Men at arms' hostility to archers – more from the Chronicle of the Good Duke

Have you ever heard a cliché so often that you begin to doubt that it could possibly be true?

One such cliché for me is the hostility of men at arms in the late Middle Ages to archers and crossbowmen. Men at arms being of course mounted well armored soldiers who in a different era would be called knights.

Today I was reading the Chronicle of the Good Duke Louis of Bourbon, a fascinating account written in the 15th century about one of the best French war leaders of the late 14th century, and his retinue. While doing so I ran across this story which tends to lend credence to the cliché:

They [Duke Louis and his men]went before a place called le Faon, which...was strongly assailed, and it was not taken that day, besides only the low court, where there were many good men wounded; for there was  a Cordelier [A Franciscan friar]  who did marvels of shooting from a rock thrower, to the point that he killed four gentlemen, and one said that he was the strongest arbalester in Poitou. And the next morning the Poitevins and Bourbonnois assailed the donjon, and there was a fierce assault and strong one, and those of the tower defended themselves, and the Cordelier was shooting but they [Louis's men] fought in the manner so that it was taken by good assault and they killed so many of the men inside, with the exception of the Cordelier-arbalester who had taken his habit and had fled to the monastery. And then everyone in the army demanded to know where the Cordelier was: and it was said that he was in the church on his knees before the altar. And so Messire Jean de Roye ran there because the Cordelier had killed in shooting one of his squires, and Jean took the Cordelier with his habit and went to hang him from a tree, concealing himself well so that the Duke of Bourbon should not know of it.

It is left as an exercise for the reader to figure out what Duke Louis's men thought was most offensive about this archer.

Mahdis! Mahdis! Mahdis!

Brian Ulrich forwards this from the Economist:

Earlier this year Iran’s authorities arrested a score of men who, in separate incidents, claimed to be the Mahdi, a sacred figure of Shia Islam, who was “hidden” by God just over a millennium ago and will return some time to conquer evil on earth. A website based in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, deemed the men “deviants”, “fortune-tellers” and “petty criminals”, who were exploiting credulous Iranians for alms during the Persian new-year holiday, which fell in mid-March. Many of the fake messiahs were picked up by security men in the courtyard to the mosque in Jamkaran, a village near Qom, whose reputation as the place of the awaited Mahdi’s advent has been popularised nationwide by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad...

Last year a seminary expert, Mehdi Ghafari, said that more than 3,000 fake Mahdis were in prison. Mahdi-complexes are common, says a Tehran psychiatrist. “Every month we get someone coming in, convinced he is the Mahdi,” she says. 

I've heard that Jerusalem has a similar problem with its Messiahs.

Image: The Mahdi hangout in Jamkaran.

Painting world religions in broad strokes

Just about every day my first read is Juan Cole's blog Informed Comment. Cole is a historian of the Middle East and has taken it on as his personal duty to comment every day on important issues. When it comes to the Middle East and Islam, you can hardly have a better source.

Today Cole posted one of the best things he has ever written, a response to another blog in which the claim is made that Islam is uniquely violent, and that there is a big difference between the Christian approach to worldly power and the Islamic one.

What Cole says here corresponds to my own understanding of the relationship between the formal doctrines of religion, what the founding documents say about it, and what people actually do in the context of their religion. My own understanding results from reading about 20 years ago a short world history of Buddhism, in which it was sufficiently demonstrated to me that just about any thing that could be called Buddhism had been called Buddhism, including the interesting notion that no one should be a monk and everybody should be married and that was true Buddhism. I concluded from that experience that if a religion wants to be more than just a local cult in an isolated village, it will have to diversify and eventually become a single religion in name only.Further, that if you really want to understand what a given religion means in a given context studying Scripture and theology will not do the trick.

Cole provides us today with a detailed discussion of Christianity and Islam in regards to their promotion of violence or their relationship to political power. I am giving an extensive excerpt here but there is quite a bit more and all of it good.

Jesus and Muhammad and the Question of the State
Posted on 04/25/2013 by Juan Cole

I’ve always liked Andrew Sullivan even when I disagree with him. I’m going to disagree with him, or more specifically Alexis de Tocqueville and one of his readers who quotes him:

“Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others.”...

You can’t compare Christianity and Islam on the basis of this kind of characterization of the founders of the two religions. The characterization is in any case unfair (the New Testament texts imply just as many ‘scientific principles’ as does the Qur’an, e.g. They think the world has three levels, that there are demons and angels, etc. etc.)

First of all, we know very little about the lives of Jesus (d. circa 30-33 CE) or Muhammad (d. 632 CE). ...

