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Pax Romana: peace at the point of a sword
Tom Holland reveals the lethal violence behind Rome's vast empire
Pax Romana brought stability and prosperity to Rome’s vast empire. Yet, argues today’s long read written by historian and broadcaster Tom Holland, behind the dazzling new cities and teeming sea lanes lay the threat of lethal, irresistible violence. HistoryExtra Long Reads brings you the best articles from BBC History Magazine, direct to your ears. Today’s feature originally appeared in the August 2023 issue (you can read it here) and has been voiced in partnership with the RNIB.
Tom Holland on the Roman emperor Trajan: "He is vastly overrated"
Historian Tom Holland considers whether Trajan, who oversaw the Roman empire at its height, was its most accomplished ruler
Please note this is a transcript of an extract from an episode of the HistoryExtra podcast that has been lightly edited for clarity. Listen to the full episode here: Tom Holland on Rome’s golden age Was Trajan Rome's greatest emperor? The Romans called Trajan the optimus princeps (the best of emperors), and that is how he is commemorated, not just by the Romans, but intriguingly right the way into the Christian period. The Christians, when they looked back at Trajan, couldn't bear the thought that this great emperor, because he hadn't been converted to Christianity, might have ended up in hell. And so they came up with all kinds of stories to suggest that perhaps he'd got a pass, uniquely, and had made it into heaven. Read more | The 8 bloodiest Roman emperors in history My personal take is actually that Trajan is vastly overrated. He wins this great victory in Dacia, but he is essentially encouraged by that to aim at conquests that overstretch Roman resources. And he does what has been disastrous to so many subsequent western leaders: he invades Iraq. The only real geopolitical rival that the Romans take seriously on their own borders is the Parthian Empire, which is an Iranian Empire, but rules Mesopotamia, as the Greeks called what we now call Iraq. Trajan decides that he's going to knock this out; he's going to conquer Mesopotamia. He does this – and he reaches the shores of the Persian Gulf, where he sees a ship sailing away. And he asks: “Where is that ship sailing?” And he's told, “Oh, it's off to India.” And he expresses an Alexander the Great-type lament that he can't follow in Alexander's footsteps and conquer India himself. The truth is that even conquering Mesopotamia has overstretched his resources. Trajan essentially dies amid the implosion of those conquests, and it's left to Hadrian, his successor, to clear up the mess. There's a point when Trajan is dying, that not only are his recent conquests in Mesopotamia imploding, but there's a massive Judean revolt – that is kind of general across much of the Mediterranean. There seems to have been massive turbulence in Britain, in Mauritania, across the empire. And I think when Trajan dies, there's a very real chance that the whole fabric of the empire is on the point of implosion. Listen on the podcast | Everything you wanted to know about the Roman emperors I think an emperor has to be judged by his legacy – and I think that actually Trajan's legacy is not nearly what it seems to be. The reason that a veil is cast over that by subsequent historians is that Hadrian does his job very well. Hadrian very discreetly clears up the mess – and because Hadrian is Trajan's heir, Hadrian has no stake in blaming Trajan.
The Pax Romana: how the Romans maintained peace at the point of a sword
The Pax Romana brought stability and prosperity to Rome’s vast empire. Yet, writes Tom Holland, behind the dazzling new cities and teeming sea lanes lay the threat of lethal, irresistible violence
In the early winter of AD 101, Caesar’s emissary arrived in Rome. Hadrian, a young man of only 25, and a relative of the emperor, Trajan, had ridden directly from the field. He bore missives for the senate. Senators, listening to Hadrian report on the great victories won by Roman arms, could feel themselves transplanted to a more distant and heroic age. Trajan, the man who only three years previously had ascended to the rule of Rome, appeared a stirringly old-fashioned figure. The qualities he put on public display – plainness and self-discipline, affability and lack of pretension – were the very markers of an antique hero. View oEmbed on the source website In the Dacians, a martial people of eastern Europe whom he had spent all year breaking to the Roman yoke, Trajan had adversaries who, in a similar manner, appeared conjured up from ancient annals. They were strange and menacing and terrible: men who wielded scythes in battle as though they were cutting corn; who bore standards shaped in the form of dragons; who wrote messages on giant mushrooms. All these were the details reported by Hadrian to the senate. Mood of excitement in Rome As news of Trajan’s dispatches began to percolate out through the city, the Roman people were swept by a mood of excitement such as they had not known for a long while. “For under the rule of sluggish emperors, they seemed to have grown old and enfeebled; but now, under the rule of Trajan, they were stirring themselves afresh, and – contrary to every expectation – renewing their vigour as though their youth had been restored to them.” Rome was a city that had been at peace for almost a century and a half by the time that Trajan became emperor. True, back in AD 69, civil war had briefly flared in the capital’s streets. Four Caesars had ruled in succession. Blood had splashed the Forum. The temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, the holiest in Rome, had gone up in flames. But this sudden eruption of violence had been only a fleeting fever. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/AKG9334059webready-3915466.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A bust of Emperor Trajan. It was under this muscular ruler that the Roman empire reached its greatest territorial extent (Photo by Eric Vandeville/akg-images)" title="A bust of Emperor Trajan. It was under this muscular ruler that the Roman empire reached its greatest territorial extent (Photo by Eric Vandeville/akg-images)" /> The victorious emperor in the civil war, a shrewd and battle-hardened upstart by the name of Vespasian, had briskly restored order to the capital. In the centre of Rome, where the meat market had originally stood, he had commissioned an imposing complex hailed by admiring contemporaries as “a building unrivalled for beauty by any in the world”: a temple to Peace. Vespasian’s aim in commissioning this architectural masterpiece had not been merely to fashion a monument to his own glory – although that had certainly been a motivating factor – but to reassure his fellow citizens that the days of war were truly over. The temple, adorned as it was with paintings and sculptures sourced from across the world, proclaimed