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The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (1589)

‘But I perceive there is no love on earth,
Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks…’
(Abigail, after learning her father conspired to get her true love murdered)

Provenance

First recorded performance: 26 February 1592, by Lord Strange’s acting company.

First published: 1592.

Earliest extant edition, 1633. This was published to coincide with a revival of the play, which included a performance before King Charles and his wife Queen Henrietta Maria, for which a new prologue and epilogue were written.

Full title: The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta. Note that, although the 1633 quarto divided the play into acts, it wasn’t divided into scenes, there were no indications where scenes were set, or which bit of dialogue were asides to the audience. All of these were added by the Reverend Alexander Dyce in his 1876 edition of the plays, and have been copied by most modern editors.

Like Tamburlaine, the Jew has a large cast of 25 speaking characters, plus numerous unnamed citizens of Malta, Turkish janizaries, guards, attendants and slaves. In other words, it was a theatrical epic, in its day.

Executive summary

The Governor of Malta seizes the wealth of all Jewish citizens to pay the Turks not to invade. In revenge the richest Jew in Malta, Barabas, designs a barrage of retaliation against the governor, helped by his slave, Ithamore.

Barabas’ murderous deeds include:

getting the governor’s son killed in a duel
terrorising his own daughter, who joins a nunnery for safety but is afterwards poisoned by her father, along with the entire nunnery
the strangling of an old friar and the framing of another friar for the murder
poisoning his servant Ithamore when he deserts him, along with the prostitute and her pimp, who had threatened to expose him

Finally, Barabas betrays the entire population of Malta by helping the Turks conquer Malta Town, but he is then outwitted when the Christian governor turns the tables on him, leaving him to burn alive in the trap he had set for the Turks, but is led to fall into himself. Subtle, it ain’t.

Historical fact check: Barabas and Ferneze are fictional characters, there never was a Jew of Malta or a governor of that name. Malta never fell to the Turks, and never paid them tribute. The entire storyline is a product of the playwright’s imagination.

The play

Prologue The ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas, the Jew of Malta. In Marlowe’s time there were only a few hundred Jews in London. They were better known from popular stereotypes of greed or cunning than from personal contact.

It is appropriate, then that one stereotype of cunning is introduced by another. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian Renaissance diplomat, philosopher and writer best known for The Prince, a handbook of statecraft which eschews any notions of religion or morality in favour of hard-nosed advice about what actually works when it comes to ruling a state. Machiavelli’s attitude is typified by these lines from the prologue:

I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

Machiavelli’s bluntness and his rejection of Christian morality, in an age drenched in Christian values, caused his name to be associated with complex and unscrupulous scheming – as it has remained, right down to the present day.

Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.

Anyway, the ghost of Machiavelli introduces Barabas as one of his own – an amoral, cunning schemer.

Act 1

Scene 1 Barabas is counting his wealth. He envies factors for the rich mines of India, and the Moors who (according to legend) simply have to bend down to pick rare stones from the earth. This opening scene establishes Barabas as very rich, very greedy, and the possessor of a Marlowe-sized imagination, rich with exotic and evocative names and visions of boundless riches.

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines,
That trade in metal of the purest mould;
The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,
And in his house heap pearl like pebble-stones,
Receive them free, and sell them by the weight;
Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,
Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds,
Beauteous rubies, sparkling diämonds,
And seld-seen costly stones of so great price,
As one of them, indifferently rated,
And of a carat of this quantity,
May serve, in peril of calamity,
To ransom great kings from captivity

And of course Barabas’s occupation is a trader in the rarest, most precious jewels, clothes and valuables in the world, so it is an open invitation for reams of Marlovian sensual luxury.

Two merchants come to tell Barabas his ships have arrived from various destinations, including Egypt via Cyprus, bearing rich goods. When they leave he soliloquises on how much more successful the practical Jews are than faithless Christians, name-checking a number of other Jewish millionaires, saying he’d rather be hated as a Jew and be rich, than be accepted as a Christian and be poor.

Three Jews arrive to tell the ominous news that an embassy of Turks has arrived to see the governor and that all the island’s Jews are summoned to the senate house. Barabas assures them they are wrong to have misgivings. When they exit, he continues to tell himself that the Turks and Maltese are at peace, so there will be no trouble. And even if there is, he is only concerned about himself and his daughter.

The scene establishes what will become a format of the play which is the many times Barabas is talking to someone saying one thing – but then makes an aside to the audience in which he reveals he is thinking something quite different.

Scene 3 The senate house The Turkish leader, the Sultan’s son Selim Calymath, makes it clear to the governor of Malta, Ferneze, that they demand ten years worth of tribute – a hundred thousand crowns. Ferneze begs a month to raise it and Calymath agrees, leaving with his retinue.

The governor calls in the island’s Jews, explains Calymath’s extortion and says he is going to raise the lion’s share of it by mulcting them, demanding half their estates. He is quite venomous about it:

SECOND KNIGHT: Have strangers leave with us to get their wealth?
Then let them with us cóntribute.
BARABAS: How! equally?
GOVERNOR FERNESE: No, Jew, like infidels;
For through our sufferance of your hateful lives,
Who stand accursèd in the sight of Heaven,
These taxes and afflictions are befall’n,
And therefore thus we are determinèd. −

So the Christians put up with the Jews but not far beneath the surface hate and despise them. The Governor announces he will confiscate half the Jews’ wealth and anyone who hesitates will a) be forced to convert to Christianity and if they still hesitate, b) all their goods will be confiscated. The other Jews immediately say they’ll surrender half their wealth, but Barabas is outraged, criticises them and tries to haggle with the Governor. Who promptly orders all Barabas’s wealth to be confiscated!

When he protests at this, one of the governor’s knights the governor’s entourage consists of members of the Order of the Knights of St John) suggests they confiscate Barabas’s house and turn it into a nunnery, which the Governor immediately accepts and orders.

The governor and his officials exit and Barabas sinks to his knees to call down a world of vengeance upon them. The other Jews tell him to reflect on the story of Job but Barabas dismisses it, saying he was vastly richer than Job, has lost more, is hugely more inconsolable.

Scene 4 Barabas’s daughter Abigail comes to meet him. She is in tears, she has heard the bad news. He reveals a secret – he had hidden quite a lot of wealth away. But Abigail tells him they have already confiscated the house and started to convert it into a nunnery! Barabas laments his lost gold and jewels, pauses, then comes up with a Cunning Plan. Abigail will convert to Christianity, enrol as a nun and, once she’s in, pull up the floorboards under which the loot is hidden, and return with it to her father.

Abigail agrees but doubts whether she can carry it off. Confidence is all, her father tells her. They exit.

Enter Friar Jacomo, Friar Barnardine, Abbess, and a Nun. They have barely made a few remarks about the new nunnery before Abigail re-enters, identifies herself as the daughter of the Jew, and begs forgiveness, penitence and asks to be enrolled in the order. Improbably the friars and abbess agree.

At which point Baraba re-enters and puts up a pretence of being appalled that his daughter is going over to the enemy. He curses and anathematises her as the Christians try to intervene, but interspersed between his curses, Barabas whispers instructions on how to find the floorboard with the secret mark and find the treasure. They all leave the stage.

Enter Mathias, a young man who, we soon learn, is in love with Abigail and dejected to see her going off to a nunnery. His friend Lodowick enters – who just happens to be the governor’s son – and asks Mathias why he’s in the dumps, allowing Mathias to explain at length his love for Abigail. While he does so, he reveals that she is scarce fourteen-years-old. Lodowick says that if she’s as beautiful as his friend claims, it would be good to visit and see her. They exit.

Act 2

Scene 1 Before the House of Barabas, now a Nunnery Enter Barabas who explains a) that it is night but he can’t sleep, and b) he’s awaiting a signal from Abigail. Enter Abigail, obviously in the balcony of the theatre, where she describes: finding the floorboards, digging up the treasure, coming to the window, whispering to her father waiting below, then throwing him the bags of gold, at which he rejoices and praises her.

Scene 2 The Council House The Governor interviews the Spanish captain – Martin del Bosco – of a ship recently docked in the harbour who describes how his ship was set upon by Turks, how they fought them off and seized one of their ships, whose crew they have come to Malta to sell as slaves.

The governor initially says no, because he is afraid of the Turks, but some of his advisors encourage del Bosco to shame the governor, to tell him not to submit to the Turks, specially after their recent capture of Rhodes (seized from the order of the Knights of St John in 1523).

Del Bosco succeeds in firing the governor’s fighting zeal. He offers to write to the king of Spain for help. Ferneze appoints him military ruler of the island and challenges the Turks to do their worst. If necessary, like the garrison on Rhodes, they’ll fight and die to the last man.

Scene 3 The market place Two officers are lining del Bosco’s captured men up to be sold as slaves. Enter Barabas who tells us he has used the gold to buy a house as big as the governor’s and his daughter has left the convent. He tells us he hails from Florence where he learned to bow and fawn and curtsey to faithless Christians and then to spit into their collecting bowls.

Enter Lodowick and he and Barabas engage in a stylised conversation in which Lodowick asks whether Barabas has a diamond, and Barabas replies, yes a pretty one – by which they both mean Abigail – the dialogue being interspersed with Barabas’s bitter vengeful asides to the audience in which he reveals what he’d really like to do to the governor’s son i.e. poison him.

Having mutually agreed to rendezvous later, Lodowick now accompanies Barabas to the slave market, where they size up the merchandise and chat to the selling officers. He rejects one costing 200 crowns, not least because he looks fit and healthy so will cost a fortune to feed, instead buys a leaner one, from Thrace, named Ithamore, for 100 crowns. Aside to the audience Barabas explains that he is buying the slave solely to further his plans of revenge!

Enter young Mathias and his mother to the slave market, and discuss the wares. We now learn that Barabas knows his daughter and Mathias are in love but plans to foil their love. Nonetheless, he enjoys leading Mathias on. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas alone with Ithamore. Barabas tells him, if he is to please his master, he must forget the Christian virtues of ‘Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear’ and lose pity. He goes on to give a magnificent speech describing his own biography.

As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells;
And now and then, to cherish Christian thieves,
I am content to lose some of my crowns,
That I may, walking in my gallery,
See ’em go pinioned along by my door.
Being young, I studied physic, and began
To practice first upon th’ Italian;
There I enriched the priests with burials,
And always kept the sexton’s arms in ure −
With digging graves and ringing dead men’s knells:
And, after that, was I an engineer,
And in the wars ‘twixt France and Germany,
Under pretence of helping Charles the Fifth,
Slew friend and enemy with my stratagems:
Then, after that, was I an usurer,
And with extorting, cozening, forfeiting,
And tricks belonging unto brokery,
I filled the gaols with bankrouts in a year,
And with young orphans planted hospitals;
And every moon made some or other mad,
And now and then one hang himself for grief,
Pinning upon his breast a long great scroll
How I with interest tormented him.

There’s nothing like a good stage villain. You can imagine the actor taunting the Elizabethan audience, who enthusiastically booed him and threw rotten tomatoes. Boo, hiss, villain! And it turns out that Ithamore is a perfect match. When Barabas asks how he has spent his life, Ithamore gleefully replies:

Faith, master,
In setting Christian villages on fire,
Chaining of eunuchs, binding galley-slaves.
One time I was an hostler in an inn,
And in the night-time secretly would I steal
To travellers’ chambers, and there cut their throats:
Once at Jerusalem, where the pilgrims kneeled,
I strowèd powder on the marble stones,
And therewithal their knees would rankle so,
That I have laughed a-good to see the cripples
Go limping home to Christendom on stilts.

He was raised in Arabia and has served the Turks till his recent capture, so it appears Ithamore is a Muslim i.e. a) like Barabas, an enemy of Christians and b) circumcised. ‘We are villains both; Both circumcisèd; we hate Christians both.’

Scene 4 Now they are in front of Barabas’s new house and enter Lodowick to keep his appointment. Barabas lets him into the house and orders his daughter to entertain him. (In asides he whispers to Abigail to pretend to Lodowick she is in love with him, to lead him on, she protests it is Mathias she loves, Barabas orders her to do it. He plans to kill them both [Lodowick and Mathias]).

Enter Mathias and Barabas play acts that he supports his suit for his daughter’s hand but is having a hard time fighting off Lodowick. Only recently he snuck into his house to see Abigail. He tells Mathias to hide and watch. They both watch Lodowick come out of the house hand in hand with Abigail, as if in love. Mathias makes to draw his sword and kill him, but Barabas says ‘not in my house; contain your wrath; there will be other occasions’ and Mathias exists, mighty angry.

Lodowick sees him depart, asks Barabas about him, who explains that Mathias is mad with jealousy and plans to kill him (Lodowick). He encourages Lodowick’s suit for Abigail, and tells her to continue pretending to be in love with him, doing so in strongly anti-Christian phraseology, which is designed to play up the Christian audience’s stereotypes of wicked Jews, describing Lodowick as:

This offspring of Cain, this Jebusite,
That never tasted of the Passover,
Nor e’er shall see the land of Canaan,
Nor our Messias that is yet to come;
This gentle maggot, Lodowick, I mean

And as to the ‘morality’ of the situation:

It’s no sin to deceive a Christiän;
For they themselves hold it a principle,

Abigail promises herself to Lodowick – then immediately turns to the audience and shares her regret. (This happens throughout the play, it’s one of its leading features – the very high amount of speaking aside, to let the audience hear a character’s true feelings of intentions, as opposed to what they say.)

Lodowick is puzzled why Abigail looks pale and faint. His doubts vanish when he sees that villain Mathias enters and makes as if to attack him. Barabas tells him to hold and leave, while he (Barabas) sorts out the situation. Barabas then tells Mathias that he – Barabas – just saved his life from the incensed rival, Lodowick. He encourages Mathias to attack Lodowick next time he sees him.

Barabas is, as we can see, adopting the role of impresario which emerges clearly as the central role in the city comedies of a decade later, written by Ben Jonson and colleagues – in which the play itself contains a trickster figure who concocts ever-more elaborate scams and schemes to humiliate or punish other characters.

Abigail has witnessed all this and has, of course, played a lying part, deceiving Lodowick. Now she bursts into tears and asks her father why he’s setting the two young men against each other. Barabas orders Ithamore to put her in the house which he does, presumably none too gently. Then Barabas gives Ithamore a letter to deliver to Mathias, as if from Lodowick, challenging him to a duel. Ho ho ho, he rubs his hands with malevolent glee, the audience boos and hisses.

Act 3

Scene 1 The Veranda of the House of Bellamira Enter Bellamira. Who is Bellamira? A courtesan. She laments that business has dried up since the Turks besieged the island. Enter her ‘bully’, meaning either pimp or associate, Pilia-Borza, who has stolen a bag of silver from Barabas’s house, through the window. At that moment, Ithamore enters, Pilia-Borza drags Bellamira away, but not before Ithamore sees her and falls in love at first sight. In passing, he tells us he’s delivered Barabas’s fake letter to Mathias.

NOTE: Ithamore, as a slave, and Pilia-Borza, as a criminal, both speak in prose, unlike every other character in the play who speak in verse.

Scene 2 Mathias and Lodowick encounter each other in the street and have a swordfight while Barabas watches gleefully from a balcony. They kill each other. Enter their respective parents, governor Ferneze Lodowick’s father and Katherine, Mathias’s widowed mother. After initial antagonism, Ferneze and Katherine lock hands in grief, promising to bury the dead boys in one mausoleum, and to discover what drove the former friends to kill each other. Ooops. Sounds ominous for Barabas.

Scene 3 A room in Barabas’s house Ithamore is cackling over the two dead Christians when Abigail enters. Ithamore laughingly tells her that her father was responsible for the scam to fool Lodowick and Mathias into killing each other.

Outraged (and not really that upset) Abigail orders him to go fetch a friar from the nunnery. She gives a little speech which is enough time for Ithamore to go and return with Friar Jacomo. Abigail tells him she wants to enter the nunnery. ‘What, again?’ Jacomo asks. She tried it once and almost immediately left. What’s changed? She’s learned more about life, she replies.

