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Pharaonic Kingship and it’s Biblical Deconstruction

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In the ancient world, political power tends, to occupy the realm of its control with iconic and symbolic representations. This may have applied also to the period of monarchy in ancient Israel, from the times of Saul, David, and Solomon down to the fall of Jerusalem, a fact that may be gathered from the numerous prophetic invectives against idolatry. We must not confuse the Mosaic Law as it is codified in the second through the fifth books of Moses, which for us has become the core of biblical monotheism, with what prevailed as mainstream religion in Israel during the kingdom. The iconoclastic and monolatrous movement of the Torah was a matter of opposition born by the prophetic tradition from Amos and Hosea down to Jeremiah and Ezekiel and by a literate elite that finally asserted itself under king Josiah and gave rise to the first iconoclastic cleansing of official religion and the redaction of canonical scripture centered around Deuteronomy, containing a quite revolutionary conception of state and religion. This innovation on the political-theological plane did not lead to an iconic turn but to its contrary, a ban on images.
The prohibition of images occurs at the most prominent place within the Bible: as the first or second commandment of the Decalogue, together with a commentary that refers unequivocally to the political sphere:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

2 Moses

God resents the making of images as an act of defection and apostasy. The distinction between friend and foe, those who love and those who hate God and His Law, has a predominantly political meaning. Carl Schmitt even saw in this distinction the hallmark of the political in general. This may be going too far, but nobody will deny that the principle of association and dissociation has a fundamentally political significance. If God makes the question of images a criterion of friend or foe, belonging or exclusion, he gives it a political meaning. Whoever wants to belong to the community of God’s friends must abstain from any image making and image worshipping. This story is not only about the foundation of a new form of religion but also of a new form of polity built on a treaty or covenant between God and the children of Israel. This is made clear by the whole body of legislation that follows the Decalogue as well as by the story of Exodus that forms its frame. It is highly significant that this concept of divine leadership precludes the making of images. The idea of the covenant implies a conception of direct theocracy. In the same way as the idea of direct democracy, the idea of direct theocracy precludes any mediating institutions of representation. The will of God chooses Moses as interpreter, and Moses will be followed in this function by a line of prophets down to the times of Artaxerxes, but he bans from his covenant all representations because he wants to reign directly and not by representation.
The political sense of the prohibition of images is made clear at the very beginning, during the reception of the covenant at Mount Sinai, by the scene of the golden calf, which functions as a kind of primal scene of idolatry. Moses climbed on top of Mount Sinai and stayed there for 40 days.

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.”
So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.
And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

2 Moses

The people did not want to defect to other gods but to replace the vanished Moses, whom they believed dead, with a representation, an image. They wanted the calf for a leader to take over what Moses had done for them, to go ahead, represent God, and intimidate any possible enemies. Moses acted for them as a representative of God; now they needed another form of mediation and fell back on Egyptian idolatry.
Representation and mediation were the principal functions of the king in the ancient world. Covenantal law aimed at destroying any forms of mediation, to radically eclipse the figure of sacred kingship, and to establish an immediate link between God and the people.
Instead of images, the king is instructed to make a copy of the text of the Torah and to learn it by heart so that his royal activities become nothing but a fulfilment of scripture. This is the exact counterimage of the usual dynamics of political and iconic display of power. Where the power is handed over to an invisible God, the images must disappear and give way to scripture. We may call this a scriptural and aniconic turn and may recognize in it the same interrelatedness of politics and image making as in Egypt, only in an inverse key. The ban on images amounts to an eclipse of the king as a representative of God and a mediator between God and humankind.
The Deuteronomistic concept of the covenant or treaty—berît in Hebrew— that JHWH established between himself and the children of Israel has a primarily political meaning. The term berît occurs, however, already a century earlier with the prophet Hosea, but couched in bridal and filial metaphors and without any political connotations. Hosea is the first one to conceive of monotheism as a matter of fidelity, truthfulness, or loyalty. Like Amos, Hosea reproaches Israel for its sins, but in his eyes, these sins do not consist primarily in injustice and oppression but in “whoredom” with alien gods. I collate here several of Hosea’s most striking invectives against Israel’s infidelity:

They sacrifice upon the tops of the mountains, and burn incense upon the hills, under oaks and poplars and elms, because the shadow thereof is good: therefore your daughters shall commit whoredom, and your spouses shall commit adultery. I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for [the men] themselves consort with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not un-derstand shall come to ruin. I found Israel like grapes in the wilderness; I saw your fathers as the firstripe in the fig tree at her first time: but they went to ba’al pe’ôr, and separated themselves unto that shame; and their abominations were according as they loved.