an order that was authentically global. Not just Rome but her entire dominion had been healed of its wounds. The peace to which the temple had been dedicated was very specifically a Roman peace: a pax Romana. “Empire without limits” Back in the time of Augustus, the warlord who had presided over the transformation of Rome from a republic to an autocracy, Virgil had described the city’s global rule as an “empire without limits”. The phrase was an exaggeration: even though the Romans had no word for ‘frontier’, everyone knew that there were lands not worth the effort of conquering. What was worth conquering, however, the Romans had conquered. Peace, imposed at the point of a sword, had come to be celebrated even by the vanquished as a gift from the gods. Three decades on from Vespasian’s accession to power, and the tidings of victory brought by Hadrian from distant Dacia served only to confirm the degree to which the collapse of Rome into civil war during the fateful year of the four emperors had been only a temporary spasm. The Roman legions, whose responsibility it was to keep the dominion won by the Roman people secure against the savages who lurked in barbarous darkness, were patently fulfilling their duty. Across the vast span of the empire, which stretched from the Atlantic to Arabia, and from the icy northern seas to the Sahara, the entire world seemed radiant with the brilliance of a golden age. The sinews that joined market to market, city to city, province to province held secure. Everywhere the sea lanes teemed with shipping. Never before had the world been so connected. Trajan, whose ambition it was to build a new port beside the mouth of the Tiber, a vast concrete complex where previously there had been only mud and reeds, aimed to make these connections even more secure. To those who contemplated the Roman empire’s greatness, her sway appeared a wonder and a miracle. “All who had ships at sea grew rich by her wealth.” The capital was not alone in benefiting from the unprecedentedly vast market established by Pax Romana. The transport of food stuffs, raw materials and luxury goods, conducted across vast distances on a scale never witnessed before, had enabled cities everywhere in the empire to flourish. Some – Alexandria, Carthage, Antioch – had grown immense on a scale that would have seemed inconceivable to previous generations; but even the most flyblown settlement might boast a library. Famines, when they happened, were notable less for their severity than for happening at all. Grain, in Trajan’s empire, was just one of the myriad products transported, traded and consumed. The sophisticated framework of laws, the network of agents, the shipping, the harbours, the warehouses, everything that over the course of the previous century had enabled the million and more inhabitants of Rome to be fed, profited millions of others as well. Merchants across the Mediterranean – named by the Romans, proprietorially but accurately, ‘our own’ – treated the great sea as their lake. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/BAL177984webreadyjpg-5af26a9.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A c200 AD depiction of a ship arriving in Ostia. Trajan’s port nearby was designed to turn Rome into the heart of a vast mercantile network (Photo by Alinari/Bridgeman Images)" title="A c200 AD depiction of a ship arriving in Ostia. Trajan’s port nearby was designed to turn Rome into the heart of a vast mercantile network (Photo by Alinari/Bridgeman Images)" /> Businessmen, cities, entire regions: all could afford to specialise. There seemed no limit to what might be shipped: “gold, silver, jewels and pearls, fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet, all kinds of scented wood, all articles of ivory, all articles of costly wood, bronze, iron and marble, cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, frankincense, wine, oil, fine flour and wheat, cattle and sheep, horses and chariots, and slaves.” This list of the commodities transported to Rome, compiled by a Judaean in the province of Asia, was not intended to flatter. The city, within the limits of her empire as well as beyond them, still had her enemies. Rome, to those who hated her and yearned for her downfall, appeared like a monstrous parasite, swollen with blood and gold. Baneful luxuries of the Pax Romana Even Romans, however, even patriots committed to her service, were capable of looking askance at the wealth of the age. The baneful effects of luxury had been a running theme of Roman moralists. One particularly mordant analysis of the Pax Romana, written by a young senator named Tacitus, had begun to circulate in the capital even as Trajan was preparing for his invasion of Dacia. The Agricola, a laudatory biography of Tacitus’s father-in-law, described an estimable record of public service. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/dreamstimel26302052webready-b4ff11e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A sculpture of eminent historian Tacitus, who pondered over the corrosive qualities of Roman refinements (Photo by Sjankauskas/Dreamstime.com)" title="A sculpture of eminent historian Tacitus, who pondered over the corrosive qualities of Roman refinements (Photo by Sjankauskas/Dreamstime.com)" /> Agricola was portrayed in it as a citizen authentically worthy of the noblest traditions of his city: a man who, during his lengthy term as governor of Britain, had proven himself in both war and peace, defeating the savage inhabitants of the island’s northernmost reaches in open battle, while also doing what he could to redeem the natives from their barbarism. Yet Tacitus, deeply though he admired his father-in-law, could not help but wonder whether Agricola might, in truth, have done the provincials under his stewardship more harm than good. Perhaps, by introducing to the savage Britons all the various refinements of Roman life – baths, fine dining, swanky architecture – he had served to debase them exactly as the Romans themselves had been debased. “For what in their naivety the Britons termed ‘civilisation’ was in reality a mark of their enslavement.” On the podcast | Miles Russell answers the big questions about the four centuries of Roman rule in Britain The fruits of conquest for the Roman people had been manifold: glory, power, wealth. But what if the fruits of these in turn had been servitude and decadence? The question was one that Tacitus continued to brood upon. In the early years of Trajan’s rule, he had looked to the vast expanses of Germany, where there were none of the luxuries that had so corrupted and softened the Roman people, and dreaded the worst. For two centuries and more the Germans had preserved their freedom against the full might of the legions. The Caesars, who initially had sought to subdue them, had abandoned the attempt. Limits had been set on the advance of Roman arms. The victories claimed by recent emperors, so Tacitus noted sourly, were “little more than excuses for celebrating triumphs”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/AKG140778webready-b8f5985.