Ash: A Secret History (221 page)

11
– [This account is accurate, with one exception. The skirmish at the siege of Neuss took place, not in 1476, but on 16 June 1475. However, records often pick up an apparent error of a year either way. Under the Julian calendar, in different parts of Europe, the New Year is variously dated as beginning at Easter, on Lady Day (25 March), and Christmas Day (25 December); and post
AD
1583, the Gregorian calendar backdates the beginning of those years to 1 January.

I can do no better than refer the reader to Charles Mallory Maximillian’s comment in the ‘Preface and Notes’ to the first edition (1890):

‘The Germanic
Life of Ash
narrates many startling and, one might think, implausible events. It is, however, verifiable that all these particular exploits of the woman Ash are well-attested to, by a great variety of other trustworthy historical sources.

‘One should forgive, therefore, this document’s mistake in the mere dating of the events contained therein.’]

12
– [Fifteenth-century man-portable matchlock firearm.]

13
– [Although it is a later translation, some 135 years after the ‘Ash’ texts, I have chosen the King James Authorised Version of the Bible (1611) as more accessible to the modern reader.]

14
– [These improbable vehicles bear some resemblance to the mobile horse-drawn ‘war-wagons’ used by the Hussites in the 1420s, some fifty years earlier than this. The Eastern European fighters appear to have used them as mobile gun-platforms. However, the del Guiz ‘iron-sided’ wagons are a mere impossibility – even if constructed, they would have been so heavy that no conceivable team of horses could have moved them.]

15
– [Padua in Italy was at this time a famous centre attended by medical students from all over Europe.]

16
– [Romans 12: 14.]

17
– [This text often gives the hour of the day by the monastic system: Nones is the sixth office or service of the day, taking place at 3 p.m. The monastic hours are:

(The unwary reader should note this is further complicated by the mediaeval habit of dividing the hours of dark and the hours of daylight into twelve-hour segments, which means, that in winter an ‘hour’ of darkness is longer than an ‘hour’ of daylight, and conversely for the summer.)]

18
– [Héricourt was a small Burgundian frontier castle, put under siege by the Swiss; their campaign ended with a battle, on 13 November 1474.]

19
– [On 24 December 1474, eighteen captured Italian mercenaries who had been fighting for the Burgundians against the Swiss were burned alive, at Basle. It was Christmas Eve.]

20
– [Monastic hours: 9 p.m.]

21
– [The Gutenberg press edition of the del Guiz
Life
gives the date as 27 June 1476; the siege of Neuss ended, of course, on 27 June 1475. However, all other contemporary sources give the date of the wedding ceremony, four days later, as 1 July 1476.]

22
– [Simeon Salus, died c.590, is the saint associated with social outcasts, especially harlots. His feast-day is celebrated on 1 July.]

23
– [Psalms 68: 30.]

24
– [No longer extant, but see similar figure at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, sculpted c.
AD
1280.]

25
– [A direct translation of the original German. No such altarpiece is extant in Cologne.]

26
– [Latin: a ‘mannish’ or ‘man-aping’ woman.]

27
– [Text uncertain here. Charles Mallory Maximillian has ‘Visigoth’, the ‘noble Goths’. Although it is couched in terms of mediaeval legend, I believe the mention of ‘Visigoths’ to have aspects we would do well to consider.]

28
– [I prefer this term, with its suggestion of the organic, to Vaughan Davies’s ‘robot’, or Charles Mallory Maximillian’s ‘clay man’.

This quasi-supernatural appearance is, of course, one of the mythical accretions which attach themselves to histories such as Ash’s; and should not be taken seriously, except in so far as it reflects the mediaeval psychological preoccupation with a lost Roman ‘Age of Gold’.]

29
– [Heavily armoured lancers, with either both horse and rider armoured in overlapping scale or lamellar armour, or the horse unarmoured. This Middle Eastern form of cavalry survives throughout the mediaeval period, notably in Byzantium. (From context, I assume this not to refer to the Greek and Roman galleys also known as cataphracts.)]

30
– [According to conventional histories, the Germanic Visigothic tribes did not settle in North Africa. Rather the reverse – with the Muslim Arab invasion of Visigothic Spain, in
AD
711.]

31
– [A term used in this text for Northern Europeans in general.]

32
– [As with the nave, this was in fact left unfinished until the nineteenth century.]

Part Two:

1
– [“For under the axis [‘Axle’ of Rota Fortuna] is written, ‘Queen Hecate’” – an interesting quotation by the author of the Angelotti manuscript, in which the mediaeval “dreadful example” of the Fall of Kings, Queen Hecuba of Troy, has been replaced by Hecate, the powerful and sometimes malignant goddess of Hell, night and the moon. Curiously enough, the Greek for “Hecuba” is “Hekabe”.]

2
– [Celebrated on 15 July; thus an internal reference for the date of the company’s arrival outside the port-city of Genoa.]

3
– [‘The Lamb of God’.]

4
– [Outriders, scouts.]

5
– [A ‘harness’ is the common term for a suit of armour. Thus the expression, ‘died in harness’, meaning ‘died while wearing armour’.]

6
– [Matthew 10: 34. ‘Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.’]

7
– [Plainly, this is another intrusion of mediaeval legend into the text. Given the earlier inclusion of the name ‘Carthage’, I suspect that this is in fact a dim memory, preserved in monastery manuscripts, of the sea-power of the historical Carthaginians in the Classical period when it dominated the Mediterranean before being destroyed by the Roman fleet at Milazzo (263
BC
), chiefly by the use of the Roman boarding-spike or
corvus
. It would not seem strange to a mediaeval chronicler to include such anachronisms.]

