The Portuguese empire

Further on the Portuguese, this wonderful, melancholic Youtube video, accompanied by an aching soundtrack from Madredeus, a contemporary music group, highlights the reach of their empire - from Macau to Morocco, the straits of Hormuz to the west coast of Africa, Goa to Brazil. Both a snapshot of the extent and durability of the Portuguese achievement, linked to a palpable sense of nostalgia for vanished glory that, I guess, haunts all empires that have had their day - the British Empire not excluded.

The Pope's elephant

I’ve been in Portugal for the last couple of weeks doing background research into the Portuguese exploration of the world. Whilst there I picked up a magazine with an old photograph of an elephant in a procession, which reminded me of the elephant the Portuguese once sent to the pope.

 In 1514, King Manuel II of Portugal sent Pope Leo X an Indian elephant. It’s interesting to speculate on the process of shipping an elephant on a sailing ship from India in the sixteenth century. I guess it would have been winched on board, and somehow restrained in a hold for the long sea journey – 12, 000 miles and six months – and fed on what? As the elephant was accompanied by its Indian mahout it must have been in expert hands. Moving animals about on ships has always been something of a problem – the crusaders suspended their warhorses in slings so that they could roll with the movement of the ship, but elephants are a different proposition. (There’s an account of a celebrity elephant in Europe in the late fifteenth century being carried to England in a ship and being thrown overboard when it became a liability in a storm.)

The Portuguese elephant was especially dramatic. It was white in colour – and Manuel, who knew a thing or two about propaganda, contrived a wildly exotic advertisement for his country's discoveries in the New World. He despatched the elephant to Rome under the command of his ambassador, Tristão da Cunha, the navigator and explorer. In March 1514 a cavalcade of 140 people, including some Indians, and an assortment of wild animals – leopards, parrots and a panther – entered Rome watched by a gawping crowd who had never seen the like of it before. The elephant carried a silver castle on its back with rich presents for the pope, who christened it Hanno, after Hannibal’s elephants in Italy.

At the papal audience, Hanno bowed three times and amused and alarmed the cardinals of the Holy Church by spraying the contents of a bucket of water over them. He was an immediate animal star – painted by artists, memorialized by poets, the subject of a now-lost fresco and a scandalous satirical pamphlet ‘The Last Will and Testament of the Elephant Hanno’. He was housed in a specially constructed building, took part in processions and was greatly loved by the pope. Unfortunately Hanno’s diet was probably not up to scratch and he died two years after his arrival, aged seven, having been dosed with a laxative laced with gold. The grieving Leo X was at his side. He was buried with honour.

Hanno and his mahout

Even less fortunate was Manuel’s follow-up gift – a rhinoceros – dispatched from Lisbon in a green velvet collar. The ship was wrecked off the coast of Genoa in 1515. The animal drowned and was washed up on the seashore. Its hide was recovered, returned to Lisbon and stuffed. Albrecht Dürer saw a letter describing the stuffed creature, and possibly a sketch. He produced his famous print without ever having seen a rhino – not a bad attempt under the circumstances.

The old photograph I saw in the Portuguese magazine dates from a celebration of the Portuguese world in 1940, in which Hanno’s entry into Rome was re-enacted in Lisbon.

The Jump

Belgian resistance fighters manage to halt the train, long enough to unlock a door. Then it starts again. Your mother pushes you towards the opening, impelled by hope – that you might survive. She hands you a hundred franc note. You tuck it into your sock. She lowers you onto the foot rail below the door. You prepare to jump. You are eleven years old.

"I saw the trees go by and the train was getting faster. The air was crisp and cool and the noise was deafening. I remember feeling surprised that it could go so fast with 35 cars being towed. But then at a certain moment, I felt the train slow down. I told my mother: 'Now I can jump.' She let me go and I jumped off. First I stood there frozen, I could see the train moving slowly forward - it was this large black mass in the dark, spewing steam."

This week, to coincide with the seventieth anniversary, the BBC website retold the story of the survival of Simon Gronowski and the daring hijack of a train bound for Auschwitz. The three resistance fighters pulled off this feat armed with one pistol, a lantern, a sheet of red paper and four pairs of pliers. 118 Jews managed to escape alive. The date was April 19 1943 – the day the Warsaw Uprising started. The last of the resistance fighters, Robert Maistriau, died in 2008. Here is his account of that day. Simon Gronowski, now a jazz playing grandfather, recently returned to the scene of his jump, the place where he spoke those last words to his mother, ‘the first of my heroes’.

Voices from the Black Sea

'Greetings, passer by!'

Looking over some material I collected on a trip round the Black Sea a couple of years ago, I was again struck by the inscriptions on Greek grave stones from the early centuries AD. There's a tradition of the dead speaking directly on these memorials, being ventriloquised by their surviving relatives, so that we feel that we're hearing the people of the past talking to us personally over a gap of two thousand years. There's something incredibly moving in these inscriptions. They beg the passer by to stop and remember; they tug at our sleeves and demand our attention; they bewail their fates or celebrate their time on earth and give us accounts of their lives.