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A Roman soldier rides over a barbarian. Victory over the Dacians convinced even Rome’s harshest critics that the empire had relocated its inner steel (Photo by akg-images/Erich Lessing)" title="A Roman soldier rides over a barbarian. Victory over the Dacians convinced even Rome’s harshest critics that the empire had relocated its inner steel (Photo by akg-images/Erich Lessing)" /> Yet even as Tacitus lamented the softening effects of luxury, the news brought to the capital by Hadrian suggested that Rome’s ancient quality of martial valour might not, after all, be completely dead. Was it possible that at last, under a bold and puissant emperor, she might be ready to resume her career of conquest, and fulfil the destiny ordained for her by the gods? Trajan’s record in Dacia offered even an instinctive pessimist like Tacitus the chance to hope for the best: to dream that Rome might simultaneously rule as mistress of the world and yet be true to her most venerable traditions. Defeat of the Dacians Dramatic dispatches continued to be brought to the senate. Trajan was anxious to make the detail come alive. Scene after scene was painted in vivid colours. The emperor crossing the Danube in AD 102 and carrying all before him. Lost standards recaptured. Great rivers bridged. Finally, by the spring of 106, Trajan was ready to close in for the kill. Slowly, painstakingly, remorselessly, he advanced into the depths of Dacia. Every last stronghold he captured; every last bushfire of resistance stamped out. Then the coup de grâce. The Dacian king, who had fled into the remotest fastnesses of his kingdom, was cornered by a squad of Roman cavalry. Rather than be taken prisoner to grace his conqueror’s triumph, he killed himself. His severed head, delivered to Trajan, was sent onwards to Rome, there – before the gaze of the assembled people in the Forum – to be flung onto the steps that led up the side of the Capitoline Hill. Meanwhile, down in the senate house, Caesar’s dispatches had been delivered to the senators. They were read out, as they had been five years previously, by Hadrian. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/AKG317453webready-c39a263.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Trajan’s Column shows a Roman soldier carrying the head of a Dacian in his teeth. Following victory, the Dacian king’s severed head was delivered to Trajan in Rome (Photo by akg-images)" title="Trajan’s Column shows a Roman soldier carrying the head of a Dacian in his teeth. Following victory, the Dacian king’s severed head was delivered to Trajan in Rome (Photo by akg-images)" /> Not since Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul had there been a feat of arms quite so glorious, so gore-sodden, so lucrative. Hadrian, who had commanded a legion during the final stages of the war, had witnessed for himself the full scale of his cousin’s accomplishment. No one could conceivably accuse Trajan of being soft. Model of discipline and modesty that he was, he had no patience with luxury. Yet Trajan, on his return to Rome from Dacia, demonstrated himself to be a builder in a long line of builders, a showman in a long line of showmen. When, flush with his Dacian loot, he commissioned a new forum appropriate to the full massive scale of his victory, the complex ended up larger in area than those built by previous emperors combined. Libraries were counterpointed with statues; shopping centres with friezes and arches, and triumphal columns. So monumental was Trajan’s forum, so overwhelming in its impact, that it set the seal on a programme of building begun more than a century before: the transformation of the city centre from an expanse of brick into one of marble. Augustus had embarked on the programme, and his successors had refined it; but it was Trajan, that stern and rugged captain of the legions, who brought it to its ultimate fruition. Surrounding his forum there rose a wall as high as it was blank. Beyond it, amid smoke and clamour, the contents of chamber pots continued to be flung from attic windows, and gangs of public slaves to farm excrement from cisterns, and the victims of muggers to lie bleeding in squalid side-alleys, and beggars to sit in huddled clusters beside bridges, and miasmas to rise and creep from the Tiber. But Rome, for all its horrors, was like nowhere in the world, nor like anywhere that had ever been. “The Romans always win” Trajan, that best of emperors, had met the challenge set him by the gods: of ensuring that the Roman people had a capital at last that was truly worthy of their greatness. Peace was nothing without an aptitude for war. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2023/07/GettyImages-182127151webready-83c101e.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A bronze portrait of Emperor Trajan, who realised that the Pax Romana was meaningless if the Romans weren’t proficient at war (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)" title="A bronze portrait of Emperor Trajan, who realised that the Pax Romana was meaningless if the Romans weren’t proficient at war (Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images)" /> That Hadrian, when in due course he succeeded Trajan to the rule of the world, opted for retrenchment rather than continued expansion, and a consolidation of the empire’s frontiers rather than ventures beyond them, did not mean that he ever doubted this. Wintering “amid German snows”, he drilled the legions there as though a great war with the barbarians might be brewing. The excellence of his soldiers’ discipline served to signal to Roman and barbarian alike that the proficiency of the legions was as formidable as it had ever been: lethal, irresistible, terrifying. The truest show of contempt that Hadrian could display towards Rome’s enemies was not to launch punitive expeditions against them, but to scorn to conquer them. What concern was it to the lord of a spreading garden, after all, that outside its walls, squatting in filth and scratching at their sores, there might lie beggars, envious of the fountains, the fruit trees, the flower beds from which they were barred? This was why, when soldiers in remote provinces from the capital marked out the limits of Roman rule with timber, or turf, or stone, the existence of such fortifications in no way implied any diminishment in their martial ardour. Quite the opposite. Universal though the Pax Romana reigned under Hadrian and his successors, no one ever doubted what it was founded upon. Peace was the fruit of victory – eternal victory. It was a soldier in the wilds beyond Palestine, scratching on a rock face, who put it best, perhaps. “The Romans always win.” This article was first published in the August 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine
