Category: Michael

I love maps. I love writing about them. I love rescuing them. I love reading about them on the internet. I love to look at them hanging on walls. I love to touch them, to trace imagined journeys by fingertip — sliding a digit over the Alps to Innsbruck, along the high passes of the Pamirs searching for the Polos, along branches of tributaries of feeders of the Amazon. Maps can be extravagant works of art or a torture device when employed for quizzing geographical knowledge of my students. At some point, I decided that every class I teach will feature a map quiz about three weeks into a typical semester, graded generously but thoroughly. My map quizzes are simple enough, but perhaps unlike what my students have previously experienced or imagined.

The typical map quiz amounts to remembering coordinates on an atypical graph. The students are given a pre-drawn map, sometimes reproduced at a detail they could never recreate themselves — this reinforces the incorrect notion that maps have left the realm of the human for the rarefied air of computers and superhuman accuracy. Maps, like history for these students, is settled, figured out, finished–those who work with them are merely cataloging and describing. I might be completely wrong in my characterization, but it still inspired me to give a different kind of map quiz, with so far pleasing results.

For my map quizzes, the semester begins with a study map provided to the students. Some ignore the study map entirely, naturally. But on the day of the map quiz, my students receive a blank piece of paper. Blank, clean, white, perfect and without blemish. No guiding hand, no prefabricated coastlines or political divisions. Upon that canvas they recreate a specific historical map, without borders, placing rivers, mountains, cities, and certain geographic features central to the topic of that particular class. I do not know if my students are acquiring anything something that can be measured in the dreaded genre of learning outcomes. That was not my goal, but I understand such an exercise could be quantified by others.

Do you also want to get deeper into maps… without closing your internet browser? I recommend starting an account at David Rumsey’s Map Collection. You might enjoy such sites as Adventures in Mapping or Strange Maps. But the best way to scratch that itch is to try your hand at map-making yourself, either on paper or digitally. The more time you spend with maps, the greater amount of their intrinsic value you can see.

There are things about maps I dislike. As a scholar and a historian, specifically, I dislike that most maps have no scholarly apparatus, meaning that they rarely include a proverbial trail of breadcrumbs for me to follow the academic path taken by the map maker. Which books or accounts were used, which other maps were consulted, how did they come down on one side or the other of the many decisions made? Similarly, few maps include any awareness of the temporal nature of their existence. By this I mean that they usually do not announce what date they pretend to represent or, which is worse, they include a historic date to mark why certain areas have been highlighted without attempting to show how physical features may have changed. For example, most historical study maps of the Crusades or the Mongol Invasion or the Spanish Conquest or the Industrial Revolution simply use modern, up-to-date base maps for the image of the planet. Modern dams have radically changed the courses of rivers, creating and moving large bodies of water. Shorelines, deserts, forests, developed agricultural land; these are not timeless, eternal characteristics of the planet, but dynamic features. They have life-cycles and movement patterns that are both under-studied and under-represented, at least in this historian’s opinion.

In the same vein as my previous post on New World Demographics, I would also like to share another controversial historical thesis. This is also the product of my teaching, but more recently from teaching two sections of Military History to 1789 and Introduction to European History, both of which cover (however briefly) the Hunnic Invasions of Ancient Rome, specifically the fifth century in Europe at the height of the Huns under Attila. Not to bury the lede: my hypothesis is that Attila the Hun’s most famous campaign (the sack and pillage of what-is-now France in 451 CE) was not the work of Huns, but more likely of Goths, Franks, or other Germanic tribes.

The Sources

I enjoy teaching history because I enjoy teaching my students that they have no control over what elements of the modern day world will remain in 500 or 1500 years to teach the future about our complicated lives. To be clear, even those works we consider histories were generally not written by authors imagining that their words would become the definitive story of their times. This is particularly true of our main sources for today’s discussion: Jordanes and Priscus. But I am getting ahead of myself.

In this case, our classical understanding of history is sadly lacking in source material, leaving us with only a handful of authors to interrogate and understand as historians. Reflecting the near total historical ignorance of the day-to-day facts of this age, there are only educated guesses for the lifespans and biographies of these authors:

1. Sozomen (Sozomenos, c. 400-450)
2. Priscus (Priskos, c. 410s-after 472 CE)
3. Jordanes (c. 500s – after 551 CE)
4. Cassiodorus (c. 485 – c. 585)
5. Procopius (c. 500 – c. 554)

First, I should introduce the sources and explain their use to us in understanding Attila the Hun and his place in history.

1. Beginning with Sozomen, his work is notable for the fact that his second volume of his Ecclesiastical History came out during the period of Hunnic tributes, treaties, and threatened invasions in the 440s. This work was dedicated to Theodosius II, the same emperor of Rome also oversaw the construction of the so-called Theodosian Walls of Constantinople between 412 and 414. The existence of his work alone is interesting evidence of the relative importance of the Huns and Goths, since they make no meaningful appearance in his history.
2. Our nearly sole contemporary source on Attila comes from Priscus. The other sources that make some contemporary mention of the raids of Attila (into ancient Italy, not ancient France) appear in Prosper and Hydatius. Priscus, unlike his contemporaries, personally met Huns and in 448/449 took part in the embassy of the Emperor Theodosius to Attila and described a complicated individual prone to rage, but also to extreme tenderness with his children. Moreover, this embassy was quoted directly and thus corroborated in Jordanes (and presumably in Cassiodorus). Priscus reported finding Romans living peacefully among the Huns, married and happy to outside the corrupt and burdensome tax system of the empire. There he also met with the general and de facto ruler of the Western Empire, Flavius Aetius (391-454), whom Procopius called “the last of the Romans,” in a nod to similar compliments paid to Brutus and Valens by earlier historians.
3. Jordanes is a horse of a completely different color, giving us both the most complete, and yet least reliable, version of the events of the 440s-450s, including the campaigns of the various Gothic tribes and Attila with his Huns. Jordanes was a propagandist for his emperor Justinian and generally wrote positively of the imperial system represented by strong emperors like Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian. A key paradox of Jordanes’ work is the paradox between his endless appreciation and praise for the Goths alongside their constant revolts against the Empire during the course of their history. In the work, Jordanes stated his intention to explain the origins and histories of the Goths to explain the extremely complex geopolitical situation of the mid-500s. A central episode of this history is the period leading up to Attila’s invasion of Gaul in 451 at the head of a subject Ostrogoth army, forced to retreat by a Roman-Visigoth alliance.
4. Jordanes, however, is a notoriously unreliable source on Attila, considering both his distance in time from the material and the fact that his history was actually a short abridgment of Cassiodorus. Nothing more of his Getica (History of the Goths) survives, but it should be noted that Cassiodorus had a connection with (and possible bias towards) the family of Aetius, Attila’s primary opponent in the text. In addition to Cassiodorus, there are brief mentions of the wars of Attila (again, centered on the Italian peninsula, not Gaul) in the surviving work of Procopius on the military and political exploits of his patron, the Emperor Justinian, The Book of the Wars. Procopius tends to be more well-known for its salacious counter-part, the Anecdota, or so-called Secret History, a collection of palace intrigues and sexual adventures (including the tale of the Empress’ private areas, a trained goose, and kernels of grain) that historians have long debated over.
5. Finally, there are a wide variety of flavorful legends (like the Nibelungenleid), saints’ lives (hagiographies), and folklore which cannot be reliably dated within centuries of the events. In other words, they more likely represent the reputation that the Huns enjoyed in the Medieval period as the scourges of God.

The Standard Story of Attila the Hun

Jordanes, Procopius, and Priscus are generally combined to produce a coherent narrative, with caveats that their works are of uneven quality, uneven reliability, and uneven importance to the history of Attila and the Huns. Jordanes dedicates the most attention (of the surviving material) to the Huns, though Procopius takes pride of place as the official court historian of the era and the work of Priscus (such as survives) stands out as the only evidence of eye-witness testimony regarding Attila and his lifestyle. Jordanes, in epitomizing Cassiodorus, was satisfied by extremely high-level, big-picture narrative for much of his history of the Goths, but devoted singular attention and detail to the campaigns against Attila and the career of his chief Roman opponent, the consul and de facto ruler of the Western Empire, Aetius. Procopius, for his part, mentions Attila briefly in the third book of his multi-volume History of the Wars, specifically the first volume dedicated to the Roman wars with the Vandals (who sacked Rome within a decade of Attila’s own march into the Italian peninsula). Procopius explains that Attila’s invasion of Italy occurred as a result of the Roman execution of Aetius, contradicting Jordanes, who places Aetius in charge of the defense, specifically of the Hun siege of Aquileia. Procopius passes on the unlikely story that the Huns only took the city after a wall fell down of its own accord, which Attila predicted after seeing a stork abandon its nest in the wall the previous day.

Briefly, here is the current rendition of Attila’s campaign into modern-day France as given in Wikipedia. It represents an eclectic blend of source material, including exceedingly unlikely legends and hagiographies of local saints credited with using divine aid to turn aside the Huns from this or that city.

