The Colorado Historian, Spring 2015 by The Colorado Historian

THE COLORADO HISTORIAN AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION SPRING 2015

Cover photo title: Canale; Date: December 28, 2009; Credit goes to Efilpera: http://goo.gl/KJS7Em

Letter from the Editor Dear Reader, Welcome to the new Colorado Historian! This semester has been quite special indeed. When we inherited the Historian it had been on hiatus for several years. Our teamâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; comprised of entirely new membersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;pushed hard to revitalize the journal, and what you are reading is a result of their hard work and dedication. It was not always easy, but it was certainly worth the effort. Equally laudable are the authors whose works appear in this journal. As an undergraduate publication, we hope to showcase the best history papers CU students have to offer. We appreciate all the submissions this semester and hope for continued interest in the future. The following papers were selected through a blinded and non-biased process, and we hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did. We would also like to say thank you to the University of Colorado History Department and Professor Lucy Chester for their support and guidance along the way. As a fledgling publication, we hope to build upon this experience and continue to breathe new life into future editions of the Colorado Historian. We appreciate your readership, and thank you for supporting the work of our fellow historians. Ryan Lanham Editor-in-Chief

University of Colorado Editorial Team Ryan Lanham Editor-in-Chief Ryan, a junior from Fort Worth, Texas, is a history major and creative writing minor. Undecided about his lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ambitions, he remains open to serendipitous opportunities and unanticipated strokes of luck. When he is not studying the past, he enjoys reading, writing, playing guitar, and all things fitness. Maura Kalthoff Managing Editor Maura is a senior majoring in History and Anthropology with a minor in French. She loves traveling, drinking tea, and watching murder mysteries. After graduation she will be pursuing a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in Medieval History at Trinity College Dublin. Casey VanSise Editor Casey, a junior from Broomfield, Colorado, is a double-major in history and international affairs. He has a particular academic focus on Latin America and diplomacy, two interests that he plans to reconcile in an honors thesis during his senior year. Some of his favorite activities include hiking, camping, skiing and voracious reading. Ben Robinson Editor Ben is a sophomore pursuing a degree in history with two minors in political science and ethnic studies. After graduation, he hopes to earn a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in nonprofit management with the end goal of establishing an afterschool program for financially disadvantaged minority students. In his free time, Ben enjoys reading, camping, and playing with his dog, Dora. His favorite historical figure is Frederick Douglass.

University of Colorado Editorial Team Lena Schneider Editor Lena, a German international student at CU, is a double-major in journalism and history. Her main interest is maritime history, especially WW2 operations in the Atlantic. She plans on going to England for her Master's degree in maritime history. Alexis Aaeng Editor Alexis hails from Fort Collins, Colorado, where she cultivated a love of academic writing and an appreciation of history. She is currently a third year History and Jewish Studies Major. In her very limited free time, she enjoys DJing for Radio 1190 and playing with her birds. Aaron Lerman Editor Aaron, a senior from Delray Beach, Florida, is a film studies major with a focus in creative writing. He believes history to be rich in stories and lessons, and enjoys reading historical memoirs and Wikipedia articles on past wars. He will be going to law school after graduation.

Table of Contents 7 â&#x20AC;&#x153;Nothing but Cows and Skyâ&#x20AC;?: The Coronado Expedition, Native Americans, and the Search for Quivira Adam Spode 24 Famines in Bengal: The Impact of Opium Trade in British India Ryan Lanham 34 Skipped Pages: The Revolutionary War Letters of Sarah Hodgkins Beth Billington 48 Two Sides of the Same Cloth: Hildegard, Heloise, and Feminine Agency through the Abbey Beth Billington 69 The Failure of Law: How Kenyan Laws Produced the Emergency Alexandrea Kord 83 Assessing the Impacts of Hunnic Difference in Mediterranean Society of Late-Antiquity Casey VanSise

“Nothing but Cows and Sky”: The Coronado Expedition, Native Americans, and the Search for Quivira By Adam Spode The expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado has become emblematic of the haphazard nature of colonial exploration. Poor planning and conception, barbaric treatment of Native Americans, and ultimate failure are all frequently associated with the first major European foray into the North American continent. The Coronado expedition is the natural forerunner to the many tales of doomed-tofail quests for lost golden cities. The journey to discover these supposed bastions of wealth and power, be they called Cíbola, Quivira, or Eldorado, has become as much a warning as a legend, a marker of the perils of pursuing myths. Yet this narrative is redundant, and overlooks the realities of the Coronado expedition. Greed, as ever, was the foundation of the journey, but this ignores the fact that apparently ample evidence supported such a mission. What is also often lost, beyond their horrific treatment at the hands of the Spaniards, is the role that Native Americans played in the expedition. Indeed, it is arguable that the expedition’s notoriety as a failure is a direct result of Native involvement. The ultimate ambition of the Coronado expedition was the discovery of the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold,” a marvelous but mythical golden kingdom comparable in splendor and opulence to the Aztec and Incan empires. This mirage, which eventually became known as Quivira, dragged the Coronado expedition across the American Southwest in a frantic, and at least partially misled, trek through largely unknown and hostile territory. Throughout the journey, Native Americans repeatedly told the Spanish not only of Quivira’s existence, but also of its apparent location, usually a great distance further north and east. This occurred multiple times among various tribes, be they the Teyas, the Querechos, or the Pawnees. This recurrent theme has become prominent in the study of the expedition, leading to the development of a theory that the Natives encountered by the expedition were in fact deceiving Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, hoping to convince the Spaniards to leave them and their lands alone.

Although the suggestion of deceit was unquestionably the case in the example of the Pawnee individual known as the Turk, who lied to and misled the expedition repeatedly, it is also possible that the other Natives genuinely believed in the existence of such great cities, or had at least heard stories of a place that matched Coronado’s description. The Mississippi river valley had for centuries been the home of the “Mound Builders,” Native tribes who had constructed permanent villages, and even cities, larger than any other settlements in North America at the time. Several Natives are also recorded as stating that some distant tribes possessed the strange metal the Spaniards desired so cravenly. In this light it becomes entirely conceivable that a combination of misunderstandings as to the scale of what the Spaniards were looking for, as well as the likely exacerbating factor of translation issues, meant that the Natives did sincerely believe that they were aiding Coronado in his search. The Coronado expedition, then, takes on a new light when the role of Native Americans is given a focus beyond the battles and the butchery from the Spaniards. The writings of several of the conquistadores, as well as contemporary analysis of the expedition, show a genuine likelihood that some of the Native Americans encountered believed that such a city as Quivira existed. This would make it at least plausible that these Natives were in fact trying to aid the Spanish in their mission. Of course, this is not the only conclusion that can be reached. The Coronado expedition was a veritable patchwork of Native-Spanish interactions, a mixture of misunderstandings, deceptions, futile attempts at help and warnings, and violence, all of which shaped the ultimate failure of the journey. Although it is difficult to study the probability of deceit on the natives’ part, due to the lack of detailed recorded histories from such peoples, the potential validity of such trickery cannot be discounted. It is highly likely that the expedition met with both these scenarios from differing tribes during the two-year period.

THE EXPEDITION The Coronado expedition was launched in the immediate aftermath of the first great swell of European colonization of the Americas in the early 16th century. Just twenty years after the capture of Tenochtitlan by Hernán Cortés, and less than a decade following the conquest of the Incan Empire by 8

the Pizarro brothers, Coronado’s trek marked a continuation of Spanish exploration outward from Mexico into the unexplored hemisphere. As with the previous two expeditions, Coronado’s objectives were wealth and power. Both Mexico and Peru had revealed immense riches, elevating the conquistadores to a social and economic position far above their standing in Europe. Led on by false reports from the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza, Coronado was promised a magnificent city of gold that would rival Tenochtitlan and Cuzco. The expedition thus set out with the goal of first finding and then conquering this northern kingdom, called Cíbola. Following a long and hard march north into modern-day eastern Arizona, Coronado and his men found nothing more than scattered Native American tribes and nothing of any perceived value. Despite recognizing the fraudulence of Marcos’s claims, Coronado nonetheless continued further north and east upon hearing stories and rumors of Quivira, a separate city that was effectively Cíbola under a guise. This belief was thoroughly embellished by Natives the expedition encountered, chief among which was the Turk. A Pawnee individual, the Turk repeatedly misled the expedition as to the location and existence of Quivira, resulting in the Spaniards’ arrival in modern-day north-east Kansas. At this point the expedition floundered, and finding nothing but scattered plains tribes, Coronado returned to his governorship in Nueva Galicia in northern Mexico, deeply in debt and with little to show for the twoyear march. The expedition resulted in many casualties in both Native and Spanish ranks, while also stunting much of the potential growth of Spanish presence and influence in the North American continent. In comparison to the opulence of the growing Mexico City, the apparently barren and worthless territories to the north took on little importance. Thus the oftentimes bloody expedition can conversely be seen as sparing some of the Native peoples of the Southwest much of the long-term sufferings endured by their counterparts to the south.

THE SPANISH MOTIVES Despite at times appearing to lack direction or any tangible goal, the Coronado expedition did in fact possess valid reasons for its trek into the unknown northern territories. The vast cities of 9

Mesoamerica encountered by Cortés during his conquest of the Aztec Empire two decades earlier had shown an opulence unseen in any European society.1 The subsequent encounter and overthrow of the Incan Empire in Peru only reinforced the growing belief that the Spanish had unearthed a continent full of exceedingly wealthy kingdoms that they could easily conquer and exploit. Given that modern-day Central America and South America both contained such realms, it is unsurprising that the Spaniards believed that the great expanse to the north would likewise yield comparable riches. Several other expeditions were launched in search of a third such empire, notably the Diego de Almagro journey into Argentina and Chile following the conquest of Peru. At the same time as the Coronado expedition, a similar expedition was launched by Hernando de Soto into the Mississippi river valley and the American Southeast. Given the relative ease with which Cortés and Francisco Pizarro had found their respective kingdoms, it is likely that Coronado and his compatriots began the expedition with a degree of confidence and belief it is ultimate success. If the Spaniards in Mexico held the opinion that it was a reasonable assumption to expect a city of similar stature as Tenochtitlan or Cuzco, their beliefs were given much credence by reports from their contemporaries. Pedro de Castañeda, a soldier on the expedition, recorded the only complete account of the entire journey. Castañeda opens his Narrative of Pedro de Castañeda: Account of the Expedition to Cibola, which Took Place in the Year 1540 by discussing how the Spaniards came to hear of the Seven Cities. Castañeda records that the governor of New Spain, Nuño de Guzman, was told by a Native of a land to the north that his father had returned from there with “large amounts of gold and silver.”2 The Native then made mention of “seven very large towns which had streets of silver workers,” apparently suggesting that these Natives not only possessed such desirables, but were masters of working with the precious metals.3

Richard Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest: A History of the Coronado Entrada (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008) 23. 2 Pedro de Castañeda, Narrative of Pedro de Castañeda: Account of the Expedition to Cibola, which Took Place in the Year 1540, from George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542 (New York: Barnes & Company, 1904) 1. 3 Ibid. 10

With this information, Guzman launched an expedition northwards in 1530, but failed to leave the modern central Mexico region due to political infighting with Cortés that sent the mission back to Mexico City. Six years later, news came from four former Spanish captives who had been held in what is now Texas and had, after a long-trek across the width of northern Mexico, arrived in Nueva Galicia. The most famous of this group, Álva Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, told of encountering groups of Natives who spoke of great towns to the north. Cabeza de Vaca brought with him some small amounts of silver, as well as a copper bell and cotton weavings, all of which reputedly came from these northern civilizations.4 As Richard Flint notes, this rather scant evidence drove much of New Spain into a fever of expectation, hoping for another great Empire to topple and exploit, and later reports only increased the anticipation.5 This was most certainly not what Cabeza de Vaca, who shared an affinity with the Natives he had met, had intended. In response to the reports of Cabeza de Vaca’s group, the viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza, ordered a reconnaissance mission northwards, to be led by Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan friar. Marcos encountered a contingent of Natives who told him of the Seven Cities, calling them Cíbola, their first naming as such. Marcos continued to hear such stories, as well as receiving reports from a slave scout named Esteban, who had formerly been a part of Cabeza de Vaca’s group. Despite confirming the existence of the settlements, Esteban was eventually killed, supposedly by the people of Cíbola. Marcos insisted in his report that he continued north after hearing of Esteban’s fate, but as Flint notes it seems more likely that the friar fled south.6 Yet, upon his return, Marcos claimed to have seen Cíbola himself. Although admittedly making no note of gold or silver in his official report, Marcos clearly embellished the truth about the region’s wealth and size.7 Coronado recognized this upon his arrival at Cíbola, writing to Mendoza that Marcos “has not told the truth in a single thing that he said, but everything is the reverse of what he said, except the name

Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 26. Ibid. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Ibid., 36. 5

of the city and the large stone houses.”8 Marcos’s deception appears to have unclear motives, though Flint attributes it to a genuine belief in the Indian reports and a desire not to dispute the earlier stories of Cíbola.9 What is clear is that the friar’s report was false. Yet to the Spaniards yearning for further opportunities in the New World it appeared that the third kingdom had been discovered, and promised the wealth of the earlier conquests. Despite doubts from Mendoza, which were only fueled when a second small expedition was sent north in 1539 and found no evidence of the friar’s findings, planning for the Coronado expedition began to take place. “EL TURCO” If the Spanish convinced themselves through a combination of ambition, wishful thinking, and dubious reports that a northern metropolis of fabulous wealth did in fact exist, it was later due to the advice of Native Americans that the Coronado expedition ended up as far removed as it did. That is not to say that the Natives explicitly misled the expedition; as already stated it is difficult to prove this conclusively one way or the other and while it may have been the case in some instances it was likely not so in all. Rather, the expedition’s continued drive into the North American interior was the result of continued information from Native Americans as to the existence and location of the Seven Cities. Coronado and his men were always going to travel at least as far as Cíbola, regardless of what they heard en-route from Natives. That the expedition now continued north and east in search of the new golden oasis called Quivira was due partially to their disappointment at Cíbola, but is much more attributable to what they heard from the Natives. Finding Cíbola to be little more than a small Native outpost with none of the material wealth that Marcos had promised, Coronado dispatched men across the surrounding region. One of these scouts, Hernando de Alvarado, heard reports from Tano Indians of a large settlement with multi-storied houses,

Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, The account given by Francisco Vazquez de Coronado, Captain-General of the force which was sent in the Name of His Majesty to the newly discovered country, of what happened to the expedition after April 22 of the year 1540, when he started forward from Culiacan, and of what he found in the country through which he passed, from George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542 (New York: Barnes & Company, 1904), 172. 9 Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 37. 12

called Cicúique. A trade center for the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest and almost certainly the largest Native settlement in the region, Cicúique was a far cry from the Mesoamerican conurbations the Spaniards had been hoping for.10 It was during the Cicúique excursion, however, that the expedition came into contact with one of the most significant Natives it would encounter on the trek, “El Turco,” or the Turk. This Pawnee individual had an almost immediate impact on the expedition, telling Alvarado of a town called Quivira, its abundance of precious metals and material wealth and urging the Spaniards to turn northeast.11 Herbert Bolton notes that despite initial skepticism, possibly born out of Marcos’s deceit, the Spaniards were quickly driven into a frenzy, their heads “filled with visions of wealth in Quivira.”12 The Turk’s actions would come to define much of the expedition, with his directions to Quivira and proclamations as to its wealth repeatedly rearing their head in the expedition’s records. It would be the Turk’s eventual admittance of his deception and his unawareness of any gold that would mark the culmination of the Coronado expedition. The Turk looms large in the eighteenth and nineteenth chapters of Pedro de Castañeda’s Narrative, as does the presence of other, possibly competing, Native Americans. A subject that emerges quickly and repeatedly in the extract is the Turk’s constant promise of the riches at Quivira; indeed the subtitle of the eighteenth chapter is “Of how the general managed to leave the country in peace so as to go in search of Quivira, where the Turk said there was the most wealth.”13 Castañeda shortly afterwards notes that once the winter of 1540 had passed, “orders were given for the start for Quivira, where the Turk said there was some gold and silver.”14 In light of the later knowledge of the Turk’s intentions to lead the Spaniards into the prairies of the southern plains and then abandon them to their fate, this passage certainly seems to indicate that the Turk knew exactly how to lure the expedition along. Castañeda also

Herbert E. Bolton, Coronado: Knight of Pueblos and Plains (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc., 1949) 187. Ibid., 189. 12 Ibid., 190. 13 de Castañeda, Narrative, 62. 14 Ibid. 11

notes that the Turk made reference to even more riches amongst the “Arche and the Guaes,” most likely the Arikara and Missouri peoples.15 This possibly suggests that the Turk was hoping to tempt Coronado even farther north and east than he eventually went, using Spanish greed to drive them into the wilderness, break their already long supply routes and leave the expedition stranded. Bolton suggests another theory, namely that the Turk “hoped by his story to get back home and thus escape from captivity.”16 Whatever the Turk’s true motivations, his actions had the desired result: the expedition followed his guidance even as doubt crept in over the Turk’s legitimacy and honesty. This apparent insatiability for treasures to rival the great Aztec and Incan realms continued to override the Spaniards’ commonsense, for Castañeda notes that despite being given another native of Quivira to act as a guide, the expedition continued to rely heavily on the Turk’s directions.17 This is quite possibly due to the supposed Quivira native, Xabe, proclaiming that while there was indeed gold and silver, it was not in the quantities that the expedition was hoping for and had been promised by the Turk.18 Despite the doubts cast over the Turk’s intentions, his mention of the Arikara peoples does potentially fuel an aspect of the argument for a genuine belief amongst the Southwestern Natives of a city of gold. The ancestors of the Arikara peoples at times were settled in the Black Hills of modern-day South Dakota. It was within these hills that gold was discovered in 1874, prompting a rush amongst prospectors to claim the precious metal. This would seem to corroborate the report from the Turk of the “Arche and the Guaes” possessing more gold than other tribes. If the tribes that the Turk and Xabe referred to were in fact ancestral Arikaras, then it becomes possible that the tales of gold were based from the same sources that would later be found by George Custer’s military expedition three centuries later. Of course, it is just as plausible that the Arikara connection is pure coincidence, and that the Turk, 15

de Castañeda, Narrative, 62; James Newton Baskett, “A Study of the Route of Coronado between the Rio Grande and Missouri Rivers,” in Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society Volume 12, ed. Geo. W. Martin (Topeka: State Printing Office, 1912), 245. 16 Bolton, Coronado, 189. 17 de Castañeda, Narrative, 64. 18 Ibid. 14

as with other Native Americans, failed to comprehend what the Spaniards sought. In addition, there is no evidence of plains Indians using or mining gold, undermining the suggestion that these tribes possessed the metal in any significant quantity. Nevertheless the prospect of small surface deposits does suggest a potential awareness of the gold. If the Turk was, initially at least, viewed by Coronado as an indispensable guide to the promised riches of Quivira, then his standing amongst his contemporary Native Americans was the polar opposite. In addition to Xabe’s dispute over the amount of gold that would be found in Quivira, another supposed Quiviran disputed the Turk’s promises and directions. Described as a “painted Indian named Ysopete,” this Indian was found as a captive of the Tano people at the same time as the Turk. 19 When a scouting party of the expedition reported to Coronado that they had found “nothing but cows and sky,” Castañeda commented that Ysopete had repeatedly called the Turk’s assertions a lie. 20 This not only affirmed Xabe’s comments, but also the later information given to Coronado by the Teyas tribes (likely Apaches), who informed the expedition that they were on the wrong track, and that Quivira lay much further north.21 Although these reactions from Natives towards the Turk’s efforts were not the only replies, in this passage at least it would appear that the Native Americans wished to help the expedition in their journey. Whether this was to remove them from their territory as quickly as possible or out of a genuine belief in Quivira and a desire to send Coronado in the right direction cannot be fully known, yet chapters eighteen and nineteen both clearly show competing attitudes towards the Coronado expedition from Indians. This ongoing debate would continue much further into the expedition. While the Turk’s intention of leading the expedition into the wilderness is obvious, what remains less clear is his motivation for doing so. Bolton takes the view of the Native being desperate to return to his homeland, thus using the heavily armed expedition as protective cover for his passage home. In addition, there is the suggestion that the Turk simply wished to lead the expedition out to the unwelcoming prairie in the hopes of pre-emptively ending the incursion of these strange and often violent 19