Son of Edward the Elder and grandson of Alfred the Great, Æthelstan (or Athelstan) was the first West Saxon king to effectively rule over the whole of England, with the whole of Britain coming to acknowledge him as overlord during the course of his reign. Historian Tom Holland describes how the brilliant Anglo-Saxon king managed to forge a new country
Early in the 12th century, a tomb in the abbey of Malmesbury was briefly opened. A monk named William took the chance to inspect the skeleton that lay inside it. The dead man, so he reported, had been of average height and slender build. Not everything in the coffin, though, was bones. Traces of hair were still to be seen – and these too the monk studied attentively. “It had been,” so he recorded later, “blonde in colour, and beautifully twisted into golden braids.” William of Malmesbury had good reason to take an interest in such details. Sent to the abbey as a child, he had grown up with a justifiable pride in its history. More than anyone, he appreciated the significance of the man whose braided hair he had so carefully noted. Æthelstan, a king who over the course of his reign had brought the whole of Britain to acknowledge him as overlord, had been laid to rest in Malmesbury some two centuries before, in AD 939. During his lifetime, he had been a formidably generous patron of the abbey. Of all the many shrines to which he had been devoted, “he had honoured none as more holy than Malmesbury”. It was thanks to his generosity that it could boast a particularly awesome relic: a fragment of the True Cross. The monks’ devotion to their long-dead patron was only to be expected. View Green Video on the source website William’s horizons, though, were far from bound by the limits of his monastery. Fascinated by the past since a child, it was his ambition to write a comprehensive history of England. That one of his parents was actually a Norman did not in any way inhibit him from declaring his motivation to be “love of my country”. The sheer antiquity of the English state, far from being despised by its conquerors, tended instead to be both prized and respected by them – for it added lustre to their rule. A Norman anointed as ‘King of the English’, no matter that his native tongue was French, ruled as the heir of those same kings who had first, long before the slaughter at Hastings, fashioned England and brought it into being. Æthelstan is a major figure in Netflix film Seven Kings Must Die, the final chapter of The Last Kingdom series, which explores the formation of England through lens of conflicted her Uhtred of Bebbanburg. Discover the real history behind the film: Seven Kings Must Die: how close to real history is it? Seven Kings Must Die ending explained: who are the seven kings? The Last Kingdom: what's the real history and how historically accurate is it? The real Uhtred of Bebbanburg: the historical inspirations for The Last Kingdom’s hero Bernard Cornwell on The Last Kingdom’s finale William, whose sophistication as a historian was profound, was in no doubt as to the scale of what they had achieved. It was not only their victories in war that had laid the foundations of the English state but their concern for justice and their sponsorship of learning. Generous a patron of Malmesbury though Æthelstan had been, there were reasons far more telling why William should portray him as the greatest of England’s kings. “The opinion of the English that he governed them with a greater concern for law and for education than anyone else in their history is a valid one.” By the time that William wrote this, ‘Englalonde’ had been a term in common use for a century, and its lineaments as a kingdom had come to be taken widely for granted. It was evident as well that the roots of this precociously unitary state, with its single currency, its common language and its intimidating monarchy, reached back in turn a further century – and that the first man who could legitimately be reckoned its king was Æthelstan. “Through God’s grace he ruled all of England alone which before him many kings held among themselves.” Read more | If King Alfred was great, was Æthelstan even greater? The achievement, though, had not been his alone. The kingdom of the English had been fashioned over the course of three generations and in the teeth of a desperate struggle for survival against the Vikings. Over the course of the ninth century, a succession of English-speaking kingdoms had been first stripped bare and then dismembered: Northumbria, East Anglia, the Midlands realm of Mercia. Only one realm had held out: Wessex. Then, in the winter of AD 878, its king, Alfred the Great, had been ambushed and sent fleeing into a marsh. The entire future of the English as an independent people had been left hanging by a thread. Alfred, though, had re-emerged from the marshes, defeated the Vikings and succeeded in stabilising the frontiers of his kingdom. When he died in 899, both Wessex and the western half of Mercia were securely under his rule. Further conquests were to follow. Edward, Alfred’s eldest son and heir as king, had arrived at a momentous conclusion: that ultimately, faced by enemies as predatory and opportunistic as the Vikings, it was only by forcing all of them to submit permanently that Wessex and Mercia would ever be able to enjoy true security. Accordingly, he dug for victory. A great line of fortresses was erected along his frontier with Viking territory In constructing these ‘burhs’, Edward was helped by a remarkable woman: his sister, Æthelflæd. Devout, learned and martial in her ambitions, she had been married by Alfred to the most powerful man in Mercia and then, after his death in 911, accepted by the Mercians as their ruler. In 917, brother and sister moved in for the kill. As Edward annexed Viking-held East Anglia, so Æthelflæd received the surrender of Derby and Leicester (the latter in 918). By the time she died, on 12 June 918, everywhere south of the Humber had effectively come under Edward’s rule. The launchpad had been built for what would prove, the following decade, to be the final and decisive stage in the fashioning of England: the conquest of Northumbria. Read more | How England rode the Viking storm This was secured in AD 927. Æthelstan, Edward’s eldest son and Æthelflæd’s ward for much of his youth, had been on the throne since 924. He had been crowned as king of both the Saxons of Wessex and the Anglians of Mercia – as king of the Anglo-Saxons. Then, two years later, he marched on the Viking-held city of York and made it his own. Princes in the lands beyond the city, intimidated by the scope of his power, scrabbled to acknowledge his authority. Never before had the grasp of a southern king reached so far. Wessex, Mercia and now Northumbria: all the peoples who spoke the conqueror’s own language, the whole way to the Firth of Forth, acknowledged Æthelstan as their lord. In mark of this, he adopted a fateful new title, that of ‘Rex Anglorum’: ‘King of the English’. Æthelstan’s