Two-Fisted Reader: A Double Book Review. Eco & Phillips on Constantinople and the Fourth Crusade

Palma le Jeune's Siege of ConstantinopleApril 1204 was a cruel month.

That was the month of the fall of Constantinople to Western Crusaders, and it changed the world in enormous ways.

It created a tremendous amount of mistrust between Eastern and Western Christians, which might be the most significant of its repercussions for readers of this blog.  It destroyed and confused the nature of one of the greatest cities in the world.  It rewrote the political map of Europe in ways that would have lasting consequences.  The Norman and Venetian crusaders burned the magnificent Imperial Library.  I know.  I know.

Oh, yes, and the Sack of Constantinople ruined and killed lots and lots of people of many nationalities and faiths.

800 years later, Pope John Paul II said, "Whoops."  (Well, okay, he said that the Roman Catholic Church felt "pain and disgust" at the events of 1204.  Never mind that Roman Catholics, if not the Roman Catholic Church, more or less caused that pain and disgust.)

Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade. Excellent Read. Thumbs Up.So I've finally got around to finishing Jonathan Phillips' The Fourth Crusade.  I say "finally" not because it sucked, but because it wasn't a freshman essay (which is to say, I didn't finish it because it didn't suck).

In fact it's quite readable.  Phillips' idea is not especially original: it's a representation of Queller's idea that the Fourth Crusade's conquest of Constantinople was a bit of an accident, one of those shootings during a mugging that never was intentional.

But Phillips does what we need more of: he tells a story extremely well.  Never mind that the plot was suggested to him by Queller (whose name is close to the German for "source," by a happy accident): here we have a book that anybody with a reasonable curiosity can pick up and read and come away with a defensible interpretation of the Fourth Crusade.  He provides plenty of quotations from the primary sources.  (I don't know about you, but my CNN saturated mind mistrusts punditry on current events unless I can see the video of the events.  If the event is eight hundred years cold, I'm more inclined to ask for the raw evidence.)

Scholars can and do argue over Phillips' / Queller's interpretation of events and evidence.  No question about it.  But this extremely well-written book situates a person in the debate rather nicely.

If Phillips situates a reader in the Fourth Crusade from the historical point of view based on his best reading of the evidence, Umberto Eco situates a reader there mythically and narratologically.Eco's Baudolino: Sly Cover Illustrator Puts Eco In The Picture (He's the Bearded Bloke)

His novel Baudolino is a sort of 12th century Forest Gump.  Baudolino is a Piedmontese peasant with a supernatural facility with languages and a gift for mendacity who finds himself in the middle of every major political event of his times, from the founding of Alessandria (Eco's home town) to the composition of the Breton lais to the seeding of the Grail legend to the invention of Prester John to the salvation of Alessandria to the sack of Constantinople.

Like all of Eco's work, it's a sly thing, filled with scraps of knowledge, hidden references and innuendoes.  (Nobody trades in milennia-old gossip so subtly and richly as Eco, most especially not that scandal-sheet writer Dan Brown.)

And like all of Eco's work, it has a great deal of fun slipping the dagger into modern scholarship, celebrating the fact that a moment of history has hidden triggers and peculiarities that are very often closed to the modern reader.  Live brilliantly, says Baudolino to me, because you'll be misunderstood in fifteen minutes.  History is, like Baudolino, a liar, and a gifted one, that enriches the world and does its best to make it better, but ultimately stumbles on its own hidden redemption if it finds it at all.  Like the Holy Grail, meaning in history depends more on what you need from it than on anything in the vessel itself.

Not having more than a smattering of Italian, I can't criticize William Weaver's translation with any authority.  The English sometimes feels a little wooden, but to be fair, it must have been a damned difficult book to write.  Eco's gift for hidden meanings and linguistic jokes might be the best case for learning Italian since Dante.

All in all, the story is a bit of an undisciplined riot, and the book wasn't as much fun for me as Foucault's Pendulum (still my favorite Eco fiction).  But it's as thoughtful and provocative.  (I never cared much for Name of the Rose.)  Worth the price and the time to read, and I thought a good fun book to read concurrently with Phillips' about a time that was neither good nor fun.