Don’t treat me this way

Date: February 18 2013

Adam Lusher

History of hysteria? After the discovery of ”villainous” Richard III’s bones come new efforts to clear his name. So who else has time given a bad rap?

THE discovery of royal bones beneath a Leicester car park has led to calls for Richard III – the hunchbacked villain of Shakespeare’s imagination – finally to be recognised as a victim of Tudor propaganda produced by, among others, Shakespeare. He is, however, far from the only ruler whose reputation may need to be reassessed. Some of history’s greatest villains may not have been quite as villainous – and some historic ”heroes” may hide some dark secrets …

Richard III (1452-1485)

Legend has it: Ruthless, disfigured murderer of his two princely nephews. The reappraised view: A victim of Tudor propaganda.

According to legend, Richard secured his hold on the throne by killing the ”Princes in the Tower” – his nephews, 12-year-old Edward V, the rightful king of England, and his nine-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York.

To Philippa Langley of the Richard III Society, who led the search for his remains, England’s last Plantagenet king was traduced by the propaganda of the Tudors, who were aware that his successor Henry VII’s claim to the throne was also tenuous.

The true character of Richard III, says Langley, was not that of a man who could kill his two nephews. In his stronghold of the north, where people knew him best, he was regarded as anything but a tyrant.

Indeed, on the day after the Battle of Bosworth, the mayor of York’s Serjeant of the Mace felt moved to report: ”King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was through great treason … piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.”

Though Richard’s remains have confirmed curvature of his spine, Langley insists that does not make him the hunchback of Tudor and Shakespearean propaganda. In fact, she says we should accept that Richard III’s scoliosis made him even braver than anyone realised.

”Acute scoliosis like that was painful. So we know that he was working through the pain barrier every day just to do his job. That tells me about his character.”

Genghis Khan (1162-1227)

Legend has it: Barbarous 13th-century empire-builder who killed more people than any other in history. The reappraised view: Lowered taxes, introduced meritocracy, helped start the Renaissance.

The feared Mongol warrior, it seems, was an admirable chap with much to commend him to the modern world. He lowered taxes, supported business, and was unusually meritocratic in his dealings, according to Professor Jack Weatherford, author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.

Khan took the revolutionary step of making appointments according to merit. ”He smashed the feudal system of aristocratic privilege [and] built a unique system based on merit, loyalty and achievement,” says Professor Weatherford.

Of course, in conquering much of Central Asia and China, and in founding an empire that would stretch from Vietnam to Hungary, there was a fair amount of killing. But, says Professor Weatherford, ”the numbers have been generally inflated by a factor of 10”.

Yes, in some rebellious cities in Persia, Khan didn’t have enough soldiers for a permanent army of occupation, and so massacred populations. Accounts of Khan having 1,748,000 inhabitants of Nishapur (in modern Iran) beheaded were ”much exaggerated” – even if Khan probably enjoyed the embellishment.

”No city in the world at that time had 1 million inhabitants. He encouraged these things so the next city down the line would want to surrender.”

The accounts of torture, he explains, were the results of misunderstanding. Mongols had a great fear of bloodletting, because blood was seen as part of the soul, and spilling it was an insult to the heaven or the ground.

”Mongols would execute people in a way that didn’t involve bloodshed – usually by wrapping them in a carpet and stomping on them or suffocating them. Most foreigners interpreted this as torture, but it really wasn’t. Mongols themselves would usually request that form of execution.”

In fact, the great tyrant and his Mongol hordes conquered so much territory that Europe established links with China.

”This helped fuel the European Renaissance, without question,” says Professor Weatherford. ”I admire him.”

Richard the Lionheart (1157-1199)

Legend has it: Crusading king and great military leader. The reappraised view: War criminal, oppressed the poor, not all that lionhearted.

Richard I’s statue outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster shows him with sword aloft, as the crusading knight, model king and hero to his villainous brother, ”Bad” King John.

Yet some historians now claim Richard the Lionheart was guilty of Islamophobic brutality that was barbaric even by the standards of the Middle Ages. In 1191, after the Siege of Acre, Richard ordered the massacre of some 2600 unarmed prisoners after failing to agree hostage terms with Saladin, the Muslim leader.

Closer to home, he is accused of bleeding the nation dry to fund his foreign adventures. ”Richard bankrupted England,” says Nicholas Vincent, professor of mediaeval history at the University of East Anglia.

Despite the legends suggesting that Richard was a friend of the poor, like his ally Robin Hood, his tax increases caused the oppression of England’s peasants. ”He insisted the barons pay him more and more for these vainglorious expeditions overseas. The barons in turn had to take it out on those lower down the social scale.

