by Souad Mekhennet

I was told to come alone. I was not to carry any identification and would have to leave my cell phone, audio recorder, watch, and purse at my hotel in Antakya, Turkey. All I could bring were a notebook and a pen.

In return, I wanted to speak to someone in authority, someone who could explain the long-term strategy of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS. It was the summer of 2014, three weeks before the group became a household name by releasing a video of the beheading of the American journalist James Foley. Even then, I suspected that ISIS would become an important player in the world of global jihad. As a journalist covering Islamic militancy across Europe and the Middle East for the New York Times, major German news outlets, and now the Washington Post, I had watched the group take shape in the world created by the September 11 attacks, two U.S.-led wars, and the upheaval known as the Arab Spring. I had been talking to some of its future members for years.

I told my contacts with ISIS that I would ask whatever questions I wanted and that I wouldn’t clear quotes or show them the article before it was published. I also needed their guarantee that I wouldn’t be kidnapped. And since I’d been told not to bring anyone else from the Post, I asked that the trusted contact who had helped arrange the interview be allowed to accompany me.
“I’m not married,” I told the ISIS leaders. “I cannot be alone with you.”

As a Muslim woman of Moroccan-Turkish descent, born and raised in Germany, I am an outlier among the journalists covering global jihad. But in the years since I started reporting on the September 11 hijackers as a college student, my background has given me unique access to underground militant leaders such as the man I was to meet that July day in Turkey.

I knew that ISIS was holding journalists hostage. What I didn’t know was that the leader I would meet oversaw the group’s hostage program, supervising the British-accented killer who would appear on the videos and become known to the world as Jihadi John. I would learn later that the man I met that summer, who was known as Abu Yusaf, had taken a leading role in torturing the hostages, including waterboarding them.

I had asked to meet Abu Yusaf during the day in a public place but was told that wouldn’t be possible. The meeting would be at night, and in private. A few hours beforehand, my contact moved the time back to 11:30 p.m. This was not a comforting development. A year earlier, members of the German antiterrorism police unit had knocked on my door at home to tell me they had learned of an Islamist plot to lure me to the Middle East with the promise of an exclusive interview, then kidnap me and force me to marry a militant. Those threats came back to me now, as I wondered if I was crazy to be doing this. Despite my nerves, I pressed on. If everything worked out, I would be the first Western journalist to interview a senior ISIS commander and live to tell the story.

It was a hot day toward the end of Ramadan, and I wore jeans and a T-shirt as I prepared my questions at the hotel in Antakya. Before leaving, I put on a black abaya, a traditional Middle Eastern garment that covers the whole body except for the face, hands, and feet. One of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s associates had chosen it for me years earlier, when I’d visited the late Al Qaeda leader’s hometown of Zarqa, Jordan. The Zarqawi associate had bragged that this abaya, which had pink embroidery, was one of the nicest styles in the shop, and the fabric was thin enough to be comfortable even in hot weather. Since then, it has become a sort of good luck charm. I always wear it on difficult assignments.

We were to meet Abu Yusaf along the Turkish-Syrian border, not far from the border crossing at Reyhanli. I knew the area well: my mother had grown up nearby, and I had visited often as a child.

I said good-bye to my Post colleague Anthony Faiola, who would stay behind at the hotel, leaving phone numbers he could use to reach my family in case anything went wrong. At about 10:15 p.m., the man who had helped arrange this interview, whom I’ll call Akram, picked me up at the hotel. After a forty-minute drive, we pulled into the parking lot of a hotel restaurant near the border and waited. Two cars soon appeared out of the darkness. The driver of the lead car, a white Honda, got out; Akram and I got in. Akram sat behind the wheel and I climbed into the passenger seat.

I twisted around to look at the man I had come to interview, who sat in the back. Abu Yusaf looked to be twenty-seven or twenty-eight and wore a white baseball cap and tinted glasses that masked his eyes. He was tall and well built, with a short beard and curly, shoulder-length hair. Dressed in a polo shirt and khaki cargo pants, he would have blended in seamlessly on any European street.

Three older Nokia or Samsung cell phones lay on the seat beside him. For security reasons, he explained, no one in his position would use an iPhone, which could make him especially vulnerable to surveillance. He wore a digital watch similar to those I’d seen on American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. His right pocket bulged; I assumed he was carrying a gun. I wondered what would happen if the Turkish police stopped us.

Akram turned the key in the ignition, and the car began to move in darkness along the Turkish side of the border, sometimes passing through small villages. I could hear the wind against the car windows. I tried to keep track of where we were, but my conversation with Abu Yusaf drew me in.

He spoke softly and calmly. He tried to hide that he was of Moroccan descent and where exactly in Europe he came from, but I noticed his North African features, and when I switched from classical Arabic to Moroccan Arabic he understood and answered in kind. It turned out he had been born in Morocco but had lived in the Netherlands since his teens. “If you want to check my French as well, just tell me,” he said, smiling. He also spoke Dutch. I would learn later that he had been trained as an engineer.

As we drove, he explained his vision: ISIS would free Muslims from Palestine to Morocco and Spain and then go farther, spreading Islam all over the world. Anyone who resisted would be treated as an enemy. “If the U.S. hits us with flowers, we will hit them back with flowers,” Abu Yusaf said. “But if they hit us with fire, we will hit them back with fire, also inside their homeland. This will be the same with any other Western country.”

ISIS had plenty of resources and expertise, he told me. In fact, the group had begun quietly establishing itself long before it appeared on the world stage. Its members included educated people from Western countries, highly trained security officers from Saddam Hussein’s presidential guard, and former Al Qaeda acolytes. “You just think we have nutcases coming to join us?” he asked. “No. We have people from all over the world. We have brothers from Britain with university degrees and of various descents: Pakistani, Somali, Yemeni, and even Kuwaiti.” Later, I would realize that he was also talking about the guards that several ISIS hostages would dub “the Beatles”: Jihadi John and three others with English accents.

