extremely close relations ceased. Indeed, the very fact that Anna Komnene is so antagonistic towards Westerners reflects the fact that she was the witness to ever growing cooperation with the west. Her brother, John II Komnenos, continued to hire foreign mercenaries, had an alliance with the HRE and campaigned with leaders of crusader states in Syria (it did not go well): Manuel I Komnenos was extremely popular in the West, was allied to the pope and cooperated with the kingdom of Jerusalem in their invasion of Egypt. Indeed, to say that Byzantines ‘were used to diplomacy and negotiation and trade agreements with their counterparts in the Islamic world, all of which was viewed as “consorting with the enemy” by the West’ is only correct to a point: yes, the Byzantines were able to negotiate and cooperate with the Islamic world, but they also were rather adept at invading them and waging war incessantly. On the other hand, even though - for instance - the Byzantines had a persistent problem in the Norman kingdom of Sicily, this did not mean they could not get along phenomenally with other western states at the same time. Really, to speak of Byzantine ‘relationship’ to either the Islamic world or the Western one is extremely reductive: these were not homogenous blocks, had intense inner rivalries that Byzantines exploited, and most importantly of all, all of these allegiances shifted over time.

What of 1054, you might ask? It is not as important as you think it is. First of all, note that schisms were not uncommon in the medieval world: really, in a sense, the Church was always in some kind of a disagreement, because it worked with an extremely unclear, hard to interpret text that Christian theologians kept piling upon. There were schism between the Eastern and Western communions before 1054 (ask me about the Photian schism): there were questions about the filioque, primacy of Rome and some minor points about practice (eg unleavened/leavened bread for Eucharist, marriage of priests etc.) Mostly, everyone just politely agreed to ignore these: the pope was able to correspond with the patriarch of Constantinople, with the tacit understanding that they both thought the other one was terribly wrong and that they would come to their senses eventually. On occassion, tensions flared up: 1054 was therefore not a cause, but a symptom.

But what mattered was 1204. John and Manuel’s courts were cosmpolitan, loud, bright and fashionably-Western: not everyone liked that. Furthermore, the fact that trade privileges given to Western merchants tended to render the Greek ones less competitive was also a major factor that contributed to a counter-reaction in late 1100s (Massacre of the Latins), which dramatically worsened the relationship between Byzantium and the West and sort of contributed to 1204. This did not mean that all foreigners were expelled or massacred or whatever: no. Constantinople still was a cosmpolitan city and trading quickly resumed: but it points us to the underlying tensions between the Byzantine emperors and their subjects. It does not mean that relationships between Byzantium and West were bound to go from bad to worse from now: but it did meant that lot of the goodwill that John and Manuel had from the papacy or HRE was gone.

1204 was both an unfortunate accident of history and a logical development from this. It did not need to happen: it also did not come out of nowhere. In the aftermath of the sack of Constantinople, churchmen like Choniates started writing about the event as a nearly apocalyptic event that demanded the outrage of the entirety of the Greek world: and really, this is when we can start talking about ‘Greekness’ as a source of identity, because it was only after 1204 (when the underlying structures of empire that created the identity of Rhomanoi fell apart) that we see people grasping onto the idea of being ‘Hellenes’. While the empire fell apart, the church remained a firm presence in everyone’s life: whether you lived in a Byzantine rump state of Trebizond or under the Venetian protectorate, you were able to rally around the church. This is where we can start to speak about a self-conscious, independent Greek Orthodox church: and its strongly defined sense of identity would survive well into the future.

But note even after 1204, people were able to conceive of and attempt reconciliation between the Eastern and Western Church: indeed, after the reunification of the Byzantine empire, it was frequently the goal of individual emperors to renew their communion with the West. This never worked out, precisely because the patriarch and his church were to a fault strongly opposed to it (the trauma of 1204 and exile of the patriarch from the city was not something anyone could easily foget): but it is extremely telling that people still attempted this. Neither the Photian schism, 1054 or even 1204 could just get rid of the idea that the differences between the East and the West were reconcilable: and in the meanwhile, new kinds of relationships flourished in places like Frankish Morea.