Ibid., 67. Ibid. 21 Ibid., 70. 20

white men. Both of these explanations are reinforced by the zealousness with which the Turk tempted the Spaniards to follow him. The Turk frequently not only embellished the truth, but also outright fabricated an advanced and wide-spanning society, one that possessed canoes with golden oarlocks, and had access to such vast quantities of gold that only wagons could carry it.22 This is an obvious lie, as wagons only became used on the plains once European settlers began to migrate to the area many centuries later. Indeed, until the horse made its way onto the plains following the release of Spanish herds in the aftermath of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, virtually all Natives of what we would now call the Mid-West used dogs as pack-animals. A few exceptions aside, Native Americans of the North American continent had little practical use for gold or silver and would not likely waste time extracting large amounts of it. It therefore seems unlikely that any tribal society would have these precious metals play as big a role as they did in the great Mesoamerican cultures to the south. Nevertheless, the Spaniards believed the stories, imagining they had found another Tenochtitlan.23 Despite almost certainly not knowing in-depth details of the Aztec Empire, the Turk apparently picked up enough information on it from the Spaniards to imply that Quivira and its surrounding settlements would overshadow CortĂŠsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; triumph.24 It was this greed that blinded Coronado and his men for so long; Bolton notes some festering distrust shortly after the encounter with the Teyas peoples, but it clearly was overruled by the continuing wish to find the elusive Seven Cities.25 Unfortunately for the Turk, this faith did not last. By the time the expedition reached approximately as far north and east as modern-day Dodge City, Kansas, the Spaniards had virtually given up and the expedition was beginning to suffer from its drawn out supply lines. Quivira had turned out to be little more than open plains and scattered nomadic tribes. At this point the Turk was imprisoned and interrogated as to why he had deceived the expedition. The Turk first mentions that he had been leading

Bolton, Coronado, 231. Ibid. 24 Ibid., 232. 25 Ibid., 256. 23

them towards his country, reinforcing Bolton’s assessment that the Turk wished to escape his capture and use the Spaniards as cover for a flight homewards.26 Intriguingly though, the Turk then confessed that the Natives at Cicúique had instructed the Turk to lead Coronado “off onto the plains and lose them, so that the horses would die when their provisions gave out.”27 The Turk describes this as revenge, presumably for both the skirmishes that occurred at Cicúique and the imprisonment of their chief Bigotes. Perhaps most disheartening for the Spaniards to hear was the Turk’s admission that he did not know of any gold in the region; Castañeda rather bitterly refers to a local chief prizing his simple copper neckplate.28 In addition to this, the Turk was found to be conspiring with local Natives to attack and kill Coronado and his advance party.29 Unsurprisingly the Turk was soon garroted, a move that offered little satisfaction to the virtually destitute Spaniards.30 Regardless of this apparently open-and-shut case, the Turk’s true dealings remain somewhat shrouded. Flint argues that it was quite possibly an accident that resulted in the expedition’s arrival in contemporary Kansas. There is a suggestion that the description of Quivira aligns with the aesthetic of the mound-building Natives of the Mississippi River basin.31 Simultaneously, it is important to note that while this region did not include gold or silver in any noticeable quantity, it did historically possess great stores of copper. Flint argues that the Turk may have confused this metal with a more precious variety,32 and that when put with his mention of the giant canoes, the Turk could have been genuine in his belief that what the expedition was seeking was a settlement such as Cahokia, a deserted but formerly large mound-builder site.33 Despite not explaining the Turk’s confession, nor his attempts at collaboration with other tribes to wipe out the expedition, it is easy to see where some confusion might have entered the

de Castañeda, Narrative, 74. Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 A. Grove Day, Coronado’s Quest: The Discovery of the Southwestern States (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964) 254. 30 Ibid. 31 Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 162. 32 Ibid., 164. 33 Ibid. 27

interactions. Cahokia would have been as close to Tenochtitlan as was possible to imagine in the 16th century North American world, while it would also explain some of the Turk’s apparently more suspect directions, particularly those to the east.34 Whatever the case, the Turk’s role continues to be unclear; it is certainly conceivable that the Pawnee had originally intended on leading the expedition to what he perceived to be their goal, only to change his plans to self-preservation when relations began to sour.

THE NATIVES OF THE SOUTHWEST Despite the uncertainty surrounding it, the Turk’s final declaration does open another line of discussion. To be sure, the Turk himself wanted to mislead the expedition, at least for part of his journey. But what is even more distorted is the intent of other Native Americans. Throughout the expedition, there was no obvious unified response from the encountered Natives; instead, the interactions between Indian and European were both fluid and relative only to the particular tribe that the Spaniards happened to be near to. These ranged from a seemingly genuine wish to aid the expedition (or at least to point them in what they thought was the direction Coronado sought), to a continuation of the Turk’s seeming resolve to leave the explorers in utter ruin. The latter response will be examined first, for it relates more closely to the already discussed intentions of the Turk. As mentioned, the Turk was unquestionably not the only malevolent force the expedition encountered in Native ranks. At the same time that the Turk was enlisted by the expedition, Coronado and his men were engaged in the Tiguex War, a winter battle with the local Tiwa Indians that resulted in several hundred Native deaths. Early in the conflict, one of the Tiwa chiefs, “Bigotes” (called “Whiskers” in Castañeda’s account), who had guided the Alvarado excursion, was taken prisoner. While the arrest was in no small part due to the Turk’s false proclamation that Bigotes possessed a fabulous golden bracelet, the episode worsened the already poor relations between Spaniard and Native.35 Yet when Bigotes was returned to his village, the chief gave the expedition the aforementioned Xabe as a guide to

34 35

Ibid. Bolton, Coronado, 190. 18

Quvira. Although not as damning of the Turk’s directions as Ysopete, Xabe did throw doubt over the promises of great quantities of gold. It is possible that Bigotes sent Xabe in order to offer some, if not a great deal, of reinforcement to the Turk’s claims, thus encouraging the Spanish to move away in their search of Quivira. This would certainly tie with the Turk’s last words, in which he said that the Natives of the Cicúique region had told him to lead the expedition away. An alternative to the above theory is that in the aftermath of the bloody Tiguex War, Bigotes realized he could not maintain the costly battle with the Spaniards, so he sued for peace, offering Xabe as a token of goodwill. This is somewhat reinforced by Bolton, who notes that the Indians had been friendly with the expedition prior to hostilities, as well as Day’s note that the war had left the region “wrapped in the peace of the vanquished.”36 Indeed, after the culmination of hostilities, the people of Cicúique (who had escaped much of the destruction) sought to ally themselves with Coronado against a rival tribe, though Cicúique’s residents soon tired of Spanish manipulation.37 Flint takes this further, suggesting that the “conspiracy between El Turco and the leaders of Cicúique” to destroy the expedition was a figment of the Spaniards’ paranoia, which settled in as the expedition continued to fail to find its desired city of gold. 38 If the Tiguex War had pummeled the Tiwa into such submission that they simply wished the expedition to move on peacefully, then the Querechos were another matter. The first Natives encountered by the expedition as it crossed into modern-day Texas, the Querechos greatly confused the expedition by telling them that Quivira lay due east, contrary to what the Turk had originally said.39 At the same time the Turk inexplicably began directing the expedition further to the east and less towards the north than before. While the earlier evidence does suggest that the Turk might have originally been leading the expedition towards Cahokia and the other mound-builders in the Mississippi River valley, it seems

Bolton, Coronado, 201; Day, Coronado’s Quest, 210. Richard Flint, Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2002) 521. 38 Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 168. 39 Bolton, Coronado, 250. 37

suspect that he suddenly changed his directions from north-east to east. This becomes even more dubious when it is noted that the Turk had gone ahead of the main Spanish force, ostensibly to scout, but in reality to teach the Querechos his story.40 For unknown reasons, the Texan Natives colluded with the Turk, although as with the Tiwa it may have been to move the Spaniards away from their lands and influence.41 It is equally plausible that the Querechos had heard news of the Tiguex War and did not wish to antagonize the overpowering Spaniards. In addition to enlisting the Querechos, the Turk appears to have been conspiring with the local Natives of the Quivira region to slaughter the advance party of the expedition when it reached the plains. Day argues that this threat was very real and imminent, yet Flint raises the point that the Natives of Quivira had little to no reason to attack the expedition.42 In addition to having scant contact with the Spaniards, the ‘Quivirans’ suffered no losses or atrocities like their southern kin and would have been loath to risk lives in an unnecessary attack.43 In light of this an attack seems outlandish, and given the sparse contact with the expedition it would appear that the Quivirans were not in a position to mislead the Spaniards either. Whilst hardly supportive of the Coronado expedition, the plains Natives did not seemingly hinder the trek either. Of course, Native Americans were not exclusively ambiguous or deceptive towards the Spaniards of the expedition. As mentioned, the expedition was accompanied by two guides who challenged the Turk’s authority and directions. Whereas Xabe mostly confined his words to downplaying the amount of gold in Quivira, Ysopete outwardly opposed the Turk often. Flint argues that this was due to Ysopete’s jealousy, rendering his counter-arguments to the Turk unreliable.44 Yet Ysopete’s intentions seem at least somewhat genuine. In addition to the earlier extract from Castañeda’s account, Ysopete tried to warn the Spanish of the Turk’s and the Querechos’ apparent collusion, stressing that Quivira was to the north 40

Ibid., 249. Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 168: Flint notes that the Querechos were hostile towards Caddoan speakers, of which the Turk was one. 42 Day, Coronado’s Quest, 254. 43 Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 168. 44 Flint, No Settlement, No Conquest, 169. 41

rather than south and eastwards.45 Despite Ysopete’s clear resentment of the Turk and his influence over Coronado, with Castañeda noting his joy at the execution of the Turk, Ysopete’s case is reinforced by the Teyas people of the Texan panhandle.46 Cabeza de Vaca’s party had spent a great deal of time with the Teyas, and the Natives remembered the Spanish fondly. This quite possibly explains the Teyas actions, which differ so strikingly from their Querechos counterparts’. Like Ysopete, the Teyas alerted Coronado to the fact that the Turk had “primed the Querechos” and told the Spaniards that what they sought was north, not south and east.47 The Teyas’ reports are given further credibility for also telling the Spanish that the houses of Quivira were made of grass and bison hide, rather than stone.48 Given that this is the most accurate description of plains Indians heard by the expedition, the Teyas’ reports cannot help but feel genuine, for they are not meekly telling the Spaniards what they wish to hear. The Teyas, more than any other tribe encountered, seemed to wish to help the expedition, a choice all the more remarkable given the theft of bison hides that occurred when the main army first arrived at the camp.49 CONCLUSION There is no single answer to the question of whether or not the Native Americans encountered by the Coronado expedition did deceive the Spaniards with the hope of causing them utter ruin and destruction. What is clear is that the Spaniards encountered a range of vastly different peoples, all of which had a different reaction to the invaders in their midst. It can certainly be expected that tribes such as the Tiwa and the Zuni, who suffered greatly at the hands of the Spanish, would have wished for the expedition to fail, but it is equally plausible that they simply wished for the strange and violent white men to move on. Meanwhile, the influence of the Turk cannot be overstated. Despite being just one man, and a potentially deranged one at that, the Turk successfully led Coronado and his men far outside of

Bolton, Coronado, 253. de Castañeda, Narrative, 75. 47 Bolton, Coronado, 262. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 257. 46

their original mission, keeping much of the party enraptured until it became obvious that the Turk was planning to destroy the expedition. Not only this, but the Turk was apparently able to override his Native kin, be it by overshadowing the objections of Bigotes, Xabe and Ysopete, or by convincing the Querechos to join him in his deception. Yet, while the theory of mass Native deception to remove the Spanish threat remains a possibility, it is overly simplistic. Despite its failings, the expedition was noticeably less bloodthirsty than the concurrent trek into the American Southeast led by Hernando de Soto, and not every tribe suffered at the hands of the Spanish. The conclusion of mass deception also ignores the ample evidence of the support given by tribes like the Teyas, who seemingly had no quarrel with the expedition. As with the prior appearance of Spaniards, in the form of Cabeza de Vaca’s party, these Natives seem to present as genuine information as can be legitimately verified in the modern-setting. Instead of promising immense cities of fabulous wealth, the Teyas told of the nomadic and small farmer communities on the Great Plains to the north. Of course the Teyas, like Xabe and Ysopete, continued to direct the expedition towards Quivira. Instead of strengthening the deception argument, however, this reinforces the notion that translation issues and a lack of comprehension of the Spanish goal hamstrung the Natives’ efforts to help. What the Spanish believed Quivira to be obviously differed from any Native interpretation of the site. Nevertheless, it would appear that at least some of the Native Americans encountered by the Coronado expedition believed in Quivira, at least to the extent that they could grasp such an entity, and were intent on directing the Spaniards to what they perceived they sought. It was amid this heady combination of violence and peace, confusion and discovery, deception and honesty that the Coronado expedition became an infamous and directionless meander into the wilderness, paving the way for several other failed explorations. As with Coronado’s journey, Native Americans would continue to play a crucial role in the failures or successes of many of these other journeys of discovery.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baskett, James Newton. “A Study of the Route of Coronado between the Rio Grande and Missouri Rivers,” in Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society Volume 12, ed. Geo. W. Martin. Topeka: State Printing Office, 1912. Bolton, Hebert E. Coronado: Knight of the Pueblos and Plains. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc., 1949. Day, A. Grove. Coronado’s Quest: The Discovery of the Southwestern States. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964. Flint, Richard. Great Cruelties Have Been Reported: The 1544 Investigation of the Coronado Expedition. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2002. Flint, Richard and Flint, Sarah Cushing (Eds.). The Coronado Expedition: From The Distance of 460 Years. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. ———. Documents of the Coronado Expedition, 1539-1542. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 2005. Hammond, George P. and Ray, Agapito (Eds.). Narratives of the Coronado Expedition. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1940. Martin, George W. (Ed.). Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society Vol.12. Topeka: State Printing Office, 1912. Udall, Stewart L. To the Inland Empire: Coronado and Our Spanish Legacy. New York: Doubleday and Company Inc., 1987. Winship, George Parker (Ed.). The Journey of Coronado 1540-1542. New York: A.S. Barnes & Company, 1904. ———. The Coronado Expedition 1540-1542. Chicago: The Rio Grande Press Inc., 1964.

Famines in Bengal: The Impact of Opium Trade in British India By Ryan Lanham Imperialism, by its very nature, involves the perpetual expansion of an empire. Whether through military force, political or economic coercion, religious crusading, or a combination of these and other factors, maintaining control over vast swaths of territory requires continuous funding. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the opium monopoly in British India provided a steady source of revenue that helped offset the costs of sustaining an empire. In an effort to tightly regulate this monopoly, all legalized poppy cultivation was restricted to the Bengal region. Under British rule, the people of Bengal suffered through multiple outbreaks of famine, the two most horrific occurring in 1770 and 1943. The narrow British focus on opium profits, coupled with the allocation of fertile lands for poppy cultivation, created conditions that contributed to these catastrophic famines and their enormous toll on human life. Opium production in India predates British rule by almost one thousand years, dating back to the eighth century.1 Poppy seeds brought by Arab traders were introduced to fertile soils in India, and independent farmers began to cultivate and produce opium. It was not until the sixteenth century, under Mughal rule, that an opium monopoly began to take shape as cultivation and trade became regulated.2 As the Mughal Empire declined, control over the opium monopoly diminished, and non-contracted farmers began to cultivate poppy with less fear of reprisal. Independent, unregulated, and competitive opium-producing factions vied for power and profits until 1773, when Governor-General of Bengal Warren Hastings reestablished a monopoly.3

J.T. Richards, “The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 61. 2 James B. Lyall, “Note on the History of Opium in India and of the Trade in it with China,” First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium (1895): 11. 3 “The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal,” Printed for J. Debrett, opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly; and Vernor and Hood, Birchin-Lane, Cornhill, 1796: 241. 24

The British opium monopoly in India was organized in a very strategic manner: in order to maximize profits, opium cultivation was restricted to the Bengal region.4 By confining opium production to a specific area, the British were better able to monitor its cultivation and exportation. Likewise, the manpower necessary for oversight could be centralized, thus reducing overall numbers and lowering expenditures. In addition, the British sought to establish a type of brand recognition by labeling the product “Bengal opium,” which was subdivided into two varieties: “Benares opium” and “Patna opium.”5 The structure and regulation of the monopoly changed over time to better maximize profits. When it was originally instated, the British leased Indian contractors the exclusive rights to buy, manufacture, and import opium which would then be delivered to the East India Company (EIC) in Calcutta for exportation.6 In 1797 and 1799, the British established policies that prohibited the importation of foreign opium in an effort to enforce stricter quality-control measures over Bengal opium. These policies also sought to restrict poppy cultivation to certain districts within the Bengal region, thereby prohibiting non-licensed growing in Bengal proper.7 These restrictions would result in much of the fertile soils being allocated for poppy cultivation instead of life-sustaining crops. Without these invaluable crops, famine conditions would be exacerbated as inadequate food supplies left millions starving. British attention, however, remained largely focused on profits. In 1825, Henry St. George Tucker, an official of the East India Company, wrote a report to British Foreign Secretary George Canning titled “A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824.” This two-hundred page report is a thorough delineation of East India Company revenue sources (i.e., land, taxes, crops, etc.) for the year 1824. In addition to providing specific numbers for the various types of revenue, Tucker presents contextual analysis of a range of societal and business trends that affect British business in India. In the section titled “The Opium Monopoly,” Tucker describes

Richards, “The Indian Empire,” 62. Amar Farooqui, “Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as Historical Factor,” Social Scientist 32 (2004): 21. 6 Lyall, “First Report,” 11. 7 Ibid. 5

the continued success of the Bengal opium monopoly, but warns of impeding financial danger in the rise of illicit Malwa opium. To begin, Tucker expounds upon the importance of restricting opium production to the Bengal region. By confining production to one region, the EIC was better able to monitor and regulate opium growth and trade. From a business perspective, maintaining tighter control over this monopoly allowed for greater ability to manipulate market prices abroad. Locally, however, this meant that vital, foodgrowing soils were continually given over for opium cultivation. Although Tucker abstains from divulging particulars, he acknowledges that the government of Bengal appointed collectors of the land revenue who were given various monetary incentives to increase opium cultivation. In a shroud of mystery, he further explains that “it will be sufficient to state that it is now broadly maintained that our object should be to encourage production” [italics in text], as opposed to whatever prior method may have been employed.8 An important note here is that these collectors (whom Tucker later calls “native chiefs”) wielded a certain amount of leverage over the cultivators in the region. Although this text does not explicitly state what measures were used to increase opium production, it is clear that the local chiefs were successful in converting large swaths of land into poppy fields. By collaborating with local leaders, the British were able achieve the desired result—namely, more profit—with less use of force. The willingness of the British to allocate finances for local chiefs is better exemplified in Tucker’s description of the Malwa opium trade. Unlike the tightly controlled Bengal region—where money flowed into the proper channels— the illicit opium trade in Malwa resulted in many parties reaping the financial rewards, much to the British chagrin. Explaining the unregulated Malwa opium trade, Tucker notes, “a portion by no means inconsiderable is likely, I fear, to be engrossed by contractors, native officers, intermediate agents, and others, whom it cannot be the interest of the Government to maintain and encourage.”9 He further 8

Henry St. George Tucker, A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824 (London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1825): 65. 9 Ibid., 69. 26

explains that money spent on attempts to eradicate this illegal trade would be better invested in native chiefs and village zamindars, all of whom would ostensibly have more power to quell the illegal activity. This threat to British profits was hardly agreeable, and the production of Malwa opium was outlawed, leaving Bengal as the sole opium-producer for the monopoly. Another British publication from this time, The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature, serves as a running commentary on British pursuits in India. Volume VI of this journal analyzes Tucker’s report and furnishes a revealing criticism of EIC business practices. An excerpt reads: “Such is the incomparable morality of the opium monopoly, which is confessed to rob the people . . . of the just use of their property.”10 Often scathing in its condemnation of the imperialistic agenda, The Oriental Herald decries the questionable methods the EIC employs in forcing Indians to set aside valuable land for opium production. Regarding the suppression of Malwa opium, whose legalization would have alleviated the overwhelming burden on Bengal, The Oriental Herald is equally critical: “[Tucker] does not object to the despotism and injustice of forcing dependent states to give us this new monopoly of [opium] . . . but he thinks that (for our own sakes, their interests being out of the question) we should have circumscribed the cultivation in [Malwa].”11 The article continues in this fashion, openly criticizing British policy in which the sole driving factor is profit. Tucker describes the EIC monopolistic practices of limiting opium quantity as being altruistic in nature, as a concern for Chinese well-being.12 The Oriental Herald highlights the absurdity of a “moralizer” who denounces a type of evil while providing it openly at the same time.13 In contrasting Tucker’s report and The Oriental Herald’s critique, the most revealing feature is how innocuous official policy appears on paper while the reality on the ground is quite different.