In 450, Attila proclaimed his intent to attack the Visigoth kingdom of Toulouse by making an alliance with Emperor Valentinian III. He had previously been on good terms with the Western Roman Empire and its influential general Flavius Aëtius. Aëtius had spent a brief exile among the Huns in 433, and the troops that Attila provided against the Goths and Bagaudae had helped earn him the largely honorary title of magister militum in the west. The gifts and diplomatic efforts of Geiseric, who opposed and feared the Visigoths, may also have influenced Attila’s plans.
Attila interfered in a succession struggle after the death of a Frankish ruler. Attila supported the elder son, while Aëtius supported the younger. (The location and identity of these kings is not known and subject to conjecture.) Attila gathered his vassals and began his march west. In 451, he arrived in Belgica with an army exaggerated by Jordanes to half a million strong. On April 7, he captured Metz. Other cities attacked can be determined by the hagiographies written to commemorate their bishops: Nicasius was slaughtered before the altar of his church in Rheims; Servatus is alleged to have saved Tongeren with his prayers, as Saint Genevieve is said to have saved Paris.
Aëtius moved to oppose Attila [and his] combined armies reached Orléans ahead of Attila, thus checking and turning back the Hunnish advance. Aëtius gave chase and caught the Huns at a place usually assumed to be near Catalaunum. Attila decided to fight the Romans on plains where he could use his cavalry.
The two armies clashed in the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, the outcome of which is commonly considered to be a strategic victory for the Visigothic-Roman alliance. Theodoric was killed in the fighting, and Aëtius failed to press his advantage [against the retreating Attila].

Interrogating the Sources

Before we come to my argument, I will lay out the problems as understood by the consensus of historians. These are difficult to order, so I will be brief. Procopius gives no detail regarding the territory invaded by Attila, so that it might only refer to his campaigns in southeastern Europe in the 440s with “Scythians and Massagetae,” most likely meaning different tribes of pastoral nomads of the steppe. Aetius, according to Procopius, had earned the jealousy and mistrust of his peers by “conquering” Attila — where, when, or how is unclear. This leads to the execution of Aetius and the Hunnic invasion of the Italian peninsula and the annihilation of Aquileia after the unforeseen collapse of one of its walls… and that is all Procopius has to say about Attila.

Jordanes has the most to say about Attila, but how much of this comes from his summarizing Cassiodorus and how much from other sources (or his own imagination) no one can say. First appearing in chapter 34 of book two, Attila is described as the most famous man of the age and practically the single ruler of all the people of Scythia, which I understand to mean ‘all the nomads of the steppe.’ Jordanes than quotes from Priscus on the countryside leading to the encampment of Attila in modern Hungary and his palace within a wooden palisade. Leaving Priscus behind, Jordanes informs the reader of Attila’s intense, terrifying personality and characteristics and the fact that he “was born into the world to shake the nations.” Attila had taken this position through the finding and wielding of a sword sacred to all the Scythians and long believed lost.

Attila, in the mind of Jordanes, longed to conquer “the greatest nations” of the time, apparently meaning Rome and, less convincingly, the Visigoths. He sought this through palace intrigues, letters, flattery, and threats to sow discord between the Romans and the Visigoths – but his efforts failed. Instead, he incited war between his own army and that of the Visigoths and Romans. Of note here are their ‘vassals:’ the Romans had on their side the Franks, Sarmatians, Burgundians, Saxons, and other assorted Celtic and Germanic nationes.

Attila opposed this union and gave battle at the Catalaunian Plains, a flat space measuring more than 100 miles long… but Jordanes gives no details of any raiding or other looting of Roman Gaul. We are told that Attila arrived to Orleans because the Alan chieftain ruling agreed to surrender the city to Attila, but this was opposed by the Roman-Visigoth armies, who quickly raised a defense. Attila arrived, saw the earthworks, and asked his soothsayers the likely outcome of battle… it would go poorly for the Huns, but at least the enemy commander would die.

Jordanes gives extreme detail to the battle following: a long afternoon and evening of hand-to-hand combat, swords and spears, with no mention of cavalry or archery. Jordanes tells us it was the single greatest battle in history, some 165,000 dead (CLXV milia), rivers of blood, and the King of the Visigoths died as foretold to Attila. The combat could have led to the total destruction of the Huns, according to Jordanes, but instead Aetius pulled back his Goths for fear that they would go on to overwhelm Rome once they had destroyed their chief foe.

After the battle (when or from where is unclear in Jordanes), Attila moved his army “forward to attack the Romans,” but whom were they attacking in Orleans? Jordanes describes the invasion of northern Italy, the miraculous collapse of the wall of Aquileia, and the sacking of Milan and Pavia. The Hunnic commanders convinced Attila that Rome was a poison pill best left untouched and, while Attila was torn over whether or not to march on Rome, Pope Leo I emerged from the city to talk. He agreed to leave and return over the Danube, but that they should send Honoria, the sister of the Emperor, to him as a bride. And so Jordanes informs us that the entire Italian invasion was the fault of Honoria, who had sent secret messengers to Attila requesting his hand in marriage and the Western Empire as her dowry.

My Argument

My argument is predicated on some important and widely accepted assumptions. Namely, that the Huns of Attila were a branch of a much larger population of pastoral nomads across Eurasia, including the Hephthalites of Central Asia and the Xiongnu in northeast Asia. The archaeological record shows a pastoral nomadic culture with many unifying characteristics. Another assumption is that pastoral nomadism has traditionally been devalued, misunderstood, and demonized as savage, brutal, uncivilized, and indistinguishable from ancient hunter-gatherers. 

I am not alone in my disbelief of the Hunnic invasion of Gaul. However, I feel as though I can speak intelligently as someone more familiar with pastoral nomadism, the history of the nomads of late antiquity (namely the “greater Hun family” of Huns, Hephthalites, and Xiongnu), and the historical trend to cast aspersions and doubts on nomads in defense of sedentary farmers and ‘honest’ forest-dwellers like the Franks, Burgundians, and (to some extant) Goths.

Making maps to visualize geopolitical trends in history is fraught with difficulty, but they also offer an excellent, easy-to-grasp support for my argument. If we were to compare two maps of Europe, one showing roughly 400 CE and the other 500 CE, we would notice some interesting points.

• Europe in 500 CE (Wikipedia map)
• Europe in 400 CE (Wikipedia map)

Modern-day France, an area previously part of the Roman Empire had, by 500 CE, become the domain of Franks and Burgundians, two Germanic tribes of the ancient world. Something, the reader will understand, occurred in the 400s. Migration, or Invasion, westward by the Franks and Burgundians, not the Huns.

However, as we have seen, the standard story is different. The invasion of Gaul (modern-day France) that  history preserves is that of Attila, the Huns, and their Ostrogoth Allies against a combined Roman-Visigoth army. Jordanes, summarizing a now-lost work, lays out the history as one most important for what it reveals about Gothic intrigues. Attila offers a glorious speech, but the weight of the battle rests in its colossal loss of life, the heroism of Gothic valor, and the ultimate defense of the Empire thanks to Gothic sacrifice. However, if we compare the stories and critique the source material, we come away with a very different image. For example, if I compare one of the standard maps of the Hunnic invasion of Gaul with one reflecting only that information coming from (the weakest) of our historical sources, the difference is striking.

Nothing about the military campaign of Attila in Gaul sounds plausible to me. Jordanes lavishes detail on the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, devoting attention that he gives nowhere else in his summary. If the Huns made military actions similar to their other actions in the Eastern Empire (and fitting with our archaeological and anthropological understanding of the militaries of pastoral nomads), Jordanes would likely have remarked on the mass of cavalry, the reliance on horseback archers, and the general lack of spears, swords, and shields. Instead we read about a “typical” war between Germanic tribes, two gigantic blocks of heroes meeting in battle, swarming up and over hilltops, and a colossal (and reciprocal) loss of life. This version allows a great deal of flexibility to Goths like Jordanes and his Frankish and Burgundian readers; flexibility to blame the despoiling and desecration of the early Christian sites in Gaul on a foreign invader. Priscus, the fragment of whose work stands alone in reliability as a first-hand account, makes no mention of how the Huns fought their wars — but does mention gold-adorned weapons and horse tack like that found in the archaeological discoveries of the era. All of this is to say that the available evidence corroborates Priscus — but quite the opposite is true for Jordanes.

I will close with the dismissal of this campaign by the “father of military history,” Hans Delbruck. He found laughable the numbers quoted by the sources (Jordanes suggested Attila had 500,000 men, whom Delbruck considered to be principally, if not entirely, Germanic tribesmen; Delbruck also noted Paul the Deacon‘s 8th century estimate that Attila’s army consisted of a ridiculous 700,000 Huns). He noted in one lecture that the wars of the 1800s, with the aid of railways and telegraphs, were unable to repeat Attila’s efforts in moving similar quantities of men and horseflesh from the middle Danube into central France. The modern science of logistics and military supply offered compelling evidence against the already unreliable source material for Delbruck, and I concur.

Sources Cited

• Jordanes, Getica, part II, edited by Theedrich Yeat
• Hans Delbruck, Numbers in History
• Hans Delbruck, The Barbarian Invasions (University of Nebraska Press, 1990)
• Priscus at the court of Attila, translated by J. B. Bury
• Procopius, History of the Wars, translated by H. B. Dewing
• R. W. Burgess, “A New Reading for Hydatius “Chronicle” 177 and the Defeat of the Huns in Italy,” Phoenix 42, no. 4 (1988): 357-363.
• Conor Whately, “Jordanes, the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains, and Constantinople” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 8, no. 1 (2013): 65-78.

Lighter Reading on Attila

• Mike Dash (for Smithsonian.com), “Nice Things to Say about Attila the Hun“
• John Walker (for Warfare History Network), “Attila’s Stinging Defeat”

The crux of this post will be to introduce a new topic for this blog; the History of Pirates, Bandits, and Brigands. As a professor of world history, I have found success in teaching a survey course of such outsiders and supposedly unethical persons throughout history, from the Sea Peoples of the Late Bronze Age to the operatives of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State today. My particular fascination is with the so-called Early Modern period (ca. 1500 CE to the early 1800s), which means focusing on the piracy of the Mediterranean (Knights of Malta and Barbary Corsairs) and that of the Spanish Main before and during the so-called Golden Age of Piracy.

