Xōchiyāōyōtl

I'm reading Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade. Currently I'm at the year AD 1200; they've called a tournament to Écry.

Écry is, basically, Thomas Cole's "The Past". It was a vital part of the duchy of Campagne... at the time; it is wholly a ruin now. Up to AD 1200 even Thomas Cole doesn't quite do to Écry justice; Phillips makes clear that a twelfth-century tournament was very, very different from the cooped-up gladiatorial-style arena matches seen in Cole (and in A Game Of Thrones). Those reflect a later era.

Over the twelfth century, the tournament was a mock battle. Knights and general men-at-arms formed into armies, and planned a big fight over the entire countryside. The only "rule" was that you had to give quarter to the opponent; the aim was to capture the enemy (but deaths did happen). Spectators observed the whole event from castle walls or on the roofs of barns. They remind me of nothing so much as the Flower Wars between the āltepētl poleis of the central Mexican Nahua.

The tournament phenomenon was cis-Hajnal; taking place over Belgium, Champagne, and along the Rhine. The quasi-French English aristocracy, I assume, also got in on it. By contrast the Cathar-ridden Occitan province in what's now the south of France didn't do 'em. Neither did the Basques or the Irish. The Italians didn't understand them either, and the Popes tried to ban them - several times. These bans made for absolutely no effect among the Franks.

Maybe the tournament had to be a Hajnal thing. A winning team required work across baronial boundaries. Good luck with that in twelfth-century Sicily.

The invention of slavery

Jonathan AC Brown over in Georgetown got himself in trouble a few years back, which even a complaisant media couldn't quite get him out of. The question put to him - which he'd tried to ban hostile audiences from hearing - was whether slavery is all that bad. Technically Georgetown sits below the Mason-Dixon Line, where certain people might get sore about the topic...

Brown was a convert to Islam at the time (I assume he still is), so that faith-system was colouring his opinions. Recall that the whole of Islam is just a late-antique take on west-Syrian Judaism and Christianity. So I'll be discussing here how we got from the Neolithic to Jonathan AC Brown.

"Slavery" in our language comes from an Islamic and Byzantine term: the concept of an alien tribe, dragged into the empire to do the empire's dirty work. For them in the eighth century AD, those aliens were often Slavs. But the Sclovenes are not noted in the Quran; races as such are rare there, beyond "Ishmael", "Jews", and "Arabs" (and there's long been debate about the Qaric understanding of these terms). The Quran instead has the concept of 'abd, the "servitor". The same word is in Hebrew. Are they the same thing?

When you get back to the Hebrew Bible, and very-probably the earliest suwar of the Quran, there's no concept of the chattel race at all. The Torah legislates the 'obed as an indenture: Mr 'Obed was set upon a six-year term, and his master would care for Mr 'Obed until the term was up. 'Obed might well decide he liked his master, at which point he might apply to join the household. Although the Quran does not repeat this legislation (there is, famously, not even Sabbath in it) we do find allusions to the general sentiment. The wala', that post-slavery clientage, was VITAL to early Islamic history.

Sex servitude existed as well. This servitude is the worst sort, in my opinion. This post will deal with that, some; but my angle is more "Marxian", if you like, dealing more with the economics, where (second-worst) chattel racial slavery is most salient.

Slavery as such was impossible at the scale of the early Hebrew kingdom. The great empires, like Egypt and Babylon, did have need for large-scale work; but that work was project-based: building this pyramid, or that road. This tended to be ad-hoc. It could be done with a corvée, or with prisoners taken in a raid, after which the people just... melted back into the local villages. Even foreigners likely had taken up with the local women and would settle near where they were at.

So: what changed?

I had the theory that monocrops changed. Olive plantations in Spain; quarries around the Med; and of course sugar in the Sasanian Iraq. Suddenly there was rough work to be done in the same place over generations. Indenture wouldn't cut it in cane-country (so to speak), and the Marsh Arabs sure didn't want to do it. So along came what the Bible's authors would have hated: the importation of many thousands of blacks from East Africa, and Slavs from Europe. These attended an imperial-scale economy.