 The idea that, as de Tocqueville alleged, very early Christianity made no doctrinal demands about the relationship of the believer to power is not clearly in evidence. Take St. Peter (2 peter 2:1-2:17: “But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive opinions.”) Wouldn’t that be a community problem that would have to be dealt with collectively? Also very surprised by this allegation would have been the masses of Christians killed by Christian states for being heretics. And, just for instance, Charlemagne had 4500 Saxon followers of Woden (you’ve all seen the movie Thor) beheaded in 782 because they wouldn’t accept Christianity. That is a lot of heads to be lost to a religion that makes no power demands. Not to mention that modern Christian fundamentalism has cleverly found ways of re-importing selective legal injunctions from the Hebrew Bible into Christianity.

...

The Qur’an, contrary to what some researchers such as John Wansbrough suggested, seems to be pretty well attested as an integral text fairly early on, maybe even better attested than the entire New Testament in the first century after its composition. The sayings attributed to Muhammad were not collected and written down for some 200 years after the Prophet’s death, and I personally don’t consider many of them historically reliable.

The New Testament picture of Jesus is full of contradictions. At some points he says to turn the other cheek and forgive enemies. At other points he says, “I come not to bring peace but a sword” (Matthew 10:34). Scholars have wondered if Jesus was a Zealot, a highly political and revolutionary movement. Or was he a mystic similar to those who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? Frankly we have no idea whether he intended to build a state or not... No two academic books I’ve ever read on the life of Jesus and early Christianity have agreed about these issues.

 Even if Jesus really was an apolitical pacifist, only a tiny number of Christians in history has ever agreed with him about that. Even if his statement about rendering to Caesar implied a separation of religion and state (unlikely), most Christians in history haven’t been willing to do that....

So these ideas in very early Christianity are anyway irrelevant to practical politics in later Christianity, which saw all kinds of political arrangements...

As for Muhammad, it is not entirely clear what his position was in Medina. He is often depicted as a theocrat. But it appears from the Qur’an that when he first went there in 622 he was more like a community organizer, balancing the needs of the Muslim, Christian, pagan and Jewish communities in the area. The stories of how he allegedly fell out with the Jews there are very late and have been questioned by some scholars. The view of him as a kind of king could well be a projection back on him by later writers of the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties, after forms of Muslim kingship and empire had emerged. Common assertions that the Qur’an disallowed paganism or allowed aggressive war on pagans are not borne out by the Qur’an. There is, contrary to de Tocqueville, very little law or politics in the Qur’an.

Much of fundamentalist Muslims’ ideas about religion-state relations are shaped by the Hadith literature, the oral sayings and doings attributed to the Prophet, which, as I said, were collected centuries after his death and I doubt most academic historians would consider them reliable. (I know saying so will offend some of my readers, but, well, I’m a historian.) ...
As with Christianity, there are almost no forms of political organization Muslims haven’t tried out, from monarchy to republic, from anarchism to democracy. So all those laws and political principles in the Hadith haven’t actually been determinative. Contemporary Muslim fundamentalism does dream of using them as a blueprint, but since that enterprise isn’t actually practical, they don’t get very far. Even Iran and Saudi Arabia are mostly governed by modern bureaucratic rationalism of a sort Max Weber would readily recognize.
...
Contrary to what de Tocqueville imagined, the Muslims have been just as adaptable as Christians to the main forms of social organization that came out of the Enlightenment. He was writing at a time when many Muslims lived under the Ottoman Empire, which seems to have shaped his image of the religion. Somehow Islam has handily survived the Ottoman demise. And what de Tocqueville rather dishonestly did not bother to mention was that Christianity has had just as much trouble with those principles as Islam has. There was that little Syllabus of Errors when the then Pope condemned democracy, popular sovereignty, separation of religion and state, scientific rationalism, etc. Later Popes even tried to prevent Catholics from voting in elections because democracy was considered a modernist heresy. As late as Franco’s Spain, the Spanish church was a pillar of dictatorship. Eventually the church made its peace with democracy (partly through Vatican II, which largely repealed the Syllabus of Errors). Islam is likewise coming to terms with democracy, however contentious and uncertain that process has been (Indonesia, Turkey, Tunisia, etc. etc.)

Many 19th century Christians imagined that Islam was on its last legs and that all the Muslims would convert to Christianity. They thought the same of Hinduism and Buddhism. They mostly were very wrong. De Tocqueville’s arrogance and simplistic view of the original ‘essence’ of the founders of the two religions was a profound set of errors. In fact, by the end of this century, some 30% of the world could well be Muslim, whereas Christianity will likely be a shrinking proportion of humankind, just for demographic reasons. Not to mention that most “Christian” countries contain pluralities of non-religious people. Many, such as Sweden or Eastern Europe, have non-religious majorities. Significant proportions of Turks, Tunisians, Uzbeks, etc. in the Muslim world also report that they aren’t interested in religion.
It is not impossible that modern consumerism, individualism and technology might gradually undermine religion, so that 200 years from now neither Christianity nor Islam will be central to most peoples’ lives.