horizons, though, were wider still. His ambitions were not content with the rule of the English alone. He aspired to be acknowledged as lord of the entire island: by the inhabitants of the various kingdoms of the Welsh; and by the Welsh-speaking Cumbrians of Strathclyde, whose king, Owain, held sway from the Clyde down to Hadrian’s Wall; and by the Scots, who lived beyond the Forth in the Highland realm of Alba. All had duly been obliged to bow their necks to him. In May 934, when Constantin, king of Scotland, briefly attempted defiance, Æthelstan led an army deep into Alba and put its heartlands to the torch. Constantin was quickly brought to heel. Humbly he acknowledged the invader as his overlord. When poets and chroniclers hailed Æthelstan as ‘rex totius Britanniae’ – ‘the king of the whole of Britain’ – they were not indulging in idle flattery but simply stating fact. Why Æthelstan was more than a warrior Conquest was not the limit of Æthelstan’s feats. The greatest warrior of the age did not scorn to moderate martial prowess with compassion. Like his grandfather, Alfred, whose own law code had been prefaced with praise for “the mercy taught by Christ”, Æthelstan believed himself bound to legislate in a way that ranked as authentically Christian. The obligation on him to maintain the order of his kingdom and ensure the security of his subjects did not prevent him from fretting at the human cost. It was the law in Wessex that even a child as young as 10 might be condemned for theft. Yet Æthelstan, in spelling out the details of what precisely was to constitute a capital offence, made sure to spare from execution all those under the age of 13. Nevertheless, Æthelstan’s conscience remained troubled. Even as he attempted to stamp out theft and robbery, legislating against them to an almost obsessive degree, anxiety that he might be betrayed by his own laws into savagery still gnawed at him. Lengthy consultations with his counsellors and his bishops duly persuaded him to ameliorate their strictness. “The king thinks it cruel to have such young people put to death, and for such minor offences, as he has learnt is the common practice elsewhere. Therefore, it is the stated opinion both of the king and of those with whom he has discussed the matter that no one should be put to death who is under 15 years of age.” Clemency such as this was the reverse side of the ferocity with which Æthelstan punished betrayals of his lordship. A Christian king was nothing, in his opinion, if he did not combine greatness with care for the vulnerable. In 932, on Christmas Eve, he duly marked the birth of his Saviour in a stable by issuing a charter that imposed a legal obligation upon its recipient to care for the poor. Æthelstan’s determination that no one living on his own lands be permitted to starve saw him issue a particularly prescriptive ordinance. The officials responsible for his estates were warned by their master that fines would be levied on those who failed in their duty to the needy and the proceeds donated to charity. “My wish it is that you should always provide the destitute with food.” But in the north trouble was brewing. Constantin, determined still to shake off the yoke of Æthelstan’s overlordship, despite his grudging submission in 934; Owain, fearful of what the greatness of the emergent English kingdom on his doorstep might mean for his own much smaller realm; the Vikings, unreconciled to their loss of York: Æthelstan had underestimated them all. By AD 937, their alliance was out in the open. Æthelstan's greatest victory Two centuries later, William of Malmesbury would report that the realisation of his blindness had numbed Æthelstan. Brought the news of the powers ranged against him, he had acted at first as though frozen by the sheer horror of it. As harvests in the north of his kingdom were put to the torch and peasants fled before the onslaught, so the rex totius Britanniae had seemed to shrink from acting. “But at length the cries of complaint stirred the king. He knew it insufferable to be branded with the shame of having submitted meekly to barbarian arms.” And so, with the weariness of a man who had believed his life’s great labour of construction completed, only to find it threatened with utter ruin, he readied himself to fight for the survival of England. “Æðelstan cyning lædde fyrde to Brunanbyrig”: “Æthelstan the king led the levy to Brunanburh.” His victory there was bloody and terrible and would long be enshrined as the most glorious that anyone could remember. It was called the ‘Great War’. Two years later, though, exhausted perhaps by the sheer scale of his labours, Æthelstan was dead, and the Vikings – taking their chance – returned to York. His two brothers, Edmund and Eadred, who succeeded the great king in turn, found it a desperate struggle to reclaim his legacy. Only after several decades of ebb and flow was the integrity of the new kingdom of ‘Englalonde’ enduringly established. In time, it came to seem as though it had always been. Two hundred years on, by the time that William of Malmesbury sat down to write his history, the existence of England appeared the natural state of affairs. Memories had faded of the seismic character of Æthelstan’s reign and of just how momentous its effect had been upon the political configuration of the entire island. Despite William’s own best efforts, Æthelstan’s personal renown began to fade. Today, nothing better illustrates the oblivion that has largely claimed his reputation than the fact that the very site of Brunanburh, his greatest victory, has slipped from memory. The king who founded England has largely been forgotten even by the English. What is Æthelstan's legacy? Yet though the site of Brunanburh may be unrecoverable, the implications of what was forged by Æthelstan and his dynasty more than a millennium ago have lately come to possess a renewed saliency. As the bonds weaken that for the past 300 years have joined England and Scotland in a united kingdom, so inevitably have the English as well as the Scots begun to ponder what defines them as a nation. That a union as long-lasting as that of Great Britain might fray can hardly help but serve as a reminder that the joining of different peoples in a shared sense of identity is not something easily achieved and maintained. Perhaps we can see now, in a way that we could not even a few decades ago, just how astonishing the creation of ‘Englalonde’ actually was. The story of how, over the course of three generations, the royal dynasty of Wessex went from near-oblivion to fashioning a kingdom that still endures today is the most remarkable and momentous in British history. That Æthelstan, let alone Edward and Ætheflæd, are shadowy figures, with inner lives that are as unknowable to us as the site of Brunanburh, does not render their accomplishments any less astonishing. They and Alfred richly merit being commemorated as England’s founding fathers – or, of course, in Æthelflæd’s case, as England’s