With the rise of empires and cash-crops, came apologists for permanent chattel. Among the Greeks, Aristotle argued that Anatolians - "Asians" - were unfit for liberty.

At the same time, polyglot multicultural empires diffused authority to subject peoples. So more-egalitarian voices sprung up. Sometimes we hear from Alcidamas. The Christian baptismal formula we read in Paul assumes that, in what truly matters, which is Christ, race and slavery is irrelevant. Later the Christian cleric Gregory of Nyssa was blunter: he thought very low of slavemasters.

Dennis Prager's commentary on Exodus proposes that book as a reaction against Near Eastern assumptions, large-scale impersonal servitude being one. Prager (if I'm reading him right) argues that if all peoples had heeded the Torah, servitude would never have evolved into true chattel slavery. He could be right... except that Genesis had already nodded to genetic servitude in "The Curse Of Ham".

Also, the world-religions, like Hellenism, Zoroastrianism, and then Christianity and Islam, offered a loophole: what of those who don't adhere to the religion? They can take slaves from the heathens, and those slaves "deserve it". (Judaism is not blameless; the Jew might not keep a slave, but he could trade in one.) The Quran is worst: over and over it speaks of infidels' sufferings on earth as a mere taste of what awaits them in Gehenna. (And it legitimises rape.)

I am Christian myself. I will admit the Bible's imperfections; and I observe how these imperfections have led to evils, in this case The Curse Of Ham and sex-servitude both. But if you'll allow me, I suggest that the overall Christian message, which follows the Jews' message, should not permit (true) slavery; it should also ban sexual servitude. I find otherwise from the core Islamic texts, which start by abrogating both Torah and Christ.

BACKDATING 8/31 1 PM MST - to the time when I was wrestling this point over in 4chan.

PHARAOH 10/17/2020 - Janissaries don't count.

Who takes away the sin of the world?

The problem of sin, and how to remove it, plagues all sentient beings in a "guilt" society. Sure, if you do another man wrong, that other man can forgive you. But can you forgive yourself?

Saint Paul proposed that Adam came to the world, where he sinned and left a legacy of sin onto all humankind after him. This sin, Jesus came to remove; through his own redemptive sacrifice.

Elsewhere, other sects have proposed other salvation-histories. One parallel shows up in Enochian literature. There exists a cycle in the Slavonic language, which came to be written down in the Middle Ages. Andrei Orlov proposes a "polemic" - that the documents which we label "2 and 3 Enoch" react to earlier literature. This goes to the short recension too, which survives in Coptic as well; but my comment here addresses the Slavonic-only long recension.

That 2 and 3 Enoch do belong after "1 Enoch" - after at least four of the five books in the Ethiopic, and we can throw in Jubilees - is the starting-point in this discussion. Orlov points out that the Slavonic books are concerned with Adam where the ancient Enochian texts are not. 1 Enoch eventually came to include the "Similitudes" which elevates Enoch to demigod status.

Orlov's essay really gets going p. 299f. In the Long Recension of 2 Enoch, ch. 64, Enoch is not just crowned in Heaven, but also given the authority to expiate sin. More: LR-2E 64 claims that Enoch has redeemed us already. For the earliest Enochian books, sinners aren't forgiven; they are simply killed. Sin came into the world through the fallen angels, and the Flood erased their wicked followers and progeny. Classic Enoch is like Noah: the righteous man avoids the storm; at most offering some advance warning to others, but we know they won't take it. 2 Enoch by contrast offers its protagonist as al-Ghafûr.

I think Orlov is right: 2 Enoch deals in polemic. The long recension's target is - I think - Christianity. 2 Enoch accepts Paul that Adam left a legacy of original-sin; but it insists, Enoch dealt with it already. (2 Enoch is vague about how. Since we know Enoch didn't die : did he invent the Temple dove-offerings? was he martyred docetically?) Anyway 2 Enoch doesn't - ultimately - care about Enoch. What matters is that Enoch precedes Jesus. Jesus is left with nothing to do. Jesus may be a prophet and/or a worldly-messiah. Jesus might be called upon to endorse Enoch. But that's it. The long recension of 2 Enoch plays the same trick on Jesus as 1 Enoch had on the Abrahamic / Mosaic Torah.