ABIGAIL: Then were my thoughts so frail and unconfirmed
And I was chained to follies of the world:
But now experience, purchasèd with grief,
Has made me see the difference of things.
My sinful soul, alas, hath paced too long
The fatal labyrinth of misbelief,
Far from the Son that gives eternal life!

She is being positioned as the Good Jew, the one who converts to Christianity.

Scene 4 Barabas has heard that Abigail has entered a nunnery. Does she suspect him of murdering her sweetheart? What has made her betray him? Who gave him away? Ironically, at the moment Ithamore enters and, with absurd exaggeration, Barabas now calls him his only hope.

BARABAS: Come near, my love; come near, thy master’s life,
My trusty servant, nay, my second self;
For I have now no hope but even in thee,
And on that hope my happiness is built.

Ithamore begins to explain that it was he who told Abigaill about the murder plot, but Barabas, thinking he is about to defend his daughter, cuts him off and says, henceforth ‘she is hateful to my soul and me.’ Rashly and grotesquely he says he’ll adopt Ithamore as his heir.

But still his servant… He bids Ithamore fetch the pot of rice off the oven. When the servant brings it, Barabas explains that he is going to use it to poison Abigail. Yes, he now shows Ithamore and the audience a vial of ‘precious powder’ that he bought off a bloke in Ancona, which binds, infects and poisons deeply.

He sprinkles the poison powder onto the rice, mixes it in, and tells Ithamore to go and leave it in the dark entrance to the nunnery where people leave offerings when they want to be anonymous. (The reader/audience can immediately foresee unintended consequences i.e. poisonings.)

Ithamore enthusiastically sets off with the pot. As soon as he’s left, Barabas says he will pay Ithamore back, too. Ooh he’s such a bad baddie.

Scene 5 The Council House Apparently it’s a month after the first scene with the Turks, for now a Turkish envoy has arrived to tell the governor the month is up, so where’s the gold? If you remember, governor Ferneze had been encouraged to break his word to the Turks by some of the Knights and the Spaniard Martin del Bosco, and so now he tells the Turkish basso (pashaw) that he will have no tribute and defies the Turks to do their worst. They will, the basso replies and exits.

Ferneze makes a brief speech summoning the young men of Malta to war.

Scene 6 Interior of the nunnery Friar Jacomo and Friar Barnardine announce that all the nuns are sick. In fact as they enter the nunnery one appears to say that all the nuns are dead – except for Abigail, who now meets them, herself grievously sick.

Jacomo goes off and Abigail confesses to Barnardine that her greatest sin or regret is knowledge that her father conspired to set Lodowick and Mathias against each other, and she shows them papers to prove it. But she begs them not to reveal this to anyone and, as it was said in confession, they can’t. And then Abigail dies – poisoned by her father.

Jacomo rejoins Barnardine to see Abigail’s body, and confirm that the nuns are all dead. Barnardine asks him to accompany him to confront the Jew.

Act 4

Scene 1 A street Barabas is malevolently gleeful that all the nuns are dead, poisoned by him! Listen to those Christian bells ha ha ha. There’s a monastery nearby. Ithamore enthusiastically offers to poison all the monks, but Barabas says that won’t be necessary. Since they were all sleeping with the nuns, they’ll all die of grief. Ooooh, you could bottle the malevolent cynicism!

Along come the two monks, to a famous line from Ithamore: ‘ Look, look, master; here come two religious caterpillars.’ There is a clever, stylised dialogue where Bardnardine keeps trying to accuse Barabas of gross sins but Barabas interrupts him to deflect the charges with confessions of more minor sins. The most famous exchange comes at the end , famous because it was used as an epigraph to one of his own poems by T.S. Eliot.:

FRIAR BARNARDINE: Thou hast committed −
BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country;
And besides, the wench is dead.

But when Barnardine finally manages to mention Mathias and Lodowick, Barabas panics that his daughter confessed everything, he will be hanged for murder, and makes a panic-stricken appeal to convert to Christianity. As part of which he says some notable lines calumniating his own religion:

Is’t not too late now to turn Christiän?
I have been zealous in the Jewish faith,
Hard-hearted to the poor, a covetous wretch,
That would for lucre’s sake have sold my soul;

Which sounds like libelous anti-Semitism, but consider the context. He is sucking up to two Catholic officials, he wants to make the best possible impression. Of course he’ll tell them what they want to hear.

Anyway, Barabas makes asides to Jacomo about how much wealth he’ll give his monastery, if can make the other leave, which he tries to do but the monks end up poking and pushing each other and then break out fighting, egged on, one imagines by the audience who are thoroughly enjoying themselves.

Barabas and Ithamore part the fighting friars, and Barabas continues to promise them, separately, his bounty. Ithamore takes Barnardine into Barabas’s house, Barabas promises Jacomo he’ll have a special meeting with him that evening.

Left alone onstage, Barabas reveals his plan which is – to murder them to stop them talking about the Lodowick-Mathias con:

Now I have such a plot for both their lives,
As never Jew nor Christian knew the like:
One turned my daughter, therefore he shall die;
The other knows enough to have my life,
Therefore ’tis not requisite he should live.

Scene 2 Inside Barabas’ House Ithamore tells Barabas Father Barnardine has eaten and fallen asleep in a chair. Barabas orders him to take off his girdle and make a noose from it. They pull back the curtain of the stage’s inner room to reveal Barnardine asleep in a chair, startle him awake, slip the noose round his neck and strangle him. Ithamore is pleased that the rope left no mark on the friar’s neck.

He has an idea and they prop the corpse up against a wall holding a staff. He looks large as life. They exit the room.

Scene 3 It’s 1 in the morning. Friar Jacomo has come to keep his appointment. He spots Barnardine, apparently blocking his way, addresses him, is irritated by his silence, eventually gets angry, seizes his staff and strikes him down. At this moment Barabas and Ithamore come out the house and feign horror to discover that Jacomo has murdered his fellow friar. Ithamore makes fun of ‘these Christians’ who murder each other. Jacomo is panic-stricken. Then horrified when Barabas and Ithamore piously make a citizen’s arrest.

Scene 4 Veranda of Bellamira’s house Haven’t seen much of her, have we? She greets Pilia-Borza who returns from delivering a letter to Ithamore. She asks where he found him? At the public gallows watching the hanging of a friar (presumably Jacomo).

Now Ithamore enters. The other two greet him lavishly. Ithamore is not wrong to think they’re planning some scam. They flatter him and Bellamira feigns sexy love for him, while they try to establish how much money Barabas has, where it is hidden, and whether Ithamore will help them steal it. Yes, is his answer, but the Jew buries it secretly every night.

Ithamore is comically ready to write a letter to Barabas threatening to reveal all unless he sends him a hundred crowns. ‘Two hundred’ says Pilia. Ithamore changes it, signs it and hands it to Pilia, condescendingly, who exits.

Now Bellamira takes Ithamore’s head into her lap and calls her servants for food and to bring rich silks to dress her lover in. It is pure comedy the way Ithamore takes to this role immediately. She tells him she’s not married. He says they’ll get married and go to Greece, and then – strikingly – breaks into verse, producing a variation on Marlowe’s famous lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love.’

Pilia returns and the Jew only gave him ten crowns. Outraged, Ithamore springs up and scribbles another letter demanding at least 500. Pilia departs. Bellamira kisses Ithamore, then takes him inside for a banquet of love i.e. sex.

Scene 5 Barabas’ house Barabas is outraged at Ithamore’s defection, and almost as much by the skinny, hacked-about appearance of Pilia-Borza, ‘a shag-rag knave’. Whining self-pity:

BARABAS: Was ever Jew tormented as I am?

At which moment Pilia appears with the new demands. More demands! Barabas adopts a wheedling tone and tries to persuade Bilia to share a meal (which he will poison) but Pilia is having none of it and simply wants the money.

Scene 6 Bellamira’s veranda Bellamira and Pilia get Ithamore drunk and to confess his role in the murder of Lodowick and Mathias, that he carried the poisoned broth which killed an entire nunnery and strangled Friar Barnardine.

Bellamira and Pilia are just agreeing between themselves that they’ll take this intelligence to the governor, when enter Barabas disguised as a French musician with a lute, offering to play love music. He has a conspicuous nosegay in his hat and Bellamira takes a fancy to it. Barabas graciously hands it over and the other three all take a deep smell of it – which is what Barabas planned, because it is poisoned.

They tell Barabas to play his lute and, as he does so, drunken Ithamore regales the other two with a series of scandalous libels on Barabas’s stinginess and personal hygiene – to each of which Barabas-in-disguise responds with angry asides to the audience. Finally Barabas can stand it no more and – still in disguised as the French musician – makes his excuses and departs.

Drunken Ithamore thinks he needs to send for one more lot of money and now dispatches Pilia, without a letter, just with a verbal threat to reveal all – then goes back inside with Bellamira.

Act 5

Scene 1 In the Council House The governor is just warning the knights that the long-threatened Turkish assault is about to begin, when Bellamira and Pilia-Borza push their way through and blurt out that Barabas is responsible for the death of the governor’s son and the dead nuns and the friar. Ferneze is inclined to dismiss them but they say they have his servant at their place, drunk: he’ll vouch for it.

Ferneze dispatches officers to fetch Barabas and Ithamore and they return approximately ten seconds later. This is theatre, a forum for entertainment not realism or plausibility. Ithamore has belly-ache (from the poison – Barabas kicks himself that he did not administer more, sooner) and readily confesses everything to the governor.

Quick-wittedly, Barabas dismisses the other three as bad witnesses, but Ferneze doesn’t buy it and tells his officers to take all four of them to the cells.

Enter Katherine who wants to know whether it’s true that ‘the Jew’ was responsible for the murder of her son. Yes, the governor tells her. Barely a minute after being taken away, an officer re-enters to say all four of them are dead! Ferneze says bury the other three, get someone to throw the Jew’s body over the wall at the Turks. Everyone exits, leaving Barabas’ corpse lying onstage.

Scene 2 Not exactly to our surprise, Barabas wakes up. He took some kind of fancy sleeping potion (actually explained to be ‘poppy and cold mandrake juice’). Now he is outside the city walls. He gets up and vows vengeance on the city, vows revenge and not in a subtle way:

I’ll be revenged on this accursèd town;
For by my means Calymath shall enter in:
I’ll help to slay their children and their wives,
To fire the churches, pull their houses down,
Take my goods too, and seize upon my lands.
I hope to see the governor a slave,
And, rowing in a galley, whipt to death.

Enter Calymath, Bassoes, and Turks to whom Barabas immediately explains who he is, why he is not a spy, and why he will help them take the town. He explains there’s a secret vault dug under the town to let streams pass under and out. He’ll lead a force of 500 along it and up into the centre of the town, surprise everyone and open the gates. Turkish leader Calyphas says: it’s a deal!

Scene 3 The next scene jumps forward to the city having been stormed by the Turks with Barabas’s help. Enter Calymath, Bassoes, Turks, and Barabas with Ferneze and Knights prisoners. As reward for his help, Calyphas makes Barabas governor of the town and says he can do what he wants with his prisoners – then exits. Barabas orders his new troops, his Janizaries, to throw the governor and his entourage in prison.

Scene 4 Residence of Barabas the governor Barabas soliloquises that he is not safe while the entire population hates him, He must be wary, ‘circumspect’.

Ferneze is brought in and, after he’s finished shouting at Barabas, Barabas surprises him by saying he plans to ‘save’ Malta. How about a plan to trap Calymath and all his men in an out-house and set it on fire? Ferneze is impressed and interested, says he will give Barabas even more wealth if he keeps his word. Barabas promptly grants Ferneze his freedom, and the shake on the deal.

Ferneze exits and Barabas reflects that he will use anyone to suit his ends. He makes what at first seems an anti-semitic remark i.e. invoking anti-Semitic stereotypes:

Thus, loving neither, will I live with both,
Making a profit of my policy;
And he from whom my most advantage comes,
Shall be my friend.
This is the life we Jews are used to lead;

But then backs it with the crucial addition – after all, this is how Christians behave:

And reason too, for Christians do the like.

So the entire play might be a monstrosity of anti-Semitic stereotyping, but Barabas makes a point of repeating that he is only behaving as the faithless Christians do.

Scene 5 Calymath and his officials have finished a tour of the ruins and the island, and Calymath is just musing on its geographical advantages when a messenger arrives inviting Calymath and his men to a grand feast, the men in a big out-house, Calymath and his officers at his house.

Scene 6 A very short scene in which we see Ferneze briefing Martin del Bosco and the Knights about the signal which will tell them it’s the moment to attack the feasting Turks.

Scene 7 Barabas is in his grand hall with carpenters as they finish some big contraption. He pays them to go and drink. In fact he hopes they drink and die. Barabas has arrived at the extreme limit of misanthropy:

BARABAS: For, so I live, perish may all the world!

A messenger arrives to say Calymath will attend the feast.

Then enter Ferneze who hands over to Barabas the sum agreed for freeing Malta from the Turks, 100,000 pounds. Barabas explains his plan: the monastery where the Turkish troops are to be feasted is mined with gunpowder; at the right moment it will be set off, the whole place blown sky high and all the Turkish soldiers massacred.

Meanwhile – Barabas explains – in this hall the carpenters have fixed it so that, at the height of the feast, at a signal Ferneze will cut a cord and the floor will part throwing Calymath and his generals into a deep pit. The Turks approach, Ferneze hides, and Marlowe makes Barabas directly address the audience. Asides are one thing but Barabas ‘breaks the fourth wall’ to boast of his ingenious evil:

A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns
By treachery, and sell ’em by deceit?
Now tell me, worldlings, underneath the sun
If greater falsehood ever has been done?

Calymath and his entourage enter and salute Barabas up in the gallery who is guilefully greeting them when…. Ferneze steps forward from his hiding place and says he will show Calymath the trap Barabas had prepared. All this time Barabas has been up in the ‘balcony’ section of the theatre. Now, at the sound of a distant trumpet, Ferneze cuts the cord, the floor opens beneath Barabas and… he falls into the vat of boiling oil.

The amazed Turks watch Barabas writhing and screaming for help. Barabas makes a death-moment confession to all his crimes, admits he was going to massacre the Turks, and dies:

Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!

The Calymath rallies his entourage and says they will fly. They won’t get far, says Ferneze: the trumpet they heard was the signal for the outhouse to be blown up and the entire Turkish army liquidated. Calymath is appalled. Ferneze blames it all on the machinations of the Jew. Now he explains he will hold Calymath hostage, until his father pays the reparations necessary to restore Malta to its former state.

And the play ends on that note: the Christian governor, Ferneze has outwitted both the fiendish ‘Jew’ – seeing him come to a richly deserved end – and the warlike Turk, come out on top and won the day for Christian Malta. Hooray!

Thoughts

Obviously, The Jew of Malta is a garish and extreme entertainment, in some ways not unlike a pantomime where the audience is encouraged to boo and hiss every time the baddie comes onstage. Marlowe’s aim was obviously to create the villainest of villains, as Tamburlaine had been the most megalomaniac of rulers.

Giving him a villainous sidekick was sort of obvious, but the character of the ruthless Muslim, Ithamore, is inspired. They egg each other on to increasingly extreme outrages while the audience hiss and boo them like Alan Rickman playing the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, and Ithamore’s scenes with fellow lowlifes Bellamira and Pilia-Borza, are very much played for pantomime laughs, including Pilia-Borza’s ridiculous sense of himself as tall and knightly when he is – according to Barabas – a gangling piece of war wreckage, and Bellamira’s absurd declarations of love.

Anyway, all this garish and crowd-pleasing comedy is why it’s not worth bothering with the play’s many inconsistencies and illogicalities, let alone considering it as a ‘moral analysis’ of anything.

The most glaring plot fault is the notion that Barabas is motivated entirely by revenge for being reduced to utter poverty… and yet by act 4 he is pretty much restored to his former position of super-wealth, having bought a house bigger than the governor’s and, as he tells the friars, once again having investments in ships bringing goods from round the Mediterranean. I.e. the real engine of his revenge has disappeared. It is a theatrical illusion, a motive which is required to quickly set the plot in motion and then just as quickly dropped.