So what does this mean for Niccolo? ‘So yes, if they were in the Slavic lands, in Eastern and Southern Europe, in Constantinople, in anywhere that adhered to the Orthodox rite, the locals would be used to Yusuf, but HATE Nicolo.’ No. In Constantinople and the entirety of Byzantium, Niccolo would be able to navigate just fine and would not be out of the ordinary anytime before 1204: it is a bit more complicated after that, but it would still be absolutely possible for him to travel around after, although it would really depend on what role and where would he assume. As for outside of Byzantium? A good chunk of Slavic lands operated according to the Western rites: Eastern and Southern Europe had complicated relationships with Byzantium and did often use alliances with Western nations to counterbalance their influence (Bulgaria in particular comes to mind). Furthermore, it is horribly reductive to say that anyone in this very wide region would be used to Yusuf: while Muslims were absolutely able to and did travel and reside in Eastern Europe, it does not follow that a Genoese man would be more out of place in 12th century Poland than a Maghrebi one.

TLDR: To speak of Byzantine attitudes to either the Islamic world or Western world is extremely reductive: relationships fluctuated depending on geopolitical situation and time. 1054 cannot be understood as the breaking point for the Eastern/Western church: 1204 can, but needs to be interpreted in a nuanced way. Byzantium had a longstanding tradition of cooperation with the Western world, which was not even broken by the trauma of 1204: Niccolo would not be out of place in Constantinople either after or before it.

I am happy to take follow up questions.

For further reading:

Michael Angold ‘Greeks and Latins after 1204: the perspective of exile’ in the Mediterranean Historical Review 4 (1989)

Michael Angold, Church and Society in Byzantium under the Comneni (1996)

Peter Frankopan, The first crusade : the call from the East (2012).

Joan Hussey, Orthodox Church in the Byzantine Empire (1986)

Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West (2007)

A. V. Murray, ‘The Enemy Within: Bohemund, Byzantium and the Subversion of the First Crusade’, Crusading and pilgrimage in the Norman world, ed. K. Hurlock and P. Oldfield (2015)

E.A. Siecienski, The Filioque: History of a Doctrinal Controversy (2010)

Mark Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium (1996

[mylittleredgirl]

my dad–also a writer–came to visit, and i mentioned that the best thing to come out of the layoff is that i’m writing again. he asked what i was writing about, and i said what i always do: “oh, just fanfic,” which is code for “let’s not look at this too deeply because i’m basically just making action figures kiss in text form” and “this awkward follow-up question is exactly why i don’t call myself a writer in public.”

he said, “you have to stop doing that.”

“i know, i know,” because it’s even more embarrassing to be embarrassed about writing fanfic, considering how many posts i’ve reblogged in its defense.

but i misunderstood his original question: “fanfic is just the genre. i asked what you’re writing about.” 

i did the conversational equivalent of a spinning wheel cursor for at least a minute. i started peeling back the setting and the characters, the fic challenge and the specific episode the story jumps off from, and it was one of those slow-dawning light bulb moments. “i’m writing about loneliness, and who we are in the absence of purpose.”

as, i imagine, are a lot of people right now, who probably also don’t realize they’re writing an existential diary in the guise of getting television characters to fuck. 

“that’s what you’re writing. the rest is just how you get there, and how you get it out into the world. was richard iii really about richard the third? would shakespeare have gotten as many people to see it if it wasn’t a story they knew?”

so, my friends: what are you writing about?

[siriaeve]

The Old Guard: A Joe/Nicky Historical Primer

If you’re like me, you’ve just recently fallen ass-over-teakettle for The Old Guard, a newly released Netflix movie which takes some of my best-beloved fictional tropes (badass ladies! found family!), mashes them together, and queers the traditional action movie in great ways. You’ve got the implied past relationship between Andromache and Quynh, and the textually explicit relationship between Joe and Nicky, the immortal warrior husbands of my heart.

And if you’re like me, you want lots and lots of fic that explores the many centuries that they’ve all spent together! And if you’re a deeply nerdy historian like me, you want that fic to be as authentic as possible. (Unless you want to deliberately just play with past-as-aesthetic, à la A Knight’s Tale, which I’m not going to judge!) I’m not a specialist in the history of the Scythians or of Hồng Bàng-period Vietnam, so I’m not the person to write a primer on Andromache or Quynh’s likely backstories. But I am a historian of the Middle Ages (12th/13th century, mostly), so here are some resources that might prove helpful for you when writing Joe/Nicky fic.