I asked what had pushed him to join the group. Abu Yusaf said that he’d grown fed up with the hypocrisy of Western governments, which were always talking about the importance of human rights and religious freedoms, while relegating their Muslim residents to a kind of second-class citizenship. “In Europe, look how we have been treated,” he told me. “I wanted to be in the society I grew up with, but I felt, ‘You’re just the Muslim, you’re just the Moroccan, you will never be accepted.’”

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 had been unjust, he said: there were no weapons of mass destruction, Iraqis were tortured in Abu Ghraib, and the Americans faced no consequences. “Then they’re pointing at us and saying how barbaric we are.”

“You say you’re against the killing of innocent people,” I said. “So why are you killing and kidnapping innocent people?”

He was silent for a few seconds. “Every country has a chance to get their people free,” he said. “If they don’t, that’s their problem. We didn’t attack them; they attacked us.”

“When you take people hostage, what do you expect?” I responded.

He then started talking about his Moroccan grandfather, who had fought the French colonialists for freedom, drawing a parallel between that jihad and this one. “This is all the outcome of the Americans colonizing Iraq,” he said. “Now we’re fighting the jihad to free the Muslim world.”

But my grandfather had been a freedom fighter in Morocco, too. When I was a little girl, he’d talked to me about that “jihad,” about how Muslims and their “Jewish brothers” had fought to expel the French who had seized control of their ancestral lands. “We did not kill any women and children, and no civilians,” my grandfather had told me. “That’s not allowed in jihad.” His rebellion was nothing like the horrors perpetrated by ISIS.

“But he was in his country,” I said. “This is not your country.”

“This is Muslim land. This is the country of all Muslims.”

“I grew up in Europe like you,” I told him. “I studied like you in Europe.”

“Why do you still believe the European system is fair and just?” he asked.

“What is the alternative?”

“The alternative is the caliphate.”

Our debate had grown heated, personal. There seemed to be so many parallels between his background and mine. Yet we had chosen different paths, and mine wasn’t what he would call the “right way” for a Muslim woman, not the Islamic way.

“Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked. “You really believe that the West respects us? Treats us Muslims equally? The only right way is our way,” by which he meant the way of the so-called Islamic State.

“I’ve read your stuff,” he told me. “You interviewed the head of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Why are you just a reporter? Why don’t you have your own TV show in Germany? Why are you not making a career in Germany, with all the awards you’ve won?”

I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what he was talking about. Coming of age and making my way professionally as a Muslim in Europe had at times been trying. I don’t wear a head scarf; I’m considered a liberal and a feminist; I’ve cowritten a book about finding one of the last living Nazis in Cairo and won prestigious fellowships in America. But Abu Yusaf was right: I don’t have a TV show in Germany. To rise in my home country as a Muslim migrant, or even as the child of migrants, you have to toe the line and praise Europe’s progressiveness. If you criticize the government too loudly or raise serious questions about anything from foreign policy to Islamophobia, the backlash can be intense.

I obviously didn’t agree with Abu Yusaf that the caliphate was the solution. But I couldn’t help thinking that Western societies and politicians have made little progress toward addressing the policies that radicalize young men like him. More intelligence services putting more restrictions on people is not the solution, nor are global surveillance networks that compromise the privacy of the innocent along with the guilty. Abu Yusaf was part of a generation of young Muslims who were radicalized by the invasion of Iraq, much as the generation before him had been radicalized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. In some ways, he reminded me of my younger brother, and I felt a big sister’s responsibility to protect him. But I knew it was too late for that.

“You may be right that we face discrimination and the world is unfair,” I told him. “But this is not the jihad, what you’re fighting. Jihad would have been if you’d stayed in Europe and made your career. It would have been a lot harder. You have taken the easiest way out.”

For a few seconds, no one said anything.

Abu Yusaf had insisted on taking me back to Antakya rather than returning to our original meeting point, and by this time we were close to my hotel. I thanked him and climbed out of the car. Even at this hour, the coffee shops were busy with people eating before dawn, as is common in Ramadan, when Muslims fast during the day. I felt glad to have gotten the interview, but I was also worried. Abu Yusaf had spoken with such confidence and fury. “Whoever attacks us will be attacked in the heart of their countries,” he had said, “no matter if it’s the USA, France, Britain, or any Arab country.”

We’re losing one after the other, I thought. This guy could have been somebody different. He could have had a different life.

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Souad Mekhennet is a national security correspondent for The Washington Post, and she has reported on terrorism for The New York Times and other news organizations. She is the coauthor of three previous books and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and has also held fellowships at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Souad is the author of I Was Told to Come Alone: My Journey Behind the Lines of Jihad and coauthor, with Nicholas Kulish, of The Eternal Nazi.

The post A Reporter’s Journey Behind the Lines of ISIS appeared first on The History Reader.

by Eleanor Herman

The story of poison is the story of power. For centuries, royal families have feared the gut-roiling, vomit-inducing agony of a little something added to their food or wine by an enemy. To avoid poison, they depended on tasters, unicorn horns, and antidotes tested on condemned prisoners. Servants licked the royal family’s spoons, tried on their underpants and tested their chamber pots.

Ironically, royals terrified of poison were unknowingly poisoning themselves daily with their cosmetics, medications, and filthy living conditions. Women wore makeup made with mercury and lead. Men rubbed turds on their bald spots. Physicians prescribed mercury enemas, arsenic skin cream, drinks of lead filings, and potions of human fat and skull, fresh from the executioner. The most gorgeous palaces were little better than filthy latrines. Gazing at gorgeous portraits of centuries past, we don’t see what lies beneath the royal robes and the stench of unwashed bodies; the lice feasting on private parts; and worms nesting in the intestines.