If one defines a pirate by their actions instead of their Golden-Age appearance, the potential group grows much larger. Pirates operate mostly by intimidation and hostage-taking for ransom, which allows historians to collectively compare the actions of early-twenty-first-century Somali fishermen and Niger river delta oil workers, eighteenth-century ex-Navy sailors in the Caribbean, early-twentieth-century Hong Kong fisherman, sixteenth-century corsairs sailing under the flag of Malta, and so on. (Note: the odd ones out from this group are the Buccaneers of the Caribbean dominant in the middle seventeenth century, though their name lived on to describe unrelated populations.)

Yet for many, a pirate is easier to define by their looks than by their deeds. This is easy enough to explain: we’ve all seen people dressed as pirates, but few if any of us have seen people living the lifestyle of pirates. Pirates in the movies, for example, are quite successful at looking like what we expect pirates to look like… but fail spectacularly at behaving like the pirates described by their contemporary observers (whether in 1700s Caribbean or 1930s Hong Kong).

To reiterate, the overwhelming of pirates throughout history did not look remotely like the pirates we see in the movies: parrots and peg-legs, eye-patches and bi-corner hats, flying a jolly roger and shouting, “Arrrr, matey!”

The how and why of this specific dominant media type help illuminate general trends in our culture and the way we write history. To be quite explicit, I argue that:

the Caribbean in the early 1700s became the Golden Age specifically because those pirates spoke English, looked like the majority population of the Caucasian West (USA, Europe, and her colonies), and threatened European colonial targets.

Piracy as a way-of-life is both ephemeral and eternal. While few pirate populations have lasted more than a generation or two, it is a lifestyle that re-emerges fully formed each time it has been supposedly wiped out. Partly this is due to the illusion that state violence or legal action are effective means of ending piracy. Piracy is a lifestyle — when it no longer provides for its practitioners, it dies off quickly… only to pop up again when it offers an attractive alternative to the desperate and marginalized in society.

One of the foremost historians of Golden Age piracy is Marcus Rediker, currently at the University of Pittsburgh and author of several books on the topic, including Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. It is a book I know well from using to teach my History of Pirates, Bandits, and Brigands course in the past. He and other scholars have shown how the poorly-cared-for but highly-trained population of the European Navies emerged from the end of each in abject poverty with an attractive set of skills. It was this lack of compensation that might explain their easy transfer into lives of ocean-going brigandage. One modern analog would be the rise of computer hackers, often under-paid, under-appreciated teenagers and young adults with skills in a technology economy that continues to privilege seniority over ability. Another modern analogy would be the fishermen of Somalia pushed out of their traditional profession by foreign incursion into their coasts, yet with the boat-handling skills to turn to professional kidnapping-for-ransom.

Introduction

I want to talk about teaching history using Wikipedia, but not in the way I believe the average person would expect (and worry about). First I should explain the context in which I developed this new project, this new pedagogical exercise.

My professional career teaching outside of my graduate institution only began in the spring of 2016. Since then I have taught a handful of courses (at Albion College and Roanoke College) while finishing my dissertation.

I do not yet have a permanent position. There are many names for this kind of position and its problems have been more closely discussed in other places, but I should recognize upfront that these are the musings of an adjunct professor, a member of the so-called contingent faculty. This group of people represent a large and growing percentage of educators at institutions of higher learning in the United States. One of the strengths of the contingent faculty is the focus on novel and energy-saving teaching techniques, particularly in those situations where one professor is lecturing at multiple institutions (as I will be, starting this autumn).

With that disclaimer in mind, I would like to share a teaching exercise that I have found great success with in several courses so far in my early career. In a nutshell, I introduce students to the nuts-and-bolts of history research, particularly in using terms like “primary” versus “secondary” source. In my course, I try to explain to them how the same source can be considered primary, secondary, or even tertiary — all depending on the kind of work we expect that source to do for us. By work, I mean, what kinds of questions are we hoping this source will answer for us.

Past Experiences

I have been able to use this Wikipedia class project in several different settings, including its maiden voyage in a “standard” undergraduate Russian History course (Peter I to Putin), its second turnout in a Freshman-oriented History of Travel (Marco Polo’s Description of the World and Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley), its third run in a Freshman-oriental History of Pirates and Bandits, and most recently in an intensive eight-week History of Kazakhstan at Nazarbayev University in Astana. The focal point of this project seems as fungible as one needs it to be, considering that the medium of instruction boasts so many millions of articles in so many of the world’s written languages.

In its first case, I divided my students into groups, having each of them read a section from the Wikipedia article on the Crimean War. The twist here was that each group read the article as written in a different language, though each was provided in English translation. Perhaps the benefit of a graduate career in graduate studies, I am not afraid to make use of the 1-year courses I took in “Reading German,” for example, knowing that with a dictionary, good-will, and a dose of machine translation (always from multiple sources), I produce adequately accurate renditions of the article from German, French, Russian, Turkish, Spanish, Serbian, etc. These articles discuss roughly the same terms in relatively dry, scientific language. I would not do this same assignment to have students compare different translations of a work of prose, each somehow rendered into English by me.

In their groups, I have the students individually boil down their selection into a single sentence, ideally fewer than seventy words. This sentence should include the definite ‘facts’ most relevant to the article, the where, when, how, who, and why of the topic. In their groups they hammer these out together, comparing their individual sentences to determine the meat of the reading.

The fun begins when I then have each group pronounce the facts of the matter to the class, writing each for everyone to see. “Huh, why don’t they agree on when the war started? Or what it should be called? Or what caused it? Or where the most important battles were fought?”

When possible, we dive deeper into the works of Wikipedia, discussing how much of the content is actually not anonymous and how many of the “Wikipedians” maintain and update author “about” pages. We consider edit histories, the longevity of different controversial sections of the page, and the heated discussions on certain contentious “talk” pages.

In the history of travel, we compared articles about Marco Polo in English, Spanish, German, and Russian. In the history of piracy, we considered the intimate connections and interesting discrepancies among the articles (particularly across English, Spanish, German, and French) on “piracy,” “buccaneers,” and “filibusters.”

What I Want To Do

I seem to harbor limitless curiosity in the study of nationalism, national identity, and the myths surrounding imagined communities. For me, Wikipedia offers an immense corpus of material written “internationally,” at least at first blush. The articles are linked together, suggesting parity and perfect agreement. Many students (and I assume most people) do not give a second glance to the list of languages that appears in the left sidebar. Surely they are simple translations of this same material?

Then I ask them the question: if you wanted to write a Wikipedia article on the French Revolution, would you think it sufficient to read the French language article and simply translate it, word-for-word? There are thousands of books available in English on this topic — can we not make use of some of them? Can this explain why we tend to see completely different sources listed at the bottoms of different language renditions of the (nearly) same content?

The specter of nationalism is difficult to pin down, no doubt. Is nationalism always a bad word? Should we prefer to same something more vague, like patriotism? In the case of the English language, one struggles to pin down which articles are ‘owned’ by which language, though there seem to be some clear winners. Articles on the American Civil War, for example, are unlikely to draw spirited editors from New Zealand. Similarly, I doubt to find many Wikipedians from Virginia actively involved in the discussion of Maori political units. The Crimean War article I assigned to my students, for example, maintained the occasional British turn-of-phrase. How could it not, sitting so closely to the Charge of the Light Brigade?

Importance for the field?

I am not certain that this is an assignment that any teacher should attempt without first doing it themselves. In all seriousness, knowing the ins-and-outs of Wikipedia, the coding, the esprit de corps of Wikipedians — these might very well be prerequisites to attempting this in class. However, I do think that a solid weekend or week of preparation would be enough time to ready a trial run.

Each time this assignment has come around in the semester, I have been even more excited than the previous time. Each time it has been “my own” class, doing something new and unique — it is a thrilling feeling to realize that your students are completely out of their element, being asked to do something they have never been asked to do before. It feels so wrong to many of them — the most common comment went something like, “but we’re told to never use Wikipedia!?”

And that was the best moment for me.

Wikipedia is a tertiary source for the study of history — but it is a primary source for the study of identity, nationalism, historiography, and many other topics. I can only articulate my excitement here in terms of my own discipline, my own field, but I wonder aloud just how far this might stretch.

I will continue to articulate this idea into teaching practice. I think this coming semester I will present at my college’s “faculty development” conferences — and I do believe that there is something here to meaningfully share with the American Historical Association. I am writing on this blog to gather these thoughts — but also to date for myself that I began this practice in the spring of 2016. Already I have learned so much from these assignments. Could I design an entire course around using Wikipedia to study identity and historiography? I think so.

Following an introduction to the idea that we actually have no genetic relationship with many of our direct ancestors, we will consider what this means for the promise from genetic-testing companies of finding your “ethnic heritage.”

Imagine that you are on a theater stage, like the one pictured. You are standing in a theater modeled after the Greek and Roman amphitheaters that survive as ruins across the Mediterranean. There is stadium seating for your audience, so that each rank away from the stage is placed about a foot or two above the preceding. Because the amphitheater stretches up and away from you in a rounded bowl shape, each row from the stage has more seats than the one before it.

The first rank of the audience is very unique to you: it seats only your mom and dad. To be more specific, it is your biological father and your biological mother. They have the entire front row to themselves, but stretching back behind them the rows become ever more crowded.

Behind your parents are their parents, in the second row back from the stage. In the third row back from the stage, as you might have guessed, sit their parents– your eight great-grand-parents gathered to see you perform. In the fourth row back sit their parents — your sixteen great-great-grandparents, possibly somewhat confused as to what the fuss is all about.