Yusuf and Nicolò Timeline

This timeline is based on movie dialogue, what can be gleaned from Copley’s wall, from the props seen in the end credits, and from additional promo material where that doesn’t contradict the movie canon. (There are conflicting bits of para-canon out there that just can’t be made to coincide re: how many centuries the Immortals have spent together.)

1066: Joe is born Yusuf ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn al-Kaysani, the son of a merchant trader family from the Maghrib (not sure if the specific region of North Africa is ever specified). First language Arabic?

1069: Nicky is born Nicolò di Genova, a former priest who takes the cross (listen, as a historian of religion I have Notes on this backstory for him but sure, whatever). From his toponymic, he’s almost certainly from Genoa in what is now Italy. This means that his first language was almost certainly a dialect of Ligurian, a sister language of modern standard Italian.

1099: Jerusalem, Nicky and Joe die for the first time

17th century?: England when Andy and Quynh are captured.

1834: Saõ Paolo

1850s: Crimea

1914-18: Western Front

1936: Spain

1940s: Pacific Theatre

1956-59: Cuba

1960s: USA

1967: Oslo

1968: Cuba

1975-79: Cambodia

1992: Nicky attends an English-speaking college

1992-1996?: Sarajevo

Early 2000s?: Democratic Republic of Congo

2019: Turkey, Morocco, South Sudan, France, England

Or, to sum up: two guys from opposing sides meet up during a war in the Middle Ages, kill one another a bunch but realise none of the deaths are sticking, fall in love, and live together happily ever after, and I think that’s beautiful.

This schematic map of Jerusalem is partly visible in the end credits. As you can probably tell, this wasn’t intended for use as map to navigate by, but instead points out some of the most important places in and around Jerusalem from a Christian perspective. National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, KB, 76 F 5, fol. 1r.

First Encounters

Ask most people to list things they associate with the Middle Ages, and the Crusades will probably make that list. We tend to think that we know what the Crusades were about just because they show up as backdrops a lot in pop culture, generally with armoured knights going up against turbaned foes in dusty settings.

But movies tend to get it wrong a lot of the time. (Know a medieval history professor, particularly one who specialises in the Crusades? Ask them what they think of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Oof.) So too do a lot of popular references to the Crusades, which often frames these wars as “a clash of civilisations” between white Christian Europeans and brown Muslim non-Europeans. This kind of framing is pretty inaccurate and very reductive. It’s not really the product of a direct engagement with the medieval primary sources, but is a product of later centuries of reinterpreting, reimagining, and repurposing the meaning of the Crusades. (Particularly in the 19th century, when white European colonisers wanted to find past precedents to justify their expanding empires.) It’s also something that uses hindsight to make a single thing out of a confusing, sprawling series of conflicts loosely connected by geography and purpose.

In other words, in 1099, Nicolò wouldn’t have thought of himself as “a Crusader on the First Crusade”. He’d have most likely thought of himself as a “pilgrim” or “soldier of Christ” who’d gone on a “journey” or “[sea] crossing” to Jerusalem. He may have thought of Jerusalem or the Holy Land as specific goals to capture (but not all Crusaders did). But that did not necessarily mean he specifically set out to fight against Islam.

In 1099, Yusuf would have thought of what was happening not as the first in a series of conflicts, but rather a continuation of many decades of Frankish aggression against the Dār al-Islam, the Muslim world. (In the eleventh century, western Europe was comparatively speaking a marginal, underdeveloped, rural backwater, and so there was a tendency on the part of Muslims to clump all western Europeans together as pale, hairy “Franks” (the people of Francia, modern France) who were smelly and had an uncouth tendency to shit and fart in public.

The first time they met, Yusuf probably thought of Nicolò as a Frank. Not sure what he thought about his toilet habits, though.)