In The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman combines her unique access to royal archives with cutting-edge forensic discoveries to tell the true story of Europe’s glittering palaces: one of medical bafflement, poisonous cosmetics, ever-present excrement, festering natural illness, and, sometimes, murder. Watch the video below for a preview of Chapter 3.

“You’ll be as appalled at times as you are entertained.” —Bustle, one of The 17 Best Nonfiction Books Coming Out In June 2018

“A heady mix of erudite history and delicious gossip.” —Aja Raden, author of Stoned

In the Washington Post roundup, “What your favorite authors are reading this summer,” A.J. Finn says, “I want to read The Royal Art of Poison, Eleanor Herman’s history of poisons.”

The post Dying to Be Beautiful: Deadly Cosmetics appeared first on The History Reader.

by Jonathan Neumann

The hegemony of tikkun olam in American Judaism may be a linguistic success story, but from the point of view of religion it is nothing to cheer about. Philologos went on to protest the political appropriation of the term as “an example of how authentic religious concepts can be cheapened when retooled and promoted for a mass audience.” He feared that “the relevance we appear to give [the term] by decontextualizing it in this way comes at the expense . . . of honestly dealing with what tradition is trying to tell us.”

This is true not just of the term “tikkun olam,” but of Jewish social justice more generally. It was one thing for the Reformers to declare they were changing Judaism’s direction. But, as we discovered in the previous chapter, Jewish social justice activists today aren’t saying that that’s what they’re doing anymore. For the last few decades they’ve been saying this is authentic, traditional Judaism. That is, their liberal politics represent Judaism as it was always meant to be understood. Think about that. Isn’t it just a little bit incredible for the teachings of the ancient faith of Judaism to happen to comprise without exception the agenda of the liberal wing of today’s Democratic Party? It’s extraordinary just how few people have questioned how plausible this is. And yet, as far as so many American Jews are concerned, Judaism means tikkun olam and tikkun olam means contemporary liberalism.

In order to demonstrate how Judaism means social justice, Jewish activists repeatedly point to a number of traditional Jewish texts that they believe bear out their liberal politics. Each of these sources reflects something inherited from Classical Reform and the Social Gospel. Specifically, these texts are the story of Creation in Genesis, which establishes universalism as the foundation of Jewish social justice; the appeal to God, also in Genesis, of the patriarch Abraham for the residents of Sodom and Gomorrah, an act of universalistic ethical selflessness that Jewish activists interpret as representing the very essence of what Judaism is about; the economic policies of Joseph in Egypt, which illustrate the indispensable and benevolent power of the state in achieving redemptive ends; the Israelite Exodus from Egypt in the second book of the Pentateuch, which underscores TO HEAL THE WORLD? how fundamentally dif­ferent the Kingdom of God is from our own society and the need for political revolution to get us from the one to the other; the Prophets, who supposedly eschewed ritual and overcame backward particularism and taught the universal religion of ethics; and, appearing in numerous rabbinic texts, tikkun olam itself, which captures what Jews mean when they talk about social justice. Together, this handful of passages forms the worldview of tikkun olam. These sources constitute Judaism’s endorsement of the politics of social justice—they are what make Jewish social justice Jewish.

In his book Why Are Jews Liberals?, the neoconservative intellectual Norman Podhoretz wrote about how the Eastern European immigrants who got involved in labor activism and radical politics were effectively converting from Judaism to Marxism. Indeed the editor Abraham Cahan, as we mentioned earlier, declared that socialism is the new Torah. But the social justice movement has now in a sense reversed this process. Tikkun olam is not about turning Jews into Marxists. It’s about rebranding Marxism as Judaism. “The Marxists,” Michael Lerner writes, “certainly didn’t invent the challenge to private property. Anyone who has ever bothered to read the Torah knows that God claims the ownership of the world.” For too long, the tikkun olam movement’s rebranding of Marxism as Judaism has been allowed to proceed unchallenged. Lerner and his cohort believe that anyone who has bothered to learn the traditional texts of Judaism must conclude that this religion endorses and even mandates the program of social justice. They are wrong. Dismally wrong. So let’s take Lerner’s challenge. Let’s actually read the favorite Scriptural texts of the Jewish social justice movement. And let’s find out if the God of Israel really is a Marxist.

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Jonathan Neumann is a graduate of Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. He has written for various American, British, and Israeli publications, was the Tikvah Fellow at Commentary magazine, and has served as assistant editor at Jewish Ideas Daily. He is the author of To Heal the World?

The post Tikkun Olam in American Judaism: A Religious Success Story? appeared first on The History Reader.

by Helen Rappaport

For the Romanov family at the Ipatiev House, Tuesday, 16 July, in Ekaterinburg was much like any other day, punctuated by the same frugal meals, brief periods of recreation in the garden, reading, and games of cards. Over the last three months, their lives had become deadened by the extreme constraints placed upon them and by a total lack of contact with the outside world. It was only the fact that they were still together, and in Russia, that kept them going; that and their profound religious faith and absolute trust in God.

Since being brought here they had come to cherish the smallest and simplest of pleasures: the sun had shone; Alexey was recovering from his recent bout of illness and the nuns had been allowed to bring him eggs; they had been granted the luxury of an occasional bath. Such are the few passing, mundane details from the Tsaritsa’s diary that have come down to us of the family in their final days and hours. Yet, despite their brevity, they give us a clear and unshakeable image of the family’s state of calm—almost pious acceptance—at this time.