“Sources of Revenue,” The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature VI (London: Sanford Arnot, 33 Old Bond Street, 1825): 23-31: The Chinese were the primary consumers of British opium. 11 Ibid., 24. 12 Tucker, “A Review,” 61. 13 “Sources of Revenue," 25. 27

Another British colonial diplomat, and former Governor of Bombay, Sir Henry Bartle Frere, delivered a lecture on Dec. 12, 1873 entitled, “On the Impending Bengal Famine.” During this lecture, Frere acknowledges the allegation that opium cultivation diminishes grain production, thereby contributing to famine conditions.14 Frere roundly rejects these assertions by claiming, “There is no doubt in the mind of anyone who knows the cultivators of India, that they are . . . so blind to their own interests . . . as to grow any crops other than those which they believe will pay them best.”15 Continuing in this manner, Frere argues that Indians are motivated only by self-interest, and that growing grain would ostensibly be a poor business decision on their part, as “surplus grain is difficult to sell.”16 Should these claims be taken at face value, one may agree that the avaricious nature of the Indian is to blame—neglecting food for wealth. Admitting culpability has never been a British strong suit (particularly in colonial times), and this method of passing the blame reflects this mentality. The local Indian farmers had a great deal of pressure to grow specific crops. In Bengal, the ryots, or local cultivators, were pressured to produce opium by the native chiefs who were pressured by the local British officials who were pressured by regional officials and so on. Frere paints a very different picture by casually suggesting that each farmer could grow what he pleased—thus clearing the British conscience. The reality, however, was quite different, and the resulting food shortages and famines may be directly linked to official British policy. Famines are typically the result of multiple conditions and circumstances. The famine of 1770 in Bengal was a result of dismal rainfall, a shortage of grain crops, unrelenting East India Company revenue demands, and poor planning, among other factors.17 Exact death toll numbers are difficult for researchers to ascertain, but it is estimated that 10 million people were decimated by this catastrophe, roughly one-

Bartle Frere, “On the Impending Bengal Famine: How it Will be Met and How to Prevent Future Famines in India,” Speech delivered before the Society of Arts (London: Murray, King & Co., 1874): 20. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 195196. 28

third of the population.18 Although the British opium monopoly had not officially been enacted at this time, many food crops had been replaced with more lucrative poppy fields.19 Despite the devastating shortage of sustainable foods during this period, the British would continue to restrict opium production to the Bengal region and neglect preventative measures that could reduce the possibility of future famines. Bengal experienced another famine in 1865-67, during which an estimated 1.25 million people died. Over 500,000 acres of fertile soil were dedicated to poppy cultivation, further compounding the famine conditions.20 The Reverend Frederick Storrs Turner, a staunch opium-trade opponent of the time, asserts that â&#x20AC;&#x153;the lavish expenditure of Government having averted the worst of the famine, we are not likely to hear how far the opium cultivation was detrimental to the food supply."21 He also explains that irrigation structures were devoted to poppy fields, thereby depriving other food crops of the much needed water supply. These practices further illustrate the lengths to which the British would go to continue reaping the lucrative opium-trade rewards, regardless of human life. Bengal experienced a final famine under British rule in 1943. It is estimated that 3-7 million people perished during this period, and the famine wrought vast social and economic upheaval, as well.22 Although the opium monopoly was no longer a causal factor in creating this particular famine, the British imperial modus operandi had long since been established. Following the famine of 1770, subsequent periods of starvation could have been ameliorated or prevented had the British been less focused on their own interests and more concerned with the well-being of the governed populace. The lack of preventative planning was apparent during the 1943 famine, and its roots may be traced back to each previous famine and the British desire for profit over sustenance. 18

Ibid., 200. Sushil Chaudhury, From Prosperity to Decline: Eighteenth Century Bengal (Dehli: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1999). 20 Frederick Storrs Turner, â&#x20AC;&#x153;British Opium Policy and its Results to India and Chinaâ&#x20AC;? (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Riving, 1876): 156. 21 Ibid., 156-157. 22 Richard Stevenson, Bengal Tiger and British Lion: An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943 (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005): 139. 19

Even in 1825, The Oriental Herald called attention to the detrimental British profit-making policies and their effect on India and its inhabitants: “The mode in which [the finances] are recruited, while it degrades and impoverishes the people, must, if persevered in, ultimately exhaust the country, fertile and productive as it might be made under a better system of government than that which now oppresses it.”23 Unwilling to recognize the injurious nature of their practices, the British continued to exert control over Indians with ostensible disregard for their welfare. One famine may be attributed to poor planning, unfortunate weather, or overall short-sightedness, but the fact that multiple famines occur in one region, with death tolls in the tens of millions, implies a fundamentally different causality. Instead, overwhelming ineptitude or rapacious policy-making on the part of the British must factor into fault assignation for famine conditions. In summary, the British opium trade in India emerged when the EIC took control of the preexisting poppy-cultivation apparatus. Originally, this was a loose network of individual farmers who produced low-grade opium for casual consumption. By the time Warren Hastings established the British opium monopoly in 1773, poppy-cultivation practices were in place that would continue to wreak havoc on local food supplies. Just three years prior, Bengal had lost nearly one-third of its population due to famine. Opium production was already a significant factor in reducing food crops during that time, but rather than redressing the issue, the British would continue to seek profits first. Malwa opium production offered the British a chance to broaden the opium trade by establishing other poppy-cultivation regions besides Bengal. Instead, the British declared Malwa production illegal, and the Bengalis alone remained yoked to the opium burden. To regulate market prices, the British had always limited the overall amount of opium produced. Had the British split this target quantity between Bengal and Malwa, more Bengali land could have been dedicated to food crops. Instead, British policies outlawed Malwa opium and relegated its production exclusively to Bengal. During the time of British rule, life in India was riddled with atrocities and hardships. In the region of Bengal alone, a series of famines erased tens of millions of lives. This catastrophic loss of life 23

“Sources of Revenue,” 29. 30

may, in part, be traced to British imperial policies that placed the primacy of profits before the welfare of the governed. Fertile soils in Bengal were given over to poppy cultivation, attributable to intense pressureâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;or coercionâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from British officials. Restricting opium production to the Bengal region entailed further hardships by reducing the amount of sustainable crops that could be grown in that area. In the end, profit-centered motivation, coupled with a failure to learn from past mistakes, allowed the British Indian opium monopoly to thrive despite the tremendous cost to human life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baker, E. N. “The Opium Industry,” The Economic Journal 6 (1896): 114-122, doi: 10.2307/2956785. Bowen, H. V. Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757-1773. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Chaudhury, Sushil. From Prosperity to Decline: 18th Century Bengal. Delhi: Manohar Publishors and Distributors, 1999. Deming, Sarah. “The Economic Importance of Indian Opium and Trade with China on Britain’s Economy, 1843-1890,” Economic Working Papers 25 (2011): 1-17. Dutt, Romesh. The Economic History of India under Early British Rule: From the Rise of the British Power in 1757 to the Accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1906. Farooqui, Amar. “Colonialism and Competing Addictions: Morphine Content as Historical Factor,” Social Scientist 32 (2004): 21-31, doi: 10.2307/3517991. ———. Smuggling as Subversion: Colonialism, Indian Merchants, and the Politics of Opium 1790-1843. New York: Lexington Books, 2005. Frere, Bartle. “On the Impending Bengal Famine: How it Will be Met and How to Prevent Future Famines in India,” Speech delivered before the Society of Arts. London: John Murray, Albemarle Street; Henry S. King & Co., Cornhill, 1874. “The History of the Trial of Warren Hastings, Esq., Late Governor-General of Bengal,” Printed for J. Debrett, Opposite Burlington-House, Piccadilly; and Vernor and Hood, Birchin-Lane, Cornhill, 1796. Lyall, James B. “Note on the History of Opium in India and of the Trade in it with China,” First Report of the Royal Commission on Opium. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1895. Markovits, Claude. “The Political Economy of Opium Smuggling in Early Nineteenth Century India: Leakage or Resistance?” Modern Asian Studies 43 (2009): 89-111, doi: 10.1017/S0026749X07003344. McLane, John R. Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. “Opium Financed British Rule in India,” BBC News, June 23, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7460682.stm. Richards, J. T. “The Indian Empire and Peasant Production of Opium in the Nineteenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 15 (1981): 59-82. ———. “Opium and the British Indian Empire: The Royal Commission of 1895,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 375-420. Rodas, Luis. “The Role of Opium in the Expansion of the British Empire from 1773 to 1834.” Presented at the seminar Empires and Nations: Case Studies and Global Comparisons, Universitat Leipzig, Saxony, Germany, February 29, 2012.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Sources of Revenue,â&#x20AC;? The Oriental Herald, and Journal of General Literature VI. London: Sanford Arnot, 33 Old Bond Street, 1825. Stevenson, Richard. Bengal Tiger and British Lion: An Account of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005. Trocki, Carl A. Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy: A Study of the Asian Opium Trade 1750-1950. London: Routledge, 1999. Tucker, Henry St. George. A Review of the Financial Situation of the East-India Company in 1824. London: Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen, 1825. Turner, Frederick Storrs. British Opium Policy and its Results to India and China. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, & Riving, 1876.

Skipped Pages: The Revolutionary War Letters of Sarah Hodgkins By Beth Billington As a young mother and soldier’s wife, Sarah Hodgkins conversed with her husband during the American Revolution by letter but surely never expected her words to be immortalized and broadcast to the masses. The publication of their letters has a curious beginning that reads like a classic fiction novel of intrigue and adventure. In June of 1956, Dr. Robert Lively of Princeton University was put in contact with the estate managers of the late Herbert Wade. In his will, Wade left a substantial amount of research, documents, and a sum of money to employ a historian in the completion of the Wade family history from the 1600s through the present. Wade, as a professional editor and writer in scientific fields, left a time constraint with the sum of money, but left no instructions on the subject matter of the final material.1 However, the excitement in the letters soon faded. What could have been included in the book as a reanimated tale of love, fear, hardship, and joy—adding other colors to the red-white-and-blue story— was left to the interpretation of men who had little interest in the feminine experiences of the American Revolution. Initially, Sarah’s story was quickly, though incorrectly, summarized by an author admittedly short on time. Robert Lively’s published interpretations were later regurgitated by other scholars who were writing and researching in a time before gender analysis was a consideration. Sarah’s name appears occasionally, associated with unpatriotic or petty women; her passionate letters were relegated to unread annexes. While it is true that Sarah Hodgkins was not the perfect patriotic wife, her story is immensely important. In addition to being part of a symbolic cautionary tale of pre-feminist interpretations by male scholars, she is an icon of the burdened, confused, helpful, loving wife, and her relationship with Joseph

Robert Lively , introduction to This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Grade Officers in Washington's Army , Robert Lively and Herbert T. Wade, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), viii, ix, xi.: Quotes from Sarah and Joseph Hodgkins retain the original spelling and punctuation. 34

Hodgkins is nothing short of a treasure of realistic and passionate love. Unlike Lively’s hope for the collected letters, which was the recovery of soldiers’ tales to “inform our understanding of all patriots, and of patriotism itself,”2 this paper will examine the only feminine voice recorded in the family line, portraying an individual grappling with life, love, depression, and war. While there are only twenty-two extant letters from Sarah, there are about one hundred from Joseph. Little remembered is that scholars have Sarah to thank for preserving so many of her husband’s letters. It is hard to blame Joseph for losing so many of Sarah’s letters, with marching, moving, freezing, starving, having his clothes torn through by cannonballs and grazed by bullets, it is little wonder there are so few of hers remaining. In a letter from 1778, Sarah bemoans that she hears much less from him, reminding him that he used to write almost daily.3 With these clues from their correspondence, they likely wrote hundreds of letters which were not preserved; however, the fact that we have any letters from a woman of little status is remarkable. It is also possible that their descendants tragically edited and pared down the letters to a set which they deemed important. The letters were passed to Hannah, their only surviving daughter, who was married to Nathaniel Wade’s son, and so passed through the Wade Family. Sarah Perkins had been Joseph Hodgkins’ younger neighbor since 1770, and was his second wife.4 His first, Joanna Webber, had died in January of 1772. Joanna and Joseph had five children together, though only little Joanna survived. There is either no record or no mention by other authors regarding her personality, relative marital bliss, or cause of death. If such records or accounts exist, they may be interesting details to enhance our understanding of Sarah’s relationship to Joseph. When Joseph and Sarah married in December the same year, little Joanna was seven years of age and had witnessed her mother and all her younger siblings die. Sarah and Joseph’s first child, Sarah or Salle, was born nine months after their marriage, followed by little Joseph in March of 1775. Joseph, necessarily, left with the

Lively, Introduction, viii. Robert Lively and Herbert T. Wade, This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Grade Officers in Washington's Army, (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958), 236. 4 Richard S. Tracey, “‘So I must be contented to live a widow...’ The Revolutionary War Service of Sarah Hodgkins of Ipswich (1775-1779),” Historical Journal of Massachusetts vol. 30.2 (Summer 2002), 204. 3

Ipswich Minutemen in early May 1775 to join the siege of Boston.5 Sarah sent word during the Battle of Long Island that their son, whom Joseph called his Little Rogue, had died.6 Martha was born in November of 1777 after being conceived when Joseph was home on furlough. Sarah would have two other daughters, Hannah, conceived during a short furlough in 1779 before Joseph’s permanent return in June but born in 1780, and Mary, born in 1782. Lively explains that Wade’s work was focused mostly on the military history of Nathaniel Wade, and that Joseph Hodgkins (his other great-great-grandfather) was only of nominal interest. In fact, Sarah’s letters were completely disregarded unless there were war details within.7 However, Lively saw the humanity of common men as heroic Americans.8 He deviates from Wade’s focus and devotes a chapter to the Hodgkins’ relationship and the strain of war, but upon any analysis of the letters, the short of his studies are apparent. He, without our current understanding of gender studies, quickly classifies that many of Sarah’s statements and actions as those of “any wife,” accuses her more than once of being manipulative and “play[ing] on Joseph’s fears.” He declares that their letters “were rarely intimate,” and Sarah’s war service was that “she won her battle” in getting Joseph to return home to stay.9 Though Sarah was twenty-four when fighting broke out, Lively lumps her with an imaginary and pervasive society of petty “young wives” who relished in the excitement of the war. Yet this excitement passed her by because “Joseph sent few presents and reported little detail from the sinful cities.”10 Lively only notes that Joseph sent her a half-box of chestnuts, a loaf of bread, and three handkerchiefs; Lively failed to report the cheese Joseph sent, a set of paper for letters, or one unnamed item, and missed the joke of the bread gift.11 As for the bread, Joseph had lamented that there were no women to do any women’s work, such as cooking and laundry; he sent his able wife a loaf of bread made by men in a 5

Lively, Glorious, 13. Joe to Sa 15 Jun 1775, 12 Aug 1776, 12 Aug 1776 in Lively, Glorious. 7 Lively, Introduction, x. 8 Ibid., viii-ix. 9 Lively, Glorious, 46, 47, 52, 66. 10 Lively, Glorious, 46. 11 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 23 Oct 1775, 23 Mar 1776, S to J S to J S to J 19 Nov 1775; 10 Dec 1775 in Lively Glorious. 6

make-shift camp on Prospect Hill so “that you may know what fine Bread we have.”12 Regardless, Sarah had no desire for excitement or presents; she had more than enough responsibility to keep her from any petty desires, as will be explored later in this paper. Lively, however, was not being purely androcentric. He also misread Joseph, calling him stoical, and describing him as a man of deliberate word and single-meanings, but entirely missing the many instances where Joseph used obvious double meanings and some important, emotionally erratic letters.13 Lively also undermined the value of the couple’s religious exchanges; what he describes as prose that “slipped frequently into the scriptural cadence” is actually true devotion, prayers, and encouragement by use of the highest power either of them knew in a time of total uncertainty, danger, and even despair.14 When the misinterpretation extends to both individuals, and is in conflict with the true content of their letters, it is tragic that Lively’s sentiments are repeated by later scholars such as Ray Raphael, in A People’s History of the American Revolution, and Robert Middlekauff in The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789. Middlekauff is less harsh, giving Sarah more of an excuse to be anxious than did Lively, due to her loneliness and increased responsibilities. However, he reaffirms the interpretation that “her letters were matter-of-fact” in tone but for one jovial and bawdy exchange copied from Lively. He insists that Sarah “filled her letters with tidbits about the children, of relatives, and Ipswich.” The majority of her letters’ contents, however, were either very short, or were emotional and spiritual outpourings to her husband, including important details about running the household, and specific news, such as familial and local illnesses which she was worried about.15 Middlekauff, like Lively, joins in accusing her of manipulation: “When she was especially lonely, she was not above reminding Joseph that she was alone with their children.”16 “I have got a Sweet 12

Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 23 Oct 1775 in Lively, Glorious. Lively, 47. Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 6 Feb 1776, 20 Jun 1776, 5 Sep 1776, 11 Jan 1778, 22 Feb 1778 in Lively, Glorious. 14 Lively, 46. 15 Robert Middlekauf. This Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1761 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 536. 16 Middelkauf, This Glorious Cause, 537. 13

Babe,” she adds in a postscript with news of another soldier’s wife’s newborn, “almost Six months old but have got no father for it.”17 Interestingly, this quotation used by each scholar leaves off the end of the phrase, “no father for it but Sally Stanwood” which shows her intention is humor, not malice; Joseph was serving with three of Sally Stanwood’s relatives.18 This particular letter was not one of loneliness as Middlekauf describes it, but one full of anxiety and despair. In fact, it is more likely that she was punctuating her depression with laughter; an absurd insinuation of homosexuality from his privately bawdy wife could only cause Joseph to laugh. In 2002, Richard Tracey, a lieutenant colonel with an MA in history, published “‘So I must be contented to live a widow…’ The Revolutionary War Service of Sarah Hodgkins of Ipswich (17751779).” Tracey finds Lively and others’ work on Hodgkins lacking. He fills out her background with details about local economics, family and kin ties, and two books on women during the revolutionary war. He rightly surmises Sarah’s important role in their community during the war as a “conduit of information to the community about the health and welfare of the Ipswich soldiers.”19 He accounts for Joseph’s different enlistment periods and their effect on Sarah.20 He demonstrates her economic wits and Joseph’s trust in her decisions.21 Yet he argues several points that are inharmonious with the evidence in the collected letters. Tracey describes her writing as a reward at the end of her day and as a way of collecting her thoughts as if she often had free time to write.22 He describes a unique period of “freedom” and traveling after her son’s death because she is free from the burden of “lactation;” but Tracey only cites that Sarah said she had been “abroad” to her father’s home, and this is the only mention of travel in all her extant letters. 23 Tracey posits but never answers his own questions: “Was Sarah’s use of the language an

Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 27 Jul 1778 in Lively, Glorious. Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 27 Jul 1778 in Lively, Glorious,” and Tracey, ‘“So I Must Be Contented,”’ 205. 19 Tracey, ‘“So I Must Be Contented,”’ 206. 20 Ibid., 207. 21 Ibid., 211. 22 Ibid., 207. 23 Ibid., 207. 18

insignificant slip, or a small act of conscious self-assertion in the face of her husband’s prolonged abandonment?”24 He asserts that Sarah had a pride of independence in the first part of the war with no primary support.25 He asserts that she experienced her role in the war as a “deputy husband,” and that her written outcry of being a widow was simply an expression of mundane truth—namely, that "if Joseph had died, the day to day rhythm of her life would not have changed.”26 While much kinder to Sarah’s memory, Tracey still weaves in his own interpretation of her, and in some instances, of all women. While citing scholars such as Carol Berkin, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Mary Beth Norton, Tracey’s summaries of their arguments are shallow, and he cannot seem to walk in the shoes of his historical protagonist to appreciate or understand her reality. Sarah Hodgkins will certainly benefit from an analysis by historians skilled in gender analysis. She was not a petty, manipulative, or matter-of-fact woman who suffered from burdens including boredom and lactation. She was a dutiful, capable, frugal, moral, and religiously devoted individual who was also very emotional, loving, and thoughtful despite likely suffering from post-partum or clinical depression. Tracey has already demonstrated Sarah Hodgkin’s shrewdness with financial questions and situations. While some elements of her personality can be deduced from her letters, others are revealed in her husband’s letters to her. Joseph Hodgkins considered Sarah a good match; she was dutiful, capable, and mindful in planning her time and future needs. Many of his letters to her ask her to undertake tasks, such as cleaning and mending clothes for him and even for his nephew Thomas.27 He knew that she was extremely busy, stating many times that he wished he could be there to relieve some of the burden, and he knew that her letters were a “rarity” only because he knew exactly what her job entailed.28 Regardless of learning new tasks, like spinning shoe thread, making shirts and coats, and growing crops, Sarah

Ibid., 209. Ibid., 214. 26 Ibid., 212. 27 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 13 Jun 1775, 2 Jul 1775, in Lively, Glorious. 28 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 1 Oct 1775, 2 Oct 1775, 16 Oct 1775, in Lively, Glorious. 25

excelled and surprised Joseph with a surplus of crops, in addition to having shirts and stockings made before he needed them.29 Joseph also regarded Sarah highly because of her reasonability. Whether there were issues to resolve about selling a gun, missing an opportunity for a raise and higher position, or discussing Sarah’s questions about his war service, Joseph explained his thoughts to her. 30 He did not simply declare what shall be, but involved her and reasoned with her. Unlike John Adams, who threatened his wife to cease writing entirely because she questioned his lack of letters, Sarah Hodgkins sent a particularly bold letter, using logic-based arguments, to convince Joseph to come home to stay. To this, he replied with great concern, “My Dear, you are very Excusable.”31 For matters which were too complicated to resolve by letter, he gave her some facts to think about which they “can consider in person.”32 It would be difficult to classify all the ways in which spirituality and religion were important to Sarah Hodgkins. She and her husband take space in almost every letter using scripture and prayer to admonish and encourage each other. That they have each other’s spiritual comfort is a deeply felt need for each of them. The Hodgkins enjoyed each other’s thoughts and presence more than anything else, often stating so, and praying for the future when they can once again have the “peasful injoyment of each other” of the “happiness of living together again.”33 Their relationship was one of friendship and love; they each state often that they thrive on the letters they receive since they “have no other way of conversing together.”34 While the letters are often highly structured in form and language, each breaks into colloquial, conversant style as if they were at home together. Sarah was often concerned about the cool nights, and whether or not Joseph was warm, fed, clothed, or healthy. She was concerned about those who were 29

Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 13 Jun 1775, 2 Jan 1776, “fryday Morning” between 5-16 Sep 1776; Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 2 Jun 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 30 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 19 Nov 1775, 5 Feb 1776, 20 Mar 1776, 10 Jun 1776, 5 Jan 1778, 13 Oct 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 31 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 15 Nov 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 32 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 13 Oct 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 33 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 10 Jun 1776, Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins 19 Oct 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 34 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 9 Oct 1775, in Lively, Glorious. 40

unkind to him, as well as his physical ailments.35 She wished him “a good night,” and he wished her “a happy new year.”36 In letters, they discuss rain or hot weather, she tells him how their infant Martha is swatting her as she writes, and has two new teeth and can already stand on her own.37 Sarah informed him of an accident that left a cut on their daughter’s arm, and he asked Sarah to tell her that “Dady is Verry sorry for it.”38 He wittily tells his wife that he wishes she could find a way for him to make money and not have to work.39 In some way, the war strengthened their romantic love, as demonstrated by the August 1778 alteration in their manner of signing their letters. Their most habitual signatures of “your kind and compassionate/ affectionate companion til death” over three years changed suddenly to “your ever Constant wife” and “your affectionate Husband.”40 Tracey’s interpretation of Sarah’s role, a surrogate or deputy husband, may need some research down a slightly different path. He is using the research of notable scholars, but Sarah’s letters, in conjunction with a few from Abigail Adams, suggest that some refining of the idea is needed. Sarah, with no explanation, switches into first-person possessive pronouns starting in late 1776, only fourteen months into Joseph’s service. She begins referring to their children as “my children,” including her stepdaughter. Joseph Hodgkins also uses the personal possessive when speaking of his children at times, but when he was away at Valley Forge, without leisure to write, Sarah Hodgkins writes that she has named their child; his reply is “you say you have named your child Martha and you Did not know weather I should Like the name But I have nothing to say if it [suits] you.”41 Earlier in his letter, he reveals that Sarah has been distraught in wanting him home, and that he has “as grate a Desire to Come home as you can Posibly have of having me,” demonstrating that there was no ill-will in their singular-steeped language.42 35

Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 2 Jun 1776; Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 22 Mar 1776, in Lively, Glorious. Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 8 Jan 1776; Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 1 Jan 1779, in Lively, Glorious. 37 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 27 Jul 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 38 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 20 Jun 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 39 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 13 Oct 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 40 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 3 Sep 1778; Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 10 Sep 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 41 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 5 Jan 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 42 Ibid. 36

Sarah writes the day before the Declaration of Independence was published, “I due really want to See you very much but don’t understand…So I must be contented to Live a widow for the present but I hope I Shant always live So.”43 Joseph writes to her two months later, enclosing “30 Dollars I Belive that will Be your third.”44 The general custom at the time was that a widow would receive one-third of her deceased husband’s estate unless he willed otherwise. Interestingly, Abigail Adams called herself a widow as well. In one letter to her husband in 1783, she laments that she has lived half her married life “in widowhood.” 45 In another she writes, “Forgive me if I sometimes use the singular instead of the plural . . . alas I have been much necessitated to it.”46 Adams and Hodgkins, who were living within one hundred miles of each other, described similar sentiments and syntax (although they were of different classes); it seems possible that women whose husbands were away were living and moving through society as if they were widows with full rights and responsibilities thereof. Living as a widow may have been a way for women to emotionally function without their husbands, living as if the husbands were dead to lessen the emotional impact of an actual death. It is also possible that it may have been a pragmatic answer to an uncertain situation, and a prolonged war, when the unnamed concept of “deputy husband” was suited more to peacetime. Finally, the aforementioned scholars who read Sarah Hodgkins’ emotional appeals to Joseph as manipulative, passive-aggressive, or typical of words that “any wife” would use, misunderstood and discounted the context and content of her words. Still, one can no longer deny obvious statements from Sarah Hodgkins to her husband that worried him enough to come home on a few occasions, and may have led to his early resignation in 1779. In some letters, Sarah writes that “things look dark” or that all

Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 3 Jul 1776, in Lively, Glorious. Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 1 Oct 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 45 Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 27 Dec 1783 [electronic edition]. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. Last accessed Apr 8, 2015. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17831227aa&bc=%2Fdigitaladams%2Farchive%2Fbrowse%2Fletters_177 9_1789.php. 46 Woody Holton, Abigail Adams,(New York : Free Press, 2009), 186. 44

“Seems to be rather against us,” and even that she does not allow herself “to depend on any thing for I find there is nothing to be depended upon but troble & disapointments.”47 These statements of impending doom or nothing but strife in her future are typical watch-phrases of those with depression. Another common symptom of depression is a feeling of not enjoying things one did before. On the evening of Thanksgiving in 1775, Sarah receives a letter from Joseph and immediately replies that “it Seems to be very lonesome and dull.”48 Whether she had isolated herself, or whether she was simply home alone after festivities, there was no hope or gratitude that the holiday could have inspired evidenced in her short letter. She also aligns herself with Job, despairingly calling one of their friends “one of Jobs comforters,” imploring Joseph to return home “before I get to the Bottom.”49 There are many other instances of this kind from Sarah. After receiving a distraught letter from his wife on a Sunday and Monday in April of 1778, Joseph Hodgkins found a way to get home. Sarah began writing on Sunday in an anxious tone, but left off suddenly; on Monday she resumed writing, but from a place of depression. Sunday she wrote circularly for about sixteen lines about how she had not heard from him in two months, thought he was dead, heard a rumor that he had been inoculated with small-pox—but did not know if he had survived—and was finally told that he had survived, but he had not written to her nor come home as promised. In the letter, she trails off on Sunday and begins the next line with “Monday afternoon I am very Low in Spirits almost despare of your coming home.” She writes, as at other times, that she does not know how to leave her worry to God. Then, curiously, she writes “but it is my old friend.” When Sarah spoke of any person, child, or of God, she never used an impersonal pronoun; there are many people currently, and in literary history, who describe their clinical depression in such a way. She continues, “& Some is wrong end upwards & Some wright. . . .I cant express what I feal but I forbear disapointments are allotted for me.”50 Despite a closing joke about Sally Stanwood as surrogate father, and her postscript 47

Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 10 Dec 1775, 3 Sep 1778, in Lively, Glorious. Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 28 Nov 1775, in Lively, Glorious. 49 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 23 Feb 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 50 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 26 Apr 1778, in Lively, Glorious. 48

attempt to lighten her previous words, her husband was deeply concerned and made his way home to bear part of her burden until late July.51 Whether she suffered from life-long depression, post-partum depression, or extended grief over the loss of her infant son—in addition to all of her unstable life circumstances—we will never know. Sarah Hodgkins presents as an imperfect human and raises questions of where her story and experiences fit in a patriotic narrative of the past. Current scholars have expanded the study and teaching of the patriotism felt and displayed by revolutionary people, accounting for the lack of patriotism found in many communities and individuals. Joseph Hodgkins knew that his sacrifices, as well as those his wife and family were forced to make, were valuable. He wrote to her almost a year into his service, acknowledging “all the Trobles we have to meet with in the way of our Duty and while we are Absent from Each other.”52 Despite Joseph’s dutiful attitude, Sarah was openly pessimistic about “our side.”53 The Hodgkins family were residents of Massachusetts and were emotionally affected by the massacre in Boston in 1770. Only a few years later, in 1774, their charter government was revoked, their town meetings outlawed, and Boston was occupied by their king’s armed forces. At the eruption of violence at Lexington, Joseph Hodgkins believed that acquiescence to Parliament’s policies meant slavery, writing that if colonists didn’t exert themselves in their “glorious cause,” “our all is gon[e] and we made slaves of for Ever.”54 He cared for his family and felt war was the only way to protect their future. Their letters also show that this couple, like most new Americans, had no way of knowing how long this war would last or what sacrifices it would demand. Tracey insists Sarah Hodgkins was a self-aware patriot, while Lively and Middlekauff have insinuated she was unpatriotic in her efforts to have her husband leave the war and his glorious cause. As tensions with Parliament mounted in the 1760s and 1770s, some women had a small but important 51

Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 27 Jul 1778, in Lively, Glorious. Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 4 Apr 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 53 Sarah Hodgkins to Joseph Hodgkins, 16 Sep 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 54 Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins, 25 Nov 1775, in Lively, Glorious. 52

opportunity for public participation in the resistance efforts, but Hodgkins did not leave hints that she was involved in any public patriotism, and she certainly questioned God’s Providence as a promise of victory during the war. Of more important actions, publically patriotic women formed organizations to promote boycotts of British goods such as cloth, clothing, tea, and sugar, although some women stocked up on such items before publicly declaring their patriotism.55 Sarah happily reported to her husband that she had “Plenty of West India goods” in late 1776.56 It was not that Sarah Hodgkins was unconcerned about the war effort, or the newly independent states, but she was mostly concerned with getting by day to day. She cared for a step-daughter (ages ten to fourteen), a daughter (ages two to six), an infant son whom she lost, and another pregnancy and infant daughter (who was two years of age when Joseph returned). She faced a loss of income and the expectation to handle the business and agrarian duties while her husband was gone. Her other male family members were away with her husband, except for those men in their sixties and older, who were too aged to fight in the war. Sarah Hodgkins cannot be paraded as a perfect wife and patriot, and this may be why her story is often overlooked. The Hodgkins’ correspondence certainly gives details of life on the warfront and at home, and it helps to round out our understanding of a significant time in American history. But what is most striking about these letters is their function as windows into the Hodgkinses’ special relationship, and the humanity of historical people. One may discard all historical themes, terms, tendencies, dates, and names, and simply read these letters for the story they tell of two people, two hearts grasping for each other across time and space to give each other the most comfort possible in a time requiring great sacrifices. In the turbulence of war, the confusion of distance and dullness, Joseph was committed to his glorious cause and to his loving wife. She was committed to him, to his daughter, their children, and their livelihood. Their love defied the danger and uncertainty of war and widowhood; though she was

55 56

Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence, (New York: Knopf, 2005), 14. Joseph Hodgkins to Sarah Hodgkins,“fryday Morning” between 5-16 Sep 1776, in Lively, Glorious. 45

already burdened, she conceived each time he was home even though she was not sure if she must live a widow in actuality. They joked with each other in letters. Yes, there was a war and strife and shortages and death and illness and uncertainty, but their letters aimed to rise above it all through emotional connection. This is what they missed the most and what was most dear to them: each otherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conversation in peace and happiness at home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berkin, Carol. Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America's Independence. New York: Knopf, 2005. Holton, Woody. Abigail Adams. New York: Free Press, 2009. Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 27 December 1783 [electronic edition]. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/. Lively, Robert and Herbert T. Wade. This Glorious Cause: The Adventures of Two Company Grade Officers in Washington's Army, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958. Middlekauf, Robert. This Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763-1761. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Tracey, Richard S. “‘So I must be contented to live a widow...’ The Revolutionary War Service of Sarah Hodgkins of Ipswich (1775-1779),” Historical Journal of Massachusetts vol. 30.2, Summer 2002.

Two Sides of the Same Cloth: Hildegard, Heloise, and Feminine Agency through the Abbey By Beth Billington Early in the twelfth century, Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent II exchanged Latin letters with two famous women: Hildegard von Bingen, a German abbess and mystic; and Heloise d’Argenteuil, a brilliant and powerful abbess in France. Due to widespread illiteracy during this time, it is remarkable not only that these women were writing, but also that they were writing in fluent Latin to renowned religious leaders and the head of the Catholic Church, at a time when women had no religious authority. Each abbess was known for being a unique woman whose life was the exception rather than the rule, but these two notable and intelligent women were dissatisfied with their experiences as nuns, each working to change the expectations and practice of female monasticism. All abbesses were struggling with issues of spiritual and physical care, yet these two approached their concerns in unique and often opposing ways. It is difficult to find a solid picture of their lives and intents, but putting both their fame and extraordinary circumstances aside, it is possible to piece together Hildegard’s and Heloise’s views of monastic life as well as what they did to change their own opportunities and their hopes for future generations of monastic women. Scholars face a challenge in researching the actual roles and duties of abbesses in the Middle Ages as information is scant and cryptic, varying widely from region to region. As recently as 2006, Margaret Schaus published Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: an Encyclopedia, noting that comparative studies of abbesses are needed, adding that much of what is known or projected regarding abbesses is based on assumption. She states that even relatively basic questions “cannot yet be answered satisfactorily.”1 In Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium, Jeffrey Hamburger demonstrates that women’s orders were unable to leave reference of their institutional and personal histories, and that any

Margaret Schaus, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe: An Encyclopedia, (New York: Taylor and Francis Group: 2006), 4. 48

‘voices’ left behind “were filtered, removed, and mediated by the inevitable scrutiny of men.”2 Scholars, therefore, know little about these women’s daily lives, frustrations, expectations, or positive experiences. In the twelfth century, monasticism had been established for males for about six hundred years, and was lightly adapted for monastic women in the seventh century. Because there is no description for monastic life in the Bible, those who took up the vows of monasticism tread new paths. As different men devoted themselves to celibacy and service with other men, some very famous and influential individuals came to their own conclusions about what this kind of life should look like, putting their ideas and instructions into writing. These collections of regulations came to be known in association with the various names of the respective men who divined them; the Rule of Benedict was just one in a number of popular Rules. Like other Rules, the Rule of Benedict gives instructions on “virtues of humility, silence, and obedience as well as directives for daily living . . . prescribes times for common prayer, meditative reading, and manual work; it legislates for the details of common living such as clothing, sleeping arrangements, food and drink,” and included strict schedules.3 A single day would begin at midnight and consist of several “offices” or group recitations of liturgies which generally consisted of “a chant, three antiphons, three psalms, and three lessons.” They often lasted over an hour. The first started at midnight, the second at three o’clock in the morning—which included additional celebrations on saints’ days—and a third, three hours later at six o’clock. They would then be given the work orders for the day, read privately until the nine o’clock office of High Mass, and work until noon, when the next office and midday meal was offered. Communal recreation and rest were scheduled until three o’clock in the afternoon, followed by work until the office at six o’clock, another at nine o’clock, and then to sleep.4

Jeffrey F. Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31.2 (1992): 108-109. 3 Jerome Theisen, “The Rule of Saint Benedict”osb.org. Accessed April 3, 2015, http://www.osb.org/gen/rule.html. 4 “Benedictine,” New World Encyclopedia. Last modified January 19, 2013. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Benedictine#Inclusion_of_women. 49

The Benedictine Rule directed monasteries to be self-sustaining. They should include a mill, necessaries for making and repairing tools, stables and land for horses and cows, a bake house, as well as dormitories and religious facilities so that there would be no reason to leave the cloister.5 Monks, and later nuns, would accept “enclosure,” literally vowing never to leave the monastery or convent at which they lived. Of course, there were times when it was necessary, so they were able to elect an individual to perform errands, or the errands could have been left to the person of highest authority, the abbott or abbess. However, in convents which were not near a monastery, self-sufficiency was difficult to establish. Trades were not taught to women, and many women were not knowledgeable or capable of the kinds of hard labor required to maintain a large facility. Abbesses relied on the dowries of women taking vows instead of husbands to gain resources for the cloister and for trade. The Rule of Benedict established a hierarchy wherein an abbot or abbess presided over a prior or prioress, who held the position next in rank, and, finally, the collected monks or nuns under them. Men were referred to as fathers, brothers, or sons, while women were mothers, sisters, or daughters. If the monastery was a “double monastery,” the property would house both monks and nuns, but living quarters were separated by sex, and females were subordinate to males. Cloisters that were strictly for women needed to be associated in some way with a nearby monastery so that a monk or priest could hear women’s confessions and preside over daily liturgies, as women were not to be ordained. Based on the letters between various clergy and lay people, as well as from other written works, we can piece together the roles of Hildegard and Heloise as abbesses. Most of their time was spent educating and encouraging their daughters spiritually, in addition to the procurement or administration of physical goods and properties. Due to unclear authority structures, donated dowries, and unequal property rights or contracts, they each became entangled in litigation to protect their land and subsistence. Because the cura monialium, literally caring for the nuns, was not well defined, each abbess had to create or adapt a program to suit her community of women and the community at large that supported them.