Hoseas

A different image used by Hosea for the special bond between YHWH and his people is that of a father-son relationship: “When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt. But the more they were called, the more they went away from me: they sacrificed unto Baalim, and burned incense to graven images.” About a century after Hosea, the original version of Deuteronomy was presented in Jerusalem as an accidental finding during restoration work in the temple and identified as a book dating from the time of Moses. This legend has a kernel of truth because it refers to the truly “Mosaic” spirit in which it is written. Deuteronomy codifies the covenant in the form of a formal treaty of alliance, thereby giving it the status of an institution recognized under international law. The covenant is now no longer metaphorical but the real thing.
The authors of Deuteronomy borrowed the model of a political contract from Assyria. The loyalty oath that in 672 bce King Essarhaddon had his subjects and vassals swear to his designated successor, Ashurbanipal, makes its influence felt right down to the wording of the biblical text. One of those vassals must have been King Manasseh of Judah, so it may be assumed that a copy of the succession treaty and oath was stored in the royal archive in Jerusalem. When applying this Assyrian template to the covenant between YHWH and the people, the biblical authors adopted and adapted it in two ways. First, God does not make this treaty with the king, in his capacity as the people’s representative before the gods, but directly with the people themselves; second, the loyalty clauses are not between the people and the king, in his capacity as the gods’ representative before the people, but between the people and God. In a startling innovation, the king’s position as representative and intermediary is thus bypassed. Through the “transference” of the king-god relationship and the king-people relationship to the relationship between God and his people, Assyrian state ideology is converted into Israelite covenant theology. The fact that God makes his covenant with the people as a whole rather than through the intercession of royalty, priesthood, or some other representative authority becomes the basis for a new; specific; emphatic; and, to some extent, “democratic” conception of the people. The people—not Moses, not the seventy elders, not Aaron, not the Levites—assume the role of a sovereign partner in the covenant. This direct access to God is what lends the biblical concept its democratic force.
In Egypt, the Pharaoh was regarded as the son of the supreme deity and given the title, son of Ra. The Jerusalem monarchy also adopted the model of the king’s divine sonship from Egypt. “Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee,” God tells the king in Psalms 2:7. God chooses the king to be his son, a transformation that takes place the instant he is crowned. In Psalm 89:27, God pledges: “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth.”
The image of Israel’s divine sonship is firmly anchored in the Exodus myth.
Unlike the bridal metaphor, which, with the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, always has tragic connotations and looks backward to the adulterous violation of the covenant, the image of sonship in Exodus has positive connotations and looks forward to Israel’s election and the fulfillment of God’s promises:
“Thus saith YHWH, Israel is my son, even my firstborn. And I say unto thee: let my son go, that he may serve me. And if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.” Rather than looking back in anger at the broken covenant, the image of sonship here looks forward in hope to the liberation of Israel, soon to be exacted by the death of the Egyptian fi rstborn, and to the covenant, which will make the children of Israel God’s chosen people and hence his adopted son. Whereas the sonship is transferred from the king to the people, the function of legislator is transferred from the king to God. On the famous Louvre-stela of Hammurabi, we see the king presenting his law code in a gesture of recitation to Shamash, the sun god and god of justice. According to the biblical concept, Moses receives the law from God. Bereft of his prerogatives of sonship and legislation, there is nothing peculiar left to the king. This is what Deuteronomy has to say concerning the role of the king:

If, having reached the country given by Yahweh your God and having taken possession of it and, while living there, you think, “I should like to appoint a king to rule me”—like all the surrounding nations, the king whom you appoint to rule you must be chosen by Yahweh your God; the appointment of a king must be made from your own brothers; on no account must you appoint as king some foreigner who is not a brother of yours.
He must not, however, acquire more and more horses, or send the people back to Egypt with a view to increasing his cavalry, since Yahweh has told you, “You must never go back that way again.” Nor must he keep on acquiring more and more wives, for that could lead his heart astray. Nor must he acquire vast quantities of silver and gold.
Once seated on his royal throne, and for his own use, he must write a copy of this Law on a scroll, at the dictation of the levitical priests. It must never leave him, and he must read it every day of his life and learn to fear Yahweh his God by keeping all the words of this Law and observing these rules, so that he will not think himself superior to his brothers, and not deviate from these commandments either to right or to left. So doing, long will he occupy his throne, he and his sons, in Israel.

Dtn 17

This is no longer the idea of kingship as represented in a paradigmatic way by King David. The king is no longer chosen by God, who says to him “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee,” or with regard to him—“I will be his father and he will be my son” and “Also I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth.” Instead, the king is appointed by the people if they like and is seen as a danger rather than a blessing that must be restricted in his display of power as much as possible. The original idea of kingship is deferred into the future and turned into as a figure of messianic expectation. The new religion as worked out by the exilic prophets and the deported literary elite emerged in a situation of total loss: of kingship, state, temple, and territory and enabled Judaea to do without external stabilizers. Law, statehood, temple, and priesthood were created at Mount Sinai, in the desert, and in a radically extraterritorial situation.
This new concept of religion no longer depends on state, kingship, and territory; it can be realized wherever Jews live and follow the law of the covenant.
In this differentiation and emancipation of religion from state and territory lies the secret of the survival of Judaism and Jewry as the only nation of antiquity over two millennia of diaspora and persecution, whereas ancient Egypt and all other states and cultures of antiquity succumbed to the assault of Christianity and Islam.