If we stop there, we can make some observations about your relationships, genetic and otherwise. For starters, there are no siblings present, no step- or half-parents or siblings. Here we see only the most strictly defined idea of parentage. What’s more, we can be fairly certain (to a degree approaching, but not quite, 100% certainty) that you share some human-specific genetic material in common with everyone in the first four rows.

Moving back in the amphitheater, let your gaze move beyond the crowd closest to the stage. In the fifth row sit the parents of your sixteen great-great-grandparents, your thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents. Here we can see a new class of audience members; from this point on, you will find fewer and fewer relatives that have left a trace in your personal DNA. And back and back the amphitheater stretches, each row with double the number of ancestors, reaching a maximum of around two or three million unique ancestors before the population shrinks down to our common ancestors — the first modern humans.

So your ancestors are not related to you? They are, and they are not. They are related to you genealogically, but not necessarily genetically. You exist because they existed (and had children who did the same). They are your direct ancestors, directly above you on your family tree. They are a part of your family. But, still, their human-specific DNA can easily be absent from your own.

To think precisely, we need precise terminology. The terms “gene” and “genetics” can mislead. For example, it is incorrect to say that “we get fifty percent of our genes from each parent” because we actually receive one hundred percent from each parent. Each human being has the same genetic code, after all. This is why mapping “the human genome” is useful — each of us has the same genes. What is individual to each person is the system of alleles.

Exactly fifty percent of your alleles come from your mother, and the other fifty from your father. Put another way, fifty percent of your alleles come from your mother’s family, and fifty percent from your father’s family. Your mother and father in turn received fifty percent from each of their parents… This leads us to incorrectly assume that we receive twenty-five percent from each grandparent, twelve-and-a-half from each great-grandparent, and so on. In reality, however, when you have a child, you are not passing on exactly half of your mother and half of your father! Your DNA is not an even four-way split between your grandparents.

Why? Because when you received your fifty percent of your alleles from your mother,  it was not evenly divided between her mom and dad. In other words, in the act of sexual reproduction, half of your genes come from your father and half from your mother, but that half is determined by that specific egg or that specific sperm. For example, each egg is genetically distinct, a different combination of alleles from your mother’s mother and your mother’s father. Each egg was created differently through the act of recombination.

One of the logical results of this variation in the genetic material we receive from our parents is counter-intuitive and very surprising – so I will underline it. 

There is a low, but non-zero, chance that one parent gave you the alleles from only one of their parents and not-a-one from the other… making you unrelated to one of your grandparents!

In other words, you are not equally genetically related to each of your four grandparents. It is possible, even statistically likely, that you are barely related to one or more of your great-grandparents. Once we get beyond that into great-great-grandparents, it becomes statistically unlikely that you share genetic traits with each of them. Again, in the extreme, you may not even have such traits in common with one of your parent’s parents!

This is much more common than most realize! Geneticists estimate that once in every four million births, a child has no genetic relationship with one of their grandparents. In the United States alone we might expect to find some 80 people in that situation. The likelihood increases dramatically when we only consider the alleles that we can see with the naked eye: the shape of your nose, the pattern of your freckles, the color of your eyes. Science, then, agrees with reality. How often have some cousins noticed that they share a stronger resemblance with each other than with a sibling?

The past is gone. If ethnic identity was formed in the past, how does it still hang around? Answer: because it is constantly reinvented in the present by those alive in the present.  That the past is no longer present is difficult to accept for many people. We recapture the past using many resources — memory, the written word, ruins, and legends. These sources offer glimpses of the past, with limited accuracy. In other words, the past is not a very safe place to store one’s identity.

When companies like 23andme, Ancestry.com, National Geographic, Helix.com, and MyHeritage.com offer to explain (sell?) our identities to us, we should understand the insurmountable limitations they face in doing so. This is especially important to remember considering that these companies charge a lot of money to analyze cheek-moistened Q-tips (starting around $80 and moving upward of $500, depending on the services purchased).

There are three genetic tests on offer: testing Y-chromosomal history (available only to holders of Y-chromosomes, i.e., “biologically-defined men”), testing mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), and testing your alleles, your “autosomal DNA.” The first two are very specific: Y-chromosome tests reveal only your patrilineal descent, while mtDNA only reveals your matrilineal descent. Both the Y-chromosome and the mtDNA is passed between generations with very few mutations or changes, making them useful for archaeologists and less useful for genealogists. For example, thanks to mtDNA and Y-Chromosome testing, geneticists have estimated that the most recent common ancestor for every human being on earth possibly lived only 2000 years ago.

Haplogroups refer to these two types of tests. They derive from the slow mutation of the Y-chromosome and mtDNA — changes that happen very rarely. In the case of mtDNA, scientists in one study observed an average of 1 mutation (“substitution”) per thirty-three generations, though skepticism remains because the observed rate in genetic studies is much, much slower [quoted here]. Y-chromosomes mutate considerably faster. However, both mtDNA and Y-chromosomes change much more slowly than the genome at large, which is scrambled and re-assembled every generation — so that both of these are used to signify “haplogroups” by geneticists, showing general relationships over large populations.

Genetic haplogroups are not synonymous with ethnicities, races, nationalities, religions, or other identities. 

Indeed, Y-chromosome haplogroups and mtDNA haplogroups are quite different (examples HERE and HERE) and do not add new information for the consumer of genetic testing — they largely confirm (or at least do not contradict) the Out-of-Africa hypothesis of human prehistory.

It is the third test that allows people to find more recent relationships and connections with “ethnic identity.” Unfortunately, such tests are limited to the above percentages — what do you do with the fact that so many of your recent ancestors (some of whom lived only 100 or 200 years ago) are not even present in your DNA? Ancestry.com divided the world up into 26 ethnic/genetic provinces, each determined by small samples, sometimes as few as a dozen, rarely more than 100. [Quick read on this here…]

And who is representing these ethnic identities? 23andme and similar companies state that if a subject has been genetically tested and affirms that their four grandparents were from a specific location, that person today is counted as a “native” of that location. In other words, when your genetic results claim that you are 57% Northern European, they mean that your markers have so much in common with the people currently living there… but again, what about their own genetic heritage? They, too, have many in their past whose DNA is absent from the present.

The fact is that the computer analyzing your DNA does not spit out your “identity,” but rather a long string of numbers and letters. This string is in turn analyzed by an algorithm searching for matches in a growing (but finite) database. That matched information is then sent on to a human being to interpret — and this is key. Should you send the same DNA to multiple testing sites, you will find different ethnic backgrounds! For more information on the process of interpretation, see this website. How does this happen?

Simple answer: because ethnicity is not based on science. Science can measure and explain the chemical makeup of your DNA, but it cannot (should not?) measure and explain your genealogical, “ethnic” identity. And much of this science-and-identity is unfortunately filtered through profit-driven companies, to boot…

So, can you tell your ethnic identity from a DNA test? No, not the way you think it can…

If you would like to read examples of the kind of literature I am criticizing in this article, you will find links in this paragraph. Works suggesting that genetics support or prove ethnic identity are commonplace, but I argue they are misleading at best and nationalistic hate-speech at worst. There are, sadly, more iterations of this argument than I can count: you can start HereHereHereHere or Here – and of course the options increase if we search outside the body of English language materials.

As the result of teaching many years of introductory college history courses, I have tried to keep fresh in the literature. In teaching this course, I have begun to think that the history of Native Americans in the United States is missing a very important conclusion from the data: that our understanding of “tribal society” represents not an age-old practice, but rather the recently produced consequences of massive die-off and the disappearance of a larger, less scattered, and in some cases decidedly urban population.

Similar to other professors of history, I teach a class called Western Civilization stretching in one semester from ancient times up to the year 1500 and the arrival of Columbus on the fringes of the New World. However, rather than stop dead in our tracks, we spend the last two lectures discussing the reputation and legacy of Columbus through the lawsuits his family endured to protect their rights to their inheritance, and putting the Black Death (covered earlier in the semester) in context by comparing it with the much larger loss of life in the centuries after the arrival of the Europeans to the Americas.

I am particularly interested in the career of Hernando de Soto (c. 1495-1542), who wandered the southern North American continent for several years with a pillaging army before he died of a fever.

Their accounts of densely populated areas were considered wildly inaccurate when Europeans came again to the same areas more than a century later.  This offers an enticing glimpse into the surviving descendants of the inhabitants of Cahokia and the broader Mississippian urban culture of the centuries prior to 1500.  While Soto found a large population still living in the area, there is also the possibility that some, maybe most, of the inhabitants of the cities of and around Cahokia where those mentioned in the origins of the Aztecs, coming from the fabled Aztlan (Aztec, in the Nahuatl language, has been rendered into English as “people from Aztlan”).

Having drawn these conclusions, I have looked for others who have had the time and expertise to articulate these ideas better than me. For a quick read, I recommend this piece in The Atlantic,1491. The best long-form book I have found so far is Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 by Dr. Noble David Cook, published by the Cambridge University Press in the late twentieth century. At the time it was hailed as a challenge to the traditional view that the massive loss of life could largely be blamed on the excesses and exploitation specific to Spanish (versus English or French) colonialism, an idea still widely entertained, though long since challenged by professional historians. Two valuable aspects of Dr. Cook’s book that strike me at this moment are his reliance on the contemporary source material from the sixteenth century and his detailed tracing of the history of how differently people in different eras have tried to answer one specific question: how did a handful of Europeans conquer and annihilate two massive, urbanized civilizations, the Aztecs and the Incas? The many ways in which this question has been answered have a lot to teach us. From Dr. Cook’s analysis of the contemporary material, he argued convincingly that disease arrived already with Columbus’ second voyage, much earlier than the more famously discussed small pox outbreak of 1513. The only real shortcoming of the work is specifically in the area that I have been interested in: Dr. Cook did not extend his analysis to the effects of this cluster of epidemics to the North American continent.