'Hades came towards me so fast' laments Hegesandros, 'the famous son of Eros and Apphia', in Amasra on the Turkish coast. 'Listen, stranger' says Ephipania from ancient Tomis in modern Rumania, 'my place of origin was Greece....I saw many lands and sailed over the sea because my father, as well as my husband, were ship owners, whom after death I laid in the grave with clean hands. My life was really happy before! I was born among muses and shared the goods of wisdom. As a woman, I gave much help to women, to abandoned wives, being ruled by pious sentiments, and I helped people confined to their beds by suffering, because I realised that mortals' fates are not according to their piousness. Hermogenes full of gratitude devoted this monument as a remembrance'. A life well lived.

And Cecilia, also from Tomis, gives us her life story.

'If you want to know, passer by, who and whose I am, listen: when I was thirteen a young man loved me, worthy of us: then I married him and bore three children. A son, first and then two daughters, the very image of my face. Finally I bore a fourth one, but I should not have had any more, because the child died first and I did too a little time later. I left the light of the sun when I was thirty. Perinthos is my husband and my home. My son's name is Priscus, my daughter's Hieronis. As regards Theodora she was a child in the house when I died. My husband, Perinthos, lives and mourns me with a faint voice. My good father also weeps because I retreated here. I also have here in the grave my mother Flavia Theodora. My husband's father, Caecilius Priscus, also lies here. A greeting to you too whoever you are, you who pass by our graves!'

I feel somehow oddly cheered by these friendly greetings from the people of the past.

The Fairford demons

On Easter day we went to Fairford – an old Cotswold market town through which the river Coln quietly flows – to see one of England’s great surviving works of medieval art: the stained glass in its church. Such glass is a rarity – so much was destroyed in the Reformation: the sculptures pulverized, the wall paintings plastered over, the windows smashed. Whatever the corruption, the cynicism, the extortion of the Church, it provided medieval people with colour, pageantry, festivals, entertainment, visions of heaven.

Somehow the glass at Fairford survived this purge almost intact. On a bright sunny Easter afternoon, brilliant blues and greens, purples and scarlets glow with an astonishing depth of colour.

For the illiterate shepherd or peasant, accustomed to the dull colours of earth, stone and bleached grass, it must have been the most luminous vision they’d ever see. It’s not only a visual bible story but a wondrous inventory of late medieval life. Amongst the lives of saints and old testament prophets, there are men in armour, distant turreted castles, brilliantly coloured gowns and hats, animals, fruits, plants and trees.



Most extraordinary of all is the west window - the last judgement. The upper half has been replaced by dull Victorian glass, but below, the scene of the weighing of souls - those destined for heaven, those for hell - is quite extraordinary. Whilst the virtuous are whirled up towards the light by piping angels, the sinful are being carried off to hellfire by terrible creatures - green monsters with scaly tales, spotted demons with horns and whips, purple ones hauling their pallid victims away in chains. Their mouths are open in silent horror as they slide down into the flames. It is too late to repent.





And at the bottom Satan waits, multi-eyed, lustful, pitiless, his gobbling stomach ready to devour the screaming souls being sucked into his blast-furnace so fiercely red you can almost feel the scorching heat coming off the sheets of glass. It could be a scene from Hieronymus Bosch - and you wonder if the men who made the glass, who were Flemish, could have shared his imaginative world. It must have scared the living daylights out of the humble folk of Fairford five hundred years ago.

‘A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!’

Two young men setting out on foot, nearly 80 years ago, on almost parallel journeys that would change their lives:

Winter 1933

‘I was signalling frantically back as the hawsers were cast loose and the gangplank shipped. Then they were gone. The anchor-chain clattered through the ports and the vessel turned into the current with a wail of her siren. How strange it seemed, as I took shelter in the little saloon to be setting off from the heart of London.’

Summer 1935

‘The stooping figure of my mother, waist-deep in the grass and caught there like a piece of sheep's wool, was the last I saw of my country home as I left it to discover the world. She stood old and bent at the top of the bank, silently watching me go, one gnarled red hand raised in farewell and blessing, not questioning why I went. At the bend of the road I looked back again and saw the gold light die behind her; then I turned the corner, passed the village school, and closed that part of my life for ever.’

Recently I’ve been reading the biographies of the two men who wrote these passages. The first was by

Patrick Leigh-Fermor

 Patrick Leigh-Fermor, public school educated rebel, restless, adventurous and reckless, with the clipped accent of a 1930s BBC news reader. The second was Laurie Lee, a boy of much humbler background from rural Gloucestershire – he described himself as a peasant, though he was slightly more than that – with the soft burr of his native valley in his speech. Young men from different worlds but fired by the same romantic vision: to escape the cramping, class-confined dullness of interwar England and see the world. Both went, in Leigh-Fermor’s words, ‘to set out across Europe like a tramp..A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!’



