I’ve been reading up on the origins of chivalry and specifically on chivalric conventions in warfare. There’s now a fairly convincing argument by John Gillingham and Matthew Strickland that chivalry in the sense of ‘merciful treatment of defeated high-status enemies’ first appears in eleventh-century France and is then exported with the Norman Conquest to England. But I was suddenly struck by a different thought, when reading a section from Matthew Strickland’s article "Killing or clemency? Ransom, chivalry and changing attitudes to defeated opponents in Britain and Northern France, 7-12th centuries." In Krieg im Mittelalter, edited by Hans-Henning Kortüm, 93-122. (Berlin: Akademie, 2001).

Strickland comments on the differing military tactics of the Anglo-Norman and the Welsh, Irish and native Scots:

the Normans quickly came to view their new neighbours as poorly armed savages, barbarians with an alien language and culture, against whom there could be no honourable combat between equals...Thus while significant chivalric constraints operated in warfare among the Anglo-Normans themselves, they might often behave towards their Celtic opponents with utter ruthlessness, which might include the mutilation, execution, or even enslaving of prisoners.

I had a sudden flash-forward: this is the argument that the anti-Geneva Convention and pro-torture brigade are making. The enemy don’t respect the conventions, therefore we should be just as brutal as them (or possibly even more brutal, since we have more advanced weaponry). I’ve never followed the logic of such people. If they deserve to be treated (horribly) as they treat us, therefore we also then deserve to be treated (horribly) as we have treated them. If pre-emptive attacks are OK for the USA, they’re OK for Iran. Torture isn’t OK just because it’s authorised by a democratically elected leader, not a dictator.

But it also got me thinking about a wider question. What is the relationship between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’? As a medievalist, I get annoyed when the Middle Ages (and the early Middle Ages in particular) are defined as uncivilised and barbaric. It seems to me to be wrongly conflating two different ideas. Civilisation can be defined in many ways, which I’ll come to in a moment, but I’ll define ‘barbarism’ here as a tendency towards violence and cruelty. So the question becomes: does ‘civilisation’ reduce ‘barbarism’, as is so often presumed?

One obvious way of defining civilisation is in terms of technological advances. The idea that this makes humankind less barbarous has been pretty much exploded (and also machine-gunned, gassed and napalmed). I always remember too what a guide on a guided tour of London told me: you could travel to some of the last public hangings in London on the Underground. Civilisation has to mean something different to be contrasted with barbarism.

Another view (which I associate particularly with Norbert Elias, but is probably earlier) is that civilisation in the sense of more refined manners reduces barbarism. The idea here is that manners means more conscientious control of oneself and hence a reduction in violent impulses. (Education more generally is also said to have the same effect). As a theoretical argument this may seem valid: as an empirical argument it does not hold up. By any measure the Nazis were both better educated and had more refined social codes than the Carolingian elite. They were not, however, less barbarous. Similarly, the practices of inquisition took off in the later Middle Ages (not the early Middle Ages), witch burning was an early modern practice more than a medieval one and slavery flourished in the early modern period and throughout the Enlightenment.

Again, the idea that democracy necessarily eliminates barbarism doesn’t seem to hold up to empirical evidence. Classical Athens (by far the most democratic city of the time) was responsible for genocidal acts, while the most deadly use of weapons of mass destruction ever was by the US in 1945, one of the most democratic states. Similarly, a democratic UK still carried out some nasty atrocities in its empire, such as the Amritsar Massacre and the suppression of the Mau Mau. Even a belief in the existence of universal human rights doesn’t necessarily prevent violence, as the French Revolutionary terror demonstrates (and the seeming acquiescence of a large percentage of the current US population with their government’s use of torture).

It seems to me that in any of these senses ‘civilisation’ doesn’t necessarily exclude committing barbaric violence: yet I still think that education, democracy, an awareness of human rights and even possibly refined manners and technological developments are necessary steps towards a less violent world. They are not, however, sufficient on their own. What seems to be vital for attempts to eliminate brutality (which is an admirable goal, even if never attainable) is an added dimension: that ‘civilised’ treatment must be applied to everyone, without exception.

That is the problem with many of the ‘civilising’ advances that have been made. Most codes of polite behaviour, from chivalry to the English idea of gentlemanly conduct have explicitly excluded such behaviour towards certain inferior groups: you don’t have to be chivalrous to peasants, treat ‘fallen women’ or slaves with respect etc. Democracy is OK for the core of an empire, but not its dependencies (who might otherwise democratically decide they don’t want to be part of the empire). Likewise, as soon as you decide that certain groups don’t ‘deserve’ human rights, you can justify almost any cruelty.