Allow me to hazard some specifics to flesh out my educated guess.

When Europeans moved into North America in the sixteenth century, the people they encountered were the handful of survivors of a series of epidemics causing a loss of life greater than fifty percent of the population, perhaps as high as eighty or even ninety percent. No matter the specifics, there were survivors and even examples of total village annihilation. In some parts of the continent, relatively small communities survived more intact due to their remoteness… but this same remoteness led them to be relatively unfamiliar with the larger communities from which they were estranged. These survivors banded together, struggling to make do with the new reality, its difficulties, and the loss of their earlier way of life made possible by larger populations. The growth rate of these survivor populations was relatively slow at first, but increased with the arrival of the settler populations, so that swiftly the two groups came into direct competition over the limited resources of individual areas of the continent. The later arriving Europeans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw these tribal, atomized, scattered societies and their practices and assumed their comparatively primitive lifestyle was the result of something other than massive die-offs in the sixteenth century. Due to the massive cultural loss caused by the swift destruction of 80-90% of the indigenous population, large sections of their previous history were reduced to legend, or worse, total oblivion. The indigenous, within six or eight generations, when their histories were being recorded in large numbers for the first time, weaved a tale that explained their current situation: They had always lived in the way they were living in the nineteenth century, even as some of their European observers corrected them with the earlier written accounts recorded by their distant ancestors in the seventeenth century.

I am borrowing maybe too freely from James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. Scott has argued at length about the need to re-evaluate those living in stateless areas, the “uncivilized” populations of hillbillies and mountain people so widely disregarded by urbanized, civilized populations. I, and other historians, have successfully used Scott’s arguments in places far flung from his original research area of Southeast Asia, but using them to discuss the remnants of a crumbling preColumbian culture is perhaps a bridge too far.

In terms of the loss of cultural memory, allow me to risk some analogies to ancient history. The example that I find most useful pertains to Ancient Greece and the fact that the Greeks, in two different scenarios separated by centuries, developed a written language. Centuries before Homer and the tales of Odysseus and Achilles, speakers of a language closely resembling Ancient Greek began to use an alphabet known to linguists as Linear B, which they borrowed from speakers of an older and (as-yet) undecipherable language written with an alphabet called Linear A. However, during the twelfth century before Christ, there occurred a series of calamities historians have dubbed the Bronze Age Collapse. The civilization of these pre-Homeric Greeks, the Mycenaeans, entered a decline and quickly stopped using Linear B to record their words. For centuries, no Greek language was recorded at all — a period referred to as the Greek Dark Ages, during which the historical Homer (or similar bards) composed the epic poetry many students still study in High School. Not until the eighth century before Christ do we see evidence of the Greeks writing Greek again, now in the Phoenician alphabet, supposedly with zero knowledge or understanding of these older pieces of writing.

One of the aspects of this line of questioning I find most distressing is how a descendant of one of the indigenous of this continent may read it. While I am attacking the basis of the “savage Indian” tropes, I am also calling into question the age-old defense of age-old harmony and eco-friendly tribes living “as one with nature,” the kind of saccharine depictions lampooned in Disney’s Pocahontas (1953) and to a lesser degree in the film The New World (2005). I am suggesting something attractive, I hope – true human equality, populations sharing the same sins and the same blessings, the same ability to live both ‘with nature,’ and also to shape it to one’s advantage. In this avenue of thought, I have great company, including: those studying the possibility that the Amazon rain forest is an artifact of human engineering; those looking to explain the success of the Puritan Pilgrims after 1620 by analyzing their recently diseased neighbors; and the growing body of evidence of an American ‘Silk Road’ of sorts connecting the continents north and south centuries before Columbus.

By the time President Thomas Jefferson of the young United States received a long, richly detailed letter describing vast urban ruins along the middle banks of the Mississippi river, other Europeans had long since traveled through. The mounds had long been settled by French trappers and their attendant priests and monks, the palisades of the indigenous settlements had fallen into ruin, and the local tribes were a fraction of their previous size. Unfortunately, the study of these ruins has lagged far behind that of older ruins in less population parts of the United States, and time may be running out. Some archaeologists and anthropologists have begun to connect the Cahokia complex and the larger Mississippian culture of the tenth through thirteenth centuries, but I do not know of any who have seriously suggested their downfall was related to the contemporary rise of the Aztecs in what-is-now Mexico. The rise of the Aztecs, however, seems to neatly line up with the decline of Cahokia, which anthropologists have linked to out-migration rather than massive loss of life. The image of water in the codex image posted above could represent a memory of a voyage down the Mississippi River and along the coast to what is now Mexico.

In the last forty years, the field of nomadic studies has taken great leaps forward which might allow scholars to make claims about the apparent age and origin of the nomadic societies described by European observers in the New World. It may be that what were considered timeless, nearly Biblical societies of tribal wanderers bear a only superficial resemblance with the kind of pastoral nomadism of the Old World, dependent on the livestock domestication so obviously absent from the New World prior to Columbus (with apologies to llama-herders). This does give me an idea for what I, a lowly historian of Central Asia, may have of value to bring to this richly-set academic table. The last word in this long thought-piece is that a great deal of important work is yet to be done in World History, specifically by bringing in outside perspectives and seeking (and dismissing) patterns where none have been sought before. Comparative histories of pastoral nomadic societies in the Old World set against those observed in the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is but one example of this exciting trend in World History.

I wrote this blog post for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in 2015 and with the passing of their blog, this post has no home. With the ephemeral nature of the Internet, aren’t I just delaying the inevitable?

Can the subaltern draw a map? This post attempts no answer to the question, but rather illustrates how a non-European habitat’s invisibility in modern “scientific” geography might raise the question of national or other biases in cartography.

Perhaps it goes without saying that Middle, or Central, Asia is not a region of many different ecological zones. It is vast, but not varied. Deserts, mountains, oases, rivers. The other areas can be waved into (or out of) view as man-made, built up through herculean effort with countless spades of dirt lifted from countless irrigation canals, ditches, and reservoirs. The Russian Conquest and later collectivization heralded an increase in labor rather than a true alteration of the land-economy: more and larger canals, ditches, and reservoirs.

There is one habitat that was once widespread throughout the region, stretching from Eastern Turkey through the river lowlands north of the Caspian to the Aral plains and reaching past the Ili River and other basins in the Seven Rivers region of southeastern Kazakhstan as far as the rivers of the Gobi and even to the Tarim Basin, where one may visit the Huyanglin Nature Reserve, established in 1983.

This ecological zone is called tugai. It is an important habitat for various species across Eurasia and would likely remind most CESS blog readers of a sandy jungle–short trees and thick undergrowth giving way to impenetrable reed-beds along shifting streams and bogs. Apart from a wealth of birdlife and smaller creatures, the tugai before the previous century supported a variety of wildlife, including large mammals like deer (Cervus elaphus bactrianus) and the Caspian, or Turan, tiger (Panthera tigris virgate) – all within the larger ecosystem of the desert-steppe. The prairie-dwelling saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) and the ever-present wolf (Canis lupus campestris) depended on the river- and artesian-water of the tugai. Not only the saiga and the wolf, but also the steppe-dwelling peoples were continuously drawn to Tugai. The steppe provided little useful timber, but the Tugai offered the lithe branches of willow and poplar trees useful in the construction of their bows, arrows, and felt-covered homes.

But where was the Tugai, exactly? This is not something one can point to on a map, barring in the narrow case of the aforementioned nature preserve in China. Consider this excerpt from an 1850 revision of an 1843 map — “Iran und Turan.”¹

The map is beautifully drawn, with colored borders showing both sovereign territory and “areas of control.” In the case of Khiwa (Khiva), the immediate environs are shaded yellow, with a neighboring area surrounded by a dotted-yellow-line border, illustrating the broader domains of the Khanate of Khiva.

The map uses several commonplace cartographic conventions. The geographer drew masses of closely clustered dots to show deserts, millipede-esque lines for mountain ranges, stacks of parallel lines for massifs and hills, and black lines of  varying thickness to show navigable and shallow rivers. The map includes vast blank areas, particularly in Iran and the vast steppelands from Kiev and Poltava in the West to the See Tenghiz/Bakaschnoor (Lake Balkhash) in the East. Occasionally wetlands are indicated, if large enough; such is the case for the swamps along the shores of the Caspian near Astrakhan and east of the Ural River north of Gurjew (Atyrau). Nowhere on the map, however, would one find the tugai.

The tugai was invisible, despite the fact that it remained, at the time of the map’s creation, an unbroken line of habitats. It supported tiger populations—which is to say it supported large deer populations—throughout the extent of this map, with especially dense clusters along stretches of the Caspian coast, the shores of the Aral Sea, and the river-lands of the Amu Darya.

Let us consider a more detailed map, from later in the nineteenth century. This excerpt from an 1872 atlas sends some mixed messages.

This portion of the map focuses on the southern shores of the Aral Sea and the Amu Darya delta. Following nearly the same conventions seen in the previous map, the cartographer shows hills, cliffs, rivers, and swamp-lands throughout the historic range of the tugai. Perhaps the exotic nature of the tugai prevented foreign observers from adequately explaining what they had observed, which in turn prevented the cartographers from expanding their own graphical vocabulary to include this distinct landform.