So, a) Muslims aren’t more prone to violence or terrorism than members of other religious communities because of the character of very early Islam and b) you can’t read off the differences between Christians and Muslims from a superficial depiction of the two founders.   

Headline of the day

From Human Rights Watch:

"New Campaign to Stop Killer Robots"

Life in the future, indeed.

Teenagers

It is easy to classify today's teenagers, if you are older, as disappointing, irresponsible, and even crazy. This is true enough in some ways but give those teenagers a good script, maybe a good set of music and see them shine. I saw a student production of Les Miserables last night and if  it was far from perfect it was extremely stirring. One thing that really struck me is that the streetwalkers and the revolutionary students about to be gunned down were played by people of the same age as the characters they were portraying. And that's what really struck me of course. In some sense I was looking at reality.

Update: I've talked about this before.

This was segregation

David Frum reviews Crespino's book on arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond :

The old Democratic South was not a very democratic place. In 1932, South Carolina gave 98.03% of its vote to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt gained a further half point in 1936. Yet that astonishing percentage was produced by an equally astonishingly tiny electorate: in a state of 1.7 million souls, only 105,000 cast a ballot in 1932 and only 115,000 in 1936. The one-party landslide was produced by one-party methods: I learned from Crespino that South Carolina did not adopt the secret ballot until the year 1950.The all-white electorate of South Carolina enthusiastically welcomed government intervention in the economy, so long as that intervention concentrated its benefits on whites. Crespino:Southern congressmen were among the most devoted supporters of New Deal largesse, yet they never failed to safeguard the prerogatives of Jim Crow. Categories of work in which African Americans were heavily represented, notably farmworkers and maids, were excluded in the 1930s from laws that created modern unions, set minimum wages and maximum work hours, and instituted Social Security. Southern congressmen ensured that local officials administered New Deal programs, and they defeated efforts to include anti- discrimination provisions in New Deal legislation.(p. 36.)As a state senator in the 1930s, Strom Thurmond aligned himself with this program of energetic government for white benefit. He supported federal job creation programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Youth Administration, so long as participation was restricted to whites. He supported New Deal farm programs on the same condition.

Creating enemies

 Tom Englehardt at Tomdispatch.com has long offered an analysis of the post-9/11 world emphasizes the need of the American security establishment for enemies to fight in the post-Cold War world. In his most recent essay, he discusses how elites who want to manipulate the public through fear must first manipulate themselves into believing their fear-based analysis.  This strikes me as of interest to historians of any era, for instance the Albigensian crusade of the 13th century. Some very good historians think there never was a Cathar heresy until heresy hunters invented it. For a long time, the origins of the great witch hunt have also been ascribed to a fear of Satan's ever-growing influence on earth, a fear of satanic power seen first in intellectual treatises, and only later in the actions of actual witch hunters. See what Tom Englehardt has to say on the subject.