Going back to the original articles, the Celtic nations were influenced by English styles of warfare and they did in time develop codes of ‘chivalry’ and restraint in warfare. A modern Highland/Scottish regiment (like the rest of the British army) would be unlikely to massacre women and children, as they were still being encouraged to do in the sixteenth century. But the question remains: would they have become ‘civilised’ more quickly if they hadn’t been treated as barbarians themselves? Is ‘Western’ adherence to the principles of the Geneva Convention and of human rights more generally really best spread to other countries by the abandonment of such principles at the first opportunity?

Reading an inordinate number of articles on Waltharius, I have stumbled yet again on one of the more common themes when discussing early medieval texts on warfare: the ‘problem of Christian heroism’. This seems to be particularly common in literary discussions, but is still seen in some historiography: the view that Christian heroic poetry was difficult to write because the church/Christianity was hostile to warfare. This is supposedly reflected in an ambiguous attitude to Germanic heroic poetry, the Waltharius as a monastic satire on German warriors etc, etc. Another strand of this view is the claim that the concept of holy war suddenly developed at the start of the Crusading movement (as seen particularly in Carl Erdmann).

Such ideas are as (as scholars have pointed out before me, but obviously not loudly enough) pretty much rubbish. From the time that Eusebius comes up with his story of the Emperor Constantine and ‘in this sign, conquer’ the vast majority of late antique/medieval Christian writers had no problems about Christian warriors. In fact, it’s probably easier to come up with a list of the few who weren’t entirely happy with warfare in the service of Christianity: after Augustine, Martin of Tours in Sulpicius Severus’ vita, and Gregory of Tours (possibly) I’m hard pressed to think of many other names. Repeatedly in Greek, Roman and barbarian histories by Christian writers, what we get shown is good Christians gloriously thrashing evil non-Christians (along, of course, with Christian armies losing because they were insufficiently Christian). Biblical justification for this was relatively easy to find; you just went back to the Book of Kings to find an expansionist model for whatever empire or gens was now the ‘new Israel’.

Why is it then that so much scholarship still presents a picture of a painful and agonising discussion by earnest early medieval Christians of whether warfare was ever justified? I suppose some of it reflects a view that Christianity is ‘intrinsically’ peaceful, and this therefore must have been central to Christian thought throughout the ages, until it fell under outside influences. In practice, however, though there’s always been an anti-war strand in Christian thought, it’s been pretty marginalised between the fourth and the late twentieth century (arguably, it still is today, if you consider Christianity as a global force).

But I think there’s more to it than that. I suspect a lot of the problem starts from many scholars still taking too seriously the series of binary opposites that early medieval authors tend to set up: clerics v laity, learned v illiteratus, Latin v vernacular, Christian v pagan, Roman v barbarian. (For a summary of some recent scholarship demolishing many of these binaries, see Matthew Innes, ‘Teutons or Trojans? The Carolingians and the Germanic Past’ in Yitzak Hen and Matthew Innes (eds), The uses of the past in the early Middle Ages (CUP, 2000)). Onto these early medieval binaries of pagan German popular barbarism contrasted to learned Latin clerical civilisation, nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship then grafted further binaries that aren’t actually prominent in the original texts, but fitted with modern essentialist views. So early medieval history and literature were also seen as reflecting contrasting ideals of warrior spirit v pacifism, blood feud v forgiveness, glory-seeking v Christian humility, greed for gold v voluntary poverty, manliness v effeminacy, etc. (Which end of the binary was seen as positive depended on whether the scholars concerned identified with Greco-Roman or ‘Northern’ culture, just as the real difference between scholars of late antiquity and of the early Middle Ages nowadays is less the period studied, then whether they think ‘barbarians’ are a Good Thing or not.)

Imposing such binaries is an impediment in seeing what the texts themselves are actually saying about the differences between pagan and Christian culture. Even worse, scholars of vernacular literature and ‘barbarian’ history in particular have tended to see Christianity’s encounter with ‘German warrior culture’ as something entirely unprecedented, requiring new acculturation. But if you want a model of how Christianity reacted to a polytheistic militarised culture, dominated by the search for fame and wealth and obsessed by nobility and honour, then you need to look at the encounter between Christianity and the Roman Empire in the third and fourth centuries. Once one empire was accommodated within Christian thought, the process was easier to repeat in the future...