This continues more or less to the present – compare with this excerpt from a mid-20th-century map of the region, and attached legend.³ In the modern landscape, still before the desiccation of the Aral Sea, the coastal and river tugai are represented by a confusing collection of map symbols, representing marsh, sand, and salt marsh almost simultaneously.

Adding another ecological symbol to map an area so far from the centers of power may have seemed unnecessary, then and now. The few visitors to the area in the nineteenth century generally saw the tugai only from a distance, i.e., from the decks of river-going ships or from the backs of horses or camels. Has so much changed? At least in the “bad old days,” the luckiest of the exploring officers engaged in the most dangerous of sporting outings – the tiger hunt.

The Caspian tiger is extinct today.⁴ The Soviet Union made a minimal effort to preserve a small portion of habitat in arguably its least developed republic, opening the first Central Asian zapovednik (nature preserve) in the Tajik SSR in 1938, following a tiger attack. The last traces of the tiger population in Tajikistan appeared already in 1958, and the last wild Caspian tiger seen anywhere was shot in Turkey in 1970. Following preliminary studies, however, an international team of scientists is recommending re-populating the Tugai of Central Asia with Siberian (Amur) tigers.

A century ago, the desert [that is now around the Aral Sea] was known as the Reed Kingdom – a marshy delta area where the Amu Darya widened as it approached the Aral Sea. Bird life and wild boars abounded, and there were enough Aral Sea tigers that, according to Russian records, between 1886 and 1891 about 200 people were eaten by them.

Aral Sea: an environmental disaster to rival Chernobyl
https://geographical.co.uk/science-environment/aral-sea-an-environmental-disaster-to-rival-chernobyl

The feasibility study produced an astonishing map, showing the historical range of the tiger, and some of its tugai habitat.⁵ Moreover, the Amu Darya delta south of the vanished Aral Sea retains enough tugai to possibly support a new tiger population… but the suggested acreage had already been leased to the government of China for oil and gas exploration.

The study concluded by suggesting that the Seven Rivers region of Kazakhstan provides a better economic and political climate for the reintroduction of tigers, an area which also has had unconfirmed sightings of the supposedly extinct Caspian tiger.

In closing, this post may seem to offer fodder to those fighting in the trenches of modernism, Orientalism, and cultural studies. I would only add a few words of caution.  This critique of “silenced” subaltern cartographers is itself suspect, in my opinion. What is the aim of this writing if not for the advancement of science? Will an addition of a new graphical convention to cartography make any meaningful change in the understanding of east by west, or vice versa? The mapping of tugai is important and useful, but perhaps the study of the slow realization by post-Soviet scientists in recent decades of its very existence is even more useful.

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¹ Available online from https://vambery.mtak.hu/en/03.htm The website honors the famous Hungarian traveler and Anglophile Ármin Vámbery (1832-1913) and was put together in recognition of the 100th anniversary of his death. It includes a wealth of valuable archival material, including pictures, maps, and manuscripts.
³ 1959 Composite map of Siberian USSR, David Rumsey Map Collection
⁴ Cheryl Lyn Dybas. “The Once and Future Tiger: Central Asia’s “extinct” Caspian tiger and Russia’s Amur (Siberian) tiger have a past—and perhaps a future—in common.” BioScience 60, no. 11 (2010): 872-877.
⁵ https://www.wwf.ru/resources/publ/book/eng/460 Pre-feasibility Study on the Possible Restoration of the Caspian Tiger in the Amu Darya Delta. Hartmut Jungius, Yuri Chikin, Oleg Tsaruk, Olga Pereladova. 2009.

(This blog post I wrote for the Central Eurasian Studies Society in July 2015 has now become an excellent lesson in the ephemeral nature of the Internet. When I wrote it almost ten years ago it was to celebrate the availabilty of a set of maps, digitized and available from a University in Sweden… and now all of these links are dead, the maps maybe? still available.

The maps brought to Europe from Central Asia by Johan Gustaf Renat (1682-1744) in the early eighteenth century are little known outside a small circle of specialists.

The two maps, together with sketches, copies, and translations provided by Renat and others are now available to the English-speaking public, following several centuries of being nigh unreachable. Housed in the library of the University of Uppsala since June of 2010, thanks to the efforts of Professor Emeritus Staffan Rosén, the maps have been digitized in very-high resolution and researchers around the world can zoom in as far as they would like when parsing the Oirat script. The maps include over seven hundred place names, a useful source for comparing the Oirat “clear script” with its parent Mongolian script and other neighboring writing systems.

This next section assumes a linked image that no longer exists.

For example, let us examine a small snipping of a map detail from the website, with a South-Up orientation. Both the original Oirat script and the Indexing of place names in Latin script are visible: № 24 – Tashkent, № 25 – Sayram, № 26 – Syr Darya, № 27- Yasi [Turkestan], № 30 – Arys River. The two parallel lines crossing from top center to lower right represent the Syr Darya, with tributaries flowing into the river. The curved lines along the bottom and left-hand margins represent the mountains, both the western Tien Shan east of Tashkent and the Karatau mountains north of Yasi. What I find interesting about this map is that mountains are not drawn as curved or pointed lines, but by lines which seem to represent a constant elevation threshold. In other words, inside the curved borders of a mountain shape, the land rises above some set limit, for example approximately 1500 meters above sea level.

Renat’s maps have received some attention since their rediscovery in Uppsala in the late nineteenth century, mostly in Russian- and English-language studies of Central Asia. The most famous, perhaps, was the long treatment in John Baddeley’s 1919 colossal Russia, Mongolia, China, a two-volume analysis of maps and travel accounts which included valuable reproductions and overlays comparing maps with each other and with up-to-date 1919 maps. Göran Bäärnhielm of the Royal Library in Stockholm has synthesized most of the scholarship, briefly and in English, on his personal website (in English with clickable map scans) Bäärnhielm had offered one of the presentations when the Renat maps were moved to their current home in the Uppsala University Library back in 2010.

For readers of the CESS Blog who, like me, are sadly illiterate in Swedish, the road to the maps’ online home is thankfully simple. First, navigate to the Image Search (Bildsök) page of institution’s website in Swedish. Here you may type any keyword, but in this case simply using Renat’s name may be simplest. So, type “Renat” in the search box and click the Search (Sök) button. This should bring up a page of results like the example image posted here, listing the original maps (Renat 1/A and 2/B), the various copies, and a few accompanying manuscripts (e.g. Renat’s key to his № labels).

These maps are particularly useful in helping to illustrate the geographic and political landscape, as Renat’s copies included both commentary, ethnonyms, and approximate boundaries of the neighboring peoples in the region. There is much in this treasure trove that may interest the historian of “early modern” Central Asia; for example, the high degree of cartographic accuracy when compared with contemporary and even early nineteenth century European maps of the region allows one to wade into the debate of whether these maps represent an indigenous map tradition or an off-shoot of a Chinese cartographic school.

In another example, one could productively compare Russian and Jungar mineral ambitions for the region in Renat’s maps, particularly with regard to Renat’s focus on placing rumored locations of gold mines. While Peter I sent two failed expeditions to the region in the early 1700s, historians do not typically view the invasions into Western Turkestan during the reigns of Galdan Boshugtu Khan (1644-1697, r. 1670-1694/97) and Tsewang Rabtan (1643–1727, r. 1694-1727) in a similar light. But from whom did Renat learn of goldmines in Tashkent if not from his Jungar captor, and the purported author of the maps, Tsewang Rabdan?

Previously I wrote that I would use the blog for writing practice, more specifically for writing things outside the scope of my dissertation. Today I am making an exception: this is an attempt to write coherently about the subject of my next dissertation chapter. My next chapter is about the poem/song now commonly known by the title “Elim-ai,” a text closely connected with the story of the Bare Footed Flight.

Before getting to the history of the Elim-ai song, let us observe just how close this relationship was in the last century.

The Text and the Flight

Let us begin with Mukhamedzhan Tynyshpaev’s 1927 article on the Bare Footed Flight. That article included the text of the song Elim-ai with a Russian translation. Tynyshpaev included the text (see below for his version) of the poem, which he introduced: “The historical disaster remains in folk memory with the following verses.”

About fifteen years later, the poem again appeared connected with the Bare Footed Flight in the 1943 edition of the History of Kazakhstan edited by Anna Pankratova: “In the music of the 18th century, as in the literature of the same period, we see the song and melody “Qara taudyn basynan kösh keledi” (“Over the Karatau mountains come the nomads“) written about the event “Bare Footed Flight.” The music and words are full of bitterness and sorrow. They tell of the heavy oppression endured by the people.”

Some twenty years later still, now outside the academy, one finds the poem/song alongside the Flight once again in Esenberlin’s trilogy Kochevniki/Köshpendiler (The Nomads). In the 1986 edition, the song appears on page 241, supposedly a nationwide response to the tragedies suffered by the Kazakhs.

Presently, the connection is much more nationwide than Esenberlin imagined. Since 2004, every student hoping to attend university in the Republic of Kazakhstan must pass the so-called Unified National Test (ENT/ЕНТ in Russian, UBT/ҰБТ in Kazakh). The test is divided into several subjects, one of which is mandatory: the history of Kazakhstan. Thanks to this country-wide testing system, every citizen of Kazakhstan under the age of 30 knows by heart at least some details of the Bare Footed Flight. On that same test, one may have to produce the “fact” that Elim-ai was the name of a song produced by that catastrophe. Whatever the veracity of this connection, let us trace the origins of this “fact.”