Die preußische Kriegstheorie um 1800 und ihre Suche nach dynamischen Gleichgewichten ~ Arthur Kohle
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Prussian theory of war around 1800 and its search for dynamic equilibria

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Intellectual historians never respect disciplinary boundaries, except when they are the boundaries imposed by the people whose ideas they study.

Richard Whatmore

For [Azar Gat], the writings of […] Carl von Clausewitz, in particular, belong to the large-scale movement of “Counter-Enlightenment”, which, in reaction to the dominant paradigm of Newtonian physics, distanced itself from the Enlightenment thinking of the 18th century and is referred to by Gat with the collective term “German Movement”, with reference to the regional focus of its formative phase.

[…]

However, Clausewitz’s oeuvre in particular continues to be understood as the crystallization of a turning point that fundamentally changed the way we think about war. His texts still play a central role in understanding the history of ideas of this era and in defining new positions in political theory.

There are two main reasons why Clausewitz and his environment are still considered important today:

  1. Clausewitz stands for the modern insight that war is to be regarded as a social phenomenon, i.e. that it cannot be separated from civilian processes, and must be understood as a “continuation of politics with other means “.
  2. Furthermore, he describes a paradigm shift according to which social processes and, above all, conflicts must no longer be understood as static, but as dynamic and historically changeable. His still famous and much-quoted metaphor of war as a “true chameleon”, which “changes its nature in each specific case”, stands for this in particular.

To this day, two names stand for the controversial interpretation of his work. While in 1935 Erich Ludendorff invoked Clausewitz’s “ideas of annihilation” with his infamous concept of “total war”, Ludwig Beck was able to invoke Clausewitz’s “mitigating principle” at the time of his resistance to Hitler, with which he morally opposed a policy of total escalation.

[…]

In Clausewitz’s recourse to a “dynamic law of war” at the beginning of the 19th century, he was moving in a tradition of contemporary natural science, more precisely the dynamistic turn that had been established about a hundred years earlier by Newtonian physics – “Isaac Newton was the giant of science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. With his new concepts of “mass” and “force”, Newton had created paradigms of a new era:

Conceptions such as ‚mass‘ and ‚force‘ were quickly recognized by Newton’s contemporaries as powerful concepts for representing aspects of bodies that allowed them to be measured and their dynamical interactions calculated.

Iliffe / Smith, Introduction (2016), S. 1.

According to Reinhard Brandt, there was “an overwhelming Newtonian fashion among the thinkers of the 18th century”. This mathematical and scientific background can hardly be overestimated, even if Sir Isaac Newton’s name is not always mentioned in the works of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. We need only recall here that in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (1781), a work that can only be understood against the background of the “fact of Newtonian science”, Newton’s name is mentioned only three times (twice only adjectivally).

[…]

The pivotal point for the present study is the concept of an “inertia of forces”, which can be found in Carl von Clausewitz’s preliminary draft of his main work “On War”. It serves to characterize his “reductive principle” in more detail. […] The concept of ‘vis inertiae’ is a core concept of Newtonian dynamics.

Originally described as a force, it became a passive and inherent principle of all physical bodies with Newton as ‘mass inertia’. The moment of inertia of bodies of mass is not itself a force, but rather provides resistance to acceleration and can therefore be used to prove and measure the effects of forces that occur. Another core concept of Clausewitz is that of “interaction”, which is also a central concept of Newtonian dynamics. […]

In Kant’s critical work, the same Newtonian concepts had already assumed central functions in a transformed form. In Kant’s work, they are transcended into general conditions of objective knowledge that must underlie every science.

[…]

It was Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst (1733-1814) who, in the 1790s, attempted to apply Kant’s critical method to war in his “Considerations on the Art of War” and to raise the question of the possibility of a scientific theory of war. The peculiarity of Prussian war theory around 1800 begins with this recourse to Kant’s epistemological approach. While Berenhorst’s efforts still ended in paradoxes, Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow (1763-1807), following on from Berenhorst, succeeded in implementing these demands for a new science of war theory in a coherent model. Bülow postulated an “all-guiding” or “binding principle”, which was not only intended to “shackle” war, but which, as the “fundamental principle of the entire science of war”, would enable a dynamic theory of social conflicts and, for the first time, make it possible to forecast and create dynamic equilibrium systems. In the years around 1800, he thus deliberately created a new approach to the then topical question of a theory of perpetual peace.
This Bülow theory, which was discussed in the Prussian officer corps after 1800 and soon throughout Europe, gave rise to the central postulates of Clausewitz’s theory: 1. that war must be based on a “dynamic law of war”, 2. that its foundations must contain a passive principle that is “inherent” in the events themselves and “moderates” them, and 3. the central idea that war is nothing static and “never an isolated act”, “not an independent thing”, but always only “a political instrument” and only the “mere continuation of politics by other means”.
All of these ideas can already be found a generation earlier in Dietrich von Bülow, whose works the young Prussian officer Clausewitz had attentively studied during his time at the “Academy for Young Officers” (1801-1804) – i.e. during Bülow’s main creative period.

