The jousts at St Inglevert are among the most famous of the entire middle ages.  The renowned French knight Sir Jean le Maingre, or ‘Boucicaut’ as he was better  known, had challenged all comers to joust in March 1389.⁵ He and two other fa-  mous French knights—Renaud de Roye and Jean de Saimpy—proposed that  the three of them would encamp at St Inglevert and would ride five strokes, or  courses, against anyone who cared to challenge them in the space of thirty  days. And if one of them was badly injured or killed, the remaining two would  take on the responsibility of fighting all challengers, down to the last survivor. 

John of Gaunt—who had seen Boucicaut joust in Gascony—was impressed  and ordered his own herald to carry news of the challenge throughout England.  Of course John exhorted his chivalric son and heir to take part. Henry and a  large number of English lords and esquires departed some time after 13 March.⁶  Thomas Mowbray, Henry’s fellow Appellant, went with him. So too did his violent brother-in-law, John Holland, a number of very experienced knights, including Lord Beaumont, Thomas Clifford and Sir Peter Courtenay, and a vast crowd  of patriotic noncombatants. 

It is not difficult to see the reason for the excitement. The three French protagonists had offered all their opponents the opportunity to fight with uncapped steel lances. These ‘jousts of war’, as they were called, were exceptionally dangerous. As a result, they were very rare events. So all attention at St Inglevert  was fixed on a fine spruce tree which stood beside the jousting field. Two  shields hung from its lowest bows. Each challenger was expected to strike one  of the two shields with a wand, in true Arthurian fashion. One shield meant a  joust of peace, with lances capped. The other meant a joust of war, with sharp-  ened steel lances, which often resulted in severe injury and death. A herald sat  in the tree from sunrise to sunset each day, and recorded the name, tide and nationality of each challenger.⁷ 

The most accurate details of the jousts are preserved in the monastic chronicle of Saint-Denis. The lists of contenders recorded therein seem to be based  on the lists composed by the heralds sitting in the spruce tree. The monk of  Saint-Denis, however, was not particularly interested in which knight did what;  he only made special note of the deeds of the three Frenchmen and one group  of Englishmen. It is Froissart’s chronicle which provides the most detail with  regard to the actual strokes. Froissart was not an eyewitness of events himself,  and unfortunately his source only stayed for the first week, so we do not have  an eyewitness account of Henry’s feats of arms; but nevertheless from other ac-  counts we can see that Henry acquitted himself very well indeed.⁸

The great event began with three days’ feasting, from Friday 18 March to Sun-  day the 20th. The next day, the first day of combat, John Holland, earl of Huntingdon, rode up to the shields, determined to prove himself. He took the wand  and struck the shield demanding a joust of war. As Boucicaut strode out of his  pavilion, he was sporting a new motto emblazoned on his arms: ‘whatever you  want’. Holland mounted his horse. With his minstrels playing behind him, he  rode to the end of the lists. Crowds gathered around, and he stood there, said  the chronicler, ‘in a very exalted manner’ and waited while his esquires fastened  his helmet. Boucicaut and the earl then faced each other, with the crowd chanting their names. They began to gallop. Froissart and the biographer of Bouci-  caut differ as to which lance strike it was exactly when Holland’s shield was broken in half by Boucicaut’s lance, and which strokes he rode against Boucicaut  and which against de Saimpy; but clearly the earl sustained a series of blows.  Sparks flew from their helmets as the steel lance tips struck them. At one point  Holland’s helmet came off. At another, their war horses collided. But  at the end of the five strokes, Boucicaut was still unbeaten. 

The next knight to try his luck was Thomas Mowbray, who also struck the  shield for the joust of war. His opponent was Renaud de Roye. At the first  stroke their horses shied away from each other. At the second, de Roye’s lance  broke, and Mowbray caught his opponent, but not hard enough to unseat him.  At the third, de Roye struck Mowbray so hard on the helmet that he broke the  straps and left Mowbray stunned, reeling. Mowbray had done well, but he could  not complete his five strokes of war against the Frenchman. 

Ian Mortimer, The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England’s Self-Made King

Somewhere, in the fog-bound plain of the sea,
Where Ortygia is, near Thrinitaka,
Alpheus’ foaming mouth mingles
With the gushing spring of Arethusa.

Some of the finest lines of the Pythia, says Pausanias.

Last night I dreamt about Wally. Or rather, his voice, on the telephone.

Wally, the rebellious chain-smoking and hard-drinking German who had at age of 18 converted to Islam, spontaneously, deciding based on his own research that it was the best possible religion. When years later he first met his prospective parents in law, god-fearing delhiwalla Sikhs, and they asked what religion he was, and he answered “I am a Muslim”, they laughed and said, “That’s a good one! He, he, but, no, seriously.”