I am currently writing a paper on the Latin epic poem Waltharius and so faced inexorably with the problem of ‘Germanic heroic epic’ (Heldensage, Heldenlied, Heldenepos), a concept I would normally shun. Unfortunately, because the Waltharius (although written in Latin) contains a story otherwise known only from vernacular texts, analysis of its contents has largely been annexed by Germanists, who are very keen on this idea. (The Latinists who discuss it largely focus on the problem of its date and its possible citations from/in other texts, which becomes even more impenetrable for a non-literary scholar like myself). In previous years reading some of the many articles on Waltharius I have become inured to their earnest discussions of heroic epic. Now, however, I am feeling like revolting. Why do so many scholars of German literature have this urge to discuss largely non-existent works?

There is almost no ‘Germanic heroic epic’ extant in any original form. The Waltharius is various dated between about 800-930. Even if you take the later date, there is very little secular ‘Germanic’ poetry that is earlier: Hildesbrandlied, Beowulf (probably), Widsith, Deor, one or two other Anglo-Saxon fragments and a few poems of the Poetic Edda. Even of these, several have clearly been extensively reworked to show off a specific poet’s craft (Beowulf, the Eddic poems) and so can’t be taken as necessarily representative of an ‘authentic tradition’. Most of what is claimed to be the ‘ethos’ of Germanic epic is taken from considerably later works, whether the Old Norse/Icleandic sagas or Middle High German works like the Niebelungenlied. We can tell in some cases that they use stories that are much older, based on the names of characters. It seems to me that presuming therefore that the ethos or values of the stories are necessarily the same as that of earlier times is quite unjustified. Similarly, a scholar who claims that whatever merit the Waltharius may have as a poem is due to its (entirely hypothetical and unknowable German original) should surely just be told to lie down and have a nice rest.

As for those who invoke ‘oral themes’, the urge to jump up and down on such scholars (while, of course, improvising insults at the same time) sometimes becomes considerable. Take a paper I read recently on ‘Formulaic Tradition and the Latin Waltharius’. The themes that this scholar identifies in the poem as ‘type scenes of oral-formulaic vernacular poetry’ include ‘Exile, Sleep after Feasting, Journey to Trial and the Hero on the Beach’. Sleep after Feasting does seem a mainly ‘Germanic’ theme, but I am deeply unconvinced that you can separate out ‘Germanic’ exile as a motif from ancient Roman exile (or indeed probably from classical Chinese or Russian exile). As for Journey to Trial, let me quote one definition from the paper:

‘a hero or heroine (a) makes a journey...,(b) is in serious danger, (c) experiences one or more confrontations...and (d) emerges physically or spiritually victorious.’

In other words, Dan Brown is following in a great oral-formulaic vernacular tradition. Similarly ‘The Hero on the Beach’ formula can mysteriously be applied to Waltharius (which never goes near the sea) by replacing the literal beach with ‘a liminal situation’. (And if a literary scholar can’t find a liminal situation whenever they need one in a text, what use are they?)

I’m not the first person, obviously, to come up with some of these objections. In fact one German article (which I haven’t yet been able to read) is called ‘Ist das germanische Heldenlied ein Phantom?’ and some scholars have been keen to reply ‘Yes’. As a historian, however, I’m also interested in the question of why such phenomena are held onto so tenaciously. It does seem to me something specific to study of German literature. As far as I am aware, the scholarship of most other European vernacular traditions doesn’t concentrate on lengthy discussions of non-extant texts, but gets to work with considering what does survive. I suspect that this all stems from how German historical and literary scholarship got tied up with ideas of German nationalism from the early nineteenth century onwards. (One of the key journals is still called Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum und deutsche Literatur (periodical for German antiquity and German literature)). If the Germans had to have their own independent non-Roman history and culture (even if accounts of the ‘Germanic ethos’ are based largely on the reports of the Roman Tacitus), then similarly, the migration period Germans had to have their own authentic literature. Since whatever they had was simply oral, the traces of this had to be tracked down even into thirteenth century texts and then reconstructed into a ‘pure’ original (by taking out whatever bits didn’t seem to fit with an idealised ‘Germanic warrior society’ that was really a figment of nineteenth century imagination). Early medieval German history, however, has in many cases moved on from such a static picture of ‘Germanism’. I wonder how long it will take till medieval German literary studies do?

A while ago L asked me what the biggest number I knew was. There are times when I start to regret that I gave her a semi-truthful answer. The mathematically accurate answer is, of course, that there is no biggest number, but this didn’t satisfy L. So instead I told her that the biggest number I knew was a googol. (The reason that this is only semi-true is that I actually also know what a googolplex is, but that is too big a number for me to contemplate for more than an instant). A googol, for those who don’t know, is 10 to the power 100 (written as 1 followed by a hundred zeros). Or, to put it differently, one hundred thousand trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.