Clausewitz’s famous definition of war, which Herfried Münkler characterizes as the “central formula” of modern conflict research and which interprets conflicts as “continued state policy with other means”, dates back to 1806 and was penned by Dietrich von Bülow. He was convinced that war could only ever be “a means to achieve diplomatic ends”. His model described social conflicts as a dynamic process in which “diplomacy can turn into war” and “a dispute with reasons” can ultimately become “a dispute with physical forces”. According to Bülow, this dynamic never actually had military roots. Above all, for him “war was by no means something complete in itself, but only a means to achieve diplomatic ends”, which was constantly “transforming” in its dynamic transition. Bülow’s analytical method is decisive for this view of things. Like Newtonian dynamics, his theory was to be based on just one “main principle”. Analogous to the axiom of inertia (vis inertiae), Bülow postulated the existence of “an all-conducting principle”, which was to substantiate the conditions of a dynamic science and a theory of dynamic equilibrium for war for the first time. Bülow had first announced this principle of “subsistence” in 1799 in his introduction to the “Spirit of the Modern System of War” for the theory of a future “perpetual peace”. With the concept of a subsistence mass, Bülow created a frame of reference for the distinction between politics, strategy and tactics in order to view “the political system of Europe” for the first time as a dynamic and interdependent equilibrium model, like the solar system, on the basis of an objective inertial principle, in which “a great power can now just as little be destroyed without shaking all the others” as “a planet can be torn from its place” “without shattering the system”. With Reihard Brandt, one could say that the Newtonian background was omnipresent at the time and could therefore appear almost trivial in Bülow’s case. However, the way in which Bülow connected to Newton’s method was highly subtle, even unique, and therefore requires detailed reconstruction. The inertial principle of subsistence, as an a priori epistemological condition – like the principle of mass in Newton’s “Principia” – was intended to open up a new measuring space in which the dynamic processes of social conflicts could be mapped and predicted in the future. It is this idea of a social principle of inertia that Carl von Clausewitz adopted decades later as the “inertia of forces” and the “moderating principle” in order to obtain “counterweights” in his model that would dynamically “moderate” the “rapid principle” of war, as in Bülow’s model. Clausewitz was therefore not the first to make a dynamic turn in thinking about war. Its origins in the history of ideas can be found earlier – with Berenhorst and Bülow. Bülow stood alone in his time with his dynamic equilibrium model of social bodies.

[…]

Long before Clausewitz, Dietrich von Bülow attempted to place war on the foundations of a dynamic science for the first time, which was to be based on a single “all-guiding principle”, thereby striving for a methodological connection to Newtonian physics, whose theory of dynamic equilibrium also rested on a “fundamental principle”, the axiom of inertia. It will be shown that this analogous role in Bülow’s dynamics was to be filled by the principle of subsistence.
Berenhorst and Bülow were perhaps the most extravagant representatives of a pacifist-intellectual current in Prussia during the French Revolutionary era, whose followers did not expect the solution to social conflicts to be found on the battlefield, but rather in the discovery of a new knowledge of war that would teach how to avoid it. With the uncovering of this forgotten context, the significance of Clausewitz must be repositioned. He was not the creator of a basis applicable to peace research. Rather, as will be shown, he was the one who destroyed it by furiously rejecting Bülow’s theory and erasing its traces. Only fragments of this theory – altered beyond recognition – have survived in his work.

[…]

In the following, an attempt will be made to reconstruct the origins of an independent Prussian theory of war on the basis of its most important protagonists, Georg Heinrich von Berenhorst and Adam Heinrich Dietrich von Bülow, as well as their environment and their successors in the circle around Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Carl von Clausewitz. Four theses are associated with this, which are to be represented in this work:

  1. an independent Prussian theory of war begins in the 1790s with Berenhorst’s question of a “fixed standpoint” for an exact science of war, to which was linked the pacifist concern of being able to objectively predict and limit interstate conflicts from such a yet-to-be-discovered standpoint.
  2. the solution was sought by Berenhorst and Bülow in connection with the epistemology developed by Kant – against the background of Newton’s paradigm. The starting point for them was the idea of a social principle of inertia a priori, via which – in analogy to the physical principle of vis inertiae – social forces could be measured and brought to a dynamic balance. The function of such a principle of inertia in Bülow’s model was to provide the “theory of subsistence” postulated by him as a “fundamental principle”.
  3. Clausewitz’s entire work can only be understood against the background of this theory and as its radical counter-proposal. Accordingly, Clausewitz adopted essential conceptual elements of Bülow’s Dynamics of War, but without having penetrated its structural coherence. Among other things, he missed the central function of a ‘moderating principle’ in the sense of a ‘social principle of inertia a priori’.
    As a consequence, the incomplete transfer of concepts in his work led to an incoherent torso. Due to his strongly romantic orientation, Clausewitz instead arrived at a model of total dynamics, into which the demand for a ‘moderating principle’ adopted by Bülow could later no longer be integrated.
    Without this principle, Clausewitz’s model inevitably led to the idea of a total dynamic, which constituted his “total concept of war”, and which lives on in the history of the reception of his work in the repeatedly gained insight that “everything […] is dynamic” and “everything is a play of forces”, which is why his theory has sometimes been accused of having led the discussion of war theory into the dogma of the unrestrained idea of annihilation for the first time.
  4. Finally, it is likely that it was Clausewitz in particular who almost systematically tried to blur the memory of Dietrich von Bülow.