The history of the Elim-ai poem/song can be traced through history to the middle of the nineteenth century. Its content, form, meaning, and associations have changed as it passed through the hands of  ethnographers, “nationalist” historians, and later Soviet-trained scholars before being enshrined in the heart of  twenty-first-century “Kazakh identity.” Following independence in 1991, the song has indeed metamorphosed into a kind of trademark of Kazakh-ness. Now (in 2014) one can stay at any of a dozen Elim-ai hotels, send one’s children to a similar number of Elim-ai nursery or music schools, cheer on the Elim-ai soccer team, enjoy a meal at an Elim-ai restaurant or cafe, or even use the Elim-ai cell-phone plan from Aktiv.

At least one reason for the popularity of the name is its meaning, though difficult to translate simply in English. Elim-ai in partial translation breaks down as “Oh, my El!” The final step of translation is the most difficult, since when one breaks open a dictionary, the word El denotes a state, a country, the homeland or fatherland, people or a people, the public, tribe, clan, a union, or more poetically an ally or friendly person.

Understanding the word El does not become easier with progressive delving into its etymology.  The Encyclopedia of Islam states that El “has undergone a wide semantic development,” from its first known occurrences in the Orkhon inscriptions of the early eighth century, whose meaning V. Thomsen explained as “empire” or, more precisely, “a people, or union of people, organized under a kagan.” We also see El used in the title Ilek Khan, possibly coming from “El-lig,” or “holding an empire.” El appears in the eleventh-century Arabic-Turkic dictionary of Maḥmūd Kāshgharī with the definition al-wilāya, or “district, territory.” Kāshgharī’s definition coincides with its use in the Ottoman Empire in place-names like Rūm-eli (“Rumelia”), meaning “territory conquered by Rome.”

So it is very difficult to conclude what, exactly, the title “Elim-ai” signifies. Soviet-era writers seem to have prematurely settled the issue, translating the song into Russian as Rodina moia, or My Motherland. However, Esenberlin’s Russian translator of Kochevniki/Köshpendiler offered the more poetic O, moi mnogostradal’nyi narod, (O, My Long-suffering People.)

History of the Text

To follow the history of this song, let us move in chronological order. The oldest identifiable text appeared in a collection published in 1885 in Orenburg, one of the administrative capitals of the Kazakh subjects of the Russian Empire. Petr Raspopov translated into Russian translation several Kazakh songs collected by Akhmet Zhantöreuly, an official within the Bukei Horde who graduated from the Officer School (Kadetskii Korpus) in Orenburg. Guessing the original Kazakh is made more difficult by the fact that Raspopov put the Russian translation into rhyming verse. Even so, as we will see, the text is clearly the progenitor of later versions:

С горы Кара-Тау идут караваны:
То, знать, перемена киргизской кочевки;
Верблюдов грузить молодых еще рано:
Нет клади на спинах, в носах нет веревки!
Тяжка нам разлука с родными, с семьею,
И жжет наши очи слеза за слезою.
И как наме назвать это время? Ужасно,
Что всякий лишь прошлое счастие знает!
Погода к тому же буранна, ненастна,
И пыль, и песок нам пути заметают.
Для нас непогодье теперь будет хуже,
Чем в зимнее время январская стужа.
В какую ж живем мы тяжелую пору!
Вернется ль когда к нам прошедшее счастье,
Все семьи в разброд, и в детях опоры
Родители больше не видят, к несчастью!
Там мать, там отец без детей остаются,
И слезы рекою все льются да льются!
Увы, сколько бедствий послал ты нам, Боже,
В гневе своем! И земля, что нам к ночи
Постель заменяет, не мягкое ложе.
Лежать ночью больно, идти днем нет мочи:
Подошвы распухли, хоть в степи и гладко.
Хотя бы плохую послал Бог лошадку!²

Raspopov gives the title as “Karatau” (cf. Karatau Mountains) with a subtitle explaining the poem refers to migrations following bad/unproductive years.

The next version of the song appears only in a 1911 book titled Түрiк, Қырғыз-қазақ һәм хандар шежiресi, which I mentioned in a previous post about Shakarim Qudaiberdiev.

“Қаратаудың басынан көш келедi,
Көшкен сайын бiр тайлақ бос келедi.
Қарындастан айрылған қиын екен,
Қара көзден мөлдiреп жас келедi.
Мына заман қай заман, қысқан заман,
Басымыздан бақ-дәулет ұшқан заман.
Шұбырғанда iзiңнен шаң борайды,
Қаңтардағы қар жауған қыстан жаман.
Мына заман қай заман, бағы заман,
Баяғыдай болар ма тағы заман.
Қарындас пен қара орын қалғаннан соң,
Көздiң жасын көл қылып ағызамын”.³

This version matches the Russian translation so closely, there can be no doubt that it is the same text. This text is the oldest version available in Kazakh. Qudaiberdiev gives the song no title, explaining that those who suffered from the Bare Footed Flight sang a song they already knew: “…және жолда айтылған қазақтың ескi өлеңi мынау…” — “…and on their way, the ancient Kazakh song they sang was this…”

Shakarim’s explanation makes it clear that the text predated the Bare Footed Flight, but the connection had been made. As we will see, the song’s adaptability to Kazakh catastrophes in the 20th century will illustrate the malleability of the song and its text.

In 1914, a poem under the name “Elim-ai” appeared in issue 52 of the journal Qazaq, written by Mir Yaqub (Mirzhaqyb) Dulatov. The poem appeared again in 1915 in a poetry collection published in Orenburg under the title “Terme.” The text of the poem in no way resembles the others,³ which isn’t so surprising considering the vagueness of the title (Oh, My Homeland!). A thorough study of the topic demands an investigation of any text under the title “Elim-ai,” but it seems we may safely dismiss this text’s possibility of describing the Bare Footed Flight.

The Text and the Music

The early Soviet era witnessed an era of renewed Russian interest in Kazakh culture, or more accurately, the problems of the lack thereof. Aleksandr Zataevich (1869-1936) was a European-oriented amateur composer from western Russia.⁴ A skilled pianist, Zataevich arrived in Orenburg in April of 1920 as part of a “concert brigade” and quickly found work teaching in a recently opened music school for the Muslim population. The Civil War was entering its final years and Orenburg soon became part of the autonomous Kirgiz (Kazakh) region of the RSFSR in October of the same year. Already in November, officials invited Zataevich to collect and publish traditional Kirgiz (Kazakh) folk songs, the results of which labor was a song collection in 1925, “1000 pesen kirgizskogo naroda” (1000 Songs of the Kirgiz (Kazakh) People). Without the aid of a recording device, musical ability with Kazakh instruments, or even a basic understanding of the Kazakh language, Zataevich collected fifteen hundred “songs” between 1920 and 1923. Particularly difficult to collect were the instrumental works played on the dombyra. Song no. 714 below showcases this excellently with an unrealistically simple and repetitive dombyra ostinato. Varvara Dernova, a Soviet musicologist who began her career with a deep analysis of Zataevich, criticized the composer-turned-ethnographer for actively “correcting” the folk music he collected with simplistic notation.

In this case, I feel confident that my own undergraduate training in music composition at Western Michigan University in combination with my own experience listening to Kazakh folk music gives me the necessary credentials to suggest that Dernova was being too kind. His notations of folk-songs are simplistic and confusing. Too often he relied on erratic time-signatures to represent the prevalent poly-rhythms while simultaneously neglecting to represent any but the most basic embellishments of the melodic line. Vernova’s dissertation rose from a study of his original research notations, from which she concluded that once Zataevich decided to highlight the “whimsical” nature of Kazakh melody, he simply excluded the tunes which did not fit that general hypothesis.

Zataevich and his work fall into the gaze of this project because he collected several songs titled “Elim-ai,” none with text attached, though each included a “vocal” line, one with dombyra accompaniment. Zataev included several pages of notes detailing the collection of the tunes and some interpretation of the un-included texts. In the case of Elim-ai, no connection is made with the Bare Footed Flight or more generally with the eighteenth century. Indeed, Zataevich explained that he collected No. 714 from a musician who explained its provenance as a tune sung by destitute Kazakhs forced to labor in the mines near Semipalatinsk in 1916.

I have transcribed Zataevich’s “Elim-ai” tunes below:

No. 444

No. 493

No. 714, with dombyra accompaniment

Not long after Zataevich published his encyclopedic magnum opus, Tynyshpaev presented his work on the Bare Footed Flight in a festscrift dedicated to V. V. Bartol’d, the orientalist then guest-lecturing in Tashkent. Tynyshpaev follows Qudaiberdiev exactly in his usage of the poem, explaining that the text relates to the Flight, but giving it neither name nor tune.

As late as the 1920s, then, the song Elim-ai and the text connected to the Bare Footed Flight remained completely separate.

In the early 1930s, the Kazakh polity had changed significantly. The Arabic script had been replaced by Latin, the borders had shifted drastically to exclude Orenburg, Omsk, and Tashkent while including Verny (Alma-Ata, today’s Almaty) and Ak Mechet (KyzylOrda, the capital of the Kazakh SSR until 1927). In 1933, the Union of Composers invited Evgenii Brusilovskii (1905-1982), a recent graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, to move to the capital Alma-Ata and teach at the Kazak Music and Drama College.

Here it is important to note the changing face of Bolshevism/Communism in the 1920s and 1930s. During the early days following the Civil War, it was impossible to predict which aspects of imperial culture were sufficiently revolutionary to remain while the bourgeois portions were liquidated. However, the “cultural” production under Stalin in the 1930s very quickly returned to the “safe” Russian Romanticism of again lionizing such icons as Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, and Glinka. In this way, instead of allowing some indigenous Kazakh artform to take center-stage, the Soviet leadership quickly explained that the lack of Kazakh operas, plays, and other European artforms was a problem with an easy solution: hire Russians to write them! The level of ignorance of Kazakh culture reached such heights that some suggested the Kazakhs had no form of musical culture prior the arrival of the Soviets in 1917!