Various waves of travel associated with the First Crusade, 1096-1099

Why Getting the Backstory Right Matters

The Crusades happened a long time ago, but like so many aspects of the Middle Ages, they still aren’t over. This is because they continue to have political, social, and cultural resonances for people around the world. The Crusades (or certain framings of the history of the Crusades, at least) are used to support a whole spectrum of extremist politics and are actively used to promote violence in the 21st century: whether that’s Anders Behring Breivik writing a whole manifesto calling himself a latter-day Knight Templar before murdering 77 people, or Osama bin Laden condemning contemporary Western policies as a new Crusade, or the Bush administration framing its own actions approvingly as a Crusade. (There’s a depressingly long list of examples I could add here.)

Writing backstory fic for Joe and Nicky that leans into the “clash of civilisations" interpretation of the Crusades obviously isn’t anywhere near comparable to any of the examples I just gave. But I think it makes them less interesting as people, and strips nuance out of their backstory—while also wrongly assuming conflict between different groups as inevitable (particularly when it comes to the Middle East and interactions between peoples in the Middle Ages as less complex, pragmatic, and layered than they are today.

Plus, y'know: it’s wrong. 

The Crusades weren’t a Hollywood movie or a video game. They were a complex, messy, multidimensional set of conflicts that involved real people. The First Crusade wasn’t the inevitable clash of two eternally opposed groups. It was a complex event that was the result of a whole bunch of factors including the popes not getting on with the German emperors, the Normans wanting to conquer even more places, the Byzantines engaged in ongoing conflict with the Seljuk Turks, economic motivations, an entire concept of penitential warfare, and, yes, religious fervour. But it wasn’t “just” about religion in the same way that no war today is about “just” one thing.

Or, to put it another way: you don’t want Joe to describe your understanding of his past as infantile, do you?

(Also, think very, very carefully before you use existing Crusader imagery/memes about Nicky. Even if you’re doing it to be funny or sarcastic, the vast majority of those memes have some pretty nasty contemporary connotations. Nicky would be very unimpressed with you for associating him with the alt-right.)

Overviews by Modern Scholars

Susanna Throop’s The Crusades: An Epitome is a very accessible, short recent introduction to the Crusades and how people have thought of them over the centuries. I strongly recommend it. You can pick up up a paperback copy for cheap, or download the e-book version for free from the publisher’s website.

If you want to read more in-depth about the First Crusade specifically, Jay Rubenstein’s Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse is a good, narrative-driven overview, while Paul Cobb’s The Race for Paradise: An Islamic History of the Crusades looks at things from a medieval Muslim point of view.

Christopher Tyerman’s God’s War: A New History of the Crusades or Thomas Asbridge’s The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land are also decent introduction, but you’ll have to invest a lot of time in reading them. (They’re bricks.)

(If you want to write something where Andy and Quynh appear, I’m sorry to say that for a variety of reasons including a dearth of sources, there’s just not a lot of scholarship out there about women and the Crusades. If you’ve got access to an academic library, there are a handful of journal articles but that’s about it, though someone is working on a biography of Mélisende of Jerusalem right now so keep an eye out for that! If you are also a nerd like me.)

Try to avoid: Steven Runciman (groundbreaking in his day, but now dated and superseded by a lot of later research), Amin Maalouf (a novelist, not a historian, and it shows), anything ever shown on the History Channel, or Bernard Lewis (Joe… Joe would not have liked Bernard Lewis.)

Voices from the Middle Ages

It’s tough to find sources from the Middle Ages that are available freely online in an accessible modern translation. The Internet Medieval Sourcebook will crop up high in any search result, but it’s ancient in internet terms (started in the mid-90s) so there’s a lot of link rot, and it is also largely made up of older, out-of-copyright 19th century translations that often show their age. (Generally speaking, if a translation is old enough to use “Mohammedan” or “Moslem” instead of “Muslim”? Hit the back button.) Some more recent, reliable translations of sources about the Crusades and the Crusader states can be found here, here, and here. The Database of Crusaders to the Holy Land will give you info about the kinds of men and women who went on Crusade 1095-1149.

If you’re willing to hunt out books in print, this bibliography is a fab list of translated texts from medieval and early modern Iberia and North Africa. In particular, Crusade and Christendom: Annotated Documents in Translation from Innocent III to the Fall of Acre, 1187-1291 and The First Crusade: “The Chronicle of Fulcher of Chartres" and Other Source Materials are good collections of materials from a largely western European perspective.