[…]

This is one of the thought patterns that – from Foucault’s perspective – “completely determine and dominate” the works of the Scharnhorst circle and were to generally assert themselves against Bülow’s theory after 1800. In this context, a hitherto completely neglected author, Friedrich von Gaugreben (1774-1822), who played a decisive role in the discourse on war theory in Berlin and about whom little is known, comes to the fore as a source of ideas for the Scharnhorst circle. He and his extensive criticism of Bülow were not only the source of the famous metaphor of war as a “true chameleon”, which is now wrongly associated with Clausewitz. With his criticism, he provided Clausewitz above all with the essential counter-arguments that were to become the basis of Clausewitz’s thinking and its contradictions. Ultimately, the aim is to show that Clausewitz’s famous work “On War” can be deciphered as a continuation of Gaugreben’s criticism of Bülow, which led him to the paradox of a total dynamic in order to create a basis for the modern idea of annihilation.

Bülow provided a new approach to the consideration of social phenomena by understanding them as dynamic equilibria on the basis of a social principle of inertia.

Die preußische Kriegstheorie um 1800 und ihre Suche nach dynamischen Gleichgewichten ~ Arthur Kuhle, Duncker & Humblot 2018

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Assassins

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The Assassins were a special factor in the external relations of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in northern Syria. They were members of an ismāʿīlī Shiite sect known today as Nizārīya, which, under its Persian founder and leader Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ, sought to spark a religious revolution in the Sunni ʿAbbāsid caliphate of Baghdad in the years 1078-1094 in the name of the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustanṣir. After al-Mustanṣir, who had been revered as the only legitimate imam with a claim to spiritual and temporal supremacy over the entire Muslim world, died in 1094 and his rightful successor Nizār was deposed, they broke away from the new leadership in Cairo. In the following decades, the sect’s leaders constructed the legend that a grandson of the deceased imam, represented by them, was hiding in their headquarters, the fortress of Alamūt in north-east Persia, waiting for the appropriate time for his return.
Early on, the sect focussed on missionary work (daʿwa) in order to assert its own authority, which gave it a growing following, especially among the rural population, who lived scattered in numerous settlement areas between Persia and northern Syria. However, these converts, who were regarded as heretics, were usually met with rejection by the majority Sunni population, which was reflected at irregular intervals in the form of spontaneous pogroms, but sometimes also those organised by the respective ruling elite. As the sect had only a few regular armed forces, which were mainly deployed as garrisons of the fortresses, it was unable to defend itself against the persecution by conventional military means, which is why its leaders mostly sought to reach an understanding with the political and religious authorities of the Sunni-dominated ruling complexes. If this failed, however, they used targeted assassinations as a means of exerting pressure to strengthen their negotiating position. They trained elite fighters (fidāʾiyyūn) for this task, promising them eternal rewards in paradise, and smuggled them into the target’s environment as confidants. If these were high dignitaries such as the caliphs and viziers of Cairo or Baghdad, the assassins sometimes had to spend several years gaining their trust before they finally received the order to attack from the imam. The possibility of a surprise attack, combined with their religious determination and intensive training in the use of weapons, gave them a high success rate. This and the widespread effect that the sudden assassination of a publicly known leading figure usually had, caused fear of the sect to grow, which contributed significantly to ensuring its continued existence. The assassins were soon surrounded by an aura of invincibility and deadlyness, which became increasingly legendary over time. They were said to carry out their attacks under the influence of hashish (Arabic ḥašīš), especially in the later Latin-European reception, which was strongly influenced by Marco Polo’s travelogue (ca. 1254-1324), and their Arabic name was attributed to this in various variants of the word ḥašīšīya (singular ḥašīšī). This assumption prevailed in the Western world over the following centuries and is still sometimes found in popular culture today, but according to current research it is probably unfounded. In fact, the effect of hashish would have been extremely counterproductive for the execution of the attacks, as they required the utmost concentration, readiness to react and the ability to realistically assess the situation. The Arabic terms do not necessarily have to be attributed to the name of the drug either, but can also refer to a metaphorical term used in a derogatory sense as “rabble of the lower class” or “unbelieving outsiders of society”.