As for the end, it is a wonderful piece of over-the-top theatrical sadism, a Hammer House of Horror, a London Dungeon level of populist, tub-thumping poetic justice, no doubt cheered to the rooftops by the very groundlings Barabas had been boasting to only minutes before.

Historical footnote – the Knights of St John and the Turkish threat

The Order of the Knights of Malta was founded in 1048, when a group of Christian merchants were given permission by the Egyptians to run a hospital in Jerusalem to care for Christian pilgrims travelling to the Holy City. The First Crusade captured Jerusalem in 1098 and the organisation running the hospital, by now called the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, expanded to provide armed escorts for pilgrims, becoming known as the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

When the Holy Land fell to the Saracens in 1291, the Order of St John (popularly known as the Hospitallers) moved their
headquarters to the island of Cyprus, from which the order continued to protect pilgrims travelling to Palestine by sea.

The Knights bought the island of Rhodes in 1310. In 1523 the Ottoman Turks laid siege of the island and after six months, the Knights were forced to surrender but were permitted to leave Rhodes with full military honours.

Meanwhile, the island of Malta came into the ownership of the Crown of Aragon in 1282 and passed into the control of the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1530 the Emperor Charles V granted Malta to the Knights of St. John who had been forced to abandon Rhodes in 1523. From that point the order took the name by which it is most familiarly known, the Knights of Malta. These are the knights who are advising governor Ferneze in The Jew of Malta.

Malta was repeatedly besieged by the Ottoman Turks but never fell to them (as they repeatedly tried to capture Venice). It had been besieged in 1565, the year after Marlowe was born and 25 or so years before the play was performed. In 1569 the Ottomans captured Crete and in 1570 Cyprus. That said, the Turks’ seemingly unstoppable advance was stalled at the sea Battle of Lepanto, where an alliance of European powers defeated the Ottoman navy.

It’s worth pointing out that some 12,000 Christian slaves – of the 37,000 slaves chained in the Turkish galleys – were liberated during and after the battle. Not all slaves were black.

The Muslim Turkish threat to Europe was still very real during Marlowe’s lifetime. So Marlowe’s depiction of Ithamore isn’t picking on a helpless ‘minority’ but a caricature of a race who were threatening to seize control of the Mediterranean and invade Europe. It was as if, during the Cold War, a comic playwright created a fiendish Russian communist who took every opportunity to criticise and scheme against ‘capitalist running dogs’, ‘reactionary troglodytes’, ‘bourgeois pigs’ and so on.

Different values, ideologies and buzzwords – but the same basic structure that an overwhelming military threat to civilisation from the East was invoked and then neutralised through theatrical representation and, in this case, crude caricature.

Marlowe’s works

The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin

Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies (Title of a paper written in October 1914 by German archaeologist and Orientalist Max von Oppenheim which argued for enlisting the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War or jihad against the colonial powers, France and Great Britain)

This is a colourful and entertaining book about Germany’s military and diplomatic involvement with the Ottoman Empire in the decades leading up to, and then during, the Great War of 1914 to 18.

Kaiser Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for Islam

The first 80 pages or so provide background, describing Kaiser Wilhelm’s first state visit to Turkey in 1889 when he met the reigning Sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and his second visit in 1898 when Wilhelm grandiosely rode into Jerusalem through a breach specially made in its walls.

And they detail the very slow progress made on an ambitious commercial scheme to extend the railway line which already stretched from Hamburg on the Baltic Sea via Berlin to Constantinople, onwards across Anatolia, Syria and Iraq, to Baghdad and thence onto the Persian Gulf at Basra.

This railway project – to create a Berlin to Baghdad Railway – the focus of the opening 70 or 80 pages, although described in detail with lots of facts about the funding, selling bonds on various stock markets, the setting up of companies, the engineering challenges and so on – is really only a pretext or way in to the wider story about German-Ottoman relations, and how cultural, economic and political factors drew the two countries closer together in the years leading up the Great War.

McMeekin describes the Kaiser’s over-excitable whims and enthusiasms. One of the most notorious of these saw Wilhelm make a speech at Saladin’s tomb in Damascus on the 1898 trip, when he declared himself and his Reich a friend to the world’s 300 million Muslims. In private letters he announced that Islam was superior to Christianity, he was intoxicated by his visits and his receptions… only to largely forget his enthusiasms once he was back in Berlin.

German High Command develops an Eastern strategy

But key elements in the German diplomatic and military didn’t forget; they built on this new idea of expanding German influence down through the Balkans into the Middle East. Germany’s European rivals, France and Britain, already had extensive empires with territories all round the world. Even the Dutch and the Italians had farflung colonies.

It was true the Germans had grabbed a few wretched bits of Africa during the notorious scramble for that continent in the 1880s, but now German strategists realised that extending her influence south and east, through the Balkans and into the Middle East was:

a far more natural geographical extension of Germany’s existing territory
fed into all kinds of cultural fantasies about owning and running the origins of Western civilisation in Babylon, Jerusalem and so on
and offered the more practical geopolitical goals of:
- forestalling Russian expansion into the area, via the Balkans or the Caucasus
- breaking up the British Empire by seizing control of its most vital strategic asset, Suez Canal, and sparking an uprising of the tens of millions of ‘oppressed’ Muslim subjects of the British, specifically in British India

So the book isn’t at all a dry and dusty account of German-Ottoman diplomatic relations from 1889 to 1918 (although it does, by its nature, contain lots of aspects of this).

It is more a description of this GRAND VISION which entranced generations of German political and military leaders and a score of German entrepreneurs, spies and adventurers, a VISION which inspired official reports with titles like Overview of Revolutionary Activity We Will Undertake in The Islamic-Israelite World and Exposé Concerning The Revolutionising of The Islamic Territories of Our Enemies, a VISION of Germany sparking and leading a Great Uprising of Islam which would overthrow the British Empire and… and…

Well, that was the problem. The Big Vision was intoxicating, but working out the details turned out to be more tricky.

Apparently, there’s controversy among historians about whether the German leadership had any kind of conscious plan to raise the Muslim East against the British before the First World War broke out in August 1914. But once war was declared, a combination of German military and diplomatic officials were dispatched to the Ottoman Empire along with a colourful cast of freelance archaeologists and regional experts who fancied themselves as spies and provocateurs. These all give McMeekin the raw material for a book full of adventures, mishaps, farcical campaigns, ferocious Young Turks and double-dealing Arab sheikhs.

The book proceeds by chapters each of which focuses on an aspect of the decades building up to the First World War, then on specific historical events during 1914 to 18, or on leading personalities, often repeating the chronology as he goes back over the same pre-war period to explain the origins of each thread or theme. Topics covered include:

the brutal reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876 to 1909) which combined attempts to modernise the Ottoman Empire with some notorious repressions of Armenians calling for independence, specifically the Hamidian Massacres of 1893 during which up to 300,000 Armenians were killed and which earned Hamid the nickname ‘the Bloody Sultan’
the revolution of the Young Turks who overthrew Abdul Hamid, and replaced him with a more compliant ruler during a series of complex events stretching from 1908 into 1909
the complex diplomatic manouevring which followed the outbreak of the war in 1914 by which the Central Powers (Germany and Austro-Hungary) tried to persuade the Young Turk government to take the Ottoman Empire in on their side
the intricate tribal rivalries in Arabia between fiercely rival tribes such as the ibn Saud, the Ibn Rashid of the Shammar, An-Nuri’s Rwala bedouin and so on

Why the Ottoman Empire joined the First World War

And of course, some time is spent explaining why the Ottomans did, eventually, come into the war, by launching an attack on Russian ports in the Black Sea on 29 October 1914, although their reasons aren’t hard to grasp. The Ottomans:

resented French incursions into Lebanon and Syria
really disliked the ongoing British ‘protectorate’ over Egypt (established in the 1880s) and encroaching British influence in Arabia and the Persian Gulf
and very much feared the permanent threat of attack from Russia, their historic enemy, whose military chiefs and right-wing hawks harboured a long-standing fantasy about invading right down through the (mostly Slavic) Balkans and conquering Constantinople, restoring it as an Orthodox Christian city

This sense of being beset by enemies was steadily compounded through the 1900s as first France and Britain signed an Entente (the Entente Cordiale, 1904), and then Britain reached out to Russia to create the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907, thus creating what became known as the Triple Entente.

Compared to these three known and feared opponents who were slowly drawing together, the Germans were a relatively unknown quantity who, led by the Kaiser’s impulsive gushing enthusiasm for Islam, and combined with the Germans’ undoubted a) money b) engineering abilities, made them welcome partners in not only building the railway but trying to rejuvenate the crippled Ottoman economy.

The Ottoman Caliph proclaims fatwas against the infidel

But the Germans didn’t just want the Ottomans as military allies. They saw huge potential in getting the Sultan, in his capacity as Caliph of the Muslim world, to raise the entire Muslim world in a Holy War against the infidel… well… the British and French infidel, not the German or Austrian infidel. Maybe the Italian infidel too, although at this early stage of the war nobody knew which side Italy would come in on (Italy entered the First World War on 23 May 1915 on the side of the Entente Powers).

So McMeekin details the diplomatic shenanigans (and the bribes, always the bribes) which led up to the great day, Wednesday November 11th, 1914, when Shaykh al-Islam Ürgüplü Hayri, the highest religious authority of the caliphate in Constantinople, issued five fatwas, calling Muslims across the world for jihad against the Entente countries (Britain, France, Russia) and promising them the status of martyr if they fell in battle.

Three days later, in the name of Sultan-Caliph Mehmed V, the ‘Commander of the Faithful’ (the puppet caliph who had been put in place by the Young Turk government) the decree was read out to a large crowd outside Constantinople’s Fatih Mosque and then huge crowds carrying flags and banners marched through the streets of the Ottoman capital, calling for holy war. Across the Ottoman Empire, imams carried the message of jihad to believers in their Friday sermons, and so on.

This was a seismic even and it had been very expensive – McMeekin calculates German payments to the Young Turk government of £2 million of gold, a loan of £5 million more, and massive shipments of arms on credit to persuade them to join the German side (p.233).

Missions and characters

OK, so now the Germans had gotten the highest authority in the Muslim world to issue a holy order to rise up against the infidel (the British and French infidel, that is), now all that was needed was to organise and lead them. Simples, right?

The book devotes a chapter apiece to the missions of a number of idiosyncratic German adventurers who were sent out by the German military authorities to recruit Muslim allies in their fight against the allies.

Key to the whole undertaking was Max von Oppenheim, archaeologist and Orientalist who, in October 1914, had published a Memorandum on revolutionizing the Islamic territories of our enemies which argued for enlisting the Sultan to call on the world’s Muslims to engage in a Holy War against Germany’s enemies, France and Britain. Seeing the possibilities, the German High Command set up an Intelligence Bureau for the East in Berlin and made Oppenheim its head.

From this position Oppenheim helped plan, equip and select the personnel for a series of missions to be led by noted German archaeologist / linguists / explorers all across the Muslim world, with a view to raising it against the British (the French Muslim colonies of the Maghreb are mentioned a few times but were too far West along North Africa to be of any strategic importance to the European war).

These colourful expeditions included:

the mission given the ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius to stir up the Muslims of Abyssinia and Sudan against the British (pages 145 to 151)
the mission led by Austrian orientalist and explorer Alois Musil to recruit the bedouin of Arabia to the German cause (pages 154 to 165)
an ill-fated military campaign of Turks and Arabs to try and capture the Suez Canal, led by Freiherr Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, which was badly mauled by the British defenders (pages 167 to 179)
Max Oppenheim’s own negotiations with Feisal, son of Hussein, Sherif of Mecca, to recruit the guardian of the Muslim Holy Places onto the German side (pages 191 to 195)
the mission of Captain Fritz Klein to the leader of the Shia world, Sheikh Ali el Irakein, the Grand Mufti of Karbala in modern-day Iraq, ‘to spread the fires of Ottoman holy war to the Gulf’ (pages 203 to 208)
the even more ambitious mission of Oskar von Niedermayer to the Emir of Afghanistan, with a view to recruiting a force which could invade North-West India through the Khyber Pass and raise all the Muslims of India in rebellion against their imperial masters (pages 209 to 229)

Several things emerge very clearly from McMeekin’s detailed accounts of each of these missions, and slowly dawned on the German High Command:

1. The Muslim world was the opposite of united; it was surprisingly fragmented.

2. The Germans were disconcerted to discover that none of the Arabs they met gave a toss what the Turkish Sultan-Caliph declared in faraway Constantinople. In fact, on one level, the ineffectiveness of the Sultan-Caliph’s call to arms ending up emphasising his irrelevance to most Muslims and, in a roundabout way, undermining the authority of the Ottoman Empire as a whole over its non-Turkish subjects (p.258).

3. Again and again, in different contexts, different German emissaries made the same discovery – that the Turks and the Arabs distrusted or even hated each other.

4. When it came to fighting the Germans could trust the Turks but not the Arabs. At Gallipoli the Arab regiments ran away, and had to be replaced by Turks, who held the line under the brilliant leadership of Mustafa Kemal’ (p.189). As soon as the shooting started during the Turco-German attack on the Suez Canal (3 February 1915), all the bedouin who had been so carefully recruited, turned tail and fled, followed by all the Arab conscripts in the Turkish ranks (p.177). The Turks didn’t trust any of the Arab regiments in their army, and made sure they were all led by Turkish officers.

5. All the Arabs were only in it for the money: whether it was the Arabian bedouin, the north African Arabs of Libya or Sudan, the Shia ruler in Karbala or the Emir of Afghanistan, all of them were currently being subsidised by the British and often their people were being supplied with grain and basic foodstuffs by the British. Therefore, the Germans found themselves having to outbid the British subsidies and handing over eye-watering amounts of money. The Emir of Agfhanistan demanded an annual payment of $15,000 before he signed up with the Germans. Ibn Rashid, headman of the Shammar tribe, had negotiated payment from Turkey of 50,000 rifles, a one-off bribe of 15,000 Turkish pounds (worth $20 million today), a luxury car and a monthly stipend of 220 Turkish pounds – but all that didn’t prevent him carrying out secret negotiations with the French to see if he could get a better deal out of them (p.163). And the Emir of Afghanistan demanded a lump sum of £10 million, the equivalent of $5 billion today, before he signed a treaty allying himself to the Central Powers on 24 January 1916 (p.228).

Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide

The book covers a couple of the best known episodes of the Great War in the Middle East, namely:

the catastrophic Gallipoli Campaign, February 1915 to January 1916 (pages 180 to 190)
the Armenian genocide, April 1915 to 1917 (pages 241 to 258)

But McMeekin is not interested in presenting comprehensive factual accounts of either. Plenty of other books do that. Both disasters feature in his account only insofar as they affected German plans and policies.

For example, from a German perspective, the main aspects of the Armenian genocide were that:

it could be used by Western propagandists against the German war effort
most of the skilled labour on the still-unfinished Baghdad railway was Armenian, and when they were rounded up and sent off to the wild interior of Anatolia, it deprived the Germans of their main labour force

Which is why the German authorities made complaints all the way up the chain of command until the Head of the German General Staff himself made a formal complaint to the Young Turk government, pointing out that elimination of the Armenian workers was hampering work on the railway which was still – in 1915 – seen as of key strategic importance in carrying arms and ammunition to the Arab Muslims in Mesopotamia or the Gulf so they could rise up against British influence in the region.

The symbolism of the Berlin to Baghdad railway

The Berlin to Baghdad railway which dominated the first 70 or 80 pages of the book thereafter disappears from view for long stretches. As and when it does reappear, it snakes its way through the narrative as a symbol of the tricky and ultimately unworkable relationship between the Reich and the Ottoman Empire (the railway was still not completed in 1918, when the war ended in German and Ottoman defeat).

But the railway also stands as a symbol of McMeekin’s strategy in this book, which is to approach an enormous subject via entertaining episodes, a multifaceted crab-like methodology.

This isn’t at all dry, factual and comprehensive account of Germano-Turkish diplomatic and military relations in the years leading up to, and then during, the First World War.

It is more a collection of themes and threads, each chapter focusing on a particularly exciting episode (ranging from the very well known like Gallipoli through to the relatively obscure, such as Niedermayer’s gruelling trek to distant Afghanistan) and McMeekin deliberately presents them in a popular and almost sensational style, emphasising the personal quirks of his protagonists.

