February 25
Peter the Great: His Life and World, Robert K Massie (1980)

Now that I'm finding time to read books again, I'd better review the past ones before the backlog gets out of hand. I can't even remember how long it's been since I've been caught up on my review-(or-at-least-mention)-every-book-I-read project. In March and April I was putting out the book posts at a weekly rate, which was enough to get the backlog down to two. Then came the post-wedding hiatus where for three months I was so busy I didn't post at all. Then again, I hardly had time to read at all either, so by the end of the hiatus I was still only two books behind.

I'd probably have a lot more to say about this book if I hadn't waited eight months to write about it, for I really did enjoy it a lot. This is the one I mentioned in an earlier post as an example of the style of biography I like best. There's nothing extraordinary about the style -- in fact, it's pretty basic: not so much a personal study as just a narrative history that happens to (mostly) follow the life of one person.

Possibly the best thing about this book is several titillating mini-biographies of various other personages whose paths crossed Peter's. The first of these is Peter's older half-sister Sophia. Among Peter's dozen half-siblings, she stood out with talent and ambition. Foreshadowing the string of tsarinas who would follow Peter, she managed, in spite of being shut up in the harem like all her sisters and generations of tsarevnas before her, to exercise effective control of the government for several years before losing her grip on such a slippery and unwieldy tool. By political circumstance she was Peter's rival, but Massie leaves one with the impression that he possibly admired her, and certainly learned from her.

Later we meet the other major players of European politics in that lively century of great monarchs and great generals: the sun king Louis XIV and his arch-nemesis William of Orange (later William III of England); England's great general, the Duke of Marlborough (one gets the impression that William took the English throne primarily to secure England's army and navy in his anti-Louis alliance); the Habsburg Emperor Leopold I and his great general, Eugene of Savoy; the adventurous rogue Augustus of Saxony, who found his way to the throne of Poland only to squander it like he did everything else; and of course Peter's own arch-nemesis, Charles XII of Sweden.

Charles really belongs more with the generals than with the monarchs. Fighting was his only real interest and he was very good at it. His army was the terror of Germany, an influence he shrewdly exercised for political power. But like would-be conquerors of Europe who would follow -- Napoleon, Hitler -- he invaded too deep into Russia and was destroyed there.

Peter was fascinated with ships. His desire for a navy is arguably the beginning of Russia's search for a "warm-water port" that we so often hear about. Peter had to settle for a glorious cold-water port, the one that bears the name of the saint who shares his name. He made a few attempts at securing a port on the Black Sea, then held by the Ottoman empire, with partial success. A lasting presence there would wait for his granddaughter-in-law Catherine.

Massie's chapter on the Ottoman empire is startlingly sloppy, with errors both general and specific. It makes me wonder if other chapters are equally sloppy and I just don't know enough to recognize it, or if Massie and his editors are, like most European historians, simply less knowledgeable about the Ottoman empire than about France, Germany and England. Right off the bat he starts out: "The Ottoman Empire, every hectare conquered by the sword, stretched over three continents." That's a dashing sentence, but I'm not sure how true it is. The Ottoman conquest was indeed largely military (much more so than the earlier Islamic conquest) but not entirely. The empire went through several phases when territories were collected (or re-collected) through negotiation of vassal agreements. At the beginning, for example, Byzantine Asia Minor was indeed overrun by ghazis, a sort of warrior-frontiersmen-settlers, but they were all independent operators. It was only by a process of negotiation and diplomatic alliances that all the little ghazi principalities came to be gathered under Ottoman rule. So if you want to read Massie's sentence as every hectare was conquered by somebody and then later joined the empire, well sure, but by that logic "every hectare conquered by the sword" could just as easily define Poland.

Not much further into the chapter, Massie embellishes his mention of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with the clause "whose sacred shrines it was the sultan's personal responsibility as caliph to protect." This is an anachronistic claim. The notion of sultan as caliph was invented shortly after the defeat at Küçük Kaynarca (1774) in response to Russia's parallel claim of religious authority over Christians within the empire. Admittedly, the inventors of that notion promptly backdated their claim, saying that of course all the sultans had been caliphs all along, so perhaps the casual historian might be forgiven for believing them, but the truth is that no 17th century sultan used the title of caliph.