founding mother. Read more | What did the Anglo-Saxons ever do for us? Some two and a half decades after the death of Æthelstan, a bishop named Æthelwold, surveying “the whole dominion of England”, hailed its existence as a miracle “obtained by God’s grace”. Yet Æthelwold, who had served as one of Æthelstan’s closest advisers before becoming a priest, knew full well that the united kingdom of the English had been obtained by human agency as well as by divine providence. Even as he expressed his astonishment that it should be marked by such prosperity and peace, Æthelwold did not hesitate to give credit to the kings who had wrought so much in the teeth of such terrible odds: “Mature in age and very prudent, and farseeing in wisdom, and hard to overcome in any strife.” Such praise, coming from a man who had grown up by Æthelstan’s side, carries rare conviction. Bishop Æthelwold spoke for all those who, enjoying the order brought to lands that only decades before had been scenes of carnage and devastation, felt due gratitude for what had been achieved by Alfred and his heirs. He, close enough in time to Æthelstan’s reign to have been the great king’s protégé, understood the full scale of his debt. We, at a millennium’s remove, could perhaps remember it better. This article was first published in the July 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine
15 minutes of fame | Tom Holland chooses Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás
As part of our series exploring lost or lesser-known figures from history who deserve their 15 minutes of fame, Rob Attar interviews Tom Holland about the life of Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás
Who was Franz Nopcsa von Felső-Szilvás? Baron Franz Nopsca von Felső-Szilvás was a Hungarian nobleman of Transylvania descent who lived through the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond. He came from an aristocratic background, but is largely remembered for his role in palaeontology, explains historian Tom Holland. Nopsca was instrumental in developing ground-breaking research into European dinosaurs and evolution. This was not all he was famous for though, Holland explains. He also became an expert on Albania, during a time when Albania was still “rather a land of mystery”. Franz Nopcsa’s life Nopsca’s interest in palaeontology was sparked by a discovery made by his sister, Holland explains. When he was 18 years old, his sister Ilona showed him some bones she had found, and he worked out they were fossils. This discovery intrigued him so much, says Holland, that he enrolled in a palaeontology course at the University of Vienna. Incredibly, within just a year of study, he had published a study on dwarfish dinosaurs. Following his studies, he continued to make key palaeontological discoveries – including the idea that the Balkans had once been an archipelago of small islands, which would have had a significant influence on the way dinosaurs had evolved. Aside from his professional achievements, Nopsca had a remarkable life that is perhaps stranger than fiction. During an exploration of Albania in 1906, Nopsca met and fell in love with a shepherd named Bajazid Elmaz Doda, with whom he would spend the rest of his life. The following year, Nopsca was kidnapped by a bandit and had to concoct a convoluted plan to escape his captor. Even more interestingly, says Holland, in 1913 Nopsca proposed to the Austro-Hungarian authorities that he should be king of Albania. The start of the First World War put an end to these plans, and also marked a deterioration in Nopsca’s life. Though his revolutionary study of dinosaurs was published in 1914 – a key moment in his life, says Holland – the war was detrimental to Nopsca. He continued to serve in Albania and worked as a spy in Transylvania (which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) throughout the war. But the conflict’s end brought bad news for Nopsca, as Transylvania was ceded to Romania, leading to the loss of his castle and being run out of his hometown by ex-serfs who had worked his land. As a result, Nopsca became quite impoverished. However, says Holland, the difficulties did not stop there though. During the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919, Nopsca was trapped, and in a spectacular turn of events, he became the first person to ever hijack an aeroplane, as his means of escape. After all these difficulties during and after the war, Nopsca was appointed to run the Hungarian Geological Institute in Budapest. But as Holland explains, this desk job was “too boring for Nopsca”, and so he set off on a motorbike tour with his lover Bajazid. Running into financial difficulties, he funded his tour by selling his priceless collection of dinosaurs to the Natural History Museum, where they remain to this day. This motorbike tour ended tragically in 1933, when Nopsca, who was suffering from depression and potential bipolar disorder, succumbed to these mental illnesses. After drugging Bajazid, shot both his companion and himself in a brutal murder-suicide. Why does he deserve his 15 minutes of fame? Franz Nopsca von Felső-Szilvás deserves his fifteen minutes of fame, says Tom Holland, because he was an extraordinary character. He was a talented and influential palaeontologist, who aspired to be king of Albania, and was also the first person to hijack an aeroplane. “He’s just the most dramatically entertaining and flamboyant figure imaginable,” says Holland. “I can’t imagine anyone having led a more dramatic or eye-popping life”. Tom Holland is a historian, author and broadcaster who has written numerous books on the ancient and medieval eras. He is also co-host, with Dominic Sandbrook, of The Rest is History podcast You can listen to the full interview and find more episodes in our 15 minutes of fame podcast series Article compiled by Isabel King
15 minutes of fame: Franz Nopcsa, Hungarian adventurer and palaeontologist
Tom Holland discusses the remarkable and somewhat unexpected life of adventurer, aristocrat and palaeontologist Franza Nopcsa
It’s the HistoryExtra podcast’s 15th birthday! To celebrate, we’ve asked 15 historians to nominate a figure from history they think deserves their ‘15 minutes of fame’. In this episode, Tom Holland nominates Franz Nopcsa. Speaking with Rob Attar, he recounts the story of the early 20th-century Hungarian palaeontologist, adventurer and specialist in Albanian studies. Browse more episodes about figures from history who deserve 15 minutes of fame
Tom Holland on Christianity’s enduring legacy
Tom Holland discusses his new book Dominion, which argues that Christianity has had a transformative and enduring impact on the western mindset
Historian and author Tom Holland discusses his new book Dominion, which explores the history of Christianity and argues that it has had a transformative and enduring impact on the western mindset. When did Christianity first arrive in Britain? What is the oldest church in England?