As for who came up with this notion, I am unsure. I don't think it is Muslims; Enoch goes unmentioned by that name in the Quran (its warner against the Flood's imminence is Noah himself), and Enoch never gets redemptive properties in the Hadith. I also don't find these themes in the Talmuds nor elsewhere among Rabbinic or Karaite Jews. The "Metatron" (metathronos?) takes on some Enochian properties in Jewish speculation, but even Qabbalists couldn't have Metatron redeem sin; Metatron is just there to shield us from Divine Perfection.

I'd look to post-Christians outside the Syriac world: Paulicians in the greater Armenia certain Manichees, perhaps. The community of 2 Enoch may have contributed to Bogomilism, as noted (not well I'm told) in 1918 by ASD Maunder (of "Maunder Minimum" fame), “The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Book of Enoch”. This would explain how 2 Enoch ended up in Slavonic. UPDATE 3/23/23: We can rule out Paulicians, as a postMarcion Pauline LARP.

The recensions of 2 Enoch

On occasion this blog has had cause to discuss the Slavonic cycle of Enoch. This exists in several versions, tied to two "recensions" - a long one and a short one. I mooted that the long one was postChristian in some Balkan / Pontic fashion. My muse was Maunder.

The short recension survives best in the manuscript dubbed "U" and - allied with it - "A". The earliest Slavonic copy of any version is, in fact, U. That recension's chapters "36-42" - corresponding to LR 36,39,37,40-2 - survive also in a Coptic language, likely Sahidic which was the official Church language in late-antiquity. This fragment parallels U and A. Orlov's online introduction dates to 2009, right before they'd found the Coptic MS.

Both recensions are in reaction to non-Enochian forms of Biblical religion. The short recension reacts to Judaism but might aim at the Temple cult, rather than at the rabbinical form. (There was no Temple in Enoch's day, and the Temple had become naught but an apocalyptic dream post 70 AD.)

BACKDATING 9/2 9:42 AM MST - because this is the needed background for the redemption-arc of the Tuesday comment.

L'Épuration!

Whilst we are discussing the canonisation of the Conquistadors (leave aside Cortés; he was a pimp), it really has to come down to a matter of degrees.

Yesterday morning in a coffeeshop in the mountains, I overheard Classic Colorado White Girl bending the ear of the baristo. Because of course the baristo agrees with you. (He'd better.) The topic was the death-penalty. She disagreed with it because sometimes an innocent man is convicted and, then, exonerated. Apparently some of these (honestly) Dindu Nuffins are now out on the lecture circuit, arguing that nobody else should be put to death either. (Which by some arguments makes them combatants in a political struggle, subject to the laws of war; but that's enough Heinlein for one night . . .)

We are talking Conservative thought on this night. They'd agree to be very careful about whom to convict, but when someone is a Diddu Sumpin : get a rope.

The Left is hardly immune to such thought either. I'd be sure it was just banter if not for the postwar Épuration in France. Of the many Nazi collaborators, a few hundred were executed, by process of law. Over ten thousand were simply murdered out of hand. The Épuration sauvage, 'tis called. But those guys deserved it. The Résistance may not have had better forensic and juridicial expertise in 1945 than we got in 2019, but they were better people. Or enim silent leges, anyway.

Sure. Why not. Liberals don't lose sleep over 10,000 German-mumbling French traitors - or 80,000; even Conservatives don't. They were all fine with carpet-bombs killing many more Germans than that, per run. Hell, Japan got nuked. Twice!

How many of the Mesoamericans deserved what they got? Or, at what point did that inter arma thing get lifted?

From anyone debating a "1519 Project", I should like to see a number. Nearest thousand, or ten-thousand, or hundred-.

John S. Carlyle Abbott

"Adam Mill", for his take on the Spanish Conquest, relies upon one source: a biography of "Cortez" by one John Stevens Cabot Abbott. This was published ... AD 1855.