On the telephone he was alive, after all, and well, relaxing under a beach umbrella at a resort some 12 km away along the circumference of the atoll. He would not be coming to town, too far for him, and then there are the tides one must reckon with, and besides he was in his cups, but would I visit him tomorrow? Yes, I said, I’ll rent a moped and come. I went downstairs to breakfast and there was this old Japanese guy, the window-seat bucho-type, the sort kicked upstairs and waiting for early retirement, studying the brochure of the tour operator. “I expected to be on the beach, but they put me here in town. Must be their way of saving money.” “Oh, be glad for it, I said. This town has lots of cozy little watering places, just like the ones you are used to from Tokyo. You’ll do fine”.

That night, in one of those cozy little dives, I found myself explaining to a Portuguese fellow reveler, in Portuguese, that cultures are like menus, and the more cultures one knew, the richer became his own personal menu of options.

Unfortunately, sunlight woke me before I could ride out to see Wally. So he will forever remain in the eye of my mind sitting under a beach umbrella, drink in hand, on a Pacific atoll.

Among the places in my dream world is this strict nature reserve, a deep mountain ravine overgrown with thick forest, with gnarly pines near the top, behind a tall, dense chicken-wire fence. A place I often sneak to, by hoisting myself up a pine branch hanging over the fence — fair athletic condition required, some tree scrambling involved. On this visit I met someone there — another interloper sneaking there to be alone in nature — a young man, tall, blond, good looking. We fell to talking — mostly him talking and me listening. He opened up in the way people sometimes do with total strangers whom they never expect to see again. As I listened, I grew more and more perplexed: this young man was struggling with all the things I had struggled with at his age; and he was coming to the same conclusions. At length he invited me home so that he could play a record for me. Hearing the first three bars, I realized he was playing Alessandro Scarlatti’s Primo Omicidio.

• 

• 

At the drink nursing part of a reception at some conference in Israel I met Golda Meir. She was in her late forties, lithe, with a copper mane, well but not fashionably dressed, in flat ballet shoes. I’m not sure how but we found ourselves talking aside, just the two of us, and moving surprisingly fast in intimacy. Look, she said, hurriedly, before someone might interrupt us, you did this, too, didn’t you, worked extraordinarily hard at everything, got the career, the money, the marriage and family, the lot, and — how is that working for you? A wan, sad smile and a gaze looking for confirmation. I didn’t dare tell her I did not do any of those things and, consequently, my life was working for me, but I was glad for the intimacy, there was a promise in it. Time is running out, I said. If you are not getting what you want, better get it now. You are good at building income, can you create an income stream to support an artist studio? she asked. For you? I asked. Is that the price?

At dinner we did not sit together. I left the table and headed to the kitchen in search of cucumbers.

On the 18th of July, at 8 o’clock in the morning, I bicycled along the highest ridge in the land. Golden sun hung low in front of me, behind a muslin veil of morning mist, and baby-blue shadows hung over the valleys. Looking left and right, towards the horizon, I could see for miles: the windmill farms in Germany and the power plant in France, 50 kilometers away. Overhead, hundreds of larks made a huge twittering racket, and with every breath I drew in the intense smell of ripening barley and drying wild grass.

Mulheren also delighted in his role as the enfant terrible of the arbitrage and trading communities. He  loved to do battle with the arbs, most of whom he considered fat and lazy, and boasted that he usually “ate them for lunch.” One of his favorite pranks was  to initiate heavy buying or selling about a half hour  before a major market announcement, such as an  antitrust court ruling that might make or break a  merger deal, was due. In fact, Mulheren would have  no idea about the outcome, but the sudden activity  coming across the tape would suggest that he had  advance knowledge. Arbs would go crazy, especially Boesky. “What did you find out?” he’d ask  breathlessly. “What do you know?” 

“Nothing,” Mulheren would calmly reply. “I just  did this to fuck people’s minds.” 

James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves

“Most historians think of war when they begin to list the changes caused by horseback riding and the  earliest wheeled vehicles. But horses were first  domesticated by people who thought of them as  food. They were a cheap source of winter meat; they could feed themselves through the steppe winter, when cattle and sheep needed to be supplied with water and fodder. After people were familiar with horses as domesticated animals, perhaps after a relatively docile male bloodline was established, someone found a particularly submissive horse and rode on it, perhaps as a joke*. But riding soon found its first serious use in the management of herds of domesticated cattle, sheep, and horses. In this capacity alone it was an important improvement that enabled fewer people to manage larger herds and move them more efficiently, something that really mattered in a world where domesticated animals were the principal source of food and clothing. By 4800–4600 BCE horses were included with  obviously domesticated animals in human funeral rituals at Khvalysnk on the middle Volga.”

(*I suppose discovery of cow’s milk went similarly. Yo, said Grok to Gryk, see that really big beast there? I challenge you to go up there and suck on those”. Where would we be today without men. Think about it.)