More concretely, the great vizier Mehmed Köprülü's name is grossly misspelled as "Memmed Korpulu". Just in case you might think that's just a typo, on the next page Ahmed Köprülü's name is similarly misspelled. Missing the umlauts is forgivable but swapping the consonants suggests to me that Massie is hardly familiar with them at all. The Köprülüs were an illustrious Ottoman family -- like so many great Ottomans (and one great Ottoman opponent), of Albanian origin -- that provided the empire with half a dozen viziers. The first two of these (Mehmed and Ahmed, father and son) were immensely talented, and thanks to them the disastrous decline that followed the death of Sulayman I was temporarily arrested. (Sulayman, by the way, is overrated. His own reign was magnificent indeed, but in my opinion nearly everything that went wrong with the empire after him grew from the bad seeds he had planted.) Massie groups Ahmed's successor, Kara Mustafa, with the Köprülüs, which strikes me as odd. Yes, he was a Köprülü by marriage, but in terms of policy and competence he was their opposite.

But I cheerfully forgive Massie for all these petty errors because, to my great delight, he gets it right when describing the "Cage" (which I discussed in my post on the Catherine biography).

I recently found out that the vocabulary discussions are Brux's favorite part of Benzene, too. (I already knew they are my mother's.) In this post I mention having taken "oodles of notes" on the Peter book. If so, I only kept a couple of them. Fortunately, I'm more than able to stretch them out with multiple tangents.

Here Massie is describing the Holy Roman Empire:

Congeries is the word I always forget when discussing the phenomenon whereby a word whose singular form sounds like a plural becomes its own plural and eventually spawns an erroneous singular form by back-formation. A well-known recent example is kudos. Derived from a Greek word, kudos is prestige or public praise. Idiomatically, we know it best from phrases in which someone gives kudos to someone else. Just as at some point in our nation's history "The United States are" gave way to "The United States is", so too has "kudos is" yielded to "kudos are". Once kudos became plural, it was only a matter of time before some people started talking them one kudo at a time. Linguistic conservatives still frown upon it, but in the past 20 years kudo has come to be accepted by all the dictionaries as a legitimate singular word.

A much older example is pease, which is (from Latin pisum) what English speakers centuries ago called what we now call a "pea" . The old spelling persists in the nursery rhyme about "pease-porridge hot", and if your Shakespeare is unrevised, you may recall that one of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream is named "Peaseblossom". The plural of pease was pease, so one might say "eat some pease" exactly as one would say "eat some corn". This led pease eaters to imagine that each little round thing within the pease was a "pea", and so it now is. (Cherry came about by a similar process, from Norman French cherise.)

Congeries has not yet finished the process. A congeries is a jumbled collection of something. The plural of congeries is congeries. No dictionary I know of yet accepts congerie as a legitimate singular form, though the fact that it could get past the editors in a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography suggests that it might be on the way.

The original name for a pea pod was peasecod -- a macaronic compound, since codd is a Germanic word meaning a sack, the peasecod being a sack full of pease. Clearly there is some etymological connection between peasecod and codpiece, but my usual sources are muddled on the issue. If someone else out there is inspired to sort it out, feel free to fill us in.

A word is macaronic if it combines roots from two different languages. The linguistic term comes from a social term. In the 18th century England, a macaroni was a dandy who had traveled abroad and come back with foreign styles and manners mixed with his local ones. (Among these was a taste for an exotic Italian food called macaroni.) In the popular song, which most of us learned at such a young age that it never occurred to us to wonder what the hell it meant, Yankee Doodle is ridiculed for being such a yokel that he thinks a feather in the cap is sufficient to make one macaroni, when of course it requires much more than that.

Only one other vocabulary word is on my list, but when I look it up in my book I see that the sentence in question provides two. Massie is quoting a Prussian courtier (in translation, no doubt) who met Peter on one of his visits to Berlin:

The sentence leaves me unsure whether the pelisse replaces the coat or the gold. In fact, it replaces the coat, since a pelisse is a sort of fur-trimmed cloak. Tabiage appears earlier in the same quoted passage, where a bracketed explanation tells me that it is a smoking room. The word must be obsolete by now, as it doesn't appear in any of my dictionaries, not even the big fat one that includes plenty that the Scrabble dictionary excludes. So if your rack turns up AABEGIT and you want the 50-point bonus, you'd better look for an L to run through and make it agitable instead. ("Agitable" sounds wrong to my ear, but on reflection I see that it's wholly consistent with "irritable".)

Last one on the list: Editors and English teachers remind us that we should always place a comma before the conjunction that separates the two clauses of a compound sentence. One can often get away with omitting it, but not in this sentence. (The Eugene here is Eugene of Savoy, the brilliant general who was born a French subject but found his career working for the Habsburg emperor.)

Took me a while to parse that one correctly.

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