An extract from my history of the British monarchy

As some regular readers of the blog may now, I am currently working on a history of the British monarchy, which will be published later this year. It's currently going well and I am very excited to share it with everyone when it's ready. As a preview, here is a short extract from early on in the book, about the transition from Roman imperial rule to an Anglo-Saxon Britain. Edits may occur between now and publication, but I hope you enjoy it. In the meantime, my new novel The Immaculate Deception is available on Amazon, both UK and US, and every sale and review is hugely appreciated in a very competitive market! There is also a Facebook fan page for my non-fiction work.

In 367, Britannia was attacked on all sides by the peoples beyond the borders. The empire provoked both resentment and envy in the “barbarian” countries around it. As Rome weakened, they seized their opportunity to strike. Hadrian’s famous wall did not repel the invaders and the Picts, who populated what is now Scotland, invaded Britannia from the north. This sweeping-south trauma was added to by invasions from the west and the south. The invasion from the west came from the Scots in Ireland – or Hibernia, as the Romans had called it. The invasion on the southern coastline was led by the Saxons, a sea-faring tribe of Germanic pagans, who the Briton-Christian chronicler Gildas described as ‘a race hateful to God and men.’ At the time of these attacks, the Roman empire’s power may have been declining, but it was not yet broken and Britannia was exceptionally lucky that the imperial throne had recently been taken by the Emperor Valentinian, who had undertaken the promethean task of trying to hold the decaying empire together and thus earned his future sobriquet of “the Great”. Livid at the so-called “barbarian conspiracy” to end Roman rule in the British Isles, Valentinian set off for Britannia himself. When he was delayed in Gaul, he dispatched one of his most gifted generals, Flavius Theodosius, to expel the invaders. He was successful in completing the task the Emperor had set for him, but the three-pronged invasion of Roman Britannia, defeated though it was, nonetheless suggested how seriously the empire’s power was deteriorating and how vulnerable it now was to threats from those it had long dismissed as contemptibly uncivilized. 

In 409, the barbarians struck again. This time, the throne was not held by a man like Valentinian, but by the weak and unlucky Honorius. Honorius was an erratic monarch who scandalised his Christian subjects by developing an incestuous passion for his younger sister, Galla Placidia, who fled to the eastern city of Constantinople to escape him. The entirety of the Roman Empire was now being besieged by incursions and attacks; Rome itself was threatened and the imperial capital was now the city of Ravenna, since Rome could no longer be adequately defended. Britannia, as an island on the farthest reaches of the empire with hostile neighbours on every side, was particularly vulnerable. The soldiers stationed there made their dissatisfaction with the current emperor clear by backing several rebellions against him. In 409, this instability was added to when Britannia was once again invaded by its enemies. Faced with the collapse of imperial rule and overstretched resources, Honorius could or would do nothing for the Britons. In 410, he declared that Britannia must look after itself for the time being and recalled the Roman legions to Italy to defend the empire’s capital. They never returned. Britain was at last free of Roman rule, but as with so many regime changes in history, the price of this freedom was a devastating loss of security. The native Britons were left defenceless to deal with multiple invasions. Initially, they coped badly and the archaeological evidence left to us would suggest that the sudden end of Roman Britain was a violent and bloody affair, with numerous casualties. Eventually, however, the Britons grew up, as all children must, and acquired something of the independent collective thought process which the empire had so long discouraged them from possessing. Some of the lessons of imperial rule still remained and in order to face the invaders, they knew that they must unite behind a strong leader. That leader’s name is given by tradition as Vortigern, but that may be a later fiction. Whatever his name, it seems that the dominant warlord of Briton decided that the main threat lay with the Celtic invaders from the north. In order to expel them, the man known as Vortigern decided to ally with the other invading force, the Saxons. Operating under the mentality of my enemy’s enemy is my friend, the hostilities between the Saxons and the Britons were halted and the former were allowed to flood into the country in order to supplement Vortigern’s attack on the northern Celts. It turned out to be Britain’s equivalent of the Trojan horse.