Ibid. 50

Hildegard von Bingen left behind a wealth of musical compositions, mystic revelations, and letters, yet Heloise d’Argenteuil, who was more educated than her counterpart in Germany, has only seven letters and a single work of dialectical reasoning left to her name. There are no remnants of any other writings or correspondence between Heloise and other family or friends, nor of writings for her nuns, as is the case of Hildegard. It was not only the women in her care who desired Heloise’s conversation and guidance; those outside her cloister eagerly demanded “her presence and her spiritual conversation for their guidance.”6 There are references from others about correspondence with her, but these letters did not survive. In fact, both Heloise and Hildegard received today’s equivalent of fan mail. That women’s correspondences and written works were not preserved may explain why Heloise, fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and trained in the most advanced methods of her day, left so few traces. The exact year of Heloise’s birth is unknown, though accepted to be around 1100, and scholars are unsure of the circumstances of her childhood. Some have speculated she was an orphan under her uncle’s care, or that her mother had given birth out of wedlock, giving her daughter to her brother. Whatever the circumstances of her family and her birth, it is most likely that she was tutored in anticipation of becoming a nun or an abbess, which often required noble birth or education, or a combination of the two.7 She was educated at Argenteuil until about age fifteen, when her uncle brought her to Paris to be tutored by Peter Abelard, a highly educated monk who was the master of his monastery’s school. He was a unique theologian and philosopher who taught using the dialectical method, in which theological questions are posed and then solved using both the scriptures and reason. In the next five years, Heloise received a university-equivalent education, fell in love or was seduced by Abelard, birthed their child out of wedlock, married in secret, and was then forced to become a nun.8 It is unclear whether she was forced into religious life because of their transgressions or if this had been

Betty Radice, trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, (Penguin Books: New York, 2003), 36. Bonnie Wheeler, introduction to Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), xvii. 8 Ibid., xi. 7

her uncle’s intentions from the beginning of her education. Her uncle famously took his revenge by having Abelard assaulted and castrated. Tragically, Heloise is almost always associated with Abelard, and his dramatic life events, though she survived him by at least twenty years. Her association with him led to her removal from the monastery at Argenteuil, and when he published a history of his life events, she contacted him, writing the seven letters which survive. She is not often referred to singularly or with any sort of association with the monasteries she founded, six of which were established after Abelard’s death. Around the year 1130, an abbot who was a rival of Abelard’s took over the monastery at Argenteuil, expelling Heloise and her sisters due to her association with Abelard. At this time, she was prioress. Abelard invited Heloise and her daughters to the Oratory of the Paraclete in Champagne. He had started a monastery at this location about a decade earlier, but left to preside over the monks at St. Gildas de Rhuys in Brittany. The building and land of the Paraclete were empty, and he signed the property over to Heloise. In 1132 she gained approval from Pope Innocent II, confirming her as the prioress and the legal possessor of the Paraclete. Around this time, Abelard wrote his Historia Calamitus, including details of Heloise’s life which incited her response and their ensuing correspondence. When Heloise and her displaced daughters arrived at the Paraclete, the area was half forested and half settled. As with most of the new religious communities of the twelfth century, they faced hardship and needed material support. Although Abelard had warned her not to be dependent on the community, she owed the Paraclete’s survival and later vitality to the lay community who offered generous contributions, enabling the Paraclete to become fairly self-sufficient.9 The goods and properties of the Paraclete ranged from yearly donations of animals, to tithes and tolls, and included women’s dowries of mills, forests, fields, granges, and vineyards, all of which were scattered through as many as sixty villages.10 Over several years, and with the help of several popes, Heloise legally established an

Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess: The Expansion of the Paraclete” in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a TwelfthCentury Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 3. 10 Ibid., 4. 52

inventory of the Paraclete’s possessions due to disputes between the Paraclete and a neighboring monastery; one of these inventories was the longest document in the papal cartulary of the time. As the fame of the Paraclete grew and spread, more women were attracted. Heloise also enjoyed the favor of the local nobility, as well as kings and popes.11 Many of the nuns of the Paraclete were from local noble families, and, as women from farther away joined, their lands and properties enabled Heloise to extend the Paraclete into its additional dependent convents, or daughter houses.12 Unafraid to enter litigation with other monasteries, she also cared for her daughters’ lay families and other community members, securing the aid of several popes in protecting their dowries and other properties to ensure the stability and success of the women presently in her care and those to come after her. Heloise became more confident in her personal spirituality and administration, and around 1142, the year Abelard died, she founded the Paraclete’s first dependent convent: Sainte-Madeleine-deTrainel.13 Between this time and her death around 1163, she established five other daughter houses near different towns and was involved in almost continual litigation regarding the dowries of her nuns and daughter houses, consolidating and fighting for rights to full use of their combined properties.14 With so much property, Heloise spent much of her time in administration. She oversaw lay laborers, made decisions about land use, and often sought to consolidate properties. However, some of the decisions were problematic. In one instance, she ceded all the Paraclete’s arable land to a local monastery for a vast forest.15 There was a demand for wood in metal working and mining, so this would have been an exceptional trade except for a clause which stated that no trees could be cut except for making enough room to accommodate a cart. The agreement also stipulated that the monastery, and not the convent, owned the acorns of the trees; the nuns were not able to pasture their pigs in the forest because the pigs

Ibid. Ibid., 9. 13 Wheeler, Listening to Heloise, xi. 14 Ibid., xii. 15 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” 5. 12

would consume the acorns.16 Unfortunately, there is no information on how Heloise confronted this dilemma. Regardless of the fact that the daughters in her care came from the areas surrounding her convents, Heloise kept friendly and mutually beneficial relationships with the local families. She provided a “dignified life for female members of community for whom marriage was not available, convenient, desirable, or desired.”17 The community, in turn, provided for the physical needs of her religious community. Heloise also offered spiritual guidance and support. She applied for permission to bury lay Christians on Paraclete’s land, a right not usually granted, and received authorization to do so directly from Pope Hadrian IV.18 In addition, she requested and received permission to bury those who had been placed under interdict by no fault of their own. The differences between Heloise and Hildegard’s policies and changes, with regard to the care of monastic women, as well as attitudes towards reform, are rooted in their experiences as nuns as well as their views on God, the Church, spirituality, and the established systems of authority which they espoused. Other than her tribulations with Abelard, Heloise is most notable for instigation of a new or modified Rule for the women in her care. In the surviving letters, she asks Abelard for a new Rule to address several problems she found with the Rule of Benedict. Many scholars feel that Heloise’s request grew out of her discontent as a nun and abbess. In fact, McLaughlin notes that among the great abbesses of her time, “Heloise was alone in realising critical, often original, and even prescient questions concerning why and how women should live this life.”19 Her problems with the Rule of Benedict for women were based on physical pragmatism and the irony she saw in an outer appearance of religious devotion when the inner person may be devoid of it.

Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. 18 “Pope Hadrian to Heloise of Paraclete,” Women's Biography: Heloise, Abbess of the Paraclete, Columbia University. Last accessed April 13, 2009. http://Epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/woman/28.html. 19 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” 2. 17

In a time when there was little written regarding female monasticism, and confusion or open antagonism existed among nuns from of different Rules, Heloise was motivated not only for herself, but for the women in her care. “What could be so foolish,” she writes to Abelard, “as to set out on an unknown path, not yet defined, or so presumptuous as to choose and profess a way of life of which you know nothing, or to take a vow you are not capable of keeping?” 20 Heloise states in one letter that the newly settled Paraclete was like a plantation “sown with plants which are still very tender and need watering if they are to thrive,” and in need of “more careful and regular cultivation.”21 She does not want to abolish a regulated life altogether but is quite concerned that nuns were being “received without proper discipline, and [living] with even less, they profess a Rule they do not know and are equally ready to despise it and set up as law the customs they prefer.”22 Citing a passage in the Epistle to the Hebrews, she argues that “anyone who adds the virtue of continence to the precepts of the Gospel will achieve monastic perfection.” Moreover, she suggests that adding any sort of burden on top of what is presented in the Gospels was an “attempt to be more than Christians!”23 Clearly, it was important to her, as the spiritual leader of her community, to provide a way of life which could help women to thrive in their religious lives rather than wilt from the strain of attempting to meet the impossible standards of St. Benedict’s Rule and from the loneliness of enclosure. Abelard’s adjustment of the Rule of Benedict was not extreme, and some scholars are uncertain as to why Heloise felt the Benedictine Rule needed adjustment, when it was written in a way that allowed adjustment for individuals and whole monasteries if the abbot or abbess felt it was needed.24 Linda Georgiana indicates that Heloise considered the Benedictine Rule to be a historical document rather than a sacred one that was “distanced in time and circumstances from her own age.”25 Furthermore, Georgiana

Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 95. Ibid., 49. 22 Ibid., 100. 23 Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 98. 24 Encyclopedia of Monasticism, 3rd ed., s.v. “Peter Abelard.” 25 Linda Georgiana, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” in Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 194. 21

insists that Heloise was making a prescient argument “against elaborate rules and observances” well in advance of the evangelical movement in Europe.26 Heloise protested to Abelard that the Rule was stifling or unsuitable for women in many physical regards, objecting to the recommended attire and vegetarian diet, requirement of hard manual labor, and the restriction of leaving the monastery grounds, among other edicts.27 Abelard’s adjustments allowed for meat three days a week, endorsed a different recipe for bread, recommended alternative clothing, and deemphasized labor. However, Abelard still advocated strict requirements of enclosure.28 Heloise questioned “the whole enterprise of attempting to regulate the interior, spiritual life by external, bodily rules.”29 She sought to modify the daily offices which were required every three hours. In addition to her concern that the regulation of appearances did nothing to change the inner soul, she cited trouble with the need to have a priest available each day to oversee the nun’s offices and masses, hoping to substitute many of the offices for chants, songs, and educational sessions where an abbess would suffice.30 Abelard’s changes projected an interdependency and mutual equality of the sexes, modeled on the biblical Book of Acts. Although he asserted that women held authoritative positions as “deaconesses” in the early church, he reinforced the idea that women were weak and required the guidance of men. He likened an abbess to a biblical deaconess and removed the requirement of a prioress. However, he writes that abbots like himself, if associated with one of Heloise’s convents, could not make decisions without the abbess’s approval or question her will in any way. Abelard’s ‘corpus’ of spiritual and lifestyle regimens for the Paraclete’s nuns was completed by 1136, if not before, but Heloise did not practice everything that he submitted to her for the Paraclete’s liturgy and Rule. Several scholars have asserted that the Paraclete and its special Rule and liturgies were a cooperative effort completely shared by Heloise and Abelard. While the extent of Heloise’s

Ibid., 199. Encyclopedia of Monasticism, 3rd ed., s.v. “Heloise,” and Georgiana, “In Any Corner of Heaven,”196. 28 Ibid., “Peter Abelard.” 29 Georgiana, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” 198. 30 Encyclopedia of Monasticism, 3rd ed., s.v. “Heloise.” 27

participation is debatable, Mary Martin McLaughlin states that “hers was clearly the real authority and responsibility for the governance of the Paraclete, its spiritual reputation, and the recruitment of its nuns, for its well-being and success.”31 She demonstrated this authority later in life when she wrote the charters that established the daughter-houses of the Paraclete; there was to be open visitation, with permission, between her convents despite Abelard’s insistence on absolute seclusion.32 By Abelard’s death in 1143, the Paraclete and its first daughter house retained about two-thirds of his original material, adding many Cistercian hymns to their repertoire. Under Heloise’s direction, they took on other Cistercian traditions, including the calendar and feast days. Worthy of note is the addition to the calendar’s feast days of several female saints, who were given special prominence. Among them were St. Ursula, to whom Hildegard had composed several chants; St. Radegund, who rejected marriage; St. Aldegund, who founded a monastery; St. Thecla who rejected marriage, cross-dressed and preached with the apostle Paul’s permission; and St. Eugenia, who dressed as a man to become a monk and later an abbot. With such women given special prominence in their calendar, it may be assumed that Heloise and her communities also encouraged and supported strong-minded women as being just as capable as men in all areas of spiritual life.33 The Paraclete and daughter houses boasted a high standard of education equalled nowhere else in Europe. Even Abelard, as a famous teacher and theologian, had no command of Greek or Hebrew, yet Heloise had learned both and taught some to her nuns. Generally, Heloise felt confident enough to question anything, with the intent of reconciling the conflict to her understanding of God through dialectical reasoning and scripture. But this was the way in which she had been taught, and Abelard was ahead of his time in many of his philosophical and theological concepts. When she was his pupil, she learned that posing questions or arguments about God, the Bible, and the Church were valid ways to deepen one’s understanding and faith. As a mature woman, she relied heavily on her own readings of Scripture as well as holy and ‘pagan’ texts, and Abelard responded as though debating with another 31

Radice, Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 11. McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” 9. 33 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” 10. 32

respected scholar.34 Her educational foundation and their continued debates conducted via letters shaped Heloise’s understanding of the nature of participation in the Christian faith: questioning was acceptable, especially when the intentions of the heart were to use argument and debate to pursue a deeper understanding of and reverence for God.35 In the way she had been taught, Heloise and her daughters read through the Bible together, discussing and arguing over its content.36 Although Problemata is her only remaining written work, it is still a fantastic window into her mind, emblematic of her style of reasoning with the Bible, God, and real life circumstances to reconcile what seemed illogical or confusing. In her abbey, women read the Bible in Latin, or Scripture was read to them. Unlike most religious authorities in her time, she believed that the Scriptures were not beyond women’s capabilities to understand, and she encouraged her daughters to question, to find discrepancies, and to resolve their concerns together. Whatever they could not answer among themselves they compiled and sent to Abelard, while he was alive, requesting his greater knowledge and interpretation.37 The charters of the Paraclete’s dependent convents even stipulated that the abbesses were to visit Heloise often for spiritual and administrative instruction, so that the daughter houses would retain the unparalleled education of the Paraclete.38 It seems unlikely that Heloise’s writing or questioning would cease in the twenty years after Abelard’s death; she likely continued to answer her daughters’ questions in the same manner without the assistance of clergy. There is evidence that Bernard of Clairvaux, who greatly admired Heloise for her practicality, her quick mind, and her deep devotion to God and her daughters, was vying with Abelard for sponsorship of the Paraclete, though it seems that she never chose a specific male authority. 39 It is simply another tragedy of a historical period in which women’s voices and contributions were, as Jeffrey

Georgiana, “In Any Corner of Heaven,” 194. Ibid., 192. 36 “A letter from Heloise, abbess of the Paraclete” Medieval Women’s Latin Letters, Columbia.edu. Last accessed April 6, 2015. http://epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/letter/178.html. 37 Ibid. 38 McLaughlin, “Heloise the Abbess,” 9. 39 Ibid., 194. 35

Hamburger noted, “filtered, removed, and mediated” by a Christian society in which male authority and contribution enjoyed a veritable monopoly.40 When Heloise died, her daughters wrote that she was the “mother of our religious life . . . distinguished for her learning and monastic devotion.”41 Abelard may have been the father of her community at first, but she carried, birthed, and nursed the sisters in her care and the fledgling daughter houses. What legacy Heloise left to her daughters is speculative; it seems plausible that her example was enough to inspire many women in her time and after. Her life was proof that women could be educated, even more highly educated than some male clergy, and that they could question God, the Church, and any authority within the bounds of reason and biblical foundations. She also left a legacy of personal and sacrificial concern for her sisters’ wellbeing, as well as care for the lay community of which they were a part, rather than secluded from. Hildegard von Bingen did not receive the same kind of education as Heloise, and she entered the religious life in a different way. The two faced similar and different questions, and approached authority and reform from different angles. Where Heloise relied on her own intellect, Hildegard relied on her status as a mystic. One of the few positions of religious prominence or authority women could hold during the medieval period in Europe was that of a mystic. Visionary women were believed to be touched by God, delivering His words; thus, they were not speaking or teaching from their inferior female capacities. Many scholars have questioned the validity of such visionaries, asserting that for some the visions may have been symptoms of mental illness, while for other women the visions were deliberate creations used to subvert their inferior standing, allowing them more of the freedoms enjoyed by men. We know slightly more of Hildegard’s childhood than Heloise. Hildegard was born in 1098 to a noble family, and, being the tenth child, it is generally assumed by scholars that she was literally tithed to the church because they could not afford to care for her. Around the year of her birth, the abbot of Disibodenburg’s monastery returned from exile and immediately implemented reforms, rededicating it

40 41

Hamburger, “Art, Enclosure,” 108-109. McLaughlin, “Listening to Heloise,” 11. 59

as a strictly regulated monastery under the Benedictine Rule.42 Hildegard most likely entered the anchorage at Disibodenburg at age eight, but it was not a double monastery for monks and nuns. Instead, she, as a child, was placed in a cell which was built along the north wall of the church for a countess named Jutta who had chosen the life of a hermit. For unknown reasons, Hildegard’s parents could have chosen a double monastery but instead placed their daughter with Jutta, seemingly to live a life of shared hermitage and isolation. There are no descriptions of Hildegard’s experience at St. Disibod’s with Jutta except a few casual comments from Guibert of Gembloux, her first secretary. The segregated cell was built with a wall surrounding it that had one door and one window. Guibert describes the cell as having “[a] small window through which they spoke to visitors at certain hours and through which the necessities of life were passed,” adding that all other approaches were “blocked up.”43 Here Jutta taught Hildegard to read the Psalter, meaning she taught her to read Latin, and Hildegard first spoke of her visions to Jutta. Hildegard was further educated by the cleric Volmar, the women’s confessor and prior who first approved the validity of her visions and later became her confidant and secretary. Hildegard most certainly participated in this highly regulated lifestyle from her cell. By the time of Hildegard’s profession of faith and devotion as a nun at age fifteen, the anchorage had attracted more women. Their small space was unsuitable and represented the widespread lack of male clergy to plan and provide for the needs of women. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was unanimously elected prioress. It would be another five years before she made her visionary status into a career. With encouragement from Volmar and confirmation from her visions, she wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux in 1147 for his opinion of her visions, which he endorsed with reservation.44 With newfound celebrity after her papal approval later that year, as well as Hildegard’s burgeoning correspondences and

Sabina Flanagan, Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life, (New York: Routledge, 1989), 22. Ibid., 6, 29. 44 Barbara Newman, Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine, (University of California Press: Los Angeles, 1987), 9. 43

her musical compositions, which well known by 1148, her female monastery attracted so many visitors and prospective daughters that they could not all be housed. About eight years after Heloise established St. Madeleine’s, Hildegard learned from a vision that she, too, was to build a convent. The cell built for Jutta had become over-crowded with nuns and was completely unsuitable, but the monks and abbot of Disibodenburg were reluctant to let Hildegard leave, as she was a source of prestige and revenue. Instead, she used family connections, validation from her visions, and proof of God’s desires by way of unexplainable illness to secure the support of the Bishop at Mainz. After receiving permission from the abbot of St. Disibo’s to leave, she acquired a property in Rupertsburg with financial support from the Countess of Stade and had a convent built in 1150.45 Throughout the negotiations with the bishop and countess, her health fluctuated in accordance with the success or setbacks met by her plans.46 Finally, Hildegard and eighteen loyal nuns moved to the new property, though she mentions with disdain that there were some women who disagreed with her actions and refused to relocate. She struggled for financial independence from the monks and exclusive rights to the property at Rupertsburg, which she eventually achieved. In 1165, about two years after Heloise died in France, Hildegard’s St. Rupertsburg had become so prosperous that she was able to found a daughter house of her own near Eibingen.47 Whatever time she did not spend in managing the daily spiritual and physical needs of her daughters, or transcribing her visions and music, Hildegard spent in correspondence. Her mission, as Barbara Newman describes it, was “to unlock the mysteries of Scripture, to proclaim the way of salvation, to admonish priests and prelates, to instruct the people of God.”48 As a mystic, she considered herself, and was considered to be, the equal of men, defying direction from the Bible that women were not permitted “to teach or to assume authority over a man.”49 It seems that in her writings and

Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 9. Ibid., 18. 47 Ibid., 10. 48 Ibid., 4. 49 1 Timothy 2:12 (New International Version). 46

correspondence, her abbacy was important to her, but not nearly as important as her perceived role as God’s vessel for communication and reform. In fact, very few of the hundreds of letters associated with her are addressed to other women. Hildegard’s biographers focus on her visions and saint-worthy life, rather than her daily role and duties as an abbess of great creativity and notoriety. Yet some information can be gleaned from Vita, Scivias, and a few letters which create a picture of Hildegard the Abbess. One debated topic during Hildegard’s lifetime was the interpretation and application of St. Benedict’s Rule.50 It seems that Heloise was far more concerned with the order of the soul, and felt that the order of life would follow with some effort. Hildegard, however, felt that discipline and the Rule of Benedict were the best aspirations for a nun and abbess. She wrote a treatise on the Rule of Benedict which has not yet been translated into English, but based on her letters and other writings, she and Heloise would have fallen on opposing sides of the argument. Hildegard felt that the Rule could be slightly adjusted for those who were weak or young, and a few times she asserted that she cared more for the spirit of the Rule than the legalistic interpretation. However, her advice to others and her personal statements indicate her general espousal of the Rule in its entirety as being inspired by God and His authority.51 She asserted that the Benedictine Rule was the best way to serve God as a monk or nun. For Heloise, the most troubling aspect of the uncharted territory of female monasticism was nurturing her daughters’ spiritual lives, whereas Hildegard was troubled by the issue of controlling her nuns in order to direct their spiritual lives. Due to Hildegard’s personal fame, there are some descriptions and insights into her life as abbess, but frustratingly few in contrast to the vast amount of her literature and letters. In a letter to a friend, her secretary Guibert of Gembloux describes her interactions with her daughters: The mother embraces her daughters with such love, and the daughters submit to the mother with such reverence that one can scarcely distinguish whether in this fervor the mother outstrips the daughters or vice versa. . . . They dedicate themselves with zeal to reading and to learning songs . . . they busy themselves in their own rooms on workdays by copying 50

Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 164-165. James McGrath, trans. The Life of Holy Hildegard: By the Monks Gottfried and Theodoric, (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1995), 20. 51

from books and by producing liturgical garments or other handcrafts. . . . The one who is the mother and leader of such a large complex is lavish in her love for all. She gives counsel when requested, solves difficult questions which are put to her, writes books, instructs her sisters, puts a fresh heart in sinners who come to her, and is fully and entirely busy with everything.52 While no one can doubt her busyness, this portrait of mutual love and devotion must be compared to Hildegard’s own records. When she moved her community to St. Rupertsburg, some of her nuns were sceptical of her actions and had been speaking poorly about her. In Hildegard’s records, she recalls that God showed her through revelation that demonic spirits had lured these daughters away from her. She responded with correction by Scripture and disciplined them, expressing her pain at their opinions of “the regular discipline by which I wanted to restrain them.”53 Eventually, these sisters not only left Hildegard, but were so disillusioned by monasticism that they returned to lay life. This caused her deep anxiety, but she was consoled by the “good” daughters who shared “her love and loyalty.”54 In an undated letter to her daughters, mostly likely written during one of her preaching tours, Hildegard warns them to avoid the sins of vanity, pride, and disobedience while she is away.55 In another, she declares that God was going to destroy their cloister, but decided instead to “cleanse it of schisms,” to cast out the “arrogant and negligent” nuns and seek out these women through examination.56 In another, she writes to her nuns from her sickbed at God’s command, about a decade before her death. Through her, in first person, God relates to the nuns that He has “feigned silence” for eight years about their monastic negligence: “Surely, you do not suppose that you will receive the kingdom of God by feasting and drinking and wanton morals? No! You will receive the kingdom of God through denial of the body and contrition of the mind. . . . You however, are not doing these things.”57 In her last preserved letter to her daughters, Hildegard warns that God will strike down, in the presence of all, anyone who 52

McGrath, The Life of Hildegard, 28-29. Ibid., 66. 54 Ibid., 12. 55 Joseph L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, trans. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 1: 140. 56 Ibid., 164. 57 Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard 2: 165-166. 53

causes discord or dissension after she dies.58 These letters illustrate a cloister of ongoing discord, rather than the scene of monastic perfection described by Guibert. In addition to the care of her nuns and the visions she transcribed, Hildegard received a multitude of letters from other clergy. Many were from abbesses disclosing their intimidation or guilt at being abbesses who did not feel inspired by God. Depending on the letter, Hildegard responded with care and encouraged the abbess, or she responded with rebuke and spiritual threats to ensure the abbess reconciled to God and disciplined her cloister. She admonished her contemporaries, “Use discipline to keep your daughters in check, for just as a child fears to be beaten with a rod, so also the master must be feared by everyone. Do not be afraid to punish them.”59 We have no record of Heloise’s struggles with discipline, but as she and her daughters lived by a different Rule, they may not have had as many conflicts, and her daughters may have felt more able to question and find resolution. Similar to the Paraclete, St. Rupertsburg and Eibingen became quite prosperous. According to Hildegard’s Vita, each room had running water, and her daughters spent parts of their work time making white silk dresses and matching veils to wear with gold filigree crowns on feast days.60 Before this, however, she had to confront the abbot of Disibodenburg for the nuns’ dowries. Five years after her establishment at Rupertsburg, she had not secured the properties of her daughters, and again motivated by a vision, she made the day’s journey to Disibodenburg and gave them an impassioned speech as to the rights of her nuns’ properties.61 The deeds were relinquished and she reaffirmed her submission to the abbot’s authority. A few years later, the archbishop of Mainz re-consecrated St. Rupertsburg and granted the women a mill, which may have been used for their famed running water.62 Much of the labor, since hers was no longer a double monastery, was done by hired servants and the tenants of their collected properties.63 58

Ibid., 170. Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard, 1: 140. 60 McGrath, the Life of Holy Hildegard, 28, and Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard, 1:127-129. 61 McGrath, the Life of Holy Hildegard, 43. 62 Ibid., 118. 63 Flanagan, A Visionary Life, 33. 59

Similar to Heloise, Hildegard was concerned that women were taking up monastic life too hastily. She only accepted women of noble birth into her convents, with the explanation that those who took up a religious life to escape poverty, or whose parents delivered them to convents because of “bodily weakness” were not inspired by piety and could not devote themselves whole-heartedly to God. Likely due to her own experience with forced monasticism as a child, she also felt that children should never be forced into monasticism, but, if housed or educated at a monastery, they should be asked when they are older if they truly understand what a choice of enclosure means.64 As for education, Hildegard taught reading and music, and she used her letters (and presumably her other writings as well) to teach her nuns how to interpret imagery and metaphor—as opposed to Heloise who taught interpretation and argumentation of texts. But this difference may be due to the styles of their respective educations; they taught others in the ways they were each taught. Hildegard’s spiritual instruction was centered on teaching her nuns how to interpret the imagery of her visions and of Scripture. Her letters of reprimand include imagery of her cloister as a garden which needed to be carefully watched for invasive weeds. Hildegard breaks down the metaphors into simple language explaining who and what are represented by the weeds, the sun, the beautiful flowers, and others, teaching her daughters even while she was not in their midst.65 Hildegard writes in ways that are deprecating towards women, but she does this to underscore the validity of her visions to an audience of academic elites and other religious leaders, all of whom were male. Many of her visions and writings describe women as having inferior natures and she specifically decried the ordination of women as priests.66 By soliciting the approval of Bernard of Clairvaux, she demonstrated her willingness to submit to his and the Church’s authority. Doing so, she secured his and the pope’s permission and validation of everything she desired to say or write in the future.67 Eventually,

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 164-165. 66 Augustine Thompson, “Hildegard of Bingen”, American Society of Church History 63 (1994): 350. 67 Gillian T. Ahlgren, “Visions and Rhetorical Strategy: Hildegard of Bingen” in Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993) 48. 65

she wrote literature without reference to visions or her status as a seer, and these were received well on her own merit. Still, she submitted herself to Church authority and to the Rule of Benedict, advising all who asked her for advice or comfort to remain obedient to these religious structures. Hildegard was raised in the system of ecclesiastical authority and felt that the established hierarchies were just as God desired them. Hildegard’s abbacy seems more of a means to a self-interested end rather than a monastic career dedicated solely to those in her care. It appears she was more inspired to care for her nuns by the Rule of Benedict than by concern for individuals when she states, “I looked after the spiritual and emotional needs of my daughters as it was prescribed for me by my Rule.”68 Shortly after relocating to St. Rupert’s, her favorite nun was chosen to become an abbess of a different community and accepted the position against Hildegard’s will. Hildegard wrote her letters, and even wrote the pope, asking him to intercede and return the woman to Hildegard’s cloister.69 Rather than encourage this daughter, she attempted to thwart her promotion. Although Hildegard had been in a similar position when the abbot at St. Disibod’s refused to let her leave, she was unable or unwilling to empathize with her spiritual daughter when she encountered the same challenges. Hildegard faithfully maintained her duties as abbess until the end of her life, but the legacy she left to her daughters is questionable. Certainly she taught them to read, sing, create, work, and regulate their lives to regulate their faith. However, it seems that the empowerment she earned, such as leaving the cloister or writing popes and theologians, was not available to anyone else. Her views of women— namely that women were inferior creations—were that of her overseers; she even asserted that she was only chosen to be God’s voice in the absence of an entire generation of pious men.70 That she wrote in Latin meant her true audience was the clerical elite. It seems that while her abbacy came first in her life chronologically, her profession as seer and writer came first in her ambitions.

McGrath, The Life of Hildegard, 65. Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard, 1: 34-35. 70 Newman, Sister of Wisdom, 3. 69

The obstacles and circumstances that Heloise and Hildegard faced were similar, but they approached each differently. Though living in different regions, they reformed female monastic life simultaneously, corresponded with the same religious leaders, and were both so famous that they each received fan mail; one wonders if these two women had heard of or read the other’s works. Their positions on issues of women’s authority and the Rule of Benedict were often opposing, yet each was in contact with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who seemed to admire each for different reasons. Did they consider each other in their own reform? Was there a greater discourse among abbesses, in their own minds if not through correspondence, regarding effective and creative means of reform? There is one such instance of correspondence between a certain Abbess of Tengswich and Hildegard, in which the abbess feels confident enough to criticize Hildegard because they are of the same rank.71 In regard to their attitudes towards the daughters in their care, Heloise was more integrative while Hildegard was more hierarchical. Interestingly, Heloise described her cloister as a plantation with delicate new plants needing care while Hildegard saw hers as a garden that needed to be carefully watched for weeds. Their directions and approaches were tempered by their differing spiritual upbringings and experiences. Heloise extended her focus from her own life, making it her life’s work to inspire other nuns by opening new cloisters and allowing women to experience God as she had. Hildegard felt she was a vessel for God’s messages, and she exploited her exceptional status to improve her life and the lives of most sisters in her care. They were well loved as abbesses, but only Heloise extended the freedoms she gained to her sisters; Hildegard’s freedoms were attainable by no one else but herself.

Baird and Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard, 1: 127. 67

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ahlgren, Gillian T. “Visions and Rhetorical Strategy: Hildegard of Bingen.” In Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, edited by Karen Cherewatuk, 46-63. Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press, 1993. Baird, Joseph L. and Radd K. Ehrman, trans. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, vol. 2. ———. The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, vol.1. Cherewatuk, Karen and Ulrike Wiethuas. Introduction to Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre, edited by Karen Cherewatuk, 1-19. Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn. Press, 1993. Griffiths, Fiona J. “Men’s Duty to Provide for Womens’ Needs: Abelard Heloise, and their negotiation of the cura monialium,” Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004). Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen: a Visionary Life. New York: Routlege, 1989. Georgiana, Linda. “In Any Corner of Heaven.” In Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, 187-216. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. “Art, Enclosure, and the Cura Monialium: Prolegomena in the Guise of a Postscript,” Gesta 31.2 (1992). McGrath, James trans. The Life of Holy Hildegard: by the monks Gottfried and Theodoric. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical press, 1995. McLaughlin, Mary Martin. “Heloise the Abbess: The Expansion of the Paraclete.” In Listening to Heloise: The Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman, edited by Bonnie Wheeler, 1-17. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Univ. of California Press: Los Angeles, 1987. “Pope Hadrian IV to Heloise of Paraclete.” Women’s Biography: Heloise, Abbess of the Paraclete. Columbia University. Accessed April 13, 2009. http://Epistolae.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/woman/28.html. Radice, Betty trans. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Penguin Books: New York, 2003. Theisen, Jerome. “The Rule of Saint Benedict.” osb.org. Accessed April 3, 2015. http://www.osb.org/gen/rule.html. Thompson, Augustine. “Hildegard of Bingen,” American Society of Church History 63 (1994). Wheeler, Bonnie, ed. Listening to Heloise: the Voice of a Twelfth-Century Woman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

The Failure of Law: How Kenyan Laws Produced the Emergency By Alexandrea Kord In 1952 a bloody conflict erupted in Kenya between the Mau Mau and the Europeans resulting in the declaration of a State of Emergency, which would last until 1959. The Mau Mau movement arose from the Kikuyu tribe due to colonial abuses and divided the tribe, as many Kikuyu supported the British. Throughout the conflict, both sides committed atrocities against each other; Mau Mau fighters targeted settler homesteads, murdering the inhabitants, while British forces beat, tortured, or killed Mau Mau suspects in an attempt to get confessions or information. Pre-Emergency Kenya was not idyllic and the patterns established in Kenyan law from the 1930s through 1952 provided a foundation for the atrocities of the Emergency. Pre-Emergency law created tensions, bred inequality by providing preferential treatment to a few, and perpetrated and allowed violence and corruption. CORRUPTION IN NATIVE COURTS From the 1930s on, corrupt legislation, administrators, and judges created a defective native court system in Kenya. Kenya had a dual court system consisting of native and English courts. Native courts, also called Native Tribunals and later African courts, tried all crimes involving Africans within their district, except for cases involving death or non-customary marriage.1 Native tribunals based their judgments on customary and traditional laws. Courts kept customary laws un-codified, claiming that doing so would stop the law from evolving with the development of the Kenyans.2 The colonial administration hoped to use the vagueness and malleability of customary law to guide and influence the

Eugene Cotran, “The Development and Reform of the Law in Kenya,” Journal of African Law 27 (1983): 42-43; Y. P. Ghai and J.P.W.B. McAuslin, Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 27-28. 2 Brett L. Shadle, “‘Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions’: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930-60,” The Journal of African History 40 (1999): 413-414, 415. 69

Kenyans. 3 Arguments against customary law therefore became a threat to the administration.4 While customary law itself was not corrupt, it did allow for corruption. As Lonsdale stated, native courts “failed to separate ‘custom’ from the corruption of office.”5 The administrators of the native courts took advantage of their positions to further their own interests or those of the colonial government. District officers or DOs held “very wide powers of supervision, revision, and appeal” and served as magistrates for native courts because of their knowledge of customary law. 6 The Bushe commission in 1933 limited their powers as magistrates slightly, but they maintained sole control over the courts. The High Court, Kenya’s most superior court, possessing the same powers and jurisdiction as the English High Court, had no supervision over Tribunals after the 1930s.7 DOs rarely possessed legal qualifications, often ignoring the “technicalities” of the law for “substantial justice.”8 They engaged in extra-judicial activities to get confessions or justice, such as accepting hearsay or rumor as evidence. Because of this, the higher courts overturned many cases appealed from native courts.9 Furthermore, as part of the administration, DOs made decisions based on local opinion, settler pressure, or the political atmosphere rather than the law.10 During the Emergency, regulations changed the rules of evidence and preliminary inquiries, making this preexisting behavior legal. These regulations further worsened the situation by extending the DO’s power over courts. For instance regulations allowed Native Tribunals to hear more serious cases, such as cases involving possession of firearms, which carried the sentence of capital punishment.11 DO power allowed them to

Ibid., 413-414. Ibid., 416. 5 John Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist,” In The Moral World of The Law, ed. Peter Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 201. 6 H.F. Morris and James S. Read, Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays in East African Legal History (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 132. 7 Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 138; Morris and Read, Indirect Rule, 135-136. 8 Brett Shadle, “White Settlers and the Law in Early Colonial Kenya,” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4 (2010): 514. 9 Lonsdale, “Kenyatta’s Trials,” 199. 10 Shadle, “White Settlers and the Law,” 511. 11 David Anderson, History of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005), 97. 4

attack both active and passive supporters of the Mau Mau movement, detaining them or sentencing them to death. The vagueness of pre-Emergency laws and little review meant that Court Elders, the other judges of native courts, possessed considerable power with little oversight leading to abuses. In theory DOs reviewed all cases tried in native tribunals, but most cases only received a cursory glance if any review at all.12 Elders used this freedom to exploit money and land from communities. Native court cases often involved large sums of money being spent on small litigations.13 Court fees in such cases climbed from £13,000 to £25,000 from 1949 to 1951.14 Land cases in particular dominated native courts. Elders often favored certain groups based on family connections, position, or bribery, allowing these people to accumulate a majority of land and wealth. Chiefs in particular acquired huge estates as Elders often created laws allowing them to obtain more land. For example in Murang’a, Elders passed a law that allowed all transactions to be redeemed.15 The Emergency extended the already vast powers of Elders, which resulted in further abuses. In the Ruthagathi district, the local Home Guard tortured Mau Mau suspects until they confessed and then took them to court, where the local chief would fine or detain them.16 Ruthagathi courts and guards often targeted wealthy citizens and extorted money and land from them.17 The Elders, additionally, used their power to exert control over young men. Colonialism had disturbed the age dynamics of the Kikuyu causing generational tensions to grow between the Elders and younger men.18 Elders complained that

Shadle, “White Settlers and the Law,” 427-428. Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 147-148. 14 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 31. 15 Fiona Mackenzie, “Conflicting Claims to Custom: Land and Law in Central Province Kenya, 1912-52,” Journal of African Law 40 (1996): 72. 16 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 301. 17 Ibid. 18 Only a small piece of the generational tensions in the Kikuyu is examined in this paper. See John Lonsdale, “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty & Civic Virtue in the Kikuyu Political Thought,” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, ed. Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992) and John Lonsdale, “Authority, Gender & Violence: The War within Mau Mau’s Fight for Land and Freedom,” in Mau Mau and Nationhood, ed. E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003). 13

young men were “spoiled,” selfish, and disobedient.19 Young men saw the Elders as greedy as they monopolized power, land, and women, the things necessary to be an adult in Kikuyu culture.20 As a result of these tensions, Elders used their power to try to discipline young men. 21 In response the young men turned to militancy, going on to make up the bulk of the Mau Mau movement. INEQUALITY IN ENGLISH COURTS English-style courts, much like native courts, suffered from corruption by favoring Europeans over Africans. The English-style courts handled cases involving Europeans as well as the more serious cases involving Africans and Asians.22 European defendants had special rights in court, such as the right to trial by jury.23 Any settler on trial would have known the men in the jury and the magistrate or judge at his trial. 24 As one inspector in the Kenya police force described, the defendant “is probably a chap with whom the Magistrate plays bridge or Tennis at the club.”25 These connections enabled settlers to receive minimal punishments. For instance, in 1949 a young Airman killed an African woman and received only eight months in prison on the charge of manslaughter.26 This favoritism divided the population, creating racial tensions, which led to the Mau Mau movement. Furthermore, because Europeans were rarely punished before the Emergency, they were rarely punished during the event. In 1954, Barry Hayward, a member of the Kenyan Police Reserves, beat and burned an African man in a Nairobi screening camp.27 The court found him guilty of assault and fined him £ 25. 28 The judge sentenced his African codefendant to two years in prison with hard labor.29 Before 1960, no 19

