SEX AND SAVAGERY
Poisoned concubines, kings hacked to death by their sons, eyeballs gouged, genitals ripped off — a magnificent new book by SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE sums up the world’s history in two words...
THERE is cause, on the very first of this magisterial tome’s 1,344 pages, to pause for thought; to ponder the despairing words quoted there from the Latin poet Virgil — ‘So many wars, so many shapes of crime . . . Unholy Mars bends all to his mad will; The world is like a chariot run wild’ — and, alongside this, the communist leader Lenin’s simple, cynical truth that ‘The whole question is: who controls whom.’
And so, from the outset, our brains are up and running as this marathon of a book attempts to encapsulate the whole of human history in a single volume — from the first footsteps on a sandy beach 950,000 years ago to Kyiv under fire from Russian missiles today. In between is an endless saga dominated by sex and savagery, punctuated by periods of peace and progress that never last.
How do you embark on such a daunting journey of scholarship? And why? I fancy historian Simon Sebag Montefiore was inspired by another quotation he places on Page 1 — the poet Dante’s admission that ‘In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost’ — and he determined to steer a way through the tangled undergrowth, to make some sense out of the chaos of world history.
He has done so magnificently and meticulously by choosing as his framework all the dynasties we know of that have ever held (and inevitably lost) power or made a name for themselves. ‘ The family,’ he writes, ‘remains the essential unit of human existence.
‘History is made by the interplay of ideas, institutions and geopolitics. When they come together, great changes happen.
But even then, it is personalities who roll the dice.’
PEOPLE — ‘ complicated, flawed, inspiring’ — are the bedrock of the story. Some you will have heard of — Caesars, Medicis, Habsburgs, Rothschilds, Churchills and Assads — but they are just a sprinkling.
Many more are strangers we find ourselves meeting for the first time.
Take Sneferu, one of the earliest kings of Egypt in 2613 BC, who was clearly not a modest man as he styled himself the Lord of Truth and Righteousness, the Perfect God — and expected to be treated accordingly.
He knew how to enjoy himself, his earthly indulgences including having himself rowed on his palace lake by 20 girls wearing nothing but fishing nets.
But for others it was cruelty and unspeakable brutality that got their juices flowing. The Assyrian king Sennacherib recorded with glee his destruction of Babylon in 689 BC: ‘I made their gullets and their entrails slither along the earth.
I ripped out their genitals like seeds of summer cucumbers.’
Much good did it do him. He was kneeling in the temple at Nineveh when his eldest son, impatient to succeed, hacked him to death. Families, eh? Jealousy and loathing have run through them since the dawn of time. ‘It is one of the ironies of power,’ writes Sebag Montefiore, ‘that kings of the world struggle to cope with their own children’ — an observation that, with our own King Charles and Prince Harry, is as current and on the ball as you can get.
It cut both ways. In 16thcentury Russia, Tsar Ivan the Terrible disliked his son and heir’s choice of wife, lost his notoriously bad temper with her and, when the young man intervened, smashed his head in. The daughter-in-law, who was pregnant, miscarried, so Ivan managed to lose two heirs in one go.
Massacres were often family affairs. When the Byzantine emperor Maurice was overthrown in AD 602, he was made to watch as his six sons were beheaded before he himself was killed, followed by his wife and three more children. Even for those days, this was considered on the excessive side.
Generally, since the year dot life has been cheap, wars frequent, human sacrifice a regular practice and revenge, of the cruellest kind, a feast for the imagination.
In this real- life Game of Thrones, why simply rid yourself of a beaten enemy with a tap on the head when you can tie him to five horses and tear him apart — the fate decreed by Ying Zheng, the first emperor of China, on a rival?
Two millennia later, a wouldbe royal assassin in Bourbon France was dispatched in the same way, his tendons sliced beforehand to make the dismantling easier.
Plus ca change . . . overkill, it seems, was never a problem. A Chinese empress disposed of an over-ambitious concubine in her son’s household by cutting off her hands and legs and then paralysing her with poison so she died a lingering death.
An 18th-century Shah of Iran killed a rival by filling his crown with molten lead, then proceeded to invade Russia, where in one captured city he had the eyeballs of 20,000 people gouged out.
Not that it’s all killing. Dip into this book anywhere and the minutiae of history leap off the page. Who knew that the Habsburg Emperor Frederick III’s hobby was collecting mouse droppings?
or that, at 481 ft, the Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2570 BC, remained the tallest building in the world until the Eiffel Tower was topped off
nearly 4,000 years later? Dip too into the author’s copious footnotes and there are gems to be mined. We learn that between 1918 and 1950, Ukraine was ‘the most murderous place on Earth’, with five million people slaughtered, one million of them Jewish. They included almost all the Zelensky family, only one managing to escape — to become the grandfather of the country’s present, heroic leader.
SEBAG Montefiore compiled all this during the Covid lockdown and wove it into a compelling narrative, chained to his desk like an illustrious predecessor, the Tudor/ Stuart adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh, who began a Historie Of The World while imprisoned in the Tower Of London for treason but never finished it because he was beheaded. Montefiore crossed the finish line, his head intact, if mighty sore from the massive effort of researching it, moulding it and turning it into storytelling — often sassy, always entertaining — of the first order.
The book has won praise in the highest intellectual quarters. Former top power-player Henry Kissinger was astonished by its scope and erudition, calling it ‘ a brilliant synthesis that imparts fresh insights to even the most learned readers’. TV historian Simon Schama describes it as ‘a staggering achievement’ and ‘a tremendous gift’.
To my mind, what it gives, above all, is perspective, from which comes understanding and not a little wisdom. ‘If this world history proves anything,’ the author writes in his final chapter, ‘ it is that the human ability to self-mutilate is almost limitless.’
In some senses, homo sapiens has never been healthier than it is in the 21st century, generally living longer and better lives. The poorest countries today have higher life expectancy than the richest empires of a century ago. but in other respects we are intent on turning around our good fortune and shooting ourselves in the foot. The number of autocracies is surging again and the ‘ flinthearted ferocity’ of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is a return to normality in a way that the warlords and despots of the past would find routine — ‘normal disorder has been resumed’.
The internet is a mixed blessing — ‘cesspit, treasure trove and reliquary of hatreds and hobbies, truths, randomness and revels, calumnies and conspiracies’. addiction to it is out of control, as is ‘the unelected, invisible power of the despots of data’.
Events move at unprecedented speed and the jeopardy of nuclear catastrophe, coupled with Covid and global warming, fosters fears of apocalypse. This is nothing new. Throughout history, a dread of Doomsday being just round the corner has been part of the human character.
‘but the stakes today make the End Of Days ever more possible,’ Sebag Montefiore concludes.
‘Just because we are the smartest ape ever created, just because we have solved many problems so far, it does not mean we will solve everything. Human history is like one of those investment warning clauses — past performance is no guarantee of future results.’
Yet he chooses to end on an optimistic note. ‘ The harshness of humanity has been constantly rescued by our capacity to create and love. Our limitless ability to destroy is matched only by our ingenious ability to recover.’
Just like The World’s very first page, his last also has illuminating quotations. ‘Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.’ astonishingly and inspiringly, the words are those of anne Frank.