Copyright  © Gareth Russell 2013 All Rights Reserved 

Saint Jude

Saint Jude the Apostle, identified with Thaddaeus the Apostle by some (but not all) historians of the Church, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Christ and a relative of Jesus and Mary. Both he and the traitor-apostle, Judas Iscariot, would have shared essentially the same name - a variant of the word "Judah". He was a relative, probably a cousin, of Saint James the Just, and ancient writers tell us that Jude preached the gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia and Libya. According to the early Church chronicler, Eusebius of Caesarea, Saint Jude then returned to Jerusalem, where he assisted with the election of Saint Simeon as bishop of Jerusalem.

Saint Jude was martyred in about 65 A.D., along with another one of the Twelve Apostles, Saint Simon the Zealot. They were preaching either in Beirut or in modern-day Iran when they were beaten to death and then beheaded. Due to this, Saint Jude the Apostle and Martyr was venerated as a saint in Christianity long before the formal process of canonisation was ratified. This is known as a "pre-congregation saint."

Today, Saint Jude is venerated by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Oriental Orthodox and Syriac Church of the East denominations of Christianity. His feast day in the Eastern communion is 19th June; in the West, it is 28th October. He is the patron saint of lost causes and cases most despaired of. He has a reputation for being one of the most faithful and beloved of Christianity's holy figures.

A beautiful prayer to Saint Jude, which I like very much, is: -

Oh Holy Saint Jude, Apostle and Martyr, great in virtue and rich in miracles, near kinsman of Jesus Christ, faithful intercessor of all who invoke your special help in time of need. 

To you I have recourse from the depths of my heart and humbly request assistance. Help me in my present and urgent petition.

In return, I promise to make your name known and cause you to be invoked.

Saint Jude, Apostle, martyr and relative of our Lord Jesus Christ, of Mary and Joseph, intercede for us.

I think it's lovely and I hope it helps someone! 

Writing Cleopatra

On his website, C.W. Gortner, author of The Tudor Secret (reviewed here), posts a guest post from the acclaimed historical novelist Colin Falconer, whose debut novel When We Were Gods, a dramatisation of the life of Cleopatra, has recently been made available on Kindle. Falconer reflects on the difficulties of being a historical novelist and the ways in which fact is stranger than fiction: -

"In revising and tightening the manuscript I was struck again by two things: first, what a fantastic story it is. If it wasn’t all true, it would be hard to believe: thirty years before Jesus, an eighteen year old princess tries to take over the world? Outrageous. Cleopatra was a woman with real cojones. She took on Roman military and political power at the apogee of its power. If she had succeeded – and she very nearly did – we can only speculate what the world would be like today... The real Cleopatra was a consummate political animal, with extraordinary ambition, a rare talent for what we would today call spin and the instincts of a street fighter."

For Colin Falconer's full article on the Kindle edition of When We Were Gods, click HERE.

Merry Christmas

"And he saddled the ass, and set her upon it; and his son led it, and Joseph followed. And when they had come within three miles, Joseph turned and saw that Mary was sorrowful; and he said to himself: 'Likely that which is in her distresses her.' And again Joseph turned and saw her laughing. And he said to her: 'Mary, how is it that I see in thy face at one time laughter, at another sorrow?' And Mary said to Joseph: 'Because I see two peoples with mine eyes; the one weeping and lamenting, and the other rejoicing and exulting.'"

- The Protoevangelium of James (approximately early 2nd century A.D.)

Christmas is a time for rejoicing, but for many people it is also a time for sadness - either as they mark the first time they have spent the holiday without a particular loved one or recalling painful memories. The above verse from a Jewish-Christian hagiography, intended to be a life of the Virgin Mary up to and until the point where she features in the biblical Gospel according to Saint Luke, is a very pretty and moving verse (I think), which captures the twin emotions Christmas can often invoke for people. In any case, I wish everyone the very best of Christmases and hope you and your family have been together and above all safe at this time of the year. 