Usama ibn Munqidh’s writings offer an eyewitness account of the Crusades from a Muslim perspective. In his travel narrative, ibn Jubayr recounts the pilgrimage he undertook from Spain to Mecca and Medina, and his other journeys in the twelfth century. It’s not specifically about the Crusades, but it will give you a wonderful insight into the diverse, dynamic Mediterranean world that Joe and Nicky were born into.

[liviadeservedbetter]

Speaking of fantastic historians, look at this! I am just probably very late to the party, but this is fantastic: I particularly appreciate the discussion of how crusades function (and should not) in the modern imagination and the fantastic overview of primary sources. 

Just from a brief look, I’d want to see Anne Komnene (Penguin translation, although not ideal, is available through libgen) on the list, but I am absolutely biased. She is a great fun to read, because she is about as far from an objective spectator as you can get (we call her work the Alexiad: it’s essentially a long treatise on how great her father, the emperor Alexios I Komnenos, was). And yet - precisely because of how strongly She Disapproves of everyone - she also provides a strong counternarrative to stuff like the Gesta Francorum, and gets us thinking about how the first crusade could be understood and later interpreted. She also thinks Bohemond is hot: that’s just deeply relatable. I rest my case.

[liviadeservedbetter]

i have had a lot of fun interacting with my readers in the Old Guard fandom: I am therefore choosing to resuscitate my tumblr after almost two years to be able to respond to people in a bit more enganging manner than in the comments

i don’t believe i will post much: but if you want a place where we can talk about queering the middle ages, dealing with eurocentrism in pre-modern historical fiction or what would be fun to read/write about for this fandom, this is absolutely something you can do through here. i’ll check up on here periodically and i’ll be happy to hear from you.

[liviadeservedbetter]

and just to follow up on a question i just got: i am absolutely up to talk about historical/linguistic aspects for your fic/any other reason. i am trained as a historian: i love talking about history and helping people out with this stuff, esp because medieval european history is often perceived as a very male, white and straight sort of subject and you know, i’m not about that at all. 

note here that my research focuses on antiquity/early middle ages in the broader mediterranean world: but i have done work on high middle ages as well, and I am particularly well-equipped to deal with questions on byzantium up to 1261. this means that i might not be able to help you out with some things: but i am able, at the very least, to point you to useful resources you might want to consult. i am sure there are absolutely some very competent historians in this fandom who know more about some of this stuff than i do (come and say hi!): i encourage you to seek them out.

tldr: ask me about history

[liviadeservedbetter]

i have had a lot of fun interacting with my readers in the Old Guard fandom: I am therefore choosing to resuscitate my tumblr after almost two years to be able to respond to people in a bit more enganging manner than in the comments

i don’t believe i will post much: but if you want a place where we can talk about queering the middle ages, dealing with eurocentrism in pre-modern historical fiction or what would be fun to read/write about for this fandom, this is absolutely something you can do through here. i’ll check up on here periodically and i’ll be happy to hear from you.

[moncrieff-deactivated20180121]

i’m actually the ghost of a tormented poet in love with melancholy who sits on patches of moss in the moors sorry you had to find out this way

[robertreich]

The Next Crash

September 15 will mark the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and near meltdown of Wall Street, followed by the Great Recession.

Since hitting bottom in 2009, the economy has grown steadily, the stock market has soared, and corporate profits have ballooned.

But most Americans are still living in the shadow of the Great Recession. More have jobs, to be sure. But they haven’t seen any rise in their wages, adjusted for inflation.

Many are worse off due to the escalating costs of housing, healthcare, and education. And the value of whatever assets they own is less than in 2007.

Last year, about 40 percent of American families struggled to meet at least one basic need – food, health care, housing or utilities, according to an Urban Institute survey.  

All of which suggests we’re careening toward the same sort of crash we had in 2008, and possibly as bad as 1929.

Clear away the financial rubble from those two former crashes and you’d see they both followed upon widening imbalances between the capacity of most people to buy, and what they as workers could produce. Each of these imbalances finally tipped the economy over.