We learn that leading German Orientalist Max von Oppenheim built up a collection of some 150 traditional Turkish costumes, that the Emir of Afghanistan owned the only motor car in his country, a Rolls Royce, that the leader of the military mission to the Ottomans, Liman von Sanders was partly deaf which explained his aloof, distracted manner, and so on. Wherever he can, McMeekin adds these personal touches and colourful details to bring the history to life.

The end of the war

McMeekin’s account of the end of the war feels different from the rest of the book. Up till now we had spent a lot of time getting to know Max von Oppenheim or Liman von Sanders or Young Turks like Enver Bey or Mehmed Talaat, leading ambassadors in Constantinople, Arabs like Feisal of Mecca or non-Arab Muslims like the Emir of Afghanistan. It had, to a surprising extent, been quite a human account, I mean it focuses on individuals that we get to know.

The end of the war in the Ottoman Empire completely changes the scope and scale and tone because, to understand it, you have to fly up to take a vast, God-like overview of the conflict. McMeekin has to explain the February revolution in Russia, how and why the Russian offensives of the summer failed and were pushed back, the dazzling success of the German scheme to send Lenin to St Petersburg in a sealed train, the success of the Bolshevik coup in October, Lenin’s unilateral declaration of peace, the long drawn out peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk – all the while describing the impact of these increasingly fast-moving developments on the main front between the Ottoman Empire and the Russians, located in the Caucasus.

In other words, the last 60 or so pages of the book cease to have the colourful and sometimes comic tone of the earlier accounts of German adventurers and two-faced Arab sheikhs, and become something much more faceless, high-level and brutal.

And complex. The fighting in the Caucasus involved not just the Russians and Turks, but a large number of other nationalities who all took the opportunity of the Russian collapse to push their hopes for independence and statehood, including the Georgians, the Armenians, the Kurds, the Azerbaijanis and many others. I can tell I’m going to have to reread these final sections to get my head round the chaos and complexity which carried on long after the supposed peace treaties had been signed…

Two big ideas

1. Bismarck had made it a lynchpin of his foreign policy to maintain the Holy Alliance first established as far back as 1815 at the Congress of Vienna and promoted by the Austrian diplomat, Metternich during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Holy Alliance bound together the three Central and East European autocracies, Prussia (and its successor state, Germany), Austria-Hungary and Russia. According to McMeekin, within weeks of sacking Bismarck (in 1890), the cocky young Kaiser rejected overtures from Russia to renew Germany and Russia’s understanding, determined to throw out everything the boring old man (Bismarck) had held dear, and to embark on new adventures.

The impact on Russia was to make her even more paranoid about the ambitions of Germany and Austria in ‘her’ backyard of the Balkans – shutting down lines of communication which might have contained the Balkan Crises of the 1910s – and made Russia cast around for other alliances and, in the end, improbably, forge an alliance with the ditziest of the western democracies, France.

All this was explained on page ten and struck me as the most fateful of all the Kaiser’s mistakes and, in a sense, the key to everything which came afterwards.

2. After the peace treaties are finally signed, McMeekin presents an epilogue, which goes on for a long time and develops into a complicated argument about the links between Wilhelmine Germany’s encouragement of an anti-western, anti-Christian and anti-Jewish jihad – which his book has described at some length – and the rabid anti-Semitism which emerged soon after the German defeat of 1918, and which carried on getting evermore toxic until the Nazis came to power.

This strikes me as being a complex and controversial subject which probably merits a book of its own not a hurried 20-age discussion.

But before he goes off into that big and contentious topic, McMeekin makes a simpler point. Modern Arabs and Western Liberals like to blame the two colonial powers, Britain and France, for everything which went wrong in the Arab world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the years after the Great War ended, and obviously there is a lot to find fault with.

But this over-familiar line of self-blame among Western liberals completely omits, ignores, writes out of history, the baleful impact of the prolonged, deep (and very expensive) engagement of Wilhelmine Germany with the Ottoman Empire – with Arabs from Tunisia to Yemen, with the Muslim world from Egypt to Afghanistan. And the fact that it was the Germans who went to great lengths to summon up jihad, to set the Muslim world on fire, to create murderous hatred against Westerners and Europeans, and at the same managed to undermine the authority of the Turkish Caliphate, the one central, stabilising authority in the Muslim world.

Summary

So if there’s one thing The Berlin-Baghdad Express sets out to do, and does very well, it is to restore to the record the centrality of the role played by the Germans in the downfall of the Ottoman Empire, and the long-term legacy of German influence across the Middle East.

The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (2) by Michael Haag (2012)

The Turks were aliens; the crusaders were not.

Haag’s book is opinionated in a very unacademic way. He has certain hobby horses, vehement ideas – about the central role played by the Templars in the crusades, and about justifying the crusades by completely rethinking their context, portraying the crusades not as violent attacks against peace-loving Arabs, but as justified attempts to help oppressed Christians in the Holy Land – which he gives vent to repeatedly and almost obsessively so that, eventually, the detached reader can’t help having misgivings about the objectivity of what they’re reading.

Nonetheless, that big reservation stated right at the start, this is a very interesting and thought-provoking book.

The Tragedy of the Templars signals its unorthodox approach by going back not ten or thirty or fifty years before the founding of its ostensible subject, the Order of the Knights Templars (in 1139), but by going back one thousand four hundred years earlier, to the conquests of Alexander the Great – and then giving a sweeping recap of all the wars and vicissitudes which struck the Middle East from 300 BC through to the eruption of the Muslims from Arabia in the 630s AD.

The book has notes on every page and an excellent bibliography at the back, and yet it sometimes reads like the opinions of a crank, determined at any cost to convince you of his deliberately revisionist point of view. This comes over most obviously in the very unacademic use of repetition. Again and again he drums home a handful of key points. These are:

Haag’s key points

– the Crusades were not an unprovoked outburst of Western, racist, colonialist, greed and violence

– they were a rational response to repeated pleas for help from figures like the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Emperor of Byzantium

Why the pleas? because:

– even as late as the First Crusade (1095 to 1099) the majority population of the Levant, of Jerusalem and all the other holy cities, let alone of Anatolia and even of Egypt – were Christians:

Christians had remained the majority at Damascus until the tenth century and maybe into the eleventh. (p.208)

Five hundred years after the Arab conquest, Egypt was still a substantially Christian country (p.211)

The Nubians were Christians, as were the majority of Egyptians (p.235)

– these Christians had suffered under the lordship of the Muslim Arabs who came rampaging out of Arabia in the 700s and quickly conquered north up the coast of Palestine into Syria, eastwards conquered the old Persian Empire, and westwards conquered Egypt and beyond

– but, despite centuries of inter-marriage, the Arabs remained an aristocracy, thinking of themselves as lords, knights, emirs and rulers over a broad population of subservient serfs – and these serfs remained predominantly Christian

– through the three hundred years from the mid-700s to the mid-1000s these Christian populations suffered from being second-class citizens, forced to wear clothes which identified them as dhimmis and, occasionally, when the oppression got really bad, forced to wear halters round their necks or be branded

– meanwhile they were forbidden to repair existing churches, build any new ones, and had to stand by while existing ones were often desecrated and destroyed in periodic waves of persecution or forcibly converted into mosques

So Haag’s central point, rammed home on scores of occasions, with all the data he can muster, is that it was not the Crusaders who were the foreign invaders – it was the Muslim Arabs. It was the Arabs who had invaded and conquered Christian Egypt, Christian Palestine, Christian Syria and raided into Christian Anatolia.

Bethlehem where Jesus was born, Nazareth Jesus’ home town, the River Jordan where Jesus was baptised, Jerusalem where Jesus was crucified and rose again, Tarsus where the apostle Paul came from, Antioch where the followers of Jesus were first named ‘Christians’, Damascus, on the road to which Paul had his great conversion experience – all these lands had, by about 400, become solidly Christian and were ruled by the Christian Roman Empire.

It was the Arabs who invaded and conquered them and subjected the Christian inhabitants to all kinds of discrimination and persecution. Christians were forbidden to build new churches or repair old ones. Thousands of churches were destroyed or converted into mosques. There were periodic massacres which triggered pleas from Christian leaders in the region to the Emperor in Constantinople for help, with the result that the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim invaders in the East were permanently at war.

And it wasn’t just the Arabs who were the alien invaders…

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

What specifically triggered the Crusades was the arrival of a third force on the scene, the Seljuk Turks, who swept out of central Asia, converted to Islam, and conquered Muslim Persia including the capital of the Abbasid Dynasty, Baghdad, in 1055.

From the 1060s the Seljuks besieged and took various cities in Palestine, as well as probing the eastern edges of Anatolia – the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Their ultimate goal was to tackle the Fatimid Dynasty based on Egypt. The Turks had converted to the majority or Sunni brand of Islam. A territorial ambition to seize Egypt – centrepiece of the Muslim lands – was compounded by the fact that the Fatimids were adherents to Shia Islam, which Sunnis regard as a heresy.

The Fatimids, for their part, also wanted control of (at least southern) Palestine, in order to create a buffer against the insurgent Turks. This meant that the two Muslim opponents clashed in various battles, at various times throughout the later 11th century, taking and retaking bits of Palestine from each other.

Meanwhile the Byzantine Empire was reeling from its defeat by the Turks at the momentous Battle of Manzikert in 1071, after which:

the empire lay open before bands of Turkish tribesmen, who looted, murdered and destroyed as they marauded westwards until in 1073 they were standing on the Bosphorus opposite Constantinople. (p.76)

As an anonymous chronicler put it:

Almost the whole world, on land and sea, occupied by the impious barbarians, has been destroyed and has become empty of population, for all Christians have been slain by them and all houses and settlements with their churches have been devastated by them in the whole East, completely crushed and reduced to nothing. (quoted on page 76)

It was not the Crusaders who were invading; it was the Seljuk Turks who, in the years after 1071, invaded, conquered, devastated and took control of a vast central region of Anatolia which had been part of the Roman Empire and solidly Christian for at least 600 years. When the First Crusade arrived 25 years later it was to recover solidly Christian lands which had been invaded and to liberate its Christian inhabitants.

Anyway, the Byzantine Emperor survived the Turkish siege and soon began launching retaliatory raids into Syria and against Muslim strongholds in Palestine. So that’s Turks and Byzantines warring across the region.

And the Turks had brought with them bands of Turkomens, tribesmen of similar ethnic origin who didn’t, however, submit to Seljuk centralised authority and so raided, kidnapped and murdered across the region at will.

And the area had become infested by nomadic Bedouin, who took advantage of the prevailing chaos to also raid and kidnap and murder. Haag quotes liberally from the accounts of Christian pilgrims from Western Europe who made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean and then found every step of their way to the Christian Holy Places fraught with the necessity to pay bribes to countless Muslim officials, and to pay armed guards to protect them from all manner of marauders and kidnappers.

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

In 1077 Turkish forces led by Atsiz bin Uwaq laid siege to Jerusalem, destroying the surrounding orchards and vineyards. The city finally capitulated on promise of good treatment but Uwaq reneged on the deal and massacred about 3,000 of the Muslim population. He went on to devastate Palestine, burning harvests, razing plantations, desecrating cemeteries, raping women and men alike, cutting off ears and noses. He destroyed Ramla then went on to Gaza where he murdered the entire population, devastating villages and towns, burning down churches and monasteries.

In other words, the advent of the Seljuk Turks into the Middle East inaugurated a new era of chaos and disorder in the Holy Land

The Muslim East was wracked by misgovernment, division, exploitation, fanaticism an aggression. (p.79)

And this was widely reported by Christian pilgrims who returned to Western Europe (if they survived) telling tales of kidnap, rape and extortion, tales which had a cumulative effect at local, regional and national levels.

Back in 1009 al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, the sixth Fatimid caliph, embarked on an attempted ‘annihilation’ of Christians in the Levant, and called for the systematic destruction of all Christian holy places which culminated in the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

This was the church built over two of the central holy sites in Christian tradition, the site where Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha, and Jesus’s empty tomb, where he is said to have been buried and resurrected.

On Al-Hakim’s orders the church of the Holy Sepulchre was razed to its foundations, its graves were dug up, property was taken, furnishings and treasures seized, and the tomb of Jesus was hacked to pieces with pickaxes and hammers and utterly obliterated. Al-Hakim’s orders led to as many as thirty thousand churches being destroyed across the region or converted into mosques. News of the utter destruction of one of the holiest sites in Christendom shocked and appalled Christians from Constantinople through to Rome and into the Kingdom of the Franks. How much longer were the holiest sites in Christendom to remain at the utter mercy of fanatical opponents?

It was against this setting that Haag lists the repeated pleas for help, from the Byzantine Emperor and the Patriarch of Jerusalem, among others, which struck a chord, above all, with the Pope in Rome who, more than anyone else, heard eye-witness reports from pilgrims high and low about the mounting chaos in the region, about the wanton violence inflicted on pilgrims, and the wanton destruction inflicted on the Holy Sites themselves.

Seen from this perspective, the Crusades are not the unprovoked eruption of a bellicose West. The question is not why the Crusaders came, the question is why they took so long to respond to the pleas for help from their persecuted fellow Christians.

The Reconquista

The other really big idea I took from the book was that the Crusades happened in parallel to the Christian reconquest of Spain. I sort of knew this but Haag’s book really binds the two processes together, explaining how the Templars (the nominal subjects of his book) played as big or maybe a bigger role in the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control as they did in the Holy Land in the early years, anyway).

He points out how Popes and senior church figures called for the Christian knights of North and West Europe to put aside their differences and fight the Muslims in both places. When you look at a map of the Mediterranean Haag’s use of the phrase ‘war on two fronts’, fighting ‘on two fronts’, really makes sense.

The map below, from Wikipedia, clearly shows a) how the Muslims conquered the East, the West and the Southern coast of what had once been the Roman Christian Mediterranean and how, as a result, all the Mediterranean islands – Sicily, Sardinia, Crete, Cyprus – became battlefields for the centuries-long ‘assault by Islam against a Christian civilisation that had once embraced the whole of the Mediterranean’ (p.93)

If you were a Christian knight it wasn’t just a case of joining a Crusade to the Holy Land (as Haag points out, the term ‘crusade’ wasn’t coined until centuries after the things themselves had ended – contemporaries wrote about ‘taking the cross’). It was a question of where you chose to sign up to the global effort to stop and repel the invading Muslims – in Spain, in Sicily, in Cyprus or in Egypt or the Holy Land.

Map of the main Byzantine-Muslim naval operations and battles in the Mediterranean

Crusades wicked, Reconquista, OK?

The big question all this left me asking is – Why is the ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Christian Holy Land from Muslim rule nowadays always criticised and castigated in the harshest possible terms as a racist, violent and greedy example of Western colonialism, whereas… the parallel ‘Crusade’ to liberate the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule, which was fought by much the same knights fighting for the same spiritual rewards offered by the same Pope… is totally accepted?

Does anyone suggest we should hand Spain back over to Muslim rule, to its rightful Moorish owners? No. The question is absurd. Does anyone suggest we should apologise to the Muslim inhabitants of Spain who were expelled 500 years ago? No. The notion is absurd.

Is it because the Crusades are perceived as consisting of violent attacks on Muslims living in a land they’d inhabited for hundreds of years? Well, the Reconquista was drenched in blood.

Or does the stark difference in historiographical thinking about the two Crusades mean that morality in history – how we judge the morality of past events – simply boils down to their success? The Christian Crusaders managed to expel the Muslims from Spain by about 1500, it has been a solidly Christian land for the past 500 years and so… it is accepted as the natural state of things…

Whereas the Christian Crusaders who tried to hang onto the Holy Land were always doomed to failure by virtue of the endless waves of new invaders streaming in from Asia (first the Turks, then the Golden Horde of Genghiz Khan’s Mongols) which were always going to outnumber the Christians’ dwindling numbers… and so… their effort is seen as reprehensible and subject to all the insults and abuse modern historians and the politically correct can level at them.

Yet the two Crusades were carried out by the same kind of knights, over the same period, inspired by the same ideology, and offered the same rewards (seizure of land and the remission of sins).