We have no way of seeing into the true workings of their hearts and minds, of course, but we do know from everything their guards later said that Alexandra, in particular, had by now resolutely given herself up to God. She was in almost constant pain—her heart, her back, her legs, everything ached—and her faith was her only refuge. She seemed content to retreat into a state of religious meditation, spending most of her time being read to from her favorite spiritual works, usually by Tatiana. One of the girls always sat with her, giving up her precious recreation time when the others were allowed out into the garden. But, as always, none of the four sisters ever complained. They accepted their situation with incredible forbearance. Nicholas, too, struggled on as best he could, buoyed up by his faith and the loving support of his daughters, although Olga—perhaps, of all the family, consumed by a private sense of despair—had become very thin and morose and was more withdrawn than ever. Her brother and sisters, however, all longed for something to relieve their crippling boredom. In the absence of access to the outside world, their only diversions were snatches of conversation with the more sympathetic of their guards, but even these had been severely curtailed by the new commandant, Yakov Yurovsky, at the beginning of July.

By the evening of the 16th we do not even have Nicholas’s few restrained daily comments to go on, for on Sunday, the 13th, he had finally given up keeping his diary. Its closing sentence, coming as it does at the end of a lifetime’s reticence, is an extraordinary and very real cry of despair:

We have absolutely no news from outside.

News of the Russia they loved? News of relatives and friends left behind? Or news of would-be rescue by their ‘loyal officers’? If by then Russia’s last tsar felt abandoned and forgotten, then the family must have sensed it too and shared in his despair. But they did not show it. And so we continue to ask ourselves: did they, in those final moments, when the guards came and woke them at 2.15 a.m. on the morning of the 17th and led them down the dingy stairs to the courtyard and across to the basement, have any inkling that this really was the end?

In Moscow, Lenin’s government had in fact been discussing what to do with Nicholas—and indeed the whole family—on and off since early April. It had become increasingly apparent that the civil war now spreading to Siberia would make it impossible to bring the former Tsar back to Moscow for the longmooted trial, but Lenin had prevaricated on making a decision until counter-revolutionary forces were on the verge of taking Ekaterinburg. In early July, knowing that sooner or later the city, an important strategic point on the Trans-Siberian Railway, would fall to the Whites and Czechs approaching from the east, a decision was taken that when the time came, the Ural Regional Soviet should ‘liquidate’ the Imperial Family rather than have them fall into monarchist hands. And they must all perish, in order to ensure, as Lenin insisted, that no ‘living banner’ (that is, the children) survive as a possible rallying point for the monarchists. But the murder of the children, which the Bolsheviks knew would provoke international outrage, must be kept secret for as long as possible.

On 14 July the Romanovs had unexpectedly been allowed the special privilege of a service, conducted for them at the Ipatiev House by a local priest, Father Ivan Storozhev. He had been deeply moved by their devotion and the enormous comfort they had clearly taken in being allowed to worship together; but he had also been chilled by an eerie sense of doom that had prevailed throughout the singing of the liturgy. It was almost as though the family had been sharing, knowingly, in their own last rites.

Yurovsky had, meanwhile, been planning the family’s murder, though with a surprising lack of efficiency for such a ruthless, dedicated Bolshevik. He chose the site in the forest outside Ekaterinburg where the bodies were to be disposed of, but failed to check how viable it really was as a place of concealment. He selected his team of killers from the guards at the house, but did so without ascertaining whether or not they knew how to handle a gun efficiently; and he investigated the best method of destroying eleven bodies using sulphuric acid or possibly incineration, again without any research into the logistics.

It was decided that the family would be killed there, in the house, in the basement room where any noise of shooting might be muffled. Early on the evening of 16 July, Yurovsky distributed the assortment of handguns to be used. There was one gun for each guard; one murderer for each of the eleven intended victims: the Romanovs and their four loyal retainers, Dr. Evgeniy Botkin, the chambermaid Anna Demidova, the valet Alexey Trupp and the cook Ivan Kharitonov. But then, unexpectedly, several of the guards refused point-blank to kill the girls. Having talked with them on many occasions, they had grown to like them; what harm had they done anyone? The intended murder squad was thus reduced to eight or nine who, when Yurovsky gave the order to open fire, launched into a frenzy of wildly inaccurate shooting, several of them disobeying instructions and shooting Nicholas first. The other victims panicked in terror, necessitating the savage bayoneting of any survivors of the first onslaught. One thing is clear: the Romanov family and their servants met their deaths in the most brutal, bloody and merciless way.

The corpses were then unceremoniously thrown into a Fiat truck and taken out to the Koptyaki Forest. But the supposed mine shaft that Yurovsky had selected for them to be dumped in turned out to be too shallow; local peasants would easily find the bodies and seek to preserve them as holy relics. And so, within hours, the mutilated corpses of the Romanov family, stripped of their clothes and the Tsaritsa’s jewels, which had been secreted in them, were hastily dug up. Yurovsky and his men then made a botched attempt to incinerate the bodies of Maria and Alexey. Sixty yards away, the rest of the family were hastily reburied in a shallow grave along with their servants.

People still insist, even today, on referring to what happened to the Romanov family as an ‘execution’. It was not. Nor was it an assassination, for even that word suggests a degree of planning and skill. There was no trial for any of the family, no due process of law, no possibility of a defense or appeal. What happened in the basement of the House of Special Purpose on Voznesensky Prospekt, Ekaterinburg, in the early hours of 17 July 1918, was nothing less than ugly, crazed and botched murder.

Despite the grotesque inefficiency with which Yurovsky and his men carried out these killings, and the even greater ineptitude with which they tried to dispose of the bodies, it would be sixty years before these lost graves would be found, in secret, by two local Russians. But it was not till 2007 that the missing remains of Maria and Alexey would finally be discovered.

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HELEN RAPPAPORT is the New York Times bestselling author of The Romanov Sisters. She studied Russian at Leeds University and is a specialist in Russian and Victorian history. She lives in West Dorset.