And so, not to put too fine a point on it, Brusilovskii, armed with Zataevich’s book of “authentic” Kazakh tunes, had all the resources necessary to write hundreds of Soviet-Realist operas. Brusilovskii admitted that he was willing to work in Alma-ata particularly because of his fondness for Zataevich’s book. Temirbek Zhurgenev, the Kazakh Commissar of Education, put the question directly: “Would it be possible for you to write an opera for us based on Kazakh folk music?” Perhaps Brusilovskii should have hesitated in his answer, because after replying in the affirmative, he was given thirty days to create the music for the opera which became the centerpiece of Kazakh national culture: Qyz zhibek. This process was undoubtedly made easier by Zataevich’s work, since Brusilovskii essentially harmonized already-existent tunes before delivering them to the librettist who then set the text.

Naturally we can ask the question: were the tunes selected by Brusilovskii according to their connection with the Qyz zhibek story? And more naturally we may reply: of course not. Rather, Brusilovskii selected songs whose characteristics he felt construed the themes of the lead figures in the tale. First performed in November of 1934, the story was praised for its emphasis of the class struggle.

Brusilovskii’s second opera Zhalbyr (1935) is the point to which this essay is racing, for in this work we have the actual origin of the song/text “Elim-ai,” though ironically without a connection to the Bare Footed Flight in the plot of the opera. The plot of the opera revolves around a group of rebels struggling under tsarist labor conscription in 1916, which suggests that Brusilovskii took the idea from the note Zataevich attached to Song No. 714. I have transcribed here an excerpt from the opera showcasing the leit-motif, the theme “Elim-ai.” Notice that, though the note to No. 714 inspired the opera’s plot, the composer clearly based the motif on No. 444.

Click here to listen to the opera excerpt at NoteFlight, where you can also hear the other Elim-ai tunes.

This dissertation chapter will also approach several other problems related to Elim-ai, including its supposed authorship by the legendary figure Khozhabergen, a statement made more precarious by its unequivocal stance on the poem’s title being “Elim-ai.” As we have seen, the text did not go with this specific title until the 1930s and its inclusion in the second Russian-composed Kazakh opera.

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¹Translation:

Over the Karatau come the nomads: The Kirgiz (Kazakhs) are changing camps; The camels are still too young to load: No baggage on their backs, no ropes in their noses! Grievous the separation from loved ones and family, And our eyes burn from tear after tear. What, then, should we call this time? It is terrible, That only past happiness is on everyone’s mind. Weather more inclement than blizzards, Dust and sand will blow us away. For us this weather is even worse Than the frost-covered fields of January. What awful times we live in! How will times of past happiness return, All the families scattered, alas the parents no longer see their children as support! There mothers, there fathers without children, And there a river of tears, weeping and weeping! Alas, so many disasters you sent, God, In your wrath! And the hard earth upon which We rest replaces our soft beds. Laying at night in pain, going in the day without strength: Our soles our swollen, though the steppe is smooth. If God could give us even a poor horse!

² Translation

 “Over the Karatau come the nomads. With them comes a lonely camel. It is hard to be parted from one’s family, tears dripping from dark eyes. What kind of time is this? A crushing time, a time when all happiness and wealth is lost. The traces of our flight throws up a cloud of dust, greater than a blizzard in winter time. What kind of time is? A time of chaos, a time of panic and destruction. Leaving behind one’s family and home causes a flood of tears to flow.”

³ The untranslated text is below:

Ем таба алмай дертиңе мен ертеден,
Сол бiр қайғың өзегiмдi өртеген.
Тырп етпейсiң бас көтерiп көрпеден,
Енсең неге түстi мұнша, елiм-ай?

Өткен сағым, келер алдың бiр мұнар,
Қызылшылсың қызарғанға тым құмар.
Сақтан деген сөздi жан жоқ шын ұғар.
Жемге шапқан, қармақ құрса, елiм-ай!

Қандай едiң, қара кейiн қайрылып.
Қандай едiң, тұрсың одан айрылып.
Мүгедек боп қос қанатың майрылып.
Өксiп жаылап өгей ұлша, елiм-ай!

Мұны құр бос өлең десең, өзiң бiл.
Жұрт болмаймын өлем десең, өзiң бiл.
Не болса да көнем десең, өзiң бiл.
Босағада жүрген құлша, елiм-ай!

Түзелесiң қашан, жұртым, оңалып?
Тiл алмасаң, кетпеймiсiң жоғалып?
Қайтер едiң өткен дәурен оралып,
Жылы жүзбен мойнын бұрса, елiм-ай!?

Сол күнiңдi көрсем — менiң арманым,
Жоқтамас ем өзге тiлек қалғаным.
Сұм жүрегiм селк етпейдi жалғанын,
Бұл мiнезiң бойда тұрса, елiм-ай!

⁴ Here I follow Michael Rouland’s 2005 dissertation on Zataevich and his role in the creation of the Kazakh nation and national identity. “Music and the Making of the Kazak Nation, 1920-1936.” PhD Dissertation, Georgetown University.

Johan Gustaf Renat (1682-1744) was an amazing historical figure, a Swedish man with an uncanny skill for survival in strange environments who traveled further afield into Turko-Mongol territory than practically any other European in his generation. He has left an interesting trail of documents and traces in others’ accounts of the time, but still one must rely on conjecture and speculation to put together many of the personal details of his life.The image published with this post is a still from the 2005 Kazakhstan film “Nomad: The Warrior,” which includes a scene where Renat is demonstrating the firepower of cannons to the Jungar leader. Renat is present in two scenes in the movie. In both scenes, he makes the same sweeping motion with his sword, giving the order to fire cannons, first as a test, and later in a siege on a Kazakh city. This image makes for great cinema, but is ahistorical — there is no evidence any such artillery force under Renat fought against the Kazakhs.

The son of Jewish immigrants to Sweden, Johan at the age of 17 joined the army of King Charles XII (r. 1697-1718), ruler and head of the Swedish Empire. Renat’s tenure in the military would see the ambitions of Charles XII dashed and the end to the regional domination by the Swedish crown. Charles XII was quite young at the time — in fact, he was the same age as Renat. His youth and military skill inspired many of the elites of the age, including Voltaire, who quoted him thus:

I have resolved never to start an unjust war but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies

Charles XII, King of Sweden

The Great Northern War in which Renat fought under Charles XII came about largely because of the policies of Charles XI, the previous king of the Swedish Empire, particularly the so-called Great Reduction. In short, this angered many of the minor nobility who then worked to gather foreign powers that they might destroy the Swedish royal line and retake their lost lands and privileges. Renat would have been a member of an up-and-coming social class (the Christian-born son of Jewish converts to Christianity) with little in common with the nobility fighting Charles XII, so it is likely that his patriotism and support for the crown were born of legitimate affection.

Between joining the military in 1699 and beginning his term as a prisoner-of-war in 1709, Renat reached the rank of warrant officer with numerous battles under his belt. In 1709, however, the Russian army under Peter I handed Charles XII his greatest defeat, at Poltava, dismantling the larger part of the Swedish military machine. Renat and his fellow officers were sent to Siberian towns for the duration of their sentence as prisoners-of-war until an official cessation of hostilities between Russia and Sweden. However, the education, experiences, and Western “charisma” stood the Swedish POWs in good stead seemingly wherever they went in the Russian Empire, as many of them lived comfortably in regional towns, some reaching respected positions of academic or civil authority.

Renat’s activities, in general, are pretty much unknown. Rather, he shows up at certain events, like the defeat at Poltava in 1709. Several years later he emerges far to the east, on the Irtysh River heading south from Tobolsk, in 1716, in connection with the doomed expedition of Ivan Buchholz (1671-1741) sent by Peter I to find gold in present-day northwest China. It was on the Irtysh that Renat’s POW status changed hands, when the Jungars attacked and turned back the Buchholz expedition, returning to their capital with many prisoners, including Renat and his future wife, Brigitta Scherzenfeldt (1684-1736).

During their stay with the Jungars, the Renats were treated fairly well. This stands in stark contrast to the horrors witnessed by both during the Great Northern War between Russia and Sweden and the climactic defeat of Buchholz’s forces. Scherzenfeldt later related to an English woman living in Russia the story of her near-rape during the Jungar raid on the Buchholz camp. That story, however, served her to explain the cultural chasm between themselves and the Jungars. The Jungar ruler questioned her personally why she had so violently resisted the sexual assault and, upon hearing that such things were not accepted practice in Brigitta’s homeland, ordered that no one attempt such violence again and gifted her to a woman in his court as a lady-servant. That same woman (either a daughter or a wife) was later implicated in the poisoning-death of the Jungar ruler, but Brigitta managed to avoid the retribution of the ruler’s successor.

Renat, during the same time, claimed later to have lived quite comfortably. Russian ambassadors arriving several years into Renat’s captivity found him living in a comfortable private home with enclosed garden and a position of respect, overseeing various workshops — including artillery manufacturing, a printing press, and weaving shops — in which his wife-to-be Brigitta worked.

It was with the aid of a later Russian envoy that the Renat’s finally left the court of the Jungar ruler, taking with them an entourage of fellow servant-slaves and valuable gifts in return for their leal service to Jungar ambitions against Qing China. Among those gifts were two maps of incredible value and import — and I’ll discuss them in detail in a later post.