Laurie Lee



Both travelled on foot on what would prove to be life-changing experiences; both would write brilliantly about what they’d seen. Leigh-Fermor walked the length of Europe – from the tip of Holland to Constantinople. The journey took him a year; but he didn’t see the white cliffs of Dover again for three, ‘a whole life time later it seemed then – and, for better or for worse, utterly changed by my travels.’ Along the way he learned multiple languages, stayed with the aristocracy of central Europe, fell in love and lived the days with a thrilling intensity.

Laurie caught a boat to Spain and walked across the heat-stunned landscapes of the central plateau, sleeping out under olive trees, welcomed in to share the food of its peasants who were enchanted by the fair-haired stranger. His passport was his violin. In this Homeric world, he captivated the souls of the people with his music. He made them laugh, dance, cry and temporarily forget their suffering: ‘They lived hard and semi-starved lives, but if I unrolled my blanket…and they saw my violin their faces would soften and crease, there’d be a cry of Musica! Musica!...I’d play paso dobles and even the old ladies would dance a few creaky steps around the patio.’

These were young men’s experiences – Leigh-Fermor was 18, Laurie Lee 21 –journeys of adventure, escape, romance. They both looked at new worlds for the first time, entranced, and noticed everything. They kept note books – and years later they would produce extraordinary artfully-shaped classics of travel writing: Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water, Laurie Lee’s As I Walked out One Summer Morning and A Rose for Winter.

Both men had complex, adventurous and – in ways – difficult lives after these first journeys. Laurie Lee returned to Spain to fight in the Civil War; Patrick Leigh-Fermor became immensely famous for his years in the Cretan mountains in the Second World War and the kidnapping of the German general there. They both drank too much, had complicated love lives, wrote too little and perhaps squandered their talents. Laurie Lee is now best known for his childhood account of the village he grew up in – Cider with Rosie (in the US, Edge of Day), but you have the feeling that nothing ever equalled the intense experiences of those early travels. And in a world in which everything can now be seen from Google Earth it’s hard not to envy their journeys without maps.

I was once tempted to send Patrick Leigh-Fermor a copy of my book on the fall of Constantinople, as he knew the Greek world deeply and lived there for most of his life, but never did, and didn’t want to be a ‘fan’. Laurie Lee I never spoke to but knew by sight as he returned to Slad, the village of his childhood, and we live nearby. (My wife once helped him plant a commemorative tree by our village cricket pitch, which he owned: she almost had to stop the sadly decrepit old man falling into the hole dug for the planting. I once watched him shuffling off the train at the local station with a half-drunk bottle of whisky stuffed in his coat pocket.) Both men lie buried in Gloucestershire churchyards.

Today – on a blue, sunny, bone-dry, and unseasonably cold Spring morning – I went on a whim to pay my respects to Laurie in the Slad churchyard looking across the road down which he departed that summer day in 1935 to the valley and the hills beyond. Inside the church there are some quite lovely stained glass windows that depict his travels to Spain, his violin and his words. 





Plague routes

This week I have found myself staring at photographs in the press of a perfectly round, very deep and ominously black pit. At the bottom a row of human skeletons.

It’s probably a plague pit discovered during the building of a cross-London rail link, going back to the arrival of the Black Death in London in 1348. Paleoepidemiologists – it’s a new job to me – are hoping to extract sufficient  DNA material from bone samples to determine the cause of death.

Because I wrote something about the origins of the Black Death in my book about Venice, I found myself thinking back to the winter of 1344, when a large Mongol army was beseiging the Genoese fortress of Kaffa on the Crimean peninsula. The attackers failed to take the fort – its walls were thick and Mongol siege equipment evidently wasn’t up to the job. As they sat outside the walls the Mongols mysteriously started to die. A contemporary chronicler recorded what happened next:

‘Disease seized and struck down the whole Tatar army. Every day unknown thousands perished . . . they died as soon as the symptoms appeared on their bodies, the result of coagulating humours in their groins and armpits followed by putrid fever. All medical advice and help was useless. The Tatars, exhausted, astonished and completely demoralised by the appalling catastrophe and virulent disease, realised that there was no hope of avoiding death . . . and ordered the corpses to be loaded into their catapults and flung into Caffa, so that the enemy might be wiped out by the terrible stench. It appears that huge piles of dead were hurled inside, and the Christians could neither hide, flee nor escape from these corpses, which they tried to dump in the sea, as many as they could. The air soon became completely infected and the water supply was poisoned by rotting corpses.’

When the siege failed, the Genoese (and Venetians) sailed away, carrying the Black Death with them so efficiently that it had ringed the western world within a couple of years, spreading down the maritime trade routes of Europe – ships were the engines of globalization in all its forms:

 Maybe now it’s the plane. This week scientists recorded tremors of a modern pandemic threat: the Sars virus killed a man in London who had taken the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Where humans meet in large numbers the potential for interactions are uncontrollable. The great flu pandemic of 1918 that killed more people than the First World War (perhaps 50 to 100 million) was efficiently spread across Europe by the large troop concentrations in camps in Belgium and Northern France. Let’s hope the epidemiologists don’t let anything lethal escape from the sub-soil of London.