Lonsdale, “Moral Economy,” 321. Lonsdale, “Authority, Gender & Violence,” 57. 21 Ibid., 60. 22 Shadle, “White Settlers and the Law,” 512. 23 Ibid. 24 David M. Anderson, “Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya's Flogging Scandals, 189520

1930,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (2011): 488-489. 25 Peter Evans, Law and Disorder or Scenes of the Life in Kenya (London: Secker &Warburg, 1956), 96. 26 W.R. Foran, The Kenyan Police: 1887-1960 (London: R. Hale, 1962), 153. 27 Evans, Law and Disorder, 265. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 266. 72

European sentenced to the death penalty were executed. In contrast, between 1908 and 1955, 459 nonEuropeans on non-Mau Mau charges faced the hangman.30 During the Emergency itself, the courts sent 1090 Kikuyu to the gallows on Mau Mau charges.31 English courts often disregarded African culture and provided little protection for African defendants. Only British judges, with the help of three African assessors, heard cases involving Africans.32 Despite their presence, however, the law did not require judges to listen to assessors.33 In nineteen of the Lari trials, assessors asked for acquittals for certain men because, although present, they did not actually wield a weapon.34 The judge ignored these pleas and found the men guilty.35 Though, colonial law mandated that traditional culture and law it be taken into consideration during trials judges often ignored them. Additionally, courts conducted cases in English, not Swahili or Kikuyu, meaning everything from witness statements to judge’s order had to be relayed through translators. This caused massive misunderstandings between defendants and the judge, which worked to the Europeans’ advantage. Furthermore, the courts did not provide lawyers to African defendants unless the charges involved a capital offense.36 Settlers took advantage of Africans, as most could not afford a lawyer, by getting them to agree to unfair charges or contracts. These issues only increased during the Emergency. Most Mau Mau suspects could not afford a lawyer, and few lawyers in Kenya would defend a Mau Mau suspect out of fear that it would ruin their reputation.37 LAND AND TENANT LAWS IN KENYA Land laws in Kenya generated grievances among the Mau Mau by allocating large quantities of fertile tribal land to settlers. This allocation began in 1902 when the Crown Lands Ordinance allowed for 30

Stacey Hynd, "Murder and Mercy: Capital Punishment in Colonial Kenya, ca. 1909-1956," International Journal Of African Historical Studies 45, (2012): 86. 31 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 6-7. 32 Shadle, “White Settlers and the Law,” 512. 33 Ibid. 34 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 176. 35 Ibid. 36 Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 173. 37 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 155-156. 73

the sale and lease of all lands in Kenya as long as no Africans were currently occupying it. 38 The government did not need the consent of any African for sale.39 Then in 1915, a new Crown Lands Ordinance declared that all land in Kenya, even land occupied by African tribes, belonged to the Crown.40 Both of these ordinances allocated the most fertile land to Europeans and forced Africans into reserves. In 1919, another ordinance earmarked 2 million acres of the Nandi Reserve for European settlers proving that even reserves were not protected.41 Overpopulation and land scarcity quickly became an issue on reservations, particularly for the Kikuyu, who were the largest tribe in Kenya. Africans fought against ordinances trying to regain land or at least compensation. African belief that they could regain their land legally was destroyed with the creation of the Kenyan Land Commission in 1932. Meant to rectify the Land issues within Kenya, the biased commission did little to help Africans. It recommended the increase of Native Lands by 1474 square miles and the designation of the land changed to Native land from Crown land.42 These recommendations did little in light of the fact that the Commission led to the full termination of Kikuyu rights to land outside of their reservation.43 Kikuyu without legal options turned to militancy to regain land. Despite the elimination of land rights, Native and English law enabled certain Kikuyu to amass land, creating tensions within the tribe that would erupt into violence. Githaka, the customary Kikuyu land law, is based upon ancestral claims to land. Mbari are the principal owners of the land and the Muhoi the tenants.44 Muhoi negotiated certain rights with the Mbari that typical tenants did not. For instance, the Mbari could not sell land without the consent of the Muhoi.45 While the British often recognized the

Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 26-27. Ibid. 40 Ibid., 27. 41 Ibid., 81. 42 O.F. Watkins, “The Report of the Kenya Land Commission, September, 1933,” Journal of the Royal African Society 33 (1934): 209; Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 91. 43 Michael S. Coray, “The Kenya Land Commission and the Kikuyu of Kiambu,” Agricultural History 52 (1978): 179-193. 44 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 139. 45 Ibid. 39

rights of the Mbari, they did not recognize those of the Muhoi. Sometimes this recognition protected native land claims for both parties. More often than not though, Mbari used this as an opportunity to gain more land. Such manipulation of the system created bitter feelings within communities for whom the Emergency served as an outlet. The Lari Massacre serves as the best example of this type of embittered conflict. On March 21, 1953, Mau Mau attacked the community of Lari, setting homes on fire and murdering the occupants.46 The attackers killed 200 men, women, and children, primarily those associated with the Home Guard and chiefs.47 A bloody revenge followed as government forces rounded up most of the community of Lari and subjected them to rounds of screening. Many who confessed to the killings demonstrated evidence of beatings and other abuse by the police.48 What happened at Lari resulted from a history of tensions between the landowners and poorer Kikuyu. The residents of Lari once occupied Tigoni, a fertile piece of land in Kenya, until the government alienated the land. In return for the land at Tigoni, the government gave the residents land at Lari. In negotiations, the Mbari agreed to the sale in return for 1.5 acres of land for every 1 acre of land they owned.49 The Mbari, as the only negotiators, agreed to the sale without the Muhoi consent.50 The Mbari got the best land, and many Muhoi lost their claims.51 The incident created deep divisions in the society for which the Emergency provided a release. Due to the scarcity of land in reserves, many Africans become squatters. Kikuyu squatters numbered more than 150,000 by the end of the 1930s.52 Initially, settlers welcomed squatters as a muchneeded labour force, but soon squatter production prospered, becoming a threat to settler agriculture.53 Legislation regarding African squatters favored settlers, stripping squatters of tenantsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; rights, land, and 46

Evans, Law and Disorder, 169. Ibid., 170. 48 Ibid., 183-206. 49 Anderson, History of the Hanged, 139-151. 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., 25. 53 Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters & the Roots of Mau Mau (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987), 35. 47

livestock, and generated anger within the Kikuyu population. The colonial government enacted laws trying to turn squatters into the labour needed by the settlers, beginning with the Resident Native Labour Ordinance (RNLO) in 1918. The Ordinance established a contract of labour between squatters and settlers in which squatters would work for 180 days in return for the right to live on a section of settler land.54 The RNLO of 1937 further transferred control of squatters to settler-controlled District Councils.55 These and other laws had a devastating effect on squatters. Settlers increased the number of days a squatter had to work to 270 and decreased the amount of land they could cultivate and the number of livestock they could own.56 Squatters resisted these laws by moving to other farms where the restrictions were less strict, by taking complaints to court, or by staging strikes, refusing to work for settlers.57 These tactics often changed little for squatters as settlers controlled the legal system. Olenguruone, a tract of land set aside for displaced squatters, became the center for squatter resistance. Restrictions placed by the government on residents angered squatters. Disagreements there culminated in 4,000 Kikuyu squatters’ being evicted from Olenguruone in 1949 and 1950.58 Squatters angry over these events and with few options turned to militancy, leading to the Mau Mau Movement. VIOLENCE AND THE LAW IN KENYA Kenyan law created a system of accepted violence against Africans that extended into the Emergency. The Kenyan courts before the Emergency preferred corporal punishment over imprisonment and fines for Africans.59 The use of corporal punishment avoided overcrowding in prison facilities and the spending of money on reform schools for juvenile offenders. The same pattern of detainment and

Ghai and McAuslin, Public Law, 83. David W. Throup, “Origins of Mau Mau,” African Affairs 84 (1985): 412. The RNLOs of 1918 and 1937 are only two of the laws passed to control squatters, others include Master and Servant laws and other RNLO’s in 1924 and 1925. See Tabitha Kanogo, Squatters & the Roots of Mau Mau (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987) and David M. Anderson, “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya,” The Journal of African History 41 (2000): 459-485. 56 Kanogo, “Squatters,” 97-98. 57 Ibid., 47-55. 58 Throup, “Origins of Mau Mau,” 415. 59 Paul Ocobock, “Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence, Generational Authority in Kenya, 1897-1952,” International Journal Of African Historical Studies 45, (2012): 29. 55

corporal punishment over rehabilitation programs and fair trials would continue to be used during the Emergency. The courts favored flogging or whipping with a Kiboko, a short whip, to discipline Africans. Screening teams also used Kibokos on suspects during the Emergency.60 Between 1928 and 1955 the government reported using corporal punishment on African youths in 10,410 cases.61 Crimes of stock theft or property theft received sentences of corporal punishment more often than other crimes, as these were seen as dangerous to the social order.62 While the courts did put restrictions on violence as a punishment during the 1930s, they had already created a culture of accepted violence against Africans, which meant these were of little benefit. Settlers often used violence as a form of “Rough Justice” on their employees and received little punishment for beating Africans even if it resulted in death. 63 For example, in 1920, Herbert Harries beat an African employee, killing the man.64 The courts found him guilty of “grievous hurt” and he was sentenced to three months in prison.65 The violence that came about during the emergency was merely a way of life in Kenya rather than anything new. The Kenyan Police Force’s design meant that it too used violence, as means of control in the country both before and during the Emergency. Since its formation, the Kenya Police Force had been too small to enforce law in all of Kenya. As a result, DOs controlled police forces in native reserves, which police could not enter without special consent.66 Moreover the British used the police force like a military force in an attempt to establish dominance over Kenya.67 Due to this the police largely recruited European men from military backgrounds, with little formal training.68 A general of the Kings African Rifles

David M. Anderson, “British abuse and torture in Kenya’s Counter-Insurgency, 1952-1960,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23 (2012): 704-705. 61 Ocobock, “Spare the Rod,” 37. 62 Ibid., 43. 63 David M. Anderson, “Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya's Flogging Scandals, 18951930,” Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (2011): 479-497. 64 Anderson, “‘the Raw Native’”, 479. 65 Ibid. 66 Anderson, “Policing,” 187. 67 Ibid., 184. 68 Ibid. 77

described the force as an “armed mob… of partially trained men.”69 All of this resulted in the police operating in solely in European areas of the country for the sake of colonial aims. During the Emergency, the size of the police force increased by necessity, bringing many settlers into the Kenya Police Reserves.70 These men brought the prejudice of settlers into an already poorly constructed police force. Settlers had for years seen the laws as protecting Africans, and the Emergency allowed them to administer their own form of justice. This led to the rampant brutality practiced by police during the period. For example, Peter Bostock, a police officer, described seeing one of his peers set a dog loose on an old man during an interrogation.71 The full scope of police of this brutality is hard to know, however, as few officers were ever brought to court. INTERNATIONAL AND BRITISH LAWS DURING THE EMERGENCY The vagueness of British and international laws as well as their dependence on local laws and courts made them ineffective at protecting the Kikuyu.72 In Imperial Reckoning, Caroline Elkins argues that through clever political rhetoric the British avoided prosecution for breaking international laws.73 True, the Geneva Convention, as well as the European Convention, had been framed by the start of the Emergency. They contained laws meant to protect combatants and civilians from torture, forced labor or any “humiliating or degrading treatment,” which the British treatment of the Kikuyu clearly violated.74 However, Britain did not ratify The Geneva Conventions and Common Article 3, which extend protections to non-combatants, until 1957.75 Further international laws were weak and vague, which became clear in the context of the Emergency. For instance, soldiers under international law should

Ibid. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 85. 71 Ibid., 86. 72 Bennett, “The Other Side,” 641. 73 Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, 96-97. 74 Ibid., 97. 75 Huw Bennett, “The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counterinsurgency in Kenya,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 18 (2007): 640-642. 70

refuse to follow illegal orders or be subject to prosecution. 76 However, if the legality of the order is unclear, a soldier must obey the order, and then file a complaint.77 As previous sections have demonstrated, the law in Kenya allowed for violence and was itself unclear. Emergency Regulations further confused the law by changing the rules of evidence, creating new capital offenses, and even justifying torture. British laws of minimum force only exacerbated the situation. Minimum force arose from British common law, which states that the government is allowed to use “no more force than absolutely necessary”.78 The courts decided whether or not the amount of force was necessary after the fact. 79 The vagueness in this law, like international laws, allowed generals and soldiers to justify their actions as necessary, avoiding punishment. Even if the perpetrator was called into court, the laws of Kenya swung in their favor. The infamous Captain Griffiths, who was court-martialed twice, serves as an excellent example of this. In the first trial, the court acquitted him of murdering an African.80 On the second occasion, Griffiths had tortured two African suspects, ordering one man’s ear be cut off. Both men died as a result of the torture, but Griffiths did not face murder charges, instead being found guilty of torture.81 CONCLUSION From 1930 to 1952, the colonial government, settlers, and powerful Africans used the law as a tool to control, steal from, and harm Africans. Administrators, Elders, and judges produced racial, generational, and tribal tensions by manipulating the law for personal gain or colonial aims. The court system and police used violence as a tool to control the African population. Furthermore, the courts allowed Europeans to commit violent acts against Africans with minimum punishments. Overall the

Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau, 70. Ibid. 78 Huw Bennett, Fighting the Mau Mau: the British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 84. 79 Bennett, “The Other Side,” 645. 80 Evans, Law and Disorder, 262. 81 Ibid., 263. 77

laws of Kenya created the anxieties and conflicts that motivated the Kikuyu to militancy and set a pattern of behavior that led to mass atrocities during the Emergency. International and British laws had little power to stop these atrocities. To view the Emergency as an aberration in an otherwise peaceful society is to ignore decades of corruption, violence, and inequality in Kenya that gave birth to the Mau Mau.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anderson, David M. “British abuse and torture in Kenya’s Counter-Insurgency, 1952-1960.” Small Wars and Insurgencies 23 (2012): 700-719. ———. “Master and Servant in Colonial Kenya.” The Journal of African History 41 (2000): 459-485. ——— . “Policing, Prosecution, and the Law in Colonial Kenya, c. 1905-39” in Policing the Empire: Government, Authority and Control, 1830-1940, edited by David M. Anderson and David Killingray, 183-200. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991. ———. “Punishment, Race and ‘The Raw Native’: Settler Society and Kenya's Flogging Scandals, 1895– 1930.” Journal of Southern African Studies 37 (2011): 479-497. ——— . History of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of the Empire. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005. Bennett, Huw. “The Other Side of the COIN: Minimum and Exemplary Force in British Army Counterinsurgency in Kenya.” Small Wars & Insurgencies 18 (2007): 638-664. ———. Fighting the Mau Mau: the British Army and Counter-Insurgency in the Kenya Emergency. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Coray, Michael S. “The Kenya Land Commission and the Kikuyu of Kiambu.” Agricultural History 52 (1978): 179-193. Cotran, Eugene. “The Development and Reform of the Law in Kenya.” Journal of African Law 27 (1983): 42-61. Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005. Evans, Peter. Law and Disorder: or Scenes of Life in Kenya. London: Secker &Warburg, 1956. Foran, W.R. The Kenyan Police: 1887-1960. London: R. Hale: 1962. Ghai Y.P. and J.P.W.B. McAuslin. Public Law and Political Change in Kenya: A Study of the Legal Framework of Government from Colonial Times to the Present. London: Oxford University Press, 1970. Hynd, Stacey. "Murder and Mercy: Capital Punishment in Colonial Kenya, ca. 1909-1956." International Journal of African Historical Studies 45 (2012): 81-101. Kanogo, Tabitha. Squatters & the Roots of Mau Mau. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1987. Lonsdale, John “Authority, Gender &Violence: The War within Mau Mau’s Fight for Land & Freedom.” in Mau Mau and Nationhood, edited by E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John Lonsdale, 46-70. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. ——— . “Kenyatta’s Trials: Breaking and Making an African Nationalist.” In The Moral World of The Law, edited by Peter Cross, 196-239. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

——— . “The Moral Economy of Mau Mau: Wealth, Poverty & Civic Virtue in the Kikuyu Political Thought.” in Unhappy Valley: Conflict in Kenya and Africa, edited by Bruce Berman and John Lonsdale, 315-504. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Mackenzie, Fiona. “Conflicting Claims to Custom: Land and Law in Central Province, Kenya, 191252.” Journal of African Law 40 (1996): 62-77. Morris, H.F., James S. Read. Indirect Rule and the Search for Justice: Essays in East African Legal History. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Ocobock, Paul. "Spare the Rod, Spoil the Colony: Corporal Punishment, Colonial Violence, and Generational Authority in Kenya, 1897-1952." International Journal of African Historical Studies 45 (2012): 29-56. Shadle, Brett L. “‘Changing Traditions to Meet Current Altering Conditions’: Customary Law, African Courts and the Rejection of Codification in Kenya, 1930-60.” The Journal of African History 40 (1999): 411-431. ———. “Settlers, Africans, and Inter-Personal Violence in Kenya, ca. 1900-1920s." International Journal of African Historical Studies 45 (2012): 57-80. ——— . “White Settlers and the Law in Early Colonial Kenya.” Journal of Eastern African Studies 4 (2010): 510-524. Throup, David W. “Origins of Mau Mau.” African Affairs 84 (1985): 399-433. Watkins, O.F. “The Report of the Kenya Land Commission, September. 1933” Journal of the Royal African Society 33, no. 132 (July 1934): 207-216.