The post The Romanov Family’s Final Moments appeared first on The History Reader.

by Eleanor Herman

It would only take one person to slip a little something into a king’s food. Henry VIII had two hundred people employed in his kitchens at Hampton Court: cooks, scullery maids, stewards, carvers, porters, bakers, butchers, gardeners, butlers, pantlers (pantry servants), and delivery men who plucked, chopped, boiled, baked, carried, garnished, plated, scrubbed, and ran errands. Royal kitchens were food factories, pumping out hundreds of meals a day as servants trudged in and out.

With such an unsettling number of hands touching his food, what steps did a royal take to avoid ingesting poison? The earliest advice comes from the great Jewish physician, philosopher, and scholar Maimonides, who in 1198 wrote a treatise on the subject for his employer, Sultan Saladin of Egypt and Syria. He advised against eating foods with uneven textures, such as soups and stews, or strong flavors that could conceal the flavor or texture of poison. “Care should also be exercised with regards to foods… obviously sour, pungent, or highly-flavored,” wrote Maimonides, “also ill-smelling dishes or those prepared with onion or garlic. All these foods are best taken from a reliable person, above all suspicion, because the way to harm by poison is only to those foods which assimilate the poisonous taste and smell, as well as the poison’s appearance and consistency.”

According to Maimonides, poison in wine was particularly dangerous and difficult to detect. “The trick is easily done by mixing the poison with wine,” he wrote, “because the latter as a rule covers up the poison’s appearance, taste, and smell, and speeds it up on its way to the heart. Whoever drinks wine about which he has reason to suspect that someone has tried to outwit him is certainly out of his mind.”

In the late sixteenth century, the powerful minister of Spain, Gaspar de Guzmán, Duke of Olivares, was evidently well aware of the dangers of poisoned wine. According to a report in the Medici Archives in Florence, Olivares, when dining in the city of Valencia, “having taken his first drink and tasting a very unnatural flavor in the wine, he feared poisoning and jumped away from the table in a great fury asking for remedies. Meanwhile, the wine steward, having heard what was going on, reassured His Excellency that the bad taste resulted from his not having rinsed the wine flask well after washing it with vinegar and salt. When the steward then preceded to drink the same wine, he [Olivares] finally calmed down.”

Girolamo Ruscelli agreed with Maimonides. He wrote the 1555 book The Secrets of the Reverend Maister Alexis of Piemont, Containing Excellent Remedies Against Diverse Diseases, Wounds, and Other Accidents, with the Maner to Make Distillations, Parfumes, Confitures, Dyings, Colours, Fusions, and Meltings, which swept across Europe in numerous translations and editions. In a section called “For to preserve from poisoning,” he noted, “You must take heed that you eate not things of strong savor, or of a very sweete taste, because that the bitternesse and stench of poisons in this maner is wont to be covered, for the over-sweet, souer, or salte thing mixed with poison, doth hide the bitternesse of it.”

Ambroise Paré, physician to four kings of France, wrote in his 1585 treatise on poisons, “It is a matter of much difficultie to avoid poisons because… by the admixture of sweet and well-smelling things, they cannot easily bee perceived even by the skillful. Therefore such as fear poisoning ought to take heed of meats cooked with much art, verie sweet, salty, sowr, or notabley endued with anie other taste. And when they are opprest with hunger or thirst, they must not eat or drink too greedily, but have a diligent regard to the taste of such things as they eat or drink.”

For thousands of years, kings hired tasters to test each dish before it reached the royal mouth. However, poisons—even a hefty dose of arsenic—don’t necessarily work instantly. Contrary to what we see in film, the victim of poison didn’t swallow something, grab his throat, and hit the floor dead. The length of time required for the first symptoms (abdominal pain, vomiting, and diarrhea) to appear varied greatly depending on the individual’s height, weight, genetics, general health, and how much food was already in the stomach, which would slow the poison’s absorption.

One of the few recorded examples of this phenomenon occurred in 1867 when a group of twenty guests sat down to a meal at an Illinois hotel and ate biscuits mistakenly made with arsenic instead of flour. One guest fell ill shortly upon rising from the table, while the others became sick over several hours, although they all consumed the arsenic at the same time. All the victims had nausea and diarrhea, but other symptoms varied, including a burning pain in the gut, a constricted throat, cramps, and convulsions. One victim had diarrhea and difficulty urinating for several weeks. None died.

Certainly, the royal family wouldn’t wait at the table an hour or two after a taster tested their meal to see if he started retching—their food would be stone cold. Evidently, kings and their physicians weren’t aware of this time lag and expected poisoned tasters to start gagging and vomiting immediately. They also must have relied on the taster to test for unusual flavors or textures.

According to Maimonides, it was preferable if the taster—or a host whom the king suspected of unkindly intentions toward him—took a great heaping helping of the food rather than a polite nibble. “Someone who wants to guard himself against someone else whom he suspects,” the philosopher wrote, “should not eat from his food until the suspect first eats a fair quantity from it. He should not be satisfied with eating only a mouthful, as I have seen done by the cooks of kings in their presence.” To prevent the poisoning of his hard-won son and heir, the future Edward VI, Henry VIII had tasters stuff their faces with the young prince’s milk, bread, meat, eggs, and butter before the boy took so much as a spoonful.

By the Middle Ages, the tasting of the king’s food developed into a complicated set of protocols, rituals, and safeguards. Testing began in the royal kitchen. A 1465 report of the banquet held to celebrate the installation of George Neville as Archbishop of York described the numerous assays, or tests, of the dishes. “In the mean tyme the Sewer goeth to the dresser,” the author explained, “and there taketh assay of every dyshe, and doth geve it to the Stewarde and the Cooke to eat of all Porreges, Mustarde, and other sawces … And of every stewed meate, rosted, boylde, or broyled, beyng fyshe or fleshe, he cutteth a litle thereofe … and so with all other meates, as Custardes, Tartes, and Gelly, with other such lyke.”