Is one a totally accepted fait accompli which nobody questions, and the other a great Blot on the face of Western Civilisation, simply because one succeeded and the other failed?

The West

Not far behind that thought is the reflection that the West is simply called the West – is the West – because Muslim conquerors conquered the East.

‘The West’ was not some great insurgent triumphant entity – it is all that was left after the rampaging Muslims seized all of North Africa, all of the Middle East and most of Spain, then, in the 1100 began the process of seizing all of what we now call Turkey.

Previously Christendom had encompassed the entire Mediterranean and the lands around it. In this basic, geographical sense, the West is the creation of Islam.

The Knights Templar

So what about the ostensible subject of the book, the Order of the Knights Templar? Well it takes a while to get around to their founding in the 1130s… and then, in the rather unscholarly way which the reader soon gets used to, Haag goes out of his way to praise their involvement – claiming they were decisive or vital in almost every encounter with the Muslims over the next two hundred years – and to exonerate them from all accusations of greed, inaction or treachery brought against them by contemporaries. For example,

– when the contemporary chronicler William of Tyre criticises the Templars for their involvement in the murder of an envoy from the ‘Old Man of the Hills’ (p.251) – Haag dismisses William’s criticism as biased.

– Haag claims that the Crusader states – by the 1100s often administered by the Templars – were far more religiously tolerant than the surrounding Muslim states. When the Templars didn’t support an ill-fated Frankish expedition against the Fatimids in Egypt, Haag makes excuses for them. And so on.

So there’s lots of detail about the Knights Templars (when they were set up, their location in Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the vows they took, names of the founders and much, much more).

But, again, I was rather dazzled by one Big Idea about the Templars, which is the notion that they were the first multinational corporation. They were established after the First Crusade had established the Crusader states in Palestine, to guard the Holy Places and protect pilgrims. Quite quickly they began offering banking services i.e. they set up branches in London, Paris, Rome, on the Mediterranean islands – because if you were going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land it was wise not to carry a big sack of gold which all manner of Muslim pirates, kidnappers and bandits might steal from you. Better to deposit the gold in London or Paris or Rome, and receive a chit or docket proving the fact, while the Templars recorded the fact on their increasingly sophisticated ledgers.

Within a hundred years they were on the way to becoming official bankers to the King of France. They made huge loans to the King of England and helped finance the Reconquista. By their constitution they answered only to the Pope in Rome. The point is that – not being allied with this or that European prince or king – they were strikingly independent. No-one had any interest in ‘conquering’ them, there was nothing to conquer except a set of international financial services.

Land and tithes in the West, gold and banking facilities across Europe, and by the time of the Battle of Hattin it is estimated the Templars, along with the Hospitallers (the other great order of knights) held maybe a third of the land of Outremer, the kingdom beyond the sea (i.e. the Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land established after the success of the First Crusade).

I found these ideas about the economic roots of their power and wealth more interesting than the blizzard of detail Haag also gives about the Templars’ involvement in various battles and strategic decisions. He follows the story right through to the events leading up to the suppression of the Knights Templar by King Philip IV of France who persuaded the Pope to suppress the order on trumped up charges of blasphemy, heresy and homosexuality, when his real motivation was simply to write off the enormous debts he’d incurred with the order to fund his prolonged war with England.

Saladin

As part of his program to debunk every myth about the Crusades, Haag really has it in for An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, commonly known as Saladin (1137 to 1193) who defeated the Crusaders at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, then seized Jerusalem later the same year, events which triggered the third Crusade (1189 to 1192) in which Saladin was confronted by Richard I of England, both becoming heroes of legend for centuries to follow.

Haag places Saladin carefully in the succession of Turkish leaders who wanted to overthrow the Fatimid Dynasty in Egypt and establish their own kingdom. Haag goes out of his way to point out that:

– Saladin was not an Arab, he was a Turk; in fact he wasn’t strictly a Turk, but a ‘Turkified’ Kurd (p.233), having been born in Tikrit of Kurdish family, his father rising within the ranks of the Turkish army to become a city governor

– Saladin spent far more time waging jihad against his fellow Muslims than against the crusaders

[between 1171 and 1186] Saladin had spent no more than thirteen months fighting against the Franks; instead he directed his jihad almost entirely against his fellow Muslims, heterodox in many cases but most of them far from being heretics (p.262)

– this is one of the points Haag really dins home with endless repetition seeking to emphasise that Saladin was not a Muslim hero defending Muslim Palestine from marauding Crusaders – he was a Kurd fighting under the banner of the Seljuk Turks, against his fellow Muslims in Egypt and Syria, in order to establish a dynasty of his own

As the Cambridge History of Islam explains, Saladin’s army was ‘as alien as the Turkish, Berber, Sudanese and other forces of his predecessors. Himself a Kurd, he established a regime and an army of the Turkish type, along the lines laid down by the Seljuks and atabegs in the East.’ In capturing Egypt, and in all his wars against the Muslims of Syria and the Franks of Outremer, Saladin was not a liberator; like the Seljuks and like Zengi and Nur al-Din, he was an alien leading an alien army of conquest and occupation. (p.234, emphasis added)

– Saladin wrote letters and issued edicts claiming he was fighting a jihad against heresy and the infidel – in both cases Haag claims, he was hypocritically assuming a religious mantle to conceal what were basically the same lust-for-power motivations as all the other petty emirs and viziers competing in the region, a record of ‘unscrupulous schemes and campaigns aimed at personal, and family aggrandisement’ (Lyons and Jackson’s biography of Saladin, quoted on page 262)

– Haag goes out of his way to contrast Saladin’s fierce campaigns against what he regarded as Muslim heretics (especially Ismaili Islam, which he explains as a form of dualism), with the religious freedom operating in the Crusader states of Outremer, even quoting a contemporary Muslim chronicler, Ibn Jubayr, who admits that many Muslims preferred to live under the rule of the Franks who didn’t care what style of Islam they practiced, where they were treated fairly in the law courts, and taxed lightly (p.243).

– far from being the chivalrous knight of legend, Saladin routinely beheaded captured prisoners of war, as well as massacring the populations of captured towns, or selling all the women and children into slavery, for example:

after taking the Templar stronghold of King’s Ford in 1179 Saladin took 700 prisoners, who he then had executed
all the Templars and Hospitallers who survived the Battle of Hattin (4 July 1187) were, according to an eye witness account, lined up and hacked to pieces with swords and knives (p.274)
when Jaffa refused to yield to Saladin, it was eventually taken by storm and the entire population either massacred or sent off to the slave market at Aleppo
after taking Jerusalem, Saladin was reluctantly persuaded to allow the inhabitants to go free if they could pay a ransom; about 15,000 of the population was sold into slavery; all the churches had their spires knocked down and were converted into stables

As with Haag’s treatment of the entire period, his treatment of Saladin is detailed, compelling and, you eventually feel, strongly biased. I dare say the facts are correct, but Haag continually spins them with the very obvious purpose of undermining the legend of Saladin the chivalric defender of Muslims.

But to the casual reader, what really comes over is the immense violence and cruelty of everyone, of all sides, during the period. Muslims massacred Muslims. Muslims massacred Christians. Christians massacred Muslims. When Richard the Lionheart took Acre after a siege, he executed 3,000 Muslim prisoners, including women and children. All sides carried out what we would consider war crimes, because all sides were convinced God was on their side.

And all sides took part in the slave trade. Populations of captured towns were liable to be sent off to the great slave trade centres such as Ayas on the coast. I was genuinely surprised to learn that both the Templars and the Hospitallers took part in the slave trade, shipping captives taken in Palestine to work for the houses, especially in southern Italy and Christian Spain (p.229).

In the last decades of Outremer, as town after town fell to the Turks, the men would usually be slaughtered but their women and children would be taken to the slave markets of Aleppo or Damascus. Many thousands of Frankish women, girls and boys must have suffered this fate, as well as great numbers of native Christians.

Otherwise the great centre of the slave trade in the late thirteenth century was the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia. Marco Polo disembarked at Ayas in 1271 to begin his trip to China at about the same time that the Templars opened a wharf there. the slaves, who were Turkish, Greek, Russia and Circassian, had been acquired as a result of intertribal warfare, or because impoverished parents decided to sell their children, or because they were kidnapped, and they were brought to Ayas by Turkish and Mongol slavers. (p.230)

Slavery is mentioned a lot throughout the book. I would really like to read a good account of slavery in the Middle Ages.

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

Haag in several places criticises Sir Steven Runciman, author of what, for the second half of the twentieth century, was the definitive three-volume history of the crusades, published from 1951 to 1954.

Haag’s criticism is that Runciman was a passionate devotee of Byzantine culture and the Greek Orthodox church – for example, the Protaton Tower at Karyes on Mount Athos was refurbished largely thanks to a donation from Runciman.

And so Runciman considered the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusaders one of the greatest crimes in human history. His entire account is heavily biased against the crusaders who he portrays as ‘intolerant barbarians’ and, in the famous conclusion to his history, calls the entire enterprise a long act of intolerance and a sin against the Holy Ghost.

This is important because:

It is no exaggeration to say that Runciman single-handedly crafted the current popular concept of the crusades. (Thomas F. Madden, 2005)

And his three-volume history, still published by Penguin, created the impression which:

across the Anglophone world continues as a base reference for popular attitudes, evident in print, film, television and on the internet. (Christopher Tyerman, Fellow and Tutor in History at Hertford College, Oxford)

Looking it up, I can see that Haag’s criticism of Runciman – that he was consistently and obviously biased against the crusaders, and that his negative interpretation has been massive and widespread and continues to this day – is now widely shared.

Steven Runciman Wikipedia article

Reflections

The big picture lesson for me is not that this, that or the other side was ‘wrong’ or ‘right’ (and Haag’s interpretation has successfully undermined my simple, liberal, politically correct view that the Crusades were xenophobic, colonial massacres by showing how extremely complicated and fraught the geopolitical and military situations was, with a complex meshing of different forces each fighting each other).

The more obvious conclusion is that all sides in these multi-levelled conflicts shared values and beliefs and codes of conduct and moral codes and ethics which are wildly different from ours today – almost incomprehensibly different – drenched with a religious fanaticism few of us can imagine and prepared to carry out atrocities and cruelties it is often hard to believe.

It is in this light that the shambolic fourth (1204), fifth (1217 to 1221) and sixth crusades (1228 to 1229) must be seen – less as the violent intrusions of a homogenous Superpower into the peace-loving affairs of poor innocent Muslims – more as forms of time-honoured attack, war and conquest (and ignominious defeat) which had been practiced by all mankind, over the face of the whole world, since records began.

The 4th, 5th and 6th crusades may well have been blessed by the Pope (who also didn’t hesitate to excommunicate them and their leaders when they wandered off-target) but in practice followed the entirely worldly, calculating, selfish, power-hungry agendas of the various European princes and kings who led them.

Already, during the third crusade, the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa had openly plotted with the Serbs, Bulgarians, Byzantine traitors, and even the Muslim Seljuks against the Eastern Empire and at one point sought Papal support for a crusade against the Orthodox Byzantines. Feeling between Latin West and Greek East was becoming ever more polarised.

It is this which helps explain why the so-called fourth crusade ended in the shameful sack of Constantinople in 1203 to 1204. The Venetians were promised a huge sum if they built ships to carry 35,000 warriors to the Holy Land. They stopped all commercial activity to build the fleet. When the knights arrived they were more like 12,000 and the Venetians were told they would only be paid a third of the promised sum. After fractious negotiations, the Venetians came up with a compromise solution – the existing Crusader force would seize the port of Zara in Dalmatia. Zara had been dominated economically by Venice throughout the 12th century but had rebelled in 1181 and allied itself with King Emeric of Hungary and Croatia. It was a Christian city, but the ‘crusade’ proceeded nonetheless, and Zara fell to the combined Venetian-Crusader forces, after which it was thoroughly pillaged. Then, after further complicated negotiations, the crusaders were prevailed upon to attack Constantinople, capital of the Greek Byzantine Empire, by the Venetians, led by their blind Doge Dandolo. The Venetians had long been commercial rivals of the Greeks, and it was said Dandolo had himself been blinded by Byzantine forces in a much earlier conflict between them. There were many more complications – for example, the crusaders were told they were fighting to liberate the deposed Byzantine emperor but, during the resultant siege, this emperor was hastily restored by the population of Constantinople, which robbed the attack of its prime goal. Didn’t stop the ‘crusaders’ from finally storming the walls and sacking the Greek capital.

The point is not that this was appalling. The point is that it quite patently has nothing whatsoever to do with the Holy Land or Muslims or liberating the Holy Places and all the rest of crusader rhetoric. It was quite clearly commercial and political warfare of the kind going on all across the world at the time, in a world awash with armies and fighting princes, kings, khans, emperors, sultans and so on, not to mention Chinese emperors and Mayan and Aztec kings.

Same goes for the long-delayed and wandering expedition of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, which he grandly titled the Fifth Crusade, and which led up to him being crowned king of Jerusalem on 29 March 1229 but which was obviously more to do with his personal ambition than any ’cause’, let alone representing anything called ‘the West’. Frederick was excommunicated by the pope three times for pursuing his utterly selfish aims. He only stayed two days in Jerusalem. By this stage the once famous city was a dump, filled with ruins and churches turned into stables. As soon as decent, Frederick took ship back to Europe and got on with the serious job of building up his empire.

The fall of the Templars

And the point – that beneath a thin veneer of religious rhetoric, all these events were just dynasty-making, invading, conquering, and commercial conflicts of a familiar and entirely secular kind – is reinforced by the last few pages of Haag’s book, which chronicle the downfall of the Templars. King Philip IV was hugely in debt to the Templars. He decided to take advantage of the fact that the last Christian enclave in the Holy Land, Acre, had fallen in 1291, and the last little offshore island, Arwan, had fallen to Muslim forces in 1303, to turn on the Templars with a whole string of trumped-up charges of heresy, sodomy and so on which, despite the efforts of the pope to support an order which was nominally under his control, succeeded. The order was convicted of heresy, its leaders were burned at the stake and – the point of the exercise – King Philip’s huge debts were cancelled.

None of this is very edifying. But it is all very, very human.

Maps

There are only three maps in the book but they are excellent, clear and easy to read and they include all the place names mentioned in the text. I can’t find the name of the map designer but he or she is to be congratulated.

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of my medieval reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on May 24, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Crusades, European History, History

Tagged Abbasid dynasty, Acre, al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh, Alexander the Great, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Anatolia, Antioch, apostle Paul, Arabia, Arwan, Atsiz bin Uwaq, Ayas, Baghdad, Battle of Manzikert, Bedouin, Bethlehem, Byzantine culture, Calvary, Christians, Christopher Tyerman, church of the Holy Sepulchre, Constantinople, crusaders, Dalmatia, Damascus, dhimmis, Doge Dandolo, Egypt, Emperor of Byzantium, Fifth Crusade, Fourth Crusade, France, Frederick II, Gaza, Genghiz Khan, Golgotha, Haag, Holy Places, Holy Roman Emperor, Ibn Jubayr, Islam, Ismaili, Jaffa, Jerusalem, King's Ford, Kurd, Marco Polo, Middle East, morality, Mount Athos, Muslim, Muslims, Nazareth, Nur al-Din, Outremer, Palestine, Patriarch of Jerusalem, Persian Empire, Philip IV, Ramla, Reconquista, Richard I, Richard the Lionheart, River Jordan, Saladin, Seljuk Turks, Seljuks, Shia Islam, slave trade, Slavery, Steven Runciman, Syria, Tarsus, the Arab conquest, the Battle of Hattin, the Bosphorus, the Crusader, the Fatimid Dynasty, The First Crusade, the Knights Templars, the Middle East, the pope, the Roman Empire, the sack of Constantinople, The Tragedy of the Templars, Thomas F. Madden, Turcomens, Turks, Venice, Zara

Posted by Simon on May 24, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/the-tragedy-of-the-templars-michael-haag-2/

The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (1) by Michael Haag (2012)

From its title I expected this book to focus narrowly on the history of the Knights Templars, but it is much more than that.