So when the new Pearl Harbor arrived out of the blue, with many PNAC members (from Vice President Dick Cheney on down) already in office, they naturally saw their chance.  They created an al-Qaeda on steroids and launched their “global war” to establish a Pax Americana, in the Middle East and then perhaps globally.  They were aware that they lacked opponents of the stature of those of the previous century and, in their documents, they made it clear that they were planning to ensure no future great-power-style enemy or bloc of enemy-like nations would arise. Ever.
For this, they needed an American public anxious, frightened, and ready to pay.  It was, in other words, in their interest to manipulate us.  And if that were all there were to it, our world would be a grim, but simple enough place.  As it happens, it’s not.  Ruling elites, no matter what power they have, don’t work that way.  Before they manipulate us, they almost invariably manipulate themselves.
I was convinced of this years ago by a friend who had spent a lot of time reading early Cold War documents from the National Security Council -- from, that is, a small group of powerful governmental figures writing to and for each other in the utmost secrecy.  As he told me then and wrote in Washington’s China, the smart book he did on the early U.S. response to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, what struck him in the documents was the crudely anti-communist language those men used in private with each other.  It was the sort of anti-communism you might otherwise have assumed Washington’s ruling elite would only have wielded to manipulate ordinary Americans with fears of Communist subversion, the “enemy within,” and Soviet plans to take over the world.  (In fact, they and others like them would use just such language to inject fear into the body politic in those early Cold War years, that era of McCarthyism.)
They were indeed manipulative men, but before they influenced other Americans they assumedly underwent something like a process of collective auto-hypnotism in which they convinced one another of the dangers they needed the American people to believe in.  There is evidence that a similar process took place in the aftermath of 9/11.  From the flustered look on George W. Bush’s face as his plane took him not toward but away from Washington on September 11, 2001, to the image of Dick Cheney, in those early months, being chauffeured around Washington in an armored motorcade with a “gas mask and a biochemical survival suit" in the backseat, you could sense that the enemy loomed large and omnipresent for them.  They were, that is, genuinely scared, even if they were also ready to make use of that fear for their own ends.
Or consider the issue of Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, that excuse for the invasion of Iraq.  Critics of the invasion are generally quick to point out how that bogus issue was used by the top officials of the Bush administration to gain public support for a course that they had already chosen.  After all, Cheney and his men cherry-picked the evidence to make their case, even formed their own secret intel outfit to give them what they needed, and ignored facts at hand that brought their version of events into question.  They publicly claimed in an orchestrated way that Saddam had active nuclear and WMD programs.  They spoke in the most open ways of potentialmushroom clouds from (nonexistent) Iraqi nuclear weapons rising over American cities, or of those same cities being sprayed with (nonexistent) chemical or biological weapons from (nonexistent) Iraqi drones.  They certainly had to know that some of this information was useful but bogus.  Still, they had clearly also convinced themselves that, on taking Iraq, they would indeed find some Iraqi WMD to justify their claims.
In his soon-to-be-published book, Dirty Wars, Jeremy Scahill cites the conservative journalist Rowan Scarborough on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s growing post-invasion irritation over the search for Iraqi WMD sites.  “Each morning,” wrote Scarborough, “the crisis action team had to report that another location was a bust.  Rumsfeld grew angrier and angrier.  One officer quoted him as saying, ‘They must be there!’  At one briefing, he picked up the briefing slides and tossed them back at the briefers.”
In other words, those top officials hustling us into their global war and their long-desired invasion of Iraq had also hustled themselves into the same world with a similar set of fears.  This may seem odd, but given the workings of the human mind, its ability to comfortably hold potentially contradictory thoughts most of the time without disturbing itself greatly, it’s not.
A similar phenomenon undoubtedly took place in the larger national security establishment where self-interest combined easily enough with fear.  After all, in the post-9/11 era, they were promising us one thing: something close to 100% “safety” when it came to one small danger in our world -- terrorism.  The fear that the next underwear bomber might get through surely had the American public -- but also the American security state -- in its grips.  After all, who loses the most if another shoe bomber strikes, another ambassador goes down, another 9/11 actually happens?  Whose job, whose world, will be at stake then?
They may indeed be a crew of Machiavellis, but they are also acolytes in the cult of terror and global war.  They live in the Cathedral of the Enemy.  They were the first believers and they will undoubtedly be the last ones as well.  They are invested in the importance of the enemy.  It’s their religion.  They are, after all, the enemy-industrial complex and if we are in their grip, so are they.

The brother of Bliomberis Loup

...was named Blain Loup. Both men fought on the French side in the campaign of 1380-1.

Just so's you know that Bliomberis was not an isolated Wolf.

A beehive cell

Darrell Markewitz, historically inspired metalworker par excellence, starts thinking about sacred enclosures and monastic beehive cells. Have a look!

Corey Robin on that Thatcher quotation

As the heat around Margaret Thatcher's death begins to cool a bit, I thought I would post something that addresses some larger questions around her career. Here is what Corey Robin had to say about the famous quotation about the nature of society.

Left critics of neoliberalism—or just plain old unregulated capitalism—often cite Margaret Thatcher’s famous declaration “There is no such thing as society” as evidence of neoliberalism’s hostility to all things collective. Neoliberalism, the story goes, unleashes the individual to fend for herself, denying her the supports of society (government, neighborhood solidarity, etc.) so that she can prove her mettle in the marketplace.

But these critics often ignore the fine print of what Thatcher actually said in that famous 1987 interview with, of all things, Woman’s Own.  Here’s the buildup to that infamous quote:

Who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families…

It’s that last phrase (“and there are families”) that’s crucial.  Contrary to popular (or at least leftist) myth, neoliberals are not untrammeled individualists. In many ways, they’re not that different from traditional conservatives: that is, they see individuals embedded in social institutions like the church or the family or schools—all institutions, it should be said, that are hierarchical and undemocratic.

Thatcher isn’t alone in this.  For all their individualist bluster, libertarians—particularly those market-oriented libertarians who are rightly viewed as the leading theoreticians of neoliberalism—often make the same claim.  When these libertarians look out at society, they don’t always see isolated or autonomous individuals; they’re just as likely to see private hierarchies like the family or the workplace, where a father governs his family and an owner his employees.  And that, I suspect (though further research is certainly necessary), is what they think of and like about society: that it’s an archipelago of private governments.

