Year: 2014

Genseric was tight lipped but passionate.  He set himself almost impossible objectives and used every tactic available to him to achieve them.  It is worth bearing in mind right from the start just how unlikely his career was.  The Vandals were not a big tribe and before Genseric they would not have been considered a particularly prominent one.  They had ended up in the empire rather more as refugees than as conquerors.  Even inside the empire they were not exactly the most successful of invaders.  At one point they had been so low on luck that they suffered a famine.  So they were very much the poor relations of the Goths.  At the point they enter our story they were in southern Spain where they were getting on rather badly with the neighbouring tribes.

The reign of Honorius was eventful, but his actual life settled into a fairly sedate business at the centre of his court.  He didn’t travel much or indeed do very much.  His sister on the other hand had as varied a career as any woman in Roman history.  She was taken from Rome when it was sacked and became a Gothic queen.  With the death of her husband, Placidia was finally returned to her brother in exchange for a large stock of grain. But her position made settling down difficult, and her personality made it impossible.  She was forced to marry the successful general Constantius.  Although she objected to it in advance she resigned herself to it once it happened and made the best of it.   They had two children, Valentinian and Honoria. Constantius may have found his wife stoking his ambition, because some years into the marriage he was appointed as co-emperor.  This was unlikely to have been an idea that Honorius came up with.  It was much more plausibly the work behind the scenes of Placidia.  

There are plenty of options to choose from for dating the start of the Byzantine Empire. But if you wanted one that would stand up in court, the reign of Arcadius is a pretty sound bet. The great Theodosius I was the last emperor to rule both halves of the empire unambiguously. He divided his inheritance between his two sons with Arcadius taking the eastern half, and as it turned out that court was to have a more or less continuous history from that point, the year 395, until the final end of the empire.

There are big and weighty matters in the papers at the moment.  Should Scotland leave the United Kingdom?  Should the United Kingdom leave the EU?  Should NATO combat Russia and/or militant Islam?  These are all worthy and important, but in the middle of all this pops up the seaside town of Clacton.  This happens to be the scene of a by-election which might well return the first member of UKIP to the UK parliament.  At the time of writing the UKIP candidate has a strong lead in the polls so it is possible that history is about to be made in Clacton.  But what has history made of Clacton itself?

Every now and again the local civic society in my town raises funds by holding a second hand book sale in the town hall.  It is a gruesome affair, where the thin veneer of civilisation is ripped off and men and women revert to the brutish state of nature.  The doors open at 10.00am, by which time the predators have already gathered.  Darwinian selection ensures that only the fittest and the most aggressive specimens get through the door first.

It is good to be clear about how the world really is, rather than how we would like it to be.  One easy mistake to make is to conflate radical Islam with Islam.  Islam does not have a moderate form and an extreme form.  Indeed, neither do Christianity or Judaism.  All three religions are large social structures with deep roots in history and with a large wealth of inherited experience and tradition.  They are big projects which have evolved to meet the needs of their adherents, and like all human creations they have high points and low points, triumphs and tragedies, heroes and villains.  As a secular atheist I am inclined to be skeptical of the claims of organised religion, but it is what it is and it isn’t entirely bad.  It offers many people a community to belong to, and that is no small thing and not something I would deprive them of.

Britain’s military agreements with France just prior to the First World War were basically a gentleman’s agreement between the Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey and the French military.  It is perhaps understandable that the details were not made public by revealing them to parliament.  It is a bit more surprising that the Cabinet were kept in the dark.  It is even more surprising that the Prime Minister, Asquith, wasn’t in the loop either.

The idea of creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine would have made perfect sense in the nineteenth century.  Nationalism was all the rage.  Everyone wanted to be in a nation.  The British and the French were there already.  The Germans and Italians were working on it.  Nationalism was opposed to hereditary monarchs and their empires and so was in a way a force for progress and revolution.  Why shouldn’t the Jews get in on the act and seek to create their own homeland?   Zionism was really just a logical extension of what was the general spirit of the age.  As to the people who were already there in Palestine, well the rights of natives weren’t really on anyone’s mind at the time.  

The Romans fought three wars against the Carthaginians.  The first two were deadly battles between great empires, but the third was simply a siege.  The Romans found a pretext and used their superior forces to surround Carthage.  The encirclement lasted four years.  The Carthaginians defended themselves for as long as they could. But it was hopeless.  Ultimately with the Romans in control of the land and the sea around the city there was only ever going to be one outcome.  When the Romans finally broke in they killed all the men and sold the women and children into slavery.  The city was destroyed and the ground ploughed up and sprinkled with salt to prevent a settlement of the area again.

The Byzantine court during the reign of the ineffectual Arcadius in the late fourth century was run by two men.  The emperor’s favourite at court was the corrupt and worldly Eutropius who ran the civil administration of the empire largely for his own benefit.  The army was run by the Goth Gainas.