The missionary work in northern Syria, commissioned from Persia, had already begun at the turn of the 12th century and had fallen on fertile ground due to the social and political upheavals caused by the first crusades, the territorial fragmentation of the Muslim world into individual dominions and the resulting constant military conflicts. Nevertheless, despite intensive attempts, it was only in the years after 1132 that the sect succeeded in gaining permanent control over several fortresses and the area in between on the western Syrian mountain massif of Ǧabal Bahrāʾ (today also known as Ǧibāl al-Anṣārīya) north of the Lebanon Mountains, the headquarters of which was the castle of Maṣyāf on the south-eastern edge, conquered in 1141. With reference to this, the later Latin chroniclers in particular often referred to the leader of the sect as “Old Man of the Mountain” (Vetus de Montanis), while the early sources only wrote of senex or vetulus and thus literally translated the Arabic title of honour šaiḫ, which is still in use today. The exact extent of their territory and influence as well as the size of their followers can hardly be determined, but William of Tyre attributed ten fortresses and more than 60,000 believers to them in the 1180s in a quite realistic estimate. The growth of their settlement area took place in the immediate neighbourhood of the northern crusader states of Antioch and Tripoli and partly spilled over into them, but relations with the Franks initially remained friendly. Most recently, in 1148, Prince Raimund of Antioch (1136-1149) and the Assassin leader ʿAlī b. Wafāʾ had formed an alliance against Nūr ad-Dīn and died together in the Battle of Ināb in June of the following year. It was only when Count Raimund II of Tripoli transferred the border region around Tortosa to the Knights Templar in 1152 that violent border disputes apparently arose, as a result of which the sect had him and two of his companions murdered in the same year as the first known non-Muslims. This was followed by violent pogroms against the sect, similar to the Sunni-dominated societies of the Islamic ruling complexes, but after some time relations normalised again and the Assassins paid the order 2,000 Byzantines annually as compensation for controlling a territory claimed by the order. There is also little information from the following years about the relations between the crusader states and their Nizārītic neighbours, who, after the conquest of Damascus in 1154, were among the last Muslim actors independent of the Zengīds in the immediate vicinity. Although troops from all three crusader states besieged the ruins of Šaizar occupied by the sect at the end of 1157, the endeavour was as unsuccessful as it was inconsequential.

[…]

According to the chronicler’s account, which should of course be viewed with caution, the Master of the Assassins had made the [aforementioned] renunciation of the “false doctrine” of Islam on his own initiative after he had recognised Christianity as the only true religion by reading the Gospel and had decided to prepare the conversion of his followers to Christianity. In a next step, he sent a trusted follower named Abū ʿAbd Allāh (Boaldelle) as an envoy with a secret message to King Amalrich, whose main concern was the request to cancel the “tribute” of 2,000 gold pieces imposed by the Knights Templar for the settlement areas of the Assassins. In return, William continued, he offered to have himself and his followers baptised and converted to Christianity for good. The king was naturally delighted at the prospect of new Christian allies and immediately agreed to pay the annual payments to the Order of Knights from his own income. After extensive talks, he sent the messenger back north with his own envoy as personal escort to finalise the negotiations with Sinān. When the duo had already travelled beyond Tripoli and were about to cross into Assassin territory, they were suddenly ambushed by Templars from nearby Tortosa. They immediately attacked and killed the Assassin messenger regardless of his royal commission and escort. When the king became aware of this, outraged by the act, which he also considered a personal insult, he summoned the Haute Cour to discuss the necessary sanctions. It was agreed that this open sabotage of an imperial affair could not go unpunished, as it had violated the royal auctoritas, discredited the fides and constantia of Christianity and lost the growth of the Church, which had already seemed certain. Two envoys, Soherius of Memedeo and Gottschalk of Torhout, were now sent to the Master of the Order, Odo of St Amand in Sidon, to demand the extradition of the main culprit, allegedly a one-eyed knight named Walter of Maisnil (Mesnil). The master refused, citing the fact that the order was subject to papal jurisdiction alone, and informed the king that he had already fined the culprit and would send him to the papal curia for further judgement. King Amalrich then travelled to the city in person, had the wanted man forcibly removed from the Templar quarters and imprisoned in Tyre. He sent a new envoy to the Master of the Assassins to protest his regret and innocence, which was supposedly believed. However, no further progress was made either in the negotiations with the sect or in the proceedings against the Templars, against whom, according to the chronicler, he planned to take extensive action, as the king fell seriously ill shortly afterwards and died in July 1174.

Asgårdsreien [The Wild Hunt of Odin] (1872) by Peter Nicolai Arbo
Posted in Other

The Wild Hunt

Posted on by audiopathik

The Wild Hunt is a folklore motif occurring across various northern European cultures. The leader of the hunt is often a named figure associated with Odin in Germanic legends, but may variously be a historical or legendary figure like Theodoric the Great, the Danish king Valdemar Atterdag, the dragon slayer Sigurd, the Welsh psychopomp Gwyn ap Nudd, biblical figures such as Herod, Cain, Gabriel, or the Devil, or an unidentified lost soul either male or female.

wikipedia

Poem by Johannes Carsten Hauch

Original danish Den vilden Jagt from his publication Lyriske Digte og Romancer (“Lyrical Poems and Romances”), the second half of which is about Valdemar Atterdag

When they thought that Denmark’s king
Soundly in the graveyard slumbered,
Words incredible, unnumbered,
Through the land crept whispering.