The same imbalance has been growing again. The richest 1 percent of Americans now takes home about 20 percent of total income, and owns over 40 percent of the nation’s wealth.

These are close to the peaks of 1928 and 2007. 

The U.S. economy crashes when it becomes too top heavy because the economy depends on consumer spending to keep it going, yet the rich don’t spend nearly as much of their income as the middle class and the poor.

For a time, the middle class and poor can keep the economy going nonetheless by borrowing. But, as in 1929 and 2008, debt bubbles eventually burst.

We’re getting dangerously close. By the first quarter of this year, household debt was at an all-time high of $13.2 trillion.

Almost 80 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. In a recent Federal Reserve survey, 40 percent of Americans said they wouldn’t be able to pay their bills if faced with a $400 emergency. 

They’ve managed their debts because interest rates have remained low. But the days of low rates are coming to an end. 

The underlying problem isn’t that Americans have been living beyond their means. It’s that their means haven’t been keeping up with the growing economy. Most gains have gone to the top.

It was similar in the years leading up to the crash of 2008. Between 1983 and 2007, household debt soared while most economic gains went to the top. Had the majority of households taken home a larger share, they wouldn’t have needed to go so deeply into debt.

Similarly, between 1913 and 1928, the ratio of personal debt to the total national economy nearly doubled. As Mariner Eccles, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board from 1934 to 1948, explained: “As in a poker game where the chips were concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing.” 

Eventually there were “no more poker chips to be loaned on credit,” Eccles said, and “when … credit ran out, the game stopped.”

After the 1929 crash, the government invented new ways to boost wages – Social Security, unemployment insurance, overtime pay, a minimum wage, the requirement that employers bargain with labor unions, and, finally, a full-employment program called World War II.

After the 2008 crash, the government bailed out the banks and pumped enough money into the economy to contain the slide. But apart from the Affordable Care Act, nothing was done to address the underlying problem of stagnant wages.

Trump and his Republican enablers are now reversing regulations put in place to stop Wall Street’s excessively risky lending.

But Trump’s real contributions to the next crash are his sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, rollback of overtime pay, burdens on labor organizing, tax reductions for corporations and the wealthy but not for most workers, cuts in programs for the poor, and proposed cuts in Medicare and Medicaid – all of which put more stress on the paychecks of most Americans.

Ten years after Lehman Brothers collapsed, it’s important to understand that the real root of the Great Recession wasn’t a banking crisis. It was the growing imbalance between consumer spending and total output – brought on by stagnant wages and widening inequality.

That imbalance is back. Watch your wallets.

[beemyaesthetic]

[heavenlivebytalkingheads]

politics are a nightmare i’m going to the scottish highlands to eat dirt and lavender

[womanzer]

[threewayradio-deactivated202005]

i love to do intense research on things that have zero impact on my life and have no correlation whatsoever to my general interests. i know a lot about combustion engines 

[lettherebedragons]

This is a very specific vague.

[sometimestuesday-deactivated202]

Sylvia Plath was right

[ironleaves]

About what?

[sometimestuesday-deactivated202]

“Being born a woman is an awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars—to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording —all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

[waller-bridge]

when i say “my last two brain cells”; this is Exactly how i picture them

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

lucretius voice: don’t do love kids

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

you either die writing erotic poems or you live long enough to see yourself lament your downfall caused by your erotic poems

[owlmylove]

pls drink a lot of wine and be extraordinarily well read and buy too much perfume and write a few too many love letters and spread affection and poetry wherever you go

[quoms]

The thing about how horrifyingly, lethally hot this summer is (across basically the entire northern hemisphere) is that yes, it is, and yet if I live for another 60 years maybe 40 of them are going to be hotter than this one. Maybe even that’s optimistic. Any acknowledgement of how bad it is right now is inseparable from the realisation that it not only can be worse, but absolutely will be worse.

I’m not saying anyone should be panicking, but I am saying that as a society, as a planet, we ought to be pouring resources into finding ways to keep people alive under these unprecedented conditions; it’s going to be one of the major public health and civil engineering challenges of this century, and we can see it coming. Yet instead, because capitalism, what we are in effect doing is pouring resources into finding ways to make these conditions worse.

That’s not acceptable.