I started out with no clue about who Abbott was, up to five hours ago, so I have looked him up. John Abbott shares a name with a later Tory politician in Canada, so we've been projecting his middle names back onto him in our day (not unlike Diego Velázquez ...). Looking over Abbott's bibliography, he put out a more-serious (but equally laudatory) bio of Napoleon Bonaparte at the same time as his Cortéz. Abbott was a contemporary of Thomas Carlyle; after Carlyle's death, Abbott went on to eulogise one of Carlyle's own heroes, Frederick the Great.

So that's "Mill"'s primary source. A fanboy of Carlylean heroes, putting out popular works for the edification of young men in positions of power. Abbott had little interest in the history, by contrast even with Prestcott in 1843.

I have, at the same time, actually finished Restall's When Montezuma Met Cortes - which, the reader will note, I'd started before "Mill" put out that article. "Mill" was of course unaware of this blog but, more to the point, unaware of Restall. I do not believe you should be commenting about the Conquistadors in Mesoamerica without reading that book, first. Restall is not the impartial historian we need, himself. Restall is however the best we got, at present.

Restall and I would admit that Cortés (slightly) deserves exoneration, in that until Otompan he wasn't in charge of the mess, despite his own letters and his son's biography of him. Still : that re-assessment, alone, disposes of Abbott (concerned with heroics which, we now know, weren't) - and it wounds "Mill".

All this leaves open some questions, for "Adam Mill" and for his publisher Ben Domenech. Any serious historian must already know that you don't just cite nineteenth-century secondary sources without even a nod to more-recent material. If not Restall then at least someone else; maybe, I don't know, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs by Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz. Maybe Richard F. Townsend's book on The Aztecs. UPDATE 9/20 : Camilla Townsend's got a post-Restall book out that looks intriguing.

My theory is that "Adam Mill" - like me, no expert in this field - had read Abbott, and maybe Jennings, and some ambient apologetics. From Abbott, he cobbled this article. And then he flung it over the fence. Hey, why not. That's how I work Ace's weekly Book Thread.

I would pin the blame on Domenech. That Domenech posted this one-trick pony, means Domenech figured it was Good Enough to make his overall point, which point would support those who subscribe to his website and newsletter, who just want a hug and to be reassured they're not living in stolen land like their smug professor told them they do. Domenech is renowned for being sloppy, for cutting corners, and for pandering to paymasters. I wonder if "Adam Mill" is Domenech.

The 1519 Project

"Mill"'s larger point isn't Cortés; it is that the Spaniards correctly ended a damnable civilisation. But "Mill" - from Abbott - must impose some constraints upon that. Cortés apologists typically wave off that he was "no saint". You know the debating-technique from the opening movements of The Shawshank Redemption; the aim is to get you, dear reader, also a sinner; to identify yourself with the wretched, imperfect soul in the dock; or with the victim of the crime, in that movie's case.

Restall, although mostly concerned with debunking the hero-worship of the last century's Abbotts, also makes comments about the Spaniards involving themselves in genocide. I've done my share of mistakes, but I've not done that. For Federalist readers, I can't speak...

Restall admits that Spain (and Portugal) hadn't quite learnt the racial theories of the nineteenth century (to that, The Federalist has your boilerplate Dems R Reel Rayciss article on Calhoun) - nor even of the seventeenth. But - he argues - they were getting there.

I think Restall's right. David Goldenberg's Curse of Ham still holds up, on the Mediterranean nations' template on racial theory, prior to Darwin. Spaniards were a beleaguered minority in Mesoamerica; they tended to stick together, and to see the rest as outsiders. It was natural that the Spaniards abroad would categorise Native Americans as alien.

Europeans before modern science have vacillated between seeing these continents as "the fourth part of the world", and as an extension of transIndian Asia; some have thought the "Indios" were tribes of Israel. For our purposes, we care only about Conquistador rhetoric. I notice that the Conquistadors didn't invoke "Ham". Instead, I notice that "Sodom" crops up. If a Christian (or Muslim) invokes that, it is like a Jew invoking Amaleq.

The Spaniards did see all the New World natives as a different race, they did destroy Mesoamerican civilisation, and they did murder many natives in the process (along with kidnap and rape).