Christ’s communists: the radical religious sect that challenged the Holy Roman Empire
Six centuries ago in Bohemia, a dissenter army led by a one-eyed warrior waged war on the Holy Roman Empire. Tom Holland tells the story of the Taborites, whose creed was to reject money, property… and the Antichrist
There had never been anywhere quite like it. The castle, perched on a spit of rock above the Lužnice river, had been abandoned decades before, and the blackened ruins of the settlement that had once surrounded it were choked by weeds. The rubble had to be cleared, and a new town built from scratch. There was an urgent need of fortifications. The nights were bitterly cold. Yet still the refugees came. All through March 1420, they made the trek, drawn from every class of society, from every corner of Bohemia (a kingdom that’s now part of the Czech Republic). By the end of the month, camped out amid tents and half-built perimeter walls, there were women with their children, in flight from burning villages; tavern-keepers from Prague and peasants armed with flails; knights, clerics, labourers and vagrants. All shared in the common danger – and all shared a common status. Every man was called brother, and every woman sister. There were no hierarchies, no wages, no taxes. New arrivals were obliged to hand over their possessions, which were shared out according to need. Private property was illegal. All debts were forgiven. The poor, it seemed, had inherited the earth. Everything you need to know about the Holy Roman Empire The legacy of Charlemagne: how the king of the Franks continues to cast a shadow over Europe The town, the first ever to be founded on quasi-communist principles, was called Tabor by its inhabitants. The name broadcast a defiant message to its enemies. In the Bible, it was recorded that Jesus had climbed a mountain to pray. “And as he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.” The site of this miracle had long been identified by scholars with a mountain in Galilee: Tabor. The radiance of the divine had suffused its summit, and heaven had been joined with earth. Now it was happening again. As lords laboured alongside peasants, toiling to provide Tabor with an impregnable screen of fortifications, they were not just constructing a stronghold, but aiming to set the entire world on fresh foundations. For centuries, the immense edifice of the Catholic church, too, had stood as a monument to this ambition. It had been raised in defiance of earthly monarchs, and fashioned to serve the needs of all the Christian people. But now the lava of its radicalism had begun to calcify; the papal order had become the status quo. Nothing, perhaps, was more debilitating to the claims of the Roman church to be the bride of Christ than one enduring abomination: a papal schism. Back in 1378, two rival popes had been elected. The schism proved impossible to heal. In 1409, a council of bishops and university masters, meeting in Pisa, declared both rival popes deposed, and crowned a new candidate – but this, far from delivering Christendom a single pope, had merely left it stuck with three. Small wonder, confronted by such a scandal, that a few bold souls, pushing at the very limits of what it was acceptable to think, began to contemplate a nightmarish possibility: that the papacy, far from holding the keys to the gates of heaven, might in truth be an agent of hell. Seduced by earthly glory It was in Prague that these sparks of subversion had ignited the most explosive reaction. The city had long been a tinder box. The Bohemian nobility chafed at being subject to Holy Roman Emperors who hailed from Germany. Czech-speaking scholars at the university, similarly disadvantaged, nurtured their own mood of resentment. Meanwhile, out in the slums, the resentment was of the rich. The most popular preachers were those who condemned the wealth of monasteries adorned with gold and sumptuous fittings, and demanded a return to the stern simplicity of the early days of the church. The Christian people, they warned, had taken a desperately wrong turn. The papacy, seduced by the temptations of earthly glory, had forgotten that the gospels spoke most loudly to the poor, to the humble, to the suffering. Only the Antichrist could have wrought such a fateful, such a hellish abomination. So it was, in the streets of Prague, that it had become a common thing to paint the pope wearing the papal crown, but with the feet of a monstrous bird of prey. One man more than any other served as a lightning rod for the gathering storm. In 1414, when church leaders from across Christendom met in the imperial city of Constance, on the edge of the Swiss Alps, their agenda was peculiarly demanding. As well as the running sore of the papal schism, a second challenge confronted them: the defiant heresy of Prague’s most celebrated preacher. Jan Hus, a scholar of immense charisma, intellectual brilliance and personal integrity, had emerged from the rarefied confines of the city’s university to become the toast of Bohemia. Denouncing both Prague’s church hierarchy and the German-speaking elites who had long been profiting from imperial favour, he helped to bring an already febrile mood to boiling point. The more rapturously his teachings were greeted, the more radical they became. Hus openly scorned the claim of the papacy to a primacy sanctioned by God. It was not only in papal circles that this prompted panic. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/09/AKG351115-cf22a3d.jpg" width="4961" height="3520" alt="The Taborites employed rings of armoured wagons to defend themselves against cavalry attacks, as this c1450 book illustration shows. (Image by AKG Images)" title="The Taborites employed rings of armoured wagons to defend themselves against cavalry attacks, as this c1450 book illustration shows. (Image by AKG Images)" /> Particularly alarmed was Sigismund, a ginger-haired veteran of war against the Turks, and a prince of the royal blood, who in 1411 had been proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor-elect. Desperate to secure a compromise that all the various factions in Bohemia could accept, he invited Hus to travel to Constance, and to negotiate directly with the delegates to the council. Hus accepted the invitation. Leaving the castle in Bohemia where he had been sheltering from papal agents, Hus travelled under a safe conduct personally guaranteed by Sigismund. On 3 November 1414, he arrived in Constance. Three weeks later, he was arrested. Put on trial, Hus refused to recant. Sentenced to death as a heretic, he was burned at the stake in July 1415. Festering resentments “The time of greatest suffering, prophesied by Christ in his scriptures, the apostles in their letters, the prophets, and Saint John in the Apocalypse, is now at hand; it has begun; it stands at the gates!” wrote one polemicist in 1420. Five years on from the burning of Hus, the Taborites gathered in