To my eyes, the connection between this and Ron and Rand Paul is pretty clear.

Image:  ...as in "A man's home is his…"  That's "a MAN'S home!"

Condemned out of his own mouth – Rand Paul

A few days ago Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, the great hope of the new libertarianism, went to Howard University and spoke to mostly African-American students in an attempt to show them that it was the Democrats back in the 1850s who showed themselves to be hostile to African-American interests, and one should never forget that, while nothing the Republicans have done since 1964 should be held against them.

When challenged on this, Sen. Paul said, according to Salon

 “The argument that I’m trying to make is that we haven’t changed — there are some of us that haven’t changed,” Paul said. “We don’t see an abrupt difference” between the party of Lincoln and the party of Richard Nixon.

Anyone who can't tell the difference between those two parties, or says he can't, should not be trusted as far as you can throw him.

The Big Chill in the Eastern Mediterranean

Brian Ulrich alerted me to this:

The Big Chill and the Eastern Mediterranean

Among the solid contributions to Middle Eastern environmental history which have come out the past couple of years is Ronnie Ellenblum's The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950-1072.  Its topic is the effects on the eastern Mediterranean of the protracted period of cold spells which Richard Bulliet termed the "Big Chill," and which was part of the global climate shift which also gave rise to the Medieval Warm Period in the North Atlantic which is well known to historians of medieval Europe.  Ellenblum convincingly ties enough major developments into the "Big Chill" that it deserves to be considered a major watershed in the region's history.

What are these developments?  One is the rise of nomadic powers, such as the Seljuqs in the Middle East, the Pechenegs in the Byzantine Empire, and the Banu Hilal in North Africa.  Multiple dynasties fell or were weakened with the collapse of bureaucracies and the agrarian base to sustain organized military power.  Major cities witnessed a decline in their population and infrastructure, marking the sharp final decline of the urban life developed in the region during the Hellenistic period.  Finally, population shifts, both in-migration and out-migration, led to religious change as Muslim nomads took the place of Christian peasants in agriculturally marginal regions.

Some will probably accuse Ellenblum of environmental determinism, but this is not his argument.  In his own words:

Civilizations are altered and transformed by calamities, although they usually succeed in finding, when the crisis is over, ways to reconstruct new stable societal structures and a new equilibrium that resemble, to a certain degree, the pre-calamity social order. Differences between pre- and post-calamity cultures, however, are often discerned.

In other words, in periods of environmental catastrophe, people adapt in a variety of ways, and even when the catastrophe is over, those ways continue to exist and leave their own historical legacies, whether in demographic shifts, institutions, or settlement structures.

Sounds interesting!

Image:  Snow in Damascus, January 2013

Just about...

I passed 2500 published posts on this blog sometime in the last month. Imagine!

"Spring" in the Near North, 2013

Morning temp:  -14 C
Snow: 6-9 inches on the ground
Trees: barely any budding
In the air:  a bug.

Yakutia laughs.

Oddball 14th century herald's name of the day

Moniquot, an "honorable" herald (is there any other kind?) who brought a message from King Henry of Spain (= Castile) to the Good Duke.
.
Image: More AEMMA.

Three pictures of rural Iran

Three striking views of Palangen village by Amos Chapple via The Big Picture. Click for the big pics.

Was the Roman Empire drowned in a bathtub?

Recently, I was at the conference Shifting Frontiers X, a leading late antiquity conference in North America.  At the conference George Benton and Richard Burgess gave an interesting talk on the changing role of gold in late antiquity. Here is an excerpt of the abstract reproduced with permission.

From the time of the introduction of the solidus by Constantine the use and perception of gold were changed radically in the Roman Empire. Silver, hitherto the dominant metal for the making of high-volume coinage, was demoted to use in decoration and gifts, while gold, whether as a unit of account or, increasingly, as bullion minted in solidi, dominated economic exchange. The massive scale of gold use is amply attested in literary sources and papyri, as well as archaeologically in the form of hoards. What remains less clear is whether there was actually more gold circulating… A largely ignored study that used proton activation analysis (PAA) provides tantalizing evidence that a new source of gold became available in the 350s.… This new supply enabled the empire to move to sort of gold standard. With this model in place of the changing use of gold, we are not a position to revisit the earlier trace elementanalyses with new hypotheses. At which minted the gold edge of the empire, was the new goal available in both the East and the West? Where were the mines?

And much of the actual paper was a discussion of which techniques might be feasible for testing coins nondestructively for trace elements like platinum. Best of luck to this project.

For my part, the paper implied that the fall of the Western Empire might be a sort of Grover Norquist scenario, in which all the new extremely high-value money accumulated in the hands of the ultra-rich, and the Imperial government became small enough to be drowned in a bathtub.