Assessing the Impacts of Hunnic Difference in Mediterranean Society of Late-Antiquity By Casey VanSise A lack of direct Hunnic sources has compounded the problem of situating Hunnic identity. However, some of the most useful historical sources on Hunnic peoples are those contributed by other peoples, including Greco-Roman accounts. In particular, the written accounts of late Roman historians, including Eunapius of Sardis (347-??? CE), Olympiodorus of Thebes (380-??? CE) and most especially Priscus of Panium (c. 410-472 CE), yield some of the most intriguing insights into Hunnic identity and show a progression toward rapprochement with the perceived Hunnic worldview. In addition, the accounts of other peoples allow comprehension regarding how the perceived “otherness” of the Huns reflected the factors and phenomena that contributed to shifting paradigms in the late antique Mediterranean world. Understanding perceptions of Hunnic identity is critical to discerning Hunnic impacts on shifts in the late antique Mediterranean, especially regarding those accompanying the end of the Western Roman Empire in c. 476 CE. Central to questions regarding Hunnic identity are the origins of the peoples that constituted the Huns. Few academic debates regarding the Huns are as pervasive as whether or not the Hunnic peoples were descendants of the nomadic Xiongnu (匈奴) confederation residing in the steppes of present-day Mongolia.1 The discovery of five dated “Sogdian ancient letters” yielded evidence of a long-discussed conviction hypothesizing Hunnic connections to the Xiongnu. The author of the second letter referred to the ancient Xiongnu pillagers as Xwn, the Sogdian transcription of the word “Hun”.2 The scholar Walter 1

Etienne de la Vaissière, “The Rise of Sogdian Merchants and the Role of the Huns: The Historical Importance of the Ancient Sogdian Ancient Letters,” in The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith, eds. Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams (Chicago, 2004), 22. : From the fourth to the third century BCE, the Xiongnu pillaged northern Chinese settlements including Ye (307 and 313), Chang’an (311) and Luoyang (311), accompanying a decline in Chinese imperial fortunes; however, by the second century BCE, the Xiongnu became balkanized, with northern Xiongnu peoples vanishing from Chinese sources while southern Xiongnu peoples settled in the region of Taiyuan under Chinese administration. 2 de la Vaissière, “The Rise of Sogdian,” 19, 22. cf. Christopher P. Atwood, “Huns and Xiōngnú: New Thoughts on an Old Problem”, in Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski, eds. Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and 83

Bruno Henning has found further comparison between Xwn and other linguistic attributions to the Huns, including the Indian Hūṇa, the Greek ούννος, the Latin Hunni, the Armenian Honk’, the Saka Huna, and the Khwarezmian Hūn, noting that these terms were in use prior to their application to the peoples encountered in Europe and India during Hunnic incursions.3 By contrast, Otto Maenchen-Helfen has suggested that the Sogdian Xwn is instead derivative of the Avestic Xyon, an ambiguously mythical people of Iranic origins, rather than referring to the Xiongnu.4 Likewise, Christopher Kelly has opined that the Hunnic homeland may have been located further west of Mongolia in present-day Kazakhstan between the Altai Mountains and the Caspian Sea. Kelly has based this conclusion on an ostensible lack of archaeological evidence yielding Hunnic artforms similar to those of the Xiongnu.5 Whether or not the “Sogdian ancient letters” and other sources are indicative of specifically Xiongnu origins framing Hunnic identity, an understanding of the Central Asian region from which the Hunnic peoples came is important to discerning Hunnic identity and in accounting for the effects of their unique identity in the Mediterranean context.6 Formulating an understanding of the origins of Hunnic peoples lends critical insight into current understandings about Hunnic identity. However, equally invaluable to establishing an awareness of Hunnic identity and its consequent effects are the direct commentaries of those that chronicled the Huns themselves. Among the first figures contributing scholarship on the Huns was the late Roman historian

Daniel Rowland (Bloomington, IN: 2012), pp. 27–52: The “ancient letters” were discovered in a Han dynasty watchtower near Dunhuang in 1907. 3 W.B. Henning, “The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12 (1948): 601615, cf. Otto Maenchen-Helfen, “Pseudo-Huns,” Central Asiatic Journal 1 (1955): 101-106. 4 Otto Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture (Berkeley, 1973), cf. Harold Walter Bailey, “Harahuna,” in Asiatica: Festschrift Friedrich Weller (Leipzig, 1954), 12-21. 5 Christopher Kelly, The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome (New York, 2009), 42-45. 6 Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns, Rome, and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge, 2013), 55-56, 148-149,153, cf. Hugh Elton, “Book Review: Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013)”, Networks and Neighbours 2 (2014): 122-124: Notably, Hyun Jin Kim has recently postulated that the medieval culture of Europe emerging in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was descended from the steppe tradition of the Hunnic peoples, as representatives of Central Asian societies of late antiquity. Kim asserts that the prevalence of phenomena including banquets, hunting practices, dual leadership and feudal tribute are derived from Hunnic contributions to post-Roman Europe, indicating the broader trend of the derivation of periphery civilizations such as those of China and Europe from Central Asian traditions. 84

Eunapius of Sardis (347-???). Eunapius contributes little to providing a direct understanding of Hunnic identity on account of his conflation of the Huns with other Eurasian steppe peoples such as the Scythians and Massagetae. He relies on prior accounts by historians such as Herodotus even in the second edition of his work published after 380.7 While ineffective in conveying reasonably authentic details about Hunnic identity, Eunapius’ curiosity about the Hunnic peoples is nevertheless useful in accounting for burgeoning Roman recognition of this Hunnic identity and how they applied their own perceptions to the Huns. Hunnic conflation with Scythians and Massagetae is illustrative of Hunnic “otherness” insofar as it underscores the notion of peoples surrounding the Roman Empire as being progressively more strange and barbaric. This is apparent in Herodotus’ descriptions of man-eating gryphons and cycloptic Arimaspeans beyond the identifiable Eurasian frontier inhabited by peoples such as the Avars, which Priscus later references when discussing the causality of the barbarian migrations of the Huns and other peoples.8 In this sense, the Huns represent the archetype of something foreign and unpredictable in the eyes of late Roman chroniclers such as Eunapius, encapsulating their difference. Eunapius compensates for this by projecting the identity of the cursorily known Scythians and Massagetae upon the Hunnic peoples. Even as direct contacts with Hunnic peoples began to take place in the Mediterranean sphere, late Roman historians continued to project their own conceptions onto the Huns in their descriptions of Hunnic identity. Though the first Hunnic incursions into Roman territory occurred around 376 when a joint Ostrogothic-Alanic-Hunnic force under Alatheus and Safrax entered South Pannonia and Valeria, Eunapius’ reliance on Herodotus’ accounts in his second edition represented a trend that would continue to characterize even the increasing direct Mediterranean encounters with the Huns.9 This trend was the projection of Mediterranean-inspired attributes onto Hunnic identity inspired by their difference. The 7

Zosimus, New History 2.40.3, in The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Late Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus, trans. R.C. Blockley (Liverpool, 1981), 12. 8 Herodotus, History 4.13, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 54. 9 Hrvoje Gračanin, “The Huns and South Pannonia,” Byzantinoslavica 64 (2006): 29-76. 85

first extensive chronicle of anyone’s personal observations of Hunnic-Roman contacts was contributed by Olympiodorus of Thebes (380-???), who recorded his diplomatic mission to the Huns in 412, possibly on the authority of Emperor Honorius of the Western Roman court in Ravenna.10 The fragment, recorded in Photius’ Bibliotheca (9th c.), is sourced from Book X of Olympiodorus’ historical collection, and details his embassy to the Middle Danube court of the Hunnic king Donatus; Olympiodorus arrives at the court, whereupon Donatus is murdered that evening and Olympiodorus placates his successor Charaton, bringing him into the fold of Roman allegiance.11 Notwithstanding debates regarding implications that Olympiodorus’ embassy was responsible for regime change, the incident raises intriguing questions about Roman perceptions of the Huns, alongside inquiries into their ambitions with respect to the Huns.12 The first of these two concerns involves controversy surrounding the name of Donatus, given its Latin nomenclature, which has led E.A. Thompson to speculate that Olympiodorus may have ascribed a Latin name to the original Hunnic king out of unfamiliarity with the Hunnic language and a desire to make the name sound more congenial by Roman terms.13 Alternatively, Warren Treadgold hypothesized that Donatus may not in fact even be the Hunnic king, but rather that the name is attributable to the presence of a Roman fugitive who had defected to the Huns, since another similar case can be attested to in Priscus’ account in the mid-fifth century.14 The second concern is relevant to whether there was an explicit desire to “romanize” their Hunnic “others” amongst the members of Olympiodorus’ embassy. R.C. Blockley is quoted as translating the phrase basilika dora as “regal gifts” rather than the “imperial gifts” translation advanced by A.D. Lee in his article making reference to Olympiodorus’ mission.15 10

Olympiodorus of Thebes, Fr. 18, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 27, 35. J.F. Matthews, “Olympiodorus of Thebes and the History of the West (AD 407-425),” The Journal of Roman Studies 60 (1970): 79-97. 12 A.D. Lee, “Abduction and Assassination: The Clandestine Face of Roman Diplomacy in Late Antiquity,” International History Review 31 (2009): 1-23. 13 E.A. Thompson, A History of Attila and the Huns (Oxford, 1948), 223, cf. Maenchen-Helfen, The World of the Huns, 423. 14 Warren Treadgold, “The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes,” International History Review 26 (2004): 713-714. 15 Olympiodorus of Thebes, Fr. 19, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 110, cf. Lee, “Abduction and Assassination: The Clandestine Face of Roman Diplomacy in Late Antiquity,” 10. 11

These two concerns underscore fundamental perceptions of Hunnic identity among Mediterranean figures. In the first case, whether or not Donatus is the name of the Hunnic king or instead represents the name of an unrelated Roman fugitive, both possibilities carry implications regarding Mediterranean perceptions of the Huns. If the former is true, then Olympiodorus is necessarily according Huns Roman-defined characteristics as Eunapius does, whether wittingly or unwittingly, still projecting his own notions about Hunnic “otherness” on the subjects of his discourse. While implying that Roman attitudes toward the Huns remain unchanged on the surface, the incorporation of a direct account of Hunnic-Roman contact situated in this context is indicative of an attempt to comprehend the largely unknown subjects of their description. However, if Donatus is a defected Roman fugitive, this implies the emergence of even more compelling circumstances beginning to take hold in the Mediterranean world: the adoption of barbarian identity by Roman citizens. By embracing Hunnic identity, any ostensible Roman defector would be repudiating Roman authority and at least partially spurning their Mediterranean identity. Conversely, if A.D. Lee’s translation of “imperial gifts” is correct, it indicates a Roman effort to incorporate Charaton and his Middle Danube Huns into the imperial system as frontier vassals in a relationship of interdependence. In attempting to “romanize” the Huns, Olympiodorus’ mission may have been attempting to alter their otherness into something familiarly Mediterranean and thereby transition the Huns into the status of a Roman subject people, in accordance with Roman policies of awing barbarian polities to the end of incorporation into the Roman system.16 In any of these cases, it is clear that each involved factor would have amounted to inducing fortuitous shifts in the paradigms of the late antique Mediterranean sphere. Despite the utility of Eunapius’ and Olympiodorus’ accounts in highlighting Mediterranean changes induced by Hunnic identity, the most revelatory chronicle is that provided by Priscus of Panium (c. 410-472) in his 449 account accompanying an Eastern Roman diplomatic mission under Maximinus

R. Smith, “The Imperial Court of the Late Roman Empire, c. AD 300-c.450,” in The Court and Court Societies in Ancient Monarchies, ed. A.J. Spawforth (Cambridge, 2006), 157-232. 87

to the court of Attila the Hun, primarily preserved in the Excerpta de Legationibus (10th c.).17 Explorations of varying forms of difference pervade the work of Priscus, and the most prominent instances of these explorations occur when Priscus recounts interactions with three different individuals in the court of Attila the Hun: the Hunnic chieftain Onegesius, the Moorish dwarf Zercon, and an acculturated Greek merchant.18 The former of the three figures, Attila’s advisor Onegesius, is referenced when Priscus describes Maximinus’ failed attempt to bribe the Hunnic nobleman into transferring his loyalties to Rome. Thereafter, Onegesius retorts that service to Attila and the Huns is preferable to Roman allegiance.19 The presentation of Onegesius as someone fiercely devoted to his Hunnic identity and disdain of Roman society is reflective of a sympathetic Mediterranean depiction of Hunnic difference in this context. This composes an exaltation of Hunnic attributes rather than representing a dismissive portrayal of the Huns, as noted by Michael Maas.20 By contrast, the court jester Zercon is the antithesis of Onegesius and indeed Priscus himself in Priscus’ tragicomic account of Zercon’s unwanted appearance in Attila’s court. In the account, Zercon petitions the angry leader for a wife in a jumble of languages.21 Zercon represents the pinnacle of barbarity, as he enjoys none of the benefits of explicitly identifying as Hunnic, Roman, Gothic, or otherwise. He is rather confined to a state of utter “otherness” by his circumstances of servitude in a gray social category as a literal barbarian, being an exception to Priscus’ otherwise generally sympathetic portrayal of the Huns while likewise possibly reflecting poorly on Rome.22

Priscus of Panium, Frr. 7; 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 119. For further research on the growing importance of Roman foreign relations with the Huns, especially under Attila, readers can consult Andrew Gillett, Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411-533 (Cambridge, 2003). 18 While somewhat vague in the context of Priscus’ account, “Moorish” can probably be treated as referring to the Mauri confederation of Berbers inhabiting the Roman province of Mauretania in present-day Algeria and Morocco, from which this English term derives. 19 Priscus of Panium, Fr. 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising,, 58. 20 Michael Maas, “Fugitives and Ethnography in Priscus of Panium,” in BMGS 19 (1995): 146-160. 21 Priscus of Panium, Fr. 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising,119. 22 Maas, “Fugitives and Ethnography,” 157-160: The term “barbarian” is descended from an onomatopoeia that evokes incoherent babbling in the Greek language. 88

The most intriguing exploration of the malleability of identity occurs in Priscus’ relation of his encounter and subsequent debate with an acculturated Greek merchant in Attila’s court. Priscus states that while he was waiting to attend diplomatic proceedings, he was approached by someone in “Scythian” dress who was fluent in Greek, much to Priscus’ surprise. Thereafter, the man revealed himself to be a Greek merchant who had been captured during the Sack of Viminacium in 441 and served Onegesius as a slave. The merchant obtained his freedom by his perceived merits to the nobleman and thereafter assimilated into Hunnic identity. In the succeeding period, Priscus proceeds to debate the Greek merchant when the latter contends that Hunnic life is superior to its Mediterranean counterpart, whereupon Priscus counters that Roman society is predicated on the Platonic conception of a benevolent legalistic state, a feature lacking in Hunnic society. The merchant responds by characterizing Roman society as corrupted, and the debate prematurely ends due to an interruption resulting from the negotiations.23 This exchange is significant insofar as it shows a Mediterranean figure who praises Hunnic identity in favor of the institutions of Roman society, and thereby represents Priscus’ explorations of the possible preferability of Hunnic “otherness” or the inferiority of Roman identity in certain respects.24 Though it is unsubstantiated, Priscus’ reference to this debate is representative of a mild rapprochement with the concept of Hunnic “otherness” even as he continues to defend the Roman system. This represents a means by which Priscus elevates the Huns to the status of “noble savages” in contrast to the corruption of the decaying Roman paradigm. Not even accounting for Priscus’ testimonies regarding Onegesius, Zercon, and the Greek merchant, other instances in Priscus’ body of work exhibit attitudes of openness in their examination of Hunnic “otherness”. Instances of further Herodotean influence occur in Priscus’ accounts, such as Priscus’ association of a “sacred sword” in the possession of Attila and the Huns with the mythical Sword

23 24

Priscus of Panium, Fr. 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising,, 55-57. Maas, “Fugitives and Ethnography,” 149-154. 89

of Mars mentioned in Herodotus 4.62 which is later recorded in Jordanes’ Getica.25 The paradoxical presentation of continuity between the culture of Rome and that of Rome’s Hunnic foils in the transfer of the “sacred sword” implies a positive transition in the fortunes of the Huns when compared to those of Rome, while still referring to the Roman polytheistic tradition to justify this contention. Furthermore, Priscus notes the transition in fortunes that has accompanied the increasing predominance of the Huns under Attila. He characterizes the Hunnic leader as being “a strong and decisive leader of men”, as similarly corroborated with Jordanes’ depiction of Priscus’ descriptions of Attila as “proud and warlike, wise, personally temperate, and clement.”26 In commending aspects of Hunnic identity, Priscus would set himself apart from later Roman historians such as Ammianus Marcellinus, who negatively characterizes the Huns as “exceeding every degree of savagery” at various junctures in his ethnographic descriptions, but Priscus’ positive attributions regarding Hunnic identity would later become situated in the works of Jordanes as well.27 Priscus’ respect for Hunnic identity was evidently great enough that he would later contribute the only credibly recorded instance of period Hunnic diction when he describes the later burial of Attila in another account: the word strava, meaning funeral.28 Though Hunnic diction is probably linguistically related to the languages of other later Asiatic immigrants such as the Magyars and the Khazars, this contribution is nevertheless invaluable to contemporary scholars and furthers the usefulness of Priscus as a source on the Huns.29 In any event, Priscus’ usage of strava underscores his recognition of the transitionary paradigms of the late Roman era, as Latin came to be complemented by other barbarian tongues with the displacement of prior forms of Roman authority.

Jordanes, Getica 35.183, in The Fragmentary Classicising,, 54; Priscus of Panium, Fr. 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising Historian, 54. 26 Jordanes, Getica 35, 180 and 182, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 63; Priscus of Panium, Fr. 8, in The Fragmentary Classicising, 63. 27 Edward James, Europe’s Barbarians: AD 200-600 (Harlow, 2009), 45-46. 28 Kelly, The End of Empire, 6. 29 James, Europe’s Barbarians, 47. 90

Consideration of other forms of archaeological evidence, including material culture, can yield further substantial information on the identity of the Huns and their transitionary impacts in the European context.30 Nevertheless, the most vital considerations of the importance of Hunnic identity upon shifting paradigms in the late-antiquity Mediterranean are derived from the reflections of outside commentators, in particular the written accounts of the late Roman historians Eunapius, Olympiodorus, and especially Priscus. It is from these sources that scholars have gleaned a better understanding of Hunnic identity and why it was significant to disrupting or altering the trends that had previously characterized the Mediterranean world. This has led to a more comprehensive discourse on the social factors contributing to the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the academic community.

Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution, eds. Igor V. Slevedski, Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Natalia A. Ksenofontova, Nikolay N. Kradin, and Thomas J. Barfield (Moscow, 2003); Borbala Obrusanszky, Symbols of the Huns in Central Asia, lecture, Cambridge University; Ciupercă Bogdan and Andrei Măgureanu, “Huns and Other Peoples – Archaeological Evidence in Present-day Romania,” in BUFM 50 (2008): 119-130; Lotte Hedeager, “Scandinavia and the Huns: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Migration Era,” in Norwegian Archaeological Review 40 (2007): 42-58. 91

BIBLIOGRAPHY Atwood, C.P. Huns and Xiōngnú: New Thoughts on an Old Problem. Dubitando: Studies in History and Culture in Honor of Donald Ostrowski. Edited by Brian J. Boeck, Russell E. Martin, and Daniel Rowland. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2012. Bailey, H.W. Harahuna. Asiatica. Leipzig, Germany: Festschrift Friedrich Weller, 1954. Blockley, R.C. The Fragmentary Classicising Historians of the Later Roman Empire: Eunapius, Olympiodorus, Priscus and Malchus. Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981. Bogdan, Ciupercă, and Andrei Măgureanu. "Huns and Other Peoples – Archaeological Evidence In Present-day Romania." BUFM. (2008): 119-130. de la Vaissière, Etienne. The Rise of Sogdian Merchants and the Role of the Huns: The Historical Importance of the Ancient Sogdian Ancient Letters. The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith. Edited by Susan Whitfield and Ursula Sims-Williams. Chicago, IL: Serindia Publications, 2004. Elton, Hugh. "Book Review: Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2013)." Networks and Neighbours. (2014): 122-124. Gillett, Andrew. Envoys and Political Communication in the Late Antique West, 411-533. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gračanin, Hrvoje. "The Huns and South Pannonia." Byzantinoslavica. (2006): 29-76. Hedeager, Lotte. "Scandinavia and the Huns: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Migration Era." Norwegian Archaeological Review. (2007): 42-58. Henning, W.B. "The Date of the Sogdian Ancient Letters." Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies. (1948): 601-615. James, Edward. Europe's Barbarians, AD 200-600. New York: Pearson Longman, 2009. Kelly, Christopher. The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2009. Kim, Hyun Jin. The Huns, Rome and the Birth of Europe. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Lee, A.D. “Abduction and Assassination: The Clandestine Face of Roman Diplomacy in Late Antiquity.” International History Review. (2009): 1-23. Maas, Michael. "Fugitives and Ethnography in Priscus of Panium." BMGS. (1995): 146-160. Maenchen-Helfen, Otto. "Pseudo-Huns." Central Asiatic Journal. (1955): 101-106. ——— . The World of the Huns: Studies in Their History and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Matthews, J.F. "Olympiodorus of Thebes and the History of the West (AD 407-425)." The Journal of Roman Studies. (1970): 79-97. Nomadic Pathways in Social Evolution. Edited by Igor V. Sledzevski, Dmitri M. Bondarenko, Natalia A. Ksenofontova, Nikolay N. Kradin, and Thomas J. Barfield. Moscow: Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2003. 92

Obrusanszky, Borbala. Symbols of the Huns in Central Asia. lecture., Cambridge University. Smith, R. The Imperial Court of the Late Roman Empire, c. AD 300-c.450. The Court and Court Societies in Ancient Monarchies. Edited by A.J. Spawforth. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Thompson, E.A. A History of Attila and the Huns. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1948. Treadgold, Warren. "The Diplomatic Career and Historical Work of Olympiodorus of Thebes." International History Review. (2004): 713-714.