Rumor said: “The king hunts nightly
Stag and doe on Sjaelland’s isle
With a company unsightly
Through the country mile on mile.”

They saw the Childe at the head of his hosts;
In the moonlight they heard the racket
Of his train of terrible shadows and ghosts
With the hawk and the sable brachet.

Fables deep in Time’s abyss
From oblivion resurrected,
Champions in their rest ejected
From the dim necropolis,

Women from their hidden prison,
Heathen kings from the sepulchre,
All (the peasants said) had risen
Forth to ride with Valdemar.

Like wings the sound over woods was borne,
In terror the dwarf dug deeper,
While overhead a mad hunting-horn
Aroused the horrified sleeper.

Volmer’s eyes with anguish blazed,
Never found he rest and quiet;
Ever in this awful riot
Must he hurry on half-crazed.

Nearest him, of all the shadows
Coursing over lake and glade
Through the night-mist of the meadows,
Was a pale and slender maid.

Her long hair flickered in the midnight blast,
She sighed with sighs inhuman;
On snow-white horse she galloped fast,
The fairest of all women.

Over castle and lofty house,
Falcon, raven, birds of evil,
Unknown fowl from Night primeval,
Fat, enormous flittermouse,

Over forests, fields, and ditches,
Clustering pallid flare on flare,
Wolves with hundred feet, and witches
Sailed the river of the air.

The hunters’ shouts, the thunders’ crash,
Roared high in the lust of slaughter,
Through horses’ whinnies, the snap of the lash,
Above the livid water.

Just before them, roe and hart
Flew as if on hidden pinions
From the ghost-king and his minions,
Cleaving the slow mists apart.

At their head there flitted, leading,
Tall and white, a wounded hind
Stuck with many arrows, bleeding,
Shaking, in the midnight wind.

The peasants who saw the chase sweep by
Swore, to all who would hear it,
That out of the hunted hind’s wild eye
There peered Queen Helvig’s spirit.

As in an enchanted space,
Trees stood in the vapor rootless,
While the stag flew onward, footless
Yet unwearied by the chase.

Then the black snake coursed the meadow,
The red dragon rose unwombed,
While the storm wailed like a shadow
To eternal anguish doomed.

The full moon, like a bleeding troll,
Unheeding the earth’s ire,
Cruelly charmed each tortured soul
From out the Abyss’s fire.

Often when the autumn brought
Wheeling gusts of phosphorescence
In this dismal chase, the peasants
Whispered, pallid and distraught:

“Save us, Christ and Maid of Heaven,
From this evil by thy grace !
Save us from the infernal levin;
Save us: ’tis King Volmer’s chase!”

They thought that his doom was sealed for aye,
By no prayers to be diminished:
To hunt until the last Judgment Day,
Till World and Time were finished.

Posted in Historic, Other

Roman Emperors

Posted on by audiopathik

From Niccolò Macciavelli The Prince, Chapter 19

There is first to note that, whereas in other principalities the ambition of the nobles and the insolence of the people only have to be contended with, the Roman emperors had a third difficulty in having to put up with the cruelty and avarice of their soldiers, a matter so beset with difficulties that it was the ruin of many; for it was a hard thing to give satisfaction both to soldiers and people; because the people loved peace, and for this reason they loved the unaspiring prince, whilst the soldiers loved the warlike prince who was bold, cruel, and rapacious, which qualities they were quite willing he should exercise upon the people, so that they could get double pay and give vent to their own greed and cruelty. Hence it arose that those emperors were always overthrown who, either by birth or training, had no great authority, and most of them, especially those who came new to the principality, recognizing the difficulty of these two opposing humours, were inclined to give satisfaction to the soldiers, caring little about injuring the people.

Which course was necessary, because, as princes cannot help being hated by someone, they ought, in the first place, to avoid being hated by every one, and when they cannot compass this, they ought to endeavour with the utmost diligence to avoid the hatred of the most powerful.

Therefore, those emperors who through inexperience had need of special favour adhered more readily to the soldiers than to the people; a course which turned out advantageous to them or not, accordingly as the prince knew how to maintain authority over them.

From these causes it arose that Marcus, Pertinax, and Alexander, being all men of modest life, lovers of justice, enemies to cruelty, humane, and benignant, came to a sad end except Marcus; he alone lived and died honoured, because he had succeeded to the throne by hereditary title, and owed nothing either to the soldiers or the people; and afterwards, being possessed of many virtues which made him respected, he always kept both orders in their places whilst he lived, and was neither hated nor despised.

But Pertinax was created emperor against the wishes of the soldiers, who, being accustomed to live licentiously under Commodus, could not endure the honest life to which Pertinax wished to reduce them; thus, having given cause for hatred, to which hatred there was added contempt for his old age, he was overthrown at the very beginning of his administration. And here it should be noted that hatred is acquired as much by good works as by bad ones, therefore, as I said before, a prince wishing to keep his state is very often forced to do evil; for when that body is corrupt whom you think you have need of to maintain yourself—it may be either the people or the soldiers or the nobles—you have to submit to its humours and to gratify them, and then good works will do you harm.