The dog ate my legislation

Jonathan Bernstein at the Washington Post cites David Farenthold:

Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) was assigned to write legislation that would cut $380 million in loan guarantees to clean-energy companies. But nothing happened with that idea, because Kelly never wrote a bill. He got distracted.

“It was a priority, and it remains an issue of interest. But Mike’s efforts shifted when he chose to focus more on holding the administration accountable with regards to [Operation] Fast and Furious. And then when the Benghazi tragedy occurred, that took the cake,” said Kelly’s spokesman, Tom Qualtere.



The truth is that the House of Representatives right now appears to be both incapable of legislating and not very interested in it, either. Thus the Boehner Rule that the Senate needs to go first; thus the fact that it’s the Senate, not the House, hard at work on both immigration and gun bills; thus the dozens of votes on repealing Obamacare but hardly any actual legislation with any chance of becoming law.

That’s from a nice article by David A. Fahrenthold about the fizzling of budget-cutting efforts by Barack Obama and by House Republicans. The Obama portion is interesting, but when it gets to the House Republicans, it rapidly becomes farce. Basically, the Republicans came up with a nice gimmick but had no interest at all in legislative follow-through.

Couldn’t write a bill because he was distracted by Fast and Furious and Benghazi? Why not just say that his computer was down or that a dog ate his homework? At least those cliched excuses don’t imply what is really going on here: Republican politicians who believed that the job of a member of Congress is to be outraged, and once they’ve done that, they can pretty much go home.

Which, as I was getting at yesterday, is the whole story of the Boehner-era House Republicans. Their big bill from the last Congress was to be repeal-and-replace, yet they never even held hearings to develop a bill to replace the Affordable Care Act. They do pass (nonbinding and unusually vague) budget resolutions, but there’s never any legislation to implement those resolutions. Last week was the third time in three years that House Republicans voted to replace Medicare with a new scheme, but they don’t even pretend that there will ever be an actual bill to carry out that plan. Now, it’s comprehensive tax reform that is supposedly their agenda. We’ll see … or, as I’m predicting, we won’t see.

My initial reaction was to say, "worse than I thought" in a comment on Facebook. But thinking about it the next day, I realize that many legislatures in many countries are effectively dysfunctional. The process of getting elected and reelected takes over and crowds out any commitment or desire to consider policy and legislative initiatives.

John Keane and thousands of others have made the point that elections by themselves are not democracy. Legislatures by themselves are not democracy. Keane his made a point in his Life and Death of Democracy that our leading institutions are 19th century attempts at implementation at the best. Perhaps we need something better; and not just a better stage for people to posture on.

Image: Some British politician.  Who knows, he may be a hard-working legislator.

Medieval imagery strikes home

You don't have to be a big fan of the papacy to be struck by how appropriate this medieval sounding statement by Pope Francis is. He made it in connection with his foot washing yesterday:

  NBC News reports that since Pope Francis became pope, he has "proved many times over that he wants to break away from clerical privilege, come down from St. Peter's throne and act as a humble servant of the faithful."
During a short homily before the ritual, the pope urged priests to go out into the world.
"It is not in soul-searching... that we encounter the Lord," he said, according to the BBC. "We need to go out ... to the outskirts where there is suffering, bloodshed, blindness that longs for sight and prisoners in thrall to many evil masters."

It is good to hear someone powerful admit that many prisoners, today, are in thrall to evil masters.

Image:  Saint Catherine thrust into prison. And  being beaten just for the heck of it.

The other account of the deeds at Vannes – a treat for my faithful readers

I have been too busy and distracted to do much with this blog recently. For those who have been checking this space in vain, I offer the other account of the famous deeds of arms at Vannes, so well known in the version by Froissart. There is a second version, told through an intermediary by one of the French combatants at the deed. It's a somewhat less friendly account of competition between English and French knights. Just because a participant tells the story, we do not necessarily have to take it at face value. The story is being retold 50 years after the event! Eventually this translation, which is mine, will appear in a book called Will a Frenchman Fight? The book will discuss how chivalric deeds of arms fit into practical warfare in the 1380s. (I have also discussed these events in my book Deeds of Arms.) In the meantime the truly dedicated can compare this account with the more famous one.

Deeds of Arms at Vannes (From the Chronicle of the Good Duke)

XLIII How the earl of Buckingham raised the siege of Nantes and how the fifteen English did not perform their arms with fifteen Frenchmen.