Faith, Reason and the Virgin Birth

".... There is much confusion as to the precise meaning of the Virgin Birth.  It is not to be confused with the Virginal Conception of Our Lord.   The Church, from the earliest times, has articulated the Perpetual Virginity of Our Lady as pertaining to three distinct moments:  before the birth of Jesus (ante partum), during the birth of Jesus (in partu), and after birth of Jesus (post partum).  Virtually every time the magisterium has spoken on the subject, this threefold distinction is made.  This teaching is derived from the early fathers of the Church, who maintained, defended and made the teaching a universally held truth..."

Via Tea at Trianon comes a defence of the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary and, in particular, the full meaning and theological relevance of the Virgin Birth.  

A new biography of Cleopatra

I have to say I agree with Elena Maria Vidal in being excited about Stacy Schiff's new biography of Cleopatra VII, the last Pharaoh of Egypt, whose suicide on August 12th 30 B.C. marked the capitulation of Egypt to Roman rule.

Interestingly, I can't help but feel that the late Roman Republic's obsession with fiscal virtue and its demonisation of Cleopatra's Egypt as "decadent" has a lot in common with the recent republican/Tea Party obsession with lambasting America's present elite, via the route of criticising people for being educated at an Ivy League university. This excellent education somehow allegedly makes them either a corrupting or alien influence. (Here's looking at you Christine O'Donnell and Glenn Beck...) The fact that many of the critics of "the elite" are themselves people who work in television, drive SUVs, have disposable incomes, take regular holidays, have private health insurance and send their children to private schools does not seem to have occured to them. They too are a long away from the economic reality most Americans live with. Not that they seem to be in anyway aware of this... too much self-reflection is alas apt to get in the way of a rant. Anyone who has ever seen Glenn Beck try to explain the Divine Right of Kings or medieval history on his show will attest that a knowledge of any elite - or indeed common sense - is not his in abundance ...

Equally, the ancient patriotic republican idea that Rome equated with virtue and hard-work, while the East was saturated with corruption, laziness, extravagance and moral degeneracy also seem to echo the Tea Party or radical Right's bizarre interpretation of "American values," in which the noun "European" has somehow become the political insult de jour and has been extended as a definition to include the entire north-east coast.

To quote Cleopatra's new biographer: -

"In the late republic, that outsized wealth impugned her morals. To wax eloquent about someone's embossed silver, sumptuous carpets or marble statuary was to indict him. In the Roman view, Cleopatra quite literally possessed an embarrassment of riches. This meant that every evil in the profligacy family attached itself to her. Well before she became the sorceress of legend—a reckless, careless destroyer of men—Cleopatra was suspect as a reckless, careless destroyer of wealth. Even if she never melted a pearl in vinegar, as legend has it, she could well afford to do so... Gulping down his envy with a chaser of contempt, a Roman found himself less awed than offended by Egypt. He wrote off extravagance as detrimental to body and mind, sounding like no one so much as Mark Twain, resisting the siren call of Europe many centuries later. Staring an advanced civilization straight in the face, the Roman dismissed it as either barbarism or decadence....  The divide between the civilized, virtuous West and the tyrannical, dissolute East began in part with Rome and its Egyptian problem. Cleopatra emerged as stand-in for her occult, alchemical land, the intoxicating address of sex and excess. She wielded power shrewdly and easily, making her that rarest of things: a woman who—working from an original script—discomfited the very male precincts of traditional authority. Two thousand years later, those tensions and anxieties have not relaxed their hold."

The full article can be read here and I would really recommend it. 

The new biography can be viewed here on Amazon.com

Early Christian icons uncovered

Firstly, a word of condolence to the Northern Irish blogger, "Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland," whose posts on the history of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ulster and their surviving (or vanished) homes are both invaluable and fascinating. He sadly lost his mother, whom he affectionately nicknamed "the Dowager," when she passed away peacefully at 10 p.m. on Saturday, June 19th. Sincere condolences, thoughts and prayers to him and his family at this sad time.

Secondly, and on an unrelated note, excavations in Rome have uncovered some of the earliest surviving Christian icons of Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Andrew (above; the patron saint of Scotland), as well as the evangelical Saint Paul, author of much of the latter-half of the New Testament. They were discovered in Santa Tecla catacombs beneath the Eternal City.