When faced with any dish bearing a crust, such as a meat pie, the tasters broke the crust, dipped bread into the food below, and tasted it. By the time the monarch received a plate of food, the resulting haggis was not only lukewarm but may have looked more like a dog’s breakfast than a king’s dinner. Servants carried the tested dishes in pompous procession to the royal dining chamber, where they placed them on a credenza, which takes its name from the various “credence” tests for poison conducted there. Each servant had to eat from the dish he himself had carried, and armed guards made sure no unauthorized person approached the food.

Anything the king drank—whether water, wine, or ale—was also tested, of course. The taster poured a few drops of the beverage into the “bason of assay,” or testing basin, and drank it. A servant also tested the water the king used to wash his hands before and after eating by pouring some from the royal basin over his own hands to see if it caused pain, itching, or burning.

But tests were not only reserved for food and drink. Servants also kissed the king’s tablecloth and seat cushion. If their lips didn’t itch or swell, they assumed the items were poison-free.
Even the king’s salt was tested. The pantler scooped out a bit of salt from its large, ornate dish and passed it to the porter to taste. The servant bringing the king’s napkin from the linen closet did so by hanging it around his neck so that he could hide no poison in its folds. According to the 1465 report, “Then the Carver taketh the Napkyn from his shoulder and kysseth it for his assay, and delyvereth to the Lorde. Then taketh he the Spoone, dryeth it, and kysseth it for his assay.” With all this kissing of the king’s utensils, it is far more likely his royal highness was sickened with germs rather than arsenic.

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Eleanor Herman is the author of Sex with Kings, Sex with the Queen, and several other works of popular history. She has hosted Lost Worlds for The History Channel, The Madness of Henry VIII for the National Geographic Channel, and is now filming her second season of America: Fact vs. Fiction for The American Heroes Channel. Herman, who happily dresses in Renaissance gowns, lives with her husband, their black lab, and her four very dignified cats in McLean, VA.

The post Killing the King with Cuisine appeared first on The History Reader.

Recently, the National Museum in Copenhagen published the report for 2016 – 17 on the progress of the Jelling project, which aims to get a better understanding of the imposing, yet enigmatic monument registered as a UNESCO site

Since 2008 an interdisciplinary group of archaeologists, historians, and scientists have excavated, studied, and pondered upon the meaning of the 10th-century monument in Jelling. Excavated on numerous occasions since 1704, the site has naturally undergone a plethora of different explanations, present project not excluded. The current project has so far succeeded in overturning our understanding by revealing a huge palisade and the outline of the largest ship setting ever discovered in the Viking world.

Currently, the project is laying its final touch upon manuscripts and publications, and we may expect the first volume of the series of three publications sometime next year (hopefully). What we know so far is that the National Museum plans to publish three volumes with the first one telling the story of the monuments and the landscape, the second the story of the Stone Church in Jelling with the third volume focusing on Jelling and Beyond.

The challenge has been that the site turned out to be much more enigmatic than first thought. As such it is a classic example of how preconceived ideas based on archaeological excavations shift when the archaeologists with their leaf trowels widen their scope. Also, the archaeologists had to agree on how to understand the remains of the stave-building beneath the present church with its chamber-grave. Was it an early church as hitherto believed? Or was it “just” a hall? What we may expect is perhaps not a univocal conclusion, but rather the presentation of the arguments, which have been going back and forth. In a sense, though, this feels more satisfying than the “finalized” conclusions, which were offered in the 80s, when the last major excavation took place; and when the remains were univocally identified as the remains of an early church.

More interesting, though, is the “new” knowledge, to which the project has painstakingly sieved its way: by analysing, classifying and counting pollen from the new excavations of the palisade and the small pond nearby, we are promised a better understanding of the landscape and the consequences of the massive depletion of the nearby forests, which the building activities will have caused. To this should be added the detailed examination of a lime-kiln, discovered in 1998, but not studied in details until now.

Royal Jelling

The Jelling monument is arguably one of the most impressive royal monuments, we possess from the Viking Age. In a broader context encompassing the Ravning Enge Bridge and the recent find of the treasure from Fæsted, the study has invited the researchers to explore the region as a landscape marked by royal negotiations of power. How far did this region reach? What role did the fashion of raising runestones tell us about the Jelling dynasty? What role did the dissipation of a particular artistic trend, the Jelling Style – play? How should we understand the relationship between earlier fortified Viking centres as the one in Erritsø from the eighth and ninth centuries and the monument at Jelling from the 10th century? How should we think about Jelling, when comparing it to the Ring Fortresses? Currently, a group of researchers are planning to explore this impressive hall of a magnate in details. Answers to some of these questions will be presented in the scheduled three-volume series. Others will be published in separate scholarly articles.

SOURCE:

Jellingprojektet – et kongeligt monument i dansk og europæisk belysning. Rapport 2016 – 17. Nationalmuseet 2018.

READ MORE

While we are waiting:

Jelling. In Germanische Altertumskunde Online (2016). Rewritten articles presenting the new finds to an international public.

Earlier publications in the series:

Dead Warriors in Living Memory. A Study of Weapon and Equestrian Burials in Viking-Age Denmark, AD 800 -1000
By Anne Pedersen
Series: Studies in Archaeology & History Vol 20:1 – The Jelling Series.
The National Museum, Copenhagen, 2014

King Harold’s Cross Coinage. Christian Coins for the Merchants of Haithabu and the King’s Soldiers.
By Jens Christian Moesgaard
Publications from the National Museum
Studies in Archaeology and History Vol 20:2. Jelling Series.
Syddansk Universitetsforlag 2015

Husebyer – Status quo, open questions and perspectives. Papers from a Workshop at the National Museum.
By Lisbeth Eilersgaard Christensen, Thorsten Lemm and Anne Pedersen
Studies in Archaeology & History Vol 20.3. Jelling Series.
The National Museum, Copenhagen 2016

The post News From the Jelling Project 2018 appeared first on Medieval Histories.

by Paddy Hirsch

Journey back to New York City in the days in which our nation was a young country, still finding its way—before The Alienist, before Gangs of New York… where the Wall Street as we know it was today was dubbed THE DEVIL’S HALF MILE.