The Knights Templar

The history of the order can be summarised thus:

The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, also known as the Order of Solomon’s Temple, the Knights Templar or simply the Templars, were a Catholic military order founded in 1119 after the First Crusade had seized Jerusalem. The order was recognised by the Pope in 1139 and was active until 1312 when it was suppressed by Pope Clement V.

The Templars became a favoured charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power. Templar knights, in their distinctive white mantles with a red cross, were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. Non-combatant members of the order, who formed as much as 90% of the order’s members, managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom, developing innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking, building its own network of nearly 1,000 commanderies and fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land, and arguably forming the world’s first multinational corporation.

The Templars were closely tied to the Crusades so that when the Holy Land was lost, support for the order faded. Rumours about the Templars’ secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Philip IV of France – deeply in debt to the order – took advantage of this distrust to destroy them and erase his debt. In 1307, he had many of the order’s members in France arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and burned at the stake. It was under pressure from King Philip that Pope Clement V disbanded the order in 1312. (Wikipedia)

From that time to the present day rumours have swirled around the Templars, and I have met conspiracy theorists who think that the tentacles of the transnational organisation they founded persist to the present day, and underlie modern banking/wars/global inequality.

Deep history, revisionist history

So much for the order itself. What is surprising about Haag’s book is the extreme thoroughness with which he presents the deep historical background for the crusades themselves, a history so deep it goes back before the founding of Christianity, and covers the conquests of Alexander the Great (333 to 323 BC), the rise of the Roman Empire, the fall of Rome to the barbarians, the endurance of the Byzantine empire, the rise of Persian power, and then the eruption of militant Islam into the Middle East in the 630s.

And the reason he goes back to such an early period is because…

Haag presents the entire crusading enterprise in a radically revisionist light

The politically correct, modern view of the crusades is that they were a racist, orientalist, unjustified, colonial attack by rapacious, cruel and undisciplined European armies, motivated solely by greed and personal aggrandisement, against the peace-loving Muslim world upon whose civilians (and even local Christian populations) they perpetrated grotesque massacres.

By going so very far back into the deep pre-history of the crusades Haag aims to present us with the broadest possible historical context for them, a perspective which then forms the basis of his drastic reinterpretation. Thus he claims that:

1. At the time of the First Crusade the majority of the population of Palestine was Christian – so the crusades weren’t an attack on a majority population of Muslims, but an attempt to rescue the majority population of the area from subjugation by alien oppressors. He quotes a young Islamic scholar Ibn al-Arabi who stayed in Jerusalem from 1093 to 1096 and wrote that, four and a half centuries after the Muslim conquest, Jerusalem was still a predominantly Christian city, as was Palestine generally:

The country is theirs [the Christians’] because it is they who work its soil, nurture its monasteries and maintain its churches. (quoted on page 88)

2. Because it was not the Christians, but the Muslims who were the outsiders and conquerors – erupting into the Levant in the 7th century and imposing a violent, racist, imperialist ideology on the native inhabitants of the region over the next few hundred years.

You can see how that is completely opposite to the self-hating, anti-western narrative most of us are used to. Haag goes back to the start of the Christian era to show that:

The entire Mediterranean basin, from the south of Spain through Italy and Greece on to Anatolia and the Levant, then around Egypt and along the whole coastline of North Africa to Ceuta opposite Spain – this entire region was part of the Roman Empire.
Christianity did not spread via the sword; the exact opposite, for its first three centuries (from Jesus’ execution in 33 AD to the Emperor Constantine decriminalising Christianity in 312) Christianity spread like wildfire around the Mediterranean empire despite the violent and cruel attempts of the Empire to crush it. Christianity was not a religion of the sword but of proselytising and persuasion, which despite all efforts to stamp it out had nonetheless become the de facto religion of the Empire by the mid-350s, and was officially made the state religion by the Emperor Theodosius in the 390s.
With the result that, from around 400 to around 700 AD, the entire Mediterranean basin formed one unified Christian civilisation.

The extent of the Roman Empire under the Emperor Trajan in 117 AD

The invaders were the Muslims, who erupted from Arabia in the 650s and quickly overran Persia and the Levant, then spread along North Africa, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and pushed up through Spain, crossing the Pyrenees and raiding half way-up France until stopped at the Battle of Tours in 732. From about 718 onwards, various Christian princes and armies began the very long, slow process of reconquering Spain for Christianity – the so-called Reconquista – which was only completed in 1492, over 700 years later.

The spread of Islam 622 to 750

Meanwhile, Muslim armies continued pushing eastwards into Persia and on towards India, and north and west through Anatolia towards the embattled centre of the Eastern Roman Empire, Constantinople, which they were only prevented from capturing by a series of heroic stands by succeeding Byzantine emperors.

During the 800s and 900s Muslims also seized the islands of Cyprus, Malta, Sicily (842) and the Balearic Islands, using them and ports along the North African coast as bases for pirate raids on Christian ships and ports. They even attacked the heart of Christendom in the West, the city of Rome, in 846, when Muslim raiders plundered the outskirts, sacking the basilicas of Old St Peter’s and St Paul’s-Outside-the-Walls, and were only prevented from entering the city itself by the sturdiness of the Aurelian Wall. In 849 another Arab raid targeted Rome’s port, Ostia, but was repelled.

This, then, was the broad – and often ignored – context for the crusades. Christian Europe was, in effect, under siege from extremely fierce warriors motivated by an ideology which aimed to suppress or wipe out all traces of Christian civilisation.

Haag goes on to make key points about the new Muslim overlords of the conquered areas:

1. The Muslim rulers generally despised agriculture and manual labour. In all the Mediterranean lands they conquered they saw themselves as a warrior élite whose fierce ideology justified them in subjugating the native inhabitants who were overwhelmingly Christian in culture and belief. The native Christians and Jews (in Palestine, particularly) were subject to punitive taxes, unable to worship openly, forbidden to repair their churches or synagogues and, in some periods, forced to wear specific clothes or even branded to indicate their lowly serf status.

2. The call for Christians in France and Italy – the ‘West’ – to come to the aid of their fellow Christians in the newly-occupied lands were not new to the 11th century (when the crusades began). Throughout the 800s, 900s and 1000s came repeated pleas for help from Spain, from the imperilled emperor at Byzantium, from Christian leaders in Alexandria and Jerusalem – pleas to be liberated from semi-slavery, from the Muslim desecration of Christian holy places, and the destruction of churches and synagogues. From the suppression of the original Christian culture and belief of the native inhabitants.

Of the five original patriarchal seats of the Roman Empire – Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem – by the 1050s Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem had fallen into Muslim hands, and – as mentioned – Constantinople was under permanent threat.

In other words, seen from this deep historical perspective, it is not the Christians who were the aggressors. Christian armies didn’t march on Mecca and Medina and occupy them and tear down their holy places and plunder their treasures and force the native inhabitants to wear special markers on their clothes or even to be branded. Christian armies have never attacked the holy places of Islam.

But Muslim armies had by the 800s:

conquered Alexandria, the great centre of Christian learning
Jerusalem, where Jesus was tried, executed and rose from the dead
Antioch, home of the first Gentile Christian church and where the term ‘Christian’ was first used
and Constantinople, explicitly founded as the new, Christian capital of the Roman Empire

For Haag, then, the crusades are the precise opposite of a colonial Western attempt to conquer peace-loving Muslims; they were an attempt to recover authentically and originally Christian lands, shrines and holy places which the Muslims had seized and whose majority Christian populations the Muslims were oppressing.

Haag makes further arguments.

Jerusalem not a Muslim holy city

By going back into the deep history he shows that Jerusalem was, for centuries, not the Holy City for Muslims which is it now generally seen to be. It is so now because the tradition grew up that the city was the location of the Prophet Muhammad’s Night Journey. Just to be crystal clear, I’ll quote Wikipedia on the subject of the Night Journey.

The Isra and Mi’raj are the two parts of a Night Journey that, according to Islam, the Islamic prophet Muhammad took during a single night around the year 621. Within Islam it signifies both a physical and spiritual journey. The Quran surah al-Isra contains an outline account, while greater detail is found in the hadith collections of the reports, teachings, deeds and sayings of Muhammad. In the accounts of the Isra’, Muhammad is said to have traveled on the back of a winged mule-like white beast, called Buraq, to ‘the farthest mosque’. By tradition this mosque, which came to represent the physical world, was identified as the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. At the mosque, Muhammad is said to have led the other prophets in prayer. His subsequent ascent into the heavens came to be known as the Mi‘raj. Muhammad’s journey and ascent is marked as one of the most celebrated dates in the Islamic calendar.

But Haag points out that the sura in the Koran which is the basis of this belief in no way mentions Jerusalem, but simply refers to ‘the farthest mosque’ or masjid.

Glory to Him Who carried His beloved by night from the Sacred Masjid to the Furthest Masjid, whose precincts We have blessed, to show him of Our wonders! He it is Who is All-Hearing, All-Seeing![Quran 17:1 (Translated by Tarif Khalidi)]

In Haag’s view, the tradition that Muhammad’s flight took place from Jerusalem was created after Jerusalem was conquered by the Muslims. He describes in detail the career of Muslim warrior Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, who built the al-Aqsah mosque (which became known as the Dome of the Rock) in Jerusalem in order to promote and aggrandise his achievements, and in deliberate competition with the large Christian Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

But, as Haag highlights, the carved inscription inside the al-Aqsah mosque in which al-Malik claims credit for building it (and which also threatens Christians and Jews with dire punishments unless they obey their Muslim overlords), and which is also one of the earliest written records of a text from the Koran – this inscription nowhere mentions the Night Flight. Thus, in his view:

Far from commemorating the Night Journey, the Dome of the Rock seems to have generated the tradition. (p.34)

The point of this section is that Haag is seeking to undermine or question what most historians (and ordinary people) tend to take for granted, which is that Jerusalem was a Muslim Holy City at the time of the Crusades.

Not so, claims Haag. It certainly had been a Jewish and then a Christian Holy City – it had been founded by Jews and was the centre of their world for a thousand years before the Romans arrived, and it was where the Jewish heretic and/or Son of God, Jesus, was crucified and rose again and preached to his disciples before ascending into heaven, which makes it pretty obviously holy to Christians, too.

But for the Muslim rulers it was, at least to begin with, just one among numerous ports and trading centres in the Levant, with no particular strategic significance in itself, but with the notable perk that – as a destination for European pilgrims could be heavily taxed – it was a useful profit centre.

Saladin not a Muslim hero

In another reversal of the usual story, Haag points out that Saladin (An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub), the legendary opponent of Richard the Lionheart during the Third Crusade (1189 t o1192), was not an Arab at all but a Kurd, who spent more time fighting against his fellow Muslims than against Christians.

For years before he finally took Jerusalem, Saladin fought Muslim rivals in Egypt and Syria in his efforts to found a new dynasty, the Ayyubid dynasty. Above all, Saladin aspired to supersede the Abbasid caliphate based in Baghdad and his seizure of Jerusalem was, for him, a great propaganda coup.

Thus if Saladin fought the Crusaders it wasn’t as part of a high-minded general Muslim resistance; it was as part of his attempts to gain kudos and respect in the Muslim world in order to reach his deeper goal, the establishment of his own dynasty, achieved through what Haag calls ‘an imperialist war.’ In fact, the core of the Muslim world, the caliphate based in Baghdad, hoped the Christians would defeat Saladin and thus remove this troublesome usurper.

Summary of Haag’s argument

In the section about the Night Flight, in his passages about Saladin, and in numerous other ways throughout this book, Haag sets out to counter the politically correct narrative and to show that:

the crusades were not a violent attack on the Muslim Holy City of Jerusalem because it was not in fact a genuine Muslim Holy City, not in the same way that Mecca or Medina were
the majority population of the Middle East was not Muslim, but Christian and Jewish
that the imperialists in the story were not the Europeans, but the conquering Muslims who (as he vividly shows) at various times massacred the native Christians and Jews (who had both been living there far longer than the Muslims) or imposed all kinds of restrictions on them – forbidding them to practice their religion in public, closing churches and synagogues, mulcting them for money, and making them wear special clothes, or even branding their skin

Which leads up to Haag’s claim that the Crusader States, far from being the oppressive intervention of Christian outsiders, were a rare period when the majority Christian population of Palestine had something approaching local rule, representing local interests.

These are the big, thought-provoking points Haag makes before he even gets to the origins of the Templars.

The vital role of Constantinople

It’s not the main focus of Haag’s book but, covering the Dark and Middle Ages in the East as he does, his narrative can’t help bringing out the way that Constantinople/Byzantium again and again and again proved a bulwark protecting the rest of Europe from the marauding Muslims.

Prompting the reader to reflect that, if Constantine had not happened to win the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 (the battle in which he defeated his main rival to the throne and thus became Emperor of Rome), and if Constantine had not become convinced of the power of Christianity – he would never have decided to create a new capital in the East and commissioned the mighty new city which came to be known as Constantinople. And this city and its outlying territories and warrior population would not have gone on to become Christian Europe’s main bulwark and protection against invading Muslims for eight hundred years (from the 600s until its fall in 1453).

And so, if it had not been for this sequence of fortunate events, might not the whole of Europe – and so its later colonies like America, Australasia and so on – not all now be Muslim?

Other medieval reviews

Complete list of medieval reviews

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by Simon on April 30, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Crusades, History, Middle Ages, War

Tagged 1492, 2012, 732, 846, Abbasid caliphate, Abd al-Malik Ibn Marwan, Alexander the Great, An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, Anatolia, Antioch, Arabia, Ayyubid dynasty, Baghdad, barbarians, Catholic church, Christendom, Christianity, colonialism, Constantine, Constantinople, Cyprus, Eastern Roman Empire, Europe, France, history, Islam, Isra, Italy, Jerusalem, Jesus, Jews, King Philip IV, Knights Templars, Malta, Mecca, medieval history, Medina, Mi'raj, Michael Haag, Middle Ages, Middle East, Muhammad's Night Journey, North Africa, Pope Clement V, Reconquista, Richard the Lionheart, Saladin, Sicily, Spain, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Battle of Tours, the Byzantine Empire, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the fall of Rome, The First Crusade, the hadith, the Holy Land, the Knights Templar, the Levant, the Middle East, the Muslims, the Order of Solomon's Temple, the Persian Empire, The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Pyrenees, the Quran, the Roman Empire, the Templars, the Third Crusade, The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States, Theodosius I

Posted by Simon on April 30, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/04/30/the-tragedy-of-the-templars-michael-haag/

The Doomed Oasis by Hammond Innes (1960)

‘Come to the point,’ said Gorde impatiently. (p.151)

This is Hammond Innes’ longest novel to date, 336 pages in the Collins paperback edition. It is a slow-burning tale of oil prospecting on the politically sensitive border between sheikdoms in the Empty Quarter of Arabia, given flavour by the soap opera theme that the young man who travels out to Arabia and triggers the narrative is the bastard son by a Welsh serving girl of the posh Arab expert and obsessive oil prospector, Colonel Charles Whitaker.

The story is a first-person narrative told by the Welsh solicitor, George Grant, who sets out to investigate the young man’s subsequent death and who becomes the reluctant eyewitness to the story’s key developments and tragic denouement.

The plot

Like many a movie, the book opens in a court where staid solicitor George Grant is called on to give the evidence which will decide the fate of the man in the dock, a ‘national hero’, a ‘global figure’, who is on trial for murder. So what led up to this scene?… cue shimmering film effects and travelling-back-in-time music…

1. Escape to Saraifa Well, it all began four years earlier when Grant is called to a house in Swansea where he finds that a 19-year-old boy, David Thomas, who’s escaped from Borstal, has returned to the family home and hit his father so severely that he’s caused a fatal stroke. It quickly emerges that the assault took place because the boy has discovered he’s not the man’s son at all; all this time both his ‘parents’ have lied to him – and he is actually the bastard son of the legendary adventurer and oil prospector in Arabia, Colonel Charles Whitaker, who they used to refer to as ‘Uncle Charles’.

Grant has been called in because his firm handles the monthly payments that come from Whitaker’s bank in Bahrain to the mother’s account – maintenance, or guilt money. When the ‘father’ dies as a result of his blows, David is arrested – but promptly escapes police custody to arrive, wet and injured, in Grant’s office where, against his better judgment and all his professional training, Grant helps the boy stow away on a ship bound for Arabia.