MSNBC has more on the story, including accounts of how lasers were used to help uncover these artifacts, the happy partnership between religion and science which helped unearth them and a little on their historical significance.

Easter Sunday

"They returned from the tomb and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest. Now they were Mary Magdalene and Johanna and Mary the mother of James; also the other women with them were telling these things to the apostles. And these words appeared to them as nonsense, and they would not believe them. But Peter arose and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings only; and he went away to his home, marveling at that which had happened."
- The Gospel according to Saint Luke, Chapter 24

Of all Christianity's many relics, none is more famous, nor more controversial, than the Shroud of Turin, kept for centuries in the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. Contrary to popular belief, the Vatican neither endorses nor rejects the authenticity of the cloth which, for centuries, has been venerated as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ. When shown under strong light, the Shroud reveals a haunting imprint of a crucified man in his early-to-mid thirties, the body bearing literally hundreds of wounds from scouring, the forehead pierced multiple times and the hands and feet pierced by nail-sized wounds.

For almost the last half-century, however, the Shroud has been a byword for religious hokum amongst the intelligentsia. Carbon dating tests carried out on the Shroud with the Vatican's permission concluded that the Shroud dated from the 14th century and, as such, was nothing more than a clever forgery. The insistence of those, like textile historian Dr. Lemberg, who argued that the intricate stitching on the back of the Shroud was utterly unknown in medieval Europe and dated from either the 1st or 2nd century AD, was ignored. So too were the queries of those historians who pointed out the technology to actually forge something as intricate and life-like as the Shroud was non-existent in the Middle Ages; a fact corroborated by forensic pathologists who argued that the anatomical details on the figure in the Shroud tally with everything we know of the physicality of death by crucifixion, facts which most people in the Middle Ages did not know due to a life-time of gazing at usually-inaccurate crucifixes. However, the carbon dating on the Shroud which placed it to over a millennium after the death of Jesus Christ was held to be incontrovertible and, for many - myself included - the fact that it was impossible for the Shroud of Turin to be genuine was more or less self-evident.

As with many things, I was rather jolted out of this complacency at Oxford by a tutor who, when I made an airily dismissive comment about the Shroud's authenticity, responded: "Ah, but what about the stitching? What about the folding patterns? What about the blood?" The blood? "Yes, the blood; it's AB. Common enough in Palestine at the time of the Crucifixion. Practically unheard-of in early modern Europeans. They couldn't have know that to 'fake it,' could they? And yet it's all over the Shroud. All over it." What about the carbon dating, I asked swiftly. "Yes, I've often wondered about that. Of course, it's equally possible that they made a mistake and simply analysed the polymers left on the Shroud from the last time it was exposed to the air for a prolonged period of time - which would be the 14th century. Still, I suppose it could be the most ingenious fraud in history, couldn't it? Anything is possible."

The Shroud's track record amongst the written sources, however, is not great. There is no evidence of it being in existence prior to turning up in France in 1360, but evidence or not, the sheer emotional impact of the dead, ghostly imprint on the Shroud was such that once it did come to the Faithful's notice it asserted a collective hold on the hearts of pilgrims that it was never, really, relinquished.

Lying sealed in a magnificent silver ark in the Cámara Santa ("Holy Chamber") of the Cathedral of San Salvador in Oviedo, north-western Spain, is another piece of cloth associated with the events of Easter. But this piece of cloth has attracted far less attention than the Turin Shroud. It is known as the Sudarium of Oviedo: a sudarium (Latin for 'sweat-cloth') would have been placed over the face of dead Jews in the time of Christ. In the case of those who died from Crucifixion, it would naturally have caught the blood and sweat of the dying man and, true to its claim, the Sudarium holds small pools of blood congregated around the nasal area, with the sweat and blood stains trailing off around the beard-line of the victim. Unlike the Shroud, however, there is no imprint. (The Sudarium would, in any case, not have stayed on the body for as long as the Shroud.) The Sudarium is simply an ancient, blood-stained piece of cloth, folded over in two unlike most of its kind because whoever it wrapped had died in a state of extreme shock, the head lolling onto outstretched arms already racked with rigamortis by the time the Sudarium was placed over the face.