their rocky stronghold confident that they would soon be seeing him again – and all the risen saints of God. Far from extinguishing the flames of subversion, the Council of Constance had served only to stoke them further. Not even the council’s success in once again installing a single pope on the throne of Saint Peter had been able to redeem its reputation in Bohemia. In the wake of the execution of Hus, denunciations of the papacy as the Antichrist began to be made openly across Prague. Of Sigismund as well – for it was presumed that it was as a result of his treachery that Hus had been delivered up to the flames. Then, in 1419, an attempted crackdown by conservatives precipitated revolt. Hussites, named for the executed preacher, stormed the city hall, flung their opponents out of its windows, and seized control of churches across Prague. It was out on the mountains, though, that the true revolution was coming to a head. There, when the faithful assembled in flight from their homes, it was in the conviction that Prague was Babylon, an evil and debauched city. Nowhere was this more evident than behind the rising walls of Tabor. Labouring in the mud, mixing mortar, hauling stone, those who had flocked there knew what was approaching. Christ was destined to return within months. All sinners would perish. The reign of the saints would begin. “Only God’s elect were to remain on earth – those who had fled to the mountains.” The Taborites were hardly the first Christians to believe themselves living in the shadow of Apocalypse. The novelty lay rather in the scale of the crisis that had prompted their imaginings: one in which all the traditional underpinnings of society, all the established frameworks of authority, appeared fatally compromised. Confronted by a church that was the swollen body of the Antichrist, and an emperor guilty of blatant treachery, the Taborites pledged themselves to revolution. It was not enough, though, merely to return to the ideals of the early church: to live equally as brothers and sisters, to share everything in common. The filth of the world beyond Tabor, where those who had chosen not to flee to the mountains still wallowed in corruption, had to be swept away. It was not only emperors and popes whom the Taborites aspired to eliminate. All those who had scorned to redeem themselves from the fallen world were sinners. “Each of the faithful ought to wash his hands in the blood of Christ’s foes,” wrote one chronicler. Many Hussites, confronted by this brutal refusal to turn the other cheek, were appalled. “Heresy and tyrannical cruelty,” one of them termed it. The summer of 1420, though, was no time for the moderates to stand on their principles. The peril was too great. In May, at the head of a great army of crusaders summoned from across Christendom, Sigismund advanced on Hussite Prague. The Taborites, leaving behind only a skeleton garrison, marched to the city’s relief. At their head rode a general of genius: Jan Žižka, one-eyed and 44 years old. That July, looking to break the besiegers’ attempt to starve Prague into submission, he launched a surprise attack on the crusaders so devastating that Sigismund had no choice but to withdraw. 6 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Ottoman Empire The 1618 Defenestration of Prague explained Blinded by success Further victories quickly followed. Žižka proved irresistible. Not even the loss in 1421 of his one good eye to an arrow served to handicap him. Innovative and brutal in equal measure, Žižka was the living embodiment of the Taborite revolution. Noblemen on their armoured chargers he met with rings of armoured wagons, hauled from muddy farmyards and manned by peasants equipped with early hand-held firearms; monks he would order burned at the stake, or else personally club to death. Never once did the general meet with defeat. By 1424, when he finally fell sick and died, all of Bohemia was under Taborite rule. On his sickbed, so his enemies reported, Žižka had ordered the Taborites to flay his corpse, feed his flesh to carrion beasts, and fashion a drum out of his skin. “Then, with this drum in the lead, they should go to war. Their enemies would turn to flight as soon as they heard its voice.” The anecdote was tribute both to Žižka’s fearsome reputation, and to the continuing success of his followers on the battlefield after his death. Yet in truth, the Taborite drum had begun to sound a muffled beat even while Žižka was alive. In the summer of 1420, in the wake of the great victory over Sigismund, it was still possible for the Taborites to believe that Christ’s return was imminent. Readying Prague for this arrival, they systematically targeted symbols of privilege. Monasteries were levelled; the bushy moustaches much favoured by the Bohemian elite forcibly shaved off; the bones of a recently deceased king dug up, and crowned with straw. As the months and then the years passed, though, and still Christ failed to appear, so the radicalism of the Taborites began to fade. They elected a bishop; negotiated to secure a king; charged the most extreme in their ranks with heresy, and expelled them from Tabor. Well before the abrupt and crushing defeat of the Taborites by a force of more moderate Hussites in 1434, the fire in their movement had been guttering. Christ had not returned. The world had not been purged of kings. Tabor had not, after all, been crowned the New Jerusalem. In 1436, when Hussite ambassadors, achieving a startling first for a supposedly heretical sect, negotiated a concordat directly with the papacy, the Taborites had little choice but to accept it. Yet even though the fall of Tabor itself in 1452 signalled the final extinction of their movement, the yearnings that had inspired them lived on. The Taborites were certainly not the last to call for the poor to inherit the earth. Three and a half centuries after the Taborites had mockingly crowned the skull of a king with straw, French revolutionaries consigned the corpse of another king, Louis XVI, to a pauper’s grave in Paris. “Woe to you who are rich.” Christ’s words might almost have been the manifesto as well of those who, in 1917, overthrew the Russian government and laboured to establish a paradise on earth. Marxists, just as the Taborites had done, believed that history was proceeding on an implacable course, and that the hour of salvation was at hand. Contemptuous of religion though Jacobins and Bolsheviks might have been, they were ultimately no less Christian in their inspiration for all that. The spirit of Tabor, long extinguished though it might appear to have been, was in truth very far from dead. Tom Holland’s latest book, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, is published by Little, Brown. He will be discussing the influence of Christianity at our 2019 History Weekends in Chester and Winchester. This article was first published in the October 2019 edition of BBC History Magazine