”So, in fact, Richard oppressed all those people you see him being friendly with in those happy films about the Lionheart. While quaffing beer with them, he was actually picking their pockets.”

‘Bad’ King John (1166-1216)

Legend has it: Tyrannical ruler who gave back foreign land, increased taxes, and was excommunicated by the Pope. The reappraised view: Even worse than history remembers.

We have always known he was bad. Perhaps the only silver lining in John’s tyranny was that it was so dreadful, it provoked feudal barons into fighting for the liberties enshrined in Magna Carta.

He extorted money from his subjects and, according to one chronicler, had the teeth of a victim pulled out until he agreed to pay up. He was, in the words of the 20th-century historian G.M. Trevelyan, ”made to be hated”.

Now, however, it seems that we didn’t know the half of it. When asked if King John was that bad, Professor Nicholas Vincent says: ”He was a great deal worse.”

Perhaps the most shocking recent discovery about John involved his second wife, Isabella of Angouleme. ”What people hadn’t realised,” says Professor Vincent, ”was that Isabella was already married – to the French baron Hugh de Lusignan – when she was as young as eight years old. The likelihood is that John consummated his marriage to her when she was aged between eight and 12.

”Thereafter, he seems to have kept Isabella of Angouleme, his first wife Isabella of Gloucester, and a succession of mistresses together as a sort of harem. Even for a dysfunctional family such as the Plantagenets, this is going it a bit.”

Nero (AD37-AD68)

Legend has it: Emperor who fiddled while Rome burnt – then burnt his Christian slaves. The reappraised view: Perhaps not that bad; probably didn’t actually fiddle while Rome burnt.

Nero was the tyrant’s tyrant, setting a standard for all other dreadful rulers who followed him. As Pliny the Elder wrote after Nero’s downfall, he was ”the poison of the world”.

Perhaps his greatest alleged crime was getting arsonists to start the Great Fire of Rome and ”fiddling” – playing his kithara, a lyre-like instrument – while the city burnt. He then supposedly blamed the Christians, who were burnt alive as human torches to illuminate his garden parties.

In his book, Nero: The Man Behind the Myth, however, Richard Holland claims that Nero was the victim of black propaganda circulated by his enemies.

While it was impossible to whitewash Nero completely, Holland portrays him as a poetry-loving patron of the arts, and with democratising instincts. He was popular with the masses: when he went ”on tour” to Greece, he had thousands of screaming fans in tow.

More attention should have been paid to the historian Tacitus, who was sceptical about Nero’s supposed fire-starting. Nero did not rush back to Rome from his holiday villa to marvel at the flames, Holland says. Instead, he took charge of the firefighting operation.

”The idea that he stood up in the way Peter Ustinov does in the film [Quo Vadis] and plunked away on his kithara is just false.”

Yes, Nero murdered, but this was a brutal, insecure age, when even an emperor’s own family might plot against him.

”He killed far fewer than any of his predecessors. In the first eight years of his reign, the total number of his murder victims was four: his mother, his wife, his brother-in-law and a cousin.”

Mary Beard, classics professor at Cambridge University, says Nero may be unfairly maligned. ”The reputation of an emperor is determined by his successors – so those who were assassinated [or deposed] are always ‘baddies’.”

Cleopatra (69BC-30BC)

Legend has it: Ill-fated Queen of Egypt, legendary man-eater. The reappraised view: Not as beautiful as Hollywood suggested, not a ”wanton seductress”, no bathing in asses’ milk, no suicide by asp.

According to legend, the last pharaoh of ancient Egypt was irresistibly beautiful, seducer of both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Cleopatra’s charms fully merited her being played on film by the young Elizabeth Taylor.

But, says Stacy Schiff, who has written a recent biography of Cleopatra, her legend has outrun reality. The near-contemporary Roman historians, she writes, ”assure us of her wanton ways [but] few raved about her beauty”.

According to Schiff, her personality – she was ”a commanding woman versed in politics and fluent in nine languages” – was probably more important than her looks in seducing Caesar. Coins struck during her reign suggest she had inherited her father’s hooked nose.

”We remember her as a wanton temptress for the wrong reasons. She was a capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency.”

It is more likely that Cleopatra, the supposed man-eater, was monogamous. Caesar was probably her first lover.

As for her famously exotic beauty regime, says Schiff, ”she was only slightly more likely to have bathed in asses’ milk than to have invented aspirin”.

And her death by asp? In 2010, a team of German academics decided the snake played no part in Cleopatra’s suicide. An asp bite would have meant a slow, painful end. A cocktail of plant poisons including hemlock would have been a more realistic option.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/dont-treat-me-this-way-20130217-2el4e.html?skin=text-only