Old Captain Griffiths likewise takes pity on this intense, unhappy young man, allowing him passage on his ship and helping smuggle him ashore in Arabia, where he’s collected by his father’s men. The last Grant hears is a letter saying that David’s met his scary father, Colonel Whitaker (beak nose, patch over one eye, feared by his men, close confederate of the sheikh) and is beginning courses in oil drilling, with a view to helping him with his prospecting.

2. Enquiries of an executioner Three years later Grant is shocked to receive a letter saying David is missing, presumed dead, in the Empty Quarter of Arabia. During that time Grant had become the UK solicitor for Colonel Whitaker, receiving funds from all kinds of business and sheikhs, before disbursing them to buy the equipment for a major oil prospecting expedition. Whitaker is obsessed with the quixotic idea that the profitable Saudi oil seams carry on into the small sheikdom of Saraifa. The shocking news that David is dead is confirmed by an obituary in The Times. And then Captain Griffiths turns up in Grant’s office with a package a harassed David had given him before his fateful, final mission, to be delivered to Grant by hand.

Is David really dead? How did he die? Was he murdered? Was he about to make a great discovery? Who was he working for? —- Trying to answer these questions is the motor of the plot driving Grant to meet and interview as many people connected with the events as possible for the middle 200 pages of the book.

The package contains a last will and testament – for David senses he will die on his last prospecting mission – along with a pledge to drill in specified locations on the Saraifa-Hadd border, which David hopes Grant can force the CEO of the oil company he and his father work for – GODCO – to sign. To make that happen Grant will have to fly to Arabia…

3. The Empty Quarter

Grant flies out to Bahrain and encounters various players including the cool, calculating Erkhard, MD of GODCO in his high-rise office. Tricky and evasive, he nonetheless convinces Grant that the company did everything it could to mount a search & rescue operation for David, but found nothing. Grant goes on to the hospital to meet David’s twin sister, Susan, a nurse working out there. He meets an Italian journalist Ruffini, who is rooting round looking for a story. He meets Sir Philip Gorde, the GODCO boss, who refuses to sign David’s document requesting drilling at key locations, which Grant has been instructed to present to him.

To explain why, Gorde flies Grant over the desert to see the locations, to show him they are on the politically sensitive border between Saraifa and Hadd, players in a centuries old blood feud. But to Gorde’s own surprise, from the plane they see a team drilling illegally and land on a gravel stretch of desert to quiz them. The drilling is being led by one Entwistle, who had met and respected David and now is, unofficially, following up David’s hunch about the oil on the border.

Grant’s dialogue with Entwistle is made up of characteristic Innes evasions.

Entwistle hesitated… ‘It isn’t easy to explain,’… he hesitated… Entwistle hesitated… He hesitated… unable, apparently, to put it into words… Again the hesitation… (pp.149-50)

When Grant gets to ask Entwistle whether he thinks David is still alive there is more evasion.

He hesitated… ‘What are you suggesting?’ I asked. ‘He hesitated…. ‘I don’t rightly know,’ he muttered… (p.153)

4. The doomed oasis

To Grant’s horror, Gorde flies off leaving Grant with Entwistle and his drilling crew in the middle of the desert, and five minutes later they’re attacked by armed bedouin. They flee in the Land Rover and drilling lorry and, after an arduous journey across desert sand and gravel, arrive at the much-mentioned Saraifa oasis, where they are promptly arrested by the ruler, sheikh Makhmud. He is very angry that they’ve been drilling on the border as it could trigger a war with the neighbouring Emir of Hadd. A tense counsel of the bedou elders is interrupted when one of the precious water pipes to the village, the falajes, fails and Entwistle makes a quick getaway in the Land Rover. Should Grant go with him?

‘I don’t know’, I said. I didn’t know anything for certain… He hesitated. (p.166)

Grant meets Khalid, the son of sheikh Makhmud and, as usual, the encounter is marked by hesitation, non-communication, evasion.

There were many things I wanted to ask him but this didn’t seem the moment. (p.170)

There was a moment then when he hesitated as though about to tell me something…. he replied ‘I don’t know.’… before I could question him he had drawn back… (p.172)

And then, finally, he meets the mysterious and legendary Charles Whitaker. He lives in a few rooms in a large empty mansion in the village and, it turns out, has the same conversational style as every other Innes character.

He didn’t say anything… He made no comment… He shrugged… the silence between us hung heavy as the thick night air… ‘It’s not easy to explain. You don’t understand the situation.’

What is clear is that: the little sheikdom of Saraifa, a castle and village based in an oasis, is under constant attack from the sands of the desert. It is only protected by a line of thorn trees and it only produces dates and rice etc thanks to an ancient system of falajes or water pipes, bringing water some thirty miles from the mountains. There used to be dozens but they have fallen into disrepair, now there are only six, and the men from Hadd are sabotaging these last ones, threatening to destroy all of them and, with them, Saraifa itself, if the illegal drilling continues.

There is a confusing scene where Erkhard flies in and appears to agree with Whitaker that the company will drill the disputed location – this leads sheikh Makhmud to organise a massive celebration feast, described in detail. But then Gorde arrives and, in front of everyone, tears the agreement up. In light of the blowing up of the falaj and some other violent exchanges, Gorde says neither his company nor any other will take the risk of triggering a war. He stalks out and the atmosphere turns very ugly as the jubilant Arabs give vent to their frustration. Whitaker returns to his half-empty palace. Grant returns to the isolated turret room the sheikh had allotted him. Crowds gather in the village square and are harangued by hotheads, and appear to go off and blow up one of the westerner’s airplanes. Grant is afraid.

5. The Quicksands of Umm al Samim

Now GODCO has definitively sworn off drilling on the border, Whitaker tells Grant he wants to liquidate all his assets in the UK and do the drilling out on the border himself as a freelance – although he knows he risks being murdered by Hadd’s men. Grant gets into a Land Rover driven by Whitaker’s servant to leave Saraifa but they reach the village square only to be blocked by armed men and Grant is returned all over again to his room in the turret.

In this tense atmosphere Grant is brought before the sheikh’s son, Khalid, who tells him David is alive. David’s mysterious disappearance/death was a set-up. The previous 200 pages, and all of Grant’s investigations so far, have been for nothing, based on a false premise.

Before that can sink in Khalid’s bodyguards whisk Grant into a Land Rover and they set off on a journey to Whitaker’s oil drilling rig thirty miles south. Here they learn that Whitaker has ordered his team to pack up and set off to drill on the dangerous border (leaving this reader to ask: why didn’t they quiz Whitaker about this back in Saraifa? Why don’t they simply order the drilling crew not to move?).

From there they drive at speed to a friendly village, Dhaid, and have barely been greeted by the hairy old sheik and his ragamuffin crew, before Khalid receives the message that the men of Hadd are massing for an attack on Saraifa, the doomed oasis. Khalid must return to his father – but he insists that Grant must change into native garb and be taken by a guide who doesn’t speak English into the remote quicksands of Umm al Samim, for this is where David is hiding out. Crikey.

Why did David fake his own death?

Khalid explains that he and David cooked up the idea of David’s disappearance for the publicity, to get it reported in the press, to bring pressure to bear on the oil company to drill in the contentious locations and encourage the British government to secure the disputed territory for Saraifa. (What a silly plan.) But it has completely failed: Gorde, the head of the oil company has expressly banned the drilling, war with the men of Hadd now looks inevitable, and the British government is (wisely) refusing to get involved – the exact opposite of everything David hoped for.

Khalid tells Grant he must go on this mission to find David and a) bring him back to be reunited with his father, to persuade him to call off the drilling b) then go to the British Political representative in Bahrain and beg for men and guns to defend Saraifa from the men of Hadd and their allies.

— Innes’ description of Grant’s journey through the desert and then across the treacherous quagmire of Umm al Samim is powerfully evocative. Around this stage of the book the longeurs which had dogged Grant’s quest for David begin to be replaced by more frequent and vivid descriptions of the desert, the harshness of bedouin life, a mounting sense of violence and impending tragedy.

Disaster

And then – very quickly, in the space of twenty pages – the situation and mood are turned upside down. As David and Grant ride their slow camels back towards Saraifa they learn that the men of Hadd have already attacked the doomed oasis. First they find the neighbouring village, Dhaid, full of wobegone refugees cowering behind the walls. Then they come to Saraifa itself, where all the falajes have been blocked, there is no drinking water, and the desert sands are blowing freely across the date gardens.

They ride out to the first watering hole where they discover the wreckage of a battlefield. Here Khalid and his men were ambushed by the men of Hadd and massacred, rusty old rifles against modern automatic weapons. All the bodies have been half-eaten by hyenas. David finds Khalid’s body, buries it with tears in his eyes, then swears vengeance on the men of Hadd.

They ride on past scattered corpses and out into the desert until they come upon Whitaker who is setting up his mobile drilling at the contentious locations, regardless of the consequences. Grant witnesses the reunion between son and the father who thought he was dead, and it is not a happy one. David is mystified as to why Whitaker is bothering to drill at all since, in David’s mind, the drilling was always about generating oil revenue to pay to restore the falajas and save the oasis. He is appalled to realise that for Whitaker it is just about confirming his lifelong theory that the oil is here, and about money. He has done a deal with the Emir of Hadd, got his approval to drill, and will pay him a commission.

David, thirsting for revenge, begs his father for men to help him carry out an attack on Hadd but Whitaker (sensibly) refuses. Whitaker asks Grant to help him make David see sense. In his turn, David asks Grant to come with him and help with his attack. Almost without realising it, Grant agrees with the latter and, along with four Arabs, they set off on camel-back for Hadd. —More evocative descriptions of the desert by day and night. And an atmosphere of real threat and tension.

The small team arrive at Hadd by night. David blows up its three wells (ha! revenge for Saraifa!) then they climb the old fort which backs onto the town. The battle – or more accurately, siege – which forms the climax of the novel, has begun.

6. Fort Jebel al-Akhbar

By this stage the novel has become gripping. Maybe it’s the introductoin of the visceral excitement of war and bloodshed – but it’s also the sense that the various strands of the plot are reaching a climax: Grant’s long association with David, which gives their relationship its depth; and David’s enmity with his father; all overlaid by his thirst for revenge for the killing of Khalid and the strangling of Saraifa, the doomed oasis.

David, Grant and their Arabs hold out in the commanding tower for days. They snipe at anyone trying to fix the wells. They successfully repulse every attack, sometimes with grenades. Three Land Rovers arrive with boastful Arab warriors and they immediately destroy two of them.

Under cover of dark, David encourages Grant to escape, blacked out, dressed as a bedouin, hiding against rocks as another wave of attackers climb the hillside. Grant stumbles across the attackers’ camels, steals one and heads west in the hope of coming across the tracks to Whitaker’s camp. —More convincing, and terrifying, descriptions of the pitiless desert.

By fluke, Grant makes it to Whitaker’s camp and his news angers the old man: he has helped set the Emir against him just as his dreams of drilling were coming true. Whitaker is torn between grief at the inevitable death of his son and hatred of him for scuppering his lifelong ambition.

The incident has been reported and one Colonel George for the British Army drops by to ensure Whitaker and his men are alright. He is accompanied by Ruffini, the snooping Italian journalist Grant first met in Bahrain. Lucky. Grant briefs Ruffini who flies out with Colonel George and manages to smuggle the story out to the British press. The next day it is dominating the national papers and a question is asked of the Foreign Secretary in the House. David’s siege has become an international incident. Over the next few days David is cast, by a jingoistic press, as a national hero. Grant watches all these developments with amazement.

Colonel George had radioed one of his patrols, led by a Captain Berry, to collect Grant and take him back to Bahrain but they divert to the border with Hadd and then, after a few days, the fuss in the press not going away, they are ordered to proceed to Jebel al-Akhbar to broker a deal.

Captain Berry and Grant are given safe passage by the Emir up the hill to the fort and meet David, more dead than alive, wounded and parched with thirst. He refuses to leave. He doesn’t trust the Emir not to assassinate him, and he thinks with a few more days holdout the British government will be forced to intervene and save Saraifa. Berry and Grant leave him some water and bandages and return to keeping a watching brief with their platoon of troops on the Saraifa-Hadd border.

Next thing they see a posse of the Emir’s men ride by in the direction of Whitaker’s drilling – then several hours later, riding back with Whitaker. The Emir is forcing Whitaker to confront his son and make him surrender.

Hours later Berry and Grant and the men hear a single shot ring out from the distant hill. They receive radio instructions that the government is brokering David’s surrender and a helicopter flies into the mountain top to bring him out. Ruffini the journalist is there to record the scene as the semi-conscious David is brought down to Berry’s camp, just enough time to whisper hello to Grant, before being flown on to hospital in Bahrain.

The Emir rides out to the camp in the dignity and simplicity of bedouin dress on a camel and harangues the British troops: they care nothing for the deaths of innumerable Arabs, but maybe they will mind the death of a white man. And one of his Land Rovers roars up and deposits the body of Colonel Whitaker onto the sand, shot in the face.

Did David shoot him? Is he a national hero or a national disgrace? Ruffini promises to write up a version that the Emir’s men treacherously murdered Whitaker, and Grant is full of hope. But Whitaker’s old friend and sparring partner, Sir Philip, says it is Grant’s fault for smuggling David out here in the first place, a dockside water-rat, a criminal wanted by the police, a rough illegitimate boy who had vowed to kill his father, one of the finest Arabists of his generation, a legend in the Peninsula, and a hero. It is all Grant’s fault.

Which is true? Which version will prevail?

Back in court

And so the narrative returns to the opening scene, a court room where Grant has been called to give evidence for the prosecution against David Thomas. The preceding 300 pages amount to a summary of his evidence, what he saw and experienced and witnessed. What will the court decide…?

Innes’ ‘secrets’

The ‘secrets’ at the core of these Innes novels of the later 1950s are often pretty trivial:

In The Wreck of The Mary Deare the crew were ordered to sink the ship as part of an insurance scam, but the captain managed to keep her afloat and beach her on rocks near the Scillies. That’s it. But it takes the narrator about 200 pages of painful obstructions and evasive conversations to prise this out of the ship’s captain.
In The Land God Gave To Cain Three engineers survive crash landing in the wilds of Labrador, where one goes mad and tries to kill the other two, one of whom just about survives, escapes and hushes it all up. The narrator, a radio ham in England, picks up a radio signal from the murderer, left out in the wastes, a week after he was officially dead – that’s the puzzle or mystery – and it takes him 200 pages of interviewing innumerable evasive and obstructive company officials and eyewitnesses before he gets to the (unsatisfyingly simple) truth.

Innes only manages to spin 200-page novels out of these thin scenarios by having everyone in them appear slow on the uptake and have long, fruitless conversations in which they refuse to ‘spit it out’. Everyone is evasive about everything. In the 1950s this might have passed for the creation of ‘pace, tension and intrigue’ but tastes have changed. We expect a modern thriller to be cleverer than the reader, to outwit us with multiple levels of deceit, layers of duplicity which are slowly peeled away to reveal something truly shocking or dazzling.

Instead, for the majority of this book, as in the previous two, I experienced a growing sense of frustration as every conversation consisted of evasions and hesitations. Not for any cunning and clever reasons but simply for Innes to create a false sense of tension and spin things out.

It’s made worse because the real explanation is obvious so early on in the novel – when David’s death is reported I thought it was a bit pat and convenient, so it came as no surprise 200 pages later to realise he isn’t dead at all. The only thing that puzzled me was, Why? And the revelation that it was a publicity stunt to push the company into signing a legal commitment to drill at the contentious locations just seems ludicrous, a ludicrous failure to understand how multinational oil companies work.

Evasions and frustrations

A classic example is the conversation between the solicitor Grant and David’s twin sister, Susan, out in Arabia. Almost every one of her replies for about five pages of dialogue is hesitant, evasive, reluctant – and, doubling the frustration, part of it is her recounting a conversation with her brother in which he had been hesitant and evasive.