 Charles King of France in honor of his coronation made many knights of whom he had many in Nantes who grandly held steady with their companions against the English. The earl of Buckingham who saw this weakness among his people and no advantage to continuing his siege of Nantes, had the intention to raise his siege for this reason; but he delayed it somewhat because fifteen men at arms of the household of the duke of Bourbon had proposed a battle on an island near Nantes with another fifteen English men at arms in the household of the earl of Buckingham, to fight to the end with no judges but only two heralds, one of France, the other of England. And this was promised and sworn, but failed on account of English as you have heard. And this enterprise cost the duke of Bourbon three thousan francs in harness and equipment that he had sent to his people every day for the space of three weeks; and the fifteen in the household of the duke of Bourbon did nothing but insist that the English hold this fight, but the English led them on by words, and told them "wait, wait, we will tell you right away." Thereupon, the earl of Buckingham seeing a great loss of his English from dysentery, one evening decamped with all his people and the next day in the morning, the fifteen English sent by a herald to the fifteen French of the household of the duke of Bourbon that they would not hold the battle there, but if they wished to come to Vannes, where their master the earl had come, they would accomplish their arms. The fifteen of the duke of Bourbon gave no other response except to say to the herald that if the duke of Brittany wanted to give them good security that they would come and accomplish them there. And so the earl of Buckingham left the siege of Nantes without having done anything to his advantage, and his Englishmen rode towards Vannes. And after them sallied out the French captains, Messire Jean de Chastelmorand, Messire le Barrois, Messire Pierre de Bueil, and the marshal of Savoy, who were a good eight hundred men at arms who harassed and held the English close and took much of the baggage train before they got to Vannes. And the French retired to Chastel-Josselin, where the Lord of Clisson, the new constable of France, had come, and asked him leave to depart for those of the garrison of Nantes to go to their masters. The Constable told them no, insisting that they should wait until the English embarked on the sea and in the meantime the fifteen of the household of the duke of Bourbon who had turned back to Nantes in the garrison with the others sent to the English fifteen that they should appear to fulfill their promise and that thereupon they should send them good guarantees from the earl of Buckingham their master and from the duke of Brittany and they would willingly come there. So a herald carried the safe conducts to Messire Jean de Chastelmorand, to Barrois and their companions, and that with them they would be able to bring forty gentlemen to accompany them and gave willingly the safe conducts believing that the fifteen French ought not go there at all; but notwithstanding the safe conduct the fifteen sent Cordellier de Gironne, a squire of the household squires of the king of France, to the earl of Buckingham and to the duke of Brittany for the guarantee, and he brought it and the fifteen companions went with Cordellier to Vannes to the duke of Brittany and to the earl of Buckingham there presents, and to notify them that they had come all ready to accomplish that which had been promised, the next day after their mass.

 XLIV How five noble Frenchmen performed arms at Vannes against five noble Englishmen and what happened.

The earl of Buckingham, seeing that this was in earnest had great counsel with the duke of Brittany to about what should be done. And the response which the earl of Buckingham made was that his people were not up to the mark, and it had been a year since he left England and also that he and his people had been at siege before Nantes for three months, for which reason their harness was very deteriorated. For this reason he was not in favor of performing arms especially to extremities but he had thought to give his advice to some of his servants that if there was any from the household of the duke of Bourbon who wished to perform specified arms, to this he agreed willingly. So the companions of the agreement were much amazed and infuriated thinking that they would not fight at all. So they decided that they should not hold to them but it would be good to do something of the sort for which they had come there and they should take what the English were offering. The arms which the English wished to do were five blows of the lance, five of the sword, five of the axe, five of the dagger, all on foot; and it was granted to them. And the next day early in the morning there were but five Englishmen who wished to perform arms and from the people of the duke of Bourbon another five: namely Jean de Chastelmorand, Messire le Barrois, the bastard of Glarains, the viscount of Aunay, Messire Tristan de la Jaille; and the five English were Messire Walter Cloppeton, Edward de Beauchamp, Messire Thomas de Hennefort, Brisselai, and Messire Jehan de Traro. All the companions standing on the field where the duke of Brittany and the earl of Buckingham were accompanied by their people. The first to perform arms from the French was Jean de Chastelmorand against Walter Cloppeton Cloppeton, an Englishman, of which they were not able to do more than three blows of the lance on foot, four for Messire Walter Cloppeton was wounded by the lance right through, between the lames and the piece, and it passed through as he fell to the earth and of those two there were only these three blows, for Cloppeton was carried off. Messire le Barrois, who was armed, entered the field to perform arms against his companion, Thomas de Hennefort, who entered the field likewise and they did their five blows with the lance very chivalrously; and when it came to swords, when they attacked at the first blow of the sword Le Barrois wounded the Englishman between the piece and the gardebras and damaged the mail and pierced the shoulder completely so that it was necessary to lead off the Englishman without doing more arms. Then came the bastard of Glarains and Edward Beauchamp and when it came to combat with lances Edward Beauchamp turned his shoulder a little and so much that the bastard of Glarains twice knocked him to the ground with two blows of the lance, notwithstanding that he was large of body and a good gentleman and then the Englishmen said that Beauchamp was dronch, that is to say, drunk. They picked him up and led him away. Then came Messire Tristan de la Jaille to his English companion and they accomplished all of their arms up to the axes; and when this came to strike Messire Tristan knocked down his Englishman with the second axe blow, and badly wounded him and that was it. The Viscount d’Aunay came into the field to his companion who performed his arms beautifully, but the Viscount wounded the Englishmen with last blow of the lance, between the avant-bras and the garde-bras, and pierced the arm right through, so that he did no more. And so were the arms accomplished that day in which the five noble men, the French companions, had the better of it, and the five noble Englishmen the worse as you have seen above.