But let us come to Alexander, who was a man of such great goodness, that among the other praises which are accorded him is this, that in the fourteen years he held the empire no one was ever put to death by him unjudged; nevertheless, being considered effeminate and a man who allowed himself to be governed by his mother, he became despised, the army conspired against him, and murdered him.

Turning now to the opposite characters of Commodus, Severus, Antoninus Caracalla, and Maximinus, you will find them all cruel and rapacious-men who, to satisfy their soldiers, did not hesitate to commit every kind of iniquity against the people; and all, except Severus, came to a bad end; but in Severus there was so much valour that, keeping the soldiers friendly, although the people were oppressed by him, he reigned successfully; for his valour made him so much admired in the sight of the soldiers and people that the latter were kept in a way astonished and awed and the former respectful and satisfied. And because the actions of this man, as a new prince, were great, I wish to show briefly that he knew well how to counterfeit the fox and the lion, which natures, as I said above, it is necessary for a prince to imitate.

Knowing the sloth of the Emperor Julian, he persuaded the army in Sclavonia, of which he was captain, that it would be right to go to Rome and avenge the death of Pertinax, who had been killed by the praetorian soldiers; and under this pretext, without appearing to aspire to the throne, he moved the army on Rome, and reached Italy before it was known that he had started. On his arrival at Rome, the Senate, through fear, elected him emperor and killed Julian. After this there remained for Severus, who wished to make himself master of the whole empire, two difficulties; one in Asia, where Niger, head of the Asiatic army, had caused himself to be proclaimed emperor; the other in the west where Albinus was, who also aspired to the throne. And as he considered it dangerous to declare himself hostile to both, he decided to attack Niger and to deceive Albinus. To the latter he wrote that, being elected emperor by the Senate, he was willing to share that dignity with him and sent him the title of Caesar; and, moreover, that the Senate had made Albinus his colleague; which things were accepted by Albinus as true. But after Severus had conquered and killed Niger, and settled oriental affairs, he returned to Rome and complained to the Senate that Albinus, little recognizing the benefits that he had received from him, had by treachery sought to murder him, and for this ingratitude he was compelled to punish him. Afterwards he sought him out in France, and took from him his government and life. He who will, therefore, carefully examine the actions of this man will find him a most valiant lion and a most cunning fox; he will find him feared and respected by every one, and not hated by the army; and it need not be wondered at that he, a new man, was able to hold the empire so well, because his supreme renown always protected him from that hatred which the people might have conceived against him for his violence.

But his son Antoninus was a most eminent man, and had very excellent qualities, which made him admirable in the sight of the people and acceptable to the soldiers, for he was a warlike man, most enduring of fatigue, a despiser of all delicate food and other luxuries, which caused him to be beloved by the armies. Nevertheless, his ferocity and cruelties were so great and so unheard of that, after endless single murders, he killed a large number of the people of Rome and all those of Alexandria. He became hated by the whole world, and also feared by those he had around him, to such an extent that he was murdered in the midst of his army by a centurion. And here it must be noted that such-like deaths, which are deliberately inflicted with a resolved and desperate courage, cannot be avoided by princes, because any one who does not fear to die can inflict them; but a prince may fear them the less because they are very rare; he has only to be careful not to do any grave injury to those whom he employs or has around him in the service of the state. Antoninus had not taken this care, but had contumeliously killed a brother of that centurion, whom also he daily threatened, yet retained in his bodyguard; which, as it turned out, was a rash thing to do, and proved the emperor’s ruin.

But let us come to Commodus, to whom it should have been very easy to hold the empire, for, being the son of Marcus, he had inherited it, and he had only to follow in the footsteps of his father to please his people and soldiers; but, being by nature cruel and brutal, he gave himself up to amusing the soldiers and corrupting them, so that he might indulge his rapacity upon the people; on the other hand, not maintaining his dignity, often descending to the theatre to compete with gladiators, and doing other vile things, little worthy of the imperial majesty, he fell into contempt with the soldiers, and being hated by one party and despised by the other, he was conspired against and was killed.

It remains to discuss the character of Maximinus. He was a very warlike man, and the armies, being disgusted with the effeminacy of Alexander, of whom I have already spoken, killed him and elected Maximinus to the throne. This he did not possess for long, for two things made him hated and despised; the one, his having kept sheep in Thrace, which brought him into contempt (it being well known to all, and considered a great indignity by every one), and the other, his having at the accession to his dominions deferred going to Rome and taking possession of the imperial seat; he had also gained a reputation for the utmost ferocity by having, through his prefects in Rome and elsewhere in the empire, practised many cruelties, so that the whole world was moved to anger at the meanness of his birth and to fear at his barbarity. First Africa rebelled, then the Senate with all the people of Rome, and all Italy conspired against him, to which may be added his own army; this latter, besieging Aquileia and meeting with difficulties in taking it, were disgusted with his cruelties, and fearing him less when they found so many against him, murdered him.

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