But since we, the readers, know that the plot boils down to David and his father disobeying oil company policy and drilling for oil in a politically sensitive region, the evasions seem unnecessary, willed and wilful, only there to delay and retard the plot, to inject a factitious sense of intrigue into a situation which is relatively simple.

She paused there… ‘Dedicated to what?’ I asked… but she couldn’t tell me… she gave a slight shrug… she didn’t answer for a moment… she hesitated… She paused, at a loss for words… I asked her what it meant but all she said was… ‘I don’t know,’ she said… she didn’t answer for a while… she shrugged… ‘I don’t know’… She didn’t seem to want to talk about it, for I had to drag it out of her… She admitted it reluctantly… she hesitated.. ‘I can’t explain’… she couldn’t put it into words… ‘He wouldn’t tell me anything’… ‘Now?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know…’ she shook her head… she shrugged… ‘I don’t know…’ (pages 123-130)

Similarly, when Grant meets David, blackened and seared by six weeks hiding out in the desert, you’d have thought he’d be desperate to explin the situation and find out what’s happened in his absence. But the scene is marred by Innes’ characteristic slowness and evasiveness.

His voice faded and once more he was staring out into the void… He didn’t say anything for a long time, sitting there lost in thought… He said it with deep bitterness and afterward was silent for a long time… (pp.233-235)

‘What happened?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing,’ he replied tersely. And after that he sat for a long time without saying a word. (p.251)

If Raymond Chandler is the king of quickfire repartee, Innes is the master of long, slow, slack, evasive and frustratingly inconclusive dialogue. How I wish I had a pound for every time a character shrugs, or hesitates, or says ‘I don’t know’.

Shellfish

There’s a physical concomitant to these evasions which is the tendence of all the characters to perform the same psychological act of turning in on themselves, withdrawing from the conversation, or looking off into the distance. It’s something I noticed a lot in The Land God Gave To Cain and it’s here in spades. This would be fine if there was anything interesting they were pondering or looking at – but they aren’t.

He had withdrawn into his own thoughts. (p.178)

He didn’t say anything. He seemed suddenly to have withdrawn into himself. (p.181)

Colour

On the other hand, Innes is good at local colour. As the plot becomes more Arab, as the westerners get left behind and Grant enters the world of the desert Arabs, the ‘plot’ may be spurious, but the text of the novel really picks up pace and intensity from Innes’ vivid description of Arab clothes and appearances, speech and customs, and the changing face of the vast and terrifying desert.

We travelled all that night without a break. The moon turned the desert to a bleak, bone white, and in the early hours a mist came up and it was cold. By then I was too tired to care where I was going and only the pain of the saddle chafing the inside of my thighs, the ache of unaccustomed muscles, kept me awake. The dawn brought a searing wind that whipped the mist aside and flung a moving cloud of sand in our faces. Lightning flashed in the gloom behind us, but no rain fell – just the wind and the driving sand particles. (p.225)

His prose is clear and functional, isn’t it? Devoid of the class-conscious grammatical correctness of Graham Greene’s prose, it is lucid and easy to read. There are no obstacles to quick comprehension and it is this ease of absorption, it is the speed you can read it at, which compensates, especially in the final section of the novel, for the frustrations of the first half of the plot.

As you put the book down it is the quick vivid descriptions of battle in the desert, along with the gathering sense of danger as Grant gets sucked into the siege on the hill, which ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the earlier human interactions, so that overall I found it a rewarding, memorable and moving book. But I can see why nobody tried to make it into a film. And also why, like so many other Innes books, it is now largely unread.

Hammond Innes’ novels

1937 ~~The Doppelganger~~
1937 ~~Air Disaster~~
1938 ~~Sabotage Broadcast~~
1939 ~~All Roads Lead to Friday~~
1940 The Trojan Horse – Barrister Andrew Kilmartin gets involved with an Austrian Jewish refugee engineer whose discovery of a new lightweight alloy which will make lighter, more powerful aircraft engines leads to him being hunted by an extensive and sinister Nazi network which reaches to the highest places in the land. The book features a nailbiting chase through the sewers of London and a last-minute shootout on the Nazi ship.
1940 Wreckers Must Breathe – Journalist Walter Craig stumbles across a secret Nazi submarine base built into a ruined tin mine on the Cornwall coast and, along with local miners and a tough woman journalist, fights his way out of captivity and defeats the Nazis.
1941 Attack Alarm – Gripping thriller based on Innes’ own experience as a Battle of Britain anti-aircraft gunner. Ex-journalist Barry Hanson uncovers a dastardly plan by Nazi fifth columnists to take over his airfield ahead of the big German invasion.

1946 Dead and Alive – David Cunningham, ex-Navy captain, hooks up with another demobbed naval officer to revamp a ship-wrecked landing craft. But their very first commercial trip to Italy goes disastrously wrong when his colleague, McCrae, offends the local mafia while Cunningham is off tracking down a girl who went missing during the war. A short but atmospheric and compelling thriller.
1947 The Killer Mine Army deserter Jim Pryce discovers dark family secrets at a ruined Cornish mine which is being used as a base by a father-and-son team of smugglers who blackmail him into doing some submarine rock blasting, with catastrophic results.
1947 The Lonely Skier Writer Neil Blair is hired to visit the Dolomite mountains in Italy, supposedly to write a script for film producer Derek Engles, in reality to tip him off when key players in a hunt for Nazi gold arrive at the ski hut in the mountains where – they all think – the missing treasure is buried.
1947 Maddon’s Rock Corporal Jim Vardin, convicted of mutiny at sea and imprisoned in Dartmoor, breaks out to clear his name and seek revenge on the captain and crew who pretended to sink their ship, the Trikkala, but in fact hid it at a remote island in the Arctic circle in order to steal its cargo of silver bullion.
1948 The Blue Ice Mineralogist and industrialist Bill Gansert sails to Norway to discover the truth about the disappearance of George Farnell, a friend of his who knew something about the discovery of a rare metal ore – an investigation which revives complex enmities forged in Norway’s war-time Nazi occupation.
1949 The White South Narrator Duncan Craig becomes mixed up in the disaster of the whaling ship Southern Star, witnessing at first hand the poisonous feuds and disagreements which lead a couple of its small whalecatcher boats to get caught in pack ice, fatally luring the vast factory ship to come to their rescue and also becoming trapped. It then has to evacuate over 400 men, women and children onto the pitiless Antarctic ice where Craig has to lead his strife-torn crew to safety.
1950 The Angry Mountain – Engineering salesman Dick Farrell’s wartime experiences come back to haunt him as he is caught up in a melodramatic yarn about a Czech spy smuggling industrial secrets to the West, with various people from his past pursuing him across Italy towards Naples and Mount Vesuvius, which erupts to form the dramatic climax to the story.
1951 Air Bridge – Bomber pilot fallen on hard times, Neil Fraser, gets mixed up with Bill Saeton and his obsession with building a new type of diesel aero-engine based on a prototype looted from wartime Germany. Saeton is helped by partner Tubby Carter, hindered by Tubby’s sex-mad wife Diana, and spied on by Else, the embittered daughter of the German who originated the designs. The story moves to Germany and the Berlin airlift where Saeton’s obsession crosses the line into betrayal and murder.
1952 Campbell’s Kingdom – Bruce Campbell, given only months to live by his doctors, packs in his boring job in London and emigrates to Canada to fulfil the dream of his eccentric grandfather, to find oil in the barren patch of the Canadian Rockies known as ‘Campbell’s Kingdom’.
1954 The Strange Land – Missionary Philip Latham is forced to conceal the identity of the man who replies to an advert to come and be doctor to a poor community in the south of Morocco. Instead of curing the sick, he finds himself caught up in a quest for an ancient silver mine, a quest which brings disaster to the impoverished community where it is set.
1956 The Wreck of the Mary Deare – Yacht skipper John Sands stumbles across the wreck of the decrepit steamer Mary Deare and into the life of its haggard, obsessive captain, Patch, who is determined to clear his reputation by revealing the owners’ conspiracy to sink his ship and claim the insurance.
1958 The Land God Gave To Cain – Engineer Ian Ferguson responds to a radio plea for help received by his amateur radio enthusiast father, and sets off to the wilds of Labrador, north-east Canada, to see if the survivors of a plane crash in this barren country are still alive – and what lies behind the conspiracy to try and hush the incident up.
1960 The Doomed Oasis – Solicitor George Grant helps young tearaway David Thomas travel to Arabia to find his biological father, the legendary adventurer and oilman Colonel Charles Whitaker, and becomes embroiled in a small Arab war which leads to a siege in an ancient fortress where the rivalry between father and son reaches a tragic conclusion.
1962 Atlantic Fury – Painter Duncan Ross is eyewitness to an appalling naval disaster on an island of the Outer Hebrides. But intertwined with this tragedy is the fraught story of his long-lost brother who has stolen another man’s identity. Both plotlines lead inexorably to the bleak windswept island of Laerg.
1965 The Strode Venturer – Ex-Merchant Navy captain Geoffrey Bailey finds himself drawn into the affairs of the Strode shipping company which aggressively took over his father’s shipping line, thereby ruining his family and driving his father to suicide. Now, 30 years later, he is hired to track down the rogue son of the family, Peter Strode, who has developed an obsession with a new volcanic atoll in the middle of the Indian Ocean, whose mineral wealth might be able to help the Maldive Islanders whose quest for independence he is championing.
1971 Levkas Man – Merchant seaman Paul goes to find his father, eccentric archaeologist Pieter Van der Voort, another typical Innes obsessive, this one convinced he can prove his eccentric and garbled theories about the origin of Man, changing Ice Age sea levels, the destruction of Atlantis and so on. Much sailing around the Aegean, feelingly described by Innes, before the climax in a vast subterranean cavern covered in prehistoric rock paintings, in an atmosphere heavy with timeless evil, where his father admits to being a murderer.
1973 Golden Soak – Alec Falls’ mining business in Cornwall goes bust so he fakes his own death and smuggles himself out to Australia to take up an invitation to visit a rancher’s daughter he’d met in England. He finds himself plunged into the mystery and intrigue which surrounds the struggling Jarra Jarra ranch and its failed mine, Golden Soak, a mystery which leads him on a wild chase out into the desolate hell of the Gibson desert where Alec discovers the truth about the mine and the rumours of a vast hill of copper, and witnesses archetypal tragedies of guilt and expiation, of revenge and parricide.
1974 North Star – One-time political agitator and seaman Michael Randall tries and fails to escape his treacherous past as he finds himself embroiled in a plot to blow up a North Sea oil rig, a plot which is led by the father he thought had died decades earlier.
1977 The Big Footprints – TV director Colin Tait finds himself caught up in the one-man war of grizzled African hunter and legendary bushman Cornelius van Delden against his old friend, Alex Kirby-Smith, who is now leading the Kenyan government’s drive to cull the country’s wildlife, especially its elephants, to feed a starving population and clear the way for farmers and their cattle. It’s all mixed up with Tait’s obsessive quest to find a remote mountain where neolithic man was said to have built the first city in the world.
1980 Solomon’s Seal – Property valuer Roy Slingsby prices the contents of an old farmhouse in the Essex countryside and is intrigued by two albums of stamps from the Solomon Islands. He takes up the offer of a valuing job in Australia and finds himself drawn into the tragic history of the colonial Holland family, whose last surviving son is running machine guns to be used in the coup and bid for independence of Bougainville Island. Though so much of the detail is calm, rational and business-like, the final impression is of an accursed family and a fated ancestral house which burns down at the novel’s climax.
1982 The Black Tide – When his wife dies blowing up an oil tanker which has hit the rocks near their Cornwall home, ex-merchant seaman Trevor Rodin goes searching for the crew he thinks deliberately ran her aground. His search takes him to Lloyds of London, to the Nantes home of the lead suspect and then on to the Persian Gulf, where he discovers several ‘missing’ tankers are in fact being repurposed by terrorists planning to create a devastating environmental disaster somewhere on the coast of Europe. With no money or resources behind him, and nobody believing his far-fetched tale, can Rodin prevent the catastrophe?
1985 The High Stand – When gold millionaire Tom Halliday and his wife Miriam go missing, their staid Sussex solicitor Philip Redfern finds himself drawn to the old gold mine in the Canadian Rockies which is the basis of the Halliday fortune, and discovers that the illegal felling of the timber planted around the mine is being used as a front for a gang of international drug smugglers, with violent consequences.
1988 Medusa – Former smuggler turned respectable ex-pat businessman, Mike Steele, finds his idyllic life on the pretty Mediterranean island of Minorca turning very nasty when he gets mixed up with mercenaries running guns onto the island to support a violent separatist movement and military coup.
1991 Isvik – Wood restorer Peter Kettil gets caught up in a crazy scheme to find an old Victorian frigate allegedly spotted locked in the Antarctic ice by a glaciologist before his death in a flying accident. His partners are the nymphomaniac Latino wife of the dead glaciologist, Iris Sunderby, a bizarre Scottish cripple, Iain Ward, and a mysterious Argentine who may or may not have been involved in atrocities under the military junta.
1993 Target Antarctica Sequel to Isvik. Booted out of the RAF for his maverick behaviour, pilot Michael ‘Ed’ Cruse is hired by Iain Ward, the larger-than-life character at the heart of the previous novel, Isvik, to fly a C-130 Hercules plane off a damaged runway on the Antarctic ice shelf. There are many twists, not least with a beautiful Thai woman who is pursued by the Khmer Rouge (!), before in the last few pages we realise the whole thing is Ward’s scheme to extract diamonds from the shallow seabed, whose existence was discovered by the sole survivor of the frigate found in the previous novel.
1996 Delta Connection An astonishing dog’s dinner of a novel, which starts out reasonably realistically following the adventures of Paul Cartwright, scrap metal consultant, in Romania on the very days that communist ruler Nicolae Ceaușescu is overthrown, before moving on to Pakistan and the Khyber Pass where things develop into a violent thriller, before jettisoning any attempt at realism and turning into a sort of homage to Rider Haggard’s adventure stories for boys as Cruse and his gay, ex-Army mentor, battle their way through blizzards into the idyllic valley of Nirvana, where they meet the secret underground descendants of Vikings who long ago settled this land, before almost immediately participating in the palace coup which overthrows the brutal ruler and puts on the throne the young woman who Paul fell in love with as a boy back in Romania, where the narrative started. A convoluted, compelling and bizarre finale to Innes’ long career.

2 Comments

by Simon on January 26, 2015 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Books, Novel

Tagged 1960, Arabia, Colonel Whitaker, David Thomas, George Grant, Hammond Innes, oil, The Doomed Oasis

Posted by Simon on January 26, 2015

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/the-doomed-oasis-hammond-innes/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Arabia

The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe (1589)

Provenance

Executive summary

The play

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Thoughts

Historical footnote – the Knights of St John and the Turkish threat

Related links

Marlowe’s works

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The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin

Kaiser Wilhelm’s enthusiasm for Islam

German High Command develops an Eastern strategy

Why the Ottoman Empire joined the First World War

The Ottoman Caliph proclaims fatwas against the infidel

Missions and characters

Gallipoli and the Armenian genocide

The symbolism of the Berlin to Baghdad railway

The end of the war

Two big ideas

Summary

Other blog posts about the First World War

Art and music

Books

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The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (2) by Michael Haag (2012)

Haag’s key points

The Seljuk Turks add to the chaos

Muslim destruction of Christian shrines, churches and towns

The Reconquista

Crusades wicked, Reconquista, OK?

The West

The Knights Templar

Saladin

Steven Runciman’s negative interpretation of the crusades

Reflections

The fall of the Templars

Maps

Other medieval reviews

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The Tragedy of the Templars: The Rise and Fall of the Crusader States (1) by Michael Haag (2012)

The Knights Templar

Deep history, revisionist history

Haag presents the entire crusading enterprise in a radically revisionist light

Jerusalem not a Muslim holy city

Saladin not a Muslim hero

Summary of Haag’s argument

The vital role of Constantinople

Other medieval reviews

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The Doomed Oasis by Hammond Innes (1960)

The plot

Why did David fake his own death?

Disaster

Back in court

Innes’ ‘secrets’

Evasions and frustrations

Shellfish

Colour

Related links

Hammond Innes’ novels

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