In a further divergence to the Shroud, the documentary evidence about the Sudarium is a lot stronger. It is first mentioned in a European source by Antoninus of Piacenza, a 6th century Christian pilgrim, who saw the Sudarium being venerated in a cave of the Monastery of Saint Mark the Evangelist, just outside Jerusalem, where, according to locals, it had been kept for several hundred years. Such was the pious love accorded to the Sudarium that it is virtually impossible to believe that it had been forged recently. Moreover, its fame was such that despite being left untouched it was already under the careful watch of the Church hierarchy in Constantinople.

Forty-four years after Antoninus prayed in the presence of the Sudarium, the Persians invaded Palestine. Fearing that the Holy Relic would fall into the hands of non-believers, the monks and the Byzantine hierarchy arranged for the Sudarium to be smuggled out of the fallen province and it commenced its wandering, after the monks charged with its safe-keeping fled south. Moving through northern Africa, they eventually crossed at the Straits of Gibraltar and brought the Sudarium to the Kingdom of the Asturias, the first kingdom on the Iberian peninsula to convert to Christianity. There, the Sudarium was stored in the silver ark which it continues to rest in today and, in the next generation, a Holy Chamber was built for the relic by King Alfonso the Chaste. The Chamber today is part of the Cathedral of San Salvador and for the last thirteen hundred years, the Sudarium has called the Cámara Santa of San Salvador home.

Not long after the Shroud of Turin, the Sudarium too was carbon-dated. The result? That it dated from the 7th century, and no earlier. Yet, we know from the writings of Antoninus of Piacenza and from Byzantine writers that the Sudarium was already old in the 6th century. Perhaps, as one of the dons had suggested to me was the case with the Shroud, the carbon dating of the Sudarium had picked up only on the bacteria left by the last time the relic was properly left in the open air for a prolonged period of time - the 7th century - when it was smuggled from Palestine to Spain.

On the surface, the Sudarium's claim to authenticity - especially in the documentary sources - is much stronger than the Turin Shroud's. Moreover, there is absolutely no evidence in any written source that has survived (and those on the Sudarium are extensive) which places the Sudarium and the Shroud (which would have formed two parts of the same funerary equipment if one believes both their legends) together, at any point in history. Not in the writings of Antoninus of Piacenza, the first European to see the Sudarium, or any subsequent saint, writer or historian since has there ever been a source which even hints that the Shroud and the Sudarium met each other in Palestine, Africa, Byzantium, Spain, France, Italy or the Hapsburg Empire. As far as the written evidence goes, we know the two never met at any point after the sixth century AD.

Today, the Sudarium of Oviedo lies in its magnificent silver reliquary near the tombs of Saint Eulogius, one of the forty-eight "Martyrs of Córdoba," Saint Leocadia of Toledo, Saint Pelayo, King Fruelo the Cruel and three queens - Queen Munia Lopez, Queen Teresa of León and Queen Jimena de Pamplona. Every year, it is exhibited to the faithful on Good Friday, then in September on the Feast of the Triumph of The Cross and once more on the Feast's Octave in October. Then, for the rest of the year, this mysterious, bloody piece of cloth slumbers in the silver ark that was built for it by a pious king over a millennium ago.

And, in one of those rare sets of occurrences which science deplores and history loves, there is one final piece of information of the Sudarium of Oviedo which is perhaps worth considering: the fabric the Sudarium is made of, the geographical origin of the cloth, the type of stitching around the edges and the blood type which stains it? They are all exactly the same as those on the Shroud of Turin. To all intents and purposes the Sudarium and the Shroud, which history tells us never met and science tells us never could have met, may as well have been cut from the same piece of cloth.

Maybe they're both the most ingenious works of fraud in history.

Who knows?

Anything is possible...