8
– [Latin: ‘by the fact (of doing it)’, rather than
de jure
, ‘by right of the law’.]

9
– [Context leads me to suspect that this refers in fact, to the city of Rome – perhaps the papal throne, the chair of Peter? The textual reference is obscure.]

10
– [In 1475.]

Part Three:

1
– [The title of a popular contemporary treatise (c. 1450) containing instructions for putting on one’s knightly armour for non-cavalry combat:
How a man shall be armed at his ease when he shall fight on foot.
]

2
– [6 p.m.]

3
– [See Revelation 6: 12; Revelation 9: 2; Revelation 8: 12, and Matthew 24: 29, respectively.]

4
– [Luke 21:25.]

5
– [Recorded in several fifteenth-century travellers’ accounts of their alpine journeys.]

6
– [‘Pourpoint’: a waistcoat-like garment, to which hose can be tied.]

7
– [This appears to be the del Guiz
Life’s
mistranslation of a Saracen term.
Faris
is Arabic for ‘horseman’, meaning the ordinary professional cavalry knight, rather than an army commander. However, I have chosen to use faris since the better alternative given in the Angelotti manuscript, the Muslim
al-sayyid
, ‘chieftain’ or ‘master’, already exists in European history – as the title of Rodrigo de Vivar: ‘El Cid’.]

8
– [Fr Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) was an early scientist, and the actual European inventor of gunpowder. He was popularly supposed to have been a sorcerer, and was credited with inventing a mechanical speaking head, made of brass; later destroyed.]

9
– [‘Hackbut’: English for ‘arquebus’, a man-portable gun.]

10
– [Back and belly fur of a European squirrel.]

11
– [Arabic: a mercenary, a soldier who fights for money or land-grants.]

12
– [‘Amir’ or ‘emir’: Arabic: ‘lord’. I can find no linguistic proof for the connection either with the Persian magi (holy men or magicians) in the Angelotti text, or with ‘scientist’ – surely a much later addition to the text, by another hand.]

13
– [By internal ms evidence, I calculate this takes place on 9 August, the feast day of King Osward of Northumbria. Born c.605, died 642 at Masefeth, St Osward prayed for the souls of those who fell in battle with him. His cult as a soldier saint was later popular as far as south Germany and Italy.]

14
– [The coronation-place of Holy Roman emperors from the time of Otto the Great.]

15
– [This is similar to the Hastings manuscript Ordinances of Chivalry of the fifteenth century, ‘The maner and the forme of the Coronacion of kyngis and Quenes in Engelonde’.]

16
– [Mehmet II, ruled the Osmanli (Turkish) Empire
AD
1451-1481.]

17
– [Louis XI of France, known to his contemporaries as ‘the Spider King’ because of his love of intrigue.]

18
– [The original text uses the Latin
fabricato
, for a structure made by human hands, not necessarily a machine in the sense that we would think of one.]

19
– [The Angelotti Latin text has, in its brief and previously obscure mention of this episode,
machina rei militarise
a ‘machine-tactician’, and
fabricari res militaris
, ‘[something] made to [create] tactics’. ‘
Fraxinus me fecit
’ renders it as
computare ars imperatoria
, or, in a bizarre mixture of Latin and Greek,
computare strategoi
, ‘a computor of the “art of empire”’ or ‘strategy’. This can be rendered into modern English as ‘tactical computer’.]

20
– [Joan of Arc (
AD
1412-1431).]

21
– [
De Re Militari
, written by the Roman Vegetius, became the standard training manual for the later mediaeval and early Renaissance era.]

22
– [On 24 August.]

23
– [French, lit. ‘kiss my arse’.]

24
– [‘Nazir’: a commander of eight men, the equivalent of the modern army’s squad-leader (corporal). Presumably a subordinate of the ‘
arif
’ commander of forty (platoon-leader) that the text mentions earlier.]

25
– [‘Frank’ is an Arab term of the period, meaning ‘Northern European’, and is certainly not Gothic.]

26
– [Latin: ‘Thanks to God’, ‘with God’s help’.]

Part Four:

1
– [
Hoc fund quam lude militorum.
I quote Vaughan Davies’s idiosyncratic translation of the mediaeval dog-Latin text.]

2
– [Bartolomeo Colleoni (1403(?)-1475) had died the previous year. A famous condottiere, employed largely by the Venetians from 1455, he lived until the age of 72, still active Captain-General of the Venetian forces, and discouraged by the Most Serene Republic from travelling north of the Alps from his castle at Malpaga, in case the Milanese should immediately attack Venice in his absence! Those who truly wanted to see the great captain – for example, King Edward IV of England, in 1474 – travelled to him.]

3
– [Sir John Hawkwood, famed English mercenary and leader of the White Company (1363-1375), saw long and profitable service in Italy and died old (in 1394).]

4
– [The Italian ‘contract’, from which the condottieri took their nickname.]

5
– [Original text, ‘kirtle’.]

6
– [In the original text, ‘triarii [veteran] of a legion’, but a modern version gives a more immediate referent.]

7
– [Contemporary records survive for this.]

8
– [Onorata Rodiani, a historical character, has obviously been incorporated in this text out of a conviction that these two women ought to have met. In fact, Rodiani is reported as dying, after a long career as a mercenary, in the defence of her home town, Castelleone, in
AD
1472.]

9
– [Priest. Most scholars (clerks) were also priests, in this era.]