XLV How the arms having been accomplished Messire Guillaume Farintonne, an Englishmen and Jean de Chastelmorand fought and what happened; and how the knight was put in prison and how Chastelmorand said some fine words.

The Duke of Brittany and the Earl of Buckingham, who had seen these arms, retired to their houses, and the French disarmed themselves; and because it was almost night the duke of Brittany sent one of his knights, maître d' hôtel, to summon them 's to to supper with him. They conceded it to him as they had been in his city and all those who had performed arms came to supper and the duke of Brittany highly honored them, making them all sit at his table and serving them very grandly. And on the removal of the table came a knight, fair and grand, named Guillaume Farrington, who urged Chastelmorand to perform arms that Messire Walter Cloppeton, his cousin German, had hardly been able to accomplish. So Chastelmorand agreed with him that if it pleased the duke of Brittany, but he did not wish to allow it and it infuriated him most feloniously against his English knight, who had come to make demands at his table. But Chastelmorand begged so much to the duke of Brittany that the next day at sunrise he was armed in the field against the one who had demanded it, to accomplish this, and more which he had not demanded, because it was necessary for his companions to mount up the next day. And when they were together in the field the English knight had no armor at all on his legs for he had a disease in one knee, on account of which he was not able to arm himself there, and they sent via Cordellier de Gironne to urge Chastelmorand that they should not have more armor on the legs and they should guarantee not to strike at uncovered areas. This having been done the two knights in the field struck lances and with that stroke did their duty well; at the second blow they came strongly together, and the Englishmen, Messire Guillaume, struck Messire Jean de Chastelmorand on the arms and Chastelmorand struck the Englishmen under the cincture and so much so that Messire Guillaume Farrington fell to one knee, and put a hand to the ground; and the third blow of the lances they came in contact strongly against each other but when it came to the clash Messire Guillaume lowered his lance and crouched a little from which he pierced Messire Jean de Chastelmorand right through the thigh, and it was advisable to carry him to his hôtel; on account of this blow there was a great cry from the company present seeing that the English knight had promised not to make an attempt by arms on uncovered areas, especially in the legs. And then the duke of Brittany and the earl of Buckingham who had seen this impropriety had the Englishman Messire Guillaume taken, and disarmed to his little pourpoint and went to have him hurled in prison and they said to le Barrois cousin german of Chastelmorand: "Go to Chastelmorand and tell him that we are very unhappy and indeed infuriated that this knight has failed to do what he had promised and we are delivering him to Chastelmorand to be his prisoner, to put him to such ransom as pleases him and between you his friends if Chastelmorand dies you can do what you like to that knight." This was considered very just on the part of the lords to maintain their sureties and safe conducts. So Chastelmorand heard the response from Le Barrois and Cordellier de Gironne, to which Chastelmorand answered that he thanked heartily the earl of Buckingham and the duke of Brittany for the good reason and justice which he found in their lordships and that he would prefer that Farrington had damaged his honor over him than that he, Chastelmorand, should have damaged his over him. "And when you inform me that he ought to be my prisoner I thank you humbly and please you to know that when we came from our side before you to perform arms with your surety and safe conduct neither my companions nor I came motivated by avarice nor covetousness and it would turn to my dishonor to wish take ransom from your knight for which I beg you to let him out from prison and do what you please, for the deed of arms involves risk. And you well know that Messire the duke of Bourbon to whom we belong gives us what we need and he, who sends us out in the world to acquire honor, would be discontented with this covetousness." And the Englishmen and the Bretons found these words to be very honorable and the earl of Buckingham sent to Chastelmorand a goblet of gold and 150 nobles; but Chastelmorand returned the gold coins to him, letting him know that he had enough money for his affairs. So he kept the goblet to drink from for the sake of his honor. At that time Chastelmorand told his companions that they should not delay riding back for him. For he did not think himself in such bad shape that he could not follow their trot.