With a strong background in financial journalism, author Paddy Hirsch spins a gripping and suspenseful tale in the very real early days of our nation. A longtime economic journalist and producer Paddy Hirsch began researching the history of the stock market and beginnings of its regulation but ended up swept into the fascinating time period he discovered. Hirsch turned his research into a page-turning new novel of suspense. The Devil’s Half Mile brings together the actual historic settings and people of 1799 New York, including Alexander Hamilton, William Duer, and more—along with a twisty murder mystery. Watch the videos below for more of the history behind this mystery from the author himself.

Paddy Hirsch on “The Wild Days of Early Wall Street”

Paddy Hirsch on “Surprising New York History”

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PADDY HIRSCH has worked in public radio at NPR and Marketplace as a journalist and producer for ten years. He came to journalism after serving for eight years as an officer in the British Royal Marines, and lives in Los Angeles. The author of a nonfiction book explaining economics, Man vs. Markets, The Devil’s Half Mile is his fiction debut. Visit him online at www.paddyhirsch.com or follow him @paddyhirsch.

The post The History Behind the Mystery: The Devil’s Half Mile appeared first on The History Reader.

by Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Critics hated it. The public feared it would topple over. Passersby were knocked down by the winds. But even before it was completed, the Flatiron Building had become an unforgettable part of New York City.

The Flatiron Building was built by the Chicago-based Fuller Company–a group founded by George Fuller, “the father of the skyscraper”–to be their New York headquarters. The company’s president, Harry Black, was never able to make the public call the Flatiron the Fuller Building, however. Black’s was the country’s largest real estate firm, constructing Macy’s department store, and soon after the Plaza Hotel, the Savoy Hotel, and many other iconic buildings in New York as well as in other cities across the country. With an ostentatious lifestyle that drew constant media scrutiny, Black made a fortune only to meet a tragic, untimely end.

In The Flatiron, Alice Sparberg Alexiou chronicles not just the story of the building but the heady times in New York at the dawn of the twentieth century. It was a time when Madison Square Park shifted from a promenade for rich women to one for gay prostitutes; when photography became an art; motion pictures came into existence; the booming economy suffered increasing depressions; jazz came to the forefront of popular music–and all within steps of one of the city’s best-known and best-loved buildings. Keep reading for an excerpt of The Flatiron.

* * * * *

What a clever simile, of a Flatiron building rolling along the sidewalk! How apt, and how iconic! It was precisely the Flatiron’s fluid nature—from every angle, it looked different—that made people love it so. The building embodied New York, where every day people arrived from across the sea, or from the farms of rural America, swelling the city’s population, and continuously remaking the city into something else, that kept evolving with each successive wave of new immigrants. New York, the Evening Post had recently declared, was a “fluid city.” It had not yet been able to settle down, either industrially or socially. New York as yet had no zoning laws—the first would be enacted in 1916—which meant that any quarter could change suddenly into something else entirely.

Change was the essence of New York, and the Flatiron was part of that change. It looked different from any other skyscraper. If you were walking toward it on Twenty-third Street, going west, it seemed like Schuyler’s huge theatrical screen, rising straight up in front of you. If you were north of the building, on Fifth Avenue or Broadway, the Flatiron appeared to be moving towards you, like a big ship. Perhaps you would imagine that it had just arrived from Europe, filled with immigrants, plowed right through the harbor and was now continuing its journey, on land, uptown. “It’s just like a great wedge of strawberry shortcake, with windows for berries,” one young girl was overheard saying. “A tall thin wedge of a building, for all the world like a slice of a gigantic layer cake, a boarding house slice, very thin and tapering,” wrote The Brooklyn Eagle. A Times reporter, watching a man walking down Fifth Avenue with his girl, heard him trying to persuade her that the Flatiron Building was architecturally superior to L’Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Elysées, and just as beautiful as the Washington Monument on the Potomac. Nonsense, she replied; to her, it resembled a clothespin that fastened Fifth Avenue and Broadway jointly onto the clothesline of Twenty-third Street. Her boyfriend replied: “Granted its scale, it is architecturally well designed. It will be to the travelers on the two great highways of our metropolis a column of smoke by day, and by night, when the interior is lighted, a constellation of fires.” She said, “The Flatiron will probably be used to advertise electrically a patent for weak backs and sore feet.” “But there is something spirited and commanding in it,” persisted the young fellow. “It gives an accent to the vista of two great thoroughfares.”

“But the accent,” his girlfriend said, “is so very American.”

That remark, the reporter later commented in his article, “was taken as a complete justification of the Flatiron Building, for what greater virtue can native architecture have than to be conceived and executed in the native vernacular?”

Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide, applauding the current and unprecedented popular interest in architecture caused by the Flatiron Building, wrote: “No amount of approval or disapproval on the part of a few interested and competent people can compensate for the (up-to-now) widespread lack of interest in architecture. An architect’s design must appeal to a lot of people, not just the elite. And this can only have a good effect on popular taste. No art can be thoroughly wholesome in a democracy that has not a good basis in popular taste.”

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ALICE SPARBERG ALEXIOU is the author of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. She has been an editor of Lilith magazine and written for The New York Times and Newsday, among others. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and has a Ph.D. in classics from Fordham University. She lives in New York.