*

Much has happened in archeology since the last time I looked. Anthony’s important contribution is to combine work in Indoeuropean lingustics — heretofore of not much use to western archeologists, whose major discoveries have mainly been non-Indoeuropean — with archeological work heretofore unknown to them because it was done by East Europeans, and published in their languages. The result is a work which populates a great white area of the map in our minds: the history of the Eurasian Steppe — from lower Dniester to Ferghana Valley — from 5000-1200 years BCE and its relations with the civilizations already known to us.

He writes:

“The relationship between mounted steppe  pastoralists and sedentary agricultural societies has  usually been seen by historians as either violent, like the Suvorovo confrontation with Old Europe, or  parasitic, or both. “Barbaric” pastoral societies,  hungry for grain, metals, and wealth, none of which  they could produce themselves, preyed upon their  “civilized” neighbors, without whom they could not  survive. But these ideas are inaccurate and  incomplete even for the historical period, as the  Soviet ethnographer Sergei Vainshtein, the Western  historian Nicola DiCosmo, and our own botanical  studies have shown. Pastoralism produced plenty of  food—the average nomad probably ate better than  the average agricultural peasant in Medieval China or  Europe. Steppe miners and craftsmen mined their  own abundant ores and made their own metal tools and weapons; in fact, the enormous copper mines of  Russia and Kazakhstan and the tin mines of the  Zeravshan show that the Bronze Age civilizations of the Near East depended on them. For the prehistoric era covered in this book, any model based on  relationships between the militarized nomads of the  steppes and the medieval civilizations of China or  Persia is anachronistic. Although the steppe societies  of the Suvorovo-Novodanilovka period did seem to  prey upon their neighbors in the lower Danube valley, they were clearly more integrated and apparently had  peaceful relationships with their Cucuteni-Tripolye neighbors at the same time. Maikop traders seem to have visited steppe settlements on the lower Don and even perhaps brought weavers there. The institutions that regulated peaceful exchange and cross-cultural relationships were just as important as the institution of the raid.”

David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

In a preamble to the chapter on the Antonine Pandemic:

In the short moral sketches of the great Plutarch, the author famous for his biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, there is a set piece, in which the question is posed whether there can be new diseases in the world. It was the kind of vaguely scientific conversation that became au current among the lettered aristocracy of the empire. Plutarch has one speaker maintain that new diseases were possible, but he thought so only because there were still unexplored foods and fads that could insult the body in novel ways, such as the disconcerting fashion for hot baths. His disputant pressed the case that new diseases were in principle not even possible. The Cosmos was closed and complete and Nature was not an inventor. The great doctors of the past stood in an authoritative rebuttal of the idea. Then, in one of those pregnant moments of error, where the very bedrock of the ancient way of thought comes momentarily exposed to plain view, he insisted that “diseases do not have their own particular seeds”.

History is full of ironies, and it is a poignant one that even as Plutarch was composing this civilized disquisition, nature was distantly preparing the seeds of a new disease, an adversary uninhabited by most the self-imposed limits that bounded the familiar pathogens of the Roman world. The reassuring notion of unchanging nature would be rudely contradicted. The Wild was preparing something new, something furious, and vast.

Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire

Rather than risk direct warfare, the Chinese devised economic strategies to control their foreign enemies.  One of these policies involved the establishment of border markets that could supply Chinese goods to foreign populations which might otherwise resort to raiding to acquire what they wanted.  The Han realized that they could use these exchange centers to bring valuable steppe resources under Chinese possession.  Chinese accounts confirm that

The Xiongnu were greedy, delighting in the border markets.  They longed for Chinese goods and the Han allowed them to trade in the markets in order to diminish their resources. 

Significant border markets first appeared in the reign of the Han Emperor Wen (180-157 BCE) when some Chinese commanders began to establish camp markets near their military outposts on the frontier.  Steppe dwellers could visit these markets to acquire silk fabrics, and other state issued materials, and in return the soldiers could acquire goods which were not part of their regular supply. 

Under Emperor Jing (157-141 BCE) the Han regime founded a series of large border markets near well guarded gateways in the Great Wall. A Chinese study called Xinshu explains the operation of this policy which was designed to make the Xiongnu economically dependent on Chinese products.  The Chinese recognized that

The Xiongnu badly need the border markets and have sought desperately to obtain them from us, even resorting to force.  Therefore the government should immediately establish many border markets in locations of strategic importance. Every border market should have shops which specialize in raw meat, wine, cooked rice and delicious barbecues.  All the shops must be big enough to serve 100 or 200 people.  This will ensure that the markets beneath the Great Wall will surely swarm with the Xiongnu. 

Once this economic dependence was established, the Chinese could exert political pressure on the Xiongnu by threatening to withhold or limit their access to Han products.  The Xinshu explains:

If the Xiongnu kings attempt to lead their people away, they will be defied by their followers.  When the Xiongnu have developed a craving for our rice, stew, barbecue, and wine, they will have a fatal weakness. 

Raoul McLaughlin, The Roman Empire and the Silk Routes: The Ancient World Economy and the Empires of Parthia, Central Asia and Han China