A googol is, therefore, a really big number. I sort of know this, but I still get flummoxed when I think about it. And I think about googols rather more than I used to, because L has taken to using the term. She, of course, is as the stage where ‘big number’ encompasses anything from about 50 upwards. She is also currently very keen on hypothetical questions. So just yesterday I got ‘what happens if we saw a googol of butterflies and every one was a different colour?’ And also (since we were going to feed the ducks): ‘what if there were a googol of ducklings in the river?’

I could provide a roughly coherent answer to both of these. Firstly, a lot of the butterflies would look the same colour, because there aren’t that many different colours. And a googol of ducklings wouldn’t fit in the river or even Hitchin. But afterwards, of course, I got to thinking about how many butterflies would be the same colour and how much space a googol of ducklings would take up. And that way lies madness (and mathematics, which tends towards the same thing). After some calculation, I came up with some very approximate answers.

Truecolor graphics gives about 16 million (= 1.6x10⁷) different colours and approaches the limit at which the eye can detect differences. Therefore you’d be left with around 10⁹² butterflies of each minutely different colour. Which is a lot of butterflies.

As for the ducklings. Assuming that you have small ducklings, they might have a ‘footprint’ of around 5 cm x 5 cm. Since ducklings are quite happy squashing up together, you could then get 400 to a square metre. A square kilometre is a million square metres, so you could get 4x10⁸ ducklings into that area. Then it starts to get hairy (or feathery). The earth’s radius is around 7000 km, so its surface area (4 pi x(radiius squared)) is about 6x10⁸ square kilometres. If you covered the earth’s surface in ducklings, you’d therefore have around 2x10¹⁷ ducklings. For a whole googol of ducklings, you’d therefore need 5x10⁸² Earths (which is five hundred million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion).

At this point my mind goes woozy and I realise that I should have told L the biggest number I know is a trillion. All I hope is that she never asks me how many numbers there are between 0 and 1...

I have been thinking on and off a lot about a moral exercise raised by Christine Odone in a recent Observer column.

You are on a deserted beach with a rifle, an elephant and a baby. This is the last elephant on earth and it is charging the baby. Do you shoot the elephant, knowing the species would become extinct?

This was the dilemma Richard Dawkins put to me during a weekend in the country. Our host, publisher Anthony Cheetham, had mischievously placed us next to each other at table. I thought the dilemma was a no-brainer - my only doubt was whether I would shoot straight enough to kill the beast.

He was outraged by my answer: man, beast, they were all the same to him and the priority must be to protect the endangered species. He berated me for my foolish belief in the specialness of humanity for its soul.

The question as it’s posed isn’t a proper dilemma, because the last elephant is going to become extinct anyway. (I will give Dawkins the benefit of the doubt and put it down it down to Odone’s misremembering his question). But suppose it’s the last of a breeding pair of elephants (and exclude issues like possibly fatal problems of genetic defects from such a tiny genetic pool). What then?

Odone’s answer would be the one shared not only by Catholics like herself, but almost all Christians (including myself) and most other people of some religion or none. But what’s interesting is that it’s also the ‘right’ answer in evolutionary terms. For wild animals to show altruism towards a different species is extremely unusual (dolphins helping swimmers in trouble, a few cases of animals ‘adopting’ a different animal to rear when they don’t have offspring of their own). Tame animals (such as rescue dogs) can be trained to do such things, of course, but that’s a different matter. And I can’t believe that any wild animal would save an animal of a different species at the cost of one of their own species. On the other hand altruism towards unrelated members of one’s own species might sometimes make sense in evolutionary terms. For example, if you help protect other animals’/people’s young when they’re in danger, they may be more ready to protect your young when they’re in danger.

So we have a paradox: if humans reject speciesm, we are going against our own animal nature. The more we say that we are just like other animals and must reflect this in our treatment of them, the more we prove that we are qualitatively different from other animals. (If any chimps disagree, they are welcome to comment on this blog).

But Richard Dawkins also needs to consider a further case, if he truly believes in an egalitarian humanism (which I take as prerequisite for any extension of rights to animals). What if the baby on the beach is his child (or his grandchild, or some other child he cares greatly for)? To be consistent, his answer must be the same as if it is a child unrelated and unknown to him. Otherwise, he is implicitly saying that his (grand)child’s life is worth more than another’s child life, which can’t be morally right on his terms. If Dawkins is prepared to sacrifice his own baby to the last but one elephant he’s morally consistent. I leave it to other to judge whether they think that would be the humane choice.