The post The Flatiron: A Landmark Signaling a New Era appeared first on The History Reader.

by William Stadiem

In post-WWII Paris, Madame Claude ran the most exclusive finishing school in the world. Her alumnae married more fortunes, titles and famous names than any of the Seven Sisters. The names on her client list were epic—Kennedy, Rothschild, Agnelli, Onassis, Niarchos, Brando, Sinatra, McQueen, Picasso, Chagall, Qaddafi, the Shah, and that’s just for starters. By the 1950s, she was the richest and most celebrated self-made woman in Europe, as much of a legend as Coco Chanel.

Born Fernande Grudet, a poor Jewish girl in the aristocratic chateau city of Angers, the future Madame led a life of high adventure—resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, gun moll of the Corsican Mafia and erstwhile streetwalker—before becoming the ultimate broker between beauty and power. She harnessed the emerging postwar technology of the telephone to create the concept of the call girl. But Madame Claude wasn’t just selling sex—she was the world’s ultimate matchmaker, the Dolly Levi of the Power Elite.

She was also one of the most controversial—and most wanted—women in the world. Now, through his own conversations with the woman herself and interviews with the great men and remarkable women on whom she built her empire, social historian and biographer William Stadiem pierces the veil of Claude’s secret, forbidden universe of pleasure and privilege. Keep reading for an adapted excerpt of Madame Claude.

Introductory French

Camelot was coming to Paris. It was their first official European tour, and the First Couple couldn’t have been more excited. While Jackie Kennedy was thrilled to be meeting one of her literary idols, the new French minister of culture, André Malraux (Man’s Fate), who was going to give her a special tour of the Louvre, the person John Kennedy may have been thinking the most about was Madame Claude, who was going to provide JFK with her own take on man’s fate. It was a rendezvous with destiny that the new president had been plotting for weeks.

Catering to the erotic whims of a visiting president was dollar diplomacy on the most delicate and demanding level. It was also a logistical nightmare, given that the eyes of the world were on the new president and his lovely wife in the first manifestation of her Francophile icon-hood. That JFK could be caught with his pants down on a state visit was a possibility that couldn’t even be contemplated. However, John Kennedy was so obsessed with sex, and so bold and reckless in his obsessions, possessing his father’s arrogance that the right kind of bad boy could get away with everything, that JFK forged ahead in strategizing his French sexcapade as if it were a priapic D-day.

Most of the preliminary planning was done between Madame Claude herself and Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s trusted press secretary, who, despite so many assumptions, was only half French (his mother) and had grown up and been educated in San Francisco. Still, he was fluent in French; plus, he shared his boss’s penchant for naughtiness. So the assignment was literally a labor of love. At first, Madame Claude turned Salinger down. There were too many things that could go wrong and too much attention on the prospective client, arguably the most famous man on earth.

Claude was relatively new in the business, and the last thing she needed was a scandal on the front pages of the world press. Most of her clients came from show business, industry, and finance; she had few contacts at this point with the French government. If they could shut down the mighty Le One-Two-Two or the iconic Sphinx, they could shut down her little operation like swatting a fly and ship her off to Fleury-Mérogis, the brutal Alcatraz of la belle France, where bad madams went to die. Claude was doing fine. Why risk losing it all?

Salinger, a born salesman, turned all the negatives into positives. The French loved sex as much as they loved the privacy of their dalliances. They would avert their eyes. And, Salinger pressed, if Madame Claude could service President Kennedy, she would become a “made woman,” capable of taking care of all the top men in every country. This was the stuff myths were made of. Would Maxim’s have feared to serve Curnonsky, the “Prince of Gastronomes,” the ultimate gourmet of the twentieth century? Rise to the occasion, Salinger exhorted Claude. Do it for your career. Do it for your country, he riffed, paraphrasing JFK’s inaugural address. Think big! Weighing risks and rewards like the shrewd banker she might have otherwise been, Claude decided to go for it.

The post Madame Claude: Her Secret World of Pleasure, Privilege, and Power appeared first on The History Reader.

Numerous small springs and other water sources feed the rivers Saale and Unstrut before they confluence with the Elbe. Along these river valleys, the hilly countryside is still fit for winegrowing while the fertile flat land along the rivers offers excellent agricultural possibilities.

The Saale-Unstrut region lies in between the confluence of the rivers Saale and Unstrut in a hilly and steep countryside with a thousand-year-old tradition for winegrowing. This made it until recently, the northern-most winegrowing region in Germany.

Vineyards

Though it is believed wine was grown from the 7th century, the earliest exploitation of the steep hillsides for viticulture is documented for the 10^thcentury. More precisely, a donation from )98 to the monastery in Memleben lists seven locations where vineyards were cultivated. Unfortunately, the hillsides with their terraces are not workable with heavy machinery, and in recent years the landscape is marred by abandoned vineyards and loss of biodiversity. Also, the traditional dry walls bordering the terraces have been left crumbling.

Although some sites – e. g. the Kathert Vineyard in Karsdorf – have been preserved as part of the regions cultural heritage, much has been lost. The traditional wine cabins, which housed the vineyard guards when the grapes were ripe, have also been lost.

Castles and Monasteries

Another natural feature, the abundant limestones and red sandstone provided building material for the Romanesque architecture, which continue to plays such a visible role in the landscape of the region.

SOURCE:

The Saale-Unstrut cultural landscape corridor
By M. Hoppert, B. Bahn, E. Bergmeier, M. Deutsch, K. Epperlein, C. Hallmann, A. Müller, T. V. Platz, T. Reeh, H. Stück, W. Wedekind. Siegesmund
In: Environmental Earth Sciences, February 2018, 77:58

READ MORE:

Natur Stein Kultur Wein: Zwischen Saale und Unstrut
By Siegfried Siegesmund Michael Hoppert and Klaus Epperlein (Ed).
Mitteldeutscher Verlag 2014

 

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